A Choice of Treasons (30 page)

York shook his head. “On this subject he has given specific orders.”

“Can’t you even discuss them as a hypothetical premise?”

“Again, under the circumstances, such a pretext would be a violation of my commanding officer’s orders.”

Temerek looked at her carefully. “He’s right, Syl.”

She didn’t like being thwarted. “Then let’s forget the Syndonese following us and talk about what we might do to get out of this.”

York went back to eating as the four of them began playing with a number of ideas. York stayed out of it, determined not to be drawn into the discussion. But suddenly, at the edge of his senses, he detected the shift in the ship’s fields indicative of the start of a hard maneuver. He reached out violently, grabbed Temerek by his tunic and yanked him viciously across the table, dragging him through the food until their faces were only inches apart. His actions stunned everyone into silence. “We’re maneuvering,” he growled in Temerek’s face, “aren’t we?”

Temerek looked at him as if he were a madman. “Yes,” he said coldly. “We do have a course change scheduled for some time this shift.”

York shouted. “Don’t you realize you’re handing them a target signature?”

Temerek started to say something, but before he could speak York pushed him back into his seat. Sierka had had him programmed out of the command channels so he couldn’t reach the bridge with his implants. He shoved Temerek aside into the d’Hart woman’s lap, climbed up over the table scraping food out of the way with his elbows, landed on the other side and dove for a small intercom buried in the bulkhead near the entrance. He hit the intercom switch with his fist, “Bridge, emergency access.”

The computer connected him instantly. “Bridge. Rame here.”

“Shields up. General quarters. Stand by for incoming.”

“Incoming?” Rame asked. “Where the—”

“Don’t ask questions,” York snarled, praying Rame’s reactions would take over, that he’d react before realizing he wasn’t supposed to be taking orders from York. “That’s an order.”

The alert klaxon started to blare. York opened his mouth to shout another order, but the ship’s superstructure echoed with the deep bass sound of a large warhead detonating nearby, and her gravity shifted sickeningly. The bulkhead containing the intercom became down, and a crushing force of several gravities slammed York into it.
Cinesstar’s
hull groaned and a rain of trays and food and dishes and human bodies slammed into the bulkhead all around him. Then another gravity wave pulsed through the ship and everyone and everything tumbled toward the deck overhead. A brief shock of pain shot through York’s shoulder as he took most of the force of his upward fall on one side, then someone landed on top of him and knocked the wind out of him.

For a few moments he came close to losing consciousness, and it was some seconds before he was again fully alert, floating weightless amidst a confusion of bodies and debris, no gravity and dim emergency lighting, everything silent except for a few painful groans coming from somewhere. A sickening terror rose up in his chest as he realized the deep background sound of
Cinesstar’s
power plant had been silenced. Other than the groans he could hear, he had no way of knowing if anyone was still alive, and in any case their lives were low on his priority list.

The debris and bodies floating in the mess hall, including him, were drifting slowly in random directions. He waited patiently for the few seconds it took to drift to a bulkhead, then grabbed a handhold, and ignoring the pain in his damaged shoulder he crawled from handhold to handhold to another intercom. He hit the switch. “Bridge. Emergency access. Ballin here.”

No answer. “Bridge. This is Ballin. Is anyone there conscious? Answer me.”

After a few seconds Anda Gant finally responded groggily. “Yes . . . Yes . . . I’m here.”

“Who else up there is conscious?”

Another pause, then a slow, deliberate answer. “I don’t know . . . Everyone I can see is out . . . don’t know for sure.”

“What’s our status?”

There was silence for a few seconds and he prayed she hadn’t passed out again. “All three chambers are down; no report on why. We’re limited to emergency standby. No gravity, no shields, no weapons. We’re sublight, coasting at just under point-nine lights. Dilation factor two-point-one. Near scan report is null to within one-point-three kilometers.”

York asked, “Drones?”

There was a short pause, and again groans from nearby wounded punctuated the silence.

“I’ve got active status on three. Should I contact Hangar to check on the others?”

“No. Launch the three to twenty thousand kliks. Then get over to the weapons console and launch a mixed load of cluster and seeker mines. We don’t need power for that. Concentrate them in our wake in a spread about three hundred kilometers wide. Dump half, wait ten minutes, then dump the other half. I’ll check with Hangar, then get up to Bridge as soon as I can. In the mean time rig for silent running.”

“Rig for what? That’s a hunter-killer trick, isn’t it?”

“Ya, but we can try it too. Shut down anything that might produce a detectable transition signal. Even critical systems if necessary. Stop feeding the drones power, run them static, and use only passive detection.

“We’ve got at least four
feddies
coming in behind us. Watch for their transition flares, record them, track them, and pinpoint them as accurately as you can. And especially watch for the first. It’ll probably come sometime in the next five to ten minutes, and it’ll be faint, almost undetectable. And if it doesn’t come right away, then keep a close scan behind any other activity. There’s a hunter-killer out there, and she’ll likely try to use another transition flare or an exploding warhead to mask her own down-transition.”

York cut the circuit, looked over his shoulder, saw Maggie hanging onto a handhold on a far bulkhead, shaking her head groggily, a smear of blood on her forehead. Temerek was on another handhold nearby, looking alert and anxiously scanning the debris floating about. “Temerek,” York called, trying to keep his voice calm. “What are you doing?”

Temerek called back with panic in his voice. “Where’s Lady d’Hart?”

“Forget her,” York said. “You’ve got more important things to worry about. Get down to Hangar and take command down there. We need drones.”

Temerek looked at him curiously for a moment, but York said calmly, “That’s an order, Lieutenant.”

Still Temerek hesitated, but then he came to a decision and nodded. “Aye, aye, sir.” He started crawling along the handholds toward the mess hall exit.

York hit the intercom switch again. “Ready-Room. Emergency access.”

“Palevi here, Cap’em.”

“Sergeant, how many wounded?”

“I don’t know about the rest of the ship, sir, but down here we got forty-two need patching up. Seven dead. I think we were lucky.”

“Probably luckier than the rest of the ship. Take all your actives and comb the ship from stem to stern, help wounded get down to sickbay. Start with the bridge. Also look for damage and note it for damage control, if we have damage control. And have you got anyone who knows how to arm warheads, and how to operate a transition launcher?”

“I sure do, sir.”

“Can you put together two crews?”

“No problem, sir.”

“Good. Check the fore and aft launch rooms. If they don’t have crews, and I doubt they will, make sure they’re manned as soon as possible.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Anything else, sir?”

“No. Ballin out.”

York cut the circuit, crawled over to Maggie who was still sitting in a daze. He reached into a pocket, pulled out a disposable palm syringe he always carried, a small, gray, flat disk that easily fit in his hand. He pulled a little, red tab at its edge, tossed the tab into the rest of the debris floating about them. The disk changed color, flashed a bright red. He cupped it in the palm of his hand, grabbed Maggie by the upper arm with his other hand, then slapped the disk against the side of her throat. The disk pulsed once beneath his hand, and a second later Maggie shivered as the
kikker
took effect. Her eyes widened for a moment, then grew alert. “Shit,” she swore, shaking herself violently. “I hate that stuff.”

He shook her, said, “Listen up. All three power plants are down. We’re sublight with four
feddies
coming at us real soon now.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out another palm syringe, handed it to her. “I need qualified officers, now. See if you can find Frank. If you can bring him around fast, do so. If you can’t, leave him. Either way, report to the bridge.”

York found another intercom and hit the switch. “Engineering. Emergency access. Ballin here.”

The answer came quickly. “Cappik here, Mister Ballin. Miss Gant says you’re in command.”

That was open to dispute, but York decided not to enlighten Cappik. “Status.”

“We took a near miss, medium size warhead, maybe twenty megatonnes. We were lucky it wasn’t a direct hit, and someone got our shields up just before detonation. But it was close enough to overload all three chambers. Starboard went down first, of course, what with all that damage. But it pulled the other two down with it, might have damaged one of them also, though I don’t know yet. Shouldn’t have done that, but there’s a bug in the programming somewhere we would’ve found if we’d had a chance to do a proper shakedown. Right now Starboard is the only one that’s hot, and it’s just barely at idle. Port and Centerline are in cold shutdown.”

“How soon before we’ve got power?”

“Fifty minutes. Maybe an hour.”

York glanced at his watch, did a quick mental calculation, then spoke carefully. “In about five minutes, maybe ten or fifteen, the
feddie
hunter-killer that just tried to burn us is going to make transition in our wake. She’ll be the first of at least four Syndonese Federals strung out behind us, maybe more. We’re too big for her to take on unless she’s sure we’re disabled, so my guess is she’ll move cautiously, transit at extreme range in case we’ve still got teeth, sit back and let one of her buddies come at us first. That’ll happen no sooner than fifteen minutes from now, no later than twenty-five. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. I do. Can you stand by for a moment?”

“Yes.”

There was a short pause, then, “Sir. We’ll have one chamber at half power in ten minutes, enough to grav up and do some maneuvering, make them think twice before coming at us. But it’s that damaged chamber so please don’t put too much of a strain on her or we’ll lose ‘er. I’m going to use her to bootstrap the other two. Then I think I can have full combat status in a total of twenty minutes. I might be able to do better, but we’re likely to blow ourselves to hell and back without the help of any
feddies
. Is that good enough, sir?”

“Thank you, chief. That’ll be just fine. I’m going to the bridge. Ballin out.”

Without gravity it seemed that floating bodies and debris of one kind or another filled every compartment in the ship, and they all conspired to hinder York. He couldn’t just push off one wall and launch across a room. Instead he had to stay with the handholds on the bulkheads, pulling himself along at an agonizingly slow pace. He tried the main lift first, but it was down, so he made his way to the nearest maintenance access shaft, a narrow tunnel running parallel to the main lift that was always kept weightless. There were metal rungs on three sides of the shaft.

It seemed to take forever to crawl half the length of the ship, but he finally opened the shaft hatch on the bridge, floated out behind the fire control console. For some reason the thought came to him that if he ever needed to, he could probably use the shaft to sneak onto the bridge unnoticed.

Floating, he pulled himself around the console in time to see a small group of marines carrying away Rame and Sierka, both unconscious. York pushed himself through the weightless atmosphere, caught an edge of the captain’s console, struggled into it and strapped himself in. Anda Gant peered through a narrow gap between instrument clusters, looked at him with relief as he yanked on a headset. “Status?”

“No sign of that hunter-killer,” Gant said, “though I’ve got two transition wakes closing on us fast. We’ve got limited power, but I assume you want to keep running silent so I haven’t done anything yet. We’re awfully close to our own minefields. Should I pull away?”

“Negative,” York said as he brought up a scan summary, looked it over quickly. Neither of the two transition wakes were the hunter-killer. Next he brought up a duty roster. Sierka and Soladin and Armbruster hadn’t bothered to assign crews to most of the critical combat stations, but they had at least assigned bridge crews, and at that moment Jondee should be at the com. “Mister Jondee. Are you conscious?”

“Well now,” Jondee’s voice said in York’s headset, “there are those who might dispute that fact, but I’ve always thought of myself as basically cognizant, and don’t believe what you hear about my moral character.”

“Shut up.” York was in no mood for repartee. “And check on the fore and aft launch rooms, see if Palevi has crews there yet.”

York glanced up from his screens and saw Andow floating over him. The senator’s hair was a mess and his tunic badly torn, but he seemed unhurt. York pointed at one of the assistant’s couches at the weapon’s console. “Sit there,” he said. “And strap yourself in. If we have any more gravity problems you’ll be a lot better off.”