Accord of Mars (Accord Series Book 2) (12 page)

T
he wreckage pinning
me to my seat stirred. That was the first thing I felt as I drifted back to consciousness. That, and the fact that my head was pounding like someone had driven a spike into my skull. I held very still, trying to take stock of my injuries. I could taste blood, but when I tried to wiggle my fingers and toes, they all seemed to work.

“Got one up here,” someone said. I didn’t recognize the voice. More lifting and shoving of the junk heaped atop me ensued. My ears told me that I was in free fall, no gravity and no acceleration. Why was I pinned in place, then? I tried to move an arm, and found I could reach around a little. Sharp, jagged chunks of metal met my fingertips. Sitting tight might be the best option after all.

“The admiral really messed this tub up,” someone else added.

“Good. These assholes fucked over the whole fleet,” the first speaker replied.

“Wouldn’t want to be in this guy’s shoes,” the second said.

I heard a high-pitched whine, and saw a cutting laser light up a few feet from my head. I wasn’t entirely sure if these guys cared if I lived or died, so it seemed like it was maybe time take matters into my own hands. I couldn’t remember where I’d put the pistol I used to kill the two men on the bridge. But I could reach down to the pocket where I’d stowed the second one. It was still there. I eased it out of the pocket.

That laser was cutting closer to my head. With an effort, I got my knees up under the chunk of scrap that had me pinned down and pushed up. Something snapped, and the metal went spinning toward the ceiling. I was free.

Two men in ship suits stood there, one of them with a laser cutter in his hands. He saw the gun and lunged at me with the cutter. I pushed away from the chair, drifting clear to get a little distance between us. Then I fired. My first shot wasn’t well aimed and went wild. My second slug took him in the leg. He yowled and dropped the cutter, both his hands going to the wound. Little balls of blood spun off his injury and floated across the small space. His buddy took the moment to duck out of the cockpit down toward the rest of the ship.

“You asshole,” he said. Fear warred with anger in his voice. “Don’t you know when you’re beat?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Stay put.”

“I’m done, man,” he said. “Just don’t kill me!”

I kept the gun trained on him as I made my way toward the hatch, but he didn’t make any moves. The gunshot had to hurt like hell. I figured he was out of the fight for now, at least. And I didn’t want to kill anyone that I didn’t have to. I wasn’t going to tell him that, though.

I hated to turn my back on him to head out through the hatch, but I needed all my focus forward in case the other guy was waiting outside the hatch. I led with my pistol, keeping an eye out for his friend. The space on the other side of the hatch was empty. And smaller than I remembered. A huge seal had been placed over the tube into the ship’s stem. The center stem must have lost atmosphere when we were hit, so they shut it off while they worked. What about engineering, though? Was Acres still alive down there somewhere?

There was only one place to go from here. The forward airlock was open, leading to a tube. I peeked into the tube, which ended in the airlock door of another ship. The wrecked hulk of my ship was floating next to the enemy flagship. It was their search and rescue operation. The airlock on the far side was closed, and I could see armed men gathering there, getting ready to pour across the gap toward me.

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah, asshole,” the guy I’d shot said from the cockpit. “You ready to give up yet?”

“Bet I can take out a few of them as they come across,” I said.

“Bet they just toss some gas over and knock you out,” he shot back.

He was probably right. And even if I could take out a couple of them as they came in my best case scenario would be that I’d still be taken captive and beaten to a pulp in the process. I could maybe make them kill me. That way I couldn’t be used as a weapon against my father.

My Dad. The commander of the enemy flagship must have realized that I was aboard here. I’d used the Stein override codes. There weren’t too many people who could do that, and only one of them wasn’t on or around Mars. It probably hadn’t taken them long to realize who I was. They’d wrecked my ship, but not destroyed it. Then they’d pulled up alongside hoping to yank me from the wreck so they’d have a hostage.

I could still deny them that. I looked at the gun, wondering if I could really do it. Either shoot myself, or toss myself out into space. Either way they would lose me as a playing piece in this game.

But I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope. They might have me. But maybe there were still things I could do to mess up their lives and save my own, if I waited until the right moment. I wasn’t ready to die, not today, not if I could find a way out of this.

“OK,” I said. The hatch on the far side was opening up. Rifle barrels aimed down the connecting tube toward me. I shouted down the tube. “I surrender.”

“Throw your weapon over to us!” barked one of the marines on the far side.

I tossed the gun down the tube. They waited as it sailed over toward them, then one of the men reached out and caught it. “Go get him,” the guard said.

Four men pushed off and glided down the tube toward me. I was impressed. These guys were obviously well trained, well coordinated. And the idea that they thought it was going to take four guys to make sure I was taken was a little gratifying. I let go of the airlock door as they came through the gap. Two of them grabbed hold of my arms, pinning me in place. One held his rifle aimed at me.

“No sudden moves,” he said.

The fourth patted me down, checking every pocket before looking back up at his fellows. “No weapons. Just this,” he said, holding up my little spy pen. “He’s clear.”

I hoped that Dad had gotten the data I’d recorded on the pen. I doubted I was going to be able to get it back. They hadn’t seen my watch as being worth taking away. I didn’t disabuse them of the notion. It might come in handy soon.

My next job was to try to make sure they knew who I was, so they didn’t just kill me out of hand. And then to see if I could get someplace where I might be able to make some trouble. It wouldn’t do me any good to end up locked in a cell somewhere in the bowels of the ship.

So I gave the marines my best grin. “I’m Thomas Stein. You’ve got me. Now take me to your leader.”

T
he marines cuffed
my hands behind my back with zip-ties, which basically meant I couldn’t move unassisted anymore. Zero gravity without your hands is messy and usually results in injury, and I’d had my head banged around enough for one day. My skull still throbbed where I’d been hit when they blasted my ship. The men grabbed me by the elbows and guided me across the tube into their ship.

“What about the other man?” I asked. “Was there another survivor, in the engine room?”

They didn’t respond. I had no way of knowing if Acres was alive or not. But at least I’d told them there might be another warm body aboard the ship. Maybe they’d look. Acres was an old friend of my Dad’s. He might not be as good a hostage as I was, but he had to still be worth something. Anything to keep him alive.

If he was. The railgun must have slammed into the middle of my ship. The missile bays were ruined, and the center stem had huge, gaping holes torn through it. They’d targeted well though, from what I could see as we went through the tube. Both ends looked more or less intact from the outside, but the insides of the front had been torn up anyway. Looks could be deceiving.

Once we were aboard the flagship, the marines retracted the tube. Cut adrift, the wrecked hulk started to slip behind a little.

“No!” I said. “There’s another man still over there!”

“Shut up,” one of the marines said. He cuffed me across the face, hard enough to split my lip. I couldn’t even duck the blow, thanks to the men holding my arms. He tapped his radio. “We’ve cut the wreck loose. You can resume spin.”

I watched the stars begin to slip by outside through the porthole in the airlock. They were spinning the ship! As the speed of the rotation increased my feet slowly sank toward the outer hull. My stomach lurched a little, as I reoriented myself to a new ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’. It was disconcerting.

My discomfort must have shown in my face. One of the men pinning my arms chuckled. “You get used to it,” he said. “Not that it will matter much for you.”

“Why the spin?” I asked. It seemed like an enormous amount of energy to spend just to be able to put your feet on the deck. And once they accelerated everyone would be pushed toward the rear of the ship anyway.

“I said to shut up. You want me to hit you again?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said. “Bring him to the bridge.”

At least they weren’t taking me to their brig. The two guards holding my arms escorted me down a long hall, then up a flight of stairs. We were moving toward the center of the ship. I could feel myself getting lighter as we moved up. The spin was set to feel roughly like Earth normal gravity on the outer edge of the ship. But the nearer to the center, the slower you were spinning and the less you were pulled outward.

Then we went up one more flight of stairs into an open space, and all I could do was stand there in awe.

The center of the ship was hollow. From where I stood I could see all the way across to the other side - the length of a football field away. I could, anyway, if it hadn’t been for the rod running down the center of the entire ship. It was like the ship was a tube, with a steel core. I’d seen something like it before. It looked a little bit like the inside of an electric motor.

But this wasn’t electricity going into magnets to induce movement, I realized. They’d reversed it. The ship’s engines powered spin, which they were using to induce magnetism. That rod through the middle was the barrel of the railgun. It was maybe half a mile long. That was a lot of magnets. The shots they fired had to be accelerating to some decent percent of the speed of light by the time they left the barrel.

“My god,” I said. “This ship isn’t armed with a railgun. The whole ship is the railgun.”

“Pretty sweet, huh?” one of my guards said.

“We’re gonna make short work of those rebels on Mars,” the other said. “You folks never should have tried that shit in the UN building.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then left it alone. There was no point trying to tell these men that they were wrong, that Choi had planted the bomb. One of them was carrying my pen with the recording, but even if I convinced them to play it back, they wouldn’t care. Their worldview depended on us being the enemy. I wasn’t going to win hearts and minds out here today.

This ship wasn’t just for beating up other ships though. You didn’t need a gun that powerful to take out a ship. The speed those railgun pellets were fired at, they’d be devastating against a planetary target, too. They could wipe out the entire colony on Mars from orbit.

I was starting to think that I wasn’t going to get away that easy, either. The ship was crawling with people. As we walked along we passed more and more of them. There must have been hundreds of crew on board. And I hadn’t seen any signs that said ‘exit’ or ‘lifeboats this way’ yet. Breaking out was going to be a lot harder than getting in.

We walked a long way along the inner level of the ship, finally arriving at a closed set of doors. One of the marines waved a hand over a panel, and the door snapped open. Biometric door controls meant getting around was going to be a bitch. Even if I got away, it wasn’t going to matter. If my handprint wasn’t in the computer system as authorized personnel, I wasn’t going to get very far.

They hauled me down a short corridor to another set of doors. This one had a handprint scanner too. The guard waved it open with his hand again and stepped into the doorway. “We’ve brought the prisoner as ordered, sir,” he said.

“Bring him in,” someone said over the speaker.

I sucked in a breath. I knew that voice.

The doors snapped open. The inside of the bridge looked like something out of a science fiction film. One wall was dominated by a huge view screen. The center of the room was occupied by a large holotank, showing the area in space around the ship. All around the periphery of the room were manned stations. All of them stopped what they were doing for a moment to gawk as the marines dragged me into the room.

And in the middle of the room, next to the holotank, stood two men I knew very well.

“Good to see you here, Thom,” Acres said. “Sorry about the bad company, though.” He was bound the same as I was, with a guard standing behind him holding the zip ties. Acres looked a little battered. Some of the cuts and bruises on his face looked like they’d been made more recently than the attack on our ship. Of course the Chief would fight back. I’d never in my life seen the man back down.

I glared daggers at the other man. “Admiral Perrault. Why am I not really shocked to see you here?”

“Because I all but told you I would be,” he replied. “Who else would they send after your father?” He made a dismissive motion with his hand. “No one else would even have a prayer of beating the man.”

“So this is how you repay the Old Man’s friendship?” Acres said. “A knife in the back?”

Perrault ignored Acres. He turned and looked me over. “Glad you’re here, Thomas. Maybe with you at my side we can undo a little of the damage you’ve done.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

He shook his head, anger gleaming in his eyes. “This could have been bloodless. Don’t you see that? With the full fleet, I could have forced your father to stand down. He would have known a battle was pointless.”

He stalked away from me and gestured at the plot. Up ahead Mars was coming into view. “Now he’s out there somewhere, and he still thinks he can win. According to our reports he has one ship. If he engages me, I can break him. If he doesn’t, I’ll be forced to attack the surface to draw him out.”

“You killed my fleet,” he said. “All those men and women, dead because you had to play hero. But now the people living on Mars are going to pay the price for your heroics. How does the hero’s mantle feel now?”

I hung my head. All I’d done was the best I could, the best I could think of in the heat of the moment. Was he right? Were tens of thousands of civilians going to die because I’d screwed up? I didn’t know how I could have done anything differently. But suddenly I felt like a very small player in a very big game.