Battlecruiser Alamo: Not One Step Back

NOT ONE STEP BACK

Battlecruiser Alamo: Book 5

Richard Tongue

Battlecruiser Alamo #5: Not One Step Back

Copyright © 2014 by Richard Tongue, All Rights Reserved

First Kindle Edition: February 2014

Cover By Keith Draws

All characters and events portrayed within this ebook are fictitious; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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With Thanks To: Mark Berryman, Peter Long, Kenneth Bailey

Through learned and laborious years
 They set themselves to find
Fresh terrors and undreamed-of fears
 To heap upon mankind.
All that they drew from Heaven above
 Or digged from earth beneath,
They laid into their treasure-trove
 And arsenals of death:
While, for well-weighed advantage sake,
 Ruler and ruled alike
Built up the faith they meant to break
 When the fit hour should strike.
They traded with the careless earth,
 And good return it gave:
They plotted by their neighbour's hearth
 The means to make him slave.
When all was ready to their hand
 They loosed their hidden sword,
And utterly laid waste a land
 Their oath was pledged to guard.
Coldly they went about to raise
 To life and make more dread
Abominations of old days,
 That men believed were dead.
They paid the price to reach their goal
 Across a world in flame;
But their own hate slew their own soul
 Before that victory came.

The Outlaws, Rudyard Kipling

Chapter 1

 Logan Winter, occasional secret agent, sat at the poker table, his attention switching from the pile of chips in front of him to his hand, the first decent one he’d had all night. He allowed his gaze to drift over to the viewport, a desolate asteroid slowly tumbling beneath the prospecting station, lingering for what he hoped was the briefest of seconds on his contact. Under normal circumstances, he would have arranged for an independent courier to pick up this information, but time had not permitted shipping someone else all the way out here.

 He looked around the room as the bet passed to him, as if attempting to size up the other players. All of them were low-level corporate types from the station’s administration, wearing carbon-copy jumpsuits with their logos emblazoned on the side. One of them was making a complete mess of hiding his tells; he had far fewer chips on his table than the rest of them, and he hoped that he hadn’t manage to bet the special chip away to someone else in his excitement. If there was one thing Logan hated, it was working with rookies, and this whole operation seemed to be decidedly amateur hour.

 “I’ll raise a hundred,” he said, pushing a pair of orange chips onto the table, rapping his knuckles on the table in the pre-arranged signal.

 Mr. Fidget, sitting to his right, rapidly tossed the special chip into the pile, “I’ll match that.”

 “Too rich,” his neighbor said, and the next player also withdrew from the game, tossing his cards carelessly to the table as they tumbled and drifted in the low-gravity. There was only one other player left, and Logan caught the beginnings of a little smile on his face; he glanced down at the three aces in his hand, hoping for reassurance, but the seed of doubt began to creep into his mind. If he had played his trick too early, he’d have to resort to something clumsy after the game.

 “I’ll raise three hundred,” he said, pushing a pile of low-denomination chips onto the table, the pile crashing down above the chips. Logan kept his face cool; this wasn’t the first time he’d played for stakes like this. He counted to twenty in his head, spending the time with his head buried in his cards, as if he was waiting to make his decision. This one had to look good.

 “I’ll match, and see you,” Logan replied. His contact eagerly – far too eagerly – threw in his hand, relinquishing his bet, and it was just the two of them remaining in the game. With a huge smirk, the confident man laid his cards face down on the table, and Logan couldn’t resist a grin as he saw three queens leering up at him.

 “Three aces,” he replied, displaying his cards with a smile, and gathering in his chips. Ordinarily he would have played several more hands in order to camouflage his performance, ideally losing most of his stake – after all, it wasn’t his money he was playing with. At least, he hoped it wasn’t; he had no idea how the accountants would view this expenses claim when he put it in. He started to pile his chips into a pouch; he had an appointment that the laws of celestial mechanics would not permit him to miss.

 “I’m afraid I’m going to have to bow out here, my friends,” he said, looking around with a smile.

 “No,” the loser said. “You should give us a chance to win back our money.”

 “If you didn’t want to lose it, you shouldn’t have bet it,” his contact said, looking at the door.  Inwardly, Logan groaned; this idiot was on the verge of blowing the entire operation.

 “You seem awfully friendly with this stranger, Saul.”

 “What are you implying?”

 Logan edged to the door as he saw a finger dart under a table, obviously heading for a hidden button. His assessment of the station’s security was fairly low, but realistically in about a minute a group of thugs would be bursting into the room, and it didn’t seem likely that they would be on his side of the argument.

 “Where are you going?”

 “I haven’t got any time to listen to you two bickering,” he said, trying to muster some bluster as he continued to move for the door. “This has been an excellent game, and I’ll be only too happy to let you try and win my money back off me tomorrow, but really…”

 Logan had an instant to react to the sight of a gun coming out of a concealed holster into the hand of one of the other players; this wasn’t just a group of frustrated poker players annoyed that they had been beaten at cards, this was an ambush that he’d managed to dance right into the middle of. Fortunately, the designer of his concealed holster was apparently better than the man who had built that of his target; the prospective gunman dropped to the ground with a hole in his shoulder, yelling in pain. He spared a second to glance at the weapon as it rolled out of his hand, a Republic Service Special.

 “What the hell have you done!” yelled one of the players, but Logan was in no mood for a prolonged exchange, racing out of the room and down the corridor. He’d spent the last three weeks on this old station, long enough to have a reasonable idea of the layout; right now his goal was the nearest shuttle bay. Sliding his weapon back out of sight, he saw a trio of guards running down the corridor, and jogged past them with a smile and a wave.

 He shook his head as that little ploy almost worked; it bought him a few seconds before they realized he was the one they had been summoned to arrest, and they turned, reaching for their guns, but before they could draw them Logan had fired a few shots into the air, sending shards of plastiglass flying from a monitor with some ominous-sounding sparks, enough to distract them long enough for him to dive into the waiting elevator, the very one they had used to reach him.

 Stabbing his finger on the button for the shuttle bay, he slid a data crystal from a hidden pocket in his jacket and placed it into a slot on the elevator’s control panel, just in time to stop the override that would have locked him in place. The system had been designed well enough that he didn’t own the whole transport infrastructure, but at the very least he could guarantee reaching his destination.

 At this point, there was no way that he was simply going to get away with sauntering into the bay and taking his shuttle, so he took several deep breaths, replaced his gun carefully in the holster but twisted his sleeve so that he could reach it with the simple flex of a muscle, and tensed himself to make a run for it.

 The doors slid open, and before anyone could challenge or question him, he sprinted out into the open bay, running to his waiting shuttle, an old, stubby-nosed craft, battered and bruised from long misuse. Guards were rushing towards him from every direction, but none of them had drawn their weapons – the damage they could do to valuable company property was sufficient to discourage them.

 Some of the prospectors, working on their ships – most of them even older than his – cheered as he outpaced the guards, no-doubt suspecting that he had been caught for some petty misdemeanor and was simply showing up the security forces. He managed to slam his hand down on the palm-print reader, and the outer airlock door opened with surprising speed to admit him, crashing shut just before the fastest of the guards could get their hands on him.

 As he walked into the cockpit, he could see a series of guards milling around outside through the viewport, obviously debating what to do; he ignored the urgent requests from his communication system, telling him that there was a critical incoming message.

He slid into the co-pilot’s chair and began to type, running through a series of quick programs. The first thing he had done when he arrived was to take over the docking systems, and the gathering crowd suddenly had a nasty shock as sirens began to sound; he’d just activated every elevator airlock, and most of them had people standing on them.

 With a quick grin at the chaos he had just caused, he slid across to the pilot’s seat, typing in a pre-arranged course to his destination. Slowly, reluctantly, as if knowing that it was doing something it shouldn’t, the elevator engaged, and with a final gasping breath of atmosphere leaking out into space, his shuttle was drifting free – a situation that lasted only long enough for him to flick a switch on his primary engine, bursting down towards the asteroid.

 Dozens of ships – many of them part-disassembled – drifted in space behind him as he calculated his course. If he had done his job right, and if his superiors had managed to get everything ready in time, there would be a Triplanetary ship waiting for him at the other side of the rock. He hoped.

 A warning alarm sounded from his sensors, and he hastily cursed in a dozen languages; a fighter had managed to scramble in time to get after him, no doubt with orders to shoot to destroy. Someone was really trying to cover their tracks today. He ran his hands over the panel, and a trio of thrusters emerged from hidden compartments on the outside of his shuttle’s hull, beginning to run through a pre-arranged series of evasive maneuvers  – maneuvers that, he noted with some alarm, were going to take him far too close to the surface of the nameless asteroid for comfort.

 No point trying to call the Triplanetary ship for help right now; they were going to have to maintain a level of plausible deniability, at least until after he had reported in. He watched the horizon get closer and closer as he dived towards the surface, the fighter curving down after him, then shook his head as another track appeared on his proximity sensors; a missile, heading right for him.

 It was times such as this that made Logan wish that he had a co-pilot he could trust; nudging the autopilot on, he skidded over to the communications station and began to engage the countermeasure programs. Twenty seconds later, the missile exploded well short of its target – surplus military hardware, so he had all the specifications, and the idiots hadn’t even changed the encryption programs.

 Grey-brown dirt raced below him as the shuttle drifted from side to side, lunging around as if caught in an invisible wind, all designed to protect him from future attack, but after a few seconds he passed over the asteroid, and could see the welcoming light of his destination ahead of him. Inserting an encryption chip using a coding that officially couldn’t exist, he opened a channel.

 “Winter to Pioneer, do you read?”

 “Pioneer here. You are cleared to dock; be advised that we have warned off incoming fighter and our defensive systems are activated.”

 He frowned at that, but made no reply, instead watching with some satisfaction as the fighter curved away, heading back for the station, no doubt in order to have an argument with his boss. The shuttle cruised towards the waiting scout, and he frowned at the fresh coat of paint; someone had done some serious work on this ship in the recent past. Usually when Intelligence borrowed a ship from the junkyard fleet, they didn’t bother with anything but routine maintenance.

 With a few careful pulses from the thrusters, the shuttle steadied itself into the waiting cradle, then jerked up as it was pulled into the small shuttle bay. Logan could feel acceleration as soon as the elevator airlock had closed; they were already underway. Climbing out of his couch, he walked over to the airlock door, impatiently waiting for it to open. An all-too familiar face was waiting for him outside.

 “Paine, you bastard, I’ve half a mind too…”