Poor Man's Fight (27 page)

The
Guillotine
—under a different name, of course—spent a few hours on the surface yesterday doing repairs, took off, and then returned an hour ago claiming the same problem had resurfaced. A professional crew would have been embarrassed by such a fiasco. Port personnel naturally dropped a few smart-ass remarks.

Those same port workers might have held their tongues had they known what had happened to the
Guillotine’s
wealthy original owner, her family and her personal staff.

“Two guys walking up to the edge of the entry ramp and poking their heads inside is my kin
d of inspection,” Ranjan conceded. He was a new addition to the crew, signing on only two months before. He, too, might’ve been disturbed to know the details of the mutiny.

As Hannah considered telling him the grisly story, Ranjan spotted a blinking light that appeared on the flat screen of his status panel. He quickly accessed and read the message. “
That’s the warning signal. They’re firing up. Sticking with Casey’s plan.
Yaomo’s
in the lead.”

“
Casey’s plan,” Hannah snorted, slipping her boots off the control panel. “More like
my
plan. He just shuffled the ships around a little. Okay, I guess we’re done with our ‘repairs.’ Call in the boys from outside. Tell ‘em they can ditch the uniforms. Then get us in line to take off.”

A moment later, the ship’s indicator lights showed that all hatches were sealed. Hannah keyed the shipboard com
m system. “Engineering,” she said, “get us revved up. Everyone else, battle stations. I say again, battle stations.”

An alarm
announced take-off, but not one to warn of impending combat. Normally, a crew took a final vote before making an attack; in this case, they voted before returning to Qal’at Khalil. Within moments, lights across the ship’s battle stations display indicated full readiness. The ship’s engines came online with a shudder that ran the length and breadth of the
Guillotine
.

Hannah’s eyes darted between split projections on her status board. One side offered take-off time and instructions. As expected, the port of Khalil City was
quite accommodating; they offered a wide launch window and a polite farewell. The other projection displayed traffic outside the atmosphere as seen by orbiting satellites. Planetary scanning systems wouldn’t spot the pirate ships until they decelerated below light speed.

Local military systems might see better than what was offered to private traffic, but
nothing could see faster than light traveled. Given the lax security the
Guillotine
encountered, Hannah wasn’t even convinced the local military had warning systems independent of the civilian infrastructure.

Hannah’s compatriots would attack without much warning, but just how sharp their edge of surprise would be depended largely on her
timing.

She
noted nervous expressions on the three other faces on her bridge. Hannah felt the same way, but she wasn’t interested in advertising. She made herself breathe steadily, sitting calmly in her chair until the traffic display picked up a new inbound freighter contact. As it arrived, Hannah called up a clock beside it, counting down rather than up.

“Take us up slow
ly,” she instructed, her eyes still glued to the display. The freighter—which had better be
Yaomo
, or things would get awkward quickly—was already in the atmosphere. Its approach vector toward Dammar, the larger city two thousand kilometers away, held more or less to the original plan. Certainly its speed had someone in traffic control alarmed by now.

Hannah threw the battle stations comms switch on and left it there. “Helm, come to zero-four-four. You know what we’re looking for. Everyone else, you’ve got your targets. Wait for my command.” She looked over the display screens that winked to life across her control panel. They gave the captain a view of each targeting system on the
Guillotine
. Luxury yachts commonly carried significant armament; they were, after all, prime targets for pirates and terrorists, or so their wealthy owners argued to the people who wrote shipbuilding standards. The
Guillotine
was no exception. Her original owners greatly exceeded Union limits.

“Ranjan,” she asked, “do you mind?”

The shipmate to her right let out a little sigh. “No,” he said, surrendering control of the ship’s rocketry systems to her. “Go ahead.”

“T
hank you,” Hannah smiled. With the target already locked in, it was really only a matter of tapping a light on her display screen. Hannah wanted to be the one to press it anyway. Her fingers lingered for only a second before coming down on the trigger key.

Four missiles shot from within the wings of the
Guillotine
, bursting out of highly illegal concealed launchers that had been part of her original custom design. Each flew to a pre-programmed target. Two missiles demolished the spaceport’s control building in a fiery explosion. One veered left, destroying the system patrol ship that
Guillotine
had spotted sitting in its hangar bay on arrival. The fourth soared halfway across the city, homing in on the undisguised anti-space/air turret system near the royal palace.

Guillotine’s
two turrets opened up on the spaceport as her missiles flew. The ship hovered in the air and rotated, allowing her gunners a moment to lay waste to targets of opportunity. Then she moved off on a strafing run taking her over the city’s police headquarters and the palace.

Hannah glanced at the screen displaying the planet’s orbital traffic network. It showed only static. Her grin widened a little more; her timing had been
excellent.

***

Yaomo
plummeted out of the sky as if it would crash headlong into the streets of Dammar directly below. Her captain screamed the whole way down.

Ming held direct control of the helm.
The five other people on the bridge of the freighter all looked more at one another than at their individual control stations. Ming had let out a yell when they hit the atmosphere at a less than gentle speed, which wasn’t entirely inappropriate. What they were about to do was crazy. Exciting. Audacious. Ballsy. Something for the history books.

As the ship began to tremble with the stress of blazing through the atmosphere, trailing smoke across the sky, Ming
ran out of breath. His war cry died off. Then he inhaled and screamed again, and that was when the bridge crew looked his way. They saw wild eyes, a wide-open mouth and veins bulging in his forehead and his neck.

Yaomo
was built with little regard for aesthetics. She was one hundred fifty meters long and mostly rectangular, with a bulbous bridge section and twin main thrusters. In between ran her primary cargo bay. The long, cylindrical cargo bays on her sides and top were attachments, not integral construction. The crew had long since forgotten the distinction; many of them made their living quarters in the cargo bays.
Yaomo
relied on deception and a strong, ruthless crew much more than on her arms and armor.

For this particular
raid, a good number of her crew had to move their personal effects out of the ship’s center cargo bay.

Yaomo
fell to less than eight kilometers from the surface before her stabilizers fired. The move quickly halted her descent and aligned the freighter parallel to the ground. Her center cargo bay doors snapped open. An enormous bundle of large cylindrical fuel cells dropped out of the bay, along with numerous scrambler units and chaff flares to prevent it from being tracked and destroyed by anyone on the ground who might recognize it as a threat before it was too late.

Barely
three seconds later,
Yaomo’s
thrusters fired. Were it not for her internal gravity system, the wrenching force of the move would have pulped everyone aboard. Even so, the ship groaned and numerous systems sounded alarms.

In her wake, the fuel cells detonated a few hundred meters in the air above Dammar’s spaceport. The shockwave reached well beyond the spaceport itself, followed by
lethal heat. Witnesses would forever call it a nuke regardless of technicalities.

Virtually all of those
witnesses were at least two kilometers away from the spaceport. Hardly anyone closer than that lived to tell about it.

***

“I just want to point out,” Casey said, turning the volume of the
Yaomo’s
transmissions almost all the way down, “that as much as Ming wants everyone to think he’s crazy, it was the guys on
Monkeywrench
who came up with that bomb in the first place.” He glanced around the bridge. Graffiti, knickknacks and slovenly pirate living had
Vengeance
looking somewhat less than military, but all the buttons, switches and electronics still worked as originally designed.  “Those guys sit around making great big bombs. Think about that.”

“Ship full of engineers gone bad,” agreed Jerry. “That’d keep me up at night if I didn’t drink myself to sleep. Speaking of. She’s alongside us now, ready to drop into the atmosphere.”

Casey glanced over to the three-dimensional display projected by the command and control table. Though coordination of a real fleet typically lay with battleships, destroyers still had to be built with the same command capacity.
Vengeance
was old, but she’d been built to last. Few expenses were ever spared when it came to upgrades.

Her image
on the holographic tactical projection was still one of a proper military ship: sleek, lean and bristling with weapons. Unlike smaller craft, she bore no wings or anything evoking imagery of flight. She was shaped much like a long shark, though instead of a tail she had large thrusters. Her armored hull ran in sleek, gently curving lines, with gaps cut here and there for gun emplacements, access hatches and other necessities.

Beside her,
Monkeywrench
looked like a steam-era ship turned inside out in a mad attempt to imitate a psychiatrist’s inkblot. Service and maintenance ships were usually ugly things, and
Monkeywrench
was no exception. Her original mutineers still made up much of her crew. The former Lai Wa Corporation employees had played merrily with all her tools and machinery ever since.
Monkeywrench
had originally been built for salvage missions, deep space ship repair and other assorted industrial chores. Now in addition to her magnetic clamps, old-fashioned cranes and tractor beams, she boasted ablative armor and a hodgepodge of weaponry.

Casey
looked over to his display of the action on the surface.
Guillotine
continued her strafing runs while
Yaomo
sped out to rendezvous.
Yaomo
was packed with pirates ready to disembark and run through the city’s streets, including many drawn from
Vengeance
.
Monkeywrench
would join her with an even larger share of manpower.

The problem came when
Liberty Rose
, a smaller, more maneuverable freighter than
Yaomo
, decided to cut in front of
Monkeywrench
to head for the surface. “Krietmeyer,” Casey said after keying the comm channel, “what’re you doing? You need to let Wei move in first.”

“The hell difference does it make?” Krietmeyer’s voice came back over the channel. “We’re all going in the same direction, anyway!”

Casey watched
Liberty Rose
hit the atmosphere and snarled. “The difference is if there are anti-air defenses Hannah hasn’t hit yet,
Monkeywrench
has a better chance of surviving--!”

“Then why haven’t they shot at Hannah yet?” Krietmeyer interrupted. “Look, I’m not going in last and letting my guys miss all the best action.”

“You stupid asshole, it’s not about that! They aren’t shooting at Hannah because she’s too low and fast for—!”

“Cannon emplacement!”
announced Jerry. Casey’s head snapped toward Jerry’s display screen, which presented a computer-generated tactical view of Khalil City and its surroundings. Much of it already showed red from the havoc wreaked by
Guillotine
. Five kilometers away from the city, though, a hillside revealed the bright red color of an intense heat signature. Then a wide, brilliant green beam shot from the hillside through the
Liberty Rose
and into the sky beyond. The plasma blast continued on well out of the atmosphere before it dissipated.

Liberty Rose
was all but cut in half. She immediately began tumbling in the air in freefall.

“Jerry, we got that thing?”
Casey asked.

He needn’t have spoken. Jerry lit up the cannon emplacement with
two of
Vengeance’s
laser batteries. Sharp red beams of light flashed through the atmosphere to cut through the hillside. At least one of the lasers struck something explosive, destroying the cannon emplacement in a ball of fire.