Rich Man's War (50 page)

In a very literal sense, the crew of the
NSS Pallene
never knew what hit them. She had a full spread of defenses up: anti-missile guns firing away with shells that detonated either on contact or after a specific flight distance, signal-jamming EM waves, and a full-strength electrostatic reinforcement current running through her hull. She still suffered a damaging hit from
Joan of Arc’s
main gun, and that was the beginning of her troubles. All three of
Joan’s
light turrets opened up, firing in sequence to keep
Pallene
boxed in where she couldn’t maneuver without suffering a hit, and then the missiles came.
Joan
fired all four tubes mounted in her wings, set in a staggered pattern so that the burst from one detonation might clear the way of defensive fire for the rest. The first two missiles did that job; the other detonated close enough to
Pallene
to rock the destroyer hard, while the last ripped open her port side.

Joan’s
turrets continued to fire until she passed over the destroyer with less than a kilometer’s clearance. Even with a full spread of corvette weaponry focused upon her,
Pallene
held on.
Joan of Arc
did not kill her alone. The fifteen other corvettes following in her wake were more than enough for that. Kelly and her crew were already on to much bigger problems.

“Bales,” Kelly called to the
bo’sun’s mate over the comm, “it’s go time.”

* * *

Eldridge’s eyes flared with alarm as
Pallene
disappeared off the board. To the other side of his flank,
Telesto
and the frigate
Sorenson
managed to kill a pair of corvettes between them, but all Eldridge cared about was the new hole in his line of defenders.
Hercules’s
companion cruiser,
Halley
, was moving back toward the flagship, and he still had two corvettes and his support ship nearby. Every one of the ships at his command kept up a constant barrage. Expeditionary Group Bravo, still largely unscathed, moved closer to help, but they wouldn’t establish interlocking fields of fire in time. Even if they did, Eldridge feared it might not matter. He saw the corvettes rapidly draw closer.

It was a classic problem of dealing with religious fanatics. Most defensive strategies expected the attacker to have some eye toward his own survival. If the attacker didn’t care if he lived or died, most of the rulebook went out the window.

Lights flashed and alarms blared as the command bridge warned the crew to brace for impact.

* * *

No one wanted to relinquish so much control to their ships’ computers for such a critical maneuver, but everyone recognized that it was too much for a human being to handle. The task demanded too fine a hand, too quick an eye and too delicate a sense of relative speeds. For seven brief, crucial seconds, Lt. Kelly and Chief Romita on
Joan of Arc
had to flip the switch and let the computer take over completely, just like their counterparts on the other corvettes that made it through the storm of defensive fire around the battleships.

Joan of Arc
flew straight for
Hercules
and then leveled off at the last instant. She matched the enemy’s speed almost down to a matter of meters per second and then glided along her hull as if the corvette intended to land on the massive ship. She shook from the impacts of explosive shells, but the corvette doggedly remained—even when a defense gun shell exploded right in front of the ship, sending shrapnel through both the armored bridge canopy and all three people behind it.

* * *

Every officer on
Hercules’s
flag and command bridges expected a very different act of madness than what they saw. They figured the screens would go black, that
Hercules
would shudder under a horrible impact or perhaps a full nuclear explosion, and that the damage would be terrible. Then they noticed that the corvette’s cargo bay ramp was down.

Commodore
Eldridge watched in shock as dozens of men and women in vac suits leapt out from
Joan of Arc’s
cargo bay onto his battleship.

The Battle of
Raphael
NSS Hercules

“Our proposal does not envision a program that fully trains every recruit for every shipboard station, nor make them proficient with every piece of equipment, nor prepare them for every possible emergency situation. Such a goal is obviously unattainable. Instead, we must instill within each recruit a solid understanding of the fundamentals of starship operation, repair and combat that will serve them in a wide variety of situations. No graduate will be a master crewman, engineer or rifleman, but every graduate will know that in an emergency, he or she can figure things out well enough to see the emergency through.”

--Gunnery Sergeant Michelle Janeka and Chief Boatswain’s Mate William Everett

Training Proposal, Fort Stalwart,
Raphael, April, 2274

All seventy boarders relied
on computer-controlled gear just like the crew of the ship that delivered them. Each wore a spacewalking harness over their body armor and vac suits, modified to put out greater thrust for a shorter burst than safety standards normally allowed. Every one of them knew, intellectually, that they weren’t falling a hundred meters onto a hostile ship. No one “fell” in space. The ship’s own artificial gravity systems would create some pull for objects outside the hull, but nothing approaching that of a planet’s surface. Yet with the nitrogen jets in their harnesses firing at full blast and the dizzying view from the point of departure to their destination, it surely felt like falling.

Tanner came out in the middle of the group.
Joan’s
pass along the battleship’s hull didn’t allow for a staggered drop. The computers handled everything, making sure the whole team jumped as one. Even with such a synchronized exit, though, the team quickly scattered across the gigantic ship’s length and width. Many of his comrades never made it to the hull at all.

He focused on his own jump. No one on the team could do any more than that. Tanner kept his eyes on the hull, spread his arms out and bent at the knees, hoping the magnets in his gloves, elbows, knees and boots would be enough to attach him to the hull.

Screams and frightened curses filled the comm net, but the void allowed for no other sounds nor any sensation like wind or a chill. A rapid, heavy breathing accompanied the sounds on the comm, but Tanner knew it was his own. Maybe some of the high-pitched swearing, too.

He hit the deck of
Hercules
like he’d been thrown out of a speeding car, and that was a blessing. His vac suit and the harness worked as designed. Tanner tumbled and sprawled against a spaceship that moved thousands of kilometers a second, but he was moving at almost exactly that speed and direction when he jumped, too. The landing didn’t kill him, but it left him winded and bruised. If his rifle, damage control kit and other gear wasn’t strapped so tightly to his body, the extra mass would have beaten him up worse.

He’d been lucky to hit at a fairly flat point on the ship’s surface. Like most
big ships,
Hercules
had plenty of large and small fixtures on its hull that one could grab. Aside from the turrets and missile pods, the battleship’s hull was littered with umbilical connectors, chemical intake fixtures, signal lamps and numerous handholds and clamps to aid spacewalkers on her hull—which her designers understandably presumed would only ever be the ship’s own crew. All of the protrusions offered things to hold onto, but they also offered numerous danger points for someone flying in at a dangerous speed.

Tanner looked up across the deck with his heart pounding. Thankfully, he wasn’t the only one to make it. At a glance, he thought maybe most of the team was scattered across the battleship’s hull with him, keeping low and holding on to regain their senses. Two other corvettes,
St. Nicholas
and
Albert the Great
made their passes barely a heartbeat following
Joan’s
, dropping more boarders in their wake on the battleship’s other sides. Yet every team took plenty of losses during the drop.

Marines and navy crewmen alike shouted with terror and anger as they flew straight past
Hercules
without ever connecting. Private Kipsang, who’d been behind Tanner in
Joan’s
cargo bay, almost made it but the magnets in his suit never got a firm grip for some reason. Tanner saw him slide right past, reaching out with both hands but only scraping the metal with his fingertips before floating away. Another marine, Sergeant Lawson, flew head first into a protruding chemical intake fixture and broke his neck, leaving him drifting off silently. Signalman Third Class Jun, another Oscar Company alumni who’d also been in weapons and tactics school with Tanner, flew right into the firing line of one of
Hercules’s
defense turrets. A shell exploded upon impact with his body a couple of meters from the gun’s barrels, sending hot shrapnel flying across the deck that wounded and killed more people.

Suddenly frantic with the instant loss of a friend of two years, Tanner’s gaze snapped to his right. Baldwin had been at his side when they went out of the cargo bay. She wasn’t so close to him anymore, but he spotted her petite, helmeted form about a dozen meters away with both arms wrapped around a protruding umbilical connector.

Hercules
went into a spin to avoid the next wave of corvettes. Tanner felt it before he noticed the way the stars and the trails of debris and outgoing fire seemed to curve overhead. Attached to the hull as he was both by the battleship’s gravity systems and his suit’s magnetic pads, Tanner knew he wasn’t in much danger of being flung off, but it made for a wild ride just the same. In a flash of movement, Tanner saw
St. Martin
fly in and try to match the spin for her drop, but a lethal hit from one of
Hercules’s
quad laser turrets cut the already battered corvette in half. Tanner thought he saw a couple of bodies fly out the back before the explosion hit, but he had no way of knowing if they were survivors or more dead men and women.

Tanner forced himself off of his belly, adjusted his gear and moved over to Baldwin, careful to assure that one foot was solidly attached to the deck before lifting the other and not at all shy about using his hands as well. The comm net that kept the boarders united—in theory—carried too many screams and shouts for Tanner to bother with it.

He grabbed hold of Baldwin’s wrist, careful not to dislodge her. Then he slapped the side of his helmet to activate the person-to-person channel. “Jesse, it’s Tanner. You okay?”

“I’m just catching my breath and I am never doing that again!” Baldwin screamed angrily.

“How do you think I feel?” He looked out across the hull. More of their teammates seemed to be regaining their footing. He spotted Rivera, now a corpsman but once a fellow stressed-out recruit, heaving an injured marine up onto his back. On one hand, the presence of Oscar Company graduates in
Joan’s
cargo bay for the drop felt reassuring. On the other, Tanner wondered how many old friends were already gone now like Jun.

He had several specific friends on his mind.

Baldwin followed him across the hull toward Rivera and his injured marine. “I lost that stupid comm unit bag when I hit, too. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Better the bag than you.”

Command tones interrupted their banter. “Regroup! All hands, form fire teams and get inside! Move your asses! Go!”

The angry, demanding voice was all but music to Tanner’s ears.
Of course, Janeka made it
.
Never a doubt there.
“Rivera!” Tanner said once he made physical contact. “Come with us. I’ve got a breaching kit in my bag.”

Rivera nodded. “Where are we gonna go?”

Tanner looked around. The starship battle still raged—he could see flashes of light and explosions in the distance in any direction.
Hercules
still put out a full screen of fire. For now, the corvettes seemed to be holding off. Many other corvettes targeted the other two battleships, far out of sight from here. Tanner had no idea how they fared. Nor did he know how many of the drops on
Hercules
succeeded, or if most ended like
St. Martin’s
.

He pointed to the defense turret that had inadvertently killed Jun. It jutted from the battleship’s hull perhaps fifty meters from his position, temporarily silenced. “There,” he said. “That gun. Probably a repair access hatch somewhere.”

“Why isn’t it firing?” Baldwin asked, but Tanner didn’t answer. He got moving.

Chatter and shouting continued over the comm net, joined now by jarring, intermittent tones as the battleship’s communications techs got their jamming systems running. Before long, nobody on the outside of the ship would be able to get any signals at all.

A small ring of metal surrounded the turret, angled inward to offer better protection. Tanner and the others practically crawled to the spot, needing more than the magnetic grip of their boots to stay glued to the hull as the huge ship fishtailed and spun in an effort to avoid further boarders. Were it not for the battleship’s artificial gravity field bleeding out beyond the hull and mitigating most of that momentum, everyone would have been flung off into the void. Even now it was difficult to maintain direction and balance.

Relying on hand signals, Tanner gestured for Baldwin to move around to the left of the turret’s protective ring while he crawled around the right, looking for a hatch or any other point of entry. Such access was a fact of life for ships with numerous external fixtures and moving parts like turrets… though Tanner expected the design of warships would never be the same after today.
Especially if they succeeded.

Their
search soon bore fruit as Tanner came to a sealed hatch, though it offered no exterior entry controls or an emergency handle. That was to be expected, and the reason why he and so many others on his team carried damage control bags. He moved with greater confidence than he had the first time he’d tried to do this—on a destroyer’s side, unrehearsed and unaided by the reassuring presence of friends. By the time he had the magnetized contact cable spooled out around the edges of the hatch, Baldwin, Rivera and the wounded marine had caught up with him. With the breaching kit ready to go, Tanner looked from one comrade to another, got the “ready” nod, and hit the energizing button.

The hatch snapped open, releasing the air within the vestibule behind it. Tanner didn’t hesitate; he swung himself over the side and climbed down the vestibule with Baldwin behind. Fully ensconced by the ship’s artificial gravity once they were in the tube, both found it easier to use the ladder than to rely on the magnetic grips and treads of their suits.
Jamming interference likewise diminished.

Baldwin reached out to touch Tanner’s shoulder
. “Manual control,” she noted, nodding toward a spot behind him against the bulkhead.

“Good eye. You wanna take it?”
He saw her nod again. He looked up and saw that the hatch above them remained open. “I don’t think that thing’s gonna close on its own. Keep yourself glued to the bulkhead.”

“I was gonna tell you the same,” he heard her grin before she pulled away. Tanner saw Rivera lean over the
edge and waved him off. He drew the pistol at his side, cranked up the power on his magnetic grips once again, and waited.

Baldwin sent the hatch swinging open into the compartment below, releasing a violent rush of air. The wind died off within a couple of seconds, prompting Tanner to kill the power to his grips and drop down to the deck below. He took the landing as he’d been taught, with his knees bent and rolling to one side. He came up to a kneeling position, weapon up and sweeping the room.

Two men and one woman occupied the compartment, situated near control consoles. Tanner found them all still securing their helmets or their oxygen tanks. He’d been ready to start shooting from the moment he dropped into the small compartment, but a single heartbeat of observation was all it took to back him off from hair-trigger reactions. The gunnery crew had no small arms. Two of them didn’t notice him right away, focused as they were on their personal life support systems. The other held his hands up, which prompted his companions to do the same. Three shocked faces looked at him through fully transparent helmet visors.

At first
, Tanner thought he’d be able to take them peacefully. He kept his pistol trained on the crew, holding on for the extra couple of seconds to let Baldwin catch up. Then he realized the woman’s mouth was still moving. He fired a warning shot with his pistol, striking the overhead with a red flash of light and making all three flinch and duck downward. With his other hand, he drew a grenade from his belt and tossed it behind the gunnery console.

Intensely bright white light erupted in their midst, along with a concussive force that knocked all three of the crewmen around. The lack of air prevented much in the way of the jarring sound that normally accompanied a stun gren
ade, but the weapon did its job. Tanner moved in around the console, pistol still up, ready to secure his prisoners.

“Could’ve warned me,” grumbled Baldwin over
the comm. “I almost caught that flash.”