Accord of Honor (2 page)

I made a fast copy of the ship’s log database. Then I packed it all into a radio signal and sent it out toward Mars for pickup on one of the company satellites. I’d radio to give my full report – later. Looking at the time, I only had about ten minutes left before my crew ran out of air. I cut our thrust. I’d be able to move faster in zero gee.

“Andrew, see if you can wake Wilson up. You’re in charge until I get back,” I said.

Then I popped my seat restraints and pulled the air lead free. The hose had recharged most of my suit air, so I was good for a while. Without the cargo wedges, the ship looked something like a barbell. The bridge and crew area was at one end, the engines at the other, with a spindle corridor connecting the two main areas.

Shimmying out the hatch from the bridge, I pulled myself hand over hand into the corridor beyond. The passage was clear for good long way, then stopped at a sealed door. I pushed off and glided down the center of the corridor and flipped around before I hit the door. I tucked my knees to absorb the impact. It almost worked, but I hadn’t quite gotten my space legs back yet. I bounced a bit and had to grab a rail to catch myself. Frustrated, I swore a little under my breath and pulled myself down to peer through the door’s porthole. Everything looked clear on the other side, just another long stretch of white corridor, with another door on the far end, and a ladder down the side for use during acceleration. The warning light was not lit – good pressure on the other side. I punched the key code to unlock the door and it opened smoothly. With a shove, I was moving fast down the tube again. I checked my watch. Eight minutes.

The next door showed a decompression alarm, strobes flashing red against the alabaster corridor. I peeked through the window and saw – disaster. The main lights were out in the corridor, but emergency lights gave me a dim view of torn metal and twisted plastic. It looked like the missile had torn through the hull on one side of the corridor and then continued on it way, punching through the other side. I’d seen hits like that from large rocks before. They’d punch through the hull so fast that they’d create a shock wave once they hit air, and then suck everything out the other side with them.

The missile had been designed to kill the crew, not destroy the ship.

But the wreckage was cutting me off from my crew in the engine room. I saw bits of light glint off bright points floating in the air, shards of the ship now in free fall, and twisted columns of steel where it had ripped apart under the stress of impact. My shipsuit was thin, made for light duty inside of a ship. If I contacted one of those shards too fast, my suit would rupture and depressurize. People don’t last too long in a vacuum.

I looked at the time again. Only six minutes. I tapped my radio and tried reaching the control room. “Andrew?”

“Here,” he said. “Mars has radioed us. I gave them the short form and said you’d get back to them with the details.”

“Sounds good. Any contact from the aft sections?”

“No. Not yet. You OK?”

“Fine. That one missile hit really messed up the corridor where it hit, though. Don’t know if I can make it through, it’s all shredded steel in there.” I had another idea though.

“Don’t try if it’s too risky,” he replied. “Stay put and I’ll break out one of the heavy suits from the lockers.”

I pushed off toward a hatch that was ‘up’ from me on a wall of the corridor. I keyed the access numbers and the hatch slid open, letting me inside.

“Thomas, just saw an airlock reading in your section. What’re you doing?” said Andrew.

“Something a little crazy,” I replied, setting the airlock to cycle its atmosphere out. I couldn’t get through, but what about around? “Those heavy suits take too long to get into. By the time we got one of us suited, anyone back there who needs help, won’t anymore.” Of course, shipsuits were not designed to take prolonged exposure to space, either. They were supposed to keep one alive through a micrometeor hit long enough to get a patch in place.

“Thomas, I don’t know...” Andrew started to say.

I cut him off. “Andy, I need to concentrate right now. I’ll radio you when I get back in.”

I’d have to crawl along the outside of the ship all the way down to the engines where there was another airlock door. It was going to be a long hike. I hadn’t even had a chance to recertify in EVA yet – my last solo spacewalk was about six years ago. I grinned, wondering if this stunt would be accepted as my recert test. The door beeped and flashed green – the air had cycled out. I punched the keys to open the outer door and pulled myself out into space. So far, so good. Wasn’t too cold, pressure in the suit was holding well. Now to drag myself hand over hand down a hundred more feet of ship to the next airlock. I got to work, climbing along the ladder, one rung at a time.

And that was were I realized I was going to have a problem. Space is...space. It’s empty. Emptiness is a pretty good insulator, so while it was nearly absolute zero, my suit wasn’t losing heat rapidly. Objects conduct heat just fine though – so the rungs of steel on the outside of the ship wicked the heat out of my hands every time I touched them. By the time I was a third of the way down the ship, I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. The shipsuit just wasn’t designed to protect against this level of heat loss. My teeth started chattering as my body reacted to my freezing hands. If I lost much more sensation, I wouldn’t be able to hang on to the rungs anymore. One slip, and I’d be tumbling out in space.

I looked at my watch. Only two minutes left before my crew would be hitting critical levels on their air. I had to do something fast. I was past the wreckage already, nothing ahead of me but a long string of ladder rungs running along the ship through a gap in the crew compartments. They went all the way to the other airlock, down by the engines. After the airlock, the engine area grew out from the spine in a huge bulge. Only one way to do this.

I reached out for the next rung, but instead of grabbing it, I made a blade of my hand and slapped the far side, pushing myself forward. Using my hands like paddles, I swung down and slapped each rung in turn as I moved forward. I was touching the ship for just an instant with each slap, so my hands were starting to warm back up. But I was also picking up speed as I went. I started having to skip rungs. I was moving too fast to slap each one.

Much too fast. I tried to grab a rung to slow myself down but slipped, and the reaction spun my body around. I almost started a full spin but managed to stop the rotation with another slap. Now I was falling feet first toward the engine block. I worried about going too fast. If I bounced off the engines and drifted off into space, Andrew might be able to rescue me – but the crew in the engine room would be dead. I started tapping each rung with my fingers as I passed, dumping a little speed with each one. I was still moving at a good clip as I came up on the airlock.

I gritted my teeth, tensed my shoulder, and shoved my arm down, toward the ship, into the rungs. My armpit slammed into the rung, stopping my fall cold. Pain shot out through my arm and shoulder. But I wasn’t falling anymore. And the airlock was right there below me. Gritting my teeth, I withdrew my arm. Nothing seemed broken, but moving it hurt. I pulled myself down toward the airlock and let myself in.

“I’m inside, Andrew,” I said over the radio.

T
he rest
of the rescue was pretty simple. The engine room had never lost atmosphere, so I just walked over and took helmets off the crew. Shortly afterward, they started waking up. We still lost one man though, a rookie whose seat had torn from its housing when the missile hit and ended up face down under the seat during the worst of the acceleration.

I spent a few long moments memorizing the kid’s face. He was maybe eighteen. Still had freckles, and bright red hair. His lips were blue, his face pale. I tried to remember if it was his first flight out of Mars or his second, but I couldn’t recall. My order made it his last flight, though. I wondered if his chair would have broken loose, had I stepped up the acceleration a little slower. Maybe he would have lived. Or maybe the missiles would have caught us and we all would have died. Either way, I’d never know. I’d just have to live with the memory of his face staring up at me without seeing.

Once everyone was awake and helping each other out, I headed back to the control room. This time, I busted out a hard suit and went the direct way through the tangled mess of the corridor. Mars would be wanting to speak with me by now. An armed ship in space? No one had dared to arm ships since the last war. This changed everything.

“Welcome back, Space Ace,” Andrew said as I pushed back into the control room after ditching the hard suit in the corridor outside.

“Space Ace?” I asked.

“Yeah, figured you were angling for a starring role in a movie or something with the antics on the hull there.”

“Oh.” I sat down. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” It had taken about ten minutes for me to get full feeling back in my hands, and they still hurt.

“And it worked,” I added. Mostly, anyway. The dead rookie’s face haunted my vision.

He just shook his head. “Mars Station wants you on the line.”

“I’ll call them in a minute. What’s our ETA at the station?”

“Just under two hours,” Andrew said.

I whistled. “So little? I thought we’d be out there another day slowing down and then coming back.”

“Got a good plot laid in,” Wilson said. He was awake now, alert, and seemed only a little the worse for wear. “I’ve calculated the angle to use Mars’s gravity to brake us a bit, carved a ton of time off by not zooming out past the planet. We’ll curve around instead,” he said. He looked down and frowned. “Sorry about falling apart back there.”

“Wilson, I don’t think any of us were ready to have our ship shot at. Don’t worry about it. You did good, getting us in to the station so quickly,” I said.

He nodded his thanks and turned back to his console.

And I turned back to mine. Time for a chat with the station. I sent the call, and was rewarded a moment later with the face of a traffic control attendant. She glared at me for a moment, all frizzled gray hair and wide glasses. “Thomas Stein. Back in space not two days and in trouble already. Worse’n your father.”

“Hi Tabby,” I said, trying not to grin. Rumor was Tabby was present when Mars Station was first commissioned, and had been working there in one capacity or another ever since. She wasn’t an employee – she was an institution. And an old friend of my father’s. “Dad hear about it yet?”

“Your father? You’re kidding, right? He’s on his way up from the planet right now, should arrive just before you do. He wants to see you. The governor is up here to see you, too. Going to be a busy day. And you folks are playing hell with my traffic patterns.”

“Sorry about that, Tabby. Wasn’t my plan for the day, either,” I replied. “You already have the initial data squirt, but I have an update. We lost Sam Higgins during the attack.”

“Damn,” she said. “New kid, right?” She seemed to know just about everyone in space. Never asked her how she kept everyone straight. It was part of being a Force of Nature, I guess.

“Yeah. Can you get things rolling for a family notification? We won’t be able to keep wraps on it long, and his folks should hear about it from the company before the press catches word.”

“Yup, done. You just get that bucket back here in one piece. Your father will kill you if your ship breaks up this close to the Station. Come to think of it, I’ll be after you too.”

I nodded. “Thanks. Motivation is just what I needed. We’ll be in soon.” Then I cut the connection and sat down to review the data on the attack, trying to sort out the details of what had happened as we started getting heavier again to slow down.

M
y father was waiting
for me as I stepped out of the airlock into the station a couple of hours later. I’d barely had a chance to wash my face – we’d been too busy keeping the damaged ship running on the way in. He looked as impeccable as usual in a black company shipsuit. His wore his salt and pepper hair – more salt than it once had – close cropped as usual. His face had a scowl so dark that it made me feel like a six year old about to be scolded.

“You’re looking even more grim than usual,” I said. “Been waiting long?”

“Long enough,” he replied. He started walking and I had to step out a bit to keep up.

I don’t remember a time when Dad didn’t have a shadow there, behind his eyes. Oh, you might not have spotted it if you didn’t know what to look for, but I could see it. As a kid I never really understood why he was so distant, always away from the colony on business trips, always off “getting things done”. Other kids had Dads who were away from home too, but it seemed like mine was always gone longer, traveling farther. And even when he was home, it was often like he wasn’t there.

That shadow was something I first remember seeing when I was seven, and just starting to understand people a bit. I saw Dad sitting at his desk. He had returned that day from a long trip. It was late, and I was supposed to be in bed. I don’t think he ever saw that his sandy-haired son was sitting there in the doorway, watching him. He was looking over some data chips on a computer tablet, and there was something about his eyes... I still remember it today.

As he stalked through the corridor of a space station in chaos, the shadow was very much in evidence.

Floating in geosynchronous orbit above Olympus City, Mars Station served as a lifeline to ferry goods from Earth into Mars’s largest settlement, and to ship out the tons of uranium Earth needed to continue supplying energy to the twelve billion souls still living there. It was part port, part political networking center, with bits of whatever else was needed at the time thrown in.

Now it was being used as a military crisis center, the first in over thirty years. The ‘Old Man’s’ rolling gait carried him down the main hall toward the control center, which was the hub of the station and the nerve center of Mars operations. I struggled to match his pace. That’s what a lot of folks called Dad – the ‘Old Man’. Or in some parts, they still called him Admiral Nicholas Stein, USN. Less politely, you’d still hear a few people whisper the name ‘the Mad Bomber’, the title media attack dogs gave him for being the only human still alive to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. I had been in more than one fistfight over that sort of whisper while I was attending university on Earth these past years.

I called him Dad, and had such a complex web of emotions about the man that I could hardly begin to unravel them, even on the best of days. Today was not one of those.

He didn’t pause as he hit the doors to the command center, ignoring a guard holding up a hand in a vain attempt to stall him. I flashed a sympathetic grin to the guardsman as I followed Dad in. I’d learned to manage my father, but most people didn’t have the advantage of being a blood relative. I knew that he wasn’t going to have me jettisoned out the nearest airlock, like the look he was giving the guard said he had in mind. Angry bears would take a look at his face and head off in the other direction. One portly guardsman with too many stress lines on his face didn’t stand a chance.

The control room was like a round cave, computer display screens sparkling along the walls like crystals growing from some enormous geode. The effect was pretty stunning, even though I’d seen it before. There seemed to be a lot more people around than usual, but that didn’t shock me under the circumstances. Mostly, this room served as traffic control for the ships docking and undocking from the station. Not today. A huge table had been placed dead center in the room. It was lit up with holo displays showing telemetry data that was getting more familiar each time I saw it – they were analyzing the attack on my ship. The people gathered around the table looked like a who’s who of Mars muckety-mucks. Dad headed straight for the table, of course.

One of the men looked up and laughed aloud when he saw Dad coming. Not the usual reaction, but then, Governor Clarke wasn’t a usual sort of man. “Nick. Might have known you’d fly up here soon as you heard. News travels fast.”

“Especially when it’s bad” replied my father. Then he added, “It seemed like my expertise might be of some use to us here, Governor.”

“And it was your son being shot at, I understand. But if you keep calling me governor, I’m going to start calling you admiral,” he added.

“All right...George,” Dad replied slowly. Then he spread his arms wide. “So, what do we know at this point, gentlemen?” he said, putting on what I called his Admiral Voice.

“I’ll ignore that technically, as a civilian you shouldn’t be in here at all,” the governor started off, “and admit that another set of eyes might be just what we need. Apart from Thomas’s ship being attacked, we’ve got another three transit ships that are late for arrival in the mining centers of the asteroids here,” he said, pointing at a spot in the holomap over the table.

“We don’t know that those ships are in trouble. They could just be running behind,” said another face at the table. That was Colonel Turrell, who ran the detachment of UN troops assigned to the station and surface of Mars. They were more a glorified police unit than an actual combat force, but they were the closest thing Mars had to a military. Dad fired him a scathing look, which he tried to meet. He withered a little instead. They were not friends. I tried hard not to grin, not being terribly fond of the good Colonel myself.

“Yes, well,” Clarke stepped back in to forestall a fight, at least for the moment. “I think we can assume that one ship being attacked and three others missing in a short period is a bad sign.”

Tabby looked up from where she was sitting at the corner of the table, bent over a tablet computer and working away. “I’ve already recalled all ships heading in that direction,” she said.

“Good,” said Clarke. “We need to figure out what we’re up against here, though. Ships firing on ships! It’s a nightmare, like something out of the Lunar War.” He stopped, looked at Dad. Heck, we all looked at Dad. Maybe I was the only one present who could see the shadows behind his eyes get a bit deeper. But maybe not, because the governor coughed and hurried on. “So some ship is out there firing on our vessels, and from the radio traffic Thomas received, probably trying to seize them.”

Dad had to have been studying the records I sent of the attack since they arrived, but he stared at the holo in front of him, watching the attack repeat itself there again. I looked too, shuddering a little as I vividly remembered those horrible moments when I was fairly sure we were all going to die.

“Well, they’re using powered missiles, obviously,” Dad said. “And from the damage to the ship, it looks like they’re non-explosive. Some sort of SABOT round, designed to punch right through the hull – in one side and out the other.” He had one hand on his chin, with an index finger tapping his nose in thought.

“The SABOT would take all the atmosphere out with it, along with any crew or loose objects in the compartments it hit. High kinetic energy impact,” I explained, when Clarke looked puzzled. “Great for taking out crew without blowing up the ship. The missile drives a pressure wave in front of it and then yanks everything not nailed down after it with the counterpressure.” That was almost me, squeezed into paste by a pressure wave. If that missile had hit a bit more forward... Sweat broke out on my brow.

Everyone was silent for a moment until Dad broke in again. “How many ships do we think they’re operating with?”

“We’ve just seen the one,” I said. “So far, anyway.”

“Isn’t one enough?” Turrell retorted. “One is all we have seen. And getting one ship armed would be hard enough. Let’s not make this more than it is.”

Dad surprised me by chuckling. “Just because the Lunar Accord hasn’t been broken before, don’t assume it’s hard to break. Adding basic arms to a spacecraft is pretty elementary in any well equipped workshop. As I’ve pointed out at length in the past.”

Turrell sputtered some more. “The UN has been enforcing...”

Dad cut him off in full Admiral Voice again. “Yes, and so very effectively, I see. No, it’s pretty certain they have more than one ship. Notice how spread out the fight paths of the missing ships are? I think there has to be at least two armed ships out there, maybe more. If you have the facility to arm one ship, arming a few more is not that hard.”

Clarke scratched his chin. “So, you think we have multiple armed pirates out there, somewhere. What’s their next move? They know we can’t just let them do this with impunity.”

“Well, there’s the problem,” I broke in. Couldn’t believe I was about to do this – Dad’s ongoing diatribes about the mess that was coming when someone broke the Accords had been a source of family strife for as far back as I could remember. Mom had left over it. He and I had fought long and loud over the topic. But it looked like he was right. “It’ll take a while to give ships even a basic refit for combat. The estimates have been...” I looked at Dad.

“Six months, per ship,” he said. “Faster if you cut corners or add a lot to the expense. Using all of Earth and Mars Station’s berths, we could have a dozen armed merchant ships out there in three or four months if enough money was put behind it. But that would mean no major repairs to any of our other ships if they broke down. And even then, we don’t know if the pirates are using retrofitted merchant ships or custom built warships. If those ships are built for fighting, they could tear our retrofits to shreds.”

“One year, maybe more, to get a true warship designed, built, and ready for action. I don’t think they plan to give us that long,” he finished.

I ran some numbers in my head and could see others at the table doing the same. Tabby beat us all, though. “Even in six months, we’re looking at some major issues if they can interdict traffic,” she said. “The mining stations rely on Earth and Mars for oxygen and food. They can’t last six months.”

And if they were forced to surrender, all that metal would go to the pirates to potentially build even more ships. There were two large berths out there in the fields that could build a new ship from scratch.

“Mars could get by for six months,” Clarke mused, “although we’d be tired of rationing by then. Earth though? They rely on our uranium for power. If trade is stopped for too long, there will be a lot of cold people sitting in the dark on Earth.”

“This isn’t an issue,” said Turrell. “The UN Spaceforce is quite capable of...”

“Sitting in orbit and getting blown to bits,” said my father.

“We have two armed ships of our own, based at Earth!” Turrell said. His face was turning crimson.

“Armed with nothing but some pea-shooters designed to look threatening to a shuttle, maybe,” Dad shot back. “They have nothing that can stop these ships. They’d be destroyed before they were even in range to shoot. I warned your bosses what would happen if they didn’t build a real navy, and here we are.”

Turrell was furious, but there wasn’t much he could say. The state of the Spaceforce ‘fleet’ was not common knowledge, but I’d heard enough about it from Dad. The UN had been forced to agree on building ships to enforce the Lunar Accords, but they ‘hadn’t seen the need’ to do a very good job of it. So the entire Spaceforce was two tiny ships, each armed with a short range cannon and a grappling gun.

The table was a zone of quiet in the otherwise buzzing room as everyone pondered the situation. It was Dad who broke the silence again. What he said came as a surprise to me. “Well, I don’t see that there’s a lot we can do about it right now. I assume Earth has already been informed?”

Clarke nodded. “Of course,” he said.

Dad sighed. “Then it looks like the ball really is in the pirates’ court for now. I don’t see that there’s much else that we can do until we know their next move, other than batten down the hatches and bring our ships in toward the planet.” Both Clarke and I were looking quizzically at Dad now. He wasn’t known for taking a passive stance on, well, anything!

“Oh!” he went on. “I’m going to grab the company courier ship for a quick run to our R&D station. Governor, can I get rapid clearance for undocking? We have research out there that we can’t afford to let these people get their hands on.”

“By all means, go then!” Clarke started, then added, “What sort of things? I don’t want to pry into company secrets, but if you have any ideas that might help...”

“Well, among other things, our people have been working on a tweak for a faster ion drive,” Dad said. His face was poker-smooth, which meant he was telling the truth...just not all of it. I was instantly curious.

Clarke stared at Dad a moment longer. For a second I thought he was going to ask more questions, but I guess he thought better of it. I didn’t plan to be as quiet about my own curiosity.

“I’ll make sure your ship is cleared as soon as you’re ready to go,” Clarke said, and smiled. “Just be careful out there. Mars needs you right now, maybe more than ever.”

Dad took that as a dismissal. He nodded to Clarke and Tabby, ignoring Turrell completely – who scowled in return – and turned on his heel to head to the door. With a smile and a wave, I followed right behind him. Something was up, and I intended to find out what.