Last of the Immortals (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 3) (22 page)

And Kasum
had
gambled after all. The Emperor would be pleased to know he had guessed right. The First Lord had sent a battlecruiser along with Keller. One more victim awaiting the executioner.

“Gentlemen,” Emmerich said to the room with a harsh smile. “We will proceed on plan. Maintain squadron formation and bring us to attack speed.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Captain Baumgärtner nodded.

While most of his attention was centered on the projection in front of him, Emmerich watched his flag captain out of the corner of his eye as the man turned and began to bark out orders, mostly confirmations. All of this had been planned well in advance, and confirmed from the edge of the system twenty minutes ago.

Very shortly, young lady. Very shortly
.

Chapter XXXVI

Date of the Republic June 16, 394 Above Ballard

“Commander,” Denis’s tight voice came over the comm. “He’s here.”

Jessica almost sighed with relief when the sensors finally detected the Imperial fleet coming out of Jumpspace.

All the planning. All the mischief. All the nightmares.

It was finally done.

The local area projection she had been studying was already live. Now it began to fill with spheres and vectors, zones and ranges. Six enemy vessels coming down the gravity well at them. Not full tilt, like she might have done in his place, but fast enough. And from the vectors, he was coming after her immediately, and not going after either of the two stations in orbit with her.

At least she didn’t have to chase him. He was coming to her.

Auberon
certainly couldn’t run from him, even if that had been her plan.

He knew that.

The man was even coming in on just about the right path, never being one for misdirection when he had the killing edge.

She envisioned the Red Admiral on his bridge, smiling right now, possibly laughing as his plan came to fruition and he had her trapped. He would be prepared for
Mischief
from Moirrey Kermode.

Jessica and Oz had a whole different level of things planned.

“Squadron, this is the flag,” she said calmly. Calmness in a commander was infectious, as was panic. “All hands to battle stations. Execute
Ballard Defense Plan Two
. Break.
Auberon
and
Ballard
Defense Station
: crash launch your flight wings and prepare to receive the enemy squadron. Flight deck, send out package number two with the wing. Stand by to launch package number one, but we won’t need it immediately. Comm, notify
Alexandria Station
to evacuate all hands immediately.”

Around her, the lights turned softly red and the alarm began to hoot again. Very few people had come off alert from the asteroid miner’s arrival two hours ago, but everything now was terminal. Enej was already wriggling into his emergency suit, so she did the same. Fifteen seconds now was time well invested, regardless of their regular training to do it in the dark and smoke of a damaged vessel.

Around her,
Auberon
awoke from her nap and came alive. The entire hull took on a new urgency as generators spun up and locked in, shields were charged, and the crew did the hundreds of little things summed up in the words
battle stations
. Even the floor shivered as the pilot, Nada, lit the engines and turned
Auberon
’s prow into the teeth of the storm.

Ξ

Arott had been scheduled to come off shift nearly an hour ago, but something about the flavor of the day had held him in his command chair. Perhaps he had known. There were only so many ways to handle the element of surprise in a scenario like this one. Either you came in hot and heavy, or you let everyone settle down just enough to get comfortable before jumping them.

Since Admiral Wachturm hadn’t been baying at the miner’s heels, Arott had kept
Stralsund
at her highest alert. Another twenty minutes of quiet and he would have had to start sending people for naps, but the man was here now.

He keyed the ship–wide comm live as he took a breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said firmly. “The Imperial fleet has arrived. First Lord selected us out of all of Home Fleet to be here today. His trust in you is well founded. Now we will show the rest of
Aquitaine
what it means to be the very best.”

Arott turned his attention to the pilot.

“Keller expects us to be her shield wall today, Mhasalkar,” he said. “You’ll have to get us in close, and then get us out as best we can. It will be very close quarters with the big guns.”

The man turned and looked back over his shoulder with a serious smile and a wild gleam in his eyes.

“That I can promise you, sir.”

Arott nodded.
Stralsund
would get her measure of attention, just because of her size and firepower, but he suspected that everything over there already had Keller’s name written on it.

Ξ

“You heard the lady,” Kigali chirped into the ship–wide comm. “We’re on point for act one, but I figure they’ll ignore us on the first go around. Everybody had their potty breaks?”

He was rewarded by a line of faces smiling and laughing back at him on the command console. The wardroom had a pair of thirty–liter jerry cans on wheels that had been adapted years ago to hold hot coffee. Nobody had to leave their station for a jolt during a battle, and everyone had snacks stashed close at hand.

The big ships always had spare crew that could plug in and rotate people through breaks and naps, even during the biggest battles.
CR–264
was as lean and tight as he had been able to get her in five years of command. If that meant a touch of idiosyncrasies, that was the price of doing what they did.

After all, everybody paid attention to the big hitters. Nobody ever collected trading cards for fleet escorts, especially not former revenue cutters that should have been retired about the time he was born.

Maybe after this battle, they might change their minds.

It was, after all, theoretically possible that someone else could somehow shave another eighty–three minutes off of his run from
Ladaux
to
Ballard
, but everything had to be absolutely perfect.

Wasn’t gonna happen
.

“Nav,” Kigali continued. “Plan Two involves us drifting in place on the rest of the squadron at the inflection point and shifting backwards in line. If I forget, throw in a one–eighty flip in the middle of that, like a flat barrel roll without the acceleration. Then be prepared to burn out the engines getting our asses clear. Got it?”

Aki,
Yeoman Aki Ridwana Ali
, looked at him and raised one delicately–chiseled eyebrow before she shrugged and nodded.

“Red Admiral’s going to be pissed,” she said, tilting her head.

“That’s why I wanna be gone when he figures it out,” Kigali replied. “Figure sixteen tubes over there at the start of battle. We’ll have the destroyers on our corners, if they’re still in business at that point, plus the wings and the big girls, but we’re still gonna be the closest thing to hit.”

“Roger that, boss.”

Chapter XXXVII

Date of the Republic June 16, 394 Alexandria Station, Ballard

Moirrey felt the weight of command settle on her shoulders like the blanket–turned–superhero–cape she’d had when she was just a young–un.

Right, ‘cause twenty–six was over the hill, weren’t it
?

Things did not smell right.

“Doc, Arlo, time to get silly,” she said. “Suvi, can you get us to the fabrication lab safely?”

“I believe so, Moirrey,” the AI replied, her voice still
off
by some unmeasurable amount. “The assassin seems to have located the node that controls all of my sensor relays beyond frame nine. Additionally, there are large blind spots in a variety of areas closer to my processing core. Yeoman Arlo, I would prepare yourself for an ambush.”

“Well ahead of you, sir,” came the reply.

Moirrey heard a whirring sound as a nearby printer suddenly spun up and spit out a piece of paper.

“For those areas where we will have to be separated,” Suvi said, “this is the route you will need to follow to get to the lab where we can work, plus the access codes for the doors. I will prepare as much as I can ahead of time, but there are certain tasks that I will require your assistance, your hands, to complete.”

“Gotcha,” Moirrey said.

She took a few seconds to commit the lines to memory.

It were a useful thing, borne of all the time spent studying schematics.
You canna always stop in the middle of a job to look up which wire to weld, when yer arms–deep in something with the laser
.

“Arlo,” Moirrey continued. “Yer up.”

Either the room were extra quiet, or she was just too keyed up. The sound of the pistol safety clicking echoed off the walls way louder than it should have.

“Roger that,” he said as he took the map and studied it, counting doors and turns under his breath.

She watched him stop cold and turn to the doc with a serious face.

“Dr. Crncevic, I brought along a spare pistol for Moirrey, but she doesn’t want it. Would you prefer to be armed?”

The doc squinted back at the marine, like he was suppressing an eyeroll or something.

“Yeoman Arlo,” he said finally, “I haven’t fired a weapon in over a decade, much to the chagrin of the rest of my family. I would probably be more dangerous to us with it than without.”

“Oh, fine, Vo,” Moirrey said with an exasperated sigh, and maybe a little eyeroll of her own thrown in. “Gimme the gun. But you better not get yerself killed, or I’ll never talk to you again.”

The weapon he handed her was a remarkably compact little hunk of black plastic and metal, even more so than the little sidearm she had taken to packing in her messenger bag when she was planet–side. It almost vanished into her own small palm, and easily slid into her back pocket.

“Can we go now?” Moirrey inquired sarcastically.

That didn’t work. Arlo just smiled down at her.

“Aye, sir,” he said. “As you command.”

One eyeroll just wouldn’t cover this, but his back was already turned to her, so she pelted him with several, just in case. He didn’t seem to feel them.

Must be the body armor.

Ξ

“Approaching frame six,” Moirrey heard Arlo say quietly.

The hallways down here were generally wide enough, so she had made him walk to the left of center, so she could see around him on the right. The doc were tall enough to see over both of them, but he had silently paced her as they moved inward through the semi–ancient bowels of the old station.

It were like sneakin’ into the castle to rescue the princess, and not knowing when the orcs or dragons would show up. Fortunately, she had her own troll fer protection.

The hallway was wide and well–lit. From her memory of the map, this was more of a secondary axis in the station. If she had to guess, Moirrey would have said that this was an equipment transport corridor, and maybe a blow–out channel in case the fusion reactor went sideways. Warships like
Auberon
had something similar, but their power systems tended to be really close to the outer hull so they could be vented the shortest possible distance, and not where people might be.

Ya counna do that on a station built like this one. Everything went outwards like layers of mother of pearl.

The hatch reinforced her assessment. It were just barely solid enough to hold air, but not armoured like most of them would be. Again, any explosion would take the path of least resistance. You wanted that away from people. Hard walls would hold. Soft doors would vent. Of course, if someone started shooting at the station from the outside, it were likely to be like poking a grape with an icepick.

Moirrey settled and watched silently as Arlo fiddled with the door. Sixteen digit numeric passcodes tended to be a pain in the ass. Talking to him while he worked were just mean. And he hadn’t done anything to merit that.

She smiled.

Yet
.

The hatch opened toward them into the hall, instead of retracting sideways into the wall.

Yup, blow–out valve. Boom comes this way. That should mean a straight shot down into the reactor core from here
.

Across the threshold, the hallway turned into a larger room. Messy. Full of, well, not junk, but stuff that had been stashed here over the years and kinda forgotten, from the looks of it, and the tarps spread across things to keep dust off of ‘em.

Movement way across the way caught her eye.

It looked like a guy in a maintenance uniform, dingy gray with his hat kinda pulled down over his eyes as he worked on the far door.

“Hey, fella,” Moirrey called to him.

The guy turned around all nice and like, and then Arlo suddenly knocked her and the doc down and started shooting.

“What?” was about all she could manage to get out as her brain decided to turn back flips inside her head.

Her butt was cold. And her back, leaned against the pillar. And this floor wasn’t exactly clean. If her uniform were ruined, she were taking it out of Arlo’s hide. Or his paystub.

He wasn’t looking at her though. He was tucked up tight against something, leaning out just enough to fire his pistol.

Wait, who was he shooting at?

Doc wriggled closer and quick–scanned her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Why wouldn’t she be? What was wrong with these people? Why was…
?

Oh
.

Moirrey’s eyes picked out a spot on the hatch that had closed behind them. It was a melted dimple about the size of her palm.

She did the math. If she were standing, that would have been just about dead center between her boobs. She was so happy Arlo was here.

“I’m fine, Doc,” she chirped. “Think we found the bad guy.”

Chapter XXXVIII

Imperial Founding: 172/06/16. Ballard system