The Unincorporated Woman (38 page)

J.D. gave the comm officer an approving nod that made her feel as if she’d won the war all by herself. “Connect us,” she said, and closed and blocked her helmet.

A holographic Omad appeared in her line of sight. “Admiral, I think—” he began.

“I see it, Omad. If you cut through the debris field you made of Jackson’s fleet, you’ll be able to intercept Gupta’s task force before he can link up with Trang.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Omad said, so excited, he forgot to call her by her first name. “We can win this thing if we can keep them apart. The ass-firing guns of ours give us the tactical advantage. The war can end today!”

Inside, J.D. smiled, as this was exactly her train of thought. But all Omad saw was a frown. “Make sure the ships in the debris field are harmless, and remember that Gupta’s forces are not yet bloodied in this day’s mess. He’s fresh and looking for payback.”

“Oh, I’ll take my hits going in, same as him, but coming out, he can kiss my ass.”

J.D. checked the relative positions of all the task forces and fed him a route. “The debris field of Jackson’s fleet should give you some sensor cover. He won’t be able to figure out your exact direction and speed till it’s too late.”

Omad looked at the course J.D. had planned for him and made a change. “If I enter the debris field at this angle, it could look like I am going after Trang’s task force.

“I’ll switch course halfway in. It may not be much of a surprise, but it should be just enough to keep them guessing till it’s too late.”

“Do it,” J.D. said, “and Omad, good job on deploying backdoor. You did even better than me.”

“Well, I could’ve said I had fewer targets and a better angle of ‘retreat,’ to sucker them in on, but that would’ve just been to make you feel good ’cause the truth is…” Omad waited a few beats then cracked an obnoxious smile, “I did do a better job than you.”

J.D. laughed with understanding grace. “Good hunting, Admiral Hassan.”

“Keep that bastard Trang off my ass long enough for me to smash Gupta, Janet.” And then he cut off.

“Asshole,” she said in the privacy of her sealed helmet, but she couldn’t help saying it with a smile.

Command Sphere, UHFS
Liddel

“Abhay, I think we’re fucked,” Trang said to his friend floating in the holo-tank. “Between you and me is J. D. Black, and it looks like Omad Hassan’s task force is cutting through the debris field that was the center held by Zenobia. He could be going after either of us, depending on the angle he’s entering the field at, but either way he’s going to get to one of us before we can link up.”

“Ship to ship, we can’t win, Sam,” agreed Gupta. “We have to link up and form a solid defensive position, porcupine our approaches to buy us some time.”

“I don’t think they’re going to give us the chance, Abhay. We might have to run our asses back to Mars.”

“Sam, I saw the damage reports on your ship. Your main rail gun isn’t going to fire again without a full shipyard refit, and you lost one third of your thruster capacity. Your structural integrity is below the safe level for atomic acceleration and course correction. You have to transfer your flag to a safer ship.”

“The
Liddel
still has a hell of a lot of fight in her, Abhay.”

“And you’re not going to be there while she does it,” Gupta said with a determination in his voice he usually reserved with subordinates and almost never with his superior officer.

For a moment, Trang bristled, but then he was forced to admit that in Abhay’s place, he would be saying the exact same thing. “Commander Ross, prepare to transfer my flag to—” He checked in the display. “—the UHFS
Ledger
. You will take command of the
Liddel
. You can’t run fast, but you should be able to keep up with the task force. Your position will shift to the rear as ships pass you, but they will be informed to compensate. With your main rail gun out, you’re not going to be in the main fight, but your interception fire is almost unimpaired. You’ll be providing defensive fire for the rest of the fleet. Also you will need to watch the—”

“Admiral,” said the XO, cutting him off. “If you wouldn’t mind, get the hell off my ship … sir.”

The XO had said it with genuinely good humor, but Trang knew he also meant it, just as Abhay had. “Computer transfer command to Commander Timian Ross, effective immediately.” He then got up, saluted, and without another word left for the hangar bay.

Command Sphere, UHFS
Ledger

In the longest twelve minutes of his life, Samuel Trang left his command, sprinted to his hangar bay, and flung himself into his personal shuttle. It then blasted off before the door was fully sealed, flew at speeds that tended to get shuttle pilots court-martialed in peace and promoted in war, and finally made it into the hangar of the cruiser UHFS
Ledger
. From there, he sprinted to the command sphere, took over from Captain Harold Waxman, and was in his new command chair authenticating his presence and getting his command codes rerouted.

“Connect me with Gupta,” he growled to no one in particular.

“Connection made, Admiral,” said the man Trang assumed to be the communications officer.

“Well, Sam, it looks like about twenty ships of Zenobia’s old command are forming a line to attack Hassan as they head out of it, but…”

“Not enough to stop him, or even slow him down much,” finished Trang.

“Have you heard anything from Zenobia?” asked Gupta with more concern than he usually let on.

Trang checked his updates, but only out of habit. “Nothing, Abhay. It doesn’t look good.”

“Well, fuck ’em, Sam. I say we win anyways.”

Trang laughed at Gupta’s spitting in the face of a tidal wave. “Now all we have to do is figure out how.”

UHFS
Atlanta

Zenobia Jackson had never known such rage in her life. For the first time in her adult life, her anger was in danger of totally controlling her actions. At first, she didn’t realize what she was seeing; the first body had a neat hole in its head, and all she thought was the technician must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then she found four damage-control specialists all floating one after the other with little holes in their heads, and at once she knew. She ordered her crew to record every body they found after that. She’d encountered some Alliance assault miner teams, but they must have thought all organized resistance was over, because they were in groups of three. She slaughtered them all in ambush. She came across one team in the very act of executing some of her crew who had obviously surrendered. Between the two she rescued there and the four others she found, she now led a crew of seven, eight if she counted herself.

But nothing prepared her for what she saw in the engine room. As she entered the vast chamber, she had to restrain a gasp. Floating in all directions were hundreds of corpses, all of them with their hands bound behind them. She didn’t know what had happened to her assault marines, but not one of the corpses floating was an armed combatant. They were all support personnel, mostly engineering, but others from life support, maintenance, and—she looked to be sure—food services. The Alliance had left a squad of five in the engine room, but surprise worked for Zenobia again. She appeared in their midst, plasma shotgun in one hand and assault rifle attached to her mutilated arm in place of the other. Her crew was as rabid for vengeance as she was, except for the still-comatose Lieutenant Chase. The Alliance personnel were quickly disposed of.

“Commander Calhoun, seal off Engineering. We have to assume the bastards will be back. We won’t be lucky enough to surprise the ones who come looking for their butchering comrades.”

Calhoun activated his magnetic field and found that it worked in Engineering. He quickly plodded over to the main engineering console and input his command codes. Soon all the doors were closing, and as a personal touch, he turned the fire suppression system into an early-warning trip wire device. Any Alliance bastards sneaking in through vents or tunnels would be greeted with loud alarms and expanding foam.

“Admiral, they must have accounted for all our assault marines. After they murdered the crew, they were probably concentrating on gaining control of the systems and then looking for you.”

Lieutenant Kerwin had activated a secondary console near that of main engineering. Zenobia went up to where he was working. “Lieutenant Kerwin, is there anything we can do to hurt the enemy?”

The lieutenant was shaking his head in anger and frustration. “Not a damn thing, sir. They did a great job of shutting down all the major systems. We have access to life support and some doors. I can get sensors rerouted down here, but nothing, I mean nothing that could make this ship a threat.”

Zenobia slammed her one good hand against the console. “Get me sensors, then. We may as well see what’s going on outside. And—” She hesitated. “—begin the self-destruct protocols. If we can’t have her, they sure as hell won’t.”

“Admiral, we have movement coming toward us, from the corridor. I have the door sealed, but I would like to blow the mechanism just to be safe.”

“Blow them all,” she ordered, then pointed to the crew she had left. “You go with Commander Calhoun and do as he commands.” Without a word, they followed the commander as he began distributing explosives and instructions.

“Admiral, I have sensors.” Zenobia turned back to the console and called up a holo-field. It was very small and lacked any meaningful detail, but it showed her enough. Over a dozen of her ships were floating helplessly. Another dozen or more showed signs of life, but it was obvious that they were fighting for their lives. Energy signatures and comm traffic revealed that they were in the midst of hand-to-hand combat with Alliance assault miners. She wasn’t positive, but she was now pretty sure that the Alliance had sent over overwhelming force to capture her ship. It was simply a miracle of timing and creative destruction that had made the command sphere so inaccessible and kept her out of enemy hands. They must have learned that the command sphere had been exposed to space and had written her off as dead or contained. After murdering her crew, they’d sent off most of their miners to capture her other ships. If they were lucky, they might actually get thirty to add to their fleet. They hadn’t had a haul that big since the early days of the war.

Well, they won’t get you, baby,
she thought as she affectionately rubbed her hand on equipment she’d slammed only moments before.

Kerwin threw his hand up in frustration. “Can’t destroy it, Admiral.”

“Go on.”

“The first thing they did was disable the self-destruct. They got to the programming and also brought the reactors offline. I can’t be sure but they may have also physically disabled the preset charges.”

Commander Calhoun returned. “Entry hatches sealed, Admiral. And it’s not terribly hard to disable self-destruct charges. Fleet is more worried that a lone saboteur could destroy a ship all on his lonesome than that we might need to blow her up under difficult circumstances.”

“Commander Calhoun, how many ships have we lost due to sabotage of a self-destruct system?”

“None.”

“That is what I thought. And how many ships have we lost due to capture by the Alliance?”

“I don’t rightly know offhand, Admiral, but it has to be in the hundreds.”

“Fucking fleet command,” Zenobia said. “They sit on their asses in Mars’s orbit, and we have to deal with the fucking consequences.”

“Begging the admiral’s pardon, but isn’t the fleet now commanded by Trang?” asked Lieutenant Kerwin.

“Lieutenant, there is a huge difference between commanding a fleet and running one. Trang is the best there is, but he can’t be everywhere at once and do it all. We need an effective and innovative fleet command for that. Sadly all we seem to have is the one we have. Well, if we survive this, I will make it my personal mission to change self-destruct protocols.”

“Admiral, it would be insulting to have to design our ships to blow up easier because we’re incapable of keeping them,” protested Calhoun.

“Not as insulting as our spacers getting blown to shreds by their own ships. The Alliance is better at ship boarding than we are. Wish it wasn’t true, but then look at where we are,” she said, pointing at all the floating corpses. “There has to be something they forgot. The bastards were only here for an hour.”

“Nukes,” gasped a voice near the main engineering console.

Zenobia moved over to the floating figure that had been left for dead. “Lieutenant Chase, I’m glad you’re back.”

Chase made an attempt to focus on Zenobia but found it too difficult. She gave up that social nicety in order to deliver her message. “Atomics,” she urged, “can destroy the ship.”

Zenobia’s face lit up like a reflection off water. “Do we even have any?”

Commander Calhoun ran to a large well-locked door about thirty-six meters from the main engineering console. “Admiral, we have six nukes here, still secured.” He ran back. “But it won’t do us any good. The Alliance was right to leave it alone. There are so many safeguards built into those things, it would be easier to build one from scratch than make it explode in the ship.”

“Not in the ship,” gasped Chase.

For a brief flash, Zenobia Jackson saw the future. It was so easy and everything was right there for her. She wondered if this was how Trang and Gupta and Black did it. Then she brought her mind back to the task at hand.

Zenobia flashed Chase a wicked smile. “Don’t die, Lieutenant, I need to promote you.” She went back to the chief engineering console and brought up a schematic of the ship. “We’ve sealed off Engineering. It seems that the few assault miners they have on board are more likely to wait for reinforcements rather than risk entering an area under strength with little current intel. As far as they’re concerned, there is nothing we can do to harm them or the ship in the hour or so it will take to arrange for reinforcements to come from the other ships.” She brought a section of the engine room into focus. “We open these maintenance tubes here. This will lead us out the main rear thruster vent. That should be more than large enough to allow us and the six nukes to leave the ship. Once we’ve left, getting our six little eggs to hatch should be far simpler.”