War To The Knife (31 page)

“Blood doesn’t mean dead,” the Sergeant-Major said bluntly. “You
know
that, dammit! You’ve been fighting since this bloody war started!”

The other nodded dumbly, then suddenly reached for the pulser at his waist and tried to insert the muzzle in his mouth. Two others sprang to restrain him. He fought to overcome their grasp.
“Let me go, damn you!”

“Take that pulser away from him!” Dave commanded. Another obeyed, ripping it from the man’s grasp then stepping back.

Dave walked over to the black-clad man. “You’re going to have to live with it, Tony,” he said quietly, as compassionately as possible even though he shared the Sergeant-Major’s outrage at so amateurish a mistake.
I should have thought to double-check, too,
he reminded himself bitterly.
It’s not all Tony’s fault. I took too much for granted.
“I can’t afford to let you kill yourself. You’re our backup shuttle pilot. Even if we reach safety, Even if we reach safety, I’ve only got fifteen people in my team now. I need every one if we’re to succeed in our mission.”

Tony writhed in the grasp of the others. “James was… I… for God’s sake,
let me die with him!”

“Instead of dying with him, I need you to make up for your mistake by living for him, and helping to do his share of our work in future. Will you do that – for me and all of us, not just for James?”

Tony sagged helplessly. After a moment he nodded. “I – I’ll try, Sir,” he said hoarsely.

Dave squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you. Now, pull yourself together. Our work’s not finished yet, and we need you.”

He turned back to the medic, who was lowering Mac to the floor. As he watched, the man reached up and closed Mac’s eyes. “Sorry, Sir. He’s gone.”

Dave blinked sudden tears from his eyes. So near to final success, and then…
this!

Sergeant-Major Deacon called, “The missiles are almost there, Sir!” Everyone looked back up at the Plot display.

~ ~ ~

The three Bactrian warships were operating only a reduced ‘anchor watch’, two NCO’s and an Officer of the Deck in their Operations Centers plus a couple of people in their engineering spaces. The rest of their reduced crews were either sleeping during their off-watch periods or busy with routine activities. There wasn’t much they could do with half of their complements planetside to take part in the Satrap’s parade, so everyone was feeling lazy.

The signatures of missile launches from the space station came as a complete surprise, freezing those on watch in shocked disbelief for a few dumbfounded moments before they could come to their senses. Klaxons blared their atonal
aaa-OOO-gah!
warning throughout the ships as the alarm sounded for General Quarters. Their diminished crews began to race towards their action stations, but few reached them and even fewer had time to put on their spacesuits. The watchstanders tried to bring the ship’s defensive weapons to the action state, but with so few people available to do work normally requiring three to four times their number, they ran out of time.

The armed merchant cruiser was closest to the space station, so the twenty missiles targeted along her length arrived first. From bow to stern a rapid-fire sequence of explosions tore plating from her hull and devastated internal compartments, the kinetic energy unleashed by each ultra-high-speed missile’s impact vastly amplifying the damage inflicted by its explosive warhead. The incoming fire missed her bridge, sparing those on watch. The others struggling to reach their action stations weren’t so lucky. Her main fore-and-aft passage was blasted open to space in at least five locations, venting her internal atmosphere. Many of those aboard were sucked out with the air, to die silently screaming in vacuum as their body fluids boiled away. More missiles struck in or near the gravitic drive, reactor and capacitor ring compartments, sending the reactor into emergency shutdown and cutting the ship’s wiring harness in several critical places.

As the last missile hit the merchant cruiser’s docking bay and destroyed her cutters and cargo shuttle, the first of the weapons aimed at the corvettes reached their targets. Their much smaller hulls were tightly packed, every cubic meter crammed with systems, equipment, weapons and supplies; so every hit did far greater damage than had been inflicted on the more open, less cramped construction of the converted freighter. Ten explosions ripped each corvette from bow to stern, tearing great holes in their hulls, venting internal compartments to space, killing every non-space-suited member of their crews, cutting off power, rendering their communications, sensors and weapons systems unusable without major dockyard repairs.

The Satrap’s yacht had also been operating an anchor watch, most of its crew idling or asleep. They, too, were summoned to their emergency stations by blaring klaxons, and watched in disbelief as missiles hammered their escorts. Their Captain was planetside with the Satrap, so the Executive Officer was in charge. He didn’t know why his vessel had been spared from attack – at least, so far – but he wasn’t about to hang around to find out. He kicked his vessel’s gravitic drive to maximum power and headed away from the planet as fast as he could, steering towards the protection of the only surviving warship in the system – the patrolling armed merchant cruiser, now on the far side of Laredo and a full light-hour distant.

~ ~ ~

The watchers in OrbCon were disappointed not to see any dramatic explosions or destruction depicted on the Plot display. At such distances, the only visual change was that the icons depicting the corvettes and armed merchant cruiser showed that they were no longer broadcasting transponder beacons.

“They’re dead in space,” Dave observed as they watched the Satrap’s yacht scorch away from orbit, turning to head towards the distant patrol vessel. “All right, people. They won’t be able to interfere with
Benbecula
’s departure. We can board her now.”

“What about Mac and James, Sir?” Sergeant-Major Deacon asked.

Dave hesitated, then said, “Leave them here. It’ll slow us down too much to carry them back to the shuttle. We’ve got to get as far away from here as possible before that nuclear demolition charge goes off, and it’ll give them as good a cremation as we could anywhere else.”

“Yes, Sir.” Deacon looked around, silencing the murmurs of protest from some of the others with a sharp, “The Captain’s right! Don’t argue! There’s no time!”

Dave ejected a data chip from the console. Mac had inserted it at the start of proceedings, to record the attack on the warships. All its information about the strike and its results would be added to their data archive for Vice-President Johns, as would the recording being made in the shuttle right now of the feed relayed from Banka, showing everything the shuttles were seeing in their assault on the city.

He knelt, rummaged through Mac’s pockets for the two keys he’d put there after arming the demolition charge, then stood again. “All right, let’s go. Back to the shuttle, quick as you can!”

He maneuvered himself next to Tamsin as they ran down the passage. “D’you think Tony will be all right?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know. He and James were like us – lovers as well as partners in combat. I’m not sure if he’ll get over this. You did the right thing to remind him that all of us need him. That might help him to hold on, by forcing him to think of others besides himself.”

“I hope so. Can you handle the shuttle on your own for the last leg?”

“I sure can!”

As they exited the corridor into the docking bay vestibule and turned towards the shuttle, Dave glanced at the locked cargo compartment door. It was just as they’d left it. He checked the timer on his chest panel, and swore as he read ‘15:41’. He raised his voice. “People, we’ve got fifteen minutes to get a safe distance away from a cosmic catastrophe! Let’s
move!”

Tamsin made sure she was among the first group through the airlock. As the others took their seats and waited for the next group, she started up the shuttle’s systems and brought the reaction thrusters online. “Tell the rest to
hurry!”
she urged as she pulled her four-point harness over her shoulders. “The sooner we’re out of this docking bay, the more distance I can put between us and the explosion!”

She didn’t even wait for the last group to take their seats before raising the rear ramp. As it sealed itself against the shuttle’s body she disengaged the trunk, feeding power to the thrusters before it had fully released the rear of the shuttle. Those still on their feet staggered as the vehicle strained, then abruptly jerked forward. Their comrades steadied them and helped them to sit down.

“Hey, wait a minute, Tamsin!” one of them protested. “Let me strap in first!”

“Like hell!” she retorted. “We’ve got no more than ten minutes to get clear. We need to be at least a hundred clicks from this thing to avoid it frying all our systems. I’m about to go to full blast. Hold on tight!”

As soon as the shuttle was far enough away to be clear of any interference between its own gravitic drive field and the larger, more powerful drive of the station, she cut the reaction thrusters. Even as they began retracting into the hull, she gunned the gravitic drive to full power. The inertial compensator beneath the floor whined shrilly, louder than any of them could recall hearing one before, as it absorbed the crushing burden of acceleration. It dumped most of it into the gravity well of space’s dark matter, but even with that assistance everyone aboard grunted, groaned and sweated under the sudden impact of several times their normal body weight. The shuttle sprang forward towards LMV
Benbecula,
almost three thousand kilometers distant.

Tamsin watched her console instruments like a hawk, fighting the stress of acceleration, sweat beading her forehead. As their velocity increased by leaps and bounds she withdrew all communications antennae, shut down the electronically-scanned phased array radar panels and invoked every EMP resistance measure built into the shuttle’s systems. As she finished, she glanced at the range display and let out an exultant shout. “We’re clear!”

Seven seconds later the space station disappeared in a five-kilometer-wide fireball. At first it was so bright that anyone looking directly at it from that distance would have been temporarily blinded. It seemed as if a gigantic photographic flash unit had exploded. The light rapidly faded from bright white through pale yellow into orange before dissipating into deeper and deeper reds and blacks. Every electromagnetic frequency in the vicinity instantly fuzzed and sputtered with impenetrable static.

As the shockwave hit the shuttle everyone aboard was jolted in their seats, but they were far enough away to avoid any damage. Dave knew the shock would hit
Benbecula
within seconds. He called to Tamsin, “Bring up a tight-beam circuit to the ship!”

“I can’t,” she said over her shoulder. “That explosion will disrupt the entire orbital radio spectrum for a while. We should be able to call them in fifteen to twenty minutes, but by then I hope to be preparing to dock with her – assuming she hangs around long enough for us to reach her, that is!”

“She’d better, or we’re screwed! If you can’t use radar or lidar, how will you find her?”

“Our passive sensors still work, so we’ll pick up her gravitic drive emissions as we close in; and I aimed straight for her as we left the space station, so if neither of us changes course we’ll end up within a few clicks of her. We should be able to see her lights at close range, or climb a bit to silhouette her against the planet below.”

“You’re the expert. Do whatever you have to do to get us aboard.”

“No, Mac was the expert on this sort of thing.” Her voice was sad as she remembered the man who’d become a friend and mentor to her, as well as a colleague.

Her forecast was proved correct. They saw
Benbecula
’s running lights as they approached, and Tamsin spotted the open door of her docking bay near her stern. She braked hard using the shuttle’s gravitic drive, then switched to reaction thrusters as they entered the larger ship’s own drive field. As she turned the shuttle to enter the relatively small docking bay backwards, she activated her radio on the orbital frequency.

“Laredo Army shuttle to
Benbecula,
over.”

“Benbecula
to shuttle.” Captain Grassby’s voice sounded rattled. “Did you set off the explosion that destroyed the space station? Over.”

“Shuttle to
Benbecula
. I’ll let Captain Carson explain once we’re aboard. I’m about to enter your docking bay. Please activate your docking systems to receive us.”

“Benbecula
to shuttle, before you dock, listen carefully. This is an order from me as skipper of this ship. You are to leave all your weapons aboard your shuttle. You may not, I say again, you may
not
bring any weapons aboard this vessel. Is that clear? Over.”

“Shuttle to
Benbecula,
wait one.” Tamsin twisted in her seat to look back at Dave. “Is that OK with you?”

Dave thought rapidly. “It’s his ship and his rules. We’re just passengers while we’re on board. Tell him I said OK, we’ll do it.”

She keyed her microphone. “Shuttle to
Benbecula,
Captain Carson says we will comply with your instruction. Over.”

Captain Grassby’s voice sounded slightly mollified.
“Benbecula
to shuttle, thank you. I must admit, I’m surprised. I expected him to argue, in which case I wouldn’t have let you aboard at all! There’s only one open airlock, so approach it and let our docking systems bring you in. Over.”

“Shuttle to
Benbecula,
understood, out.”

Dave looked around the shuttle as Tamsin brought it closer to the ship. “You heard. All weapons stay here, including any personal weapons, backup handguns, anything at all. Take them off now and dump them in the cargo area before we go through the airlock.” He mentally decided to leave the two pulsers in the case of evidence. They were scan-proof, so if the case wasn’t searched – which he wasn’t about to allow – they’d be safe enough there.