A Call to Duty
“No, just the same one,” Flanders said grimly. “Only now, instead of blasting into the grid, I run down the guard. If I can get that carbine away from him, I can shoot him and the others. If I make it, and if I still have ammo left, I’ll try to shoot the grid. Once we spark a stage two and the automatics lock out everyone else, we’re back to you getting in and scramming the reactor.”
“That’s insane,” Gill told him. “That guard’s a good ten meters away, and he and all the rest of them are also wearing sidearms. You don’t have a chance.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah, I do,” Gill said. “You charge the guard; I charge the guys at the console. That creates double the chaos, double the targets, and double the chances that one of us will get a gun while we’re in good enough condition to use it. And don’t give me that look,” he added. “You know it’s the only way that makes sense.”
Flanders huffed out a breath. “Maybe,” he conceded. “But it’s not right. You’re a Manticoran; this is a Havenite ship. This shouldn’t be your fight.”
“Tell that to Guzarwan,” Gill said sourly. “Anyway, it became my fight the minute they marched the captain away as a hostage. Not to mention locking me into that damn ridiculous dumbbell spin section of yours.”
Flanders flashed an unexpected smile. “Now, that one we definitely agree on,” he said with a hint of humor. “Always thought those things looked ridiculous, not to mention cramped. You have a preference as to which console you go for?”
“Main control board,” Gill said. “There are two men there, which gives me a choice of two guns to go for instead of just one. Plus, if everyone down there knows what they’re doing, they’ll be a little leery of shooting toward the main controller. Certainly more leery than shooting toward the monitor station.”
“And if they don’t know what they’re doing, a few ill-considered rounds could end up scramming the reactor for us,” Flanders agreed. “We’ll need to find better entry points. You saw how I unfastened the ceiling section?”
Gill nodded. “I think my best shot will be something over there.” He pointed to a space between a return coolant pipe and an air-exchange driver. “It’s right over main control, and there’s a solid bar above it that I can use to kick off of.”
“Good,” Flanders said. “I’ll see what I can find above the guard. Work quiet, work fast, and signal me when you’re ready.”
The missile was programmed and ready, and Commanders Metzger and Calkin were doing their final check on the numbers, when Travis finally found the answer he’d hoped was there. “Commander Metzger?” he called. “I think I may have something.”
Metzger was at his side in an instant. Faster than Travis had expected, in fact, robbing him of the ten seconds he’d counted on to let him double-check his conclusions. “Go,” she ordered, leaning over his left shoulder.
Travis braced himself. He would just have to trust that he was right. “The molycircs in the nodes,” he said, pointing to the Péridot schematic he’d pulled up. “The ones that handle the synchronization of the Casimir cells. Specifically, the ones here and here, at the core of the clusters closest to the hull.”
“Yes, we see them,” Calkin said. The tactical officer had come up on Travis’s right shoulder, sandwiching Travis uncomfortably close between the two officers. “So?”
“You said it yourself, Sir, earlier,” Travis told him. “Edge effects. The gravitational strength drops off rapidly from the edge of an impeller stress band, but the effect does extend a few dozen meters out before it becomes negligible. And molycircs are highly susceptible to transitory stresses.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?” Metzger asked, though her tone made it pretty clear that she already knew.
“We don’t have to actually hit Péridot to kill its wedge, Ma’am,” Travis said. “If we can run the edge of the missile’s stress band within twenty or thirty meters of the hull, that’s all it’ll take. It’ll wreck the focus, kill the stabilization, foul up all the other nodes as they try to synch up into stand-by, and that’ll be it for that ring.”
“And if we run the missile parallel to the hull, we’ll take out both rings in the same pass,” Metzger murmured. “And there goes the wedge.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Travis confirmed. “And they’re not going to get the nodes retuned, either. Not anytime soon.”
“What about the reactor?” Calkin asked. “It has molycircs, too.”
“Yes, Sir, but all of them are deeper in toward the center of the hull,” Travis said, pulling up a different page. “The gravity transient shouldn’t get close enough to affect them.”
“Besides, even if it does, it’ll just shut everything down in a controlled scram,” Metzger said, reaching over Travis’s shoulder to the intercom. “Exactly what it’ll do to the nodes, in fact. Weapons; bridge. Donnelly?”
“Donnelly, aye,” Donnelly’s voice came back instantly.
“Get back to your board,” Metzger ordered. “I need a fast reprogramming.”
“Missile away!” Mota’s voice boomed from the bridge speaker. “From Guardian—damn it all, they’re firing!”
Guzarwan snapped his head around to the tactical display, feeling his tongue freeze to the roof of his mouth. No—it was impossible. The Manticorans, firing on a Havenite ship? That was an act of war.
But the missile was there. It was there, damn it—a blur on the tactical as its thirty-five-hundred-gee acceleration ate up the thousands of kilometers separating the two ships. Guzarwan had one final glimpse of the missile as it bore down on Péridot’s stern—
And then, nothing.
Guzarwan stared at the tactical, a sense of utter disbelief swirling through his mind. According to the track, the missile had shot out from Guardian, angled the last few degrees to line up on Péridot, and continued straight on toward its target.
And after all of that effort, the Manticorans had missed.
They’d missed.
It was impossible. But it was true. The track plainly showed the missile running parallel to the portside flank, a good ten kilometers out, then heading off toward the eternity of the universe.
They’d missed.
No one out here was supposed to have much experience with real warfare, Guzarwan knew. Even Haven, who’d tackled pirates and the occasional lunatic interstellar nomad group, was barely above amateur status. But this was just ridiculous. Even if the missile itself didn’t zero in, Guardian should at least have been able to get it close enough to its target for its stress bands to do some damage. But they hadn’t even managed that.
Could Péridot have some automatic ECM running that had confused or disabled the missile? Mota hadn’t been able to tap into any of the weapons or active defenses, but it was possible the Havenites routinely left some of their passive defense systems running on general principles. Guzarwan hadn’t spotted any evidence of such a setup on the status monitors, but it was the only thing that even halfway made any sense.
And if that was indeed the case, then he and Vachali were even more home free than he’d thought. If none of the Manticoran missiles could touch them, Péridot and Saintonge could not only bring up their wedges at their leisure, but they could also cut their mowing-machine swath through the other orbiting ships with impunity. Guardian would be the first, of course, lest one of his new ships accidently stray within laser range—
“Chief!” Thal’s frantic voice came from the speaker. “The wedge has collapsed!”
Guzarwan’s heart skipped a beat.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“It’s collapsed,” Thal repeated. “The whole system—both impeller rings—they’ve shut down. We’re trying to restart, but—God, the diagnostics have gone crazy.”
And in a horrible, suffocating instant, Guzarwan understood.
The Manticoran missile hadn’t missed at all. It had done exactly what it was intended to do.
Somehow, that close pass had
scrambled the impeller rings. Scrambled them badly enough to shut down, and to take the half-formed wedge with them.
And now, far from being immune to Guardian’s weapons, Péridot stood utterly open and defenseless against them.
Thal was still blabbering about tuning and synchronization and molycircs, his voice joined now by a chorus of frantic reports coming from other parts of the ship. But Guzarwan wasn’t listening. There was a way out of this, he knew. There was always a way out. He wasn’t going to give up, not now. Not after the Manticorans had so clearly demonstrated their reluctance to destroy Havenite property and lives. Not when he had two ships’ worth of hostages to bargain with.
Certainly not with the ultimate hole card, Wanderer and its missile, still unsuspected up his sleeve.
“Everyone shut up,” he called toward the mike. “Shut up.”
The cacophony trailed away. “All right,” he said into the tense silence. “Everyone shut up and listen. Here’s what we’re going to do . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gill had just finished unfastening his section of ceiling when something seemed to zoom by.
An instant later, he realized how absurd that sounded. He was floating in zero-gee, in the middle of a tangle of pipes and conduits that pretty well precluded the possibility of anything moving quickly, let alone moving so fast that he hadn’t seen it.
But yet the sense remained.
Frowning, he looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed. He leaned out from the air-exchange box that was blocking his view of Flanders.
To find that the other was looking around, too. In the gloom of the accessway Gill couldn’t make out Flanders’s expression through his faceplate, but he had the sense from the other’s posture that he was feeling the same confusion.
The commodore spotted Gill looking at him, and for a moment they gazed across the cramped space at each other. Then, motioning Gill to stay put, Flanders worked his way through the equipment to his side. He touched his helmet to Gill’s—
“I just had the strangest feeling,” the Havenite’s faint voice came. “Like a mini-groundquake. I know that’s ridiculous, but . . .” He lifted a hand helplessly.
“Not really,” Gill assured him. “Only to me it felt like something shot past.”
“Weird,” Flanders said. “After forty years in the Navy, I thought I knew every twitch or grunt a ship could make. But that was a new one. What the hell are they doing down there?”
Gill looked at the status display at the inside edge of his faceplate, freshly aware of the red glow that marked the silenced com. But if the reactor crew was in vac suits, and couldn’t easily use the hard-wired intercoms . . . “Let’s find out,” he suggested, pointing to the com control.
Flanders nodded and reached for his own control. Twisting his face so that he wouldn’t even be breathing toward his mike, Gill turned on his com and ran slowly through the frequency presets. He reached the fifth one—
“—to Shuttle Port One,” Guzarwan’s harsh voice came. “Stay in good retreat formation—remember there are still at least two Havenites running around loose, plus probably a few more gone to ground elsewhere.”
“Never mind the Havenites,” someone bit out. “What about the damn Manticorans? If they decide to blow us out of the sky—”
“If they wanted to blow us out of the sky, they’d have done that instead of just wrecking our impellers,” Guzarwan bit out. “Stop yapping and get your butts to the shuttle.”
Flanders tapped Gill’s arm and tapped his com switch. Gill nodded and shut his off, as well, then touched his helmet to Flanders’s. “Any ideas?” he asked.
“About what Guardian did just now? Or about what we should do next?”
“Either or,” Gill said. “I’d go with the second question, because frankly I haven’t a clue as to how they scrambled Péridot’s nodes without gutting us like a fish. But somehow, they managed it.”
“With the happy result that the rats are pulling out,” Flanders said with grim satisfaction. “And once they’re gone, the ship is ours. You know how to assemble an emergency micro airlock, right?”
“I’ve knocked together a few in my day,” Gill confirmed. “But I don’t know the first thing about disarming bombs.”
“You won’t need to,” Flanders said. “We use the airlocks to reseal the outer hull hatches they blew, then repressurize the amidships section.”
“But the hatches to the spin sections are still booby-trapped. How do we clear them?”
“Again, we don’t have to,” Flanders said. “Once the area is repressurized the bombs are welcome to blow through the viewports. Hell, they can disintegrate the entire hatch if they want. As long as everyone inside is out of the blast range, I don’t care.”
“So we just stand off and throw bricks at them or something until they go off?”
“Something like that.” Flanders’s face settled into hard lines. “And once we’ve got Péridot back . . . well, we’ll see what our options are.”
Gill felt something hard settle into his stomach. There was a simmering death in Flanders’s eyes that Gill hadn’t seen there before. It was just as well, he thought soberly, that that death wasn’t aimed at him and his people. “Sounds good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
It worked. To Travis’s mild surprise and infinite relief, the plan actually worked.
Kountouriote’s gravitics sensors confirmed Péridot’s wedge had collapsed. Carlyle’s infrared sensors further confirmed a dip in the cruiser’s heat that suggested the reactor’s systems had taken a mild hit as well before the automatics restabilized the power levels.
And as the quiet and cautious triumph rippled across Guardian’s bridge, Travis felt a warm glow of satisfaction filling him.
The glow lasted exactly forty-five seconds before the com board he was still strapped to went crazy.
The first furious and frantic calls came from the Havenite courier ships in distant orbit, their watch officers demanding to know who the hell was throwing missiles and who the hell they were throwing those missiles at. Travis was still fumbling with the unfamiliar controls when Marienbad’s ground command chimed in, a surprisingly calm General Chu acknowledging the event, though pointedly asking if this was what Manticorans considered keeping an ally informed.
Fortunately, before Travis could even begin to figure out what to say or do, someone he hadn’t even seen enter the bridge nudged his hands aside and keyed everything over to the Tactical station, where Calkin had settled in and was starting in on the explanations.
Travis wished him luck with that one.
A minute later the newcomer had helped Travis out of his straps and taken his place at Com. “Over here, Long,” Metzger said, beckoning.
Travis pushed himself to her side. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“Well done, Petty Officer,” she said, peering at her displays. “Now for Saintonge. Any thoughts?”
Travis frowned. “I thought you were sending Colonel Massingill to deal with them.”
“Sent, past tense,” Metzger corrected. “Massingill’s shuttle left about a minute ago.”
“Oh,” Travis said, frowning at the tactical. He hadn’t even noticed that one go by.
The shuttle was there, all right, arrowing toward Saintonge’s bow endcap. So far, the battlecruiser wasn’t showing any response.
“I’m mostly wondering if you’ve got any other thoughts on taking out impeller rings,” Metzger continued. “We’re not exactly in position to try the same trick again.”
“No, Ma’am,” Travis agreed. Missiles had a certain level of maneuverability, but it was only a few degrees at the most.
And of course, turning Guardian’s bow to Péridot had left her stern pointed toward Saintonge. Battlecruisers like Vanguard had aft lasers back there to use against enemy ships. Elderly destroyers like Guardian didn’t have so much as an autocannon.
And they certainly couldn’t get away with the same slow yaw rotation that had got
ten Guardian lined up for the shot on Péridot. Not now. Saintonge would be watching them like a giant hawk. “I’m afraid I don’t have any other ideas, Ma’am,” he admitted. “I don’t know the standard tactical responses in this situation.”
Metzger snorted. “The standard tactical response in this situation is to not get in this situation,” she said. “If you’re already there, you roll wedge or else use your laser or missiles to beat the crap out of the enemy before he does it to you. Here and now, we’re not in a position to do either.”
“Except as a last resort.”
“Except as a last resort,” Metzger said grimly. “And if we don’t, General Chu will. He will, and he should.”
“I understand,” Travis murmured. “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
“Never mind sorry,” Metzger countered. “My point is that unless the Saintonge hijackers have been sloppy at their job, Massingill is unlikely to find any useable allies over there. If the rest of the Havenites are dead or contained, she won’t be able to do more than buy us a little time. It’s up to us to find a more permanent solution.”
“A solution that doesn’t involve destroying the ship,” Travis said. “Understood, Ma’am.”
“Commander, we’re getting a signal from one of Péridot’s shuttles,” Com spoke up. “Correction: it’s one of the ones Saintonge sent over there earlier today. Audio only, on laser carrier.”
“Wants to keep this private, I see,” Metzger muttered. She hunched her shoulders briefly and keyed her board. “Péridot shuttle, this is Commander Metzger, Executive Officer of HMS Guardian. I assume that’s you, Guzarwan?”
“It is indeed, Commander,” a familiar voice answered. “Congratulations on your splendid maneuver a few minutes ago. My technical people still don’t know exactly what you did, but it was most effective.”
“We’re glad you liked it,” Metzger said. “We’ll be using it on Saintonge next. You might want to warn your people there.”
“Already done so,” Guzarwan said. “But I’d recommend not trying it a second time. Not unless you want to risk a war with Haven.”