A Call to Duty

  “You let one of my men out to reseal the hatch and let me fly this shuttle back to Wanderer,” Guzarwan said. “I then tell you where the bomb is and how to disarm it. A simple trade, really—I get away; you get your husband back. Oh, and you also get Saintonge, assuming you can take it back from Colonel Vachali and his team. I make no promises on that one.”

  Massingill squeezed the barrel of her carbine. It sounded good. Very good.

  Too good. “How’s the bomb triggered? Radio signal?”

  “It’s on a timer,” Guzarwan said. “But don’t worry—you’ll have plenty of time to get to Péridot and disarm it. Assuming you leave within the next few minutes, of course.”

  “Don’t believe him, Ma’am,” a nervous voice whispered.

  Massingill looked up in surprise. In open defiance of her direct order, Riglan and the others hadn’t so much as budged from their positions.

  Or rather, two of them hadn’t. Riglan and O’Keefe were still there, but Boysenko was nowhere to be seen. “I ordered you the hell out of here,” she bit out. “Now, go.”

  “Don’t believe him, Ma’am,” Riglan repeated, sounding more nervous than ever. He was also making no move to leave. “He’s trying to stall.”

  “I know what he’s trying to do,” Massingill said, her heart feeling like it was tearing itself apart. A convenient bomb, on a convenient timer, and he was even throwing in Saintonge. No, the deal was way too good to be true.

  Especially since she already knew that Alvis was dead.

  Which just left Captain Eigen and Saintonge still in the equation.

  And with that, Massingill knew what she had to do. “Counteroffer,” she called. “You bring Captain Eigen and the ambassador to the hatch so I can see they’re still alive. Then I’ll come seal the docking hatch myself and you can go.”

  “You know I can’t give up my hostages,” Guzarwan said. “If I did there’d be nothing to prevent Guardian from shooting me out of the sky.”

  “I’m not asking you to give them up,” Massingill said. “You can keep them until you’re aboard Wanderer. I just want to confirm they’re safe and unhurt.”

  There was a pause. “Stand ready,” Massingill murmured to Riglan. “You and the others—well, you and O’Keefe. Where’s Boysenko?”

  “She left a little while ago,” Riglan said reluctantly. “It was—well, the shooting was mostly done.”

  Mostly, but not quite? Massingill grimaced. But it was unfortunately all too common. Some people could handle live combat. Others couldn’t. “Doesn’t matter,” she told Riglan. “When the shooting stops, wait a moment and see if the captain comes out. If he doesn’t, then get to the fallback and wait for orders from Holderlin or Pohjola.”

  Riglan’s eyes went wide. “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me.” Massingill turned back toward the shuttle, the cold lump that combat always brought to her stomach dissolving away. It was almost finished, and there were no longer any life-altering decisions to be made. If Guzarwan agreed to her terms, she would head to the shuttle and step into the hatchway as if preparing to close the collar.

  But instead, she would open fire on the hijackers, emptying her carbine in three-round bursts, killing as many of them as she could before their return fire ended the burden of decision-making forever.

  It was Eigen’s only chance. It was also the way a Marine should go out. She flicked her selector to burst mode and filled her lungs. “Guzarwan? Do we have a deal?”

  And then, to her utter amazement a new voice crackled in her ear. “Massingill, this is Guardian,” Commander Metzger said. “I have urgent new orders for you.”

  “Understood, Commander,” Massingill’s voice came from the bridge speaker. “Pulling back now. I’ll be in space in two minutes.”

  “Good,” Metzger said. Her voice seemed calmer, Travis thought, but the tension in her face more than made up for it. “We’re prepping another shuttle now to come get you after you eject.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Ma’am,” Massingill said. “Can you send Pohjola or Holderlin to pick up the rest of my team?”

  “Already done,” Metzger said, frowning. “What do you mean, it won’t be necessary?”

  “One other thing,” Massingill said. “Guzarwan said there was a bomb—”

  Without warning, her voice cut off. “Simons?” Metzger demanded.

  “It’s Saintonge’s wedge, Ma’am,” Simons said. “It’s rotated high enough to cut us off.”

  “It’s all right,” Calkin said. “She got the orders. It’s just a question now of whether she can wreck the radiator in time.”

  “That’s not the only question,” Metzger said grimly. “She said something about a bomb. Did she mean a bomb aboard the shuttle? Is that what she meant about not needing to send another one?”

  Calkin hissed between his teeth. “Well, if the bomb holds off to the right second, it’ll make even more of a mess of the radiator. If it doesn’t . . .”

  Metzger nodded heavily. “If it doesn’t, we still have the missile.”

  Kichloo eased his head around the hatch, and Guzarwan braced himself to watch the lieutenant’s head get blown off.

  But it didn’t. Instead, he took a long look around and then gave a thumbs-up. “They’re gone.”

  “Massingill too?” Guzarwan asked.

  “Her, too,” Kichloo confirmed, sounding puzzled. “I wonder what spooked them.”

  “Maybe Manticorans are naturally nervous,” Guzarwan said. But he would have sworn from the tone in Massingill’s voice that she was about to make a grand, self-sacrificing stand of some sort.

  Maybe she’d gotten new orders from the other teams. That could be good, or very, very bad.

  Either way, it was time to get the hell out of here.

  “Get them out,” he ordered Kichloo, gesturing toward the closed cockpit hatch.

  Kichloo nodded and shoved off the bulkhead to the hatch. He opened it and floated inside, and a moment later Eigen and Boulanger floated out into the main shuttle. “They behave themselves in there?” he asked as Kichloo emerged behind them.

  “Yeah, but not from lack of trying,” Kichloo said darkly. “Eigen was trying to run up the thrusters.”

  “Good trick, with your hands tied behind your back,” Guzarwan commented, eyeing the Manticoran.

  “It would have worked if you hadn’t shut the board to standby,” Eigen said, peering out the hatch as Kichloo caught his upper arm and steered him toward the opening. “Or if my people had kept you busy longer. Though I see they made a pretty good showing as it is.”

  “They did,” Guzarwan conceded, silently cursing his carelessness. They’d already released the hostages from their restraints when the attack started, and he hadn’t wanted to risk his insurance policies getting damaged in an open gun battle. He should have left someone in there to keep an eye on them, but at the time it had seemed more important to have every gun available to repulse the unexpected attack.

  With a locked board, the hostages’ hands tied, and no weapons available, it had worked out all right. But it had still been sloppy, and if anyone else had made the decision he would have flayed the man alive.

  “But they’re gone now,” he continued. “Come on—next stop is the bridge.”

  Two by two, the pirates slipped out into the passageway, some heading toward the Manticoran ambush site, the others creating a vanguard and heading forward.

  “You weren’t really going to give her the bomb’s location, were you?” Eigen asked quietly.

  “You heard that?” Guzarwan asked.

  “The cockpit intercom was still on.”

  “Ah,” Guzarwan said. “To answer your question, I might have. She fought well, and I appreciate that in an enemy. I might have given her back her husband as a reward.”

  “Ah,” Eigen murmured. Pretending to believe his captor, just as he’d pretended to accept his captivity.

  But Guzarwan wasn’t fooled. So far, aside from the shuttle at
tempt just now, Eigen had behaved himself. He hadn’t attempted to escape, not even when Guzarwan pretended to give him an opening.

  But that was all illusion and a biding of time. The Manticoran had simply known better than to try anything aboard the confines of a shuttle or aboard a ship already firmly under enemy control. Here, with Saintonge’s ownership still under some dispute, all bets were off. If Eigen found an opening, Guzarwan had no doubt he would go for it.

  So he made sure to stay close to the hostages, where he could keep a close eye on them, as the group filed out of the shuttle and headed forward. Fortunately, the need for hostages would soon be past. The charade would be over, and he could relax.

  Until then, he would make sure neither of his prisoners got away. He would make damn sure.

  Massingill’s reflexive assumption, when she’d first noticed that Boysenko was no longer with the group, was that the young com officer had broken under the unaccustomed stress of combat and fled. Now, after the unexpected reestablishment of contact with Guardian, she recognized the far more palatable and honorable truth.

  Boysenko was in the hijackers’ shuttle, the one they’d entered Saintonge through, when Massingill and the others arrived. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have come back here without telling you why,” the young rating apologized as Massingill joined her in the cockpit. “I thought that if our own shuttle’s com was out I could run a relay through here instead.”

  “It was a good idea,” Massingill assured her, glancing at the controls. The shuttle was still on standby. Perfect. “I probably couldn’t have heard you over the noise anyway. Get to the passageway with the others and get the hatch closed.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Boysenko’s eyes narrow. “Shouldn’t we have two of us for this?”

  “You know how to fly this thing?” Massingill countered. “No? Then get out.”

  “But—”

  “Get out or I’ll shoot you,” Massingill said, turning to look her straight in the eye. “I mean it. Go.”

  Boysenko nodded, a quick, guilty jerk of her chin. “Yes, Ma’am. Good . . . good luck, Ma’am.”

  Ninety seconds later, with the hatch closed and sealed, Massingill hit the thrusters and drove the shuttle hard away from Saintonge’s flank. Rolling over, she gave herself a long push outward, backing away as many kilometers as she could from the battlecruiser’s flank. More distance would have been better, but she was pressed for time, and this was all she dared risk. Swiveling the shuttle into a corkscrew one-eighty, she headed up and over, firing a long blast from the thrusters to kill her outward momentum. A pair of tweaks from the starboard laterals turned her back around and lined her up with her target.

  There in front of her, jutting thirty meters upward from the hull, was the aft dorsal radiator.

  Massingill smiled tightly. Good luck, Boysenko had said. But she hadn’t meant it. Or, rather, hadn’t said it with any expectations that the words meant anything. She’d looked into Massingill’s eyes, and she knew beyond a doubt what was about to happen.

  Alvis Massingill was gone . . . and with that crushing loss, Jean Massingill no longer had anything to live for.

  Throwing full power to the aft thrusters, Massingill sent the shuttle leaping toward the radiator. Forty seconds, she estimated, until impact.

  “For Alvis,” she murmured.

  On the status board, a set of amber lights went green. “Wedge is up, Ma’am,” the helmsman reported.

  “Thrusters off,” Metzger ordered. “Increase speed of yaw to full; pitch positive twenty degrees. Missile Ops; bridge. Confirm missile readiness. TO; prepare to launch on my command.”

  Travis looked at the forward display, his pulse throbbing in his neck. Saintonge was nearly in range now, with Guardian’s rotation suddenly speeding up now that her wedge was driving the movement.

  But Saintonge’s wedge was almost up, too, and the floor was currently between the two ships. In order for Guardian to get her shot, she was going to have to line up with the battlecruiser while simultaneously rising to get above the forward edge of Saintonge’s lower stress band.

  And meanwhile, Massingill was doing . . . what?

  Travis didn’t know. No one aboard Guardian knew. Saintonge’s wedge was already strong enough to block all the destroyer’s sensors: optics, radar, and lidar. For the moment, as far as Saintonge was concerned, Guardian was blind.

  The next few seconds would tell the tale. Until then, there was nothing to do but wait.

  Wanderer’s drift upward in its orbit—upward, and backward—had been slow. Sometimes infuriatingly slow.

  But Jalla’s patience had finally been rewarded. Over the rim of the planet’s horizon, Guardian was finally in sight.

  Actually, all the players were in sight. Péridot was closest, floating dead and quiet the way Guzarwan had left it, her remaining crew still unaware of the larger drama going on beyond her hull. Far beyond Péridot was Guardian, her wedge completely up now, her bow mostly turned away from Wanderer as she continued lining up for her shot on Saintonge. Just beyond Guardian, practically on top of her in fact, was Saintonge, her wedge angled upward like a fighter with his forearm raised to block his attacker’s incoming fist.

  Jalla took it all in, the way an experienced warrior took everything in. But really, he only had eyes for Guardian. For Guardian, and her stern turned so inviting and vulnerable toward him.

  Larger warships had aft autocannon to protect them from up-the-kilt attacks. But compact destroyers like Guardian didn’t have room for such things. Their only defense against an up-the-kilt attack was to make sure no enemy ever got behind them.

  Wanderer’s missile was a bit out of date, as such things went. Unlike modern missiles with their ten-thousand-gee sprint modes, Jalla’s could only manage five thousand.

  But five thousand gees would be enough. More than enough. At that acceleration, it would take a little over forty seconds to cross the forty-five thousand kilometers separating them.

  Which meant that the Manticorans would see what was coming, and even have time to recognize and bitterly regret their folly. That, for Jalla, was the best part of all.

  “Hatch door open,” he ordered. “Target parameters ready to load. Stand by to ignite booster.”

  He grinned tightly. He’d always, always wanted to say this. “Prepare to fire.”

  With barely twenty seconds left to impact, Massingill threw herself out the shuttle hatch.

  She was going way too fast to stop, of course. Fortunately, she didn’t have to. Kicking her thruster pack to full power, she drove straight up, directly away from Saintonge’s hull, clawing for distance up and over the huge radiator vanes rushing toward her. She made the necessary clearance with less than two seconds to spare, wincing as the sudden spike in heat from the now distant radiator nevertheless blazed through even the extra protection of her Marine vac suit and singed her skin. The heat continued to increase, peaking as she sailed over the top of the radiator. Directly below her, the shuttle slammed into its target—

  And the entire center of the radiator disintegrated into a boiling cloud of superheated liquid metal.

  Reflexively, Massingill flinched, despite the fact that sitting inside a suit traveling on a ballistic path made the value of flinching pretty much zero. For a heart-stopping couple of seconds she was afraid the expanding cloud of superheated liquid would overtake her and burn her alive. But she was still hurtling past at the shuttle’s original impact speed, and the extra vertical momentum she’d given herself was still eating up meters, and the blazing light from the cloud was already fading as the metal droplets dumped their heat into the universe at large and began solidifying again. She watched the cloud another few seconds, just to make sure it was safely behind her, then turned her eyes to the vastness of space above.

  The vastness of space . . . and the whole of the incredible starry host stretched out across the sky. A view she could see with perfect clarity, unimpeded by anything.

&
nbsp; The gamble had worked. Saintonge’s reactor had scrammed, and taken her wedge with it.

  “There you go, Guzarwan,” she said under her breath toward the ship pulling away beneath and behind her. “That’s the kind of deal I make. Choke on it.”

  The group was still only halfway to Saintonge’s bridge when a wailing klaxon alarm erupted around them.

  Cursing, Guzarwan grabbed a handhold as the alarm shifted from solid tone to a staccato three-one-three-one cadence. Spinning around in a half circle, his gun held ready, he darted quick looks both directions down the cramped passageway. But there was nothing. “What the hell is going on?” he bellowed over the siren. “Mota?”

  The hacker was hunched in half a fetal position at the side of the passageway, working furiously on his tablet. “It’s—my God, it’s a reactor scram.”

  Guzarwan felt his eyes widen. “A what?”

  “The reactor’s shutting down,” Mota said, his voice suddenly frantic. “Automatic safety—someone’s got to override it or it’ll just—oh, God.”

  There wasn’t any time even to swear. “Get the bridge!” Guzarwan shouted. “Get the reactor room. All of you—go. Get the hell back there and—”

  But it was too late. Abruptly, the passageway lights flickered and went out, the dimmer red glow of emergency lighting springing up to take its place.

  And in that fraction of a heartbeat as the lights went briefly out something hard and unyielding slammed against his throat.

  Reflexively, he let go of his gun and grabbed at the agony that his neck had become, trying desperately to dislodge the bar squeezing against it. But he was too late. The arm pressed against his throat—it was an arm, he realized now—had locked into the elbow of another arm, and the second arm’s palm was pressed hard against the back of Guzarwan’s head.

  And with a wave of horror he realized that his life was being choked out of him.

  He tried to shout to the rest of his men, milling uselessly around him, looking wildly in all the wrong directions for the ambush they obviously expected was imminent. But his voice was long gone. He tried to retrieve the gun he’d let go of when the attack first began, but the weapon was also long gone, plucked from the air by yet a third hand.