Human, page 23
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
Eth approved. It might seem a small thing, but it was good to get them used to acknowledging her authority now, when it was over minor issues. It should reduce friction later, when she was directing them in combat.
“The Lady Bau’s forces have already engaged the enemy less than a day ago,” Eth told them, “and she gave them a nice friendly beating. They’ve gone to ground but they’re still a force to be reckoned with and they’ll be back in the next three days because they have the shame of a withdrawal to answer for. Your task will be to sneak in close and slit a few throats.”
“Do we know where they are?” Hela asked.
Eth could still feel some apprehension from Hela. It was good to see she wasn’t keeping her concerns to herself. “No, we don’t,” he admitted, “but it’s unlikely they’d simply leave this system and run out into the black. It puts them too far out to make repairs and still get back in time for another assault.
Eth paused to consider his thoughts. “I might be putting more weight on that because it relieves me of the need to search an impossibly large area,” he admitted with a smile. The faces remained mostly serious but he could feel the mild amusement hiding behind them.
“They’ll want to stay in system, but hidden. That leaves only three possibilities – the three gas giants in the outer system. The innermost giant is the biggest and, therefore, the hardest to search. That’s probably where they’re hiding. I’d bet Father Sulak’s entire supply of fermented fat on it.”
“Given where he keeps it,” Carol said, making a face, “I’m starting to question whether you want to be correct on this!”
Sulak frowned, sniffing at his robe.
“Seems like a bit of a stretch,” Carol continued, shrugging, “but I don’t have a better theory. What’s our play?”
Eth brought up a holo of the gas giant. “This band, near the equator, has relatively low turbulence compared with the rest of the atmosphere. It’s the most likely place to hide a partially damaged fleet. They’ll be staying close together, given the sensor and comms challenges in that dense gas.
“They’ll be reasonably certain that Lady Bau won’t strip Arbella of defenders to come after them but they’ll be in the outer atmosphere, just in case they’re wrong. They want to spot any incoming frigates and cruisers.”
“But they won’t be able to spot us!” Hela said. “Our scout-ships should have no trouble closing with them in that soup.”
“You’ll have twenty additional crew in each scout-ship, two ships in each hunting party. Working together gives you a decent sized boarding party and barely enough of a prize crew if you manage to seize anything.
“I want three frigates. Don’t come back with cruisers; the damn things need too many crew for the punch they deliver and they move like a fat-raised water buffalo. The automated systems on the frigates will let twenty serve as a decent crew, just barely, but you can’t operate a cruiser without a lot more people.”
Everyone nodded assent, though he could feel the strong desire to take a larger ship. He sensed they’d let their training and common sense override their desires.
“Alright,” he nodded past them to the exit, “off you go, and good hunting.”
He watched them file out, wishing he was going with them. It went against the grain to send them off to risk their lives while he sat in the relative safety of his cruiser.
He’d expected to spend the rest of the current turmoil in his little scout-ship but then he had to go and seize a cruiser. He grimaced. If he’d thought it through, he might have simply scuttled it and gone after another target, but it was too late for that now.
And now he was attempting to take more ships, frigates to turn his little fleet into a force he could use to aid the Lady Bau in Mishak’s name. He laughed as he realized his own hypocrisy. He was feeling sorry for himself – the victim of his own success but he wasn’t a victim.
He was an active co-conspirator.
H ela sat up in her bunk, feigning a yawn for the sake of the crew. She hadn’t slept but she didn’t want them knowing that. In a small scout-ship, trouble spread fast and hearing your captain was a nervous wreck wasn’t good for morale. “Contact?” she asked her tactical rating.
“A ghost of a contact,” Nils replied, leaning against the doorpost of her sleeping cubicle. A ghost was what they were looking for. Hunting in a gas giant was a chancy business.
She touched a tab in her collar and her under-suit closed up as she stood and backed into the suit armature attached to the wall. The nanite-plate mix flowed into place around her body, fully closing and pressure-testing before opening up again to leave her head and hands exposed.
Fifteen hours and they were finally getting a contact. She’d been starting to doubt Eth’s read of the tactical situation.
“Are we closing on the ghost?”
Nils nodded. “It’s firming up. I’m betting fifty ducats it’s a frigate.”
“Who’s taking that bet?”
“Just Gleb.”
She walked out of her cubicle and led Nils back forward, threading their way between the seated and sleeping forms of the prize crew who had no room to store their suits and so had to stay in them round the clock. They walked through between the two pitch drives and into the bridge.
At least it didn’t take long to get to work in a little ship like Your Last Chance. She was pleased with her new command, especially since she’d inherited the ship from the first Human to gain a commission. It felt like a vote of confidence.
Gleb, Nils’ shift-relief, sat at the tactical console. He gave her a nod. “We’ve got a cruiser ahead of us.”
Nils muttered a curse.
“Someone owes you fifty ducats, Gleb!” She grinned at her tactical specialist.
“I’d gladly give up the money if I could just know why we’re seeing cruisers first,” Gleb groused.
“Maybe we just missed their frigate screen?” Hela offered, her tone innocent.
“Miss frigates?” Gleb exclaimed. “This may not be the clearest of conditions but there’s no way we’d miss something the size of a frigate trying to fight against all this gravity. Twenty-eight times our mass and with only three pitch drives? They’ll be lit up like pulsars, red-lining those drives for all they’re worth.”
The Quailu preferred size and firepower over mobility. Their species was heavier and less agile than most of their subjects, their design philosophy tended to favor their own strengths. Most of them saw the scout-ships as extravagant toys, a waste of two perfectly good pitch drives.
Hela had to admit to a certain respect for Quailu design as she snuck up behind one of their cruisers in a mostly unarmed little scout. Still, she’d been on her share of operations against stronger enemies and she knew the value of stealth and agility.
“Should we go around them?” Eve called from the pilot’s seat.
Hela considered that. Don’t come back with cruisers. That had been Eth’s orders. He said nothing about attacking any cruisers that got in their way.
And she didn’t want those weapons aimed at her backside.
“Bring us up under their hull,” she ordered. “Ventral, center-line. We’ll link up to them in one of the un-pressurized engineering spaces.”
She pulled a holo-display down from an overhead emitter, ignoring the exclamations from her crew. She stripped away the outer hull on the standard cruiser overlay and did a search of the critical systems file.
“Here,” she said, clenching a fist and throwing a copy of the projection up to where Eve could see. “Right under the main power shunt in the central core. We’ll open a boarding link on our starboard side and toss in a few grenades.”
“Ok…” Eve looked back over her shoulder. “I like where your head’s at, but please tell me we’re all keeping in mind that we’re gonna be attached to the bottom of that thing while we’re fixin’ to drop it to crush depth?”
“That’s why grenades have delay settings,” Hela replied. “Gleb, close all suits and rig the ship for combat.”
“You got it, Boss.” He activated a command in the system and thirty suits closed up. He looked up at her. “Aren’t we supposed to be all formal in our orders, now that we’re in the house fleet?”
“Screw that,” Hela said. “They need that on a cruiser where they have an overblown hierarchy. We run lean. I can talk to every crewmember on this dinky little boat without taking a single step. It’s working so let’s not screw with it.”
She grabbed her holo display and dragged it aft. It flickered as it jumped from emitter to emitter until she stopped and released it to starboard of the two drives. The main core flashed in red, showing her the shapes to look for once the enemy hull was breached.
Meesh came over from behind one of his beloved pitch drives. “We’re gonna make their core go boom?” He unspooled a safety cable from his chest and clipped it to an overhead support.
Hela did likewise. “HE grenades on a five-minute delay.”
“I’d recommend synchronizing them,” he offered. “Explosions in non-pressurized compartments are always so underwhelming. We want to get the max bang for our buck. I’ll toss in a few-shaped charge grenades as well, if you don’t mind.”
“Thanks for the advice,” she said. “Throw whatever you think will work best. This is more your area of expertise.”
She knew she couldn’t be an expert on everything, so she made sure she showed appreciation when her subordinates filled in the gaps for her. She’d seen how officers in the house military would snap at NCO’s for volunteering information that they probably needed. It didn’t make for the most effective teamwork but, then again, they hadn’t been grown for this work.
The last of the cabin atmosphere disappeared into storage and the side of the hull opened in front of them, letting in the roaring winds of the upper atmosphere. She had to resist the urge to jump back as the cruiser’s hull filled their view, coming closer with alarming speed.
They came to a stop, or rather, matched course and speed with only a finger’s width between the two ships. The strength of the wind, rushing between the two hulls, compressing in the gap and then buffeting against her whole body, was unexpected. The atmosphere was thin up here but it was still blowing along at a hell of a velocity.
Gas giants looked so peaceful from outside.
Somehow, perhaps because the atmosphere was too thin and toxic to be breathable, she hadn’t expected to hear so much noise when the hull opened up. Still, gasses were compressible and, therefore, capable of transmitting sound. The compression waves buffeted against her suit, transmitting through to the air inside and battering at her eardrums.
The noise rose to a high-pitched shriek before cutting off entirely as Your Last Chance’s hull flowed out from the edges of the opening to connect with the nanites forming the enemy hull.
Once the seal was complete, the enemy hull activated a subroutine designed for maintenance access and split open in the middle of the gap, flowing out of the way.
Hela and Meesh both aimed their weapons through the growing gap. If some enemy crewman happened to be mucking about in there, they wanted to be the first to shoot.
There were no enemies in sight and Hela stepped up to the edge of her own decking. She slid a high-explosive disc from her grenade dispenser, tossing it toward the core. She cursed as the planet’s gravity took hold of it and slapped it down against the inside surface of the cruiser’s hull.
She’d forgotten that these spaces didn’t have grav plating to counteract external forces. She pulled out another grenade and threw it with all her might. The disc hit one of the shapes she’d identified as critical and she breathed a sigh of relief.
She’d hate to go through all this trouble only to slink away without doing what she’d proposed. She made a mental note to keep more to herself. That way, her crew might not realize it when she failed to carry out all of her plan.
They got more than two dozen grenades placed before Meesh deigned to offer another opinion.
“That ought to mess them up,” he grunted, voice sounding slightly deeper over the comms. “Shall we activate the countdown?”
“Yeah, let’s get on with it.” Hela used the pad on her forearm to synch the timers and start them. Now there was no stopping them.
“Let’s go, Eve,” she ordered.
“Roger that,” came Eve’s relieved reply.
But nothing happened.
“Let’s GO, Eve!”
“We’re not separating!” Eve said. “I can try to tear us loose but I don’t know if that’s even possible.”
“It’s not,” Meesh confirmed. “The bond between nanites is stronger than the engine mounts; we’d just knock the drives loose.”
“Well, why the hells are we stuck?” Hela demanded. “We’re gonna have a front row seat for an explosion in about three and a half minutes.” She’d managed to keep her voice calm, but she could feel the sweat collecting on her skin.
Meesh was scrolling feverishly through lines of holographic code. “Wait, Eve, what the hells are you doing inside the code interface?”
“Trying to break the seal!”
“Is that how you originally tried to break us free?”
“Yeah, why?”
“’Cause Noa programmed a lockout to prevent accidental separation while a boarding team might be crossing over. You can’t separate from the coding screens. Get out of there.”
“Three minutes,” Hela warned. She was starting to think they were about to disgrace their species in the eyes of the empire and the lord who’d given them this chance.
And dying would also really suck.
“Ok, I’m out.”
“Give me a second to put the code back in the right sequence.”
“Hurry up,” Hela growled. “We still need to get clear without being detected.”
“Got it!” Meesh nearly shouted. “Ok, Eve, if you bring the drives up to anything more than point-five standard grav-units, the separation subroutine will kick in.”
The sound of shrieking wind was the sweetest Hela had ever heard. The racket grew louder and deeper as the seam between the two ships widened and then they were completely free.
The small ship lurched away from the cruiser and they had just cleared the starboard side of the larger vessel’s hull when she saw the eruption of debris from the underside.
The cruiser still had its forward momentum but, with power cut to her pitch drives, she could no longer hold out against gravity. The emergency capacitor bank cut in but they couldn’t supply the power needed to keep her drives running at their designed maximum output.
The huge ship started dropping down into the atmosphere and the bridge windows slid past the little scout-ship. Hela could see the terrified Quailu at their stations, the captain gesturing wildly and she realized, for the first time, that the result of her own orders would be the deaths of every Quailu aboard.
She shivered, keenly feeling the coldness where the suit’s airflow was evaporating sweat through her under-suit. Her whole life, up till now, had revolved around service to the Quailu. To harm one of them or even to fail to protect one had been unthinkable.
And now she was deliberately sending hundreds of them to their deaths.
“Bye, folks,” Meesh said, waving. “Next stop, metallic hydrogen!”
Clearly, he wasn’t as struck by the moment as she was, but then this was on her authority, not his, and, frankly, he was a bit of a sociopath. She wondered what it must have been like for the Humans boarding the Mouse . They’d killed Quailu in close combat, shooting them from so near, their victims would have felt their attackers’ emotions.
She shivered again. That was exactly what she’d be doing if they found a frigate.
It seemed stupid to put a bridge so close to the outer hull – so close they actually had windows . She shook her head as she stepped away from the closing hole in the scout-ship’s hull.
Kill a few hundred Quailu and suddenly she’s allowing herself to think they’re less than magnificent. There were no Quailu aboard to catch her at it but it was a dangerous habit to get into.
“Gleb, any more ghosts?”
“Nothing right now,” he replied, his voice changing in pitch as her helmet snapped open. “Just our original contact and it looks like she’s starting to lose her hull integrity.”
Even their path drive would be useless, though some deck officer had likely suggested they jump out of their predicament, raising hopes for a brief moment. Someone would have pointed out that the path drives needed power just as much as the pitch drives, which would have depleted the capacitor bank far too much to allow even the shortest of jumps.
“Is A Waste of Time still out there?” She hadn’t even considered what reaction her hunting partner might have had to their unexpected approach to the enemy cruiser. She cursed her own foolishness.
What if they’d thought we were trying to seize that ship and moved in to back us up? She could have sent a lot of Humans to their deaths if that had happened.
“Pretty sure they’re right here,” Gleb pointed into the holo.
She suppressed a sigh of relief and made a promise to herself to think things through a little more thoroughly next time. She’d gotten lucky this time but she wouldn’t be trying anything like that again, unless she could predict what the other scout-ship might do.
She took some small measure of comfort in the talk she’d had with Eth before leaving his cruiser. She’d been apprehensive about letting him down and, almost as if he could sense it, he sought her out.
“Every good leader has their fair share of dumb-assed blunders in their past,” he’d told her, “myself included.” He held out a hand to forestall her protest. “It’s true. I’ve been behind some monumental screw-ups. I’m only alive because of luck and a damn good team. Rely on the second more than the first. Do everything in your power, and a few things beyond it, to look after them.”
