Cobra Traitor, page 42
part #3 of Cobra Rebellion Series
It was awesome and terrible at the same time. But Jody didn’t have time to be either amazed or repulsed. She twisted her left leg up out of her crouch and sent a quick horizontal slash of laser fire across the table’s support column. The column splintered, dropping the weight of the table into her hands. Shifting her leg back around into a bracing position behind her, she shoved the table with all her strength toward Kemp and Merrick.
The intensity of the laser fire might have faltered as the Cobras reacted to this new attack. Jody couldn’t tell, and she didn’t have time for further assessment. Castenello and Filho had scrambled halfway back to their feet; reaching behind her, Jody grabbed Filho by the collar, gave Castenello a shove in his back toward the side hatch she’d come through barely two minutes ago, and got the group moving.
Castenello was still a couple of meters away from the hatch when it unexpectedly slid open.
Jody snapped her hands up into firing position. But it was only Rashida. “Hurry!” the Qasaman called urgently.
“Go!” Jody said, giving Castenello another shove and glancing behind her to confirm that the other officers were following. If Kemp and Merrick finished off the Marines before they could get out of the room…
The battle was still raging when the last of the four officers made it through and the hatch slid shut behind them. Meekan, the last in line, did something to it and a locked logo lit up.
“This way,” Rashida said, starting down the service corridor.
“Like hell,” Castenello growled, braking to a halt. “Who the hell do you think—?”
“Move it,” Jody snapped, giving him another shove.
“More Marines have been summoned,” Rashida added. “Captain Moreau will also meet us.”
The route Rashida led them along was longer and more twisty than the path Jody had taken earlier. But when they finally emerged into some kind of workshop they indeed found four Marines waiting for them. Two were standing guard, facing the workshop’s main hatch, while the other two were hurriedly climbing into battle suits they’d obviously grabbed along the way. “Where’s the captain?” Filho asked as Meekan again sealed the service corridor hatch behind them.
“Captain Moreau decided to shelter in an electrical room thirty meters from the conference room, sir,” one of the Marines said. “He was hoping to see what the intruders did if they got out.”
“What they’ll do is hunt him down and kill him,” Jody bit out. “Didn’t you try to stop him?”
“We weren’t with him, Ma’am.”
“Never mind Moreau,” Castenello said, pulling a small cylinder from his belt.
“The man with the captain is Sergeant Oponn, sir,” the Marine said.
Castenello nodded and clicked a switch. “Senior Commander Castenello for Colonel Mwando.”
“Mwando, sir,” a voice came back promptly. “Are you and Acting Captain Filho secure?”
“For the moment,” Castenello said, throwing a glower at Jody. “Report.”
“The two intruders seem to have split up,” Mwando said. “They’re heading—”
“Hold it,” Castenello interrupted. “Splitting up? Why haven’t they been contained in the conference room?”
“Because they got out before my reinforcements could reach them.”
“They stopped eight Marines?”
“They stopped nine, sir,” Mwando said tartly. “Four are dead, the other five unconscious and on their way to sickbay now. The intruders also left behind the third prisoner, Cobra Smith.”
Jody looked at Rashida. Like Jody and Kemp, Rashida and Smitty had become close over the past few weeks. “Is Cobra Smith all right?” she called toward the comm.
“Quiet,” Castenello growled, sending her a warning glare.
“Cobra Smith has a severe laser wound in his left lung,” Mwando said. “We have him in custody.”
Rashida’s face had gone rigid. “Why isn’t he in sickbay?” Jody asked.
“He’s in custody in sickbay,” Castenello snapped. “One more word and you’ll be with him. Colonel, you said the intruders had split up?”
“Yes, sir. They disabled the security cameras in the conference room, and when they left they went in opposite directions, destroying the personnel sensors as they went.”
“You’re tracking them?”
“We’re trying, sir,” Mwando said. “They’re moving fast, using a mix of regular passageways and service corridors, and burning the sensors as they go. We have a squad in pursuit of each, but they also appear to be occasionally doubling back to areas that they’ve blacked out, which throws us off the mark.”
“I assume you’ve locked down CoNCH, engineering, and weapons?”
“Yes, sir,” Mwando said. “But…”
“But what?” Castenello demanded. “Are they locked down, or aren’t they?”
“They’re locked down against any normal threat,” Mwando said reluctantly. “But these are Cobras. I don’t know if—”
“Cobras are hundred-year-old technology,” Castenello snapped. “Ancient, Colonel. They might was well be carrying flintlocks.”
“It’s not quite that easy, Commander,” Mwando said. “On their way out of the conference room they stripped two of the unconscious Marines of their tunics.”
Castenello shot an unreadable look at Jody. “The hell?”
“Yes, sir,” Mwando said. “Even if my squads find them, they may not be able to do much.”
“Understood,” Castenello said between clenched teeth. “All right. Tell me how the rest of your men are deployed.”
Jody stepped closer to Rashida as the conversation switched to shipboard numbers and equipment specs. “Any idea what the deal is with the tunics?” she murmured.
Rashida shook her head silently. Her face was still rigid.
“The deal is that it’s trouble,” a new voice came quietly from over Jody’s shoulder.
She turned to see that Meekan had come up behind them. “How bad?”
“Very,” Meekan said. “Marine tunics include an IFF system that blocks other Marines’ ability to autolock and autofire. They can still lock and fire manually, but it’s slower and less precise.”
A shiver ran up Jody’s back. “And Cobras are very good at dodging.”
“Yes, we’ve noticed,” Meekan said. “Even worse is that we only have fifty Marines aboard.” He hissed between his teeth. “Correction: forty-one functional Marines.”
“Fifty?” Jody echoed, frowning. “We had way more than that on Aventine.”
“That’s because Captain Lij Tulu had most of our contingent as well as the ones from the Megalith,” Meekan said grimly. “Commodore Santores thought a larger force might be needed if the Cobra Worlds continued being uncooperative.”
“Great,” Jody muttered. “How did they figure out the trick with the tunics?”
“Most likely from Gunnery Sergeant Plaine,” Rashida murmured.
“Or from the Trofts,” Meekan said. “They figured it out a long time ago, but since the IFF requires the wearer to be running a human body temperature and to have a carotid pulse that comes from a four-chamber heart there wasn’t much they could do with the information.”
“Terrific,” Jody said. “So how are we going to—”
“Listen,” Rashida cut in. Her eyes were focused on infinity, her mouth half open. “The hyperdrive. It just went off.”
“Are you sure?” Jody asked.
And suddenly, the room was filled with the harsh blare of an alarm. “What the—?” Castenello broke off as he gazed into space. “Damn. Damn.”
“What is it?” Jody asked, her heart thudding suddenly in her ears.
“We’ve hit a flicker net,” Meekan snarled. “The Trofts laid a trap for us.
“And we walked right into it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The news scrolled past on the data stream, sending a chill through Barrington’s blood.
A flicker net. The Trofts had set up a flicker net.
No wonder they hadn’t attacked over the planet, or even raised any kind of threat. Why risk local damage from an orbital battle when they had a net waiting to gather in their prey?
And the Dorian had flown straight into it.
His thoughts bounced back to his earlier conversation with Garrett, where his first officer had confidently asserted that the Trofts would never suspect a Dominion ship coming from Qasama. But just as someone had anticipated the Aventine-to-Qasama route and set up the net that had earlier snared the courier ship Hermes, so to the Drim’hco’plai had clearly expected a Qasama-to-Muninn flight, as well.
Only how had the Dorian failed to hit it on the way into the system? Barrington had set his course directly from Qasama to Jody Broom’s coordinates, and Filho had presumably simply reversed the course for their departure. Deviating from a known route through unmapped space was always time-consuming and sometimes dangerous, and the acting captain would have wanted to return to Qasama and Commodore Santores as quickly as possible. Had the Drim’hco’plai thrown the net together in the brief window between the Dorian’s two passages through this area?
Or had the net been deliberately inactive during the Dorian’s approach? Did the Drim’hco’plai not care who came into the Muninn system, but only who left it?
Did they want Merrick Broom back that badly?
But there was no time to wonder about that now. Barrington’s ship was dead in space, and the only way it was going to survive was if it got undead, and fast.
Updates were flowing across the stream, almost too fast for him to read. There were four major Troft warships out there, arrayed in the standard bent-square formation about eight hundred klicks out. So far they hadn’t opened fire, but the Dorian’s sensors showed their laser capacitors powering up.
And thanks to Castenello’s grand inquisition plan, not a single one of the command officers was currently in CoNCH.
That needed to change, and fast. “Sergeant, check the passageway,” he ordered Oponn.
“It’s clear, sir,” Oponn said, his eyes moving as he checked the data stream.
“No; look in the passageway,” Barrington told him. “I don’t trust the data stream on security matters anymore.”
Oponn shot a look at Plaine. “Yes, sir.” He stepped to the hatchway of the electrical room they’d sheltered in, opened it and glanced both ways down the passageway. “Clear, sir.”
“Good,” Barrington said, starting toward him. “Let’s go.”
“Just a minute, Captain,” Plaine said, stepping in front of him and holding up a hand. “Where exactly are we going?”
“Where do you think?” Barrington countered. “CoNCH.”
“Not a good idea, sir,” Plaine said. “If the Cobras are lying in wait along our route you’ll be a sitting duck.”
“Would you rather I wait here until the Trofts destroy the ship?”
“No, sir,” Plaine said. “But you should at least collect a bigger Marine escort than just Oponn and me.”
“If you’d checked the stream, you’d know they’re being deployed at CoNCH, engineering, and weapons,” Barrington said, frowning as a sudden ominous thought struck him. “What makes you think they’d be lying in wait for me?”
“I told you, sir, I was drugged like they were,” Plaine said. “Our orders were to decapitate the command structure in preparation for this attack.”
“Only you were cured.”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?” Plaine retorted.
“Yes, about that,” Barrington said, eyeing him closely. “It occurs to me that you don’t need to kill the senior officers if you can simply neutralize them. By, say, keeping them locked out of CoNCH.”
Plaine’s eyes narrowed. “I already told you—”
“Someone’s coming,” Oponn muttered suddenly.
Barrington checked the data stream. No personnel were indicated in their area. “Are you sure?”
“I hear footsteps,” Oponn said, tapping the control to close the hatch. “Coming this way.”
Barrington felt his stomach tighten. So the Dorian’s security system was well and truly fouled. “Stay quiet,” he murmured. “If we’re lucky, they’ll pass us by.”
“And if they don’t?” Plaine asked.
Barrington stared at the closed hatch. “Then here is where we make our stand.”
* * *
“You sure you know where you’re going?” Jody murmured as she and Rashida hurried down the deserted corridor behind Lieutenant Meekan.
“I’m sure.” Meekan glanced over his shoulder. “If you’d rather go with Filho and Castenello, you can probably still catch up with them.”
“Thanks, but we’ll stay with you,” Jody growled. “I was just asking—”
“It’s the only one in the area,” Meekan interrupted tersely. “They have to be here.” Abruptly, he stopped in front of a hatchway. “Stay behind me.”
“Right.” Jody stepped partially behind Meekan and raised her hands into firing position. Even if Meekan was right, they could still be too late. Meekan tapped the release and the hatch slid open—
Plaine and another Marine were standing shoulder to shoulder in front of them, completely blocking the opening. Behind them, alive and well, was Captain Moreau.
Jody exhaled a relieved huff. “Captain,” Meekan said briskly. He was trying to be casually courteous, Jody could tell, but the relief in his voice was unmistakable. “Are you all right, sir?”
“So far, Lieutenant,” the captain said, also clearly relieved. “Come in. Quickly.”
A moment later all six of them were inside. “All right, what have we got?” the captain asked. “Where are Filho and Castenello?”
“They headed to CoNCH, sir,” Meekan said. “Along with all the Marines Colonel Mwando could spare for escort duty.”
“Which probably isn’t a lot,” Moreau said. He scowled into space, probably checking the Dorian’s data stream. “Looks like Colonel Mwando took your suggestion earlier, Sergeant, about raising the Marines’ alert status. Good.”
“What does that mean?” Jody asked.
“It means they were already gathering at the Dorian’s critical areas when this thing went down,” Plaine said, “with twenty percent of them already in combat armor. In theory, that should keep Broom and Kemp out of CoNCH, weapons, and engineering.”
Jody nodded, suppressing a grimace. Every time they talked about her brother that way it was like an extra twist of the knife in her gut.
“But surely Kemp and Merrick know those places will be guarded,” Rashida spoke up. “Why then would they go there?”
“The drug programming,” Plaine said. “Maybe hubris. Maybe both.”
“Plus Broom’s never seen Dominion Marines in action,” Meekan said. “He has no idea what he’ll be up against.”
“No, but Kemp has,” Jody said, frowning. Plaine had a reasonable point. Still, while the Drim war drug might make them crazy focused, it presumably didn’t make them stupid.
Or did it? Would it drive Merrick into a suicidal action simply because he couldn’t think for himself anymore?
“Merrick may have, as well,” Rashida said. “I assume, Gunnery Sergeant Plaine, that you fought somewhat against the Trofts while you were securing a ship for his Troft ally?”
“Yeah, a little,” Plaine conceded. “I forgot about that. So I guess we’re back to programming and hubris.”
“It still doesn’t make sense for them to just throw their lives away,” Jody said.
“They may not need to do that,” Meekan said. “Just keeping the senior officers out of CoNCH may be enough for their purposes.”
“Along with the immediate goal of sowing confusion,” Moreau said. “They’ve managed to knock out half the internal security sensors, which means as long as they stick to that side of the ship we have no idea where they are. Until and unless they launch an attack, we’ve been forced onto the defensive.”
“While meanwhile the Trofts out there blast the Dorian to rubble,” Meekan said grimly. “Sir?”
“I see it,” Captain Moreau growled. “All right, conversation’s over. Whatever their game is, we’re not playing.”
“What’s the matter?” Jody asked.
“Two of the Troft ships have moved closer and opened fire,” Plaine told her grimly. “Extreme range, no real damage, probably just probing our point defenses. But the battle’s definitely started.”
Jody curled her hands into fists. And her own brother was the traitor who was making it happen. “How can we help?”
“Talking your brother down would be a good start,” Meekan said. “Other than that, just stay out of the way.”
“Actually, there is something,” Captain Moreau said. “That antiarmor laser of yours. Is it strong enough to cut through a bulkhead this thick?” He tapped the side wall.
“Probably,” Jody said, frowning. With the hatch right there in front of them, why would he need her to cut through the side wall?
Meekan was obviously wondering the same thing. “I presume you don’t mean this particular bulkhead, sir?”
“No,” Captain Moreau said. He started to reach a finger in front of him, then paused. “No,” he said. “No. If they’ve—no. All right, here’s my thought. There are only two access points to CoNCH, both of which are heavily armored and presumably by now heavily defended.”
“There’s a double Marine guard at both entrances, sir,” Oponn confirmed.
“If we can trust the data stream,” the captain countered. “I’m not sure I do anymore. The point is there’s a back door no one’s thought of.”
“Just a moment, sir,” Meekan interrupted. “Before you say any more—” he turned a suddenly intense look on Plaine “—I think we should figure out how to isolate Plaine from the data stream. Or else isolate him from us.”
“What?” Jody asked. “Why?”
“Because as the captain said, the data stream’s been compromised,” Meekan said. He was standing at Plaine’s left side now, almost pressed up against the Marine’s shoulder. The exact spot, Jody noticed suddenly, where Plaine’s epaulets could bring the least amount of firepower to bear on him. “Half the ship’s lost security sensors, and Plaine’s the only one of the Muninn group who had access.”
