Evasion, p.27
Evasion, page 27
For the first time in a long time, EB missed his nova fighter. Even his NEWAC nova craft had been designed for this environment in a way Evasion just wasn’t. His freighter had the cannon to go toe-to-toe with any of the gunships in the mess, but she was no warship.
“Optical scans commencing,” he announced aloud. “We might—might—process them out of the chaos a second or two faster than they find us.”
“That’ll be enough,” Reggie said confidently. “I make it five minutes to likely range.”
“Me too,” EB confirmed. “Vexer, you comfortable with this?”
“Only one way to become comfortable with this, right?” his lover replied. “Better with a fleet of backup than on our own.”
“Fair enough.” EB stretched over to squeeze Vexer’s hand, temporarily turning off his link to the crew channel.
“I love you, you know,” he told the navigator. “However this mess shakes out, I wanted to say that first.”
Vexer lifted EB’s hand to his mouth for a kiss. His other hand remained on the joystick, continually slightly adjusting their course around their main vector.
“I figured, but I wasn’t going to push you to say it,” he admitted. “Space dads forever?”
EB laughed, shaking his head at his lover.
“That’s up to Trace, but she seems okay with the idea,” he admitted. “All we need to do to earn ourselves a grumpy teenage daughter is take down a crime syndicate that spans thirty star systems. You with me?”
“To the end, EB. Always.”
EB squeezed Vexer’s hand again and relinked to the network. From the network, he was able to tell that Ginny had been studiously ignoring their moment, focusing on the scan data around them.
“We have no link with the rest of the fleet,” she reminded everyone. “I’ve got a subroutine processing their location, but it may well screw up. This isn’t a clean environment for tracking.”
“That’s the point, Ginny,” EB told her. “But let’s try not to shoot our friends. They’re in this for the money, and I’d very much like them to get paid.”
“Hostiles are definitely inside our jamming bubble,” Reggie reported softly as the rest of the crew chuckled. “I’m beginning to pick up intermittent contacts. They’re ghosts, but there’s enough of them that somebody is actually out there.”
“And the station?” EB asked.
“Three hundred-twenty-five-thousand kilometers and closing,” his gunner replied.
“Twelve minutes to dock,” Vexer told him. “Do we take down our jammers at some point?”
“When we dock, if nothing else. We’ll need coordination between boarders and ships,” EB said. “Let’s hope we make it that far.”
50
EB had three different analysis programs running in parallel while scanning through the data with his mark two eyeball at the same time. Like Reggie, he could see the ghosts scattered across the jamming on the display.
The gunships were definitely coming out to meet them, which suggested that they’d succeeded in blowing away all of the defensive stations. But four gunships couldn’t fight ten, and he doubted their crews wanted to die for the Siya U Hestî.
Though they might be terrified of the consequences if they abandoned the Cage.
EB shook his head.
“What am I missing?” he muttered. “Surprise, sure, that got us here, but…”
He studied the ghosts again. Range could be anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers. The size of the contacts was all over the place too. There was no way to resolve anything solid at this distance, but…
But.
There were too many contacts and they weren’t big enough.
“Oh, stars,” EB whispered. “Vexer, take us to full evasive. Reggie, refine your targeting. Expect targets in the three- to four-hundred-cubic-meter range.
“The station launched sub-fighters.”
Considered a crude desperate countermeasure to nova fighters in the Rim, a sublight fighter had the engines and guns of a nova fighter without the nova drive. They were maneuverable enough, but with SCD tech, they were badly undergunned for their mass.
But while very little of the Beyond was fully up to even Outer Rim tech, there were plenty of pockets of “better than SCD” tech out there, and the Siya U Hestî could likely access the best of the thirty-two systems they operated in.
“Understood,” Reggie said calmly. “There’s parameters in the system for them. Loading them up now.”
And just in time. Two dozen tiny contacts solidified at the fifty-thousand-kilometer range—and any benefit that Evasion had from better sensors or computers was lost against the unexpected size of the fighter craft.
“They’re firing; evade,” EB snapped. “Reggie?”
“I’ve got them. Half-cycles, engaging now.”
The turrets spun on their bases, cannon elevating and tracking with a speed EB had never asked of them. Reggie had very clearly been doing his job perfectly, as the guns acted exactly as they should and the gunner opened fire.
Vexer pulled the ship out of the sub-fighters’ opening salvo, clearing Reggie to work his fire across the formation. Every ten seconds, a shot blazed out from each of Evasion’s turrets.
There was no way Reggie could hit with every shot, not even with near-lightspeed weapons, at this range. His first pair of shots obliterated its target, though—and then sub-fighters started maneuvering to evade the return fire.
EB’s allies clearly hadn’t been expecting sub-fighters. None of the gunships had detected them in time, and focused fire hammered the mercenary ships. Only the imbalance between the gunships’ limited armor and the fighters’ even more limited firepower saved anyone.
Three of the mercenary gunships came apart under the attack. Others were losing atmosphere and had clearly lost guns when they opened fire a moment later.
Now that the mercenaries had identified their enemy, they accelerated their maneuvers, cutting around the Cartel fighters’ fire. They’d been surprised, but EB’s allies were clearly veterans of the constant low-scale warfare of the Beyond.
The sub-fighter pilots…weren’t.
Their opening salvo had been devastating because only EB had seen them coming, but their formation collapsed as soon as they had to dodge around incoming fire. EB had seen the pattern before, at the beginning of the war.
The pilots had been well trained, but they’d never expected to face hostile fire and they hadn’t been trained in a way that prepared them for it. They landed a solid blow, but when faced with real opposition, they just…came apart.
Reggie was working his way along their excuse of a formation, nailing a sub-fighter with every second or third shot. The gunships’ weapons might be toys by EB’s standard, but they were more than sufficient to take down nova fighters—and most of the pocket warships had as many of those popguns as Zeldan Blade did her heavier cannon.
“Blade isn’t firing,” Vexer said. “What’s going on?”
“She shouldn’t,” EB told him. “Zelda built her ship with the heaviest guns she could find. She probably doesn’t even have the tracking for sub-fighters—she got lucky hitting this place with support that did.”
“So, what is she— Oh.”
Zeldan Blade had plunged forward under the cover of Reggie’s careful sustained fire, and she saw the enemy gunships first. Her heavy plasma cannon, as heavy as any Rim destroyer and probably any cruiser ever built in the Beyond, opened fire first.
The lead gunship never even had a chance to fire. The other three broke formation, maneuvering to clear their lines of fire—only to discover that Smasher had a similar limitation to Blade and her captain had made the same call.
Blade’s armor shrugged aside the scattered fire the three gunships unleashed, and then Smasher’s tore apart a second gunship. Zeldan Blade’s fire walked across the remaining two, failing to destroy either ship but distracting their sensors enough to force a miss.
Thirty seconds later, it was all over. Five mercenary gunships were gone, including Naveen’s Daisy. Three of the others, including Smasher, were leaking atmosphere and fuel.
If Zeldan Blade had taken any damage, she didn’t show it as she began to decelerate toward the Cage. Evasion matched vectors with the corvette, Vexer tucking the armed freighter into their companion without instruction.
“Kill the jammers,” EB ordered. “Try to get a laser link to Captain Zelda.”
He wasn’t sure if the Cage itself had jammers—it was fifty-fifty in his mind. The Cartel hadn’t armed the station, but they had stuck two dozen sub-fighters aboard. The fighters and the gunships and the defense platforms would all have jammers.
That last thought reminded him—just as Reggie fired the ship’s turrets again. Blade opened fire a moment later.
“Defense platforms located,” he reported unnecessarily. “And neutralized. Jamming is down; watching our allies.”
An icon flickered up to tell him he had a link to Zelda.
“Captain, are we good?” he asked.
“We could be better,” she admitted. “Half the upper assault team was on the ships we lost. Al’ama, I liked Naveen. He was good people.”
“I figured most of the lot who signed on for this stunt were good people,” EB told her. “I didn’t know any of them well.”
“I don’t have decent coms with anyone except you, but the plan called for them to kill their jammers soon.” She shook her head. “Hayden is still with us, so he’ll fly overwatch while the rest of us offload.
“I wish I could say the hard part was done, Captain Bardacki, but I think this may have been the easy part.”
“I know,” EB confirmed. “But we’ll get through. I’ll see you in the prison decks once you’ve got the bosses in chains.”
“Inshallah!”
51
Zeldan Blade had a custom-built boarding system, a combination of docking tube, airlock and fusion cutter that Trace guessed was meant to latch on to a hostile ship and slice its way in.
It also had a mustering area attached to it for Zelda’s ground troops—and one armored but very nervous guide. Her helmet was on but unsealed so she could hear the troopers around her chatting as the range counted down—and watched the corvette’s tactical feed on her helmet.
Zelda herself had made a real effort to make the teenager comfortable on the ship for the three-day trip, but Trace couldn’t help missing Evasion. The freighter was home now, and she would have felt far safer going aboard the Cage with EB and Vexer around her.
Well, maybe EB and Reggie. Trace knew that Vexer was going aboard the station, but all that did was worry her. EB and Reggie were fighters. Vexer was…Vexer.
“Shooting’s stopped. Space fight’s over,” one of the soldiers grunted. “How’d we do?”
“Blade is fine,” Trace said instantly, before she could stop herself. “We lost…a lot of ships, though. Daisy. Evermore. Lancelot Dancer. Shit You Not. Chamomile Star.”
She’d only confirmed the IDs now as the jammers came down, but she could see the winces of the dozen armored mercs around her.
“Well, fuck us,” the same soldier said bleakly. “Thanks, kid. You were keeping an eye on it?”
“The whole way in,” she admitted. “Dad—EB—Captain Bardacki taught me how to run a sensor data feed to my headware, and Captain Zelda gave me access.”
“That’s half the landing force, isn’t it?” one of the other mercs. “What does that do to the plan, Sarge?”
“Nothing,” Captain Zelda declared, the intimidating Muslim woman striding unexpectedly into the holding area, her helmet under her arm as her eyes surveyed her people. “Every extra gun hand was valuable, but it’s only the loss of Naveen’s team that we’re going to feel.
“Em Finley here”—she gestured to Trace—“is going to lead us right to the prize queen, and once we have her, we make her shut everybody else down. Clean, simple. And remember: stun if you can.
“There are innocents in this hive of scum—and the folk that aren’t innocent are worth money to us if delivered to the Trackers Guild.”
“I hope I’m allowed to use a real weapon when the stun fails,” the man the others had called Sarge replied.
“You see armor, Sarge, you put a blaster bolt through it,” Zelda told him. “But anybody out of armor? Stun them. If they stay up, blast them. That’s why I bought you all underbarrel stunners, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Sarge replied. “Contact in sixty seconds. The Moray is ready to feed.”
“And four of the gunships are going to dump another thirty troops across the upper part of the station,” Zelda told them. “Stun everyone we meet, cuff them, move on. We don’t know where the station control center is, and until we take that from the Siya U Hestî, everyone we take aboard is in danger.”
She turned to Trace.
“You ready, Em Finley?”
“I’m ready,” Trace confirmed, mentally giving her armor the order to seal. She’d practiced enough now to be comfortable with the overtuned muscles and reactions of the suit. It had sucked up most of the last week, so part of her hoped to need it.
The more sensible part of her knew that she really, really didn’t want to need that edge.
The cutting edge at the end of the boarding tunnel made a horrific racket, even through the sound protection on Trace’s helmet. It only lasted a few seconds before the first wave of armored mercs charged down the tunnel with Zelda in the middle of them.
Trace started to follow Zelda, only to find Sarge’s armored hand on her shoulder.
“You’re our guide and our charge, Em Finley,” he said on a private channel. “You stick to me like you’re magnetized, you get me? Captain and I will keep you alive. Nobody on this op wants to bring a kid into the middle of it.
“But we need you, so we’re going to keep you safe.”
Trace grimaced inside her helmet, but she let him hold her back as blaster fire echoed down the tunnel.
“Bravo team, go. Charlie team, on my order,” Zelda’s voice ordered over the network. “Leapfrog by squad. These people are not as scary as they think they are.”
More blaster fire echoed.
“Charlie,” Zelda snapped.
“That’s us,” Sarge told Trace, swinging a massive combined blaster and stunner rifle up to point down the tunnel.
“Underbarrel stunner” was not the correct description for Sarge’s weapon of choice. It was the size of Trace’s leg in her armor.
The last wave of mercs went ahead of Trace, with Sarge watching between their armored shoulders and Trace sticking right behind him with her own blaster rifle. She had an actual underbarrel stunner, an attachment about the size of her fist that locked on to the barrel and trigger guard of her rifle.
Sarge led her past the first two teams, each holding what limited cover they had been able to find. None of Zelda’s people were down, but there were at least a dozen dead guards in familiar-looking red-and-black armor scattered around the space.
They had camo settings on the armor, Trace was sure, but the Cage’s guards’ job was to contain and intimidate the people the Cartel kidnapped. Intimidating color choices had been part of that.
The skill to stand against Zelda’s battle-hardened mercenaries clearly hadn’t been.
“Stop here,” Sarge ordered, pulling up his team at an intersection. “Is this familiar, Finley?”
Trace looked around, trying to place herself. It took her a moment and a reference to the map she’d put together.
“Yeah, we’re in the starboard wing,” she told them. She gestured to the left. “That corridor leads to one of the guard barracks. I…”
She shivered as she remembered why she’d been to the guard barracks. The thirteen-year-old victim had too much value to make her service the guards, but she’d been required to watch on several occasions for “educational purposes.”
And, Trace suspected, to make her understand the consequences of not being cooperative.
“And the other way?” he asked.
“I’m not sure what’s behind us,” Trace admitted, pulling her focus to the moment. “But to the right should lead to the central hub. Gravity switches over when you enter the hub. It’s always to the exterior, to disorient anyone coming in from any of the arms.”
“Of course,” Sarge said. “Captain?”
“We can’t risk anyone coming up behind us,” Zelda replied. “We’ve seen less than I expected, so there may still be some people asleep in the barracks. Seal that corridor and we move to the hub.
“Alpha, we’re moving up.”
Trace stuck with Sarge as Charlie team pressed themselves against the edge of the intersection. Two of Sarge’s mercs pulled components out of their armor storage and assembled some kind of device.
“Pass it here,” Sarge ordered as Zelda led her team past them and toward the hub. He examined the device—Trace had no idea what it was—and then grunted his satisfaction.
“Deploy,” he ordered, passing it back.
One of the mercs went about a meter down the corridor Trace had flagged as leading to the barracks and placed the device. A solitary blaster bolt flashed over the merc’s head, and they tapped a button and swiftly retreated.
Trace never even saw who had fired the shot before the device activated, spraying some kind of foam in a semicircular pattern. One moment, there was just a collection of bits of gear sitting on the floor.
The next, a wall of foam had filled the entire corridor—and then some kind of catalyst sprayed over the foam and it turned pitch-black.
“They’ll be better off cutting through the hull than going through that,” Sarge said with satisfaction. “Barracks sealed, Captain Zelda.”
“Understood. Bravo, move up and leapfrog!”
One threat was down, and Trace was starting to feel confident that she would really see this place of horrors burn to the void.
