Rebel hell hells jesters.., p.3
Rebel Hell (Hell's Jesters, #3), page 3
The Union Lieutenant is slapping her helmet on. “You’d better get into the bunker, Miss. This sounds like more than just playtime!”
“A full blown attack...?”
The Lieutenant yells at a man rushing by with the shoulder chevrons of a sergeant. “Get that repeat blastcannon up here, Cintas! Now!”
“Lieutenant—”
The officer grabs Aisha by the arm and starts hauling her down the trench, the camera following them with a chaotic, bouncing perspective undercut by the operator’s heavy breathing. They reach a bunker entrance and the Lieutenant shoves Aisha in before turning to point a finger right at the camera.
“Get below!”
The operator half-tumbles into the bunker, tossing images showing Aisha crouched in the dark under a swinging lantern. The view swings back to the bunker entrance.
The Lieutenant is crouched close to her sergeant as another blast sprinkles them with dust. “Charge packs are drained down to sparks!” he tells her. “Goddamn it, Loot! We never have enough of anything!”
She grips his arm, yanks him close, nose-to-nose. “We’ve got guts, don’t we?” She snarls and shoves him on his way.
>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 666789 - NOVA TERRA - GOVERNMENT SPONSORED>>>RECEPTION>>> “Am I to understand, then,” Grantholm asks incredulously, “you’re questioning your own superiors’ decisions concerning Geiger’s promotion?”
“The Admiralty has shared its concerns,” Harrison replies. “I have shared them, in documentation and testimony. Admiral Geiger’s elevation to Fleet Admiral came at the recommendation of the High Council, which I’d add is highly irregular.”
“Command of the Fringe World Fleet?”
“That’s right.”
“Your former command?”
Harrison scowls but manages to quell the expression, keep his response even. “Again, I’d stress the unusual nature of his elevation. We are here to discuss Conduct, are we not?”
Grantholm smirks a little at the jibe. “Grand Admiral Severson signed off on the order, did he not?”
“The Grand Admiral has always been friendly to the High Council’s overtures.”
That starts fresh murmurs throughout the chamber and Grantholm chuckles, shakes his head once, and glances at the Assemblymen at the desks adjacent to his. “Well, as you know, Admiral, the High Council and I have had our tiffs, too.” That triggers laughter from the onlookers, most knowing of Grantholm’s failed bid for the High Council seat for Plymouth a year before—his ongoing feuds with its current Councilor. “But are you suggesting some kind of conspiracy here?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Harrison snaps back, “I’m simply pointing out irregularities to a committee claiming oversight for the Conduct of the War.”
“And thank you so much for reminding us,” Grantholm drawls. “To that end, and back to unorthodox solutions, can you articulate for us what those might entail?”
“Certainly. We’re not just talking about guerilla tactics, here. We’re talking about propaganda. We’re talking about tearing people apart, mentally, emotionally. We should have seen the Jesters as a test case. Their heroic imagery, their folk-hero status should have been a warning. They’ve cast themselves as these downtrodden defenders of the oppressed. People who’ve bought into that will buy into any kind of radicalism.”
“Some would say they already have.”
“If we believe that then we’re in bigger trouble than we know, Mister Assemblyman.”
Grantholm nodded, seemed to affect thoughtfulness. “Am I to believe, then, from your testimony that you believe Admiral Geiger will make matters even more radical?”
“You seem determined to talk about Admiral Geiger, sir.”
That brings a titter of nervous laughter from the audience. But Grantholm isn’t smiling. “Answer the question, please, Admiral Harrison.”
“Geiger is like a hammer. That’s easy to admire because it’s direct, it’s simple. But people aren’t nails. Hammering them builds nothing; it destroys.” Harrison tapped the desk before him to accentuate his words. “The point of the war is to bring the rebel planets back into the fold, is it not?”
Grantholm glances at his fellow committee members, shrugs, and nods. “Of course, it is.”
“How do we do that if we’ve hammered everything into dust?”
THE WEIRD VORTICES and phantoms of hyperspace lashed by Tim Watkins’ Hellhound as it streaked for Loudon.
“How long, Jeanie?” he asked the AI that helped copilot the star fighter.
“I estimate fifteen minutes,” the machine replied.
He gripped the control stick, ground his teeth, and wanted to will more speed into the spaceframe. That was ludicrous; hyperspace already had them moving at speeds vastly beyond light, a reckless careen that would carry them from the far periphery of the galaxy to the fighting around Loudon.
But his soul screamed for more. They had to get there now, had to.
It’d been a long, hard road just to end up right back at home. He’d been a failure as a farmer—really, a failure as anything but a Jester. Loudon folk admired constancy, stability, and hard work. Tim had always been willing to pitch in, but the drudgery of the existence, the sameness had poisoned him. The lure of the stars always had drawn his eyes skyward. After mom and dad died in that factory explosion, it eventually drew him whole.
But the space ways were a trap of their own. The Alliance had been terminally ill by the time Tim threw off the yoke of Loudon, already rent by the stresses that would eventually tear it asunder. Galactic governance was up for sale and the mega-corporations were buying, using that power to exploit and drain and destroy. Tim got caught up in that whirlwind. He’d never been any kind of radical, and the Hell’s Jesters had started out as a way to plunder for profit—even if it really was anger that drove him. But when the piratical became political and the Jesters threw in with the rebel movement, he suddenly found himself a freedom fighter, a folk hero—a terrorist.
But Loudon had always been home, even if she’d rejected him, and he her.
He’d tried returning, once, had failed at that like everything else. He’d slunk back in the night, like a thief, like a man afraid to have his face seen. He cursed himself, even now, wondering what the hell he thought he’d accomplish.
That ended with Nikki.
Of course Tim had failed as a husband, too. And she let him know it, standing there on that humid night when he came to her, denying him, calling down all the curses of hell upon him. And he deserved it. He didn’t belong. Like Loudon, she’d valued that which Tim rejected.
But he couldn’t let her go.
Loudon.
Nikki.
He wasn’t going to let them down, not this time.
Tim touched a control, brought up a globular hologram showing a star map of the Loudon system. Four planets circled its primary, Loudon the second one out. An asteroid belt separated it from the outer two, both unremarkable gas giants, clearly forgotten by the fleets spread out on either side of the debris field. Union and Alliance ships had been at it for at least two days, maneuvering, sniping, and sometimes colliding in spurts of real battle. But fresh ships had been arriving the whole time, building towards an inevitable collision.
And most of them were Alliance.
Tim swiped the hologram, drew its perspective to the edge of the system, beyond the outermost, ringed gas giant. A halo blinked there. “This is our projected re-entry spot?”
“Projected, yes,” Jeanie replied. “We’ll come in on the far side, galactic-west from the battle lines and right at the ecliptic plane.” A dotted line drew itself from behind the gas giant, looping around behind the Alliance fleet and into the smaller formations of support vessels. “They won’t see us coming. Their reserve area will be completely exposed.”
“This data’s thirty six hours old, Jeanie.”
“That’s true.”
The accusation wasn’t fair to the AI; it’d been the best they had, transmitting right up till the moment before the Jesters jumped from Shangri La. And they couldn’t update while in hyper. But Tim wasn’t feeling fair. “The situation could’ve changed.”
The AI seemed to hesitate, a human affect it approximated. “You sound like you have another idea.”
“Shooting up transports isn’t going to make a difference. The fight is here.” He put a finger to the hologram and highlighted the belt. “We’ve got to get down-system from this, get between Loudon and the Alliance.”
“The invasion fleet needs those support vessels to keep up their advance,” Jeanie pointed out. “Damage there delays the main battle—”
“Delays,” Tim snapped. “Forget delay, we need to get stuck in!”
“Tim, we have our orders from Red.”
He scowled. “Maybe I’m tired of taking orders from her.”
“The plan was Chief of Staff Harrison’s.”
Kelly.
Where Red was the founder of the Hell’s Jesters, their face, their spirit, Kelly Harrison—former Alliance star fighter pilot—was their brains. Her gift for organization and planning had transformed the Jesters from an outlaw band snapping at the flanks of the galaxy’s great conflict to the terror of the space ways, the Union’s unofficial partner in the war with the Alliance.
For Tim, she’d gone from being the outsider, the ball-buster who’d usurped what he’d seen as his place in the group to a friend, a trusted comrade, and...well, yeah, something probably a little more than that. He snorted at himself. Probably a lot...
But he couldn’t think on that now, not with hell coming their way the moment they left hyper. He couldn’t let one woman, one person cloud his thinking.
“Jeanie,” he said, “we ready for this?”
The AI brought up a globular systems display, showed a schematic of his Hellhound. Scratch built from a common inner-system flitter chassis and retrofitted in the Jesters’ fabrication suites on Shangri La, the simplistic, vulpine shape had come to represent the Jester way across the galaxy: predatory, opportunistic, fast. Particle cannon sprouted from forward-swept wings and a plasma blaster mounted in the chin served as its close-range fangs.
The Hellhound had showed its worth in countless skirmishes and scraps against the drone hunter-killers of Syntar Fleet Corporation, when the Jesters’ main prey had been merchant convoys. When the schism amongst Alliance worlds erupted finally into civil war, the Hellhound had faced the mainstay of the Alliance head-on, the dreaded Valkyrie space superiority fighter. Jester tenacity and skill had kept that contest even, but recent fights had started exposing the Hellhound’s tender spots.
The schematic Tim viewed showed some of the innovations come of that realization. The originally sleek silhouette of the ‘Hound had acquired a little meat. Bulkier grav drive nacelles gave it even more of a hunchbacked profile, but more speed against the Valkyrie’s sprint. Bulging ablative plate added last-resort armor, but also protected augmented electronic counter measures, better stealth and scramblers to throw off targeting sensors. And in place of a foursome of six-missile scatter packs at the hard-points, they’d swapped out eight-packs of shorter ranged birds—less individual hitting power, but better for overwhelming point defenses.
“I would’ve liked to have had a little more shake-out time before we took these new toys to the dance,” Tim grumbled.
“All systems show nominal,” Jeanie replied with her approximation of cheerfulness.
Tim chortled at her, swore that the longer he spent around the AI, the more he was certain it was trying to annoy him. All the Jester AI’s did that, melded themselves to their pilots, each one becoming a highly-individualized simulacrum that then reported back to a shadowy super-intelligence the Jesters called Overmind, nestled back at Shangri La.
Knowing as much as he knew about the AI’s, Tim sometimes thought the Jesters would be better off without them. But he suppressed the thought with a shiver. We made our deal with the devil...no living without it now.
“Ten minutes, Tim,” Jeanie said after his silence dragged.
“I hear you.”
“We’re not going to do something stupid are we?”
“When have you ever known me to do something stupid, Jeanie?”
“I don’t think you actually want me to answer that.”
Tim laughed.
“There are people counting on us.”
“I said I heard you, you big pest!”
People counting on us...the Jesters, the Union, Loudon. And Tim had his own wing to worry about, three squadrons of fifteen, following him into what was likely hell. People counting on me...that’s never gone wrong before.
But it wasn’t this time. He was going to do right.
FLEET ADMIRAL HARLAN “Hal” Geiger stood on the bridge of his longtime flagship, the Immolator and grinned till the scars stiffening the left side of his face would let it spread no further. The ancient Earth conqueror Alexander had once said “Fortune favors the bold”. Well, Fortune had carried Geiger far this day.
The Loudon System spread before him like jewels for the taking. The planet occupied the center of the massive tactical hologram filling the forward third of the bridge compartment. A stirred hornet swarm of icons spread out before it, barring the way, the silly band of the Union’s fleet, armed merchantmen, outdated militia craft, and a bare handful of more modern capital ships. Still, there was a hell of a lot of them, the largest mustering the Union had managed for a fight since the Battle of Junction.
Junction...
If Geiger could’ve smiled wider, he would have. That day had made him. That day he’d shown the galaxy. While Harrison, the coward, had dithered about what to do, Hal Geiger had made the choice the politicians wouldn’t. He’d triggered the battle that had given them the war, driving his ships right into the traitors.
He hadn’t stopped since. And the Alliance had rewarded him for it.
That reward sprawled in formation around the Immolator: the Fringe World Fleet, largest of the Alliance’s offensive forces. With reinforcements, it numbered one hundred and forty eight ships, not counting fighters and support vessels, a monstrous host, a hammer. Finally, I have the power, Geiger mused. And now I’m going to use it.
More troublesome than the Union craft jockeying for position were the asteroids, several of them still being towed into place by repurposed construction tugs wielding tractor beams. As each asteroid was seated into a stable orbit and released, fusion signatures flared to life from installations welded into their crusts. Energy fields blossomed outward from each, linking them to the others in a shimmering web.
“They appear to be little more than augmented tractor beams, sir,” Flag Captain Harriet Prescott said from her seat at the center of the bridge. “Each asteroid station acts as an anchor, allowing them to weave these overlapping strands. Individually, they’re mundane fields we could break with shields or enough acceleration. Altogether, though...” She shook her head, caused the short ponytail tied at the back of her head to wave.
“Ingenious, I’ll give them that.” Geiger turned to her. “Can we target the stations, knock out the anchors?”
“The stations are nestled in amongst the fields, which will dissipate the effectiveness of our energy weapons.” She frowned. “And any missiles we fire will just get trapped in that. It really is a spider’s web. Anything that goes in there gets caught.”
Geiger turned to Lieutenant Curry at the Tactical station. “Can we go around it?”
“They’ve positioned several outlying rings of these asteroids that aren’t tied to the web, sir,” he replied. A short, normally snide little man, Curry became almost chipper in action. “We identified a few, but there are certainly more. If we maneuver, it looks as though they can just shift the web into our path.”
“I’ll say it again, it’s clever.” Geiger shook his head. “It looks like the traitors used the time the Admiralty gave them while they pissed our forces away on other, lesser fronts.”
An awkward hush filled the bridge. Geiger smirked a little. The crew didn’t like it when he sneered out loud, Harriet especially. Any more, the Academy built cogs in a machine, not star sailors. Knowing one’s orders was paramount, of course, but the younger officers lacked initiative, always sought it from on high—just as the Alliance politicians wanted it.
Of course, in this environment, the decisive man stood out. And Geiger rarely lacked for initiative.
“We could break off part of the fleet,” Curry suggested. “While we attack here, they outflank this position.”
“You’re so certain the Union doesn’t have another force lurking out here, waiting for that very thing?” Geiger said slyly.
Curry pinched his lips together in frustration.
“No,” Geiger went on, “we’re not going to dance to their tune. He turned to the Communications station, where a tall, yet trending towards fleshy officer stood. “Commander Chandler, are we in contact with the Revelation?”
“She has just pulled abreast of us, yes, sir.”
“Tell her to stand by for orders.” He held his chin up. “In fact, inform all commanders to stand by for orders.”
“Aye, sir.”
He turned back to Curry. “Can her mass driver penetrate that web?”
The Tactical officer turned back to his console for a moment, fingers flying over a holographic keyboard. His expression pinched in the bluey light as he read analyses.
The Revelation was the last of the Alliance’s planet-busters. Built on a Retribution-class spaceframe, just like the Immolator, a third of its structure had been gutted to make room for a monstrous gravitic impeller core. In theory, it was just a huge gravity drive, but inverted. It carried a magazine of building-sized, hyper-dense slugs that could be loaded, energized, and flung with astronomical force at a target.
That target could be anything, up to and including an inhabited world.
“The web will catch her incoming at this range,” Curry replied finally. He pivoted his seat to face Geiger. “But if we get closer, she should be able to pound the asteroid stations out of their orbits, one at a time.”
