Accord of Honor (3 page)

I
hurried
to keep up as he marched out of the control room. He wasn’t running, but he always set a fast pace when he walked. Dad ignored me as we moved down the halls away from the station hub, headed out toward the docking sections. He pulled out his phone and made a call.

“Is the courier ready to undock?” he asked. “I’m going to need a fast flight.” Whatever he heard must have satisfied him. He nodded. “No worries, not bringing crew. They wouldn’t have clearance to go where I’m headed anyway.” Then he hung up on the call.

“Dad, stop.” He did, and turned to look at me. I raised my eyebrows. “You know the station has a two pilot rule – no ships fly out of orbit without a second person on board.”

He started walking again. “The governor just said he’d expedite. They won’t hold me up.”

I caught up, came up alongside him. “They will if I inform them you’re taking off by yourself in a ship meant to be crewed by ten.” At that, he froze in his tracks and turned to glare at me. I took a deep breath and met his stare evenly. I had his attention, at least.

“You need a copilot. I’m here, I’m flight and command certified for interplanetary class ships. And I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t want to be stuck with just anyone.”

“You should head to the surface, get down in the corporate building. The bottom levels should make a pretty good bunker,” he said. “This is going to get messy, and fast.”

“So you’re pretty sure they’re going to hit Mars Station, then.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s their next logical target,” he replied. “Once they have control of the mining bases and Mars, they have Earth in a bad place.”

I looked at Dad. I could see he didn’t want me anywhere but safe in a hole. I could even understand why. But maybe I had inherited more from him than I usually wanted to admit. I could feel that this was the cusp of something important. I knew damned well that my father was about to go and do something drastic to help solve the problem. And...

I had friends on Mars. And there were thousands of other people there who relied on the station, and contact with Earth. Like the governor said, life without contact would be hard for the people on Mars. Very hard. More, there was a part of me that was burning in anger at the people who had attacked my ship. I couldn’t help thinking about the kid who died. I wondered how long it would be before his memory stopped haunting me. Those people killed one of my crew. And they’d put the lives of everyone on Earth and Mars at risk.

“I want in, Dad. I don’t know what you’re headed off to do, but these people attacked me. The people on this station are my friends too. If you’ve got something in mind to stop these people, I want to be part of it.”

He stared at me for a long moment. I thought I saw the shadow recede a bit, but that might have been my imagination. “OK,” he said simply. “You’ve earned the right to be in on this. But once we get in that ship, there’s no turning back. And you might not like where we’re going.”

“I think I’ll manage,” I said grimly. We walked together out onto the docks. For some reason, I felt closer to the Old Man than I had in years.

T
he trip took
us out about two light minutes from Mars – not a short hop. Took more than a few hours, during which the conversation was just about non-existent. I had tried to quiz Dad about where we were going, what he had in mind, and why the total secrecy, but he brushed off my questions and attempts to draw him into chatter.

“It’ll be easier to show you than explain to you,” he all he would say.

Finally I gave up, let him peck intently at his tablet while I stared at the flight controls, trying to keep my mind busy without worrying about what the pirates were up to or where they’d pop up next.

I wasn’t too worried about running into them, mind you. We were well off the beaten path of the major shipping lanes, and as I said before, space is a really, really big place. No, I was more worried that we’d get a sudden alert from corporate headquarters on Mars that the station was under attack. Dad asked me to order all company personnel on Mars Station groundside, which was an unusual bit of delegation for him. That kept me busy for all of twenty minutes while he piloted us away from the station and set our course. Most of our folks went, but we had a few die hards who had volunteered to stay and keep things running. I hoped they’d be OK.

Meanwhile, word had gotten out, and the situation in Olympus City was getting pretty wild, or so I gathered from the radio. People were panicking, and a few fights had already broken out. Once the radio confirmed that the story had been leaked, I figured we were a little more free to help our people out. I ran the idea by Dad, who nodded, then I passed the word that all employees and their families were to be housed in the company base if they wanted a safe spot to stay. We had the room, with a little work and a lot of cot setup. And if the bottom of the base was safe enough for Dad to want to plunk me there, it was probably one of the safest spots on Mars right now.

Instead of being tucked away, I was out flying God knew where on Dad’s ‘secret mission’. I was starting to regret my earlier curiosity. No conversation, no idea where we were going, and I wasn’t in the mood to lose any more chess games today. Bored, I pulled up the station’s data on the missing ships. Two of them were ours, which stood to reason. We had more ships flying to and from Mars than any other company. When I got to the rosters of missing personnel, I froze. I sucked in my breath, hard.

Keladry Flynn.

I scanned the rest of the info absently, half in a daze. She was listed as pilot on one of the missing ships. On their way back from a long survey mission to the outer planets. Lost on approach a day out from Mars, overdue. No communication.

I couldn’t concentrate on the data, couldn’t focus. My mind was playing back memories of a young woman with auburn curls helping me load cargo and almost dropping a crate on my foot. Of her smile on a shared watch. The scent of her as we tumbled together in free-fall, nothing between sweat-slick bodies.

It wasn’t unusual for crew of interplanetary ships to pair off. And we were both teenagers, out doing our apprentice cruises. The lure of zero-gee sex was enough to tempt anyone to experiment, so in general there was no rules against it so long as the job got done and no one got hurt. Kel and I shipped out together several times and got very close. Maybe too close. We were starting to talk about becoming partners officially – which would guarantee we’d ship together every time. We were full of daydreams about shipping out to every human station in the solar system together, hitting them all one by one.

But Dad found out and pitched a fit. I was yanked off flight status and given a choice: go to Earth for college and grad school without contacting Kel again, or she lost her job.

I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye.

That was six years ago. I had kept my promise to never contact Kel again, and I knew in my bones that so long as I did, Dad would keep his end of the deal. He was infuriating, but he never broke his word.

It had taken me two years to stop dreaming about her at night.

And now she was ‘lost’. Maybe dead, maybe taken. The bottom of my stomach felt like it had dropped away, and just kept falling.

I realized my hands were shaking, and Dad was watching at me. Gauging my reaction. He nodded.

“I saw the list, too. I didn’t tell you. Wasn’t sure how you’d handle it.”

“And?” I said through gritted teeth.

“Still not sure. Christ, Thomas. You spent six years at Harvard and never even found anyone to date there, not even once.” I wasn’t shocked he’d been monitoring my personal life, but it raised my anger another notch. “You were still mooning over that girl. Still are, from the looks of you.”

“Why the hell do you care?” I asked.

“There’s too much at stake here, Thom. I could use you, but only if you have a level head. I’m not sure that you do.” He looked away.

I started to reply, but six telltale warnings all went off at once. I put thoughts of Kel away – for now.

“Dad...”

“I see it,” he said. He started punching numbers into the console.

“We’re being pinged,” I said. “Radar, lasers, god knows what else. Is this your reception committee, I hope?”

“Yes,” he said simply. He punched another couple of keys, I saw he was transmitting something. Then the alarms all went dead at once. Whatever sensors had been giving us the once-over had stopped.

“Give me flight control,” he said.

I took my hands off the console. Now I could see the source of the pings – a mass of girders, hab modules, and solar panels off there in the distance. We were slowing down steadily but still closing fast. A free floating station, out in space, nowhere near any planet. This had to be the Special Projects site.

It was hard to describe the base. The whole thing was painted a matte black, so it didn’t reflect light well and thus didn’t stand out much from the darkness around it. The radar was barely picking up anything at all, even as we drew close. It wasn’t until we were under a kilometer away that I realized what I was seeing. It was a dry-dock – a ship manufacturing station. And it looked to me like there were two ships in the berths.

I looked at Dad without saying a word, but he must have felt my questions burning. He changed the radio frequency and said, “Hit the floods as I fly by, eh? I want to see how we’re doing.” A second or two later, floodlights splashed onto the two ships in the bays, and I got my first good look.

The first was a ship I’d seen before, tons of times. It was our standard hauler class freight ship; we’d had that class in service for ten years now. It was basically the same ship I’d commanded when the pirates attacked. There was something odd about this one though. The cargo area didn’t look right. I dialed up the resolution, zoomed in, and saw there were some attachments here and there that changed the ship’s profile slightly. Something Dad had been tinkering with, no doubt.

The engines were huge – easily twice the size of the standard ion drives that class should have. So that ship could hit some serious acceleration – probably more than a crew could survive for long. Could hit, if the drives were functional. I could see that they were either still being installed, or were being overhauled. Hard to tell which, but a lot of plating and some of the innards were missing, and I could see a suited crew out there working away, torches blazing.

The “spine” of the ship looked normal – a single conduit running from the engines to the command capsule in the bow. Wide enough to pass a few people, or a large chunk of cargo or engine part down. The spine had some exterior mods, though. Normally, there would be two rings of couplers on the spine, four couplers per ring, each supporting one large cargo container. Those containers could be disengaged from the bridge or manually from inside the spine, which made it easier to pick up and drop off cargo. Instead, this ship had disks where the cargo containers should have been. Each disk was pretty big, a hundred meters in diameter or so. They intersected the spine perpendicularly, so a gentle spin around the spine’s axis would create an artificial gravity there. They looked a bit like the units used to transport cattle, horses, or other large livestock that didn’t do well in zero gravity. There were some odd round ports on them, but my eyes were drawn instead to the teardrop shaped command and quarters area at the bow.

The command capsule looked perfectly normal – except for a pair of what could only be turrets mounted above and below. Two barrels per turret of some sort of large bore, high velocity weapon.

Weapons. In space. I looked at Dad. He was studiously ignoring me, which meant of course that he was carefully watching my reaction. I knew I had to have paled once I saw those guns. This ship was modified for combat, which meant those round hatches on the disks were probably some other sort of weaponry.

Then the other hangar came into view. It housed a ship the likes of which I’d never seen before. This had to be a totally new class. Rather than the engine, spine, command unit design common to most freight ships, this craft was built more like a hammerhead shark. The bow area was large, and wider than the bulk of the ship, with a flattened top and bottom, but rounded outer edges. The frame wasn’t a skinny rail like the first ship. It was perhaps a hundred meters across and half that in height. Round ports stuck out like sore thumbs in regular intervals down the side I could see. The engines were larger than the midships as well, sitting huge and hulking in the rear.

This ship had the look of a predator. There didn’t seem to be any room for cargo. And if those round ports were some sort of weapon, like I had assumed with the first ship, then this one looked like it had over a dozen. I saw more of the small turrets like the ones mounted on the first ship, this time both fore and aft. It was hard to believe. Here was that ship ‘built for war from the keel up’ that Dad had been talking about a few hours before. Right before my eyes. But the ship sitting there was a death sentence for my father and everyone who had worked on it.

“They’ll execute you,” I said in a quiet voice. Of course he had done this. Why hadn’t I seen it before? It wasn’t in his nature to step aside when he believed something needed doing. No matter the personal cost. Or the cost to others around him.

He nodded. “That’s certainly possible, if the enemy doesn’t do the job first.”

“So you’re going after them. In that.” He nodded. “How long have you been planning this?” I asked.

“Really? Since they signed the damned Accord,” he replied.

“That long?”

I wasn’t even in school yet when the Lunar Accord was signed, but the history of the Accord and the war that led to its signing was a mandatory part of our education. When the Earth’s fossil fuels had begun to run out in the first half of the century, nuclear power had stepped in as the primary energy source – barely. Anti nuke protests slowed down the build up to an effective nuclear grid so much that the grid didn’t really come on line until after the oil crisis of 2035 was in full swing.