Accord of Honor (7 page)

We had perhaps thirty seconds left before they were in range to be dangerous. “Helm, bring us under acceleration, back us away from the second ship and get our nose into alignment with them. I want them in our railgun arc, now! Weapons, pop the covers off our antimissile gatlings. I want those guns free to target their EVA squad and especially their mines, if we can’t swing around in time.”

A chorus of ‘aye, sir’ and the bridge crew went to work. I could feel the beginnings of our retro rockets coming alive, feel the gentle acceleration as the ship turned. Ships in space aren’t really designed to do a lot of backing up. They’ve got propulsion units in the nose for precise steering, and those can be used for reverse thrust as well. But they aren’t all that strong, so the changes in velocity would be slow, doubly slow because we were trying to move two ships with only the nose jets of one. I heard the first shrieks of stressed metal as the docking clamps tried to hold the two ships together. That would probably get worse. We were putting a lot more stress on those units than they were designed to take.

I was dimly aware that the gatlings had opened fire, saw an explosion in space near the enemy ship. Most of my focus was on the railgun arc, marked on my scan screen as a red circle, and the slow drift of the enemy ship as it slipped into that circle. First the nose... “Not yet,” I said. “Hold off on the railgun another moment.”

Their bridge slipped into the cone of fire. Now the shrieking of tortured metal was almost unbearable, even in suits. I winced. New lights popped onto the damage control screen, and a warning bell began to cry out decompression alert. We’d popped a seal somewhere or part of a seal. We were venting air into space. But still, we continued to turn.

Finally I had the front half of their ship in the arc. “Stop thrusters!” I called. “Weapons, fire railgun, continuous fire! Rake their ship from bridge to missile bays, then focus fire there,” I pointed to a spot on the screen that I was pretty sure was their missile storage. The weapons tech punched a button, and the railgun began spewing iron slugs across the void.

Railguns use magnetism to fire their ammunition. They take a charged round, and run it through a highly charged magnetic field, pushing the object out at a powerful velocity. Really, they worked a lot like the ion engines that propelled the ship, but instead of lightweight charged particles, the railgun spat out hundreds of chunks of metal. It shouldn’t make a lot of noise, but I swore I could feel or hear something as the gun went into operation.

The result was immediate. Plates around their bridge shattered under the impact. Air vented from the enemy ship in huge gusts, moisture freezing into mist as it was sucked out into space. The railgun continued to track along the side of the helpless ship, blowing chunks of metal away from the frame to spin out into space. Two of the hapless EVA crew were in the way of the steady stream of metal, and vanished from the screen into puffs of red mist and spinning suit debris. Then the gun was targeting the missile launcher, which exploded into a cloud of shrapnel. Slugs punched into where I thought their ammunition was stored, but I didn’t get the nice secondary explosion I was hoping for. Still, the railgun was tearing hole after hole into their hull, ripping huge chunks out of deck plating, walls, tearing deeper into the ship with each impact.

And then we got the secondary explosion. Inside the ship, something lost nuclear containment and blossomed into a bright flash of light. The ship tore itself into two pieces, and then the aft section with the engines exploded as well, a devastating blast that completely obliterated the hull. The forward section went spinning off into deep space, away from Indefatigable and the other ship still latched to our hull.

I didn’t hesitate. “Radar, scan for those mines and crew. Any sign of them?”

“All three mines were destroyed, sir,” came the reply. “Impossible to be certain about their crew, but I think most of them are dead.” Or would be soon, if not already. If they were alive, they were out there somewhere, drifting in a suit, breathing canned air, nothing between them and space but the thick skin of the suit. That air wouldn’t last forever, and then they would die alone in the black of space. It was a nightmare way to go for most spacers. I had a hard time feeling bad for those men, though. They’d brought it on themselves.

“How bad was that decompression?” I asked.

“Looks like we blew part of the airlock seal between the ships. Blast doors dropped in place to seal the area, but that means we can’t support the attack squad, and it sounds like they’re being pressed hard – they made it onto the enemy ship, but they’re pinned down,” said the communication tech.

I thought fast. Time to take another chance? It seemed the lesser of evils. “OK...Marks...” I started, pausing as I read the weapon tech’s name tag. I had to get better at remembering names, it was something I’d noticed that Dad did as easily as breathing. “You have the con. If we’re stopped, take the ship and what you can of the crew, and make for Mars Station. Try to link up with the Admiral there.”

He stared at me. I grinned back. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine. And I fully intend to be back here shortly. Comms...Williams,” I corrected myself. “Get the crews of both missile bays to meet me in the armory. We’re going to go reinforce the Chief.”

I
punched
the code to snap the bridge door open again and headed down the hall toward the armory where racks of weapons and the armored pressure suits were waiting. Another command code opened the door, and I silently thanked Chief Acres for forcing me to memorize the dozen or so different command codes for the ship. It had seemed like a lot at the time, and were we really likely to need to blast shield the bridge or lock out the engines? But things happen. Had happened. Would happen.

I walked in, grabbed armored suit parts and started changing out my standard pressure suit for one of the armored suits. I was about halfway suited up when the missiles crews arrived. Ten men, six women. All started quickly swapping suits for the armor. I was finished first, and unlocked the weapons rack. They were good rifles, gunpowder based arms with a special mix that didn’t rely on outside oxidation from the air so it could be fired in a vacuum. The ammunition was caseless, to save on stray bits of metal flying about, and armor piercing to get past enemy body armor if they had it. That boosted the risk of decompression, but we’d all be suited anyway. We had a decent number of frangible rounds as well, designed to shatter on impact with anything really solid, so they would never punch through a hull plate and let the air out. But that same feature made them useless against body armor, and I was pretty sure the enemy would have armor.

So AP rounds it was. I passed out rifles and ammo packs to everyone, and watched as they made final preparations. As people finished getting their gear together, I started talking. “OK. The Chief is in there fighting, and so are the rest of our crew. The enemy is over there too – the Chief pushed them off our ship, at least, but the last report I have is that our men are pinned down over there.”

“We don’t leave our people in trouble,” I went on. I was rewarded by nods and a few affirmative grunts. “Those people over there are putting everything we love at risk. It’s time to show them that we’re not going to sit on our thumbs.”

“What’s the plan, sir?” one of the men asked, settling a rifle against his shoulder.

“We need to get our people out of there and then capture the ship. There’s seventeen of us. I want two squads. Stay with your usual section leader. I’ll travel with the crew from Bay One for now.” The crew from that bay shifted a bit, seemed to stand a bit taller. “Let’s go, people. Everyone is counting on us.”

We moved back into the hall, then down toward the contested airlock area. Up ahead was the blast door, sealed to retain the air in the rest of the ship after the depressurization alarm sounded. I waited until my squads were in between that blast door and the next one up the hallway. “Activate magnetic boots, if you haven’t yet,” I said over our radios. “I’m using this hallway as an airlock.” I closed the blast door behind us, then once that was sealed, I keyed the sequence to over ride the lock ahead of us and opened that door.

Air went streaming past us, but we were already moving, mag boots keeping us gripped to the deck as we pushed out into the hall where the battle had been fought. Bodies hung from their mag boots throughout the hall as grisly testament to the fight. Some were ours, but I was glad to see that most of the dead seemed to be the enemy. Gobbets of blood floated around the hall in small globules of red ice, and the frozen dead bodies drifted in the wind generated by the air venting from our hallway.

I let two of the missile techs who looked like they knew what they were doing take point. As we crossed over to the other ship, the evidence of fighting became more and more apparent. Slugs from the guns had gouged chunks out of the decks and walls, and shattered some of the lights. Another body here, an enemy. I checked out what he had for gear, trying to ignore that this was a dead man. I needed to know what we were up against. The armor looked a lot like our own, unfortunately, which meant it was probably good stuff. The rifle that the dead man carried looked different from ours, but still dangerous. I didn’t know small arms well enough to make a guess about how theirs compared with ours, but it all looked like top end gear. My Dad had the military contacts to get access to the good stuff. But where had these pirates acquired expensive military grade hardware? I filed the question away to answer later. No time right now.

Still no air pressure here. I wondered how much of their ship had lost air when the seal blew. I placed a hand on the wall next to me, and felt the vibration of rounds impacting against the walls nearby. That meant we were close – very close. I signaled the teams to slow down. No sense barreling into the middle of a fight. We’d be there soon enough.

The enemy crew spotted us about the same time we saw them. The guns made no noise in the vacuum, so we weren’t hearing the shots, although we could feel the impacts the rounds made when they hit something reverberating through the deck. We rounded a corner, and one of our lead troops suddenly stopped moving, then keeled over, blood streaming from a shattered faceplate.

“Move!” I hollered. The first ranks dropped to a knee and started firing off shots blindly ahead. Behind them, myself and the other middle ranks laid down fire over their heads. Whoever it was wasn’t really happy about being shot at, since the answering fire from the enemy was light and then vanished entirely. They were backing up.

We surged down the corridor after them, firing as we went. Once we hit the next intersection, I called over the radio, “Squad two, move down to their engineering. Try to take control of the room there. Squad one with me.”

A bit ahead of us was what was left of the Chief’s squad. One of them had ripped a hatch right out of its housing and was using it as a barrier to protect against enemy fire. They were huddled behind that crude cover. The Chief had gone in with ten crew plus himself. They had done well, pushing the enemy back off our ship and killing a lot of them. But they were in rough shape now. Only three people still had their weapons up at all. Four others were lying on the floor behind the barricade, held down by magnetic clips. I could see the relief in the men’s sweat streaked faces.

“Where’s the Chief?” I asked over the radio.

The man in front of me gave me a pained look. That wasn’t good. “Right here,” he said, pointing down at one of the casualties. “He took a round, and he’s in a bad way.”

I thought fast. We needed to finish this fight and get our wounded out safely.

“You three, get them up and moving. Turn off their mag boots and drag them if you have to, but get them off this ship and down to our medical bay. Seconds probably count for some of these guys,” I said, and it was true. Acres and one other crewman both looked especially bad. “Move! We’ve got you covered here.”

Our injured out of the way, I knew we had two key areas to capture – the enemy bridge and their engine room. Both would be well defended. Both were vital to the ships operation. I had sent one team down to engineering already. Should I bring my other team down there as well? Or try to take the bridge with that squad? Or was there a third option?

I thought it over for a moment, the germ of an idea forming. I turned to my squad. “Move out to support the other squad. We’re taking their engine room,” I said over the tactical channel. Then I switched channels to talk to the Indefatigable’s bridge. Acres hadn’t given me updates, which had made it impossible for me to help support him. I didn’t want to repeat the mistake.

“Bridge, this is Stein. Acres is down, I have him moving back to medical. I need to know if you can fire off a few SABOT rounds from our starboard launchers and have them circle back around to hit the other ship.” I got a dubious affirmative, but it was the best idea I had. With the missile crews off operating as tactical squads, there was no one left to manage reloads, so we were stuck with what we had loaded for SABOTs – I could get four rounds off. “Fire the four SABOTs, swing them out to pick up enough acceleration, and then peg them through the enemy bridge.”

“We’re still linked, sir. We could hit the Inde if we’re not lucky,” was the reply.

“Then be lucky. Better yet, be good. Captain Stein out.” I was acting captain now, with Acres out of commission. I hoped that ordering the Inde to fire missiles that would impact at thousands of meters per second was a good idea. Fifty meters off and they could hit the Inde, or blow my men and I to bits in the engine room.

I got back on the tac channel, “All tactical squads, expect multiple impact of SABOTs to the forward section of the ship in about one minute. Stay on suit air.” Even one missile striking their bridge should pretty well mess up anyone inside.

Of course, if I thought of the idea, they might as well. They could do the same thing to the Inde, so I made my way down toward their engine room by way of their port side missile bay. The bay door was locked, blast door slid in place, and even if though we had a cutter with us, it would just take too long to punch through the door. Toughened as it was against explosives and small arms, it was going to be a tough nut to crack. Luckily, we didn’t have to. The design of this ship was remarkably similar to the Indefatigable’s layout. That alone was making me wonder if Dads teams had sprung a leak at some point, or if it was just similar design because that was the most logical way to handle the problems of cargo ship conversion.

Either way, it meant that I knew the guts of this ship almost as well as my own. Which meant that I knew the relays and computer controls for the actual missile tubes all passed from the missile control room through a conduit, and I knew right about where that conduit needed to pass under the deck plates. A couple of quick explosive cubes later, the floor was a bit torn up and the conduit was cut. No more missiles for these pirates. Repair of that mess would take at least an hour.

Then the SABOTs hit. Each impact shook the ship, tossing us all against the deck like we’d been slapped by a giant hand. The three impacts left my head ringing from being slammed against the deck and wall. I found out later that one of our missiles had strayed enough that the Inde bridge crew was worried about it, so they took out our own missile with a gatling. But the other three streaked in and smashed the front end of the enemy ship.

Once I recovered enough to talk again, I called our bridge for a quick report and damage estimate. Three missiles hit the front end of the enemy ship. It looked like two had pierced their bridge, and the Inde wasn’t detecting any power from the front end at all. Everything was shut down. Best guess was any crew up there were dead. I got my squad up and moving in the opposite direction – toward the engine room.

The hall outside their engineering was a mess. The walls were scorched. Tiny shards of metal and shrapnel floated about randomly. Here and there were patches of red fog, zero gravity and cold temperatures combining to turn blood into a drifting mist. I tried to avoid those, shivering inside when I accidentally brushed the floating remains of what was once a person.

Our crew and theirs were still exchanging fire, but it was sporadic, not continuous shooting. People were hunkered down and no one really wanted to make the next big push. What bullets did to people they hit was never pleasant, and the effect wasn’t improved by zero gravity. I sent my squad in to help reinforce the other squad and pull out our wounded. Then I found a wall mounted intercom unit and yanked a couple of plugs out from the glove of my left hand. Comm interfaces were pretty standardized, and with luck I could plug in here.

It seemed to work. I tabbed to general channel, and tried to turn on the receiver. Nothing. I tried again, and this time was greeted with a green telltale on my heads up display. I had linked into the enemy ship’s radio system. Now to give them a little taste of their own medicine.

“Attention, pirate crew, this is the captain of the ship you were attempting to seize. Those impacts you felt a few minutes ago were our weapons. We have fired SABOT missiles at your bridge and killed the crew inside. Your other ship has also been destroyed.” I paused. “You will surrender immediately, or we will retreat from your ship to our own, and continue firing more SABOTs until our heat scans show that we’ve killed every living thing on this ship. Surrender now if you want to live. Continue fighting, and you will certainly die.” I broke the connection. The ball was in their court, now.

I ordered our crew to cease fire, but we still had our weapons trained into the smoke filled room ahead. Time passed. The chronometer on my HUD said it was under a minute, but it felt like hours. Ee saw movement through the smoke. Everyone sharpened their grip on rifles.

“Hold your fire as long as you can,” I said over our tactical channel. “Give them a chance to surrender.”

Give us a chance to get out of this with no more dead or wounded crew, I thought silently.

A rifle clattered to the deck in front of us, tossed from the engine room. Another was thrown out the hatch toward us, and another, and another. The enemy crew came forward then, hands on their heads, faces grim and scared inside their suits. My squads took them into custody, using a set of zip ties to secure their wrists. And just like that, it was over.

A
sweep
of the rest of the ship turned up another half dozen living crew. All surrendered. We had sixteen prisoners now, all men who would be instantly condemned to death by any court on Earth. What I was going to do with them, I wasn’t sure. For now they were left unsuited, bound hand and foot in our small cargo hold under armed guard.

Their ship was a mess. We’d torn up their bridge with the SABOTs, and running the ship was going to be rough for a while. The first thing we had done was quickly patch the holes made by the missiles, our gunfire, and the airlock damage from the Indefatigable’s boost. Once that was done, we opened the damaged sections and got air circulating around the ship, and we could begin making repairs a bit more rapidly.

The engines were still fine. We’d messed up one of their missile bays, and the repair on that conduit was going to take time we didn’t have. The other missile bay was still working OK, which gave us three active missile tubes. I wanted to go over their logs and communication station, both of which might have vital intelligence. But first I needed to check in with my own crew, make sure everyone was OK, especially the folks down in medical getting treated.