Barbarians at the Gates (40 page)

Further, if he’d actually concluded a deal with the Federation loyalists, why not string Admiral Justinian along while the Federation prepared a counterattack of its own? Even now, the undefended flank was being strengthened, with starships and fortresses being dispatched from Harmony to slow down any would-be invader. An offensive would rapidly become much harder. So who really benefited from attacking Marx?

They’d rejected the possibility of the Federation Navy launching the attack without Hartkopf’s permission because it would have been difficult for the Federation to get an assault force in place. But difficult wasn’t the same as impossible. Hartkopf’s regime was known for being even more corrupt than the Senate—an achievement that Caitlin would have previously considered impossible—and it was quite possible that some devious Federation Navy Admiral had merely applied a large infusion of cash. His ships could then have passed through the Asimov Points without being reported to superior authority, allowing them to launch the attack on Marx in the certain knowledge that Hartkopf would be blamed.

And yet, if they hadn’t had Hartkopf’s assistance, how had they obtained the codes?

She was still mulling the possibilities over in her mind when the small squadron reached the Asimov Point and launched recon drones into the gravimetric distortion directly ahead of them.

“Commodore, the recon drones have just returned,” Captain Lachlan informed her. “There are no hostile fortifications on the other side of the Asimov Point.”

Caitlin studied the results in disbelief. In the days before stardrive, there was little point in defending an Asimov Point everyone
knew
to be a dead end, but the continuous displacement drive had turned interstellar defense doctrine upside down. Governor Hartkopf had to
know
that it was easy for ships to cross the light years between Marx and The Hive—he collected money from smuggling ventures—so why had he left the system undefended?

Something was very wrong...she considered, just for a moment, aborting the mission until they received new orders from Admiral Justinian, but they’d been given no leeway at all. They had to launch the raid.

“Cloak us,” she ordered. If there were no defenders, no one would notice as her ships flickered into existence in Tranter. And then they could sneak up on their targets and blow them to hell. “Take us through the Asimov Point.”

* * *

“Now
that’s
interesting,” the sensor officer said slowly. “Captain, I think you should see this.”

Roman tapped his console and brought up the feed from the sensor department. The task force had found a suitable hiding place within The Hive system—a large asteroid that had been mined out and abandoned some time before the apocalypse had destroyed the entire system—and the engineers had been turning it into a base.
Midway
and her consorts had returned to find themselves briefly assigned to cloaked defense and scouting duties until the base was complete, not something that pleased him. Admiral Mason, it seemed, wanted to keep a close eye on
Midway
and her young commander.

The nine enemy battlecruisers didn’t seem to be heading for their current location; in fact, they were heading straight towards the Asimov Point. And the report from the passive sensor platforms was showing that their weapons and shields were fully charged. They were looking for trouble.

“I think we must have annoyed someone,” he said. “Alert the flag and prepare to move out of formation.”

The enemy battlecruisers didn’t slow until they reached the Asimov Point, at which point they came to a halt and waited. Roman wished—not for the first time—that the Federation Navy had developed the kind of sensors they saw in entertainment dramas, where it was possible to not only watch targets halfway across the system in real time, but determine what they were carrying and if they were hostile with ease. The enemy ships could be doing anything from sealing the Asimov Point to preparing to transit through with bad intentions; there was no way to tell at such a distance.

Admiral Mason’s face popped into existence on his private display. “Captain,” he said coldly. “I believe that your actions at Marx have sparked a response. I do not wish you to engage the enemy ships or even to scout after them.”

Roman frowned. “Sir, this is an opportunity to...”

“That is an order, captain,” Admiral Mason said. “In fact...”

“Captain, enemy starships are transiting the Asimov Point,” the sensor officer reported, suddenly. “They’re leaving the system.”

“It would appear that you succeeded,” Admiral Mason said. “We will keep our heads down and watch what happens from a distance. Might I remind you, captain, that you have already threatened the secrecy of this mission?”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said. It was frustrating, but Mason was in command. “I understand.”

* * *

Caitlin’s sense that something was very wrong only grew stronger as the fleet—still hidden under cloak—crossed the Tranter System, heading right towards the other Asimov Point. The system’s sole inhabited planet was barely defended, but there was a squadron of old-style dreadnaughts on guard at the Asimov Point. They could deter her from carrying through with her offensive—if she meant to take the system permanently—but they couldn’t stop her from launching an attack and then beating feet back home. Governor Hartkopf did not seem to have prepared for an attack.

“Start rolling missile pods,” she ordered as the squadron slowed to barely within engagement range. She wasn’t going to take battlecruisers any closer to the dreadnaughts than necessary, not with the dreadnaughts clearly refitted with the latest in weapons and shields—and sensors. Missile pods were rare in ship-to-ship combat, but attacking from cloak...they were workable. They just couldn’t be towed behind a ship travelling at full combat speed. “Prepare to engage.”

She pushed her misgivings away, knowing that she might well be about to open a two-front war between her superior and Hartkopf. The governor was a weasel, everyone knew that, yet he might just be able to bite Admiral Justinian to death. They didn’t dare pull too much combat power away from the Asimov Points linking Admiral Jefferson’s territory to the Federation. The Federation wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of such weakness.

One by one, the battlecruisers checked in. “All ships report ready, Commodore,” the squadron coordinator reported. “Weapons hot; I say again, weapons hot.”

“Fire,” Caitlin ordered.

As the Federation considers itself to be charged with ensuring the fundamental unity of the human race, it comes as no surprise that it disapproves intensely of independent worlds. The few settlements that have no ties to the Federation often find themselves pressured into associate membership, even if they have nothing that the Federation actually wants or needs. When a world manages to maintain even a semblance of independence, it only occurs because the world is protected by powerful allies from the Federation.

-
An Irreverent Guide to the Federation,
4000 A.D.

Hobson’s Choice, 4095

“We’re not being challenged at all?” Captain Roman Garibaldi asked.

“No, sir,” Uzi said. The enhanced human looked as if he was enjoying himself. “Did you really think that they’d stop us coming into orbit? As far as they’re concerned, we’re just another pirate ship.”

Roman wrinkled his nose. The pirate ship—hastily renamed the
Wildflower—
stank. It was clear that the pirates hadn’t bothered to do much, if any, preventative maintenance. Roman knew that if Federation Navy ships had routinely been left in such a state, the entire Navy would literally have rotted away. His first commander would have exploded with rage if he’d discovered his crew urinating in the passageways and clogging up the tubes with rubbish, yet that’s exactly what the pirates appeared to have done. In the end, the repair crews had vented the entire ship, just to kill the cockroaches and rats infesting most of the ship. God alone knew how many pirate ships lost life support or internal power because a rat had chewed the wrong piece of wiring.

Even now, after the ship had been put back into near-working order, Roman was still nervous.
Midway
was following them into the system, hidden under cloak, but if Janine had to recover them, their cover would be blown wide open.

Hobson’s Choice had no government or System Traffic Command. Starships—smugglers, pirates and rebels—clustered the system, taking whatever orbits that suited them and ignoring protests from other starships. Roman would have expected a mass outburst of fighting among pirate crews, but everything seemed to be remarkably civilized. Fighting, the briefing files had stated, wasn’t good for business.

Hobson’s Choice served as a clearing house for pirates and smugglers, where anything could be sold and few—if any—questions were asked about where it had been originally found. The planet should have been shut down years ago, but it seemed that various interests in nearby sector governments had their own ties to the planet. They quietly ensured the Federation Navy never raided the place. Or, better yet, bombarded it from orbit.

He scowled as the helmsman—a volunteer, like everyone else on the undermanned ship—carefully guided her into orbit. Hobson’s Choice was a dull brown world, her surface unbroken by oceans or greenery. The briefing had claimed that most of the planet’s water was actually below the surface, with plants adapted to live in near-desert conditions growing roots that reached down towards the great aquifers. There were no official settlements, either; the handful of small communities were purely nominal, serving as places for crews to land and sell their products. Very few people would choose to live on the planet permanently, apart from Hobson himself. He’d built himself a small farm in the north and refused to have anything to do with most of the visitors.

“Orbit achieved, sir,” the helmsman said. The pirates, for reasons that doubtless made sense to them, had combined the helm and tactical consoles into one. Roman would never have allowed it if he’d been crewing a ship, for the two roles could not be effectively carried out by a single man. “We’ve been pinged by a number of other ships, but nothing from the surface.”

“They don’t bother,” Uzi said. He stood up and grinned at the bridge crew. “Do you still want to see the planet, captain?”

“Yes, I do,” Roman said.

The data they’d recovered from the pirate ship stated that the prisoners would have been brought to Hobson’s Choice, at least until the ransoms were paid. And if they weren’t, Elf had pointed out, they’d be in the right position for being sold as slaves. There were plenty of credible stories about that, or worse, people simply being executed outright; the lucky ones were rescued by the Federation Navy. “Besides, I have to make sure everything goes properly.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Uzi told him. “You just make sure that you and your companions don’t blow your covers. Discovery here could mean death.”

* * *

The shuttle flew down to the settlement, its passage barely troubling the hot air surrounding it. Roman watched through the shuttle’s sensors as it flew over the settlement and turned to land, coming down on a patch of ground on which someone must have used a fusion flame to bake it as hard as rock. The settlement looked rather like a shantytown to him, with hundreds of prefabricated shelters and apartments scattered around without rhyme or reason. There were no wooden shelters, due to the fact that Hobson’s Choice had no forests, but there were a number of buildings constructed from stone. He guessed there had to be a quarry somewhere nearby.

“Just remember,” Uzi said as the shuttle came in to land, “you’re
not
Federation Navy officers and you’re
definitely
not Marines. You’re mercenaries from the Free Ship
Wildflower
sampling the booze and other entertainments here. Even if someone recognizes the
Wildflower
, they won’t say anything. They’ll just assume that the bastards lost a fight and their ship was taken as a prize. Don’t fuck up and you’ll be fine.”

The shuttle’s hatch cracked open, allowing a wave of hot air to come streaming into the compartment, bringing with it a sandy smell mingled with something unpleasantly human. Roman scowled, resisting the urge to cough as the dry air invaded his lungs, and followed Uzi out into the open air. The sunlight beat down from high above, a mocking reminder that the planet had no ozone layer to protect visitors from the star’s rays. Roman and his crew had been treated to prevent skin cancer—it was a fairly simple genetic modification—but he didn’t want to think about what might happen to anyone who hadn’t been treated. If there were children on the planet...he pushed the thought aside. There couldn’t be children on the planet.

Elf caught his arm as they started to walk towards the settlement in the distance. “Slouch,” she ordered firmly.

Roman nodded and tried to take the Academy out of his walk. It didn’t work very well, but she seemed satisfied. Or perhaps she was hiding her opinion, even though she’d called him crazy in private. A captain shouldn’t risk himself on a landing party in hostile territory.

The settlement had been marked in the files, but it had no name. Up close, it was a sandy mass of small makeshift buildings, prefabricated dumpsters and small shacks. Roman heard the music of a dozen bars, while there was a large market set up in the center of the settlement. He almost stopped dead as he took in the mass of humans and aliens plying the market, buying or selling as the fancy took them. They didn’t seem to care that—officially—aliens were second-class citizens everywhere in the Federation. Here, the scum of the galaxy coexisted in an uneasy peace. He saw men holding guns and swaggering around, sometimes followed by older—beaten—men and women who were clearly slaves. Elf put a hand on his arm as a half-naked girl—with all of her teeth knocked out—walked past, following a tall man with a cruel glint in his eye.