Battlecruiser Alamo - 7 - Battlecruiser Alamo: Sacred Honor (19 page)

 “They can do what they want. As far as I’m concerned they can go right back into the Fleet; I won’t want a parole. Besides, I suspect that your Fleet will be far too busy to worry about the Cabal soon.”

 “What the hell does that mean?”

 “Never mind that for now. Are you interested?”

 Looking down at the deck, Cooper felt as if his legs had been chopped out from under him. They were his friends, his comrades, and he’d let them down simply by surviving. A voice in his head said that the ship was doomed anyway, that he might be able to salvage something from the disaster, get some word back home. Even if it meant committing treason.

 “What would I do?” There was no harm in getting more details.

 “Nothing to directly harm the ship. I need a message sent to that vessel.”

 “Saying what?”

 “That Alamo is going to make its rendezvous with destiny at Gliese 4
42
. I have obtained the exact time and location where the ship will emerge.” Smiling, he said, “That knowledge will make it much easier to capture them, Corporal. You might be saving even more lives on this ship.”

 “That’s all?” he said, inwardly smiling. He was being bribed for carrying out his assignment, albeit in a slightly unorthodox manner.

 “That’s all, Corporal. No destruction, no explosives, nothing. My fleet will handle that.”

 “How do I do it?”

 “I leave that to you,” he said, rolling a data crystal along the ground. “You know this ship a lot better than I, another advantage. That, and I know that any information you send will get through the security filters. You still have friends on the upper decks, after all.”

 Faking reluctance, Cooper said, “How can I trust you?”

 “Do you have a choice? You trust me or you die.” He smiled, then said, “I assure you that I do not trust you. I will be watching your every move by remote, and if I don’t like what you do, your Barbara is going to die.”

 The blood drained from his face as he replied, “What?”

 “There is a small explosive charge in her shuttle. Quite fatal, I assure you.”

 “Bastard.” 

 “I am fully aware of my parentage, Corporal. Do you want to get on with it? Loading is almost completed, and the clock is ticking.”

 Snatching up the data crystal, he replied, “I’ll do it. Don’t expect me to
enjoy it
.”

 “I’ll keep my word, Corporal. I assure you of that.” Diego stepped forward, picked up Cooper’s pistol, then retreated back into the shadows. Turning the crystal over in his hands, the trooper looked out of the viewport, then made his way into the maintenance shaft, almost catching his wounded shoulder on the bulkhead.

 If it were not for the monitoring, this would have been simplicity itself; he could have simply told the Captain what he needed to do, and he could have just sent it through the usual channels. As it was, he had to do things the hard way, and the only thing he could think of was a spacewalk. There were enough people working on the outside of the ship that no-one was going to notice another, and one of the secondary communications arrays was only a few decks up.

 Hesitantly, he swung up into a crawlway, scurrying towards the outside of the ship, hand over hand, the crystal tucked into a pocket. Treason. He was committing an act of treason against the Confederation, against the ship.

 Looking up, he said, “Monitoring or now, I don’t trust you. I’m checking the contents of this crystal.” He slipped it into the datapad and started to scan the files; all of it was astrographic data, a course plot. There could be almost anything embedded in the content, but it looked genuine. His communicator beeped, and he put it to his ear.

 “Commendable, Corporal, but we do know everything we need about this ship already. You don’t think we haven’t got all the specifications after years of espionage. The data is as I said; if you trust nothing else I have told you, then you can accept that. Now, if you don’t mind, the clock is ticking.”

 Replacing the communicator in his pocket, Cooper continued to make his way towards the airlock, dropping through an overhead hatch just in front of it. While he slipped on a spacesuit and ran the usual checklist, a part of him wondered if he would have gone ahead with this if it hadn’t already been his mission. With all those lives at stake...not that he thought he was buying anything other than the life of Barbara with this action. Still, at the back of his mind, the faces of his comrades seemed to be coming back to the surface.

 The outer door opened and he stepped out onto the hull, clamping a safety line into place. Tipping back, he started to walk up towards the antenna, a long complex of discs and cables that cast strange shadows on the gray hull. A trio of maintenance technicians were to his side, and one of them waved at him; hoping it was simply a bored worker being friendly, he waved back, and turned towards his destination.

 A hundred steps, each one a mental agony as he realized what he might be about to do. In his suit it would be even easier to track him that it was in Alamo; Diego would be
even be
able to know his heart rate and blood pressure. Glancing down at his communicator, he smiled when he saw all the telltales dark. His traitorous commander had made sure that he wouldn’t try any betrayal, and doubtless was riding shotgun to make sure that the antenna didn’t do anything unexpected like point back up to the bridge. 

 Finally he was there, and resigned to his task, he pulled off the maintenance cover and started to clumsily type in a command sequence, watching as a reader rose from the hull, just the right size for the data-crystal. While he watched, the antenna turned down to the right, pointing towards the freighter, and with one final, bitter regret, he slid the data crystal into position and watched the transmission begin.

 “Very good, Corporal,” a voice said in his ear. “You will be glad to know that you have saved the life of your friend. Now, if you make your way to Airlock Ten-Nine, I will be waiting to give you the rest of your instructions.”

 “That was it, Diego,” he said, not bearing to use his rank. “One shot deal.”

 “Very well, Corporal. Still, I would advise you to do as I have said, or you might find yourself experiencing a little suit malfunction.”

 Glancing down at his systems indicator, he saw a series of amber lights appear on some of his key systems, a warning of potential problems to come. As he watched, they all flicked back to green. Another message from Diego, and one he decided to
take notice of
. Starting towards his destination, he saw a faint blue flash from the sky above, a ship making a hendecaspace jump. Pausing for a moment, he shook his head. The message wasn’t intended for the freighter, it was just acting as a relay to the real target.

 “Hurry up, Corporal. There are now many alarms going off.”

 The final paces towards the airlock seemed glacial, and it was only with reluctance that he rested his hand on the controls, opening the outer door and scrambling inside. As the lock pressurized, he could hear sirens and alarms. 

 “....to standby stations,” Lieutenant Caine was saying. “All personnel to stand-by alert.”

 The inner door opened to reveal Diego, a gun pointed square at his chest, the smile still painted onto his face. Cooper braced himself for a quick death, took a deep breath, and moved into parade rest.

 “You don’t have to stand on ceremony, Corporal, we’re
both
traitors
together
here. Though the rest of the crew only know about you; seems that I was a little careless covering up that transmission. There were several good pictures of your face on the security cameras.”

 “I see.”

 “Most of them already thought you were a traitor, and even the ones you were working with will now have doubts. I imagine that you are interested in what happens next.”

 Folding his hands, Cooper said, “I’m absolutely fascinated.”

 “I think the time has come for you to disappear for a while. Not that I intend to kill you, simply put you into storage. Once the battle is over and Alamo is captured, I will see that my end of the bargain is upheld, for I assure you that the Cabal always keeps its promises.”

 “Is that how they got you to turn, Diego? Promises?” 

 Shaking his head, he replied, “To turn implies that I had a loyalty to the Confederation in the first place. I was born to the Cabal, and am going home. Now that I have completed my mission and the Hercules trap has been successfully sprung, I can expect to receive a good pension and a comfortable retirement.”

 “You’ve been locked up for ten years, and you just accepted that?” Cooper said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it.”

 “How different was it than if I had served on a ship, Corporal? I always knew that there would be a rescue eventually; had the war broken out, I would have been retrieved with the remainder of the Hercules crew. I played the percentages, and I have won.”

 “Not yet, Diego. If that’s actually your name. This isn’t over.”

 “With everything Alamo is going to face, I fear it is. The only sane choice will be to surrender.”

 “You don’t know the Captain very well, evidently.”

 “He will surrender, or he will die. And you, incidentally. I will be unable to rescue you in that circumstance, and for that I must apologize. You may blame your commander.”

 “Do you actually expect me to
just
walk into captivity?”

 “Not in the least.” Diego fired, and the world went dark.

Chapter 19

 There was no such thing as stealth in space. Sensor networks could detect the slightest change in the nature of a vacuum, a misplaced molecule of oxygen, and they could certainly pick up a spacesuited boarding party trying to sneak on board a starship. Which didn’t mean that stealth tactics couldn’t work, it just meant that they had to be based on misdirection rather than brute-force technological trickery.

 “This is never going to work,” Nelyubov said as he looked at the crates, six of them all lined up in Hercules’ hangar bay, open and ready for use. 

 “Relax, Lieutenant. Didn’t you ever hear of the Trojan Horse?”

 “I certainly did, and I suspect so did they.”

 “Do you want to come or not?”

 Smiling, he said, “That isn’t even a question.”

 Orlova looked around at her hand-picked team, selected from the only members of Hercules’ crew that had actual combat experience. Durman had invited himself along for the ride as well, pointing out that he had at least fired a weapon in recent memory. She looked down at the boxes again, wondering how she had managed to get quite this desperate.

 Wilson walked over with the sealant, shaking his head, “You realize that if you aren’t on board in an hour, you are in for a world of problems. Bad enough for these things to pop open if you are in atmosphere, but during transit...there’s no room for a spacesuit, just a respirator. You’d have maybe thirty seconds to find an airlock.”

 Looking around, Orlova said, “If anyone wants to back out, now’s the time. I won’t object, and won’t think any the less of you.”

 The crew looked around, each of them wondering if anyone else was going to drop out. Shaking his head, Durman started to climb into his box, folding himself into the fetal position and sliding his rifle into the slot.

 “Let’s get this over with. I don’t like being in confined spaces.”

 Nodding, Orlova scrambled into the box, slipped on her oxygen mask, and crunched herself up into a ball as the crate was closed, the whining sound of the sealant gun echoing through the space. Reaching for her watch, she started a sixty minute countdown; if she was any longer than that, she’d have to improvise.

 The problem was that she couldn’t really feel what was going on in zero-gravity. She could just about tell that the crate was moving, but there was no way of seeing outside; there was nothing anyone could think of that wouldn’t be immediately obvious, and there were troubles enough as it was. 

 Glancing down at her watch, she realized that only twenty seconds had passed. This was going to be a long wait. She began to mentally picture what was going to happen; Price’s people would collect the crates, place them with the next consignment of stores for the Dumont, and take them outside in suits, dropping them off in one of the cargo bays. Shortly afterward, the crates would pop open and they could begin their work.

 She was definitely on the move, but she tried not to think about it. There was nothing she could do until the sealant popped, and she might as well relax. Starting a series of deep breaths, she closed her eyes, started to count, and tried to clear her mind of thought.

 The beeping of her watch woke her up; glancing at the face, she saw that she had only one minute to go. Against all her expectations, she had actually managed to fall asleep. Trying to stretch out was impossible; she banged her elbow against the side of the crate, wincing; no-one was going to hear her at least.

 With a loud pop, the crate flew open, and she pushed out into open space, not sure what she was going to see. A part of her expected that the plan wouldn’t work, that she’d emerge to see a dozen guns pointing at her. What she actually saw was a worried-looking Neander holding a datapad, her head jerking from side to side as the troopers emerged from their
personal
plastoform chrysalis. She saw an angry red welt on the side of her head, scars on her bare arms.

 “Don’t worry,” she said, reaching for her gun, “We’re not going to hurt you.”

 “Who are you?”

 “The Triplanetary Fleet. We’re here to help. How many more of your people on board?”

 “Twelve.”

 “Do you know how to use a gun?”

 Nodding, she said, “I don’t want to.”

 Durman sighed, then tossed her a pistol, “I’d rather be sitting around a fire cracking a beer, but we don’t always get what we want. We need to get to critical stations.”

 “Frank,” she said to Nelyubov, “You take Mathis, go grab engineering. Jenkins, you and Scott
take
life support. I’m heading up to the bridge.” She turned to the frightened woman, “What’s your name?”