Battlecruiser Alamo - 7 - Battlecruiser Alamo: Sacred Honor (2 page)

 “Quinn, are you in here?” he yelled.

 “Over here, sir,” came the muffled reply from behind the engine venturi.

 “What the hell happened?”

 “Don’t know, sir. It wasn’t any of the elevator airlocks, though.”

 “Tell me this isn’t the one you were about to start maintaining.”

 “Just a precaution, skipper.
Thousand hour checkup. Mostly
.”

 “Great,” another, unfamiliar voice said. Marshall struggled to recognize it, finally placing it as Lieutenant Bailey, his new security officer.

 “Look on the bright side,” he replied. “This will give you something to work on right away as soon as we get back into the ship. And as for the rest of you, I suspect we’re going to be safer here than in the mess.”

 “You speak for yourself,” an anonymous voice yelled from the rear. “I’m starving.”

 “Can we at least get into the shuttle?” a gruff voice asked. 

 “Not enough room,” Quinn replied. “These airlocks are tight.”

 “How long are we going to be stuck in here?”

 The engineer paused for a moment, then replied, “If it is just a pinhole leak, then a maintenance team will be down in a few minutes. Say fifteen minutes in total to secure the leak, test it, and re-pressurize the deck.”

 “And if it is something bigger?”

 “Regulations stipulate that if it is bigger than three centimeters, then no access to the exposed area is permitted until we complete our jump. In about thirty-one hours time.”

 “Thirty-one hours!” the voice replied. “You’ve got to be joking.”

 “We can last that long if we have to,” Marshall replied.

 “How?”

 “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s just hope we get through all this more quickly. In the meantime, just try and relax.”

 “Relax?” 

 “Consider it an order.”

 He snatched a quick glance at his watch, running through possibilities in his mind. If it proved to be longer than half an hour, he’d have to start thinking about sanitation at the very least. Glancing down at the shuttle airlock, flush to the wall, he started to ponder how they might get inside, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

 The seconds crawled by. His left leg, stuffed into a corner, was starting to ache; he tried to extend it but was met with a yelp from someone else; whoever it was had the decency not to swear at his Captain for kicking him in the ribs, but he decided to put up with the aches and stay put.

 “Anyone getting any signal from outside on their datapad?” asked Gruff Voice.

 Quinn shook his head, “Not in here they aren’t. The data relays don’t work inside the airlocks at the moment.”

 “That’s a bit of a design flaw,” Marshall said.

 “Ran out of spares; I had to cannibalize them. They were on my list of parts to replace…”

 “...during your servicing. Great.”

 Only three minutes had passed, and they seemed to have been an eternity. The air was getting hot; there was no danger of them actually suffocating, but the airlock systems weren’t meant to handle this many people. He tried not to think about what might be waiting for him on the deck above. Five other elevator airlocks, so there was plenty of room for everyone to have got to safety – aside from the twenty or so who would have emerged, gasping for breath, on the sensor decks.

 “They do know we’re here, don’t they?” another voice asked.

 “The alarms went off,” he replied, “so the bridge was alerted. Besides, the ones that got away will have spread the word by know. Relax.”

 “There must be something we can do.”

 “No spacesuits in here.”

 “The shuttle…”

 “Give up on the shuttle,” Quinn said again. “Unless you can squeeze down to the size of a datapad, we’re not getting in.”

 Marshall glanced at his watch again, and heard something from above, a faint rattling noise, which rapidly grew in intensity. The status board on the side of the airlock began to flash, red to green, and settled into a solid green.

 “At last,” Gruff Voice said, and the airlock doors slowly opened, the platform rising to the level of the deck. Marshall rolled off the shuttle onto the floor, tumbling to the feet of Zebrova, his executive officer; he looked up at her stern face with a smile and bounded to his feet.

 “Anyone missing?”

 She shook her head, “All accounted for.”

 “Thank goodness for that.” He pulled his rumpled dress uniform, making a vain attempt to smooth out the crease, then shrugged. “Mr. Quinn…”

 “I’ll have a full report with you as soon as I can.”

 “Good. Do a full check of the other key areas of the ship.”

 “I already did, sir,” Quinn replied, quietly. “I don’t see how it can have been battle damage.”

 Marshall’s face dropped, “You know what you are saying, I presume.”

 “It has to have been sabotage, sir. There’s no other possibility that makes sense.”

Chapter 2

 There was something forlorn about a
long-deserted
bar. Quinn’s wife – during the time she was stationed on Alamo – had managed to con
vert
a cubby-hole in the maintenance levels
into
a squadron rec room; with no fighter pilots stationed on the ship any more, it had fallen into disuse. As far as Marshall knew, the only people who knew about the place were dead, light-years away, or on their way here for a quiet meeting.

 He glanced around the pin-up posters on the wall, shaking his head. Normally he’d be talking to his officers in a formal briefing room, all high-tech and holodisplays. Not in a dingy corner of a sparsely-occupied
deck
. Sometimes he forgot how big Alamo really was, spoiled by the elevators that whisked him from compartment to compartment. Half a mile of tangling corridors and compartments added up to a lot of room.

 Lance-Corporal Cooper was the first to arrive, frowning as he crawled into the compartment. Technically, Lieutenant-Major Diego should be representing the espatiers, but this was decidedly not a normal meeting. This one was invitation only, and Marshall was being exceptionally cautious with the guest list.

 “What’s this all about, sir?” he asked, looking around.

 “I’ll tell you when the rest get here. How’s your new officer working out?”

 “Seems fine so far, sir,” Cooper replied, puzzled.

 “Getting him broken in, then,” Marshall said with a grin. “
Havin
g a new commanding officer is always fun for a while.” The young trooper began to blush, and he decided to let him off the leash a little, “Just keep doing what you’ve been doing, and I’m sure everything will be fine.”

 “Yes, sir,” Cooper said, gratefully.

 Lieutenant Caine, his Tactical Officer and one of his oldest friends was next to arrive, sliding in from behind him to land on a pile of scattered seat cushions. She peered around in the gloom, then looked up at him.

 “Should I get the drinks in?”

 “Not today, Deadeye. This is business.”

 “Spoilsport.”

 Quinn, for once in a fresh uniform, crawled in from another shaft, looking around quizzically, nodding at Caine. He tossed a datapad over the Marshall, who snatched it out of the air and started to scan it.

 “Report on the hangar bay. It was sabotage. A microscopic shaped charge. Really good work, it took quite a lot of digging to find it.”

 “Who else knows about this?”

 “Just you. I haven’t briefed Lieutenant, ah, Bailey yet. She’s still working on the software.”

 “Good.” He tapped a couple of buttons, encrypting the contents of the datapad. “This is excellent work. Unfortunately, Quinn, you found evidence that it was a malfunction in the hull sensors that caused your team to miss a microfracture after the last battle.”

 “What?”
Shaking his head, he continued, “Sir, I checked the maintenance records twice. There is no way that a fracture of this sort would have been missed, and I found traces of the chemical used on the bulkhead. This was deliberate, Captain.”

 “I accept your word that this is sabotage, Lieutenant, but if we have someone on board, I’d rather they not be aware that we are onto them. That could easily lead them to try something desperate, and I don’t want to have to clean up the subsequent mess.”

 “I won’t reprimand any of my people…” 

 “I’m not asking you to.”

 “Not asking what?” Zebrova asked as she scrambled in. “What’s all this about, Captain?”

 “Trust, Lieutenant,” Marshall said. “Specifically, I trust everyone in this room with two critical pieces of information. The first is that we have a spy, a saboteur, on board. Undoubtedly transferred from Hercules before the loss of that ship.”

 “May I then suggest, sir, that all Hercules crewmen should be placed in immediate close confinement pending interrogation?” Zebrova said, matter-of-factly.

 “We can’t do that,” Caine said. “Not only would we be totally reliant on circumstantial evidence, but they’ve been on board for long enough that all manner of mayhem could result from a sweep.”

 Marshall nodded, “Lieutenant Caine is quite correct.”

 “Some of them are in key positions…”

 “My presumption is that we are looking at a single saboteur. All the pieces fit together for that.”

 “Someone senior, more than likely,” Quinn added. “They’d need a lot of key access.”

 “Not necessarily, sir,” Cooper replied. “Not if they were a good hacker.”

 “Corporal, I’m putting you in charge of finding the saboteur.” 

 “Sir?” Zebrova said, frowning, “With all respect to Corporal Cooper, he is not trained for such a task, nor…”

 “I know, but he’s the best we’ve got. Cooper, this is a request, not an order. I can’t give you any orders, not officially, and I can’t tell anyone what you are doing. You’ll be working undercover for the purposes of this operation, without the knowledge of the bulk of the chain of command. I am aware that there are risks involved, but…”

 “I’ll do it, sir. I know how important this might be. And if there’s a saboteur on board, they might well have been involved with the attack on the asteroid.”

 “This is not personal, Cooper. We can’t afford that.”

 He nodded, “I know, sir.”

 “Good.” Marshall looked around at the rest of the officers. “I’ve come to a decision regarding our flight home. There’s a bottleneck coming up, albeit one with several potential egress points to exploit.”

 “Odds are the Cabal will have ships on picket duty. It’ll be chancy, but we’ll probably have an even-odds fight and a mad scramble to jump out of the system,” Caine said. “I’m working on my recommendations for which point we use. Are you in a hurry?”

 “No.” Marshall took a deep breath, then continued, “We have a task force at our backs, and a traitor on board. I say we use both to their best advantage. They’re going to be one jump behind us all the way home, and they have a lot more options to refuel than we do.”

 Zebrova nodded, “Ultimately, they are likely to catch us. I had considered this. If we still had Hercules, I’d be advocating that the two ships split up and find separate ways home.”

 “You both might be right, but what can we do about it?” Caine asked. “Other than do our damnedest to stay ahead of the game.”

 Shaking his head, Marshall said, “I’m going to attack.”

 “What?” Quinn yelled. “Four battlecruisers and a carrier, assuming they haven’t got reinforcements.”

 “Four battlecruisers and a carrier,” Marshall repeated. “But if we can fight them at a time and place of our choosing, we can catch them by surprise. We’ve dealt with their fleet commander enough now to get a read on him, and I know what he will think when we – very quietly – feed him the destination of our jump.”

 “He’ll think that it’s a trick, and will plan accordingly,” Caine said. “He’ll mass his fleet because he really has no choice, but he won’t be expecting a battle.”

 “So we give him one, blast through his ships, and leave them in our wake. Do enough damage that we can buy ourselves some breathing room.”

 “Against odds of five, six to one,” Zebrova said, shaking her head.

 “We’ve got the Cabal database, though. Not full access, but a lot of new information. Not to mention our analysis of their ships
from our prior encounters
. Your job, the three of you, is to come up with some dirty tricks. Anything you can think of to shorten those odds.”

 Caine nodded, “Presuming that we jump in, prepared for battle, ready to face that fleet, and through everything at them.” 

 Quinn mused, “We could probably mount some additional missiles on the outer hull. Batches in the elevator airlocks, for that matter. Not really design spec, and it’ll just about run down our parts...we’re really going to only have one shot at this, sir. And even then, the odds won’t be promising.”

 “Right now the odds aren’t good either,” Marshall replied. “The deeper we get into Cabal territory, the greater the risks we face. If we knock out this fleet now, take it off the table, then we give ourselves breathing room.”

 “Besides,” Caine mused, “If they are planning a strike against the Confederation, that’s the fleet they are most likely to use. Blunt that sword now, and they can’t use it against us.”

 “Which gives the boys back home more time to get their forces ready for action.”

 “We’re not officially at war,” Zebrova said, frowning, but Cooper broke in.

 “Tell that to my mates. But you’ll have to shout very loud, ma’am.”

 “Cooper,” Marshall said, sharply. “No-one questions that. The Cabal have launched attacks against us, intelligence operations against us...there isn’t any formal declaration of war, but they aren’t exactly in a position to make demands against the Confederation if they want to complain.”

 “We came out here to gather intelligence…”

 “And have found ourselves with somewhat more significant opportunities. The information the Admiralty wanted was intended to help us fight a war more effectively, should it come. Far better to prevent that war from taking place at all.”

 “Have we completely written off Hercules, then?” Caine said. “We
still
don’t know what happened back there.”