Ginger Lewis watched her work section help the crew of Rail Number Three maneuver the pod back into Cargo One. The pod was smaller than a LAC, but it was much larger than a pinnace, and its designers had been far less concerned with ease of handling than with combat effectiveness. Nor was the situation helped by the fact that Wayfarer, as one of the first four ships to be fitted with the new, rail-launched version, had been forced to work out handling procedures more or less as she went. But each pod cost over three million dollars, which put their reuse high on BuShip's list of desirable achievements. And, Ginger admitted, having them available to shoot at another enemy made sense all on its own.
Missile pods are bigger than a pinnace, which is itself roughly the size of a commercial airliner albeit smaller than an LAC. Which is less helpful than it sounds, LACs are big. $3 million Manticoran per pod.
Commander Harmon's LACs had tracked down all but three of the pods used in the short, savage destruction of Andre Warnecke's cruisers, which was outstanding, given how difficult the system's low signature features made finding them. Be a good idea to put a homing beacon on them, Ginger thought, making a mental note to suggest just that. Wonder why no one at BuWeaps thought of that?
So someone in the story does get the right idea, just not the designers.
In the meantime, all twenty-seven of the (beaconless) relocated pods had been towed to Wayfarer, where skinsuited Engineering and Tactical crews had worked their butts off recertifying their launch cells. Two had been down-checked—they were repairable, but not out of Wayfarer's onboard resources—and the Captain had ordered them destroyed.
That left twenty-five, all of which had to have their cells reloaded. That could have been done on the launch rails, but Cargo One didn't offer much space for maneuvering capital missiles. Wayfarer was equipped with the latest Mark 27, Mod C, which weighed in at just over one hundred and twenty tons in one standard gravity. Even in free-fall, that was a lot of mass and inertia, and the damned things were the next best thing to fifteen meters long. All in all, Ginger had to agree that reloading them outside the ship, where there was plenty of room to work, and then remounting them on the rails made far more sense.
120 tons for the new capital ship missiles, against 75 tons for the fleet action in the first book. The pods are being reloaded EVA before being brought inside.
She walked further up the side of Cargo One, standing straight out from the bulkhead to get a better view as the rail crew—wearing hardsuits and equipped with tractor-pressor cargo-handling units—babied the current pod into mating with the rail. The handling units looked like hand-held missile launchers, only bigger, and each end mounted a paired presser and tractor with a rated lift of one thousand tons. The rail crew was using the pressers like giant, invisible screw jacks to align the pod's mag shoe precisely with the rail, and despite their fatigue, they moved with a certain bounce. Ginger smiled tiredly at that. Morale aboard Wayfarer had soared since Schiller. First they'd taken out two raider destroyers—well, all right, one destroyer—and a light cruiser and captured a Peep CL for good measure. Then they'd sailed straight into Marsh and zapped four heavy cruisers, and then they'd captured one of the most wanted mass-murders in Silesian history in a personal shoot-out with the Old Lady, blown a thousand more straight to hell, and saved an entire planet from nuclear devastation. Not too shabby, she thought with another grin, remembering a long ago discussion with a bitterly disappointed Aubrey Wanderman. Not a ship of the wall, no, Wonder Boy. But somehow I doubt you'd have wanted to be anywhere but on the Old Lady's command deck when this one went down!
Pressor beams pop up from time to time in sci-fi. They're the opposite of tractor beams in that they repel things, so a combined tractor/pressor unit for moving things (particularly in zero-g) makes a lot of sense. Also hardsuits, are like contemporary spacesuits, bulky. But they're one-size-fits-all where skinsuits have to be individually tailored, and
Wayfarer has a lot of space for things like that.
General state of the crew after their rip-roaring adventure. Not even the hardest merchant cartel leader can say now that the Trojans haven't made a difference.
But she wasn't here to admire the view. She centered the HUD reticle on Pod Twenty-Four's beacon, locking her vector into the automated guidance systems of the outsized Sustained Use Thruster pack strapped over her skinsuit. The SUT packs were designed for extended EVA use, with much greater endurance and power than the standard skinsuit thrusters, and Ginger loved her rare opportunities to play with them. Now she double-checked her vector, grinned in anticipation, and tapped the go button.
That was when it happened.
The second she enabled the thrusters, the entire system went mad. Instead of the gentle pressure she'd expected, the SUT went instantly to maximum power. It slammed her away from the ship under an acceleration intended only for emergency use, and she grunted in anguish, unable to cry out properly under the massive thrust. Her thumb reached frantically for the manual override, finding the button with the blind, unerring speed of relentless training, and jabbed sharply . . . and nothing happened at all.
Nor was that the worst of it. Her attitude thrusters were equally berserk, whipsawing her wildly and sending her pinwheeling insanely off into space. She lost all spatial reference in the first two seconds, and her inner ear went mad as she whirled crazily away from the ship. It was only God's good grace that she was headed away from the ship; her malfunctioning SUT could just as easily have turned her straight into the hull, with instantly lethal consequences.
But the consequences she had were bad enough. For the first time in her life, Ginger Lewis was hammered by the motion sickness which had always evoked amused sympathy when she saw it in others. She vomited helplessly, coughing and choking as the instinct-level responses her instructors had beaten into her fought to keep her airways clear. She'd never expected to need that training—she wasn't the sort to whoop her cookies over a little vacuum work!—but only the legacy of her merciless DIs kept her alive long enough to hit the vomit-slimed chin switch that dropped her com into Flight Ops' EVA guard frequency.
Skinsuits have their own thruster packs, otherwise the only option they'd give spaced crewmen is a slow death. But they also accept the much heavier SUT unit. Which in this case has been sabotaged.
"Flight Ops," he said crisply into his boom mike. "I have an unidentified bogey heading out at—" he checked the numbers "—thirty-five gees. All section leaders, check your sections. I want a headcount soonest!"
SUT on emergency power can pull 35 Gs of accel, plenty to cripple or kill the user. But the gravity tolerance debate just gets better from here.
"Dutchman! Dutchman!" he barked. "Flight Ops is declaring a Dutchman! Get the ready pinnace out now!"
A startled acknowledgment came back, and he plugged into CIC.
"Ullerman, CIC," a voice said.
"Tremaine, Flight Ops," Scotty said urgently. "Listen up! I've got a Dutchman headed away from the ship at thirty-five gees. I painted the trace on your plot three minutes ago. Tie into the ready pinnace and guide them in on it—and for God's sake don't lose it!"
"Acknowledged," the voice snapped, and Tremaine turned back to his own radar. It was short-ranged and much less powerful than the main arrays, and the trace was already fading from his display. He saw the much larger radar signature of the ready pinnace, driving hard on reaction thrusters to clear the ship, and his lips moved as he whispered a silent prayer for whoever that disappearing trace was.
If the pinnace didn't get to him before Tracking lost him, the poor bastard would become a Flying Dutchman in truth.
Dutchman is the signal for somebody zooming helplessly into space. EVA crews have a dedicated distress channel activated by chin-switch, plus they carry radar to track anyone randomly hopping off into the black and keep a retrieval pinnace on standby. Good.
Now someone had attempted to murder one of her crew, and the way whoever it was had done it was almost worse than the attempt itself. Few spacers would admit it, but the terror of being lost, of drifting helplessly in space until your suit air and heat ran out, was one of the darkest nightmares of their profession.
An SUT could conceivably fail that way, but the comm is an independent system, which means sabotage. And most spacers have a healthy respect for the perils of hard vacuum and Newton's laws.
"Her attitude thrusters could just as easily have slammed her straight into the hull, and she inhaled enough stomach acid to cause major lung damage. Angie's on top of that, but she pulled thirty-five gees for twenty minutes, with no warning, and her vector looks like a near-weasel chasing a rabbit. That didn't do her a bit of good, and she was pretty far gone in anoxia—from the lung damage, not suit failure—before the pinnace got to her. By the way," he added, "Tatsumi was the ready section SBA. Angie says he's the only reason she's still alive."
So, 20 minutes of constant 35 G accel, on a corkscrewing vector. From what I can follow of the gravity discussion, she really should be dead, right?
They'd put her under a general while they flushed the acid out of her lungs, and then they'd had to hit her with a massive dose of the quick heal compounds. That always put the recipient out like a light. But knowing it didn't make her look one bit less terrible, and he looked up as Yoshiro Tatsumi paused at the foot of the bed.
Apparently the quick-heal drugs also knock you out.
Randy Steilman bellowed his fury and lunged with murder in his eyes. He reached for Aubrey's throat, fingers curled to rend and throttle—then whooped in agony as a perfectly timed snap kick exploded into his belly. He flew backward, crashing down over two empty chairs, and heaved himself back to his knees on the deck. He fought for breath, glaring at the slender acting petty officer, unable to believe what had just happened. And then he swung his arms, smashing the chairs away from him, and lunged again, this time from his knees.
Aubrey's flashing spin kick took Steilman square in the face before he was half-erect. The power tech went down again, with a scream of pain as his nose broke and two incisors snapped. He spat out broken teeth and blood, staring down at them in shock and fury, and Illyushin stepped towards Aubrey with a snarl of his own. But his movement stopped as suddenly as it had begun—stopped in a gasp of agony as a steel clamp closed on the back of his neck. One of his arms was snatched behind him and twisted till the back of his hand pressed his shoulder blades, a knee drove into his spine, and a deep, cold voice rumbled in his ear.
"You stay out of it, sweetheart," Horace Harkness told him softly, almost lovingly, "or I'll break your fucking back myself."
Illyushin went pasty white, arched with the pain in his elbow and shoulder. Like Steilman, he was a bully and a sadist, but he wasn't a total fool . . . and he knew Harkness' reputation.
No one else paid any attention to Illyushin or Harkness. All eyes were on Steilman and Aubrey as the power tech staggered to his feet once more. He shook himself, face slimed with blood from his nose and pulped mouth, and dragged the back of one hand across his chin.
"You're gonna die, Snotnose!" he raged. "I'm gonna rip your head off and piss down your neck!"
"Sure you are," Aubrey said. He felt his heart pound madly, felt the sweat at his own hairline. He was frightened, for he knew how badly this could still end, but he was in command of his fear. He was using his fear, as Harkness and Gunny Hallowell had taught him. Letting it sharpen his reflexes, but not letting it drive him. He was focused, in a way Randy Steilman could never even begin to understand, and he watched the other man come.
Steilman came in more cautiously this time, right fist clenched low by his side, left arm spread to grab and drag Aubrey in close. But despite what had already happened, his caution was only a thin veneer over his rage. He didn't understand, had no concept of how much Aubrey had changed, and his intellect hadn't caught up with his emotions. He'd taken damage, but he was almost as tough physically as he thought he was, and he couldn't even conceive of the possibility that he might lose. It simply wasn't possible. The snotnose had gotten lucky, that was all, and Steilman remembered how he'd terrified Aubrey the first time they'd met, then beaten him savagely the only time he'd ever laid hands on him. He knew—didn't think; knew—he could tear this little bastard apart, and he growled deep in his throat as he prepared to do just that.
Aubrey let him come, no longer afraid, no longer uncertain. He remembered everything Gunny Hallowell had taught him, knew Steilman could still take him, despite what had already happened, if Aubrey let him. But he also remembered what Hallowell had told him to do about it, and his eyes were cold as he stepped right into the other man. His right arm brushed Steilman's grappling left arm wide like a parrying rapier even as the power tech's fist came up in a smashing blow. There was immense power in that punch, but Aubrey's left hand slapped his wrist, diverting the blow into empty air, and then his right hand continued forward from the parry of the older man's arm. His fingers cupped the back of Steilman's head and jerked, and the power tech's own forward momentum helped bring his face down just in time to meet Aubrey's driving kneecap.
Steilman staggered back with another scream of pain, both hands going to his face. Feet pounded as two Marines in the black brassards of the ship's police burst into the compartment, but Sally MacBride's raised hand stopped them. Neither Marine said a word, but they came to a complete halt, eyes dark with satisfaction, as they realized what was happening.
Steilman's hands were still covering his face, leaving him blind and vulnerable, when a rock-hard right fist slammed a vicious uppercut into his crotch. The punch started somewhere down around Aubrey's right calf, and the sound Steilman made wasn't a scream this time. It was an animal sound of agony, and he jackknifed forward. His hands dropped instantly from his face to his groin, and the edge of a bladed left hand broke his right cheekbone like a hammer. His head snapped sideways, his eyes stunned, wide with disbelief and terrible pain, and then he shrieked as a precisely placed kick exploded into his right knee.
The kneecap shattered instantly, and he went to the deck, his screams high and shrill as his leg bent impossibly backward. He'd never even touched the bastard. Even through his agony, that thought burned in his brain like poison. The snotnose hadn't just beaten him; he'd destroyed him, and he'd made it look so easy.
Didn't feel like I could skip this fight after all the build up. Bit of an anticlimax to be honest. Wanderman openly accuses Steilman of trying to kill Lewis, Steilman gets enraged enough to jump him and gets it handed out to him.
The only good news, aside from the fact that Ginger was coming back extremely well from her ordeal, was that what awaited him was "only" a Captain's Mast, not a formal court martial. The worst Captain's Mast could do to him was stick him in the brig for up to forty-five days per offense and bust him a maximum of three grades. Of course, that didn't count taking his acting petty officer's status away. The Captain could do that whenever she chose and start the busting process from his permanent rate.
The worst a Captain can do to her crew without stopping at a naval station for a formal court martial.
She might just do it, too, Aubrey thought. Fighting aboard ship was a serious offense, but one the Navy had long since learned to handle "in house" without bringing up the heavy artillery. Crippling a fellow crewman was something else, and Randy Steilman's knee was going to require surgical reconstruction. That could very easily have turned it into a court martial offense, with heavy time in the stockade or even a dishonorable discharge attending a guilty verdict.
Particularly where you were looking for a fight, even if the other guy threw the first punch.
"Prisoner is charged with violation of Article Thirty-Four," she said crisply, "violent, abusive, and threatening language to a fellow crewman; Article Thirty-Five, assaulting a fellow crewman; Article Nineteen," her voice turned colder, "conspiracy to desert in time of war; and Article Ninety, conspiracy to commit murder."
Steilman's eyes flickered at the third charge and turned suddenly very dark at the fourth, and Honor looked at Rafe Cardones.
"Have you investigated the charges, Mr. Cardones?"
"I have, Captain," the exec replied formally. "I've examined each witness to the incident in the mess compartment, and all the testimony supports the first two charges. Based on further testimony from Electronics Tech Showforth and Environmental Tech Stennis and corroborating evidence located in the prisoner's quarters and in Life Pod One-Eight-Four, I believe there is convincing evidence to support the latter two charges, as well."
Steilman's Mast. Once he got busted up, his conspirators rolled on him about the murder and mutiny plans. Of course, Honor can only summarily space pirates, so Steilman and co wind up in the brig until they can be unloaded on a large enough naval station to give them a fair hearing.
"Very well. For violation of Article Thirty-Five, with aggravated circumstances, the prisoner is confined to quarters for one day and fined one week's pay. Dismissed."
Aubrey blinked, and his eyes dropped to the Captain's face in disbelief. Her face didn't even move as muscle as she returned his goggle-eyed stare, but there was the ghost of a twinkle in the eyes which had been so cold. He wondered if he was supposed to say something, but the Master at Arms came to his rescue.
"Prisoner, on caps!" he barked, and Aubrey's spine stiffened automatically as he replaced his beret. "About, face!" Thomas snapped, and Aubrey turned and marched obediently out of the cabin to begin his confinement to quarters.
Wanderman's punishment.
Honor rubbed the tip of her nose thoughtfully. There had not, in fact, been a timer on the nuclear demolitions, and the ground troops had crumbled when they learned of their leader's desertion—and of what had happened to all their erstwhile associates aboard the repair ship. When Wayfarer's pinnaces disembarked a full battalion of battle-armored Marines and then went back upstairs to provide air support, they'd fallen all over themselves to surrender.
Not, she thought grimly, that it was going to do them a great deal of good in the long run. Sidemore's planetary government—or what was left of it after the long, savage months of Warnecke's occupation—had come out of hiding when it realized the nightmare was over. The planetary president had been among the first hostages shot by Warnecke's troops, but the vice-president and two members of her cabinet had eluded capture. There'd still been a haunted, hunted look in their eyes when Honor went dirtside to greet them, but they constituted a functional government. Best of all, Sidemore had a death penalty.
Warnecke and crew get to face Sidemore justice from the surviving government. He is assured a fair trial, but at this point just listing the evidence against him will take weeks.
What did bother her was that four of Warnecke's ships were still at large. One was a light cruiser, and the other three were only destroyers, but the Marsh System had nothing with which to defend itself against them. And since the privateers didn't know their base had been destroyed, they were certain to return eventually. According to records captured on the planet, they were cruising individually, so they could be expected to return in singletons, but any one of them could destroy every town and city on the planet if its captain chose to take vengeance on Sidemore, and it would be some weeks yet before Commodore Blohm's promised IAN squadron could get here.
"I think we're going to have to detach some of the LACs," she said finally.
"For system security?"
"Yes." She rubbed her nose some more. "We'll detach Jackie Harmon as senior officer and give her LAC One. Six LACs should be able to deal with all of Warnecke's remaining ships, especially taking them by surprise and with Jackie in command."
For now what they're doing to look after Sidemore. Honor's pretty confident that half a dozen LACs can handle a destroyer, or even a cruiser. Then again she has another thought on how to help them out.
"I think we'll leave them a few dozen missile pods, as well. We can modify the fire control to let each LAC handle a couple of them at a time and then put them in Sidemore orbit. If any of Warnecke's orphans want to tangle with that kind of firepower, they won't be leaving again."
So apparently the LACs can handle some pod missiles, though that may be without launching their own, since the pod missiles are so much heavier than theirs.
"Another thing. I think I'll leave Jackie written orders to turn their ships over to Vice-President Gutierrez if she can take them intact. They're not much, but these people are totally on their own, and they ought to be enough to scare off any normal pirate."
"Do they have the people to crew them?" Cardones asked dubiously, and Honor shrugged.
"They've got a few hundred experienced spacers of their own, and the ones Warnecke was using for slave labor will still be here until someone with enough life support can arrange to repatriate them. Jackie and her people can give them a quicky course on weapon systems. Besides, I'm going to recommend that the Admiralty put a fleet station in here."
"You are?" Cardones eyebrows rose, and she shrugged again.
"It makes sense, actually. The Confederacy's always hated giving us basing rights in their space. It's stupid, since we're the ones who've traditionally kept piracy in check, but I think part of it's resentment at having to admit they need us for that in the first place. Then too, some of their governors hate having us around because we're bad for their business arrangements. But Marsh has every reason in the world to be grateful to us, and they've just had a pretty gruesome experience with the consequences of not being able to defend themselves. They're also only fifteen light-years from Sachsen. We don't have a station there but the Andies do, and if we put in a base here and kept a few cruisers or battlecruisers on station, we'd have a place to turn convoy escorts around . . . and to keep an eye on the Andies in Sachsen."
The immediate and long-term future of Sidemore, as Manticore's premier fleet base
just outside the Silesian border where no one can legitimately object to it.
