Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Six: Alex

The Gathering Storm was the absolute state of the art in Laconian naval technology. The first ship of her class to be fielded, she was intended to be the prototype of an entire fleet of fast attack destroyers that could patrol the many systems of the gate network and project Laconian power to every corner of the empire. She had a keel-mounted rail gun capable of firing a three-and-a-half-kilo slug every five seconds at velocities that would punch a hole through smaller moons. She had two separate batteries of torpedo launchers with four rails on each and a fast reload system that could have another eight fish in the tubes and ready to fire less than seventy seconds after the first barrage was let loose. She was defended on all sides by a network of twelve rapid-fire point-defense cannons, and every angle of approach on the ship was covered by at least four of them. She was, as Alex’s copilot Caspar liked to quip, a couple thousand tons of fuck-up-your-day stuffed into a five-kilo sack.

Nestled inside the massive cargo hold of the Pendulum, she was also defenseless.

Sitting in the pilot’s couch, waiting for the go signal, and knowing that if someone realized they were there and started firing he wouldn’t even be able to see it on radar made Alex’s scalp itch. The Pendulum fed them her scopes, so they weren’t completely blind, but she was a lumbering heavy freighter. Her threat detection was mostly so she didn’t run into a stray hunk of rock. The low-res radar and grainy telescope shots he had to look at did little to calm his nerves.

“So you and the boss go way back, right?” Caspar said.

He sat second couch on the Storm, behind and to the right of Alex’s chair. Caspar Asoau was a short, skinny kid with a motion tattoo of a running cheetah on one shoulder and the wispiest hint of a goatee. In spite of looking way too young for the job, he was a hell of a good pilot. Quick to obey an order and perfectly charming company. Alex had rapidly discovered that they had nothing in common outside of a love of flying, so other than a casual greeting, the only time they ever seemed to talk was sitting at the Storm’s controls.

Alex didn’t hold it against the kid. He remembered being a young pilot and trying his hardest to hide his nervousness by chatting up the older officers.

“Yeah. The gunny and I have known each other for a long damn time.”

“See, that’s funny. She’s the captain of this ship, but you guys all call her Gunny. That was a rank or something, right? Back on Mars?”

“Something like that,” Alex replied. “She’ll always be Gunny to me.”

Caspar was running the preflight as he talked, fingers tapping softly on the screens. On Alex’s monitor the checklist rolled past, each system verified and reporting green before Caspar moved on to the next, with Alex giving the final okay to his work. His copilot was thorough and efficient. He took his job seriously. It kind of made Alex wish the kid were thirty years older so they could be friends.

“She give you any hint on what this op is about?” Caspar asked, then threw the weapon stores inventory to Alex’s screen for his double check.

“I show two hundred slugs in the rail-gun mag, eighty fish in the pipes, all PDCs show green and full,” Alex said, sliding his finger down the inventory list as he went. “And no, she’s an old operator. Keepin’ your mouth shut gets drilled into those guys pretty hard.”

“Copy, two hundred in the rail gun, eighty torpedoes, PDCs full and greens across the board, verified,” Caspar said. “Yeah, but I figured since you guys were friends, maybe she gave you some kinda heads-up.”

“She did not. And I wouldn’t ask. We’ll know when we need to know, and that’s good enough for me,” Alex said, then, with the preflight complete, spun his couch around to face Caspar. “It’s okay to be nervous.”

Caspar nodded. He didn’t look embarrassed at all to be discussing his fear. Alex felt another little rush of affection for him. He was a good kid. Alex hoped he’d make it through to the other side of the Laconia business, but the odds on that were pretty short for all of them.

“I knew a guy on Pallas,” Caspar said. “It wasn’t like we were tight. We never seriously dated or anything. But when I’d go through the station on cargo runs, we’d hook up. Ben Yi. I liked him.” A tear formed at the corner of his eye and then failed to be pulled down his cheek in the gentle quarter-g burn of the Pendulum’s drive.

“He didn’t make the evacuation?”

“Nope,” Caspar said, then wiped his eyes. “They say that the Tempest turned the station into rubble so fast no one would even have seen the actual attack coming. I guess, if you have to go, that’s not the worst.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. Everyone on the Storm had their reason to hate the Laconians. Everyone had a story. The only answer for most of them was I’m sorry. It felt pretty limp.

“If this op gets blown up,” Caspar said, turning his attention back to his screens and going through his checklists one more time, “I want you to know. You don’t have to worry about me. If that big bastard Tempest comes after us, the only thing I’ll be thinking is how can I make a hole in it.”

“I know, man,” Alex said, then patted the kid’s knee before turning around. “No doubts.”

“Kamal?” said Bobbie’s voice in his ear, where the comm bud was inserted. Bobbie only called him Kamal when they were on an op and other ears were listening. It meant go time.

“Kamal copies from the flight deck, Cap,” he replied, sitting up straight in his couch. From the hiss of the gimbals behind him, he knew Caspar was doing the same. Even the crash couches on the Storm sounded slick.

“I need a go, no-go for deployment,” Bobbie said. “Pendulum cuts us loose on your word.”

“We are all greens up here on the flight deck, go on your command.”

“Outstanding,” Bobbie said. “Okay, kids, word came down, and here’s the op. Listen close, because I don’t have time to repeat myself.”

Alex hated flying ballistic. No drive meant he had maneuvering thrusters at most. No active sensors was like piloting with his eyes half-closed.

The Storm had a tiny radar profile for such a large ship. Something about the hull materials just absorbed or bounced off at an angle almost any radar that hit it. She could also dump all her waste heat into internal heat sinks for several hours and run liquid hydrogen through capillaries in her skin, keeping the hull temperature pretty close to zero. Unless someone was really looking for her, she’d just show up as a slightly warmer spot in space with a radar profile not much bigger than a bunk bed. Alex could remember when a destroyer with similar technology had killed his old ship the Canterbury. How terrifying it had been when a gunship seemed to materialize out of the dark of space and started firing torpedoes. Apparently that came standard now. Still, he could relate to what their intended targets were about to experience.

“One minute,” Caspar said. There was no time for sympathy.

“Copy that, one minute,” Alex replied, then switched channels over to Bobbie. “Cap, we’re go in sixty seconds. Your team ready?”

“Kids are belted in and ready for a roller-coaster ride,” she replied.

“Copy that,” Alex said, then watched the countdown timer on his screen drop toward zero. “Three … two … one … mark.”

“Mark,” Caspar said, and the Storm flared to life around them. The screens switched to active sensors and telescope shots of their target: a fat Transport Union freighter, escorted by two Laconian frigates. Behind the freighter lay Jupiter’s vast bulk.

And that was, according to Bobbie’s pre-mission brief, the reason for all the secrecy beforehand. Whether or not they could make their attack run depended on the resistance partisans on the freighter’s crew getting the signal out on the ship’s course and date of entry into the Sol system, all while working around a Laconian political officer who had been stashed on board. Because for the attack to work, it had to all happen while Jupiter blocked line of sight to Earth and the Magnetar-class battleship parked there.

It was a lot of moving parts, any one of which could have failed out at a moment’s notice, and launching the attack meant burning some spies in the union. If things hadn’t panned out, the Storm would have just climbed back into her berth on the Pendulum and flown away, her crew none the wiser and the spies on the freighter undiscovered.

But the prize was worth the risk. A ship directly from Laconia with highly sensitive cargo attached to some secret Laconian project and replacement parts for the Tempest itself. Hopefully also some of the weird fuel pellets the Laconian ships used that couldn’t be manufactured anywhere else, and which the Storm was getting dangerously low on. Ammunition for the Storm’s weapons and for the power armor suits Bobbie’s team wore. Taking the freighter meant keeping the underground’s best weapon armed and operational, possibly for years.

And—best of all—the political officer. Taking them alive would be a huge intelligence win.

If Alex could take care of two escort frigates and deliver Bobbie’s dropship to the freighter.

“They’ve spotted us,” Caspar said. No surprise there. With the Storm pinging away with active radar, she was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Jammers on,” Alex said, and the Storm drowned the little fleet in static, cutting them off from each other and from any outside help. The three ships didn’t change course, apparently deciding the smartest move was to try to get around Jupiter. It was their best strategy. Alex would have done the same.

Which was why he’d prepared for it.

“Cap, launching you now. Make sure you come back,” Alex said, and hit the button that hurled the strike team’s high-speed breaching pod at the freighter. Bobbie and her boarding party throwing themselves at the enemy ship like pirates. While the pod burned hard toward the Transport Union ship, Alex fired two precisely angled shots from the rail gun past it and through the freighter’s drive cone. The shots covered the thousands of kilometers separating the ships in a handful of seconds, and the freighter’s drive winked out.

“Get ready, they’ll be coming for us now,” Alex told Caspar, and almost as if on cue the Storm buzzed an angry target lock warning at them.

“PDCs hot,” Caspar said. Alex was surprised at how calm his tone was. For all the sadness and fear the kid had expressed in the moments before the fight, now that the battle was on, he’d become almost machine-like. “Ready for incoming. Tubes two and four are locked.”

“We should close a bit, cut off their options,” Alex said. The two frigates were not a trivial threat, but the Storm massively outclassed them in tonnage and firepower, and he didn’t worry too much about flying straight at them fangs out and trying to end the fight quickly.

“Copy that, one and three loaded and locked if we need them.”

Acceleration pressed Alex back into his couch as he closed the gap. In the distance, Bobbie’s pod had reached the crippled freighter and was firing grapples to lock the two ships together. The frigates couldn’t talk to each other, but their crews had some emergency plans already on the books, because they split up and flew away from the freighter in opposite directions as if they’d coordinated the maneuver.

“They’re trying to get on both sides of us,” Alex said, but Caspar was already on it. He was tasking half their PDCs with one ship and half with the other. Didn’t matter if they came from both directions at once, the Storm’s flak screen could handle it.

Down at the freighter, Bobbie’s pod suddenly flared to life in a massive deceleration burn. Alex had crippled the freighter’s drive, but the ship was still hurtling along with whatever velocity it’d had before the engine went out. Bobbie’s pod was programmed to push back against that speed on a vector that would keep the freighter safely hidden behind Jupiter. Part boarding pod, part secondary, aftermarket temporary braking thruster.

“We’re on board,” Bobbie said, her voice phase shifted into a robotic screech as it cut through the static from their jamming.

“We have fast movers,” Caspar said at the same moment the alerts showed up on Alex’s threat board. The two frigates unloaded their tubes. Alex ignored them, waiting for the missiles to get into PDC range so the Storm could chew them up.

“Let’s go ahead and start shooting back,” Alex said, and a moment later the Storm shuddered as if with pleasure as she fired four torpedoes of her own.

Before the rapidly closing missiles could even pass each other, two of the incoming torpedoes veered off in a wide turn.

“Worry about the two that are still coming at us,” Alex said to Caspar, and then stopped thinking about that. The other two Laconian torpedoes were now winging in a wide arc toward the freighter. And the two frigates had also flipped and started a hard burn back toward their former charge.

They hadn’t been able to draw the Storm away or shoot it down. Their plan B appeared to be scuttling the freighter. Bloodthirsty, but not unexpected. Alex threw the throttle down to catch the swiftly slowing freighter as quickly as possible, shifting from attacking their prey to protecting it. For a moment, everything was falling toward a central point in space defined by the crippled ship. The Storm, eight torpedoes on wide looping courses to find their targets, the two frigates burning back. On the threat board, it looked like the freighter had turned into a black hole, and its gravity was sucking everything, large and small, into its event horizon. In its way, it was beautiful.

Then everyone was shooting.

Caspar’s PDCs cut down all four of the Laconian torpedoes in an instant, even as two of the Storm’s impacted on the nose of one of the frigates and the plasma warheads turned the front half of the ship into glowing slag. The other frigate spun and slewed sideways and shot down the torpedoes chasing it, then continued its rotation and gave the freighter and Bobbie’s attached breaching pod a full broadside from its PDC array. The freighter was riddled with holes, and plumes of escaping atmosphere jetted out, looking a bloody pink in the reddish light coming off Jupiter. Or maybe there was some actual blood mixed in there. As many holes as the freighter had taken, it defied belief that no one on board had been hit.

“Splash that one,” Alex ordered, but Caspar was already saying, “I got that motherfucker.”

The frigate killed its rotation with a massive blast from its maneuvering thrusters, then kicked on its drive. Even though it only slowed down, it seemed to leap straight at the approaching Storm. The two ships passed at high speed, every PDC blazing.

The much smaller frigate was hit by half a dozen of the Storm’s cannons all at once, and seemed to just come apart into a cloud of chaff as it passed by. But it unleashed a barrage of its own before it died that cut along the Storm’s flank.

Suddenly the ship was a cacophony of alarms, sirens, and alerts from the control panel.

“Damage!” Alex yelled over the din. The noise was getting gradually quieter, which meant at least the flight deck was in the process of losing its atmosphere. He grabbed his helmet from under his couch and locked it into place. He could see Caspar doing the same.

“Damage!” he yelled again, but heard only static on his suit’s speakers. He banged his fist on the side of the helmet in frustration, then spun around. Caspar was pointing at his mouth and ears, signaling that his suit radio seemed not to be working either.

Alex flipped through the pages of damage reports popping up on his screen and found the culprit. A PDC round had cut through the computer nexus that controlled all intraship and intership communications, and for whatever reason the backup wasn’t taking over. Maybe it was fucked too. It looked like there were a lot of flashing red lights on the engineering panel.

But the Storm would heal the hull breaches, just like it always did. And damage control teams were already on the move to bring their other systems back online. The Storm would survive, Alex had no doubt.

But the freighter with Bobbie and her strike team on it was tumbling through space, out of control and empty of atmosphere, and with the radio down, there was no way for him to know if anyone on it was still alive.