Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (27 page)

“I copy that Major, you’ll have him shortly.”

He’d chosen the hotel in part because it was close to both a gym and the turbolifts up the station’s three-arm to the hub. The elevator car arrived full of barabo, whom the female police officer cleared away with much yelling and flashing of her shiny badge, to disgruntled looks all around. There was barely enough room for eight armoured marines, two unarmored humans and one unarmored barabo, but they all made the squeeze and the barabo spoke some kind of override command into the car’s voice recognition, and all impending stops on the display disappeared, giving them a clear route up to the hub.

“Thank you,” said Dale, raising his visor. The barabo gave him a nod, with every impression of just wanting him the hell off her station as fast as possible. “Will you be in trouble with station?”

A disinterested shrug. “Maybe. Maybe don’t care.” The black fur at her neck was shaved in odd stripes on each side. It made a sleek pattern from her shoulders up to her jaw. For perhaps the first time ever, Dale wished Romki were here, to tell him what it meant. “You talk your ship?” Dale nodded. “Ship say what happen Joma Station? We still no coms.”

“Hacksaws,” said Dale. “Joma was attacked.”

The barabo raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, thinking he was joking. Then studied his face, with dawning horror. “True?”

“True.” And he looked at Chankow, staring at him beneath his civvie hood. “Any idea why or how?”

“There were reports,” said Chankow. “From sard space, and Outer Neutral Space. Sard messing around with the old AI stuff they’d found. The tavalai no longer enforcing the anti-AI laws, Dobruta short of manpower from the war and told by tavalai command to leave the sard alone. The reports were ignored, humans thought anything that made trouble between sard and tavalai was good.”

“Sonofabitch,” Dale muttered, as gravity grew lighter. Vola Station’s spoke arms were barely a kilometre long, and the rotational gravity disappeared fast compared to the monster stations
Phoenix
crew were more accustomed to. The car’s occupants grabbed rails in anticipation of floating. “This sounds like a lot more than just ‘messing around’ with old AI tech. You can’t reprogram hacksaws, and they won’t fight for anyone but their own queens.”

“Sounds more like an alliance,” Lance Corporal Ricardo said grimly.

“Between sard and hacksaws?” Lance Corporal Kalo replied. “Well that’s fucking cheerful.” Until a short while ago, conventional wisdom had said that hacksaws were mostly extinct and encountering a group of them would be as likely as winning — or rather losing — a lottery. And now
Phoenix
had had two nasty encounters within three months. What the hell was going on?

When they reached hub transition, everyone floated to the ceiling as the elevator car came to a halt. They emerged from the tube as forward windows showed the huge steel canyon walls moving smoothly past them — the stationary hub, holding still in space on frictionless magnetic bearings while the entire, multi-million tonne station rotated around it. Directly opposite them was a new vehicle car on rails, moving parallel to the elevator, and Dale pulled himself aboard, squeezing into a corner as the rest followed. Behind them, the transparent walls showed another car full of barabo passengers, waiting to move up and enter the now-empty elevator car, all staring at the armoured humans. Once full, someone hit the right button and their new car took an off-rail and began to slow.

“Okay everyone,” said Dale as the car approached two others queued at a big hatch. “Bottleneck ahead, stay sharp. Perfect ambush spot, everyone watch the blindspots and mind your own sector. Keep it tight and watch your attitude jets amongst the civvies.”

Ahead of them, the lead car full of barabo passengers accelerated away up the rail, chasing the nearest station-arm elevator. The car ahead moved up a spot, and their own bumped after it. Passengers hauled themselves from the car ahead as doors opened, floating one after another up the handlines.

“Hello Lieutenant, this is PH-1,”
came the crackle in Dale’s ear as they waited.
“Our ETA is now twenty-four, please confirm your status?”

“Don’t worry PH-1, we’ll make it with about ten to spare.”

“Good thing, because Phoenix is coming in real fast and she’s got tavalai and barabo friends for company with sard right behind. Gonna be tight, see you there.”

“Hey! What…?” It was their new replacement volunteer off
Europa
, Private Tabo. “Hey you! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He was addressing the barabo policewoman, who was pulling herself out of the car’s farside door, into the narrow gap against the wall where no passengers were supposed to go. She seemed eager to get out in a hurry. Almost as though… and then Dale realised.

“Oh fuck, grenade!” And marines nearly broke the car glass spinning to try and look for it. “Where the fuck is it?”

“Get out!” yelled Carponi, and smashed the glass with a fist, then bang! as everything shattered, and the car was full of smoke. Dale barely felt it, with his visor down the armour was far too tough for small AP grenades. Then why… and then he realised again, also too late.

“Oh man,” Private Yu complained, in the same tone as someone who had just seen something horrible. Dale looked, and it was indeed horrible — Supreme Commander Chankow, very dead and now spilling an awful lot of zero-G blood globules into the car. And innards. “Man, she stuffed it into his fucking coat.”

“Dammit, the girl’s hurt bad,” said Private Halep, cradling Lieutenant Raymond, who was out cold and bloody. “LT? She’d get better care here, even if she’s not barabo — if we take her with us she might bleed out under Gs.”

Dale could recall plenty of times being more angry than this, but rarely at himself. He bit back some more bad language, as the damaged car bumped up another spot to the wall hatch. The Major discouraged officers swearing in combat — it indicated a lack of control. “She comes with us, she might still know stuff. Patch her best you can and bring her. Corporal Kalo, get your section out there and secure the way.”

“Yessir!”

Of the backstabbing barabo officer there was nothing they could do — sure as hell he wasn’t going to go chasing and shooting through a civilian station to catch her when he was urgently needed at Berth 59. And just as sure he’d think twice before trusting barabo security again.

E
rik was
flat on his back for a 10-G burn when
Europa
’s message came through from Lieutenant Shilu’s post.

“Phoenix, this is Europa. Europa is outbound and preparing to jump. All crew and passengers are safe and accounted for, including Calvin Debogande. I thought the Lieutenant Commander would like to know.”

“Thank you Europa,”
Shilu replied.
“The Lieutenant Commander sends his best wishes to Europa, and to all aboard.”

Erik’s attention was fixed on his holographic display of PH-1, burning hard away from Vola orbit, but still firmly snared in the much larger gravitational pull of enormous Rhea, looming to one side with swirling, malevolent clouds. He’d just dumped a little V with the jump engines, but could not cycle deeply into hyperspace this deep on the gravitational slope, and would have to lose the rest of the V with main engines. They were sharing data with PH-1 via two-way link, navcomp fixing a rendezvous point that their combined thrust would hit precisely, and any deviation would see them miss completely. The pursuing sard vessels were as jump-pulse limited as any others this close to Rhea, and would miss their fire-intercept window by nearly two minutes, assuming they’d already fired.

“Hello Phoenix, this is Makimakala,”
came Captain Pram’s voice, no doubt uplink formulated as
Makimakala
was pulling a similar manoeuvre behind them.
“We request a common jump point for system exit, there is safety in numbers. Clearly these sard want us dead, and we should consider why.”

It was hard to make life changing decisions for an entire crew while flat on your back at 10-G and attempting to line up a very non-standard rendezvous. A second uplink light blinked where his peripheral vision would usually be — at this G-stress, eyesight tended to tunnel.

“Understood Makimakala, Phoenix copies. Please standby.”
He flipped channels.
“Hello Major.”

“Take his offer,”
said Trace.
“Romki’s just been chewing my ear off down here, and I think he’s right. Take his offer, we need to get to the bottom of this.”

“If we take it, we’ll miss Fleet’s offer of pardon. It will expire in our absence.”

“Lieutenant Dale said Chankow told him we’d be dead in a year if we took it anyway. He said it was all about hacksaws. Romki says the same. Given what’s just happened, I have to agree. We fucked up Erik. I fucked up. I was obsessed with thinking we could make peace and save humanity from civil war. We can’t, we were stupid to think we could. But this, we can do. Fighting humanity’s foreign enemies is what we were made for. Let’s do that, and we might get to the bottom of our Fleet problem at the same time.”

Erik knew she was right, of course. It was everything he’d already been thinking, every doubt that had nagged at the back of his mind since far before the hacksaw attack. But to make that decision here would be to condemn all of
Phoenix
’s nearly-600 crew to become hunted outlaws from their own species, from their families and everything they’d known, without giving them a vote on it. His visual showed him rendezvous in one minute thirty, and no time to stop and think about it.

“LC, Makimakala’s sending us jump coordinates,”
Kaspowitz told him.
“It’s Tobana, unsettled system, I’d guess we’ll have to two-jump an escape unless the tavalai have some help waiting there.”

“This is not a democracy,”
Trace added.
“This is the call, and you know there’s no choice. Call it.”

“Kaspo,”
Erik formulated.
“Accept and lay in coordinates. Shilu, thank Makimakala for me. Operations, rendezvous ETA one minute and five, stand by.”

“Operations copies LC.”

Erik could see PH-1 adjusting thrust angle even now to bring the shuttle across and line up the position where
Phoenix
was about to arrive. He cast a final glance at the nav feed, and
Europa
’s position, disappearing at a more moderate yet purposeful thrust toward Kazak System’s outer fringes, one jump pulse down and preparing for the second, with human space several jumps ahead. His biggest regret was that Lisbeth wasn’t on her… but how could he trust his sister to any ship holding Fleet’s pet killer, who found honour only in obeying orders, no matter how grotesque?

At fifteen seconds Erik cut thrust as
Phoenix
’s velocity precisely matched PH-1’s. He left them thrust-neutral as Lieutenant Hausler flung PH-1 about with a precise rotation of thrust, and slammed her hard into the matching grapples.

“PH-1 is aboard!”

And Erik threw
Phoenix
end-over-end and kicked in the mains once more, building to a steady roar as they powered about Rhea’s gravity slope with the jump point emerging on the far side.

“Hello Phoenix crew, this is the LC,”
Erik addressed them all on open coms.
“It seems that these sard are really out to get us, and our tavalai companion has some ideas why. Phoenix does not run from fights, but first we need to regroup and consider what we’re up against. We are leaving for Tobana System first, then possibly beyond. All hands standby for combat jump, LC out.”

And just hope that our tavalai friend hasn’t been playing us all along, and isn’t leading us into a huge froggie trap on the far side.

A
fter Medbay rounds
and ship rounds, it took Erik a full two hours to finally intercept Trace in Assembly. They were two jumps out of Kazak and still on orange alert in case the sard pursuit found them again, but there hadn’t been any sard vessels on scan when they’d made the second jump, and Tobana System had no nav buoys to interrogate and tell later vessels where the earlier ones had gone. They were in fast transit now across a desolate and unsettled system known only as GH-14, three thousand K off
Makimakala
’s flank with
Rai Jang
another forty thousand K in front.
Rai Jang
’s two companions had not joined them in the first jump, and Erik had been surprised at the smaller ship’s speed — it had arrived only fifteen minutes late on each occasion.

Now he walked tiredly along the steel gantries of Assembly, with its endless racks of armour suits and weapons that climbed maze-like toward the outer hull. Automated stacking arms whined and crashed as marines shifted suits that no longer moved under their own power, and the repair bay howled and sprayed orange sparks as bare-armed marines did panel-beating jobs on battered armour. Some of the damage was scary, armourplate torn like paper. Some armour still had blood on it. Marines who had just recently been fighting, then pushing huge Gs through twin combat jumps, now blinked back exhaustion and got their gear back into fighting shape as best they could.

Erik found Trace on a lower gantry by the ammo transport rails, big crates of Koshaim ammunition humming from level to level, and now being unloaded and snapped into empty magazines by hand. Trace wore an open jacket, sweaty like the rest in Assembly’s hot air, and shouted with several marines about their progress. Erik recognised one of them in particular — Lance Corporal Penn of Charlie Platoon, Second Squad, who had been personally escorting Lisbeth when things went bad.

“LC,” said the Corporal with a nod. He looked grim — just a young guy, pale with dark hair and square features, in civilian life the kind of guy you wouldn’t look twice at if you passed him on the street. But Penn was a five-year vet, retired for one year but volunteering through mutual friends of Sergeant Hoon on Homeworld after seeing what Fleet did to Captain Pantillo. And now he’d saved Lisbeth’s life.

“I just talked to Private Herman in Medbay,” Erik told him. “Docs say they can synth a new leg, he’ll be walking in maybe three weeks. Could even get back to service four weeks after that if he wants.”

“He’ll want,” said Penn with conviction. “He’s a good marine.”

“And I’m sorry about Bernardino.”

Penn exhaled hard. “Yeah. He was a good marine too.” He managed a tight smile. “It’s a bit of a change from selling furniture.”

“That’s what you were doing on Homeworld?”

“Yes sir. It was a jobs program that places former vets, the owner was a vet himself. It was just temporary, I hadn’t decided what I really wanted to do… maybe go back to school. But then
Phoenix
happened, and…” He shrugged, and indicated around. “I guess I missed it more than I realised.”

“You still think that?”

Penn’s look was intense. “Hell yes sir. Best call I ever made.” Erik was surprised. “If we’re going after the hacksaws. And the bugs. We are going after them, aren’t we sir?”

“That’s the intention Corporal. If we can find out where the hell they are, and what the hell they’re doing working with the sard. Our tavalai friends might have some ideas.”

“I got no problem working with tavalai sir,” said Penn, surprising him again. “I mean they’re arrogant pricks and they had it coming in the war, but they’re still just normal folks. We can talk to tavalai. Can’t talk to those fucking bugs sir, and sure as hell can’t talk to hacksaws. They’re the real threat. People back home think the war’s over — I always told them they were kidding themselves.”

Erik nodded in agreement. “And the tavalai don’t like them any more than we do. Or not the hacksaws anyway, and they may be coming around on the sard.” Ahead, Trace finished her conversation with another two marines. “Excuse me Corporal, I have to talk to the Major.”

“Yes sir.” He departed, and Erik congratulated himself at his restraint at not thanking the Corporal for saving his sister. He knew what the reply would be — ‘just doing my job sir’, and knew that some marines actually took that kind of personal thanks as offensive. Marines didn’t fight for personal favours. Lisbeth was
Phoenix
crew, for now at least, and it was the job of marines to fight like hell to protect
Phoenix
crew. That she happened to be Erik’s sister, and heiress to one of the most powerful human families, was irrelevant, and to suggest otherwise was to suggest that marines were unprofessional.

“What do you think?” Erik asked Trace, nodding after Corporal Penn.

Trace glanced. “Good,” she said, which was enough. She didn’t look happy though. Not only exhausted and sweaty, but wound up tight and hard. “I’m sorry. We fucked up. Unacceptable spacer casualties and I’ve told them so. Ships function without marines but not without spacers. We let
Phoenix
down.”

There were six dead marines and another fourteen wounded, against seventeen dead spacers and three wounded. Most of Erik’s just-completed rounds had been not in Medbay, but around the ship’s crew, talking to Ensigns and Warrant Officers about crew rotations to fill in the losses, and providing what comfort he could to grieving friends. Most of the deaths had been when hacksaws had breached the defensive perimeter on the evacuation of the accommodation block, firing chain guns onto spacers running on the open dock. Thus so many dead, and so few wounded, and it could easily have been far worse.

Erik hung off the steel overhead and considered her. He wanted to disagree with her assessment, but that was the emotional thing to do — to comfort, to be nice. Trace hated that, in him especially. If she thought it was the case then it was probably so, and he’d be wise to listen. Procedure said they should get together and do a full review of what just happened, but that procedure was for the Triumvirate War, with its large-scale actions and organised pauses. Out here and alone, there was just no time to do everything by the book, and now was as good a time for a review as any.

“So what happened?” he asked her.

“Well firstly,” said Trace, “the accommodation block was too far from our berth. That’s my fault as well, they put us down the end of the dock and the block was near enough for the usual procedure — I thought having an empty dock full of construction activity and no permanent residents could actually work in our favour by increasing our defensive possibilities. Civvies always get in the way. But none of us appreciated the danger we were in, we’ve been blind the whole way up ’til now, so that’s mistake one.

“Mistake two was Lieutenant Crozier took a defensive stance once the hacksaw threat was identified. She was thinking ‘withdrawal’, and so did not want to forward deploy too many marines too far from
Phoenix
, because they take time to recover when it’s time to leave. As a result, our crew furthest from the berth were nearly overrun, including your sister, because we had insufficient firepower on site to help them. When I arrived back from PH-4 I took command and sent out everyone we had, and we regained control of the docks from our berth up to the far section seal with overwhelming firepower. It cost us extra time getting out, but security for personnel on dock is always paramount, and we don’t leave crew undefended because it’s inconvenient — that’s no better than just shooting them ourselves.

“Mistake three was the sloppy evac of the accommodation block, including one spacer hurt by a stray round and left behind — that’s Spacer Reddin, the guy your sister saved.”

“And Furball,” said Erik. “Don’t forget the Furball. Reddin will make it, I was just talking to his team, they’re midships operations.”

“And left the Furball unattended in crew quarters,” Trace continued angrily. “I’ve still no idea how that happened, but I’ll get answers, and someone will be apologising to Tif in person.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Erik said pointedly. He didn’t like to rub it in, but he had to take the opportunity, and Trace wouldn’t respect him if he didn’t.

“We have,” she acknowledged. “It was sloppy, and now it’s not just you that’s pissed about it.” It was an apology, Erik realised, for not pushing it harder before.
Phoenix
marines had to drop their attitude that if it wasn’t directly combat-related, it didn’t matter. In their present circumstance,
anything
could become combat related, at any time. And in that, the whole crew needed to adjust.

“And the fourth mistake was Lieutenant Dale,” Trace continued mercilessly. “Who just completely screwed the pooch by allowing the former Supreme Commander of all human forces, and the greatest intelligence source we’ve had access to since this whole mess began, get assassinated right under his nose by a girl he got tricked into thinking was friendly. And she had a
beard
, so he can’t even claim he was thinking with his dick.”

Erik nearly smiled. “What’s the thinking on why?”

“Oh, Fleet probably.” Trace shrugged. “All those spies out to get him. Spies like Hiro, too damn smart for grunts like Dale, obviously.”

“That’s a bit rough.”

“He’s my lieutenant and I’ll be the judge of that. All these barabo stations bending over backwards to please Fleet, my guess is Fleet told Vola Station they wanted Chankow dead, and Vola obliged. We were stupid to get ourselves into that, Erik. Damn stupid.”

Erik exhaled hard and stared at the nearby armament circle — two sections of marines feeding ammo into magazines, drudge work that was more easily done by hand than machine.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “And it got
Edmund Chandi
killed, most of the crew were dead when we got off. Another five came with us, a few of those have volunteered to help but I think most want to jump ship first opportunity. If ever the Worlders were going to listen to us, they probably won’t now.”

“Oh they were just stringing us along,” Trace muttered. “Worlder politics is so big, and we’re so far away. They were interested in the Captain, not in us. We were an embarrassment to Fleet, but no more. Our chances of influencing the Worlder-Spacer conflict died with the Captain.” She gazed at Erik, a brow slightly furrowed, as though trying to figure something out. “How did we fall for that?”

“Yeah,” Erik echoed. “We who don’t hope, and don’t kid ourselves wishing for impossible things.” Looking at her edgily.

“Maybe Colonel Khola was right,” said Trace. “Maybe I have completely lost my bearings.” She took a deep breath. “It’s not the kind of mistake I usually make.”

Erik frowned. “So why do you think you made it?”

“Because I thought I knew everything when I first arrived on
Phoenix
,” Trace admitted. “I was only a green louie, but I was a crusty old Kulina since I was a kid.”

“Still are,” Erik ventured.

Trace smiled faintly. “And then the Captain said that things weren’t exactly as I’d imagined them. That all human institutions are flawed, even Fleet, and even the Kulina. That you have to separate loyalty to the institution from loyalty to the cause the institution serves. The Captain’s cause was humanity. That’s my cause as well. But serving that, and serving Fleet, aren’t always the same thing, and so many times he would second-guess Fleet doctrine and logic, and achieve superior results. It made Fleet question his loyalty, but he did more for the human cause than any of those robot yes-men Fleet were always promoting could ever dream.

“For a long time I denied that final lesson, though. We’d have these arguments where he’d make his point, and I’d say, ‘Well yes, but…’ And then I’d just regurgitate everything the Kulina taught me to believe. I never really accepted the Captain’s final teachings until Fleet murdered him. And then I realised he was right.”

She met Erik’s gaze. “Since then I’ve been serving his legacy. Kulina believe in mentors, you know. It’s old tradition, the student learning at the feet of his siksaka — his teacher. I felt I had to carry on his cause, and his teaching. He was all about keeping humanity together, stopping any civil war from happening. I became obsessed with that, I think. Keeping his cause alive.”

“But the Captain didn’t see the whole picture,” said Erik. “I think we’ve come further down this road than he ever could. And now we’re going further still. I think if he could have seen what we’re seeing, he would have agreed with us that the main threat to humanity lies elsewhere.”

“No,” Trace disagreed, but mildly. “No, I think he was focused on human politics because those were the tools he had. He could actually do something about it. He had the following, and the contacts and support. We don’t. But we have other things. He may have set us on this road, but at some point we have to stop asking ourselves what the Captain would do, and start choosing our own direction.”

“
W
e had
an experience on Tuki Station just before we left,” Erik spoke to the monitor in his quarters. On the screen, the wide face and mottled skin of
Makimakala
’s Captain Pram. “A human freighter named
Grappler
docked with station on autos, it had not been speaking to anyone on the way in. We thought it was just maintaining secrecy. Once it docked, we found it was empty and all the crew missing, with many bloodstains indicating many if not most had been killed. All indications are that the sard intercepted
Grappler
at a midpoint jump, took the crew and wiped the navigation logs to allow the ship to continue on automatic. We think the same may have happened on Joma Station, only sard not only removed the crew, but replaced them with hacksaw drones. Which means the sard and the hacksaws are somehow working together.”

Captain Pram looked grim.
“Then you have discovered our sard problem.”