Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (39 page)

“Thank you,” Ayan
said. It only took her a moment to bring one of the Carthan
Destroyers up on the tactical display. Two of them were hanging back,
orbiting a mining asteroid. She sent an encrypted message signalling
her orders to her father.

The Clever Dream was
taking off again, whirling towards Haven Shore to join the offensive
against Carthan forces. Ayan caught sight of Lacey out of the corner
of her eye. The poor woman was as white as a sheet, and looked
uncertain for the first time since she’d known her. “Are you all
right?”

“You just declared
war,” Lacey said.

“They didn’t give
me much choice,” Ayan said. “Are you all right here while I help
in the cockpit?”

“I’m fine. I mean,
I think I’ll be fine.”

“Good,” Ayan said.

“Do you think we’ll
win?” Lacey asked.

“It’s too early to
be sure,” Ayan replied, leaving for the cockpit.

Shadow and Fire

Carl Anderson knew who
his best and brightest Rangers were. He hand picked his team of
fourteen and knew they’d perform the grisly duty ahead admirably.
As the pair of small cloaked shuttles approached the Carthan
destroyer, he found himself wishing that Alice and Remmy were on his
team.

Regardless of his
offhanded wish, the collection of rangers he had with him were
excellent mental and physical specimens. He was glad for the regimen
of fitness and youth restoration medication he started when the first
group of rangers began training. Carl didn’t know how he’d keep
up with them without the pharmaceutical assistance. He didn’t have
time for most of the physical training that would improve his
reflexes and muscle memory, but he looked like a well-built man of
forty, a marvel of medical technology. He didn’t expect to be on
mission with them under such dire circumstances, however.

The shuttle door
opened, baring one entire side of the large converted escape shuttle.
He pushed out of the shuttle compartment first, leaping towards the
destroyer only a hundred and three metres away. Anderson could see
the rangers from both shuttles following his lead. Their cloak suits
kept them just as hidden as the pair of ships delivering them, which
used exactly the same cloaking technology. They added a few extra
layers of material and emitter bands to the hull, and thanks to the
shuttle’s small size, the new technology worked perfectly.

The destroyer reminded
Anderson of a lounging beast, watching the distant fighting, waiting
for the order to attack. The Carthans may be some of the most
socially crude people Anderson had ever met, but they weren’t
stupid. They believed in enslaving debtors, reprogramming criminals
so they could serve their sentences as soldiers and public servants,
they even believed in privilege by birth and the separation of the
classes. Their social backwardness made them even more dangerous.
Anderson had never seen evidence that any soldier ever questioned
their orders, and he knew the Carthans believed in defending their
way of life, even in the darker corners of the galaxy, like the Rega
Gain System.

Anderson struck the
hull. His suit protected him from most of the impact, and the outer
layer of his armour stuck to the surface. To his right there was a
large quad-turret; the gunnery team of two sat in a transparent metal
cockpit watching a tactical hologram. Anderson stood and walked to
his position, right under the guns. As he drew nearer, he could see
that the ships that the Carthan carrier used to protect itself were
scattering, and the Triton took a few hits from their torpedoes
before cloaking. One of the gunners regarded the other, shocked and
dismayed while his partner stared at the hologram, agog, shaking his
head.

Anderson crawled under
the main body of the turret and waited as the rest of the rangers got
into position. They walked, ran, and crawled to their targets. Major
sources of power, big energy taps like turrets, beam emplacements,
and sensor arrays, and crevasses in the hull were their points of
interest. After a couple more minutes, the last Ranger was in
position, lying against the hull where two main thruster pods
connected to the ship.

That was the signal.
Without hesitation, Carl Anderson took two six centimetre wide, eight
centimetre long cans off his back and affixed them to the hull. He
continued affixing more devices around the turret mount until there
were fifteen ringing the weapon emplacement. He was behind; most of
the other rangers had finished, and passive sensors in his suit told
him that the ship had detected the new devices attached to the hull.
They had minutes before the commanders of the destroyer sent troops
out onto the hull. He finished getting out from the underside of the
turret and pushed off hard.

Everyone activated the
devices they planted, and they began to burn tiny holes into two
hundred and ten sensitive spots across the ship’s hull. If all went
well, there would be no decompressions, no immediate reason for
anyone aboard that ship to seal portions of the vessel off, and they
wouldn’t figure out what was going on in time.

Airlock doors opened
nearby, and a group of four soldiers rushed out, each headed towards
one of their cutter cans. It was already too late.

The cutter cans were
starting to penetrate the hull, burning holes only half the width of
a human hair, and nanobots programmed to disrupt major systems were
pouring into the ship from all sides. They would provide data taps
that the Triton could use to connect to the destroyer’s core
systems.

The Carthan soldiers on
the hull didn’t see any of the rangers; their cloaking systems were
working perfectly. Three of the cans failed to cut through the hull,
but the first of the systems, the ship’s main thrusters,
deactivated. The nanobots there sent a signal indicating that the
Triton could control the destroyer’s main thrusters. The lights in
that section of engineering flickered and went out. It was working.
Less than a minute later, other lights in the midsection of the ship
winked out. The gunnery team Anderson noticed before hurriedly
departed from their posts, climbing down into the ship as their
systems went dark. That was it, the fearful strike Ayan and Oz would
need to terrify the Carthans. Carl Anderson rarely felt such
satisfaction. One of his shuttles signalled him, and he curled up
into a ball. The interior of the shuttle appeared as he passed
through the cloaking field around its side door.

He couldn’t suppress
a grin as he helped the next ranger into the shuttle. The Rangers had
just completed their first space combat mission.

The Triton Engages

“Show me the centre
of the issue,” Oz said as he stepped in beside Lieutenant Victor
Davis, who was standing in the centre of the lower half of the
bridge. A portion of the lower half of the bridge had been adapted
for internal security, and Victor shared it with Paula Mendle, the
Flight Operations Chief, who was heavily pregnant.

“Here it is,”
Victor replied to Oz as he brought up a few playbacks recorded only
moments before. Oz selected the most recent clip from a club called
the Oota Galoona. It was being used as a gathering hub, mess hall,
and observation area for people who were new to the ship and given
quarters nearby. In the clip, the Oota Galoona was packed, and as Oz
played it, he saw people watching Ayan’s speech.

At the end, when she
made it clear that they were fighting the Carthan Alliance, several
people, in new but basic vacsuits, got to their feet and started
arguing with people from nearby tables. With a simple adjustment,
Victor cleared up the audio so Oz could hear one tall woman shout,
“We didn’t sign up to go to war with the Carthans! They’ll
break this ship’s back and turn us into drone soldiers!”

A patron at her side
shoved a pair of nearby men into a table where several crewmembers
sat. People nearby were getting to their feet, and Oz watched as
arguments started springing up wherever vocal malcontents from either
side decided it was their place to force their opinions on another.

Seeing the rough
looking new recruits in their very basic, unmarked uniforms choosing
sides reminded Oz of another situation that took place aboard months
before. It was a situation he still believed he handled badly. “This
is two minutes behind,” Oz said as he advanced to the current
moment. The shouting was continuing, and two people were highlighted
in red, indicating that a short-lived physical altercation had taken
place, and a few people in the crowd were keeping them separated.
“Okay, this is escalating and we don’t have time,” Oz told
Victor. “Sedate everyone in Oota Galoona using their medical
monitoring patches, then have a team gently move them to their
quarters. Confine anyone who was recorded committing assault to any
degree to their bunks until we can address every one of them. If it
looks like there will be problems with smaller groups of newcomers, I
want your security people to escort them to quarters. We don’t have
time for any large incidents.”

“How long do you want
me to sedate the crowd in Oota Galoona for?” Victor asked.

“Six hours,” Oz
said. “Let them get a good night’s sleep before they have the
opportunity to volunteer for repair and support crews. If they don’t
volunteer when they wake up, we’ll put them off the ship. No
exceptions.”

“Aye,” Victor
replied.

Oz took the ramp up to
the top level of the bridge, aware that Victor thought his methods
were harsh, but Captain Terry Ozark McPatrick was past the end of his
patience with people who believed they deserved more than they were
getting aboard the Triton. It seemed half the people they recruited
from Tamber over the previous three days expected five star
treatment, or to be put in charge.

Not only was that not
possible, but none of the new recruits had earned any rights to
anything but decent food, good lodgings, and the opportunity at a
rewarding job starting at the bottom of the command ladder. Only
twenty percent had finished a qualification trial of any kind, and
they were placed according to their skills and the levels of loyalty
they exhibited. The training systems aboard were incredible, and most
of the people who finished their first qualifications were astounded
at the world of career opportunities that opened up. The
qualification system was set up like a broad tree chart, and there
was training available for everything within a crewmember’s
aptitude. All the Triton Officers asked was that any crewmember who
took a position served there for at least a month before applying for
another post aboard.

“Under other
circumstances, you would approach that problem differently?” the
voice of Triton asked through Oz’s subdermal communicator.

Oz simply nodded in
response. He hadn’t told most of the crew about the being that
served as the heart and mind of the Triton yet. The time was coming,
but there were still too many new people aboard.

“I’m glad, but I
agree with your methods for the moment. Now for our real problem,”
Triton said. “Navnet is working in the Carthans’ favour.”

Oz took the command
seat in the middle of the bridge and looked to Agameg. The tactical
hologram surrounding the command seating showed exactly what Triton
was telling him. A thick river of ships had been directed between the
Carthan command carrier and the rest of the solar system, making it
impossible for Triton to approach cloaked. “There’s no way we’ll
be able to fire on time with all that in the way,” Oz said.

“By Panloo’s
estimation, we can close to seventy thousand kilometres without
dropping our cloak,” Agameg told him. “Any closer and we risk
several collisions. Our shields will protect us, but the other ships
would be devastated. We will not have a good firing solution on the
carrier.”

“How many of the
ships in the flight pattern between us and the carrier are smaller
Carthan vessels?”

“Only thirty-four
percent – they are obviously creating a screen intentionally while
preserving most of their own smaller ships. Most of the screen is not
armed,” Agameg replied. “I wonder if they know why they’re
being directed there?”

“Probably not. From
what we’ve seen with the Carthans over the last few months, they
don’t have much regard for life past filling manpower needs. How is
our shield regeneration rate?” Oz asked. “Do we still have a
potential overload problem with reactor three?”

“Yes, but the other
reactors are making up for it. The new bypass is active, and we can
regenerate our entire deflection shield from zero in just over six
seconds. Refraction and cloak shielding are not a problem.”

Oz shook his head and
smiled. “I can’t believe what you’ve accomplished in two days,
Agameg.”

“I regret not being
able to fully re-establish power to the gunnery deck. If I knew we
would be going into a fight today, I would have it finished for you.”

Oz checked the torpedo
load status and was more than pleased. All five of the missile
turrets were loaded with the ordinance he requested and they were as
ready as they could be, considering the timing. The command carrier
they were targeting had a broad centre with hundreds of shield
emitters. The main thruster section at the aft of the ship splayed
out like four fingers, and at the fore the main launch bays mirrored
the pattern. “That ship is in good shape, I’m surprised their
taking it into the fight at all,” Oz said as he examined the enemy
vessel’s shield profile for any weakness. A message came in from
the main hangar, informing him that the collision shuttles were ready
well ahead of schedule. He was amazed at how fast the crew who
returned to Triton from Haven Shore only days ago resumed their old
duties. Triton’s operating crew was back over two thousand seven
hundred, nowhere near ideal, but better than it had been in months.