Battlecruiser Alamo: The Price of Admiralty (22 page)

"You'll get a chance to admire it for a while. In flight," Grainger said, as he climbed into the pilot's cabin, taking the co-pilot's seat. Forbes moved forward, opening the door to the rear compartment, and the guards gestured them in, the last to climb into the passenger section and take their seats, being careful to keep their guns in reach while Forbes strapped everyone down, taking the jump seat for himself. There was a loud roar from underneath them, thrusters firing to push them to altitude before the main engines engaged. A few seconds of that, and all of them were pushed back into their seats as the acceleration began.

"Sergeant?" Esposito said.

"Yes, ma'am?" Hunter replied, turning his head.

"Now!"

In unison, the two of them snapped open their bonds and engaged the emergency release; there were several instants where the guards might have taken a shot, but they both hesitated; using those weapons in a confined space was generally a poor idea, particularly where a pressure hull was the target in the event of a miss.

While Esposito lunged down to the rear of the cabin, Hunter slipped his blowgun out of his pocket, sending one of the guards into instant unconsciousness with a swift blow. Esposito hit the other one on the chin, with Forbes crashing his fist down hard on the back of his neck, knocking him to the deck.

"So you are on our side? I did wonder," Esposito said.

Orlova had struggled loose of her bonds, and raced over to the emergency lock. "You want out, we have to hurry." She pulled open the compartment, and started to pass out parachutes.

"Are you mad? We've got to be passing the speed of sound by now?" A loud bang confirmed Hunter's suspicions.

"We can't get into the pilot's cabin from here, but he can do fun things to us like turn off the life support." There was a loud bang from outside. "I've activated the emergency release. Just strap in the parachute and prepare for the ride of a life!"

Without waiting for the others, she followed her own advice, clipping the parachute to a bracket above the airlock door. Four more clicks came home, and she slammed her fist on the manual override, opening both doors at once. The cord swung her down the long pole that had extended along the outside of the shuttle, catapulting her fifty feet from the door as the shuttle continued to fly away. The mechanism catapulted the others close to her, though close was relative in these circumstances. They'd probably end up miles apart, but at least they were free.

She looked down, seeing Ragnarok laid out beneath her; their breakout had taken only a few seconds, but in that time they'd crossed almost the entire length of the inhabited part of the moon. The chute would open at a safe altitude; right now she was in free fall, the ground very slowly rising to meet her.

Free diving had been a popular sport while she'd been taking flight training on Mars; there it was very different,
with a
special light spacesuit, and parachutes augmented by a rocket rig that kicked on for the last stages of descent. None of that was needed here, though the biting cold was beginning to affect her.

The seconds raced by as she fell further and further, until finally the canopy opened, drone chute first to stabilize her, then the main chute to guide her to the final descent. As she'd relied on, these had been adapted for the local conditions, and a survival bag dropped down underneath her on a cord, released as part of the mechanism.

She wrapped her hands around the two control straps, looking for other canopies as they opened nearby; this was going to be her best opportunity to find the others. She could only make out one, out to the north of her, and she started to carefully guide herself in that direction, making the moves as conservatively as she could.

Trying to remember the training she'd had, she braced herself for the fall, bending her knees slightly. With a brief stab of pain, she hit the ground, rolling onto her side to absorb the shock of the impact, then hurriedly separating her canopy. Her first thought was to rush towards her survival bag, tearing out the cold-weather gear and pulling it on over her uniform, then slapping the heating elements on.

She looked up, and spotted the other canopy a few hundred yards to the south; grabbing the bag, she quickly made her way towards it, anxious to make sure that at least one of her comrades had come through that intact. The odds had been rather poorer than she had made out back on the shuttle.

The shuttle! She looked up, and the contrail was still burning up; the pilot had committed to at least a suborbital hop, probably hoping to evade Alamo then come back around. By now he'd have warned the planetary authorities that they had escaped, which meant there was a chance that the ship had some idea of their current whereabouts. She heard the crack as the person landed, then headed to see a grimacing Forbes lying on the ground, rolled onto his back, gasping for breath.

"I've got you covered, Forbes," Orlova said with as much force as she could muster. "Just stay there until the others arrive."

He looked up at her, and laughed, a sound that echoed around the rocks. They'd landed in a small valley, rocks poking through the snow, the translucent ice slippery underfoot. "You've got no-one covered, darlin'. Give an old man a hand up, will ya?"

She started to laugh as well, bracing herself against a rock as she offered him a hand. With a grunt, he pulled himself up, while Orlova disengaged his parachute, the wind immediately tossing it to a side into a tangle of knots and cords.

"You still in one piece?" she asked.

"I think my stomach's about a thousand feet up, but yeah. That was one hell of a ride." He slowly moved over to his survival pack, pulled out a jacket and gloves and placed them on. "I saw a couple of other canopies over there," he gestured with a free hand, "so I suggest we go see."

The two of them climbed to the side of the valley, and saw a trio of figures slowly making their way towards them; two of them seemed to be helping the third, and there was a splatter of red against the white snow.

"Damn, that's going to slow us down," Forbes said.

Orlova waved her hand, and started to make her way down the other side of the hill in long, loping bounds, Forbes following behind. As she drew closer, she saw that it was Esposito and Hunter helping Jennings, who looked more embarrassed than hurt. They set the crewman down on the ground, panting for breath.

"Maggie, don't do that again!" Esposito said.

"I figured you must have done some jump training at some point," Orlova said. "Sorry, Jennings."

Jennings grunted, "My own stupid fault."

Esposito turned to Forbes, "An explanation would be nice. Not that I'm complaining, but if I'm going to trust you, I'd better know why."

"I didn't think they'd arrest you. I thought they'd try and get you on side, and that you might offer us a better deal than the Loonies. I know that we're being played by them – hell, Haynes knows it too, he just didn't think he had a choice at the time. The Loonies turned us from a gang of rogues into a fighting force, but the price is too damn high."

Jennings shivered in the cold, "What do we do next, Ensign?"

"Our top priority is a communications relay so we can contact Alamo. Then we need to see what we can do about the rest of the squad, and the prisoners."

Forbes shook his head, "Forget the squad for the moment. That shuttle's a hundred miles away. I know a safe house about three miles out, got some transport for the sergeant. The young hothead here," he waved a thumb at Orlova, "can come with me if you like, then I'll send someone for the rest of you."

"No tricks, this time?"

The prospector looked up at the sky, gesturing at the shuttle's slowly dissipating contrail, "I could have screwed you up just by staying in the warm, couldn't I? Why would I betray you now?"

"You've got a point."

Chapter 19

The senior staff were sitting around the table in the briefing room, looking at each other with poorly-disguised suspicion, a mood that the two espatiers standing at attention by the door did nothing to foster. Caine was fixated on Zakharova and Dietz; the former was returning the look, jotting down notes on a datapad.

The room had two empty chairs; Esposito, still down on the moon's surface, and Marshall. No-one spoke; it wasn't necessary. That much hostility didn't need words to communicate. Finally, the door slid open and Marshall walked in, the espatiers saluting as he passed. He returned the salute and stopped
on the threshold
.

"I thought the custom was for junior officers," he stressed the word junior, "to stand to attention when the commanding officer enters the room in a non-critical situation?"

Dietz and Caine got to their feet first, followed by Mulenga. Zakharova was the last, flashing an insolent look at him as she rose. Without a word, Marshall walked around the room and sat down in his chair, looking around at his officers.

"Be seated." He turned to his security officer, "Mr. Tyler, I gather from this report that you have still failed to determine the identity of the person who tried to kill myself and Senior Lieutenant Mulenga three hours ago?"

The young officer's face flushed red, and he nodded, "I'm sorry, sir."

"Mr. Quinn, have you any thoughts on the subject?"

Quinn looked up from a datapad he was busily browsing, and looked around the table. "Whoever did it had familiarity with the ship's systems, they knew the quirks and foibles of the ship."

"This ship does not have foibles, Lieutenant," Dietz said, a harsh tone in his voice."

Marshall shot him a look, then turned back to his engineer, "Continue, please, Mr. Quinn."

"As I was saying, they knew the ins and outs of the ship, and they had engineering clearance. That narrows it down to about twenty people, including all of us in this room."

Zakharova sneered, "That narrows it down to a fifth of the ship's company. Brilliant."

"Ordinarily I could narrow it down for you using workstation logs and the like, but someone managed to throw a scrambler program into the work logs." The engineer pushed the datapad he was looking at across the table to the Executive Officer. "I'm sure the computer techs would greatly value your input, Lieutenant. We've spent most of the last three hours trying to unravel it."

The engineer had done a good job of masking his sarcasm; Marshall could hardly detect it, "Don't we have safeguards on our systems?"

"Those are non-critical systems. They're only really used to assess workstation use profiles for maintenance scheduling. Not much of our protection is focused there."

"Then I suggest, Lieutenant, that you implement increased protection. Do your job rather than talking about it," Zakharova said, the sneer growing across her face as if she had won a point in a game.

Anger seeped into Quinn's tone as he stood up, his chair sliding back across the floor. "Where the hell do you want me to take software protection from? Tactical systems or life support? We have a finite amount of processing power, Lieutenant, and there are reasons why it is concentrated where it is. Damn it, it isn't even on the same network, it's dumped down in the file access sub-net."

"That's enough, Lieutenant. Consider yourself...," Zakharova began.

"That is it!" Marshall yelled, slamming his hands on the desk hard enough to shake the objects on it. "You are both senior officers. If you can't act that way, get out of here. Your transfer will be waiting for you in your cabin."

Quinn looked down at the table, shaking his head, and said in a quiet voice, "I'm sorry, Captain." Words rather carefully chosen.

"My apologies, Captain." Zakharova looked as if she was about to add another remark, but instead chose to keep her silence.

"This isn't exactly the first mission I'd wanted. If the saboteurs were out to cause maximum disruption to this ship, then by putting us all at each other's throats, they have succeeded."

Caine nodded, "It's spreading across the crew, as well. I'm catching people making all sorts of remarks when they don't think anyone is listening. Enough that if I acted on them half our personnel would be on report." She looked around the table. "If we push our security restrictions any tighter, then everything is just going to get worse. Look at us, we're supposed to be senior officers setting a good example to the rest of the crew."

"Increased security is pointless at this time," Dietz said. "There are no guarantees that the crewmen implementing the security procedures are not themselves responsible for the sabotage."

Tyler bristled at that. "If you have any allegations relating to my staff, I'd like to hear them."

"I have no specific allegations to make against any crewman, or I would have already made them."

Marshall raised his hand, "I agree with Mr. Dietz."

"What do they want?" Mulenga asked, almost to himself.

"To wreck the mission, obviously," Zakharova responded. "Knocking out enough of the senior staff would do that, not to mention damaging the ship."

"Specifically, though? Most of their actions are not designed to do anything other than inspire terror and cause us to implement greater security precautions. That's having a bad effect on our efficiency."

"You think that it's a diversion from something else? A terror campaign?"

The astrogator nodded, "That is precisely my analysis. The saboteurs are trying to goad us into either leaving the system, or weaken us for an encounter with the frigates."

Marshall stood up, walking over to the wall, then turned to face the room. "Your assessment, Lieutenant Caine?"

That did not please his executive officer; she glared red at not being immediately consulted. Caine smiled a little at her discomfort, then replied, "I think I agree. And I know what you are about to say."

Zakharova, almost through gritted teeth, turned in her chair to face Marshall, "For those of us who are not benefited with such insight into your thoughts?"