Event Horizon (Hellgate) (28 page)

“You’re not going to see that many,” Rodman warned. “Ten pods … fourteen. Eighteen … no more.” She was too busy to look up. “That’s maybe 140, 150 survivors. A lot of the rest will still be aboard, in armor.”

“Hey – watch the
Tabriz
!” Hubler’s voice cut like a knife. “She’s got power – she’s coming about, goddamn it.”

She was a cruiser, three times the size of the frigates with a crew of around 500 and power an order of magnitude greater than a ship like the
Horme
. Vidal was there at once, hands flying over the instrument surfaces. “Got it. Asako, punch a comm line through the blackout, and make it fast.”

Three seconds, four, five, dragged like hours before Rodman said, “You’re on the air.”

Vidal pressed the combug more firmly into his ear. “Commander
Tabriz
, this is
Kiev
Ops. Leave it alone. Don’t make it worse.” He looked over his shoulder, directly at Rusch. “Who am I talking to?”

“That’s Colonel Piotr van
Meerkerk
… and you’re wasting your breath, Michael.” Rusch came to the tank and glared into the display, where the cruiser was wallowing around to present her forward guns. “They could hurt us,” she warned.

“They could, if we sat here and let them do it,” Vidal muttered. “Roark!”

“Aragos are ramped and interleaved,” Hubler assured him.

“Colonel van
Meerkerk
, do everybody a favour and leave it alone,” Vidal invited in a steely tone, but van
Meerkerk
did not even deign to respond. Vidal repeated the warning a third time before he sighed, a hiss through his teeth, and stroked the fire controls again.

He raked the dorsal surfaces of the
Tabriz
with every railgun the
Kiev
possessed – bigger cannons, firing heavier ordnance, than the
Tabriz
could muster. The cruiser staggered, Arago fields overloading under the onslaught. Vidal’s target was one specific point on the hull, and both Marin and Travers groaned as they saw what he was doing.

He had targeted the most heavily armored point on the cruiser’s spine, and the
Kiev
had the power to take the prize surgically. Cocooned in that armor were the Ops room, the flightdeck, the AI core. He was playing a shrewd hunch, Marin knew – that the suicidal attack on the super-carrier was the business of a small group of hardline Confederation loyalists. Eliminate them, and the crew of the
Tabriz
would be grateful to walk away from this encounter.

The cruiser’s Arago fields were powerful enough to put a critical drain on the ship’s power. She lumbered, began to list as sublight engines went intermittent, and her starboard cannons opened up on the
Kiev
for just moments before the Arago generators overcooked and shut down. Unimpeded, the broadside from Vidal’s railguns battered into the ship’s spine, and a crater opened where Ops and flightdeck had been.

The AI went offline, and as Marin and Travers watched, escape pods began to blow out along the dorsal section of the cruiser’s hull. The lower decks would be safe enough as armordoors slammed, sealed, to close off the damage, and the distress calls issuing from the
Tabriz
were entirely human.

“Their AI’s not coming back up,” Rodman reported. “She’s finished … but I’m seeing energy signatures off the
Santa Marta
you’re not going to like.”

She was another cruiser, wallowing like a pig in mud beyond the wreckage of the
Horme
and the hulk of the
Bilbao,
where a smattering of data indicated localized generators cranking up to manage life support and comm. As the
Bilbao
began to call for help, the
Santa Marta
swung around in weird slow motion to present her starboard cannons, and again Vidal swore bitterly.

“Don’t waste your breath,” Rusch advised. “That’s Colonel Vanessa
Fourneau
… she’ll fight to the last drop of her crew’s blood. This one traces her ancestry right back to some tallship captain at Trafalgar.”

“And you have a clear shot, Mick,” Hubler said harshly.

“Don’t waste it,” Marin whispered more to himself than to Vidal.

Vidal had no intention of wasting the opportunity. The vidfeed overloaded with sun-bright tracer as railguns and chain guns scythed through the cruiser’s Arago fields.
Fourneau
fed so much power to the Aragos that her engines went dark and cannons were inoperable – anything to hold off the broadside.

“Shit,” Hubler muttered, “
shit
shit
, you
seein
’ what I’m
seein
’?”

The
Kiev
’s port side railguns were starting to show overheat warnings. Vidal had noticed this in the same moment as Hubler. His face was taut as he touched his combug. “Carrier pilot, acknowledge.”

The voice belonged to a woman, not a young woman, and thick with the accent of Lushiar. Marin grinned wolfishly at Travers as he imagined a tiny Lushi woman, smaller than Bill Grant or Tonio Teniko, and older than both of them combined, with the power of the super-carrier under her bare hands. “I hear you, Mick.”

So Vidal knew her – Marin was not surprised. “Roll her over, Bernice,” he said tersely. “Fast as you can, bring the starboard guns to bear.”

“Doing it right now.” A certain glee stitched through the pilot’s voice.

“Bernice Fong,” Rusch said quietly. “One of the best in the business. Hold on, now.”

Collision alarms shouted through the ship, but it was a matter of regulation. The
Kiev
rolled like a porpoise, and with the exception of a momentary weird sensation in the pit of his belly, a certain conviction of his inner ear that the deck had fallen out from under his feet, Marin felt nothing much. The big ship stabilized, and as fresh guns came to bear Vidal’s fingers dove back for the triggers.

Just as he hit them, the comm began to scream. “
Kiev
Ops,
Kiev
Ops, hold your fire!
Kiev
Ops, this is
Santa Marta –
cease fire. This is the
Santa Marta
, standing down.” The signal was so distorted, it was impossible to tell if a man or woman was speaking.

“Who is that?” Vidal angled a hard look at Rusch. “Not
Fourneau
?”

“No. It could be her XO, Roy Griffiths.”

“Colonial?” Vidal wondered.

“From Jagreth.” Rusch touched her combug. “Is this Major Griffiths?”

A blast of static white noise, then: “Yes. Is – is that Colonel Rusch? You’re alive, you’re back? Is it a mutiny on the
Kiev
? Just hold your fire!”

“This is Rusch,” she told him as comm interference settled down. “Where’s Colonel
Fourneau
?”

“At gunpoint.”
Griffiths’s
voice broke. “Is it mutiny on the
Kiev
, ma’am? We’re under your guns – we have sublight, but not enough power to run, and if we show you our tail, you’ll put a bloody missile in our sterntubes and we’re dog meat. The
Santa Marta
is stood down. Repeat, the
Santa Marta
has powered down.”

“Well, good for you,” Vidal said into the loop. “Put your colonel somewhere safe, and pull the plug on your Weimanns. Stay right where you are. Acknowledge.”

“Copy that,” Griffiths said breathlessly. “The
Santa Marta
is under my command. Are we – is this a fleet-wide mutiny?”

“Hold your position, Major,” Rusch said firmly. “You’ll be briefed regarding the situation earliest possible, like every other commander.”

Marin’s eyes were cutting broad swathes through the navtank, making sense of the chaos of information. Markers had been pinned to the ship icons, denoting which were dead in space, which were wreckage – which, like the
Santa Marta
, had changed their colors.
Phaeton,
Elpis
, Durban, Livorno, Bilbao,
Horme
, Tabriz
, the
Santa Marta
herself, were all tagged as inactive.

Just two remained unaccounted for, and Marin had already seen them. Travers moved around for a better view into the tank, and made a bass sound of scorn. “It’s a couple of frigates – the
Arke
and the
Circe
... with just enough sublight capability to limp away.”

“They’ll be scrambling to get Weimanns online,” Hubler warned. “They’re holding a vector across the system, and they’re dead slow. Five minutes, minimum, before they reach the Weimann exclusion limit.”

“If they wait that long.” Vidal flexed his hands. “Do we know who’s in command on those ships?” His brows arched at Rusch.

He was asking, might hardline and furious Confederate officers seize an opportunity to punish the
Kiev
and even Omaru itself with the noxious fallout from a Weimann ignition, inside the safe distance limit. The shower of hard radiation was potentially lethal to all life. Marin knew enough about it to make his blood run cold – the breakdown of DNA, cancers, cellular mutation. The Weimann drive made an evil weapon. In the two centuries of its development history, it had not yet been used to crush or punish an enemy, but inevitably there must be a first time. And there was no more likely time and place for it to happen, he thought with an icy sense of foreboding, than in the Deep Sky and at the endgame of a battle which the Confederacy was losing.
Had lost.

“Carrier pilot,” Vidal called softly.

“Yo.” Bernice Fong must have been waiting for this.

“Plot me a vector to cut them off,” Vidal said in an ominously quiet tone. “Roark, standby tractors.”

The
Kiev
had power reserves comparable to the
Wastrel
, and Marin knew what Vidal was up to. Rusch and Shapiro stood back, content to merely observe as the carrier drove away in the wake of the fleeing frigates.

The AI had edited the battle group data into one brief, coherent bottom line, and Travers’s mouth compressed as he read it. The cruiser
Livorno
and the frigate
Phaeton
were signaling surrender, and in both cases it was a junior officer calling frantically over the comm with pleas for the
Kiev
to cease fire, garbled accounts of officers at gunpoint. Those ships were critically disabled, with AIs begging to be towed to dock facilities. A lieutenant on the
Livorno
was swearing by several gods from Earth’s subcontinent that his crew would be glad to jettison the cruiser’s main gun batteries, if the
Kiev
did not trust their oath of surrender.

Alexis Rusch wore a weary, relieved expression as she fielded the call. “Who is this?”

“Lieutenant Takagi.” He paused to find his breath. “I’m just the head of the Arago team ma’am, the command corps is under arrest – don’t fire on us. No one on this ship wanted to attack the
Kiev
.”

“Who’s your senior officer
not
in custody, Lieutenant?” She was leaning on the side of the tank, studying the plot of crippled and drifting ships.

“That would be Captain of Engineers
Dreyfuss
– but she’s trying to bring one of the reactors online, ma’am. There’s no power, the storage cells melted down. We’ve got life support for a few hours, but it’s already getting cold in here. Engineer
Dreyfuss
is asking for a tow to the Fleet docks, soonest possible.”

The dockyards orbited high above the pole of Omaru, and since the engagement began the crew there had been shouting for information. The facility was only lightly armed and armored since it depended on the battle group for defense. By now, every man and woman there knew they were under the guns of mutineers, and Marin realized they must be terrified for their very lives.

“The docks can’t handle this load,” Shapiro said quietly. “They’re already working on the
Aldgate
and several smaller ships.”

“You expected this.” Travers’s brow creased as he looked up through the mauve threedee haze at Shapiro.