Battlecruiser Alamo_Depth Charge Read online

 “Is this a bad time?” Foster asked, sticking her head through the curtain, throwing the light from the ship beyond into the cramped cockpit.

   “Come and have a seat,” Salazar said, his eyes remaining on the controls. “I’m just trying to get the feel of the beast, as best I can. Which is far from easy given the circumstances. We’re guessing about far more details than I feel really comfortable with, but I don’t think we’ve got much of a choice.” Glancing at his watch, he added, “Unless there’s been a change nobody told me about, we’re scheduled to depart in twenty-four hours.”

   Looking at the simulation report, she asked, “Why aren’t you working through any malfunction tests?”

   “If it’s a problem with the lifesystem, I can probably fix it based on what I know already. If it’s anything else, I’m dead. We’re having trouble getting everything else to work, and once I hit the water, there’s no way for me to leave the ship. I’m working on the assumption that she’ll hold together long enough for me to pull this off and get back again.” He smiled, and added, “You should have been here for the parachute tests. I’m pretty sure I can hit the target, but we won’t know until we get down to the surface.” Gesturing at the screen, he added, “All of this is just extrapolation. Anything might be down there.”

   “Who are you taking with you?” she asked.

   “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about that yet. Bartlett, maybe, or Harper.”

   “What about me?”

   “Are you volunteering?”

   “I guess I am,” she said, sliding into the seat next to him. “You said yourself that there isn’t much point taking an engineer along, and both of the others are more valuable here than they would be on the surface. I’m expendable.”

   “I’m not,” he replied, a smile on his face. “Between you and me, I’m rather hoping to get through this in one piece. This isn’t a suicide mission. Quinn and his team are putting together one hell of a ship.” He paused, then corrected, “Boat. Apparently, you call them boats. I was reading about them last night in my cabin, watched a couple of old films.”

   “You’re looking forward to this, aren’t you,” she said.

   “Hell yes! I haven’t had this much fun in months, and this is precisely what I came into the service for in the first place. I get to fly, drive, whatever, something that nobody in the Confederation has ever flown before, and I get to explore an alien world, be the first one to go under the ice down here. We’ve got no decent sensor analysis of the land down there, and we only know that it is strange, mysterious, and that alien beings visited the world long ago and left something behind for us to find. And I’m going to see it for myself, first-hand.” Turning to Foster, he asked, “What about you? Why do you want to go?”

   “Maybe I feel the same way you do.”

   “No, you don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s different. You want this to be your career, can see yourself sitting center seat on a starship in a decade or two. Me, I’m a born tourist. If someone gives me a job to do, I’ll take it, and I certainly won’t turn down a command if one turns up, but I’m just as happy as Security Officer.”

   “I’ll do a good job, Pavel. You know that. I’m a good pilot in my own right, and I took that under-ice tour as well. And unlike you, I got to take the controls.”

   “How the hell did you manage that?” he asked.

   “My parents and I took it. Second honeymoon, but they took me along for the ride. We had a month out at Saturn, going from one moon to another, doing the tourist thing.” She smiled, and said, “We were the only ones on the submarine that time, and Dad arranged for me to sit up with the pilot. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.” She paused, then said, “Don’t tell anyone this, but I wanted his job for a long time.”

   “In that case...”

   Raising her hands, she said, “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not out to take your place. Just to go along for the ride. You’re a better pilot than I am, and I’m happy to take right seat on this one.”

   He paused, then said, “I don’t buy it.” Turning back to the controls, he said, “Thule.”

   She frowned, replying, “Damn, Pavel.”

   “Am I right? Because I said at the time that you don’t owe me anything. You’d have done the same for me down there, and I was glad to do it. If it mended some fences between us, that’s fine, but what I did was no more than any shipmate would do.”

   Taking a deep breath, she said, “I used to hate your guts, Pavel. After what happened at Flight School, the whole class did.”

   “I know,” he replied, his face darkening.

   “Let me finish, please.”

   He nodded, then said, “Go on.”

   “We’d condemned you, sentenced you in our minds, not even worrying about all the facts.” She looked around, and added, “I worked like hell to get this posting, Pavel. All of us did. We all wanted to be on one of the battlecruisers, one of the flagships of the Fleet, but Alamo was something special, something beyond the norm. The ship that first reached Ragnarok, Jefferson. The ship that fought the Cabal.”

   “And when I got the job...”

   “It felt like I’d been slapped in the face. That just made it worse.” She looked at him, and said, “I was wrong. We all were, but I can only speak for myself. We thought you were the worst of us, but you’re the best of us all, even if you don’t know it. All you’ve got to do is get rid of that willingness to throw your life away for your people, and you’re going to be an outstanding officer. You say that you see me commanding a starship in ten, twenty years?”

   “I think so.”

   “I hope you’re right, and that’s certainly what I’m working towards, but I’m increasingly aware that I’m not the first member of my class that’s going to make it. You will. And I’m comfortable with that, because you damn well deserve it. There are a lot of people on this ship who would follow you to hell, who would take a running dive into a black hole if you ordered them, because they trust you, they believe in you.” Shaking her head, she added, “And you don’t even know that, do you?”

   “I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly special to engender such trust.”

   “Don’t be a damned fool. You should hear Lombardo and Bartlett talking about you sometimes. Most of the crew feel the same way. You’re a good officer, Pavel, and a good leader, and maybe I want to make amends for everything I said and thought before, and maybe I want to learn from you, and maybe, just maybe, I think that this is going to be an amazing adventure, and that with you in the driver’s seat, it’s one that I’ll come back from in one piece.”

   Shaking his head, Salazar said, “I’d love to meet this guy you’re talking about sometime.”

   “Try looking in the mirror. I’m quite serious, Pavel.”

   “They were right,” he replied.

   “Who were?”

   “All of the people at the Academy. I should have been thrown out of the service for what I did. I was stupid, and some good people died because of it. People I should have done better for than I did. I don’t have any real excuse. We can talk about training deficiencies, and we can say that others should have done things that they didn’t, and to an extent, they might even be right, but at the end of the day, I was arrogant, I was stupid, and people died. People who I called friend, people I was responsible for.” His eyes remained locked on the viewscreen, and he said, “So don’t get to feeling bad about what you thought back then. I agreed with you. And I still do.”

   “But...”

   “That doesn’t mean I can’t come to peace with it. Those men are dead, and there’s nothing I can do to bring them back. All it means is that I’m going to do everything I can to make up for what I did, and I’m going to make damned sure that nobody else dies because of something I do wrong. No matter what it takes, even if it means sacrificing my own life to do it.” He turn
ed to her, and said, “I don’t aspire to anything other than what I am, and if I’m still Security Officer of this ship in ten years, that’s fine with me.”

   “It’s far more likely that you’ll end up commanding her,” she replied. She paused, and added, “What’s going on with you and Harper, by the way?”

   “Oh?”

   “Come on, you can tell me. I’m not going to go running to the Captain. Not that I think she’d mind much if she knew. She’d probably cheer the two of you on.”

   Salazar’s face reddened, and he replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

   “Whatever you say, Pavel,” she said with a smile. “Whatever you say.” She looked at her watch, and said, “It’s almost thirteen-hundred. What say we hit the mess for lunch, then come back and run the simulation again. Maybe throw in a few malfunctions just to keep it interesting.”

   “Sounds like a plan,” he said, tapping a control to bring the simulation to a close. “I’m with you.”

   She made for the door, then replied, “Maybe we’d better make sure the Captain doesn’t have a problem with me going along.”

   “I doubt it,” Salazar said. “I already requested you, and she approved about half an hour ago. I was going to come get you after lunch, actually.”

   “Then everything I just said...”

   He shrugged as the simulator lights darkened, and replied, “I was kinda interested in just why you were willing to volunteer. And I wanted to make sure that you were doing it for the right reasons, rather than just a sense of duty. That’ll carry you so far, but no further.”

   “How the hell did you get so damned smart?”

   “Try facing the firing squad a few times. You learn quickly, or you don’t learn at all.”

  Chapter 13

   Cooper shivered, despite his heated uniform, looking out at the icy wilderness surrounding their temporary camp. Behind him, a dozen people worked, all but him wearing technician’s uniforms, most of them ill-fitting. Given the danger of the situation, he’d demanded that the entire ground force should be Espatiers, and that they should all be fitted on a single shuttle. Anything more than that was taking too great a risk with the lives of untrained personnel.

   The problem was that none of them had a good idea of what they were doing. Surviving in arctic terrain was one skill that the Espatier Corps had mastered, months of training in the snow-laden wilderness of Ragnarok now standard, but none of them had been trained on the equipment they were struggling to use, and a constant stream of increasingly-frustrated messages were flooding their communications from the harried technicians on Alamo, using ever-more-basic techniques to describe the setup procedures involved.

   Sergeant Gurung could handle that. He was more concerned with the three contacts on the horizon, infra-red points darting around in the distance. He glanced down at his watch, a frown spreading across his face. They were only monitoring him, watching their progress, and their camouflage was good enough that they wouldn’t have any idea what they were actually doing, but they were well within the blast radius of the nuclear charge they intended to detonate within the next half hour.

   He pulled out his datapad, his gloved fingers sliding across the slick touchscreen, and his frown only grew as he read the incoming data stream. The submersible was almost ready, up on Alamo, the shuttles preparing for launch under the command of his wife. As far as they could tell, the UN installation was on the verge of breaking through the ice, ready to launch its craft into the abyss below. They didn’t have any time to delay, couldn’t risk postponing the operation.

   Nor could they risk killing three UN soldiers. This operation was hazardous enough as it was, but if he read Colonel Clarke right, he’d launch an attack on Alamo to avenge his dead, no matter that they’d intruded into hastily-claimed Triplanetary territory. He looked down at the datapad again, his trained eyes roaming over the terrain, then walked back over to his men, currently in the process of ineptly setting up a sampling drill.

   “Sergeant,” he said, the stout figure of Gurung moving over to him with a grin.

   “Not that good, are they, sir,” he replied. “We’ll get it together in time.”

   “No, we won’t,” he said. “I want a distraction, something nice and big, and I need it right away. Is there anything you can do to make the drill blow up, something like that?”

   “You’re going to visit our friends out there,” he replied. “We’re going to be hurting on time, sir, and once that shuttle flotilla launches, there’s no going back.”

   “I can be out there in five minutes, Sergeant. I’ll take Rhodes along for the ride.”

   “Just one other man, sir?”

   “If this goes wrong, if we don’t make it back, I want to keep the casualties to a minimum. Under no circumstances are you to attempt any sort of a rescue mission. I want that clear. As soon as we hit the deadline, get onto the shuttle and get back to the ship on the double. That’s an order.”

   “I understand, sir,” Gurung said. He looked over the equipment, and said, “What about the lox tanks? They’d make one hell of a bang if they ruptured.”

   “Sounds like a plan,” Cooper replied. “Just make sure not to break anything we actually need, and make it look as impressive as possible. Give the two of us sixty seconds to get into the fissures.” He glanced over at Rhodes, walking towards him, pistol in hand, “You ready, Private?”

   “Good to go, sir. You sure we don’t want to take plasma rifles with us?”

   “Come on, Rhodes,” Gurung said. “Bad enough that your body’s radiating heat, but they’d be able to pick up the emissions from a plasma rifle from orbit.” Turning back to Cooper, he said, “Good luck, sir.”

   “Thanks, Sergeant.” Gesturing at the trooper, he said, “Come on. We’ve got to move quickly if we’re going to get to those bastards in time. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot to kill. We’re trying to save their lives, not end them.”

   The two men ducked into a crack in the ice, crouching low, one that would take them at least close to their target. They raced along the slippery surface, the heat from their suits melting puddles into the ice with every step they took, moving as quickly and stealthily as they could across the terrain. The enemy troops were a mile away; in the low gravity of this world, that was just about realistic in the time they had left.

   They had to reach them quickly. Had to get to them before Alamo launched its shuttles, or they’d be on the alert. Detonation was twenty-eight minutes away, but they’d need at least ten of those to get to a safe distance. Eighteen minutes to reach the enemy troops, capture them, and get them back to the shuttle. Which would then be overloaded, but for a single, quick hop across the sky, that might not matter. They should still be able to get to orbit, and Alamo could always send a tanker to pick them up. Assuming Kolchak didn’t intervene, but with hostages on board, that seemed less likely.

   Hostages. The word was distasteful. The idea of taking prisoners to use as human shields was abhorrent, but they’d brought no fast transport of their own with them. If he didn’t snatch them from the snow, then they were as good as dead anyway. And so was he, if they didn’t get clear in time. That thought urged him on, to greater speed, as behind him, a mighty crack rent the air, a column of steam soaring into the sky as the tanks of liquid oxygen ruptured. Any observer would see a disaster in progress. Certainly it would provide the distraction they needed to press their attack home.

   The crack turned around, twisting to the left, leaving them with a hundred yards of open ground to cover. He paused for a second, getting a good look at the terrain ahead, at the three soldiers kneeling behind carefully prepared cover, periscopes high as they examined the battered Triplanetary camp. They’d evidently walked here from their own base, forty miles distant, the better to cover their approach. It had almost worked; he hadn’t detected them until they were right on top of them. If they hadn’t
already been running a deception play, they’d have been caught easily.

   He glanced across at Rhodes, and raised his pistol, gesturing at the landscape ahead. They’d only have one chance to make this work, and it meant sacrificing any attempt at stealth. They simply didn’t have the time for anything other than a mad chase.

   “Now,” he hissed, jumping out of cover and sprinting towards the trio of surprised troopers, while Rhodes fired three quick shots in support, biting into the endless ice and sending shards raining into the air. One of the soldiers reached for his rifle, but Cooper was an instant faster, his bullet slamming into the barrel of the gun with a precisely aimed shot that knocked it from his hands.

   “Nice, sir,” Rhodes said, as Cooper leveled his pistol on his prisoners.

   “Hold it right there,” he said. “Drop your weapons, or I will end you.”

   “And start a war.”

   “Believe it or not, I’m trying to save your life.” He peered at the nearest figure, and said, “Ah, Lieutenant Monroe.”

   “If you release us right now,” she said, “then I won’t mention this in my report, and we can...”

   “Boss,” Gurung said, “We’ve got a problem. A big one. Kolchak has changed its orbit, dropped down a lot lower than we’d expected. That’s going to put them overhead in less than five minutes, and in a perfect position for an orbital bombardment. I doubt they’ll do it if we stay, but...”

   “But if we don’t, then they’ll blow the site from space before we can detonate the bomb, and make enough of a mess that we’ll never crack the ice.”

   “You’ve planted a bomb down here?” Monroe asked, her eyes widening. “A nuclear charge?”

   “One that was going to detonate in twenty-three minutes,” Cooper said. “Sergeant, contact Alamo, and tell them that we’re advancing the detonation time.” He ran through trajectory plots in his head, deploying half-remembered formula to work out how long they had. “Nine minutes. If they launch right now, then they’ll be able to get down before any missiles from Kolchak can hit. As soon as you’ve done that, get onto the shuttle and get the hell out of here. That’s an order.”