Traitor's Duty Read online

   “It’s so useless, though. We’re in the right, dammit. Constitutionally, legally, morally…”

   “I’d question the latter,” she said. “I doubt the people of the Confederation will welcome a war of conquest.”

   “Interesting,” the Commandant said. “I appear to be getting a unique viewpoint into the decision-making processes at the highest levels of your government. I had no idea you were such a key figure, Lieutenant. Our intelligence division will need considerable instruction.”

   Looking across at him with a sneer, Tarrant said, “I wouldn’t worry, Commandant. You’ve got minutes left to live. Just another loose end to tie up.”

   “Is this morality, Tarrant? Killing people to tie up loose ends? Like you did on Carter Station?”

   “I have no compunction about killing enemies of the people, Maggie, and while you wear that uniform, neither should you.”

   Taking a step back, she said, “This uniform is not a license for murder. If that’s what you think it is, you have no business wearing it.”

   With a deep sigh, he replied, “All of this is rather academic. My guards are on the way down as soon as they’ve disabled your smoke bombs, and we’ll all be going into custody. You will he charged with the murder of the Commandant, and we have some very effective special effects people working on the footage now.”

   “And presumably I will be killed while attempting escape.”

   “Treason carries the death penalty.”

   “Another loose end for you to tie up, then.”

   “It doesn’t have to be that way, Maggie,” he said, gesturing at the Commandant. “He can be the one who dies while attempting escape. It works just as well either way.”

   She shook her head, and said, “That’s not how it’s going to be, Tarrant. You’re going to let the two of us walk out of here, without attempting to stop us.”

   “Why would I do that?”

   “Because those smoke bombs I planted are of a rather special design. They double as signal boosters, and right now every word we’ve said is being transmitted to a friend of mine in another location.” Smiling, she continued, “Unless you want this conversation to be live on every news broadcast in the system, I suggest you reconsider your actions.”

   “You’re bluffing.”

   Shrugging, she said, “The collapse of the Confederation won’t affect me very much if I’m dead, and I suspect that the Commandant would be willing to die for his country.”

   “Speaking as one who has been on the receiving end of the Lieutenant’s remarkable talent for deception before,” the Commandant volunteered, “I would suggest that you do exactly as she says. I would like some fresh air, in any case.”

   “All of this to help an enemy prisoner escape.”

   “Look carefully at your own motives before questioning mine.” She gestured over at the Commandant, who rose to his feet in response and started to make his way over to her, standing by her side.

   “Last chance to change your mind about this, Maggie,” Tarrant said, his gun not wavering by a millimeter. “Don’t force me to do something I’d regret.”

   “Why do you care so damn much?” she asked.

   “Because, my dear Lieutenant,” the Commandant said, “You are one of only two officers to have defeated Cabal forces in battle, and he isn’t quite sure of the rest of his brethren. From my own personal experience, military coups are generally not led by the top caliber of the officer corps; those are more interested in protecting their country than destroying it.”

   “We’re trying to save it, dammit!” he yelled, and his gun twitched across for a split second. Long enough for Orlova to fire, ducking to the ground as the echo reverberated through the corridor. He crumpled to the floor and she raced up to him taking his pulse.

   “Dead?” the Commandant asked.

   “Stunned. Taser charge. Something we’ve been working on.”

   “You appear to have access to some rather advanced equipment for a rebel on the run.”

   “Friends in low places. We can stand here discussing this all day if you want, but I think we should consider getting out of here.”

   “I bow to your superior wisdom in these matters.”

   Stepping over Tarrant’s unconscious form, they raced down the corridor, scrambling up the ladder to ground level. Orlova kept her gun in her hand, and as she reached the top, heard a trio of cracks from above; she peered out to see one of the Ragnarok troopers cautiously making his way inside, disobeying her orders and providing her with backup.

   “Car’s waiting outside, Lieutenant,” he yelled. “We’d better move.”

   “Right, Talbot,” she said. “Commandant, let’s go.”

   She stepped out to bask in purple light, shaking her head; Harper had excelled herself this time, though it was not a trick she ever wanted to repeat. A crowd had gathered outside the building, the noise of the gunshots drawing those whose curiosity overrode their common sense, but she forced her way through the crowd towards the getaway car, scrambling into the passenger seat as Talbot took the controls.

   “Move it!” she yelled, tugging on her seatbelt. This was likely to be a wild ride, and the grin on Talbot’s face confirmed her suspicions as he slammed on the accelerator, just giving the crowd enough time to dive for safety as he raced down the street.

   “What’s the score, Lieutenant?” he asked.

   “We got what we came for. How are things out here?”

   “Harper’s hanging on to finish our daring getaway. I’ve got Fitzroy in position to get her clear at the end. You want to speak?” he replied, tossing her a communicator.

   “Harper, this is Maggie,” Orlova said. “We clear?”

   “Security’s sorting out the mess I made right now. You can expect company inbound any time now, but I don’t think you’ll have too much to worry about once you get outside the dome. Someone seems to have thrown an invasion alert practice into the defense subroutines.”

   “How the hell did you hack into the defense mainframe?”

   “I didn’t have to. It’s a lot easier to hack into the messaging computers, and hell, who’s going to question putting the planet on a higher defense status?”

   “True,” she replied.

   “That and Triplanetary Intelligence taking an extended vacation is making this simple. I haven’t had this much fun in weeks.”

   “I can tell.” The car sped up as it reached the end of the road, the long vehicular airlock up ahead, a tunnel a quarter mile long that would give them ample room for a quick getaway. “Get the doors open.”

   “Wait one.”

   Orlova’s face fell, and she said, “I can’t, Harper!”

   “Estimate twenty seconds to doors,” Talbot yelled. “What do I do?”

   “Working on it, working on it,” Harper muttered. “Someone smart at the other end’s on to me.”

   “Fifteen seconds.”

   The hatch was made of solid metal, and the car was going to make an awful mess when it slammed into it. She could hear sirens from behind, the local security services belatedly responding to their escape.

   “Harper, get that damn hatch open!”

   Finally, reluctantly, the hatch begin to slowly grind open, making a narrow gap just wide enough for the car to glide through, and Talbot adjusted the steering to slide through the gap with just a few sparks on either side where metal scraped against metal, quickly opening up to the familiar corridor beyond, out to the red surface in the distance.

   Behind, the sirens were still sounding, fading away as the pressure dropped while the car raced towards the exit, and the rear door slammed shut, sealing them off as the airlock completed its cycle. The car bounced on the sands as it sped across the desert outside, racing to gain distance before their pursuers could get after them.

   “Unbelievable,” Talbot said. “I don’t see how we
got away with that.”

   “A little luck and a lot of skill,” Orlova said, pulling the communicator up again, “Great work, Harper.”

   “Maggie,” she replied, “That wasn’t me. I was a second from telling you to brake.”

   “If it wasn’t you, then who the hell was it?”

   “I don’t know.”

   “Tarrant,” Orlova said, shaking her head. “Damn me for a fool.”

   “What?” Talbot asked.

   Looking across at him, she said, “Now he’s got me. He knows that I can’t release that footage, not without bringing everything down around our ears, and now I can be charged with aiding and abetting the escape of an enemy prisoner of war. He must have known that I’d come after him.”

   “Why not just capture you?”

   “I’m guessing we’re on his backup plan. Once we got out of the building, I suspect we were home free.” She shook her head, and said, “I don’t like dancing to someone else’s tune.”

   “What now, Maggie?” Harper asked.

   “Get to Site Y, and we’ll make our way from there,” she said. “Let’s just hope no-one else gets there first.”

   “Out of interest,” the Commandant asked, “Where are you taking me?”

   “You have an appointment with the President, sir, and my job is to make sure that you don't miss it.”

  Chapter 6

   Marshall looked at the tactical display on the viewscreen, shaking his head. Two Cabal battlecruisers in any state of repair were enough of a threat to be worried about, but his force was superior in every way to them at present. With two battlecruisers, three scoutships and a fighter squadron to play with, he had all the options a commander would want, and had deployed his strike force accordingly, ready to intercept them.

   This commander had developed a reputation for trickery, but this time, Marshall just couldn’t see what he could be up to. There was a chance that he might vector away, head for the hendecaspace point and leave the system, in which case he would probably just let him go and avoid an unnecessary battle. If he’d wanted to do that, though, he’d had far more options where he was at the planet.

   “I don’t like it either,” Cunningham said, catching his expression. “All of this is just too damn convenient for my liking.”

   “Perhaps we took out their commander in the last battle,” Caine suggested, “and this is someone with less experience.”

   “Then why didn’t he attack sooner?” Marshall replied. “How’s our squadron.”

   “Meshed and ready to go,” she said with a smile. “We ought to be better than we were last time; we’ve had a lot more chances to practice.”

   “Message from Lieutenant-Major Brownworth,” the communications technician said. “Wishes us good luck in the battle ahead.”

   “Acknowledge, Spaceman, and send my thanks and compliments. Nothing from the enemy flotilla?”

   “Thermopylae and I have been calling constantly since they broke orbit, sir, and haven’t picked up any signals at all.”

   “Why’s Frank calling them?” Cunningham asked. “Did you order it?”

   “Ninety seconds to firing range,” Caine said. “Kelso, keep us in tight formation. Danny, I need firing orders.”

   “I think you can assume that you can fire at will this time,” Marshall said, still pondering Cunningham’s question. “We don’t have enough of an advantage that we can yield the first shot.”

   “Always good to here. Seventy-five seconds to go.”

   “Get me Thermopylae and Gilgamesh,” Marshall said, turning to the communications station. “On your monitors, if you please.”

   “Aye, sir,” he replied, and after a short delay, two faces appeared on the monitor, sitting on their respective bridges. Captain Gorski of Gilgamesh on the right, his perpetual scowl staining his face, and Frank Rogers on the left, looking around the bridge.

   “Gilgamesh is ready for battle, sir,” Gorski said. “I presume we are using the same tactics as last time?”

   “Take one each, with the scouts in reserve and half a squadron each for defensive/offensive work. You get to command your own fighters.”

   “Nice to know,” Rogers said. “We’re ready over here, Danny. Let’s hope we all get out the other side.”

   “As long as the enemy doesn’t, I’ll be comfortable calling this a win,” Marshall replied. “Anything I need to know about?”

   “Sir,” the sensor technician said with a frown, “Thermopylae is falling back.”

   “What? Frank, are you having problems over there?”

   “Wait one, sir,” he replied, turning away from the screen.

   “Missile salvo ready, Danny,” Caine said. “Gilgamesh is closing on the enemy.” She looked up, sharply, and said, “Thermopylae just dropped out of the tactical datanet.”

   “Frank, what the hell is going on?” Before he could answer, the screen went dead, and a sickening feeling began to grow inside his stomach. He looked across at Caine, her face a catalog of frustration and fury.

   “The battlecruisers are turning towards Gilgamesh,” she said. “They’re ignoring Thermopylae, and I can’t get through to her Tactical officer. There must be something seriously wrong over there.”

   “Press the attack,” he replied. “Take one of them, and get Dragomirov to pull Thermopylae’s support squadron out to support us. We’ll just have to make the best of what we have.”

   “Aye, sir,” she said, and the ship surged forward, the other two vessels in its squadron on either side. Marshall looked at the tactical display, watching his carefully planned formation slowly fall apart as Thermopylae hung behind, loitering out of combat range. For whatever reason, he couldn’t count on that ship entering the fight. They were going to have to do this one by themselves.

   “Energy spike! Twelve missiles incoming to Gilgamesh.”

   Marshall shook his head; there was nothing he could do to help the battlecruiser at the moment; his forces had to strike the second enemy ship, and their course was curving towards it rapidly, their fighters hard on their heels.

   “Firing!” Caine said, and Wyvern rocked back as two missiles leapt forward, matching the launches on the other scoutships in the formation. Their target started to turn, moving to face them as the six warheads moved ahead on their track towards their target. Over on one side, Gilgamesh was concentrating on defense rather than attack, trying to knock down the incoming missiles before they could reach her.

   “Enemy battlecruiser launching missiles, sir. Six warheads, right at us!” the sensor technician yelled, and Marshall shook his head. They’d only just put Wyvern together after the last battle, and of all the scoutships in the squadron, she was the weakest. The enemy commander was making the best of a bad job, trying to take his ships apart one at a time, but he’d take a terrible pounding getting that home.

   At last, the fighters swooped past the scoutships, four of them pushing ahead to make an attack run on the Cabal vessel, the others holding back to help Wyvern defend; Caine was frantically working her controls, trying to get the launch tubes reloaded in time to get some anti-missiles out, while riding the countermeasure controls to try and knock down the incoming targets.

   “Got one!” she yelled. “Four to go; one of the fighters just took another down.”

   “Progress, Deadeye, progress.”

   He tried to step back from the ship, to take an overall look at the battle; it was an effort for him to remember that he was commanding the whole fleet now, and that he couldn’t just focus on a single ship, even if it was the one he was riding. Gilgamesh seemed to be just about holding its own against its target, matching salvo for salvo now that the odds had been evened, and the fighters were getting in some good strikes, but the scoutships were faring less well; the formation had broken, and they were no longer mutually-supporting their countermeasure systems.

   “Kelso,
get us back into sync,” he yelled.

   “Trying, sir,” the helmsman said, struggling with his controls.

   “Still got two incoming, getting very close,” Caine warned.

   “All hands,” Cunningham said, slapping a control on his chair, “Brace for impact!”

   Despite all his experience, Marshall could never quite get accustomed to the terrible shock of a missile impact on the ship he was riding; the two missiles slammed amidships, sending the lights flickering as the systems struggled to compensate for the damage to the power grid. On the viewscreen, the stars began to tumble as the ship drifted out of control, Kelso muttering in frustration at his unresponsive board.

   “It’s bad, Danny,” Cunningham said, looking at his status indicators. “I think we’re sitting this one out.”

   “Sensor resolution’s low,” the technician said. “I’ll try to clear it.”

   “Do what you can. I’d at least like to see what the hell is going on.”

   “We’re getting a lot of jamming,” Caine said. “I can’t get a clear channel to the rest of the squadron.”

   “If you get a chance, tell Gorski that he’s got the command. Any chance of a shuttle?”

   “Not through all that, you don’t,” Cunningham said. “Gorski can handle it.”

   While Cunningham and his crew started the slow process of putting the pieces back together, the battle began to ebb past them. The remaining scoutships, Dragon and Griffon, pushed ahead in an attempt to co-ordinate with the fighters to get a strike on to their target, but it was an uneven struggle and they knew it; another salvo began to range in on Griffon, threatening to take the squadron down to a single ship.

   Gilgamesh seemed to be faring better against its prey; the Triplanetary battlecruiser had evidently made more progress with its repairs than its Cabal equivalent, and the damage to the latter was beginning to seriously show, rips in its outer hull and outgassing from the current engagement adding to the problem.

   Caine stood up, walking to his side, and said, “Nothing I can do at the moment.”

   “That bad?”