A Rising Thunder-ARC (4 page)

“Captain,” he said finally, “first, I don’t see how you could possibly be accused of piracy. You’re covered by the fact that you were ordered to return immediately to the star kingdom. Any accusations of piracy or theft on your part would fall legally at the government’s door, not yours. Second, I think it’s highly probable that the ‘act of God or act of war’ clause of your contract would protect you against any nondelivery penalty. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that, because I frankly don’t know how the courts are going to look at this after the dust settles. But my legal officer and I
have
discussed this, and that’s her opinion.”

“And if she’s
wrong?
” Malachai demanded harshly.

“If she’s wrong, she’s wrong, and you’re screwed, Captain,” Wu admitted. “I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“Even if I don’t get hit with the nondelivery penalty, I’m going to come up short on the note, especially if I have to sit in a parking orbit somewhere in the home system between now and then,” she pointed out. “A ship that’s not moving is only a hole in space that people pour money into. It sure as hell not a hole money comes
out
of!”

Well,
that’s
true enough
, Wu reflected.
And what are you going to do if she refuses?

HMS
Cometary
was a mere light cruiser. Admittedly, she was an older ship, which meant she carried a larger Marine detachment than most current
battlecruisers
did, but he couldn’t go peeling off details of his
Navy
personnel to take over the engine rooms and bridges of freighters and passenger liners. In theory, he could order his Marines to take control of
Vortrekker
and force Captain Malachai and her own crew to sail directly to Manticore, yet he shied away from the possibility. It wasn’t the Royal Manticoran Navy’s job to seize control of honest merchantships, damn it! But if he didn’t do
something…

“Klondike, you said,” he heard himself say, and swore at himself silently when Malachai’s eyes lit with sudden hope.

“Right, Klondike.” She nodded vigorously. “I can be there in three and a half T-weeks. And from there to Beowulf’s only another three T-weeks. Just six T-weeks—that’s all I need.”

“And it’s only
two
T-weeks from
Hypatia
to Beowulf,” he pointed out.

Her lips tightened, but she didn’t say anything. She only looked back at him, blue eyes unaccustomed to asking for anything pleading with him to relent.

He looked back at her, wrestling with those eyes and his own temptation. He had no doubt the Admiralty would have quite a few choice things to say to him if he granted an exemption from a nondiscretionary order. Worse, once he started down that slippery slope, where did he stop? How did he justify letting
Vortrekker
slide if he wasn’t going to grant exemptions to everyone
else
who asked, as well? Hypatia wasn’t a major traffic node, and it was unlikely he was going to see a lot more Manticoran ships before his own orders took him home again, but still…

You’re a Queen’s officer, Jared
, he told himself.
You took an oath to obey all legal orders, and the shit’s busy hitting the fan on a scale you never even
dreamed
of. It’s not your job to go around second-guessing the Admiralty. Especially not at a time like this!

All of that was true, but there was another side to the coin, as well.
Cometary
was only an old, obsolescent light cruiser, but she was still a Queen’s ship and Jared Wu was still her commanding officer. And that meant he was supposed to have the guts to do what his orders required him to do…and to be willing to put his own judgment on the line when it came to those selfsame orders.

“Captain Malachai,” he said at last, “I have exactly zero authority to ignore the orders I’ve been given. You realize that?”

Malachai gave a single, choppy nod, her face grim, her eyes bleak once more. He let silence linger between them for two or three breaths, then squared his shoulders.

“I have no authority,” he repeated, “but…I’m going to, anyway.”

The last four words came out in more of a sigh of resignation than anything else, and he felt himself shaking his own head in disbelief as he said them. Malachai’s eyes lit up like light-struck sapphires, though, and her face blossomed in an enormous smile.

“Understand me, Captain!” he said much more sharply, waving an index finger at the com pickup. “Straight to Klondike, unload your cargo, then straight to Beowulf and back to Manticore. I don’t want to hear about any other charters you’ve got. I don’t want you picking up any other cargoes. You’re dropping off what you have aboard, and your heading straight home. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Perfectly, Commander!” Malachai said, nodding hard.

“I hope to hell it is,” he said, “because frankly, we’re
both
going to be in a world of hurt if you don’t do exactly that. I remind you that the WCSA’s penalties for noncompliance are
ugly
, Captain.”

“Don’t worry, Commander,” Malachai said, her voice far gentler than anything Wu had yet heard from her. “I owe you big time for this.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to do
anything
to screw you over, I swear.”

Wu looked at her hard for several seconds, then smiled faintly.

“Glad to hear it. And I’m going to hold you
to
it, too, Captain!” Their eyes held for another heartbeat, and then he waved his right hand at the pickup. “Now, go on. Get out of here before I come to my senses and change my mind!”

Chapter Three

“Oh,
crap
.”

The words were spoken quietly, almost prayerfully. For a moment or two, Lieutenant Aaron Tilborch, commanding officer of the Zunker Space Navy’s light attack craft
Kipling
, didn’t even realize he’d spoken them out loud, and they were hardly the considered, detached observation one might have expected from a trained professional. On the whole, however, they summed up the situation quite nicely.

“What do we do now, Sir?” Lieutenant Jannetje van Calcar,
Kipling
’s executive officer, sounded as nervous as Tilborch felt, and Tilborch thought it was an excellent question. Not that there was much
Kipling
’s small ship’s company
could
do about the events preparing to unfold before them.

The ZSN wasn’t much as navies went. There were several reasons for that, and one was that the Zunker System’s nominal sovereignty had depended for the last T-decade and a half or so upon a delicate balancing act between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League. The Office of Frontier Security’s local commissioners had cast greedy eyes upon the Zunker System ever since the wormhole terminus associated with it had been discovered, but the terminus was the next best thing to six and a half light-hours from the system primary. That put it well outside Zunker’s territorial space, which meant simply grabbing off the star system wouldn’t necessarily have given OFS control of the terminus…especially since its other end lay in the Idaho System.

In point of fact, the “Zunker Terminus” had been discovered by a survey crew operating out of Idaho seventeen T-years earlier. And Idaho, unlike Zunker, lay only seventy-two light-years from the Manticore Binary System—three weeks’ hyper flight for a merchant ship from the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Actually, the survey ship had been Manticoran, not Idahoian, although it had been under charter to the Idaho government at the time. Prior to the discovery of the Idaho Hyper Bridge, Idaho had been a relative backwater, completely overshadowed by the bustling trade and massive economy of its Manticoran neighbor and fellow member of the Manticoran alliance.

For Zunker, whose existence had always been even more hand-to-mouth than that of many other Verge star systems, the consequences had been profound. The hyper bridge between it and Idaho was over four hundred light-years long, and the system lay roughly a hundred and ninety light-years from the Sol System and just over a hundred and fifty light-years from Beowulf. In fact, it lay almost directly between Beowulf and Asgerd, closing the gap between the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction and the Andermani Empire’s Asgerd-Durandel Hyper Bridge. That had turned both Zunker and Idaho into important feeder systems for the ever more heavily traveled Manticoran Wormhole Junction.

The sudden influx of so much traffic, and the kind of cash flow that went with it, dwarfed anything Zunker had ever imagined…and it had turned out to be a mixed blessing. The cascade of credits and the frenzied construction of shipping and support structures for the traffic that produced it had fueled an economic boom such as no Zunkeran had ever dreamed was possible. Over the last fifteen T-years, something like decent medical care, a proper educational system, and the beginning of true prosperity had sprouted in Lieutenant Tilborch’s home star system. Yet that same abundance of cash had inevitably attracted the avarice of the Office of Frontier Security and its transstellar “friends.”

Unfortunately for OFS, Idaho had no desire to do business with yet another tentacle of the OFS/corporate monstrosity. So when Frontier Security started sniffing around Zunker, Idaho mentioned the sudden upsurge in Solarian compassion and philanthropic urges to its neighbors (and allies) in Manticore. And those neighbors (and allies) in Manticore had intimated to Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury Brian Sullivan, Agatá Wodoslawski’s immediate predecessor, that Solarian transit fees through any of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction’s many termini might well experience an inexplicable upsurge if anything unfortunate were to happen to the Zunker System.

The result was an official Solarian consulate in Effingham, Zunker’s capital city, an equally official OFS observation post right next door to it, and a clear understanding that although the League would be permitted
influence
in Zunker, it would
not
be allowed the sort of puppetmaster control it exercised in so many other “independent” star systems. As a sort of quid-pro-quo for the League’s…restraint, it was understood that Zunker fell ultimately under Solarian “protection,” rather than Manticoran. The terminus itself, on the other hand, was granted Idahoian extraterritoriality, recognized by both Manticore and the League, although Prime Minister Cromarty of Manticore had insisted that the Zunker System government receive one third of all transit fee revenues it generated.

All of which meant the Zunker Space Navy consisted of little more than a double handful of LACs, suitable for policing the traffic which flowed through the star system’s freight-handling and servicing facilities. The ZSN certainly didn’t possess anything remotely like a true warship, although it did assign a squadron of its LACs to Zunker Terminus Astro Control, where it worked in concert with a similar force of Idahoian vessels.

Which was how Lieutenant Tilborch and the crew of ZSNS
Kipling
came to have a ringside seat for what promised to be a most unhappy day in near-Zunker space.

“What do we do, Jannetje?” he asked now, never looking away from the display where a single Solarian merchant ship headed directly towards the terminus, escorted by six Solarian League Navy battlecruisers. “What
we
do is get the hell out of the way and com home to Effingham.”

“But what about—?” van Calcar began.

“The Manties are the ones who announced they were closing the terminus to Solarian traffic, and Idaho backed them,” Tilborch replied, cutting her off. “You know where my sympathies lie, but we’ve got no official business poking our noses in. Besides”—he smiled humorlessly—“it’s not like
Kipling
was going to make any difference, is it?”

* * *

Captain Hiram Ivanov watched his tactical display and frowned as he considered the odds and how they must look from the other side. His division of
Saganami-C
-class heavy cruisers was one ship understrength, leaving him only three to confront the oncoming Solarian battlecruisers. He also had four
Roland
-class destroyers, however, which actually gave him the numerical advantage, although destroyers and heavy cruisers were scarcely in the same league (nominally, at least) as battlecruisers. On the other hand, all of his ships had Mark 23-stuffed missile pods tractored to their hulls, which put rather a different complexion on traditional calculations combat power. Unfortunately, it appeared these particular Sollies still hadn’t worked through the implications of the Battle of Spindle.

“How do you want to handle it, Sir?” Commander Claudine Takoush asked softly from his command chair com display. Ivanov looked down at her image and raised his eyebrows, and she shrugged. “I know what we’re supposed to
do
, Sir. I’m only wondering how much talking you plan to do first? I mean, this”—she twitched her head in the direction of her own tactical plot—“is just a bit more blatant than we expected.”

“Blatant isn’t precisely the word I’d choose, Claudine,” Ivanov replied in a judicious tone. “In fact, on reflection, I believe ‘
stupid
’ comes a lot closer to capturing the essence of my feelings at this moment. ‘Arrogant’ and ‘pigheaded’ probably belong somewhere in the mix, too, now that I think about it.”

“Do you think it’s the local Frontier Fleet CO’s idea? Or that it represents orders from their admiralty?”

“I’m inclined to think it’s the locals,” Ivanov said. “Especially given Commissioner Floyd’s attitude towards the Star Empire’s ‘interference’ in his personal arrangements,” he added, eyes drifting back to his own display.

The incoming icons had made their alpha translation the better part of fifty million kilometers from the terminus. That represented either pretty poor astrogation or else a deliberate decision to give any Manticoran warships plenty of time to see them coming. Ivanov suspected the latter. It was entirely likely that someone like Commissioner Floyd would figure the Manticorans’ nerve would fail if they had to watch the slow, inexorable approach of the Solarian League Navy. Whether or not the Solly flag officer assigned to the mission would share that belief was another question, of course. Either way, it was going to take them a while to reach Ivanov’s small force. The velocity they’d brought over the alpha wall into normal-space was barely a thousand kilometers per second, and their acceleration rate, held down by the 4,800,000-ton freighter at the core of their formation, was barely 2.037 KPS
²
. At that rate, it would take them over two and a half hours to reach the terminus with a zero/zero velocity.