Accord of Honor (14 page)

T
he aero brake
maneuver went well. None of the ships had blown to bits or crashed, and it looked like we had escaped with all systems intact. Now we were climbing up out of the thin upper layers of the atmosphere, and our radar slowly able to give us a better picture of the space around Earth. We’d dumped most of our speed in the move and had to fire our engines now to give us a bit more thrust. Up there ahead somewhere was the enemy, and I watched as the scans slowly cleared.

“Multiple contacts, dead ahead!” someone hollered. “Missile launch! Sir... over seventy missiles inbound, ETA one minute.”

“Give me a firing solution on them.” Outwardly, I was calm, but inwardly I wanted to scream in frustration. If they’d kept chasing Defender for just another minute, we would have been cleanly up behind them. But I supposed they realized that, and now they had turned the tables back on us.

“Solutions set, sir,” came the immediate reply.

“Transmit firing solutions to the other ships, fire all tubes on continuous fire for as long as we can,” I replied. There was the brief shudder as the ship spewed forth eighteen missiles. “Launch buoys,” I said, grateful beyond measure that Meg had brought them along and found time to install the devices on the Constellation. The buoys popped off the sides of the ship and begin spiraling off in different directions, screaming that they were really the target the incoming missiles wanted. “Engage antimissile fire,” I continued. Only two of our ships had antimissile rockets; Kel’s Aisling had none and would slip back into the trail of Constellation as we’d arranged previously, to try to duck away from some of the incoming heat.

Rockets leapt forward to engage the missiles. We had no guns to supplement them, but they managed to wipe away half of the deadly shots. I was sweating as I watched some of the missiles go scattering off in different directions, chasing the ghost images of the buoys. And then the missiles were in our formation, exploding around and through our ships. Seventeen missiles punched through our defenses to smash into our ships, carrying death with them.

Five hit Andy’s Excalibur, ripping huge tears in the hull and stabbing SABOT fire deep into the crew areas. One missile bay exploded, breaking off the ship and then detonating completely just clear of the starboard side. The force of the explosion kicked Excalibur into a spin and it slewed around, falling precariously back toward atmosphere as the crew struggled to right their ship and restore full power to the drives.

Two missiles snuck past the blocking obstacle of Constellation and smashed through the spindle of Aisling. She continued moving forward under power despite being rocked by the impacts.

Ten missiles impacted with Constellation. The ship was the logical biggest threat, and so most of the missiles had been targeted at us. I knew intellectually that we would be hit hard when we went into battle, but nothing had prepared me for the havoc those missiles wreaked as they smashed into and through the ship. Five nukes impacted against or near the hull, blowing the center ring to bits and smashing most of the forward crew ring, which also housed our missile defense platform. SABOT rounds shattered the hull near the engine, just missing the vulnerable fission generators. Our drive shuddered, and power fell as emergency shut-off switches killed the generator nearest to the impact. We were still under power, and the bridge was still alive, but we would be hard pressed to survive another set of hits like that.

On the bridge, I found myself again fighting hard not to vomit in my pressure suit. I could taste blood from a split lip. We’d been tossed around a lot. At least one console had exploded from feedback before the generator cut out. The man who’d sat there was laying back in his seat, his faceplate shattered, the glass cutting into his face. He wasn’t moving. The rest of the bridge crew seemed stunned as well. I unbuckled from my chair, staggered to my feet and somehow pushed off toward the weapons station where the tech was still too dazed to move. Three of our six bays showed damage, but that left us three more to return fire with, and nine more missiles launched from our tubes as I braced for the inevitable next wave that would destroy us.

I watched the plot and saw that there was no new flight bearing down on us. Our own missiles had done their work, of course. Even the defense from twelve ships could not completely shrug off thirty missiles. They had taken some hits as well. But none of their ships were down. But seeing my three ships damaged, our return fire faltering, they’d turned to face the bigger threat – a single, fast moving target.

Defender was accelerating toward them at twenty gravities, piling on all the thrust they could manage and firing as they came. Missiles streamed in to meet Defender from the enemy ships, but the range was too short for them to properly acquire such a fast moving target. While the missiles were trying to spot Defender, buoys were launched to confuse them and most of the missiles lost their track completely. Those that did find the right target were blown to bits by the missile defense guns mounted all about the ship.

The hostile ships were not as fortunate. At close range, their antimissile rockets had a hard time spotting the fast moving inbound missiles. The computers lacked the time to properly calculate trajectories so many launches were wasted. Missile after missile slammed home, all precisely targeted at vulnerable areas of the enemy ships. Then our second volley, ragged as it was, impacted into their rear.

Under the doubled attack, their ships came apart, spraying explosions like confetti. Half the enemy force was destroyed or reduced to lifeless hulks in seconds. The rear shots from our squadron blasted into vulnerable engine areas, shutting off power or setting off secondary explosions in their fission drives. None of their ships escaped unscathed.

Then Defender was in the middle of their formation, trading fire with them, SABOTs licking out at each other like broadsides from ancient ships of sail. These ships had never been meant to do battle at that range, and at the ship’s relative speeds the engagement lasted only seconds, but in those seconds, dozens of missiles flew back and forth. Defender exited that maelstrom intact, but shattered, drives dead and showing no power signatures at all.

The enemy had only four ships that were still in the fight. A fifth had decided they had enough and was trying to weakly boost away from Earth into space. The other four saw that Defender was out of the game and turned back on us.

Excalibur was still falling slowly toward the planet. Their drive was flickering on and off, but so far they had not been able to draw enough power to slow their descent. They’d have to abandon their ship soon if they didn’t find a way to stabilize the power to their drive. Ion drives are a superb system for traveling in space, but lack the thrust to lift a ship out of a near gravity well. They had perhaps another minute before they were too close for even full power to draw them back out again. Then – into the life pods. Every cargo ship had a few little pods you could hop into in case the ship was about to go bust. They had little air, a weak radio, no real radiation shielding, and were floating coffins as much as anything else, but if you were near a planet you might be able to get close enough to get pulled down toward the surface, pop a parachute and get rescued.

Constellation continued to limp forward under minimal power, using the leftover momentum from our aero brake to help us coast free of the planet’s grip. Suddenly, Aisling ducked around us, falling in directly in front of my ship. Her missile tubes were still all intact and blazing away. Constellation shuddered again as we fired another volley into the last of our foes. I saw Aisling pulling away farther and opened a channel to their bridge.

“Kel, what are you doing?”

“Taking the heat. You still have more tubes than us, and no antimissile rockets left, if my damage reading is right on. We’re taking point to buy you another volley. Don’t waste it.” And with that, she cut the connection.

I wanted to scream, or curse. To do something. But there was nothing I could do.

Twenty more missiles came roaring down toward our ships. They ignored Excalibur entirely, her slow plummet making her less a threat. She’d stopped firing a while ago. They focused their entire fire on the two ships dead ahead of them.

“Fire the last buoys,” I ordered. “This is it. We win here or die.”

The enemy’s fire control had to be damaged. More than half their missiles went off after the buoys, only nine chasing our ships as the senders had intended. Nine was still enough. Only one SABOT round made it past Aisling, punching through another of our missile bays and killing the crew inside, disabling another three of our tubes. The other eight missiles impacted Aisling, which detonated under the combined impact. I watched the missiles collide with the image of Kel’s ship on my radar screen, and then they all vanished, ship, crew, and missiles into one cataclysmic explosion.

My heart felt like it shattered along with her ship. For a moment I couldn’t see anything but the growing cloud of debris in front of my ship. It was my worst nightmare come to life. I’d brought Kel out here and that decision killed her.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. My ship barreled ahead, firing as fast as our remaining tubes would allow.

Our eighteen missiles scattered among the enemy ships. Their defensive fire was ragged, sporadic. Damage had hurt their defensive ability as well. Only a third of our missiles were stopped. The other twelve found three targets, six at one and three at each of the others. The first went the way of Aisling, detonating in a concussive display of light and fire before vanishing. The second was torn in two, both halves spiraling off into different directions, spewing atmosphere into space as the crew on board tried desperately to escape their dying ship.

As suddenly as it had been joined, the battle was over.

J
ames got
Excalibur’s drives back on line and was limping forward to take a position alongside us, and the pirates – or whatever they were – decided that they had taken just about as much abuse as they wanted to today. They had already been accelerating on a new vector, and were even now jumping forward out of the reach of our missiles, boosting to higher speed as they left. Their parting volley was spent blowing the rest of the shattered hulls of their own ships – a cold but practical way to prevent more information about who they were from falling into our hands, and to stop us from repairing those ships to use against them in the future.

Three enemy ships escaped out of the twenty which had been arrayed against us. Not a total victory, but not a bad day.

Aisling and Indefatigable were both completely destroyed. Excalibur was in bad shape, and I wasn’t doing a lot better in Constellation. Defender was drifting and powerless. We made our way gradually over toward her, slow to catch up because of the speed she’d been moving when her drive cut out. As we were maneuvering, I called back to engineering to see how soon we could get our own drives back to full power, and I got another taste of how bad our own status was. No reply from engineering, and the main engine room was showing no atmosphere. A SABOT had passed through, and likely everyone inside was dead. We sent a rescue team anyway, but it was no use. The SABOTs made outstanding anti personnel weapons, and no one had survived the impact. Meg had been there. She’d wanted to see things through to the end, and I supposed she had. She’d saved my life twice, though. I wish I’d been able to thank her properly.

Once we had reached Defender, we docked with her. We pulled up one ship on either side and proceeded to evacuate the crew who had survived. The last man across my airlock was my father. He saluted smartly as he left his ship to step on mine, asking the ritual question, “Permission to come aboard?”

Our eyes met. Was that the glimmer of a smile I saw?

“Granted,” I replied. “And welcome aboard.”

He crossed the airlock in two steps and scooped me into a rare hug. I returned the hug hollowly. I felt spent, worn out. Done. Keladry was gone. It was my fault she was dead.

He seemed to sense something of my mood. I guess I’m not that hard to read. He backed away, hands still on my shoulders, looking into my eyes.

This past week – it had been such a short period of our lives, but somehow I felt like I understood him better than I ever had before. And looking at him now, I thought that the shadow I had seen behind his eyes for so long might finally be gone.

And with that, I realized what the shadow was. My father was a man of honor who had struggled his whole life to act as he thought honor demanded. But his own honor created an internal conflict. To do as he thought he must in order to defend humanity against the threat he saw looming in the future, he was forced to break the law, to circumvent rightful authorities. But worse, he had been forced to lie to people he’d cared for and respected. That, more than anything else, had caused him pain. At long last, the demands of my father’s honor were back in line with the dictates of his own personal code of integrity.

We started in on repairs right away. Nobody much wanted to talk to Earth right about then, although they certainly wanted to talk to us. We had nonstop comm requests from just about every official in just about every government out there. Dad said we’d need to get drives on line for all ships first, so that we could leave orbit if things got too heated. At first, I wasn’t at all sure Defender was going to go anywhere without a yard refit, her drive was so smashed up. On the fly repairs of something that complex are hard, even for the best. And Meg was dead. I think that one hit Dad harder than most. They’d been close for a long time, and something in the way he took the news made me wonder if they’d ever been a thing.

For me, I couldn’t help thinking about Kel, and thinking about what we’d shared all those years ago, and what it might have been if Dad hadn’t spotted romance flaring and sent me packing off to school and her to the far side of the solar system. I kept her out of our conversations enough that I think Dad caught on and stopped bringing her up. That was fine with me. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see her face again. I’d touched her life again – and destroyed it even more completely than I had the first time. She haunted my dreams, and I slept poorly.

We got emergency power back on the Defender the day after the enemy ships ran off. The day after that, we finally got a little bit of power back to the ship’s main drive. It wasn’t going to anywhere very fast, but it was able to move under its own power again. We moved Dad’s crew back into their own ship, a relief for our overcrowded vessels. Not everyone had been working on the engines – other crew placed patches in spots all over all three ships. The hulls had been holed by more SABOT rounds than I could count. Our ships still needed a lot of work before they’d be ready for another battle. Excalibur was missing a missile pod. Constellation had lost more than half her tubes and most of her missile defense was still out of action. Defender didn’t have enough power to fire a missile, although a few of her tubes would still function if we could get the fission drives working properly again. The one fission drive we’d gotten running was only running in ‘low power’ mode, a safety feature we decided we didn’t want to override until we had specialists take a look at it.

That was the shape we were in when my father, James, and I gathered in Defender’s bridge to accept our first call from Earth. We were battered, but still flying. Earth had been trying to contact us nonstop ever since the battle. We’d ignored all their calls and eventually they just left the same message on repeat – just asking us to please pick up the phone, radioed into orbit over and over. Earth still had ships that could reach us – shuttles and such. But they hadn’t launched anything. They were leaving us alone, and we were ignoring them. It worked fine while we were getting those first repairs done. My chest was a little tight, wondering what was going to happen when we re-opened communication.

Dad pressed the ‘receive’ button and the image of a bored comm tech popped up on our screen. The kid was staring off into space with a vacant look on his face, clearly bored to tears. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there, watching a communications console for our reply.

It took my father coughing loudly for him to realize we were watching him.

“You’re...I mean, you’ve...I mean...Uh...,” he stammered at us.

“Superior. Get him. Now!” my father ordered. Dad never did take kindly to idiots, and this kid wasn’t showing much in the brains department. He practically ran out of the room when he heard the ice in my father’s voice. A few moments later, the screen blinked as the call was transferred elsewhere. The person on the screen in front of me was and older man, balding and thin, with an oily smile. He seemed happy to see us in a way that I was sure we wouldn’t be happy about. I’d seen his face more than once before: Patrick Shaunesey.

“Stein,” he said. “Finally. You will surrender immediately to lawful authority for violating the Lunar Accord.”

“Patrick, Patrick... You have to be about wetting yourself right now,” my father said. “You want me in your claws so badly you can taste it. But I think even you’d have to agree that we just saved Earth from an enemy it couldn’t deal with any other way. The Accord is done for. Earth will be forced to build defenses now.”

“Yes, we probably will, but that doesn’t change anything. You broke the law while it was still in force. And you as well as anyone alive know the penalty for ignoring the law you fought to hard to stop,” Shaunesey replied.

“You might be short sighted enough to see it that way, Patrick, but will the U.N. President? Will the elected leaders of the rest of the world?” Dad asked.

“I am the new President of the United Nations,” Shaunesey said. “After signing the surrender order two days ago, President Michiov shot himself in the head. I was elected in his stead yesterday. You would have heard if you’d responded to our calls instead of sitting there in radio silence fomenting more rebellion,” he continued with a dark look.

This time, my father looked taken aback, and I understood why. The United Nations President held a great deal of power – on Earth, and even more so on the colonies, which were all run as U.N. colonies. From that seat, Shaunesey could put pressure on the various governments of the world, influence who was made a judge in the International Criminal Courts, and in general make life pretty miserable for us.

“Yes,” Shaunesey hissed. “I have already relayed orders to Mars for all SSI assets there to be seized and all employees arrested. Mars is a United Nations colony, so I have the all the authority I need to take emergency measures there in a case like this. As for your company holdings on Earth, it will be days at most before they are all seized. When I am done with your people, even the most loyal among them will curse you, Stein. And they will be all too glad to name you the terrorist and traitor to peace that you are!”

Time seemed to freeze for a moment. We all looked at my father, who had after all planned for the eventuality of the Accord’s failing for years. He must have had something in mind to deal with the aftermath. I hoped. ‘Lethal injection or firing squad’ was not a question I hoped to be hearing! But I looked back at the screen and stood firm beside my father. He seemed to draw a bit of strength from that and shoulders that had slumped a little drew straighter. He stared this new President in the eye.

“What do you really want, Shaunesey?” he asked. “You don’t really want to arrest all those people, tear apart all those lives. You’d go down in history as a tyrant, an evil man. Oh,” he waved his hand when the man on the screen looked about to object, “you’d do it in a heartbeat if you thought I was calling your bluff. You’re mean spirited enough to hurt anyone to get what you want.”

My Dad paused. “But that’s not what you really want, so what is it?” And then he crossed his arms and waited.

Shaunesey’s face mottled with rage. “You, you bastard! I want you, thrown down from where you’ve raised yourself up again. I tossed you down from fame to degradation once, but you had the temerity to crawl out from under your rock. This time, I won’t just tear you down. I will see you destroyed!”

Then he was suddenly calm again. I was starting to think that President or no, this guy was not exactly running on all thrusters. At least where my father was concerned, anyway. “And then you yourself handed me the perfect tool. Breaking the Lunar Accord is a capital offense. Surrender yourself to me and plead guilty to the charge of that violation. Do that, and your family, employees, and anyone else connected with your actions will be given a full pardon.”

My father nodded. “Now I understand. Very well, I accept your terms. Beam the pardon to this ship so that I can have the SSI legal team on Earth check it out. The pardon starts the moment I surrender, or no deal. No, I don’t trust you. Stein out.” And he closed the connection.

I realized my father had this outcome in mind for a while. He’d sacrifice himself to save everyone else – and Shaunesey would take the deal because he hated my father that much. But there had to be another way!

“Dad, you can’t. They’ll kill you,” I said.

“Didn’t you make that comment about one week and a lifetime ago?” he countered. “I have to. Doing this frees everyone else involved. In theory, he is right. With some work, the employment of hundreds of our people – maybe thousands of them – could be found to be involved. I doubt he could sentence thousands of SSI employees to death without an uproar, but he can file other charges against them and make their lives hell for a long, long time. I can’t protect them with one ship from space. Not even with three ships. Not without committing the same actions as the criminals we just fought against, and I won’t fight terror with terror.”

“Let’s think about it,” James said. “Maybe we can find another option?”

“No,” Dad said. “This is the only way I can protect all my people. All our people – they’ll be in your hands to safe guard if they do execute me, Thom.”

Softly then, he finished, “I knew this was the most likely end of this journey for me, son.”

Like hell it was, I thought grimly. I’d lost Kel already. I wasn’t losing my father too.