Rich Man's War (53 page)

Yeoh was on her feet at the command table before the damage report was finished.
Hercules
moved further off with her frigates in tow, but the cruiser
Halley
and destroyer
Telesto
remained engaged with
Los Angeles
. Somehow, the battered ship resumed her screen of defensive fire, augmented with a rush of chaff missiles to give her a second to catch her breath.

That was all Captain Bernard’s business. He could take care of
Los Angeles
. Yeoh had to keep track of the bigger picture. Perhaps only a third of the corvettes made their drops. With that success spread across three different battleships, none of them had enough troops on board to seize control of their objectives. And now the battleships retreated into their escort formations—except
Hercules
, which opted to run all the way back to one of the expeditionary groups.

Two of Yeoh’s five frigates were gone. A third sustained heavy damage. Only
Devout
and
Resolute
remained in the fight. They harried
Andromeda’s
strike group alongside a couple of Yeoh’s surviving destroyers, while most of the rest of her larger ships tried to keep the third battleship and its escorts occupied enough that more of the corvettes could make it in for their drop-off runs.

Los Angeles
stood alone. The destroyer
Caracas
had done all she could to back her up, but now
Caracas
was so much debris a few thousand kilometers off to port.

Impact alarms flashed again across the flag bridge. This time the missile was intercepted further out.
Los Angeles
shook again, but not as frighteningly as it had a moment ago. Yeoh glanced at the link to Captain Bernard’s status screens. Wounded as she was,
Los Angeles
could still dish out more punishment. She needed a clean shot, and if they could take the enemy cruiser off the board, the other battleship groups would have to re-allocate their escorts to keep
Los Angeles
covered.

“Captain Bernard,” Yeoh called out. “Can we make a good attack run at that cruiser?”

Heartbeats passed before she received an answer. “It’s Commander Sutton, ma’am. The captain’s dead. I’m in command now. I don’t think… shit, that destroyer’s moving in to flank us. It’s all we can do to stay evasive, and that game’s running out!”

Yeoh called up the cruiser’s weapons status at the push of the button, thankful that Captain Bernard had been forthcoming with such access from the outset. The main cannons remained online and ready to go—they just didn’t have a clear shot. Several of the secondary turrets were offline or, in a few cases, gone completely. The defensive guns were still good—Sutton must have done an excellent job with them from the
instant he took command, or
Los Angeles
would already be gone. Yet even there, she saw gaps.

“Commander, roll us to keep our belly facing that destroyer,” she warned. “It’s the only way we’ll defend ourselves and get a good shot in with the main guns.”

He didn’t argue or question. The XO—now the CO—followed her advice right away, perhaps out of reflex or because he didn’t have a better idea. Nothing
Los Angeles
could do would keep her from all harm at this point, but he saw the value in lunging at the larger opponent rather than remaining on pure defense until
Los Angeles
died of a thousand small cuts.

Halley
didn’t see the move coming. Yeoh could tell that from the larger enemy’s sudden upward pitch. She wanted to get out of the way and present a minimal aspect, but she wouldn’t make it in time.

Then alarms screamed and
Los Angeles
shook again. Lasers stabbed at her from beneath, gutting the armor along her belly and detonating one of her chaff missile launchers.
Halley
had blinked in the face of serious danger, but her companion destroyer saw the opportunity as soon as it was presented. She, too, pulled up to bring her main guns to bear directly on
Los Angeles
.

And then the enemy destroyer exploded.

“Take the opening, Commander!” Yeoh urged.

Again,
Sutton responded instantly to Yeoh’s orders. She felt the slight rumble of the cruiser’s remaining thrusters going into overdrive and the hum in the deck plates as
Los Angeles
lashed out with both of her main cannons. Wide red beams struck
Halley
at the juncture between the main thrusters stacked on her port side, right where the hull was already under significant heat and stress. The blast resulted in a violent explosion, putting
Halley
into an uncontrolled lateral spin.

Yeoh leaned against the command table to catch her breath, leaving Commander Sutton to call out orders to his gunners to follow up with everything they could. She turned her eyes to the tactical screen again, wondering who’d taken out that destroyer.

Now a hundred thousand kilometers out, with enough damage that she left a visible trail of gases and debris, the passenger liner
Argent
limped back into the fight.

* * *

“Didn’t see that coming, did you, fuckers?” Casey growled. He held his sprained left wrist close to his chest, leaning on the broken remains of his captain’s chair since there wasn’t enough of it left for sitting. He operated almost entirely off of screens projected by his personal holocom and the info he could see on the hardware at each bridge station. The corpse of yet another bridge casualty remained strewn across the astrogation table, his impact having rendered the whole apparatus useless until a technician could see to it.

Casey’s damage control teams had
more pressing matters to address.
Argent
hadn’t sent her foes packing without gaining scars of her own. The bridge had more holes in it, which the DC team busily sealed up as best they could. The power plant could no longer rise above 75% of its usual output unless Casey wanted to risk a cascading failure. Most importantly to him,
Argent
couldn’t possibly get into FTL now… which, as far as he was concerned, dictated his course for the rest of the battle.

“Tell
Los Angeles
we’re beat up and our missile tubes are empty,” Casey said to his comms tech. “We’ll do what we can with what we’ve got left. Helm! That strike group over there at three-four-zero by oh-four-oh. Pick a frigate and get us within long range. Might not hurt ‘em, but let’s at least make ‘em dance.”

* * *

The blast door opened only at the insistent override signals of Tanner’s breaching kit. Tanner quickly yanked the contact cable back from the edges of the door as it parted at the center. Alicia swept around the corner with her assault rifle to check for any targets. She found none. “Clear,” she said. “That’s two lucky breaks. Anyone think we’ll get a third?”

“
You count that last firefight as a lucky break?” Tanner asked. The cable quickly snapped back into the boxy kit hanging at his hip from a shoulder strap.

“There were only
six of ‘em,” Alicia shrugged.

“We can’t seal this door behind us now, can we?” Baldwin
wondered. She kept her eyes and her weapon trained on the passageway to their rear.

Tanner secured the kit and picked up his rifle again. “No clue how long it’ll take the relays to reset. If we’re lucky, it’ll happen fast, but these kits have all the safety regulators removed. For all I know, it fried the whole door.”

“Nothing for it now,” said Alicia. “I think that’s where we’re going, up to the left. Go, I’ll cover from here.”

Tanner moved through the open portal to the passageway beyond. But for the blast door and its closed twin that lay thirty meters beyond it, the area looked much the same as the rest of the ship. Every hatch and door remained sealed. No one wandered about. Overhead lights flashed as if anyone might forget the ship was still at battle stations.

Their goal lay halfway along the corridor. Tanner and Baldwin rushed to the tall hatch, putting their backs to the bulkhead on either side. Tanner then reached for the manual wheel on the hatch and tested it with a gentle push. As soon as he felt the handle give, he let go. “We’re good,” he declared. Alicia then left her position to join them, stepping up along the bulkhead beside Baldwin.

“Might be best if you two lead
.” Alicia got between them to take hold of the wheel with one hand, her rifle still gripped in the other. “I’ll cover from here and then secure the hatch.”

Neither of her companions argued. They set their weapons against the bulkhead and filled their hands with stun grenades. “You ready?” Tanner asked.

“I haven’t been ready for anything since I woke up this morning,” Baldwin admitted. “They’ve gotta have this compartment guarded by now. You sure we can do this?”

“We made it this far,” Tanner shrugged. Baldwin nodded. “On three?” he asked Alicia. “One. Two…”

Alicia threw the handle and pulled the hatch open. To Alicia’s right, Baldwin reached around the corner of the open hatch to hurl in her grenades. Tanner stepped around Alicia to do the same. His first glimpse of the compartment inside showed him something akin to a similar space on
Los Angeles
: the hatch opened onto a thin walkway and railing surrounding a circular, mostly open compartment stretching down at least one deck, with a wide, cylindrical shaft filling up much of the compartment’s center all the way up to the overhead. He saw no more. Alicia slammed the hatch shut as soon as the grenades were inside.

“One,” she counted again. Tanner and Baldwin each pulled another stun grenade set to fly with a flick of the thumb. “Two,” Alicia said. By the time she said, “Three,” her companions had their weapons in hand
. They heard the bursts of their first barrage of stun grenades, muffled by the hatch. “One more,” she said tensely, and then, “Go!”

The team repeated their move, but this time Tanner and Baldwin moved inside after throwing their grenades. They both moved to the right as they entered, Tanner watching forward while Baldwin swept her gaze and her weapon in an arc to cover the rear. They found that the compartment extended downward through three decks, with another railed walkway immediately between them and the floor below. Only a handful of crewmen in NorthStar vac suits were on the top walkway or the one below it; most of the people in the compartment sat or leaned against workstations on the lowest deck, staggered by the stun grenades that continued to detonate.

Yet not everyone below the walkways succumbed to the blinding and deafening explosions. Several men in security uniforms held up well enough under the blasts to fire back, sending lasers and bullets up toward Tanner and the others. At a glance, Tanner figured that this security team had only just arrived and hadn’t taken up positions yet, given that they were all on the bottom deck. The chaos of the assault threw off the security team’s aim for a few critical seconds, allowing all three attackers to enter the compartment, but the pressure quickly rose on both sides as everyone exchanged fire.

Tanner rushed at the nearest crewman, jabbing him hard in the chest with the butt of his rifle and then shoving him into the bulkhead before moving past. Beyond that point stood a ladder running the full height of the compartment. Tanner hustled for it, hearing repeated bursts from Alicia’s assault rifle behind him. He
looked below to see several people dive for cover, though most were too stunned to do much more than fumble around. Baldwin took a couple shots as well, putting down one of the security troopers.

None of the shots directed at Tanner struck home before he made it to the ladder. He slung his rifle and threw himself over the side, gripping the rails lightly so he could slide down. At the bottom of the ladder, he felt the sudden impact of a harsh kick at his hip. Tanner gave ground,
turned and found himself faced with a noticeably larger man in a regular, unarmored crewman’s jumpsuit who came in with a second kick. Someone else rushed him from the other side, wielding one tool or another—Tanner had no time to look.

His first opponent was competent, but not especially skilled. Tanner caught the man’s next kick with one arm and held the leg firm against his hip while he brought his opposite elbow down on it. That didn’t save Tanner from the wrench that
struck his right shoulder, but a careful shot from Alicia at the top walkway ensured it wouldn’t happen again. His first opponent, the kicker, fell down screaming and clutching at his leg.

Tanner moved right and dove to the deck, realizing that anyone waiting for a clear shot against him now had it. Indeed, pulse lasers struck the bulkhead behind him as a security trooper tried to put him down. He scrambled to get behind the nearest control console. Tanner could hear Alicia and Baldwin
’s guns up above, but he couldn’t tell yet where their attention lay. He unslung his rifle, got to his feet in a crouching position and tried to regain his bearings. He saw holo screens, cabinets bearing burns from pulse laser fire and just enough reflective fixtures to have some small clue of who was shooting at him and from where.