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CHAPTER EIGHT

“Plasma breach!” The computer-generated voice blared from every speaker aboard SMS Preussen. “Plasma breach, Conduit Seventeen! Plasma breach! Plasma breach! Plasma breach, Conduit Seventeen!”

“Shut that damned thing off!” Fregattenkapitän Greuner shouted, and the heel of Uhlriz’s hand slammed down on a button.

“Plasma breach! Plas—”

“Thank you,” Greuner growled, spinning his chair towards the chief petty officer at the damage control board. That would normally have been a commissioned officer’s station, but with the ship in orbit Oberbootsmann Palzer had the duty. “Palzer?”

“The sensors confirm, mein Herr,” Palzer said tautly. “Conduit Seventeen, just forward of Frame Ninety-six. Two compartments are gone.”

Scheisse.” Greuner shook his head, then shook his entire body, like a man throwing off the effects of an unexpected punch. “Initiate—”

“Explosion in Reactor One!” another voice—a human one this time instead of a computer—announced suddenly over the intercom. “Explosion in Reactor One, and—”

The voice chopped off suddenly, and another scarlet damage icon glared on Palzer’s panel. Then another, and another.

Fregattenkapitän, we may have a cascade failure!” Palzer called, his face pale. “I’m showing breaches at Frames Eighty-seven and One-One-Three, as well.”

Greuner swallowed hard. The failsafes were designed to shut conduits down and vent to space the instant there was any sign of a breach. Normally, they did just that, limiting damage to the immediate vicinity of the breach where, admittedly, it was usually devastating. But if they failed, if there was a cascade of breaches—

He braced himself, feeling the skeleton bridge watch’s tension as they waited for his response. “I—”

His earbud buzzed with a sudden priority code and he felt a huge spasm of relief as he recognized it.

“Yes, meine Kapitänin,” he said.

“Set condition Zulu-Three,” Hansen’s voice came crisply in his ear. “Until we know what’s really going on, we don’t need any extra bodies in the way. Then seal off Reactor One and Conduit Seventeen until we get some remotes in there. Better make that Seventeen and Sixteen.”

“At once, meine Kapitänin.

* * *

“All hands, Zulu-Three,” Greuner’s voice blared from the bulkhead speakers. “Repeat, Zulu-Three.”

Bajer grabbed a handhold, stopped, and flattened himself against the bulkhead as Preussen’s crew responded. Zulu-Three was the least drastic of the three emergency shipboard evacuation plans in the standing orders. He wished it were Zulu-Two or Zulu-One, but there was only so much that could be expected from plasma breaches, given that the heavily armored compartments around them were designed to contain the damage.

Still, it would get about half of the remaining shipboard personnel off the ship. They’d just have to deal with the ones the order left behind.

* * *

Kapitänin on the bridge!” Palzer barked as Hansen swam onto her bridge, Jachmann close on her heels. The relief on Greuner’s face could not have been more obvious as he unstrapped and thrust himself out of the command chair as quickly as he could.

“Thank you, Fregattenkapitän,” Hansen said, her briskly calm formality extraordinarily reassuring. “Report damage.”

“We show eleven compartments breached, meine Kapitänin,” Palzer said. “At least two of them show breaches clear through the outer hull.”

“At least two of them?”

Ja, meine Kapitänin,” Palzer confirmed uncomfortably. “With the outages spreading and much of our sensor coverage lost, I can’t be more precise.”

“I see.” Hansen turned to the young leutnant der sterne manning communications. “Alert Station Alpha, Leutnant Selavko. Inform them we have what appears to be a cascade failure of a plasma conduit and request additional assistance.”

Ja, meine Kapitänin,” the leutnant said, turning back to his console.

* * *

Ensign Rolf Panum of the Tomlinson Emergency Services was waiting in the crash car when the alarm came through.

“This is it,” he called over his shoulder to the thirty-five men and women crowded silently into the compartment behind him as he gunned the thrusters. “Game faces on.”

Two seconds later, the crash car was clear of the platform and blazing across the empty space between it and the Andermani battleship. Four more TES crash cars accelerated out of their bays behind him and all five streaked toward Preussen.

In the old days, Panum reflected with a touch of wistfulness, the area around Station Alpha would have been alive with freighters and buzzing shuttles, bringing in supplies and trade goods. Now, with the Andermani controlling shipping in and out of their Empire—and the bulk of that shipping funneled as a matter of course to New Berlin—traffic was far sparser, and most of the satellite freight platforms had been handed over to TES as staging areas for emergency vehicles and personnel.

Unfortunately for the invaders, while they were extremely cautious about foreign shipments to their conquered worlds, they were less attentive about who got to help one of their ships when it was in trouble.

They weren’t completely oblivious, of course. Normally, a crash car like Panum’s would undergo close examination before being allowed to enter any Andermani warship’s defense zone.

But a plasma conduit rupture threatened both the ship’s interior and exterior, and the local emergency crews had faster and better access to the hull than any of the repair crews inside. More importantly, certainly from Panum’s point of view, a rupture as catastrophic as the one Preussen’s systems were reporting threatened to overwhelm the battleship’s own damage control personnel, especially with so many of them on leave. With an entire quadrant of the ship at risk, even proper Andermani procedures were likely to be brushed aside, given how urgently they would need extra hands.

That was the theory, anyway. Panum and his team were about to find out whether or not it was true.

* * *

“We show five TES shuttles headed our way, meine Kapitänin,Stabsgefreiter Thörnrich reported.

“Excellent,” Hanson said. “Clear them straight through.”

“A very prompt response,” Jachmann commented.

“Indeed,” she agreed. “And I—”

Another alarm buzzed raucously.

“Compartment Niner-Seven-One-Zero shows open to space, meine Kapitänin,” Palzer announced.

* * *

Bajer floated at the end of the tether snap hooked to the handhold at Access Bravo. The large compartment, one of four spaced equidistantly around Preussen’s core hull, was crowded as a stream of disciplined but obviously anxious spacers funneled through it to the lift cluster. The battleship’s spin section, which provided her crew with living space outside the microgravity of the rest of her hull, had four spokes, each of which contained one three-lift shaft cluster for rapid personnel movements.

Under normal circumstances, the computer-controlled lift cars were timed so that there was minimal delay transiting between the core hull and the spin section without interrupting its revolutions, but there was always some delay. At Zulu-Three, however, the spin section locked, exactly as it did when the ship cleared for action, which greatly speeded the lift cars’ transit cycle.

At the moment, the personnel currently on duty in the ship’s core hull but designated to evacuate under Zulu-Three were headed up the lift shafts to join the ship’s off-duty personnel and board the lifeboats riding the groove around the center of the spin section. There were additional escape pods in the core hull itself, but they couldn’t be launched without first blowing the charges that blasted away scabs of armor to clear the escape pod’s launch shaft. Except under the most dire of circumstances—which clearly didn’t obtain…yet, at least—the spin section’s lifeboats were the preferred mode of evacuation.

Access Bravo wasn’t actually Bajer’s station under Zulu-Three, but no one seemed inclined to complain about his calming presence. Here and there, a few people actually smiled briefly at him, their expressions strained but determinedly calm, and he always smiled back with equal falsity.

“Eight more minutes, mein Herr,” the oberbootsmann supervising the lift cluster announced, and Bajer nodded.

“Good,” he said.

* * *

“There they go, right on schedule,” Rolf Panum said as his radar showed lifeboats separating from the mammoth battleship. Its half-kilometer length dwarfed his crash car, and the lifeboats were even tinier. “Thrusters moving them clear.”

“Good,” Sean Clendenin, the crash car’s team leader grunted.

* * *

“Evacuation complete in three minutes, meine Kapitänin,” Greuner announced.

“Excellent.” Hansen nodded.

“TES requests docking instructions, meine Kapitänin,” Selavko said.

“Tell them to use the forward emergency ring,” Hansen replied. “We’ll bring them aboard closest to the breaches and have them work their way aft.”

* * *

“Understood, Preussen,” Panum replied over the com. “Moving to dock now. Estimate three minutes to hard contact. Emergency One, clear.”

He released the transmit button and looked over his shoulder at Clendenin.

“Three—”

“Heard it,” Clendenin interrupted as the men and women behind him made their final weapons checks.

* * *

“That’s it, Herr Korvettenkapitän,” the Access Bravo oberbootsmann announced as the final lift car completed its journey.

He and Bajer were alone now in the large, echoing compartment, which seemed even larger after the crowd that had just passed through it. Indeed, the entire ship felt somehow empty around them, Bajer noted, as if the vessel itself sensed the absence of almost ninety percent of its crew. Only essential engineering personnel, including every soul assigned to the Damage Control Department, the Army personnel of her Raumbatallion, and her command crew remained onboard.

No more than two hundred and fifty people, if Bajer’s calculations were correct. And of course, a solid ten percent of that number—including Beta Section, the Raumsbatallion’s off-duty company—were holding down stations in the spin section, not the core hull.

“Excellent work,” Bajer complimented the petty officer as the other began reconfiguring the lift cluster. The spin section would remain in its locked position until the onboard emergency was completely contained, and the lifts would be in damage control mode, controlled independently of the central computer net by their occupants.

“Thank you, mein Herr,” the oberbootsmann said over his shoulder as Bajer unhooked and drifted closer to him. “I guess all the drills were—”

It was much easier the second time, Bajer thought, watching the body drift away under the impetus of the bullet, leaking globules of blood and tissue. He wiped blood and bits of brain off the control panel with his forearm and finished reconfiguring the lift cluster.

The command code he entered, however, wasn’t the one Damage Control would use to activate one of the lift cars.

But that was all right. It would work just fine for the Emergency Services personnel who would be boarding soon.

* * *

“Are we glad to see you,” Maat Ditmar Muthig said as the inner hatch opened.

“Got here as quick as we could,” Panum assured the petty officer, floating past him into the compartment with Clendenin on his heels. “Understand you’re having a few problems?”

“One way to put it,” Muthig replied with feeling. A toe push sent him drifting back to clear the way for the TES personnel. “As soon your people have their near onboard, we’ll—”

His voice died as Clendenin arrested his own drift by gripping the front of Muthig’s uniform coverall and the edge of a lethally keen knife pressed suddenly against the Andermani’s throat.

“Not one more word,” Clendenin said. His tone was almost conversational, but his eyes were bleak and hard. Muthig stared at him in shocked disbelief for perhaps two heartbeats. Then he swallowed hard and nodded.

“Good,” Clendenin said as Panum reached out and plucked the maat’s com from his ear and slid it into a pocket.

“Now why don’t you and I just step over here,” Clendenin continued, hooking one toe into a handhold and using his leg muscles to pull the two of them out of the way as the rest of his heavily armed team began gliding swiftly past them.

* * *

“How can I help you, Herr Korvettenkapitän?” Bootsmann Eicher asked politely, in a tone which obviously meant and what the hell are you doing here? as Bajer came gliding swiftly down the passage towards Reactor One.

“I was in the vicinity and the Kapitänin asked me to get her an eyes-on situation report before I head for the bridge,” Bajer told the Damage Control tech. “What do we have?”

“I’m not sure yet, mein Herr,” Eicher replied. “We just got here ourselves, but the damage seems a bit odd. Most of it’s pretty minor—a lot less severe than the remotes are reporting. And the blast pattern’s weird.”

“Really?” Bajer frowned. “Your crew’s inside?”

“Of course, mein Herr.”

“Then why don’t you and I join them? If the damage really is less catastrophic, I’m sure the Kapitänin will be relieved to hear it.”

“She’s not the only one, mein Herr,” Eicher said, pulling himself through the open reactor compartment hatch to lead the way. “I just can’t figure—”

He didn’t notice that the assistant tactical officer wasn’t on his heels until the hatch zipped shut behind him. He was still trying to figure out what the hell was happening when the boarding grenade Bajer had tossed through the hatchway drifted past him.

Two seconds later, there was another explosion in Reactor One.

* * *

Obergefreiter Schuster couldn’t understand why his diagnostic unit insisted there was no plasma breach on the other side of the sealed hatch in front of his Damage Control team. According to the ship’s sensor net, the breach was actually spreading, but his stupid handheld unit didn’t agree.

What the hell?

“Well, is it, or isn’t it?” Bootsmann Tischler demanded. “I’m damned well not opening that hatch until I know what’s on the other side.”

“All I can tell you is what the unit says,” Schuster said helplessly. “And it says there’s no problem, which can’t be right.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Tischler snarled. He keyed his com. “Central, Tischler,” he began. “Something’s—”

“Mein Gott!” someone exclaimed, and Tischler broke off as he and Schuster spun towards the sound of the voice.

Just as a fusillade of bullets from the Emergency Services personnel who had rounded a bend in the passageway ripped through their entire five-man team.

* * *

Gunfire!” a voice shouted suddenly from the bridge speakers. “Gunfire in Compartment Niner-Four-Th—”

The unmistakable staccato of automatic weapons fire cut the voice off, and Hansen stiffened in her command chair.

“Where was that from?” she snapped.

“Niner-Four-Three-Zero,” Selavko reported in a disbelieving tone.

Hansen shot a look over her shoulder at Jachmann. For once, the Flotillenadmiral looked completely nonplussed, and she didn’t blame him a bit. She stabbed a button on her chair arm, activating her personal com. “Major Kleinberg?” she said sharply.

“Ja, meine Kapitänin?” the commander of Preussen’s embarked Raumbatallion replied from his station aft of the spin section.

“What’s Alpha Team’s status?”

“Alpha Team, meine Kapitänin?” Kleinberg echoed, clearly confused about why his CO was asking about the duty boarding team when her ship was threatening to explode around them.

“Alpha Team!” Hansen repeated sharply. “We have gunfire in at least one compartment forward of Reactor One.”

“Gun—” Kleinberg began, then cut himself off instantly.

“Exactly! Maybe there’s more than just a plasma breach going on.”

“I can have Alpha geared up and heading up-ship in three minutes, meine Kapitänin.

Nein,” Hansen said firmly. “Get Bravo Team down from the spin section to secure the lift clusters and the center of the core hull and isolate whatever’s happening in the forward half of the ship. I want Alpha on the ready shuttle—have them come to the forward emergency ring. If this is really an attempt to take the ship, whoever it is must have gotten aboard in the TES crash cars, and I want you coming in behind them. Use the shuttle breaching charges if you have to in order to avoid the airlocks. Once you’re aboard, move aft and trap them between your people and the spin section.”

“Ja, meine Kapitänin,” Kleinberg replied. “We’ll be underway in four minutes.”

“Good.” Hansen shifted channels. “Oberstabsbootsmann Kellerman, this is the Kapitänin,” she said. “I need you and at least three people you trust on the bridge. And bring sidearms.” She listened for a second, then snorted harshly. “Yes, that’s exactly what I said. Now move.”

She released the button and raised a calm eyebrow at Jachmann. “Any other suggestions, mein Herr?”

“You’re not going to warn the rest of the crew about what’s happening?” he asked. Stunned disbelief no longer filled his eyes, but he was clearly still trying to sort things out in his own mind.

“No,” she said. “We don’t know how many there are or where they are right now, and I can’t warn our people without tipping them off that we know what’s happening. I want Kleinberg’s arrival to surprise them, if we can manage that.”

“Yes, that all makes sense,” Jachmann conceded.

“And if this is the Freets—and I don’t see who else it could be,” Hansen added, “they can’t know the ship as well as our people do. That should slow them down. There’ll be time enough to warn the rest of our people when Kleinberg’s back aboard.”

Jachmann made a face, but nodded. “Agreed.”

* * *

“Move. Move!Oberfeldwebel Zunker bellowed as the Alpha Team’s three squads grabbed their helmets and sent themselves shooting down the passage towards the waiting ready shuttle.

The Komet-class shuttle was armed with a light autocannon, but its primary function was to transport boarding teams, and it carried hull-breaching charges as well as racked GK12 rifles, the standard infantry rifle of the Imperial Andermani Army, and the SK1 assault guns that were specially designed to fire flechettes for shipboard actions. The Alpha Team was kept vac-suited for moments just like this, and they would mate with their personal weapons once they were aboard the shuttle and en route.

Hauptmann Kleinberg waited till the last member of the team was in motion, then kicked off and followed them, his brain busy as he thought about the challenge ahead.

* * *

“Reporting as ordered, meine Kapitänin,Oberstabsbootsmann Arthur Kellerman announced as he and three grim-faced enlisted spacers entered Preussen’s bridge.

Even after almost forty-seven T-years, there was just a trace of Kellerman’s original Old Earth North American accent in his German. There was a lot of white at his temples now, too. A lot more than there’d been when he’d been a very junior stabsgefreiter assigned to Hansen’s mother, Kapitainleutnant Amanda Hansen.

“Thank you,” Hansen said, eyeing the man who’d made it his business to watch her back since she’d learned to walk. “Defensive positions.”

“Ja, meine Kapitänin.” Nodding curtly, he twitched his head at the three spacers who’d followed him. They spread out, moving to the corners of the bridge, their SK1s held with the competence instilled by the Navy’s regular small arms training.

* * *

“Shuttle’s separating in fifteen seconds, Hauptfeldwebel,” Feldwebel Metzger announced over Hauptfeldwebel Huan Niekisch’s earbud.

“Good,” Niekisch said, never looking away from her own handheld. Every instinct honed in twelve years of service told her she ought to be aboard the shuttle with her CO, but her forebrain knew better. As the Raumsbatallion’s senior NCO, her proper place was keeping an eye on Hauptmann Waldschmidt, Beta Company’s NCO. Waldschmidt was a bright enough young fellow, but this was his first deployment as a company commander. He was shaping up nicely, but any hauptfeldwebel knew her job was to buff off any rough spots on the newbie officers.

“Last trooper into the lift, mein Herr,” she continued now, looking up at Waldschmidt. “And the Skipper and the ready shuttle are separating in thirteen seconds.”

“Then we’d best get to it,” Ruogang Waldschmidt said grimly, and Niekisch followed him into the central lift car and hit the button.

* * *

“Separation!” the shuttle pilot announced as the ready shuttle broke free of Preussen. It quivered as she fired her thrusters and sent her craft outward. She had to clear the spin section to reach her assigned destination, and the shuttle rose vertically on its belly thrusters.

* * *

The three lift shafts from the Raumsbatallion’s quarters aboard the spin section operated perfectly, sliding their lift cars rapidly up the spin section spoke to the core hull. Their doors opened, and the men and women of Waldschmidt’s company started to crowd out.

The six Tomlinson-born spacers waited until the doors slid apart, then two of them opened fire on each lift car with the GK12s and SK1s they’d taken from the arms lockers.

* * *

“Right on schedule,” Obermaat Collette Filipov murmured.

A native Tomlinson, she was rather older than most of the Andermani Navy’s second-class petty officers. She was better at her job than many of those younger maats and obermaats, but it wasn’t a huge surprise that she hadn’t been promoted as rapidly as they had.

She’d seemed to be having a little more trouble with that apparent slight lately, however, which was why Greuner, on Bajer’s advice, had moved her from Preussen’s bridge crew to one of the on-mount point defense crews, where she could perhaps regain some perspective. Greuner had deferred to Bajer’s recommendation, as he usually did where the handful of Tomlinsons in their department was concerned.

And so Filipov now found herself in charge of the four-person on-mount crew of Point Defense Three, the only mount manned at Zulu-Three. Where, by a strange turn of fate, all but one of her personnel happened to be fellow Tomlinsons.

“Tracking,” the one non-Tomlinson on PD 3’s crew reported.

Filipov eyed him. She didn’t know exactly where the hauptgefreiter had come from, but she was pretty damn sure he wasn’t the Andermani his papers proclaimed him to be.

“Seven seconds,” someone else said, and Filipov nodded.

* * *

The assault shuttle cleared the spin section and started forward.

“What the—?”

There was no alarm in the pilot’s voice. There wasn’t time for that. There was only confusion as she realized the point defense station had trained out. It had only begun to register that its gaping muzzle was aimed directly at her when it fired.

* * *

“Meine Kapitänin!” Greuner gasped. “Point Defense Three just fired! It—it destroyed the Ready Shuttle!”

A ripple of shock and confusion ran like a fire wave through the bridge. But Hansen’s face showed no emotion. Releasing her seat restraints, she gave herself a shove that sent her drifting towards Kellerman. The stone-faced petty officer extended a hand to draw her to a bulkhead handhold next to him, and she turned to face the shocked members of her bridge crew.

“I know, Fregattenkapitän Greuner,” she said, her voice icy calm. “I’m sorry.”

And suddenly the assault rifles at the corners of the bridge—the rifles in the hands of the men who were supposed to be protecting them—were leveled and aimed.

At them.

For a frozen moment total silence enveloped the compartment. Then, Selavko thrust up out of his seat, turning toward Hansen.

He never completed the turn. An SK1 coughed, and the burst of flechettes struck him from behind at the base of his neck.

His neck simply disintegrated in an explosive shower of blood, and his head—eyes wide and staring in confusion—sailed across the compartment.

Hansen’s lips tightened. She started to say something sharp, then stopped herself. The spacer who’d fired had been unable to see Selavko’s hands. He hadn’t known whether or not the leutnant had a weapon.

Besides, despite all the effort she’d gone through to keep casualties to an absolute minimum, it wasn’t as if Selavko was the only one of Preussen’s people who’d died today.

Jachmann stared at her, his face dark with mingled shock and fury, and she looked back levelly.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded harshly.

“I think I’m committing mutiny, mein Herr,” she said calmly.

“That’s insane!”

“On the contrary, it’s very sane,” she said. “I have my reasons, Herr Baron. I can’t explain them to you right this moment, but eventually I will. And when I do, you’ll have a choice to make.”

“Choice? What kind of choice do you expect me to make?”

“A difficult one,” she told him. “Very much like the one Arthur had to make.” She touched the oberstabsbootsmann lightly on the shoulder. “It wasn’t easy for him. In fact, he tried very hard to talk me out of this. But in the end—”

She shrugged, and Jachmann transferred his glare to Kellerman. Hansen gave him another twenty seconds or so, then looked at one of the spacers who’d accompanied Kellerman.

“Dorfman, escort the Flotillenadmiral to CIC,” she said.


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