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CHAPTER SEVEN

Jalal System

Terran Federation

October 27, 2552


“Sublight…now,” Commander Augustus Creuzburg announced, and TFNS Ishtar and her consorts blinked back into existence in normal space.

As always, Creuzburg’s astrogation had been perfect. Murphy’s flagship was just over 151.6 light-minutes from the Jalal System’s primary, decelerating at 1,800 KPS2 as she and her consorts hurtled towards it at 297,000 KPS. Even at that prodigious deceleration rate, it would take them almost six hours to decelerate to rest relative to the star at the point Murphy had christened Point Rubicon, 6.2 LM from the primary and two light-minutes outside the orbit of Jalal Beta, the habitable planet Jalal Station orbited. The station’s light-speed sensors wouldn’t even see Ishtar’s transponder code for more than two and a half hours, although that would be less than twenty-two minutes for Ishtar, at her current velocity. By that time, however, she would have decelerated to 131,777 KPS—“only” forty-four percent of light speed—and the relativistic time dilation would have dropped to only about nine percent. At the moment, what her light speed sensors saw was a two-hour peek into the past, and Murphy watched data fill in across the quadrants of the master display.

“No ship IDs, Sir,” O’Hanraghty murmured. “Got all the standard nav beacons and general ‘information to shipping’ transmissions, but not a single Navy beacon. Seems a bit…odd for a place like Jalal, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why would you even think that, Harry?” Murphy smiled. “It’s not like they didn’t know we were coming.”

O’Hanraghty grunted something that was a cross between a chuckle and a laugh. They hadn’t sent Jalal any ship movement information, but they knew the base’s gravitic arrays had spotted their incoming FTL footprint while they were still at least twenty-four light-weeks out. That had given Jalal over four and a half hours to decide what to do when they arrived. And one of the first things Terrence Murphy would have done with four and a half hours in hand was to make damned sure any of his mobile assets were as hard to detect as possible.

“No challenges, either, though,” Murphy continued, and O’Hanraghty nodded. Just as there’d been ample time for Jalal to shut down its ships’ ID beacons, there’d been plenty of time for the station to transmit a light speed challenge they would have received the instant they arrived.

“Gotta wonder about that, Sir,” the captain said.

“Why?” the tall, one-eyed lieutenant on the other side of Murphy’s command chair asked. “Oh, there’s a bunch of things I’m wondering about, Sir,” he added when O’Hanraghty raised both eyebrows at him. “The fact that they aren’t talking to us isn’t as high on my priorities list as some of the other ‘wonders’ in question, though.”

“There are a lot of things they could be saying, Callum,” O’Hanraghty said. “Coming in on this heading, they have to have a damned good idea who we are. And the size of our footprint will have told them we’ve got a lot more carriers than we left with. So I’m not really all that surprised they aren’t saying ‘Welcome home! Glad to see you!’ But they’re also not telling us we aren’t welcome. So the question is why they aren’t. Add that to all of the ship beacons we’re not seeing, and a naturally suspicious fellow—which, of course, we all know I’m not—would have to wonder if they aren’t lying low to entice us into some sort of trap.”

“I can’t believe you just said that without attracting a lightning bolt,” Murphy said dryly.

“What? That it’s something to wonder about?” his chief of staff asked in slightly hurt tones.

“No, that bit about not being a naturally suspicious fellow.”

“Ah!” O’Hanraghty touched the side of his nose with an index finger. “Just a professional intelligence geek’s natural dissimulation.” He shrugged. “Sorry. Can’t seem to shake the habit.”

“Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point, Callum,” Murphy continued, glancing up at his son. “They’d have to think we were pretty stupid if they could actually fool us that way, but it’s not like it costs them anything to try.”

“Which is why we went ahead and deployed the first-wave Heimdallars as soon as we dropped sublight,” O’Hanraghty added, and Callum nodded.

The long range, Hauptman-coil-powered recon drones had a maximum acceleration rate of only 800 gravities, half the 17.7 KPS2 an FTLC like Ishtar could produce, at least outside the primary’s twenty-three light-minute Powell Limit. Their lower deceleration meant they’d be unable to decelerate to rest before they overflew the inner system—in fact, they’d still be traveling at 14,568 KPs when their Hauptman coils exhausted their ten-hour endurance. For now, however, the gap between them and the carriers was opening steadily at a rate of 25.5 KPS2. They would overfly Point Rubicon at 214,112 KPS over an hour before Ishtar reached it, then streak clear across the inner system and back out into interstellar space at a velocity that would make intercepting them effectively impossible. In the process, however, their sophisticated active and passive sensors would give them a very close look at what awaited Murphy’s ships, hopefully in plenty of time for him to do something about whatever surprises that might entail.

“And in the meantime, let’s start analyzing that ‘information to shipping’ comm traffic,” Murphy said.

“Analyzing it, Sir?” Callum asked.

“Of course.” Murphy smiled almost serenely. “You never know what might have been…inadvertently included in a broadcast like that.”

* * *

“It’s confirmed, Ma’am,” Captain Farkas Tibor said. “That’s Ishtar’s transponder code.”

Vice Admiral Géraldine Portier grimaced without ever looking away from the holo display. There’d never been much doubt who their visitors had to be, coming in on that heading. And the size and strength of the incoming Fasset signatures had warned them hours ago that whoever it was had to have more than the five to seven FTLCs Terrence Murphy was known to possess. But twelve of them?

Only one was showing a transponder, which was why she didn’t have a clue who the extras might be. She doubted that was just coincidental, but still—

“Where the hell did he get all those carriers?” She kept her voice low, pitched solely for Tibor’s ears, and looked away from the display to meet his eyes at last.

“Ma’am, let’s be realistic,” her chief of staff replied, equally quietly. “Right or wrong, a hell of a lot of people, especially out here in the Fringe, agree with him. Or at least want to hear him out.” He inhaled deeply. “I’m afraid what we’re seeing here is proof of that, actually. If he’s got that many carriers it means other Navy units—a lot of other Navy Units—not just Fringe Worlds, are going ‘out of compliance’ to support him.”

“Goddamn those traitors!” Portier hissed, eyes going back to the display. “How can they not see what he’s really doing?!”

Tibor shrugged, ever so slightly. He and the Jalal Station CO had served together for over four years. He respected her ability, and he liked her a great deal. But this was a conversation they’d had—or danced around, at least—often enough since word of the Battle of New Dublin reached Jalal. There was no point continuing it now, although he suspected that deep inside somewhere, even Portier had to know the answer to her question.

Tibor was as much a Heart Worlder as she was, although he lacked her ties to the Five Hundred. The Oval wouldn’t have handed command of a base as important as Jalal to someone it didn’t trust on multiple levels, so of course it had to be one of the Five Hundred’s own. Tibor understood that, and as recently as a year ago, he would have agreed that lunatics spouting theories of secret Rishathan involvement in the endless war against the League should be locked up someplace where they couldn’t hurt themselves or anyone else. But he’d seen Terrence Murphy’s reports, and especially the summary report on the League shipyards at Diyu. Murphy might still be wrong, but the evidence seemed compelling. Worse, unlike Portier, Tibor completely understood why angry, exhausted Fringers would buy into it. Why they would rally behind someone as charismatic and decisive as Terrence Murphy had proved himself to be.

They’d already seen that in New Dublin’s reaction to his successful stand there. They didn’t have any news of what had happened since Murphy’s dispatch about the Leaguies’ shipyards. But if he was here now, with that many carriers, it was painfully obvious the plans to arrest him on what were clearly trumped-up charges had been…less than successful. And it also meant that whatever else had happened, the plans to arrest him on what were obviously trumped up charges had been…less than successful. The question was how much less than that they’d been, and the answer would seem to be a lot less.

He wouldn’t be here at all, much less with that many carriers, if the whole damned sector wasn’t going up in flames behind him, Tibor thought grimly. And I can’t blame them, God help me. I’ve never met Murphy, but all I have to do is look at what he’s done over the last seven months. Of course they trust him!

And if there’d been even a handful of other Federation flag officers willing to do what their oaths actually required like he had, that wouldn’t be a problem. But there hadn’t been, and now, whether he wanted it that way or not, Murphy had become the living avatar of the Five Hundred’s worst nightmares.

From his own reading of Murphy’s reports, Tibor was almost certain he hadn’t wanted to. That all he’d really wanted was to do his duty, honor his oath to protect the Federation’s citizens—all of its citizens, not just the one fortunate enough to live on Heart Worlds. But what he’d wanted in the beginning didn’t really matter now, because there was no way in the universe Portier and the others like her would ever recognize him—or admit that they did, at any rate—as anything other than a self-serving, ambitious warlord and would-be dictator.

“Whatever his people may be thinking, they’re here now,” he said instead. “How do we want to respond?”

“I think we’ll just have to go with Fenris and hope it works,” Portier replied after a moment. “And at least we know the threat axis now. Go ahead and start deploying the Kavachas.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and the vice admiral looked over her shoulder at the communications officer.

“Standard challenge,” she said.

* * *

“I’ve found something just a little…odd, Admiral,” Callum Murphy said.

“No! Really?” Murphy replied, and Callum turned from his flag deck display to bestow a suspicious look upon his father.

“Yes,” he said. “There appears to be an embedded data packet in the standard information transmissions. It popped out as soon as it hit Ishtar’s ID firewall. You and Captain O’Hanraghty wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“As a matter of fact, we do.” O’Hanraghty moved to Callum’s shoulder and looked down at the same display. “We weren’t positive Silas and friends would be able to pull it off, but they’re very inventive.”

“And a damned good thing, if this is accurate,” Callum replied.

“You think?” O’Hanraghty’s tone was dry, and he looked over his shoulder at Murphy. “According to this, they must’ve started ferrying parasites in from Sol as soon as they heard about what happened to Xing at New Dublin. There are only three carriers in-system—Selene, Dictys, and Hylonome—but they’ve reinforced the Jalal sublight picket heavily.”

“How heavily?” Murphy asked. Given Jalal’s strategic importance, the station had always been heavily defended—for a Fringe system—by a permanent sublight task force that included six full-strength battleship squadrons, plus screening and support units.

“They’ve more than tripled it,” O’Hanraghty said grimly. “According to this,” he twitched his head at Callum’s display, “there are over three hundred sublight units covering the station. That’s in addition to the carriers’ groups. Call it three hundred sixty, with the carrier groups added to the pot.”

“Ouch.”

Murphy’s tone was remarkably mild, and Callum looked at him sharply. The admiral noticed and pushed up out of his own command chair. A toe thrust against its back sent him across to his son’s station.

“The number of sublight units they have doesn’t really matter all that much, Callum,” he said quietly. “We’re not planning on going anywhere near Jalal Station if we have to shoot our way in. And if we don’t go to them, they can’t possibly come to us.”

He quirked an eyebrow until Callum nodded in understanding.

“But what if it turns out we do have to ‘shoot our way in’?” the younger Murphy asked. “Ishtar’s been squawking her transponder from the moment we went sublight. They have to know who we are. The fact that they haven’t said anything to us suggests to my powerful intellect that they aren’t just happy as hell to see us. So what happens if they start the shooting and we have to shoot back?”

“That’s the last thing we want to do, which is why Rubicon is two light-minutes short of the station,” O’Hanraghty replied. “At that range, anything they send our way will be ballistic long before it reaches us, so nobody but an idiot would launch in the first place. Of course, they may be idiots and do it anyway, but if it happens, that’s why we brought along the Casúrs.”

“Exactly,” Murphy agreed somberly.

The drone-carried attack missiles Murphy had devised for the defense of New Dublin had been dubbed Casúr Cogaidhs—War Hammers—by the citizens of Crann Bethadh, and the name was only too apt. Three of Murphy’s FTLCs carried cargo pods stuffed with the drones on their parasite racks instead of warships, and he’d commandeered two massive FTL freighters to haul the next tranche forward from New Dublin as soon as the industrial platforms finished building them.

If he needed it, he’d have all the firepower anyone could possibly need to take out half a dozen targets as tough as Jalal.

“God knows I don’t want to use them,” he said now, “but if we have to—”

He broke off with a shrug, and Callum nodded.

“Admiral, we have an incoming transmission from Jalal Station,” Lieutenant Cointa Mastroianni, Ishtar’s communications officer, announced from the holo display of the enormous carrier’s command deck.

“Well, speak of the devil,” O’Hanraghty said dryly. “Took their own sweet time, didn’t they?”

“I expect there was a bit of dithering at their end,” Murphy replied. “It does seem a little tardy of them, though, doesn’t it?

They’d dropped sublight just under two and a half hours earlier. Their velocity had fallen to a “mere” 138,132 KPS, less than half the speed of light; they’d traveled 108.8 LM towards Point Rubicon; and the range to Jalal Station was down to 43.2 LM.

“Excuse me, Admiral,” Commander Riley Mirwani, Murphy’s operations officer, said.

“Yes?” Murphy looked at him.

“We’re picking up Hauptman signatures, Sir. A lot of them.”

A fresh sparkle of icons frosted the plot, drifting towards one another to cluster on the direct line between Ishtar and Jalal Station.

“My, they are untrusting souls, aren’t they? You’d almost think they expect us to shoot at them or something,” O’Hanraghty said, and Murphy snorted.

The range was far too great for detailed sensor resolution, but those had to be Kavacha platforms. The platforms came in two varieties—the Shankhas and Sharangas—but their shared function was to defend against long-range kinetic attack. Both of them were enormous, almost the size of the Casúr Cogaidhs, which made them impractical for shipboard use. On the other hand, ships could dodge, which space stations—and planets—couldn’t. And targets that couldn’t dodge were dead meat for kinetic attack at almost any range. It might take hours or even days for a KEW to reach its target, but it would get there eventually, and when it did, the consequences would be ugly. Unless something like a Kavacha intervened, at any rate.

Of course, his momentary amusement at O’Hanraghty’s comment fading, they weren’t used to defend all space stations and planets, were they? Providing them to systems in the Fringe was another one of those things federal governors weren’t supposed to do. There’d been none in New Dublin when he arrived, which he’d thought was particularly stupid, given the way New Dublin’s deep-space industry had been ungraded to support the Navy. That decision had been made in Olympia long before he ever departed for the Fringe, however, and once he’d decided to go out of compliance, he’d had to choose between Kavachas and Casúr Cogaidhs. Thank God Third Admiral Than had used only missiles in his attack on Crann Bethadh’s orbital platforms!

The Shankha’s function was to launch clouds of relatively small, superdense pellets—they were called kankads, from the Hindi for “pebble”—into the path of incoming kinetic projectiles. A solid slug of super collapsed material from a capital ship’s K-gun massed over 750 kilograms, so even a direct collision with a kankad was unlikely to actually destroy one. Multiple collisions could be a different matter, but they were also unlikely as hell. The energy release of even a single impact at those velocities would deflect it significantly from its original trajectory, however. That was one reason Shankhas were deployed as far out as possible, where even a relatively small deflection could cause an incoming KEW to miss its target completely.

The Sharanga was a more capable version of the TFN’s Phalanx “escort missile,” fitted with multiple Alysída systems. Unlike the Shankha’s kankads, which were deployed at the lowest possible velocity in order to provide the greatest dwell time before they dispersed, the Alysída batteries of fighter-sized K-guns targeted the incoming KEW with KEWs of their own, and they were actually quite good at it. Their greater size gave them the volume not only for much better sensor suites and fire control than the standard Phalanx could boast, but also for eight times the K-guns and much deeper magazines, and their KEWs packed well over two hundred times a kankad’s kinetic energy.

Unfortunately, neither Kavacha platform was as effective against missiles, mostly because, in order to be effective against KEWS, they had to be deployed so far from the station or planet they were defending. That meant an attacker usually knew where the defense had placed its Kavachas, and even after a shipkiller like the TFN’s Bijalee had exhausted its Hauptman coil and gone ballistic, its fusion-powered final stage was capable of generating a pop-up evasion that was usually sufficient to clear the Kavachas’ defensive zone on the way in.

“Well, untrusting or not, it’s hardly a surprise,” the admiral said after a moment, and shrugged. Then he looked at Mastroianni once more.

“Go ahead and put up that message now, please,” he said.

“Yes, Sir.”

Mastroianni disappeared from the master display, replaced by another woman—this one with dark hair, dark brown eyes, a strong Roman nose, and the uniform of a TFN vice admiral.

“This is Vice Admiral Portier,” she said. “State your identity and intentions and be aware that you are forbidden to enter weapons range of Jalal Station. Portier, clear.”

“Succinct and to the point,” O’Hanraghty observed. “And mighty strong talk from someone who’s only got sixty odd sublight ships to fend off our vicious onslaught.”

“Despite that ‘state your identity’ business, she knows perfectly well who we are,” Murphy replied, rubbing one eyebrow with a thoughtful index finger. “Well, she may not know precisely who the other carriers are, but she damned well knows which one is Ishtar, given how long we’ve been squawking our transponder. So I imagine she plans on showing us the others if we just keep coming. For that matter, she has to know we would have deployed Heimdallars, so she can’t hope to hide them from us a whole lot longer.”

In point of fact, the first-wave Heimdallars would cross Point Rubicon on their one-way voyage to infinity in just under twenty minutes.

“No, and she should sure as hell have deployed those carriers somewhere besides Jalal Beta orbit,” O’Hanraghty said in the sour tone of a craftsman offended by inferior workmanship.

“I’d tend to agree, Harry. On the other hand, that’s a pretty distant orbit. They may be inside the stellar Powel Limit, but at least they’re outside the planetary limit.”

“So their acceleration will match ours once we cross the limit inbound,” O’Hanraghty conceded. “They’re still dead meat for anyone who opts for a high-speed firing run. If we just wanted to kill them, we could carry enough velocity across the limit to run them down anytime we wanted to.”

“That may be why they’re where they are,” Murphy said. “And what other option did they have? It’s unlikely they’d be able to hide somewhere out-system and then outmaneuver us to sneak into attack range. And even if they’d thought they might get away with that, they only have three, whereas they figured we had five of our own, at minimum. Given those odds, they may have figured it made more sense to keep them inside the sublight defensive envelope just in case we were crazy enough to attack them. I wouldn’t have done it this way.” He shrugged. “If I’d been deploying them, I’d have put them at least half a light-hour from the Station, well outside the limit, with every active system locked down to make them impossible to detect. At least that way, they’d be able to run for home if we attacked. But I can more or less understand their thinking.”

“Sure you can, Sir.”

“Be nice,” Murphy said almost absently. Then his nostrils flared.

“Lieutenant Mastroianni, please get me Commodore Tremblay.”

“Yes, Sir.”

A moment later, Commodore Esteban Tremblay appeared on Murphy’s display. The flag bridge of TFNS Kishar, his FTLC flagship, was visible behind him, and his expression was less than delighted, but Murphy saw no hesitation in those steady eyes.

“Yes, Admiral?”

“I’m afraid they sound just about as unreasonable as we thought they would, Steve,” Murphy said somberly. “I’m not ready to throw in the towel and say we can’t bring Vice Admiral Portier around, but I don’t think anyone would offer very good odds.”

Tremblay’s jaw tightened ever so slightly, but he nodded.

“It looks like we may need Pre-Spot after all,” Murphy continued. “Hopefully, we won’t, but better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them.” His lips twitched in a humorless smile. “At the moment, it looks like all we’ll need is the Alpha deployment. I certainly hope that’s all we’ll need, anyway, but go ahead and prep for Baker, as well.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The commodore nodded again, crisply, and Murphy nodded back. In many ways, Tremblay and other TFN officers like him offered the best—indeed, probably the only—hope for the success of his mission. Esteban Tremblay was about as Heart World as anyone outside the Five Hundred came, and he’d also been one of the solid majority of Heart Worlders who scoffed at the very notion of Rishathan complicity, ridiculed the “tinfoil-hat” brigade of “conspiracy theorists” who were prepared to entertain even the remote possibility of the Sphere’s involvement.

He no longer was. He’d seen proof that while Murphy and O’Hanraghty might be mistaken about the Rish, their intelligence of the impending League attack on New Dublin had been spot on. More than that, he’d found himself completely supporting Murphy’s decision to stand and fight in New Dublin, even against the Oval’s direct orders. And after New Dublin, the evidence of Rishathan involvement from the Diyu shipyards had completed his conversion from skepticism to solid support for Murphy’s analysis. But it had been Lipshen’s effort to arrest Murphy for the unforgivable crime of doing his duty and restoring the TFN’s honor—and the murder of President Alan Tolmach—that had turned that support for Terrence Murphy’s “crackpot theories” about the Rish into unflinching support for Terrence Murphy the man.

“Thank you, Steve,” Murphy said now, hoping that Tremblay heard his deeply felt sincerity. Then he looked over his shoulder. “Lieutenant Mastroianni?”

“Yes, Admiral?”

“Be kind enough to record for transmission, please.”

“Recording now, Sir.”

Murphy folded his hands behind him and looked into the pickup.

“Admiral Portier, I believe you know exactly who I am, since Ishtar’s been showing her transponder for well over two hours. As for my intentions, they are precisely what I’ve stated in my earlier reports to Olympia and the Oval. I intend to establish communications with the Oval and the Prime Minister and present to them the evidence that supports the analysis I’ve already transmitted to them. I further intend to make Jalal my communications nexus. It is not my intent to approach Sol or any Heart World star system with this much firepower in tow, but I have a…less than lively faith in the willingness of the Powers That Be to listen to me—and, especially, to make my information part of the public record—without this firepower at my back. Under the circumstances, Jalal strikes me as the most reasonable point from which to establish contact with our superiors on Earth. Other factors have come into play since my last report, many of them political in nature, which make it even more urgent that I establish that contact as promptly as possible. It is not my intention to engage in combat with anyone except enemies of the Terran Federation, which is exactly what I’ve been saying ever since the Battle of New Dublin. My force will decelerate to rest two light-minutes clear of Jalal Station—outside your Kavachas—and remain there. Murphy, clear.”

* * *

“And how much of that bullshit do we want to believe?” Vice Admiral Portier demanded harshly forty-three minutes later, glaring at Murphy’s frozen image on the master display.

“I can’t speak to his ultimate intentions, Ma’am,” Tibor replied. “But his current deceleration profile tracks exactly with where he says he plans to stop.”

“Sure it does…for now. And what about those?” Portier jutted her chin at a shoal of Hauptmann signatures burning in the master plot. They’d streaked past Jalal Beta seventeen minutes ago at 212,788 KPS, still decelerating at 800 gravities. To get there that soon—and at that velocity—Murphy must have dropped them as soon as he’d gone sublight.

As for Murphy himself, his carriers were down to 88,353 KPS and 30.3 LM from the system primary. Which put them a little over seven light-minutes outside the Jalal Powell Limit…and less than 26.3 LM from Jalal Station.

“Heimdallars.” Tibor shrugged. “Anybody but an idiot—and whatever else he may be, Murphy’s clearly no idiot—would have deployed recon drones. But they burned right past the Station—hell, they’re already eleven light-minutes downrange!—so they didn’t give him any dwell time at all.” He shrugged again. “Sure, he’ll have a pretty good snapshot of what we’ve got, but we always knew that was going to happen, Ma’am,” he added almost gently.

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it when it does happen,” Portier growled. She frowned in intense thought, then nodded to her communications officer. “Record for transmission.”

“Recording, Ma’am.”

“Rear Admiral Murphy,” Jalal Station’s CO said coldly into the camera, “your presence here is unauthorized. In fact, given what I know your actual orders were, it constitutes an act of mutiny. Moreover, I am aware of the federal government’s orders for your arrest, which you have obviously defied…in addition to all your other crimes.

“Given the number of vessels in company with you, it’s clear to me that the decision to take you into custody and return you to Earth for trial were only too wise. In light of that, you are instructed and ordered to surrender yourself and your senior officers to the legitimate authorities. To be perfectly clear, in this instance, the ‘legitimate authority’ is me. Moreover, it is the lawful duty of every uniformed man and woman aboard the ships of your illegally assembled force to take you and those senior officers into custody, immediately, by whatever means are necessary. Failure to comply with the legal, binding orders I have just given you will constitute a further act of mutiny and will be met with lethal force. I advise you to consider the cost to the personnel who have followed you this far into what can only be construed as an act of treason very carefully, indeed. Portier, clear.”

She paused, considering what she’d said, wondering if she should review it, possibly edit its stark severity. But then her lips firmed into a thin line.

“Send it,” she said flatly. “And append an all-ships header to it. I want all of those bastards to know exactly what the real stakes are.”

* * *

“Well, that wasn’t very promising,” Callum observed, rubbing the patch over his right eye socket thoughtfully.

“Could’ve been worse,” O’Hanraghty replied.

“Really? How?”

“Well, she could have said…well, let me see here…She could’ve said—”

O’Hanraghty paused, then gave Callum a lopsided grin.

“Actually, considering the fact that we’re too far out of range for her to actively shoot at us already, that probably couldn’t have been any worse, now that I think about it.”

“I prefer to think of it as simply her opening negotiation gambit,” Murphy said calmly, contemplating the master tactical display.

Ishtar and her consorts were only 2,880,000 kilometers outside the Powell Limit now. On their current profile, they’d cross it in less than two minutes. Their velocity would have decreased to 73,500 KPS, but their maximum deceleration rate would drop to only 900 gravities once they crossed the limit. That meant they were still over two hours from Point Rubicon, and the plot didn’t look promising. The initial flight of Heimdallars were long gone, but they’d pointed their motherships’ sensors in the right direction, and the display was thickly populated with the icons of the hundreds of sublight warships they’d spotted, despite their rigid emissions control, on the way through.

“Opening gambit, Sir?” Commander Mirwani sounded dubious.

“Oh, she may not realize it’s her opening gambit, Riley,” Murphy replied. “But that’s because she’s…misreading the balance of power, let’s say. And she may not realize yet that we know how much firepower she has in Jalal Beta orbit. The Heimdallars might not have picked them all up, for that matter, if Silas hadn’t already warned us they were there to look for. So she’s probably still thinking ambush-ish thoughts at the moment. Once she begins figuring out the truth, she’s also going to realize just how unlikely it is that anyone on our side’s going to do any surrendering.”

He frowned, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Then he shrugged.

“Harry, please comm Tremblay. Tell him to deploy Pre-Spot Alpha on the mark.”

* * *

The incoming FTLCs continued to decelerate steadily and smoothly towards Point Rubicon. Five hours and twenty-five minutes after they’d gone sublight, with their velocity down to 47,283 KPS, one of the cargo pods riding TFNS Kishar’s parasite racks opened its Number Two hatch and deployed fifty Casúr Cogaidhs. Each Casúr was essentially a large, highly modified cargo drone made of EM-absorbent materials, armed with three Bijalee shipkiller missiles, and capable of up to ten hours of acceleration at 7.8 KPS2 even here, well inside the system’s Powell Limit. Now they coasted ballistically—and the next best thing to undetectably—closer to Jalal Beta as their mothership continued to decelerate behind them.

“Alpha Casúrs deployed, Sir,” Commodore Trembley said from Murphy’s comm screen. “Baker deploying in twelve minutes.”

“Thank you, Steve,” Murphy replied quietly. “I hope we don’t need them. Either of them.”

* * *

“They’ll be down to zero in five minutes,” Captain Tibor reported. “Range two light-minutes. Exactly where Murphy said he’d stop and hold.”

“And we should expect him to stay there exactly why?” Vice Admiral Portier said. She glared into the plot, rubbing her upper lip. “I don’t see any—”

“Incoming transmission from Ishtar, Admiral,” the comm officer of the watch announced. Like most of Portier’s subordinates, the lieutenant commander used the FTLC’s name rather than the sender’s to avoid any awkward questions about traitors and their ranks.

“Put it up,” Portier half-snapped, and Terrence Murphy appeared on her display once more.

“Admiral Portier, my carriers will have decelerated to zero five minutes after you receive this transmission,” he said. “At that time, I will be deploying the sublight parasites from two of them. At two light-minutes, they will constitute no threat to any unit under your command, but they will provide me with additional sensor platforms and an expanded missile defense zone, should I need one.” He smiled humorlessly. “I genuinely don’t think you or anyone over there is stupid enough to waste missiles at such an extended range, but there’s no harm in playing safe. I will contact you again once we reach two light-minutes. Murphy, clear.”

“Deploying his parasites, is he?” Portier growled.

“Like he says, Ma’am, at two light-minutes, they really don’t constitute any more danger to the Station than his carriers already do,” Tibor pointed out.

“No?” Portier scowled at him. “Every single one of our ships—not to mention the Station itself—is a sitting duck. None of them can maneuver against incoming fire, and his fire control knows exactly where to find all of them!”

Tibor managed not to blink. Portier was right that none of their units could dodge incoming fire, but that was why the Kavacha platforms hovered between Jalal Station and Murphy’s ships. His base velocity was already down to 2,650 KPS, which gave his K-guns a maximum velocity of under 2,700 KPS. At that speed any KEWs would take almost four hours just to reach Jalal Station, which would give even sublight ships plenty of time to evade them. More to the point, they’d be relatively easy targets for the Kavachas, and it was unlikely as hell that he’d get one—or more than a tiny handful of them, at any rate—past the platforms. And once he’d decelerated to rest, their maximum velocity would be only 16.75 KPS. No KEW coming in at that velocity was getting through. Not from a two light-minute range.

As for missiles, even from Murphy’s current velocity, a Bijalee’s maximum powered engagement range was well under two hundred thousand kilometers. After that, they’d be ballistic targets with a closing velocity of barely 3,880 KPS, which would give the defenses over 35,000,000 kilometers—and better than two and a half hours—to track them. The odds of anything getting through under those circumstances was…minute, to say the least.

“Ma’am,” he said in a careful tone, “assuming he continues his current profile, he’ll be exactly on the other side of the Kavacha platforms. Given that, a kinetic attack seems unlikely to get through.”

“Oh?” Portier’s scowl deepened. “And what if instead of going directly after the Station, he decides to spend some time blowing the Kavachas out of his path? What then?”

This time, Tibor did blink. Not because Murphy couldn’t do exactly that, but because Farkas Tibor couldn’t conceive of any reason he’d want to. Every single thing Terrence Murphy had done since opening communications with Jalal Station tracked perfectly with his announced intentions. If one thing was obvious to Tibor, it was that Murphy didn’t want a fight. The reasons he didn’t might be debatable, but the man had done everything he possibly could to demonstrate his currently peaceful intentions. And whatever else he might be, someone who could accomplish everything Murphy had wasn’t stupid. Certainly not stupid enough to believe that even a dozen FTLCs could possibly survive against the massed fury of the entire Federation Navy.

Or to think for one moment that launching an unprovoked attack on Jalal Station wouldn’t produce exactly that.

He started to point that out, but he didn’t.

Portier’s tension had wound tighter and tighter as Murphy decelerated towards her command, and Tibor knew she was castigating herself for holding Clarence Maddox’s carriers so close to the planet. He also knew better than to mention it, especially since he’d argued against that close deployment from the outset, but it was clear to anyone who knew Portier as well as he did that it was an added coal in the furnace of her unhappiness.

What worried him most, though, was the possibility that she was thinking with her frustration and anger rather than reasoned judgment. And if she was able to genuinely convince herself that missile fire from two light-minutes out represented a significant threat to her command…

* * *

“Point Rubicon, Sir,” Commander Creuzburg announced.

“Thank you, Augustus.” Murphy leaned back in his command chair, watching the display as TFNS Chthonius and TFNS Ninshubur deployed their sublight parasites.

Behind them, four more cargo pods detached themselves from TFN Kishar’s parasite racks and quietly deployed six hundred more Casúr Cogaidhs. Ahead of them, twelve minutes behind the fifty Alpha-launch Casúrs, the two hundred and sixty-four additional Baker drones continued onward.

“The Alpha pods will begin decelerating in sixteen minutes, Sir,” O’Hanraghty reminded him, and he nodded again.

“I know. I’m trying not to cram things at Portier too quickly. Let’s give her a few minutes to get used to seeing all of this—” he waved at the display “—before I tell her about them.”

“Most likely she’ll assume they’re just more Heimdallars,” O’Hanraghty pointed out, and Murphy snorted.

“Unless she—oh, I don’t know…decides to check one of them out on her optical systems.”

“Well, for her to do that, she would’ve had to not assume they were just more Heimdallars, so my point stands.”

Murphy gave him a hard look, and the chief of staff shrugged.

* * *

Géraldine Portier straightened her shoulders.

“It’s time,” she said. “Pass the word to Admiral Maddox. Tell him to execute Case Orange.”

“Admiral, I still think that’s a risky idea,” Tibor said urgently, keeping his voice down. “At the moment, no one’s doing any shooting. There’s no need to destabil—”

“Those fucking mutineers are the ones doing all the ‘destabilizing’ around here,” Portier snapped back. “If they don’t like what I’m doing, that’s just too bad.”

“But—”

“They’ve got a zero relative velocity,” Portier interrupted again, “and their acceleration rate’s no better than his now that they’re inside the Powell Limit.” She bared her teeth at her chief of staff. “And it just so happens that at this moment Maddox is on the far side of Jalal Beta, and two hundred thousand kilometers out. Even if they had a Heimdallar right on top of him, they wouldn’t even know he’d started bringing his fans up for another two minutes, and that gives him a minimum three-minute head start.”

“I understand that, Ma’am. It’s just that we haven’t even really talked to Murphy yet. All the advantages you’re talking about right now will still be there thirty minutes or an hour from now—hell, a week from now, given Maddox’s orbital period. I just think it would be a good idea to let things settle a little bit before we kick the fire that way.”

“The only reason there’s a fire to worry about kicking is Murphy and his mutineers,” Portier grated, “and I think it’s about time he got to chew on the fact that we’re not just his puppets.”

Tibor started to speak again, then closed his mouth tightly when she glared at him. It was a mistake. He knew it was a mistake. But there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about it.

“You heard me,” Portier said flatly to the comm officer. “Send the order.”

* * *

Murphy looked up at the time display. Ten minutes had elapsed since his carriers had reached Point Rubicon.

“I think it’s probably time to warn Vice Admiral Portier about the Casúrs,” he told O’Hanraghty. “Or, at least, that we’re sending in additional platforms to keep an eye on things.” He grimaced. “I don’t expect her to like it, but we can at least keep it from being a total surprise.”

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said with a deadpan expression.

“No doubt.” Murphy shook his head and looked at Lieutenant Mastroianni. “Record for transmission.”

“Recording, Sir.”

“Vice Admiral Portier, please be advised that you will shortly detect incoming Hauptmann signatures. Those platforms will decelerate to rest relative to Jalal Station at a range of two light-seconds. They will not approach any more closely than that without prior warning to you. Murphy, clear.”

* * *

“What the hell are those things?” Vice Admiral Portier demanded as the fresh cluster of icons appeared in the master display thirty seconds after Murphy’s message reached Jalal Station.

“Hauptman coils, Ma’am,” her tactical officer said. “They look like more Heimdallars.” Portier glared at him. “Sort of,” he added in a sheepish tone.

“Why should Murphy be sending in more Heimdallars now?” The vice admiral shook her head. “Maybe a few of them, to give him a closer look, but fifty?”

“I…don’t think they are Heimdallars.” Tibor looked up from CIC’s analysis of the Hauptman signatures. “They’re too big. But they’re not missile drives, either. Looks like some kind of cargo pod, actually.”

“Cargo pod?” Portier frowned at Tibor, and her tense-faced XO shrugged.

“I don’t like it, Ma’am,” he said. “Like you say, there has to be a reason for Murphy to be sending them in, and from the numbers, they’re going to stop exactly where he told us they would.”

Which, he did not add aloud, would put them 140,000 kilometers outside the defenders’ powered missile range…and well on the Station’s side of the Kavachas’ defensive zone. Oh, anything Jalal might fire at them would still have its fusion-powered reaction stages, but those were good for only 150 gravities and three minutes. The drones, or whatever the hell they were, could pull 800 gravities…and dodge any incoming missiles with ludicrous ease.

“You think they’re missile carriers,” Portier said.

“Well, that might explain what happened at New Dublin.”

Portier looked at her chief of staff, then shrugged.

“Obviously, he wants us to see them,” she grated. “I’m sure the threat to use them will be along shortly.” She smiled with no humor at all. “Probably as soon as he sees Maddox’s carriers starting to move!”

* * *

“Twelve minutes, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Pegram announced.

“Thank you, Louise,” Captain Emilios Galanatos acknowledged.

The captain stood with one toe hooked through a floor loop and his hands clasped behind him, gazing into TFNS Selene’s main holo display. Galanatos was tall and slender. Thirty years in the Federation Navy had put quite a lot of muscle onto that slender frame, but he’d grown up on Kavala (otherwise known as Samothrace III) in the Fringe system of Samothrace, and Kavala’s gravity was only eighty-two percent that of Earth. Unlike some of his personnel, Galanatos was delighted that his command deck was at the core of his vast command’s hull, where the non-spinning citadel was in permanent microgravity.

There was very little “delight” in his expression as he acknowledged his astrogator’s report, however, and his eyes were bleak.

He frowned as the seconds ticked away and Selene’s Fasset drive powered steadily. The Titan-class carrier was the flagship of Task Force 1712, and as Rear Admiral Clarence Maddox’s flag captain, Galanatos was much better informed than most of the task force’s personnel about Vice Admiral Portier’s contingency planning. There’d never been any likelihood that TF 1712’s three FTLCs could go toe-totoe even with the seven carriers they’d known Terrence Murphy had commanded as of the Battle of New Dublin. The fact that he’d turned up with almost twice the hulls of the vice admiral’s worst-case projection could only have made any contest between them even more suicidal. He knew Maddox had questioned—even protested—the orders that had tethered his carriers to Jalal Beta, but Portier had been adamant about the need to protect such valuable strategic assets behind the shield of her hugely reinforced sublight defense force.

She’d been especially insistent because no one in the Jalal System knew exactly when additional combat power would be deployed to confront Murphy. It was a given that that combat power had to turn up soon, however, since Jalal Station was the logical—indeed, the inevitable—staging point for any operations against New Dublin. As Portier had seen it, that meant that in the event Murphy appeared in Jalal, her primary responsibility was to hold Jalal Station and conserve her mobile units—especially her FTLCs—until the relief force arrived.

Galanatos had no better idea than anyone else when that would happen, but everyone knew the Oval had been ordered to assemble a fleet to deal with Murphy. As of the last dispatches from the Oval, that was still a work in progress, however, and no one back on Earth had possessed any better appreciation for his actual carrier strength than Portier had. For that matter, details on exactly what Murphy had done to win the Battle of New Dublin remained sketchy. The bits and pieces available to Galanatos, however, suggested he’d used missiles—lots of missiles—in a mobile engagement, not simply fighting from fixed positions. That suggested he’d probably brought as many of those same missiles with him as he could, which meant he could do the same thing again here. And what they did know about New Dublin indicated that they would be a significant force multiplier, making the numbers no one in the Sol System knew about even worse.

That was the real reason Portier had ordered Maddox’s carriers to break orbit. It was five weeks to Sol, so it was entirely possible the relief force would be well on its way to Jalal by the time Maddox reached it. But it was equally possible it wouldn’t be, given interstellar distances and the time it took to assemble task forces and fleets. And if Maddox got there in time, Fleet Admiral Fokaides and the Oval would undoubtedly hold the relief still longer in order to assemble an overwhelming force, one strong enough to deal even with the unanticipated increase in Murphy’s order of battle. Depending on how much of the Reserve they chose to commit and how many FTLCs they’d diverted from the Beta Cygni Line, they could reinforce their response force to at least twice Murphy’s actual strength. Concentrating that many carriers would take time they’d hate to burn, but they could do it if they wanted to.

It was unlikely that whatever he’d done to his missiles could offset that sort of odds, especially when the incoming CO would be on the alert for exactly that. Which meant that if Maddox reached Sol in time, Terrence Murphy was doomed.

“Ten minutes, Sir,” Pegram said, and Galanatos nodded.

“About time,” another voice said.

It was harder, darker, then Pegram’s, and Galanatos’s lips tightened for a moment before he turned to face Commander Higgins, his XO. Unlike him, Higgins was a Heart Worlder. She was also a full eleven centimeters shorter than he, with the sturdy build of someone who’d grown up on Old Earth itself.

“You do realize that if Murphy’s really a mutinous traitor, he’ll be perfectly willing to open fire before we wormhole out, right?” Galanatos asked quietly, voice pitched to avoid other ears.

“He can’t catch us, not from a cold start of his own,” she scoffed.

“But if he’s really as far gone as the newsies are saying, he can always threaten to open fire on Jalal Station unless Vice Admiral Portier orders us to stand down.”

“If he has the balls to,” Higgins acknowledged. “If he does that, though, he’s openly crossed the Rubicon. Be a bit hard to keep selling his ‘Rishathan conspiracy’ snake oil if he opens fire on a major Federation base to stop Navy carriers from simply departing the system. A part of me almost wishes he’d try it. I know how badly we’d get hurt, but he’d cut his own throat as far as anyone back home is concerned. Not that anyone with a working brain’s going to believe his bullshit cover story, anyway.”

Her expression was scornful, and Galanatos’s nostrils flared slightly. This was a conversation they’d had, in one variant or another, more than once, and he was far from certain Terrence Murphy was a snake oil salesman. Higgins wasn’t a bit uncertain about that, however. In her opinion, Murphy was a proven mutineer and quite possibly the greatest traitor in the Federation’s history. A narcissistic, opportunistic, would-be warlord driven by sheer, raw ambition and perfectly ready to shatter the Federation while it remained locked in mortal combat with the League.

There’d obviously been no point debating it with her then, and there was even less point now that Murphy had turned up with so many ships, he supposed.

“I’d rather not be the decisive factor in discrediting him,” he said instead.

* * *

“Status change!” Commander Mirwani snapped suddenly, and the plot updated as the icons of Portier’s three carriers begin to strobe amber.

“They’re bringing up their fans, Sir,” the ops officer continued grimly, and Murphy grimaced.

“I thought Portier was smarter than this,” he said.

“It does seem a bit stupid,” O’Hanraghty agreed. “On the other hand, she got caught with cold fans on all three of them. If she’d tried to run any earlier, they’d have had an even worse chance of getting away with it.”

“Precisely how much worse than ‘zero’ can their chances be?” Murphy demanded, and O’Hanraghty shrugged.

“Depends a lot on how willing she thinks you really are to pull the trigger,” he pointed out. “And that datum’s over two minutes old. For them to be this far along, they must have started before you warned her the Casúrs were inbound. For that matter, she still doesn’t know what the Casúrs are. She does know they’re Hauptman birds, though. And that means she’ll probably figure her carriers still have the acceleration advantage. Which,” he conceded, “they will. She couldn’t have planned it this way, but they’ll have decelerated all the way to zero before we could tell them different at this range.”

“But it’s still stupid to do it now.” Murphy shook his head in disgust. “What would it have cost her to at least talk to us, first?”

He scowled at the plot, then looked at Mirwani.

“How far into startup are they?” he asked.

“They were already moving from Standby towards Readiness when we picked them up, Sir,” Mirwani replied. “I can’t say exactly how far into the cycle they were at that point, but they had to be at least a couple of minutes in. Then allow for the two-minute light-speed lag, and they can’t be more than eight or nine minutes from activation.”

“We’re inside their loop,” O’Hanraghty observed, and Murphy nodded. His carriers’ Fasset drives were already at Readiness. They could be accelerating again in only five minutes, which would give them the crucial head start in the acceleration race. But—

“What do you want to do, Sir?” O’Hanraghty asked, and Murphy frowned, then shrugged.

“Doesn’t really change anything,” he said, watching the strobing icons’ color darken as their drives powered steadily upward. “We always knew we’d have to send someone to Sol to tell them we were here and wanted to talk. Might as well let them take the message. It’s certainly not worth charging after them to try and prevent it. The last thing we need is to start escalating! On the other hand…”

He swung his chair gently from side to side for a few more seconds, then looked at Lieutenant Mastroianni.

“Cointa, please record for transmission to Jalal Station, repeated to the carriers in orbit.”

“Recording, Sir.”

“Vice Admiral Portier, we’ve detected your carriers bringing up their drives. Be advised that I have no intention of interfering with their movements in any way. Obviously, word of my presence here—and why I’ve come—has to reach Earth at some point, so we might as well use your vessels to carry it. Murphy, clear.”

“Good recording, Sir,” Mastroianni said.

“Then send it, please. And attach an all-ships heading. Let’s defuse as much tension over there as we can.”

* * *

“Six minutes, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Pegram said.

Captain Galanatos nodded at the update, then glanced over his shoulder at Lieutenant Maxim Lindquist. Selene’s comm officer was young, barely half Galanatos’s age, and his expression was more anxious than his captain’s.

“Max?” Galanatos said, and Lindquist’s eyes darted to him.

“Yes, Sir!”

“Feeling a little antsy?”

It was a sign of Galanatos’s rapport with the men and women under his command that he could ask that question without a trace of condescension…and have it taken the same way.

“Maybe just a bit, Sir,” Lindquist replied with a fleeting grin.

“Well, let me show you something that might make you feel a bit more confident.”

Commander Higgins snorted in amusement as the captain smiled encouragingly and unsealed the breast of his shipboard utilities. He reached into the opening, his eyes still on Lindquist.

“This is for Inverness,” he said, and his voice was suddenly hard.

His hand came out of his utilities as he turned back to face Higgins, and the pistol in his hand rose.

“Stay very still, Beth,” he said.

Higgins’s eyes flared as she found herself confronting that pistol.

“What the hell do you—?!” she began, then chopped herself off she realized two thirds of the command deck crew, including Lindquist, had just produced weapons of their own. The handful of officers and ratings who hadn’t found themselves holding just as still as the XO in the face of all those weapons.

“Max?” Galanatos said again, never looking away from Higgins.

“Yes, Sir!”

“Send it.”

* * *

“Ensign Sung?”

Lieutenant SG Emmett Marconi couldn’t have said why he looked over his shoulder when he heard Chief Nahrong’s voice. Not really. There was just something a little…off about the chief petty officer’s tone.

Which was a stupid damn thing to be thinking. If anyone had ever had an excuse for their tone to be “off,” the personnel of Jalal Station did today! What with the mutinous Murphy’s sudden appearance, and the rumors spreading like lightning over personal comm channels about the number of ships he’d brought with him, every person aboard the enormous station was strung tighter than a tuning fork. And as the watch officer in Fusion One, one of Jalal’s three fusion rooms, Emmett Marconi had a hell of a lot better things to be wasting attention on.

Despite which—

“Yes, Chief?” Sung Hua replied. “What can I do for you?”

Sung was a bright young officer who’d signed on for Preference when her draft number came up. She’d had the aptitude to breeze through the Federation’s power engineering school, and her skills would be in high demand on the civilian side once her time was up.

“Something over here you should see, Ma’am,” Nahrong said, pointing at his workstation display.

“Oh?” Sung grabbed a handhold and pushed off towards Nahrong, and Marconi frowned slightly.

Nahrong wasn’t in her duty section, so why—?

He unsnapped himself from his own command chair, pushing up in Fusion One’s microgravity. If whatever Nahrong had turned up was important enough to show Sung, he should probably take a look at it, too.

He turned towards Nahrong just as Sung stopped beside the chief petty officer and looked down at the display. Her back was to Marconi, and her right arm moved, as if she were tapping something on Nahrong’s touchscreen.

“Interesting,” she said, then turned around, and Marconi’s eyes flew wide.

She hadn’t been tapping Nahrong’s screen, he realized. She’d been unsealing the front of her shipsuit to get at the gun concealed inside it.

The gun that matched the one Nahrong had produced while her body shielded him from anyone’s eyes.

“Inverness!” Sung barked.

She grabbed a handhold with her free hand and pulled hard, spinning aside to clear Nahrong’s field of fire, and lightning bolt comprehension flashed through Marconi. He didn’t try to reason it out; he only reacted.

His own right hand still gripped the back of his command chair. Now he heaved with all his strength, and the force of his pull sent him flashing across the forty-meter-wide compartment. His command station was near its center, but his trajectory took him within arm’s reach of Petty Officer Loomis’s station, and he kicked the back of Loomis’s command chair as he went by, changing his trajectory sharply.

Loomis was just beginning to turn towards Sung and Nahrong when a chattering burst from Nahrong’s pistol tore through his torso.

Marconi heard the start of Loomis’s bubbling scream, but the deafening thunder of more pistols drowned it almost instantly as the entire compartment went insane. Guns seemed to be everywhere; it wasn’t until later that he realized only Sung, Nahrong, and Chief Benson were actually armed. But even though they were outnumbered by three-to-one by the unarmed members of Marconi’s watch personnel, they used the advantage of surprise ruthlessly, and their fire swept Fusion One.

“Nahrong! Get that Heart bastard!” Sung shouted through the cacophony.

Marconi heard the ensign, but recoil, even from a handgun, was far harder to deal with in microgravity than most people realized before they’d actually tried it. The murderers slaughtering his personnel weren’t very accurate, and the lieutenant was a moving target, arrowing straight towards the compartment’s open hatch. Bullets snapped past him, ricocheting from the bulkhead, tearing into command consoles, but unlike the conveniently stationary victims still strapped to their seats, he was a target in motion.

Fucking idiots! The thought cut through him, despite his panic. If the killers hit the wrong thing, they might throw the entire plant into emergency shutdown—if they didn’t manage something even worse!

Another burst of bullets sizzled past him, missing by centimeters—if that much—and screamed off the hatch frame as he sailed into it. The heel of his left hand hit the close button, and he shoved himself hard to one side as a final handful of bullets followed him through the hatch before it slammed shut.

He grabbed a handhold, stopping himself at the bulkhead touchpad. He flipped up the touchpad cover and allowed himself a brief, triumphant smile as he tapped in a five-digit code. It wasn’t much, but the test cycle he’d just initiated in the hatch locking mechanism would buy him at least three minutes.

Now what the hell did he do with them?

* * *

“Admiral?”

“Yes, Cointa?”

Murphy turned to face the master display as the comm officer appeared in it once more. He stood behind Callum’s chair at O’Hanraghty’s tactical station, watching the Heimdallars update their sensor reports as TF 1712’s FTLCs began accelerating at last.

“We just received something…weird, Sir.”

“Weird?” Murphy repeated. “In what way?”

“It’s a one-word transmission from Selene, Sir. With an ‘all-ships’ tag.”

Murphy’s expression tightened and he looked quickly at O’Hanraghty, then back up at Mastroianni’s holo image.

“What word?” he asked.

“‘Inverness,’ Sir.”

“Oh, shit,” O’Hanraghty breathed, and tapped a touchscreen to plug into Mastroianni’s communications feed as Murphy wheeled back to the tactical display.

“Admiral, network traffic has increased substantially,” Mastroianni said from the master holo display. Text scrolled through multiple windows at the same time. “There’s a lot of direct ship-to-ship popping up, and the central net’s going berserk.”

O’Hanraghty had one hand cupped over his earbud, listening intently. Now he looked up, his expression grim.

“She’s right.” His voice was as grim as his expression. “It’s going to hell, Terry.”

“How bad?” Murphy demanded.

“Bad. Damn! Why didn’t Silas’s people warn us about this in their data dump?!”

“About what?” Callum asked.

“That transmission from Selene had to be an execution code,” his father told him in a flat tone.

“Execution code for what?”

“Mutiny, Callum,” O’Hanraghty said harshly. “That’s what all this comm chatter is about. And from the traffic volume, it’s widespread. In fact—”

“Weapons fire!” Mirwani announced. “Weapons fire in Jalal Beta orbit!”

“Goddamn it!” O’Hanraghty snarled. “Why the hell now?!”

“Because Portier decided to send Maddox home.” Murphy’s voice was unnaturally calm.

“But we were letting them go!” Callum protested.

“And they didn’t know that,” Murphy said. “Eighty-five seconds.” He jerked a hand at the time chop on Selene’s transmission. “Eighty-five seconds!” He slammed the same, fisted hand into his console. “They sent the execute code eighty-five seconds before they could have copied our transmission to Portier!”

Callum’s expression was sick.

“Display Tactical in the main tank,” Murphy said.

Mastroianni disappeared from the master display, replaced by a tactical plot of the volume around Jalal Station. Every bit of data on it was at least two minutes old by the time they saw it, but the explosions and the sudden eruption of atmosphere from breached hulls were horrifyingly clear. There were only a handful of them at the moment, but the carnage spread even as they watched.

“Whoever pushed the button must have been planning it for a while,” Murphy continued, “and better than two thirds—hell, closer to three quarters!—of all Fleet and Marine personnel are Fringers, Callum. If even a small percentage of them decide to mutiny, it’s going to be about as ugly as it gets. And they didn’t know I was perfectly happy to let Maddox go. What they knew was that he’d arrive in Sol with detailed numbers on our order of battle.” He shook his head. “That’s what they’re trying to stop. They don’t want the Oval to realize how strong we are.”

“But…whatever the Oval’s sending is probably already on its way,” Callum objected.

“Probably.” His father nodded. “But we don’t know that for certain any more than they do. For that matter, they probably know the Oval’s deployment plans a lot better than we do. None of which matters, because there’s no road back from this for any of them.”

Increasing numbers of the sublight warships on the tactical display had begun firing, and at ranges that short, with weapons that powerful, the carnage—already terrible—was about to turn horrific. Murphy knew that, and his jaw tightened, his eyes bleak, as the first explosion sparked on the outer skin of Jalal Station’s middle habitat ring.

“There’s no way in hell the Oval will believe—or admit, anyway—that you didn’t orchestrate this, Terry,” O’Hanraghty said softly, and Murphy nodded.

“I know.”

He watched the display for another second, then squared his shoulders.

“Harry, tell Tremblay to expedite the Baker pods. I want them in attack range ASAP. Then tell Atkins it’s going to be Lepanto, after all.”

A chill wind seemed to whisper around the flag bridge. Brigadier Scott Atkins was the New Dublin ex-colonel who commanded the mutinous Marines and Fringe system defense force personnel who’d been folded together into the newly organized Free Worlds Alliance Marines to provide Murphy a larger ground force component than his own task force had included, and Lepanto was the plan for that force to stage an opposed boarding action against Jalal Station. No one had wanted that escalation, and no one wanted to contemplate where it would lead when the Federation learned it had happened anyway, but O’Hanraghty only nodded.

“Yes, Sir,” he said quietly.

“Commander Mirwani.”

“Yes, Sir?”

“I want the Alpha pods in motion now. And use Alpha’s Phalanxes to plow the road for Baker; I want the Kavacha platforms cleared.”

Callum’s stomach tightened. The Phalanx “escort missiles” aboard ten percent of the Alpha Casúrs mounted fewer installations of the TFN’s Alysída system than the Sharanga platforms did, but their high-velocity slugs were even better at interdicting incoming counter-missiles than standard KEWs. Shipkillers were equipped with only a single Alysída each, capable of killing no more than three or four counter-missiles even under optimum conditions. A Phalanx mounted eight of them apiece…and they were inside the Kavachas, the one place none of their sensors or auto-defense programming would look for threats. That made Jalal Station’s anti-KEW defenses sitting ducks, and once they were blown out of the way…

“Portier will see that as an escalation,” O’Hanraghty warned.

“Escalation, hell!” Murphy grated, jabbing an angry hand at the plot. “People are killing each other out there, Harry! I can live with Portier’s hurt feelings just fine!”

“Point,” the chief of staff acknowledged, and Murphy looked back at Mirwani.

“CIC will identify the parasites actively shooting. I want the three largest of them designated as targets.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

That chill wind blew colder, and Murphy looked at his comm officer.

“Lieutenant Mastroianni.”

“Yes, Sir?” The comm officer’s always crisp voice was soft.

“General transmission to all units in-system.” If Mastroianni’s voice was soft, Murphy’s was hammered iron.

“Recording, Sir.”

“To all units in the Jalal System. This is Admiral Murphy. Stand down immediately. I repeat, stand down now.” His eyes were harder even than his voice. “I didn’t come here for men and women of the Federation Navy to kill each other. It stops now. I don’t care whose ‘side’ any of you are on. Cease fire, cut acceleration, and stand down. We can sort out who did what first later, but the killing stops. And be advised that I have weapons deployed in range of Jalal Beta orbit. I don’t want to use them, but I will. You have five minutes from the receipt of this message to cease fire. Any ship which continues to fire at the end of that time will be destroyed.”

He stared into the pickup for two more breaths, then showed his teeth.

“I advise you to take this warning very, very seriously. Murphy, clear.”

* * *

Lieutenant Marconi bounded down the narrow catwalk in long, leaping strides. Thick pipes, electrical cables, and plasma conduits lined the catwalk, and his feet clanked on its bare metal grating each time he touched down. The thin air was icy, and beneath the catwalk, the inner core of Jalal Station’s central spindle stretched into the abyss. Long highways of blinking lights marked logistics rails that shuttled personnel and material up and down the length of the station.

The station’s fusion reactors and main environmental plants were located in its spindle to take advantage of the microgravity there. Gravity was only a little heavier along the outer bulkhead of the innermost habitat ring where the catwalk was mounted, which let him cover distance quickly, but unlike Fusion One, there was no artificially maintained overpressure here. And, along with the lower atmospheric pressure, oxygen levels were lower, as well. Normally, that was no problem, but “normally” didn’t include a man running for his life, and stars twinkled across his vision as his blood oxygen levels lowered with each panting breath.

“Get back here, Heart!” Chief Nahrong called from behind him, and Marconi swore with bitter, silent venom.

There’d always been a certain tension between him and Nahrong, who obviously resented the “Hearts” he blamed for every single one of his homeworld’s woes, but the CPO had never let it grow to anything that would have been called outright disrespect. Marconi would never have pegged the chief as a potential traitor, and he wondered how many other people he’d misjudged the same way.

A lot, apparently.

He’d tried frantically to use his personal comm to find someone—anyone!—he could alert to the massacre in Fusion One. But there’d been no response from Station Security or the command deck, and after the fourth time he’d almost been shot, he’d realized his pursuers were tracking his comm signal. When he did, he’d tossed it into the core’s vast emptiness.

That sort of littering was a major breach of station protocols. An officer could lose his command over a serious Foreign Object Damage to equipment report. At the moment, that was the least of his worries.

Another bullet snapped past his head and punched a hole in the casing of a mag regulator. Mechanical groans ran up the entire stack as safety protocols locked down more and more of the enormous platform's inner workings.

Marconi slid behind a power relay with substantially better armor plating and tried to catch his voice.

“Give it up!”

This time, it was Ensign Sung’s voice, and boots clattered against other catwalks, echoing amongst the alarm Klaxons.

“Goddamn it, don’t shoot me!” Marconi shouted. “If-if I’m dead…I can’t repair any of this mess!”

“We don’t need you!” Nahrong shouted back. “Stupid fucking Heart! You think just because we’re a bunch of dumbass Fringers, we can’t do anything without you lording it over us?!”

More boots echoed on catwalks above and below him, and he knew Nahrong was trying to buy time, keep him talking while mutineers got into position around him.

Marconi looked around desperately. The P-37 junction was only a couple of dozen meters away…across an open gap. If he could reach it, he could cut the power to this entire sector of the core. That would shut down all the lights and all of the logistics rails, and if they shut down, if he could use the darkness for cover and get inside one of the stacks without being crushed by moving lifters…

It wasn’t much of a chance, but “not much” was a hell of a lot better than “no hope at all.”

“What did I ever do to you, Sung?” he shouted, crouching as he readied for his dash.

“How many decades have you Heart bastards fucked over—”

Marconi launched himself, his eyes locked on the control panel. He’d have to cross the open gap to get there, but once he did, he’d have pretty damned good cover, at least until they could maneuver into fresh positions. That would take time, and he’d need only a few seconds to kill the power, then yank out the control module and toss it down the core after his comm.

Good luck getting it back online before I’m long gone, traitors, he thought. And once I’m out of—

He’d gotten three long strides across the gap when pain flared in his left calf. He was moving too quickly to react, and his left foot hit the catwalk and promptly gave out on him. A simple fall might not have been that bad, but his momentum provided more than enough inertia to make up for the low gravity, and light flashed across his vision as his head slammed into the workstation full tilt. Then he face-planted into the catwalk grating and skittered across it, as well.

Boots pounded towards him, and he tried to at least roll over. He didn’t make it before hard, brutal hands closed upon him.

He was dazed, limp, unable to fight, but the pain of his broken nose and the bullet wound in his leg were twin beacons. They kept him from losing consciousness, and his heart pounded in his ears as he was dragged away.

* * *

“You fucking well watch your ass in there, Sir,” Sergeant Major Logan’s voice growled in Callum Murphy’s earbud over the dedicated command circuit. “God knows what kinda shit’s going on, and I better not see you getting between the detail and any bad guys. Hell, between the detail and anybody! You got that…Sir?”

“I got it, Smaj,” Callum replied. “Trust me, I got it!”

“And I’ll damn well have Eira shoot you in the leg if you forget.”

Logan’s growl was at least marginally less intense, and Callum’s lips twitched in a smile. There wasn’t much humor in it. Not when his assault shuttle was only twelve minutes out from Jalal Station.

The visual display was littered with broken and wounded ships. With debris, life pods, wreckage, and drifting bodies. Callum Murphy looked at the display, and his brown eye was grim and hard, and not just because of what he could see.

In the sixteen months since he’d first visited Jalal Station, he’d learned a lot about himself. And in some ways, he’d learned even more about his father, because first he’d had to unlearn so many things about Terrence Murphy. He’d had to learn how much of the man he’d always thought he knew—the man he’d loved—was only the outer shell, the protective filter, between his father and the world. Oh, the parent who’d loved him, the father who’d at least tried—with, Callum had to admit, limited success—to help his son realize how much more there was to being a man than just the privileged life of one of the Five Hundred’s wealthiest scions, had been real. The father who’d lectured him about responsibility, when he’d wanted to be out clubbing. The father whose quaint ambition was to return to Survey Command and explore new star systems. The father who was about as apolitical as it was possible to be. Who acquiesced in his father-in-law’s political ambitions and plans only because it pleased Callum’s mom.

That man had been real, but he’d also been a mask. Over the last two years Callum had seen behind the mask to the man who believed in honor. Believed in the Terran Federation’s responsibility to protect all of its citizens. Believed in the Fringe’s rights. Believed it was wrong for the Five Hundred to pay the price of an unending war in the blood of Fringers while the profits poured in from the bottomless military contracts.

Believed it was his job, his duty—his responsibility—to do something about the abomination the Five Hundred and the Federation it controlled had become.

Along the way, Callum Murphy had discovered that although he’d always loved his father, it hadn’t been the way he loved and admired and so deeply respected the man inside Terrence Murphy’s mask. The man he would follow through the gates of Hell themselves. Who he hoped he might someday, somehow, find the depth to become, himself.

And that man had watched as mutiny wrapped Jalal Station in a halo of fire, wreckage, and vented atmosphere. Seen it, known it was the result of his actions, although not because he’d ordered or wanted it. And not because he’d created the tensions, the hatred, that had spawned it. But he was here, he and his ships and the men and women who crewed them. That was what had touched the spark to the tinder and turned that hatred loose.

And because Callum had come to know him, he knew how soul-deep his father’s pain was.

But another thing he’d learned about Terrence Murphy: he would never do a centimeter less than his duty. As explosions speckled the outer skin of the enormous station like tiny incandescent pinpricks and sublight warships savaged one another at ranges as short as a hundred kilometers, he’d done—as he always did—what had to be done.

The people killing each other either hadn’t heard or hadn’t believed his initial warning as the Casúr Cogaidhs accelerated once again. The Alpha drones were already well inside the Kavacha platforms. For that matter, they were inside the station’s point defense perimeter. When they’d fired, there’d been no time for even cybernetically controlled defenses to react before the missiles struck, and the battleships Sentinel, Liberator, and Champion disintegrated into mangled, debris-shedding wreckage. It had been a single, finally coordinated, savage hammer blow, not the spreading chaos of the mutiny, and it had almost certainly killed over two thousand human beings.

Both sides had noticed that.

And they’d also noticed the Phalanxes as they blew the Kavacha platforms out of the way, clearing the way for the suddenly accelerating Baker Casúrs to close on the station and the warships orbiting with it. But while the ship-to-ship fighting might have faltered, it hadn’t stopped.

And because it hadn’t, half the Baker drones had fired six minutes later…and killed the battleship Paladin and the battlecruisers Algeria and Nigeria.

The other half had decelerated hard, holding position outside any effective shipboard interdiction range, and a third wave of Casúrs had headed in behind them. Not two hundred and sixty-four of them, this time, but over six hundred. That third wave was a good thirty minutes from launch range, but there was no longer anything to keep them from getting there, and they’d realized he meant it. He didn’t care who’d started it; he didn’t care whether they supported or opposed him. If they continued firing, he would kill them all.

Over two dozen ships had been destroyed—three quarters in mutual combat—before they absorbed that message, and three times that many were damaged, many of them heavily, but the survivors had finally stopped shooting each other. At least the ships had; Callum didn’t even want to think about what might be happening—what almost certainly was happening—in the passages and compartments of some of those surviving vessels.

Even at an FTLC’s 900 gravities, it had taken an hour for TFNS Ereshkigal and TFNS Ninshubur to get close enough to Jalal Station to drop their parasites and Marine assault shuttles. His father had wanted to take Ishtar in, but O’Hanraghty had shot that notion down quickly.

“If there’s one ship out here that could convince some die-hard loyalist it was worth dying to take out, it’s Ishtar,” the captain had said flatly. “Kill you, and this whole thing falls apart, and they know it. So Ishtar isn’t going…and neither are you, Terry.”

“I’ve got to go! This is my mess. Even if it wasn’t, I need to be there, on the ground, when decisions have to be made. I can’t be at the other end of a four-minute comm lag!”

“Yes, you can.” O’Hanraghty had held Murphy’s eyes unblinkingly, and Callum had felt the silent agreement of every other man and woman on the flag bridge. Not because they were afraid of being shot at themselves, but because they were frankly terrified at the thought of losing him.

“I’ll go,” O’Hanraghty had continued. “I’ll transfer to Ereshkigal before Captain Jurgens heads in. We both know Atkins is going to be calling the shots if it comes to actual fighting aboard the station, so you sure as hell don’t need to be there for that. Anything else comes up, I can act as your deputy, and four minutes isn’t that huge a lag for most of the decisions you’re going to have to make, anyway.”

“They’ll be just as eager to kill you as to kill me,” Murphy had pointed out.

“And they’ll be a hell of a lot less likely to actually try if they know you’re still out here to kick their asses!”

“But if they think I’m hanging back, they’ll all say it’s part of my ‘warlord’ act. I’m willing to spend other people’s blood—just like any other member of the Five Hundred—but when it comes to putting my own ass on the line, I’ve got better things to do. I can’t hand that line to the Five Hundred…and we can afford it even less if it starts coming from the Fringe.”

“Send me,” someone had said, and Callum had realized it was him.

His father and O’Hanraghty had both wheeled to face him, and he’d shrugged.

“Captain O’Hanraghty’s right, Dad. You can’t go. I know you’ve got the guts to take point—I know it, Dad—but he’s right. We can’t afford to lose you. But I’m a Murphy, too. And I’ve learned a few things over the last year or so. Send me with one of the boarding parties. I know better than to think I could make the decisions he can make for you, but I can at least, oh show the flag for you.” He’d made himself smile. “You’re right. We need to put a Murphy on the deck plates over there, Dad. He just doesn’t have to be you.”

And that was how he found himself sitting aboard this assault shuttle as it decelerated toward Jalal Station and trying hard not to think about what he was likely to find aboard it. If the fighting between warships had been bad, then what—

“Callum, I need you to divert to the Juliet-One-Niner freight bay,” his father’s iron-hard voice said in his earbud. “We still don’t have any clear picture of what’s happening aboard the Station, and we haven’t heard anything from Vice Admiral Portier since the shooting started. But we’ve got Heimdallars in tight enough to keep a close eye on things, and one of them just picked up some short-range comm chatter. Atkins’ll have his hands full dealing with the planned Lepanto objectives. We can’t divert any of his people to this. Besides I need you—you, specifically—and Logan in there as quickly as possible.”

* * *

The pinch of a stim patch against Emmett Marconi’s neck snapped him out of his stupor.

He lay on a stretcher, his injured leg bound up and the bullet wound pulsing around a first aid clot patch. His supine position meant he couldn’t see much, thanks to the crowd of station crew, all with the Terran Federation patch ripped off their coveralls, who surrounded him. But he could tell he was in one of the station’s main cargo-handling boat bay galleries, because he could see the upper edges of the outsized airlocks that marched down its outer bulkhead.

His captors might have skimped on the painkillers, but not on the tightness of the flex cuffs binding his wrists. A pair of prisoners sat on either side of him, both beaten up and dejected. One was a contractor from Vargas Interstellar, one of the Heart World’s major freight lines, the other a shuttle squadron commander who’d attended regular Tuesday-night poker nights with Marconi.

“Guilty!” Chief Nahrong’s pronouncement came through the crowd and was met with cheers.

“No! Wait, please!” someone wailed, and more cheers greeted the distinctive audio alert of a closing airlock door.

“Who’s next on the docket?” Nahrong asked.

Ensign Sung pushed through the throng around the prisoners. She looked the trio over with a smug smile, then snapped her fingers and pointed at Marconi. A pair of mutineers grabbed him under his arms and lifted him off the stretcher. One at least had the courtesy to prop him up so he didn’t have to walk on his injured leg.

“Why patch me up if you’re just going to space me?” Marconi asked through thick lips. Dried blood flaked off his chin and nose.

“Justice,” the ensign said. “More than your kind ever gave us.”

“This ’cause I didn’t sign your leave paperwork two months ago?” Marconi asked. “I’m just an engineer, Sung.”

“He’s awake!” Nahrong sat on a makeshift throne of cargo containers. Rank pins and epaulets were piled in front of him. Sung snapped a small blade out of a pocketknife and flicked it under Marconi’s double silver bar rank. She ripped the patch away and tossed it into the pile.

“Marconi.” Nahrong leaned back. “You stand accused of being part of the ruling oligarchy that’s spent Fringe blood in the war against the League. A war your kind never sacrificed for. A war your kind was happy to spend Fringe blood to fight.”

Marconi licked dried blood from his mouth and spat.

“I fought at Formite,” he said. “I lost three fingers to a power surge keeping the Hiroba’s mag bottles from going critical. I don’t know where you’re getting all this from, but I’ve done my part in this war. Didn’t matter who my parents were or what planet I came from.”

The crowd died down.

“Well then,” Nahrong leaned forward. “If you’re really on the side of the fight, why don’t you renounce the Federation and join the Free Worlds Alliance?”

Sung pressed the flat of her blade against the Federation flag on his right shoulder and began to cut.

Pain from his injuries started to sting. He glanced through the nearest airlock’s armorplast bulkhead and saw a half dozen men and women pounding at the door.

“What about them?” he asked Nahrong as the flag came free and Sung tossed it onto the pile in front of Nahrong.

“I gave them the same chance you’re getting, but all of ’em were more loyal to a corrupt institution than our cause for freedom and self-determination,” Nahrong said. “You cross over to us and you get a pass. Oh, we’ll keep you on a short leash until we’re sure you’re with us, but at least you’ll have the chance to prove you mean it.”

“He was trying to sabotage power to the entire core before he went down, and he knows the station’s power net like the back of his hand,” Sung said. “There’s no place on it where he won’t be a threat to us.”

Nahrong held up a hand.

“Then he can space this batch.” Nahrong guffawed and slapped his knee. “Damn, why didn’t I think of that sooner? Why trust some Heart’s words when we can judge his actions, am I right?”

The crowd cheered.

“I’ll make it real easy.” Nahrong pointed to the airlock controls. “You either jettison that trash or we’ll make sure you’re not on this station to be a pain in our ass anymore. Sound fair? Get him over there.”

Sung shoved Marconi forward. One of the guards had to keep him from falling as he hopped over to the controls on his good leg. He looked down at them, told himself all those other people were going to die anyway, whatever he did. Told himself it wouldn’t matter to them in the end, anyway.

And then he looked through the armorplast into the lock again.

A woman in pajamas was at the armorplast. She was a junior hydroponics tech who’d arrived two weeks ago from a Preference call-up. She’d left a little boy—a two-year-old named Prinav—back home, and there were pictures of him all over her workstation.

She mouthed “please” to him.

Marconi’s index finger touched the button that would open the outer lock door. He closed his eyes, and his hand began to shake. He stood there for a long, frozen moment, his jaw aching from the pressure of clenched muscles. Then he lifted his index finger.

The crowd snarled like some vast, furious beast, and a wild, strange elation went through him as he heard it.

He switched his raised digit to his middle finger and held it over his head for all to see.

The blow to his kidneys pitched him forward, smashed his face into the bulkhead. Someone kicked him as he went down. Then someone else. He heard Sung laughing wildly, got a glimpse of Nahrong’s contorted face, and then it was his turn to be chucked into the airlock. Clubs and boots beat back any of the condemned trying to escape, and the inner door closed behind him.

“Thank you. Thank you so much!” The young mother propped Marconi up against the airlock wall. She dabbed at fresh scrapes on his face with the cuff of her pajamas.

“Can’t win for losing, can I?” Marconi mumbled. “I…I didn’t accomplish much. Dying with a clean conscience is kind of selfish, when you think about it.”

“They’re just messing with us,” a thin man said from the far corner. “They won’t murder us for nothing.”

“We’re Heart Worlders,” Marconi said. “Soon as that Murphy turned up, it was open season on all of us. Don’t suppose anyone in here’s a priest? I’d like to confess some sins before it’s too late.”

“I just want to see my baby again,” the woman said. “I didn’t do anything to anyone!”

A vibration began in the deck plating and the condemned froze. Marconi knew the sound airlock doors made when they opened. They must have just spaced another lock full of loyalists, he realized. No doubt they were next, and he closed his eyes. Would the mutineers pull the air from the lock first, slowly enough to make a show out of them suffocating to death, or would they override the safety controls and have a laugh as they were all blasted into space like confetti?

“Everyone exhale, unless you want to die from a lung embolism,” Marconi said. “Remember, it’s only nine to twelve seconds to unconsciousness in a vacuum. So just pass out and pass on from lack of oxygen.”

“You shut up!” the man in the corner wailed.

Marconi let his breath out and thought of his parents. He’d promised he wouldn’t get killed doing anything stupid, that last time he saw them. Getting spaced during a mutiny seemed borderline, but at least word would get to them eventually. He wouldn’t be “missing in action” for seven years until he was declared dead, like his older brother or—

A hammer hit the armorplast hard enough to star even its steel-hard surface with cracks. Then an entire line of sudden divots tracked across the bulkhead, across the airlock door, into the solid alloy on its other side.

Marconi opened an eye.

“Now they’re shooting Hearts?” the woman asked. “Anyone else get the choice between getting spaced or getting a bullet?”

“No…I think the equation’s changed.” Marconi rubbed a sleeve across his still bleeding nose and grimaced at the red smear.

The airlock door slid open and the muzzle of a gun barrel thrust into the chamber. It belonged to a massive battle rifle in the powered gauntlets of a Hoplon suit of battle armor. Several broken and cracked marshal’s badges were fixed to the suit’s breastplate, and a black shield, mounted above the trophies, with the ancient, traditional balance scale of justice, superimposed across a stylized silver tree, glittered as it caught the light.

“No one move,” a deep male voice said through the battle armor’s external speakers. Behind him, several mutineers lay dead. Nahrong was slumped over one side of his throne, soaked in blood from the large bullet wounds through his chest. “No one do anything stupid.”

Marconi raised his cuffed hands up to his chin.

“Get corpsmen up here. Then shut down every airlock on this station until we’ve got this place under control,” a crisp voice said from behind the Hoplon. “Eira, get in there and see if anyone needs immediate treatment.”

A young blond woman in an armored vac suit with the same symbol on her chest stepped around the Hoplon. She held a sidearm that she kept pointed to the ceiling in a two-hand grip as she looked over the prisoners.

“That one,” she pointed her chin at Marconi and stepped into the airlock.

“No,” snapped from the Hoplon. “What’s the protocol when treating potential hostiles?”

“We’re no hostiles! We’re super friendly. We promise!” the mother exclaimed.

She waved at the blonde. The battle rifle nudged slightly toward her and she shrank away.

“You’ve scanned them for weapons,” the blonde said with a frown. “No uncovered sight lines to the principal…Oh right.” She holstered her sidearm and clicked a biometric lock on its side. The holster tightened around the weapon, making it impossible for anyone with the wrong gauntlet code or the wrong DNA to draw it again.

“Next protocol?” the Hoplon growled.

“If attacked I—”

“Not out loud!” The Hoplon shifted its weight and Marconi tried to smile, but his lips hurt too much. “Treat him already.”

The blonde tugged off her vac suit’s gauntlets and mag-sealed them to her sleeves, then held her empty hands up to Marconi and knelt beside him.

“Rest of you to the back,” the Hoplon said. “Don’t be stupid and you won’t get hurt.”

The blonde touched the bandages on Marconi’s calf and pressed around the edges.

“Ow,” he deadpanned.

“My name’s Eira.” She looked at him squarely and he noticed the slaver’s gene brand over one eye. “I’m going to give you medical attention to keep you stable until we can get you to a proper treatment facility.”

“The guy in the tin can makes you read off a script?” Marconi asked.

“There’s only one way to do things, and that’s the right way,” she said. She turned a palm to his face and a screen mounted on her forearm cast pale light over her face. “Deep contusions. Blood pressure elevated. Adrenaline levels are falling, which means the pain will get worse. Any known allergies to Federation standard angleasics? No, anal-gessicks. An-anal—” She looked over her shoulder to the Hoplon.

“Eyes on the patient!”

“I’ll take all the painkillers you got,” Marconi told her.

“Stupid big words,” she muttered. But she also opened and closed her other hand quickly. An injection module snapped forward over her wrist, and she plugged a fingertip into the apparatus and touched Marconi’s neck.

There was a hiss and Marconi sighed in relief as the painkiller hit.

“Whoever treated your bullet wound did a poor job,” she said. “I need to redo everything or you’re likely to bust your synth clots and bleed to death. Hold still.”

She pulled a thin black strap from her belt and wrapped it around his leg just below the knee. The tourniquet pulled into place and the pressure would have been painful if the anesthetics hadn’t already been working their magic.

Marconi sat back, his eyes on the ceiling. He’d never liked watching medics work, and he certainly didn’t care for the show when he was the star.

“Sorry we couldn’t get here sooner.” A black-haired young man with an eyepatch stepped around the Hoplon and leaned over Marconi, blocking the light. He wore an armored vac suit with the helmet racked on his chest, and the engineer recognized the voice that had ordered the airlocks shut down. “Rough business out there.”

“Who’re you?” Marconi narrowed his eyes.

“Name’s Murphy.”

“Can’t be,” the engineer objected. “You’re not old enough.”

“I didn’t say I was that Murphy,” the other man said. “Name’s Callum—Lieutenant Callum Murphy. Dad’s a little busy right now, so he sent me instead.” He shook his head, his single eye somber. “None of this lynch mob stuff was by my dad’s order. Trust me, he’s the due process type.”

“Oh, so after she’s done patching me up we’ll all have proper trials before we get to taste vacuum,” Marconi chuckled, and that still managed to hurt, despite the painkillers.

“He’s also not the sort to hang you for something someone else did.” Lieutenant Murphy smiled. “And the way he sees it, just being on the wrong side—excuse me, on the other side—doesn’t necessarily make you guilty of anything. We’ll get you home soon as the situation allows.”

“And until then?” Marconi asked.

“We should send them all to Inverness,” the young woman—Eira—said. “Kinda cold this time of the year, but it’d do them good to see it.”

She tossed bloody bandages and red wadding to one side, then took a small canister off her belt and pressed the nozzle into the open wound on his leg.

“You have nothing to fear from our people,” Lieutenant Murphy said. “I’m no murderer, and neither is my dad.”

“How ’bout—” Marconi’s vision swam from the painkillers and he was aware that he was about to ask a very stupid question, but being drugged up had removed much of his verbal filter. “How ’bout all them ships he just blew to hell?”

“I said he’s no murderer. He is a killer, when he has to be. So am I, for that matter.” Lieutenant Murphy gave Marconi a tight smile. “Guess you might say it runs in the family.”

Marconi looked at him for a moment. Then his eyes dropped, and the lieutenant looked at the blonde.

“Eira, the next wave of Marines are docking soon. Pass him on to them if he’s stable, then catch up to me.”

“Aye, aye,” she said.

Lieutenant Murphy gave her a pat on the shoulder and left the airlock.

“Is he for real?” Marconi asked. “He doesn’t seem like the vids make his father out to be.”

“I need you to be quiet and keep still for a minute.” Eira sucked in her lips and tugged at the bandages on his leg. “This was a terrible patch job. Whoever did it was more interested in keeping you from bleeding all over the place than saving your leg. Minor perforation to the soleal vein…Do you have any sensation in the bottom of that foot?”

“It hurt like a mother flocker before. Things are all floaty now,” Marconi said. “Why’re you patching me up? Ain’t we all going to another airlock?”

“Callu—Lieutenant Murphy meant what he said. You’re lucky we docked in the same bay as you. Some of the Fringers didn’t think he was serious when he ordered them to not murder you all, but—Ooh! The quick-clot compound’s massing in your medial gastroc—gastro—the big blue one on my screen. Hold on.”

Eira jammed a thumb under Marconi’s knee and he groaned in pain.

“There. Couple hundred cc’s of O negative and you’ll be almost normal,” she said. “Prosthetics are hard to come by these days.”

“Just jam a peg in the hole and I’ll join Murphy’s merry band of pirates. Son’s taller’n I expceded he’d be. No horns, though. Least not on him. Dunno ’bout his dad yet.”

“I don’t care what anyone else says about Admiral Murphy.” She spritzed some blue foam onto a fingertip and swiped it across his split lips. “He saved my life and he saved millions more on Crann Bethadh.”

She unsnapped the tourniquet from his leg and wrapped bio film around his fresh bandage.

“You’re…super pretty,” Marconi slurred.

“I gave you weight-appropriate painkillers. Are you normally this forward?”

“Nope! Near death ’speriences…make me…make me…What’re we talking about?”

“Okay, you’re green across all the checklists. Why don’t you lean back and relax?” Eira touched his face and pushed the back of his head gently against the airlock wall.

“You tell that Murphy guy we all jus’…jus’ wanna go home. If he’ll let us.” Marconi drifted away.

* * *

Callum Murphy stood over a corpse.

Most of the cranium was gone, smeared across the bulkhead and workstations of Jalal Station’s command center. The smell of drying blood and brain matter had become unfortunately familiar to him, and he knew he’d forgo any sugar in his coffee for the next few weeks.

Two more bodies lay crumpled in pools of blood that had turned dark and tacky, and there were other blood trails, not adorned by the bodies of those who’d made them. He knelt, cautious on his prosthetic knee, and turned the mostly headless body on its side.

“This is Captain Tibor,” he said.

“You’re sure?” his father asked over his earbud sixty seconds later. He’d insisted on moving Ishtar ninety light-seconds closer to the station after the shooting had stopped. O’Hanraghty had made his opinion of that decision abundantly clear, but to no avail. Although they’d at least managed to keep him aboard the big carrier.

Callum knew his father could see the feed from his own vac suit’s camera, but he couldn’t see the admiral in return.

“I’m sure,” he said grimly, double-checking the name tape. Then he shoved awkwardly back to his feet, covering his mouth and nose against the stench.

“And this one’s Portier,” Harrison O’Hanraghty said, prodding another of the bodies with his boot.

“Damn,” Murphy muttered, and Callum heard him over the comm as he inhaled, pictured the characteristic shake of his father’s head. “So they’re both dead. Wonderful. And the rest of the command crew?”

O’Hanraghty scowled. He scraped a fingernail over a blood-smeared display, clearing away a few red flakes. Then he rapped a knuckle against a blinking cursor and sighed.

“Harder to say,” he said. “We’ve got three of them in custody, and they’re all Fringers and they all have fairly consistent stories. Tibor must’ve known what was in the wind. I don’t know if he was actively involved in the planning, but when Galanatos transmitted the execute, he produced a sidearm from inside his shipsuit, and a couple of the junior watch officers backed his play. Apparently he thought—hoped, prayed, maybe, for all I know!—that they could talk Portier into standing down. He was wrong.”

The chief of staff shook his head and used his forearm to scrub blood from another display as he continued speaking.

“He might’ve pulled it off if Portier’d been one bit less stubborn. Or if he’d been readier to pull the trigger. She hadn’t brought a gun of her own, but she managed to grab one of the armed JOs. Got control of his gun, used him as a human shield, hit the panic button…”

O’Hanraghty shrugged.

“If Tibor’d just gone ahead and fired, he’d probably still be alive. But he hesitated—probably couldn’t bring himself to shoot through his own man to get her—and she opened fire when one of the other JOs moved. And then Station security came busting in through the hatch on her override, and the entire situation went straight into the shitter. Thirty-three people in the compartment when it started: five of them dead, six with the medics, three in custody, and God only knows where the others are. It’s a shit sandwich in here, Terrence.”

“Can we at least please get the air vents functioning?” Callum asked, still covering his mouth and nose with his hand.

“I’d love to.” O’Hanraghty shrugged again. “But some of the loyalists—excuse me, the Feds—had free access to the Station’s systems for several minutes. Over half an hour, in at least a couple of cases, before they were taken out. They’ve sabotaged a lot of systems, but they didn’t have control here in Command Central after the shootout, and the mutineers managed to shut down AuxCom and Engineering One. Which at least meant some frigging lunatic with a death wish couldn’t blow the entire station to kingdom come.”

He scowled at the displays he’d been trying to clear, then straightened and looked at Callum as the younger man moved closer to the pair of Hoplons standing on either side of Command Central’s open hatch. The air on the other side of that hatch was no prize, but at least it was better than the abattoir stench of the command center itself.

“Leaving aside Callum’s query about air vents, how long until we can restore full functionality?” Murphy asked.

“Hours.” O’Hanraghty sighed. “For the equipment and systems, that is. Personnel matters are a bit more…complicated. I couldn’t give you even an educated guess on that end.”

“Can we hook me into a station-wide address?” Murphy asked after the inevitable light-speed delay.

“Soon as the central stack recompiles,” O’Hanraghty said. “Half an hour at least, though.”

“Another half hour of mayhem,” Murphy said bleakly. “Sergeant Major Logan. What’s the status on our boarding parties?”

“Better question for the Brigadier, Sir,” Logan replied.

“I’m sure it is,” Murphy said dryly, “but he’s a little occupied right now. Besides, I want a frontline grunt’s take.”

“Well, if you put it that way, Sir, I’d say our people are in pretty good shape,” Logan said, after a moment. “We’ve got enough Hoplons aboard that nobody but another Hoplon wants to mess with us. And looks like somewhere around half the Station personnel are on our side. Or not on the Feds’ side, anyway. But it’s messy, Sir. Be lying if I said different. Brigadier Atkins’s got maybe enough warm bodies over here to lock down the control nodes, but no way enough to secure the entire station. ’Specially not with all the parasite crews. Not till we thin the herd some more.”

“I knew that was going to make problems.” Murphy sighed, and O’Hanraghty scowled.

“Still the best of your options, though,” he said sternly, and Callum nodded.

Logan was right, of course—ordering the personnel of every parasite orbiting with the station to evacuate to the station—or to Jalal Beta—on pain of their ships’ destruction had at least shut down the last of the fighting. It had also pulled the parasites’ teeth, which was the only reason O’Hanraghty—and Callum, to be honest—hadn’t pitched ten different kinds of fit when Murphy insisted on bringing Ishtar in closer. But it also meant that even after they’d used every available lifeboat and escape pod to evacuate direct from their ships to the planetary surface, the next best thing to 81,000 spacers and Marines had funneled aboard Jalal Station itself, instead.

The enormous station had the life support to handle the additional load, at least temporarily, and roundtrip shuttles were already delivering the rest of the refugees to Jalal Beta’s surface. It wasn’t the most pleasant planetary environment in the entire Federation, but it was better than being packed like sardines aboard the station. Besides, until they could “thin the herd,” as the sergeant major had so eloquently put it, by getting the majority of them dirtside, Brigadier Atkins simply lacked anything like the numbers needed to effectively lock down the station.

“How bad is it, Logan?” Murphy asked now.

“Fair amount of looting through the Promenade, Sir. And I think there’s a lot of score-settling going on.” The sergeant major grimaced inside the bubble of his turret-like helmet. “Don’t know that all of it’s Fringe-versus-Heart, either. Some of it’s just plain personal, looks like. But whatever it is, it’s gonna leave a lot of bodies before it’s done. A lot of armed Feds’ve gone to ground in Logistics and Hydroponics Five, and they’ve got control of one of the heavy-lift freight boat bays. Per your orders, the Brigadier’s keeping them isolated but not looking for a fight. Right now, we’ve got all of the priority targets under our control.”

“But you don’t think we can push out from the priority targets?”

“No, Sir,” Logan said firmly. “Not unless you can find the Brigadier another five, six thousand Marines, we can’t. Not till we get more people out of this can and down to the planet.”

“I don’t want to jinx anything,” Callum said, “but even allowing for what the Smaj just said, it seems like everything’s gone pretty smoothly. Or a lot more smoothly than it could have, anyway. All things considered.”

“Why did you say that?” O’Hanraghty shook his head. “Crann Bethadh should have taught you not to say that.”

“What? Given the casualties we could’ve taken—would’ve taken, if we hadn’t been able to shut down the ship-to-ship fighting and get our boarding parties aboard the Station so quickly—we actually got off lightly. And not everything’s broken.” He removed his hand from his nose and raised it, palm up. “I know a lot of people got killed, and we won’t even know how many of them for a while, but we could be standing around knee-deep in blood and bodies, and we aren’t.”

O’Hanraghty gave him a skeptical look, and he shrugged.

“Callum,” Murphy said. “Look over the munitions logs and tell me what you find. Harrison, we have a problem.”

“Only one?” O’Hanraghty chuckled. “Things must be going better than I thought.”

“The kangaroo court Callum interrupted wasn’t the only one,” Murphy said grimly.

“I know.” O’Hanraghty’s smile faded into a grimace. “And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some of those ‘justice-loving’ Fringe bastards aren’t still butchering as many Hearts as they can get away with before we catch up with them.”

“Exactly,” Murphy agreed. “And this isn’t the last time we’ll come across sudden allies with blood on their hands.”

“I know,” O’Hanraghty repeated. He exhaled a long breath. “But we can’t hold an inquiry every time Fringers mutiny and seize a ship or remove Heart officers. If a ship comes over with eighty percent of her full complement, it’ll be fair to assume most of her people agreed and came over peacefully. But it won’t help our case one bit if we bring out-and-out war criminals into the fold.”

“Even leaving that aside—you’re right, but even leaving the pragmatic considerations aside—we’re not out here to turn a blind eye to score-settling or pure vengeance. Barbarity serves no one,” Murphy said. “This is a revolt. I don’t want it to turn into a civil war.”

“The Free Worlds Alliance would say it’s a revolution, not a revolt,” O’Hanraghty replied.

“What’s the difference?” Callum asked, looking up from a computer workstation whose displays were thankfully free of blood spatter.

“A revolt is a forceful and often violent objection to the status quo,” Murphy said. “A revolution’s the end of the status quo. The introduction of a new order. And that’s what we need to head off. The Federation’s sound—fundamentally sound. It’s governed Earth and most of her colonies—outside the League, anyway—for over three hundred years. Ushered in scientific advances and prosperity for billions. Instituted and enforced interstellar law and courts. Regulated interstellar trade. All the—”

“Would those be the same Federation courts that sent marshals to arrest you on trumped-up charges and got President Tolmach killed in the process?” Callum asked.

The silence over the comm lasted longer than the light-speed lag could account for, this time.

“Bad actors,” Murphy said then. “We can’t hold the entire Federation responsible for the actions of an inner clique. That’s why this is a revolt and not a revolution.”

And that, Callum realized, was also why his father willingly recognized the Free Worlds Alliance as an organized group of star systems protesting their treatment but had always stopped short of recognizing the validity of the FWA’s declaration of secession. Of course, how long he could keep that up—

“Callum has a point, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said in an unwontedly formal tone. “That arrest warrant came from the highest court in the Federation. The Prime Minister and her cabinet wanted you in cuffs and humiliated in front of the entire human race, and the court issued the warrant exactly as ordered, without even a pro forma objection, as far as we can tell. And from what Lipshen said, the Oval and the IG signed off on it without so much as a protest. Then there’s the Alliance’s grievances—its entirely justified grievances—and the Federation’s policy—its longstanding policy—of sacrificing Fringe worlds to protect Heart money.”

“I’m aware of that,” Murphy said quietly. “But the underlying cause of all this—what created the preconditions for it—is the war against the League. That’s what distorted and twisted the entire system.”

“Maybe it created the preconditions,” O’Hanraghty conceded. “But that’s not the problem anymore, is it? Preconditions or no preconditions, it’s the people invested in maintaining the status quo that are the problem now.”

“Back to the bloodbath out here,” Murphy said.

O’Hanraghty opened his mouth, then closed it again at the admiral’s abrupt change of topics and looked across the reeking command deck at Callum. Their eyes met in a moment of shared understanding, and something almost like pity, then the chief of staff’s nostrils flared.

“Of course, Sir,” he said.

“Every death will be investigated,” Murphy said, “and unless Commodore Taylor refuses to cooperate with ‘mutineers,’ his people will take lead with Prajita riding shotgun.”

O’Hanraghty looked dubious for a moment, but then he nodded, instead.

Commodore Aaron Taylor was—had been—Portier’s JAG officer, Jalal Station’s senior cop. He had a reputation as a relentless investigator and an equally relentless prosecutor, and rumor had it he’d been exiled to Jalal because he’d refused to turn a blind eye just because the object of his investigation sprang from one of the Five Hundred’s premier families. Lieutenant Prajita Tripathi, Murphy’s JAG, was little more than half his age and astronomically junior to him, but they were actually very much alike under the skin. And if Murphy could get someone with Taylor’s well-earned reputation to endorse any investigation’s integrity…

“The more egregious cases will be easy to identify and prosecute under the Uniform Code of Justice,” Murphy continued. “That case law’s sound…most of the time. And a few prominent prosecutions of murders will put out the word that the Alliance doesn’t consist of barbarians out to loot and kill for the sake of looting and killing.”

“Good policy, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said. “I’ll see it gets done.”

“How’s this going to play out back in the Heart?” Callum asked, looking back down at a lit screen and tapping in commands. “Are we the Huns or Fringe Jihadists or—That’s funny.”

He frowned at the data scrolling across his workstation.

“I’m not worried about the Heart’s opinion,” O’Hanraghty said. “We’re not getting off that naughty list whatever we do.”

“This can still end at the negotiating table and not at the muzzle of a gun,” Murphy said. “Revolt, not revolu—Wait. What’s ‘funny,’ Callum?”

“I just compiled the magazine inventory for the outer hull cargo rails, and there are thousands of missiles in transfer containers,” Callum said. “Must’ve moved them out of the magazines at least three or four weeks ago, from the inventory. That’s convenient. It’ll shave days off how long it would take to steal what we need if we had to dig them out of the magazines ourselves.”

“We don’t ‘steal.’ We…what did you call it, Harry?”

“Dynamically acquire, Sir.” O’Hanraghty’s tone was a bit absent as he woke up a nearby terminal. He pulled Callum’s screen view to him and simultaneously shared it to Murphy’s display aboard Ishtar.

“One coming in,” Private Steiner said from his post beside the hatch through his Hoplon armor’s external speakers. “Cleared.”

Eira stepped past him onto the bridge. Her nostrils crinkled at the smell. She gave O’Hanraghty a nod and crossed to Callum.

“Did you take your peptide supplement?” she asked.

“Huh? No,” he said. “Been too busy trying to stop the galaxy from burning down.”

“Damn it!” Murphy snarled over the comm. “How long do you think we have, Harry?”

“Wait.” Callum frowned. “What did I just miss?”

“Why would Jalal Station move missiles and warheads out of deep storage into transfer containers on the outer hull ranks?” O’Hanraghty asked in response.

“Because…the mutineers knew we were coming and wanted to help us out?”

O’Hanraghty glanced at him, shook his head, and went back to typing queries into the workstation.

“No?” Callum frowned. “Why else would the Station pre-position all that equipment if they weren’t expecting to—Oh. Oh, no.”

Callum rubbed his eyepatch, and Eira pursed her lips and looked a silent question at him.

“I should’ve seen it on my own,” he told her. “The Federation’s coming here in force. That’s why the out-hull cargo stations are full of weapons. They’re coming here from…”

“Has to be detachments from First Fleet,” O’Hanraghty said.

“First Fleet?” Callum frowned at him, because First Fleet was the primary combat component of the Beta Cygni front.

“Has to be,” O’Hanraghty repeated. “Oh, they could draw some strength from the Reserve, but they won’t want to cut too deeply into that. And there hasn’t been enough time to assemble detachments from the Heart fleet stations. This is good news and bad news.”

“Good news? If they send the entire Beta Cygni Fleet, we’ll be outmanned and outgunned by—”

Callum’s remaining eye looked up and to the left as he did the mental math.

Detachments, I said.” O’Hanraghty glanced up at him for a moment. “They won’t send the entire fleet, Callum. They can’t. The front would collapse.”

“And they haven’t had time to recall it, anyway,” Murphy said over the comm. “They’ll send enough of Harry’s ‘detachments’ to convince me I can’t win a standup fight, leave me no choice but to run for the Blue Line or surrender. That’s Harry’s bad news. The good news is that this fight was inevitable, and at least we’ve got time to set conditions in our favor.”

“We want to have a pitched battle here?” Callum frowned. “I thought we didn’t want to get into a fight at all. I thought the idea was to continue to Sol!”

“And what happens to Crann Bethadh and the rest of the FWA if we make for Sol now we know they’re coming? You think a fleet the size they’re probably sending to meet us is just going to turn around and go home when it gets here and finds out about the Free Worlds?” Callum could almost hear his father’s headshake. “No. If we’re not here to stop it, the Federation’ll turn its wrath on the systems in revolt, and then it’ll be Gobelins all over again. Or they’ll simply invoke Standing Order Fifteen to justify the orbital bombardment of every planet in the Alliance.”

“They wouldn’t…” Callum went pale.

“I was on Gobelins,” Logan said from his post by the hatch. “I’ve seen what happens when they send in the Army to deal with revolts or worlds ‘out of compliance.’ It ain’t pretty.”

“I didn’t realize you’d been on Gobelins, Anniston,” O’Hanraghty said, turning to face him fully. “I should’ve wondered.”

“Why?” Callum asked, and O’Hanraghty shrugged.

“I’ve been through the jackets on all of your dad’s security detail. There’s a redacted section in Logan’s from about the time Gobelins went down.”

“I was there,” Logan confirmed, and the voice over his armor’s speaker was harsher even than usual. Harsher than the speaker alone could explain.

“I hadn’t realized that, either,” Murphy said over the comm, and Callum heard him draw a deep breath. “Was it really as bad as I think it was?” he asked almost gently.

“Pretty sure it was worse, Sir, if you don’t mind my saying it,” Logan replied. “Known you a while now. Your brain’s not sick enough to imagine what it was like.”

“Tell us,” Murphy said. “Please.”

Callum’s eyes were on the sergeant major, but those eyes narrowed as he heard his father’s tone. It wasn’t an order. It was genuinely the request it sounded like. And as he realized that, Callum realized something else. His father wasn’t asking for his own benefit; he was asking for Callum’s benefit.

Logan was silent for a long moment, then—

“Drop didn’t go bad,” he said, “but none of the Marines were happy about the duty. You serve long enough, you do some shitty things. Some things you don’t want to face or remember. But we spend most of our time with the Fleet. We get sent down to shoot somebody, it’s usually Leaguies, not our own. That’s what the fucking Army’s for, Sir. Five Hundred’s wrecking crew. Its leg breakers. Only time it never gets deployed to the Fringe is when there’s a ‘problem’ that needs ironing out, and it irons it. Fucking right, it irons it.”

He paused for a moment, jaw tight enough for the muscles to ridge.

“Anyway,” he resumed after a moment, “you know how it is between us and the Army pukes, Admiral. Lot of it’s just the usual horseshit between branches, sure. But not all of it. Not when it comes to putting desperate folks back into compliance. So, yeah, we weren’t any too happy when we got picked to back up the Army. And Alaimo knew it. Called my battalion CO a ‘crayon-eating coward’ to his face before the drop, and my platoon got sent to secure a mountain pass leading out of the planetary capital. Didn’t want us leading the assault. Didn’t trust us to be the tip of the spear, even though that’s what Marines are for. What we do. We drop hard, and we kill Leaguies until the Army’s ready to waltz in for the victory parade and take the credit. Way it always works. But not this time. Nah, this time he didn’t trust us to kill everybody he wanted killed.”

He paused again, and O’Hanraghty nodded, his own expression grim.

“My LT did everything by The Book. Checkpoint around a natural obstacle. LP/OPs on every likely avenue of approach. Drone and drop sensor coverage ten klicks out. Rebels weren’t going to fart without us knowing about it. I was a team leader, and I was on the checkpoint when a ground car pulled up. We were supposed to turn civilians back, keep them penned in around the capital while Alaimo…did what he was sent there to do.”

“Who was in the car?” O’Hanraghty asked quietly.

“A woman and three children.” Logan’s voice cracked for a second. “We had biometrics and photos of every high-value target. They weren’t on any kill/capture list, but they were the wife and the children of one of the system assembly’s delegates. Nothing in our files said he’d been part of Butler’s clique, had anything to do with the decision to secede. Didn’t much matter. By that time, everyone on the frigging planet knew what was happening to all the delegates. ’S why she was running with her kids. And I was in my Hoplon armor.…God, those kids were so scared of me. You ever had a kid look at you in terror, Sir?”

“Can’t say I have,” O’Hanraghty said.

“I tried to calm them down, but that’s not what the suit’s voice box is built for. It carries a four-cycle-per-second frequency. It’s designed to scare people, as if the suit’s not enough by itself. The kids were begging their mother to leave, she’s begging me to let them through, and I couldn’t just do that. No matter how much I wanted to. Orders, no exceptions. Everybody had to be cleared by Central. But they were women and children. They weren’t combatants, hadn’t had a damned thing to do with the decision to go out of compliance. But…no exceptions.

“So the LT calls it in, just like we’re supposed to. Talking to Central. Then General Alaimo cuts through all the channels, and he says two words: ‘Eliminate them.’” Logan’s voice cracked again. “The mom, she had cash and a contact that could get her and the kids off-world. And they didn’t mean squat to the mission. Not the mission the way we’d been briefed. Not the official mission.”

“But you weren’t in command,” O’Hanraghty said quietly.

“Nope. LT was. But LT, he was a good Marine. Fresh out of OCS. True believer. He’d never seen the elephant, either. First combat deployment. So he calls up our chain of command for clarification, but Alaimo pulls him into a one-on-one channel for a bit. General got his point across, and then the LT, he pulled them all out of the car—”

Callum’s stomach tightened as he heard the unshed tears hovering in the sergeant major’s voice. As he waited for Logan to tell the rest.

“LT, he…he couldn’t do it. Hell, he hadn’t even killed a Leaguie yet! Can’t expect someone to start with women and children. He couldn’t. So he breaks his wideband antenna, so Alaimo can’t drop in again, and tries to get company or battalion on the horn. But we’re being jammed, for some reason.”

“Alaimo didn’t want witnesses,” O’Hanraghty said.

“Can see why you did so well in Intelligence, Sir,” Logan said harshly. “Anyway, LT keeps trying to call for help. And then Alaimo’s command shuttle sets down and the man himself gets out with half a dozen Army Hoplon pukes. Doesn’t say a word. Just looks at us like we’re worse than dog shit, and then he takes the mom and kids away in the shuttle. Thing is, it doesn’t head back to the capital. No, it heads out toward the ocean. We watched it on the IFF trackers. Shuttle goes out a klick or two, does a U-turn over the water, and heads back to the city.

“Never saw or heard of those civilians again.”

Callum swallowed hard, but Logan wasn’t done yet. It was as if some inner dam had broken, and the words came out hard, with whetted-steel edges.

“LT, he about loses his shit. We finally get taken off the checkpoint, and he goes straight to the company commander, and Captain Arriga, she goes to our battalion commander, and they all go to confront Alaimo. Never came back. Air car accident, officially. And then Alaimo puts his Army pukes in charge of us Marines and sends us first into every fight he can find. And whatever you may’ve heard, they fought back hard on Gobelins, after they figured out what Alaimo had in store for ’em even if they surrendered. Casualties were…high. Where I took my first bullet.”

“And that justified the K-strikes on Altamont and Ballston,” Murphy said over the comm from Ishtar.

“Yep.” Logan’s voice was quieter now, almost washed out. “Oh, he’d’ve been just as happy as a pig in shit to get more Marines killed trying to break the perimeter. But he was making a point. Making a statement. Every civilian on the damned planet was a hostage, and he’d kill every fucking one of them if the ‘rebels’ didn’t lie down and die for him.”

“And after Gobelins was pacified, Alaimo got off clean,” O’Hanraghty said, this time looking at Callum, not Logan. “Helps to be the attack dog for certain Five Hundred members whose financial interests seem to coincide with everywhere he’s sent.”

“I heard the Société Auchan stepped in, bought up every local corporation that didn’t seem to have owners anymore, somehow,” Logan said. “Hadn’t seen how it worked—not up close and personal—until then. Too many years into being a Marine, I realized that even I’d been the Five Hundred’s mercenary.”

“Why did you stay in, Anniston?” Murphy asked quietly, and, again, Callum knew who his father was really asking that question for. “You cleared your mandatory service term years ago. So why not put in your papers?”

“Can’t, Sir. I love my Marines. No one else’s gonna take care of them the way I can. And they goddamn well deserve somebody who will.”

Callum looked past the sergeant major’s armor, saw Eira’s expression—the fierce affection, the love, burning in her eyes like blue fire—and knew she hadn’t been surprised by the sergeant major’s answer.

“Anyway, like I say,—” Logan turned his head in his armor’s domed helmet and looked directly at Callum “—it ain’t pretty any time the Army moves in. And Standing Order Fifteen’s even worse when it gets invoked.”

“And if they’d do it to Gobelins, Callum—do it when only a single star system was involved—what do you think they’ll be willing to do when they find out they’re looking at over a dozen star systems going ‘out of compliance’?”

“Of course, they don’t know yet that they are,” O’Hanraghty pointed out, and sixty seconds later Murphy barked a harsh laugh over the comm.

“They don’t know yet, Harry, but they will. And President Tolmach spent his dying breath begging me to protect Crann Bethadh,” Murphy said. “I can’t leave them vulnerable. And I can’t leave a percentage of our force behind to cover every system that’s pledged support to the Alliance, either. If I do that, I’ll show up in Sol hitching a ride with some tramp freighter, and we have to make that trip with enough force to make the thought of a pitched battle over the Earth itself too costly for the Oval to contemplate. Then we can talk.”

“So what do we do?” Callum asked.

“O’Hanraghty comes back to Ishtar,” Murphy said. “I’ll send Tremblay and Jurgens over to replace him on the Navy side. Until they get there, I need you to hold the fort for me, Callum. Don’t joggle Atkins’s elbow. That’s not your job. But you’re my eyes and ears—and voice—over there.”

Callum’s expression was unhappy, but his father continued before he could speak.

“Go ahead and start getting the Station’s defenses back online, too. I doubt any Fed commander would want to destroy this installation unless he thought he had absolutely no other choice, but I want options to protect it beyond charging face-first into a missile barrage.”

“So I’ll just…stay here?” Callum said, and O’Hanraghty gave him an oddly sympathetic look as he headed for the hatch.

“Get a data feed to Ishtar and flag any data you find ‘funny,’” he said. “And, trust me, we’ll be handing you plenty of headaches of your own.”

Callum looked skeptical, and O’Hanraghty waved an index finger at him.

“Stay put,” he said firmly. “I know you think you should be out there sorting stuff out. But that’s not your job. Let Atkins’s people handle the head-knocking. That’s their job. You stay here and do yours. Last thing we need is you going sightseeing and getting into God knows what!” He glanced at Logan. “I trust you got that, too, Sergeant Major?”

“Got it, Sir,” Logan rumbled, and O’Hanraghty disappeared through the hatch.

Callum stared at the opening for a moment, then put his hands on his hips.

“They left me behind,” he said.

“They gave you a job,” Eira said.

“Yeah? So why did they lock me up in here instead of out there? ’Fraid I’ll stub my damned toe or something?”

“They gave you a job,” Eira repeated. “A pretty important one, from what I heard.”

“Maybe.” Callum scowled, then looked down at her. “What took you so long getting here? I was a little worried.”

“I was delayed at the bars on the Promenade.” Eira grimaced. “The prostitutes there are very excited to welcome anyone and everyone into their establishments. They didn’t seem to understand I needed to be somewhere else.”

“Yeah, well…good for them,” Callum said. “At least we’ve got those hearts and minds on our side.”

“They’re whores,” Logan said. “They’re on everyone’s side. Captain’s point is that there’s still a lot of people out there who ain’t on our side. And most of ’em’d just love to put a bullet or three in anybody named Murphy.”

Eira nodded quickly, and Callum shrugged.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll just sit and spin here, then.”

“Your father trusts you,” Eira said. “If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have sent you in his place in the first place. And now he needs you here.”

“Here in Command Central, you mean? With Hoplons at the door to keep me nice and safe?”

“He trusted you enough to send you to break up that mob,” Eira pointed out a bit more waspishly. “That wasn’t exactly ‘nice and safe.’ And if he has to risk you again, he will. You know that. But, yes, he worries about you, too. You’ve already lost a leg and an eye. Are you really surprised he worries about your well-being?”

“I almost had my well-being blown off in New Dublin, and that came out all right. Mostly,” Callum growled. Then he sighed. “Okay. Okay! Guess I’ll just plunder these data archives until the Feds get here, and—”

He paused and scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“What?” Eira asked.

“I was just thinking. I wonder if they’ll send Uncle Rajenda with their fleet?” Callum’s mouth worked from side to side.

“Admiral Murphy has a brother?” she asked.

“In-law. My mom’s brother. And let me tell you something; Uncle Raj wasn’t what you’d call a big fan of my dad even before this mess. I can guarantee his opinion’s even worse now.”



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Framed