The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 3

  “Very good, Captain Fall. Your crew knows what to do.” She cast a quick glance around the bridge, nodding confidently. “You don’t need me looking over your shoulders. I’ll grab some food and get back to our intel reports.”

  She noticed a few grins as she left. It rarely hurt to show confidence in subordinates and it usually did wonders for morale. She had no intention of being off the bridge when the fight started, but it would take at least a deciday before the distress call could filter through the Gray repeater network and result in the dispatch of a capture team.

  She frowned slightly as she entered the main companionway. Did they seem a little too surprised at her mild display of approval or were her impressions clouded by her concerns over Fall’s quality as a leader? Like it or not, he was her flag captain for this operation and she’d have to work with what she had.

  She dropped down to twelve deck, where the main mess hall was located. She could have eaten from the auxiliary mess set up directly aft of the bridge but she wanted to get a better feel for the crew. As always, with just over a thousand crew operating three shifts, there were close to a hundred crewmen in the mess, either eating a full meal or simply having a coffee and swapping stories.

  The buzz of voices trailed off quickly as she walked in. Visible traces of her combat implants, running along her jawline and up to circle her ear, made her easily recognizable. Keeping her head closely shaved for a better calibration in her heavy Marine armor also marked her as a professional warrior.

  The buzz quickly picked up again. It’s one thing to know that Marines have augments. It’s quite another to remember, specifically, that they have augmented hearing, especially when a Marine general walks into a common mess for lunch.

  …turned those Sector Defense units into an elite regiment in just six months. They even kicked some Marine ass…

  …captured a Gray cruiser within hours of escaping their custody…

  …have a proper fighting officer with us, we’ll make it home ok, regardless of what old ‘Pride before a Fall’ might blunder into…

  …in that underarmor suit, I’d follow her anywhere!

  She frowned. Crews always griped about their officers – It was a law of nature – but when they started giving them disparaging nicknames, it indicated a distinct lack of respect. She grabbed a tray of food and headed for a table with an open seat.

  The chatter at her table died out as she approached, but quickly resumed as they switched their discussion from her to the pending fight.

  She suppressed a smile. The young crewman who’d restarted the conversation with the new topic was sharp. He’d bear watching.

  She returned their politely nervous nods. “Forgot to bring hot sauce,” she told them. “Anybody here have a canister I can use?”

  The food on their ships was nourishing but hopelessly monotonous, and she laughed as five canisters appeared in the hands of her table-mates. She took one from the young woman across the table and gave her food a liberal spray of Xel Ha’s finest export.

  “That’s pretty hot stuff, ma’am,” the young woman warned as Julia handed back the canister. “You might want to start with a small, oh…” she trailed off as her commodore shoveled in a large mouthful.

  “Shorry to be such a pig,” Julia apologized around her food. “Old habit from training at Twenty-nine Moons. They give you fifteen minutes to eat lunch and the course senior always wants you lined up ten minutes early, so you end up stuffing your face in the chow line and running right back out to the boarding ledge.” Her voice was becoming more intelligible as she chewed and talked.

  “Walking into a mess hall seems to put me back in the old OCS mindset.” She grinned at the young woman. “Antonov, isn’t it? That’s good spice but I went a little light on it. Would you mind?”

  Eyes wide, the young woman handed over the canister and watched as Julia gave the food a second, heavier dose of the spicy spray.

  “Different from what I’m used to,” she said as she handed it back. “Sharper… less pungent. Gives mess-deck food a real kick in the pants.” She’d proven she could handle the stuff; no harm in showing a little respect for it.

  “How long till our ambush brings in a catch?” Antonov asked, more at ease now that she was sharing with her commodore.

  Julia looked over the young woman’s shoulder as she thought it through. “We’ve been here a half-centi,” she mused. “Another one and a half centis should see us killing something.”

  “How did the Grays ever build such an advanced civilization when they’re so stuck in their ways?” the young man at the end asked.

  Julia shrugged. “Maybe they were different when they were a younger race. Perhaps this final generation, the one that lives through an endless succession of clone bodies, has simply lost the ability to think creatively.” She grinned. “You have to admit, knowing you’re gonna die in a few short decades has a way of lighting a fire under your ass.”

  The Gray reluctance to employ innovative tactics was actually turning out to be a problem for Julia and not simply because of the restrictions it placed on those who sought to impersonate them. The real Purists were a motivated group dedicated to their own goals but, at the end of the day, they were still Grays. Their dedication didn’t lead to any great leaps of tactical or strategic innovation. They fought with the same scientifically precise battle drills as the forces loyal to the Gray Quorum.

  Without any tactical advantages, it simply boiled down to a numbers game and the Quorum had vastly more force than the Purists. They were dwindling quickly.

  Julia’s forces were posing as Purists, like a fleece-wolf hiding among a grazing herd of claw-toed sheep. It was rare that one was detected before it made its final lunge at an unsuspecting deer. It was an effective tactic.

  But the herd was shrinking fast.

  Julia finished her food and stood with the tray. “Thanks for the hot sauce.” She nodded at Antonov.

  She headed for the tray conveyor but stopped next to the crewman who’d mentioned her underarmor suit. His comrades cast him nervous glances as she looked down at him. “If you were wearing this suit,” she told him, deliberately misinterpreting his earlier remark, “you wouldn’t be following anyone anywhere.” She leaned down to give his protruding belly a light smack with the back of her hand. “You’d have no circulation left in your legs!”

  A chorus of guffaws broke out at the man’s expense but he took it well, grinning up at her. “I doubt they make ‘em my size anyway – I’d hate to see the armor that’d fit me!”

  She laughed, giving him a thump on the shoulder as she resumed her course for the conveyor.

  Julia returned to the bridge and took a tablet from a locker at the back. She settled into one of the command chairs with a polite nod to Fall before immersing herself in the latest disposition reports.

  The tablet let her avoid conversation. Fall was content to ignore his subordinates but he just couldn’t keep quiet when his superiors were around. If she didn’t have the tablet, she’d be subjected to an endless stream of inane comments about the ship, the current plan, the state of the engines…

  She wished she’d found another way to fend off chatter. The reports were becoming more alarming each day. The projected Purist force strength was shrinking faster than she’d thought and it wouldn’t take the enemy long to figure out that some of the Purists were not like the others.

  She needed to come up with a new plan. The Grays would be heavily damaged by the end of the short civil war she’d managed to engineer. The Purists represented nearly a fifth of Gray forces and they’d probably take close to that much with them as they were destroyed, but that still left an overwhelming amount of enemy ships.

  There’d be more than enough force left over to wipe out the colonies once they learned they’d been fooled by the Humans. It wasn’t a question of if. With the Gray’s civil war winding down, there’d be little chance of keeping her crews bottled up at the mining world they’d been hiding
on. Word would definitely get out.

  She frowned at the tablet. Was there another race out here somewhere who could give the Grays a run for their credits? She looked up at Fall but decided not to ask him. Not only was she reluctant to get him talking, but she also didn’t trust his judgement.

  Captain Fall possessed clarity of vision but only where it involved immediate personal advantage.

  She entered a scheduling note that would invite Brother N’Zim and Resident Mullins to join her the morning after she returned to Defiance, the small mining outpost they were currently calling home.

  She stared down at the small hologram projected by the tablet without really seeing it. They needed to find a rival for the Grays to focus on before the colonies got wiped out. Maybe…

  “Contact!” The tactical officer announced. “Two enemy cruisers conforming to standard Gray tactics. They’re sliding straight into the kill-zones.”

  Julia closed the tablet and looked up to see Fall, eyes blazing with anticipation, turn to the weapons officer, his mouth opening to say something.

  She wouldn’t put it past him to open fire too early.

  “They’ll be in the sweet spot in a couple of ten-millis,” she said with an affected wolfish tone as she came out of her chair. She was genuinely concerned he’d trigger the fight too soon and let the enemy escape and so she’d provided him with a plausibly deniable reminder of the plan.

  She came to stand next to him in the central, tactical holo.

  The last thing she wanted was for him to turn an easy ambush into a running firefight. Not only would he have denied his role in the failure, but he’d almost certainly blame her for it, citing her orders to use Gray tactics.

  She didn’t think he was bad enough to do such a thing consciously, but she’d seen more than her fair share of officers in the Imperial Marines who’d built a career out of blaming others for their own shortcomings. Some had known they were terrible combat officers, but others, like Fall, simply didn’t know how much they didn’t know.

  “They’re both in the zone,” Weapons announced.

  “Signal the squadron,” Fall ordered. “Weapons free!”

  As usual, the Gray captains were confused about the presence of a small Gray squadron where a distress call indicated the presence of a stricken Human ship. Just like every other ambush, they continued on toward their originally planned positions, no doubt assuming that they’d be better able to focus fire on the central ship if it came to a fight.

  Fall’s order came back as confirmed, activating a signal at the weapons station to tell the weapons officer he could now open fire without jumping the gun on his counterparts in the other four ships.

  The enemy ship to their front was intimidatingly close. They wanted to minimize the time required to ferry their Human victims aboard and it meant the outgoing rounds from the ambush ships would impact their targets before the Gray captain could draw breath and mumble a single order.

  A hail of enhanced conventional ammunition hammered at the enemy’s forward shield. The smaller-caliber rounds focused on the area directly in front of their main armament. No shot could be fired without the shield generator creating a small aperture for the rounds to pass through and no aperture could be opened while an enemy was firing at that area or the launch rails would be damaged by incoming fire.

  “We’ve got them sealed up at the bow,” the weapons officer said.

  “That salvo from the Emma nearly broke through their dorsal shielding,” the tactical officer advised. “The next might even… Whoa!” he shouted. “Complete overmatch! A round from the Oliver went through from ventral before detonating against the inside of the dorsal shield.”

  He enlarged a holographic menu. “Given the path taken by that round, I’d estimate heavy damage to the command and control links. The departments are probably isolated until they can activate new pathways.”

  “Give ‘em another salvo from our mains,” Fall ordered, commendably eager to pound them while they were on their heels.

  Before the rounds were fired, the enemy started backing off, but the front half of the Gray cruiser began to rotate slightly to port.

  “Looks like the damage was even worse than we thought,” the tactical officer said. “The stress of backing up has sheared off whatever held her together on the starboard side. The front half is hanging on by a few primary longitudinal frames.”

  The deck rumbled as the mains fired again, their soul-rending shriek vibrating the jury-rigged Human-sized bridge chairs. The projectiles slammed into the unshielded hulk ahead of them, tearing through both the fore and aft sections and trailing a haze of debris behind them.

  “She’s dead,” the tactical officer pronounced, then raised his voice to a near-shout. “Collision alert! Contact astern of us is accelerating and opening an aperture for her mains!”

  “All ahead, full!” Fall shouted. “Twenty degrees up angle. Take us over that wreckage…”

  Before he could finish, the deck shook and the pressure on the bridge jumped a few Pascals.

  “Grazing hit to port,” the tactical officer reported. “The shields held but we had some energy bleed-through. He highlighted the affected sections in the ship-status holo. A long stretch of hull plating on the port side was crumpled and torn.

  “Catastrophic venting in eighteen compartments,” he continued. “Estimated thirty two dead. Damage control teams are working to seal the affected areas and get two point defense weapons back online.”

  “Helm, keep us moving,” Fall ordered. He turned to Tactical. “Let’s shift some of the forward shielding aft to shore up our stern.”

  The tactical officer looked up at him, one eyebrow raised. “We can certainly do that, sir, but we’re danger-close. We have four friendlies trying to get a solution and if one of my counterparts leads the target too much…”

  “Do it,” Fall ordered. “We might take friendly fire, but we know for a fact that those húndàn behind us are trying to hit us, so I’ll take my chances.”

  “Aft contact is showing heavy damage to the outer hull,” the tactical officer offered. “They’re following us into the envelope for the Emma and the Oliver. There’s no way they can take much more.”

  Emma and Oliver were turning to bear on the remaining contact and they opened up almost in punctuation to the officer’s statement. The combined, concentrated fire of the four ships was too much for the enemy’s shield emitters and the blue haze began to fail in multiple locations.

  That spelled the end for her. One moment, she was a fighting ship – a heavy cruiser – and, the next, she was a failing habitat for her crew as enhanced conventional rounds tore bulkheads, stanchions and deck plates to lethal shreds. Fragments flew away from the hull, propelled by escaping atmosphere, and the bodies – and body parts – soon followed.

  Julia nodded to herself as she watched the tactical holo. The remnants of both enemy ships were ejecting their escape pods. Some of the small, unshielded capsules were colliding with wreckage and rupturing.

  “Captain Fall, signal phase two, if you’d be so kind,” she requested. “The goods have a very short shelf-life in this environment.”

  Fall passed on the order to the squadron while she assessed the beacons on the escape pods, touching each high-priority signal to mark them for pickup.

  Shuttles from the five ships launched and began picking up the pods, slowly scooping them into their open boarding ramps.

  This was becoming the main purpose of the ambush program. With the end of the civil war in sight, the Humans were scrambling to capture as many prisoner specialists as they could get their hands on. Gray ships engaged in the capture of Human experimental subjects were equipped and staffed to begin the conditioning process from the moment the victims were brought aboard.

  Experts in Human conditioning were a rare commodity among the Grays and they got top priority in a rescue scenario, higher even than the ship’s command staff.

  Progress was being made on reversi
ng the effects of the conditioning, but Brother N’Zim wanted more trained Grays to accelerate his work. A large portion of Humans in the colonies had been conditioned and then set free. They were committed to the constant, draining conflict between the colonies and they rarely failed, if captured, to destroy the evidence.

  Seeing as that evidence resided in their brains…

  They were grabbing as many specialists as they could, while the Gray civil war lasted.

  “That’s all of ‘em, ma’am,” Fall announced.

  “Very well, Captain,” Julia replied. “Leave a message drone and let’s go home.”

  The communications officer released the drone and a slight rumble began to build as the ship turned for the jump to the primary RV point.

  “I do hope the distortion drive hasn’t been knocked out of alignment,” Fall said mildly but with a slightly accusatory glance at Julia. “Wouldn’t do to drop out in the middle of one of Defiance’s stars…”

  Julia affected not to hear him, despite her military augments, and the ship slid into distorted space. If he was worrying over nothing, she could afford to be gracious about it. If he was right and they reappeared inside a planet or star, then nobody would be left to raise a fuss about it anyway.

  They left behind nothing but a Gray drone, repeating the Purist manifesto over and over.

  Beating the Bushes

  Daffyd paid for his coffee and walked over to a small table on the edge of the half-deserted market square. He dragged a finger across the seat and made a small grunt of approval at the cleanliness. Masra was built on a desert world and he’d expected a great deal more heat and dust, given the way the city was laid out.

  Unlike the Imperial way of dropping a massive arcology into the desert and sealing it up, Masra was a collection of buildings, none more than five stories high, set close to provide shaded alleys for pedestrian traffic. Wind towers caught the breeze, electrostatically filtered out the dust and released the wind to cool the pedestrian level. Without even tapping into the city’s fusion plants, the average temperature was nearly twenty degrees lower than the surrounding desert.