Alliance, page 39
part #2 of Linesman Series
If Cotterill had changed her identity, she might have dropped out of sight with her old identity. Stellan added another filter. People who hadn’t used their accounts in the last month.
Behind him, Cotterill’s voice became sharp. “But you wouldn’t know that, would you?” and Stellan knew exactly who she was looking at. “Because you haven’t spent any time on your ship or any time with your crew.”
“That ship should have been destroyed,” Edie Song said. “It’s a useless piece of junk sitting out there waiting to—”
Stellan dropped his comms. He knew, even as he drew his weapon, that he was too late, for Cotterill had fired.
He did the one thing that would keep them alive. He turned the blaster on Jarrad. “Don’t move.”
She paused, hands over the boards, which gave him just enough time to follow up the weapon to the side of her head. Hard enough to knock her out.
“You crazy bitch.”
Cotterill was shaking. “She had no right to insult the ship like that.”
“How in the lines are we going to get on board now? They won’t let us land.”
“I can get us on board.”
Of course she could, where they’d walk right into a barrage of blaster fire. Even if they let them out, what would they do when they saw Song’s body?
Unless they were expecting a body.
“Make it look like we’re giving her oxygen,” he ordered Lahti. “Hide the blaster burn,” and waited until they had done so before he hit the comms.
“This is Team Leader Vangellan on the shuttle 73B, approaching the Gruen,” and prayed that Markan’s aliases would pass the quick glance the people on the ship would give them. “Captain Song has collapsed. We’re administering CPR. Please have the medicenter ready to receive her.” Thank the lines Jarrad had set the autopilot before they’d had to knock her out.
“What appears to be the problem?” The woman at the other end was a team leader. He recognized her. She was one of those who had rescued Lambert the night Mendez was injured. Her name was Bhaksir.
“It looks like a heart attack,” Stellan said.
“Heart attack.” Bhaksir sounded mystified. “But she’s never shown any sign of—”
Another voice near them said, “There are other sorts of heart attack, too, remember.”
Lambert. Stellan’s heart hammered almost as heavily as Song’s would have if she had been having a heart attack. He was close.
“Can’t stabilize her, sir,” Lahti said from behind him.
Bhaksir looked up at something in the corner of her screen. “Put her on a stretcher. We’ll be ready for you.”
The shuttle chimed for landing.
“Will do,” Stellan said, and clicked off.
Cotterill’s crew had a stretcher down and were strapping Song’s body onto it. Definitely military, and they worked as a team. Had they been a team once?
Stellan moved Jarrad’s unconscious body away from the boards so that Cotterill could take over.
“You’d better be able to do this.”
“Of course.
Stellan strapped the pilot into a seat at the rear, and swung himself back to his own seat. As he buckled himself in for the landing, he picked up the comms he’d dropped earlier. There was one name left on the list.
Hilda Gruen.
FORTY-ONE
EAN LAMBERT
EAN DIDN’T NEED the lines to tell how the atmosphere on the Gruen changed after the emergency call from the shuttle. The air was almost crackling as Bhaksir clicked off her comms. “Anyone heard of Team Leader Vangellan?”
“No.” Ru Li didn’t add his customary “ma’am.” “And no one told us about a change in personnel.”
Radko checked her own comms. “It says he’s cleared. A whole team.”
“Which means we have a security problem somewhere. Ean, we want you.” Bhaksir looked around with a frown. “Shuttle bay three,” she decided. “In case we need to retreat. Burns, you, too. Radko, Gossamer, Hana, Ru Li. With them.”
She looked at the trainees waiting to return on the shuttle. “Hernandez, Klim, Solvej, Chantsmith, Wallace, Tendulkar, Green. You’re with me. Weapons on stun. They’ll come out attacking, and they won’t care who they kill. Ean,” for Ean hadn’t moved. “Shuttle bay three.”
“But you’ll have four extra soldiers if we stay here.”
Radko grabbed his arm and dragged him away. “The longer we stand here, the less time they’ll have to prepare.”
He followed reluctantly.
“And the less time we’ll have to prepare,” she said, once they were down near the third shuttle bay. “We need visuals, Ean.”
He sang the visuals for shuttle bay one—where the others were waiting—onto the screen in shuttle three. “What if they are simply who they say they are?”
“Sheesh,” Ru Li said. “You’ve been with us for six months now, and you haven’t learned anything.”
Radko’s look was cold, which warmed Ean. “For that, you can put the shuttle into warm mode, while Hana and Gossamer stand guard.”
“I was just saying.”
“Sometimes you say too much, Ru Li. Sometimes what you say is uncalled for.” She turned to Ean. “They’ll be after one of two things. The ship or you. You control the ship, so provided we protect you, we have both covered. Don’t try anything heroic. You’re welcome to help, but do it the way linesmen do. Through the lines. Don’t get in the way of the physical fighting. And when one of us tells you to move, you move.”
Ean nodded although he felt a “Yes, ma’am,” would be more appropriate.
“Fergus, stick with Ean. Like glue. I don’t want to have to hunt for you if we need to run.”
Fergus nodded. “I feel I should salute,” he whispered to Ean.
Ean did, too. One day, Radko would have her own team, and she’d be the best team leader ever. He would miss her. Much more than he thought he would ever miss anyone. As much as Michelle missed Abram.
FORTY-TWO
SELMA KARI WANG
THE BRIDGE ON the Eleven reminded Kari Wang of the bridge on her own ship, when they knew a battle was imminent and were waiting, poised for something to happen but knew it wouldn’t for hours yet. Any moment now, she expected Will to turn around and say something in a deadpan voice that would stop the whole crew, then they’d crack up laughing. Will knew how to break the tension.
But Will wasn’t here and never would be.
She forced herself to breathe quietly while she listened to the crew match what was on their screens to hers. She’d pulled up the human view of the screens and put an overlay of the alien screens on top. The overlay had the ship names marked—after all, the ships had already been identified—but she hid the names. She wanted to work it out with her crew.
“They’re talking to you,” Sale explained to the three linesmen. “All you have to do is listen. You recognize them by their song. And their lines.”
She might as well have been speaking an unknown language by the way they looked at her. Kari Wang didn’t blame them.
Sale indicated the flickering bars on the wall screen. “Which one has a twelve on it?”
They looked blank.
“You’re the linesmen,” Sale said. She indicated the wall again. “There’s only one twelve out there. Pick him out.”
Tinatin and Abascal looked to Kari Wang for guidance. Mael simply studied the wall.
Ean Lambert was the only twelve Kari Wang knew of. “Which ship is Lambert on?” she asked.
Their faces cleared.
Tinatin pointed to the brightest flicker. “That one. The lonely ship,” and Abascal nodded.
Kari Wang wasn’t sure if he was agreeing it was Lambert or agreeing it was a lonely ship. “The Gruen?” she asked.
Sale nodded. “You can usually tell the ship Ean’s on. It’s always bright.”
“Loud,” Tinatin said.
“You know.” Mael put out a hand to touch the flicker. “He really has got twelve lines.”
Kari Wang cross-checked the results on her human equipment. The full electromagnetic spectrum, and the comms. Everything confirmed this was the Gruen. She linked the Gruen on her human view with the overlay of the wall screen, and added a note. “So where’s the one with eleven lines?” There were two elevens, and they were sitting in one of them. The other would be the Confluence.
Tinatin started to point to another bright flicker, hesitated, and waited for Mael and Abascal to nod before she put her hand close. “That one.”
“So the more lines they have, the stronger the display,” Kari Wang said.
“No,” Sale said. “It’s all to do with the crew and seemingly nothing to do with the power of the ship once you get below eleven.” She pointed to one of the duller lights on the board. “That’s the Excelsior.”
The Excelsior was a massive Alliance fleet carrier, bigger than the Kari Wang had been. It was the first ship Kari Wang had come up against on becoming captain. She’d made some mistakes, been lucky to come out of it with her ship intact. Did that mean the Excelsior was a poorly run ship? That it was poorly maintained? Or that crew morale was low?
She pinged that one on the human equipment and confirmed it was indeed the Excelsior. She marked that on her overlay.
Sale tapped a bright flicker. “That’s the Wendell”—which was a quarter the size and power of the Excelsior, but one of the brightest lights on the board—“and it’s been stripped.”
Poor Piers Wendell, who’d had a brilliant career in front of him until he’d landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kari Wang hoped the Eleven shone as brightly as his ship did.
They worked through the ships one by one. The three linesmen couldn’t tell her the names of most of the ships, but they could identify them with their own unique song. Kari Wang recorded each song and duly linked and added the records. At least all three had the same song for each ship.
She hoped she could learn the songs enough so that in an emergency, if one of her crew sang the name of the ship to her, she wouldn’t waste precious seconds trying to convert it to something she could relate to.
They identified the Eleven fleet ships first, then started identifying ships in a radial pattern out from the central flicker that was the ship they were on, moving out in a spiral to collect them all, no matter how far away they were.
Ship by ship. Progress was slow but thorough. The linesmen sang the ship name. Kari Wang recorded it. They identified the ship if they could. Most times they couldn’t although Jem Abascal identified a Balian combat ship he had worked on—the Freedom—and Mael identified an Aratogan Patrol ship he had worked on—the Void Cutter. Kari Wang then checked with the human equipment to confirm the identity of the ship and linked the two. There was a logic to the links, provided you didn’t take depth into account on the overlay.
They’d identified some twenty ships when a new flicker appeared on the wall screen between the Excelsior and the Wendell.
Tinatin clucked with exasperation. “We’ll never finish if ships keep jumping in like this.”
Mael agreed. “It’s probably a million kilometers away.”
It had better be a million kilometers away, because Kari Wang didn’t like the thought of ships jumping any closer to a fleet, even if it was a stationary fleet. She checked against the human-made equipment to see how far out it was. It wasn’t in range.
She fought down sudden panic. She had to see the ship, to identify it. It was irrational, she knew. The ship was simply out of range, but she needed to see it on her screen.
“How far out does the Eleven recognize lines?” she asked Sale.
Sale shrugged. “Who knows?” She must have seen something in Kari Wang’s face. “I don’t know what limits the ships have, but the linesmen themselves have limits. That’s two hundred kilometers.”
“There’s another one,” Tinatin said. “They should at least wait until we have them all cataloged.”
Sure enough, a second ship was flickering on the wall, moving away from the first one, as if they’d both arrived out of the void close to each other—enough to give one the shivers—and were now moving apart.
Kari Wang checked her own screen. Nothing. She opened her comms to the Lancastrian Princess. “Captain Helmo.” He could do this faster than she could. “We’re registering two ships just arrived in this sector, but here on the Eleven we can’t work out where they are.” She showed him the screen overlay with the two ships. “Can you find out who has arrived, please?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you.” She clicked off, and tried to still her fast-beating heart. She’d have to get over panicking every time a ship appeared that she couldn’t identify. But for the moment, the way to calm herself would be to identify the ships.
Fitch moved close, looking at something registering on his comms. “Your readings have gone off the scale,” he murmured quietly. “Do you want me to stop the exercise?”
She shook her head. “Mael, Abascal, Tinatin. I want you to talk to those ships. I want to know everything about them. What you hear, what you see, what you smell. All of you,” as they looked at her as if wondering if she was sane. “Go on, start singing.”
Tinatin started first. A thin, wavering thread of sound, one eye uncertainly on Kari Wang.
“What’s the ship’s name?” Kari Wang asked.
Tinatin sang a series of notes. A short series, shorter than the other ships. After a moment Mael picked up the tune, too, then Abascal.
“That’s one,” Tinatin said. She turned her attention on the other ship. “And the other one is,” another series of short notes. “And the other one is,” a third series of short notes. “And,” a fourth.
Four ships.
“Are you sure?”
Tinatin nodded. “They’re together.”
“What, together like the Eleven fleet?” Sale demanded.
The three linesmen looked at each other.
“No,” Mael said, after an interminably long pause, which probably wasn’t a pause at all.
Helmo called back. “No ships arrived in the sector in the last hour. Ten ships left.”
That was normal. The gate controllers dispatched ships in groups.
“Thank you,” Kari Wang said. The pound of blood in her head was the only thing she could hear. Time seemed to slow, like it did in battle.
“So how do you know they are together?” Sale persisted.
“They are,” Tinatin said.
Kari Wang opened channels to the Lancastrian Princess, the Wendell, and the Gruen. “We have four unidentified ships showing up on the Eleven’s boards. They’re not showing up on the human boards.”
“Four?” Wendell asked. “What formation?” and she knew he’d picked up the significance.
“We can only see two of them at the moment.”
“Three now,” Mael said. One of them had moved out from behind the others.
“I want to hear them talking,” Sale said to Tinatin.
Tinatin looked blank.
“Positions?” Helmo asked.
Kari Wang sent through the overlay. “No positions yet, just visual on the Eleven.” Was it a visual? “Aural, rather. Line detected,” and felt a surge of satisfaction as she said it. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t hide from a line ship.
“Whoa,” Mael said, nearly losing his feet as the ship echoed her response. Tinatin and Abascal clung to the wall.
“Talking,” Sale reminded Tinatin, then snapped her comms open. “Ean.”
The override tone cut her off. Bhaksir, through the comms. “Suspected attack on the Gruen. Preparing to repel intruders.”
“Shit.” Sale looked at the comms as if she wanted to throw it at someone, then looked at the three linesmen in front of her. “You,” to Abascal. “Line five.”
“Seven.”
“I don’t care if you’re line thirteen. Five is the line I want right now. Tell those ships I want to hear them.”
Abascal looked as uncomprehending as Tinatin had earlier, but contemptuous, too. “You have no idea how lines work.”
“I know they can do this. They’ve done it before. Tell the Eleven you want to hear those comms. Out loud.”
“You can’t—”
“Just do it, Abascal,” Kari Wang said, as her fingers flew over the board, bringing up the visuals on the cameras outside the hull. She knew she wouldn’t see anything. They didn’t know where the ships were, and the Kari Wang cameras hadn’t seen anything either. The only way to see a cloaked ship was by comparison against the stars in the background. Unfortunately, you needed someone in a suit in space for that. Not to mention close enough to the ships that they obscured the stars behind them. “Tell the lines you want the communication pushed out on your comms. All of you do it.” If anyone was going to make them understand, it would be Tinatin. “You, too,” to Sale.
Right now she could have done with one of those linesmen Lambert had been training for months. Or better yet, Lambert himself.
She joined in the request, speaking the words because she didn’t know the song. “Ship, channel the ship conversation through the comms.” She couldn’t identify which ships she meant. She hoped the Eleven understood Abascal.
Suddenly, around the bridge a voice poured out in clear, multichannel stereo. It was answered by another.
The second voice was deeper than the first, and Kari Wang didn’t understand a word of it, but there was no mistaking the uptrill at the end of each sentence.
Redmond.
FORTY-THREE
EAN LAMBERT
THROUGH THE LINES, Ean could hear and see Bhaksir reporting their situation to Abram. He couldn’t see what Abram did, for Abram was on Haladea III, but he heard the alert go through the Eleven fleet ships. Except it went through before Abram would have had time, and it was Helmo who sent the alert.
