The Mutineer's Daughter Page 2

  He worked quickly, opening the hub and replacing the existing trunk interface with a new network interface card. He clipped in an armored fiber cable, anchored it down, and began unspooling it from the reel he had brought. Stepping gingerly, he crossed the hull gash to the other side and another working hub. These components had never been directly connected before, but Benno couldn’t care less about the system’s original design. If they could jury-rig enough connections, the system would re-route itself. Satisfied, he went on to the next task on the list.

  Benno passed other techs, repair drones, and damage control teams, laboring as expeditiously as he was, making temporary repairs to primary power, cooling lines, and air supplies. He could also see a couple of his techs, stringing their own data cables or replacing components battered beyond repair. They were not warriors. Others—especially the aristocrats who made up the officer ranks and the upper classes who filled the more operational war-fighting positions—would scoff at such a label. They would be equally incredulous. However, the fight could not be accomplished without them and without their courage to be out here while battle and destruction loomed. Benno felt fine with his role and that of his men and women. They served honorably. And most importantly, Mio was proud of him.

  That was all that mattered.

  In the middle of the gash, en route to his next task, thrust gravity cut out. Before his gorge had a chance to rise at the sudden freefall, the accelerometers in his suit detected the shift and switched on magnets in his boots, knees, elbows, and palms. Benno reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest exposed structural girder, anchoring himself with the magnets.

  Usually, the massive dark matter conversion engines astern turned the long bulk of the Puller into a tower, improbably balanced upon spindles of fire, thrusting upward at a continuous Earth-normal gravity of acceleration. Cutting out meant changing vectors. Changing vectors in battle indicated violent maneuvers. Benno gripped and prayed.

  The sideways acceleration hit him like a club as enormous retros wheeled the warship through a complicated arc. The star field overhead spun by as the direction of “down” changed erratically. Debris that had fallen when they were under normal thrust rose and peppered the broken pieces of the gash, some falling into the infinite oblivion beyond. Benno’s body swung out and slammed into a shattered equipment mount. Fortunately, nothing punctured his suit and sent him to join Kenny in death. He didn’t have faith that would hold true for everyone out here in the cut.

  The typical “down” returned, but this time at multiple G’s, and still the vessel jerked around. Radio noise repeatedly and randomly snapped in Benno’s headset. He couldn’t see the source, and he was usually shielded within the skin of the ship when they went off, but he surmised it was the noise of pulse power supplies discharging as laser mounts fired, burning away incoming warheads as they closed upon the Puller.

  Benno tried to pull himself forward, to find a more secure position past the open wound in the hull, but the G’s were too punishing. Even lying down, his vision began to black out.

  An abrupt scream sounded in his helmet. In the corner of his tortured vision, a figure flashed by, drifting free from one side of the cut and zooming out into empty space as the maneuvers continued. The scream was on Benno’s working channel. That meant it was one of his techs. Guiltily, he hoped it was Ortiz, but there was no way he could be that lucky.

  Just as abruptly, the scream cut off—far sooner than it should have from the ship merely leaving the tech behind. They might well have heard the unfortunate tech for hours until the Puller thrust beyond his suit’s radio range. But now there was only silence, broken by the continuing snaps of radio noise. Benno supposed the ship had carried on past the technician—exposing him to the hot particle thrust of the main engines.

  Poor bastard.

  The hull thrummed an extended vibration. Point-defense cannons, but Benno could see no evidence of what they were shooting at through the narrow, unenhanced perspective of the cut above him. It was not good, though. The incoming fire continued to close, fended off with railguns, maneuvers, lasers, PD, and undoubtedly electronic jamming, but none of it was aimed or coordinated centrally. The Terran weapons closed, and the Puller hardly stood a chance of destroying them until Benno and his compatriots finished their work—and they couldn’t finish until this round of defense ended!

  Everything cut off. The vibrations, the radio noise, and the wild maneuvers and heavy thrust. Benno rose up again in the sudden microgravity, and he shifted his grip, anticipating the next round of punishing motion. Instead, the ship slewed over gently to a new heading and slowly brought thrust back up to a standard one gravity forward.

  The Executive Officer’s strong, confident voice sounded over every channel, but without her usual ebullient surety. “Puller crew, we are in the toughest situation we’ve ever faced. The battle between our capital ships and those of the Terran Union in the central orbits has gone to hell, with no semblance of formation or structure anymore. As a result, we’re getting a lot more fire coming our way. We’ve already been wounded once, and we just shot down four more xaser heads. Another two we missed completely but were able to distract off target with EW. Others in our group fared worse, and this is just the beginning. I know you’re all working as hard as you can to restore target direction, power, and cooling, but I need you to work faster. I’ve spoken with the CO, the TAO, and the OOD. We’ll maintain a stable one-G deck as long as possible, but time is running out. If we get more than we’ve already fended off thus far, there’s no way we’ll be able to survive without coordinated fire. It’s all on you now. No pressure.”

  Commander Amanda Ashton sounded weary and worried, and that did not inspire much hope in Benno. Where LCDR Johnson represented perhaps the worst aspects of the Alliance of Liberated Systems’ classist structure, CDR Ashton represented its best, viewing her aristocracy as a blessing to enable her to give back more to all. Benno wouldn’t bother pissing on Johnson if he caught fire, but for Ashton, Benjamin Sanchez would do almost anything.

  Benno struggled to his feet and keyed the working channel. “Network repair team, sound off!”

  Their voices came hesitantly, in no particular order. “Salazar, here.” “Aquino, present.” “Goldman, here… Umm, Warrant Sanchez?”

  Benno keyed his mic and answered her. “Yes, Goldman?”

  “I saw Webb fall, sir. It was him. He was that scream you heard. You think there’s any chance he… “

  “No,” Benno said with finality. “I’m sorry, but no. Webb is gone. Break. Ortiz? Ortiz, sound off!”

  There was no answer.

  Goldman spoke the query they all must have had. “You think maybe he fell off, too?”

  I’d never be that fortunate, Benno thought, uncharitably. Ortiz either had bad comms, was quietly dead…or the faithless bastard was up to something for himself. Regardless, the work had to be done, or they’d all be dead soon. Benno checked the active system diagram on his forearm. They had closed several critical loops and signals were starting to flow again in the combat direction network, but latency and bandwidth were still pitiful. The gunners did not need to shoot at where the incoming warheads had been, they needed to shoot where they were at that moment, or—better yet—extrapolate with sufficient fidelity where they would be.

  Benno re-assigned a number of Webb and Ortiz’s tasks to Goldman, Salazar, and Aquino, but he took the lion’s share for himself. These kids had him beat in speed, but his experience had been twice all of theirs combined before he had left the technical enlisted side and earned his warrant. He knew tricks for accomplishing temporary battle repairs they had never even imagined.

  The labors became a blur. Find a working node, strip the damage, wire in a replacement module, connector, or transceiver, and string fiber to the next station. And all the while, the Puller jinked and juked, piled on acceleration, went back into freefall, and backed at flank thrust, dodging the relatively tiny warheads and their invisible lanc
es of ship-killing energy. The hull shuddered and vibrated with defensive fire hard enough to shake apart their repairs, but they and the damage control teams gained ground nonetheless. The work was quick and dirty, but as they toiled, the running diagnostic diagram on his forearm grew greener and greener.

  Finally, the voice of the TAO cut in over every circuit, “All mounts, we show the combat direction network back online. Take your mounts out of local and shift to coordinated remote fire from CIC.”

  LCDR Johnson said nothing to him directly. No gesture of thanks, no acknowledgment that Benno had been right, or that he and his plebeian techs had just saved the ship. Benno felt a distinct lack of surprise at that.

  It would have been imperceptible to most, but Benno’s long experience in destroyer hulls allowed him to feel the change in maneuvering and fire. Instead of popping off randomly, the electronic noise and physical vibration of the various point-defense mounts firing transitioned to a harmonic dance of destruction, firing zones bleeding seamlessly into one another instead of overlapping desperately. The fire became surer, and the maneuvers lessened more and more until the Puller seemed not to be fighting anymore. It grew as calm and sure as a drill, far away from the Terran Union.

  Time to find Ortiz.

  Benno called Goldman, Salazar, and Aquino. He thanked them and dismissed them back to their usual stations. With the destroyer’s combat systems network back online, the system was able to support secondary non-defense functions, such as the bio-monitoring network the stretcher-bearer teams could use to locate and remotely triage injured crew. Ortiz was not listed among the auto-populated list of wounded, deceased, or missing crew. Using his supervisor access, Benno delved deeper and pulled up Ortiz’s name from the list of uninjured crew.

  An icon appeared on his forearm display, “R. ORTIZ,” stationary and located amidships, near the dropship hangar, far from the battle damage where he should have been working. Ortiz’s vitals did not seem to indicate either unconsciousness or injury. If anything, to Benno’s untrained eye, they appeared panicked. He zeroed in on the section Ortiz’s icon populated, and his initial guess was confirmed.

  Ortiz was in one of the Puller’s emergency life pods.

  Benno shook his head and opened a direct line to Ortiz. No answer. Steeling his resolve, he made his way aft and down, carefully negotiating his way through the cut’s debris, still a hazard even if the ship was no longer making such extreme and violent maneuvers. He found a working compartment door and again went through the process of evacuating the air from the passage beyond and using it as an emergency airlock. Two minutes later, and he was, at last, walking around in air again. Benno left the damaged section behind and continued down the thrusting tower of the Puller’s bulk to the aft portion of the forward battle hull, where all the penetrations for hangars, work pods, and lifepods lay.

  The crew of the destroyer went about the business of battle around him, but with his workstation gone, Benno had no place. Regardless, everyone else was too busy to question him or ask where he was going. He arrived at the ring of lifepod hatches without further delay and found Ortiz in seconds.

  The armored hatch separating the destroyer from Lifepod 11 appeared to be sealed and locked, but Benno’s practiced, former-Chief Petty Officer’s eye for detail noted the broken tamper seal across one edge of the hatch. He looked through the small porthole into the pod beyond and found a desperate, frantic Raoul Ortiz trying like mad to escape the trap in which he had caught himself. Benno brought up the status display on one side of the hatch and saw that Lifepod 11 was rife with condition alarms.

  He scrolled through and brought up an intercom window on the panel. Benno pressed the ‘talk’ icon, and his suit comm connected to the pod. “Hey, Raoul, you do know lifepods can’t function unless the bridge or the damage control system issues an ‘Abandon Ship’ alert, right?”

  Ortiz first blanched, then his face turned red. Whether it was out of anger or shame, Benno could not tell. Benno pointed to the intercom on the pod’s operating panel, but Ortiz made no move toward it. He did see that the panel had been tampered with, however. Ortiz had wired his maintenance tablet into the mess of connections from a removed access plate.

  He hit the icon again. “Or maybe you did know that, and you tried to spoof the system with a fake alarm. ‘Cept maybe you didn’t know you’re not the first asshole in history to try this, so that whole interchange is encrypted. If you don’t have the passcode or the right keying material, you’re just gonna make the whole thing fault and shut down hard.”

  Ortiz glared at him and finally reached for the intercom. “Lemme out of here, Benno. Cut me a break.”

  Benno jabbed the intercom icon harder than necessary. “That’s Chief Warrant Officer Sanchez, you cowardly, traitorous son-of-a-bitch. I’m not gonna give you a break! We needed you out there! You abandoned us to try and save your own sorry ass, and you couldn’t even do that right. No, you’re gonna stay right there until we get blown up, you starve, or the ship’s Masters at Arms show up to arrest you.”

  Ortiz’s face snarled and turned red with pure, apparent rage. “You’re really gonna turn me in to those fuckin’ aristos? Let them shoot me or hang me? All because I didn’t wanna die for a bunch of arrogant assholes who don’t give a shit about us ‘plebeians’?”

  Benno said nothing, but he felt his face get hot.

  Ortiz yelled, “They say we gotta hate these Terran Union ‘Turds’—that the Alliance of ‘Liberated’ Systems stands for freedom against the oppression of the old worlds. But you know what I see? We just fightin’ one group of oppressive elitists for another group! I thought I could at least count on someone with my same history to have my back. But no. I don’t got two enemies—the TU and the ALS—I’ve got three, with your Uncle Tom ass! You’re gonna side with the very people who hate and dismiss us? I’m not the traitor; you’re the traitor!”

  Benno shook with equal parts of anger and shame. A litany of denial and refutations went through his thoughts, but he couldn’t seem to say anything.

  Ortiz continued, emboldened, jeering now. “You think you’re better than me? Better than the people of our station? You think those officer aristos respect you just because they let you have a warrant, just because you eat in the wardroom instead of the mess? You’re a fuckin’ joke, their token pleb. You think any of the rest of the crew respects you? They all think the same as me, Benno! They figure you’re a traitor. Everyone at home figures the same thing. But you do this, and they’ll know it for sure! You’re no longer one of us. Your family will know. Your own daughter will spit on you in disgust!”

  Benno stabbed the talk icon. “Mio loves me! She has faith in me! She knows I do everything for her, to pay off the farm and forge us both a free life, to fulfill the dream of the ALS—a dream that includes all of us plebs. Are there some problems? Are there some asshole aristos, some people who really do think they’re better? Yeah, of course, and guess what? There’s always gonna be those people and those problems. But I don’t teach my daughter to pull back from a challenge, to turn tail and run like you’ve done. I’ve earned our land. I’m paying our debt. And my daughter will live free and proud for it!”

  Before Ortiz could respond, the announcing circuit around them cut in. “All hands, secure from General Quarters. Stand down from Battle Stations. Assemble damage repair teams in Engineering Control. Now rotate the regular underway watch. On deck: Section 3 of 4.”

  When Benno looked down, the color had drained from Ortiz’s skin. They both knew the time for their discussion to remain private was up. Benno smiled at him and said, “Looks like we’re not gonna blow up after all. Battle’s over. The MAAs will be along any minute.”

  Ortiz’s eyes pleaded with him, his face blanched. “Please, Warrant Officer Sanchez. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ran away. I’m sorry I yelled and insulted you. I shouldn’t have. Please, let me out and handle this below decks. Do whatever you have to, but don’t turn me over to those bastards!”


  Benno leaned closer to the porthole, his faceplate touching the glass. “Goldman, Aquino, and Salazar stood their ground. I stood my ground. David Webb stood his and paid the price…and Ken Burnside did too. They made their choices. You made yours. Live with it for as long as they let you.”

  Ortiz turned crimson again and screamed, but Benno killed the intercom window and cut him off mid-cry. Benno stepped back and walked away, headed for the brig to grab the Duty Master at Arms.

  And the whole way back, his thoughts turned away from the events of the day, to his young daughter, Mio, light-years away on Adelaide, hopefully as proud of him as he was of her.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Two: Mio

  “It’s not fair!” Mio Sanchez wailed. At fourteen years old, Mio exhibited characteristics from both sides of her mixed heritage. Just over five feet tall, she was average height for a Japanese girl—like her mother—but she also had the fiery Hispanic temper from her father’s side of the family.

  “Mio, enough with the theatrics,” Mrs. Rogers said. “You know very well that when your mother died we promised to keep you safe until your father returned from space. The only way we can do that is if you stay here.”

  “But mom didn’t know dad would be gone this long. He’s been gone four years! If I go to space, I may be able to find him.”

  “Mio, you know as well as I do why your father hasn’t been back for four years,” Mr. Rogers replied. “He’ll be back when he can. Besides, space is a big place. I’ve been there; I know. Unless you somehow end up on the same ship as he, you’re never going to find him. You’re far more likely to find your father if you stay here where it’s safe and wait for his return.”

  “Jimmy’s going to space. You’re letting him go.”

  “That’s different,” Mr. Rogers replied. “Jimmy’s 16. He’s an adult. You’re not.”

  “But it’s not fair,” she screamed. “My father is out there somewhere. Why can’t I go?” She stomped her foot to let him know she was serious. It had always worked in the past.