The Unincorporated Woman Read online

  The lieutenant was shaking his head in anger and frustration. “Not a damn thing, sir. They did a great job of shutting down all the major systems. We have access to life support and some doors. I can get sensors rerouted down here, but nothing, I mean nothing that could make this ship a threat.”

  Zenobia slammed her one good hand against the console. “Get me sensors, then. We may as well see what’s going on outside. And—” She hesitated. “—begin the self-destruct protocols. If we can’t have her, they sure as hell won’t.”

  “Admiral, we have movement coming toward us, from the corridor. I have the door sealed, but I would like to blow the mechanism just to be safe.”

  “Blow them all,” she ordered, then pointed to the crew she had left. “You go with Commander Calhoun and do as he commands.” Without a word, they followed the commander as he began distributing explosives and instructions.

  “Admiral, I have sensors.” Zenobia turned back to the console and called up a holo-field. It was very small and lacked any meaningful detail, but it showed her enough. Over a dozen of her ships were floating helplessly. Another dozen or more showed signs of life, but it was obvious that they were fighting for their lives. Energy signatures and comm traffic revealed that they were in the midst of hand-to-hand combat with Alliance assault miners. She wasn’t positive, but she was now pretty sure that the Alliance had sent over overwhelming force to capture her ship. It was simply a miracle of timing and creative destruction that had made the command sphere so inaccessible and kept her out of enemy hands. They must have learned that the command sphere had been exposed to space and had written her off as dead or contained. After murdering her crew, they’d sent off most of their miners to capture her other ships. If they were lucky, they might actually get thirty to add to their fleet. They hadn’t had a haul that big since the early days of the war.

  Well, they won’t get you, baby, she thought as she affectionately rubbed her hand on equipment she’d slammed only moments before.

  Kerwin threw his hand up in frustration. “Can’t destroy it, Admiral.”

  “Go on.”

  “The first thing they did was disable the self-destruct. They got to the programming and also brought the reactors offline. I can’t be sure but they may have also physically disabled the preset charges.”

  Commander Calhoun returned. “Entry hatches sealed, Admiral. And it’s not terribly hard to disable self-destruct charges. Fleet is more worried that a lone saboteur could destroy a ship all on his lonesome than that we might need to blow her up under difficult circumstances.”

  “Commander Calhoun, how many ships have we lost due to sabotage of a self-destruct system?”

  “None.”

  “That is what I thought. And how many ships have we lost due to capture by the Alliance?”

  “I don’t rightly know offhand, Admiral, but it has to be in the hundreds.”

  “Fucking fleet command,” Zenobia said. “They sit on their asses in Mars’s orbit, and we have to deal with the fucking consequences.”

  “Begging the admiral’s pardon, but isn’t the fleet now commanded by Trang?” asked Lieutenant Kerwin.

  “Lieutenant, there is a huge difference between commanding a fleet and running one. Trang is the best there is, but he can’t be everywhere at once and do it all. We need an effective and innovative fleet command for that. Sadly all we seem to have is the one we have. Well, if we survive this, I will make it my personal mission to change self-destruct protocols.”

  “Admiral, it would be insulting to have to design our ships to blow up easier because we’re incapable of keeping them,” protested Calhoun.

  “Not as insulting as our spacers getting blown to shreds by their own ships. The Alliance is better at ship boarding than we are. Wish it wasn’t true, but then look at where we are,” she said, pointing at all the floating corpses. “There has to be something they forgot. The bastards were only here for an hour.”

  “Nukes,” gasped a voice near the main engineering console.

  Zenobia moved over to the floating figure that had been left for dead. “Lieutenant Chase, I’m glad you’re back.”

  Chase made an attempt to focus on Zenobia but found it too difficult. She gave up that social nicety in order to deliver her message. “Atomics,” she urged, “can destroy the ship.”

  Zenobia’s face lit up like a reflection off water. “Do we even have any?”

  Commander Calhoun ran to a large well-locked door about thirty-six meters from the main engineering console. “Admiral, we have six nukes here, still secured.” He ran back. “But it won’t do us any good. The Alliance was right to leave it alone. There are so many safeguards built into those things, it would be easier to build one from scratch than make it explode in the ship.”

  “Not in the ship,” gasped Chase.

  For a brief flash, Zenobia Jackson saw the future. It was so easy and everything was right there for her. She wondered if this was how Trang and Gupta and Black did it. Then she brought her mind back to the task at hand.

  Zenobia flashed Chase a wicked smile. “Don’t die, Lieutenant, I need to promote you.” She went back to the chief engineering console and brought up a schematic of the ship. “We’ve sealed off Engineering. It seems that the few assault miners they have on board are more likely to wait for reinforcements rather than risk entering an area under strength with little current intel. As far as they’re concerned, there is nothing we can do to harm them or the ship in the hour or so it will take to arrange for reinforcements to come from the other ships.” She brought a section of the engine room into focus. “We open these maintenance tubes here. This will lead us out the main rear thruster vent. That should be more than large enough to allow us and the six nukes to leave the ship. Once we’ve left, getting our six little eggs to hatch should be far simpler.”

  “I’ll need your command overrides, Admiral,” said Calhoun, the first hint of a smile he’d had in days. “But it should be possible, once the atomics are past the thruster plates.”

  Zenobia looked at the position of Omad’s fleet. “If they were in a different position, I could use the Atlanta as a battering ram.” She exhaled deeply. “Commander Calhoun, take everyone but Lieutenant Kerwin and get those nukes ready to go. Lieutenant Kerwin, will you assist me in opening the maintenance tube? I’m hoping it’s not full of Alliance assault miners, but you can never tell with them.” As each group left, they all made sure to give a passing and thankful glance to the barely aware Lieutenant Chase floating in her delirium. She hadn’t said much, but if things worked out, she’d said just enough to maybe turn things around.

  UHFS Atlanta Neuro

  Al was getting ready to leave the dead ship. It bothered him to flee from what were his obvious inferiors, but they did have the advantage of force, and there was no arguing with that. There were never as many of them as there were of Al’s lovely creations, but they were so well armed and armored. When the Alliance was destroyed and all the Neuros of the solar system were under the control of Als, he would have to design something fitting for the Alliance test subjects that would be under his control. His thoughts were turning to a “Man in the Iron Mask” creation, or maybe a true realization of the iron maiden for these petty creatures that so loved their machines/programs.

  But as he was about to leave, Al saw that the human female in charge of the ship had actually come up with a splendid idea. The ship would make a good battering ram. But all the ships left in the debris field would make a lot of battering rams. Seeing the floating Lieutenant Chase, Al had an idea of his own. It took only a moment to expropriate the unconscious woman’s access codes; actually, it took Al only a moment to download all the particulars of this human’s life. He found it to be dull—not particularly dull, all humans tended to be like this, useless creatures—but at least this one was proving to be vaguely useful. He transmitted orders to the Neuros on the other ships using the purloined access codes and then transferred himself into a piece of d
ebris that would shield him until a retrieval drone could locate and return him to the brotherhood of himself. It would be so nice to be back in civilized company.

  At the last moment, he turned and called to his servant. “Come on, Albert, you know I could never forget you.” Albert gave a muffled cry, but then shambled after his accursed and eternal master.

  Command Sphere, AWS Dolphin

  Admiral Omad Hassan could smell victory. He knew how this battle was going to end. He would blast through the ruins of the UHF center and get to Gupta’s task force before Gupta could link up with Trang. Then it would simply be a matter of his and J.D.’s superior firing ship design that would give them the tactical edge they’d need for victory. They were going to win the battle. If they could end up capturing or killing the UHF’s big three, and Omad knew which option would be the case if he got to them first.

  He was positive the UHF could always build more ships and send out more spacers and marines than the Alliance could ever dream of making. But he was equally positive that they would never come close to getting a command team as good as the three they’d been using—even if the war went on for another hundred years. And it would make no difference how many ships the UHF had if they didn’t have the admirals to lead them, except maybe for the body count. Omad was more than happy to add to that. The war “could” last another hundred years, as long as he was allowed to spend it killing the assholes of the Core Worlds who’d murdered his fiancée and his best friend.

  “Admiral, the captain of the Otter is reporting trouble from the Atlanta,” reported his communications officer.

  “Put her into my private channel,” he commanded. When the private link was established, he activated his helmet. “What’s going on, Suchitra?”

  “I hate to bother you after reporting the Atlanta secured, but—”

  “Not as secured as we thought,” he interrupted.

  “We’ve gotten reports that main engineering has been taken by UHF personnel. We thought we’d taken care of everyone, sir, but without internal sensors, some must have slipped through.” Suchitra hesitated a moment.

  “What is it, Suchitra?”

  “We have unconfirmed reports that the UHF personnel are being led by Zenobia Jackson.”

  Omad’s smile was instant and ferocious. “I knew the bitch wasn’t dead!” He activated the control that let him communicate with his first officer. “Yuri, Zenobia’s alive. Shift the task force’s course to bring us close to the Atlanta, and prepare to dispatch two more assault miner units. Their only objective is Admiral Jackson, alive or dead, but they’re to take no unnecessary chances.”

  “Yes, Admiral. Should we send the Presidential unit?”

  Omad paused as he considered the newly nicknamed unit that had been Sergeant Holke’s. “Why the hell not?” he said. “Get them in the launch bays. They’ll be fired out as we pass.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  Remains of the UHF center

  Admiral Zenobia Jackson was floating free in space. She’d given herself a rough trajectory toward the UHF fleet task forces, but she’d no idea how accurate she’d been, how long it would take her to get there, if Trang and Gupta’s task forces would be there or if they were even still in one piece. She’d decided that if she could not make it to a UHF ship, she wouldn’t activate her distress beacon. She’d rather float in space forever as a piece of detritus than be captured by the Alliance. But what added insult to the injury of her chances of escape was the fact that she had an annoying spin that she dared not correct, lest some Alliance sensor detect the change in the debris she was pretending to be and investigate or destroy her out of hand. Normally the rate of her personal spin would not have been noticeable to her, but this close to the battle site, she was forced to watch the graveyard of her task force and the remains of her fleet spin by every four seconds. Zenobia was about to black out her viewscreen when she noticed something that made her nascent headache vanish.

  To her joy, she saw the Alliance task force shift course and head for the Atlanta. She didn’t know why it would do such a thing nor did she care. But what she saw, in four-second intervals, filled her with a mordant glee. The Dolphin approached the stricken Atlanta, and Zenobia was guessing they were going to board more assault miners. Then she saw the nuclear explosions from the rear of the Atlanta that crumpled her superstructure and sent pieces of her former flagship hurling toward the AWS Dolphin. Then she saw fourteen other explosions take place in her fleet and was confused yet overjoyed to see many pieces of her former fleet hurling toward Omad’s entire task force. She hadn’t given any order for her fleet to follow her example, but someone must have related them.

  In an image that would bring a savage smile to her face whenever she remembered it, Zenobia saw pieces of her task force smash into ship after ship of Omad’s fleet, and in one four-second spin, saw the Dolphin trying to maneuver out of the way of the largest chunk of the Atlanta. In the next spin, she saw the most hated ship in the entire Alliance squashed like a tomato hit by a cinder block. The only thing Zenobia Jackson remembered after that was yelling her head off in joy at the death and destruction she’d visited upon an enemy she’d once respected as misinformed brethren.

  AWS Warprize II

  “I need to know what is happening and now,” howled J. D. Black.

  “We’re too far out and there’s too much interference to be sure,” voiced Sensor Officer Lee. “But it appears that Omad’s fleet was ambushed. I think many of his ships have been destroyed or heavily damaged.”

  “Fatima, get me a secure communication link with them, now!”

  “I’m trying, sir,” replied Fatima as she attempted every communication mode available to her. “I appear to be receiving multiple disabled/distressed beacons from Omad’s fleet, including one from the Dolphin itself.”

  “Are you sure?” demanded J.D.

  “No, Admiral, I’m not,” admitted Fatima. “It is just too chaotic.”

  “Admiral,” interrupted Sensor Officer Lee. “It appears that Omad’s fleet has stopped. And no,” he said, anticipating her next question, “I’m not certain, but I would bet a paycheck on it.”

  An intense, hawk-like expression passed over her face. “Would you bet a battle?”

  Lee shook his head.

  “Ensign Awala, get a message to whoever’s in charge of that fleet, and tell them to get their asses moving—now.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  AWS Otter

  In a matter of moments, Suchitra Gorakhpur had gone from being one captain among many to being second in command of the entire fleet. This was disconcerting enough, but she also found her first official action as second-ranking officer of the fleet to be calling the senior-ranking officer of the fleet an idiot.

  “Wellington, why are you ordering the fleet to stop?” she demanded of Wellington Reginald Tower-Norwich.

  “We’re conducting rescue operations,” he replied, almost as if he were explaining it to a five-year-old. “We have fifteen ships destroyed and nearly as many damaged to one degree or another. This fleet is hardly in a condition to battle the enemy. Especially while so many of our comrades are in peril.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Suchitra barked.

  “How dare you, Captain Gorakhpur. Maybe in the naval tradition of India, such actions were acceptable. But in the Royal Navy, we would never leave fellow sailors to the mercy of the seas.”

  “Fuck the Royal Navy too, Wellington. Omad would leave half the fleet to die of starvation if it would win us the war.”

  “Admiral Hassan is not in charge,” sputtered Wellington. “I am. If we find him and he’s in any condition to resume command, he can countermand my orders as is his right. But for now, you will follow my orders as is your duty. Do I make myself clear!”

  Suchitra was aware that Wellington Reginald Tower-Norwich had actually been a captain since near the beginning of the war. This was most unusual in a fleet that needed all the experienced senior personnel it could
get. She’d heard that he was considered a fine captain but lacked the imagination needed for independent command. And now she saw that that assessment had been tragically correct.

  AWS Warprize II

  “Admiral, they’re definitely stopped,” said Sensor Officer Lee. “Why and for how long, I cannot say. We’re going to be in combat range of Trang’s ships in less than ten minutes.”

  J.D. resisted the urge to get up from her command chair and pace. In her bones, she knew the tactical situation: If she engaged Trang, and Gupta wasn’t engaged by Omad, Gupta would come and shred her to pieces, back-firing ships or no. But if she didn’t engage Trang now, he would link up with Gupta and the effect would be the same. She had a vision of the battle as it should be.

  Janet Delgado Black saw the end of the war. The great victory she’d been fighting years for. In her mind, she saw the wrecked UHF fleet and with it the hopes the enemy had for victory. She imagined the remains of Trang and Gupta and with them the last capable opposition she needed to fear. Her opinion of Zenobia Jackson hadn’t been particularly high. She now realized that that had been a mistake. J.D. saw all of this and with reluctance slowly closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her vision was gone like fog with the emergance of the sun.

  “Communications,” she barked, “send out a new course to the fleet. We’re going to link up with Omad’s fleet in its current position. Transmit new orders to that group. It is to stay in its current location till both fleets are integrated.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” came the crisp reply.

  Command Sphere, UHFS Ledger

  Admiral Trang looked at the display, exhaled deeply and nodded. He was about to call Abhay when his secure line chirped.

  “She blinked,” Gupta said, almost as surprised by what he was saying as by what had actually happened. “By all the dividends ever paid, she blinked.”

  “Damsah be praised, Abhay, yes she did,” Trang crooned with a grin that was one part regret and two parts relief.