Rogue Battleship Read online

  ROGUE BATTLESHIP

  The Green Zone War – Book 5

  By Jake Elwood

  Copyright 2019 by Jake Elwood.

  This is a work of fiction. A novel. Totally made up. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, damaged battleships or local militias is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Author Notes

  Chapter 1

  “It should be just on the other side of this storm, Commodore.”

  Tom Thrush, sitting in the co-pilot's seat of the armed freighter Rime Frost, nodded to the young man in the seat beside him. Jason Stormcrow was the captain of the freighter, charged with delivering Tom and a dozen spacers to a crippled Dawn Alliance battleship – if they could find it.

  The rest of the fleet trailed behind them, eight small freighters and a battered supply ship. The supply ship carried no supplies; her hull was filled with troops.

  All around the little fleet, the energies of hyperspace seethed. A storm that could have engulfed Jupiter raged to starboard, a vast ball of yellow energy darkening to orange near the center. Other storms glowed in the distance.

  Directly ahead, a rapidly dissipating storm showed as nothing more than a red mist. The supply ship, sturdily built, could have sailed through it safely. At least, she could have before she was captured. The ship had taken some damage during its “liberation” from a Dawn Alliance supply convoy. It might be a bit fragile now.

  As for the armed freighters, they could handle a moderate amount of storm energy. A prudent captain would steer around the mess directly ahead.

  But a battleship lay on the other side of the wall of storm energy. Her engines were crippled, many of her guns were destroyed, and she'd taken a lot of damage, but a battleship – even a crippled one – was not an opponent to be approached lightly. Looping around this wall of storm energy would make them visible to the battleship from quite a distance.

  Tom gestured straight ahead. “We'll punch right through.”

  If the prospect worried Stormcrow he hid it well. He nodded, moving his hands across the console in front of him. Gentle acceleration pressed the seat against Tom's back. He held his breath in spite of himself as the wall of storm energy rushed toward the ship.

  The frustrating thing about space travel, of course, was the lack of anything to give a sense of scale. The freighter flew on and on, tendrils of storm energy becoming more distinct as the range closed. Tom exhaled, then rolled his shoulders, releasing tension. The wall was farther away than he'd realized. They probably had several more-

  The bridge windows turned red as the ship penetrated the storm. The screens on both consoles filled with static. Tom gripped the arms of his chair, then made himself relax. It wouldn't do for a commodore to look nervous in front of a seasoned captain.

  He glanced at Stormcrow, who had a death grip on both arms of his chair. The man's lips moved silently. He might have been praying.

  The red storm energy filling the windows abruptly vanished as the ship broke through. Tom's console beeped as it reset itself. He craned his neck, trying to look in every direction at once for the battleship.

  Storms of half a dozen colors glowed in the distance. Aside from that, they were alone. The battleship was gone.

  More beeps sounded from Tom's console. The ship's scanners were picking up contacts. He checked the display as, one by one, the other ships of the colony fleet emerged from the wall of the storm. He did a quick count. “Looks like everyone made it through.”

  “Well, how about that?” said a cheerful voice over the bridge speakers. “The good news is, they were kind enough to fix their own engines for us. That's one less thing we have to do.”

  Tom grinned in spite of himself and tapped his console, opening a channel to the Afternoon Thunderstorm. “This mission just keeps getting easier and easier.”

  “I don't see them,” said O'Reilly. Normally the captain of a corvette, today he was a passenger on the Afternoon Thunderstorm. “Let's see what the snooper has to say.” The bridge speakers beeped, and then O'Reilly said, “Alice, do you copy?”

  A third voice joined the conversation. Alice Rose, who usually commanded the Winter Morning, was also a passenger for this mission. “Querying the snooper now.”

  The snooper was Free Worlds technology. Tech created and perfected by colonist pirate fleets, in other words. Alice, as a former pirate, would know how to use it. Tom and O'Reilly were from the United Worlds Navy. They had only a general idea of how snoopers worked, or a hundred other pirate tools.

  “I've got a direction,” Alice said. “They're a good six hours ahead of us, but they're not moving very fast.”

  “I've got the heading,” Stormcrow said.

  “Let's go.”

  The battleship burned.

  Tom winced as he saw the damage. Flames glowed from a jagged hole on her port side. That meant air was escaping, had been escaping since the battle a day and a half before. How much air could the ship carry? She would be a pain to resupply.

  Six massive engines jutted from the stern of the ship. Only two engines glowed, one on the top left, one on the bottom right. Neither engine ran at anything close to full power.

  “Are they out of fuel?” Stormcrow looked at Tom. “No, that doesn't make sense. They'd be better off running at high speed, building up some velocity.”

  “The engines are linked,” Tom told him. He thought back to his time in Battleship School, during what now seemed like a different life. “They're not using the main fuel exchanger. It's right in the middle, and we destroyed it. They must be pumping fuel directly into the engines.” He shook his head, picturing it. “The engines are not designed to work that way.” The engines on a battleship were complex, far more powerful yet far more delicate in a way than the engines on a little freighter like the Rime Frost. “It's amazing they've got any thrust at all.”

  Stormcrow shrugged. “What now?”

  “They're trying to escape,” Tom said. “That's good. It means they're not smashing things, not spiking guns or blowing up ammunition. But we need to get aboard fast. Get control before they change tactics.”

  Stormcrow nodded, fingertips tapping and sliding on his console. The Rime Frost drifted sideways until she was dead aft of the battleship. It was the angle of attack that would make her hardest to see, hardest to hit.

  Tom checked his own display. The other crews had been thoroughly briefed. They were lining up behind the Rime Frost, almost close enough for collision danger.

  Tom reached for the communication controls, then made himself lower his hand. His captains were seasoned professionals. Most of them had been raiding United Worlds shipping since before Tom started shaving. They didn't need any more instructions from him.

  “Thank you, Captain,” he said to Stormcrow. “I'm going to go suit up.”

  When the outer hatch of the airlock slid open a rush of excitement washed over Tom. He'd made a number of jumps between ships, mostly in training, a few times during the war. It raised goosebumps every time, and he hoped the thrill would never go away.

  He wanted to take the lead, but the spacers around him pressed in close. Without ever quite seeming rude, they pushed him back with elbows and shoulders until he was against the inside hatch. It ma
de perfect sense, of course. He was the ranking officer on this mission, and the only one with battleship training. He had no business risking himself in the first wave. Still, he glared at the backs of the helmets of the commandos in front of him.

  Three beeps sounded in his ear, his stomach lurched as the artificial gravity cut out, and the first couple of spacers launched themselves out of the lock. For thirty seconds Tom could only float there, his heart thumping madly, as the others leaped into the void in ones and twos. A woman with black leopard spots painted over her bright gold vac suit pulled herself through the hatch, crouched for an instant with her feet against the hull, then kicked herself away. That left Tom alone in the airlock. He grabbed a handle, swung himself out, and suppressed the urge to whistle as he caught his first unimpeded glimpse of his target.

  At close range the battleship was enormous, like a city moving through space. It was huge, so vast the Rime Frost was an inconsequential toy beside it. How did we ever cripple this thing? And what made me think we could ever capture it? We need a thousand troops – two thousand! We don't have a chance.

  It was, of course, much too late to turn back. Tom took a deep breath, forced his fears into a corner of his mind, and kicked off.

  For a bad moment he couldn't see the rest of his team. Then a spacer passed between Tom and the glow from the battleship's starboard engine. The sharp black silhouette gave Tom something to focus on, and he oriented his body, pointing himself at that distant figure. His hands went to the thruster pods at his waist, old habits taking over. He adjusted his trajectory, nudging himself sideways with puffs of compressed air.

  The battleship grew as he raced toward it. Cold prickles danced across Tom's back and shoulders, but a tightness in his cheeks told him he was grinning. No matter how desperate the mission, it was impossible not to enjoy the sheer thrill of flinging himself through hard vacuum toward an enemy ship.

  One by one the rest of the team crossed the glowing backdrop of the starboard engine, then vanished against the blackness of deep space. Tom caught white smudges, though, as each commando fired a jet of air, making a course adjustment as they passed the tail of the ship.

  Now the engine loomed directly in front of him. His chest and face grew warm. He was almost certain the warmth was his imagination; he was not close enough to catch heat from the engine. Still, he had to blink perspiration out of his eyes.

  Then the engine was beneath him, the top hull of the battleship looming like a cliff. Tom twisted sideways, pointing his right hip away from the battleship, and gave a squirt of air from the thruster mounted there. He wanted to fly parallel to the hull. He held the thrust for a moment too long, though, and the armor-plated wall beside him tilted as his trajectory changed.

  “Damn it.” He cringed as soon as the muttered words were out of his mouth, knowing he'd broadcasted them to the rest of the squad. Oh, well, no one would notice him. He turned his body until his chest was toward the battleship and stretched out his arms, ready to catch himself on his palms. Closer and closer he came, until he could reach out and slap his palms against a hull plate. His body tilted, his toes bounced once from the hull, and then he was sailing along just out of arm's reach of the armor plates.

  “I found a hatch,” said a voice in his ear. A blue glow appeared ahead and to the right as one of the commandos set off a flare to mark his position.

  Tom was reaching for his belt thrusters when he realized he was drifting toward the hull. The battleship's artificial gravity was bleeding through and pulling him down. Closer and closer he drifted, scanning the hull for a handhold.

  A handle appeared, a loop of metal that he snagged with his left hand. There was a quick jerk as he lost the last of his momentum, and then he hung motionless beside the hull.

  From there it was easy. More handles sprouted from the hull, one every meter or so, leading directly toward the dazzling flare.

  By the time Tom reached his squad, a second flare glowed twenty or so meters forward and to port where another squad prepared to make a breach. He watched spacers converge on the flare, then turned his attention back to his own squad.

  A spacer in a vermillion vac suit stood beside the closed hatch of a wide airlock, holding a console the size of a thick dinner plate. A thin wire connected the console to a port on the hull. Other squad members stood around the perimeter of the airlock, pointing mismatched weapons toward the hatch. Tom got his boots against the hull plates and walked over to join them, drawing a blast pistol from a holster on his thigh.

  The rest of the squad from the Rime Frost joined them, followed soon after by spacers from the Trickling Brook. Other spacers streamed across the hull, heading toward one flare or the other.

  In all, a hundred and twenty people were about to board the battleship. Standing on the hull with the armored hull plates stretching away like an endless plain, Tom found himself doubting that such a small attack force could possibly be enough. A United Worlds battleship carried a standard crew of two hundred and ten, with an additional eighty marines in time of war. He shivered at the thought of this colonist militia going up against trained marines. The former pirates of the Free Planets were tough and versatile, but marines were highly trained killers who specialized in exactly this sort of combat.

  It's the Dawn Alliance, he reminded himself. They don't have a Marine Corps. They're demoralized and disorganized. Their ship’s been defeated. We've already won the psychological battle. They won't put up much resistance.

  It sounded good, and he almost believed it. Almost. The defenders had superior numbers, and they knew the terrain. This might get ugly.

  “Got it,” said a voice. The vermillion vac suit turned the spacer with the console into an anonymous silhouette, but the voice belonged to a man who sounded young and nervous. He unplugged the wire, slung the console across his back, and drew a laser pistol as the hatch to the airlock slid open.

  No hordes of enemy soldiers came pouring out. No grenades exploded. The inside of the airlock was an empty rectangular box with room for a dozen or more people.

  “Looks clear,” Tom said, and popped his left boot free. He started to advance.

  A moment before, he could have sworn he had plenty of room. Suddenly, though, there was a spacer on either side, elbows and shoulders blocking him without quite seeming to do it deliberately. Tom watched in frustration as a trio of spacers dropped into the lock.

  “Feels like about half a G,” said a woman's voice. One of the spacers in the lock, a slim figure in a pale blue suit, tapped a panel set in one bulkhead. “The controls are live. We’ll secure the other side.” She swiped with a fingertip and the outer hatch began to close.

  Tom said, “But-”

  No one paid the slightest attention as the outer hatch sealed. He waited in an agony of suspense.

  “Holy jumping-” It was the same woman, her voice high with alarm. She didn't speak again for ten endless seconds. Tom wanted to shout, to demand to know if she was okay, but the last thing anyone needed was him filling the channel with panicky noise. So he waited. All of them waited, a couple of dozen tense figures clustered around the airlock with more arriving every moment.

  “Oh, God.” Pain and fear thickened the woman's voice. “They were a little slow off the mark. There were four of them coming down the corridor when the hatch opened. They've got us pinned in the lock.”

  Which meant the lock couldn't cycle, and no reinforcements could reach them.

  “Wow. They don't like grenades much. Okay, we're in the corridor. Get down here fast. We don't have much cover.”

  Once again Tom tried to get into the lock. This time the spacers on either side were more blatant, turning to plant hands on his chest and shoulders. It was a man and a woman, both of them strong and solidly built. Tom glared at them, their helmets almost touching his own, as the lock filled with eager spacers and the outer hatch closed again. There was no point in ordering them to let him pass. The colonies had a long, rich history of independence an
d self-reliance. The colonists could follow orders, but they were fundamentally incapable of the sort of blind obedience you got in a traditional military.

  “Corridor’s secure,” said a man's voice over the suit radio. The spacers holding Tom back immediately relaxed. The woman raised her eyebrows and gave him an apologetic smile. The man gave him a hard look that said Tom should have known better.

  Knowing he was right only made it worse. Tom scowled at him, then squeezed between the two of them. When the hatch slid open in a rush of vapor he was the first one into the lock.

  The boarding party controlled a section of corridor forty paces long. At one end, they'd taken manual control of an emergency hatch. Thick doors designed to stop airflow in the event of a hull breach blocked most of the corridor. A pair of spacers stood at the shoulder-width gap, watching the corridor beyond.

  In the other direction, spacers clustered near an L-intersection, occasionally leaning around the corner to snap a quick shot. The walls were scorched and pitted by the detonation of a grenade, and a couple of bodies in Dawn Alliance vac suits lay twisted on the deck plates.

  Just outside the airlock, the woman in pale blue lay on her back with a couple of spacers kneeling over her. The faceplate on her helmet was up, and Tom could see her lips moving, though he couldn't hear her words. They had cut open the side of her suit from hip to armpit and peeled it back. The fabric of the suit was charred, and the bright yellow foam of trauma gel covered her wound.

  The corridor clearly had atmosphere, so Tom retracted his faceplate. The first thing he heard was the woman's voice. She was swearing, a steady stream of curses in a low voice. Then she sighed, and her voice trailed off. Tom looked down, horrified, sure she had just died.

  She grinned up at him, her expression blissful, and he grinned back as his shoulders sagged in relief. The pain medication was doing its work.

  He thought about evacuating her, which would be difficult now that her suit was pretty much destroyed. But the medical equipment on the armed freighters was nothing great, and New Panama was many hours away. The closest high-quality medical equipment was in the battleship's surgery. The best thing he could do for her was hurry up and capture the ship.