Jack Campbell - Perilous Shield

So when he asked how does everything look? these soldiers knew that he meant it as a question to be answered.

The more veteran of the two chewed his lip for a moment. “We’re being watched, Colonel, sir.”

The other soldier nodded.

“By who? How often?”

“Pretty often, Colonel. It’s a feeling. Someone is watching. Like on a battlefield, even when the armor sensors are saying there’s nothing there, you can still tell there’s a sight on you. They’re staying low, though. So many workers go by all the time, they can just meld in with them.”

The second soldier nodded again. “Especially when we’re doing turnover, Colonel, relieving the shift before us or being relieved. Whoever it is pays close attention at those times.”

“But you haven’t seen anyone in particular?”

“No, sir. Just the feeling. The others who’ve been standing guard have mentioned it, too, Colonel.”

Worrisome. Very worrisome. Veterans developed a feel for such things, sort of a new sense, or perhaps a very old sense brought to life again, one that had been mostly lost as humans developed tools.

No one person could be watching the soldiers that often. This was a group effort. Would someone try to get at Bradamont? The two sentries could stop one or two attackers, but what if there were many? What if an overwhelming number of workers came down this passageway, bent on revenge against the woman who represented the enemy and was within their reach?

Rogero studied the door. A freighter’s internal door. Just a flimsy, lightweight panel that provided some privacy but little else. Like most living compartments on the freighter, this one couldn’t even be locked.

She would be trapped in there.

But there were no better rooms, no more secure place on this ship, and he knew better than to suggest that she share his room. Bradamont would not agree under these conditions, and if, impossibly, she did agree, the blowback against him from everyone else on the freighter would be huge.

There must be something he could do. The vague sense of warning had grown stronger. If I do not think of some extra measures to protect Honore Bradamont, she might not make it to Atalia. I must think of something, and I must do so quickly.

Two hours until the freighter left jump. Two hours until they reached Atalia. One hour until “dawn” as measured by the freighter’s internal time. Colonel Rogero lay on his narrow bed in his very small quarters, staring up at the tangle of wiring and ducts that made up the overhead.

The sense that something was going to happen had been growing. Indefinable, perhaps only a new manifestation of the old jump-space nerves, but still it had kept him from sleeping much this night and brought him fully awake well before he needed to get up.

He sensed a trembling through the structure of the freighter before he could consciously feel it. The trembling grew with shocking suddenness, turning into an irregular beat of many feet in the passageway outside. Whoever they were, they were moving quickly and silently.

Rogero’s feet were hitting the deck when he heard the sentries outside Bradamont’s new quarters down this same passageway shout warnings and commands. He paused only for the barest fraction of a second, deciding between his sidearm or heavier armament and choosing the latter. He was reaching for the door when the shouts of the sentries were submerged in a roar of sound that erupted in the passageway as at least a hundred throats shouted hate.

As he opened the door, a crash sounded down the hall, the unmistakable sound of a grenade detonating nearby and only slightly muffled by having exploded inside some room off the passageway. Almost certainly, that room had been Bradamont’s quarters. A small portion of Rogero’s mind wondered where the mob had acquired a grenade, and resolved to find out. If one of his soldiers had lost or bartered away a grenade…

But that would be a priority for later.

Rogero came out of his stateroom, not wearing armor but his pulse rifle powering up. Every passageway on the freighter tended to have a lot of people in it, but right now this passageway was packed solid with the mob pushing toward Bradamont’s quarters.

One of the uglier things about iron discipline was that when it cracked, it didn’t simply cause minor disruptions. Any crack tended to be catastrophic. Which meant responses had to be immediate and overwhelming.

He would have had to react the same even if Bradamont had not been the target of this mob.

“Comply!” Rogero shouted over the tumult, then without waiting fired a shot into the worker immediately in front of him. The pulse rifle blew a hole completely through the worker and knocked down another in front of that man. “Comply!” Rogero yelled on the heels of the shot and fired again right after that.

This time three workers in the congested passageway dropped, Rogero pushing forward over their bodies. “Comply!”

A third shot, two more down, but the others finally grasping what was happening, workers reacting from habit and fear drilled into them, twisting to put their backs to the nearest bulkhead, raising their arms to place both hands on their heads, staring outward without speaking as Rogero bellowed the command a fourth time. “Comply!”

There was a small group before the door to Bradamont’s quarters, trying to push their way inside past a door loose on its hinges but still somehow holding them back as if solidly braced from behind. Traces of smoke from the grenade explosion drifted past the edges of the door from inside. Caught up in their efforts, reacting more slowly to the sounds of the shots and the commands, some were still pushing when Rogero fired a fourth, fifth, and sixth time without pausing.

Silence fell then, except for a couple of wounded workers gasping in pain. Everyone else had their backs flattened against a bulkhead, hands locked on their heads in compliance.

The two soldiers who had been on guard were trying to struggle to their feet when Rogero reached them. He wasted a precious second looking them over, searching for evidence of whether they had resisted the mob or just given in. But uniforms were torn, bruises and scratches were evident, and one of the soldiers, face drawn with pain, cradled an arm broken in at least one place.

“We locked arms,” the other soldier reported. “But we couldn’t hold.” She stood at attention now, almost trembling in anticipation of two more shots aimed at punishing her and her comrade for their failure.

But Rogero lowered his weapon. “You tried.” The grenade detonation and the shots he had fired had set off alarms inside the freighter, the frantic tones stuttering warnings that no longer had any purpose. “There should be more soldiers here very soon. See that you are checked in the freighter’s autodoc.”

He turned to the broken door and carefully knocked in a special pattern. After a moment, the door finally gave way, falling inward to reveal a figure in battle armor standing amid the wreckage created by the grenade explosion in the small room. “Are you all right?” Rogero asked.

Bradamont nodded, unsealing the suit’s faceplate to speak to him directly. “The armor took some damage from the grenade. I’m all right, though. With the help of the armor, I could hold that door for a while.”

It had been the only possible solution. While all eyes had been on Bradamont as she shifted her belongings out of her old quarters and began walking to this one, while this passageway had been temporarily cleared of anyone else in the name of security for Bradamont’s move, Rogero had quickly brought his own armor out of his quarters and slid it inside Bradamont’s new living space. If the soldiers outside held long enough, and she had any extra warning, Bradamont would be able to get into that armor and hold off an attack until relief arrived. So he had hoped.