The Ascent

Chapter 33

The breaching pod swung around toward the hanger deck. The hanger doors were open and as the pod pulled in, I could see a boarding tube hooked up to an atmospheric lander and people loading plastic crates inside.

Once the pod had docked, the troops moved inside. The passages outside the spinning habitat portion were deserted, but once in among the crew cabins, they saw people packing crates and stacking them in corridors littered with empty containers and packing filler.

Kouvaras stepped in front of a young spacer who startled and looked up in shock at the powered armor standing before him. Kouvaras waved an arm towards the crates in the hall. "What's going on here?"

"We're abandoning the ship," the S2C said.

"Abandoning it? What's wrong with it?"

The spacer shrugged. "I just heard from one of the NCO's that the commander ordered it."

Kouvaras' gauntleted hand clamped on the spacer's shoulder and pulled him out into the hall. "Show me where his cabin is."

They trudged up to executive row and Kouvaras pounded on the commander's door. Most cabin doors were thin plastic barriers designed more for low-mass privacy than security. Not so with the executive cabins. But neither were they designed to hold up to the powered gauntlets of Kouvaras' armored suit. His fingers punched through the metal door and his servos whined as the door, groaning in protest, tore loose from the frame. Kouvaras leaned the door up against the corridor wall and entered the cabin, trudging through piles of dirty clothes and discarded food containers. Riley lay sleeping in his bed.

Kouvaras gently shoved the man. "Commander Riley?"

Unwashed and unshaven, Riley opened his eyes then jerked back against the cabin wall. "Who are you? What do you want?" he shouted.

"The fleet commander would like to know why you are abandoning your ship."

"You can tell him I'm not doing anything."

"He's listening to our conversation right now. Tell him yourself."

"Go away!" Riley grabbed his blanket, flung himself down on his bed and threw the blanket over his head. "My XO is in charge. Go bother him."

I switched on my microphone. "I think we can accept this as his resignation."

A grunt of disgust was Kouvaras' only reply.

"How would you like to command a war ship?"

"Don't even joke about it."

"I'm not—at least not entirely. Go find the XO, or if he's uncooperative, the most reasonable of the ship's senior officers and put him in charge. Then go find whoever is in charge of the troopers. Use them however you must to enforce proper military discipline. A simple show of force may be sufficient; I'll leave that up to you."

In a very short amount of time, with a little help from the troopers on board who were waiting for someone with some authority to start issuing reasonable orders, Kouvaras got the Leroy Kelso ready to boost. A group of junior officers and NCOs, who had already shuttled to the planet's surface and who were waiting for more evacuees to come down with additional supplies, refused to return to the ship insisting they would no longer participate in our "death march." They refused to listen to reason. I was tempted to send the troopers down to force them back on board, but we didn't have any combat landers. The fleet had long ago left the system and the pirates were closing in with greater numbers, so in the end I simply wished the mutineers luck and gave the order to break orbit.

The nameless system of which our moss planet was a part had a single transit station connected to a network of small inhabited worlds. By the time we made the transit, the fleet had already divided up and claimed what supplies they could. Chris Knight had, on my behalf, claimed a world for me and not just any world but the political capital and trading hub of this part of the district.