At the moment, all those small craft, aside from two purely reaction-drive cutters, were absent, however. By this time, they were sitting obediently in orbit around Flax, under the watchful eyes—and weapons—of Commodore Terekhov's cruisers, and the boat bay was a huge, gaping cavern in their absence. A cavern which looked even larger with only a trio of Manticoran pinnaces docked in it like lonely interlopers.
Captain Ingebrigtsen had lt Lieutenant Lindsay and Platoon Sergeant Francine Harper handle First Platoon's debarkation, and Markiewicz had been pleased by the way Ingebrigtsen managed not to hover. For that matter, he'd been pleased by the way Lindsay had let Harper get on with it. But now, as the platoon's forty-four men and women formed up in Leeuwenhoek 's boat bay gallery, he recognized Ingebrigtsen's itchy expression. He ought to, given that he shared the same ignoble temptation to start fooling around with those details he was supposed to stay clear of.
Fortunately, young Lindsay seemed unaware of the pair of incipient backseat drivers somehow managing to restrain themselves. The lieutenant glanced around, then looked at Sergeant Harper.
"Let's get a squad on each of the lift banks, Frankie," he said.
"Aye, Sir!" Harper replied, and barked a few, crisp commands. The platoon quickly and smoothly unraveled into its constituent squads, and Markiewicz gave a mental nod of approval. It was a simple evolution, but the confidence in Lindsay's voice and the briskness with which he'd acted were both good signs.
And, unlike one Major Markiewicz, Lindsay appeared completely immune to the temptation to micromanage his platoon sergeant.
"Bay secure, Ma'am," Lindsay reported a moment later to Ingebrigtsen.
"Thank you, Hector," the captain replied gravely, and keyed her battle armor's com. "Bay secure," she announced. "Second Platoon, come ahead."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Lieutenant Sylvester Jackson, responded almost instantly. "On our way."
The second pinnace's hatch cycled open, and Jackson's platoon swam briskly down the personnel tube. They fell in just inside the gallery, and Jackson—four years older than Lindsay, with sandy hair and a pronounced Sphinxian accent—reported to Ingebrigtsen.
"You know what to do, Sly," Ingebrigtsen told him.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Jackson saluted her and Markiewicz, then turned to his own platoon sergeant and passed through Lindsay's people into the central shaft of each bank of lifts. They did not enter the lift cars , however. Instead, they sent the cars upward, overriding the automatic command to close the shaft doors behind them, and, as per their pre-mission orders, followed the cars up the shaft in their armor. Markiewicz didn't really expect anyone aboard Leeuwenhoek to be stupid enough to try anything, but if anyone was so suicidally inclined, he had no intention of offering his people up in neatly packaged, easily bushwhacked lots.
"All right, Aldonza," Ingebrigtsen said over her com. "Your turn."
"Understood, Ma'am."
Lieutenant Aldonza Navarro, Third Platoon's CO, had a more pronounced San Martin accent than Fariсas'. At a hundred and seventy-two centimeters, she was on the short side for most of the San Martinos Markiewicz had met, but there was nothing wrong with her efficiency, and Third Platoon quickly assembled in the boat bay.
Markiewicz, meanwhile, was monitoring his HUD, watching the icons of Jackson's Marines as they ascended the lift shafts. Jackson's second squad left its shaft at the 03 Deck lift doors. The lieutenant himself stayed with his first squad, leaving the shaft at the 02 Deck level. His second squad continued to the 01 Deck, and Markiewicz gave another mental nod as all three squads settled into position.
"Take the banks, Aldonza," Ingebrigtsen instructed, and Third Platoon relieved Lindsay's people as the anchoring security element on the lift banks here in the boat bay. At the same time, First Platoon fell back in, and Ingebrigtsen nodded—in her case, physically—in approval.
"Ready to proceed, Sir," she said formally, turning to Markiewicz.
"Very good, Captain." Markiewicz smiled. "Let's get this show on the road, then."
"Aye, aye, Sir. Head them up-shaft, Hector."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Lindsay acknowledged, and First Platoon started climbing into the shaft Jackson had used, with Ingebrigtsen, Fariсas, and Markiewicz trailing along behind.
This time, Markiewicz noted, Lieutenant Lindsay hadn't quite managed to keep his excitement out of his voice, but the major was inclined to cut the youngster a little slack. After all, his platoon had been chosen to accompany Markiewicz to Leeuwenhoek 's flag bridge to formally accept Admiral O'Cleary's personal surrender before the rest of his Marines began moving through the rest of the core hull to secure it. Which meant young Hector Lindsay was about to go into the Corps' history books as the first junior officer—very junior officer, in his case—of any star nation to command the squad which took a Solarian League Navy's flag officer's surrender on the flag deck of an SLN superdreadnought. Markiewicz wasn't exactly immune to the same awareness, which was one reason he couldn't justify taking Lindsay to task for it. At the same time, though, he wondered if Lindsay had figured out he'd drawn this particular assignment because he was the least experienced of Ingebrigtsen's platoon commanders? Navarro, with the most combat experience of all, had taken over the boat bay detachment because it constituted Markiewicz's reserve. If something went wrong and dropped them all into the crapper after all, he wanted somebody who'd been there and done that in charge of the force assigned to pull them all back out again.
I wonder if Luciana had the heart to explain that to Lindsay? he wondered. I know Ididn't!
* * *
Abigail Hearns took one more look around. The passageway immediately inboard from the emergency airlock was longer and a bit wider than it would have been in a Manticoran or Grayson-designed warship, but it looked rather cramped at the moment, with her entire boarding party and six counter-grav sleds of salvage and rescue gear packed into it. Other than that, about the best she could say was that it was still atmosphere tight. Only the emergency lighting was up, and close to a third of the lighting elements were dead. One of her engineering ratings had already determined that the backup hardwired emergency com system was down, but from the looks of things, that could just as easily have been due to lack of maintenance as to the damage Charles Babbage had suffered at Manticoran hands.
The ship—or, rather, the battered hulk which had once been a ship—was under an apparent gravity of about 1.2 g . The wreckage had been rotated perpendicular to its line of flight, putting the decks and deckheads back where they ought to be, and Tristram was playing tugboat to slow what was left of the Babbage down. In many ways, Abigail would have preferred to remain in microgravity. It would have made getting about faster and simpler, not to mention avoiding the stress the deceleration was putting on damaged structural members. And she was well aware that the deceleration might actually be life-threatening for survivors under some circumstances. Unfortunately, the wreck's velocity of almost eighteen thousand kilometers per second had already carried it past Flax. It was now hurtling across the inner system at roughly six percent of light-speed, bound for a fatal encounter with the gas giant Everest in just under twenty hours. It was extraordinarily unlikely, given Tenth Fleet's limited manpower, that the SAR parties would be able to completely search ships as mangled and torn as Babbage and her consorts in that time. Which meant they had to be slowed down somehow.
Tristram looked like a guppy tethered to a whale as she worked to decelerate Babbage 's wreckage, but there wouldn't have been any point using a larger, more powerful vessel. Tristram was could brake them at the current rate indefinitely, and they dared not apply any greater deceleration, for a lot of reasons. At this rate, it would take over fifteen T-days (and the next best thing to twelve light-hours) to actually stop them relative to the system primary, but it would also divert them well clear of any collisions with odds and ends of system real estate, which would be a very good thing from the SAR perspective.