Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 45

CHAPTER 13

DUNSTAN

Dunstan huffed through the last three of his twenty pull-ups. Each one took more effort, and only the knowledge that the twentieth was the last one made him summon the willpower to get his chin over the bar. Minotaur was on the way home at one standard g of acceleration, but on the pull-ups, he could have sworn that a cheeky engineer increased the burn by 10 percent every time his commander started a set, just to vex the Old Man. It was a more comforting theory than having to face that, at forty-six years old, he couldn’t bang out twenty pull-ups with the same ease as he could when he was a cadet.

He dropped from the bar and reached for his towel to wipe the sweat from his face. Next to him, the intercom panel chirped.

“Bosworth here. Sorry to disturb you on your off watch, sir, but do you have a few minutes to come up to the AIC? It’s kind of urgent, I think.”

Dunstan finished wiping his face before replying.

“Of course, Lieutenant. But I have to tell you that your timing is lousy. A minute earlier, and I would have had an excuse to skip the pull-ups. I’ll be there in a moment.”

“I’m eighty percent sure this is a prank or a trick of some sort,” Lieutenant Bosworth said when Dunstan stepped into the AIC, still in his sweaty exercise clothes.

“It’s not a good time and place for pranks. What do you have?”

“We just got pinged by an Oceanian courier boat. They say they’re on a delivery run. And they just discovered that their contract cargo is a nuke.”

Dunstan stopped in his tracks and blinked.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Could you run that by me again? Because I thought you said they have a nuke.”

“I did, sir. And it appears they do. Their engineer sent imagery. It looks like a Mark Sixteen. Or a very convincing mock-up of one.”

He brought up the image and showed the screen to Dunstan.

“Variable-yield tactical nuclear warhead, ten to five hundred kilotons. The engineer says her scanners show a plutonium fission core. The radiation profile is consistent with the warhead type.”

“That’s just wonderful,” Dunstan said. “Where are they now?”

“They requested a rendezvous to turn over the warhead to the authorities. We just gave them permission to approach on an intercept vector. But I ordered them to stay at least a hundred klicks from us or anyone else. Time to rendezvous is two hours, thirty-one minutes.”

“I suppose I have time to shower,” Dunstan said.

“Yes, sir.”

Dunstan looked at the plot, where Minotaur sat in the center of a bubble of mostly empty space. They had three days left to go on their low burn to Rhodia, where a long-overdue shore leave and overhaul was waiting for them.

Three more days, and it would have been someone else’s interesting problem, Dunstan thought.

“I hope you are correct, Bosworth. About the odds for an elaborate prank. Because if it isn’t one, we’re about to make system-wide news.”

Thirty minutes before the intercept, Minotaur was at action stations. Dunstan had never heard of a pirate blowing up a navy ship with a suicide nuke. But this year had seen new firsts for a lot of unusual things, and he didn’t want Minotaur to gain immortality as a fresh textbook example at the academy. There was no exact protocol for dealing with nuclear warheads on civilian ships because there weren’t supposed to be any nukes on civilian ships. Not even the few armed private security contractors in the system were authorized to carry atomic warheads.

“Tell them to come about and fly a parallel course no closer than a hundred klicks off our port side,” Dunstan said. “That ship is not coming closer until we have that warhead and the crew secured.”

“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said.

“They’re coming in nice and clean, by the book,” Bosworth commented. He was looking at the plot, where a single ship icon was closing the distance with Minotaur slowly. “Transponder on, position lights blinking, steady course at one g.”

“Once they get into position, give them a few sweeps with the targeting system. Not a hard lock yet. But let them know we have guns pointing in their general direction. I don’t think they’ll try anything dumb, but you never know.”

“We’ve seen them before,” Bosworth said. “That ID. OMV-2022 Zephyr. It’s that quick little ship we watched off Pallas a few days ago.”

“The one that pulled fifteen g,” Dunstan said. “What does the database say?”

“Everything matches, sir. Transponder ID, drive signature, hull profile. Tanaka Spaceworks model two thirty-nine, registered as OMV Zephyr in the database three years ago. They seem to be who they say they are.”

“That’s something,” Dunstan replied. It made it more likely they were telling the truth, but it didn’t tell him a thing about how they could have ended up with a nuclear warhead in their cargo compartment by accident. There was no way to get a nuke through a space station’s cargo transfer facilities without triggering twenty different kinds of alarms.

“Does the database say anything about authorized armaments on that ship?”

“Negative, sir. She’s not certified for offensive weapons.” Bosworth whistled softly through his teeth as he scrolled through the list of Zephyr’s sanctioned modifications. “She does have a killer point-defense array, though. Megawatt-class emitters, fully integrated defensive AI. That’s some pretty expensive kit for a fast courier.”

“Especially one that can sustain fifteen g. At a hundred K, we may even have trouble getting a missile through.”

“There’s no may about it, sir,” Mayler said from the tactical station. “If they decide to go to full burn and set their point defense active, we’ll never score a hit. Not at that distance.”

“Well, there’s no way