Tor touched a console key, and a flashing red light appeared on the screen well off to one side, against the backdrop of stars. That was the Kurita warship's location, 12,000 kilometers away. There was still no transmission, no indication that anyone suspected anything was wrong.
He opened the ship's intercom. "All hands... stand by. I'm going to tell them who we are."
The freighter normally carried a crew of fifteen. Three of the original crew had gone with Tor to Trellwan and died there. The memory was still an anguish of guilt in Tor. He did not know how many of the remaining twelve of his crew were still alive aboard the Invidious,though it was unlikely — or so he prayed — that so many trained starship hands would be casually wasted.
A bigger question was how many guards might be standing watch over the ship. Tor couldn't even guess at that, though conditions would be pretty cramped with more than ten or twelve passengers.
He glanced at the screen, which was recording time. It read 55 hours, 30 minutes exactly, with the seconds flickering away to the right of those numbers.
There were a number of ways to attack a JumpShip in space. If it was unsupported, there were several positions a DropShip could take that would threaten the vessel — aft of the jump sail, for example, or close forward of the stationkeeping drives, assuming the defensive weapons had been neutralized.
If the DropShip opened fire on the Invidious'weapons blisters, the Unionwarship would detect the radiations and investigate. If the freighter suffered any damage at all — perhaps a torn sail or an explosion in a weapons pod — the warship would investigate. Or, at the very least, it would try to raise the freighter on a ship-to-ship frequency to find out what was happening.
Tor had been prepared to try such an attack if their approach had been discovered, but his primary plan was still on schedule so far. He knew that one or more of the ship's officers would meet them at the docking lock. If he and his men moved fast enough, they might be able to storm the ship and take it before the Invidious'deck watch could get off a yell for help.
Might. If the watch officer was awake and on the ball, he would have at least enough time to get a message off to Trellwan. The warship might pick up a general, nondirectional broadcast, but unless the two ships were in active communication, with the frequency open, it was more likely that the warship wouldn't pick up the message.
It would take only a little over five and a half minutes for a beamed message to reach the spaceport's ground antenna at Trellwan. From there, a message would instantly go out to the warship, which would be alerted within the five and a half minutes it took a radio signal to travel back from Trellwan to the jump point. That was the greatest danger, and only the Lancers' attack on the spaceport antenna offered a way around iL
Then again, if the Duke had discovered the deception with the computer manifest, Tor might be met by a squad of marines with drawn guns.
The computer made a last-minute correctional burn. The DropShip's bridge rang with the clear bell tones and rattling thumps of magnetic grapples swinging home, of docking flanges clamping down to secure the vessel to its berth on the freighter's hull.
"Docked," he announced over the intercom. "Stand by, boarding party, main ship lock!"
The next few seconds would spell failure or success.
* * * *
As soon as Lori's coded message had reached him, Grayson brought the hidden Shadow Hawkto its feet and began moving along the wadi. He was headed toward a place where the bank had partly collapsed, offering a natural ramp up and out of the gully and onto the flat ground southwest of the port. The port itself was still masked by smoke, but the ground com antenna stabbed up out of the haze two kilometers away. Other shapes were gradually becoming clear — the squat saucer of the control tower, the four parallel rows of liquid hydrogen tanks farther to the east, the grey shapes of the grounded Combine DropShips.
And 'Mechs. Grayson was getting moving radar images of at least eight of them, though the continuing ECM jamming was scrambling his images and making it impossible to get a hard fix. All the 'Mechs seemed to be moving toward the north end of the field, and none were closer than two kilometers away. From the look of things, the plan seemed to be working.
A light haze of smoke was drifting across the southwestern perimeter, dispersing before a light northerly breeze. The Shadow Hawkreached the chainlink fence at the port perimeter, and stepped over it to the ferrocrete apron. A hovercraft weapons carrier whined through the smoke a half-kilometer ahead, heading north, but it ignored Grayson.
He'd been counting on that. Though the Duke's men knew all too well that Grayson had made off with their captured Shadow Hawktwo days before, there was still a company of 'Mechs in the area. Any casual observer would most likely assume that the battle-scarred machine moving across the southern edge of the port was friendly. The field officers who would know differently would be at the Castle monitoring combat communications, or in the field piloting their 'Mechs and with other business on their minds.
The sounds of continued combat drifted down the rising ground to the north. If the Lancers' three 'Mechs could hold out just long enough for him to destroy the antenna, he could join them by attacking the Combine forces from behind. With surprise and confusion, they might all be able to pull back into the Rift and disengage from the enemy.
After that, the Lancers would have to make their way through Thunder Rift to a prearranged landing site on the shores of the Grimheld Sea. If Tor was able to recapture the Invidious,one of the freighter's DropShips would meet them at a beacon they planned to set two standard days from now. They would have to abandon their 'Mechs to make the passage through the Rift, because the waterfall had begun in earnest now, making any passage by water impossible. In case of his death, Grayson had hand-drawn maps to help them pick their way through noise-blasted paths to the north opening, then down through rugged terrain to the Sea.
Once aboard the DropShip, they could make their way to the Invidious,and from there to the nearest Commonwealth outpost Grayson could find. Those of the Lancers who wished to remain could survive for 30 standard days on the supplies the DropShip would leave them, then make their way by hovercraft back to Sarghad as soon as it was dark again.
And there they would wait, with the promise that Grayson would return again with a Commonwealth force large enough to smash the Combine invaders.
Grayson tore his mind away from the plan. Looking at it overall, he saw too many assumptions and premises and outright guesses, and too many little details that could so easily go wrong. He remembered another of Kai Griffith's maxims. "If something can go wrong," the Weapons Master had said, "it will. Keep your planning simple, because the plan's certain to get a lot more complicated in practice than you thought it'd be."
Grayson didn't see how he could have simplified it any further. With so few 'Mechs against so many, only a complex plan gave him the options and flexibility he needed.
He triggered a switch marked HUD on his console, and the green targeting bullseye and characters of his heads-up display snapped on at eye level. He centered the antenna mast in the target circle, and read the range as 850 meters. Then he made a weapons check. The autocannon was still at rest, but fully loaded and ready to be brought into action. His forearm medium laser was charged and ready, and the missile launchers — a battery of LRMs set into the 'Mech's left torso and a pair of twin-tube SRMs mounted on either side of its head — were on line, loaded, and showed a display of green lights on his weapons board.