Battlecruiser Alamo - 7 - Battlecruiser Alamo: Sacred Honor Read Free Page A

want to have to clean up the subsequent mess.”
     “I won’t reprimand any of my people…” 
     “I’m not asking you to.”
     “Not asking what?” Zebrova asked as she scrambled in. “What’s all this about, Captain?”
     “Trust, Lieutenant,” Marshall said. “Specifically, I trust everyone in this room with two critical pieces of information. The first is that we have a spy, a saboteur, on board. Undoubtedly transferred from Hercules before the loss of that ship.”
     “May I then suggest, sir, that all Hercules crewmen should be placed in immediate close confinement pending interrogation?” Zebrova said, matter-of-factly.
     “We can’t do that,” Caine said. “Not only would we be totally reliant on circumstantial evidence, but they’ve been on board for long enough that all manner of mayhem could result from a sweep.”
     Marshall nodded, “Lieutenant Caine is quite correct.”
     “Some of them are in key positions…”
     “My presumption is that we are looking at a single saboteur. All the pieces fit together for that.”
     “Someone senior, more than likely,” Quinn added. “They’d need a lot of key access.”
     “Not necessarily, sir,” Cooper replied. “Not if they were a good hacker.”
     “Corporal, I’m putting you in charge of finding the saboteur.” 
     “Sir?” Zebrova said, frowning, “With all respect to Corporal Cooper, he is not trained for such a task, nor…”
     “I know, but he’s the best we’ve got. Cooper, this is a request, not an order. I can’t give you any orders, not officially, and I can’t tell anyone what you are doing. You’ll be working undercover for the purposes of this operation, without the knowledge of the bulk of the chain of command. I am aware that there are risks involved, but…”
     “I’ll do it, sir. I know how important this might be. And if there’s a saboteur on board, they might well have been involved with the attack on the asteroid.”
     “This is not personal, Cooper. We can’t afford that.”
     He nodded, “I know, sir.”
     “Good.” Marshall looked around at the rest of the officers. “I’ve come to a decision regarding our flight home. There’s a bottleneck coming up, albeit one with several potential egress points to exploit.”
     “Odds are the Cabal will have ships on picket duty. It’ll be chancy, but we’ll probably have an even-odds fight and a mad scramble to jump out of the system,” Caine said. “I’m working on my recommendations for which point we use. Are you in a hurry?”
     “No.” Marshall took a deep breath, then continued, “We have a task force at our backs, and a traitor on board. I say we use both to their best advantage. They’re going to be one jump behind us all the way home, and they have a lot more options to refuel than we do.”
     Zebrova nodded, “Ultimately, they are likely to catch us. I had considered this. If we still had Hercules, I’d be advocating that the two ships split up and find separate ways home.”
     “You both might be right, but what can we do about it?” Caine asked. “Other than do our damnedest to stay ahead of the game.”
     Shaking his head, Marshall said, “I’m going to attack.”
     “What?” Quinn yelled. “Four battlecruisers and a carrier, assuming they haven’t got reinforcements.”
     “Four battlecruisers and a carrier,” Marshall repeated. “But if we can fight them at a time and place of our choosing, we can catch them by surprise. We’ve dealt with their fleet commander enough now to get a read on him, and I know what he will think when we – very quietly – feed him the destination of our jump.”
     “He’ll think that it’s a trick, and will plan accordingly,” Caine said. “He’ll mass his fleet because he really has no choice, but he won’t be expecting a battle.”
     “So we give him one, blast through his ships, and leave them in our wake. Do enough damage