Innes in Command
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 18
As the shuttle accelerated away from the expanding debris field, Innes forced himself to look away from the viewport. The Andomaru was gone, along with Chief Rina and her three engineers. Nothing he did now would change that.
The troop compartment had been designed for twenty-four fully armored marines. It now held thirty-one civilians and eight marines, packed so closely that movement was barely possible. Wounded passengers occupied the deck between the jump seats, field dressings visible on arms, legs, and torsos where burns and injuries from the pirates’ slug throwers had seared and ripped through clothing.
Innes moved through the cramped space, stepping carefully between bodies, stopping to speak to a person here or there. The final evacuation had been so sudden that he hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone but the ship’s captain. A boy of maybe eight huddled against his mother’s side, eyes wide, knuckles white around a stuffed animal that had seen better years, and the mother had a medpatch on her forearm. She met Innes’s eyes for a fraction of a second.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m fine. It’s just...” She glanced down at her son. “He just keeps shaking.”
“Anyone would in his place,” Innes said. “You’re safe on this boat.”
The boy looked up at him. “Are we going to blow up too?”
“No,” Innes said. “We’re going to Shiro Station where they have real doctors and places for you to sleep. You’re safe.”
Two rows over, Private Miller worked on a man whose leg dressing had soaked through. Miller’s helmet sat on the deck by his knee, his hair was damp with sweat as he peeled back the bandage enough to check for fresh bleeding.
“Pressure’s holding,” Miller said. “You’ll get a proper rebuild on Shiro; for now, don’t try to walk.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” the man muttered.
His skin had that gray tinge Innes didn’t think looked good, but the pulse-clip on his finger read within emergency norms, if he was reading it correctly.
Innes kept moving and checking on people, but mostly he thought about the four men whose deaths he’d ordered. He knew it was the right call; the shuttle had barely cleared the blast zone before the ship went up. If they’d waited even another minute, there was a strong chance everyone on board would be dead.
But that wouldn’t be much solace to the dead crewmen they’d left behind.
“You did everything you could,” Roberts said over his shoulder, having materialized from somewhere in the press of bodies.
Innes didn’t respond immediately. He watched Miller murmuring something to a woman with a neck brace.
“Did I?”
“Yes. I’ve seen that look before. Hell, I had it on my first deployment when I lost two marines on a boarding action because I spent thirty seconds trying to find a better approach instead of accepting the approach I had.”
Innes turned to look at him. “What happened?”
“Pirates had rigged the compartment and detonated it when we breached. If I’d gone in thirty seconds earlier, before they finished arming the charges, those two marines would still be alive. Or maybe they would have died anyway, and I’d have lost four more besides. It’s impossible to know. That’s the thing about command decisions; you make the best call you can with the information you have, and then you live with it so you can make the next one.”
“Four people are dead because I couldn’t figure out how to save them.”
“Four people are dead because pirates attacked a civilian ship and damaged its reactor. You saved twenty-six others, plus got out the bodies of fifteen more so their families can have something to bury.” Roberts paused. “You can’t put the deaths of the chief and her engineers on yourself.”
“I don’t have to like it, though,” Innes said.
“No, and that’s a good thing.”
Before Innes could respond, the tactical channel crackled to life.
“Sir,” the pilot called back.
Roberts and Innes headed to the shuttle cockpit.
“He’s here, say again, Paquette.”
After a moment, the pilot’s voice came over the comm. “I’ve been running sensors rear just in case any more pirates come out of the field after us, and I had a sensor contact. It’s gone now, but it was definitely there.”
“What was it?” Innes said into the comm.
“I don’t know. It was deep in the belt, bearing two-seven-four mark fifteen relative to our current position, and it vanished almost as soon as I caught it, but it was definitely there. Sending sensor logs now.”
The shuttle pilot turned from his controls. “I caught it too, but I thought it was a ghost return from the debris field, but if the CAP also saw it...”
He expanded the tactical plot, isolating the sector Paquette had indicated. The display was a mess of noise; the Kumo asteroid belt was a navigational nightmare of metallic ore and EM interference, but the computer had flagged an anomaly.
“Replay the feed,” Innes ordered.
The sensor feed switched only slightly to show what the shuttle had seen from a minute before, when they’d been slightly closer to the belt. For a second, it seemed like everything was the same as it was now, when suddenly a red icon flickered into existence on the display. It was faint, heavily obscured by the background radiation of the belt, but it was there. It held position for a heartbeat before vanishing again. It hadn’t moved or done anything, but it was definitely there.
Innes had spent a lot of time reading tracking plots and learning to identify ships and missiles from background noise.
This was not debris.
“Did we get a mass reading?”
“The computer gave us an estimate of between five and ten thousand tons, but that’s a soft number.”
Innes understood. It was possible to get a mass reading off a stable object, but it would take a full scan of it and need more than three seconds without warning to get it, so the computer had given a very wide range that could still be off by a factor of five.
Still, that would make it bigger than most civilian ships, although smaller than the big cargo haulers. Maybe a small ore hauler or a mobile mining platform. It was much too big to be a pirate vessel, which were usually up-worked civilian ships, unless they got their hands on a full-out warship.
But if they’d had that, they could have come out and swatted Innes’s shuttle and the two fighters aside fairly easily.
“Any chance this was sensor error?” Roberts asked.
“I don’t think so,” the pilot said. “The reading’s too clean, and debris clouds don’t hold a consistent density number over three seconds, not with that much relative motion in the belt.”
Innes keyed the second fighter. “Sierra Two, did you detect anything at coordinates two-seven-four mark fifteen?”
“Any listed mining ops in that sector?” Innes asked.
“Negative.” The pilot pulled up Shiro’s registry overlay.
The screen populated with translucent tags showing licensed claims and active extraction permits. Their own vector back to Shiro skirted three legal claim zones further in-system, but the coordinates of the ghost contact sat in a blank patch.
“Could be a mobile base,” the pilot offered. “Old mining platform somebody never registered, parked back when nobody was filling out Concordian forms.”
“Maybe,” the copilot said. “But you’d think someone would have spotted that much mass by now if it was just sitting there.”
“Maybe not. Kumo’s big and the belt’s messy,” Innes said.
“Do we divert and try to get a better look?” Roberts asked quietly from behind him.
The wounded civilians needed medical facilities, and the rest of the survivors needed processing and care. The shuttle’s limited combat capability and the presence of thirty-one civilians made any pursuit into asteroid cover impossible. Innes knew what his duty required.
“Not with this many civilians aboard. Once we get this mess sorted, we’ll come back out and take another look.”
Roberts nodded. He’d probably already known the answer before he’d asked.
Still, Innes felt that whatever it was, it was important. He was definitely coming back to find out what they’d seen.
Commander Menon stood at the sensor station, scrubbing through the recording frame by frame. The timestamp in the corner advanced in tenth-second increments, each frozen moment showing the Dart’s electronic signature against the background clutter of the asteroid field. At mark seventeen-forty-two, the signature bloomed bright on the display. At mark seventeen-forty-four-point-seven, it vanished again as the ship slipped back into the sensor shadow of a tumbling nickel-iron mass three kilometers across.
Two point seven seconds of exposure. Two separate minor errors combined into a near catastrophe.
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