“Two jumps, boss; I really want to use one of them right now.”
“Enemies in range,” Fars yelled over the comms. A volley of mass-driver rounds struck our shield and kept peppering us as he announced. Two of the six prototype ships buzzed by us and hit our shields with something I couldn’t distinguish without Mitto’s analysis. They came about as the next four fired missiles.
“Incoming missiles, boss!”
“Activate countermeasures! Bring those missiles down!”
They detonated at the bow.
We were sitting ducks while Mitto cut up the unfinished ship to meal-sized proportions, and yes, I had to agree that it was an insanely stupid thing to do, but if I was right, then we had a real chance of making a difference down the line. If we managed to survive.
Two of the missiles exploded far out as small beams sliced them apart but two slipped in closer, detonating near our bow.
“Boss, I’ve loaded the pieces up. Can I get us the hell out of here, please?”
The odds of winning this fight were virtually zero. The Tanaree was a hell of a ship but there was no way it could hold its own against six of its sisters.
“They’ll follow our signature, Mitto. We can’t escape with just two jumps. Or am I missing something?”
“Maybe we can?” he replied with a strange tone to his voice.
“Mitto, stop questioning me! I’m taking manual controls over the ship. You just focus on our defenses.”
I studied the sensor data with a single glance and decided on the one ship that seemed to be flying a tad bit faster than the rest of its group and got on its tail. Our shield was nearly depleted, but I had confidence in the hull and my team. I couldn’t say that we had ever faced something like this, but we had picked up a trick or two in our relatively short career as pirates that could prove useful.
“Five of them on our tail, boss. Why are we chasing the one that is hardest to get?”
“Distractions, Mitto. Don’t spare the countermeasures, our goal is to survive as long as possible, not to inflict damage. Arthur, use our mass-driver cannons to deter the missiles that Mitto doesn’t catch with the countermeasures. Fars keep our plasma beam pointed at the bow of ship four at all times, force them away from—”
A massive tremor reverberated through the ship and the lights flickered for a brief moment. Even the pleasant music and the scent dissipated for several seconds before everything turned back to normal.
“What the hell was that?”
“Shields are gone, boss. Pavlov’s gun hit at the stern. Hull integrity at 89%, and it doesn’t look good if they keep slugging us.”
That was a terrifying hit. If it wasn’t for the SI materials that covered our ship, any other frigate would now be two smaller frigates that would never fly again.
“Vogron! I want you on Pavlov gun control! Fire only when you have a secure lock!”
“It won’t do enough damage to kill anything,” he replied calmly. “The best it can do is deter them.”
“It doesn’t have to kill anything. It just needs to throw them off course for a bit.”
“On it,” he muttered. The way he managed to keep his cool during such situations would always remain a mystery to me.
The ship shuddered slightly as he fired off a dual salvo. Be it pure skill or luck, one of the railgun projectiles struck the closest ship at a strange angle where the shield failed for a single second. It was enough to cause massive damage on its bow and it veered off, losing valuable time and almost knocking a second ship aside. Vogron cheered and I couldn’t help but cheer with him.
“Good job! Keep them coming!”
“Hull integrity at 77% and dropping quickly,” Mitto reported and shat on our parade. He had as much tact as a cat on a dog show.
“Arthur, keep the ship we’re pursuing busy. Fire missiles in ten-second intervals. You can’t give it any breathing room.”
“Captain, why are your nanites in my engine? What are they doing there?”
“No time, how are we on countermeasures?”
“I have eleven left but… ten now. They won’t do. The six ships probably have more than a hundred projectiles between them. It would be shrewd to get out of here.”
“Shrewd, huh?” I snickered. “I’ll show you what shrewd means.”
Just as my boast left nobody particularly impressed, the Tanaree shook violently and I almost flew out of my chair. Barely catching myself and preventing a blunder, I seated myself again and stared at the holo screen.
“We’ve been grabbed by—it’s a grappling beam.”
“At full speed? You must be wrong, Mitto!”
“I’m never wrong, boss, only slightly off course and that’s once a year. One of the ships got close enough to fire it off and they’re pulling us back.”
“Break the fucking beam! Fire at the ship!” I was furious.
How in the hell could this have happened? I knew that each of those ships had a quirk of its own. Some had sturdier shields, others had more powerful weapons or were quicker, but a grappling beam that can be fired at frigate-sized ships at full speed... That was pretty terrifying for more reasons. A ship with the Tanaree’s speed would be able to catch anything that tried to outrun them and even catch up after being called in late.
“We can’t get a clear shot. The other ships are protecting it.”
I read that the engines were going at full strength. The only thing that could save us now was a jump, but they would latch on to our signature like dogs and just get us in the next system.
“Boss, incoming transmission from ship two. Do you want to accept?”
“Don’t! We can still fight!” Fars yelled.
“Put them up,” I said, shaking my head at Fars. He looked away and hissed. The Eres really had a way of becoming too proud whenever it was least convenient for us.
The holo-screen filled up with a Frey’s helmetless face. He looked grim, even for a Frey. His mandibles were trembling which was a sign of aggression the Frey rarely displayed. They were the epitome of calm.
“Bloodmancer, Captain of the Crimson Death, welcome to Frey justice. I can’t say how glad I am we finally met.”
“Can’t say the same, Frey.”
“How arrogant, but it’s nothing I didn’t expect from a marauder with a god-complex!” He stopped for a moment as if waiting for my reply, but when I didn’t say anything, he went on visibly even more annoyed. “Do you know who I am?”
“Can’t say I particularly care, Frey.”
“Too bad! See, I’m the one who will have his revenge today!”
“Nice to meet you ‘one-who-will-have-his-revenge-today,’” I said tiredly.
If I had a penny for every guy who promised to take his revenge on me, kill me, destroy me, have my heart and eat it, I’d have probably enough to buy a planet. I inconspicuously checked hull integrity and saw it was at 78%. Good, let’s hope I was right.
“I enjoy that you think this is somehow a humorous occasion. It will make your suffering so much worse. My name is Praetorian Ardencio Ruzia of the Frey!” he said, apparently expecting me to know who that was supposed to be.
“THE Ardencio Ruzia?” I said, pretending to be in shock. To my surprise, it worked because the Frey almost smiled and then even snickered at himself.
“Then you know why it is me who wanted to end you here today! Then you know why I have put my whole reputation, my family, and my life on the line so I can be here on this ship today!”
“I’m sorry, Ardencio. Can you refresh my memory a little? I’ve done so many things, shameful things, really. Is there anything in particular that I should be ashamed of right now or do you just generally dislike the idea of me and my crew?”
“Hah!” Arthur laughed across the bridge. This was endlessly entertaining to him, but I had to admit I was barely keeping myself from laughing as well. The Aloi, however, didn’t have that kind of restraint.
Ardencio’s grim face grew even grimmer. It wasn’t jus
t his mandibles shaking, at this point; his whole body seemed to convulse and tremble. Almost as if he was having an epileptic attack, but the foam didn’t froth at his mouth.
“You! You scum of the galaxy! It was you who left my sister on Gardonia! It was you who left her to the Greth rebels who tore her apart! It was you who has the blood of my wife on his hands!”
Then it came to me. The Frey commander from two years ago. He was actually a she, and she was his sister, well, and wife. Frey had a pretty strict policy regarding bloodlines. To a human it was sickening, but to a Frey, the human custom of sharing DNA with someone completely unknown was sickening in equal measure.
“Oh—” I said sort of surprised, and I had to admit that I was a bit ashamed too.
My intention never was to kill the Frey commander, so we dropped her off with the first people who wanted her. It was a Greth rebel ship called Gardonia that was more a traveling fortress than a ship. Within its hulls, Greth opposed to the current rule created its own space-faring city. I had no use for the commander and the Greth were willing to pay in detrium so off she went.
“I didn’t kill your sister, Rosebud. The Greth of the Gardonia killed your sister.”
I checked our hull integrity again: 80%. The absorption process was underway and according to calculation, it was accelerating. Still, I needed to buy more time because a strong hull wouldn’t be enough to get us out of the mess I got us in.
“So, you admit it? Good, Bloodmancer! We’re halfway there already. And the Greth? I killed the Greth! All of them! Gardonia is nothing but rubble floating through space now.”
“That’s a shame, Rosy. You killed thousands of innocent beings, and for what?” I said and hit the mute button low-key. “Guys, be ready to fire all weapons and then jump on my mark.”
“What? You said it’s pointless!” Vogron roared. “I want to board them!”
“Just be ready,” I hissed.
Ardencio kept promising revenge, torture, death, and destruction so I missed a little of the whole shebang. What worried me more than Ardencio’s prattle was whether my assumption about the Tanaree’s absorption capabilities was right. That and the fact I was juggling half a batch of nanites back in our engine without anyone’s knowledge. All I needed was time and Ardencio Ruzia was growing very angry and decisive.
“So, you’re telling me you married your sister?”
“What?” he snapped, his eyes bulging outward. “Of course I married my sister!” He had lost it by then and was full-on screaming. “She was the love of my life! The Ruzia is a name as old as the Frey, but savage scum like humans know nothing of civilized society!”
“My sister married a college professor on Earth. He’s twice her age but he’s a nice fellow. Robert’s the name. He’s a historian at the university.”
“Enough of this! We have six ships surrounding you! There’s nothing you can do, so lower your weapons and prepare to be boarded!”
Again with the nothing you can do, I thought. Couldn’t they come up with something smarter? A better threat like, “We’ll disintegrate you into atoms and put you together again?”
“We will resist your boarding procedure, you know this.”
“Don’t test me, Bloodmancer. We can have you burned alive on board that ship.”
“Well, I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.”
“Captain! If you—”
“Shut up, Mitto, the ship will be fine. Just trust me like you’ve been doing so far.”
Ardencio cut the transmission for a couple of seconds, just as I expected he would. I turned to my crew.
“The absorption is almost done. A single critical piece is missing, though, so I will buy us as much time as I can. Stick to my story whatever they say.”
I had just enough time to blurt it out before Ardencio called in again.
“You will be boarded, and you will answer for your crimes before me and the rest of the Frey. We will deliver the Jareet to the Commissariat and the Aloi, well, we have special orders for the First Betrayer.”
“And me?” Fars inquired angrily.
“You? You might want to eat your own sword before we come. Nobody cares about you.”
Fars looked at me in shock and I shrugged. There was nothing the Frey wanted of a disgraced Eres. A slight shudder ran across the ship and Mitto informed me they were pointing three Gavran beams at our cargo bay. The fools were trying to cut through.
“How are our weapon systems?”
“They’re online, but at this range there’s going to be damage both ways.”
I checked hull integrity again and saw it was at 84%. Ardencio spoke.
“The more you resist and damage our property, the worse your sentence will be.”
Sure, I thought. I bet you don’t want to come in and lose half your men but those are your orders, aren’t they?
“Boss, they’ve almost gone through the hull. Three concentrated Gavran beams can’t be stopped by any kind of material, not even—”
“What are you doing?” Ardencio said angrily again. “What’s going on with your ship? Explain yourself right now!”
“Mitto can you locate the ship we were following before? The one that was slightly faster than the others?
“Just a moment,” he replied calmly. “It’s that one,” he said and a ship started blinking on the holo screen.
“It’s ship five, right?”
“It is. Why?”
“Never mind that. Now, can you tell me if Ardencio is on that ship? “
“No, boss. But why are you—”
I put my hand up to silence him and mocked panic.
“It’s not me, Ruzia! The ship is doing something on its own!”
“There’s a growing extension on your port side, human! What is it? Speak!”
“Oh, I think the Tanaree had a bad breakfast,” I replied and feigned throwing up.
“Boss, the ship is replicating the long-range particle converter from the parts in the docking bay. It’s incredible, it’s beautiful, I-I—”
“I know. Can you access the terminal for the particle-converter?”
“It’s already integrating into the rest of the systems. This ship, I love it so mu—”
“Good, then target ship five with the particle-converter and tell me when it’s ready to fire.”
“My people are coming your way, Bloodmancer, you better not pull anything…”
“Ready, boss.”
“Fire.”
The particle-converter took half a second to warm up and then unloaded a detrium cell’s worth toward the SIM hull of ship five, ignoring the shields completely. The beam didn’t manage to rearrange the tightly packed atoms in the hull, but that was expected. What it did do, however, was heat them to the point of significantly weakening the molecular structure.
“One detrium cell left, boss!”
“Now, fire everything!”
Missiles, plasma beams, mass-driver rounds, and our Pavlov railgun blasted ship number five with enough force to breach open the SIM hull and cause massive damage within several decks.
“Don’t target the engines!” I screamed at the last second forgetting that my whole plan depended on them being able to escape our fury. Just as I expected, ship five turned around immediately and fired up its engines.
“Jump to these coordinates, Mitto. As soon as they’re gone!”
Ship five stormed away from the sector trying to save its skin, leaving debris in its wake. Before any of the other ships understood what just happened, we did the same.
Several nerve-racking minutes later, we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere with our weapons ready to engage any ships coming our way.
“Be ready to fight for your lives if this doesn’t work,” I said calmly, sounding much better than I felt. I wanted to throw up and curl up. The last encounter just showed how fucked we were when facing a superior enemy.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Fars said as he scanned the blackness of sp
ace for more prototype ships, but nothing showed up.
“Scan the area again. Are there any signs of life nearby?”
“None, boss. This is as abandoned a sector as can be.”
Five minutes passed and nothing happened. Ten minutes later my hands were still trembling. Half an hour later, I finally relaxed as I understood that we evaded our pursuers. I sunk into my captain’s chair and took a deep breath, unaware that everyone was looking at me with a question mark above their heads.
“What in the Craters’ name was that? Why didn’t they follow our signature?”
“They did,” I said with a smirk. “They’re exactly where our signature is right now.”
“You can’t do that. Nobody can do that, how did you—” Vogron asked in disbelief and cut himself off mid-sentence.
“Do what? I copied the signature of ship five while we were in pursuit.”
“Copied their signature? No ship can copy the signature of another ship. The detrium decay rate differs on so many levels for each engine. You’d have to be in complete sync with the other ship and—no! Was it your damned nanites? They worked overtime to do just that, didn’t they?”
“Ruzia and his friends followed their own ship. All they saw was two identical signatures and they had to make a split-second decision.”
“How could you have known they’d follow their own ship?”
“Our signature is cleaner. Their ships’ AI went for the one with more discrepancy in its pattern. Ship five just had a detrium cell blast at its hull.”
“So, you gambled?”
“I played the cards I was dealt,” I said with a broad grin on my face.
Fars jumped from his weapons console and hugged me tight enough to pull me out of the chair and almost choke me. I coughed and pushed off, but I only managed as much because he let me.
“Fars!”
“You are a genius, Richard Stavos! Qualt himself wouldn’t have thought of such a maneuver. The audacity, the gamble, the genius of it all, Richard Stavos, you honor me with your presence!”
“All right, big boy, I’m turning bluer than you, put me down already.”
Arthur came up to me and nodded his approval.
“It is a shame,” he said in all seriousness, “to use such a mind for some misplaced sense of doing the right thing. With the right tools, you could have conquered a planet for yourself.”
Redeemer: A Military Space Opera Series (War Undying Book 2) Page 17
