"No, captain. They haven't changed position. Relative motions are still carrying them away from us."
"A small blessing."
Savor the Moment came within three hundred kilometers of Pessac's upper atmosphere before being painted by Ajaxian radar. Running with her engines cold and all but her life support systems off made her almost impossible to detect since her hyperspatial shield swallowed most of the incoming radiation. This wasn’t perfect. It never was, and now that she had come so near there was bound to be a detectable return. The warning beeps on the freighter's bridge were so numerous and urgent that Pran ignored them. It didn't matter how precisely many had found his ship. All of them had.
Savor the Moment had approached from the south pole, and the DN's blockade was especially thin there. The blockade captains preferred to keep their ships in geosynchronous orbit above the equator. This left a window open for Pran to run in at high speed without being spotted until the literal last moments before he dumped his care packages.
"Releasing cargo pods!" Urant declared.
Pran watched on the forward vidscreen as hundreds of pods fell toward the surface. They streaked downward, fiery jets plummeting through a bright sky. There were cheers from his tiny bridge crew of three.
Pran smiled guardedly. "Engines ahead full!"
Savor the Moment's maneuver drives sprang to life, spewing plasma in a brilliant train behind her. On any other run, Pran's mission would be over, and his only task would be to make the outbound run away from Pessac so fast that the patrolling DN warships could never hope to catch him. He had a ten-to-one current speed advantage over the next-fastest moving ship, a corvette, and he could have outrun her easily.
Not this time. Instead of heading straight into space, Savor the Moment curled around the planet, picking up speed by using its gravity to slingshot it ahead faster, but at the same time taking it closer to a squadron of blockaders on the far side of the world.
This would have been stupidity in the extreme at any other time. And yes, it did still seem like stupidity to Pran and every member of his crew when he explained to them what they would be doing.
But Admiral More wanted it done. He said it was for the good of Aquitaine. Pran had listened. Pran had agreed. It was all for Aquitaine.
Savor the Moment raced by the milling Ajaxian squadron, a knot of five sloops in orbit above an equatorial sea. Had Savor the Moment been heading out to space at a different angle, they would never have bothered trying to give chase. The distance between them would have been too great. They would never have caught up to him to launch even a missile.
The turn had been costly. Despite the boost to velocity, Pran was passing so close that the hunting instincts of the DN sloops were awakened. They smelled their prey, and broke orbit to pursue.
This was both good and bad from Pran's perspective. Good, in that this was what his mission had been intended to achieve, apart from the delivery of the supplies that he had just dropped. Bad, in that his little ship with a flimsy shield and no weapons was being chased by five missile-carrying death machines. As he watched the red icons on his holo gain on Savor the Moment, he decided that this was more bad than good.
It all depended on how much the Jaxers wanted to take him out. For the sake of the mission, he needed them to try to destroy his ship. That was why he couldn't get too far ahead of his pursuers, or else they might give up the chase. He couldn't let them get too close, either, or they would debris field his ship in no time, and that wouldn't be helpful to the mission. It would also be very bad for him and his crew. So Pran was pushing his engines hard, but not maxing them out. He had to stick to the plan.
He was lucky that they hadn't decided to expend a missile or two on him. A big Firebird antiship missile would have been the only munition that might have caught him at this range, and they were too expensive to use against a civilian cargo ship. Instead, they were using their guns.
Plasma bolts flew past his ship, bright blue-white streaks brushed hastily over a starry field. The Ajaxians were still too far away for their shots to be made with any accuracy. At this distance, still over twenty thousand kilometers, even the smallest error in aim would cause a shot to miss its target by a kilometer or more.
Nonetheless, they were gaining on Savor the Moment. The DN sloops were doing hard burns, maximum acceleration, and would come within a range in under thirty minutes, and their shots would be harder to avoid.
Pran checked the holo. His ship was being chased by four red icons, but there was no sign of the support that he had been promised. He chose to believe that they were hiding so well that his scanners had no chance to detect them. He decided that it was better that way. If he could see them, then so could the Jaxers, and that would also mean that his friends weren't the pros they were cracked up to be.
*****
Ten minutes passed. The sloops were in range now where their guns were missing by only a little bit. Some plasma shots were coming within two hundred meters of Savor the Moment, and there were many more of them. All four sloops had opened up, with the trailing three being fed targeting data by the lead ship. One was bound to get lucky.
"If they're going to make a move, they ought to do it soon. The Jaxers won't be missing us at all inside five minutes," Urant said.
"They're around, just you wait." That's what I hope, thought Pran.
"We’re being hailed, skipper," Urant said.
"I'm shocked they want to talk. Maybe it will buy us some time. Put it through."
Lieutenant Commander Hens Wells was the epitome of an Ajaxian naval officer. Sneering, haughty, and certain of his superiority over all lesser mortals. Pran had seen his kind for most of his life, before they'd been driven out of Aquitaine. Such men didn't have conversations. They made demands. They gave orders.
"You will cut your engines and prepare to be boarded," Wells stated matter-of-factly within seconds of his image resolving on the forward screen.
"Hello to you too. How can I help you?"
"Do not get cute with me," Wells snarled. "You will reduce your velocity and allow us to board. You are within gun range." To emphasize this point a bolt of roiling particles raced past Savor the Moment. “Or you will be destroyed."
"Cut audiovisual," Pran ordered.
"That missed by just forty meters, skipper," Urant said. "They've got us."
"If they can hit us then why haven't they taken us out yet? They haven't hesitated before."
Urant smirked. "Maybe the Jaxers have turned over a new leaf and want to be more merciful."
"Fat chance of that." Where are you guys?
“Back on screen,” Pran ordered.
"Sorry for the delay, lieutenant commander," Pran said once the link had been reestablished. "That last shot of yours put our comms into an electromagnetic funk and we lost contact. So what guarantees do I have that you won't space us once you board?"
Wells appeared taken aback by the question. Could he really not be aware of Ajax's reputation?
"You have my word as an officer that you will not be harmed," he said after a long pause.
"I see. I recall that when you guys were lording it over Aquitaine some years back that your word couldn't be trusted in the best of times. So, if you don't mind, can you give me any better guarantee? One I could trust?" What's so important about this ship that they won't destroy us? Ajax has never been shy about using deadly force.
"Cut the link again," Pran whispered. Urant complied, and Wells' face disappeared from the screen.
"Evasive maneuvers!"
In a civilian spacecraft, no matter how fast, 'evasive maneuvers' were difficult to accomplish. Commercial ships were meant to go from point A to point B. They were not built to dodge cannon fire. Urant gamely tried to weave Savor the Moment side to side around an imaginary slalom. The fire from the DN sloops actually slowed, despite the closing range between the hunter and the hunted.
"They could have had us already, skipper," Urant confessed as he put Savor the Moment into anot
her turn. "Their aim isn't that bad that they couldn't have hit us by now."
"They want to capture this ship, not destroy it," Pran guessed.
"Our protectors should have been protecting us by now," Urant said.
"They are out there somewhere," promised Pran.
"We're being hailed again, skipper."
"This is getting boring, but we can spare the time. Put it through."
The angry face of Lieutenant Commander Wells resolved on the vidscreen. "This game has gone on long enough. Shut down your engines and prepare to be boarded. Failure to comply will result in your destruction."
Obnoxious SOB, thought Pran. Still, it didn't add up. What does he want with this ship?
"We can't fight, and we can't run away,” Pran said. “There's nothing we can do to stop them from boarding. Once aboard they'll kill us and take the ship. I won't let them do either. Once they board, I'm scuttling the ship."
Urant responded with a grim nod. "Aye, skipper."
Warning klaxons sounded, bellowing and urgent. "Displacement bubble forming!" Urant shouted. “Three hundred klicks astern!"
"Our bodyguard has arrived! About time!"
Urant shook his head. "Negative, skipper! The bubble has failed to stabilize. Decohering. It's gone."
"What?"
"It was there one second, gone the next."
"Damn!"
The DN ships had spotted the displacement bubble too. The four ships had withdrawn into a defensive huddle, allowing some distance to grow behind between them and Savor the Moment.
Two shots that flared past the freighter reminded Pran that they had not forgotten about him.
"Scuttling protocol ready to initiate," Urant said.
For a moment, Pran had allowed himself to hope that it wouldn't be necessary. It was. There were two basic ways that a ship could be scuttled. A few ships came equipped with internal explosive charges that could tear apart a ship. Military ships most often had these. There were often times when the captain of a warship might need to ensure the destruction of just portions of his vessel. This could arise in the midst of a boarding by hostile forces. Useless sections of a damaged ship might also need to be jettisoned to let the healthy portion survive.
Civilian craft, such as Savor the Moment, didn't have such things. For ships such as her, that was an unnecessary cost that few owners were willing to bear, especially when the time-honored expedient of a reactor blow was available.
Causing a fusion reactor to self-destruct was at once both a simple thing and a difficult task. If one dropped the electromagnetic containment fields that surrounded the fusing nuclei in the heart of the reactor, while at the same time force-feeding it fuel, an explosion certain to reduce the ship to tiny fragments was the result. Simple.
The dropping of the containment field around the fusion reaction, however, was something that in almost all cases was not desirable, so there were multiple redundancies and built-in safeguards to prevent such a thing from happening by accident. It wouldn't do for an interstellar hauler to go kaboom inside an orbital, or while carrying a valuable cargo. Fusion reactors had been made extremely safe because insurance companies and the crews who flew them had demanded it. Difficult.
But there were bound to be times when a ship had to be destroyed utterly. Pran recalled that this had been such an unwelcome topic of discussion that his first employer, Lutece Lines, had never broached the topic aloud, instead merely referring obliquely to the appropriate section in the employee manual where it was euphemistically labeled a matter 'last resort.'
'Last Resort' had arrived. The Jaxers rarely took prisoners, and you'd probably rather be dead than fall into their clutches. Their occupation of Aquitaine had been a hundred-year nightmare. . .
Blowing up a fusion reactor required the assent of the ship's captain and his first officer. There then followed the input of several codes that had to be confirmed three times before the safeties that protected a powerplant from a runaway reaction could be taken down.
"They've launched boarding boats," Urant noted. The screen showed two red icons making their way toward Savor the Moment. "Probably ten armsmen between them."
There was no chance of fighting it out, even if Pran had been so inclined. Besides himself there were only three other crewmen. Urant, who doubled as the ship's engineer; Fyodor Simonetti, the ship's loading specialist, who also doubled as the navigator, and Clarence Bjorn, the ship's mechanic, who doubled as the medical officer. It was a small crew. . .
With certain death approaching, Pran began doing what he had always promised himself that he wouldn't when his end neared, and that was to indulge in a sentimental reverie about his life. He'd never been one to look back, over his shoulder, to the past, and ask what he might have done differently, what he should have done, what he wished he had done.
He was doing that now.
His happiest years, he decided, were when he had gotten his first ship, the Tabitha, and began doing the hauls between the moons of the gas giant Maxime. He had been young, and still full of hope. It was right after the expulsion of the Jaxers, and he was running his own route hauler free of the taxes and periodic confiscations that had been every freight carrier's lot underneath the Ajaxian boot. There were fifty-three moons in the Maximian subsystem, plus five orbitals. He picked up water from the planetary ice rings, which he brought back to the thirsty moons, on and on, until he had made a fortune.
With this money in hand, he had sold Tabitha and then purchased the Lightning Bolt, the fastest ship he'd ever come across. When competition grew too fierce around Maxime, he left and set up his new line around the gas giant Hercule. Hercule was much further from the primary than was Maxime. If the Maximian subsystem seemed like the boonies, then Hercule was the back of beyond. Pran's runs between Hercule's forty-three moons and two orbitals were even more lucrative than those around Maxime. He specialized in cryogenic gas transport, which was the basis of the Herculean economy and made everything else there possible. There wasn't a single restaurant, gravcar dealership, coffeehouse, or beauty parlor that didn't owe its existence to the gas recovery business. He made so much money that he was able to buy back Tabitha, pick up another ship, the Bargain Hunter, and put together a new shipping company, On Time Delivery Corp. These vessels spent the next three years making runs from one world to the next.
Urant had been with him in those days. They worked well together, which in the realm of freighter jocks making lengthy runs between moons, with only one, two, or maybe three other people for company, meant they rarely wanted to kill each other.
The years around Hercule should have been the best of his life, Pran believed, and they had been.
Only for a time. . .
Pran had met her on the Dryden orbital. Cara was a singer, and very beautiful. He could not sing, and was not beautiful. He was also very lonely. She had more than enough attention from other men, and it surprised him a bit when she responded positively to his overtures. She had plenty of her own money, so he didn't think that his wealth had been the reason. He decided that she liked him for himself, much though he found that hard to believe. He had just entered middle age, and she was a knockout, so they were a couple the likes of which you rarely saw together, at least not where true love existed.
But she had loved him, and he had been madly in love with her. They were to be married in six months time, when she had fallen ill, and died. It was so sudden, so fast, that it took him weeks to accept that she was gone. The doctors said it was a congenital heart defect that claimed her. There was nothing they could have done. There was nothing anyone could have done.
Looking back, these happiest years of Pran's life were tempered by the memory of Cara's tragic passing. He renamed Lightning Bolt to Savor the Moment to remind him to enjoy what he had right then and there. It might not last.
The grieving process had lasted longer than Pran had expected. He'd always thought of himself as a tough guy, wise to the ways of the galaxy, and none too
emotional.
He was a wreck for weeks after Cara died. He threw himself into his work, to take his mind off of his loss, but that made him feel worse. It was like he was trying to forget her by not paying attention to his feelings. In time, he came to grips with his pain. He broke down sobbing one morning, as he was shaving in his cabin. He had not allowed himself the benefit of the emotions that he had for her, and had refused to acknowledge how much he hurt, until then.
His business prospered. On Time grew to include five ships, and he took back his routes around Maxime. Though the bulk of the population of Aquitaine lived on the inner planets, closer to the sun, the outer worlds were heavily populated enough to support multiple shipping lines, and make his concern the second-largest in the entire star system. Now he was going to die. He wondered if he would see Cara again, on the other side of wherever this life was located.
"Ready to initiate countdown," Urant said. "We had a good go of it."
"That we did." Five successful blockade runs to Pessac. That was two more than anyone else had made.
"Wait for the boats to come close. We'll take some of those Jaxer bastards down with us."
"Aye, skipper."
Urant was silent for a few moments. "One klick."
"Sixty second countdown," Pran said. "Give them time to attach themselves to the hull."
The boats settled on the port and starboard sides, extending boarding bridges that connected to Savor the Moment’s airlocks. Pran heard the detonations of the explosive charges that blew in the outer doors as muffled thuds.
"Start countdown."
"Aye, skipper."
The shipbrain delivered its warning. "EMERGENCY SELF-DESTRUCT INITIATED. SIXTY SECONDS. EXIT CRAFT IMMEDIATELY."
"Shut that off."
Urant cut the warning announcement.
"That's better."
As much as he loved his ship, Pran had no wish for Savvy’s atonal machine voice to be the last thing he heard.
"Play a waltz," he ordered the shipbrain. “Might as well go out listening to something classy.”
"Please specify era," requested Savvy. "There are forty-six eras and ninety-two sub-eras from which to choose.”
The Ajax Incursion Page 11
