Wings of Pegasus

by Jay Allan

  He stood up and walked toward the center of the room, coming out from behind the pile of boxes. A moment later, two Foudre Rouge walked in, followed by Louis Moreau.

  “Louis, I’m damned glad it’s you. Whatever this place is, it’s far from completely dead. I don’t know what else is prowling around, but I’ve got a feeling we can use all the firepower we can get.”

  “It looks like you’ve found something. Boxed up parts? Electronics, maybe? This could be a massive discoveries, maybe the biggest ever.”

  “Maybe. We just started looking through all of this. The crates are locked. We could blast them open, but that might damage the contents. We’re working on hacking our way in. But getting another team working on them can only speed things up.” A pause. “And we need to send out an exploration party. We’ve got to find the reactor core or some other system we can sabotage. We take everything we can get out of here…but our orders were clear. When we leave, we destroy this place, before the Confeds can get here. That directive came from the top, from Gaston Villieneuve himself.”

  “Understood.” Moreau was technically at the same rank as Caron, but the leader of the first team was the senior operative, and the overall commander on site. “Any word from the third team? They’ve got the warhead.”

  Caron sighed. “No. I was about to ask you the same thing. They should have made contact with you shortly after you landed. If they don’t show, we’ve got a problem. Without that warhead, we’ve really got to find the reactor and sabotage it. Maybe we’re lucky in a way that this place is still somewhat operative. The power generation system has to be at least partially functional, and that’s our best bet now. Nothing else we’ve got besides that warhead is powerful enough to take this whole place out…and I for one am not going back and telling Gaston Villieneuve we left the place intact and ran home.”

  Moreau just nodded. The expression on his face adequately communicated his complete agreement. Villieneuve was the head of Sector Nine, and if he was a bit less prone to random violence and cruelty than his immediate predecessors had been, his utter intolerance for failure was well known. The cells under Sector Nine headquarters were legendary. Caron had been there a number of times, on the side of the inquisitors. He had no desire to experience them from the other perspective.

  “Okay…let’s split your people up. Put together a team to find the reactor and report back here with its location. And send a pair of Foudre Rouge out to patrol, and supplement my pickets. If they encounter any security bots or other problems, they are to withdraw and report at once.”

  Moreau nodded again, clearly trying to hide his resentment at having to take Caron’s orders. “Yes, sir.” The tone almost hid Moreau’s true thoughts.

  Almost.

  Caron understood his comrade’s point of view, but he was still defensive of his seniority on the mission. Sector Nine’s hierarchy was built almost entirely around the naked pursuit of power. Every operative was focused the those on the next rung, ready to move up, whatever that took. Whether it was the promotion of senior agent that opened a spot…or something darker…was generally of little concern. Outright mutiny was out of the question, of course. That was a good way to land in one of those cells. But Caron had no doubt Moreau would be less than heartbroken to see him become a casualty of the operation…and to return in the senior position to deliver the captured artifacts, along with news that the facility had been destroyed.

  He had to direct the mission…but he also had to watch his back.

  “Choose your teams, and order the rest of your people to join mine in searching these crates.” Caron let a bit of his arrogance slip out, a brush back of sorts targeted toward the resentment he’d heard in his subordinate’s voice. It was counterproductive, perhaps, at least in some ways, but he wasn’t about to allow Moreau to start thinking they were partners in the mission.

  “Yes, Nicolas. I’ll see to it immediately.” Moreau sounded slightly chastised…but still resentful. He turned and walked back across the room, shouting out commands to his people. Half a minute later, four Foudre Rouge moved toward the single door on the far side of the room. It had been opened, but the corridor beyond hadn’t yet been scouted, at least not past twenty meters or so to confirm it was unoccupied. The best data the portable scanners had been able to gather in the imperial alloy clad rooms and hallways, suggested energy output in that direction.

  A moment later, two more Foudre Rouge from the second team walked toward the original entry door, weapons at the ready. Caron wasn’t sure if there were anymore threats behind them, but he’d left plenty of unexplored corridors, and he felt better with a second pair of Foudre Rouge covering the rear.

  The entire place gave him the creeps, and he couldn’t wait until his people were back on their ship, and headed toward Phantasia. He knew almost everything in the facility was priceless, one irreplaceable artifact after another. But he would be happy with enough stashed in the hold to call the mission a success. The sooner he was back in Union space, the better he would feel, and if that meant blowing a chunk of mankind’s lost legacy to atoms, so be it.

  * * *

  “No word, Commander. Not from any of the landers. The scanner buoys haven’t picked up any signals since the strange…detonation. Of course, at two kilometers depth, we wouldn’t pick up normal operations, or even combat.”

  “Keep scanning. I want continuous updates.” Boucher sat in her chair, telling herself for the tenth time, the enemy ship had been destroyed, that the detonation her scans had picked up had been the vessel’s reactor losing containment. But she wasn’t buying it, not even from herself. The energy profile wasn’t quite right, the radiation patterns…off. It looked more like a warhead to her, a big one. Where would some Badlands prospector have gotten two nukes like that?

  “Yes, Commander. All scanner buoys sending constant data streams. If anything happens down there, we’ll know about it.”

  Boucher nodded. She didn’t have any rational concerns. She’d sent three teams down, ten agents in total, plus thirty-one Foudre Rouge. It was more than enough to deal with any Badlands adventurers. Her people had numbers, and they had the advantage in armament, too. The lack of a report didn’t mean anything, not yet, at least.

  And, even if there was some kind of trouble she couldn’t specify, if through some miracle that ship had survived, if its tiny crew somehow defeated five times their number of fully-armed Foudre Rouge and three landing craft…they wouldn’t stand a chance against Phantasia. Her ship was nearly as large as a light frigate, and its armament vastly outclassed the popguns mounted on any prospector’s ship. The Confeds had slipped past her, gotten lucky. But if they weren’t dead already, she would finish them as soon as they tried to escape.

  But the detonations still bothered her. She was even more convinced that could only have been a warhead of some kind…a military grade one. And that kept her on edge. Whatever she faced—perhaps was still facing—it was no normal adventurer’s ship. It was something special, and it packed more power than she’d expected to face. Those warheads were of particular concern.

  Especially if that ship has more of them…

  She resisted the realization that Phantasia itself could be in danger, but it crept around the edge of her thoughts anyway, pushing and pushing with each hour that passed with no word from her people.

  “I want all scanners checked every thirty minutes. Full diagnostics. I want them functioning at one hundred percent.” She paused, staring at the main screen.

  If that Confed ship is still down there, I want targeting on it before its hull dries off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Free Trader Pegasus

  Somewhere in the Endless Sea

  Planet Aquellus, Olystra III

  Year 302 AC

  The flash on the screen had lasted only an instant, Pegasus’s damaged sensors showing little more than an undefined energy surge. But to Andi, it was confirmation of what she’d feared for the last half minute.<
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  The second enemy ship had managed to lift off from the ledge, and now, it had fired at her vessel. Any thoughts of catching both Union landers idle was gone. Pegasus faced a real fight.

  The shot had gone wide, by a considerable margin, though her vessel’s battered sensor suite couldn’t provide more than a wide and almost meaningless range of numbers. The enemy laser had accomplished little save to heat the normally frigid deep sea water to the vapor point, the heat intense enough to overcome even the immense pressure of more than two kilometers of depth to create a wild vortex of air bubbles rising steadily toward the surface.

  It did one more thing. A billowing shafts of roiling steam traced the laser’s path…and it showed the way back to the enemy ship.

  “Barret…the steam.” Pegasus’s scanners were still searching for the enemy ship, but that last shot had provided at least a line back to its approximate location. It was far from precise, but it was something, and to a skilled and experience gunner like Barret, perhaps something significant. Eyeballing a shot was almost impossible in space combat, where the distances involved where immense, but the current fight wasn’t in the vast vacuum of space, it was deep under the oceans of Aquellus. Andi knew Pegasus’s enemy was no more than a kilometer or two away, ranges that seemed almost gibberish to her space honed sensibilities.

  Pegasus’s savaged scanners hadn’t yet detected the target’s location, but the effect of the vessel’s laser shot, combined with its engine output on the surrounding ocean, were creating a rough roadmap to follow.

  “I’m on it…but they’re moving, too. I’m tracking their engine output, trying to get some kind of fix. But there’s still a lot of guesswork in this, Andi.” Barret was silent for a few seconds, then he added, “A lot of guesswork.”

  Andi moved her hand on her own controls, increasing the thrust slightly, bringing Pegasus around toward her best guess at the enemy’s location. It was guesswork for her as well, but it was all she had. She glanced down at the AI, but she knew it would be of limited use in the current fight. Fighting underwater was too different from the space combat for which it had been programmed. She’d monitor the data, review the recommendations from the computer, but she knew in the end, this fight was going to be won on instinct, on raw focus and determination.

  She tapped the controls again, her eyes moving from her own screen to the main display, looking for something, anything to give her a better idea where the enemy ship was…and where it was heading. There were some new readings, almost certainly the result of the enemy’s maneuver, of the pilot in that thing doing just what she herself was, struggling to bring that ship to bear, to get a another shot at Pegasus. To destroy her ship before she could do the same to them.

  Another laser blast ripped by, closer this time. Andi recoiled from the screen, surprised by the flash even as she’d expected it.

  That was too damned close…

  She pulled up all the scanners could give her, every reading, every partial stream of data. The line of the shot traced back again, a long column of boiling seawater, bubbling up, before the frigid temperatures all around condensed it and stopped the upward flow, more than a kilometer short of the surface.

  But it was more than a lesson in underwater thermodynamics. It gave her another line on the enemy ship…and a chance to calculate the vessel’s speed and vector. The kind of wild evasive maneuvers so crucial to space combat were impossible in the ocean depths, or nearly so. The warring vessels were cumbersome, their moves slow, predictable. Whichever ship could locate the other first would almost certainly win the battle.

  Andi was determined that would be Pegasus. Her stubbornness had taken her far, from the misery of the gut to ownership of her own spaceship. She was relying on it again, on her outright refusal to lose.

  “Barret…wait to fire until you feel you have a good shot…a really good shot.” It was difficult, almost unbearable, to endure enemy fire without returning it, to sit there hoping against hope that the vessel attacking you didn’t score a hit. But Andi had a gambler’s mind, and she grasped the odds with practiced skill. Wild shots were a poor trade, a tiny chance of scoring a lucky hit, purchased at the price of giving the enemy real targeting data. It was worth forgoing three or four ten percent chances of success, in return for one sixty or seventy percent shot.

  The fact that the enemy presumably had fully functional scanners only made it more imperative not to give them any further advantages by giving them missed shots to track Pegasus, even as Andi and Barret were using their own to develop their attack.

  “I’m working on a fix, Andi.” A pause, then Pegasus’s gunner continued nervously, “One more shot from them, and I think I can get solid coordinates.” Barret’s voice was hoarse, the stress he was feeling evident in every word.

  Andi understood the tension. She felt it herself. Sitting there, waiting for the enemy to shoot again, it went against every natural instinct she had. She had always been one to act, to seize the initiative.

  But she knew waiting—gambling that the enemy missed again—was the right move. So did Barret.

  That didn’t make it any easier. She shifted around in her seat, pawing almost unconsciously at the harness holding her in place. Andi had faced danger her entire life, she’d fought her first battle to the death at an age when most children in the Confederation were still in school. She didn’t back down from fights, no matter how strong, how tough the enemy.

  Sitting there and doing nothing was harder for her than any combat, any struggle.

  Pegasus’s bridge was almost eerily quiet, the faint hum of the reactor in the distance almost inaudible next to the sound of her own breathing. She fought a war with herself, a desperate battle to hold back the order she longed to give, to command Barret to fire before the enemy had another chance to finish them. But she held firm. She knew what they had to do.

  Her mind warred with itself anyway, and shouts flew back and force inside her head, grim warnings that her maneuvers had given the enemy targeting data they needed, that even holding fire was no guarantee the Union spacer at the gun controls out there couldn’t score the deadly hit he sought. Pegasus was a tough ship, but she was damaged, too, and Andi had very little idea how the water pressure pouring in from a serious hull breach would compare to the vacuum of space. Gregor had managed to patch them all so far, but those were small gashes in the hull. A direct hit would be far more serious…and deadly. Space sucked out anything—and anyone—not secured, and it necessitated survival gear if the crew was to survive. But the water was a force on its own. It wouldn’t just flood Pegasus, and short out every exposed electrical system. It would tear her ship apart from the inside. It was a massive force amplifier, and it made the first hit even more important than it was in space combat.

  It very probably made the first direct hit the last hit as well. The killing shot.

  She waited, concentrating on her breathing, trying to maintain a cold focus. It was far more difficult, often, to patiently pursue the right course. Wild, impulsive action at least gave the feeling of doing something…even if it was mostly illusory.

  She nudged the controls again, tracking the enemy ship as well as she could, even as Barret was doing the same with the gunnery station. Her comrade was silent, the intensity of his concentration clear to see in the brittle tension gripping his body. Andi almost spoke three or four times, words of encouragement or suggestions on targeting, but she realized the best thing she could do for Barret was to leave him alone.

  The time passed with agonizing slowness, and for an instant, Andi wondered if the enemy had fled instead of continuing the fight. That would be dangerous, too, and the idea of an enemy ship running around loose in the open sea was daunting. At the very least, it would make landing a deadly dangerous course of action, leaving Pegasus a sitting duck if the Union vessel returned.

  Assuming, of course, she could land the ship on the now debris strewn platform.

  She pushed the thought aside, discarded
the notion that the enemy had run. She reminded herself of Sector Nine’s policies regarding failure, a legend about the spy agency she had found, in her own limited experience, to be entirely true. Andi was vengeful against her enemies, and merciless at times as well. But the idea of torturing and killing her own people for failing at a task…it was unthinkable to her.

  She saw the utility in it, perhaps. Merciless brutality sometimes created a kind of pseudo courage, and she suspected the realization that the only other options were to face a horrible death at home, or to remain forever hiding in the haunted Badlands, made a heads up fight with Pegasus seem like a good choice.

  From that perspective, it was. It was exactly what she would do in her enemy’s place.

  Her eyes caught the flash even before her thoughts processed it. Her first realization was, it had been close. The scanner report confirmed that a second later.

  The beam had come within eighty meters of Pegasus.

  Whoever is handling the gun on that thing knows his shit. Come on, Barret…this may be our last chance…

  She turned and looked at her comrade, silent as her eyes bored into the back of his head. She could see his hands tight around the controls, moving slowly, deliberately, to adjust the shot she knew was coming, but seemed to be taking forever.

  Her own hands balled up into fists again, and she struggled to maintain her deliberate breathing. She glanced back at her screen, checking Pegasus’s position, and confirming to herself there was nothing further she could do to help Barret. Her fate—the fate of everyone aboard the ship—was in the gunner’s hands. The enemy had come close, too close, with that last shot, and if Barret missed, if they gave the enemy the additional location data the laser pulse would provide, she had no doubt the next attack would be a hit.

  And under two kilometers of water, any significant damage to the hull would likely finish Pegasus…and all her people.

  Her eyes darted to Barret’s hand, drawn by the slightest visible motion. Her mind processed the data her eyes provided, and came to its conclusion an instant later. Barret was about to fire.