by Daniel Gibbs
Some he considered reasonable. Most he thought were inane or petty. A few were even ridiculous. Nevertheless, he kept his smile on as they came. When it looked like they were done, Vitorino turned to the Speaker and asked, "May I have the floor, Mister Speaker? I wish to make a statement."
"The Assembly recognizes Minister Vitorino," Acosta remarked with solemnity.
"I thank the Assembly for its patience and time. I will not occupy more of it," Vitorino said. "I only wish to impress upon you the value and need of this agreement. The galaxy is dangerous these days, and trade is getting more difficult. If we wish to continue thriving, we need to work with other worlds, other systems, even governments like the League. Whatever we think of their domestic politics, and I have my own qualms about them, they are not going to disappear because we wish it. They're a fact of life, and we should be willing to extend the hand of friendship to them." As he spoke those words, his voice carried through the assembly, aided by both the microphone and the carefully-designed acoustics of the chamber. He was gratified to see that many were considering his words. It was clear to all he hoped to convince all of them to side with the new treaty.
He took a quick swig of water to wet his throat and glanced back toward his digital reader to continue his statement.
That was when the bombs went off.
33
The Shadow Wolf emerged from the third wormhole it'd generated since leaving Trinidad Station. It arrived in an uninhabited system, TR-778, with an A2 star. Piper had the watch with Brigitte and Felix. She looked over the holotank display of the course she'd plotted and noted with satisfaction that the next jump would bring them to Lusitania and relative safety.
She remembered herself and directed a look to the helm. "Well done, Brig," she said. "That was a textbook wormhole entry."
"Thanks, Piper," Brigitte replied, her tone chipper. She didn't fly the ship often, given the usual piloting rotation was Cera, Felix, and Piper herself, and Vidia was usually fourth. The chance to do so was both daunting and a little fun. "Think I'll work into the rotation?"
Piper smiled at that. "We'll see. We're pretty well covered on the helm, after all."
"Always good to have options," Felix added from the operations seat. "Just in case of emergencies."
"Speaking of the possibility…" Piper looked back to the holotank. "Anything we should be worried about?"
"Got a contact a few hours out," Felix said. "They'll cross our path in two hours at current course and speed. It looks like a passenger liner. Probably running the New Kerala-Lusitania route." Felix looked at Piper with a concerned look on his face. "Although given the circumstances, we can't be too careful."
"We'll adjust course slightly. But not too much; otherwise, we may scare them." Piper glanced at the holotank and ran the calculations through her mind for a moment. "Brigitte, alter heading by zero-zero-zero mark positive zero-zero-one." It was only a one-degree course change, but for Brigitte's education, Piper used the full term.
"One degree angle up. Right." Brigitte did so.
"At this distance and these speeds, that'll keep them a safe distance, and it'll look like we're just being courteous," Piper reasoned aloud.
"Works for me," said Felix.
They went silent for some time, each going over their thoughts while attending to the duties of their respective stations. The minutes became an hour. As they approached an hour and a half, Piper glanced to the holotank, which was showing the incoming contact. Something about the range didn't sit right with her. She checked, and it looked like the ship wasn't quite going to pass by, but it was closer than she'd intended.
Her first impulse was to assume she'd just miscalculated slightly. Her first full thought didn't dismiss that idea so much as consider what it meant if she hadn't. Perhaps the incoming liner had also altered course. That made her wonder why. Changing position in-system between jumps was common in these systems, if only to reduce the risk of being motionless in a pirate ambush, but she couldn't think of why the liner would reduce the distance between them.
"Felix, what do you make of this?" she asked.
Felix looked up from his short-range sensors, more concerned with sudden arriving wormholes, and checked the holotank. "They're a bit closer than they ought to be," he said. "What's up with that?"
"I don't know. Think I should raise them and ask if anything's wrong?"
"If they're looking for us, it'd just give away they've found us," Felix said. "Let's see how interested they are."
"Right. Brigitte, adjust course, three-five-seven mark three-five-nine."
"Right." Brigitte put her hands on the control wheel, opting for manual course correction over inputting it into the thruster systems. The turn and push of the wheel shifted the Shadow Wolf's course three degrees to port and one "downward" on the bow. "Course changed."
"Time to jump?" Piper asked, even though she knew the answer: at least three more hours, given the delicate nature of their drives since the double-jump into Trinidad.
"Pieter's counter shows two hundred minutes," was the reply from Brigitte.
"Right." Piper checked the course and speed of both ships. As things stood, the liner would come closest to them in thirty-three minutes at its current course and speed, being just outside of the engagement range of the plasma cannons. Close enough for missiles, but at that range, our auto-turrets can shoot them down, she thought. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid," she admitted to the others.
"It's not paranoia if you know someone's out to get you," Felix pointed out.
"Right."
Time continued, and the tracks of the ships didn't change. Piper calculated the moment to being near each other over and over, with the time falling below half an hour to a quarter of one. There was no sign of a further course alteration by the other ship.
"Power spike," Felix said, his voice tight and alert.
"They're increasing speed?" Piper's heart went from the solid, strong pounding of before to a more frenetic pace.
"Yes." Felix was intent on his instruments. "Acceleration profile is picking up and… wormhole forming. They're jumping."
Just like that, the tension left the bridge. They were alone in the star system again. Piper let out a breath and urged her heart to slow to a more normal rate. "This sucks," she said.
"Like being back on a war patrol." Felix turned to her and grinned. "I felt like I was back in my days as a TAO on the Epaminondas."
His board beeped.
A chill spread through Piper while Felix's head snapped back around. "Another wormhole signature," he said. "Two hundred thousand kilometers."
That was somewhat close, engagement range, but not "on top of us" close. Piper tapped a button on the command chair that would automatically trigger the liquid crystal display built into the forward wall of the bridge, directing it to show the magnified camera feed from that direction.
The swirling wormhole was still open, and a ship emerged. It was a liner like the other, painted green and blue from the livery of a liner company. Piper identified it tentatively as a Holden-Nagata model like the Shadow Wolf, a larger Mark V passenger liner body.
After a few seconds, a warning flagged in her mind. The profile wasn't quite right. The surface wasn't as smooth as the model was meant to have. The profile was lumpy, ugly, as if things had been bolted to the hull. On the bow, a long two-pronged device that made her think of the jaws of an antlion was starting to point their way.
Piper's eyes widened. "Evasive action! Brigitte, evasive…"
Cerulean lightning crackled from the prongs and crossed the distance. The lightning seemed to fill the screen, lighting up the bridge.
Then it was gone, and the three were plunged into pitch blackness.
On the bridge of the repurposed Hathaway Clipper, Commander An Rong Zhung watched through intent eyes as the electromagnetic pulse rippled over the hauler on the converted liner's internal screen. It crackled like lightning as it traveled the length of the ship. The run
ning lights went out, and, at the end, the engines on the target vessel died as well.
At a station beside her, Lieutenant Hakao Saratov looked up. "Target vessel disabled, Commander," he said, his English accented with a hint of an accent from the Russo-Japanese colony world of Toyohara.
"Excellent work," she said. She directed that mostly to the ship's astrogator and helmsman, who'd used the incoming data from the probe they'd left in-system to jump into firing range of the EMP cannon. "Bring us into range. Ready the grapplers."
"Aye aye, ma'am."
Another officer, this one European in look and with a Scandinavian accent, spoke up from beside her. "The Marines are ready to go over at your command, Commander."
"When we're in range," she replied. A small smile came to her. "No need to waste fuel when they can't run."
Henry was woken up by the banging on his door. The first sign that something was wrong came when the light didn't come on at his command. The second sign was that he was lying on nothingness. He was half a meter above his bed, in fact, showing that the gravity was down. He immediately reached down and grabbed the surface of the bed, gently pulling to bring himself back into contact with it.
In the dark, he scrambled instinctively for two things: his Danfield-Colt pistol and his commlink, which proved his only source of light. Zero-G training kicked in, and he used a basic kick-off to push himself to his door, where a grip on the side allowed him to prevent himself from floating away. The door didn't respond to his pressing the open key beside it, telling him the ship was suffering a severe power loss. He reached for the automatic release on the door's privacy lock, essentially turning it into a sliding door that a moment's effort moved out of the way. As he'd expected and dreaded, the main corridor of the ship was pitch black as well.
A light shined in his face. He turned to it and saw Felix's face, barely visible at the edge of the light. "It's bad, Jim," he said. Henry could see Felix was gripping the bar along the upper wall of the corridor for zero-G use.
"What happened?"
"A ship jumped two hundred thousand kilometers out. Before we could do anything, it fired some type of EMP gun. The whole ship went dark." Felix's voice was deceptively calm. He knew full well the stakes they were facing.
"That's what the League did to the Kensington Star," Henry said. "Dammit. Do we know what's going on in engineering?"
"Brigitte's heading there now," Felix said. "Piper's getting her gun and she'll send Cera back to the bridge." He took Henry's hand and pressed a flashlight into it. "I'm doing flashlight and softsuit patrol."
"Keep it up. Get everyone armed too." Even as he said that, Henry didn't see what it mattered. Without internal comms, the League could blow its way into any of the airlocks, or even breach through the hull, and they wouldn't know where until they heard the blast. Holding the ship against League Marines would be the fight of their lives in ordinary circumstances. Doing it like this, with no communication across the ship, was a hopeless cause.
No. Don't let the fear take you, Henry admonished himself even as he made his way to his office. Make them earn it. The layout there was so familiar to him, he didn't need the flashlight to get the family rifle from the wall. He checked it and was relieved to see the EMP, whatever it was, hadn't disabled the rifle. The same was true for his pistol, which he slipped into the holster on his hip, thankful that he'd lain down dressed and ready.
Once back in the corridor, he nearly bumped into Cera as she glided by him. She squinted as the beam of his flashlight played over her face. "Ah, Cap'n, please don't blind me. I'm awake, for Christ's sake."
"Sorry." He lowered it. "Didn't see you coming."
"Aye, that's the problem, isn't it?" With her lilt going full force, "isn't it" sounded like "iddinit." "If Pieter an' th' new girl can get power back, I'll be ready t' burn everythin' we've got."
"Good." He pulled himself to the side and let her head to the bridge. With flashlight in hand, he journeyed down the hall. Moving through zero-G was always tricky. It was something you had to train for, adapt to. Henry mused that the earliest generations of space-going humans would have laughed at him over needing to deliberately think through the movements they could do in their sleep.
The next figure to cross his flashlight beam was Miri as she pulled herself from her quarters. "It's them," she said.
"Yeah."
Miri nodded. "I'd offer myself, but… they'll take all of you anyway. They probably have a camp ready."
"We're not going," Henry said, his tone grim.
"Right." She nodded. "Better to die fighting. Although I'm going to die anyway."
Henry almost told her that might not happen, but he needed to get to engineering. He heard Miri fall in behind him for the rest of the trip. Inside engineering, only a couple of light beams were visible, both at a supply locker. "Pieter, Samina?"
"We're here," Samina replied. Henry heard a familiar shakiness in her voice and realized she had it coming from both directions; this was her first time facing such a crisis as a full crew member of any ship, but she'd seen her family's ship wrecked by pirates as a younger girl. "Just… just trying to figure out what happened."
"It's a weapon," Miri said from behind Henry. "They used it on the Kensington Star. We lost all systems; they only got the lights working again after they took our ship."
"It was an EMP burst. It overloaded all of our active electronics, blew some of the fuses." Pieter's accent was thickening again, his usual sign of stress. "I've got replacements for vital systems, but we'll need to land."
"We've got what's probably a League-held ship two hundred thousand klicks away," Henry said. "How long until we've got thrust and the Lawrence drive up?"
"Shit," Pieter cursed. "The Lawrence drive will take half an hour to get going, and that's after I spend an hour getting the fuses replaced and the fusion cores going again."
"We could bring the emergency batteries online," Samina suggested.
"It's not going to do any good with the fuses burnt out from the EMP," Pieter said.
Henry was already considering how much time they had left. Two hundred thousand kilometers was not a lot of space to cover when you had a modern sublight drive. Even if the League ship wasn't burning hard to conserve fuel, the Shadow Wolf didn't have long before they were taken. "We need power back. We need to get moving."
"I bloody know that!" Pieter shouted back, frustration ringing in every syllable, particularly the drawn out "oo" in bloody. "But I've got to visually inspect—"
"Wait!" Samina's eyes widened. "Mister Hertzog, what about the fusion drive?"
He gave her an exasperated look. "What about it…" Now his eyes widened. "Oh! Yes!"
Henry felt a brief surge of hope at the looks on their faces. "What about the fusion drive?"
"She was shut down when the EMP hit!" Pieter exclaimed. "There shouldn't be any damage, not at all! Just need to fire her up, she'll get us electricity and thrust!"
"Enough to jump?" Miri asked.
"It may take a while for the drive to charge the Lawrence drive to full power," Samina said. "But it should give us time to get the main systems back online. It'll even give us lights and maybe gravity!"
"Tricky thing is I still need to replace a couple of fuses and modify the systems to accept power from the fusion drive reactor," Pieter said. "Brigitte can handle fitting the new power cords, but I've got to do the fuses and run the line." He looked to Samina. "You've worked the drive system before, right?"
"I helped with some of the installations, yes," Samina replied.
"Good!" Pieter scrambled across the dark engineering bay with little heed to the conditions. Moments later, the sound of metal hammering metal came from that direction, immediately joined by a loud curse in Afrikaans, all while Pieter's flashlight bobbed around. They followed more cautiously while he opened a storage locker and pulled out a long cylinder of yellow color with a contact end. "Here, a portable battery. It should be enough to power the deuterium and
helium-3 tanks."
Samina nodded. "The reactor has the start-up emergency battery, right?"
"Of course it does," Pieter scoffed. "Chief Khánh's no fool."
"I just wanted to make sure!" Samina adjusted her jumpsuit and fitted the flashlight to a loop on her shoulder. Ordinarily, the battery would be a heavy burden for her, but in zero-G, it was light as a feather.
"You! Miri or whatever your name is!" Pieter's flashlight focused on Miri. "You're a spacer now, right?"
"I am," she confirmed.
"Then get over here and help me," he said. "Or do you want the League to throw you out an airlock?"
Miri smiled wanly at that before nodding in acknowledgment. "I do not. I'm at your disposal, Engineer Hartzog."
Henry left Pieter and Miri to the job in engineering so he could follow Samina. She knew her way around the ship well enough that she quickly found the stairs leading to the lower deck. He followed and marveled at her speed in zero-G. It occurred to him that her work on Trinidad Station undoubtedly included repairs in the zero-G bays of the station's arms.
Yanik was already downstairs but said nothing as Samina floated past, already huffing with exertion from her rapid maneuvering. "An emergency battery," he noted. His plasma gun, which was more of a heavy assault weapon by human standards, was in the Saurian's arms, and his tail was hooked around the nearest bar. "There is a plan?"
"There is. Let's hope we have time to complete it."
"A little help?" Samina called out.
The two men followed her voice to the hatch for the port stern hold. Samina was straining to open the door. "I already hit the emergency release, but there's something wrong," she said, her fingers trying to find purchase.
"Wouldn't be the first time one of those things broke down," noted Henry. He and Yanik each took a side of the sliding door and pulled. It finally started to separate.
A whistle filled the air. Samina yelped and pulled away from the door. "Vacuum!" she shouted. "There's vacuum in there!"
