by R S Penney
“All right,” Anna said. “Let them go.”
On the screen, Sheral Tyse's eyes widened. “Ma'am?” she said in that shaky voice people used when they weren't sure they had heard you correctly. “I thought you wanted to search the ship.”
Anna blew out a breath, her head drooping as she fought through her irritation. “I am much further away from Velezia's sun than he is,” she said. “I have a significant speed advantage. Let him go, and I'll intercept him as he leaves the system.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
The screen went dark.
Whirling her chair around to face her two companions, Anna frowned at them. “Get ready,” she said. “Because I'm pretty sure that we're about to get a whole lot of worst-case scenario.”
Chapter 24
When the comm went dark, there was nothing to do but scan the solar system and wait for any sign of a ship trying to leave. Anna hated waiting; patience was not one of her virtues and sitting still even less so. Technically, the shuttle was moving toward the Velezian star, but at sub-light speeds, it would take a little over twelve years just to reach the orbital distance of the furthest planet.
Her console displayed a system of six planets – three terrestrial worlds and three gas giants – all orbiting an F-Type star. Velezia was the second planet from that star, and though its atmosphere was not conducive to human life, the inhabitants had built several domed cities on its surface.
So, she waited.
As long as she avoided going to warp, her shuttle would be invisible to any other ship in the star system. Standard sensors were only useful to a range of about four or five light seconds, but a ship at warp sent a ripple through SlipSpace that traveled faster than light by several orders of magnitude.
The instant she jumped to FTL speeds, anyone within a lightyear would know her exact position. And she would still be visible to other ships even further away. Her plan was to use that trick to home in on her prey. Let the cargo hauler go to warp; extrapolate their trajectory out of the system, and intercept them.
Anna sat with her hands on the armrests of her seat, staring intently through the window. “We'll have to time this just right,” she said. “Melissa, estimate how long it would take to circumnavigate the star system if we began from our current position.”
The girl murmured to herself as she performed that task and then replied with, “Just over ten minutes.”
Shutting her eyes as she drew in a breath, Anna nodded once. “Which means we'll be able to reach any point on that circle in about five,” she said. “I don't want to jump to warp until we absolutely have to.”
“Why not?” Jack asked.
“If we go to warp too early,” she explained. “the Brivan will alter course to avoid crossing paths with us. They'll fly around the interior of the solar system while we prowl the outside like a circling piranha. As they get further away from the sun, their effective velocity will increase. I want them committed to a single escape trajectory.”
Her instruments displayed a map of the system with the sun as a large white dot and each planet a red dot on a green ellipse that traced its orbit. Suddenly, a blue dot appeared next to the second planet with a circular wave spreading outward.
“The Brivan has gone to warp,” Anna said.
She swiveled around to find Jack bent over his console with a look of concentration on his face. “I'm tracking them on a course nearly perpendicular to the plane of the solar system,” he said. “It looks like they're headed for a red giant about 23 lightyears away. It should take us roughly two minutes to put ourselves in front of them.”
“How long until they reach the intercept point?”
Melissa was squinting as her hands danced over the console. “At their current rate of acceleration,” she began. “Just under seven minutes.”
“Then we wait.”
But waiting was hard. She watched that blue dot traveling upward from an image of the solar system that was tilted so that she could view it edgewise. Slowly, the dot rose with pulsing circles expanding from it.
“Three minutes until they reach the intercept point,” Melissa said.
“Patience,” Anna replied. “We don't want them to know we're here. Not until it's too late for them to turn around.”
She already had the intercept course plotted. Now, it was just a matter of waiting for the right moment to get moving. Her heart rate was up. Anna could feel it with the growing anticipation.
She activated the warp engines.
In her window, stars began to clump together, fusing into a single amorphous point of light in the distance. They were tracing a circular path around the solar system with an effective velocity of almost 300C. Her engines were at ninety percent power output. She wanted them to underestimate her top speed.
On her screen, the blue dot changed direction, continuing on a path out of the solar system, but now they would just slip past her.
Pursing her lips, Anna blinked as she stared through the window. “Let's make this look good,” she said with a glance over her shoulder. “Increase power output to ninety-two percent. I want them to think we're straining for it.”
“Ninety-two percent,” Jack confirmed.
“Hold this speed.”
With the pilot's seat in the way, she couldn't use spatial awareness to see what Jack was doing, but she heard him exhale. “For how long?” he asked. “They're gonna get past us if we don't gun the engines.”
“I want them to think they can get away.”
The blue dot continued on its current trajectory. At their current speed, the Brivan would cross the intercept point roughly five seconds before her shuttle did and then race off into deep space.
If that happened, they would have a significant advantage. As they got further and further away from the Velezian star, their maximum effective velocity would increase at an exponential rate. Anna – who would be closer to the star – would have a difficult time keeping up.
“Fifty seconds until we hit the intercept point,” Melissa said. “Forty-five, forty-”
“Now!” Anna shouted. “Full power!”
Her shuttle threw everything it could into the warp field, and they sped up. Now, they would make the intercept point with a few seconds to spare. “Ready a Slip-Pulse,” she ordered. “I want to knock them out of warp as soon as we drop back to sub-light-”
The blue dot vanished from her screen.
“We've lost them,” Melissa said.
Wrinkling her nose, Anna shook her head. “No, we haven't.” She leaned over the console and began tapping out commands. “They've dropped out of FTL to hide from us. I'm closing in on their last known position.”
A moment later, that point of light in her window split into a flurry of stars that seemed to spread out all around her. The heads-up display projected a tiny circle on the window's surface, zooming in to give her a close-up of a box-like ship that floated against the blackness. “Fifty kilometres away,” she said. “We move in slow and careful. Jack, be ready to trigger a Slip-Pulse if they go to warp.”
In less than a minute, they closed to within two kilometres of the Brivan. The small cargo hauler was motionless in her window. Of course, that wasn't the actual ship; even in space, the human eye couldn't see that clearly. The computer simply projected an image onto the SmartGlass.
“What are they waiting for?” Anna wondered aloud.
“For you to make a move,” Jack answered.
She closed her eyes and took a moment to run through scenarios in her head before tapping a button on her console. “Freighter Brivan,” she said. “I'm Special Agent Leana Lenai of the Justice Keepers. We have a warrant to search your ship.”
No response.
“You're already in enough trouble as it is,” she added. “If you cooperate now, we might be able to reduce the charges the sector attorney is guaranteed to bring against you after you shot your way out of that docking bay.”
The ship just sat there.
�
�Brivan, answer.”
A high pitched beeping from her console alerted her to the fact that the other ship had powered up its weapons. Reacting by instinct, she activated the shuttle's shields and powered up her weapons.
A targeting reticle appeared in the centre of her window, focused on the back-side of the other ship. “Freighter Brivan, you have ten seconds to power down your weapons,” Anna said. “If you don't, I will open fire.”
Her enemies just hung there, waiting.
Closing her hand around the flight-stick, Anna performed a silent countdown in her head. Should she do it? Should she initiate combat? The part of her that wanted to avoid violence at any cost was shouting that there must be another way, but she had done this dance one too many times. If she didn't do something, her enemies would probably take it as an opportunity to slip away. “Particle weapons, half strength,” she ordered.
“Half strength confirmed,” Jack said.
Anna squeezed the trigger.
Orange bolts of plasma shot forth from the wings of her shuttle, converged on the distant ship and crashed against a screen of flickering electrostatic energy instead. Her instruments showed no damage.
Anna felt her mouth drop open, then quickly shook her head. “Those are military grade shields!” she stammered. “You were right, Jack! Slade did have a few surprises in store for-”
She gasped.
Blue plasma sped from a cannon on the back of the freighter, bearing down on her. Just before they hit, a force-field snapped into place, and the energy diffused along it instead of killing her.
The Brivan was speeding away.
Anna gunned the engines.
On the window's surface, a green circle appeared around the enlarged image of the cargo hauler, and her instruments said that she was ten kilometres away and closing. She squeezed the trigger again.
More orange projectiles sped toward her enemies, but the Brivan rose a few inches in her field of vision, and her shots passed uselessly under its belly, flying off into the starry void.
Suddenly, the hauler slowed down.
Her shuttle was flying past underneath it.
“Oh no you don't!”
Pulling back on the flight-stick, Anna pitched her shuttle one hundred and eighty degrees so that they were now flying upside-down and backwards. When the enemy ship came into view, she aligned her targeting reticle on it and fired.
A pair of plasma bolts rushed from her wings, crossed the distance in seconds and struck the Brivan, pounding its shields. Instead of counterattacking, the cargo hauler veered off to her left and flew out of her field of vision.
“They've gone to warp!” Jack shouted.
“Slip-pulse!” she ordered.
“They're out of range…and heading back toward the Velezian system.”
Anna squinted through the window. “They're not getting away from me that easy,” she said, leaning over her console and programming a pursuit course. “Reinforce those shield emitters; I want to be ready for anything they throw at us.”
Distant stars scrolled past in her window as the shuttle reoriented itself to point in the direction her enemies had gone. Half a second later, those same stars blurred into thin streaks that clumped together at some point at the very edge of creation.
On her console, she saw a blue dot that represented the cargo hauler rushing toward the third planet from the sun. What could they possibly want there? It was a desolate world, unsuitable for human life, and there was no place to hide. “Melissa!” she snapped. “Check the computer for any data on Reladris. Let's see what might possess someone to go there.”
“On it!”
It was a long chase, one that left her feeling antsy the whole way. With the Brivan decelerating as it approached the Velezian star, it wasn't long before she was right behind them. But she would have to drop out of warp to use a Slip-Pulse. And though the pulse would travel millions of kilometres, disrupting the warp fields of any ship it hit, when the Brivan dropped back to sub-light speeds, it would be millions of kilometres away. Better to see what they were up to. Anna wanted to know what would possess them to run to an inhospitable world without a single human outpost on its surface.
“We're approaching,” Jack said. “Dropping out of warp in three…two…one!”
The point of light at the end of this endless tunnel broke apart into a million stars that spread out all around her shuttle. And then a planet grew from an infinitesimally tiny point, expanding until it filled her window.
It was a dry, brown wasteland with craters that were visible from orbit and a thin atmosphere of helium and nitrogen. The surface temperature on the day side was over 120 degrees centigrade. Not suitable for human life by any definition.
The box-like cargo hauler was hanging in orbit, seemingly inert. When she scanned it with her instruments, she detected no energy spikes. Even the shields were offline. As if…As if they had abandoned ship. But why-
Cargo doors in the hauler's belly suddenly opened, and a smaller ship dropped out. This was a single-passenger craft, shaped like the head of an arrow. “I'm not detecting a warp drive on the smaller ship,” Jack said. “It seems to be a one-man fighter designed for atmospheric flight.”
“But why here?” Anna mumbled.
The fighter sped off on a line to her left, then whirled around to point its forward guns at the cargo hauler. Its weapons were charging up. “Oh no!” Anna shouted. Surely, they wouldn't destroy their only means of survival just to prevent her from getting her hands on it.
She gunned her engines.
In a few seconds, she had her shuttle positioned between the fighter and its mother-ship. Just in time to intercept incoming fire. There was a quiet thumping noise like rain falling on a roof, and then the lights in the cockpit flickered. “EMP rounds!” Anna shouted. The main weapon of fighters that were designed to work in an atmosphere.
She slammed her foot down on the pedal.
Her shuttle yawed to the left, stars wheeling past until the enemy fighter was dead centre in her window. A targeting reticle appeared, and she wasted no time. She squeezed the damn trigger.
Orange plasma rushed toward her opponent, but the fighter dipped its nose and flew downward into the atmosphere. Her shots hit nothing but empty vacuum. “Damn it!” she shouted. “What's the damage?”
“Dorsal shield emitters on the port side have been damaged,” Jack said. “And I'm having some issues with the attitude stabilizers. Redundant circuits are taking over, but I wouldn't want to test our luck by doing that again.”
EMP rounds were designed for up-close, ship to ship combat. They would phase right through most shield configurations and do damage to the ship itself. “All right,” she said. “What's our next move?”
She swiveled around.
Melissa was hunched over her console, her face glistening as she gasped for breath. “Tell me if I'm wrong,” she began, “but didn't we just win? They fired on their own ship, which means they've probably abandoned it. Why not just go over there and take what we need from their computers?”
Jack scowled, shaking his head. “It's no good,” he answered. “They'd rather destroy that ship than let us get our hands on it. For all we know, they've strapped a bomb to the fusion reactor, and it'll go off the instant we get on board.”
Anna squeezed her eyes shut, nodding her agreement. “Jack's right,” she said. “We can't risk it. And since they've almost certainly encrypted their files, we need the pilot of that fighter anyway.”
“So…”
“We go after him.”
Turning around, she laid her hands on the console and programmed a course that would take them into the atmosphere. The shuttle's nose pitched downward, and she saw a brown and craggy landscape in her window.
“I've found him,” Melissa said. “Thirty kilometres south, southwest and forty-five hundred metres below us.”
It didn't take long to spot an arrowhead-shaped fighter racing across a brown sky where stars were still vi
sible through the thin atmosphere. The enemy yawed around to point its nose at her, and white tracers erupted from its wings.
Anna thumbed the hat-switch.
Her shuttle dropped a few metres just before twin streams of charged bullets flew past overhead. Pulling back on the flight-stick, she aligned her targeting reticle on the fighter's belly, but the enemy rolled to the left and veered off.
When she got behind them again, she saw the fighter descending toward a patch of ground where a canyon left a vertical gash in the barren landscape. “He's smaller than us, An,” Jack called out from the back of the cockpit. “If he goes in there…”
Anna nodded. “I know,” she replied. “Redirect power to the gravitational drives. I want everything we've got if we have to climb suddenly.”
She fired.
White tracers sped from her wings, bearing down on the enemy, but the tiny fighter rolled out of the way and vanished from sight. “He's still going for the canyon,” Melissa said. “The guy must be suicidal!”
The ground was rushing up toward her, the canyon growing larger and larger in her field of vision. Her instruments detected no energy signatures, nothing to indicate that she might be flying into a trap.
Tapping at her console, Anna leveled off, allowing the shuttle to descend with its nose pointed forward. Gravitational propulsion made such maneuverability possible. She slowed them down.
Rock walls rose up on either side of her, and then she was staring into the darkness of a long trench with brown sky visible overhead. She brought them to a stationary hover, scanning the area. “I don't like this,” Anna said.
“I'm not detecting any power sources,” Jack said. “Whatever he came-”
Something flew out of the sky, struck the canyon wall and exploded, unleashing a blizzard of rocks that fell upon the shuttle. The shields reacted instantly, erecting force-fields that prevented the falling boulders from pummeling them, but Anna heard more explosions. Someone was bombarding the canyon from above, trying to bury them.
“It's the Brivan!” Jack shouted. “They're firing on us from orbit!”
