by T J Mott
“Perhaps.” The Governor did not sound moved by Thad’s taunting. “You will return to the Depot and turn yourself in at once. We detected your exit flash. If you don’t return, we will release your coordinates to the entire system and let all the bounty hunter-wannabes deal with you. And there are quite a few of them, our comm channels are being overloaded by civilians begging for your coordinates so they can follow you and cash in a bounty.”
“No can do, Governor.”
“You have one hour. After that I broadcast your coordinates and every teenager with a skiff will be out there with dreams of destroying your little fleet and getting rich from the rewards. One hour, Marcell.”
Thaddeus watched as the projector redrew the miniature holographic Caracal. The updated version plainly showed extensive damage to the frigate’s port side. The bow appeared to be missing completely, and Thad shuddered as he realized what would have happened had anyone actually used the main bridge instead of the more secure Command Center. “So call me back in an hour,” he said, keeping his tone nonchalant and disinterested. “Until then, my gunners will be pleased to run drills against simulated teenage skiff drivers. They were worried that a fight against the Waverly System Police would be too easy.”
Gage finally started to sound annoyed. “Don’t toy with me. If you do not comply, I will let the rioters here execute your men.” The comm channel abruptly closed.
Bennett’s nostrils began flaring in rhythm with his heavy breathing. “You have a lot of gall, Marcell. Any brilliant ideas now? He captured half our flotilla, and then you provoked them further, and now he threatens to execute our men!” His face was now flushed with red.
“Gage is bluffing!” Thad snapped back. “He’s corrupt but he isn’t a despot.” Thad turned to face Reynolds. “For the first time ever, we have a clue about Earth in our possession. Top priority right now is getting away. Recovering the Owl and Shrike will have to be a later mission. There is nothing we can do for them right now.”
“The Panther can’t keep up!” Bennett responded. He was now openly yelling at Thad. “You’d trade three ships and their crews for your idiotic delusions?!”
Thaddeus clenched his fists at his side and fought the urge to throw Bennett down to the deck. After a moment, he turned to face Reynolds and ignored Bennett completely. “Get Allen. Have him send over anything and everything that might be helpful to get the Panther moving again. Supplies, personnel, whatever. And as for us, we need to jump now, before anyone catches up to us.”
“The Panther can’t even jump to hyperspace and the Depot knows our location!” Bennett shouted. “We can’t leave them behind!”
Thad continued to ignore him. “Helm, what’s our range to the Panther?”
“Point-six light-seconds,” replied Lieutenant Poulsen from the main helm station near the front of the Command Center.
“Okay…Assume bounty hunters will be here any minute. What’s our current max jump range, at our current hyperdrive charge?”
“One-point-eight, maybe one-point-nine light-years,” she answered.
“Close, but maybe not quite enough to get out of detection range,” Thad remarked sourly. Starships emitted a burst of faster-than-light phi-band radiation whenever they entered or exited hyperspace. Big, high-traffic space stations were often equipped with a bulky high-gain phi detection suite. Such suites were far too big and heavy to mount on starships, but were very useful on a space station, able to provide coverage with a range of about two light-years. Any jumps within that range, and the station would know exactly where they entered and exited, to a precision of a few light-seconds. We need to improvise. Distract, confuse, delay. “Okay. We need to make a very short hyperspace jump. Just a light-second or so. Can you do that?”
Poulsen swiveled around in her chair, turning to face Thad and Reynolds. Her expression was that of utter bewilderment. “Standard procedure is to move at sublight for distances less than five thousand light-seconds.”
“But can you do it?” he asked. Bennett started to protest, but Thaddeus cut him off with a pointed finger. “Shut it!” he exclaimed. “You open your mouth again and I’ll bust you down to Ensign!” Bennett’s mouth moved a few times as if trying to speak, but he remained silent, and Thad turned back to the pilot.
“How the hell would it help us?” Poulsen blurted, apparently unaffected by his outburst. “A one light-second jump?”
“Can you do it?” he repeated angrily.
“Disengaging the hyperdrive that soon after activating it—”
“Come on!” Thad interrupted. “We don’t have time to waste!”
She was silent for a few seconds, her expression flashing from anger to bewilderment to careful thought within moments. She played with the software at her station. The displays in front of her flashed through a cycle of graphs and solutions to the hyperspace equations as she entered some parameters. “…I think so,” she finally answered.
“Next question. Can you make a one light-second jump and then immediately begin a max-range jump as soon as it ends?”
“That’s even more dangerous!” she said. “It takes time for the hyperdrive to stabilize after a transition. Three state transitions that rapid—”
“Dammit, Admiral!” interrupted Bennett, and Thaddeus suddenly considered dragging him out of the Command Center and dropping him off at the nearest airlock. “I thought you were an engineer! Are you trying to blow us up?”
“ENOUGH!” Thaddeus finally bellowed. All chatter in the room died suddenly, and the various warnings and alarms which had been inaudible beneath the staff’s voices now blared piercingly. “I’m trying to get us away from here, and you’re all wasting what little time we have!”
“What are you trying to accomplish, Admiral?” Reynolds asked calmly after a few seconds. “I don’t follow.”
“I want two phi bursts from about the same spot at about the same time.”
Reynolds cocked his head to one side as he started to understand, and his mouth curled into a sly smile. “You want to trick everyone into thinking both ships jumped out together.”
Thad forced a grin. “Correct,” he replied, bringing his voice back down to conversational levels. “Misdirection is our best option right now. While we get away and lure any pursuit with us, Captain Simon will cruise away at high sublight while they make repairs. No one will know he’s still here. If all goes well, he can jump away later. Or, once we’re away, we can hire a tug to retrieve him.”
“Clever,” Reynolds remarked.
“Get it all figured out,” Thad ordered as he left the Command Center.
***
Half an hour hour later, the frigate’s crew had made the preparations. Fortunately, no other ships jumped into the area during the interim, and Thad wondered if Gage was actually giving him an entire hour to respond to the ultimatum. But why wouldn’t he? Those Uhlans were right on top of us when we jumped. He has to know the extent of our damage, and that we didn’t have enough time to charge up for a jump beyond his detection range.
He smiled as a thought crossed his mind. His plan was already a misdirection, a gambit to make observers think both ships jumped out together. He didn’t know how well the sensor images would pass scrutiny though. It might work, or his enemies might realize something wasn’t quite right and jump to the Caracal’s old position anyway—where the Panther would remain.
“Comms,” he said as his smile slowly melted away. He needed a neutral expression for this. “Prepare a recorded audio/video message to be transmitted via phi-band.”
“Recording started, Admiral.”
“Admiral Thaddeus Marcell to Governor Gage of the Waverly Depot. I know my one-hour time limit is not quite up but I have prepared a response to your request that I return to the Depot and surrender.” He paused, and then let a toothy smile spread across his face. Then he made a universally rude gesture to the camera, and held it for a few seconds before motioning to the comm officer to stop recording. “Blast that
out over the local phi-band broadcast channels, open and unencrypted, and then let’s get underway.”
He nodded to himself, hoping his taunt would anger them enough to hide the purpose behind the Caracal’s next maneuver. An emotional enemy rarely thought clearly. It was just as well if they thought him to be overly cocky and emotional, because then they would underestimate him. Even if somebody caught on, there was a strong chance they’d downplay any seemingly clever moves, because clearly Thaddeus was too arrogant and boneheaded to even make a clever move. Or so I hope.
Captain Reynolds stared at him for a long moment with one eyebrow slightly raised and his eyes narrowed into a disbelieving squint. But if he had any reservations about the message, he kept to himself, and moments later he ordered the Caracal into hyperspace. Thaddeus felt a massive clunk through the deck plating as the hyperdrive engaged, instantly hurtling the frigate into the strange realms beyond the speed of light. About a second later, he felt a rapid double-clunk as it briefly skipped out of hyperspace, just for a handful of milliseconds, before returning. The ship entered into an unusual shuddering oscillation that the artificial gravity struggled to cancel out for several seconds, then it settled into a typically smooth hyperspace transit.
“Well?” he asked cautiously.
“I think we just blew out one of the secondary artificial gravity generators,” Commander Allen said.
“Get going on repairs then. What about the jump itself?”
“I think it worked, Admiral,” Poulsen said, her mouth hanging slightly open in awe that they were still alive. “Somehow, we’re back in hyperspace and we’re not a cloud of dissociated molecules stretched across millions of kilometers. My math was pretty quick but I project one-point-eight light-years before reverting.”
“How fast? I don’t want anyone to beat us there.” The Caracal was not a rare model of starship, nor was it modified much. With such a short jump, almost any ship in the area would be able to precisely calculate her exit point and time from the phi-band bursts if they could sort out the confusing series of phi flashes. If they didn’t manage enough speed, a cooler and better-rested ship might actually arrive ahead of them. And in the frigate’s current battered state, that would be a disaster.
“Zero-point-four light-years per hour,” she said. “That’s the best I could do. That double-jump thing brings a lot of uncertainty into how the hyperdrive operates.”
“Damn. Four hours gives them plenty of time to think. Okay, once we revert, I want a high sublight course in a random direction. Just put some distance between us and our exit point. Hopefully that’ll give us enough time to do some repairs and plot a better jump.” He mentally estimated a few numbers. If they could manage even a half hour at high speed, that would get them far enough from the exit point that no one would have a precise fix on their location.
As long as nobody beat them there.
***
Captain Simon wiped the sweat from his brow as he stood in the overheated corvette’s main bridge, and watched as a strange sequence of phi-band signatures flashed on the ship’s sensor displays.
“Well, did it work?” he finally asked.
“It’s very weird-looking, but at first glance it looks like two ships jumped out together,” the sensor officer said. “Mostly. The computer is giving a nonsensical destination coordinate for one of the flashes, but the other one is believable. If you look really closely you can tell there were three flashes, but the gap between the last two is so small it’s easy to dismiss as a sensor glitch.”
“Very well. Move us away from the system. Half lightspeed relative to the star, any heading. I want to be well out of sensor range before anyone decides to jump in and investigate.”
Chapter 10
The portable emergency airlock opened again, and a large figure wearing a vacuum suit—the kind used for in-flight maintenance—stepped through. It was dragging another body. The figure dropped the body on the deck, haphazardly lining it up next to two other bodies, and stepped back into the fragile airlock, returning into the depressurized and badly-damaged section which had until recently housed the Caracal’s portside weapons—and weapon operators.
Lieutenant Commander Green clenched his jaw tightly, to the point of pain, and forced himself to look at the latest body, and he felt bile rise at the sight. One leg was missing just below the hip. All three remaining limbs were broken in multiple places, twisted and bent around in a sickening manner. His torso was nearly separated from his hips by the force of the explosion, and past the few strands of flesh that bridged the gap, he could see the snapped spine which still linked the two halves of the body together like a rope with most of its strands snapped. His face was pale and white, entirely drained of blood by the effects of sudden hard vacuum on the gaping wounds.
“Raddic,” Green said solemnly. His voice broke on the second syllable.
“This place will not be the same without him,” Green’s second, Lieutenant Durant, said. “Or without Kahler and Franco,” he added, referring to the other two recovered bodies.
“This place will never be the same,” Green said. He couldn’t peel his eyes away from the gory sight before him. He swallowed. No one deserves to die like this.
“Commander?” a voice said from behind. Green turned and saw a corpsman standing nearby in the dim corridor. This area of the frigate had lost almost all power, and only a few jury-rigged emergency lights functioned. “Smits did not survive surgery,” he said.
“It’s not fair,” Green whispered while shaking his head in frustration. “His contract was almost up. This was his last mission and then he was leaving the organization. Taking on a safer job near his family.”
“Damn,” Durant muttered.
“How is Stence?” Green asked the corpsman.
“Still in surgery, sir.” The corpsman looked down at the deck and hesitated. “If he survives, he will need extensive skin grafts once we return to HQ.”
Green grunted and balled his fists. He looked down and closed his eyes, then pointed at the line of bodies on the deck without looking up. “Three more for the morgue when you can.”
He stepped away without dismissing the corpsman, and walked into a nearby bunkroom which had long ago been converted for storage. He crossed his arms up at forehead level and leaned forward into the wall, pressing his face into his forearms and feeling grief and anger and a raging hatred towards Marcell and his insane obsession with Earth. I can live with dying to protect home and family. I can even live with dying for money. But dying for a myth? For Earth?
I signed up with a mercenary group that paid outrageous wages. I didn’t sign up to help a deranged psychopath throw away lives while searching for a planet that doesn’t even exist.
He shook his head as he thought of all the men he’d just lost, and wondered how he’d write the letters to their families. He’d had to write such letters before while working with other pirate or mercenary groups prior to Marcell’s organization, and it was never easy. I regret to inform you that your father has lost his life. As you likely knew, he belonged to a pirate fleet. Here is his share of the plunder and his bonus for the year.
But how could he write I regret to inform you that your husband died while helping the mad Admiral Thaddeus Marcell try to locate his supposed homeworld of Earth? This time, the deaths were pointless. Nothing he could say would detract from the utter futility of the organization’s purpose.
He took a step back from the wall and then punched it. Hard. The metallic thud reverberated loudly through the room.
“Commander?” Durant’s voice snapped him away from his thoughts. He hadn’t realized he’d been followed.
“All those drills we did, Durant. On the way out here. We knew this could happen.” His knuckles stung and he rubbed them absentmindedly with his other hand. He twisted his head to look at his second-in-command. “We should never have attacked the Cassandra.”
Durant crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the doo
rframe. “We didn’t have nearly enough firepower,” he said softly, as if afraid of being overheard. “That much was clear from our sims.”
“Yes, it was clear!” Green shouted, facing the wall first so as not to direct his anger at his subordinate. “And I passed that up through the chain of command, and everyone ignored me! I told them it wouldn’t go well, and they continued anyway. Not only that, we split off half the group. One light frigate and a corvette against a cruiser! And who gets to pay for their mistakes? We do. Half our department is dead, Durant. Half. Can you believe it?”
His outburst echoed through the room for a long moment. They both stood in silence, and then Durant responded, his voice barely above a whisper. “We got hit hard, Commander. That magazine detonation was one-in-a-million.” He shuddered. “We’re lucky to be alive. If it had been all the high explosive shells instead of a laser supercap, we wouldn’t even know we died.”
“And three of our ships got left behind,” Green said, no longer shouting but now speaking quietly with a weak, trembling voice that threatened to break. “They deserved better than that.” Green looked around absentmindedly at the dimly-lit room. Rows of three-high bunks stretched from the floor to the ceiling, never used for their intended purpose because of the frigate’s light crew. Each one held a haphazard collection of boxes, equipment, and other junk. Some of it was scattered across the deck, having been dislodged by the battle and then by the odd gravity malfunction Green had noticed during their last hyperspace jump. “Did you feel that last jump?” he asked.
“Yes. It didn’t feel right at all. It was like the gravity couldn’t keep up. I’ve never seen that before. And the hyperdrive sounded…slow. Very slow. I don’t think we got far.”
Green nodded. So it hadn’t been his imagination. “They knew who we were. Knew it was Marcell. The bounties on him just went up again, right before we set out for Waverly.” He clenched his jaw so tight that the muscles in his face started to hurt. “And I think we’re just barely limping along right now. We’re probably still in range of Waverly, and I’m sure every ship in the system is looking for us now.”
