When they were finished, the Troopers nodded to me before packing up their equipment and leaving Anne and I alone in the compartment. It was clear that Ensign Fraser did not know what to make of me so I felt it was time to tell her my story. I explained to her how I came to be on FNS Destiny in the first place and where I came from. I told her about the various trials and tribulations, the events at Zafar, the multiple ship to ship battles, the mines, the boarding, how all the ships officers were injured badly enough to be in stasis pods during the final battle for control of the ship. I explained the way I agonised over who would lead this crew so FNS Destiny could successfully make the voyage back to port. I detailed how I reluctantly came to be in command. I explained to her how I was trying to guide the FNS Destiny and her crew home to safety in the Federation. I told her how I understood that under Federation law I would be considered a pirate but I felt I owed this crew my life and this was a price I was willing to pay if I could get them home safely. Then I asked her if she would be willing to take the burden of command from me. She, of course, politely declined my request, telling me she was too young and did not have the necessary skills but did promise to advocate on my behalf when we finally found assistance. She also told me it would be too destabilising for this crew if she took over now and she would feel like a mutineer because the crew had picked me to lead them home.
I then asked her if she would at least be willing to assist me, to act as my executive officer to take some of the burden from my shoulders. That, she did readily agree to. Once all this business was dealt with, I asked her if she’d eaten recently. She just shook her head so I stood and beckoned for her to come with me. On the way, I contacted Eri via my implant to see if Anne had any specific dietary needs as I was heading down to the mess with her. Eri replied that she would meet us there and advise Anne on the foods she should be eating at this stage of her recovery.
When we arrived at the mess, Eri was already there with another Tangesha female. Eri introduced her to me as Lady Conti. Of course, Anne already knew who this was. The three females, went over to the serving lines to choose some food while I found a table where the four of us could sit. After the three females joined me, Anne related some of my story to Lady Conti.
Eri was quietly corroborating what I’d told Anne and in some cases, expanding the story I’d already related to her, filling in some of the blanks where I skipped over some of the details. For example, Eri told Anne and the Lady how I suggested the existence of mines to Captain Carlon and how I was closely involved in helping the ship’s officers while they planned a number of the successful defensive actions FNS Destiny had been involved in. Eri also pointed out to them they were safe now solely because of my wish to rescue anyone stranded by the damage to the pirate ship. Anne and Conti looked at me with new respect after that. After the women finished their food, I asked Anne to accompany me to the meeting with my department heads. I wanted to introduce her to the senior crew, at least the ones who would be attending the coming meeting where we intended to plan our next move. I also wanted them to know she would be acting as my executive officer.
Anne and I were only in the meeting room a few minutes before the others started filtering in. Many of them looked curiously at Anne when they came in but none said anything other than the standard respectful greetings. When everyone was there and we were all seated, I introduced Anne to the others and told them she was actually an officer in the Federation Navy. I told them I was appointing her as my executive officer. I expected she would retain that roll till either one of the ships original officers could be healed or until we made it back to Federation space and were able to hand over command to the legitimate authorities. This done, I asked the navigation staff to run over our options again, mostly for Anne’s benefit. Once the navigators finished their presentation of our possible route options, I asked Anne if she had any information such as possible areas along one of those routes where we might be able to contact the Federation Navy to request assistance.
She told me she thought the longer route may actually be the better option. She believed moving towards the closest jump point might actually get us to a Navy presence a little sooner because, paradoxically, the other route was considered more secure so was patrolled a little less frequently. I asked if there were any dissenting opinions, there were none. Provided we didn’t have a drive failure, I thought we should be able to stay ahead of our pursuer if we took the longer route. I asked engineering to report on the main drive. They reported there were no indications anything was amiss. After our last failure, they were very carefully monitoring everything in the power feeds for the drive as well as the engines themselves. As far as our engineering staff could tell, based on performance and on the inspections they carried out prior to restarting them, the engines themselves had not sustained any damage whatsoever.
I sat and pondered all the information we’d accumulated so far, then asked if anyone had any additional opinions or other information I should be aware of. Nobody disagreed with Anne’s assessment. I dismissed everyone else in the compartment but asked the Anne to stay as I wanted to go through the pros and cons with her before I made my final decision. One big concern I had was that I didn’t want to lead a pirate to a place where unprotected Federation citizens who were just going about their legitimate business would be put at risk unnecessarily. On the other hand, we really needed to find a secure location as soon as possible so our remaining injured could be given proper medical care. Anne and I sat there in the compartment, painstakingly looking at every point, discussing it, ranking it against the others and looking for any side issues we thought may be relevant. Anne’s input turned out to be invaluable to me as she’d undergone a lot of the military training I lacked. Even though she was not a line officer, she’d still been taught many of the same things junior line officers were taught so I was able to gain quite a good insight into how a Federation naval officer could be expected to react in this situation.
Finally, I made my decision and announced to the helm and navigation that we would head for the closest jump point as soon as we exited jump space. The next day, we exited jump space right on schedule. FNS Destiny immediately turned for the next planned jump point and immediately began accelerating towards it as hard as she could safely go. As a precaution, I asked engineering to continue to monitor the entire drive system, looking for any possible problems before they became real problems. We were only in the system for just under one hour when our pursuer exited the jump point behind us. We now knew they were serious in their pursuit, it was clear they wanted us, or at least, they wanted what we were carrying or perhaps what they thought we were carrying. By this time, we were traveling somewhat faster than the maximum safe speed for jump entry and still accelerating so we were pulling away from our pursuer quite rapidly.
I didn’t dare turn and fight. With the missiles we’d been able to scavenge from the pirate ship, we still only had enough for one and a half full salvos. I didn’t think one and a half salvos was anywhere near enough to allow us to defeat the other ship, or even to inflict serious damage to them, and we still needed to modify our new missiles before we could use them anyway.
Of course, if they did somehow manage to corner us, my plan was for us to go down fighting. In this, I had the support of the entire crew and almost all the passengers. Reports from the Troopers suggested that even many of our prisoners supported this position. If those reports were accurate, it appeared that at least some of our prisoners would be willing to fight alongside us. None of us wanted to surrender to these pirates, none of us wanted to be tortured, or raped, or murdered or become slaves. I overheard many conversations between members of the crew and all of them told me this crew would prefer to die fighting than to be captured by these, or any other pirates. In the meantime, we very carefully monitored the pursuing vessel as we continued moving away from our jump exit point.
When the pursuer exited the jump point, they took a few precious minutes to locate us on t
heir sensors, giving us that much more of a lead. As soon as they did find us though, they immediately turned in our direction and restarted their pursuit. It was becoming increasingly clear to me they really were not ready to give up on catching us yet. The other ship seemed to have an acceleration curve that was quite similar to ours so it did not take too long, only a few hours, before they were no longer falling behind because the limited relativistic effects we were subjected to were beginning to take hold and while we still had maximum power to the engines our acceleration was beginning to drop off. It quickly became obvious they were planning to chase us till they caught us, or until we managed to reach a Federation Navy presence able to chase them off or destroy them. I found myself hoping and praying we wouldn’t run into an unarmed or lightly armed civilian ships before we found the Federation Navy, or if we did, I hoped the pirate would remain focused on us and leave them unmolested.
I asked the navigation crew to monitor our position in relation to the jump point, ready to give the order when it was time to begin decelerating. I told them the standing order was for us to set up for the jump at the maximum safe jump velocity and jump out of this system as soon as we could. We needed to enter the jump point no faster than the maximum safe jump speed and we wanted to be decelerating for the shortest possible length of time or we would be in trouble either by missing the jump entirely or by the pirates catching us. The hours crawled by as we ran across the system on our way to our target jump point, the pursuing pirate still behind us, still trying to catch up though not having much success. Finally, we reached a point where we needed to begin the deceleration burn so we could reach the correct speed for jump insertion. This was where the pirate would begin to catch us, this was the part of the journey across the system when we would be most vulnerable.
Praying the engines would hold up till we were safe, I gave the order and they were switched to full reverse thrust. If the engines failed now, we did not have the luxury of time to repair them, we would only be able to fight it out in the hope we could somehow prevail against the other ship. Of course, as soon as we began deceleration, the pursuing pirate began gaining on us closing the gap and bringing us into range of his weapons. He didn’t need to decelerate yet, if he didn’t intend jumping at the next jump point, he didn’t need to decelerate at all. I was not overly concerned about this as he really only had two choices. The first was to continue as he was and hope he could disable us before we went into jump, the other was for him to set up so he could follow us through the jump which meant he would need to start his own deceleration burn before too long.
We calculated that if he chose the first course of action, he would only be in range to fire on FNS Destiny for less than three minutes and even then he would only be at extreme range. The other downside for this course of action would be that he would overshoot the jump point before he could slow enough to safely enter jump space. While he was busy slowing down and then returning to the jump point so he could resume the pursuit, we would be moving further away and would have a little more space in the next system due to the time he lost setting himself up for his next jump. I thought we could probably survive for three minutes under his guns because we could dodge about a little. making it much harder for them to effectively target us, then before he could achieve accurate targeting, we would have entered the next jump point and be safely away. Really, I thought our most vulnerable time would be just after we entered the jump point event horizon, but just before we entered the jump corridor because that was one location where we had to be in order to escape the system, we simply could not dodge his bullets there. Thankfully, we would only be in that location for about twenty seconds, not very long at all.
If he chose the second course of action, neither of us would be any better or worse off when he reached the next system. When he down jumped and began his pursuit, he would be in the same position as he would have been when we started our deceleration. In the end, it all depended on how hungry and how reckless he was feeling. Having said all that, I found myself worrying endlessly about the effect of our throttle settings on Destiny’s engines. FNS Destiny had been away from her home port for nearly two years and was now overdue for a major overhaul. I really had no idea what the state of repair of the pirate vessel was, but she was keeping up with us quite well so far. I just continued praying our engines would hold up till we could reach somewhere safe.
As we decelerated the pirate continued to close the gap, slowly catching up with us, closing the range to a point where he would soon be able to fire on us. The point where he would need to begin his deceleration burn came and went without him making any attempt to set up for the next jump. At least we now knew his intentions, he wanted to stop us from leaving this system, perhaps even destroy us before we could escape. I found myself hoping he didn’t have some weapon we could not counter or stand up to for the three minutes or so we needed before we were able to enter jump. As we closed on the jump point, the pirate finally reached the stage where he was within range to begin firing at us.
I had our tactical officers continuously calculating when the various weapons that could do us damage would be able reach our current position and updating the times constantly. I needed that information for this stage of our journey so I could maneuver the ship out of the way in a timely manner. Our navigation ratings were only just able to pinpoint the exact current location of the jump point so we thought the pirate would be unlikely to know its precise location in three-dimensional space yet.
Jump points moved about space in a limited sense, the movement governed by the current positions of nearby masses such as planets and stars, even a reasonable size ship moving at near relativistic velocities as we were, acquired enough mass to impact the exact location of the jump point. They did not move a huge amount, at least not in the context of the size of a star system, but neither were they a completely unmovable fixed point in space. The navigation database could identify a rough location in space where the ship’s crew expected to find the jump point. When the ship was close enough, its’ sensors would pinpoint the exact location so the ship could then use it. Fifteen seconds before we expected that rail-gun rounds could reach us, I ordered the thrusters fired to push the entire ship hard to port.
Energy weapons were pretty much useless at this range as the beams spread and dissipated. Of course, my ideas for avoiding damage to FNS Destiny by dodging their bullets so to speak, relied heavily on the assumption that the people behind us were reasonably good shots. We barely vacated the space when the sensors detected approximately one-hundred projectiles from a rail gun passing through where we would have been if we had not moved. Lasers had also started to weakly splash off our shields when we started our move but they did not cause any damage at all to either the ship or the shields. As it turned out, the energy weapons didn’t even reduce our shield capacity by a measurable amount. I ordered point defence to close up because I expected missiles next and those were guided, they would be able to change trajectory to follow us, at least till they ran out of fuel. I quickly ordered the helm to move is hard to starboard to maintain course for the jump point.
The next time, fifteen seconds before another volley of rail gun rounds could reach us, I had the helm lift us above our current plane of motion. We were still heading in the general direction of the jump point and decelerating hard while the pirate continued to gain on us. We would soon need to reposition once more to a particular line of approach in order to enter the jump point correctly to reach the next system. The change also meant any munitions fired on a trajectory to intercept our current course would again miss because we will have changed our position in space relative to the pirate’s plane of travel once more while we were still heading towards the jump point. I was trying to position us so once we reached the correct location in space, we would only need to make one final course change at the last second before going into jump. This final course change would leave us with less than twenty seconds before we escaped this system in
to jump space. That was less than twenty seconds when our location would be predictable. I hoped whoever was in charge on the other ship did not recognise my ploy in time to hit us with some disabling munition.
The one big thing we had going for us was that the pirate was still about seventeen light seconds behind us. This meant that when we changed course, he wouldn’t know about the change, at least not for certain, for seventeen seconds. Then he had to make a decision on what to do before firing. Except for his lasers, all his other weapons would take significantly longer than seventeen seconds before they could reach us.
We reached the point where I ordered the helm to make our penultimate course change and they immediately complied, setting us up for the jump. Before then, the pirate finally reached a range close enough for his lasers to begin nibbling at our shields, gradually weakening them. At the last possible moment, we veered toward the jump point, out of the laser fire with our shields still at sixty percent capacity and dropped the shields ready for jump. He would not know what we’d done for a little while and by the time he could re-target, his lasers were unlikely to do much damage before we were gone. Our course straightened as we aimed straight for the jump point.
Tactical let me know the pirate had finally fired a spread of missiles. Our point defence opened up and the missiles started disappearing as we picked them off. Five seconds later, we once again entered the safety of jump space. We were only just under the maximum safe velocity to enter jump so we had timed our jump perfectly. We now had a four-day jump to reach the next system which was uninhabited, then another three and a half days to the final jump point into Federation space and hopefully the protection of the Federation Navy. That final jump, the one into Federation space was a long one, lasting nearly seventeen days but it ended at a system known to be heavily patrolled and strongly defended, almost always having at least two Navy heavy warships present. This system, also had a large space station and a ship repair facility. We hoped we could get help for the people we were holding in stasis when we arrived.
Star Man 1: Star Bourne Page 32
