Boneshaker

by Joshua Dalzelle

  "Looks like your theory that they're here for that data core is off, LT,' Taylor said. The corporal leaned in through the open hatch, his arms stretched over his head and hanging onto an exposed conduit.

  "It just means they have no idea who has it right now, not that I'm wrong," Jacob insisted. "Look! Assault barges are breaking off the main fleet and heading to the lower decks. They're going to— Ah, shit."

  "What?" Sully asked.

  "The only reason they'd be landing an assault force on the lower decks is because they're going to round up the criminal element and do a search," Jacob said. "They're going to hit hard and fast, and they don't trust Pinnacle Security to do it, so they're after something specific."

  "And if they grab that guild master who gave you the core…" Taylor left the thought hanging in the air.

  "Oh," Sully said. "Yeah…shit."

  Jacob leaned back in the seat, staring intently at the display as if he could will the ConFed ships to ignore his little shuttle as it zipped along in a flotilla of other, similar ships away from the station. Sully had debated back and forth about staying with the group or veering off and heading for a mesh-out point alone, but in the end, decided that keeping in the group and not standing out was the smarter move. Jacob trusted the pilot to make those decisions since he wasn't exactly an expert in space combat tactics.

  He took his mind off the details of flying the ship and thought hard about the situation they were in. If a ConFed cruiser intercepted and captured them, the UEN and United Earth Council would disavow any knowledge of them or their mission. Those were the risks Scout Fleet crews faced during even the most mundane mission. If it all went to shit, there would be no diplomatic efforts to recover them. It was something he rarely thought of unless they were in a situation like this, where capture seemed like better than even odds.

  Jacob's gut feeling told him the guild master on Pinnacle wouldn't give them up even if the ConFed shock troops got a hold of him and squeezed. They'd been waiting for a suitable crew to ferry the data core, and Jacob's purloined Blazing Sun marker had vetted them as such a crew. It indicated the data core was highly valuable to some very important people…people the guild master wouldn't betray. Of course, it was also equally likely the alien they'd dealt with personally had escaped himself, and he had nothing to worry about, but with the way his luck had been going on this mission, he didn't count on it.

  "Corporal Levin, would you please go back in the engineering bay and standby on the manual engine control reset," Sully said, frowning.

  "What's wrong now?" Jacob asked.

  "Engines are surging, and we're dropping off," the pilot said, calm as ever. "I can't maintain this acceleration. This loose formation is going to pull away from us."

  "On my way— Shit!"

  A meaty thunk let Jacob know his tech specialist had hit his head on a low-hanging condenser pipe, the same as he and Sully had done a few times as they'd left the flightdeck. Jacob laughed but never took his eyes off the tactical hologram. As Sully had warned, the other ships pulled away, still under their full acceleration while his shuttle started to fall off. The other ships weren't roaring away, but the DeltaV was high enough that, soon, they'd be caught out in the open, alone.

  "How is this even possible?!"

  "Relax, Lieutenant," Sully said. "This is just part of the issue with mismatched components, not another failure. Once I have Taylor reset the controller, we'll get full power back."

  "How long?"

  "I've chopped power to zero, so another five minutes until the emitters bleed down enough to do the reset."

  The time seemed to tick by while the other ships pulled further away. So far, all the ConFed ships were still maneuvering to form a blockade to trap the larger freighters at their docks, but he'd still be more comfortable once they were well away. A soft chime from his panel made him look back to the hologram. A new contact had appeared on the other side of the system, coming at them from the direction they flew.

  "Who are you?" he asked himself as the computer chugged through the incoming sensor data to resolve the contact. They had a database of known ship-types it could match to if the newcomer didn't fire up its ident beacon.

  "What's it doing?" Sully asked, reaching over and hitting the intercom switch. "Hit the reset now, Corporal."

  "Just drifting down," Jacob said. "Adjusting course and coming to bear on the formation ahead of us, but it could also be lining up to intercept Pinnacle."

  The computer found a type match a moment later. Sully let out a slow whistle.

  "You don't see those very often," he said. "I think we're going to try something a little drastic here. Standby."

  Jacob watched as the now-identified ConFed assault carrier flew deeper into the system, still not broadcasting an ident beacon or issuing any demands. The assault carrier was exactly the type of ship you would bring in if you wanted to run down a bunch of small cargo ships and shuttles you suspected of smuggling something you wanted. This class of assault carrier had a compliment of two hundred and seventeen fighters, eighty-two assault boats that could land troops anywhere, and forty-six gunships that could hammer targets on the surface of a planet or duke it out with another ship in space.

  Sully waited until the controller reset was complete, and then smoothly pushed the power all the way to maximum, swinging around onto course perpendicular to the one they'd been on. The little ship shuddered and surged ahead on her new course. Jacob could see they were splitting the difference between the taskforce at Pinnacle Station and the assault carrier that had just arrived. On the long-range sensors, he could see that two other groups of fleeing ships had also been corralled by ConFed ships, but they were too far away for him to tell what type.

  "What's your master plan?" Jacob asked.

  "Going to accelerate to mesh-out velocity, and then we'll engage the slip-drive and get the hell out of here," Sully said. "I'm taking us out towards Colton Hub, but not on a direct vector that could be tracked by the ConFed."

  "Wonder why nobody else has thought of that," Jacob wondered aloud. Mesh-out points had nothing to do with anything other than the arbitrary spot in the system that local governments had agreed on for ships to depart the system. It helped control the traffic flow, but from a technical standpoint, a ship could mesh-out anywhere assuming they weren't near any planetary bodies with significant gravitational pull.

  "They will," Sully said. "A ship out by itself in this sort of situation makes it a sitting duck and draws attention. Once they realize the carrier is actually there to intercept them, they'll scatter. It'll be too late by then, of course."

  "So, we're the smart ones this time."

  "No…we're probably still screwed. The ConFed Fleet is very good at this sort of thing. We'll be lucky to make it out of— Ah, there we go." Sully pointed to the tactical display where another ship had just appeared. This was one was a lowly frigate, but it was also only a million klicks off their port side and turning to intercept.

  "Shit," Jacob muttered, watching the big capital ship commit to them. "We gonna make it?"

  "It'll be close," Sully said. "Slip-drive is primed, we just need more relative velocity for mesh-out."

  Jacob sat silent and let Sully work. He could make out what the instruments were telling him, and it looked like they would just make it before the frigate could get them in weapons range. Of course, that assumed their engines wouldn’t hiccup again and cut their acceleration. While he watched the numbers converge, an alert splashed across the panels on his side, and he saw immediately what they were warning him about.

  "Frigate has just fired! Three plasma cannon shots inbound!"

  "Can't juke, no time," Sully grunted, sweat beading up along his hairline. He reached up and grabbed the lever on the overhead console that controlled the slip-drive engagement and stared hard at their relative velocity numbers, seeming to will the last bit of power from the worn-out engines that he could.

  "Impact in six seconds!"

/>   "Now!" Sully shouted, shoving the handle forward. There was a shrill whine from deeper in the ship, and all the portholes instantly blacked out, protecting the occupants from the brilliant slip-space energies flowing around the ship outside.

  "Well, that was exciting," Jacob deadpanned, his body crashing after the adrenaline charge he'd gotten from almost being caught by the ConFed. He looked over and saw that Sully leaned back in his seat, looking like he felt much the same way.

  "Why did they fire on us?" Sully asked. "I figured they'd broadcast demands we heave to and wait to be recovered."

  "They weren't warning shots," Jacob said, gesturing to where the tactical hologram would normally be projected. "The computer had calculated the intercept points, and it looked like they meant to hit us. It was a long range shot, so maybe they assumed we'd see it and slam on the brakes."

  "They're not that sloppy." Sully shook his head. "The ConFed may be a corrupt cesspool, but their fleet is top notch. If they opened fire, they intended to splash us. Their sensors probably saw our type and velocity and correctly surmised we were close to mesh-out and rolled the dice."

  "A frigate pops into real-space just close enough to try and grab us and tries to shoot us down without any warning or demands," Jacob said. "Perhaps I gave our guild friend too much credit, and he talked as soon as they got him."

  "Good job not getting us dead, Sully," Taylor said as he swung on the conduit line back onto the flightdeck. "Everything seems okay back there for now."

  "It's a seven-day flight out to Colton Hub," Sully said, yawning. "I'm going to hit the rack, and then I'll go down and check everything over again with fresh eyes."

  "I'll take first watch," Jacob said. "Taylor, tell Murph he's relieving me, and then you're up after him."

  "What about MG and Mettler?"

  "Mettler can relieve you, but I don't want MG up here unsupervised," Jacob said.

  "And his stupidity gets rewarded yet again," Taylor muttered as he turned and walked back down the center corridor.

  Jacob reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out a pack of issue stim tabs, popping a couple to keep him alert through his five-hour watch shift. He climbed out of the copilot seat and went to the auxiliary station at the rear of the cramped flightdeck, activating the terminal and accessing the ship's new slip-com node. There was a new message in Obsidian's dead drop box that originated from the UES Kentucky. It was from Captain Webb, explaining that Scout Fleet teams and ships were being hit all across the quadrant. His eyes widened in shock as he learned Scout Team Diamond had been completely wiped out, and the Northstar had taken a beating but managed to escape.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes, saying a quiet prayer for Lieutenant Commander Morse and his team. Per Webb's message, it was likely that whoever was taking out Scout Fleet units had no idea how to find Obsidian. Their ship, the Corsair, had been dragged back to Terranovus, and there were very few people who knew the details of how they acquired the ship they were currently in. UEN regulations were pretty explicit about things like pirating and theft, so the reports filed with NAVSOC were a little vague on things like the fact they had killed the original crew and flew off with a known smuggler's ship.

  After answering Webb's message with a coded acknowledgement that would tell his CO he'd received and understood his orders, Jacob pulled up as much information as the ship's limited database had on Colton Hub. He didn't want to risk accessing the NIS database with his ship's slip-com node since it could possibly be used to track them. He'd only been working in Scout Fleet a short time, and he was already extremely paranoid, seeing One World traitors behind every odd happenstance or message. Having Hollick pop up at two different locations hadn't done much to help.

  In the remaining hours of his watch, he put together a plan for when they reached the Hub. He made a reminder to check the personal journal of the ship's previous owner for any more background information on the infamous facility, and even kicked around the idea of reaching out to Whitney to see what she knew or, more accurately, would be willing to share. By the time a bleary eyed and grouchy Murph walked onto the flightdeck, Jacob felt like he had the barebones of a pretty solid plan.

  13

  Colton Hub was nothing like Pinnacle Station, save for the fact that each was an independent, self-sustaining artificial habitat in space that had their own cultures, politics, and rules.

  While Pinnacle was a respectable place that cooperated with local governments and was widely considered a crucial resource for interstellar trade and commerce, Colton Hub was seen as a scourge. No government claimed the Hub, nor did any want to bother wasting the resources to tame it. Some few had tried and, after burning through money and troops at equal rates, had slunk off and left it to its own devices.

  The station had started life as a refueling platform for long-haul freighters back before starships had the legs to make it across the quadrant without replenishing. Unlike most platforms, Colton Hub wasn't anchored in a star system, it sat in deep space, which made it tricky to navigate to. Since everything in space moved relative to everything else, Colton Hub was never in the same spot when you came back. The station updated its position relative to the galactic center every fourteen hours and eleven minutes on a publicly accessible Nexus node. That would put you in the general area, but the updates were deliberately fudged so that nobody could mesh-in right on top of them. It gave the dirt bags that inhabited the station time to evacuate should a ConFed taskforce pop into real-space intent on dropping the hammer.

  "That…does not look safe to be aboard," Murph said, looking at Colton Hub through the shuttle's high-resolution optics. "Is it on fire and venting?"

  "It's both…and that's normal," Jacob said. "The habitat vents atmosphere from a hundred or so holes at any given time. The crews repair the holes, new ones pop up. The fires happen now and again when one of the exhaust vents from the reactors ignites trash that lands near the ports."

  "This happens often?" Taylor asked skeptically.

  "The hub is the only thing within three hundred lightyears that has any significant mass," Jacob said. "Anything that gets tossed out of a ship in the area will eventually be pulled back down to the station."

  "How the hell do you know all that?" Sully asked.

  "It was in the ship's database. The previous owners had some pretty detailed information on Colton Hub, actually," Jacob said. "The captain even had some detailed maps of an area they call the Catacombs, where you really don't want to go unless you absolutely have to. He used it to hide from time to time since nobody wanted to go down there to dig him out."

  "Incoming transmission from the station," Sully said, flicking a switch to put it on the overhead speakers.

  "Incoming Eshquarian light-ship, we have you on approach. Your transponder codes have been recorded, please provide your ship's registry name, cargo, and intent."

  "We are the light cargo shuttle, Boneshaker," Sully said into his mic, giving the name the team had christened the ship with after leaving Pinnacle. "No inbound cargo, intent is to find a load heading back towards the Concordian Cluster." After all the mechanical failures and near misses, the crew had decided that maybe the curse of flying an unnamed ship had some teeth to it.

  The station didn't immediately respond, and as the time dragged on, the more Jacob feared their ship had been recognized. The previous crew frequented Colton Hub, and even though they'd swapped out all the coded transponders, the visual profile of the ship might be spotted by a sharp-eyed sensor operator familiar with the previous crew.

  "Boneshaker, your landing is approved. Please proceed to public hangar bay thirty-four, landing pad twelve." The channel went dead, and the navigation panel lit up with course corrections from the station's automated system, directing them to the correct hangar. Like Pinnacle, Colton Hub was built on a scale that boggled the mind, so large that when they were still a full kilometer from the hangar bay outer doors, the construct was all they could see out the forward portholes.r />
  Sully expertly shut down the drive and slid the ship through the atmospheric barrier and into the hangar, deploying the landing gear and swinging them gracefully around onto landing pad twelve. He positioned the ship so that the bow was pointed out towards open space, a precaution in case they had to flee for their lives once again.

  "Hey, your gizmo from that smuggler just lit up!" Mettler shouted up to the flightdeck from where he and MG sat in the galley.

  "The data card that's supposed to tell us our new contact," Jacob said. "I guess it detected the signal from the station it looked for."

  They left Sully to secure the ship from flight mode and settle up their account with the deck boss as far as landing fees and fuel costs and went aft to the galley. The alien script on the card glowed in a brilliant blue, and the edge of one side glowed yellow, indicating it was now ready to be accessed. Jacob took it and placed it on a lit yellow pad by the terminal that sat in one corner of the galley. The terminal gave a quick double-chirp to let him know it was reading the card.

  "This seems surprisingly straight forward," he said as the instructions scrolled across the screen. The galley terminal was an isolated, stand-alone computer, so any nasty little surprises someone might have put on the data card wouldn't be able to jump onto the ship's network and ruin their day. "We need to take this card down to a computer terminal on Zult Deck—I think that's right under the main promenade—and access it from there. That specific terminal will give us the current location of this Dekav Qozulun we're supposed to meet, as well as a physical description."

  "And that terminal will also make sure Dekav knows what we look like, as well as where we are the moment we access it," Murph said. "Smart. We can assume that terminal will also be watched."

  "Safe bet," Jacob said. "Let me check in with the Kentucky, and then we'll get this party started. I'm taking MG with me, Murph and Mettler will trail behind and watch for any observers, and Taylor will stay with the ship to route coms and help Sully."