by GARY DARBY
The young woman mumbled, “Mmm?”
“Answer a couple of questions for me.”
She yawned before saying sleepily, “I’ll try. . .”
“How did you find me?”
“Process of ‘limination,” she murmured. “Knew you were aft in a starboard hold, just kept opening doors till we found you.”
“You were able to open the hatch door?”
“Sure,” she replied. “Couldn’t have gotten in otherwise.”
Dason stared at Shanon with a perplexed expression. The hatch hadn’t opened for him, and it didn’t make sense that the controls operated on the outside but not on the inside.
Too tired to try and think it through, Dason said, “Well, I do thank you. That was a slick piece of work.”
“Welcome,” Shanon replied with her eyes shut. “Team effort. Too bad the poachers showed up. Nabbed us just as we chased the ape off.”
“Yeah, too bad, “Dason responded. “But to tangle with that thing in the dark isn’t anything I would recommend. Good thing you were able to turn on the lights.”
“Didn’t,” Shanon answered sleepily. “Lights were on when we blasted the ape.”
Dason scratched at his chin. “You didn’t turn the lights on?” He started to ask another question, but Shanon had finally fallen asleep.
His eyes softened as he gazed at her. She had a large dirt smudge on her nose and mud splatters on both cheeks. Her disheveled hair had bits of caked dirt, and her hands still had red clay from Alistar under her nails.
She was the most beautiful girl he had ever known.
He stretched out and put his hands behind his head for a makeshift pillow. While his eyelids became heavier, Dason thought how lucky he had been that his teammates had managed to get the door open when they did.
A few more seconds and . . .
Chapter Twenty
Star Date 2433.55
The Poacher’s Ship
Grabbing Dason’s leg, the Torther Ape pulled him toward its cavernous mouth. Dason tried to reach for his knife, but instead pulled out his Life Sensor. He kept pushing on the little device, waiting for it to shoot out a death ray, but nothing happened.
The monster’s talons swept at Dason’s neck. He lashed out, tried to strike at the star creature, anything to get away.
The ape pinned Dason’s arms to his side in a bone-crushing grip. Its fang-lined mouth opened wider and wider, coming closer and closer . . .
“Dason,” a voice called out. “Hey, wake up!” Someone slapped his foot.
Dason opened his eyes and jerked upright. Seeing TJ, he grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, must’ve been a nightmare.”
She gave him an impish grin. “Well, I hope I wasn’t the mare.”
Dason shook his head no. Around him, the others were stretching out sore muscles. TJ held up a net-sac containing five ration cubes.
“Our hosts threw this in a couple of minutes ago. I think we must have come out of n-space, and it was time to feed the animals.”
Dason rubbed at his forehead trying to clear the mental cobwebs. N-space? Then he remembered. Bianca had said the run to Stygar Six would be twelve hours. They had slept twelve hours!
Dason heard a soft swish, and the door slid back revealing two renegades. Both wore laz-guns but didn’t have them drawn. “You’ve got ten minutes to eat,” one declared before stepping back and closing the hatch.
Sami read the cube label. “Delicious, ready-to-eat. Contains all essential nutritional ingredients. Serve hot or cold.”
He wrinkled his nose while saying to Nase, “Give me one of your boots to eat; we’ll split mine at lunch.”
A few minutes later the door opened, and the same two crewmen motioned them out. A short march and they entered the large round compartment that marked the astro-bridge. Dason puzzled over why the poachers would want them there.
Once his eyes adjusted to the subdued lighting, Dason noticed numerous consoles lining the curved wall. Several crewmen sat at their bridge stations, no doubt monitoring the various systems within the ship, along with the ship’s interstellar sensors.
The bridge’s forward part held a large vis-screen for external views of neighboring space. Right then, the screen displayed a rust-colored planet with innumerable tiny freckles that seemed to pockmark its face.
Sami gestured at the screen, whispering loudly, “One really bad case of the zits.”
Bianca, who had ignored them to this juncture, turned in response to Sami’s comment. Her response had a lecture like quality as she remarked, “Those ‘zits’ are an asteroid field that surrounds the planet.
“Sometime in the distant past, a sister planet, or large moon of Stygar Six shattered into countless pieces. Thanks to the gravitational influences of Stygar’s other moons, those fragments ended up in multi-orbital planes around the planet.”
She busied herself at her station before turning and saying, “As you might guess, Stygar Six doesn’t get many visitors.
“In fact, the last was a few years ago when the SciCorps survey ship Bridger crashed when their phasic force field either failed or the bombardment overloaded it and the ship took several major hits from the asteroids.
“No survivors.”
Dason frowned as he let the information sink in; it wasn’t often that a ship went down from an asteroid collision so close to a planet. The Bridger must have taken multiple and extensive impacts.
Bianca caught his attention by saying, “However, that’s not going to happen to us. There’s a way down, a bit risky, but doable.”
When Dason looked at the planet, he had to question Bianca’s judgment. If the Bridger’s powerful phasic field failed to safeguard a large survey ship, how did she think her smaller ship, with its tiny force field, could handle such an onslaught?
As if reading Dason’s mind Bianca explained, “Turns out that there is a donut hole in the asteroid field at both planetary axis points.”
She frowned. “Hole is the wrong description. Let’s just say it’s a place where there aren’t as many big rocks flying around.”
Pausing, she motioned to several empty grav-seats behind the scouts. “We may have to do some pretty fancy maneuvering. Could lose the internal grav-field and you scoutees would get all smashed up in your comfortable sleeping quarters.
“So you’ll ride down in style. Grab a grav-seat and buckle yourselves in. Tight.”
Dason caught Sami by the elbow and steered him over to two empty seats near an outlaw and sat down.
Bianca walked over and spoke to the poacher in low tones. She looked over her shoulder and commented, “I suspect you two are a bit curious about how we’re going to get this ship down.”
“Eternally curious, believe me,” Sami muttered.
Bianca’s mouth curled into a tiny smile. “Zane, give them a quick run-through,” she ordered and walked away.
The man nodded and brought up a three-D holographic view of the planet. He tilted it so that they observed it from above one of its planetary poles.
Miniscule pinpoints of light spun around the globe. There were so many that it looked like a cloud of sparkles encased the planet.
Zane gestured at the image. “The computer says that there’s a thirty-second window that opens about every ninety minutes over this pole. Not entirely debris-free, but compared to the rest of the planet, it’s almost empty. Only one or two fragments large enough to hurt us per square kilometer.”
The poacher ran a hand over the console and changed the view so that the asteroid belt at the pole parted as if swept by a brief wind gust.
“Before crashing, the James Cook transmitted the information it had collected on the asteroid’s orbits. We accessed it through the Imperium’s public database.”
Sami gave Dason a sharp glance and started to speak, but Dason shook his head to stop him. He had caught it, too. Bianca had said the Imperium survey starship Bridger crashed, not the James Cook.
Dason wondered if it was a slip of th
e tongue from Zane or something else. For some reason, he felt it important to find out which ship had gone down on Stygar Six. But it was obvious that he would have to bide his time until he found a way to answer the question.
Not witnessing Dason’s quick head movement, Zane continued, “We fed their data into our computer, and with other long-range sensor information, have a pretty good picture of the field’s activity. Here, let me show you.”
Zane added another command to the hologram’s program causing The Queen Bee’s miniature replica to join the whirling specks. “We hit the window just when it starts to expand,” he explained.
“And this is the tricky part: The computer says the hole will start collapsing inward from the top, something like a funnel that begins to squeeze together at its uppermost end.
“Because of that, we do a dive straight down, outracing the collapsing tube. Once we clear the debris cloud; we do a high-g J roll, and land.”
Sami scratched his head and remarked, “Doesn’t sound too hard, need any help with the piloting?”
The man stared at Sami, his expression saying, are you crazy, before going on. “Considering that we’ll be going about twenty kilometers a second when we hit the J’s tail end at about sixty kilometers above the planet’s surface, no, it’s not hard at all.”
Sami raised his eyebrows, eased back in his chair and began whistling the refrain from Mandelnay’s Ode of the Lost Scout.
Dason considered “tricky” a definite understatement. The five novices had dozens of training and mission flights in the small craft called scouters, including extreme weather, high-pressure atmospheres, no atmosphere, and below water.
Nothing though, that came even close to the risky maneuver of having only a few seconds at the end of a high-g dive to right themselves into a suitable landing posture.
“Who’s the pilot?” he asked.
Zane stood with a straight face and stated, “Me.” He then walked over to where the pilot and copilot chairs sat in the compartment’s forward section.
He brought acceleration bars across his body just as another outlaw slid into the copilot seat. “All hands, stand by. Maneuvering stations!” Zane called over the ship’s intercom.
At that order, the other crew members locked crash-bars across midsections and thighs.
Sami muttered to Dason, “I sure hope that guy graduated at the top of his class in piloting school.”
Dason leaned over and replied, “Outlaws and poachers don’t go to piloting school, Sami.”
“Oh,” Sami answered in a meek voice as both he and Dason engaged their acceleration bars across torso and legs.
A few moments later Zane spoke to his copilot, “Karm, disengage autopilot.”
“Auto off,” the copilot replied. “Pilot has the helm.”
Scant minutes later, The Queen Bee began her dangerous dive through the massive careening asteroids that guarded the planet.
Dason watched the two pilots work the conning and navigation controls. Both seemed confident and competent in their abilities.
He judged that at the ship’s speed coupled with the planetary debris’ orbital velocity, an impact would send a rock fragment slicing through the ship like a blistering blowtorch cutting plastic.
Karm spoke up. “All systems green, altitude 30,000 kilometers. We’ve got two bogeys port side at sixteen degrees to trajectory angle. Tracking astern and above.”
“Roger,” Zane acknowledged. Both pilots spoke in calm tones, but Dason could feel the tension fill the bridge as the Queen entered the debris cloud.
The seconds trickled by while Dason kept his eyes glued to the vis-screen. The screen showed a large crescent slice of the ruddy planet, while off to one side, the starry lights of the galaxy burned bright.
“Ten seconds to reverse attitude,” Karm stated. She began to chant, “And four, and three, and two, and one, and execute!”
Zane tipped the ship’s nose almost straight down toward the planet. The planet’s pale red crescent slid upward to fill the whole display. Dason watched the planet’s surface loom closer and closer.
It wasn’t long before he could make out distinct features, a large mountain range, vast whitish flat spaces resembling long-dried-up lakebeds, a huge jagged and winding canyon that snaked across the landscape.
Zane’s hands flew over the control board, in constant motion to adjust their downward plunging path. “Anything forward?” he asked.
“Clear so far,” she replied, then hesitated for a second before saying, “Wait, we got one on the edge, computer’s tracking . . . tracking.”
She let out a breath. “Okay, it’ll pass ahead and below by a thousand meters.”
More seconds ticked by. The deeper they dove into the asteroid cloud; the faster Karm’s readout came. “Two at thirty degrees’ port, passing astern, another at forty degrees—this one’s close, skipper, passing ahead at five hundred meters.”
She paused, and then observed, “Computer readout is going wild with targets behind us; the window is closing.”
“Concentrate on what’s ahead and any vectoring close to us from either side,” Zane ordered.
“Check,” the woman answered.
Seconds later her voice tensed up as she declared, “Cripes, skipper, this one’s got our name on it. Intercept course, eight seconds to impact, ten degrees’ port side!”
Zane jabbed at his controls, trying to steer clear of the flying mountain. With the internal grav-field on, Dason couldn’t tell what gyrations the Queen went through, but he had the impression that the ship accelerated.
The tension in the room thickened second by second until Karm puffed out a loud breath. “It’s sliding off, passing behind.”
The strain ratcheted down a notch. Dason noticed that he’d gripped the armrests of his chair so tight that he’d left indents in the cushion.
“Time to roll-out?” Zane demanded.
“Thirty seconds,” Karm replied.
“Are we clear yet?”
“No, there’s one crossing in—” Karm began, but just then the vis-screen exploded in brilliant streaks of orange and scarlet from the collision of two spheroids.
The pounding impact of gaseous molecules on the rock fragments turned them a fiery cherry red as both sped downward in a final plunge to add to the planet’s pitted surface.
“Pretty,” Zane observed with a grim tone. “Hope that’s not us in a few seconds. We’re coming in faster than we programmed. The flight surfaces are going to take a beating when we roll out.”
He paused for a second. “Give me the count at ten, Karm.”
“Roger.” For a few more seconds, there was silence in the astro-compartment, then Karm started the count, “Ten . . . nine—”
Her voice caught before she yelled, “Inbound! Two bogeys, intercept course. Impact in—”
Zane slammed a hand down on his pilot console. A wailing tone warbled throughout the ship, and a robotic voice blared out, “All hands. Collision! Brace! Brace!”
As if a giant battering ram had broadsided the ship, The Queen Bee staggered and rolled to one side, followed by a second vicious punch to the vessel.
Dason caught sight of Zane battling to regain control of his craft, but with the planet sliding off the vu-screen, he had a sickening feeling in his stomach that Bianca had lost her bet.
Out of control, the doomed vessel charged headlong in a death spiral with nothing to stop it from becoming another crater on the planet’s pockmarked face.
Chapter Twenty-One
Star Date 2433.057
The Queen Bee, Stygar Six
Wide-eyed, Dason watched as Zane fought to right the bucking vessel. A loud whooping sound reverberated throughout the bridge making conversation all but impossible. A half dozen red lights blinked on the pilot’s console.
“Turn that thing off!” Zane exclaimed. Karm hit the control panel, and the collision alarm stopped sounding.
Dason craned his head toward Shanon. She gave a thu
mbs up that she and the others were okay.
“Sliced right through the phasic field,” Zane stated.
He ran a hand over several controls before turning to Karm. “Where did we get hit?” he demanded.
Karm read off the damage, “Port-side fuselage punctured, compartments Five-Delta and Six-Echo. Ship’s stores. Compartment Seven-Foxtrot breached. Secondary hydroponics.”
She bent over to read her console before saying, “Skipper, it took out four of the six forward thrusters on the port side.”
“Port-side lifters?” he asked.
“Still retracted and intact,” Karm answered. “But at this speed they’re not going to be much help without the thrusters.”
“Which means I might have to actually fly this thing,” Zane grunted.
“Any other damage?” he asked.
“No,” Karm replied. “Believe it or not, but I think those two rocks just grazed us, the damage is bad, but it doesn’t look like the meteors punched clean through us.”
On hearing that, Dason let out a breath. To have a chunk of rock hit a ship like The Queen Bee dead on and blast through their phasic shied would be catastrophic. If large enough, the meteor’s kinetic energy would blast the craft into thousands of pieces.
The rock would rip through the ship’s outer skin, tear through inner bulkheads and out the other side. Flying debris would destroy nano-filaments, fibro-cables, optic relay junction boxes, all critical elements of the ship’s operating systems.
In seconds, the ship would lose all power, navigation controls, and life support.
A dead ship.
Zane spoke over his shoulder to Bianca. “I’ve got her under control, but the landing is going to be pretty tricky.”
He glanced over to Karm. “Give me the altitude in thousand meters increments.”
“Roger,” Karm replied. A deep rumbling filled the vessel from the powerful forward thrusters pushing against Stygar’s thin atmosphere to slow the ship’s fiery descent.
“We’re at thirty thousand,” Karm pronounced. “Twenty-five . . . Twenty. Coming up on fifteen.”
