by Dan Moren
“Ready, sir.” The lieutenant was cradling the comm unit in his hands.
“Give ’em the rabbit.”
Page tapped something on the screen and outside they could hear the faint sound of repulsors coming online, then fading into the distance. “This thing doesn’t have a radar strong enough to detect the patrol ships,” said Page without looking up. “So we’re going to have to take a risk on when to go.”
“Give it a minute,” said Kovalic. “If they’re going to bite, we should know pretty soon.”
Huddled in the jeep, they all lapsed into silence, the only light the glow from Page’s display washing his face in the blue-white tones of the drowned. Kovalic strained his ears, trying to catch any hint of response from the patrols, and did his best to ignore the throbbing in his shoulder.
Thirty seconds. Forty-five. One minute.
Nothing.
One fifteen. One thirty.
Tapper and Kovalic exchanged a look in the dim light, and the sergeant started to shake his head when something pinged the edge of Kovalic’s senses. He held up a finger and closed his eyes to concentrate. It was faint, but there it was: the sound of engines high in the sky. It was hard to tell which direction they were heading, but they seemed to be getting quieter, not louder.
“Page?” he murmured.
“Still going,” said the lieutenant. “No contact yet.”
“Sergeant,” said Kovalic, “I think it’s high time we get out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tapper. He tapped a control on the dash, triggering the garage door. With a screech and rattle of machinery, the mechanism slid upwards, curlicues of snow swirling through the opening. Kovalic pulled his parka tighter around himself as the cold seeped in along with the snow. It was already a bit brighter; false night wasn’t long, especially at this latitude, and it would be sunrise soon. Which would just make it that much easier for the Illyricans to nail them.
Tapper reached out to turn on the jeep’s headlights, but Kovalic grabbed his wrist with his good hand.
“Can you run dark?” he asked.
The sergeant hesitated. “On an unfamiliar road, with the crims on our tail?”
“Pretty much.”
A grin spread across the sergeant’s face. “I can damn well try.” He threw the jeep into gear and pulled out into the thick crust of snow, the heavy tires crunching through the white stuff with nary a slip. Impressed with the jeep’s performance, Kovalic revised his estimate: whoever’s little getaway this was had clearly had a thing for historical authenticity, if not for taste.
For his part, Kovalic could see little in front of them, even once his eyes adjusted to the dark. A bower of trees covered most of the road, adding to the darkness, and snow whispered across the windscreen and up and around the three of them. Every time they hit a bump in the road – and they hit plenty of them – Kovalic found himself thrown upwards a couple inches, only to slam back down into the thinly padded seat. He started to worry his arm wasn’t going to be the only part of him in need of medical attention.
But there’d been no sign of patrol ships yet. He looked back at Page, and the man spared him a brief glance and shrugged. “No interception on the hovercar,” he yelled over the sound of the jeep’s engine.
That was less reassuring. Then again, it had taken longer than he’d thought for the patrols to change course to follow the decoy, so maybe they were just being cautious. Still, something was giving Kovalic goosebumps, and it wasn’t just the cold of the Sevastapol pre-dawn.
Tapper swore suddenly and wrenched the wheel to the right, narrowly missing a dark shape that Kovalic suspected was a tree or similarly immovable object, though it whizzed by too quickly for him to identify it.
“Sorry,” Tapper called. “I can’t see more than ten feet in front of my face.”
“Maybe you need glasses, old man.”
“Only if they’ve got night vision.”
Kovalic gripped the jeep’s dashboard as they hit another nasty jolt and he wondered how long before they’d lose a tire or break an axle. The jeep had already surpassed his expectations, but there was well-constructed and there was able-to-withstand-breakneck-speeds-on-a-dark-bumpy-road.
Suddenly, the jeep passed out of the darkened woods and onto the clear, wide open tundra. The blizzard had already faded, and the sky was lit with dancing auroras of green and red, caused by the magnetic fields of the gargantuan blue-gray Yalta, itself rising in the eastern sky. On the horizon, Kovalic caught the haze of pink from the city – they were getting closer to the outskirts. It also, thankfully, meant the ride had smoothed out.
“Almost th–” Tapper started to say when a large predatory shadow swooped overhead, making Kovalic instinctively duck. The sergeant hit the brakes and cut the jeep’s wheels to the left, sending it into a sideways skid that only through luck didn’t become a barrel roll. They came to a stop half-off the road.
A second later, the sound of engines at full burn caught up with them, but the ship had already passed overhead. It turned its nose back towards them and begun to lower itself into their path. Bright floodlights snapped on, bathing the jeep in harsh white light. Kovalic squinted and reluctantly raised both his hands.
“I don’t suppose either of you can reach those grenades in the back seat,” he murmured.
Even as he said it, another shadow rippled overhead, followed again by the whine of repulsors. Kovalic’s heart sank. Taking out one patrol ship would have been hard enough, but two?
He sighed. “Belay that last, sergeant. Hands up, everybody.”
The second ship came back around for another pass, and Kovalic frowned. There was something not quite right about it – actually, there were several things. The shape of its silhouette was wrong; it was sleeker than the patrol ship. And the engine pitch was higher, too, like it was straining at the seams. Plus, it was just hovering in the air, fifty meters or so above the first ship. As Kovalic watched, a sliver detached itself from the ship – an entry ramp lowering, he realized – and a figure appeared on it, leaning out over the edge to the point that it was almost parallel to the ground below.
The figure was carrying something, too.
“Down,” snapped Kovalic, ducking his head between his knees.
A sound that could only be described as a fwump filled the air, followed by the sizzle of fat hitting a hot skillet, a heavy crunch, and the groaning of stressed metal. The floodlights that had been trained on them blinked out, as though extinguished by the pinch of a giant’s fingers, and the only sound that was left was the engines of the second ship.
“What the hell just happened?” hissed Tapper, swiveling his head towards Kovalic.
“No idea,” said Kovalic through gritted teeth, clutching his shoulder. “But I think I’d like to buy those guys a drink.” He lifted his head back up to peer at the scene.
Whatever the second ship had fired at the first had caused it to completely collapse; it had crumpled to the ground and was now lolling to one side, smoke funneling from the engines. It wasn’t on fire, though, nor did it look to have been damaged in any way beside its impact with the frozen tundra. Given that its engines appeared to have been disabled and the floodlights had gone out, Kovalic guessed that the culprit was some sort of electromagnetic pulse weapon.
Meanwhile, the second ship was maneuvering closer overhead, banking slowly from side to side, making sure its prey was well and dead. The side with the ramp slid towards the jeep now, and as it got closer Kovalic could more clearly see the figure standing on it. She – he was pretty sure it was a she – was carrying what was, upon closer inspection, some sort of rocket launcher. Kovalic frowned: there was something undeniably familiar about her, even in silhouette.
His breath caught. “Tapper,” he said, as calmly as he could manage, given the circumstances.
“Sir?”
“Exactly how much blood did I lose?”
A man’s amplified voice, also strangely familiar, boomed into the night,
raising the hairs on Kovalic’s arms. “Looks like you fine gentlemen could use a ride. Perhaps we can be of assistance?”
Kovalic blinked, staring into the face of the similarly stunned sergeant.
“No way…” Tapper said slowly.
Chapter 4
The ship drifted closer, the ramp hanging only a couple of feet above the hard-packed tundra as the repulsor fields threw up tiny whirlwinds of dirt and snow.
“Sooner is better,” the amplified voice said. “We’ve got multiple bogeys coming in from the west, so I wouldn’t mind getting the hell out of here.”
The lady or the tiger, as the old saying went. Well, Kovalic knew which one he’d choose, given the chance. “All aboard.”
Tapper and Page swung themselves out of the jeep as Kovalic wrangled himself more gently to the ground, grimacing as the muscles of his right arm instinctively tried to perform some of their customary duties. Page offered an arm, but Kovalic waved his good hand and half-stumbled towards the hovering ramp.
The silhouetted woman had turned her back on them and was yelling something to the pilot, but it was drowned out by the sound of the engines. Tapper and Page both clambered onto the gangway, between them hoisting Kovalic aboard. From the end of the ramp, he could see that the tube the woman was carrying was indeed some sort of launching device, though it was somewhat smaller than a standard rocket launcher. He could also see a lengthy pair of steel cables clipped to a belt around her waist, which explained how she’d kept from falling off the ship. A pair of combat boots hid the cuffs of her cargo trousers, which were topped in turn by a mid-weight navy blue jacket.
The blond hair, though, was shorter than he remembered.
“Nat?”
The face that glanced back over the shoulder, cheeks flushed red with the cold, plucked something deep in his gut, a half-forgotten memory of an old life. She nodded at him and offered a tight smile that was more business than pleasure as she unhitched herself from the harness.
“Simon,” she said, ducking her head in greeting. “Come on, we’ve got to go.” She waved the three of them into the ship, slapping the ramp’s closing controls as she passed through the upper hatch. Hydraulics groaned as it slowly levered up to meet the ship’s hull. Once Kovalic and crew had passed through the hatch, that too slid shut with a pressurized hiss. When the hatch light shone green, she touched another button.
“Everybody’s aboard. We’re good.” The intercom clicked off without an acknowledgement, and the deck shifted under their feet as the ship started to gain altitude.
Nodding to the cramped corridor to their left, Nat gestured for them to follow her. Kovalic exchanged a glance with Tapper, who shrugged and gave him a no-after-you wave. Page, meanwhile, looked blander than a slice of plain wheat bread.
The corridor ended in an open hatchway to the ship’s small cockpit. Nat was already strapping herself into the co-pilot seat, alongside a lanky young man with a head of tousled brown hair and an expression of concentration on his face. He spared a glance at Kovalic, his face breaking into a smile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a millionaire playboy. At the same time he pulled back on the yoke in front of him and the ship angled sharply upwards, forcing Kovalic to flail and grab onto one of the compartment’s other two seats with his good hand.
“Captain Kovalic,” said the young man. “Good to see you again. How’ve you been?”
“Pleasure’s all mine, Mr Brody,” Kovalic grunted, as he managed to lever himself into the seat. “And I’ve been better.”
Next to him, Tapper had strapped himself into the vacant flight engineer’s station, while Page had folded down one of the two jump-seats at the rear of the cockpit.
“Sorry to hear that,” said Brody. “But if you’ll all just strap in and stow any luggage, we’ll be under way shortly.”
“Brody, you’re a lucky son of a bitch that I can’t reach you right now,” growled Tapper.
“Welcome aboard, sergeant.”
Kovalic rubbed his forehead with his good hand. “Where the hell did you two come from?”
Brody nodded at Nat. “Commander cracked the local Illyrican comm traffic. Figured you’d be making some noise, so we just followed the growls of frustration.”
That answered just one of a long list of questions, but as Kovalic watched Brody flicking switches overhead, a more pressing one came to mind. “Let me just inquire – before we get blown out of the sky – how you plan to get by the orbital defense system.”
Nat pointed through the cockpit’s canopy, which showed a rapidly darkening skyscape, punctured by pinhole stars. “We’ve got a three-minute window on this vector, clear of both the defense platforms and the orbiting Illyrican battleships, thanks to a sympathetic technician at the ops center – and by sympathetic I mean ‘doesn’t mind having his bank account augmented.’”
Kovalic raised an eyebrow in her direction and she turned her hand palm up. “You know the general,” she said. “Always have a plan B.”
“Right. He doesn’t always like to share, though.”
“He seemed pretty intent on getting your team back.”
“Well, we’re expensive to replace.”
Nat rolled her eyes, and turned her attention to a console in front of her. “One minute left in our window, lieutenant.”
“Copy that, commander.” Brody seized the throttle lever with his right hand and slammed it forward. The increased speed pressed Kovalic back into his seat, his shoulder feeling like it was pressed inside a rapidly closing vise. The ship rattled around them like it was on the verge of breaking apart.
Kovalic closed his eyes. “This thing going to hold, Brody?”
The pilot’s hands wrestled with the yoke. “Don’t worry; she’s a good ship. We’ll make it.”
A loud series of crashes issued from the rear compartment.
“Though it’s possible I may have forgotten to tie a few things down.”
Sweat beaded on Kovalic’s forehead, dripping down his temple. Here was hoping the general’s frugality hadn’t extended to their ride. He was glad he hadn’t died on Sevastapol, but dying above Sevastapol didn’t really improve on the situation.
“Breaking atmo… now.”
The rattling dissipated as they passed the atmospheric boundary, and the cockpit was quiet, except for the whirring of equipment. Opening his eyes again, Kovalic let out a breath and clutched at his shoulder, which was insistently radiating pain into both his arm and chest.
“Commander, could you plot the rendezvous path?” said Brody, as he swung the helm around and cut over the engine systems.
“Coming up now,” said Nat, as a dotted green holographic display was overlaid on the cockpit canopy.
“Adjusting course to follow.”
Kovalic looked blankly out the viewport. “Rendezvous with what?”
“Well, our ride home, obviously,” said Brody. “Sorry, did you want to stay?”
“You got another sympathetic operator on the Illyrica gate?”
Brody chuckled. “Oh no, we’ve got something way better.”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?” Tapper muttered.
The ship sped through the vacuum of space, tracing the course laid out for them by the green dotted line on the canopy. A few minor spaceborne objects zipped past, deflecting harmlessly off the ship’s magnetic field. As far as Kovalic could tell, they weren’t heading towards any inhabited body in the system, but rather a wide open expanse of empty space. Just as he was about to ask exactly where they were going, he caught sight of an object dead ahead: a small, dark gray blob hanging amid the blackness. As they got closer, it resolved into a large, blocky shape that Kovalic recognized all too well.
Project Tarnhelm. The experimental jump-ship that just might be the most valuable object in the entire galaxy. No need for wormhole gates when you had a ship – the only ship – that could instantaneously zip anywhere else at the push of a button.
“He didn’t,” Kovalic breat
hed.
“You better believe he did.” Brody shook his head. “No expense spared. I hope I merit this much next time I need rescuing.” He reached over and touched a control on the ship’s console. Out to the fore, a crack of light appeared in the side of the larger ship, widening into a bright rectangle.
“All right, everybody hang tight,” said Brody. “The last time I tried this, I totally killed myself.”
“What?” said Tapper sharply, his head shooting up.
Brody throttled down as they approached the opening, leveling them off by flicking the attitude thrusters with delicate touches of his fingers. His mouth set in a grim line as they neared, then his whole face relaxed with relief as they passed through it; rotating the ship 180 degrees, he set them down with a gentle bump and spun down the engines, leaning back and giving a deep sigh. Another touch of a control, and the hangar doors started sliding closed.
“I left the artificial gravity on, but we’ll need a couple minutes before the bay’s repressurized,” he said, taking in his passengers. “Then it’s home again, home again, jiggity-jig.”
Waves of fatigue washed over Kovalic; suddenly he could barely keep his eyelids from drooping closed. He was about to surrender to the weariness, when a firm, dry hand seized his jaw. He blinked and found himself staring into Nat’s blue eyes. Her brow furrowed. “How bad was it?” The question seemed to be addressed to Tapper, who was also looming over him.
“Through and through,” said the sergeant, his lined face concerned, if a bit hazy to Kovalic’s eyes. “But he’s been running on adrenaline and fumes for the last hour.”
“Does this thing have a med bay?” Nat asked, looking at Brody.
“Commander, this thing is basically a giant empty shell strapped to an experimental propulsion system. We’re lucky it has bathrooms.”
“In that case, we’d better get moving. And you,” she said, her attention alighting back on Kovalic, “you stay with me. Capisce?”
“I love it when you get all romantic,” Kovalic said woozily.
