by Kal Spriggs
Mike waved Run to stop as he began to repeat himself. He switched the volume down. “That’s bad. If the Warden’s little betrayal didn’t have any Chxor military force on the way, that certainly will.” He typed in commands on the sensor console. It took a moment to work through the unfamiliar controls and his own limited knowledge of sensors. When he finished, Mike looked at Ariadne, “How close to loaded are we?”
“Around twenty others have decided to come, the rest don’t think we have a chance,” She said. “I… I thought about manipulating some of them, but I’m not sure I could control that many, and some of them are just so broken…”
Mike grimaced, “If they want to stay here, they’ve already given up. I won’t try to kidnap them to bring them with us, not with how tight things are already.” He mentally reviewed the size of the bay. “How are we for food and water?”
“Crowe found some human ration bars in the administration area. They’re expired, but it’s better than nothing,” Ariadne said. “I’m not sure about water.”
“The ship has a potable water tank, looks like five thousand liters,” Pixel said. He peered at his datapad. “There’s no link from there to the cargo bays, but there’s a faucet in the bathroom off the engine room.”
“Head,” Mike corrected automatically.
“What?” Pixel asked. “Yeah, I need to watch my head here, the ceilings are pretty low. I should to do something about the lighting too.”
“No, the bathroom is called a head. And it’s not a ceiling, it’s an overhead. The floor is the deck,” Mike said patiently.
“Oh, right, jargon,” Pixel said. “What was it you typed in the sensors a second ago? It looked like a monitoring program of some sort, sort of like what engineers use to check engineering software.”
“Something like that,” Mike said. “Just a simple sweep with the video telescope. It’s mounted forward, so between the bulk of the station and our fixed position, we’ll only get a fraction of the sky, but if something’s out there…”
A harsh buzzer sounded, and an image popped up on the screen. Mike peered at it for a long moment. He looked at Run, “It found something, what does it say?”
Run had gone completely still. His big eyes went wide. Mike saw his body tremble. “Hey, what does it say?” He reached out to shake the little Chxor, but got no response. He glanced over at Ariadne, who had gone pale as well. “Can you do your…” he waved his hands around his head… “You know?”
“It’s not magic,” Ariadne snapped. “But yeah, I did. He’s so shaken because he thinks we’re all going to die. It turns out that Run has a very heightened survival instinct-”
“Run hide!” Run shouted. The little Chxor bolted out of the cockpit, and scrambled down the hallway and into the engine room.
“…and from what he understands, we’re pretty much screwed,” Ariadne said. “That message indicates that six ships have come within visual identification range. Four of them are ten-class Chxor cruisers.”
“Cruisers?” Mike asked. He felt his stomach drop. Four cruisers… they effectively possessed no weapons, the riot guns wouldn’t so much as scratch a fighter. He didn’t know how the Chxor armed their ships, but four cruisers sounded bad. “What about the other two… support ships?”
Ariadne gave him a grim smile, “No, the identification codes on their transponders report them as five-class dreadnoughts.”
* * *
Mike felt sweat bead his face, “Well, I guess I should have just taken the ship and abandoned the rest of you when I had the chance.”
“What?” Pixel asked.
Mike smiled, “I joke.” After all, with how he had needed Run to translate controls, he would not have gone far anyway. Well, not unless he captured the pilot alive, or dragged the Warden in to do the work. After all, he could have disposed of either of them at his leisure. “Well, anyway, we’re not totally screwed.”
“Why is Run hiding in the bathroom?” Simon said from the corridor. “We’ve got a lot of people on board. Some of us have a dire need to relieve ourselves.”
“We have two Chxor dreadnoughts coming up on us, and the Chief of Security and Warden both tried to screw each other and told half the Chxor fleet about a planned mutiny in the process,” Mike said.
“Oh,” Simon said. He seemed to think the entire thing through for a moment. “Well… at least I don’t need to pee anymore.”
Mike snorted, “Yeah, I would shit myself, but that mush they gave us stopped me up pretty well.” He gave a sigh, “But anyway, we may have a chance. It looks like only those ships, and they’re coming in at an angle that puts the bulk of the station between us and them. The only reason we even saw their approach is because the nose of this boat sticks out a little bit around the docking hub, and that’s where they installed the telescope.”
“There could be more of them coming from directions we can’t see, though,” Pixel said. “I mean, you said yourself before that we can only see a part of the sky.”
“Yeah, but if we think about all the stuff we don’t know, and all the things that the universe could do to screw us over, we’d never get anything done, we’d be paralyzed by fear,” Mike said. “Besides, why would they need to send more than a pair of dreadnoughts to put down a riot on a station?”
“Why would they send two dreadnoughts in the first place?” Ariadne said. “I mean, my grasp of military vessels is pretty weak, but those are big ships, right?”
“Yeah, you can say that,” Pixel said. “If I use those cruisers for scale… they’re over two thousand meters long.”
“Big enough,” Mike said. “But maybe that’s just what they had nearby, or maybe some admiral or someone thinks it’s good training. I don’t know why they sent those two ships-”
“The Chxor only have two types of military ships,” Eric said. He shakily leaned against the hatch combing. “Five-class dreadnoughts and ten-class cruisers. They use mass production of those two classes to sustain a massive fleet.”
“And you know that how?” Mike asked
“You shouldn’t be up,” Ariadne said, her voice harsh. “You need to rest, heal up.” She seemed very motherly all of the sudden. She reminded Mike of his older sister for a moment. That thought seemed absurd on the face of it. His tiny, Asian, sister had no resemblance to the tall blonde woman. Mike hadn’t thought of her in years, he realized.
“I can rest later,” Eric said. “I did some time as a weapons officer in the Centauri Confederation Fleet. I got a bit of experience identifying enemy ships, and I studied them a bit… before I joined the Centauri Commandos.”
“You were a Commando?” Mike asked, surprised. Military he expected, but the Centauri Commandos retained an almost mythical status amongst those who knew about them. The successors of the Amalgamated Worlds Special Forces, the Centauri Commandos had the best training and equipment, many had extensive training in a number of fields of fighting, from counter-terrorism to insurrection.
“For a while, before I got recruited for…” Eric paused and shook his head, “Sorry, must be going a bit loopy from blood loss.”
Mike frowned though; someone had recruited him from the Commandos?
“Anyway, the Chxor dreadnoughts are the only ships in their fleet with any real offensive firepower. The cruisers just have some light interceptor weapons, pop guns really. Good enough to kill us, I bet, though. The rest of them are defenses, jammers, defense screens, and electronic warfare systems. The dreadnoughts are the dangerous ones, the cruisers just screen them.”
“Alright, well, we still don’t have any weapons, so we’ll focus on escape,” Mike said. “And I have a plan. We pull out, use our maneuver thrusters to get clear of the station and drop into the debris cloud. Put something big and solid between us and their sensors, and then light off the main drive.”
“The thrusters burn a lot of fuel,” Pixel said. “We might burn ourselves dry to get behind the gas giant.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll cross that
bridge when we come to it,” Mike said. He didn’t want to die in a cold ship, but it might well beat whatever fate the Chxor reserved for rebellious prisoners.
“I have an idea,” Pixel said. The engineer tapped at his screen for a moment. “Look, if I make some simple modifications to the engine, I can get a sort of pulse drive effect.”
“A what?” Simon asked.
“He means the engine will give a massive pulse of thrust, and then go quiet, right?” Mike asked.
“Exactly. We’ll only be detectable for a few seconds,” Pixel said. “It puts a lot of strain on the drive, but we don’t really care if we add a few thousand hours of strain on the magnetic plasma guide rods, right? I mean, it’s not like we’ll keep this ship; we’re going to have to get one with a Shadow Space drive soon or we’re dead.”
“Right,” Mike said. “If this ship blows up a few minutes after we’re clear of it, I could care less.”
“Really?” Pixel said. “Hey, you know…”
“How long would you need to make the modifications, and how long will the burn last?” Mike asked even as he brought up the thruster controls. He glanced at Ariadne, who gave him a nod to show he’d brought up the right ones. Next time we get a choice, we do not take a Chxor ship, he thought. He hated that he had to rely so heavily on someone else to do something he normally would have found simple.
“Uh…” Pixel tapped at his datapad. He frowned and stared at it for a moment, then rotated it upside down and tapped at it some more.
Mike looked at Simon, “All aboard?”
“Roger,” Simon nodded. “We’ve got around twenty others, besides our little group. Should I have everyone brace themselves?”
Mike frowned. Normally he would have engaged the the inertial dampeners before he brought up even the maneuver thrusters. Yet once they separated, they would have to rely on internal power and internal fuel. He glanced at the fuel gauges, which at least showed a bar graph of the hydrogen level in the fuel tanks. The maneuver thrusters would drain a lot of fuel, just as Pixel had said. Inertial dampeners and artificial gravity would drain more. “Yeah, tell them to secure everything they can. Tie it down, tie themselves down. Whatever they can do. They have three minutes and then I cut artificial gravity and we move.”
Simon nodded, “I think I saw some straps by the crates and there may be some rope in the engine room. I’ll get it done.”
“Take the former pilot with you, would you?” Mike asked
Simon shook his head, “Would it have killed you to take him prisoner?”
Mike gave him a level glare, “I didn’t kill him. Rastar did, after he went for a switch.” Mike glanced at the switch in question. From what Run had said, that control would have shut power down to the controls. Mike felt he could stay silent on that, however, as Simon gave him a glare and grabbed the corpse by the feet.
Mike gave him a sixty second count and then flipped the switches that closed the outer hatch. He kept the umbilical that shared air and power with the station for the moment. He doubted that the ship’s designers had planned for thirty passengers when they designed the life support. The longer they breathed station air, the longer they’d have air aboard the ship.
Finally Pixel looked up, “I could be wrong, but I think I can get us around ten gravities acceleration for twenty seconds. We’ll only be able to do it once, though; after that the engines shouldn’t run at higher than normal load. We can’t trust their magnetic guide rods under that strain more than once.” Pixel frowned, “I can do all of it from here, most of it is just setting up the process in the system. But once I hit execute, we’ll be locked in.”
“Understood,” Mike said. He looked at Ariadne, “You good for normal space navigation too?”
She nodded, and she typed in a series of commands into the navigation computer. A system map appeared on the heads up display. Mike opened his mouth to make a suggestion, but she just closed her eyes and typed in further commands. Mike frowned, she didn’t even seem to check the numbers she typed in. He’d known some pretty hot shot navigators, especially from when his more recent work aboard smuggler ships, but he had never known one to plot a course on the fly without even the use of a calculator.
She typed in the last command, and a curved line appeared on the screen. Mike frowned at the course, it seemed to take them out and around the gas giant in a maneuver designed to use its gravity well to throw them deeper into the system at a higher velocity. Also, it curved past two planets before it cycled past the star and then towards the outer system again.
“Those two planets are both in the life bearing belt,” Mike said. “Can we break and try for orbit over either of them with this course?”
“Yes, but we’ll give away our position. I tried to align our course to match a probable shipping lane between the two, we may get lucky and come across a freighter we can hijack.”
Mike snorted, “Right, that’s pretty damned unlikely. But thanks for thinking of it.” He glanced at the timer. “Alright, strap in to a seat if you’re staying here. Otherwise find someplace to hang on.” He saw Ariadne take a seat in the rather messy copilot seat in front of him. He heard Pixel take a seat, and out of the corner of his eye, saw Eric lower himself to the floor and brace against the hatch combing.
Mike cut the artificial gravity first, and then the umbilical to the station. A moment later he brought up the thrusters. He used light taps, just enough to get them clear of the station itself, before he swung around and increased the burn.
The thrusters put out seven hundred thousand newtons of force, enough to accelerate the ship at almost four gravities of acceleration. They also drained the fuel tank at a rate that made Mike wince. He kept an eye on the fuel even as he worried about the signature the vessel would made as they vented superheated hydrogen plasma at a prodigious rate.
It put out a serious thermal signature, he knew. He could see the high visual signature as well, as florescent gas flared out in a bright trail. But not nearly as much as the fusion drive. That would put out measurable radio and x-ray and even a little gamma radiation as well, and a much higher energy signature. He somehow doubted that the Chxor would overlook that.
“Why is the acceleration throwing us forward?” Pixel asked. His voice sounded slightly strained from the acceleration. .
“I’m using our forward thrusters,” Mike grunted, “Because normally those are bigger to assist in braking on boats like this. Also, it lets me gain a visual of the station, and the ships headed there.”
He saw Ariadne type in a command on her console, and the radio went live again. A Chxor voice spoke. Ariadne reached back and touched Mike’s knee. For a moment, he heard the Chxor words and then he heard the human translation, only in his head. The thought of what she did made him shiver. She considered her psychic abilities weak. Mike really did not want to meet up with one of the powerful psychics, or worse, one of the infamous Shadow Lords.
“Penal Station 2214, this is Ship’s Commander Krakkan. I notice gas venting in your vicinity and note a debris cloud near your salvage bay. I notice that the emergency message recording has ceased its transmission. My sensors also show your defense turret offline. If Chief of Security Kras is available, have him communicate on this frequency. If he is not, put Warden Hral on.”
A long period of silence passed. “This is Warden Hral. I regret to inform you that Chief of Security Kras was killed by the prisoners aboard the station. It seems likely that he had formed an alliance with them and they subsequently betrayed him.”
“What a bastard,” Mike muttered. He could understand the Warden’s survival instinct, but his betrayal of his own kind, and his lack of loyalty to those who served and protected him, left Mike feeling nothing but disgust.
Ship’s Commander Krakkan answered after a moment. “Warden Hral. Chief of Security Kras’ death represents an unfortunate loss. However, I find it fortunate that I can speak with you directly. This maximizes efficiency, as I can directly inform you that for
your treasonous activities, System Commander Hran has ordered your death.”
If Mike didn’t know better, he might have sworn the other Chxor actually sounded the slightest bit happy about that, almost as if he gloated about it a bit.
Mike shook his head; the thought seemed ridiculous, after what he had seen of the Chxor so far. If they had emotions, the crazy bastards suppressed them. No Chxor, especially not one ranked high enough to command a dreadnought, would show emotion.
“Ship’s Commander Krakkan,” Warden Hral spoke after a moment. “I request that you put aside any philosophical differences that we may have and look at the opportunity presented here. The station has a full load of precious metals and-”
“The logical thing for you to do is to surrender, Hral,” Krakkan said. “You have betrayed the Empire, so you will face a tribunal. You will almost certainly be granted a quick execution, rather than sentence to a work camp. Your genetic offspring will not be purged if you follow the System Commander’s orders.”
“You will have to fight your way aboard,” Warden Hral said. “This will result in a loss of your personnel. In addition, a result of violence will reflect poorly on your own career.”
“Not particularly, Hral.” Ship’s Commander Krakkan said. “And System Commander Vren has authorized use of munitions if I felt them necessary. In the interests of efficiency, and to preserve the forces under my command, I will authorize use of a single mark three fusion warhead. Ship’s Commander Krakkan out.”
Mike stared at the station ahead of them. “Shit.” They had put a good distance between them at this point. He didn’t know if it would be enough. He cut the thrusters as they cleared the shadow of the station. “Pixel, you ready?”
“Um, almost?”
“You have thirty seconds,” Mike said, a moment after the sensors caught a flare as something separated from the lead dreadnought.
The camera tracked the shape as it flew, and Mike threw up a countdown. He felt confident the warhead would detonate almost in contact with the station. He didn’t know what bad blood lay between the two Chxor, but it looked like it had killed all the prisoners left aboard along with the Warden.
