by R. M. Meluch
Calli hailed her drone operator. “Mister Raytheon, confirm that the prisoner on board SPT 1 is dead.”
“Negative confirmation,” Wraith responded.
Calli felt a chill. It wasn’t exactly shock. It was a dread come true. “Mister Raytheon, is that negative confirmation because of a detection failure, or are you telling me the prisoner is still alive?”
“Captain. The prisoner is not on board SPT 1.”
“Mister Raytheon, check your detection equipment for malfunction. The prisoner was immobilized in restraints. His body has to be there.”
Dingo suggested, “The pirates could have displaced him out of there. Those bangs had the sound of displacements.”
“We have jammers on. If they tried to displace him out, then he’s dead and really gone.”
“They must have done,” Dingo said.
Calli nodded. The pirates were ruthless. She hadn’t realized it extended to their own brothers.
Still, she assumed nothing. “Mister Raytheon. Send the transmission from the drone monitor up to the tactical station. I want to see exactly what’s inside SPT 1.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Transmission now available.”
Calli and Dingo looked over Marcander Vincent’s shoulders at the current readout from inside the Spit boat.
Calli blinked. “Is this real time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They did it,” Dingo said. “They killed him.”
“There’s a landing disk.” Marcander Vincent pointed.
The flimsy metal disk the size of a dinner plate lay on the pallet where the prisoner had been strapped down. The straps were still buckled.
“Rzajhin manufacture,” Marcander Vincent added.
Rzajhin landing disks were cheap, untraceable, and reliable despite the abuse heaped on them. They were the favorite equipment of smugglers.
“How did they get a landing disk through jammers?” Calli said.
“Two of them.”
Dingo pointed. A second landing disk lay on the deck, right next to the pallet.
“They must’ve missed the first placement,” Marcander Vincent said.
“No. They didn’t miss.” Calli tapped her finger on the image.
Dingo saw what troubled her. The landing disks appeared altogether intact, normal. Their lights were on.
“They’re intact. Those disks got through our jammers intact.”
It was tricky enough to get an initial landing disk to a destination without a corresponding disk already in place. Sometimes it took several attempts. The pirates got this one on the first try. Through jammers.
“Mister Vincent, back up this record to the time mark of the first crack we heard. I want to see what happened in there.”
The playback from the drone monitor showed first a landing disk appearing inside the Spit boat with the sound of a thunderclap. The disk dropped from the air and came to rest on the deck next to the restrained prisoner, Nox.
At the second thunderclap a tall man with a red goatee and the number 666 tattooed on his brow appeared—alive and well—atop the landing disk. He carried another landing disk and another displacement collar with him. He snapped the extra collar around Nox’s neck and slid the extra landing disk underneath him. Then the pirate stepped back onto the landing disk that brought him. The two of them—Nox and the red-bearded pirate—vanished with a bang, leaving only their two landing disks behind them.
“They did it.” Dingo sounded unhappily astounded. “They displaced through our inertial screen. With jammers on. Alive. How in the hell?”
“Patterner,” Calli said.
Cold shock gripped the command platform at the word.
The machine-augmented mind of a patterner could synthesize information to solve complex problems with machine speed and human reason.
Calli felt as if she were exhaling poison. “The pirates of the Ninth Circle are not just alive. They have a patterner embedded with them.”
Jaunty Dingo Ryan looked as grim as Calli had ever seen him. “That would mean the pirates are working for Caesar Numa Pompeii.”
Calli nodded. “That is what it means.”
Inwardly she was reeling. She hadn’t wanted to believe it.
This patterner had joined in the same charade that made the U.S. and the rest of civilization think that the Ninth Circle were all dead.
The Ninth Circle were known for leaving no witnesses alive behind them. There was a moment back there when Merrimack should have died.
The pirates could have killed everyone on board. They hadn’t done so. Because someone was holding their leash.
There was only one power with that kind of reach.
Calli had often hated Numa Pompeii, but this was different. Now she hated Numa for not being the man she thought he was. Numa used to mock her, discount her, scorn her. She had weathered his contempt. She’d proved herself a worthy adversary. Worthy. As if Numa were someone whose regard mattered.
It had mattered. Numa Pompeii had been formidable. As infuriating as the man was, Calli counted on Numa Pompeii to be Rome—to embody all its grandeur, strength, honor, intellect, invention, resourcefulness, its limitless ability to conceive and to do, its civilization, daring and cunning, its overweening pride and arrogance. What had happened to the honor?
Here Numa was using that most squalid of space vermin—pirates. It hurt to find the grand, indomitable triumphalis, whom Calli thought she knew, here so desperate that he was rooting in the muck with pirates. Numa Pompeii had been something she wanted to believe in. Disappointment came bitter.
Numa was going to be sorry.
Calli turned her head to the Dingo. “Want to compose my report to the admiralty, Stuart?”
“Not on your life, sir,” said the Dingo.
A bright flash from the portholes lit the left side of all the faces on the command platform. Specialists hunched over their stations in a useless reflexive cringe.
“Identify that!” Calli demanded as a clattering noise like thrown pebbles buzzed against the ship’s inertial shell.
“Explosion,” Marcander Vincent reported from the tactical station. “Our own isolation capsule.”
The isolation capsule was the small craft that had first picked up Nox’s life pod. The isolation capsule had contained the prisoner Nox while the drone medic extricated the nanites from him. Merrimack had left the isolation capsule out in space, with the life pod and the infestation of nanites inside it.
It seemed Nox’s oscillating nanites had just achieved synchronicity.
“What took them so long to sync?” Dingo wondered out loud.
“I imagine they’ve been synced for a while,” Calli said. “They’ve been constructing an explosive.”
“Constructing an explosive out of what?”
“Out of the isolation capsule, apparently.”
“Captain, what do you want done with the Spit boat?”
SPT 1 had been boarded by a pirate—a pirate with imperial resources. It could not be trusted. The Spit boat needed a nanoscopic scan and flush before it could be allowed back inside Merrimack’s inertial shell.
“Take it in tow—half hook only. Initiate a full nano scan on it. Take us at best speed to Indra Shwa Zed.”
Dingo Ryan gave the orders to make it all happen, then spoke low, not to question his captain’s orders out loud on her own command deck, “The pirate said Romulus was already gone from the facility at Indra Shwa Zed.”
“No,” Calli said. “What the pirate said is he didn’t see Romulus in the facility.”
Not seeing didn’t need to mean that Romulus wasn’t there.
And Indra Shwa Zed was where the pirate had seen TR Steele.
16 January 2448
U.S. Space Battleship Merrimack
Asteroid 543
Indra Sh
wa Zed Star System
Perseid Space
THE ASTEROID LOOKED DEAD. Like any of the millions of other asteroids in the triple star Indra Shwa system. The rock was larger than some planets, irregular, pocked with craters, crusted with ice, and unremarkable until Merrimack’s active scanners touched it. Then it erupted.
Beam fire lanced up toward the U.S. space battleship.
Impacts against Merrimack’s inertial field shimmered and splintered into jagged fissures. The sharp cracks faded right back to black except for those red and green blotches left swimming on your retinas.
Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue sat in her cockpit. Her Swift was locked down in its launch slot on the starboard flight deck under the force field. She bayed with the rest of her squadron to be set free.
The Swift pilots were ordered to hold.
Then they were ordered to shut up.
Kerry Blue shut up and watched the flashing lights.
A red serpentine fissure sizzled and healed right above her. A blue-violet one snaked crosswise. Kerry had been through a few dust ups in her tours of duty. Never seen anything quite like this. Kinda pretty. Now let us the flock out of here to show the lupes something unpretty.
Kerry opened her com. “What’s hitting us?”
“Crab crackers,” someone answered. Sounded like the Yurg. “Didn’t you read the last bulletin?”
“Yeah,” said Kerry—reading.
The boffins could’ve just given her a data module to plug in behind her ear—like an extra bit of brain. Then she would know right now what a crab cracker was. But no, the boffins didn’t like unnecessary add-ons in your head when you were piloting.
Kerry read the briefing.
Okay, crab crackers were new Roman weaponry, designed to assault hard targets.
Targets didn’t come any harder than the Mack.
Another blaze of red and indigo splintered above Kerry’s canopy. Made her glance up.
Great big white flash.
She didn’t flinch from those anymore.
She returned to reading the briefing.
The crab cracker was intended to disrupt a ship’s energy shell. Merrimack’s shell was constantly reforming in staggered layers, so the crackers never achieved an actual gap in this crab’s shell.
But the one-man fighter Swifts weren’t so thickly layered. In the grip of one of these crab crackers, a Swift would be broken to pieces, and Kerry Blue would be breathing vacuum.
And that was why Kerry Blue and Alpha Flight were sitting like a clutch of chicks on mama’s wing, waiting for the navvies to take out the crab crackers at the source.
Kerry’s monitor showed her the asteroid down there. It was completely black. The Romulid station was underneath that frozen blackness.
The enhanced image on Kerry’s tactical display showed her waves of escape craft launching from underground chutes. “They’re bugging out!” she yelled to no one.
Couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned on her com. “Hey! Somebody with a beam gun! Shoot the rock! They’re getting away! What are you doing!” She kicked her floor plate, trying to wake someone up down there in the battleship.
As near as Kerry could make out Merrimack wasn’t picking off the runners. Mack wasn’t even trying to shoot at the escaping spaceships.
Someone else, sounded like Rhino, Alpha Seven, clicked on her com too. “Hey! Navvies! What you doin’ with your trigger fingers? Shoot something!”
As if the Navy beam gunners on board Merrimack would take orders from a couple of Fleet Marine flight sergeants.
Cain Acting-WinCo-No-Fun-Anymore Salvador called for com silence again.
Kerry Blue sat, staring up from her launch slot on the space battleship’s wing. She made real sure her com was off and said lots of things.
And watched the enemy getting away.
The weapon on the asteroid surface belched out energy balls—the crab crackers. Their strikes sizzled against Merrimack’s force field in a constant barrage.
Captain Carmel pointed at the source of the barrage on one of Merrimack’s tactical displays and ordered, “Take that out.”
She meant take it out.
Dingo gave the orders. “Engineering.”
“Engineering, aye.”
“Ready half hook. Target the weapon emplacement.”
“Half hook ready, aye. Ground weapon emplacement targeted.”
“Deploy half hook.”
“Half hook, aye.”
A tendril of energy deployed like a lariat down to the asteroid surface. It stabbed into the rock and under the gun emplacement and burrowed beneath it.
“Target acquired.”
“Helm. Put us somewhere else.”
The space battleship’s six engines roared with an abrupt acceleration, sudden enough to physically yank the weapon emplacement out of the rock. The half hook immediately released. The uprooted emplacement flew away in the direction of one of Indra Shwa’s suns.
“Status of target,” Captain Carmel demanded. She didn’t want to see that coming back.
“Hostile weapon is not functioning,” Tactical advised.
“Does it have any propulsion system to get itself back?” Calli asked.
“Negative,” Tactical reported.
Dingo Ryan added, “That weapon emplacement was never meant to fly. The only way that’s ever coming back is if some other spacecraft hooks it and hauls it back.”
“Tactical. Monitor that. Helm, take us back to the asteroid.”
A thumping in the deck had started low. Got louder. Pushed into Calli’s awareness.
The fighter pilots, obeying the order for com silence, had taken to stomping their war dance in their cockpits. Sounded like all of them. BOOM pom pom pom BOOM pom pom pom. The Swifts were still in physical contact with the ship, so Calli could actually feel the thumps from here on the command platform.
Calli gave the order. “Mister Ryan. Let my dogs out.”
Kerry Blue woulda sang hallelujah except that Kerry Blue couldn’t sing. Merrimack retracted her energy canopy, and the Swifts were off in four, three, two, YeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeHA!
The fighter craft screamed off the battleship’s wings, coms on. Most all of them yelled, slung out at 53 percent of the speed of light. The inertial field only let you feel a fraction of the g’s you were actually pulling, but it was still a rush. The inertial field kept the launch from shooting you out your own aft hole.
Kerry Blue yipped and yelled with the rest of them. Remembering that Reg Monroe used to have a screech that only bats could hear, she gave a couple of yips for Reg.
The voice of Cain Salvador sounded in Kerry Blue’s helmet. “Deploy lampreys only. Do not damage the targets. Assume the presence of hostages on board all enemy craft.”
Problem with being an instant officer is that your mates forget you aren’t one of them anymore, and Kerry Blue sent back, “Been told five times, Cain.”
So the Fleet Marine pilots got told for a sixth time: “Arrest all spacecraft. Do not destroy enemy spacecraft.”
That was not Cain Salvador.
That was the voice of God Almighty this time. Captain Calli Carmel.
Kerry joined in the company choir: “Aye, aye, sir!”
* * *
Far below, Roman spacecraft launched from their underground bunkers and ran for the big empty. Kerry Blue wasn’t sure what kind of hostage the brass thought the enemy could be holding out here. She was just glad to be out of the can and in the hunt.
Knew she needed to run down the enemy before it got clear of the star system’s gravitational pull.
Even the slightest gravitational pull got huge when a ship was trying to jump out of normal spacetime. Inside the gravitation of Indra Shwa’s three suns and all their orbital crap, the enemy could only run at sublight velocity.
But once out of the gravity sink, your Roman target could jump to FTL. And anything achieving FTL has escaped—gone, you’ll never see that fugger again, you lost that one, bucko.
So ram your stick through the gate and catch him before he can get there.
The Swifts carried lampreys for this sortie. The right tool for this job.
Kerry had trained on lampreys. Well, not really. She’d trained in a dream box. Never actually used a real lamprey. But the simulators were usually good for teaching you to get it right the first time.
The lamprey was an energy half hook with an additional physical barb on the end of it. How it was supposed to go: The energy tendril loops the target, inserts microbarbs through the weakest part of the target’s energy field and into the hull—not enough to breach the hull and let the vacuum in—just enough to snag and hold and reel him in alive.
Someone who wasn’t Kerry Blue wanted these lupes alive.
Problem with lampreys was they had a range just about as long as your nose. You needed to get close to your target. Close enough to sniff him.
And if that don’t get your heart pumping, you should report yourself in dead.
Then you haul your catch in—your live catch—and hand off the energy tether to Merrimack.
That was how it was supposed to go.
Someone on the com was heeing and hawing like riding a wild bronc. The new guy. Shasher Wyatt. Sounded as though Shasher had snagged something a lot bigger than he was, and it was dragging him around the park. “Yeeaaaaaahhahaha.”
Kerry Blue closed on her own target and launched her first lamprey. Felt like she was roping a steer—something else she’d never done. “Hooks away!”
Her lamprey stabbed through the transport’s shield and latched onto its hull.
“Got him!” she cried, proud of herself for one nanosecond.
The son of a bullfrogger didn’t fight the energy tendril. It reversed attitude and rammed her. Head on. She actually saw it bounce off the energy field right over her canopy. And then it was swinging around on its tether for another hit. On her stern this time.
Not letting that happen. Kerry jinked. She took the hit on her cowcatcher, the stoutest part of her energy field.
