Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure

by SM Reine

  “There’s the delay,” Zoya said, nodding at the starboard port. A tug pushed a massive freighter slowly toward the dock.

  Natalya nodded. “I’ve got clearance to burn for Burleson as soon as we’re clear of the inner markers.”

  “How far out do we have to go?”

  Natalya offered a smile. “Half a day. No more. Maybe less if we push the kicker a bit. I haven’t had a chance to burn it in yet, so I don’t want to push too hard.”

  Zoya’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “Half a day?”

  “Sure. We’ll be able to make a short jump if we can get out of the clutter and find a clean spot to jump to within two Burleson units.”

  “Only two units?” Zoya’s face clouded. “I thought this was a scout.”

  “Oh, the ship can jump twelve, fourteen units from clean space. From this mess?” Natalya waved a hand to indicate the space around them. “We’d need to go out at least two or three days before we’d be safe to jump that far. We’re so small we can make short jumps just a few stans out of port. Once we get out there, we can jump a long, long way.”

  “How short a jump can she make?”

  “One unit, but those are hard on the drive. Systems won’t let you a jump any closer.” She glanced over at Zoya. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Someplace called Dark Knight. It doesn’t show on the charts.”

  “Dark Knight Station?”

  “Yeah, you know it?”

  “Heard of it. Toe-Hold space. That’s what she meant about outside TIC control.”

  “Margaret Newmar is sending us to Toe-Hold space?”

  Natalya shrugged. “Don’t look so surprised. Lots of people go there.” She shot a smile at Zoya. “That’s where this ship came from. My father got it from The Junkyard.”

  “Really? Somebody junked this?”

  Natalya laughed. “No. The Junkyard is a station in Toe-Hold space. Out near Ciroda, actually. It’s a kind of dumping ground for ships, tanks, station parts. All kinds of stuff.”

  “Junk.”

  “Well, some of it is. You should have seen the Peregrine before she got cleaned up.” Natalya smoothed her hand along the nubby fabric on the couch and remembered her father struggling to get it recovered.

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “Not much that a persistent engineer with a half decent yard nearby couldn’t fix. My father and mother replaced the fusactor. That was the most critical piece. They tinkered on it for stanyers. Finally got it where they wanted it and gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday so I’d have a way to get to the academy.”

  “Nice birthday present.”

  Natalya shrugged. “Yeah. Well, they split up. Mom went to be chief engineer for Consolidated Freight and I think Dad’s back out in Toe-Hold space somewhere. I haven’t heard from him since I started at the academy.”

  “You’re my roommate for four stanyers and you never mentioned any of this before?”

  “Pox. You knew I had a ship and that I’ve been working on it as long as I’ve been at the academy.” Natalya shook her head. “It’s not exactly been a secret. Even Margaret Newmar knows, apparently.”

  “Sure, but you never asked for help. Never offered a ride, even. And Toe-Hold space? Really?”

  Natalya shrugged again. “Never came up. Toe-Holds aren’t exactly in the CPJCT approved curriculum.” She glanced at Zoya. “What do your parents do?”

  Zoya’s face closed down. “Long story. It’s complicated.”

  Natalya snickered.

  Zoya gave her a rueful nod. “Point taken.”

  They cleared the inner markers and Natalya pushed the throttles forward. The murmuring vibration in the space frame ratcheted up. Natalya looked at Zoya and raised her voice to speak over the noise. “We’ll be clear shortly and can coast the rest of the way.”

  Zoya nodded. “Do you know of any place nearby that we can jump to?”

  Natalya nodded. “Pull up the waypoint menu on the console. Label is ‘Picnic Area’”

  Zoya did as instructed and snorted. “Now I know what you did instead of summer cruises.”

  Natalya pulled the throttles back and the kickers resumed their low grumble. The quiet was a blessing. “Yeah. In all honesty, I got most of them from other pilots.” She grinned. “Lotta old timers around Port Newmar. They remember these scouts and they’re more than happy to share what they know.”

  Zoya laid in the plot and watched the timer start ticking down. “You weren’t kidding. At this rate we’ll be out of the system in another two stans.”

  Natalya nodded and slapped the release on her seatbelt. “Maybe less. Want some coffee?”

  “You have coffee aboard?”

  “Yeah. Coffee is just water and beans. We have water and a few kilos of beans don’t take much volume. I don’t mind a cup of tea now and again, but when I’m out here, there’s just something that makes me want coffee.” She lifted her chin. “So? You want a cup?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s been a long day and I could use one.”

  “Me, too. I still feel like I’ve got my head in a bucket or something.” Natalya made her way back to the passageway and the tiny galley beyond. “You don’t suppose they spiked my tea with something, do you?”

  Zoya didn’t answer for a few moments.

  Natalya stuck her head back around the corner. “What? They didn’t, did they?”

  Zoya shook her head. “I have a hard time imagining they’d do something like that. To what end? Not like any of them was going to take you home as a plaything. Did you see those guys?”

  Natalya laughed at the image and went back to fixing the coffee. “Purvis, maybe.”

  “Nats? You might want to come out here.”

  The high-pitched squeal of a collision alarm filled the tiny space.

  Natalya jumped as if she’d been stabbed and threw herself into the couch, her eyes scanning the displays. She slapped the override on the alarm. “Where?”

  Zoya pointed to her scanner display. Two blips showed intercept courses. The ships were small and fast. The range markers seemed to be melting away as Natalya looked.

  “TIC interceptors?” Natalya asked, not quite believing her eyes.

  “That’s what the transponders show.”

  Natalya checked her boards again, double-checking the comms array. “They haven’t tried to hail us.”

  “They’re burning like crazy,” Zoya said. “They’ll catch up with us in a stan.”

  “Are we sure they’re coming for us?”

  “How would I know? They just popped up on the scope a second before the alarm spotted them.”

  Natalya stared at the screen, measuring the angles and velocities with her eyes. She buckled her seat belt again and reached for the throttle. “Hold on. Let’s see if we can learn anything.” She pushed the throttle up and the heavy thrusters kicked hard. The noise and vibration practically rattled her teeth, but Natalya watched their velocity increase. Their projected tracks changed on the displays and the intercept courses slowly crept backwards to cross behind them.

  “Maybe they’re going someplace else in a hurry,” Zoya said, almost shouting over the noise.

  Natalya squinted at the screen hoping against hope it wasn’t what she thought it was. She kept the throttle up, even as the engineering console showed the strain on the big engine approaching the red-line.

  For a few ticks, it looked like a false alarm and then the bips shifted on the screen. Their new projected courses intersected with their ship in just under a stan.

  Zoya looked at Natalya, her face pale in the subdued cockpit lighting.

  Natalya sighed and shrugged. “Looks like they know.” She pulled the throttles back enough to keep the engines from burning out and the screaming vibration faded a bit.

  “Intercept in seventy-five ticks,” Zoya said.

  Natalya looked at the navigational plot. “They’re going to catch us before we can jump.”

  “Can you get any more
out of the engines?”

  Natalya looked at the engineering displays, flipping through the readouts and trying to find something that might give them an edge. She shook her head. “If I red-line them, they might blow.”

  “Not really the way I want to escape,” Zoya said, her eyes bright but her face still pale.

  Natalya looked at her comms panel. “No hails.”

  Zoya’s fingers started flying over the keys on her console.

  Natalya’s head snapped around as she tried to figure out what her roommate was doing. “Astronomical data? What are you looking up?”

  Zoya shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the answer. Hush.”

  A warbling screech filled the cockpit and a computerized voice chanted. “Weapons lock. Weapons lock.”

  Natalya slapped the keys to silence the alarm and looked at the scanner display. The small icons blinked red. Both ships had target lock on the scout. “The bastards!”

  Zoya shook her head. “Hush.”

  After a tick, Zoya looked at Natalya. “If we shift course we might be able to outrun them.”

  “Shift how? Why?”

  “The system’s calculating mean Burleson thresholds for a ship of this class, right?”

  Natalya’s brain stuttered once but caught on. “Yes!”

  “Most of the mass of the system is on the other side of the primary. Mean threshold is farther out than the actual computed one. If we come to this heading and goose it, we might outrun the interceptors and jump before they catch on.” She pointed to a course laid out on the navigational console. “Hit it.”

  The small ship twisted and slowly reoriented its trajectory. The interceptors didn’t lose lock and didn’t slow down. They simply adjusted their courses.

  Natalya felt like there wasn’t enough air in the ship as she waited for the computer to recalibrate the intercept.

  When the displays settled, the distances were too close to call.

  “Pull back the throttles,” Zoya shouted.

  “They’ll catch us.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “And I’ve got a feeling we’ll need that extra boost before we’re done. Slow down. Save them for now.”

  Natalya pulled back so the engines stayed out of the red and tried to gauge the distances and times. The computer said they’d be caught.

  “They’re not going to catch us,” Zoya said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Zoya looked at her. “They’re not trying to catch us.”

  Natalya felt her stomach drop.

  “TIC interceptors have paired missile bays. Smart munitions. Kinetic warheads. Ship-to-ship range something over half a million kilometers,” Zoya said. “Exact range is classified.”

  The emergency klaxxon screamed and the computer voice said, “Weapons fire. Weapons fire. Weapons fire.”

  “Answers that question,” Natalya said.

  “Punch it!” Zoya said.

  Natalya slammed the throttles forward again and slapped the alarm off. The noise from the engines mostly drowned it out anyway.

  “Four tracks. Both ships fired two birds,” Zoya shouted.

  “How soon?”

  “Half a stan.”

  Natalya’s fear melted away, leaving a molten anger. How dare they? She’d done nothing wrong. She didn’t kill that idiot. Zoya had done nothing at all. And TIC was trying to kill them both. No evidence. No jury. No trial. Just the silent interceptors in space.

  “How far are we from Newmar?” Natalya asked.

  “Too far,” Zoya answered. She sat back in her couch, panting. “This can’t be happening.”

  “It’s happening.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Zoya said again.

  “It’s happening, Zee. Set up the plot for the Picnic Area. I’ll prime the Burleson.”

  “You can’t jump this deep in the well. We’re still inside the limit.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a safety margin built into the systems.”

  “If we try to jump too deep in the well, the drives may take us apart,” Zoya said.

  “If we don’t jump, those missiles will take us apart. Set up the plot. It’s the only chance we have.”

  Zoya stared for a moment and then her fingers began flying. “If you kill us, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “That’s a safe assumption.” Natalya flipped to the Burleson control screen and started charging the jump capacitors. “Ten ticks until we can jump.”

  “Eleven until we’re in position,” Zoya said. “Nine until the missiles get here. We’re not going to make it.”

  Natalya brought up the engineering overlay and toggled in the maintenance menus. She gritted her teeth and pulled the safety overrides off the engines. “We’re going to be damn near dry on fuel before we get out of here, but if we don’t get out, fuel won’t matter.”

  The vibration and noise picked up a fraction. The smell of overheated electronics cloyed at Natalya’s nose.

  “What’d you do?” Zoya shouted.

  “Reset the overrides and goosed the fuel pumps. It’s not much but it might be enough.”

  They watched the computers recalculate courses and trajectories. The missiles missed the velocity shift for a few seconds before coming to a new intercept.

  “Ten ticks until they hit us,” Zoya shouted. “Just under eleven to the limit. That jink bought us a fraction.”

  Natalya watched the scanner plot and tried to think of something else they could do. “This isn’t right,” she said.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t right,” she shouted. “Something is just not right here.”

  “With the ship?” Zoya’s eyes grew even wider.

  “No. This whole thing. Why are they trying to kill us?”

  “You killed a TIC officer. That’s not a good way to make friends.”

  “But I didn’t. Any competent forensics analysis should prove it.”

  Zoya pointed at the screen. “They don’t look like they believe you.”

  Natalya looked at Zoya’s screen again. The interceptors seemed to be falling back.

  “Five ticks, Nats. What can we do?”

  Natalya pulled the Burleson drive overlay up again. The capacitor had enough charge for a very short jump, barely a bump in the road on interstellar distances but it might be enough. She slapped keys and pulled the navigation system up on her console. She zoomed the chart in on the edge of Newmar’s boundary. “Check long range. Dead ahead. Push the scan range all the way up,” she shouted. Her fingers kept moving on the keyboard and the navigational computer began the calculations to take her to the point she had marked on the chart.

  “Nothing out there for a billion klicks that I can see right now,” Zoya shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “Saving our asses, I hope,” she shouted back and punched the jump button.

  Nothing seemed to happen but she reached forward and pulled the throttles back to zero. The screaming, roaring vibration chopped off. “Where are the missiles now?”

  Zoya looked down at her screen and shook her head. “Gone. Or so far back in relativistic terms we won’t see them for another few ticks.” She brought her own screen up to a navigational plot and started running her own scans. “You jumped to the edge of the system?”

  “About a tenth of a Burleson unit.”

  “You could have killed us.”

  “We were dead if I didn’t.”

  Zoya turned back to look at the scanners. “I can’t even see the interceptors, let alone the missiles at this range.”

  Natalya shrugged. “They’re really small targets a very, very long way off.”

  Zoya looked out the forward ports and adjusted her display. “You jumped into the outbound heavy freighter lane.”

  “It was the only place I could think of that might be clean enough for us to jump to.”

  “What if there’d been a ship?” Zoya asked, incredulity leaving her voice squeaky.

  “You’d have se
en it on long range. They’re moving fast by the time they get out here, but you’d have seen where it had been. You didn’t see anything. I jumped us.”

  They sat there, the tiny ship still racing toward the Deep Dark at a break neck pace.

  “Now what?” Zoya asked.

  “How far are we from Dark Knight?”

  “Twelve, maybe thirteen BU’s.”

  “So one good jump.”

  “You weren’t joking about the legs on this ship?”

  Natalya shook her head. “No. It was built for exploration in the uncharted areas of the Deep Dark. I wouldn’t want to jump blind into a system but the old timers used to cross this whole region in a matter of a few days, not months.”

  Zoya brought up the charts for the Deep Dark around their destination coordinates. “Not much to see.”

  “The Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Trade doesn’t recognize Toe-Hold space on their charts. The station’s there.”

  Zoya looked at Natalya. “How do you know it’s there?”

  Natalya grinned. “I don’t, for sure. But if Margaret Newmar says that’s where it is, that’s where it is. When we get there, we can probably get the updated Toe-Hold charts.”

  Zoya’s eyes narrowed. “Probably?”

  “Well, we’d need to find somebody there who’d be willing to let us have a set. We’d probably have to pay for it. Somehow.” Natalya shrugged.

  “Somehow?” Zoya’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Somehow? You’re not filling me with confidence here.”

  “Relax. We’re going to Toe-Hold space. As long as we don’t run up against any of the Iron Mountain trolls, we’ll be all right. May have to work for our suppers, that’s all.”

  “Doing what?”

  Natalya shrugged one shoulder. “Depends on what needs doing. Mining, probably. Maybe need to take a couple cruises on a freighter. We could probably make a decent living out here just using the gas skimmers on this ship.”

  “Gas skimmers?”

  Natalya sighed. “How do you think these boats kept themselves in volatiles?”

  Zoya shook her head. “I guess I never really thought of it.”

  “Never mind. We need to get back on track and get out of Newmar before TIC realizes where we are. Plot us a new course for a jump to Dark Knight Station. Who did Margaret say to contact?”