by Rick Partlow
“Get the shuttles up,” he ordered curtly. “I want a constant patrol over the city, day and night. Arrange for refueling and keep them both in the air.”
“But that’s a lot of hours,” Medina protested. “Those birds aren’t exactly military assault shuttles off the line, sir…”
“Constant patrols, day and night,” Jordi reiterated in a tone that would brook no arguments. “Tell the lighter crew to break orbit and stay at the minimum Transition distance, be ready to engage the Acheron when it arrives.”
“Yes, sir,” Medina acknowledged, his expression glum but his tone obedient.
“What’s the situation with the Tahni weapons?” he asked, trying to flog his brain into analytical reasoning. It seemed to take more effort to do that every day…maybe he needed another hit.
“Everything that can be operated by humans has been handed out to the troops, and we have crew-served weapons surrounding the perimeter of the fortress.” The big man shrugged. “Of course, we can’t figure out how to get those battlesuits to work for us; you gotta’ have one of the control singlets, and they only work for Tahni.” He brightened with a sudden idea. “Hey, we could let that Tahni guy Vala-Kel operate it if you want. He has the control jammies.”
Jordi considered it for a moment, but then shook his head.
“No,” he decided. “He’s of use, but he has his own agenda. I don’t trust him enough to give him a weapon more powerful than anything we have.” He sucked in a breath, trying to let the air calm his thoughts, but there was too much smoke drifting through it and he coughed convulsively.
“Get the ships up, and double the guard. When they come, we’re going to end this shit.” He coughed again and spat on the floor carelessly. “We’re going to shoot that piece of shit out of the air and kill that bitch.”
Chapter Fifteen
To be outside the universe was a meaningless phrase; the universe was, by definition, all there was, the whole of spacetime. Ash Carpenter’s Academy physics instructors had chided him whenever he’d used the term to describe the Transition Drive. They’d made serious, academic noises about how Transition Space wasn’t another universe, it was merely a “rolled-up dimension not normally accessible to four-dimensional constructs,” as if that made any more sense.
Nevertheless, any place you literally couldn’t see because your mind hadn’t evolved to make sense of it, any place where the laws of physics were so different you could make your own gravity and travel faster than light, was close enough to outside the universe for him. It scared some pilots. They didn’t want to admit it, but being in T-space scared them. You could see it in their eyes, the subtle claustrophobia of being stuck inside a small bubble of realspace, at the mercy of a technology most of them didn’t understand and couldn’t hope to repair beyond swapping one part out for another. One malfunction, one energy surge at the wrong time, and you’d just cease to exist.
That wasn’t what scared him, and he’d never really understood why being in T-space with a bubble of spacetime between you and death was so much different than being in regular space with a thin layer of metal between you and death. Vacuum could kill you just as dead as losing atomic coherence because you lost the spacetime bubble.
Dying wasn’t that scary, except in an abstract, philosophical way, at least not dying on a ship where it was likely to be quick and clean. What was scary, what knotted his guts and kept him awake at nights, was the idea of being helpless, of having to sit there and watch as his friends, the people he loved, died.
This sucks, he thought.
Oh, he realized it made perfect sense. Savage/Slaughter was down a shuttle pilot, and it was the two of them who’d asked the mercenaries to get involved in this. When the Captain of the Warlock had requested that Sandi pilot one of the landers, she could hardly have said no. But somehow, she was going to be the one flying down into the teeth of the enemy again while he was stuck as air cover.
He bit off a curse and shunted himself and the Acheron back out of Transition Space.
Gravity faded and light exploded across the breadth of his expanded senses, data rushing in through the ship’s cameras, lidar, radar, thermal scanners and spectral analyzers and coalescing into a coherent picture his brain could interpret. Brigantia was a dark circle against the glare of fiery Belenus, and the planet’s moon lit up a bright white off to the side in the view from the optical cameras.
He concentrated, looking deeper into the picture, and the smaller details began to manifest. There was the orbital industrial processing facility, abandoned and unpowered, and a glittering web of communications satellites floating over the surface, most of them on the night side of the planet, facing him. And even closer, so close he felt he could almost touch it, so close it was nearly in optical range, was the La Sombra lighter.
It was probably the last starship they had, he mused. If Jordi had more, he would have brought them along. He took the measure of the craft in an instant; it was typical of the converted freighters that passed for gunships out in the Pirate Worlds or the Periphery, though not as professionally assembled as the Savage/Slaughter ship had been. Thermal readings showed the leakage where power feeds were inexpertly routed into makeshift weapons mounts, and the armor layered over the ship’s hull was bulging and ugly.
That didn’t make it any less dangerous, though, and that was the reason he was sitting alone in the Acheron while Sandi was still on board the Savage/Slaughter ship, waiting a micro-Transition away for him to clear this heap of junk from the board. He watched the cartel ship with half his attention, the other half plotting a course to an insertion orbit, then hitting the drives. Fusion plasma roared out of the Acheron’s drive coils and flattened him into his seat, sending the cutter leaping ahead, lunging for the planet.
The lighter had been waiting for him, sitting out on sentry duty probably for days now, but it still took nearly a minute for the crew to see him and react.
Amateurs. He heard the word inside his head in Fontenot’s voice.
The exhausts of the missiles launching from their bolted-on weapons pods were signal flares in the night, half a dozen of them screaming towards him at twenty g’s. He cut the ship’s boost, breath rushing back into his lungs, then hit the bow thrusters, spinning the ship around to face the flight of laser-guided weapons coming in from the portside at about forty degrees off his line of travel. He had neither the time, nor the fuel, nor the inclination to attempt to out-maneuver the missiles, so he’d go with the trickier, riskier, and much quicker option.
The Gatling turret opened up at the very edge of its engagement range, controlled by the ship’s computer systems; the long burst of laser fire was a broken line of red in the enhanced view over the interface, and there was just the slightest flare of vaporizing metal where it touched the closest of the missiles. There was no explosion, but the targeting system assured him that the missile’s maneuvering thrusters were badly damaged, and it moved on to the next in line. He couldn’t wait that long. The lighter was swinging around, trying to line up his cutter with the railgun on a fixed dorsal mount down the length of the cartel ship. At this range, he had a chance of dodging the unguided slug, but they’d be trying to drive him into the missiles, to keep him from maneuvering.
The Gatling laser was already firing again, but he ignored it and kicked the nose of the ship a degree starboard, and fired the proton cannon with a touch of his thoughts on the trigger. He was well out of range for a shot at a fighting ship with deflector shields, but he didn’t have to penetrate shielding or thick BiPhase Carbide armor. Those missiles probably weren’t even stolen military inventory, not with Jordi’s black market sources drying up; they were home-made with fabricated designs and local materials, and BiPhase Carbide was too expensive to use for armor on anti-ship missiles.
The range was great enough that the proton blast didn’t have the energy or cohesion left to violently convert the warheads to vapor, but the particles still penetrated far enough to ignite the propella
nt remaining in the fuel tanks. Two of the missiles expanded into white balls of flame as propellant and oxidizer mixed in one last, violent chemical reaction, and the blasts were close enough to knock out two of the other weapons, the fragments impacting them and throwing them far enough off course that they lacked the fuel to correct in time.
That left one missile intact, and his Gatling laser was still slaved to point defense and still firing without his interference. In seconds, the board was clean of threats and he was accelerating again, this time directly at the lighter. She could have launched another spread of missiles; he was sure the weapons pods grafted to her flanks had a battery full of them. But he was getting close and boosting at three g’s. If they didn’t intercept him on the first run, they wouldn’t be able to correct and lock on again until he was in slugging range of the lighter. Trusting home-brew guided missiles not to lock onto your own ship when fired at close range was a gamble, and apparently not one this captain wanted to take.
He knew what was coming next; the range was still too far for beam weapons and too close for missiles. He couldn’t see it on optical, but his lidar picked up the incoming slugs from the lighter’s railgun when he was only a hundred kilometers out, too close to maneuver away from the shots. He tensed up, teeth grinding, the sudden concentration pulling him out of the interface just slightly, allowing the pressure of the acceleration to slide past his guard and squeeze the breath out of him.
Three slugs, each solid tungsten, a meter long and half a meter wide, burned in across the distance in less than thirty seconds. Any one of them could have sliced through the Acheron’s armor as if it weren’t there, but they were metallic and exactly the sort of thing military-grade electromagnetic deflectors were designed for. Fusion-fed EM fields diverted the course of the rounds, sending them careening off to be someone else’s problem. The cartel ship’s captain would see that, too, and since he was fighting this battle like an amateur who’d only ever faced other amateurs, Ash knew what his next move would be.
He started the cutter into an axial spin even before the laser fired. It was a re-tasked mining laser, not a heavy Gatling, and he’d expected that, too. Gatlings needed constant resupply of ammo, and it wasn’t easy to produce out in the Pirate Worlds; mining lasers just needed an occasional recharge of the reactive gas, and a reactor to power them, and they were plenty to take out some half-assed, slapped-together cartel-rigged assault shuttle.
Ash could feel the laser playing over the ship’s armor like a sunburn on his naked skin, but the spin kept it from burning through the BiPhase Carbide, and just about the time he figured he couldn’t take the spin and stay conscious anymore, the ship was in range. The proton cannon fired almost of its own accord, his instincts riding the interface even as his conscious mind was starting to black out. He barely retained enough coherent thought to ignite the maneuvering thrusters and stop the spin.
He killed the drive, the sudden microgravity threatening to bring his stomach out through his throat, but the cutter and the lighter were still heading straight for each other at pretty healthy velocities. He sensed rather than saw the damage he’d done, the sparking, hemispheric glow of expanding gasses from the spot where the lighter’s port weapons pod had been, and knew it wouldn’t be enough to take the cartel ship out of the equation. He had one more crack at them before they passed by each other and headed out of range again; the capacitors wouldn’t recharge in time to get off more than one shot.
He could easily have put that shot right through the lighter’s bridge; at this range, even if they had deflectors, nothing would stop the proton cannon from burning right through it and killing everyone on board. He shouldn’t have had any problem with that; these were criminals, murderers. He’d killed men like them before, so many times.
He didn’t make the decision consciously; he was still reeling from the spin maneuver and operating on gut-feeling and instinct. He felt as if he were along for the ride when the cutter spun laterally on a reverberating bang of maneuvering thrusters, turning her nose to keep it facing the lighter as they passed only a few hundred meters from each other.
The proton cannon fired one, final time and a flash of vaporized metal and a firefly swarm of fragments flew away into a ring-like orbit, and the lighter’s main drive was nothing but slag. She kept moving the direction of her travel, heading into interplanetary space trailing a small cloud of plasma.
He watched them drifting helplessly away, drawing back from the interface and seeing the image with his physical eyes on the screen. They couldn’t turn and follow, and he didn’t know if they could even use their Transition Drive with that sort of damage…but they could use maneuvering thrusters to set themselves on a course into the asteroid belt. It would take weeks, maybe even months, but a ship that size should have the supplies to last that long.
The miners out there would spot them and send a ship to intercept. If they wanted to kill them, they could do it themselves. Like the loose railgun slugs, they were someone else’s problem. He submerged under the interface again and knew that his trajectory was carrying him towards planetary orbit, but so fast he was going to skip off the atmosphere and never be able to land. He spun the ship around with the resonant banging vibration of firing maneuvering rockets, and started a two-g deceleration burn.
With the fusion flame between him and the planet, he couldn’t see sensor data camera feeds, but he knew the shuttles were coming. Like the lighter, they’d been waiting for him, and their pilots would be panicking at how quickly he’d disabled the bigger ship. They’d hang in the upper atmosphere and try to take him there, looking to take advantage of their greater maneuverability in the soup.
He activated the ship’s main antennae, pointed at a specific coordinate a light-minute away, and pulled out the interface long enough to speak into the audio pickup.
“I’m going in,” he told the Captain of the Warlock. “It’s time.”
“Roger that, Acheron,” Alcala responded two minutes later, his voice phlegmatic and even. “Transitioning in five minutes.”
Ash switched to Sandi’s private channel, running the message through the Warlock’s receivers but coding it for her ‘link.
“Be careful,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t have time to respond before they Transitioned and he was in the soup. He resisted the urge to call her “honey,” or “baby” or anything else cute and romantic. She hates that shit. “I love you, so it’s not okay if you get killed.”
He knew, as he knew his own name, that the ship’s velocity had slowed enough. He turned into the darkness of the Brigantian night, and rushed headlong into the fight that awaited him.
***
Sandi grinned, the countdown to Transition fading into the background as she listened to Ash’s words a third time over her ‘link’s ear bud. The man knew how to get to her; he always had, even back when they’d only been friends.
“It’s not okay if you get killed either,” she murmured back to him, not transmitting it. She didn’t want to distract him.
“What?” Jacobson asked from the seat next to her, glancing over. He wasn’t really a qualified co-pilot for the shuttle, but they’d decided to squeeze as many ground troops into each lander as they could, so every acceleration couch was filled with an armored trooper.
He didn’t have his helmet on yet, probably feeling a little lax about it since they were headed for a habitable planet, and she could see the confused frown on his squared-off block of a face. Sandi wondered how he felt flying with her; she’d gotten his friend killed not that long ago. At least that was how it felt to her, despite everyone assuring her there was nothing she could have done.
I could have insisted on taking the shuttle back up after the drop-off, she argued again in her head, where there was no one around to debate with her about it. Sure, Captain Alcala had said to stay on the ground in case they needed a quick exfil, but he wasn’t her boss and she should have followed her own instincts.
“Just talking to m
yself,” she told him, only half a lie. She gestured at the digital countdown on the main display screen. It was already below ten seconds. “Get ready.”
He nodded, pulling his helmet on quickly, slapping down the lever-lock on the seal just as the counter reached zero. Reality lurched, and then almost instantaneously did the same thing again, and suddenly, they were close enough to Brigantia for the dark circle of the planet’s night side to fill the main viewscreen, shadowed and backlit by the primary star.
“Prepare for high-g boost,” Alcala’s voice came over the PA speakers and her ‘link’s ear bud simultaneously.
He didn’t wait long; the echo of his announcement was still ringing off the bulkhead when the acceleration pushed her back into the pilot’s seat with six times her normal weight. The ship rumbled and shook as the fusion drive roared silently into the vacuum, and she could see the planet growing in the viewscreen’s as the minutes crept by. She fought for breath, wondering how long they were going to boost, knowing that eventually, they’d have to decelerate in order for the landers to be traveling at a safe velocity for atmospheric entry.
I guess he doesn’t want to give the ground forces much time to react to us, she reasoned.
“Deceleration in ten seconds.” Alcala could have been sipping a glass of whiskey in his stateroom for all the strain he let into his voice.
The fusion drives cut off and there was a violent, cacophonous series of bangs as the ship’s steering thrusters skew-flipped the Warlock, spinning it 180 degrees. She sucked in a deep breath and held it, and then the drive cut in again and the pressure was back, worse than before, turning her thoughts into a hazy, formless cloud. Her vision began to narrow to a dark tunnel and she thought she passed out for just a moment, because the next second the weight was off her chest and the view in the lander’s main screen was swinging around to face the planet again, and she didn’t remember hearing the maneuvering thrusters fire.
