by B. V. Larson
“No. Not at all.”
I began to describe the entirely different set of circumstances under which Sosa and I had met while we worked on the patrol ship. Rose was suitably horrified.
“She killed whole crews of men? Men she’d served with?”
“Only one such crew. She told me they’d abused her.”
“What if she’s lying, William? Did you ever think of that?”
I frowned slightly. “The proof of her loyalty is in her actions. She could have fried Jort and I today—but she didn’t.”
Rose shook her head, astounded that I could be so trusting of such a person. She might be right, but then again she might be wrong. I considered myself to be a fairly good judge of character. Sosa was a surly, rough individual. But she was loyal to me because I’d freed her from Kersen’s parasite, among other things.
After that, we all went to work plundering the patrol ship. The main item I wanted to steal was the hardest one to remove. It was a belly-mounted gun turret and targeting system. This gun was different from any other weapon on the ship. It was a close-range anti-personnel unit.
In the overall scheme of things, it was a minor weapon aboard the patrol boat. It had a short range with a high rate of fire, using kinetic projectiles in rapid bursts. It was pretty much useless in space battles—but that wasn’t what I wanted it for. It was designed to deal with rebel troops around the ship while it was grounded.
Carrying the weapon aboard around two hours later, Jort and I grunted with the effort. I didn’t have time to mount it. Disconnecting it and hauling it into the cargo bay, that was as much as we could do.
In the meantime, the model-Q yacht captain had castoff and flown away with Rose’s parents. Several mournful messages, mixed with threats and invective, came into the ship’s general console. I ignored them all.
“Hand me that power-spanner, will you?”
Rose handed me the buzzing tool, and I applied it to secure a bolt on the stolen gun mount. I didn’t want it flying around loose back here.
“William?” she asked. “My parents are really upset. They’re sending me awful messages about you.”
I sighed and wiped my forehead. “You want to take another ride in a survival pod back to Prospero? Again?”
She looked at me, and she shook her head. Her eyes were glistening with tears.
“You’re sure? It’s okay if you don’t want to come. But this is the last time you’ll see me alive.”
“No…” she said stubbornly. “I’ll go with you. These last few months—they’ve been unbearably dull. Already, you’ve brought more excitement into my life than I’ve ever experienced.”
Deciding to take her word for it, I smiled and went back to work. She sniffled now and then, but she didn’t complain. She kept on working.
Her soft hands were soon red and lightly torn up by the metal flanges. I put gloves on her, and she began working like a crewman.
Sosa came out from hiding at that point and began sternly securing things for the trip. The androids were all wrecked, so we dumped them in the patrol ship. There were some other things we could use, like ammo, fuel and other supplies.
We took everything we could use and then cast the patrol ship adrift. A chill went through me as I looked outside into space, watching the dead ship drift away.
We were officially guilty of piracy now. There could be no denying it.
We ran from the Prospero system with a few patrol boats in our distant wake. They were fast—but nothing like my ship.
Royal Fortune was built to slip away from military ships that were built to doggedly pursue. We outran them, leaving the system using normal space routes. It was a good thing we’d drained a full tank of fuel from the patrol ship. Without that, I’d have been unable to apply the full thrust of my twin terawatt-rated engines.
As it was, we accelerated at twice the rate the patrol boats could muster. That didn’t stop them from throwing a long stream of complaints, threats and admonishments over the radio.
“Why are we on this course?” Jort complained after the first hour.
“Are we still inside their scanner range?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
I nodded. “Then you have your answer.”
Jort appeared baffled. “But we’re heading toward the nearest Conclave world, Dinari. That’s crazy!”
Sosa growled at him. “That high-gravity planet of yours filled your head with muscle instead of brains,” she said. “Captain Gorman will change course the minute we’re out of range of the patrol boat sensors. Then, since they are stupid robots, they’ll chase us to Dinari—the one place we’ll never go to next.”
Jort looked at me with upraised eyebrows. I nodded to confirm. Sosa had the plan all figured out.
We relaxed then, except for Rose. She wasn’t entirely comfortable aboard Royal Fortune—not yet. I couldn’t have expected her to be. She wasn’t anything like the rest of my crew. She was soft from having led a life of privilege. I hoped she would fit in over time.
I got up and walked her around the ship, giving her the ten-credit tour. She seemed numbed by the whole experience.
“Here, check this one out,” I spun a creaking wheel and threw open a small door. Inside, a dark cabin glowed into life, sensing our presence and turning on the lights. “It’s a little musty, but no one has used it since we started this voyage. It’s all yours.”
She stepped inside and looked around. The cabin had a low ceiling, like most of them. It was little more than three bunks stacked against one wall and a small desk against the other.
“Three beds?” she asked.
“Yes, but don’t worry. This ship is a corvette, rated to carry a crew of thirty-odd souls. Since there are only four of us aboard, we’ve got plenty of room.”
“Okay… good. But, I kind of thought…”
Rose looked shy, studying the deck. She sat on the lowest bunk of the three and didn’t meet my eye.
“Thought what?”
“I kind of thought I might stay with you,” she said in a small voice. “In your cabin.”
I smiled. “There’s nothing to keep you from visiting. But I’ve always found it’s good for crewmembers to have a place to call their own. Don’t you think you’d like that?”
She nodded, still studying the deck.
I sat next to her. I felt a twinge of guilt. She was innocent in relative terms. I was used to associating with the roughest of crowds.
“You’re going to be all right?” I asked.
“Yes. You don’t have to baby me.”
My immediate thought was that I was babying her already, but I’m sure it didn’t seem that way to her. From her point of view, she’d jumped into a den of snarling wolves.
I assigned her to work a shift with Jort. It was a relief, really, to have an extra crewman—even someone as green as Rose. Aboard any ship, it was a good idea to have someone awake on watch at all times. With Rose, we could do that much more easily, taking shorter shifts and longer breaks.
After we left the complaining patrol boats behind and changed course toward Ceti, I retired to my cabin. I left the door unlocked, but no one came to visit me.
I fell asleep wondering if I’d made a mistake not placing Rose in my cabin, as she’d suggested. Sosa had shown a distinct lack of interest in me for some time now. Perhaps instead of gaining a new partner, I’d lost them both.
Never being a man who dwelled much on such things, I stretched out on my bunk and slept soundly. At least I had peace and quiet.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The ship’s klaxon went off some hours later. I groaned awake, wondering if Rose had committed some fateful error and endangered the ship. Sosa had been grumbling about such a possibility from the moment she’d met the girl.
Rolling out of my bunk, I was shocked to find the motion carried me all the way over the deck, still rolling, to crash into the opposing bulkhead.
Lurching to my feet, I reached out and tou
ched the walls. The lights glowed brighter.
The ship was changing course—violently.
Grunting with effort, I dragged myself toward the bridge using the loops and rings that were cunningly placed all over the ship’s passages. The vessel was designed to fly inverted, with gravity or centrifugal force tugging at the crew in any imaginable direction.
“Jort!” I called out, knowing it was his watch. “What the hell are you doing?”
“We’ve got company, Captain!” he called back over the comm system. “Two unknown contacts approaching from the direction of Ceti.”
From Ceti? That could only mean one thing: Kersen knew of our plans somehow and was trying to intercept us. Either that, or it was random chance. I didn’t like betting on chance, so I figured we were in trouble.
“Are they firing on us, Jort?”
“Not yet, but we’re still out of range. We’re closing the distance head-on with them right now.”
In space, you don’t just stop and turn around at an instant’s notice when you’re traveling fast. Spacecraft traveled great distances by building up tremendous speed. Once that speed was built up, slowing down or changing course took just as much effort and time. Like a ground car that’s gliding along a highway, our ship had inertia. Steering sharply to either side required a lot of braking and gut-wrenching forces would be exerted on the crew.
Rushing to our stations, we began the process of steering clear of the approaching ships. Rose came near and strapped into the copilot’s chair. I let her since there were plenty of consoles available. Sosa was down in engineering, so I kicked Jort to the sensor array station when I took the pilot’s chair.
“Keep an eye on them, Jort. If they get within range of our guns…”
“I’ll be ready!”
Rose turned to me. Her face was full of concern. “What if they’re just some random travelers like us? Merchants from Ceti? Are you really going to shoot at them without knowing who they are?”
I glanced at her. “In space, seconds can count. If we fire first, they’ll die—not us.”
“But you don’t know who they are!”
“We’ll know soon. Don’t worry.”
She was clearly worrying quite a bit, so I made a further effort to explain.
“Space is big. Really big. The odds that this pair of ships heading toward us is out here by accident are fantastically low.”
“How could they know our course? How could they know where to find us?”
I shrugged. “Maybe the patrol ships saw our course change before they lost us. If they sent a messenger drone to Ceti through the slip-gates, Kersen could have learned when and where we were.”
“But ships fly back and forth between these worlds all the time.”
Sosa stepped onto the bridge, and she put her hands on her shapely hips. She looked a bit disgusted. “Grow up, kid” she told Rose. “Most ships use the slip-gates. The odds are a trillion to one these ships are out here for something other than to find us.”
Rose shut up after that, but she still looked worried.
“Jort, are the torpedoes ready to fire?” I asked him.
“They should be.”
“Go check.”
Excitedly, Jort climbed out of the sensor op chair and rushed away to the weapons pods.
“Sosa, man the sensor station.”
With a final appraising glance at Rose—I knew Sosa wanted to sit in the copilot’s seat—she took her station and worked the instruments.
“They’re converging slightly,” she said. “On us.”
“Right… two ships sent to scan for us. There might even be more of them out there, looking for us along this course line, but outside our range to detect.”
“Stands to reason,” Sosa agreed.
Rose gritted her teeth and fretted. She was uncertain about what to do. I had no useful role for her, as she’d never been trained on ship controls.
Finally, I sighed. “Rose, go man the aft neutrino cannon.”
“The one at the back of the ship?”
“Yes. Go.”
She raced away, and Sosa snorted rudely. “You’ve got a bright one there, Gorman. I hope she’s hotter in bed than she is on the bridge.”
“No you don’t.”
Sosa cast me a dark glance then went back to her instruments. “We’re coming into extreme weapons range.”
“Hold your fire.”
“Are we doing this or not, Captain?”
We looked at each other again.
The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to play it. Rose was right, I had no definitive proof as to who these ships were. I might just fire and destroy them both, learning only later they were full of university students on a field trip to study far-space objects. It was a tough choice to make.
“Contact the lead ship. Request their identification.”
“No!” Jort shouted from below decks. He must have been listening to our comm channel. “Madness!”
I glanced at Sosa. “Do it.”
She lit up the comm box and transmitted the request. It was all automatic, computer-to-computer. We normally kept our ID box off, unless we were changing the registry or arriving at a civilized world.
“No response,” Sosa said a long minute later.
“You can’t just fire on them,” Rose said over the comm system. She was wearing a headset in the neutrino cannon cupola by now and watching the situation play out on her screens.
“I can and will defend this ship.”
“I could just use this neutrino cannon—to disable them.”
I shook my head. “We’re too far out. You’re there in case they close the distance. We can’t aim a particle stream that precisely at this range. The neutrinos will spread too wide and become ineffectual. All we’d do is warn them.”
Sosa displayed upraised eyebrows. “Are you giving the order or not?”
I nodded. “Jort, fire on the lead ship.”
Almost immediately, the ship shuddered. He must have had his finger hovering over the touch point on his console.
“Torpedo one away!” he said happily.
“That’s it then,” Rose said. “We’re going to die.”
“Second ship in range…” Sosa said. “They’re firing… Both ships are firing.”
“Firing what?”
Sosa looked at me, her face was pale. “Torpedoes. One each from each ship—they’re exactly like ours.”
I nodded. Patrol ships didn’t carry torpedoes. These vessels must be working for Kersen after all.
“Jort, fire on the second ship. Just one torpedo—fire!”
Royal Fortune shuddered again.
The incoming torpedoes were seven minutes out—ours would strike within seconds of that time as well.
“Hang on everyone,” I said. “We’re going to do some hard Gs.”
With that simple warning, I tripled the thrust, using side-jets on full to steer us away from the oncoming torpedoes. I didn’t have much hope that the ploy would work.
The problem was mathematical. We were in a small, unarmored ship. Any serious strike would take us out. Hell, a golf ball could destroy us through kinetic force alone if it nailed us squarely.
We were turning, our guts wrenching, but if either of the enemy torpedoes struck home, we’d be dead in a nanosecond.
“Contact the lead ship!” I ordered, shouting over the roar of the engines.
“Trying,” Sosa answered.
“They didn’t respond last time,” Rose said. “Why would they now?”
“Because they’re as dead as we are if these torpedoes land.”
A few moments passed, then the boards lit up. A head wearing an unhappy expression flashed into being and hovered over my central console. I recognized that face after a moment—it was Moreau, Kersen’s other symbiotic servant that had worked with Sosa on the space station.
“Gorman? You madman, you’re going to kill us all!”
“Not if you disable your torpedoes,
Moreau.”
“I won’t do it first. Trickery will only get you so far.”
I glanced at the clocks. “Six minutes. You’ve got two on me, if you disable one, I’ll disable one of mine. It’s up to you.”
“Kersen is very displeased. You’ve been out here running around various worlds without a care, without any attempt to report your whereabouts. You’ve gone rogue.”
“Five minutes thirty seconds. There’s some lag time on disabling these things, Moreau. I wouldn’t cut it too close.”
Moreau showed me his teeth. I got the feeling he didn’t like me. Then, his face changed. His eyelids fluttered, and he groaned in agony, shrinking into himself.
“His rider is unhappy,” Sosa said quietly. “It’s poking at his nerves.”
“All right, I’m disabling my torpedo,” he gasped. “Now, destroy yours!”
We watched. By the five-minute mark, the first torpedo heading toward us disintegrated, having gotten a command to do so from the firing ship.
“Destroy the second one we fired,” I ordered Jort.
He did so, and the face on the screen turned a shocked look toward me. “You destroyed the wrong one!”
“On the contrary. If you don’t disable your second torpedo, your ship will be a puff of gas in… four minutes, twenty seconds.”
There was some more cursing and shivering with internal pains. I was impressed that Moreau could control his Tulk so well. Back on Baden, the men had been completely consumed. As you got used to your rider, Sosa had explained, you could resist it to a greater degree. Moreau had apparently been getting a better handle on his parasite since the last time we crossed paths.
But the Tulk in his gut still exerted dominance. It did not want to die. It wanted nothing more than to live.
The second incoming torpedo was destroyed. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
“Gorman!” Moreau shouted at me. “Send the signal! Get this thing off me!”
“Don’t do it, Captain!” Jort said in my ear. “We can be rid of one ship. There won’t be time for them to get off another shot. We’ll pass one another, and escape cleanly.”
Sosa looked at me. She nodded grimly. “Kill him now. You know he’s out here for the bounty. You’ll only be forced to do it later if you don’t do it right now.”
