by Joe Pace
“Enter,” he said when the chime of his door sounded. Fletcher strode in, in the Navy uniform that still looked so strange and formal on her lithe frame. Pearce stood and handed her a flute of champagne.
“To the Harvest,” she said, raising it.
“And her crew,” he replied, and then added the traditional Navy blessing, “Good fortune to her and all who sail with her.” They touched glasses, and each took a sip. Pearce looked out the window again. “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.”
“That’s pretty, Bill,” Fletcher said, and then caught herself with the slightest giggle. “Sorry. Sir. That’s taking some getting used to, but I’m working on it.” She sat, still holding her flute, one finger rubbing idly along the lip. “I never had you as a religious man, sir.”
“The 107th Psalm,” Pearce murmured. “Captain Baker had it on the wall of her star-cabin on the Drake. I’ve never forgotten it.” He was silent a moment, thinking of Jane Baker and all the other star-mariners who had left Earth uttering the same blessings, but never made it back. He coughed and set down his glass, the champagne inside almost untouched.
“In another 24 hours we’ll clear Pluto and the gravity converters should be fully enriched, so we’ll take in the sails and engage the interstellar drives. Then I’ll need you and Mister Hall to plot a course for Kepler. The King wants his new plants, and he wants them before the year is out.”
“Seems a long way to go for flowers,” Fletcher said.
Pearce suppressed a flicker of annoyance. He knew Fletcher was irreverent, and had to remind himself that nobles had a different tolerance for the King’s whims.
“It’s a long way to go for anything. Make sure the route passes through Lyra, Christine. That system is a wealth of gravity currents, and a brief diversion there will save us two weeks of travel.”
“I know that, sir. And so do the Procyeans. It’s a favorite ambush spot of theirs. It’s a risk.”
They stared at one another across the desk for a moment while Fletcher tried to suppress a smile and failed.
“What?” demanded Pearce.
“You. Us. How often have we had conversations like these? Only now you’re the one wanting to take risks, and I’m arguing for caution.”
“Only warranted risks. Listen, Pott seems good, but I don’t know him or trust him – yet, anyway – the way I do you. The midshipmen are impossibly young, and the crew is less than I’d hoped. As my emissary to them all, you are vital. We must succeed. The stakes…” he trailed off. He wanted to tell her the true purpose of their mission, to take her fully into his confidence, but Banks and Exeter had counseled against it. In a small drawer near his left hand, a drawer encrypted to open only at the voice prompt of the commanding officer of the Harvest, was a datachip that outlined his orders in their entirety, a safeguard in the event something happened to him. Unless he was incapacitated, killed, or otherwise removed from command, he would be the only one on board, with the exceptions of Reyes and Green, who knew their true objective at Cygnus.
“I know,” Fletcher said softly, with that warm, slow-burning smile. She reached out and put a hand on Pearce’s, and only then did the captain realize his were clenched into fists. “I know how much this means to you. A promotion for you would mean a lot for James, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him, round eyes full of concern and affection. “I promise, I will do everything I can to make this voyage a success for you.”
“Thank you,” he said after a long pause. “You have no idea how much that means.”
Seven
Gravity
“Captain, perimeter scans show something astern, and closing.”
Pearce had been reviewing duty roster reports, and looked up from the tablet in his hand.
“More precise, please, Mister Worth.”
“An energy signature, sir.” Hope Worth was young, but competent, and Pearce waited as long as he could for the midshipman to relay useful information. No use berating the girl. Seconds ticked past, and Pearce’s patience waned. He was about to repeat his request for more data when Worth shook her head and turned from her scanning console. “Unfamiliar, sir. The computers classify it as ion combustion, but it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Of course not, thought Pearce. You’ve been in space for about ten minutes. Fletcher moved quickly to Worth’s side and looked over her shoulder at her screen.
“I have,” she growled. “Raiders, Captain.”
Damn. Ion combustion was an antiquated technology, compared to gravity sails. It was reliant on unstable and dangerous ignition engines, and had long since been abandoned by the Royal Navy. The age of ion travel had been a short and brutal one for vessels and their crews, with a loss rate of forty percent on deep space missions. It did make for faster ships, though. And some nasty weaponry. Which, in addition to its cheap availability, made it the power source of choice for extralegal pirates.
“How far away?”
“Five hundred thousand kilometers and closing, Captain.”
“Beat to quarters,” Pearce ordered, and Fletcher repeated the command over the shipwide comm system. As a low, steady, artificial drumbeat filled the air, men and women tensed at their stations. Pearce could feel his own body begin to respond, from the sharpening of his focus to the tightening of his bowels. He gripped the arms of his command chair once, then forced himself to relax his fingers and breathe out slowly. Fletcher was at his side, and her green-gold eyes fixed on his.
“The price for the Lyran shortcut,” she murmured, so quiet only he could hear. Pearce narrowed his gaze, still looking straight ahead at the main viewscreen, wondering if she were about to resume their argument, but she simply shrugged and sighed. “Sometimes you gamble and lose.”
“We haven’t lost yet.” He gritted his teeth and rattled off a series of commands in clipped barks. “Reef the gravity sails! No sense in having one of them carried away by an early shot from those thugs. Helm! Hard to starboard, if you please, and commence evasive protocols. They’ll not have this ship, by God.”
The moments that followed were full of crew executing their orders, perhaps not as fluidly as Pearce might have liked, but they were hardly a seasoned group. He doubted that any of them had ever taken hostile fire. That’s about to change. He did notice that Thomas Peckover, the boatswain, had briskly abandoned his remote engineering station on the Quarterdeck before Pearce was halfway through his order, headed for his main post in the engine room. There’s a start. An alarm sounded -- a tinny, electronic noise meant to replicate an ancient ship’s bell -- and the entire world turned on its axis. The command deck tilted hard to the right, and to their credit, none of the crew went sprawling. A moment later the Harvest shook, her interior lights dimming for a moment. Charlie Hall, at navigation, turned and looked at Pearce, his face bloodless.
“Ion cannon, son,” Pearce said, and the officer nodded, licking his white lips.
“Just missed us, sir. If we’d stayed our course…”
“That’s why we didn’t.” Pearce would have been pleased, except this was just the beginning. “Procyean raiders like to fire early, Mister Hall, to disable their prey from a distance. They’ll fire again, but we may have bought ourselves a few minutes while they shift into a new attack pattern.” He knew more, of course, from tales told by fellow merchant star-mariners, but he wasn’t going to tell this frightened young man about those stories, about how, once their victims couldn’t fight back, Procyeans would board the targeted vessel, strip her of her cargo and any technology of value, and then sell her crew at the galactic slave markets thousands of parsecs from home. You could resist, of course, but you wouldn’t die fighting. They would simply cripple you until you were no longer a threat, and then sell you at a reduced price.
“Lieutenant Fletcher, if I recall correctly, we are not far from the Hitzelberg proto-star.”
Fletcher consulted the NavWork system, and nodded. “Yes, sir. Less than two hundred AUs. With gravity converters, we could be there in under two minutes.”
Cutting it fine, Pearce thought. He checked the gravity store monitor at his fingertips, confirming that the converters were fully fueled.
“Very well. Mister Hall, lay in a course for Hitzelberg, please, and engage the converters.” Hall’s hands played across his helm console, and in a heartbeat they accelerated smoothly.
The Harvest wasn’t nearly fast enough to outrun a ship using ion combustion, and it certainly couldn’t outfight her. Pearce thought of the electron carronades he had on board. He glanced across the Quarterdeck at the gunnery station and Heywood Musgrave, his gunner, idle through no fault of his own. He would have laughed if it weren’t so damned pathetic. Navy regs called for a gunner on every armed vessel, regardless of whether or not those armaments amounted to anything. Electron carronades! Might as well be water pistols in any kind of close engagement. He tried to convince himself that Banks and the Star Lord had done the best they could, secretly and swiftly outfitting a voyage no one else wanted, but he wished, again, that more of his suggestions had been heeded. Like more advanced weaponry. Gravity-conversion was ideal for deep-space travel, reaching speeds in excess of a parsec a day, but was next to useless in close-ship action. The Harvest rattled again, harder, and the shipboard illumination actually blinked out for a long second before relighting. They couldn’t have found us a damn cruiser for this mission?
“Another miss, sir. Closer this time.”
“Thank you, Mister Worth.” Pearce tried to remember what the re-energizing lags were for ion cannons. Sixty seconds? Thirty? He forced himself not to ask how much longer it would be before they reached Hitzelberg. It would either be in time, or it wouldn’t.
A reddish brightness emerged from the pinpricked black of the viewscreen, and began to swell in size. The Hitzelberg proto-star, Pearce thought grimly, silently urging it to grow faster. “Mister Hall, the instant we arrive at the edge of the accretion disk, disengage the converters, and deploy the sails.” Hall’s mouth hung open, and he began to blink furiously.
“Captain, within the edge of the event horizon…” His voice trailed off as Pearce stared at him. “Yes, sir. Disk edge in three…two…one…”
A familiar whine filled the deck as the gravity conversion engines shut down, and the Harvest plunged into the rust-colored haze that surrounded Hitzelberg. The fetal star had been in the process of being born for millions of years, gathering dust and gases and other loose material into its orbit, material that would, in the distant future, become planets, moons, asteroids -- the stuff of a star system. The pulsing center of the cloud, where hydrogen and helium piled in upon one another in the ever-denser hydrostatic core, would someday be the newest star in the galaxy. But not yet. Until then, within the accretion disk there would be swirling matter, wildly fluctuating gravity, and unpredictable plasma eruptions.
Pearce was thrown from his chair as the Harvest suddenly tilted ninety degrees to port. Bodies tumbled about the command deck amid shouts of surprise, and he felt Hall thud into him. He seized the young navigator by the upper arm, and with his free hand seized a railing. Pulling himself to the helm, he thrust Hall into his seat. Worth, he noticed, had managed to keep her station. Good girl. “Strap in!” he bellowed. Then louder, “all of you!”
“Did they fire again?” Pearce shook his head. He didn’t know who had asked the question, but it had not been another attack from the pirates.
“No. Until our gravity sails fully deploy, we are at the mercy of the turbulence inside the disk.” He did not spare a glance to the rest of the crew on duty, but instead focused on Hall. He was young, his face unlined and inexperienced, but his duty profile reported a marked aptitude for manual navigation. On simulators, thought Pearce. He lowered his mouth to within inches of Hall’s ear, and hissed softly through clenched teeth. “Son, the instant those sails deploy, assume manual control. The computers are useless in here. You have to feel the eddies and the currents, respond to them instantly, even anticipate them, you understand?” The helmsman nodded, once, almost imperceptibly. A small change came over his face, the jaw no longer slack, the eyes no longer wide with fear or astonishment, but almost serene as he wrapped his right hand around the manual stick. “The Star Lord himself told me you’re the best young navigator in the Navy,” Pearce lied. “Prove it now or we’re all dead.”
The ship righted itself, and Pearce could feel more than hear the taut thrum that told him the sails were deployed and locked, and the Harvest was now under steerage way. He tore his attention away from Hall, and looked around the deck. Everyone seemed intact for the moment. His gaze found Worth, and she answered his unasked question.
“The scanners are having some trouble with the interference here, Captain, but as far as I can tell, the raiders haven’t followed us in.”
“Is that what you wanted?” Fletcher asked, suddenly at his side, frowning. “We can’t hide in here forever, and they’re likely to wait for a bit.”
“No,” replied Pearce. “No, I want those greedy bastards to give chase. I want to see if they can last as long in here as we can.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Another gamble, Lieutenant.” Before she could respond, he turned back to Worth. “Send a distress message, Mister Worth. Merchant channel, not Navy, you understand? Say that our cargo of precious metals and rare liquors is about to be seized by Procyean raiders. And Mister Worth, don’t encode it.”
“Sir?”
“I want this message to be intercepted. Send it!” The ship heaved, pitched, and then settled back into its course. This time, Pearce noticed, everyone stayed strapped in their seats.
“Sorry, sir,” said Hall, not taking his eyes off the viewscreen or his hand off the stick. “These currents are damned tricky.” He realized his language. “Sorry, sir.” Pearce actually smiled.
“Never mind, Mister Hall. You’re doing splendidly. Keep her nose into the wind as best you can.” Perhaps there’s some steel to the lad after all.
“Captain!” Worth’s voice rose with excitement. “Scans show the Procyean vessel has passed through the edge of the Hitzelberg accretion disk!”
“Greed, Mister Worth, is a universal constant.” He never thought he would be pleased to hear that he had pirates on his tail. “Mister Hall, can you ease off the controls a bit? Give the impression that the Harvest is struggling.”
“The impression?” Hall laughed, a thin, high-pitched sound. Sweat beaded on his white forehead. “Of course, sir.” An instant later, the ship was weaving from side to side in a wild dance, with no rhythm and no pattern. Pearce wondered if the midshipman was doing a masterful job of mimicking a ship out of control, or if he were only just keeping it from actually becoming so.
“Raiders closing, sir,” Worth reported. “A hundred thousand kilometers to stern.”
Come on, you bastards. Fire! Much closer, and he couldn’t be sure his own ship would survive. “Abaft view on screen.”
The Procyean vessel appeared before them, surrounded by the swirling red and black detritus of the Hitzelberg disk, the picture imperfect and grainy through the sludge. It was an inelegant thing, thick and menacing, without sails or ornament to interrupt the dull, scarred gray of its hull. Pearce could see the ion cannon, mounted below the main body, and he could see the ominous orange glow that was building in the maw of that huge cylinder. Pearce activated the comm unit by his arm. “Sternshields, Mister Peckover.”
“But Captain, they’ll never hold against that thing!” came the crackling reply. “And if we divert power…”
“Now!” barked Pearce. If his theory held, he wasn’t concerned about the raiders’ weapon, and if he was wrong, it hardly mattered, but he was not in the mood to argue with the boatswain. For a heartbeat, he wondered what the hell was the matter with this younger generation of officers. It would never have occurred to him to debate an order
from Jane Baker, least of all during a close-ship action when seconds could mean the difference between survival and a fiery death.
A moment later, nothing but a brilliant white bloom filled the viewscreen, and the Harvest lurched forward. Peckover must have obeyed the order despite his misgivings, or else the ship would have been consumed in the explosion. The radiance swiftly faded, and when it did, the other ship was gone.
“Captain, I show no sign of the Procyeans.”
“Let that be a lesson to you, Mister Worth. Never try to activate an unstable ion combustion reaction in the midst of a dynamic gravity field.” Pearce favored her with the faintest smile.
“And if that hadn’t worked?” Fletcher asked. He couldn’t fathom the look on her face. Was it relief? Or surprise that old Bill Pearce was proving to be a bit tougher and more resilient than she’d thought?
“We’d be ashes. Or, if we weren’t, we’d try something else. He punched the comm again. “Good work, Mister Peckover. Well done. Now reef those sails, mister, and…”
Before Pearce could complete his sentence, the command deck darkened again, and with a stomach-churning swoon, the Harvest plummeted into a spiral. Even strapped in, Pearce fought the sudden and intense vertigo. It was nearly a full minute before the battered vessel regained some kind of normal attitude, and even then it shuddered, like a living thing in shock.
“What the hell was that?”
“Gravity plume, Captain.” Somehow, Worth’s voice was level. “And we’re still in it.”
“Tiller control nominal,” Hall reported. “I can keep her mostly steady, but our trajectory is toward the heart of Hitzelberg, sir. Into the hydrostatic core.”
