He nodded vigorously. “Yes, I’ve known him for years, even before he signed on with the Imperium. He’s a good man.”
“I’m sure Provost and Gorman were good men once,” I said. I hit the switch that opened a line of communication and said, “Sergeant Hart.”
The computer automatically routed me to Hart’s location.
“Hart here, Captain,” the sergeant said.
“I need to see you on the bridge,” I told him.
“Yes, sir.”
I closed the channel and opened a new one. “Tegan Prime.”
“Yes, Captain?” came her soft voice. In the background, I could hear the whining of the engines.
“I need you on the bridge,” I said.
“Yes, Captain.”
Next, I called Sumiko Shibari to join us.
The computer, knowing I had summoned Hart, Prime, and Shibari to the bridge, allowed them access through the door. Five minutes later, they stood by my chair. Hart looked worried, Sumiko looked joyful as usual, and Tegan seemed curious as to why she had been called here.
“There’s been an attempt on my life and that of Mr. Vess,” I told them. “Two of the Imperium soldiers on board carried out the attacks.”
Tegan’s eyes widened with shock. “An attack from within the ship?”
I nodded. Knowing that the tracker was on board, she and I had been expecting an attack from space but not from the ship’s personnel.
I turned my attention to Hart. “How well did you know Provost and Gorman and how did they come to be on this ship?”
“I didn’t know them at all, Captain. At least, not before we were hired out to Mr. Vess. Commander Everson added them to the men I picked myself, sir.”
“Commander Everson,” I said. The name wasn’t familiar to me but the Imperium was huge and my memory wasn’t exactly acute. It had been dulled by a year’s worth of drinking binges. “Who is he?” I asked Hart.
“He’s in charge of military operations in the Ripley sector, sir.”
“And he put Provost and Gorman on your team?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did he put anyone else on your team?”
“No, Captain, the other members of the team are soldiers I picked myself.”
I sat back in my chair. Was it possible that an Imperium commander was working for the Outsiders, that he had planted men on the Finch to sabotage our mission? It was a possibility I didn’t want to consider but had to face.
“Okay,” I said, addressing everyone on the bridge, “we don’t know what’s going on here but we can make some working assumptions. We have to assume that Commander Everson put those men on board to kill Mr. Vess and me in the hopes that the mission to Savarea would be abandoned. We don’t know why he wants us to abandon the mission but assuming he’s working for the Outsiders, which is likely judging by the behavior of Provost and Gorman, that means there is probably something on Savarea that the aliens don’t want us to discover.”
“A good theory,” Morrow said, “but something about it doesn’t make sense.”
“What?” I asked.
“How will Everson or the Outsiders know if we’ve abandoned the mission or not? They won’t know if their assassins have completed their tasks or failed to kill you and Vess.”
“Maybe Provost and Gorman were supposed to call someone once they’d finished the job,” Vess suggested.
“No,” Morrow said, shaking his head. “They couldn’t do that because the ship’s computer would detect any call being made from the ship.”
“They didn’t have to call anyone,” I said. “The person in charge of the operation would know the mission had been abandoned because the Finch would turn around and head back to the October Girl.”
“And how the hell would they know we’d turned around?” Morrow asked incredulously. “There’s nobody out here but us.”
“There’s a tracker on the ship,” I said. “It’s in the engine room.”
Everyone except Tegan looked shocked.
“And when the hell were you going to tell us about it?” Baltimore asked.
“When the time was right,” I said. I asked Tegan to explain to them about her discovery of the tracker. While she did so, I watched their faces. They all looked shocked and confused, even Sumiko. None of these people were part of the plot to stop the Finch completing her mission, or if they were, they were damned good actors.
When Tegan was done filling them in on the details regarding the tracker, I said, “So now we may have a problem.”
“What’s that?” Morrow asked.
“Eventually, the people in charge of the assassination attempt will realize we haven’t turned around. They will have to assume Provost and Gorman failed. What will they do then?”
“Perhaps they will try more drastic measures to ensure we don’t reach Savarea,” Sumiko said.
I nodded. “My thoughts exactly. If whatever they’re trying to keep secret on that planet is important enough, and they know their plan to kill Mr. Vess and me has failed, they’ll try to stop us some other way.”
“They’ll try to blow us out of space,” Baltimore said.
“Probably. They probably would have preferred to make us quietly abandon the mission, but once they realize we’re still headed to Savarea, they’ll have to resort to more drastic measures, as Sumiko said.”
Morrow grinned. “We’re going to have us a space fight. I’ve been itching to know what this old bird can do.” He patted his control console.
I didn’t share his enthusiasm for a fight. We might be outnumbered and outgunned, and this old Avis class fighter was so far unproven in battle.
So what do we do?” Vess asked. There was a worried look in his eyes and I understood why. All he wanted to do was get his daughter back. He hadn’t expected this ship to be targeted by an alien race that was part of a conspiracy involving members of the Imperium.
“We need to keep moving forward and be prepared for anything,” I said. “It’s unlikely that anything will happen until whoever is tracking us realizes we aren’t turning around. We can give ourselves more time if we jettison the tracker. They’ll know we’ve found it when the signal stops moving, of course, but by then we can be some distance away. They won’t be able to track us any longer but they know where we’re going, so it won’t be too difficult to intercept us somewhere along the way. But I’d feel a hell of a lot more comfortable without that tracker on the ship.”
“You didn’t seem to mind before,” Baltimore said, “when you kept its existence a secret.”
“I was being prudent by keeping it there,” I said. “Now, it’s in our best interest to get rid of it. The enemy has made their move and now we need to react accordingly. That means throwing that thing out of the airlock.”
“What about the bodies of the dead soldiers?” she asked.
I turned to Vess. “Do we have a doctor on board?”
He nodded. “Yes, of course. I have no idea what condition the survivors will be in when we pick them up so I’ve brought a full medical team with us.”
“Hart,” I said, “get some of your men to take the bodies to the infirmary. The doctors can take a look at them and see if there’s anything out of the ordinary. Drugs maybe, or computer implants. Something made them act the way they did.”
We had no idea how the Outsiders controlled the Horde, and examining the dead bodies of our enemies didn’t reveal much because they had alien physiology and our medical teams didn’t know what was normal and what might be abnormal.
But human bodies that had been controlled by the Outsiders could reveal secrets about our enemy. We knew next to nothing about the Outsiders, so if our doctors could unlock some information from the bodies of Provost and Gorman, it might help us to understand the alien masterminds, and any piece of information we could find would be invaluable.
Hart snapped to attention and said, “Yes, Captain.” He left the bridge purposefully.
“Tegan and I will get ri
d of the tracker,” I told the others. “I suggest you all go about your business as usual but be ready to man your battle stations. We could be in for a rough ride.”
Tegan and I left the bridge and went down to Engineering. She picked up a toolbox from beneath a computer console and descended the ladder to the turbine where the tracker had been placed. I followed her down into the eerie blue dimness and waited while she selected a few tools from the box and crawled beneath the glowing turbine.
“This shouldn’t be too difficult,” she said after removing the dark gray casing from the tracker. “I can remove it without turning it off.”
“That’s great,” I said, watching her. In the blue glow from the turbine, she looked almost ghost-like. Her right hand held the tracker in place while her metallic left hand worked on the insides. After a few moments, the device came free and she replaced the cover.
She crawled out to where I was waiting and held the tracker up so I could see it. The red light in the casing was still illuminated.
“It’s working,” she said. “So when we throw it out into space, they’ll still be tracking its movement. That gives me an idea.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Instead of jettisoning the tracker out of the airlock, where it will simply float in space and reveal our last known position, we could shoot it out of one of the rear guns. Whoever is watching its movement might thing we’ve turned around. It could buy us some time.”
I nodded. “Sounds like a good idea. How are we going to shoot it out of the gun?”
“We can attach it to a missile. We’ll disarm the missile first by removing the warhead.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
We ascended the ladder, Tegan holding the toolbox in her left hand. I wondered how strong her mechanical limbs were. She climbed rapidly, leaving me to come up slowly behind her. When I finally reached the main Engineering deck, Tegan led me past the engines to the rear of the room where a door slid aside and opened onto a small room that contained a circular hatch door and a row of missiles racked in a machine that loaded them into the firing tube behind the hatch.
She opened the toolbox again and quickly and expertly removed the warhead from the lowermost missile. She placed the conical piece of steel carefully into a storage area that held more warheads, and then attached the tracker to the side of the disarmed missile’s body.
She pressed a large red button on the wall and the circular hatch opened. At the same time, the lowermost missile, the one with the tracker attached to its side, dropped from the rack and was automatically loaded into the tube. The circular hatch closed behind it.
“Ready to fire,” Tegan said.
I nodded. “Let’s get rid of that thing.”
She lifted her head and said, “Morrow, I’m going to manually fire rear missile launcher one-A.”
“Affirmative,” Morrow’s voice said through the wall-mounted speakers.
Tegan pressed a second button and I heard a rushing sound beyond the circular hatch door.
“That’s it,” Tegan said. “It’s out in space now, rocketing back the way we came.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Now let’s hope it buys us some time.”
CHAPTER 10
NOTHING HAPPENED FOR THREE DAYS. Life on the Finch settled into a routine of eating, sleeping, and sitting on the bridge, checking reports on the ship’s systems. The old Avis class fighter was running optimally. Vess had hired the best technicians and mechanics to refurbish the Finch and it showed in her performance.
She was basically flying herself and intervention from the crew was minimal. So instead of focusing on redundant tasks, we spent our time watching space, searching for an enemy ship in our vicinity.
When we were only an hour out from the second gate, and in sub-light speed, I thought we might actually make it there without incident. But Morrow turned to me and said, “Captain, there’s a predator class ship in our path.”
“Can you identify her?” I asked. I got up from my seat and stood watching the forward window. Given the distance the Finch could detect other ships, there was no way I was going to be able to see the predator in our way, but I felt too keyed up to stay seated.
Vess was also on the bridge, seated at the console beside Morrow and looking suddenly worried.
“Negative,” Morrow said. “We’re too far away at the moment.”
“Well, there’s one thing we know,” I said. “If she’s a predator class ship, she isn’t an alien vessel.”
“She’s probably Imperium…or a pirate ship,” Morrow said.
“Yes, and knowing what we know about a possible Outsider infiltration of the Imperium, I think I’d prefer pirates.”
Vess turned in his seat to face me. “What are we going to do, Captain?”
“We’re going to wait to see what happens next,” I said. “It might just be an Imperium patrol wondering what an old Avis class fighter is doing in the area.”
“She’s scanning us, Captain,” Morrow said.
“Identify her,” I said. If she was able to scan us, we should be able to identify her.
Morrow tapped his keyboard and consulted his screen. “She’s an Imperium fighter. The Zodiac. According to the computer, the Zodiac is usually stationed in orbit around the planet Druun-9.”
“Druun-9,” I repeated. “Where’s that?”
He consulted the screen again. “It’s an Imperium planet in the Ripley sector, Captain.”
The Ripley sector. The same sector Commander Everson was in charge of. That was no coincidence.
“They’re hailing us, Captain,” Morrow said.
“On screen.” I stepped down off the dais and stood by Morrow and Vess.
The front window changed to a screen that showed a gray-haired man in an Imperium captain’s uniform. He sat in his captain’s chair while, around him, his bridge crew was busy working their various consoles.
“Captain Blake,” he said, leaning forward slightly and regarding Morrow, Vess, and myself. “I am Captain Partridge of the Zodiac. I am here to inform you, on behalf of the Imperium, that your mission may not continue. You are ordered to turn back.”
So this was how they were going to play it, was it? Instead of attacking us, they were going to tell us to turn around and forget about Savarea. I guessed it made sense. If we did as they asked, they could avoid bringing unwanted attention to Savarea and whatever the hell was hidden there.
“Turn back?” I said as if I had misheard Partridge. “On what grounds?”
“The Imperium is aware of the nature of your mission,” he said. “If there are survivors on Savarea, it is our responsibility to rescue them. The planet is in Horde space and traveling there is too dangerous for your small crew. Leave it to us. We have ships en route to Savarea already.” He looked at Vess. “Mr. Vess, you may rest assured that we will bring your daughter back safely.”
Vess shook his head. “I chose this crew to get my daughter back, Captain Partridge, because I didn’t want the Imperium to get involved. There’s really no need to use your resources in this matter. I have every confidence in Captain Blake and the crew of the Finch to rescue Georgia from that planet.”
Partridge sighed and I wondered if he had expected us to simply turn back without any resistance.
“Captain Blake,” he said, “if you do not turn your ship around, I have orders to use any force necessary—”
“Of course you do,” I said, cutting him off, “and I suppose those orders come from Commander Everson.” I leaned forward, resting my hands on the control consoles and said, “Tell me something. How much are you being paid to work for the Outsiders and betray your own race?”
He seemed taken aback by that. He frowned at me through the screen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Everson put Provost and Gorman on board this ship to kill Mr. Vess and myself in the hope that the mission to Savarea would be abandoned. When that didn’t happen,
you had to try a different tact. Sending us back home keeps us away from Savarea and gives you time to…what, kill those survivors?
“Because if they’ve been on the planet for a year, they’re sure to know what’s going on there. You didn’t know they were there, though, did you? Not until Vess put together this rescue mission. So I’m guessing that after we turn back, you’ll be heading through the gate to Savarea, not to rescue those survivors but to kill them.”
He sat back in his chair and grinned at me but there was no humor in his eyes. “I’m impressed by your thinking, Captain Blake. And to think I was told that you were nothing more than a drunken waste of space pining for his Imperium days. It’s a shame you’ve recovered a captainship only to lose it, and your ship, so soon.” He turned to one of his crew and said, “Raise shields.” The screen went blank and was then replaced by the window showing the stars.
“They’re raising shields, Captain,” Morrow said.
I flicked the switch on the arm of my chair to open a ship-wide channel. “Battle stations.” The alarm began to wail and the red lights started to flash.
“We’re being fired on,” Morrow said.
“Evasive maneuvers and shields.”
“Yes, Captain.” I thought I detected a hint of excitement in his voice. Grinning, he slid his chair to one side to position himself in front of the flight yoke. He hit the switch that took the Finch out of automatic pilot and activated the yoke. Morrow twisted it and the ship tilted sharply to the left.
I had to grab my chair to stop myself from falling over, reminding myself that I had ordered the crew to battle stations and not taken up my own. I was supposed to be buckled into the captain’s chair.
I climbed into the seat and hit the button that sent the safety belt snaking around my waist.
“We’ve avoided the initial salvo,” Morrow said.
In the front window, I could now see the Zodiac. She was twice the length and width of the Finch and better armed. She was white, and on her side, in dark blue, she displayed the emblem of the Imperium, a shield topped by an eagle’s head and wings. Within the shield was a painted star field and a depiction of Earth.
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