The only answer was the hiss of interstellar static. The runner was not replying.
Laser-ranging pegged the target's speed at 15 kps, but with an acceleration of 5 Gs, that was mounting rapidly. Gold Squadron was closing fast, yet as the runner boosted for deep space, the rate of closing was falling. The question was whether the runner would pull the plug and pop for T-space before the squadron was able to close to within weapons range. When the target would shift over to its faster-than-light drive depended on how far its pilot planned to travel, and how quickly—both factors were total unknowns at this point.
At 50 kps, Gold Squadron stooped over the fleeing vessel. Jaime's imaging radar painted the runner's image in silver light on his target display, and his computer screen traced out the schematic three-view matched from his Pilum's computer vessel ID. As he'd thought, it was a freighter, an aging Higgins Class, massing 5800 tons, with an old Type 271-K drive. They must have completely overhauled the drive to give that old rustbucket a 5-G kick!
"Gold Leader! Gold Three! I have target lock! Firing range in nine...eight..."
"Three, Leader! Don't kill him! Knock down his shields and put out his fire!"
"Affirmative, Gold Leader! Two! One! Range!"
Green light pulsed and flared across the starfield, momentarily banishing even the brightest stars from the sky.
"All Golds! Gold Three! Warn off! Warn off! He's got teeth!"
The last double handful of kilometers flickered away, and Jaime could see the runner ship at last, in steel and blue plasma drive flare instead of as a ghost image on a phosphor screen. It was squat and ugly, with a vaguely oval shape. Streaks of red-brown rust and weathering hinted that the vessel had antigrav generators capable of landing the un-streamlined craft on a planetary surface. The field coils and mag flux energizers exposed aft near the quad drive nozzles looked new, however, and the faint amber flicker of the freighter's shields spoke of considerable untapped power.
He had a glimpse of her name, computer-enhanced off one of his telephoto recorders: Corrine. Not that names meant much. Runners changed their names as frequently as they entered a system where they might be recognized.
A turret behind the freighter's sharp-edged bridge spun to bear on Jaime's Pilum. "Two...Break right!" he shouted over the comm channel to his wingman, then twisted his ship's controls to the left. Green fire bathed his ship, hammering at his forward shields. His own lasers fired in response.
For a fractional instant, Jaime's fighter streaked low across the freighter's rugged hull. Laser fire tracked him from paired turrets, but too late. He flashed across the freighter's bow and into open space once more, untouched.
"Gold Leader to all Golds! Damage reports!"
"Leader, Gold Three. I'm holed forward, but nothing serious."
"Leader, Gold Six. Same here."
"Right. All Golds, reform for another pass! I read two dorsal turrets mounting twin 7.5/6 lasers."
"Gold Five. Add one ventral turret, under the chin," another voice added.
"Copy, Five. Sweep back around, Golds. We'll take this guy from the tail!"
Slowing their forward velocity, the six Pilums diverted massive thrust in a high-G turn that took them in a wide, steep circle around the freighter's starboard side. Approaching from the rear and slightly below the runner's drive flare, they were in a good position to fire into the fleeing vessel without taking return fire themselves.
Jaime's scanner read a positive weapons lock, and he keyed his right-hand firing button. From a range of less than ten kilometers, lasers and mass drivers fired together, blasting at the freighter's shield with coherent light and uranium-cored hypervelocity steel slivers.
He watched his volley penetrate the target's shields, watched rust-crusted hull metal blossom open in ragged, glowing craters. White-hot
fragments of metal spun crazily through space.
Then Jaime was streaking past the freighter once more, as the runner's dorsal turrets swung to track his racing craft. Laser fire seared ihrough his port shield. Red warning lights flared on his instrument panel. A three-view schematic of his fighter showed the narrow but deep damage tracks that high-energy lasers left behind. His portside armor had been holed, though his internals and electronics still registered all green.
Someone gave a piercing yell over the communicator. "We got 'em good that time, Boss! We nailed him!"
Jaime swung his ship around for the next pass. The orderly battle sequence of approach-fire-regroup had disintegrated with the last pass. The six Pilums were on all sides of the hapless runner now, lasers and mass drivers probing. Jaime's imaging radar registered gaping craters across the ship's aft ventral hull, and one of the blue-white hot plasma drive flares wavered with the eerie flicker that warned of imminent drive failure. One of the dorsal turrets had been smashed open as well, leaving a ragged hole from which debris trailed back into space. A dull, flickering glow, dimly glimpsed through the wreckage, showed where internal fires were feeding on oxygen vented from the leaking pressure hull.
Jaime opened a ship-to-ship channel. "Attention, Runner! This is Squadron Leader Douglass, of the Gael Naval Militia! Shut down your I-K drives immediately, and stand by to receive maneuvering orders! Obey or be destroyed!"
This time there was an answer, a voice muffled by a static roar. "Screw you, TOG face!" The freighter's surviving dorsal turret opened fire, scoring long-ranged hits on Jaime's forward hull.
The tactical situation was rapidly getting out of hand. Jaime issued a stream of orders, drawing the other five fighters off the wounded freighter and into a semblance of order once more. Closing ranks again, they flipped end-over-end, decelerated sharply, and prepared to execute another massed attack on the freighter's stern.
One more pass would do it.
"Lieutenant! Massed contacts, one-eight-oh relative! Incoming!"
Jaime glanced down at his screens and stifled a curse. Blips marked a flight of ships coming up on their rear from insystem.
He scanned and fed the readings through his computer ID. The newcomers were Gladius fighters, two full squadrons of them, and they were at full boost, vectored toward the freighter.
"Militia patrol, this is Imperial Half-Flight Delta Five." The voice that snapped out over Jaime's ship-to-ship was arrogant and sharp.
"Disengage and clear out."
Jaime bristled. "Delta Five... what the hell are you talking about? We've got the runner locked in! We'll have him in another ten seconds..."
"Get those rattletrap rustbuckets clear or we'll run you down!" a different voice interrupted. "We are assuming responsibility for this contact!"
"Like hell you are..." Gold Squadron had worked hard to flush this bird, and taken the risks in jumping him. He'd be damned if he was going to let a pack of TOG Imperials crowd in now to claim credit for the capture!
This time it was the first voice, measured and cold, that answered. "Militia Squadron, I remind you that all Imperial directives and commands take precedence over all provincial military matters. You are hereby ordered to break off the engagement immediately. Report to your base at Vanur Gamma for reassignment."
"Reassignment! What about our patrol..."
"You don't have it anymore, Militia. The Imperial Navy is taking your run, and your whole flight's getting shuffled insystem to Alba Port. Now clear out before I order you blasted as a menace to navigation!"
Jaime had no choice but to comply. Gold Squadron killed their acceleration and maneuvered clear, watching the damaged freighter dwindle on their screens forward. To their rear, the blips of the twelve Gladius fighters hardened and brightened, until the Imperial fighters swept past. The Gladii were sleek, wicked-looking craft, with needle-slim, outrigger pontoon hulls on either side of a stubby, two-seat cockpit. Their drive flares blossomed blue-white as they boosted toward the fleeing freighter. AGladius carried much heavier weaponry than did a Pilum—heavy mass drivers, particle cannons, and multiple-missile hardpoint racks. They passed close eno
ugh abeam that Jaime could make out the TOG markings on the sharp fins of the nearest fighter—a red and black arrowhead against a globe.
Jaime gave the order to flip end-for-end and begin acceleration insystem, then cut the tactical channel to blank out the grumblings he heard arising from the other ships of Gold Squadron. Not that he blamed them any, but he did not trust himself to reply to their outrage.
Being pulled off the tail of the runner was infuriating.
It was also ominous. The TOG commander's insistence that the Imperial Navy was taking over the Alban outsystem patrols seemed a sinister encroachment on Alban sovereignty and responsibilities. Though Jaime rarely took part in political discussions, he secretly supported Alba's Jacobites. That was something he had not yet been willing to admit publicly. Alba's Jacobite Party held that the Gael Cluster would be better off without the TOG Imperium.
Unfortunately, now that the TOG was here, no one had yet managed to think of a reasonable way to ask them politely to leave.
A red light winked on his com board, indicating that someone wished urgently to speak with him. He opened his tac com, and Davie Marshall's voice came over his helmet phones. "Lieutenant, I think we ought to haul a few Gs insystem."
"Eh? Why?"
Marshall's voice trembled with some barely suppressed emotion. Humor? "I don't know if you've noticed, Boss..."
"What?"
"Check your screens aft. That freighter pulled the plug just before those TOG boys got within range!"
"What?"
"Yep! He's clean gone, lined up on nothing in particular, so they won't be able to track him."
"God..."
"Yeah, and I'll bet that Imperial Commander's fit to be tied. Maybe we shouldn't be here when he finally slows down and gets turned around!"
"Right you are, Dav! Embarrassing, what? Especially since we'd have caught the runner if our friends hadn' t happened along! Listen up! Gold Leader to all Golds! Boost to seven gravs on my mark, three... two... one... Boost!"
The six Pilums accelerated toward Vanur. Perhaps it would be best if Gold Squadron and the other three squadrons of the Gyrfalcons packed up and cleared for Alba Port before their TOG replacements decided to vent their frustration on any handy target.
Such "accidents" had been known to happen.
"Breakout in twenty seconds," Spalding's voice said over the corvette's intercom system. "Our plus tau will be 392 hours. All passengers and hands, be sure to program your perscomps accordingly."
Kendric keyed the information into the narrow strip of plastic strapped to his left forearm through a sequence of pressure-sensitive touchplates, checked the result on its screen, then leaned back in his seat. The swivel screen mounted on one of the chair's armrests had been set as a bridge repeater, duplicating the scene displayed on the
bridge viewer. In the past hours, the black mass shadows of suns had thronged far more thickly than they had been before. The Teachdair was well inside the Gael Cluster by now.
"Five seconds," Spalding announced. "Three...two...one...
Breakout!"
There was a wrenching, inner sense of falling as Teachdair and all aboard slipped from T-space to the steadier realities of what physicists persisted in calling Rational Space. Gravity fluctuated, then steadied at the one Alban gravity-a shade more than one Imperial standard G that the Gael ship internal grav generators normally manufactured.
On the screen, the milky backdrop of T-space had been replaced by the star-clotted blackness that made up the sky as seen from anywhere | within the Gael Cluster. There was something reassuring about the number of starry beacons and their seeming closeness.
Kendric looked at his hands, squinting to see the shimmerheat effect. It showed only as a faint distortion to his vision, for sixteen days j of T-space was not enough to give him the steady glow of a star traveller pushing his tau limit. He looked up at Elliot, seated in the chair across from him, and grinned ruefully.
"How long a trip is it to Trothas, did you say?"
"Twenty-some days at a reasonable entry speed," Elliot told him. ! "Don't worry. You'll have time to bum off your plus tau before we get there!"
"I'd better, or the Empire will need a new commander for their battleship."
The mechanics of faster-than-light travel were bound up in the dimensions of time as well as space. Neither ship nor man could push his stay in T-space past a certain, critical point called the T-tau Intersect. To do so invited a rather dramatic suicide. During long interstellar passages, ships—and individuals transferring from ship to ship—had to be careful not to exceed approximately 700 hours in T-space without first "burning tau"—spending time in Rational Space to allow their plus tau to recede again. Basically, travellers gained an hour more in T-space for every hour they burned off in normal space. Programming one's perscomp to keep track of personal plus-tau was a basic and vital ritual in interstellar travel.
The hours passed swiftly now. Boosting at four Gs, the corvette 1 closed with the world of Alba, whose shape grew with the passing hours from one of numerous bright stars to a tiny half sphere to a swelling crescent as the Teachdair swung across the world's night side, pursuing the electronic beacon of Alba Port.
More hours passed, and the Teachdair began to decelerate from interplanetary velocities of tens of kilometers per second to the slower speeds necessary for orbital insertion. Kendric could see the orbital station now, an immense white disk made toylike by distance and the unnatural clarity of objects viewed through the vacuum of space. From far off, the station's surface appeared smooth. As the image closed, irregularities appeared, swellings, protrusions, and convolutions that showed it to be an immense structure, nearly ten kilometers across. Built by the TOG Engineering Corps as a gift to the Gael people, the station was startling proof of the technological accomplishments of the Galactics.
The disk was not turning. Artificial gravity, of course, was provided by internal grav field coils rather than through the clumsy artifice of rotation. As the shuttle drew closer still, the outer rim of the disk resolved into irregularly spaced crenelations and slots against the white wall of the station. Many of those slots were filled. Starships nested there, taking on fuel, supplies, and passengers. Small ships— frigates and corvettes—could grav to a landing at Alba's Port Balmarin facilities without problem, but larger fleet ships drew so much power for planetary landings that they rarely, if ever, entered atmosphere. Alba Port was the orbital station built for Gael fleet operations in orbit.
Kendric strained to see if he could recognize the Gael Warrior. She would be there, in one of those ship berths, but he could not identify her.
No! There! On the far side! That gray, shark-finned behemoth was the Gael Warrior. She had to be!
Kendric had never been aboard her, though she was enough like the old Metus Magnus that he felt he already knew her. Half a kilometer long, massing almost one million tons, and with a crew complement of over a thousand, she was among the largest and most powerful of the TOG Imperium's fighting ships.
The Gael Warrior was broad and flat, much wider than she was deep, except aft where her bridge decks crowded up against the cant of her dorsal radiator fin. She filled her port berth like some piece of the port's complex exterior machinery, and she was long enough that her main I-K thrust projectors extended far beyond the station's rim. Like the station's hull, the ship looked deceptively sleek and smooth from far off, as streamlined as any atmospheric interceptor. Those great, stabbing fins—actually designed to radiate tach-shimmer rather than to deliver lift in an atmosphere—added to her swift and deadly look. It was not until the shuttle had approached to within a few kilometers of the vessel that the bulges and protuberances of field coil generators, of bank upon sinister bank of weapons turrets and blisters, of fuel tanks and tach-shim deflector banks, became visible through the partly open
design of the berth cradle.
Weapons seemed to be mounted everywhere along that lean hull. Where lesser warships mount
ed weapons turrets grouped in twos and threes, an Imperial battleship bore laser and particle cannon bays, mass driver accelerators and missile tubes arrayed in banks that could lay down devastating fields of fire. Just forward of the bridge tower was the main battery platform, which mounted eight giant laser bays, four to starboard and four to port. These, in combination with with numerous secondary weapon systems, could devastate any target chosen by the Ship's fire control officer. The ship's principal weapon gaped like a mouth between the projecting horns of her twin bows, a spinal-mount mass driver capable of delivering kilotons of destructive energy I through kinetics alone.
He couldn't see them, but Kendric knew that slung close along the ship's belly, outboard port, outboard starboard, and midships, the triple maws of her fighter bays gaped open to space. The Gael Warrior carried one full fighter group in three flight bays, a total of 72 one- or ! two-man close-combat ships.
Anti-collision strobe beacons pulsed their monotonous warning from the station's hull as the corvette drew near, plunging into darkness ' as it passed from sunlight into the structure's shadow. Navigational approach lights winked in steady tempo at Docking Bay 7, and the corvette's antigrav keened to life once more to kill its approach speed. I
Kendric took a last look at his new command before it was hidden by the shadowed rim of Alba Port's disk. They would disembark into the station's main terminus, and he would be able to make his way from there to his ship. He straightened his sash and cloak and ran a nervous hand through his hair. As best he could, he began to prepare himself to meet his new command.
TO: Fraser, Flag Captain, Gael Warrior FROM: Marius Arada, V. Admiral, Cdr, Alba DATE: 4 Jul 6830 TIME: 0945 H. (Alba Port Local)
SUBJECT: Orders
1. You are hereby required and directed to assume command as Captain Battleship Gael Warrior (GIS).
2. You are hereby required and directed to assume full duties as Flag Captain of Battleship Squadron, Codenamed "Gael Squadron," under command Marius Estes Severno, Commodore, TOG Imperial Navy, Severno expected Alba Port no later than 10 Jul 6830.
William Keith Renegades Honor Page 3
