William Keith Renegades Honor

by Renegade's Honor

  T.C., of course, remained aboard the Gael Warrior. It could be that her experience with the Underground would be helpful later if the Squadron needed to make contact with the Renegade Underground for supplies or passage out of TOG space.

  At last, both transports were in space and ready for boost. Meanwhile, the last shuttle was taken aboard and the last fighter returned to its place in one of the Warrior's fighter bays. It was time to leave.

  Kendric had settled on an arbitrary target as their next destination, a triple star listed on the charts as Gamma Sacculus. There were planets there, but no record of Human habitation. He'd chosen it because it was a convenient navigational target, and because it could be reached easily within the personal deadline he faced. At a moderate boost, the fleet would arrive at Gamma Sacculus in six days. That left Kendric, T.C., and Jaime with a plus tau of 27 days—just three shy of the limit. Kendric had lately been haunted by the memory of the man he'd watched turn inside out from shimmertau. The image pursued him, even into his dreams. Twenty-seven days was as close as Kendric cared to come to his tau-limit.

  There was no question about it, though. They had to jump. If they remained any longer in Greshem orbit, the reinforcements Gracchi must be organizing back at Alba might arrive. They would certainly be powerful enough to heavily out-mass and out-gun the Gael Squadron. If the squadron could jump before those reinforcements arrived, Gracchi would never know where they had gone. With the whole, wide sky to vanish into, the Overlord could search for centuries before looking in the right place.

  That was another reason to choose Gamma Sacculus as their next rendezvous. Because it lay on the far side of Greshem's sun, the TOG personnel left behind on Greshem would not be able to see and record the course the squadron was taking out of the system, even if they had the instruments to observe their departure. Let Overlord Gracchi search. At Gamma Sacculus, Kendric and his people would have the time they needed to plan their next destination.

  "Captain! Ops!"

  "Go ahead."

  "We have a T-doppler contact, sir. Bearing one-six-three degrees, plus 50."

  "ID?"

  "Hard to say, sir. It's extreme range, but it looks commercial."

  Freighters and ore barges were common contacts. T-doppler could detect the wakes of ships traveling in T-space out to a range of a light year or so, but could neither identify targets nor pinpoint where those targets were going to break into rational space.

  "Keep an eye on them."

  "Uh...sorry, sir. We've lost them."

  "Breakout?"

  "Possibly. Or they may be out of range. It was a weak contact."

  Probably a freighter passing out of range, Kendric thought. If we stop to track down every passing T-d contact, we'11 be here for years. "O.K., "he said aloud. Keep your eyes open for a Cherenkov flash. We'll proceed with our own jump."

  Damn. We're probably getting away clean, but it would be nice to know for sure.

  "All stations. Report readiness for T-space transition."

  Hours later, on the far fringes of the Greshem star system, a lone ship materialized out of T-space with the radiant flash of Cherenkov radiation marking her transition to sublight speed. She was old and rust-marked, her name barely visible in faded red paint along her prow: Hyperion.

  Within the Hyperion' s dark and cramped bridge, Overlord Magnan Gracchi peered into the scanner tank, his face eerily stage-lit by the tank's glow. "There!" he said, and the legate who served as his chief of staff nodded.

  "That is the Renegade fleet, Lord." The light they were viewing was hours old.

  "Pilot!"

  "Yes, my Lord!" The Hyperion s Captain was old, spindly, and quite frightened. He had no doubt that the men who had commandeered his ship at Alba Port were capable of flying it themselves. The less they noticed him, the better he felt.

  "Set your scanners on this target. Track and record."

  "R...recording, Lord!"

  "Range?"

  "Thirteen AU, Lord."

  "Nearly two light hours, Lord," the legate added.

  "Good. They haven't seen us yet.. .and won't for hours! Get a line on their course. Quickly!"

  "They may have seen us on T-doppler."

  "Perhaps. It doesn't matter. Look! They're already accelerating toward transition!"

  It would take two hours for the light of their arrival to reach the fleeing ships. By the same token, the light they were seeing was two hours old, the events they were witnessing already out of date. Moments later, the eleven ships vanished from sight.

  "Got them, Lord!" the legate said, smiling. "We'll have a projection for you momentarily, sir!"

  It seemed to Gracchi that they had arrived just in time. The transports had obviously been taken by Fraser's ships, but he had expected that. With the warships in the Argrian system out of commission and the reinforcements not yet arrived, the Overlord had been reduced to commandeering an old and slow-moving freighter. The first transport he'd commandeered had not worked out. The socketer pilot had regretfully informed Gracchi that his ship, the Agravender //, had a drive malfunction that would require several days to trace and repair. Gracchi had chosen the Hyperion instead, threatening the pilot with slow death if he did not drive the craft to the limits of its engineering endurance. If they had arrived even a few minutes later, Gracchi would never have been able to trace the course Fraser's fleet had taken outbound.

  B ut those few minutes had been granted him and now he knew! He knew!

  "I have a line, Lord," the legate said. "On screen..."

  The freighter's main viewer blanked to show a 3-D map, the Gael squadron's course projected along a red line.

  "They're headed in the general direction of the Galactic core, Overlord," the legate said. "It will be difficult deciding which of a number of systems they are aiming for..."

  "Not so difficult," Gracchi said. "Fraser has probably only recently arrived from the mines at Haetai-Aleph. He must have considerable plus tau by now, and he won't be able to make a long T-space transition."

  "True, my Lord!"

  "He'll have.. .oh. ..let's say not more than twenty-five days of plus tau...and not less than eighteen days. That means the squadron can't travel in T-space for more than twelve days. That, and the slow speed they were travelling when they entered T-space, will limit his possible destinations sharply. All we have to do is plot possible destinations on the map at their transit speed, along a line out to twelve days of travel from here!

  "Pilot!"

  "Y-yes, my Lord?"

  "You will set course for Dorlennion."

  "Dorlennion, Lord?"

  "Correct. It's a short jump, only twenty light years from here."

  "Yes, my Lord."

  "There is a VLCA at Dorlennion," Gracchi, said, more to himself than to anyone on the bridge. "And there are TOG fleets thick between here and the Core. Once we know in which systems the Renegades might appear, we can deploy those fleets accordingly." His fist snapped shut, a convulsion that left the knuckles white and straining. "And then we'll have them!"

  We believe we have narrowed down the possible destinations of the renegade fleet to one of five possible star systems. Of these, the trinary Gamma Sacculus system has been given priority.

  —Excerpt from transmission, VLCA Dorlennion to Vice Admiral, commanding 112th TOG Imperial Fleet, Tholman, 28 Oct 6830

  The Gael Warrior's main officer's lounge had been set up with chairs around a low, central table. The lighting had been keyed down, and a large holographic projector set up to cast images into the space above the table. Kendric had invited his senior bridge officers to meet with him, and had asked T.C. to sit in as well. He wanted her input in the decision on their next destination because T.C. probably knew the TOG Imperium better than any of them.

  In the semi-darkness, the projector displayed an image of the Galaxy, a hazy, blue-glowing whirlpool of light two meters across. Though the image looked like a holoview, it was actually a computer projection dra
wn from the Warrior's data banks. On command, the computer could zoom in to examine specific parts of the Galaxy map, display courses, and show the vague boundaries between those regions not yet dominated by TOG.

  "We don't have a whole lot of choice, it seems." Morganen was leaning back in his chair, scowling, his arms crossed before him. The glow from the projection illuminated his features with a frosty light. "We have all we need to start a new colony somewhere. I say we find some out-of-the-way world with suitable conditions and start building ourselves a new home." He indicated the ragged fringes of the galaxy map. "Maybe we could find a cluster out along the Rim, somewhere."

  "Aye, sure," Logan said. "And how long are you prepared to go hunting, Mr. Morganen? If it's not inhabited, it won't be listed on our charts now, will it? How long can we poke about from system to system before a TOG patrol spots us?"

  Lee Fairfax grinned. "That's why making a run for M-31 is so appealing. They'll never find us there, and then we can poke about as long as we want!"

  "Supplies, Lee," MacAllister observed. "Even with most of our people in cold storage aboard the transports, the rest of us would need a couple more transports loaded with food and water or we'd never make it that far!"

  "Then we find a TOG outpost and raid it."

  The discussion had gone on for hours, with Kendric allowing it to follow its own course, volunteering little. The arguments went round the table, pro and con, and he listened to them all, weighing the speakers as well as their points of view. Commanders MacCandless and Logan were in favor of a fight, though they conceded that the chances of decisively beating TOG were slim. Lenard Morganen and MacAllister, on the other hand, both wanted to find a new world and colonize it, avoiding all contact with TOG.

  Most of the discussion had worried back and forth between those options, but Kendric had his doubts about both of them. No one in the fleet would refuse to fight TOG if he gave the word, but it did not seem feasible for the long run. The fleet would need supplies, war materiel, a base of operations, and a source of new recruits and ships to make possible any kind of long-term struggle. So far, no one had been able to propose how to manage all that.

  The idea of finding a new homeworld somewhere out along the Galactic Rim, where they could start a new colony had its good points. Its disadvantages lay in the time it would take to find such a planet, and the need to keep their presence there hidden from TOG. There were worlds aplenty throughout the Galaxy, including hundreds of thousands capable of supporting Human life. Compared to the hundreds of billions of stars, however, those potential colony worlds were few and far between. Even if they had the resources to find one, could they manage to do it without first blundering into a TOG patrol?

  Even if they succeeded in founding a colony, they would face the ever-present danger that a TOG patrol, a Galactic survey expedition, a wandering tramp freighter, or some other unwelcome guest would happen on the place and report it to TOG authorities for the Discovery

  Bounty. The colony would be limited in how far it could advance, too. Neutrino emissions from starships or fusion power plants, radio broadcasts, even patterns of agriculture visible from orbit would mark that world as the abode of intelligent life before many years had passed. Could they colonize a planet knowing that they and their children would be condemned to a stone-age existence, possibly forever? Kendric, for one, was not quite ready to give up antibiotics, computers, and polyesters for flint knives and the skins of slaughtered animals!

  The most daring suggestion had come from Lee Fairfax. The current limit on travel imposed by Irrational Physics and modern technology was something just less than .23 light year per minute, or 10,000 light years—approximately one tenth the breadth of the Galaxy—in 30 days. Once a starship and her crew had reached the critical 30-day tau limit, they had to burn off their plus tau at the rate of one day in rational space for every day spent in T-space.

  For travelers within the Galaxy Journeys limited to the diameter of the Milky Way itself imposed no particular problems. A trip beyond the confines of the Galaxy to, say, the satellite Magellanic Clouds required many T-space transitions. There were Human colonies somewhere within the Clouds, but little was known about them except that they seemed to be allied with the Baufrin-Human Commonwealth. Most of Kendric's people were decidedly uncomfortable at the prospect of trying to reach Commonwealth space.

  Fairfax proposed that they flee the Galaxy entirely rather take a chance on finding a world that TOG would not soon discover. The Magellanic Clouds were a pair of satellite galaxies gravitationally linked to the Milky Way Galaxy, about 180,000 light years distant. The next nearest galaxy was the Andromedan Galaxy, a spiral like the Milky Way, M-31, but Andromeda was some two million light years away.

  Fairfax had suggested that the fleet travel toward Andromeda for thirty days at maximum speed, then drop into normal space. It did not seem likely that TOG would pursue them ten thousand light years outside the Galaxy, and less chance that the Squadron could be found in the immensity between galaxies. After their plus tau shimmerheat had been burned off, they could run for another ten thousand light years for 30 days...and then another.

  It was an appealing idea. In a few years, the Gael Squadron could be among the hundreds of billions of stars of Andromeda. Colonies they planted could grow and develop on their own for centuries— perhaps millennia—before there was any chance of TOG learning of their existence. Within the Milky Way, TOG might be well-nigh invincible, but even Caesar's Imperium did not have the resources to extend its empire into other galaxies. Besides, the TOG's desire to maintain absolute control over those it ruled was almost a guarantee that it would not soon seek to extend its Empire beyond the Galaxy's Rim.

  The key problem with that plan, as the ship's First Lieutenant had pointed out, was supplies. Each ship now carried enough for about two months. At a bare minimum, the squadron would need two thousand men to crew all of the squadron's ships, and those crewmen would need to eat. Without transports packed with consumables, or ships carrying enormous hydroponics farms, they would all starve before they had even begun to cross the intergalactic gulf. They would also need sources of hydrogen for the fusion convenors and to supply reaction mass to the I-K drives, not to mention oxygen, to maintain the atmosphere and to mix with hydrogen for water. There were other more subtle necessities that Humans needed for survival, substances that would be totally lacking in the crossing, and that would take time to find in Andromeda—trace elements such as phosphorus and compounds such as vitamin C. The list seemed endless, yet Kendirc felt that only this last proposal offered real hope of them becoming free.

  T.C. had been silent through most of the discussion. When the arguments finally began to run down, she seized the opportunity to speak. "Excuse me, but why are you gentlemen so opposed to the Commonwealth?" Though she had introduced that possibility before, no one had taken the notion seriously.

  "With respect, ma'am," Morganen said, "we just don't know enough about that option."

  "You people are talking about spending over three years on a oneway trip to Andromeda, and yet you say that the Commonwealth is too big an unknown?" She laughed. "Gods around us.. .no one's even been to Andromeda!"

  "That's just it, Miss Lloyd," MacCandless said. "We have the chance for a clean start in Andromeda. There will be native civilizations, certainly, but we'll be able to stay out of their way. But everything we know about the Baufrin-Human Commonwealth is bad.. .Humans subservient to entymoid xenos, for instance."

  She shook her head, as though in disbelief. "Don't you realize that nothing you've been told about the Commonwealth is likely to be straight? TOG distorts the truth on general principles, just to maintain control of things."

  "It's more than that," Fairfax added. "The problem of approach alone makes it impossible. How far into the Commonwealth do you think we could get before one of their patrols spotted us—a squadron of TOG warships? They're not about to believe the story that we're friendly! We'd be wiped out befo
re we could get anyone to listen to us!"

  "We could work something out..."

  "Pardon me, Miss Lloyd," MacAllister said. "But how do you know what sort of reception we'd be likely to get there? Have you been to the Commonwealth? Can you tell us what it's really like?"

  "No. But don't imagine that they're monsters over there. Not just because TOG says so! If nothing else, any enemy of TOG is a friend of..."

  "We can't operate by guesswork!"

  "And we can't let ourselves be slaves to blind, unreasoning fears!"

  "I think we'd better adjourn for now," Kendric interrupted. Inviting T.C. in on the bridge team's deliberations had been a breach of long-standing tradition—and almost certainly a mistake. Her opposition could well weaken his own standing with the other Warrior officers. "We have plenty to think about, and breakout is only ten hours away.

  "Our first order of business at Gamma Sacculus will be to take on more reaction mass. I intend to remain in the system for at least three weeks, while those of us with high plus-taus get back into step with the rest of you." He smiled disarmingly. "I don't know if you people have noticed, but T.C. and I have started to glow in the dark! It keeps us awake, and we'd like to do something about it!" There was a gentle ripple of laughter around the table, and the tension of a few moments before vanished. Kendric reached out to touch a control, and the Galactic projection vanished. The meeting broke up.

  "That was a stupid thing to say."

  Kendric turned to T.C., startled at the angry edge to her words. "What was?"

  "The bit about us glowing in the dark. Dammit, Ken, everybody on this ship already thinks I'm sleeping with you, and cracks like that just make it worse. It puts me in a damned awkward position!"

  "Oh?" He assumed an expression of exaggerated curiosity. "What position would you prefer?"

  "Stop it, damn you!" She was trembling with anger.

  "T.C.! I'm sorry! Hey, what's the matter?"

  "What's the matter is everybody aboard this ship assumes I'm the Captain's woman, and they see me no further than that! What's the matter is that you saved me from a slave camp and I'm grateful, but/' m not grateful enough to change one master for another!"