Right. Well, if you can’t make it, fake it, Charline thought. It was going to be hard enough keeping these people alive. If they didn’t trust her, she’d never manage it.
“We’re going to get the 3D printer up here,” Charline said. “I want Halcomb fixing the armor and making more of it for us.”
“More?” Tessa asked. “We’re short on pilots.”
“This is an all-hands-on-deck deal,” Charline said. “Everyone fights, or we’re in deeper trouble than we already are.”
She wished there was time to get more people trained up. Those without training were going to be easy pickings for the aliens. But they had a right to defend themselves and face the enemy, same as she did. Every gun might count if the enemy came over trying to board the ship and retake it.
Sirens blared, and a blue light began flashing in time with the alarm. Charline all but leaped up from where she’d been sitting and sprinted back to where she’d left her tablet. Snatching the thing up, she flipped to the sensor readings. Three large alien craft were floating outside her ship. Had it been ten minutes already? Charline glanced down at her watch and saw it was more like eleven. The tablet beeped again and sent her a message. It looked like voice commands, maybe orders?
Odds were good the other ships were telling her to respond to them. Maybe to open their hatches, slow to a stop, and prepare to be boarded. Well, that was too bad. She didn’t have any intention of doing that.
The timer had ticked back up a little bit. It wasn’t a lot of juice, but it should be enough for a small jump. Charline ran the controls of the ship through another diagnostic. She was pretty sure she knew where the wormhole drive controls were, but once again she couldn’t be completely certain until she tried it.
Dealing with the symbols wasn’t as hard as she thought. The final digit controlled location within the solar system. All she needed to do was change the icon in that spot, and they’d be off to the races. Sure, they wouldn’t exactly be getting away from the enemy solar system – but it might buy them enough time to get more charge into the wormhole drive.
Buying time was the best plan she could think of just then. She tapped the wormhole icon and altered the final symbol, setting it to take them someplace else. Just about anyplace else would do.
“Here we go again,” Charline warned the others. Then she activated the drive.
The big ships noticed right away. All three of them opened fire on her ship, blazing away with plasma cannon fire. Two of the shots went wide. The third hit her ship.
Charline froze, hoping the damage would not be too severe, but the ship only shook a little from the impact. The shields protecting their smaller vessel were still holding. They couldn’t take a lot of that abuse, though.
“Time to fly,” Charline said. She tapped the icon on her tablet to engage the wormhole drive, and in a flash they were gone.
THIRTY-TWO
The ship exited a few light-hours up from the solar system’s ecliptic. By leaving the plane where the planets orbited behind, Charline hoped to avoid detection for a little more time. They were less likely to run into random alien vessels so far out from their primary world. The more time they had, the better. Maybe the other aliens would think she’d fled the system entirely, although she thought that might be too much to hope for.
She turned away from the console. All the data coming from their sensors was hours old, anyway. Just about useless. Charline brought her tablet with her this time, though. Just in case they needed to react quickly again.
Karl and Halcomb had already joined the others. Andy lay on the deck, his feet propped up. Karl was putting an IV into his arm. Charline rubbed her own arm, the memory of that sting still fresh. At least Andy would be sleeping through it. She tried to frame that as lucky in her head, and failed. It simply wasn’t possible for her to think of Andy injured as a good thing.
Halcomb had already wandered over to her armor. He was running both hands through his hair as he surveyed the damages. Charline smiled. She couldn’t help herself. He was so damned protective of his machines! She wiped the smile off her face before going to Halcomb’s side.
“You tore her up pretty good this time,” he said.
“Had to. The fighting in here was rough,” Charline said.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Halcomb replied, looking around at the mess made of the room. “It would be nice if just once you could survive a fight without needing a bucketload of repairs, though!”
“I’ll pass along your complaint to the next bug I see,” Charline shot back.
Halcomb laughed, taking the tension out of the air. “You do that! All right, the arm guns are shot, but I can’t imagine you have much ammo left for them, anyway.”
Charline shook her head. “Tapped out. I used the last of it in that fight. Had to resort to my sword for a bit there.”
“How’d it work?” Halcomb asked.
“Not as well as it might have, but good enough. See the tears in that one?” Charline asked, pointing at one of the fallen aliens.
Halcomb nodded. “We can work on getting better blades another time. For now I think we need to get your suit fixed up, the arm guns replaced with plasma cannons from these bugs, and swords put on some of the rest of these walking tanks.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Charline said. It would give him something to do, even if they didn’t end up needing the armor. She still hoped they might get away from the system before any more aliens discovered their position. How long would the engines take to spin up to full power? The Satori required an hour or two, depending on how far they wanted to jump.
She walked over to Andy’s side. Kyle already had the IV in place and was dripping a steady stream of clear fluid into her friend’s arm. Andy looked too pale. Dried blood streaked his face, dribbling down from a nasty cut on his forehead. That might have been the impact that knocked him out.
“How is he?” Charline asked.
“Not good,” Kyle said. His voice was much more grim than she’d expected. “He’s got internal injuries, on top of the obvious cuts and bruises. Something is bleeding inside. I can see the pressure building up in his abdomen, but I don’t know where the bleed is.”
“Can’t you just give him more of the nanites you put in me?” Charline asked.
“We used the only dose we had bringing you back. I’m stuck using more mundane medicine to keep him alive,” Kyle replied.
Charline cursed under her breath. “I’d never have authorized the only dose we had for anything short of life-threatening injuries! Who did that – Andy? When he wakes up, I may kill him myself.”
“Whoa, cool down a bit,” Kyle said, holding his palms up toward her. “Your injuries were bad enough to warrant the treatment. If those burns had gotten infected you’d have been on death’s door, too. He did the smart thing. Look around you.”
Charline did. The room still stank, but she’d gotten more used to the smell. The décor was, if anything, even worse. Bits of alien were mingled with scraps of metal, both splattered and scattered all about the walls and floor.
“We made a bit of a mess,” she observed.
“You kept most of your people alive against a serious enemy. It’s good work. Don’t knock your accomplishments,” Kyle said.
“Thanks,” Charline replied.
Her tablet buzzed, then gave an audible alarm. Something was nearby. Charline pulled the device up to eye level to check the sensors.
One of the big ships had found them. It was launching a group of smaller ships, all moving directly toward them. Before she could wonder how long it would be until they were in range, the big ship unloaded its main guns.
The lights in the control room dimmed as the blasts of plasma struck them, then came back to full strength.
The shields must be drawing power from the same energy core as the wormhole drive and everything else! The more power they used on other things, the longer it would take for the ship to store enough energy to get them home.
Charline tapped a few commands and executed another short wormhole jump. She’d play tag with these assholes all day if that’s what they wanted, but keeping them from firing on her shields was crucial.
She stalked back over to the main console, wondering how long they had until they were discovered again. It should have taken longer than it did. How had they been spotted?
Going over the sensor logs gave her the answer. The system was heavily seeded with small sensor drones. They picked up her exit and transmitted her location back to the alien ships. It looked like the aliens were using some sort of quantum entanglement for communication, because based on the time it took for the light of their arrival to reach the nearest sensor, the alien ship had jumped in after them less than a minute after they’d been detected.
Charline spotted something else unusual on the sensor logs. The inner system used to be full of ships. Now it looked almost empty. A few ships were jetting back and forth between the various worlds, and there was that one massive ship that followed them, but the others weren’t showing on her scans anymore. Were they hiding somehow? Cloaked? Or had they all gone someplace else?
Charline felt a chill at that thought. If they ever found out where Earth was, it would be a very bad day for the planet. Humanity had nothing that could even slow down a fleet like that. They’d wipe out every human on the planet without breaking a sweat.
The sensors reached out, looking for the nearest drones. The things were small and hard to spot, but she managed to detect the locations of three nearby where she’d had the wormhole drop them. Scan lag was working in her favor this time. Because the drones didn’t move, she was seeing their positions fifteen minutes before they would first see the light of her exit wormhole. It let her know how much time they had in advance, which was helpful.
But it wouldn’t be long before that big ship was back on top of them again. Even if she jumped before it arrived to avoid its guns draining away her shield, each jump was eating into their power supply just the same. If they had to do short jumps several times an hour, they were never going to build up enough power to do the massive jump home. There had to be another way.
Charline jumped the ship a few minutes before the alien battleship was due to arrive. They popped out and she assessed the power drain, grimacing. She still didn’t understand how to convert the bugs’ timer to Earth units, but she was close enough to get a feel for it.
Between the jumps and the hits on their shield, they weren’t gaining any ground toward a jump home. They couldn’t keep this up forever! All it would take was coming out unluckily close to one of the drones, and they’d have an enemy ship on top of them before they could react.
This time, they had only eight minutes to burn. Charline shook her head in disgust.
“How’s it going?” Isabella asked.
“It’s not. We’re jumping around to stay away from them, but I can’t keep this up. Something’s going to give.”
“Hmm. We can’t run?” Isabella asked.
“Not enough power, and they’re not letting the drive recharge,” Charline replied.
“That sucks. You’ll figure it out, though. You always do,” Isabella said. “Let me know if you need anything from me.”
Then Isabella walked away, leaving a stunned Charline to stare at her back. How could the woman have such confidence in her? She’d almost gotten all of them killed more than once. Some of their party had died. She wasn’t figuring anything out. They were going from one danger into another.
How am I supposed to live up to that sort of expectation? It wasn’t fair to throw all of this on her shoulders. She hadn’t asked for this job. It had been tossed in her lap. Forced on her, practically.
Well, no, they hadn’t actually held a gun to her head and told her to ‘take the job or else!’ But the guilt trip had been heavy enough to almost count, hadn’t it? Charline still didn’t understand why they’d wanted her in command of the mission, any more than she understood why Isabella had such faith in her ability to get them out of this mess.
She wished she had that much confidence in herself. It would feel good to know what the next move should be, to intuitively react in just the right manner every time. Other people she knew were like that. Herself? not so much.
Time to plot out new jump coordinates again. She started setting up for a new exit even farther from the red star. Maybe if she kept jumping out, the ship would eventually leave the zone patrolled by the sensor drones? She couldn’t jump in anything like a straight line, of course. They’d figure that out and be on her in a flash. But if she ran a random zig-zag out away from the center of the system?
It was worth a shot. She plugged in the new coordinates and started to prep the jump.
Before the wormhole appeared, two ships came into view on her sensors. Alarmed, Charline almost aborted the wormhole jump by accident. The ships were reading as small vessels – smaller even than the one she was on. They had just exited wormholes a good distance away from her. It would be some time before they spotted her ship, and by the time they did she would be long gone.
But it bothered her just the same. They were early. Which meant they weren’t just relying on the sensor drones to find her team anymore. Either they had a faster-than-light means of detecting her ship, which she doubted – the enemy would have jumped right in on her location if that was the case – or they had a lot of those small ships out in the system, sweeping the area and looking for her.
That was going to be a problem. These bugs had been using wormhole drives for a long, long time. If anyone knew how hard it was to track down a fleeing ship with that tech, it would be these bugs. But if anyone had figured out a way to snare such a ship using a web of smaller ships to slowly close a net around it, this would be the race to have mastered the technique.
Their ship jumped into another wormhole. They were clear of the enemy for the moment. But Charline had a feeling they were fast running out of time.
Well, fine. They’d continue trying to run as best they could. But if the enemy wasn’t going to allow them to flee, she’d damn well give them a fight they’d never forget!
THIRTY-THREE
Charline gathered most of her team in the hall outside the ship’s bridge. She would have preferred to meet in the bridge itself, but the smell of dead bug had only grown worse. It was hard to remain in the place long unless you were in a space suit or armor. Since she had the command and control mostly wired to her tablet, they didn’t need the bridge every minute.
She glanced down at the tablet. Four minutes until they had to jump again. They’d managed to get far enough away to have twelve minutes, but since then they’d been losing a minute or two each time.
The bugs were closing their net. Before too long, the enemy ships would be on top of them before they had enough time to charge the wormhole drive and escape.
Then they’d summon all their ships to that spot. The fight would last about six seconds, tops.
She’d called everyone together again. Well, almost everyone. Karl was tending to Andy and two other wounded men back on the shuttle. Halcomb was off disassembling bug armor and feeding it into the fabricator as fast as he could. In a few minutes he was going to have a bunch of spare hands helping him assemble the stuff.
She glanced around the crowd. Tessa, Arjun, and Isabella, she knew well. They’d fought alongside her more than once. You got a feel for a person after that sort of ordeal. Most of the others were more of a mystery, despite having spent the last few days together.
Roger was another security person. He and Tessa where the only ones they had. He was a sure bet for getting into armor as soon as they could manage it. Juanita was a computer geek like Charline. Unlike Charline, she had neither the background in this tech to work with it nor the experience with firearms to know how to shoot well. Still, every fighter might count for what she planned.
Gerald, Toni, and Sing rounded out their crew. All three were engineers of the roughneck variety. The
y’d been chosen for the mission more for their ability to make things work even in nasty environments than for their science. Charline was glad to have them along. Without all three, they wouldn’t have accomplished nearly as much work on the first set of armor suits. Halcomb was brilliant, no doubt about it. But he was only one person. Having more skilled hands to share the work was the difference between two suits and six.
“All right, folks. We’re in a tough spot,” Charline said. It was still hard to believe that was all she had left. She thought about all those who’d died so far. No more. She didn’t want to lose any more of these people. If that meant she died to keep them alive, so be it. Her crew was getting home safely.
She owed them that. Them, and the ghosts of the people who’d died already under her watch.
“Where are we?” Sing asked.
“Good question. I have no idea,” Charline replied.
That caused some confused conversation.
Charline raised both hands in a calming motion to quiet them all. “Please! We don’t have a lot of time left before we need to jump again. We were dragged to what I think is a – maybe the – home system of these alien bugs. They’re hunting us, slowly penning us into a net of ships. No matter how we run, they’re tracking our movement and slowly cutting off escape options.”
“Then how are we going to get away?” Juanita asked.
“We’re not. At least, not right away,” Charline said. “They’re going to nail us before too long. We can keep running a bit longer, but before too long we’re going to run out of juice.”
“At which point they just come and blow us away?” Tessa asked.
“Pretty much.” Charline nodded.
“That’s a crappy plan,” Tessa said.
“Which is why we’re not going to do that. We’re going to do what they least expect from us,” Charline said.
Dust & Iron (Adventures of the Starship Satori Book 9) Page 14
