Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2)

by A. G. Claymore

  No sense playing tail-end-charlie if you don’t have a weapon.

  The far end of this particular cargo alley had a passageway leading out of the hangar and Robin led them into it and straight to the end. She brought her weapon up and checked the corner, firing two quick bursts before moving forward.

  Paul followed, seeing two dead Grays lying next to a roughly melted circular section of hull. The escape pods of Imperial vessels once employed a mix of metal oxides, held in a circular ring, to melt through the hull of an enemy ship. If a crew was forced to abandon their ship in a fight, it was intended to give them a chance at seizing a new ship for themselves, or at least taking a few of the enemy with them.

  The design had been abandoned more than three centuries ago.

  Without a word, Robin waved them toward the hole in the side of the passageway. The pod door had extended through the new opening in six hinged sections like metal rose petals. Handles on the inside of the door sections aided in boarding while the door sections themselves gave protection from the recently melted alloys of the enemy’s hull.

  Paul and Julia slid inside and found restraint bars against the sides of the small pod. Dem came next, followed by Robin.

  “Mary Starbuck,” she called out. The door folded shut and she barely managed to pull her restraint bar down before the small pod pushed violently away from the enemy hull.

  Paul held tight to the restraint as his body tried to slide to the right. The acceleration cut off and he had to change his handholds to prevent his body from rotating out of the rudimentary safety bar. He assumed they had reached the midway point of their journey and the pod was re-orienting in order to dock with the mother ship.

  “I’m having a hard time believing the Imperium would simply abandon a colony ship,” Paul said. “There would have been close to ninety thousand citizens aboard. That leaves a lot of angry relatives back home.”

  Robin shrugged. “The wealthy relatives would have had too much to lose, so they could be relied upon to keep their mouths shut. The rest are too poor to be taken seriously. The kind of folk that are always indulging in conspiracy theories. Nobody would have listened or, if they did, they still didn’t care.

  “It’s the same now. Few folks out here have any desire to go to the Imperium and the few who sneak past the Maegi are ignored as nutcases anyway.”

  “Maegi?”

  She nodded. “A monastic order that operates on the Rim of the Imperium. They make sure we stay a rumor and they decide who gets to come our way. The Imperium doesn’t want to look into it because the implications are somewhat damaging to citizen morale.”

  Paul had to admit, it sounded like the Imperium he knew.

  “There’s more than thirty main worlds out this way,” Dem added. “The legacy of thirty colony ships ‘lost’ by a very careless emperor. Our ancestors were understandably pissed by the whole thing.”

  Robin grinned. “But you’d be hard-pressed now to find anyone who thinks it was a bad thing.”

  Paul wondered if she said that simply because nobody wanted to think they were getting the short end of the stick. To people who’d never lived in the Imperium and enjoyed the advantages that citizenship conferred…

  He frowned. His own father had been a citizen, but he’d nearly fallen into indentured servitude working on a company mining planet. It had only been his death that set Paul on a path to his current position.

  Who exactly was on the short end of the stick here?

  “How do you know who we are?” he demanded.

  Dem laughed. “We get immigrants from the Imperium. Just got a ‘fools’ hope’ from Irricana two months back, as a matter of fact.”

  Julia wrinkled her nose at him. “A fools’ hope?”

  “Seven years of serving out on the Rim,” Paul teased, “and you’ve never heard of the ‘fools’ hope’ ships?”

  “I was mostly in space, killing raiders,” she reminded him drily, “not down on the surface dribbling pastry icing on arrest reports…”

  “Alright!” Paul held his hands up in surrender. “Anyway, they’re just ships loaded up with desperate people, hoping to escape the Imperium. It’s not like there’s any real lost colonies…”

  He trailed off and looked over at Dem. “Well shit, I suppose they were headed somewhere after all.”

  “So you weren’t looking for us,” Julia said. “This is just a good ambush point?”

  Robin smiled. “This part of the arm is less dense,” she explained. “The Grays like to avoid picking up too much gas in their bow wave when they squeeze space. You can pretty much count on any ship going from Sintel to the Gray home world passing through this region.”

  “We were cruising nearby anyway,” Dem added, “so we decided to stop and scatter a few singularity generators. Two thirds of the time we manage to rescue someone on the bounty list, so it’s worth the expenditure in the long run.”

  Paul frowned. “Bounty list?”

  Robin nodded. “The Grays snatch our people for research any chance they get. They mostly trans-ship ‘em through Sintel so a lot of ships coming from there have Human prisoners aboard. If they’re on the official list, we get a bounty for their rescue.”

  A wash of blue light shone through the small windows, swinging from the floor to the ceiling before disappearing. Paul figured it was from a nav shield and his theory was confirmed when the gravity suddenly shifted from the pod floor to a spot behind him. They were coming into a ship.

  They climbed out into a large hangar deck to find four other pods nearby. Crewmen were directing the small crowd of bemused Humans who’d apparently come from the four tiny craft.

  “Looks like we got a decent payday after all,” Dem mused, nodding at the knot of people now being led across the deck. “Should at least earn back the cost of our singularity generators.”

  A flash caught Paul’s eye and he looked out the hangar entrance to where the Gray ship had suddenly become an expanding cloud of energy and debris. He shuddered. It wasn’t so long ago he’d nearly been killed aboard a self-destructing Gray warship.

  “Told you the suppressor field’s getting glitchy,” Robin insisted, ignoring the spectacle. “Foch needs to start setting some funds aside for maintenance.”

  “Foch loses any more votes and he’ll be back in the fire control teams,” Dem replied cheerfully. “So, yeah, I’m sure he’s gonna claim some of our bounty to fix the generator.”

  “He’s gonna lose the votes of anyone who boards Gray ships if he doesn’t.” Robin scowled at him but she saw someone approaching and called out. “Hey Cedric, we’ve got two celebrities here. I’m taking them up to the bridge to meet Foch.”

  Paul figured Cedric was the deck officer in charge of the hangar, but he wasn’t clear on the rank of their two rescuers. Unlike Cedric, they wore no insignia of rank.

  Cedric opened his mouth to say something but it just stayed that way as he stared at Julia.

  “Yeah,” Robin grinned at him. “It’s really her.” She led her small group past the officer and through a hatch on the far side of the hangar.

  Paul stepped through and the hatch slid shut behind him with surprising quietness, despite the brutal speed of its movement. He jogged a couple of steps to catch up with the group. “Is this a warship?”

  “I suppose,” Robin answered non-commitally. “Or at least as close as you’re going to find out here. The Mary Starbuck is a licensed privateer.”

  That was a new one for Paul. He did a quick search in his CPU and it caused furrows in his forehead when he found the term. “So, there’s a government out here somewhere that licensed you to raid the Grays?”

  “Hah!” Robin led them into an ascender shaft. “You don’t need a license to attack the Grays,” she called over her shoulder as she pulled her way up a rail at the back of the shaft. “We’ve got a proper letter of mark to go after the Spirians. Getting off at the next deck, folks.”

  She exited and walked over to a guarded door. Paul an
d Julia followed, but Dem continued on up the shaft. Robin gestured at a holo screen to the left of the door.

  “Here’s our letter,” she announced proudly. “We’ve been at war with the Spirians ever since they wiped out the Dresden colony.”

  Paul and Julia leaned in for a closer look.

  The Clerestory Administrative Management Company hereby extends a commission to the officers and crew of the fast cargo carrier, Mary Starbuck, to pursue and seize any and all enemy shipping.

  There was more, but the first point stuck in Paul’s mind. Julia beat him to the point.

  “Shouldn’t this have been issued by your government?” She looked over to Robin.

  “It was,” Robin insisted with a frown. “Clerestory has the contract for the next three years.” The frown quickly cleared. “Of course, you have a different system. Here we hold a vote to decide which company gets the contract to run our infrastructure.”

  She opened the door and led them onto the bridge. “Politicians should never have input on the funding of hospitals, schools or power grids,” she insisted, ignoring the curious glances from the bridge crew. “They’d just spend your money to buy your vote.”

  Before either Paul or Julia could think of a response to that, they were being introduced.

  “Captain Foch,” she announced before waving to indicate them. “This is Brigadier General Julia Urbica of the Imperial Marine Corps and Inspector Grimm from the ‘Eye’.”

  The captain looked to be a man in his late forties with long dark hair that might have been an attempt to draw attention away from his implants. The external data points ran from his temples to circle around behind his ears, terminating halfway along his jawline. He turned his chair to look at the newcomers. His expression showed surprise for a moment but he brought it under control. The rest of the bridge crew ranged from grins to expressions of outright disbelief. Most of the amazement, Paul noticed with a surge of pride, was directed at Julia.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the captain grunted. “It really is you. What the hell brings you two all the way out here?”

  “My unfortunate demise,” Julia replied evenly, “if we don’t get the hell out of here. There’s a Gray armada bearing down on us. You knocked us out of distortion before the rendezvous, but there’s no telling how much distance that put between us and them.”

  Foch waved a dismissive hand. “Even a milli-day’s worth of distortion…”

  “Yes,” Julia cut him off impatiently, “I understand the basics of distortion theory. What we’re not factoring into this discussion is that the approaching armada is based around a planet-killer and, given how they lost their prototype jumpship, they’re probably throwing out a much wider screen of escorts than they used to.”

  A dark chuckle. “I’m sure they regret taking that ship too close to you and your dragoons. Mayhaps we should…”

  “Distortion alert!” the sensor officer announced.

  Two Gray destroyers smashed their way back into regular space ahead of the Mary Starbuck. Almost instantly, they began turning toward the Human ship, their nearer batteries already spitting out a hail of ordinance.

  The Grays had their fair share of weaknesses, but they made combat decisions very quickly.

  “Lord a’ mighty!” Foch thundered. “Weapons free! Helm, spool up the distortion drives and jump the instant you have a clear path.”

  The sensor officer turned to call over his shoulder. “Enemy’s heading straight down our throats.”

  “Are they now?” Foch grinned. “It’d be damned churlish of us not to do something about that. What’s the TTI?”

  The weapons officer checked his screen. “Time to impact for standard ordinance is twenty seconds.”

  “They’d slip out of the way at this distance,” Foch mused. “And speaking of which,” he directed a pointed look at the helmsman. “Shift us, Mr. Horrocks, if you’re not too busy.”

  Paul grabbed at a railing that circled the captain’s chair as the ship lurched to starboard. He thought, at first, that inertial compensators were sadly lacking in this corner of the universe but then he saw the changed angles on the tactical display.

  “What the hell was that?” Julia demanded.

  Foch kept his eyes on the display as he replied. “All those Imperial resources and your precious Corps of Engineers never once thought of setting up pitch drives to operate in tandem? They emit a waveform. With two engines, you can reinforce the effect.”

  He edged forward a few inches. “Dammit! I knew the pasty little bastards would turn that trick on us sooner or later. Horrocks, the one to port just micro-jumped. She’ll be on our flank before you can finish scratching your arse so…”

  He nearly fell out of his chair as Horrocks proved he was more on the ball than his captain thought. The deck seemed to drop out from beneath everyone as the angles on the display changed yet again.

  A blast of light washed through the bridge windows as the enemy destroyer appeared to starboard and just above them. It was pointed at the place where the Mary Starbuck would have been if it hadn’t been for Mr. Horrocks’ initiative.

  The familiar, pulse quickening drumbeat of the ship’s guns rattled through the ship. On the tactical display, Paul could see most of the fire was concentrated on the enemy bow. A bright orange line was growing where the seam between two shield generators left a weak point. He had to admit, these privateers knew where to shoot.

  “Reading a spike in their EM signature,” the sensor officer warned. “It’s stabilizing.”

  The Mary Starbuck slid to port and moved up to look down on the dorsal surface of the enemy vessel. Horrocks clearly had no intention of letting the now fully-charged enemy main gun get a shot. The Gray destroyer began turning toward them.

  “We’re burning through,” Foch shouted. “Can you see if there’s any damage to their main rails?”

  “Shit, that thing can turn fast,” Horrocks muttered as he began shifting the Mary Starbuck again.

  A brilliant plume of energy engulfed the enemy bow, expanding out toward the Human ship. Everyone on the bridge was pushed forward as Horrocks backed off at maximum power.

  The explosion reached the ship, slamming the crew forward even harder. Paul rolled right over the railing and fell in a heap behind the captain’s chair. He climbed back to his feet as the shock wave dissipated, only to find that the screens had gone blank.

  “Complete array strip,” the sensor officer groused. “We’re flying blind but, in answer to your last question, Captain, I’d say it’s pretty damned obvious their main rails were damaged before they fired at…” He trailed off, mouth hanging open.

  Paul followed his gaze. Foch was dead. Something must have overloaded his implants because they were a half-melted mess and his hair was starting to smoke.

  That wasn’t good. They were blind and they still had at least one enemy destroyer out there. It was a relatively safe bet the closer ship was out of the fight, if not entirely destroyed, but the fight was still far from finished.

  The bridge officers seemed paralysed, looking around at each other uncertainly. It was starting to seem like they might die from their own indecision.

  “Horrocks,” Julia called out calmly, “keep us moving and keep it erratic. We still have an enemy out there trying to kill us.” She came to stand to the left of Foch’s chair. “What’s our weapons status?”

  The weapons officer stood there for a moment, a look of relief on his face. He finally realized she was talking to him and lurched around to consult his panel. “Uh, point defense batteries took a hell of a beating on our starboard side but everything else is operational.”

  She nodded. “Helm, what about our distortion drive?”

  The navigation officer turned from his position behind Horrocks. “The drive was nearly spooled up when that blast hit us. It knocked out a few flash capacitors but we’re good to go. Only problem is we’re still inside the event horizon of our own artificial singularity generators. That Gr
ay ship slid in at the end of their microjump – pretty good driving on their part, if you ask me…”

  “When can we jump,” she cut him off calmly.

  “Not till we clear the effect and that’ll take another five or ten minutes at full pitch.”

  “Then we fight,” she said simply. “Sensor, we need eyes on that second destroyer. What can you give us?”

  “That blast tore off every external receiver we had,” the sensor officer replied with a shrug that quickly turned into a grab for an overhead rail. Horrocks was taking his orders very seriously.

  “The only thing left to us,” he said, nodding up at the main holo, “are the neutrino traps ‘cause they’re buried deep in the hull. Just thank your stars the Mary Starbuck was a prospector, back in the day.”

  On the holo, a ghostly haze did its best to imitate a Gray destroyer. It was still headed straight for them and a string of hazy oblongs were streaking toward the Human ship.

  The sensor officer pointed to the streaks. “Does a decent job of showing the incoming ordinance, at least.” He gave Julia a feral grin. “Won’t be able to detect shield seams, but it’ll at least make sure we can hammer the chalky little bastards.”

  She nodded. “Horrocks, get us in close. I want to smell the nutrient paste on their breath. Keep dancing, though. The closer we get…”

  “The easier we are to hit,” Horrocks completed her sentence. “Aye ma’am.”

  “And they’ll probably keep up the volley fire,” Julia warned. “If they wait till everything’s charged, they can throw a wide spread at us and make it harder for you to evade the incoming fire. Don’t let the long stretches with no enemy fire lull you into a false sense of security.”

  Paul, meanwhile, had queried the bridge transmitters and discovered that, unlike a proper military vessel, the Mary Starbuck had no signal limiters. The transmitters feeding data to Foch’s receiver, which was also not up to military grade, had let a surge through.

  Somewhere in his implants, a circuit must have polarized, the crystal allowing a surge to cascade through almost every system, building in intensity until the energy had been released into the captain’s brain.