The Clones of Mawcett

by DePrima, Thomas

  "Or they may simply puncture the hull and the pilot will lose atmosphere," Jenetta said.

  "So the pilot must be wearing an E.V.A. suit," Two said.

  "But that will only delay the inevitable," Three said. "The pilot is doomed either way. And once the shuttle is halted, the Tsgardi are free to pursue and stop the others."

  "The longer it takes to collect the first shuttle, the more time the others have to get away," Two said. "And with objects as tiny and slow as a shuttle, DeTect system efficiencies drop off quickly after a billion kilometers."

  "But at a shuttle's top speed, it will take 2.8 hours to reach the billion kilometer point," Three said. "The Tsgardi will catch all three long before they can get far enough away to lose themselves in space."

  "We might be able to arrange it so the Tsgardi don't realize that more than one shuttle has departed," Jenetta said.

  "Yes," Two said, "We can ensure which one they go after first, by sending up one alone, and waiting until the Tsgardi ship breaks orbit to pursue."

  "Then the others fly close to the planet surface until they reach a point directly opposite the flight path of the first shuttle," Three said. "When they leave the planet's atmosphere, they keep the planet between them and the Tsgardi ship pursuing the first shuttle."

  "When we were talking to the Tsgardi captain," Jenetta said, "I didn't see any holo-tables in the background. If they're relying solely on standard two-dimensional image screens for DeTect observations, the Raiders will never even know that the others have left because the planet's icon will be superimposed over the shuttle icons."

  "So one of us deliberately sacrifices herself for the other two," Two said, "and does everything that she can to prolong the capture to give them time to escape. At four-billion kilometers out, the others can change course and head directly for their destinations with little fear of being detected by the Tsgardi. They'll also transmit an IDS message as soon as they're a hundred-million kilometers away. The jamming satellites around this planet will prevent the Tsgardi from even knowing that a signal was sent. The jamming makes them as deaf and dumb as we presently are."

  "Assuming that there's only one Raider ship out there," Three said.

  "Yes," Jenetta said. "We have to face the possibility that this is a trap to draw in ships coming to rescue us."

  "Possible, but not likely," Two said. "This technology is too valuable to risk having it lost in a fight. I think that they'd want to get in quick, grab the prize, and get away. And if they wanted to draw in other ships, they wouldn't have blocked our IDS communications."

  "Okay," Jenetta said, "the two shuttles carrying equipment will travel together towards Higgins. Only if they DeTect pursuit by the Tsgardi, will they split up."

  "Then the only remaining question is, 'when do we leave?' Now, or after the Tsgardi captain calls again," Three said.

  "During," Jenetta said.

  "That'll be interesting," Two said. "Will his crew interrupt him while he's talking?"

  "It may give us an additional minute if he's preoccupied with giving his 'prepare to die, Terran scum' speech," Three said.

  "So who goes?" Jenetta asked.

  "Me," Two said. "You're needed here and I'm the next oldest."

  "By less than seven days," Three protested.

  "As base commander, it's my decision," Jenetta said. "Two, I'm sorry— you'll take the first shuttle. You'll head directly away from Vinnia. The other shuttles will lift off as soon as you've drawn off the Raiders and they can get away without being detected. They'll head directly towards Vinnia, so keep the planet between your ship and their course for as long as you possibly can. The umbra cone in which the other shuttles will remain indiscernible is considerable and will allow you quite a bit of room for maneuvering. Your astrogation computer will alert you if you move too close to the edge."

  "Right, Jen," Two said.

  "Who takes the other shuttles?" Three asked.

  "You'll take one and I'll find a volunteer for the third. In seventeen minutes you'll be beyond a hundred-million kilometers from Mawcett and outside the jamming range, so you can send a mayday message to the base asking for emergency support. If the message gets out, a ship from Higgins can make it here in as little as thirty days, if they have a decent top speed. We might even get lucky and reach someone who's already much closer. We're a bit off the beaten path here, but you never know who's on patrol. The shuttles should have at least a week's worth of emergency rations on board. We'll add another ninety days worth, in consideration of our DNA enhanced appetites. Someone will definitely reach you within five weeks."

  With their plan formulated, the women began to make preparations so they'd be ready when the Tsgardi captain made contact again. Lieutenant Crocker immediately volunteered to pilot the third shuttle when offered the opportunity, and was briefed on the plan. Marine Captain Greene sat in on the briefing and was advised of the role that he and his people would play. Then it became simply a matter of executing the plan.

  Tension filled the command center as everyone waited for the Tsgardi captain to make contact again. All three shuttle pilots were sitting nervously at the controls of the three ships, suited up in bulky E.V.A. suits, just waiting for the signal. Their courses had been plotted and entered into the navigation system on each small ship.

  When Captain Verdisqi's disagreeable countenance once again filled the communications monitor, Jenetta stalled as she gave the signal to commence the operation. The order was relayed to Marines standing by to open the end of the shelter containing the first shuttle. Two had already engaged the 'oh gee' system and raised the craft enough to retract the landing skids. As the end panels swung clear, she flew the shuttle out slowly, then punched the throttle as the vehicle gained enough separation that the vortices of opposed gravity waves would not effect the Marines or the shelter.

  Verdisqi continued to glower at the screen and ignore the voices calling for his attention as he demanded her answer, while Jenetta again asked him to state the terms of surrender for the equipment. The Tsgardi captain was growing angry with the stall and ignored other voices calling for his attention as he ranted at Jenetta. The com screen suddenly went blank.

  The tactical station operator announced, "Commander, the shuttle is away from the planet. The Raider ship hasn't moved yet. The transmission went dead from the source."

  It took the Tsgardi captain more than five minutes to decide on a course of action. His first step was to examine the site optically. Only when they spotted the open end of the shelter did they realize that they had been duped into thinking that the base didn't have any transportation. Then he had to decide whether or not to pursue. If he didn't, key elements of the cloning process might be lost to him, but it might also simply be an attempt to get far enough away from the jamming equipment to send a signal. He didn't expect to be around long enough to be caught here, but catching the shuttle before it got to clear space might buy extra time needed to overrun the base without having the equipment destroyed. In the end, he decided that he couldn't afford to let the shuttle get away. The Tsgardi ship left orbit in hot pursuit.

  Seeing the ship leave orbit made it clear that there weren't any other ships out there. If there were, the captain would simply have sent one of them after the shuttle, rather than leaving the planet unobserved. As soon as the Tsgardi ship was gone, Jenetta gave the order for the other two shuttles to depart. The ends of the shelters were opened, and the ships flew off on their mission. Unlike with the first shelter, the ends of the other two were closed back up again so the returning Tsgardi ship wouldn't know that two other shuttles had been secreted there.

  With the shuttles away, the base prepared for the expected attack. Two torpedoes from the ship could probably flatten the entire area, but Jenetta was gambling that they wouldn't want to risk damaging the equipment. The Marines climbed into their personal battle armor and prepared their positions in the trenches around the facility. The battle armor wouldn't protect them from a dire
ct hit by a gunship-mounted laser or kinetic weapon, but each armor surface did provide camouflage by duplicating the patterns and colors on the opposite side of the Marine. It enabled them to blend into the background better than a Nordakian. It also blocked all thermal readings produced by a warm body, while mimicking the temperature of the surroundings. Lastly, since it had an inner layer of lightweight tritanium, the same material as the hull of the Prometheus, the wearer was protected from direct hits by most hand-held weapons and from most collateral damage resulting from nearby explosions.

  The Tsgardi ship didn't return to planetary orbit for six hours, and when it did, it came from the direction that the first shuttle had taken. Jenetta calculated that the second and third shuttles, having attained Sub-Light-100, should be more than two-billion kilometers away. Although the small ships might appear on the DeTect equipment in the Raider ship, they wouldn't activate any alarms since there was no risk of a collision. And given their small size and slow speed, the Tsgardi tac officer might simply dismiss them as simply being natural celestial objects such as tiny asteroids. That is, if he even noticed them and realized that they were moving. Limited to Sub-Light speeds, the shuttles could never reach Higgins SCB on their own, but once the base received their IDS transmission, a Space Command vessel would be dispatched immediately. The jamming satellite, placed in the planet's ionosphere by the Tsgardi, would continue to prevent them from even being aware that a signal for help had been sent until an SC warship appeared on their sensors. So now, the base defenders just had to hang on until the cavalry came to the rescue.

  The Tsgardi captain didn't attempt to communicate with the base until the following morning. Jenetta had finished breakfast and was enjoying a cup of coffee when the call came in. She hurried to the command center to respond.

  "This is the Commander," Jenetta said.

  "Oh, Commander is it?" The Raider captain said. "Well, Commander, we have one of your officers up here. She refuses to cooperate, and wears no rank insignia, but we know from her slave imprint that she's Lt. Commander Jenetta Carver. If you don't turn over the cloning equipment, you'll never see her again. How would that look to your Galactic Alliance? I'm sure they don't want to lose their biggest hero."

  "She knew the risks, and she knows we'd rescue her if we could. But she also knows that we won't pay ransom for any Space Command officer, or every piece of scum in the galaxy would be trying to kidnap them. Tell her we're sorry and that we wish her well."

  "What kind of people are you?!" the Tsgardi captain screamed. "How can you leave your people to die with your enemies? Don't you have some rule about never leaving anyone behind in an engagement?"

  "The engagement isn't over yet, Captain."

  The captain didn't respond for a few seconds. "Brave talk, but you don't have a chance. We could destroy you in seconds, but we want the technology more."

  "You'll have to learn to live with failure then."

  "I'm afraid that you, on the other hand, won't live long enough to learn any new lessons."

  The com screen suddenly went blank. Jenetta knew that their fate would be the same whether she had complied or not. If she had turned over the equipment, the Tsgardi would have either killed all witnesses or taken them as slaves. That's really how the Tsgardi kept a low profile. Like their Raider bosses, they didn't leave anyone behind to point fingers.

  The attack on the base didn't come for several more hours. Fighters began making low level passes, firing at marine positions, but being extra careful to avoid the two closed shelters. The marines tried to fire their shoulder-mounted SAM's at the fighters, but the treetop level tactics made it difficult to hit anything because the fighters were overhead and then out of sight before anyone could lock on. Fortunately, low altitude tactics made it equally difficult for the fighters to target the marine positions. Whenever a fighter moved to a higher elevation to get a clearer shot, the marines also had a clearer shot and the fighter didn't survive to make another pass.

  After eight fighters had been shot down, the Raiders broke off their attack, but by then the base had suffered six dead and seven wounded. All had been taken below to the facility. Of the seven wounded, four were patched up and returned to duty, two had suffered serious injuries, and one was critical. Jenetta knew that before the fight was over, a lot more might die.

  The second attack, a ground assault by mechanized forces, began about four hours later. It was impossible to tell if the six armored vehicles were manned, but their rate of fire was prodigious. The Marines responded with shoulder mounted launchers that fired telemetry guided rockets. The weapons were partially successful, taking out two of the behemoths, but in the end, the Marines had to fall back. Jenetta ordered every one into the facility. The main door was then closed for the first time since Space Command had assumed control of the site. Jenetta had created a special password in the computer so it could be locked. If someone at the dig site had solved the riddle of the language, and was in the employ of the Raiders, they couldn't let their confederates in even if everyone else in the facility was incapacitated. Besides Jenetta, only the three marine officers knew the password and how to open the door once it was sealed.

  As soon as the door closed, all communication and sensor information was lost, including the signals from the topside remote vid cameras, so they were now blind, deaf, and dumb to the outside world. They were, in effect, buried alive.

  Hours later they began to hear noises, as if someone were pounding on a solid steel anvil with a sledgehammer, but the ringing sound seemed a very long way off. Verdisqi had probably thought he won when the Marines pulled back, but if he expected to find the equipment in the topside shelters, he was probably spitting endless streams of profanities by now. Jenetta knew that the facility door wouldn't yield to conventional forced entry methods so she relaxed and let everyone catch their breath as the injured Marines were cared for. She didn't know how long it would take the Tsgardi to resort to explosives, but they had prepared for a long siege. The tunnel entrance leading down to the power supply facility had been filled in again with dirt to prevent the Raiders from finding it, and Jenetta was confident they could hold out until the facility entrance was breached.

  * * *

  Atakis Verdisqi, captain of the Boshdyte, swore repeatedly and kicked the door that had so far defied all their efforts. He knew, or at least suspected, that his quarry was inside laughing at him, and that made him even angrier. He swung the short whip, rather like a riding crop, at the nearest crewman and ordered him to go to the ship and retrieve a plasma torch. Verdisqi vowed that when he got his hands on the Commander, he would squeeze her neck until her head popped off.

  * * *

  Turning to Captain Gavin on the bridge of the Prometheus, the com chief said, "Priority-One message from Higgins Space Command Base, sir."

  "I'll take it in my briefing room."

  "Aye, sir."

  Gavin lifted the com screen as he took his seat behind his desk. The face of Captain Richard Dommler, the officer in charge of fleet communications in the deca-sector, appeared when he selected the message from his queue and ordered the computer to play it.

  "Larry, we've had a communication from Mawcett. It seems that the distress call you're responding to was just a ploy to draw you away from the planet. We've confirmed that the ship allegedly calling for help isn't even in the deca-sector. It picked up a shipment at the Hawking SCB transit cargo farm six days ago. We've also learned that your base on Mawcett is under attack by Tsgardi mercenaries working for the Raiders. It's recommended that you return to the planet as soon as possible, although you probably won't be in time to save the people that you left. Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. Dommler out."

  Gavin punched the two intercom buttons that would instantly connect him via CT to both the ship's astrogator and the helmsman on duty. "This is the captain. Lay in a course back to Mawcett and engage. Top speed."

  "Yes sir," both said.

  The enormous battleshi
p began to swing almost immediately as the helmsman redirected the shape of the temporal envelopes being produced without even waiting for the final course coordinates from the astrogator. It took just forty-eight seconds to turn the ship a hundred-eighty degrees. That was significantly faster then dropping the envelope, using the Sub-Light engines to turn the ship around, and then rebuilding the envelope. They had left Mawcett over a month earlier and it would take that long to return. Gavin was forced to admit to himself that the landing party might only be a memory by the time they reached the planet. The Raiders were notorious for striking quickly and being gone before help could arrive, and he knew that the two companies of marines he'd left were no match for the resources aboard a Raider warship, even if it was a Tsgardi vessel. He cursed himself for being duped into rushing off to save a ship that had sent a phony distress signal, leaving his people to die against overwhelming odds.

  Commander LaSalle was in the officer's mess when notified of the course change. She immediately rushed to the bridge. Not seeing the captain there, she walked briskly to his briefing room.

  "Come," Gavin said in response to the computer's announcement that she was at the door.

  The computer opened the doors as soon as the spoken command was received, and LaSalle walked to Gavin's desk.

  "I was notified that we've reversed course, sir. Is there anything that I should be aware of?"

  "The distress call was a ruse to get us away from Mawcett, and our base there is under attack by Raiders. They must have found out about the cloning somehow and are after the equipment."

  "How many Raider ships, sir?"

  "Unknown, but one would be more than enough to take the base. Shuttles can't mount a defense against fighters. Higgins believes that Commander Carver and her people are already lost, and I'd have to agree with them. I just hope the Raiders are still there when we get back. Find Captain Kanes, XO, and ask him to join me here."