Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t accustomed to violence. She looked terrified. Unless March missed his guess, this was the first time the woman had ever been in a fight.
“Hello?” said the woman, her voice shaking. “Hello, can you hear me? Please, I need help.”
“I’m Captain March of the Calaskaran privateer Tiger,” said March. “State your identity and your intentions.”
“Please! I...I...” She pulled herself together. “My name is Dr. Cassandra Yerzhov, I’m a professor at the University of Oradrea. Those ships are shooting at me! I don’t know...”
“Why are they shooting at you?” said March.
“I don’t know!” said Cassandra. “I just...I just jumped here, and they were waiting for me, and the computer said I had to take evasive action, and I tried to do it, and...” The words came out of her faster and faster.
“You’re in luck,” said March. “They’re trying to shoot at me, so I’m going to have to fight. Listen, is your autopilot set to evasive?”
“I...I think so,” said Cassandra.
“Keep it on evasive,” said March. He gripped the flight yoke and sent the Tiger around in a tight turn towards the approaching Raptors. “I’ll deal with the fighters coming after me, and then I’ll go after the Raptors targeting you. Keep going evasive. Understand?”
“I think so,” said Cassandra.
“Leave this channel open,” said March. He cut the video but kept the audio live. “I’m starting an attack run.”
He kicked the fusion drive to maximum, pushing the Tiger towards its highest sublight speed. The shields were fully charged, and the plasma cannons ready. March switched the laser turrets to point-defense mode, instructing them to target and disable any incoming missiles. The indicator for the railgun flashed green, the electromagnetic coils ready to fling a five-meter-long tungsten rod at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
A warning blared through the flight cabin as the Raptors launched a volley of missiles.
A firing solution appeared on the displays, and March targeted one of the Raptors and fired.
The Tiger shuddered as the railgun spat a tungsten rod. The rod smashed into one of the Raptors, its sheer velocity overwhelming the starfighter’s kinetic shielding. The tungsten round sliced through the armored pilot cabin, ripping it apart and killing the occupants, and the rest of the fighter tore apart as the engines ripped free from their mounts and stabbed through the damaged hull.
March sent the Tiger into an evasive spiral as the missiles shot towards him, and the remaining Raptor did the same, firing its engines to get away from the unexpectedly dangerous freighter. The Tiger’s laser turrets opened up, slicing into the ion thrusters guiding the missiles’ flight, and March triggered the flak cannons at the last minute, throwing out a cloud of deflective particles. The missiles slammed into the flak and exploded, the shrapnel hammering into the Tiger’s kinetic shielding. The power levels of the kinetic shields dropped, but they held, keeping the shrapnel from striking the ship.
The Tiger came out of its spin, and March sent the ship hurtling after the second Raptor. The starfighter went into a wild evasive pattern, but March was on its tail, and he watched as the targeting computer made its calculation. Another firing solution appeared on his screen, and March pulled the triggers. The railgun spat, but this time the shot was not quite as accurate. The tungsten rod sheared through the fighter’s left wing, damaging some of the ion thrusters. The starfighter’s speed remained constant, but its maneuverability dropped.
March squeezed the triggers and opened up with the Tiger’s plasma cannons. All four cannons rained bolts of superheated plasma onto the Raptor. The starfighter dodged, but March kept pouring the fire on. The Raptor’s radiation shields sputtered and then collapsed, and the plasma bolts chewed through the armor and into the fighter’s guts. The Raptor broke apart as the plasma bolts tore the fighter into jagged wreckage. March banked hard to starboard to avoid the spreading debris field, turning the Tiger towards Cassandra’s shuttle.
The targeting alarm went off again. One of the Raptors had broken off its pursuit of the shuttle to target the Tiger, and it had gotten a missile lock. March went evasive at once, throwing out a cloud of flak as the Raptor fired its missiles. The point-defense lasers burned down two of the missiles, and the flak cloud caught three more.
But the final missile exploded too close to the Tiger, and some of the shrapnel punched through the kinetic shield. The ship rang like a bell, and a half dozen red lights flashed on March’s displays. He snarled a curse and sent the Tiger through another evasive spiral, risking a glance at the damage reports. Weapons were good, ion thrusters were good, life support was undamaged...that was all he needed right now.
He brought the Tiger out of its evasive spin and started firing volleys of plasma bolts at the Raptor. The fighter dodged, twisting into an elaborate spiral. Some models of Raptors had rear turrets installed as after-market modifications, and March was relieved that this fighter didn’t have that option. Only a few of his plasma bolts struck the starfighter, but that didn’t matter, since the Raptor blundered into the path of the railgun.
The tungsten round drilled through the starfighter, and it ripped apart from its own velocity, debris scattering in all directions.
March turned the Tiger towards the shuttle and locked onto the last remaining Raptor. The heavy fighter had been firing at the shuttle during the entire dogfight, and several plasma bolts had stabbed into the shuttle’s drive section. March accelerated, and started calculating a firing solution while he glanced at the damage reports scrolling across his displays. Some of the shrapnel had punched through the ship’s armor and outer hull, though it didn’t look like the inner hull had been breached. There had been some damage to the engines and the power systems, and the hyperdrive hadn’t fully discharged its remaining dark energy before the damage had caused a power surge.
That was bad. That was potentially very bad, especially here in an uninhabited and unclaimed solar system.
But March could not spare the time to worry about it right now.
He headed towards the remaining Raptor, Vigil calculating a firing solution.
The final Raptor had seen enough. The fighter banked away from the damaged shuttle, engines firing as it drove for deep space. Before Vigil could finish the firing solution, the instruments detected a surge of dark energy. The Raptor opened a hyperspace tunnel, invisible to the naked eye, but the dark energy detectors rendered it as a whirlpool of snarling purple and blue energy.
Then the Raptor vanished, propelled into hyperspace. Most likely the Raptor’s crew had made an emergency jump to get to safety, but March had no doubt they would be back with friends.
And the diagnostics reported that the Tiger’s hyperdrive had almost certainly taken damage.
“Shit,” muttered March.
“Captain March?” said Cassandra. In the heat of the moment, he had forgotten he had left the audio channel open. “Captain March, are you all right? What’s happening?”
“Dr. Yerzhov?” said March, opening the video channel. Cassandra’s face appeared on the screen, her eyes still wide with fear. There was smoke in the background of the image. “Are you all right?”
“I...I think so,” said Cassandra. “But they shot the shuttle a bunch of times. All the panels are going red. What’s happening?”
“I destroyed three of the Raptors, and the fourth one went into hyperspace, probably to get reinforcements,” said March, keying for a sensor focus on the shuttle. The craft had taken heavy damage, and it looked like both its power plant and its life support systems were failing. “My ship took some damage, but it looks like you had the worst of it. What is your status?”
“I don’t know,” said Cassandra. She sounded on the verge of panic again. “I...I...”
“There should be a master systems display either to the left or the right of the manual flight yoke,” said March. She blinked in confusion. “The black
stick thing with red buttons on it. The master systems display will be to the left or the right of that. Do you see it?”
“I...yes, I do,” said Cassandra, taking a deep breath.
“What does it say?” said March.
“Um...reactor failure, shutdown in progress. Life support off line. Imminent thruster failure,” said Cassandra. “Oh, dear. Starship repair is not my field of study but that all sounds very bad.”
“It is,” said March. “I think you’re going to have to abandon the shuttle and come aboard my ship.”
She didn’t make any effort to hide the fear. “What are you going to do with me?”
For a woman traveling alone through unclaimed space, that was a reasonable question. She was pretty enough to fetch a decent price from Kezredite slavers.
“Nothing,” said March. “I am heading to the Constantinople system with a load of algae protein. I can drop you off there, or anywhere you like along the route. Oradrea is a neutral government, so you should be able to hire a ship or take a berth on a liner heading back there.” Though he didn’t know why anyone would want to go back to a hellhole like Oradrea...and he was beginning to wonder if Dr. Yerzhov had stolen that shuttle from the University of Oradrea.
“No!” said Cassandra.
Evidently, she agreed with him.
“I can’t go back,” she said. “I need to go to JX2278C.”
“JX2278C?” said March. It was another unclaimed and uninhabited system on one of the common jump routes to the Constantinople system.
He started to ask why she wanted to go to JX2278C, and then an alarm started blaring. He looked at his displays and then realized that the noise was coming from the communications channel.
“Um,” said Cassandra. “Captain March? The display says the life support failure has accelerated, and that atmospheric toxins will approach dangerous levels in another seventeen minutes.”
“All right,” said March. “We’ll have to get you to my ship right now.”
Cassandra flinched. “I don’t know how to put on a spacesuit.”
“No,” said March. “I’ll dock and bring you over. You’ll need to bring your shuttle to a halt.”
Cassandra blinked a few times. Her eyes were turning red, either from suppressed tears, smoke, or both. “I...I don’t know how to do that, either.”
“Right,” said March. If she had stolen that shuttle, how the hell had she gotten this far from Oradrea without getting herself killed? “You managed to put the ship’s autopilot on evasive, didn’t you?” Cassandra nodded. “One of the options on that screen should bring the ship to a full halt for docking procedure.”
“Um.” Cassandra jabbed at something off-screen. “Um…I don’t know…”
March suppressed a sigh. If he lived long enough to retire from the Silent Order, he decided that he wasn’t going to work for a technology help desk.
“Wait!” Cassandra tapped at another screen. “Um...yeah, I think this is it. There’s an option on the menu that says...HALT/DOCK.”
“That’s it,” said March.
Cassandra jabbed at something else. “Now it says REV/VECTOR/VELOCITY.”
“That’s for relative vector and velocity,” said March. “See if you can tell it to match the Tiger’s relative speed and velocity.”
“Okay,” said Cassandra, bobbing her head in a jerky nod. “Okay. I think I did it.”
March glanced at the tactical display. The shuttle was slowing. Its fusion drive had cut out, and the ion thrusters were firing, bringing the shuttle to a halt relative to the Tiger.
“Good work,” said March. “Don’t touch anything else. I’m going to bring my ship around to dock with your starboard airlock. Don’t try to move your shuttle, or you’ll get both of us killed.”
“Okay,” said Cassandra. “Okay. Thank...thank you, Captain March.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” said March. He muted the audio channel. “Vigil, start running damage reports. Focus on our hyperdrive. Initial assessment?”
“Damage to the power systems and the hyperdrive,” said Vigil. “The hyperdrive is operational, but long-term reliability is unlikely.”
“Shit,” muttered March. He reactivated the audio channel. “All right, Dr. Yerzhov. I am approaching to dock.”
She made another jerky nod. March cut the fusion drive and eased the Tiger toward the shuttle on ion thrusters. His ship was a lot bigger than the shuttle, which looked as if it had been designed only to carry a few passengers a short distance. Fortunately, March had performed docking procedures of this precision many times before. At least no one was shooting at him this time.
He made one final adjustment, and a faint clang echoed through the Tiger.
“Oh, God,” said Cassandra. “The ship just shook. Is it supposed to do that?”
“Yes,” said March. “I’ve docked. Get to your starboard airlock, along with any luggage or equipment you need. I want to be gone before that fourth Raptor comes back with friends.”
“I forgot about that,” said Cassandra. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
She unstrapped from the pilot’s seat and hurried out of sight from the camera’s field of view.
“Vigil,” said March. “Keep running that hyperdrive diagnostic. If there is any ship activity in the system, alert me at once.”
“Acknowledged,” said Vigil.
March pushed out of the pilot’s chair and hurried into the Tiger’s dorsal corridor.
He stopped at the armory and unlocked the door. Like the gym, the armory had previously been a cabin, but March had converted it to weapons storage. The armory was a small rectangular room, the walls lined with metal shelves, and handguns, rifles, grenades, ammunition, power packs, knives, mines, and more ammunition filled the shelves, all of it labeled and organized.
March took a gun belt and slung it around his hips, holstering a plasma pistol on his right side. Two knives went in hidden sheaths up his sleeves. He didn’t think Cassandra Yerzhov intended any treachery, and he didn’t think this was a trap.
But he had been wrong before, and if someone wanted to seize control of the ship, March would give them a warm welcome.
For an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order, paranoia wasn’t a mental affliction but a way of life.
March slid down the ladder into the cargo bay and jogged to the airlock. The Tiger had a large cargo ramp in the stern for quickly unloading or loading cargo, and in the middle of the closed ramp was a smaller airlock for ship-to-ship docking. March checked the airlock status and found that the seal was secure.
He took a deep breath and triggered the airlock.
The inner door slid open, and then the outer door. Beyond it, March saw the outer door of the shuttle’s airlock. Nothing happened, and March almost told Vigil to give the shuttle a call.
But then the door opened, and March found himself looking at Cassandra Yerzhov.
She was wearing a blue jumpsuit, her face smudged with smoke and tears. March had never thought short hair a good look on a woman, and Cassandra was no exception. It didn’t help that her haircut was ragged and uneven. Nevertheless, she was far more attractive in person than over the video channel. She had a somewhat spindly build as if she didn’t exercise and forgot to eat on a regular basis, and she had the slightly stooped posture of someone who spent long hours with a computer doing research.
In her right hand, she held a large travel suitcase, and in her left, she held the handle for a small metal cart. The cart contained a big plastic trunk, the sort commonly used by soldiers and starship crewers to store their possessions.
Cassandra’s bloodshot eyes went wide when she saw him. “Captain March.”
“Yeah,” said March. “Come on, Dr. Yerzhov. The sooner we get moving, the safer we’ll be.”
Cassandra nodded, seeming to wilt. He hadn’t tried to be harsh or threatening, but she seemed terrified of him. “Okay.” She stepped through the airlock, trying to pull the metal cart with her, but the wheels caug
ht on the frame.
“Here,” said March. Cassandra stepped to the side, and March stepped through the airlock and picked up the trunk. It was heavier than expected, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, but his arm of flesh and his cybernetic arm were up to the task. He picked up the case and set it next to the airlock, shoving the metal cart back into the shuttle.
“Wow,” said Cassandra. “That’s really heavy. I think it weighs more than I do.”
March looked at her, and she blinked and looked down. That was usually an involuntary sign of deception, but...no, she wasn’t lying. She was frightened of him, of the situation. Which was a logical reaction, since she was alone with an armed man who could overpower her with minimal effort.
“Is that everything you need from the shuttle?” said March.
Cassandra gave another jerky nod. “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “I suppose you’re probably wondering what’s going on.”
“I am,” said March. “But we need to get out of this system first. Leave your stuff here and come with me.”
Chapter 2: Escape
March climbed up the ladder to the dorsal corridor, and Cassandra followed him.
“Where are we going?” said Cassandra.
“Flight cabin,” said March. “Before we do anything else, we need to get out of here before your friends come back.”
“Why did they start shooting at you?” said Cassandra. “They were after me.”
March glanced at her as he walked to the flight cabin’s door. “Whatever they wanted you for, they also wanted to make sure there were no witnesses.” The door hissed open, and he pointed at the co-pilot’s station. “Sit there, please. We can talk more once we are in hyperspace.”
Taking her into the flight cabin was a risk, but it was a manageable one. She might try to seize control of the ship or otherwise work mischief. But until March knew what was going on, he wanted to keep an eye on her. She didn’t have any weapons, and dripping wet she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifteen pounds. If she tried anything, he could stop her.
Silent Order: Eclipse Hand Page 2
