by Rick Partlow
He kept the ship low, only fifty meters up, barely clearing the top of the spaceport bay walls as he changed the angle of the nozzles to forward thrust. The Dutchman surged ahead, cutting straight into the city at low altitude and drawing squawks of disapproval from Tartarus’ traffic control system until Kara overrode it with her DSI authorization.
“Head straight into the interceptors,” Kara told him, pointing at the ship’s Tactical display, where the glowing green triangles of a flight of incoming defense cutters were inbound from orbit.
“Teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Deke muttered.
“Someday,” Kara said, “you’ll have to explain to me just what the hell that means.”
Deke snorted but didn’t speak, keeping his attention on their weaving course through the cityscape, narrowly missing emergency services hoppers as they made their way towards the port, and all the time keeping one eye on the sensors pointed to their rear. The Predecessor ship had downed another of the cutters and was coming after the Dutchman again, moving through the atmosphere effortlessly at supersonic speeds.
How does it know where we are? Deke wondered again but didn’t bother to say.
Since nap-of-the-earth evasive maneuvers weren’t going to shake it, Deke brought the nose of his ship up sharply and gave the atmospheric drives every bit of power he had. Acceleration slammed Kara and him back into the cushioning of their seats and the scream of the turbines filled the interior of the ship as they shot upward at hypersonic speeds.
A normal human not wearing a g-suit would have gone unconscious immediately at the g-forces pushing against them, but Deke and Kara weren’t normal.
Not that I ever was that normal, Deke reflected with cynical humor.
There were times when Deke lamented the modifications Omega Group had made to his body, but this wasn’t one of those times. He was able to retain consciousness despite the acceleration, so he could see the alien-tech ship rushing up behind them, moving impossibly fast through Inferno’s thick atmosphere as if Newton’s laws didn’t apply to it.
And maybe they don’t.
He watched the approaching cutters change course to stay on an intercept heading, but what he was hoping was that now that they were higher in the atmosphere, away from the crowded city, that the planetary defenses would be able to target the Predecessor ship. Even that thing shouldn’t be able to shrug off a hit from a planetary defense laser…
“Why the hell isn’t the defense net targeting that thing?” he asked aloud, straining it out past lips skinned over his teeth from the acceleration.
“They can’t see it,” Kara told him…he guessed she was still connected to the networks. “They couldn’t see it coming in and they can’t see it now.”
“Well, that sucks,” he commented simply.
He didn’t say anything else, just monitored the automatic switch from the air turbines to the metallic hydrogen fuel stores as the atmosphere grew too thin to use as reaction mass. He pushed the ship to seven gravities, willing to burn through his onboard reaction mass to get away from that ship.
“Moon base,” Kara strained out, barely audible over Deke’s own pulse pounding in his ears. “Take us past the moon base.”
He could tell that she was accessing the ship’s comm’s systems and he hoped to hell she had a plan, because he was fresh out. He did as she said, using his neurolink to set a course for the orbit of Inferno’s only moon. A captured asteroid, it was less than half the size of Earth’s moon…and he remembered from his time here during the war that it had a defensive weapons installation.
The cutters were engaging the Predecessor ship less than 500 kilometers behind them, but one by one, he could see the friendly icons begin to disappear from his Tactical display. They were slowing the thing down, though, and in just a few agonizing minutes at high-gravity acceleration, the Dutchman was far enough away from Inferno to activate the Teller-Fox impellers.
Deke and Kara both breathed an involuntary sigh as the weight lifted off their chests and the ship abruptly went from seven gravities to none. Deke fought back a surge of bile that tried to rise up his throat at the sudden transition, his fingers sinking into the arm-rests of his seat with the effort.
“Jesus, I hate that shit,” he muttered, sucking in deep breaths.
“Is this as fast as this bucket will go?” Kara asked, frustration in her tone.
“Feel free to buy me a larger fusion reactor any time you want,” he shot back. “We’ll be in lunar orbit in fifteen minutes, give or take.”
“I don’t have confidence that it will take our friend that long to burn through those cutters,” Kara said.
“That’s pretty fuckin’ cold,” Deke commented, thinking of the crews on those ships. “They’re sacrificing their lives to protect us.”
“They’re sacrificing their lives to protect this base from attack,” she corrected him unapologetically, “and they’d be doing the same thing whether we were here or not.”
Deke wanted to point out that the Predecessor-tech ship wouldn’t be attacking Inferno if they hadn’t been there, but he didn’t want to get into that conversation, because then it would force him to consider something that very much frightened him: who was flying the damn thing. So he shut up and watched on the display boards as the Attack Command cutters threw themselves into battle. The Predecessor ship was taking some hits---he could tell because its threat icon was glowing red as it picked up and tried to shed prodigious amounts of heat. More importantly, the fight was forcing it to slow its rate of acceleration, possibly to divert power to its shields and weapons.
Deke watched the blue icon that represented his ship drawing away from the red menace of the icon of the enemy vessel and tried to use his best wishes to urge the gap to grow larger. They just needed a few minutes…
They were five thousand kilometers away from the Predecessor ship when the threat icon flared and a spear of energy stretched out across the space between them. Deke barely had time to blink before the beam struck.
Deke had been in space battles before, so many times he’d lost count. He knew that when a beam weapon struck the Teller-Fox field that surrounded a ship running on impellers, the physical effects were negligible. Either the field warped the electromagnetic energy away from it, or it overloaded. If it overloaded in one spot, you could get a burn-through that could damage your ship; or if it overloaded catastrophically, you could pop like a balloon. Either way, you wouldn’t feel a thing.
When the Predecessor-tech weapon hit, the Dutchman shook like she was caught in the fist of God, throwing Deke and Kara painfully against their restraint harnesses.
“What the hell was that?” Deke demanded, checking the Dutchman’s systems with practiced precision despite his shock. The ship was basically undamaged, though their drive field had destabilized for just a moment.
“It’s got to be gravity based,” Kara surmised. “Jesus, that range though…”
“Drive field has stabilized,” Deke said, shaking his head. “We’re back at max acceleration and pulling away. Hopefully that was outside the max range of that weapon.”
“If it weren’t, we’d be disintegrated like everything else it hit,” Kara pointed out. Her eyes glazed over and Deke assumed she was interfacing with the comms again. He thought he knew what she was doing: if the fixed defenses were having trouble targeting the thing with their dedicated systems, she must be trying to feed the ship’s targeting systems to the moon base to rig up a way for them to get a shot at it.
“Two more minutes. Just two more fucking minutes…”she chanted like a mantra. She looked at him sharply. “What about making a jump at the LaGrangian point, like we did that one time? Where the gravity well of the moon offsets the gravitational pull of the planet?”
“No time,” he dismissed the idea, shaking his head. “It would take a good five or ten minutes to get the exact coordinates. We’d be dead by then.”
“Start the process,” she said in what sounded very much l
ike an order. “Just in case.”
Deke cursed under his breath but started the calculations anyway. It was just computing power and they weren’t exactly using it for much else at the moment. He’d barely started the process when another bolt lashed out from the alien ship, even further away this time. The ship shook again, though not as violently, and the impeller field barely quivered. Deke glanced around at the hull, half-expecting it to rip apart.
“That’s fucking unnatural,” he commented earnestly.
Kara laughed quietly at that, though he didn’t know why.
“Damn it,” Deke hissed as he saw another of the cutters disappear from his Tactical display. With most of the opposition destroyed, the Predecessor tech ship surged forward, closing the thousands of kilometers between the ships in seconds…
“…and now,” Kara said with a savage grin.
The words were hardly out of her mouth when a spear of energy that originated somewhere on the near side of Inferno’s moon lashed out and intercepted the alien ship less than a thousand kilometers out from them. The Predecessor-tech vessel was close enough that the Dutchman’s optical viewers were able to combine with the lidar, radar and gravimetic sensors to create a computer simulated image of it. One second it was there, glowing green against the blue of Inferno’s oceans, and the next it was a miniature sun. The laser, powered by a proton fusion reactor buried beneath the surface of Inferno’s moon, pumped gigawatts of energy into the enemy ship in a fraction of a second.
When the halo of liberated energy faded, Deke expected there to be nothing left of the ship but vapors; instead, it hung in space, somehow motionless despite the fact that it had just been accelerating at hundreds of gravities. The green glow was gone, and it seemed dull and lifeless somehow, but it was amazingly intact.
“Holy shit,” Deke said, disbelief strong in his voice. “That’s got to have destroyed it…” He glanced at Kara. “Right? I mean, it’s got to be out of commission, right?”
“How long till we can make the jump?” she asked him flatly, staring at the Tactical display.
He checked the progress of the computer’s calculations. It was impossible to jump to Transition Space this close to a planet or other large body due to gravitational warping of spacetime interfering with the formation of the wormhole…unless there was a sufficiently large body to balance the warping with its own mass. Then it was theoretically possible, though very risky, to make a jump at the most stable LaGrangian point. Risky enough that no one tried it outside of active combat or some other emergency.
“We’ll be at the most likely LaGrangian point in a couple minutes,” he told her. “But why risk it? That thing has to be…”
“For Christ’s sake, Deke,” Kara exclaimed, her voice raw with impatience, “don’t fucking argue with me, just do it!”
“Fine,” Deke acceded, holding his palms up in surrender. He adjusted the ship’s course slightly, heading them directly for the stability point and started the preparations for the jump. “Just ninety seconds now.”
“There’s an energy buildup inside that thing,” Kara declared, pointing at the sensor readouts.
The thermal and spectroscopic readings from the motionless alien vessel were showing an incredible heat buildup coming from deep within the cigar-shaped object, something with a totally different signature than the halo that had surrounded it when it was active.
“What is that radiation?” Deke wondered, shaking his head in confusion. “Something that hot has to be nuclear, doesn’t it? Maybe even antimatter?”
“If I could tell you what powered that thing,” Kara declared, a note of fear in her voice as her eyes remained glued to the display, “people wouldn’t be killing each other to try to get the technology.”
Deke had opened his mouth to make what was probably going to sound like a smart-ass remark when the Dutchman shook once more, a gentle rumble similar to the second time the Predecessor vessel had struck at them. The two of them looked at each other, eyes wide.
“Gravity waves,” Kara stated. “Not a beam this time…”
“Omnidirectional radiation,” Deke agreed, feeling a fire of panic in his gut. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that ship is hauling around a miniature black hole in its guts, and that laser from the moon base just cut the power to the containment…”
“Get us out of here now!” Kara yelled, reaching out as if she could take control of the ship manually.
“Calm down,” he said ironically, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead as he watched the ship’s icon move ever-so-slowly into the green circle his navigation computer had projected. “Transitioning.”
He touched a haptic control in the holographic projection over his control panel and he just had time to wonder if they would actually make the jump or wind up as random molecules spread out over two universes before the wormhole opened. There was a slight, unfamiliar shudder as they passed through it and the Dutchman was engulfed in a sea of nonexistence.
Chapter Five
Mitchell:
“…checked via an Instell Comsat when we came out of T-space,” Kara was saying as I came back to the present, shaking my head sharply to clear it of the existential detritus of seeing things through Deke’s eyes. “The Predecessor ship detonated seconds after we transitioned out from Inferno.” She locked eyes with me. “The singularity at the heart of the ship ceased to exist and the resultant flare of radiation killed over a hundred Starfleet personnel on the moonbase.”
I winced. This was like some kind of nightmare, more so since I was still feeling mentally dislocated, having abruptly jumped from the cockpit of Deke’s ship into my own living room.
“How the hell did this ‘Naga’ get a hold of a Predecessor starship?” I wanted to know. “I thought they were all destroyed at Petra.” At the cost of entire squadrons of Attack Command cutters, no less.
“No idea,” Kara admitted. “I can only think of two ways, and I don’t like either one of them. Either someone found a second cache of Predecessor technology, or…”
“Or someone in the military or the Corporate Council had one---or more---of those things squirrelled away,” Deke interjected, “and now they’re working with the Naga.”
“It would have to be more than one,” Kara said quietly, “for them to risk one chasing down the two of us.”
I shot Deke a glance, still processing what I’d seen. When I had gone to Thunderhead to ask him for help against the Corporates, I’d thought that Deke hadn’t changed at all in the ten years since the war ended. Now…had the last four years really made that much of a difference?
“Where do we go to look for General Murdock?” I asked Kara. Her eyes narrowed and I knew what she was thinking: how did I know she knew.
“He said he’d be rounding up the usual suspects,” Kara explained. “That’s a line from an old pre-space-travel Earth drama, 2-D…it’s a favorite of General Murdock’s.” Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “He forces me to watch it with him every couple months. The show is about a place called Casablanca, a kind of haven for criminals and spies. He used to call Belial a modern version of Casablanca.”
I groaned. “Not that place again.”
“Belial,” Rachel repeated, frowning thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the pleasure station out in the Centauri Belt?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “That’s where Mat M’Voba had us go to meet with him back when we were on the run from the Corporate Council. Last time we were there, Kara and I got into a fight with a bunch of DSI cadre and almost died.”
“Oh sure,” Deke said sotto vocce, “emphasize the negative…”
“If we want to find General Murdock,” Kara said, “that’s the place we have to start.”
“What do you think, Cal?” Rachel asked me, obviously not predisposed to accept Kara’s advice at face value.
I sat back in the kitchen chair I’d pulled into the living room, my thoughts churning as violently as my gut. I should have expected something l
ike this, but I hadn’t. Foolishly, I’d thought all of this was behind me. I should have known better. I’d expected General Murdock to call in the favor for freeing Trint, had thought I’d have to go do his dirty work at some point as a matter of quid pro quo.
But I hadn’t thought that the events of four years ago would come back to visit us here at home. And I should have. I’d been involved in pulling some awfully powerful people down from some awfully high places, and you don’t get to do that without ramifications.
“We’ll start at Belial,” I decided, “but we have to leave Canaan immediately.” I looked around at Rachel, Trint and Pete. “All of us,”
“Do you really think they’ll come after you again?” Rachel asked as she leaned towards me in her seat on the easy chair I usually occupied, the hard line of her mouth showing that she didn’t like what I was saying.
“It’s not that they’ll come after me, hon,” I told her, “it’s what they’ll do to Canaan in the process.” I shook my head. “Jesus, they attacked a Starfleet base! What’ll they do to Harristown? The last time I got involved with this shit, the Corporate Security Force destroyed the Mt Carmel Hospital and killed hundreds of innocent people, just to get to us.” I stood. “I’m not going to bring that down on these people again. Deke, Kara and I will take the Dutchman to Belial; Trint, Pete and Rachel can take the ship General Murdock loaned out to me and head for…”
“No.” Rachel said it with so much volume and force that at first I didn’t even realize the word had come from her. She rose from her chair and looked me in the eye.
“But Rache,” I said, feeling an empty pit in my stomach, “we can’t stay here…”
“I understand that,” she informed me, hands balling up into fists. “But you are not going to stick me someplace ‘safe’ this time, Caleb. We tried that last time and look at how much good it did.” She unconsciously flexed the fingers of her right hand…the hand and most of the arm had been regrown at the hospital after Corporate mercenaries had blown the original off attacking our house. “Not again,” she stated, her tone leaving no room for argument. “Where you go, I go.”
