“Yes, however I do not have command authority for such an action.”
Mac rubbed her eyes in frustration. “Rae, given our current situation, who is the ranking UDA officer?
“That would be you, Ensign Pickett.”
“So if I order you to disable the enemy party with hazine, will you carry out my order?”
“Affirmative.”
Mac sighed. “Do so, and keep them unconscious until I, or a superior UDA officer, orders otherwise.”
“Acknowledged. Hazine dispersement commencing.”
Cale said, “Rae, what about the Helios missiles? Mac ordered you to use them to destroy the Redshift vessel if you could do so without hurting our crew.”
“I attempted to do so,” replied Rae’s drone. “I sent the stealth missiles in once I verified our crew’s departure. However, they simply broke apart on impact. Apparently the warheads had degraded and did not detonate. There was no reaction by the enemy ship, and no communication traffic to indicate that they knew of the attack.”
“Damn,” swore Cale, as he stood up from his seat. His face turned red as he pointed an accusatory finger at the drone. “That means they’re still in orbit somewhere, and possibly coming for us. Why didn’t you fire the Valkyrie’s weapons?”
Rae turned her head to meet Cale’s eyes. “I am not permitted to take such action without direct orders.”
Mac sighed. “Rae’s right, Cale. The Captain made it a standing order, and we never countermanded it. We told her to use the missiles and nothing else. We’re just lucky they didn’t see them.”
“I am sorry, Cale,” said Rae. “I could find no work-around to the command authority restriction. One minute to communications blackout.”
Mac said, “Rae, under the current situation you recognize my full command authority, do you not?”
“Affirmative.”
“Rae, under my authority, I order you to engage stealth mode, disable any and all Redshift vessels in orbit around this planet where such action does not risk loss of life to the crew of the Valkyrie, or other non-combatants. Further, I order you to rendezvous with this platform with all due haste consistent with stealth protocols.”
“Acknowledged.”
Rae’s human facade disappeared, and Cale looked at Mac with wide eyes. “Will the Valkyrie get here in time? I’d put good money on the Redshift vessel coming to intercept us. They might have received word from the surface.”
“Yeah, and we’re sitting ducks right now.” She paused in thought, then checked her suit status. “My suit’s fully charged now, but I didn’t use as much power as you. What’s your power level?”
“Ninety-two percent.”
“Okay. Our best chance is to appear inert and non-threatening. That might give Rae and the Valkyrie enough time to get to us. Seal your suit and shut everything down, except keep the core on-line with minimal power, and keep your weapons console in standby mode. I’m going to vent the atmosphere.”
Cale stared at her. “A second ambush? We’re toothless, Mac. There’s no way we’re going to take out a fully armed enemy ship.”
“We just need to buy some time.”
Cale frowned, but then nodded. “I suppose it’s worth a shot. How about we jettison anything not nailed down after we vent atmosphere? It might make for a better deception.”
Chapter 15, Battle Zone
The platform tumbled amid a nimbus of floating debris and wreckage. Cale and Mac had tossed anything and everything they could find out the open airlock, including several large pieces of internal bulkhead Cale had cut away with the pulse rifle. They returned to the command consoles and shut almost everything down, and plugged-in their suits again to keep them fully charged for whatever was about to happen. One nice thing about Rae’s upgrade to the platform’s software was that their suit connections also carried data from the platform’s passive sensor array. With exterior imagery displayed on the inside of their visors, it was like floating in empty space. The bad part was the nausea caused by the display and the lack of artificial gravity.
“What do you think of our chances?” asked Cale. His voice had an odd tinny quality over the suit’s com channel.
“I don’t know. If this were a sporting event, I wouldn’t put money on our team unless I hedged the bet.”
Cale was silent for a long while, then asked, “What do you think of our chances—as you and me, you know, together? Assuming, of course, that we both get out of this alive?”
Mac laughed. Cale had a way of breaking the tension, although she doubted he even realized it. “Us, as a team? Yeah, I might bet a tiny bit of money on us.”
“How much is a tiny amount?”
“I might go as far as a week’s pay.”
“Just a week? What a cheapskate.”
“Hey, on an ensign’s salary I have to minimize my losses.”
“In the interest of the morale of your one-and-only current subordinate, would you go two weeks pay?”
“Hmmm, no. But I will throw in a dinner at Alevita Palace.” Contrary to its noble sounding name, the Alevita Palace was a tiny dive restaurant on Serenity, where you could buy a full meal for a pittance.
“If I buy half, how about dinner at Chinook’s instead?”
Mac shook her head in disbelief. Somehow Cale had turned an innocuous conversation into a dinner date at one of the best restaurants in the quadrant, and she was supposed to buy half. “If we make it out of this alive? Okay, fine. Dinner at Chinook’s. But I’d better not find you daydreaming about it on duty.”
“No ma’am, Never ever. Wouldn’t dream of it. I think I’ll have the salmon. I hear they import it all the way from Earth.”
Mac’s smile faded as the Redshift vessel came into view above the planet’s dark horizon. She reviewed the orbital data from the sensors, and her mouth went dry. “Stay sharp and cross your fingers. If my orbital calculations are correct, the Valkyrie won’t be here in time. The enemy ship is on an intercept course.”
The platform’s com channel crackled in Mac’s ears. “Rafe, you miserable shit, this is Captain Jacob.” The voice was deep, loud, and barked like an old-fashioned slug gun. “Have you gone insane? I saw the feed from the surface, and I know what you did. I’m going to have you ejected out an airlock. I’ll even give you a suit, so you’ll have a few hours to ponder your inevitable death from asphyxiation. If I see so much as a twitch from any of your weapons, I’m going to do to you what you did to the other platform. You hear me Rafe?”
Mac didn’t reply. It wouldn’t do any good to tell him the Rafe guy was already dead, and they were from the Valkyrie. That would just hasten their end. In her suit’s local com she said, “He’ll board if he thinks we’re defenseless. Despite his bluster, he’s not going to destroy a perfectly good defense platform unless he has no other choice. If he boards, we’re done anyway. We have to fight, but fortunately we have something he doesn’t.”
“Yeah, and what might that be?”
“We have nothing to lose.”
Cale threw up his hands. “Look, I don’t see how that helps us. I might be able to fire one of the smaller lasers, but that’s not going to do a damn thing.”
“No, not with a laser. That would be rather pointless.”
“What then? We’ve got nothing…” Cale stopped in mid-sentence, and Mac saw his helmet turn in her direction. “Surely you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“If I could think of another way, I would. But the reality is that this platform is expendable. We aren’t.” She turned and began entering navigation commands and overriding fail-safes. “I’ll program the nav computer to intercept the Redshift vessel at full thrust, with automatic course correction if they try to evade. We jump off as soon as everything is set up.”
“Can I at least cover our jump with some pre-programmed laser shots?” asked Cale.
“As long as you don’t burn out the rest of the power cells. I’m going to shut down everything except maneuver
ing and weapons. We have to have maneuvering. Can you program the lasers to fire only when power levels permit? “
“Yeah, I think so. It’ll just take a minute.”
“That’s about all we have. Make it quick.”
“Right. I’m on it.”
Mac stopped the platform’s tumble and rotated it to face the oncoming enemy ship with their heavily shielded upper works. The other platform had been unprepared for their attack, and had left its weak underside exposed. She wasn’t going to make that mistake, especially since they needed time to escape.
The Redshift vessel ship approached in her visor display, and she watched it while Cale worked. The ship was big, at least three times the size of the Valkyrie. The hull looked like an ancient Morough class freighter, with its distinctive bulbous front end and cylindrical storage bay aft, but that’s where the similarity ended. Like the platform, an enormous array of scavenged weapons systems and thick layers of ablative shielding adorned all its outer surfaces. If they also had a decent power core they could take on almost any vessel in the UDA fleet, and the platform’s armor would be a minor inconvenience.
“Done,” said Cale. “Can we get out of this death trap now?”
“Yeah, let’s move. Rae, compact your body for transport, but stay active.”
The little drone folded and packed itself into a tight assemblage of components no bigger than Mac’s thigh, with its sensor head at one end.
They unbuckled their seat restraints, and Cale attached Rae to a set of loops on the back of Mac’s suit. It was eerily quiet as they pushed off in zero-gee toward the access shaft. Even the usual high frequency whine of laser capacitors charging was absent since there was no air to transmit the sound. They were just exiting the bottom of the shaft when a two-meter wide flare of laser and burning vapor pierced the platform from top to bottom. Cale yelled a warning and grabbed Mac’s foot as she floated toward the deadly column. She jerked to a halt and rebounded to see Cale hanging from a grab next to the access shaft. Her breathing came in short gasps. The flaming column marched five meters across the compartment before it winked out. “Thanks,” she said, trying to get her breathing and pounding heart under control.
A sing-song, almost gleeful voice came over her suit’s general com. “I told you not to fire on us, Rafe. I’ve got a lot more firepower than that old pile of scrap. I’m going to enjoy carving up your little platform a piece at a time.”
The platform’s maneuvering thrusters kicked in, and Mac gyrated in Cale’s grasp. He said, “Mac, we have to move now if we don’t want to get vaporized.”
“Right.” Mac studied the damage in the red emergency lights. “Let’s go out the breach. It’s huge and we should be all right if we avoid touching any of the hot edges.”
They pulled themselves to the compartment’s overhead, tethered themselves together, and pushed off with Mac in the lead. The laser shot had been surgical, vaporizing everything in its way and leaving the remaining cut edges glowing orange. She could see faint starlight ahead as they moved through the destruction. They exited into an enormous debris field and a glowing cloud of condensing vaporized matter.
Mac pulled Cale close with the tether, and said, “Grab hold. I’m going to use my suit jets to get us out of the way of the station’s maneuvering thrusters.” She aimed at the planet below, assuming the Valkyrie was coming from that lower orbit, and engaged. The push they gave was weak, and it took an anxious minute as continuous laser fire tore through the platform behind them. She shut down her jets to conserve power, looked back at the platform, and gasped. “My god, will you look at that.”
Cale let out an astonished cry. “Damn good thing we got out of there when we did. It looks like Swiss cheese.”
He was right. At least twenty massive holes had been cut through the platform, but the thrusters were still firing due to the massively redundant and individually shielded military grade control cables. One ineffectual laser flared from the platform, and a quick response from the enemy vessel vaporized the emitter. They had to know what was coming by now, didn’t they?
“They’re maneuvering now,” said Cale, as though reading her mind.
And they were. Mac could see large jet plumes of maneuvering gas coming from the Redshift vessel. A particle cannon fired from the ship, and it burned through the platform’s ablative top armor in mere seconds. The beam marched across the platform, dissecting it into three huge pieces that began to separate and tumble, trailing their guts across the intervening space. It was an act of desperation, Mac guessed, but they had miscalculated. She pointed. “My god, look at that.” One of the three massive pieces was on a collision course. Mac had been counting on the rogue planet’s gravity well, since it’s presence would make use of their interstellar compression drive impossible. Great clouds of thruster wash sprayed from it as they attempted to maneuver away from the oncoming projectile, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The old freighter at the core of the Redshift vessel had never been designed for maneuverability, and the additional mass of weaponry and armor must have made the problem much worse.
Suddenly, every weapon on the Redshift vessel fired at once on the approaching hulk in a dazzling display of firepower, but they had waited too long. Mac watched in mixed horror and fascination as the huge piece of platform hit the ship. It was perhaps twenty percent of the mass of the Redshift vessel, but it was more than plenty. It plowed into the ship and disappeared into a gaping tunnel of destruction. A few seconds later, a mangled ball of debris twice the size of the original piece ejected out the far side, and the battle was over.
Chapter 16, Rendezvous
The remains of the Redshift vessel and platform fell towards the surface amidst a shimmering cloud of wreckage. With little to do as they waited for the Valkyrie to pick them up, they spent the next few hours watching in horror and fascination. It was a mixed blessing to have magnification optics in their suit’s visors, as they were able to see almost too much. Mac shut off the emergency frequency as the largest pieces made their final plunge, as it was hard to listen to the last few survivors’ desperate pleas for help. Impact with the planet surface occurred near the horizon in a series of explosions that sent huge plumes of dust into the thin atmosphere.
The Valkyrie appeared like a ghost five hours after the battle with the enemy vessel. With adaptive stealth mode activated as Mac had ordered, the ship was nearly impossible to see until it was almost upon them, and it never recorded a single blip on their suit’s sensors. Their first inkling that the Valkyrie had arrived was when a group of dim lights illuminated the open access hatchway on the port side.
Once inside, Mac reached for her helmet seal release but was stopped by Rae’s drone, who once again looked human. “Mac and Cale, please keep your helmets sealed. Hazine is still present to keep our prisoners asleep.”
Cale groaned. “Rae, I need to get out of this damn suit. It stinks in here.”
Mac chuckled. “Hmmm, I wonder why. Did you have a few too many of Rafe’s magic fiber bars?”
“Hey, I was hungry.”
“How you could eat that junk is beyond me. Rae, where are the enemy techs?”
“In my computer core, E deck forward, port side.”
“Then let’s get to it. The sooner we get them to sick bay and into stasis sleep, the sooner we can get out of these suits.”
Mac took two steps then hesitated. “Rae, did we ever transmit a distress call?”
“Yes, I sent a distress call to Serenity when my system came back on-line. It’ll take a week to get there though.”
Mac swore under her breath. Redshift reinforcements could arrive at any moment, and they had to get their crew back before that happened. Otherwise they might be lost forever.
Cale led the way down the port side access trunk to the lowest deck, then forward to the small computer core compartment. Rae followed in their wake. Three techs were slumped over the maintenance consoles, and a fourth lay on the floor. They all appeared to be breathing. All
carried hand weapons in holsters except the one woman, which surprised Mac. Somehow, she just couldn’t picture a woman as a Redshift enemy combatant.
Rae’s drone went to a small red cube-shaped module plugged into the core’s auxiliary maintenance panel, yanked it out, and crushed it.
“What was that?” asked Mac.
“The access knife. It was still running, and felt like a splinter I couldn’t reach. Unfortunately, hard coding prohibits maintenance drones from entering this compartment, or I’d have taken care of it sooner. I even started building a special new drone just to yank it out in case you didn’t return.”
Cale said, “Mac, if we lower gravity to a quarter it’ll be much easier to get them to the medical bay.”
“Good idea. Rae, please reset gravity to a quarter gee.” For a moment it felt like the floor fell away under her, and Mac had to steady herself against a console. “I hope I get used to variable gravity some day. My stomach can’t handle much more of this.”
Rae’s drone said, “I can take one, and I have three standard drones waiting outside this compartment to take the others.”
Cale grinned and shook his head. “Damn, I’m just too used to being low man on the totem pole.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I didn’t think of it either.”
They each picked up one of the unconscious bodies and carried them out to the waiting drones. Rae returned to the computer compartment, retrieved the fourth body, and then the group made their way up two decks to the medical bay. They placed each one on a bed, and Rae restored full gravity. Mac frowned at the mismatched group. They had no common uniform like the UDA, but something was off-kilter. She found herself staring at the woman. She was a few years older than herself, with close cropped black hair, and a thin dimpled scar along her jaw line.
“Cale, aren’t these UDA issue boots?”
He looked up from attaching a dosing & monitoring cuff to one of the men, and nodded. “Maybe. They sure look like ours.
Voyage of the Valkyrie Page 9
