Jason swung around, horrified. “What?”
***
“They have us,” Cooke snapped. “Their sensors just penetrated our cloak.”
“Drop the cloak, raise shields and open fire,” Glen ordered. The lights brightened as the cloaking device was deactivated, revealing Dauntless to the enemy ships. “Fire at will.”
“Firing,” Cooke reported.
Glen braced himself as heavy phase cannons flared out in the darkness of space, blasting steams of deadly energy towards the enemy ship. Her shields shuddered under the impact as she twisted, her crew too surprised to fire back for several seconds. Cooke launched a spread of missiles, knocking down the target’s rear shields. A moment later, her drive section was reduced to scrap metal.
“Target crippled, sir,” Cooke said. “Her power curves are gone.”
“Prep the Marines for boarding duties,” Glen ordered, as two more enemy craft rotated to face Dauntless. “Continue firing.”
Dauntless shuddered as missiles slammed into her shields, then returned fire towards the enemy craft. Neither of them seemed keen on pushing into the teeth of her fire, even though they could probably win if all of them attacked at once. Glen wasn't entirely surprised; pirates and raiders didn't seem to be inclined to actually put their own lives at risk. The enemy light cruiser – probably their command ship, according to the tactical staff – was pulling back from the planet. If nothing else, they’d saved the planet from being bombarded.
He watched as a flight of incoming missiles were swatted out of space by the point defence, then Cooke fired another barrage of his own. The enemy didn’t seem to have trained as a unit, Glen noted; their datanets weren't linked together, preventing them from combining their force into a single entity. That wasn't surprising either, he knew, but it had its own dangers. The behaviour of such an ill-prepared crew could be unpredictable.
“Three destroyers and a frigate turning to engage us,” Cooke reported. “The other ships are falling back.”
“Take us directly towards them,” Glen ordered. “Fire at will.”
Dauntless went to rapid fire, peppering the enemy craft with phase cannons and antimatter blasts. The enemy craft broke off and scattered, one of them leaking plasma from a nasty hull breach. Cooke slammed another missile into her hull and the entire craft vanished in a ball of superheated plasma. Her companions kept running, bringing up their portal generators. Moments later, they slipped into hyperspace and vanished.
“One target destroyed, three escaped,” Cooke said.
“Take us towards the final craft,” Glen said.
***
“Inconvenient,” Jason observed. If there was one rule that applied on all bridges, no matter who they served, it was that the commanding officer could never be seen to panic. “Trigger the explosive charge on Madden.”
There was a pause. “Charge failed, sir,” Dana reported. There was a grim note to her voice. “Data downlink suggests that the entire computer network crashed.”
Jason swallowed a curse as he analysed the situation. The Federation cruiser had crippled one of his ships, destroyed another and forced most of the remaining ships to scatter. There was no hope of destroying Madden before the Federation Marines boarded her; thankfully, the crew had been equipped with suicide implants and collars, but they might still pick up some physical evidence they could use to track the raiders down. But the only people who knew the full story were on Havoc. He hadn't told anyone else more than they needed to know.
“Open a portal,” he ordered, finally. They’d drop static bombs, then vanish in hyperspace. If nothing else, the feds would be too busy with Madden to come after them. “Take us out of here.”
He scowled as the portal opened up in front of the ship. This little disaster was bound to upset Ford and his mystery backers. The Federation would look good ... and the raiders would no longer seem unstoppable. And it would worry his crew. Some of them might even consider mutiny.
“Drop static bombs,” he said. “And then set a random course.”
***
“Enemy ships have disengaged, sir,” Cooke said. “They’re gone.”
Glen scowled. There was no point in trying to give chase; even if the enemy didn't use static bombs, Dauntless had other priorities. The crippled enemy ship had to be boarded before the crew managed to destroy her. And they had to do what they could to reassure the locals that the Federation Navy would protect them.
“Stand down from red alert,” he ordered. It was unlikely that the enemy had left any ships in the system. “Take us back to the cripple, then launch the Marines.”
He settled back into his command chair, forcing himself to relax. “And pass a general signal to all hands,” he added. “Well done.”
Sandy should have been here, he thought. Dauntless had faced her first real combat test and won. The enemy had broken and scattered, losing two ships in the process. It wasn't quite as dangerous as facing Dragons, he conceded reluctantly, but it had convinced the crew that their training had prepared them for war.
He watched as the Marines boarded the enemy ship, their armoured suits sending back a constant stream of data to the bridge. There were Captains who couldn't resist the urge to micromanage, to offer instructions to the Marines; Glen knew better than to try. Even without their CO, the Marines knew what they were doing. If they ran into trouble, they could probably deal with it before Glen even managed to get the first word out of his mouth.
His console bleeped. “Captain,” Cynthia’s voice said, “I would very much like to board the raider ship.”
“Once the Marines have cleared it, you may board,” Glen said. He silently gave her points for making the request. Maybe there was more to her than he’d thought. “But wait until we know it’s safe.”
Another message popped up on his display. “Captain, this is Lieutenant Rosado,” a new voice said. “They’re all dead. All of them. And we don’t know what killed the bastards.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sandy felt ... sick.
For a long moment, she was utterly unsure of what had happened or where she was. She hadn't felt so bad since she and her classmates had celebrated their freedom from school by buying several dozen bottles of alcohol and drinking them in a wild party that had left them all with very sore heads. Had she been drinking? But the systems didn't feel as if she’d been drunk ... memory returned and her eyes snapped open. She had been on Dawson and now she was on a starship. There was no mistaking the faint vibration she could feel through the deck.
She was lying on the deck of a large compartment, with dozens of naked men and a handful of naked women around her. No, they weren't entirely naked; they all had a single black collar wrapped around their necks. Sandy reached up and felt a similar collar around her neck, seemingly one solid piece of plastic. It refused to break, no matter how desperately she tried to pull it away from her body. There was a groan nearby and she turned to see a pale-faced man staggering to his feet. He looked as though he was going to be sick.
“Lie still,” she said. “We were stunned. The effects will wear off eventually.”
“Too right,” Jess’s voice said. Sandy turned to see her friend, also naked, sitting upright. “It does feel bad, but it also goes away. Eventually.”
The man groaned, but sat down on the deck. One by one, the others awoke and looked around blearily. Not all of them looked pleasant, Sandy realised, silently grateful that they’d been stunned before being transported to the ship. If they’d been fit and well, they might have tried to have some fun with the female crewmembers. A dull clang echoed through the compartment as a hatch appeared in the far bulkhead; moments later, two men in full combat armour stepped into the compartment. They weren't carrying visible weapons, but they didn't need them. Augmented strength could carve through flesh and bone like tissue paper.
“Good morning,” one of the men said. His voice was completely atonal, stripped of all human feeling. “You are here because
you were looking for employment and weren't too particular about what you actually did. Congratulations; you have found employment. You will be paid, at the very least, spacers minimum wage. If you refuse our offer, you will be returned to Dawson, where you will never get another one.”
And we can believe as much or as little of that as we like, Sandy thought. Given how much trouble the raiders – if they were the raiders – had gone to collect their new recruits, it was unlikely they would detour back to Dawson to abandon anyone who thought better of joining them. It was much more likely that anyone who wanted to back out would be flung out of the nearest airlock. Refusing is not an option.
“You will note that you have all been collared,” the man continued. “Those collars are intended to maintain discipline. Should you refuse to obey orders, you will be shocked; should you continue to disobey orders or try to betray us, you will be killed. The collars are designed to be impossible to remove without the correct code. Should you fail to input the correct code, the collar will explode. Your brain will be reduced to mush.”
Sandy shuddered. There were prisons in the Federation that operated on the same basic principle. Someone who walked too far from the central building would discover themselves immobilised or simply killed outright. Escape was impossible, as any attempt to remove the implant would be fatal. She had to admit that the raiders had come up with a neat system to ensure that their crewmen followed orders, no matter how unpleasant. Those who failed to obey would be tortured, then killed if they proved too stubborn to give in.
“You will be called through the hatch one by one,” the man concluded. “There, you will be interviewed by our crew. Should you fail to please them ...”
He tapped his throat meaningfully. Sandy shuddered. The collar probably worked by simulating the pain centres in the brain, like a handful of torture devices the Dragons had been reputed to use. Several doses of such pain would be enough to break anyone, even Sandy or Jess. Or it would simply kill them, if overused.
“First person,” the man snapped. “Tomas Abrams.”
It was nearly an hour before Sandy was called forward, into a small room. A dark-skinned man sat there, studying her ID chip in a datapad. He looked up at her, his eyes flickering over her breasts, then motioned for her to sit down. Apart from her nakedness, it was almost like any other job interview. The thought would have been amusing if she hadn't been able to feel the collar around her throat. Could it detect an outright lie? There was no way to know until she told one and then it might be too late.
She forced herself to remain calm as the man returned his attention to the datapad. “Your record states that you embezzled money from the militia,” he said, without preamble. “How did you do it?”
“I was a computer tech,” Sandy said, recalling her fictional background. “One of my responsibilities was supervising the money transfers from the ship’s fund to the crewmen, running the onboard banking system. Jess and I set up a command in the system that transferred a credit to us every time someone put money into the network. By the time we were found out, I had amassed over twenty thousand credits.”
The interviewer lifted his eyebrows. “And what did your friend do?”
“She ... talked me into it,” Sandy said, trying to project the right amount of nervousness and humiliation. The story they’d worked out suggested that Jess had threatened Sandy into helping her, then ensured that they both took the fall when the truth came out. “We would have been rich.”
“No doubt,” the interviewer agreed. “And what happened?”
“A routine audit was moved forward,” Sandy said. “I had planned to dump the credits into the Federation Bank when we reached Fairfax. But they performed the audit and realised that my account was larger than it should have been. After that, they knew the truth.”
“I see,” the interviewer said. There was a long uncomfortable pause as he studied her though dark eyes. “We have need of computer techs, but I see from your record that you also have qualifications in navigating and tactical operations?”
“Yes, sir,” Sandy said. “My CO was a great believer in cross-training.”
“You will be taken to the computer centre, where our techs will cross-examine you and then put you to work,” the interviewer informed her. “I must tell you that we will not take it so lightly if you steal money from us. You will be thrown to the men.”
Sandy nodded. Somehow, she wasn't surprised.
“Sir,” she said carefully, “what about my friend?”
“We will decide her position after we interview her,” the interviewer said. “One of the crew will guide you to the computer centre. Behave yourself.”
A hatch opened in the far wall, revealing a grim-faced man wearing a black uniform. He led Sandy out into the next room, then passed her a pair of trousers and a shirt. There was no insignia on the uniform, she realised, nothing to suggest what she’d joined. The man waited impatiently until she’d dressed, then led the way through yet another hatch into a corridor that led deeper into the ship. Trying to match the deck plan with ships she knew, Sandy followed him, keeping her eyes and ears open for useful intelligence.
Most pirate ships were poorly maintained, she knew from long experience. This ship seemed to be reasonably well maintained. Indeed, it lacked the makeshift appearance common to older vessels in the Colonial Militia, where spare parts from a dozen different factories had often been jury-rigged into working together. If she hadn't known better, she would have wondered if she was on a Federation Navy starship. Only the feds had the resources to produce several different standards of spare parts at the same time.
“In here,” her escort grunted. He opened a hatch, revealing a large room crammed with computer cores. Sandy kept her expression blank, even though she recognised two of the cores as being top-of-the-line mil-spec Federation Navy gear. “The officer will deal with you.”
A pale-faced man, so pale he had to be an albino, appeared from behind one of the cores and beckoned her. There was something in the way he walked that told Sandy that he'd had all of his determination beaten out of him, perhaps by the collar around his neck. His eyes had seen terrible things and he’d been unable to look away. Or, perhaps, he’d been forced to watch as the raiders slaughtered humans and aliens alike.
“Greetings,” he said, in a faint voice. “You are our new tech?”
“Yes, sir,” Sandy said. She had to pass this test – and she hoped, desperately, that she knew enough to please them. It was unlikely they would let her near the navigational systems until they trusted her. Her father had insisted that she learn the nuts and bolts of starship operations, but she wasn't as good as a regular computer tech. But then, no one would expect that of a colonial officer. “I just came onboard today.”
“My name is James,” the albino said. “Come with me.”
Three hours later, Sandy felt utterly exhausted. James had gone over everything from basic data entry to debugging rogue computer cores. He’d even touched on blending human and alien technology together, which Sandy knew enough to avoid if at all possible. There were enough horror stories of problems caused by integrating Dragon computers into human starships to convince her that only the desperate – or the fools – would try.
But James hadn't looked unhappy with her work. He’d merely pointed her to a tiny cabin and told her to get some sleep. Tomorrow, Sandy told herself, she’d try and work out just where they were – and how best to get in touch with Jess. Once they were speaking again, they could decide what to do next.
***
“Not a great success, Commodore,” Mr. Ford said.
Jason felt a flicker of anger which he repressed, savagely. Losing two ships, one of them almost certainly captured by the enemy, was a major problem – and a black mark on his record. The mercenary community was nowhere near as tight-assed as the Federation, but they wouldn't be so inclined to serve with a commander they blamed for losing two starships and their crews. Crewing his new ships had just
become a major problem.
“No, sir,” he agreed, tightly. No wine this time, for sure. “However, I believe I warned you, more than once, that our pattern was predictable – and the feds predicted it. Had they been able to station more ships in the system, we would have been looking at a total loss.”
Mr. Ford lifted an eyebrow. “Are you saying that it doesn't matter?”
“Losing the ships is a major hassle,” Jason said, keeping his voice calm. “But it is not a complete disaster. Our security precautions will ensure that the Federation cannot use their brief advantage to track us down, not when hardly anyone knows the location of our base. Your overall plan, whatever it is, is still good.”
He paused, meaningfully. “It is unavoidable that this will give a moral boost to those concerned with protecting various worlds from attack,” he admitted. “The Federation Navy will gloat about the glorious victory and the Colonial Militia will be embarrassed, but relieved that a world was saved from attack. It will only hurt them the greater, sir, when we move ahead with the rest of the plan.”
Knight's Move Page 24
