Unfaithful Covenant

by Michael Anderle

The following minutes passed in the kind of easy, comfortable silence Erik had grown accustomed to when spending time around Jia. He didn’t bother to turn on recordings or bother with instrument readouts. Instead, he sat in his seat, entertaining himself by reflecting on the upcoming mission and how when it came to the war of applied arrogance, the Core kept losing to them.

  In the beginning, his quest might have seemed foolish or insane, but he was now traveling the galaxy defeating his enemy, drawing closer and closer to their leaders. He knew the truth about why his men had been murdered, and that fueled his vengeance. Sophia Vand had been the first, but she wouldn’t be the last.

  Erik grinned at the thought, not caring if that made him seem bloodthirsty. The truth was, he didn’t seem bloodthirsty. He was. The Core shouldn’t have come after his soldiers if they didn’t want to die. They’d made their choice and were now suffering the consequences.

  The planet loomed large in front of the ship. Jia’s hard burn and careful course were designed for them to skim past it on their way to their final destination. Erik used to worry about having too much time to think, but with Jia around, he never worried. There was always someone to keep him from spiraling too far down into darkness. They had saved each other in their own ways.

  Erik smiled at her, but she was too busy looking at sensor readouts to notice. Having something to look forward to after cleansing the UTC of its greatest filth was nice.

  “We’re about to pass in front of the planet,” Jia announced. “If anyone’s watching this part of the system, they’re going to spot the ship. It seemed like a good idea to hide here temporarily, but it could end up costing us that.”

  Erik nodded. “Adding a day or two to take the long way just to avoid anyone seeing us would be a waste. If the Fleet ships don’t buy our credentials, it won’t matter what direction we came from.”

  The cockpit shook slightly from Jia’s constant course corrections. Staying close to the planet seemed pointless given what they were about to do and what she just said, but Jia seemed like she needed the distraction, so Erik didn’t question it.

  “What the…” Jia frowned, her eyes dipping. She nodded at a short-range sensor display. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Erik leaned forward. Two fast-moving dots had emerged from the other side of the planet. He didn’t need to be an astronomer to understand the tight formation and flight path weren’t natural, and he doubted they’d run into some stray aliens.

  “Identification?” he asked.

  Jia shook her head. “Nothing yet. No transmissions, no transmitted signals, no light signals. They’re going out of their way not to let us know who they are.”

  “Yeah, so clearly, they’re not Fleet.” Erik crawled into the copilot’s seat and fastened his harness. “I’d hate to think we jumped right into a Core trap. It’d be a big hit to the ego.”

  “Everyone, strap yourselves in,” Jia announced to the ship. “Two unidentified ships are coming up on us fast. We don’t know who they are yet, and we have not established that they are friendly.”

  “I’ll get ready to reroute power to shields,” Lanara replied. “I would have hoped for at least a day of quiet before this kind of crap came up. I’m glad I didn’t start working on anything. I swear, it’s like you two are wearing a galactic tracking device.”

  Erik waved his hand over the control panel and tapped a code on a virtual keyboard. Their weapons status display popped up, but he didn’t deploy any of the turrets or missiles. He remained grateful for the recent additions since he was never as confident in space as he was on the ground.

  “Let’s keep it nice and friendly until we know who they are,” Erik suggested. “Don’t want to start an unnecessary fight.”

  “Emma, we’re going to need you.” Jia fired the reverse thrusters to slow the ship. “Sorry.”

  “I’m now fully engaged with the Argo’s systems,” Emma announced. “And I’m directly coordinating with Lanara. We’ll do everything we can to support you in your attempts to expose the enemy fleshbags to hard vacuum.”

  “We don’t know they are enemies, not that they’re acting friendly. Maybe Lanara’s right, and we do have some ridiculous galactic tracker.” She scoffed at Erik. “Or your Lady really likes messing with us.”

  “Or both,” Erik muttered, his gaze fixed on the sensor readout.

  The enemy ships slowed and moved away from one another. The Argo would close to engagement distance in minutes at their current relative speeds.

  “Powering up the shields,” Jia announced with a frown. “If they find that threatening, they shouldn’t be this far away from the main system flight paths.” She narrowed her eyes as a comm display blinked and reached toward it. “We’re still far for real-time comm, so let’s see what they have to say.”

  “Attention unidentified vessel,” said a gravelly voice. “Reduce your speed and prepare to be boarded. We will take anything valuable aboard. If you cooperate, you don’t have to die here. We’ll even be nice and let you set off a distress beacon so someone can come and pick you up. Resist, and we’ll pull what we need off your ship after we cut it open with you inside. I’m sure you’ve got something juicy you didn’t want anyone to find.”

  Erik grunted in irritation. “Pirates. They’re probably preying on smugglers. It’s not worth sitting around if they’re hoping for normal traffic.”

  “Pirates trying to steal from smugglers.” Jia rolled her eyes. “At least Tellvane gave the Guild men a chance to join her syndicate. It’s amazing that criminals accomplish anything when they’re busy shooting each other in the back.”

  Erik cracked his knuckles, all doubt gone. This would be a nice warmup for whoever and whatever they would face on New Samarkand. There was something almost relaxing about a battle of pure self-defense. No complicated justifications were needed, only the basic animal instinct to defend oneself.

  Jia angled the ship away from the planet with a quick burst of the attitude thrusters. She sped up, and the enemy ships renewed their acceleration seconds later, now understanding this wouldn’t be an easy surrender. Erik’s hands flew across the weapons controls. The point-defense and offensive laser and plasma turrets deployed smoothly. A moment later, one rack of missiles extended beneath the ship, and the torpedo launchers uncovered themselves.

  Erik grinned. “I bet those pirate bastards didn’t expect teeth this sharp on a ship this size. Should we warn them off? Give them a chance?”

  “And let them pick off somebody else who isn’t packing these kinds of weapons?” Jia shook her head. “We’re doing Fleet a favor. They might be going after smugglers today, but two weeks from now, they might hit a liner or transport. Pirate scum.”

  Erik nodded, more than happy to take out pirates. In his experience, they lied more often than not about letting people go. The crew of both approaching ships likely already had dozens, if not hundreds of murders, to their credit. It was time for some justice.

  Jia’s eyes narrowed. “Not much time left, but I did think of one reason to let them go. Given our location, size, and sensor signature, there’s still a chance no one has spotted us unless they’re looking right at this planet. We start a major battle, people are going to notice, even this far from New Samarkand.”

  “We’ll have to take the chance,” Erik commented. “If we run, they’ll just follow us.”

  Jia scoffed. “We need to bring a smaller ship along with us.”

  “At the rate we’re going, there’ll be the Army, the Fleet, and us.”

  “We’re about to enter maximum effective engagement distance,” Jia reported. “It’s time to take down those pirates.”

  The enemy ships had widened their gap considerably. Concentrating fire in one area was no longer a viable strategy to take them down, and Erik and Jia still didn’t have a clear idea of the enemy’s capabilities.

  That was one of the advantages frontier pirates possessed. Their ships and configurations wer
e nonstandard, meaning that even Fleet ships had to exercise caution to avoid being surprised by an enemy with unexpectedly robust firepower.

  Now that they were closer, magnified images and sensor readouts highlighted a pair of top-side laser turrets and large single missile launchers under each flat, ugly vessel. The pirates had demonstrated good maneuverability, but unless Lanara had a pair of long-lost sisters, there was no way their engineers could match her. That limited their ability to quickly shift shield protection, which, combined with their limited weapons capability, put them at a disadvantage. As it stood, the Argo had more weapons than both ships combined.

  It was time to make space a safer place. Erik linked the firing controls to the turrets, including the plasma turrets, into two groups, top and bottom. The pirates continued speeding toward them, so far apart now it’d be easy for them to attack the Argo from opposite sides. Their strategy was crystallizing.

  “Level out the shield power around the whole ship,” Jia ordered. “At least until we’ve picked one of these ships off.”

  “Adjusting shield power and reactor output,” Lanara replied. “I hope everyone’s strapped in. Rerouting power from internal grav field emitters. Things might be a little bumpier than usual.”

  Erik and Jia ignored the front cameras to concentrate on their sensor displays. Despite what people saw in films, the huge distances and invisible nature of the primarily laser weapons involved in most ship-to-ship battles meant that visual input, even when magnified, was less helpful than multi-spectrum sensor readouts. It wasn’t sexy, but it kept you alive.

  Jia rolled the ship onto its side relative to the approaching enemy, counter-thrusting to kill the roll so quickly someone might have forgotten they were in space. The maneuver provided kill arcs to both groups of turrets, but the pirates didn’t change course.

  Arrogant enemies were the best. They made battles more efficient.

  “Almost there,” Jia announced. She took shallow breaths and kept her hands steady.

  Erik spun the turret groups toward the enemies and opened fire. His sensor readout lit up with his beams and plasma discharge. The pirates thrust to the side without rolling or changing direction, their turrets counterattacking. The Argo and the pirates narrowly missed one another.

  The pirates ripped past and flipped their ships with expert thrusts. They continued barreling away from their inertia. Missiles burst from their launchers and zoomed toward the Argo. Jia rolled the ship to its other side and angled it down relative to the pirates and their missiles. The projectiles changed course and continued their dogged pursuit of the Argo.

  “Handle point-defense, Emma, but make it look close,” Erik ordered. “I’d rather they get overconfident. Jia, line me up with one of them so I can try our new toys.”

  She smiled. “Don’t use them up. You never know what we’ll run into later. I’d hate to run dry and have to take down the pirate mothership. Lanara, give us more forward shield power.”

  Erik’s body strained against his harness, thanks to another hard lateral burn and Lanara’s reduction siphoning power from the internal grav field emitters. The enemy’s complacency regarding their victory became obvious when they both initiated low, long burns to slow down. Their large missiles barreled toward the Argo.

  “These guys have gotten too used to taking out smugglers with a spare turret or two,” Erik muttered. “They’re about to have a very bad day.”

  The point-defense lasers came to life and ripped into the missiles. Both exploded, flares in space, announcing the battle to any who might be watching. Erik didn’t care. He was going to show these pirates what happened when they assumed.

  Jia spun the ship onto its belly and accelerated toward one of the pirate ships. They finally understood their mistake and initiated their own burn, but the Argo’s approach angle meant only one of them had a clear line to their target.

  Erik’s stomach gurgled to register its complaints as Jia rolled from side to side to avoid the pirates’ lasers. The Argo’s turrets delivered their invisible streaks of death, marked only by puffs of debris and new holes in the pirate vessel. A continual stream of fire from the plasma turret made for brilliant fireworks, the power dissipating at first due to the distance, then exploding across the surface of the enemy ship in small bright flashes. The back of the missile launcher exploded, and the chunks hurled away from the bottom of the wounded vessel.

  Pirate lasers raked the Argo. Red lights flashed as a diagram marked the damage to different sections of the ship. Nothing more than minor surface armor destruction, pockmarks compared to the holes they were boring through the enemy ship and shearing off its thrusters. A small cloud of debris grew behind the pirate ship, which was now rolling.

  “These new shields and armor are paying for themselves already,” Jia commented with a grin. “Now finish them off. I know you want to test the missiles. You’ve got five seconds before I turn.”

  Erik snickered since he already had a missile lock. He pressed a button for a single launch. One of the weapons blasted loose and flew toward the pirate ship. Jia pulled up and kicked in the primary thrusters to whip the Argo up at an almost ninety-degree angle. The pirate turrets swung around and nailed the back of the Argo just as the missile rammed into the front of the pirate ship and blew it into a metallic cloud.

  The other pirate ship didn’t waste their friend’s death. They’d taken the opportunity to circle around the rear of the Argo and line up another missile. This time Emma didn’t toy with them, just picked off the missile with ease.

  Erik chuckled. “Sometimes I forget how overstuffed with weapons and defenses this ship is. It’s like the world’s sexiest little destroyer.”

  “I think you need to adjust your expectations,” Emma suggested. “These are common gun goblins with scraped-together ships, not the leaders of the Core.”

  “Not leaders of anything, not with the fight they’ve been putting up. This almost isn’t fair.”

  “They’re the ones who chose to be pirates and attack us,” Jia replied, no humor in her tone. “And they haven’t been fair to their victims.”

  “Not disagreeing. Let’s finish this bastard off before he gets lucky. How are we doing damage-wise?”

  “Minor hull damage all over the ship, moderate damage to some rear grav emitters and thrusters,” Emma reported. “No significant reduction in overall power, despite minor internal routing issues. Shields emitters remain undamaged, and there has only been a small reduction in maneuverability because of minor damage to a thruster.”

  “Charging in close might not have been worth it,” Erik concluded. “Fine. Let’s stick to this guy’s blind spot and finish him off with the turrets.”

  Jia completed a wide turn back toward the pirate ship, which was also attempting to circle back on the Argo. The pirate took extreme-range potshots with his laser turrets but hit nothing.

  “Get ready,” Jia announced. “I’m going to bring us under him. Finish him off in one pass.”

  “Do what you need to,” Erik replied, flexing his fingers. “I’ll do what I do best—blow things up.”

  Jia spun the ship with expert ease. The Argo was already accelerating toward the underside of the pirate ship before it completed its turn. Erik wondered if Lanara’s redirection in power from the grav emitters was worth it, given that he was also grateful he had not eaten in a while. He ignored his protesting stomach and opened fire on the enemy.

  The pirate turrets nailed the Argo a couple of times, gouging a line into the top and narrowly missing a plasma turret before they lost their attack angle, but Erik’s lasers sliced deeply into the pirate vessel. Close-range hits from the plasma turret blew out huge pieces, exposing the interior. He kept up the attack, the turrets pounding on the bottom of the pirate vessel, melting, shredding and cutting away chunks. Internal explosions rippled through the ship and blew it into larger chunks than his friend.

  Jia let out a sigh of relief. “It’s over.”

  “Goo
d job,” Lanara sent. “You managed not to kill us all. There’s only so much I can do in space, but I should be able to patch up most of this within a couple of days once we’re on the planet.”

  Erik disengaged the weapons, smiling as the ship shook from the turrets and missile launcher folding back into their hidden compartments. “We took out two ships with only minor damage. Not bad.”

  “Yes.” Jia took a deep breath and let her head rest against the back of her seat. “But was that equipment or skill?”

  “Both. Battle always comes down to equipment or skill, so the best thing to do is make sure you have both if you want to win.”

  Jia gave Erik a sidelong glance. “We might have just given our position away to everyone in the system. If they have friends, they’ll come looking.”

  “If that’s the quality of pirate coming, I’m not sure I care.” Erik unfastened his harness. “We should hard-burn straight for New Samarkand and tell the Fleet they have two less pirates to worry about.”

  The door to the cockpit opened, and Malcolm stumbled inside. Jia raised an eyebrow, and Erik snickered at his outfit: boxers and a white undershirt.

  “We’re not dead, are we?” Malcolm sputtered. He rubbed a large bump on his head. “Beds need emergency harnesses.”

  “You were told to strap yourself in,” Emma commented.

  “You didn’t give me enough time,” Malcolm whined. “I did eventually.”

  Jia chuckled. “Go back to sleep. We’ll let you know if we need you. Even our luck isn’t so bad that we’ll be attacked twice on the way to a planet.”

  Malcolm’s brows lifted. “I think I’m going to get dressed. I don’t want to die in my underwear.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  A half-hour later, Jia joined Erik in the galley, a scowl on her face. “We need to go back to the jumpship right away.”

  Malcolm, in pants and a purple Hawaiian shirt featuring explosions, sat at a table eating soup. Erik was on the opposite of him, working on what looked like a poor man’s attempt at roast chicken. They looked up from their meals in surprise at Jia’s declaration.