“Twenty thousand clicks,” Jase said with intense concentration.
The drone was taking our sensor data now, constantly presenting me with a range of firing solutions. I selected a sixty five percent hit probability, then let the drone take charge. Soon the targeting reticule on screen turned green, indicating the Raven was in range, but the drone stayed put while the scout came hurtling towards us.
Jase gave me an impatient look. “Are we shooting, Skipper, or waving as they go by?”
“Any second now.”
At last, the drone decided it was time to go to work. A point of brilliant white light shot away from the hull and curved away to starboard.
“Go baby!” Jase exclaimed.
Marie’s eyes narrowed in surprise. “Is that a drone?”
“It’s only a little drone,” I said.
It flew towards a point well ahead of the scout, then when it reached the Raven’s projected trajectory, it turned sharply to go head to head with its target.
“They’ll be needing clean underwear about now!” Jase said.
“How’d you get that past the navy inspectors?” Marie asked.
“What inspectors?” I said lightly, glancing at Jase. “Does Izin know anything about inspectors?”
Jase shrugged, feigning ignorance.
We’d been checked many times by the navy, but the physical space the ASD launcher occupied was small and Izin had the compartment cleverly shielded. If the navy found such an obvious ship killer hiding in the Lining’s bow, they’d have impounded her on suspicion of being a privateer. She wasn’t the only trader to carry such a weapon, but she might have been the smallest.
Trade ships were allowed any shield and defensive weapon they could afford, but hull puncturing hypervelocity anti-ship drones were reserved for Earth Navy ships alone. Even the Brotherhood preferred disabling weapons to ship killers. After all, there was no profit in destroying their prey. They wanted to capture operational ships with their cargoes intact.
Marie watched the lightweight drone track towards the Raven scout. “You’ll lose your ship if the navy ever finds out about that thing.”
Before Lena hired me, that might have been true. Now I could probably get an upgrade, courtesy of the EIS. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” I said as the glare of the drone began to fade into the Shroud’s gas and dust.
“The Raven’s overcharging his shield,” Jase reported as the scout ship began dumping all available energy into its defensive field, not that it would do any good against the drone’s meter long penetrator.
“They don’t realize what it is,” I said. They were acting like it was a simple torpedo that would detonate against their shields – a fatal miscalculation.
“Man, they’re cooking their engines!” Jase said.
The scout’s high velocity made it difficult to maneuver as our little robot-of-death closed on its target. The anti-ship drone’s marker on our screen flashed as it entered its terminal phase and began charging its penetrator warhead. The Raven scout’s sensors would have detected the sudden surge in energy from the drone, alerting them too late to the danger they were facing.
“They’ve stopped scanning us!” Jase said.
“They’re pulling their sensors,” I said, imagining the panic spreading on their bridge. “They’re going to bubble.”
“Is there time?” Marie asked.
“No,” I said somberly. “Ravens aren’t equipped to fast bubble.” Their ships sacrificed fast spacetime distorters for extra weapons, or in the scout’s case, more powerful sensors.
There was a flash as the drone hit the outer edge of the shield and fired its slender, electrostatically charged penetrator. Energy sparkled around the penetrator as it dived into the shield, then smashed through the hull. A tongue of orange flame burst from the scout’s bow as the chemical warhead exploded and the forward section of the Raven ship explosively decompressed. If it had been a reactive warhead, the scout would have been vaporized, but there was no way even Izin could hide such weapons from the navy.
The scout’s engines died and its shield collapsed as it lost main power. The scout’s surviving crew would be weightless and trapped in airtight compartments as the crippled ship drifted deeper into the Shroud.
Jase whistled. “Eat that Raven boys!”
Marie winced as she watched the wreck hurtle past us, completely out of control. “There’ll be survivors over there.”
“Not our problem!” Jase declared belligerently, itching to blast the wreck just to finish them off.
Marie gave me a concerned look. They might have been Ravens, but now they were human beings in trouble, trapped in a doomed ship. All her life, she’d lived by the ethos that you always helped fellow spacefarers in trouble, no matter who they were. It was more than tradition, it was who she was.
It wasn’t who I was.
“He’s right,” I said. “They’ll need rescuing, but not by us.” If the scout’s energy plant had survived, they might regain control, but odds were the Raven scout would never fly again. I glanced at Jase. “What are the two prowlers doing?”
Jase suddenly remembered there were two very dangerous combat ships still watching us. “Their energy levels are spiking!”
They were going to bubble, but were they coming in for us, or running?
Ugo’s ugly face appeared on screen, thrown up automatically when the incoming signal reached us. “We’re leaving now. Good luck, Marie.”
Before Marie could speak, a warning alarm sounded. Ugo’s face vanished, replaced by images of two gray metal ships barely two hundred clicks ahead. One was a long rectangular ore transporter, bristling with weapons. The other a spherical intersystem tug with a single heavy naval gun mounted ahead of its four enormous maneuvering engines. Beyond the Raven combat ships, two markers showed where they’d been moments before. The autonav kept the ghost images on screen longer than they were actually there, so we understood what had happened. The Ravens immediately began extending sensors through their hulls, preparing to target us. Our screen went blank as the Lining’s autonav pulled our sensors and fast charged our spacetime distorters. For a moment, the flight deck was filled with silence as we held our breaths, knowing it was a race between our automated escape system and their automated weapons.
Two hundred kilometers away the tug fired its one big energy weapon as the Lining’s bubble formed. The Raven crews on the two combat ships saw a dead straight line of light flash away into the interstellar depths as their energy blast streaked through the space we’d occupied a fraction of a second before.
On the Lining’s flight deck, we stared at the blank screen until it filled with numbers describing everything from bubble integrity to hull temperature. It was enough to tell us we were superluminal and safe.
“Be ready to bubble when you see double!” I said with a triumphant grin.
“I’ve heard it a hundred times,” Marie said, “but that’s the first time I’ve ever seen it done!”
“Done by the best!” Jase yelled with both fists in the air. “Yeah!”
“Did the Heureux make it?” Marie asked.
“I’m sure Ugo got her away,” I said. He and I might not have been on the best of terms, but he was a first class pilot. He’d be long gone before the Ravens got anywhere near the Heureux. “So, where’s Vargis headed?”
“He told me on Icetop he was going to scan the Codex down to its component atoms. He didn’t just want what was in it, he wanted its technology too.”
“That’s your clue?”
“He didn’t say he was taking it back to the Core Systems or to Earth, or even copying the data on it. He was very specific.”
“How does that help me find him?”
“Do you know how to scan a piece of equipment like that, down to the atomic level?”
“Sure,” I said. “How?”
“You need a picometric scanner. Do you know how many there are out here?”
“I’m guessing . . . six
?”
“There’s only one and it belongs to Biosphere Builders Incorporated. Heard of them?”
“Yeah, they genetically engineer indestructible Earth organisms to take over entire planets.”
She nodded. “They have a research facility on a candidate world sixty light years from here. We did a delivery there once, when I was young.”
“It’s a long shot,” I said, unconvinced.
“Do you know who owns BBI?” When I shrugged, she said, “The Consortium.”
The Consortium was rumored to control many companies. It didn’t mean it was true. Nevertheless, if she was right, it narrowed the odds considerably. “And the name of this biosphere the Consortium is building for all mankind?”
“Deadwood.”
Chapter Five : Deadwood
Terraforming Candidate World
Riarnon System
Outer Cygnus Region
0.994 Earth Normal Gravity
1,029 light years from Sol
15,400 inhabitants
Deadwood was a mega-flora planet that had suffered a cataclysmic mass extinction event four million years ago. A planetoid had passed close by, gravitationally triggering seismic shifts in the planet’s tectonic plates causing more than six hundred volcanic eruptions. Billions of tons of dust and volcanic gas had spewed into the oxygen rich atmosphere, strangling most photosynthetic dependant life forms. Only a handful of species sheltering in caves and living off ecosystems built on fungal growth survived. The giant flora that had dominated the planet for over half a billion years did not. Buried under volcanic ash and starved of sunlight, the mega-trees died and slowly petrified. Its continents were now covered by massive stone forests that formed a woven monument to the great plants that had once ruled supreme and were no more. The planetoid itself – known to the colonists as the Tree Killer – had fallen into a stable orbit a third closer to the system’s star than Deadwood. Geological analysis indicated the planetoid was not a native of that system, but a rogue world that had drifted in from interstellar space before wreaking destruction upon its hapless victim.
The catastrophe not only destroyed the planet’s rich ecosystem, it deterred other interstellar civilizations from colonizing it – an unusual outcome for a world that had been well suited to oxygen breathing life forms. Over the next several million years the atmosphere cleared and the species that had survived emerged from their subterranean sanctuaries to repopulate the planet’s surface. When mankind reached Deadwood, it was still a ghost of its earlier ecological diversity, although it retained the potential to become a rare jewel – if Earth was prepared to provide the polish. Most important of all, prior claims had long been abandoned.
According to the Tau Cetins, there were over fifty million habitable planets in the galaxy, an infinitesimally small number compared to the trillions of planets orbiting the galaxy’s two hundred billion stars. Our problem was that most were off limits because they were already inhabited by some form of intelligent life, or were deemed close to spawning such life.
Deadwood was an exception.
It was a long haul from Earth and it needed a lot of work, but given a few centuries of planetary engineering and a name change, it might just become mankind’s second home. Human Civilization consisted of hundreds of colonies on marginally habitable worlds and thousands of artificial habitats in economically useful locations, but there was no truly perfect Earth-like world. We were, after all, picking from the scraps left by a great many other civilizations over the last billion years.
Commissioned by the Earth Council, Biosphere Builders Incorporated had set up one of the most sophisticated terraforming assessment programs in mankind’s history. Now they were determined to transform the once destroyed planet into a garden world and make the greatest profit ever recorded. They’d determined we had the technology and were now developing the planetary engineering plan that Earth would pay for. The one problem they faced was the tiny community of survivalists who’d beaten BBI to the planet by less than a century. They’d set up a back-to-nature home called Refuge among the petrified mega-trees and were now engaged in armed insurrection to keep the planet builders away.
Knowing BBI had spared no expense on their assessment facility, we unbubbled over the opposite side of the planet from their base. With our active sensors off and our transponder disabled, we were relatively stealthy, provided we flew on minimum power to keep our neutrino emissions low.
“I can hear two communications and one navigation satellite,” Jase said as he listened with passive sensors only. “There’s nothing actively scanning us.”
A three dimensional image of the planet rotated slowly on our wrap around screen. It wasn’t a real time optical feed, but a projection based on our relative aspect to the planet. It showed the BBI complex on the far side, located within a soft blue hemisphere that defined its tracking envelope, a vast volume covering a tenth of the planet’s airspace out to geosynchronous orbit. If we stayed where we were, eventually the base would pick us up as the planet’s rotation brought it over the horizon towards us.
Other than the main BBI facility, there were dozens of automated science stations scattered around the planet, but no sign of any independent settlements. It was as if the survivalists no longer existed.
“There’s nothing down there,” Jase said.
“Maybe they up and left?” I suggested.
“They’d never do that,” Marie said emphatically from her couch behind us. “Refuge is on the coast of the northern continent.”
“So where’s the beacon?” I asked.
The Lining should have been picking up Refuge’s locator beacon and automatically placing it on the planet’s image. Those beacons were fully autonomous and built to withstand any natural disaster so ships could always locate settlements from orbit, no matter what disaster might strike them.
“They don’t use locator beacons and they have no approach control,” Marie said.
“So how are we supposed to find them?” I asked as I started the Lining gliding towards the atmosphere.
“You’re not,” she said. “They don’t like visitors.”
I double checked our astrographics catalogue, the data base of human habitation meticulously maintained by Earth Navy. Surprisingly, there was no indication that the survivalist settlement had ever existed.
“If they’ve been here for ninety years,” I said, “how come there’s no record of them?”
“Their reference must have been deleted!” Marie said.
“Now who do you suppose could have done that?” I said bitterly, knowing only a substantial bribe could have wiped out all record of an entire colony.
The astrographics catalogue was automatically and constantly updated at every spaceport, with the latest changes carried by every ship and prioritized by entry date. It was an organic system that ensured all ships always had the most current information, although it normally took several years for an Earth sourced change to reach every ship and settlement in Mapped Space. Nevertheless, a deletion update could cause all record of a remote colony to eventually vanish, so no one would ever know it had ever existed, let alone that its inhabitants had a prior claim.
“All it takes is one corrupt officer in the right place to change the catalogue,” Marie said, “and BBI would have this world all to themselves.”
It seemed whenever I got near the Consortium, I smelled rats. It wasn’t an odor I appreciated. “No wonder the survivalists shoot strangers on sight!”
“Let’s hope they don’t shoot us!” Jase said.
“They may not trust us,” Marie said, “but they hate BBI.”
“Think you can find them?” I asked as we nosed into the upper atmosphere.
“I remember a big harbor, like an inland sea,” Marie said thoughtfully. “Cliffs on one side, a long peninsula on the other, and lots of giant stone trees.”
“Stone trees? That narrows it down to eighty percent of the planet’s land surface!” I zoomed Deadwood
’s image towards the small northern continent. On the southern coast was a curved expanse of water, trapped between a rocky peninsula and the mainland. “What do you think?”
“That’s it!” Marie said.
While there were data gathering stations all over the planet, both on land and in the oceans, the number of stations decreased markedly near the inland sea. Either BBI had voluntarily chosen not to collect terraforming data near Refuge, or the survivalists had decided for them. Using minimum power to remain stealthy, I let the planet’s gravity pull us down, applying just enough kick from the thrusters to carry us to fifteen degrees above the equator. While the Lining may have resembled a flying wing, she was incapable of generating aerodynamic lift. She needed help from the thrusters just to glide through the atmosphere with the grace of a falling rock.
Presently, the navigational image of the planet was replaced by real time optics as we approached the sprawling harbor. Ragged cliffs dominated the eastern shoreline while a low rock barrier paralleled the coast some distance away to the west. At the extreme southern end of the harbor, a narrow gap between the cliffs and the rocky peninsula provided access to the open sea beyond. When we cruised over the entrance, a white cable supported by bright orange floats became visible linking the opposing headlands.
“It’s a net!” Jase said surprised.
It sealed the harbor entrance, turning the interior into a protected aquatic habitat. Further north, green smears appeared beneath the surface. Jase zoomed the optics towards one of the green patches, revealing a thick kelp bed where dark streamlined forms darted between giant underwater plants.
“I thought this planet was dead,” Jase said.
“Some life forms survived,” Marie said, “but not those. They’re transplants from Earth.”
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 21
