Chapter 23
They ran back the way they’d come as fast as they could, with power-assist turned up to the max. Lucien kept expecting a ball of plasma to slam into him from behind, but it never came. Maybe the Faros knew better. What would superheated plasma do in a cave filled with freezing liquid methane? The sudden explosion of methane expanding as it boiled into a gas might just be violent enough to kill them all—that, or the methane would simply dissipate the energy harmlessly before it reached them.
Lucien risked glancing over his shoulder to see the two Faros gaining on them.
“Keep running!” he urged.
Up ahead, Addy gave no reply, but he heard her breathing hard over the comms. As they ran, questions swirled through Lucien’s brain. How had the Faros found them? They’d ditched the other shuttle before jumping away, so it couldn’t have been a tracking device—unless they’d somehow attached one to the Inquisitor’s hull, too. Then there was the fact that the Faros were down here in a frigid ocean of liquid methane, not wearing pressure suits or armor of any kind. Didn’t they need to breathe? And how was it possible that they hadn’t frozen to death?
The only thing Lucien could think of was that the Faros were more mechanical than biological.
He and Addy burst out of the caves and blasted off the ocean floor with their grav boosters firing at full strength. Lucien looked down as they rocketed to the surface, and he caught a glimpse of the blue-skinned aliens rising swiftly after them.
They broke the surface and roared up into the murky orange atmosphere, quickly losing all sense of direction. Lucien activated all the sensor overlays he could think of to keep his bearings.
The ground appeared as a white wireframe with only the most basic features and the largest rocks detailed. Small green-shaded outlines appeared in the distance, revealing where Tyra and Garek were. Another green outline popped up on his left—Addy. The shuttle was a green blob, and red-shaded outlines marked the Faros. There were three of them—two below, and coming up fast, and one in close proximity to Tyra and Garek.
“We need to get back to the shuttle!” Lucien said, but he didn’t have to tell Addy that. She was already on her way.
It only took them a few seconds of flying to reach the shuttle. They landed beside the rear airlock, and Lucien hesitated there with Addy, wondering what to do. Tyra and Garek were cut off, over a hundred meters away.
Then the Faros they’d met in the caves landed in front of them, and there was no more time to hesitate. Lucien thrust out his hands and fired the grav boosters in his palms at full strength, aiming for the Faro with a crown.
Both the alien and Lucien went flying backward. Lucien slammed into the airlock doors. Addy slammed into the doors beside him, after firing her grav boosters at the other Faro.
Lucien pushed off the doors with a grunt and waved the airlock open. He dragged Addy inside and shut the airlock before the Faros could recover.
Precious seconds slipped away as the airlock cycled. Then Lucien remembered Jalisa up in the cockpit. He was about to tell her to take off, when the shuttle lurched off the ground, and she said. “Hang on back there!”
As soon as the crimson light of decontamination faded and the airlock opened, Lucien ran up to the cockpit and fell into the co-pilot’s chair beside Jalisa.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” Lucien replied. “Make a low pass. Let’s see how those personal shields fare against the shuttle’s laser.”
“The tickler?” Jalisa asked.
“It might be weak for a spaceship, but it’s still a hundred times stronger than our suits’ lasers.”
Lucien fired at the Faro attacking Tyra and Garek. A brilliant beam of red light shot out, illuminating the dense atmosphere like lightning. The laser hit its target, and the red-shaded outline became suffused by a sudden bloom of blinding light. When the light faded, the Faro was gone.
“Now that’s more like it!” Lucien crowed, already scanning for his next target.
The other two Faros were closing on Tyra and Garek, but suddenly they flew off at high speed, using some Farosien equivalent of grav boosters. They flew so fast that Lucien briefly lost track of them in the murky atmosphere. Then he found one, headed straight for the shuttle’s belly cannon. He jerked the joystick trigger, firing another shot, but the alien thrust out its palm and fired a burst of plasma in the same instant.
The scene disappeared in a burst of light, replaced by an error message. “Damn it! They took out the laser,” Lucien said. Glancing at the shuttle’s scopes, he found only one red blip remaining, which meant that he’d killed the Faro who’d taken out the laser cannon. He hoped it had been the crown-wearing warlord.
Lucien pointed to the sensor grid. Two green blips were flying toward them at high speed. “Open the airlock!”
“Are you crazy?” Jalisa asked, sending him a wide-eyed look.
Lucien opened the doors himself.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Jalisa said.
“So do I,” Lucien said, already jumping up from the co-pilot’s chair. “Addy! Get ready! We’re about to have some company!” He raced back into the cabin and found her already reaching into one of the weapons lockers. She handed him a large rifle that fired guided explosive rounds, and she took a hypervelocity cannon for herself. The barrel was as long as she was tall.
Lucien stared wide-eyed at their weapons. “The point is to defend the shuttle, not blow it apart!”
“So make sure you don’t miss,” Addy said.
They heard thunking sounds inside the airlock, and Lucien saw through the inner doors that two green-shaded outlines were clinging to the zero-G rails, one inside, and one dangling out the back.
“Level out!” Tyra ordered over the comms in a strained voice.
Jalisa stopped climbing just in time for someone else to land inside the airlock. A red-shaded outline.
“Screw this!” Addy said. “Get clear of the doors!” she called over the comms. After only a momentary hesitation, she fired her cannon and blew the inner doors apart. The shrapnel got sucked out along with all the air in the cabin as the shuttle depressurized.
Lucien caught a brief glimpse of a bald, blue-skinned alien with black robes tumbling out the airlock. He must have killed the crown-wearing Faro with the shuttle’s laser. King Faro / “Lucien” was dead.
“A little help over here?” Tyra asked. She was the one dangling out the back of the shuttle. Garek walked over and yanked her in. She collapsed on the deck as soon as the shuttle’s gravity took over. She lay there wheezing from the exertion—and the pain of her injuries.
Her left arm was missing from the elbow down. She had a combination bandage/suit patch over the stump, but even so, what was left of her arm had to be frozen stiff.
“Are you all right?” Lucien asked, hurrying to give her a hand.
Tyra nodded as he and Garek helped her stumble through the airlock into the cabin.
“Jalisa, get us out of here before that thing comes back!” Garek said as he waved the outer airlock doors shut. He appeared to be in one piece, but his faceplate was cracked, and there was a deep furrow carved into the breastplate of his suit.
Up ahead, the doors to the cockpit were sealed. They’d automatically shut when the cabin lost pressure.
Lucien went to look out the small windows in the rear doors of the airlock, and watched as the orange haze of Snowflake fell away below them. The world flashed white as Jalisa micro-jumped them from a low orbit back to the Inquisitor. A few minutes later a fuzzy blue shield swept over his view of space as they flew inside the galleon’s hangar. A boarding tunnel swept out to greet them. As soon as he heard it seal, Lucien tried to wave the doors open, but they wouldn’t respond.
“Cabin’s depressurized,” Garek reminded him, walking up to the control panel. “We’ll have to override the airlock. Everyone brace yourselves!”
The airlock opened and a s
udden gust of air slammed into them. Lucien rocked back on his heels, almost falling over.
“Everyone to the bridge!” Tyra croaked, running past them.
They ran after her.
“Pandora?” Tyra began.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Start calculating a jump to another random system.”
“We still have another hour before our capacitors finish charging.”
“Damn it!” Tyra said, panting over the comms as they ran through the ship.
“And we don’t know how they followed us here,” Pandora reminded. “Chances are good that they’ll follow us again.”
“We can’t just sit around waiting for one of those capital ships to show up and blast us!” Tyra replied.
“It’s already here.”
“What? Why didn’t you say something?”
“It only just appeared, ma’am. I believe it has some type of cloaking shield.”
“Range to target?”
“Eighty-six thousand klicks. Well outside of their last known weapons range—but they are coming about on an intercept course,” Pandora replied.
“Set course away from the enemy at maximum thrust,” Tyra said.
“Aye, ma’am. Setting course…”
Chapter 24
“They’re still gaining on us, Captain,” Pandora announced. “ETA to enemy’s last-known weapons range, ten minutes, seven seconds and counting.”
“It’s going to come down to a slugging match,” Lucien said.
“Not if they hold back, keeping out of range of our guns,” Jalisa said.
Lucien frowned. She was right. The Faros had demonstrated superior weapons range and superior speed, so they didn’t have to risk getting hit at all. They could dance around the Inquisitor firing their lasers all day long. “We’ll have to fire back with missiles,” he said.
“No point. At this range they’ll have plenty of time to shoot them down,” Jalisa replied.
“Why haven’t they jumped closer to us?” Garek asked. “Our jamming field only extends to thirty thousand klicks. They’ve shown that their effective laser range is around forty thousand, so they could jump straight into range with us.”
“They must still be waiting for their jump capacitors to recharge,” Pandora said.
How long had it been since they’d encountered the Faros in the cave? Lucien wondered. At least twenty minutes. Assuming the Faros’ drives had a similar cycle time to the Inquisitor’s, that didn’t leave very long before the Faros could jump again.
“If they just jumped here, how did they get down to the planet so fast?” Tyra asked, her voice noticeably weaker than usual.
Lucien glanced at her. She was pale, and her brow was beaded with sweat. Garek had dressed her severed arm when they’d peeled out of their exosuits, and he’d given her a shot for the pain, but meds weren’t magic, and she was obviously still battling something.
“They couldn’t have taken a shuttle down in that time,” Jalisa said.
“Maybe they jumped their people straight to the surface,” Addy suggested from where she was filling in for Troo at the comms control station.
“With no way of returning to their ship?” Jalisa asked.
“They could always send a shuttle down afterward,” Lucien said. “Or maybe they planned to steal ours.”
“It’s all academic at this point,” Tyra said. “What we need to figure out—” She interrupted herself with a ragged breath. “—is how they found us.”
“They spoke over our comms,” Lucien said, “so they’re definitely hacking us.”
“Which means they may have hacked the Inquisitor, too,” Pandora said. “That may be how they followed us here. A virus could have given away our position without us noticing.”
“Run a deep systems scan,” Tyra ordered.
“Aye, Captain,” Pandora replied.
“It won’t matter if we find the virus if they manage to destroy or disable us before we can jump out again,” Lucien said. “What if we send a distress call to Astralis? The Faros already know where we are, anyway.”
“They won’t come,” Tyra said.
“What? Why not?”
“It’s against protocol,” she replied.
“What protocol?”
Pandora explained, “It’s easier to resurrect us than to send good ships after bad and risk losing them all.”
Lucien snorted. “I love how you clerics think.”
Pandora chimed in, “If we get into an all-out war with every hostile force we encounter beyond the red line, we’re not going to make it very far.”
“So why not just give up? Let them kill us, or better yet, we should self-destruct our own ship,” Lucien said.
“It may come to that, but there’s still a chance we might save our galleon,” Tyra said. “How far can our sensors reach inside of Snowflake’s atmosphere?”
“All the way to the surface, ma’am,” Pandora replied.
“Then we can’t hide down there,” Tyra said.
“Maybe we don’t need to,” Jalisa said. “The atmosphere is dense enough to scatter lasers badly. They’d only reach us with a fraction of their strength. They’d have to resort to kinetic weapons and missiles to do any damage. Hypervelocity rounds would burn up on entry, leaving only missiles as a viable threat, and we should still be able to intercept those with our own lasers.”
“Depending on how many missiles they shoot at us,” Lucien pointed out. “They could overwhelm our point defenses.”
“It’s better than staying up here where they can sit out of range and shoot us all day with laser cannons,” Jalisa said. “At least with missiles we know that they have to run out eventually.”
“Agreed,” Tyra replied. “Pandora, take us down. Fly as low as you can without crashing into anything.”
“Aye, ma’am. I’ll fly over the ocean,” Pandora said.
Snowflake’s orange atmosphere swelled in the bridge’s main forward viewports as the galleon dipped toward the planet. Soon their view was shuddering with turbulence and glowing around the edges from friction with the planet’s atmosphere. A deafening roar accompanied their descent, and unsecured items rattled around the bridge, despite the galleon’s inertial management system and artificial gravity.
A thick orange haze swept over all the viewports, blotting them out and casting the bridge in a dim orange light. It would be hard for the Faros to target them through that murk. Lucien gave a grim smile and leaned forward, gripping the armrests of his chair.
“We might just make it through this after all,” he said.
“That’s the plan,” Tyra replied, her eyes on a sensor display that she’d summoned from her control station. “The enemy is four minutes from firing range,” she said quietly.
The methane ocean swept up out of the gloomy orange atmosphere, and the galleon leveled out, skimming low over the surface. The ocean blurred by impossibly fast, looking like an endless sheet of glass.
“Missiles incoming!” Pandora announced.
Lucien summoned a sensor grid and watched as red blips streamed out from the enemy cruiser.
“Jalisa—!” Tyra began, her voice rising in alarm.
“I see them! Guns tracking!”
The leading wave of missiles took their time to reach the upper atmosphere, but as soon as they did, Lucien heard muffled screeches coming through the bridge speakers as their bot gunners opened fire on the enemy ordnance.
Simulated streaks of red light snapped up from the Inquisitor, and pinprick-sized explosions flared on the grid, beating back the waves of incoming missiles.
“We’re holding them off!” Jalisa announced.
“How long before our jump capacitors are charged?” Tyra asked.
“Thirty-eight minutes remaining,” Pandora announced.
Tyra nodded. “They’ll run out of missiles before then.”
“They could follow us down into the atmosphere,” Lucien said. “If they close to point-blank range,
their lasers will still be effective against us.”
“At least we’ll be able to shoot back,” Jalisa said.
Pandora spoke up, “I should also point out that we are now in range of the enemy’s quantum jamming field. We cannot jump away while that field is engaged and in range of us.”
“Then we’ll just have to defeat them,” Tyra replied.
“The enemy is launching fighters!” Pandora said.
“We don’t have any fighters left to defend us,” Lucien said.
“Enemy fighters are launching missiles!” Jalisa warned.
The number of missiles swarming toward them suddenly increased by a factor of ten.
“We won’t be able to get them all!” Jalisa warned.
“ETA ten minutes before the first missiles reach us,” Pandora said.
“Krak!” Lucien cursed, drawing glances from the rest of the crew. Paragons never cursed.
“Given our current rate of interception, how many missiles will reach us?” Tyra asked.
“Twenty-seven, approximately,” Pandora replied. “But the enemy is still launching ordnance, so that number is rising.”
“Can our shields hold off twenty-seven missiles?”
“Based on estimated payloads from our previous encounter with the enemy, our galleon would be destroyed after only twenty,” Pandora replied.
“We should evacuate in the shuttles,” Lucien said. “Some of them might be able to jump back to Astralis.”
“And lead the Faros straight to them?” Tyra challenged. “We’re not going back there, Commander. Not until we know that we won’t be followed.”
Lucien shook his head. “Then I’m out of ideas.”
“We could take the galleon down to the ocean floor,” Pandora suggested. “The Liquid methane will be the perfect shield, absorbing any laser fire, and their missiles are going fast enough that they will detonate on the surface. We’ll be perfectly safe.”
“Do it. Find the deepest part of the ocean and take us down,” Tyra ordered.
“Aye aye, Captain,” Pandora replied. “There’s a trench not too far from here with a depth of more than two hundred kilometers. Will that do?”
Dark Space Universe by Jasper T. Scott Page 16
