Alex and the other command officers burst out laughing – impossible to say who laughed first, but they all did, Alex giving a helpless snurge while Buzz whooped, Martine Fishe guffawed, Tina Lucas dissolved into hoots and Very Vergan just howled.
Jonas looked a little affronted for a moment, which only made them laugh even more, then he too saw the funny side and cracked into an abashed chuckle. Here they were, after all, in space that no League ship had ever reached, before. They were handling a first contact situation so delicate that their ship might be destroyed at any moment. In the circumstances, budgets were not high on anyone’s priorities.
‘Oh!’ Alex still had a huge grin on his own face as he attempted to call the meeting back to order. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’ As they did their best to compose themselves, he gave Jonas Sartin a bright-eyed look. ‘Thank you, Mr Sartin – your concern is noted. However, I feel confident that either the Diplomatic Corps or the Sub-Committee will reimburse us for the cost of the probes.’
Jonas foresaw yet another financial entanglement, but accepted it with good humour.
‘Yes, skipper,’ he said, and added, ‘I’ll get started on the forms,’ which made them all chuckle again.
No, Simon had to concede, they did not appear to be suffering from any kind of intolerable strain. They were just waiting, relaxed, accepting that the Samartians needed time to consider the proposal of a mutually beneficial relationship, and to process that through whatever form of government they had in order to reach a decision. If they had to sit here waiting for a month, they would not consider that unreasonable.
In the event, though, they got an answer, at least a kind of answer, later that day. Again, it was a one word signal, and already familiar to them.
‘Pursos.’
So, they followed, as the eight ships broke their holding pattern and took up an orbital course. They were remaining on the edge of the sensor array, evidently intending to stay in communication range with their central authority. Gunny Norsten set their own course so that they would track the Samartian squadron, while remaining on their own side of that border.
Aboard the frigate, everyone was speculating, from the hum of discussion on the mess decks to the ops meeting on the command deck.
‘We can only guess where they’re taking us,’ Davie observed. ‘My guess would be to meet with someone more important – perhaps a flagship, something of that sort.’
Alex nodded agreement. That seemed to be the most logical explanation.
It was, indeed, entirely logical. It was also a hundred per cent wrong.
Sixteen
They had been following the Samartian squadron for just under five hours when, without any warning at all, the Samartians whipped around and tore away, accelerating far beyond the ability of the frigate to keep up.
‘What do we do?’ the question was on every face, looking at Alex either directly or via the command deck feed.
‘Follow them!’ Alex said, without hesitation, and at the same time, tapped his hand onto the control that brought the ship to action stations.
The Heron’s crew did their best. They had mastered a technique for rapid manoeuvring which used the thrusters on the fighters docked to their belly. It made the hull groan and some lights flickered red, but by doing that they were able to get their turning arc nearly a second faster. Those members of the crew not yet suited up were scrambling to stations even as the frigate yawled around and powered up to full acceleration. The Samartians were already vanishing off their scopes. They were heading away from Samart on an apparently random course – nothing out that way but several hundred light years of uninhabited systems.
‘Perhaps it’s some kind of X-base,’ Jermane gasped, arriving on the command deck in something of a fluster. He had been working on the matrix in the lab, a quieter environment than the command deck for long, concentrated work. He was a slightly comical figure, pink and breathless from his frantic wrestling into a survival suit and ping-ponging through the ship. Jermane had a unique approach to traversing in freefall. Despite all their efforts to teach him controlled, graceful manoeuvring, he persisted in pushing off with all his strength, hurtling at high speed with arms flapping ineffectively, and more often than not cannoning into walls, ladders or furniture. The duty rigger was helping him to his seat at the command table, even then, grinning as he shoved the linguist into position and clipped his freefall harness on.
Alex, however, took no notice of the civilian slapstick – he was so used to that that he really didn’t even notice it. Instead, he gave a quick acknowledging nod for what was, in fact, an intelligent suggestion. The League, after all, maintained quite a number of secret bases beyond their own borders. It was possible that the Samartians had decided to trust them sufficiently to take them to such a base of their own.
That, though, did not explain their tearing off at a speed that they must have known the frigate could not match. Something was different, here. And something just didn’t feel right.
‘Follow their vector,’ Alex confirmed, as the astrogator looked to him for orders. So Gunny kept them following along the course that the Samartians had been on, even though they could no longer see them.
When they had been doing this for about ten minutes, Alex could feel his crew starting to relax. It was almost subconscious, a sense of the ship picked up from a half-glance at the comms screens and awareness of background sound. With the ship at full alert there were no conversations going on, just an odd murmur here and there.
Alex could almost feel the crew coming down off their toes, though, watching screens now with an air of interest but no great urgency. Some even looked dismayed, apparently thinking that the Samartians were ditching them.
‘Stay alert, people,’ Alex spoke on the comms without looking up from monitoring long range scopes. His tone was calm, but warning. Heads lifted and turned, all across the ship. Quick, searching looks were directed at the skipper. He looked totally focussed, poised as an athlete on starter blocks.
When the attack came, though, it took even Alex entirely by surprise.
Blobs appeared on the edge of their scopes. There were eleven of them, now – three being escorted by the eight familiar needle-thin shapes of the Samartian squadron.
No, Alex realised, in the two seconds it took him to make sense of what he was seeing, there. They were not being escorted. They were being pursued. Herded, almost – he saw one of the three new blobs attempt to dart away to one side only to be forced back onto a course which was bringing them straight to the Heron.
In exactly the same moment, he recognised the size and heatscan signature of Marfikian Thorns.
There was no time to discuss it, no time to comment or even to swear. The Marfikians had seen them, too, and they were coming at the frigate with their cannon firing.
Alex slapped ‘live target’ authorisation on all three Marfikian ships and heard himself shouting, ‘Fire!’
It was the first time he had ever fired at a live target with the intention of destroying it. He had often wondered, of course he had, what that would feel like, giving orders to kill. He had imagined that it would be a matter of duty, personal morality overcome by the need to protect his crew and others.
In the event, he didn’t even have time to think about that. There was no choice. He knew only too well how many full-impact strikes from a Marfikian cannon his ship could take before it lost integrity. It was not a number that ran to double figures. And the Marfikian ships were already firing.
The first impact caught the Heron on the port bow. The whole ship jerked and shuddered, with a screech of tortured duralloy and the characteristic bang and roar of blowout. The second strike raked across their starboard side, adding a crackling splutter of electronic shorts to the noise, quickly followed by a ship-rocking bang, the dull roar of an explosion, and a fire alert on mess deck two.
The third shot hit them on the belly. It was only later that Alex would be able to see that it had been a
imed at the fighter occupying the for’ard docking bay – Firefly. Shion, though, seeing it coming, had launched the fighter and spun it out of the way with superhuman speed. The shot struck Firefly’s docking bay, but obliquely, ripping off a docking arm and searing off the paintwork, but not penetrating the hull.
The other two fighters were just a second behind her, racing into one of the tight formations perfected during their training for combat displays. All three fighters and most of the frigate’s guns managed to fire, too, as the Marfikian ships ripped past them.
Alex could hear fire and blowout alerts shrieking in different parts of the ship. He could hear the urgent voices at work on damage control. He even heard the word ‘casualties’ and from somewhere a scream, quickly broken off.
All his attention remained on the scopes, though. The half-second of relief he felt as the Marfikians shot past them gave way to a blood-chilling moment of realisation, as he saw what the Samartians were doing.
Their ships had whipped past even faster, getting ahead of the Marfikians and forcing them to turn back. They were firing waves of missiles, giving the Marfikians no choice but to flip around or run straight into the blast.
They were herding them, Alex saw. And they were herding them straight back at the Heron.
‘Fire!’ he shouted again, as if anybody would need telling. They were already firing, in fact, all but two guns on the port bow stabbing bolts like eye-searing lightning at the oncoming attackers.
For Alex, there was a moment of almost dream-like unreality. They had been through scenarios like this so many times, on the way out here, playing games with the Stepeasy’s tender. The Heron’s crew were reacting automatically, no need for any orders to be given, no time for any orders to be given. All three Thorns were coming back along their starboard side so the rating at the helm immediately put them into a broadside spin, rolling the ship rapidly to enable all of their guns to fire in continuous blast. At the same time, missiles were firing as fast as they were loaded in the tubes. Their fighters, Alex saw, were going with strafe pattern kappa 39. They had got themselves behind the Thorns and locked on to the rear-most. The Thorn already had its one big cannon targeted at the Heron and could not fire at the fighters as well. Alex saw Firefly blasting away at them with cannon and missiles, and knew that the question of whether Shion would be able to fire at live targets had been settled, once and for all.
A blinding flare where the third of the Marfikian Thorns had been showed that Firefly had found its target. In almost the same moment the leading craft span out, blasting debris and gas from a great gash torn along the port side. There was only just time to see that before the crawling blue flicker of dephase became another silent flash.
In the next second, with only one target left, every gun on the Heron and all those on the fighters locked on to the last of the Thorns. It span and writhed in a frantic effort to escape, but every route was blocked by the Samartians.
They would not be able to tell, later, which of their shots or missiles took out the third Thorn, or even whether it blew itself up, seeing that defeat was inevitable. At the time, Alex just registered the third garish flash. He was aware of some remote part of his mind, curiously detached from the rest of him, thinking three for three. Most of him, though, was watching scopes, looking at the Samartian ships.
His heart beat three times while he was watching to see if they were going to come in for the kill, and he felt every beat like a punch in the chest. He only drew breath when he saw that they were turning away. They had done what they’d intended.
And they had not done so undamaged, themselves. As he watched, Alex could see that one of their ships was out of control, tumbling end over end and spinning sideways. Even at this distance, it was obvious from the sudden stabbing, stuttering brilliance of the heatscan readout that the damaged ship was going into dephase.
Alex paid no further attention. Now that he was satisfied that the Samartians had no immediate intention of attacking, all his attention focussed on what was happening aboard his own ship.
He caught his breath again as his eyes moved to the damage control boards. He could hear Buzz beside him, talking calmly through a headset. He could see on comms that teams were at work, already assessing the damage and prioritising repairs. He could see the medical teams, too, and the names of the casualties they were working on. At first sight it looked just like a drill. Everyone was doing what they should be, busy and focussed. It was only after a few seconds that the eye took in the burnt and broken fittings, the bent, half-melted furniture on mess deck two. It took a couple more seconds again to recognise that the substance the little autobots were cleaning away so efficiently from the walls and floor and ceiling was charred blood.
There were three casualties listed from the explosion on mess deck two. Tina Lucas was being carried to sickbay already – rated a minor injury, she had broken her leg.
The other two were already in stasis bags. Petty Officer Ali Jezno and Ordinary Star Banno Triesse. Banno was rated category six, meaning that he required stasis for immediate life-saving but that his injuries were considered to be treatable. Ali Jezno, however, was category eight. That meant he was so badly injured that he was considered to be dead, though it would need a medical appraisal before that was made official.
Alex stared at the names. Ali Jezno had been with him since before the Fourth even became the Fourth. Originally sent to Alex as a bullock for rehab, he’d risen through the ranks to become one of the most capable petty officers on the ship. He was one of the most popular members of the crew, too, with his ever-ready grin. His talent for story-telling could hold an audience spellbound. He had even undertaken a key role in their operations at Tolmer’s Drift, helping to convince the spacers there to take their cargos through to Novamas.
Alex realised that he was thinking of Ali Jezno as if already composing his obituary, and reminded himself that it wasn’t over yet. He had two of the best medics around right here on this ship. And he’d seen them save a man, too, just about any other medic would have declared dead on arrival at sickbay.
And then there was Banno Triesse. Alex hadn’t wanted civilian recruits, on principle, but Banno had become as much a member of his crew as if he’d transferred in from the regular Fleet like everyone else. Alex liked his enthusiasm, his determination to succeed even if he could do no more than race to the skipper’s cabin with coffee when he saw there was a meeting there. And now he was seriously injured.
Alex had no time even to think about that, though. His attention had to be directed to getting his ship and crew ready to face another onslaught. More Marfikians might come at them at any moment, or the Samartians themselves turn on them. They had to be ready.
Alex could see that his crew were just as shocked as he felt, himself. They too were coming out of the auto-pilot state that the immediate demands of action had triggered. They were realising what had happened, and seeing the names of casualties on the damage control board. In another few seconds, Alex knew, they would start to react emotionally.
‘Attention on deck.’ His voice sounded harsh even to his own ears, and he realised that he had not made a conscious decision to put his hand on the ship-wide broadcast. ‘Keep it together, people.’
It worked. His words caught them just at the moment when they would have started to exclaim and swear. He could see people all over the ship taking a grip on themselves, taking deep breaths, closing their eyes for a moment or gritting their teeth as they got on with their work. The thought crossed his mind, fleetingly, that he would be immensely proud of them, later. For right now he didn’t seem to have any more capacity for feeling anything very much, beyond a desperate sense of urgency.
It seemed to take an age even to work out what had happened to his ship. He felt as if he was sitting there, dazed and incomprehending, while everyone else knew what had happened and was getting on with fixing it.
That was an illusion, he knew. The only member of his crew at that point with
any clear idea of what had happened was Buzz, and that because it was his job to keep his eyes on damage control screens no matter what else was going on. In reality, everyone was just carrying out their practiced role in whatever situation was in front of them right then, from those who were dealing with the blowout in section eight to those who were going through rapid checklists in undamaged sections.
The worst of the damage was on mess deck two. Alex could see the trail of devastation that had led to the explosion there. Marfikian fire had ripped across their starboard side and struck their comms array. The blast of energy had been so overwhelming that it had jumped cut-outs intended to prevent energy surges from penetrating the hull. Once into the ship’s systems, it had branched into every conductive path it found – every wire, every pipe, everything that could carry a charge. Fuses, safety-cut outs and insulator systems had been firing in a tumultuous cascade. For the most part, they had worked. But the energy bolt had leapt a cut-out and crashed through to an air processing unit on the mess deck.
It was that which had exploded – heated to hundreds of degrees in a fraction of a second, the air pressure had detonated with the force of ten grenades. Their survival suits were good, the best Alex had been able to get, but they were not invulnerable. They could be penetrated by supersonic shrapnel. The heat in the explosion had also been so intense that it had caused a flash fire which ripped through the section in the wake of the blast. Seeing the levels of energy involved, it was a marvel that any of the people on the mess deck had come out of it uninjured.
Alex, though, merely noted what systems were down and how long it would be till the ship was back in a reasonably functional state. That wouldn’t take long. Teams were already fixing an emergency airlock over the torn and blasted wreckage in section eight. Others were busy all over the ship, getting backup systems operational while the primary response team dealt with the immediate aftermath on mess deck two. Even Davie North was helping – he was running systems diagnostics on one screen while staring intently at the external data screens, watching the Samartians. Estimated time to achieve functional stability was eight minutes, though it would need a good couple of days’ solid work to get everything fixed. Their fighters, miraculously, had come through it relatively intact – scorched and trailing superficial hull-tech damage, but still reporting combat-ready and with no casualties. They were on-station alongside the frigate, hovering protectively.
Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Page 36
