by Britt Ringel
It had been thirty minutes since Orphan had ceased to exist. Heskan had ordered Anelace to cut power to her engines and she was currently drifting. The corvette had surpassed her V-max speed, the speed that Brevic Naval Regulations had recommended she never exceed. Of course, in this instance, the potential danger of destroying her power plant or drive systems due to V-max was far less than the very real danger of exploding in Orphan’s shock wave or frying in the intense radioactive aftermath. The shock wave had imparted a six degree yaw to port, which had not been corrected before Anelace’s power plant went into standby mode giving the corvette’s track through space the appearance of a heavily damaged ship.
The mood in the meeting room was equally bruised. After the immediate relief of escaping destruction, the loss of nearly half of the operations section’s personnel began to sink in. Heskan looked around the room at his senior staff and saw the faces of people just starting to realize that some of their fellow crewmembers would not be leaving Skathi.
“Funeral services will be at Oh-eight hundred tomorrow. I’ll accept a skeleton crew in all sections and Operations is excused from duty entirely. Brandon, get with the chief and detail some of your men to fill the vital functions during services.”
The chief engineering officer nodded as Heskan continued, “Boats, I’ll do the service but I’d like you to say some words and then anyone else who wants to speak will get the opportunity. Services will be in the hanger. Any questions?”
Heskan looked around the room and noticed that most of his officers were staring straight down at the conference table. They look defeated, he thought. I can’t blame them for feeling like they do but I need to change the mood in here before this meeting breaks.
“Let’s move on. Ship’s status?” Heskan asked.
Riedel tapped the console in front of him and an image of Anelace appeared in the middle of the conference table. “Ana is fine. Her shield took the shock wave well and Engineering is double-checking her systems after the V-max. Of course, the damage to the rescue crew’s shuttle was total.”
“That’s a problem,” Heskan noted. “We only carried one. How do we perform inspections?”
“Our only option is to commandeer a shuttle from the RALF. They use Class B and Class F shuttles. The B’s are too big but the F’s will fit easily. They’re smaller and we won’t be able to carry more than eight people on board but it will have to do,” Riedel offered. “Spaceman Gables and the Chief here are our only fully qualified shuttle pilots now too.”
“We’re also down to half our inspection crew,” Heskan observed. He looked across the table to his engineering officer. “Brandon, your section is the largest which means you’ll have to take the hit. I need four crewmembers to split their time between Engineering and Operations. The chief will train them up for normal ship operations and for cargo inspections.”
Jackamore produced a frown but merely nodded. No section chief liked to have his resources taken from him.
“I know it’s a bad deal, Brandon, but that’s how it is.” Heskan looked over to Chief Brown and added, “During inspections, Boats, I want the newbies to be paired with a regular ops crewman.”
Chief Brown nodded wearily but spoke up, “We’ll make it work, Capt’n. I’m goin’ to have my guys doin’ double shifts from here on out. That way we won’t have to impact Engineerin’ too much.”
The ship’s business settled, Heskan switched gears. “We need to go over the events with Orphan. What happened?”
There was a deep silence for a moment and then Brown finally replied. “It was a trap, Capt’n. They suckered us in good an’ then tried to take us out an’ it woulda looked like an accident.”
“Captain,” Jackamore added, “looking at the sequence of events, I think Orphan’s computer was set to initiate a core overload when the starboard docking hatch opened. She also had some containment fields up in her cargo hold which helped hide the dutronium but those dropped too when the safeties were released.”
“They also used the ship’s computer to light up their engines and ram us, or, in the worst case, keep us from getting to a safe distance,” Selvaggio said. “It was a damn good trap.”
“Bastards even welded Engineerin’ up to prevent access,” Brown growled. “This was well thought out.”
Heskan looked over the room. The defeat he had seen in the eyes of his crew seemed to be transforming into something different. “Yes, it was. Not to mention whoever did this had to highjack Orphan in the first place. I looked at her record in the standata and it looks clean. Orphan wasn’t even scheduled to come to Skathi.” He shook his head, “I doubt her crew was complicit in this.”
“Captain,” Selvaggio asked with wide, brown eyes, “what do you think happened to her crew?”
“The same thing you think happened,” Heskan responded simply.
Truesworth looked over to Selvaggio and shrugged, “We never did get positive confirmation of life signs.”
“I bet that stealth ship was watching us the whole time, probably still is,” Vernay suggested. Her face turned bitter as she thought about how that crew must have cheered when Orphan exploded.
“That’s what I would do,” Heskan said. “But we can use that against them.” Heskan leaned forward to operate his console. He pressed several buttons until a steady green “Recording” image pulsed silently. “RALF-Three, this is Anelace. We were unable to prevent the total destruction of the freighter, Orphan. Our engineering officer reports that he believes the initial cascade failure during their tunnel jump collapsed further when they dove out. She suffered numerous computer malfunctions ending in critical failure. We got caught in the resulting core overload and took moderate damage and crew casualties. Power will be restored shortly but propulsion has been reduced by seventeen percent. We’ve also lost our shuttle and request the use of one of your Class F shuttles. Under the ISC Rules, Renard will be fully compensated for its use. Once we can maneuver, we will return to the RALF. No estimated time of arrival yet. Heskan out.”
Heskan stopped the recording and then called up to the bridge.
“Davis here, sir,” the sensorman immediately responded.
“Davis, send this recording out to the RALF over broadband. Mark it priority,” Heskan said.
After receiving confirmation from Petty Officer Davis, Heskan looked back to his senior staff. “Two can play the deception game. Brandon, when we bring the power plant back up, I don’t want you to use Engine Three. Keep it shut down as if it were damaged.”
Jackamore smiled slightly and acknowledged. Vernay, who had been reviewing the text of Heskan’s message, looked up at Heskan, “So what else can we do, Captain?”
That’s the million credit question, Heskan thought. “Right now, we head back to the RALF and collect a shuttle. I’ll also send a coded message to Narvi with the next freighter, updating them of our real status and findings, although I don’t expect any additional support.” Heskan tried his best to keep the bitterness out of his last statement. Time for a pep talk.
“The circle is closing and these pirates are getting desperate.” Heskan could see a little more optimism in his crew now. “We’ll keep the pressure on them and when Paragon comes into the system, we’ll show these murderers that we can set a trap too.” Although it felt forced, Heskan smiled and was rewarded with hopeful and determined expressions from his officers. Chief Brown’s face remained stoic.
* * *
Anelace “limped” back to the RALF where she stayed docked for ten days to “repair.” The first freighter that delivered its cargo and loaded the RALF’s ore to be hauled away was an Emeray Freight Company bulk carrier. Odds that it was affiliated with the illegal activity in Skathi were low.
It was a risk not to be on station near the Narvi tunnel point or near the Beta Field where Renard extractors were operating, but Heskan believed the deception that Anelace was hurt would embolden the pirates and provide a valuable advantage when it came to drawing them out. He fe
lt a bit like he was putting all of his eggs in one basket but frustration was creeping into his judgment. He was frustrated at the lack of support he had from Narvi, frustrated at being one step behind the pirates for the last several months and frustrated at the loss of his crewmembers. He knew the feeling could make him act rashly but at this point, he was not sure he cared. The asteroid fields and ensuing radiation made it almost impossible for a single corvette to find any criminal base of operations. Consequently, the only way to stop them was to starve their source of supplies and draw them out. He had been doing everything he could to make it impossible for them to resupply and it must have been working for the pirates to try something as outright audacious as they had. The pirates’ gambit had failed but Heskan knew that while the pirates had not succeeded, neither had he. He had traded away four lives for no new information. This deception was the only element of advantage he could take from a disastrous situation and he owed it to those crewmembers to make every use of their sacrifice that he could.
While Anelace sat at the RALF, he had asked Chief Brown to let word slip from some of his operations crewmembers that Anelace’s next task was to replace the navigation buoy at the distant Skoll tunnel point. Heskan was still confident that pirates had not actually infiltrated the RALF but it wouldn’t hurt to spread the misinformation just in case. Anelace waited three more days, ostensibly under repair until she was ready to make her move.
“Navigator, cut the moorings,” Heskan ordered and the corvette slipped the bonds securing her to the refining station. “Set a course for the Skoll tunnel point, Diane. Point one-five light, if you please.”
The sleek corvette glided through the blackness of space slower than her normal cruising speed, five of her Allison drives pushing her toward the distant tunnel point.
While Anelace drew further from RALF-3, Heskan brought up the master freighter schedule for the system and saw that Paragon wasn’t due to dive in-system for eighteen more hours. I hope I’m right about this, he thought. This is my best chance to catch them and if I’m wrong, they’ll know for certain that we’ve figured out how they are resupplying inside the Beta Field. Even though he knew nothing was going to happen for a day, Heskan felt anxious. Trying to look relaxed, he stretched out and yawned. His shift was nearing its end and he decided that he would eat before getting some rest.
The food was tasteless and the rest was sleepless. During the time Heskan spent futilely seeking sleep, Anelace had moved into the Beta Field on an intercept course for the Skoll tunnel point. However, once inside the Beta Field and now hidden from anyone monitoring her movements, Anelace cut her navigation emissions, technically illegal under the Rules of Interstellar and System Commerce, and came about. Moving at just .05c, Anelace crept to what her captain had designated as the capture point in his planning sessions with his staff. Fourteen hours after leaving the RALF, the corvette was at relative rest, exactly halfway through the Beta Field in a straight line between the Narvi tunnel point and the RALF. Heskan had decided this was the most likely rendezvous point for a resupply mission between a freighter and a pirate ship. The corvette was in the heart of the interference zone of the Beta Field and even a full-fledged Brevic surveyor ship would have had great difficulty detecting it.
The EMU to deploy their last buoy took three hours. Petty Officer Deveraux and Spaceman Ford painstakingly checked and double-checked every setting on the modified buoy. Normally, a navigation buoy detected space traffic and automatically broadcast that information to any ship in the area. Buoys were also programmed to accept any active navigation request from a nearby ship, commonly called a “ping.” The ping would give that ship extra navigational data and assistance in augmenting sensor sweeps in specifically requested portions of space, or augment the ship’s communications capability with the buoy’s powerful repeater transmitters. All of these functions were placed into sleep mode in Anelace’s final buoy. The buoy would only monitor and record the space traffic it detected. It would also only use its passive detection mode, meaning that it would not emit any transmissions common to a navigation buoy. Officially, this too was in violation of the ISC Rules. Any tampering with a governmental aide to navigation could result in a serious sanction. Fortunately, there were military regulations that could supersede these edicts.
The modified buoy would remain silent, even if it detected two ships on a collision course. The only exception to this rule was if it received a coded transmission from Anelace. If that happens, Heskan thought, all hell will break loose.
After deploying the buoy, Heskan had his ship slip 2.5lm from its location. Ensign Truesworth had carefully calculated this position as virtually guaranteeing that Anelace would not be detected, yet she might still have a chance to track Paragon once the freighter entered the Beta Field. Tracking Paragon from the tunnel point to the Beta Field could be done easily through the Narvi buoy but once she entered the Beta Field, Heskan would have to rely on Anelace’s passive sensors to maintain sensor contact with the freighter.
Ensign Selvaggio wrapped her hands around the sides of her console as she said, “Ana is now at relative rest, Captain. She’s facing the capture point.”
“Very good, Diane. Now we play the waiting game,” Heskan said hopefully.
“The waiting game sucks,” Vernay countered.
Chapter 11
The HandyMax freighter transitioned from t-space into Skathi’s n-space with the usual calamity of physics. After several seconds in which human and silicon senses on the ship readjusted to normal space, the freighter shifted course slightly and began to thrust toward the star system’s RALF.
Twenty-two minutes later, Ensign Truesworth calmly reported, “Captain, we have a tunnel drive disturbance at the Narvi point. The signal is a freighter’s beacon, twenty-two light-minutes from us. Her beacon color is green. It’s the Paragon, sir. She’s altering course… heading toward the RALF at point one light.”
They’re now twenty light-minutes out from us adjusting for the time lag, Heskan thought. They’ll have received our automated communications transmission from the Narvi buoy informing them we’re halfway across the system and won’t be able to provide escort for their ingress or egress but to broadcast on the standard emergency frequency if they encounter a problem.
“Everyone confirm that we are running silent,” Heskan ordered. Confirmations came from around the bridge, including the side stations occupied by Chief Brown and Ensign Elena Antipova, the rarely seen second engineering officer. Antipova’s battle station was normally commanding Auxiliary Control but Heskan had wanted an engineering officer on the bridge until it was certain that Anelace would actually see action. For now, he wanted a direct link to Engineering to ensure Anelace’s electronic profile was as reduced as possible. Heskan’s entire plan depended on the deception that the corvette was conveniently far away, affording the pirates an opportunity to resupply via Paragon that was too good to pass up. They must be critically low on supplies since we’ve been escorting every remotely suspicious freighter through the Beta Field the last five weeks, he mused.
Anelace was relying purely on the Narvi buoy for detecting and tracking the freighter. She had shut down all emissions, including active sensors, three hours ago and without the buoy would have been blind. Even her power plant was running on minimum, with most of her power being pulled from her emergency batteries. With such minimal output lost inside the intense radiation generated by the asteroid field, Anelace was, in essence, a hole in space.
“Jack, monitor Paragon’s progress continuously. Let me know any changes in her status.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Truesworth responded while inputting the necessary command to bring the tactical view onto the bridge’s main view screen. The screen showed the relevant portions of the system. Anelace was quietly tucked deep in the Beta Field. Twenty light-minutes away, Paragon was cruising at .1c on a course that would take her roughly within 1lm of the buoy Anelace had secretly deployed inside the asteroid field. The fre
ighter’s path was projected to take her on the opposite side of the buoy, so Paragon would pass no closer than 3.5lm to Anelace.
Three and a half light-minutes. Will we lose sight of her at that distance? Heskan wondered.
“When she enters the Beta Field, I don’t know if I can keep track of Paragon with passive sensors, Captain,” Truesworth echoed Heskan’s thoughts.
“You’re a mind reader, Jack.” Heskan turned to Lieutenant Riedel. “Options?”
Riedel stared at the plot briefly. “We can creep up some to the capture point, use our active sensors on low power or do nothing and hope we can keep track of her,” he offered. It was obvious that none of those options appealed to the first officer.
“We both know that active sensors will give us away. Paragon might not be able to find us but she’ll know that someone is watching her, which will alert her crew and ruin our plan. Do we try to move up or just hope for the best?” Heskan asked no one in particular. I need to move closer. I can’t take the chance of losing the pirates as this is probably our best shot at catching them in the act. On the other hand, we have no idea where the pirate ship is in the asteroid field. It could be a light-minute from us right now and powering up to move would certainly give us away. Is this what command is all about? Not knowing the right answer but being forced to act like I do anyway?
“The greatest enemy of a good plan is a perfect one,” Heskan stated. “We stay here. I trust that the Brevic Republic’s finest sensorman won’t lose our target.”
“No pressure, Jack,” Selvaggio teased in a muted tone.
Truesworth shot her an irritated look as a bead of sweat glided down the side of his face. “I estimate three hours and forty minutes for Paragon to reach the projected rendezvous point inside the Beta Field. That’s assuming she maintains point one light up to the asteroid field but then reduces to point zero five light once inside.”
Each hour passed slowly. Heskan rotated his bridge crew so that each had at least twenty minutes off duty and tried to keep the atmosphere relaxed. However, as the freighter approached the edge of the Beta Field, the tension on the bridge increased exponentially.
