“Report, Arty,” Silver said.
“Hull breaches. The shrapnel from the counter measures has smashed a section of hull on the forward section. Grav shielding is holding. The composite is healing itself. No loss of personnel.”
Silver called the admiral. “How many of those hits can the Intrepid take? You have to call off your attacks.”
“I’m not attacking, chief. I’m defending my ship.”
Arty interrupted. “The Defender has launched a salvo of mosquitoes. They will impact the Intrepid in seventeen seconds.”
“Admiral,” Silver shouted. “Abort your attack. We have a full complement of military personnel on board.”
“It wasn’t me,” the admiral said in between calling instructions to his command officers. He turned to Silver with a grim expression. “The AI has calculated the Intrepid is too great a risk to the Defender. Abandon ship, chief. I can’t stop the missiles. Impact in twelve seconds.”
Silver grabbed Captain Peel. She generated a gravity field around them both and carried the captain toward the office door. He had to answer for his crime of attacking her agents. Leaving him here to meet his fate would be too easy. Silver would do what she could to ensure Peel faced the charges against him.
The command deck was bathed in a pulsating red light, impact warnings flashed on various displays. Several officers remained at their posts, hastily working away. Silver burst into the command deck and called out to the remaining officers.
“Abandon ship, you fools.”
One officer looked up from his post with a broken and dejected look on his face. “Impact in five seconds,” he said, his voice cracking slightly.
Silver dropped Captain Peel and generated the strongest field around her that her suit could attain.
The entire command deck rocked as the mosquitoes impacted the Intrepid’s hull. The holostage went off line. All lighting failed. The command deck was plunged into darkness. Emergency lighting kicked in and lasted for a second before another quake rocked the ship. In perfect darkness Silver felt herself being flung across the command deck. Her suit cushioned the impact against the wall. Screams filled the dark for a moment before a cracking and splintering of composite hull drowned them out. And then Silver was flying again, blown toward a massive breach in the hull, blown by the ship’s atmosphere as it rushed out to the void of space. Lights flickered across Silver’s view and she began to make sense of the kaleidoscope pattern, the entire ship was breaking apart, huge sections of the craft were breaking off, fire lapping over the broken edges.
Silver saw a gap ahead as two massive sections of hull tore apart. She angled her grav field and propelled herself away from the interior of the smashed destroyer and out into the darkness of space.
Looking back, Silver saw the Intrepid broken in two. A mosquito smashed into one end of the burning wreck and shattered the massive section into more broken pieces that flew away from the site of the explosion, burning composite hull spinning and spiraling away.
“Arty,” Silver called out.
Silence.
Silver watched as the Intrepid broke up, spewing flame and debris, and the unmistakable figures of dead crewmen. And away in the distance Silver saw the massive shape of the Defender, dark and imposing. Silver reached out toward it with her grav field. It was too far away for her to grab it. She focused instead on the large burning section of defender hull that was tumbling in space before her. She drew herself toward it and as she neared she reversed the field and flung herself past it and toward the Defender.
The Defender was closer now. Again she extended the field toward it. She connected with the lightest touch. It would be enough to draw her in eventually but the procedure could take hours. She didn’t know how long she had before the Defender redeployed. If it left the region she would be left, adrift, floating helpless in space. Her suit could sustain power for years if she simply sat and waited for help. But she would run out of food and water in only a matter of days. It would be a long and cruel end.
Another large fragment of hull lay up ahead. She was able to grab that with her grav field and she used it to catapult herself toward the Defender. Now she was heading in the right direction and with more speed. She reached out and contacted the Defender with greater field strength. It could be enough. She began to draw herself closer and closer to the Defender, every meter closer and she was able to increase the force and draw herself in even faster. The Defender was racing toward her now. Her only fear was that the Defender would power away and leave her tumbling in its wake.
But now she was close. The massive ship filled the space before her. She refocused the field on the landing strip on one side of the defender. Patrol fighters were taking off and landing. Larger cruiser sized craft were taking off in what Silver hoped was a rescue effort. Few would have survived the attack. The Defender was a powerful weapon. It had done its work on the Intrepid.
Silver came close enough to make out the deck crews servicing the craft that were landing and taking off second by second. She focused her field on a section of the landing strip. She felt the strength of the gravity shielding that covered the landing strip. She caught it just in time. Failure to treat this shielding correctly could repel her and send her spinning off once again into the void. She eased her way through the field and picked her landing spot. It was toward the side of the long strip. There was no crew working there that she could see. Still twenty stories below her she could just make out a doorway, a hatch leading away from the landing strip and into the interior of the Defender.
Silver touched down on the landing strip without a sound and moved smoothly into a walking gait. She slipped in through the open hatch. She needed to find Commander Dooley.
Silver released her entire swarm of bloodhounds. They had only one objective. Find Dooley. The bloodhounds spread out in all directions and sniffed out his trail. It took mere moments before a number of bloodhounds picked up his trail. Silver selected the most recent and least decayed trail and followed.
Following the directions that blinked on her visor Silver reached down to her hip for her blazer. It was gone. Lost. She hesitated for a fraction of a second before focusing again on the trail. She was unarmed and on unfamiliar ground. She still had the advantage. Dooley would not expect her.
The bloodhound trail was fresh and soon Silver received Dooley’s current location. She was close. He was behind the hatch up ahead. He was still. She had him now. The sign above the door showed it was a targeting system control room.
Standing outside the door, poised and ready for action, Silver made an appraisal of her situation. Her lack of weaponry left her with only her natural abilities to call on. She would fight Dooley hand to hand and bring him down. She was familiar with the commander and she knew how he moved and she knew how he was built. She guessed he could handle himself. She would have to act decisively, aggressively and fast.
Silver flung open the door and burst in, running at the point the bloodhounds indicated as Dooley’s position. She ran at the man, determined to take him down hard. The body of Dooley lay twisted on the floor. His face was contorted and swollen. His tongue was swollen and filled his mouth. His eyes were red. Silver recognized the effects of decompression and suffocation. Silver looked around the small room, walls covered with open circuitry. There was probably only a few ways that the space could be sealed off from the rest of the ship’s ventilation system. She stepped back to the doorway to be sure she was not trapped and suffocated in that space only to be found dead next to the conspirator commander. She stood there considering the fallen commander. In his hand was a small data chip. Silver reached out with her grav field and brought it to her.
Chapter 10
“He used this data,” Silver held up the small chip she’d found on Dooley’s body for the admiral to see, “and he tricked your sensors into thinking the Intrepid had fired on you.” Silver dropped the chip onto Blake’s desk.
“It was an impossible situation,” the admiral said gravely a
nd then puffed lightly on his cigar.
“Did you find many survivors?”
“Eighteen out of a compliment of..,” Blake trailed off. “A horrible waste,” he said at last.
“And I lost my AI,” Silver said.
Blake looked at her for an explanation.
“My AI had integrated itself into the Destroyer’s systems, superseding the military AI. I haven’t been able to contact him since the ship went down.”
“Him?” the admiral asked, leaning back in his chair.
“I guess I did personalize it a bit,” Silver said, and she felt the loss of Arty more strongly as she tried to deny his importance to her.
Blake looked around the office. “If it helps you get the job done. The Defender is a girl,” the admiral said. “She’s a big girl and I know her well. We all put a personality on these things.” Blake placed his cigar in a small tray on his desk. “Central AI will provide you with a new AI. You’ll need it if you are going to rebuild the police service.”
Silver looked down at Blake as he settled back into his chair. Silver grabbed his attention with a word. “Admiral,” she said. “I need to get back to police HQ.”
“Of course,” Blake said, standing. “You’ll need a ship. I’ll have my hangar crew arrange something for you. Just a little something to get you back in one piece.”
The military cruiser was a similar build to the police cruisers that Silver was familiar with, but the military build was designed for personnel transport and tactical support. It had a sophisticated military AI onboard. Silver instructed it to depart.
The cruiser lifted off. The holostage display showed that the craft was moving. The flight deck was still and calm. It was almost restful for Silver to sit back for a moment.
She settled back into a chair and let the cruiser take her back to HQ. She’d missed out on a lot of sleep. She’d lost a lot of colleagues. She’d lost her friends. But she hadn’t lost everything. She had allies, some powerful, some devious, some cautious.
One other thing remained. It was something most important. Silver still had her duty.
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading Infiltrate, the third book in the Silver Cane series. I am so excited you took the chance to read it and I really hope you liked it. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.
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Preview: Discovery
Space is so boring!
This was certainly not what Violet had expected space travel to be like. She had dreamed of this since the first time she looked up at the stars in the sky, but none of those dreams had included endless days of nothingness. The only excitement she had experienced during the first days of the journey was when an occasional piece of space debris penetrated the warp field forcing the pilot to take evasive action. Even those potentially deadly encounters were brushed aside, as if they were no more bothersome than a fly buzzing around the room, by the Krim Sprinter's legendary pilot, Cyrus Jones, who was as much machine as man.
The captain had assured her that the Krim Sprinter was the fastest ship in the fleet, which made it the fastest ship in the known universe, when he reluctantly brought her on board the week before. The problem with space travel was the incomprehensible distances between planets. Even at three hundred times the speed of light, the travel time to Proxima was listed as seven days. The captain had assured her that they would be there in five. When she asked what they would do on the Proxima outpost for two days while they waited for the rest of the crew to arrive, Captain Mitch Cooper had just smiled and walked away.
After four days of watching countless specks of light stream past in a blur, Violet wished her childhood dream had involved something less monotonous...like being an accountant. She was wondering if it was possible to actually die of boredom when the ship violently lurched, throwing her from her chair. She froze in the air momentarily as the warp drive was forcibly shut down, dropping the ship back into real time, before being slammed into the navigation console. Everything went black.
When she came to, the ship’s bridge was in total chaos. Warning sirens were going off. Red lights were flashing. Captain Cooper was rushing from station to station, assessing damage and muttering to himself. She had a pretty good idea of what he was saying.
"What the hell just happened, Cyrus?"
"We were hit by a photon torpedo, Captain," he answered calmly as he stared at the seemingly empty space in front of the ship.
"That's impossible!"
"Yet here we are."
Captain Cooper looked ready to explode. Instead, he took a calming breath as he ran both hands through his grey hair. "Did you drop us out of warp before we tore the ship apart?"
"Of course," Cyrus replied without taking his eyes off the still empty space in front of the ship. "Belzaire's not gonna be happy, though. There's no telling how much of the warp system we tore up shutting it down that quickly."
Violet had pulled herself to her feet and was using the navigation console to steady herself. "So what just happened?"
"Somehow, we were hit by a photon torpedo while traveling at warp three," the captain muttered.
"How is that possible?"
"It's not."
The captain raised his hand to head off further questions. "We'll talk later. Can you find your way to engineering?"
"I think so."
"Get down there and help Belzaire. There's bound to be damage of some sort."
She was leaving the bridge when Cyrus quietly said, "There's something out there, Captain."
"Where?"
"Right in front of us."
"What is it?"
"I don't know," Cyrus answered. "I can't see it."
"If you can't see anything, how the hell do know something's there?"
Cyrus just shrugged.
The captain pointed at Violet. "Get to engineering. Tell Belzaire to get that warp drive back online."
"I'll do what I can."
The last thing Violet heard as she headed to engineering with a renewed sense of urgency was Captain Cooper telling Cyrus to put everything they had into the shields. All their lives might depend on it.
As Violet rushed into the warp room, she was confronted with a scene straight out of her nightmares. Glowing green warp fluid squirted everywhere. Steam leaks sprouted like geysers. Blinking red and yellow beacons were the only discernible source of light. When a huge man with deep red skin and jet black hair rounded the corner screaming curses, she thought, just for a moment, that she had been transported to Hell and was facing the devil himself.
"What are you doing here?" the large, angry man growled through gritted teeth.
"I...I...I'm here to help," she managed. "Captain said to help you get the warp system back online."
"Oh," he said with a sudden smile. "Glad to have you. I'm Belzaire. Come with me. We've got a lot of work to do."
Belzaire turned and walked straight into the chaos, not even bothering to avoid the steam blasts or
leaking warp fluid. Violet followed tentatively, doing her best to avoid both. When she caught up to him, he was in the process of sliding a very heavy looking cabinet to the side, revealing a trapdoor in the floor.
"What's in there?"
"Warp fluid," he replied nonchalantly.
Before Violet could ask why the warp fluid was stored behind a hidden trapdoor, Belzaire pulled the door open to reveal a deep chamber with hundreds of clear cylinders full of glowing green fluid. There was easily ten times the legal limit of warp fluid in there.
Belzaire answered her unasked question with a mischievous smile and started pulling out cylinders. "We lost almost two hundred liters before I got the system shut down," he said. "I'll fix the leaks while you refill the system."
"Two hundred liters is more than a ship this size needs for the entire system," Violet sputtered, finally coming to terms with what she was seeing. "Not to mention twice the legal limit of reserves allowed on a ship like this."
"I've made some modifications," was all he said while he continued to pull out more cylinders of the precious liquid.
When he had retrieved twenty-five cylinders, Belzaire stood up and looked at Violet, who was staring at him with wide eyes, trying to comprehend what was going on. "Now, look," he said firmly. "If the captain sent you down here to help, something is seriously wrong. We need to get this ship back up and running. You deserve an explanation, but now is not the time."
Sensing the gravity of the situation, if not the cause, Violet nodded slowly. "What do you need me to do?"
Belzaire smiled reassuringly and pointed across the warp room to the half-empty tank of warp fluid. "We need to refill the reservoir. Can you do that while I fix the leaks?"
"I think so."
"Good. Just put a cylinder on the fill pad and hit the green button."
Infiltrate (Silver Cane Chronicles Book 3) Page 6
