Length: 80 meters
Estimated Crew: 20
Estimated fighter craft: 2
Estimated drone payload: 8
Heavy plasma cannons: 2
Light plasma guns: 4
Laser arrays: 4
Beagle Class Battle Sentry. BCS-89876-956-314.
Manufactured by: Elaka Nota Corporation: Trappist - 1e
Branding: Elaka Nota Corporation 3rd Fleet 1st Array
Hyperdrive: EN - 5200TALLEY- 45 hours to 1 light year.
Warpdrive: No
Foldingdrive: No
Length: 80 meters
Estimated Crew: 20
Estimated fighter craft: 2
Estimated drone payload: 8
Heavy plasma cannons: 2
Light plasma guns: 4
Laser arrays: 4
“I don’t know what any of that means, but I’m gonna guess we are about to die. Again.” Z moaned.
“These are short distance battleships. They are meant for solar system or planet defense,” I said. “The two on the right of the screen are escorts for the larger one.”
“Can we outrun them?” Eve asked. “The screen says they are five thousand, five hundred kilometers away.”
“Maybe. If they fire up their hyperdrive, they can get to us in a minute, but then we can use our drive to get away. Z, do you know how to use the drive?” I asked the hacker.
“No.” She shook her head.
“You’ve got forty-five seconds to figure it out.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” The hacker grunted and then turned away from me so she could dance her fingers across the various controls.
The alarm on the bridge continued to howl, but Eve was also messing with the controls, and the annoying sound cut off as soon as I saw her press the screen on one of her monitors.
“I believe they are trying to open communications with us,” Eve said to me as she pointed at her screen.
“Can you do it so they can’t see our faces? I just want the audio,” I said.
“I will try to do so,” the vampire said before she began to press her fingers against her screen. The contrast between the two women’s movements was apparent. Z’s hands, fingers, and arms waved around the screen, keyboards, and controls as if she was trying to tame an out-of-control orchestra. Eve made careful, methodical movements after she studied the terminal screen for a few seconds.
“It is simple. Audio on in three, two…” Eve said as she counted down with her fingers above her head.
“This is Captain Mariah bin Kulthum of the Elaka Nota Corporate vessel HCS Three Four Five. You are committing an act of galactic theft. Cut your engines and weapons systems immediately.” The woman’s voice was gravelly, and she had the thick accent of most natives on Trappist - 1e.
The two women turned around in their seats to glance at me, and I gestured for Z to continue working at her station.
“HAD Three Five. I see that you have opened up the communication channel. I know you hear me. Surrender immediately. You have stolen Elaka Nota Corporation property. Cut your engines and weapon systems immediately.”
“Mute our line, but I still want to hear her,” I whispered to Eve, and the vampire nodded as she carefully pressed a button on her screen.
“I have no idea what I’m doing. Shit, I’m sorry,” Z moaned.
“Keep looking. You figured out how to turn on the engine to get us into orbit, you can engage a hyperdrive,” I said.
“Yeah, but that was just the main thrusters. This thing has that plus a hyperdrive, a warpdrive, and a foldingdrive. I thought a warpdrive was the same thing as a hyperdrive, so I’m obviously not the right person to be looking at any of this.”
“You are doing fine, and you are the most capable person here.” The beast was angry at the hacker’s complaints, but I forced his rage down into the pit of my subconscious. “Hyperdrives are slower and are measured in terms of how many hours it takes to go a lightyear. Warpdrives are measured in how many light years a vessel can travel per hour. Foldingdrives--”
“I thought were just experimental. The specs I got from the control tower didn’t say anything about one, but I see a control interface for it.”
“Can we use the folding--” Eve began to ask, but Z interrupted her.
“I don’t know how to do any of this stuff! I’m like a fucking monkey trying to drive a car in reverse while adjusting the radio,” the hacker shouted.
“This is my last request. If you do not cut your engines and disarm, we will attack and destroy you.” Captain Mariah bin Kulthum’s voice was angry, but I also sensed the undercurrents of fear there. I guessed she didn’t want to attack this ship. I doubted it was because she thought we could retaliate. It was probably more that her orders were to only destroy the vessel if she absolutely had to.
She would try to capture us first. This strange ship was no doubt worth too much to them.
“I’m going to find the gun controls so I can buy you some more time.” I unbuckled the harness on my chair and turned toward one of the many other stations on the bridge. One of these chairs would have access to the weapon controls.
“I will help,” Eve said as she climbed out of the copilot’s seat.
We moved to the other stations. It was hard for me to fit my large frame into the space, but I managed to squeeze into the first “gunnery” station and put my hands on the controls there.
Z’s comment about the monkey driving a car couldn’t have been truer.
There were dozens of monitors, three different control sticks, small map displays, and terminals that seemed to scroll an endless vomit of text. Most of the displays still had the plastic wrap on them, and I pulled a large sheet off before I could actually lay my tiger hands upon what looked like the master control switches. My changed hands were much too large to fit over the controls comfortably, and the rage came to my throat with a thunderous growl.
I’d been on plenty of ships, and seen pilots work. I’d also manned guns and assisted with drone controls on occasion. I picked this one because it seemed to have appropriate controls, but I couldn’t make sense of how to turn on the weapons or set the targeting display. Most of the ones I had used were either already set up, or the old fashioned “point at the bad guy and pull the joystick trigger” style.
“I found the engine user interface! Wooooo! Now I have to figure out how to tell one of them to go. Do you have a destination?” Z shouted across the bridge.
“Anywhere but here,” I growled.
“That doesn’t help. Space is a big fucking place, also we can’t go very far because--”
The alarms howled again, and a red light flashed from the ceiling of the bridge. The three cruisers on our display stretched as if they were made out of rubber, and they blinked from view. The bridge screens adjusted a second later to put the ships in the center of the view screen. Their images were a bit sharper now, and the distance measurement on the side read that they were now four kilometers away.
Fighter craft began to launch from the bays of each ship like angry space bees.
“Z!” I yelled at the hacker.
“I see them. Where the fuck are we going?”
“Far away!” I shouted back.
“We can’t!”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t have any fucking food! There is just water on board and only a few hundred gallons. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. If I fuck this up, we might be months away from another planet or station. You both say you aren’t going to eat me, but I’m going to look pretty delicious after a few weeks of starva--”
“Go to the closest inhabited solar system,” I ordered.
The fighter craft spun toward us like angry darts.
“Which is?” she asked.
“You don’t know?”
“Don’t you know?” she shouted back. “You are the damn captain!”
“Gliese Eight Seven Six,” Eve said, and her words cut through Z and my shouting m
atch like a knife.
“Thank you! I’m going to engage the warpdrive. Partially because it sounds cool, and partially because I’m scared shitless of using the fold--”
“Just hurry the fuck up!” I shouted as the fighters shot out their first blasts of greenish-yellow plasma fire.
“Oh. My. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. Here we go!” I saw Z raise her arms up over her head and brought a single finger down to press a button on her display.
Nothing happened.
“Uhhh. I didn’t expect that--” she started to say, but then our ship rocked as the initial wave of plasma blasts slammed into the hull.
Except it didn’t hit our hull. One of the displays in front of me showed a semi-transparent, twisting, strange cloud of smoke had emerged around the vessel.
“What is that?” I asked Z.
“I don’t know. Some kind of shield or something? What kind of ship did we steal? I’m not an expert, but I didn’t think starships had shields that could stop plasma.”
“They don’t,” I confirmed. I’d never heard of such a thing, and the Jupiter Navy had the latest in technology.
But then again, technology could evolve rapidly, and in many ways when each solar system was an island which could only be reached by starship.
“I have figured out how to access our side cannons,” Eve said the words as if she had found what she wanted for dinner next week, instead of just figuring out how to prolong our lives for a few extra moments. “Access them with the orange array of buttons on the top right of your terminal and then grab the rightmost control stick.”
“Confirmed,” I said as I followed her instructions. My screens all flickered as soon as I hit the buttons, and I saw a series of six gun ports that I could control. It looked as if I could actually man any of the cannons on the ship by toggling through the selector, but my sights first appeared on the flank of the ship where the other craft were attacking.
“I’m going to figure out why this thing isn’t work--” Z was interrupted by our ship rocking a bit. The motion was much less than the initial attack, but my anger still made my hackles rise. I almost ripped the control stick out of its mount when I whipped the guns around toward the enemy fighters.
Eve was already shooting, and I saw her cannons spray red streaks of laser punctured with slower moving balls of tumbling plasma. My shots were of similar color, but the enemy craft was taking evasive action.
They weren’t evasive enough.
It took me three shots to get a feel for the lag time of the lasers. They traveled much faster than the plasma balls, but it was taking them about a second to make it between the space between our ship and the twisting craft. My fourth shot lanced through the wing of one of the craft, and the metal turned dark red a fraction of a second before it imploded.
“The lasers make the plasma globes explode to roughly twenty times their original size,” Eve said.
I looked over at her screen and saw what she meant. The plasma balls moved achingly slow, but the woman shot one that was near a group of enemy fighters. The globe instantly exploded like a mini sun, and the craft around the detonation were vaporized.
“Confirmed,” I said as I turned to my own guns and began to launch more of the globes along with my lasers.
I hit another fighter with my laser and then got a hit off on the plasma ball to fry another one of the fighters. These were manned craft, and I saw boarding mechanisms on the undercarriage of a few of them. The sight further convinced me that they still wanted to capture our vessel, or they would have just launched offensive drones first.
Then I saw the sentry cruisers launch their offensive drones.
“Z!” I shouted over my shoulder.
“I see them! There has to be sixty. Why won’t this piece of shit drive work? Do I need to suck its--”
“Use the foldingdrive!” Eve actually yelled, and I turned to look at her.
“Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Sorry!” Z said as our ship rocked again.
“Z!” I shouted at her again.
“Fuck! Fine. Damn! I plugged in the coordinates. Get ready!”
“Just do it!” I screamed, and my voice sounded more like a tiger’s roar than a person.
“Three! Two! Oh, this is going to suckkkkkkkkk!” The blonde hacker’s voice seemed to echo off of the walls of the bridge like a dance club screech.
Her voice cut off suddenly.
Everything turned to black.
As if someone had turned off a switch on my vision, hearing, touch, and smell.
As if someone had turned off a switch on my life.
Chapter 18
I ran through a warehouse. It was a large space. High ceiling with lights that seemed like stars in the night sky. There was smoke or fog on the ground. The space felt empty, but it wasn’t. There were endless rows of cages on each side of me.
Inside of the cages were massive tigers.
These weren’t Earth Tigers. They were five, maybe six times the size. Hell, each of the monsters’ paws was probably the size of an average tiger. I was but an ant in their presence, but the creatures all studied me with their huge elliptical eyes. They made no sound as they watched me, and while they didn’t seem aggressive, I was glad for the bars on the cage.
Then I heard a growl behind me.
One of the cats had escaped.
Its fur was black. Its stripes were a bright white, and its eyes glowed red. The monster took a step toward me and opened its maw to growl. The beast didn’t have teeth, just a pair of long fangs and a longer serpent tongue.
I got the idea and turned to run.
The other tigers started screeching when it sprinted past them. Their cries of hunger almost split my skull open. I brought my hands up to my head to try and cover my ears, but their screams made me dizzy. I fell into the fog that hugged the floor. Then I tried to crawl, but the black fanged monster was on me.
Its long tongue wrapped around my legs like a tentacle. My fingers slid against the smooth concrete floor as the tongue pulled on me. I thought about bending myself in half so I could punch it, but then I was hanging upside down in the air.
I looked up and saw the fanged mouth open wide to swallow me.
“Adam!” the creatures screamed, and it felt like my ears were starting to bleed.
“Adam!”
I yelled and tried to pull out of the wrap of the tongue, but it wasn’t the tongue around my legs, it was a grouping of sheets.
I was laying on a bed drenched in sweat and hyperventilating so much that I thought I was going to faint. I was no longer in my half-tiger form, and I couldn’t actually remember if I had been human or animal in my dream.
“Shhh. I am here. Are you okay?” Eve asked from the side of my bed. There were no lights on in the room, and the woman was sitting in darkness.
“Yes. Where am I?” I asked. There was a tube connected to my wrist, and I looked up to the head of my bed to see a stand with eight empty saline drip bags. Eve or Z must have realized that I needed a lot of liquid to replace the blood I had lost.
“In your quarters. We are on our new ship in the Gliese Eight Seven Six system. Can I turn on the light? I didn’t want to earlier for fear it would wake you.”
“Confirmed. How long have I been sleeping?” I asked. I was naked under my twisted sheets, and somehow not covered in any dried blood. I did smell of fear, though, and I truly wanted to take a shower.
“Fourteen Earth hours,” she said as she turned on a sleek looking lamp on the nightstand next to my bed. The beautiful woman was wearing the same clothes she had during our escape from Trappist - 1e. “How do you feel?”
“Like I need to sleep another fourteen or twenty-eight.” I laughed and then ran a hand through my hair. “Are we safe then?”
“For now. I picked this system because one of the surface thoughts I remember reading many years ago. The B planet in this solar system has eight moons that have been terraformed. He had visited one of them during a port stay. This system is
close to Earth, and far out of Elaka Nota Corporation’s territory. There are other threats here, of course, but they won’t be looking for this ship, you, Z, or me.”
“That is good news. Did you undress me?” I asked as I swung my feet to the edge of the bed. The I.V. tube moved with my arm, and I went about yanking the needle out of my vein.
“Z and I did,” she answered plainly. “We gave you a sponge bath while you were sleeping.”
“You both did?”
“Yes. I needed to make sure you didn’t have a bullet or piece of shrapnel stuck inside of you. It was easier with the two of us. Even when you aren’t in your changed form, you are still a large muscular man. I’m not quite able to move you by myself. Ahhh, you are a bit embarrassed.” Eve laughed. “It is okay. You are not nearly as embarrassed as Z. She tried to leave four times. I finally let her go.”
“Uhhh. Thanks. I think I would have preferred to be awake for that.” I laughed, and the beautiful woman joined me.
“Will you dress and join us on the bridge? We need to discuss our next move.”
“Confirmed. I’ll take a quick shower, then be there.”
“Good.” The woman smiled at me, and we both stood.
Our eyes met, and we stared at each other for a few moments. I might have been too bold to stand up naked, but the woman had seen me in the nude three times now, and I had seen her. She could read my mind and speak to me from inside of my head. She was beautiful, powerful, and dangerous.
I wanted her.
She leaned her head up slightly and wrapped her arms around my neck. My fingers found her narrow waist, and I pulled her to me. Eve’s red eyes closed and her mouth parted half a second before our lips met. It was a bit weird sliding my tongue past her fangs, but I didn’t mind. Her full lips were made of the softest silk, and the heat from her mouth seemed to fill my body until I thought I would never know cold again.
We both moaned at the same time, and our arms tightened around each other. The kiss was like no other I had ever felt, but Eve was like no other woman I had ever met. It was a soft joining between us, but I could feel her passion in the way her tongue explored my mouth.
“Ahhhh,” she sighed when our lips finally parted. Her cheeks looked a bit red, and my manhood was standing at full attention.
Eye of the Tiger: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 1) Page 19
