Apex

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Back in the long line of transports more merc crates were being opened, safely clear from the firefight. The Great Death Head had deployed a full company of infantry, 120 strong. The Cres could sense their numbers and made a point of making them believe they faced a significant force themselves. Phantom images were continually being driven into their minds, appearing and disappearing behind cover to bolster the illusion.

  Meanwhile, as Marren, Ivara, and Lornas engaged the enemy on the ground, Ella had climbed up on top of the crate stacks and was leaping the four-­meter gaps between them in rhythm. She had yet to fire a shot, and with all the commotion around them had been able to keep those with lines of sight on her from taking notice.

  When she approached one of the unloading trucks she chucked a pair of grenades into two of the opening crates, taking out eight mercs with each. She leapt down onto the flatbed and policed the bodies, shooting two survivors and glancing up at the driver at the top of the tower. His mind was clouded in fear and she could sense that he was a noncombatant. Satisfied that he was unarmed, she jumped across crate tops and onto the next flatbed, firing at the soldiers already coming out.

  From the mercs’ point of view there were six Cres on the ground firing at them, making her the seventh. Most chose the ones on the ground to shoot at, decreasing the number of shots coming her way. Those that did shoot at her she killed first, quickly leaping across the gap and onto their flatbed. She stepped over the edge of one crate and dropped down between three of the mercs, kicking one off the transport before any of them could react.

  The other two she grabbed quickly, one by the throat, the other by the arm. Using her considerable strength, she pinned the one to the flatbed’s deck by the throat and rotated her body until it was on top of his, pulling the arm and body of the other one across her and adding a strong kick to the motion. That chucked him off as well, tossing the merc up in a high rainbow-­like arc through the air and out over the drop-­off to the ground below.

  Ella grabbed the pinned man’s own weapon and shot him in the head twice to make sure she got through his helmet, then leapt up off him and shot the one she’d just thrown off as she cart-­wheeled through the air, landing on the ground a moment before his torso did. Another shot to the head ensured that he was down as well.

  Letting the other one go for the moment, Ella ran off a different direction, creating as much chaos and confusion as possible and adding more telepathic misdirection to the battle as she moved through, up, and over the trucks and crates almost randomly.

  INSIDE THE SHIP Orrona waited, guarding their cargo. She wanted to be in the fight, but knew this must take priority. She monitored the minds of her fellow Cres, keeping aware of what was going on as well as taking note of the positions of the enemy. None had yet boarded the ramp. If and when any did, then she would act. Until then she needed to stay with their crate.

  She was so intent on the ramp as the enemy’s only means of entrance that she missed the presence of another mind much closer . . . until it shot her in the back.

  Orrona bounced forward into the crate, ricocheting off it and landing on her butt.

  The Death Head scout put two more shots into her chest before she could fire back . . . at nothing.

  Instinctively she moved to the side, the pain of the superheated armor melting into her chest making her eyes water. Her shields were down, and she didn’t know where the shots had come from. In the brief respite that followed she reached out mentally trying to identify the shooter, only to realize he was coming around to her right, directly behind her.

  Their crate was to her left, and she was sprawled on the floor, so she laid back, bringing her weapon up over her chest and pointing back over her head. She aimed for the mental presence and fired.

  A dark shadow suddenly lit up in a cascade of neon colors as the scout’s camouflage armor attempted to match the luminal intensity of the lachar blast . . . something it was never designed to do. Orrona pumped several more shots into the now obvious attacker, dropping him to the ground with several columns of smoke rising from his charred flesh.

  Orrona pulled herself to her feet, feeling the burning sensation in her chest ease up, but an intense pain persisted. Her armor was cooling down, but she was still burnt underneath. Hefting her rifle, she mentally scanned the ship looking for more intruders. Confident that there were no more, she limped forward and headed to the boarding ramp. If any more were to get aboard they would have to go directly past her, and a camosuit wasn’t going to fool her a second time.

  JALIA HELD HER own behind the landing leg, knowing full well all the enemy had to do to take her down was rush her laterally. Fortunately there was enough chaos that they didn’t pay much attention to her. She made use of that advantage, taking potshots at mercs preoccupied with the Cres. Whether she hit them or distracted them, she was aiding the golden-­armored wonders, which was all that mattered.

  One on one, she might have been able to take one of the mercs. Maybe even two on a good day, but she wasn’t outfitted for combat, nor was she trained for it. She was a scrapper for sure, and a decent shot with her sidearm, but on this impromptu warfront she was out of her league and she knew it, which made her more than happy to be able to keep her head down while helping out a bit here and there.

  As the weaponsfire died down, Jalia kept to her position. She didn’t want to walk out from cover, but from the sound of things the battle was coming to a close. Who won she wasn’t quite sure, but she hadn’t seen any of the Cres actually go down.

  What seemed to be an annoyingly long time later, Ivara’s voice entered her mind again.

  It’s over. We need to leave immediately.

  “You think?” Jalia whispered sarcastically, then belatedly realized that Ivara had probably ‘heard’ her think that as she jogged back to the boarding ramp. Orrona came down the ramp pulling the body of a merc and dumped it over the side. She yipped a bit with the effort and Jalia noticed a large charred section of her chest armor, which was now retracted into vest mode.

  “I’ll live,” the Cres said, anticipating her question.

  Jalia nodded and left her at the ramp as she headed into the ship and up to the bridge. She was starting to get used to the Cres reading her mind, and it certainly saved time.

  When she hit the bridge and saw it was clear, Jalia slipped her pistol back in its holster and slid into the pilot’s chair. She ran through a quick engine start-­up, powered up the shields, and remotely retracted the boarding ramp after making sure all five of her passengers were aboard.

  Meanwhile, the Cres did a sweep of the ship to look for additional intruders. Their mental inventory came up negative, and their visual sweep detected nothing out of the ordinary. When finished, Ivara joined Jalia on the bridge and sat down at one of the secondary stations.

  “Can you . . .” Jalia began to ask.

  “Yes,” Ivara answered, pulling out the small device from inside the cloak she had reclad herself with and began hacking into the local planetary information grid. As Jalia engaged the gravity drives in antigravity mode and eased the ship off the ground, Ivara displayed a small holographic map in her palm again.

  “No activity yet,” she relayed to the Junta. “I wouldn’t count on that lasting.”

  “Me neither,” Jalia said as the ship’s landing gear retracted. Once locked in place, Jalia stood the ship on its tail using the small bow gravity drive, bringing the nose of the Resolute up 90 degrees until it was pointing to the sky.

  “Here we go,” Jalia said, kicking in the primary drive at relatively low power. The ship visually jerked and rocketed skyward, accelerating fast.

  Jalia luckily found a sizeable hole in the aerial and orbital traffic patterns and pushed her ship as hard as she could against the atmospheric drag. The friction was absorbed by the Resolute’s shields, but still they could only take so much. Plus the dimensions of the shields weren
’t superaerodynamic, so she had a bit of a struggle on her hands piloting a straight line up, but she managed well enough.

  They escaped the atmosphere within forty seconds, after which Jalia greatly increased their speed, pushing off against the planet’s gravity well in a perpendicular direction from the system’s star. She didn’t care where they were headed just yet, all that mattered right now was getting off the planet and getting some maneuvering room between themselves and any potential pursuers.

  Jalia kicked off the drive and let the ship coast, glancing at the sensor panel to make sure they weren’t in danger of running into anything ahead, at least nothing big enough to see. Debris impacts were always possible, and extremely dangerous. Fortunately, space was vast and mostly empty.

  The Junta slid out of her seat and into the adjacent navigator’s station. She brought up a system map and began plotting jumppoints for the adjacent star systems. Four pulsating dots appeared on the holographic map, then stretched out into lines intersecting the center of Hellis. Any point along those lines would allow a jump to the distant system along that exact trajectory, with any point farther away not being able to yield sufficient repulsory momentum to achieve the desired speed that Jalia had input into the computer.

  Faster ships could use weaker gravity to attain similar speeds, thus they had longer jumplines to work with. The Resolute’s possibilities had plenty of leeway, allowing the ship to get enough gravity to push on without having to get sunburnt from getting ultraclose to the star.

  One of the jumplines switched from blue to flashing red, along with a highlighted icon ring pointing out that one of the small outer planets in the system was sitting along the trajectory of the jumpline to the Pella System.

  Jalia frowned. If she wanted to, she could tighten her calculations and probably still make the jump. The parameters the computer was using were generous, meaning that the warning would pop up if there was any interference within a sizeable zone around the jumpline.

  No point in taking any chances.

  That meant Pella was out, leaving Korfax, Mewlon, and Wresto as possible destinations. There were four other reliable spacelanes out of Hellis, but the target systems were too far away for her ship to jump to. Jumpships not only had faster drives, but more accurate ones, allowing longer spacelanes to be used. If any ship overestimated their accuracy range, it could miss its destination star altogether, which meant no gravity well to brake against and a slow, starving death. Jalia’s options were limited to those systems within the range of the Resolute’s gravity drive, and she’d be insane to try for anything else.

  “Mewlon,” she chose. It was the least distant, and in the general direction of Iras, which was their eventual destination. Jalia pulled up that jumppoint in greater detail and began focusing sensors on the area. There was considerable lag, given the lightspeed limitations of the Resolute’s tech, but within a few minutes she would begin getting feedback.

  “Can I see that?” she asked Ivara. Sensing what she wanted, the Cres pulled up the traffic control tracking data for the system and highlighted the area of her chosen jumppoint. Its data was limited too, but not quite so much as Jalia’s. Several monitoring stations in the system were using Telaris sensors, which had a return rate three times that of lightspeed.

  “Looks good for now,” Jalia said with a nod. She began plotting a course to that location, using the gravity of three different planets, plus that of the star, to maneuver a route that would get them to the jumppoint with significantly reduced velocity. Otherwise she’d have to really bleed her plasma engines dry to kill their momentum before making the jump, for less lateral momentum meant more accuracy.

  And when dealing with interstellar jumps, accuracy was everything.

  Jalia tweaked her route four times, adjusting at multiple points until she got what she wanted. Once satisfied, she activated the gravity drive and made a microjump on the first leg of the insystem journey to the jumppoint.

  Chapter 8

  AT THE END of the fourth leg of its transit to the Mewlon jumppoint, the Resolute decelerated against the gravity of the second moon of Rextor, a small, uninhabited planetoid in the system. After bleeding off speed Jalia, with the help of the ship’s navigational computer, latched onto Rextor’s gravity and swung the ship into a high speed orbit around the planet, breaking free at the desired angle to launch them on the fifth and final leg in toward the star, against which they would later decelerate near the jumppoint.

  The problem was, during their multiple hour journey a small armada of mercenary ships had transited to the jumppoint ahead of them and were setting up a blockade. In fact, they were now blockading all the jumppoints within the system, but the Mewlon jumppoint had been reinforced with additional ships as the Resolute’s course had been plotted and their intended destination surmised.

  Jalia and Ivara had already discussed the situation and decided to proceed. Blockades in space were virtually impossible to construct, given how large an area needed to be covered and how fast gravity drives allowed a ship to accelerate. The only practical way to disable a jumppoint was to fill the area with debris, creating an asteroid field which would increase the chances of a collision and subsequent ship destruction. A captain could always choose to take the risk and jump anyway, but most prudent individuals wouldn’t jump anywhere close to a debris field of any size or density.

  Artificial debris fields took an extremely long time to construct, so the enemy’s one and best hope of containing them within the Hellis System was not in play. There would be, however, a moment of vulnerability when the Resolute came to a standstill and aligned for the interstellar jump. Extraneous movement would cause inaccuracy in the jump, meaning the ship had to be on an exact straight line between stars, else the gravitational push would be off target and they’d have to either adjust en route or miss the destination altogether.

  During this alignment time the enemy could theoretically intercept and disable their ship. An evasive microjump away from the jumpline could always be executed, but it would mean remaining in the system and missing the exit point, though they would still have eluded capture. Only if they attempted the alignment and saw it through would the enemy have a brief opportunity to capture them if they were close enough.

  The trouble for their pursuers was that the Resolute could jump at any point along the jumpline. The closer to the star theywere the more push they could muster, but the angles inherent would also allow for more inaccuracy. The farther away from the star the more accurate the jump, yet less gravity to push off from.

  This still left a wide range of possibilities, and even with several mercenary ships sitting on several jumppoints, both in close to the star and more outward, there was enough space that a carefully calculated jump could pass by them without incident. Even with 100 ships in circular formation it would be difficult to contain a ship making a jump, though it could prompt some negligible inaccuracy in flight. That could then be accounted for during the journey using conventional engines or even a slight gravitational tug from a nearby star system, amounting to nothing more than additional fuel loss.

  Fearing that remaining insystem would only strengthen their opposition, the Resolute was going to run the blockade and Jalia had chosen a jumppoint on the line that wasn’t near any of the ‘parked’ ships. However, as they closed and the sensor systems on the mercenary ships began to detect them, their alignment changed and they began to position for a potential intercept.

  The Resolute had no weapons, so running was their only option. Playing cat and mouse in space afforded a huge advantage to the mouse . . . until it ran out of fuel. With multiple ships at their disposal and the ability to refuel, playing the waiting game meant the mercenaries would win out eventually. Jalia and the Cres had to make a break for it now if they were going to have any real chance of surviving.

  To that end, the Junta watched as the freighter was getting close to scissor cr
ossing the jumpline, with the mercenaries moving to gather at the calculated intersection point. Before they arrived, however, Jalia engaged the gravity drives and began killing momentum against the star while simultaneously pulling on three distant planets, running those drives high and expending a significant amount of fuel to pull off the maneuver. She killed the star’s drive connection and moved the ship laterally over to the jumpline using the other gravity feeds, then braked as much as she could against them.

  That left them floating near the jumpline and drifting towards it at an odd angle. With the navigational computer’s autocontrol, the plasma engines activated and corrected their position with a lot of burn time and several angular redirections. All the while the enemy ships, temporarily out of position, began closing in again.

  “They’re deploying fighters,” Ivara informed calmly, still tapped into the system’s tracking grid. “They’re making microjumps ahead of the warships.”

  “Which means they’re already closer than we think,” Jalia commented, watching the navigational display with anticipation. They were close now.

  The Junta glanced at the shields, making sure they were fully deployed in defense mode. She’d have to switch them to jump mode soon.

  The deks ticked off the clock slowly, far too slowly, but they were almost there. Just a few more to go.

  Jalia held one four-­fingered hand over the shield panel and her other over the engine control. Both programs had already been entered and configured, they just required a single ‘go’ command. She started counting down from twenty along with the clock, with each pause between dek seeming to take an eternity. When she reached nine the proximity warning sounded.