The Horseshoe Nail (The Donn Book 1)

by S Thomson-Hillis

  Banking steeply, he yanked the ZR’s nose up favouring Macluan’s side.

  A Dart ricocheted off nothing, swerved and stung Jenson’s rear-shield.

  Harris’ soft curse echoed down the three-way link.

  “Mind your language,” tutted Jenson, ramming rear deflectors onto full power and engineering a spin that severely tested Tam’s struggling webbing and his balance.

  A triad of Darts hung fire. Another two triads intercepted on either side.

  RIP the first triad, ballooning into flak. Rears shields wavered.

  “Who did that?” barked Jenson, not caring and spotting trouble in the shape of groaning shields. The remaining Darts scented blood and circled like starving scavengers. Yet the ZR was holding and flooding with a Crystal energy that Jenson had not previously believed in. He asked for velocity-plus and the ZR gave it with careless, consummate flair.

  Ok, they had speed enough to come round. “This time,” he chided Mark for no reason other than he’d always worked with Mark, “try to concentrate, you need to hit them.”

  Irked at the slur, Macluan did. Another Dart exploded.

  And it looked as if Tam had finally discovered which way was up too.

  Jenson saw the calculation cones had coughed out a nearby Bylanes window.

  Ahead Darts parted suddenly.

  If he swerved the ZR into that blazing hole, they’d drill straight into the window.

  * * *

  Something old and familiar roused Ellis. It needed her awake.

  Mark had secured her webbing with straps, scared she’d fall off the bunk and hurt herself, but the same wild something that had dragged her into the here-and-now needed her to be free and mobile and overrode the buckles. Her last clasp sprang open and she jerked up, air whooshing through her ears. No sooner up than down. She spilled out of the bunk landing on the deck on all fours, with a wallop that nearly whacked her into tomorrow. For a moment she scrabbled like a hyper-active puppy on a polished floor, then stopped, still as ice.

  With mounting terror and utter certainty she glimpsed the trap.

  “No!” she burst out. “Don’t, for pity’s sake no!” Back off. Mark, don’t let him follow through. They’ve got a Command Spitter, stop him. It’s been waiting for us.

  The answering blast hurled her across the shiny deck, spinning like a top.

  Her head collided with a solid bulkhead; she bounced and whimpered.

  * * *

  The Dome on Belthan had roots like a tooth, long fat juicy roots, boring deep into the planet’s cracked crust. As his confidence grew Sam wandered them all. He soon realised his mental map was pretty accurate and he wasn’t such a bad cartographer. Tracking down the nerve-centre wasn’t hard but the throbbing engines terrified him. Sam had never been good with engines and after a series of disastrous training attempts Soren had given up. Yet even Sam could see that those vast devices did much more than simply maintain life support. There was enough power being generated to shift the planet out of its orbit and halfway into the next galaxy. What’s more the power, once produced, was being transferred.

  Why and to where?

  The levels immediately above were full of sterile medical docks and psychiatric units manned by hideously grinning mechanicals. The rapier appendages to their blunt arms were more malevolent and threatening than anything Sam’s overworked imagination could create. Settlers had been shipped onto old Belthan and penned like animals at a slaughterhouse; that had to be part of it, didn’t it? There were thousands of people in the Dome, mostly males from about Sam’s age up to, but not much above, Soren’s. There were no children anywhere, no oldies – so what had happened to them? Hannah Morlstin was definitely not on Belthan and Sam had searched for a long, long time. She was nowhere in the Dome. Nowhere.

  There had to be a reason for power generation.

  And the people.

  The terms processing plant and mobilised kept shivering under his skin and the answer might not have taken so long if he’d studied, not bunked, his history classes.

  That wasn’t his real problem though.

  The real trouble was that after he’d worked it all out, what could he do?

  He had never felt so insignificant or so useless. He needed help. He needed the marines. He needed the guys with the white hats led by a genuine stalwart hero.

  Soren had died trying to warn the Union and Sam had no ambition to follow his guardian down that bloody road. Anyway, there were lots of extra guards patrolling the communications rooms and central operations areas now and he didn’t fancy his chances.

  So when he’d figured it all out, who could help them? Who could he call and how?

  * * *

  Command Spitters were big fry and bad news, usually reserved for deep-space heavy-attack, they were fast, lethal and vicious. A Spitter roaring at them from behind the fourth moon wasn’t the best news Jenson had on that fine day. He ducked, noting, deep inside, that if they’d turned left they’d’ve ended up virtually on top of it. The echo of Mark’s voice down the three-way link didn’t help matters because he could’ve sworn he’d just been called Ellis.

  “Damn right you should’ve known,” he bussed back briskly. “That’s why you got the extra pip, not to mention the paranormal nervous system. I told you to concentrate.”

  “Have we got enough fire to down a Spitter?” asked Mark.

  “How should I know?” He had an inkling they might, just, if the wind happened to be blowing in the right direction, but the trilling amber flashes pirouetting across his board unnerved him and he needed time to sort out the damage reports before asking the impossible of the ZR. “Let’s pull over and dial up your friend Eban for a chat, shall we?”

  “Lister,” retorted Mark pedantically. “And Stanson. Engineering, Flight.”

  “Sorry. Forgot your boss don’t know the time of day about this ship.”

  “I’ve got sweet nothing down here,” said Harris hastily, sensing a punch up. He surveyed the glowing mess of his targeting trigger. “Another work-out and it’ll blow.”

  “Thanks for your positive contribution, Commander Harris.” Jenson hit a cone that was still working, if only just. The ZR shot upwards, dead vertical, dead against any rules of combat, dead ready to about-turn on a dime and dodge through anything that gave him a clear run towards that Bylanes window, which was still waiting for them. “So good for morale.”

  “Everybody else seemed to be stopping for a chat.”

  Jenson frowned down at something odd happening on his board.

  Slightly stunned, he realised it was the SC CPU kicking into a third defence mode.

  There was an extra cone forming on his board.

  It seemed to be augmenting main defence. The power was immense...

  Jenson goggled. Jenson grinned. Jenson did something odd, and innovative.

  “Why don’t you two concentrate on shooting Darts and leave the Spitter to me?”

  “Dart,” objected Harris, on the wrong side and sure he could count if nothing else.

  “Darts,” snapped Mark, on the right side of the ship and, depressingly, finding it easier not to bother counting. “He means the ones tracking from behind as well.”

  * * *

  The last bump whacked the glitches out of Ellis’ head. As she struggled up she realised it was the ship calling, the Crystal heart of the ZR, and there was something it needed. Something urgent. Suddenly she was thinking ship, thinking ship straining at the seams. Ships cracked up under this kind of combat and if you didn’t have an engineer you were stuffed. Ellis had toured a ZR-prototype during her last days training with the Typhion fleet. Even then she’d been pilot enough to note potential flaws. This ZR-3 (series 3 – how long had she slept?) was tottering and the last spasm had dislodged more circuits than any pilot could see from the flight-deck. In about five minutes his board should be buzzing like a box of lighted firecrackers. Jenson was flying, Tam and Mark were gunning so that made Ellis engineer designate. Using
a technique every Donn pilot of her generation had been made to learn, she staggered over to the nearest wall panel, flattened her palm on it and methodically checked the primary, secondary and tertiary defence systems for overload.

  The ZR gave her much more than the usual codes, the Crystal greeted her like an old friend, singing its dismay and then spilled chapter and verse and several sections of the manual... Something was very, repeat very, wrong in the central defence arsenal.

  In a blink she’d spotted the grumbling link and isolated the fault.

  Ellis nodded grimly. It was the E-blue section; those buggers always blew first.

  Her mind might be surprisingly lucid but it hadn’t told her body and they didn’t seem to be speaking at all. Hand over hand, she dragged the door open and stumbled down the slope to engineering. That repair had to be done, mighty soon; there was only Ellis to do it.

  The ship had been explicit. It had offered Jenson a new tertiary defence cone. If he drew on the SC core to target the Spitter, the command current would have to flow through a splintered axial link. If the stream was blocked because the link connecting them was severed (and it bloody near was) then the command would simply recoil. The contents of the energy cone had to go somewhere and there was nowhere else to go but the ZR’s engineering deck.

  Boom! Chain reaction. End of story, nice try, but definitely end of story.

  Unless Ellis could patch the link before Jenson gave the command.

  * * *

  “I think,” declared HStJ Jenson fervently to HStJ Jenson. “I’ve got it.”

  Of course, he wasn’t certain and he was never able to describe to anybody how it worked. Also he’d’ve loved to have known why the cone next to the additional defence he’d just been so mysteriously offered, was having some kind of fairy fit. On the whole he guessed it was about seventy-five percent certain that the new command cone, the one he’d just located all by his genius self, was going to blow that Spitter into the middle of next week.

  If front shields held.

  If Mark and Harris kept the Darts off the failing shields at his back.

  If nothing else blew up.

  Harris turned out to be a critic. “How can I hit’em if you keep jigging?”

  “Harris,” said Mark. “It’s called avoiding fire, it’s a well known battle tactic.”

  “Picky,” mumbled Harris and took out his temper on a Dart. “Picky, picky, picky.”

  * * *

  Engineering was sparking up a real storm and most of the emergency repair kits had spilled out of their cradles to roll about on the deck, which was lucky from one point of view, as they were readily in sight and available, but not good for those who needed to keep their footing or balance. The link, E-blue-7, glowed like a drunk’s nose. The problem was plain enough for any fool and Ellis was no fool. Getting close enough to mend it, now that was a problem. At least it was if you cared about singeing clothes, flesh or anything else. Ellis was past caring and the ship helped her where it could. Not often enough, the ZR was a busy craft. Grabbing the extinguisher, she shot coolant at the link, slung the insulator strips over the mess and groped for a manually operated auto-weld among the garbage biting her ankles.

  The first patch didn’t hold.

  The second thought about it before deciding to stick, gingerly.

  It wouldn’t hold. Ellis soon realised that. Slapping spare insulator sheets around it, she locked it down with grip and willpower while she looked round, frantically trying to spot a zephyr-bond or even to see where the spare arc-gun had ended up in the mess.

  All that held E-blue-7 secure was Ellis’ thin hands. And a wish.

  * * *

  Jenson’s debris clouded sights suddenly cleared and the Spitter’s silver-streaked underbelly was exposed. His cone glowed gold with promise, cheering him on.

  “Right,” he said. “Here goes nothing.” Punching cone, he fired.

  The Spitter cracked. Slowly, she rolled onto her back, orange/blue pinwheels belched from her underside and mopped along the hull, licking gashes. For a shocked minute she wallowed and then lolled drunkenly onto her side and began to quiver. A final excruciatingly sluggish rotation took forever, then abruptly she stopped, still as death.

  Five, four, three, two, one...

  She blew.

  Darts fled, black flies skirling through livid pyrotechnics.

  The ZR-3 sizzled as the shockwave beat her shields. Jenson slung her into a giddy spin, trying to rock her out of range and, at first, she seemed to double back but then leapt at the last minute, thus facing space etched with the signature of a Bylanes’ window. Ramming the ship into the Bylanes wall, for a second of crazy almost-impact, Jenson thought they were skimming it, then he corrected, pierced the wall and finally, gasping, achieved sweet peace.

  Harris’ webbing shattered, he lost his balance and hit the deck.

  Mark rammed his trigger with his nose and swore, boss-eyed and bleeding.

  Jenson took a long, icy breath and realised his hands were shaking.

  “I love you,” he assured what would forever be his ship. “Consider us betrothed.”

  * * *

  The fractured link in engineering wept under its insulator patch. The matter stream had been a shock but the emergency mend held and probably would for some time.

  What surging power the insulator sheets had not absorbed, Ellis had.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Five Wings of Glo-white fighters twirled lazily about Imperious as she turned her nose towards the Bylanes and Harth Norn. A pack of small raptors keeping pace easily with a deceptively cumbersome dinosaur. Massive motivators powered up, and vector funnels vented as she jockeyed into position. For the last time until the Games ended, her Vista-View framed the sight of the rest of the fleet in the distance, including two command vessels Endurance and Endeavour, and behind them, the Astro-research buggy, Evermore.

  From her station, Kent was forced to watch, blue eyes wide.

  Timmis watched Kent and hid a smirk.

  A short stocky man in a crumpled navy-blue uniform showered with gold pips, blurred past them cutting a swathe directly to the Admiral, waiting to greet him on the View’s dais. He was a genial grandfather of a man and though nothing special he towed several harassed aides. A second later a stately Giagosian, so tall, so broad, flanked by two brown/green combat dressed aides marched past, heads high and feet marking rhythm.

  The deck trembled and well-sprung seats bounced. Like Kent’s.

  “Who he?” she demanded on a gulp, very conscious that she was the new girl.

  “Which?”

  She swallowed her pride and it tasted rotten. “Both.”

  “The first lot was Flight,” explained Timmis. “Terrin Stanson, and the Flight boys, over from Endeavour. The others are the Ground Hogs, they do everything like that. We don’t call their base Endurance for nothing. Didn’t you know WuVane was a Giag?”

  “No,” said Kent baldly. “It wasn’t in the induction pack.”

  “Probably the new discrimination dictates,” nodded Timmis briskly. “The Council’s so terrified about offending some newly reinstated Ex-T government or another it’s tying itself up in dirty big knots. You’d’ve thought they’d’ve bunged in an Intro-Image though.”

  There was a brief silence during which Kent chewed her lip-gloss moodily.

  “War Games,” she said quietly at last. “Just practice manoeuvres?” Just games. They wouldn’t use real ammunition, it wouldn’t be live fire; there’d be no danger. Would there?

  “War?” he assured her solemnly. “Most certainly. Games? Who knows?”

  She fixed him with a hollow eye. “You know, don’t you? What do you know?”

  “Nothing,” admitted Timmis honestly. “Or not just yet at any rate. Give it time.”

  * * *

  Jenson crooned tunelessly as he combed damage reports, all screeching urgent, urgent, and urgent. The computer could deal with most but there was one message that st
ood out. Like that strange defence command-cone that’d appeared out of nowhere in the nick of time, it was as if the craft itself was pushing the report. Though he’d read about Sentient Crystal CPUs in engineering history classes there’d been few descriptions showing just how their crews had dealt with SC ships. Jenson intended to become the galaxy-wide expert very shortly. The rogue was a damage report about a leaking link in engineering blue. Mumbling something cynical about sticking a finger in a dyke, Jenson briefly wondered if it would be Mark’s finger or Harris’ and then bet on Harris because Mark’d be fussing over that bloody woman. Shoving it back in the queue he moved on to something that was a priority.

  Like getting them home in one piece.

  * * *

  The ride had been rough but not rough enough to make Mark as unsteady as he actually felt. The memory of the brief, intense flare of communion with the ZR-3 was hazy and indistinct but he was unbalanced, as if he was ploughing through an earthquake. It didn’t matter to him. Jenson was right, Mark was searching out Ellis. She’d been ill, and when Donn were joined, as he was sure they were, they shared. It was an effect he hadn’t suffered since he’d lost his family and it was disturbing, no, worse, a rake in the gut. Familiar passages danced and jigged, and he stopped at one point, leaning dizzily against the shaft.

  He called but Ellis did not answer.

  Clutching the corner of the engineering levels, he hesitated. A shaky trace flashed past, shivered and swooped drunkenly away. Engineering blue-links? How the hell had she got there? He’d strapped her down; she’d been weak and delirious so how?

  Macluan began the long drag down to engineering blue.

  * * *

  Jenson had put his money on the right man. Harris was way ahead, already plumbing the murky depths of the ZR’s engineering sub-sections. Correctly assuming that life for Jenson on the flight-deck would be hectic, Harris sensibly decided to take a shufty. Never trust a computer when you had a pair of eyes. He whistled tunelessly to take his mind off the twinges in his leg, and his back, and his hips, and the turret kickback that’d frozen one wrist. Motivators first, Tam reckoned, then defence couplings. At the corner of the blue defence links, a slight sound tapped him on the shoulder. He stopped. If the ZR was making noises like that, she was terminal and he wanted a survival pod now. It sounded like... Meow?