by Blaze Ward
“Make a note to let Trinidad Mildon and Markus Dunklin know,” Phil decided. “If we can capture the ship cleanly enough, they can run down and fill their holds with materials from the truck stop. But have them check with me first.”
“Roger that, sir,” Evan said.
“I think I’ve seen enough, Evan,” Phil said a moment later. “You?”
“Anytime, sir,” he said. “Got everything I need.”
“West,” Phil turned to the Yeoman flying today. “Prepare to drop us into JumpSpace and take us back to everyone else.”
It was time to take the war up a notch.
The Stalk (January 4, 403)
The commanders had been aboard CS-405 for the final mission parameters, but Granville was home now. Back aboard Persephone and planning his approach.
He hadn’t been in combat in nearly eight years, and for once he was happy not to share his bridge with anyone. Nobody could see how bad his hands were wanting to shake. Deni would make a joke about now that would break through all the tension.
He missed his other half. This mission had to succeed, so that they could go find their own happiness.
Everyone was at their stations, instead: Leomiti forward with Morgan and Spier on the flanks; Olshefski midship and Bardeen aft.
Persephone’s bridge had been designed for three. A command officer and two specialists handling things. Given the size of the vessel, maybe only a Lieutenant, like he had been, but possibly a Lt. Commander. With maybe one or two other officers aboard at most, serving as a Chief Engineer and a Navigator.
But he was alone. As he had always been in his fightercraft. His, the sole responsibility to fly, navigate, and maintain the shields, if combat broke out. He was his own science officer as well, handling all the communication chores with everything slaved to the commander’s console.
And he was about to attack, a guppy threatening a whale, except that this little fishy could bite. Granville wondered if they would actually use the guns today, or just threaten the big hospital ship, and then help the others chase it down when it decided to run.
“All hands, sixty seconds to action,” he said into the intercom.
Because he couldn’t see anybody right now, Granville had decided to leave the line open ship-wide, so everyone had a friendly voice somewhere close. Otherwise, they were all alone in whatever chamber their duty station required.
He had spent enough time alone on Abakn. At least until Deni saved his sanity.
“Engineering, confirm all systems on-line and putting out full power,” he continued.
“Everything on the beam, sir,” Bardeen replied with a smile in her voice. “Shield generators on and ready.”
“Systems, how’s life support holding?” Granville called to Isiah, his longest-serving crewmember, by only several weeks, but still a plank-holder, along with him and Galin.
“I wanna convert one of the storage lockers to a green house, sir,” the man said. “Systems are still kicking up old dirt and grime and it gets a little stinky back here.”
“Remind me later,” Granville said. “Bow Gun?”
“We are fully charged and ready for battle, sir,” Leomiti sounded like a young WarGod preparing for the end of the universe.
“Starboard Gun?” Granville continued.
“All set, sir,” Morgan said quietly. He was always quiet.
“Port Gun?” Granville completed the circuit.
“Cleared and prepared for action, bridge,” Spier replied crisply.
She had never seen combat, but you couldn’t have told that from her voice.
Granville looked down and confirmed his own boards. He could have read the status from here, but it was better to talk to people.
He had once spent nearly a year in silence, learning Mongolian well enough to actually talk to people. Silence wore on the soul in ways that pain, physical pain, never could.
He had survived, he reminded himself. He would continue to. He had a place. He had a purpose.
And he had friends. And his love.
Now he needed to go be a hero.
“Ten seconds, everyone on your toes,” Granville ordered, hearing his own voice change.
He sounded like a commander now, and not the punk-kid pilot who knew everything in the universe, right up until the moment he didn’t.
Persephone emerged from the shadow of Hades and cast spring about her. He was coming in fast, but not so hot that he would blow by his target. And not close enough to the edge of the gravity well that he collapsed his matrix and had to rebuild it.
No, today he was a messenger speeding to the king with critical news from a distant battle. Nobody should panic.
At least, not yet.
Granville read the system plot on the right-hand side of his screen, while listening to the comm and keeping the left-hand side dedicated to internal gauges.
They were coming in from behind the target as it orbited. The other ship was about twenty degrees south from the planet’s equator, but Granville had aimed to insert right at the ecliptic. It would look less threatening, and hopefully put him in a position to pounce if the captain over there wasn’t paying attention.
He purposefully didn’t hail the only other vessel in orbit, and all of his transponders read like he was a light freighter from Ninagirsu. Anything to put the other guy off guard, as there was nobody likely to accidentally fire on them right now.
“We are inserting into system orbit,” Granville said out loud, keeping up his story-telling narration of events.
Persephone’s scanners were too good and too powerful for a simple freighter, and he wasn’t skilled enough to dial them down now, and then bring them back up later when he needed them, so he went in on passives instead.
CS-405 had spent two days watching, and nothing had apparently changed from the notes Evan Brinich had provided.
Slowly, Granville converged, maintaining a line twenty degrees north of the hospital ship, but at a close elevation and closing speed.
Finally, somebody woke up. Obviously a civilian vessel, as anybody with a military background would have said something as soon as hit an orbital path.
“DYWXK-345029, this is PWMGT-6357181,” a man’s voice challenged over the radio. He sounded bored. “We’re on an operational deployment with a designated clearance zone. You need to move to a different orbital location, or land on the planet below. Everything within thirty degrees of sky-arc is off-limits.”
“Uhm, could you repeat that, please?” Granville said, putting the internals on mute so his crew could listen, but not be heard. “What’s up with so much sky?”
“We’re a medical vessel, DYWXK-345029,” the man continued. “We have just retrieved our lander from the ground and will be departing soon, but you need to keep your distance. If you are landing, you should start your spiral now.”
“Oh,” Granville continued to play dumb. “Like, a real hospital? In space and everything?”
“You got it, buddy,” the man replied. “Serving The Holding by taking care of outer colonies.”
“So if I hadn’t seen a doctor in a year…?”
“Make an appointment at our next landfall, just like everybody else. We’re on a tight timeline and everything’s already packed up for transit.”
“Okay, good to know.” Granville tried to sound relieved, disappointed, and full of wonder, all at the same time. “Gimme an hour to plot my landing, we weren’t expecting anyone here, so I only had us to orbit while I got out the slide-rule and did the rest.”
“Acknowledged, DYWXK-345029,” the man said, still bored and distant. “But keep on your current heading so you don’t cross our flight path.”
“Gotcha,” Granville said, cutting the circuit.
He reopened the intercom so everyone could hear.
“All hands, stand by while we give them time to relax,” Granville smiled into the microphone.
They were coming up on the hospital ship slowly right now. Casually, as it were. A
nd well clear, despite the other guy’s insistence on thirty degrees of clearance in every direction.
It wasn’t like there were any other vessels in orbit besides the two of them, so the man was just being a punk. Or a didact, which was even worse.
Granville hated barracks-lawyers.
Ship like that had next to zero acceleration, so he wasn’t worried about them suddenly putting the engines into overdrive and escaping a police cutter that had just come out of the maintenance yard.
And they should be completely unarmed, except for the deadly, razor-sharp wit of the man currently being a pain in the ass on the radio.
Their only escape from big, bad pirates was going to be triggering the JumpDrives from inside the gravity well, and hoping for the best.
Pity, that.
There were two ways to do this. First, he could just kind of ooze over, playing stupid until the other guy noticed and said something. But that ran the risk of them getting away from him, and Granville really wanted this one for himself, if that was possible.
Or, he could turn to an intercept course and push the engines as hard as they would go, getting in close enough, hopefully, to put a shot across their bow before they could react.
He gave them ten minutes to drift off onto other tasks. No threat from over here, just a dumb-ass country-boy in a small freighter trying to make a quick hit of cash, maybe swapping for useless trinkets from some other poor colony nearby.
It was time.
“All hands, prepare to raise the black flag,” he ordered calmly.
Granville had already programmed the course because it needed a good deal of precision, and the target wasn’t going to be evading him. He brought the ship around hard and set the engines for maximum burn.
The only thing that went against his instincts right now was not doing a hard ping on their ship, instead relying on their scanner emitters to locate them for him, and hoping they hadn’t launched a small shuttle or crew in EVA. He could always rescue someone later, if he needed to, but he wouldn’t see them until he was in their laps, as it were.
Apparently, they weren’t paying any attention to their screens over on that other bridge. They were sending out a basic navigational ping every sixty seconds, but that was automatic on most vessels in orbit.
And he was accelerating up their asses right now.
“DYWXK-345029, this is PWMGT-6357181.” A woman’s voice now, so the other guy must have gone off duty.
Granville wondered if he had told her anything or if she was frantically looking up comm logs right now.
He ignored her signal. There was nothing she wanted to hear from him, since he was not about to sheer off and apologize for bad piloting.
Sensors detected a hard ping.
Someone had just turned on the big sensor array and sent a pulse at him. Their systems would register that his current course would pass well below and to port from them, which was his plan. Accidents could happen, when ships got too close going too fast.
And he only needed to be close enough to open fire with the Type-3 in the bow.
“DYWXK-345029, this is PWMGT-6357181. Please respond.”
She was growing concerned now. Not quite to the level of red alert and launch the flight wing, but getting there soon.
In twenty seconds, Leomiti would be in range.
“PWMGT-6357181, go ahead,” he said in a distant, unfocused drawl.
“DYWXK-345029, you are violating a no-fly zone and will pass too close on our flank,” she snapped. “Sheer off and move to a different orbit, before I notify the authorities and have your pilot’s license revoked.”
“Negative, PWMGT-6357181,” Granville let his attention sound like it was wandering. “We’re still on course. Have your gyros lost their heading?”
It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. He just needed to distract them some more.
“What are you talking about, you idiot?” she demanded. “Heave to. You are a menace to navigation.”
The little light on his console went green, indicating that they were hopefully within outer range of the Type-3. He wouldn’t know without lighting them up with a targeting scanner, at which point, all hell was likely to break loose.
Granville considered arguing with the woman some more. Maybe rattling her cage pretty hard with a variety of misdirections and profanities, but Persephone was really here to drive them to CS-405.
It was time for them to get mean.
He pressed the button on his console and brought all the targeting scanners on-line, then he sent a hard pulse of energy downrange from the sensors. It returned quickly, establishing all the baseline parameters he needed as a former fighter jock.
Granville tweaked the course up and in a little bit, like he was shifting into a ramming stance, just to make her choke on her tongue a little extra.
“Bow Gun, put a shot across their bow,” he ordered. “You don’t have to miss by much, but I want their undivided attention and an undamaged target.”
“Roger that, Commander,” Leomiti called. “Stand by.”
The whole frame of the ship rattled when the gun fired. Lights flickered just the slightest amount as the capacitors dumped and began to suck power out of the generators and batteries. Even the metal vibrated at a slightly different pitch for a moment.
“DYWXK-345029, what the hell are you doing?” the woman screamed at him.
Frantic, from the sounds of things.
“We’re pirates,” Granville growled back. “Surrender or you will be destroyed.”
Wolf Pack (January 4, 403)
Phil considered being angry with the man, but Veitengruber had been following orders, more or less. It was the idiots aboard the other ship that ruined all Phil’s carefully laid plans.
Apparently nobody had told them about all the piracy problems over the last eight months. Or they hadn’t listened. Something.
Stupid bastards had surrendered instead of running.
He looked down at the console and read the message from Veitengruber again.
Initial assault successful. Vessel has struck. Require assistance in orbit. Persephone.
Then Phil laughed out loud, causing Evan to glance up with a quizzical look.
“Heather, Siobhan, and Stunt Dude will be so disappointed,” he observed loudly enough to get a round of chuckles from his bridge crew. “They wanted to pull another Packmule on this one.”
Hard assault against a defended vessel, frantically trying to cover all airlocks as pirates started to hit emergency overrides so they could board. Weasels in the hen house. And instead, the Director over there had apparently rolled over and showed his belly.
Granted, Persephone had a big gun, which few small vessels did. That might be enough to overawe civilians in the back end of beyond.
“Send a signal to Heather and Siobhan,” Phil continued. “Order them down to orbit at best speed, and then put us in firing range as fast as you can. This signal’s nearly three hours old, so things have happened and we need to assist.”
Phil caught Evan’s nod and then went to work on the next step in the big plan. He almost felt like the dog that had been chasing the car, and then suddenly caught it.
What the hell did they do next?
Trick question. They were the RAN. And this was war.
Prisoners of War (January 4, 403)
Well, that hadn’t gone according to plan.
Granville studied the gigantic vessel as it lay quiescent in orbit, an elephant he had accidentally, successfully herded, and now had to do something with it.
And nobody was close enough to help, with CS-405 and the others lying in wait where they expected the vessel to emerge.
He triggered the laser comm and send a quiet plea for help to the upper reaches of this solar system. Three hours and ten minutes until help arrived, best guess.
Those folks would get into too much trouble if he left them alone for that long. He certainly would have, if he was in their boots.
When in doubt, audacity.
He programmed a quick escape course into the ship’s system for an emergency, and then an even easier plot that someone could engage by just pushing a single button.
“All hands, this Veitengruber,” he said unnecessarily into the intercom. He could almost yell loud enough that they could all hear, but he was the only one talking. “Isiah, and Spier, lock down your stations and come forward to the bridge.”
Audacity. It was just another word for insanity that happened to turn out to be successful in retrospect. If it failed, he’d probably be dead, so Phil couldn’t Court Martial him, and the current plans would be so badly broken that they had to fall back on the alternative.
That might still have been the best option, because the risks just kept getting crazier and riskier.
His two crew members joined him quickly. Granville stood and gestured Isiah to take the right hand crewman’s seat in front of him, where the navigator would normally sit. The intercom was still open.
“Isiah, you will continue to maintain Systems from here,” he ordered. “Additionally, you will be flying the ship after Spier and I board the enemy vessel.”
The young man’s head swiveled around like an owl, face gone white, eyes huge and mouth fallen open.
“I have programmed you three course options, Sailor,” Granville turned stern. “First one backs you off to a polite distance so you can continue to threaten them with the main gun. Use that unless something bad happens. Second one does the same, but then jumps to where CS-405 should be waiting.”
“And the third?” he asked, filled with dread.
“The third one shuts the entire vessel down by scramming the engines and generators,” he replied. “Kam and her crew can probably fix it before the vessel falls out of orbit, but it will take days, so if you get captured, the locals can’t do anything except piss Siobhan and Heather off.”
