Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

“Yes, sir,” Kerzanna replied, and only barely stopped herself from saluting. She hunched her shoulders and ducked her head until she was in the hallway and out of view, then took off at a fast jog to the crew-only lift that would take her straight to the engine pod. She keyed her private percomp and pinged Jess urgently, subvocalizing her message as she stepped in.

  K: Trouble. Three jacker corvettes, probably want to slice the hull and haul our cargo.”

  The response came quickly.

  J: One of the stewards ordered me to our quarters. I’m on my way now.

  Crew and passenger quarters should be relatively safe, even if the jackers managed to slice open all seven of the cargo holds.

  K: Monitor nav pod comms so you know what’s happening. I’ll ping when I can.

  She wanted to tell him what to expect, but the lift doors opened to reveal the engineering pod, and she was no longer alone.

  Yarsulic was a short, muscular man whose Russian accent thickened when he got excited. “Kane, good.” He pointed to an even shorter young man with pointy, shock-orange hair. “He is Engine Tech Moon.” He pointed her to a section of curved wall that was unfolded to reveal a compact weapons station. “You have guns experience?”

  She scrunched her face but nodded. “Some.” Kerzanna had plenty, but she wasn’t sure what Kane would plausibly know.

  “Good. Moon can’t hit broad side of moon. Take earwire, listen to pilot and captain. Shoot when they tell you.” He handed her the earwire and gently pushed her toward the station. “Don’t shoot us.”

  “Yes, sir.” She turned and ducked her head to cover her amusement as she pressed the earwire to the left side of her face and hooked it into her ear. She hoped she could keep it straight from the hidden one on her right side that allowed her to subvocalize to Jess.

  She strapped herself into the foldout seat, then checked the consoles. She recognized most of the controls, and paired the rest with the inventory in her head. Fortunately, the conscientious Yarsulic had kept the power storage at max capacity. The console featured a sophisticated built-in AI, which made sense when weapons officers were usually part-timers with more experience handling cargo than combat.

  Her internal chrono said they had sixteen minutes before estimated contact, and right on schedule, the system engine surged audibly with the first vector curve in the nav plot she’d sent Malámselah. Unless the distributed, redundant gravity compensators failed, the passengers wouldn’t feel it.

  The engine pod was three-fourths of a donut, wrapped around the central engine core that held both the system and light drives. The nav pod controlled use of the eight propulsion spokes that made the ceiling of the engine pod look like the underside of a giant octopus.

  “Kane, weapons status,” demanded Liao through her earwire.

  Before Kerzanna could answer, Malámselah interrupted. “Liao, if you can’t stick to the nav job, why don’t you make yourself useful and go get Bhatta.”

  Kerzanna rolled her eyes as Liao and Malámselah traded barbed comments about who had more experience, forcing Tanniffer to tell them both to chill their jets. Pilots could be such farking drama queens. She waited a moment, then reported.

  “Captain, debris lasers, energy torps, stingray, and nets are all online and ready.” Except for the powerful stingray, the weapons were typical for a commercial ship, and they all seemed to be good quality. They must have gotten a good deal on displacement nets, because they had nearly a hundred.

  “Acknowledged,” said Tanniffer. “Pilot Malámselah will give you orders.”

  “Yes, sir,” subvocalized Kerzanna.

  Yarsulic came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. “Good, you find Boris.” He pointed to indicate the glowing, friendly-faced icon for the AI assistant. “Don’t let him take insurance shots. He thinks power charge grows in ship’s hydroponics section.”

  “Yes, sir.” She turned to look at Yarsulic. “Will Moon be at the other console?” She pointed to the darkened icon that indicated another weapons control station.

  Yarsulic frowned. “No. Broke again yesterday. Waiting for ‘system drive repair’ at Felterholdt.” He made air quotes with his fingers. That explained the lengthy repair record, and made her feel better about the coil drive. Some people still preferred the old-style fuel drives, fearing the radiation from fractured coils, but as her old subcommander used to say, die fast from radiation, or die slow from zero fuel.

  Kerzanna frowned. “Does Boris run both consoles, then?”

  “Yah. You have three-sixty sphere control for stingray.” He patted her on the shoulder as a uniformed crew member entered and shouted his name. “Do good job.” He took off around the engine shaft, neatly dodging a dangling fiber cable.

  She brought up a copy of the pilot’s holo display, just to be looking at something besides the countdown on her internal chrono. She started to ping Jess to make sure he’d made it to their quarters.

  “Kane,” said Malámselah through her earwire, “Ready all torps, please. I think we can get enough velocity to go transit before our playmates arrive, but let’s be prepared. The stingray burns flux, so we’ll save it for another day. The debris lasers have three times the normal range, but they’re still a last resort. A displacement net might fool one ship, but not all three.”

  “Yes, sir.” She twitched a smile when she realized Malámselah was trying to keep her focused instead of worrying, since combat supposedly nauseated Kane. “Thank you, sir.”

  The engines surged with the stop-and-turn maneuver, and stayed loud. Their new vector and velocity change took the closing ships by surprise, but not for long, and the active scans said the MO-1 corvette was faster than the Faraón.

  A chorus of vile oaths erupted from her earwire, and after a moment, the holo display showed her the reason: a fourth unknown ship appeared.

  The Faraón was outclassed and out-gunned.

  Tanniffer spoke to the whole crew via their earwires. “Three corvettes and an unknown are closing in on us. We’re preparing for transit. If that fails, cargo is replaceable. Lives are not. We will follow standard procedure for passenger safe… one moment.”

  The comms went silent.

  From behind her in the engine pod, Kerzanna heard Yarsulic yelling at Technician Moon about putting tools back where they belonged. She opened the holo display as large as it would go, then rotated it. The fourth ship, MO-4, was labeled as a medium warlighter, a popular model with jackers. Boris, the AI, helpfully showed her targeting solutions using each of the Faraón’s weapons, apparently unaware that solo warlighters were typically shielded to the max. Considering its aggressive action, it was probably armed to the max, too.

  Yarsulic stepped up behind her just as she realized MO-4’s trajectory put it on an intercept course for the lead MO-1 corvette. Yarsulic saw it as well.

  “Wolf packs fight, prey slips away.” He sounded more hopeful than certain. He turned and strode away, shouting for Moon to prep a wide flux-line connector because the nav pod was about to ask for maximum speed. Most private ships only used flux to power system drives if needed, whereas the military, with its priority access to flux resupply, could afford to burn flux in system whenever they wanted.

  If she were in the pilot’s seat, she’d stutter the side jets and bend the vector to avoid any hobbling measures from the jackers, then burn flux like a supernova and punch into transit. The Faraón’s spherical hull should take the stress in stride, and they could load more flux at the next station. However, since she was only the provisional weapons officer, all she could focus on was her job. She rotated the display again to show the two slower corvettes, both of which were still headed straight for the Faraón, then asked Boris for targeting solutions.

  Tanniffer came back online to the crew. “Our situation is fluid. A fourth ship may be engaging our fastest pursuer. Cargo Master, get ready to space Cargo One and Two on my order. Logistics, issue exosuits on the double. I’ll notify the passengers.”

  Kerzanna knew
Jess was listening to the ship’s comm chatter, but she pinged him anyway.

  K: If you’re in our quarters, ping Logistics about a tall exosuit. They might forget you otherwise. Passenger berths all have multiple exosuits, but crew quarters only have one.

  J: Do cats get exosuits?

  K: What?

  J: No one was looking out for the captain’s two cats, so I took them with me.

  She wouldn’t have pegged Jess as a cat lover, although perhaps he preferred them to some of the passengers he’d told her about.

  K: Ask Logistics.

  “Kane,” said Malámselah through the earwire, “target MO-2 and MO-3 main propulsion signatures with energy torps, two-second pulse, on my mark. We’ll stop and zag to forty negative ten right after, so be prepared.”

  “Yes, sir. Max fire power, or save some for later?”

  Malámselah paused, then replied, “Fifty percent.”

  A distraction, then, to cover the course change. She quickly gave Boris the instructions, then gave the AI the data from the other nav solutions she’d provided to Malámselah. If he disliked Liao as much as he seemed to, he might choose to use one of Kerzanna’s over anything Liao suggested, and Kerzanna wanted weapons to be synced.

  She reported torpedo readiness to Malámselah. Six minutes to weapons-range contact with MO-2 and MO-3.

  Waiting was always the hardest part of space combat, because stress and adrenaline demanded immediate action and narrowed focus, and made it hard to keep the big picture in mind. She took two centering breaths and distracted herself by picturing Jess carrying two unhappy cats all the way to the crew area. Good thing crew quarters had first-aid kits. It made her wonder if he had any pets on his farm, and if they’d be…

  Malámselah interrupted her thoughts. “Kane, Liao wants to know if you have any Jumpers in your family.”

  “Uh, no, sir.” No one else in her family had been tall enough—or naively idealistic enough—to enlist. “Why?”

  “She says your nav solutions are typical Jumper tactics. I told her they’re exercises from the texts I recommended.”

  Subvocalization flattened tone, so she couldn’t tell if he was warning her that Liao was suspicious, or needling Liao that even a Class 1 Navigator did a better job than Liao.

  “They’re exercises, sir,” she said earnestly. “The Myrian and Etibar text has a whole section on military tactics.” Kerzanna hoped Liao didn’t have time to track down and read the book, because Myrian and Etibar were academicians who’d never spent a single hour in actual combat, and didn’t know their ass from a black hole in space.

  Yarsulic tapped her on the shoulder. “Exosuit. Now.” He pointed to an open storage closet she hadn’t noticed before that had six or seven exosuits on hooks.

  Yarsulic and Moon already had theirs on. Fortunately, the largest one was rated for her height, so she shimmied into it fast and returned to the weapons console. Equally fortunately, the shipping company didn’t skimp on exosuit quality, at least for the engine pod, meaning the excellent tactile transmission of the gloves allowed her to accurately work holo interfaces.

  She strapped herself in and checked that Boris was still locked onto the targets, and that the other two jack ships were still intent on each other.

  “Standby, weapons,” Malámselah warned.

  “Copy,” Kerzanna replied, then realized that was another military response. She was rotten at undercover work.

  “Countdown. Three, two, one, launch.”

  Kerzanna keyed the command right as Malámselah said the last word, and heard the roar of the system engine as it strained to effect the ship’s flux-burning full-speed vector change. The gravity compensators held steady, so the passengers wouldn’t be panicking.

  Fifty seconds later, Boris reported that both torps hit their targets. The next active scan said MO-3 wavered and slowed, but MO-2 was still barreling toward them, having already adjusted to the new vector.

  The engine pod shook with several seconds of vibration. The passengers would definitely feel that.

  “Alert. Hull compromised. Cargo Three pressure loss. Seal not possible. Cargo Three gravity seventy percent.”

  The growl of the engines made it hard to hear the shipcomp’s synthetic voice repeating the announcement.

  “Cargo Master, jettison Cargo Three now,” ordered the captain.

  Kerzanna didn’t hear the reply. If their power storage held, they had enough for ten, maybe eleven full-power torp shots, if they wanted to save some power for the amped-up debris lasers. She directed Boris to analyze the MO-2 jack ship for vulnerabilities and propose single-shot solutions.

  The engine pod vibrated again, stronger than before, enough to rattle things off shelves.

  “Alert. Hull compromised. Cargo Four pressure loss. Cargo Four gravity zero percent.”

  Liao’s angry voice came over the earwire. “Kane, what are you waiting for? Shoot the jack-bastards now!”

  “Cancel that!” yelled Malámselah.

  Tanniffer sternly ordered Liao to calm down.

  The engines ramped up even louder than before, meaning they were making the final sprint to transit… except the velocity was dropping, meaning they were making another manual vector change instead. Kerzanna rotated the holo to see.

  “Captain,” Malámselah growled, “get this asshole out of my nav pod. She just cost us… What the hell?” She heard an inarticulate sound of pain. The comms went silent. The vector change put them on course directly toward the MO-2 ship, with weapons intercept in seventeen minutes.

  CHAPTER 13

  * Interstellar: “Faraón Azul” Ship Day 05 * GDAT: 3242.009 *

  KERZANNA SURREPTITIOUSLY SUBOCALIZED a message to Jess, hoping he was online.

  K: Is Liao booting everyone out of the shipcomp’s command module?

  J: Yes.

  So much for hope that the trouble in the nav pod had been a simple mishap.

  K: Stop her and isolate her jack and comms—nothing in or out. Physically lock her in the nav pod if you can. I think she sold the ship’s schedule and cargo to one of the jack crews.

  Seconds dragged by.

  J: Done. Do you want control?

  Relief shot through her. She hunched over her console to hide her reaction.

  K: No, I’d need a pilot’s wirejack. Have the shipcomp order Pilot Kreutz to take the helm, emergency protocol. He should be able to do it from wherever he is. Tell him to stay away from the nav pod. Liao will probably shoot anyone who comes in. Get Bhatta online, too, if you can find her. Check her records for pilot experience.

  J: You’re not in the nav pod?

  She realized she’d forgotten to tell him where she’d gone.

  K: Engineering. Weapons control.

  J: Emergency monitoring system says Kreutz’s shiplink isn’t on board. Bhatta is in her quarters.

  K: Frelling hell. Either he’s eating hard space, or he’s in on Liao’s plot. Let Bhatta—

  Through her earwire, she heard Kane’s private ping tone and her name being whispered. “Kane, can you hear me?” It sounded like Malámselah. “Liao has… beamer… killed… captain. I’m hurt. Don’t let Yarsulic seal… pod. Engine rigged to fail.”

  “Copy.” She unlatched the seat strap and walked fast to the other side of the engine core. She found Yarsulic at the engine control console and pulled him backward and away from it. “Don’t seal off the engine pod.” She had to shout in his ear to be heard over the tortured system engine as she explained. She added the fact that Kreutz wasn’t responding, letting Yarsulic think that information came from Malámselah as well.

  Moon finished opening a panel and put the access plate and the multidriver on the counter. Yarsulic voiced a string of colorful oaths, then stomped over to Moon, and unexpectedly delivered a roundhouse punch to the jaw, knocking Moon to the ground. “How much did she pay you?”

  The man curled up as he fell, covering his head. “Nothing! Who? What are you talking about?”

 
Yarsulic leaned in. “Maybe it was evil clone Moon who let Pilot Liao in system drive access tube two days ago?”

  The man hunched tighter. “She said there was a problem with the controller,” he whined. “She said you asked her to take a look.”

  “Brainless idiot. Your job and engineering career ends at next station.” Yarsulic made a disgusted sound. “Pilots know nothing about engines.” He turned away from Moon to look at Kerzanna. “Go back to weapons. I look for trouble with my nalozhnitsy.”

  Only an engineer would refer to his engines as his mistresses. Moon clambered slowly to his feet, mumbling.

  “Yes, sir.” She started to turn, but something about Moon’s movements caught her eye. He was fumbling for something in his tool belt, and his expression had morphed into rage focused on Yarsulic. She launched herself toward Yarsulic, but even as she did, Moon stabbed at Yarsulic’s back. Her height and momentum carried her and Yarsulic to the floor a meter away. Yarsulic grunted as she rolled off him to use her leg to sweep Moon’s out from under him.

  Moon cried out as he fell to his knees and stabbed at her thigh with what looked like a phaseknife, but he missed, and the motion threw him forward, exposing his torso to another kick from her. The impact sent him toppling sideways. He rolled away, but got tangled up in Yarsulic’s feet and lost the phaseknife, giving Kerzanna enough time to scramble to a crouch and tackle Moon.

  He drove fists into her ribs and snapped teeth at her ear. She slammed his forehead with hers and stunned him long enough to roll him onto his stomach and pull his wrists up hard behind his back. She cast about for something to secure his limbs, but the only thing in view was the dangling strap to one of the engine pod’s gravcarts. She hooked her foot around the cart’s railing and pulled it closer, then wrapped and tightened the strap around Moon’s wrists.

  She picked up the phaseknife and powered it down, then left it on the console counter while she pawed through the engine room drawers until she found a long enough scrap of fiber cable to hobble Moon’s limbs, like he was a sheep ready for shearing. He moaned and began squirming away, so she grounded the cart and locked the controls. She pulled off his shipcomp earwire, a second one she found hidden behind his ear, and the silver shiplink from his collar, then put them in her pocket.