“We'll have to do better than that,” Norlin said drily. “We're a single ship against an entire fleet that numbers in the thousands.” He turned to Chikako Miza. “Contact Barse and determine how long it will be until I can drop down to the planet. After that, we can start a shakedown cruise.”
The woman tipped her head to one side and touched a silver bud in her scalplock. “She pulled the equipment and the electric ion drive. There wasn't any authorization to get for refueling—or anyone to honor it, even if she had bothered. Your ship is ready. Barse will have it in the cargo bay in ten minutes.”
“So fast?” Norlin realized then how capable his engineer was. Even with a full complement of robots working at her orders, the stripping and fueling had been done in extraordinary time.
“She likes engines better than people,” sniffed Liottey.
“I would, too, if you were the only human aboard.” Miza mimicked the man's tone then said, “I'll return to my duty station, Captain, unless you need me for something important.”
This time, the sarcasm stung like acid.
“Dismissed.” Norlin needed to maintain some hint of authority. The crew calling him by his title helped, but their tone showed no deference. He had yet to prove himself. They might not know it, but he did—they could all be cooked by the aliens’ radiation weapon before they acknowledged him properly.
“Do you want me to accompany you?” asked Liottey, as eager as a puppy. He had already begun to wear on Norlin's nerves.
Loud enough for all three to hear, Norlin asked, “I'm going on a rescue mission. Do any of you have relatives or friends you'd like retrieved?”
“You'd risk your neck for my friends?” asked Miza. Her cynicism dropped for a moment then rose again like a palpable mist. “There's no one on this rock worth the effort.” She stalked off, returning to her computers.
Mitri Sarov shook his head once.
“No one. We just arrived from Earth,” said Liottey. “I haven't had time to make many ... friends.”
“Very well. Prepare for the shakedown run when I return.”
“Should you go?” asked Sarov. “Barse had trouble finding us a pilot—any pilot. To risk your life is to risk our mission.”
“I'll be careful. Thanks for your solicitude.” Norlin pushed past and went back to the cargo bay airlock and waited for Barse to dock. She pulled the smaller ship in close enough for him to run a flexible ‘lock extender over and magnetically grapple it to the steel airlock ring. He hurried back to his first command.
Cramped as it was, the research ship had become home. He felt comfortable inside. He knew its quirks—and its simplicity of operation.
“All yours, Cap'n,” Barse said. “How do you like the crew?”
“I just hope Liottey doesn't get to liking me too much,” he said, grinning crookedly.
“If he does, just let me know. I'll put him in his place. I eat executive officers for breakfast.”
“Don't. He might clog the engines if you stuffed him too far into the venturis.”
Barse laughed and slapped him on the back so hard his teeth rattled. “You're going to be just fine. If you can pilot, the Preceptor is going to be the hottest ship in space.”
Norlin held back his retort—it might be the only Empire Service ship in the entire Lyman system.
He waited for Barse to uncouple and pull back the extensible airlock then hit the jets. He shot away from the cruiser's bay, oriented himself and calculated his descent. Fuel was of little concern—Barse had filled it to the hull after removing the equipment and ion engines. The ship was light and more responsive than he had ever experienced.
He plunged downward, correcting constantly, using unconscionable amounts of fuel as he visually located the university and circled above. He was not challenged, and the planetary nav system wasn't opera-tional.
From an altitude of two kilometers, the campus appeared calm. Using his sensors and magnifying the pix showed a different world. Buildings had windows knocked out. The computing center had been razed, and smoke still spiraled upward from the ruins. Huge craters had been blown in grassy areas once populated by students, and several of the research laboratories he was familiar with had been turned into burned-out husks.
His heart almost stopped when he thought of Neela caught in the middle of such mob action.
Norlin fought the buffeting as he hit denser atmosphere and brought his ship down near the lab where Neela had an office. He winced as his exhaust cut through one wall and spectacularly brought down a nearby administration building. The structure exploded with a ferocity usually reserved for fulminating barrage shells.
The true destruction had preceded his landing, though. He killed the jets and left the ship on standby.
“You will not launch unless I use emergency code sequence Neela,” he ordered. He didn't want anyone tampering with his ship or trying to hijack it while he sought his girlfriend.
“Understood,” the computer answered. He noted the huskiness and the baritone timbre that betrayed immense stress.
Norlin adjusted his belt comlink to the cruiser, checked the weapon tucked in his belt then unslung the laserifle. The readout showed almost full energy. He had at least a dozen shots at full power and three times that at half-power.
He left it on maximum and exited the ship.
Acrid smoke bit into his nostrils. On all sides were the sights and sounds of devastation. The rioting had happened days ago, he judged, but the smoldering fires and slow deterioration lingered.
Hurrying toward Neela's lab, he saw a few people duck from sight like cockroaches in sudden light. He decided they were too far away to do him any harm, and getting into his ship would be impossible using anything less than a monatomic hydrogen cutting torch. He worried more about what they had done rather than what they might do. He clutched the laserifle a little tighter as he trotted toward the lab.
“Captain?” came Liottey's voice over his comlink. “We're picking up incoming vessels. Miza thinks it's the leading element of the Death Fleet.”
“Acknowledged,” Norlin said, touching a stud at his belt buckle. “I'll hurry.”
“Miza estimates an arrival time within the hour. Those fellows are coming in fast—and none of the cometary detectors let out a peep. They're following the same pattern as on Penum. So far.”
Norlin didn't respond. He pushed past the debris blocking the front entrance to the astrophysics laboratory and stared up and down the length of the marble-floored corridor. He felt as if he had walked into an elevator shaft—and there wasn't an elevator there. His stomach fell endlessly and his breath came in quick, harsh pants.
Much of the lab equipment had been thrown into the corridor and smashed. He ran toward the fifth room on the left—Neela Cosarrian's.
“Neela!” he called, not expecting to find her.
Her computer console had been ripped out, and its tough PLZT ceramic screen cracked. He used the muzzle of the laserifle to push through the debris, hoping for some clue to the woman's whereabouts. The search would take forever.
“Liottey!” he barked into his comlink. “Can you locate individuals on-planet?”
“There's a chance Chikako might be able to tie into the master computer at Empire Central Control. I'll check.”
Static almost drowned out the words. Norlin frowned. The reception had been good before. The breakup in communication might be the result of alien action. Neutralize contact, swoop in, kill, rape, pillage and retreat. Repeat in the next star system.
“Who do you want?” came Chikako Miza's peeved voice. Norlin told her. Miza snorted, then broke off for several seconds, coming back with “Got it. She's in the police computer as a dissident wanted on a variety of charges.”
“Not Neela!”
“She started a riot the first day after news of your discovery leaked. Hmm, she was involved, at least. Hard to tell if she started it. She certainly knew those who did.”
Norlin nodded. Neela's politics wer
e more radical than his, and she knew many campus activists; but she would never be part of wrecking her own lab. Her research meant more to her than anything else. Norlin swallowed hard. Her membrane-dark matter interaction project would have been a career-maker. She might well have valued it far more than she did him.
“Where is she?”
“They have her jugged in a temporary lockup in the building next to the one you're in. At least, they had her there three days ago. That's the last entry anyone bothered to make.”
Norlin raced from the lab and burst into the sunlight. Except for the more visible destruction, he found it hard to believe this world was in any turmoil. Wind whistled softly through the trees in the green areas. The blue sky had enough fluffy white clouds to hide the sun every few minutes and put to rout the rising summer heat. The humidity made it pleasant.
Then he caught a whiff of smoke. Burned meat. Burned human flesh. He kept from gagging as he raced on.
He was so intent on reaching the next building he didn't hear the whistle above his head. When the second rocket launched, he saw the flare and dived onto his belly. The rocket swerved and tried to home on him. It blasted a small crater in the ground a few meters behind him.
Norlin swept his laserifle in a circle and turned the side of the building into slag. He didn't wait to see if he had killed the sniper. He got to his feet and ran on, smashing into the wall, spinning and plunging into the interior.
He fired at a moving object. The woman let out a scream and fell backward, pistol falling from her lifeless hand. Norlin kicked the weapon away and began a systematic search for Neela. He gagged when he saw the corpses in the first three makeshift cells. Someone had penned the victims inside and blown them apart with a rocket pistol.
The men in the next two cells were little better than dead. They stirred feebly. Norlin tried to interrogate one.
“Neela Cosarrian. Where is she?”
The man reached out weakly. Norlin opened the cell door and hurried on. He had no hope that the man might capitalize on his freedom, but it was all he could do for him.
He found her in the last cell. Norlin wouldn't have recognized her except for the blouse she wore. He had given it to her on her birthday two months ago.
“Neela!”
“Pier? They put me in here. Dr. Scotto tried to rescue me...” Her voice petered out. She collapsed in his arms. Norlin swung her over his shoulders and lifted. She hadn't been fed in days; she was feather-light.
He reached sunlight again and stopped. Two men armed with rocket pistols prowled around the ship. These weapons lacked the power to breach the ship's lock, but they were more than adequate to blow him and Neela into atoms.
Thoughts of honor and duty and his oath to protect the civilian population flashed through his head. Pier Norlin lifted the laserifle and touched the trigger. A deadly bolt of coherent radiation erupted and turned one prowler's head to vapor. The other returned fire.
By this time, Norlin had started across the grassy lawn separating him and Neela from escape in the ship. The man fired wildly, the rockets never coming close enough to lock onto them.
A second bolt from the laserifle sent the man scurrying for the cover of a burned-out floater car. Norlin kept firing and forced the man to stay down. The laserifle left little more than sludge where the car had been; the man sought safety farther away.
Norlin tossed away the rifle when it sputtered, its magazine exhausted.
“I put the energy to good use,” he said to Neela. “I got you back.”
He gave the ‘lock opening sequence to the ship and heaved the woman inside.
“Close, prepare for lift-off,” he ordered.
The ship did not respond. He cursed. The two men must have somehow damaged the computer.
“A tank leak has been detected. Fuel is critical,” the computer said. “Is the added cargo necessary?”
“Cargo?” Norlin cried, outraged. “You're talking about a human.”
No response. Norlin turned to where he had laid Neela on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and a look of serenity had erased the pain that had been there when he first found her.
“It'll be all right,” he said, cradling her head in his lap.
“There is only one human aboard,” the computer said. Again came a long silence. “She is no longer alive.”
Norlin panicked. He pressed his fingertip into Neela's throat, searching for a pulse. He found none. His hand under her nostrils detected no exhalation. Prying open one of her eyes, he saw only a fixed pupil. There wasn't any reaction to light.
“No!” he cried. “You can't die on me! No!”
“She is dead,” the computer repeated. “Fuel is critical. Please unload any unnecessary mass.”
Pier Norlin held back the tears as he dragged his lover outside and laid her near the exhaust tubes. He couldn't give her a proper burial. Cremation would have to do.
“Launch,” he said in a choked voice. “Get us to the Preceptor as quickly as fuel allows. Launch code Neela.”
The computer said nothing. Lights dimmed as power shifted to the control circuits, and the engines ignited. Norlin was crushed into his couch. Only then did he cry. The tears streamed back across his cheeks and spattered on the bulkhead behind his couch.
It was all he could do for her, and it wasn't enough.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Six
“Sloppy work, Cap'n. You knocked the hell out of the docking tube.” Tia Barse glared at the damage he had caused by his inattention to the wash from the side jets.
“Close the bay doors. Either jettison the research ship or secure it. I don't care what you do. I'll be on the bridge.”
“Hold up, Cap'n,” called Barse. “What happened down there? Didn't you find your friend?”
He turned a bleak expression in her direction. She read the full answer before he said laconically, “I left her.”
Norlin couldn't bring himself to say any more. The idea of Neela vanishing in the exhaust tore at him as much as the memory of the widespread destruction on-planet. The population hadn't waited for the Death Fleet to kill them. They had started rioting and done much of the aliens’ work.
As he stalked through the Preceptor's shoulder-wide corridors, he conducted a cursory inspection. Each compartment he glanced into seemed neat, clean and everything he could want in readiness. He might not have acquired a good first impression of Gowan Liottey but the XO had done a fine job of keeping the vessel shipshape in the absence of a captain.
By the time Norlin arrived in the control room, he had his emotions hidden, if not under complete control. The ache remained deep inside; he doubted it would ever go away.
“Report on the Death Fleet's position,” he snapped.
Chikako Miza ran her fingers through her hair, lightly brushing and stroking the silver ornaments there as if she played some musical instrument. Seconds later, a trivid picture coalesced around her head, giving Norlin the sense that she was at the center of the universe and he, an outsider, peered into her world.
Tilting her head to one side, she got a distant expression in her ebony eyes, as if she listened to the ancients’ music of the spheres. Only then did she reply.
“They're braking hard. I've picked up Cherenkov radiation from the trailing ships of the fleet. Only a few of them were an AU inside the system. The remainder were in shift and are homing in on the leading elements.”
“Numbers?” Norlin slid into the captain's swivel chair. His hands shook as he settled the heads-up visor on his head so it covered his eyes but left downward vision clear. By turning in different directions, he saw every instrument aboard the Preceptor. By shifting his eyes, he isolated the data he needed. A simple touch to the brim of the HUD visor locked in a particular display. Norlin had no interest in most of the readouts. He settled for a summary display from each station.
“Locked onto three thousand war ships,” said Miza. “They're going to
burn us out of here.”
“How many following them?”
“Twice that,” she said. “I'm counting in one, two, many mode. There are more of them on the way, and they know who's been naughty and nice. It's not going to be a good Christmas for us.”
“There can't be that many,” Norlin snapped angrily.
“How many does it take to blow us out of space?”
He ignored her jibe and shook his head, trying to clear his vision. “How do I get rid of some of the summary displays? I want ranging, I want nav, not what I've got.”
“Punch it into the arm of your chair. I'll redo,” Miza said.
Norlin glanced down at the arm of the command chair and saw the small keypad. His fingers seemed too large and clumsy for such precision instrumentation, but he found the right sequence to obtain the information he wanted regularly. The HUD still glowed with torrents of data, but he was trained to assimilate and act at this rate. Or so he thought.
For a split second, he thought he'd gone blind. The bright flash of the display reprogramming faded and left only the terse summation of readouts he wanted.
“What happened?”
Miza said, “All planetary sensors are gone—burned out by alien EMP. Let me cut those feeds from your circuit.”
“Thanks.” He set to work making certain the Preceptor was ready for combat.
Norlin fell easily into the role of ship's captain. This was exactly like his training in academy simulators, but after a few minutes he began to feel the pressure of command, of making the right decisions.
“Waiting for authorization to arm,” came Mitri Sarov's calm baritone.
Norlin swung around, and the summary display changed to the tactical officer's setup. He nodded. Sarov knew his job. The Preceptor wouldn't vanish from space without one hell of a fight.
Sarov had expertly arrayed their missiles; neither he nor Norlin saw any reason to power up the heavy lasartillery. The greater the distance at which they engaged the Death Fleet, the better off they were. If they came into laser cannon range, they wouldn't last ten seconds.
“Begin launch at your discretion,” Norlin commanded. He watched as the first flight of missiles blasted free. Vibration coursed through the ship as new missiles auto-loaded into the electromagnetic rail launchers. Flight after flight of the heavy projectiles left the cruiser's tubes, hurled outward without betraying jet flash. Only when the missiles were light-seconds away did the rockets kick in and the internal homing devices begin hunting for suitable targets.
Alien Death Fleet [Star Frontiers 1] Page 6
