Chronicles of a Space Mercenary

by Ronald Wintrick

  “But we succeeded.” I thought out loud.

  The ore freighter was indeed now unarmed, its protection reduced to space flotsam. It probably only crewed two or three at most and they responded immediately to our call to surrender;

  “We read you. Please give us time to disembark.” A frightened voice replied, probably belonging to a novice pilot too quickly promoted to rank during the recent war, as so many had been.

  “Shut down your engines.” I ordered them, but the freighter just kept pushing ahead, getting closer to the velocity required for warp jump, and I could see what they planned.

  “They’re not stopping.” Tanya warned.

  “I can see that.” I replied. If they got into warp we might never stop them before they got into the Kievor’s Protected Zone. In fact I knew we wouldn’t. I accelerated Last Chance once more down the freighters length, drawing away at the same time to give us room to fire on her.

  “Slag her warp array.” I said over ship’s com, and as we approached her bow and flashed beyond all three of our guns opened up and poured plasma fire down on the vessels nose, which was covered with the Trinium mesh needed to generate the warp field required to bend or warp the fabric of space and allow a physical object inside space.

  Though Trinium could dissipate heat faster than any other metal now known to man, it could not dissipate the heat created by direct strikes by plasma cannon. Most of the mesh boiled away into vacuum and within moments the ore freighter was shutting down. I brought Last Chance back to her side.

  “An escape pod just jettisoned on the other side of the freighter.” Bren informed.

  “Let them go.” I told my gunners, half expecting them to disobey, remembering those escape pods Melanie had slagged not so very long ago. I just wasn’t that blood thirsty.

  “Letting them go could be a mistake.” Tanya warned.

  “You think the mines on Cribon don’t already know what’s happened?” I asked. “Should we kill them all too?”

  “You’re the Captain, Sir.” Said sarcastically.

  “Hell no!” Bren said, probably thinking Tanya was only moments from doing exactly that. She’d vaporize the whole moon if we’d had the firepower to do so, and if there was only a marginal chance that doing so would delay the pursuit that was bound to come. That and eliminating the Katons ability to mine Trinium forever. That in itself was almost reason enough. Vengeance with a capitol V.

  “Don’t even think about it.” I told Tanya, realizing Bren would possibly incite her. “We don’t have time to screw around.” We were going to have a whole hell of a lot of people really mad at us as it was, we did not need to exacerbate the situation by slagging escape pods. That would draw down the dogs upon us if nothing else did.

  We had been forced to slag the freighters warp array and this the Katon System, but the planet below us was an uninhabitable ice ball about as far out from the Katon’s yellow star as was probably possible without being flung away into space. The Katon star was little more than a brilliant yellow point of light in an otherwise empty horizon. The planet Katon and whatever forces were left of the Katon Navy were on the other side of that point of yellow light. That did not mean we had time to waste. In fact, the clock was ticking.

  “Who’s going to fly that thing?” I asked, looking back and forth between Tanya and Bren. Tanya gave me a scornful look and turned away. “O.K. Bren, I guess that leaves you.”

  Bren gave me a disgusted look but got up and ran for his suit.

  “Take tools.” I told him as he left, then said to Tanya. “They may have sabotaged the controls. Bren’s actually the best choice, or I would have made you go."

  Tanya looked at me and let a small smile stretch her lips. “Right.”

  By the time we had docked to the bigger ship, Bren was waiting outside the airlock. I glanced at the monitor to see that he had his tools. He had them. And a Kievor made blaster.

  “Shoot first and ask questions later.” I told him over ship’s com and suit radio at once. Then he was in the airlock and it was cycling him through.

  The freighters airlock, located just off the nose of the freighter, let directly into the Bridge. As Bren looked around we saw the simple arrangements the Katons had engineered into their freighter. The Bridge was the only accommodations for the crew, beside a small head that looked more closet than lavatory. Their sleeping accommodations were two bunks mounted on one of the walls.

  Bren moved over to the simple control panel and its two utilitarian seats and soon had the freighters engine fired up. It was a good thing the two Katon pilots had not sabotaged it because their slow moving escape pod still had not reached Cribon and the moon bases relative safety. There would have been no holding Tanya back if they had done sabotage.

  The Katons had at least designed the dock apparatus so that both ships were facing forward while docked, and I added Last Chance’s thrust to the job of evacuating Katon space. Within moments we were back under way and accelerating rapidly, relatively speaking.

  “We going straight in with it?” Tanya asked. This was a part of the plan we had not discussed, maybe not really believing we would ever get to this point in the whole adventure. Never believing it was actually possible. It had been crazy. We were crazy.

  “Or stash it,” I said, “but I’d like to be able to take it straight in. The Kievors will honor whoever has possession, of course. What do you think?”

  “Works for me.” She said. Whatever I decided would work for her, I already knew. It always had. She trusted my judgment, despite her shows of obstinacy. “Think they’ll fill it up again for us if we bring it back when we’re done?” Smiling.

  “If we brought back enough of those Kievor nuclear warheads.” I half joked. “How many more Katon Warships do we have to kill before they’re spread too thin to guard every one of their freighters?” It was only half rhetorical and Tanya looked at me with a gleam in her eye I recognized as greed, but for the moment all I was thinking about was getting paid for the load we already possessed. Then the smart thing to do would be to jump out of this sector and forget the Katons forever, or at least for a while.

  Now that Bren had gotten the freighter running on auto-pilot he was reconnoitering the freighters holds via the freighters internal surveillance cams and redirecting the feed to us for our perusal. One after another, every one of those holds was chock full of the refined, silvery ore.

  “We’ve got a full load!” I whooped to my crew over com, probably nearly blowing eardrums in the process. “Stay at those guns. We’re running full bore for the Kievors!”

  Now I had a dilemma. Did I accelerate the two ships only to the velocity at which the freighter would be able to stop itself independently, without Last Chance to aid her, or did I press on to the point where it would take both ship’s thrust to decelerate (when overflying the Kievor Trade Station could be the absolute worst thing we could do). Expecting trouble, where Last Chance might be too busy to aid in the deceleration, either in fighting off attack or in drawing away that attack, the intelligent choice had to be the safe choice. Only accelerate to the velocity at which the freighter could stop itself, without Last Chance to aid her, in case of the very real possibility that Last Chance would be too busy to aid in deceleration. Contrary wise, only accelerating to the velocity at which the freighter could safely stop itself without aid might give the pursuit enough time to catch us up. They would not care about stopping and would burn at full thrust to catch us. It was a catch-22 and I wasn’t sure which way to go.

  I explained my thoughts to Tanya, and of course everyone else, via com. There were pros and cons offered but nothing that decisively pointed to one action over the other. I still had time to decide, of course, at the slow speed at which we were accelerating, relatively, and Bren promised to work out a mathematical solution to the problem that would account for all the factors, but I did not see how that could apply. Bren and his fricken ideas. In the meantime, all we could do was sit tight and hope things work
ed out. That we could get to the Kievors before the Katons got to us. I had a feeling it would be a close race either way.

  “Last Chance should be free to fight.” Tanya said suddenly, as if she were feeling crowded. She had a look on her face that reminded me of a cornered animal and she made me uneasy.

  “We need a little more thrust.” I said. “At least for now.”

  “We need to be free to fight.” Tanya argued. “Right away.”

  Did I need one more thing to have to worry about? I said instead; “We’ll undock shortly.” I was in no mood to argue.

  “The Katons at Cribon didn’t get ten seconds warning!” Tanya said. “We could get even less!”

  What I liked about our chances of escape were that now only a warp equipped Capitol Class Warship would be able to catch us and there were definite questions in my mind concerning how many more of those they had available, and of those available, how many were in a position to intercept us before it was too late. Of course it didn’t help that they would be able to guess exactly in which direction we would be traveling. Maybe I should have turned us in another direction, but it was too late now for second guessing my decisions. If I was going to start second guessing myself, the place to start would be in planning this insanity from the beginning. All else fell under that initial decision. The time for second guessing was long past. Now I had to get us out of this.

  “Nothing like well laid plans.” Bren said over com, from the freighter, where he was safe from my wrath. Temporarily.

  “We need to undock.” Tanya said annoyingly.

  “Thrust.” Bren said. Of course, stuck on the freighter, he would want thrust.

  “Undock.” Tanya countered him menacingly, but I don’t think he was moved by her threat, safe in the other ship as he was.

  “You’re beginning to sound like a video loop.” I snapped at Tanya. “Fine! I’ll put it to a vote. Well, let’s hear it, everyone. What’s it to be?”

  “We stay docked.” Bren said immediately.

  “We already know your vote.” I now snapped at Bren.

  “We need the speed.” Manuel said. That was two for remaining docked, one for undocking.

  “We should be free to fight,” Melanie said, “or flee.”

  “Oh great!” Bren complained.

  “Well Janice?” I asked her, wishing suddenly I had made my own vote right away, because it looked as if it was going to come down to me anyway.

  “I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s really going to come down to you anyway.” Janice said. “I can see good arguments for both points, but I would prefer us to be free to fight, if it comes down to that.

  “So that’s my vote. I vote we undock, though I hope it doesn’t come to having to fight.” Janice finished.

  That still left it to me. I could vote to stay docked, in which case it would be a tie and I would still have to make the decision, or vote to undock. Tanya was glaring holes through my head. I glared back. I wasn’t going to let her influence my decision, nor did I want her to think she had influenced me, when I voted to undock. I was suddenly feeling crowded. Maybe it was Tanya’s sense of impending doom that swayed me, because I had certainly learned, over the years, to trust her intuitions. “Fine. We undock.”

  “Damn you Deveroux!” Bren cursed me from the separated ore freighter, Tanya having released the docking locks the moment I spoke my decision. I could see from his helmet cam feed that he was watching the freighters own video feeds of the two ships pulling apart and though I couldn’t see the expression on his face, I could fairly well imagine it.

  “He’s never going to forgive me for this one, you realize.” I told Tanya, but not before I turned off the com link. “We’re practically abandoning him.”

  “If any of us survive this he’ll thank us later. We’ll be fighting before this is over. You don’t seriously think the Katons are going to lie down and let us walk off with a whole ore freighter, do you? Be realistic. Their whole Navy is burning for us now. They’ll abandon every other obligation and put every one of their ships on our trail. Mark my words, Marc.”

  “Every minute reduces the chance of their catching us, Tanya.” I said. “I think we’re going to get away clean.”

  “Or they might have caught us with our pants down. If we were still docked to that freighter.” Tanya smirked. “Something that's been happening to you a lot lately.”

  “Where would you be if I had surrendered us to the Katons?” I demanded.

  “Where would I have been if you hadn’t lost all our money gambling and gotten us into that stupid war for a measly ship full of cargo.” She returned. “A war, I might add, that none of us had any personal ties to. A war none of us had a stake in and which we shouldn’t have been in the first place.”

  “That I picked the losing side to fight for.” I helped her. Why not, she was on a roll, and after all, I had certainly meant to pick the winning side. The Federation had had the numerical strength, but there is no calculating for the ferocity of a fighter fighting for his home and family, and for freedom.

  “And there’s that.” Tanya agreed.

  “You’ll be singing a different tune when we’re spending these billions.”

  “Maybe so.” She agreed for once. “I do have to give credit where credit is due, and you’ve got it coming on this one. This was a coup. Now if we can only survive to cash in.”

  I clicked the com back on and David immediately demanded; “Are you done talking about me?”

  “For now.” Tanya answered. I glared at her, for all the good it did me.

  “How long until apogee, Bren?” I asked.

  “Now I’m good for something?” Bren demanded.

  “For now.” Tanya said again. “Until we need you again.” This time I didn’t bother looking at her. Would it do any good?

  “Bren?” I said.

  “That depends on if we’re hooking up again.”

  “We’re not,” I said, “so make your calculations based on that.” The only good thing I could see was that we weren’t far from the Kievor Trade Station now. We had spent three hours in warp getting here but that was only because we had gone in the other direction first, to throw off our trail. I waited with bated breath while Bren made his calculations.

  “It’s going to be three hours and twenty-four minutes to apogee.” Bren said. “That means just under seven hours total. Unless we hook back up, then we can cut that time by third.”

  Seven hours of extreme stress. Waiting for the Katon Navy to pop out on top of us. I could only hope that the worst of it was already behind us, but things never seemed to work out like that for me. Disaster seemed to follow me like hell follows a sinful life, though I wasn’t sure I liked that analogy, it striking too close to home just at that moment.

  “Turnaround is going to be the dangerous part.” Bren went on. “No one is going to catch us before then. They might come out of warp and take a pot shot at us, but no one is going to catch us now. Not until we start deceleration.”

  As if to counterpoint Bren’s statement, the warp proximity sensor began ringing throughout Last Chance, warning us of an incoming warp signature. Bren heard it over com.

  “I’ve got no instrumentation over here.” He warned us. He would ordinarily already be evaluating the data to pinpoint the intruding ships vector and possible entry point, something that took an extraordinary ability, and something I could only muddle through given time, and time was not something we would be given. The warp proximity sensor only went off at the last moments before a ship re-entered normal space. Bren could look at it and with one glance know approximately where the ship would be entering. It took a high powered AI to calculate warp re-entry before the intruder had actually intruded, and Last Chance certainly had no such computer. So now all we could do was wait, but it wasn’t a long wait.

  It didn’t matter. The normal space proximity sensor now began clamoring for attention, ringing shrilly, adding its cacophony to the first alarm an
d adding its additional stress to that which I was already feeling. I slapped the alarm deactivation toggle and they both fell silent. I switched my long range scan to a side screen and was in time to see a massive ship be birthed into space behind us, as if the Universe itself had spawned it.

  It came out of warp space slowly. First it nosed into existence. Then more followed. And more. And more. And still it came. It was festooned with scores of smaller digital signature blips. Fighter craft, I realized, piggy backing their way alongside the mother ship, a Carrier. Last Chance gave digital labels to all the smaller ships and there were so many that the little square labels could not find enough room on the screen and overlapped each the other dozens deep.

  The Carrier instantly fell behind, of course. We were traveling much faster, and there was absolutely no way they were going to catch us. At least not as long as we kept accelerating. The problem was that we couldn’t just keep accelerating. The Carrier shrank to a dot on my screen and then, finally, vanished altogether.

  “We’re in trouble.” Tanya said simply.

  I just sat there stunned. If they had sent anything else we might have had a chance, but a Carrier with its multitude of small fighting craft meant big trouble. I hadn’t thought the Katons still had one. The problem was that the Carrier didn’t have to catch us itself. It could continue accelerating until it came even with us while we decelerated for our rendezvous with the Kievor Trade Station, and once even with us, or even before coming even with us, release all its small fighter craft as it went by. The smaller fighter craft, which were nearly all engine, could quickly decelerate and catch us, and eat us for breakfast.

  Or, guessing our destination, could jump back into warp again and simply wait for us outside the Kievor Protected Zone. Or there could be more ships in warp already on their way there.

  “You might have a point.” I admitted, though it hurt me to say so. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”