by Blaze Ward
“Sir,” a voice intruded on Zakhar’s happy little fantasy.
Tobias Gibney. Gunner’s Mate. Also, pretty damned good with the sensors when Javier wasn’t around. He was short, skinny, and pale. And so quiet about his past that nobody knew anything about the man, except which planets he adamantly refused to ever take leave on.
Zakhar looked over.
Gibney had an angry look on his face, but it seemed to be pointed inward. It usually was.
“Go,” Zakhar prompted.
“I’ve got a weird signal return,” Gibney finally said. “I’d say a sensor ghost, but I know how good our scanners are. Science Officer would have spotted something going that far off beam a while ago and fixed it.”
Yeah, Javier would have.
Not much brought out the nerdy professionalism in that man. Having better eyes and ears than any warship in service was high on that list, though.
Zakhar checked his boards. Everything was still in stealth mode, passive sensors only, but drinking in as much data as they could and filtering it according to the paranoid tendencies of one Mister Javier Aritza.
The chances of a false positive were technically above zero, but not by enough to actually count in anything but horseshoes and hand grenades.
“Where?” Zakhar asked in a tight voice.
Once upon a time, he had been a captain in the Concord Fleet. Warrior. Commander.
Right sneaky bastard.
Being a pirate hadn’t taken any of that away from him.
Calypso was orbiting in front of them as they went, a little below and off the port bow. A silvery object close enough to be a very detailed model on a twenty-zoom telescope, but not so close as to present a maneuvering risk.
Good ship handling was still one of Sokolov’s hallmarks.
“Higher plane. Sixteenth of an orbit ahead,” Gibney chopped off his syllables like slicing carrots.
A-yup. Right where I’d want to be to start an attack pass. If I was running silent and trying to get close enough to ambush someone. Come to a dead stop relative to everything and let them come up under me before I uncloaked.
A genius admiral had once said that the difference between a good commander and a great one was fifteen seconds.
Which meant reacting immediately instead of dithering.
“Comm,” Zakhar snapped his command voice across the entire bridge. “Break radio silence and order Calypso to emergency jump and then go silent. Bring all shields to maximum settings now.”
“That will void our cloak, sir,” the comm yeoman stated.
“Acknowledged,” Zakhar said. “Tell Del to go silent as well. Nav, as soon as Calypso confirms, trigger our jump. Up and out. Get me clear so Engineering can start putting us back together. Drop us back to full cloak and total silence as soon as we come out of jump.”
Things started happening immediately, at least here.
Calypso blinked out of existence. The ship was in good-enough shape, and the crew over there capable. They could get it all to rights in a couple of hours. Three or four light-hours of empty space took a long time to quarter, if you were looking for a silent needle in an empty haystack.
Storm Gauntlet surged with power as every generator was suddenly dropped into line and paralleled.
Above and ahead, something appeared. The mystery bird got off one salvo that hit home on the shields with a mighty sledgehammer, but not a second one. Not the dangerous one.
And then Storm Gauntlet jumped.
Darkness.
Emptiness.
Otherspace.
Back.
Everything went back to dimness as Storm Gauntlet’s crew hid, silent mice in the cupboard. Down below, Engineering would be a kicked-over ant’s nest of activity as the jump matrix went sideways from too much gravity, too close. An average crew could fix it in six hours. On an average day his Chief Engineer, Andreea Dalca could probably do it in three.
Hopefully, this was a better-than-average day for her.
The captain over there had been good. But he had made a mistake.
I would have fired everything from under the cloak and let it collapse, rather than trying to bring it down cleanly. It would regenerate just as well as the jump matrix.
The difference had been not getting a second, full broadside from a battle frigate-sized Raider. One hit had gotten home hard. The second would have done damage, had Zakhar still been there.
Zakhar checked the readout. He even knew the vessel that had tried to kill them.
Ajax.
One of the enforcers for Walvisbaai Industrial.
Officially, the competition.
If the many pirate clans could be arrayed on a spectrum from good to evil, Zakhar would put his bosses, the Jarre Foundation, somewhere closer to the nice end.
Walvisbaai was about as bad as it got.
There was no chance in hell that they just happened to be out here in the middle of nowhere, all stealthed up and ready to attack.
Piet glanced over from his pilot’s seat, but remained silent. The smile in the man’s eyes was enough. He didn’t have to actually say it out loud.
Javier had been right.
It was a trap.
Book Fourteen: Svalbard
Part One
As the humongous door waddled open and lights on a single overhead track came on, Suvi sent a soft ping on a weird, ultrasonic frequency down the big atrium. Just the sort of thing for annoying the hell out of bats.
She didn’t figure there were any on this planet, anyway. And if there were, better to find out what sort of mean bastards might have colonized an iceball in the middle of nowhere, early, right?
Tunnel. Straight for a bit, back into the soul of the mountain. Inclined at exactly seven degrees for the four hundred meters she could scan. Either the tunnel hairpinned at that point, or there was another door blocking things.
Because the outside air was just at freezing, she had transformed her regular black, skin-tight, leather flying-suit gear into fur-lined pants, snow goggles, and a parka made from a hideously-pink polar bear.
You could do anything when you were an AI. You just had to dream silly enough.
Suvi maneuvered her armed gunship through the door and looked around. Javier was following her lead, and the corridor was empty, but it was still twenty-seven meters tall, perfectly round if you had cut off the bottom third. Probably bored that way, and then all the pipes and wiring put in underneath before they built a new floor.
Weird, but humans did things that made no sense, even to themselves.
Because she could, Suvi decided to fly this mission on the ceiling. She left fourteen centimeters of clearance above her, tilted her nose down and imitated one of those flying cops tracking speeders with a radar gun as she moved at Javier’s relaxed pace.
And because there might be carnivorous bats around, she unlocked the pop-up pulse pistol turret the bigger drone had on the bottom ring. Probably heavy enough to knock a moose on his ass.
Girl needed to be prepared.
The big cathedral door began to close behind them with a hooting sound, probably designed to remind stupid humans to move out of the way. She had to dial down her audio sensors a little, and throw in a filter, or it would have been extra annoying. Kinda the reverse of what she had just done to the bats.
Javier was mostly watching her feed as she let every scanner and probe she had make as much noise as it wanted. She hadn’t found anyone, so if they were here, they were really good at hiding.
Or they were ghosts.
She was pretty sure none of Javier’s wardroom pixies had followed him here.
Not yet, anyway.
“Anything?” Javier asked.
“Moles don’t tunnel straight,” she typed back. “Space dragons?”
That got a laugh out of him, which was good. Javier had been too tense lately. Probably needed to get laid more. You never knew with organics, but that seemed to be his go-to remedy, since he didn’t drink with near
ly the audacity of some of his old stories.
Thirty seconds after the outer door closed, the light flickered out, but Javier had apparently been expecting it. He had a flashlight out and on. Good enough for him to see, and she didn’t need to add anything.
The inner door, when they got there, was just as grandiose as the outer one. In better shape, since it didn’t have the added exposure, but cut to exactly the same dimensions. Someone had forged both simultaneously and put them here.
What the hell did you hide on a dying planet in the middle of nowhere? And why would it need to be this big?
Suvi took a quick spin through the encyclopedia she had finally convinced Javier to upload, but nothing jumped out with an answer.
Javier approached the inner door and took off his gloves as she watched. He stashed the flight controller in his backpack and studied the big door.
Hmm. Temperature was warmer here. Already three degrees ambient, and the door itself was nine degrees. Was there a volcano on the other side of that wall, or something?
Javier stepped to the side and entered a different four-digit sequence to open this portal.
Interesting that they didn’t use the same one as the outer.
No, strike that. Absolutely illogical. And thus, human.
The door beeped once and started to open.
The hallway lights came on again.
Because she was above it, Suvi had a great view of the interior, while still being kinda invisible up here.
And that was good, since there were a dozen guys on the inside, armed to the teeth.
Javier had no chance to move before he was suddenly at the wrong end of the problem, but at least he never looked up at her. And the visible guns were all stun models, as near as she could tell.
“Don’t move,” one of the closest guys said.
“Yeah, I kinda figured that,” he replied.
“Who are you?” the stranger asked.
“Just a guy,” Javier said.
And then they shot him.
Part Two
The jump hadn’t been as far as Zakhar had hoped.
Hopefully, it was still far enough.
That was the problem with triggering an emergency jump. By its very nature, it would be a random distance, in a random direction, since the drives were not capable of factoring the extreme curvature of space-time once you got too close to a planet.
Still, it had worked.
Storm Gauntlet had gotten clear before Ajax was able to lock on and hit hard enough to get through the shields.
However, now was when things got dangerous.
Calypso would be staying as dark as a hole in space, waiting either for orders, or to make their escape if Ajax took out Storm Gauntlet. Either way, he didn’t have to worry about them. An unarmed freighter had no business being around here, so they would be moving away as quietly as they could. He’d already set up a rendezvous with the prize crew, for exactly this sort of surprise.
At the same time, the ground team was trapped on a very hostile planet. With an enemy overhead.
Zakhar wasn’t sure if their best outcome would be to be abandoned here forever, or to be captured by a bunch of goons from Walvisbaai. Certain death versus the possibility of something worse.
The control boards, at least, were promising.
Engineering was on the ball. Drive tuning would be accurate within an acceptable limit in under an hour. Piet was flying. Mary-Elizabeth had the guns. Even Gibney was doing nearly as good a job as Javier at the science officer station.
And now, to sail into harm’s way, against an invisible opponent.
“Ahead one quarter,” Zakhar ordered. Just enough to get them in the right direction, having already killed their inertia.
Time to get sneaky.
Zakhar studied the various readouts at his fingertips.
Ajax had been a purpose-built pirate ship, rather than a retired and refurbished old warboat like Storm Gauntlet. She was bigger and meaner, but most assuredly not built to the same standards for durability. That was expensive to engineer and fabricate, and like most pirate ships, Ajax would be relying on an overabundance of firepower for such a small hull.
Hell, at the end of the day, Ajax could probably go toe-to-toe with a destroyer for a little bit, before the bigger ship’s mass began to tell. But that wouldn’t do Zakhar any good today. These two vessels were capable of pounding each other into scrap at a fairly even pace. Sykora and Aritza were still trapped on the planet below.
The edge he had was in his sensors. Already, Gibney had managed to spot the other vessel once. After all, the cloak function wasn’t perfect, nor invulnerable. Just an energy shield that masked nearly all emissions behind a blanket of randomness.
Nearly being the operative phrase here.
Could they do it again?
Zakhar’s ability to rescue Djamila, from this trap he had stepped into, hinged on it.
What was the best way to out-think the other guy?
Zakhar glanced over at Gibney, face down and studying everything intently, as if Javier was leaning over his shoulder offering suggestions.
Yeah, there was an inspiration.
When in doubt, do something crazy.
“Piet,” Zakhar continued, as if not a moment had passed. “Plot an insertion orbit that runs on an oblong angle.”
“How oblong?” the pilot actually looked over his shoulder with a concerned face.
“Del landed forty degrees south?” Zakhar asked.
Piet nodded carefully.
“So forty-five south, fifty-five north,” Zakhar concluded. “And keep it extremely high.”
Just the unconscious recoil that shook Piet’s whole body told Zakhar just how offended a well-trained pilot would be with such a course. Which was the whole point. He would never think of something like this on his own, so he wouldn’t be expecting it.
Out-think the other guy.
Everyone else plotted orbits that ran parallel with the equatorial plane, usually at some latitude that put you directly overhead of some important terrestrial target below you. That or an orbital insertion that let you cover the whole planet as you went pole-to-pole with it turning beneath you.
This was the sort of thing Javier would have thought up.
“Why this orbit, sir?” Gibney asked, trying to wrap his head around the kind of craziness that usually emanated from the science corner of the bridge.
Probably afraid it was contagious.
“I want him to fly below us at some point, Tobias,” Zakhar replied. “Our sensors are better than his, so if we can get him to shadow part of the planet, we’ll see him.”
“Then what?” Mary-Elizabeth chimed in from the gunner station.
“Still working on that part,” Zakhar said. “Feel free to offer ideas.”
“Roger that,” she replied.
Zakhar opened an internal comm channel.
“Wardroom,” he said quietly. “Prepare to feed the bridge crew lunch and dinner in place, please.”
He closed the channel and got to thinking.
How do you beat a bigger enemy, when all he has to do is just stop you from saving your people?
Part Three
Unlike Del’s Assault Shuttle, the pilot from Calypso’s shuttle hadn’t stayed aboard after the other group had landed.
Or if he had, he had found a really good place to hide. One even Djamila couldn’t find.
She finally considered it good enough, for now.
Her team had cleared the vessel about as quickly as anyone could have managed. Certainly, they would have been on the podium, if this had been a competitive event. The after-action report wouldn’t have many deductions.
She left Sascha and Hajna aboard the vessel as a precaution and went outside to gather up the strike team. The two girls were good scouts and pathfinders, but the six boys were more linear.
The men were for the times when charging a machine gun nest really was the best solution.
&nb
sp; Del was standing in the hatchway as she emerged back into the brisk air.
“Where’s Aritza?” she called, looking around.
He smiled at her, and pointed back to the tunnel.
Damn it. Was that man incapable of ever acting like an adult?
“Lock everything up, Del,” she ordered, signaling her men to join her, battle rifle held casually pointed downrange.
The first door was better suited to be a flight hangar, even if it was built like a bank vault, except that it was just too narrow for anything big enough to be dangerous. Still, someone was obviously intent on hiding something down here, or it would have shown up on scanners.
Aritza wouldn’t have been capable of keeping out if he saw something like this. Just like he wasn’t capable of not walking right into what was obviously a trap, instead of waiting for backup.
Hopefully, he had finally met with that tragic accident she had always been meaning to arrange, whatever Del thought to the contrary.
Six men, and her. Good enough.
Everyone was prepared. Del had already started withdrawing the landing ramp upwards. Aritza’s sensor drone would be nice about now, but had obviously gone inside the deathtrap with him.
Hopefully, it had survived enough that she could make use of it in the future. After he was dead.
The panel was obvious. Human designed. Set into a stone façade. Door opening outward from a plug frame, where outside overpressure would just drive it deeper into a narrowing face and let it survive much greater pressures than just resting in place would allow.
Good architecture for defense.
She checked the keypad and noted that someone had permanently carved a four-digit numeric sequence above it.
Her men had squatted into a defensive formation. Well spread-out against grenades. Covering front, sides, and rear. Every weapon was hot, judging from the fingers carefully not touching triggers.
She moved to one side and pressed her bottom flat against the cold wall. Given the confines, Djamila slung her rifle and drew the pistol on her hip. She transferred it to her left hand, multi-dimensional ambidexterity having always been one of her greatest assets, and keyed the button sequence with her right.
