by Dan Moren
There was a chime from the console, followed by a new voice blaring out of the speakers. “Unidentified vessel, you have deviated from your course heading. Please advise.”
Eli shot a glance at Page, who shrugged. “We could answer them, but I haven’t got any traffic authorization codes, so we’re going to get in over our heads pretty fast.”
“Fake a communications outage?” said Eli.
“If we don’t say anything, it at least fits with the profile of a hush-hush mission.”
“Let’s hope they buy that. But just in case they don’t.” Eli slid the throttle up and watched their speed increase. Unfortunately, the Warhorse-class vessel had been built for cargo capacity, not performance, so that only cut their time in half. Five minutes. They weren’t going to do much better than that.
A scream pierced the air and Eli glanced over his shoulder in time to see a figure dressed in a blue maintenance jumpsuit fall to the floor. It also gave him an eye on another one of Eamon’s crew creeping up behind a conduit, in Kovalic’s blind spot. And Tapper can’t see him either.
“Page,” he said urgently. When the lieutenant looked up, Eli jutted his chin toward the man.
Calmly, Page unshipped the carbine he was holding and lined up the shot. When the other man peeked out to aim at Kovalic, Page neatly shot him in the head, then went back to the console without another word. Eli felt like he was going to be sick, but he forced himself to turn back to the helm.
“Unidentified vessel,” came the traffic controller’s voice again. “Come to a full stop and await our escorts. That is a priority one order.”
“Sounds like they didn’t buy it,” noted Page, arching an eyebrow.
“Yeah, didn’t really think they would.”
A handful of small green blips appeared on the tac display, radiating out of Illyrica. They moved swiftly in formation toward the dot that represented their position, and even from the display it was easy to tell they meant business.
“Illyrica’s scrambled fighters from an orbital defense platform,” said Page. “Assuming standard defensive interceptor load-out, they’ll be in firing range in around two minutes.”
“We’ll be clear of the gravity well in about three. How’s that jump solution coming?”
“I’m working as fast as I can.” From out of the corner of Eli’s view he could see Page’s eyes rapidly moving back and forth over what looked like a page of text. “User friendliness was clearly not at the top of the engineers’ priority list.”
There was a barrage of shots from the door, followed by another abbreviated scream and the thump of bodies hitting the deck, but this time Eli didn’t risk a glance. His entire world was comprised of the tactical display and the helm controls. “Hey, can you divert power from non-essential systems to the engine?”
“Probably, if I weren’t trying to figure out a system that half a dozen people in the galaxy have ever used. And if I don’t get this just right, I could very well put us inside a star, on the event horizon of a black hole, or on the other side of the galaxy.”
“Thanks for that. I feel much better.”
“Happy to help. Fighters closing, one minute to range.”
“Shit,” muttered Eli. The tac display said the freighter was still two minutes out from the gate and there was no way of closing that distance without more engine power. “We’re going to have to go evasive.”
“Evasive?” repeated Page, looking up with an expression that was as close to alarm as Eli suspected the man got. “You do realize this is a bulk freighter, right? Not a starfighter?”
“We don’t know if this boat has any weapons and, even if it did, we certainly don’t have the time or manpower to figure out how to use them. There’s nothing to hide behind out here, we’re flying a straight line course and we can’t outrun them. Besides,” he grinned at Page, “they’ll never see it coming.” And we only need to keep them off of us for a minute. Though that was saying a lot. In a dogfight, a minute was an eternity.
“Clear!” came Gwen’s voice.
Thank god. One less thing to worry about.
“I count five bodies down,” he heard Kovalic say.
“Then what the hell happened to Dr. Graham?” asked Gwen.
That brought Eli’s head up, and he whipped around to look at the pipe Eamon had been cuffed to—the cuff was still there, locked securely to the metal, but the other end dangled loose. Notably absent was any trace of Eamon Brody.
“Kovalic! Gwen!” he shouted over his shoulder, trying to keep one eye on the pilot controls. Thirty seconds until they’re in firing range.
The pair arrived at a dead run, and he wordlessly jerked his head at the loose cuff. The red-haired CalSec officer let out a string of curses that would have made a Caledonian dockworker’s ears curl. “That bloody blonde doctor got him out somehow. He’s got her wrapped around his little finger.”
“Well, there’s nowhere for them to go,” said Kovalic, looking around. “So they’re somewhere on the ship.”
A klaxon shrieked overhead, stopping the conversation in its tracks. “Fighters are in range!” said Page.
“I suggest everybody find something to hold on to,” Eli suggested.
Kovalic, Page, and Gwen looked at each other and then scattered to the nearest stanchions, consoles, and conduits, each wrapping their arms around whatever stable object they could find.
Eli sucked in a deep breath and fixed his eyes on the console. This is it, Brody. One shaky hand and we’re all nothing more than a cloud of space dust. His palms were sweaty on the glass of the touchscreen in front of him; he would have traded his trousers and shirt for a pilot’s yoke over these goddamned infernal, intangible controls.
The ship shook underneath him, another alarm sounding loud in his ears. His eyes darted to the sensor readout in one corner of the display, the blip of a fighter strafing across the ship’s port flank. Another was coming up on the starboard side, all too fast.
“Oh well, why not,” he muttered to himself, dialing the starboard thrusters down and doubling power to the port, which sent the ship into a spin. “Deal with that, flyboy.”
The fighter to port had been approaching at attack speed, and the sudden shifting of the bulk freighter meant that they were now spinning directly across the fighter’s course. In his head, Eli could hear the pilot’s startled shriek and he watched with a grim smile as the blip on his display pulled up to compensate. The ship’s inertial dampers meant that the spin didn’t feel as severe to those onboard, but it was still making them an all too easy target.
His left hand realigned thruster control, bringing them back onto a straight bearing and he watched as the fighter squadron looped around for another pass. They were keeping their distance this time, so the same trick was definitely not going to work again. One of the fighters had dropped below the freighter and was coming up on its presumably undefended underside.
There’s got to be something else on this boat I can use. He scanned the consoles, his eyes running across each of the additional systems. Besides the thrusters and main engines, he only had access to the built-in sensors, limited power diversion options, and controls for the landing repulsors.
Repulsors! He blinked, remembering Kovalic’s trick from earlier, then glanced around at his compatriots, each holding on for dear life. Page was hugging a nearby support for the catwalk while Tapper, up above him, was starting to look a bit green. “Nobody let go!”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” he heard someone mutter.
He brought up a visual camera of their underbelly, resting his hand near the repulsor controls. A small gray dot against the black background of space slowly resolved into the shape of a fighter, which began spewing high-velocity slugs. As the ship started firing, Eli smacked the repulsor control.
Fast as those slugs were, the anti-gravitational power of the repulsors were responsible for lifting a ship that weighed hundreds of thousands of tons. The rounds rebounded off the antigrav fiel
d—some deflected out to the side, but more than a few reversed course toward the fighter, which promptly took evasive maneuvers to avoid being the victim of its own fire.
Eli’s enthusiasm was quashed mid-grin as an impact knocked him to his knees; he narrowly avoided smacking his head on the console. Pulling himself back up, he caught sight of the red-tinted warning on his display, which suggested that he seal off part of the top decks since they were now venting atmosphere into the void of space.
“Page! I need some help!”
The lanky lieutenant somewhat reluctantly released his death grip and staggered over to the console next to Eli’s. He took in the damage report at a glance and immediately set about making the necessary adjustments.
The deck stabilized under Eli’s feet.
“Twenty seconds until we’re clear of the gravity well,” said Page. “Just keep them off of us a little bit longer.”
Easier said than done. Eli diverted the power they’d spared from sealing off those top decks straight to the engines, boosting their speed ever so slightly. Great, probably nineteen seconds now. Would it be unseemly to start praying?
Keeping one eye on the radar, he sent the ship into a zig-zagging course, trying to keep the maneuvers as unpredictable as possible. Despite that, the bulk freighter could hardly turn on an industrial-sized manhole, much less a dime. More impacts registered from slug rounds, but to Eli’s relief nothing seemed to come close to the engines or the jump drive.
The edge of the gravity well inched closer; there were snails that were probably outrunning them. They needed something, some sort of distraction to keep the fighters off for just a few more seconds. He swallowed.
“I’m shutting down the engines,” he announced.
Four pairs of eyes burned holes into his head.
“You’re what?” Tapper exclaimed.
“Trust me!” His fingers danced over the controls, bringing up the emergency engine shutoff.
“Isn’t that, you know, the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish?”
“The inertia will keep us moving,” said Eli, eyes flicking rapidly back and forth to the relevant pressure gauges. “And that means that I can use the engine to do this.” He slapped the venting controls, sending the engine’s exhaust emissions pluming behind them in an expanding cloud of vapor.
Flying through that much radiation wasn’t too bad for a ship like the bulk freighter, which was heavily shielded to protect its cargo and crew, but the Illyricans built their fighters to, well, fight, and not necessarily to survive giant radiation clouds. It was just one of the many ways the military saved on its expenses.
Eli held his breath, watching the blips; of course, if these guys were suicidal, or were really into following orders to the disregard of their own safety, they might just fly through the thing anyway. But if it were him, he knew what he would have done. Break. Break. Break!
The blips hesitated for a second then split apart to each side of the cloud. They’d come around wide for another pass in a moment, which, if they were hunting any other ship, would have only lost them a few seconds.
But this isn’t any other ship.
He let out the breath as they cleared the line that marked Illyrica’s gravity well. Looking over at Page, his mouth started to form the word “Go!” even as the lieutenant touched a control on his console.
The ship went quiet and Eli looked over in alarm, only to realize that the gravity had cut out as well, and they had all started to float a few inches above the deck. Oh shit, I remember what comes next.
“Hold on,” he started to say, even as gravity kicked in at what felt like twice the standard strength. He heard an exclamation from Gwen and a grunt that sounded suspiciously like a curse from Tapper as they all slammed flat to the deck. Eli had managed to grab hold of a support strut next to the console, but it felt like his arms were about to be torn off.
And then, with an ear-popping pressure, the gravity was back to normal. Breathing heavily, Eli let himself drop back to the deck where he windmilled his sore arms and hoped he hadn’t torn any crucial—or hell, non-crucial—ligaments, tendons, or muscles. The rest of the team were picking themselves up off the deck, rubbing sore necks, legs, and arms.
“Let’s not do that again, real soon,” said Kovalic, grimacing.
Eli looked around. “We need to find Eamon.” Ignoring Kovalic’s insistent call to wait, he started off toward the last place he’d seen his brother.
It was the sound of sobbing that eventually led them to the missing pair. They rounded one of the collections of machinery that dotted the engine room and found Dr. Graham kneeling on the deck, Eamon’s head on her lap. Her normally white lab coat was soaked pink with blood.
She looked up at them, tears streaked over her pale cheeks. “It was the gravimetric field,” she said, in a detached voice, not really focusing on any of them. “The wormhole creates an immense amount of gravity, offset only barely by the ship’s artificial gravity generators running in reverse. It doesn’t cancel out the effect entirely.” She laughed bitterly to herself. “We were working on making the transition more gradual, but it can take you by surprise if you’re not ready for it.” She looked down at Eamon’s face and stroked a hand over his brow. It came away coated in his blood. “I don’t think he even saw the railing.”
Oh no.
They were all staring at Eamon, so even Kovalic and Page’s trained reflexes weren’t fast enough to catch the gun in the woman’s free hand as it came up and jammed into the fleshy spot under her own chin. The shot was quieter than Eli thought it would be, but the image was burned into his brain as he spun around and threw up all over the deck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The general’s office on Terra Nova was more ornate than the spare room he’d commandeered on the Indefatigable, but it still couldn’t be called anything more than stark. A marble bust of the first Emperor of Illyrica—real marble, Kovalic had discovered on one visit—stood on a pedestal in one corner, and paintings—those were reproductions—hung on the walls. The view was also better than the blank wall of the Indefatigable’s cabin: a window looked out onto a thick, leafy rainforest that was no less real than the sculpture.
“So, then,” said the old man, leaning on the carved black walnut of his cane as he limped over to the bar against one wall. “Drink?”
“Anything but Caledonian whisky,” said Kovalic, making a face.
The old man gave a low chuckle. “Didn’t grow on you?”
“Foul stuff. Give me a beer or a cocktail with a little umbrella any day.”
“I’m afraid I’m all out of beer,” said the old man, pulling out the stopper in a crystal decanter. “Bourbon?”
Kovalic nodded. Any port in a storm, as the old saying went. The general poured two tumblers of amber and lifted them in his free hand, then ambled over to Kovalic with his usual stiff-legged gait, placing the two glasses on the desk. He settled himself behind the desk with a sound that was part natural creaking of a man in his advanced years and part whine of servos.
“So,” he said, raising the glass. “To a job well done.”
Reaching out, Kovalic took the glass from the desk, but he didn’t drink, just stared at the honey-colored waves sloshing against the side of the glass. “A success maybe,” he said after a moment, “but I’m not sure about well done.”
The general raised an eyebrow, then started to tick off items on his fingers. “You located Eamon Brody, severely disrupted a major Illyrican military research project, and did so without harm to your own personnel. Most importantly, the Special Projects Team maintains its flawless record, which will look nice the next time our budget comes up for review by the Commonwealth Executive.” The old man tilted his head to one side, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “It would have been nice to take Eamon Brody alive, I agree, but that was outside of your control.”
Kovalic grimaced and took a swig. It burned its way down his throat, sending smoke signals back up after it
. “Agent Rhys wasn’t very happy about it, either.” That was an understatement of galactic proportions. She’d tried everything short of giving the man CPR and even then had insisted upon getting Eamon to the ship’s medical bay and putting him in an emergency cryogenic tank. It wouldn’t matter—they had both known that—but this was Rhys’s collar of a lifetime and privately Kovalic thought she’d actually liked the man. He understood that: undercover work often came with its fair share of internal struggle.
“Yet she didn’t try to take you in or recover the prototype?”
One corner of Kovalic’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “I told you, I don’t work for the Illyricans, and I could care less about their toys,” she’d said. “Hell, one less weapon for their arsenal is fine by me.”
“What about you?” Kovalic had asked. “How are you going to explain your part in this?”
She’d smiled ruefully and shrugged. “I’ll come up with something.”
Not to mention, she’d had little chance of insisting upon anything, outnumbered three-to-one as she was. “She … made do with the hand she was dealt.” At least she’d gotten Kelly, McKenna, and most of Eamon’s team. “Meanwhile, the Illyricans have attributed the explosion on Aran to a rogue comet impact. Not the most believable story, but anybody who’d say different is locked up or dead.”
“And the Black Watch?” asked the old man. “How do you think they’ll take their leader’s death?”
“They’ve been fighting the Illyricans for twenty years,” said Kovalic. “Brody isn’t the first De Valera they’ve lost. They may go underground for a while as they rebuild, but their roots run deep into Caledonian culture by now. The Imperium hasn’t heard the last of them.”
He took another sip of the bourbon, wincing as it caught a not-yet-healed cut on his lip. He had a few bruises and lacerations from various fights, though he privately suspected that most of them had resulted from being repeatedly slammed against the deck by artificial gravity.
