by Kal Spriggs
"Five minutes," Captain Burani said, his voice nervous. "What should we do?"
"Withdraw, full speed," Ricky snapped, "Uh, that way," he drew a vector on his command screen. Navigation was something that gave him a headache at the best of times. The ragtag group of pirates and slavers he'd put together wouldn't stand a chance against real military ships, he knew.
Luckily my flagship is the fastest, he thought. The Raptor and the Panjar were the only military-built ships in the entire squadron, both of them old Baracuda-class corvettes. Captain Burani and Captain Saban used that speed to put the other ships of the squadron between the Raptor and the enemy.
"Titus and Brutus," Ricky said, "launch all your missiles. That might slow them down." He hated to waste the missiles, while he'd bought the cheapest ones he could find, that still represented a huge expenditure.
The two elderly freighters launched all their missiles. They didn't have a hope in hell of controlling that many missiles, but the hundred or so in the flight should at least do something. As long as they don't hit us, Ricky thought nervously. He'd bought the cheapest missiles he could find and while the Raptor wasn't in the path of those missiles, it wasn't too far off.
He gnawed on his lip and then shot a look at Captain Burani, "How much time?"
"Four minutes," Captain Burani said, "No fire yet from the enemy ships... holy shit!"
***
Alannis grinned as the squadron opened fire. She'd been cuing up interceptor fire and she heard someone whoop as two of the enemy vessels vanished. Since the identities for several of those ships were known pirate vessels, she felt a surge of vindication. I hope these bastards are working with Reese, she thought, so we're hurting him while we clean out pirates: two birds with one stone.
All the pirate vessels were small, most of them seemed to be converted freighters or haulers. The Constellation's main weapons shredded a vessel with each hit. The smart thing to do would have been to surrender... but most pirates faced execution for their crimes, anyway.
"Lieutenant Giovanni," Lieutenant Commander Miller said, "Sensors has another inbound wave of missiles, but I want you to switch to telemetry. Ensign Robb, you're on interceptor fire. Lieutenant Giovanni, kill those missile platforms."
"Sir," Alannis said, even as she cued up targeting data on the distant ships. Both vessels were at an angle from the platform. It looked as if the main body of the enemy force had approached the sensor platform, while the two missile vessels had remained back.
Both ships were heavily modified freighters, loaded with external missile racks. They probably fired everything they had, she realized, watching the huge inbound salvo. Neither ship was a threat at this point... but letting them get away would set a bad precedent.
Alannis toggled her system to missile telemetry and fired four of the Moljnirs. The big missiles were overkill for this kind of fight, but that was fine with Alannis. They were doing this to teach the pirates a lesson.
The Moljnirs were fast, short-ranged heavy missiles, with hundred megaton warheads designed to kill a capital ship.
They crossed the twenty thousand kilometers in under a minute of flight time and Alannis guided them in, sending them through an evasive pattern just before they went into final acquisition.
She needn't have bothered with evasion. Only one of the missile platforms fired at all, a single stream from a rotary cannon and then all four missiles detonated.
The massive detonations distorted their sensor feed in that area for a moment. When they finally cleared, nothing but ionized gas remained where the two ships had once been.
"Targets destroyed, sir," Alannis said with satisfaction.
***
"Jesus!" Someone on the bridge shouted. Ricky blanched as the four horrifyingly powerful missiles detonated among the Titus and Brutus. Who the hell are these people, he thought with shock. He didn't even want to fight them.
"Screw this, I'm out of here!" one of the pirate captains shouted over the net.
Ricky swore as half his squadron scattered, fleeing in every direction. The stupid bastards don't realize that they can kill all of them separately with missiles easier than a formation, he thought. Then again, it wasn't like he selected his subordinates for intelligence.
Still, it might give his loyal ship's captains a chance to escape. "Everyone, tighten up, they'll go after the stragglers, stay in close formation!"
This had all gone horribly wrong. He'd come here on a tip that one of his informants had told him about. The bastard who had set up his operation of Sapphire had been a regular at this ansible and Ricky wanted to nail him to the wall. I barely got out of that catastrophe, he thought, and now I'm caught in an ambush. It had to be an ambush, there was no other reason for a military task force to appear at the same time as him. It wasn't like they'd be after the same target or something like that.
"Evasive action!" Ricky snapped as more fire shredded the Panther and the Fox. Now there were only three ships between the Raptor and the enemy fleet. "How long till we can jump!"
"Calculations finish in thirty seconds!" Captain Durani shouted back.
Ricky felt a sweat break out on his forehead as another wave of weapons fire swept into his squadron. The Cutlass died, followed by the Buccaneer. An energy torpedo flashed past the Raptor close enough that they lost half the sensors on that side of the ship.
"Calculations complete!" Captain Durani shouted as he hit the switch and they jumped to shadow.
***
"Two ships jumped to shadow," Lieutenant Givoanni reported. "Should I use missiles on the others?"
"Negative, Lieutenant," Captain Beeson said, "Let them go, while I'd like to finish them off, we're a long way from resupply."
"Roger, sir," Alannis couldn't help a note of disappointment in her voice. Lieutenant Commander Miller picked off a couple more of the pirate craft before the survivors jumped to shadow. Of the twenty-five ships that had ambushed them, only four had escaped.
"Stand down from battle," Captain Beeson said. "Begin rescue and salvage operations. Battle damage assessment?"
"No damage to any of the squadron, we're down four Moljnirs," Lieutenant Commander Miller reported. "Twenty-one pirate or probable-pirate vessels engaged and destroyed." He listened for a moment in his headset, "Shuttles launching for recovery operations in thirty seconds."
"Excellent," Captain Beeson gave a nod. "Main priority for our Marines will be to find out why they were here and then to catalog any evidence of crimes we find. While they're working on that, I want our research team to connect to the ansible platform. Rory and Feliks, are you ready?"
"Yeah, what was all those alarms about earlier?" Rory asked.
Daniel smiled, "Nothing to worry about. How long to get information?"
"Well, it's not exactly like placing a call or looking up records. This is a Icon Telecom ansible platform. We don't have the access codes, so we're going to hack the software to access data logs. If someone left a back door from when they accessed it last, it could take a few minutes. If not, it could take days, even weeks..."
"You have twelve hours," Daniel said. "I don't want to be sitting here in case those pirates had friends." He cut the signal and then stared broodingly at the icon of the ansible platform. He didn't like how this had already resulted in combat. Whether these were allies of Reese Leone or not, he could tell that they were involved somehow.
Daniel doubted that the pirates were waiting here as a trap for his force, but that might have been their goal. As it was, they'd acted as a tripwire. Word would get out that a United Colonies task force was in the area. This had the potential to rapidly snowball into a complete disaster... and Daniel wondered, somehow, if that wasn't the point.
Admiral Mannetti had thrived in chaos. She'd lived on the margins, taking advantage of the collapse of nations to pirate stations and convoys. Reese and his patrons seemed to operate the same way. What if this is the trap, to get us involved in a shooting war with someone else so that he
can take advantage of the situation?
Daniel considered that as he stared out at the ansible platform. He hoped they would have answers soon.
***
"This is fascinating," Rory said as he looked over the schematics. "Have you seen this?"
"Yes," Feliks replied. "Very impressive. You see the modifications to the hardware?"
"Oh, yeah, beautiful piece of work," Rory said. They'd been studying the data from the ansible platform for the past thirty minutes. Rory figured that Captain Beeson would be getting impatient for news soon. These military types, he thought, always so impatient. They demand solutions right away and miss all the important nuances...
He activated his comm unit, "Captain Beeson, this is Rory."
"Yes, you have news? Did you track down Reese yet?"
"What?" Rory shook his head, "No, of course not! We've just begun investigating the ansible platform and it's a good thing we did that first. You wouldn't believe what he's done to it."
"Let's skip the guessing game," the officer replied, "how about you just tell me."
That takes the fun out of it, Rory thought. "Well, fine. It's pretty simple, actually. Someone has come in and made some additions to the platform's control hardware. There's an entire interface that's separate from the rest of the control system. Essentially they've piggybacked an entire data transmission package into the platform. They send it a signal and it takes over the ansible and passes the signal along."
"Can you hack it?"
"Can I..." Rory shook his head, "you don't understand, do you? They've added an entire physical package to this thing! That kind of thing isn't what an outlaw on the run could manage. The platform maintenance crew would notice and that's assuming the company owning it didn't!"
"From what I can tell," Feliks said, "the platform was built with this additional section from the beginning."
"So you're saying Reese is in collusion with Icon Telecom?" Captain Beeson demanded.
"Well..." Rory glanced at Feliks. "You think?" It was all he had to say, they'd worked together so much that at this point, they both knew what the other meant.
"Thirty percent chance, at most," Feliks shrugged.
"Yeah, I'm going to say it's a twenty percent chance of that. There's some additional modifications, here." Rory said. "Someone changed the frequencies that this thing will respond to, and they also modified the controls. It's nothing a maintenance crew would notice on a routine inspection, but we found it on our scans. I think this was some kind of military upgrade that Reese knew about and then modified for his use."
"Icon Telecom is a Centauri corporation," Captain Beeson said. "I'm not sure how he'd know about their military communications."
"Well, he must have known somehow, or someone told him," Rory said. "One thing we've noticed is there's a few traps. If we do this wrong, we'll trigger a self-destruct on the platform."
"Great," Captain Beeson said. "Can you do it without triggering one of those traps?"
Rory looked at Feliks. His longtime friend waggled a hand. Rory rolled his eyes in reply. "Yeah, sure, no problem at all, we'll have it done in a jiffy."
He cut the call and Feliks shook his head, "Why would you say that? You know that this Reese fellow is very good at programming."
"Yeah, that's his specialty, but you and me, we're even better at hardware," Rory ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. "Look, we'll take it slow. Get every bit of data we can. I mean, this guy's smart but he's not our level of smart, right? Besides, we'll tie into the Constellation's main computer. That should give us far more capacity than he'll have."
Feliks nodded, his stork-like head bob about as much agreement as Rory knew he'd give. Great, Rory thought, he's going to be all sulky the rest of the day. Feliks was his best friend. Probably his only friend, Rory could admit, if only to himself. But still, sometimes he wanted to strangle the morose man.
They brought up the remote interface and Rory nodded at Feliks. "Alright, you get us access to the core system and I'll start going through the remote access log..."
"This is stupid," Feliks grumbled.
"We're fine," Rory said as he paged through the access log. The first one was their current connection. The next one had to be the pirates. They'd tried to access at least a dozen times. Idiots, he thought, they had no idea what they were doing. It looked like the pirate's hacker had tried a series of access attempts with a cheap off-the-shelf decryption set. It was the kind of program that paparazzi used to hack celebrity message accounts.
Rory's eyes widened, though, as he saw a different access, right after the first failed one. Someone had accessed the platform remotely via ansible connection, only minutes after the first failed attempt. After that they had opened up the ansible platform's sensor net and...
Rory's eyes went even wider. Whoever it was, the connection was still open and they had accessed the ansible platform's core network.
"I'm seeing a large bandwidth in my hacking attempt," Feliks said.
"Shut it down, shut it down now!" Rory shouted. "It's him, he's hacking us through your connection, shut it down now!"
Rory's computer display flickered and then a face appeared. The blonde, handsome man gave him a sardonic smile. "Ah, the scientists. You'd be Feliks?"
"Rory," Rory sputtered. He made a chopping motion to Feliks and he saw his friend scramble to disconnect cables. We're plugged into the ship's main computer, he thought with horror, he'll be able to dump the core.
"Ah, yes," Reese nodded, "I'd read your paper on Illuari Energy Projection. I think you jumped to a hasty conclusion about how they do it."
Rory's face flushed, "Listen here, you..."
"Now," Reese said. "I could dump the ship's computer and leave your brand new ship powerless and drifting, but I'm not going to do that. In fact, I could override the antimatter containment protocols and vaporize your fancy new ship. But I'm not going to do that, either. Pass along to whoever is in charge that this is none of their business. What I'm doing is going to save humanity... and you all are just getting in my way. I have no love for the United Colonies, but I'm not out to destroy it. Leave me alone, let me focus on humanity's true enemies: the Balor."
"Ha," Rory said, "if you're messing around with Illuari artifacts, you're either crazy or desperate and either way, that means you're dangerous. You have no idea what some of their tech can do."
"I wager I understand far better than you," Reese said. "Now, be a good little middle-man and pass along my message."
"If they don't listen?" Rory asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Feliks give a signal, he'd disconnected their computers from the mainframe. At least we're safe, now, he thought.
"Then I'll destroy anyone who gets in my way," Reese said. "Oh, and tell my wife that I love her, but she’s included."
Rory blinked at that. He looked over at Feliks, but the other man just shrugged. "Your wife?"
Reese's handsome face hardened, "Princess Alannis Giovanni."
"Giovanni..." Rory looked at Feliks again, "isn't that the President's name?"
"I think so," Feliks said.
"You idiots, I know she's aboard that ship. Tell her what I said," Reese snapped. He looked over his shoulder. "Oh… and your effort to track me? Nice try." The transmission cut out.
Rory's screen flickered. He looked over at Feliks, "Were you able to track that at all?"
"He bounced the signal, there's three possible systems, all of them nearby, but most likely those are merely relays as well."
"Oh, man," Rory shook his head. "This is a disaster. At least that Captain fellow won't know how badly this went..."
"Rory, Feliks!" Captain Beeson barked over their communications, "what the hell did you just do, the ansible platform just self-destructed!"
It's not fair, Rory thought to himself, we're smarter than him, it should have worked...
***
"So, let me get this straight," Daniel asked a few hours later. "Not only does he know we
came here, but he had several minutes of full access to our ship's computer... so he probably knows our encryption and security codes?" He had gathered his department heads and the commanders of the other ships from his squadron, though they were present only by holographic display.
Rory and Feliks looked at each other. "That's... yeah." Rory said.
"Not only that, but we have no leads as to his location. None. Zero," Daniel said. He looked over at his department heads, but none of them spoke up.
Feliks spoke up, "We do know that he broadcast from one of three possible systems..."
"Where we'll probably find a similar setup which he can destroy whenever he wants," Daniel said. "Assuming he hasn't prepared an ambush for us on arrival." He covered his face, "Gentlemen, this is a disaster." In one fell swoop they had lost every advantage of surprise. He was tempted to abort the entire operation. Reese knew their resources and knew everything that they knew. They now had nothing to go on.
"Look," Rory said, "he may know about us now, but we learned something too!"
"We know he's a better hacker than you," Captain Bowder said from the display. "Smarter than you, too, apparently."
"Now, that is not true!" Rory sputtered. "Yes, he may have temporarily outmaneuvered me, but this is just a minor setback. We know his tactics, now! Feliks and I can bypass his software, we can take apart the hardware on one of these ansible platforms and--"
"And if he detonates one while you're doing that?" Daniel asked
Rory's mouth snapped shut. "I hadn't thought of that."
"This is a fool's errand," Captain Bowder growled. "At this point, we'd be better off returning to the United Colonies and requesting new orders."
"We can't allow him to continue his plan," Lieutenant Commander Forrest Perkins said. "I mean, I can't claim to understand all of what he may be up to, but if he has even a slight chance of activating that station, we need to stop him."
