An Airless Storm: Cochrane's Company: Book Two

by Peter Grant

  Jock quipped, “Lends a whole new meaning to smash-and-grab.”

  “It sure does! The same principle applies to stealing spaceships, like the patrol craft we got from New Westray when the Commodore set up this whole thing. You figure out a way around the defenses. Hardly anyone ever actually sees a spaceship with their own two eyes, not unless they go right up to it in a cutter or cargo shuttle. To most people it’s a blip on a radar screen, or an icon in a Plot display. Most times, the blip or icon isn’t the ship at all; it’s a transponder beacon. You don’t have to worry about people seeing you get away with the ship, if the beacon doesn’t move. Switch off the beacon in the ship at the same moment as you switch on another one right next to it, and Orbital Control or System Control probably won’t even notice. You can sneak away quietly in the ship, with them none the wiser. Only when your replacement beacon runs out of battery power, or someone goes to visit the ship and finds it gone, will they realize something’s wrong.”

  Jock had listened, fascinated, to the former criminal’s exposition of his craft. “Sounds like you were really good at that sort of thing, Henry.”

  “I made a living.”

  “I bet you did! What if someone got clever, and tied up their stuff in so much security that you just couldn’t break in?”

  “That’s a common error. People set up all these smart systems that only they can operate, and figure no-one can get in now. Sure, they can. A ruthless criminal will kidnap him, or maybe his wife or son or daughter, and give him a choice. Open up, or have one of his, or their, fingers, or ears, or noses removed. Still dithering? Have another one! It normally doesn’t take long. I was never in that line of business – I don’t have the stomach for it – but I know others who were. I’ve even used a couple of them from time to time, if I was dealing with other criminals who were just as bad.”

  Jock couldn’t suppress a shiver. “Remind me to stay on your good side!”

  “I will. Tonight, we’re getting in the easy way. Missiles and nuclear warheads have security crawling all over them. They’re weapons, which means they’re scary. People want to keep scary things secure so they can’t bite them, so they put layers of security around them. Range safety packages, on the other hand… it’s like their name says. They’re safety packages, not weapons. It’s basic psychology. A safety package isn’t dangerous, by definition, so they don’t need much protecting, right?”

  Now it was Jock’s turn to laugh. “Unless someone like me gets at them.”

  He was still amused as Henry led the way into the deserted factory, after slipping a sheaf of folded banknotes to an appreciative night watchman at the entrance to the yard. The seventy-two boxes containing the safety packages were lined up in rows, waiting to be collected the following morning and taken up to the Arsenal. He and Henry selected six, taking them from widely spaced locations in the rows, and laid them on a table.

  Henry unboxed the first package. Jock unscrewed its access panel and disconnected the capacitor that powered the device at all times, even when ship’s power was switched off. He lowered a jeweler’s visor over his eyes, and began unplugging and unscrewing tiny components and cables to get to the heart of the device. He referred constantly to a schematic diagram as he worked. It took him almost twenty minutes to uncover the chip that contained the critical circuits.

  He used a special tool to liquidize the sealant holding the chip in its socket, and eased it out onto the table. Reaching into his toolkit, he took out an identical-looking chip, one of several Henry had obtained, along with the schematics, through a little judicious bribery and corruption a month ago. Jock had reprogrammed them using some specialized equipment, also obtained by Henry through local contacts. Holding the chip carefully in the jaws of an insertion tool, he planted it in the newly vacated socket and re-sealed it in place; then he began the tedious task of replacing everything he’d removed to get at it.

  Twenty-five minutes later, he watched the last light turn green on the self-test display, and nodded with satisfaction. He screwed the access panel back into place, and handed the device to Henry to be re-boxed and replaced in the waiting lines; then he turned to the next one.

  It was after four in the morning before Jock finished the fifth device. Eyes blurring with tiredness, the result of focusing fiercely on tiny connections at close range, he shook his head. “I’m done, Henry. I just can’t see clearly enough to manage a sixth.”

  “Five will have to do, then. That should be enough for at least partial success.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  They made sure everything looked the same as before they’d arrived, then slipped out to where their van was parked. They drove back to their apartment, collected their already-packed luggage, returned the van to the rental agency, then took a cab to the spaceport. By evening they’d completed planetary exit formalities, and boarded the grimy tramp freighter that had been loafing in orbit for three weeks, ‘making repairs’ while waiting for them. By midnight, it was heading for the system boundary. Its officially filed flight plan was to the Bismarck Cluster, but that would last no longer than its first hyper-jump. From there, it would turn toward Constanta.

  CONSTANTA

  Mr. Grigorescu flipped through the screens of information on his terminal. “You’ve worked in some very interesting places, Ms. Funar. I must admit, I’m surprised that someone with your qualifications and experience has ended up on a smaller planet like Constanta. We don’t normally attract visitors of your caliber.”

  She seemed to blush. “Ah… it’s a little embarrassing, sir. I met a man, and things got… involved. He invited me to come here, and I did; but after a while, he began to get very possessive, very controlling. I wasn’t prepared to put up with that, so we broke up – on rather bad terms, I’m afraid. I’m looking for a job for a year or two, to rebuild my savings and re-establish myself. I’d rather do that first, then go home, rather than appear to crawl back like a failure.”

  Grigorescu nodded approvingly. “That’s a very sound approach, if I may say so. I like people with self-discipline and determination. Ah… may I ask who he was?”

  “That’s a private matter, sir.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” He seemed embarrassed as he turned away from the terminal, back toward her. “I can certainly use you, Ms. Funar. With the expansion we’ve enjoyed over the past few years, the shipyard really needs to overhaul its accounts department and put better management systems in place. If you can help us do that, you’ll go on your way with my grateful thanks, and a nice bonus to ease your return home.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  They spent a while discussing salary and other details. Grigorescu warned, “You’ll be based planetside most of the time, but there will be times we’ll need you to go up to the orbital shipyard. We have visiting staff quarters there, not great, but adequate, and you won’t be there for more than a few days at a time. I trust that won’t be a problem?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “Good. When can you start?”

  “Would Monday be in order, sir?”

  “It certainly would! I’ll tell Personnel to make the arrangements.” He offered his hand. “Welcome to the family at Grigorescu Shipyard, Ms. Funar. You’ll soon make friends here.”

  She shook it firmly. “Thank you, sir.”

  15

  Losses

  NEW SKYROS

  The final briefing before departure from New Skyros was relaxed. The three Brotherhood commanding officers were relieved to get away from a planet where so many things had gone wrong over the past few months. They’d made sure to document every one of them, to prove to an increasingly irascible Agim that none of the incidents had been their fault. He was not taking the delays well.

  “We’ll travel in company to the system boundary,” Captain Hoxha told the others. “After that, of course, it’ll be impossible to stay together until we reach base. We’ll rendezvous at the system boundary there at ele
ven on the second of next month, due galactic south of the fleet beacon, at a range of one-point-two billion kilometers. Try to be there on time, so we all look good. Make your arrival signal individually, as you emerge from your last hyper-jump, then wait for the rest of us. We’ll travel in together, in close formation.” The two destroyer commanders nodded their understanding.

  Mr. Metaxas and his shipyard executives muttered more than a few prayers under their joint and several breaths, as they watched the icons of the three ships head away from the planet toward the system boundary. Never in their experience had a contract run into so many difficulties, almost from its inception. It was as if it had been jinxed by a malevolent spirit – not that they were superstitious, of course. There were still six more destroyers and a depot ship to be constructed and delivered. Despite the record profit they were making on each ship, they did not look forward to the further troubles that they were sure would await them.

  At the New Skyros system boundary, the three ships exchanged final signals of farewell and good wishes for the voyage, then separated to make their first hyper-jumps. The destroyer Aries, named for the first of the historical signs of the zodiac, was the first to depart, followed by her sister ship Taurus. Last to leave was the fast freighter Rades.

  In two of the missile pods aboard Aries, range safety packages inserted into individual missiles sensed the unmistakable gravitational shift pattern of a spaceship’s hyper-jump, picked up by their accelerometers. The chips installed by Jock Murray compared the accelerometer readings to their preprogrammed routines, and added one to a zeroed-out counter.

  On board Rades, three more range safety packages, in three more missile pods carried in her cargo holds, did the same.

  Commander Gjonaj settled into his command chair aboard Aries as the time grew near for her fifth hyper-jump of the voyage. He was growing less tense, less stressed, as New Skyros fell further and further behind them. Perhaps they had left their bad luck at the planet? He hoped so. The sooner he could pick up the bulk of his crew at base, and train them to make the best use of this shiny new modern warship, the sooner they could all help to avenge the Patriarch. That was something to look forward to!

  He listened to the reports coming in to the OpCen from his abbreviated passage crew. Satisfied at last, he sounded the hyper-jump alarm. For one minute, it echoed through the passages and compartments, warning everyone on board to secure themselves against any sudden movement as the ship was launched through space and time in a single powerful transition.

  Right on time, the ship’s computers triggered a massive power dump from the capacitor ring into the gravitic drive. Instantly, a gigantic toroid-shaped gravitic field formed around and ahead of Aries’ hull, pulling the warship into it. Time and space warped as the toroid spat out the vessel, twenty light years ahead of its previous position, that much closer to its destination.

  Jock’s reprogrammed chips in the range safety packages compared readings from their accelerometers, confirmed that this was, indeed, another hyper-jump, and added one more digit to their counters. They clicked over to read ‘5’. That instantly triggered an automatic subroutine, one normally only initiated if a missile had gone out of control during a test flight, and now posed a danger to other traffic, and had to be destroyed.

  Instructions blazed from the range safety packages to their missiles’ payloads. Safety features were automatically bypassed or neutralized in such an emergency. With a blinding flash, visible for many thousands of kilometers – if anyone had been so far into deep space as to witness it – two five-megaton thermonuclear warheads detonated. Aries and all aboard her were utterly consumed in their actinic fire.

  Ten days later, Taurus emerged from her final hyper-jump, almost exactly in the right position in relation to the secret base in the otherwise deserted star system. Commander Prifti nodded in satisfaction. “Well done, navigator! You put us right on the button.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Communications, make our arrival signal, and advise we will wait here for Aries and Rades.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  They waited, growing more and more impatient. Prifti glanced at the bulkhead timepiece again and again, but saw only the inexorable passage of time. What could be keeping the other two ships? He had arrived precisely on time. Surely, they could not have fallen that far behind him?

  Six hours had passed before his impatience grew too great. “Communications, signal to base. Taurus is proceeding to rendezvous. We can wait no longer for Aries and Rades.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Navigator, put us on course to enter orbit at base as quickly as possible. Max cruise speed.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Turning her back to the void, Taurus set out on the last, lonely leg of her journey.

  PATOS

  “What could possibly have happened? Did our enemies intercept them?” Agim’s voice trembled with fury.

  Captain Toci shook his head emphatically. “We have no idea what happened, sir, but I can assure you, our enemies did not intercept them. That would be impossible – against all the laws of physics and mathematics – for the same reason that we cannot travel in formation between our departure points and our destinations.”

  “Why? Why? I do not understand!”

  The captain suppressed a sigh. “Sir, one light year is almost nine and a half trillion kilometers. Freighters cover ten to fifteen light years in a single hyper-jump; warships and courier vessels, up to twenty. Twenty light years is so great a distance that the human mind cannot comprehend it. It has no yardstick against which to measure it. Suffice it to say that if our astrogators make an error of one hundredth of one degree in their calculations – which is not uncommon, due to sensor margin of error – then our ships can be trillions of kilometers out of position, up or down, left or right, or before or behind where they planned to emerge from a twenty-light-year hyper-jump. A power fluctuation in the capacitor ring can accomplish the same thing, building on navigational errors. That is why we spend hours recalculating our position after every hyper-jump, while our capacitor ring recharges. When we are as sure as we can be of our location, we hyper-jump once more, and so on.

  “Such enormous margins of error make it flatly impossible to plan an interception of a ship in transit. Not only would an enemy have to know exactly where she was planning to exit her hyper-jump, he would also have to calculate exactly where any error was going to place her in relation to that position. It cannot be done. Once a ship has left a system, she is effectively invulnerable until she reaches another system, where she can once again be precisely located and targeted. The only exception is if she should hyper-jump by accident into range of an enemy ship she did not know would be there.”

  Agim nodded reluctant understanding. “But, if your error potential is so great, how do you ever arrive where you want to be?”

  “When we draw near to our destination, we make our penultimate hyper-jump to a point about half a light year from it. That way, we can calculate the final jump much more accurately, over a much shorter distance. The same error of one hundredth of a degree, over half a light year, will put us at most about a hundred and thirty million kilometers out of position. Given that the average system boundary is plus-or-minus one billion kilometers from its star, and we aim to arrive well outside it, that is a sufficient safety margin for us to make that jump with confidence.”

  “I see. So, you are telling me there is no way Hawkwood could have intercepted our ships en route?”

  “No, sir. It is absolutely impossible.” The Captain’s assurance was total.

  “I must take your word for it. What, then, could have happened to them?”

  “There are natural hazards, sir. If we jump too close to a black hole or a star, we might emerge so close to it that we cannot escape its gravitational pull. If we jump into the path of an oncoming planet or asteroid, we might not be able to take evasive action in time. There might have been a malfunction o
f a critical system on board, for example, the gravitic drive, leaving the ship stranded in deep space. Every year, one or two spaceships vanish without trace, so those hazards are real; but given the number of spaceships in operation, and the incomprehensibly vast distances they cover, the odds of them happening are vanishingly small. For two out of three ships to disappear on the same delivery voyage, from the same starting point, is unheard of in my experience. It is statistically impossible that both losses could be due to such circumstances. I can only suspect sabotage.”

  “I knew it!” Agim raged. “I knew those bastards would not give up! They do not listen to warnings, it seems. Well, there will be no more. We shall find a way to finish them once and for all!”

  “Yes, sir. I should point out, sir, that we now have just three armed fast freighters, plus one modern destroyer with no reloads for her missiles. Our two older destroyers have already been taken out of service, and are not worth reactivating, because they are no longer capable of facing modern warships. That means our forces are far too small to engage in all-out battle against Hawkwood. We do not know precisely what they used against Ilaria, but I am sure it was more than mere corvette missiles. She carried more defensive missiles than all the corvettes in orbit around Mycenae Secundus Two, combined, carried offensive missiles. I cannot imagine their weapons could have prevailed against her without another, more powerful factor on their side.”

  “I… I must concede your point,” Agim said stiffly. “Thank you for taking the initiative to come here so swiftly to report to me. I do not need to tell you to keep absolutely quiet about this. Order the officers and spacers under your command to do likewise. Hawkwood must never know that their attempts at sabotage succeeded. Let them live in fear that we found out about them, and prevented them, and are now planning to strike them again.”