by David Dixon
“I know,” he called back. “Range is ‘I broke the array.’ I got it. You’re gonna have to keep me informed, ‘cause I can’t see them from the cockpit and without radar, I got no way of telling where they are.”
“Should we tell Carla?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure she already knows,” he said grimly.
I watched in horror as four more fighters emerged from the hulking vessel.
“We’re coming for you, cunt,” a different harsh voice said over the encrypted channel. “He dumps that cargo, or you got about five minutes ‘till we open your merchie friend up and see what he’s made of, and you along with him.”
“Boss, they just launched four more fighters. He’s not kidding. Fuck this job,” I said. “It’s time to run.”
“Where to?” the boss asked weakly. “Even maxed out, we can’t run from those fighters—and sure as hell not three hours back to the jump point. Our only chance is to stick with Carla long enough for her to buy us some time. I’m just hoping she sticks with us.”
Fuck.
He was right, but it was not a reassuring thought.
“Three minutes,” the harsh voice warned again.
“Like I said,” Carla shot back, apparently unconcerned, “I want to talk to Anders. I got a right.”
“Bitch, you got no rights except what we give you.”
“Fine,” Carla answered over the encrypted channel. “But when you tell Anders you jumped Maria Vega escorting a load for Mr. Tanaka, you let me know how that works out for you.”
The response was laughter. “You got a sense of humor. Maria Vega is dead. Roscoe stamped her in Pinewood two weeks ago.”
“Really? That what Roscoe said? ‘Cause here I am. Come to think of it, when’s the last time you heard from Roscoe? About a week ago, maybe?” Carla taunted.
“What are you talkin’ about?” There was a note of doubt in the man’s voice.
“Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a picture of Roscoe—what’s left of him. You see it gets to Anders, and tell him next time he should send a pro to do it instead of his son.”
The computer beeped, but messages don’t display at my station. I didn’t need to see it, because the boss’s reaction told me all I needed to know. “Holy fuck, they must have hit him with a laz rifle.”
A new voice came across the encrypted channel, enraged and bitter. “You fucking cunt, Vega! I will cut you to pieces and drink your fucking blood! I’m coming for you!”
“I’d hoped you were out there, Anders,” Carla said in a tone of voice that told me she was grinning from ear to ear. “I’m coming for you too.”
In the distance, a bright yellow glow silhouetted the incoming fighters—afterburners.
“Boss, they didn’t like that very much. They’re coming in quick.”
“Black Sun, you got multiple contacts off the port side,” Carla told us, this time on the regular broadcast channel. “They are hostile. I’m engaging.”
“Yeah, no shit, Carla,” the boss radioed back. “We aren’t as dumb as you take us for. We’ve been listening to your little chit chat. You got some explaining to do.”
“Maybe later,” Carla said as her Razor rolled underneath us and her afterburners kicked on, headed straight at the Peterbilt and its complement of fighters.
“Snake, we gotta close with her,” the boss said as the ship heeled around to face the incoming fighters. “They probably won’t be able to get a good lock on the Razor, but they aren’t gonna have that problem with us. Only way to survive is to stick within gun range.”
I grunted. He was right, but the problem with sticking inside gun range was we were a pretty big target compared to Carla, and they had a whole hell of a lot more guns than we did.
The ship shuddered as the boss engaged our afterburners to close the distance between us and the fighters.
“Shit! Snake, they got a lock!”
“I’m on it,” I shouted, scanning through targeting frequencies with my left hand while keeping the guns facing the nearest fighter with my right. When I saw the tell-tale waveform that marked a missile’s targeting radar on my left VDU, I highlighted it and pressed the worn “active countermeasure” button.
The boss rolled the ship left and I heard the muffled whump of our chaff dispenser kicking out thousands of radar-attracting pieces of foil. Space lit up somewhere to our right.
“I think we just dodged one,” I told the boss as I continued to scan, even though years of practice kept diverting my attention to the blank radar screen.
“Yeah,” he said, “but there’ll be more for sure—fuck!” The ship jerked right and then dove.
I couldn’t see whatever had spooked the boss, but that was fine by me. I had plenty to worry about as it was-a yellow Banshee fighter coming at us from forward and low, filling space with laser fire. I couldn’t get a range to him, but I figured if he was shooting at me, I was close enough to shoot back.
Keeping up the scan-identify-jam pattern to keep the missiles at bay with my left hand, I trained my guns on the small fighter and sent a burst right back at the Banshee. His shields flared as my rounds hit, but he pulled up and out of my sight.
“Got one diving on you,” Carla radioed. In the background, there was the unmistakable sound of a missile lock warning.
The boss rolled the ship on its x axis, bringing a diving Puma 120 into my cone of fire. His shots took our bottom shields down to what my readout said was twenty-five percent, but the extended burst I put into his forward shields collapsed them completely. As the Puma afterburned away from us, I saw debris trailing behind him.
“You’ll think twice about that shit again, won’t you motherfucker?” I muttered.
“Got one on you, Carla, six o’clock high,” the boss radioed.
“Roger,” Carla replied. “Watch out for that—” Whatever she said next was drowned out by the loud screech of an alarm going off in her cockpit.
“I got it,” the boss said and pulled the ship into a climb. “Port side, low. He’s—”
“Watch out!” Carla interrupted. “Imrec away—don’t—shit.”
I cut the comms off in the turret.
“Boss, I cut comms,” I shouted. “Anything important, let me know.”
“Yep. You got a visual on anything?”
“Two too far out to hit, but for all I know somebody’s creeping up our ass from six high. I can’t see and without radar it’s pretty tough down here, you know?” I asked.
“You should try flying without it, it’s almost impossible to—” A vibrant, glowing blue line appeared below the ship, close enough to bathe the turret in pale blue light for half an instant. “Fuck! Railguns, Snake.”
“Yeah,” I said, wiping a sweaty palm on my pant leg. “I saw it. That shit about picked me off the bottom of this rustbucket.”
He didn’t reply. Instead, he jerked the ship hard to the left as another blue line appeared in space beneath us. A silver FRL99 streaked between us and the light, tailed by Carla’s Razor, guns blazing. As I slewed the turret further left to clear a firing Delta off Carla’s tail, I caught the explosion that marked the end of the FRL out of the corner of my eye.
“She got one, Boss!” I called.
The ship shook from repeated hits and I heard a series of warning alarms go off overhead. The boss dove hard, which gave me a beautiful topshot on the Puma I’d damaged earlier. My first burst shredded his shields and the second punched through his armor. The fighter exploded in a ball of fire and sent flaming wreckage in every direction.
“And scratch one for me!” I shouted.
I didn’t have time to pat myself on the back, though. I worked through two more jamming cycles while I found another target, a different Delta than the one I’d seen trailing Carla before, this one painted yellow and black and sporting three lasers forward. I fired at him, but he cut his throttles and passed underneath the ship to a position somewhere behind us. Th
e ship shook violently, and the boss swore.
We climbed again and the massive Peterbilt loomed into view, with Carla’s black Razor in silhouette as she fired a pair of missiles at a distant target. Even though I doubted I’d scratch their shields, I fired a long burst at the Peterbilt, receiving a barrage of orange laser fire in return.
“Snake, whatever you just did, how ‘bout cutting it out, ‘kay?” the boss called as he maneuvered us through the dancing beams.
Our Black Sun 490 dove and the boss rolled us right, avoiding yet another shot from the Peterbilt’s railguns but bringing us perilously close to a purple blur that blazed past me so fast I couldn’t even tell what kind of fighter it was. As a flash of yellow on my left caught my eye and as I spun the turret to try to get a shot on the Delta, our impact warning alarm blared. Carla’s Razor appeared out of the dark, so close I could actually see warning lights going off in her cockpit. I saw her helmeted head snap up at me and then she was gone, slipping underneath us and forward.
My heart hammered in my chest. “Jesus fuck, she almost hit us!” I shouted.
Apparently, Carla wasn’t thrilled either, as I heard the boss shouting back.
“Fuck no, I can’t see you. Snake told you our targeting system was down.”
I couldn’t hear her response, but I did hear his.
“Of course, he was serious!”
The ship shuddered and there was an instant of quiet as the onboard lights and circulation flickered off and back on again. I risked a nervous look upward just to make sure nothing overhead was on fire.
“Yo, Snake,” my boss called, voice high-pitched and nervous. “Port side shield generator’s overloaded, and if it goes, we’re gonna lose life support too. I’m gonna have to shut it down and bleed the capacitor before I restart it. Don’t let us get shot from port, all right?”
“Shit. No promises.”
“I figured,” he muttered.
He turned to put our starboard side toward the Peterbilt, hoping, I guess, that all the enemy fighters would politely stay between it and us while we completed the restart. The problem with that approach became very obvious, very quickly—the purple blur I had seen earlier was, in fact, an Indus F. He paralleled our course for a second, pulled into a high loop and came at us, twin lasers on the rampage.
From the port side.
The ship shuddered from repeated hits and a loud scree from above told me we’d lost pressure in the cargo hold. The ship’s computer intoned “fire, fire, fire,” followed by the whoosh of an automatic fire bottle. I fired back, throwing off the Indus’s aim, but the pilot pulled up and disappeared.
“Roll to starboard!” I shouted.
“But the Peterbilt!” the boss yelled, even as he rolled hard to starboard like I’d asked. In addition, the boss threw on the thrust reversers, decelerating us so quickly I almost slammed into my gun status VDU.
The sudden move brought the Indus back into my field of fire. My shots lanced into him, disappearing into showers of sparks as they impacted his shields. The Indus broke off his attack run and hit his afterburners and he passed forward of our Black Sun 490.
And right into Carla’s gunfire.
I had just enough time to see the pilot’s ejection seat blast clear of the wreckage before the boss put the ship into a sudden dive and rolled back to port. We passed through a burst of orange fire from the Peterbilt which took our shields down to virtually nothing before drawing the attention of the yellow and black Delta I’d been trying to hit earlier.
He strafed us topside, and the boss muttered something about our top-mounted sensor package. The boss hit the afterburner and rolled while I scanned, trying to find the Delta, but the pilot was no amateur. He matched us, corkscrew for turn, keeping just out of my sight and putting out some serious fire.
“Snake, give this guy a nosebleed, would you?”
“Working on it. But he’s just—damn it—he’s good.”
“He’s got a lock on us, Snake!” the boss shouted.
I scanned through the missile frequencies as fast as I could. From our ship, I saw a trail of flares punching out into the dark along with two new clouds of chaff. I heard a sigh of relief from the boss and guessed we’d beaten the missile lock.
The relief was short lived.
A railgun shot passed close behind and orange lasers reached out for us, scoring a few hits against our already weakened forward shields. One laser got through and melted a deep hole in the armor not a meter from the turret. I tried to keep calm by reminding myself the clear polymer that made up my turret was rated to take a direct hit from a J class laser—and tried to forget that a manufacturer will tell you anything you’ll believe as long it makes you buy whatever the hell it is they’re trying to sell you.
Behind us, the Delta started firing again, and again we went back into our spinning corkscrew dance. The boss shouted something over the radio to Carla, but couldn’t make it out over the sound of various alarms and my own heart pounding as I tried to draw a bead on the Delta.
Carla scissored across my vision, trailed by a Super Storm. I risked pulling off the Delta long enough to penetrate his shields and scorch his armor before I lost him.
Shit.
I slewed the turret in a vain attempt to follow the Delta and noted, much to my horror, that the Peterbilt was dead ahead and closing fast. Orange laser fire and blue railgun shots lit the space around us as the boss juked along every axis to throw off their gunners’ aim.
“What the fuck are you doing, Bossman?” I asked.
“Making a run for the nebula while we still can.”
“The nebula? We go in there without a targeting radar and we’ll be lucky we don’t find an asteroid the hard way.” I didn’t like this plan one bit and liked it even less when the next thought struck me: “Shit, man, without the radar will we even be able to find our way back out again?”
“We’ve still got navigation, Snake, but, yeah, a radar would be a big help. And while we might die in there, we’re definitely gonna bite it if we stay out here!”
More shots buffeted the ship, and loud bang from engine three told me we had compressor damage.
By now, the Peterbilt was close enough for me to line up good shots, so I figured I might as well go down swinging. I poured fire into him, but his shields had no trouble stopping my lasers.
There was an incredulous “What?” from the boss, followed by a long string of curses.
“What is it?” I asked, bracing for the worst.
“Carla’s got a torpedo—military issue. A real carrier killer. She’s lining up for a shot on the Peterbilt.”
“So, what the hell’s she been waiting for, then?”
“She said something about electronic counter-countermeasures and phased shielding frequencies. How the fuck should I know, Snake? All I know is she said she’s taking the shot.”
By now the massive gray Peterbilt filled the view in front of us, obscured only by the mass of orange laser fire. An impact warning sounded and the boss pulled up sharply. The Delta who’d been trailing us the entire time chose to dive under his mothership instead, and I shifted my futile fire off the Peterbilt and onto the yellow and black fighter. His shields arced and glowed.
Just before he disappeared underneath the Peterbilt, I saw a jet of flame spurt from his left wing.
The massive ship flashed under us, topside turrets reaching at us the whole time and scoring several more hits. Sparks showered from the computer cabinet above the turret, sending stinging hot bits into the turret with me, but I couldn’t afford to care. I had my hands full trying to break a dozen missile locks from the hulking pirate carrier. A solid burst from one of the turrets hit us in the rear quarter. Our internal lights winked out again, replaced by red emergency lighting. The radiation alarm buzzed.
Space went pitch black as we punched into the inky darkness of the Tellison Nebula.
We flew on for another tense moment but th
e Delta who had been pursuing us didn’t seem to want to follow us into the nebula. The boss killed the number three engine and silenced the ship’s various alarms. The ship slowed and he rolled it over nose to tail so we’d be facing out the exact way we’d come in. We slowed to a halt and I heard furious typing from the cockpit as the boss toggled through various menus, assessing the damage.
I looked down at the puddle of sweat in the turret and pried my white knuckles off the gun controls. I kept cycling through frequencies with my left, just in case, even though a missile lock in the nebula was a remote possibility.
I flipped the comms at my station back on just in time to hear Carla taunting us.
“Where’d you go, amigos? You’re gonna miss the show.” Over her transmission I heard her ship’s computer intone “Firing solution complete. Hit probability ninety-nine point nine percent. Fire at will.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want to miss that,” the boss replied, voice dripping sarcasm. “We’ll sit tight, thanks. I dunno if you remember how you sold me on this job, but you hired a cargo ship, not a fucking missile frigate. Between the Delta and that damn pirate carrier Peterbilt and the damage we’ve already taken, we’re not coming out till he’s dead or you are.”
“The Delta is dead,” Carla said. “Snake got him. Pretty good shooting.”
“Don’t even open your damn mouth, Snake,” the boss warned. “I’m not in the mood.”
I shrugged.
“Whatcha thinking?” the boss asked me.
“I think we’d better be damn careful. She’s obviously a smooth operator and a dangerous pilot, but I’m not sure I buy she’s got a torp. I think she’s just trying to get us to come back out for bait so she can either get away or hit him with missiles.”
“And now the Peterbilt is dead too, and Anders along with it,” Carla radioed triumphantly.
The boss snorted. “Listen to her all happy, Snake. You know what? Even if she did kill it, what’s to say she doesn’t just wipe us out and not pay us?” he mused.
“Yeah, because if—”
Ahead, the blackness evaporated, replaced by a wall of pure blinding white light, stripping the black dust of the nebula away in an eyeblink. I closed my eyes to shield my seared retinas and my hands came up to shield my face involuntarily.
