by Marko Kloos
“They’re determined to keep up the theater, it seems.”
“They probably figure they’ll take their chance with the courts and hope their rigged autolog gets them off. Or they have a mysterious data bank malfunction right as we board. I’ve seen that one tried more than once,” Dunstan said.
“They are reversing thrusters and slowing down as ordered,” Robson reported.
“Drop the tight-beam.”
“Tight-beam connection terminated, sir.”
“Bring the drive on line and let’s go for an intercept,” Dunstan said. “One-quarter g, no more. They’re looking hard for us right now. I don’t want them to see a thing. Once we’re close enough for network access, it won’t matter what switches they flick over there.”
“Aye, sir. Bringing the drive on line. Setting thrust for one-quarter g, steady as she goes.”
“We’ll have to flip and counterburn in twenty minutes if we don’t want to overshoot them,” Lieutenant Hunter said.
“How close for the network takeover to work, Lieutenant Robson?”
“Depends on their equipment, sir. If they still have the factory systems integration, we shouldn’t have to be much closer than ten or twenty thousand.”
“Start the hack as soon as you think we’re close enough. We’ll cut the burn halfway but don’t turn the ship just then. Once we are inside their systems, we can turn around and counterburn. At that point it won’t matter if they see our exhaust on IR.”
“That will be plenty of time, sir. I’ll be in long before we have to flip.”
“Very well,” Dunstan said. “Weapons, go to standby on the missile launcher. Make sure you have an updated firing solution if things go to shit and we have to throw punches. Could be they decide to let us get close and then stitch us up.”
“I’ve had a passive solution running on that ship since we spotted it,” Lieutenant Armer said. “Going to standby on the missile launcher, aye.”
“Sir, once I am in their AI core, they won’t even be able to flush their toilets unless we allow it,” Lieutenant Robson said. Hunter grinned and shook her head.
Morning Star seemed to be who she claimed to be through her transponder. As Hecate decreased the distance on her intercept trajectory over the next twenty minutes, the optical sensors on the warship’s bow brought the other ship into ever-sharper detail on the viewscreen Robson had overlaid on the tactical plot. If this was a clandestine Odin’s Ravens unit, it didn’t strike Dunstan as a particularly suitable platform for the job. It was a sleek and elegant hull, but it was built for sightseeing, not piracy. Many of the decks had large wraparound Alon windows, to allow passengers to see planets and moons with their own eyes instead of through a viewscreen connected to an optical feed. Alon windows were highly resilient and impact resistant, but they were still transparent slabs mounted onto big holes in the hull. Any opening in a spaceship’s hull was a weak spot and a potential failure point in a fight.
Maybe we’re mistaken and you really are only out here to have your rich guests view the stars, Dunstan thought. I guess we will see in a few minutes.
On the tactical plot, the positions of the three ships were now the corners of a roughly equilateral triangle. Zephyr was floating in space at just a few dozen meters per second. Morning Star was drifting toward Zephyr at the same slow rate.
“Did they really come in dumb like this?” Dunstan said, more to himself than the rest of the operations crew.
“What was that, sir?” Hunter asked.
He gestured at the plot.
“This feels a little off, Lieutenant.”
“How do you mean?”
“The Zephyr crew gave us the coordinates for the nuke handoff a few weeks ago, right? We showed up and the other ship ran. We gave chase and ended up running into a gun cruiser. They’d planned for the chance that they’d get crossed. Now they know that crew over there has crossed them once already. And now they just show up with another ship and no backup.”
“You think there’s a trap waiting for us out there.”
“I think the odds are better than even, Lieutenant.”
“With respect, sir, this is not some antique prewar frigate. They saw you coming, and they had time to run. That ship right there doesn’t even have the faintest idea where we are right now. We’re a hole in space,” Hunter said.
Dunstan looked at Morning Star’s icon creeping across the plot and bit his lower lip in thought.
“I know you are right,” he said. “But let’s not get overconfident. The last time I let that happen, I ended up with a wrecked frigate.”
“Crossing inside of a thousand kilometers now,” Armer announced.
Dunstan stared at the plot, trying to divine the immediate future from the limited information on the display. The passive sensors were telling him that the coast was clear, that the only ships out here other than Hecate were Zephyr and the Oceanian pleasure cruiser, but he knew the limits of passive sensors all too well. As long as they didn’t use active radiation, Hecate was invisible, but the difference in their own awareness was like the difference between walking into a brightly lit room while fully awake and stumbling into a dark basement while wearing sunshades.
I’m not going to let myself fall to the bottom of that well without knowing what’s really waiting down there, he thought.
“Take us out of EMCON and get us into that ship’s AI,” he said. “And send a message to Zephyr to turn off their emergency beacon. It’s too much background noise right now.”
“Aye, sir,” Robson said.
“Stand by on active sensors. On my mark, give me a 180-degree active sweep.”
“Ready for active sensor sweep.”
“Three. Two. One. Mark.”
Hecate’s powerful active sensor array swept the space in front of the ship in a wide cone. Dunstan looked at the tactical screen to follow the progress of the scan.
“Getting a blip of something at 290 by positive 10—never mind, it’s gone now,” Robson said.
“Define ‘blip,’” Dunstan said. An electric sort of trickle was working its way up his spine to the base of his skull. “And be quick about it.”
“Like a sensor echo. It was there for half a second and then it went away.”
“Isolate that location and do an active search at full sensor power.”
“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Robson said without taking her eyes off her control screen.
“I’ve seen that sort of echo before,” Dunstan said. “Back at the internment yard, three months ago. Then again above Rhodia, right before the nuke dropped. Active search now, Lieutenant.”
Robson tapped a field on her screen. At the same moment, an alarm trilled on the tactical screen, and two red icons appeared as if she had just summoned them with her control input.
“Bandit, bandit,” Lieutenant Hunter called out. “Missile launch, 290 by positive 10, distance 441 kilometers.”
“New contact,” Robson shouted a moment later. “Active return—290 by positive 10, distance 480. Designate Sultan-1. Burning hard and away.”
Another icon materialized on the display behind the missiles, rushing in the opposite direction. Dunstan had seen this precise pattern before when the attack on Rhodia had commenced three weeks ago. When he opened his mouth to shout a command, the anger he felt squeezed his throat and forced his voice into a growl.
“Hammer that piece of shit on active. It’s a stealth hull. Don’t let him get away. Bring up the drive and lay in an intercept course.”
“Point defenses are online,” Armer said.
“Those aren’t meant for us,” Hunter said. “They’re headed for Zephyr and Morning Star. Twenty-five seconds to impact.”
“Tight-beam to Zephyr,” Dunstan ordered.
“Go ahead on tight-beam, sir.”
“Zephyr, you have ship-to-ship ordnance coming your way. Get the hells out of there right now. Twenty seconds.”
“We see it,” Captain Decker’s voice replied. Sh
e sounded remarkably calm for someone who had a few hundred pounds of high explosives or maybe even a tactical nuke headed for her unarmored ship at one hundred gravities. “Point defense is active. Going evasive.”
On the tactical screen, Zephyr rapidly increased the gap between herself and Morning Star. She was burning her main drive at full throttle now, leaping from a virtual standstill to a twenty-g sprint in just a few seconds. It was an astonishing rate of acceleration, one that he’d never seen another ship match, civilian or military. He knew the crew were trying to create extra milliseconds for their Point Defense System, the only right move they could have made in this situation.
“Fifteen seconds,” Robson called out.
“I have a firing solution on the bogey,” Armer announced. “They’re moving off at seventeen g. We need to move if we want to catch them, sir.”
“Knock me those missiles out of space, Lieutenant Robson.”
“Brute-forcing the guidance systems,” Robson said. “AI core at thirty percent. I’ve got control of one.” Her fingers were a blur on her control screen. “Overriding and detonating.”
One of the missile icons disappeared from the tactical display. The second one rushed toward the two civilian ships.
“Squash one,” Robson said. “Bandit-1 is history. I can’t get a solid lock on Bandit-2. Seven seconds. That one is headed for Zephyr, sir.”
“At least they have a PDS. I hope it’s a good one.”
Sorry we couldn’t do more, Captain, he thought as he watched the missile icon rush toward the icon for Zephyr. The fast little courier was running the sprint of her life, not to evade the missile but to give her PDS’s AI the needed time to calculate a precise intercept. The red missile icon raced toward the blue ship icon, closing the distance relentlessly. When the red icon was almost on top of the blue one, it blinked once and disappeared.
“They got it,” Robson said in disbelief. “Their PDS shot it down, two seconds out.”
Dunstan watched Zephyr’s icon, expecting it to blink and leave the plot forever as well, but the little courier kept up its trajectory, still accelerating at an unheard-of twenty and a half gravities. As he watched, the pilot came off the throttle, and the acceleration value next to the icon fell: eighteen, sixteen, ten, then five.
“Tight-beam for Zephyr,” Dunstan said.
“Go ahead on tight-beam.”
“Zephyr, Hecate. What is your status?”
“We got our tail singed a little, I think,” Captain Decker’s voice replied. “But the PDS worked as advertised.”
“I’d say it did,” Dunstan said.
“I’m rather glad. I’d hate to have to haggle over a refund.” Despite the joke, Dunstan heard the stress in Decker’s voice, and he doubted that she still felt as calm as she had sounded earlier.
“Sultan-1 is hotfooting it out of here at seventeen g,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “They’ll be out of engagement range in twenty seconds.”
“Standing by on missiles,” Lieutenant Armer said.
Dunstan shook his head. “Weapons hold. We need evidence, not glowing debris. Come to new heading for intercept and open her up all the way, helm. All ahead flank.”
The ship vibrated as the main drive lit off at full throttle. Up ahead beyond the top bulkhead, Dunstan knew that the gravmag system was pouring megawatts of current into the palladium rotors to counteract the gravitational effects of the acceleration from the fusion rocket. Even with the gravmag system at full spin, it still felt like someone had come into the operations compartment and sat down on his chest.
“Passing through eight g,” Hunter said, her voice strained. “Ten. Twelve.”
“They’re doing seventeen, sir,” Armer said from his couch. “We can’t catch them in a stern chase.”
“They have to keep their throttle open if they want to get away,” Dunstan replied. “We follow them for as long as we can keep them in sight. Give the AI as much data as it can get. Maybe we’ll get a good prediction of where they’re going.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Thirteen g,” Hunter said. “Fourteen. Come on, you little beast. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
On the tactical screen, an alarm beeped, and one of the ship icons started flashing orange.
“Morning Star has activated her emergency beacon,” Lieutenant Robson said.
“Get them on comms.”
“Morning Star, Hades. What is your status?”
“Hades, Morning Star. Whatever exploded off our stern sent a bunch of high-speed debris through our stern section. We have lost propulsion and our reactor power. We need immediate assistance.”
Dunstan allowed himself a grim smile.
“We’re a little occupied, Morning Star. The missile we intercepted off your stern was sent to wipe out evidence. You’re damn lucky you only lost your drive. Take that into consideration when the next Alliance ship comes alongside to take you into custody in a few hours.”
He terminated the comms link without waiting for a reply.
“Can I get a visual on Morning Star? Something tells me we can’t take them at their word.”
Lieutenant Robson opened a screen and flicked it over to the main tactical display. They were still close enough to the civilian liner to get a high-definition visual of the hull. They were trailing frozen air and venting gas into space from multiple spots on their stern section, and hundreds of shrapnel holes of various sizes were evident in the outer skin.
“Contact the two Alliance ships we spotted four hours away. Cerberus and Pelican. Tell them to make haste to Morning Star’s location and secure the ship and crew.”
“Aye, sir,” Robson said.
“Fifteen and a half.” Hunter was grasping the armrests of her gravity couch so hard that Dunstan could see the whites of her knuckles. “We’re as wide open as we’re going to get. She’s got maybe another quarter g in her. We’re not going to catch them.”
The unknown stealth ship opened the distance between them with frustrating ease. It wasn’t a huge head start, and the acceleration advantage wasn’t decisive yet, but it would get the other ship far enough away in a few hours to let her cut her main drive and drift back into stealth to lose her pursuer. Dunstan was absolutely certain by now that this was the stealth unit that had smuggled a nuke through Rhodia’s planetary defense belt and then launched it at the planet to devastating effect. It was the same ship that had started the scuttling of the Gretian internment fleet a few months ago, the event that had signaled the rise of this insurgence on land and in space. This was their best chance at catching this ship, and he was going to stay on their tail as long as he could.
“Keep her open, Number One. If they get away, we may never see them again.”
On the tactical plot, the icon for Zephyr had changed course, and the civilian courier was accelerating again. They were a few ten thousand kilometers off the starboard stern of Hecate, but they were catching up rapidly.
My kingdom for a ship with a thrust-to-weight ratio like that, Dunstan thought. The acceleration number next to Zephyr’s icon was once again climbing rapidly into numbers that were unobtainable for any fleet unit ever built. They blew through fifteen g, then accelerated past sixteen and seventeen.
“Tight-beam from Zephyr, sir,” Lieutenant Robson said.
Dunstan tapped his comms screen.
“Hecate, they’re pulling away from you,” Captain Decker sent. “We can keep pace with them. Let us take the lead and attach ourselves to their ass. We can relay their position back to you, and you can come and collect them once they’re out of fuel or they’re tired of running. They won’t be able to shake us. We have at least two g on them.”
“You seem to have a real obsession with volunteering your skin today, Captain,” Dunstan replied.
“I can hold a mean grudge,” Decker said. “It’s a character flaw. Look, we’re going to stay on them anyway, and you won’t be able to do a thing about it unless you’re willing to launch a missile at us. S
o I suggest you take advantage of our obsession while the opportunity is developing in front of you.”
“I want that ship,” Dunstan replied. “Whatever it is. The people who are flying it killed almost forty thousand Rhodians. If you can help me get them, I’ll be happy to give you my absolution. In fact, I’ll make sure you’ll never have to pay docking fees at Rhodia One again.”
Decker laughed.
“I’ll hold you to that. You people overcharge shamelessly, you know.”
“That’s beyond my pay grade,” Dunstan said. Decker’s voice sounded like she was now squeezing out sentences in between fast, shallow breaths. He glanced at her ship’s icon on the tactical screen and saw that Zephyr was now a fraction of a percentage from twenty-one g of acceleration.
“We will keep our connection open,” he continued. “May the gods be with you, Captain.”
“I don’t think the gods are interested in our little disagreements. But we will both get our payback today, Commander. Zephyr out.”
The Oceanian courier was now well past Hecate on her intercept course, gaining thousands of kilometers on the Rhodian warship every second. With a fast scout like this one, there was very little chance for the stealth attacker to slip back into anonymity. If they couldn’t hide, they’d have to surrender or turn and fight at some point.
“That’s one lucky ship today,” Dunstan said to the command crew. “Let’s hope their luck holds just a little while longer.”
“Call me a pessimist,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “But I really hope those people are just running because they’re scared. And not because they’re the ones playing bait right now.”
CHAPTER 20
SOLVEIG
“Look, I warned you ahead of time that this would be a step down from your usual lunch fare,” Berg said.
Solveig looked up from the offerings at the lunch counter and realized he was taking her smile as incredulity. She laughed and shook her head.
“I told you I’d be fine with this. I was just looking at the curried sausage bowls. Gods, I haven’t had one of those since my first year at university.”
Berg still looked at her as if he was trying to figure out whether she was joking, so she took one of the dishes from the counter and put it on her tray to demonstrate her sincerity. Now it was his turn to laugh and shake his head.
