Citadel

by Marko Kloos

  “Hecate, we are relaying sensor data,” Aden sent. “We have four contacts at ninety-eight thousand, dead ahead.”

  “Zephyr, acknowledged,” the response came. “You may want to tweak your trajectory soon.”

  “Turn us around, Maya,” Decker ordered. “Full counterburn. Open her up as wide as she’ll go. Slow us down.”

  “We won’t be able to stop in time,” Maya said even as she wrapped her hands around the control sticks to follow the command. “We’re going way too fast. If they have guns or missiles, we’ll end up in someone’s firing arc no matter which way we burn right now.”

  “Just do it,” Decker said. “Aden, open the comms link to Hecate.”

  “It’s open,” Aden replied. “Go ahead on voice.”

  “Hecate, we are doing a full counterburn. I suggest you do the same while we give you a nice big thermal bloom to hide behind.”

  “You know you won’t get out of range even at full burn,” Hecate’s commander said.

  “No,” Decker said. “But neither will they. You should be able to get into range before they even realize you’re coming in behind us.”

  There was a moment of silence in the link.

  “You’re aware that trap may close on you, too, Captain.”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” Decker replied. “If they swallow the bait, just make sure they end up squirming on the hook. We’ll try to stay out of the way and put our point defense to work. Now I suggest you turn and burn, Commander. Time’s running short.”

  “Affirmative.”

  On Zephyr’s navigation screen, Hecate duplicated their maneuver a few ten thousand kilometers away until both ships had reversed their acceleration vectors. With the sensors now pointed away from the ships they had detected, Zephyr’s AI updated the plot by placing small spheres of uncertainty around the icons, representing the area of their possible presence based on the data from last time they had been actively spotted. Aden watched as the spheres around the icons expanded slowly with every passing minute.

  “When we are five thousand klicks out, you turn the ship around,” Decker told Maya. “We’ll go right through them and hope they hit each other if they start shooting. Tess, you turn on the PDS and the active sensors that very second.”

  “You got it,” Tess said. “Let’s hope it’s just a quartet of shit boxes like that Iron Pig.”

  “So do I.” Decker checked the tightness of her harness straps. “Either way, I hope that Rhody ship is as good as they seem to think it is.”

  “We will find out soon,” Maya said. “Nine minutes until we cross inside of five thousand K.”

  The feeling of weight was back on Aden’s chest now, and he grasped the ends of his gravity chair’s armrests and closed his eyes. It was a reckless thing for them to do, hurtling themselves into the midst of a group of unknown ships just to help the Rhodians, but it felt good and right to be acting instead of reacting, to claim the initiative even if it seemed rash. Whatever happened next, they would have the other side on the defensive for the first time, even if only for a few minutes.

  “We are really burning through reactor pellets,” Tess said. “Fuel is down to forty-five percent. I’ve never seen the gauge drop that quickly. The way we’re flogging her, we’re going to need to put in for another overhaul when we’re done with this business.”

  “We can buy more fuel,” Decker replied. “If we come out of this with an overhaul as our biggest worry, I’m going to mark it as good fortune and pay the tab gladly.”

  To Aden, the next few minutes ticked by much too slowly and way too quickly at the same time somehow. It felt like an exquisite form of torture to have time to reflect on the danger they were hurtling toward without a way to avoid it. But every minute that passed before they reached the danger zone was one where he was still alive, still drawing breath. It was something that he had stopped taking for granted after the events of the last few months, where he’d had more close scrapes than in his seventeen years of military service.

  He looked over at Tess, who glanced in his direction and flashed a smile before returning her attention to her screens.

  If we don’t come out of this, there are worse ways to die, he thought.

  “Thirty seconds,” Maya announced, her voice slightly vibrating from the resonance of the fusion rocket blasting at maximum power.

  “Active sensors and PDS are on standby,” Tess said. “Ready to reroute the power output.”

  “We will be on our own for a little while before the Rhodies get here. Let’s try to still be around when they do,” Decker said. “Maya, Tess, it’s all on you now. Dodge what you can and blast what we can’t.”

  Aden looked at the navigation screen that was floating between them in the center of the maneuvering deck, expanded to fill the available space. The little Zephyr-shaped symbol in the center of the plot was almost touching the outer bubble of the computer’s probability zone for the new contacts. There was another bubble that represented the possible locations of the ship they had been chasing, but with no contact updates from the active sensors in ten minutes, the prediction zone was so large as to be useless from a tactical standpoint. If they had resumed their burn, they would now be well out of range for active detection.

  “Ten seconds,” Maya counted down. “Stand by on PDS for turn on my mark. Three . . . two . . . one. Mark.”

  The center display rotated through a full 180-degree arc in just a second or two as Maya brought the nose of Zephyr around to point at the threat. At the same time, she cut the main drive, and the acceleration numbers next to Zephyr’s icon plummeted.

  “Bow sensors are online. Active sweep commencing,” Tess called out.

  In front of Zephyr, the uncertainty bubbles around the unknown ship icons disappeared as the bow sensors lashed the space ahead with active radiation. The four icons blinked and shifted position into a diamond-shaped formation, just a few thousand kilometers in front and slightly below Zephyr’s trajectory.

  “Keep the active sweep up. I want to clutter their sensors as long as we can so they won’t see what’s behind us,” Decker ordered.

  “Well, hello there,” Tess said to the screen, where one of the icons now had a familiar name popping up next to it. “If it isn’t our old friend, the Iron Pig.”

  “What the fuck is that thing,” Decker said. Aden didn’t have to guess what she meant. Next to Iron Pig, a much larger contact was at the tip of the formation, at least three times the mass and length of the cobbled-together smuggling freighter they had encountered weeks earlier. On Tess’s consoles, several warning sounds went off.

  “Whatever it is, it’s sweeping us on active,” she said.

  “Bend our trajectory as far away from that as you can, Maya,” Decker said. “I don’t have a good feeling about that ship.”

  “I got visual. Putting it on the main display.” Tess flicked a screen over to the navigational plot, where it expanded and arranged itself on the periphery of the screen. It showed a chisel-shaped prow aimed at them, and a long and lethal-looking hull behind that very clearly belonged to a capital warship.

  “Rail-gun mounts,” Tess said. “Fuck.”

  “A lot of rail-gun mounts,” Decker confirmed. Aden’s stomach did a little lurch at the sight of the batteries on the unknown ship’s hull.

  “Database says it’s a fucking Gretian. GNS Sleipnir. Seventeen-thousand-ton heavy gun cruiser. How the hells can that be? Their navy’s gone. Captured or destroyed.”

  “Someone managed to tuck that one away for a rainy day, I guess,” Decker replied. “Keep us out of the firing arcs of those things, Maya.”

  “Three thousand klicks and closing. We’re going to cross their engagement zone no matter what,” Maya said. She sounded tense, an emotional note Aden wasn’t used to hearing in her voice.

  The other two icons on the plot now had ID tags next to them, but with the presence of the huge gun cruiser in the picture, the information was almost irrelevant to Aden. They were b
oth smaller commercial designs, a freighter and a fuel hauler, and even if the pirates had refitted them with weapons, they didn’t represent a tenth the threat of the Gretian ship, purpose-built to engage and destroy other vessels.

  “You want me to burn or what?” Maya asked.

  Decker shook her head without taking her eyes off the plot. “It’s not going to make a difference. Better to keep them lit up on active. Let the sensors see what’s coming.”

  They hurtled along their trajectory, closing the distance with every passing moment. Aden saw that their course would take them just fifty kilometers past the gun cruiser. He wasn’t trained in space warfare, but one thing he had learned was that fifty klicks on the ground went a much longer way than the same distance in space, where missiles and rail-gun slugs could bridge that range in just a few seconds.

  “They’re accelerating and spreading out their formation,” Maya said. “Maybe they think we’re about to nuke them.”

  “They’re clearing the fields of fire for that cruiser,” Decker replied.

  “Shit,” Maya muttered.

  Over by Tess’s position, another warning signal beeped on one of her screens.

  “They’ve locked onto us with their fire-control sensors,” Tess said. “If you have any tricks up your sleeve, use them now, people. Shit is about to fly our way.”

  Aden turned on the comms transmitter and selected the universal emergency frequency, then turned the transmitting power to maximum.

  “Hold your fire, you fucking idiots,” he said in Gretian. “You’re locking up a friendly.”

  Tess and Decker looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged in response.

  “What did you tell them?” Tess wanted to know.

  “That we’re one of theirs,” Aden said. “Couldn’t think of anything else.”

  There was no reply on the emergency channel, and the alarm for the target lock kept chirping on the screen in front of Tess. A second, much louder alert sounded over by the main screen, where several small objects launched from the cruiser and rushed to intercept them on their trajectory.

  “Incoming fire,” Maya shouted. “Rail-gun slugs. Sixteen seconds to impact. Going evasive.”

  “Guess they didn’t buy it,” Tess said. “Setting PDS to automatic mode.”

  Maya took the ship through a series of rotations and hard burns to alter their trajectory. The rail-gun projectiles streaked ahead to the point in space where they would have been without the corrective burns. Aden let out a breath when the salvo passed a few kilometers in front of them.

  “Don’t start celebrating,” Maya said. “Those are just ranging shots. The next round will be a bit harder to dodge.”

  True to Maya’s prediction, another round of slugs left the cruiser, rippling out from the ship’s icon one by one in short intervals. She turned the ship again, counterburned, then flipped the bow into a different direction and burned the main drive.

  “Staggered ranging shots now,” she commented in a matter-of-fact voice. “Their targeting AI is trying to get dialed in.”

  The center display spun madly as Maya continued her series of random turns and burns. When the salvo passed, it was still a clear miss, but Aden saw that some of the slugs from this group had come much closer to Zephyr than the previous one.

  “We’re inside of a thousand kilometers. This is going to get bumpy, I’m afraid,” Maya said.

  “I can’t believe they’re wasting that much energy on us,” Aden said. “We must have pissed them off somehow.”

  “We’re broadcasting their position and ours to anyone within a million klicks,” Tess replied. “They want to shut us up as quickly as they can. Where are those fucking Rhodians?”

  Decker checked the main display. “No telling. We lost them when we came out of the burn and turned around. They can see what’s going on unless they’ve gone blind and deaf. We’re not exactly subtle out here. And neither is that Gretian.”

  “I don’t think he cares much about subtle right now,” Aden said as he watched another staggered swarm of rail-gun slugs separating from the warship and heading their way at tens of kilometers per second. Just a moment later, another salvo followed, then another.

  “Three broadsides coming in,” Tess yelled up at Maya.

  “I see them,” the reply came.

  Aden grabbed his armrests again as Maya spun the ship through another round of evasive maneuvers. She was working with her whole body now, both hands on their respective control sticks, feet on the pedals for the cold thruster controls. She weaved Zephyr through the barrage like a dancer sidestepping punches from a boxer. This time, Aden heard the high-energy discharge from the Point Defense System reverberating through the hull. One of the rail-gun slugs had crossed into Zephyr’s inner defensive zone despite Maya’s maneuvering ballet, and the closest PDS emitter fired a megawatt of tightly focused energy at it and blasted it into tiny fragments.

  “Hard kill on one,” Tess said. “Keep doing what you’re doing. Everything’s still in the green.”

  Another salvo headed their way from the Gretian cruiser. Decker groaned at the sight of the staggered phalanx of sensor returns on the main screen.

  “They’ve thrown fifty or sixty slugs at us already. They really want to see us dead.”

  “No missiles yet,” Aden said.

  “They won’t waste one, now that they know we have a PDS,” Tess replied. “Too easy to shoot down outside of a hundred klicks. But you can bet your ass they’ll keep those tungsten slugs coming.”

  “This one’s going to be close,” Maya warned from her station above.

  The grid on the navigation screen spun around again, first one way and then another, until Aden had thoroughly lost his reference points. Zephyr twisted and squirmed her way through the oncoming storm of projectiles once more. The PDS emitter fired again, then a second time. There was a sharp, ugly noise from belowdecks that sounded like a hammer coming down on a tablet full of silverware. All the lights on the maneuvering deck went out for a heartbeat, then returned. The navigation screen flickered and disappeared. At the same time, Aden felt the strangest and most unpleasant sensation, like his body was being pulled into two different directions by a pair of giant hands. He felt a brief and intense wave of nausea that made him retch. Then the feeling dissipated, and he looked around, dazed.

  “What was that?”

  “Reactor just went out,” Tess said. She let out a wordless shout of frustration. “So did the drive.”

  The navigation screen projection returned, showing a grid that was slowly spinning around them. All the ship icons on the plot had little uncertainty bubbles around them again, signifying they were out of date and getting more so with every passing second.

  “Sensors are down. PDS is down. Main drive is down. We’re running on the backup power bank,” Tess said. Her control screen had returned, and she used it to check the status of the stricken ship.

  “The reactor is out,” she said. “Integrity breach, magnetic confinement shutdown. We got nicked by a slug, or maybe some shrapnel from the PDS intercept.”

  “Can you bring us back online?” Decker asked.

  Tess shook her head even as she unbuckled her harness to get out of her gravity couch.

  “I’ll go below and see. But if the confinement field collapsed, there’s a hull breach and a hole in the torus jacket. That’s nothing we’ll be able to fix outside of a good repair yard.”

  “Give me something up here,” Maya said. “We’re coasting ballistic right now.”

  “You only have the cold-gas thrusters and whatever runs off the power cells,” Tess replied. “Sorry.”

  Tess floated out of her couch and pushed off toward the ladderwell at the back of the maneuvering deck. She grabbed one of the ladder rungs and pulled herself against the ladder.

  “If anyone wants to take to the rescue pod, I won’t think less of you,” Decker said. “Any of you. We’re done for the day, I think.”

  “Not in this
lifetime,” Tess replied with conviction. “I’m fixing this ship or I am going to turn to stardust with her.”

  She looked at Aden, and he shook his head.

  “Not going to claim I’m not scared shitless,” he said. “But I don’t want to be the only one in that pod.”

  Maya let out a long breath up on her piloting platform. “I didn’t just inherit one-fifth of this ship to let these people have her.”

  “So stop talking nonsense, boss,” Tess said in a gentle tone. “I’m going to go do my job now. If we get blown up before I come back up, it was the best fucking time of my life to fly with you all.”

  She pushed off her ladder rung and disappeared belowdecks before anyone could reply.

  “Well,” Decker said. “That settles that, I suppose. We’re all a bunch of idiots.”

  “We already had that settled before the shooting started,” Maya replied. “Can I get the passive array up, please? Not that I can dodge a lot with the thrusters. But if there’s something coming I could be avoiding, I’d like to be able to see it.”

  Decker turned on her control screen and started tapping input fields. A few moments later, the navigation screen updated with a blink and shrunk the bubbles around the other ship icons to half their size. Aden realized that without the active array, there was no way to tell if the cruiser was launching another salvo at them. Zephyr was coasting ballistic now, an easy target for even the most rudimentary gunnery AI, defenseless without her PDS emitters.

  “Attention, all ships,” a voice sounded over the emergency channel. It was that of a woman, and despite the telltale echo of a multilingual translation, Aden could tell that her original voice was Rhodian with a Gretian accent.

  “This is the Alliance warship Hecate. Cease all active sensor and weapon use immediately, or you will be disabled or destroyed at our discretion. You have twenty seconds to comply. There will be no further warnings.”

  Above their heads, Maya let out a celebratory little whoop sound, a sentiment that Aden found he shared wholeheartedly right now.

  On the main navigation screen, the bubble around Sleipnir disappeared as the Gretian warship started an active sensor search of the area. One by one, the other pirate ships came out of their uncertainty bubbles as they lit their drives to maneuver, until the screen showed all four ships without any margin of doubt as far as the passive sensors could tell. Despite her active broadcast, there was no sign of Hecate on the plot, no indication that Zephyr’s sensor AI had picked up the faintest trace of the Rhodian ship’s presence.