by Jay Allan
Brewer stared back, his face mostly a mask of emotionlessness, but Carmichael could see the agent was interested in what he had to say.
“Do you remember a certain captain named Lorillard.? He commanded a ship called Nightrunner. Would it intrigue you to know his handpicked successor, a woman I also believe is of interest to you, was now the captain of that vessel, since renamed Pegasus?”
“You are sure of this? You know where Andromeda Lafarge is…and you are certain the vessel Pegasus is Nightrunner?” Brewer let his guard down further, and Carmichael was sure he’d hooked his prey.
“I am sure.”
“It was this Pegasus that fought with your people in the spaceport?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where that ship is now? My sources inform me the vessel lifted off after creating a considerable ruckus, and then outran the system patrol to escape into the Badlands. Where was Andromeda Lafarge headed? Do you have any information on her whereabouts or intentions?”
Carmichael was silent for a moment, then he shook his head and said, “No, unfortunately I do not. I was able to trace some of her recent movements. Pegasus fled Dannith after my first…unpleasant…encounter with Captain Lafarge. The ship was gone for a short while, and then it returned unexpectedly, after bribing someone at landing control to hide her ship’s identity. I do not know where she was in the time between her initial departure and her return. If was not long enough for a trip to the Badlands or, indeed, any other interstellar voyage. Perhaps, she was simply hiding out somewhere in the system…or…”
“Samis.” Brewer’s tone was one of certainty. “She must have gone to Samis. There is no other place within five systems she could have replaced Nightrunner’s beacon and replaced the ship’s old identity with a new one…one that checks out in records systems. That means she has a relationship with someone there. Perhaps her ship needed more repairs, or…”
Carmichael stared at the tall man. “Or?” The gangster didn’t know much about Samis, nor the mysterious owners of the outer system facility. But there were rumors, dozens of rumors actually, many contradicting each other.
“Or…something else. It is possible there are more reasons Captain Lafarge would have gone to Samis than simply to hide or obtain repairs.”
Carmichael could see Brewer knew more than he did, or at least that the Union operative had some idea of what Andi Lafarge might have been up to on Samis…and he looked concerned about it.
More concerned than Carmichael had ever seen the normally self-assured spy.
“Very well, Carmichael,” Brewer finally said. “The information you provided might indeed be of some value. And it will serve your purposes, too. Andromeda Lafarge has been a thorn in our side for far too long, one we will now remove…and in doing so, solve one of your problems as well. This, I trust, will make us even on this particular transaction.”
Carmichael smiled. “Yes, Brewer, it will. I can rebuild my organization, negotiate truces with my rivals until I regain my strength…as long as I don’t have to worry about Andi Lafarge.” Carmichael hated himself for being scared of Andi. But that didn’t change the reality that he was afraid of the outlaw captain. Very afraid.
“You won’t have to worry about Captain Lafarge for long, Carmichael. She will have to return to Dannith at some point…and we will be waiting.” The spy was silent for a moment, his mind clearly somewhere beyond Dannith. “Unless we find her before she comes back.”
Chapter Fourteen
Sector Nine Stealth Ship Phantasia
Olystra System
Year 302 AC
“Contact number two has crashed into the sea, Commander. Their descent angle was critically steep. It is likely they were destroyed on impact.”
Boucher frowned. I wouldn’t assume that, Drusus, and you shouldn’t either. The vessel is almost certainly damaged, but we cannot be sure it is not salvageable without further inspection.” A pause. “Prep team three for immediate launch. They are to descend into the Aquellian sea and locate that ship…or its remains. They are to exercise extreme caution, and to approach only if the vessel is destroyed or critically damaged. If the ship appears to remain functional, they are to break off at once and report.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Load navigational data into the landing sled’s AI, including trajectory and speed of impact with the ocean surface…and bring us back to high orbit as soon as team three is away.” Phantasia was a large ship, barely streamlined enough for atmospheric operations. The vessel handled sluggishly in air, and Boucher wasn’t about to test it out in the even more difficult underwater environment.
Besides, there was still another contact in the system, one her attack ships were about to engage. And she’d lost radio contact with the bombers once Phantasia had entered the atmosphere. It was time to see what was going on up there.
She sat quietly as the final lander prepped for launch, and then she watched as the sled blasted its way out of the launch bay and into the rough air currents above Aquellus’s planetwide sea. She waited a few seconds after the lander had cleared Phantasia, and the she turned toward Drusus, about to repeat her order about returning to orbit. But the aid spoke first.
“Commencing ascent to orbit, Commander. Thrust in three, two, one…”
Boucher felt the force of the ship’s engines, and then the rocking as the vessel pushed its way up through the planet’s atmosphere. Phantasia shook hard, its partially streamlined hull vulnerable to the strong wind gusts buffeting it, even as the vessel rose above the zone of the heaviest air pressure.
The ship continued, the image on the screen moving from light blue to a darker shade, and finally to black as the border of space loomed ahead.
“Continue out of orbit, Drusus. Clear the planet and locate the attack ships. I want an immediate status update.”
“Yes, Commander.” A moment passed, and then Boucher felt the dampeners kick in, replacing the feeling of 3g acceleration with the sensation of Montmirail-normal 1.07g.
A few seconds later: “We’ve got the bombers, Commander. They’re moving in on the contact now.”
Boucher could already see the image on the display, the two attack ships approaching the enemy contact. She stared at the readings for a few seconds, and her eyes locked on the data stream scrolling down the side.
Something isn’t right…
The scanners had pegged the contact as a ship, one of a mass comparable to a typical Badlands prospecting vessel, not unlike the one she’d chased down to the Aquellian sea. But the data flow was wobbling, and the AI’s assignment of certainty had dropped from eighty-nine percent to sixty-one.
And it was still falling.
Her eyes darted down to her own screen, her hands moving over the controls. Then she saw it, the problem the AI was reviewing. It was minute, the kind of thing she’d never have noticed herself, nor even detected with her own senses. But the AI had confirmed and reconfirmed the inconsistency. The ship, what she thought was a ship, had entered an area on the extreme fringes of the system’s asteroid belt. And it wasn’t exerting the expected gravity on the surrounding interplanetary particulate that it should have been. The differences were minute, the gravitational force exerted by something the size of a ship almost undetectable.
But almost undetectable wasn’t undetectable. And the effect, the infinitesimal pull on the dust clouds and small bits of rock, was far less than it should have been. By a factor of a hundred or more.
“Call off the attack ships…now!” But even as the words came out of her mouth, she could see it was too late. The contact dropped its cloak an instant later, revealing it to be a much smaller ship.
No…not a ship…
The contact’s thrusters fired up, bringing it around, directly toward her approaching bombers. The g force readings were high, impossibly so for an occupied vessel, and they confirmed what she’d feared. That was no ship. The 80g or more of acceleration her scanners were reading proved that.
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A robot craft? A probe?
Her heart sank as realization set in.
“I said get those ships out of there!” The anger in her voice was directed at Drusus, but it was her frustration infuriating her, not her aide. Drusus had already sent her orders, but the bombers were eight light seconds away. No known force in the universe could speed the transmission of her command.
And eight seconds might prove to be too long.
She knew what was going to happen, even as she watched in growing horror. Fifteen seconds later, she watched the bombers suddenly push their engines to full power, struggling to come about, to escape the thing. They had received her command, and she knew she was watching the events of eight seconds earlier.
The bombers struggled to pull away from the contact—and she was sure by then it was a weapon of some kind—bearing down on them with rapidly increasing velocity.
She felt the urge to shout out another command, but the pointlessness of it held her back. She’d already ordered the ships to break off…and they were already doing so. Direction wasn’t the problem.
Time was. And she had no commands that would alter that unstoppable force.
She watched the weapon—and the data streaming finally allowed the AI to offer a likely identification, some kind of torpedo, a big one—her eyes glued to the screen as it closed rapidly with her fleeing attack craft. The last few seconds dragged out, each one seeming like minutes to her, even hours.
Then she saw a flash on the screen, almost certainly the weapon detonating. She could tell immediately, the explosion had been a massive one, far more powerful than she’d expected. Whatever payload that warhead had carried, it was massive. Then she saw the AI’s preliminary calculation.
One point six gigatons.
That’s not possible…
As she looked, she could see immediately that one of her ships was gone. Just gone.
The other was moving along, clearly damaged, its data feeds wild and irregular. She turned toward Drusus, about to order Phantasia to close, to move to retrieve the crippled bomber, but then she hesitated. There was nothing else on the scanner, but that didn’t calm her concern. There were a hundred ways to hide something in a solar system, and a weapon that powerful was a deadly threat not just to small attack craft, but to Phantasia itself.
She remained still, silent, even as the urge to move toward the stricken ship beat at her defenses. But then, the bomber spared her the torment. It didn’t vanish as the other one had, consumed in thermonuclear fury, but its vector stabilized, its engines clearly dead, its power levels down to dead zero.
Its life support complete offline.
Boucher knew the two crew onboard were dead, or that they were dying just then and would be gone long before Phantasia could reach them. She was a Sector Nine section chief, immersed in the Union philosophy of the relentless pursuit of power. She didn’t mourn for the four crew lost. They were expendable enough. But the loss of combat power, of her entire mobile attack capability, that concerned her.
And it upped the stakes.
It wasn’t just the bombers. It was a starkly cold realization.
That torpedo had been solidly military grade, a weapon far more powerful than anything she possessed, if somewhat difficult to employ without surprise.
It was more than just the hardware, though. It was a question she found deeply troubling.
What the hell is some Badlands prospector doing with state of the art military ordnance?
* * *
“I think we’ve found something, sir.” Antoinette Bissel turned from the scanner board and looked at Caron. “It’s faint, and…different…from anything I’ve seen before, but it’s definitely some kind of energy reading.”
Caron leaned forward, more an expression of the tension he felt than anything else. He looked at the small screen in front of him, now displaying a wave pattern. It was an energy reading, he was almost sure of that, but Bissel was correct. It didn’t match any known patterns. He didn’t have to figure it out, he just had to decide if it marked the location of the imperial facility supposedly located nearby.
“AI confirms that it’s not natural, and that means…”
“Yes.” He interrupted Bissel. He’d seen the AI report just before she’d spoken, and a twinge of fear had accompanied his realization. He’d found what he was looking for, almost certainly…and that meant it was time to push forward into the remnant of an almost forgotten time. And a place where several previous expeditions had disappeared. “Increase active scanner pulses. We’ve got a basic location, so let’s see if we can narrow that down some. There’s got to be some kind of base or facility down here. Let’s find it.” And whatever it is, if we’re picking up an energy wave, it’s still operational, at least partially.
The ghostly feeling of long-dead imperial sites was difficult enough to endure. Caron had been at a few surface digs, walked along the ruins of long-dead cities. But two kilometers under the sea, and a base still showing some kind of power generation…it was all he could do to hold back the shakes threatening to take him.
He looked at the scanner screen, even as the first data came in from the pulses his small craft was sending out. There was nothing further…yet. Only sharp rock formations, towering undersea mountains that formed small shelves of flat terrain almost two kilometers below the surface. The more or less flat sections of rock clinging to the mountains were surrounded by massive chasms sinking into the murky blackness to almost unimaginable depths. He’d ordered a series of scans when the ship had first descended, but the deepest undersea valleys defied the range of his equipment. More than fifty kilometers was all he’d been able to ascertain, at least in the deepest spots, and still without a discernible bottom.
“Bring us toward that energy wave, Antoinette. Stabilize our depth at two kilometers, and increase active scanners gradually.” Caron didn’t really imagine a full-scale imperial security system was actually still operational, but he wasn’t going to be careless. Three missions had been lost, and though none of those vessels had possessed the resources Phantasia and its crew did, nor the fully combat ready Foudre Rouge the current operation possessed, Caron wasn’t about to lose his caution.
“Yes, sir…moving toward the readings now, speed twenty meters per second.”
Caron nodded. The ship was moving forward, even as the water currents pushed it around, requiring constant adjustments. The engines were on minimal power, but even so, the heat from the engine was leaving a plume of steam rising up before the colder water above began to condense the vapor back into liquid. The whole thing was making movement difficult, and Bissel was busily adjusting the course every few seconds.
Caron looked at the screen, his eyes focused on the energy readings. For the first moment, they looked unchanged, but then he could see the power level rising as the sled moved forward. They were getting closer, and with each hundred or two hundred meters, the energy wave grew in power. It was still less than he’d expect from a truly operational facility, but it was well beyond minimal levels…and certainly enough to support some degree of defensive array.
“Stay locked on the power readings…and get some active scanner pulses bouncing off those rock formations. The facility’s got to be there somewhere.”
“Yes, sir.” A few seconds later: “Scanners show solid rock ahead, all results…no, wait. We’ve got something. Eight degrees off our current heading, depth sixty meters above.”
“Bring us in directly at those readings.” Caron stared at his own screen, confirming what Bissel had just told him. Then, he flipped the comm channel to the rear hold. “Lieutenant, get your people ready. I want your suits checked and rechecked, and all weapons prepped for action.”
“Yes, sir!” The officer snapped out his response. Caron cut the line before even acknowledging. Like so many Sector Nine agents, and even spacers in the fleet, he found the Foudre Rouge unnerving. The clone soldiers fought well, there was no denying that, and they followed
orders to the letter. But they still made him uncomfortable.
“We’re closing on the nearest detectable cavity inside the rock, sir. It looks big.”
“Maneuver us as close as possible, and then bring the ship down. The Foudre Rouge will deploy out the rear hatch.”
“Yes, sir.”
Caron sat quietly as Bissel lowered the thrust levels further, and activated the forward positioning jets to bring the ship almost to a halt. The small craft crept forward, moving at less than one meter per second, and with a flip of a switch, Bissel turned on the forward lights.
Caron stared out the windows, his eyes staring directly at the deep gray of the rock wall just ahead. It looked very much like a mountain, though it was buried deep under the sea. There were sharp drop-offs all around, descending into the terrifying blackness. Caron had never been particularly nervous around bodies of water, but the almost unimaginable depths of the Aquellian ocean was starting to get to him. He looked at his screen again, transfixed by the data feed from the bottom of the ship. The lights were powerful, but they didn’t extend very far into the murky darkness two kilometers below the surface. Caron found himself wondering how far down it went, how many kilometers—dozens of kilometers—of dark water lay under the landing ship before the true sea bottom.
The answer was irrelevant, of course. The sled could handle the pressure at the current depth, perhaps even another half kilometer down. But not long beyond that, its hull would collapse, and its occupants would be crushed in an instant. Caron had served in space enough times to understand deadly environments, but somehow, he found the almost bottomless water more terrifying than any dangers he could remember.
“Bring us down on that ledge, Antoinette…and feed the scanner readings to the Foudre Rouge.” He figured the best way to find a way in was on foot, the squad of soldiers in the back of the craft debarking, and searching the rock shelf just ahead.