“Roger. What’s the bogy up to?”
“He’s beginning to make headway,” Markland said. “He’ll have an angle on us in ten minutes, max.”
“That’s not much time.”
“More than enough,” the first mate corrected. “We can evade projectiles with slight changes in vector and delta-v at this distance.”
“How long before he’s in effective range?”
“Two and a half to three hours, if he maintains status quo. We’re depending on you to see that he doesn’t.”
“I’m ready,” Terson said. “Tell Massoud to open the bay.”
Cormack MacLeod picked up enough of the Embustero’s internal communication to know that his host was in dire straits. Numerous systems were damaged; the ship’s hull had been breached, judging by the amount of debris drifting nearby. The transmissions were terse and professional, evidence that the crew understood exactly how serious the situation was.
He didn’t dwell on the twists of fate that led him to attach his little ship to the hazardous blind spot at the base of the Embustero’s main thrust tubes instead of the keel, which he preferred for its excellent vantage. The freighter’s defensive maneuver would have placed him directly in the line of fire but Lady Luck had seen fit to let him live a while longer—but not necessarily too much longer. He’d found her a capricious companion over the years and given up trying to discern the logic in her favor and disdain.
Cormack weighed the option of staying with the wounded freighter against an attempt to transfer to the attacker. The large ship provided excellent concealment despite its damage. Abandoning his position too hastily would get him stranded or blown to bits. Remaining where he was too long might have the same result, but Shadrack had demonstrated an uncanny ability to squeeze through tight spots in the past and Cormack decided to stay put.
The launch bay doors on the Embustero’s stern just above him opened and the lander began to back out. The pilot couldn’t help but spot him if he didn’t move. Cormack released his hold on the freighter and eased into the blind spot beneath the lander’s keel. He wasn’t inclined to give up his shelter yet and he knew that he could dash across to the Embustero again when the lander turned away, but doing so would certainly trap him when it returned.
Cormack chose the lesser of two evils and brought his craft into contact with the lander, jarring against it in his haste. If nothing else a first-hand tour of the damage would give him a better idea of the freighter’s survivability.
“Damn! Sorry about the bump,” Terson apologized when he felt the contact.
“Didn’t feel a thing,” Markland said dismissively. “Listen: we don’t have circuits to the cambots, yet. I need you to patch your video to us and fly past the keel on your way out.”
“Wilco,” Terson replied. He cleared the Embustero’s thrust tubes and dipped the lander’s nose, rotating ninety degrees to starboard as he passed beneath the ship to bring the damage within range of his camera gimbal.
The Embustero’s belly sported a huge, ragged hole almost ten meters across. Rapid decompression had sucked out tons of debris, most of it the barely recognizable remains of shipping containers and their contents. Huge sheets of ballistic fabric and bright white shards of polyethylene trailed off into space. A steady stream of vapor issued from the main breach and two-dozen or so smaller punctures around it.
“Looks like you’re still losing atmosphere,” Terson told him.
“Negative,” Markland replied. “The vacuum seals engaged when the hold lost pressure. What you see is petroleum sublimating.”
Indeed, the largest portion of the debris was crude oil that had boiled down to hard globs of tar. All in all, the visible damage was negligible. The Embustero’s spaceframe was flight worthy, and they’d have known instantly if the breach extended to the operational decks.
“Not as bad as we feared,” Markland commented as Terson finished his run along the keel. “Come around to heading eighty-seven point three by five and maintain a steady acceleration of six gravities for ninety minutes. This course will set you up for the intercept and carry you out of his field of fire before you get close enough to worry about it.”
“Got it,” Terson replied easily. Despite popular perception, most spacers rarely experienced the sensation of free-fall or high G-forces. Gravity plating and inertial compensation fields made space travel as physically comfortable as living on the surface of a planet. The power plant required to operate such technology, however, made installing it on vessels as small as the lander cost prohibitive or downright impossible.
Terson’s atmospheric flight experience and recent training on Nivia, notwithstanding his upbringing on a high-G world, had prepared him for the physical stress more effectively than the average spacer’s experience.
He opened up the lander’s reactor, slowly increasing the thrust at one-half-gravity per minute. The effects on his body were markedly different than if he were pulling the same G’s in an aircraft, which could only occur during a tight turn. The forces in that instance were directed toward the feet, forcing blood to pool in the lower extremities, resulting in blackouts and unconsciousness despite G-suits. In space, G-forces were most often the result of linear thrust and blood pooled in the posterior of the brain and organs evenly rather than rushing to one spot.
The effects were less catastrophic in the short term and rarely resulted in loss of consciousness but no less uncomfortable as the heart struggled to pump sluggish blood and lungs strained to inflate.
Terson’s suit detected his increasing weight and injected a higher proportion of oxygen into his breathing mix to take the strain off his lungs. He bore down with his diaphragm every few seconds to increase his blood pressure and flexed his major muscles to help move blood through his capillaries. The mild but constant strain would prove physically exhausting over time but he had no choice but to endure it or surrender to a vessel that would just as soon see them all dead.
Neuchterlien set a scorched, distorted metallic lozenge on Shadrack’s desk with a solid thunk. “Massoud found this on his way back from the lander bay,” the engineer said. “One hundred forty grams of nickel-iron. It struck at an angle or spent itself against a structural member and ricocheted around between the hulls. Took out at least a dozen electrical, signal and hydraulic conduits all over the ship.”
“How long to repair the damage?” Shadrack asked.
“Everything, or just enough to give us a fighting chance?”
“Main drive.”
“Sixteen hours, minimum. We’re talking bundles of wire and fiber optic strands the size of my arm, Shad. We have to physically locate every damaged circuit in the drive system, then hope we’ve got enough material on hand to make repairs.”
“We don’t have sixteen hours,” Shadrack said pointedly. “Pelletier might buy us three or four, but once that stringer realizes the lander is no threat he’ll ignore it and come after us again.”
“I’m not making excuses, Shad,” the engineer said quietly. “I’m just telling you the way it is. I’ve got every qualified crewman available working on this. We’ll cannibalize every system and bypass every interlock we have to, but it takes time.”
“Sorry, Nuke,” Shadrack sighed, “I know you’re doing everything you can. I just don’t want to believe that we’ve lived through everything that’s happened to die here.”
“We’re not dead yet,” Neuchterlien said, picking up the projectile again, “and believe it or not this is actually good news, under the circumstances.”
“I fail to see how,” Shadrack muttered.
“This is low-tech,” the engineer informed him. “Asteroidal ore processed no more than necessary to shape it—the equivalent of a musket ball. Inaccurate. Military rounds are more dense; made from depleted uranium with ceramic tabs to engage the rails. The ceramic doesn’t ablate nearly as much as the round accelerates—flies true. They’d’ve chewed a hole a meter in diameter clean through us.”
“
Furthermore,” Neuchterlein continued when Shadrack opened his mouth to point out that the distinction was irrelevant, “these things hit us at around fifty meters a second. A milspec system can put them out at ten times that—kinetic energy alone might have torn us in half. Odds are seven out of ten that that bastard is nothing but a cobbled-up piece of junk that barely holds together.”
“So we’ve got a fighting chance after all,” Shadrack surmised, measuring determined agreement in the grim set of the other man’s jaw. “Very well, then, Mr. Neuchterlein, go get some fight back in us.”
“Aye, sar!”
Shadrack didn’t bother to remind him, before he marched away, that they’d thought the same of the pitiful-looking ramjet craft off Sodih that had nearly killed them all.
“I’m picking up railgun emissions,” Markland announced. “Duration five seconds...radar’s got his projectiles—reverse thrust at two gravities for five seconds.”
The cockpit ports polarized and Terson’s body strained against his straps as a plume of plasma erupted from bow thrusters, altering the lander’s velocity. “Done.”
“They’ll miss you by over a kilometer,” Markland said.
The stringer launched a series of volleys over the next hour. Terson avoided each burst with the evasive solutions Markland relayed from the Embustero’s navcomp. He dared to hope they’d run out of ammunition when the pirate let its guns fall silent, but suspected that they’d chosen to wait for the lander to fall deeper into their field of fire.
One of the stars in the lander’s forward port grew steadily brighter. A dark mote became visible in the center of the brightness as the moment of truth drew near. “You guys having any luck with the reactors?” Terson asked hopefully.
“None worth mentioning,” Markland replied. “My clock makes the transition in five minutes.”
“I concur,” Terson replied.
“Make it fast,” Markland suggested. “He’ll fire on you while you reorient. You don’t have as much margin for error.”
“Rolling now.” Terson cut the engine and clutched the lander’s gyros. The craft rotated end-over-end and the bright illumination of the stringer’s drive vanished to Terson’s rear quarter.
“He’s firing!” Markland exclaimed. “Three gravity thrust, ten seconds!” Terson lit his drive again; an immense weight pressed him deep into the seat’s padding and he struggled to fill his lungs. “Five gravity brake, four seconds!” The force slapped his body hard against the straps. The lander’s short-range radar painted a target no more than fifty meters away as the tight string of projectiles flashed past. “You okay?”
“Still here,” Terson panted. “What’s my intercept?”
“Calculating,” Markland told him. “You’re just on the edge of his field of fire. He’ll have to reorient on you in the next fifteen minutes to take another shot. You’ll see his drive cut off if he takes the bait.” Terson patched the stern camera feed to his auxiliary monitor. The stringer’s drive was brighter than ever. “I’m going to load the intercept directly into your navigation system,” Markland said. “You’ll be too close for me to relay timely solutions in another couple of minutes. The best I can do is warn you when he fires.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Terson said lightly. “You probably won’t hear from me if I need to ram him.”
“Joey,” Markland asked in the awkward silence that followed, “are you really willing to go that far?”
“I wouldn’t be out here if I wasn’t,” Terson replied.
“I can’t say this changes my opinion of you entirely,” the first mate said, “but there are people aboard who wouldn’t do this for their own children, much less the rest of us.”
That seemed the closest the mate was willing to come to an apology. “You know, Markland, as assholes go you aren’t too bad.”
“Likewise.”
The lander was now running a parallel course with the stringer, using its thrust to slow the vessels’ rate of closure. Terson planned to swing hard toward the pirate just before the nearest point of approach, passing behind it within five hundred kilometers. The enemy crew could not afford to ignore such aggressive provocation, but Terson’s survival, if the stringer reacted as hoped, was uncertain.
He began to sweat as the maneuvering clock neared zero. His suit felt intolerably confining and he resisted the urge to remove his helmet. Terson rested his hands and feet on the controls lightly. The computer would initiate the maneuver more efficiently than he could, but accepting the role of passenger aboard a guided missile lay at odds with his instincts. The electronics lacked intuition; Terson was prepared to override the autopilot to act on his.
The lander swung hard to starboard and the stringer’s drive cut out. “He’s firing!” Markland cried. Terson cut his throttle for a full five seconds then rammed it back up to ten gravities. The lander cut across the stringer’s wake at a velocity the pirate could not follow without incapacitating its crew.
The lander continued to lose ground to its opponent, though at a lower rate. The numbers counting up his distance-to-target were almost legible. They slowed to a crawl, paused, and reversed direction. Terson backed off to one-half gravity. The point of the game now was to keep the stringer’s attention, hound it for as long as possible.
White-hot fire blossomed in the darkness ahead and Terson throttled up to follow. Markland transmitted the lander another intercept solution as Terson closed on his adversary. The bright plume of the stringer’s main drive vanished as it maneuvered to get its sights on him but Markland’s warning sent Terson skipping aside. He emerged ahead of the stringer near his original position.
The pirate couldn’t maintain thrust toward the Embustero and attack the lander simultaneously. It had lost the element of surprise, and as formidable a weapon as the railgun was, its limitations leveled the field. The pirate made several attempts to turn on him, but Terson maintained enough distance to dodge the barrage and the pirate vessel couldn’t reorient rapidly enough to lay down the multiple vectors of fire necessary to trap the lander.
The enemy captain chose to live with the stalemate and continued after the Embustero. Terson made another run at the pirate, but the vessel didn’t react. “Looks like the game is up,” Terson told Markland. “He knows I haven’t got guns.”
“You bought us a little time, anyway,” Markland replied.
“But not enough.”
“No, not enough.”
“I’ll try to take him in the engine or the bridge,” Terson said.
“Gun,” Markland corrected. “Take it out and he’ll high-tail away.”
Terson’s instinct to disable the vessel or kill the crew lost out to Markland’s wisdom: the stringer was already on its way to the Embustero’s position; taking out the engine wouldn’t change that and they could still fire on the freighter out of spite. The same went for the crew if he failed to kill them cleanly.
“Understood. See you in a few hours, one way or another.”
“Copy, Joey; good luck.”
Terson eased back on the throttle and let the stringer pull away, but not so quickly that the enemy would realize it was intentional. The lander’s hull began to flicker with a weak aurora when it encountered the outer edge of the pirate’s drive exhaust. Terson activated the forward port shutters and moved farther into the baffles, vanishing from the sensors of both the pirate and the Embustero.
Markland didn’t expect to see Pelletier again. He couldn’t ride the pirate’s baffles all the way in—the other ship’s exhaust would deliver him a fatal dose of radiation before he got close enough to worry about heat damage to the lander’s hull. He had to exit the baffles at a velocity high enough to cover the remaining distance before the pirate’s crew could react to his sudden appearance, but not so high that he over-shot his target and fell into the rail gun’s sights.
Disabling the weapon wouldn’t be difficult, if Pelletier managed to make it that far. A railgun was nothing more than a linear DC motor in p
rinciple, albeit on a massive scale. Instead of spinning an armature, current was fed to two parallel field-producing plates. Basic physics took over when an armature (the projectile) was introduced into the gap between the plates to complete the circuit. The Lorentz force then propelled the armature in the opposite direction from which the current was applied at massive velocity limited only by the drag of the rails and strength of the current.
The gun’s barrel lay along the pirate’s longitudinal axis, incorporated into the mesh of girders that formed the basic spaceframe. If a powerful physical blow sprang the rails’ casement out of alignment, damaged the armature feeding mechanism or the power supply, the weapon couldn’t fire.
Of course, Pelletier had no way to determine how hard to hit, or if he could survive a collision powerful enough to damage the device. The instructions and advice Markland had given the young man seemed inadequate in hindsight, but there was no way to cram a lifetime of experience into a few minutes.
The stringer’s drive plume grew perceptibly over the next fifteen minutes while Markland’s eyes flicked back and forth between the monitor and the countdown clock. A massive flare deformed the drive plume; the Embustero’s sensors detected another burst of electromagnetic emissions from the stringer at nearly the same moment.
Cheers erupted on the Embustero’s bridge, but Markland didn’t join in. Successful or not, the event marked the moment of Joseph Pelletier’s likely death. One by one the rest of the bridge crew realized the same thing and fell into embarrassed silence. Markland scanned his displays again, experiencing a spike of anxiety when the freighter’s radar did not lock on the projectiles their adversary fired just before the flare.
It took a moment before the cause of the failure sank in: the radar didn’t see any projectiles because there weren’t any. The first mate experienced a burst of elation—He did it! The son of a bitch did it! But as the flare subsided the stringer’s drive plume returned to normal. Radar detected something else: a sizeable target, moving erratically, emerged behind the stringer and a sobering explanation came to mind, another pearl of wisdom neglected in haste:
Embustero- Pale Boundaries Page 23