Assured (Envoys Book 2)

by Peter J Aldin

  “Can you communicate with the other pods?” Gregory asked.

  “Not both ways. They don’t have outgoing comms like a bridge pod does. Just transponders.”

  “Not both ways. So you can message them?”

  “I can send a voice message. It’ll play automatically upon reception.”

  “They all have steering?”

  “Rudimentary only, sir.”

  “Message the pods outside of the blast radius to aim as close to that old volcano as possible.”

  “Yes, sir. But not all of them are going to be able—”

  “Tell them anyway.”

  “Aye.”

  Once the message was sent, Gregory regained the man’s attention. “Does one of the safe pods contain personnel from the medbay?”

  “Medbay pod is away, sir. And outside blast radius.”

  “The medbay is a pod,” Lindberg told him.

  So Buoun was safe. Relatively safe. Soon they might all be together on the surface with enough shelter, food, water, and ammunition to hold off the enemy until …

  Until what?

  It would be a fortnight or more before the Navy suspected something was wrong. If they immediately launched a ship to Chaatu, they’d be another week away. At least. The Devilfly might offer support—except that Berderhan’s final transmission hadn’t been encouraging. Their short-term hope was the frigate, if it knew where to look—or the Lioness if its crew could miraculously break it out of the orbital.

  Slim hopes of an early rescue then.

  He took a glance at Pan unconscious beside him. The captain’s head lolled.

  God, I hope I’m making the right calls here, Pan. God, I hope you wake up soon.

  April 18th, 3014, Old Earth Calendar

  20

  Stines slipped Chipper’s spare recycler in a chest pouch for him, then tossed one up to Vazak. Before he could return around the ship’s nose to his earlier position, Chipper pulled him back.

  “You really wanna follow my lead?”

  Stines shrugged one shoulder. “I ain’t got any bright ideas.”

  The idea that had come to Chipper wasn’t a great one. It wasn’t even good. But it was something. “Lieutenant Catanno, you hearing me?”

  “Yes.” The pilot’s reply was cut through with static.

  “Where you at with repairs?”

  “I need a code-jockey in here to look at this mess. Man, I can’t even tell if it is Xenthracr interference that’s screwed everything up, or if it’s some kind of virus we already had. Maybe some fragment of the Domain Surface thing last week.”

  Chipper frowned. This new possibility could undermine the sketchy plan he’d come up with. “Why didn’t you say that before?”

  “Just thought of it.”

  Chipper put a finger to his helmet and mimed pulling a trigger. Stines actually chuckled. “Catanno, you’re a navy lieutenant. You fly ships for a living. You make important life or death decisions as part of that job. Right?”

  “What’s your point, assface?”

  “Make a decision now. Is it a virus shutting you out, or an interference signal?”

  Almost grudgingly, the pilot said, “I think it’s a signal.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s a signal, all right? It’s a jamming signal or a scrambler or something.”

  “All right, then. I’ll tell you guys my plan. None of us are gonna like it. Except maybe Vazak.”

  Stines said, “Gotta do something, right?”

  “Right. So, Catanno stays here to defend the ship—”

  “Wait,” the pilot started to object.

  Chipper didn’t let him. “And to get it online. Vazak and I will scout ahead, see if we can stumble across whatever’s scrambling our systems. See if we can find anything else that helps us.”

  “And me?” Stines asked.

  “You got two jobs, depending on how long Vazak and I take. The main job’s getting back to the skiff’s payload of cambots.”

  “Oh, terrific.”

  “Hey, you wanted me to lead, Stines.”

  “All right, all right. Get the cambots from the skiff. If the crabs left us any.”

  Chipper groaned. “That’s a good point. You did say they were interested in scrapping that thing.” So why hadn’t they tried the same thing here? Had their soldiers warned them off? Did they now recognize the intruders as dangerous aliens? He hadn’t seen any workers since the firefight, he realized. “Go check anyway. If you can get enough working, send one down every corridor exiting off that big chamber. You brought a comms-tab along?”

  Stines slapped a thigh pouch in answer.

  “Do you think you can route their feeds back to it?”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good. Also check out the condition of the skiff. As in, could it fly with its busted door as long as we have our suits on? Do its systems work okay? That kinda thing.”

  “Drive and thrusters were working when we got sucked in here. Dumb pilot cut the engines while the crabs were dragging the ship further. Worried about damage to this skiff. As if we’d cause damage to anything except the crabs.”

  “He was following protocols for a crash scenario,” Catanno objected. “He’s supposed to do that.”

  Stines wasn’t having it, talking over the top of him. “Then his protocols are stupid. I told him to push us up into the middle of the chamber. The empty space. Away from the crabs.”

  “And if this same interference had hit him then? What then, genius?”

  “Gentlemen,” Chipper said.

  “Well, if you’re worried about the interference, then why the hack are we thinking of flying the thing again?”

  The pilot’s voice rose in line with Stines’s. “That was your friend’s idea! I’m happy to wait right here for Assured!”

  “Gentlemen!” Chipper shouted it this time, shocked at the volume and force he had managed. Apparently, so were they, shutting up immediately. “If Assured was sending people in, they’d be here already. Either something’s happened out here, or they’re having trouble getting in. Maybe the orbital’s developed new defenses to keep them away. Maybe they can’t find us. We don’t know. We can’t know till we poke our heads outside and take a look. The skiff is the best way to poke our heads outside. Or do you want to blow a hole in the wall now and try’n spacewalk back to Assured? Or the Tluaan frigate?”

  A short silence followed, while he caught his breath and Stines looked at the ground and Vazak watched the corridor and the pilot did whatever the pilot was doing.

  Stines mumbled, “I’ll check the skiff’s operational.”

  “Good. When you’re back here, the second job is for you and Catanno to figure out how to get a warhead off one of the Lioness’s missiles. And how to trigger it remotely.”

  “What?” the pair exclaimed in unison.

  “If the skiff’s flyable, we might blow a hole in that big membrane or the floor and get out before the workers organize to fix it.”

  “Oh,” said Stines. “I was wondering how we were gonna get it outside.”

  There were no further arguments. It might mean they thought his plans were good. It might mean they thought he was out of his mind. Chipper himself had a foot in both camps.

  He caught Vazak’s eye and gestured for her to climb down. “You’re with me, Vazak.”

  “Shoot more?” she asked.

  “Probably, yes.”

  “Good.”

  No, not good. Not anything like good.

  “You know the weird thing here?” Stines said, as they waited for her.

  “There’s only one?” Catanno replied.

  “The Lioness comms don’t work. Our suits’ comms do.”

  “Hm,” Chipper said. “That is weird. But let’s focus on our jobs here.”

  Stines huffed, nodded, and headed off toward the cargo receiving chamber again.

  Assured hadn’t found a way in yet to help them. Also, the main ship’s comms signals were
n’t penetrating the orbital’s skin. If they were even sending any. What he wouldn’t give for a particle cannon to disintegrate the corridor floor right now. And for Ana and Westermann to come storming in.

  Ana, he thought as Vazak reached the floor. Hope you’re having a good birthday. Coz it sure hasn’t been a good day for us.

  From the pod’s helm, Yassim announced they would enter atmosphere in two minutes.

  “Any of you ever hit atmos without inertial dampeners before?” Westermann asked.

  A couple of people said no. A couple of people told her to shut up.

  “Holy crap!” Yassim gasped. “Contacts!”

  “What?” Gregory said.

  “We have contacts, sir. Multiple contacts in high orbit. I … I think …”

  “It’s the enemy fighters,” Toller cut in. “I count thirteen. They’ve come around the planet from sunwards. Scans just picked ’em up. Must be the ones the Devilfly was dealing with. Shit, they’re moving fast, sir.”

  What happened to Berderhan? he wondered. “What do we do?”

  As he got the last word out, he was momentarily slammed back into his chair.

  “I’ve just done it,” said Toller when the pressure lifted. “The last burn I can risk before we hit atmosphere. We’ll get there ahead of those things, unless they wanna follow us in. But …”

  “Finish your sentences,” Gregory snapped. “But what?”

  “The other pods, sir. They’ve fallen behind us. They’re not moving as fast as us.”

  “Well, warn them, message them!”

  “Won’t help, sir. This one’s better fitted for maneuvers than they are. They can steer a little, but not evade fighters.”

  “They can’t speed up?” he asked.

  “A little maybe, using maneuvering jets. Not enough.”

  “The medbay pod can,” Yassim put in.

  “Right. That’s right. It’s as good as this one. If whoever’s in it knows how to—”

  “Message them!” Gregory shouted. “Now!”

  “Aye, sir.” The man started recording a terse message.

  Meantime, Gregory asked Yassim, “Can you put video or data on the roof screens?”

  “Gimme a sec, sir.”

  “Sending message to medbay, sir,” said Toller.

  A bank of four ceiling screens blinked to life. “Best I can do, sir,” said Yassim.

  A graphic had been split across them, spread across them to provide a wider, clearer sitrep. It showed the relative positions of nine pods, including their own at the center.

  He winced. Their pod plus eight more. Earlier there’d been eleven. The debris from Assured’s blast wave had already destroyed three.

  And we all have to make it into atmosphere to have a hope of escaping those fighters.

  Gregory knew enough science to know there was never an exact border between an atmosphere and space. But the simulation had decided on a boundary in this case, showing it as a white curved line. In the image, the bridge pod headed directly for the apex of that curve, very close to it; the other pods had fanned out to the sides and behind.

  “Fighters firing,” said Yassim.

  “Will they get us?” asked Esana, the sensors op.

  “Negative, they’re too far, but they’re flinging ordinance ahead of the other pods on intercept vectors.”

  “Can you tell if they’ll be hit?” Gregory asked.

  “Impossible to tell, sir. I’m hoping, at that distance, their math is off.”

  Gregory felt that it wouldn’t be. He wondered how the Xenthracr pilots were calculating it without instruments on their fighters. Was somebody—or somebodies—on the orbital doing the math for them? And transmitting commands directly into the pilots’ brains, as Nkembe had suggested?

  “Entry interface in thirty seconds,” came a call from Toller.

  Gregory looked askance at Grace. She told him, “The point we start feeling atmosphere.”

  “You have been spending a lot of time with Piers,” he said, attempting black humor. It didn’t work. Grace turned away, face rigid.

  He returned his attention to the screens above them. One of the other pods was close to them, he realized, and accelerating. Probably Buoun’s. Then the marker for one of the other pods blinked out, the one closest the approaching fighter swarm. He was not the only one who saw it, nor to moan in dismay.

  The marker for the bridge pod touched the curved line. They were reaching the outer boundaries of Kh’het3’s atmosphere. The graphic fizzled away, leaving the screens blank and the fate of the other pods unknown.

  And their pod began to quiver and shake.

  “We can’t just give up,” Ana said. She checked the corridor again, but Fowler was nowhere to be seen. Raised voices came from the back of the yacht and she hoped Umbrano would continue keeping the colonel busy until she and Piers agreed on a plan.

  “Never said I was giving up,” the pilot replied. “But I’m seriously not going to be much use to you against those two.”

  “I swear on my grandmother, if you say ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter,’ I’ll kill you now.”

  Piers sagged in his chair. “I won’t say it. But …”

  “So far you’ve shot down both my ideas. If you’re half as good at shooting off a gun as your mouth, I’ll take it.”

  “I told you, Jogi—is that your name?”

  “Ana.”

  “Ana. I told you we can’t just go firing guns in here. Passenger craft like this don’t have the internal armor that a military ship has.”

  “You want me fightin’ those guys—both those guys—with knives? They’re bigger than me, got better reach. If I make one mistake, I’m dead. Then you’re dead. Maybe if you turned off the gravity, I’d have a chance against them, but even then it’d be a small one. Besides, there’s, like, two of them …”

  “I get it. Let’s think of something else, something that requires brain not brawn. Because we don’t have the latter.”

  “Hey, I got brawn, asshole.”

  “You just said—”

  “I just said they got better reach and body mass than me, that’s all.”

  “So, they have more brawn.”

  “Keep insulting me, ese, and—”

  “I’m not insulting you!” Piers hissed. “God! How are we going to take them down when we can’t even have a conversation?”

  She pressed her brow to a bulkhead and squeezed her frustration into her fists. “All right, all right. Gimme an idea, then.”

  “If you can seal your friends in one of the staterooms—cabins—we could maybe trigger the ship’s fire suppression. And keep it going. Suffocate them with CO2.”

  She kept her head against the wall, soothed by the cool surface. “That’s not bad. Don’t know how we’d get ’em both in one cabin, though.”

  “Hey, you didn’t like me shooting down your ideas.”

  “And you said let’s have a conversation. I’m having a conversation. The idea’s okay, but not perfect. What else you got?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” He buried his fingers in his hair, scratching. “Well. Something. Maybe.”

  “What something?”

  “There are three emergency e-suits onboard. One per cabin. One for you, me and the Tluaan guy.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “We get into those, then—wait, you’re a code-jockey, right?”

  “A good one.”

  “Excellent. I’ll set the ship to come to full-stop in an hour—I can do that from my cabin if that fat one’s not watching me. When it happens, Fowler will run up here to see what the problem is. Umbrano will follow him. That’s when you trigger what’s called a ‘full purge.’ Basically, open the side hatch.”

  “… What?”

  “If you’re good enough, you can convince the ship to do it.”

  “Oh, I’m good enough. But what if—?” She broke off when her peripheral vision caught movement at the other end of the corridor. Hidden by her body, her hand signaled Pi
ers to silence. He caught her meaning immediately and swung his chair around to face his panels.

  Ana withdrew from Fowler’s path as he reached the cockpit.

  “You better be done,” he told Piers.

  “Not that I want to be, but, yeah, I am.”

  “How long until the leappoint?”

  “A bit under nine hours.”

  “And to Hipparcos system?”

  “One hundred twenty-eight hours, twelve minutes, fifteen point five nine seconds.”

  “Good.”

  Piers rotated his chair to face the Xerxians. “Then what? We arrive near some Class B star that not even CUSET or the PRC cared about, thirty parsecs from the closest human settlement. We meet some of your government’s democratically elected pirates. Then you hand over Chlalloun and shoot me in the head? That it?”

  “You’ll be fine,” Fowler said and switched his focus to Ana. “Small change of plans. Take Mr. Mouth here to his cabin, then trade places with Umbrano. Take care of the scientist before Umby kills it.”

  “It”? Like a thing. Like a resource.

  “Yes, sir.” She motioned for Piers to precede her. He vacated his seat after a moment’s hesitation. Fowler dropped into it with a tired groan.

  Following close at the pilot’s heels, halfway down the corridor, she murmured, “We have nine hours, right? Keep thinking. I will too.”

  Over his shoulder, Piers replied, “There’s an e-suit in my cabin with a comm-panel in the sleeve. When I get a chance, I’ll message the suit in Gregory’s room.”

  “Copy that.”

  Umbrano waited in the corridor past the lounge. “I’ll take this baka. The alien’s in there.” He reached back and thumped a door.

  “You’re keeping him in Grace’s room?” Piers said with a meaningful look back at Ana. “She won’t like aliens sleeping in her bed.” Subtly, he tapped his arm where on a civilian e-suit comms-panel would be.

  Gotcha, she thought. Grace’s suit ain’t got text comms.

  Umbrano jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That your room down the end? The one with all the dirty holograms?” Piers nodded. “Think I got the better deal, Jogi.” Umbrano gave her a wink. He stomped after Piers, giving him a shove toward the end of the short passage.