Rosto, his finery ripped and torn, lay on the floor. Four huge men stood around him, taking it in turns to kick him while a fifth sat on the edge of a table nearby, sneering at him. I shot the seated pirate. I know that shooting someone in the back isn’t supposed to be the done thing, but there are a number of positive things to be said for it. Starting with the advantage of surprise, and continuing with their inability to shoot back. (Unless they can shoot backwards or have a mirror, of course.) The other pirates stopped kicking Rosto, and I shot two more before they had time to turn on me. The other two backed away. After exchanging glances, they started to move apart.
“Stand still!” I ordered. If they separated enough, I couldn’t cover them both at the same time. “Captain Redwood?” I shouted. Rosto raised his head and peered at me through the sheen of blood that ran over his face.
“Captain,” sneered one of the burly pirates. “He’s no captain. He’s a nark for the Imperium, that’s what he is.”
“And,” added his mate, “since you shot Captain Morgan, it’s a fair bet that you are, too.” His hand strayed towards his belt, so I shot him in the knee. Well, I missed, naturally. After it gets hot, this hand blaster tends to pull up a little. In any event, the pirate started screaming and lost all interest in proceedings. The other stood very still indeed.
Rosto crawled over towards me, stopping when he was close by. “Get out of this, you moron.”
“Most people would try saying ‘thank you’.”
Rosto managed to get upright, sort of. He was still bending forward, clutching his stomach and ribs. “If you don’t make a run for it, you are going to get yourself killed, Frank.” He let go of his stomach long enough to dash his sleeve across his face, smearing the blood away from his eyes, but causing a fresh flow to start on one side of his head.
“I couldn’t leave you.”
“Then you really are as stupid as you look, but thank you anyway. Give me your weapon.” He held out his hand. Reluctantly I handed over the hand blaster, and looked bemused when he turned it on me.
“What do you think you are doing?” I asked.
Rosto turned to the remaining pirate. “You were right, Raol. He is an agent of the Imperium – and I am assuredly not. You saw him shoot Morgan and the others. I’m going to take him outside and shoot him where he’s going to die, very slowly and in a lot of pain.”
“What!” Raol and I both said the same thing at the same time.
“Go and get some help, and contact Captain Hobb. He needs to get down here to take charge in Port Royal. Morgan’s dead, and I’m too badly hurt to do it.”
Raol looked at Rosto/Redwood uncertainly.
“For Hell’s sake man, get to it!” Rosto’s voice, despite his obvious pain, was sharp and authoritative. Raol nodded nervously, then ran from the Rim Bar. Rosto dropped the blaster and clutched his ribs again. “Now get me out, Frank.”
I was perplexed. “What’s going on?”
Rosto groaned.
“You had a gun on me!”
“And now I haven’t. Just pick it up, you might need it. Now get us out through that door over there.”
Outside the bar there came a huge explosion. Dust flew around the bar, and windows and doors shook violently. Heavy ground weapons opened up, and the Bar rocked.
“Hurry!” gasped Rosto. “That’s Starker!”
I needed no further encouragement. Ignoring his muffled cry of pain, I grabbed the Colonel round the waist and dragged him across the floor. He made me halt for a moment at Morgan’s body, while he spat straight into the dead face. “Wanted to do that while he was alive,” Rosto said conversationally. “Never got the chance, really. Come on! That door there, please.”
The firing was getting heavier, but fortunately not on the side of the Bar where we made our exit. Automatically I looked up at the sky: tracer from the ground weapons fled upwards, making stairways to the heavens. I could not see any incoming spacecraft, but as the tracers swayed to and fro seeking them, they must be there somewhere. The door had led out into the courtyard where the damaged shuttle lay waiting.
“Behold, our chariot of fire,” panted Rosto. I realised that he was in much more pain than I had first thought and began to worry about my chances of getting him off this world, and what exactly would happen to him when I did.
“We can’t use that shuttle!” I objected. “Look at the hull damage. And the windows of the Flight deck are smashed, too!”
“It will fly, though. As far as your Speedbird, and then we can lift off in that.”
“You are mad, Colonel. Mad.”
Rosto turned and looked me in the eyes. He smiled, and I realised that I was entirely correct. He was mad.
“But it will work. Trust me.”
The world went still and quiet. Then, slowly, silently, but impressively, the Rim Bar collapsed in upon itself leaving a heap of rubble. Sound and fury returned, accompanied by a cloud of dust that left us choking. “All aboard that’s going abroad!” I said hastily. Exerting myself far beyond the call of any duty, I hauled my erstwhile boss up the steps and into the shuttle. We didn’t need any internal lights: the holes in the hull let in enough light to see. And lots and lots of dust from the recently collapsed Rim Bar, of course. We left footprints in the dust on the floor, as I half walked, half supported, and half dragged Rosto to the Flight deck. (All right, I know, but maths was never my strongest subject.)
I helped him into the copilot’s chair, and from the captain’s left-hand seat wiped the panel clear of smashed glass and dust until I could see the instruments. The controls were quite straightforward, much more simple than my Speedbird’s, as this shuttle was never intended for interstellar flight
“Let’s see,” I mused as the engines started with a horrid coughing and grinding sound from somewhere behind us. “The screen is shattered. Navcom is offline. Vidscreens ruined. Undercarriage lights all off, suggesting the wheels are unreliable or unsafe. Flight controls are, well, a matter of guesswork as the readouts are smashed.”
Rosto had turned to stare out of the side window. “I wouldn’t bother too much about that, if I were you.”
“Rosto, this thing is a death trap!”
“Correct, Frank. Well done. We are trapped inside it, and Raol has finally worked out that I wasn’t telling him the truth.”
I craned my neck to peer out of the side window next to Rosto’s head. There, indeed, clambering across the rubble of the Rim Bar came Raol, and three more of his comrades, all waving unpleasantly efficient looking weaponry and clearly not well disposed towards us.
“Since you put it like that, Rosto.”
I touched the power lever, and the shuttle shuddered, groaned, and began to rock on its wheels. The hull complained and groaned, and Raol and his compadres opened fire. With that incentive I shoved the power lever all the way forward. The abused shuttle screamed in agony, and shook itself clear of the rubble around its wheels. The firing intensified and came closer to the cockpit. The shuttle rose into the air, vibrating so wildly that my vision blurred. Next to Rosto, the hull panel fell away, spiralling down to the ground and adding a little to the debris on the floor. Rosto pulled the seat harness around him, and fastened it, wincing with the pain from the movement. More hits, and every instrument on the panel went dead. I would have to fly the shuttle in the oldest way – a Mark One Eyeball and a lot of luck.
Activating the flight controls, I shifted thrust direction and the shuttle moved away from the remains of the bar and headed for the space port. I had a brief glimpse of a missile as it dove out of the clouds and hit the control tower with an enormous explosion. The shuttle was thrown wildly to one side, and I fought the controls to try and keep it stable. We were less than one hundred feet up, but from the pilot’s seat it looked far too far into the sky for my liking. All around the space port, the remaining heavy defence weapons tried to keep firing, but it was clear that they were losing. I guided the shuttle erratically across the flat top of the spac
e port buildings, peering through the smoke and flames towards the apron where the Speedbird was waiting. Hopefully.
Then the engines lost power. Frantically I tried to keep the shuttles nose up, but flight was unsustainable. A last small surge from the rear thrusters took us over the edge of the building, and we dipped down towards the concrete. I was screaming, the poor, much abused, shuttle was screaming; Rosto seemed quite calm. He was looking across the apron at the devastation with a bright smile.
I was less calm, especially when a scout ship covered in the Spaceship and Sun of the Imperium, and the extra insignia that showed it was part of Colonel Starker’s Black Ops unit flashed across the nose of the plunging shuttle, the wake turbulence almost throwing me out of the pilot’s seat and causing me to bang my nose painfully on the flight console.
“Left a bit,” observed Rosto in a casual tone. “We don’t want to crash into our only means of escape, do we?”
I couldn’t see a thing through the splintered and starred remains of the front screen, so I used what remained of the engine power to give some directional thrust, then pulled up the nose as high as I could just before we hit the concrete. With a howl from the tortured hull, the shuttle slid across the apron, and stopped violently when we smacked into another shuttle. I was thrown across the flight deck by the impact. Rosto of course had been strapped in. he undid his harness, and pushed casually at the remains of the shuttle hull next to his seat. It all fell off the hull with a crash.
“This way.” Rosto levered himself off the seat, and half slid, half fell down onto the concrete apron. I followed him, trying hard to stop the blood flowing from my battered nose. There, just yards away and amazingly undamaged, was my trusty Speedbird. I grabbed Rosto’s jacket, and dragged him over to the entry port. Then stopped.
“Rosto, the maintenance crew booby-trapped the door. If I use my entry code, then we get poisoned, or blown up or something.”
“I know. It’s a standard practice here. Try this one.”
“Are you sure?”
Above us, several interstellar troop ships emerged from the cloud cover and started squirting small arms fire in every conceivable direction as they approached the main runway of the space port.
“What have we got to lose?”
I nodded.
“Zero.”
I punched that number into the keypad.
“Zero.”
Again.
“Zero.”
A third time.
“Let me think…”
“Rosto!”
“All right. Let’s go for it. Zero.”
“Are you kidding me? Four zero’s is a secret entry code?”
“It’s the maintenance crew we are talking about here. No imagination. Hit it.”
I duly hit the key and the hatch opened without exploding or poisoning us. Result.
“Get to the flight deck. I’ll follow as fast as I can. But Frank…”
“There’s no need to thank me.” I paused part way up the spiral staircase to the main deck of the Speedbird and looked back down at Rosto. His clothes torn, his face grey through the mask of blood that had flowed following the beating he had endured, he looked nothing like the Space Fleet Colonel I had known.
“I wasn’t going to.” Rosto coughed into his hand and looked at the fresh blood in his palm with a professional disinterest. “Just reset the Free Union IFF. The Black Ops ships have been forewarned to expect a ship leaving with that identification flashing, and to let it go unmolested.”
I stared at him in silence. Then the Speedbird shook to a nearby explosion and I turned and ran for the flight deck. By the time Rosto caught up with me, I had the main engines started and warming up, and the defence systems in full operation.
“Ready?” I asked him without turning from the flight console.
“Ready,” he confirmed.
I raised the power level and the Speedbird started rolling across the apron. I steered carefully around the smoking wrecks of some space-going shuttles, and peered through the smoke and chaos ahead. The runway was littered with rubble, and so I added power to the main engines and lifted far enough off the ground to get a clear acceleration path.
“The IFF?” asked Rosto.
“It’s operating,” I confirmed. “We seem like a regular Free Union Fleet ship now.”
Rosto looked satisfied, and sat down on the floor. Being a single crew scout ship, there was of course only one seat in the flight deck and I needed to be in it to fly the ship. “Go for it,” he said in a quiet voice.
I shoved the power lever all of the way forward, and the Speedbird responded. The elderly ship’s engines fired willingly, and we began to gain altitude, the rate of ascent rising quickly. The Speedbird rocked, and the defence systems alerted me to incoming fire. I diverted a little more power to the shields.
“Rosto, I thought the IFF was supposed to protect us?”
“Friendly fire, I suppose,” he replied.
“Well if that’s friendly, I don’t want to see them being unfriendly!”
We were climbing fast now, and the action was left behind us as the Black Ops squadron began to set down at Port Royal to obliterate the pirate base from the ground. Ahead in the vidscreens the clouds cleared away, and the deep blue of space appeared. I made small adjustments to the trajectory.
“When we escape the gravitational field, head for the moon,” instructed Rosto.
“Why? Why not just get out of this system?”
“I’ve a larger ship concealed there. You can drop me, and we can both fly out of the system, and go our separate ways.”
“You forget,” I told him. “I’m only here at all because my hyperdrive unit failed. So I can’t make a jump into hyperspace. It will take me months to get anywhere, maybe years.”
“Then I’ll help you. Seems fair. We’ll tether you to my ship, and make a linked Hyperspace Jump. Then we will leave you somewhere safe.”
“Done,” I said.
Then all the warning systems started yelling at once. The noise was unbelievable. I cursed and turned them off, and looked for the danger. There, in the rear vidscreen was the problem. A StarDestroyer had managed to sneak up on us, and was manoevering into an attack vector.
“I thought Starker’s men were to let us through!” I spun the Speedbird hard to the right, and the StarDestroyer twisted to try and follow us. Rosto slid across the floor, grabbing at the base of the pilot’s seat as he went.
“That was the deal,” he managed. “I set up the attack at the rim of the system, and located the main base – then Starker attacked the base.
“With you on it? Great plan, Rosto!”
“I was supposed to have got off the base before Starker descended on it. Now his men will think we are pirates, and try to finish us off.”
The StarDestroyer opened fire, but missed, badly. The world rotated below us as I kept the Speedbird accelerating in orbit. A little further round and we came across another conflict. Two pirate frigates and a battlecruiser, all blazoned with the skull and crossbones, were attacking a second Black Ops StarDestroyer which was having the worst of the exchange – until we entered the fray from an unexpected direction. I released two torpedoes, which scored a direct hit on one frigate, putting it completely out of action.
The defence system computer warned urgently of a missile lock: I headed straight at the second frigate from the rear quarter, while the StarDestroyer concentrated its fire on the battlecruiser. At the last moment before we collided I changed vector, and lifted us over the frigate. The pursuing Black Ops missile failed to change course to follow me, and slammed into the frigate’s main engines. The resulting explosion blanked out all the vidscreens in the combat area, and I used the chance to make good our escape: leaving the two StarDestroyers to enjoy playing with the pirate battlecruiser, which was now on the wrong side of the odds.
I was enjoying myself now, and looked for another fight to join. But just then Rosto groaned, loudly. That was un
like him and I looked down at him.
“Frank, get me to my ship. I need the medics there, urgently.”
“Medics? How big is your ship?”
“Never mind. Just fly me to the moon.”
That was just on the edge of the planet’s horizon, and it took me very little time to set up an approach to the moon.
“There’s a big crater. Next to the crater is a large mound. Land beside that.”
“I see it.” I set the co ordinates into the navcomm, and the Speedbird, after just one short orbit, settled down as ordered. Curious, I stared at the vidsceen. Rosto crawled to the console, and pulled himself upright. His hands flashed to the commscomputer, and input a frequency I did not recognise. In a moment, the commscreen showed a fully uniformed Star Fleet captain I didn’t recognise either. But he recognised Rosto.
“Is that you, Colonel?” he asked.
“Get the medics. I’m in trouble.”
The screen flashed and went blank. Rosto changed the frequency before I could log it, then slumped to the floor. I released the airlock security, and knelt down beside him.
“Good flying, that, Frank. Well done.” Rosto was lying very awkwardly and could no longer open both eyes. I suddenly realised that he was dying: and that he represented my only way out of this battle zone.
“Hold on, Rosto! Hold on!” I told him urgently. He stared vaguely at me, then focussed clearly on my face as the medical team sprinted up the spiral staircase towards the main deck.
Chapter eight
The Speedbird, and the battlecruiser to which it was linked, dropped out of hyperspace, and started to slow down. I severed the tow link that had held me to the battlecruiser and had dragged me safely out of the pirates’ system and the fight to the death that had been raging there.
Colonel Rosto, swathed in bandages and a rather colourful sight now that all the bruising had achieved its full glory, appeared in my commscreen. He was still in a wheelchair, but the medlab onboard his waiting battlecruiser had managed against the odds to save his life. For better or worse, of course. It depended on your point of view.
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