Almost like they are looking for something. Or someone, El thought in alarm. Had what he had just seen not been an accident? Did Armcore suspect that they were here? He wondered if maybe the Armcore guards had found ‘Phillips,’ the sentry that he had killed.
“Just like any other job you get us mixed up in, huh, captain?” shouted an out-of-breath voice as Irie, Val, and a complete stranger ran up the corridor behind him.
“Hey, who’s she?” El said.
“Someone who saved our life. Come on. No time to stop and smell the roses.” Irie was already accelerating past him.
“What roses?” Val growled. “I do not see any roses living down here.” The gunner followed the engineer, leaving El standing and looking at the blonde-haired woman.
“Cassandra. Renegade archaeologist,” the woman said, smiling tentatively before racing after the others.
“Eliard Martin, the fracking captain.” El was left to sigh to himself, and follow his crew as they made their escape.
5
Cassandra Milan
There was a woman in Captain El’s cockpit. Or rather, there was another woman in El’s cockpit. Not that El cared about the gender of the person behind the wheel, but he did care an awful lot about the fact that a) he didn’t know who one of them was, and b) he couldn’t get into it at the moment. Instead, he was standing in the main hold while Val was busy packing away the weapons. The Duergar had seemed to take the arrival of the mysterious new crew member of the Mercury in stride, saying something about ‘blood honor’ that now meant they owed this stranger their lives.
“Excuse me? Who are you again?” he called up to where Cassandra was leaning over Irie’s shoulder and pointing things out on the window display.
“Cassandra.” She turned around. She was striking, El saw. Slim and clearly comfortable around a ship, the woman wore a dark blue tunic and heavy expedition trousers, with a grey robe on top. She had a blonde bob now released from her visor that was fraying at the edges and had a way of looking directly at whomever she was talking to, which El found slightly unnerving. She’s not afraid of anything, he thought.
“She saved our lives, Cap,” Irie said over her shoulder, before adding, “Oh right, I see what you mean. The moon has an irregular orbit, meaning that in about eight minutes, it’ll be behind Tritho Prime for an extended time—perfect for us to jump and not get noticed.”
Huh, El thought. “You seem to have thought this whole ‘evading capture by Armcore’ thing through pretty well,” he said dryly.
“I have.” The woman still held his gaze, descending the metal steps to the hold beside him. “I guess that we should be introduced properly,” she said, sticking out her hand. “Cassandra Milan, originally from Prosperous Prime, and lately, the Tritho Archaeological Expedition.”
El shook her hand carefully. “And do all archaeologists carry blaster pistols, and know how to dismantle hunter drones?” he asked.
“Only when Armcore has decided to steal all of your research,” she replied, before finally flicking a glance away around the rest of the hold. “This is an impressive ship you have here, Captain, if a little small. What is it, a Marcionne build?”
El was impressed that she could recognize the ship’s make that quickly. “Actually, yes. What gave it away?” Apart from the superior quality of the components, the ergonomic design, and the fact that the Mercury is the sexiest ship in the galaxy, the captain thought affectionately. Maybe this Cassandra Milan wasn’t quite so bad after all…
“Meh, I’ve been on board a few in my time,” she said noncommittally, before her eyes suddenly lit up. “Are those photon rail-guns?” She pointed at the two large bodies of the gleaming black armaments, each lying on the deck and longer than a regular human was tall. “I thought they were illegal!”
“You know your armaments as well,” El said appreciatively. “They’re only Coalition-illegal. Outside of Coalition-controlled space, you can pick them up from the right retailer,” he said, before remembering that his ‘right retailer’ had been Trader Hogan. Ugh. I still need twenty thousand credits for that scumsucker. The memory suddenly plunged him back into a bad mood.
“And we need to get them mounted before long,” Val grumbled, pointing to the loading doors on either side of the hull, where once inside, the internal mechanism would roll them out to the gun ports just outside the main hull. Val’s plan was to have them under-slung on the Mercury and used as ship-to-ship weapons. El had balked at the intense retrofitting and new fabrication that the Duergar had done to his beloved ship, but he had agreed in the end that it would be a wise move. Originally a racing / pleasure craft, the Mercury only had one fairly strong but slow-to load forward laser to use against asteroids and space debris that they happened to encounter. Not enough for what a successful space “adventurer” would require as a part of their job.
“Ach. It must hurt to retrofit those gun ports into this beauty,” Cassandra mused.
“Yeah, actually, it does.” El found himself grinning at the woman. She really does know her way around a ship. Maybe she isn’t going to be such a burden after all.
“So, if I could just get a lift back up the Traders’ Belt, that would be amazing,” Cassandra said with a smile.
“Why, sure...” El was halfway through agreeing to this charming woman, before he actually heard what it was that she had said. “The Traders’ Belt?” he repeated.
“Yeah. That is where I agreed to meet my supervisor.” Cassandra grimaced. “It was the only place that Armcore doesn’t seem to want to touch, thankfully.”
“And your supervisor is another of these renegade archaeologists, right?” El frowned slightly.
“The academic world is rife with radicals and troublemakers.” Cassandra nodded. “There’s a whole team of us who don’t want to be collaborating with Armcore anymore. We’re sick and tired of our hard work going to military projects.”
“How very noble of you,” El said dryly, his earlier suspicions rising once again. “What was your research, anyway? What was Armcore doing there?”
“Probably the same thing that you were doing there, Captain.” Cassandra’s tone turned a matching level of cold. “They were trying to take advantage of Valyien tech.”
She doesn’t know what I saw, El thought, playing his cards close to his chest. That Valyien orb-flower thing, the accident that it caused. A self-deprecating grin spread over the captain’s face as he shrugged and held up his hands. “What can I say? We have an entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Lucky for me, I suppose. Otherwise I would still be stuck down there.” Cassandra nodded. “What do you say, a ride to the Traders’ Belt?”
“Ah. Now that is where we might have a problem…” El said. “We, uh, this ship is experiencing a breakdown of communication with the Traders’ Belt currently.”
The woman’s face dropped like a stone. “What?”
“We can take you to the Gundaba Platform instead? On the gas giants of Gund? That is out of Coalition-controlled space, and it is almost as free-thinking as the Traders’ Belt is.”
“No.” Cassandra shook her head. “It has to be the Traders’ Belt. And Charylla in particular.”
“Ah,” Irie said from the cockpit, and El felt the same way. Val, for his part, didn’t seem to care at all because he was busy loading the massive photon rail-guns singlehanded with all of his Duergar strength.
“Yeah, I’m afraid that is not going to happen, is it, Irie?” The captain shook his head.
“It’s pretty bad…” Irie murmured from the pilot seat.
“You see?” El said firmly. “The Gundaba Platform it is!”
“No, it’s not that, Captain…” his chief engineer said in an alarmed voice from above them all. “I need you to take the wheel, right now.”
What is it? El turned.
“There’s an Armcore Battle Cruiser heading straight for us,” Irie said.
6
It’s All About Physics
“
Irie! Cycle up that warp engine, and I want it done yesterday!” El shouted as he threw himself at the wheel. “Val!”
“Loading the rail-guns.” A grunt and a clunk of metal.
“Cassandra, can you help him?” El called and heard a quick affirmative response. Good. At least she can work, he thought as he peered at the window display.
Oh, crap.
It was un mistakable shape, and one that El had hoped never to see twice in his life. An Armcore Battle Cruiser was shaped like an inverted bow, but with a shallow angle and large, angular head and tail, and it was rising from around the horizon of Tritho Prime, where it must have been taking advantage of the moon’s irregular orbit to hide from external sensors.
Of course, it was there. How could I think that many Armcore soldiers had been living in those cramped archaeologists’ landers? El cursed himself.
A battle cruiser was easily twenty or thirty times the size of the Mercury, and it wasn’t even the largest of the military ships that Armcore had to deploy. But they were deadly because they could move faster than the world-killing Titan-class warships, and they still had enough firepower to obliterate a medium-sized city. One of the many problems with Armcore was, as everyone in the galaxy knew, they had cornered the market on military tech. A few of the non-aligned worlds had their own Navy, of course, and the noble houses of the Coalition had their own personal protection fleets, but it was to the ‘Free Company’ of Armcore that everyone turned for their protection and their offense, the captain knew.
They supplied the warships. They supplied the soldiers. They ended the wars.
“With any luck, they’re just on maneuvers…” El said through gritted teeth, waiting for word from Irie when he could jump. There was no way that the Mercury could out-blast a battle ship…but we might be able to outfly it.
El pulled the Mercury into a vicious curve, feeling the pressure throw him to one side. On the screens in front of him, the battleship swerved to the extreme left, where he saw smaller shapes dropping from its sides like a cloud of angry hornets.
“Great. Looks like they’re sending their attack-fighters after us,” El snarled, seeing the booster rockets on the backs of the small ships flare and their cross-shaped wings open above their carapace. The one-pilot attack-fighters of Armcore even looked like angry wasps, El thought miserably as they dipped and darted around each other, their gun ports extending from under their bodies.
Thunk! Wham! There were growls as Val and Cassandra were trying to get their own guns to load.
“Come on, people! I don’t want to be toast…” El called. “Irie? How we doing with that warp engine?”
“She’s cycling up, Cap. Another minute,” the engineer’s stressed voice came over the comms.
“We haven’t got a minute!” he shouted. “Val?”
“One rail-gun in place. Syncing the firing systems. Working on the second,” his voice boomed. On the window display ahead, El could make out the small flash of the loading sigils as the Mercury’s computer tried to update its new rail-gun firing protocols.
“Outstanding,” El snapped, pulling on the release to fill the rear boosters with plasma. “Looks like I’m going to have to fly my way out of this one…”
The attack-fighters up ahead were starting to glitter as they released their own deadly payload of weapons. Tiny missiles, El imagined, seeing the flares and dark shapes speed across the stars.
Hold, and…go! He pushed down the injection levers for the boosters, releasing all of the plasma into the ignition. Suddenly, the Mercury was racing through the void, burning warp plasma at an astonishing rate. It was like nitrous oxide in terrestrial petrol vehicles, giving them far more power over a shorter time.
The captain allowed the ship to ride the burn to its peak and just at the moment that the momentum started to ebb, he pulled on the wheel again and swerved violently downward. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that he could even see the flashes of the missile darts fly past his window.
“Hold course, hold course…” His arms shook as the wheel translated a very small amount of pressures that the ship was undergoing. El didn’t have to have his ship’s wheel set up that way, but he preferred it like that. He preferred being able to feel what the ship was doing.
“Now!” Another swerve of the wheel, and at the same time, pulling on only one of the booster ignitions along the righthand side of the craft. This made them spiral and turn at the same time, giving them some extra speed with the momentum.
It’s all about physics. It’s all about momentum, El kept repeating to himself. He was worried and he was tense, but these feelings were receding to the edges of his mind as he worked the controls, allowing the ship to ride the strongest force before quickly turning and interrupting the ebb of the boosters. To say that El was at peace or even calm when he flew would be a mistake, but it was true that there was something that he felt in the middle of that cockpit. A sort of balance. A sort of homecoming.
Flying was something that Eliard Martin was good at, and he knew it. It helped that unlike most of the pilots he would be facing, he had been trained at the prestigious Trevalyn Academy.
Another fact that I don’t want getting out to the general public, El considered as he performed one of the advanced evasion methods they had taught him.
“We’re clearing the pack!” he called out.
Weapons sync! New weapons system online: dual photon rail-guns.
Override request: Chief Gunner.
The alerts flashed across El’s window display. At last. The computer had recognized and accepted the codeware weapons patches that Val had installed into her. Way to go, baby, El thought to his ship. Additionally, his gunner had requested a localized command for the guns—and sparing a quick glance, he saw that Val was sitting in one of the command chairs that slid out from the side of the wall, right over where he had loaded the gun bay.
If this had still been a racing craft, those two command chairs—one on the right and one of the left of the main hold—would be places for El’s co-pilots, and where they would control the minute flows of warp plasma to the various boosters and adjust stabilizers to get the maximum speed and efficiency out to the Mercury. But the captain had agreed to transfer all flight power straight to the cockpit—I’m a better pilot than any of the others, he thought—and instead gave Val his gunner’s positions.
“Accept weapon override,” El shouted, and he felt a distant clunk as somewhere far below and behind him, the ammunition clicked into the rail-guns.
Val gave a roar of approval and, as the captain turned back to his job, the Duergar slapped down the targeting visor that slid out from the chair across his eyes and by using the joystick in front of him, the entire chair swung around to face back down toward the engine room. In tandem, the left rail-gun slid out from the Mercury’s belly and swiveled toward the oncoming Armcore fleet. Val started firing.
“I hope you can target under pressure,” El called, feeling a zing of wild enthusiasm as he punched the boosters again and just before the Mercury hit maximum burn, he spun the wheel, throwing his ship into a corkscrew turn. He heard thunks and growls from behind him, and the metallic pings as wrenches were flung across the space, but the rail-guns kept swiveling and firing.
Incoming! his screens told him, a second before the Mercury shook and spun of its own accord.
Defense analysis: class 3 intercept missile. Low payload. Damage? External.
“Thank the stars for that,” El breathed, dropping into a different loop once again.
“Captain! Jump engine powered up. Coordinates?” Irie’s voice broke into the cockpit. On the swerving screens, there was the sudden explosion-implosion from the attacking vessels as the rail-guns found their targets.
“Away from here!” El shouted. “Two micros. Scramble the jump signatures…”
“Already on it, Cap. And jump in three…two… Brace!”
There was a shudder throughout the ship, and a whump of pressure as the warp engin
e fired. El felt his stomach lurch, the lights grow bright and strange and his body unbearably heavy, before suddenly, with the subsonic squeal that he was sure he couldn’t hear and yet his body could, everything became instantly easier.
Jumping is like falling asleep, El had thought on more than one occasion. That groggy, not-quite-real moment as your higher brain functions start to shut down and the deeper, stranger intelligences take over. A tiny part of your conscious mind is aware that something very weird is happening, but it is powerless to stop it.
But jumping was also, the captain reflected, like falling off a cliff. A sudden moment of terror and then that longer second as you realize that you are not dead, but you will be soon. Utter confusion. Complete reality readjustment—
Whap!
El coughed as they emerged back into commonplace three-dimensional reality. Everything seemed normal, only it wasn’t, not really. The constellations outside of his window display were entirely different, and one half of the screen was filled with the purple, orange, and ruddy-yellow of a gas giant.
“Whoa. You dropped us a bit close, Irie, if I do say so…” he said in alarm. Everyone knew that there were all sorts of problems if you warped too close to a planet’s gravity well, or even more dangerously, it’s atmosphere.
“Hey, I didn’t have an awful lot of time to run the calculations, remember?” her voice came back angrily.
“Okay, fair enough.” El looked at his alarms. How is my ship? How is my baby? The damage report was still coming back as ‘minimal’ and a suggested schematic of external plates that he might want to check out. Yes, will do. As soon as we jump again. “We ready for second jump?” he called, earning a chorus of calls from the hold behind him, and an affirmative from Irie.
They knew that it was imperative to jump a few times in succession, as dangerous and disorientating as it was. Warp signatures could be descrambled and decoded by an advanced enough adversary.
Valyien Boxed Set 1 Page 5