by Mark Wandrey
Splunk floated alongside the ship’s defensive station, a position she’d adopted as her own shortly after coming aboard. She had a Tri-V up showing the system, and a detailed image slowly grew in resolution, starting with the emergence point where Pale Rider slowly drifted. Three other objects were shown nearby. Splunk quickly assigned details to them.
“Three derelicts in the emergence zone?” Jim asked in an incredulous tone. They appeared to be wrecked ships with minimal power readings. “Shields,” he said suddenly.
Splunk responded immediately, raising the former light cruiser’s defensive shields. The pair of fusion plants thrummed with the power required to run the systems, and Jim applied more to move them ahead. “Better to move and make a harder target,” Jim had heard Captain Winslow say on more than one occasion.
A pair of five-megawatt lasers drew glowing lines along Pale Rider’s shields as they absorbed the coherent light energy.
“Designate target Alpha,” Jim said as Splunk painted one of the formerly derelict ships now registering a steadily growing EM field, unmistakable as a fusion plant coming to power. They had their lasers charged and were waiting. Ambush.
“The other two are coming up as well,
“Damnit,” Jim yelled. “Designate Beta and Gamma.” Splunk updated the Tri-V, and data began flowing into Jim’s pinplants as he fed copious amounts of power into the ship’s engines, shoving him back into the pilot’s couch. “Splunk, do Beta and Gamma have shields up yet?”
“
“Big mistake, bucko. Splunk, missiles, both of them!”
“
While Pale Rider might have looked like a rich person’s toy, she was anything but helpless. She possessed two missile launchers, both oriented forward. They were most of her remaining offensive punch—not that an old Crucible-class light cruiser ever had much of a punch. The problem was, what punch he still had was the missiles, and he had a grand total of eight missiles left onboard.
Pale Rider bumped as compressed air blasted the two missiles into space. Jim watched through the bridge glass as the missiles flashed brightly, their engines rocketing them away at hundreds of Gs. He glimpsed a fleeting image of the two missiles diverging and turning on new bearings before losing sight of them. Missiles were hard to spot on purpose.
Jim skewed Pale Rider using its maneuvering jets and pushed her acceleration past three Gs, ever more grateful Hargrave made him work out every day he was in space. Even though it still felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest, at least it was an elephant he could still breathe under. All three of the former derelicts had them under fire now, but thanks to his maneuvers, none scored more than a couple of hits. Pale Rider’s shields were doing fine. A second later, his missiles reached their targets.
Small explosions flashed brilliantly in the void of space and were consumed a split second later. Splunk updated the sensor data. Just like that, two ships no longer existed.
Jim shook his head. Idiots.
It wasn’t the first time Jim had killed in combat; far from it. Still—most of the time—there’d been some logic to it. A reason, even if it was just profit. This was senseless. They didn’t even try to force him to surrender under threat. Pirates operated under the logic it was best to seize an intact ship. Take out her engines fast and board. A ship full of holes often wasn’t worth much, if anything.
“Alpha is running,
“Where?” Jim asked.
“Q’posa Prime,
“Hold fire,” he said. “I want to see if we can get some answers.” He reduced power and fell in behind the last ship. It wasn’t hard to keep up; in fact, Jim had to throttle down to a quarter of a G in order to not catch up. The pirate’s engine emissions were all over the chart, too. It had a fusion torch which appeared to have bad baffles; it was a deathtrap.
The tactical board beeped as their shields absorbed another laser hit, this one only a megawatt. Another followed one minute later, then another at the same interval. Jim activated the comms with his pinplants.
“You might as well stop it,” he transmitted in the clear. “You can plug away at me with your popgun from now until the end of time, and you won’t accomplish anything.” The radio was quiet for two minutes as he flew along behind the other ship, which doggedly continued to fire on him once a minute. “You can’t hurt me, but you are annoying me.”
The radio suddenly came alive. “Leave us alone.”
Jim’s pinplants automatically translated it into English, so he looked at the raw language code, Jakota. He blinked as he accessed their data; there wasn’t much. The Jakota were known as a race of traders, and not very successful ones. The simple image in his GalNet records reminded him of a mole—or maybe a muskrat—only with long, floppy, rabbit-like ears and spindly, hairless limbs. They weren’t a merc race.
“I was just visiting,” Jim replied. “I wasn’t the one who shot first.”
“We own this system now; it is interdicted.”
“Are you saying the Jakota have Q’posa under a trade interdiction?”
“Yes, yes, now you leave!”
“I don’t think he understands how this works,” Jim said, to which Splunk nodded. “Scan ahead. Are there more ships at Q’posa Prime?” While she scanned, Jim considered. Who tries to interdict a system with a couple of POS ships that can get trashed by a partially disarmed escort frigate?
“I detect eleven ships in orbit,
“Not enough to be a decent interdiction fleet, though,” Jim noted. She nodded in agreement. “The Jakota aren’t major players in the Merchant Guild, either,” he added. He briefly considered having Splunk disable the other ship, but he already felt like a bit of a bully for blowing the other two ships to hell.
“Another ship is at the emergence point,” she said. “I think it appeared during the fight. It’s sitting there, waiting.”
“Smart move,” Jim observed. “Let us deal with the pirates.” Splunk nodded. The pirates were no real threat, but hindsight was always 20/20, and he had no way of knowing if they weren’t pirates. For all he knew, they really were, and the interdiction was just a convenient story after getting their asses kicked.
Jim used the nav system to analyze how long it would take the Jakota ship to reach Q’posa Prime—eleven hours at their current acceleration. “Screw this,” he said and fed power to Pale Rider’s fusion torch. The former warship surged ahead at two Gs.
The Jakota ship, which Splunk had identified as having once been a Jeha frigate, did its best to evade on barely functioning thrusters. Pale Rider accelerated past in a flash. Splunk modulated the shields to face the Jakota ship, which hit them one more time as they overtook the pirates.
“They’re stubborn; I’ll give them that,” Jim said. Splunk gave a snorting laugh as they rapidly left the junky ship in their wake. It fired three more times before Pale Rider was out of effective range. “Keep an eye on it,” Jim told his friend.
“Will do,
The nav system told Jim they were less than an hour out from Q’posa Prime, with a midcourse flip to decelerate in 23 minutes. He could do two Gs for an hour, no problem. In fact, he could skip his afternoon workout because of it—bonus. As the Jakota ship fell astern, he worked with the sensor feeds and directed them toward Q’posa Prime.
As Splunk said, there were eleven ships in orbit. Because of how fast he was approaching, though, it was also possible several ships were orbiting on the far side of the planet where his sensors hadn’t had a chance to scan yet. Based on the world’s size, a nominal orbit would be four to five hours.
“Two of the ships in orbit are going active,
“Got it,” Jim said and examined the data in his pinplants. As the ships powered up and began to move, they provided considerably more information fo
r Pale Rider’s sensors. Delta looked like a transport, maybe even a tramp freighter or free trader. Epsilon was reading like a cruiser, though the data was muddled. He broke the analysis down through several filters and compared it against his ship’s profiles for various warships, but nothing matched. Where’d they get these ships? “Can we project a destination on Delta and Epsilon?”
“Stargate,
“I guess this is the end of their interdiction.”
“Missile launch from Epsilon,
The space between Pale Rider and Q’posa Prime, formerly all but empty, now lit up with 20 little bright red dots. Well that’s not good. “Configure turret one for anti-missile.” Splunk nodded but didn’t look at him. Jim could see she was changing the turret, so he looked at the data being gathered on the missiles. Their acceleration was under 150 Gs, and each was over a ton and more than five meters long. Good lord, they were firing shuttles at him? He was about to ask Splunk how soon it would be before they could engage the missiles when she fired.
The missiles used by Pale Rider weren’t the best available, partly because the best was expensive as hell, and partly because the ship’s launchers weren’t made to use the best. Still, her missiles were three meters long and accelerated at 200-300 Gs nominal. After a few seconds of boost, they coasted and became nearly invisible. Tipped with a high-tech explosive charge, they were sleek, fast, and hard to hit. The Jakota missiles were fat, slow, and easy targets. Instead of coasting they were constantly boosting.
Configured to anti-missile, one of Pale Rider’s two laser turrets used a beam splitter and engaged four of the enemy missiles at a time. It took five laser pulses to disable all 20 missiles with zero misses.
Jim transmitted again. “Do that again, and we will destroy you.” Epsilon managed to increase its thrust to a blistering three-quarters of a G and began to leave Delta behind. “Let them go,” Jim told Splunk. She glanced at him, her ears drooping in disappointment. He was learning as they spent more time alone; she liked fighting. It was something he hadn’t expected based on her gentle nature.
He throttled back the engines to one G and updated the autopilot for their rendezvous with Q’posa Prime. The planet grew steadily closer as he watched the sensor data and wondered what they were heading into. Pale Rider handled the junk Jakota ships with ease, but against a true warship, even one her own size, the outcome was liable to be vastly less favorable.
The clock counted down.
* * *
Orbital Insertion Maneuver in Five Minutes, the computer informed him. Jim clicked his seat restraints back into place. He’d taken the time between their engagement with the Jakota ships and reaching orbit to relieve himself and get a bulb of ice water. Splunk simply clung to the combat control station. She had a seat configured to her ergonomics, though she seldom used it. Pale Rider’s peak thrust output wasn’t much more than she could handle by just hanging on. Being an arboreal species had its advantages.
“Keep an eye on the orbitals,” he reminded Splunk as he oriented the ship for braking.
“I’m on it,
He powered up the engines and inserted them into orbit with Pale Rider’s fusion torch. They had enough time on approach to be certain none of the remaining nine ships in orbit made any hostile moves. In fact, Jim was sure most of them weren’t even usable as ships anymore; they were mostly in high geocentric orbits.
The planet was tiny, not much bigger than Earth’s moon. Sensors showed it had a rudimentary atmosphere, less than a quarter the density of Human normal, with gravity roughly half a G. It wasn’t a dangerous atmosphere, just not a friendly one. They could breathe the air with the help of masks. So, was there something worth the time to travel down there?
Most inhabited star systems maintained data uplinks for visitors to provide them with vital information. They announced who was in charge of the system, rules, etiquette, or even just a warning to stay away. There had been nothing there, and Jim thought the Jakota might have destroyed the beacon at the emergence point.
The system’s stargate was at another LaGrange point, like always. It was visible in telescopic views—a distant ring of asteroids with a vast filigree of solar collectors, far larger than most to collect the dim light of the orange star.
Jim briefly considered sending a message to the stargate, but the gate masters weren’t known for their willingness to help unless large sums of credits were involved. While he had large sums of credits, he didn’t have unlimited assets. The Cavaliers were still recovering from bankruptcy, and throwing around red diamonds wouldn’t help them recover any faster. Besides, it looked like this particular stargate was quiet. In the views he had, it appeared old and rundown.
This place is nothing anymore. It was a mistake coming here.
The comms system received a broadcast from the planet’s surface. “Warship in orbit, warship in orbit, can you hear us?”
“This is Jim Cartwright, in command of ESS Pale Rider,” Jim replied. His pinplants showed the translation was Vaga. Another race he’d never seen before; they looked like dung beetles! “With whom am I speaking?”
“I am Klay, leader of our people on Q’posa Prime. We saw you fire on the Jakota. What is your purpose here? Are you another faction?”
“I don’t know anything about factions,” Jim admitted. “Actually, Pale Rider isn’t a warship—it’s my family ship.”
A small silence ensued before Klay replied. “A pleasure craft? You destroyed two Jakota warships.”
“They weren’t very good warships,” Jim said. “I am a merc commander, but I’m not here on work.”
“Why did you attack the Jakota?”
“They attacked me,” Jim said. “We just defended ourselves.” Splunk updated the bridge Tri-V of near-space around Q’posa Prime; Alpha had modified its course and was moving to rendezvous with Delta and Epsilon, which were still limping toward the stargate. She was keeping a keen eye on them in case they decided to send more missiles. The ship which waited at the emergence point hadn’t moved. Reconsidering his choice of destinations?
Klay spoke again, the translator rendering his voice with a grateful edge to it. “We owe you a debt, Jim Cartwright. How can we repay you? We are a poor people, but we reward generosity when we encounter it.”
“No payment is necessary,” Jim assured the alien. “I was wondering, are there any ancient ruins down there? Places left from the Great Galactic War? I am interested in them for archeological studies.”
“Ruins? You mean old buildings and things? Yes, we have many. Our colony lives among them, though I fear there is little of interest for studies. Anything of value has long been looted.”
“How do you make your living?” Jim wondered.
“Q’posa Prime yields rich crops of fungi which our species thrives on. It would be a huge Vaga colony, except the ruins bring opportunists often hoping to find some rich piece of technology missed by the millions who’ve come before.”
Jim was beginning to put together a picture of how things were on the planet. It didn’t sound good. “May I come down? Maybe trade or look around?”
“You are certainly welcome to come down,” Klay said. “But we cannot guarantee your safety.”
“After our reception, I assumed as much,” Jim said. “We can take care of ourselves. Please transmit a location for us to land.”
“It will be done, Jim Cartwright. Welcome to Q’posa Prime.”
“We’re going to land Pale Rider,” Jim told Splunk. She glanced at him. “I don’t want to risk leaving her in orbit.”
“Smart,
scavenged to keep the other ships flying.
“Maybe one or two are flight worthy,” Jim said after surveying the hulks. “But they could be concealing smaller craft.” Splunk nodded. Pale Rider would be helpless in orbit with no crew, and there was no way he would go down without Splunk watching his back. Q’posa Prime, with its light gravity and thin atmosphere, would be particularly easy to land on and take off from.
The surface station transmitted coordinates, and Jim fed them into Pale Rider’s nav computer. He could fly the ship well enough, but he had no confidence in his ability to manually land her. Splunk could probably do better. As long as the ship’s computers were fine, though, there was no need.
The computer analyzed the data and provided a number of approach vectors. Jim was less than confident after having to fight his way in, so he chose the steepest angle, which would provide the fewest opportunities to be fired upon prior to touch down. Worst case, he would be able to use the ship’s powerful engines to escape back to orbit. They’d be in a bad place, fuel-wise. However, their rendezvous with his Cavaliers wasn’t far and was within their range under the scenario, barely.
Pale Rider performed a deorbit burn and began the fall toward Q’posa Prime’s surface. The ship automatically retracted and locked its gravity decks. As they slowed and dropped out of orbit, Jim watched one of the ships pass close abeam. It was one of the functional transports. It looked to be in good condition, of modern design and versatile. It sat quietly in its orbit as Pale Rider went by.
“The ship at the emergence point is moving toward the planet,
Jim looked at the Tri-V plot and considered for a moment. It was possible the other ship was coming to attack them from above, using the high ground to their advantage. It was equally possible they’d just decided it was now safe to approach the planet. “Not going to worry about it right now,” he said. Splunk shrugged as the planet’s thin atmosphere began to heat Pale Rider’s hull.
* * *