Shadow of Oblivion

by Richard Tongue

  “Dixon, when you get a target, feel free to engage,” Corrigan said.

  Nodding, he replied, “Working on a firing solution now, skipper.”

  “They’re slower than we are,” Novak said. “Once we build up our acceleration, we’re going to leave them in the dust.”

  “We’ve got to live long enough to do that,” Corrigan warned.

  “Enemy opening fire, extreme range,” Singh reported. “We’re being hailed. Simple message. Surrender or die. We cut engines in thirty seconds if we’re willing to accept those terms.”

  “Worth considering,” Dixon replied. “Can we stall?”

  Shaking his head, Corrigan said, “It isn’t worth it, not if we can’t use it to improve our odds. We stick with the plan we came up with.” Turning to Singh, he said, “See if you can identify those ships, their commanders. We should have that information in our database somewhere.”

  “Aye, sir, working on it,” the technician replied. He paused, then added, “They’re in a rather strange formation, sir. Technically by the book, but it’s almost as though they were expecting more ships.”

  Corrigan looked back at the trajectory plot, his face dropping into a frown. Singh was right. Given their target, the Belter warships should be moving to envelop Avenger, come at them from as many angles as possible to hinder their defenses, but they were moving instead into a double arrowhead formation, concentrating themselves on a single point, a single course. Instead of maximizing their time in the firing line, they appeared to be minimizing it, exposing themselves to as little risk of destruction as possible.

  And in the process, opening up a weak spot in the formation that he could exploit. He looked at the display for a few seconds more, looking for the catch, looking for the trap being set by the enemy commander, but no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find one.

  “I’ve got the information on the enemy commander,” Dixon said. “Looks like Robert Malek. Head of one of the big prospecting unions, with a reputation as a military history fanatic. No formal training.” He paused, then added, “That either means that he’s going to go by the book or he’s going to think he knows better than it.”

  “I don’t know which to root for,” Corrigan replied. “Though if he’s going by the book, right now he’s looking at the wrong chapter.” He looked at the display again, and added, “Let’s stall for time. Helm, take us right through the heart of the formation. Best possible speed, then run for the planet. Singh, throw off a few probes, starburst pattern. I want to cover all possible sensor blind spots. Dixon, you my fire at anything you see.”

  “Opening fire now,” Dixon replied, as Novak threw the helm over, sending Avenger racing into the gap in the enemy formation, the engines roaring even louder than before, enough that the vibration hummed through the deck plating. Avenger’s weapons opened up, just as they had at Triton, the eight might particle cannons pounding away at the enemy, the full force concentrated on a single target.

  Dixon was good. Very good, but not in Volkov’s class, and the dispersal pattern of the impacts was far more concentrated than it had been on Vostok. The hapless warship facing the barrage was caught in the rear, sent spinning out of control, tumbling end over end, her helmsman using his maneuvering thrusters to guide her safely out of the formation, out of the battle, out of danger, at least for the present.

  “That’s widened the gap,” Novak said, as bolts of emerald energy burst all around them, salvo after salvo of megawatt-scale force flying through the sky, the enemy gunners trying their hardest to bring them down, to inflict the one, devastating hit that would bring the battle to an immediate end. None struck home, Novak guiding Avenger through the firestorm with almost supernatural ease, dodging through the blasts before they could come even close to striking home.

  “Charging cannons, preparing for second strike,” Dixon said. “Helm, I’m going to need line of sight on one of the bad guys in five seconds. Target Beta Three, at the rear of the second formation.” A blaze of light blasted the viewscreen, and he added, “That was too damned close.”

  “Not close enough,” Singh said. “We’re almost clear, Commander.”

  “Firing!” Dixon yelled, and a second salvo pounded from Avenger’s mighty cannons, raining hellfire onto the enemy ship. This time the target was forewarned, tentative, and had boosted his shields as strongly as possible to resist the devastating blast. The shields burned bright as the systems struggled to disperse the energy, finally failing as the capacitors gave out, the resultant shockwave savaging their hull armor.

  “Not so good,” Singh said. “They’ve got a lot of hull breaches, but nothing too serious. They’re still in the game.”

  “We can live with that,” Corrigan replied. “Novak, careful…”

  “I see it,” she said, hurling the ship to the side to avoid a combined salvo from the two remaining ships in the second formation. Avenger darted through the trap, and out into open space, nothing ahead of her other than ice world and the starfield beyond. She shook her head, then asked, “Am I going for a standard orbit?”

  “Anything interesting on sensors?” Corrigan asked.

  “I’m picking up three outposts on the surface that still seem to be operational. One of them has half a dozen shuttles scattered all around. I’m guessing that they’re from the station.” Singh paused, then added, “There’s a debris field in orbit. The size suggests that it’s the remains of Prospero Station. All signs indicate a total loss. Based on the dispersion of the debris, I’d say that whatever happened took place about forty-eight hours ago.”

  Shaking his head, Corrigan replied, “I don’t believe in coincidences. They knew that we were coming here. We’ve been set up. Guided here.”

  “How?” Novak asked. “We didn’t know we were coming here until we boarded this ship. I know it seems a little convenient, but unless someone’s playing with precognition, I can’t see how anyone could have set a trap.”

  “Status of the enemy fleet?” Corrigan asked.

  “They’re heading out, moving into a dispersed blockade, I think,” Singh replied. “By the book, once more. The heavily damaged ship is limping towards the outermost moon. It’s small enough that they’ll be able to use it as a dry dock. I’d say her engineers are in for the job of their lives. The other damaged ship is moving off, heading outside the gravitational threshold.”

  “Heading for home to make repairs,” Corrigan mused. “Sensible.”

  “That was too damned easy,” Dixon said. “They pulled their punches. Any competent commander should have been able to hurt us badly. That’s no disrespect to Novak, but that formation was the worst possible choice. And don’t talk to me about political appointees. The war’s been going on for long enough now that anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing at least at some level has been pushed off into a sideshow.” Turning to Corrigan, he added, “If this was a trap, if they knew we were coming, then they’d have set their best to catch us.”

  “Do you have a recommendation, then?” Corrigan asked.

  Nodding, the hacker replied, “Execute a fast flyby around the surface. Contact the outposts and see if they’ve got any useful information for us, pull out anyone willing to take the risk of a flight into orbit, then run out of the system and make for somewhere else. The freeport we came for is gone, anyway. We’ve damaged two ships, one of them critically. That’s a good start. We head for a star we know is quiet, a brown dwarf, maybe, and we plan our next move. That’s the safe option.”

  “I agree,” Singh said. “My long-range sensors don’t show anything else of interest in the system. Just a few scattered outposts, all neutral, none of them worth a battle.”

  Corrigan frowned, then said, “I agree with your interpretation, but you’re overlooking one obvious flaw in your reasoning. If there’s nothing here worth a battle, then why have the Belters chosen to fight one?”

  “Surely that just means that we are the target?” Dixon suggested.

  “I
f that was the case, then why didn’t they put this task force at Triton? They hid one ship. They could have hidden three or four, crack ships, the best commanders, and done everything they could to bring out mission to an end before it even started. For that matter, if they were this well-informed about what we were planning, enough that they knew our plans better than we did, then why are we here at all? Why didn’t they stop us, right at the start?”

  “They want the ship,” Novak began. “No, that doesn’t work either. They’d be able to get all the technical specifications they wanted. While actually capturing the ship is a bonus, their strategy is based on beating us quickly, before there can be any serious new ship construction. They’re using the fleet they’ve got now, not one they might build over the next decade.”

  “Meaning that there is something else going on, another layer to this that we don’t know about.” He paused, then said, “Contact the surface. See if there’s anyone done there willing to talk to us.”

  “I’ve been trying,” Singh said. “Everyone’s playing dead.”

  “That’s the smart play,” Dixon replied. “If we lose, or if we do the smart thing and leave the system, they’re still here, and they’d be worried that the Belters might decide to take some revenge. There are families down there. I can’t blame them for playing it safe.” He paused, shrugged, and added, “We ought to think about that as well.”

  “See if you can hack into their computers. At least get me some sensor logs of the battle that destroyed the station. There must be something down there we can use. We need to know what happened here, and we need…”

  He was interrupted by the chime of the communicator, which then barked, “Collins to Bridge. I’m in Volkov’s quarters. He’s dead, sir.”

  “Christ.” Turning to Dixon, he said, “I’m going down there. You’ve got the deck until I get back. Find me some answers.”

  “Answers? I don’t even know the questions!”

  “You’re the hustler. Improvise. Fast.”

  Chapter 15

  Carter looked around the room, running a hand scanner to record every detail of Volkov’s quarters. It was unlikely that there would ever be a formal inquest, but for the sake of his family, she wanted to know what had happened. Even if it was just to make sure that they never knew the truth. She looked down at the body on the floor, the gun still in his hand, and sighed.

  “I guess he ended up taking my advice after all,” she murmured.

  “What was that?” Collins asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Nothing at all.” Placing the scanned back into her pocket, she knelt down by the body, and asked, “You think we should place him into cold storage now, or see what the automed can do with an autopsy?”

  Shaking her head, Collins replied, “He’s got two aged parents on Earth, and that’s about it. We’re not going to get the body back to them any time soon, and even if we did…” She paused, sighed, and said, “Let’s take him down to Sickbay and let the computers do their work for the formal record. Then we can bury him in space. He didn’t leave any instructions.”

  Carter paused, then said, “That’s a damned good point.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where’s the note? There’s no message, nothing for his parents, nothing for anybody. Not even a threat to come back from the dead and haunt those responsible for the death of his family. I don’t get it.”

  “Crazy people aren’t usually renowned for rational thought.”

  “He wasn’t crazy,” Carter said. “Sad, disturbed, tortured, but not crazy. He was as sane as you and I would be in the same circumstances. There’s something strange about this.” She looked down at the pistol, reaching down to check the charge, and said, “This wasn’t suicide.”

  “Come on, he’s got the gun in his hand…”

  “And the settings are wrong for the wound on his chest. At that power level, there wouldn’t be a body left for us to find. Someone drained enough energy to make it look like he’d shot himself, but unless his ghost decided to tamper with the evidence for fun, this wasn’t suicide, but murder.”

  “Murder?” Corrigan asked, walking into the room. “Are you sure?”

  “All the evidence points to it,” Carter replied. “Someone killed him, and did their best to set it up to look like suicide. Probably figuring that we wouldn’t investigate too closely, given his background.” Glancing at Collins, she added, “It damned near worked.”

  “Where do we go now?” Corrigan asked. “What about the security records for the room, the corridor outside?”

  “I’ll check,” Carter replied, “but I don’t think they’re going to do any good. The ship would have instantly flagged someone discharging a pistol unless the overrides had been engaged. We’re going to find out that someone used Volkov’s identification codes to knock out the local systems.”

  “Good guess,” Collins said, looking up from the console. “Almost…”

  “No, no, it’s an obvious enough move,” Corrigan said. “Fine. Let’s turn this around. Where was everyone else when the weapon was discharged? Have we got a time index on that?”

  “Medical scanner suggests a time of death about fifteen minutes ago,” Carter replied. “Right in the middle of the firefight.”

  “That rules out myself, Dixon, Novak and Singh. We were all on the bridge together, and nobody could have left without the rest of us knowing.”

  “Unless all four of you are in on it,” Collins replied.

  Corrigan walked over to the console, and said, “You were meant to be in Engineering, Carter in Warp Control.”

  “Meant to be?” Collins asked. “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “Right now I’m just eliminating…” Corrigan said. “Damn. Someone’s deleted the feeds from both areas.” Looking at Collins, he added, “That makes you both obvious suspects. Too obvious.”

  “I agree. Someone is attempting to set us up,” Carter replied. “We’ve got three prisoners on board. I think we’ve got our prime suspects. Has anyone been down to check on them lately?”

  “Not directly,” Collins said, “but when we went to battle stations, I made sure that the locks on their cells were fully functional, and looked at the camera footage to check that they weren’t trying anything.” Turning to Carter, she added, “You’re the expert on this ship, Lieutenant. Are there any weak spots that our friends might have been able to exploit?”

  Shaking her head, Carter replied, “I can’t think of anything, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. We hadn’t done a shakedown cruise, and the security systems on the detention area are meant to be the best available, but they haven’t been fully tested.”

  “The time to tell us that was before we put people in there,” Collins snapped. “For all you know they’ve been wandering around the decks at will.”

  “If they did, we’d all be dead, not just Volkov,” Carter said.

  “Enough,” Corrigan said, his voice deceptively soft. “This gets us nowhere. Call up the security feed on the cells.”

  “Doing it,” Collins said. “They’re intact. Nobody seems to have done anything to them.” She looked at the readouts, then tapped a control to speed through the footage, passing through each minute in a couple of seconds, watching as the prisoners darted comically around the cells, Martin especially gesturing with his hands as he paced around, screaming something at the hapless Clayton.

  “Maybe we should get her out of there,” Corrigan said.

  “Wait, play that last second back again,” Carter ordered.

  Nodding, Collins complied, then turned to Carter, and said, “I see it. Two minutes of footage has been duplicated. Someone’s messed with it a little, just enough that it wouldn’t be noticed if the feed was being watched live, but there’s a definite pattern here.” Turning to Corrigan, she added, “We ought to get down there right away.”

  “Carter, you’re with me,” Corrigan ordered. “Collins, I want you to lock this room down, c
ompletely down, then pick one of the auxiliary control feeds at random. Start monitoring the cells. I want a complete record of everything that happens while we question them.”

  “Sir, if they’re armed…,” Collins protested.

  “I’m playing a hunch,” Corrigan interrupted. “It’ll be interesting to see just how far it leads us.” He reached for the communications panel on the wall, and said, “Corrigan to Bridge. Sit-rep?”

  “The enemy are moving into their holding pattern,” Dixon replied. “The wounded bird has fled the system, and the crippled one has settled into the nest. We’ve got a chance of a firing run on them in about an hour if you feel like taking a monumentally stupid risk.”

  “With enthusiasm like that, how can we fail?” Corrigan asked. “Any progress hacking the surface computers?”

  “Some, but it’s going to take a while,” he replied. “They’re putting up quite a defense, and I think the Belters are trying it as well.”

  “The Belters? Any idea why?”

  “That’s the strange thing. I’d normally just assume that they were trying to cover up what they did here, but they seem more eager to obtain information than they are to remove it. I suppose it could just be a feint to try and throw me off, but I think there’s more going on here.”

  “Keep looking, and warn me instantly if anything changes.”

  “Trust me, skipper, you’ll hear the scream down there. Bridge out.”

  Corrigan led the way down the corridor, Carter a pace behind him, and asked, “Any other thoughts, Lieutenant?”

  “Only that your mission…”

  “Our mission, Lieutenant,” Corrigan said with a smile. “I think we’re both in this together now. To put it bluntly, you’re in rather too deep.”

  “Fine, our mission is not what we were told.”