Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Funny how that works.” He glanced at the timer. “Okay, we’re coming up on the space station with the good pancake place. Squee, you need a break?”

  He released Squee and she serenely floated up in front of him.

  “You’re not bouncing off the walls, so I’ll call that a no. Coal, sensors on full spread once we drop out of FTL. We’re right at one of the borders where VectorCorp butts up against JPW, so the agents tend to pile up and really try to outdo one another in places like these.”

  He tapped through a few settings and held tight to the controls as the Carpinelli Field eased away and the ship dropped into sublight speeds. Light shifted down from ultraviolet to the visible spectrum. His cockpit overlay traced out a navigation marker over the deep space station that contained pancakes along with presumably some other important things that he couldn’t care less about. Two more points followed, one registering the transponder of a VectorCorp agent and another registering the counterpart code for a JPW agent.

  “What did I say? Setting new heading, get ready to jump,” Lex said.

  “Not yet,” Coal said.

  “Yes, yet. The VectorCorp guy is already hailing us.”

  “There is a broadcast with a deep level of encoding and metadata identifying itself to be associated with Ma.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “I have to decode it to know that, and it is extremely weak. We need to stay in range of the station until I get enough repetitions for the CRC to resolve correctly.”

  “Attention, unmarked CAII. Readings indicate an unauthorized passage through VectorCorp corridors without travel clearance,” squawked Lex’s communicator.

  He pressed his thumb to the controls. “Uh, could you check again, please. I’m pretty sure I’m still seven hundred and fifty-three kilometers outside of any marked VC corridor,” he said.

  “Recent changes to sublight corridor safety buffers extend the no-fly zone to seven hundred fifty kilometers.”

  “I may have to run the numbers again, but last time I checked, seven hundred and fifty-three is greater than seven hundred fifty.”

  The ship began accelerating toward him. “We are permitted a sensor inaccuracy margin of three percent.”

  “That extends the buffer to a maximum of seven hundred seventy-two point five kilometers,” Coal said.

  Lex muted the microphone. “You just focus on the message.”

  “I can do two things at once, Lex.”

  “I’d rather you do one thing twice as fast.” He unmuted the communicator. “I notice you’re a lot closer, and my path is parallel to the corridor, so if you’ll do a more accurate scan—”

  “Is this Trevor Alexander?” the man snapped.

  He muted. “Is the vocal scrambler on?”

  “It is,” said Coal.

  He unmuted. “I shall neither confirm nor deny my identity. If I wanted you to know who I am, I’d have an active transponder, now wouldn’t I?” He muted the microphone again. “How much time do you need, because this guy’s about to try to get up close and personal.”

  Another connection activated.

  “This is JPW Route Enforcement. Unnamed ship, please—”

  He slapped the com. “Wait your turn!”

  “Forty-eight seconds,” Coal said.

  “Give me a countdown, and give me a visual indicator of max range for whatever you’re doing,” Lex said. “Squee, buckle up, we’re doing the classic runaround.”

  Squee curled around his neck and held tight. Lex popped open a compartment and fished out a pack of gum. A wireframe visualized around the distant space station. The good news was the whole station was outside the corridor, a standard method to avoid paying ruinous fees to whichever transit company was running it. The bad news was the framework was very close to the station.

  “I said maximum range,” he said.

  “You said twice as fast, too. Closer is better. Higher signal-to-noise ratio.”

  “So be it,” he said, popping the gum into his mouth.

  He turned the audio from the communicator down so that the increasingly agitated demands of the VectorCorp and JPW agents dropped down to a dull drone. With relative peace and quiet restored to the cockpit, he punched the acceleration.

  His navigation screen started to flash with assorted warnings as the agents of both companies adopted what Lex liked to think if as “big boss-man posture.” Considering that their role in ensuring the makers and maintainers of the corridors got every credit they were owed, the companies made sure agents were very well equipped. As beefy as Karter had made the SOB, physics were physics and there were limits to just how fast and maneuverable a ship could be outside of an atmosphere without tearing itself to pieces. Both ships shifting into intercept position were as near to a match for the SOB as made no difference. But of the three ships, only one had Lex at the controls.

  “We are now inside the minimum perimeter. This is much better. Thank you,” Coal said.

  “Uh-huh,” Lex said. “Why am I seeing three dozen new ‘hostile markers’ on the HUD?”

  “The VectorCorp ship has deployed thermal focus drones.”

  “They have those now?!” he said.

  “Evidently.”

  “Fun… Well, get ready for a real good signal, because we’re getting closer.”

  He tugged the controls and angled the SOB toward the station. As the combination of speed and proximity shifted from inadvisable to dangerous to suicidal, the shifting points on his HUD began to cluster up. Thermal focus drones were an increasingly popular “less lethal” method to disable ships. They were little more than poorly focused lasers with huge power cells and puny thrusters. Heat management was such a problem for spacecraft that even a few extra focused heat sources—three dozen, for instance—could easily kick the thermal fail-safes on if they were trained directly on the sensors. Depending on the ship, spiking the hull temperature could dump the ship into a low-power mode or even cause a full propulsion shutdown. It was “less lethal” instead of “nonlethal” because space wasn’t nice enough to bring a ship to a stop just because the engine was shutdown. All it did was keep the ship going in a straight line. If that line happened to intersect with something more durable than the ship, then “less lethal” was more of a matter of statistics than actual individual survival. Fortunately, drones were controlled by computers, computers followed the rules, and the rules were very conservative.

  Lex, on the other hand, was not.

  He whisked close enough to the surface of the space station to read the names on the storefronts of the promenade within. Drones took potshots only when they could do so without the risk of hitting the station. A single poorly maintained security ship, probably on the payroll of the station’s management, emerged from a docking bay to further complicate Lex’s life.

  Twenty new dots filled his HUD.

  “Looks like JPW has drones, too. Jeez. You take a break from this sort of thing for a couple of months and they go and get upgrades. How are we doing?” he said.

  “Fourteen seconds remaining.”

  He squinted at the wraparound display, mentally tracing out potential escape paths. These people trying to bring him in were clearly pulling in the big bucks, because they’d already started to withdraw their drones to form a relatively dense network of them surrounding the station. If they couldn’t get him while he was close, they’d wait until he tried to leave. That was problematic, because FTL was inherently a straight-line sort of thing, at least in relative terms, and straight lines weren’t known for their evasive potential.

  “Five seconds,” Coal said.

  “What do you think? Do these agents have a good way to positively ID me?”

  “The ship is distinctive, but not unique,” she said.

  “Okay, good, because they’re not going to like this move. You ready?”

  “Message decoded. I will play the message for you when we are clear, but I be
lieve a premature ‘I told you so’ is at this point appropriate.”

  “Fair enough. Might scratch the paint on this one.”

  “I do not have a layer of paint. I have a specialized anodization layer for maximum—”

  Lex rolled down the volume for the interior speakers, twitched the controls, and maxed out the rear thrusters. The lowered inertial inhibitor meant the acceleration pushed him into his seat. The ship was carefully angled to pass through the densest cluster of drones. They were each about the size of a two-liter bottle of soda. Heavy enough to get your attention if you impacted them at reasonable speeds, but not enough to shatter anything important. He blazed toward them. As expected, both agents jumped at the opportunity to be the one to catch him. They issued whatever commands were necessary to guide their drones into an intercept path, doubling the concentration dead ahead. The drones started jockeying for position, programming preventing outright collisions. All of the sudden repositioning meant only about a third of them were actually focusing their thermal beams.

  The temperature ticked up steadily, but the bulk of the heat was being contributed to power funneling into his boosters. Colorful sparkles danced across his shields as he plowed through the first couple of drones.

  “So far so good,” he said.

  He picked up speed. The impacts started knocking dozens of percentage points off the shields.

  “A little more.”

  Just as he was passing the last of the drone cluster, the shields gave out and the remaining drones got their acts together. In less than a second, the sensors were fooled into thinking the hull temperature was high enough to start pushing the ship into low-power mode.

  “We’ve really got to talk to Karter about beefing the shields up against these sorts of things.”

  “I can do so right now, if you want,” Coal said, her voice barely audible.

  “What?” he said, raising her volume.

  “Thermal reflect mode is disabled by default because it is a violation of civilian equipment laws. Would you like me to switch it on?”

  “Well not now. I’ve already committed to this dumb maneuver.”

  Both agents’ ships started to move into a pursuit trajectory. They’d been stationary, so they still had a lot of acceleration to do to catch up with Lex even in his mostly powered-down state. But they also had tractor beams. The ships latched on a second or two apart and flared their retrothrusters. Lex’s speed started to drop. The drones started to move ahead of him.

  “Just a little bit more,” he said, watching his sensors.

  The agents pivoted their ships to put their main thrusters to work on bringing Lex to a full stop more quickly. As they maneuvered as close to each other as possible to get the best deceleration vector, they fell more directly behind him.

  “That’ll do.”

  He popped open the “secret” control menu and activated the heat dumpers. The back of his ship blossomed like a very high-tech flower, huge fins unfurling and radiating heat to the vacuum. His temperature dropped down to the safe zone well before the ships could work out that they might need to get his heat back into the danger zone. A moment later, he pushed his engines for all they were worth. They were dragged along behind him for a few hundred kilometers before the tractor beams gave out. A handful of drones along either side of him valiantly tried to do their jobs, but the way ahead was clear. Lex was free to make his FTL jump.

  An automated warning tried to keep him from popping the Carpinelli Field on. Technically the drones were too close for an ideal jump, but very little about his interstellar travel was ideal. The field activated, partially encapsulating the two nearest drones, and he activated FTL. This had a rather unpleasant effect on the two pieces of VectorCorp equipment that got caught up in the mix. They were suddenly asked by the laws of physics to move at a gradient of different speeds, starting at the several hundred meters per second they’d been moving in standard space to the multiples of the speed of light that the Carpinelli Field facilitated. This resulted in the drones being smeared across a pretty significant swath of space, with most of the debris no more than a few atoms in size.

  “Hopefully they don’t know who I am, because I really don’t want to have to pay to replace those things.”

  Angry voices on his communicator garbled away along with anything remotely visible through his windows, and he was once again in the relative safety of FTL transit.

  “Glad to know I’ve still got it. We’re going to do a quick juke in two minutes. Is that enough time to tell me what we just learned?” Lex asked.

  “Plenty. Here is the message.”

  After a brief silence, a similar but not identical vocalization played through the speakers. While it took a bit of a trained ear to detect the differences, the “voice” he was hearing now was Ma as opposed to her lightly malfunctioning subset, Coal.

  “If you are hearing this, you are either a frequent collaborator with Karter Dee or in position of an illegitimately obtained transceiver with his personal decryption settings. Based upon present circumstances, it is likely you are Lex. Hello, Lex. I apologize if you have attempted to contact me and have not received an answer. This has no doubt been a source of anxiety for you, sufficient to compel you to visit Big Sigma in person. If you are presently en route, I must request that you reroute immediately. A recent data-based attack and security breach, which we are still investigating, has necessitated the complete shutdown of all communications into and out of Big Sigma. This message has been recorded and placed on re-broadcast at all known ‘juke points’ you have used in your approach to Big Sigma. If you arrive at Big Sigma, we will be unable to provide you with a safe transit window through the moat. Moreover, any attempt to penetrate the moat without a safe transit window will be interpreted as an additional attempted security breach and will be subject to orbital and land-based defenses. This can and will lead to the destruction of your vessel. Please understand that the nature of this threat is such that even the accidental destruction of a valuable ally is preferable to further loss of data control. We will be in contact if your aid is required. Thank you again for your concern.”

  “That concludes the message,” Coal said. “I reiterate, I told you so.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a long shot, Coal. This is me we’re talking about. Disaster magnet. So I guess all we can do is contact Mitch and see what she got. Maybe we’ll be lucky and she’ll have turned up nothing, and someone else will have to deal with whatever’s going on.”

  “Based upon present evidence and prior precedent, I predict that I will once again be telling you so.”

  “Mmm-hmmm…” Lex grumbled. “You know, there was a time when my ship wasn’t sassy. Starting to miss those days.”

  “I will gladly deactivate. I am sure there won’t be any more urgent messages to decrypt that, if left unreceived, will lead to your destruction via Karter Dee–designed orbital weaponry. However, if it is your intention to be blown to pieces by energy weapons, I will remind you that this can be more efficiently achieved by once again providing me with a fusion device.”

  “No fusion devices. Now stand by to contact Mitch.”

  #

  “Michella… Michella!”

  She snorted and sat up. The sun was a lot lower on the horizon than she remembered. But then, she’d not been spending much time looking out the window of her recently acquired office. She turned her bleary eyes to the doorway and found Jon standing there with yet another round of coffees.

  “Wha-what? What is it? Did we get any replies?” she said, quickly pulling her brain together.

  “We got a few. Do you want them now or after you’re done composing your letter to someone whose name apparently starts with the letter D a few hundred times?” He pulled a tissue from a dispenser and handed it to her. “It takes a special kind of person to pass out on a virtual keyboard and still get it to work. Those things are supposed to have palm rejection. I guess they don’t have fa
ce rejection.”

  She wiped the face print from her input panel. “It’s not my fault business hours on three of the locations I’m trying to contact start in the middle of the night local time.”

  He placed a hand on his hip. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

  “But I was up in the middle of the night calling them, which is why I’m fighting to stay awake now. This wouldn’t be happening if you’d agreed to the night-shift, day-shift thing.”

  “The network wouldn’t go for keeping someone on staff around the clock, and unlike you, I’ve got a social life to think about. Donnie says I need a work-life balance and I agree. However, I did get some messages back. Lieutenant Huxley says there’s been no motion in his sector. Captain Issacson says nothing by her. Major Kimanthi says nothing by them. But General Soltani got really cagey and insisted he speak to you directly.”

  “Soltani. Soltani,” she said. “He’s with the Teeker army. I’ve had some good dealings with him.” She gestured her fingers in the general vicinity of her larger input panel and called up some regional data. “Okay. It’s still day where he is. Are you up for taking notes?”

  “Yes. Unlike you, I’ve actually slept in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Good. Sit down, stay silent, and take notes. Off-line mode. I don’t want anything getting backed up to off-site until I’m sure we’ve cleaned it of any potentially sensitive information.”

  “Oh. Good. We’re persuading military officers to leak sensitive information again. Potential treason is my favorite part of being a journalist.”

  “Technically they would be guilty of treason, not us. And it wouldn’t be treason because we’re not at war with the Teekers.”

  “These are technicalities normal investigators don’t need to know about, Michella.”

  “Which is why they don’t get the good scoops. Are you off-line?”

  He tapped his slidepad. “Yes.”

  “Okay, here we go.”

  She called up a sophisticated bit of software and activated it. Several windows popped up, each representing a different layer of encryption and/or redirection. That this needed to be layered atop the already fairly excessive network security at GolanaNet spoke volumes for the sort of conversations Michella had been getting into over the years.