by GARY DARBY
“Check,” Jadar replied.
He jerked his head toward the young officer. “Lengley get those bars down tight again.” Jadar ran his hands over the controls, testing what he had left in terms of thrust and maneuverability.
“Shar,” he ordered in a tense voice, “plaster yourself to that scope; I need to know the exact instant they fire and the missile’s course.”
“You got it,” Shar replied and turned to the sophisticated tracking radar. The radar’s ability to follow speeding objects would prove critical in Jadar’s scheme.
“They’re closing,” Shar stated in a low tone.
The seconds trickled by as the tension in the compartment thickened with each passing moment. “Okay, gentlemen,” Jadar expressed softly, “Stand by for emergency deceleration and a 180-degree reverse course.
He grinned wickedly. “And won’t they be surprised."
Jadar reached out and held his hand over the console. “And—now!”
He hit the command emergency stop. The ship shuddered and shook before it flipped over and blasted at full thrust in the opposite direction. The ship slowed, came to a full stop, and then leaped forward, heading right for the Zephyr.
Jadar could just picture the stunned look on their attackers’ faces when they saw their prey racing toward them. It was those moments of hesitation that Jadar counted on for his idea to work.
With both ships hurtling towards each other at a tremendous speed, the distance between them seemed to close in an instant.
Shar yelped, “They’ve fired. One missile. Straight down our throat at Mark 268!”
“Got it,” Jadar spat out. He cut the ship’s engine thrust and rotated the craft ninety degrees so that its starboard side fronted the speeding torpedo.
With quick jabs of his finger, Jadar stabbed the control to fire both starboard escape pods along azimuth 268, one after the other.
With a slight jolt, both pods exploded in succession from their bays and rocketed toward the onrushing projectile.
Jadar rolled the transport again, this time so that their port side faced the oncoming craft. Counting to three, he repeated the sequence and fired the two port-side pods toward the speeding Zephyr.
Knowing that he had done what he could, Jadar flipped the ship toward the M-class planet and hit the acceleration thruster. They would still try for a safe haven on its surface but unless his gambit worked, it would be a very short race.
Seconds later a bright flash of light illuminated space around their craft. Shar punched his fist in the air and hollered, “Gotcha!”
He slapped Jadar on the back. “Scratch one missile. Great job.”
“What about their ship?” Jadar demanded.
“Still coming—” Shar started when a flare like light filled the darkness behind them.
“Whoa,” Shar began, and then laughed. “They’re decelerating, and one or more of the pods must have hit’em dead-on.”
With a pounding jolt, the little troop ship lurched sideways, and electrical sparks flew from the control console. “Ion cannon!” Jadar yelled. “We’re hit!”
The ship began to corkscrew, its flight and navigation panels smoking ruins. Out of control, it careened headlong toward the onrushing planet.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Star Date 2433.060
Aboard The Queen Bee
Shanon was missing.
Dason kept glancing around trying his best not to appear nervous or anxious, but he could feel his stomach growing tighter with each passing minute. It was taking every ounce of willpower he had not to whirl around and go search for her.
The last thing he wanted was to alert Bianca and her gang that Shanon had gone somewhere she shouldn’t. That could be disastrous for them all.
Still, he blamed himself. He had given in to her when the best course would have been to say no. And now he had this sinking feeling that she was in deep trouble, or worse.
TJ peered at him with a questioning expression. Seeing that she sensed his distress, he started to respond when Shanon jogged into the cargo hold and stopped next to him, a little breathless.
Dason whispered, “I was getting worried, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Did you find it?”
Shanon leaned toward him so that their shoulders touched and handed him a nano circuitry board for the laser splitter. “You mean this?”
Dason glared at her. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
With a small wink, she replied, “I found it.”
“Well?”
Shanon shook her head and murmured, “Not now, definitely not the place or time. Besides, Bianca’s pacing like a hungry Maw Tygress. If I didn’t know better, I would say the lady is a bit anxious.”
Dason bit his tongue and with the others turned their attention to the outlaw leader. Bianca held up a hand and began. “Listen up. We’ve got a job to do.”
Glancing around, Dason could see that the assembly in the hangar hold was the same as on Stygar Six, minus Jy, but with a few additions, including Stinneli.
“We just popped out of the Helix Nebula’s inner rim. Ahead of us is a G-type star with a Class M planet. There’s nothing in our data banks on the planet. It’s uncharted and unexplored, so we’ll be going down cold.
“Long-range sensors indicate its atmosphere is Earthlike and surface gravity is at 98 percent Terra standard. So we won’t need protective suiting.”
The poacher leader looked right at the novices. Her eyes, voice and face stern and no-nonsense in expression. “Once we ground, watch where you put your hands and feet, because if you don’t, you might be missing body parts by the time we’re through.”
She let the message sink in before resuming. “The reason for our detour is that we've received a distress signal from the Celeste T, the private yacht of Mr. Samuel Theodore Pinkins.”
Bianca jutted her chin toward Sami and asked, “You savvy Samuel Pinkins?”
Sami gave a little shrug. “Uh, the sector governor?”
“No,” Bianca stated flatly. “Do the names Galactic Express, Stellar Cruises, Galactic Mining and Exploration, Interstellar Outfitters to name a few, ring a bell?”
“Sure,” Sami answered. “Interstellar makes an awesome mega-hertz stereo woofer. You can sound-bounce or do a singular wave or . . .”
Sami’s voice lowered to a whisper and then stopped as he noticed Bianca glaring. Several renegades laughed out loud.
Bianca pursed her lips together before saying, “Samuel Pinkins runs those space corporations plus about twenty others. He personally owns two planets. One of the richest men in the Imperium.”
“Oh,” Sami replied in meek tones, “that Samuel Pinkins.”
“That Samuel Pinkins,” Bianca retorted. “If he’s down there, we’ve hit the jackpot.”
Gesturing toward the five novices, she said, “And to ease your conscience, we’re not talking ransom money, we’re talking salvage and rescue reward money. So remember the deal, and no foul-ups.”
Bianca shifted her weight while saying, “Here’s the plan. The Queen will skim the atmosphere at a hundred thousand meters and do a Heerdon maneuver. Our own little band of scouts will pilot us out. I assume they’ve all done at least one Heerdon.
“The distress signal is intermittent and very weak so we don’t have a good lock on the Celeste’s precise location. That means a search grid. Anyar is taking Jy’s place in Stinger Six with me, and I’ll be the lead ship.
“Once we clear the Queen, spread out in a standard V formation. One and two on my left wing, four and five on my right. Three kilometers apart. Once we locate the Celeste wait for my orders. Any questions?”
No one raised a hand so Bianca ordered, “Egress in twenty minutes.” The group split apart, each crew heading for their respective craft.
Once aboard Stinger Six, Bianca ordered, “Sami, pilot seat. I’ll copilot. Dason, take the jump seat.”
Dason handed Sami the circuitry pane
l which only took a few minutes to correctly install. Once done, Bianca and Sami ran a quick diagnostic to ensure the ship’s systems read the new board.
Bianca leaned over and gave Dason and Sami their scout knives. “Just in case,” she muttered. With raised eyebrows at her action, the two slid their knives into their respective scabbards.
To Dason, it felt good to have some semblance of weaponry given that they were about to make planet fall on an unknown alien world.
From his jump seat position, Dason watched Sami and Bianca go over the preflight sequence. He wasn’t surprised that Bianca had Sami double-check everything, considering the hazardous upcoming flight maneuver.
“How many Heerdons have you done?” Bianca asked Sami.
“Plenty,” he replied. Bianca’s skeptical stare caused him to shrug and say, “Okay, one.”
“One,” she sighed. “I guess that’s better than none. You remember the routine?”
“Sure. Wait for the flip-over,” Sami began, “we go static and I hit the boost button and out we go. No problem, I think.”
With tight lips, Bianca muttered, “Right, no problem, I think.”
Dason found Bianca’s directive for the scouts to fly them out more than a little surprising. It made him feel that perhaps none of her crew had the training to do a Heerdon. Like Sami, he and the other novices had done at least one in training.
The maneuver was a boost-out stratagem in which the mother ship, inverted, would come to a dead stop relative to the planet’s surface. With the flight bay doors wide open to space, the scouters would dart out like bees from a hive and dive toward the planet.
However, the tactic had the potential for tragic consequences.
First, there would be a short period of weightlessness as the artificial gravity and main engines were shut down to allow the departing ships a quick, hot boost out.
The scouter pilot, experiencing the twin aspects of negative g’s and vertigo, would have to fly the vessel under those conditions out of a very confined space.
The slightest misjudgment and they could slam into a side bulkhead or overhead.
The second problem concerned the Queen. If engine failure occurred and the crew couldn’t restart the main drive, the big ship would corkscrew down in a death fall to the surface.
But the dangerous tactic’s value lay in the fact that it placed the scouters almost on top of their target and considerably shortened their transit time to the planet.
Dason could only guess that Bianca had accepted the risk to the Queen and to the scouter crews as acceptable. He also assumed that the reason the Queen wasn't going to down planet, was to lessen the strain on the Holett patches.
“Bianca,” Zane called over the ship’s communicator, “we’ve got a little problem.”
“Can we discuss it in the clear?” Bianca answered while glancing at Sami and Dason.
“Roger,” Zane responded, “Sensors are showing heavy thunderstorms over your search area.”
“Storm magnitude?” she asked.
“Five or six on the Kamuchi scale. They’re big, nasty supercells. Wind shears, high straight-line winds, and upward vortices embedded in every cell. We don’t see any tornadic activity, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility.”
Dason whistled to himself. If they hit a magnitude-six storm, it would knock the little scouter around like a stone bouncing down the side of a mountain.
On the technical level, scouters could fly through such a brutal storm, and even an F2 or F3-sized tornado, but the inertial dampeners would have a hard time keeping them aloft.
Any scouter pilot who took on such a maneuver, would find himself or herself wishing they hadn’t in very short order.
Bianca mulled over Zane’s news before she replied. “Got it. Thanks for the update. We’ll continue with the plan but work the storms’ periphery until they die out, or we find a way to navigate through.”
“Check. Five minutes to roll-over,” Zane stated.
Bianca keyed her communicator. “Stinger craft, this is six. We have severe t-storms over our target site. Do not attempt to enter the storm cells. We’ll wait them out if need be.”
Minutes later, she turned to Sami and ordered, “Get a status check on the others, we’re close to boost out.”
“Can do,” Sami replied. “Stinger craft: status checks.”
In sequence, all ships reported they were flight ready. “Very well,” Sami intoned. “Stand by.”
To the astro-bridge, he reported, “Bridge, all craft have green boards and the Queen Bee herself is ready to go look for some honey.”
While Bianca glared at Sami, Karm’s voice came back with a noticeable laugh. “Roger, six. One minute and good luck on finding the honey.”
With Bianca shaking her head in apparent disapproval at Sami, the two finished their final checks. Dason could see that both pushed their pressure bars a little tighter across their bodies in anticipation of boost-out.
Seconds ticked by, and Karm stated, “Stinger craft, bay depressurized, bay door opening.”
The massive metal clamshell doors slid back to reveal the black of space turning purple and then a dark blue-green as the Queen sliced through the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Dason heard Karm say, “Beginning roll-over, prepare for dead-stop.”
Above them, Dason could see the sky start to swing through the giant skylight until a broad arc of the planet’s green and brown landscape slid into view.
Karm’s voice came again. “Ten seconds, prepare for boost-out.”
Dason could feel a deep rumbling coming through the deck plates as the big ship powered up in the deceleration sequence.
Karm began the countdown. “And five, four, three . . .”
The rumbling became a loud growl and the shuddering increased as Sami poised his hands over the flight controls.
“Two and one. Dead-stop!” Karm shouted.
Dason’s stomach tried to crawl up his gullet as full weightlessness hit. At the same time, Sami punched in his thrusters, brought the scouter’s nose straight up, opened his main engines to full power and shot the ship through the bay opening.
Seconds later, after peering at her flight screen, Bianca ordered, “Okay, pilot, everyone’s cleared the bay, take us down.”
As they rapidly descended through the atmosphere, Dason could see soaring cumulonimbus clouds reaching upward.
Their tops appeared like great white anvils while giant dark bubbles seemed to cover their sloped sides. Lightning strokes seared the swirling cloud’s black innards.
Watching the titanic forces at work, Dason appreciated Bianca’s orders to steer clear of the tempest. Even sturdy craft like the scouters would be hard pressed to withstand the unpredictable nature of supercell thunderstorms.
Sami piloted the small craft down to a safe distance from the raging squalls while they scanned the terrain. On each side, Dason could see a series of valleys, some broad and open, others steep and V-shaped, broken by sharp ridges and high, irregular hills.
In the distance, highlands trailed off into a vast, undulating, brown plain, pockmarked here and there with dull yellow-green foliage. Deep within the valleys came the occasional glitter of sunlight striking water.
Sami dropped the scouter to half a kilometer above the surface, and from where he sat, Dason marveled at the forest’s enormous trees that would rival Terra’s giant redwood sequoias in size.
Sami glanced over at Bianca. “If the crash site has trees like those, you want me to try and set down?”
Bianca shook her head. “No, we’ll land as close as we can and hike in, if necessary.” For several minutes, Sami put the scouter through a series of long, stretched-out figure-eight maneuvers to wait out the storms.
Bianca leaned back from the console and let out a breath that lifted her bangs. “Okay, we’ve got a problem. The meteorological radar is showing new storm cells spinning up one after another, but the whole system doesn’t seem to be moving.”
> “So what do you want me to do?” Sami asked. “I can keep doing figure eights all day, but how about we try a new number like sevens or threes or—”
Bianca’s baleful glare caused Sami to close his mouth. She spoke over the comms, “Stinger craft, it appears that we’ve run into a stationary weather pattern. Work the edges of the storm line, but do not fly into these t-storms. They’re still too strong.”
Bianca turned to Sami and directed, “Ease her in, and I do mean ease.”
“Easy on the easing,” Sami responded and maneuvered the ship closer to the nearest cloud wall.
Bianca pointed toward the churning storm clouds. “See how the clouds swirl in different directions. That usually means the cell is sucking in air, growing stronger, and most likely has significant wind shears, updrafts, and microbursts. Don’t get any closer, too dangerous.”
Bianca motioned toward a nearby high knoll while saying to Sami, “Use that hill as your center point and spiral outward in your search pattern.”
“Can do, ma’am,” Sami replied. “Around and around we’ll go and where we—”
“Knock it off,” Bianca ordered and turned to Dason and Anyar. “Scan on each side, since we can’t get a lock on that signal, we’ll do this the old-fashioned way, eyeballs on high beam.”
Dason nodded and surveyed the ground below. The turquoise-colored forest canopy provided few breaks; semidarkness swathed the few openings in the trees.
The flight of five scouters flew over the area, each scouter moving farther and farther away from Stinger Six in their search patterns.
Dason began to doubt that they would be able to spot the downed space yacht under the thick tree covering. He was about to say so when he heard Nase intone over the communicator, “Stinger Six, this is Stinger One, we’ve got something below us, and it might be the Celeste.
“We’re forty clicks from you on an azimuth of one-six-zero. We’re not able to see much from the air, too much vegetation, and we’ve got rain showers moving through.”
“Stinger One,” Bianca replied, “how sure are you that you’ve located the Celeste?”
A new voice answered. “Six, this is Granger. We’re not all that certain. The visibility is marginal, but whatever is down there looks man-made. Sensors are telling us that the object is metallic and the approximate size of a small spacecraft.”