Vick's Vultures (Union Earth Privateers Book 1)

by Scott Warren

  The reactor shielding was breached, though the explosion only harmlessly scattered the remains of his beloved Dreadstar.

  The captain turned to him, “You’re sure he’ll ping us?” she asked.

  Tavram nodded, attempting to compose himself, “He will. He is thorough, and will take no chances. I am surprised he has not seen the heat signature of your ship already.”

  The captain didn’t answer him, instead thumbing the main circuit again.

  “This is the Captain. As of 0430 hours the Dreadstar has been destroyed by a hostile Dirregaunt cruiser designated Primary. We are expecting an active sensor pulse imminently. The attenuator is online. It’s going to get a bit warm.”

  Sure enough the sensors called it out just as the electro-magnetic wave passed over them.

  “Captain, nine-nine point five percent attenuation. Pulse strength recorded at… oh God, 1.2 gigawatts.”

  “Fuck, Yuri shut down the attenuator now! If we eat another pulse we’ll all be boiled.”

  A wave of heat washed over control and Tavram gasped. Instantly the room had become an oven, the metal rail which he gripped painful to touch. He could see heat shimmers in the air, and every light and screen began to flicker. What happened?

  “Engineering, conn. Come in. Engineering, conn. Shit,” the captain thumbed the general circuit, “Damage control parties to engineering.”

  Chapter 2: Attenuation

  Sergeant Aesop Cohen sucked scalding fire into his lungs. At least that’s what it felt like. Beside him, Aurea hung weightless attempting not to touch any of the scalding hot metal that surrounded them as she roused him. He hadn’t felt heat like this since fighting a fire aboard the Hyperion. Thank god the vacuum suit still protected most of his body or he’d be in as bad a shape as the other engineers. They floated at the ends of their lanyards, passed out or worse. Most of engineering was down, both equipment and personnel, and the heat sirens were blaring in his ears. Who knew what damage to the computers the heat had done before they’d automatically shut down. The smell of burnt circuitry was heavy in the air. Faint blue smoke drifted in the dark compartment, illuminated by sporadic flashes from the struggling lights.

  “Human Aesop, what is going on?”

  He coughed, his throat so dry and rough he could barely speak, “The attenuator. It turns the electromagnetic energy of active sensors into heat energy and disburses it inside the ship. It stops a reflection, but we have to deal with the waste heat.”

  “There are no safeguards against this?” asked Aurea, gesturing around them at the smoking equipment.

  “We don’t have data on Dirregaunt sensors, 1.2 gigawatts is 10 times the Condor’s peak output. Just for an active sensor sweep? Come on.”

  Aesop detached his lanyard and pushed towards the upper deck of engineering.

  “Human Aesop, your comrades!”

  “We have to shut down the attenuator first. If they pulse again we won’t survive the temperature increase.”

  The heat on the upper level was even worse. Aesop pushed past the free-floating form of Chief Engineer Denisov, stopped briefly to check his pulse to make certain Yuri was still alive before continuing towards the firefighting locker. He winced as the latches singed his bare hands, having stowed his gloves and helmet before showing Aurea the engine room. He pulled out two pairs of asbestos gloves, handing one to Aurea. She seemed better able to handle the heat, but she tugged them on anyway, filling only the first two fingers and thumb of each glove.

  Pushing himself toward the attenuator he could see shimmering air coming off the device’s vents. It looked fried, but it was built to work at extreme temperatures. “Aurea,” he called, trying to ignore the feeling of his face baking as he drew closer. It was like sticking his face into an oven. “Those cables on the other side are where it interfaces with the matte plating on the hull. When I give you the signal, pull them out. There will be sparks.”

  Aesop tore open the fore panel. Smoke billowed out, along with the acrid stench of burned rubber. The gaskets and fan bearings had melted. It was easy to see why, much of the shielding for the cables within had melted together too. Coughing, he plunged his hand in up to the shoulder, trying to keep his cheek from touching the top of the panel. He felt around, looking for the emergency shutoff he knew was there. His finger wrapped around the little lever and he jerked it forward, hoping the innards of the device hadn’t been completely slagged.

  The lever cut power to the attenuator from the engine room, but after absorbing a pulse it could self-power for a time off the waste heat, enough to trigger the reactive plating on the hull. Even after shutting it down it was still a danger while hardwired to the plating, but pulling those connections without securing power first would almost certainly start a fire. The lever isolated the attenuator from the ship’s reactor, but the device was still able to self-power from waste heat. The only problem was, any more heat would lead to a fire. Fire killed a ship as dead as any xeno weapon. The Ulysses, the Merit, and the Haldeman had all been lost to shipboard fires. A fire in space doubled in size every 30 seconds and a closed system left nowhere for the smoke to go unless the captain vented the entire atmosphere. It took less than 5 minutes to choke everyone aboard those ships and raise the cabin temperature over 200 degrees Celsius.

  “Aurea, now!” he shouted. She braced her feet against the bulkhead, screaming as the heat from the metal burned her right through the thin shoes of her suit. She yanked at the cables, putting the leverage offered by her long legs to use. The thick cords resisted briefly, then snapped free in a shower of sparks. No longer held in place by the tension of the cables, the Malagath technician spun across the engine room, slamming against the bulkhead with a sickening crunch. On the level below he heard the access hatch to the central compartment open and the damage control teams enter the engine room to search for fires and casualties.

  Aurea collided with a backup engineering console and was now drifting nearby. He pushed off the attenuator, reassuring her as he moved to thumb the control circuit.

  “Bridge engineering, attenuator offline and disconnected.”

  The captain’s voice, previously issuing orders to the damage control station switched back to the open microphone, “Engineering bridge aye, what’s your status?”

  “Lieutenant Denisov is down, along with the rest of engineering. Lots of burns. No fires that I can see but most of the equipment is offline. Captain, without the attenuator we’re naked, another sweep will spot us.”

  “You let me worry about the fucking sensor sweeps, right? You get your ass to the GSD and keep that fucker online. And stay out of damage control’s way if you can. If there’s no fire we’ll circulate the engine room, get some cool air in there at least. We can’t vent in view of that battleship,” said Captain Marin. True to her word, the fans began to hiss, blowing blessedly cool air into the compartment. It was a temporary relief; the ship was only going to get hotter until they could break line of sight with the Dirregaunt ship.

  Aurea whimpered beside the console, “I believe my shoulder has broken. But I will help if I can.”

  “No, you need to get to DC central and get that looked at.”

  “By what doctor? Is your medic versed in Malagath physiology? I am staying.”

  He cursed, but she was right. The doc would have no idea how to treat her. “Alright follow me,” he said. He pushed off towards the aft ladder. The gravitic stealth device was on the fore end of the second level, but taking the aft ladder would keep him out of damage control’s way. As he pulled himself down the rungs he saw two crewmembers in firefighting gear floating unconscious engineers back toward the hatch.

  “Aesop, where the hell you going?”

  “The GSD,” he called back, “It goes offline and that cruiser will spot us whether or not it does another active sweep.” He shouted back.

  “Get going then, boy. You waiting on an invitation?”

  Aurea followed closely behind. Nearing the hatch, he swung le
ft to get out of another pair’s way, then bounced to the GSD. The gravitic stealth device wasn’t anything to write home about. No flashing lights, no soft green glow. It was based on tech they stole from the Havash, an amphibious race who developed it to help their ships fly like something other than huge tanks of water. The Havash had adapted it from the Kreesvay, who had stolen it from someone else. On the Condor, it analyzed her mass’ pull on space-time down to the kilogram and pumped out an equivalent antigravity field. It took a lot of power, and wouldn’t work at the same time as the artificial gravity generator so they couldn’t make major acceleration changes while using it. But many hostile xenos used gravitic field analysis in their passive sensor suites, and the GSD hid them from that. After leaving the Mossad, Aesop got his degree in xenotechnology, and had always been shocked at how little the rest of the galaxy had developed stealth warfare. Even the Dirregaunt, who loved ambush tactics, made no effort to remain hidden once battle was joined.

  Then again, he reflected as he pulled up the diagnostic panel on the GSD, the ones who are good at it, we don’t know about.

  The LCD display was completely cooked, but the device was humming so it hadn’t shut down yet. It had independent heat sinks to deal with the extra waste heat it generated and that’s where the danger lay. Aesop grabbed the diagnostic tool, plugging it into the port of one cooling tower, then the other.

  “Shit. Aurea, this thing needs new heat sinks, it’s getting close to burning out. That case there,” he said, pointing. The Malagath technician tore open the shelf, pulling a pair of tall slender heat sinks from within and letting them drift nearby. She was adapting well to the zero-G conditions, despite her injury.

  “Good, bring them over here. We’ll have to do it by hand with the automatic system down. I’ll show you what to do.”

  “I cannot change these with my broken arm, human Aesop.”

  “I know, I’ll do that. Take this tool,” he said, handing her the diagnostic reader, “when I say, hit this button here to open the shielding, and then this one to close it once the new heat sink is installed. Got it?”

  “I understand,” she said, taking the diagnostic tool from him.

  “Press it.”

  The shielding slid open and the air began to hiss and shimmer as the heat sink was exposed. Because warming up the place a bit was exactly what they needed to do. If the attenuator had been an oven, this was a forge-fire ready to bake steel. Holding his breath so as not to burn his lungs he grabbed the handle on the heat sink and pulled the red-hot tower out of the GSD, glove sizzling. He let it hang in midair, out of the way for now and quickly shoved in the replacement unit. Aurea closed the shielding. He would have to move the old one to the deck before the gravity was switched back on. If it could switch back on. Hopefully having it offline protected it, otherwise they’d be limited to what acceleration the human body could tolerate, which wasn’t a great deal.

  “Why are they like this? Is one enough?” she asked.

  Aesop shook his head, “No, the GSD is at the failsafe shutdown. Both towers need to work in tandem or we lose the gravitic field. The attenuator offloads excess heat to other heat sinks across the ship, they’re probably all like this except for the main computer.”

  He maneuvered to the other tower and swapped the cord for the diagnostic tool, “Ok, now,” he said.

  The shielding slid open. He gripped the handle, tugging against the cooling tower. The heat sink barely budged. He swore, letting go of the handle as the heat began to bleed through the thick firefighting gloves. Looking around desperately he spotted the lanyard on Aurea’s uniform.

  “Aurea, I need your tether,” he said. Good girl, he thought as she unhooked it and passed it to him, didn’t even ask why.

  Aesop looped the length of cord around the top of the heat sink and slid it down behind. He braced his foot against the base of the tower and heaved again. He felt something sliding and pulled even harder, rope crackling. The heat sink came free, slamming into his chest and bouncing away, missing his face by inches and leaving a shiny streak down the front of his vacuum suit. The wind was knocked from him and he spun out of control until he collided painfully with the water purifier. As fast as he was able he righted himself and shot after the heat sink to stop it from crashing into anything flammable. While he did, Aurea managed to shove the second replacement in and close the shielding with the diagnostic tool.

  Aesop winced as the rogue heat sink crashed into the aft hydraulic pump, but managed to catch it before it could smash into the starboard power bus. He reached out for something and found a pipe joint. His momentum shifted direction and he slammed into what would have been the deck of the level above them, had the ship had gravity. He let the heat sink go. They had done it. Aesop began to laugh, deep, so hard it almost hurt.

  “Human Aesop what is wrong, are you hurt? You’re frightening me”

  Aesop wiped away tears from the corner of his eye with a soot-stained finger, “No Aurea I’m not hurt. Not badly, anyway. I just can’t believe we did it. Though I suppose we’re not out of it yet. You were brilliant, Aurea.”

  “Look!” exclaimed Aurea. Aesop twisted to where she pointed in her ill-fitting glove, worried it was some new crisis. But she pointed at the lanyard, spinning slowly through the air. It was on fire from the heat of the second tower, but the flames adhered to the cord in a close sheet in an almost beautiful way. Aesop continued to laugh.

  Victoria scowled at the muted optic image of the Springdawn as it began to slide around the horizon of the local star. She watched unblinking for a count of ten before speaking into the open microphone. “Yuri, we back online back there?”

  “Aye Captain, still undermanned but we’re good for a dump-and-jump”

  “Roger that. Shutdown the gravitic stealth, flush coolant and prep the horizon drive. Oh, and give Cohen a fucking raise.”

  “Aye Captain.”

  She switched the main viewport to the forward aspect and watched the star’s rotation on screen. The ship’s belly banked toward the dwarf star and with the automatic cooling system back online they ejected every spent heat sink where no enemy ship could detect them. Gravity returned and she felt the signature shudder of the horizon drive warming up.

  “Miss Wong,” she said, looking at Huian, “Get us the fuck out of here.”

  “Aye Skipper.”

  The Condor used the star’s gravity to pierce into horizon space, and rocketed away from the Springdawn and the atomized remains of the Dreadstar.

  Best Wishes stood at the fore of the bridge, hands resting upon the bone protuberances of his chest. Before him, the view screen replayed the final moments of the Dreadstar. The attack had been masterful. Swift. Without warning or opportunity for reprisal, as a hunt should be. He had complimented his crew on it. But he would find room for improvement, as he always did. Every skirmish was a lesson and Best Wishes was a scholar of battle. He had to be, for a member of the lower caste who had elevated himself through merit there was no other honor to be had. His ambition would falter, he knew, when he could no longer climb. He would forever do the dirty work of the Praetory. He was doomed to command small battle groups striking from the shadows, never to strategize grand fleet movements.

  “Again,” he commanded, all four eyes locked on the screen. His first officer, Modest Bearing, complied with his order. Again the slippery blue-black waves of the interstellar dispersed to reveal the Dreadstar, and moments later the already warm weapons of the Springdawn began to cut her to smaller and smaller pieces. She had been so close to the point of the distress call that they had emerged not only within visual range, but so near that he could have thrown a spanner from one vessel to the other.

  So why did something feel wrong?

  “Again,” he barked. The recording reset back to the interstellar emergence. “Hold,” he said, raising his hand as the dark waves faded and the Dreadstar appeared. Modest Bearing stopped the recording.

  First Prince Tavram’s ship h
ad been without engine power, as evidenced by her stationary position relative to the earlier distress call, and by initial readings recorded before the attack. So then why is she perfectly oriented to the local stellar plane? he wondered. Troubling. He turned away from the screen, “Master detector, bring me the report on the active sweep and the passive sensor analysis if you please.”

  The secondary view screen flickered, then displayed the result of the active sweep. Nothing of note, no space junk larger than a few inches across that was not a planet.

  “Thermal,” he requested. Again, nothing of note. A small flare of heat near the bearing of the sun shortly after the active sweep, but a small flare was hardly remarkable. “Now show the gravitic,” came the command.

  A display of the disturbances in space-time replaced the thermal readout, both real time and at the moment they had warped into the system. This was pointless, if there was anything worth his attention his sensor team would have alerted him at the time. Why did his doubt persist, despite the success of his attack?

  “Spectrum.” A list and analysis of elements that made up the wreckage of the Dreadstar appeared before him. He scanned it, unsure of what he expected to find. He stopped partway down. Ionized xenon, attributed to the Dreadstar’s laser banks. But xenon produced lasers in the ultraviolet range, whereas Tavram’s ship had lasers of a yellowing color on the visible light spectrum. Helium-Neon, if he recalled correctly. He scanned down. Sure enough, the discrepancy had been overlooked and there were two gasses attributed to the Dreadstar’s lasers.

  “Master detector, give me a bearing for the highest concentration of xenon.”

  The sensor officer, Dutiful Heiress, listed a series of numbers. He snuck a glance at her as she looked to her console, but one of her eyes swiveled, dispelling his attempt at subtlety.

  “And the thermal discrepancy I noted previously?”

  A pause, “The same, my Commander. The very same. But of the active sweep and the gravitic sensors there is nothing.”