“It is my last gift to you. You seek knowledge concerning me. You are about to die, copy of Strand. Thus, I will grant you greater knowledge concerning my real function.”
“Did you always plan to murder me?”
“No. I had computed that we would succeed without that. Captain Maddox has changed the equation. He is a remarkable individual.”
“Are you saying that to piss me off?”
“No. I am sorry. That was not my intent. I will now tell you my true function.”
At that point, the force field abruptly collapsed. As it did, the ancient device on Strand’s chest heated up incredibly.
The clone of the Methuselah Man howled in agony. The intensely hot device burned through his garments and began to scald his skin and heat his bones underneath. Strand collapsed upon the floor, writhing in agony.
The super-hot device began to burn through his body.
The robot no longer beamed him. The Builder construct hovered closer. A new slot opened. A thicker nozzle protruded. Foam bubbled from it. The foam fell on the super-hot device. In seconds, the foam hardened around the thing.
The danger to the ghost-ship vanished as the hardened foam would not allow the super-hot device to burn through the deck plates.
The human was dead, however.
The thicker nozzle moved back inside the artillery-shell-shaped robot. The slot closed. The robot floated to the control panel. Electric impulses left it. Lights flashed on the controls.
The ghost-ship adjusted its flight path.
The robot turned around and headed away. It would have told Strand its real function. It would have granted the man that final knowledge. The robot had miscalculated the age and fragility of the ancient force-field emitter. It did not like that failure. There had been far too much failure for such a masterful construct as itself.
That caused the robot to wonder if it was too old. The Builders had been the greatest race in the galaxy. They had constructed it and given it its function. But entropy was the enemy of even the greatest. The robot could not detect any problems with its software or hardware, however.
The robot moved faster, floating through a hatch into the main computer area. It began to issue commands. It did not have much time. Soon, Starship Victory would appear. He had slain Strand because the clone would undoubtedly have tried any trick possible to remain alive. The clone might have given away its—the robot’s—existence. That, the robot could not allow.
There was a twenty-two percent probability it would not be able to escape the Tristano System. Not acceptable. That would retard the great plan by too much.
A piece of ultra-computing—a pulsating cube—detached from the main computer. With a miniature tractor beam, the robot pulled the cube to itself.
The very top of the robot's cone un-screwed on command. With a reverse tractor beam, the robot caused the piece to levitate. It then brought the pulsating cube down through the new opening into itself. A moment later, the very top of the cone settled back down. It screwed back onto the robot.
Satisfied with its progress, the robot turned and floated toward the torpedo tubes.
Soon, it inserted itself in a tube. With another electric impulse, it gave the command.
Thirty-one seconds later, the tube ejected the robot into space. The little Builder construct used a torp-pack, accelerating toward the Laumer Point.
The ghost-ship was already on a new heading, moving away from the Laumer Point. At that moment, a starship appeared.
The robot emitted another command. It ejected from the accelerator, moving on a straight trajectory toward the Laumer Point.
The torp-pack exploded nine seconds later, hopefully shielding its tiny mass from the starship’s sensors.
The robot now calculated it had a seventy-eight percent chance of pulling this off.
-32-
Victory came out of the star-drive jump ready for battle. Lieutenant Noonan rapped out orders. The rest of the bridge crew were soon up and operating.
For the first few minutes, no one could detect anything unusual.
“I see something,” Galyan said.
“The cloaked vessel?” Valerie asked.
“Negative, Valerie, it is the radiation from a recent explosion.”
“How recent?”
“It must have exploded just before we jumped,” Galyan said. “I detect debris from the explosion. This is suspicious.”
“Talk, talk,” Valerie said. “What do you see?”
“A piece of debris, like I said, is heading for the Laumer Point. I do not believe that is a coincidence.”
“Scan the debris,” Valerie said.
“Captain,” Andros said. “I’ve detected mass gravity waves and the signature concentration of metals. I believe I have located the ghost-ship.”
“Galyan,” Valerie said. “Confirm if you can.”
“Confirmed,” Galyan said. “The cloaked vessel no longer appears to be heading for the Laumer Point. It is attempting to circumvent the third terrestrial planet. I believe it is trying to move to an inward Laumer Point.”
Valerie frowned. “That seems odd. Why not make an attempt for the closer jump point?”
“I do not know, Valerie.”
Valerie stared at the holoimage. Something seemed off, but she couldn’t place it. She shook her head. She had her orders. She must destroy the cloaked vessel.
She gave the orders.
Soon, the starship’s powerful disruptor cannon energized. The weapon’s officer tracked Andros’s concentrated metals.
“Ready, Captain,” the weapon’s officer said.
“Fire,” Valerie said.
The ship’s antimatter engines hummed with power. A great beam left the disruptor cannon, speared through space and struck the cloaked vessel.
The beam burned through the hull armor with pathetic ease. It smashed bulkheads next, burning through one after another. The clone of Strand’s body lay in the path of the beam. It sizzled into nothing, and the beam reached the ghost-ship’s propulsion system.
At that point, the small, cloaked vessel ignited. It blasted apart from the disruptor beam and its own exploding engines. Bulkheads, fuel, computer parts, bio-matter; all blew outward in a mass. The cloaked vessel was destroyed.
“Captain,” Galyan said.
Valerie already sat back against her command chair. She’d done it. She had destroyed the clone of Strand and his cloaked vessel. It hadn’t been as hard or as difficult as she’d imagined. There must be a lesson in there for her. She could do this. She could command a starship in battle.
“Captain,” Galyan said.
Valerie smiled. She waved to the bridge crew. “Well done,” she said. “You did it. You acted promptly and precisely. Captain Maddox will be proud of your achievement.”
“Valerie,” Galyan said.
She turned toward the holoimage. “It’s rude to interrupt the acting captain of a starship while she’s speaking.”
“I am sorry, Valerie. But I have something odd to report.”
Valerie felt a moment of doubt. She brushed that aside. She’d just destroyed Strand. “Okay. What is it?”
“As you annihilated the cloaked vessel,” Galyan said, “the Laumer Point activated.”
“What’s that even mean?” she asked.
“Something used a Laumer Point opening. Something went down the Laumer Route connection. I suspect it was the piece of debris I spotted earlier.”
Valerie pursed her lips. “Could the cloaked ship’s destruction have imitated a Laumer Point opening?”
“I do not see how, Valerie. Such a frequency is very deliberate.”
“So…you’re saying something…escaped while we destroyed the cloaked vessel?”
“I would rate that the highest possibility,” Galyan said.
“Chief,” Valerie said. “What do you make of that?”
Andros thought about it and finally shrugged. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
&nb
sp; “We should go through the Laumer Point and see what made it to the other side,” Galyan said.
“No,” Valerie said. “First, we pick up Captain Maddox.”
Galyan hesitated before saying, “And Keith, Valerie?”
She stared at the holoimage, wondering if Galyan had just secretly reprimanded her. No, she didn’t think so.
“You don’t want to first pick up the captain?” she asked Galyan.
“You are correct, Valerie. Let us get the captain. We can always follow the Laumer Point in a few days. I don’t see how it can make a difference, as the debris was not traveling fast. It should be easy to spot later.”
“Right,” Valerie said. “Besides, we’ve just taken out the deadly menace. We’ve done it. We should all be proud.”
On that note, the bridge crew scanned the area and soon began to ready itself for another jump, this time back to the missing personnel in the shuttles.
-33-
Captain Maddox was in a deep state of sleep aboard a combat shuttle, dreaming fitfully. In his dream, he ran along a fog-shrouded beach. He could hear the crash of ocean waves beside him, but he could not see the ocean. He felt the stiff breeze. He smelled the salt. It seemed odd that he couldn’t see the ocean. Every few seconds, salt droplets and spray struck his face.
Maddox began to wonder why he was running so hard. What was so important that he struggled like this? Why not stop, climb up the beach and just sit for a while? Was it necessary to struggle all the time?
Maddox did stop, and the sand underneath shifted, causing him to stagger. The shaking grew worse until a giant crack in the sand appeared before him. The captain expected water to gush up. Instead, a strange octopus-like being flopped out of the crack. The thing writhed on the sand on the other side of the crack. Finally, it gathered several of its long tentacles and pushed itself up onto them.
The creature regarded him.
“Are you a Fisher?” Maddox asked. He didn’t know why, but he had trouble remembering exactly what Fishers were supposed to look like.
“Why did you stop running?” the creature asked.
“Why should I run?”
“That is the essence of life,” the Fisher said.
“To run?” asked Maddox.
“To live, to do, to compete.”
“Why?”
“Because to stop doing those things is to die,” the octopus-like creature replied. “Do you want to die, Captain Maddox?”
Maddox frowned. All of a sudden, that seemed like a tough question.
“You took a hit in the Alpha Centauri System,” the creature said. “The battle cost you more than any other battle ever has. It has left you…exhausted. You have lost your grit, Captain.”
“I don’t know that that’s true.”
“You have questioned the wisdom of running, when this is the only time in existence that you can run. Once you die, your time in life is over.”
“Yes…that’s true.”
“What do you want out of life, Captain?”
Maddox blinked at the strange creature. “To start with, I want to avenge my mother.”
“You want to kill your father?”
“I want to find him first.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Lord Drakos.”
“Do you know for a fact that your father is Lord Drakos?” the creature asked.
“Yes!”
“Captain Maddox, do you really know that for a fact?”
“This is ridiculous. Who are you?”
“Do you know, Captain Maddox…?” the creature asked as it began to fade from existence.
“Why do you think I’m wrong about Lord Drakos?” Maddox shouted.
“Do you know for a fact…?” the creature asked in a faint voice that seemed to echo as it faded from view.
In his dream, Maddox shook his head. That had been straight-up weird. Why was he having such strange dreams all the time?
In the dream, Maddox’s head jerked upright. How did he know this was a dream?
Even as he thought the question, the dream, the invisible ocean with its crashing waves, faded away as Maddox woke abruptly from sleep.
He lay on a cot in a tiny cabin aboard the combat shuttle. He was sweaty and felt grungy. He knew that the battle against the Ska was the reason he kept having such strange dreams. Would he ever be rid of them? Would he ever recover fully from the fight?
With a groan, Maddox sat up. He felt lightheaded and slightly nauseous. With a grunt, he stood. He staggered to a side alcove and opened a drawer. He took out a cloth and dried his sweaty face.
A red-alert klaxon began to blare. The harsh noise startled him. Maddox whirled around, lunged to his captain’s jacket, put it on, shoved his feet into his boots and hurried out of the hatch to see what was wrong.
-34-
Maddox hurried into the piloting chamber. Meta sat at the controls, typing fast onto the console.
“What’s happening?” Maddox demanded.
“An enemy ship just appeared,” Meta said.
“Appeared?” asked Maddox, as he slid into the seat beside his wife’s. He buckled in as Meta applied thrust.
The combat shuttle jumped ahead, picking up velocity.
Maddox switched on an independent weapon’s board. In a pinch, the pilot could control all the ship functions. She could also delegate responsibilities so she could concentrate on piloting.
Maddox immediately saw the debris of a destroyed strikefighter. The other strikefighter fired a salvo of defensive missiles. An incoming enemy missile detonated. The blast took out a second enemy missile. It did nothing to the third that came in seconds later.
That missile zeroed in on the remaining strikefighter. As another flock of anti-missiles zoomed at the missile, the enemy warhead exploded.
The strikefighter was deep in the combat-radius blast. The Star Watch fighter buckled and began to flip end over end and suddenly exploded, as something hit the fuel pod.
“Scratch two strikefighters,” Meta said grimly.
Maddox felt cold inside. It wasn’t due to fear, but to concentrated anger. Someone had just killed two of his officers. He was responsible for them, and he felt the deaths keenly. He felt it more since Alpha Centauri than he would have before the terrible battle with the Ska.
He fiddled with the weapon’s board and finally saw the attacking vessel. The squat spaceship was three times the size of their shuttle. According to the scans, the enemy vessel had heavy hull armor, but more importantly, it had an electromagnetic shield, one that might prove resistant to their ordnance.
“Is that from the asteroid?” Maddox asked.
“It just appeared,” Meta said. “So I don’t know.”
“Appeared like a fold-fighter?”
“Yes!” Meta shouted. “It’s radar-locked onto us.”
“Right,” Maddox said. His fingers blurred across his board.
The shuttle ejected emitters.
“Done,” Maddox said.
Meta began to turn the shuttle hard right and down.
As the Gs pulled at him, Maddox checked on Keith’s shuttle. It was farther away and had already launched several emitters along with two drones. The drones had been placed to look like mines. Keith was no doubt piloting over there but had kept comm silence.
“That must be a pirate vessel,” Maddox said. “They might be Strand’s people.”
Meta glanced at him.
Maddox thought carefully. Could Strand have planned for this, his being back here in a shuttle while Victory was elsewhere? He didn’t see how, and yet, the clone had lured Victory out to Smade’s Asteroid in the first place.
“The enemy ship is accelerating,” Meta said. “It’s coming after us.”
Maddox saw the comm light blinking. He pressed a switch. On his weapon’s board, he saw the blunt face of a Shanghai heavy.
“This is Sergeant Chem,” the huge man said. “You will surrender immediately. If you do, I will let you live
, Captain Maddox.”
“You should surrender to me,” Maddox said. “Victory will return shortly. If you’re caught firing on my shuttle, you will die.”
Chem glanced at someone unseen. The heavy nodded. “I’m already a dead man, Captain. I’d love to kill you and your people before I die. But if you can persuade me why I should let you live, I’m waiting to hear it.”
Maddox made some swift calculations.
As he did, Meta spoke up. “The enemy ship is powering up its laser.”
“I will surrender,” Maddox told the heavy.
“I know,” Chem said.
“They’re still radar-locked onto our ship,” Meta said.
“I’ll power down,” Maddox told Chem.
The enemy laser-port turned bright with energy. A second later, a powerful beam smashed against the shuttle’s light shield, knocking it down with ease. The beam struck the armored hull, burning deeper by the microsecond.
Meta jinked the shuttle one way and then the other. The enemy laser kept digging into the hull armor, but not always in the same spot. As the beam continued burning, globules of melted metal floated into space, leaving a trail.
“You’re a dead man, Chem,” Maddox said.
“I have said as much,” the heavy replied. “You are not convincing me to let you live, but to take you with me to the grave.”
Maddox cocked his head. The words struck him as rehearsed.
“He’s killing us,” Meta said. “It was the fold. He bypassed all our defenses by jumping next to us.”
“We’re not dead yet,” Maddox said. He didn’t know how they were going to get out of this one. The other ship was superior to two shuttles. Without the enemy’s fold mechanism putting them right on their tails, they could have easily outrun the enemy ship until Victory returned. Maddox had never counted on the asteroid pirates to have a fold-capable ship.
I got sloppy, Maddox told himself. It might cost Meta her life. The captain realized he cared more for Meta’s life than for his own.
“No,” the captain whispered. He wasn’t going to quit that easily.
At that point, one of Keith’s fake mines energized with power. The drone began to accelerate for the enemy vessel.
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