“Welcome to Jersey Air,” Jalawi retorted, as though completely unsurprised.
They slammed and rocked through thick cloud, the shuttle pushed right to its aerodynamic limit on engine power that far exceeded its atmospheric performance. It was always the problem with assault shuttles — they had engines designed for deep space, with crazy power that was utterly out of sync with aerodynamic load. Pushing too hard, in deep atmosphere, could create a tumble. Most of those tumbles, at low-to-middle altitude, even Lieutenant Hausler hadn’t figured a way to recover from. And now Regan saw the countdown to Phoenix rendezvous approaching fast, and wondered how the hell she was going to make that climb in time.
“Countermeasures got one!” Singh announced. “The other’s still coming!” Regan hit hard left, ramming everyone down, secondary countermeasures blazing chaff, flares and jamming. One missile got distracted as it streaked into cloud at Mach 7, course-corrected too fast and tumbled. A second broke up in the heavy air, then detonated on proximity. A third survived all countermeasures but found it too hard to find a bouncing target in cloud, and blew up right nearby, with a flash that lit the right side of the cockpit.
“Phoenix,” Regan called, “we survived the first wave but if they keep coming, I don’t like our chances.”
“PH-3, we got him,” came the astonishing reply. “Rendezvous is unchanged, he’s dead.”
“I copy Phoenix,” she replied, keeping all surprise from her voice with practised calm. The pilot code was always cool. “Going upper-atmospheric now.” She pulled back and climbed, her canopy still a flurry of thick cloud.
“How the hell?” Singh wondered. “They weren’t even line-of-sight with that guy.”
“My guess is Styx,” said Regan. They burst into clear night sky and climbed, Regan pouring on the power as the atmosphere thinned, and the bumping grew less. “I reckon she must have triangulated his position somehow when he started shooting at us.” Phoenix armscomp alone was good, but not that good. Regan called her marines. “We’re clear, Phoenix got the guy who was shooting at us. How you guys doing back there?”
“Where’s my inflight meal?” Jalawi complained. “I wanna refund.” Regan cut him off, grinning madly. Ahead, the dark night sky grew darker still, and began to show signs of stars. And now, heading left-to-right, came a cloud of flaming stars, streaking across the horizon in a profusion of burning trails, slowly arcing toward the ground.
“Whoa!” said Singh. “Guess that was him, huh?”
“Yes it was,” said Regan with satisfaction, applying the thrust harder as the proper climb to orbit began.
Singh transferred a visual feed to the marines down back. “Guys, check this out. Here’s the fucker who shot at us.”
There came back on coms multiple exclamations, in defiance of the marines’ dislike for trans-orbital manoeuvres. “Don’t fuck with Phoenix,” Jalawi cackled.
Erik cut thrust at the last moment to let Lieutenant Jersey make the final approach, the Berth Four grapples crashing home with what the Operations lights told him was a perfect grip. Then he ramped up the thrust once more, several seconds build up to five-G, then a full, shuddering roar at nearly ten. It was always a horrible sensation, a crushing, suffocating blackness of gasping breaths and fading vision, but spacers and marines alike were augmented for it, at prolonged forces that would probably kill the unaugmented. Bridge crew like Erik could even function in it, at moderately high levels, as micros widened arteries in the brain to get new blood in, while narrowing others to keep old blood from flowing out… to say nothing of juicing the bloodstream to keep oxy levels high, and the micro-filament structural support through spine, neck and every major muscle group.
After several minutes, Erik could see Aristan’s three new ships on Scan, hurtling past the silver half-crescent of Cephilae, joined by the one remaining operational ship from close orbit. One was braking hard to intercept Toristan at nadir polar orbit, and Erik wondered just how effective those assassin bugs had been.
“Hello Captain,” came Styx’s voice, as though reading his thoughts. “I had thought to attempt contact with my bugs on Toristan, and attempt to transfer them to this new ship. In case it attempts to chase us.”
Erik wondered what the lifespan on those little things was… and the amount of neurotoxin they carried. Given it only took a tiny droplet to kill, probably they could account for multiple entire crews, given the chance. But then, they could be stopped by a closed door, or a thick spacesuit, so he knew he shouldn’t get his hopes up.
“Hello Styx,” he formulated in reply. “Go ahead and transfer them. I hope we won’t need them, these ships aren’t fast enough to follow us through jump. But a recon mission could be useful, if they could find a way to hide a pirate transmission that might reach us eventually.”
“Yes Captain,” Styx agreed. Erik angled thrust, swinging Phoenix’s tail out to bring their course across, lining up on Kaspowitz’s best course to their escape route — Brehn System, and from there a path back to tavalai space. The pursuit was too far behind them now for him to worry about expended ordnance catching up, and they were too deep in Cephilae’s gravity-well to dump or boost V with a jump pulse. As was Phoenix, but that would change in several more minutes. “Captain, I assure you that the message I received from Gesul’s spy on Toristan was not fabricated. I was under the impression that you had doubts.”
Styx had put a bug in his quarters, to spy on his meeting with Suli and Jokono. Erik did not want to have this conversation now, nor at any time. Protestations of undying trust and loyalty from Styx meant nothing. She’d no doubt talk her way out of any sinister implications, saying she was merely guarding him, or something similar. Styx was an enormous calculating machine. She calculated, and judged the most probable course by which she might arrive at her destination, and concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘trust’ were just curiosities along the way. Supposing she was anything else, at this point, was foolhardy.
“I believe you, Styx,” he replied.
“I am glad, Captain.” Erik got the distinct impression that she still didn’t believe him, and wondered if she were subtle enough to inject that tone of faint disbelief, to let him know that she doubted. And noted further that such exchanges only reinforced Trace’s belief that Styx’s protestations of ignorance at human psychology were one giant load of manure. One could go crazy, thinking round and round in circles, trying to figure out exactly what was going on in that synthetic alien brain. “This combat action and recovery has been exceptionally impressive. A drysine combat vessel could not have done better. I have no higher praise.”
“Thank you Styx. And we must have that conversation sometime, about drysine combat vessel capabilities.”
“I agree. It may be useful in what lies ahead.”
She disconnected, as pre-jump data began to flow from Kaspowitz’s post, a final assessment of required trajectories, followed by Engineering’s stream on the fast powering jump engines. Cephilae and Pashan’s gravitational influence dropped below the threshold, and Erik pulsed the jump engines once, a sickly lurch into hyperspace… then out again, and rushing with nearly one percent of light’s velocity more. Now they were racing, and he cut main engines thrust as the acceleration became redundant. Bridge crew gasped deep breaths, and prepared their posts for combat jump.
“Brehn System,” Suli announced as Navigation made the final alignments. “Combat jump, this is parren space run by House Harmony, and we are always expecting trouble.”
“Well done people,” Erik told them all, on open coms to the entire ship. “Operation data-core recovery is a success, we faced extreme odds and came through like a breeze. We did Captain Pantillo proud today, and the legend of the UFS Phoenix grows.” He shut off ship-wide coms, and talked only to his bridge. “Now let’s nail this jump and bring this sucker home.”
Exactly where home was, for this galaxy-shaking thing that PH-3 had acquired, he wasn’t entirely sure. Everyone in the Spiral would now either want the
m as best friends, or want them dead.
14
Erik felt Phoenix come out of jump with a sensation like falling. It never felt entirely like waking from sleep, because no one ever dreamed in jump. There was no confused displacement, putting one reality aside to refocus on the new one, and unable to tell which was which. There was just a bright and nauseous sense of here, and a wide world of wrap-around data and schematics, demanding his analysis. His brain just wanted a moment to settle, to process the fact of this new reality, but suddenly he had to think, at a depth and intensity that always felt offensive.
“I have the nav buoy,” came Kaspowitz’s reassuring voice. “We are at Brehn System, we are in the slot, nailed it within ten thousand K.” Ten thousand kilometres was insanely accurate, across the distances they’d just travelled. But heading into a great, crazy mess like Brehn System, accuracy was safety. “We are two million K off the elliptic, rocks will start to get messy in another seven minutes at current V.”
Erik frowned at his screens, sipping electrolyte-heavy water from his drinking tube as he took that in. Brehn System was a giant disk of incredibly crowded, dangerous space. They’d come out of jump right beside the nav buoy, which was positioned precisely to allow it — Phoenix’s nav computer reading the signal in hyperspace while humans were non-responsive, and pulling them into realspace close enough to the elliptic disk to find cover if things went bad. Seven minutes was cutting it fine, but Phoenix had been through this system just recently, confirmed the nav buoy’s placement, and Kaspowitz’s settings would have pulled them out much sooner if someone had moved it, or the signal hadn’t reached them.
“Captain,” said Shilu, and Erik could hear the frown in his voice. “I’m getting…”
“This is Engineering,” Lieutenant Rooke’s voice cut him off. “I have a yellow light on that number three jumpline… Captain, I’m looking at the figures and I think it’s nothing, just a polarity defect but I’d like a chance to check it asap.”
“I copy that Engineering,” Erik acknowledged. “Get me a full systems check and report, I want it top-to-bottom before we take the next jump.”
“Engineering copies Captain, we’re on it.”
“Captain,” Shilu resumed more loudly, “I’m raising a yellow light on coms chatter. It’s way down, there’s dozens of mining settlements in the system, maybe a hundred major sublight ships in flight at any time last we were here… coms dropoff is maybe seventy percent.”
“We haven’t been here that long,” Suli replied, completing her thorough post-jump systems checks. Better that she did it, and left Erik’s attention clear to observe their surroundings. “Coms chatter isn’t that intense among parren, give it another few minutes.”
“No,” Shilu corrected impatiently, “I’m reading off the navbuoy, the last hour’s worth of traffic, it’s…” He stopped mid-sentence, eyes widening as he heard something alarming. “I think I’m hearing a distress call, hang on, I’m running translators…”
“FULL EVASIVE!” Geish screamed, and Erik hit max thrust without asking, one of those horrible manoeuvres that could kill less advanced ships with engine overloads and structural failures. Without G-augments everyone on the bridge would have been slammed unconscious, hearts thudding with artificially-induced chemical charge.
The move was pre-programmed, there was no way any pilot could think through those Gs, nor even move his hands, and when the pressure faded enough to do both, he saw the same autos were plastering a single, fast-moving spot in space with heavy fire. He was just thinking they’d missed the main volley when something hit them, a shocking lurch that snapped everyone sideways for an instant, then a flare of red lights on the upper-cylinder hull, and reports of things broken and breaking.
The thing that had shot at them was moving, only to avoid their own fire, and it was insanely fast. The firepower that flowed from it was vast, more self-propelled rounds accelerating in their wake. Something that fast couldn’t possibly have that much armament, this thing was faster than Phoenix, and surely had to be smaller to move that fast. Normally he had time to at least formulate to his bridge crew, the synthetic voice that was all captains could manage under high-G when the vocals weren’t working. But now there was nothing save the groans and grunts through gritted teeth — the whole crew straining to a single task, to keep Phoenix alive.
“Captain, that ship is deepynine!” came Styx’s voice in his ears. “Find cover or we die!”
Something else hit them, a glancing blow from an oblique angle, and Phoenix rang like a bell. Scan was showing Erik only a fraction of the full volume of fire. That was terrifying. If he couldn’t see what was incoming, he couldn’t dodge. He only saw it too late, as it snapped past at hyper-V, and each one seeming closer than the last.
Erik pulsed the jump engines, and everything heaved and folded in on itself… then re-emerged, racing much faster and well ahead of that ordnance. But now he’d increased speed straight after jump, when Phoenix was already hurtling at high-V, directly toward one of the least navigable systems Erik had ever seen.
“Twenty seconds!” Kaspowitz growled, the whole crew hunched and strained at their posts even now the Gs had stopped. “Fifteen seconds! Captain, we hit one of those rocks, it’ll hurt worse than a round!”
“Find me a hole, Kaspo!” Erik demanded. “We gotta hide, that thing has us outclassed!”
“It’s still coming, it pulsed up behind us!” Geish shouted. “Fuck, it’s got us V-plus, it’s faster and closing! If we dump V among the rocks, that new ordnance will kill us!”
But now Karle and Harris were pounding every weapon Phoenix possessed in their pursuer’s direction, laying down a sheet of ordnance in his way. And sure enough, the other ship was burning hard to miss it, climbing relative to the fast-approaching system-elliptic. It had to be messing up his gunnery, Erik thought desperately.
Ahead was Scan’s best guess at a ‘safe’ hole through the clouds of Brehn System rocks and ice… but of course, it wasn’t safe at all, because Phoenix was now travelling so fast that Scan couldn’t possibly see all the things they might hit, most of which were hard enough to see at much slower speeds. But the thing with high-V ordnance, Erik knew, was that it was far too fast to change direction easily. Starships could cycle jump engines and lose huge chunks of V in an instant. Self-guided munitions could not.
“Brace for hard dump,” Erik told them, rotating Phoenix perpendicular to the approaching rocks, as the first heavy concentrations of debris began to flash past them at speeds that didn’t bear thinking about. One strike, and the explosion would be seen from neighbouring star systems, briefly out-glaring the sun. “If you have a God, pray now.”
He hit thrust hard, another brain-crushing burst of force and pain, and then a jump pulse dialled all the way up as high as the technology would go… and they came out travelling much slower. Erik continued the rotation, allowing all of Phoenix’s batteries a good firing angle. But now the deepynine ship was also dumping V, again a much harder manoeuvre than Phoenix had done, then burning hard to stay clear of the thickest debris.
“He doesn’t want to come in here,” Suli observed. “He’s evading.”
“I have partially blinded his controls,” Styx gave a more likely answer. “I used your main coms, he is not equipped for the antique methods of electronic warfare I use. We must get clear now and hide, before his friends arrive.”
Erik swung them back around, kicking thrust even now to dodge the looming threat of a large rock. It flashed by at multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometres an hour, faster than the naked eye could follow, were that even a possibility on a windowless warship. Phoenix could see the rocks, and as long as that remained the case, Erik was confident he could avoid them. But at this speed, and in the densities that were approaching, that wasn’t going to remain possible for long.
“Captain,” said Kaspowitz, “we’ve got a one percent chance of dying in the next five minutes at this V. That will increase steadily
after that five. Cumulative odds of mortality will exceed a theoretical one hundred percent in less than thirty minutes.”
“I hear you Kaspo,” said Erik. He’d never felt so utterly absorbed in his work as now. He felt like a ghost, some non-corporeal entity that existed only as pure intellect, calculating numbers, trajectories, distances. If his body had sensation, he was not aware of it. Phoenix was the only body that mattered. “We need to extend, we will not survive if we don’t get some distance.”
Flight control kicked again on automatic, artificial reflexes still superior to his own guiding the ship past some new flashing obstacle on Scan. Erik was vaguely aware of Suli running systems diagnostic on damage, talking to Engineering, rerouting the systems they could manage on automatic — all the things he had no time to do himself. Something hit the ship once more, a sound like a cannon shot, and more red lights on his screens.
“That was an impact,” Suli told him, matter-of-factly. “Our bow shield is damaged, forward docking has a red light.” There was more, Erik knew, but Suli wasn’t going to bother him with it now. Probably the rock that had done it was the size of a marble or smaller — Scan only saw them sometimes, but at this V they struck with the force of heavy artillery.
“He’s pulling right off,” Geish said confidently. “He’s getting parallel with us, but he’s definitely not following us in.”
“That’s because he doesn’t want to get pulverised,” Kaspowitz growled. “Captain, we’re clear and I recommend we dump V.”
Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 20