by Ian Sales
“It’s Riz’s ship,” Ormuz said. The diagram matched the warship he had seen in the nomosphere.
Plessant swore, loudly and fluently. Lotsman, perversely, seemed pleased.
“What can they want?” The captain was plainly thinking aloud. “How far away are they?” she demanded of Lotsman.
“About four million miles. There’s still a twenty-one second time-lag.”
“So she could be anywhere. Thanks, Lex—” She suddenly slammed a fist down on the arm of her chair. “Twenty seconds. She’s heading our way.”
“What do we do?” Lotsman asked.
“We move. I’m not convinced they’re as friendly as Cas insists. Find the data-vial with the evasion protocols. Let’s get that time-lag working for us.”
The pilot hunted in a locker by his chair and pulled out a small golden ampoule. He screwed it into a connector on his console. Data scrolled across glasses. Ormuz watched in undisguised fascination. An evasion protocol? That was not standard complement aboard a data-freighter. For the first time, he witnessed Divine Providence reveal qualities she was not supposed to possess.
“I can’t enter the toposphere,” Lotsman said. “The calibration’s not finished.”
“Head for Bato,” Plessant ordered. “We’ll have to make a run for it.”
“Still no word from her?” asked Ormuz. If the battlecruiser were friendly—as he believed her to be—then surely she would signal as much?
“Sensors are painting a better picture,” Lotsman said. “We’re getting more details.” He paused. “Her main gun is aimed our way.” He swore. “We don’t stand a chance.”
“Have you got that evasion protocol pumped in yet?” demanded Plessant.
“Switching to it… Now.”
The gas giant visible ahead abruptly cartwheeled somewhere to port. Stars smeared across the sky. Ormuz felt no sense of movement. The artificial gravity chargers operating within Divine Providence saw to that.
“Twelve seconds,” said Plessant. “Still coming towards us.”
Ormuz tried to picture the scene: the battlecruiser gliding silently and menacingly towards its data-freighter prey.
“I think we’ve broken out of their firing solution,” Lotsman said.
“Yes, but how far?” muttered Plessant.
The pilot and captain looked up from their consoles. They gazed out at the stars expectantly.
For several long moments, there was nothing to be seen beyond the shifting heavens.
A spear of intense light suddenly appeared, crossing diagonally from below-port to above-starboard. No sooner had it seared its image on their retinas then it disappeared.
Plessant swore. She glanced back at Ormuz. “Friendly?” she sneered.
“Riz is fighting the Serpent,” he insisted.
“Then why’s her ship firing on us?”
“I don’t know,” Ormuz admitted.
“We’re pulling away,” Lotsman said. “Eleven seconds.”
The captain glanced down at her console. “She’s faster. She can catch us.”
Lotsman shook his head. “We’ve got at least ten seconds to play with,” he said doggedly. “That’s two million miles between her and us, and nearly two hundred thousand miles between where she thinks we are and where we actually are. We can make it.”
“How far are we from Bato?” Ormuz asked, leaning forward. One of the glasses on Lotsman’s console gave a schematic of the planetary system. He could see icons representing planetary bodies and the flashing arrowhead that was Divine Providence. But no sense of scale was apparent.
“About three hundred million miles.”
“How long will it take us to reach orbit?”
“Flat-out? Forty-something minutes. I can red-line the drive-tubes and shave a couple of minutes off that—”
“It’s not worth it,” Plessant interrupted. “Keep evading.”
“Can’t you slingshot around the gas giant or something?” Ormuz had seen the manoeuvre performed on some melodrama: the hero had escaped by using the gravity well of a large gas giant to boost his velocity well beyond that of his pursuers.
Lotsman shook his head. “No. We’d have to lock in to a vector. We’d be a sitting target.”
“Shut down all our emissions,” Plessant ordered.
“Won’t help,” Lotsman replied, quickly flicking series of switches on his console. “She’ll have us on her mass sensor. We can’t make the effect our presence has on space-time go away.”
“But we can hide it,” said Plessant thoughtfully. “If we get close to some other point mass, like an asteroid or a comet—”
“What do you want me to do?” cut in Lotsman. “Run for Bato, or start hunting for space debris? I can’t do both!”
The ship’s pipe buzzed loudly. The three of them jerked in surprise and turned to the communications-console between the two stations.
“What in corruption is going on up there?” demanded a voice. “My telltales are going crazy down here.”
“Marla!” said Plessant.
“The bloody toroid’s near to bursting! Do you have to draw so much power?”
“Marla, get up here. I want you in the cupola. Bring Adril.” Plessant closed the connection, and turned to Lotsman. “They should be here to see this.”
The pilot nodded in agreement. Ormuz realised, with some shame, that he had forgotten the ships’ engineer and cargo-master. He had been caught up in the drama unfolding in the cupola.
Plessant thumped her arm of her chair. “Suggest something! Lex, Cas.”
Lotsman thought out aloud: “We’re running evasively, so they won’t get a firing solution until the time-lag’s down to a few seconds.”
“Agreed,” said Plessant.
“She can track us on her mass sensor but it’s not as discriminatory as electromagnetic sensors. She won’t be able to plot our position with enough accuracy to pinpoint her fire.”
“Agreed.”
“They could always use their active sensor suite.”
“I want suggestions on how to get out of this in one piece, not the tactics she should be using!”
“There’s not much we can do,” Lotsman said. “We’ve got near enough, um, two hundred and ninety million miles to cover before we’re safe.”
“What about a decoy?” Ormuz asked.
“Where do we get a decoy with the same mass as Divine Providence?” scoffed Plessant.
“No.” Lotsman shook his head. “Cas has a point. We set a transmitter to broadcast on all bands and bung it overboard. It’ll take the battlecruiser a couple of minutes and several course changes to pinpoint the source, but her mass sensor’ll only give her a rough idea of our position. She’ll prefer using EM—it’s more accurate. It could confuse her.”
Plessant accepted the idea with a nod. “I’ll get Marla on it.” She turned and glanced back at Ormuz, and nodded approvingly. “Any more suggestions?”
Ormuz tried to think of the various tactical tricks he had seen in melodramas. They were not, perhaps, the best source: the demands of story-telling often required actions that were either physically impossible or usually doomed to failure. “Does the battlecruiser have a blind-spot?” he asked.
“Not unless you’re right up close to it,” mocked Lotsman. “And they’ll be able to eyeball us if we’re that near.”
“So we’re doing all we can,” Ormuz said.
Both Lotsman and Plessant nodded sadly.
The decoy, a lashed-together collection of consoles and transmitters, had been launched from the main airlock. After a delay of twenty seconds, it began broadcasting assorted signals and EM traffic. It was a crude device, but it functioned as required.
Divine Providence was twenty minutes from Bato. The world was visible ahead, a pinprick of light a fraction of an inch across. It was only identifiable because it shone more brightly than any other celestial object. It jerked from port to starboard,
from above to below, from the centre of the scuttles to out of sight, as the data-freighter jinked evasively. The planetary system’s star was somewhere off to starboard and could not be seen.
The five crew-members were all in the cupola. Ormuz stood between the captain’s and pilot’s stations, gripping the shoulders of their chairs. Tovar hung onto a hand-hold by the hatch, and Dai was squeezed between the captain’s chair and the hull. Divine Providence had managed to survive four salvos from the battlecruiser. The nearest had been no more than forty miles away.
“We’re back up to fifteen seconds lag,” Lotsman said. “We’re pulling away.”
“Are they going for the decoy?” Ormuz asked.
“I can’t tell. It’ll be a couple of minutes before we get enough data to figure out their course.”
They would have to wait. There was no cover, nowhere to hide. The data-freighter could only hope to use the time-lag, a consequence of the speed-of-light barrier written into the fabric of space-time, to confuse her hunters. She would not be where they predicted her to be. Divine Providence could not fight back: she had no weaponry. But she might be able to escape.
“Twelve minutes to orbit,” Lotsman said.
“Then what?” demanded Dai sarcastically.
“They’re not going to do anything where everyone can see,” said Tovar. “Surely?”
“All they have to do,” she said, “is turn on their Navy beacon and claim we’re a brigand. The authorities on Bato won’t be able to do anything. No one comes here.”
“If we can get down to the starport,” Plessant pointed out, “we can abandon Divine Providence. They’ll never find us if we go to ground in one of the townships.”
“What about Kapuluan?” asked Ormuz.
“We’ll buy passage. Don’t worry, Cas: we’ll get you there.”
“Who are they?” asked Tovar. They had not thought to tell him.
“That woman,” Plessant said. “Riz Gotovach. It’s her ship.”
“She has a battlecruiser?” the cargo-master asked in disbelief.
“So Cas claims.”
Ormuz explained: “She’s a lieutenant-commander in the Intelligence Office aboard the battlecruiser. I don’t know who her commander is. I think it might be a woman with no hair.”
Lotsman barked a laugh. “Say that again.”
“A woman who’s shaved her head.”
“Should be easy to recognise.”
“What do you mean, ‘think’?” Plessant demanded of Ormuz.
“She wasn’t wearing a Navy uniform,” he replied. “But Riz was with her. She looked like she was in charge. The bald woman, that is.”
“What uniform was she wearing?” asked Dai, clearly not believing a word of it.
“Black.”
“She’s an Oppie?” asked Plessant.
Ormuz shook his head. “No, it wasn’t an OPI uniform.”
“Ten minutes,” said Lotsman.
“How far behind us is the decoy?” asked Dai.
“Um, one million two hundred thousand miles. She’ll spot the discrepancy between her mass sensor readings and her EM readings soon.” Something on his console caught his attention. He bent close to a glass and swore.
“What is it, Lex?” Ormuz asked worriedly.
“We’ve picked up more bogies. They’ve fired torpedoes.”
Plessant stiffened. “At what? At the decoy?”
“I think so. Hard to tell. Give me another fifteen seconds.”
They waited in silence for new data to arrive.
“They’re definitely going for the decoy,” Lotsman said in relief.
A minute later, static fuzzed the glasses at the pilot’s and captain’s stations. The torpedoes had imploded.
“Decoy’s gone,” Lotsman told the others. “Eight minutes to orbit.”
Bato swung into view. The planet was not noticeably larger. It still seemed beyond reach, a tiny beckoning star. Ormuz wondered if they would make it. They still had over twenty million miles to travel. The battlecruiser was only some three million miles behind them, and a faster vessel than Divine Providence. In a straight race, she would soon catch the data-freighter. The battlecruiser had to find them first, of course.
And that was where Divine Providence’s safety lay.
Bato loomed large in the control cupola’s windowed roof. A greyish rocky world, marbled with black and stormy clouds. It astonished Ormuz they’d managed to get so close. Divine Providence was seconds away from orbit. She had survived—no, not survived: evaded—six salvos from the battlecruiser. The nearest had missed by a mere ten miles. They had seen the energy-beam from the control cupola, an eye-searing pillar of light which flashed into being and vanished just as suddenly several seconds later. Ormuz, blinking away after-images, had been reminded of lightning storms on Rasmara, great jagged fingers of brilliance arcing between cloud-deck and mountain-tops in an eye-blink.
It was not failure on the battlecruiser’s part which had seen Divine Providence finally reach Bato. The evasion protocol used by the data-freighter was, Lotsman admitted, highly sophisticated and possibly even better than that used by the Imperial Navy. Ormuz considered the ramifications of this disclosure: whoever Plessant and the others represented, they wielded as much power in their way as the Serpent did in his. The thought was both comforting and worrying.
The time-lag between the two ships had, during the last few tense minutes, varied between eight and twelve seconds, between 750,000 and 1.2 million miles. Which gave Divine Providence a sphere of some 180,000 to 270,000 miles in radius as a buffer zone.
“We’ll be hitting atmosphere in forty seconds,” Lotsman said. “This is the dangerous part. It’s going to get rough, so hold tight.”
To enter Bato’s atmosphere at their previous intra-planetary velocity would have been certain death, so Lotsman had flipped the data-freighter through 180 degrees and used the drive-tubes to slow their headlong rush. The timing was tight: Divine Providence could only brake for so long before she needed to adopt the correct attitude to slide into the air englobing the world.
The communications-console buzzed: a signal from the Bato starport authority. Lotsman ignored it. He had no intention of obeying their traffic restrictions. They were going down as quickly and as safely as possible. The pilot silenced the buzz with a flick of a switch. He turned back to the console glasses before him—
“Corruption!”
“What is it?” asked Ormuz, leaning forward. He could see the schematics and data on the pilot’s glasses, but could not interpret them.
“She’s not slowing.”
“Rot it, Lex!” snapped Plessant. “Get the bloody ship under control! We hit too hard and too fast, and it’s all over.”
“Not us,” Lotsman replied impatiently. “The battlecruiser: she’s eating up the distance.”
Plessant slumped back in her seat. Her hands settled on the chair-arms, and gripped white-knuckled. “They don’t need to slow,” she said in a hollow voice. “They can slingshot around. They only need to destroy us.”
Tovar spoke up from behind Ormuz: “It’s all over.”
Ormuz twisted and looked back at him. The cargo-master gazed back at him calmly. Ormuz saw… not fear, not fatalism, but… regret? He frowned.
“She’s dropped torpedoes,” Lotsman said.
“Too close to the planet for the main gun,” Plessant explained.
The explanation was not comforting.
“Twenty seconds until atmospheric insertion,” said Lotsman.
“It’s going to be bloody close,” Dai said, and swore.
“Torpedoes coming up…”
The glasses on the consoles flickered. Static replaced the prickly graphs and columns of data. Moments later, Divine Providence jerked powerfully. Ormuz lost his grip on the shoulders of the chairs. He reeled sideways and bounced off the hull beside Dai. Tovar let out a loud grunt. Plessant swore.
; Dai, tightly wedged between chair and hull, reached out. Ormuz took her hand and pulled himself to his feet. His shoulder ached. There would be a bruise there.
“Just aft of us,” Lotsman said.
“Damage?” demanded Plessant, already checking her own consoles for evidence.
“No. Wait… Corruption! I’m getting spikes in the fuel supply. Power’s dropping.”
“We’re not venting,” Plessant put in. “Hull integrity is sound.”
“Something broke loose,” offered Dai. “Down in engineering.”
“Nothing’s supposed to be loose down there!” Plessant snapped.
Dai glared at the captain. “Rot it, Murily! This rust-bucket wasn’t designed to take a torpedo hit up the rear!”
“We’re losing power,” Lotsman said fatalistically. “I can get her into the right attitude for insertion, but it’s anybody’s guess what happens after that.”
Plessant stared rigidly at the world dominating the view through the ports. “Prepare for crash-landing,” she said tonelessly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Divine Providence blazed a trail across the heavens. She ripped through clouds, screaming. Curtains of rain flashed into steam as she tore through them. Splintered forks of lightning cracked and crackled about her. Sonic booms rumbled across the land below.
Flying surfaces gripped the air. The data-freighter’s stubby wings made their presence felt. Painfully, ponderously, Divine Providence’s supersonic glide-path stabilised. Her speed slowly dropped. She was still going down but now she would have some say over where.
Ormuz, buckled into a chair in his cabin, felt the data-freighter gradually steady. The fierce rocking and shaking diminished. Lotsman was back in control. Ormuz wondered at the view from the control cupola. What could Plessant and the pilot see? What did their consoles tell them?
The ship’s pipe squawked. Lotsman’s voice burst from the caster’s speaker. “It’s going to be messy. We’re through the worse but stay strapped in.”
Plessant took over: “We’re not going to make the starport. We’ll probably hit about two hundred miles short. I’m checking out the terrain. It’s not good news. This place is all mountains and rocky plateaux. It’ll be a rough landing.”