Of course, because of alterations the Final Consciousness had made to his physiology during his time as an Iron Hand, March was immune to those dangers, but if he was taking on passengers, best to make sure they did not become homicidal mutants.
Vigil finished the first of the hyperspace computations, and March activated the hyperdrive. The hyperspace tunnel opened before the Tiger, invisible to the naked eye, but a vortex of writhing energy on the dark energy sensor display. The Tiger shot into the tunnel and into hyperspace, and then the computer blanked all the external displays to prevent any crew and passengers from looking into hyperspace and going insane.
March set the computer to alert him if anything went wrong, and left the flight cabin. Interstellar travel was a bit like stepping from stone to stone to cross a creek, albeit a creek of unimaginable distance. To aid in navigation, the easiest method of interstellar travel was to jump from system to system, one at a time, using the star’s gravity well to collapse the hyperspace tunnel at the appropriate instant. March’s first jump was to an unnamed system with the chart number of NB4633J, and it was nothing but gas giants and uninhabitable rocky inner planets. From there, he had another jump to calculate, but he had three hours before they reached NB4633J.
So he headed to the Tiger’s gym.
He had converted one of the cabins and half the galley into a gym equipped with free weights, a treadmill, and a few other exercise devices. The early training given to all Iron Hands remained with him, and he felt restless if he did not maintain his exercise routine. The nanotech in his blood could do many things, but it could do far more with a healthy, fit body than it could with a weak one. For that matter, the rigors of interstellar travel were hard on the body, and the stronger he was, the better off he would be.
And given how often he found himself in combat, he needed physical strength.
Exercising with his cybernetic arm was a challenge, but he had long ago mastered it. His left arm could easily lift four or five times the weight of his right arm, so he refused to rely on his left arm in training. The cybernetic limb had inhuman strength, but the rest of him had to be strong as well.
He exercised while the ship made its way through the hyperspace tunnel. He did squats, overhead lifts, and dead lifts, interspersed with stretches and forms he had learned as part of his unarmed combat training. March worked through each form until he reached muscle exhaustion, and then moved onto the next set.
As he recovered between sets, he used a tablet computer to read the files that Censor had sent him on the Vindex twins.
The Silent Order kept records on powerful and wealthy Calaskaran citizens, and the House of Vindex was no exception. The current head of the House, Lord Sebastian Vindex, was the Earl of Sundrex on Calaskar, held a seat in the Congress of Lords, had served in various government ministries, was friends with the King, and fantastically wealthy. He had nine children, and Roanna Vindex and Thomas Vindex were his youngest. It seemed they had not been disciplined as his elder children had been, all of whom either served in the Royal Calaskaran Navy or had posts in the ministries of Calaskar’s various colonies. No one in the family had shown any Machinist sympathizes until Thomas.
March did another set of military presses, and then read the file on Thomas as he caught his breath.
The file included a picture. Thomas Vindex looked like a charismatic young man, with thick black hair, bright blue eyes, and commanding features. The file noted that he had been on the typical career path of a young Calaskaran noble until he had befriended some dissidents who had been later arrested as a part of a terrorist plot. Thomas had joined a Machinist cell, changed his mind, and wanted out.
His sister had gone to rescue him.
Thomas had been charismatic, but Roanna Vindex, if the picture was any indication, was beautiful. The features that made her twin brother look commanding became forceful beauty on her. The Silent Order’s report noted that her character included a strong selfish streak combined with an altruistic impulse, along with a tendency to make decisions on an emotional basis and rationalize them later.
Such women, March knew, were trouble. It explained why she had taken off after her brother to get him back from the Machinists. An emotional decision rationalized later. March wasn’t sure if she would become a Machinist or not. It seemed unlikely. Most probably she was arrogant enough to reject the ideology of the Machinists out of hand.
He looked at her picture a moment later, and then shut off the tablet.
“Captain,” came Vigil’s voice. “We are ten minutes from the terminus of our hyperspace tunnel.”
“Acknowledged,” said March.
He toweled off and walked back to the flight cabin.
The Tiger returned to normal space without incident. The dark matter sensors detected a few active ship reactors scattered around the NB4633J system, likely gas miners prospecting the gas giants, but no threats. Vigil calculated the next jump, and the Tiger entered the hyperspace tunnel without any difficulty.
The trip fell into a familiar pattern. March exercised during the hyperspace jumps or practiced his marksmanship in the cargo hold with a low-power hand laser. He also attended to various maintenance tasks. The Tiger’s maintenance drones could do a lot of things, but some repairs had to be done manually.
The first thirteen jumps passed without incident.
As the Tiger exited its fourteenth hyperspace tunnel, things got interesting.
The system was called Wyatt’s Folly, evidently due to a doomed colonization effort a few centuries ago. The colonists had slaughtered each other in a political dispute, and the system had remained empty ever since.
The Tiger’s sensors lit up as it locked onto a starship about three million kilometers away, its reactor hot and its defensive systems activated. March keyed for a sensor focus, and information about the ship scrolled across his screens. It was a Mercator Foundry Yards Class 5 patrol craft, sold to planetary navies for use as a customs enforcer and long-distance patrol ship. The Tiger’s database had the official specifications of that class of ship, and it was generating way more power than it should have. The visual scan picked up additional weapons emplacements and missile racks on the patrol ship, and its hull armor had been replaced and thickened.
“They are on an intercept course,” said Vigil.
“Send a standard greeting,” said March, running through the checklists for the weapons systems.
“Greeting sent, no answer,” said Vigil. “There are no standardized identifying markings on the hull, and the ship is not broadcasting an ID signal.”
A visual came up. The Class 5 patrol craft was sleek and narrow, with back-swept wings for both aesthetic appeal and to present a smaller targeting profile. The lines were marred by the addition of missile pylons to the wings, and the clunky shape of extra armor plating. On the wings, March saw a crudely painted symbol – a gray wolf’s head, fangs bared in a snarl.
“Missile lock detected, Captain,” said Vigil. “Recommend immediate switch to battle configuration.”
“Do it,” said March, flipping switches as his combat reflexes came to the fore, his heart speeding up, his mind slowing down. This was the kind of battle fought while sitting in a chair and pressing buttons, but it was a fight nonetheless, and his body responded as if he was about to go into combat with his fists.
The Tiger switched to battle configuration. All external communications shut down, to reduce the risk of a successful hacking attempt. The shields powered up, both the kinetic deflector to block missiles and projectiles, and the radiation deflector to absorb the damage from beams and plasma bursts. The Tiger’s own weapons came online, four forward-facing plasma cannons, a keel-mounted railgun that flung tungsten rods at dangerous velocities, and a dorsal laser turret and a ventral laser turret for point defense. It would take time for the plasma cannons to build up enough active particles to fire, but the railgun and the defense turrets were ready.
Which is just as well, because a shrill
alarm filled the flight cabin.
“Missile launch detected,” said Vigil, red text scrolling across the display.
“Give me manual flight control,” said March, gripping the flight yoke and spinning the Tiger around with a burst from the ion thrusters. “Calculate a firing solution for the turrets.”
March fed power to the drive, and a faint shudder went through the ship as the drive pushed them forward, the gravitics and the inertial absorbers unable to quite keep up. The sensors identified the missile as a standard fragmentation warhead. It would hit the Tiger’s kinetic shield and shatter, and the resultant explosion would hurl thousands of small fragments at the ship. That many contacts might overwhelm the kinetic shield and send the fragments hammering into the hull.
The Tiger hurtled towards the patrol ship, the missile burning close. March turned the Tiger so that the ship’s nose pointed towards the oncoming missile, which also meant the dorsal and ventral turrets could target the missile.
“Firing solution calculated,” said Vigil.
March glanced at the displays, noting the targeting information and the remaining charge time on the plasma cannons, and hit the firing switches for the lasers. The turrets rotated, locked, and let out invisible beams of light. The missile was not shielded, and the beams sliced into the missile’s side, breaching the reaction chambers of its ion thrusters. March jerked the Tiger to starboard, and the missile tried to follow, but with its thrusters damaged it could not change course.
The patrol ship kept flying towards him, and March adjusted his vector, locked on with the plasma cannons, and squeezed the firing triggers. Bolts of superheated plasma burst from the cannons, hammering into the patrol ship’s radiation deflectors, and both of his laser turrets added their power to the barrage. If the patrol ship’s radiation deflector collapsed, the plasma bolts would rip through the armor and into the hull.
The next volley of plasma bolts missed as the patrol ship banked, and the battle turned into a dogfight, with March trying to keep the Tiger on his enemy’s tail. The patrol ship was more maneuverable, but the Tiger had heavier armor, and the two ships circled and spun around each other, their relative velocities moving closer and closer. March only managed to hit the enemy with the plasma cannons a few more times, but the laser turrets kept their invisible beams fixed on the patrol ship, and March watched his enemy’s radiation deflector weaken. If it collapsed, the laser turrets could slice apart the hull, or a volley from the plasma cannons could rip open the patrol ship.
As abruptly as it began, the fight ended.
The patrol ship turned, and an alarm blared as March’s sensors picked up a surge of radiation from a dark matter reactor. He spun the Tiger and fed power to the drive, blazing away from the patrol ship as it opened a hyperspace tunnel. An instant later the patrol ship vanished from real space, leaving behind only a fading signature of dark energy and conventional radiation.
“Calculate their vector,” said March.
“Calculating,” said Vigil. A moment later the pseudointelligence spoke again. “Deep space, vector leading to no nearby systems. Probability indicates that was an emergency jump to escape.”
“Check the sensor logs and calculate their original position,” said March. “Did that ship come from NB8876X?”
He waited as Vigil crunched the numbers. They were far from the core systems of the Kingdom of Calaskar, far from the solar systems of any major power, and this system was exactly the sort of place a pirate ship might decide to prowl. Nevertheless, it seemed an unlikely coincidence. This solar system was vast, with hundreds of potential terminus points for hyperspace tunnels from the neighboring systems. Combined with the fact that Lorre and his thugs had been waiting for March at Antioch Station, stumbling on a pirate ship waiting at exactly the route from the Antioch system to Rustbelt Station was an improbable coincidence.
“Calculation complete, captain,” said Vigil. “I estimate a fifty-two percent chance that ship originated in the NB8876X system. However, based on its original position and vector, there are at least nineteen surrounding systems the ship could have used as a starting point before jumping here.”
“So a pirate,” said March, “or someone waiting specifically for us.”
“Most likely,” agreed Vigil. “Either conclusion fits the available facts. Without further data, it is impossible to reach a definitive conclusion.”
“I suspect,” said March, “we’re about to get further data. Calculate a jump to NB8876X, with our terminus near Rustbelt Station. Once we’re in hyperspace, I’m going to do as much of a maintenance check on the weapons as I can without doing a spacewalk. I expect we might need them before we get to Rustbelt Station.”
“Acknowledged,” said Vigil. While the computer calculated the jump, March did the usual pre-jump check on the hyperdrive, the dark matter reactor, and the resonator coil. Sometimes he wished for additional crew on board. He could fly, operate, and repair the Tiger himself, though he did have to hire some things out. Still, it wasn’t as if he had the funds to hire additional crew, and any crewers would have to be members of the Silent Order to satisfy the need for operational security.
Once they were in hyperspace, March went to the cargo bay, threaded his way past the pallets of prepackaged meals, and opened the weapons access panels. He would have to do some of the weapons’ maintenance outside of the ship, but from here he could clear some of the crystallization from the plasma cannons’ capacitors and make sure the reaction chambers hadn’t developed any flaws. Once that was done, he went to the laser turrets and made sure the servos and gears in the turrets were operational, and that the railgun's coils were ready.
By then there were only a few moments until the Tiger reached the terminus of its hyperspace tunnel, so March returned to the flight cabin, made sure the shields and weapons were ready to power up, and waited.
The ship exited hyperspace, and the Tiger returned to normal space in the NB8876X system.
March looked at the sensor displays.
NB8876X was a binary star system, with a smaller blue star and a red supergiant. The first nine planets were rocky but too close to the suns to hold an atmosphere or too far away to support life. The remaining twelve planets were gas giants, and each one held a constellation of moons, some of them the size of a planet, some of them no more than captured asteroids. The system had two asteroid belts, one between sixth and seventh planets, and another beyond the ninth planet, at just about four and a half AU from the stars
The system was deserted of any life save for Rustbelt Station.
The station occupied an asteroid in the outer belt about forty million kilometers from the Tiger’s exit point. As the Tiger drew closer, March watched the sensor data scroll across his displays. The asteroid was shaped like a lumpy potato and was about fifty kilometers in diameter at its thickest point. The radar and ladar picked up dozens of metallic domes clustered near the asteroid’s southern pole, and the radiation sensors detected several active fusion reactors. The sensors also registered enormous empty spaces within the asteroid, places where the mining equipment had cut into the rock. Once the asteroid had been home to some rare ores, and a mining company had tried to exploit them. The market prices had changed, driving the company out of business, and the mine had shut down.
But Rustbelt Station remained, catering to those who wished to conduct their business far from official eyes. Smugglers and pirates and drug runners turned up here, along with people involved in far more serious crimes, such as slaving and kidnapping. Naturally, spies from the various starfaring nations and races visited Rustbelt Station as well.
“Vigil,” said March. “How many ships are docked here?”
“Ninety-seven,” said Vigil. “Mostly light freighter craft the size of the Tiger, but several larger vessels. It is possible that additional starships are docked inside the caverns of the asteroid where our sensors could not penetrate.” One of the displays started flashing red. “Also, several missile turrets
have locked onto our ship, and we are being hailed.”
“Acknowledged,” said March, and he reached for the communication controls. “This is Captain Jack March of the Tiger calling Rustbelt Station control. Requesting docking permission.”
“Tiger,” came a dry male voice, “this is Administrator Heitz of Rustbelt Station. Identify your purpose for visiting the station.”
“I am carrying a load of prepackaged meals,” said March, “to be delivered to one Constantine Bishop and his restaurant the Emperor’s Rest.”
An amused snort came from the speakers. “More swill for Bishop’s dive? Fine. The docking fee is seven hundred and fifty credits. Hard currency, nothing electronic. We’re a long way from any communications out here.”
March scowled. “A bit high for a docking fee, isn’t it?”
Some smugness entered Heitz’s voice. “We’re also a long way from civilization out here, Captain March. There are additional expenses. Everything has its price at Rustbelt Station. Consider it a good faith gesture, proof you’re not a pirate or a troublemaker.” The sensors reported another missile turret locking onto the Tiger. “And if you’re not willing to make that good faith gesture, well…no one will miss another pirate. You understand me?”
March understood extortion when he saw it, but he didn’t see any way around it. “Fine. I’ll pay.”
“Excellent,” said Heitz. “You are cleared for Bay 93.” The coordinates flashed on a display. “I will meet you there to collect the docking fee in person.”
“Fine,” said March again. “Will I have room to unload my cargo? I don’t want to pay a shuttle to ferry it to a different dome.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Heitz. “You can get to Bishop’s restaurant without any trouble. You’re cleared for landing. Don’t try anything clever, or else you and your ship will be on the scrap market.”
The call ended.
“A good faith gesture,” muttered March with disgust.
Silent Order: Iron Hand Page 3