My love affair with the Harpy II was waning.
“Jump Exit Zenthia Delta-2 has acknowledged and accepted our request for entry.”
“And now they know we’re coming,” I muttered.
“T-minus two minutes to exit.”
We sat in silence for one of them.
“If we don’t come out of this alive,” I suddenly said. “I’m sorry.” And where that had come from, I didn’t know.
“I know, Captain.”
And that said it all, really.
“T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7…”
I waited for a quip, but none came. This was a Basic.
“3, 2, 1. Exiting jump point.”
A flash of white light and then we were through.
“Incoming,” the Basic announced. “Initiating Evasive Manoeuvre Charlie-Alpha-3.”
“Say what now?” Odo asked, firing up the railguns.
We started corkscrewing through the space, stars winking at us from all directions, the shape of two enormous Zenthian battleships spinning in and out of view as the H2 evaded their incoming missiles.
“If this is their idea of monitoring the backdoor,” I shouted, “I’m damn glad we didn’t use the front one.”
Odo grunted and pressed down on the firing triggers. Hot bolts of heated kinetic projectiles scorched the Black, arcing across the distance between us and the nearest behemoth.
We couldn’t take on two at once. Hell, we probably couldn’t take on one if it was already crippled. But we did have manoeuvrability and speed on our side. The battleships were huge and cumbersome. And the little corvette had some serious style.
My mouth fell open as we ducked and dived and dodged all incoming fire, and then we shot through the centre of them, and the camouflage routine was activated.
I hadn’t given the order. Shit, I’d almost forgotten about it until I saw the system activate on my command board. The speed in which the commands were being executed across the console was mind-boggling. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said Cassi was flying the vessel.
“Basic. Who gave that order?” I snapped.
“Which order, Captain?” the Basic asked in a monotone which somehow still sounded cheeky.
“The camo.”
“That particular subroutine has been written into Evasive Manoeuvre Charlie-Alpha-3.”
“How many of those programmes are there?”
“Two. Evasive Manoeuvre Charlie-Alpha-3 and Firing Solution Gamma-Foxtrot-2.”
“Would have been nice to know that,” I muttered.
“This vessel is designed to exit jump points in autonomous mode should the crew be incapacitated.”
“Incapacitated?” Odo asked.
I shook my head and checked the vid-screens. The Zenthian battleships had started a grid pattern search of the area in front of the jump point exit. They couldn’t detect us, and they weren’t going to try to follow an imaginary trail. But Zenithia Actual would know something got through and that the likely heading was Zenthia.
“So far so good, I guess,” Odo rumbled.
“Sure.” We were on a ship under the remote control of a Mutt pirate about to enter a blockade set up by the most advanced species in the galaxy. So far, so good was right.
I let out a breath of air.
“Make best time to Zenthia, Basic.”
“Best time to Zenthia Actual is t-minus sixty minutes.”
We had an hour before we would do it all over again. This time with more battleships trying to stop us. We’d been lucky. None of the battleships’ fire had connected. If we took a single hit, it would compromise our camouflage, and the only reason we were still alive was the camouflage.
“All dressed up and nowhere to go,” Odo muttered.
“Strip the weapons system,” I instructed. “I’ll work on flight. Malcolm may not have had access to a top-tier AI, but he did spend some time on writing a programme. I want to know exactly what those two programmes can do.”
“On it, boss.” Which was something Cassi had always said and Odo knew it. He was reminding me exactly what a top-tier AI could do.
And what I had lost.
“Assume everything is bugged,” I said quietly, feeling the ache of Cassi and Doc’s losses all over again.
“I’ve swept for audio bugs and found none.”
“I don’t trust him. Do you?”
Odo paused and then said, “Not after that exit jump.”
At least that was something I could rely on with Odo. He could see the bigger picture when push came to shove. I might not have told him about the data stack anomaly, but after what we just witnessed the ship do, he would be on high alert for any more threats.
It was ironic that the Evasive Manoeuvre programme saved us and yet it made both of us more mistrustful.
It took the better part of that hour to read the Evasive Manoeuvre programme code line by line. My head hurt, my eyes felt gritty; I so could have gone a mug of beer right now. But the programme came back clean. It did what it was meant to do. Elegantly.
It would have cost Malcolm a fair few chits to have it created, and he’d included it on this ship, pro bono.
“Weapons programme looks sweet,” Odo declared not long after I’d finished my own assessment. “Kinda makes you wonder why he didn’t tell us about ‘em.”
“He likes to be in control, and we would have removed them summarily as soon as we boarded.”
“What else has he done?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing, but we don’t have time to search deeper.” I nodded to the main viewscreen. “There’s Zenthia.”
A slowly spinning ball of blue and green bloomed in the distance — white-capped mountains and deep blue oceans and lush green forests; much like New Earth.
It was slightly smaller than New Earth, which meant its gravity was lower. That’s why Zeniths were so tall. But they supplemented their slender frames with technological enhancements, making them stronger than humans by a small margin.
Zy was stronger than me, but only just. And I used to work hard to make that difference smaller. We’d sparred daily on the Harpy. I’d let myself go a little since then, but I wasn’t going to be embarrassed about that now. Delphini B had been workout enough.
Just the beer that fluxed it all up.
I watched the globe grow bigger and then caught the first sight of outer defences. Battleships and drones and then Zenthia Actual; the enormous military installation which couldn’t really be called a space station as it covered the entirety of their moon.
I’d always thought it ironic that the planet was called Zenthia and the moon was called Zenthia Actual. But because they housed their military on the moon, and commanded the entire solar system and all the solar systems they’d claimed since entering the Black aeons ago from there, it was Zenthia Actual, and the planet was just the Homeworld to them.
Cities came into view, magnified by the forward cameras. Glittering towers scraping the upper atmosphere; monuments to their technological superiority.
There were over twenty billion Zeniths on their homeworld, and they didn’t suffer from anything as mundane as congestion. Their infrastructure was used as a model for all establishing colonies.
It was impressive and also a little frightening.
“I think we can sneak through if we’re careful,” I said. “But once we hit atmo, they’ll know we’re there.”
“I find it hard to believe they won’t detect us before then,” Odo grumbled, brow furrowed as he glowered at his own vid-screen.
There were hundreds of ships in orbit, and not one of them was non-military.
“I didn’t even know they had that many battleships in their line up,” he said.
I rubbed my sweaty palms on my armour surreptitiously. This was looking like an arse-kicking waiting to happen for sure.
“We sneak in,” I said, sounding more positive about our outcome than I felt, “and then make best speed under EM Charlie-Alpha-3 to the mountai
ns.”
“You’re the boss, Cap’n.”
I’d checked the programme. I hadn’t had time to recheck it. But I’d been as thorough as I could given the short amount of time available to me. There was nothing else I could do save from flying the ship on manual.
And even I didn’t have a big enough ego to do that.
I would have felt a hell of a lot more confident if Cassi had been in the driving seat. Hell, I would have felt more confident if Zyla was.
But Malcolm wanted that Mutt and so had given us tools to make it happen. I had to assume it was the best course of action available.
“Activate Evasive Manoeuvre Charlie-Alpha-3,” I said to the Basic. “And get us down there.”
“Evasive Manoeuvre Charlie-Alpha-3 has been activated.”
He’d expected us to find the programmes. That’s why the Basic hadn’t had a problem telling us about the two of them when asked. The Evasive Manoeuvre was to get us down there and then along with the Firing Solution they would both get us back out.
That was the plan, anyway.
I just had to hope that Malcolm the Mutt was as good at planning as he was at pirating.
“Let’s go get our girl back,” I murmured, and the Basic punched it, making the corvette streak through the Black toward the largest blockade I had ever seen in my entire life.
Chapter Nine
They clocked us as soon as we hit atmo. The knowledge of every single surface-to-air missile locking onto our little corvette was surreal and yet the most shocking thing I had ever felt.
The ninety seconds it took us to burn through the mesosphere were the most nerve-racking of my entire life. We were sitting ducks — a sitting duck with a oneway directional mind. There were no evasive manoeuvres in the mesosphere. It took everything we had not to burn up.
The missiles started coming fifteen seconds into our mesosphere flight through hell.
“Shields at maximum,” the Basic said. “Possible impact imminent. Brace.”
I gripped the armrests of the command chair until I was sure I’d pull the damn things off. Rockets tore through the lower atmosphere and breached the layer we were stuck inside of. One missed by what had to be a mere metre; the entire ship shuddered. The corvette’s anti-missile fire destroyed another, and we had to fly through its debris field afterwards. And then we were through and hundreds of the fluxing things were heading towards us.
“I count fifty,” Odo yelled.
OK, so I might have been exaggerating, but it sure as shit looked like hundreds of nuclear warheads heading our way in a hurry.
The ship spun in a corkscrew much like the corkscrew we’d effected exiting the jump point, but this time Odo shot back. He didn’t need to do much, just lay down chaff and fire off the occasional round from the railgun to get the missiles that broke through the countermeasures.
I think it was more luck than anything, and the fact that the camo on the ship was so damn good, that helped us run the gauntlet. We took a hit to the side which the shields managed to deflect and rocketed out of our entry zone and towards the mountains at faster than the speed of sound.
A boom echoed out behind us, but by the time anyone tracked the sound, we were already several kilometres away and gaining sped by the second.
“Not as fast as the pinnace, my arse,” I muttered, checking systems and reflexively testing my restraints.
“They’ve launched drones with heat-seeking sensors,” Odo advised.
“Does the ship have a sleeve?” I asked the Basic.
“Affirmative, Captain. Heat and biosignature blocking capable.”
“Activate it, please.”
“Sleeve activated.”
Beneath the shield, a thin layer of high tech material snaked out and over the entire ship, ballooning around the exhaust on the atmospheric thrusters. It slowed us down by about eighty percent, but we were far enough away from our entry zone to get away with it.
After a tense filled five minutes, I started to relax.
“Coming up on the glacier,” Odo said quietly. I think he’d been holding himself rigid too.
“That was fun,” I quipped.
“We shouldn’t have made it through.”
No, it was too easy. Just what the flux was going on here?
I checked the vid-screens and noted the pristine landscape. None of the orbital drones had made it through the blockade. Or maybe they hadn’t even tried to bomb Zenthia from space yet. There were still over fifty Zenthian controlled planets out there, not to mention all the stations they had built on asteroids and moons across the vastness of space.
“Can we connect to the local Net without being detected?” I asked.
“Negative, Captain.”
Cassi would have been able to do it for a couple of minutes.
“Hankering after some reality TV?” Odo asked.
“Nah, just wondering what else has been blown to flux while we were in the Chi system and on the way here.”
“Yeah. The Zens sure as flux think something’s coming their way, don’t they?”
Yeah. And yet they’d let us break through the blockade.
“Are we sending a transponder signal?” I asked.
Odo snorted. No pirate ship worth their salt would send a signal when flying stealth.
“Affirmative, Captain.”
“Say what?” Odo shouted.
“Explain.”
“A two-second burst was sent once we breached the mesosphere.”
“What did it say?”
“Unable to confirm.”
“Show me the burst transmission log.”
The log scrolled across the vid-screen. It’d take too long to decipher it. But Malcolm had knocked on the Zenith’s door, and they’d held it open for us.
“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” I muttered.
“So they let us through?” Odo asked, sounding uncertain.
“Yeah. Either Malcolm knew a military code that deactivated the SAMs, or he sent a message to someone who did it for him. This Mutt is really starting to worry me.”
Odo said nothing for a while and then, “Glacier dead ahead, boss.”
I checked the vid-screen and got an eyeful of ice several kilometres long.
“Overlay the facility’s location on the screen,” I instructed the AI.
A diagrammatic outline of the facility superimposed itself on the vid-screen, partway up the side of the mountain, to the left-hand side of the steepest glacial cliff face.
“I hope our rappelling lines are long enough,” Odo muttered.
“Take us in, Basic.”
“Taking you in, Captain.”
“Maintain stealth.”
“Stealth measures are all active.”
“Highlight threats.”
The overlay started to blossom with dots of red. There were more than Malcolm had thought there would be. His intel was out of date. Despite the pile of shit it put us in, I was rather pleased to know the guy wasn’t infallible.
“Damn,” Odo muttered. “I don’t think we can get in without them knowing, Cap.”
No. There was line of sight between security towers. The door we wanted to use was directly between two of them. From the number of red dots on the screen, there were four guards on each tower. Eight in total watching that access way. And that wasn’t even considering the four guards on the ground at the door we wanted to breach.
“This is one hell of a high-security facility,” I announced.
“What’s the plan?”
I didn’t have one that could combat the eight guards in the towers. They hadn’t factored into my planning.
I scrubbed my face and tried to think.
“My guess,” I said, “each tower calls in at a different time, so even if we were to take them out, one of them would miss their call-in time before the other. We won’t have fifteen minutes after taking out the four guards in the shack beside that door as well as the ones in the towers.”
&nb
sp; “So we go in loud.”
I shook my head. “They’ll shut the place down like a can of beans. We’d need a can opener and a fluxing big one to crack it.”
“Well, think of something. You’re the one who said you were good at planning things and then executing those plans.”
I turned slowly and stared at my engineer.
“The lack of respect around here is staggering,” I drawled.
His lips twitched, but he was worried, so it didn’t make it to a full-on grin.
I was worried, too. That’s why I was teasing him.
I let out a breath of air and said, “OK, we go in loud.”
“Music to my ears. Approach?”
“The AI lifts-off as soon as we’re out and takes out the two guard towers simultaneously. Right after we take out the shack. We’ll have to move quickly. If a signal gets off to either of those towers, we’ll be fluxed. And if there’s a deadman’s trigger at all, we’re doubly fluxed.”
“It all comes down to timing.”
I nodded.
The H2 slowly hovered over the location we’d decided was the safest to offload us and then touched down gently on the glacier. For a second, no one moved. But once it was clear that we weren’t going to fall through a fissure, we unbuckled the restraints and headed to the cargo ramp.
There were other ways to exit a corvette, but the small cargo bay ramp was the easiest to offload troops.
We donned our helmets and Odo hit the ramp release. A blast of super-chilled air rushed into the cargo bay, but we were insulated in our armour.
Zyla and the Mutt wouldn’t be when we escaped. But taking along a bag full of armour for them was too restricting. We were going to have to improvise once we were there. I was sure the guards needed cold-weather gear, so we’d strip one of them when needed.
I stepped off the ramp, my plasma rifle at the ready. Nothing stood out on my heads up display, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Lock it up and take off, Basic,” I said into the comm. “Hover in stealth and wait for my signal. Soft target the guard towers.”
The ship began to lift off, but already we couldn’t see it; the camo was simply too good.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 10