Jensen said nothing. He sat straight in his chair, his hair was like combed ebony, and his fingers trimmed short like a model’s. Harris pressed switches and sequenced the Shearborn’s condenser coils into recharge for FTL. Then Jensen fussed with the adjustment of his chair belts, as Harris shrugged, punched up the gravity drive, and wrenched their little chaser out of station.
Immediate protest issued from the ship-to-ship com speaker mounted above the controls.
“Commodore Meier, howling for both your balls,” surmised Harris. His fingers hesitated ever so slightly above the flight board.
“Just carry on!” Jensen tripped a switch, and the angry voice of their superior became buried in background noise as the power banks gunned maximum thrust into the engines.
Harris grinned in that cocksure manner indigenous to pilots. Skill of his caliber was too scarce to waste; when the boom came down, he could count on some measure of immunity.
Against the wrath of irate brass, Junior Grade Lieutenant Michael Christopher Jensen, Jr., had only the far-reaching influence of his politician father; if, that was, Jensen senior chose to bend his public stance of calling no favors for his son. Harris preferred to believe that paternal sentiment would prevail as he spun the chaser in a neat turn and opened throttle.
The lieutenant in command knew otherwise. Heart pounding, Jensen expected that hell would freeze before his family would bail him out of trouble. It had been his father’s imperiousness about carving his fortune on his own that had tangled his fate with that of the skip-runner captain in the first place. The Shearborn’s pursuit simply resumed unfinished business.
Vigorous protest arose right on schedule. Commodore Abe Meier’s voice barked angrily on emergency interrupt. “I’ll have your officer’s bars, boy, and a mark for desertion on your record that even God can’t erase.”
Slammed back into his crew chair by inertia, Jensen laced his fingers to stop their shaking. No threat could make him reconsider; by now, their course was committed. Harris’s cocky grin was gone, dissolved into a frown of sweaty concentration.
“Snarking game of live pool,” the pilot murmured, and intently slapped a control.
The Shearborn veered, narrowly missing the expanding nebulosity of a plasma burst vessel. Debris pattered against the hull, and something clanged against the port gun housing. Then they were past and screaming a tortuous course through the flank of the Fleet offensive.
Jensen barely noted the glittering bursts of fire on the analog screens. Harris’s wizardry at the helm escaped him utterly. He saw only the white streak that was the Marity, twisting now with the immunity of a miracle through the thick of the Khalian fleet. Dead Star lay beyond, a disk sharp as a compass cut through a backdrop of scattered stars. As if that dark body were a magnet, MacKenzie James steered his craft for the core.
“Crazy,” Harris muttered over the scream of the gravity drive. “Slag his coils for sure, if he doesn’t slow down to shed heat.”
Jensen sweated with his uniform fastened to the chin. The course Mac James had chosen was too predictable not to be deliberate. The lieutenant reaffirmed his intent to capture the space pirate. No price was too great to see the Marity’s captain brought to justice. “Don’t lose him, Harris.”
The pilot half spun from the controls. “I won’t melt down an engine for anybody’s pleasure, sir. Not to capture the devil himself.”
Jensen knew Marity’s master was the devil incarnate. His shout for Harris to continue was cut off by the rising wail of the proximity alarm.
The pilot shrugged, stabbed the switch to raise the chaser’s shields. The alarms went silent. Seated like a stone image and half-lighted by the angry yellow glitter of the monitors, he continued his silence, clearly challenging his superior to pull rank.
Jensen refused argument. Ruled by the need to evade the fire of Fleet and foe alike, Harris could not abandon their new course all at once; and a slight change on the analog screens offered a telling reason why the Shearborn should continue.
Absorbed with planning an evasive maneuver, Harris took longer to notice that the Marity appeared to be braking. If the skip-runner captain who flew her intended to slip pursuit, deceleration cost him the chance. Past Dead Star and the forefront of the battle lines, the Fleet chaser would be on him like a wasp.
Mac James never made stupid misjudgments.
Convinced that he witnessed the power lag as the Marity charged her coils for FTL, Jensen grinned with a candor normally kept hidden. The Shearborn was newly commissioned; fitted with gadgetry hot off the design boards, she was capable of following her targets through FTL. “Harris, close in tight. We’re going to trace the Marity’s ion trail.”
“Just a snarking minute!” The pilot shot a glare at his superior. Giving a skip-runner chase across a battle line was a lark he could boast of to buddies, a daredevil affirmation of skills that might bring the customary slap on the wrist for high jinks that tradition accorded a gifted pilot. Deserting the scene of a battle was another thing, a speed-class ticket to courtmartial and a firing squad. Left grouchy by the risks just taken, Harris ended with a gesture that brooked no argument. “Forget it, sonny.”
Jensen’s amusement vanished. His obsidian eyes never left the analog screen, where a tiny fleck of light winked into being. It blinked once, then steadied onto a vector that bent gently and matched course with the Shearborn, The lieutenant keyed for additional data and almost laughed outright in satisfaction. “We’ve picked up a stalker mine,” he announced. Even his recalcitrant pilot must now bow to expediency; the only effective evasion was to transit to FTL before the missile closed.
Harris scanned the readout without alarm. “Stalker mine’s a damned lousy reason to go AWOL, sir, when we carry the coded disarm frequency.”
“For Fleet, any offensive,” Jensen responded. He sounded smug. “This one’s manufactured by the Freeborn. Check your screen, pilot, only do it fast. If you hesitate, Marity escapes, and we get convicted posthumously.”
Harris shot a withering glare, fingers flying over the controls. “What’s Freeborn hardware doing crapping up this sector, anyway? It might just get us killed.”
Jensen answered with a confidence born of ruthless networking. “Fleet intelligence scoped a Freeborn plot to slam the Khalian rear wave. But the codes for rebel stalkers weren’t part of the package.”
Harris cursed. Jensen’s explanation made no sense whatever; since secession from the Alliance, the Freeborn were hostile to the Fleet. But dispute of the fine points made a fool’s errand. The damnable fact remained: a stalker mine of enemy manufacture had locked onto the Shearborn as a target. Either Harris abetted Jensen’s craziness and punched into FTL or two million credits worth of chaser got cremated. The reasonable alternative was to commit desertion in pursuit of a recognized criminal, except that the pilot would need to fly a course like macramé to make transit before the stalker took the Shearborn out.
Harris tripped the controls with an attitude of reckless abandon. Spun hard against her limits, his spacecraft flexed and groaned under the stresses of centrifugal force. As a grade-one test pilot, Harris had survived a lot of mistakes; he had a sixth sense for gauging tolerances. The chaser might protest, might develop a stress shear or two, but her tail pins would stay tight as she twisted and spun to gain distance from the less maneuverable mine. Harris caressed the machinery, wooing the electronics as he would a lady; the wall of the alarms and the digital display showing the stalker’s course of intercept made him itch as if the hot breath of the hardware fanned the back of his neck.
Jensen followed only the skip-runner ship that drifted like a lopsided jewel at the rim of Dead Star’s disk. Apparently nerveless, he cared for nothing beyond the moment when Marity’s image flashed and vanished from the analog screens.
By then Shearborn was barely inside the requisite radius for an ion trail fix, with the stalker closi
ng fast.
A green sequence of numbers flooded the navigational screen. Harris waited a panicky moment for resolution of a course readout. When the figure stabilized, he hammered the lever down and blew a kiss in sheer relief. Never in life had he been happier to suffer the queer hesitation in continuity that marked the transit to FTL. He blinked, elated that no explosion had erased his existence. The next instant, triumph died, quenched by the realities of the moment. Harris unclipped his seat restraints and rounded angrily on his superior.
“Snarking hell, Jensen. You damned near got us roasted. You knew Freeborn stalkers were loose out there! For that I’d like to push your face in. I wonder if you understand how close we came to being ionized?”
Jensen swung his crew chair from the screens. His dark eyes showed not the slightest trace of regret. “Try to remember how close,” he said. “If you lose Marity on me, that stalker mine will be the only excuse we have to offer at our defense briefing.”
“And may you shrivel in front of the ladies for that,” snapped Harris. He wanted a drink and a chance to take a leak in real gravity. What began as a lark had turned seriously sour; until the sensors signaled Marity’s transit from FTL, nothing remained but to wait and brood, because certainly no sane man was going to fathom the intentions of Lieutenant Jensen.
* * *
The transit lasted days. Harris slept, or banged about in the chaser’s tiny galley unearthing the beer he had stashed where he swore no Fleet inspector would check, never mind that access to his cache took most of his off-watch time. He needed his comforts. A man couldn’t get booze in detention; to Harris’s thinking that was precisely where Shearborn’s hare-brained officers would be headed.
“Autolog won’t lie for us,” he carped when the lieutenant in command crossed paths with him at meal time.
Jensen refused to debate.
Harris parked the heels of his boots on the table and cradled his mug, which untruthfully read COFFEE, between his knees. But even a barbarity of this magnitude provoked no reaction. Nettled by the lieutenant’s secretive silence, the pilot added, “A leap this long could send us clear to Halpern’s.” Which was about as far from Khalian raid sites as a ship could go and stay within charted Alliance space. “You better think up a very fancy alibi.”
Jensen sat down opposite, drank his orange juice in chilly stillness. His uniform looked as if he had just stepped off parade. No stubble shadowed his chin. Just when had he taken time to groom, Harris wondered. Since the jump to FTL, the man had done little else but pace before the analog’s blank screen, brooding over the unguessable motives of Marity’s skip-runner captain.
* * *
Despite such fanatical vigilance, the tracking alarm caught Shearborn’s crew of two napping. Harris shambled from his bunk, stretching like a bear and complaining of a hangover. As always, he slept in his uniform. Jensen had not. He bolted without ceremony from his berth, clad in fleur-de-lis pajamas that looked like they had been starched with his uniforms.
“You guessed right,” he announced when Harris reached the bridge. “Marity broke light speed in Halpern’s Sector.” He flicked irritably at his uncombed hair and killed the FTL drives. The Shearborn abruptly ended transit, underwent that unnerving blurring of edges that heralded return to analog navigation.
Harris winced as his hangover flared in sympathy. Once reality stabilized, he laid his cheek against the cowling of the companionway and muttered something concerning martyrs and zealously sober commanders.
Jensen ignored the comment, fingers drumming impatience while the sensors assimilated data and the screens flashed to life.
Visual display revealed the dim red disk of a dwarf star, a strangling haze of interstellar dust and no immediate reason for Marity’s choice of destination. Jensen chewed his lip. “Why should a planetless star in Halpern’s interest MacKenzie James?”
Harris pitched himself into the pilot’s chair, his coveralls halfway unfastened. He studied the readouts, then shot his companion a look of surprise. “That’s Cassix’s star.” The lieutenant continued to look blank, which proved to a certainty that his source network had not included scientists. Harris explained. “Any test pilot knows. That’s the site of Fleet’s classified orbital R&D lab—the deep-space flight-and-weapons division, where the fancy new gadgetry gets prototyped. Security like a church vault, though. A skip-runner shouldn’t be able to get close.”
But along with gunrunning, MacKenzie James’s speciality was trafficking military secrets; he’d stolen records from Fleet Base once and gotten away clean. Uncomfortably, Jensen considered implications. The skip-runner was a dangerously subtle man. If the Shearborn’s crew caught him attempting a raid upon the Cassix base, they would instantly become heroes.
Jensen thought quickly. “Where’s Marity? Have we still got a fix on her?”
Harris raised his brows with dry sarcasm. “You haven’t looked through the tail port?”
Jensen did so, and colored as if caught in a gaffe. The Marity drifted off the Shearborn’s stern, so close that the scuffs of every careless docking could be counted in her paint. To the last worn strut, the craft looked her part, that of a privately owned, hard-run cargo carrier that had suffered and survived a succession of mediocre pilots. Scratches to the contrary, the man at the Marity’s helm had to be Harris’s equal or better to have achieved her present position with such delicacy. The chaser’s most sensitive motion detectors had tripped no alarm.
“Serves you right for leaving FTL without taking precautions,” muttered Harris. “That merchanter’s inside our shield perimeter. If Mac James is inside, he’s certainly laughing his tail off.”
Yet Jensen surmised that the truth was very different. MacKenzie James had a smile like crystallized antifreeze; his eyes could be unnervingly direct, but no man in Fleet uniform had ever known the skip-runner captain to laugh.
When the Shearborn’s lieutenant offered neither comment nor orders, Harris’s annoyance shifted to suspicion. “Why should a criminal of Mac James’s reputation lure us out here in the first place? I say you’ve played right into this skip-runner’s hands. Or did you maybe agree to collaborate with him beforehand?”
Jensen spun from the analog screen, furious. Whatever rejoinder he intended never left his lips. That instant the communications speaker crackled crisply to life.
“Godfrey, but you boys like to bicker,” drawled a voice. The accent was vague and untraceable, trademark of any operation engineered by MacKenzie James. Harris swore in astonishment that any skip-runner alive should brazenly commandeer a monitored Fleet com band. Across the compartment, Lieutenant Jensen went threateningly still and cold.
Incisive as always, the skip-runner captain resumed. “If your pilot can fly covert, and if between you the initiative can be gathered to eavesdrop on local transmissions, you’ll discover a terrorist action in progress. The director of research on Cassix is being coerced into breach of Alliance security. Now it happens that the Shearborn is the only armed vessel on patrol in this system. You’d better prepare to intervene, because your course log can’t be erased, and your careers will both be stewed if you can’t justify your precipitous withdrawal at Dead Star.”
Harris slammed a fist into his crew chair and wished he could kick flesh. “Well, happy snarking holiday! Just who in hell does that arrogant sonuvabitch think to impress?”
But MacKenzie James returned no rejoinder. The Marity vanished, dissolved from continuum into FTL, leaving the Shearborn drifting unprepared. The instruments which flagged ion trails were not yet reset; neither Fleet officer had thought that a necessity, since every current theory assured them that the departure of the skip-runner’s craft should not have happened solo. Within such close proximity, Shearborn should have been swept along as the coil fields collapsed. Yet Marity went FTL without a flicker of protest from the instruments.
“We’ve lost him.” Harris l
ifted his opened hands, his light eyes bright with disbelief. “That rumor must be true, then. The bastard buys technology from outside.”
“Maybe something an Indie found,” Harris speculated.
But the whys and hows of Marity’s systems were suddenly the least of the issue. Hunched in the command chair with a frown of obsessed concentration, Lieutenant Jensen rose to the challenge. Cassix Station lay on the far side of the dwarf sun from their current position. If a raid were in progress, and if skip-running instigators had jammed communication by translink, they would be forced to coordinate their operation through local transmission. Temporarily they would be blind to more sophisticated sensory data, which meant everything scoped by deflection imagery. The Shearborn was shadowed by Cassix’s star. She would not yet be noticed, but to stay that way and eavesdrop on the terrorists, she would have to launch a probe to relay signals from the dwarf’s far side. Crisply, Jensen listed orders.
His pilot responded with indignant disbelief. “You aren’t going to believe that criminal!”
“I never knew him to lie.” Jensen gestured with extreme irritation. “Carry on.”
Harris fastened the front of his uniform with uncharacteristic care, then entered the codes for navigation access. “Well, the society releases on the news bulletins don’t cite that guy for humanitary idealism. If I wore the stripes on your jacket, I’d be wondering what’s in this for MacKenzie James.”
But that was the uncomfortable question Jensen dared not ask. He had sworn to escape his father’s shadow by outwitting and bringing to justice the most-wanted criminal ever to work Alliance space. For that he would have to beat the skip-runner at his own game, and the necessary first step was to play along. Jensen said, “I want surveillance on that station, and quickly. Secure trajectory data and sequence ignition for launch of a relay probe.”
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 14