The Eye of Orion_Book 2_Spinebreakers

by Mitch Michaelson

  Yuina went back to the holobridge, and slowly flew through the wreckage. Shortly she released a deep breath. They were back at the portal into the hold. Steo seemed to be losing energy.

  Renosha said, “Yuina, take us somewhere safer than this wreck. Its signal is strong enough to blind scanners to our movement for now.”

  She flew out of the carrier, wending between the flotsam and jetsam of the graveyard, until she found a cluster of interconnected ships. They were all anxious to get a moment’s peace and see how Glaikis was, so they went to the dining room, leaving Hawking in the bridge to watch for any sign of attack.

  Glaikis was sitting up, her back against a large crate, wide-awake.

  “You! You’re alive!” Yuina ran over to the table.

  “A bit foggy, but the drugs Governor gave me are real hard,” Glaikis said with a slur in her speech. She sniffed. Her mouth and nose were bloody. Her left arm was wrapped and bound to her chest.

  “Is she okay?” Steo asked Governor.

  “The patient is in stable condition, sir. She has been exemplary and uncomplaining. Her wounds will heal. I recommend plenty of rest.”

  Glaikis said, “Did Cyrus make it back? Is he gone?”

  “He went with them,” Steo said.

  “I don’t get that. What happened? Why would he go with those murderers? He said he valued Tully’s sacrifice,” Yuina said.

  Steo said, “He chose to go with Slaught. It was like he was compelled to do it. Remember, an hour after he woke up, he recited that speech? Who knows what kind of control Slaught has over Cyrus. It might be built into him, like a command he had to obey.” Steo was exasperated at losing him.

  “So he betrayed us?” Yuina asked. She didn’t believe it.

  “Renosha, you suggested maybe we were followed because a spy was on board. Tully said it was radioactive dust. I never heard of that before, but I don’t know much about stuff like that,” Steo said.

  “You think Cyrus sent signals to Slaught?” Glaikis asked.

  Renosha said, “I was conjecturing. It seemed extreme how easily the Fire Scorpion followed us, but Tully’s explanation was scientifically legitimate.”

  “Why did he do it though?” Yuina asked. “Did he just walk off with them?”

  “No, Slaught convinced him. Cyrus was supposed to work for Slaught, remember? He was created for that purpose. What could we offer him?” Steo said.

  “I don’t know if Cyrus was always on Slaught’s side,” Glaikis said.

  Yuina bit her lip. “I didn’t want to say this at the time, but he was lousy with the missiles. He only hit the one I had already strafed.”

  “And he wanted the Vadyanika destroyed,” Glaikis said. “Maybe that was to destroy evidence.”

  “He saved us on the forbidden planet,” Steo said. That had to count for something, he thought. Did that prove Cyrus’s loyalties?

  “He saved himself there too,” Yuina said.

  “He seemed to avoid telling us anything about Slaught until he fell and hit his head, isn’t that right Renosha?” Glaikis asked.

  Renosha tilted his head as if in thought. “He didn’t mention much until after that incident.”

  Steo said, “I don’t know how to explain this, but I had sort of a vision of Cyrus becoming a star messiah.”

  “A vision?” Renosha asked.

  “With the light manipulator.”

  “It showed you Cyrus?”

  “Yes, only he sort of sneered at me and walked away.”

  They were all exasperated. The crew changed the topic to Glaikis’s injuries. Governor explained that she would be able to move around after some sleep, but shouldn’t be too energetic. He had set her bones and she would be on a regimen of painkillers and tissue regeneration drugs for weeks. Glaikis would have to stay in her quarters for the next day or so, because soon the shock and stress would take their toll.

  Eventually Steo took Yuina and Renosha back up to the bridge.

  “Let’s see what’s going on,” he said.

  Hawking reported that the carrier was useless now, except as scrap metal. It emitted an intense signal on many frequencies, identical to theirs. A shuttle had flown from the Fire Scorpion to the carrier and back.

  “So Slaught made it back to his ship.”

  “That is the most logical conclusion, Master Steo,” Hawking said. “The carrier is both unrepairable and a defenseless position. An admiral wouldn’t stay on such a ship.”

  “Well my plan can still work. Renosha, we’re going to try your maneuver. Hawking, locate the cutters. Yuina, prepare to lure out the cutters and get them to follow us. I’ll handle navigation.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Purity Tests

  Doib was able to move, albeit with a comfort harness to prevent him from falling down. Muuk took the four Reminders with him to see Councilor Ulay, who greeted them via holographic conference from the Fire Scorpion. In actuality, the conditioning section created the Councilor. Admiral Slaught was busy elsewhere.

  The Reminders first demanded that the dead be returned to the community. Councilor Ulay hesitated at this. He gave them reasons why it might be unsafe, according to what science robots had advised him. The awakened refused the line of reasoning, citing their own evidence. Eventually the fake Councilor came around to their way of thinking and agreed with them.

  Actually, the robots would take the bodies of the dead to the reclamation center, but it had been redesigned. Now it secretly fed the bodies to a disintegration chamber and vented the ash into space. The foodstuffs on the ship no longer included what the science robots referred to as “contaminated sewage.”

  Next the Reminders asked about a missing member of the awakened, a young blond man. He came into view and waved. They couldn’t hear his voice, but the Councilor assured them with a smile that the young man was now serving proudly aboard the Fire Scorpion. In truth, the infected remains of the troublemaker, which were quite deadly due to exposure to Venicarce, had already been annihilated and disposed of.

  During the conversation Kiluth and the conditioning section carefully released real information to the people on the AndroVault, including the names of ships, their location and the status of newly awakened people. Muuk was shocked to learn his family would be awakened soon. The other Reminders congratulated him and patted him on the back. That defused much of his anger.

  Feeling confident in their meeting with the self-proclaimed star messiah, they raised the issue of teaching the Old Ways to the soldiers. Councilor Ulay was modest and said he was a prophet at most. He would allow time for soldiers on the AndroVault to spend in classes with the awakened.

  Kiluth thought this was a good idea. Several of the mercenaries, soldiers and crewmembers were judged by his novorian staff as excellent candidates for liaisons with the defectives. None had ever seen Admiral Slaught in the Councilor Ulay disguise. If they began to follow the outdated religion, it would form a bond between the two organizations and make the defectives easier to control.

  Lastly Limax, the Reminder of Contribution, asked when more awakened would be allowed to serve outside the AndroVault. The fake Councilor Ulay assured them that everything was taken care of; they would be adding repaired ships to the fleet soon. The awakened would crew those ships.

  During the entire conversation Admiral Slaught had been on board the carrier. He never spoke to the defectives, though Kiluth would update him on the developments at the next staff meeting.

  After the meeting, Kiluth allowed himself some self-indulgence. His mask changed to a smile.

  “Section chief Kiluth is pleased with himself,” a novorian said.

  “That is how you manipulate a homogenous monoculture,” Kiluth said.

  Although Admiral Slaught paid him, Kiluth’s real sponsors were far away. He was no mercenary. In the Crux spiral arm near the galactic core, a human empire had fallen millennia ago. Their planets regressed technologically, reverting to scattered rural communities. Most had forgotten about sp
ace flight and alien species. The ji’ionos were an insectoid species bent on conquering that region of space. They had hired Kiluth to develop methods of controlling these rustics.

  The AndroVault was proving quite a test subject.

  CHAPTER 13

  Trading Storms

  There was a steady hum in the bridge/holobridge area, a representation of the loud signal being sent by the carrier. The Eye of Orion came out from cover. Yuina had to do everything but send a transmission to the cutters to get them to notice. She acted like they were headed out of the graveyard away from the AndroVault. The cutters came out of the field like bugs out of weeds. Yuina accelerated. They remained spread out behind the Eye of Orion.

  Steo fired fragmentation missiles at them to make it look convincing. The cutters kept their distance even though Pesht yelled at them.

  Then Steo had Yuina slow near some loose wreckage. It was necessary to be at a full stop to go to faster-than-light speed. They gave off every impression they were preparing to leave.

  “This will require meticulous execution,” Hawking said.

  They weren’t in open space yet, or free of the debris.

  Yuina flew through the junk, using it to shield them from line of sight. The loud signal from the carrier meant that missiles were useless against them, however all the cutters had guns. That meant they had to get close to fire.

  “You have to let them get into range before we leave the graveyard, Yuina,” Steo said.

  “It’s against my nature to get caught.” She concentrated on her console.

  “Mine too, I get that. But we’re not planning on getting caught. Think of it as an alley ambush … reversed.”

  “All right.”

  She slowed imperceptibly. The cutters closed. Renosha hit a button that emitted a signal indicating engine trouble. The cutters aggressively sped up. Suddenly the Eye of Orion reversed course. In an instant, the corvette was amongst the smaller ships. The cutters trained their guns on their target.

  Steo said, “Now, Renosha!”

  Renosha hit the transmit button. The Eye of Orion was equipped with powerful active scanners, which meant they were powerful transmitters, able to bounce signals off distant objects. The ship drew power from the graviton engines; it had no nuclear reactor. Renosha’s idea had been to run far more power through the transmitters than they were designed to handle. The transmitters sent focused beams of energy at the cutters. They were harmless but overwhelming. The panels inside the five cutters went blank, overloaded. Beeps indicated damage on the Eye of Orion too, as systems shorted out.

  “Get us out of here!” Steo said.

  Yuina pushed hard and the ship flew back into the field. She flew as fast as she could through the debris toward the Fire Scorpion.

  Many little lights flickered on their consoles. Hawking said, “One ship fired but didn’t penetrate our shields. Several scanners burned out when we surpassed their input thresholds. Scanner capacity down by 27.9%.”

  The cutters were blinded. For seconds their scanners were plain gray. By the time they came back up, they didn’t know where the target was, and began searching. It would take a minute for them to locate the Eye of Orion. That was what Steo was counting on.

  Yuina rotated the corvette forward. Hawking set the fore shields at maximum, bouncing away garbage. “Approaching the Fire Scorpion,” he said.

  They shot into the open area around the AndroVault, deep in the ship’s graveyard.

  “Spike is ready!” Yuina said.

  “Target locked,” Hawking said.

  “Fire!” Steo said.

  The Fire Scorpion was moving slowly. Military vessels tended to move constantly. A ship could appear and shoot guns at a stationary target, so moving even a few thousand miles an hour – a tiny distance in space – presented a hard target. However the Eye of Orion had tracked the Fire Scorpion all the way through the ship graveyard and knew precisely where it was.

  To reduce the complications in making the straight-line shot, Yuina had to stop. She hit a button that jerked the ship to a dead halt.

  Strangely, everything in the bridge of the Eye of Orion went silent.

  “Go Spike go,” Yuina said as she fired the kinetic cannon. The projectile flew like an arrow at the Fire Scorpion.

  Steo fired a salvo of missiles behind it.

  “Why is it quiet?” Steo asked.

  “The Eye of Orion is back! It’s firing! Command?” said a crewman.

  Pesht blew air out of his mouth-stalk. It was a kalam expression of alarm and it sounded disgusting to humans. “Execute command Clearspace-1! And move!”

  All he could do was wait and see if the trap worked.

  The signal from the carrier had prevented missiles from tracking the Eye of Orion. It was gone. The crew had grown used to the sound, a signal that was no longer transmitting.

  “They have shut off the signal from the carrier,” Hawking said.

  Pesht had deployed missiles throughout the area, but left them inactive. When the carrier’s signal was shut off, the missiles were activated. They saw their target and took off after it.

  Looking at all the approaching dots Yuina said, “We’re so skewed.”

  “No time for another shot! Launch defenses! And move!” Steo yelled.

  Slaught’s best men couldn’t break Steo’s security on his own equipment. They considered blowing up the carrier to shut off the signal. Instead they installed a device that cut the cable on command from the Fire Scorpion.

  The tactical section had evaluated the Eye of Orion. They noticed that it probably held a direct-fire gun of some sort in the long central bay. The projectile didn’t emit signals so a missile couldn’t shoot it down. A direct hit would punch through any shields short of a battlecruiser’s. It was deadly but required a stationary target or point-blank range. They discounted its danger to the Fire Scorpion.

  They didn’t know that the kinetic cannon fired two kinds of rounds: direct hit and area burst. Given the distance, Yuina had fired an area burst.

  Alarms screamed in the bridge. Pesht didn’t know why.

  The round had layers of explosives. It went off four hundred feet from the Fire Scorpion – a near-miss in space terms. When it exploded, the first wave of flechettes taxed the shields until they broke. A plate hit by flechettes buckled, exposing wiring. The second wave hit the Fire Scorpion in thousands of points. Many struck the dense armor plating and bounced off. The exposed wiring was shredded. Unprotected items like scanners and weapons were torn away. Everything on that side of the ship was hit. Struts supporting the engine were bent.

  The force of the massive explosion physically pushed the Fire Scorpion. The pilot and navigator worked to right the ship.

  When they got control, Pesht asked, “Where did their missiles go?” The Eye of Orion had fired a barrage as a follow-up attack. No one could locate them. Pesht didn’t need to give all the orders. His crewmen often defended the ship on their own, but he didn’t have time to find out more. Instead he gave directions to his gunners.

  On a military ship like the Fire Scorpion, gunners were a special breed. Missiles could be launched by anyone, but a gunner had to account for many conditions to score a hit. Their faces were covered in masks with cables leading up into the ceiling. What little skin showed was underlined with silver enhancements.

  One gunner thrashed and technicians outside could hear his muffled curses. He yanked out his cables. The explosion had destroyed his gun. Until it was repaired, his purpose in life was gone. He was furious.

  The other two tried to track the Eye of Orion as it pulled away from the cloud of missiles pursuing it. The gunners knew enough not to hit the trackers, but wanted to create a “bullet storm” ahead of the ship.

  They scrambled sideways to avoid missiles. Yuina found a gap and flew through it. The missiles were agile though and raced in pursuit. She fired chaff and Hawking launched decoy drones. They knew none of the Fire Scorpion’s missiles had fallen for it befo
re, and the crowd of trackers didn’t this time either.

  Steo used anti-missiles to destroy the nearest trackers.

  The main panel showed dots moving in from all sides, with a large pack behind them.

  “There are nuclear missiles in flight,” Hawking said.

  “No matter where we fly, we’re closing the distance to a missile somewhere. We’re running toward missiles we don’t have good readings on yet,” Yuina said, trying to stay calm.

  “Renosha, you’re in charge of anti-missiles. Try to use them on ones in front of us and any getting too close,” Steo said.

  “Aye,” Renosha replied. “I’ll navigate, too. Go do what you’re good at.”

  “Excellent shot, Pilot Yuina,” Hawking said. “She is flying and firing the rotary cannon simultaneously. It is a feat of the tirrian mind’s dexterity.”

  “Thanks but now is not the time, Hawking!” Yuina said.

  Steo ran back to the holobridge. He put the ship’s icon in the center of the surrounding dots. He circled some trackers, highlighting them. It was too many so he deselected some. Then he dragged an icon onto them and dropped it. The dots disappeared almost immediately.

  I could eliminate most of them electronically if there weren’t so many, he thought.

  The ship rocked. Hawking said, “A cluster missile exploded near the ship. Shields are down to 46.81%.”

  The five cutters appeared. They stayed a safe distance away from the action and chased on a parallel course.

  Steo yelled, “Head toward that dense area of ships! Get us out of this open space!”

  “How?!” Yuina said.

  “We’ll make a hole.”

  “Rotate the ship forward. Renosha, prepare to fire all anti-missiles, mostly at those to the front.”

  Steo sent the hacking attack at missiles to the front.

  He ran into the bridge to Yuina. He hit a button. The kinetic cannon fired.

  “What are you shooting at?” she said.