Kendric straightened and found himself staring into the muzzle of a laser pistol held by Clovis's bodyguard, a short, tough-looking man who had remained motionless in the shadows by the door until now.
Kendric froze, keeping his hands in view, palms open. "There are thousands of lives on that mountain, sir...and you are responsible for their welfare! If that mountain erupts while they're up there..."
"Who are you?"
"Kendric Fraser, sir. Formerly Navarchos Fraser of His Imperial Majesty's Navy."
"Master, I've seen his records!" Lynch said. "The man is a criminal! A mutineer and a rebel! He was attempting to organize a Renegade element within the Imperial Navy!"
Those brilliant blue eyes fastened to Kendric. "You take a great deal upon yourself, young Fraser. You say you were burned?"
Kendric nodded. Moving slowly, he pulled the leg of his coveralls high enough so that Clovis could see the blisters along his calf.
"Self-inflicted, Master," Lynch said. "He was trying to escape work..."
"Be still, Lynch." Clovis did not raise his voice, but Lynch fell silent, save for a low wheeze to his breathing. Clovis made a motion, and the guard behind him relaxed, but only slightly. "So, whatever else you may be, you are also a brave man."
"No, sir... But I detest waste and stupidity. Thousands of people are going to die up there if something is not done about them, and quickly!"
Clovis pursed his lips and nodded. "This bears investigating. Lynch? We will go in your aircar to Mine 12. You, myself, and one of my guards. I would like to see the site for myself."
"Master...Sir...I..."
"We will investigate this young man's claims. If he is lying, I will trust your judgement to best dispose of the matter. If he is telling the truth, however..."
"Sir!" Kendric said, stepping forward. He stopped again and raised his hands slowly as Clovis's guard again snapped his pistol into line with Kendric's head. "Sir... if you would please give the order that I and my friend—that other worker prisoner I mentioned—be kept together, while we wait."
"You fear...ah...retribution, of some sort?"
"Yes, sir, I do. He has promised it, in fact."
Clovis turned on Lynch. "Lynch, the safety of these people is on your head. If I find they have been hurt in any way when we return, you will suffer. Do you understand me?"
"Y...yes, Master."
"Give the order. Now."
Barris was on his feet again, though he favored his left leg and kept Kendric transfixed with an evil glare.
"Go on, Barris. Do as he says. Take him to his 'friend.'"
Barris growled something unintelligible.
"And no rough stuff until we get back." Lynch turned a dark look on Kendric. "You will answer for this, slave, you and your play-pretty friend, both! I promise you!" With those words, he turned on his heel and stomped from the room.
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
—Saying attributed to unknown military commander, Early Interregnum period, Terra
"Break out in three minutes, Captain."
Morganen nodded. "Very well. Engineering, stand by with I-K drive."
"Drive turning and ready to go, Captain."
"Communications, put me on intraship."
"Intraship, aye, Captain."
"Now here this. This is the Captain speaking, We are less than three minutes from breakout in the Narbon system. According to the data provided us, we should be coming out fairly close to our target, which is the moon of a gas giant in the star's outer system.
"We don't expect a fight, but we will fight if we have to. They have our Captain, and we're going to get him back! All hands to battle stations now."
The harsh bleating of the general-quarters alarm sounded through the ship as seconds trickled down toward zero on the main screen. The only near mass shadow in this strangely empty T-space whiteness was a single black orb almost dead ahead—the Narbon sun. Then the screen flashed with color, and Morganen felt the familiar surge of gravity as the Gaidheal dropped back into the normal dimensions of rational space.
"Scanners out," Morganen ordered. Long and tension-wracked minutes followed as the Gaidheal's scanners reached out into an expanding volume of space around the destroyer. The Damadas was reported on station a few hundred kilometers above and aft of the Gaidheal. Haetai was a bright star in the forward viewer, close beside the sharp orange blaze of Narbon.
It's empty here, Morgan was thinking. I'd feel happier with more stars around me.
"Range to target, just under two light minutes," the Scanner Chief informed him. "We're reading neutrino sources from one of the gas-giant moons. We've tentatively identified them as gravitic fusion reactors on Haetai-Aleph. There are no capital ships that we can see."
"Fighters?"
"We're too far out to tell yet, Captain. There are some traces that might be interplanetary transports... and a great deal of radiation that could be transports or cargo carriers in the vicinity of one inner planet."
"That will be Narbon II," Morganen said, leaning forward. "It's something of a trade center hereabouts." He considered for a moment. "Looks like we've timed things well," he said. "Helm, stand by for combat maneuvering. Let's close with our target. Scanners...keep your eyes out. If there are warships. ..Hell, if there's an ore freighter masked by the planet or any of its moons, I want to know the instant you spot it!"
The Gaidheal's lean shape moved through the darkness, shadowed by her smaller consort. The radiators of both vessels glowed with the white radiance of shimmertau. Ahead of them, the wavefront of Cherenkov radiation heralding their arrival in the system raced toward Haetai-Aleph at the speed of light. Almost two minutes after their arrival, it impinged upon the detectors of robotic watchcraft in orbit over Haetai-Aleph, and alarms sounded on the world below.
The timing, Clovis decided, could not have been better—or worse. The aircar bearing Lynch, their bodyguards, and him across the bleak deserts of sulfur and basalt had only just settled to ground at Mine 12's landing field when the sirens began to wail and the alert came through over the aircar's radio.
He opened the radio channel. "Clovis."
"Thank Caesar, you're here, sir!" said a voice taut with urgency. "This is Haetai-Aleph Ground Defense Command! Your flight plan states that you arrived with a personal fighter escort. Are they with you, sir?"
"Not presently. I am at Mine 12, on Grod. They are in the area of
my villa on Plateau."
"We have an emergency, sir, and request control of your fighters!"
Clovis's fighter escort was not an Imperial unit, strictly speaking, but mercenary bodyguards hired to pilot those ships. Imperial law was clear, however, concerning the obligations of Imperial citizens in the face of a military threat to a TOG-owned facility such as the mines on Haetai-Aleph. The Ground Command controller was showing unusual courtesy in requesting the use of those fighters, but that was because Clovis was a relatively high-ranking official in the TOG hierarchy. Those who managed gennium-arsenide facilities wielded considerable power, which was why many had their own fighter escorts for their interplanetary travels.
"What is the nature of your emergency, Control? An alert has just been sounded here at Mine 12."
"Sir! We have unidentified vessels closing on Haetai-Aleph! The base computer gives a probability of 90 percent-plus that they are warships, sir!"
Clovis's brow furrowed. "Warships? Imperial warships?"
"Unknown, sir. None are scheduled to call here."
Damn and damn and damn, Clovis thought. What now? Renegade forces occasionally raided gennium-arsenide mining facilities, but Haetai-Aleph was far from any area threatened by those predators.
"You have ships in the area?"
"No warships, sir. Ground defense has been alerted, but we're not sure yet what their target is."
It would be some moments before they could guess that, Clovis knew. There were over a hundred mines on Haetai-Aleph. Any of them could be the
raiders' target—or all of them.
"Very well. I am releasing command of my personal fighter escort to you, Command. Stand by. I will download the scramble code to your communications computer." It took milliseconds to squirt the code stored in Clovis's perscomp through the Haetai-Aleph Defense Command's comm network, allowing them to speak with his fighters.
Moments later, Clovis's six Spiculums wheeled from their patrol area and began racing east.
The Damadas entered Haetai-Aleph's atmosphere high over the moon's cold side, the flare from the ship's ionization trail illuminating twilit ice plains with cold and silent light. Commander Uillam Lyle watched the ice brighten on the frigate's small bridge viewer as the craft plunged across Haetai-Aleph's terminator and into weak daylight. Moments later, ice gave way to rugged canyons clogged with broken rock, prairies of yellow sulfur, and an endless expanse of mountainous desert. Gray clouds piled high against the horizon, marking active volcanos and swallowing the half-full globe of Haetai.
"We have radar contact with Gaidheal," the Scanner Chief reported.
"Confirmed," the Helmsman said. "Course bearing checks...and locked in."
"Comm channels...locked in," the Communications Officer reported a moment later.
Communications near Haetai-Aleph presented certain problems. The gas giant and its vast, powerful radiation belts combined to form a titanic source of radio noise that blanketed local space with shrill yowls, hisses, and poppings on every frequency. Though the satellite's magnetic field and ionosphere were strong enough to shelter the surface from the worst of both radiation and radio white noise, communication past the satellite's atmosphere—to a starship in orbit, for example—was limited to tightly beamed microwave broadcasts or to laser communications systems that operated on coherent light rather than radio waves. In other words, people could use radio to talk to one another on the surface of Haetai-Aleph near the equator, but ships and facilities in orbit were out of touch unless their antennae were carefully aimed and computer-tracked.
The Damadas's Communications Officer had just established a laser link with the destroyer out in orbit.
"Signal from Gaidheal, Captain," the Comm Officer reported. '"Target facility in sight. Ready to download navigational data.'"
"Acknowledge. Helm, are you ready for a course feed?"
"Ready to go, Captain."
"Open data channel."
Two thousand kilometers above Haetai's moon, the Gaidheal was acting as a navigational satellite, keeping both the Mine 12 mountain-top and the low-flying Damadas in sight as her computers fed information to the frigate that would bring the two together. The Damadas's navigational computers made small corrections in course and speed to bring the frigate close enough to Haetai-Aleph's surface to generate a thunderous sonic boom.
"Gaidheal reporting," the ship's Comm Officer continued. "'Confirmed: no capital ships within sensor range. No spacecraft in vicinity of target facility.'"
"That's good news, at least." Lyle's gravest concern had been that a squadron or two of fighters might be in position to attack when he
arrived in position to deliver his Ultimatum. "We might..."
"Sir! New report! Gaidheal has identified neutrino sources in motion!"
"Fire control! Stand by your weapons!"
"Fire control, ready Captain."
"Do we have a tactical feed?"
"Coming through now, Captain. On the screen!"
The view of tortured black rock streaming away beneath the ship's belly was replaced by a detailed contour map of the planet's surface. The frigate's position was marked by a gold diamond in the screen's center. Other objects—fusion reactors on the surface, heat or radiation sources from small aircraft, the pulsing, thermal glow of a volcanic chain—stretched around them for a thousand kilometers.
Six red triangles in close formation raced across the landscape, a thousand kilometers away and closing fast. Data on vector, mass, and acceleration scrolled across the bridge screen.
"Computer identifies the targets as medium fighters. Captain. Spiculums...probability 80 percent."
Lyle narrowed his eyes as he studied the map. He could slow and l ight. Or he could boost in an attempt to reach the target before the Imperial fighters reached him. In a fight, he would probably win, but his ship might be damaged in the process. If he could reach those ore containers first, however...
He did not linger on the decision. "Helm! Give it all she's got!"The distant rumble of the Damadas's I-K drive increased in pitch and ihunder in its steel cavern somewhere beneath the bridge. He switched channels. "Douglass? Stand by! We've got company...six fighters following us in to the target."
"I have them on my repeater, Captain."
"Looks like our best bet is to boot you clear the moment we reach Ihe target. We'll cover for you while you ground and negotiate for Fraser. With luck, the fighters'll hold off when they see us squatting over their precious ore containers!"
"Affirmative," Douglass replied. "I'm ready to go when you say the word."
"Right. We're coming up on the target. Ten seconds. Luck, Pilot..." We' 11 all bloody well need it!
The frigate arrived over Mine 12 with a sonic boom as loud and as startling as a barrage of high-explosive warheads. Lynch crumpled beside the administrator, hands over his ears, gibbering fear.
Clovis ignored him. They had left Lynch's bodyguard, Juvin, with the aircar and had been walking across the open field toward the base headquarters building. From that vantage point, he had a clear and unobstructed view of the vessel, which had appeared, as if materialized from invisibility, a half-kilometer over his head. It had theclean, shark-finned lines of a small Imperial frigate.
Imperial! A captured ship, perhaps? Clovis did not know what to make of the apparition. It wasn't large enough to carry a very heavy cargo load. What might its operators want?
Sunlight glittered on a smaller shape separating from the larger. The shuttle was also of Imperial design, similar to his own personal shuttle, large enough to crowd in half a dozen people, or for perhaps a ton of cargo. As it descended, he could make out an Imperial device painted on its hull, but no other identification.
Who were these people?
Clovis was studying the shuttle so intently that he did not at first see the arrival of his fighters. Multiple sonic booms echoed across the floor of the crater. Then came the far deeper boom of an exploding warhead as it smote the surrounding crater walls with a tangible thunderclap that sent the slaves and workers still on the surface of the crater floor scurrying for cover.
Laser fire tracked and flashed. "Don't look at the light!" he warned Lynch, but the slave was already gone, running as quickly as his fat legs would carry him across the landing field toward the grounded aircar fifty meters away. Lynch's bodyguard was standing in the vehicle, gesturing wildly.
His own bodyguard stirred beside him. "We should get under cover, sir."
"Very well, Merrit. But walk. These legs are too old and stiff to try for ground speed records." And it might help dispel the panic that's gripped all these the workers. The screams and yells all around them drowned the snap of laser bolts and the shriek of high-speed fighters overhead.
The frigate was in motion again, its own laser batteries firing in reply. A Spiculum dove at the frigate from above, its twin lasers flaring in rapid-fire pulses of blinding light. The frigate skittered aside, returning fire. The Spiculum plunged past, still firing wildly. Laser bolts tore into the landing field, as chunks of black rock geysered into the air. A sheet-tin building twenty meters from Clovis's back detonated in white fury.
A spinning, knife-edged fragment of metal nearly cut Clovis's bodyguard in half, while the blast picked the mine administrator up off his feet and hurled him forward and down. Clovis knew only a whirlwind instant of suffocating blackness. He was dead even before he could know he'd been hit.
"What's happening?" Morganen snapped. "Why did we lose them?"
"Sorry, Captain!" The Gaidheal's Co
mm officer said. His mouth moved in some unheard imprecation before he added, "Their maneuvering has broken our laser link!"
Morganen's fingers drummed on the arm of his command seat. The plan had been to avoid combat at all costs, but it was clear that combat had begun anyway. Lyle's last, fragmentary message had been, "We see them! They're firing! Stand..." Dammit all! There weren't supposed to be any fighters on this planet!
He caught himself remembering an old, old phrase concerning military strategy he had once read somewhere. No plan survives contact with the enemy...
The damnable part was that the Gaidheal was helpless to intervene. The larger and more massive a warship, the more power its grav generators required if it was to maneuver in a planet's atmosphere. A destroyer could enter atmosphere on its gravs—barely—but would consume such enormous amounts of energy in so doing that it would be almost helpless in combat. Larger ships were even worse off, and so never entered atmosphere. The Gaidheal's part in the operation was to protect the mission on the planet's surface from an attack from space. There was nothing the destroyer could do to help the frigate now.
"We're tracking Damadas by radar," Morganen's Scanner Chief reported. "They appear to be maneuvering just above the target."
"Great," Morganen muttered, more to himself than to his bridge crew. "What do they expect to do, blast Fraser out of that mine?"
"Contact reestablished, sir!" The Communications Officer was out of his seat with excitement. "They' ve nailed us with a laser com beam!"
"Put it on! Fast, man, before we lose them again!"
The Comm Officer opened a switch, and Commander Lyle's voice came out over the bridge speakers. "The plan is scrubbed, Gaidheal... do you copy? Old Man is scrubbed...Repeat, scrubbed!"
Morganen touched a control on his console. "This is Morganen. We copy, Uillam. What's the problem?"
"Gaidheal! Everything's wrong here! We're over the mountain... but there are no containers...repeat...no cargo containers at the location marked in the intelligence holographs!"
William Keith Renegades Honor Page 25