Morganen felt fingers of cold dread along his back. Of all possible military problems, the failure of intelligence had to be the most exasperating—and the most deadly. Everything depended on the Damadas being able to hold a large supply of gennium-arsenide ore hostage!
"One squadron of medium fighters is attacking us. No problem holding them, but we're coming under increasing fire from ground emplacements. We have not been able to broadcast our demands. The shuttle has already been deployed...repeat...shuttle deployed...but we have not yet established contact with anyone in charge!"
Morganen closed his eyes, and made the only decision he could. "Very well, Damadas! Abort. Rendezvous with Gaidheal."
"Acknowledged, Gaidheal!" There was a sound of thunder behind Lyle's voice. "The shuttle has grounded. We are attempting to contact him before..."
The blast of static sounded like a waterfall in the close confines of the bridge, chopping off Lyle's words. "Lost him," the Comm Officer said. "I think he's moved again and broken his beam..."
"What now?"
Lynch had been as good as his word, and Kendric had indeed been taken to T.C.. They shared a cell now, a narrow cage of welded steel bars set against a wall in the basement of the villa. There was barely room for a cot, a washstand, and—with crowding—two people. T.C. was clean now, her hair fairly gleaming after what must have been its first scrubbing in a year. She was wearing gray coveralls identical to Kendric's. He thought her beautiful.
If the cell did not entirely inspire confidence in their future, the Ssora standing vigil nearby made things worse. He would say or do nothing in response to their attempts at communication. Rather, he just continued to watch them with a cold, unblinking intensity.
Kendric tried to keep his voice cheerful. " We're better off here than in Mine 12, T.C.. Don't you think? There are lots of possibilities."
"I'd say your possibilities were kind of limited, right now."
They both turned at the new voice. Barris stood in the doorway next to the reptilian Ssora, a squat, ugly needier in his hand.
"Well, Barris," Kendric said carefully. He liked the look in the slave boss's eyes even less than the vicious little handgun in his fist. "You're not going to disobey your boss, now, are you? Administrator Clovis might have something to say about that."
"Clovis is dead," Barris spat out. "The Boss just called on the aircar's radio. Mine 12 is under attack, and Clovis bought it." A smile spread itself slowly and deliberately across Barris's face. "The Boss said to go ahead and get started on you two, but not to worry 'cause Juvin and him'll be back as quick as they can!"
An attack! "What attack?" Kendric demanded. "Who's attacking?"
"Aw, why should you care?" Barris was using a coding disk to unlock the cell door, the Ssora close behind him. "Yeah.. .the girl first, I think. Watch 'em, Hesh..."
The marvelous thing about Interceptors is their ability to close with an enemy, to take the fight in close. In modern ship-to-ship combat, one squadron of mediumfighters can take on a small capital ship with afair chance of winning if they can get near enough.
—From Tactics in the Sky: Modern Naval Tactics, by Lawrence Iversson, Imperial Naval Academy, Grelfhaven, A. I. 6809
T.C. screamed and threw herself to the side of the cell, then tried to barge out past Barris. Grinning, the man turned to grab her, his pistol wavering. In that instant, Kendric lashed out with his foot in a slashing side kick.
T.C. was on top of Barris before he hit the floor, her panic a sham to distract the underboss and give Kendric his opening. Kendric's foot caught Barris in the side of the head. The man slumped under T.C. and stopped moving—whether dead or unconscious, Kendric could not tell.
Warned by a hiss, he looked up. The Ssora was advancing toward the cell door, his pike raised in clawed, three-fingered hands. Kendric lunged through the open cell door, landed on his shoulder and rolled. The Ssora turned sharply to follow his movement. Though the Ssora was somewhat shorter than Kendric, he massed about the same, with much of the weight in his heavily muscled and prehensile tail. The blade-edged pike whistled as it swung in the Ssora's grasp, then struck sparks as it clanged against the bars of the cell. Kendric lashed out with his foot and nearly fell when the blow failed to connect. The Ssora pivoted around, dancing out of reach, the long-handled pike glittering as it scythed around for a second strike.
The needle beam chopped diagonally across the reptile's scaly chest, which erupted in a splattering gout of orange blood. The pike wavered in mid-flight and clattered across the stone floor next to Kendric. The Ssora's mouth gaped, exposing rows of needle teeth. Exhaling a sharp "Sssaah!", he crumpled and died.
T.C. stepped out of the cell, Barris's needle beamer raised in both hands.
"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" he asked.
"Imperial Navy.. .remember? But it's been a while since I qualified with a handgun."
"I'm just glad you're on my side. C'mon!"
"Where to?"
"Clovis's shuttle. I want to tune in on that battle Barris mentioned."
They hurried up the stairs and out the door. Moving quickly, they circled the house until they were in sight of the shuttle grounded on the small field in the rear.
"Now what?" T.C. asked.
Clovis's second bodyguard was still at his post, standing beside the ramp that descended from the belly of the craft between its down-angled, partly folded wings. The man paced slowly back and forth within a narrow strip by the ramp, a laser rifle cradled in one arm.
"Let's see if we can get inside. We should be able to find their tactical frequency and listen in."
"Why?"
"If someone is attacking Grod, I'd like to know who."
"Ore pirates?"
"Maybe...I wonder, though. If this were a place ore pirates were likely to strike, wouldn't it be better defended?" He pointed toward the distant sentry and then at the ship above them. "We can use the radio in that ship if we can get past him."
"Well, it's a long shot, but maybe..." She raised the beamer.
"No," Kendric said, laying his hand on her arm. The guard was at least 150 meters away, an extraordinarily difficult shot for a handgun with a barrel as short as the stubby little hand beamer's. Accuracy with such a weapon depended on the distance between front and rear sights, but needle beamers were so short that they rarely carried any sights at all. A hit at such a range would depend on sheer luck, and Kendric was not about to risk everything on luck.
"Miss and we'll never get him," Kendric said. "He'll button up inside the shuttle. Let me."
Kendric stood up, straightened his coveralls, and began to stride toward the guard with a brisk and professional walk.
The guard saw him before he had gone twenty meters, but Kendric did not vary his pace. Dressed in the semi-uniform that Lynch had given him, he hoped to resemble a household servant enough that the shuttle's guard would not shoot him down outright.
There was a subtle psychology involved in Kendric's ploy. If he kept his face expressionless and his walk measured and controlled, the guard would assume that he had a right to be there, walking toward him. Probably.
Closer. When Kendric was ten meters from the guard, the man's rifle came up, neither pointing directly at him, but not pointing away, either.
"Hello! Are you Administrator Clovis's man?"
The rifle wavered, and the barrel dipped slightly. "What's it to you, slave?"
"He called on the house radio. Said he wanted to talk to the guard at the shuttle. He said you could use the shuttle radio, channel 20."
The guard looked uncertain. "Th' Boss wants t'talk to me?"
Kendric shrugged expressively. "That's what they told me. You don't want to talk, then..."
"Wait! Wait! What channel did you say?"
Kendric had the feeling the guard was not entirely sure what a radio looked like, but he smiled and nodded. "Twenty. He said he'd wait, but that you'd better hurry."
That word seemed to settle any re
maining conflict in the guard's mind. For a hired man like Clovis's bodyguard, it would not do to keep an important man like Clovis waiting. He turned his back on Kendric as Kendric took the final three steps toward the guard's position.
T.C. ran up as Kendric dragged the guard well clear of the shuttle, then stooped to retrieve his laser rifle. "Let's go, T.C.!"
The shuttle was a civilian luxury version of the Stella Errans Class types he had flown briefly after graduating from the Academy. It was equipped with both gravs and a streamlined airfoil for maneuvering in atmosphere and a powerful I-K drive that could manage perhaps four Gs of acceleration. Designed strictly for surface-to-orbit travel between the worlds of a single star system, it was not equipped with T-space drive. It did, however, carry a radio on its tiny, two-man bridge.
T.C. slipped into the co-pilot's seat next to Kendric as he turned dials, the radio alternately hissing and roaring under his ministrations.
"Are you trying to tune in on those attackers?" she asked.
"Doubt that I could get them. They're probably tight beam and scrambled. The defenders will be scrambled, too, but if we're real lucky, Clovis's fighters are in the fray."
"So?"
"If they're scrambling their transmissions, the shuttle computer ought to be equipped with the code to unscramble them. Ha!"
A twist of the tuning dial brought in a throbbing, pulsing electronic sound. There were voices behind that pulse, but the words were unrecognizable. "Scrambled," Kendric said. "I wonder if that was one of the pirate ships? Ah.. .that's more like it!"
"Escort Three...this is Escort One!" The voice was blurred and tattered by static and by the throbbing roar of a small ship' s drives. "Are you close enough yet? Can you make an ID?"
"Affirmative, One! I make it to be an Imperial frigate....Velox Class."
"Imperial? You sure? That don't make sense!"
"Hey...I'm tellin' you what I'm seeing! Velox Class. Maybe a bit smaller than a standard Velox, but I don't recognize the ID...."
Kendric's hands were already on the shuttle's controls as the fighter pilots continued to talk. From aft, the keening whine of the ship's gravs rose in a banshee wail. Aft and below, the belly ramp swung up and locked shut as green lights cascaded across the console, reporting the ship tight, pressurized, and ready for flight.
The shuttle lifted clear of the field then, its grav field raising a cloud of dust where it brushed past. Kendric had noted their direction of travel when they'd come this way by aircar. Now the shuttle's prow aligned with a certain remembered notch in the mountains along the skyline, and the shuttle began drifting forward, slowly at first, then faster and faster. He deliberately did not increase their altitude, save to rise above obstacles as the ground rose higher beneath the little ship.
As the plateau dropped away behind them, Kendric pressed the grav acceleration control gradually forward. The ground, already moving swiftly, turned to a gray-brown blur beneath the streamlined ship. Behind them, the sulfur-encrusted landscape erupted in a long, vertical curtain of boiling yellow dust racing just behind the shock wave of a deafening sonic boom.
"I hope you know how to fly this thing!" T.C. yelled over the whine of the gravs.
"If I don't, I'll have to go back to Grelfhaven for a refresher course!" Kendric shouted back, and T.C. laughed.
"Hey!" she yelled once more. "I think I've just been rescued!"
"Hang on with your congratulations a moment. I want to see what this attacking fleet is."
At hypersonic speeds, the hurtling shuttle closed rapidly on the familiar clouds of billowing ash. Kendric judged the angle between two remembered peaks, then adjusted the shuttle's course slightly. They could see the battle, and there was no doubt about their course. As an Imperial frigate rose slowly above the mountain, Spiculum fighters swooped, angling for good shots, lasers spearing at the warship with every pass.
Kendric let out a shrill war whoop as he hauled back on the shuttle's controls.
"Kendric! What...?"
"It's the Damadas!" he shouted. "Wheeeeeoooo! It's the Damadas! I recognize her numbers! They're here to rescue us!"
Jaime Douglass kept his laser pistol steady between the two and wondered what to do next.
He had grounded the shuttle only moments after the sky had become full of man-made lightning bolts and flashing Spiculum fighters. It was clear that the original plan was no longer going to be possible. Why hadn't the Damadas located the cache of stored ore containers and hovered there? Instead, the frigate seemed to be all over the sky as six medium fighters circled and lunged like sleek, evil birds of prey.
He had tried to contact the Danmdas by radio and had received no answer. It was clear enough that they were busy, though... and perhaps they were talking to mine officials by radio.
From his vantage point low above the crater floor, Jaime saw a ponderously fat man running slowly toward a grounded aircar, reaching it, and scrambling aboard. The aircar itself was distinctive, obviously an expensive civilian model and not what one would expect to find at a gennarite mine's above-ground workings. He could make out the man seated in the front passenger's seat as he spoke into a microphone.
So! Perhaps the fat man was the facility's administrator or some other high official! If he was giving orders from the seat of an expensive aircar, he had to be someone important.
Jaime decided to improvise. If the Damadas wasn't talking to the mine officials, it was possible that the fat man would offer an alternative. He continued to guide the shuttle downward. The aircar, piloted by the man who had been waiting in the driver's seat, began to lift off the crater floor. Jaime's shuttle caught the little machine under one broad, canted wing and returned it to ground.
The landing was a rough one. Jaime had the shuttle's side hatch open while the hum of the ship's gravs was still dwindling, and had vaulted onto the crater floor with a Mark XXIV laser pistol before the ramp had touched ground. The aircar was tangled in the port wing stabilizer inductors, its occupants unarmed and already free of their vehicle. Jaime brought his pistol up, stopping them in their tracks the moment they saw him.
"Right!" He had to yell to be heard above the screech generated by a low-turning fighter. "Inside, both of you!"
He had only the vaguest idea of what to do next. If these people were important, however, he might be able to parlay them into a ceasefire...and an exchange for Kendric Fraser. If nothing more, he could question them within the relative quiet and imaginary safety of his shuttle.
Grinning, he gestured with his pistol. He might yet salvage the mission!
The shuttle began rising toward the crest of the mountain, its pace slackening as Kendric cut back on the thrust. Flashes of coherent light snapped and stabbed from around the crater rim, adding to the fiery pyrotechnics close about the frigate in the sky overhead.
On the crater floor, Kendric caught sight of the glint of sunlight across another familiar hull design. It was another shuttle, a true Stella Errans Class. The orange and blue design on her wing and the number stenciled on her tail fin left no doubt about her origin.
"One of our shuttles!" he yelled in T.C.'s ear. "Off the Damadas, I think! They must be here looking for me!"
T.C.'s eyes were bright as she turned them on Kendric. "Then we're saved!"
Light flashed outside the cockpit and the shuttle staggered. "Not yet, we aren't!" Relief turned to biting fear as he realized that the near-miss had come from Damadas, now half a kilometer overhead. "The damned idiots don't know it's me!"
He banked the shuttle sharply, turning his head to search out the grounded shuttle. Why had it landed? Perhaps to look for him? It was a long shot, but the only one he had. Perhaps he could ground close enough...
T.C. screamed.
Above them, white light blossomed across the Damadas's ventral hull, leaping from seam to seam along her armor, devouring the twin turrets of her ventral laser battery. Her shield pulsed once, then failed as a blinding flash of light hammered at the ship,
rocking her hard over on her beam. Kendric could make out chunks of flaming metal arcing out and down, tumbling toward the ground, trailing plumes of twisting black smoke.
The shock wave of the missile detonation struck their shuttle an instant later, and Kendric battled against the violently bucking craft. Jagged rocks blurred past the cockpit window as he hauled the shaken craft around, pulling the nose up by willpower and stark, blind fear. He damped the shuttle's velocity in a long, skidding turn, gunning her gravs aft as she skittered backward a few meters above the crater floor.
Above them, the Damadas exploded, her power systems dumping the fury of a small sun in her engine room as magnetic bottles collapsed and fusion heat and pressures were loosed.
Burning, the Damadas fell wing over wing toward the crater.
A frequent problem encountered in the recovery of gennium-arsenide is the high level of seismic and volcanic activity caused by the very conditions that create the ore in the first place. Casualties among mine workers can be severe...
—Extractfrom Social and Economic Structures: A Survey of Way s and Means, Imperial Naval Academy, Grelfhaven, A. I. 6809
Jaime couldn't understand why the fat man was laughing so hard. "What's so funny?"
His prisoner gasped for breath, wiping at the tears on his pudgy cheeks with the back of one hand. They were inside Jaime's shuttle, the din of the battle suppressed to a dull roar by the little vessel's soundproofing.
"You...you're here to rescue Kendric Fraser?"
"That's right. Have someone bring him up out of those holes, and I won't have to start carving up you and your friend here with this!" He gestured with his pistol, more to remind them of its presence than anything else. He didn't trust the black expression in the bodyguard's eyes.
"Unnecessary, my friend, I promise you. Fraser is already up out of the mine...and safe. I have him, not far from here!" He giggled a little hysterically. "Although we'd better hurry, or he may not be safe for very long!"
Jaime scowled. The man who identified himself as "Administrator Lynch" was being entirely too cooperative. He opened his mouth to ask just what Lynch meant when a blast hit the vessel's hull like a tidal wave, rocking the vessel violently to one side. Jaime fell sideways against a bulkhead strut, striking his head. In a wave of blinding, dizzying pain, he dropped his pistol, which went rattling across the deck toward the cockpit.
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