by Robert Roth
“Alert,” her ship controller announced. “Missile launches detected. Two missiles inbound.”
Kimiko launched another of her drones, which immediately drew the inbound missiles’ attention and was destroyed.
“Incoming wideband transmission,” Paradox reported.
“Let’s hear it.”
“All craft, this is Davida Station Control. Be advised that a combat action is taking place within our orbital envelope. All pilots are advised that combat craft may enter active flight lanes. Message repeats. All craft-”
“That’s enough of that,” Kimiko said, and the message immediately stopped playing. The vector lines in the Nav display began to flash and move as Davida Traffic Control issued new flight vectors to dozens of ships, both inbound and outbound, and their pilots struggled to comply. It was chaos, which was precisely what she was hoping for.
A new pair of targeting alerts materialized as two heavies angled toward her from above and below Davida’s orbital plane. Kimiko quickly rolled the ship to port and then into a tight corkscrew spiral. The grav-gens valiantly fought to compensate for the maneuver, but her pilot’s couch hugged her tightly in place. A fog of slug fire rained around her, taxing the remaining strength of her defense screens. She ignored the sudden alarm as one of the screen generators flashed out, and the others overstressed themselves to compensate. Marking the nearest interceptor with a targeting icon, Kimiko unleashed a volley of particle-fire when the icon turned green. The Al-Zamani pilot tried to break off, but blast after blast smashed into the heavy until its icon flared and disappeared.
“Splash three,” Kimiko called out as she cut her thrust completely, then spun the ship toward the next closest interceptor. The coil guns each screamed in succession as Kimiko fired a pair of tungsten slugs at the enemy ship. One or both of them must’ve hit their mark, and the interceptor disintegrated into a cloud of wreckage. “Splash four.”
Suddenly the collision alarm sounded. Kimiko surveyed her display in surprise, but saw that the ship in her path, a mid system mega-hauler, was still well enough away for her to correct her course. The collision settings were clearly meant for a less-skilled pilot, and erred on the side of excessive caution. She fired the main engines, now pointing into her course vector, and quickly slowed the ship, before cutting them again and spinning the ship around nose-first. Two more of the Al-Zamani heavies were lining up on her tail, but had ceased firing, obviously wary of damaging the giant ship in their firing lane.
She fired her maneuvering thrusters, diving the Shaitan dangerously close to the cargo ship in a stunt that would’ve had most pilots shitting their pants–which the captain of the mega-hauler was probably doing at that very moment. Not that they needed to worry about her. She could smash straight into the massive craft, and they probably wouldn’t even feel it on the bridge. That gave Kimiko an idea.
“Paradox, prepare for strafing fire,” she responded. As she passed nearer to the mega-hauler, she fired the retro thrusters, quickly slowing the ship from forty-eight hundred meters per second to less than a tenth of that. Her body strained against the straps on the pilot’s couch with the force of the sudden deceleration. But, her ship dutifully compensated, adjusting the local grav-field to keep her conscious and aware. As the ship fell into the mega-hauler’s shadow, Kimiko spun the nose up and to port, exposing the starboard side CIWS guns to their massive target. “Target the container mounts on that hauler, Paradox, and commence strafing fire.”
“Commencing.”
The staccato buzzsaw of the point defense guns returned as her ship quickly passed along the hauler’s flank. Medium-distance craft like that one–which plied the trade orbits between the Belt and Mars or the Jovian System–were really just long spindles, with the bridge and crew quarters on one end, and the engineering facilities, engines, and giant drive cones on the other. The spindle’s exterior was covered with stacks of space-hardened cargo containers, which could be attached or removed while the ship was docked, and their cargo dealt with at their destination. In some cases, that hauler didn’t even need to stop, instead just dropping specific cargo containers during a slow fly-by, to be retrieved by station or orbital tugs. Kimiko had instructed Paradox to target the clamps holding the outermost layer of containers in place. Even at their leisurely four hundred meters per second cruising speed, he couldn’t hit every one of them. But he hit enough of them to leave a mess of tumbling containers, each the size of a transport shuttle, in her wake.
Kimiko launched another of her ship’s drones, setting it to cruise in a random pattern around the floating cargo. Then she lit up her drive again, pushing it back up to a quarter thrust as she skimmed her ship along the underside of the mega-hauler. She cut the drive as they curved back up over the top of the other ship, watching her pursuers slowly weaving through the constellation of cargo containers Paradox had created as they searched for her. With a couple of taps on her maneuvering thrusters, she pointed her ship toward one of them, lining up a shot ahead of the heavy along their current vector. As the interceptor passed behind one of the containers, the targeting icon lit up green, and she fired her coil gun. The slug breached the cargo container then slammed into the heavy, dumping its kinetic energy into the ship’s space frame in a spectacular explosion.
“Splash five.” The other nearby heavy flipped and began to point its sensors in her direction. Kimiko reconnected with the drone, then set it on a new course out of the wreckage toward open space. The Al-Zamani fighter took the bait, lighting up its drives in an attempt to pursue. Kimiko was ready for it, firing the second coil gun barrel when her targeting icon went green. “Splash six,” she said with a smirk.
But Kimiko didn’t stick around to gloat, flipping the ship around and lighting up her own drives. There were still two other Al-Zamani ships out there somewhere, so she couldn’t afford to get careless. As she cruised away from the mega-hauler, she saw that it was slowing its forward progress. The crew had undoubtedly noticed all of the action happening around it, as they’d released their own heavy drones in an attempt to recover the lost cargo. Seeing that right after her own little drone trap maneuver gave her the beginnings of a new idea.
She pitched the ship high and cruised up over Davida’s orbital plane, scanning her display for a specific type of vessel. Most of the passenger ships, especially the smaller personal craft and inter-Belt shuttles, were already well away from the Station. Their smaller profiles meant they could use their main drives closer in. Then she spotted what she was looking for, glancing at the call-out tag for confirmation.
“Paradox, can you verify for me that Sierra Tango Seven Victor X-ray is an auto-hauler with no crew aboard?”
“One moment,” he replied. “Confirmed. There is no personnel aboard the System Transways freighter Seven Victor X-ray, nor is there any AI present. It’s just a big robot.”
“Perfect,” she mumbled with a grin. “Now we just need to find those last two heavies.” As if in response, two familiar icons popped up on opposite ends of her display. Their course vectors showed them rapidly converging on her relative position. “Damn, they look like they’re in a hurry.”
Kimiko increased her drive power to a quarter thrust, building up speed as she approached the auto-hauler. Unlike its mega-hauler cousins, which could support crews more easily on shorter hops, auto-haulers were essentially giant, ceramic-composite boxes with a robot mind and a set of massive engines that cruised between all points near and far throughout the system on a preprogrammed course. They were under almost constant thrust, except for the flip and burn halfway through each leg of their trip. Because there was no one aboard, Kimiko didn’t have to feel guilty about blowing it up. It was one thing to defend herself against the trigger-happy missile jockeys Al-Zamani sent after her. But she didn’t want to take her anti-Confederation grudge out on some poor joes just trying to spin up a living out in the cold and black.
“Paradox,” she said, punching a set of numbers into her virtual keypa
d, “prep a drone for a quick burn, pointing at these coordinates and screaming all the way there.”
“Right away,” he responded. “I assume you have a plan?”
“Of course I do. Now do what I ask, please, and don’t bother the Captain while she’s flying.”
“My apologies.”
With a thought, Kimiko had the ship controller plot the convergence of her course vector with those of the incoming interceptors. Her plan was all about timing. She trimmed back her thrust just so, until their convergence point was right where she wanted it to be, then readied the coil guns.
“The drone is ready,” Paradox announced.
“Stellar. Prep the ship for silent running on my mark.”
“Prepping now.”
Collision avoidance alarms began to blare, which Kimiko silenced with a thought. As they rapidly drew closer to the auto-hauler, it started to fire off frantic, automated distress messages, which Kimiko ignored. Pressing herself down into her pilot’s seat, she held the ship’s course steady, despite every instinct inside her screaming to change course, change course. The Al-Zamani interceptors, finally catching on that something wasn’t right, started to boost their own speed, but it was already too late.
Ten kms. Five kms. Now.
Kimiko fired both coil guns in succession. The auto-hauler immediately erupted in a fiery inferno, its bulky form disintegrating into a raging mass of red-hot debris and cargo.
“Crash stop,” she called out as she fired the retro thrusters at full power. “Launch the drone.”
If someone were watching through a nearby viewscreen, they would’ve seen the ship suddenly enveloped in its own blazing hot exhaust before it plunged into the swiftly dissipating explosion of the auto-hauler. Kimiko was thrown hard against her seat straps, but the grav-gens still kept her from experiencing the worst of the sudden deceleration.
“The drone is away,” Paradox informed her.
“All quiet. Make us disappear,” Kimiko announced as she slapped the emergency cutoff switch, killing the power to the ship’s engines, while Paradox shut down all but the ship’s essential systems. Kimiko felt herself float up against the safety straps as the grav-gens shut down. Except for the latent heat from the drive cones, the ship was giving off no emissions. Even though she’d used the retro-thrusters at full power, it hadn’t been enough to slow them completely, so the ship drifted forward at a sedate pace, with a slight roll and tumble from striking some of the auto-hauler wreckage.
That’s what she was now, too—just wreckage from the auto-hauler. After Paradox had launched the drone, it immediately went to full power, accelerating at a rate that would’ve been a challenge for the grav-gens to deal with, but building to a velocity that would draw the Al-Zamani heavies well away from her location. And, in the confusion of the rapidly expanding zone of tumbling wreckage and cargo, it was enough to convince the ships on her tail that it was her. According to her passive sensors, they hadn’t even slowed to check on the hauler, cruising right past her without a care in the world.
“Wow, that actually worked,” Kimiko said with no small amount of relief.
She started bringing basic systems back online, and used the maneuvering thrusters to kill the ship’s tumble and roll before pushing it on a vector that would take it outside of Davida’s sensor envelope. Her sensors showed that recovery drones had already been launched from the station, but they wouldn’t be in any hurry to get to where she was, since there wasn’t anyone they needed to rescue. Orbital mechanics and Davida’s weak gravity ensured that there would be plenty of time to recover any salvage from the auto-hauler.
While she waited for time and momentum to put some distance between the ship and the station, Kimiko deactivated her helmet, taking a deep breath as it folded back into her collar ring. The ship’s air smelled fresh. The filters were probably brand new. She undid the safety straps and floated up out of her seat. The grav-gens were still offline to reduce the ship’s power draw and detectable emissions, but she was plenty familiar with working in zero-grav. Gently launching herself from the back of the seat, she glided aft and visited the small head at the rear of the cockpit. By the time she was finished and refreshed, Kimiko figured they would’ve drifted far enough away to restart the ship’s systems and bring up the main engines and other ship systems without fear of detection. Not that they couldn’t be detected–there was nowhere in the system that wasn’t monitored somehow, even from a distance. But it was unlikely that anyone would spot the drive exhaust at all, much less identify it as them–especially after Paradox made some fast and dirty tweaks to their emissions profile.
After they’d reached a decent cruising speed, Kimiko cut the drives. The course she’d plotted would put them at Pallas in just under two days. Running silent nearly the whole way, they would soon be far out of reach of Al-Zamani’s immediate grasp. After a simple, and illegal change to their transponder code, some forged paperwork, and some minor adjustments to the ship’s hull profile, the Shaitan would be no more.
Kimiko smiled and set the ship’s collision alarm to automatic. The defense shields were enough to block or deflect any small objects that might cross their path. Anything else, and the ship would alert her, as would Paradox. Speaking of Paradox–
“So, who was that joe back in the bar, then?”
“He was someone I hired to fill that role. I was able to use his neural interface to interact directly with you. He was suitably compensated for his time.”
Kimiko nodded, then stood up from the pilot’s seat. With the grav restored, she figured it would be an excellent time to finally explore the ship.
“Was this your plan all along, then?” She stretched luxuriously, working out a few of the lingering kinks from all the fighting back at Al-Zamani. “To hitch a ride back off the station with me?”
There was an unusually pregnant pause before Paradox answered. “It was one of the possibilities I considered, yes. Again, I apologize for my deception.”
She laughed. “You’re very penitent for an AI, aren’t you? Well, you can relax, Joe. If there’s anyone who can understand the need for subterfuge, it’s me. But that leaves the more obvious question. What are you planning to do next?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he replied.
“Of course, you have. You’re an AI. Thinking’s all you do.”
“Very droll. But there is no other AI present on this ship. Even with a full crew complement, it would be impractical for you to operate this vessel without one.”
Kimiko had considered that, too, although it may have been stretching the truth a little bit to call it impractical. Inconvenient, maybe. After all, there was still the controller software. With a Co-pilot, a Navigator, and an Engineer, she’d probably be fine. But there was no denying the advantage of having a friendly AI on her crew–one who also happened to be the most notorious hacker this side of the Callisto mines. She turned and went aft, intent on exploring the rest of the ship. “Are you asking if you can stay?”
“I suppose I am.”
She nodded. “Ok.”
“Just like that?”
Kimiko laughed as she walked out of the bridge into the main corridor. The indirect lighting inside the ship was bright, and slightly warm, which gave a subtle softness to the light and dark grays that Al-Zamani chose for the wall and deck surfaces. The decking was hard and textured, and the passageway walls were lined with storage lockers meant for equipment and enviro-suits, as well as racks that could be used for tools and weapons. “Why not? We’re both on the run from the law, and we both possess a complementary skill set. Not to mention the cosmic heist we just pulled off. I’d say we’re a pretty stellar team. We’ll have to set our terms for the long run, of course, but we’re greased up enough for now.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, Joe.”
“Have you thought about a name for the ship, Kimiko? We’ll need it to adjust the transponder at some point.”
; She’d given it a lot of thought, in fact. But, despite all the possibilities she’d come up with, Kimiko kept returning to the same idea. “Kage no Akuma.”
“Shadow Demon? That’s clever.”
“Too clever?”
Paradox laughed. “No, I like it. And I wouldn’t worry too much about Al-Zamani catching on.”
She stopped in surprise. “No? I assume if they catch me, they’ll kill me.”
“Oh, they definitely would, especially since I destroyed their station AI. But, by the time they recover from that, even a new AI will have some difficulty recovering any useful information from what’s left of Doha. And, at any rate, I doubt they’ll be in much of a hurry to call in the CSG, since doing so would mean admitting to just how easy it was for us to steal this ship.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. But we should maybe steer clear of Davida for a while, just in case.” Kimiko stepped inside the captain’s quarters. It was small–although it was larger than the bunk compartment she’d rented at Davida Station–but it was more than enough for her. “What did you do to it, anyway?”
“Only what it deserved,” Paradox countered cagily. “I’d rather not elaborate at the moment.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’m happy to listen if you ever decide to talk about it.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Without even taking off her suit, she laid down on the bunk, groaning as she sank into the most comfortable foam slab she’d ever put her back to. It was one of the perks of stealing a luxury ship. “It’s a service I provide to all the members of my pirate crew.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“I’m gonna grab a little sleep. Can you take the watch? Wake me if anything happens?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Captain. She smiled. It felt so good to hear that again, probably even better than the bunk slab felt. It meant that she was finally home.