by M. D. Cooper
Sera and Cargo shared a long look, his eyes showing mild recrimination. Sera sighed and told Cheeky they were carrying something extra special for The Mark.
“Figures,” the pilot sulked. “I don’t know why you do runs for them. From what I can see, we’re pretty profitable even without all the extra risks.”
Sera’s expression was stony. “I have my reasons.”
“Well, I hope they’re worth dying for.”
“We’re not going to die here; we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves,” Sera said. In her mind, where only Helen could hear she said,
Sera checked scan and saw that the two unidentified ships had fallen from their entry velocity of 0.73c to 0.45c. Their vector around the star had not been clean and they lost velocity breaking out of its gravity well.
Cheeky was looking at the same data. “Damn, those ships must be all engine to only lose that much v during such a sloppy maneuver.”
“Don’t forget the guns,” Cargo added. “All engines and guns.”
Sera switched her display to show their outsystem course. Their destination was an FTL jump point several million kilometers beyond the last of the outer planets. The interior of Trio system was a good seven light hours across and they still had just over three hours to the jump point on full burn.
She widened her view and saw that the two ships behind were accelerating again. Both were back over half the speed of light, nearly at their previous velocity of 0.73c. Sera looked down at Sabrina’s indicators and saw that they were accelerating slower than expected and the ship was developing an odd vibration.
“Scoop!” Sera cried just as Sabrina reported that the scoop was still deployed and slowing them down. Cheeky cursed and quickly killed the electrostatic field that had been scooping hydrogen for fuel.
The pilot turned slightly red face back to Sera. “Sorry, Captain. It sorta slipped my mind.”
Sera’s brow furrowed. “Mine too,” then she nodded. “Now the ol’ girl’s picking up.”
Cargo looked over his shoulder. “Stellar medium is a bit lighter on our vector. We should be able to hit 0.60 c with all drives burning hot, but they’ll,” he jerked his head to the stern to indicate their pursuers, “get that advantage, too.”
Helen had been examining their outbound vector and brought an issue to Sera’s attention. Sera cursed silently. Things were always working against her.
“Ladies,” Sera asked Cheeky and Sabrina, “if we do this burn for another forty minutes, what are the chances we can hold shields at max while we vector for the jump and keep all three drives online?”
“Planning to melt us?” Cheeky asked.
“What about the SC batteries?” Sera asked.
“They’re way low,” Cheeky replied. “Pansies at Trio get all nervous with a hundred fusion reactors humming around their station. You said they charge too much for station power, so we ran on batts while docked.”
“Huh,” Sera grunted. “Well that was short-sighted of me.”
When traveling at any appreciable speed, Sabrina always ran her forward shields. Even a speck of sand, traveling at even a tenth the speed of light, would punch right through the ship. It could destroy the reactor, and certainly any humans in its way.
However, with ships chasing them, they now had to deploy shield umbrellas over the entire vessel, and that was going to run them beyond their power generation limits.
Flying directly behind a ship running grav, fusion, and AP engines was a recipe for a bad day. If they were smart, their pursuers would fan out and flank Sabrina. From those positions, they would be able to hit nearly any part of the ship. The only advantage was that they couldn’t shoot straight up the engines.
And so, the battle of the AIs continued.
“Do we have a solid intercept time, Cheeky?” Sera asked vocally.
“Not one hundred percent, they have a few course corrections to make that may slow them down a bit, but even if they have one-eyed apes flying those tubs, they’ll catch us before we jump.”
“Any chance we can jump early?” Cargo asked.
“Not unless you want to see how you look smeared across a clump of dark matter,” Sera told her first mate, while looking over their course. “There’s gotta be something…” There was always a way out of these situations, it just took some creative thinking. “Cheeky, you’ve got one more correction to make, right?”
“Yup, shortly before our transition we’ve got to angle down and get back into the main plane of the system.” Cheeky said, highlighting the position in the plot on the ship’s main holo.
“Would you be able to make it now, and have it be shorter? It may be enough to get us out of this mess.”
Cheeky pulled up several holos and manipulated them, plotting positions where she could make the alteration, looking for the one with maximum efficiency, lowest drag, and best time-to-jump improvement. The incongruity of her nearly naked, oversexed pilot furiously processing advanced spatial calculations on a dozen holos was not lost on Sera; she hid a small smile behind her hand as she watched.
Cheeky turned and Sera schooled her expression.
“There’s a point coming up where we can do our burn that would work well, but I don’t like traveling in the main plane at these speeds. You never know what uncharted rock is out there, waiting to end our little race.”
“Trio’s pretty busy; I’d imagine they have everything charted.”
“Who? The people with senile tug AIs and faulty nav comps?”
“AI can go senile?” Cargo asked.
“We have evidence,” Sabrina said, her voice dripping with implied meaning.
“I’ll take the chance of a stray rock over the surety of their lasers. Plot it out,” Sera replied.
She leaned back in her chair. Despite the humor, she found in the small things around her, Helen was right; this was serious. But her crew was smart, and her ship was a pro. This would work; they’d make the jump before the pirates caught up with them.
Cheeky made her computations, rechecked them and then had Sabrina review them, as well. They passed muster and Cheeky announced stellar south course alteration in just under five minutes. The time came and the change occurred with no noticeable sensations in the ship.
Sera ran the computations again, Sabrina’s nav systems telling her that they had insufficient data to provide an accurate model due to unknown deceleration capabilities of the pursuing ships.
In addition to catching up with Sabrina, the two pirate ships also had to show some care in matching speeds. At the velocities they were traveling, even miniscule speed differences would cause immense differences in position. If the pirates didn’t match Sabrina’s speed precisely, they would flash past faster than the human eye could even detect.
High relative v also made targeting with lasers tricky at best. Good gunners with powerful AI could do it, but even they missed a lot. Her
real worry was that if Sabrina managed to avoid being boarded, the pirates would resort to relativistic missiles.
Apparently, Cargo had been thinking along the same lines.
“Do you think they have RMs?” he asked.
“Pirates can get their hands on those things?” Cheeky asked, her entire body getting a bit paler than it already was.
“Yeah, but even if they have them, I doubt they’d use one. Those things aren’t cheap.”
Cheeky was looking over her nav board again. “How fast can they accelerate?”
“It varies and it’s not linear,” Sera replied. “At the speeds we’re traveling, at I’d guess they could go from seventy percent to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light in a few minutes.”
“Ninety-nine percent?” Cheeky choked.
“They don’t have the word ‘relativistic’ in the name for nothing.” Cargo’s voice dripped with sarcasm, which earned him a scowl from the pilot.
“They can’t burn too long, though,” Sera said. “Only so much fuel in them.”
“Probably because they usually kill things before they run out,” Cheeky commented.
Scan showed their pursuers making course corrections to match the burn Cheeky had made. The calculations now showed that their pursuer’s loss of v from the adjustment would be just barely enough; Sabrina would make it out of this. Apparently, the two ships behind them had come to the same conclusion, as the comm board suddenly lit up with an incoming message.
Sabrina activated the connection and a very unhappy face appeared on the main holo. From the lack of uniform and a glimpse of the bridge, it was confirmed; they were definitely pirate ships.
“Ship designated Sabrina, you were ordered to cease acceleration and divert to the transmitted course. Why are you not complying?” The man was trying to sound officious.
“’Cause I like my skin on my body,” Sera said with copious amounts of sarcasm. “Why don’t you tell me why you have such a keen interest in my ship?”
“That’s none of your concern,” the man snarled. “Now comply with our directive.”
Sera almost laughed. This was the saddest line she’d ever been fed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not diverting, I have a schedule to keep and I’m not going to interrupt it to have tea with you.” With that, she killed the connection and looked to Cheeky. “Time to FTL?”
“Twenty three minutes,” came the pilot’s reply. “Those looked like Padre’s men, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, I’m starting to get a suspicion about who Kade stole that ‘racing hound’ from.”
Cargo turned from his station. “They’re still trying to make contact. Let’s hope that’s as mean as they get.” He glanced back at his board. “Never mind that, scan shows energy signatures on their bow. I’m guessing lasers.”
“Any room to twitch?” Sera asked Cheeky.
“Not unless we want to do another burn to correct, but that would put them right on top of us when we make the jump.”
Sera cursed their luck.
“Sabrina, do we have the power to extend the shielding back over the AP engine nozzle? It looks like they’re warming up their heaters and I bet that’s gonna be the first target,” she asked.
The shields that protected Sabrina were not a firm shell around the ship, but rather an anti-gravitational field that repelled any objects and particles. Complex systems allowed the shields to detect laser impact on the hull and diffuse the beam with targeted gravitational waves. It was a tricky system to operate and often worked better in stellar space where the leading edge of a laser beam could be detected by refraction from the particles it had to travel through. Out in gasless interstellar spaces, lasers were much harder to counter.
Unfortunately for Sabrina, that was just the type of space they were entering. They had cleared the Kuiper Belt, and the Trio System had a stretch of very empty space between their current location and the jump point.
The shield extension came just in time, as invisible beams lanced out striking at Sabrina’s AP nozzle.
Sera turned to Cargo. “What tricks do we have up our sleeves?”
Cargo mulled it over for a minute. “Could pepper them with some beams right on their bow. It would cause them to throw some force off the front of their ships, but I don’t know how much good it would do. Could also drop a mine or two; might be able to do it accurately enough to force them to twitch out of the way.”
Sera looked at the numbers again on her screen; although they were on course to jump before interception, the nav systems still showed a much closer race than she’d like. “Do both.”
Cargo called down to Thompson and Flaherty and told them to get two magnetic proximity mines loaded into the tubes and ready to drop on the bridge’s mark. Sera watched him run a few simulations to see if it was possible to hide the mine’s presence with a bit of a light show from the aft lasers.
“Think it will work?” She asked.
“Worth a shot. Gonna be shooting at them anyway.”
Cargo initiated the laser sequence, and seconds later, dropped the proximity mines. The mines had their own small propulsion units, which allowed them to reach the desired position as the lasers flickered around them.
Right before the lead ship was about to hit its designated mine, the vessel twitched and avoided impact. The other ship wasn’t so lucky. Under constant fire from Sabrina’s lasers, they never saw the second mine.
“Score!” Cargo shouted.
The resulting explosion was too small to see at the ten thousand kilometer distance, but scan showed a direct impact. With its forward shields maxed out, the pirate ship didn’t appear to take damage, but the shaped charge managed to shed enough of their velocity. They were out of the race.
Scan updated, showing the first pirate ship’s maneuvers to avoid its mine had placed it over a hundred thousand kilometers further away, now far to port. It was out of the running, too.
“Great work Cargo,” Sera said to her first mate with heartfelt gratitude. She thanked everyone over the Link for their calm, steady response to the trouble. Before she could finish, Cargo interrupted her.
“Captain, I wouldn’t get too excited yet, we’ve got an RM inbound.”
“Shit!” Sera swore over the open comm. “Belay that happiness, missile on our tail.”
Sabrina was five minutes from the jump point. The relativistic missile was four minutes from intercept.
Sera ran the math and couldn’t see any way they could get to the point before the RM hit them. Even killing aft shielding and diverting more power to the engines wouldn’t give them enough extra thrust to pull it off. She looked to her pilot.
“Two options, Cheeks; we twitch and jump on whatever vector we end up on, or we dump to FTL now and hope there’s no dark matter between us and the point.”
Cheeky bit her lip as she pulled charts of the local dark layer onto the main holo.
Dark matter occupied its own sub-layer of space-time, which is where ships transitioned when they made FTL jumps. However, dark matter orbited its host star erratically and charts never displayed it with perfect accuracy. Jump points were positions with outsystem vectors that were always clear of dark matter. Ships could enter FTL without fear of colliding with a solid mass.
Cheeky zoomed the holo in on their course and pointed to a rather large clump of dark matter. “Can’t do the jump on our current vector, there’s a big lump of the black stuff in our path. Let me see if there is a clear path outsystem parallel to our vector.”
Though it took Cheeky less than thirty seconds to find a course they could twitch to, it seemed far longer with the main holo showing the RM closing on them. Sera was tempted to try a mine again but the nav computer showed that the RM could compensate even if it had to avoid the mine. The damn things were just too fast and maneuverable. Sera was ordering Thompson and Flaherty to load another proximity mine anyway whe
n Cheeky let loose a triumphant cry.
“I’ve got it! There’s a clear path to port, if these charts are right, that’ll take us out of here. DM does orbit through, but it should be clear right now.”
Moments rolled by as Cheeky double checked her work and then laid in the burn time and vector that would give them a spare twenty thousand kilometers from the RM. She called out the count as everyone held their breath.
“On five, four, three, two, one, burn for three, two, one, kill!” The eight seconds stretched into a lifetime and then the two more seconds dragged on while scan updated. The RM had overshot and was compensating to approach their position. It had dropped down to 0.8 c as it maneuvered, but was quickly up to 0.9 c back on a direct course for Sabrina.
“It’s on us again, Cheeky. How long to jump?”
Cheeky spared a hand to wave behind her at her captain as she concentrated on her console and the numbers rolling across it. She made a few final alterations and then rechecked them.
“Kay! FTL transition in T minus fifteen.”
She began counting down the seconds to the transition as Sera brought the RM’s time to impact up on the main holo. It was only a half a second behind Cheeky’s count. Through those long seconds, Sera’s mind raced over the thousand things that could go wrong, praying that they would make the jump in time.
Then, with the customary gut twisting wrench, they made the transition and were in the lightless void of the dark layer.
TANIS RICHARDS
STELLAR DATE: 07.01.8927 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Interstellar Dark Layer
REGION: Galactic South of Trio Prime, Silstrand Alliance Space
Sera took a deep breath as Cheeky leaned over the side of her chair and threw up. Without a word, Cargo rose and walked out to the corridor. He returned with cleaning supplies from the small head just outside the bridge.
Sera rose from her chair, shaking far more than expected. She moved to Cheeky’s console and rested a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. Cheeky was quaking, and Sera helped her stand, wrapping her in a tight embrace. She choked back tears of relief and Sera did her best not to join in.