“The corvette has launched fighters,” Ravi reported.
Keel had expected as much. They were probably Preyhunter interceptors tasked with reaching the docked ships before they had a chance to separate and escape. They would certainly arrive before the slower corvette had reached effective firing range.
“Wait.” Ravi sounded piqued. “These are… Republican Lancers?”
The hologram had likely had the same expectations as Keel. In any case, Ravi was clearly surprised at seeing an MCR-painted vessel scramble Republic starfighters. Perhaps they had stolen the ship and its complement of snub fighters? Or maybe the crew had mutinied and joined the MCR.
“Something’s not right.” Keel halted his run long enough to point at Exo and Bombassa. “Stay aboard the ship. If those Lancers start firing, the first thing that’ll go is that docking corridor. And then you’re both floating outside in the cold.”
“What can we do?” Exo asked. He meant to help.
“If you want to get in the fight, you can manually command a burst turret emplacement,” Keel shouted back. “Otherwise strap yourself in and pray.”
Exo immediately moved toward the Six’s aft turret.
Keel knew that Ravi was fully capable of overseeing the turrets from the cockpit, but while the support AI did a better than average job tracing targets and converting locks to effective fire, a legionnaire running the gun platform could do just as well, and maybe better. For all the turrets’ predictive algorithms modeling combat, artificial intelligence—in Keel’s opinion—had never fully developed the right instincts for combat. That problem abounded in all AI, regardless of its purpose. There was no programming out there that could make up for those gut feelings that so often spelled the difference between success and failure, life and death. Even a top-of-the-line combat targeting system couldn’t tell when things were just… off. Or if they could, they didn’t know what to make of it. They had a hard time recognizing traps. They had a hard time calculating when a single shot in the course of a battle counted more than all the other programmed auto-fires. They were fine in a target-rich environment, when all it took was selecting their next lock and eliminating it in a full-fledged battle. But there was just too much happening in a fight. Too much that could go wrong. Too much that needed seeing, and then… processing of a variety and sort that humans—with their mix of empathy, emotion, and reason—were just able to do better. That’s why great armies of bots and unmanned ships had never grown to widespread galactic use. They could cause damage, but they couldn’t win wars.
Bombassa followed Keel toward the cockpit. “I’ll come with you.”
Keel shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
As they arrived at the cockpit, keel slid into his captain’s seat. The well-worn leather embraced his body. Sitting there felt just right, like returning to a warm bed after getting up on a frigid night. He immediately began adjusting actuators and hurrying through the docking procedures, trying to see if he could salvage the docking tube. He glanced at his sensor array and saw that shields were set to full, with weapons systems armed and ready to go. Knowing his navigator, there were probably already a number of exit trajectories calculated for a hyperspace escape. They’d be able to leave Porcha before the incoming Lancers could even warm up their blaster cannons.
“Okay, Ravi, what looks good?” Keel said after re-routing non-essential life support to thruster standby. “Where we jumping?”
Bombassa reached out with a staying hand. “Jumping? No, no. We have to stay with the shuttle. It takes much longer for them to program jump coordinates, believe me. And if we don’t leave together, we’ll have to circle around and repeat this whole process because of the hand.”
Keel grimaced. He didn’t like the idea of being forced to wait around for the relatively slow and unwieldy Black Fleet shuttle to get its coordinates and jump. He let out a sigh. “I’m not gonna stick around and just allow my ship to get shot to hell.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I’m only requesting that you refrain from leaving the system until the shuttle has coordinates and is ready to jump out. The Lancers will split their attention between the two crafts, and our shuttle is armored enough to handle a beating—for a while anyway. But if we leave it alone, it will be disabled at best, and potentially destroyed. That would mean mission failure for all of us.”
Keel thought of the finger he’d ripped off of Maydoon’s hand before giving Exo the case with the fake. He knew that the mission would go on just fine without the shuttle. Maybe even better. But that wasn’t a card he was ready to flip over for Bombassa to see. Not yet. Discretion, in this case, involved playing along.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. Maybe we can pull some of these Lancers off of your buddies.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Ravi looked at the two men with him in the cockpit. “A Lancer is a two-man craft, so they will be firing on us pretty much constantly. Thankfully they are older than Raptors or tri-fighters, and their blaster cannons will not pack quite the same punch.”
“Don’t forget about the concussion warhead they’re equipped with,” Keel said, wrapping his fingers around his flight controls. To Bombassa he added, “If your buddies on the shuttle don’t get moving, they’ll make for an easy target for those.”
Bombassa furrowed his brow. “I was in the Legion. I know all this.”
Keel grinned. “Just a refresher. You’ve been with the Black Fleet for a while. Don’t know what you might’ve forgotten, Leej.”
“They are in firing range,” Ravi announced, as casually as a holonews anchor telling viewers that the night’s seamball scores would be on in a few minutes.
Blaster fire seared toward the ships at range, and the green bolts raced hotly through the empty space where the docking coupling and corridor had been.
“Staying on the ship was a good call,” said Bombassa.
“I tend to make those,” replied Keel with a fractional tip of his head.
The Indelible VI shot away with an abruptness that was matched only by the way it spun and looped through the field of fire. The Lancer pilots and their gunners struggled to keep up with the ship’s maneuvers.
Keeping his concentration directly on his front viewport and the HUD overlaid in front of it, Keel asked Bombassa, “How much time do they need to jump?”
Bombassa made a low groaning noise as though he were thinking of his answer and didn’t like it. “The jump computers take time. Seems like a lot of time. I don’t know exactly how long, but I’ve heard one of our team who has some minor flying experience talking about how this particular shuttle took its sweet time about going anywhere—whether in hyperspace or anywhere else.”
Keel allowed himself to look away from his displays to stare, confounded, at Bombassa. “Do you mean to tell me that you’re flying a mission-critical, high-speed mission for your space wizard boss completely under AI?”
Ravi let out a low laugh. “Hoo, hoo, hoo.”
“Pilots are a precious commodity and could not be spared at this particular juncture in the Black Fleet,” Bombassa replied. “We do fine running an AI.” He sounded hurt, perhaps even taken aback.
Keel rolled his eyes. “Some empire.” He lurched the Six to the left, corkscrewing into a long loop that threaded down past a Lancer that had been trying to come up on an intercept path to get a shot at the ship’s belly. Ravi sent out torrents of blaster cannon fire to pound at the Lancer—and ultimately ignite its gases in a brief explosion.
One down. But the Lancers were plentiful, and Keel didn’t think he and Ravi would be able to take them all, at least not without sustaining significant damage to the shield array, and possibly losing an essential drive function. If that happened, they would need to stop for repairs—and Keel didn’t like the idea of jumping to another star port. He didn’t want to keep Leenah and the rest of the crew waiting any longer than they already had. Nor did he like the idea of flying a damaged Indelible VI into the he
art of a hidden and purportedly lethal fleet.
“Ravi, can you get some verification that they at least started the process of getting out of here? Some idea of how much longer we have to keep this up?”
To this point all Bombassa’s shuttle had done was move about like a pig on ice, following a straight trajectory with no evasive action of any kind. The AI was apparently programmed to trust its thick hull and powerful shielding to protect it from the Lancers’ oncoming attack. It was all but useless in the fight.
Ravi’s fingers danced across his console. “I confirmed that they have the coordinates. It’s just a matter of time. Shall I ask them when they think they will make the jump?”
Before Keel could answer, Ravi gave a concerned grunt.
“What is it?”
Ravi shook his head. “All of the fighters have stopped pursuing the shuttle. And technically speaking, I do not see why they would do this.”
“We’re famous,” Keel said, a broad smile on his face. “They probably realized who this shuttle was running with.”
Bombassa pointed at an oncoming fighter that was spitting death directly into the shields in front of the cockpit. “Lancer!”
Keel casually pushed down on his flight controls, causing the Six to loop gracefully, while Exo sent blaster fire into the offending starship.
Unfazed, Keel continued, “I mean, it’s been a pretty eventful few months. You can’t tell me word of what the Six has done hasn’t spread at least somewhere in the galaxy.”
Ravi frowned. “I do not think that is it. I am going to do a digital monitoring of the recent aggregate holo-news.”
“You’re going to watch the news in the middle of a dogfight, Ravi?”
Bombassa leaned forward. “Do you need me to do something?”
A volley of blaster fire raced across the Six’s shield array, causing the cockpit to tremble and shudder.
Keel looked back and locked eyes with Bombassa. “Yeah. Pray.”
Bombassa leaned back into his seat. “That’s not reassuring.”
Ravi was perfectly still, his fingers no longer dancing across the Six’s console, his eyes no longer perusing the various screens and heads-up displays. He remained like this for several seconds before coming back with a quick shake of his head, as if returning from a trance. “Oh dear.”
The ship rocked from another direct hit to the shields.
“‘Oh, dear,’ what?” said Keel as he attempted to swing the Six in front of a spiraling Lancer and also get Exo positioned to take a shot at another one that had been hounding them, dodging in and out of the Six’s periphery.
“It would seem that the Black Fleet shuttle now appears to be flying in formation with these MCR Lancers. It has been possibly captured?”
“Already?” Keel didn’t think that was possible, but he had to focus on evasion for the time being. Still, he had a funny feeling the worst was yet to come.
02
“I’m sending them instructions, but they aren’t responding to me.” Bombassa spoke through gritted teeth. He’d been trying to reach his team over S-comm.
“What do you mean they aren’t responding?“ Keel boomed, louder than he’d meant to. “You’re the team leader, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am the team leader.” The annoyance was evident in Bombassa’s voice. “But they are not returning my call over S-comm.”
Keel rolled his head and looked up at the cockpit roof in a motion that seemed to say, Great. Just great. He hit the comm and tried the other shock trooper on board. “Exo! Your boys back on the shuttle listening to you?”
“I got nothing on comms from them either. But I got Lancers stacked eye-high!”
It was clear that the Lancers no longer viewed the shuttle as a threat. Instead it was being used as cover. They swooped around it, formed up behind it, and launched wave after wave of attack patterns, trying to get the better of the Indelible VI. So far, Ravi, Keel, and Exo had prevented the Lancers from doing any real damage, but Keel’s patience was wearing thin. The only reason he was even still out here was because the shuttle needed some time to escape. But if the shuttle wasn’t even at risk…
“Ravi, what’s the story? Can they receive their little S-comm transmissions?”
“I have no confirmation that the messages from Bombassa or Exo were received, Captain. However, a sensor sweep indicates that there are life forms on board. They’re not dead. They’re either ignoring or unaware of the attempts to reach them.”
Keel frowned. “Maybe they’re sleeping.”
Bombassa was speaking quietly into his comm, still trying to reach the shuttle. He didn’t appear to be having much success.
The big shock trooper looked up and asked, “How much longer, best case scenario, do you think you can stay out here in the fight?”
Keel gave a quick look at his instrument panels and heads-up display. The Lancers were older fighters. Better than Preyhunters, but still nothing too difficult. Not like going up against Raptors. The real trouble was the Republic corvette the MCR were in control of. It had been moving in their general direction the entire time, and Keel had been forced to keep the Six close to the shuttle, which meant he was almost in firing range of the corvette’s big guns. And while he wasn’t particularly worried about those bruisers scoring a direct hit—MCR gunners were terrible—the added incoming fire could make the situation volatile enough that a Lancer might get a lucky shot. Or, barring that, the reverse might be true, and in dodging Lancer fire, one of the heavy turbo blaster batteries might zing close enough to cause some serious electrical ionization.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Five minutes? Maybe ten if we really put some distance between us and the shuttle. But hey, if you were good with leaving those guys behind, we’d already be gone.”
Another series of laser blasts darted out in front of the cockpit. The enemy pilot was leading his target far too much. Keel drifted the ship in the hopes that Exo could pick him off.
Ravi chimed in with a calculation for Bombassa to consider. “I anticipate our odds of leaving without serious damage decrease five percent for every minute we remain.”
“There you have it,” Keel said.
“If we leave,” Bombassa said, sounding like he was talking to himself, “we would have to storm the hidden fleet. I don’t feel particularly good about attempting that. We need the bio-key.”
Keel was about to let Bombassa in on his secret, just to see if it might get them out of the fire, when the big shock trooper held up his hand.
“Wait. I’m getting something on the S-comm.”
Ravi and Keel exchanged a look.
Bombassa spoke into his comm, his bucket still off. “Why haven’t you answered any of my hails?”
Leaning close to Ravi, Keel said, “Tap into that for me. I wanna hear what the guy on the other end has to say.”
Ravi did as he was asked, and the S-comm transmission was relayed over the cockpit audio. Bombassa looked up, obviously surprised by the amplified sound of his own voice, and just as obviously annoyed that Keel had this ability to listen in. But he didn’t protest.
“Sir,” came the reply from the shuttle, “we have orders to work with the MCR element here and ensure that the fleet is obtained for Goth Sullus and the Republic. Those orders include eliminating all outside elements. Sir, I need to be sure that you have taken control of the ship you’re now on.”
Keel didn’t have to tell Ravi to take over flight controls of the Six. The navigator did so immediately, allowing Keel to whip around with his blaster drawn. He leveled it at Bombassa’s head. “So that’s how this is going to be?”
Bombassa shook his head. “I would never—”
“What the hell?” It was Exo’s voice, carried over the S-comm to the cockpit’s audio system. “Are you out of your kelhorned minds? I gave my word.”
The voice from the shuttle seemed not to care. “Sir, understand that I need to hear within ten seconds that you have either seized control of
the ship or are in the process of subduing the ship and killing its crew, or I will open fire with the rest of this MCR element.”
Ravi spoke quietly. “We are ready to make the jump, Captain.”
Bombassa cleared his throat. “That is not going to happen,” he responded to his subordinate over comm. “We gave our word as legionnaires. That still means something.”
“Not to us,” replied the voice from the shuttle. “To hell with your Legion, and to hell with you.”
The Six’s cockpit rang out with alarms.
“They fired concussion warheads!” yelled Ravi, though Keel already knew this from the tone and pitch of the alarms. “All of them!”
“Punch it, Ravi!”
The Indelible VI disappeared into the folds of hyperspace, leaving the missiles without a target.
***
The ship came out of hyperspace by an asteroid Keel recognized as RX-17732. It was a big one—larger than some moons he’d visited—and on its surface were the ghostly remains of an abandoned mining colony. Places like this were scattered throughout the galaxy. Keel had come across this particular rock a few years previous, while smuggling rare Kuta fish packed on ice to an old freighter that served as a floating restaurant specializing in taboo meals, always jumping just ahead of Republic authorities. The hold of the Six stank for weeks after that job. Keel vowed never to haul seafood again, no matter how lucrative the dark market rate.
“Okay, Ravi, bring her down onto the mining station’s platform.” Keel got up and motioned for Bombassa to follow him out of the cockpit. “The three of us need to have a little talk about where we all stand.”
“Four of us,” corrected Ravi. “I’m coming, too.”
“Sure,” Keel said, hitching up his gun belt. “But that’s just semantics. I already know where you stand.”
Ravi said nothing.
“Wait. You are with me, right, Ravi?”
Message for the Dead (Galaxy's Edge Book 8) Page 2