by Joseph Lallo
“What the hell?” he said, groggily brushing the sawdust wrappers off the console.
He fiddled with some settings just to be sure, but there it was, a dot on the navigation overlay with an approximate distance and an approximate mass. It was a ship, it was behind him, and it was getting closer.
There were only two things it could mean. It could be another freelancer. It wasn’t. No freelancer stupid enough to stay on someone else’s tail that closely would live very long. That only left the far less pleasant possibility that someone was purposely following him, and that meant The Law. Probably a VectorCorp security patrol, but there was no way they could have found him. He took precautions. The only way that he could have been followed is if he’d managed to come close enough to a couple of their marker pylons for them to plot a speed and heading from his transponder code, but for that the transponder would have to be active, and there was no way he was stupid enough to...
“Son of a bitch...”
He rapped on the dash and the transponder light winked off.
“Okay... okay,” he muttered to himself, “Should have done the curved sprint this time. That would have shaken this guy. Too late for that. No big deal, no big deal. forty-five minutes to the next stop. He can’t do squat to me until then. Then I just bob and weave, standard juke, then do a curved sprint to a secondary stop, and that’s that. Piece of cake.”
He began to sift through the nav computer. A curved run at FTL speeds was generally ill advised. There was no real reason for it when you could just as easily and much more safely do two straight ones. A decent turning radius at that speed would practically be measured in parsecs, and plotting a course was immeasurably trickier. The one upshot was that a calculated trajectory like the one this guy must have followed would pretty quickly be millions of miles off course. That meant that if he could lose him just for the few seconds preceding the jump, he’d be home free.
His eyes flew over the stellar maps. If he’d known he was going to be pulling a turn, he would have chosen a different starting point. The area was fairly thick with VectorCorp trade routes, and of the places he could squeak through, most didn’t lead to anything that would be even remotely effective for evasion if he was followed. Eventually he dug up a route that might work, and plugged it into the computer. There were three minutes left before he would drop out of FTL and try to shake the pursuer. Nothing to do but wait and try to piece together what information he had.
The ship on his tail was lighter than his, and faster. That was difficult to achieve. It wasn’t like you could make a space ship more aerodynamic to give it some extra speed in space. In the absence of an atmosphere a brick flew just as well as a dart. The only things that mattered were power, mass, and cooling. Betsy had a power to mass ratio that was off the charts, and the sheer size of the engines allowed for pretty decent heat dissipation, too. That meant his adversary had the money to invest in a more efficient set of equipment, which pretty much confirmed it was corporate security.
Knowing that, there were only three ships that he could be flying, and the weight class narrowed it down to one. This guy was flying a Delta Astro-Recon, a DAR, and probably a military edition at that. Light, fast, maneuverable. He dug unto the pouch of his flight suit, pulled out a stick of gum, and popped it into his mouth. The final seconds ticked down, the beginnings of color already starting to shift down into visibility in his view window. A grin came to Lex’s face. This was going to be fun.
The universe came roaring back. A glittering star field opened up before him, a red star nearby, and around it a brown haze. The inertial dampeners switched to a lower power, pushing Lex forward into his harness. Sensors winked back into operation, instantly screaming proximity alerts, with a special focus on the ship that had overshot him by a few thousand miles. Considering the fact that they were both going a high multiple of the speed of light, a few thousand miles too far along was damn near surgical precision. It also placed him right between Lex and where he needed to go. This guy was either very lucky or very, very good.
“Attention, pilot of the... Of the unauthorized courier vessel,” squawked a voice over his com system, “This is Senior Asset Protection and Loss Prevention Specialist Agent Emanuel Fisk. You will adjust course to one eight mark four seven and match speed. You will then remand all packages to my custody and accompany me to the nearest VectorCorp-”
“I’m going to interrupt you right there, Mister way-too-long-title. I am not in VectorCorp space, and you have no way of knowing if I do or do not have a package, and certainly not if I’m delivering it professionally without a VectorCorp permit. You and I have nothing to talk about. You have no authority out here.”
The ship had done an about-face and was coming at him head on. It was becoming visible as a faint red gleam. Sure enough, the sensors identified it as a DAR.
“Well then, I suppose I’ll have to do this off the books,” said Agent Fisk, an edge in his voice.
Another warning bleeped.
“Uh... Agent, are you aware you are weapons hot?”
The answer came as a bright stripe of violet light slicing across the space between them. Lex banked hard and cranked the engines, sweeping around the streak of plasma and accelerating toward Agent Fisk’s ship. Betsy was a runner, not a fighter. Some freelancers flew fairly well armed ships to fend off pirates and the like, but Lex had never run into anything he couldn’t fly his way out of, so he hadn’t bothered to bolt on a single weapon, and his shields were strictly for navigation. If he was going to get out of this intact, he’d need to employ tactics.
Another salvo of plasma launched at him and he flitted underneath it, dialing up the speed and closing the gap between himself and Fisk. DARs were lousy at frontal assaults. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. They were excellent at frontal assaults, but they were absolutely invincible at everything else. An arsenal of tracking and homing weaponry made them a sure thing in a close pursuit, and any number of long range armaments made them lethal at a distance. In a game of chicken, their homing stuff wouldn’t have enough time to lock on and get on target before they went roaring past, and the heavy stuff would be too dangerous to use without the risk of getting both ships caught in the blast radius. So it was all ahead full and see whose nerves gave out first.
“I would hold still if I were you. I’m supposed to disable you, but it wouldn’t break my heart if one of these shots hit life support,” crackled his voice on the com.
The distance dropped quickly enough for Lex’s navigation system to start screaming warnings about impact danger. He ignored it, keeping his eye on the approaching ship. It was close enough now for him to make out some details on the visual scanner. It was old, one of the first model years of the DAR. There were signs of wear, but no signs of damage or repair. That implied that this guy hadn’t done a lot of fighting... or at least he hadn’t done a lot of losing. The ship was more or less stationary, taking slow, deliberate shots with its plasma cannon. They were impeccably aimed, and came heart-stoppingly close to connecting. A weapon like that wouldn’t destroy Betsy outright, but she certainly wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. Unless it hit the cockpit. That would wipe out the controls and, more importantly, the pilot. Lex focused on dodging.
“Listen, Mister Fisk. I’m on a nice little stroll through space. If your ship just happens to be occupying some of that space, well, that’s your own fault. And my ship weighs a lot more than yours, so who do you figure comes out on top in that situation?” Lex taunted.
When something is moving toward you at truly high speeds, it can play tricks on the eyes. Particularly in space when there isn’t anything nearby to serve as a reference point, things that are far away don’t seem to move at all, regardless of their speed. Beyond a certain distance they seem to be a speck creeping along at a leisurely pace. Then at some magical point it appears to close the remaining space in no time at all. It isn’t a well known phenomenon, since most of the people who experience it don’t survive
. Lex had seen it more times than he cared to recall, so he was ready for it.
The few hundred yards passed in a fraction of a second, but the trained reflexes of a racer stretched them out for ages. He tugged at the controls at the last possible instant, nudging the ship upward just as a final bolt of plasma launched at him. The projectile passed near enough that Lex could hear a crackle of interference as it brushed his meager shield. A tenth of a second later the enemy ship dodged downward, but Lex adjusted to follow. If he was going to have a chance at making it to the hiding spot he’d had in mind when he’d plotted this course, he would need to cut this close. Loud, urgent alarms informed him that impact was immanent. Finally he felt just the tiniest shudder of upward motion, his shields sliding across the beefier ones of the DAR. That was his cue. He punched the engines for all they were worth.
In a roar of white-blue light and a jolt of thrust, he let Betsy do what she did best: Haul ass. The flare of the engines belched out all manner of frequencies up and down the electromagnetic spectrum in one monumental blast. It wasn’t technically a weapon, and it didn’t last long, but at point blank range the EMP created from an oversized engine revving like that was more than enough to scramble the controls of even a well shielded ship like the DAR. Lex watched the sensor screen as his ship creaked and shuddered under the acceleration. The rear camera showed Agent Fisk drifting downward and slowly twisting in an awkward direction. It was a motion pilots liked to call “going belly up,” a sure sign of instrument and control failure. For now, Fisk was dead in the water, figuratively speaking.
Lex had only had to pull that stunt once before, so as he headed for relative safety, he feverishly tried to work out how long he had before the heavily armed ship would be back on his tail.
“Okay, so he’ll curse and try to figure out what happened for fifteen, twenty seconds. Then another fifteen or twenty seconds of fiddling with the electronics before he figures out he has to reboot to get them to come up clean. Then, say, thirty seconds for the systems to reset. So that’s a good minute and a half before he...”
His calculations were cut short by a flash of blue on the ship in his rear viewer as the engines kicked back on. Evidently Fisk had skipped the cursing and fiddling steps, and the DAR was just a tad heartier than he’d given it credit for.
“Congratulations, Mr. Alexander. No one has been able to rev me out in years. But you’re not the only one with EMP,” the agent’s voice muttered out of the cockpit speakers.
“Shut up, Fisk!” Lex growled.
“Missile lock detected,” chimed the soothing computer voice.
“Shut UP, Betsy!”
The rear viewer painted a flashing yellow dot on its screen with a distance that was ticking down a bit too quickly for comfort. Ahead, the brown haze around the sun was beginning to look a bit more granular. It was one of at least seven different asteroid clusters that had earned the nickname “The Briar Patch” from local astronomers, evidently because local astronomers weren’t the most creative lot. It was relatively new, astronomically speaking. A few hundred thousand years ago it was probably a pair of planets that got too close, and a few hundred thousand years from now it would probably be one larger planet and a couple of moons. Right now it was a big, gooey ball of molten rock with a veritable playground of cooling asteroids around it. As asteroid clusters go it was almost cartoonishly dense. It was exactly what he needed to shake this guy long enough to make his escape. It was also just a little too far away to reach before the missile hit.
Lex glanced at the controls. The engines were at 98%. Thank god for that, plenty of overhead left. He cranked them up to 120%. The percentages, in this case, had to do with the heating/cooling balance of the engines. Running them at 100% meant that they were cooling off at the exact same speed they were heating. You could go over for a few minutes, provided you ran it at lower power afterward to let things cool off. It voided the warranty, but then, so did grafting on triple the number of engines. With the extra speed he earned just enough time to reach The Briar Patch.
As soon as the first of the chunks of former planet zipped by, he placed it between himself and the missile and dropped the engines to almost nothing. The weapon smashed uselessly against the faintly glowing space rock, its payload managing to cause little more than some digital static on the control screens. Fisk’s ship came charging around shortly after it. Now came the fun part.
The scattered, red hot rock made tracking via nearly any type of sensor almost impossible. Infrared sensors were blinded by the sun and the molten masses, radio frequencies were hopelessly scattered among them, and at this distance visual was anything but easy. Lex cut it close to one asteroid, letting the gravity tug ever so gently before twisting and bursting his ship to another tight little cluster. He bounced back and forth, tiny bursts of engine sending him in sharp, sloping curves. To his credit, Fisk followed him into the mess. Most of the times he’d had to shake a security ship they gave up as soon as they lost sight of him, but this guy was willing to get his hands dirty.
He guided his nimble ship among the stones and did an admirable job of following Lex, but the former racer’s path around the briar patch was utterly random and beyond reckless, crisscrossing the same space and coming close enough to some of the rocks to change their spin. It took better than five minutes, but finally Fisk was searching fruitlessly near the sunny side of the briar patch as Lex spat back out the dark side. He oriented his ship, selected the course, and shifted to FTL.
As the view outside his window shot quickly past the point of visibility, he kept his eyes glued to the scanners. If Fisk was going to have any chance of catching him, he would have to get on Betsy’s tail almost immediately. Two minutes went by with little more than a flicker on the screen, probably the agent taking an educated guess that would leave him light-years away. Lex leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief.
This was a short sprint, just a few minutes, so there was no sense getting comfy. He rattled through a list of things he would have to deal with thanks to this unplanned bit of excitement. It had left him a little off course, but that wasn’t too much of an issue. Being a freelancer pretty much meant doing almost a whole trip on a route most pilots would consider wildly off course, so this was business as usual. The engines were running a little bit hot. They were back down to ninety-eight percent now, but he should probably run them at twenty or thirty percent for a while until they cooled off. That could wait until the FTL stretch was over.
One would think that if pushing engines too hard at conventional speeds was burning them up, moving faster than the speed of light would fry them in no time, but such was not the case. It was an aspect of space travel that Lex was never completely able to grasp. There was a field generator involved, he knew that much. It produced something called the Carpinelli Field, which partially shifted everything in the field’s radius into an alternate dimension. There were different physical laws there, and the engines pushed along using those rather than stricter native laws. He’d heard it described as similar to how an outboard motor dips into the water to push a boat along. Of course, he’d also heard that the outboard analogy was an insultingly inaccurate oversimplification that ignored the more complex issues the Carpinelli Field overcame, like time dilation and the like. It was easy to remember, though, so it was the one he stuck with. Lex didn’t care HOW it worked, just so long as it did. Plus, it had the bonus of allowing the same engines to do the work for FTL and conventional acceleration, so he only had to learn to tinker with one system.
The line of thought had drifted to the specific tinkering he had in mind when the universe began to assert itself again. When everything dropped down to the sort of speeds physics intended, he was approaching the orbit of a planet he didn’t recognize. It hadn’t been on the initial flight plan, after all, so suddenly seeing it show up was a little like waking up in a hotel room and forgetting you weren’t home.
“Betsy? Remind me where I am.”
“Entering
the gravity well of Sigma Six. Colloquially known as Big Sigma. It is a-”
“That’ll do, Betsy. The trash heap.”
Lex didn’t know the history of the planet. It should at this point be clear that he was not a man of penetrating curiosity. Trash heap, though, was probably as close a description to the planet’s actual role as any. It was visible on the viewer as a grayish blob. There was nothing wrong with the visual. The planet just looked like that. Junk of every size and description cluttered the orbital space in a shroud so thick it was difficult to make out the surface features. If nature had anything to do with it, that trash cloud would settle into a ring, clump together into a few moons, or come crashing down. Instead, something kept it spread in a uniform, jumbled layer of filth. It wasn’t populated, but it did have some sort of salvage facility. That was probably what kept the junk cloud so fresh, a steady stream of haulers dumping wreckage from high orbit in exchange for a few spare credits, or just to avoid the fines associated with improperly disposing of hazardous waste. It was a testament to how cheap and easy interstellar travel had become that such a place was even conceivably worthwhile.
Lex took the ship in close, just outside the fringe of the junk cloud, and let himself drift along for a while, dumping heat from his engines and deciding what course would get him back on track the fastest. While he did, he flipped the slidepad back on to pull in his messages and net content. It finished almost immediately. Evidently the junkyard had a much better network connection than the diner. Go figure. He was still reviewing the list of news and messages when the computer blipped to let him know that another ship had entered the system. Probably one of the haulers with another load... Though it was awfully small for a hauler. In fact, it was just about the same size as-