To Fall Among Vultures

by Scott Warren

  Victoria glanced to her Navigator. "Huian, no disrespect to your mother, but State and Colony will talk themselves in goddamn circles while we wait to learn what happens at Pedres. The fact of the matter is that a xeno fleet officer sought us out. The Condor, by name. He came to us because he believes that we can make a difference in his fight. Whether or not we can I don’t know. But this is why we were sent outside the ‘protection’ of the colonies. This is why Privateers have the backing of Union Earth. Not just so we can haul back junk for the eggheads to tinker with. Is that why any of you shipped yourselves a dozen horizon jumps from UE space?"

  Resolution looked back at her from the faces of her officers. A body did not end up on a Privateer ship by accident. Whatever their reasons for being here, they did not extend only to picking the bones of dead xenos for trinkets. Victoria took a deep breath. "Let’s give the Maeyar a call."

  Sothcide looked at the command deck of the Twin Sister. Half a hundred Maeyar bustled about as Ersis dropped away in the main optical screen. His flight helmet was tucked beneath his arm, dress uniform packed away after his meeting with Human Victoria. The sleek bulk of Twin Sister’s escorts lifted beside the carrier as well as the other four ships in the battlegroup, and the Condor, smallest of their entourage save for the fighter craft in his bay. His wife’s bay, in truth, and the woman stood not far from him, fins wavering gently with the air circulation as she monitored reports from the system divisions across the vessel. As he watched her read the same report three times he approached.

  "You are distracted, Jalith. What troubles my reason for being?"

  She did not turn. "More vessels have entered Pedres, they continue to muster beyond Juna, and three more listening posts have been located and destroyed. At last count we identified almost a thousand vessels, all arriving from the vector of Gavisar."

  Sothcide gently lowered her screen, bringing Jalith’s attention to him. "Gavisar has never sought to expand. Not after . . ."

  "They have never needed to," said Jalith, quickly cutting him off. "Not with a homeworld the size of a gas giant."

  "Why now? And how did they amass a fleet of such size?"

  "Questions that I hope your human captain is able to answer. Why the light of my morning puts such stock in the abilities of this primitive vessel I am eager to see," said Jalith.

  "Are they in position?" she asked her contact tracker.

  "Yes Matron, it’s just . . . well, surely it’s nothing."

  Sothcide looked up to the tracking board. "Yes?"

  "We are seeing a similar profile on the other side of the battlegroup, for moments at a time. I had thought at first they were out of alignment."

  Sothcide shrugged. "Probably a glitch in the active radiation sensors. Reflection from the atmosphere of the planet. Who knows what kind of strange signatures Human Victoria’s vessel gives off. Primitives really, these humans. Perform a service check on the array, we cannot afford errors when we arrive at Pedres. Contact the Condor and give them the necessary information on the Twin Sister’s darkspace shroud so that she’s close enough to enter the space tear with us."

  "Aye, Wing Officer."

  The Twin Sister had the tonnage and the reactor power to pull smaller ships with it into leaps between stars, or even in a ring of warped space to cheat the speed of light in more conventional ways. Ersis was too far for most of their battlegroup to make the jump to Pedres in a single bound, but riding on the back of the Twin Sister made it possible. The humans were unused to traveling by such a means, and required an explanation for the process. Spending time aboard the Condor had gifted Sothcide with a modicum of insight in the value such common knowledge might hold to the humans, and suspected that within the next few years he would see them employing the strategy to leave even messier holes in reality than they already did. More power added to a recording of poor poetry simply resulted in louder poor poetry. In the interim, the fighter wing needed inspecting. A sortie awaited his pilots on the other side. Jalith returned to her half-minded scan, thoughts on the distant star and the threat looming over the planet of her birth. So Sothcide descended to the deck alone, helmet a familiar weight beneath his slender arm.

  Chapter 4 - Pedres

  The blue-black waves of horizon space slipped past the Condor. Not really. Victoria knew they were only a digital artifact, a failure of the ship’s sensors to discern the true nature of this pocket universe where time, speed, and distance seemed not to apply as thoroughly as the one she was more familiar with. Though if she was being fair, once you started fucking around with Alcubierre science and exotic matter, the universe at large started being a little less rigid. She wondered if humans would ever have broken the light speed barrier if they’d not found a vein of the stuff on Titan, setting off every radiological alarm the survey ships had.

  "Battle stations, set general quarters throughout the ship."

  Victoria had no way to communicate with the other ships in the battlegroup during the horizon jump. Thus far, humanity had not gleaned any hint such a technology existed, and some scientists argued that for all intents and purposes, no ships existed in horizon space other than the one you were in. It just further proved to Victoria that even scientists could be stupid fools, better off keeping their mouths closed and their noses buried in their obsolete books. Sciences and constants that had held for thousands of years were being challenged daily as the privateers brought back proof that more intelligent life had long since found workarounds to many expected physical impossibilities. Often before the theorizing physicists had been born.

  Despite the lack of communication, a countdown timer superimposed on the main viewscreen ticked down the seconds in a way that reminded her a little too much of a descending range indication from the previous year. She swept it from the screen with a gesture.

  "Huian, what do you want to bet we miss the star and just keep going into the great unknown?"

  What little Victoria could see of her pilot’s face paled visibly at the comment, eliciting a chuckle from her command couch. "Maybe we’ll find the Baron. She went missing along this heading, right?"

  Huian didn’t answer. The steady heartbeat hum of horizon space started to falter, the viewscreen flashing as the sensors refocused and a band of stars appeared across the forward half of the conn. Pedres, they’d made it after all, and as her sensor repeater began to populate with little blue icons representing the Twin Sister’s battleground it became evident that so did the rest of her escort. Victoria breathed a sigh she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

  "Conn sensors, no immediate hostile contacts, should take them a few seconds for reflected light."

  Unless they had any kind of superluminal sensors, or had co-opted one of the Maeyar listening posts instead of destroying it. Even as she considered the possibility, her port-side sensor nodes picked up a spike in electromagnetic energy as the Twin Sister emitted a burst of active radiation. The active sweep propagated out into the system, returned reflection illuminating every contact within several thousand kilometers on her screen as bright as day.

  Except one. One tiny signature on the other side of the battlegroup flared up for just a moment. Panning to the heading she looked at the spike in thermal emission that was gone in an instant. As quickly as she was able, she pulled up the optical sensors on the main viewscreen. Empty space greeted her. Empty space with a backdrop of stars. But as she watched, one winked out, then its neighbor as the first reappeared. And a brief glimmer that might have been the heat of an attenuator on an otherwise matte black hull. The hairs on the back of her neck raised.

  Jones.

  Her focus shifted as a score of fighters led by Sothcide cut across her screen on trails of scarlet exhaust, and when the residual heat cleared there was no sign of the other privateer. Jalith scrambled her fighters quickly, and as soon as her tactical display updated with fresh information from the Twin Sister, Victoria could see why.

  They emerged from horizon space much more distant fr
om the star than they’d planned, hoping to skip past the invasion fleet, but a formation of four ships blocked their way. The ship’s computer identified one as a Gavisar light cruiser, almost two light-seconds away and already changing its trajectory to respond to the new threat of the Twin Sister.

  The other three were human.

  Alarms on her console lit up as active sensor pings swept over the Condor, dual emissions of radar and lidar that the coating and faceted surface on the Condor’s stubby ablative wings deflected away.

  "Avery, get word to the battlegroup, IFF paints the three in the rear as friendly. That must be the trade barge and its escorts. Make sure they don’t fire on those rear three ships!"

  "Aye Vick, I’m getting bursts of heat on the surface of that cruiser, missile launchers would be my best bet, tubes along its forward lateral faces."

  As if to punctuate his point, the closest of the escort ships erupted in a pyre of burning plasma and composite hull. More heat bloomed off the flank of the cruiser as the last volley from the dying Union Earth Navy ship was cut down by point defenses. Not a single shot came within a hundred kilometers of its hull.

  Victoria called for more acceleration, and felt the whine of the generators intensify through the decking of the ship. "Shit, we’re falling behind the battlegroup. Huian, tightwave message to the other escort, let them know help is on the way."

  Sothcide shook in the cockpit of his fighter, pushing his wing to max acceleration into the Gavisar vessel. The harsh explosion of one of the smaller contacts reflected off his helmet just before word filtered down that behind the light cruiser were three human ships, en route to Pedres and caught in the Gavisari web. Out here so far from the system’s star, the glow was almost blinding in the dark of space.

  "First Wing, disable the munition pods along the left side. Second Wing, look for the point defense and dust it. Third, go for the engine linkage. I want a kill shot."

  The projected vectors of his other two fighter wings veered off on his tactical plot, tight turns compensated by the latest generation of vibration dampeners, which would let the Second and Third make their pass from angles the crew of the cruiser couldn’t predict. Turn cost burn though, or so the saying went, and the First continued straight in on the most dangerous assignment with Sothcide directing the charge. Directional thrusters fired semi-randomly, an effort to deter any lucky shots, the repeating pattern of four hundred short bursts memorized by his gunner in order to compensate for their effects in his targeting.

  The short radio of his gunner clicked in his ear. "Closing to target, have good range lock."

  "Confirm," he called over the open channel, and was answered with the assertions of his other pilots as they deconflicted thermal targets. The cruiser was still beyond the range of optical targeting, even with the new vibration dampeners, but the missiles it continued to fire at the retreating humans painted every missile hatch on the vessel’s starboard side as the broad front of the cruiser turned to face the new threat of Sothcide’s fighter wings. The light cruiser was without escort or battlegroup. While his wing of interceptors lacked the raw firepower to destroy it, or in all likelihood even penetrate its armor, much of the Gavisar’s fighting and defensive power was exposed.

  The fighter weapons had one-tenth the range of the cruiser’s anti-fighter defenses, but with their mounting velocity that range advantage would quickly evaporate. He could feel static dance across his skin as the capacitors charged for a single max-power barrage. "All pilots, target defensive range approaching, maintain thrust, we get one pass and one pass only."

  His active sensors lit as the defensive laser arrays twisted to intercept his path. The wavelength emitted by the solid beams was too low for his visible spectrum, and too little matter existed to illuminate the deadly beams anyway. But a pinprick of light blossomed in his screen, one of the interceptors in the Second Wing had been struck from the stars. No time to determine who it had been as their own range window approached. The point at which Sothcide’s gunner had focused the six emitters came before the cruiser could recharge its capacitors, and all six pulsed in unison, the energy surge blasting static across his screens and sensors as his arrays launched a half-dozen coherent beams in less than a second.

  When the view cleared he was greeted by a score of plasma jets erupting from the cruiser’s starboard hull, visible for no more than an instant as his velocity carried him past the target and quickly closer to the two remaining human vessels, among several missiles still en route to their intended targets. Maeyar interceptors were designed with missile interdiction in mind. Several of their prominent enemies, the Gavisar included, employed directed nuclear, exotic matter warheads, or both. This was a chance to show Victoria he was serious about defending the trade pact.

  "First Wing, wide dispersal, rapid beam configuration. Cut them down," Sothcide ordered.

  Behind him he heard the reports of his other squadron successfully eliminating the point defenses on the cruiser, leaving it vulnerable to Maeyar missile fire even as he began systematically dismantling the few remaining warheads in pursuit of the human vessels. Then they were past the human vessels, carried away from the fight at breakneck acceleration. Sothcide flipped the interceptor around, beginning the long process of decelerating so that he could return to the Twin Sister and his wife. Third Wing hadn’t managed to disable the drive linkage between the reactors and the engine, but the attack craft would be inbound shortly.

  The Condor had better optical sensors than any xeno ship Victoria had encountered. Xeno ships had comparatively poor eyesight. When one looked at many of their neighbors in the Orion Spur, incredibly powerful active radiation and even some forms of gravitic sensor technology were readily apparent. But like kinetic weaponry and advanced computers, it seemed the local competition just hadn't bothered with electro-optic cameras. Xenos learned to employ the alternatives before refining primitive ideas. It was for this reason that only Victoria and Huian saw the state of the Gavisar cruiser as Sothcide led the first pass, extensive damage across the hull highlighted by the small explosions that peppered the starboard side of the ship. Warped and fractured metal exposed superstructure beneath the armored skin of the giant.

  "No human ship did that kind of damage, and the fighters don’t carry the weaponry to do the job either," said Victoria. She saved several still images to analyze—after the battle, but before the Maeyar left nothing to record. The battlegroup was closing with the wide, brutish cruiser, intent on destroying it before it could reach its comrades. In doing so, their commander dismissed the threat of the human ships, so primitive that their point defense systems could strike down any missile fired from a Union Earth Navy tube. Point defenses that the fighters had just disabled. Victoria opened a ship-to-ship channel.

  "This is Captain Victoria Marin of the UE Condor. Primary target point defenses are minimal functionality and interior is exposed on the starboard flank. If you want to answer that fucker, now’s your chance."

  A small window opened on the main viewscreen, filled with a sweaty, rough-lined face above the collar of an underway officer’s uniform. Eagles decorated both shoulders and lent their appearance somewhat to the stern, deep-set eyes of her counterpart, a full-bird Union Earth Naval captain. "Captain Bullock, ma’am, UEN Hudson River, and I’m damn glad you’re here. Everything we tossed at him got knocked out, but I saved one last hurrah. Our optics are in a bad way, can you lend us your eyes?"

  "My tactical team is transferring a solution now. Give ‘em hell, Hudson."

  Bullock left the channel open as he relayed orders to his own tactical team, parsing the targeting data into their system and ordering a volley of missiles. On the main portion of the screen, the Hudson River disappeared in a cloud of vapor and ice crystals as the calliope-style missiles fired in clusters of six on trails of solid rocket exhaust. Most were still struck down, even by weakened defenses, but sheer numbers overwhelmed the cruiser and a few began to strike home. Those that hit the hull boi
led away ablated armor, doing little more damage than those destroyed en-route, but two or three of the hundred and twelve tracked missiles penetrated the weakened ship, and the starboard side of the ship expanded, venting gas and magenta flames.

  "Conn sensors, reading a substantial decrease in the heat and light coming from the primary’s engines, substantial drop in bearing rate increase."

  "Nice shot, Hudson," said Victoria. "Suggest you make yourself scarce and let the Maeyar handle the rest."

  "Don’t need to tell me twice, damn thing dropped out of horizon right behind us. My magazines are empty and I’m glad to put him in my rear viewscreen. Hudson Actual out."

  True to her prediction, Victoria watched as the Maeyar destroyers and missile boat closed with the larger cruiser, passing the 10,000 kilometer marker and opening up with tight-beam maser pulses that slugged into the crippled ship like the fists of an angry deity, releasing enough energy to rend the metal hull and set the Gavisar vessel rotating off course, even as her flight crew tried to right her and continue the acceleration on their escape vector.

  The Twin Sister’s missile boat escort, the Slingray, saw to it that escape was off the table. It launched a pair of missiles from its dorsal tubes that burned faster and hotter than even their fighters, armored and hardened against the weakened, laser-based point defenses. With nothing to stop the Maeyar artillery, exotic matter payloads detonated within a kilometer of the cruiser in a flat disc of violent blue-white light that sheared it nearly in half from stem to stern. The two halves of the ship separated, each continuing on a ballistic trajectory as secondary explosions tore and twisted through the ruined hulk. Victoria could hear the cheers of her crew.

  "Huian, link us up with the rest of the battlegroup. We may be needed shortly."