To Fall Among Vultures

by Scott Warren

  Chapter 5 – A closer look

  "I’m curious, Captain Marin," said Jalith. Her bridge was abuzz with activity in the background of Victoria’s main viewscreen, but the Maeyar commander herself was as still as stone. "How is it you were so certain that cruiser was in poor fighting condition before we arrived? My husband claims your optical sensors are beyond even that of the Dirregaunt. Lensing controlled and stabilized by computers, of all things. It sounds like perfect nonsense, to me."

  Despite the cold regard on Jalith’s onyx-black face, Sothcide’s wife elected to use Vick’s title instead of addressing her simply as ‘Human Victoria’. That spoke either of respect, professional courtesy, or both. The xeno put a great deal of stock in the word of her husband while maintaining a healthy skepticism of her supposed abilities. That suited Victoria just fine, for the most part. The aspects of technology humanity uniquely excelled in was not common knowledge among the peoples of the Orion spur, and the Union Earth preferred to keep it thus.

  "It’s necessary, Ma’am. We don’t have the power output for the types of active sensors you employ, nor the defenses to risk a standoff battle. You saw how poorly the Clarke fared, despite damage to that cruiser."

  "Again, the damage. Not unusual for an isolated ship without escort or fighter wing."

  "I agree, but Captain Bullock said the ship came out of horizon space right behind them. Wherever they got into a scrap, it wasn’t Pedres."

  The Maeyar wing commander considered this information, her eye spinning slowly in the center of her forehead, ticking along almost like the second hand of a watch. Humanity had no information on how Maeyar optometrics functioned, seeming to lack any of the familiar parts common to xeno eyes. Maeyar possessed none of the retina, iris, or pupil common to humans and even other xenos. Only a smooth black globe looked back at her, resembling a snapshot of the night sky as it spun slowly in its socket.

  "The dawn of my day also speaks of your cunning and guile, and your ability to pass freely among enemies blind to your presence. If what you say is true, and we obtain proof, it may put us in a position to strike first. But we must know for certain before we endanger our fighting strength. Two of my interceptors were destroyed, and the loss of any craft jeopardizes our defense when facing such overwhelming numbers."

  It was left unsaid that Jalith considered Victoria expendable, but she heard it loud and clear in any case. The Condor was not a battleship, a cruiser, a destroyer, or barely even a frigate by most spacefaring standards. When it came down to it, the Maeyar defense might not even notice her absence in terms of sheer strength.

  "I am ordering the battlegroup closer to Pedres to establish a link with the Maeyar Fleet Operations. It appears nearly the entire strength of the Maeyar fleet is present, but most are arrayed around Pedres and the two closest planets. You will not accompany us, Captain Marin. Instead, you will use this guile and these optics and reconnoiter the Gavisar fleet. Discover how fractured and bruised this company is, and whether they can stand before the Maeyar’s full strength."

  That was a whole mess of xenos floating around the last planet, and it only took one lucky sensor operator to notice the Condor, even as slick-smooth as she was. Between Huian’s sticks, Prescott’s heat management, and Avery’s near preternatural sensor analysis she had one of the best stealth teams in space. There were maybe two or three shit-hot ships she’d put ahead of the Condor. Unfortunately, she knew for a fact that one was floating around the system. Probably listening in on every communication between the battlegroup and Victoria. Maeyar communicative encryption was a joke for human computers to crack, and Jones was being treated to every strategic and tactical tidbit floating around the task force wavelengths. Victoria still wasn’t sure what his endgame was, but the little bastard was no fan of hers. Would he resort to outright hostility? Unlikely. He was a pirate, first and foremost, not always patient enough to wait for a ship to need help before he set his sights on it. Even the Graylings seemed to leave him alone.

  "We can do it. If they’re all holed up near Juna we can get close enough without being seen to read names painted on hulls. Just give us time. Sneaking ain’t a quick ordeal."

  "Time is one thing I cannot give to you, there is no telling when the Gavisar will move for Pedres. The stream of their ships has slowed, and defense only mounts before them if they delay."

  Victoria shrugged. "Maybe the delay is because they’re not ready to fight. But then, that’s what we’re for, eh? Stay safe, Wing Commander Jalith."

  "To you as well, Captain Marin. Stars’ speed to the Condor, and a safe return."

  Ceremonious drivel. But brass always seemed to love the shit. Pride and pomp were universal. Victoria terminated the connection and the Maeyar’s face disappeared from the forward monitor. She stood from the command couch, stretching the tightness out of her back and shoulders. Her mind immediately went to the wet stores in the wheelhouse. She tried to suppress the thought as well she could, which was not very.

  "Huian, set a course for Juna. Sublight only, we know at least a couple of the heavy hitters out there are going to be packing FTL sensors."

  "Aye Skipper."

  The plating beneath Victoria’s feet shuddered as the Condor’s ion engine delivered a burst of acceleration. Worse than it should have, forward inertial dampeners must have needed work. But Victoria had a stop to make first. On the same deck as control, she made her way aft of the communication array to the tiny sensor shack. She slid into the dark room, illuminated only by the scrolling wash of passive sensor displays. Under Avery’s instruction, one of the junior sensor operators was inputting commands using the virtual keyboard created by his retinal implants, synched to the computers on the Condor.

  "Looks like photon doppler, but not as clean as mine," said Victoria.

  "Good eye, Vick. You’re right, the Hudson River sent this over. They happened to get the Jackdaw’s old module before this patrol, and good thing too, since it gave them enough of a warning to get their missile countermeasures warmed up. The Clarke wasn’t so fortunate. Captain Bullock thought we might be able to put it to use somehow."

  The operator played back the event, showing a spike where a superluminal wave compressed the photons moving past the Hudson River. Supposedly you could catch it on a viewscreen if you were lucky with the recording rate. For a few thousandths of a second, the stars toward the disturbance would be brighter, while the stars behind your ship would dim ever so slightly. The sensor module extrapolated the size and force of the wave to determine the origin and sometimes even the class of ship using it. It had been one of the earliest acquisitions of the privateer fleet, at a time when people remembered the age before first contact.

  "Their cruisers have Alcubierre-type drives. Think they rode it all the way from Gavisar?" asked Victoria.

  Avery glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "No, they didn’t. But you want to know how I know they didn’t. Well I’ll show you," he said, bringing up another display: the radiological sensors. "Coming out of horizon space isn’t always clean, especially if you get bumped out a few million miles early, like by a solar flare or matter of sufficient size in your path. It creates a burst of light, heat, and radioactive waves. The light is easy enough to see, and xenos run hot enough that we barely notice the extra heat. But the radiation can get into the metal of the hull, seep in and hold fast, and with a half-life short enough to output measurable particles."

  "More than usual?"

  "That cruiser was practically bathing in it, once we got within fifty KK of the wreck it started setting off alarms." Avery crossed his arms. "Now how did you know?"

  "You spend so much time looking at emissions and engine heat that you sometimes neglect the most important sensor onboard," said Victoria. She tapped out a command herself, bringing up the images of the cruiser before the Maeyar had closed to a killing range. It was at the edge of the Condor’s magnification, but Avery picked it up immediately.

  "It was already in a figh
t," he said.

  "That radiation could have just as easily come from weapons fire. Never trust anything you can’t see with your eyes," said Victoria. "That cruiser was hurt bad, and whatever did it, did it before it got in this system. Trying to use an Alcubierre-type drive on a ship with a compromised hull risks compression shear."

  "That ship was stranded, couldn’t link up with his buddies, couldn’t get past Pedres to make another horizon jump. Lashed out in fear at the closest thing, and it happened to be us."

  "And how many of the bastards floating in circles around Juna are in the same shape? We’re on our way to the lion’s den here, Avery. Hell, our job is to pry open their mouths and get a close look at their teeth."

  "Well, at least we know the Gavisari don’t have many ships with gravitic sensors. If we go full dark they’ll have to get pretty lucky to spot us."

  Victoria shuddered. "They don’t need much luck with a thousand of them rolling dice. I don’t like this, but Commander Jalith has the right of it. They don’t have a ship that could manage the kinds of missions we do daily."

  "And we don’t have a ship that can withstand the kind of punishment their warbirds can shrug off."

  "Then we just have to make sure the Gavisari are really, really unlucky."

  Avery nodded, and Victoria turned to leave.

  "Vick, wait."

  She stopped.

  "What kind of weapon has a radiation profile identical to horizon space transference?"

  "I don’t know, but it chased over a thousand ships to the Maeyar’s front door."

  Juna had the distinction of being the sixth and last planet in the Pedres system. Despite the constant twilight its surface enjoyed, volcanic activity from active tectonics pumped greenhouse gasses across landscapes made mountainous by the shifting plates. Combined with the composition of its quickly rotating core, it retained the unusually high amount of heat that it generated while exerting an unusually strong magnetic field. Thick electrical storms were a near constant, roiling across its glowing surface. It was visible in the optics four hours after the Condor split from the battlegroup, but it wasn’t until they were a couple million kilometers away that Victoria began to see flashes of continent-spanning lightning stretching into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  "We’re ballistic, ma’am. On our current course we’ll get caught in Juna’s gravity and slip into orbit," said Huian.

  Victoria tapped her fingers on the arms of her command couch. As the Condor began its transition from the sunward side of Juna to the nightside, she began to see thin white snakes trailing across its upper atmosphere. Dozens of them traced their way across the night sky from sunset to sunrise.

  "Conn sensors, sensors to the conn."

  A moment later, Daniel Avery appeared through the hatch, floating in the microgravity as he examined the main viewscreen. Victoria didn’t know that the Gavisar had gravitic sensors, but she also didn’t know that they didn’t, and so the replacement Gravitic Stealth Device was humming away in the back of the ship. She wished she still had the Malagath-enhanced version they’d rigged up while they were aboard, but tech-div had torn it out almost before they’d docked in human space.

  "What’s going on down there? Planetary electrical event?"

  Avery scratched at his stubble. "I’m not sure what to make of it, but those are the Gavisari." With his virtual keyboard he pulled up their passive thermal sensors, highlighting the source of the anomalous lights. "Each one of those is a ship dragging a metal tether hot enough to melt steel. I’d say one in four have got one deployed. Never seen anything like it."

  Victoria shook her head. Most xenos neglected the stealth elements of warfare, but not to the extent of towing ten kilometers of neon sign behind them. "Why would they do that?" she asked.

  "Conn engineering," came Davis Prescott’s voice over the open channel. "I just pulled up the main feed back here and I think I’ve got some notion of what they’re about. It’s a power generator. Dragging that line across the planet’s magnetic field induces one hell of a current in a tether that long, enough to maintain some life support and maneuvering, but not much else."

  A source of power, mooched directly from Juna’s unusually strong magnetic field. "Any idea why they’d be running a setup like that?" she asked as Avery returned to the sensor shack just aft of her.

  She could imagine the heavy Texan shrugging back in the engineering compartment, strapped down to the main station. "Damaged reactor? It’s a constant supply of voltage, Skipper. Maybe your theory about them being in a fight was onto something if they ain’t running their reactors."

  "Huian, adjust course, three degrees starboard and two positive on the azimuth. We need a closer look. Avery, what have we got for active sensors down there?"

  "A lot of EM radiation pointed at Pedres," said Avery while Huian made the minor course correction, "So much that it’s causing more interference than useful returns. I don’t think they’re as coordinated as they’d like us to think, lots of chatter but it’s our first time breaking Gavisar’s encryption. But down in middle orbit? If they’re not running reactors they won’t have the power for active sensors, and all that magnetic interference will be like gliding through white noise. We’re losing some fidelity already on the Condor. We’re ghosts here, Vick."

  Victoria nodded. "Steady as she bears. Set for middle orbit, let’s get into this formation and take a turn around the planet. Huian, how long will it take us for a full orbit?"

  "One hundred and eighty minutes, Ma’am."

  "Alright. One turn in the lion’s den, then we break orbit and haul back to Pedres and the Twin Sister."

  The light show of induction tethers grew as the Condor slipped beneath the majority of the Gavisari defensive scans, spreading as tiny streaks became vast luminescent scars trailing across the planet’s night side. Small deceleration maneuvers brought the Condor’s relative speed closer to that of the orbiting ships, and within a quarter hour Victoria could see the inductive tethers above as well as below.

  "Conn sensors, we’ve got a contact coming up bearing two zero zero, high bearing rate. They’ll pass close in about thirty seconds. Another at zero four zero, low bearing rate but we’re picking up strong horizon space radiation, I’d put them both within three thousand kilometers."

  Close enough for a kill shot if either one saw her, but the matte black hull of the Condor shrugged off light as well as radar. Victoria brought up the first contact on the main screen, the ship streaking across the sky as the white-hot cord extended behind it. The ship was massive, larger even than the light cruiser they’d encountered before.

  "Conn sensors, class identifiers suggest a bulk freighter. Spectral shows gas venting from heavy damage along her starboard side. I’m surprised she’s still in one piece. Not seeing any substantial armaments. Reactor is definitely suspended but the ship is active. I’m getting radio transmitter signals from inside. Horizon radiation is strongest along the tear."

  Victoria glared at the twisted and fractured metal striping the length of the freighter. An invasion fleet? This ship was barely holding together. The freighter didn’t even have a conventional FTL engine, it was built to transit from horizon jump to jump on sublight propulsion.

  "Avery, what about the second ship? Visual can’t make it out past the light of the tether. Are we getting any comms chatter from them?"

  There was a pause as Avery adjusted his sweep. "Negative, Vick. If there’s anyone over there, they’re not broadcasting with enough energy to reach us, and we’re closer to them than any of the neighbors. It’s small though, civil transport is my best guess."

  "Huian, adjust course three degrees right. Bring us to four and a quarter miles per second."

  There was an almost imperceptible shudder as the Condor fired her lateral thrusters. Just enough to induce a trend that would swing the ship on their starboard forequarter directly ahead, and match the speed as close as Victoria dared. The planet below completely eclipsed the s
un now, lighting flashing periodically in its thick roiling storms beneath the trailing creepers of spaceships in low orbit around Juna. But that cover wouldn’t last forever. They’d seen a lot, but not enough to bring back to Pedres. They needed more before the Maeyar Fleet could decide on a course.

  "Passing the end of the tether now, Ma’am," Huian said from the pilot’s chair.

  Victoria panned the main viewscreen down, switching from the fore optical sensors to the belly-mounted modules. The tether itself was putting off incredible amounts of heat and light. The heat that mounted as the slack line dragged across the magnetic field of Juna had nowhere to go in a vacuum, and was somewhere between a vacuum forge and a rocket engine test. What she wouldn’t give for a length of whatever material it was made of that could stand up to that kind of heat without melting. The ship’s computer had to dim the display to compensate for the brightness, and the feed actually became grainy as Huian pulled the Condor even closer. The privateers ate up the kilometers of cable in only a few minutes, revealing the ship towing the line to in fact be a smaller, unarmed ship. Apparently without power despite the tether, its heading tumbled slowly, drifting independent of its orbital trajectory.

  "Conn sensors, that wreck looks completely cold. Nothing on EM, spectral, infrared, or visual to suggest activity or any type of propulsion."

  Looking at a dead ship was no uncommon sight to the Vultures, despite the circumstance being more likely in a long-finished battle than surrounded by close to a thousand hostile xeno vessels. Being fair, maybe this was the result of a finished battle. Something brought these Gavisari here, and expansionism seemed less and less likely with every passing hour. That ship might hold answers, or the key to finding them.

  Victoria thumbed the main circuit.

  "Prepare to board."

  Chapter 6 - Tether

  Aesop Cohen tightened the strap affixing the X-87 carbine to his chest. The vacuum suit gloves offered more dexterity than the previous generation, and had ingenious little hooks for getting underneath fasteners. The interior of the helmet smelled like a swamp sprayed down with copious industrial cleaner. The algae cultures in the oxygen pack were fresh, but over time the pond scum and ammonia odor would fade away, leaving behind fresh, clean oxygen. An escape, actually, from the desiccated air of the Condor.