“I’m not taking your bet,” Tally remarked. “That plea for help was just a little too pat.”
“Captain,” Sebastiàn inquired, “were you aware that we don’t have a tenth torpedo tube?”
Drake smiled. “Of course, Lieutenant.”
Crazy as a fox, Sebastiàn thought, with a fierce surge of admiration. “Then what was that about a ‘plasma torpedo’?”
Drake shrugged. “It sounded good at the time.”
Chapter Twelve
The massive arrowhead shape of the cruiser Implacable seemed to cut through the blackness of space itself as she sped towards the Kuiper Belt, her triple engines thrumming with tightly leashed power. Neatly flanking her were the near-twin destroyers, Lightning and Vigilant. They cruised near the capital ship like young sharks following a larger cousin through the sea, hoping for a morsel of their own. One of the two destroyers accelerated with a sudden burst of speed, moving to a position far ahead.
On board Ruger’s flagship, the communications officer called up to Fleet Commander. “Communication from the Lightning.”
“Put it through,” Ruger said. A shimmer, and Cavendish’s broad face filled the bridge screen.
“We’ve detected a ship entering this quadrant.”
“Good. What did Mackall say?”
Cavendish’s wide, stubbly cheeks turned as red as port wine. “It’s not Mackall’s ship sir. It’s the Ranger.”
“What?” Ruger sat up straight. “Then what happened to Mackall?”
“I’m not sure, but we’re picking up a faint distress call from the Kuiper Belt. It’s the Repulse. She’s been crippled and needs help.”
“So that’s the way Drake wants to play it,” Ruger muttered. “At least Mackall delayed Drake long enough to let us get ahead of him. Cavendish, go to battle stations. I want your ship to take point. Drake knows something is up, so he’s going to try to get out of this system as fast as he can. There’s only one Chandrakasar gate nearby. So he must be heading for it.”
“Sir, what about Mackall?”
“We don’t have the time!” Ruger shouted. “I’m leaving the wounded behind. If you don’t stop Drake, then I’ll leave you as well!”
On board the Ranger, Lieutenant Sebastiàn looked up from his tactical screen. His expression was grim as he spoke.
“I’m showing a task force of three ships between us and the Chandrakasar gate. One cruiser, two destroyers. The cruiser and one destroyer are holding a position five hundred kilometers in front of the gate. The second destroyer is coming forward to take point.”
“Of the three, the cruiser is Ruger’s baby,” Drake stated. “She’s the only halfway up to date ship the Guard has. Let’s call up the weapons specs and see what she’s packing.”
“Yes sir, calling it up now.”
“Captain,” Tally said, “we’re being hailed.”
“By which ship?”
“Implacable. It’s Ruger.”
Drake’s eyes narrowed. “Put him on.”
Ruger appeared every inch the Fleet Commander as his visage filled the viewscreen. He was dressed in his full uniform, and the golden bars upon his shoulder boards gleamed in the cruiser’s bridge lights. His voice boomed with authority as he spoke.
“Captain Drake, I order you to surrender your ship and prepare for boarding.”
Drake took a breath and straightened his own uniform, not out of self-consciousness, but to control his reaction to what he saw on the screen. The view camera on Implacable’s bridge had been set to display an extremely wide-angel view. In the left hand corner, Drake had spotted the cruiser’s weapon console. Every system the ship had was armed and pulsed with a lethal green. Drake heard a quiet hiss from forward; Sebastiàn had seen it too.
“Commander, I demand to know the reason you want me to turn my ship over to your authority.”
“You are insubordinate, Captain—”
“You’re damn right I’m insubordinate, Ruger!” Drake snapped. “You’ve saddled me with enough of your petty demands. I want to know why you sent Frank Mackall out to ambush us, and I want to know why you’ve called out an entire task force in order to bring back a little patrol ship.”
“You’ve already had that explained, Drake,” Ruger said smoothly, backing off a step. “Your crew and ship are carrying a deadly virus, the product of a classified bioweapons experiment from the Interstellar War.”
“Kincaid?” Drake didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“That’s the lamest cock and bull story I’ve heard,” Kincaid spat. “There’s no infectious agent on board our ship, and if there was, he should have sent a medical frigate out to meet us, not a warship commanded by someone as boneheaded as Mackall.”
Ruger opened his mouth to reply. But the man stopped in mid-breath. Drake watched as the cords in his commander’s neck relaxed, and the man’s eyes went blank, as if a heavy decision had been reached. Ruger made a big, exaggerated sigh.
“I could continue to argue this all day, but I’m afraid that you’ve snared me in your little web of logic.” Ruger spread his hands magnanimously. “All right, I came out here on orders of the Terran Security Council. They wanted me to find you and bring you back, dead or alive.”
Drake was brought up short by Ruger’s sudden turn to the truth. And it was the truth. He could feel it. But that in turn made him even more wary. Drake felt the hair on the nape of his neck start to rise, standing on end as if doused with static electricity.
“I’m told that whatever you saw, on or inside that asteroid, was too highly classified for the eyes of a second rate captain. Or a third rate junk-and-trinket hunter,” Ruger continued. Tally glowered, crossing her arms, but said nothing. “I was told to systematically remove any link from your expedition to the outside world. Starting with any and all of your personnel on Earth.”
Drake rose, though it felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. “Our wounded...” he said, understanding.
“I see that you understand me. You do recall that you had five wounded men from your first engagement out here, correct? Of those, two were still in intensive care—”
“They didn’t know anything!”
“—and they met with an accident. Their life support machines failed. As for the other three, they’ve also vanished. Rather mysteriously, too. What was it that pirates used to say? Dead men tell no tales?”
“Ruger, I swear I’ll have your hide…”
The Fleet Commander leaned forward towards the video pickup. His greasy smile filled the screen as he went on. “I’m telling you everything, Drake, because I don’t care who hears this. Simply bringing your body back to Terra is enough for me. You’re my key to regaining my glory, you know. My people aren’t going to talk about anything I do to bring you down. And of course, you won’t be able to after I’m done with you.”
“Bastard!” Drake snarled. He shut the comm link down with the pound of a fist.
If I’m going to die, then I want to take as many of Ruger’s foul brood with me as I can.
“Ready full spread of torpedoes! Set intercept course for the point destroyer!”
“No, Captain!” Sebastiàn cried. “We need to close with Implacable!”
For a second, Drake stared mutely at the young officer. He nodded abruptly. Sebastiàn had already demonstrated that he knew what he was doing. At least, that was what Drake hoped.
Laser blasts erupted from the Lightning’s batteries as she came forward and swung into action. The Ranger jolted, as if a giant hand had touched her. A ragged, door-sized hole appeared in the starboard wing. Sebastiàn accelerated, weaving his way between the deadly arcs of light, each of which could burn another crisp hole in the tiny patrol ship.
“Captain Cavendish doesn’t like to close,” Drake informed his Lieutenant. “He’ll rely on long range weapons if he can. Target his lasers!”
“At once, Captain,” Sebastiàn said, without missing a beat.
With a touch of a button, the
Ranger did a neat pirouette in space on the tip of one wing. She dived beneath the Lightning’s fire. The patrol ship blazed by the destroyer at close range, crossing from upper left to lower right.
“Locked on the Lightning’s forward laser battery!”
“Fire all forward tubes!”
The ship bucked as the forward tubes emptied with a blast of compressed gas. The neat, concentrated semicircle of missiles looped back around as the Ranger dove out of the way, laser fire singeing her tail.
The Lightning executed her own evasive maneuvers. She broke to port and lanced space with her laser blasts. One torpedo broke lock and oriented on Implacable; the cruiser’s antimissile lasers easily swatted it aside in a puff of flame. The remaining three torpedoes bore in mercilessly, exploding within a few milliseconds of each other along the Lightning’s after deck.
“Got her!” Sebastiàn exclaimed.
The bridge of the Ranger erupted in cheers. Drake watched with unabashed glee as the destroyer veered out of the way, her laser turret a fount of erupting flame.
“She’s not crippled, not by a long shot,” warned Kincaid.
“It’ll buy us some time,” Drake said. The second destroyer lanced into the viewscreen from the opposite direction, like a tackler after a runaway pass receiver. “Can you get a lock on the Vigilant there?”
Sebastiàn shook his head. “She’s still out of range.” He nudged the comm button with his elbow as he hurriedly swung the ship back on course for the approaching cruiser. “Ferra, on my mark, I want you to give me every scrap of power you’ve got.”
“You need it for weapons?” she asked.
“No. I need to get us as close to light speed as possible.”
“You got it. Kid, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Wait for his signal, Ferra.” Drake ordered.
Sebastiàn threw a glance of gratitude at his captain. He winced as a nearby orange explosion almost blotted out the viewscreen in a wave of static. The destroyer had slackened her speed. She remained at a distance and fired salvo after salvo of long-range missiles. The missiles were not guided, so their accuracy was minimal, but there were enough to cause plenty of trouble.
The cruiser closed in from the opposite direction. It still blocked the gate. Just as the missile fire from the destroyer began to slack off, the cruiser opened its own salvos. Exploding warheads rattled teeth aboard the Ranger as Sebastiàn tossed the patrol ship back and forth, weaving between the fireballs which blossomed like miniature suns strewn at random through space.
He hammered away at the navigational panel like a keyboardist performing an especially demanding piece. His eyes stayed glued to the screen, keeping his senses in tune with the three dimensional conflict spread out before him. Sebastiàn had trained half his life for this kind of combat, and he devoted every bit of concentration to the task. Forward, the image of the cruiser grew rapidly.
“Come on, baby, hold together just a little longer,” he pleaded.
He was answered with a skull-flattening roar from the lower decks. Damage reports began to flood in from all over the ship on the comm channels.
“Hit to section six, we’re ruptured—”
“We have fire in engineering!”
“Come on...” whispered Sebastiàn.
“Tally, man the aft torpedo launcher!” Drake indicated the auxiliary panel next to the woman’s seat. She nodded and punched up the tactical grid. Drake couldn’t spare Sebastiàn, not for a second.
“How do I get it to lock on the target?”
“Don’t worry about that! Just fire at will, keep that destroyer at our rear off our backs a few seconds longer!”
Tally swiveled the target scope with a wave of her hand over the blunt nose of the approaching ship. She pulled the arming lever and mashed the firing button with her thumb. She was rewarded with a whoosh of compressed air, and she emptied the tube in short order. Each of her projectiles fell short, but it was enough to see the destroyer jump and shuffle out of the way from the nearby explosions.
The cruiser’s bow was clearly outlined against the glare of her engines now. Each laser battery sparkled with deadly intensity, each ready to unleash its firepower.
“Lieutenant,” Drake said, “whatever you have planned, you’d better do it now.”
“Ferra, get ready!” Sebastiàn shouted. “Now!”
Those not firmly buckled into their seats on the bridge were knocked flat. A heavy jolt ran the length of the Ranger, crackling down the ship’s spine with a bone-splitting crunch. On the screen, Drake could only look on with terror as they rushed towards the cruiser’s charged laser batteries with silent, horrifying speed.
Implacable’s laser batteries belched a sheet of flame, rattling the Ranger and damaging her, but no more missiles erupted from the open weapons ports. Drake looked up as the hull of the cruiser passed overhead. The larger ship was so sickeningly close that he would have sworn that someone standing between the two ships could have touched both with outstretched limbs.
The Ranger tore through the small, deadly space at a velocity just below light speed. Trailing gas and smoke, she plunged into the entry zone of the Chandrakasar gate like a rabbit down a hole. Ruger watched in astonishment as the gate shimmered into existence.
The eyeball frying whiteness of the star gate ripped open to claim the Ranger as her own. With a silent thunderclap, the small ship passed into the void and the gate snapped shut. The trio of satellite markers buzzed and hummed as they began to build up power for the next automated opening sequence.
Ruger stepped forward and pressed his hands to the viewscreen, as if he could will the Ranger back into existence. His voice was dry and humorless as he spoke to his navtech.
“Get us through that gate. Now.”
“Sir,” the officer said, his voice trembling, “you can’t—”
Ruger lashed out with the back of his hand, making a meaty crack as he connected with the navtech’s face. The man fell halfway out of his chair, his lip dribbling blood, as Ruger advanced on him.
“Get us through the damned gate!”
“The gate won’t open for hours, sir,” the officer said numbly. “There’s simply no way in the world I can get it to open ahead of time.”
Ruger clenched his fist. The navtech winced. He stopped and considered.
“Get me Sindal and Cavendish,” Ruger instructed his communications technician.
He then turned to regard the stunned members of his bridge crew. His voice rose to an angry crescendo. “This isn’t over. We’re going to find Drake and his crew if I have to take us beyond the Galactic Rim!”
Chapter Thirteen
The Ranger drifted in space. Her wounds slowly closed. The vents and jets of various gases and fluids leaking from her hull slowed to a trickle, then to a stop. The space she occupied was not the familiar, inky black between the widely scattered solar systems. Instead, she floated like a galleon of ages past in a sea of crimson clouds dotted with brilliant blue stars, like a handful of sapphires tossed upon a red satin sheet.
“Stabilizing orbit...now,” Lieutenant Sebastiàn said calmly. For the first time since they arrived at the Kuiper Belt, he lay back in his chair and relaxed.
Tally looked out over the starscape of wine-colored gases. Her voice was filled with wonder. “Where are we?”
“The Trapezium gate point,” answered Drake. “Trapeze Central, to the local star runners. It’s a stellar nursery in the Orion nebula. There’s over two thousand protostars and newly formed mature stars charted in here. But all the kinks and whorls those stars put into the gravity fields out here allowed us to put in multiple star gates. We have our choice of five gates, depending on their times of operation.”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Sebastiàn interrupted, “there’s six.”
“How do you figure that, Lieutenant?”
“In my stellar navigation class, we were taught that the sixth gate is an abandoned one leading to system Estacium. Plans we
re in motion to stabilize it and make it usable again.”
Drake mulled that one over. “Care to check on that one, Lieutenant?”
“My pleasure, sir.”
“And before you do…” Drake walked over to Sebastiàn’s seat. “I want to know why you decided to risk our lives in a point-blank run on Ruger’s ship.”
“The weapons specifications, Captain. Implacable was one of the first cruisers to carry a modernized missile system. The warheads are powerful enough to tear a hole in the launch platform if detonated within five hundred meters. To prevent that from happening, the weapon systems will not target a ship that is closer than that range. Even if Fleet Commander Ruger had decided to take the risk of blowing up his own ship, he couldn’t have altered the weapons program before we were through the gate.”
Drake nodded, and a smile crept onto his face. “If we ever get on the right side of the law again, I’m going to recommend you for immediate promotion. As for now, I leave the conn in your capable hands. Notify me of any change.”
“Mind if I join you, Captain?” Tally asked.
“Not at all.”
The two proceeded down the corridor to the engine compartment. Here and there, portions of the walls were scorched, and the faint smell of ozone was in the air. Drake heard the sound of repair work in the distance, and he picked up his pace.
“I wonder how badly we’ve been hurt.”
“Where I’m from, if you can walk away from a fight, you’re automatically the winner,” remarked Tally. She put a hand out to Drake, impeding his progress, and he looked at her, puzzled. “Hey, slow down. We’re not in immediate danger anymore, and if you wind yourself up any tighter, you’re going to snap.”
“We may not have blast guns pointed at our heads right now, but we’re hardly out of the woods yet,” he pointed out. “Ruger’s not going to make the same mistakes twice. He’ll shoot first and talk later. I have to get our ship as far away from here as possible.”
“For Christ’s sake, will you put aside your duty for a moment?” she asked, a small anger flaming in her. “If it wasn’t for the fact that you have a primitive sense of humor, you’d be insufferably boring.”
Treasure of the Silver Star Page 10