Treasure of the Silver Star

by Michael Angel

  “Duty is a sense built into military people. A sense of humor is optional,” said Drake, but his affected gruffness didn’t fool Tally.

  “That’s more like it, Captain.” She paused a moment and continued. “Benjamin, that was a very brave thing you did back there.”

  “That was Sebastiàn’s piloting, and a lot of luck.”

  “Partly, yes, but Sebastiàn is as much of an officer as you are. He wouldn’t have lifted a finger against any of those ships unless you gave him permission. And…look, I heard the same things you did from Ruger. He said that you were his last chance to ‘regain his glory’. I want to know the answer to what I asked you earlier, over dinner. What is it between you and that man?”

  Drake pursed his lips, as if deciding where to start.

  “All right,” he began. “I served under Ruger, first in officer training school and afterwards. Bright man, with the right family connections. He had made and executed tactical plans that trounced opponents with twice the available hardware, and he was clearly on the fast track to the highest levels of military command. He was hand-picked by our superiors to put down and eradicate an uprising of colonial pirates in the outlying colonies. I led one of his squadrons on a deep penetration raid into enemy territory.”

  “I gather things did not go well.”

  “We were torn to pieces. Someone had guessed which hand Ruger was going to play, and when I tried to tell him, he refused to listen to me. Then, when he sent in the main battle fleet, he emerged from the star gate right into a sector that had been booby-trapped with magnetic mines. He lost a third of his ships and men. That would have effectively ended his career, had it not been for the fact that there was an alternative. And a scapegoat.”

  “The Terran Home Guard. And you, I guess.”

  “Right on both counts. Because of what happened, I’ve been stuck in the Guard just as long as Ruger himself.”

  She looked at him with amazement. “You’ve been paying for someone else’s mistake for years. Why didn’t you just—”

  “Leave?” Drake let out a bark of a laugh. “And do what? Run cargo transports? Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’d get to command the Earth-to-Moon commuter shuttle?”

  “I’ll bet that they pay a damn sight better than the Guard,” she retorted. “What’s more, you don’t get shot at, and you don’t have to kiss up to double-dealing, power hungry maniacs like the one that’s after us.”

  “Sure, the pay’s bad,” Drake agreed. His face flushed as his voice rose. “Sure, the work’s hard, and the food’s cold, and we don’t get mints on our pillows when we go to sleep, but at least I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I joined the military to serve Earth, and if this was the best I could do, so be it!”

  They glared at each other. The silence between them crackled with the sounds of distant welding. Tally was the first to look away.

  “Damn it all, Benjamin!” She rapped her knuckles against the hull. It made a hollow sound. “Why is it that we keep ending up like this?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, and with that statement, the tension between them melted away as quickly as it had come. “Until a few days ago, I would have fought anyone to prove that I meant what I just said. But now? The government has branded us as expendable. And my commander’s already murdered five of my crew. In cold blood.”

  “I wish I could do something for you.” She reached out to Drake. He looked at her closely, and then pulled her in. Held her, inhaled her scent. She circled her arm about his waist in turn. Her hair smelled like wildflowers, vibrant and alive, not raw and heavy like the scents around them.

  Drake pulled back, held her at arm’s length. Only his eyes betrayed his need.

  “Tally, if we’re to learn anything from all this, it’s that everyone’s playing for keeps now. Ruger’s going to scour that asteroid, if he doesn’t have the same or better information than what we’ve got. If we don’t find that engine before he does, then we’re effectively handing that psychopath the key to Armageddon.”

  “Maybe we can find something in the scientists’ logs that will give us a leg up.”

  “Maybe,” Drake agreed. He smiled at her. “Perhaps we can also work a little harder at not getting on one another’s nerves, right?”

  “I’ll take that as an order, Captain.”

  Cavendish paced up and down alongside the table in Ruger’s conference room like a caged tiger. His commanding officer, on the other hand, reclined in his chair. In fact, Ruger was as relaxed as he’d ever been.

  “Commander, I must protest,” Cavendish complained, and he summoned up all the spine he had. “This entire operation has gotten completely out of control.”

  “Really?” Ruger’s voice was wry, amused. So were his thoughts.

  How extra authority emboldens one, Cavendish.

  “You didn’t have to threaten Captain Drake with summary execution! Had we instead—”

  “Cavendish, please get your facts straight.” Ruger waved a cautionary finger. “I didn’t threaten Drake with execution.”

  “No?”

  “Oh, no. I was threatening to kill him. There’s a difference.”

  “Commander—”

  “Cavendish, let’s end this discussion, shall we?” Ruger stood abruptly, and the sound of his hard boots striking the carpet sent a bolt of fear through Cavendish’s gut. “You’re here to report on my activities to the Security Council. Fine, I’m not going to buck that, seeing as how they’ve offered me the lifeline out of this dead end job. But the council isn’t here on my bridge. I am.”

  “That’s true, but—”

  Ruger brought his face up to Cavendish’s, bringing out beads of sweat on the captain’s face. “This is my show. You get in my way, you get crushed under my wheels. Do we understand one another?”

  Wordlessly, Cavendish nodded.

  Down in the Ranger’s medlab, Kincaid was busy sealing a cut on Lieutenant Ferra’s thigh with the tri-laser. She grimaced, and a single bead of sweat rolled down one cheek, but she remained still and silent.

  Kincaid glanced up for a moment as Drake entered the medlab. “Be with you in one minute, Captain.”

  “Take your time,” Drake replied. He looked around, both surprised and pleased. Although there was ample evidence that the medlab had been in use, the beds were empty at a time when he had expected them to be crammed with patients.

  “No casualties,” he remarked. “That’s good news.”

  “Four injuries, nothing serious enough to require bed rest. To be honest, I think that it’s sunk into everyone’s skull that if we don’t want to end up as cannon fodder on Ruger’s dinner plate, we have to get back on our feet as soon as possible. And speaking of which...” Kincaid put the medical laser away and then helped Ferra stand. “Better try out the leg now. I’m not looking forward to dragging you up here again.”

  “Goes double for me,” Ferra agreed. She winced as she put weight equally on both legs. “Ouch! Kincaid, couldn’t you have at least left my legs the same length?”

  Kincaid gave Drake a wry look. “You know, Captain, military medicine would be a lot more fun if it weren’t for all the sick people in it.”

  Drake rolled his eyes at that and addressed his engineer. “Not to put any more pressure on you, but we’ve only got a couple more hours until Ruger and his little entourage come barging through the Trapezium gate. How soon can we get moving?”

  Ferra considered. “Oh, I’d guess that we’ll have partial main power in a few more minutes.”

  “After the damage I saw to engineering?” Kincaid exclaimed incredulously, “We’re talking spacedock level repairs here!”

  A shrug. “I didn’t say we were in tip-top condition. But we managed to stem the leaks and stabilize the engine core. As for the rest? This baby is solid state, no-nonsense hardware. Give any engineer with half a brain a laser torch and a pack of chewing gum, and they can get this ship running.”

  “How ‘partial’ is our main power?
”

  “Around sixty percent. That’s plenty for life support, sensors, and navigation. Marginal on the weapons and communication. And I can goose her up to half speed, but not for long.”

  Drake set his mouth in a grim line. “That’s not good enough for the situation we’re in. If it comes to another fight, we’re going to be badly outclassed.”

  “Best we can do without a visit to a spacedock. That’s just not a realistic option right about now. Ruger must’ve notified all the military bases in the sector, so they won’t help. And the civilian ones will charge us an arm, leg, and a spare set of ribs. Unless you have a spare half-million in credits lying around, they won’t talk to us.”

  “It just so happens that I know someone who might have that kind of cash lying around,” Drake said, without missing a beat.

  Kincaid chuckled. “I do believe that we have a rather flush treasure hunter on board.”

  “There is that,” Drake agreed. “And believe me, I can’t think of a better way for her to spend her credits right now.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tally and the Ranger’s officers gathered on the bridge to view the tactical screen that Sebastian had put together. Drake tapped his fingers against the arm of his captain’s chair expectantly, and the rest of the bridge went quiet as the Lieutenant began.

  “Of the five fully operational Chandrakasar gates, three are currently on line,” he said, punctuating his demonstration with the main viewscreen graphics. “The ready gates are for systems Kelebi, Tarazed, and Rastaban. The gates for Tania Australis and Altair Four will be usable within the hour.”

  “What about the sixth gate?” Drake asked. “The one you told me about, that was under repair?”

  “I ran a sensor scan on the gate leading to system Estacium,” Tally put in. “It’s up and running, but it’s still unstable. It’s anybody’s guess where it will take us.”

  Drake turned back to Sebastiàn. “Lieutenant, you’re the navigator. Do you have any recommendations?”

  “I do, Captain. I made two assumptions: first, that we don’t want to gamble with the intermittent gate. Second: that we want to get to a repair dock as soon as possible without blowing out our engines.”

  “Sounds logical. Go on.”

  “Rastaban and Altair leave us in sectors which have no other gate points nearby. That’s bad. If Ruger locates us in either area, he could easily spot us and outrun us before we made it to the next gate. Tania Australis doesn’t have a repair dock or additional gates, so that’s not an option. System Kelebi also isn’t a great choice.”

  “Why’s that?” Drake asked, surprised. “Kelebi’s a major transit point. We’d have access to multiple points of departure.”

  “That’s true, sir. But it also has a new garrison, staffed by the Interstellar Marine Corps. I’m willing to bet that Fleet Commander Ruger’s going to alert every military outpost around that we’re suspected mutineers.”

  “Point made. What about System Tarazed?”

  “Farming colony. There’s a dense asteroid belt in that system that could help hide us if Ruger comes snooping around.”

  “Sounds good, but a farming colony won’t have a starship repair dock.”

  “Yes, sir. But it does have other gates. I’ve worked out a series of three system jumps that will put us into Northumbrian space, where there’s a major civilian space dock. What’s more, a triple jump should be enough to throw off any attempts to track us.”

  “I like the idea, but a triple jump is seriously going to strain the hull. Why Northumbria? I can think of closer facilities where we might be able to get repairs.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” Tally broke in. “Our survival is going to be worth very little if we can’t locate the space temporal engine before Ruger does.”

  That made Drake pause. “I thought you said that all records on the test site had been erased.”

  “We’ve still got some clues. You remember when Ferra and I found out that each atom of that alien metal is aligned on the same magnetic axis? Well, I have a theory about that.”

  “Go on.”

  “Just as a gyroscope helps keep a ship steady when it’s in motion, I think that the aligned spin rates of the atoms in the metal acts as a kind of stabilizer. That’s why you need to use that specific material for the receiving platform.”

  “Okay, I follow you so far.”

  “I ran a sensor scan over our sample of the metal, both before and after we came through the gate to Trapezium. And the magnetic alignment on each particle in the material has been changed a tiny bit.”

  “I take it back. Maybe I’m not following you.”

  “This metal was designed to act as a universal ‘constant’ when moving objects in time. The position in space doesn’t matter. At the subatomic level, the magnetic poles will swivel in the same direction.”

  Drake sat up, surprised. “So this metal acts like a compass.”

  “Exactly. Sebastiàn and I plugged the shift in the metal’s alignment into the navigation computer. And this is what we came up with.”

  With a touch of a button, a yellow grid field neatly bisected the display, cutting through several of the more populated star systems on through to the edge of the galaxy and beyond.

  Kincaid squinted at the display. “How does this help? There’s dozens of star systems on that plane, no matter which end you start with!”

  “That’s right,” Tally admitted. “We need more information. And that’s why we need to get to Northumbria. That system is high above the projected plane. By taking a final reading from this metal when we get there, we should be able to triangulate the position of the star system in question. And there’s going to be a big pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I can just feel it.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right, then,” Drake said. “One last thing: before we leave, I want to tip the odds in our favor as much as possible. There must be a way to encourage Ruger to disperse whatever force he has chasing false leads. Can we make any use of that fluctuating gate?”

  “I was thinking of using a decoy to pass through that gate,” Sebastiàn considered. “If we have something that would leave a trail, that is.”

  “Wish we did. The Ranger never got the standard issue decoy. ‘Budget cuts’ and ‘the Guard’ are always mentioned in the same sentence.”

  “Maybe I can help there,” Tally offered. “My gear contains a homing beacon. It’s standard issue for salvage hunters, in case a crew gets trapped on board a derelict ship.”

  “Launch it through the gate with a defused torpedo,” Sebastiàn said, catching on, “that would leave a propulsion trail for Ruger to pick up on. Then I could do a short burn with this ship’s maneuvering jets, shut the engines off, and coast the rest of the way to another gate. If Ruger follows the trail, he could search for that beacon until next Tuesday.”

  “I like it,” Drake decided. “Let’s prep our decoy and set course for the Tarazed gate before we get some unwelcome visitors.”

  Two and a half hours later, the blazing whiteness of an opening gate lit up the crimson backdrop of the Trapezium. A trio of shapes coalesced from deep in the furnace of nullspace, crystallizing into ships as the gate snapped shut behind them. Implacable led the pack, while her two escorts veered off in opposite directions. The scanning gear on each ship peered into every nook and cranny of the gaseous space around them.

  Ruger tapped his finger impatiently. His eyes swiveled like a gunsight as the holographic shapes of his two captains shifted into view opposite his desk. “Report,” he said gruffly.

  “We’ve picked up an ion dispersion trail, not more than a couple hours old,” Cavendish reported.

  “Which gate does it lead to?”

  “None of them.”

  “None?” Ruger clenched his fists and began to swear. “Drake, you devil. How many more damned lives do you have?”

  “Sir, if I may,” Sindal put in. “We picked up the same reading too, and I think it’s
a decoy.”

  “Go on.”

  “Rumor has it that there was a sixth gate in the Trapezium,” she said, looking pleased with herself. “As you know, I wanted to be thorough, and my final sensor sweep has confirmed it. This last gate exists, but it has problems with its exit point. It’s a long shot, and it’s what Drake would like you to think he’s doing. Remember, Drake is outmatched and outgunned. He’ll try to put as much distance between us as he can.”

  “He may be outmatched and outgunned, but he’s already slipped our net twice,” Ruger pointed out. “Which gate do you think he used, Captain Sindal?”

  “The one to Rastaban. It’s exactly one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction from that intermittent gate.”

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Cavendish shot back. “There’s a number of ways Drake could have covered his tracks, in any direction.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well...many ways,” he replied, floundering. “Look, I say that he’s gone through that intermittent gate. My ship is the only one that has found any hard evidence.”

  “Hard as your head,” muttered Sindal.

  Ruger ignored the sniping. “That may be true, but I think we’re leaving out a third possibility. Drake’s ship is badly damaged. He’s going to want to get repairs, or he doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “A spacedock,” Sindal breathed. “Of course.”

  “The nearest spacedock facilities are the ones in system Wessex. If I’m right, he’s going to need to make a dash through the gate ports in system Kelebi to do that.”

  Sindal snapped to attention. “I’m with you, sir! We can—”

  “Quiet. I’ll take Implacable through, it’s the best bet we’ve got. But I want you to cover a second possibility. If Drake wanted to get to a different system with dock repair facilities, he’s going to have to go through Tarazed. Head towards that gate.”