The Empty Warrior

by J. D. McCartney

  In the current situation her opinions concerning Lindy’s flying mattered even less than they normally would have, as there was no choice but to push the envelope. The Vazileks would see to that. So whether he was the foolhardy flyboy of Valessanna’s nightmares or the peerless pilot he obviously believed himself to be, Lindy was going to have to make what was a near impossible rendezvous if he and his crew were to survive. And as much as Valessanna may have been loath to admit it, Lindy was the only man she had ever known who might actually be able to pull it off.

  “Don’t worry,” she answered sarcastically, trying to match his nonchalance. “We’ll be going as fast as the engines will push us.”

  “Roger that. See you soon. Talon out.”

  Valessanna had no time for pique over Lindy’s brusqueness. Putting the pilot out of her mind, she spoke to her ship. “Vigilant, enable intraship address, please.” The PA system activated. “This is your captain speaking,” she said clearly and with as much spirit as she could muster. “Prepare for incoming fire. We are going to have to fly past three Vazilek raiders in order to retrieve our shipmates. Then we’re headed home. It’s going to be a rough ride, but we’ve a good ship and a good crew. So hang on, do your duty, and we’ll all make it through. Captain out.” She fervently hoped that her words had not betrayed the deep-seated doubt she felt about Vigilant’s short-term prospects or the demoralization that had begun to eat into her being since she had learned of the loss of the barge. A captain’s negative feelings could spread through a crew like plague if one was not careful to hide them.

  “Defense,” she snapped, trying hard to put those thoughts behind her, “activate the shields. Maximum protection over the bow if you please.” She continued, not waiting for an acknowledgement. “Weapons, open the ports, raise the emitters, and charge the capacitors. We will engage on my command.”

  “Understood, Captain,” came the perfunctory responses.

  The tactical plot showed Vigilant accelerating, rapidly closing the distance between herself and the two Vazilek ships that blocked her path, while the cutter still lay hidden on the far side of the aberrant world. There was no noticeable reaction from the third raider. It was still moving away from the planet, garnering speed as it went. Either they were somehow unaware of the cutter’s presence or simply did not consider it a target of high enough priority to warrant their attention.

  Abruptly, a tactical realization struck Valessanna squarely between the eyes. The cutter was bait. The Vazileks knew full well exactly where Talon was; they hadn’t destroyed her because they wanted to use the little ship to draw Vigilant under their guns. Without the presence of Talon, the Vazileks might have sniffed at Vigilant’s exhaust, maybe gotten close enough to bang a few plasma balls off her shields, but that would have been the extent of the encounter. With nothing to draw her back, the big cruiser would have simply disappeared beyond the light barrier and the three raiders would have in all probability never seen her again. But the cutter was an enticement Valessanna could not ignore. She had to go back—back where the Vazileks would get their chance to kill her ship and her crew. Well, screw you, you bastards, she thought. I’m coming to get my people; let’s see you stop me!

  Tension permeated the bridge. Except for the susurrus of the environmental plant, there was complete silence. Even the small sounds of the crew manipulating their controls had ceased as Vigilant had total authority over the execution of orders now. The crew merely issued whispered commands to her from within their chairs. All eyes were glued to the center viewscreen, where the magnified images of the paired Vazilek ships hung against the backdrop of Sol Three, the planet growing rapidly larger beyond them.

  The raiders were very unlike Vigilant. The Union ship was a trim, elegant, needle nosed craft; as black as the void of space she traversed. The wings she sported for stability in atmospheric flight were a wide and sweeping delta configuration, bisected in the stern by an enormous array of horizontally mounted drives. Her two lines of conventional engines were slung both above and below the deep drive propulsion, situated where they could thrust either forward or aft. With the proper combination of engines burning, Vigilant maneuvered in the vacuum as easily as when she had air beneath her wings. And to better handle the duties that required her to be airborne, a tall and sleek vertical stabilizer was mounted atop her stern, balancing the sweep of her wings.

  The Vazilek ships, in contrast; were squat, utilitarian vessels; all of them colored a mottled gray reminiscent of weathered, galvanized steel. Thick, stubby protuberances extending horizontally from their sides were their only airfoils; otherwise, they were not much more than platforms for guns and engines. Antennae and sensor dishes of every description were mounted with seeming haphazardness about their drab hulls, silent testimonials to the persistence with which they hunted their victims.

  As Vigilant powered closer and closer to them, the Vazileks simply drifted along suspended in space as if oblivious to the cruiser’s approach. For a moment, Valessanna felt a fleeting and utterly irrational hope that the louts had had their fill of killing for one day, and would let Vigilant pass without incident. That hope was immediately quashed in a flash of incoming fire. Vazilek plasma cannons belched their lethal rounds into the darkness, the impacts dissipating rapidly against the sturdy, unseen shields that Vigilant had erected between herself and her adversaries. Though accurate, the range was still too great for the salvos to tax the shield generators to any significant degree.

  “Weapons,” Valessanna spat forcefully, “initiate random protocol; fire everything we can bring to bear. Concentrate on the nearest Vazilek. And be on guard against any missiles they might launch or mines they may have dropped.” The void was immediately filled with the blasts of particle beams leaving the emitters that peppered Vigilant’s hull.

  Now it was simply a matter of endurance and luck. If the shields held, they could retrieve the cutter and escape. But inevitably, even when the shields were at 100 percent, damage would be sustained. Both sides had to open momentary gaps in their invisible armor, funnels leading directly to their guns, to give themselves apertures to fire through. It was part of the game for each weapon to be fired in a desultory fashion lest a pattern be descried and an opening targeted. Yet even with an utterly random firing order, some shots could still be expected to penetrate Vigilant’s protection. The hope was always that one would be more fortunate than one’s enemies, which was a lot to wish for at present. Vigilant would need a great deal of good fortune with the odds at three to one.

  If there had been only one ship to contend with, Valessanna would never have trusted to chance. She would have raised the shields and run past it without firing a shot, ignoring what would have been a useless fusillade on the part of their tormentors. But Vigilant’s shielding would never survive the relentless pounding that three uncontested ships could inflict. To escape, the raiders’ firepower had to be suppressed to some degree, and the only way to do that was to return fire.

  The Vazileks had already made the first mistake. Range was a crucial factor for their plasma weapons. Had they slowed to just the right velocity, they could have forced Vigilant to literally creep past them, hammering her at very nearly point blank ranges all the way back to the aberrant world and beyond. But now they were making too little way, apparently having underestimated the thrust that Vigilant was capable of, and she was already coming abreast of their position. In moments she would be leaving them astern, giving them a smaller target to aim for and more concentrated shields to penetrate. Sensors had reported to Valessanna that the Vazileks had ramped up to full power for the chase, but it was too late. With her antigravs pushing her away from the star and her conventional drive already at full power, Vigilant had the advantage. All they had to do now was retrieve Talon.

  The shimmering globe that was the aberrant world grew larger by the minute on the main viewscreen. The captain of the third Vazilek ship, which was still trying to regain speed after its dip into Sol Three’s atmosph
ere, was obviously not in the mood to try any of the cute maneuvers his counterparts had attempted. He was coming at full acceleration on a direct intercept course. In moments Vigilant would be under fire from two directions. Valessanna ordered the shield power split between the bow and stern; then instructed the weapons stations to concentrate as much fire forward as possible. Her display showed Lindy’s cutter still behind the planet, but arcing away from it now with its engines at 100 percent power and on a course that would at length bring it parallel to Vigilant’s track.

  Blasts from one of Vigilant’s batteries found their way through the shields of the charging raider. Its image now filled the right-hand viewscreen, so the bridge crew was treated to the spectacle of a large chunk of the raider’s forward hull exploding outward as the powerful beams lashing out from Vigilant’s emitters pierced their adversary’s hull and opened the ship to the vacuum of space.

  The Vazilek wobbled; then fell off its intercept course. The damage did not stop the ship from firing however, and its course change brought it more abeam of Vigilant, forcing the Union cruiser’s defense stations to spread the shields more thinly than before as now the whole of her starboard side and her stern were open to attack.

  Seconds later the ship paid the price. A shot from the stricken raider found a gap in Vigilant’s defenses. It sliced through the gun deck like a hot knife through warm butter; then continued through two storage decks. It finally dissipated, but not before burning a hole through the ceiling in a corridor that ran through a section of crews’ quarters.

  Air tight doors, activated by Vigilant’s machine brain upon the first detection of pressure loss, slammed seamlessly shut on all four of the affected decks, sealing the hull breach but also the fate of those left on the wrong side. Some were thrown into space like rag dolls by the explosive decompression, their bodies ripped to shreds by the torn and melted wreckage between them and the void. Others, though still intact initially, exploded from within as the pressure in their bodies reacted to the vacuum. Valessanna knew the consequences of a direct hit as well as anyone but closed her mind to the thought of what had just happened to members of her crew. Her focus had to be on taking Talon aboard.

  It was going to happen quickly. Vigilant streaked past the damaged raider, leaving it wallowing in her wake even as the weapons crews fired several parting shots in its direction. The aberrant world fell astern as well as the ship powered by on its way out of the system. The cutter lay just ahead, and the big police cruiser bore down on it like a hammer on a crystal vase. On the underside of Vigilant’s hull, the enormous bay door opened, but not in the manner customary for docking. Instead of the entire assemblage rising slightly and sliding rearward along the inside of the hull to provide an opening that a barge or cutter could slowly rise into, about 80 percent of it lowered into space on great hinges built into its stern half, forming a large scoop headed straight for the Talon.

  This hatch configuration had been designed for the vapid orbital sweeps police vessels were routinely called upon to perform—missions meant to collect debris too small for the robotic arms of roving garbage scows to grasp and pull from the busy orbital lanes of the more populous Union planets. On such missions a ship’s forward deflectors were shaped into a gigantic concave bowl forward of the ship. The bowl gradually narrowed into a funnel just beneath the bow that herded all the tiny bits of gathered debris into a line that flowed beneath the ship’s belly. That line of detritus was swept from space and up into a collector placed in the docking bay. But the procedure was designed for very low speeds, and even with the bay door shielded it was never left completely unscathed by the flotsam and jetsam that inevitably built up in planetary orbits. There were always some few bits of trash orbiting in the opposite direction that had a combination of too much mass and relative speed for the shielding to deflect at an angle necessary to miss the bay door. Those pieces came into physical contact with the hatch, sometimes with enough force to cause damage significant enough to send teams of robots to the scene for repair work. And now instead of bits of space junk the door was going to collide with the mass of a 240 ton cutter.

  Valessanna gulped as she checked her board. She had not expected the difference in speed between the two ships to be so great. At the current rate of closure the bay door would certainly be ripped from its hinges and the cutter atomized by the impact. No one, not even Lindy, could bring in a ship with this kind of speed disparity. But the rendezvous was happening now; there was no time for corrective action.

  Suddenly the acceleration of the cutter increased markedly and Valessanna realized that Lindy was using his antigravs to push against the mass of the approaching cruiser. As the cutter slipped beneath the bow there was another surge of speed from Talon. Having tapped into Busht’s mission monitor, Valessanna could see that the cutter’s engines were now being pushed to levels well beyond their design limits. But they only needed to burn for a few more seconds.

  At the last instant Lindy tipped the bow of the cutter down nearly forty degrees as he simultaneously lowered the drive nozzles, somehow keeping his thrust parallel to Vigilant’s vector through the entirety of the maneuver. The little ship impacted belly first, with enough force to push through its own shielding and that of Vigilant as well, its hull slamming into the bay door. The cutter caromed up and off and shot, backward, into the docking bay amid a shower of sparks generated by the collision. There was a monstrous crash that reverberated throughout the ship and then… silence.

  “Well?” Valessanna demanded, looking to Busht, afraid to consult her own monitor.

  He looked back at her out of the corner of his eye and smiled wryly. “The son of a bitch made it,” he said, his tone one of incredulity. “He had the power plants going full bore even after he was inside the bay, still adjusting the thrust manually as he went, and even so he crashed through the containment field and hit the stern bulkhead, but he got the damn thing in. Talon’s a wreck, the bay is scorched and the door won’t seal, but he landed the thing. The Dock Master says he damn near burned all the atmosphere out of the bay. No injuries to report though; all three crew members exited the ship under their own power. Damage Control has dispatched a squad of bots to repair the bay door, and despite the damage they say we are sound enough to engage the deep drive at your discretion.” He chuckled caustically, his lips still formed into a smirking, ironic grin as he slowly shook his head in skepticism. “I don’t believe that guy,” he finally added, more to himself than to Valessanna.

  Astern of Vigilant, the two undamaged Vazilek ships were slowly falling farther behind, but still kept a steady stream of fire concentrated on the Union ship. The rate of their blasts had increased markedly as Vigilant, her captain now confident of escape, had ceased returning fire. What had been a confrontation now became a race. If Vigilant could attain the necessary velocity to activate her deep drive before the pursuing Vazileks could bring down her shields, she would escape beyond the light barrier, where the Vazilek ships could only blindly follow. It was a race Valessanna felt Vigilant was sure to win.

  But just as it seemed that nothing could stop the cruiser’s escape, one shield took several simultaneous plasma hits. It absorbed the strikes, and dissipated the energy, but an enormous strain was imposed on the field generator responsible for powering the shield in question. It faltered for a moment; but came back on line. Its resurgent effort to keep the shield in place caused a massive power spike that put the unit well beyond its nominal safety specifications. The generator’s override automatically shut it down completely, waiting for it to wind down to a stop before commencing the restart sequence.

  Vigilant sensed the loss instantly and reacted by widening the area each of the other generators was responsible for. That patched the hole in the ship’s defenses, but not quickly enough. In the fraction of a second that the ship had been vulnerable, another plasma strike made it through and impacted inside one of the topside conventional engines pushing the cruiser toward deep drive velocity. A
tremendous explosion shook the ship. The engine blew outward, away from the heavily protected deep drive, but the force of the blast pushed down Vigilant’s stern, sending her off on a vector that brought nearly the whole of her dorsal spine under the guns of the Vazileks, forcing the ship to attenuate her shielding even further.

  On the bridge there was chaos. Crew members were screaming. Valessanna checked the spatial plot and could see that Vigilant was not resuming her course. She screamed urgently into her com link. “Maneuvering!” There was no reply. “Maneuvering!” she yelled again and still received no answer. She ordered the command chair to free her, pushed the spatial display to one side, and sat up so she could see the helm. The crewman there, Joella Darcon, sat frozen at her station, also free of her cocoon. That meant that the helm was under manual control—Darcon’s control. And yet she sat there immobile, unseeing, and unresponsive. Only her restraining belts and the fact that the chair was securely bolted to the deck had kept her from being thrown about the bridge as the ship had been struck.

  With the helm station still in good working order and its operator uninjured, there was no easy way to override the panel from the command chair, or anywhere else for that matter. Instead Valessanna screamed at Darcon directly. “Maneuvering! Joella! Joella, look at me! Look at me now!” The crewman’s vacant gaze slowly turned toward her captain. Her mouth gaped; her eyes were wide with fear. Valessanna stared straight into her terrified mien and pointed an extended index finger directly at the bridge of her nose. She half spoke and half shouted, deliberately enunciating each word, malice dripping from every syllable. “Turn the ship away from the Vazileks now.” Or I will come off this chair and rip you head off with my bare hands, she may as well have added. Darcon sat frozen for one more second, before gathering herself and turning to her station.