by Rick Partlow
He shook his head in obvious amusement. "You always did go for the big guns." Turning to Kara, he confided, "I think it's a phallic thing. Male insecurity, eh?"
"When everyone's out to get you," I said, grinning, "being paranoid's just good sense."
Deke chuckled softly, remembering the first time I'd said that to him, back in the Academy.
"All right." He drew his pistol. "Let's get going before they figure out where we are."
The tunnel was dark, narrow and twisting, and the footwork a bit precarious, but we finally made our way out of the mountain, emerging more than a half an hour later into a small clearing---and an annoyingly steady rain. I did a quick scan of the cloud-filled sky and the dense woods around us as I stepped out of the tunnel, but saw no sign of the mercs. If we were lucky, they wouldn't figure out what had happened until we were offplanet.
The trek through the woods went quickly and wordlessly, Deke leading us down the barely-existent path as though he walked it every day. The dense foliage finally opened up and we stepped cautiously into a landscape of tall grass, interrupted by scattered stands of trees. The moon was partially clouded over, but it provided enough light to make me feel pretty vulnerable, combining with the cold rain running down my back to give me a partially-psychological chill.
We jogged quickly across the open patches of ground, heading steadily uphill until we reached the edge of a large plateau, ringed with tall, spongy trees that bent like reeds in the planet's strong windstorms. Stepping through the line of trees, we found ourselves standing not ten meters away from the angular, metal mass of a starship. Partially concealed by a huge camouflage net that stretched from one side of the clearing to the other, the basic lifting-body shape of the craft was still obvious.
Not too large for a starship, it looked like a converted military tactical missile carrier from early in the war. The StarFleet had still been trying to figure out how to take advantage of the Transition drive, and the tac-missile carriers were the first attempt to get away from the capital-ship mentality. They didn't last too long after the war, since most of them weren't retrofittable for the new, more efficient and powerful reactors and weapons, and most were stripped of armaments and sold on the open market to try to recoup the massive war debt. This one still had its camouflage coloring---green and brown on top, grey-blue on the underside---and seemed in pretty good shape for a surplus job. Scrawled across its left hull in bright red letters, in sharp contrast to the camouflage, was the unofficial name: Dutchman. I wasn't sure if Deke had named her, or if the designation was a holdover from some anonymous pilot.
Deke pushed a button on his laser signaling unit, and a broad ramp lowered slowly from the ship's belly with a hiss of hydraulics, a light from inside the craft spilling out to create a shadow play on the ground in front of it.
I squinted at the bulky craft curiously. "So, you always keep your ride hidden in the mountains, or are we just on the edge of a used starship sales lot?"
"One thing you learn real quick anywhere in the Pirate Worlds," Deke replied, striding quickly up the ramp, "is, if you have anything you want to keep for long, you damn well better keep it hidden."
"I take it all back, Captain Conner," Kara said, following him up into the ship's equipment bay, "I'm glad you're paranoid."
Deke hit a control on the bulkhead, and the ramp began to raise almost before I stepped off it, while he continued on out of the bay, heading, I guessed, for the cockpit. I stashed the Gatling laser in an open equipment locker and followed Deke and Kara up the corridor, even as I heard the turbines of the ship's atmospheric takeoff jets whine to life.
In the cockpit, I fell into the navigator's seat behind Deke and Kara's station, facing portside. Strapping in, I felt the Dutchman begin to rise from the ground, ripping the camo nets apart with a roar of the belly jets. I could see the trees falling away from the front viewscreen, our jets stripping off a cascade of leaves from the tall growths as we rose above the clearing, and I wondered how long we would have before the mercs' ships spotted us.
"Look," Deke called from the pilot's seat, as if reading my thoughts, "I'm going to have my hands full trying to fly us out of here. Kara," he said, poking a finger at her, "I'm assuming you can run the tactical board and long-range sensors."
"I can handle anything you've got," she replied, finding the copilot's 'face hookup and plugging it into her socket.
"I believe that, darlin'," Deke laughed, sounding more and more like the man I'd known during the war. "Cal," he said, twisting around to look me in the eye, "I've got the forward guns, but I'm going to need you to take the upper turret mount---and while you're at it, tell this bucket of bolts where we're going."
"No problem." I chewed my lip as I set the navigation board to accept my neurolink frequency, hardly feeling the Dutchman surge forward as Deke vectored the thrusters for horizontal flight.
I plunged into the ship's computer system, splitting my consciousness into fragments to set the navigational board for an outward course, while also taking control of the turret mounted behind the cockpit and linking into the camera feeds from all of the outer viewers. It was a rather heady view soaring over the jagged mountains, lightning crackling all around us, and I found that I had to withdraw slightly from it, to keep myself from losing sight of the other inputs. Having drawn my consciousness back from the first-person view, I augmented it with sensor input from Kara's board and immediately saw a pair of bogeys coming into the atmosphere above us at about twenty klicks out.
I ran the specs of the weapons systems, found that Deke had a two-Megajoule proton accelerator slaved to the pilot's board and drawing power directly from the ship's reactor, while I was in control of the remote turret mounting a 300 Kilojoule heavy Gatling laser with a 5,000-round ammo reservoir. It wouldn't bring down a starship, but it would do fine if they sent assault shuttles after us.
I didn't bother asking Deke how he'd gotten his hands on the proton gun, which was illegal as hell for civilians---in the Pirate Worlds, you could buy anything and everything up to fusion missiles, if you had the money. Hopefully, it would give us an edge.
"Assault shuttles at oh-nine," I could hear Deke announce tightly almost at the same time that the sensors put the computer-generated delta shapes over the bright dots that had represented the bogies. "In range in forty seconds. I'm gonna' push her," he murmured, half to himself, as I felt the turbines step up a few degrees, "see if we can get far enough out to use the impellers before those boys hit us."
"They're going to have a ship up there," I reminded him. "Probably a big one if it can carry that many shuttles."
"Rock and a hard place, bud," he snorted. "Least we'll have a better view."
Shrugging with resignation, I directed my full attention to the laser's targeting AI unit, waiting for the Gomers to come into range. My gun actually had a longer reach in the atmosphere than the proton cannon, but it was less likely to knock them down with one burst---my main job would be to keep them off our ass and make them come around into Deke's sights, so he could blow the shit out of them. If they were smart, they'd break in different directions and try to use their greater maneuverability to its full advantage, which was where I'd come in.
I watched the distance indicator, keeping half of my attention on it and half on the shuttles, until they were just at the edge of my range---and then they split-S, jets flaming with acceleration, and began curving up beneath us.
"Shit, bring me over!" I yelled, but Deke was already angling us downward to the starboard to bring them into my firing arc, and I targeted the closest of them first, centering the computer-generated crosshairs on the enhanced delta image projected on the outside view and giving the mental order to fire.
The heavy Gatling belched out a thirty-round burst, the bright red flashes clearly visible in the vapor-laden air. A flashing yellow dot lit up the delta shape, the AI's way of telling me we'd scored a direct hit. The shuttle immediately broke right, putting his rear end, and the pla
sma flame of his drive, towards my gun, and I swung the turret around to try to get a lick in on his wingman.
I was hoping to get the other shuttle to break off as well, in order to give us the time to clear the planet's grav field; but instead, he increased speed, willing to absorb a bit of punishment to get us into his firing range. I jammed a long burst down his throat, the red line of pulses connecting us for a full second, and the computer's hit indicator glowed a bright red. The color of the computer-generated halo around his ship told me there was a major heat blossom coming off of it, and I thought maybe I had hurt him, but he kept coming, only a second away from proton range. I wondered if Deke was going to give him a free shot, but he chose that moment to break left with a 9-G turn that threw me sharply against my restraints with a jolt that would have made a Normal black out.
The turn brought us nose-to-nose with the attacking shuttle, and both Deke and the shuttle pilot fired almost simultaneously. The white scar of a particle beam went wide right of us by about twenty meters, the atmospheric ionization sending a shudder through the ship---and through me. But Deke didn't miss; the eye-searing bolt of fusion-powered lightning that came from under our ship's chin impacted the shuttle's cockpit and speared it through the center. The assault craft's reactor blew in a blinding starburst of plasma plumes, and our ship nearly went out of control from the turbulence of the kilometers-distant explosion.
"Watch the other guy!" Kara warned us. "He's coming up behind us!"
Deke was still struggling for control of the Dutchman, but I could see the second shuttle arcing back, hoping to take advantage of the diversion to get a shot in on us. I swung the laser turret around, fighting to track him as the view from the outside cameras tumbled with the ship, and hosed a long burst from the Gatling. Half the shots went wildly into the night, but I finally locked on him, sent nearly two hundred rounds ripping into the port side of the aerospacecraft. A bright red halo circled the sensor delta, and the merc shuttle started into a tumble, some of its control surfaces obviously burned away.
The computer simulated a flare of white that indicated the shuttle had stoked up his engine output, trying to power out of his spin; but before he could compensate, Deke brought our ship back under control, bringing us around in a course perpendicular to the bogie's. I could almost feel Deke's mental whisper to the fire control system as the proton cannon gushed a gout of charged particles, connecting us to the shuttle for a brief moment. The merc craft vaporized in a ball of fusion fire, and then we were out of the atmosphere, the curve of the planet receding beneath us.
I hardly noticed the transition from gravity to acceleration, as the reactor ceased expelling inhaled air and began feeding off the ship's supply of metallic hydrogen until we could get far enough away from the planet to use the impellers. What I did notice was the computer construct that the sensor feed overlayed on the camera view.
"Bogie," Kara announced from the sensor board. "It's big and hot and coming right for us at three G's."
"That'd be that starship I mentioned," I sighed. "Not that I'm saying 'I told you so,' or anything..."
"It reads like a stock heavy freighter," Kara said.
"Yeah." I heard the sneer in Deke's voice. "And this is a luxury yacht."
"Not much chance we can outrun that, is there?" I asked hopefully.
"Maybe not outrun," he admitted, "but definitely outthink."
The acceleration that had pressed us back into our seats faded suddenly as Deke cut the flow of reaction mass to the fusion reactor, feeding power to the impellers. The Dutchman surged forward like it had been shot out of a mass driver, and the view from the cameras wavered as the gravimetic field distorted the incoming light waves, until the computer adjusted the image to compensate. Much to my surprise, however, we didn't shoot away from the merc starship, but toward it.
"Uh...Deke," I said aloud, twisting around in my seat, "is there something you'd like to tell me?"
"Did you ever hear," he asked calmly, turning to face me, "what would happen if two impeller fields physically contacted each other?"
"Oh, no," I moaned, remembering that lecture in the Academy. "You're not going to try that, are you?"
"Try what?" Kara asked, eyes narrowing, head swivelling back and forth between us.
"Trust me," Deke muttered, grinning wildly.
"Oh, God." I put a hand to my forehead. "And I had such high hopes of living through this."
"What's going on?" Kara demanded.
"Advanced hyperdimensional gravimetic physics," I told her. "When one warp field meets another, they tend to repel each other at the square of their combined velocities. There were a lot of experiments during the war to use that property to launch missiles and fighters at near-lightspeed."
"So what's the problem?" she wanted to know.
"Warp fields are inherently unstable," I explained. "They want to collapse in on themselves, and if you feed them too much energy, electromagnetic or kinetic, they will...to make that trick work, you've got to make sure the fields only graze each other at just the right angle, or else you're fucking neutrons." I was surprised at how matter-of-factly I could tell her this, considering the situation.
She turned away, her eyes, I was sure, seeing the image of the merc starship steadily growing in the viewer feed.
"So we're going to try to graze the enemy ship," she said, trying to sort things out, "and head off into space far enough and fast enough to give us time to build up jump power before they can catch us."
Deke shook his head. "Too easy. That's only half the plan."
"I'm not even going to ask what the other half is," McIntire sighed.
I was about to agree, but then the merc ship opened fire on us with its long-range lasers, the viewfeed enhancing the ultraviolet beams and turning them into scarlet threads seeking us through the blackness. We were going at a pretty good percentage of lightspeed, however, and burning in head-on, and the beams missed us, if only by a few meters. The merc craft, only now starting to move slowly in our direction on impellers, was visible on visual magnification as a boxy, oblong, black monolith set against the far-off crescent of Thunderhead's moon.
I couldn't help but close my eyes as they tried to get a shot in with their proton accelerators, but the burst only grazed our shields. Then we were right on top of them, the huge flank of the two hundred meter-long ship looming in front of us, only a few hundred meters away...
I had this feeling that was not quite a feeling, just the feathery kiss of angels' wings across my spirit, and there was a burst of light so intense that I could see the veins in my eyelids. When I opened my eyes again, we were hurtling through space at what must have been close to lightspeed, the heavens gathered into a rainbow of brilliance ahead of our ship. Thunderhead was so far behind us that, if I'd been able to see it at all, it would only have been a distant star among thousands of others. Deke immediately began using the impellers to brake us, and the stars gradually spread out back into their usual pattern.
It was a long time before any of us spoke, but it was Kara who finally broke the silence.
"So," she said, as if nothing had happened, "what was the other half of the plan?"
Deke was sporting his best shit-eating grin. "We got nudged in one direction, but they had to get pushed in the other."
The outside viewfeed switched back to a few minutes ago, just after the ships' drive fields had touched, and showed us an extreme slow motion image of the merc starship hurtling out of control...directly into the surface of Thunderhead's moon. There was a blinding fusion blast, followed by the softer spike of a volcanic explosion caused by the starship piercing the crust at relativistic velocity.
"Fuckin' A'," was all I could say. I couldn't help but think that Deke was still the best pilot I'd ever known---and the craziest.
"Well," Kara laughed quietly as the viewers switched back to the present, "we've left yet another epic disaster smoldering in radioactive ruins behind us. Where to next?"
"
So far we've been running because we've been outgunned," I told her, loosening the straps of my safety harness. "We need some official help, and I only know one person who'd listen to us."
"Who you got in mind?" Deke wanted to know.
"Colonel Murdock," I told him, and his eyebrow went up.
"The Colonel Murdock?" Kara asked me. "The creator of Omega group?"
"Now General Murdock, head of StarFleet Intelligence. If anyone can help us, he can...once we know where to start."
"Where do we start?" Her eyes were on me. I looked to Deke, but saw that he was looking to me also. Great, I told myself, sighing.
"Maybe," I mused, "we should try starting at the beginning."
Interlude: Damiani
The moon had risen high over the Alberta wilderness, bathing the endless expanse of Canadian pines in its pale glow. Andre Damiani leaned over the porch railing and sniffed the night air deeply, savoring its soft bouquet as if it were a glass of Chardonnay. As a child, he'd spent many summers here, at the family's estate outside Calgary---summers when his father had been too busy to come down from his orbital offices. Here he'd found the closest thing to a home he'd ever experienced after years of boarding schools, tutors and an endless string of Corporate townhouses. One of his few regrets was that he wasn't able to spend enough time at this place.
"Monsieur Damiani." He heard Trint's cat-soft footsteps approaching behind him, turned away from the scenic view toward the open double-doors leading back into the conference room.
"Yes, I know," he sighed with some sadness at the interruption. "They're waiting."
It galled him to see the seven of them in this place that he still considered a refuge. They lolled about the oaken table, men and women who would have been obese but for the techniques of surgical bodysculpting, awash in the trappings of conspicuous consumption with their nano-tailored suits and Artificial-Intelligence wrist computers. In theory, they were his peers---the chairs of the Stonehenge of business monoliths that made up the Council---but in truth he held them in as much contempt as he did the politicians he controlled.