by Rick Partlow
"They should be arriving presently," Chang told her, examining the sensor feeds with an unflappable calm. "Time is not an exact thing when dealing with hyperdimensional physics. It could take them several minutes longer to make the jump than it did us."
"Then we have to draw those ships away," Pete declared, and she could see him waving his hands through the holographic control fields, trying to bring up the weapons systems she thought. "We have to give them a chance to get out of there."
"Mr. Mitchell," Chang said, regarding the man with what seemed to Rachel like an air of amusement, "I am fairly certain that you will, eventually, figure out how to fire the weapons at those ships; however, all that will accomplish is making sure they take the time to come over here and destroy us as well." Chang cocked an eyebrow. "This is combat, not a pleasure jaunt. I can either fly this ship or handle the weapons, but I can't do both. Neither of you are qualified to do either."
Rachel bit back a curse as she worked at the fastenings of her safety harness, finally yanking it off and pushing off towards the bridge entrance.
"Mrs. Mitchell," Chang asked her, a frown passing across his face, "might I inquire as to where you think you're going?"
"You said you can't do it alone and we aren't qualified to help you," she reminded him, glancing back over her shoulder as she passed through the bridge entrance. "I'm going to find someone who is."
Rachel took a moment outside the closed hatchway to steel herself, gripping the pulse pistol tightly in her hand as she reached for the door plate with the other. She took in a deep breath, let it out and then touched the plate. The door slid aside and revealed the narrow, sharkish features of the former CSI cadreman named Nouri. He'd been floating in the center of the room in a lotus position, looking very much at peace given his situation.
"What's wrong?" he asked, his voice and his manner calm and businesslike. The man was a professional, she realized, like Kara McIntire. He did this for a living...for a life.
"We need your help," she told him. "Do you know how to run the guns on this ship?"
The corner of his mouth turned up and he unfolded, fastening his sticky plates to the deck.
"I think I can manage that."
* * *
Conner:
Deke nearly collided with Cal's back as his friend came to an abrupt halt at one of the next access tube junctions, then had to squeeze against the side of the tube to avoid Trint and Kara slamming into him.
"Here," Cal said, dragging Gregorian out the exit and into what looked like an equipment bay.
Deke steadied himself as the cruiser rumbled around him, breathing out a curse.
"Why the fuck haven't these morons jumped into T-space?" he grumbled into Kara's ear.
"Too close to the gas giant's gravity well," she guessed. "Something's wrong though. If these were the same weapons that were on the Predecessor ship that attacked us, this ship would be shredded by now."
Deke wanted to tell her not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he was concentrating on trying to hear what Cal was asking Gregorian. Caleb had anchored himself to the deck beside a bulkhead and was slamming the former DSI director up against it, slapping him across the face trying to get him back to coherence.
"Gregorian!" Cal bellowed, his voice down an octave from usual, coming from somewhere in his thick chest. "Where are you holding General Murdock?"
"Wh..what?" Gregorian stumbled over the words, as if he were just regaining his senses. "Who?"
Cal slapped him again, then put the muzzle of his carbine in the man's face. "Where is General Murdock?" he demanded again.
Kara moved up beside them, sticking her face right into Gregorian's and Deke could see the man's eyes go wide.
"You know who I am, you traitorous son of a bitch," she hissed, her face twisting into a mask of rage that made even Deke shiver. "You know I have every reason in the world to kill you, so you'd better fucking give me a reason not to."
Comprehension finally made its way into Gregorian's carefully-designed face and he shook his head violently.
"What are you talking about?" Gregorian asked helplessly, glancing around at the carefully-arranged equipment bay as if looking for help. "Why the hell would I know where Murdock was? I haven't seen him in over a year!"
Caleb and Kara shared a look and Deke knew what they were thinking, but he couldn't help staring at the bulkheads in trepidation as the ship trembled again under the attack of the gravity weapons.
"Can we continue this conversation in the hangar bay?" Deke asked tautly, grabbing at one of the wall-mounted cabinets for an anchor. "While there still is a hangar bay?"
"We can't leave until we know if Murdock is on the ship," Cal began, but Kara cut him off, addressing Gregorian once again.
"We're taking you with us," she said, grabbing him by the throat and squeezing hard enough to make his eyes bug out. "We're going to psych-probe you. And if we find out you lied about Murdock, I'll take a piece off you every day, then let it grow back in the automed before I take it off again. Do you understand me?"
Gregorian nodded desperately and Kara let loose of his throat with seeming reluctance, then looked at Cal.
"Let's get him to the shuttle," she said brusquely out loud, but added via her neurolink to Deke and, he presumed, to the others as well: We've been played. Something's not right.
"All right," Cal said, and Deke wasn't sure which part he was answering. But he pulled a neural web from his belt and used it to secure Gregorian, then dragged him back to the access tubes and headed upward towards the docking bay.
Deke felt himself breathing easier knowing they were leaving; something hadn't felt right about this from the beginning and maybe now that they had Gregorian they could just get the hell out of this system. And at the very least, they could finally get out of the damned tubes...
Then there was a shriek of metal and polymer unbonding on the molecular level, a sound more felt than heard, and Deke found himself hurtling backwards down the tube, tumbling out of control and grunting with shock as he bounced off the sides of the passage and collided with the unyielding mass that was Trint.
That holed us, he thought, scrabbling for purchase on one of the hand-holds lining the access tube. He could feel air rushing out, beginning to pull him forward now that his backward momentum had been arrested. Shit...if we're on the wrong side of the pressure seal...
Then there was a solid, metal sound and the rush of air ceased. The pressure seal had closed just aft of the bridge and towards the outer hull.
Shit, Deke thought, is this the wrong side or the right side?
"We're cut off from the docking bay," Trint announced a bit unnecessarily, pushing Deke and Kara off of him as he anchored his feet against the side of the tube. "We need to get to the escape pods."
Deke caught the smell of stale air and a hint of smoke from burning electrical relays, looked to the others and saw that they smelled it as well. "And we need to do it while we still have a ship to escape from."
* * *
Nouri:
Augustus Nouri watched the enemy ships growing larger in the tactical display that filled his consciousness through his neurolink and felt questions nagging at him. The ships looked familiar in design, similar in shape to the Predecessor ships but smaller and somehow more...primitive? If you could use that word about a spaceship that moved using gravitational waves, anyway.
He'd seen the Predecessor ships move during test runs back under Damiani and these were slower and more clumsy as well, not exhibiting the graceful and effortless motion of the ones he'd witnessed. They were swarming through the Naga ships like enraged wasps defending their hive and the cruiser was taking the brunt of the charge. Even as he watched, a shot hit her near the docking bay and a gush of burning atmosphere blasted into space.
A warning tone alerted him that the nearest of the enemy ships was in range of the lighter's weapons and he lashed out with the forward laser as if it were an appendage of his body. He fel
t a lurch in his stomach as the power was leached off the rest of the ship's systems to feed the photon beam, watched the simulated red line as it streaked across hundreds of kilometers and speared the nearest of the strangely curved ships.
Nouri didn't know what he'd expected, but what happened wasn't it. The laser cored the little ship from stem to stern, but for a moment it continued on as if nothing had happened. Then it imploded, collapsing in on itself like a piece of origami artwork and disappearing for just a fraction of a second before it exploded in a flare of light that nearly outshone the system's primary.
"Whoa," Nouri breathed, impressed. Get us between the cruiser and the enemy, he said to Chang over his neurolink.
I'm already heading there, the man the others called Cutter responded imperturbably, not visible to him because of the sensory immersion of the tactical display.
Nouri was pushed into his acceleration couch by the ship's maneuvering and the view from the sensors and exterior cameras shifted with the change in course. He waited for another of the alien attack craft to come into his field of view, then targeted it and fired again. Another implosion and another star-bright flare.
"That'll never get old," Nouri said, chuckling. "But I think they've noticed us."
The cloud of little attack ships was abandoning the damaged cruiser and moving quickly towards toward the lighter, closing the distance with alarming speed. A sharp tremble went through the ship as one of them opened fire with their gravitic weapons from long range, and Nouri clenched his teeth.
Okay, he transmitted to Chang, maybe we need to think about drawing them out to where we can use the Teller Fox drives...
He took out one of the swarm with the laser and fired the Gauss cannons at another just for shits and giggles, but was unsurprised when the hyperaccelerated alloy slugs arced away from the their target, deflected by the ship's gravitic shields. He wished for a complement of torpedoes, but the multi-X-ray laser warheads had to be pumped by a fusion bomb and Gregorian had decided he didn't want to allocate the resources to buy enough to make a difference.
Fucking short-sighted, Nouri judged, feeling the lighter shudder as the enemy weapons fired from a bit closer range.
Keep them interested, Chang told him. I'm going to try to lead them away from the cruiser.
"Oh, I'd say they're interested," Nouri muttered, firing the laser again. He was scoring a kill with each shot, but the recycle time for the weapon was just too damn long and there were too damn many of them.
He saw in the outer edges of the sensor feeds that the other ships in the Naga flotilla were fighting back and thinning out the herd, but even as he watched another of the lighters came apart with a flare of igniting on-board atmosphere. This wasn't a fight they could win, not without the cruiser...and Mitchell and the others had distracted the crew of the cruiser enough that it hadn't been able to make a difference.
There's unintended consequences for you, he chuckled.
But the enemy ships were abandoning the crippled cruiser and he could see her auxiliary engines sparking to life in a flare of plasma, struggling to take her to a higher orbit...the orbit of the other inhabited moon, he judged.
Good. Let 'em run...that'll give us time to run, too.
He felt the pressure of the fusion engines melt away as the Teller-Fox drive took over, warping the fabric of space to propel the ship. The lighter jumped away from her pursuers for a moment, freed from the crushing burden of the gas giant's gravity well, but the alien ships increased their own speed in turn.
They were tenacious and oblivious to their own losses, which made Nouri wonder if they were remotely piloted or even AI drones. The former had never been made to work in battles that frequently jumped in and out of Transition Space, and the latter...they'd been experimented with, but never trusted in actual combat without a human handler. Perhaps their opponents didn't have such concerns. The alternative was scarier: that they didn't have much concern with their own lives.
"Cal and the others aren't going to be able to reach us," a voice seemed to float out of nowhere, but he knew who it was: Rachel Mitchell, speaking in "realtime," penetrating his sensory immersion. "Even if they get back to their shuttle, they'll never make it through the enemy ships."
"Bigger problems right now," he said tautly. "I'm more worried about us making it through the enemy ships."
"I'm afraid," Robert Chang interjected out loud, "that the best we can do right now is to draw the enemy away from the cruiser and give them a chance to clear the area. If we try to move in and rescue them, all we'll do is get them killed."
"This is bullshit," Pete Mitchell asserted angrily. "Why don't we send the Ariel in after them? You could cover the approach from this ship."
"Because there is no one on this ship other than myself qualified to fly her in combat," Chang declared. "And I am needed to fly this ship. Mr. Nouri," he went on, his tone less didactic and more conversational, "I'm going to jump us to the ice giant, then jump back in a few thousand kilometers towards the other inhabited moon. Please drop a probe so we can keep an eye on our friends in the meantime."
"Hope you know what you're doing, Chang," Nouri said, shrugging as he pulled himself out of immersion, his eyes viewing the bridge and the people around him once again. Rachel and Pete Mitchell didn't look happy; they obviously thought they were abandoning Cal and the others. Nouri fervently hoped that Caleb Mitchell didn't feel the same way.
* * *
McIntire:
"Well, someone's driving this thing," Deke announced---unnecessarily, Kara thought---as they were forced back to the deck by the acceleration of the ship's fusion drives. "At least it's not coming apart yet."
"They've stopped shooting at us," Cal observed, half-dragging Gregorian down the corridor. "Like something's distracted them."
He was frowning and Kara thought she knew why. If Rachel and Pete had seen that they were in trouble, they might have tried to help, and she didn't care for the idea of them trying to take that lighter into combat any more than he would.
"Come on," Trint urged them, striding purposefully down the corridor that ran from the crew quarters to engineering. "The life pods should be right outside the engineering section."
"Should we eject though?" Deke asked, hesitantly following the cyborg down the corridor. "I mean, this ship is still navigable..."
"It's a big fucking navigable target," Kara snapped. "It can't land, it can't hide and there's no way they're getting it to jump distance before it gets hit again."
"Okay," he raised a hand in surrender. "Okay, I get it. Let's get to the pods."
She felt guilty for a moment; it wasn't Deke she was angry with, it was the possibility that her suspicions about General Murdock were correct, which seemed even more likely now that Gregorian had denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. Why would he do this to them? Why would he do this to her?
"Someone's coming," Cal warned, pushing Gregorian to the deck and bringing up his carbine even as Kara heard the pounding of footsteps from behind them.
Kara sometimes wished her senses had been boosted to the level of Deke and Cal, but even with the less advanced enhancements she'd been given as a DSI cadre, she could tell before she turned that there were three of them. A millisecond's glance told her they were Normals, but all three were armed and they were already firing by the time she shifted the aim of her weapon.
Super-ionized air flashed around her amid thunderclaps of the evacuated space it left behind, but she tried to ignore it, realizing she and Trint were the only ones with a clean shot. She sprayed a burst from her carbine at waist level, feeling the vibration of igniting hyperexplosive cartridges through the iridium of the receiver as they pulsed their heat energy through a lasing rod and were focused by the crystalline lens at the end of the barrel. The air around her crackled with static electricity and the pulses from her weapon and Trint's ripped into the three crewmen at the other end of the corridor.
She saw with preternatural clarity the m
ultikilojoule bursts striking home, saw the bodies of the man and two women jerking spasmodically as miniature steam explosions tore through them from their own blood superheating along the path of the lasers. It had always amazed her how quickly a breathing, thinking human being could turn into a lifeless sack of meat. She knew it could happen to her, too; but for some reason, it didn't frighten her. That was the real reason she hadn't been interested in Robert's offer at cloned immortality. She didn't think it would be wise to share that with him, though...or with Deke.
She and Trint ceased fire when the last of the three hit the floor, smoke drifting through the corridor as a sudden silence replaced the roar of the weapons, broken only by the persistent snap of static discharges. The whole thing had taken bare seconds.
"Aw shit," she heard Deke mutter behind her and she turned, a flush of sudden and unfamiliar concern going through her.
But it wasn't Deke who'd been hit. Caleb Mitchell was down on one knee, a charred and blood-stained hole in the right side of his chest that was already being sealed over by his Reflex Armor, but she wasn't too worried about that: the armor would have stopped a good part of the shot and Cal would heal from just about anything that didn't kill him. No, what was distressing was that Gregorian was very clearly dead. He'd caught a round through the throat and his head was barely hanging on by a flap of skin.
"Damn it!" she snapped. "Now how the hell are we going to know if Murdock is on this ship?"
"He's not," Cal told her, taking Trint's arm and letting the Tahni help him to his feet. He winced, looking away from the wound in his chest. "Fuck, I hate getting shot," he muttered. Then he glanced down at Gregorian's body. "Not as much as he hated it."
"What do you mean he's not?" Kara demanded, stepping over Gregorian and grabbing Cal by the shoulder. "How do you know?"
"I've been working the security system as we moved," he said, visibly relaxing---she guessed because his neurolink was blocking out the pain. "Finally got through the security gates. I've scanned the cruiser from stem to stern using the thermal and heartbeat signature I have in memory from General Murdock. He's not on board."