“The auction was rigged?”
“From the very beginning.”
So we were simply window dressing, hiding the auction’s real purpose. “That’s why you didn’t blow my cover?”
“There was nothing to gain. Senor Vargis was meant to win no matter what any of us did. You outbid him in the second round, yet he still won.”
“But you offered to pool your resources with me.”
“Your second bid was impressive, proving you represent someone of substance. Call it a hunch, but you didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would surrender easily.” He shrugged. “I was correct, although perhaps I should have offered Captain Dulon a deal instead.” He gave me a rueful look. “We all have our weaknesses.”
“So someone cracked Earth Bank security just to get the Codex to Vargis,” I said thoughtfully.
“To the right people,” Bo said, “knowing how to defeat Earth Bank encryption would be worth even more than the Codex itself.”
I couldn’t tell him it was the Matarons who’d cracked it. Earth Bank security was so fiendishly complex, it defied any human attempts to penetrate it. Even the EIS, who’d tried for years to break into it, had been unsuccessful. Only superior alien-tech could have done it. If I could have gotten the auctioneer to the EIS, they might have been able to reverse engineer what the Matarons had done. I began to wonder what had happened to the Earth Bank device after the Mataron attack. It may have been buried under the rubble of a collapsed wall or hidden in the darkness – I couldn’t be sure – then my eyes fell to the large case Bo was carrying. His knuckles were white from the weight, even though his face showed no strain.
“I’ll be damned!” I said. “You stole the auctioneer!”
“This trip has not been a complete waste,” Bo conceded.
My threading flashed an alert into my mind, warning that a tiny particle stream was painting my chest. It took only a moment for the threading to determine Bo’s ship had me targeted. They must have been listening in on our conversation.
“Any chance of sharing?” I asked for the benefit of whoever had me in their cross hairs.
“I think not, Captain Kade.” Bo slipped his robotic eye back into its socket.
In the distance, Vargis’ skimmer rode up into one of the Soberano’s cavernous cargo holds, then a large rectangular door lifted up and sealed shut behind him.
“Well Bo, I guess Mr Li won’t be too disappointed in you after all.”
Bo smiled, almost embarrassed. “My friends call me . . . Jie.” He gave me an amused look as understanding appeared on my face. An organization as secretive as the Obligation would never send a lackey to gamble all they were worth on a piece of unproven alien-tech. Only one man could make such a decision and that was the inimitable Jie Kang Li himself. “Perhaps one day Sirius Kade, you really will work for me. I could use a man like you. Then you can tell me how you beat the perfidious Mr Sarat. Until then, please do not pretend to work for me again. I would not like to have you killed.”
“Deal.”
Jie Kang Li hesitated, then smiled. “One credit!” He tapped his prosthetic eye meaningfully, telling me with a gesture how he knew my final bid for the Codex. “An intriguing choice!” he said, before heading towards his deceptively decrepit container ship.
With a growing sense of urgency, I hurried towards the Lining. Jie Kang Li’s ship lifted off as I reached the airlock, rising like a point of brilliant white light towards the low hanging clouds with an acceleration belying its antiquated appearance. Once inside, I went straight to the flight deck where Jase was finishing his pre-flight checks.
“All I need is a destination for the autonav,” he said with a quizzical look as I climbed onto my acceleration couch.
“Marie’s got an open contract with the Beneficial Society,” I said. “She’ll want to collect on it before I can stop her.”
Jase made a face. “Oh no!”
“I’m afraid so. We’re going to Axon.”
Axon Way Station was home to the closest Society Headquarters. It was a haven for traders and smugglers alike, a place where cargoes were swapped and profits made without fear of surprise inspections by nosy Earth Navy officers. Unfortunately, the local crime bosses had posted a kill bounty on my head, thanks to a little disagreement a few years back.
“Have we got a launch window?” I asked as our wrap around view screen revealed a light dusting of snow was beginning to fall across the spaceport.
“There’s no schedule,” Jase said. “Control requested we broadcast when we’re ready. If anyone else broadcasts, we have to give them two minutes head start before going ourselves.”
I guess it made sense, considering they normally only saw one ship a month. I activated the communicator, setting it to all bands and announced, “Silver Lining declaring launch.”
Jase released the autonav. Our landing thrusters lifted us off the apron, tilted our nose skyward, then our two big maneuvering engines came to life, sending us racing up into the clouds at twenty gravities. The autonav expertly balanced the ship’s inertial field, uniformly accelerating every atom in our bodies at nineteen gravities, ensuring we felt only one gravity inside the ship. Tundratown’s cluster of prefab buildings, strung out along the sprawling harbor shore, quickly disappeared beneath the clouds. For a few moments, dense gray water vapor surrounded the ship, then we broke out into clear air and climbed rapidly up through the thinning atmosphere.
Icetop’s curvature quickly appeared as blue sky faded to black, then a contact indicator illuminated on the screen. It was above us and to port, showing no transponder signal and approaching from high orbit on an intercept course. It was over twenty thousand clicks away, thrusting hard towards a firing position that would catch us soon after we cleared the atmosphere. They had to have been watching the spaceport from orbit and begun maneuvering the moment we lifted off.
“Its energy levels are eight times ours,” Jase said, eyes locked on the neutrino detector’s display. That much power meant big engines or hungry weapons, probably both. He ran the neutrino profile through the system. “It’s Gwandoya!”
Izin had recorded the profile of Gwandoya’s old navy cutter when it had lifted off, adding it to the recognition database as a matter of routine.
I switched on the intercom. “Izin, we’re going to need power to the shield. Expect weapons fire.”
“What kind of weapons fire, Captain?” Izin asked in his synthesized voice as calmly as if I’d requested a wash and a wax.
“Assume the shield’s going to bleed hard to stay up.”
“Understood,” Izin said, focusing his attention on ensuring the energy plant would be ready to give us everything it could.
“You’re not planning on fighting that thing are you?” Jase asked apprehensively. We both knew the Lining was no match for a navy cutter – even an old one.
“Not a chance!” Our single particle cannon could do little more than tickle the cutter’s reinforced hull, while the little nasty hidden in our bow was strictly a one shot gamble. If we missed this close, Gwandoya would have no choice but to blast us to bits to prevent us firing again. “I’m going to run like a Valurian jackrabbit with my tail on fire.”
“Glad to hear it, Skipper. Not that I object to fighting, just dying.”
The autonav indicated we needed nine minutes to reach the minimum safe distance for superluminal flight. The trick would be staying alive long enough to show Gwandoya a clean pair of heels.
“We’ve cleared the mesosphere,” Jase reported as we emerged into the deep blackness of space.
I reset the autonav, kicking our maneuvering engines up to thirty five gravities, our maximum, inertially shielded acceleration. The engines could have pushed the Silver Lining higher, but that would have exposed us to unshielded acceleration, pinning us to our couches barely able to breathe.
“I’ve got another contact,” Jase announced. “It’s coming up from the planet.” It took a moment for the third contact
’s transponder to register. “It’s the Soberano!”
She was exactly two minutes behind us on a similar trajectory. If the Soberano was even half the ship I thought she was, Gwandoya’s old cutter would have little chance against her advanced weaponry.
“Heave to and surrender the Codex!” Gwandoya’s voice blared from the flight deck’s comm system.
I felt momentary relief that he didn’t know Marie had the Codex, reassuring me that she’d gotten away clean.
“We don’t have it,” I replied casually.
The cutter’s higher orbit and greater velocity gave her the initiative and there was nothing I could do about it. It was as great an advantage for the hunter as diving out of the sun from high altitude was during the old days of aerial combat. If we didn’t do exactly as Gwandoya ordered, he could come in fast, cripple us as he passed, then decelerate and come back to loot us at his leisure. If we surrendered, he could keep us targeted as he decelerated down onto us, blasting us if we so much as blinked.
“You’re lying!” Gwandoya said. “I paid one of Sarat’s guards to tell me who won.”
“Sarat and his guards are dead. They were killed before the Codex was stolen.”
“Cut your engines now,” Gwandoya said in a more threatening tone, “Or I will destroy them.”
“He’s not bluffing, Skipper,” Jase said anxiously. “There’s a hot spot on his starboard side!”
Jase threw the infra red sensor feed up onto the view screen as an overlay. A glowing red bloom appeared halfway along the cutter’s hull where a large weapon was charging, perfectly positioned to fire. Gwandoya was clearly an expert at this kind of fighting – dropping in fast on a defenseless trader – and he was too smart to let me talk him in circles, buying time while we raced out to bubble.
“Cut the engines,” I said to Jase, then transmitted to Gwandoya, “Silver Lining powering down. Send a boarding party. You’ll see we don’t have it.”
“A wise decision, Kade,” Gwandoya growled.
The cutter immediately tumbled one hundred and eighty degrees, showing us its stern, and began decelerating hard to match us. All the time, the red heat bloom of the cutter’s charged weapon remained expertly angled at us, Gwandoya’s way of telling us he never took his finger off the trigger.
Jase gave me a confused look. “You’re going to let him board us?”
“If I let Gwandoya board this ship, I’ll never get it back.” Even if he searched the Silver Lining from top to bottom and found nothing, he’d keep her as a prize and space us for his trouble. “Izin, how fast can you get the shield up? No safeties, just throw it out there.”
“Nine seconds,” Izin said. He’d been listening to everything said on the flight deck since I’d warned him I’d need the shield.
“How long before they see it?”
“I can hide the activation for the first few seconds.”
“OK, you have shield control,” I said as my mind raced trying to figure out how I could distract Gwandoya long enough to get the shield up. At that range, he only needed a second to knock us out.
“How many crew do you think he has?” Jase asked, wondering if we could fight it out at the airlock.
“A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty.” Too many for a gun fight.
The Soberano’s contact marker was growing in size now that we’d cut our engines. I rotated the optics, bringing the super transport into view as she came roaring up from the planet’s surface.
“Give me a tight link to Vargis,” I said. When Jase indicated we were beam-locked, I hailed the super transport. “Silver Lining to Soberano. Request immediate assistance. We are about to be boarded by pirates.” I had no doubt Vargis had been watching the exchange between us and Gwandoya and knew exactly what was happening.
Vargis reply came back immediately using an omnidirectional transmission, ensuring Gwandoya heard his reply. His face appeared in the center of our screen with the Soberano’s expansive control room visible behind him. “Captain Kade, I have to say I’m not entirely sure who the pirate is, you or Gwandoya.”
“Listen Vargis, you don’t have to like me, but you know what’s going to happen if Gwandoya’s men get aboard this ship. I know you can stop it.”
Vargis feigned confusion. “I have no idea what you mean. The Soberano is a defenseless freighter. Considering she’s worth at least . . . ten thousand times what your little garbage scow is worth, I really can’t get involved. I’m sure you understand.” Vargis’ face vanished from the screen.
“That scumbag cut us off!” Jase exploded.
I swung our optical feed back towards Gwandoya’s cutter. She was close now, almost on top of us. Her square stern, dominated by one large circular engine surrounded by four small boosters, glowed blue with ionized light. She would be monitoring our every move, but Gwandoya’s desire to take the Silver Lining intact would make him reluctant to wreck us until he was sure we were running. I was gambling that his greed would buy us a few valuable seconds when his cutter was most vulnerable.
Our interior cargo hold was empty, but we still had one external VRS container clamped to maglock two, the center of the three towing positions between our engines. The container was full of scrap metal destined for Tanos, junk yard of the Outer Lyra region – nothing we couldn’t afford to lose.
Jase furrowed his brow in confusion when he saw me studying the cargo manifest. “Even a pirate wouldn’t want any of that garbage.”
“Oh, he wants it,” I said with conviction. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“Silver Lining preparing for docking,” I said, then slowly turned our bow towards the cutter as if we were a lumbering freighter offering our starboard airlock for docking. Gwandoya’s sensors would tell him our particle cannon was stone cold and, if he knew about our hidden bow compartment, he’d see the outer doors were closed. “Get ready.”
“For what?” Jase asked apprehensively.
When our bow was aimed across the cutter’s deceleration path, I said, “Izin, power the shield . . . now!”
Izin started shield activation while I pushed the engines to thirty five G’s, sending the Lining shooting forward as if she’d been fired out of a cannon. Before Gwandoya could attack, we were beneath him, directly astern of his engines and outside his big gun’s firing arc. I immediately nosed up toward the cutter and accelerated into its engine blast, filling our screen with the glow of her engines.
Jase tensed. “Skipper! Don’t ram him!”
I chuckled, without taking my eyes off the screen, amused Jase thought I was that crazy.
A thermal warning appeared on the main screen as the cutter’s engine blast began to heat our hull – nothing the Lining couldn’t handle while the shield was activating. Our collision alert sounded, then I released maglock two, dropping the external VRS container and rolling hard away. We narrowly missed one of the cutter’s boosters before flying out from behind her stern on the side opposite to her main gun. I barrel rolled again, keeping the cutter’s bulk between us and their big stick, then sent the Lining racing up alongside the cutter’s scarred black and gray hull.
By now Gwandoya knew we were running, but his collision alert would be wailing in his ears as our container full of scrap metal hurtled towards his main engine. The cutter began to thrust sideways and spin on its axis, trying to bring its big gun to bear as it dodged the container. Good ship handling for a pirate, but the cutter was too big and slow for that kind of maneuver.
If there were weapons on the blind side of the cutter, they weren’t ready, because we passed along her hull without a single shot being fired. I swung the optical feed to view astern as we passed the cutter’s bow, keeping it center screen while we climbed away. A bright flash erupted from the cutter’s stern as the VRS container struck Gwandoya’s main engine, then a massive fireball engulfed her aft section. It blasted away from the cutter in all directions, forming a rapidly expanding orange ring of superheated plasma with the raider at its center.
“Damn!” Jase wheezed. “He’s got a can opener!”
It was slang for a fusion beam, a short range naval weapon that could slice open lightly armored hulls like tin foil. They required enormous capacitors to charge, which is why Earth Navy fitted them to much larger ships than cutters. Gwandoya must have gutted the interior of his ship to mount it, but how did a rabid murderer like Gwandoya get his hands on such a weapon?
“Captain,” Izin called over the intercom, “the shield is bleeding at four hundred and thirty percent.” His artificial voice sounded calm, but I knew he was worried. “Failure is imminent.”
“Just a few more seconds,” I said, knowing we were piling on the distance between us.
The fusion beam stayed locked onto us as we pulled away, testament to the accuracy of Gwandoya’s targeting system. Below our stern, a brilliant white disk formed and began to grow as the Lining’s shield struggled to radiate away the incoming energy pouring into us. The shield thinned, but the distance between the two ships grew until the glow softened and began to slowly shrink. Soon the fusion beam’s intensity fell away, diffused by distance.
“The shield has stabilized, Captain,” Izin reported.
Far behind us, the cutter’s stern had begun to tumble and was no longer aligned with the rest of the ship. The blast ring had expanded into a large circular cloud that was slowly cooling, while secondary explosions rippled along the cutter’s hull from the wrecked stern. After each explosion, a slender plume of atmosphere vented hundreds of meters out into space as another section of hull decompressed.
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 16