I expected the idler with the alpha wave scanner to be outside with his friends, so I needed something to keep them away. The small spherical device was just large enough to fit inside my hand without being noticed and its effective radius was small enough not to turn half the station against me.
“How many G-Max Sensory Assault Grenades do you require, sir?” the silver, multi-armed vending machine asked, holding up the demonstration model for me to inspect.
“Just one.”
“They come in a box of twelve, sir. I am not permitted to split packs.”
“OK, I’ll take a box.”
“Would you like them delivered to your ship with your other purchases?” the vending machine asked politely. It was perfect for dispensing information and taking orders, but lacked any real intelligence.
“I’ll take one with me, deliver the rest.”
“Very well sir. The activation code will be automatically loaded into the device as you leave the store. Internal guard systems have been advised the weapon is currently inactive.”
“Thanks,” I said, relieved to know the autoturrets wouldn’t shoot my arm off the moment I touched the grenade.
“We offer a full range of intensive urban assault courses, sir. These courses are recommended if you require training in deployment techniques for your high quality, money back guaranteed munitions in a manner designed to achieve maximum effect.”
“Thanks. I’ve got it covered.”
“As you wish, sir,” the vending machine said, then one of its flexible arms handed me a G-Max SAG. I hadn’t used a weapon like it in years, but they were relatively simple to activate, and for the ultra-reflexed, easy to throw accurately. “Do you require any other assistance, sir? We have a special on TNK Body Armor. Today only. All sizes. Would you like to try a set on, sir?”
“Some other time,” I said, heading for the exit with the grenade hidden in the palm of my hand.
The moment I stepped through the door, my threading drew a red targeting reticule around the face of the idler I’d DNA locked earlier. He stood across the street with a group of shaven headed thugs, each with a pair of thunderbolts tattooed on their foreheads in a “V” formation. They carried metal pipes with handles – electro-shock clubs – nasty thug weapons capable of inflicting excruciating pain, but not fatal wounds. Several had handguns, still holstered, telling me they were here to take me alive. The tallest and heaviest of the group had his back to me. At the promptings of his companions, he turned towards me. Like the others, Heiko Krieger had the same distinctive V-shaped gang insignia tattooed on his forehead and additional matching thunderbolts striking down from his dark eye sockets.
We locked eyes on each other, then he said, “That’s him!”
I sensed movement behind me. An electro-shock club jabbed me in the back, sending a neuroelectric charge coursing into my spine and hurling me onto the street. I lost muscle control and collapsed onto the metal floor. My threading detected the attack and kept my fingers locked around the grenade by overriding my nervous system. By the time my body started to respond, Heiko and his gaggle of muscle-modded sycophants were all around me. He kicked me in the stomach with metal tipped boots, spinning me around onto my back. A threading status message flashed before my eyes, informing me my ribs were bruised, but not broken. Half a dozen shock clubs began pounding me, all set to low intensity so they wouldn’t stop my heart. My threading, sensing the assault, blocked my pain receptors sending my body numb while my keeping my fingers clamped on the small metal sphere in the palm of my hand.
When they finally stopped jabbing me with their torture sticks, Heiko leaned down towards my face. “I’ve been waiting for you, Kade!”
I tried to open my mouth to compliment him on his dental work, but all I could manage was an indignant gurgling sound.
“My brother and I are going to keep you alive for a long, long time.” Heiko and Kord were kings of the local protection racket. I hadn’t intended to kill Niklaus, their uglier older brother, but he’d left me no choice. “But you won’t be lonely. You’re going to make a lot of friends where you’re going, the kind who like raw . . . red . . . meat.”
Heiko grinned viciously, stroking my cheek with his shock club. I could feel my skin pinching from the neuroelectric shock, but my threading’s pain blockers spared me the worst of it. A puzzled look slowly appeared on his face as he began to realize something was wrong.
ENABLE SPEECH, I thought. When my threading gave me vocal control, I said, “Lower . . . and to the left . . . Hmm, better!”
Heiko scowled and removed the shock club from my face, grabbing my jaw with his free hand. “You toxxed out, Kade?”
“Yeah, by your smell!” I sniffed experimentally. “Don’t you ever get to wash down here?”
Heiko gave me an astonished look. “You are one dumb, smart mouthed freak!” Heiko sneered. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life in a tiny little cage, Kade! Except when we bring you out to play.” He jabbed me again with his shock club, twisting it spitefully as my body convulsed.
I opened my mouth, feigning an inability to speak.
Heiko withdrew and shock club and leaned closer. “What?”
ENABLE FULL MOTOR CONTROL, I thought, overriding my threading, then when his face was close, I said, “I . . . don’t . . . like . . . cages,” and smashed my forehead into his nose.
Heiko fell back, hand over his snout as blood began seeping through his fingers.
SUPPRESS OPTICAL, THREE SECONDS! I thought, pressing the grenade’s detonator and letting it roll free of my hand.
My threading shut off the optical feed from my eyes, giving me nothing but blackness, while the grenade jetted up off the ground to eye height and emitted a blinding white pulse. It was longer than a simple flash and intensely white, yet completely silent.
My vision returned as the grenade clattered to the ground, its power supply exhausted. Everyone in the street was doubled over, hands on eyes, some groaning, some screaming, all temporarily blind. I staggered to my feet while Heiko and his little band of torturers stumbled around me stunned. All had dropped their electro-shock clubs in their rush to press their hands to their eyes.
I picked up Heiko’s inactive club, tripped his ankle with it and sent him face first onto the deck. While he lay there holding his eyes, I tapped him lightly on the back of the head with the club. “Heiko, watch your step!”
“I’m going to kill you, Kade!”
“Not today you’re not.” I flipped him over with my boot, turned the electro-shock club on and ramped the power to maximum, then slid it under his back.
Heiko’s body began to shake uncontrollably as neuroelectric pulses twitched his muscles so fast, he couldn’t roll away from the club. He’d be stuck bouncing like that until one of his girlfriends could see well enough to switch it off.
I leaned towards him. “This was fun, Heiko, but let’s not do it again.”
I straightened, stretching shock-stressed muscles and walked stiffly towards the elevator. Once Kord found out his brother had been stomped on, they’d both come looking for me with their assorted friends. I’d have to put Izin on guard duty at the airlock, just in case they tried to get aboard ship. He’d like that.
Izin was, after all, an ambush predator extraordinaire.
* * * *
There was a message waiting for me from the Beneficial Society when I got back to the Silver Lining. A report had been logged with Axon Control that a Caravel D class medium freighter had been sighted adrift near navpoint two along the Outer Lyra passage. It hadn’t been showing a transponder and was close to where we’d detected the unknown contact on our way in. Now that I knew the contact was the same class as Marie’s ship, there was no doubt in my mind we’d detected the Heureux without realizing it!
I contacted Axon Control and asked if they’d sent a rescue ship, but they informed me they had none to send. When I offered to investigate, they gladly gave me the sighting report. That’s whe
n I smelled a rat. The report had been logged by the Soberano a few hours before we arrived at Axon! They hadn’t docked, just done a flyby, calling it in from distance. That’s why it had taken so long for the Society to hear about it.
It was unlikely the Ravens would have caught Marie napping, but if they had, the Heureux wasn’t equipped to fight. The old freighter was a rugged workhorse, lightly armed, but no match for a combat ship. Like most freighters, she was equipped to fast bubble, to escape before being forced to fight. So why hadn’t she used it? Had a Raven been waiting inside the navpoint safe zone? They normally prowled out near the edges to avoid navy patrols and collisions with incoming ships.
Or had the Soberano attacked the Heureux? It was possible, but I doubted even Vargis would shoot up a defenseless freighter, and if he had, why risk retribution from the navy by calling in the sighting? After detecting the Heureux, he may have decided not to risk his ship, knowing the Ravens would see the Soberano as the catch of a lifetime.
Anxious to get back out there, I met Izin and Jase in engineering to show them the message.
“Izin, I want you to install the new burster while we’re underway.” It had been loaded aboard only minutes before my return, yet in that time Izin had already examined the parts and read the technical manuals. He was a quick study.
“The hull crawlers can work in shifts,” Izin said, “to limit their exposure to bubble heat.”
“Good. How long will it take?”
“Six weeks.”
After all the time I’d spent picking the perfect weapon, studying every stat, calculating every possible tactical use, the one thing I hadn’t considered was how long it would take my tamph engineer to install it. “You’ve got two hours.” That’s how long it would take us to get back to the navpoint where the Heureux was adrift.
“Captain, the capacitor is too large for the weapons bay. I’ll have to install it in the cargo hold and upgrade the arterials from the energy plant. The weapon will then need to be tested and the targeting system recalibrated. It’s a major overhaul.”
Clearly, I’d underestimated the effort required to sharpen the Lining’s teeth. “OK, leave the old cannon in place for now. It’s better than nothing.”
“Barely!” Jase said.
“But get started on any upgrades that won’t take the old gun offline.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Jase, dig out the log records on that contact we spotted on the way in, and calculate its drift vector. Once we get back out there, I want to spend as little time as possible searching for it.”
“Suppose it drifted into the cloud?” Jase asked apprehensively.
“Then we go in after it.” The gas and dust would reduce our sensor range, but it would also make it tougher for Ravens to find us.
“That’s bandit country, Skipper.”
“I know.” Ravens had made a fine art out of hiding in nebulas, but they used the same sensor tech we did. Even so, it was only a matter of time before they spotted the Heureux, then they’d have not only the ship and Marie, but the Codex as well.
I could ransom Marie, but if the Ravens got their hands on the Codex, I’d never get it back.
* * * *
We unbubbled at the center of the navpoint where we’d previously sighted the derelict ship. I kept our transponder off and our power levels low to conceal our presence while we listened for any sign of the Heureux.
“I’ve got a faint energy source fifty million clicks out,” Jase said. “It’s inside the Shroud – definitely not the Heureux.”
Faint energy readings meant it was sneaking, like us, keeping its energy plant reacting as low as possible to limit the release of tell tale neutrinos. “Have they seen us?”
“If they have, they don’t know what to make of us.”
“Let’s not give them time to figure it out.”
I selected the autonav’s best guess of the Heureux’s drift vector, retracted sensors and performed a sub-second micro-bubble into the Shroud. When we could see again, we were more than a million kilometers inside the thin mistiness at the edge of the dark nebula and now just ten million clicks from the stealthy contact. The Shroud’s sensor clutter blinded us to their position and, I hoped, hid us from them, making the Raven scout believe we’d bubbled out.
The optics sensed a shadow forty thousand clicks away. The computer automatically oriented the view screen image towards the shadow and drew a thin outline of its silhouette. A display square appeared beside the outline, then dozens of hull configurations flashed through the square as the computer tried to match the profile. Suddenly, one hull configuration stuck, then rotated and spun to match the outline. The library hologram flashed to confirm a match and a neat inscription appeared below the outline.
Caravel D class medium freighter
12,500 metric tons
Registry unknown
“Jackpot!” Jase declared as the display square vanished from the screen.
“Let’s hope our sneaky friend isn’t looking this way,” I said, feeding power to the maneuvering engines and sending the Lining surging through the dust and hydrogen vapor towards the hulk. Our sudden spike in energy output lit us up like a Christmas tree, while the heat blasting from our engines turned the cold cloud into a growing infra red source, signaling our presence. Even with interference from the Shroud, it wouldn’t be long before we had company.
“She’s stone cold,” Jase said as the neutrino detector found no sign of a reacting energy source inside the Heureux, signaling she was a dead ship.
So where were the crew? Where was Marie?
Slowly the shadow grew in size, becoming a silhouette, until the three rectangular holds and its stern superstructure were visible. The Heureux drifted bow first through the nebula, showing no running lights.
“I don’t see any damage,” I said as we came alongside, satisfying myself that there were no holes or energy burns anywhere along its length.
“It looks like she just lost power,” Jase said, “and kept on going.”
I rolled the Lining over and matched velocities as we came alongside the Heureux’s stern superstructure. If anyone was alive, that’s where they’d be. While I mated airlocks, Jase kept his eyes on the sensors.
“A ship just unbubbled at the edge of the Shroud,” Jase said. “We’ve got active scanners lighting us up.”
“Let them look.” The gas we’d heated up on the way in would be messing with their sensors, buying us a little time.
A point marker appeared on the wrap around view screen showing where the snooper was. We couldn’t tell what kind of ship it was, but I assumed it was the same contact we’d picked up prowling the edge of the Shroud when we first arrived.
“There are two more contacts, very faint, a long way off,” Jase said. “No transponders on either of them, but they must be big for us to be reading them from here.”
“They’re all Ravens.” It was a tactic long favored by the Brotherhood. The nearby contact was the eyes and ears, the two distant prowlers were the teeth. The scanning ship would be small, fast and expendable, while the larger, more valuable combat ships were far enough out that they had time to run if it turned out they were stalking a navy warship. “How close is the scout?”
“Eight hundred thousand clicks, and coming in real slow.”
The pirate commander would be on the scanning ship. His two attack dogs would be charging weapons, getting ready to bubble in on top of us once they received the order, but they’d only come once they knew how weak we were. Considering they could micro-bubble to us in under a second, we were a sitting duck locked up to the Heureux.
I searched for an old log entry. When I found it, I deleted the Lining’s name from it, then passed it to Jase. “Send that on all channels. It should buy us some time.”
Jase glanced at my selection and grinned. “I hope the Shroud’s screwing with their sensors or they’re going to die laughing, right before they blow our brains out.”
&nbs
p; “I’m betting this close to the Heureux, they can’t see what we are. Send it.”
Jase began broadcasting the log entry we’d recorded on our way into Macaulay Station, a hail from an Earth Navy officer accompanied by the ENS Nassau’s frigate transponder signal. Both were genuine, they just weren’t ours. "Power down your engines and prepare to be boarded! Do not attempt to re-engage your star drive, or you will be fired upon!”
Moments later, the snooper’s neutrino levels spiked as it turned and began accelerating hard away from us.
“That got their attention!” Jase said. “The two distant contacts have slammed on the brakes too.”
“We spooked them, that’s all.”
A distant fuzzy blue light appeared on the view screen as the Shroud’s dust and gas diffused the glow of the scout’s engines. He was holding his nerve, running obliquely away from us so his sensors weren’t blocked by his own engines, trying to confirm if we really were the ENS Nassau. If he’d fully bought our ruse, he’d be superluminal already and our Raven problem would be solved.
“Keep a close eye on them,” I said. “Once they see there’s no frigate charging after them, it won’t take them long to figure out they’ve been conned.”
“I’ve got heat!” Jase exclaimed, then his brow furrowed. “From the Heureux! It’s too small to be her energy plant.”
“Where?”
“Starboard side of the superstructure.”
I’d been on board Marie’s ship often enough to know its layout reasonably well. “It’s their lifeboat. It must still be racked.” If their lifeboat had heat, it had power, and there was a chance Marie and her crew were still alive! I climbed out of my acceleration couch. “Let me know the moment that scout starts back towards us.”
“You’re going over there alone?”
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 18