by Kalina, Mark
Timing was everything, thought Ylayn as she watched the station fall away. It always was. The team had had to wait for the 'liner to be ready for this, for the singularity reactor to be refitted, and for new escape shuttles to be fitted aboard, since many of the old ones had been destroyed by the damage the ship had taken. And finally, just yesterday, the repair crews had used the anchorage station's vast power to start up the 'liner's singularity reactor. The team had been waiting for that. Starting up a cold singularity reactor would have taken dedicated specialists who weren't usually part of an infiltration team. Besides, there was no easy way to start the reactor quickly and covertly. They would have had to subvert and hijack the station's power systems to do it; that would have been very risky. But now, there was no need, since the repair crew had done it for them. Now the ship would have power without needing to draw it from anchorage station. Power to do this.
12
The freight-liner was moving. On schedule, Nas thought. At this range, even if the main optical scopes could have had a clear view they could not have provided much detail. But still, even with just the tiny sensor relay drones, it was easy enough to see the ship. If one knew where to look, even a low-end optical sensor could see something the size of the freight-liner at millions of kilometers. In fact the Whisperknife was a lot closer than that, parked in a waiting pattern holding orbit less than a hundred thousand kilometers away. There was a risk in that; even with her fake hull panels the converted swift-ship looked like a predator. The size of her drive and radiators alone would have raised alarms: too big for a civilian ship, too much mass devoted to speed. An experienced observer might also have noted that the Whisperknife's "cargo pods" were placed to conceal the places where weapons mounts would be, if she were a warship. So Nas had taken precautions, choosing a parking orbit that interposed one of the gas giant's tiny moons, just a captured asteroid a few kilometers across, between the Whisperknife and the station. But plenty of other sensors could see them.
But that was the other side of the coin about optical sensors, Nas thought. They could see for millions of kilometers, but their view was very narrow. A quick scan with wide array sensors would show no details, and there was no reason that anyone would task a high magnification optical sensor to look at his ship. There were never enough of the "scopes" to look at everything at the same time, and there was every reason to expect that the local authorities had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Of course they knew where his ship was; the exhaust plume of an active drive could be seen for billions of kilometers. But in this busy system, unless she did something unusual, the Whisperknife was just one more contact, indistinguishable from hundreds of civilian ships.
The infiltration team was doing well; the 'liner looked like it was on course.
The station's traffic control would probably expect the stolen freight-liner to make a run for the edge of the gas giant's planetary system, to try to escape via an FTL transit. After all, why steal the ship if you don't mean to get away with it?
Why indeed? Nas could think of many reasons, but none were a perfect fit to the facts. Why had the ship been attacked in the first place, and now, why was someone so keen to have it destroyed? There was no cargo left on the ship; Nas had been paid to ensure that certain cargos were never delivered before, but that couldn't be the case this time.
Was there still something on that ship that had to be destroyed? Or was it the ship that was the target? Maybe its owners needed this ship for something... insurance would pay for the loss, but money wasn't the same as having a ship. Or maybe money was the point. It might have been the owners, or their agents, who wanted the ship gone. Nas could imagine someone wanting the insurance money in place of a badly damaged ship. Or maybe that was just that the conclusion that his employer wanted someone else to make?
Not that it mattered, really. The Whisperknife's orbital transfer shuttle had been carefully pre-positioned, launched well before the 'liner started to move, which reduced the odds of anyone noticing where it came from when the business got hot.
The little shuttle was already inbound, burning its little plasma reaction drives to build a vector that would match vectors with and intercept the 'liner in less than half an hour. Once the shuttle docked with the 'liner, the impossibility of smuggling a nuclear demolition charge onto the anchorage station would be quite moot. The nuclear mining charge that the shuttle would deliver was small, as nukes went. But it was going to be detonated right inside the freight-liner. At the very least, it would still be enough blow the huge ship to radioactive fragments. If it actually set off the singularity reactor, instead of just tearing it apart, then that would reduce the ship to radioactive vapor. Either way would work fine.
The tricky part was timing. Timing was always the tricky part; timing to get the 'liner's singularity reactor up and running, a task his infiltration team could not have done themselves; timing to put the two local guard-ships on the wrong vector in their complex patrol orbit around the gas giant; and now, last, timing to bring the little shuttle in to dock with the 'liner. Nas allowed himself the thought that he was quite good at timing.
---
"What in hell could they be doing?" asked Section Supervisor Kanton, again, mostly to himself. He supposed he was still talking to Smit, who was now fully committed to tracking the 'liner. There was no communication from the 'liner, and somehow the comm-code for the repair contractor whose team were aboard was answering with a recording of a cosmetic products commercial.
"Could it really be a runaway, sir?" asked Smit.
"Of course it's a damned runaway! They've hit a work pod, for God's sakes!" said Kanton. His voice was getting high pitched. "Maybe a short in the maneuver drives, or a computer problem!"
"A short in the maneuver drives that just happens to pull the ship away from the dock?" asked Smit. "And then lights up their main drive?"
"Or a computer error, dammit! Maybe a pre-programmed undocking-and-departure routine got executed!" said Kanton, almost shouting. "They must be out of control!"
Maddeningly, the rest of his team had to continue to run local traffic, dealing with a cascade of confusion as the runaway freight-liner disrupted arrival and departure schedules and plowed, heedless, through approach lanes. The 'liner was on a corkscrew of a course, accelerating seemingly at random. At least the giant ship hadn't lit her main drive too close to the station, Kanton thought, as the communication channel to the repair crew's main office continued to play an annoying jingle for insta-tan lotion.
His comm system was showing another incoming message; it was the PTC watch supervisor. God damn it all! Now the fucking supervisor wanted to know what the progress on the "situation" was. Kanton smoothed his uniform and looked briefly at his reflection in one of the vid-screens; the supervisor's call was a holographic video call, not a direct interface connection.
"Sir," Kanton began, as the supervisor's holographic face appeared in front of him.
"Sir," came another voice. It was Smit, intruding a max-priority call into the comm line.
"Controller Smit, get off this line!" shouted Kanton.
"Sir," Smit continued, addressing the supervisor in a calm voice. "I have reason to believe that the 'liner has been stolen!"
---
"The device is not, repeat, not operational, Captain." Ylayn's voice was far from calm. She spoke quietly but with exaggerated clarity. No room for misunderstandings. Somehow, she could feel the captain's presence. It felt much closer than the hundred thousand or so kilometers that actually separated the captain, aboard Whisperknife, from Ylayn, sitting in one of the command pods of the freight-liner Ulia's Flower.
Lag was not a serious issue. It took less than a half a second for her signal to reach the captain, less than a half a second for his reply to reach her. None the less, there was a long pause.
"What do you mean, it's not operational?" came Nas Killick's voice.
"We went over it with diagnostic tools, Captain. The detonator is too old; the
initiator is just fucked. The super-conductors are decayed. It won't go off."
"Shit. Can you fix it?"
"Hyuer says no. We'd need a full micro-factory setup, and it'd be nuclear ordinance work; we didn't bring anyone who can do it."
There was a pause, and Ylayn could almost imagine the captain pacing. He usually paced when things went wrong, if he could. Though with the ship in free-fall, he couldn't now, Ylayne thought. There was always a sense, with the captain, of restrained energy. New members of the crew sometimes thought he might lash out at the crew that brought him bad news. But he never did. Plenty in the Brotherhoods did use violence to control their crews. Not the captain, though. It was, Ylayn mused, as if having so much ability, so much potential for violence, made the actual act unnecessary. Thinking of the captain brought a faint thrill of attraction. She wished she were with him now, aboard Whisperknife.
"OK," came the captain's voice. "I'm bringing the shuttle back. We'll load the nuclear device off of one of the old anti-ship warheads instead and send it back to you. That will go off, or there's at least one ordinance master that's floating home without a vac-suit."
"OK, captain. I'll get everyone on the navigation, and we'll update our vector info to you for the new rendezvous." Ylayn's voice was brisk, businesslike. The captain liked that, she knew.
The shuttle was headed back. Its tiny drive was flaring bright, building a vector back to the Whisperknife. It would be arriving in about half an hour. That was enough time. Nas did not allow slack for his crew, not on ship, on duty. Reaction mass tanks would be standing by to refuel the shuttle. The power coils would have to be recharged as well; Whisperknife had an ultra-compact singularity reactor for power, but it still took up almost a third of the swift-ship's internal volume. The smallest singularity reactor was far too large to fit into the shuttle. So was a fission reactor, given how small a swift-ship's shuttle had to be. Instead, compact superconductor coils storing vast amounts of power were crammed into the little shuttle. But the shuttle's plasma drives used vast amounts of power, accelerating reaction mass to almost one percent of the speed of light. The design used reaction mass and power in equal measure; no point having one without the other. So the shuttle would arrive almost out of both.
Refueling was fast, but recharging the power coils meant cooling them back down to their ideal super-conductive state, and that would take more time. There was no point trying to use the little atmospheric interface shuttle that rode piggyback on the Whisperknife's dorsal aspect. Its reaction mass tankage was barely adequate for limited orbital maneuvers; air intakes sucked in atmosphere for reaction mass when the interface shuttle landed or took off from a habitable planet; it was useless for deep space operations like this. So there was no way around taking the time to refuel and recharge the Whisperknife's orbital transfer shuttle.
Time was the issue, Nas knew, but if your timing was good, you could use delays to your advantage. Recharging the power coils on the shuttle would give his crew enough time to strip the nuclear device out of an old anti-ship warhead and cram it into the orbital transfer shuttle's little cargo hold. He'd have the ordinance master ride back with the shuttle. That way there would be no problem in setting the nuke to explode.
Still, the delay galled him. So did the extra cost. The Whisperknife had a very limited store of anti-ship warheads. And a warhead was a lot more expensive than a mere nuke. The warhead had a powerful nuke at its core, but also the targeting systems and detonation lasers that made it lethal against an enemy. There was no guarantee, once his crew stripped the nuke out of a warhead, that they could ever get it back in working order again. This mess would eat into his profit.
There were thirty of the weapons aboard, twelve in their launch tubes, and eighteen more in high speed loading racks; those could be loaded and launched in a matter of seconds. A real swift-ship would have two dozen launch tubes, or more, capable of swarming a heavily defended target with warheads. The Whisperknife had only a dozen tubes, and only six of those were capable of rapid reloading. The other six were improvised tubes, requiring manual reloading and good for only one shot each in most engagments. But even so, once all the warheads were armed it would take Whisperknife less than a minute to launch all of her weapons.
And twelve of the warheads resting in the loading racks were high grade weapons built to military specification, with military grade targeting and counter-measures systems and compact anti-matter triggers for their nukes. They were much better, and much smaller, than the other warheads the Whisperknife carried; those were almost hand-built out of salvaged parts and civilian components, and their fission-triggered fusion nuclear devices were inevitably bulky, making the whole warhead larger and more cumbersome.
The dozen military weapons he had been given as payment for this job had no markings. No markings at all. Even serial numbers and manufactures' marks on the inner components had been removed. That was interesting in and of itself. Someone had taken enormous effort to make these weapons untraceable. The warheads' design was one that Nas recognized; old Hegemonic weapons, a generation out of date. That was... interesting, too. He was familiar enough with the basic model. In his brief time in the Fleet Academy, Nas had been trained to know the details of Fleet warheads, both the most current models and surplus weapons. An entity the size of the Hegemonic Fleet could not afford to constantly issue new designs, and it was inevitable that old designs would continue to serve for generations after they were officially "replaced."
These unmarked warheads were not of any recent Fleet issue, Nas knew. Possibly weapons from the last war; enough of those had been "lost" over the long course of the conflict. Of course, it was not impossible that the weapons were manufactured by someone, somewhere, who could copy and produce old military grade weapons from a private facility. But whoever had made or obtained them had painstakingly altered the warheads so that there was no way to precisely trace their manufacture.
Nas settled back into his command pod and let his mind muse on the possible implications for a while, as he idly tracked the shuttle's vector line on his command pod's display. The little shuttle had almost reached turn-over, and would start decelerating towards Whisperknife in a few moments. It was very likely, once the shuttle started vectoring to rendezvous with the swift-ship, that some observer, on the station or on some nearby ship, would track the shuttle's vector and thus notice the Whisperknife. That made it likely that they would have to leave this system fast, possibly even pursued by the two guard-ships that were currently orbiting the gas giant. It had been sloppy of those ships to set their orbit so that both could be caught so far from the station that they were supposed to protect. Nas smiled coldly at the thought of the local Fleet being sloppy. Only a system defense fleet, of course, but still part of the Hegemony's vast military.
No need for Whisperknife to be sloppy in turn though, Nas thought, as he began to plot a new escape vector towards the edge of the system, taking into account the likely vectors of pursuit. He had originally planned to leave via a commercial shipping lane, using a preset vector sent by the station. That plan had amused him; who would look for a desperate void-runner to escape by meekly following local traffic laws?
That plan wouldn't work if his ship was spotted for what it was, though. He finished the new course plot and sent it to the FTL navigator. They would need an FTL transit plan for their likely new initiation point. The FTL navigator was sleeping in his bunk when the signal chimed on his porta-comp, and Nas let himself feel a hint of satisfaction to see the rapidity of his response as the man rolled out of his bunk and headed straight to his command pod. Other void-runner crews may have lacked this discipline. His crew did not.
It was not Fleet discipline, Nas knew, his face growing cold with the memories of his previous life. He had no use for the simpering subservience of the Fleet, where discipline was enshrined and commanders could be held in contempt by crews that hid behind the rules. His crew obeyed him not out of fear of some distant code of disc
ipline, but out of simple recognition of his own merits; because they personally respected him, feared him, and even more, because they trusted him to lead them better than they could do themselves. That was the true basis of discipline, and of power.
For a moment he let his pride in his ship and his crew flow together with his contempt for the Hegemonic Fleet and all its rotting, putrid tradition. His ship, Whisperknife, was a weapon in his hand, and for a moment he wanted to launch that weapon at the entity that he hated. A surprise attack on those incompetent guard-ships played out in his mind. He was almost sure he could kill one of them, and face the other with better odds of victory than any outsider could expect. The desire to unleash his ship, to bring destruction to those useless, deluded bastards, to show them, was seductive, almost a lust.
But foolish, he knew. The weapon was no better than the warrior, and if he used his Whisperknife rashly, it would not matter how well he had crafted his crew and ship into a weapon. With practiced patience, he folded away the desire for a violent, immediate revenge on the entity, the concept, that had betrayed him. It was not those guard-ships, after all. He would not limit himself, not waste his effort, on those ships, any more than he would choose to target just the trigger finger of an enemy who shot at him.
Let it all be calm, he thought to himself. Let them wait...
"Captain!" came a voice from behind him. Nas looked down at his displays, looking to see if the crewmember who had spoken had also sent a signal through the command pods' communication system. Some of the newer crew tended to ignore their command pods and shout out instead, a bad habit that Nas worked hard to overcome in his crew.
A comm signal was pulsing on his display, coming from his sensors officer. Nas cursed himself with brief, silent ferocity. The man had tried to send his signal through the command pod, but Nas had been too unfocused to notice. He plugged into the data feed and focused.