by Drew Wagar
'Ready for escort.' Red’s voice came over the narrowband.
Reet leaned forward, eyeing the main scanner screen, 'How long ’til we make station-side?'
'I make it about three-and-half-hours, all being well,' replied Rebecca. That was the problem with having a set of escorts: no in-system hyperspeed drive. It was effectively jammed by the presence of other ships, which didn’t matter if you were solo, but rendered it useless in a fleet. Of course, you could get rid of the escorts, but a ship as big and slow as the Boa caught alone would be effectively defenceless. It wasn’t bad as a big freighter, but as a fighter it was slow and unwieldy: you might as well just paint a target on the side of the ship and lower the shields.
'I’m getting me some kip then,' Reet said, 'Wake me if anything interesting happens.'
Rebecca punched in the coordinates for system space and eased the throttles up to three-quarters power. The old ship didn’t like racing along at maximum speed, and besides which it wore out the generators twice as fast. Maintenance was too expensive these days, particularly in the more advanced systems they were coming into now.
'Follow my lead,' she said into the narrowband, transmitting her plotted path.
'Lay on Macduff, little sister.' Red’s voice came back to her. He always said that; she had no idea what he meant. She’d ask him one day. It had been a phrase her mother used apparently.
Rebecca looked wistfully out of the forward viewers. Her mother had been lost in space when she was only six. Reet and Red had gone looking for her when she failed to return from a trade mission in chart five. They found no trace of her at all, despite a lengthy search. Both eventually gave her up for lost, presuming she'd been shot down by a pirate. Rebecca could tell Red wasn't happy with the explanation. Their mother had been a excellent pilot, not one to loose a fight. Rebecca remembered her only vaguely, but she did recall some of the stories she'd been told. Her mother had a particular one Rebecca had loved to hear over and over again – the magical planet of Raxxla.
I wonder if she's still out there somewhere? I'd love to meet her. I wonder if she left because she was bored with the trader life? Wish she'd taken me with her!
The scanner pinged. Another ship had just popped out of witchspace almost on top of them. She flipped the ident computer over onto it.
'Busy system,' Lance commented. 'Mk3 Cobra by the look of it. Wish we had one of those. Look, it’s trailing plasma, must have just been sun-scooping somewhere.'
Cobra's! Boring! Look at me flying my ship, I've got no imagination at all!
The ident computer took a strangely long time to run the scan. Rebecca saw it was rechecking its findings. She looked at the result.
Cobra Mk3, 15% discrepancy. 100 Metric, .3 LM.
Gravimetric Radiation Detected!
Point-three LM, or ‘lem’ as it was usually referred to, looked fine to her. It was basically a speed measurement, LM stood for ‘LightMach’ or something similar. Lance would know. It was another technical thing Rebecca had deliberately chosen not to bother understanding. Point-two lem and under was slow, point-four lem and over was fast. Point-three was strictly average. The tonnage wasn’t unusual either. It was the ‘discrepancy’ that confused her. She wasn't sure what the radiation warning meant either.
'You been fiddling with the computer again?' Rebecca snapped. 'It’s got bugs.'
'Huh? No. What’s up?'
'Look.'
Lance checked out the display, sighing with frustration.
'15% discrepancy? How can you have discrepancy on a Mk3 Cobbie?' Lance was furious. 'What is the matter with this thing? Maybe our whole ident computer is fragged. Ignore it. I’ll pull it when we get station-side and flush its database, or maybe I’ll just give it a good kicking. It’s getting worse than those old Baud systems that took twenty minutes to load up.'
'What's gravimetric radiation?'
'Oh don't worry about that, one of the sensors must have a glitch. We really need to get some maintenance for this old bird!'
The Cobra over flew them, passing close by about half a kilometre away. It had an odd colour scheme and Lance made some comments about the engine flux not looking quite right.
'Looks like one of those new Cobra Couriers to me. Quad plumes.' He said, trying to sound knowledgeable. 'The ident computer should pick it up as such though. Oh well.'
Rebecca thought he was simply embarrassed over screwing up the ident computer and was trying to save face.
It wasn’t long before the ship was out of range, apparently on a course towards the sun. It soon dropped off the scanner.
The Viper pilot was snoring, the autopilot slowly navigating the ship between Zaonce patrol waypoints. Earlier on they had received a priority update from Galcop central. A special scanning signature. If detected they were to issue a coded response.
The computer beeped.
Gravimetric Signature Detected.
The pilot woke up, stimulated by nerve inducers in the seat beneath him.
'Prak! Who the frag designed these things? Sadistic Goids!'
He was near the end of his patrol; he’d be approaching the witchspace in system marker within half an hour or so.
He looked at the readout and submitted the coded response. Within moments an audio only comlink became active.
'Report.'
'Lieutenant Davidson, sir, Zaonce patrol five. I have detected the signature posted earlier today. It’s weak, but confirmed.'
'Location?'
'Two thousand kays from in-jump, vector one four three mark two.'
'Hold your position. A ship will arrive shortly. You are to leave it alone. Once it moves off, you will not approach within scanner range of it again, regardless of situation. This overrides all Galcop protocols. Is this understood?'
'Absolutely.'
'Congratulations, Lieutenant-Commander Davidson.'
The pilot looked surprised, 'Sir, thank you, sir! This is most…'
But the comlink was already hissing static back at him.
A quarter of an hour later Rebecca had almost dozed off at the helm. Flying in system was so boring. They’d seen a couple of other traders around and exchanged a greeting, but they had been in a hurry and accelerated past quickly, leaving the aged Boa cruising in their flux wake. A large convoy of Oo-Haul freighters was overtaken next, along with a handful of irritatingly enthusiastic Rickshaw owners plying for trade.
They were cruising at point-two, a pretty glacial speed by modern standards, but the Boa was a big and heavy old ship. Zaonce was still a fair way off, its pastel clouds scintillating enticingly in the distance. She could now visually see the Coriolis space station off to the right of the planet as a tiny glowing speck, illuminated by the sun. It flickered and flashed in the darkness.
God I hate this. I'd go outside the space lanes, torus drive it in fast and efficient. We could make three times as much profit if we just took a few more risks! Lone trading – that's where the money is, not this slow haul across the galaxy!
She looked down and saw the tell tale mark of another ship coming into range, a single one on the right hand side of the scanner approaching from in front of them. That in itself was odd: there was no longer any need to fly out from a system. The indicator was yellow, indicating another neutral ship. Out of curiosity she locked the ident computer onto it. For a moment it chuntered through a variety of identification protocols before coming up with a response. The response made Rebecca sit forward.
Vessel type unknown. Mass 480 Metric. Speed .375 LM. Interrogating Galcop Astrometrics, please wait…
It was the first time she’d ever come across a failed ident; to have an unregistered ship was most unusual. Today was getting weirder by the minute. Either it was a new type – there were quite a lot of new ships coming on stream at the moment for some reason - or… a Thargoid.
Thargoids were mad insane dangerous insects. Nobody knew where they came from and nobody knew what they wanted, but everyone knew they were bad news
. They attacked without provocation, explanation or reason. Their ships were fast, unpredictable and powerful. Their tech was more advanced than anything in Galcop. They’d been known to employ scanner jammers, cloaking devices, gravity wells and all sorts of jiggery-pokery to trap vessels before blowing them apart, usually with some obscure nonsensical insult in the bargain.
There was a competition running on the Tionisla Chronicle at the moment, totally devoted to finding the best Thargoid insults. Survivors of attacks would send them in. The top rated one so far was:
Eat bat, Discos!
Nobody knew if that was what the Thargoids intended to say, or simply had badly programmed translators, or whether they were trying to confuse people, or were just plain nuts. They were an enigma.
Rebecca shook her head. Not a Thargoid: they should show up green on the scanner anyway, they always attacked on sight and to encounter one here near the seat of Galcop power in a Corporate system was simply ridiculous. She was disappointed; she rather fancied a fight with a Thargoid as a test of her skills. She hadn’t seen one yet. It had to be Lance’s mucked up programming.
'Lance! Get your backside over here! What have you done this time?'
He came across and looked at the scanner, rechecking the ident. He whistled. 'Not me this time. Wacky. You checked for a transponder?'
'Obviously.' Rebecca rolled her eyes at him. 'It reads as a trader, that’s all.'
'No registration?'
'Nope.'
'If the cops spot them, they’ll get an attitude adjustment. Auto Offender status without ID.'
'We’re not completely clean ourselves, thanks to your attempt to flog those space lice with that cat! What were they called? Tribbles?'
'Trumbles.'
'Trumbles, tribbles, whatever. Vermin. Galcop should nuke that whole planet.'
'That’s a bit rough, isn’t it?'
'They’re ghastly things, they breed incessantly.'
'Well, that’s the trouble with trumbles.'
'Just make sure we don’t have any more trouble with trumbles, ok?'
Lance changed the subject back, embarrassed by his part in that misadventurous escapade. 'I wonder what they’re playing at.'
'Maybe they’re damaged.'
'Flying at point-three-seven-five? No way. At least we don’t have to worry for long. He’ll be past us and out of scanner range in five. Look at the prakker go.'
Already the unidentified ship was level with them. Rebecca hit the starboard viewer. It was at extreme range, barely larger than a dot. It was flickering slightly, as if it was changing shape.
'He’s dropping speed and altering course,' Lance observed, double-checking the stats.
'I don’t like this,' Rebecca said quietly, keying the comlink onto narrowband, 'Red?'
'You called, little sis?' her brother answered.
'We’ve got a pacer, twenty kay off the starboard bow.'
There was a pause. Presumably Red was having a look for himself.
'I see him, though he’s out of range on my scanner. Funny looking ship. What’s the ID?'
'That’s just it. There isn’t one; he’s got no reg. He came howling up ahead of us and slowed to match our course and speed.'
'Don’t see any need to bother him unless he bothers us; probably one of these hot shot boy racers again. We’ll activate guns and be ready with a missile lock just in case. Suggest you do the same.'
'Will do.' Rebecca flipped the switches for the beam laser’s prefire coil and the missile arming mechs.
'He’s probably from in system and us just checking us over,' Lance agreed, 'Or maybe just sightseeing. This is a corporate system; what’s he going to do? There’s police every hundred kays from the planet to the jump point.'
'Yeah.' Rebecca still felt worried, a tightness in the pit of her stomach; something didn’t feel right. Traders always kept themselves to themselves; you didn’t follow other vessels around; you didn’t do anything to cause alarm: accidents happened that way, people got nervous and started firing. Traders had to assume the worst, it was the only way to guarantee staying alive. Her instincts were screaming red alert.
It couldn’t be a boy racer either, not at 480 metric! That was a pretty heavy midsized ship.
They waited an anxious five minutes before the other vessel slowly started accelerating away, changing to a course that would take it behind them. She’d been wracking her brains trying to think of any ships that could manage point-three-seven-five at that tonnage but she’d come up blank. She could see it a little better now: it looked almost like a catamaran, but nobody, as far as she knew, had ever gotten a twin hull design of ship to work effectively. Maybe it really was some new Galcop prototype; they were testing a lot of new ships at the moment, what with the Thargoid situation. The ship was too far away for any decent visual observation.
The ident computer pinged up again.
Ident remains unconfirmed. Galcop Restricted. No data available.
Rebecca bit her lip, 'Looks like a prototype of some kind.'
'And there he goes,' her brother’s voice said reassuringly over the comlink. The strange ship was quickly accelerating away from them now. The exhaust flux was bright white with an actinic blue edge, unlike the cyan glow of traditional engines.
The agent opened the secure comlink channel, 'I’m closing on the target’s gravimetric emission. However there is a complication.'
The agent had no idea who his employer was. Compensation was the only consideration. A hit was required; payment was made. A simple transaction. Identity was not required. In fact, anonymity was crucial to their relationship. It was all about plausible deniability.
'Define.'
'There is a civilian Boa and four escorts involved.'
'They interacted with the target?'
The agent looked at his scanner log, 'Affirmative. The target’s trail intersected with the Boa about fifteen minutes ago at the jump point.'
There was a fractional pause from the other end of the comlink, 'This is… unfortunate. Orders remain unchanged. The area will be cleared.'
'Acknowledged.'
The agent switched on his attack computer and turned his vessel around.
Suddenly all hell broke loose. The astrogation scanner lit up red and the sirens went off.
'Prak!' Lance shouted. 'Someone’s got a target lock on us!'
Rebecca looked at the console: it was the other ship, the one that had been pacing them, the restricted Galcop vessel. It had turned and was accelerating towards them, closing the range between them rapidly. Attacking from behind.
Prak! A pirate in Zaonce? How does that make sense? Surely he can see he's outnumbered? One ship against five?
'Red?' called Rebecca, her voice high with alarm.
'I see him; we’re moving to intercept. Lock missiles, hit full throttle and sit tight. We’ll handle this.'
'Copy.' Rebecca flipped switches and pushed the throttles forward. With a top speed of point-two-four the Boa wouldn’t be able to outrun the unknown ship. They were relying on their escorts. The generators began to whine as they met the increasing energy demands. They were only carrying four missiles; one pylon was empty. They were also the cheap unhardened type.
'Here’s hoping he doesn’t have an ECM. Good shooting.'
Eclipse lurched slightly as her brother’s Krait, the Cobra Mk1 and the two Sidewinders roared back past at full throttle. She wished she was at the helm of one of the fighters rather than stuck on the old barge. They all knew she was the best pilot. She targeted all four missiles.
I should be out there…
'And this is supposed to be a totally safe system,' Lance complained.
'No such thing,' growled Rebecca with feeling.
The incoming ship was rapidly growing larger. It was big, dwarfing their fighter escorts. It was nothing like anything she’d seen before. A mean, tough looking ship. Twin hulls, which appeared to be mostly engine nacelles, and a sleek modern profile quite unlike t
he blocky designs of the last fifty years. It’s central section was very elongated, presenting a very slim frontal aspect. Clearly a ship designed for fighting.
'What the prak is that?' Rebecca stared at the newcomer, in awe of the design.
It's gorgeous… and scary!
The four fighters broke off into a standard engagement pattern, shooting out away from each other to attack from four different angles, combining their firepower into a simultaneous strike. Rebecca watched as the newcomer turned and began tracking one of the Sidewinders.
Whatever it was it was quick; even faster than the fighters. She’d never seen anything so big turn so quickly. It must have been souped up somehow, probably high gee bow thrusters or something. Their escorts’ formation broke up in disarray, completely underestimating the new ship’s performance.
'Frag! Would you look at that…'
Suddenly laser fire spurted from the strange ship’s forward gun emplacement. A continuous high intensity beam. The laser fire streaked across space towards the targeted Sidewinder. Rebecca saw the beam splay across the Sidewinder’s shields.
'Jenner, roll left. He’s got a bead on you!' Rebecca called out.
Jenner’s Sidewinder rolled drunkenly. Rebecca stared as she saw the attacking ships laser beam hitting duralium, sparks flying. Even the old Sidewinder’s shields couldn’t have gone yet surely —
Then Jenner’s ship was gone. Nothing remained but a quickly dispersing cloud of debris.
Oh my God!
'You stard!' Rebecca screamed. 'No! Jenner!'
The wash from the explosion rattled Eclipse. Rebecca steadied the resultant roll. She’d never seen a ship killed so fast.