by M. D. Cooper
He boarded the ship and walked through the passageways to the presidential lounge where he had met with Kylie just a week or so ago.
A legion of his assistants and sycophants waited for him.
He spoke to no one in particular. “Inform the captain that he is to let all the other senatorial ships leave first. They will make for excellent distractions. Inform all of my ships on station to depart with us and shield us as we leave. Once we are clear, make for Jericho.”
“Yes, sir!” one of his lieutenants—a woman named Francis—said, then left the lounge for the bridge.
Maverick liked Francis; the girl had spunk. Not that he was taking her collar off anytime soon. He’d learned his lesson with both Harken and Kylie. Treat slaves like people and they started to think they could rise above their position.
Well, Harken had finally been dealt with, killed by Kylie’s lover, no less. It was delicious how well he could play his pets off against one another.
He cast his gaze around the room and grinned at those present. “If Silstrand thinks they’ll just take out the GFF as if we’re nothing but ants, then they’ll learn that Freemont is, and has always been, a puppet to the real power at Jericho.”
He settled into a couch, and brought a holodisplay up, showing the battle raging outside the station.
Mercedes—one of Vaax’s former assistants—hurried to his side. Pretty too, but not wearing a collar. Yet.
“We received all of the information on Vaax’s named successor. Everything appears to be in order, sir. But I worry that the senators won’t sit still for another power grab.”
“I’ll take care of them,” Maverick said as he sipped a drink handed to him by one of his girls. “I’ll take care of all of them.”
* * * * *
“You think we can’t tell when a transmission is leaving our own ship?” Micha raised a ballistic handgun and held it right against Grayson’s forehead, his eyes gleaming amidst his dancing tattoos.
Behind Micha, Gabriel stood at the console, controlling the auxiliary array and shut down Grayson’s transmission.
“Now it’s time for us to have our own conversation. Take him to cargo bay two. String him up.”
“My pleasure, Captain.” Micha grabbed Grayson’s collar and threw him toward the door. “Move it, liar, or I blow your head off here and we’ll just have to wonder idly about what you were up to.”
Grayson knew he couldn’t take on both men while unarmed, so he rose to his feet and walked to the ladder.
He only hoped General Samuel could reach the ship in time.
SEPARATION
STELLAR DATE: 09.24.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Main Sweep, Ring 2, The Futz, Freemont
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Watching Kylie slump like a rag doll in her brother’s arms was harder than Nadine had thought it would be, but it had to be done. It caught David by surprise, and he barely caught Kylie, grunting as he held her up.
“What did you do to her?” he asked angrily. It was clear, he cared about his sister. That, at least, was something.
Nadine swept Kylie’s hair away staring at the face of the woman she loved, knowing they would see one another soon. Very soon.
Then everything would be explained.
“She’ll wake up in a couple of days. Enough time for you to get to your ship and head home. It’s time she went home, David. Her family needs her. She needs them too.”
Nadine took a deep breath and gazed away. “The AI…”
“You see it too? You understand?” David whispered.
Solemnly, Nadine nodded. “I understand everything, same as you do. Take her home and make her understand, but don’t hurt her. If you hurt her, I’ll come for you. I have means at my disposal to make you and your whole family pay. Understand me?”
David nodded. “I have no intention of hurting her. I hope we meet again under better circumstances.” David lifted Kylie over his shoulder. “Do you have a ship? If you need a ship…”
Nadine shook her head. “I have friends I need to get to. They need to get off this station, same as everyone else.” She looked away for a moment, forcing the tears back. “But good luck.”
David nodded and peered out around the fallen crates. Beamfire no longer lanced through the air, and he dashed off toward bay 12B. Nadine followed to the bay’s entrance, ensuring he reached his ship safely—which appeared to be guarded by four rather large men.
Once Kylie was safely aboard, Nadine turned and rushed down the sweep, weaving through the crowds now coming out of hiding after the fighting had moved on. She burst into Bay 12A where the Dauntless rested on its cradle, reactor hot, ready to run.
Time to get out and stay alive.
BOOST OUT
STELLAR DATE: 09.23.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Bay 12A, Ring 2, The Futz, Freemont
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
They weren’t headed to hell in a handbasket, they were headed there in a friggin’ tin can.
“Get on the guns!” Rogers yelled at Winter, his eyes on the holodisplay floating before him.
“Go, go, go!” Nadine called out as she raced up the ramp onto the bridge.
Rogers spun his chair, “Where the hell is Kylie? Is she on board?”
Nadine slipped into her seat at the comm station and looked up at Rogers. “Her brother cornered us. Kylie approached him to protect me and…” Nadine swallowed hard and her eyes filled with intense grief, “He took her. He injected something in her that knocked her out, then he just took her. I tried to catch up. I—,” Nadine paused and squeezed her eyes shut. “I chased after them, but I was cut off.”
Rogers sighed. “Brother? As if we don’t have enough problems. First Lana, and now Kylie.”
“We have to get out of here, Rogers,” Winter urged. “If we stay here, we’ll be dead with a side of dead! Then we’ll be no good to anyone.”
“I can’t leave the captain,” Rogers said, he began to lower his seat to the deck. If he had to shoot his way across The Futz, he would. They weren’t losing any more crew.
“Don’t worry,” Nadine said. I slipped a tracker on her before she got too far. We can track her. Her brother has probably already left The Futz, which is exactly what it is we should be doing right now,” Nadine said. “We gotta get out of here and then we follow her!”
“Well damnit, Nadine, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Rogers sent his seat back up and released the docking clamps. Careful not to fry anyone still in the docking bay, he boosted out on grav drives only.
But the moment they were out of the bay, he punched up the fusion burners.
“What’s my heading?”
“Ship’s the Cleansing Fire,” Nadine said. “There! Putting it up on your display.”
“Got it!” Rogers said.
The Cleansing Fire was boosting toward Freemont’s south pole, along with most of the other civilian ships. As they passed The Futz’s outer rings, a warning came over the STC channel.
“Can you shut that up?” Winter asked.
“Wish I could. Best I can do is to silence it for a minute.”
“Might be long enough,” Nadine said. “We might be de
ad by then. Will they really fire on us?”
Rogers looked at the massive battle going on around the station. “If they can get close enough. Luckily most of The Futz’s more powerful weapons were disabled by the SSF’s first run.”
“Well, try to avoid the ones that are left,” Nadine said as she gripped the edges of her console.
“You used to have more faith in my piloting skills than that,” Rogers replied. He tucked in close to three freighters, keeping them between the Dauntless and a group of SSF destroyers that were closing in.
Two of the freighters veered off, beamfire lancing into one of the SSF destroyers.
“Are they nuts?” Winter asked.
Rogers watched as over six hundred civilian ships suddenly altered course and attacked nearby SSF ships.
“What the hell is going on?” Rogers asked.
“I think I might know,” Nadine said, as she piped a message onto the bridge’s audio systems.
“All Gedri ships, this is your President, Maverick. You are ordered to attack the Silstrand vessels assaulting our capital. They have declared war on us, and we are seceding from the Alliance. We are now at war with Silstrand.”
“Holy mother fucking…” Winter whispered. “I can’t believe he just did that.”
“I can’t believe Maverick is our president,” Rogers said as he increased the drive burn, closing on the Cleansing Fire. It was now only a hundred kilometers ahead, clustered together with several other small civilian ships.
He saw two of the destroyers in the nearby squadron break free to pursue the Dauntless, their beams lancing out, targeting the shields around the Dauntless’s engines.
“Looks like the SSF spotted us,” Nadine said.
“Time to see how these new weapons perform,” Winter added as he activated the ship’s new beams and fired on the destroyers.
While the Dauntless was fresh and ready, the two destroyers had already been in the fray for half an hour, and one of them lost forward shields. Winter fired again, and the beam tore into the vessel, ablative plating boiling off into space.
“Take that, sucka!” Winter cried as the ship turned to move their unshielded section out of range.
It wasn’t fast enough, though, the third freighter Rogers had stayed close to fired a barrage of missiles at the destroyer. Its point defense beams got half of them, but the rest hit, and the destroyer went up in a ball of fire.
The other destroyer turned back as Winter fired on it, an attack which the freighter joined in on as well.
“Get us through this,” Nadine said to Rogers.
He took a deep breath as he spun the Dauntless, pushing the still-cold engines to their limit, ducking through a group of shuttles headed for the planet’s surface, and then back into open space. His seat spun around, maintaining his orientation as the ship pivoted around him. Rogers forgot the calculations, the math of flight, and flew on instinct and gut feel. He and the Dauntless were one. He and the Dauntless were one. He was a bird…
A particle beam hit them amidships, and the internal grav systems lost power for a moment, throwing everyone in the bridge against their harnesses.
Nadine screamed and scrambled to hold onto her console. “Rogers!”
“Doing the best I can. If you want this ship to stay alive…” His words were cut off as the proximity alarm sounded.
“In coming projectiles.” Winter said. “Missile! A lot of missiles!”
“Well, shoot them down!” Nadine called back.
“Point defense is working on it, got two…four…shit!”
Rogers clenched his teeth as atomic fire washed across the ship pushing them off course, and away from the other civilian ships.
Alarms sounded and Rogers struggled to regain control.
“Dorsal shields are down,” Nadine called out. “Reactor is running at red-line to recharge. Hull breach in the cargo hold. Sealing it off.”
“Shit!” Rogers snapped. “Sorry, Nadine.”
She nodded. “It’s okay. I understand. Watch your six, Rogers!”
Rogers turned his attention back to the scene in front of him and saw a group of SSF cruisers moving to intercept the Dauntless. He prayed the a-grav systems would dampen the inertia enough to keep them conscious as he rotated the ship and boosted at a ninety-degree angle to their previous vector.
“They’re moving to intercept,” Nadine said.
“Ship to ship,” Rogers ordered. “Tell them we’re simple junkers trying to get the hell out of dodge. We are no use to them.”
“There’s no way they’ll buy it,” Winter said. “I bet every pilot in the SSF has a picture of the Dauntless in the corner of their displays.”
“It’ll slow them down for a moment,” Rogers replied.
Nadine nodded, breathless and her mouth hanging open as her fingers flew across the console.
Rogers looked over the cruisers, expecting to see the Hanover among their number—but it wasn’t. He scanned the battlefield, and saw it pursuing another ship, the Emperor’s Tears.
Grayson, you better have an ace up your sleeve…
“Message sent,” Nadine said.
“Keep sending it while I make calculations for dump to the DL.”
“Are you kidding?” Winter asked. “Ever heard of ‘three strikes and you’re out’? There are no known pockets around here. We can’t just duck and hide.”
“SSF dumped in through the dark layer,” Rogers replied. “Half the pilots were talking about where they did it, and what it means.”
“Do it,” Nadine said.
Rogers nodded as he worked out the vector they needed to hit. He was going to jump a lot closer to Freemont than the SSF had, but maybe, just maybe, it would be clear of dark matter.
“They’re demanding we cease acceleration and prepare to be boarded,” Nadine said.
“Uhhh…I think they’re stalling us,” Winter said. “They just fired a barrage of missiles.”
“I guess they know Lana is on the Emperor’s Tears,” Rogers said. “Means we’re mince-meat.”
“Lana’s where? What—” Nadine asked.
Winter interrupted her. “They’re firing beams. Shields are almost gone. When those missiles hit…”
“Making the jump,” Rogers called out.
Nadine gasped. “You haven’t finished the calculations. Rogers, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We can take a few moments longer—”
Rogers was willing to chance the random placement of dark matter versus the certainty of the hundred missiles speeding toward the Dauntless.
He trigged the graviton emitters. Exotic energy created from combining positive and negative gravitons in just the right manner tore the Dauntless from newtonian space, sending them into the unknown.
* * * * *
Nadine let out a long sigh of relief and shook her head at Rogers. She was impressed with his flying, but going into the dark layer again was too much.
“That was close,” she said.
“Yeah, we’re still alive, too,” Rogers grinned.
“You need to dump out as soon as we’re clear,” Winter said. “We’re tempting fate in a big way in here.”
“The SSF took this corridor from Einendart,” Rogers replied. “The biggest risk was doing it right by the planet. If we’re still alive now, we’ll be fine.”
“OK, then,” Winter said and turned to Nadine. “You want to tell us what happened?”
“I did already.” Nadine swallowed hard and brought the grief back onto her face. “She was protecting me. She was keeping me safe, like she always is.”
“And you just left her?” Winter asked.
“It wasn’t like I had a lot of choice. Her brother had guards protecting his ship. It wasn’t like I could muscle past them. Getting back here was the best plan I had. Don’t you trust me? You used to.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Winter’s eyes shifted away. “I trust you. I’m just sick of losing people.” He leaned back in his chair and put a leg up on hi
s console.
In Nadine’s opinion, he looked like a pouty little puppy. She knew things between him and Lana had gotten intense, which was why it was strange to see such strong loyalty from Winter. He was Winter after all, he had the emotional IQ of a rock.
“We’ll get her back. The tracker is working. Once her brother brings her home and she’s no longer on his ship, we’ll swoop in and bring her back.”
“Should we rescue Lana first?” Winter asked.
Nadine did a double take. Now Winter cared about Lana too? What had happened while she was gone?
“Yeah, you said something about a ship called the Emperor’s Tears?” Nadine asked. “How do you know she’s there?”
“Grayson’s on board. He confirmed it,” Rogers said. “It’s a spy ship for Scipio, I guess. From what Grayson said, it’s safe to assume that the Scipian government has been behind this whole nanotech theft from the beginning.”
“What?” That was the exact opposite of what Nadine wanted to see happen.
“Grayson’s there. He’s going to free her.”
“He’s under cover?” Nadine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How had this situation fallen apart so hopelessly? She needed to get a message to Petra as soon as possible. And then be prepared to have a strip torn off her.
Rogers held up his hand. “It’s OK, I saw General Samuel’s ship chasing the Emperor’s Tears right before we dumped to the DL. Grayson is going to turn Lana back over and work to clear our names.”
Winter snorted. “Knew he was a company man all along.”
“And if Samuel doesn’t catch the Emperor’s Tears?” Nadine asked. “Grayson’s playing a very dangerous game. He’ll get himself killed at best. At worst, Scipio figures out he’s not who he says he is and they torture him for information. And when he won’t give it to them? He’ll wish he had never been born.”
That was something Nadine knew first hand.
“I have faith in Grayson—plus the hundred SSF ships chasing the freighter he’s on. There’s a lot I don’t like about the SFF, but Grayson’s solid. I liked him. Especially those little potato things.”