by Blaze Ward
“Fair enough,” Zakhar agreed.
Flashing lights and dancing girls?
The only place he had ever encountered something like that was in a port, where the locals had laws about where the casinos, brothels, and bars had to be, usually set back from chandlery row by a razor-topped fence.
Still, that made a crazy sense.
“Without a hard ping to be sure, I’m only guessing here,” Gibney continued. “But I think I picked up something. If Del went low and fast for a ways from his last known coordinates, with all his running gear turned off, before he went vertical, it might look like this. Especially if he and Javier are trying to be silly.”
Gibney pushed a button and Zakhar’s secondary screen lit up with an orbital insertion path that looked designed to make Piet squirm.
Horribly inefficient. Climbing out at eighty-eight degrees south off the equatorial belt. Way the hell over there, as far as everyone was concerned.
Still, with the oblong orbit Storm Gauntlet was running, they didn’t have to deviate far to pop up over the top of where that path would cross sky.
At that point, they could unmask, pulse the running lights, and either have Del in hand before Ajax could react, or drop back down under the blankets and continue their little game.
“Any sign of Ajax?” Zakhar finally said.
That was the wild card here. If those folks went after Calypso’s shuttle, they would be entirely out of position to get him before he could hop away. And once he got a couple of light hours out, it wouldn’t matter if they had to retune the engines yet again.
No way in hell Ajax could catch them at that point.
“Negative, sir,” Gibney said. “Nothing on any of the systems has even registered as enough of an anomaly to look closer. If they were sloppy before, they’ve been cautious since.”
“And they’re waiting for us like a trapdoor spider right now,” Zakhar agreed. “Hopefully, close to the cubesat and not anywhere else. Keep an eye out.”
Because that was about the only way they were making it out of this situation alive.
The best the rest of the crew could hope for would be that Ajax would use the Ion Pulsars to knock Storm Gauntlet out, like he had done to Calypso. Most of the crew were just folks. Probably captured and sold as slaves, like they themselves had done to others, but not killed outright.
No, death would be a fate for him and Navarre. Maybe Hadiiye, as well, depending on how angry they had made someone.
Briefly, he considered the pistol he kept next door in his day office, locked in a drawer. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to be taken alive by these yahoos.
Had something changed in the universe? Was Walvisbaai Industrial declaring open war on the Jarre Foundation?
Either way, he needed to escape this trap so he could go someplace specific and ask questions. Ugly questions.
And share what he knew with his employers.
It might be time to bring Javier Aritza into the fold, as well.
Part Two
Turner studied the bridge readouts in utter frustration, something she probably shared with her crew.
Ajax had plenty of guns, but her sensors weren’t up for anything like this.
The shuttle was easy to spot, broadcasting a transponder code on several frequencies. Ditto the little satellite Sokolov was using to talk to the shuttle.
Even slicing away more than half of the available orbit, on the assumption that Storm Gauntlet had to maintain a line of sight to the little box, hadn’t helped. The space to survey was just too damned big, and to top it off, they had to rely on passive sensor arrays only.
Not that the targeting systems would have helped much.
Turner ran her hands back through her short, blond hair and blew out a breath.
So much unknown.
One more time, she checked the targeting solutions readouts from her gunner. With nothing better to go on, they had positioned the ship at optimal gunnery distance from the commsat. The shuttle was flying a happy, predictable path to orbit, centered to insert fairly close to the little box.
That would make them easy prey.
Sokolov had to know that. Navarre might, as well. Especially if all of her ground forces had been captured, which the man had intimated. They could be made to talk.
The unknown was who else might uncloak at the critical moment. Ajax was much bigger than Storm Gauntlet. Any fight would be over quick enough, with Sokolov either dead or dead in the water. And Navarre was in a shuttle.
But when she appeared, a divine, avenging angel, would anybody else be there?
Storm Gauntlet wasn’t the biggest warship the Jarre Foundation employed. Just one of the better known. Turner knew of a couple of enforcers they owned that were big enough to seriously threaten Ajax.
Time to prep the crew. Better to be over-prepared, than under.
“Pilot,” Turner announced. “Make sure you have an emergency jump locked in, just in case someone bigger uncloaks.”
The woman turned to actually stare at her. Turner scowled hard enough back that the pilot went back to her boards with a sharp nod.
“Gunnery,” the captain continued. “Fire from cloak this time as soon as you have a solution lock on Sokolov’s ship. Ignore the shuttle.”
“Roger that,” the next woman replied.
Turner smiled. Another advantage of being captain. She could build an entire command team that was female. Probably the only pirate ship like it.
Much less macho posturing this way. Let the belligerent punks serve as ground fighters.
Women were sneakier. Women pirates even more so.
Now, she just had to outthink Sokolov and Navarre.
Part Three
And insertion.
Javier sent the final commands to the little autopilot to move into orbit, perfectly on level with the satellite, trailing slightly and keeping it to port of the shuttle at a distance of only a few kilometers. The ship beeped in response.
Bull’s-eye, as it were.
It was almost as rewarding as training a puppy to go pee on his little paper.
Del, on the other hand, wasn’t going for insertion with the assault shuttle. He had the ship pointed straight up and red-lined.
Pop out the bottom and run like hell for deep space. Sokolov had a higher acceleration, if push came to shove. He could run them down. So could anybody else.
Del turned enough to make eye contact, but said nothing.
Not much to say. They had kinda covered it all. Sykora included. And, wonder of wonders, she had remained silent for the entire ride.
“Sokolov, this is Navarre,” he said, studying the readouts from his erstwhile chariot closely. “You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?”
“My only second thoughts revolve around ever letting you on my deck in the first place, Navarre,” the man growled out of the darkness. “If I didn’t like Del and the others so much, I’d have just shot you during the climb out.”
“Hey,” Navarre replied in a cruel voice. “You can always take Calypso and retire to a warm beach somewhere, old man. I’ll keep your ship and your crew and show them what a really successful pirate enterprise looks like.”
“You barely know which end of a gun the boom comes out of, Navarre,” Sokolov retorted.
Javier smiled. Hopefully, the fools listening were getting their money’s worth from this. Before the first meeting aboard the Land Leviathan, Javier might have thought that man was serious.
They had gone to a different place in their relationship, after that, Javier and Zakhar.
The Bryce Connection.
Concord fleet officers. Retired now, but once upon a time the good guys. Saving the galaxy from thugs, hoodlums, and Neu Berne.
The good, old days.
They had both forgotten it, somewhere along the way. But now, it was back.
“Well, I’m here,” Javier said into the microphone.
The words were translated into pulses of light an
d shined off the hull of the shuttle by a laser. Over there, a receiver recognized them, decoded them, and turned them into words to play into a radio transmitter.
“We’ll be along shortly, punk,” Sokolov’s voice came back a moment later.
Another laser-to-secondary system relay.
It was weird, talking this way, but the bogeyman was close.
Coming for their souls, as it were.
“Put some sand down on the flight deck,” Navarre said cruelly. “Wouldn’t want you to slip when we duel. I want to see the look in your eyes when you die.”
“Hopefully you know a good necromancer, then,” Sokolov fired back. “Someone who can raise your sorry ghost from hell in about a hundred years so I can laugh at you from my death bed.”
“I’m not the one hiding under a cloak, Sokolov,” Javier observed.
“Look over your shoulder,” Zakhar said in a hard voice.
Seriously, Javier was going to have to buy the man drinks. He hadn’t had this much fun in a long time. Not since ’Mina left.
Del rolling his eyes was too much. Javier closed the comm channel so he could just laugh out loud and be done with it.
“Oh, shit,” Del shouted, hands suddenly gripping the flight controls tightly and furiously toggling buttons.
Javier checked his seatbelt and pulled everything a little tighter.
Something big was in the process of uncloaking, almost on top of them.
Part Four
Turner let the butterflies in her stomach have a vote.
It was all too pat, Navarre and Sokolov. Too smooth.
Too wrong.
Sokolov knew she was here, yet talked like he had chased her off, when he was the one that had barely escaped destruction.
Navarre knew there was somebody here. Hell, he claimed to have captured her ground team, so Creator only knows what he had gotten out of them.
And yet at no point had they discussed the party-crasher.
Turner finally realized that she’d been had.
The gaps in the conversation had thrown her off balance, as intended.
At that moment, she wasn’t sure which man she hated more, but Navarre won out purely on the contract to bring him back alive.
The cubesat was running in a bizarre orbit that had taken them two tries to match.
Who the hell inserted off-plane over a strange planet?
Bastards.
The shuttle had come up and north from somewhere around thirty-three degrees south latitude. At least, that was where it had been when they picked it up. It had climbed up to orbit just about as predictably as an autopilot.
Autopilot.
Shit. There was nobody aboard it, was there?
Navarre had talked a big game, challenged Sokolov to a duel in orbit. Pink slips and the girl.
Turner had forgotten that there were two shuttles down on the surface.
Everyone had.
Navarre was on the other one right now, sneaking away.
He had done the same thing as Sokolov with the damned cubesat. Launch it loud and ugly. Keep a tight communications laser locked between them.
Smoke and mirrors.
“Sensors,” she called loudly, mostly angry at herself. “We’ve been had. That shuttle is empty. Find me the other one. That’s where the bastard is at.”
It was like the whole bridge groaned on cue. Each barely a whisper. Collectively, a growl bordering on rage.
“Should we kill it?” the gunner asked, flipping her brown hair back in exasperation.
“Negative,” Turner said. “Hold the cloak.”
Which way would Navarre run?
The man had a mixed rep. Slaughtered Salekhard and then had Sokolov shatter the corpse with guns. Snuck into Shangdu and out again without anyone being killed.
Took out her ground fighters so readily that all of them were taken prisoner.
Misdirection. That has to be it. We’re thinking in straight lines and he’s running on French curves.
Turner flipped a coin in her head.
“Pilot,” she called. “Get me to the south pole soonest. Look for the other shuttle to be sneaking out like his tail feathers were on fire.”
North would risk flying right below Ajax, at a time when they might be looking down and see it anyway, passive sensors or not.
“On it.”
The ship groaned this time, gyros down below suddenly leaning into the vessel’s mass and inertia, like a sloop coming hard into a windward turn. Lights flickered as the engines put everything into a push and the auxiliary generators stuttered, trying to pick up the slack.
Turner imagined the air itself growing a little stale as every erg of power went to movement and not comfort, but that would be minutes from now.
“Contact,” the sensors officer called, her buzzed red hair like a crimson halo. “Tallyho.”
Target in sight.
“Intercept plotted, Captain,” the pilot called, twitching her long, black braid as she turned to look.
“Go,” Turner commanded. “Ionization only on the shuttle, if he refuses to heave to. Keep the guns ready for Sokolov. He’ll come out to play rather than let us have Navarre.”
“Roger that,” the gunner responded, fingers dancing across her boards every instant as she updated her firing solutions.
I have you now, you son of a bitch.
Part Five
In addition to everything his new science officer had done for the crew, Zakhar Sokolov decided, stealing the entire sensor package off of a dedicated probe-cutter had made a great deal of the hassle worth it.
“Got him,” Gibney almost sang the words. “Piet, come to zero-one-zero, up thirty, and accelerate hard.”
Zakhar kept his mouth shut as Gibney and Piet worked. The sensor feed hit his secondary screen a few moments later.
Yeah, that was Del flying. Zakhar didn’t know anybody else capable of doing that with a shuttle, even one as rugged as Del’s.
Straight up. Accelerating still. Engines probably red-lined and holding at a temperature hot enough to cook eggs right on the casing.
Needs must, when the Devil drives.
Impressive, considering the amount of mass wanting to fall backwards into the gravity well.
“Gibney,” Zakhar called after a moment. “Anything?”
Give the kid credit. He stopped and reviewed all of his boards for several seconds before he looked up.
“Negative, sir,” he said. “Us and Del.”
Unlikely, but let the kid have his moment of triumph anyway.
“Mary-Elizabeth,” Zakhar turned his head to see her smile. “Roll your torpedo now. Prepare to engage Ajax the instant we drop our cloak to pick up Del. Hit them with anything and everything you have.”
She smiled inquisitively.
“Yes,” Zakhar breathed heavily. “That includes firing one of the onboard torpedoes as well. I’d rather survive the day.”
“Hot damn!” she declared, thumbing a comm switch. “Damage control teams, jettison your bird and prepare for combat.”
Zakhar watched various signals all go green around his board.
All that dancing. All the maneuvering in the darkness. It all came down to this.
Zakhar thought about the first girl he had ever seduced in the back seat of his dad’s flitter. Today had that same dangerous edge.
“Preference on the approach, Captain?” Piet finally asked.
“Shields max on all facings,” he replied. “Assume Sykora will shoot us on general principle when we uncloak. Come up on Del hot and straight. Let him sideslip into the bay under power and hope nobody screws up getting him locked down. As soon as the flight deck signals that he’s secure, jump. I don’t care where. Well away. Andreea and her engineers can rebuild the matrix again a second time. We have to survive first.”
“Understood, Captain,” Piet said, pressing a big, red comm button. “All hands. Brace for emergency maneuvering and possible impact.”
Anybody bu
t Del flying that shuttle, and it would be probable impact.
That crazy, old man was good enough to pull it off.
They needed every second, every bit of luck, if they were going to make it out of here alive.
Part Six
Javier held his breath as the monstrous shape took form, almost on top of them.
Cloaks didn’t make a ship invisible, but a gray knifeblade, nose-on, at a few kilometers distance was as close as you could get to the same thing. Certainly, the sensors barely had anything to go on, until you were too close to escape.
The life of a pirate and his victim.
The screen took on a pinkish hue as Sykora let loose with her landing guns. Trust her to try to tickle that whale to death. Trust Del to have tuned visible parts of the damned beam to magenta.
“Did someone order a taxi?” Sokolov asked over a tight beam laser that was suddenly painting the side of Del’s chariot.
“You’re damned right I did,” Del yelled back. “How are we doing this? I’m going too fast.”
“Planned for that, Del,” Zakhar said. “Cut your engines now and prepare to be swallowed. We’ll come along-side. You use maneuvering thrusters and yaw to get aboard.”
“At this speed?” Del roared. “Are you even crazier than Navarre?”
Javier lost it and started giggling when Piet’s voice came on the line.
“You tell me,” the big Dutchman said. “If you don’t think you’re good enough anymore, Del, we can always slow down to a polite speed for you. Need a walker?”
Del’s response might have made Javier’s grandmother blush. Which was saying something, all things considered. A saint, that woman was not.
A second later, Javier got a front row seat to a master class in extreme orbital docking maneuvers. Even at his craziest, he wouldn’t have tried something like this. Sure as hell not at this speed.
“Oh, shit,” Del suddenly yelled.