The Eye of Orion_Book 1_Gearjackers

by Mitch Michaelson

  “Cyrus isn’t infectious in any way, Pilot Yuina,” Hawking replied.

  “Good then he’s just plain crazy. I’m going back to my station.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Prey

  The Eye of Orion came out of FTL travel and flew into a trinary star system. In the center a pair of stars orbited each other closely, and a third star orbited at a far distance. Planets orbited the binary pair.

  They had jumped away from the Vadyanika fast and used all of their stored energy. This put them quite far away.

  During the jump, people had returned to their stations. Steo asked Governor to help Cyrus acclimate. Cyrus’s metabolism was still running fast and Hawking predicted it would continue for about a week, so Cyrus needed to consume a lot of energy. Governor was happy to help him get a good meal.

  Steo and Renosha walked toward the dining room.

  “I feel sorry for him, a little,” Steo said.

  “He’s evaluating his place in the universe,” Renosha said.

  “How do you think he’ll turn out?”

  “Cyrus wasn’t made evil. No one is,” Renosha said. “Everyone has a right to decide who they’re going to be. Some understand they have a responsibility to do so.”

  Cyrus sat in the dining room over an empty plate. He looked at a wall panel, scrolling around the known galaxy. At first his search was determined, then it became frantic, and finally glum. He didn’t find anything he recognized. With no evidence for what he thought he remembered, he was forced to question his own knowledge. His heart told him one thing. The facts told him another. The truth was indisputable: he was a symbiant, a human being rapidly grown on a science vessel, and implanted with false memories.

  As Steo and Renosha walked into the dining room, Cyrus struck the panel. “What am I, a plant?”

  Governor shook his head at Steo. “As requested, I have assisted Mister Cyrus with nourishment, but I’m afraid I can only help the body, not the mind.”

  Steo and Renosha sat across from Cyrus.

  “Cyrus,” Steo said. “I can’t pretend to understand what you’re going through right now.”

  Renosha sat and bowed his head as if dozing off. His eyes weren’t focused.

  “Maybe think of it like this: we liberated you from bad people. I don’t want you to feel worse, but you’re free from whatever plans they had. You’re free! You can go anywhere, do anything,” Steo said.

  “Everywhere I would go is a myth,” Cyrus said. “You and your robots can tell me where I am. But can you tell me who I am, Steo?”

  From Steo’s optimistic viewpoint of the galaxy, Cyrus had a clean slate. He could go anywhere, do anything.

  “No, I can’t tell you who you are Cyrus. That’s not my choice to make.”

  Cyrus laughed. “I keep realizing the lie of it all. You’re not even the Appointed One. Your robot isn’t the advisor who would provide knowledge of my people.”

  “Hmm. I’m not?” Renosha said, looking up.

  Governor looked upon Cyrus with pity.

  Steo said, “You’re free to remain on board until you get your feet. Talk to the crew and the robots, read what’s on the ship’s computers. You’ll see there’s a galaxy out there.” He didn’t want to go into a speech when Cyrus was in a sensitive mood.

  Governor said, “I will make you comfortable as possible, Mister Cyrus. You need only ask.”

  The Fire Scorpion arrived in the trinary star system. Admiral Slaught ordered them to battle stations. He commanded Bridge XO Pesht to actively scan for the Eye of Orion.

  On board the Eye of Orion, Hawking detected unusual emissions. He couldn’t identify them yet. It was possible they were normal background radiation. He alerted Glaikis and together they studied them.

  Steo and Cyrus’s conversation was interrupted by a red alert. They rushed to the bridge.

  Glaikis said, “We’re being scanned. We’re spotted for sure, but we don’t know by who.”

  “Low on energy, e-cores nearly drained,” warned Tully’s voice.

  “Here she comes,” said Glaikis.

  The front panel showed the solar system and a dot moving toward them.

  Hawking said, “The data indicates a military vessel larger than ours.”

  “How far away? Were they already here? This system should be vacant,” Steo said.

  “Fast! They’re coming at us fast!” Yuina said.

  Renosha gestured for Cyrus to follow him into the holobridge.

  “Hail them,” Steo said.

  Hawking said, “There is no data on how long they’ve been in system.”

  “Standard greeting sent,” Glaikis said.

  The other ship didn’t reply to the hail. The moment the words FIRE SCORPION appeared, missile dots also appeared.

  Yuina kept her mouth shut and shook her head. Hawking described the situation although everyone could see that they were under attack. The missiles flew far faster than those launched by the pirates. Yuina barely got shields up when the missiles surrounded their ship and detonated. The Eye of Orion was sprayed with shrapnel but the shields held.

  Hawking warned, “Pilot Yuina, if you accelerate while surrounded by debris –”

  “I know what a couple hundred thousand miles per hour through a cloud of metal does!”

  They didn’t have the energy to go to FTL speed yet. Yuina flew away from the Fire Scorpion anyway. In space, the Eye of Orion looked like it was moving backward. The debris stripped away some of the shields but they didn’t fall.

  The robot Leech arrived in the Fire Scorpion’s bridge. The room was a whirl of activity. Slaught observed as Pesht moved from one crewman to the next. Reports came in from the tactical and countermeasure teams. The tacticians estimated that the Eye of Orion didn’t have enough energy to make an FTL jump. The countermeasures team watched for any sign of electronic intrusion.

  They determined that the smaller ship was new, with advanced defenses and its shields were still up. This was no science vessel.

  “Those were weak missiles Steo,” Glaikis said. “They have many that are more dangerous.”

  The Eye of Orion flew away from the Fire Scorpion but the distance was closing.

  “Instructions,” Yuina requested.

  Hawking said, “If I may, Master Steo?”

  “Go ahead Hawking,” Steo said as he ran back into the holobridge. Renosha and Cyrus had created a hologram of the battle. Steo wasn’t a tactician. His only thought was escape.

  Hawking described a tactic to Yuina. She said, “You want me to ride the gravitational fence? I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know how to do it.” Hawking instructed her.

  In a multiple-star system, gravitational forces were considerably more complicated than in a single-star system. Yuina flew to a point between the binary pair and the outer third star, where the gravitational pulls were equal. By weaving back and forth across the plane, simple automatic systems couldn’t keep up. The missiles would get sudden shifts in the pulls and fail to adjust quickly enough.

  The Fire Scorpion’s tactical team noticed the maneuver and advised the bridge. Pesht launched a Stalker missile, which had a sophisticated tracking mechanism.

  Yuina adjusted rapidly, keeping the Eye of Orion moving and weaving. Glaikis and Hawking fed her information.

  The Stalker used all of its computational ability. It closed.

  Glaikis fired chaff. Hawking launched a decoy drone. Both had no effect.

  Steo brought up his own apps and tried to divert the Stalker missile. This was no old pirate junk. Steo realized it would take minutes to crack its security, minutes they didn’t have.

  Seeing that riding the gravitational fence wasn’t affecting their tracker and weaving was slowing them down, Yuina took a direct course away. Suddenly the Stalker sped up. She made a last-second maneuver that prevented a direct hit. The Stalker detonated, firing a shaped-charge explosion. The Eye of Orion was saturated in flying metal. The right front weapon pod was violently torn away. Eve
ryone was flung to the left but came to a soft landing as internal controls adjusted to the shock.

  Yuina sat up straight with a trickle of blood from her right eye. Her face had hit the side of the chair.

  Amidst the earsplitting squeal of alarms Hawking said, “Had you not diverted so suddenly our ship would be destroyed, Pilot Yuina.”

  “Can’t keep this up forever,” she said through gritted teeth. “They’ll use an atomic soon.”

  “I have something!” Steo shouted from the holobridge. On the front panel a spot highlighted and flashed. “Go there! You told me you could stop on a comet!”

  It was a comet, and a big one too.

  Steo hoped his trick would work. His ship was wounded and everyone’s lives were in grave danger.

  “Gone sir,” said a crewman on the Fire Scorpion.

  “They don’t have the energy to escape by FTL,” Pesht said. “They went around that comet.”

  “They probably just went dark,” another crewman said. Pesht snarled at him for voicing an opinion.

  The Fire Scorpion rounded the comet and sensors showed nothing.

  Admiral Slaught said, “Slow, but continue on course. Do a full scan. I have an idea where they are.”

  Pesht grinned.

  “We have a matter of minutes before they discover us, Master Steo,” Hawking said.

  The Eye of Orion was on the dark side of the comet, floating in its tail. The comet’s dust and gas were harmless to their shields but obscured them.

  “They’re not accepting hails, and they’re obviously hostile with highly advanced missiles,” Steo said.

  “Neither running nor fighting seems an option,” Renosha said.

  Steo said, “That maneuver – riding the gravitational fence – it was designed to confuse missiles, right?”

  “Yes sir,” Hawking said.

  “Let’s try that again but a different way.” If the crew wanted direction, he had ideas to spare.

  “Spinebreaker missiles loaded sir,” a crewman said.

  “Found them, Admiral! You were right, sir! They’re hiding in the comet tail,” said another.

  “Full about,” Pesht ordered.

  Glaikis said, “We’ve been discovered.” She was used to being the aggressor, hunting pirate ships from large, powerful knight-mercenary vessels. She hadn’t been this worried about dying in a long time. It wasn’t something she relished.

  “Yuina, take us out but not too fast. Head directly between the binary stars,” Steo said.

  The tirrian did as she was told, but now had a look of concern on her face. The forces between two stars so close to one another were tremendous.

  As soon as they cleared the comet, the Fire Scorpion changed course to follow.

  “Use everything if you have to!” Steo said.

  The Eye of Orion raced toward the big orbs of fire.

  Cyrus looked at the hologram. “We’re going to fly into the suns?”

  “I believe Steo is flying between them,” Renosha said.

  “Isn’t that dangerous? Maybe I’m new, but even I know about radiation,” Cyrus said.

  “It’s sort of like running through the rain. If we do it fast enough, we won’t be burned to a crisp,” Steo said. “Yuina, wait for it …”

  The Fire Scorpion launched a salvo of missiles.

  “Now! As fast as you can!”

  Tully’s voice said, “This is all we have, Steo. We’re going to slow down on the other side.”

  The Eye of Orion rushed toward the brilliant suns. Panels flashed warning signs. Hull temperature rose. The shields struggled with the radiation.

  It was a sprint. The corvette barely kept ahead of the missiles. The instant the ship entered the blazing zone, one missile disintegrated, then another.

  The ship’s sensors shut off to avoid overload. The panels were gray. The crew of the Eye of Orion flew blind.

  “Pull up,” ordered Slaught in a gruff command.

  The Fire Scorpion slowed. They watched as their missiles flew into the white-hot zone between the suns and disappeared one by one.

  “Admiral Slaught, what do you think they’ll do?” Pesht asked. He was a fine tactical officer but was used to deferring to his Admiral.

  “If we fly to the other side and fire missiles, they’ll pull the same trick,” Slaught replied.

  “You want the ship destroyed?” the kalam XO asked.

  “We’ve tried damaging them,” Slaught said. “I would rather destroy them then see them escape.”

  The Admiral was a mercenary, used to cutting losses. He normally made fast decisions. The crew awaited his orders. Slaught stared impassively at the main panel for a long minute.

  “Get me the tactical section. We need some missiles reprogrammed,” Slaught ordered.

  “No sign of the enemy ship yet,” Glaikis reported. They sat motionless on the other side of the suns. The crew was quiet, everyone on edge for another attack. They didn’t know why they were attacked, much less how they had been found. The Fire Scorpion’s motives were unknown.

  Yuina leaned back, her platinum-and-blue hair hanging flat and straggly. She wiped the blood from her cheek and blinked. She touched her face, making sure her eye socket wasn’t broken.

  Renosha said, “Steo, if I may? I’m no science robot like Hawking, but as I understand these new drives, they gather graviton energy and use it to convert the ship into tachyons for faster-than-light travel.”

  Hawking said, “Well actually they form a massless bubble –”

  “Roughly correct Renosha,” Steo interrupted.

  “We require a lot of energy to do that, which takes a lot of time to gather, correct?” Renosha asked.

  “Correct,” Hawking said. “Because gravity is a weak force, it takes time to collect.”

  Renosha pointed to the two blazing suns in the center of the holobridge. “Is it weak between them?”

  Steo looked at the suns and realized what Renosha was saying. The gravitational pull of the two suns was immense. “Tully, keep gathering energy. I know it won’t be much but we’ll need something.”

  Slaught directed the Fire Scorpion to fly under the binary suns, to the other side. Before long they detected the smaller ship.

  When they were within range, Pesht launched a salvo of cheap shrapnel missiles. The Fire Scorpion was equipped with countless of them. They watched as the Eye of Orion withdrew into the zone of radiation between the two suns, where the missiles disintegrated.

  The destroyer launched Stalker missiles in multiple directions. The missiles found their targets: stationary points in space where they stopped and waited for their secondary target to appear.

  The Eye of Orion remained in the zone between the burning spheres. Massive bursts of solar wind pulsed in that zone.

  “They can’t survive in there,” Pesht said as he observed the front panel.

  Unlike the area around it, the interior of the Eye of Orion was dim and cool. The panels were shut off. Yuina balanced the pulls from the two stars.

  In the engine compartment, Tully moved between consoles. The e-cores were below one percent but rising. He verified the gravitational forces on the ship. They were intense. He opened the collectors on the main engines and watched the energy flow in. Converters which normally pulsed slowly turned white, flickering faster than the eye could see. Some of the energy had to be redirected to the shields to keep the ship from burning up.

  Even though it was chilly inside engineering, Tully sweated. Unlike Glaikis, this was the kind of trial he enjoyed. Boredom back in the Tarium arm was killing him. Tully balanced many factors, keeping the ship in one piece while gathering gravitons.

  Hawking’s voice came over the air with a sense of urgency. “Rising pressure on the shields. Plasma increase indicates an incoming coronal mass ejection. Magnitude … immeasurable. Plasma wave will impact in forty three seconds.”

  “That means we’re going to need more shields, Tooly,” Yuina said. She barely knew the people
she was relying on, and it worried her.

  “I’m on it, kid.” Tully stopped and looked at a console. “Maybe … did you? Where did you put those credits … I wonder …”

  He looked at a panel and smiled. He spoke over the comm. “We should be fine. Thank Steo for investing in the new Avert/Ward shields. I just raised them.”

  The plasma wave was tens of thousands of miles wide and hundreds of miles deep. It washed over the little ship. Minutes passed. When it was gone, the Eye of Orion remained. Its shields had held. These particular shields held well against slow increases in radiation. The missing weapons pod proved they didn’t hold up as well against shrapnel.

  Steo asked for a status report. No one was hurt. Hawking verified the ship’s status. Nevertheless, Steo’s stomach was in knots. This was more trouble than he had counted on. His ship was wounded and they would have to work to survive.

  Tully confirmed that they were gathering graviton energy at a high rate and should be able to make an FTL jump soon.

  Glaikis had bad news. “We can’t go to faster-than-light travel while in this zone. Nothing could account for the variables.”

  “All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” Steo said. “Direct the ship out and begin flying. This will take perfect timing.”

  “That is no pirate.” Slaught paced the bridge.

  “I haven’t seen maneuvers like that before,” Pesht agreed.

  “We know its name but not its affiliation?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Yet they knew precisely where the Vadyanika was. In addition, they knew what was on board or why else steal it,” Slaught said, thinking aloud.

  Leech had his arms folded behind his back like he usually did. “The maneuvers and generic hail indicate a talented crew. The countermeasures team has evaluated the invasive attempt on our missiles. Their assessment is the hacker could have cracked our missiles’ systems and used them against us.”