The Eye of Orion_Book 1_Gearjackers

by Mitch Michaelson

  Pesht was startled at that.

  Slaught said, “It’s been a while since I’ve faced a skilled enemy.”

  Most of the panels inside the Eye of Orion were still gray, overloaded by the waves of energy from the suns. The front panel was stuck with an image, an estimate of their position.

  “Where did we see the Fire Scorpion last?” Steo said. It was odd to think of a strange ship as his enemy, attempting to destroy them without a single communication.

  “There,” Hawking highlighted it on the front panel.

  “Fly off to the side a bit. Does everyone understand what needs to happen here? Everyone know their role?”

  They confirmed. The Eye of Orion began flying out of the radiation zone between the binary stars. As soon as their sensors came up, they could see the Fire Scorpion. The destroyer launched a missile and several others appeared out of nowhere.

  The missiles closed. The crew of the corvette launched a handful of decoy drones and some chaff. Just as the missiles reached their position, Yuina punched the FTL flight button.

  The target was enveloped by nuclear explosions. Pesht was satisfied. He returned to his metal chair and climbed up its side. The dot indicating the corvette was gone.

  “Dead and gone,” he announced.

  Slaught called his men to the bridge, including Boc and Hack.

  Slaught said to Pesht, “Set heading to station Vector Zero.”

  To his mercenaries he said, “Make this known at Vector Zero. Offer ten million credits for the Eye of Orion.”

  Pesht looked shocked. His stalk hung limply. He jumped down and ran to a crewman, who pointed at his panel. There was no debris, only a cloud of radiation and a faint line indicating a ship that had just jumped to FTL speed.

  Slaught left the bridge.

  CHAPTER 29

  Factions

  Glaikis grabbed Steo in a big hug when they made the jump. Yuina whooped. Tully cheered from down in engineering.

  Everyone relaxed once they were far from the trinary star system. Glaikis picked an empty point in space several light years away, stopped, then jumped again. No one could discover where they were headed.

  They flew for almost a day along the Percaic arm, eventually stopping in a system with a pulsar. The star gave off bursts of electromagnetic radiation every few minutes, in the shape of cones from the poles. Planets tens of thousands of light years away would see those pulses one day far in the future.

  The planets in the system had no atmospheres. There were no signs of life.

  Steo fretted over the state of the ship. He ran every test twice, with the help of Hawking. The Eye of Orion was banged up by the space battle and massive radiation, but it was still functional.

  When they established orbit around the sun, Tully began charging the engines. Some parts had overloaded when they were between the binary stars. The shields and hull plating showed wear. Tully had plenty of work to do, and activity made the engineer happy.

  Governor checked Yuina to make sure she didn’t have a concussion. He said, “The amount of cursing seems to indicate you’re feeling better, Miss Yuina.” She grumbled.

  A purple icon appeared on the upper corner of each panel, a maintenance warning for a refresh. If they ignored it, rooms would need to be closed off and the air would get stale. Tully advised that before the long process of gathering energy for the jump back to the Tarium arm, they had to refresh. Glaikis checked charts for a station or planet where they could recharge gases.

  Cyrus caught up with Steo in the holobridge. Steo was running scans on the damage.

  “Why do people defer to you, Steo?” Cyrus asked.

  “Oh, this is my ship, Cyrus. I bought it and hired everybody. Glaikis is navigator, Tully is engineer and Yuina is pilot.”

  “Hawking is the science robot and Governor is your nanny robot, right? What about Renosha?” Cyrus asked.

  “Valet. Governor is my valet. And I found Renosha on a planet in the Tarium arm. He’s a Senex, a sage or advisor robot.”

  “You don’t have a gunner, I saw that.”

  “We don’t have guns.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Cyrus had something on his mind, but didn’t share it with Steo.

  Glaikis found a small mining venture. The solar system wasn’t far. The charts indicated a satellite orbiting a gas giant. The satellite was capable of refreshing ships.

  “How the heck do we have this info? This is obscure for Tully to find in public networks,” she said.

  “Before you and I entered Kurzia Station, I had Hawking use my apps to hack into private networks, including other docked ships,” Steo said. “We should a complete survey of the region.”

  Glaikis plotted a course and Yuina took them there. They decided to stay on board. It was a quick trip. They appeared, docked, transmitted some credits to the satellite and were back in the pulsar system within hours.

  The next few days were spent repairing and preparing for the long jump. Steo directed the bridge crew to maintain active scans. They didn’t know why the Fire Scorpion was after them but it didn’t take much guessing: they’d stolen someone’s experiment. While alert, the crew’s nerves settled down.

  The next day, Hawking announced that a ship had entered the system. It came out of FTL flight and didn’t move further. They detected a distress signal from it. Scans showed that was the only signal the ship transmitted. It was an older merchant vessel, a standard design with little weapons or armor, and a big belly for cargo. The ancient nuclear reactor was leaking into space. The merchant ship wasn’t gathering energy to jump again.

  Steo had Yuina fly them closer to see if they could help. Hawking verified it was a harmless merchant damaged by weapons fire. External explosions had torn several compartments open, including the reactor.

  “Looks like a victim of pirates,” Steo said.

  The name popped up on the front panel, DIGNITY.

  Glaikis said, “The reactor isn’t leaking into the ship. There might be people alive inside. It’s hard to tell. It’s spiraling a little. A living crew would halt that.”

  “Yuina, get closer. Hawking, is the tractor beam powerful enough to correct the ship’s drift?”

  Hawking confirmed. The corvette came alongside the merchant vessel. From fifty feet away, they slowed it to a stop. The Dignity began transmitting a powerful distress signal, bathing the Eye of Orion on all frequencies. The panels flickered. Some went plain gray.

  Steo was talking to Glaikis about the possibility of boarding the Dignity when Renosha came in the bridge.

  “Did you hear that?” the robot asked.

  “Hear what,” Yuina said.

  “A loud noise.”

  “Did your old sensors pick up the distress call?” Yuina asked sarcastically. The ship’s shields blocked signals.

  “No, my old sensors heard something hit the hull,” Renosha said.

  That shut down conversation.

  Hawking reported, “Sensors are being inhibited by the high-intensity distress call.”

  Steo jumped to a console. With one look he said, “We’re being jammed! That’s an electronic interference signal!”

  The crew leapt to work. Glaikis increased power to the sensors and cut through the noise. “I’m not sure I believe this, but they just launched magnetic grapples at us. We’re physically tethered to that ship.”

  “They hid the jamming signal with the distress beacon,” Steo said. He had hidden signals within signals before, and kicked himself for not thinking someone would do it to him.

  They searched for solutions. Yuina didn’t dare fly away. They couldn’t communicate through the electronic trash being blasted at them, and it was unsafe to space-walk to cut the cables linking the ships. Tractors beams weren’t powerful enough to push the Dignity away or snap the cables. Even if they had missiles, that wouldn’t help.

  The Dignity’s distress signal cut off. The panels kicked in. In front of them on the main panel, the Eye of Orion sat next to the Digni
ty. A fleet of ships approached fast. More appeared near to the corvette, materializing from FTL flight. They were small ships with names like Hellion, Black Spiral and Tormentor.

  Hawking said, “It’s a ragtag armada of armed ships, Master Steo. The largest is the Berserk Fury. We’re being hailed by them now sir.”

  Steo said to Tully over the ship-wide comm, “T-mek, now’s your chance to prove yourself. We need a way to detach those magnetic grapples!”

  “I’m working on reversing polarity of the ship’s hull but it will take a bit!”

  Steo was frustrated but nodded to Hawking. The front panel changed. A man on a gold-plated throne with purple velvet cushions appeared. The fat man smiled.

  Steo spoke first. “A throne? You couldn’t find a more obvious way to introduce yourself as a pirate?”

  The grinning man said, “You fell for a lure? You couldn’t find a more obvious way to say you’re a bitch?”

  There was plenty of laughter aboard the Berserk Fury.

  “My name is Roi Tanner, and there’s a big bounty on you and your ship: ten million credits. I’m gonna claim that. You hold right there. You don’t have a choice though, do you?”

  The Tormentor drifted closer. Hawking confirmed the pirate fleet had many weapons, ready to fire. Yuina doubted she could get to FTL flight fast enough, even if they weren’t tethered.

  “We’re so skewed,” Yuina said.

  Glaikis said, “There’s a skeleton crew on the Dignity. They’ve released a couple of the cables.”

  “T-mek, do you have anything?” Steo asked.

  “I need more time! At least a few minutes,” he replied.

  “We’re not going to get that,” Glaikis said.

  Renosha said, “The Tormentor intends to board us when they get close enough.”

  “A bounty?” Steo asked.

  “It’s been several days. If the Fire Scorpion put the bounty on us, the news could have spread far and wide by now,” Glaikis said.

  Hawking said, “If that is so, then our trip to get refreshed at that mining facility could have been the trail they followed.”

  “Steo, do you know I dream of nuclear missiles?” Yuina said. “Seriously. Last night I dreamt about shooting nuclear missiles out of my fingers.”

  “I’m not sure they would do us much good in this situation,” Hawking said.

  “A bounty on this ship? It’s not worth ten million credits. Interesting. They might want Cyrus back,” Renosha said.

  The Eye of Orion was helpless. They threw out several ideas, but none would work. Any action they took would destroy them.

  Suddenly the Tormentor erupted in a blast. The front and back sections were split as a larger ship’s nose came through it. The name TORMENTOR flickered on the panels and went out, replaced with the words SAVAGE AVATAR.

  The Savage Avatar flew through the wreckage of the pirate vessel and slowed, positioning itself between the pirates and the Eye of Orion.

  “That’s … impossible,” Glaikis said.

  Ships never rammed other ships. The combined mass and velocity would disintegrate both.

  Hawking said, “The new ship is a battlecruiser named the Savage Avatar. It’s several classes larger than our ship, and the pirates. It didn’t technically ram, Navigator Glaikis. It cut the Tormentor with an energy weapon then pushed the pieces aside with its powerful shields.”

  No one on the Eye of Orion knew how to react. The large cruiser sat between them and the pirates. It looked battle-scarred and angry. It rotated to face the Berserk Fury.

  The Savage Avatar broadcast an open message. The panel showed a youthful man in shiny black armor, with mismatched eyes and awful scars on his face. He smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile.

  “Hello, father,” said the young captain of the Savage Avatar.

  “Blage!” said Roi Tanner.

  “Caught up with you, didn’t I,” Blage said.

  “By the dead gods of a thousand worlds, are you still following me? When will your craving for revenge end?” replied the captain of the Berserk Fury.

  “When you float in cold-space,” Blage said.

  “Are you still on about that girl?” The pirate captain laughed with his crewmen. “I can’t tell you what number that one was. I don’t remember whores all that well.”

  Blage seethed and they argued.

  A signal came to the Eye of Orion from the Savage Avatar. Hawking established it in the corner of the main panel. It was an older man, bald, with a mechanism where his left ear should be. “This is Nurl, from the knight-mercenary battlecruiser Savage Avatar. Move out of this system. This is a personal matter. We won’t share the bounties for these ships.”

  Steo replied, “Is that an order?”

  “We won’t make any more attempts to protect your ship. You’ll probably get caught in the crossfire. Captain Blage doesn’t wish you harm, so he strongly advises that you leave.” The man cut off the transmission.

  Renosha said, “Steo, if we leave while the pirates are occupied, they won’t be able to see which direction we took.”

  “They split a ship open like a melon. I don’t want to stick around for the rest of this fight,” Glaikis said.

  Steo said, “Agreed!” and they began plotting a way out.

  Tully’s voice said, “Ready! I can disconnect most of those magnetic grapples but not all of them.”

  “That’s okay,” Glaikis said. “They disconnected some already. Get it done now! We need to get out of here!”

  Back on the main panel, the pirate captain said, “Tell you what boy, I’ll let you live. You seem damnably hard to kill anyway. Get out of the way. I just want the reward for that little corvette. I’ll let the crew go.”

  “No more lies.” Blage pointed and yelled, “Die by fire!”

  A volley left the Savage Avatar. Two pirate ships were vaporized.

  Tully announced, “Only a couple grapples remain!”

  Yuina took the Eye of Orion away from the battle with the Dignity in tow. Pushing on it with the tractor beams didn’t have any effect. She raised the shields to max and came to a halt. The Dignity bounced off. Then she rapidly accelerated, snapping the remaining grapples.

  Nuclear explosions expanded behind them. The pirates used open communications, shouting back and forth. They were in abject terror of the Savage Avatar.

  Soon the Eye of Orion was beyond communications range. They moved behind the pulsar and shot off into FTL flight.

  “Yuina, take us into deep space,” Steo said. Deep space was anywhere far from solar systems. Again they made several jumps to prevent being followed.

  The Percaic arm had proven itself chaotic and hazardous once again. They breathed a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER 30

  Radiant Trail

  “You can’t blame us, mercenary!” shouted the captain of the Hellion.

  Admiral Slaught stood in the bridge of the Fire Scorpion, facing the front panel. “Watch your tone, pirate. You may have escaped the Savage Avatar, but you would not escape me.”

  “Fine, whatever you say. The ship you were looking for, Orion’s Eyes, was there.” A few pirate ships had fled from the father-son battle. No one waited to see who won.

  “The Eye of Orion fled?” Slaught asked.

  “Yeah, we didn’t get a flight path on it when it left,” the pirate captain said. “You owe me something for this!”

  Slaught considered his options. At his side, Pesht prepared to obliterate the pirate at a moment’s notice.

  “I will give you a thousand credits for this information, and another two thousand if you provide the complete data you collected from the battle,” Slaught said.

  “Done.” The pirate closed the link.

  “Let them be, Pest. They have something I need,” Slaught said.

  Pesht removed his hand from the console.

  Leech arrived in the bridge. “Admiral Slaught, the last of the men are returning. I believe they have spread the bounty far and wide.”<
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  “The pirate off our port who just saw the Eye of Orion might be proof of that,” Pesht said derisively.

  Heading off a petty argument, Slaught said, “Leech, check the data coming from the Hellion. I’m looking for a pattern in the Eye of Orion’s radiation.”

  Leech said with a bow, “If I may humbly observe Admiral, that ship doesn’t have a nuclear reactor.”

  Slaught said nothing in reply, so Leech nodded and left the bridge.

  In the holobridge, Steo studied charts, looking for free stations, inhabited planets or any repair point. The Percaic arm didn’t have many of those.

  Everyone met in the dining room and Governor served hot drinks. Tully gave a detailed damage report. The ship had lost more than paint, but nothing prevented them from flying home. Yuina’s eye was puffy but otherwise she was fine. It was hard to see bruises on the purple-skinned alien girl.

  They were analyzing their security when the alarms went off.

  “What?” Steo shouted.

  They rushed to the bridge and saw the Fire Scorpion racing toward them.

  “It seems nowhere is safe for us,” Renosha said.

  Hawking said, “This borders on the unfeasible, Master Steo.”

  Yuina was already in her chair and the Eye of Orion was moving.

  “How?” Steo asked, exasperated. “One ship in a whole galaxy just can’t be found accidentally.”

  The Fire Scorpion bore down on them, almost close enough to launch missiles.

  Yuina didn’t wait for instructions. She made sure the Eye of Orion was at a full stop and jumped.

  Glaikis yelled, “I didn’t have time to put a course in!”

  “I put one in,” Yuina said. The ship came out of FTL travel. “One light year away.” Then she jumped again.

  Glaikis tapped furiously on her console to get ahead of the pilot. This was not the side of the hunter/hunted relationship she wanted to be on.

  “I’m getting tired of this game,” Yuina said. “If we don’t get closer to home soon, I’m going to ram the next miraculous appearance of –”