“I’d rather stay, sir,” she answered, eyes glued to the plot.
Seven bells of the first watch. Every pair of eyes on the bridge intent on the chase—a fixity of expression, almost wolfish.
“Ms. Easley, what do you estimate his time to turnover to be?”
“Forty-one minutes for M7, sir. Twenty-six minutes for M5,” the lieutenant commander replied, her clipped tones stiffening her normally smooth voice. “Unless he smokes us, sir.”
As if on cue, Lieutenant Wagner appeared in overlay from his post in CIC. “His drives just spiked, sir. I think he’s made us.”
“Put his energy profile up, Mr. Wagner. Two sigma limits, please, and stand by.” A dense stratum of lines replaced the lieutenant’s young face. The chase had certainly spiked his drives.
“Increase to full,” snapped Sir Phillip. “Mr. Emmanuel, tight beam to Swiftsure with relay to Kestrel: Close the chase, best acceleration. Kestrel will not unmask until directed by me.” That would put Kestrel farther behind but in a good position if the chase tried to double up. Although it would be difficult for him to narrow his trajectory into a hyperbolic about the system’s primary, the captain was not willing to bet it could not be done. And he did not wish to reveal his ace-in-the-hole unless he absolutely had to.
“Sending now sir, aye,” Ensign Emmanuel announced briskly. Then: “Acknowledged.”
Sir Phillip gave no more than a nod. Commander Easley had left the chase’s estimated turnover point on the forward screen and it was growing and blurring as his acceleration increased. It was becoming increasingly obvious they no longer had any hope of covering both M5 and M7; they would have to choose, and choose soon.
“What do you make of him, Ms. Easley?”
“He’s fine for M7, sir, on his current tack. He can still make M5 though. He won’t be committed for another twenty-three minutes.”
Sir Phillip pulled his narrow chin and addressed the Signal Lieutenant. “Send Avenger and Swiftsure ahead. Have them lay in a course to make intercept one light-minute short of M5.”
“M5, sir?”
“Just so, Lieutenant. Tell them that they are to be prepared to come about on my order.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Captain Lawrence swiveled his chair again and this time addressed Kris directly. “So, Midshipman. Have you pearls of wisdom to cast before us?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
The captain favored her with that tight-lipped smile. “Do you care to voice an opinion as to where this fellow might be headed? He appears to wish us to think he is pelting headlong for M7. So do we conclude he seeks to fox us and means to break for M5? Or shall we take him at his word?”
How the fuck should I know? He couldn’t really mean to throw this straight on her? Could he? Cathcar and Mantua were both major slaving centers and traffic still moved through Lacaille, though it seemed less likely a fleshex would be headed there. Is this some kind of fucking test? She began to feel the oppressive eyes on her, just as she’d felt them at the inquiry, but there she knew how to find the answer. Here, what should she do? Slavers didn’t run to a goddamn schedule unless they were in a hurry to make a gathering. Should she guess? It was almost a fifty-fifty deal, right?
Kris opened her mouth, feeling everyone on the bridge ready to pounce on whatever she was about to say, and half-formed words practically choked her. A gathering. She brought a fist to her mouth to cover a cough and then cleared her throat. “Ah, sir? What are the dates?”
“Dates, Ms. Kennakris?” His mobile face seemed to express genuine puzzlement.
“The local dates, sir. On Cathcar and Mantua. What day in the season is it?”
Captain Lawrence gave his head an abrupt twitch as though he were trying not to blink and Huron, standing where Kris could not see him, indulged in a covert smile. “Mr. Wagner, ask Commander Ravenswood if she would be so good as to have someone look up the current local dates on Cathcar and Mantua. By season, that is.”
“Yes, sir. One moment, sir.” The line muted. A tense, pregnant air, like the audience of a play’s third act when all is to be revealed. Then Commander Ravenswood appeared. “Sir, Cathcar’s local date is the forty-fourth day of High Summer. On Mantua, it is the sixty-first day of their autumn.”
The hush continued. Kris swallowed. Shit. How many days in Mantua’s autumn? Sixty-four? Or was that Solon? God fucking dammit! Why couldn’t she remember? She’d been there often enough.
“Sir? Can you ask if that’s four days before the winter solstice? On Mantua, I mean.”
Sir Phillip spoke again in a strained, unnatural voice; he was not accustomed to relaying messages for midshipmen. “Commander, would that be four days before the winter solstice on Mantua?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
The Mantua Winter Solstice Gathering: the biggest gathering on that planet during the year. One of the biggest slaver gatherings. Loads of VIPs; captains from all over bringing their bitches. Deals, trades, loans . . . A lightheadedness seized Kris and for a moment she genuinely feared falling. Then her eyes cleared.
“That’s it, sir. Mantua.” Her voice was brusque as she endeavored to conceal its weakness.
“Are you quite sure, Midshipman?”
“As sure as I can be, sir.”
Captain Lawrence seemed oddly reluctant to look away. “Ms. Easley, is there any change in the chase’s trajectory?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Mr. Wagner, is there any change in the chase’s energy profile or emissions?”
“Negative, sir.”
More silence. The tension on the bridge was mounting towards the snapping point, with officers actually beginning to lean forward at their stations.
“Ms. Easley, if Avenger and Swiftsure were to come about and make intercept before M7, how soon must that be done?”
“Swiftsure is on the ragged edge right now, sir. Avenger could wait maybe five minutes.”
“Why the imprecision, Commander?”
“Sir, I’m not entirely confident we’ve seen the chase at his best so far.”
“You suspect he’s foxing us then?”
“I can’t say he isn’t, sir.”
Captain Lawrence grunted. Then: “Mr. Wagner, please update the energy profile for the chase.”
“Two sigma, sir?”
“I should like it raw this time, Lieutenant.”
The strata of colored lines fuzzed into bands of spiky hash. Sir Phillip considered them minutely. Huron left Kris’s side to go stand by the captain’s console and stared with equal intensity. The chase did appear to be running for all he was worth, redlining his bottles. He was in fact running harder than they’d known, chuffing his drives for extra boost. A dangerous practice that; the smoothing of the Poisson filters had masked it. Yet his acceleration seemed less than it should have been, pushing so hard, and what was that shuddering in the plume signature—?
“Foxed us, by God!” Sir Phillip muttered emphatically. He looked up at Huron. “A shunt, I dare say. Or am I deceived?”
“No,” Huron answered. “About seven, eight percent, I’d guess, the way he’s chuffing.” A shunt bled off thrust, usually through emergency exhaust ports in the engine housing. It had risks and care had to be taken to hide the broadening of the plume it caused, and it also produced wake turbulence. But so did chuffing and it was very difficult to spot the difference unless one was quite close—or unusually astute.
“Foxed us!” Captain Lawrence repeated. “Ms. Easley—” But the conning officer had already updated her turnover estimates for the chase’s new energy profile. “Quite. See there? He can still come about three minutes after we’re committed to M7. Well, my friend, we’ll see about that.” The look of tension dissolved, replaced with a renewed predatory gleam, and Captain Lawrence actually rubbed his hands. “Mr. Emmanuel, raise Avenger. She is to come about for M7 immediately and hold that course for fifteen minutes. Tight beam to Swiftsure: ‘Conform to Avenger.’ She may be a trifle le
ss than swift in her motions, although I am sure it will be done with every appearance of alacrity.”
As the lieutenant relayed the message and they watched the evolution unfold, Lawrence looked up at Huron with a devilish smile. “The sluggishness of frigates, you know. In six minutes that will open up a gap in our dispositions, and he will have another four in which to shoot it if he wishes to make M5.”
Sir Phillip sounded almost gleeful, but Kris, watching the plot, failed to see why. She knew only the rudiments of ship handling, but even she could see that with Avenger bearing up for M7 and Swiftsure just finishing her clumsy turn, only Retribution could possibly close the chase before he reached M5, and Retribution had not yet started her turn in pursuit. She knew the battlecruiser was fast, but even at flank acceleration, the chances of intercept could not be better than fifty percent and they were falling every second she held this vector.
Yet Sir Phillip seemed entirely confident. Indeed, his smile was now a most unbecoming grin, and he rubbed his hands briskly again.
“I think it is time we show that fellow over there what a battlecruiser can do. Mr. Martinsen, inquire of Commander Grinenko about the possibility of going to one-hundred-thirty percent on the bottles.” There was the briefest pause, and the helmsman’s relaying of that message echoed loud in the bridge as even some of the senior officers looked a bit pale at the question.
SWO Martinsen took his hand from his earpiece and reported, “Engineer says she can do, sir. But she begs your honor will not keep it up for more than ten minutes.”
That sounded like Deirdre, and Captain Lawrence broke out in a look of intense satisfaction. “Ten minutes shall be more than adequate. Helm, come about. Increase to flank and go to one-thirty on the bottles, if you please.”
The helmsman responded, “All ahead flank and going to one-thirty on the bottles, aye sir.” Then, quite low: “And may all the goddamned fuckin’ sacred martyrs preserve us.” It was not the most politic thing to murmur on a bridge where you could hear a pin drop, but no one, not even Captain Lawrence, saw fit to take issue with the sentiment.
As foretold, the chase came about as soon as the gap materialized, turning on his heel with an ease that was well-nigh breathtaking. He shot ahead, displaying his true form—no tricks now—going all-out in a headlong rush towards M5. For all of three minutes, the chase must have reveled in the excellence of his maneuver, but then the magnitude of the battlecruiser’s acceleration became apparent and signs of panic broke out.
“He’s watering his drives, sir,” Lieutenant Wagner reported and the conning officer concurred. It was a desperate stroke in a ship that size: small craft would inject water molecules directly into the reactor chamber for an instant gain in thrust—some CEF fighters implemented a system to do this called E-boost—and while it could increase acceleration by as much as twenty percent in a fighter, it also greatly increased chamber pressure, and the presence of oxygen had a damping effect on the reaction which would cause the reactor to go subcritical if it was sustained.
Watering your drives was therefore a running gamble between having them shut down due to chamber overpressure, the reaction damping out, or the chamber itself blowing due to a pressure spike, and on a corvette, one of these was sure to happen within a very few minutes. A terrible gamble, then, and a futile one: Retribution continued to gain. Sir Philip and his officers watched with even greater intensity, alert for the smallest signs of any reckless, frantic measure the chase might try next.
“Hail the chase,” he said crisply after a minute had gone by. “Inform him that if he opens hatches or ejects anything whatsoever from his ship, he and his whole crew will be spaced in suits with pinholes in them.”
Kris no longer flinched when the captain threatened that—slow decompression over a matter of hours in a suit with a pinhole leak was perhaps the most agonizing death imaginable—especially after the late Captain Castonguay had ejected some of his ‘cargo’ from his hold before they could board.
“Make that quite clear, Mr. Immanuel,” Sir Phillip continued, “I wish it to be particularly well understood.”
The hail was sent, and with Retribution coming up hand over fist, the chase’s heart died within him. Died utterly, but not fast enough to save his drives: they went into emergency shutdown and the chase became a mere ballistic projectile. They readied the cutter and two armed pinnaces as Retribution drew to within a hundred kilometers, still vigilant.
“Mr. Wagner,” Captain Lawrence called as the boats were preparing.
“Sir?” the young man snapped to something like a seated species of attention at his station.
“I do not believe you have yet had the pleasure of taking possession of a prize.”
“No, sir.”
“I trust you feel that to be within your capabilities?”
“Absolutely, sir!” A bright, shining reply, as near ecstasy as discipline allowed.
“Then be so good as to do so. Select a squad of marines and a party of bosun’s mates—Gunnery Sergeant Thompson and Chief Zayterland might be good choices, but I leave that to you.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The captain regarded the beaming lieutenant with a tolerant smile. “Carry on, Lieutenant.” As Wagner’s cavernous grin disappeared from the forward screen—it remained strangely present in Kris’s mental eye, rather like the Cheshire Cat’s smile—Captain Lawrence turned to her.
“Midshipman?”
“Sir?” Kris blinked, startled out of her reverie.
“As you seem to know something of these flechettes, perhaps you would care to accompany Lieutenant Wagner and give him the benefit of your lights, should questions arise.”
“Ah, yessir. Of co— Aye aye, sir.”
Lawrence favored her with the barest nod of his elongated skull. “Do carry on, Midshipman.”
Chapter Seven
The Chase
Killian's Reach, Hydra Region
They carried on: Kris, Wagner, and a squad of marines in full combat armor led by Gunnery Sergeant Gunnar Thompson, a man so enormous Kris could not imagine where they found for him to bunk, along with a party of bosun’s mates under Senior Chief Pamela Zayterland, a diminutive woman who didn’t quite come up to the middle of Gunny Thompson’s chest, but who matched him pound-for-pound in resolute, unsmiling professional competence.
Coming alongside the heavily modified corvette—or flechette, as the CEF now reckoned it—in Retribution’s largest cutter, they announced their intention to board under the covering guns of the two pinnaces.
The flechette’s master sent his acknowledgement and broke the seal on his main hatch. Chief Zayterland ran a scan to detect any untoward power sources, such as rigged fuel cells or charged weapons, and grunted her acceptance of the negative results. They extended a boarding lamprey and it latched on. Wagner demanded the master open his airlock and prepare to receive them with his mates and all his logs and papers. The master acknowledged that too.
The hatch retracted and the lock opened, revealing the master and two other men, doing their best to look compliant. Zayterland repeated her scan with the same result; the cutter’s hatch opened and Thompson advanced at the head of his marines, their weapons brought to bear. Entering the other ship’s hatch, they fanned out and scanned the passageways of the craft while the master and his mates were careful not to make any abrupt gestures. After a tense minute in which Kris forgot to breathe, Thompson gave the all clear.
Wagner advanced now, followed by Kris, Zayterland and the bosun’s mates. Everyone was in combat armor except Wagner, and he was also the only unarmed person in the party; even Kris had been issued a sidearm. It was a calculated bit of theatre that Kris found pointless, and she would have been quite pleased to go unarmored as well. This was her first experience in a combat suit and she was finding the thing cumbersome, oppressive and vastly annoying: it pinched in some very uncomfortable places. Either marines were more stoic than she knew, or they’d gotten the measurements of the dam
n thing wrong in their hurry to fabricate it. But the pistol on her hip did make her happy.
Stopping in front of the master, Wagner demanded to see his documents and that he provide an explanation of his actions. The master, a thin, youngish-looking man with ruddy skin and long black hair that fell over his shoulders in elegant ringlets, supplied both, the former on a tablet and the latter in a long series of run-on sentences: here was his registry—Ivorian, sir! See the Emir’s own signature?—his cargo manifest and bills of lading, his customs certificates from his last port ‘o call—Qazvan, sir—and his clearance for his destination: Outremeria, a good five days from here.
Why had he run? Wagner wanted to know. Pirates, of course, came the agitated answer. Pirates! The lieutenant expressed disbelief: Did not the master know a CEF warship when he encountered one? A League warship—a battlecruiser? Here? Absurdity! The CEF never patrolled out this far—everyone knew that. What was he to think, being pursued in such a threatening way? His cargo of Maxor herbs—rare herbs used in the making of a unique perfume—was extremely valuable, highly perishable, could not be frozen. Of course he was in a hurry; his ship was one of the few that could make the delivery without spoilage.
Accompanied by these explanations, often repeated, they retired to the bridge to review the logs. Kris followed along while Chief Zayterland and her team went about their survey of the ship. Half the marines went with them—just in case. Gunnery Sergeant Thompson stayed with the lieutenant to encourage the master should his spirit of cooperation begin to flag. Kris squashed herself into a corner as well as she could in the bulky armor and tried to pay attention while Wagner and the master scrolled through the ship’s logs on the main console, and the questions began again.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 27