Chapter 10 – Luta
Out of the Black
“ALL SCREENS ON,” I snapped as soon as I reached the bridge. “Full perimeter view from the ship. Viss?”
“Here, Captain.”
“Everything ready to move at a word from me.”
“Already done.”
I saw that Cerevare was on the bridge with everyone else. Like a good passenger, she’d taken a seat out of the way and sat quietly watching the proceedings, but her furred face was drawn with concern.
With all the screens turned on, the bridge of the Tane Ikai took on the appearance of a surveillance vessel. “This one,” said Rei, and the magnification on one of the starwise screens increased. The vessel that had come through the wormhole hurtled in our direction. The NPV R. Stillwell moved slowly out of position to follow. It had taken them by surprise, apparently, and blasted past the waiting ship. The newcomer had a configuration I didn’t immediately recognize, which might have surprised me if I’d been capable of more surprise at that point. The vessel was long and blunt-nosed, with a sunburst of fins at the tail end and a sleek body.
“Lots of chatter between the Protectorate ships,” Baden reported. “It’s encrypted, but I could break it pretty easily. Should I?”
“Better not,” I ordered. “Not yet, anyway.”
“It probably consists of a lot of ‘Sankta Merde!’ and ‘What the hell is that?’“ Hirin said with a tight grin.
“I could tell them what it is,” Cerevare said evenly. She slid out of the skimchair and glided closer to the screen. “It is a Chron ship.”
“What?” Yuskeya’s long plait of dark hair swung as she whirled to face the Lobor. “Are you certain?”
Cerevare nodded. “It is my job to be certain of such things.”
“Dios! There’s a second one!”
“Can you get a closer view?”
Rei nodded and with a few strokes had enlarged the image of the second ship to twice the size.
This second ship looked nothing like the one Cerevare had identified as Chron. It was all dark angles and sharp protrusions as it snaked across the starfield in apparent pursuit of the Chron ship, but something else about it caught my eye. Despite its angular shape, the vessel had a shimmery, unstable appearance—almost as if it were gelatinous. Again, I didn’t recognize it as anything I’d come across in Nearspace before. I pulled up the Nearspace registry on my datapad to see if I could spot a match.
“Incoming from the Domtaw,” Baden said.
“Domtaw, this is the Tane Ikai.”
“Captain Paixon, this is Lieutenant Praveen. We’re not sure what’s happening here. Please move your ship a safe distance away.”
I resisted the urge to ask what that distance might be.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant,” I said. “Rei, set a course for the far side of the moon. Use the burst drive. I want to get it between us and whatever’s going to happen here.”
“Aye, Captain.” She didn’t take her eyes off the screen or the pilot’s board. The Tane Ikai leapt away from the current path of the oncoming Chron ship, as the Domtaw moved to intercept it.
“What about the pirate?” Rei asked.
“He can worry about his own azeno. He’s the Protectorate’s problem, not mine. Now, everyone find a seat,” I ordered. “This ride might get rough.”
Maja slid into the empty skimchair next to Baden, but Cerevare didn’t move from the screen displaying the Chron ship. Hirin crossed to her and gently led her to sit down. Her eyes didn’t leave the screen.
“I never expected to see one in my lifetime,” she said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
“Any communication from either alien ship?” I asked Baden.
“Nothing.”
“I think they’re scanning,” Yuskeya said. “I’m picking up something from their ship, but I don’t know exactly what it is.”
“They’re changing course,” Rei said. “If I had to take a guess, I’d say they’re moving toward the moon.”
“After us?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’d have a more direct intercept course to us.”
“Keep getting us out of the way,” I told her. “The torps we’ve got on board won’t be more than fireworks if these folks decide to light it up with each other.”
Admiral Woodroct must have seen the change in course as well, because the Domtaw also turned back toward the moon. It was no match for the speed of the Chron ship, however.
There was too much happening on too many screens to easily keep track of it all, but the scenario was this: the Chron ship speeding toward the operant moon (where presumably the Domtaw’s people still were), the Domtaw moving to try and intercept it. Further behind, the Stillwell hurtling after the Chron ship, and behind that, gaining fast, the dark mystery ship that had emerged last from the second wormhole.
And us, trying to get the hell as far away as possible from whatever was going to happen. While still, I admit, keeping it all in view, because it was damned interesting.
I was studying the dark ship, which I already unconsciously thought of as the spider, when a bright flash lit up one of the other screens, jabbing sharply into my peripheral vision. A jolt almost shook me out of my seat as the engines died, killing our acceleration. My datapad shuddered in my hand, the notification vibration gone berserk, and the screen dissolved into gibberish. The case suddenly burned with a searing heat, and I dropped it to the floor. At least the pseudo-grav fields hadn’t been affected.
“Damne! What happened?”
“No main drive, no maneuvering thrusters,” Rei said, her voice tight with concentration, fingers skittering over the screen. “And my board reset itself. We’re coasting, folks.” She slid across to the co-pilot’s board. “This one’s still live.”
“Comm board is down, too. Switching to backup,” Baden reported. “We’ll have reduced range.”
“Chron ship fired something on the moon,” Yuskeya said. “We happened to be in the line of fire.”
“The operant moon?”
“The what?”
“Captain, we have a problem,” came Viss’s voice over the comm.
“That’s what the Protectorate calls it. The artifact moon. Viss, I can feel it. Report.”
“Propulsion system shut down without warning,” he said. The frustration in his voice was almost palpable. “I have to reset the entire system, including prechecks. Thrusters’ll be quick, main drive, not so much.”
I sucked my scorched fingers and swung my gaze to the screen showing the moon. It still spun unperturbed in its orbit, golden rings circling it like delicate bangles. It appeared completely unaffected. “Yuskeya, what’s our course? Immediate danger?”
“We have to restore drive power before we get caught in a gravity well, but for now we’re okay.”
“They missed it? How can you miss a moon?” Hirin sounded incredulous.
“They didn’t miss it,” Yuskeya said, focused on her screen. “There wasn’t any sort of an impact, but the moon started generating the same kind of rays that we encountered coming through the wormhole. It’s sending them in a stream directly into the mouth of the wormhole to Delta Pavonis.”
“Any idea what they are? Or what they do?”
“Not enough data. The Admiral’s people must have done something that triggered it before we arrived. Then they either stopped it, or it stopped itself.”
“Time it,” I said. “See how long it continues.”
“Domtaw is going nuts, ordering the Chron ship to stop, stand down, answer them—anything,” Baden said. “No response that I can pick up, and they’re still within range, even on the backup board.” He swung around to catch my eye. “Domtaw is threatening to fire on them.”
“Thrusters online, starting main drive pre-check,” Viss said from engineering.
I felt the ship rock as Rei applied thrusters to turn us slightly away from our course toward the moon, still coasting.
; “What happened to the Stillwell?” Rei asked suddenly. “I’m not watching the fun—honest, I’m not, I’m driving the ship again—but it seems to have stopped moving, on my readout.”
I searched the screens. The dark ship was almost upon the Chron vessel, but the Stillwell had been in between them only a moment ago.
“It’s stopped moving,” Maja said.
I couldn’t look because at that moment the Chron ship veered aside from its course for the moon, and pointed its nose toward the Delta Pavonis wormhole. The Domtaw opened fire, and two torpedoes snaked silently out of the launch tubes and toward the Chron ship.
The Chron ship returned fire, a bright bite of orange light that chewed into the fore end of the Protectorate ship and burst it apart from within. The explosion was so brilliant it lit up most of the screens on our bridge. When it flared out again, the Nearspace Protectorate Vessel O. Domtaw was nowhere to be seen.
I never saw what happened to the Domtaw’s torps. All I knew was that we were in deep merde.
Chapter 11 – Jahelia
Curiosity as a Dangerous Pastime
“MEGERO!” PITA SAID when Captain Paixon closed her comm connection to me without even saying goodbye. “She could have been a little more polite. But you didn’t exactly stick to the script, either.”
I allowed myself a little smile of satisfaction. Alin Sedmamin had given me a script for our encounter, but I’d decided at the last minute to improvise.
I sat back from the console. “I thought my message was better,” I told my personality-attuned computer AI. “Paixon was too cocky. I wanted to cut that out from under her.”
“You think she really knew you were working for PrimeCorp?”
“She could have been bluffing. Or she might think anyone who crosses her is working for them. They’ve got a long history, after all.”
“Maybe she knows more about us than you think.”
I ignored that. “Anyway, one of her weak spots was obviously her mother, as I’d suspected. Nice to have that confirmed.”
“And at least that idioto of an Admiral stopped shouting at us over the comm.”
“Typical Protectorate,” I said. “Happy to let us be the Tane Ikai’s problem, as long as I didn’t bother him or whatever his little secret mission is.” I’d almost laughed aloud at him, ordering me to do this and not do that. He didn’t know about the burst drive installation PrimeCorp had gifted me—if I felt like going through the damned wormhole, I’d go, and I’d be past the terminal point before he could get that lumbering Pegasus tub even pointed in my direction.
I did chuckle now, as I moved to the tiny galley behind the cockpit and pulled off another nice mug of hot cazitta. My plan had been to catch up with Paixon, give her the message, and take off again, leaving her to wonder what else I might be up to, but I’d stumbled into something far too interesting to walk away from just yet. A secret wormhole? Protectorate ships in an unknown system? And a second wormhole leading who-knew-where?
Curiosity, that old cat-killer. One of my few weaknesses.
Mug in hand, I returned to my seat at the control board. “Pita, message for Alin Sedmamin, double-encrypted.”
“Go ahead.”
“Target acquired and message delivered. Initiating surveillance.” Short and sweet, and guaranteed to annoy Sedmamin, who always wanted to be briefed in detail.
“That’s it?” Pita asked.
“That’s it. Shoot it off through the wormhole, but store it to send again later, once we’re back in the Delta Pav system.” There had been something weird about that wormhole skip, strange grey lines streaking along the inside. I wasn’t entirely confident the message would go through, and I wanted to be sure he got it. I was only sorry that I wouldn’t see his frustrated face when he read it.
“Now,” I mused, settling in my chair and tapping my fingertips against the side of my mug, “what are all of you doing here?” Two Protectorate ships and the Tane Ikai, in what Pita confirmed to be a previously undiscovered and uncharted system. Sedmamin would be interested in this. Very interested. And he’d have to pay me very well for the information. I set scanners running to record every bit of data I could collect about the sector.
“Hey, another ship just joined the party,” Pita said. She put the visual on the main screen without waiting for my order. The ship had come busting out of the second, further-off wormhole—not the one we’d followed the Tane Ikai through.
I sat forward again. “Sankta merde. What is that?”
Pita didn’t answer me right away. The ship had taken the Protectorate by surprise, too, I could tell by their sluggish reaction. They didn’t fire. They didn’t move immediately. Slackers. They were obviously there to guard the wormhole against such a possibility, and where had they been when the possibility became reality? Napping, that’s where.
Despite my extensive knowledge of Nearspace registered ships, this thing wasn’t familiar. Something flickered up from the recesses of memory, like maybe I’d seen something similar long ago—in a book? a vid?—but it wouldn’t come into focus for me.
“I think that’s a Chron ship,” Pita said finally.
It takes a lot to surprise me, but that did. Chron? It was over a hundred years since anyone had heard from the Chron. I got a weird rolling feeling in my stomach. “Are you sure?”
“It’s an eighty-nine percent match.” Pita sounded annoyed that I would question her pronouncement. “The eleven percent discrepancy would be reasonable for changes in design, propulsion, and composition since the last data point I have for comparison.”
Pita could sound like any normal uptight computer intelligence when she wanted to.
The comm surveillance lit up with chatter between the Protectorate ships, and I was privy to it all thanks to PrimeCorp, again—I had to admit they weren’t stingy in sharing their “special” tech when it served their purposes. The Protectorate uniforms were as freaked out by the ship as I was. I heard them calling battle stations.
“Pita, let’s get out of the way.” Paixon and the Tane Ikai seemed to be thinking the same thing, as the ship turned to make for the other side of the planet.
“Engaging fore thrusters,” Pita said, and I pushed the Hunter’s Hope into a slow backward glide, out of the line of fire.
We didn’t get far before Pita said, “You won’t believe this. Another ship just came out of that wormhole.” She flashed it onto one of the viewscreens. “This place is getting crowded.”
This one really made me stop and take notice. I felt the tiniest surge of doubt—that maybe I hadn’t been so smart in coming here after all.
“What the hell is that, Pita?”
It looked like no other ship I’d ever seen . . . actually, like no other kind of ship I’d ever seen. It was dark and slick, all sharp planes and wicked angles. And it had a shimmer, or a wobble—an instability that sent a shiver racing down my back. That thing was weird. And dangerous. And coming our way fast.
It took even longer for Pita to answer this time. When she did, all she said was, “Unknown.”
That scared me worse than anything. All I wanted was to get as far away from it as I could, and my curiosity about it yielded ground to self-preservation.
“Forget the thrusters, Pita. I’m engaging the burst drive and getting us out of here!”
Before we could move, though, I guess we caught its attention. As the dark ship passed the Hunter’s Hope, a panel in its side opened, and something black and shadowy bloomed inside. The burst drive rumbled to life, and I yanked the ship to the side. Too slow. Something hit the ship—not an explosion, nothing concussive. It felt like we’d been grabbed by a giant hand.
“We’re—” Pita’s voice cut out. The rising hum of the drive died like a switch had been flipped, and the rear sensor readings went dead, too. Now I couldn’t see what the dark ship was doing, or anything else, and my stomach churned. Sweat prickled on my neck.
“Pita! Respond!” I punched things all over the contro
l board, but it was a lifeless expanse of plasteel and glass. Pita didn’t answer. The only sound in the ship was the soft putter of the air recycler.
“Damne!” I slammed my hands down on the unresponsive board and pushed my skimchair back. It spun around on its axis, and I jammed my feet down on the floor to stop its momentum when I saw the rear of the cabin. Beyond the tiny galley, a hazy black wall now bisected the bow and stern of the ship. I stood and cautiously took a couple of steps toward it. No sound, no smell. It was simply there.
“Pita?” I tried again. I suddenly understood why computer AI’s were so popular in one-person ships. Bigger ships with multi-person crews didn’t use them very often, but smaller vessels always came equipped with one, even if it was very basic. Annoying as I usually found her, without Pita I felt very vulnerable and excruciatingly alone.
I was tempted to touch the shadowy barrier, but decided that would be crazy when I didn’t know what it was. Curiosity lost that round, too. I took a step back from it. I wasn’t going to touch that thing at least until I could get Pita functional and get her to scan it. It felt good to take control of that decision, minor though it was.
Until an eye-searing flash lit up the viewscreens at the front of the ship. The concussion followed a heartbeat later. The floor tilted, and I stumbled forward against the murky, unforgiving wall that hadn’t existed moments before.
Chapter 12 – Luta
Enemies Resurrected
“DIPATRINO!” HIRIN WHISPERED behind me. The bridge of the Tane Ikai had gone as quiet as the vacuum of space surrounding us, as the explosion signalling the death of the Domtaw faded.
But there was no time to mourn, and barely time to think.
“Viss, how long to main drives?”
“It won’t be quick, Captain. I might be able to rush the burst drive if I leave the main for now.”
I chewed on my lip. The burst drive was fine for short durations, but if we had to get far away from here quickly, we’d need the main drive. But there could be people who needed our help.
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