Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Marti, if we get the mains up before they get here, can you sync the fields on the fly so we can outrun pursuit?” Nuko asked.

  “We would be safer cutting the DSL coils before we bring the ship’s field back online.”

  “What’s going on up there?” Ammo’s face appeared on his console screen.

  “Looks like we’ve got black hats on approach and the main engines are down. We’re trying to snake out of here before they catch us,” he said.

  “About that,” she said. “One of our passengers—”

  “Not now,” he said. “We’re busy pulling a Miracle Mike and I don’t have time to yakyak.”

  “You need to make time,” she said. “We’re on our way up to the ConDeck now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “How much time have we got,” Ammo asked, appearing on the ConDeck with one of the artillery team members in tow.

  The captain glanced at her and frowned. He was watching the sensor readout on the engineering console.

  “The DLS coils are up,” Nuko said.

  “Make feet,” he said. “You two might want to hang on.”

  The deck plating under Ethan’s seat groaned and both Ammo and her guest slammed down into the jump seats along the back wall as the inertial bleed-through crushed them under the acceleration.

  “That’s as hard as we can drive it,” she said. “It’s not much but unless they want to live dangerously that might buy us five minutes ... ish.”

  “Rene, you’ve got maybe eighteen minutes now,” the captain said.

  “I’m pushing all the power I can through the relays,” he said. “We’re looking at sixteen minutes and thirty seconds.”

  “The ship is changing course and velocity to intercept,” Marti said. “ETA fourteen minutes.”

  “Dangerous is apparently not a problem for them,” Nuko said, sighing.

  “Rene never mind,” Ethan growled. “Keep charging but we’re about two minutes longer than reality gives us.”

  “Sergeant Eriksen here says her RDA team can deploy a gun in fifteen minutes,” Ammo said.

  Ethan stared at her blankly for several seconds. “Where? You can’t bolt one of those to the hull.”

  “We can maglock it to the floor of the hangar deck and partially power it from the two shuttles you’ve got down there,” the sergeant said. “It won’t be good for more than a couple shots unless you want to drag a trunk line down from engineering, but it might be enough of a surprise to set them to thinking about whether they want to do this. We’re loaded with particle beams and ion cannons both. They’ll damn sure pack more hit than the anti-boarding lasers you’re carrying.”

  “We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Ethan said.

  “So we get them talking,” Ammo said. “Pirates are full of themselves. Give them a chance to rattle their sabers and they’ll talk you stupid.”

  “One shot’s not going to do much,” the captain said.

  “These are planetary defense guns,” the sergeant said. “They’re designed to punch through an atmosphere and hit a target at a thousand klick. In a vacuum, even at quarter power, these guns will slice clear through their ship.”

  Ethan looked at Nuko and she shrugged.

  “Fifteen minutes?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Eriksen said. “But you’ll have to back off the pedal. Our exosuits are in the back container and none of us trained to work naked in two-g.”

  “If we back off, we’ve got to talk longer,” Ammo said.

  “Do it,” he said. “Nuko, drop our acceleration to half and let’s see if we can make this count. Otherwise we’re going deep fast.”

  The instant the fist of gravity dropped back to normal the sergeant was on her feet and out the door.

  “Ammo, sit tight,” the captain said. “I want you here when I talk to them.”

  She nodded and settled back into the jump seat.

  “Why are we letting off?” Rene asked. Even over the commlink his stress was obvious.

  “We’ve got a new plan,” he said. “Keep charging the coils until I tell you to stop. We’re going to surrender.”

  “What?” the engineer nearly shrieked.

  “Temporarily,” he added, almost laughing at Rene’s panic. “We’re doing it to buy time for the RDA squads to set up a surprise on the hangar deck. If we get lucky, we’ll knock their asses into the dust and then we’ll only have a partial charge to go. Get us as close to ready as you can.”

  “Boss, seriously I think you’re frakking nuts,” he said.

  “Probably so,” Ethan agreed. “Crazy is always a good fallback position for the desperate.”

  “The pirate’s backing off too,” Nuko said with a sigh. “Obviously they only want to push if they have to.”

  “They’re probably wondering why we’re not running as hard,” Ammo said. “Chances are, if the captain is any good he’ll be suspicious, but maybe we can use that.”

  “The new ETA is still thirteen minutes,” Marti said.

  “Walker to Sergeant Eriksen. When you lock the gun down to the deck, set it back inside the hangar far enough that it’s not visible when the doors start opening.”

  “That will limit the firing arc,” she said.

  “But it will make it harder for them to see it in the dark. It will give you the longest possible time to line up the shot.”

  “Aye, sir,” she said. “As long as you can get the enemy vessel off the nose.”

  “Leave that to us,” he said, cutting the comm and getting up to move over to the pilot’s station. “Nuko, I want you to get into the DSL. We need manual control in case they pull a shitty on us. Your job will be to jerk the back end of the ship sidewise to make sure we get squared with them once they drop into position and launch their boarding parties.”

  “Sure thing, Boss,” she said.

  “Just keep your head down and the lights off,” he added as he tapped her out and slipped into her seat. “We don’t want them seeing you up there and taking a shot at you before we move. Odds are if they want to make this messy they’ll hit the ConDeck first, so no matter what happens, your job is to get us squared up so we can get the shot.”

  She stopped as his words sank in. “Boss… Ethan, you don’t have to stay here if you think that’s how they’ll play it. You can let Marti drive, and you can be somewhere safer.”

  He shook his head. “If they give us a chance to talk, they’ll be suspicious if I’m not sitting here. I have to keep up appearances.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it,” he said. “If we do our part right, they’ll believe we’re surrendering and then they might prefer to take a ship without battle damage.”

  She walked back over and kissed him on the cheek. “For luck,” she said. Her eyes said she was terrified.

  Once Nuko left, he looked over at Ammo and nodded toward his usual seat.

  “Understand, I’m not kissing you,” she said. “Not even if you beg.” She laughed. “Well, maybe if you beg. That’s kind of sexy.”

  He snorted. “I think I need to save my begging for the captain of the pirate ship.”

  She sat down and reconfigured the layout on his usual console. As he watched her, it was obvious that she’d been at the controls of a ship before. She centered the defensive weapons panel in front of her and the power systems controls beside them to the left and right. After she pulled the sensor screen into place above the weapons, she turned off all the other displays. An ideal battle arrangement.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Nope,” she looked over at him and winked. Her face said she might have been lying.

  “We’re getting some data on long range scans,” Marti said. “The pursuing vessel appears to be a substantially modified Clydesdale class freighter.”

  “Those are perfect for pirating,” Ammo said. “Heavy superstructure that can take a lot of abuse.”

  “I worked on a Clydesdale as a pilot,” Ethan said. “They’re not
agile and they’ve got weak power couplings.”

  “I am detecting high EM output,” Marti said. “They have obviously upgraded the power plants.”

  “To feed heavy weapons,” she said. “And hot engines.”

  “Then the couplings will be their vulnerability. There’s no room in engineering for bigger hardware,” he said.

  “A Clydesdale doesn’t have a lot of living space does it?” Ammo asked.

  “Not a lot,” he said. “They weren’t designed for hauling passengers like a Percheron class. They carry six crewmembers and have four guest quarters, but if they aren’t far from base, they could pack twenty in there. Maybe more if they don’t mind the stink.”

  “That limits the number they could send over in a boarding party,” she said.

  “So will the fact that there are only two docking clamps for shuttles,” he said.

  “They’d be hard pressed to get more than twelve per shuttle, so we’ll be looking at twenty-four or less on the first wave of their boarding party,” she said. “We’ve got our two handlers and sixteen more trained soldiers in the RDA squads. If they do get aboard, they’ll be fighting a lot harder than they expect.”

  “Let’s plan to keep that from happening if we can,” he said.

  “I’m in the DSL,” Nuko said. “I got into an EVA suit and left the life support offline, so they won’t see the lights on.”

  “Good thinking,” Ethan said. “I should cut the engines and put your coils into standby before they get close enough to notice what we’ve done to get mobile.”

  “We may not be out of range of the pulse surge weapon yet,” Marti said. “We have another seventy seconds before it reaches the level of potential discharge and if the DSL coils are active, a hit may damage them.”

  “Then I’m cutting the drive now,” the captain said, tapping the controls and bringing them down to zero acceleration. “We’re ballistic.”

  “Coils offline,” Nuko responded. “I’ll leave them hot until just before the pulse and then recharge them as soon as it passes. That should give them ample time to come back to full power before they catch us.”

  “The new ETA for the pursuing vessel is four minutes ten seconds,” Marti said.

  “Eriksen to Walker,” the sergeant cut in on the commlink. “We’ve got the mag-lock installation complete and we’ve cabled both shuttles to the capacitance bank. We’re pre-charging the first one while we finish the installation. I ordered the second squad to pull another bank from the cargo. You’ll get one full power shot and a second round at two thirds power thirty seconds later if you need it.”

  “Excellent, Sergeant. You’ve got five minutes, if we can keep them talking,” the captain said.

  “It’ll be tight, but we’ll be ready,” she said.

  “When we open the hangar doors, you’ll need to target their power couplings,” he said. “They’re located on either wing, along the top of the root where it attaches to the upper superstructure. There should be a visible exterior hull access panel about halfway back that covers them. If we have enough punch to get through the hull and we’re lucky, it might take out their whole internal grid.”

  “We’ve got the hit points for it,” she said. “If they’re not wearing suits, they’ll be breathing vacuum.”

  “If we get the shot, they’ll be doing an EVA to make repairs. That will give us at least an hour head start before they can try to catch us,” he said trying not to think about the idea that they’d be killing a lot of people if they ripped the hull. It didn’t matter that they might do the same to him, killing people wasn’t in his game plan this morning.

  “Sergeant Eriksen,” Ammo said, jumping in on the conversation. “When you’re set up and ready, do not report that to us up here over the open com. We might be negotiating our surrender and announcing we’re ready to blow the frak out of them would be a bad idea.”

  “Understood. We’ll maintain comm blackout from now on,” she said. “All future messages via the AA.”

  Ethan leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “Twelve years in the merchant fleet and then ten more in private transport and this will be the first scrape I’ve had.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I was on the Aggie when it got jumped by three raiders outside of Kentaurus.”

  “The Agamemnon was lost wasn’t it?” he said. “I remember reading about it.”

  “Yah, I spent five weeks in an escape pod with four men and a spider monkey,” she said. “It’s also why I decided to work from home. Just my luck that my first run back into the black we’d run into trouble.”

  “Ah, so it’s your fault,” he said, winking. “You must be a pirate magnet.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “We’re being hailed on deep comm. The ship is still more than a minute out,” Marti said.

  “Olympus Dawn, this is Captain Kendrick Jetaar of the Blackwing,” the voice on the comm snarled as he spoke. “Who of you has the displeasure of making my acquaintance?”

  “Blackwing? Did this guy read too many pirate novels growing up?” Ammo whispered.

  “Yah, but Jetaar is the one that MacKenna warned us about,” Ethan said. “He’s supposed to be a ruthless frak.”

  “It’s all a matter of perspective. He’s probably got a pet poodle too,” she said.

  Ethan tried not to grin as he opened a visual channel. The image of the approaching ship shifted to the side and the ConDeck of the Blackwing appeared. Red light illuminated everything and as he scanned the image, it got harder to swallow his grin. The man sitting in the command seat of the pirate ship looked to be wearing clothes from the same fetish shop that Quinn had used for his leather outfit. His imagination supplied the apron. And the poodle.

  “This is Captain Ethan Walker,” he said, surprising even himself with how calm he sounded.

  “Really? Isn’t that a surprise,” Jetaar said. “I heard that you’re supposed to be some kind of hero. It’s not every day I get to take down somebody famous.”

  “Take down?” Ethan said. “I figured we could talk about this and maybe come to an understanding.”

  “Aren’t you cute,” the pirate said. “Here is what I understand. Your coils are down and it’s pointless for you to run.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “If I intended to run, I’d still be on it.”

  “Yah. That’s a pretty slick trick,” Jetaar said. “Not sure how you managed to move after we popped you, but a nod to your engineer for pulling a Miracle Mike. It doesn’t matter though, I’m sure by now you’ve scanned us and you know that if you want to survive you will stand down.”

  “Like I said, if I intended to give you a problem I’d still be accelerating,” Captain Walker said. “We’re only coasting since it would be a bone crusher to slow back down.”

  A countdown timer opened on his control panel and he glanced down. Time to weapon ready: 1:30.

  Out of his peripheral vision, Ethan saw Ammo slide her hand forward as she tapped in a response to Eriksen and then nodded.

  “Let me explain this to you,” Jetaar said. “You won’t twitch, and you will stop charging your coils immediately or I will eat your ship for breakfast.”

  “Stand by and I’ll order my engineer to stop charging,” he said, muting the comm and turning to the side so that the pirate couldn’t see what he was saying. “Rene, how close are we to ready on the coils?”

  “Ninety-two percent. About a minute,” he said.

  “Stop charging now,” he said, “but stay on top of it. If we make it through the next few minutes, we’ll need as much as you can give us.”

  “Understood,” the engineer said. “Here’s to hoping.”

  Ethan unmuted the com. “We’re off the coils. We’ll surrender the cargo, but honestly there’s nothing there of much value.”

  “They’re dropping into position forward-starboard. Range seven hundred-fifty klick.” She made the announcement out loud and when the captain glanced over at her, she nodded at the com pane
l. She’d also made sure it went out over the commlink so that Nuko and the gun crew knew where to look when the time came.

  “I’m sure your sensors will confirm I’ve got all kinds of ugly looking at you,” Jetaar said. “And we’re well outside the range of your repelling lasers.”

  “Yah, I can tell you’ve done some work to that old Clydesdale for sure,” he said. “But we’re not going to give you any problems. You can have the cargo and we can go on about our lives with no stink between us.”

  One minute to weapon ready, flashed on the timer in front of him.

  The pirate captain leaned back and scratched at his beard for several seconds. “You know for a hero you sure are rolling over easy on this. I’d expect more of a fight out of you.”

  “Don’t over play it,” Ammo tapped into his console display.

  “My cargo is mostly ground penetrating sensors for an archaeology dig somewhere out here,” he said. “Other than that, I’ve got a bunch of dusty old archaeologists aboard. I’m hoping handing it over without any ugliness will buy their safety.” He knew that even if the Blackwing had upgraded bio-sensors in its kit, it wouldn’t be able to tell more than the body count they had aboard and he better have an excuse for nineteen passengers.

  “If he took Dr. Westmore, he might know you’re lying,” she typed in again.

  He nodded slightly, trying to read the pirate’s face. It was steady as stone with no sign of whether he sensed Ethan’s deception. For all that he looked to be straight out of a low-budget tri-vid production, it would be a foolish mistake to underestimate the real danger they faced if he didn’t buy their bluff.

  After several seconds, Jetaar shook his head. “I’ll be taking your cargo, but we’re coming aboard. If things swing true, there won’t be any bloodshed. But if there’s a whiff of shit, we’ll start with that pretty helmsman of yours and you’ll be the last one who dies. Then after you get to enjoy the experience of all the creative things we can do to your crew, I’ll be taking your ship.”

  “I understand,” Ethan said, trying to look believably scared when all he wanted to do was laugh at his cliché intimidation tactics, even if they were true. “No tricks.”