by Eric Thomson
“Hi, Nihao,” Zack grinned at the purser as she walked in. She wore a simple, conservatively cut suit that fit her like a glove. Her clothes were covered with a thin sheen of reddish dust, proving she'd just come back from a jaunt ashore. But the former Pathfinder's instincts told him she'd not confined her activities to the city. The layer of dust seemed too thick, especially on her boots.
As she came near him, he realized that Kiani stank like a goat which also pointed to more than a night in town. The purser smiled back at him, but without warmth. She seemed tired, irritated and in no mood for a conversation with her bunkmate.
“Good morning,” she replied, with a curt nod, before stripping off her long-skirted jacket.
“Had a good time ashore?”
“Huh,” she grunted, her back turned towards him. “Always bloody work for me when the ship lands. No fun to be had, in particular on a barbaric backwater hellhole like Itrul.”
Zack was taken aback by her tone but understood that she didn't want to talk. Nihao Kiani was a difficult woman to understand. She fell back into the cold detachment of their early days together with frightening ease whenever something irritated her. Other times, she was just like an old pal.
“Glad you had a good time,” he replied with more than a hint of sarcasm. Her tone had robbed him of his relaxed mood, and he resented the theft.
“I have to get to work. See you in the wardroom later.” Without waiting for a reply, he stalked out of the cabin and headed for the bridge.
*
Raisa Darhad was standing watch, her body a picture of languid repose as she scanned a report on the pad in her hand.
“Permission to enter the bridge, sir?” Decker asked formally, conscious of her delightful presence and her determination to keep their professional and personal lives separate.
“Granted, Gunner,” she replied glancing up at him. Her face was solemn, but her eyes twinkled just enough to let Zack know he was still in her thoughts. “We have not yet received word from the Itrulans about unloading, but the captain expects them to move sometime today. With luck, we shall receive an hour or two warning.”
“That’ll be enough, sir. I’ll do my rounds now and brief the bosun’s mates.”
“Very well, Gunner. Carry on.”
*
Captain Strachan had been right. By sundown, several dozen brawny, collared Itrulan slaves, wearing the Akmin's livery, had emptied the cargo hold using only the most primitive of hoists. They did most of the work by hand, forcing grudging admiration for their brute strength even from the ex-Marine, who watched them from the catwalk, his right hand hovering near his gun holster.
He might have enjoyed the bit of Itrulan culture of the previous evening, but that didn't diminish his mistrust. Experience bought with the blood of comrades tended to stay engraved in his mind.
Since this was a one-way freight, Shokoten was due to return to Commonwealth space in ballast. Not very profitable for her owners. But, as Zack suspected, whatever profit they made from the hidden cargo on this trip, be it monetary, or otherwise, far outweighed the cost of coming home empty.
*
They lifted the next morning as the rising sun painted the dusty plains blood-red. Without a space station to control traffic, Shokoten wasted little time in orbit but headed straight back to the Commonwealth, jumping to hyperspace as soon as they could.
“It's over to Mykonos, I hear,” Sladek remarked to Zack over lunch in the wardroom.
“Huh,” Decker grunted around a mouthful of reconstituted fish cake and rice. Grub was decent on the freighter, but this time around, the time spent planetside hadn't brought fresh food to the galley. Nihao Kiani hadn't made much of an effort, Zack figured, but he appeared the only one to have noticed. Perhaps because few on the ship had bothered to eat a full Itrulan meal and realized they had some good stuff.
“Used to live there.”
“Is that a fact,” Sladek replied absently as his eyes flitted over to Third Officer Sonoda, who'd just walked in and helped herself at the buffet table. “Not a bad place, I reckon. Provincial, but what the hell. Better than an alien place anytime.”
“What's better than an alien place?” Sonoda asked as she sat, her gaze avoiding Decker.
“Next port of call,” Sladek said, “Mykonos Colony. Gunner used to live there.
“Backwater hick-planet,” Sonoda scornfully replied, dismissing the subject as she bit into a reconstituted poppy-seed bun.
Decker smiled to himself. Whatever he touched had to be lousy in the third officer's eyes. She would never forgive him for standing up to her.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, then Zack rose to pour himself a mug of coffee from the urn beside the galley door. As he turned, something caught Sonoda's eyes, and she looked at him with a nasty expression.
“Wearing jewelry on your uniform, Mister Decker?”
“It's my Master Gunner's badge, sir,” he replied, amused at her hostility. “Didn't know there were formal dress codes in the merchant service. Figured if I was to be the ship's gunner, I might as well look the part.”
“Hah,” Sonoda snorted contemptuously. “As if a little military bauble will turn a space grunt into a proper starship's gunner.”
“He got us out of that pickle with the Shrehari marauders,” Sladek pointed out, looking nervous at the rising tension in the wardroom.
“Luck is all,” the engineer replied maliciously. “It's pretty easy to shoot blindly and run, but it takes a hell of a lot more to properly fight a ship.”
“And you're saying I can't do it, sir?”
“I've seen no proof so far.” She replied with a sneer. Before she could say more, the door opened, and Raisa Darhad entered the wardroom.
“Is there a problem?” She looked from Decker to Sonoda. The emotions were as thick as morning fog. She had been passing near the wardroom when she sensed Zack's rising anger. Normally, she wouldn't have sensed him through bulkheads, but their mating had created a bond between them, a one-sided bond, unfortunately, since he was not Arkanna.
“Well, is there?” She repeated when nobody answered.
“No, sir,” Zack finally replied, putting his usual mask of studied neutrality in place. He didn’t want to pull Darhad into this dispute. Having a superior officer as lover was not a comfortable situation, and he wanted to keep the two separate. Of course, Decker had underestimated her again.
“Do not give me that bullshit, Mister Decker.” Zack started at the crack in her voice, and her use of the human slang. “You looked as if you were about to commit murder. And your facial expression is no more congenial, Mister Sonoda. The captain will not have bickering officers on his ship, and it is my duty to make sure this does not happen.”
Decker knew his face didn't reveal as much as Darhad had read into it. Over the last few weeks, he'd been teaching himself to keep a better control of his expressions, and he was sure he had made a lot of progress.
“What the hell, sir,” Sladek sighed as he sat again. “I might as well tell you myself. The chief engineer and the gunner disagreed on the latter's professional skills as pertains to blowing reivers into the next dimension.”
“I suspected as much.” She stared at Sonoda with hard eyes. “Well then, Third Officer. You don't trust our gunner's marksmanship. Understandable since he has not been given the occasion to prove himself.”
All three officers looked at her in astonishment, especially Zack.
“And it would be nothing more than the truth to affirm that he is out of practice in ship-to-ship combat. Am I correct, Mister Decker?”
“Aye, sir,” he grudgingly admitted, avoiding Sonoda's malicious look. “Those Shrehari weren't much of a challenge.”
Sladek guffawed but quickly shut up under Darhad's icy glare.
“Very well. I propose a challenge,” she continued. “Third Officer Sonoda, you will prepare a combat simulation to be fed into the ship's computer. The captain and I will approve it beforehand, of c
ourse. Then, we will all see how good Mister Decker is. Any objections, Gunner?”
“No sir.”
“Be warned, Mister Decker, that although the captain and I will review the sim, we will not let it be an easy scenario. It will not be a no-win situation either. You must achieve a clear victory.”
Zack shrugged dismissively but remained silent.
“In three days, then. Will that be enough time, Mister Sonoda?”
“More than enough, sir.”
*
Word spread fast on small ships like Shokoten. There was little in the way of entertainment on board, and a grudge-match was a lot more fun than cockroach races in the biosys section. The crew quickly split into two camps: those who thought Zack would win, and those who figured he was just a washed-out grunt with airs. There were somewhat more of the former than the latter. Decker's rough charm, no-nonsense manner, and hard-nosed skills had won him many friends among the crew.
Betting started on the lower deck and at first gave Zack good odds, which heartened him to no end. Then, as rumors about the simulation made the rounds, the odds started to lengthen, and Zack began to worry in earnest. Master Gunners weren't magicians, and few could claim to be as good as the best Navy gunnery officers. Decker wasn't one of them.
Three days later, at two bells in the afternoon watch, Zack entered the bridge and, after going through the formal ritual, headed for his console.
Captain Strachan and the entire command crew were at their stations and watched him settle in with keen interest. For the occasion, Zack wore his battledress, with the mysterious Master Gunner's badge pinned to it. Maybe the motto of his old outfit would bring him luck. Uncharacteristically, Decker felt nervous, like the day he was married, or the day he took command of his first Pathfinder troop as a young, loud-mouthed, freshly promoted command sergeant.
“Mister Decker,” the captain interrupted Zack's mental efforts to calm down.
“Sir?”
“To keep the simulation fair, and give the rest of the crew a good work-out, we shall do a general battle drill. This means you will have access to any personnel or systems on the ship in your efforts to defend it. Anything less and it would not be an accurate test of your abilities.”
“I understand. Thank you, sir.”
“Be warned, however, that the simulation will be of an appropriate degree of difficulty.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Number One,” Strachan turned towards Darhad, “engage Sim-Alpha and go to battle stations.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” She bent over her console, fingers flying and the main view screen wavered for a fraction of a second, as a computer-generated universe replaced the real thing. Then, the battle stations siren screeched throughout the ship as the lights dimmed to red.
The sounds seemed to steady Zack's nerves: this was an environment he knew well. Intently, he sent his sensor probes out in an ever-widening circle around the ship to find the enemy that had tripped the proximity alarm. His ears shut out the usual din of a starship's bridge as the captain did what captains normally do when they're about to be attacked.
Bingo!
“One starship on an intercept course emerging nine hundred thousand kilometers on our starboard quarter.” Decker's voice was steady, professional and cut through the chatter like a knife.
“Identity?”
“Unknown. Refining scan. Power consumption curve consistent with a human-built fast, armed freighter.” Then, “Two more emergence traces on our port bow, range six hundred thousand kilometers. Scanning. Same power consumption curve. Definitely human, likely marauders. No honest ship wastes that much power.”
Zack grinned to himself. These looked exactly like fast freighters converted to reivers by renegades in the Shield cluster. Like all human tech, they were pretty good, but Sonoda had fallen into the chauvinism trap. If you really wanted to make life hard for someone in a sim, you didn't use human reivers, you used Shrehari. Two Shrehari ships of equal tonnage were more than a match for the three armed freighters and could really ruin your day.
This wouldn't be a piece of cake, but a lot easier than he thought. Humans were predictable, even renegades, especially sim-reivers programmed by a human starship officer. Had Sonoda used Shrehari, and let the computer set the variable parameters, to better approximate the Shrehari's chronic lack of predictability, there was no telling what might have happened.
An energy spike appeared on the readout of the closest ship.
“Brace for incoming fire,” Zack's warning rang out loudly. “For what we are about to receive...”
A string of plasma blossoms erupted from the guns of the lead reiver and sped towards Shokoten at a respectable fraction of light speed. A few seconds later, the computer registered an impact on the number six shield, as competing energies clashed. At that range, however, the plasma burst caused no damage to the force field enveloping the ship, but Zack felt an eerie sensation snake through his adrenaline-charged consciousness. By all rights, his mind told him, the ship should be groaning under the pressure of the energy clash.
Then, the developing tactical situation brushed away all other considerations. The battle sim had automatically analyzed the force of the hit and correlated it to the range of the firing ship, a software modification Decker had written himself. Now, the results scrolled on the screen.
Zack smiled. The sim-reivers had shot too early, giving him time to shift his defenses. Quickly, he retuned the frequency of the shield generators to provide maximum strength against the particular energy coefficient of the reivers' fire. It wouldn't make more than a few percentiles difference, but it could easily mean the difference between life and death. The subroutine was another modification he'd done after his stay in the sickbay.
All three marauders closed in on Shokoten, in a regular, predictable, and two-dimensional pattern. Zack almost laughed out loud. Sonoda, for all her years on a starship still thought in two-dimensions! She also seemed to think making the attackers come at the freighter at the same speed and evenly spaced would give him a headache. Second-year cadets at the Academy had that sort of lazy thinking beaten out of them real fast. As he recalled, Sonoda had washed out of the Academy in her second year.
He turned to look at the captain.
“Sir, I need helm control.”
Strachan stared at him for a few seconds.
“Helm, you will take your maneuvering orders from the gunner.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The helmsman sounded unsure at the strange order.
Closer, closer, my beauties, Zack mentally chanted as he entered the maneuvering sequence into the computer. There. Now the firing sequence. More simulated hits impacted on the shields, but Zack ignored them. When a shield was about to go critical, the computer would call it to his attention. He hit the feed button and sent his instructions to the helmsman.
“Helm, confirm course instructions.”
“Confirmed, sir, but -”
“Engage on my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”
Shokoten plunged downwards, beneath the ring of encircling reivers and swooped up again. The enemy might be fake, but the ship's movements were very real. Within less than a minute, the freighter had dropped out of the reivers' gun sights and was now coming up straight under the belly of the lead ship, her bows pointing at a spot dead center between the two hyperdrive nacelles.
“Helm, prepare to pull up and clear the reiver's starboard side on my mark.”
“Ready, sir.”
The bridge crew collectively held their breath as they watched the reiver's keel grow on the view screen. Blossoms of plasma dotted its hull as the pirates fired their small caliber belly guns. Zack didn't seem to notice the return fire.
“Make sure you're not going to ram her,” Strachan warned, his voice as tense as if this battle, and the ship filling the screen, were real.
“Then I hope your helmsman is fast off the mark, sir,” Decker snapped. “Helmsman, prepare to pull up, three, two, one,” th
e view screen suddenly filled with streaks of light as Decker fired every forward bearing gun and missile launcher, “MARK!”
Shokoten shuddered at the sudden change of course. Just as the reiver slipped off the view screen, it was enveloped by a fireball as the salvo hit at extremely short range.
“Direct hit,” Darhad called out, “Number four shield pierced, catastrophic damage to the hull.” A pause. “She exploded. Confirmed kill! Backwash impacting our aft shields, down to forty-nine percent. Congratulations, Gunner.”
There were a few ironic cheers on the bridge, but all eyes remained glued to the view screen. They knew this was a trick Decker could only use once, and they wanted to see what he would do next.
Zack wasn't listening. His mind was already tackling the next target with methodical cold-bloodedness. First, shift the aft shields out of their arcs of fire. Then...then give 'em the old Raskolnikov Maneuver.
The surviving reivers were slow to react and only now turning to pursue the freighter. Zack fed new maneuvering instructions to the helm and made sure the guns and launchers had cycled through.
“Captain, can you order engineering to release a five-second stream of fuel on my mark?”
“Why?” Strachan raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Take too long to explain, sir. We can spare it.”
“Very well. Engineer, we shall release a five-second stream of fuel. Advise when ready.”
As the two reivers finally engaged pursuit, Zack brought the ship back into a very tight loop, keeping the upper shields towards them. He glanced at Strachan with a cocked eyebrow. The captain nodded.
“Prepare to release fuel stream on my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”
A few moments later, he nodded, satisfied that his instructions had been carried out. The ship changed course again.
Zack's finger hovered over the firing button as he watched the readout. At the critical moment, his finger stabbed down and the forward guns coughed out a full spread of plasma.
Come on, come on, Zack silently chanted. Then, the plasma salvo and the two reivers met at the spot where the fuel cloud was expanding. The plasma ignited the volatile crystals and enveloped the ships in a ball of fire brighter than a star. Cries of astonishment rang out.