Honest Profit and Unlikely Regret were both of a simple tube design with underhanging bellies for cargo holds, and the forward doors to the holds were opening.
“Concentrate fire on the largest,” Umlk shouted. “Everything on a single point. Let’s tunnel though those damned shields.”
“Concentrating fire on Honest Profit,” Tactical confirmed.
“One minute to gate.”
Umlk blinked at the piercing flash of light as Honest Profit’s shields failed and Deltue’s lasers burned through into the ship’s belly, lighting it up in a violent flash that split the ship asunder.
Triumphant, she threw out a pair of limbs to splash through the deck water. Several others around her did likewise, but not the sensor officer.
“Energy spike from Unlikely Regret,” he reported.
“Concentrate fire on Unlikely Regret.”
“We are, sir.” For the first time, a note of fear entered the tactical officer’s voice. “She has overlapping shields. We can’t punch through.”
“Unlikely Regret’s shields are shifting frequencies. She’s about to fire.”
“Repurposing auxiliary targeting lasers to detect frequency gaps in enemy shield configuration.”
“We’re taking fire. Upper shields degrading. It’s a particle cannon. Entropy! Estimate 500 megawatt.”
“Roll and yaw,” Umlk commanded. “Present lower shields. All power to shields. All of it!”
Lights dimmed and several stations failed as power was re-routed while Deltue spun behind the protection of her boosted shields. As she did so, Umlk noted Unlikely Regret’s strange motion. It appeared to be nodding.
It was Umlk’s last thought.
Almost the entirety of Unlikely Regret’s cavernous holds had been refitted to carry a particle cannon with its own dedicated fusion reactor.
The weapon’s particle beam lanced through Deltue’s bridge, instantly vaporizing the water that filled the space, along with the crew, their equipment, and anything in its path as the beam continued through to the outer hull and beyond.
Unlikely Regret sliced the ship vertically with an up-and-down motion, like a plasma torch cutting up scrap metal, though this scrap ship was still disgorging atmosphere and bodies.
Parts of the Deltue successfully made it through the jump gate…and passed straight through to the other side.
Corpses could neither pay bribes nor make threats; the gate remained inactive.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixty-Two
Bridge, Unlikely Regret, near Thananya Stargate
Commander Gadzo watched as many of the Spine Navy ships that had been comrades in arms moments before, now transformed into competing salvage teams.
“Shall we join them?” asked Lieutenant Abebe.
“What are we, a charity mission? The skipper would have our guts for garters if we didn’t try.” Gadzo checked the tactical plot. “Launch Arnie and Sparrow. You have the salvage mission, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.” Abebe was grinning. Arnie and Sparrow, formally known as Pinnace-1 and Shuttle-2, had much less inertia and so had a fighting chance of picking over the last of the pieces. They’d have to shift, though. The grin left Abebe’s face as he realized this, and he ran off the bridge, issuing orders as he went.
“Good luck,” Gadzo whispered, and then he sent a general message to the fleet. “Unlikely Regret to all ships. While we’re grubbing through the spoils in these debris fields like the lowlife rogues we know ourselves to be, let’s not forget we are at war here. Intel on the Scythe is more valuable than scrap and treasures. It needs to be shared for all our sakes.” His message was replied to by a handful of agreements; he also received rather more reminders that the arrogant Human should mind his own damned business. In general, he was mostly ignored. The other ships had heard, though; that was the important thing.
Nonetheless, Gadzo threw curses at the scavenger scum. Like Honest Profit and some of the other larger ships, Unlikely Regret had sacrificed Hold-1 to house not only the enormous particle beam weapon, but its coolant, spares, and power conduits. Hold-2 was filled with the fusion reactor that powered the cannon. Hold-3 was all they had left to earn their profits.
Abebe pinged him, the message metadata reporting his current location as riding the Aft-2 elevator. “I’ve been reviewing the real-time map, sir. We’ll never make it to the enemy ships before the others, and we’d burn good fuel just to try. Do you think—” He cleared his throat. “I have to ask…should we pick over the bones of Honest Profit?”
Commander Gadzo sucked in a sharp breath. He’d already dispatched the other pinnace to look for survivors, but that mission was a formality. The fusion reactor powering the Profit’s particle cannon had blown and blown hard. No one would have survived.
If the situation had been reversed, and the Profit’s Captain Looshah had looked out on the wreckage of Unlikely Regret, she wouldn’t have hesitated to loot the corpses of her friends. To many of their Spine Patriot allies, turning a profit had become more than a self-enriching act, it approached a patriotic duty.
Abebe couldn’t stomach it, though. It was only pure chance that meant the Scythe ship had concentrated their fire on Looshah and not him.
“No, Lieutenant Abebe. Not this time. We’re the only ones on a close enough vector to Honest Profit to reach her easily. Let her debris field spread and cool. Helm, turn us back and make for the enemy ship. By the time we get there, there won’t be anything left worth credits, but there might be something valuable for the war.”
It wasn’t an unrealistic hope. An advantage of the beam weapon over a missile strike was that it carved up the ship with minimal damage and less chance of explosions.
As it was, they found three Cartar prisoners in a pressurized, water-filled compartment. The dropship that had tried to take out Captain Jenkins down on the planet had also survived intact, floating freely inside a spreading cloud of frozen atmosphere.
In that dropship they found a slate. It took three days for the finest code hackers amongst the Patriots—and they were as fine a bunch of code pirates as anywhere in the galaxy—to break the encryption. But once they did, they found it belonged to Captain Grenshal and contained detailed records of inventory resupply and gate transits. There were personal notes, as well.
It would take months to fully analyze, but two secrets revealed themselves within hours.
Firstly, there were references to something called the “Infinite Flow.” The Zuul himself didn’t know what that was and had been trying to piece it together. Grenshal had considered the Infinite Flow to be highly important.
Of more immediate and practical use was the location of the Zuul’s base. Whether or not it was the main base for the entire Scythe operation was unclear, but the Patriots were done with reacting to Scythe outrages. Now they could take the offensive. They headed for the Aneb system.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixty-Three
CIC, Midnight Sun, Scapa Prime
Missiles streaked past her port quadrant, confused by her last-minute shriek of ECM lies.
“Point defenses could have taken them out,” Commander Flkk’Sss reminded her.
Blue cut the comm channel to the MinSha First Officer and the rest of her CIC team, slipping further into the acceleration cocoon of her command station. They didn’t need the crew.
She, Blue reminded herself. She didn’t need the crew.
All she needed was the ship.
She shut down her plasma torch and spun her outer shell around, blowing salted plasma ejecta from exhaust ports three and four while jiggling her backside to spread the plasma plume into a cloud fat enough to hide behind.
Behind the concealment of the high-energy haze, she relit her torch and directed it out of port eight.
Midnight Sun lunged forward into a 7G burn.
Via the ship, Blue became aware of the crew’s pain and anger at the unexpected hard thrust.
Protocol said she should
have warned them that extreme maneuvers were imminent, but the ship blew away her foolish concerns with soothing calmness enriched with millennia of experience.
A stressed crew was like working up a sweat, the ship suggested. It was a natural sign of vigorous activity. An indication of robust health.
They tore back through the plasma cloud, surprising the enemy ships on the far side at point blank range.
Everything else fell away.
It was her and the three enemy craft.
Timing and accuracy were everything.
Inside her cocoon, Blue grinned. It was the snarl of a predator closing on her kill.
She hurled a one-ton bolt from one of her main cannons.
Spin.
Fire again.
Spin.
She faced a final opponent head on.
Time slowed.
Space contracted.
Her shields flared from the enemy’s nose laser.
It burned. She relished the fiery sensation, like the pleasurable peaty heat from a cask-strength whisky. Blue breathed in the moment, capturing it with every sensor at the highest fidelity.
Then she blew three ship-killer missiles across the short distance to her opponent.
Time rebounded into its proper shape. Midnight Sun swooped through the exploding ship and soared away into the black, leaving the three spreading debris clouds in her wake.
She replayed the final seconds of her triumph, freezing at the moment just before she fired the missiles.
The enemy continued to disappoint her.
Gloriana frequently insisted that the disruption to the Infinite Flow through the Spine Nebula was the result of Veetanho interference. That after assassinating her ex-husband, they were going to ground in the remoteness of the nebula like the rodents they were.
With her three missiles frozen the instant before impacting the ship, their target didn’t look like a Veetanho warcraft. It looked more like an old freighter taken by pirates and reconfigured as a gunboat.
She saw some kind of insignia on its nose. She isolated the image and blew it up for closer detail.
It resembled an ancient Earth flag, crudely painted. Fresh, too, because it was barely weathered. On a multicolored rectangle was set a circle of fifteen white stars, no doubt one for each star system in the Spine Nebula. Its resemblance to Earth flags unsettled her, its symbolism the same as the old European Union flag and the American Betsy Ross, too.
The concept was obvious, she tried to tell herself. A design that must have been used across thousands of worlds.
Yet she couldn’t shake the sense of humanity from it.
In any case, it wasn’t the Mobius strip emblem of the Endless Night, and it didn’t feel like a Veetanho design.
The rats were happy to let others fight for them when it suited them, but with every engagement in this campaign, the grubby takeover Blue was fighting across the nebula felt less like a Veetanho operation.
“Back up,” she ordered Flkk’Sss. “Examine the debris field. Search for survivors and other intel. I particularly want to know whether we can make any connection between those ships we just atomized and the Veetanho.”
She tried to relax, to ease herself away from control of the ship. Instead, her body went as rigid as cold stone, her teeth grinding, but she forced herself to permit her crew to take the ship away from her and pilot her under their own direction as they came about to inspect the battlezone.
“Report,” said a voice in her pinplants.
She took a moment to recognize it as Gloriana and recall that the owner of the Midnight Sun Free Company was down on Scapa Prime, overseeing the ejection of the supposed Veetanho forces from their dirtside bolt holes.
“We won,” Blue answered. “Did you encounter Veetanho, Gloriana?”
“No.”
“I don’t think there are any behind this. We wiped out pirates here. That fifteen-star circle emblem was on one of the ships. Fifteen star systems in the nebula. Whoever they are, they’re claiming to be local forces. Do you have firm intel that they are Veetanho?”
“The Veetanho will employ the lowest scum in the universe if they carried out their wishes for the right price. It means nothing.”
Gloriana’s logic was flawless, but Blue remained unconvinced.
Momentarily, the idea that Gloriana was lying pushed Blue toward confronting her mistress, but another part of her warred against her curiosity and pushed it aside.
Not because Gloriana was to be trusted, but because she gave them what they craved.
Danger.
Battle.
Victory.
So what if those battles were fought under false pretenses? If Gloriana thought they cared who they fought against, then the more fool her.
“Whoever they were,” said Blue, “we’ve swept them from the Scapa system. Where is the next confrontation?”
“I hear reports of suspicious activity on Aneb-4.”
Aneb!
“I wager the Veetanho will strike there next. We must jump there without delay.”
Aneb…
Blue emerged from her acceleration cocoon, dripping buffer gel onto the deck. She watched her bedraggled figure through a security feed and wondered how much she stank.
Then she severed the link to the ship.
She blinked, the sudden gaping hole in her psyche leaving her lonely and afraid. Cold and hungry, too. Wondering where the hell her sister was.
They had been a time when it had been her sister’s absence that would have left a cavernous hole in her heart, not the ancient warship’s. That memory felt more distant by the day, but its echoes still resonated.
Sun’s last communication had come from Aneb-4.
“We are alive and safe for the moment,” the message had read. “We are seeking passage to return to you at Station 5. We anticipate extended periods where we may be unable to communicate. But we shall return home. Sun.”
Her sister’s message had been simple text. Why no video?
What was Sun hiding from her?
That Danish snake! He’s corrupted her.
Blue bit her lip until the blood merged with the gel-slime on her face and flowed hot down her chin.
Danish snake? Was that her speaking or was it Midnight Sun?
Blue blockaded her pinplants, cutting her off totally from her ship.
Around her, the CIC crew were flicking guarded glances at her peculiar behavior.
“Commander Flkk’Sss, you have command.” Her voice sounded raw, unpracticed. When had she last used it?
“I have command, aye.”
She straightened her posture and walked off to her quarters with a head filled with thoughts of her sister and Saisho Branco.
She thought she’d come to accept her sister’s lover. Perhaps she had, but the ship hadn’t. Didn’t matter. They were going to Aneb, and, if Sun’s message was to be believed, she would be making her way back to Station 5. When this was all over, they would eventually meet up at a Vane 3 bar to boast about their respective victories and adventures.
“I need you back,” she declared to the empty passageway, not caring that Midnight Sun would hear and know whom she was missing most.
“What’s your problem?” she demanded. “I still need her.”
An answering note of disapproval rang clear in the background hum resonating through the corridor.
She bit her lip again, until the pain woke her to her responsibilities. She was the captain, dammit. She had a ship’s crew and a mercenary company who looked to her for leadership. In theory, at least. She doubted that was true of the Goltar companies.
She released her pinplant blockade and began to absorb the reports flooding in of resupply status, intelligence analysis, details of the operations dirtside on Scapa Prime. There were casualties on board ship too. Not from enemy fire but from her aggressive maneuvering.
It was too much information.
Overload.
Her body began to tremble.
/>
Or was it the deck?
She looked down and saw her bare feet had left wet prints.
Where were her boots?
She fought hard to control the shakes as a pair of deckhands approached along the passageway. She returned an unsteady salute, let them pass, and then sought refuge in the nearest compartment.
It was an avionics access space. You couldn’t swing an ElSha in here, but it would have to do.
Immediately upon locking the door, she collapsed to the deck, curled into a ball, and allowed the shakes to claim her body.
Tremors passed through her flesh, accompanied by waves of sweat. Behind it all lurked an overwhelming sense of absence, a loss that threatened to drive the sanity from her mind.
Was this the loss of the connection to the ship or to her sister?
The dim light in the overhead grew brighter and began to swirl in greens and reds. The ship whispered to her through the drone of the air scrubbers and the hum from the reactors at the ship’s core.
You are deceived. Weak. Outlawed. Gloriana’s fool.
Why are you captain? You never earned your place.
She wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t cry out. During the Raknar job, her crew had dragged her screeching from her station once, but that wouldn’t happen again. She was stronger now. Better.
Her gut lurched as the tiny compartment spun around, accelerating. Faster. Out of control. Faster. Faster.
She retched violently.
The sharp taste of bile sobered her little. Enough to let her climb to her hands and knees.
She contemplated the mess she’d splattered. It wasn’t much. She hadn’t taken on solid food for…a while. She felt better for her purging, nonetheless.
Gradually the room unwound, and she was able to get to her feet.
How long had she been in her command station?
The pinplants wouldn’t tell her. She had to fight them. It was like peeling back a scar, but she won the data in the end.
Seven days.
It felt like she had only taken her station that morning, but she must have been lying to herself.
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 29