Starbound (Lightship Chronicles)

by Dave Bara

  Karina was back in her coveralls as we docked and the cargo doors were opened inside the station. I was glad to be back on what could be termed friendly territory, if only marginally so. She stayed undercover with the work crew as the crates were being transferred through the station to Benfold, under Captain Lucius Zander’s command. Colonel Babayan and I were walking the station’s cargo deck trying to locate what berth Benfold might be in when I heard a voice call my name from behind me.

  “Commander Cochrane?” I turned to find the curly-haired Lieutenant Daniel from Starbound.

  “What are you doing here, Lieutenant?” I asked, surprised to see a familiar face. Then I glanced at his garb and I had my answer. He was out of uniform and dressed as a merchantman.

  “Captain Maclintock sent me,” he said. “He thought you two might need some assistance, and, well, I volunteered.”

  “I see,” I replied. I was impressed with the slight young man’s desire to be more than the ship’s purser.

  “Captain Zander and Mr. Harrington would like to meet with you both aboard Benfold as soon as possible,” said Daniel.

  I nodded. “That was my plan exactly. Lead the way, Mr. Daniel.” Daniel weaved his way quickly through the crowded loading dock as he led Lena and me down a series of passenger terminal hubs and connectors and then through a large umbilical dock and onto Benfold.

  Once aboard we walked onto a gangway above Benfold’s hangar deck just as the crates containing our secret cargo were being delivered. As I looked down to the deck below a group of six Carinthians were inspecting the crates. Not Loyalist guards, but rather the military police, the Feldjäger, the same type of troops I had encountered at the military base where I had been put on trial.

  “What’s with the MPs?” I asked Daniel.

  “While you were in transit a preliminary agreement was reached between the two princes. The MPs were put in charge of station security as part of the agreement,” he said. I eyed them nervously.

  “This might not be good,” I said. As I watched the MPs were probing each of the crates with some advanced scanning devices, nothing like I had seen before. Karina and the two longshoremen, who I took to be her personal bodyguards, stood to the side as the inspection continued. The bodyguards were getting agitated, though, shifting from side to side every few seconds, something that didn’t go unnoticed by the Feldjäger. Karina stayed stoic and covered under her hood and mask.

  “Stay here,” I said to Daniel and Lena. “I’m going down there.” I made my way down an open metal stairwell and headed straight for the cargo crates. Against my orders I heard Lena trailing behind me, but I didn’t have the time to correct her.

  “Say there!” I called to one of the Feldjäger military police as I approached. “Those are my supplies!” My yelling seemed to confuse them temporarily as I approached. Then two of them peeled away from the pair of investigators and approached me with weapons at the ready.

  “Zeugenstand verlassen!” one of them yelled at me in German as I kept coming, which I took to mean “stand down” or something similar. The second brought his weapon to bear on Babayan as she came up beside me.

  “Sir, wait!” I heard Daniel’s voice from behind me. I waved him off.

  “Get back, Daniel!” I turned and ordered. Just then one of the inspectors was at the crate containing the grand duke. It only took him seconds to sound the alarm. He started yelling something in German and then everything exploded into a flurry of action. One of Lady Karina’s bodyguards pulled out a coil pistol and shot both guards approaching me in the back. The first one fell neatly but the second got off a reflex shot that burned past Lena and me far too close for comfort. The second bodyguard dispatched another Feldjäger as Karina ran for cover. I scrambled to gather the rifle from the nearest fallen MP and Babayan did the same. We ran for cover, firing at one of the inspectors as we went. A bolt of energy from my rifle went right through one of the inspector’s handheld devices and pierced his chest. The second inspector went for cover as the lone remaining MP dispatched one of the princess’s bodyguards. The second guard took cover behind some crates, protecting the princess behind him. The problem now was that from either direction the crate containing the grand duke was in the way for one of us. Babayan and I then took up a sniper position behind some barrels. The second inspector was in my sights, but so was the crate just past him. If I missed . . .

  Meanwhile the two MPs and the princess’s lone remaining bodyguard were exchanging potshots to no avail. We were at a stalemate. This exchange went on for several more tense seconds before I heard the sound of someone calling out and demanding attention.

  It was the Princess Karina.

  She yelled at the two remaining Feldjäger in German, some commands that I didn’t understand. She stood up and pulled her hood down off her face so that they could see her. That was all the distraction I needed. The second inspector raised his head clearly into my line of fire and I took him out with a sniper shot. The last MP was so startled at seeing his sovereign that he had dropped his rifle and stood up to surrender, hands in the air. It didn’t stop the princess’s bodyguard from dropping him with a shot to the chest. I jumped up and ran to the princess.

  “Are you all right? What the hell did you think you were doing?” I demanded. It was the second time I’d asked that question of her.

  “Giving orders to my subjects,” she said. “It worked, didn’t it?” I looked around at the carnage on the deck.

  “Seven of your ‘subjects’ are dead, Princess,” I said.

  “Eight.” She pointed behind me. I turned to look. Ensign Daniel lay in a bloody pool, a neat hole the size of a melon in his chest. He’d been cut down by the reflexive coil rifle shot from the fallen MP. Damnable luck. He was a good kid, or at least he had been.

  “He was one of ours,” I said, but there was no time to waste now on sentiment. “We’ve got to get these bodies—”

  “Get them off my deck!” yelled a voice from behind me. I swiveled, rifle still drawn, to see Lucius Zander and a group of his men rushing to the scene of the shootout. “Lock down the hull! We’re breaking station in two minutes!” he bellowed. I went to him as he stood over Ensign Daniel’s scarred body. “He was a good lad, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Like us?” I said.

  “Not if I can help it,” replied Zander. Then he bowed as the Lady Karina came up. “Highness,” he said.

  “Captain Zander I presume,” she said, then removed her gloves and extended her hand and he kissed it. “How long until we can get underway?”

  “Thirty seconds if I have my way, Highness,” he said. “The station’s been taken over by those Feldjäger bastards. Part of your brother’s ‘Peaceful Resolution.’”

  She nodded. “Unfortunate. But we have to go. Time is of the essence, Captain.”

  “I understand, Highness,” he replied and then turned to Lena and me. “If you’re done shooting up my cargo hold, Mr. Cochrane, perhaps you’d like to join me on my bridge,” he said.

  I handed the rifle to one of his men. “Gladly, sir. Anything to be out of this star system.”

  We were rushing on full impellers toward the primary jump point out of Carinthian space. It was still a two-hour trip from our current position. Time enough for trouble to find us.

  “What happened to Harrington?” I asked once things had settled down. Zander sat in his captain’s chair, ever-present coffee cup in hand, monitoring our progress on his main plasma screens, which included forward visual, longscope, tactical, and infrared. It was an impressive display for any vessel less than a Lightship. I sat next to him in what was clearly a military XO’s station, actually quite an array for a “merchant” vessel.

  “He got off of Three in his yacht. Not to worry though, it’s better equipped than Benfold and a far sight snazzier. I imagine he’ll be in touch at some point in the future,
once he can create enough plausible deniability about that shootout you had in my cargo hold,” he said.

  “I am sorry about that,” I replied, “but our cargo—”

  “Is of the highest priority. I understand that, lad.” I sat back in my chair. Lena and Princess Karina and her lone remaining bodyguard were standing watch in the cargo hold over the grand duke. My thoughts turned elsewhere.

  “I didn’t even have the chance to thank Harrington for getting me off of Carinthia,” I said between sips of some of Zander’s famous exotic coffee. This batch was from Levant, and the mere thought of that lush green world and its most beautiful and popular ruler, the Princess Janaan, sent a pang of loneliness through my body. I put those feelings, and the coffee cup, aside for the moment.

  “No need to thank him. It was your Admiral Wesley who sent me to pick you up. Harrington was just doing his job,” Zander replied.

  “Job?” I said. “You mean—”

  “Harrington works directly for Wesley and the Union command, lad, as do I. Our merchant status is only a front. Wesley thought he would be useful in an intelligence-gathering role, moving agents about, that sort of thing. Turns out he was right,” said Zander. It made sense, especially the way Benfold was trimmed out.

  “And what about you?” I asked. Zander shrugged.

  “Wesley offered to hire me in the same capacity. Truth is, there’s been rumors of trouble with the Carinthians for years. Wesley, and the Earthmen as well, saw the Merchant Marine as a way of surreptitiously supplementing the official navy forces. Of course, when he offered, I said yes. Rather be out in the midst of things than on some glorious Lightship doing First Contact negotiations when trouble hits,” he said.

  “So there’s a surreptitious navy?” I asked.

  “As I just said, lad.”

  I thought about this. It must mean that my father and Wesley both believed that war with Carinthia was a possibility, if not inevitable, and for quite a long time. Ships like Benfold didn’t just spring up full-born overnight.

  “What’s this ship’s military capacity?” I asked, glancing down at the XO’s station console. Zander took a sip of his coffee before answering.

  “My Wasp’s got the same firepower as a Hobart-class missile destroyer, and she’s faster, harder, and more nimble by a long ways. Your father and Wesley commissioned these ships as a backstop against trouble with Carinthia, trouble that has now arrived. Since these are classified as merchant ships, they don’t count against either Earth’s or Quantar’s navy allotment, which has to stay relatively equal to Carinthia’s. And Harrington runs twenty-two of them for your Admiral Wesley in his merchant fleet,” he said.

  So these were really warships after all. It was worse news than I was prepared for.

  “So the Admiralty has suspected war with Carinthia as a possibility for years,” I asked. Zander nodded.

  “Carinthia has strong cultural ties to the old empire. Any good textbook will tell you that. They were firmly in the Imperial camp during the civil war, and your two worlds were deeply involved in that conflict, on opposite sides. The Earthmen took a risk when they chose Carinthia and Quantar to be the first two planets contacted for membership in the Union. The old ties would always be there. But things accelerated when you encountered your dreadnought at Levant. Arin and his like are clearly under the influence of the empire, and the black school of Historians,” he said.

  “Excuse me, the what?”

  Zander looked at me. “There is a secret society, even within the Historian order itself, a group that shadows the order, integrates with it, but has its own motives. That’s where Tralfane came from. They don’t show their faces until it’s too late. You should really ask your friend Serosian about all this.”

  “I will,” I said. That was another item to add to my list of worries. “One thing has me curious though. I thought you were a tried and true Carinthian Navy Officer, not so much a Unionist.”

  “No, lad, I’m a Loyalist. Loyal to that man down there in that crate. Old Henrik brought Carinthia forward into the Union with the best of intentions. I’d never have been in command of Impulse if it wasn’t for him. I owe him my career. So do a lot of other officers. We may be Carinthian, but we swore an oath to the Union and to the grand duke, and I intend to fulfill it.”

  Just then the ship shuddered with an impact, something being deflected by the Hoagland Field, jostling us enough that my coffee dropped off the console to the floor of the bridge. The tactical board lit up with incoming data. From what I could read, we had plenty of unwanted company.

  “How many ships?” I asked.

  “Looks like three, cruiser displacement,” said Zander; then he barked orders at this tactical crew. “You’d better strap in,” he said to me. I did.

  “Can you handle them?” I asked.

  “Any two would be a cakewalk, lad. But three . . .” His voice trailed off as he yelled more commands, then returned his attention to the tactical display. “That was just a warning shot, likely a missile with a conventional warhead. They’ll want us to heave to, but I’m not of a mind to give them what they want.”

  “Are they trying to stop the duke from escaping?” I asked.

  “It’s you they want, and our cargo. They must know the grand duke’s on board. If they can capture us they can blame you for trying to kidnap the old duke, really fan the flames for war. My job is not to give them that satisfaction.”

  “What’s going on up there?” came the voice of Princess Karina over the captain’s com.

  “We have company, Highness, of the surly and not-too-friendly type,” said Zander. “I suggest you strap in.”

  “They can’t take this vessel, Captain. They cannot take my father back.”

  “I understand that, Highness. I swore an oath to your father before you were born, and I have no intention of failing him. Now if you’ll excuse me, we are a bit busy up here,” Zander said.

  “But—”

  Zander cut off the com and turned to me. “Can you operate that longscope, lad?” he said, pointing to a small station.

  “I am still a Union Navy officer, not just a royal prince with no training,” I said, unstrapping again and springing from my seat as the ship rocked with more nearby missile detonations. At least they weren’t shooting directly at us. Yet.

  Once I was under the longscope hood I piped into the com and was able to send vector and speed status to Benfold’s weapons officer, who turned my data into targeting resolutions. Benfold launched a counterattack with five tactical atomic multiwarhead missiles. The separate warheads gave the cruiser commanders plenty to think about. Our first volley took out nearly thirty percent of one of the cruisers’ tactical capabilities, including weapons. The other two were only slightly diminished, at just five and eight percent lost.

  “I’d feel better if we could have knocked one of those cruisers out,” said Zander, just before we took our first full-on volley of retaliatory missiles. My displays showed a twenty-two percent degradation in our attack and defense systems, which I quickly reported to Zander. “We need cover,” he said to me through the private com.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” I said, and began a search pattern as I’d been taught at the Academy. I quickly had an option.

  “Large field of ice and rock planetesimals at point-four-four AU distance, Captain,” I said. “Calculations indicate we can be there in three-point-six-six light-minutes at full max.”

  “Mr. Fraser,” called Zander, “Full max on the plasma impellers. Mr. Cochrane will give you our heading.”

  “Full max,” said Fraser, after I fed him the directional telemetry. At our current clip Benfold could accelerate to .994 of light speed in about thirty seconds. The Cruisers would of course follow, but I doubted they could match Benfold’s acceleration curve. Still, with three of them they could keep us from reaching Carinthian jump space b
y chipping away at our defenses.

  “Recommend you strap in again, lad,” said Zander, and I did. After a few seconds of ratting and shaking we hit a safe cruising speed and the ship’s hull integrity normalized with the aid of her Hoagland Field.

  The passage through open space was tense. The cruisers quickly fell away behind us, but only out of range of their missiles and torpedoes. If they had accurate coil cannons they could still hit us with those. Within a few moments though, it was obvious they either had none or were unwilling to use them until they could regain their tactical advantage. We were faster in a sprint, but we were still two hours from jump space and we wouldn’t be able to maintain our speed for that long.

  We were thirty seconds from the asteroid field when Zander cut the impeller drive and we went to maneuvering thrusters. The bridge doors opened a few seconds later and the Princess Karina stepped onto the deck. She had changed into a regular Benfold casual duty one-piece uniform, Lieutenant rank, and made straight for the weapons station, pushing the merchant sailor there aside.

  “Highness, you would be best served to remain in your cabin,” said Zander. She snapped around to face him.

  “I’m a naval officer, Captain Zander, and probably better qualified at this station than your commercial grunts,” she said. “And my first observations indicate your defensive fields are only running at seventy-two percent because your man here is running them off batteries instead of the ion plasma from the sub-light impellers.”