[01] Elite: Wanted (28 page)

‘Take us in,’ she said. There was so much murder in her voice that she barely recognised it as her own. ‘Get the decoy drones racked and ready. Load the rest for hunting bear.’

‘You have a k-cast incoming from Enaya.’

‘Not now. Take a message.’

One more micro-jump as the
Dragon Queen
dosed her up with adrenaline and nanites for a hard burn into the planetoid and then the g-force ripped her back into her cocoon. The Cave appeared ahead of her and all hell broke loose as Jackson’s Lighthouse lit her up.

It was the moment before a fight. Everything seemed to slow. Everything was taking too long. A few spoken commands and the fuel scoop was reprogrammed to a gentler setting for handling human cargo. Ravindra had slowed the
Song
right down. They were currently facing the mouth of the cavern. She could not see the corvette, but she was searching the feed from the rear optics. The corvette would want to be positioned behind and below the
Song
, the optimal vantage point for a dogfight.

‘We’ve got Jenny,’ Orla said. They had managed to get into position a lot quicker than the
Omerta
. ‘The suit’s badly malfunctioning … I’ve got life signs. Some irregularities.’

‘Orla? Rav?’ Jenny’s voice at that moment was the best thing either of them could hope for, even if it was full of pain.

‘Jenny, can you get yourself out of the suit? Quickly?’ Orla asked.

‘Doing it.’ There had only been a moment’s pause.

‘They’re at the crate, scoops deployed.’

Where’s the bloody corvette?
It was a silent scream. Then, more rationally:
If it’s not where you think it should be …
Ravindra ran all the optics through expert analysis programs. There were too many of them to run as windows on her lenses. She put the
Song
in a lazy spin through its horizontal access, heading towards the mouth of the cavern as she looked all around through the transparent section of hull that surrounded the bridge.

‘They’ve got the cargo,’ Orla said. Ravindra could hear the tension in her first mate’s voice.

In his berth on the
Scalpel
, Ji reached into his rucksack and took the object out. Even considering its origin, it was still difficult to imagine all the death and suffering that was connected to it. In a few days they would be on the other side of human occupied space. There he could sell it, disappear and become someone else.

Harlan’s cracksman had finally broken the security of the crate the cargo had come in. It hadn’t been easy, but he had done it and been well paid for it. Now to find out if it had been worth it. Ravindra glanced at the countdown. It reached zero. The two missile warheads they had put in the crate, replacing the cargo, should have gone off by now. If they had, she couldn’t see any external sign of it. There was a chance that the explosion could have been contained by the
Omerta
’s heavily armoured hull. She let herself imagine the effects of two warheads going off inside the ship.

Jenny pulled herself into the cockpit. Ravindra couldn’t help but take a glance at her. The younger woman looked badly burned. The engineer ordered her acceleration couch to inject a painkiller/stim cocktail similar to the ones the others had taken, along with a battery of anti-radiation compounds.

The expert systems had flagged a number of the screens. Ravindra opened the windows for them in her lenses.
There!
The corvette was hiding amongst long, sharp, teeth-like protrusions of hard rock, each one about the size of an apartment block. The induction effect had long since removed the more metallic rock from around them. The
Song
told Ravindra that Jenny was secured in her couch. She used the manoeuvre engines to tip the
Song
forty-five degrees on its horizontal axis and then bank hard from a nearly standing start.

The corvette shot out of its hiding place, burning hard to block the
Song
’s attempt to reach the cave mouth. The
Omerta
started rising from the pickup point, again towards the mouth of the cave. The dark space was bathed in red light from a multitude of lasers fired by both vessels. The corvette and the Anaconda launched a spread of rockets, a tactic as much about denying area as actually trying to hit the
Song
.

Ravindra slaved the pulse and beam laser batteries to the targeting system and the optics, effectively turning them into space’s most ineffective automated point defence system. The batteries drew lines of red light from the
Song
to the missiles-come-rockets as Ravindra triggered a hard burn towards the cavern mouth among the silent blossoming explosions from the missiles’ warheads. The
Song
shed ablative and reflective chaff and clouds of particulate matter in a bid to refract the incoming laser fire from the
Omerta
and the corvette. They tried to leave a clear path for Ravindra to fire the military laser again and again at the corvette. The laser scored a black line down the other craft’s ablative armour, beating the corvette’s weakened shield, but the corvette pilot was good. A series of chaotic, counterintuitive manoeuvres resulted in Ravindra missing the corvette more than she was hitting.

Orla rained missiles on the
Omerta
. Their contrails lit the cavern up, many of them dying in a hail of point defence fire. The missiles fired from the
Song
passed missiles fired from the
Omerta
rising in flight and then blossoming into submunitions. The
Omerta
’s point defences became strobic as they attempted to keep up with the incoming warheads fired by the
Song
. The few warheads that made it through exploded against the hull, and from this distance the damage they did to the heavily-armoured ship looked like exploding puffs of dust.

Ravindra was banking hard through violent light and exploding submunitions, racing for the mouth in a constantly renewing cloud of chaff and countermeasures. The
Song
was handling much better with Jenny compensating for the constant system degradation, but frankly Ravindra had other things to worry about. The
Omerta
launched a pair of Sidewinder fighters from its hangar bay. It would soon be over. They could have fought the corvette, or maybe the Anaconda, but not both – and definitely not with a fighter escort. The
Song
ran for the cavern mouth.

‘Er, Rav?’ Orla said nervously. Ravindra checked the time until the pulsar bathed the Cave in hard radiation. The corvette was on an intercept course. Ravindra could just about make it out through the wall of exploding warheads as their point defences intercepted incoming missiles. The corvette’s own military laser was burning a hole through their countermeasures and working through their ablative armour. Ravindra memorised the corvette’s trajectory.

‘Rav!’

The light of the pulsar came again. Everything went white. Ravindra closed her eyes. Her sight was still bathed in red as warning icon after warning icon appeared on her lenses as system after system dropped out. Blind, she turned the
Song
over, changing trajectory away from the mouth. Then, with the aid of a hastily assembled navcomp simulation, she fired the military laser again and again, at where she knew the Corvette was supposed to be.

They made ‘shade’. Ravindra could hear Jenny swearing constantly as she attempted to bring a number of systems back on line and compensate for those she couldn’t fix. Ravindra cut the fusion torch, keeping momentum, just using the manoeuvring engines now – not even bothering to fire – as she made for the canyons of tooth-like, building-sized, jagged hard rock. The other ships would take a moment to find the
Song
again.

Ravindra caught a glimpse of a shadow in the pulsar’s light, a ghost ship existing only in silhouette.

There was an art to a good ambush. Ziva came in from the light side of the Cave riding a sweep of the pulsar’s beam, power plant juiced with anti-matter and every Watt of energy thrown at holding up the aft shields. The pulsar was shredding her anyway, but no one would be expecting her to come in like this because no one in their right mind ever would.

The Anaconda was heading across the cavern. The hanger doors to the converted cargo bay were open and the first pair of Sidewinders had already emerged. She was firing and launching ordnance at something Ziva couldn’t see. There were at least two other ships out there somewhere but the
Dragon Queen
couldn’t get any sort of fix on them before the pulsar’s beam swept over the cave again and all her imaging processors shut down. By the time they powered up again, Ziva was coming in.

She had enough time for a momentary glimpse before it happened again. It was like watching the world through a slow strobe.

No matter. She wasn’t here for Khanguire, not this time. She had three salvoes of drones in the air and a fourth ready to go when the
Omerta
finally saw her coming. Ziva lit her fusion torch and lit the drones at the same time, their plasma plumes offering some protection, at last, against the sweep of the pulsar beam. They burned hard for a second and then bloomed, each one becoming a cluster of thousands of sub-munitions, some real and tipped with anti-matter, many nothing more than a scatter of infra-red lamps and corner reflectors. Two decoy drones ran ahead of her with their signatures set to match her own, both jamming hard – for all the difference it would make with so much radiation already burning into the cavern. If she’d done it right, the very first impression the Anaconda would have was of three Fer-de-Lances bearing down on it from point-blank range amid a salvo of enough ordnance to vaporise a battlecruiser, while all the Anaconda’s sensors and warheads would have to look straight into the pulsar beam with no plasma plume to screen them.

Then again, with the way the Jackson pulsar was buggering her own sensors, maybe they wouldn’t see anything at all.

A slew of diagnostics came back from the drones. Hundreds of malfunctions. Sensor failures, comms failures, half of them were flying blind … no, nearly
all
of them were flying blind. It came down to manoeuvring by eye.

The first Sidewinders out of the fighter bays had already lit their torches and were powering deeper into the Cave. Ziva let them go. She had the
Dragon Queen
’s targeting servos slaved to her Fresnels and lined up on the next Sidewinder as it came out. Half a dozen rapid-fire pulse lasers opened up from the
Omerta
in point-defence. At the same time it launched a dozen small drones that immediately fragmented into hundreds of micro-interceptors. Countermeasure dispensers threw out clouds of particulates, anti-laser aerosol and microscopic reflectors. For a moment, Ziva blinked at what was coming back at her, as the
Dragon Queen
’s targeting systems jumped from not having much to do straight to overload. There was simply no possible way to know exactly what the
Omerta
had just thrown back at her and how much of it would get through.

The pulsar beam swept across the Cave and her entire sensor suite went down again. Ziva swore loudly. The displays returned almost at once but the whole targeting system had reset. Fucking thoroughbred over-sensitive Fer-de-Lance design, that was. Ziva shuddered and whispered a quick prayer that the
Omerta
was having it just as bad. Even so, what should have been a delicate calculated tactical battle was turning into two blind men blasting at each other with sawn-off shotguns.
Christ!
Maybe turning backside on to ram the fucker with her fusion plume turned full blast wasn’t such a bad idea.

The
Dragon Queen
’s own point defence pulse lasers were already on full-automatic, although it was a mystery how they knew where to shoot. Ziva took a gamble and kept the main lasers for herself, targeting them by eye on the next Sidewinder. The
Omerta
could throw up as much jamming and as many countermeasures as it liked: she’d still caught it with its pants down and it wasn’t going to get away.

‘Keep our eyes on the Anaconda and feed targeting solutions to the drones,’ Ziva snapped to the
Dragon Queen
. Assuming there were any drones left whose comms hadn’t failed.

A Sidewinder flared as a fist of coherent X-rays from the Fer-de-Lance punched through its shield and its thin skin of armour and ripped its insides to vapour. The Sidewinder exploded so close to the
Omerta
that it had to have hurt the Anaconda as well. The
Dragon Queen
’s canopy darkened to protect her from the plasma flash. Through the chaos of thousands of sub-munitions flying at each other, Ziva steered the Fer-de-Lance’s laser across to the hanger door where another Sidewinder was coming out. She caught one wingtip as it tried to dart behind the bulk of the
Omerta
and then lost sight of it. She couldn’t tell whether she’d crippled it or whether it had escaped.

The two waves of blind, dumb drones and countermeasures came together in a crash of hard light and high-end radiation. Tiny anti-matter warheads smaller than pinheads detonated around one another, converting into a brilliant quantum flurry of exotic particles and energetic photons. The
Dragon Queen
’s canopy blackened while the ship threw up a hopelessly inaccurate simulated rendering of the colliding warhead swarms. For a few seconds, Ziva lost sight of the
Omerta
. The point defence pulse lasers started up as some of the
Omerta
’s return fire began to leak through, then stopped for a moment as the pulsar beam swept past. Ziva caught a glimpse of what might have been another Sidewinder bolting out of the
Omerta
and turned the
Dragon Queen
’s main laser on it, firing steadily until the power circuits started to overheat. Something flashed bright as a nova, enough to see even through the wall of fire erupting between them.

‘Arm the next salvo.’ The
Dragon Queen
crashed through the remnants of the
Omerta
’s return fire. Radiation was battering at her shields. Something exploded close by, an anti-hydrogen warhead set off by the pulse lasers just before it hit. Ziva felt the
Dragon Queen
shudder. She had shield warnings all over the place.