[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (29 page)
Read [04] Elite: Mostly Harmless Online
Authors: Kate Russell
Tags: #Mostly, #Russell, #Dangerous, #elite, #Kate, #Harmless
‘Shit!’
She glanced to the radar and saw a mass of angry red dots filling up the circular panel behind the sweep of the probing arm -
pirates -
dozens of them within range of the first scan alone.
‘Shit,
shit
!’
Alerted by the cosmic signature of a rip through space, most of the hostile ships were already scanning her. Numbers on the dash climbed as digital fingers probed for information.
‘Shit,
shit, SHIT!
’
As bad as this was though, she didn’t have the luxury of time to worry about it. The jump engines had died the moment she’d landed, her ship instantly snagged by the sun’s gravitational pull, dragged down in its fiery embrace like a rock sinking to the bottom of a lake. The hull rattled and moaned under the pressure of her increasing speed as she raced toward the sun. If she didn’t do something soon she was going to be swallowed up in a cataclysm of fire.
She grabbed for the flight-stick, ramming her foot down on the roll pedal to steer the ship away from the sun. She was a breath away from pumping fuel into the reverse thrusters too, the spaceflight equivalent of slamming on the brakes, when she realised she was too close to the sun; already captured by such a fierce gravitational pull no conventional engine power could break free. They’d played out scenarios like this at flight school; flown VR missions in the simulator that had ended in being caught in the orbit of a large celestial body, plummeting to your doom. The trick was to use its own force against it; slingshot around the celestial object until you built up such momentum you could snap your vessel free of the gravity on the return arc of orbit, like a line cast from a rod into the open sea of space.
Angel’s stomach clenched and she felt her gorge rise as the ship screamed towards the sun. She was going to have to fully commit to this manoeuvre if it was to have any chance of succeeding. But then, what other options did she have?
In an instant she slammed her right foot across both thruster pedals, keeping the pressure on a starboard roll with the left. The flight-stick also fully rammed to the right she let go with the left hand to quickly flick the last of the fuel cylinders over to the forward thrusters, flooding the engines with every last bit of power she could muster. The Viper howled as it sped up even faster, walls, panels and windshields shaking like a paper house in a gale.
A swarm of ships up ahead was already scrambling to intercept. As she fought to stay in control of her rapid transit around the sun she came into range of their tracer fire. Bullets shot past her like darts, plinking here and there off the bodywork. Sweat popped out on her forehead and cheeks, though whether this was down to her increasing proximity to the sun or the stress of her ongoing situation was entirely debatable.
Closer yet and the fleet’s heavy guns started hammering. At first she was hopelessly out of range, but a heartbeat later a salvo of missiles from the lead ship bellowed in a deafening cascade along her flank. If she’d been in
Hope Falls
it would have been game over, but
Heron’s Webb
had been upgraded to the max when it came to defences; a fact she was very thankful for right now. She watched the shield indicator drop to eighty-seven percent as she sped across the pirate fleet’s bows and out of range to continue her headlong rush around the sun.
With her orbit now just about under control she turned her attention to strategy. If she could keep up this trajectory she might make it around the sun in one piece. Scanners showed there were a couple more clusters of pirate ships she would have to fly past, but at this speed it had already been proved they shouldn’t do more than ten or fifteen percent shield damage. Once she’d passed around the back of the sun she should have the velocity to break free of the gravitational pull and fling herself back in the direction she’d come from.
But what then?
She didn’t have to query the fuel gauges to know any attempt to make a run for it would be embarrassingly short-lived, and although
Heron’s Webb
had thick skin, the ship had surprisingly short teeth for a Viper. A couple of pulse lasers and an auto cannon weren’t going to get her far in a fist fight.
‘Shit!’
Aware her vocabulary seemed to have shrunk to just one word, Angel was racking her rattling brain for an idea when an orange light started flashing on the dash. It was the hyperdrive fuel scoops detecting proximity to an energy source; informing her with an uncanny sense of timing they were ready and able to recharge. She gritted her teeth against the jaw-juddering vibrations of the ship. Her flight school scenarios hadn’t covered refuelling at this speed but she guessed there was risk involved. That would certainly fit with the pattern of her luck anyway, right? Regardless though, about the only chance she had to make it out of there alive was to slingshot straight in to another hyperjump. She needed fuel for that, so she changed hands on the flight-stick and reached up to flip the lever underneath the orange, flashing “READY”.
A clunk Angel didn’t like the sound of was followed by a high pitched wail mixed unharmoniously with the howl of the ship’s hull. The fuel gauge had starting rising; ten, fifteen, twenty percent ... she was coming into range of the second fleet of pirates now; half a dozen ships, about the same size as the last batch. There was pretty much nothing she could do other than hold her course and hope she didn’t take too much damage. Her thighs ached as she pressed all the pedals under her feet even further into the steel floor plates, her eyes fixed on the shield read out. It was ticking down slowly, taking damage under the pressure of flight but also getting close enough to the sun for radiation to become an issue. Already at eighty-three percent and just a third of the way around the sun it was clear she didn’t have much wiggle room.
The Viper’s engines deafened her. A line of orange blooms ignited up ahead as a premature salvo of missiles erupted across space. The next swathe was timed a little better but the fleet had still been trigger happy and only the last few tornadoes connected with her nosecone. Shields dropped to seventy-eight percent. The next salvo would be too late so she allowed herself to breathe again, shifting focus back to the hyperdrives - eighty-eight percent full. That would be plenty. She snapped the collection lever off and gripped the flight-stick with both hands, grimacing as the sun spun below her, catapulting her recklessly towards the next band of pirate ships in her path.
This fleet was bigger; a motley crew of makes and models from shipyards all over the galaxy. On the sector map it looked like about two-dozen in total. But while their origins were scattered and confused, their strategy was clear. They punched through space towards and ahead of her, with the deadly precision of a protractor.
She was now travelling at such velocity everything had become a blur; the sun, the stars, the approaching onslaught; the windscreen, the dashboard, even her nose for that matter as her whole sense of reality reverberated with the almost impossible speed of her flight. She narrowed her focus to the singular task she could still have some, small influence over - namely staying just out of reach of the sun’s final embrace while keeping her vessel on course for the hyperjump corridor sketching out on the holographic heads up display in front of her. There had been no time to think about a destination so she’d literally flipped the last jump on its head, pointing the ship back to exactly where it had come from; as ‘exactly’ as you’re ever going to get with hyperspace science anyway.
The first boom from the pirate’s attack pushed the air through the cabin like thunder. She was vaguely aware of lights flashing on the dash but any desire to read or interpret the numbers was hopeless optimism by now. Angel was thrown from side to side in her harness as the ship rocked and corkscrewed through the relentless slew of munitions ripping open the space just in front and to the side of her, over and over.
‘Computer, engage autopilot. Lock to local hyperjump co-ordinates.’
Seems like voice control was a good idea after all,
Angel thought, as there was no way she could’ve entered co-ordinates by hand at these speeds. Yet another instance when
Hope Falls
would have been the death of her. As the last dregs of the pirate attack shunted her tail to the left and the right in the after blast of explosions, the shapes on the dashboard told her she had completed a fifty percent orbit of the sun. Taking her feet off the accelerator she pushed everything one last time to port - left, left, left with anything sticking out of the floor or the dashboard she could get a limb to. The Viper erupted in a cacophony of discordant metallic complaints. It shrieked, it screamed, it howled in rage. Every atom in the ship’s being put its entire will to staying in one piece as the sun finally relented its grip on her and she went hurtling towards the blossoming hyperspace rift up ahead.
* * *
Suddenly everything was silent again.
Spat out in to uncontentious, unremarkable, neutral space she killed the engines and clung to the flight-stick with desperation as her body acclimatised itself to the now normal ambient experience of peaceful space. After a few moments she could read the shield status off the jittering dashboard.
Eighteen percent.
Okay, that wasn’t too bad at all.
She released her death-grip on the controls and allowed herself to breathe again.
Safe.
Was she safe?
She tried to swim past the tsunami of adrenaline coursing through her body to recall the status of this area …
Safe? Yes … She was definitely safe for now. A fact irrefutably confirmed when the first pass of the radar found no other ships in range.
She laughed shakily.
Had she really just survived that? Perhaps her luck was on the turn after all?
She blinked a couple of times and peered out of the forward windscreen.
Nothing but distant stars; beautiful and black, featureless space; featureless, that was, apart from a blip. Her radar swept across her path and registered something; something her eyes caught hold of too as the ship coasted towards it. She was almost upon it and over it before she realised what it was.
DORIS.
Her re-entry point had set her on a terminal collision course with the biscuit-tin sized robot as it drifted through the vacuum of space clutching a recipe book to its LCD panel. As the tip of the Viper’s fuselage, still blisteringly hot from rapid orbit and the friction of leaving hyperspace, connected with the diminutive robot it exploded in to a billion fragments.
Angel stared, transfixed by the glittering cloud of silicon particles as the book spun off in to the nothingness of space in an un-plotable direction. The secret of what was perhaps the tastiest sauce the galaxy will ever know lost forever.
THE END
About the Author:
Kate Russell has been writing about technology, gaming and the Internet since 1995 and now appears weekly on BBC2 and BBC World News, reporting for technology programme Click. A regular expert on the sofa at ITV’s Daybreak and various other TV and radio stations, she writes columns for National Geographic Traveller magazine and Web User magazine.
Kate's website:
Kate's Twitter:
Kate's Facebook:
Kate has also written 'Working the Cloud', an indispensible guide to getting the most out of the internet for you and your business. Here's the website;
Other books available in the Elite:Dangerous series:
Elite: Lave Revolution by Allen Stroud
Elite: And Here The Wheel by John Harper
Elite: Reclamation by Drew Wagar
Elite: Tales From The Frontier by 15 authors from around the world
All the above published by Fantastic Books Publishing
* * *
Elite: Wanted, by Gavin Deas
Elite: Nemorensis, by Simon Spurrier
Elite: Docking is Difficult, by Gideon Defoe
Published by Gollancz
* * *
Out of the Darkness by T.James
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