Back From the Dead (30 page)

“We only have–” Helton suddenly freezes with a thoughtful expression. “You said this thing has tough armor. How tough?”

“Not going to stop a contact hit from a heavy anti-ship missile straight on, I wouldn’t think.”

“How about a collision at moderate speed?”

“WHAT?”

“I think they’re going to rumble us. How fast could you invert and cycle the drive fields?”

“It’d take … wait.” Stenson is suddenly incredulous. “NO! You CANNOT be SERIOUS! With enough velocity a used bandage would blow a bloody big hole in a ship, and those are sixty-ton interceptors!”

“They’ll have to slow down to make the turn around the moon, and move slow enough they don’t break their own drives rumbling us.”

“Dammit, Helton! This is a starship, not a hockey player!”

“You said it’s the toughest warship hull ever built. Time to find out just what that means. How long?”

“Aw crap, I don’t know. I’ll let you know what’s possible as soon as I know.”

“No guns. No missiles. Can’t run. Nowhere to hide. No other option. Get it ready. We’ll only have one chance.”

Rumble

The ringed planet and the corp-war robo-moon hang in space in the near distance.
Tajemnica
streaks by, blocky, angular, and dirty, space glowing faintly around it. Shortly behind it is a formation of four lean, lethal-looking spacecraft, newly painted and streamlined for atmospheric flight. The interceptors are moving faster; the glowing molecules excited by their drives are bright. A pack of hungry wolves in their prime chasing an aging moose.

In the cockpit of the lead interceptor sits a handsome young man, dashing in his immaculate uniform spacesuit, comfortably strapped into his seat, surrounded by controls and screens. A confident air of superiority shows in the lines of his face. “This is Prince Walid of the Cruiser
Hussein
to unregistered piece-of-shit freighter
Taj-shitica
. You are ordered to return to port now, or we will use you for target practice. Respond.” There is a pause as he looks out the windows at his wingmen, then forward at the rapidly approaching
Tajemnica
. “Last chance before we open fire!” A long pause while he listens for a reply. He continues disdainfully. “Didn’t think so. Idiots.” He thumbs a control. “Line up behind me, time to rumble the dog!”

The interceptors stretch out into a line before surging forward and blazing past the larger ship. Close together, one after another, the glowing patches around them overlapping with the fainter glow surrounding
Tajemnica
, they create ripples of interference patterns where the fields interact, like iridescent and intersecting ripples on a three-dimensional pond.

Tajemnica
shakes and the people on the bridge sway as the line of interceptors pass.

“Not bad,” Cooper opines. “Guess that’s what happens when you try to push around someone bigger than you.”

“Been through worse than that landing.” Helton speaks into the mic. “Stenson, drop power on the Sokolovs.”

“They broke one!”

“Well then, prepare to kill the other one, and start getting the Harmons ready.”

“They’ll likely try coming around again for another pass as a group,” Lag says. “It’ll take them a while to reverse and come back by us. Eight, maybe ten minutes.”

On the speaker, a mechanical voice calls: “Challenge gallium Albert chocolate tintinnabulation.”

The Ship AI responds in a similar voice. “Respond alpha arsenic Carthage galaxy trophy.”

“Send cladistic profiler for final.”

Cooper expresses everyone’s confusion.

“What the HELL?” Cooper yells. “We are outside their exclusion zone! And we CAN’T jump!”

“If we can’t transition, don’t get any closer,” Helton agrees. “If it fires we are all screwed.”

Prince Walid bounces around vigorously in the interceptor’s cockpit; outside his windows are the ripples and glow of the interfering drive fields. Warning indicators flash on screens and a dedicated warning light turns red. His expression shows surprise, then anger. He looks over his instruments, thumbs a button, his voice contemptuous. “Looks like they are down to one drive. Bastard barely moved! When we pass back, we go by all at once, you three very close together with synced-up fields. I’ll be right behind you to match and ride the interference wave you set up. That should shake them up and take down their remaining drive. They’ll be stuck!”

Stenson and his crew are at stations, tired and nervous. The readouts around them are all over the place. Some are red, some green, a lot of yellows, a few steady, most changing every second. Helton’s voice comes in on the speaker. “Ready or not, here they come!”

“Drives are online! Hit the switch whenever you want!”

One of the techs closes his eyes briefly and crosses himself in silent prayer.

The screens on the bridge show the rapidly approaching quartet of ships in tight formation. Helton takes a deep breath. “Spun up, Cooper. Get ready to kick ’em into gear.”

“I sure hope you know what you are doing.”

Helton looks defiantly at the oncoming ships. “So, you wanna dance? No problem. Let’s dance.” He nods to Cooper.

“Rumble THIS!” Cooper says, and he hits the “Drives Online” switch, pushes up the power levers hard, twists and pushes the control yoke. At his first motion, the slight background hum of the drives abruptly changes to a wildly discordant three-tone scream as energy flows and
Tajemnica
digs her drive fields into the very fabric of the universe. As the volume ramps up, the tones start to converge in a powerful, pulsing, deep-throated scream.

The three lead interceptors have a large and bright envelope of glowing atoms around them, excited by their drives’ combined energy. The faint glow around
Tajemnica
disappears. Prince Walid wears a wolf-like grin of contempt. Suddenly, his cockpit is filled with a deep, powerful, angry, metallic voice: “
Your friends close, your enemies closer
!” He looks around wildly, his grin of anticipation gone.

A huge and growing blaze of angry light leaps from
Tajemnica
, much brighter than the squadron’s, as
Tajemnica
spins, rolls, and rotates sideways, presenting the largest possible target. The lead interceptors’ courses suddenly alter, and instead of passing close by they dive straight at
Tajemnica
, pulled in by her powerful drive field. The last ship manages to turn its nose away, but it has too much velocity and is pulled sideways by the field’s inexorable grip. The field intensifies and the ships are violently crashed and crushed and splattered across the landing pads and lower hull of
Tajemnica
. One collapes like a cartoon accordion, the second shatters on an angled corner, the third explodes on an edge. The drive field interference patterns disappear as the interceptors, their drives, and their pilots die. The glowing field surrounding
Tajemnica
intensifies even more, extending like a great glowing arm, a deadly blazing swarm of fireflies, toward the surviving fighter.

Cooper works the controls frantically, everyone else hangs on, and the noise of the drives rises to a beating roar. A faint undertone that nearly sounds like an old steam locomotive thundering in the distance can be heard in the thrashing the ship is inflicting on itself and the space around it.

Most of the readouts in Engineering are well in the red, and the screaming of strained power systems and mechanical stress makes the ship sound like it is in pain. Stenson and his crew just stand back in amazement, hanging on, wondering how much more abuse she can take.

Prince Walid looks around frantically, trying to find some way out of the trap. His visor is down, and he is being shaken violently about, not always the same way as his ship. Over the cockpit speakers he hears the last thing that isn’t his own terrified scream. The voice of
Tajemnica
is female, commanding, and imperious.

“
Come to me! NOW!
”

The great glowing arm of agitated atoms glows, mostly reddish-yellow, but they coruscate and shimmer with interference patterns in many colors, like an Aurora Borealis, all around the interceptor. The helpless fighter shakes violently, vibrating ever faster as it is pulled in closer and closer to
Tajemnica
.

Then the light fades considerably, the interference patterns disappear, and the shaking stops. The interceptor is carefully pulled in close to
Tajemnica
’s topside, cradled in the drive field. Loose debris and the crushed and flattened hulks of the first three interceptors spin away into the void. The drive glow diffuses, extends, and reintensifies, then
Tajemnica
flips back to her original course and accelerates away.

Tajemnica
’s bridge is a scene of celebration.

“THAT was perfect!” Helton exclaims. “Absolutely perfect!”

“Wow!” says Cooper. “That was…” He’s as much surprised and confused as happy. “Not quite sure how that last bit happened though.”

“Did I see that right?” Lag says. “The first three wrecked, the other one shaken and
grabbed
, and it’s alongside?”

Helton thumbs his mic. “Stenson, I don’t see any failure lights. How’s it look there?”

“I … I don’t
think
we broke anything major, but Hindu’s hamburgers, we’ve got a lot of checking to do before I’ll swear to ANYTHING.”

“Then before we find out we can’t, let’s get the hell out of here. I’m pretty sure they might be just a little bit annoyed that we trashed four of their shiny new interceptors. Nice and easy, just fast enough for us to leave before they can launch anything at us.”

“Aye-aye!” Cooper says.

“And we deleted at least one prince from their roster,” Lag observes wryly. “That may not go over well.”

“So,” Helton says with a grin. “How much do you think your buyer of interceptor information might pay for a mostly whole if slightly used ship?”

“That’s going to be an interesting negotiation,” Lag replies. “Could be complicated; information can be hard to trace, but entire late-model ships are bit harder to sterilize. Let’s get out of here before we count any profits, shall we?”

The main screen on the bridge of the
HMS Hussein
shows a cockpit camera view from Prince Walid’s interceptor, along with various critical systems readouts, which fluctuate wildly. Walid looks desperately at the controls of his ship, flicking switches, making changes, trying to find something that will save him. He is crushed back into his seat, then shaken violently. He screams incoherently, and his pain and terror echo around the bridge. The camera view goes blank, and the critical systems readouts all flat-line, then display NO DATA, like three others beside it.

Silence falls. The captain is shocked, and everyone else on the bridge looks at their screens in mute fear, wondering what happened, how imminent victory became destruction. On the main screen, now nearly blank, the transponder data on the lower right flickers and changes.

Name: Irony
Class: Nightmare
Registered: Nowhere is home

An image appears on the main screen, a woman standing alone on the small command platform of a large bridge. Mature, sharp features, lean and beautiful and dangerous-looking. Her face is scarred, and a black patch with a red Possenti Cross covers her left eye. The other is a vivid green. She wears a simple, dark blue uniform with red, white, and gold accents; on her left side she wears dark gray, medievalesque armor of polished metal, with a few gilt highlights. A sword at her left side, pistol on the right. Dense dark and silver hair is pulled to one side of her head and down her neck into a thick, short braid. She could be the half-sister of Lag and Harbin, the one with a sense of style. She leans forward to address the crew of the
Hussein
up close and personally. She speaks coldly, quietly, deliberately.

“I don’t like people who try to hurt my children. I despise incompetent commanders that get their men killed needlessly, for the sake of a family name. Go tell their parents the princelings died, terrified and screaming, without a shot fired, in the best ships you have. Under your orders.

“Remember my face. I will remember yours for a very long time. Next time, it will not be only your interceptors I embrace.”

The screen goes blank. A final image of the dying pilot appears on every screen, fear and pain stark on his once-handsome features.

The Captain of the
Hussein
looks both angry and afraid, then comes back suddenly to life, in a rage, and at his first words, everyone on the bridge scrambles to look very busy and not meet his eyes.

“GET THAT PICTURE OFF THE SCREEN!” the captain screams. “GET ME HER NAME! FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED! I WANT THEM HUNTED DOWN!”

REST AND RECREATION

Farm

Sandwiches and finger food for dinner in the Officers’ Mess. Helton, Lag, Harbin, Bipasha, Kaushik, Allonia, Kaminski, Sar, and Stenson all look tired and drained. Quinn doesn’t.

Helton
: I think canceling R&R on Geminorum and having the parts shipped to us would be the more discreet choice.

Lag grins around a bite of sandwich; ironically, but lopsided.

Lag
: Now you’re worried about discreet?

Helton
: I don’t do subtle very well, but it seems wisest to not stay in the same system right now.

Harbin
(dryly)
: True. Virtually nothing but a small moon for a million kilometers, and you still manage to crash us into no less than three other ships.

Helton
: Just stickin’ to what I know, I guess.

Bipasha
(weary, but in good humor)
: Best not to mention it to anyone. It might make getting insured more difficult.

Bipasha takes the pitcher of tea and refills Kaushik’s glass. He winks at her and drains it, then turns to Helton.

Kaushik
: The next insurance policy you buy should include weapons — you are, after all, nominally a privateer. Should start acting like one for real, rather than expect to keep taking ships on accident. Risks would be more manageable. We were lucky those guys were so incompetent, thinking that their badges or names made them invincible.