The Voyage of the Star Wolf (4 page)

“Confidence?”

“Eighty-eight percent.”

“Good guess,” Korie said to Hodel, but he wasn't happy.

“I'd rather have been wrong.”

Korie turned toward the Bridge, but Captain Lowell was already stepping down to the display. “There's only one ship it could be—the
Dragon
Lord
—but she's reported to be on the other side of the rift. The Solidarity doesn't have a lot of heavy metal to spare.”

“How reliable was that report?” asked Korie.

“Reliable enough for the High Command.” The captain shook his head unbelievingly. “If the admiral had known that a dragon class anything was lurking in this neighborhood, we'd have never assembled this convoy.” He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well, it can't mean anything. She's traveling alone. Probably sharking us.”

“Well, it's working. I'm scared,” said Hodel.

“Relax,” said Lowell. “She's not going to attack. The Solidarity isn't that stupid.”

Suddenly, the shimmer brightened and expanded. And expanded.
And expanded again
.

“Oh my God—” said Hodel. “Look at the way she's expanding her envelope.”

“That's an attack run.” Korie was already reaching for a terminal.

“No!” said Lowell. “No. They
can't
be that stupid. They can't be! Nobody attacks alone—”

The operating lights went suddenly to red. The alarm klaxon screeched throughout the ship.

Korie was suddenly listening to his headset. “Signal from the flagship, sir—”

“It is the
Dragon Lord
,” Hodel said, still staring horrified at the shimmering display. “The signature is confirmed.”

“And she's got a wolf pack coming in behind her!” added Captain Lowell. The blood drained from his face. He looked suddenly gray.

Korie forgot his headset for the moment and turned back to the display. It was his worst nightmare. Behind the expanded shimmer of the
Dragon Lord
, too many other lights were appearing on the display, winking into existence like tiny stars, one pink shimmer after the other.

Korie looked to the captain. The old man was frozen.

“Sir—?”

Captain Lowell started to lift a hand, as if he was about to say something. A thought flashed through Korie's mind.
He's never been in a real battle.

Korie whirled. “Targeting—? Get a lock on her.
Battle stations
! Stand by to fire.”

HARLIE replied instantly. “Targeting now.”

Captain Lowell blinked, as if abruptly realizing where he was. “Uh—what did the flagship say?”

“Scatter and attack.”

“Uh, right.” Captain Lowell nodded. “Uh—disruptors, fire at will!”

Korie looked up sharply at that. What was the old man thinking? The attackers were still in hyperstate, fifty light-hours away, two minutes in real time. Disruptors were local-space weapons. The only way to destroy a ship in hyperstate was to hit its envelope with a field-effect torpedo.

Maybe he was just momentarily confused
, Korie thought, but he knew the truth of the moment even as he tried to deny it. The captain was paralyzed by the enormity of the disaster. The huge holographic display dominated the Operations deck and every officer on duty could see the horror for himself. The bright pink shimmers of the Morthan wolf pack were sweeping ruthlessly down upon the convoy's flank. The darker, blue shimmers of the Alliance ships were scattering now—but slowly, much too slowly. They didn't have the same mass-to-power ratio as the much lighter vessels of the Morthan Solidarity. The marauders could easily outmaneuver the cargo and passenger vessels—
and most of the destroyers too.

The only hope for the unarmed ships of the convoy was to scatter into the darkness of the rift, leaving the warships to slash and parry and dodge. The battle would spread out across a hundred light-hours of hyperstate—it didn't matter; what counted here was visibility and interception velocity. The wolf pack would chase the fattest targets. The destroyers would chase the wolf pack. The battleships would weave complex evasion patterns.

And in the center of it all, like a fat red spider in the center of a glistening web, was the largest brightest shimmer of them all—the
Dragon Lord
. Her immense hyperstate envelope was a lens for her hyperstate scanning devices that would let her see farther than any other vessel in the battle. She would be able to track the ships of the fleeing convoy for days—and she would be equally visible. She could ripple orders and directions to every ship in the wolf pack. Nothing would be able to get to her, but she would be able to see the whole battle. The Alliance ships would be helpless before such an advantage.

Korie saw the whole plan at once. It was brilliant. He could only admire the beauty of it. This wasn't just an attack on a convoy. This was about cutting The Silk Road and isolating all of the Alliance worlds on the far side of the rift. The
Dragon Lord
would sweep everything from here to Marathon—and then beyond. With the fleet in shambles, there would be no protection for the outworlds.

Korie stepped in quickly to Captain Lowell's side. It seemed as if everything on the Operations deck were beeping, buzzing, ringing, and clanging. He ignored it. “The missiles, sir?” he prompted.

“Yes, yes, of course.” The old man looked almost grateful. “Ready missiles!”

“Recommend an evasion course, sir,” Korie prompted.

“Yes. Make it so.” Lowell nodded eagerly at Korie's suggestion.

Is he that scared
? Korie wondered. So far, only Hodel could have noticed—and he was too busy with his own board to say anything about it.

Hodel's panel blinked and flickered. He slammed it with his fist—
HARD
—it was a reaction, not a cure; the computer channels on that console were locked up, thrashing with contradictory information; but the screens came immediately back to life anyway. Hodel muttered an oath and resumed working, laying in a series of complex evasion patterns. And then he glanced up at Korie knowingly. “This isn't going to work.”

“Shut up,” said Korie. “Do you want to live forever?”

“It's a trap,” said Lowell. He was visibly flustered. “We can't fight the
Dragon Lord
and a wolf pack.”

Korie noted that the old man was getting more ragged-looking every moment, but there wasn't time to do anything. If the attack was every captain's nightmare, then Captain Lowell's disintegration was every executive officer's nightmare. Korie was going to have to make it work. Abruptly, the targeting program chimed. Korie snapped, “Targets in range!”

“Missiles armed!” called Li on the weapons station. “Locking . . . one, two—locked.”

Korie touched Captain Lowell's arm almost imperceptibly.

It worked. “Fire all missiles,” said Lowell, not even realizing how he'd been nudged.

The two missilemen, Li and Greene, punched their red buttons. The boards flashed yellow, then green. The bay doors snapped open. The missiles dropped away from the ship—

The bright bubble surrounding the ship flickered and disappeared, dropping the vessel rudely out of hyperstate. A dozen missiles accelerated away. The envelope shimmered back into existence and the starship was superluminal again. The missiles were already igniting their hyperstate torches. They flared against the darkness and arrowed toward their targets with a speed no vessel could outrun. In the display, they were bright red points, moving faster than any of the pink shimmers representing Morthan ships.

The missiles would seek, they would close, they would pursue, and ultimately they would intercept and destroy. They could not be outrun—but they did not have the endurance of a larger vessel. They had to catch their targets in the first few minutes, or not at all. Their power would fail and they would wink out, exhausted.

The battle display told the story. Pink shimmers would blink and a dozen bright red pinpoints would streak across the intervening space toward the nearest blue shimmers. Or blue shimmers would blink, dropping missile spreads of their own—but most of them were fleeing, scattering and running into the darkness at top speed.

Korie was watching one particular flight of missiles. Some of the pink shimmers were dodging. Haphazard bright flashes demonstrated where other ships were already flashing out of existence. Most of them were blue.

“We've lost the
Melrose
,” said Hodel, glancing down at his monitors. “—and the
Gower
. The
Columbia
's down too.”

Korie turned to Captain Lowell. “You're right, sir,” he said carefully. “We're too visible. Suggest we drop from sight. Go subluminal—”

“You can't hide from them. They'll find us,” cried Hodel.

“We don't have time to argue,” said Korie. He pointed at the display. “Look—incoming!” The missiles were coming at them from three different directions now. The software was screaming alarms. The display was flashing wildly.

Lowell said something; Korie didn't understand it, he assumed that it was assent. “Do it!” he yelled at Hodel and the flight engineer punched his board. The starship shuddered as the hyperstate envelope collapsed around her.

“Rig for shock-charging—”

Korie never got a chance to complete the order. The faintest fringe of ripple effect from one of the hyperstate missiles hit them then, with an effect as devastating as a direct hit from a disruptor beam. Every electrical field in the
LS-1187
was momentarily discharged. Every instrument, every machine, every communications device, and every human being was suddenly paralyzed.

Every neuron fired at once
. It was like touching a live wire. Every person on the ship went instantly rigid as their nervous systems overloaded. Their hearts froze, unable to beat; their muscles tightened in agony; the screams were forced involuntarily from their lungs; all their brain cells discharged completely into oblivion, triggering massive seizures and convulsions; their bowels and bladders let loose. Some of the men ejaculated
involuntarily. Hodel spasmed and was thrown backward out of his chair. It saved his life. His console sparked and then blew up. Captain Lowell staggered, almost falling. Korie grabbed for him—they both collapsed to the floor. Korie had a flickering impression of flowers and purple fire and then nothing else.

All over the Operations deck and Bridge, the effects of the shock-charge were still going off. Wild electrical fire was flashing everywhere. Balls of lightning roiled around the chamber, bouncing and flashing, sputtering and burning.

Everywhere, crewmembers spasmed and shuddered and jerked across the deck, helpless. A flicker of purple lightning skewered Captain Lowell, enveloping him.

The same lightning flashed through the engine room, up and down the corridors of the vessel, and all around the singularity grid that held the ship's power source: a pinpoint black hole. The energy had no place to discharge—it tried to bleed off in a thousand separate directions, finally found weakness and leapt out through the portside disruptors; they exploded in a blossom of sparks and fire.

And the
LS-1187
was dead in space.

For a long dead moment, she drifted.

Then—slowly, painfully, life began to reassemble itself. A heartbeat, a gasp, a twitch, and finally even a flicker of thought. Somebody moved. Somebody else choked. There was a moan in the darkness and a terrible stench.

The ship was pitch dark—and so silent it was terrifying. All of the familiar background whispers were gone. Korie came back to consciousness screaming. He felt as if he were on fire. All his nerve ends were shrieking. He couldn't move—and he couldn't stay still. He tried to move, he couldn't. He was floating, rolling, bumping and drifting back the opposite way. He couldn't think. His head jangled.
Free fall
, he realized.
The gravity's off
.

He stretched out his arms, grunting in pain as he did so, and tried to feel where he was, trying to grasp—his head banged into something and his body twisted. He grabbed and missed and grabbed again, caught a railing and held on. Something else bumped into him, something soft and wet; it felt like a body, he grabbed it and held on. Whoever it was, he was still unconscious. Or . . .