CHAPTER TEN
With the power plant dead and the grav generators off, the bodies in the forward section of the main corridor floated like drowned men in a stagnant pool. They turned slowly, globules of blood drifting behind and around each one in a widening pattern. ’Sandro Magee looked past the nearby corpses—each one in civilian coveralls rent by multiple, dark-rimmed holes—and moved his shoulders so that the neckless space-helmet was now aimed up the corridor and into the small bridge at the other end of the prospector ship. The hatch was open and another torso was just drifting out of sight beyond the rim of the coaming, trailing more dark droplets. “Are you seeing this, Doghouse?”
“We are, Bloodhound One,” Ossian Wethermere’s voice answered. “Recommend you proceed with extreme caution.”
Harry Li, who was not on the command circuit, muttered. “Jeez, ya think?”
’Sandro cut a sharp glance at him and pushed off the deck with a grace that was almost incongruous in so large a man. As he did, his receiver crackled to life once again. “Say again, Bloodhound One. Negative read on that last transmission.”
Evidently Magee’s mic had picked up a fragment of Harry’s insolent sotto voce comment. Or not so sotto voce after all, it seemed. “Nothing of importance, Doghouse. Just some housekeeping chatter on our end.”
Harry waved to the two Marines with them and kicked himself more aggressively down the corridor. The trio arrived at the bridge with coil guns at the ready. Their suddenly relaxed posture told ’Sandro what they had found: more of the same. No survivors. And no attackers.
Magee shifted to the tactical channel as he continued to drift forward. “Any clues as to what happened here, Harry?”
“You mean other than a stem-to-stern massacre? No idea, ’Sandro. A few of the crew lived long enough to get to a weapons locker, another one managed to get a sidearm out of a holster. But beyond that, nothing. No sign of attacker casualties, no sign that the crew got a shot off. Whoever greased them was a known—and evidently trusted—group.”
“Damn it, this just doesn’t make sense.”
“As if anything about this investigation does? The deeper we go, the wider and weirder the clues and connections become. I can’t figure—”
Alessandro’s radio crackled again, emitted a triple-tone which signified that its secure channel had been switched remotely. Wethermere’s voice was calm and uninflected—which told Magee that the fecal matter had definitely hit the oscillating air circulator: Ossian typically communicated by emphasis and inflection almost as much as by words. So when his voice became flat—
“Bloodhound One, be advised: we’ve got a bogey inbound, emerging from the shadow of the debris-field at 87 by 18.”
“A hostile, Doghouse?”
“Uncertain, Bloodhound.”
“Do we call for the gig to auto dock with this ship and exfil at the double, sir?”
“Negative. Just gather your team on the bridge and observe radio silence.”
“Acknowledged. And once we’re on the bridge?”
“Check the ship’s systems and await further orders.”
“Received and understood. Bloodhound out.”
Li was staring at ’Sandro from the other side of the bridge. “Did we find some trouble?”
“Do we ever find anything else? Call the other teams up here, Harry. Radios off once they’ve got the word.”
“And then?”
“And then we wait.”
* * *
Eighteen light-seconds away, snugged in the lee of a Brobdingnagian chunk of what had once been an Arachnid monitor, Ossian Wethermere leaned back in the well-worn captain’s chair of the forty-year-old freighter-turned-Q-ship Woolly Imposter. He nodded at his commo officer. “Ensign Schlender, terminate all broadcast. Confirm lascom array remains fixed on Bankshot One.”
“Broadcast comms are now dark, Captain. Bankshot One telemetry test returns five by five.”
“Very good, Dylan. Keep it that way. I don’t want to lose contact with the rear.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sensors, lascom inquiry to our remote sensor platform: update on the bogey.”
“Forward deployed remote sensor platform Bankshot Two shows no change to the bogey, sir,” replied Lieutenant Engan. “Of course, Bankshot Two’s sensor suite is vastly inferior to our own. If we could just—”
“We don’t need to read the lettering on the bogey’s hull, Katharine. I’m just watching for them to light up some active arrays.”
“Aye, Captain. As you ordered, I’ve been keeping my eye out for those.”
“And you keep that eye well-peeled, Ms. Engan.” Wethermere rubbed his chin. “Are they still running a drive field?”
“Affirmative, sir. And power output is steady.”
And way too high for my comfort, Wethermere appended silently. It’s hard to believe a genuine belt-runner of any kind—freight, salvage, prospecting, mining—would need, or be willing to spend the fuel, to keep pumping out that kind of energy. Belt folk were, by nature and necessity, a parsimonious lot.
But the bogey’s steady, high-energy signature was only one of several mysteries. The first mystery, the one that had brought them to the system known simply as Home Hive Three, was news that one of the “persons of interest” who’d come to light during Ishmael’s interrogation had made contact with a number of surveyors, prospectors, and salvage operators in the past four months. Nothing was known beyond that—except that three of the contacted groups were later reported journeying and tarrying in two backwater systems: Home Hive Three and Pesthouse. Scenes of gruesome battles in the Bug War of 263 years ago, the systems remained diffuse junkyards, and, in the case of Home Hive Three, no longer had inhabitable planets.
Home Hive Three had been the site of the first application of what was known as Directive Eighteen: the extirpation of a species. In one of the most famous, and one-sided, battles of the Bug War, the invading Grand Alliance fleet had rained a relentless hail of antimatter warheads down upon Planet One and Planet Two. An estimated twenty billion of the enigmatic and only partially individualized arachnids had been killed, many in the blasts themselves, but many more in the sequelae of tsunamis, firestorms, overlapping shockwaves, cyclones, and fallout. If any survived the attack, they did not do so for long. Ash-choked skies triggered a nuclear winter, turned the once blue oceans into lethal chemical stews, and destroyed all plant life.
Wethermere glanced at the external monitors: gutted ships’ carcasses floated about them, ominous, grey, and silent. Even out here, in its furthest reaches, the entirety of Home Hive Three seemed to be repeating a ghostly word just beyond earshot: graveyard graveyard graveyard. Far beyond the inner planets, even this remote asteroid belt was marked by death-images of the battle that had killed the whole system. A blackened hetlaser turret—a museum piece anywhere else—drifted past, faint amber reflections of the distant primary picking out raw metal where it had been ripped and split away from a hull by titanic explosive forces. Other, smaller bits of detritus, indefinite given the range, trailed behind the scorched behemothic ribs of the wrecks, imparting gruesome momentary impressions that they might be the remains of the crews—arachnid, human, Orion, Ophiuchi. Collectively, it was as if a fantastical fleet of the dead—of slain ships and their crews—were making a lugubrious progress through a sparse valley of floating asteroid mesas, creeping toward final oblivion at the end of time.
And then the moment of reflection was past, and Wethermere turned his eyes back to the holoplot that showed the red bogey at the midrange twelve-o’clock position—which abruptly began moving toward the green icon that denoted the derelict prospector’s ship at two o’clock.
“Sir—!”
“I see it, Lieutenant Engan. How fast is the bogey moving?”
“Twice as fast as our max, sir.”
“Their tuners?”
“Gotta be redlining, sir. That crew is either impervious to rads or suicidal.”
Or maybe both. Either way, they’re cranking 0.10 cee out of that hull. Which leaves me two choices: sit on my hands and watch them do whatever they’re going to do to Magee’s team, or get moving. Which was no choice at all: “Mr. Lubell!”
“Sir?”
“Plot an intercept that will put us between the bogey and the prospector. Best speed. Execute.”
“Executing. Sir, some evasive maneuvers—”
“—Will slow us down. We’re already the tortoise compared to their hare. Make a beeline to get between them and Magee. Zhou?”
“Sir?”
“Bring up the auxiliary plant; I’m going to need a lot of energy for shields and weapons, I suspect.”
“Sir, if I do that, they’re going to know we’re a Q-ship.”
“All the better, at this point. We’ve got no time to be coy, and just maybe, the prospect of a real fight will make the bogey pause.” But I seriously doubt it.
The bogey’s actions confirmed Wethermere’s instincts. Active sensors reached out from it. The opposition force certainly knew two things already: that the prospector had been boarded by a team that could be carried by the gig that was docked with it, and that said boarding party had been in contact with a home vessel somewhere in the area. And in another moment, they would notice the energy bloom peeking out from around the leeside curve of the asteroid behind which the Woolly Impostor had been lurking. Time to get their attention focused on the immediate area of operations and keep it there—hopefully, myopically so. “Mr. Schendler, bounce our spectral-phased lascom alert off Bankshot One. Repeat three times: we need to be certain that the intended recipients get that message. Ms. Ross—”
Katharine Engan jumped in before Wethermere could issue orders to his weapons officer, J.T. Ross. “Captain, the bogey is attempting to get target lock on the prospector. And they’re trying to get a bead on us, too, sir.”
Wethermere paused. Multiple targeting? “Engan, spectrum and power analysis of their sensors: are they milspec?”
Engan’s pause was not quite a second long. Her response was rapid but hushed, “Without a doubt, sir.”
“Okay, time to match their bet and call. Light up our own active arrays. Task Bankshot Two to start piping us advanced targeting information.”
“That’s likely to get Bankshot Two pranged, sir,” commented Lieutenant Ross.
“I’m hoping it will, Weapons. I want them to show us what kind of heat they’re packing and the ranges at which they’re comfortable using it.” Woolly Impostor’s hull began to quiver as the engines reached maximum output and the drive tuners shuddered against the physical constraints of normal space-time. “Mr. Lubell, are we going to be able to get between the bogey and Magee in time?”
“With about a minute to spare, Captain. But that’s going to put us very close to the OpFor. Very close.”
“How close?”
“Inside two hundred kilometers, sir.”
The bridge grew silent. At that range, conventional point defense fire systems—active defenses that slapped away missiles—were all but useless. Also, the powers of both ships’ respective weapons were at their most focused and destructive. “Ms. Engan, do you have a cross-section of that bogey yet?”
“Pieces of it, sir. Computer is interpolating—got it.” She paused. “It’s a gunboat, sir. Moon-class: Terran Republic manufacture of almost half a century ago. What’s the Republic doing out here, and why are they attacking us?”
“They’re not, Ensign. The Republic’s last few Moon-class gunboats were decommissioned about ten years ago. Converted into outsize tugs or sold to security firms and planetary governments as convoy escorts, customs patrol ships, local defense.”
“Which means they have the power plant and possibly the turrets to mount some serious weaponry, right—sir?” Ross sounded anxious.
Wethermere kept the smile off his face. “Well, when it comes to weaponry, ‘serious’ is a matter of perspective, Lieutenant.” Just four months ago, Wethermere had been skipper of a Devastator-class warship: its secondary missile bays were large enough to swallow a gunboat whole. “But right now, yes, they’ve got the on-board systems to power and direct multiple milspec beam weapons.” He paused, resisted his habitual impulse to rub a hand through his hair when puzzling out a problem. “Mr. Zhou,” he said slowly as the green blip of the Woolly Impostor passed the halfway point to the line of intercept.
“Yes, sir?”
“No shields until I give the order.”
“But sir—”
“Mr. Zhou, I understand the risks. But I’m betting that the OpFor has never even imagined a Q-ship like this one.”
“But how do we know when they plan to—?”
“Ms. Engan, you watch your sensors like your life depends upon it—because it does. Along with all our lives, as well.” These bastards are playing poker, just like we are. Keeping some of their hand hidden, even though it seems as though they’ve put all their cards on the table. If that’s a Moon-class, and she still has multiple mil-spec fangs that either haven’t been pulled or were retrofitted by whoever bought her title, then she’s got even more energy output that she hasn’t touched yet. Her designers put in enough power plant capability to drive her at full speed while also powering her beam weapons. So when her commander pushes the power plant to those higher gigawatt levels—
Damn it: the range and power of those weapons puts a spin on another variable in the tactical equation. “Schendler, raise Bloodhound One right now. Secure channel two.”
“Sir, Magee is responding on secure two.”
“Bloodhound one, this is Doghouse.”
“Reading you five by five, sir.”
“Good. I need a fast report on the ship’s systems.”
“Yes, sir. Inconsequential small arms damage throughout. Minor damage to control elements on the bridge; can’t know functionality unless she was up and running. But the biggest problem is that someone took a sledgehammer to the containment rings.”
“Alignment is shot?”
“Again, can’t say without trying to start her up, sir. She’s running off batteries, right now. And if the rings are messed up just enough to allow fusion to begin before finally losing containment—”
“That’s sufficient, Captain.” Wethermere looked at the respective position of the blips in the holotank. The bogey could start firing any moment now. “Bloodhound One, prepare to abandon ship.”
“Sir?”
“Did I stutter, Magee? I said ‘prepare to abandon ship.’”
“But the gig—”
“We’ll get to the gig in a moment. Right now, I need to know about the condition of the prospector’s escape pods.”
“Grimy, but functional.”
“Get your men in the pods. Then you and Lieutenant Li are to carry out the following orders…”
* * *
Wethermere did not allow himself to watch Ensign Engan closely. If he did, the rest of the crew would, and the pressure on her would be counterproductive. He, and they, just had to trust that, the moment that the enemy ship doubled its power output—
Engan’s spine snapped straight. “Sir, energy spike—”
Wethermere turned to Zhou. “Bring our plants to full, and shields up.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ross, launch a full spread of missiles. Soft-deploy a second wave of autonomous missiles from our bay under the cover of the launch, but keep that second wave inert. Lubell, bring us about and put us nose to nose with the intruder to protect the blind spot behind our engine decks. Schendler, activate the gig’s remote helm and detach it from the prospector.” Wethermere switched channels. “Bloodhound One?”
“Here, Doghouse.”
“All hands abandon ship. Execute.”
“Executing, sir.” Magee’s audio feed was rendered inaudible by a roar of background sound—the jettisoning rockets—and the Marine’s sudden grunt under eight gees of acceleration.
The previously minimal activity in the holoplot—the red blip approaching the slower green blip—became a chaos of disparate motions. The smaller green blip that was the prospector spawned an even smaller one—the gig—which moved away in an arc that would ultimately carry it behind the intruder. A sprinkling of verdant snowflakes fluttered outward from the prospector at the same instant: Magee’s Bloodhounds abandoning ship. Too small to be picked up by the ship’s sensors, their individual locations were being established by each suits’ transponder telemetry. Small actinic pinpricks launched from the Woolly Impostor towards the enemy, even as another cluster of dim, transponder-located icons—the autonomous missiles that had been ejected, powerless, from the main bay—emerged lazily from the rear of the big green icon.
The enemy’s response was not surprising. A mix of force beams and hetlasers licked out at the Woolly Impostor’s missile spread and at the gig as well—which, if allowed to complete its sweep toward the enemy’s rear, would be in an excellent position to mount a counterattack. One additional beam struck at Wethermere’s ship itself.
Zhou waited to see the results. He almost preened when he reported, “Shields holding; capacitors running green.”
“The gig?” Wethermere insisted.
“Badly hit, sir” reported Engan. “Venting atmosphere, damage to drives—”
Engan’s report was interrupted by a sharp actinic bloom in the portside viewscreen.
“Gig destroyed,” she amended.
No time for regret. “Magee and his men: their distance from the derelict?”
“Now passing out of danger range in the event of catastrophic powerplant failure.”
“Excellent, but with the gig gone, we have less ability to distract the enemy, or compel him to divide his attacks. And it’s essential that we keep the prospector ship intact. Range to bogey?”
“Four light-seconds, sir.”
“Time to contact?”
“Approximately eighty seconds, at current rate of closure.”
Not a lot of time left. At point-blank range, Wethermere doubted that even Woolly Impostor’s outsized shields would save them from the attacker’s military-grade weapons. “Schendler: time elapsed since we sent our engagement alert back through Bankshot One?”
“Just over five minutes, sir. It’s going to be close.”
Indeed it is, but then again, no one had expected that the adversaries who had hit the prospector a few hours ago had been operating from a rehabilitated warship. Or that it was captained by a suicidal maniac, given the rads the ship’s tuners were pumping through its crew. “Then let’s make every second count. Ross, do we have lock?”
“Have had one for a minute, sir. But they just pranged Bankshot Two.”
“That’s okay; we don’t need a second set of eyes anymore.” And that remote sensor platform had kept the bad guys a little bit more busy. Which was, ultimately, the name of the game.
“Sir,” Ross appended cautiously, “is there any reason we’re not using our own hetlaser?”
“Yes—because I want them to get close to us before they find out that we have one, Lieutenant. And be quick on the trigger when I call for it.”
“Yes, sir!”
Engan’s voice had risen a half-pitch. “Bogey firing missiles.”
“Target?”
“Hard to tell, sir. We now lie along the same vector as the prospector. Could be either one of us.”
But that’s only half of the problem with keeping the prospector in one piece: if we leave the enemy’s beam weapons unoccupied—“Ross, activate the sprint missiles we soft-deployed.”
“Missiles now active and homing, sir.”
And in the holoplot, those missiles began moving toward the bogey—which immediately committed its beam weapons to serve in the PDF role, thereby temporarily precluding their use as offensive weapons. Wethermere watched his missiles’ icons disappear one after the other, checked the engagement clock: the missiles alone weren’t going to buy enough time—
“Ross, our lasers are to target the bogey’s—”
“Sir,” Engan shouted. “The approaching enemy missiles are—are multiplying, sir!”
And so they were. A useless technology against warships because of insufficient killing power, multiple independent warhead missiles could be devastating against smaller, slower craft. And in the case of Woolly Impostor—
“Ross, belay that last order. Switch our lasers to PDF mode. Smartly, now! Engage!”
The Navy crew on Wethermere’s bridge switched tasks in mid-execution with smooth, well-practiced precision. Ross’ lasers began whittling away the first rank of enemy missiles. But that meant—
“Bogey firing beam weapons at prospector, sir. Minor hits. Now targeting us—”
Automated danger klaxons hooted throughout the cramped, converted freighter. “Shields held,” reported Zhou, “but they won’t next time. His beams won’t be diffuse at all when he’s spent another fifteen seconds closing the range.”
Wethermere glanced at Ross. “And their missiles?”
“First wave eliminated, sir. Second wave is only four missiles—but they are not spawning more warheads.”
Ossian glanced at Engan. “I confirm that, sir. But their lock is wavering—”
There was no time to hear any more. “Ross, reacquire the bogey with our lasers. Zhou, over-power our shields.”
“Sir—?”
“Just do it. They’ll have to take the last four missiles. Ross?”
“Sir, I have almost—lasers locked on target!”
“Fire and sustain. Burn the capacitors if you have to, just keep hammering him amidships.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Woolly Impostor’s weaker lasers faltered as they encountered the gunboat’s shields, then again when they hit the relatively light armor. But the unremitting beams ultimately tore a widening gash along the side of the enemy gunboat. Charged plasma arced, and flames danced and flickered at the peripheries of that wound. Damn it, that attack may have been too successful. If that ship blows up…
But again, there was no time to think that far ahead. “Engan, what about their missiles—?”
She was staring at the holoplot. “They have shifted lock, sir.” The four missiles that had been following the first wave had not hit the well-shielded Woolly Impostor, but had bypassed it. They were now heading for the smaller green blip further along the vector: the prospector hull.
Damn it, they suckered me. “Ross, shift our lasers back to PDF mode. Acquire—”
“Sir, we’ve already lost fifty percent capacitors—”
“Then burn the other fifty percent. Shoot what you have, damnit.”
Ross did. And vaporized two missiles.
But the last two struck the abandoned prospector in her engine decks. What began as a modest responding flare of flame burgeoned outwards into a blue-white sphere of annihilation.
“Bogey correcting her course, coming about,” reported Engan.
“Our shields?” asked Wethermere.
“Solid,” replied Zhou.
“Lasers?” he asked Ross.
She shook her head. “Burned out, sir.”
“Then Lubell, back us away: open the range and cover our tail. And Schendler, send this encrypted but in the clear: ‘the enemy ship is not to be—’”
At that moment, four green blips raced into the holoplot from where the intruder had originally emerged. And as they did, they were firing weapons.
“It’s the cavalry from our carrier, sir. Delta flight—with plasma torpedos inbound.”
“No damn it, no!” Wethermere snapped, standing up from the con. “Don’t destroy—!”
The enemy ship was struck along the length of its already savaged portside hull by four of the torpedos. The viewscreens suddenly whitened and then shut off.
Staring at the monitors, then the readouts on the sensor board, Wethermere resisted the urge to rub his brow in exasperation. Well, there go both of the only clues we have—
Schendler looked up. “Sir, message from the Celmithyr’theaanouw.”
Wethermere sighed. “Is it Least Fang Kiiraathra’stakjo, himself?” No doubt his friend, the Orion commander, was calling to find out if his fighters had rescued Woolly Impostor before any serious damage had been done to her, and to also do some oblique bragging on behalf of his fighter jocks.
Schendler shook his head. “No, sir. It is Counselor Ankaht on secure one.”
Ankaht? Well, I might as well tell her the bad news: that we just destroyed every useful lead we had in this investigation. “Pipe her through, Mr. Schendler.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ankaht’s soothing alto vocoder-voice seemed to swim up from a dark, still pool into his ears. “We are glad you are safe, Ossian. This was most unexpected.”
“Yes. So unexpected that it caught us by complete surprise—and so we lost both ships. Almost lost our boarding team, too. Tell Jennifer that Tank is all right. But damn it, I think I just ruined our entire investigation beyond any hope of—”
“Ossian,” Ankaht interrupted. Her voice was tense, as if she was constraining some news that both excited and horrified her. “Ossian,” she repeated, “you have not destroyed the investigation: you have propelled it into its final stage.”
Wethermere blinked in surprise. “I what? But how—?”
“The ship you fought was not guiding its missiles by lascom or radio, but by selnarm links.” She paused. “Your opponents were Arduans.”