“I’ll be damned!” I said. “You
stole the auctioneer!”
“This trip has not been a
complete waste,” Bo conceded.
My threading flashed an alert
into my mind, warning that a tiny particle stream was painting my chest. It
took only a moment for the threading to determine Bo’s ship had me targeted.
They must have been listening in on our conversation.
“Any chance of sharing?” I asked
for the benefit of whoever had me in their cross hairs.
“I think not, Captain Kade.” Bo
slipped his robotic eye back into its socket.
In the distance, Vargis’ skimmer
rode up into one of the
Soberano’s
cavernous cargo holds, then a large rectangular door lifted up and sealed shut
behind him.
“Well Bo, I guess Mr Li won’t be too
disappointed in you after all.”
Bo smiled, almost embarrassed.
“My friends call me . . . Jie.” He gave me an amused look as understanding
appeared on my face. An organization as secretive as the Obligation would never
send a lackey to gamble all they were worth on a piece of unproven alien-tech.
Only one man could make such a decision and that was the inimitable Jie Kang Li
himself. “Perhaps one day Sirius Kade, you really will work for me. I could use
a man like you. Then you can tell me how you beat the perfidious Mr Sarat. Until
then, please do not pretend to work for me again. I would not like to have you
killed.”
“Deal.”
Jie Kang Li hesitated, then smiled.
“One credit!” He tapped his prosthetic eye meaningfully, telling me with a
gesture how he knew my final bid for the Codex. “An intriguing choice!” he said,
before heading towards his deceptively decrepit container ship.
With a growing sense of urgency, I
hurried towards the
Lining
. Jie Kang Li’s
ship lifted off as I reached the airlock, rising like a point of brilliant
white light towards the low hanging clouds with an acceleration belying its antiquated
appearance. Once inside, I went straight to the flight deck where Jase was finishing
his pre-flight checks.
“All I need is a destination for
the autonav,” he said with a quizzical look as I climbed onto my acceleration
couch.
“Marie’s got an open contract
with the Beneficial Society,” I said. “She’ll want to collect on it before I
can stop her.”
Jase made a face. “Oh no!”
“I’m afraid so. We’re going to
Axon.”
Axon Way Station was home to the
closest Society Headquarters. It was a haven for traders and smugglers alike, a
place where cargoes were swapped and profits made without fear of surprise
inspections by nosy Earth Navy officers. Unfortunately, the local crime bosses
had posted a kill bounty on my head, thanks to a little disagreement a few
years back.
“Have we got a launch window?” I asked
as our wrap around view screen revealed a light dusting of snow was beginning
to fall across the spaceport.
“There’s no schedule,” Jase said.
“Control requested we broadcast when we’re ready. If anyone else broadcasts, we
have to give them two minutes head start before going ourselves.”
I guess it made sense, considering
they normally only saw one ship a month. I activated the communicator, setting
it to all bands and announced, “
Silver
Lining
declaring launch.”
Jase released the autonav. Our landing
thrusters lifted us off the apron, tilted our nose skyward, then our two big
maneuvering engines came to life, sending us racing up into the clouds at
twenty gravities. The autonav expertly balanced the ship’s inertial field, uniformly
accelerating every atom in our bodies at nineteen gravities, ensuring we felt
only one gravity inside the ship. Tundratown’s cluster of prefab buildings, strung
out along the sprawling harbor shore, quickly disappeared beneath the clouds.
For a few moments, dense gray water vapor surrounded the ship, then we broke
out into clear air and climbed rapidly up through the thinning atmosphere.
Icetop’s curvature quickly
appeared as blue sky faded to black, then a contact indicator illuminated on
the screen. It was above us and to port, showing no transponder signal and approaching
from high orbit on an intercept course. It was over twenty thousand clicks
away, thrusting hard towards a firing position that would catch us soon after
we cleared the atmosphere. They had to have been watching the spaceport from
orbit and begun maneuvering the moment we lifted off.
“Its energy levels are eight
times ours,” Jase said, eyes locked on the neutrino detector’s display. That
much power meant big engines or hungry weapons, probably both. He ran the
neutrino profile through the system. “It’s Gwandoya!”
Izin had recorded the profile of
Gwandoya’s old navy cutter when it had lifted off, adding it to the recognition
database as a matter of routine.
I switched on the intercom. “Izin,
we’re going to need power to the shield. Expect weapons fire.”
“What kind of weapons fire,
Captain?” Izin asked in his synthesized voice as calmly as if I’d requested a
wash and a wax.
“Assume the shield’s going to
bleed hard to stay up.”
“Understood,” Izin said, focusing
his attention on ensuring the energy plant would be ready to give us everything
it could.
“You’re not planning on fighting that
thing are you?” Jase asked apprehensively. We both knew the
Lining
was no match for a navy cutter –
even an old one.
“Not a chance!” Our single
particle cannon could do little more than tickle the cutter’s reinforced hull,
while the little nasty hidden in our bow was strictly a one shot gamble. If we
missed this close, Gwandoya would have no choice but to blast us to bits to
prevent us firing again. “I’m going to run like a
Valurian
jackrabbit with my tail on fire.”
“Glad to hear it, Skipper. Not
that I object to fighting, just dying.”
The autonav indicated we needed nine
minutes to reach the minimum safe distance for superluminal flight. The trick
would be staying alive long enough to show Gwandoya a clean pair of heels.
“We’ve cleared the mesosphere,” Jase
reported as we emerged into the deep blackness of space.
I reset the autonav, kicking our
maneuvering engines up to thirty five gravities, our maximum, inertially
shielded acceleration. The engines could have pushed the
Silver Lining
higher, but that would have exposed us to unshielded
acceleration, pinning us to our couches barely able to breathe.
“I’ve got another contact,” Jase
announced. “It’s coming up from the planet.” It took a moment for the third
contact’s transponder to register. “It’s the
Soberano
!”
She was exactly two minutes
behind us on a similar trajectory. If the
Soberano
was even half the ship I thought she was, Gwandoya’s old cutter would have
little chance against her advanced weaponry.
“Heave to and surrender the Codex!”
Gwandoya’s voice blared from the flight deck’s comm system.
I felt momentary relief that he
didn’t know Marie had the Codex, reassuring me that she’d gotten away clean.
“We don’t have it,” I replied
casually.
The cutter’s higher orbit and
greater velocity gave her the initiative and there was nothing I could do about
it. It was as great an advantage for the hunter as diving out of the sun from
high altitude was during the old days of aerial combat. If we didn’t do exactly
as Gwandoya ordered, he could come in fast, cripple us as he passed, then decelerate
and come back to loot us at his leisure. If we surrendered, he could keep us
targeted as he decelerated down onto us, blasting us if we so much as blinked.
“You’re lying!” Gwandoya said. “I paid one of
Sarat’s guards to tell me who won.”
“Sarat and his guards are dead.
They were killed before the Codex was stolen.”
“Cut your engines now,” Gwandoya
said in a more threatening tone, “Or I will destroy them.”
“He’s not bluffing, Skipper,”
Jase said anxiously. “There’s a hot spot on his starboard side!”
Jase threw the infra red sensor
feed up onto the view screen as an overlay. A glowing red bloom appeared
halfway along the cutter’s hull where a large weapon was charging, perfectly
positioned to fire. Gwandoya was clearly an expert at this kind of fighting –
dropping in fast on a defenseless trader – and he was too smart to let me talk
him in circles, buying time while we raced out to bubble.
“Cut the engines,” I said to Jase,
then transmitted to Gwandoya, “
Silver
Lining
powering down. Send a boarding party. You’ll see we don’t have it.”
“A wise decision, Kade,” Gwandoya
growled.
The cutter immediately tumbled
one hundred and eighty degrees, showing us its stern, and began decelerating hard
to match us. All the time, the red heat bloom of the cutter’s charged weapon remained
expertly angled at us, Gwandoya’s way of telling us he never took his finger
off the trigger.
Jase gave me a confused look.
“You’re going to let him board us?”
“If I let Gwandoya board this
ship, I’ll never get it back.” Even if he searched the
Silver Lining
from top to bottom and found nothing, he’d keep her
as a prize and space us for his trouble. “Izin, how fast can you get the shield
up? No safeties, just throw it out there.”
“Nine seconds,” Izin said. He’d
been listening to everything said on the flight deck since I’d warned him I’d
need the shield.
“How long before they see it?”
“I can hide the activation for
the first few seconds.”
“OK, you have shield control,” I
said as my mind raced trying to figure out how I could distract Gwandoya long
enough to get the shield up. At that range, he only needed a second to knock us
out.
“How many crew do you think he
has?” Jase asked, wondering if we could fight it out at the airlock.
“A hundred, maybe a hundred and
fifty.” Too many for a gun fight.
The
Soberano’s
contact marker was growing in size now that we’d cut our
engines. I rotated the optics, bringing the super transport into view as she
came roaring up from the planet’s surface.
“Give me a tight link to Vargis,”
I said. When Jase indicated we were beam-locked, I hailed the super transport. “
Silver Lining
to
Soberano
. Request immediate assistance. We are about to be boarded
by pirates.” I had no doubt Vargis had been watching the exchange between us
and Gwandoya and knew exactly what was happening.
Vargis reply came back
immediately using an
omnidirectional
transmission,
ensuring Gwandoya heard his reply. His face appeared in the center of our
screen with the
Soberano’s
expansive
control room visible behind him. “Captain Kade, I have to say I’m not entirely
sure who the pirate is, you or Gwandoya.”
“Listen Vargis, you don’t have to
like me, but you know what’s going to happen if Gwandoya’s men get aboard this
ship. I know you can stop it.”
Vargis feigned confusion. “I have
no idea what you mean. The
Soberano
is a defenseless freighter. Considering she’s worth at least . . . ten thousand
times what your little garbage scow is worth, I really can’t get involved. I’m
sure you understand.” Vargis’ face vanished from the screen.
“That scumbag cut us off!” Jase exploded.
I swung our optical feed back
towards Gwandoya’s cutter. She was close now, almost on top of us. Her square
stern, dominated by one large circular engine surrounded by four small boosters,
glowed blue with ionized light. She would be monitoring our every move, but
Gwandoya’s desire to take the
Silver
Lining
intact would make him reluctant to wreck us until he was sure we were
running. I was gambling that his greed would buy us a few valuable seconds when
his cutter was most vulnerable.
Our interior cargo hold was empty,
but we still had one external VRS container clamped to maglock two, the center
of the three towing positions between our engines. The container was full of
scrap metal destined for
Tanos
, junk yard of the
Outer Lyra region – nothing we couldn’t afford to lose.
Jase furrowed his brow in
confusion when he saw me studying the cargo manifest. “Even a pirate wouldn’t
want any of that garbage.”
“Oh, he wants it,” I said with
conviction. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“
Silver Lining
preparing for docking,” I said, then slowly turned
our bow towards the cutter as if we were a lumbering freighter offering our
starboard airlock for docking. Gwandoya’s sensors would tell him our particle
cannon was stone cold and, if he knew about our hidden bow compartment, he’d
see the outer doors were closed. “Get ready.”
“For what?” Jase asked
apprehensively.
When our bow was aimed across the
cutter’s deceleration path, I said, “Izin, power the shield . . . now!”
Izin started shield activation
while I pushed the engines to thirty five G’s, sending the
Lining
shooting forward as if she’d been fired out of a cannon. Before
Gwandoya could attack, we were beneath him, directly astern of his engines and
outside his big gun’s firing arc. I immediately nosed up toward the cutter and
accelerated into its engine blast, filling our screen with the glow of her engines.