Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (10 page)

PC Parasite
Five

► “He is going deeper into the atmosphere, Subaltern.”

Subaltern Penae Girar nodded. “I see the track, Saulo. What pressure are they at?”

“Three standards and increasing.”

Penae hissed, annoyed.

Space-capable vessels were not particularly suited for atmospheric transit, even when they were designed to handle such conditions. The stresses on a hull were far different in the void, and thus ships had to be designed to resist vacuum rather than pressure. Certainly, they could be made strong enough to handle some significant pressure, but it seemed that either the target vessel was better suited to planetary atmospheric conditions, or the pilot was insane.

Either was annoying, but of the two he’d much prefer the ship design to be superior. Crazy people were more trouble than they were worth.

“Signal
Three
and
Eight
,” Penae said. “Close the loop.”

“Yes Subaltern,” his subordinate said. “Orders issued.”

“Helm to my command,” Penae said, reaching for the controls.

“Helm is yours to command, Subaltern.”

The control circuits switched over to his station, and he pushed forward, driving his craft deeper into the atmosphere.

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► Turbulence buffeted the shuttle hard, throwing Steph and Milla around and causing the straps to bite into their shoulders and waists. Steph worked the controls hard, trying to get a feel for the state of the atmosphere but finding the task difficult through electronic controls. The Archangels had been designed with force feedback loops built into the system, not quite as responsive as the old hydraulic systems or a pure cable link, but a lot better than the video game controls he was fighting through now.

“This damn thing is a pig,” he grumbled, eyes flicking to the telltales as he tried to keep track of how the shuttle was reacting to his movements.

The shuttle’s lifting surfaces flexed and twisted under the stresses he was pushing it through, fighting the fast-moving atmosphere rushing around them.

“I see a new vector on the radar, Stephan,” Milla offered. “Coming from ahead of us, low orbital track entering the upper atmosphere.”

“That’s two,” Stephen said. “Come on, lucky number three . . .”

The shuttle jumped then dropped again as Steph played with the CM reactor, trying to keep a stable flight as the turbulent atmosphere tossed them around.

“There is three!” yelled Milla. “Coming in from . . . ten o’clock, very high!”

“Alright.” Steph loosed a feral grin. “New game. Let’s see how well you suckers fly.”

CHAPTER 10

PC Parasite
Five

► Penae smiled tightly at the plot he was reading.

The target was well below them, but it was rapidly running out of room to maneuver. Penae didn’t care how well that little craft could handle pressures—it had to be close to its limits. With three parasites and the planet itself to pin the enemy pilot against, the capture operation should be simple enough.

“Parasite
Eight
, hold at your current altitude,” he said. “Secure the outer perimeter. If they get past us, you snap them up.”

The commander of parasite
Eight
acknowledged the command and leveled the ship’s descent, holding altitude just inside the atmospheric envelope of the planet. The frigate would have greater speed and maneuverability at that altitude, as well as the high stance if the enemy craft managed to escape the combined maneuvering of
Three
and
Five
.

“Ensure that quantum lock systems are charged and ready,” Penae ordered next, eyes still on the screens.

“All systems are blue, Commander.
Three
and
Eight
confirm as well. We are ready.”

“Execute.”

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► “They are closing, Stephan,” Milla warned as Steph monitored the CM levels.

“I’ve got ’em,” he said with a nod, looking back up. “Keep an eye on the counter-mass. We’re going to have to finesse that while we’re this low in the atmosphere.”

“I have the controls,” Milla confirmed, turning her focus to the shuttle’s CM systems.

“Bandit Three is holding back,” Steph commented as he punched in a series of numbers, one eye on the scopes while the other checked his entries. “We’re going to have to run a blockade once we’re past the first two.”

Milla couldn’t help but smile, just a little, as she took in the quiet confidence in his voice. There was no hint of worry that the two closing frigates would pose a serious problem, despite the fact that the shuttle was hardly one of his Archangels and they were unarmed. She found herself in an unusual position for one of her people, as she was almost enjoying the anticipation of the violence that was about to happen.

Oh, they wouldn’t be shooting or trying to kill anyone—lacking weapons tended to make that sort of thing difficult—but Milla had no doubt that what was to come would be violent all the same, constituting a clash of wills between the parasite frigates and Stephen Michaels.

She knew very little, if anything, about who was piloting the frigates—but regardless, Milla would place her faith in the pilot at her side.

“Punch it!” Steph ordered, causing Milla to push more power to the CM systems just as he hit the throttle and pulled hard on the stick.

Eagle One
stood on its tail in the thick roiling atmosphere of the gas giant, nose pointing right at the closest frigate, and her reactors screamed in response to their commands. For a brief moment they hovered. Then the acceleration slammed Milla and Steph back into their bolstered seats with the force of a dozen Earths, and they were moving.

Like a bullet from a gun,
Eagle One
thrust vertically straight and true at the closest parasite frigate, proximity alarms screaming as the shuttle’s systems warned against the impending collision.

►►►

PC Parasite
Five

► “Hard evasion!” screamed Penae, eyes bugging wide as every alarm in his ship seemed to come alive at once. “Get them locked! Now!”

“They’re changing velocity too quickly, Subaltern!” his tactical officer called. “I am attempting to override automatic systems. I will try to catch them manually!”

Penae didn’t respond. He was involuntarily gripping the edge of his seat as parasite
Five
pulled aside in an attempt to evade the oncoming craft.

Are they suicidal?
he wondered. The Oathers were
anything
but suicidal, he knew, but this craft didn’t fit any Oather configuration. The Empire had, on occasion, encountered other civilizations that he knew of. Mostly they were easily absorbed, but occasionally a culture with some severe social malady managed to survive the tumultuous transition from irrelevant life-form to spacefaring culture.

Those cultures generally had to be exterminated.

Penae wondered if he was looking at just such a species. But if that were the case, why did the larger contact fit traditional Imperial and Oather designs?

“I think I have them, Subaltern. Engaging lock!”

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► A whole new set of alarms wailed into existence across the flight deck of the shuttle. Neither Milla nor Steph noticed. They were both jerked hard in their seats as
Eagle One
jolted in position, decelerating sharply for an instant before the reactors whined. Then the shuttle broke loose and continued the upward track.

“What the hell was that?” Steph cried, eyes quickly scanning his instruments.

Milla too was focused intently now, trying to find the cause of the disruption, but there were certain scanners that she was used to that the shuttle simply did not have.

“I . . . I believe it was a . . .” She scowled, thinking hard to remember the word. “A quantum lock.”

“A what?” Steph glanced over briefly before refocusing on his flying.

“A quantum lock, yes?” she said. “They tried to lock the shuttle into place by linking us to the local subatomic field of space.”

Steph wanted nothing more than to cross his eyes, but he thought he got the gist of it.

“Are you telling me they have a bloody
tractor
beam?”

Milla frowned. “What is a tractor? Never mind. No, it’s not a beam. It’s a way to cause the shuttle to link to the part of local space that is below atoms, yes? It’s used to capture targets. Priminae use it often for asteroid mining.”

“Yes? Are you asking me?” Steph shot her a confused look. “I’m actually pretty well educated, Milla, but I think you just left me drowning in the deep end. Okay, forget that, they have a tractor beam. Great. Okay, I can work with this . . .”

He wrenched the stick in his hand, sending the shuttle into a spiral out and around the parasite frigate and cleaving through a cloud bank that briefly cut visuals down to effectively zero. He wasn’t basing his flying on what he could see, so for the moment that was the least of his concerns.

“How strong is this lock? Can we break it?” he asked as he put the shuttle through a tight corkscrew, half taking evasive action and half looking for a clean slot between the two closest parasite frigates from which to make his move.

“One?” Milla looked uncertain. “Most likely, yes. Two, however, would be very unlikely. Against three, there is no chance.”

“Well, I guess we’d better not get caught, then,” Steph quipped. “Give me military power on the CM field in three.”

“Military power in three, aye.”

Steph twisted the shuttle around, hard over, and away from the closest parasite frigate, winding up with the nose pointed right at the second bogey just as Milla threw full military power to the CM generator. The shuttle lanced forward, cutting through the storm around them and leaving contrails in its wake. The lights dimmed, however, and Steph felt his controls get a little sluggish as the energy-hungry counter-mass systems swallowed up everything the reactors could put out and a fair chunk of what was coming from the stored batteries.

He rolled the shuttle over, showing the heat shields of the craft’s belly to the enemy ship, and hit the rockets generally used for precision maneuvers in space. Normally, those weren’t remotely powerful enough to throw the big transport shuttle around, but with CM maxed out, the boost threw the duo to one side with shocking force, and hopefully with as little predictability as possible.

“Back down to full power,” Steph ordered, flipping them back over and pointing the nose to the skies again.

“Full power, aye.”

“Can we track their tractor beam?” he demanded.

Milla looked over at him, her expression incredulous. “What is this . . . tractor, Stephan? I do not know this word.”

Steph sighed. “Later. The lock. Can we detect it?”

She scowled at him, then glared at her instruments. “None of these systems will do it, Stephan. A quantum lock molds space-time . . .”

“Like counter-mass?” he asked.

“No, different aspect of space-time,” Milla answered. “Counter-mass affects mass and, thus, gravity. A quantum lock is magnetic.”

“We have magnetic sensors on board . . . ,” Steph said as he twisted the bird away from the second frigate.
Eagle One
was now climbing rapidly, hell-bent on flying deeper into space with both frigates turning into pursuit.

“Yes, but your electromagnetic sweep equipment is very crude for this sort of work,” Milla rushed to explain, honestly shocked at how easily he was handling the flight systems while talking seriously about the situation with her. “It is designed primarily to scan large items. The lock will be
very
small, below the atomic scale.”

“So you can’t do anything?”

Milla grimaced. “I may be able to detect when they are trying to establish a lock. However, I certainly could not pinpoint where the lock will be focused.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Steph said through clenched teeth as he sent the shuttle through another spiral, trying to gain ground while the two frigates below him were still attempting not to cross one another’s bows. “Get to it.”

Milla stared at her instruments helplessly for a moment, then pulled up the radio intercept software, cycling through into the core settings and looking over the range she had to work with. A quantum lock was fundamentally a very focused diamagnetic point, one that could be tuned with the appropriate hardware to move through space.

Detecting the lock was relatively straightforward, though the maximum range was generally rated in meters at most. That meant that the only way they were going to detect an attempt to lock the shuttle into place was if the system had already pinpointed their position. Milla killed most of the radio intercept channels, narrowing the band to the electromagnetic frequencies a lock would affect, and then set a warning tone to go off if anything tripped the system.

“There,” she said, closing the settings. “That should do it.”

Steph glanced over. “That was fast. You’re sure?”

“No,” she answered, laughing a little nervously. “However, we will soon know.”

Steph looked at her evenly for a moment, then grinned widely. “Now you’re getting into the spirit of things. Let’s fly.”

►►►

PC Parasite
Five

► “That pilot is a lunatic,” Penae growled as collision alarms sounded across the command deck.

Parasite
Three
was passing only a half beam away from them, almost within the margin of error for manual control and certainly too close for ships this deep in a stormy atmosphere. Still, he believed they weren’t going to collide, so he turned his focus back to the craft they were chasing.

“Yes, Subaltern,” Penae’s own pilot agreed, his face pale and clammy.

“At least we know that the fool doesn’t have any weapons.” Penae forced a chuckle, trying to remain as calm as possible for his men’s benefit almost as much as his own.

“How are you sure, Subaltern?” his second asked, confused.

“Because if they’d been armed, we’d likely be venting smoke by now.” Penae sighed, shaking his head. “He caught us flat. That’s a fast little prick.”

He looked over to where the pilot was finishing up clearing their beams, noting that they were no longer at risk of slamming into parasite
Three
.

“Enter pursuit course, maximum atmospheric thrust!” he ordered.

Parasite
Five
tipped its nose up, and a shock wave erupted as the frigate began to climb hard after the fleeing ship. Under full thrust, the frigate should start to gain on the much-faster accelerating craft shortly, but there was going to be a period of time before the range could be closed again, and quantum locking was
not
a particularly long-ranged tool.