Shepherd Moon: Omegaverse: Volume 1 (6 page)

He turned around, walked through the door he had used to get in, and answered ‘Hangar’ when asked for his destination.

The hangar deck was at the top of the station, a dome. A wall about three meters high stretched around the base of the dome, with airlocks spaced evenly around the circumference. Above the wall, stretching to the top of the dome, was glass or carbon lattice or whatever. Beyond he could see ships of many sizes coming toward and moving away from the station.

His phone rang in his helmet, the notification across the top of his viewscreen said “
Clancey”.

“Answer.” He paused, “What’s up?”

“You’re auctioning off the gun?” Duncan could hear sound of the bar in the background.

“How did you know?”

“
Fuck
texts me whenever there’s an auction started with certain keywords,” he answered.

“
Fuck
?”

“Yah,” laughed Clancey, “that’s what I named my in game assistant. That way, whenever I start cussing in game, it calls up my assistant instead of yelling it over the radio”

Duncan laughed, “Any bids?”

“It’s up to fifty thousand.”

Duncan’s heart fell. That wouldn’t get anywhere close to funding
The Plan
.

“But don’t worry about that. The auction control software won’t let you set up your auto-bids until you place at least one bid. Fifty K is actually pretty damn healthy for a new auction. The price will skyrocket at the end when the auto-bidding takes over.”

“God, you scared me for a second. I did set a reserve of five million, though.”

“I don’t doubt that’ll be met. Some Corp or Clan will buy it, and
all
of them will want it. What are you going to do with your newfound wealth?”

“You’ll see,” laughed Duncan.

They hung up and Duncan resumed walking toward the center of the dome.

Clive, bring up the ship purchase menu

He started reading, selecting options. He went back and forth a few times, trying to create something that he thought best suited the plan. When he thought he had what he needed, he had it configure the ship. The price was what he feared it would be. Astronomical. He began to see why individuals didn’t buy ships. They were used mainly by groups who could pool their resources to buy one. Large groups. He hoped Clancey was right about that auction.

Closing the menus, Duncan decided to begin exploring the station.

Chapter 6

Birmingham, West Midlands. UK.

Eric West paced in the computer room in his small, two bedroom flat. Six high resolution screens were arrayed in two rows of three, one over the other, on one wall. They provided the only light in the room. The center top screen showed a view of space dominated on one side by a hemisphere of a rocky planetoid; a shepherd moon in the ring around a gas giant. The rest of the monitors were divided among charts and instrument panels.

He stopped, leaned forward, and looked at the center bottom screen. It presented a three dimensional view of a star system. The star system that he’d been stalking all day. He touched and dragged on the screen, rotating the map to get a better view of the trade routes laid over it. The green lines cut through the system, converging as they approached the system’s fourth planet; the jump point for this system. All ships passing through this system in hyperspace had to pass that point. All systems had a jump point; nobody knew why they had to be used. All part of that silly, ‘lost tech’,
Old Ones
cover story the game used, he thought.

Bright red dots marked spots on the map that West’s research had identified as past pirate activity. As the cargo routes came together, the frequency of attacks increased, but falling off rapidly as the routes approached one astronomical unit from the fourth planet. He confirmed that his ship was still targeting this region with its passive sensors. Throughout the day, at irregular intervals, he’d tracked the bright green dots of cargo craft as they approached or left the system. The shields created for faster than light travel spread tachyons, faster than light particles, that were somehow detectable via the Old One technology. This allowed anyone with the requisite equipment to follow the progress of FTL ships through the various star systems. But there’d been no sign of his prey. There was one green dot at the edge of his detection range, approaching him.

“Number One, how often do attacks occur in this system and how long has it been.”

“Attacks average once every sixty-four hours,” answered his assistant. “It has been ninety-three hours since an attack.”

The last answer had increased by thirty minutes since the previous time he’d asked. He resumed pacing.

“Overlay sensor ranges”

Concentric rings, centered on his ship, appeared on the map. At each subsequently larger ring, the sensor range increased by one light minute. The seventh ring intersected the heaviest concentration of red dots. He was seven light minutes away, hiding in the shadow of the fourth planet’s moon. Unless a raider knew just where to look for him, he wouldn’t be found. He’d been silent all day. Nothing radiating. No chance of anyone picking him up passively. Behind him, the gas giant’s ring would probably prevent any active scan from picking him up as well. He waited. Watched.

Seven minutes after an attack, his sensors would detect the torpedo signature and he would instantly go to flank speed and the clock would begin to countdown the seven minutes until the pirate detected him. Six minutes after starting, he’d reach the L5 Lagrange point, an area of stable equilibrium between the gravity created by the pulls of the planet and its moon. At that point, effectively outside of the gravitational well of the planet, he’d be able to light off his jump drive, already set with the coordinates of the attack area. Thirteen minutes after it attacked, he’d jump in on top of the pirate, all of his weapon systems armed and primed: one full minute before the sensors on the pirate ship detected his sudden appearance near the moon. He fully intended for those detection systems to have been vaporized by that time.

Assuming it took longer than thirteen minutes for the pirate to loot the cargo ship, he’d have a kill. Assuming he managed to both prime his weapons and his shields on the six minute flight to the L5 point. Assuming that while doing that, he also had time to input the exact jump trajectory to the contact point. Assuming that he’d jumped close enough to the pirate to wipe him out with a single broadside, and didn’t get drawn into a running, gunning, fight.

His problems were manifold, but manageable. Assuming everything went well.

Ideally he’d have the rest of his crew online, managing the various stations and systems throughout the ship. Their advanced character skills, appropriate for each station, would greatly decrease the time it took to prepare the ship. They would also be able to work in parallel, unlike his AI crew. As it was, however, they’d become less and less agreeable to playing the waiting game required to land the big prey. He’d tried to explain it to them in those terms. The waiting was boring, yes, but the payoff could be huge. But they seemed more interested in jumping onto planets and shooting aliens. He’d enjoyed that too, and was happy to lead the group in doing so after they’d formed.

“It got old, though,” he said to himself, and when he saw the group had acquired enough to buy an older class destroyer, he’d convinced them that it was the way to go. Hell, some of the guys had even put in real money to help fix up and equip the ship. He just didn’t understand why they weren’t here. He had himself invested in getting six top of the line monitors, thinking that commanding the crew, his crew, this way would be more efficient than using the VR interface. All of that, he’d done for them.

Now, when the payoff finally looked like it was about to happen, they were nowhere to be found.

“Number One, is any of my crew online?”

“Negative. Shall I send out a call to arms?”

“No. Fuck them. If they’re not interested, I don’t need them.”

He sat in a large leather high backed chair in the middle of the room. “Fuck them,” he repeated to the room. “If I can’t count on them now, what’s it going to be like during the bloody World Cup next summer?” He pounded on the chair’s armrest. “Fuck them.”

As if in response, a red light flared on the map.

“Captain, I’ve detected …”

“I can see that. Flank speed! Waypoint 1!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You answer a command with ‘aye aye’. I’ve told you again and again!”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Shut up you fucking idiot.”

He stood, approached the monitors. The pirate’s torpedo had been a hit. The green dot had come to a rest and the red dot moved to intercept it. The torpedoes didn’t damage ships, they disrupted the shields generated to protect the ship during faster than light travel. After the shield was disrupted, the ship dropped out of warp space into normal space, and the pirates could board and plunder until the FTL drive regenerated the shield; about twenty minutes. Once that happened, the fully automated cargo ship jumped back to light speed and resumed its course.

After the shield was back up, there was no way to remove loot from the ship, so unless the pirate wanted to spend another very expensive torpedo to keep it there, there was no reason for them to remain in the area. That was especially so since a popular, but expensive, add on that many cargo ship owners were now buying was an ansible-based distress signal that sent out a plea that was instantaneously transmitted to the nearest space station; which would then dispatch a Navy ship. The response time depended upon how far away the attack was from the station; the Navy usually arrived very quickly if only a system or two away, but even at the furthest reaches they could be expected in less than twenty minutes. Eric wanted to be there well before that could happen. Sharing credit for the kill was not part of his plan.

He began working on one of the screens, bringing up his shields. They took the longest to initiate of any ship board system, about five minutes, and they also sent out the largest electro magnetic signature. Any shipping within about one AU would be able to detect him in about eight minutes at most, as the shield’s field emission radiated out at light speed. He set the shields at twenty percent of ship’s power. Weak, but he didn’t expect to be hit. Unfortunately, the power allocation had no effect on shield generation time. One hundred percent power to shields or twenty percent power both took around five minutes to generate or regenerate. The difference was in how quickly they were depleted after being hit.

He wasn’t really concerned about shields, however, but wanted to be able to set the remaining, majority, of the ship’s power reserve toward the weapons. Unlike the merchant class ships, his class didn’t have to share power between engines and shields; he had a dedicated power source for the engines. But he did have to share between the shields and weapons, and his shields needed a constant power supply to maintain them, also unlike the merchant who could set shield power and forget it. His shields, though, could take a much heavier pounding as a result. But he had to choose between a heavy offense or a heavy defense, and he wanted the first shot to count. To be the only shot needed.

“A quick short, sharp shock, they don’t do it again. Dig it?” he said in his best Cockney accent.

“Are you asking me to play ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Captain?”

“Sure, Number One,” laughed Eric, “but only until we reach waypoint one.”

As he finished the initiation sequence for the shields, he moved to the monitor he had dedicated as the weapons station. He was going to put everything, eighty percent of ship’s power, into the plasma cannon. One shot should be able to take out most light pirates. For this kind of job, they usually used a small mining ship. They were small, relatively cheap, and had a decent sized cargo bay for loot. The controls for the torpedo were inside the weapon, and once activated and launched required no further input, so the pirates didn’t worry about buying any weapons systems upgrades for their ships.

Where they did, however, tend to spend was in stealth. Surface coatings that could reduce the albedo of their ships to almost nothing. They also added active camouflage systems that received star light on one side of the ship and projected it on the opposite side, so you couldn’t find them just by looking for parts of space where stars weren’t. Unless they were moving fast enough that they couldn’t conceal either their engine emissions or the miniscule heat generated by encountering randoms atoms of space stuff, they were next to invisible; the only thing that gave them away was the wake, and subsequent explosion, of the torpedo.

They also tended, for stealth and price concerns, to avoid any sort of combat shields. So while they were very very hard to detect if they were running silent, they were very very easy to kill when found.

He finished bringing the weapons online and looked to the shield screen. They were at sixty percent. Three minutes. Right on schedule. Three minutes to go until jump. He moved to the navigation screen.

“Number One. Overlay the jump locations I calculated earlier.”