“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nguema scoffed. “I’m not going to blow off energy for that.”
“They’re not going to charge anything anyway,” Pickers added. “The fee-for-rescue thing is a myth.”
“And there’s no point in getting any farther out than we already are,” Shresthra concluded. “Especially if we find out you can’t put that back together.” He jabbed a finger at the disassembled interface.
Grimm clenched his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to do this, certainly not here and now. But the very fact that the Salamander was heading in their direction showed that something had made the captain suspicious. And once the destroyer was alongside there would be nothing he could do except hope and pray that the Manticorans didn’t find Bettor’s precious instruments.
And Grimm had never been much for praying.
“We need to get moving,” he told Shresthra, keeping his voice low and calm. Merripen would be on the bridge, he knew, keeping track of things up there. “Please.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Do we, now?” he said, matching Grimm’s volume. “Why exactly is that?”
“That’s not important,” Grimm said. “Just call Nguema and have him get us moving.”
“I see.” Shresthra took a deep breath. “Nguema?”
“Yes?”
“Shut down the impellers,” Shresthra ordered. “I repeat: shut down the impellers. Then call the Salamander and request—”
“Merripen?” Grimm cut him off.
“I’m here,” Merripen’s voice came faintly from the intercom.
“Do it.”
Shresthra frowned at Grimm. “Do what—?”
He broke off at the soft, distant-sounding crack from the speaker.
“Nguema?” he called. “Nguema?”
“I’m sorry,” Grimm apologized. “But I did say please.”
And before the captain could do more than open his eyes wider in a disbelieving stare, Grimm drew his own gun and shot him. Pickers had just enough time for a surprisingly feminine squeak before Grimm shot him, too.
“Merripen?” he called again.
“Bridge is secure,” Merripen’s voice came back, as stolid and emotionless as always. “He didn’t get the wedge down. Want me to get us moving?”
“Immediately,” Grimm confirmed, slipping the half-cleaned board back into its slot in the interface. “Then go finish off the rest of the crew. I’ll send Bettor to the bridge to watch things while you do that.”
“Right,” Merripen said. There was a short pause. “Okay, we’re up and running—eighty gees acceleration. How soon before you get that thing back together?”
“A couple of hours at least,” Grimm said, wishing now that he hadn’t been so thorough in his disassembly. “You just worry about your part of the job.”
“On it.”
Keying on his uni-link, Grimm punched for Bettor. “Status report.”
“It’s coming along,” Bettor said, his voice tight. “Was that a shot I just heard?”
“It was,” Grimm confirmed. “That RMN ship—the Salamander—decided they needed to get up close and cozy. Shresthra wouldn’t get us moving, so I relieved him of command.”
“And we’re moving now?” Bettor growled. “Great. That’s not going to look suspicious or anything.”
“Bottom line for you is that we may have to cut your sampling time short,” Grimm said, ignoring the dig. “Will two or three more hours be enough?”
“I guess we’ll find out. You want me to lock down here and go to the bridge?”
“Yes, at least until Merripen finishes his sweep.”
“Okay. What do I do if the Manticorans call?”
“Just pipe it down here,” Grimm said. “I’ll handle it.”
* * *
“They’re running?” Fairburn demanded, part of his brain refusing to believe the evidence of his eyes.
“Confirmed,” Tactical Officer Wanda Ravel said. “She’s up to point eight KPS squared. Seems to have leveled off, though a ship of that class ought to have another few gravities in reserve.”
“Probably waiting to see our response,” Todd murmured.
Fairburn scowled at his displays. There was no reason for Izbica to be doing this. None. She was a freighter, damn it, and freighters had only one purpose in life: to fly cargoes back and forth and make money doing it. Izbica was beyond the hyper limit and on her way to Minorca, and the next item on her checklist would be spinning up her hyperdrive and hitting the Alpha band. This extra n-space acceleration made zero sense.
Unless her new purpose in life was to get away from Salamander.
Smugglers? Ridiculous. Izbica had been in Manticoran orbit for nearly a week, with every hour bringing the possibility that Customs would suddenly decide to drop in and take a look at her cargo. Granted, the probability that anyone would do something like that was pretty small, but it was still possible. If Captain Shresthra hadn’t been worried about an examination then, why would he be worried about one now?
The Cascan mass-murderer? Same logical problem.
So why run from Salamander? And why run now? Could it be because Fairburn, unlike Manticoran Customs, was definitely talking about boarding her?
Mentally, he shrugged. He could speculate all day without coming up with anything. Sometimes the best way to an answer was just to ask.
“Increase acceleration to one point four KPS squared and recalculate zero-zero,” he ordered. “Com, get me a laser on Izbica. Let’s see if Shresthra has a logical explanation.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Todd asked.
“Then we’d best be ready, hadn’t we?” Fairburn countered. “Bring us to General Quarters, if you please.” He smiled tightly. “We’re on a training exercise, after all. Might as well run the crew all the way up.”
* * *
“Damn,” Grimm muttered.
“Yeah, I think damn pretty well covers the situation,” Bettor’s tight voice came from the intercom. “Now what?”
“Let’s not panic,” Grimm soothed as he eased the board he’d just finished back into position. Just three more to reassemble and replace, and the interface would be up and running again. “They can’t possibly catch up with us before we’re ready to get out of here.”
“They could still fire a missile.”
“They won’t,” Grimm assured him. “They have no reason to attack and nothing to gain. And missiles are damned expensive.”
“Yeah.” For a moment Bettor was silent. “Though, you know…maybe we should give them a reason.”
Grimm blinked. “Come again?”
“I’m trying to come up with a good reason why we’re running,” Bettor said. “I mean, a reason from their point of view. We can’t be smugglers—if we weren’t worried about Manticoran Customs finding some special cargo a week ago, we shouldn’t be worried about the Salamander finding it now. We can’t be accelerating just for the fun of it—merchant ships run too close to the margin to waste energy that way. What’s left?”
Grimm pursed his lips. Unfortunately, Bettor had a point. It would take a huge leap of intuition for the Manticorans to guess that the Izbica was secretly collecting data on a wormhole junction that no one even suspected was here. But in the absence of any other reason, someone could conceivably wander off down that path.
And Grimm’s team’s job wasn’t just to collect data, but to make sure no one knew that they were collecting it.
“I guess what’s left is the most obvious one of all,” he told Bettor. “They still waiting?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Patch me through.”
There was a brief pause— “You’re on.”
“Hello, Captain Fairburn,” Grimm called toward the intercom. “This is Captain Stephen Grimm of the Solarian Merchantman Izbica. How can I assist you?”
There was a long silence, longer than the normal light-speed time lag for their current distance would account for. Grimm had the third-to-last board halfway reassembled
by the time the Salamander finally responded. “Apparently, our records are in error,” Fairburn’s calm voice came over the speaker. “We have Stephen Grimm listed as a passenger, not the captain.”
“There’s been a slight shake-up in the chain of command,” Grimm told him. “None of your concern. What do you want?”
Silence descended as his words began their slow, speed-of-light journey to the distant RMN vessel. “What exactly are we going for here?” Bettor asked. “You hoping to convince him we’re pirates?”
“That’s the big buzz word around here these days,” Grimm reminded him. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get them to that conclusion. Once they do, they won’t look for other possibilities.”
“What are you going to do if he asks why we didn’t take the ship sooner?”
“Probably spin some nonsense about hoping Shresthra would pick up some high-tech stuff at Manticore we could add to our loot,” Grimm said. “But I doubt he’ll ask. Their focus now should be on doing whatever they can to catch us.”
“But they can’t catch us, right?” Bettor asked, his voice sounding just a little apprehensive. “You’re going to have that interface finished in time, right?”
“Don’t you worry your little head,” Grimm soothed. “A Salamander-class destroyer can pull a maximum of two hundred gees, but they’re not going to go over one-seventy. We can safely do about eighty. At our current vector differential—look, you can run the numbers yourself if you want. Bottom line: we’ll be out of here before they can get even close to a zero-zero.”
The speaker hissed with a sigh. “If you say so,” Bettor said. “You’d just better be right.”
* * *
Grimm’s—Captain Grimm’s—message ended, and for a long moment Salamander’s bridge was silent.
Not for lack of anything to say, Fairburn knew. But merely because everyone was thinking the same thing.
Izbica had been hijacked. And there was only one reason why a simple freighter with no ransom-worthy people aboard would be seized.
Grimm and his fellow passengers were pirates.
Pirates.
The word seemed to hang in front of Fairburn’s eyes. After all these years of sifting through flight data, listening to rumors, and traveling across interstellar space, he and Salamander finally had found real, living, breathing pirates.
And unless he did something fast, those pirates were going to get away.
He squared his shoulders. “Increase acceleration to one point eight KPS squared,” he ordered, wishing briefly that his voice was the deep, resonant type. This was history in the making. “And recalculate for zero-zero.”
There was a brief silence, and he knew what they were all thinking. Eighty percent of maximum acceleration was one point six KPS squared, and standing orders were to stay below that line unless at dire need.
But Izbica held the proof that would finally and permanently shut up Chancellor Breakwater and the rest of the doubters in Parliament. There was no way in hell that Fairburn was going to let that proof get away.
The rest of the bridge crew knew that, too. That, or they knew better than to argue with their captain. “One point eight KPS squared, aye,” the helm confirmed.
“Recalculating zero-zero,” Ravel added.
“Good,” Fairburn said. “And go to Readiness One,” he added. “Izbica appears to have been taken by pirates.” History in the making… “We’re going to take her back.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Readiness Two.
The words echoed through Osterman’s mind as she carefully slid her rebuilt circuit board back into the Forward Missile capacitor-charging monitor. Captain Fairburn hadn’t bothered to explain what was going on, and Osterman suspected most of the crew thought it was just part of the training exercise.
But all her years in the Navy had honed Osterman’s instincts into fine-tuned sensors in their own right. She could feel the subtle tension in the air, the slight edge in the sporadic orders and communications emanating from the bridge.
Something was definitely going on.
But what? A rescue mission? An attack on the Star Kingdom?
Pirates?
Readiness Two.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure float swiftly past the compartment doorway. She glanced over just in time to see that he was carrying something fist-sized in his hand. An electronic module, her brain automatically identified it, probably a hex.
Which in itself wasn’t unusual. Ever since general quarters had been called, officers, petty officers, and spacers had been scrambling like mad to get half-working systems up to full operating capacity. Forward Weapons was no exception, and Osterman had nearly been mowed down at least twice by spacers maneuvering racks and large components through the zero-gee at unsafe speeds.
What made this current sighting odd was that there were no storerooms or component bins in the direction the spacer had come from.
Which strongly implied that the hex clutched in the spacer’s hand had been borrowed from somewhere else.
Osterman had pushed her way out of the compartment and sent herself flying down the passsageway almost before the analysis had fully worked its way through her brain. Midnight requisitions were hardly unheard of aboard Salamander—indeed, they were depressingly common, given the chronic shortage of equipment. But there was a big difference between borrowing from a secondary system and from a vital one. Wherever the spacer was going with that hex, she was damn well going to find out where he’d gotten it.
She caught up with him two turns later, and to her complete lack of surprise saw that it was Spacer First Class Hugo Carpenter. “Hold it,” she called as she hurried to catch up. “Carpenter? I said hold it.”
For that first second it had looked like he might try to ignore the order and make a break for it. But the use of his name had apparently convinced him that running would be both useless and foolish. Catching hold of a handhold, he brought himself to a clearly reluctant halt.
“Yes, Senior Chief?” he greeted her carefully as he turned around, pressing the hex close to his side. Maybe he was hoping she wouldn’t notice it there.
Fat chance. Even on a ship full of scavengers, Carpenter was something of a legend among the petty officers.
“Something seems to have attached itself to your hand,” Osterman said. “I thought you might need help getting it removed.”
The majority of people didn’t blush in zero-gee. Unfortunately for Carpenter, he wasn’t one of them.
“Uh…” he stalled, his face reddening.
“Come on, we don’t have time for this,” Osterman growled, gesturing to the hex. “Where’d you get it?”
Carpenter sighed.
“Ensign Locatelli ordered us to get the tracking sensors up and running,” he said, reluctantly holding up the hex.
“What, all three systems?” Osterman asked, frowning. One of His Majesty’s ships these days was lucky if it had even two of the tracking systems running. Most of the time they had to make do with one.
“All three,” Carpenter confirmed, giving her a wan smile. “He said he didn’t care how we pulled it off, but that by God we would.”
Osterman suppressed a scowl. That sounded like Locatelli, all right. Still trying to wield the kind of authority he wasn’t even close to actually possessing.
“Where’d you get it?” she asked.
“The laser temperature sensor,” Carpenter said. “I figured that since the system has been down for weeks, and these components were just sitting there—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Osterman interrupted, plucking the hex out of his hand. With the lack of a functioning X-ray emitter having put the beam weapon semi-permanently out of commission, the rest of its associated equipment had become a sort of happy hunting ground for Salamander’s scroungers.
And indeed, Carpenter’s hex looked damn near fresh out of the box. There were no kluges, no rebuilds, and only a couple of casing scratches around the mounting bolts
where careless techs had missed the mark with their screwdrivers. Definitely a component that hadn’t seen much use.
“You put your old hex in its place, I assume?”
“Yes, Senior Chief,” Carpenter said. “Ours wasn’t broken, exactly, just a little iffy, and I wasn’t sure it would hold up to one of Ensign Locatelli’s one-ten tests. If it didn’t—well, you know what he’s like.”
“Not sure I like your tone, Spacer,” Osterman warned. “That’s an officer you’re talking about.”
“Sorry, Senior Chief.”
Osterman grunted. Tone notwithstanding, Carpenter had a point. Locatelli the Younger was famous for pushing people and equipment past their limits, and had little patience when the results didn’t match up with his expectations.
In a navy with infinite money and resources, pushing components to a hundred and ten percent of their normal operating ceilings was a good way to weed out those that might fail under the added duress of combat. In a navy with extremely finite quantities of both, that kind of limit-pushing was just begging for trouble.
But nobody could tell Locatelli anything. More depressingly, nobody would tell him anything. Not with the shadow of his powerful uncle looming over him.
Still, this kind of poaching wasn’t something a senior chief ought to turn a blind eye to. Osterman was trying to decide whether to simply tell Carpenter to return the hex, or to take the time to accompany him to the beam monitor compartment to make sure he did it, when the ship’s klaxons abruptly began wailing. “Battlestations! Battlestations! All hands to battlestations. Set Condition One throughout the ship.”
Osterman swore under her breath. Battle stations. Whatever the hell was going on out there, it had just gotten real.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the hex back into Carpenter’s hands. “Get the tracker back together before Locatelli skins you alive.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said tensely. Shoving off the handhold, banging his shoulder against the bulkhead in his haste, he headed back toward Forward Missiles.