Setosha - the Beating Heart
Copyright© 2010 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 14
United Families Catalog, System RR-231
Second Officer Tatiana Silversmith studied the scan. This system was looking like another dry hole. She turned and said as much to the others on Snooper’s bridge. “And this place was supposed to be crawling with Imperial ships,” she added.
“We can’t always be the lucky ones,” Loren said. “I’m getting a lot of trace He3. Somebody was here, and not that long ago.”
Tatiana looked at the other gals, but none of them had anything more to add. She turned back to the scan, grumbling under her breath. “Well, I don’t like it. They’re not here anymore. I want to know where they are.” She scowled at the scan. Nothing had changed. “Do we have any signs of jump activity?”
“Nothing recent, boss. I’d say that whatever was here left at least two days ago.”
Tatiana felt a knot of something ugly with lots of sharp points forming in her gut. There were supposed to be a lot of ships in this system, maybe even warships, and now they were gone.
“Mad Dog, any ideas?”
“With all the He3 we’re sniffing, it has to be warships. Nobody refuels merchants from tankers. Where did they go, Tasha? I don’t like this.” Tatiana caught an image of a worried coyote, muzzle on the ground, paws over its ears.
“Yeah, me too. Where did they go, and what can we do about it?” Tatiana unfastened her belt and kicked herself down the passageway to Snooper’s galley. They were in stealth mode for this approach, and in stealth mode only the most essential systems had power. In Scouts, artificial gravity was not an essential system. Tatiana grabbed a quick snack, then settled in front of Snooper’s only porthole to think.
They were far enough out from the primary that the system’s K6 star was indistinguishable from all the other stars in the sky. The sight of all those stars put her thoughts at ease and gave her a chance to calm down, a chance to focus. This was as much privacy as Snooper’s tiny crew compartment offered, and the crew had learned to respect her thinking time. Well, maybe sometimes it was more fear than respect. She’d brought more than a few really wild schemes back from her thoughtful solitude.
Intelligence had hints that there were a lot of Imperial ships somewhere among these dozen stars. How many were a lot? Nobody would say, but she got the impression there should have been at least 40 big ships. Snooper had jumped in well outside the hyper limit and crept inwards on reaction drive as quietly as possible, every passive sensor alert for the slightest hint of activity.
That had been 30 hours ago. In all that time they had picked up absolutely nothing in the system except traces of He3 in the absorption spectra of the star. A probe she sent deeper into the system had picked up heavy concentrations of the rare gas in odd pockets throughout the system. Whatever had spilled all that He3 must have done so recently. It didn’t take many days for the stellar wind to dissipate any concentration of a gas.
So what did she do now? She was the Captain; it was her decision. The only sensible thing they could do was head back to base and report. Most systems Snooper visited were empty, but Intelligence had been so sure about this one. Tatiana yawned. Snooper had been coasting for 30 hours, and she’d been on the Bridge for the entire time. She would sleep after they jumped out. She glanced at the clock. No, she’d have to sleep before then. Leaving quietly took longer than sneaking in; they’d jump out in 50 or 60 hours, maybe more.
“Rosie,” she said when she returned to the Bridge, “we’re leaving, but we’ll go out the same way we came in. Keep it quiet. Give me a time until we can jump.”
“Time to jump: 66.3 hours, boss.”
“You already had a course calculated,” Tatiana said.
“Aye, ma’am, of course I did.” Rosie managed to look smug. “When you decided there was nothing here, that was the only logical thing to do next.”
Tatiana stuck her tongue out at her astrogator. “Go ahead and do it. What would you have done if I’d decided we should go further into the system?”
“I have that course plotted, too. But I figured we’re not going into the system. Snooper isn’t a PSK cruiser. Snooper’s a scout. Only the PSK is dumb enough to jump into the middle of an unknown system and risk a whole ship. We’d hang out here for a month if we wanted the information that badly.”
“Look how long we sat outside of K-303,” Loren reminded them. “We were there for what, 42 days? Something like that.”
“Just over 45 days, then Spatha arrived,” Tatiana said. “Now there’s a PSK ship I like. They do the same thing we do, they just do it in a different way.”
“You just like that giant sensor array of theirs,” Anthoinett said. “You wish we had it.”
“We made a good team,” Loren said, defending Tatiana’s assessment. “But we all noticed they sent us in to sniff K-303 first to make sure it was safe for Spatha.”
Tatiana yawned. “I’ve heard all of this before. I’m going to catch some sleep. You know the drill.”
“Aye, boss,” Rosie answered. “If anything so much as twitches, we’ll kick you out of bed.”
Tatiana waved vaguely in everyone’s direction and made her way to her bunk. There she washed off a day’s accumulation of grime with her cup of soapy water, then slid into the sack. In moments she was asleep.
It seemed like no time at all had passed before she felt someone shaking her awake. Glancing at her clock, she saw she’d slept for four hours.
“What is it?”
“Inbound hyperjump footprint,” Sunni reported. “It’s nowhere near us, but I thought you should know.”
“Who’s on scan?” Tatiana pulled herself out of her sack and grabbed a clean spacesuit from her clothes bag. Sunni ducked back out of the way of flying arms and feet.
“Lilliana. She took over from Loren about two hours ago.”
“All right. I’ll be on the Bridge in a couple of minutes.”
“I’ll get you something to eat,” Sunni said, and kicked off for the galley.
“What do you have?” Tatiana asked three minutes later as she drifted through the open Bridge hatch, chewing on a ration bar.
“The ship emerged about a minute ago,” Lilliana told her. “It’s fairly massive, with civilian-grade drive emissions. We’re still analyzing, but I’m betting it’s an Imperial merchant. It’s moving in-system at 20 Gs.”
“Course?” Tatiana choked down the rest of her ration bar and chased it with a sip of hot brew before strapping herself into her seat.
“Too soon to know for sure, boss, but I’d say it’s headed for the largest of those big concentrations of He3. Maybe Mad Dog has a better idea.” Tatiana glanced up at the scan, where a line appeared across the display of the system. “That’s the course Mad Dog is projecting for them,” Lilliana added. “We’re assuming they’ll make orbit near the biggest concentration of He3. Maybe they’ll do something else when they figure out nobody’s home.”
“Mad Dog, what do your instincts say?”
Tatiana easily recognized the fleeting impression of sharp canines gleaming in the night. “I’d say it’s a merchant, Tasha. This looks like a good time to try that idea you had two months ago when we were docked at the Fleet Base at Home.”
“Which one was that one, puppy? I have lots of ideas. One or two are even good.”
“The one where you came on board drunk.”
“I have even more ideas when I’m drunk, puppy. Not so many of those are good ones.”
“That package you rearranged the #2 hold for.”
Tatiana struggled to remember what was in Snooper’s #2 hold. She must have been really drunk that night. What would Mother think of that? Well, no matter, Mother was at least 45 light years away in the South Sea Islands on Setosha and not likely to find out.
“All right, puppy, which idea was it?”
“You got that shipment of missiles from the Marine with the limp, those experimental ones.”
“Experimental missiles? On a Scout? You’re crazy, or I was.”
“We can take him, Tasha. That ship is defenseless against us.”
”We’re defenseless against us, puppy.”
“It’s the only way you’ll know for sure what leaked all the He3.”
That brought Tatiana up short. The officer who had given her their orders had told Tatiana to do whatever it took to find out what was going on here. Normally, an order like that was ignored. There were certain things a Scout just did not do, attacking other ships, for instance. Scouts were for, well, scouting. Other ships were supposed to do the fighting.
So why did she grab those missiles when they were offered? Tatiana stared into her scan and concentrated. She remembered going out to party with the rest of the crew, then separating from them when she saw some old friends, including Marine Officer Robbie Sinclair, who had been her roommate at Command & Staff. Robbie was now walking with a limp, and had been promoted to Third Officer.
She’d had some wild tales of a crazy place full of crackpot scientists who built weapons that almost worked. She was fun to drink with, too. Tatiana could even remember some of the test weapons she had described. There was the remote-controlled powered armor that escaped control and wrecked three buildings before they managed to shut it down. There was the energy cannon that blew holes in mountains and melted itself down after every shot. There was the “gravity cannon” that pushed the weapon itself so hard in reverse that it ripped itself loose from its own mounting blocks. Then there was the “gravity rifle” that compressed everything within one meter of the muzzle to 1/10,000th of its original diameter, including the rifle and the test stand. Hilarious. Some of those stories might even be true.
The missiles--now she remembered them--were backpack-portable missiles with an antimatter warhead that had a five-kilometer blast radius. Trouble was, the motor they had put on those tiny monsters only had enough thrust to propel the things about 200 meters in a single G environment. Tatiana had blithely told that Marine officer that those motors would be plenty for ship-to-ship attacks, but only if you got really close. Everybody at the table had laughed when Tatiana then explained that really close in space combat meant a few thousand kilometers. After that, somehow, she wasn’t too clear on the process; she had ended up with an even dozen of the deadly little toys in a crate stashed in Snooper’s #2 hold. Those missiles.
“So what’s our plan?” Tatiana asked. “Get close enough, fire one of those missiles, and make them think we’re a real warship?”
“Sounds good to me. All right, let’s do it.”
“And people wonder why we call you Mad Dog,” Tatiana muttered softly. She broke the connection to her shunt. “We’re going to intercept that merchant,” she said to Lilliana. “Calculate orbit and time to intercept. Mad Dog will fill you in on the intercept parameters.”
Lilliana’s reply projected all the distilled sarcasm of two years’ experience surviving her captain’s wild schemes. “Intercept, ma’am?”
“Intercept.” She saw Lilliana hesitate. “My orders. It’s a merchant, Lilliana. They’re even more defenseless than we are. At least we can run if this doesn’t work.”
After a moment’s consideration, Lilliana nodded and got busy with the astrogation board. “Intercept, aye, ma’am.”
Tatiana grinned at her annoyed Scan Tech’s back, unbuckled, and headed aft. “Where will you be?” Lilliana asked, eyes locked on the scan.
“Hold #2. I have to see about some cargo.”
The hold was cold, and the air was thin. Tatiana could see her breath as she floated from bin to bin, checking their contents. Finally, in a box marked “Captain’s Personal Possessions”, she found what she was after: three small crates two meters long by 40 centimeters on a side.
She pulled one out of the bin and pushed it down the passageway to the hatch. Back in the warmth and good air of Snooper’s crew compartment, Tatiana opened the end of the box and found four gleaming white missiles with a portable launcher. There was a thick book of instructions that she could not possibly absorb in a month, much less the short time before she had to be ready to launch a missile. She flipped through it quickly, looking for important things like aiming, fusing, and launching.
Most of the text was incomprehensible. Marine jargon outlined tactical parameters and safety precautions that made sense only on a planet. There was one line she did find amusing. It was one of the few instructions actually relevant to her situation. She found it in the section on launch procedures. “CAUTION: point missile towards enemy before launching!”
After a few minutes of searching, she found the section on fusing. These little terrors were equipped with a fuse that could be set for impact, proximity, time, or any combination of the three. Not knowing how well they would guide, and remembering that Robbie had had a very funny story about seeker warheads that chased rabbits and birds, Tatiana set all four missiles to detonate 30 seconds after launch. That ought to take them plenty far away from Snooper.
Tatiana placed the missiles in the airlock, tying them and their launcher in place with vacuum cord. She was baffled by how to work the launch controls remotely until she found a long scrap of double-strand wire that she connected to one of the airlock’s lighting fixtures. She carefully tied down the wiring and wrapped another vacuum cord around the launcher, securing it to the nearest anchor point.
When she was done, she stepped back and carefully inspected her handiwork. Four gleaming white missiles. They didn’t look at all menacing here in the lock.
“Mad Dog? The missiles are launched by keying the overhead lights in the airlock. I’ve pulled the circuit breaker. Sunni will restore that just before we fire.”
“What do we have to contain the gasses from the rocket motor?”
“Oh. Right.”
Tatiana pried open the back of the crate the missiles came in. There was nothing there but a handful of small plastic waterproofing inserts that fit in the exhaust ports of the missiles. She took another trip to the hold and found some spare ablative shielding that she could fasten behind the missiles to protect Snooper’s airlock from superheated rocket exhaust.
“All taken care of, puppy. Roll the ship towards the target, open the lock, cycle the lights, and away it goes. 30 seconds after launch, it goes boom.”
“One missile? Or two?”
“One. Somebody will have to rewire the launcher to fire a second shot.”
“Here’s hoping we don’t need a second shot.”
“You and me both.”
Tatiana suppressed the thought that maybe they shouldn’t even fire the first shot. This could work, and the information she would obtain was likely to be priceless. That made this worthwhile. She examined her connections and fastenings one last time before sealing the inner lock door and returning to the Bridge.
Lilliana gave her a long, flat stare. Finally, she had to speak her mind. “So we’re a warship now?”
“Looks like it.”
Lilliana shook her head. “You and Mad Dog are suited to each other. Only headmits to being a predator. You’ve always claimed you’d rather run from a fight.”
Tatiana let that comment go unanswered. “What can you give me for an approach vector?”
Lilliana laid it all out on the scan. “With our vector and acceleration, we can intercept in 11 hours.”
“I thought we could do it sooner.”
“If we just wanted to blow them up, sure. We could take them faster, assuming that jury-rigged goody of yours actually works. But I assumed you wanted to capture them, not kill them.”
Tatiana winced. “All right.” She studied the vectors a moment longer, then nodded. “We’ll do it your way. The missile has a time fuse on it. I set it for 30 seconds. I didn’t want to trust the proximity fuse.”
“You mean you don’t want it to chase us?” Lilliana asked. “Why not? Why not make this really exciting?”
“Was that sarcasm I heard from the junior scan tech on this ship?” Tatiana inquired sweetly.
“I was just exercising that free exchange of ideas that the Scouts Manual says is so important in the proper execution of our duties,” Lilliana replied. “Oh, and with all due respect, of course, ma’am.”
“As long as you show that respect,” Tatiana said. She yawned. “Get me up in six hours, or if they start calling us, or if another ship pops into the system.”
“Aye, boss,” Lilliana said, throwing her a half-salute. “The Junior Scan Tech on the battle-scout Snooper will comply.”
“See that you do,” Tatiana ordered through another yawn.
She actually got all six hours of sleep. In that time, Snooper had come to rest with respect to their target and had begun accelerating at a modest 25 Gs on a converging course with the merchant. They had turned on their auto-respond beacon so they were more easily visible on the merchant’s scan. When they were five light-seconds from the merchant, it hailed them.
“Imperial Trading Associates Ship Merclipse to unidentified ship,” said a male voice in heavily accented Common. “Identify yourself and state your intentions.”
“Brassy, aren’t they?” Tatiana said to no one in particular. She had already recorded her first reply with just this in mind. She touched the button that sent it on its way.
“This is the United Families Raider Vengeance,” her pre-recorded voice said. “Cease accelerating and open your locks. You are our prisoners.”
“Like hell! We don’t surrender to any little pipsqueak of a boat that comes along.”
“We’re receiving fire-control lidar,” Loren reported quietly. “It’s not anywhere near acquisition values.” She frowned. “It’s not military grade, either. This might be one of those armed merchant ships we’ve heard about. Even if it’s just a popgun, whatever they have could hurt us.”
“Do you have a reading on his mass?”
“1,850,000 standard tons.”
“Which means he’s not as nimble as, say, a Families scout. Option Two, Rosie. Cut across behind him and we’ll shoot.”
“How close do you want to cut it, boss?”
“I want our missile to warn him, not fry him.”
Fire-control lidar on all ships was severely degraded by the gravitational distortion of a ship’s drive. Most ship captains knew of that weakness and sought to cover it by either maneuvering or coordinating with another friendly ship.
As Snooper loafed through a turn, still at 25 Gs, the Merclipse turned as well, still tracking its smaller opponent with its lidar. As the range came down to under two light seconds, the Merclipse had managed to turn just enough so that it could still track, and perhaps fire, at Snooper. That’s when Mad Dog pulled the surprise they’d worked up and labeled Option Two.
Boosting to their maximum of 600 Gs, Mad Dog corkscrewed Snooper in behind the merchant ship. In seconds, they were within the launch parameters of their missile. Mad Dog popped the hatch, cycled the airlock lights, and the missile flashed away, with Snooper running in the other direction.
When the lock was repressurized, Tori opened the inner door and quickly connected a second missile. When she was done, she closed the lock door and dumped the atmosphere into Snooper’s emergency holding bottles. On the Bridge, Tatiana saw the lock hatch light blink green as Tori finished her rewiring.
“Firing Bay to Bridge.” Everyone could hear the laughter in her voice. “All set here. We’re reloaded.”
The missile raced past the Merclipse and detonated a comfortable 4,500 kilometers away with that sensor-searing blast that was only caused by a matter-antimatter explosion.
As the electromagnetic hash faded from their receivers, Tatiana hit the Send button. “That was your only warning,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a snarl. “Surrender now, or the next one won’t leave enough of you to pick up with a spectrometer.”
Merclipse tried to turn. Mad Dog easily kept Snooper in the lidar shadow of their target’s cargo pods and drive emissions. When the Captain of Merclipse saw this, when he saw he had no options whatsoever except surrendering or dying, he ceased accelerating and opened his locks.
Tatiana considered the visible proof of their success with decidedly mixed feelings. This was the one part of their plan that she hadn’t figured out. She didn’t have the Marines that were normally sent across as a boarding party. She had a handful of techs, none of whom had any fighting skills other than what they’d been provided back in Basic Training. But the merchant had ceased accelerating. That gave her an idea, and she reached for the controls.
She whipped Snooper up close to Merclipse, rising slightly above the worst of the Imperial ship’s drive emissions. When they were a bare kilometer from the merchant ship, she had Mad Dog pulse Snooper’s main engine at full power, then dropped back behind the suddenly stricken merchant.
When two gravity drive fields competed for the same volume of space-time, the weaker of the two was always stressed by the stronger. It was not a good assumption that Snooper had a stronger drive than the merchant when the merchant was under way. Thanks to that experimental missile, the Imperial merchant ship’s drive was in standby when Mad Dog pulsed Snooper’s drive. Merclipse may have had the more powerful engines--probably did to boost 1,850,000 tons of mass--but because Merclipse’s engines were in standby, Snooper’s drive field was the stronger at that moment. The drive on Merclipse instantly went into emergency shutdown as components warped all through their system. Effectively, Merclipse was now helpless.
“Merclipse, this is... Vengeance.” Tatiana had to think for a moment to remember the name they’d claimed for themselves. “Detach your cargo pod and skeleton, NOW. We will take you in tow.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“To our nearest Fleet base,” Tatiana said. She smiled. That answer was totally correct and absolutely useless to the unfortunate Imperial merchant captain. “My crew will attach us to you for the hyperjump.”
“But my cargo! What about my cargo?”
“Did you get paid for it?”
“Well, yes, but--”
“Then what’s your worry? Detach your pods and skeleton.”
Moving carefully, Mad Dog brought them alongside the skeleton and cargo pods. When they were in the right position, Mad Dog accelerated hard against the skeleton, ripping the nearest pod free and voiding its contents to vacuum.
“They were carrying He3,” Loren said. She scanned the slowly pinwheeling cargo pod and the dissipating cloud of gas surrounding them. “Tons and tons of it. No wonder that skipper was mad at us. That’s a fortune out there, boss. We just cost the Emperor a lot of money.” The pod tumbled away on a close approach orbit to the primary where heat and radiation would render it useless. Mad Dog returned them to the Merclipse.
“Sunni, Tori, go hook us up,” Tatiana ordered. She hit the button on her console that let her talk to the Imperial merchant ship. “All right Merclipse, you can put away your sidearms. We are not boarding you. I repeat, we are NOT boarding you! We will transport you to a Families Fleet base where you will be processed and possibly exchanged.” She noticed something else and hit the button again. “We are monitoring your systems. I suggest you shut down your fire control lidar before we shut it down for you.”
“And how would you do that, boss?” Rosie asked. “We aren’t armed with precision weapons.”
“If I had to, I could probably talk Mad Dog into cooking them a bit with our reaction drive.” Rosie stared, shocked, then her expression twisted as if tasting something rotten. Tatiana nodded sympathetically. “I don’t like that one either, but I bet it would work. He doesn’t have to know our only other option is to leave him. Plot a course for the nearest Fleet base. It took us 12 days to get here, I hope it won’t take that long to tow him back.”
When Tori and Sunni returned from attaching Snooper to what remained of Merclipse, Mad Dog boosted straight out of the system with no stealth at all. There had been no signals or suddenly-appearing Imperial warships when their missile detonated. Tatiana felt confident they were alone with their prize. The inertial field that protected them from G forces during acceleration extended to Merclipse, so they were able to accelerate at nearly 400 Gs.
Eleven days after capturing Merclipse, they emerged just outside the hyper limit of Fleet Base 3, an otherwise unimposing star with a large number of planetoids, a few small rocky planets, and one relatively large gas giant ringed by Families gas extraction plants. Strangely enough, there were almost no ships in the system.
“You did what, Snooper?” System Control sounded incredulous.
“We captured a merchant ship,” Tatiana repeated proudly.
“What did you do with the crew?”
“They’re still there. We haven’t boarded them yet. We need someone to help us with that. Can we borrow some Marines?”
“We don’t have anybody available,” System Control replied.
“Why not? What’s going on?” Tatiana glanced at the nearly empty scan. “Where is everyone?” The knot of worry in her gut that she thought she’d left behind was back with a vengeance.
“Haven’t you heard? No, you wouldn’t have, would you? A message came from Fleet Headquarters five days ago. The Empire has attacked Setosha. Their whole fleet is in the system, and we have reports that they’ve landed on the planet.”
Tatiana stared at her Bridge crew, who stared back with the same stunned expression. “When ... when did that happen?” Tatiana asked.
She felt like somebody had kicked her in the stomach. She couldn’t stop her brain from calculating travel times from Setosha back to system RR-232. It had to be the ships she had just missed. If Snooper had been only a few days earlier, she might have seen them. There was nothing they could have done to stop them, but maybe some advanced warning would have helped the defense.
“They jumped into the Setosha system just over 19 days ago.”
“Are you sure?” She desperately wanted it to be only a rumor.
“Aye, ma’am. Our Fleet is rendezvousing at Fleet Base 5 for a counter-strike. All ships are to--”
“Don’t tell me now!” Tatiana said. “We’re cutting loose our prize. We’ll be over, all of us. Then you can give us the details.”
“Sprinter came in 122 hours ago,” Fourth Officer Sanders told them in the wardroom of the Station an hour later. She looked like she had not slept more than an hour herself since getting the news. “She was dispatched by Setosha System Control to alert all the Stations in this sector.”
“Thirteen hours before they left, 24 Imperial battleships, accompanied by at least 75 cruisers and other ships, jumped into the Setosha system. When Sprinter left, there was fighting going on all around the planet. Fifth Officer Simerson of Sprinter told me she saw landings underway on the main continent.” She dimmed the lights. “We have some vids recorded by the forts around Setosha and relayed to Sprinter.”
Initially, there was very little to see. The planet seemed undisturbed. Then streaks appeared in the atmosphere. “Those are Imperial Landers,” Fourth Officer Sanders said. Several violent flashes appeared suddenly on the land masses below, mostly on the small northern continent and in the circular chains of islands to the southwest.
“Those are fusion weapons,” Fourth Officer Sanders said quietly in the silence. “They dropped them on most major population centers and all navy bases.”
Some of the streaks from the re-entering Landers disappeared in bright fireballs; most did not. On the edge of the screen, an expanding fireball showed where a ship had died, though you couldn’t tell who it belonged to. A few frames later, the film ended, and silence filled the room.
“We beat the Idenux at Home when they had a hundred cruisers,” Tori said coldly, the anger hard in her voice. “We’ll beat these new vermin at Setosha. Then we’ll clean them out everywhere else, too. All of them!”
“I hope so,” Fourth Officer Sanders said. She carefully pressed her trembling fingers flat against the wardroom tabletop and drew a deep breath. “My family is from Setosha,” she added quietly. “They’ll be under the guns of the Imperials ... if I have any family left.”
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