Chapter 11

"Come in, Pham," Colin gestured to the man who stood in the door to his cabin. "I've got an unusual mission for your guys this time. I'll need your best surveillance team."

"Well, they're well rested," Pham said, "but floating around in deep void takes a toll on them. A few seem to have gotten used to it, but I've got about a twenty percent transfer out rate, and not many new volunteers."

"I understand," Colin answered, "but I've got a feeling this mission won't require waiting as long. We've worked up a new pickup strategy that we'll try out on this mission."

"A new pickup strategy?"

"Yeah, for the drop, we'll put your shuttle in the path of the enemy fleet on the same vector but moving slightly slower. It will remain dead and invisible while the fleet catches up, maneuvering with only minimal Inertial effect to say out of the paths of individual ships. You'll just step out as the fleet approaches and use your suit IDs to to reach your target."

"Okay, that's fine for drop off, but that's not usually the problem," Pham replied. "It's the wait for pick-up that sends guys over the edge."

"We've got that covered, too, now that we've got a few more assets," Colin told him. "We'll follow the drop off shuttle with a string of shuttles on the same vector, half a day apart. Once you get clear of your objective, you get clear of the fleet in the same way as before, and within half a standard day or less, you should be in pickup range of a shuttle."

"That should be a big improvement," Pham nodded. "So what's the mission?"

"We chose this mission to test the new drop off and pick up strategy because it should be slightly less risky. We want you to get into a particular ship in the support fleet."

"Support fleet?" Pham asked, surprised. "I thought we already knew what all those ships were used for."

"All but one..." Colin said.

"That one? But it's too small to be any threat. Why do you want to know about that one?"

"Because of all the shuttle traffic your teams have observed between it and the rest of the support fleet," Colin answered. "If it's so insignificant, why do all the other ships have to send shuttles to it so often?"

"Okay, but that's a damn small target," Pham replied. "I hope your shuttle pilot knows his navigation. He's going to have to drop us damn near on top of it for the suit drives to work on it. On the plus side, with all that shuttle traffic, it shouldn't be any trouble getting in."

"You'll have our best pilot on the drop-off. Pick-up's pot-luck, since we don't know how long the mission will take. It's just whichever shuttle is passing through when you stick your thumb out."

"That's okay. I'm more worried about getting within ID range of the target on insertion. Pickup will take care of itself," Pham said. "You realize that, since they're in deep space, the support fleet is right on the attack fleet's tail, so we're going to have to thread our way through the attack fleet before we even reach the support fleet, right?"

"The pilots have been running sims for that," Colin told him. "It's a little tricky, but even the attack fleet maintains a spacing of several miles while in transit. Even without maneuvering, the odds of running into one of them are slim."

"Still, those are some damned massive chunks of metal," Pham said.

"When you're floating amongst them in your armor, I'm sure they look enormous, but on the scales that navigators use, they're miniscule. Don't worry, we'll get you delivered safely."

"Standby, Recon," Commander O'Hare's voice came through the wired intercom. "Opening hull door."

The a rectangle of the shuttle's floor disappeared, a fact that registered on the sensors in Pham's visor, but not on his eyes. With the lights off in the shuttle's cabin and only the faint light of distant stars outside, there was little light for even his enhanced eyesight to register.

"Recon One, we are at optimum launch vector," Moira's voice said again, "Good hunting, Captain!"

"Thanks for the ride, Specter," Pham said. "Recon One, disconnecting."

He released the intercom connector from his helmet and signaled his team. Two by two, they let the shuttle's artificial gravity drop them through the inertial damping field that ended just beyond the shuttle's hull. This gave them a vector away from the shuttle of about ten miles per hour. A snails pace in the vastness of space, but it was enough to get them clear.

To Pham's delight, the shuttle had dropped them almost on top of the target - an ungainly cylindrical vessel that was both more symmetrical and much smaller than the other Gorz vessels around them. The ship's gravity, microscopic by planetary standards, registered strongly on his suit's Inertial Drive indicators.

The shuttle had dropped them slightly ahead of the ship to compensate for the fact that they were moving more slowly than the ship, though not by much. Viewed from a stationary point in space, his team would have appeared to be losing a race to the enemy ship - both rushing along in almost the same direction at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The Gorz vessel's fraction was just a tad bigger than his team's. This was by design. Their forward vector was the same as that of the shuttle that was slowly drifting away but keeping pace with the invisibly suited recon team. This allowed the shuttle to gradually fall behind the Gorz fleet to a point where the mother ship could pick them up.

His team latched onto the oncoming ship with their suits' Inertial Drives and began matching vectors with it as the invisible shuttle fell further and further behind,

The ship was spinning around its long axis, making landing on its hull very tricky. It did simplify the task of finding the shuttle bay doors, however. For a shuttle to dock in a hull that spun like this one, it had to approach one end of the hull, along the axis of the spin. Since the drive engines were, like all impulse engines, mounted in the rear third of the hull, that left only one end for docking shuttles.

Axial rotation suggested that the vessel was using centrifugal force to simulate gravity, but for the life of him, Pham couldn't figure out why they would need to. Clearly, the Gorz had artificial gravity generators, so why not use them on this, one of the smallest of their ships?

They didn't have to wait very long to find out. The shuttle traffic to and from this ship had not abated, and within a few minutes after landing on the rotating end of the hull, they were able to follow a shuttle through the bay door. It was a little tricky, since they were accustomed to transitioning from weightlessness to gravity oriented, usually, toward the aft end of the ship. In this case, the centrifugal force that threatened to dislodge them from the outer hull pulled at them just as strongly as they entered the shuttle bay.

Using the ID fields of their suits, the recon team slid down the forward bulkhead of the cylinder until they reached its outer rim. Here, centrifugal force operated at approximately one and a half times Earth normal gravity. No problem for their enhanced muscles, but they had to hurry to follow the Gorz from the shuttle through a huge airlock. The Gorz were accompanied by an assortment of other alien races, each wearing a collar on which a number of colored lights blinked.

The collars communicate with a computer aboard this ship, Pham's MI informed him. Based on the information received by your armor, there is a high probability that each collar contains explosives and that they are programmed to explode if the signal from the ship's computer is lost.

We have seen this on other ships, Pham nodded within his C-thru. Each ship in the support fleet must have a repeater or there must be some sort of handoff between computers.

I have managed to isolate and infiltrate the unit that controls these collars, the MI told him. Please wait while I analyze the machine code ... Your conjecture is correct. There is a repeater unit on every vessel of this fleet - but not the attack fleet. That includes the shuttles that transport the slaves between vessels. Based on the number of units present within this vessel, it would seem that this is where the slaves are kept when they are not...

The MI broke of abruptly much to Pham's surprise. Minh? he called mentally, using the name he had assigned his MI. Minh? What's going on?

There is a Chofri here! Minh answered, its thought tinged with something akin to awe.

For a Chofri to have survived this long, especially in captivity, it must have had the highest levels of enhancement available to their science. This might well be someone worth risking the mission for.

How do you know? Pham asked.

I can sense its MI, Minh answered, but for some reason, it refuses to answer my communication.

Where?

Through that hatch, but far away, the MI responded. Please, if we can, we must help!

Let's go! Pham did not question further. Aside from the fact that the human race owed the Chofri a debt that they could never repay, this Chofri might just be able to provide information critical to their defeating the Gorz.

Martinez, Jones, you've got the door. The rest of you are with me.

The door was not locked but they had to wait for one of the MIs to jam its sensor so the ship's computer would not detect their entry. Jones and Martinez took up guard positions outside the door.

Inside, the reason for spin became abundantly clear. Virtually the entire core of the vessel, except what was needed for Gorz quarters, navigation, and machinery, was a vast hollow cylinder, filled almost to its center with stacked blocks of cages, most containing one or more alien life forms. In the cages Pham could see, the life forms wore some form of the explosive collar noted on the alien slaves. This vessel was the slave barracks, and because it housed beings accustomed to different levels of gravity, the spin provided a cheaper means of providing simulated gravity at whatever level was required.