Apex (8 page)

“Can you . . .” Jalia began to ask.

“Yes,” Ivara answered, pulling out the small device from inside the cloak she had reclad herself with and began hacking into the local planetary information grid. As Jalia engaged the gravity drives in antigravity mode and eased the ship off the ground, Ivara displayed a small holographic map in her palm again.

“No activity yet,” she relayed to the Junta. “I wouldn't count on that lasting.”

“Me neither,” Jalia said as the ship's landing gear retracted. Once locked in place, Jalia stood the ship on its tail using the small bow gravity drive, bringing the nose of the
Resolute
up 90 degrees until it was pointing to the sky.

“Here we go,” Jalia said, kicking in the primary drive at relatively low power. The ship visually jerked and rocketed skyward, accelerating fast.

Jalia luckily found a sizeable hole in the aerial and orbital traffic patterns and pushed her ship as hard as she could against the atmospheric drag. The friction was absorbed by the
Resolute
's shields, but still they could only take so much. Plus the dimensions of the shields weren't superaerodynamic, so she had a bit of a struggle on her hands piloting a straight line up, but she managed well enough.

They escaped the atmosphere within forty seconds, after which Jalia greatly increased their speed, pushing off against the planet's gravity well in a perpendicular direction from the system's star. She didn't care where they were headed just yet, all that mattered right now was getting off the planet and getting some maneuvering room between themselves and any potential pursuers.

Jalia kicked off the drive and let the ship coast, glancing at the sensor panel to make sure they weren't in danger of running into anything ahead, at least nothing big enough to see. Debris impacts were always possible, and extremely dangerous. Fortunately, space was vast and mostly empty.

The Junta slid out of her seat and into the adjacent navigator's station. She brought up a system map and began plotting jumppoints for the adjacent star systems. Four pulsating dots appeared on the holographic map, then stretched out into lines intersecting the center of Hellis. Any point along those lines would allow a jump to the distant system along that exact trajectory, with any point farther away not being able to yield sufficient repulsory momentum to achieve the desired speed that Jalia had input into the computer.

Faster ships could use weaker gravity to attain similar speeds, thus they had longer jumplines to work with. The
Resolute
's possibilities had plenty of leeway, allowing the ship to get enough gravity to push on without having to get sunburnt from getting ultraclose to the star.

One of the jumplines switched from blue to flashing red, along with a highlighted icon ring pointing out that one of the small outer planets in the system was sitting along the trajectory of the jumpline to the Pella System.

Jalia frowned. If she wanted to, she could tighten her calculations and probably still make the jump. The parameters the computer was using were generous, meaning that the warning would pop up if there was any interference within a sizeable zone around the jumpline.

No point in taking any chances.

That meant Pella was out, leaving Korfax, Mewlon, and Wresto as possible destinations. There were four other reliable spacelanes out of Hellis, but the target systems were too far away for her ship to jump to. Jumpships not only had faster drives, but more accurate ones, allowing longer spacelanes to be used. If any ship overestimated their accuracy range, it could miss its destination star altogether, which meant no gravity well to brake against and a slow, starving death. Jalia's options were limited to those systems within the range of the
Resolute
's gravity drive, and she'd be insane to try for anything else.

“Mewlon,” she chose. It was the least distant, and in the general direction of Iras, which was their eventual destination. Jalia pulled up that jumppoint in greater detail and began focusing sensors on the area. There was considerable lag, given the lightspeed limitations of the
Resolute
's tech, but within a few minutes she would begin getting feedback.

“Can I see that?” she asked Ivara. Sensing what she wanted, the Cres pulled up the traffic control tracking data for the system and highlighted the area of her chosen jumppoint. Its data was limited too, but not quite so much as Jalia's. Several monitoring stations in the system were using Telaris sensors, which had a return rate three times that of lightspeed.

“Looks good for now,” Jalia said with a nod. She began plotting a course to that location, using the gravity of three different planets, plus that of the star, to maneuver a route that would get them to the jumppoint with significantly reduced velocity. Otherwise she'd have to really bleed her plasma engines dry to kill their momentum before making the jump, for less lateral momentum meant more accuracy.

And when dealing with interstellar jumps, accuracy was everything.

Jalia tweaked her route four times, adjusting at multiple points until she got what she wanted. Once satisfied, she activated the gravity drive and made a microjump on the first leg of the insystem journey to the jumppoint.

 

Chapter 8

A
T
THE
END
of the fourth leg of its transit to the Mewlon jumppoint, the
Resolute
decelerated against the gravity of the second moon of Rextor, a small, uninhabited planetoid in the system. After bleeding off speed Jalia, with the help of the ship's navigational computer, latched onto Rextor's gravity and swung the ship into a high speed orbit around the planet, breaking free at the desired angle to launch them on the fifth and final leg in toward the star, against which they would later decelerate near the jumppoint.

The problem was, during their multiple hour journey a small armada of mercenary ships had transited to the jumppoint ahead of them and were setting up a blockade. In fact, they were now blockading
all
the jumppoints within the system, but the Mewlon jumppoint had been reinforced with additional ships as the
Resolute
's course had been plotted and their intended destination surmised.

Jalia and Ivara had already discussed the situation and decided to proceed. Blockades in space were virtually impossible to construct, given how large an area needed to be covered and how fast gravity drives allowed a ship to accelerate. The only practical way to disable a jumppoint was to fill the area with debris, creating an asteroid field which would increase the chances of a collision and subsequent ship destruction. A captain could always choose to take the risk and jump anyway, but most prudent individuals wouldn't jump anywhere close to a debris field of any size or density.

Artificial debris fields took an extremely long time to construct, so the enemy's one and best hope of containing them within the Hellis System was not in play. There would be, however, a moment of vulnerability when the
Resolute
came to a standstill and aligned for the interstellar jump. Extraneous movement would cause inaccuracy in the jump, meaning the ship had to be on an
exact
straight line between stars, else the gravitational push would be off target and they'd have to either adjust en route or miss the destination altogether.

During this alignment time the enemy could theoretically intercept and disable their ship. An evasive microjump away from the jumpline could always be executed, but it would mean remaining in the system and missing the exit point, though they would still have eluded capture. Only if they attempted the alignment and saw it through would the enemy have a brief opportunity to capture them if they were close enough.

The trouble for their pursuers was that the
Resolute
could jump at any point along the jumpline. The closer to the star theywere the more push they could muster, but the angles inherent would also allow for more inaccuracy. The farther away from the star the more accurate the jump, yet less gravity to push off from.

This still left a wide range of possibilities, and even with several mercenary ships sitting on several jumppoints, both in close to the star and more outward, there was enough space that a carefully calculated jump could pass by them without incident. Even with 100 ships in circular formation it would be difficult to contain a ship making a jump, though it could prompt some negligible inaccuracy in flight. That could then be accounted for during the journey using conventional engines or even a slight gravitational tug from a nearby star system, amounting to nothing more than additional fuel loss.

Fearing that remaining insystem would only strengthen their opposition, the
Resolute
was going to run the blockade and Jalia had chosen a jumppoint on the line that wasn't near any of the ‘parked' ships. However, as they closed and the sensor systems on the mercenary ships began to detect them, their alignment changed and they began to position for a potential intercept.

The
Resolute
had no weapons, so running was their only option. Playing cat and mouse in space afforded a huge advantage to the mouse . . . until it ran out of fuel. With multiple ships at their disposal and the ability to refuel, playing the waiting game meant the mercenaries would win out eventually. Jalia and the Cres had to make a break for it now if they were going to have any real chance of surviving.

To that end, the Junta watched as the freighter was getting close to scissor crossing the jumpline, with the mercenaries moving to gather at the calculated intersection point. Before they arrived, however, Jalia engaged the gravity drives and began killing momentum against the star while simultaneously pulling on three distant planets, running those drives high and expending a significant amount of fuel to pull off the maneuver. She killed the star's drive connection and moved the ship laterally over to the jumpline using the other gravity feeds, then braked as much as she could against them.

That left them floating near the jumpline and drifting towards it at an odd angle. With the navigational computer's autocontrol, the plasma engines activated and corrected their position with a lot of burn time and several angular redirections. All the while the enemy ships, temporarily out of position, began closing in again.

“They're deploying fighters,” Ivara informed calmly, still tapped into the system's tracking grid. “They're making microjumps ahead of the warships.”

“Which means they're already closer than we think,” Jalia commented, watching the navigational display with anticipation. They were close now.

The Junta glanced at the shields, making sure they were fully deployed in defense mode. She'd have to switch them to jump mode soon.

The deks ticked off the clock slowly, far too slowly, but they were almost there. Just a few more to go.

Jalia held one four-­fingered hand over the shield panel and her other over the engine control. Both programs had already been entered and configured, they just required a single ‘go' command. She started counting down from twenty along with the clock, with each pause between dek seeming to take an eternity. When she reached nine the proximity warning sounded.

“Kitja,” she swore as the
Resolute
's shields registered weapon impacts. The visual displays showed three fighters arriving around them, with one moving directly in front of the ship, blocking their path. The other two began peppering their engines with lachar blasts, trying to get through their shields and take out their gravity drive.

The countdown went to zero and the ship's plasma drives shut down. They were now exactly where they needed to be, but with that fighter sitting off their nose they'd obliterate both ships if they jumped now.

Fortunately there was another option.

Jalia shifted shield power 75% forward, reinforcing the bow shields, then kicked the plasma engines back on. The ship surged forward, with its big, blunt forward hull ramming into the fighter at amicable speed.

The small, one-­manned ship bounced off the forward shield, crumpling under the impact as its own shields were overstressed and breached. It careened off the starboard side as the
Resolute
moved on through into the clear. A few puffs from the navigation thrusters appeared to correct the minute momentum shift from the impact and the freighter's shields suddenly stretched out to a needle point in front just before it blinked out of existence, leaving the two intact fighters in its wake, unable to match speeds and follow them out of the system.

Jalia finished shifting all shield power forward, for she'd held off 10% to keep the fighters' fire off her engines through the jump, but now that power was needed to overcome the hypercompressed light and any tiny particle impacts on the ship at seventeen times lightspeed, which they were now accelerating up to. Without the shields, the ultra-­high frequency EM would eat through their unarmored hull plating.

Jalia waited a few heartbeats, fortunate that nothing had gone wrong. She watched the tracking display as her ship quickly moved through the Hellis System on an outbound trajectory. Her gravity drives had been active only eight seconds, though if need be they could still have been adding velocity at a diminishing rate. Fuel was a concern though, and as it was she only had enough for this one jump, which included the deceleration at destination.

Beside her, Ivara put away her hacking device. The systemwide information grid was now inaccessible. They were moving faster than the outbound signal, essentially creating their own blackout. The ship's sensors were likewise useless. Any rebound signal would never make it back to the ship. All data on the Hellis System hologram was now dated, with their trajectory across it being calculated rather than measured. Likewise, they'd disappeared from the mercenaries' point of view.

“Woo,” Jalia breathed in relief. “That was cutting it a little close.”

“We're not safe yet,” Ivara counseled. “If they have a courier ship available, they can send word ahead of us to any assets they may have in the Mewlon System. Or their warships might be able to jump ahead of us and be waiting there when we arrive.”

Jalia chewed on her lip. “You might be right about the courier ship, but I doubt those warships are any faster than us. Their drive compartments are too small. They're designed to be carried around by jumpship for insystem operations, not make intersystem jumps.”

“Perhaps, but I would not put it past them. They are going to great lengths to catch us. Learn to expect the unexpected.”

Jalia considered that for a moment then clipped out a short laugh. “Killjoy,” she mocked.

But she knew the Cres was right.

B
ACK
IN
THE
Hellis System, two mercenary frigates on the jumpline in close to the star watched the
Resolute
disappear from the tracking grid. What appeared to be an instantaneous jump was actually a very fast acceleration, leaving a brief trace on the sensors. The Nevax ships were then able to estimate the power applied, given the strength of gravity at that jumppoint and the engine capacity of that particular class of freighter. Duration of acceleration was unknown, so the Nevax navigators made a guess and plotted their own jump to the Mewlon System.

The two frigates interlinked their nav comps and made as simultaneous a jump as possible, getting a larger push off the star due to their closer jumppoint. The bulky ships disappeared from the Hellis tracking grid, following the
Resolute
. They activated their forward sensors, attuning them to their protective shields to allow a certain frequency range to pass through as they looked for the target ship ahead.

Whether they blew by them en route or lagged behind, they weren't going to lose their prey. With the insane amount of credits they were being paid to hunt them down, and the much larger bonus for capture, Nevax and dozens of other mercenary groups would be devoting every asset they had to the chase. The frigate captains hoped they'd guessed right and had a chance of a mid-­jump capture, even if it meant bleeding their drives dry.

They
had
to be the ones to get to the fugitives first.