Hegemony (29 page)

Abruptly there was a loud banging sound and the skimmer shuddered, like a ground car hitting a pothole.

"Muir, what are you doing?" asked Freya.

The skimmer's cabin was suddenly saturated with a flash of blinding light, almost too brief to register, but bright enough to hurt. The skimmer lurched again, and began to rattle loudly and shake.

"Laser! We're under fire!" Freya shouted. Muir nosed the skimmer down into a  diving turn before she finished her shout. Freya craned her head around, fighting the suddenly tilting cabin to look back. There was another flash, not as bright, but this time Freya could see the faint ionization trail left by a laser pulse as it tracked past the skimmer.

The rear section of the skimmer, just behind the cabin, was burned. The plastic hull panels had been ripped open and peeled back by a laser pulse. The skimmer was trailing a faint stream of smoke.

Behind, just behind, Freya could see the other aircar, turning and diving to follow Muir's evasion. The other aircar looked like a civilian skimmer, small, gold colored, with the canopy retracted to make it open topped. Its single pilot wore a bright red racing helmet with a polarized face shield.

Muir was fighting to pull up now, still continuing a spiraling turn, but the skimmer shook and shuddered as he tried to bring the nose up. The damaged hull panels rattled loudly in the splitstream.

The pilot of the gold skimmer leveled off and raised one hand, aiming a sidearm pulse laser. It seemed to Freya that the weapon was leveled right at her. She threw herself down onto the seat, and again the cabin flashed with the glare of the laser pulse. The rear window shattered into a spray of half-molten plastic. Freya shouted as bits of the plastic landed on her back, burning hot even through the protective material of her uniform. She twisted and brushed at her back to get them off, burning her hand a bit as well. Freya hit the mental overrides to shut off the pain and tried to get up again, shaking the last bits of windscreen off of herself. The uneven tilt of the cabin made her stumble a Muir tightened the skimmer's turn.

There was another flash of laser fire, and the left stub wing flared with painful brilliance and started shedding bits of debris into the splitstream. The damaged wing's plastic structural panels started burning with a thick white smoke.

"Get us down!" shouted Freya.

"We're going down, alright!" said Muir. "The super-conductor coil is overheating and we're losing power. Strap yourself in."

Freya hurried to get herself back into one of the seats, fumbling with the safety restraints. Muir had pulled out of the steep dive now, and the skimmer was flying straight, losing altitude slowly as its lift fans lost power. The ground was getting very close, and Muir was trying to aim for a clearing among the spiky blue "trees" below. The other skimmer was hard to see through the smoke pouring from their skimmer's left wing and rear. Freya hoped that the smoke would also make it hard for the shooter to see them, though she knew it would not be enough to seriously weaken the laser.

"Hold on!" shouted Muir. There was a brief floating feeling as they lost altitude and then the skimmer hit the ground. Freya was thrown forward into the restraints with stunning force. The pressure of the restraints against her breasts was like a punch and she hit her pain override again to keep from screaming.

The skimmer skidded on the rough ground until the right wing struck a tree trunk and sheared off. The skimmer spun, throwing Freya back into her seat, then sideways against the restraints again as it came to a stop. For a moment, Freya could not move. She could taste her biosim's artificial blood in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be full of white light. Then her vision began to clear, and the smell of harsh chemical smoke filled her nose. Freya moved to unlatch the restraints, and felt sharp pain in her shoulders and across her chest. Another override shut down the pain, but she began to worry about the condition of her biosim body. The cabin was filling with dark smoke from the seat padding, which was starting to burn. The smoke made her cough, sending new sharp pains, not yet screened by her overrides, through her chest. Freya flailed for the emergency escape lever, striking at it blindly, and the door popped open with a high pressure thump. Freya stumbled out of the smoking skimmer, falling and rolling to the ground. She tried to stand up, but her biosim body seemed off balance. She thought that, had she been human, the pain in her shoulders and chest would have made her eyes water.

After a moment, she began to crawl away from the skimmer. She did not think it would explode, but if fire reached the superconductor power coils and they still held some charge, even that was possible. At length she steadied herself up against one of the blue trees. There were no spines or spikes for the first five meters of trunk and the bark was strangely smooth and waxy. Freya ran a simple diagnostic of her body. That was always a disorienting feeling, but surprisingly she found that she was not badly hurt. A lot of her artificial musculature was bruised, but, except some small burns on her back, nothing was damaged beyond her biosim body's ability to quickly heal. Freya looked about and tried to take stock.

The skimmer was burning; black and white smoke merged into a thick gray plume rising up into the forest's "canopy" of interwoven spines. The cabin was filled with black smoke that poured from every opening, while the still smoldering wing panels gave off a ribbon of white smoke. She could not see Muir anywhere. Her gaze went back to the skimmer, but there was no way to see into the pilot's seat through the smoke.

Freya shook her head, removing overrides from the less intense pain signals; too many pain overrides made her dizzy and disoriented. Briefly she looked herself over. Her uniform had kept the fire and hot debris from burning her too badly. No doubt it was singed, but that didn't show on the black material. She started forward towards the skimmer, finding that she could walk normally without the pain overrides messing up her balance. The pain from everything but the burns was tolerable, and she left the override on for those. She made her way around to the front of the skimmer, now facing backwards to the direction they had come from. The front windscreen was cracked and warped with heat, but the pilot-side door was open, smoke pouring out of it in thick clouds. There was no sign of Muir.

The skimmer had left a gouge in the soft turf of the clearing where they had crash landed. The little aircar had skidded through the clearing and into the trees. It had spun and come to rest against a tall, thick "tree." Green-blue "tree" trunks rose all around. 

A motion made her look up. A man in a tan jumpsuit with a red racing helmet was stepping towards her from around one of the trees. He held the pulse laser forward in a basic combat stance. Freya swayed where she stood as her muscles tensed. She had no weapons and knew that there was no way she could get to cover. A
telestraal
adept would have instinctively known where the cover was, could have moved for it without the slightest hesitation, but her own limited training had seemingly deserted her. She found herself recalling one of the first tenets of
telestraal
: Bring a gun to a gun fight.

The man stood and, with his other hand, raised the polarized face shield of the helmet. The face, pale, framed with red-blond hair, seemed vaguely familiar. The man smiled and brought the laser up to aim at her head.

Muir, holding a pocket needler, stepped around a tree on the man's left and fired. The burst of a half-dozen high explosive needles stitched into the man's side with a rapid snapping sound. The man's body jerked. The narrow eyes went wide and blood flowed from his mouth, pooling in the helmet's chin-guard and overflowing to drip onto the forest floor. The laser fell from his hand, and the man slumped and dropped silently.

Freya stood staring for a moment, and then let herself slump down as well, in relief, till she was sitting on the soft ground.

---

Nas Killick, captain of the
Whisperknife
took a deep breath and stretched. It was a luxurious feeling. It had been more than ten hours of claustrophobic immobility in his command pod, acceleration gel engulfing him, all commands, all sensorium, coming thought direct interface. It felt good to stretch.

Whisperknife
had been substantially faster than the guard-ships, which was no surprise, but even so, it had been a narrow enough margin, with two guard-ships and their deployed gunships all trying to intercept the void-runner swift-ship.

The gunships were dangerous. They were small manned ships with a powerful short-duration plasma drive; they could outrun a swift-ship, maintaining almost nine gees, though it was hard on the human pilot, even encased in acceleration gel and flying the gunship through direct interface.

Two guard-ships meant four gunships, armed with a dozen warheads each. Four gunships, if they had attacked together, could have overwhelmed the defenses of the
Whisperknife,
though it would have cost them. The answer to that was to keep them from linking up, keep them off balance. Instead of running,
Whisperknife
had attacked, vectoring to intercept the gunships before they linked up, forcing them to break off and scatter. The danger was that the maneuver took
Whisperknife
almost into laser range of the leading guard-ship, which outgunned the swift-ship better than four-to-one.

Nas had flown
Whisperknife
through the eye of that needle, keeping out of effective laser range of the larger ship and boosting away before the gunships could regroup. Luckily, the gunships were short-duration, powered by super-conducting power coils. The maneuvers, first trying to attack, and then to get away from the
Whisperknife,
had run down their power and the four small ships were forced to match vectors with the guard-ships and dock to recharge.

By that time,
Whisperknife
was far enough from the gas giant Yuro V to initiate an FTL transit, leaving the guard-ships helplessly guessing where the swift-ship had gone.

And that, Nas thought with a smile, was the best part of it. The guard-ships would be considering the nearby systems, both the inhabited ones and the lifeless ones. They might even pursue, though the odds of them forcing a fleeing ship to engage were not great even if they guessed right and transited to the same system that their quarry had escaped to; they would have to emerge in the system close enough to force an engagement before the fleeing ship could restabilize her reactor and transit again.

That wouldn't have been a concern for the
Whisperknife
under normal circumstance; she was faster than a guard-ship. But given what they had done in the course of destroying the empty freight-liner, Nas suspected that Fleet swift-ships might be sent after him as well. Those
were
faster than
Whisperknife
; their cursed daemon crews could operate at high gees with no trouble at all. And though his
Whisperknife
was heavily armed for a void-runner swift-ship, she would still be outgunned by a Fleet swift-ship.

But Nas was content to let them look; the odds of them finding the
Whisperknife
were really quite small. What Nas had done could only work in a busy system like Yuro, where the FTL emergence of a ship was a very common event... because
Whisperknife
had never left the Yuro system. Instead, Nas had taken the risk of a high-stress transit and emerged on the other side of the system's star, still in the Yuro system. A few hours' careful watch and he had been able to ascertain that the guard-ships were still in orbit of Yuro V, not vectoring towards him; that meant they had no idea he was still here. Likewise, there was no sudden burst of activity from any swift-ships, if there were any, in orbit of Yuro-III where the local system defense fleet main base was.

So now
Whisperknife
could drift silently, watching the system and letting her singularity reactor restabilize, while Nas decided what to do next.

"Alright," he said, aloud, relishing the sound of his own voice, "I think we can stand down. Crew can get out of the 'pods. Let's have FTL Navigation start running some transit numbers; give me an option for every system within easy transit.

"Weapons... Xulios, make sure the tubes are clear and ready to load, and make sure the lasers are in good shape; we didn't run them too hard, but make sure they're at one hundred percent."

"Right," the ordinance master said.

"Warez," Nas went on, "stay on the sensors. I want you to keep the main optics on our local system defense fleet friends, but otherwise scan everything. If so much as a grain of dust or an energetic photon comes our way, I want to know about it."

"Got it, Captain."

"Good," said Nas. "Senny, get your Engineering monkeys and go over the ship from end to end. If it's broken, fix it; if it looks like it might break soon, make sure it doesn't. And then get some rest. That goes for everyone who's not on watch. Make sure of your systems and then stand down. We give the reactor time to stabilize and then we're out of here."

All in all,
Whisperknife
had come through in good shape, Nas thought. Reaction mass was a bit down, but not critical yet; a singularity reactor gave so much power to the plasma drives that a little reaction mass could go a long way. The ship's lasers were in good shape too;
Whisperknife
hadn't needed to use them hard, so serious heat buildup hadn't been an issue. The expenditure of seven warheads was another matter. The value of the new warheads, none of which had been used, was much greater, but Nas intended to
keep
those for his own use. Which meant that as far as liquid wealth went, he had actually lost out on this job. That was unfortunate, but not a disaster. There were reserves, and the syndicate might be willing to extend a loan if those ran dry...