Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3) (22 page)

-38-

One by one, I brought all my key officers down to Vogel’s chambers and convinced them. Yamada was next after Durris, then Rumbold.

Oddly enough, Rumbold took it harder than the rest. He was a romantic at heart, and he didn’t like the idea of having been robbed of his memories for decades.

“It’s just not
right
, Captain!” he exclaimed, pacing and gesturing with sudden chopping motions of his hands. “Are you certain about all this?”

Yamada stepped up, as Rumbold didn’t trust Vogel any farther than he could throw him.

“It seems to be true,” she said. “I’ve found trace evidence in the computer systems on
Defiant
. Possibly, this ship has the only system they couldn’t fully erase, because so many of her component parts were built on Beta. They aren’t based on Earth technology, and therefore, they’ve resisted a clean sweep.”

“Unbelievable,” Rumbold said, “I didn’t think the oldsters capable of this level of deceit.”

This caught everyone’s attention.

“I never said who was behind it all, Rumbold,” I said quietly.

His eyes flicked to me, then down to the deck. “No. No you didn’t… but you didn’t need to. I’ve been around a long time. Only Vogel has been alive longer. There always were rumors. Back in the old days, people disappeared. I’m talking about the Cataclysm, back when I was young. When someone vanished back then, you shut up about it.”

“I remember those times,” Director Vogel said, “I was still an intern.”

“Yes,” continued Rumbold, “and I was a young man dreaming of becoming a spacer. It started when the world government was established after the Cataclysm. People figured those who’d disappeared were dissidents. After a time, the process seemed to stop, and we all relaxed.”

“Only, it
didn’t
stop,” Vogel said. “Your captain has opened all of our eyes. The purges, the disappearances… The altering of history goes on every morning when our minds are updated with the latest world view our masters want us to have.”

We all eyed him, thinking about it.

Rumbold slammed a fist into his palm. “It’s just plain wrong. I’ve often wondered why the people put up with our government. Why they don’t rise up, protest, or kick anyone out of office—not even their clones? No offense, Sparhawk.”

“None taken.”

“Well then,” Durris said quickly. “The question becomes: what are we going to do about this?”

“First,” I said, “we’ll find out what’s at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs Halsey has left behind for us. I’m hoping it will be something worth the journey.”

“But Captain!” Rumbold said, stepping close. His bloodshot eyes stared into mine. “Shouldn’t we head back to Earth right now? Surely, with
Defiant
in our hands we could do something to change it all!”

I looked around the group. They looked worried, uncertain, lost. I shook my head. They were shocked and disillusioned, but they weren’t revolutionaries.

“Now isn’t the time for drastic action, Rumbold,” I said. “Let’s first attend to the duty we’ve all been sworn to perform: the protection of humanity at large.”

They fell into line as we marched back up to the command deck. No one spoke, and I knew they were all lost in their own thoughts.

When we arrived and filed to our stations, sending our replacements below, we quickly took stock of the situation.

All of the missiles we’d fired at the enemy ships had been destroyed without damaging their targets.

“Your bluff has run its course, Captain,” Durris informed me. “The enemy ships are increasing speed in pursuit.”

“A dangerous choice,” I said, “but at least they aren’t turning around and heading home.”

Some of my staffers looked at me as if I was crazy, but I didn’t care. I had bigger matters to attend to.

“Captain!” Durris called out triumphantly, “we’ve got something! A solution—we’ve found the way out of this hyperspace.”

I looked at him, impressed. “That was fast. Who can I thank?”

“I’ll be damned… The solution was sent to the battle computer over the ship’s public net.”

“Ah… Vogel then, in a spare moment?”

He shook his head. “No sir, the solution was worked out by K-19. Can you believe that?”

Oddly enough, I found that I could believe it. We punched the answer into the navigational system, and the ship lurched onto a slightly new course.
Defiant
would now strike the breach point at speed and exit into another star system approximately thirty-two minutes from now.

Time went by at a crawl. When we were only five minutes from reaching our goal, a message came from Okto.

I was uncertain how to handle the situation. I considered delaying as once we were through the breach the channel would be cut off automatically. For a few moments, I dithered.

With a sigh, I finally signaled Yamada to open the line. We were very close to the exit by the time she did so. Due to the distance between our two vessels, there wouldn’t be time to have a real conversation. It would take too many light-seconds for our respective transmissions to pass back and forth between our ships.

“Captain Sparhawk,” Okto greeted me from the forward screen. She appeared to be unexpectedly pleased with herself.

Everyone on the deck watched the screen. How could they not? The Betas were doggedly chasing us, determined to see us destroyed.

“I’m sending this message for my own personal gratification. I hope you don’t find it in poor taste during your final moments.”

Frowning, I glanced over at Durris. He shrugged in return.

We turned back to the large, round face of Okto as she beamed at us. She was unable to see us, and her message amounted to a prerecorded announcement. Obviously aware of this, she went on, but not without pausing dramatically first.

“You might wonder why, when you fired harmless missiles at us in an insulting manner, we didn’t respond in kind. It was because we didn’t want you to change anything about your behavior, or your course.”

For some reason, I began to feel a trickle of sweat inside my suit. What was this huge woman hinting at?

Without meaning to, I glanced at the countdown. We had only a single minute left before we hit the breach and broke through into a new star system.

The smiling Alpha continued talking. “We’ve calculated that you’ll be too close to the exit of this ER bridge when you hear this transmission to do anything about it. Just let me say that it’s been a pleasure chasing you to your cowardly finish. No kill could have been more satisfying. Knowing that your final moments will be spent in hopeless terror makes the situation all the sweeter, and I thank you for that—oh, and when you reach Hell, Sparhawk, please give my regards to Zye.”

That was it. The message ended, and the channel closed.

We sat in stunned silence. We had less than forty seconds to go.

“We can still divert, Captain,” Durris said. “If we do it right now, we might miss the breach!”

“That could be what she wants, Captain!” Rumbold shouted from the helm. “We might run out of hyperspace in this pocket, it’s hard to say. We’ll slam right into the wall if we screw this up.”

Durris locked eyes with me. He was afraid but resigned. “It’s your call, Captain.”

My call.
Those two words clearly stated the difficulty in commanding a starship. It was
always
my call, and consequently everything that went wrong was my fault. In this case, my entire ship and crew were likely to pay a gruesome price if I chose unwisely.

There were fifteen seconds left now. Rumbold had his hands on the helm, fingers poised and quivering, ready to direct the ship into a slewing turn if I were to give the order.

I had to think, but there was no time to do so. Was Okto bluffing, hoping that we’d take her bait and veer away, allowing her ships to close and destroy us? Or was she in earnest, like all her kind seemed to be, and merely enjoying herself?

“Steady on,” I said in a voice I thought was remarkably calm.

My heart pounded in my head, and my eyes stared unblinking as the breach loomed, shimmering and colorful. It was an unusual breach, I could tell that.

What was on the far side of it? Instant death? Or an agonizing finish full of radiation, screaming and the hopeless sounds of my dying ship?

My mind tried to conjure possibilities. Black holes, blue giants, even something as simple as space dust, too condensed and slammed into at too high a speed.

Before my brain could complete the list we hit the breach, and we broke through it.

-39-

When
Defiant
first returned to normal space, there was always a transitional period of adjustment. This span lasted from several seconds to over one minute.

We weren’t fully aware of it, but the transition period had been documented carefully. There was a brief sensation of dreaming. A sense of falling asleep, then waking up again.

How much of that time was spent in transit, “appearing” in the new star system? How much of it was due to our instruments settling down, reacting to the radical shift in measurable inputs?

It was a mix of the two, I suspected. Our computers added another delay as they were programmed to balk before relaying faulty input to the crew. No designer wanted a crew to become confused. A surprised helmsman might send the ship into a deadly maneuver to avoid a phantom. The computers probed with their sensors, requiring more than purely passive input before they painted a confirmed picture of our surroundings.

In this particular case, the wait was excruciating for all involved. Even though it lasted no more than half a minute, such a length of time can feel very long indeed when one’s life is in the balance.

When we did start to function again, we found ourselves in a new place. Like every other time I’d ventured into an unknown star system, the experience never failed to be a thrill.

My heart was in my mouth. I swallowed dryly, over and over again. My eyes roved over the instruments trying to monitor everything at once.

“Sir…” Yamada said, working her sensor arrays. “I think we’re okay. The system isn’t all that unusual. It’s a tri-star arrangement with two close red dwarfs and a third brown one circling widely in a distant orbit.”

Rumbold released a breath explosively.

“No final moments of hopeless terror and death?” he asked, his eyes swiveling from Yamada to myself and back again.

“No…” she said. “At least, I don’t detect any immediate threat here.”

“Okto!” Rumbold raged, his face instantly transforming. “That witch!”

He slapped his palms on his console and jumped up, performing a strutting circular dance around his chair. “You know, it’s just this sort of bullshit that might convince an old man it’s time to retire.” His agitation amused many of the staffers who twittered from the edges of the command deck.

I smiled. The tension had been broken, and I was glad for Rumbold’s display. I didn’t correct him, but he eventually climbed back into his seat and began to mutter to himself.

“She tried to rook us, Captain,” he said loudly. “Just for spite.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“I agree,” Durris said. “She
did
attempt to bluff us but not because she wanted to cause us emotional pain. She wanted us to turn away from this breach.”

Yamada nodded slowly. “That sounds right to me, too. If we’d missed the breach, her ships would have caught up and destroyed us. It was either that, or she knew there wasn’t room for us to turn around. She wanted us to die by slamming into the barrier surrounding that patch of hyperspace.”

“The question is,” Durris said, “will she follow us?”

“Have we got a new course yet?” I asked him.

Durris looked startled and turned back to his instruments. His planning table lit up, and he decorated it with thin green arcs.

“Are we exploring or running?” he asked me.

“A little of both. I want to put distance between the breach point and our stern, but we need to scan this unknown system at the same time.”

Durris nodded. “We should head toward the inner planets then. There’s a ring of seven that circle the twin suns at the center of the system. Our next destination is in their midst. It’s the last coordinate listed on Perez’s map.”

“Finalize the course and pass it to the helm.”

Durris and Rumbold spent the next few minutes sorting out our new direction, and we were soon gently veering to our port side. It felt good to have a destination again even if it was a vague one.

Once the course was laid and set, Durris moved to my side.

“Sir,” he said, “I’ve got a tactical recommendation.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“We should lay out a barrage of missiles,” he said. “We’ll deploy them in our wake directing them to fly to the breach we just passed through. Our newest units are smart. They’ll sit there and watch space at the exit point. When the Beta cruisers come through, I’ll set them up to concentrate on the lead ship. With luck, a score of hits will take out one of the three.”

“No,” I said simply.

He blinked at me. “No? You mean you don’t think it will work? You must recall our disorientation when we first arrived here… The enemy crew will experience that same incoherence. That’s when our missiles will plunge in and strike. You know, this possibility might even be why Okto didn’t want us to go through. Maybe she foresaw this kind of tactic, and—”

“No,” I repeated. “No attack. No missiles. No mines. We’ll slip away, and that’s all.”

He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. It was a mixed blessing, but I was used to that sort of thing. His lack of confidence didn’t rattle me.

“I’m not budging XO,” I explained. “We’re simply taking the course that will get us closer to those planets.”

“You’re still holding out hope they’ll help us in some way. All right, Captain. It’s your call. It’s my duty to give you my opinion and—”

“And you’ve done so,” I said, cutting him off. “Thank you, Commander.”

He returned to his post sullenly.

Over the following hour, we flew quietly toward the inner planets of the unknown system. As we did so, we picked up more and more data.

“Sir…” Durris said. “There’s a lot of evidence of space traffic out here. A lot of radioactive clouds and debris as well.”

“Meaning?”

“There has almost certainly been a major fleet action in this system. I’m not seeing much here now, fortunately. The system appears to be dead.”

My heart sank as we went over the data. We quickly found a world that was likely to have once held life. It was lifeless now, scorched by radioactive clouds. Dust obscured the surface, and storms raged with five hundred kilometer an hour winds blowing deadly particles everywhere.

“Do you think it was a colony once?” Yamada asked me as we examined the world.

“Yes,” I said. “Rather recently, in fact, if I don’t miss my guess. The variant fleet must have passed through here and destroyed them all.”

After we’d been in the system for several hours, a trio of ships appeared at the breach point behind us. They were moving relatively slowly. They’d obviously been braking since we’d last seen them in hyperspace.

“Okto has arrived,” Yamada said.

“Damn,” Rumbold said. “I’d hoped that tricky woman had turned around and gone home.”

“She slowed down out of fear,” I said. “She was worried we were laying an ambush for her. The enemy’s caution is our gain. We’re well ahead of them now.”

My upbeat comments failed to brighten anyone’s mood. The cruisers were more distant, but they were still behind us, still following doggedly.

“Where’s the next breach point?” I asked, turning to Durris.

He shook his head. “I’m not seeing it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I demanded, rushing to his side.

“Just that—there’s nothing out here, sir. This planet, the burnt out one we’re passing by, is very close to the coordinates. The location is very unusual. I’m not sure there can be a bridge this near a paired star.”

Frowning, I looked over his data hoping he’d made some kind of mistake. Naturally, there was no error.

“A dead end?” I asked.

“Well, if the last coordinate was the location of a breach, then yes.”

“What else could it be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Perez wanted us to come here to help defend this broken planet. Maybe when he scrawled these notes there was a fierce battle going on right here. But now… everything’s dead, Captain.”

Durris’ words were damning. Everything about this voyage now seemed like a farce. We were the joke of the galaxy, chasing ghosts at the whim of a dead Stroj agent.

“Carry on,” I said, “decrease speed. We’re not doing a quick fly-by. Take us to the exact coordinates, so we can at least prove we reached the spot. Record everything carefully, and begin plotting an escape route.”

Durris began swiftly working on a set of calculations. I glanced at them, and I realized they had nothing to do with my orders.

“What are you up to, XO?” I asked.

“I’m plotting the Beta ships likely actions—to see how much time we have.”

“Is this in order to formulate an argument against my orders?”

He looked up, startled. “Not at all, Captain. I just wanted to know how much time we’d have at the location specified before we have to move on. I mean, it could be a small item we’re looking for. Something like a time capsule, a satellite…”

The odds of such things seemed extremely remote to me, but Durris was nothing if he wasn’t a man of details. I nodded to him, and he went back to his calculations.

Soon thereafter,
Defiant
shuddered and decelerated.

“It’s looking like we’ll have approximately an hour on station,” Durris told me. “Maybe two, tops, before we have to run.”

“That should be good enough,” I said. “We’ll prove or disprove the premise of our mission long before that.”

I found out soon afterward my confident words were quite wrong, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.