The Mandate of Heaven (40 page)

“What happens now?”

“Now you leave, just like you should have earlier, having given me my payment.  Find your father and go, but take care, as the artificial gravity has now been shut-off completely.  Come to think of it, take my hand and I’ll lead you to him, the last thing that I need right now, is you floating off somewhere.”

Ignoring Alex’s outstretched hand, she reached out catching a firm hold on a nearby table, which must have been anchored to the ground, as unlike her it was firmly affixed in place.  With a graceful summersault, she re-orientated herself in the direction of the room, pushing off from the table with her fingertips, stylishly floating in the direction of her father, who was frantically grasping at an exposed conduit, to keep himself in place.  Glancing back, she observed Alex staring back at her, mouth agape, like a fish out of water.

“Three times zero-gravity gymnastics champion,” she said with an impish smile, as she sailed away from him.

“Of course you were,” Alex sighed out loud.  “Stay close to Sanderson.  I promised your father that no harm would come to you.  Sanderson will look after you both and see that you get to safety.”

“What?” she cried out, tumbling in mid-flight, as she tried to reorient herself, but helpless to change direction and go after him.  She only just had enough time to reach out to catch the same conduit that her father had wrapped himself around, like a python.

“Jessica,” he said relieved.  “Thank the Gods that you’re safe.  What is going on here?  Stanton said that he would arrange everything, he personally guaranteed—who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Good to finally make your acquaintance, High-Lord Hadley,” Sanderson replied formally, doing a passable impression of a bow, while floating several feet off the ground.  However, he broke the illusion with his next question, “I don’t suppose that you’ve got a light, have you?  Turns out that my lighter doesn’t work in zero-gravity.”

At the incredulous look from Jessica and her father, he sighed despondently, stuffing the cigar back into his jacket pocket, which it proceeded to float out from.

“I hate zero-g,” he complained out loud, to nobody in particular.  “Anyway, we’d better get going, we’ve got a shuttle prepped and ready for launch.  Templeton, Baracoa, stop messing around and get over here.  I’ll take point, you two bring up the rear.  You ready to go?” he turned back around to face father and daughter.

“Where’s Alex?” Jessica demanded.

“How should I know?  What do I look like, his father?”

“I mean if you three are here, who is helping Alex?  Murdoch?”

“No, he’s already doing the pre-flight checks for your shuttle.  Which reminds me, one or both of you can pilot it, right?  As I don’t think Alex has enough money to bribe Murdoch to fly you all the way back to Osiris.”

“You mean he’s out there, alone?” Jessica demanded incredulously.  “Stanton, I mean High-Lord Stanton, still has men out there looking for him, they’ll kill—”

A high-pitched whine, followed by an abrupt scream, which was suddenly cut off, interrupted whatever she was going to say next.

“I think that answers that question,” Sanderson replied succinctly.  “Time to be going, Lady Jessica, if you could give your father a hand please, I must congratulate you on your anti-gravity skills, but your father, he’s going a bit green around the gills.”

“Come on dad, let go and hold onto me,” Jessica reassured her father.

“I’m glad that all the money I spent on those zero-gravity gymnastics classes wasn’t wasted,” Hadley muttered, holding on tightly to his daughter’s arm.  “Now, can you explain to me what is going on?  Who are these people?”

“Shush father, later,” she replied, releasing the conduit and gently pushing off in the direction that Sanderson had taken, noting Templeton and Baracoa waited a few seconds longer, before pushing off after them.

The group flew onwards for several seconds, before coming to the first emergency decompression door, discovering, not surprisingly, that the door was already closed.

“Give me one minute, while I open this,” Sanderson grunted, finally managing to catch hold of a handle, pulling himself in the direction of the access panel.  Tapping a few controls, he nodded his head.  “That’s released it.  Seems like all the internal pressure doors have been closed from the bridge.  It’ll slow us down a bit, but we can still make the shuttle.”

Before he’d even finished, internal servo-motors began to whirl and the door centimetre-by-centimetre, inch-by-inch, started to open—to reveal half a dozen troops on the other side.  In their combat armour, with compact assault rifles, it was obvious that they worked for Stanton.  Even though terribly disorientated, facing in different directions, many spinning uncontrollably, they all immediately raised their rifles and opened fire…

*****

“Missile launch detected!”

The Weapons Officer screamed out from the front of the bridge, even two hundred metres distant, the fear in his voice easily carried the warning the length of the bridge.  “The
Valkyrie
has launched six torpedoes, all running straight and true, estimated impact time, three minutes.”

“I think I might have upset Admiral Sloane,” Granville complained.  “As he doesn’t appear to have taken the loss of those shuttles very well.  These torpedoes, I take it that they do considerable damage?”

“They each possess a fifty kiloton warhead, my Lord.”  At the confused expression on Lord Granville’s face, the Captain sighed.  “Yes, considerable damage, my Lord.  Normally I would recommend that we commence evasive manoeuvres, however—”

“Yes, yes,” Granville said crossly.  “There is no need to continually labour the point.  I’m aware that we have no engines.  Do you have any idea how much those things cost?  They wanted like half a billion, each, to retrofit a pair of Fusion engines.  Look at me.  Do I look like a man who has a billion credits, burning a hole in my pocket?”

“You’re often boasting about your personal net worth,” the Captain hedged.  “Well, never mind, in that case I would recommend that we instead target them with the guns.”

“Are you mad!” Granville exploded from the captain’s chair to his feet.  “Do you have any idea how much even one of those things is worth on the black market?  More than I pay you each quarter, that I can promise.”

“I can well believe it,” the Captain grumbled.

“Order the ships,
Phaeton
,
High Flyer
,
Spider
and
Curricle
to intercept those torpedoes and retrieve them for me.  Whichever ship successfully retrieves a torpedo; I’ll give the crew a bonus of twenty thousand.”

“Uh, is that twenty thousand,
per
torpedo, my Lord?”

“Don’t be daft man, what do you think I am, made of money?  Remind the Captains that if they fail in their mission, best to do so spectacularly.  As it would be most unwise for them to survive the failed attempt.”

*****

“I can see you Stanton,” the disembodied voice echoed from the darkness.  “What did you expect when you threw me into the deepest, darkest hole you could find.  You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

The fusion beam snapped into existence, echoing the sound of the voice, unerringly finding its target—the chest of one of the few bodyguards that still surrounded the High-Lord.  The man dropped to the floor, a smoking charred hole, all which remained of his chest.

The remaining guards immediately opened fire, with weapons on full automatic.  The corridor was briefly illuminated by the muzzle flashes of their weapons.  When all ran dry, one of the guards pulled a pin from a grenade, tossing it back down the corridor in the direction of the voice.  The entire corridor lit up like a roman candle and even from a distance of twenty or thirty feet away, they could feel the heat of the blast.

A few seconds later, another beam snapped out from the dark, this time from a perpendicular direction, like the half-dozen before it, this also squarely struck a guard who fell wordlessly to the floor.  Dead.

“Fall back,” the Major screamed, pushing High-Lord Stanton ahead of him.  “Covering fire!”

“Have I told you about a conversation that I had while in captivity.  I think you might be interested, as you were the sole topic of discussion.  It was when I traded my soul with the devil.  It was a very simple bargain really, my soul in exchange for sending you back to hell where you were spawned from.  I thought it a fair deal.”

Another beam pierced the night, and yet another guard collapsed to the floor.

“You seem to be rapidly running out of men,” the discorporate voice called out, mockingly.

*****

Concealed behind the vast superstructure of the dreadnought, the ships lit up like miniature stars, as one by one, they powered up their fusion engines.  The four ships, in close formation, were the oddest, most bizarre group ever seen.  All looked like they’d been drafted by some eccentric ship designer, while drunk.  They sprouted sensors, antenna and various other utility attachments in every direction imaginable.

In short they looked like a prickle of hedgehogs, on a bad hair day.

It wasn’t their physical characteristics, that most drew the eye however, but what they towed behind—a net.  It was vast.  Over twenty-seven kilometres in length, the individual constituent strands, each only a few nanometres thick, were a million times thinner than a strand of human hair.  It was made of graphene ribbons, perfect two-dimensional sheets of carbon, which had a tensile strength greater than one hundred thousand kilonewtons.  As the ships continued to accelerate, they moved laterally apart, casting their net even wider.

Rounding the Dreadnought, the ships’ targets came into view for the first time, the incoming torpedoes.  They were clearly visible, a tight cluster of stars, their own rocket motors burning brightly, as they continued to accelerate onwards.  With a combined interception speed of over five thousand kilometres per hour, the graphene net would have shredded the torpedoes and the resulting megaton explosion would have been visible from the nearest star-system.  It was for this very reason that while still fifty kilometres distant, the four ships flipped about on their axis, pointing the way that they had just come.  Their engines at full thrust, they desperately tried to bleed off their speed, as they started to brake.  When the two groups, ships and torpedoes, finally intercepted each other several seconds later, the ships had bled off almost all their unwanted velocity and the interception speed was measured in hundreds, not thousands, of kilometres per hour.

The net slipped easily around the first five, but it was just slightly off-centre enough that it scraped along the side of the sixth.  A tremor travelled along the length of the torpedo and its course wavered for a moment, before internal guidance systems corrected the trajectory and it continued onwards—heading directly for
Elysium Fields
.

One of the strange, claw like, appendages of the nearest ship, rotated round until it was pointing in the direction of the rapidly vanishing torpedo and, with a brief squirt of compressed gas, shot from its housing, trailing a long, thin, filament of carbon nanotubes behind it.  The grappler caught the torpedo two-thirds of the way along its length and immediately on contact the claw started to retract, biting into the thin surface of the weapon casing.  But as soon as the trailing cable went taut, with the tremendous forces acting in opposite directions, the claw started to slice along the outer-casing, in the direction of the rocket engines and its volatile fuel tanks—

Only for moments later to be hit by a second, third and fourth grappler from the remaining ships.  Caught at perpendicular angles, this helped to stabilise the external force on the outer casing and slowly, but surely, the torpedo began to veer off track.  The four ships, with cargo in tow, altered course, now heading in a parallel direction to the Dreadnought and enemy fleet, carrying away their precious, and extremely valuable, bounty.

*****

“What the hell just happened?  Somebody, please, tell me that I just imagined that,” screamed a red-faced Admiral Sloane, in the middle of a full blown temper tantrum.  “He just
stole
my torpedoes! That, that, thief.”

“I believe that a more accurate term is pirate, Admiral,” the Operations Officer quipped, before snapping his jaw tightly shut, when Admiral Sloane turned the full force of his glare on him.

“Well, I don’t care what the correct label is, Granville can’t have ‘em.  They’re mine.  Activate their self-destruct.”

“Negative, Admiral,” the Tactical Officer shook his head.  “The weapons aren’t responding to the destruct codes, something seems to be jamming our signal.”

“The Dreadnought?” Sloane asked, shocked.  “That ship is over two hundred years old, no way does it possess the transmitters to block our communications, not from this distance away.”

“Correct Admiral, we’ve confirmed that the jamming signal isn’t originating from
Elysium Fields
.”

“Then, by the High-Lords, where’s it coming from?” Sloane demanded.

“Everywhere,” the Operations Officer responded.  “It’s coming from all around us.”

*****

To describe the massive freighter as run-down, dilapidated and neglected, was to compliment all other decrepit hulks still in service.  It was a miracle that it still flew at all.  This was plainly clear from the large gaps in its hull, where poorly welded plating had simply, fallen off.  With its large fusion engines at the stern, the rest of the ship was given over to bulk cargo containers, several thousand at full capacity.  Such ships were the back-bone of the merchant fleet and carried everything from computers to duct tape.  Everything that an advanced, space-faring, civilization needed.  Obeying the laws of physics, such mass came at the cost of acceleration, which was roughly comparable to that of a similar sized moon.