Chapter Fifteen
“Oh wow, this is going to be fun,” said Guiora.
“What do we have?” asked Powell.
“Let me put it this way, I’m glad we jumped short to see what was there,” replied Guiora. “I can see debris and rocks and boulders in a fairly high density over an area about thirty six thou across. There are boulders bigger than stations out there, some a lot bigger. And that’s just what I can see from here. I can’t even begin to tell you what’s inside there.”
“Scanners won’t penetrate?” asked Isacus who was feeling much better and had returned to his post.
“Impossible. There’s too much chaff. You could hide an entire battalion or a hundred capital ships in there, if anyone was insane enough to go in there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that someone shattered a planet.”
“Impossible,” said Papo. “You can’t put that much energy into a planet without cooking yourself first.”
“Any ideas, Captain?” asked Tyrell.
Powell studied the displays. According to the information that Tyrell had provided him with, they were looking for a marker that would respond to a given code when broadcast. But with this many obstacles, even the most powerful signal wouldn’t penetrate very far. The best equipment they had would have difficulty penetrating more than a few thousand meters into the debris.
“How much activity?” he asked Guiora.
“Hard to say. It mostly seems stable. If there were any bits with any decent amount of momentum in them, they would have drifted away a long time ago. From here, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of movement, but I wouldn’t want to take the ship in there.”
Powell wholeheartedly agreed. Taking a soft ship such as the Celiker would be very foolish without an exceptionally good reason. A lot of money was a pretty good reason, but was it good enough?
“What exactly are we looking for?” asked Powell, addressing Tyrell. “You’ve been a little vague over that during this trip.”
“Sorry about that captain.” Replied Tyrell. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But I do know that it is worth a great deal because several planets have gone to war to get it.”
“War?” asked Guiora. “You suppose that someone blew up a planet?”
“No,” said Powell. “If anyone had that kind of power, we’d know about it. Assuming that they didn’t blow themselves up during testing. But that’s unlikely because there’s no primary around here. It would have been a pretty dark and cold planet indeed.”
“What do you suppose happened here?” asked Tyrell. “I know that there are asteroid fields all over the place, but this seems slightly out of the normal.”
“Unknown and unknowable,” said Papo. “We can sit here and think of theories all day and even come up with something that sounds really good, but we’d have no way of knowing if we were right or not.”
“Good point. Orders?”
Powell looked at the displays again. What he really wanted was to go home and get a bigger ship, preferably a combat one with heavy armour. And some decent scanners. There could be anything hiding in that mess and he didn’t like surprises.
“The only thing that we really can do is to skim around the surface and broadcast the code to see if we get a response. Although if I wanted to hide something in there, I’d bury it down inside, not near the outside.”
The crew looked around sullenly. They didn’t want to give this late in the game, especially Tyrell, but it was fairly obvious to them that the captain wouldn’t be taking the ship into the debris.v
“Take us in. Mr. Tyrell, put in the access code and set it to broadcast every twenty seconds”
Isacus made the small jump to the edge of the field. The view would have been quite terrifying, if there had been windows to look out of. They gently traversed across the edge of the field, or just above it depending on your angle of view. From their original vantage point, the field had looked practically solid. From closer inspection it could be seen on the displays that there were large gaps between the larger pieces. It was just that there were so many that it looked denser than it really was.
An indicator lit up on the console.
“A response?” asked Tyrell hopefully.
“No,” said Powell, slightly worried. “Someone is hailing us.”
Guiora locked onto the signal and put it on the comms.
“Well, hello there little fella. Glad ya could make it.”
Guiora and Powell looked at each other, then at Tyrell. Tyrell just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had no idea what was going on.
“Although I am curious as to why ya didn’t use the code we gave ya.”
Tyrell was even more dumbfounded than anyone else. He had been expecting a vault or a derelict spacecraft or an abandoned station or something. Not a stranger to be waiting here for them.
“But since yer here, I guess we ougthta get on with things. Ya ready for the transfer?”
“This Captain Powell of the Celiker. Can you please identify yourself?”
“Aw, tha little girly didn’t wanna come play herself, did she? Too bad. But as long as ya got my money, ya’ll can call me anythin’ ya like darlin.”
Powell looked at the others. This was obviously not what Tyrell was expecting. And he had a nagging suspicion that they were not who the resident was expecting either.
“I’m sorry sir, but we seem to be getting confused. We’re here on a … survey mission. I think that you were expecting someone else.”
“Ah, now things are a little clearer. Tell me ma good man, does the name ‘Valerie Opatz’ hold any meanin’ for ya?”
Powell looked at the others, who were shaking their heads. “No, doesn’t seem familiar to anyone here.”
“Aw, such a shame. We’ll be sayin’ goodbye then.”
The connection was cut.
“What the hell was that?” asked Higuel, speaking for the first time.
“More to the point, is our treasure still here,” said Tyrell. “He seemed to be expecting us to bring money to him.”
“New contact, moving fast,” said Guiora. “It’s … oh dark, it’s a damned missile!”
“Everyone strap down! Gimme control,” yelled Powell. Deftly he maneuvered the ship straight towards the debris field. The missile was coming at them fast, but not from directly below. There was no way that they could outrace a missile, but if he could put some solid material between him and it, they might have a chance.
The Celiker raced past the smaller outer bits and did a hard right behind the first large piece they came across. The missile followed, closely passing over the surface of the obstacle. As it came around the edge, it found another large boulder and no sign of the Celiker. Having lost its target, the missile impacted against a boulder.
Further along the debris field, the Bloodbath rose up out of its hiding place.
“Whaddya reckon, did we get im?” asked Raktu.
“Probably not,” said Lother. “If I don’t see shiny bits of metal, we didn’t get it.”
“Why do ya think they was out here?” asked Svelte. “Ya think they was lookin’ for us?”
“Nah. Musta been coincidence.”
“No,” said Lother. “But something isn’t right. They claimed they were on a survey mission but they were transmitting a code. That means that they were looking for something.”
“Oh looky, they’re hailing us,” smirked Raktu. “They are alive. Le’see what they want.”
“What the hell was that for?” demanded Powell across the comms. There was a bit of background static from the debris blocking the path of the signal.
“Don’t take it personally,” said Lother. “We were just trying to kill you.”
“We didn’t even know you were here! We don’t know why you’re here and we don’t even know who you are. Why would you try to kill us?”
“Because we can. Oh, and thanks for giving away your position.” The Bloodbath launched another two missiles.
“Deeper!” said Isacus. The Celiker flew further into the debris field, with the two missiles hard in pursuit. Dodging tightly around as many large obstacles as he could find, Powell managed to shake one and then the other missile.
The Bloodbath followed them in, ducking around and following their trail as best they could. “Now this is what I calls fun!” shouted Raktu. “Haven’t had sport like this in a looong time!”
“What do you want?” asked Powell over the comms, with a lot of background noise on the signal from the intervening debris.
“Duh, to kill you,” replied Raktu. “Thought tha was obvious.”
The Celiker was maneuvering on remass engines which meant that it was leaving a fairly easy to follow trail amongst the debris. They could stop using the engines and leave no trace, but then they’d be coasting in a straight line. Powell was busy trying to stay ahead of the pursuing ship and not slam into one of the bits of debris either.
“How long can we keep this up?” asked Powell.
“About six hours,” replied Guiora. “But after that, we won’t be able to dock with anything without slamming into it.”
“Can we jump from in here?”
“Possible, but I’d really, really like you to not try. Minimum clearance for us would be six hundred meters and at the moment you’re getting within twenty meters of some of those bigger ones.” Just as Guiora finished speaking, a dull thud reverberated throughout the ship.
“Closer than that,” muttered Isacus.
“How are we going to get out of this?” asked Tyrell.
“Our best bet is to try and shake them loose and get clear of the debris and make a jump. But if we get ready for a jump, we’ll be vulnerable for about twenty seconds.”
“Can we clamp onto one of the bigger rocks?” asked Higuel. “I saw that on a movie once.”
“No chance,” replied Papo. “We don’t have the gear to do it and if we did, we’d have to slow down and match velocities first in order to do that.”
“Can we drop a bomb and let them fly into it?” asked Tyrell.
“Sure we could,” said Isacus. “If we had one. The only thing we could really throw out the back is cargo, and we don’t have any of that on this trip.”
A deep, resonating moan could be heard as the stresses started to affect the ship. The Celiker was built as a cargo ship, not a combat ship. The dance that Powell was making her perform was well beyond what she had been designed for.
“What are our odds of the ship breaking up?” asked Higuel. Nobody even bothered to answer. Not that they found the question to be pointless or that they were rude, but the gee forces that were pushing them around were starting to make it hard to breath. That, and nobody really wanted to think of those particular odds.
Meanwhile, on the Bloodbath, the captain and the navigator were busy arguing over the best method to destroy the annoying ship. Raktu had been incapable of closing the gap between the two ships, which should have been quite easy. Raktu wanted to maintain the pursuit, while Lother wanted to move out of the debris field and wait them out.
Back on the Celiker, Guiora and Powell were both surprised by a sudden surge of wide-band energy across almost the entire location band. They were blinded for a moment and needed to pull some fairly harsh gee’s to bring the ship to a halt.
“What the hell was that?” shouted Guiora.
“No idea,” said Powell. “But it might be the break we need.”
“Why have we stopped moving?” asked Tyrell.
“That energy pulse blinded us, so it must have also blinded them. If we sit tight, they’ll fly right past us.”
Everyone on the bridge sat in perfect silence. There wasn’t much point since the odds of detecting the other ship passing by listening was nil, but everyone had their attention focused on the scanners. Set to passive sweep only, they made a strange and unsettling cacophony which was barely audible over the environmental systems.
The ship gave a slight lurch and picked up a small rotation, which was only just detectable by the inner ear.
“She passed us,” whispered Powell. Guiora quickly stabilized the ship while they were still in the other ship’s blind spot. The hailing light started blinking on the console again.
“Are they hailing us again?” asked Tyrell quietly.
“No, it’s a wide band transmission. It’s another ship.”
“Are they hailing us or them?”
“Not sure, but if they respond on an open band we’ll be able to listen in.”
There was silence once more on the bridge as the crew sat in anticipation. Isacus put the hail on speaker but there was nothing to hear yet, it was just a hail.
“What do you think?” asked Lother on the Bloodbath. “Do we answer?”
Raktu was angry. No, he was way past angry. This should have been a simple grab and swap. They took the girl, a representative from the band showed up with the cash, they swapped and everyone went home happy. Instead this chatty twerp had shown up who had no idea what was going on. He’d had to waste three perfectly good missiles, who knew how much remass and now some new ship with some damn-awful powerful transmitters had shown up and made him lose the target. And this location had been chosen so carefully.
“Answer ‘em,” said Raktu. “Switch and use.”
Lother smiled. Raktu was the boss and everyone knew it, but Lother was the better educated one, so he was the one to do the talking. Switch and use meant pretend to be the good guys and lure the new ship into helping them destroy the other ship.
“This is the Righteous Might responding to an open hail,” said Lother with a wide grin on his face.
“Copy you Righteous Might, this is the New Dawn. We saw some fairly strong energy emissions in there. Do you require assistance?”
“Mighty glad to hear from you New Dawn. We have two Judges aboard and are currently tracking some known fugitives. We’d be mighty appreciative of any assistance that you can offer.”
Powell and Guiora looked at each other. “Judges?”
“Well, there isn’t that much that we can do, but we do have some mighty powerful survey equipment here with us. We can tell you exactly where the fugitives are,” said Rosalie.
“Uh oh,” said Isacus.
“This is Captain Powell Blakely of The Celiker here. We arrived in this system a few minutes ago and these guys fired on us for no reason.”
“They’re lying,” said Lother. “They’ve killed dozens of people trying to evade the law and have already blown up our escort ship.” As Lother spoke, Raktu maneuvered the ship trying to get a lock on where the Celiker was.
Aboard the New Dawn, Rosalie and Frank looked at each other.
“Who do we believe?” asked Kimetz.
“I’m not going up against a Judge,” said Frank. “And why the hell are these people here? Is it anything to do with us?”
“It may just be coincidence,” suggested Georgi. “The map that led us here was over a hundred years old, and nobody had seen it in the last eighty seven or so. So either one of these ships is the one that reached the Im … ah … the Swift first, or they just happen to be here for another reason.”
At that moment, the Bloodbath fired on the Celiker again, five missiles this time. Powell didn’t even waste breath on cursing; he just fired the engines and dived in deeper amongst the debris field.
“They fired on us,” said Lother as one of the missiles exploded. “Help us, tell us where these bastards are hiding.”
“That’s odd,” whispered Kimetz. “The Judge says that the Celiker fired on them, but the signal source came from the ship that fired.”
“Can we contact the two ships separately on encrypted signals?” asked Rosalie.
“No problem,” said Frank. A blue and a green light came on in the display in front of the captain. “When you want to speak to one, press the green button, the blue for the other. I’ll leave both on speaker so you can hear what they are both saying at the same time as well as the open frequency.”
“Well done,” said Rosalie. “Green ship first. Do you read me?”
“We read you, New Dawn,” said Powell. “Good idea to chat on encrypted lines, even if I don’t have a lot of spare time to talk right now.” Even across the comm Rosalie could hear the distinctive noise of something impacting against a hull. That was not a noise a captain wanted to hear. “If you’re talking to that manic as well, ask him for access to his ship’s computers. We’d be more than happy to provide you with access to ours, so long as that nutjob stops firing at us.”
“He has a point,” said Selinin. “Nothing says trust like giving someone else control of your oxygen supply.”
Rosalie pressed the blue button. “Do you read me, Captain?”
“Loud and clear,” said Lother.
“Can you provide us with access codes to your ship’s computers?”
Raktu and Lother looked at each other. This was a new trick. He didn’t even know that giving one ship control of another ship was even possible. That was something that he’d need to remember for the next time they did a spot of pirating.
“Sorry New Dawn, our reception is really bad in here. We’re moving out of the rubbish into clear space to improve the reception. I don’t need to remind you of the penalty for firing upon a ship that has declared itself to have Judges aboard, do I?”
Everyone aboard the New Dawn looked at each other. That wasn’t the expected response, and it made them hesitate. As soon as the Bloodbath was clear of the debris, it fired a missile at the New Dawn. The distance between the two ships was quite small, and the missile covered the distance in just seventeen seconds. Captain Rosalie had plenty of time to react, but not enough time to get the New Dawn to do anything due to the inertia of the large ship.
It’s sheer size made the New Dawn a sitting duck, but the same size gave it a certain amount of protection, plus with all the excess equipment and antennas that were projecting from it afforded it even more protection.
The missile impacted one of the sensor towers and the resultant explosion only made a moderate amount of damage to the New Dawn. Two hull breaches, but nothing major.
“Close all compartments,” screamed Frank.
“Got ‘em,” shouted Raktu triumphantly.
“But not fatally,” replied Lother.
“What do we do?” asked Higuel. “We have to help them!”
“How?” asked Powell. “A minute ago we couldn’t save ourselves.”
“We should dive deeper and cling onto one of the larger rocks,” said Tyrell. “We’ll be able to hide until they leave.”
“We should get clear and make a jump while they’re still distracted with the New Dawn,” said Guiora. “It sounds callous, but we can’t help them. Another two minutes and they’ll have blown them to bits. Then they’ll come looking for us again.”
“No, don’t fire,” said Lother. “If we disable her, we can capture the ship, sell off the crew and then strip it for parts.”
“Good point,” replied Raktu. “And they haven’t fired back, which means they probably aren’t armed.”
The Bloodbath approached the New Dawn menacingly. It had all weapons deployed and ready to fire. A laser strafed across the Bloodbath, destroying sensors and blowing several hull breaches across the upper decks.
“Hold right there,” said Captain West on the open frequency. “This is captain Westcott of the Kilkka, deputized ship under license from the Judiciary of Balga Station.”
“How dare ya fire on us!” screamed Raktu. “Do ya have any idea how much trouble ya’ll be in fer firing on a judge?”
“Yes, but since Judges don’t use words like “ya’ll” then I think I’m fairly safe,” said West dryly. “You are the Bloodbath, rogue ship and kidnapper. You currently have Miss Valerie Opatz aboard as a reluctant guest. Inform me immediately that she is safe and well or I’ll open fire and blast you to pieces.”
“She’s alive and well,” said Lother before Raktu could scream any obscenities.
“You’ve bought yourself sixty seconds to prove it,” said West.
“She’s not aboard,” said Lother. “We’ll have to go get her from our base.”
“Then that’s too bad for you, since that means I get to blast you to pieces right now.”
“If you kill us, you’ll never find her. You need us alive so we can take you to our base.”
“You don’t have a base. But you do have forty seconds.”
Aboard the New Dawn, everyone held his or her breath. A moment ago, they had been about to die. Now they were about to be saved. Or blown to pieces, there was still no certainty either way.
During this exchange, the Celiker had risen up to the edge of the debris field in order to be ready to run. The sudden arrival of the Kilkka was a welcome distraction, and Powell was deciding whether to try and jump or stay and see how it turned out.
On the Kilkka, everyone was looking at West. They knew full well that they had very little information about the Bloodbath or it’s crew, so West was bluffing when he said he knew that they didn’t have a base.
“Um … hello?” said a trembling female voice.
“Identify yourself,” said West.
“I’m Valerie,” said Valerie.
“Tell me the name of your teddy bear,” said West. He had been hoping that the Opatz family had some secret way of passing information to each other but they hadn’t. This was the closest thing that they had been able to come up with just before leaving Balga. Valerie hated things that were cute and fluffy, and she particularly detested teddy bears, considering them obnoxious. If the person who was speaking didn’t know, they would waste time trying to guess a name or stall for time.
“I don’t have one,” said Valerie.
Aboard the Kilkka, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Now that they had found her alive and well, things were looking a lot better.
“Okay sunny jim,” said Raktu. “Here’s how it’s gonna go down. We’re gonna jump away now, an’ if ya try an’ stop us, we’ll throw little miss starshine out tha airlock.”
“Blast their PD Rods,” said West. Oxley fired one of the secondary lasers and blasted a precision hole in the side of the Bloodbath, destroying her capacity to go anywhere. “Or we can do it this way. We’ll send a shuttle down to dock with you, collect Miss Opatz and any of your crew that wish to surrender and then leave. That sounds good?”
“You keep blasting holes in us and you’re likely to kill the girl,” said Lother.
“Don’t care,” said West. Everyone aboard the Kilkka looked at him sharply. “I’ve already been paid to come out here and attempt a rescue, so if we get her or not is irrelevant to me. The question is, how badly do you want to live? Because it’d be rather sad if you decided that you wanted to kill yourselves just out of spite.”
“None of ma crew will evar surrender!” said Raktu.
“Fine, don’t care,” said West. “We just came for the girl. And just to sweeten the deal I’ve also been authorized to pay you the ransom of ten mil. That should help you get your boat patched up.”
Lother and Raktu looked at each other. They really weren’t expecting to get paid. But their position was untenable at best. They still had over fifty missiles left, but the Kilkka could shoot them down as fast as they could launch them. Getting the ransom was the whole point – and ten million would go a long way towards fixing up the Bloodbath.
“Sounds good ta me,” said Raktu. “Transfer tha money over.”
“Not until I we see the girl,” replied West.
“Send your shuttle over,” said Lother. “Your crew can see her and confirm that she’s fine. Then you transfer the money and undock the shuttle.”
“Agreed. Launching shuttle now.” A small shuttle launched from the Kilkka. “The other ships here, how are you guys holding up?”
“We’re fine,” said Powell aboard the Celiker. “Pulse is a bit high, but we’ll survive.”
“Some damage and hull breaches,” said Rosalie on the New Dawn. “No casualties or major problems. I have my crew putting up a few patches right now.”
“Excellent,” said West. “Bloodbath, my shuttle will be docking at your secondary airlock in one minute. Please have Miss Opatz there ready and waiting. Oh, and if you get any last minute ideas about trying to take more hostages, that shuttle has a load of NiPox explosive aboard. That’ll reduce most of your ship to monatomic vapour.”
“But you’ll kill your own crew members if you do that,” said Lother.
“True, but I’ll be saving them by killing them,” said West. “Remember, I’ve read your file.”
The small shuttle docked with the Bloodbath. It took a moment for the two airlocks to sync up with each other and then the doors opened. In the Bloodbath’s airlock was Valerie and two of Raktu’s men, weapons drawn. In the shuttle was Lincon in a ship’s suit and Glodi and Lasho, both in full EVA combat armour, also with weapons ready.
“Good morning,” said Lincon in an entirely too happy manner. “Do you fancy a ride?”
Valerie moved from the Bloodbath into the shuttle. Addressing the two crew, Lincon said “We’ll be waiting on the other side of this door while the funds are transferred. Toodloo!”
With that cheerful goodbye over, the door on the shuttle swung shut. As soon as it was, Lincon grabbed Valerie and the four of them moved deeper into the shuttle.
“Sorry miss, but we have to be quick,” said Lincon. “We’re going to jump into an emergency pod and the two big chaps will tow us back to the Kilkka while the shuttle remains here.”
Almost before he had finished speaking, they had reached the back of the shuttle. Lincon unceremoniously picked up Valerie and dumped her into the emergency pod, a small ovoid about two meters long. Glodi and Lasho strapped on some maneuvering packs on in one swift motion and cycled the airlock almost before Lincon had jumped into the pod and closed the lid. The rear door on the shuttle opened and the two suited men pulled the pod out into space.
“Sorry about the cramped quarters miss,” said Lincon. “It’ll only be for a few minutes.”
Valerie just gave him an angry glare. She was upset about having been thrown around, but the look didn’t have the right effect since her nose was up against his ear.
“Encrypted banking line open, transferring the funds to you now,” said West. The money flowed from the Kilkka to the Bloodbath faster than you can say ‘we’re rich!’
The Celiker fully rose up out of the debris into clear space, but was careful to stay behind the Bloodbath.
“New Dawn, will you be okay to jump?” asked West.
“Sure,” replied Rosalie. “We’ll stay here a bit longer and make some repairs before we do though.”
“Celiker, how are you doing?”
“We’re fine,” said Powell. “We’ll stay and see if the New Dawn requires assistance. We have several excellent mechanics aboard.”
“What about us?” said Lother. “You crippled our ship!”
“We’d be more than happy to give you a tow,” purred West. “The charge is a little steep though, ten mil to take you anywhere you want to go.”
“That’s piracy!” screamed Raktu. “You can’t do that!”
“That’s the game you signed up for,” replied West in a cold voice.
“How about five mil?” asked Lother. “A fifty-fifty split is fairly reasonable, isn’t it?”
“Well, for five mil I can tow you direct to Balga, where the judiciary have a bounty for live prisoners. That would make up the shortfall. For the full ten mil, I’d be more than happy to take you to any system you wanted to go to.”
“How about seven and a half?” asked Lother. “That will cover you for your expenses and be more than whatever the bounty is.”
Ken was carefully checking the displays and then looked up at West and gave him the pre-arranged “she’s safely aboard” signal to let him know they had Valerie.
“Sounds like a sweet deal to me,” said West. “Eject all your remaining missiles and we’ll pop those party favours. After that, we’ll position ourselves ready and lock you in and you can nominate the system that you want to go to.”
With the money transferred back, the missiles destroyed and both ships in position, the Kilkka made the jump, taking the Bloodbath with it.
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