Gibraltar Stars Page 27

  With bodies arrayed in rows, and anchored to the deck with cargo nets, he’d led a funeral service with all hands in attendance. Then had come the installation of two more incendiary bombs. Lastly, they emptied the freezers of ice and spread it over the bodies to reduce the rate of decay. With the ventilators sealed and the hatch dogged tight, the compartment would not be heated and the odor of corruption would be contained.

  Should capture be imminent, Mark planned to order everyone into the mess, and in a scene reminiscent of an ancient movie he’d once seen, have the doctor pass out suicide pills. The timers would be programmed to explode after the pills did their deadly work. He hoped the magnesium and oil, fed by a plentiful supply of pure oxygen, would burn hot enough to destroy all biological material in the two compartments, leaving nothing for the Broa to analyze.

  It wasn’t as effective as a nuclear explosion, but it was the best he could manage with the resources at hand. Unfortunately, the plan included one major drawback. No matter how redundant the initiating circuits, there was still the remote possibility of a malfunction preventing the incendiaries from igniting. To guard against such a contingency, someone would have to stay alive long enough to do the job manually, if needed. By long tradition, that someone would have to be the captain.

  Of all the ways to die, Mark considered being burned alive the very worst. To make sure his resolve did not fail him in those final few seconds, he unlocked Captain Darva’s safe and retrieved the pistol that regulations required to be there.

  He was jogged out of his reverie by the sound of a throat being cleared. Doctor Hamjid was hovering in the hatchway.

  “Come in, Doctor. How is Captain Darva?”

  “Resting comfortably. I have the cranial swelling under control. The palsy has ceased.”

  “Good. And your other patients?”

  “Spacer Grimes is the worst. I don’t think he will survive the day. The others are in no immediate danger. We have their pain under control.”

  “Do you have enough pain killers?”

  There was a hint of mirth in the doctor’s response. “Considering how long we are liable to require them, the supply is more than adequate.”

  Mark nodded, glad to see their predicament had been accepted to the point where people could make jokes about it, no matter how lame.

  “Gwen is going to put spin on the ship to get us a pair of eyes. It will be a nudge, only one-tenth RPM. Make sure your patients are all strapped down. We don’t want any of them drifting out of bed.”

  “Will do, Captain. It is at the request of my patients that I have come. They are all asking about the Broa. Have they spotted us yet?”

  “Doctor, we lit up their inner system like a supernova. Of course we’ve been spotted. We’re blind at the moment, but you can bet your stethoscope they have ships en route.”

  “Is that what you wish me to tell my patients?”

  “No. Tell them we are working on getting the sensors back online and that I will make an announcement when I have something to report. How is the crew holding up?”

  “They are doing well… considering the circumstances. You’ve been keeping them busy. That helps.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “There is one more thing,” Hamjid said.

  “Shoot!”

  “You haven’t slept since the explosion. Scuttlebutt has it that we will be in battle soon. We need your head clear for combat.”

  “Message received and understood. I’ll catch a nap as soon as I finish a few things here.”

  “Yes, sir. I will get back to my patients.”

  #

  Mark was shaken awake by Chris Sotheby. Turning over in his bunk, he asked, “How long did I sleep?”

  “Four hours, sir. Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a bogey on detectors.”

  “Where is it coming from?”

  “The planet.”

  Mark slowly rotated himself to a sitting position, using the sleeping belt to keep from floating away. He rubbed his eyes. “Is it headed this way?”

  “It appears so. Number One scope is locked on. The cross-axis velocity is virtually nil, and there seems to be a slow change in the Doppler shift. We think it is boosting at two standard gravs, which probably makes it a warship.”

  “Accelerating or decelerating?”

  “Accelerating.”

  “Okay, that means we have time. Give me a minute to wash the sleep from my eyes and I will be with you presently.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mark got up and sponged his face with cold water. It helped. The adrenaline had worn off shortly after Dr. Hamjid left the bridge and he’d taken the doctor’s advice about getting some rest.

  As he’d told Sotheby, if the ship coming toward them was accelerating, it was good news. Matching velocities with a ship headed directly at you was one of the hardest of all space maneuvers. With Sasquatch aimed at Karap-Vas, their pursuer would first have to accelerate away from the planet, then at the one-third point, flip end for end and thrust vigorously back the way it had come. Eventually, the last of the outward velocity so painfully gained would dissipate, bringing the ship to a halt before it picked up speed back in the direction it had come.

  Essentially, the ships were doing what the runner in a relay race does at the approach of the baton holder. The second runner sprints forward and gains velocity until the two are moving at the same speed at the moment the baton is passed.

  There were limits as to how quickly a practical head-on rendezvous can be accomplished. Starships, like the nuclear-powered rockets that preceded them, possess essentially unlimited propulsive capabilities, at least on the scale of this particular intercept. The number of gees the Broan ship could lay on was limited only by the acceleration tolerance of its crew. At two standard gravities, their pursuer would require another seven days to pull alongside Sasquatch.

  Of greater concern to Mark was a Broan ship behind them. Since hunted and hunter would be moving in the same direction, any Broan coming from behind would have an inherent advantage over a head-on approach. In such a situation, a stern chase was no longer the long chase.

  He finished washing and combed his hair before returning to the bridge. A few seconds later, he was huddled with Chris Sotheby and Bob Costello, the sensor operator. The three of them gazed at one of the newly repaired screens where a fuzzy patch of white lay silhouetted against an ebon sky.

  “Is that them?”

  “That’s them,” Sotheby confirmed.

  “Where’s the planet?”

  “Five degrees down, out of the field of view,” the operator replied. “Whoever that ship is, they’ve got engines. They’re coming on fast.”

  “What class?”

  “Definitely a warship, sir. That blotch is from its radiators. They’re running way too hot to be civilian. From the energy they are radiating to space, I would say it’s an avenger.”

  Mark nodded. He was familiar with the type. One had chased him out of Pastol. An avenger’s long-range weaponry was more than capable of vaporizing Sasquatch, if he could just make the commander mad enough.

  #

  “… that ends my official report. On an unofficial note, please tell my wife, Lisa, that I love her. Commander Mark Rykand, T.S.N.S. Sasquatch, Commanding. End of message…

  Lisa gazed at the viewscreen through the globules of tears that pooled in her eyes. She sniffed and reached up to wipe the tears away with a towel, not wanting them to float around the compartment where they could get into delicate electronics. It was two days since Captain Cavendish provided the recording to her, and she had just finished listening to it for the fifth time. Its impact on her emotions was undiminished from the first time she’d listened.

  There had been two more communications from the crippled cruiser, but neither from Mark. These were handled by one of the crew. The first message informed them that a Broan avenger had been detected rising from the planet. The second was mostly a long list of the dead. As before, the
messages came via directional radio beam on the emergency frequency.

  Nor was Sasquatch the only ship with which they were in contact. Yeovil was on the downhill portion of her run, currently decelerating at 3.2 standard gravities and some fifty hours from rendezvous. Yeovil and Galahad had comm lasers locked on one another and were exchanging continuous updates. There were no conversations, however. Those were made impossible by the current speed-of-light delay of 40 minutes.

  Despite its herculean efforts so far, Yeovil had still not closed to weapons range.

  The primary weapon of human starships was the superlight missile. Essentially, SMs were optimized versions of the message probe with which Dan Landon destroyed the Broan ship that had killed Mark’s sister.

  Normally, a message probe has no offensive use. However, with Magellan under attack as it orbited New Eden, Landon recognized that attempting to launch a message probe would quickly overload its drive generators, causing it to explode. Without the drive field to keep it in superlight, the debris would return to normal space with an intrinsic velocity that was a goodly percentage of the speed of light.

  And so it had. The Broan aggressor ran into the debris field and was instantly vaporized.

  SM drive generators were built more robustly than those of message probes, but they were no less susceptible to gravitational curvature. At Sasquatch’s distance from Sabator, the effective range of a superlight missile was a few million kilometers.

  For three days, Yeovil had swept space before it with sensors at full gain. An hour earlier, Captain Sulieman reported two more enemy ships stalking Sasquatch. Both ships’ trajectories were straight out of the asteroid belt between Planets Six and Seven.

  One of the pursuing craft did not seem to be a problem. Yeovil identified it as an asteroid mining boat. The other ship was a war craft, less powerful than an avenger, but more than capable of handling an invalid like Sasquatch.

  The bad news was that both would overtake the cruiser twelve full hours before Yeovil could arrive on the scene.

  #

  “Goddamn it, Number One!” Captain Ravi Sulieman said to his executive officer. “We’re going to be half a day late.”

  Of necessity, both Sulieman and his Exec conferred via screen. Both were sunk deeply in their respective acceleration couches, held down by a force three times that of normal gravity. With their flesh drawn taut by acceleration, they looked like two old men. Moreover, after three days of this torture, with only periodic reductions to change the watch, they felt like two old men.

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but that’s what TacPlot is telling us. Do we revert to our original orders?”

  Sulieman considered it. His orders were very specific. He must not allow Sasquatch to fall into enemy hands. If the situation allowed him to rescue those poor unfortunates, then that was his primary objective. If, however, rescue proved impossible, his orders were to shift from rendezvous to attack, and to destroy the ship and its survivors with SM fire.

  But damnit, he’d come too far to kill his comrades. There had to be a better way!

  He looked at the velocity plot again. It showed the projected course and timeline for four ships: his own and the three Broans. The curve representing the avenger was shifted far to the right, and not a factor. However, the curves for the two ships from the asteroid belt both terminated to the left of Yeovil’s projected arrival time. The first ship to reach Sasquatch would be the mining boat, and then, an hour later, the warship.

  What the hell could he do? The laws of physics were inviolable. There was an ancient phrase he had always liked: It’s not only not nice to fool Mother Nature, it is not possible! Yet, if he weren’t so dog tired, perhaps he could think of something.

  “Captain, do we revert to our original mission?” his executive officer asked again. “If so, I have to crank in the new acceleration profile.”

  “No, damn it!” Ravi Sulieman growled after another thirty seconds’ consideration. “We’re not giving up. Cut all acceleration!”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me. Kill the normal space generators, now!”

  #

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Captain, we’ve got another bogey.”

  Mark looked up from reading the morning report. He was belted into the command chair on the bridge, sipping coffee from a drinking bulb. If there was one positive aspect to their situation, it was that they were eating hot meals again. That was thanks to one of the repair crews who, without orders and in their off hours, had patched several shrapnel holes in the galley and rewired the stoves and ovens to get them working again. Foodstuffs, of course, were no problem. They would last for as long as they were needed.

  Normally a captain would read the morning report on the work screen built into the instrument cluster at his command station. The screens in front of Mark were dark. Instead, he was reading from a bedraggled sheet of paper on which progress reports had been scribbled by several different hands.

  “Where, Mr. Costello?” he asked, looking up at Screen Two, where the plot from the wide angle scanners was displayed.

  “Behind us, Captain.”

  Mark took the news with the passivity that befitted an officer in command. The only outward sign of the sudden tightening in his lower abdomen was the deep sigh that escaped his lips.

  “Okay. Swing Telescope Two around and let me see him.”

  For the last two days, one of their two operating viewscreens had been focused on the Broan avenger climbing toward them. Measurements of Doppler shift indicated that it had very nearly shed all of its outward velocity, and that it would soon begin the process of accelerating toward the planet in order to make rendezvous when Sasquatch overtook it.

  Screen Two came alight and showed star streaks for a few seconds as the telescope slewed into position. Then the view stabilized. Once again there was the white blob of a thermal source silhouetted against a black sky. This one wasn’t as bright as the avenger’s thermal signature.

  Smaller it may have been, but this was no mirage or sensor glitch. There was, indeed, a ship coming up behind them. There were only two questions: How far and how fast?

  The answers came five minutes later. “Uh, we’ve got a Doppler shift and rate of change, sir. I make the closing velocity 200 KPS and his deceleration rate approximately two standard gravities.”

  The two data points told Mark Rykand all he needed to know. Assuming the bogey was attempting a rendezvous (any other assumption was nonsensical), it was a simple matter to calculate how long it would take for the two ships’ velocities to converge. And knowing that, he could determine how far the pursuer would travel between now and then. That pinpointed the current range.

  “Shit! He’s less than three hours away,” Mark exclaimed. “How did he get so close without us seeing him?”

  “He’s a much smaller target than the avenger, sir. Radiator temperature is only about a thousand degrees, and from the energy readings, I would say he has it pointed directly away from us.”

  Mark thought about it and nodded. Their wide-angle thermal array was far from optimum for this sort of work. He was just thankful the sensors had picked up the bogey before it rammed its prow up their ass.

  Mark pressed the key that would send his voice to every pressurized corner of the ship.

  “Attention, All Hands! This is the captain speaking. We have detected an enemy craft coming up behind us. ETA is three hours. Initiate Plan Alpha. Stop what you are doing and evacuate all wounded to the sanctuary. I will be calling for Battle Stations in one hour. Repeat, we suit up in one hour. Make all preparations. Captain out!”

  He hadn’t finished the announcement when Chris Sotheby floated through the hatch.

  “This it, sir?”

  “Looks like it, Chris. Get your people ready on the attitude control jets. We’ll increase spin to one RPM as soon as everyone is at battle stations. This close, we need faster circumambient updates.”

  “Captain?”

 
; “What is it Mr. Costello?”

  “I think I’ve got another one. It’s about ten degrees from the first bogey, two o’clock relative. Its radiators are operating at the same temperature as the avenger. Could be a warship.”

  “That’s just not fair,” Mark growled, trying to make light of it. Somehow, it didn’t come out that way. “Okay, use Telescope One. Tell me what we’ve got.”

  The image on Screen One changed for the first time in two days as the telescope slewed to look behind them. In a few seconds, the second bogey was centered on the screen.

  “Definitely military, Captain. Not big enough to be an avenger. Might be a hunter-sniffer.”

  It had been Sar-Say who had given them the names of the various Broan naval classes in the days before they found out that he was a Broa himself. ‘Hunter-sniffer’ loosely translated into destroyer.

  “Deceleration rate and velocity?”

  Costello studied his instruments. After two minutes, he replied, “Three hundred KPS, decelerating at 2 gees.”

  “Okay, that puts him an hour behind the other one. We’ll take them in order. Designate the small one as Bogey 2, and the hunter-sniffer as Bogey 3.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  Mark again keyed for the address system and informed the crew of the new pursuer.

  No doubt about it. The end game had begun.

  #

  Lisa was back at her station, eavesdropping on the Karap-Vas traffic control system. The last five days had involved feverish modifications to their search algorithms. The new software favored extra-atmospheric message traffic, the better to track the three ships she’d heard ordered in pursuit of Sasquatch. There had been no other intercepts concerning them since that first one.

  As she listened to a series of messages in High Broan, she sat up straighter. Halting the playback, she ordered the computer to begin again at the minus-30 second mark. She listened again. Someone was reporting that the objective was in sight. Lisa keyed for the Captain on the bridge.