Ambassador 4: Coming Home (36 page)

In the command centre, weapons crew were frantically analysing and calculating. Clearly I had misunderstood the point of the drones. They had been deliberately sacrificed to collect valuable data on the nature of the ship’s weapons. Screens displayed ranges and possible weapon types.

Kando Luczon sat quietly, his back straight, his legs folded and his hands on his knees. Next to him, Tayron sat in exactly the same position. Lilona had slumped over. Her shoulders were shaking and her cheeks glittered with tears. One of her hands lay in her lap, but Federza held the other. Under the soft skin of the underside of her arm, a row of angry red lights flashed. She tried to pull her arm free, but Federza held it firmly.

“Kill me. Just kill me. He’s using my connection to communicate with the crew. I don’t know how long I can hold out. Kill me, now, before he orders them to attack.”

Tayron hit out at her, lightning fast. But he wore a blindfold and missed. He leaned over and grabbed Lilona’s free hand, twisting her arm.

She screamed at him in Aghyrian.

Federza snapped something at Tayron, and Tayron spat at Federza.

I called out, “Hey, that’s not how you treat a crew member.” I pushed off my seat and floated back to the platform.

Thayu was with me. She took her gun out of its bracket, and pushed the end against Tayron’s head. “Do you feel that? Do you know what this is?”

He lifted his chin. “Killing me will have no effect. I’m not bound and my position on the ship is of no importance whatsoever. Kill her, if you need. She has fulfilled her purpose.”

“Is that how you talk about the people who have given you a lifetime’s worth of service?” Thayu poked harder. “The Delegate is very nice and even tempered. If he weren’t here, if it was up to us, you’d be dead many times over. I guess you haven’t come here to be shot by us, so you might like to—”

“Action!” someone shouted.

I turned around so that I could see the projection. Thayu turned around. Crew all throughout the command centre went quiet.

The navigator zoomed out. He overlaid the projection of the thousands of little dots, each representing a ship, with an image of light filaments interweaving, all connecting to the same point in space.

The array of nodes blinked and pulsed again. In the split-second before the lights went off and the command room went dark, I saw a bright shape: a second ship had jumped.

We hadn’t even known about a second Aghyrian ship in the system. This was not a visit to their place of origin. It was an invasion. These Aghyrians had lied to us about everything.

Alarms started blaring, voices were more agitated than before. In amongst all the military’s urgent voices, I heard Ledaya’s shouting orders. We had lost contact with Fleet Command, but the weapons people could fire at will.

Why I had had no idea.

We had no defence against these people at all.

F
IRST THE INTERNAL
lights and screens came back on.

The weapons team started up their systems immediately. The crew were tense, with hands on the controls. Waiting for orders, waiting for the outside feed to come back online.

First the viewscreens flickered into life. Without the scope feed, Ledaya couldn’t enlarge the live view, and the unenlarged version was not very informative. Ships were no more than little dots against the starscape, if we could see them at all.

Then the three-dimensional projection in the middle of the command room came back up. Several people took in sharp breaths, but I didn’t understand why.

“What is that thing?” Deyu whispered

I stared at the projection, confused by the mess of trailing jump wake lines that resembled old spider webs strung over bare tree branches. Ledaya enlarged an area further.

A long, stylus-like shape resolved in the projection, visible only because it trailed anpar filaments as if it had just flown through a dense concentration of spider webs.

That shape was familiar.

It looked like—No, it
was
the military sling.

“How the hell did they end up here?” I asked.

“They must have figured out how to use the array,” Thayu said. “And the Aghyrians, not expecting them to be able to do this, had not closed the line or dampened their wake.”

Sheydu shook her head. “That is a major miscalculation.”

Seated in the command chair, Ledaya balled his fist.

A few of the crew did the same, smiles on faces, and with shining eyes.

There might have been the odd, very uncharacteristic, cheer.

Everyone went back to work. Data scrolled over screens, commands rang around the room.

The sling ship kept a good distance. It was still smaller than the Aghyrian ship but not that much shorter. It went through a series of engine burns that kept it directly behind the Aghyrian ship and that positioned it so that the focus point of the output beam was focused on the ship. It was hard to see that from our position, even in the projection, but Thayu explained it to me.

Space warfare, people had told me on many different occasions, involved long periods of manoeuvring with very short periods of intense action. It also involved extraordinary amounts of physics.

“I don’t understand why the Aghyrian ship doesn’t move away,” I said. “They have to realise that this thing is a weapon.”

Thayu said, “I would stay, too, if I had as much confidence in the integrity of my shields as they seem to have. They would be running calculations to determine where and how they can move through a series of configurations where the sling will always be pointing at one of our ships as well as theirs. Well—I don’t know that they’re doing that, but I would.”

“Maybe you should run a pirate fleet or something.”

She smiled, nervously. We were both nervous. Everyone was nervous. I didn’t like all this waiting. I kept looking at the clock ticking down to the moment the ship would come into range of the station. I trusted that Ezhya was not going to let that happen.

Ledaya held his hand up to get my attention. “Tell the hostages how the new situation stands. One last chance.”

I was still floating next to the platform where the Aghyrians sat. The tether line hung slack. I reeled it in, pulling myself onto the platform.

I faced the captain, who still sat with his back straight.

“A ship has just jumped that will give the Coldi military a big advantage if it were to come to a fight. I plead you to change your ship’s course, or the Chief Coordinator will order to have this weapon fired. I don’t want that to happen. You have a crew of thousands. We have no desire to kill these people.”

“You have a very high opinion of the strength of your weapons.”

“You have a high opinion of the strength of your shield.”

“Yes. I’m not worried. You, on the other hand, are all afraid. You’re afraid that we are going to hit that precious base of yours, and we will. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

“You cannot murder all these people yet again!” Lilona yelled at him and continued in Aghyrian.

He replied. I didn’t understand what he said, but the disdain dripped from his voice.

“Why does she allow him to talk to her like that?” Deyu whispered.

Ezhya’s voice came through the loudspeaker. “We have the sling aimed at your ship. Change course, or there will be a warning shot.”

We waited.

Kando Luczon’s face was impassive. Was there any communication between him and the ship going on?

And waited.

No one spoke; barely anyone dared move. All those crewmembers in the command room watched the three-dimensional projection. The Aghyrian ship’s engines remained off. The clock counted down.

Kando Luczon said nothing. Lilona sat silently crying, pulled as far from him as her bonds allowed. She held Federza’s hand.

In the heavy silence, Ezhya’s voice sounded loud. “I do not see a change. I’m out of patience. Fire.”

No one moved; no one spoke. Not even the faintest whisper or beep of a machine broke the silence.

Kando Luczon sat with his chin in the air, as if he were meditating. We had tested all three of them for equipment, and found nothing. Yet I still didn’t believe that nothing was there.

We waited. And stared at the projection. My heart was thudding like crazy.

Too long.

Damn, it didn’t work. The sling was damaged or jammed, or the ship had a counter-weapon that rendered it harmless—

A blindingly bright beam crossed the space from the sling to the behemoth ship. It hit to the side of the shield and would have whizzed past into space if the shield had not been there. Instead, the charge glanced off an invisible barrier that surrounded the ship. For a moment I thought this was it, but then a bright glow spread around the ship. White turned to angry, pulsing red, enveloping the ship before fading slowly.

“All the outside lights have gone out,” Deyu said.

She was right. Not that the ship had been well-lit to begin with, but now it was completely dark.

Thayu whispered to me, “Look.”

She pointed at the projection, where a shape glowed so brightly that it was hard to make out what it was.

“That’s the shield,” she said.

The hit from the sling had created a pulsing anpar field full of angry, pulsing energy. As the ship moved, wisps of energy eddied off into space, but this didn’t reduce the glow noticeably.

We waited. I barely dared breathe.

Below my feet, the weapons team waited ready to respond with a massive display of fire. Our shield was up as well, which blurred the view on the viewscreens.

Ledaya switched the three-dimensional projection to visible light and enlarged it until a replica of the Aghyrian ship hung in the middle of the room. The outside was still dark.

Sheydu frowned. “I can’t imagine that this glancing blow would have killed the ship. They’re acting. Drawing out time. They want to destroy the station.”

Ledaya was still waiting.

Kando Luczon sat with his eyes closed. His face looked pale and thin. The Aghyrian crew were all unhealthy, if Lilona was to be believed. Was this some sort of macabre suicide mission?

Thayu whispered, “Look at the clock.”

“That was a warning shot,” came Ezhya’s voice through the loudspeakers. “If you do not change course within the count of thirty, we will aim at the centre of the ship and will keep firing until the shield explodes from the heat.”

The captain’s face remained blank and emotionless.

Bright green numbers started the countdown: twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . . twenty-seven . . .

The space station was already over the horizon. It was not particularly well-armed, I thought.

I didn’t understand why Ezhya left the Aghyrians in this orbit for so long. If I was him, I would have fired immediately and kept the ship a safe distance from the station. If they killed it now, what was the guarantee that the empty hull or debris wouldn’t hit the station? I hoped someone was moving the station to a higher orbit. I hoped that was possible.

Twenty-one . . . twenty . . . nineteen . . .

How many people even lived on the station? I hoped they had been able to evacuate a good proportion of them, but I knew there would barely have been any time.

Fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen . . .

Ledaya sat with his hands on the controls. Watching, ready to spring when the order came.

Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .

I wiped sweat from my upper lip. Lilona hid her face in her hands. A line of lights flashed angry red under the soft skin of her forearm.

Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .

This was ridiculous. I called out to Kando Luczon, “Come on. You can stop this. They will destroy you. Have you really come here to have your people murdered?”

Six . . . five . . . four . . .

Thayu and Veyada stared at the projection of the ship. The shield glowed as brightly as it had previously, with trailing strands of energy. It was not shedding its energy quickly enough to be able to absorb another hit.

Three . . .

Ledaya made a barely perceptible move with his finger.

Two . . .

Damn it.

One . . .

Someone yelled, “Action!”

Thayu took in a sharp breath.

Four blinding white spots appeared in the projection: the ship’s engines flared with a brief burst of fire. And then another one, longer this time.

Ledaya yelled, “Hold fire!”

More and more people were staring at the projection.

Slowly, the path diverged from the projected trajectory. The ship broke orbit and moved away from the planet.

The captain said behind me, “We’ll speak briefly.”

K
ANDO
L
UCZON
looked stressed. Hell, everyone looked stressed, with the exception of Tayron, who I had never seen display any emotion whatsoever.

Even Ledaya who was doing his best to hide it, but I spotted him wiping his face and closing his eyes.

“Holy crap,” Thayu said. “Can anyone confirm what just happened? Did they just back away?”

“They did,” Veyada said.

The Aghyrian ship was still gathering speed, climbing to a higher orbit. The station had come over the curve of the planet and was moving a good distance underneath the ship.

I blew out a heavy breath. “They sure did, but I don’t know that I had anything to do with it.”

Ledaya in the command chair gestured me over.

I threw the tether magnet and pulled myself to the command module.

Ezhya was on the screen again. “You have the captain still there in one piece?”

“Yes, although I would have loved to have taken a few pieces off him. He says he wants to talk. Briefly.”

Ezhya snorted. “Guess who decides the duration of our conversation. Bring him.”

A crewmember went to the cargo platform, undid the ties that secured Kando Luczon to the platform. He pulled the captain to the command module by using his tether. He then pushed the captain into the chair and tied his arms and legs. Another crewmember brought a sticky sheet which went over the controls of the bench in front, I guessed so that the captain couldn’t see or interfere with them. A third crewmember brought a bigger sheet of flexible material which he bent around the chair, making a little closed-off cubicle. Only when this was all secured did they remove Kando Luczon’s blindfold.