Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

-40-

Finding the last pirate ship turned out to be easier than we’d imagined.

Seeing us make a screaming pass by his friends, and quickly realizing he could never outrun us, Lorn went into silent-running mode again.

The mistake he made was leaving a very straight line of tritium in his wake.

“There,” I said, leaning over Zye’s shoulder. “Lead him. Fire ahead of where you think he is.”

“Why not run a missile right up his tailpipe?” Zye asked.

I glanced at her. She’d been picking up old-fashioned idioms from Rumbold. One element of longevity that I’d never gotten completely used to was the way that oldsters sometimes expressed themselves. It was almost like talking to someone from Elizabethan times, when they lapsed into the slang of their youth.

“Because we want to force him to capitulate,” I explained, “not destroy him.”

She shook her head. “He’s Stroj. He won’t surrender. Even if he does, he’ll only do so to harm us in some way. He’ll never cooperate.”

“Leave that up to me, Zye. Fire as I’ve directed.”

The missiles zoomed ahead moments later. Twin vapor trails followed them. The engines quickly dwindled to tiny points of light like stars, then vanished completely into the eternal night which we called space.

About sixty seconds after we launched the weapons, they ignited in a single brilliant puff of energy. I studied the data.

“That was too close. Zye…?”

She shrugged. “I struck directly ahead of the enemy craft,” she said, wearing her best poker face.

Growling in frustration, I moved to Yamada’s side.

“Any sign of debris? Zye decided to play one of her tricks.”

“We’ve got venting,” Yamada said, her voice rising in excitement. “Gas traces, residual radiation, but the ship isn’t visible.”

“Open a general hailing channel,” I said.

“Ready to transmit.”

Engaging my implant, I spoke into the void, hoping the damaged enemy could still hear me.

“Captain Lorn,” I said. “We know where you are. We’ve penetrated your stealth technology. If you don’t heave-to and prepare to be boarded, we’ll fire again. This time, we’ll hit your ship directly and take it out.”

We listened for a full minute, but there was only crackling static in return.

“Maybe they can’t hear us,” Yamada suggested.

“Or maybe,” Zye said, “they don’t care. They’ll play dead until we get close, then strike without—”

That was as far as she got with her prediction before it came true. The enemy appeared directly in front of us and unloaded all its remaining armament.

“All decks, brace for impact!” I shouted.

The missiles were so close we could see them. The forward shields were up, fortunately, but at this range—

I barely made it back to my command chair before the ship began to shudder with the strikes. The energies released buckled our shield and slammed into the hull so hard it would have destroyed a lesser ship.

But
Defiant
was nothing if not tough. She was thicker-skinned than anything Earthmen had ever built. In that moment, I was very glad the Betas were a paranoid people.

The nav table flickered and went out. The starboard side of the ship had lost power, including portions of the command deck. Emergency power kicked in and took over automatically. Red lights glowed dimly and the air smelled of ozone.

Hurriedly, I lowered my faceplate. There was no telling if there had been radiation contamination. We’d been hit hard and there were cracks in the tough hull.

A dozen voices were talking all at once. I cut through them all with my own booming shout.

“Damage report!”

“Decks three, two and one—our deck, Captain—all suffered serious damage. Two casualties reported, one killed, one seriously wounded.”

“What about our weapons? Zye?”

“We’ve got one bank of plasma cannons online. Our missile ports are not responding.”

I looked at her. “Not responding? Send a crew down there to get a visual.”

“On it, sir. Shall I fire our remaining plasma cannons?”

For a long second, I regarded the ship hanging in space in front of me. It was mocking us. Damaged but unwilling to surrender, the Stroj vessel had turned about and was now lashing our hull with her thin beams. If they had any more missiles, I had no doubt her crew was racing to load them into their tubes.

My fist came down on the arm of my chair. “Damn it, yes. Destroy her.”

Zye let a quiet grin play on her lips as she spun back around to her boards. She must have had every gun target locked and ready. The beams sang, and at this range, we could hardly miss.

The pirate ship was cut apart. We couldn’t see the beams themselves, of course, but we watched as they drew lines of explosive heat across the hull, striking amidships. They dug and dug deeper, releasing billows of pressurized vapor and burning sparks of metal. The internal vessel was compromised, life-giving gases and fuel escaping into vacuum. The gases were ignited by the intense heat, creating a series of flashing explosions that quickly died out, swallowed by the hard vacuum.

Then, after we’d cut her almost in half, the pirate’s engine core was breached and the whole thing blew up in our faces. I blinked and squinted, such was the level of that momentary brilliance.

Zye turned back around to me. “I told you. The Stroj would never let us capture their ship.”

I nodded in defeat. I thought of reprimanding her for what I suspected was shaving down the range on our missile strike, but I realized that there was little point to it now. She’d been right, after all. The enemy hadn’t allowed us to capture their ship. Destroying her was the only true option we’d had all along.

“Sir, I’m picking up something else,” Yamada said.

“Specify.”

“Small objects—relatively small. There are three of them drifting away from the debris.”

“Scan them for life signs.”

“I’ve got nothing. Nothing on any of them.”

“They could be mines,” Zye suggested.

“Yes, or records of the battle,” I said. “Target the nearest and destroy it, Zye.”

Happily, she turned back to her work. A single cannon fired, and the first of the canisters vanished in a puff of heat and gas.

“Doesn’t look like it was a mine, anyway,” I said, examining the spectroscope readout. “Fire on the second.”

The second was disintegrated without incident. It didn’t even explode.

“Sir, the third is moving away from us,” Yamada reported in surprise, “under its own power.”

“Interesting. Weapons-lock, Zye?”

“I have a firing solution.”

“Don’t fire,” I said quickly. “Yamada, try to hail that canister.”

She listened for a second, then smiled. She piped the input to the forward screen.

A very angry image of Captain Lorn appeared. He looked the worse for wear. His body was scorched in places and most of his hair had been burned away. His metal and polymer parts were exposed like scorched bone all along his right side. I wondered briefly how he’d evaded our sensors, but then decided it hardly mattered.

A huge grin expanded over my face.

“Captain Lorn!” I boomed. “I’m so glad you survived this misunderstanding.”

“The feeling isn’t mutual, Sparhawk,” he growled.

“Don’t be a poor sport, man,” I said. “We won, you lost. That’s how it goes in battle.”

“Why do you contact me? To torment me before you deal the deathblow? In that case, I’m done with this conversation.”

He reached up to switch off the comm system, but I raised my hand toward the screen to stop him.

“Hold on, Lorn. Let’s talk seriously.”

“Speak, don’t prolong this.”

“I’ll get to the point. You seem like a thinking man. A man who values his existence more than your average Stroj.”

He stared at me for a moment. He was breathing heavily, as if injured. Curls of smoke twisted above his head. I wasn’t sure of the source, but it might have been his scorched body.

“You insult me. I’m Stroj. I think only of service to my people.”

“Of course,” I said smoothly, “but think: a man can’t be much help to his people when he’s dead.”

“Again you call me a man. You must stop with these insults or I’ll terminate this conversation.”

I found it interesting he objected to being called human. Insinuating that Earth Basics, such as myself, could be considered in any way equivalent to a Stroj was insulting to him.

“Captain Lorn,” I said, “I would like to meet and discuss matters with you personally. I’m offering you your life as a prisoner of war.”

He eyed me thoughtfully. “Such a thing is unknown to us. You wish to dissect me.”

I gave him an airy wave of the hand. “There are countless Stroj bodies drifting around in space due to our efforts. It’s not your anatomy that I’m interested in.”

“What then?”

“Come aboard as my guest—under guard, of course—and we’ll discuss it.”

His haggard eyes took on a calculating aspect. “You mean we’ll discuss this in person? Face to face?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He rubbed at torn, blackened lips with a hand that was missing a finger or two. “All right. I’ll come aboard. But remember, you said we’d talk face-to-face.”

“We’ll talk,” I said, “rest assured on that point.”

The channel closed, and Zye looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

“Many times you’ve met with the Stroj,” she said with a mixture of anger and disbelief. “And still you would invite one aboard our ship? To sit and talk with it?”

“Relax, Zye,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”

Her face smoothed out, and I was surprised to realize she was actually making a serious effort to do as I’d instructed.

-41-

Letting a Stroj commander board
Defiant
was a big step. I did it with trepidation, but also with haste. The enemy warship, which we’d only caught a glimpse of when we’d buzzed by her hours earlier, was still in dogged pursuit.

The enemy ship couldn’t catch us with sheer speed, but she clearly outclassed us. Resembling a barrel bristling with weapons, I went over the imagery we’d gotten during our fly-by.

“That, sir,” Zye had declared, “is a Stroj dreadnought. She’s probably tasked with security for this system, which is obviously some kind of advanced base for the enemy.”

I nodded, having come to much the same conclusion. The enemy warship displaced twice the amount of mass that we did. Maybe, if the truth were to be told, she was even a bit bigger than that.

“Well,” I said, “she hasn’t caught up with us yet. We have time to talk to our guest.”

Zye’s thick arm came up to bar my passage. I pushed it away, and she looked down.

“Sorry sir,” she said. “I would just like to point out that Captain Lorn can have only one purpose for allowing us to capture him.”

“Which is?”

“He wants to kill you. Probably through self-demolition. Remember the Stroj agent back at House Astra?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I have no intention of allowing Lorn to injure me. Rumbold? Where’s Rumbold?”

“Here sir,” he said.

His voice was muffled, and I realized he was one of the three techs standing in blast gear at the back of the group. I gave him a twisted-lip stare.

“I take it you’re prepared to withstand a bomb?”

“Just in case the enemy slips one past us, Captain. I’m sure you understand. Not meant to be an offense in any way, shape or form,” came his muted response.

“None taken,” I said, and I led the way to the landing bay.

All vehicles and cargo had been cleared from the deck. The small Stroj craft came tumbling in, having been dragged into
Defiant’s
belly by grav-beams.

When the pod stopped rolling, we approached it diffidently.

“Looks hot, sir,” Rumbold said when the craft had come to a full halt against the back wall of the hangar.

“It’s smoking like a meteor,” I said. “Is that because of the grav-beams?”

He nodded his head. “This only happens if the craft battles the beam. The life pod was probably flying on automatic. Maybe that’s why Captain Lorn gave in—maybe he didn’t really have any choice.”

Shrugging, I directed two crewmen to set up a stasis field around the pod. They did so, and the field swiftly deployed. It felt like a cobweb was being dragged over my face and entire body. The field was visible only as a slightly shimmering dome in the air. The air itself felt full of static charges. Every movement made my uniform crackle and flash with tiny discharges.

“Open the pod,” I directed.

The two crewmen did so fearfully, despite the fact they were suited up in what amounted to blast-proof armor. Rumbold stood well back and supervised.

Almost immediately, a hideous head popped out of the pod.

“You took long enough,” Lorn complained. “If I were you, I’d punish these crewmen for their slow performance, Sparhawk.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “Now, if you would be so good as to shed all your weapons on the deck, we’ll take you into protective custody.”

“Protective custody?” he asked, laughing. “Absurd. This is a hijacking—false imprisonment. If our two empires don’t go to war immediately, this event will soon push the matter over the edge.”

I gestured toward the deck. Lorn hesitated.

“What’s to stop me from taking you all, right here?” he asked.

I’d been expecting that question. Stroj rarely respected anything other than superior force. I drew my saber and powered it.

“I’ll cut you down myself if I must.”

Lorn loosed a hollow, ringing guffaw and shook his head. He climbed out of the tight pod with some difficulty, but soon he stood before us on the deck. He looked around the group again, obviously sizing us up.

At last, he nodded affirmatively. “I can take you. All five of you. You’re not even carrying guns.”

He lifted both his artificial limbs and black tubes extended from his wrists.

I took a half step forward in response, lifting my sword.

A spray of dark spheres, about the size of beetles, sprayed out of those tubes. They showered all of us. The crewmen, including Rumbold, backpedaled reflexively.

“Steady on,” I said, “stay within the dome.”

Rumbold and his men stopped retreating. The black balls bounced off of our bodies and rolled all over the deck. A few made it past the protected limits of the stasis dome. Flashes immediately occurred when they exited the dome.

“Bomblets?” I asked. “Crude, but probably effective under some circumstances.”

Lorn looked confused and annoyed. He took two steps closer and put his fists on his hips.

“What’s this then? Some kind of field? That’s very unsportsmanlike of you, Sparhawk.”

With the tip of my blade, I scooped up one of the bomblets and bounced it off his chest. He winced reflexively.

“It’s far more sophisticated than your clumsy attack.”

“That was just a personal defense system,” he said, waving his hand at the bomblets dismissively. “I just wanted to test your resolve.”

“I see. Now, Captain Lorn, if you would be so good as to comply with my orders. Remove your weapons and drop them on the deck.”

“My entire body is lethal,” Lorn said. “You can’t truly disarm me.”

“We’ll start with those black tubes that dispensed the bomblets.”

The process took several minutes and countless threats, but we finally got him to shed a variety of needlers, energy projectors and bomblets as well as other, less easily identified items.

At last I was satisfied. Directing Rumbold and his team to pick up the stasis generator and follow, I turned to lead the way into the ship.

Lorn balked in annoyance. “We’re taking that contraption with us?” he demanded.

“Of course. Every moment during your stay aboard
Defiant
, you’ll be in close proximity to a stasis generator. You won’t be able to blow yourself up or commit some other combustible crime of large scope.”

“Bah!” he bellowed. “Then I’ll have to end it here.”

He charged me then. I had to admit, I was somewhat surprised. My hand reached up to the clasp on my personal shielding—but of course, that didn’t work. No major energy release would.

Zye moved to intercede, stepping between my person and Lorn. He reached her, and the two struggled.

Under less threatening circumstances, the battle would have been fascinating. Zye was a clone, genetically selected for size and strength with powerful arms born from the rigors of life on a high-gravity world. Lorn was a hybrid of flesh and machine with polymer substitutes for muscle and bone.

My impression was that both were surprised by the strength and ferocity of the other. Zye locked arms with the Stroj captain, but he quickly swept her feet out from under her with a thick leg.

She held onto his arms and pulled him down with her, rolling him over her head so he landed flat on his back. She sprang up, as did he, and they charged one another again.

It was my sword that ended the conflict at that juncture. I thrust it between Lorn’s legs, taking one of them off just below the knee. He went down and tumbled onto his face on the deck.

Zye fell upon his back and held him down. The Stroj heaved and bucked under her, but was unable to dislodge her weight.

“That was unnecessary,” she said, breathing hard, “but thank you.”

“You’re bleeding,” I said, looking over her forearms where Lorn had gripped her.

“It’s nothing.”

In the end, we had to chain Captain Lorn with thick force-bonds and frog-march him to a cell in the brig. The stasis-generator stayed outside his cell, just out of reach. He glowered at us, angry and soundly humiliated.

As a peace offering, I brought his lower leg to the bars and passed it through. He grabbed it.

“Here,” I said, offering him a set of basic tools.

He took the tools and hopped to the back of his cell. There, he began to reattach the limb.

“Why did you take me aboard, Sparhawk?”

“Because I wanted to exchange valuable information.”

He snorted. “What, in your fevered dreams, do you expect to extract from me? Surely, even a foolish Basic such as yourself must know I’ll do everything I can to slay you.”

“You’ve made that abundantly clear, yes,” I agreed. “But I still hold out hope for an exchange of value to both of us.”

“You’re a dreamer. You should listen to that pet Beta of yours. She knows my kind all too well—as I know hers. I’ve killed no less than six of her sisters personally, you know.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t share
that
information,” I suggested.

“Get to the point then, man. You’re wasting what little lifetime I have left.”

I cocked my head curiously. “Why are you so sure it’s limited?”

“Because of that dreadnought out there. Surely, you’ve noticed her? She’s a predator. A shark where your ship and mine were only minnows. She’ll come for us, and catch us, and mangle us in time.”

“You’ve struck upon an area in which we might be able to cooperate,” I said, “privately, of course.”

He looked at me quizzically. His expression was one of irritation mixed with curiosity.

“I get it. You want a way out of this system. I led you here as part of a trap—but you know that, don’t you?”

“I figured it out eventually. But you’re trapped as well.”

He shrugged and snorted. “What of it? I’m screwed regardless. For a Stroj who’s been defeated, the only final act that makes any sense is to damage or kill the enemy who bested him. Now, you’ve denied me even that small pleasure.”

“What if I offer you survival?” I asked.

“In exchange for what?”

“There must be a way out of this system. A way to redirect the artificial bridge, for example.”

He shook his head. “No, not that one. It’s been shut down. You sent a probe through to check, didn’t you?”

We hadn’t of course. After a brief pause during which I considered lying to him, he shouted with laughter.

“You didn’t know, did you?” he demanded. “You had no idea you couldn’t go back the way you came!”

One of our viable options
had
been to circumnavigate the central binary stars and come around to escape through the same portal where we’d entered the system. Lorn had just dashed that hope.

“Listen, Sparhawk,” he cackled. “Before this is over, you’re going to wish you’d let me blow us both up. That would have been a kindness. You’re going to watch your entire crew die, knowing that afterward scraps of their flesh will be hunted for within the wreckage by a thousand greedy Stroj spacers from that dreadnought.”

“We’re still alive now,” I told him. “You and I both. I repeat: let’s come to an understanding.”

He approached the bars, carrying his severed foot. “Really? Am I detecting a craven side of you I hadn’t suspected? You’d perform a treasonous act to save your skin?”

“That’s not how I’d describe it. What I’m proposing is that you help this ship exit the system, and I’ll drop you off in your lifepod there, or wherever you might want to be released on our return journey to Earth.”

His eyes were calculating. I could see he was interested, but he was probably also trying to figure out how to screw me in the bargain.

“All right,” he said. “Free me from this cage. I’ll accompany you to the command deck and direct you to the exit from there.”

Shaking my head, I chuckled. “I’m a gullible man,” I said, “but there are limits. You will give us the data we need and we’ll check it out. If we escape with your help, I’ll honor my bargain and free you.”

He made a dismissive gesture and returned to a small stool at the back of the cell. He sat on it and tinkered with his damaged leg.

“No, I’ll pass,” he said.

“Really? There’s no other way either of us will survive. You said so yourself.”

He shrugged. “No matter. I was willing to die to take you with me just an hour ago. Or have you forgotten?”

“Fine,” I said, walking toward the guards. “Attendant, it’s time to flush this cell. Are the evacuation hatches in working order?”

The man looked surprised, but he nodded.

“Good. Let’s clear the chamber and—”

“Hold a moment,” Lorn said behind me.

I ignored him. “We’ll have to secure the stasis unit to the deck first,” I told the guard. “I wouldn’t want to lose it when we space the cells.”

“Sparhawk!”

Slowly, I turned toward him. “Is there something you wish to say, Lorn?”

He was breathing hard and his face was pressed against the bars. I could see he’d been reaching, straining to touch the stasis unit. But I’d made sure it was beyond any hope of retrieval.