Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (3 page)

Natalya nodded. “I’ve got clearance to burn for Burleson as soon as we’re clear of the inner markers.”

“How far out do we have to go?”

Natalya offered a smile. “Half a day. No more.”

Zoya’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “What?”

“Half a day. We’ll be able to make a short jump if we can find a clean spot to jump to within two Burleson units.”

“Two units?” Zoya’s face clouded. “I thought this was a scout.”

“Oh, the ship can jump twelve, fourteen units from clean space. From this mess?” Natalya waved a hand to indicate the space around them. “We’d need to go out at least two or three days before we’d be safe to jump that far. We’re so small we can make short jumps just a few stans out of port. Once we get out there, we can jump a long, long way.” She glanced over at Zoya. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Someplace called Dark Knight. It doesn’t show on the charts.”

“Dark Knight Station?”

“Yeah, you know it?”

“Heard of it. Toe-Hold space. That’s what she meant about outside TIC control.”

“Margaret Newmar is sending us to Toe-Hold space?”

“Don’t look so surprised. Lots of people go there.” She shot a smile at Zoya. “That’s where this ship came from. My father got it from the Junkyard.”

“Really? Somebody junked this?”

Natalya laughed. “No. The Junkyard is a station out near Ciroda. It’s a kind of dumping ground for ships, tanks, station parts. All kinds of stuff.”

“Junk.”

“Well, some of it is. You should have seen the
Peregrine
before she got cleaned up.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Not much that a persistent engineer with a half-decent yard nearby couldn’t fix. My father and mother replaced the fusactor. That was the most critical piece. They’d been tinkering on it for stanyers. Finally got it where they wanted it and gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday so I’d have a way to get to the academy.”

“Nice birthday present.”

“Yeah. Well, they split up. Mom went to be chief engineer for Consolidated Freight and I think Dad’s back out in Toe-Hold space. I haven’t heard from him since I started at the academy.”

“You’re my roommate for four stanyers and you never mentioned any of this before?”

“Never came up.” She glanced at Zoya. “What do your parents do?”

Zoya’s face closed down. “Long story. It’s complicated.”

They cleared the inner markers and Natalya pushed the throttles forward. The murmuring vibration in the space frame ratcheted up. Natalya looked at Zoya and raised her voice to speak over the noise. “We’ll be clear in a couple of ticks and can coast a bit.”

“Do you know of any place nearby that we can jump to?” Zoya asked.

“Pull up the waypoint menu on the console. Label is ‘Picnic Area.’”

Zoya pulled up the menu and snickered. “Now I know what you did instead of summer cruises.”

Natalya pulled the throttles back and the kickers resumed their low grumble. The quiet was a blessing. “Hey, I did my time. I got most of those from other pilots.” She grinned. “Lotta old timers around Port Newmar. They remember these scouts and they’re more than happy to share what they know.”

Zoya laid in the plot and watched the timer start ticking down. “You weren’t kidding. At this rate we’ll be out of the system in another two stans.”

Natalya nodded and slapped the release on her seatbelt. “Want some coffee?”

“You have coffee aboard?” Zoya grinned.

“Yeah. Coffee is just water and beans. We have water and the beans don’t have much mass. I don’t mind a cup of tea now and again, but when I’m out here, there’s just something that makes me want coffee.” She lifted her chin. “So? You want a cup?”

“Oh, yes. It’s been a long day and I could use it.”

“Me, too. I still feel like I’ve got my head in a bucket or something.” Natalya made her way back to the passageway and the tiny galley beyond. “You don’t suppose they spiked my tea with something, do you?”

Zoya didn’t answer for a few moments.

Natalya stuck her head back around the corner. “What? They didn’t, did they?”

Zoya shook her head. “I have a hard time imagining they’d do something like that. To what end? Not like any of them was going to take you home as a plaything. Did you
see
those guys?”

Natalya laughed at the image and went back to fixing the coffee.

“Nats? You might want to come out here.”

The high-pitched squeal of a collision alarm filled the tiny space.

Natalya jumped as if she’d been stabbed and threw herself into the couch, her eyes scanning the displays. She slapped the override on the alarm. “Where?”

Zoya pointed to her scanner display. Two blips showed intercept courses. The ships were small and fast. The range markers seemed to be melting away as Natalya looked.

“TIC interceptors?” Natalya asked, not quite believing her eyes.

“That’s what the transponders show.”

Natalya checked her boards again, double-checking the comms array. “They haven’t tried to hail us.”

“They’re burning like crazy,” Zoya said. “They’ll catch up with us in a stan.”

“Are we sure they’re coming for us?”

Zoya shrugged. “No idea. I saw them pop up on the scope just before the alarm spotted them.”

Natalya stared at the screen, measuring the angles and velocity in her head. She buckled her seat belt again and reached for the throttle. “Hold on. Let’s see if we can learn anything.” She pushed the throttle all the way up and the heavy thrusters kicked hard. The noise and vibration practically rattled her teeth, but Natalya watched their velocity increase. Their projected tracks changed on the displays and the intercept courses slowly crept backward to cross behind them.

“Maybe they’re going someplace else in a hurry,” Zoya said, almost shouting to be heard over the noise.

Natalya squinted at the screen, hoping against hope it wasn’t what she thought it was. She kept the throttles up, even as the engineering console showed the strain on the big engines approaching the redline.

For a few ticks, it looked like a false alarm; then the blips shifted on the screen. Their new projected courses intersected with the
Peregrine
in just over a stan.

Zoya looked at Natalya, her face pale in the subdued cockpit lighting.

Natalya sighed. “Looks like they know.” She pulled the throttles back enough to keep the engines from burning out and the screaming vibration faded a bit.

“Intercept in seventy-five ticks,” Zoya said.

Natalya looked at the navigational plot. “They’re going to catch us before we can jump.”

“Can you get any more out of the kickers?”

Natalya looked at the engineering displays, flipping through the readouts and trying to find something that might give them an edge. She shook her head. “If I redline them, they can still catch us in time and they’re not really broken in that well yet. They might blow.”

“Not really the way I want to escape,” Zoya said, her eyes bright but her face still pale.

Natalya looked at her comms panel. “No hails.”

“Maybe they’re not after us?” Zoya’s question hung there.

Natalya didn’t answer. She just gazed at the displays.

Zoya’s fingers started flying over the keys on her console.

Natalya’s head snapped around as she tried to figure out what her roommate was doing. “Astronomical data? What are you looking up?”

Zoya shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the answer. Hush.”

A warbling screech filled the cockpit and a computerized voice chanted. “Weapons lock. Weapons lock.”

Natalya slapped the keys to silence the alarm and looked at the scanner display. The small icons blinked red. Both ships had target lock on the scout. “The bastards!”

Zoya shook her head. “Hush.”

After a tick, Zoya looked at Natalya. “If we shift course we might be able to outrun them.”

“Shift how? Why?”

“The system’s calculating mean Burleson thresholds for a ship of this class, right?”

Natalya’s brain stuttered once but she caught on. “Yes!”

“We have that big gas bag out there, but most of the mass of the system is on the other side of the primary. If we come to this heading and goose it, we can probably outrun the interceptors and jump before they catch on.” She pointed to a course laid out on the navigational console. “Hit it.”

The small ship twisted and slowly reoriented its trajectory. The interceptors didn’t lose lock and didn’t slow down. They simply adjusted their courses.

Natalya felt like there wasn’t enough air in the ship as she waited for the computer to recalibrate the intercept.

When the displays settled, the distances were too close to call.

“Pull back the throttles,” Zoya shouted.

“They’ll catch us.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “And I’ve got a feeling we’ll need that extra boost before we’re done. Slow down. Save them for now.”

Natalya pulled back so the engines stayed out of the red and tried to gauge the distances and times. The computer said they’d be caught.

“They’re not trying to catch us,” Zoya said.

“How can you be sure?”

Zoya looked at her. “They didn’t lock weapons for practice.”

Natalya felt her stomach drop. “Maybe they’re just trying to warn us. How soon before they’re in firing range?”

“TIC interceptors have paired missile bays. Smart munitions. Kinetic warheads. Ship-to-ship range something over half a million kilometers,” Zoya said. “Exact range is classified.”

The emergency klaxon screamed and the computer voice said, “Weapons fire. Weapons fire. Weapons fire.”

Natalya found the voice oddly calm, given the message. For a brief instant she wondered why they didn’t program the voice to make it sound more urgent.

“Punch it!” Zoya said.

Natalya slammed the throttles forward again and slapped the alarm off. The noise from the engines mostly drowned it out anyway.

“Four tracks. Both ships fired two birds,” Zoya shouted.

“How soon?”

“Half a stan.”

Natalya’s fear melted away, leaving a molten anger. How dare they? She’d done nothing wrong. She didn’t kill that idiot. Zoya had done nothing at all. And TIC was trying to kill them both. No evidence. No jury. No trial. Just the silent interceptors in space.

“How far are we from Newmar?” Natalya asked.

“Too far,” Zoya answered. “By the time this is over we’ll be in that gas bag’s shadow anyway. Nobody’s going to be able to see anything.” She sat back in her couch, panting. “This can’t be happening.”

“It’s happening.”

“This can’t be happening,” Zoya said again.

“It’s happening, Zee. What do we have?”

“I got nothing, Nats.”

“Set up the plot. Prime the Burleson for jump to the Picnic Area.”

“You can’t jump this close. We’re inside the limit.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a safety margin built into the systems.”

“If we try to jump too close, the drives may take us apart,” Zoya said.

“If we don’t jump, those missiles
will
take us apart. What gives us better odds?”

Zoya stared for a moment and then her fingers began flying. “You’ve got engineering.”

Natalya flipped to the Burleson control screen and started charging the jump capacitors. “Ten ticks until we can jump.”

“Eleven until we’re in position,” Zoya said. “Nine until the missiles get here. We’re not going to make it.”

Natalya brought up the engineering overlay and toggled in the maintenance menus. She gritted her teeth and pulled the safety overrides off the engines. “We’re going to be damn near dry on fuel before we get out of here, but if we don’t get out, fuel won’t matter.”

The vibration and noise picked up a fraction.

“What’d you do?” Zoya shouted.

“Reset the overrides and goosed the fuel pumps. It’s not much but it might be enough.”

They watched the computers recalculate courses and trajectories. The missiles missed the velocity shift for a few seconds before coming to a new intercept.

“Ten ticks until they hit us,” Zoya shouted. “Just under eleven to the limit. That jink bought us a fraction.”

Natalya watched the scanner plot and tried to think of something else they could do. “This isn’t right,” she said.

“What?”

“This isn’t right,” she shouted. “Something is just not right here.”

“With the ship?” Zoya’s eyes grew even wider.

“No. This whole thing. Why are they trying to kill us?”

“You killed a TIC officer. They don’t really like that, you know.”

“But I didn’t. Any competent forensics analysis should prove that.”

Zoya pointed at the screen. “They don’t look like they believe that.”

Natalya looked at Zoya’s screen again. The interceptors seemed to be falling back.

“Five ticks, Nats. What can we do?”

Natalya pulled up the Burleson drive overlay. The capacitor had enough charge for a very short jump—barely a bump in the road by interstellar standards, but it might be enough. She slapped keys and dragged the navigation interface onto her console. She zoomed the chart in on the edge of Newmar’s boundary. “Check long range. Dead ahead. Push the range all the way up,” she shouted. Her fingers kept moving on the keyboard and the navigational computer began the calculations to take her to the point she had marked on the chart.

“Nothing out there for a billion klicks that I can see right now,” Zoya shouted. “What are you doing?”

“Saving our asses,” she shouted back and punched the jump button.

Nothing seemed to happen but she reached forward and pulled the throttles back to zero. The screaming, roaring vibration chopped off. “Where are the missiles now?”

Zoya looked down at her screen and shook her head. “Gone. Or so far back in relativistic terms we won’t see them for another few ticks.” She brought her own screen up to a navigational plot and started running her own scans. “You jumped to the edge of the system?”

“About a hundredth of a Burleson unit.”

“You could have killed us.”

“We were dead if I didn’t.”

Zoya turned back to look at the scanners. “I can’t even see the interceptors, let alone the missiles at this range.”