No Honor in Death (34 page)

"Aye, aye, sir.  Get the prisoner moving, Vincenzo."

NINETEEN

"Describe the contact."

Siobhan slipped into her chair, tense with the imminence of action.  A normal question would have been, "Where is the contact," but in the other universe, 'where' was an indefinable element.  The idea of location simply didn't exist.  Or if it did, no one could - for want of a better term - define it.

"We've picked up a strong wake to starboard of our line of travel."

Dunmoore nodded absently, listening to her instincts.  Above, below and any other reference point was meaningless.  One was either on another ship's line of travel or not.  Thus, the question which bedevilled every warship Captain stalking her prey was whether the wake belonged to the vulnerable target ship or an escort.  Following another ship's precise line of travel was a matter of luck not calculation, a blind man's game of tag.  They could end behind either, and tag the wrong one.

Statistics meant the chances of finding the right target were something like thirty percent, if one counted both escorts and the rear-most transport, and there was no way of increasing the odds rationally.  One wake looked exactly like another, a simple disturbance of the other universe's fabric.  And that was all the sensors could tell, all they could see.  Weapons officers in the convoy were, of course, just as blind.  They kept security by watching the wake of the ship ahead.  If it wavered or vanished, they knew they had a problem.

Siobhan came to a snap decision, as always going with the first gut feel she got, never stopping to think it out and let doubt cloud her professional instincts.

"Escort.  Are we within their sensor area?"

"Doubtful, sir," Devall replied, sounding confident.  "Their equipment's range is about eighty percent of ours, and we crept up slowly enough that we're probably still a good margin outside their range.  The wake's strength isn't increasing, which means we're not getting any closer."

Siobhan smiled.  "Excellent.  We should track the target within a few minutes then."  She didn't add, "Exactly as I predicted."  She didn't have to.  The covert looks she got spoke of an awed respect, of the beginning of her legend among this crew.  The same kind of legend she had created on the
Don Quixote
and the
Shenzen
with her uncanny feel for the flow of the other universe, and for her Shrehari opponents.  A hunter's instinct, pure and simple.

"Mister Devall," she said after a few moments of utter silence, "fuel torpedoes and stand-by to launch."

"Aye, aye, sir.  Fuelling one through four."

She nodded and let her eyes lose their focus again as she mentally reached out and tried to touch the target ship, feeling, as she often did, like a submarine skipper during Earth's Second World War.  They too had fought on instinct and bits of hard data provided by inaccurate instruments in a little understood environment.  The fact that the only usable weapon in hyper space was the inaccurate and expensive torpedo, essentially a large, unguided missile driven by a small jump engine, completed the analogy.

"Nearly there."  Siobhan's voice had a smoky, otherworldly tone.

Pushkin looked up from the console where he monitored the ship's systems and glanced at Dunmoore.  She looked mesmerized, as if lost in the unpredictable currents of the other universe.  He felt a shiver run down his spine at the weird look on her face.  The First Officer had heard of Captains who possessed an eerie sixth sense for finding the enemy in the murk of hyper space, but this was the first time he saw one in action.  No one knew whether it was an acquired or genetic talent, or whether it even existed.

"Contact!"  Devall's normal reserve vanished in a surge of excitement.  "Dead on track.  You did it, skipper!"

Pushkin had been one of the doubters.  No more.  Siobhan Dunmoore had tracked down an enemy convoy, in the bubble universe, over a distance every tactics manual called impossible.  The Shreharis were about to get a very unpleasant surprise rammed up their collective behinds.

So this is what it feels like to
really
hunt!
He marvelled at the blood-thirstiness filling his heart.

"Scan."  Jhar's order broke through the emergence disorientation, ringing loudly in the tight, bare confines of the bridge.

Wordlessly, the Gun Master bent over his console and let the sophisticated instrumentation expand its reach into the surrounding void.  The minutes ticked by slowly as the computer analyzed and sifted through the cascade of information.  Imperial ships were deadly killing machines, outmatching, gun for gun and armour for armour their human equivalents.  But in the area of sophisticated electronics, the upstart Commonwealth had everybody beat.

This time however, the Shrehari designed and built scanners worked just beautifully, feeding the tactical processor with an image of events billions of kilometres away.  The processor, in turn, compensated for time lag and transformed the electronic bits of data into a simple and understandable format, projecting the result as a schematic.

Commander Brakal, master of the Imperial cruiser
Tol Vakash
swore like a common peasant, drawing a hard look of disapproval from 'Lieutenant' Khrada.  The tactical display no longer showed a rough triangle, with the convoy's ships at the apex, the human hunter at the square angle and Brakal's ship at the third corner.  The eight Imperial hyper-space bubble signatures had spawned a ninth.  And the
Tol Vakash
was too far away to do anything but watch in helpless rage.  The report was already several
utras
old.   Time lag was unforgiving and immutable.

"He chased through hyper space for the whole distance since we spotted him," Jhar commented emotionlessly, though he felt rage mixed with awe, a most unusual sensation.  "Only thus could he have closed the range so fast."

"Yes."  Brakal stroked his chin, watching the screen through narrowed eyes, thinking hard.  "A very good ship commander, that one.  He will be a worthy adversary, one we will learn from."  The admiration of one professional for another in his voice caused Khrada to frown.  "The last ship of the convoy is lost, I fear.  And no one but us, and the human commander know it yet.  Hah!  And the senile toads in the Council refuse to believe me."

"Treasonous thoughts, Commander?"  Khrada's tone bordered on the threatening.

"Silence, excrescence,"  Brakal snapped, "or you will leave my bridge.  This is a time for true warriors, not home world lackeys who think eating the Council's turds will win this war.  That,"  he pointed at the screen, his voice loud and hard, "is what will win the war for the humans, Khrada. Daring, initiative and more courage than any of the lazy child-fornicators at the Admiralty.  We could do much worse than learn from them.  We damned well have not learned from our own experience."

He fell silent, breathing hard, aware again that he had let his temper get the better of him.  That outburst might just have cost him his career, if not his life.  But frustration at being outmanoeuvred, before the human commander even knew of his presence, had stripped Brakal of any remaining patience with the
Tai Kan
serpent.  He successfully repressed a desire to strangle Khrada, realizing his urge was unworthy, as his quarrel remained with Trage and his cronies, not their lackey, unpleasant as he may be.  Not for the time being.

"Let us salvage what we can.  Navigator, prepare a jump to the spot where the enemy will emerge, and be fast about it.  Helmsman, when you have the coordinates, engage without waiting for my order.  With any luck, the human will take his time and linger around his prey until we arrive.  Bah!  If security had not forced me to wait until a friend gave me the convoy's course so I might protect it, we might have been close enough to take the bastard.  Tell that to your masters, Khrada, and tell them the treason is not mine but theirs.  I fight for the Emperor.  All they do is obstruct me. Who is the real traitor then?"

Jhar growled, but did not otherwise show his disapproval of his Commander's reckless words.  If not now, then the
Tai Kan
would have found another time and reason to ensure Brakal's downfall.  The Lord of Clan Makkar would never change, not to gain the approval of the Council or the infant Emperor himself.  He knew his duty, treasured his honor and commanded the loyalty of his crew.  If only the Empire had more like him.  The war would then be on a very different course.  Brakal should be Admiral of the Deep Space Fleet and free to act as he wished.  If they survived this tour, perhaps it would be time to count his support among the ship commanders and act.

Jump nausea gripped Jhar, rendering any further thought impossible.

Down in the blunt bows of the Commonwealth frigate
Stingray
, the two senior torpedo gunners waited patiently, tracking the target's wake on their fire control screens.  Normally, the senior Petty Officer in charge of the torpedo room rotated her people through the firing chair to give them as much experience as possible.  This time however, she sat in the hot seat herself, with her most experienced rating acting as backup.  Captain Dunmoore would get the best goddamned torpedo shooting this ship could give.

Both gunners wore full armour, the better to survive should the frigate take a bad hit, and the isolation it provided helped the Petty Officer concentrate.  Below their feet, in individual tubes, the four ready torpedoes waited for the signal to launch.

They were huge, thick and stupid weapons.  Consisting mainly of a miniaturized jump drive topped by a small anti-matter warhead, the torpedoes had no guidance system.  Under the laws of hyper space, they could only travel in the direction they'd been launched and therefore, anything more would have been useless.  This did, however, make the gunners' job a most challenging one.  Where the missile techs and regular gunners could use the computer to aim and shoot, the senior torpedo gunner had to go entirely on instinct, aiming the entire housing in the direction she thought was the right one.  On a warship, torpedo specialists were reckoned to be the best gunners in the business, and those who managed to beat the usual thirty percent success rate were minor legends in their own right.

Petty Officer Second Class Ashara Lako did not consider herself a legend, but she knew her business inside out, even if she hadn't practiced it much under Commander Forenza.  This would be her first real shot in nearly a year, and she was nervous.  Captain Dunmoore demanded high standards and Lako definitely did not want to disappoint her.

The armour's efficient environmental system kept her body's temperature steady, reclaimed her perspiration before it soaked her underclothes, and generally ensured her body's well-being.  Still, Lako's palms felt moist and slippery inside the thick gloves, and the suit couldn't eliminate the butterflies in her stomach.  It could, however, relieve the pressure she felt in her bladder and she made full use of the built-in plumbing.

Lako glanced at her second, who monitored the 'fish', as torpedo gunners called their weapon for some obscure reason.  His board remained green, showing that the anti-matter warhead was stable, the jump drive warm and the tube ready.  On top of being huge and dumb, the fish were sensitive things.  The unstable anti-matter fuel for both warhead and drive were injected at the last moment, and if any reading slipped outside the safety parameters, her assistant would eject the torpedoes from the ship without so much as a second thought.  One of these buggers could blow the ship's bows off.  Four exploding together did not bear thought.

The wake signature of the target was in range now.  Lako gently nudged her joystick to the left and then up, feeling her way to a firing solution.  Under her feet, the tube moved by millimetres, responding to the Petty Officer's slightest correction.  As the range changed, she kept updating her aim, ready to fire on the Captain's command.  It wouldn't be long now.  Lako knew the
Stingray
couldn't get too close.

"Torp, this is bridge," Devall's voice startled Lako out of her intense concentration.  "Do you have a firing solution?"

"Aye, sir," she replied through clenched teeth, her eyes still glued to the screen.

"Fire Tube One when you feel ready."

Lako was too caught up in the difficult process of maintaining a steady aim to grin at Devall's order.  Some Captains insisted the torpedo gunners fire the moment they gave the word.  It didn't make for a great hit ratio, but they never seemed to understand why.  Dunmoore, on the other hand, was letting her choose the moment of firing, and Lako would make damn sure the Captain's confidence was rewarded by, if she could manage it, a first round hit.

The Petty Officer's eyes narrowed to a slit and she took one deep breath, releasing it half-way.  Then, she pushed down on the firing button with her thumb, ejecting a torpedo from Tube One with a blast of compressed air.

The fish's signature wavered for a fraction of a second as it tried to return to normal space before its drive kicked in.  But the miniature jump drive worked perfectly, as Lako had known it would.  She'd selected and checked out the four first torpedoes herself when they spotted the convoy hours ago.  Her screen tracked the torpedo's tiny wake as it sped away from the frigate, heading straight towards the large, pulsing turbulence that marked the target.

On the bridge of the escort
Ptar Korsh
, the Sub-Gun Master yawned loudly, exposing yellowing teeth in a leathery face, and absently scratched his crotch.  He was a non-commissioned officer of the fourth level and had served aboard this vessel for a long time.  The boredom of escort duty had long ago blunted his alertness, and he looked forward only to the pleasures of shore leave on the occupied world of Cimmeria.  It was rumoured that human females sold themselves to Imperials as whores.  The Petty Officer was curious to discover this for himself, and maybe even try one of the soft-skinned creatures.  He did not find humans attractive, preferring the females of his own species, but the exoticism of the idea appealed to him.  And it was more than likely no Shrehari female on Cimmeria would even look at him, let alone cater to his needs.