Rebel Fleet (24 page)

=40=

They began hacking back the control systems at about the same time Captain Lael came out of her paralysis.

It was a lot to handle at once. I had to pretty much sit on the captain—which she didn’t appreciate at all.

“Get off me, you worthless ape!” she snarled, writhing around weakly.

“Just a second, your people are giving me problems.”

My sym had gained control of the Imperial interface due to a heavy reliance on certain top-level security systems. They were built in to bypass everything else, to allow the top officers easy access to whatever they needed to do.

The problem for them seemed to be that they hadn’t considered a hacking attempt, even a simple one. Apparently, Imperials were a pretty docile, law-abiding group. These people did what they were told and didn’t go up against each other much if I had to guess.

My sym had been developed by people from a very different, chaotic culture. We weren’t good at lining up, me and my wild-eyed Rebel brethren, but we knew how to break things.

As my sym worked to regain control of the ship, I took a moment to reflect upon the current situation. I couldn’t help but see this as an example of the advantages afforded to those living among varied cultures and backgrounds. A ship that came from a planet full of thieves, for example, was bound to have solidly built locks on everything, while a ship from a world without crime would have few, if any.

When my sym came through again, I was disappointed that I didn’t have complete control any more. I couldn’t even see where we were in space. All I could do was control some basic things like life-support, force-walls and various chemical processing systems.

Deciding to give the Imperials as much trouble as I could, I turned off the air then took a look at the chemical systems. That rabbit-hole led me down to my crew, who had escaped in the confusion—most importantly, they’d gotten past the force-walls that had kept them in the algae tanks. Using the security cameras and transmitting to their syms, I finally got their attention.

“Hey…” I said with some excitement. “Gwen, can you hear me?”

“Leo?” she asked, looking around wildly at the walls. She spotted a camera stick tracking her and stepped up to it. “Are you behind all this chaos?”

“Naturally. Listen, you need to find an oxygen supply. I cut off the ship-wide distribution matrix.”

“How in the hell—?”

“No time to explain, but you might be able to do the same thing with your own sym if you focus hard enough. Reach out with it to the chemical processing facilities. They’re all located in your area. See if you can use them to your advantage.”

“All right… I’ll try.”

She was a good hacker, I knew that. She’d demonstrated her powers several times in the past. But she wasn’t as used to using her sym in that way as I was. It was going to be a challenge.

I had no more time for Gwen. In fact, I’d just felt a powerful pinch in my hindquarters.

Opening my eyes, I found Captain Lael was trying to take a bite out of me. I restrained her and talked to her seriously.

“Tell your crew to stand down,” I said, “or I’ll kill everyone aboard.”

“You couldn’t—”

“I killed the force-walls, didn’t I? I can kill the ones containing the reactor core just as easily.”

Her wide eyes widened further. “You wouldn’t. The ship would be destroyed.”

My face presented her with my best grin. “Exactly. I’ve already tried to take you out twice, you know that. And I don’t care if I die as long as I achieve my goals—you know that, too.”

She looked at me in growing alarm. I could tell she was paranoid to begin with, and after the events of today, I’d done nothing to reassure her.

“I’ll tell them,” she said, “but they may not listen. I’m your captive, therefore my orders are nullified.”

“You’d better sound convincing then.”

I let her sit up, and when she reached for her wand, I moved it out of her reach. I activated it myself and allowed her to speak into it.

“This is Captain Lael. The situation is under control, the barbarians have surrendered. The Empire has prevailed, as it must.”

I waved my hand at her, suggesting she speed it up. She kept talking while I listened with gritted teeth.

“Security techs are ordered to return all passcodes to their original state for the convenience of the officers. Everyone else should focus on damage control. That is all.”

I killed the transmitter. We looked at one another, and I smiled thoughtfully.

“You
really
do want to live, don’t you?” I asked her. “I should have realized that when I sensed your paranoia. Who would be paranoid if they didn’t value their own lives very highly?”

“It’s a natural instinct,” she said. “There’s nothing in this part of the galaxy worth my life.”

I nodded. To her, this wasn’t a war at all. This was a hunt. An exercise designed to bring pleasure and training opportunities to her kind. Who went hunting willing to die to shoot the deer?

Not Captain Lael, anyway. She had no intention of sacrificing her life or her ship for honor, or anything else.

That simple fact gave the Rebels an advantage. This was
real
to us. We were losing planets, whole civilizations. If we could only get our act together, we might win this war simply because we cared more about the final outcome than the Imperials did.

Morale.
I’d learned back in my officer training days in the Navy that battles and even wars were often won before they started. If one side didn’t really want to fight, they often lost by default. That was how so many nations had lost their colonies to rebellions in the past—they just didn’t have the stomach to lose all that blood and treasure over some distant outpost.

“Okay,” I said as I felt my sym regain control over the ship’s systems, one after another. I could hardly believe she was allowing it, but then, I was effectively holding a gun to her head and that of everyone aboard.

“Let me go now,” she said.

“No… I don’t think so. You’ll stay here as my hostage and go-between. I want to take this ship back to Rebel territory.”

“What?!” she demanded in shock. “I’ll never allow that! You’re a mad creature and—”

That was all she said before she took a “nap.” I’d activated the neural paralyzer again. She slumped stiffly onto the pillows that surrounded us.

Knowing I had a few minutes of peace during which to concentrate, I took a look around.

We were inside some kind of big nebula. That was interesting all by itself. A gassy cloud of dust and vapor surrounded the ship, and it made our shield sparkle with thousands of tiny impacts.

Sand-grain sized particles flared into energy as the ship ran into them. Now and then, a sheet seemed to ripple across the vessel, lighting it up like the Fourth of July.

There were stars nearby too. Big, blue-white giants. By “near” I’m talking about half a lightyear or so, but still, at this distance they were lovely to behold.

Recalling what little I remembered from my only college class in astronomy, I figured out this was what they called a “stellar nursery.” A place where young stars grew from accumulated dust and were flung to become independent burning chunks of matter in the heavens.

I tried to get my bearings, but I had difficulty. I couldn’t see the way home.

“Mia?” I called, trying to reach out to her again.

“Here, Chief.”

“How are things with you?”

She gave me a mean giggle. That surprised me, as she wasn’t much for laughter even when someone told an excellent joke.

“Are you drunk or something?” I asked in concern. “Is the oxygen running out already?”

“No,” she said. “Look here—follow my sym.”

I piggybacked my sym onto hers, and I let her lead the way. We raced through cameras and conduits until I saw the algae tanks again.

Only this time, the crawling, green-black mess in the tanks wasn’t contained in the tanks. It was sliding around the passages, attacking people. Several were mired in it, and even the armored guys were having trouble.

“Those monsters fed us to that slime,” she said. “I hope they get their skins peeled off!”

“Uh… that’s great,” I said, wondering if her own sym was influencing her emotions less than optimally. “We need to do some navigating. I can jump the ship again, but I don’t have any coordinates to target.”

My vision retreated to her location, and she shrugged. “Try finding a beacon star—like Rigel. That’s an easy one.”

Of course. I was an idiot! When jumping between the stars, we’d always tried to use a beacon star. A big, massive lighthouse of a star that could guide us to the correct destination.

I didn’t know if Rigel was still in our effective range or not, but I felt I had to give it a try. The ship’s crew had already begun their effort to retake control using stealthy techniques. My sym revealed that they were crawling down the passages shutting down systems they didn’t need and reactivating essential ones. Already, they’d turned life-support back on.

Captain Lael had given them my orders, and they were following them, but it was only a matter of time before they figured out who was really calling the shots. They had to be suspicious by now. The wand I’d lifted from the captain was vibrating almost constantly, and I was pretty sure there were something like cell phone calls coming in which I couldn’t afford to answer.

On the floor, the Captain was beginning to twitch. Her eyes were swiveled up, almost rolled up into her head, just so she could glare at me.

Closing my eyes again to eliminate distractions, I reached out with my perception and used the ship’s navigational interface. Where was Rigel? Where was the biggest class B giant star in this part of the galaxy?

After a minute or so, I found it. With an effort of will, I directed the ship to open a new rift.

The people on the bridge reacted much faster this time. They knew something very fishy was going on. They implemented their new security protocols, and shut down all my access to the rift engines.

But it was too late as the space-time rip I’d created was right in front of us. They reversed the engines, but you don’t turn on a dime in space. We were going around a thousand miles a second, and even though they managed to slow that down by half, with our rudder controls frozen, they couldn’t turn away.

In those final moments, I could imagine the panicked shouts by the bridge officers as we plunged into another rift that led to God-knew-where.

The thought made me smile.

=41=

My biggest worry over the next few moments was that we’d scatter again. There was only one ship in this train, and she had a beacon star to guide her, but I was still worried. After all, it was only my second stellar-jump I’d performed in a lifetime.

The computers did their magic right this time, however. I needn’t have worried. The gravitational forces caused by the immense hot mass of Rigel guided us in with ease.

All over the ship, alarms were wailing, and people were panicking. It took me a second to realize
Splendor’s
crew had been called to battle stations. After all, this was enemy territory to them, and this cruiser had no backup.

Standing up, I took two seconds to look at Captain Lael. She was in control of her eyes again by now, and she looked up at me with the most malevolent stare I could recall having seen from a lovely woman.

I gave her a grin and blew her a kiss, then ran out of the place.

Sure, I should have zapped her with the wand one more time to keep her from causing trouble, but I felt bad about having done it twice already.

Needing a distraction, I killed the external force walls around the forward section of the ship. They were going down in the same order as before. They were trying to block me, but I could still manipulate their force fields.

I knew shutting down the force walls would panic the officers. The radiation levels in this star system were extremely high. I was glad to be far from the core suns. The suns were about a hundred thousand times as bright as Sol, but we were a lot farther out than Earth was. Even so, without a protective force field, orbiting Rigel was like being inside a blast furnace.

As I ran below decks, plenty of skinny guys in space suits came up toward me. They were repair crews heading toward the region I’d just sabotaged.

They were stunned to see me. I took that moment’s hesitation to attack. I paralyzed the ones wearing armor. Those not wearing armor got knocked to the deck with a left hook. Either way, they all went down. It seemed to me that Imperials simply weren’t good at handling surprising situations aboard their own ship.

Gwen and the rest of my tiny crew had broken free and were coming up to meet me the other way. We found each other on deck seventeen, and everyone was out of breath.

“These guys are wimps,” Samson puffed. His red knuckles were the only explanation I needed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think they’re used to less gravity where they’re from. Maybe they’re born in space, I don’t know or care. What I want to know now is how we get the hell off this ship.”

Gwen shook her head and put her hands on her knees to pant. “I’ve been scouting with my sym. There’s nothing but a few life pods for the officers. They won’t get very far.”

I nodded. “To the hangar then,” I said.

“What? Back to
Hammerhead
?” Samson asked. “We barely had any fuel, and the core was drained anyway.”

“I know, but she’s all we’ve got. Besides, we know how to fly her.”

We ran to the midsection of the ship, the belly itself. We reached the cargo bay where our ship was, and I was surprised to find very few people there. Apparently, calling battle stations didn’t send a large contingent to this part of the ship.

We found
Hammerhead
and jumped aboard. Our reactor coil had regained some juice, and we were soon whooping.

“The Imperials drained our core, but it was a temporary effect,” Dr. Chang said. “The core has slowly recharged itself. We’re about a quarter full now.”

“That will have to be enough,” I said, climbing into the pilot’s seat.

Focusing my mind, I communicated with my sym: “This is it. We’ve got to open that big door.”

I concentrated, but nothing happened.

“They’re blocking us,” I said in a panicky voice. “I can’t do anything.”

“Let me try,” said Gwen.

She concentrated. A minute passed, then another.

I was becoming impatient. We had the cannon online again. I directed Mia to swivel it around and aim it at the big bay doors.

“The back-blast will kill us,” Dr. Chang cautioned.

“To say nothing of the decompression,” I added. “But we have company.”

Crawling out onto the hangar deck was a small army of armored troops. They were spread out, with weapons lifted high.

“Mia,” I said, “take care of those guys, will you?”

She swiveled the gun smoothly. The enemy, seeing the danger, scattered and threw themselves behind cubes of cargo.

Mia released a happy sound that could have been a growl or purr—it was hard to tell sometimes. Then she opened up with her cannon.

Troops were blasted, and the red contents of their armor splattered the walls. Scorch marks and gouges showed on every surface touched by the big gun.

The troops returned fire, throwing gravity grenades that rocked our small ship. A hundred flashes of energy splashed over the wings and hull, pitting and pockmarking my poor, heavily abused fighter.

I heard a gasp, and then I found we were in sudden, unexpected flight.

The gasp had come from Gwen. She’d thrown her eyes wide at last, and it was as if she’d come up from a deep, deep dive into the sea. Perhaps she’d been holding her breath all this time, without knowing it. Whatever the case, she’d managed to get the big bay doors open.

Bodies of armored troops flew up out of hiding and tumbled past us, limbs flailing. All around them sailed the crates they’d used for protection.

Merciless, Mia shot at them, swiveling her gun this way and that.

Then we were flying, too. The hangar door had blown open, and
Hammerhead
was sucked out into space.

It all happened so fast. I barely had time to register it all. But by the time the velvet black of open space appeared, I had the controls in my hands and spun the fighter around to face the exit.

“Rigel…” I said. “Samson, put up every radiation shield we have or we’ll be cooked!”

He worked the air around his seat like a pro. I was glad to have him in that moment. There was no substitute for a good support-man in a cockpit like this one.

Driven out into open space with the rest of the debris, the blinding light touched each armored troop and cargo crate like an intense torch. They went white, so white that no unshielded human eye could bear to watch without being damaged.

“Dampen the hull ninety-nine percent!” I ordered.

The chamber dimmed, but it wasn’t enough. The light was still blinding us.

“Full opacity!” I ordered, keeping my eyes shut. Even through my helmet, the darkened hull, and lots of other filters, the light was intense and painfully leaking into my eyeballs.

Samson’s fumbling fingers found the right part of his interface at last, and the light suddenly cut out. We were enveloped by darkness. I opened my eyes and looked around in a wary squint.

The hull was solid steel again, emitting no light at all. Outside, the glare had to be extreme. We’d come out too close to the beacon star when we’d jumped, I realized now. It was a rookie mistake, but after all, I wasn’t really an astronavigator—not an experienced one, anyway.

Soon, we regained control of our battered craft and flew purely on instruments.

“Radiation levels are high,” Dr. Chang said in a remarkably calm voice. “We’ll be eating potassium iodide tonight—assuming we live.”

“Break out the pills now,” I said, and we all took a handful.

I chewed the bitter compound and swallowed it, coughing. “Any report on
Splendor
?” I asked.

“She’s gone, Chief,” Gwen said. “She was venting, but they must have regained control long enough to jump out again.”

“I thought starships couldn’t jump again that fast…” I said.

“They can if they’re willing to take grim risks,” Dr. Chang explained. “Let’s hope the ship was destroyed.”

For some reason, that thought gave me a pang. As mean of a woman as Lael was, I didn’t want to think I’d caused her death.

“Why didn’t they destroy us?” Samson asked.

Gwen grinned. “I took the liberty of disabling their weapons systems when I had the chance.”

“Damn,” I said, looking at her. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She beamed, eating up the praise.