Rebel Fleet (25 page)

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Despite the turbulent nature of our brief time in each other’s company, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Captain Lael. We were lightyears apart now—and she might well be dead—but to my all-too-human mind, that didn’t matter. I felt I should be able to look around and find her again because I’d been with her so recently.

Why was I still thinking of her? It wasn’t
just
because she had possessed haunting beauty. I’m not that shallow—at least, not all the time.

An outside observer might reason I could be dreaming about revenge for her mistreatment of my crew, but it wasn’t like that, either.

What I was feeling was a sense of pride. I’d beaten her fair and square. If her ship had survived the damaged force-containment fields I’d left her with, I was pretty sure she was thinking of me right now, too.

How could she not be? Leo Blake, a lowly savage to her way of thinking, had waltzed aboard her ship and commandeered it for a spin. Just thinking about that made me grin.

“Why are you so happy?” Mia asked me with a hint of suspicion. She was eyeing me, and I gave a guilty start. “What did that bitch-captain do to you in her quarters?” she asked.

“She put me in a cage and shocked it, mostly,” I said. “But I managed to get the upper hand using my sym in the end. I’m just happy we all got away with our lives.”

“We did more than that,” Dr. Chang said. “Much more. We embarrassed the enemy. That could be good—or very, very bad.”

“How could it possibly be bad, Doc?” Samson asked.

“Because, now they know who we are. The Imperials have noticed the creatures known as humans, and they’ve singled us out as dangerous. The only question is: what are they going to do about it?”

My grin faded. I realized he was right. The Imperials weren’t the kind to take a setback lightly. They were hard-assed, arrogant, and intolerant of any kind of rivalry. They might even come after Earth.

“We have to get back to the Fleet,” I said. “We need to report in, pronto.”

“Leo…” Gwen asked, “why didn’t you just take us home? You could have taken that Imperial ship anywhere.”

I gave her one of those, “are you crazy?” looks.

“What you’re suggesting wouldn’t have been easy,” I said. “Getting home on our own would have required a very long stellar-jump. Earth is deep in Rebel territory, far from the Orion Front. And old Sol isn’t much of a beacon star for navigation. Remember too, I barely knew what I was doing. If I’d tried for Earth, I’d probably have scattered us to Andromeda.”

“For another thing,” Samson said, taking my side, “I don’t think Earth needs an enemy cruiser in orbit.”

“No, but…” Gwen went on thoughtfully. “Leo, I guess you should have destroyed that ship. You should have exposed their core as we escaped.”

Coming from Gwen, the idea seemed uncharacteristically ruthless. I looked at her in surprise.

“You really think I should’ve killed them all?” I asked.

“That’s what I would have done,” Dr. Chang answered for her. “Our situation is infinitely worse now. You revealed we had power over them. I know you had to in order to allow us to escape, but the mistake you made was in leaving them alive to tell the story.”

“You’ve got a point…” I said. “But they just took a blind jump away from Rigel with a damaged ship. They might be dead or lost.”

“You can’t
know
that,” Gwen insisted, “and now, they know we came from Earth.”

“True…” I admitted.

Despite our escape, they appeared to be unhappy. I couldn’t blame them they more I thought about it. We’d seen enough dead worlds that were dotted with cities compressed to black mounds of ash. We all knew humanity’s survival was at stake.

“As it is, we’re going to have to rejoin the Rebel Fleet,” Gwen said, sounding depressed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”

Looking around
Hammerhead
’s cramped main deck, I realized it was time for a pep-talk.

“Like it or not,” I said, “we’re the best fighters Earth has right now. We’re her best hope for a defense in space—for your world too, Mia.”

She nodded.

“We’re trained,” I said, “we’ve got new know-how when it comes to hacking enemy systems, and we’re flying a warship again.”

“A tiny one,” complained Samson.

“Gwen,” I said, “have you got a fix on the Rebel Fleet?”

“I’ve got a signal, but it’s garbled. Rigel A and B are putting out so much radiation I can’t get anything other than a directional fix.”

“Give it to me.”

She did, and I set our course for the distant outpost I hoped was waiting there. The course intersected with a large rock in space about the size of Earth’s Moon. The region around Rigel’s stars was so saturated with light and atomic and subatomic particles, we suspected the Fleet had taken refuge behind this star-blasted rock for protection.

Rationing our fuel, I figured we could make it out there in two days. The main worry was that the Fleet would pull out before we got to them. If they did that, we’d likely sail out into deep space and never be found again.

“We’ve got a choice to make,” I said, working the numbers. “We can either blow our fuel and get up to high speed, taking us to that rock faster. That’s option A.”

“What’s B? Self-destruction?” Samson complained.

“Either of these paths might lead to that,” I admitted. “Option B is to coast, saving enough fuel to slow down when we get out there to that rock they’re hiding behind.”

Gwen shook her head. “Why bother doing that? The Rebels can chase us down and grapple us or refuel us with a tanker. I vote we blow the fuel to get back to them as fast as possible.”

“Hold on,” I said, lifting my hand. “If we do it that way, we’ll be going pretty damned fast by the time we get there. If they leave that rock before we arrive we’ll sail away into the dark. Even if they come back later, they’ll never find us.”

“Oh…” she said, thinking it over. “I get it. We’d have to use more fuel to slow down, and they might be occupied or just miss our fly-by. We don’t know when they’ll gather here again at this beacon star.”

“You got it. Well, which option sounds best?”

They all looked glum and uncertain. My fantasies about passing the buck on this one were fading fast.

“Hmm…” I said. “I think we should split the difference. We’ll fly out using most of our fuel, but save enough to slow down when we get close. That should at least give us a few days to hang around the area and get noticed.”

They agreed reluctantly. What I wasn’t telling them was that, according to my calculations, we only had about two weeks of good air left. We had to get rescued soon, or we were going to suffocate. Rebreathers and carbon-scrubbers only worked for so long before a small ship with five passengers became toxic.

With our plan in place, things were fairly quiet on the flight outward. After about thirty hours, Gwen came to me and whispered in my ear.

“Leo?”

“What’s up?”

She looked guilty. It was an expression I wasn’t accustomed to seeing on her face.

“What?” I repeated. “Did you eat the last candy bar or something?”

“No, nothing like that. But the radio signals we’ve been following—they’re gone. I’m not getting anything from that rock we’re flying toward. There’s nothing else out here to get a fix on, either.”

I stared at her, and she lifted her eyes and stared back.

Was this it?
I thought to myself. Were we screwed, destined to float away in space forever? We’d be dried out fossils inside of a month.

“Hmm,” I said, “I can’t do much with our course or speed. We’re locked.”

“I know,” she said. “I ran the oxygen numbers after we decided to do this, and I saw why you’d chosen to take this option. There really wasn’t much of a choice, was there?”

“No,” I said quietly. “Don’t bother to mention that to the others. No point.”

She shook her head. “No point.”

We parted, and I caught Mia watching us. She had a funny look on her face, but I didn’t know what it meant. Her facial expressions were just different enough from human ones that I had trouble tracking them. Was she worried? Jealous? Pissed? I had no idea. Hell, I wasn’t even good at reading the emotions of human women.

I smiled and gave her a friendly nod then went back to my station. I felt her predatory eyes on me for several seconds afterward, and I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I turned to look at her and demand to know what she was thinking—but she was gone.

The feline types were good at vanishing quietly when they wanted to.

The next two days crawled by. Periodically, I conferred with Gwen—but there was nothing else indicating life or technology in the system.

We began the deceleration process on schedule. The ship had been coasting for a while, but now we wheeled around, put all our shielding toward Rigel, and braked hard.

The rumble of the engines was continuous. To save fuel, I had Samson turn off the anti-grav system. That made us uncomfortable, but it gave us several more hours of time to be spotted.

To keep himself busy, Dr. Chang had been working on a gizmo. He showed it to us on the third day of the journey.

“It works like this,” he said, displaying what looked like a lead-lined crate with some electronics packed inside, “this transponder will beep every six minutes for about a month. We’ll fire it out of the airlock toward the back of that rock as we pass by. With any luck, it will survive impact with the planetoid and sit there beeping for attention.”

By this time, my crew had all figured out that there wasn’t any welcoming committee out here—if there ever had been.

“That’s great, Doc,” Samson said. “But we aren’t going to last a month. We’ve got less than a week, tops, before the air runs out.”

No one was happy about our situation, but they seemed resigned to it. They weren’t depressed or angry. All I sensed was a serious, quiet desperation.

“We’ll try it,” I said. “I assume you put information aboard the device about our course and speed?”

“Certainly. Anyone who finds this will be able to locate us.”

I nodded, and we all worked together to make it happen. We loaded the transponder into our airlock and shoved it out into the brilliant blue-white light. Even at this distance, with every filter set to maximum, Rigel was blinding and deadly.

The following hour was a bleak one. We all kept quiet, conserving our air. We were out of happy-thoughts to spread around to cheer one another up. Morale was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Then, at the one hour mark, a funny thing happened.

“Chief…?” Dr. Chang called to me. “Blake… I don’t—take a look at this.”

I pulled up his sensor data and displayed it for everyone. We all stared and gaped.

“What the hell…?” Samson asked. “How many are there?”

“I’m getting a count…” Dr. Chang said. “We’re running entirely on passive sensors now, so it’s bound to be inaccurate, but I’m picking up over two hundred contacts.”

“It’s the Imperials,” Gwen said with a dreadful certainty. “It has to be. Maybe Captain Lael brought them back for us. Or maybe, the Imperials destroyed all the ships in the Rebel Fleet and waited to see if—”

I shushed her with a hand. “They aren’t firing. Can you get a reading on their hull configuration?”

“No,” she said. “There’s too much interference from Rigel for that. What do we do?”

“We play dead,” I said, “what else can we do?”

“It’s not going to be much of an act,” Samson said sourly.

We waited for several tense minutes. Then our tiny ship lurched sickeningly.

“Gravity beam,” Gwen said. “They’ve locked onto us. Why not just blow us out of the sky? Why torment us further?”

She began rubbing at the healing scabs on her arms. The carnivorous algae had done a number on my crew. Memories were causing them to itch.

“We don’t have our thumpers anymore,” Samson said, “but you’ve got Captain Lael’s wand.”

I pulled it out thoughtfully. I had no idea if this thing was going to work on a different Imperial ship’s security systems. It didn’t do anything aboard
Hammerhead
, so I hadn’t given it much thought.

Holding our disruptors, we waited for the hatch to be ripped open again when we were sucked up into a hulking ship’s interior. I thought about igniting the engines to burn whoever was outside, but there wasn’t enough fuel. I considered making the hull transparent again, but even that would take some energy. Every ounce of power in
Hammerhead’s
systems had been rerouted to shielding and similar efforts. Our active sensors were all dead.

The hatch sprang open. We all twitched, lifting our disruptors in a final hopeless act of defiance.

But when the scene outside was revealed, we blinked in confusion.

The environment was one we knew well. It was the hangar deck of a carrier—a Rebel carrier.

Then, a familiar figure strode into view. His tail flicked from side-to-side violently.