Shepherd's Crook: Omegaverse: Volume 2 (3 page)

Vince then let out a little laugh, a very creditable imitation of Elmer Fudd’s.

Duncan shouldered his plasma rifle, drew the m1911 .45 caliber pistol instead. His friends did likewise.

“Good idea,” said Clancey. “In these tight spaces, a pistol will be easier to use.” The room was not much more than a cube, two meters on each side, with the ladder dropping into the middle and a door to one side.

“Shall we?” asked Vince, his hand on the door.

“We shall,” said Matt, raising his pistol toward the door.

Vince pushed the door, ducked and ran through, followed closely by Matt and then Clancey. Duncan moved into the doorway when all hell broke loose. Laser fire erupted from the other end of a long, high room; built almost to human scale, but with Arn sized furnishings. As Duncan fell back into the entrance room, he saw his three friends diving for cover behind what looked like child sized desks.

“Hold up,” said Shannon, “I’ve got some shields to recharge. Duncan, drop some smoke, s’il vous plait.”

Duncan saw that all three had taken multiple hits, their shields dropping dangerously low, as he opened his bag and took out a Snell grenade.

“Last one,” he shouted as he threw it out, aiming for the area to his friend’s right, to try to get it between them and the murderously accurate laser fire.

“Thank you, sir,” said Shannon, “I’ll have them repaired in a jiffy.”

“Who even says
jiffy
?” laughed Clancey.

“The goddess saving your scrawny ass. Five more seconds and y’all will be good as new.”

“Reverting to plan ‘A’,” said Duncan, re-holstering the pistol and pulling out his plasma rifle. “Cover me.”

The other three rose enough from behind their desks to begin, as quickly as they could pull the trigger, sending .45 bullets downrange, through the protective laser diffusing smokescreen.

Duncan ran out of the room, crossing in front of his friends, and ran to the other side of the room where he’d spotted a small alcove. He reached it after taking a glancing hit; whether from the Arn lasers or human bullets, he didn’t know. His shield dropped ten percent, then he was back under cover. He waited while his friends reloaded, then, when they started taking more deliberate, aimed, shots, he raised his plasma rifle to his shoulder and peeked out around the cover of the alcove. As he leaned further out, sweeping to his left, his gun sight swept across the first of the Arn ambushers; he put a blast into its head and it dropped from view.

After a second, Vince stood, pointing his pistol, held with both hands, toward the other side of the room.

“It looks like we’re clear,” he said after a second. Matt and Clancey both stood as well, and began to advance.

“Really?” asked Duncan. “There was only one of them?”

“Nope,” said Clancey. “They realized that you had a good position on them, and they fell back.”

“Doesn’t that seem kind of smart for a video game?” Duncan asked.

“It does,” said Matt, “and it is. That’s why we like fighting the Arn. They’re smart.”

Duncan noticed that his shield had been recharged. “Thanks Shannon.”

“If you’re going to thank me everytime I save your ass, you’re going to be too busy to do anything else. But you’re welcome.”

Clancey was kneeling, facing toward the way that they’d come. He began talking, no doubt for Duncan’s benefit. “I’m setting a little surprise for any Arn that decide they want to try to flank us through some hidden passageway or even by going outside and running around to come in behind us through the airlock. It’s a little omnidirectional ‘claymore’ mine. Any movement in this room will set it off and the entire room will be blasted with little pellets that’ll rip through just about anything.”

“Are there any other exits or entrances to this base?” asked Duncan, sweeping around the room which looked like an office space, more or less square with desks and chairs spread throughout. Other than the way they’d come in, there was only one door out; the door that the ambushing Arn had escaped through.

“You know as much as I do,” continued Clancey.

“But they are some sneaky little bastards,” added Matt.

“I’ve still got an eye on the entrance you guys went through,” said Shannon, “and I’ll let you know if anything tries to come that way.”

“Why can’t you just nuke them from orbit?” laughed Duncan.

“Because you spent all of your money on a clipper, and not a battle cruiser. You buy us one of those and I’ll be able to drop some true nightmares on the bad guys,” said Shannon.

“Really?”

“Really,” she answered. “Of course, they’re probably a few times as expensive as your stupidly expensive ship. Start saving your pennies.”

Fifty million credits or so, Duncan thought.

“Maybe for Christmas,” he replied. Maybe someday, he thought.

“See anything?” asked Matt.

“No.”

“Nope.”

“Me neither,” said Duncan. They were arrayed in a semi-circle just outside the door that the Arn had used to evacuate, looking through into the next room.

“Looks clear,” said Matt. He began to move into the room. He paused, looked around, “Yep, it’s clear.” The other three followed him through.

“Wait up,” said Clancy, closing the door after they were all through, “I need to activate the claymore. Remind me to deactivate it when we come back through,” he chuckled.

“File cabinet,” said Vince, who began to move toward it. He reached it, opened it, and began rooting through it. “Got some skill certificates. Nothing fancy.” He leafed through them, putting them into his backpack. “Hey, here’s one, Duncan. Pilot II. Do you have that?”

“Nope.”

“Cool, here,” he said, handing it to Duncan. “That should increase your piloting skill.”

“What’ll that do?” he asked. “And, thanks.”

“Improve your jump accuracy. Increase fuel efficiency,” said Clancey. “Just by a percent or so, but they add up once you really pile on the certs.”

“Talk later,” said Matt, “kill stuff now.”

They spread out, moving through the room. It was of a shape and size with the previous, but more sparsely furnished. They moved toward the door on the opposite side of the room, when Shannon came over the radio.

“I think you guys can calm down. An Arn shuttle just took off from near you guys. It looks like they ran away.”

“Then why,” said Matt, “haven’t we received a ‘mission over’ message?”

The complex shook, rattled, from an explosion. From the room they’d just vacated. Dust flew from around the edges of the door they’d just shut. Clancey’s claymore had taken out the rearguard’s attempted flanking maneuver.

Chapter 4

Birmingham, West Midlands UK

Eric West tapped nervously on his chair’s armrest. He looked from the monitor displaying his tactical map to the top, center monitor in his array of six. That monitor showed the forward, bridge, view of his Delta class destroyer; the HMS Westy. He saw his crewman, Jordi, bent over his station. Jordi handled sensors on the Westy.

“Ready?” asked Eric.

“Almost,” said Jordi, “just a few more seconds.” He continued working, then, “Ready.”

“Cool,” said Eric, standing, “launch it!”

“Right-o,” laughed Jordi. Eric saw him reach to his station screen, press a button. Eric looked to the upper right monitor, which he’d configured to show the view forward from turret one, showing the first third of his ship from deck level. It suddenly lit up in a strobe of flashing, yellow lights, accompanied by a staccato thumping that pulsed through Eric’s computer room.

This was the first time that Eric had used the ‘hedgehog’, the system that launched a series of passive sensors that spread in a pattern defined by the sensor operator.

Jordi, as Eric had instructed, had created a spherical area bounding a stranded cargo ship. The sensors accelerated, much more quickly than his ship could, until they’d spread into a net that would entrap, and allow Eric to track down and kill, the now hapless pirate that had attacked the automated ship.

Eric had purchased the system the evening before, putting it on his now nearly full credit card. It was more than he wanted to, or really should have, paid, but he could probably push off a few bills for a month or two. Besides, he justified, laying a pattern of passive buoys by dropping each directly off his ship, one at a time, was probably the reason he had yet to make a kill; so all of the money he’d already spent was wasted without this system.

He moved to the tactical map.

“Number One, overlay the hedgehog sensor with the tactical map.” A translucent sphere appeared around, centered upon, the cargo ship. Dark blue dots, plotting the spread of passive sensor buoys, shifted to a lighter, higher, intensity as the buoys arrived in place. He shifted the tactical map so that it also centered on the sphere, and watched as the icon representing the Westy moved toward it.

“Number One, are any of the crew online?”

“Yes, sir. Gray Eagle is showing.”

“Perfect,” chuckled Eric. A weapon’s station man; just what he wanted. “Send him a note, tell him to report for duty,” he added, then paused and thought. “Add a smiley emoticon, please.” He moved to the navigation screen, zoomed in to center on the cargo ship.

“Number One, add the sensor array to the nav screen as well.”

He set a waypoint to the center of sphere. The cargo ship began accelerating. It jumped to hyperspace just as the Westy arrived at the outer edge of the sphere.

“What’s up, Eric-dude?”

Gray Eagle had arrived. His long, silver hair and bushy white beard incongruous with his sleek, black naval uniform. He sat at the weapon’s station.

“We’ve got a pirate cornered,” began Eric, “and we’re going to bloody well kill it.”

“Rock
on
, dude!” said Gray Eagle, leaning over the weapon’s station, checking the status of the plasma cannon while opening the missile bay doors.

“When we find it,” continued Eric, “target with the forward cannon. It’s set to twenty percent power. We just want to burn off any sensor absorbent coating. Once that’s damaged and we have a good target lock, send in missiles, one at a time, until the engines are disabled.”

Eric returned to the sensor screen. “Jordi, as soon as we enter the sphere, start dropping passive buoys. Not so soon that the coverage overlaps. We want to eventually fill up this space with enough that there’s nowhere left for him to hide.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n,” Jordi saluted, smiling. Then he bent back over his station.

Eric stood back, surveying his screens. He laughed at himself when he noticed that he was, literally, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. This was the moment he’d been working toward; captaining a ship with his friends as crew, hunting down a wily and elusive prey.

He hoped, more than anything, that the bastard out there was the same guy who’d led him on that chase around that damned shepherd moon. He groaned a little, thinking about how much he really wanted to blow that guy to hell. Taunting him by repeatedly begging not to be shot had put Eric’s temper over the edge. He’d chased the ship around that moon for half an hour; and he still didn’t know how the guy had gotten away from him.

Eric smiled; once he’d begun running him down, though, the mocking fake pleas had ceased. “At least I was able to teach him that lesson,” he muttered. “Do
not
fuck with me.”

The HMS Westy reached the center of the sphere described by the passive sensor buoys. Jordi dropped another sensor, to join the ones he’d been placing as the ship made a line from the outer edge of the sphere to the center. Eric paused to think.

“Which way would you go, if you were trying to sneak away,” he asked.

“Away from us,” said Gray Eagle.

Jordi nodded, “Directly away.”

“Which is why I don’t think he will,” said Eric, mentally flipping a four-sided coin; port, starboard, up or down. He decided it came up ‘down’. He reached for the helm screen, rolled the ship one hundred and eighty degrees; upside down from its previous stance. He then changed the orientation further, pitching up ninety degrees. Now it was pointing straight ‘down’, perpendicular to their previous bearing.

“You really didn’t need to roll the ship first, dude,” laughed Gray Eagle, “all you had to do was drop the nose.”

Eric was in too good a mood to let this insubordination bother him, so he laughed.

“Number One, all ahead full!” he said as he returned to his chair. He sat and turned, “Jordi, anything on the sensors?”

“Nothing on any of the passive scans. I’m running a narrow beam active scan to the front of us,” Jordi responded.

“Good, good.” Eric resumed tapping his fingers. The narrow beam scan was much more likely to return a hidden ship, if it hit. That was also where Jordi’s advanced player skills paid off; his Sensor VI level gave him approximately a cumulative ten percent increase in finding and locking onto a cloaked target.

“Wait,” said Jordi, “I’ve got something. Come left twenty degrees …”

“Port,” corrected Eric.

“ … and pitch up by 30.”

“Number One, comply,” said Eric, standing again.

“It’s faint,” said Jordi as the ship adjusted to its new bearing. “Gray Eagle, it’s about three degrees off the starboard bow now, straight ahead.”

“Right,” said Gray Eagle, adjusting the forward cannon, “Range?”

“Tough to tell,” said Jordi.

Eric began rubbing his hands together again. “Fire!”

“Rock on, dude!”

Gray Eagle reached to the control for turret one, hit the big red fire button on top. Twin beams lanced forward, into space. Nothing.

“Adjust right,
uhm
, starboard just a tic,” said Jordi excitedly.

Gray Eagle moved the targeting joystick. “Three seconds until the cannon recharge, dude!”

“Fire when ready,” said Eric.

“Firing!”

“YES!” screamed Eric. One of the beams had intercepted the ship, slashing down the side. Minimal damage, but it was enough to disrupt the ship’s light and sensor absorbent cladding. The sensor station jumped to life with the newly acquired returns.