Star Viking (Extinction Wars Book 3) (10 page)

“Hmm,” I said, pondering the idea. “We can’t be obvious about this. Ten ships might be too many. Whatever we do, though, we’re going to have to move fast. We need tech. We need tools, and we need more starships. If the Saurian fleets really have retreated, now’s the time to strike and grab some of the things we need. Yes, I like your idea, N7.”

“I don’t,” Diana said. “Whose starships do we use? Not mine, I’ll tell you. We only have so much ordnance. I mean missiles, mines and laser coils. If you become a pirate—”

“Viking,” I said.

“Names don’t matter,” Diana said.

“I think they do.”

She shook her head as if I was simple. “Jelk Corporation planets will have missile defenses, I’d bet, and planetary beams. You won’t be able to just swoop down and make yourself rich.”

“It’s time to take risks,” I said. “You’re right about that.” With an elbow on the table, I made a fist and rested my chin on it. “Okay. You don’t want to risk your precious ships. I’ll use one of mine, then. It’s time to make a trial run. I’ll need a freighter, though, to carry our loot.”

“We can’t afford to waste any of our freighters,” Diana said. “We have too few as it is.”

“Wrong,” I said, “we can’t afford
not
to use them. But I’ll tell you what. Loan me a freighter and I’ll give you a percentage of our take.”

The Amazon Queen studied me, and I could see the calculations in her eyes. Finally, she asked, “How much of a percentage?”

We spent the next two hours haggling. Star Vikings, I liked the name. It was better than Forerunner Guardians. It was an Earth name rather than one the aliens had coined for us. Now we had to decide which star system to strike.

Several days later, I took the
Aristotle
, a former Lokhar cruiser, and the
Maynard Keynes
, a scow of a Jelk freighter. Diana had given me her worst vessel, not that I could blame her. Unfortunately, the engines broke down after the sixth jump.

Going through a jump gate took its toll on the passengers. Flu-like symptoms struck just about everyone, even our android. It also produced wear and tear to the equipment.

Thus, for three days, all my engineers and N7 struggled on the freighter’s propulsion systems, trying to get it mobile again. Luckily, this was an empty system. There was no one to give us grief. It had a brown dwarf for a star and burnt-out husks for planets. None of the worlds contained atmospheres. Most were ice-balls with particles of nickel-iron and rock.

On the third day, Ella Timoshenko found a drifting body on her scanner. It turned out to be a Lokhar soldier in wrecked powered armor.

“How long do you think he’s been adrift?” Ella asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t know and didn’t care. The raid weighed me down with responsibilities and worries. This wasn’t anything like joining Prince Venturi before on
Indomitable
. There hadn’t been any choices last time. The Kargs would break into our universe, and that would be the end of life as we knew it. Here, I could make good choices and bad ones. The wrong decisions would mean the end of the human race. Talk about piling on pressure. I felt the weight of past and future generations squeezing me down.

Finally, the
Maynard Keynes
could move again. The endless work had left our engineers exhausted, though. I let them rest and kept the two starships where they were. Soon enough, everyone would have to work at peak efficiency.

I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. If you guessed that I was having second thoughts, you’d be right. I didn’t mind raiding the Jelk Corporation. That wasn’t the problem. I wondered about scale, though. This would solve our dilemma in a pinprick fashion. We needed strategic answers.

Alliance with the Jade League, full-bore military and economic assistance, would have made a world of a difference to what we planned. That’s what I’d originally thought I had been buying with the agreement to put one hundred thousand assault troopers into harm’s way. It turned out I’d been a fool. Despite the few automated factories they’d brought, the Lokhars had snookered us, and I didn’t like it.

With my fingers laced behind my head, I told myself I had to rid all thoughts of squeamishness from my heart. This was like a lioness with a den full of cubs. She went out and killed a baby gazelle or slew the mother and let the baby starve to death. I wasn’t in some airy-fairy tale where the universe played paddy cake with the Marquis of Queensbury Rules to guide us. This was the law of tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, baby.

What did that mean? It meant I had to play this as ruthless as I could. I hadn’t come to another race and laced their world with nukes. The tigers and, in a way, the Jelk had come and done it to us. Now, we scrambled for any advantage we could eke out. If I failed, humanity sank out of sight, never to lift its head again.

So be it. I would do whatever—

A knock at my hatch startled me. I swung my feet off the cot, stood and pressed a button. The hatch opened and N7 stood there with rolled-up star charts in his arms.

“Do you remember you wanted to look at these?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, having completely forgotten. “Let’s take a gander.”

For the next several hours, N7 and I pored over his charts. He knew a lot about this region of Jelk space and our target the Demar star system.

It had an “O” Spectral Class Star, a bluish-white furnace that burned at 30,000 Kelvin on the surface. The system lacked any terrestrial planets. In fact, it only had one Jupiter-sized gas giant. The moons of that Jovian world were heavy with mined ores. The Demar system also boasted Inner, Middle and Outer Asteroid Belts. Those, too, were rich in thorium and deuterium, a veritable mother lode of mineral wealth. The system contained a single huge habitat known as the Demar Starcity. It wasn’t a pleasure palace or breeding ground for Saurians. Instead, it had a giant processing center with sideline industries that produced finished goods.

N7 stood beside the table, with a star chart magnetized in place. Using a forefinger, he stabbed the starcity. “This is my origin point,” he said. “This is where I was built.”

I rubbed my jaw thoughtfully.

“Perhaps as important for you, here in the habitat are many military articles.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“I suspect you will find automated missile systems and beam cannons,” N7 said. “There will, of course, be mining equipment. Or, if you prefer, you can take gas giant scoopers to mine Jupiter and Saturn for deuterium.”

“Seems too good to be true,” I said.

“Agreed,” N7 said. “This was the base system for the Tenth Saurian taskforce. The fleet wasn’t on the frontier between the Jade League and Jelk Corporation territory. This was a secondary force meant to reinforce wherever needed.”

“And you think those warships are gone?” I asked.

N7 straightened. “I do not presume to know, Commander. I work only off the information you received from Doctor Sant.”

“Great,” I said. “Really, we’re in the dark about just about everything.”

“Yes.”

I gazed at the star chart and the Demar system in particular.

“If the Jelk Corporation was in trouble,” I said, “I mean against invaders. It seems as if the secondary or reinforcing fleet would be the first one to go.”

“That is logical,” N7 said.

“The question is, will the Jade League members already have invaded these regions?”

“That is another reason to try here,” N7 said. “Logically, the Jade League members would wish to scour star systems close to their base worlds. This is farther away.”

“Do you think Doctor Sant told us the truth?”

“I have no way of verifying his words,” N7 said.

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my jaw again. I had a bad feeling about this, and I couldn’t fool myself. If we failed here, things would likely get even darker in a hurry.

***

I’m sure you’ve heard of deep-sea fish that live in a world of eternal gloom. Well, I mean the fish that
used
to live in the subterranean reaches of the Earth’s oceans. I’m sure the bio-terminator had settled down there by now, too.

My point is pressure. Those fish had learned to live with an intense pressure per square inch that would have crushed a human. No submarine had ever gone to such a depth, although a few bathyscaphes had. The fish could take intense pressure because their own bodies pushed outward. The funny thing occurred when that pressure stopped. If a fisherman hooked such a fish and reeled as fast as he could, the deep-sea creature would die. It couldn’t live with the lesser pressure.

What did any of that have to do with our raid? The Jelk Corporation had put intense pressure against the Jade League for uncounted years. These last few years, and now even more so, the pressure had lifted. It was gone. Like those deep-sea fish, it appeared that most of the Jade League members didn’t know what to do with the lesser threat. It had seemingly unhinged their thinking. It had also apparently opened old wounds among the members.

What we found as we cruised the jump lanes in Jelk Corporation territory was a decided lack of Jade League vessels. Several times, Saurian scout ships hailed us. N7 responded, using old codes.

The Saurian scout commanders always demanded to know why an old freighter accompanied an obvious Lokhar military craft.

N7 told them he was bringing the Lokhar cruiser to Sector Eight Headquarters for study. Each time, the Saurian commander grew utterly still on the viewing screen. Then he would hiss. After the hissing, the commanders told N7 to carry on.

Sector Eight was code for
secret mission
. As had been the case many times in the past, N7 was the source of priceless information.

I had a meeting with my main team: Ella, N7, Rollo and Dmitri. I’d taken them with me, figuring I needed my best people to pull this off.

Dmitri was a Zaporizhian Cossack from the Ukraine. They used to be a hard-riding, freedom-loving people from the steppes or plains of Russia and the Ukraine. They were supposed to be good fighters. Most people knew them as those acrobatic dancers who squatted low, folded their arms on their chests and vigorously kicked out their legs.

Dmitri was as a solid, muscular man, shorter than my six-three. He had taken to wearing his hair in a straight-up brush-cut.

N7 had magnetized the chosen star chart on a wall. We stood beside it, me with a pointer in my hand.

“We’re several jumps away from the Demar star system,” I said. “Now is the time to decide where in the system we should target. Any thoughts?” I asked.

“I say we get in, hit and get out as fast as we can,” Dmitri said. “That means we should strike a weak spot. So, what’s the easiest place to hit there?”

We all glanced at N7.

“I would imagine the Outer Asteroid Belt,” the android said. “It’s closest to the jump gate.”

“Everything is relative,” Ella said. “We have to know the lay of the system better. What’s the most heavily defended location?”

N7 pointed at the starcity.

“That also happens to be the plum prize,” I said. “This is our first raid, and as far as we know, the first time the Demar system will have been hit since the Saurian taskforce left. Are they worried? Who knows? But once they’ve been hit, the word is going to go out. The second raid will be harder. This might be the time to strike big.”

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t be ready for an assault now,” Ella said.

“Because this is a secondary area,” I said. “As far as we know, no Jade League members have struck the Jelk Corporation frontier. The Jelk have been on the offensive for a long time, remember? They’re not going to think of defense right away. At least, that would be my guess.”

“Still,” Ella said. “With the protecting fleet gone, those left at home have to be nervous.”

“That is my own view,” N7 said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, maybe we should try to put them at ease. Besides, I think the closer we can get to our target, the better for us. We don’t want to trade shots with the starcity’s laser batteries or defensive missiles.”

“What do you suggest?” Ella asked.

I stared at the star chart. What had the old-time Vikings done? They used daring and cunning. I remember reading about one chieftain who pretended to die. The raiders had been pagans, striking Christian Europe. The chieftain had his warriors tell the city fathers of one walled town that he’d become a Christian at death, and wished for a Christian burial. The head priest had realized what a religious coup that would be. He’d forced the townspeople to consent, and he even began to write a letter to the Pope about it. Several days later, big Viking warriors carried the supposedly dead chieftain to the town’s church. They had laid their spears and great axes under the faker. During the ceremony, the chieftain opened his eyes, rose with a gusty laugh and pitched the weapons to his men. They went berserk and slew the city fathers and their guards. Then, the Norse warriors rushed through the lanes to the main city gate, opening it to admit their hidden men outside. That night, they sacked the town.

It had been a Trojan horse kind of plan. With a grin, I told the others the story. I finished by saying, “That’s what we need to do at the starcity.”

“Why there?” Ella asked. “The starcity will be the most heavily guarded place.”

“Exactly,” I said. “If we can storm it, we’ll have breached their main defenses. That means we’ll be safe enough for a time to pick our plunder. There’s another thing to consider. The starcity should have the kind of goods we need. Besides, the habitat sounds like the best place to use assault trooper tactics.”

“How to you propose we trick the defenders?” Ella asked.

I glanced at N7. “You know the Saurians much better than we do. You’re going to have to think of something.”

We waited, and our golden-haired android blinked at the star chart. “I have an idea,” he said at last.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

N7 began to speak.

***

Two days later, we passed through the final jump gate to the target, entering the Demar star system.

The
Maynard Keynes
led the way. The much larger freighter used a barely-working tractor beam to pull the shutdown
Aristotle
. If our ploy failed, it would take twenty solid minutes to activate the former Lokhar cruiser to full capacity. We were attempting our own version of a Trojan horse attack. Our very weakness demanded we do it this way.

Inside the freighter were two thousand assault troopers. Two thousand combat soldiers ready to try to turn the tide of history that swept against humanity.

On the bridge, I stood near N7, who acted as the freighter captain.

The intense Demar sun shined its fierce light. The starcity orbited it at a Mars-like distance.

“We’re being hailed,” Ella said, who worked the communications system.