Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit (18 page)

"Did those idiots forget to lock
down something we already took, or are they showing too much initiative?"

Scar watched the pods hit their
maneuvering thrusters hard, small units designed to let the pods fly themselves
in limited fashion around the bustling cargo ports.  All four were rapidly
closing the gap between the Solar Venturer and her ships.  Actually, it seemed
like the second pair of pods were headed towards her corvettes and not her
cargo vessel; one for each of Captain Scar's fighting ships...

"Where are those pods headed?"
she asked, voice starting to rise.

The reply only took a second. 
"They're on collision courses with the
Interceptor
and
Eclipse
, captain!"

Scar lunged across the small, cramped
bridge space to see the sensor feeds.  Was it a malfunction of the maneuvering
thrusters?  Had her crew lost control of the captured cargo ship?  It didn't
matter at this instant.  "Full power to the engines!  Get us out of their
path!"

The helmsman nodded rapidly as he bent
over his console, mashing buttons and tapping commands.  The engines started to
hum, deckplates vibrating as the ship started to surge forward.

"Tell
Eclipse
and the cargo ship to move, too!" Scar yelled.  The
cargo ship was stolen from a breaker's yard and would be abandoned once the
pods were unloaded; they hadn't even deemed it worthy of a name.

At that point, the pod headed for her
ship exploded in a bright white nova of energy.  It was close enough that the
released radiation superheated the hull, fragments from the pods tearing
through the thin, weakened bulkheads and holing the pirate ship.  Hull breaches caused oxygen to vent, and Scar slammed the emergency switch to seal
compartments and isolate the various power and air sources.  Her ship was
hurting, engines damaged and leaking fuel and exhaust; the ship started to
tumble as the drive thrusters malfunctioned.

On the bridge, sparks and smoke from an
electrical fire obscured the forward part of the compartment.  About half the
displays were dead and the other half weren't being fed any data by the ship's
mangled computer network.  What she could see was sobering.  Her other
corvette,
Eclipse
, had been worse off.  She seemed to have
split in half amidst a cloud of debris.  Scar couldn't see the cargo ship, but
the handful of remaining sensors started wailing in warning.

"What now?" she yelled over the
screaming horns.

"We're being targeted by a weapons
guidance system!" she heard someone yell.

"How in the hell can they have
weapons?" she demanded of nobody in particular.  Their weapons were
disassembled; she'd received confirmation from her boarding party.  However, if
her own people had been out of commission long enough, there was the outside
chance the Solar Venturer crew had reassembled at least one of their defensive
guns, and her damaged ship would be no match for even the underpowered mounts
that local law allowed the cargo ship to have. 

A half dozen options raced through her
mind, but only one stuck.  She tried to think of something else to do, but time
was against her.  Once more she willed herself to think of something, and once
again only a single idea came to the fore.

"Get us out of here," she
commanded to her helmsman softly.  She turned to the Qualin who had been
monitoring local space.  "Tell our cargo ship to get out of here and
rendezvous at our rally point."  That in itself was risky; there was
always the chance the crew would just take what they could and scatter, leaving
a stripped-bare cargo ship floating in deep space.  Loyalty didn't run all that
deep among the sort of people she employed, and she had to admit that she was
already running with a 'B' crew.  All she could do was hope for the best and
try to instill a little fear in them.

"And tell them, very
specifically," she continued, "that we already have a manifest from
the Solar Venturer and I'll expect everything to be sorted by the time we dock
with them."

The Qualin smirked knowingly and obliged.

Scar turned back to her helmsman and
caught him looking at her.  "Why are we still here?" 

He nervously finished setting up the
course and then engaged the nav system.  The Interceptor stopped her wobble and
shot into hyperspace, barely making it past the barrier before her hyperdrive
engines malfunctioned and dropped the ship back out in realspace in a wild
tumble.  It was going to be a long trip home for Captain Scar.

Solar Venturer was back in hyperspace. 
Halley had subdued the pirate guarding the mess hall; Solar Venturer's decon
chambers were bursting at the seams with the pirates who'd been captured alive
in the ship's recent ordeal, the Trin among them.  They complained loudly about
abuse and inhumane conditions, but always quieted right down when Halley came
to check on them.

The crew was even holding a celebration
of sorts in the mess hall.  They'd decorated it with what they had, which
included imaginatively repurposed packing materials and a few clothing articles;
items taken from the pirates were displayed as well, hanging festively from the
ceiling.

Web and Halley had circulated for a
while, enduring toasts from the captain and assorted crew.  It made them
nervous because their goal of remaining unremarkable was a hopeless sham now;
the best they could do was help these people move on and start thinking about
other topics as quickly as possible.  To that end, they'd constantly redirected
conversations to the topics of what the crew would do next, asking for ideas
about security and opinions on the war in general.

Even Lodoc the abrasive engineer had taken
a shine to Halley, and seemed intent on helping her escape the other crew when
they seemed prepared to overwhelm her with their questions.

Lodoc turned to Halley as he saw Web
approaching from across the mess.  "That one seems to be quite interested
in your attention," he said conspiratorially, to which Halley could only
smile. 

"He doesn't seem so bad," she
said neutrally. 

"I don't buy the line about him
being a retired, harmless Fixer, though," Lodoc continued. 
"Something about him is not quite above board, you know what I
mean?"  Halley simply nodded.  "All I'm saying is, watch out for
yourself.  He could be trouble."

"How do you know I'm not
trouble?" Halley asked with a big smile as Web arrived to join the
conversation.

"Nice girl like you?  I don't see
it." Lodoc nodded politely to Web, inclined his drink towards Halley, and
wandered off to mingle.

"So do we have to come up with a way
of erasing everyone's minds here?" asked Web in muted tones.

"I don't think so," she said
after a moment of thought.  "They're in good spirits.  They think you and
I are pretty nice folks, and probably just want to get on with their lives as
soon as possible.  I'll bet it will take a day or two for them to even notice
we didn't come back from our run to the surface."

"But now they're thinking about
us," Web cautioned.  "We were supposed to just disappear and doctor
the ship's records so it looked like we clocked back in with the drop-crew. 
They'll wonder where we've gone and why we both left together."

Halley gave him a look that he found
incredibly attractive, and whether she meant anything by it or not, Web's mind
was spinning.  "Lodoc already thinks there's about to be something going
on between us," Web said slowly, sly grin on his face.  "I'm thinking
there's a way to work your obvious attraction to me into a good cover for why
we leave on Callidor."

Halley laughed, and Web's heart raced at
her smile.  It fueled him somehow; her happiness and positive energy kept him
going.  "So," Halley said, theatrically pursing her lips and staring
at the deckplates as her mind worked, "you're saying, maybe in the heat of
this traumatic, emotional experience, we both discovered we were adrenaline
junkies and decided to run off together to see what we might accomplish?"

"That sounds like a great plan,
actually."

Halley looked up and down the corridor. 
"I think that could work as well.  It would explain why we left together,
which otherwise might seem suspicious.  But if we left together because you
couldn't keep your hands off me, well, everyone would understand that,
right?"

"It would look suspicious if I
didn't make a pass at you."

"Well then," Halley continued. 
"We'll need some witnesses.  Not a lot, but enough that when people notice
we're missing, the rumor mill can fill in the facts and the crew will believe
it."

"Let's go get all grabby with each
other near the turbolift bank," suggested Web helpfully.

"The things we do for the good of
the Confederation..."

CHAPTER
TEN

Merritt ran a gauntlet down the upper
hull of a huge construction ship.  The monster was studded with tractor arrays,
docking gantries, cranes, cargo pod hard points and observation towers.  It was
a perfect way to camouflage his movements, and right now he needed to stay
under the radar.

The brief dogfight near Avenger was over,
the Priman fighters having been destroyed to the last.  He'd chased the Primans
all over the place, claiming several kills to add to his impressive
collection.  The rest of his Talon fighters were split between escorting Cory's
remaining Intruders and flying CAP over Avenger herself.  Avenger was moving,
albeit at a painfully slow pace, towards a spot in the shipyard where the
captain planned to make an exit once the hyperdrive was operational. 

To that end, Cory's Intruder squadron had
formed up and was probing towards where the Priman cruisers were estimated to
be.  Merritt had taken some amount of liberty with his own orders.  He was
supposed to scout for the enemy and avoid detection if at all possible in order
to more effectively arrange an ambush if need be.  He'd elected to select as
his starting point the last known location of Cory and the two wingmen she'd
been with when sensor contact had been lost.

Merritt hit his retro thrusters hard as
he neared the aft portion of the construction ship.  He used his maneuvering
thrusters to gently nudge his fighter towards the edge of the upper hull.  His
active sensors were all off; passive sensors soaked up the data, information
and emissions floating around, but didn't send out any scanning beams of their
own.  Between that and his own eyes, he'd do this the old fashioned way.

What he saw made him cringe.  In an open
space within a row of old naval cruisers sat two Priman warships- a cruiser and
another that his computer classified as an escort carrier.  There were a
handful of Priman fighters patrolling the area, and he allowed himself a grim
smile because he knew why there were only a couple fighters to guard the bigger
ships.  There was a stream of shuttles moving between the cruiser and the
escort carrier.

The regular cruiser was damaged, though
he couldn't tell by how much.  The ship was slowly spinning, however, and he
watched with interest as the aft came into view.  He saw the engines, one of which
was badly mangled.  That's when Web knew that Cory had been here; the blast
damage was just about right for the yield of a Quick Strike torpedo.

Then Web saw the Reaper and knew with a
stone-cold dread why Cory and her wingmen were missing.  They'd tangled with
the Reaper; he knew her, and knew she wouldn't have backed down even if the
damn thing had parked right in her path.  Her determination and drive, some of
her best character traits, were also the things most likely to end up getting
her taken away from him. 

He looked around, squinting and surveying
the area nearby.  He wished desperately that he could fire up his active
sensors and run a scan for the alloys unique to Confederation military
construction, but he couldn't allow himself to be detected.  Still, he wasn't
going to leave this area until he had some sort of information, some closure
either way.

He instead tried to imagine Cory making
an attack run.  If the Priman ships were sitting here, he had to assume they
hadn't gone far from where they had been damaged.  He looked in the direction
they'd come from, out towards the edge of the tractor field that helped keep
the shipyard from floating apart. 
If
they came from there,
he
thought,
and Cory came from this direction
, he continued as he picked a
likely spot,
then she'd be looking at a firing run somewhere by those
transports
. 

He brought his systems back to low power
and spun in place before backtracking down the hull of the ship.  He got about
halfway down when he gave the throttles a quick burst and dashed across to the
next row of silent vessels.  This row was slightly staggered against the first,
meaning that he could cross the gap from where he was to the other side towards
the transports he wanted to investigate without the Primans having a direct
line of sight on him.

The next few minutes were
nerve-wracking.  He needed to get back to Avenger and report what he'd seen,
but not without being able to say he'd given Cory and her wingmen a fair chance
at rescue or recovery.

He saw a series of scorch marks on the
transport to his left; it probably meant that the Primans had been firing this
way and perhaps the Intruders had been in this very spot.  He cut his forward
momentum to zero and spun slowly in place.  Nothing.  He spent one more precious
minute waiting for something to catch his eye, but no miracles happened. 

He couldn't wait any longer; Captain Elco
was no doubt wondering where he'd gone off to or if he'd been destroyed in his
recon efforts.

He spun his fighter again to the
direction he'd come from.  The ship seemed to move reluctantly, as if mirroring
the emotions of its pilot.  It didn't want to leave, either.

As he turned his head, he saw something. 
A glint of light reflected off of something in the darkness.  But that didn't
belong.  The area was in shadow; there was nothing for light to bounce off. 
His mind raced- was somebody trying to contact him?

He pushed his thrusters much higher than
he should have, but he was on the verge of panic.  He got close to the shadowed
hull of the old transport and came to a stop.  He searched again, reluctant to
use his own landing lights for fear of the brightness attracting attention. 

There was a knock on his canopy, and he
nearly jumped right out of his flight suit, a strangled curse stuck in his
throat.  He turned to look and saw a figure in a vacuum suit floating
alongside, a small emergency flashlight floating from a tether attached to a
harness point.  It was a Confed flight suit, with Warbirds patches and a
nameplate sewn in place: Sosus, C. Captain. 

Merritt yelped in excitement and turned
off the polarization of the canopy.  It was Cory, waving slowly to him.  Her
faceplate reflected some of the lights from his cockpit displays, but he could
see her smile inside.  It was her, but the smile was sad, somehow reserved.  He
could imagine why; she was here alone, no other pilots in sight.

He dialed up his comm system to the
lowest setting and keyed the transmit button.  "You have to stop doing
this to me, Cory," was all he could manage.

"I know," she replied in a
somber tone, as if she was still gathering herself.  "Patton and Steer are
gone.  Did we hurt the cruiser?"

Merritt could only nod, then realized she
probably couldn't tell he was doing so.  "Yeah, you damaged her engines. 
They're both sitting dead in space one row over, one tending to the other. 
Let's get out of here, ok?"

"No complaints there," she
began, "but your fighter only seats one."

Merritt was already running diagnostics
on his emergency systems.  With a green board, he tapped some commands and
pulled a small lever.  His flight suit instantly isolated itself from the
umbilicals that connected him to his fighter.  At the same time, he heard the
latches in the canopy come undone.  He reached up with both hands and pushed on
the transparent armor glass and sent the canopy floating off into the darkness.

"Come on in," he began. 
"You'll be safest sitting in here and we can make good speed back away
from here towards Avenger."

Cory obliged, and a few seconds later was
sitting on Merritt's lap as he spun his now open-cockpit fighter around towards
their ship.

"Time to go," she said softly.

Captain Elco sat at his command chair,
plotting potential exit routes from the shipyard on his tabletop display. 
There were a good half-dozen serviceable ways out, but the Primans had to know
that as well.  And with two of the Priman cruisers in the shipyard, that meant
there was a third outside, lying in wait for them.  Space was big, so it wasn't
as though there was no way to avoid the enemy, but his hyperdrive still wasn't
online and there were only a few directions that made sense to use.

He could try heading back towards
Carada.  That would in theory offer protection, but the Monarchy and
Confederation weren't officially allies and he wasn't going to find out the
hard way if they were willing to risk getting involved with the Primans just to
help his ship.

He could also take the most direct route
to Confed space.  To be sure, it was a long trip, almost two week's travel now
that they were so far into the galactic core, but once in hyperspace it was a
lot harder to track and catch an adversary.

But he figured the Primans were thinking
the same thing.  The disconcerting fact was that they seemed to have been
waiting for Avenger.  There were just enough ships to mount an ambush; it
wasn't like his ship had blundered into the vanguard of an invasion fleet.  No,
this had been a targeted strike at him; he felt that in his bones.  If that was
the case, and the Primans knew what his options were, he needed to do something
they wouldn't expect.

What could that be, though?  He studied
his map, dragged and zoomed it around to explore all his options.  It took a
while, but finally, he had it.  It wasn't much of a plan, but it was unexpected
and would buy him and Avenger some breathing room.  And if he had time to plot
and scheme, he was already thinking of ways to get vengeance on his pursuers. 
But first thing was first; they needed to make it out of the shipyard without
tangling with any of those three Primans again.

He tapped a few spots on his desk's
surface and saw the image of his Chief Engineer, Andros Fyr. 
"Chief," he began, "what's the status of our engines?"

The Chief's eyes darted to a display next
to his own workstation, then stared up at the ceiling as he tried to decide
what he could promise.  "Sublight is still at one quarter, Captain.  We're
making replacement parts, but the 3D printers, supply tanks, and machine shops
took some damage and we're at reduced capacity.  Should take a couple hours. 
Hyperdrive is at about half our rated speed.  I wouldn't push it too hard until
I can watch the patches and bypasses, but we should be good for a while."

"Helm," Elco stated to the
officer at the port forward station on the main platform.  "What's the ETA
to Faaria in the Mining League if we maintain half-speed in hyper?"

The officer ran the what-ifs and replied
quickly.  "Just under twenty hours, Captain."

"Think it'll hold together for
twenty hours, Chief?" Elco asked into his display again.

Chief Fyr rubbed his face with his hand
as he thought about it.  "That should work, Captain.  We'll all be keeping
an eye on things down here."

"Thanks.  Be ready soon; I don't
know if I'll be able to give you much warning before we engage the hyperdrive
up here."  Elco cut the connection and mentally plotted a route to
Faaria.  They'd have to make some course changes and approach slowly in case
any Priman units were in the area, but it was doable so he moved on to the next
phase of his plan.

"Weapons," he called over his
shoulder as he turned to look at the 'sensor shack' aft of his command chair,
"what's the status of our torpedo launchers?"

"Still completely offline,
Captain," came a guardedly neutral reply.  "The aft launchers have
had their feed mechanisms to the magazines destroyed by the torpedo impact. 
They're trying to bring some up manually, but that whole part of the ship is
pretty madly mangled.  We just have the torpedoes in the tubes, no ability to
reload.  Forward magazines are ok, but the fire control computers are
completely scrambled.  Last update was," he paused to check the data log
scrolling across the glass next to his station, "twenty minutes ago.  They
were trying to wipe and reinstall the computer's software, but as of right now
forward launchers are inoperative."

"Thank you," Elco replied,
gloomy again.  He needed something to make the Primans respect Avenger as she
left the area; Intruders with their smaller torpedoes wouldn't cut it, aside
from the fact that they'd lost a third of their number just keeping Avenger's
six clean on the way in.  With only her starboard laser batteries functional,
Avenger wasn't exactly a force to be reckoned with at the moment.  Again, the
gears turned.

"Loren," Elco said into the
pickup on his chair.  "Can you get up here quick?"

"On the way," was the prompt
reply.

Seconds later, the XO came trotting
through the starboard escape trunk up from C3 and onto the bridge, stopping on
the platform where the captain's and XO's stations were.

"What can I do for you?" Loren
asked matter-of-factly.

"We need something to fight
with," Elco admitted, then showed Loren a readout on his workstation of
Avenger's meager available weaponry.

"I saw that in C3," Loren
added, "and was thinking about this."  Loren chewed on his inner
cheek while he tried to put the finishing touches on the plan that had been
floating around, partially formed, in his mind.  "We have torpedoes, but
we just can't launch them.  We can still control and steer them, right?"
Elco merely nodded. "So, let's drop a ton of them behind us as mines.  We
can flip Avenger over and just use the emergency jettison function of the
torpedo tubes.  They'll slide out into space, but after that we could control
them remotely.  Then we could strap a few into one or two of our Freedom
transports.  Same deal; fly them remotely.  I know a lot of our signals can
still get scrambled by the Primans and their ECM gear, but from the reports
I've seen at least one of the cruisers in here is pretty beat up and the other
will be watching her closely.  We might get some lucky hits in.  That only
leaves the one that's on overwatch outside the shipyard.  All we have to do is
get past her and we're on our way."