Death Drop (49 page)

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK! The Zebulon shuddered from the impact and the warning siren and lights were coursing in unison again. “I know, dammit—I know!” Dezmara shouted as she disengaged the alarm and returned the lights to normal. The hull wasn’t breached, but it could have been. Dezmara didn’t have the time or the desire to think about what would happen if someone were unlucky enough to be inside a compartment where bullets punched through. She checked the systems to make sure all compartments were sealed and engaged the airlock door to the cockpit behind her. “This just isn’t our goddam day, Doj. Hang on!”

She jerked the control stick back, and the
Ghost
streaked upward in a vertical climb and then arched over backward. Just before the apex of the loop, Dezmara rolled the ship right side up and then slammed the stick forward, screaming down on her attackers with machine guns blazing. The six big-bore weapons in the
Ghost’s
nose were like revolving fangs, spitting their scalding venom in streaks of red and orange as tracer rounds cut through the dark like glowing blades.

The
Maelstrom
, flying slightly higher and just behind Rilek’s flagship in cover position, had broken from the formation at an intercept angle as soon as Dezmara started her maneuver. Captain Saraunt turned broadside and opened fire with all three portside gun turrets as bullets flew from the
Ghost
, but the move was fruitless. Before the
Maelstrom’s
fusillade could hit home, the elusive Zebulon passed below its line of fire, and the salvo, with no atmosphere to slow it down, sailed off to explore more closely the dark dust lanes of a young spiral galaxy burning deep amber in the distance. A spray of slugs pierced the
Maelstrom’s
vertical stabilizer and portside aileron, but her engines were unharmed and she gave chase.

“Short bursts, Sy, and make ‘em count!” Dezmara said, pulling and then releasing the trigger on her control stick several times as the long top deck of the
Lodestar
rushed up at them with terrifying quickness. Dezmara didn’t need to tell Simon how to shoot down enemy aircraft: in addition to being a genius engineer, mechanic, and hacker, he was a skilled gunner. She heard the quick, pulsating rattle of the top turret guns, and she knew he was right there with her, giving hell to the ship on their tail.

If it weren’t for her strong survival instinct, Dezmara’s feelings would have been severely hurt. She had flown more runs with Rilek than any other runner and, until now, she had admired his strict sense of honor.
“Think he’s doing this just to win a freakin’ run or did Rilek find out you’re Human? I bet they picked up their cargo in Luxon too. Did he tip off that sonofabitch, the portmaster, and hope to split the bounty?! Goddamit, what in the hell’s goin’ on?”
There was no time to think about the answers as Dezmara concentrated on the two big cannons in front of the the
Lodestar’s
conning tower and fired a squirt from her forward guns. Her shells slammed into the domed, armored cover encasing the barrels, peeling back chunks of jagged metal as they stitched their way across the deck, but the hits failed to cause any mechanical damage and Rilek answered almost instantly.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The pinpoints of starlight outside the cockpit of the
Ghost
blurred and smeared across the viewing panes in a drunken collage as the ship shook violently from the concussion of cannon fire. She pulled out of her dive and killed the impact alarm before it could howl its first wounded cry, and it fell silent only to be replaced by another report. There was no siren to accompany this new bedevilment and the humble, white words flashing on Dezmara’s screen were modest in comparison to the blood-red pulsing of an impact warning. By all appearances, this was a problem that could be overlooked until they thwarted their attackers, but appearances can be misleading.

“Gun system failure?” Dezmara read the alert out loud. “What the shit does that mean?”

“Luv, we’ve got a big problem!” Simon crackled over the com. “Those cannon blasts ruptured the coolin’ tubes on the top turret.”

“And?!” Dezmara clamored as she spun away from a line of tracers that arced beneath them from behind.

“’Less we find some atmosphere to continue our little scuffle in, the gun barrels’ll be melted softer than mum’s custard pie on a hot day!”

“Just move to the rear turret and keep firing, dammit!” Dezmara was irritated. The
Maelstrom
was in dogged pursuit, peppering the rear of the ship as she weaved and rolled away from Saraunt’s relentless gunfire.

“Sorry, luv, no can do. The guns all drink from a central radiator on a closed system. Coolin’ fluids all been sucked out to space.

“Tell ya the truth, don’t think it makes much difference—we’re almost out of bullets as it is!”

“All right,” Dezmara said, punching rapidly at her keyboard, “let’s break for the closest system with a planet we can use. I can stay ahead of ‘em for a while. Looks like Clara 591 is the winner. Hold on to your goggles!”

Dezmara leveled the ship and jammed the throttle forward. Fuel dumped into the cycling combustion chambers of the
Ghost’s
engines, and the roar that followed would have cowered a supernova. The
Ghost
was faster than both of her pursuers, but not by much. Rilek always made a close race in the
Lodestar
, and the
Maelstrom
had been the number one ship before Dezmara started running. She could outpace them—she just hoped she could get far enough ahead to stay out of range of their guns. She also prayed she had enough fuel left to do battle when they got to where they were going.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and Dezmara didn’t have the time or the fuel to zigzag around the universe. Unfortunately, the course charted for Clara 591 took them right through
The Cloud of Lost Kings.

Scholars of ages past would have said it was one of the coldest regions in space: an area spanning millions and millions of light-years where the elements were coming together to form stars—the birth of a new galaxy. But any sailor or pilot in any dive pub from Luxon to Angwar would tell a different story—the
real story
. They knew it as the mysterious vapor that swallowed the envoy of Vladonik Draoncul, the last king of Rulunsk, as they fled the legions of Durax that chased them from their home world.

Of course, navigating through stardust—as it was commonly known—wasn’t exactly easy, and the king had had an entire legion of the most relentless, evil murdering sons-of-bitches in the universe chasing him. Dezmara figured that Draoncul and his envoy of ships had been tracked down in the cloud and blown to pieces. However, sailors, never passing on a perfect opportunity to add to the lexicon of superstition that sustains their colorful lives, say that King Draoncul and his envoy became hopelessly lost and, in their haste to escape, didn’t put enough provisions aboard and they starved to death. If the theory stopped there, Dezmara wouldn’t have such a hard time believing it, but the embellishments of sailors is beyond compare, and the story continues that the angry spirit of King Draoncul and his phantom fleet sail the dreaded
Cloud of Lost Kings
and attack any ship unlucky enough to pass through the haunted miasma.

At first, Dezmara was cheered by the thought of passing through the cloud. It was another obstacle between her and her attackers and she longed desperately for its cover. She also didn’t believe in King Draoncul and his ghost armada, and the only true sources of her worry were the stories about strange electrical failures and the loss of all navigational instruments when flying through this particular patch of stardust. But as their unrelenting speed brought them closer, the sailor inside Dezmara caused her heart to pound a little faster.

The Cloud of Lost Kings
looked like an enormous explosion in space. Billows of vapor that looked like roiling flames blossomed from one another in every direction. Creases of red and orange burned around dark smoke-like clusters as flashes of pure white stood surrounded by the encroaching necrotic rot of hellfire gas that would slowly snuff out its light in the eternity to come.

Dezmara’s sudden apprehension at entering the cloud was pushed aside as cannon fire exploded just short of the
Ghost’s
engines, and several shockwaves battered the ship in quick succession. The tail end of the star freighter lurched upward and it was still trembling as she pierced the perimeter of the cloud and was enveloped. If they had had enough fuel, Dezmara would have played a few games inside the haze, perhaps pulled a half-loop and doubled back to the Straits while Rilek and Saraunt fumbled around in the dark. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure whether they would be able to make it on the fuel they had left—it was a direct course to Clara 591 or nothing. The only thing they had going for them was that Rilek didn’t know they were low on fuel. He would expect her to change course and try to lose them in the cloud.
“But what if he expects that you expect him to expect you to change course, so he just blasts away on this trajectory?”
she thought to herself.
“He’s smart and there’s two of ‘em—you’re screwed!”

The murk didn’t move; it just changed color outside the viewing panes—a solid sheet, like a tarpaulin wrapped tightly around the nose of the ship, streaked with deep purple, blood red, fiery orange, and charred black that unraveled endlessly as Dezmara charged on at full throttle. Visibility was zero. Silent white bursts ignited around the
Ghost
in a strobing pulse, and she squinted, shielding her eyes with her hand, each time a flash invaded the cockpit. “Dammit!” she cursed, rapping the control panel with her fist after a particularly bright flare. “Sy, come in! Come in, Sy, over!” The com crackled and buzzed. The instruments were haywire. Dezmara didn’t know much about stardust—most sailors and pilots avoided the stuff at all cost—and she was hoping the light show was just another mystery of the elements unknown to all but the bravest of captains and crew who dared to venture here. But part of her, the battle-worn part, thought the flashes looked a lot like cannon fire.

The mute explosions circled the
Ghost
, and Dezmara kept a nervous record in her head as to the position and proximity of each, trying to decide whether she could recognize a pattern. If she were Rilek, she would be pounding away with her guns in some sort of grid and hoping for a lucky shot. With her instruments malfunctioning and zero visibility, there was nothing left for Dezmara to do but study the lights and hope that her steady hand would stay true to the course she had set for Clara 591 before they entered the cloud. Her palms were wet, and she took turns wiping one on the nearest leg of her flight suit as the other carefully gripped the control stick, then repeating the action with the opposite hand. She held her breath and counted the flashes.

They came in ones. They came in twos. They came in brilliant, blinding uncountable clusters that brightened the insides of her clamped eyelids like a thousand white-hot suns. She kept her hand at the ready, her index finger curved over her brow, and her thumb gently nestled in her temple as she dared to look out at them again and again. And then, slowly, the intensity of the flashes faded. They came less and less toward the front of the ship, and then they were farther off. Whatever they were, cannon fire or strange lightning, the fact that they were moving away was good. The cloud thinned out and swirled past the viewing panes in stretches of purple-red mist. They would be out soon.

Dezmara dropped her hand down and let out a long sigh. Her shoulders rolled forward as she relaxed slightly in her captain’s chair. She had set a course that pierced one end of the cloud on a diagonal line to Clara 591, and now that the stardust was beginning to fade, she knew they were going to make it out alive. She had held the course almost perfectly.

There was another flash in the distance on the port side of the cockpit, and she bolted upright, clutching the control stick with crushing force, then leaned slowly forward and waited. Another flash. She blinked her eyes rapidly, shook her head and stared out again. Multiple bursts erupted in every possible direction around the ship, illuminating a huge swath of cloudscape in the distance. Dezmara strained to see the slightest hint of what she thought might have been there, but the lights flickered off, and it was dark again. She was on edge and the mind played strange tricks when it was stressed and the senses obscured, but Dezmara could have sworn that in one of those flashes, silhouetted against the eerie purple vapor of
The Cloud of Lost Kings
, was the outline of a hull.

The fact that the vessel wasn’t visible in the last flash didn’t comfort her. There was something strange about the shape of that shadow that was almost surreal, like a dream she knew she had dreamt at one time but she couldn’t remember when: was it this life or the one before she was found?

“You saw that, right, Doj?” she said without looking away from the viewing panes. Diodojo let out a troubled growl. “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t the
Lodestar
or the
Maelstrom
—can’t miss the shape of either of them—and I don’t believe in ghosts!”

Diodojo cocked his head and gave her what seemed to be a questioning look.

“You know what I mean, Doj,” she said, realizing the irony of her statement. “I don’t believe in
real
ghosts. But still, if that wasn’t Rilek or his other ship or Draoncul’s phantom boat, who the hell was it?”

KABOOOOM!

The straps of her four-point harness pulled unbelievably tight across her legs and shoulders as the
Ghost
jumped and fishtailed, turning onto one side and shuddering like a dying animal. The ship rolled into a death spiral and Dezmara was screaming through clenched teeth as she gripped the control stick with both hands and fought against the centrifugal force. Wide paths of purple, swirling mist trailed from the wings as the fuselage corkscrewed faster and faster. She tried her best to keep the ship on a level flight path. Even if she regained control, she couldn’t afford to get turned around inside the cloud, but it was becoming impossible to tell which way was up as the ship continued to spin, and worse yet, she was starting to black out.