Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (24 page)

“Captain, the capacitor is too large
for the weapons bay. I’ll have to install it in the cargo hold and upgrade the arterials
from the energy plant. The weapon will then need to be tested and the targeting
system recalibrated. It’s a major overhaul.”

Clearly, I’d underestimated the
effort required to sharpen the
Lining’s
teeth. “OK, leave the old cannon in place for now. It’s better than nothing.”

“Barely!” Jase said.

“But get started on any upgrades that
won’t take the old gun offline.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Jase, dig out the log records on
that contact we spotted on the way in, and calculate its drift vector. Once we
get back out there, I want to spend as little time as possible searching for
it.”

“Suppose it drifted into the
cloud?” Jase asked apprehensively.

“Then we go in after it.” The gas
and dust would reduce our sensor range, but it would also make it tougher for Ravens
to find us.

“That’s bandit country, Skipper.”

“I know.” Ravens had made a fine
art out of hiding in nebulas, but they used the same sensor tech we did. Even
so, it was only a matter of time before they spotted the
Heureux
, then they’d have not only the ship and Marie, but the Codex
as well.

I could ransom Marie, but if the
Ravens got their hands on the Codex, I’d never get it back.

* * * *

We unbubbled at the center of the navpoint
where we’d previously sighted the derelict ship. I kept our transponder off and
our power levels low to conceal our presence while we listened for any sign of
the
Heureux
.

“I’ve got a faint energy source fifty
million clicks out,” Jase said. “It’s inside the Shroud – definitely not the
Heureux
.”

Faint energy readings meant it
was sneaking, like us, keeping its energy plant reacting as low as possible to
limit the release of tell tale neutrinos. “Have they seen us?”

“If they have, they don’t know what
to make of us.”

“Let’s not give them time to
figure it out.”

I selected the autonav’s best
guess of the
Heureux’s
drift vector,
retracted sensors and performed a sub-second micro-bubble into the Shroud. When
we could see again, we were more than a million kilometers inside the thin
mistiness at the edge of the dark nebula and now just ten million clicks from
the stealthy contact. The Shroud’s sensor clutter blinded us to their position
and, I hoped, hid us from them, making the Raven scout believe we’d bubbled out.

The optics sensed a shadow forty
thousand clicks away. The computer automatically oriented the view screen image
towards the shadow and drew a thin outline of its silhouette. A display square
appeared beside the outline, then dozens of hull configurations flashed through
the square as the computer tried to match the profile. Suddenly, one hull
configuration stuck, then rotated and spun to match the outline. The library
hologram flashed to confirm a match and a neat inscription appeared below the
outline.

Caravel D class
medium freighter

12,500 metric tons

Registry unknown

“Jackpot!” Jase declared as the
display square vanished from the screen.

“Let’s hope our sneaky friend
isn’t looking this way,” I said, feeding power to the maneuvering engines and sending
the
Lining
surging through the dust
and hydrogen vapor towards the hulk. Our sudden spike in energy output lit us
up like a Christmas tree, while the heat blasting from our engines turned the
cold cloud into a growing infra red source, signaling our presence. Even with
interference from the Shroud, it wouldn’t be long before we had company.

“She’s stone cold,” Jase said as
the neutrino detector found no sign of a reacting energy source inside the
Heureux
, signaling she was a dead ship.

So where were the crew? Where was
Marie?

Slowly the shadow grew in size,
becoming a silhouette, until the three rectangular holds and its stern
superstructure were visible. The
Heureux
drifted bow first through the nebula, showing no running lights.

“I don’t see any damage,” I said
as we came alongside, satisfying myself that there were no holes or energy
burns anywhere along its length.

“It looks like she just lost
power,” Jase said, “and kept on going.”

I rolled the
Lining
over and matched velocities as we came alongside the
Heureux’s
stern superstructure. If anyone
was alive, that’s where they’d be. While I mated airlocks, Jase kept his eyes
on the sensors.

“A ship just unbubbled at the
edge of the Shroud,” Jase said. “We’ve got active scanners lighting us up.”

“Let them look.” The gas we’d
heated up on the way in would be messing with their sensors, buying us a little
time.

A point marker appeared on the
wrap around view screen showing where the snooper was. We couldn’t tell what
kind of ship it was, but I assumed it was the same contact we’d picked up prowling
the edge of the Shroud when we first arrived.

“There are two more contacts,
very faint, a long way off,” Jase said. “No transponders on either of them, but
they must be big for us to be reading them from here.”

“They’re all Ravens.” It was a tactic
long favored by the Brotherhood. The nearby contact was the eyes and ears, the
two distant prowlers were the teeth. The scanning ship would be small, fast and
expendable, while the larger, more valuable combat ships were far enough out
that they had time to run if it turned out they were stalking a navy warship.
“How close is the scout?”

“Eight hundred thousand clicks,
and coming in real slow.”

The pirate commander would be on the
scanning ship. His two attack dogs would be charging weapons, getting ready to
bubble in on top of us once they received the order, but they’d only come once
they knew how weak we were. Considering they could micro-bubble to us in under
a second, we were a sitting duck locked up to the
Heureux
.

I searched for an old log entry.
When I found it, I deleted the
Lining’s
name from it, then passed it to Jase. “Send that on all channels. It should buy
us some time.”

Jase glanced at my selection and
grinned. “I hope the Shroud’s screwing with their sensors or they’re going to
die laughing, right before they blow our brains out.”

“I’m betting this close to the
Heureux
, they can’t see what we are. Send
it.”

Jase began broadcasting the log
entry we’d recorded on our way into Macaulay Station, a hail from an Earth Navy
officer accompanied by the ENS
Nassau’s
frigate transponder signal. Both were genuine, they just weren’t ours. "Power
down your engines and prepare to be boarded! Do not attempt to re-engage your
star drive, or you will be fired upon!”

Moments later, the snooper’s
neutrino levels spiked as it turned and began accelerating hard away from us.

“That got their attention!” Jase
said. “The two distant contacts have slammed on the brakes too.”

“We spooked them, that’s all.”

A distant fuzzy blue light
appeared on the view screen as the Shroud’s dust and gas diffused the glow of the
scout’s engines. He was holding his nerve, running obliquely away from us so
his sensors weren’t blocked by his own engines, trying to confirm if we really
were the ENS
Nassau
. If he’d fully
bought our ruse, he’d be superluminal already and our Raven problem would be
solved.

“Keep a close eye on them,” I
said. “Once they see there’s no frigate charging after them, it won’t take them
long to figure out they’ve been conned.”

“I’ve got heat!” Jase exclaimed,
then his brow furrowed. “From the
Heureux
!
It’s too small to be her energy plant.”

“Where?”

“Starboard side of the
superstructure.”

I’d been on board Marie’s ship
often enough to know its layout reasonably well. “It’s their lifeboat. It must still
be racked.” If their lifeboat had heat, it had power, and there was a chance Marie
and her crew were still alive! I climbed out of my acceleration couch. “Let me
know the moment that scout starts back towards us.”

“You’re going over there alone?”

“One of us has to stay aboard and
fly the
Lining
out of here if those
Ravens come back.” I started for the hatch as Jase realized I would order him
to leave me on the
Heureux
, rather
than risk losing the ship. He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “And
kill that navy transponder, they got the message.”

* * * *

I slipped into my pressure-suit, cycled
through the airlock into the
Heureux
and found myself floating in zero gravity. Main power and life support were off
and my head-up display told me there was vacuum outside my suit. A few feeble
emergency lights threw a faint red glow into the corridor, which my helmet lamp
drilled with a brilliant white beam. Ahead, a magnetic boot and a coffee cup
hung motionless in the otherwise deserted corridor.

“The
Heureux
’s decompressed,” I said over the short range communicator.
“Izin, feed some power into the
Heureux
and run a diagnostic. Find out what happened to their life support.”

“You’ll need to activate the
umbilical link, Captain,” Izin replied.

I pulled myself to the control
panel beside the inner hatch and turned the release that gave the
Lining
access to the
Heureux’s
systems. “Umbilical enabled.”

I brought my feet up, preparing
to push gently away from the bulkhead when Izin’s mechanical vocalizer sounded
in my ears again, this time in emergency mode, louder and faster than normal.

“Captain! Disconnect umbilical
immediately!”

Izin almost never used emergency
mode. Knowing something was up, I spun back to the control panel and severed
the connection. “It’s done. What’s wrong?”

“Something tried to access our
ship’s systems,” Izin replied, now using his vocalizer’s normal mode again. “Standby.”

Curbing my impatience to get to
the lifeboat, I floated beside the airlock’s inner door while Izin implemented
some technical trickery. Minutes passed and he still hadn’t given me clearance
to proceed.

“Izin, I’m waiting.”

Presently, Izin said, “There’s something
controlling the
Heureux
. It tried to
spawn itself into the
Silver Lining
via the umbilical. I’ve isolated its embryo within our system, but it will take
time to remove. Now that I know how it propagates, I can block it spawning
again.”

“OK. Get rid of it,” I said,
recalling the strange probing I’d felt when I’d touched the Codex. Was that
what had crippled the
Heureux
? “Jase,
any sign of the Ravens?”

“I’ve lost the two distant
contacts, and the scout’s still moving away. It’s cut its engines and is just
drifting, listening.”

“He wants us to chase him,” I
said, “so he can get a good look at us.”

“You may reactivate the
umbilical, Captain,” Izin said.

I threw the release again and
waited while my tamph engineer ensured that whatever was in the
Heureux
didn’t spread to the
Silver Lining
.

“It lay dormant in
Heureux
’s airlock emergency system,”
Izin explained, “waiting for an umbilical connection. I’ve now purged it from
the
Heureux
’s airlock.”

“OK. Get life support and gravity
back online. I’m heading for the emergency bay now.”

I pushed off from the airlock and
began gliding through eerily lit corridors. The
Heureux
was three times the size of the
Lining
by tonnage, although her interior volume was considerably
greater. It made getting to the lifeboat rack from the airlock quite a long float
in zero gravity.

“Captain,” Izin said after several
minutes, “You need to sever the connection between the
Heureux
’s processing core and the rest of the ship.”

“Why?”

“Whatever’s controlling the
Heureux
is in her processing core. It’s
blocking me from accessing any of the ship’s systems.”

“Can’t you kill it from where you
are?”

“No Captain. It’s highly
adaptive. I’ve never seen anything like it. The processing core will have to be
physically isolated – not something I can do remotely.”

If Marie and her crew were in the
lifeboat, a few more minutes would make no difference. “Understood,” I said,
immediately performing a zero-G roll and kicking off a bulkhead to send myself
gliding down another corridor towards system control.

After several minutes of floating
through corridors and dodging drifting debris, Izin said, “The aggressor embryo
in the
Silver Lining
has been
destroyed, Captain.”