Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (27 page)

Only this time, we were a mouse impersonating
a cat.

“Are you going to fry our sensors
again?” Jase asked, wondering if I’d wait for the sensors to retract or go
early and let the bubble burn our eyes out. “You know how irritated Izin gets
when he has to replace them.”

“No, we’ll have time.” I was normally
prepared to cook our sensors if our lives depended on it, but I needed them to
recover the Codex. The danger was if the Raven attack ships used a sensor feed
from the scout, rather than wait for their own sensors to deploy, they could
fire immediately. That would hurt. The only solution was to ensure the scout
was in no shape to see for the combat ships.

“I’m reading a big shield,” Jase
said, eyes glued to his sensor display. “Ablation type. Class five or six. No
weapons.”

“Your little pop gun won’t do
more than tickle that shield,” Marie said.

“Let’s hope they’re ticklish.” I
glanced at Jase. “Range?”

“Seventy thousand clicks and
closing fast.”

Marie leaned forward, wondering
what I was waiting for. “Shouldn’t you be charging your gun?”

“No point. You’re right, it’d
have no effect.” In the few seconds we’d have to hit the scout as it streaked past,
the particle cannon would do little more than excite a few ions in the Raven’s
shield, while charging it might encourage the combat ships to come in early.
Better to keep them guessing, and with no active weapon signatures on the
Lining’s
hull, the scout wouldn’t appear
to be in any immediate danger.

“Got another contact!” Jase
exclaimed.

I glanced up at our view screen.
A large marker dead ahead represented the scout racing towards us, while two smaller
symbols to the upper right indicated where the two combat ships were waiting,
but nothing else. “Where?”

“Behind us! It’s in the Shroud, half
a million clicks astern.” Jase whistled slowly. “It’s bright! It’s damn near
overloading our neutrino detector!”

I leaned toward his console. The
contact’s immense energy output alone told me what it wasn’t – it wasn’t one of
ours! “What’s it doing?”

“Nothing,” Jase said. “It’s just
sitting there watching us.”

“What’s the spectral analysis?”
Marie asked.

Jase furrowed his brow in
confusion. “I got zero spectral!”

“That’s impossible,” Marie said
in a tone indicating she thought he was reading it wrong. “Station keeping
thrusters alone should be giving you something.”

I reoriented the optical feed
towards the unknown contact astern. The
Heureux
had shrunk to a tiny sliver almost lost in the dust and gas of the Shroud,
while the bright energy contact appeared as a rounded black mass lurking in the
misty darkness. Our recognition system couldn’t get enough of an outline to
attempt a silhouette match, but even if it had, I knew the prowling ship was a
design unknown to our civilian catalogue. It didn’t matter. I’d seen enough to
know why Jase was getting no spectral readings.

“It’s not using ion based
technology.”

Jase glanced at me, immediately grasping
the implications. “Same guys from Icetop?”

“Wait a minute! There were aliens
on Icetop?” Marie asked confused.

In her desire to get away with
the Codex, she’d stunned Jase before he could tell her a Mataron had killed
Sarat and his guards.

“At least one,” I said. “Maybe
more.”

“Why’s it following us?” she
asked.

“Nosy aliens,” I said evasively.

Alien ships from across the
galaxy regularly shadowed human ships without making contact, mostly out of
scientific curiosity. Studying ships using what they considered to be ancient technologies
was a window back into their own antiquity as interstellar civilizations, not a
reason for open contact. In two and half thousand years, we hadn’t encountered a
single civilization still using ion propulsion for sublight travel, although
what they used remained a mystery. This time, however, I was certain our shadow
was no curiosity seeker.

It was Mataron.

They knew the limits of our technology
with frightening precision, although it did them no good. They could avoid most
of our sensors at will, but not even a civilization as advanced as theirs could
mask neutrinos produced by their ship’s energy plant. Out of all the thousands
of civilizations we’d encountered, only the Tau Cetins could do that, and we
suspected that was because they no longer used reactive energy sources.

I wondered if the Mataron who’d
attacked Sarat’s penthouse was on that ship, and whether he knew who I was.
When dealing with alien civilizations, I assumed they could do anything I could
think of – that way they never surprised me. I decided the Matarons knew I’d swiped
the Codex out of the Consortium’s hands, making me a threat to their plans. It
was why I had their attention now.

They’d be hoping the Ravens
finished me off, but dared not interfere in case the Tau Cetins detected the
residual effects of their technology, or worse, were themselves out there now, watching
unknown to any of us. Fear of giving the Tau Cetins a reason to intervene would
force the Matarons to watch helplessly from the shadows, hoping one group of
humans destroyed another, even though they could have vaporized all of us in a
heartbeat.

A rules-based universe had its
advantages, even for a technologically immature, expansionist species like
mankind.

“Ignore them,” I said, focusing
the optics on the Raven scout again and switching my console’s mode from piloting
to weapons. “Opening outer doors.”

The scout would detect the two
meter circular opening appear in our bow. With luck, their nerve would break
and they’d bubble away while they still could. Seconds passed and the Raven
scout kept coming, sliding rapidly away to starboard. A flashing red targeting
reticule appeared on the main screen framing the scout, signaling that it was
still out of range.

“He’s thirty thousand clicks out,”
Jase said. “Seven degrees off line.”

“The dynamics are still in our
favor,” I said, watching how the yaw acceleration of the scout was affecting
our firing solution. The Raven would now pass us six hundred kilometers to starboard.
Another micro-bubble would improve our chance of a kill shot, but we’d have to
go blind for a few seconds, giving the wolves an opportunity to pounce – not a
risk I was prepared to take a second time. “The warhead is set to arm three
seconds after launch.”

“What
warhead?” Marie asked confused. “I thought you were bluffing!”

“This
is how I bluff.”

We had one bird in the launcher
and three reloads. Not an arsenal by any means, but a nasty surprise for an
opponent who wasn’t expecting a hypervelocity anti-ship drone in the face. The ASD’s
warheads were conventional, not reactive – technically only marginally illegal.
The drone fired a statically charged penetrator through the target’s shield
into its hull, delivering a high yield chemical explosive that wrecked fragile
systems and triggered localized explosive decompression.

“Twenty thousand clicks,” Jase said
with intense concentration.

The drone was taking our sensor
data now, constantly presenting me with a range of firing solutions. I selected
a sixty five percent hit probability, then let the drone take charge. Soon the
targeting reticule on screen turned green, indicating the Raven was in range,
but the drone stayed put while the scout came hurtling towards us.

Jase gave me an impatient look.
“Are we shooting, Skipper, or waving as they go by?”

“Any second now.”

At last, the drone decided it was
time to go to work. A point of brilliant white light shot away from the hull
and curved away to starboard.

“Go baby!” Jase exclaimed.

Marie’s eyes narrowed in
surprise. “Is that a drone?”

“It’s only a little drone,” I
said.

It flew towards a point well
ahead of the scout, then when it reached the Raven’s projected trajectory, it
turned sharply to go head to head with its target.

“They’ll be needing clean
underwear about now!” Jase said.

“How’d you get that past the navy
inspectors?” Marie asked.

“What inspectors?” I said lightly,
glancing at Jase. “Does Izin know anything about inspectors?”

Jase shrugged, feigning
ignorance.

We’d been checked many times by
the navy, but the physical space the ASD launcher occupied was small and Izin
had the compartment cleverly shielded. If the navy found such an obvious ship
killer hiding in the
Lining’s
bow, they’d
have impounded her on suspicion of being a privateer. She wasn’t the only
trader to carry such a weapon, but she might have been the smallest.

Trade ships were allowed any
shield and defensive weapon they could afford, but hull puncturing hypervelocity
anti-ship drones were reserved for Earth Navy ships alone. Even the Brotherhood
preferred disabling weapons to ship killers. After all, there was no profit in
destroying their prey. They wanted to capture operational ships with their
cargoes intact.

Marie watched the lightweight drone
track towards the Raven scout. “You’ll lose your ship if the navy ever finds
out about that thing.”

Before Lena hired me, that might
have been true. Now I could probably get an upgrade, courtesy of the EIS. “I
won’t tell if you don’t,” I said as the glare of the drone began to fade into
the Shroud’s gas and dust.

“The Raven’s overcharging his
shield,” Jase reported as the scout ship began dumping all available energy
into its defensive field, not that it would do any good against the drone’s meter
long penetrator.

“They don’t realize what it is,”
I said. They were acting like it was a simple torpedo that would detonate
against their shields – a fatal miscalculation.

“Man, they’re cooking their engines!”
Jase said.

The scout’s high velocity made it
difficult to maneuver as our little robot-of-death closed on its target. The
anti-ship drone’s marker on our screen flashed as it entered its terminal phase
and began charging its penetrator warhead. The Raven scout’s sensors would have
detected the sudden surge in energy from the drone, alerting them too late to
the danger they were facing.

“They’ve stopped scanning us!”
Jase said.

“They’re pulling their sensors,”
I said, imagining the panic spreading on their bridge. “They’re going to
bubble.”

“Is there time?” Marie asked.

“No,” I said somberly. “Ravens
aren’t equipped to fast bubble.” Their ships sacrificed fast spacetime
distorters for extra weapons, or in the scout’s case, more powerful sensors.

There was a flash as the drone
hit the outer edge of the shield and fired its slender,
 
electrostatically charged penetrator. Energy
sparkled around the penetrator as it dived into the shield, then smashed
through the hull. A tongue of orange flame burst from the scout’s bow as the
chemical warhead exploded and the forward section of the Raven ship explosively
decompressed. If it had been a reactive warhead, the scout would have been
vaporized, but there was no way even Izin could hide such weapons from the
navy.

The scout’s engines died and its
shield collapsed as it lost main power. The scout’s surviving crew would be
weightless and trapped in airtight compartments as the crippled ship drifted
deeper into the Shroud.

Jase whistled. “Eat that Raven
boys!”

Marie winced as she watched the
wreck hurtle past us, completely out of control. “There’ll be survivors over
there.”

“Not our problem!” Jase declared belligerently,
itching to blast the wreck just to finish them off.

Marie gave me a concerned look.
They might have been Ravens, but now they were human beings in trouble, trapped
in a doomed ship. All her life, she’d lived by the ethos that you always helped
fellow spacefarers in trouble, no matter who they were. It was more than
tradition, it was who she was.

It wasn’t who I was.

“He’s right,” I said. “They’ll
need rescuing, but not by us.” If the scout’s energy plant had survived, they
might regain control, but odds were the Raven scout would never fly again. I glanced
at Jase. “What are the two prowlers doing?”

Jase suddenly remembered there
were two very dangerous combat ships still watching us. “Their energy levels
are spiking!”

They were going to bubble, but
were they coming in for us, or running?

Ugo’s ugly face appeared on
screen, thrown up automatically when the incoming signal reached us. “We’re
leaving now. Good luck, Marie.”

Before Marie could speak, a
warning alarm sounded. Ugo’s face vanished, replaced by images of two gray
metal ships barely two hundred clicks ahead. One was a long rectangular ore
transporter, bristling with weapons. The other a spherical intersystem tug with
a single heavy naval gun mounted ahead of its four enormous maneuvering
engines. Beyond the Raven combat ships, two markers showed where they’d been
moments before. The autonav kept the ghost images on screen longer than they
were actually there, so we understood what had happened. The Ravens immediately
began extending sensors through their hulls, preparing to target us. Our screen
went blank as the
Lining’s
autonav
pulled our sensors and fast charged our spacetime distorters. For a moment, the
flight deck was filled with silence as we held our breaths, knowing it was a
race between our automated escape system and their automated weapons.