McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (35 page)

Of greater concern to Mark was a Broan ship behind them. Since hunted and hunter would be moving in the same direction, any Broan coming from behind would have an inherent advantage over a head-on approach. In such a situation, a stern chase was no longer the long chase.

He finished washing and combed his hair before returning to the bridge. A few seconds later, he was huddled with Chris Sotheby and Bob Costello, the sensor operator. The three of them gazed at one of the newly repaired screens where a fuzzy patch of white lay silhouetted against an ebon sky.

“Is that them?”

“That’s them,” Sotheby confirmed.

“Where’s the planet?”

“Five degrees down, out of the field of view,” the operator replied. “Whoever that ship is, they’ve got engines. They’re coming on fast.”

“What class?”

“Definitely a warship, sir. That blotch is from its radiators. They’re running way too hot to be civilian. From the energy they are radiating to space, I would say it’s an avenger.”

 Mark nodded. He was familiar with the type. One had chased him out of Pastol. An avenger’s long-range weaponry was more than capable of vaporizing
Sasquatch
, if he could just make the commander mad enough.

#

“… that ends my official report. On an unofficial note, please tell my wife, Lisa, that I love her. Commander Mark Rykand,
T.S.N.S.
Sasquatch
, Commanding. End of message…

Lisa gazed at the viewscreen through the globules of tears that pooled in her eyes. She sniffed and reached up to wipe the tears away with a towel, not wanting them to float around the compartment where they could get into delicate electronics. It was two days since Captain Cavendish provided the recording to her, and she had just finished listening to it for the fifth time. Its impact on her emotions was undiminished from the first time she’d listened.

There had been two more communications from the crippled cruiser, but neither from Mark. These were handled by one of the crew. The first message informed them that a Broan avenger had been detected rising from the planet. The second was mostly a long list of the dead. As before, the messages came via directional radio beam on the emergency frequency.

Nor was
Sasquatch
the only ship with which they were in contact.
Yeovil
was on the downhill portion of her run, currently decelerating at 3.2 standard gravities and some fifty hours from rendezvous.
Yeovil
and
Galahad
had comm lasers locked on one another and were exchanging continuous updates. There were no conversations, however. Those were made impossible by the current speed-of-light delay of 40 minutes.

Despite its herculean efforts so far,
Yeovil
had still not closed to weapons range.

The primary weapon of human starships was the superlight missile. Essentially, SMs were optimized versions of the message probe with which Dan Landon destroyed the Broan ship that had killed Mark’s sister.

Normally, a message probe has no offensive use. However, with
Magellan
under attack as it orbited New Eden, Landon recognized that attempting to launch a message probe would quickly overload its drive generators, causing it to explode. Without the drive field to keep it in superlight, the debris would return to normal space with an intrinsic velocity that was a goodly percentage of the speed of light.

And so it had. The Broan aggressor ran into the debris field and was instantly vaporized.

SM drive generators were built more robustly than those of message probes, but they were no less susceptible to gravitational curvature. At
Sasquatch
’s distance from Sabator, the effective range of a superlight missile was a few million kilometers.

For three days,
Yeovil
had swept space before it with sensors at full gain. An hour earlier, Captain Sulieman reported two more enemy ships stalking
Sasquatch.
Both ships’ trajectories were straight out of the asteroid belt between Planets Six and Seven.

One of the pursuing craft did not seem to be a problem.
Yeovil
identified it as an asteroid mining boat
.
The other ship was a war craft, less powerful than an avenger, but more than capable of handling an invalid like
Sasquatch
.

The bad news was that both would overtake the cruiser twelve full hours before
Yeovil
could arrive on the scene.

#

“Goddamn it, Number One!” Captain Ravi Sulieman said to his executive officer. “We’re going to be half a day late.”

Of necessity, both Sulieman and his Exec conferred via screen. Both were sunk deeply in their respective acceleration couches, held down by a force three times that of normal gravity. With their flesh drawn taut by acceleration, they looked like two old men. Moreover, after three days of this torture, with only periodic reductions to change the watch, they felt like two old men.

“I’m sorry, Captain, but that’s what TacPlot is telling us. Do we revert to our original orders?”

Sulieman considered it. His orders were very specific. He must not allow
Sasquatch
to fall into enemy hands. If the situation allowed him to rescue those poor unfortunates, then that was his primary objective. If, however, rescue proved impossible, his orders were to shift from rendezvous to attack, and to destroy the ship and its survivors with SM fire.

But
damnit
, he’d come too far to kill his comrades. There had to be a better way!

He looked at the velocity plot again. It showed the projected course and timeline for four ships: his own and the three Broans. The curve representing the avenger was shifted far to the right, and not a factor. However, the curves for the two ships from the asteroid belt both terminated to the left of
Yeovil
’s projected arrival time. The first ship to reach
Sasquatch
would be the mining boat, and then, an hour later, the warship.

What the hell could he do? The laws of physics were inviolable. There was an ancient phrase he had always liked:
It’s not only not nice to fool Mother Nature, it is not possible!
Yet, if he weren’t so dog tired, perhaps he could think of something.

“Captain, do we revert to our original mission?” his executive officer asked again. “If so, I have to crank in the new acceleration profile.”

“No, damn it!” Ravi Sulieman growled after another thirty seconds’ consideration. “We’re not giving up. Cut all acceleration!”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. Kill the normal space generators, now!”

#

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Captain, we’ve got another bogey.”

Mark looked up from reading the morning report. He was belted into the command chair on the bridge, sipping coffee from a drinking bulb. If there was one positive aspect to their situation, it was that they were eating hot meals again. That was thanks to one of the repair crews who, without orders and in their off hours, had patched several shrapnel holes in the galley and rewired the stoves and ovens to get them working again. Foodstuffs, of course, were no problem. They would last for as long as they were needed.

Normally a captain would read the morning report on the work screen built into the instrument cluster at his command station. The screens in front of Mark were dark. Instead, he was reading from a bedraggled sheet of paper on which progress reports had been scribbled by several different hands.

“Where, Mr. Costello?” he asked, looking up at Screen Two, where the plot from the wide angle scanners was displayed.

“Behind us, Captain.”

Mark took the news with the passivity that befitted an officer in command. The only outward sign of the sudden tightening in his lower abdomen was the deep sigh that escaped his lips.

“Okay. Swing Telescope Two around and let me see him.”

For the last two days, one of their two operating viewscreens had been focused on the Broan avenger climbing toward them. Measurements of Doppler shift indicated that it had very nearly shed all of its outward velocity, and that it would soon begin the process of accelerating toward the planet in order to make rendezvous when
Sasquatch
overtook it.

Screen Two came alight and showed star streaks for a few seconds as the telescope slewed into position. Then the view stabilized. Once again there was the white blob of a thermal source silhouetted against a black sky. This one wasn’t as bright as the avenger’s thermal signature.

Smaller it may have been, but this was no mirage or sensor glitch. There was, indeed, a ship coming up behind them. There were only two questions: How far and how fast?

The answers came five minutes later. “Uh, we’ve got a Doppler shift and rate of change, sir. I make the closing velocity 200 KPS and his deceleration rate approximately two standard gravities.”

The two data points told Mark Rykand all he needed to know. Assuming the bogey was attempting a rendezvous (any other assumption was nonsensical), it was a simple matter to calculate how long it would take for the two ships’ velocities to converge. And knowing that, he could determine how far the pursuer would travel between now and then. That pinpointed the current range.

“Shit! He’s less than three hours away,” Mark exclaimed. “How did he get so close without us seeing him?”

“He’s a much smaller target than the avenger, sir. Radiator temperature is only about a thousand degrees, and from the energy readings, I would say he has it pointed directly away from us.”

Mark thought about it and nodded. Their wide-angle thermal array was far from optimum for this sort of work. He was just thankful the sensors had picked up the bogey before it rammed its prow up their ass.

Mark pressed the key that would send his voice to every pressurized corner of the ship.

“Attention, All Hands! This is the captain speaking. We have detected an enemy craft coming up behind us. ETA is three hours. Initiate Plan Alpha. Stop what you are doing and evacuate all wounded to the sanctuary. I will be calling for Battle Stations in one hour. Repeat, we suit up in one hour. Make all preparations. Captain out!”

He hadn’t finished the announcement when Chris Sotheby floated through the hatch.

“This it, sir?”

“Looks like it, Chris. Get your people ready on the attitude control jets. We’ll increase spin to one RPM as soon as everyone is at battle stations. This close, we need faster circumambient updates.”

“Captain?”

“What is it Mr. Costello?”

“I think I’ve got another one. It’s about ten degrees from the first bogey, two o’clock relative. Its radiators are operating at the same temperature as the avenger. Could be a warship.”

“That’s just not fair,” Mark growled, trying to make light of it. Somehow, it didn’t come out that way. “Okay, use Telescope One. Tell me what we’ve got.”

The image on Screen One changed for the first time in two days as the telescope slewed to look behind them. In a few seconds, the second bogey was centered on the screen.

“Definitely military, Captain. Not big enough to be an avenger. Might be a hunter-sniffer.”

It had been Sar-Say who had given them the names of the various Broan naval classes in the days before they found out that he was a Broa himself. ‘Hunter-sniffer’ loosely translated into destroyer.

“Deceleration rate and velocity?”

Costello studied his instruments. After two minutes, he replied, “Three hundred KPS, decelerating at 2 gees.”

“Okay, that puts him an hour behind the other one. We’ll take them in order. Designate the small one as Bogey 2, and the hunter-sniffer as Bogey 3.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

Mark again keyed for the address system and informed the crew of the new pursuer.

No doubt about it. The end game had begun.

#

Lisa was back at her station, eavesdropping on the Karap-Vas traffic control system. The last five days had involved feverish modifications to their search algorithms. The new software favored extra-atmospheric message traffic, the better to track the three ships she’d heard ordered in pursuit of
Sasquatch
. There had been no other intercepts concerning them since that first one.

As she listened to a series of messages in High Broan, she sat up straighter. Halting the playback, she ordered the computer to begin again at the minus-30 second mark. She listened again. Someone was reporting that the objective was in sight. Lisa keyed for the Captain on the bridge.

“Captain, I think I have something,” she announced.

“What is it, Commander?”

“A ship, definitely military, just checked in with space traffic control. They report ‘sighting objective.’ I think they are talking about our lost cruiser.”

“Monitor and keep me apprised. Costello out.”

“Rykand, out.”

#

Sasquatch
was rotating at one revolution per minute and Mark’s stomach was feeling it, although not as much as it had immediately after the explosion. One reason was that the ship was spinning about its long axis, not tumbling end-over-end as before.

Around him, the command stations on the bridge were full, even those that were still inoperative. Susan Ahrendt, encased in her vacuum suit, sat at the inert engineering station two stations over. She had requested permission to observe after Dr. Hamjid relieved her of her nursing duties. With all of the wounded moved to the sanctuary, the doctor and his two assistants were able to tend the wounded. They inserted intravenous tubes in the arms of those who would not be able to swallow a suicide pill. An injector charged with something that would do the job when the time came was taped to each patient’s makeshift bed.

Other supernumeraries requested that they be allowed to observe as well. Hosting visitors on the bridge during battle was strictly against Space Navy regulations. However, Mark granted the requests without comment. It was the least he could do. No one wants to die alone.

Not everyone was a sightseer, of course. Missile control was fully manned, if not fully capable.

In space warfare, there is no need to point the ship at its target, or to equip it with trainable turrets. All that is needed is to eject the weapons out into space where they are free to maneuver and acquire the target.