THE PRIZE: BOOK TWO - RETRIBUTION (35 page)

“So you say, yet it is peculiar that the reactor exploded after I reached the remote station. How convenient for you, and a pity it didn’t achieve its goal.”

“B…but I didn’t!”

“And you of course didn’t send a message drone to the next station to tell them I was coming, did you.” The look of shock on Var Dirkoff’s face told Penn everything he needed to know. It was only a guess that Dirkoff had sent a drone, but in this case, his guess was spot on.

I…I thought it necessary to inform the station commander of your coming so he could prepare a suitable welcome.” Dirkoff stuttered, feeling as if the ground under his feet had turned to jelly. He was sinking fast and no matter what he did, nothing came out right. From Penn’s point of view, it looked as if the Var was on the verge of crying. Not that he had any sympathy for him. He ran a station that fed on the misery of others, and garnered a substantial fortune doing it. Now for the ‘coup de grâce’ as the French like to say.

“It would behoove you to get your affairs in order in anticipation of being recalled to Telluria Prime. Penn out!” It wouldn’t surprise Penn to hear that Var Dirkoff had had a sudden heart attack, or accidently walked out an airlock without his pressure suit.

Just the thought of having to return to the capital and face Director Markoff, even if it wasn’t for what he thought it was, would have any Var peeing his pants. How he’d explain how he’d helped one of the most wanted humans in the galaxy with credit and ships would be something to hear. It was doubtful he’d understand how deep in the shit he was in until Markoff explained it to him. Penn smiled thinly as a thought struck him. In the scheme of things, nothing he did out here would make that much of a difference to the overall confusion in the Empire right now, but anything he could do to piss Markoff off was a plus in his book. Disrupting the flow of credits to the capital would do that, as would shutting down IMPSEC’s listening station along the outer reaches of the Empire.

“When you are ready, initiate the jump to the next station.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Chapter Eighteen

Hare and Hound

To Ellis, space flight was boring. Jump space was nothing but gray twilight with odd bursts of color that no one could explain. Not that she cared one way or the other, just how long they had to stay in jump space before they got where they were going, which was nowhere. Three jumps so far and each time they’d exited in some forsaken backwater star system with nothing of interest to anyone. All they could do was wait for the Nav computer to recalculate their position, or download data from an imperial Nav Buoy and figure out where they were going to jump to next. The fact they’d come out in an uninhabited system was good news to Ellis, as that meant there were no imperial naval vessels to worry about. Ellis viewed the Nav data darkly, unsure of where to jump next. As a field officer in the Imperial Marines, she didn’t have an in-depth knowledge of navigation. Most of what she knew came from command briefings where they’d be shown where they were and where they were going to put the hurt on some poor bugger. She zoomed way out, seeing this spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy and their overall relative position to the center. She plotted out several jumps that would take them to the outer edge of the arm and almost into the black. Out there, few stars shone in the blackness, which meant they’d be taking blind jumps without the aid of any Nav beacons. This place was the haunt of smugglers, slave traders, pirates and drug runners, none friendly, and all looking to make a score on any unknown ship passing by. Not a happy thought at the best of times. The one thing they did have going for them was that this was an Imperial Corvette, even if it was an older design. She was tough, well built and armed to the teeth. She could probably outrun most of the ships out here, or turn and fight if need be. That meant getting her diverse crew sorted out and trained on the weapons. A tall order with so few qualified people. Just then, her chief engineer, Garry Asher walked onto the bridge.

“How’s it going, Chief?”

“Great. The engines are working perfectly.”

“How are the families settling in?”

“Not too bad considering. The Kids are running wild after being cooped up for so long.” Ellis laughed, thinking of her brood back home.

“Let them run, as long as they don’t get in the way or into anything dangerous.” Garry scratched his balding head.

“Don’t know about that. Gwen stuck them in the point defense modules and they are having a blast, so to speak, shooting up everything in the simulator.” He chuckled. “Boy are they fast.”

“I hate to say it, Chief, but we might just need them there before this trip is over.” Garry looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

“You could be right, but the mothers are going to scream their bloody heads off if that happens.”

“If it comes down to a choice of putting them in the point defense modules and saving the ship, in they go.”

“Oh, I’m with you there. We just don’t have enough people to man all the weapon systems.”

“What’s the most important from your point of view?”

“Whew! You ask me that. You have more experience at this than I do. I’m just a mechanic and run the engine room and environmental systems.”

“When it comes to all this naval stuff I don’t. I’m a ground pounder and more used to shooting the hell out of people with solid earth under my feet.”

“Well, you’d better learn fast, Major, or should I say Captain now. Either way, you’re in charge.”

“It still begs the question of which weapons we should concentrate on.”

“I’d say engines and run like hell if we run into anything.” He looked at her a moment, seeing her dark look. “Well… after that, I’d say torpedoes and then main guns.”

“And let the kids on point defense handle anything coming our way, right?”

“Yes, Ma’am. That’s about it.” Ellis gave him a sour look.

“Anyway we can tweak those engines to make us go faster?” she asked at last.

“Now you come to mention it. That old rust bucket we were on actually ran faster than this one, considering the business she was in.”

“And?”

“Well, we did learn a few tricks to get more speed out of her. I could try the same thing on these engines.”

“Do it. Anything we meet out here will be as fast as this ship and then some.”

“Yeah. Drug runners and smugglers don’t want to get boarded. Running away from Imperial warships is what they do.” Garry nodded and gave her a half salute and exited the bridge.

Ellis went back to contemplating the Nav data. One important thing they’d need soon was hydrogen for the fusion reactors. That meant finding a system with a gas giant so they could scoop. So far, none of the systems they’d entered had one, so that meant keeping an eye on the fuel gage. Surprisingly, the navigator cum pilot had turned out to be pretty good, considering he had only been jumping between the slaver way stations and Earth up until now. His story wasn’t that much different than many. An ex-pilot in the Canadian air force when it existed, he’d bummed around looking for any work he could get. At first, he didn’t realize what the crew he’d fallen in with was up to, and by the time he did it was too late to try and run away, not unless he wanted to end up a slave himself. So he did what he was told and tried not to think about the poor souls in the cargo holds.

“Where to next, Ma’am?” He asked, looking over his shoulder at her.

“I’m thinking. Any suggestions?” Pushing back his helm seat, the young man flipped his sandy hair out of his eyes and swiveled his seat to face her.

“Oh, by the way, what’s your name?”

“It’s Jack, Jack Briscoe, Ma’am… Captain.”

“Ma’am will do.”

“To answer your question, I don’t honestly know. What, or where are we trying to go?”

“To Silurian space, but I’m betting you have no idea where that is?”

“No, Ma’am. I’ve sort of heard of them.”

“You’ve heard of the Tellurians I take it, and maybe the Thrakee?”

“Those are the bad lizard types I’ve heard people talking about.”

“Right. They are really, really bad-ass people, and if at all possible I’d like to avoid them.”

“And the Tellurians?”

“Them as well. This might be an Imperial Corvette but we have no clearance to enter their space. They could just shoot on sight thinking we are smugglers or drug runners.”

“Got you.”

“There are a bunch of other species running around out here and they might not want an imperial ship poking its nose into their space either.”

“Phew! I never knew that. The old crew didn’t talk about other species much, just to walk softly around anything that wasn’t human.”

“You’d better understand from the get go, that to most species out here, all humans are stark raving mad.”

“Huh? I’ve wondered why many of those species sort of avoided us. But why, we’re not that bad compared to others I’ve heard about.”

Ellis snorted a short laugh. “Not bad. Earth is more trouble to the Tellurians than ten other star systems combined.”

“How come?”

“Because we won’t stop fighting them, no matter how many of us they kill.”

“Well, they did invade our planet and kill a whole bunch of people. I did hear we did them a lot of damage after the invasion.”

“That’s not the half of it. The whole Tellurian Empire is in an uproar with civil war breaking out all over the place, star systems trying to secede from the Empire, and the Imperial Navy and Marines trying to quell uprisings and put the Empire back together. On top of that, the Thrakee and Silurians are nibbling away at the edges all because of two humans.” Jack’s brow pulled into a frown.

“I don’t understand. What two humans and what did they do?” Ellis had to smile.”

“Because my husband and I faked an attempt of Emperor Cytec’s life, screwed up their navigational data banks and sent out fake messages that the Emperor was dead.” Jack Briscoe blinked.”

“You… How?”

“It’s a long story, and maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime, that’s of course assuming we can get out of this mess.”

“Is that the reason we can’t go back to Earth?” Ellis nodded.

“We… Penn erased Earth’s location from the imperial database and uploaded a virus that wiped the information from all the Nav Buoys.”

“Hole shit - Sorry Ma’am. Didn’t mean to swear.”

“That’s okay, I’ve heard worse.”

“So, I take it you want us to go to Silurian space and make contact with them.” Ellis smiled. The boy was sharp.

“That’s the plan, but I have no real idea where that is.”

“Is it up, or down the spiral arm?”

“I wish I knew for sure. Down I think, towards the core.” Swiveling his seat, Jack looked at the holographic Nav display.

“I see. So you want to jump along the edge of the arm and try to sneak past all the bad guys.”

“Right, and avoid the low life trash out here.”

“Got it, but what about fuel? We can only make two or three more jumps before we need to find a fuel depot or something.”

“You’ve never scooped before, have you?”

“Scooped?”

“Yes. All imperial ships are equipped with an electro-static net of some sort that extracts hydrogen out of the atmosphere of any gas giant.”

“Oh cool.”

“It can extract it out of space, but it takes a long time and is only used in emergencies.”

“I wondered what that extra control panel was for.”

“That’s probably it. I’ll check.”

“There’s another one over on that side console, but I have no idea what it’s for.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. The layout of the controls is about the same as on my old ship, so I don’t have a lot of problems piloting this one, but those two panels are a mystery to me.” Walking over, Ellis ran her hand over the controls, verifying that it was indeed the one that operated the hydrogen scoop.

The other was more of a mystery as all Ellis got when she ran her hands over the controls was a mental picture of a lance. That was odd to say the least, as her ability to understand what something was for by just touching it usually seemed to work. She tried again with the same results, except this time she knew how to switch in on, and how to adjust whatever it was.

“This is a weapon of some sort. One I haven’t seen or heard about before.”

“Not much good without knowing what is does. We might blow up the ship or something.”

“True. I’ll try it out in the next system we reach.”

“Better you than me.” Jack answered, smiling at her.

The days passed slowly, even with all the training going on. The ladies bitched and moaned about having to learn how to load torpedoes or how to aim and fire the main weapons until Ellis pointed out rather forcefully that their training could be the difference between life and death if they ran into something. They still bitched and moaned, but not so loudly or where Ellis could hear them. After a while, Ellis started calling ‘stand-to’ and action station drills much to everyone’s displeasure when she did it in the middle of the ship’s night cycle. At first, there was utter confusion as people ended up in the wrong place, or couldn’t remember where they were supposed to go. Ellis gritted her teeth and praised them for their efforts instead of strangling a few of the dumber ones. It would’ve been a good object lesson but she didn’t want to spend the rest of the trip sleeping with one eye open. Gradually they got the hang of it and at least ended up were they were supposed to be, doing what they’d been trained for. It wasn’t up to fleet standard when it came to speed, and Ellis hoped any enemy they encountered would give them the time to get their shit sorted out before shooting at them.

“Dropping out of jump space in fifteen minutes.” Jack Briscoe announced over the intercom. That brought Ellis out of a light sleep, and pulling on her uniform, she made it to the bridge before the last warning alarm sounded.

“Exiting in five -four - three - two - one.” Jack murmured, stating the obvious out of habit. They’d dropped out on the edge of a star system, and it took a moment before the sensor data firmed up. “Oh yeah. We have a gas giant, Ma’am.”

“Set a least time course.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.” He laughed. Ellis smiled at his excitement, feeling a little relieved they’d found a system with one.