The Veritian Derelict (Junkyard Dogs) (10 page)

The new crew of the
Skorpios
wasn't about to take no for an answer.

Chapter
13.

One Week Earlier...

UTFN Planetside Launch Facility, North American Continent, Old Earth, November 24, 2598.

Tamara
Carlisle made it to the Naval Spaceport near Homestead in the legacy Florida region of Old Earth with only a half hour to spare. As she headed through the facility towards her gate, the knot of fear in her stomach beginning to dissipate as she realized she wasn't going to miss her connection, she thought how happy Lieutenant Ryan Harris would be for her when he found out about her new assignment.

"Ryan!
Omigod!" she blurted out as she stopped so abruptly that the two sailors directly behind her almost ran her over. It suddenly hit her with a sickening flash that during the whirlwind of activities associated with finishing her Doctorate and taking on her new assignment, she hadn't written to the Lieutenant for two email cycles. She decided right then that she would write to him as soon as she got settled on the
Asimov
and send the email off as soon as she could. She was immediately subjected to another flash, as she remembered that she had been ordered not to communicate with anyone.

She
continued to the gate for transport up to the
Asimov
, a little more subdued then she had been. As she boarded the shuttle that would take her into space and to the orbital facility where the destroyer
Asimov
waited, she pondered if there was any way possible to get some kind of message to him. After chewing the problem over in her mind for more than an hour she came to the disheartening conclusion that she wasn't going to be able contact him anytime soon.

Orders were orders.

She made it onto the
Asimov
with several hours to spare and was in her assigned quarters and squared away for transport when the destroyer broke orbit and headed out for the Sol System Whitney hyperlink point before translating out. Carlisle didn't have any official duties on board the
Asimov
for the next week as the ship and crew made their way between and through several additional Whitney jump points that marked the route between Old Earth and the Santana Nexus and she was able to set her own schedule.

Fortunately, the data chip that the
Academy intelligence people had provided her with contained a wealth of information about the home planets of all the religious and political leaders she was likely to meet in the days after she arrived at the Nexus as well as biographical information on them and their families, if they had any. She also read up on the Meridian Ambassador. Carlisle had known that the father of the Ambassador's wife, Sondia, was the Meridian Prime Minister but she hadn't known that the Ambassador's father was a former general in the Meridian Army.

She also found out that the Ambassador himself had been a military leader of some note, having led a successful combined space naval and land-based attack on
Fundamentalist forces holed up on a moon in the Meridian System. He had proved to be a capable leader but that particular action hadn't made him any friends in the very conservative branches of his government or his faith. An uneasy peace had been maintained for the last five years but the Fundamentalists remained a potent and growing force in the Meridian system.

She was to be the Federation liaison for the Ambassador
and knew how important this mission was to the Federation and to her future in the Navy, so she spent the bulk of her time memorizing the sections on the chip concerning diplomatic protocols such as the proper form of address for dignitaries of various official, religious and social rankings. Many of the rigid behavioral practices and other arcane rituals associated with proper diplomatic deportment had evolved over centuries of interaction and, as a result, the material was dauntingly complex. Since much of the protocol dealt with members of royalty and other self-important people, common sense was not a reliable guideline either. To her surprise, getting up to speed on all the proper societal interactions proved to be at least as difficult as anything she had ever studied at the academy!

Carlisle spent most of each day onboard ship in her small but adequate quarters studying. She took her meals in the
officer's mess along with whoever else happened to be off duty at the time. Scuttlebutt on board the
Asimov
was that tensions were building among several of the minor but very militant factions within the Islamic Alliance and the odds were about even that one of them was going to start trouble within the Alliance itself before involving any Federation planets. There were also a growing number of disturbing rumors that remote outposts were being attacked and communications ceasing afterward. To Carlisle, the
Asimov's
crewmembers all seemed a little edgy.

All anyone knew about
the Ensign was that she was in transit to a special assignment out in the Santana Quadrant. Several of the more junior officers even addressed her as "Doctor" rather than "Ensign." Hearing the unfamiliar title while she was being addressed was a bit awkward at first but she discovered that she rather liked it and didn't think it would take too long for her to get used to it.

A
week after leaving the Sol System, the
Asimov
arrived at the sprawling collection of inhabited freestanding constructs that made up the Santana Nexus.

***

On board the Santana Nexus Main Station, December 1, 2598.

Clancy Davis-Moore bade farewell to his two companions
as he left the Nexus Plexus, one of the swankier restaurants on the Santana Nexus station. His friends were off to catch their transport back towards the inner systems and old Earth where their homes and their business headquarters were located. Davis-Moore had a few more days on the station while his cargo ship, the
Dingo
, one of a dozen that his ever more prosperous company owned, was loaded and prepared for the long transit that would put him in the Meridian system. As the head of a company that specialized in the trade of all sorts of exotic artifacts and materials, Davis-Moore was uniquely positioned to be one of the first to take advantage of the recently negotiated trade agreement between the Meridian government and that of New Ceylon.

Clancy had
been visiting New Ceylon, and the famous Federation orbital scrapyard located in that planetary system, when the terrorist attack had occurred and had played an important role as a member of the resistance group that had reclaimed the orbital station. As a direct result, he had met the Meridian Ambassador and had been in attendance when the newly-inked trade agreement had been finalized. The trade agreement was an important test case and if some of the kinks could be worked out, the agreement would no doubt be expanded to include other markets, most notably from Davis-Moore's point of view, a sizeable number of the other settled planets located in the Santana Quadrant.

He was to meet later in the
week with the Ambassador who would be passing through the Santana Nexus on his own way back to Meridian. The Ambassador was hosting a big diplomatic shindig of some kind and had invited Davis-Moore to participate, to provide a merchant's point of view. Afterwards, he and the Ambassador were planning to join forces, with the three ships of the Ambassador's entourage and Davis-Moore's
Dingo
making up a convoy of sorts
.
He was grateful for the promise of companionship and for the added protection; terrorist and pirate activity had been on the up rise throughout the quadrant and numerous attacks on private vessels were also being reported. There was even a rumor, originating from a tramp freighter that had arrived at the Nexus in the last day or so, about a Tunisian Destroyer having been hijacked by terrorists from a base somewhere in a remote part of the quadrant. There was more, something about the destroyer's weapons being disabled, but Davis-Moore didn't know whether to believe the story or not; the captain of the freighter was notorious for shading the truth when describing his exploits.

Whether the rumor was true or not,
he was more than happy to team up with the Ambassador's small group. Even if the Ambassador's two escort ships were only destroyers, they were modern, dedicated military vessels and the firepower that this small fleet possessed was still far superior to any band of pirates they were likely to encounter. The extra security would be a great comfort on the journey ahead.

Davis-Moore had also been informed that t
he Ambassador was expecting a representative of the Federation Navy to join his group before the big meeting. The merchant glanced at his wrist chronograph. He was to meet another of his merchant contacts in a half hour to discuss the transport of some small but valuable artifacts. He headed for the business district on the fourth ring of the Nexus orbital station
.

Chapter
14.

On board the Piedmont Mining Station, Catskill-Soroyan system, December1, 2098.

Deputy Director Hartmann and several of his hand-picked associates were lying in wait. The mining station invaders, cut off from their companions in the
departed yacht and unwilling to reboard their shuttle due to the threat posed by two mining ships lying in wait, each of which was equipped with an easily reactivated mining laser, were starting to get desperate. A team of four terrorists, two of them clad in battle armor, were working on opening one of the locked-down hatches that opened into the main corridor on the top level of the station. The two unarmored men of the team were using plasma cutting torches to methodically cut their way inward on the station towards what they knew to be their opposition: the station security team. Having negotiated several hatches, the terrorists had established a routine procedure for their continued invasion of the mining station. Once the hatch was cut and one of the battle armor-clad invaders had kicked it through into the next corridor or compartment, the two armored men would squeeze through the opening where the hatch had been to make sure the area was secure. The two torchmen would wait for the all clear signal, follow through the opening and begin the process of cutting through the next hatch. They had not encountered any resistance.

So far...

As the two armor clad invaders squeezed through into the newly accessed compartment, Hartmann's small but concentrated forces opened fire on them with pulse rifles and pulse pistols, bombarding the invaders with a virtual hail of pulse bolts. This time around though, only four of the ten men with Hartmann were firing at the faceplates of the invaders. Their earlier experience had revealed that though the faceplate was the most vulnerable spot in a suit of battle armor, the faceplates in these modern units were not affected by the pulse weapons the security forces were equipped with. Firing at the faceplates did have the virtue of distracting the men inside the armor from the security team's real targets, however. If the armor was, for all intents and purposes, invulnerable to the Security team's weapons, the pulse rifle that each raider carried was not.

While part of his team hammered at the faceplates of the armored warriors, to keep them off balance, Hartmann and his remaining men concentrated their fire on the pulse rifle that each of the invaders carried. Within thirty seconds, each the rifles had taken three or
more direct impacts apiece and it soon became obvious that the weapons no longer functioned. When the armored men had attempted to return fire, they discovered that their guns no longer functioned and had quickly cast them aside. Both invaders immediately began fumbling for their sidearms but the next several volleys of shots targeted the pistols as well. Neither of the two raiders was able to get off a single shot before their pistols were also neutralized. With the enemy's pulse weapons out of the fight, Hartmann put the next stage of his plan to work.

"Gable
? Stanford? Fire those riot nets, now!"

Two more of Hartmann's men, who had been lying low
waiting for the signal, popped up with standard issue riot net guns which, except for the huge five-centimeter bore, resembled nothing more than a pair of overgrown sawed-off shotguns. Each of them sighted in on their designated target and pulled the trigger. A short, black canister that that rapidly bloomed out into a writhing, coarse- meshed, two-meter square spider web cartwheeled towards each of the disarmed invaders, engulfing them from ankle to neck in less than a second. The bewildered, armor-clad invaders found themselves tangled up in a web of neo-Kevlar fibers embedded with a gooey substance that would stick tenaciously to almost anything, battle armor included. Their motions slowed as the webs automatically retracted. Hartmann was certain he could detect some evidence of panic on the part of the ensnared men as they began to understand the predicament they were in. Hartmann was taking no chances with these still dangerous men, however.

"Again," shouted Hartmann.

Two more spidery nets tumbled out to engulf each of the raiders, restraining any possible movements even further. In the space of two minutes, the heretofore arrogant, invincible soldiers found themselves disarmed, immobile and all but totally helpless. To add insult to injury, each of them was further handicapped when two more of Hartmann's men inverted mop buckets full of hull sealant and slipped them over the enemy's armored helmets. One of Hartmann's other security officers used a device that ran a current through the sealant to harden it. Within two seconds, the mop buckets were bonded firmly in place. They then used the same device on the now fully contracted nets, hardening them in place as well and rendering the soldiers inside completely blind and totally helpless. The remaining invaders had long since fled.

The security team brought in a couple of maintenance carts and, without much regard for the well-being of the men
trapped inside the armor, rudely tipped each of their trussed up enemies over on to a cart and wheeled them ignominiously away.

"Good work everyone," Hartman
called out. "Now let's lock these guys in the brig and see which one of them wants out of his form-fitted coffin first. They've each got maybe ten hours of air left. I personally don't think it will take that long. Any bets?"