The View from the Imperium (2 page)

Once the Castaways had been part of the Imperium, but that was long ago, before Iltekinov was born. The Imperium was too far away to have any real impact on his life, so he ignored the arguments that went on between historians and politicians. For him, business was the most important factor. He paid his taxes to Yolk’s council, and the money was shared out evenly among the other planets and stations in the Cluster. There were the usual arguments about the wealthier communities paying in more and getting less, stations getting heavily subsidized at the expense of groundbounders, and so on, but little changed over the years. Everybody got educated, fed, protected and physicked, mostly.

Iltekinov didn’t care. All he wanted were safe spaceways and profitable deals. Yolk might be a backwater, even a little inbred, but Yolkovians knew a good life when they had it. He and his fellow Cluster merchants generally policed themselves, preferring not to bring their affairs to the attention of the councils.

The big companies, suppliers of staples such as food, textiles and power supplies, more or less ran everything, but they left openings of opportunity for such small entrepreneurs as himself. He filled a niche, and he was proud of it.

What with the Cluster being as isolated as it was, the merchants formed a close, though non-geographical, community. Meeting another ship on one’s way in sublight was grounds for a friendly greeting, if not time to stop for a moment and exchange drinks. The rare strangers from one of the big alliances knew the custom, and most of them joined in.
No doubt,
Iltekinov thought wryly, making himself more comfortable in the smooth seat,
they thought it was quaint.

Navigator Natalia Poldin glanced up as the proximity alarm went off. Surprised, Iltekinov swung his scope 135 degrees to port and got a distant bloom of a minute heat signature in among the cold rocks, no more than a pinpoint in size. The ship’s ID was unfamiliar. Poldin met Iltekinov’s eyes. He read the worry in hers, and felt it echo in the pit of his gut.

“Someone coming out of the crossing?” she asked. “A visitor?”

The captain counted up ships in his head. “Maybe,” he said. “Otari from the Trade Union was coming this way, but I didn’t think he was due out of Scanama for another couple of weeks, so he’d be months early. Maybe Dagnessen from the Central Worlds?” But Dagnessen wouldn’t hover among the asteroids in the belt. In fact, no one would linger there, unless they were up to no good. It had to have been hiding there, its telemetry concealed by the thick walls of one of the planetoids, waiting for someone to emerge from ultra-drive. Who? Them? No time to guess. The other ship was moving towards them. The captain felt a prickle of fear. Pirates were not unknown in the spaceways.

“Have they hailed us?” Iltekinov called to his purser, Sam Delius. In spite of his human-sounding name, Delius was an Uctu, a Gecko, born in the Autocracy but brought up in the Cluster.

“It has yet to send a hail. I have signalled it thirty-five times now,” Delius replied, his long-lidded eyes fluttering nervously. “All wavelengths, digital and rapid-transmit.”

“Then they don’t want to talk to us.” Iltekinov steeled himself to survive. He slapped the signal in the arm of his seat. “Buckle in! All crew, this is a warning. Stations! We’ve got a stranger out there.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Captain,” Pinckney exclaimed. “That’s judgmental.”

Iltekinov didn’t turn around. There was no time to indulge in the irritation he felt. He concentrated on linking into the ship’s computer system through his communications link, freeing his hands for running auxiliary weapons control, if it should come to that. The viewtank responded by zooming in on the other ship as tightly as it could. No details in the visible range yet, but stats began to stack up on the side. Impressive mass it was showing, much greater than the
Little Darling.
“Councillor, when I hail a ship ten ways from Restday and ’un doesn’t answer, either it’s disabled, an’ y’can see it’s not, or it’s out to get me,” he snapped out smartly. “I didn’t get old like this lettin’ my ship get too close to predators.”

“Predators! Hardly . . . !”

Whatever Pinckney was going to say was interrupted by the flash of light that bloomed in the viewtank in the infrared band. An energy blast! Iltekinov’s heart pounded.

“Turn tail, Nat,” he ordered. “Put on some speed!”

“Aye, Captain!” she replied. She plastered her palms down over the relays. The ship jerked sideways as it came about hard to starboard and up the Y-axis, seeking to put an approaching asteroid between it and the coming blast. The ship’s internal inertia-dampers kicked in a moment later, but not before the five councillors clinging to the rails went rolling into the bulkhead. His eyes glued to the viewtank, Iltekinov heard the banging and swearing.
I told them to buckle in,
he thought, with just a tiny bit of satisfaction.

“Captain, what are you doing?” Pinckney demanded furiously, clambering to his feet and shaking a fist. “We should sue you for dangerous transport!”

“Councillor, they’re shooting at us,” Iltekinov barked, and immediately tuned out any further ranting. Not since the Pletznik Coupon War twelve years before had he had to use evasion techniques to avoid anything but an asteroid or a piece of tumbling space junk. How that damned Pletznik and his fool associates from Carbon had caused so much controversy over “Grid-based discounts” still made him shake his head. But that was the problem with not having a central government in the Cluster. No uniform laws existed for the redemption of sales offers, or customer protection neither. Iltekinov hadn’t fired the ship’s weaponry except in tests since then, either. He hoped they’d work. But more than that, he hoped he wouldn’t be trapped in a position where he had no move left but to shoot it out. With the distances and the level of force involved in any typical space battle, the chances were good there could be
two
losers.

He studied the path of the thermal mass fired by the other ship. It didn’t change course when he did, so it had been pure energy, not a missile with tracking capabilities. In his experience that salvo had been in the nature of a warning. But warning him of what? Who was over there?

In the meantime, his ship continued dodging its pursuer. Whenever the other vessel managed to swoop around the last obstacle Poldin put between them, the captain studied the telemetry the computers were assembling about the stranger. It was bigger than they were by a factor of six. The overpowered engines suggested a warship rather than a trader. He’d never seen the configuration before, and his memory of ship design was almost as good as the computer’s. Who could it belong to? And why were they chasing him?

Though he didn’t like taking his hands off the controls, Iltekinov trusted the maneuvering technology, which enabled the
Little Darling
to maneuver into some impossibly tight berths aboard outdated space stations. The computer assist all but anticipated Poldin’s requirements for speed, kicking the light engines into .3 sublight. The gravity generator moaned at having to maintain internal conditions. Iltekinov knew how it felt.

“Prepare to jump back t’ultra,” Iltekinov ordered. The system “binked” acknowledgement. Figures scrolled along the bottom of his viewtank as it started calculating the safest and longest jump away from that spot.

“What in space are you doing?” Pinckney demanded.

“Gettin’ us out o’ here, Councillor!”

“No!” All five of the guests cried at once.

“We must get to that meeting,” Quelph pleaded, her eyes wide. “Take us to Boske, please!”

Iltekinov felt his blood pressure surge. Could they be such idiots? “Councillors, we’re under
attack!”

The other ship emitted another burst of energy. According to the scope, this blob was headed for a collision with
Little Darling
’s current flight plan. The other fellow was trying to take his measure. Iltekinov swore and slammed both hands on his control panel.

“Evasive action,” the computer’s tinny voice stated in his ear. Red lights flared on, bathing the bridge in a gory glow. A white line appeared on the scope ahead of
Little Darling
’s nose, showing its revised trajectory. Iltekinov felt helpless. The machines were taking over, just as they had twelve years ago. Straining his body against the straps, he tried to urge the ship to greater speed. He was frustrated. He just couldn’t move fast enough to make a difference. No human could, not even enhanced ones, and there were fewer of those than there’d used to be.

“Strap in, Councillors,” Iltekinov shouted.

The Yolkovians scrambled to the sides of the crowded bridge for the safety seats, battered cups of heavy shock padding laced with flat straps of a material that was slightly elastic. Iltekinov tried not to listen to the minor bickering going on around him as two of the visitors tried to get into the same chair. The ship lurched. Side thrusters had kicked in to avoid a spinning chunk of rock.

To Iltekinov’s horror, the pursuing ship seemed to have no trouble following
Little Darling
’s twists and turns. As soon as she put a rock in between them, the stranger seemed to crest it, closing the distance between them a little more each time. He armed a precious two of his eight missiles, attached the file of the other ship’s particulars from the telemetry computer and launched them. Twin trails of ions drew away from the
Little Darling
’s outline in the viewtank, attenuated and disappeared in the distance.

“How long?” he asked. The twitches and facial tension he relayed to the computer meant “How long until we can jump back to where we came from?”

After thirty-three years in the space lanes, his ship understood him, verbal speech or no. “Six point four five minutes.”

An eternity. “When’s it goin’ to catch us?”

“Four point nine seven minutes.”

“Damn!”

“Yes.”

Iltekinov could smell his own fear. Now he could see the telemetry for the other ship’s weapons systems. It ran fully loaded: lasers, plasma pulse, magnetic pulse and neutron missiles.

“Can we jump sooner?” Pinckney asked.

“No.”

“Who’s out there?” Quelph asked, her voice shaking. At last it had dawned on them that the danger was real.

“Pirates, most like,” the captain rattled out. Well-financed pirates, but it wasn’t unheard of for a “businessman” to decide it was better to sell goods one didn’t have to pay for in the first place. Enough people in the Cluster lived high lives because the honored Founder of the Family had made his or her pile out of do-it-yourself salvage. The ship’s configuration, put together by the computer, showed a narrow silhouette shaped like a diving bird, all smooth curves angling back from a sharply pointed nose. The shoulder angles of the wings held the main weapons. They were
huge
.

Hot, red light bloomed on the face of the tumbling, boot-shaped rock they were passing: a plasma burst had found a target. The ancient, pitted stone slagged, forming a vast bowl where there had been a heel-like protruberance. Iltekinov knew his ship’s shielding capability.
Little Darling
would take tremendous, possibly crippling damage from a bolt like that. Dampening his fears, he looked on the readouts as if they were the stats of a digitavid game.

He scanned the waste, looking for a means of escape. Being constantly in motion, the debris in the heliopause had no memorable geographical points he could recall. But certain features appeared frequently in any of those rocky belts. Iltekinov widened his scope’s view, hoping to locate one of them.

“Do you see it, l’il one?” he murmured to the ship’s computer.

“Yes.”

About one minute ahead of them was what he had hoped to find. Collisions occurred regularly, on a galactic scale, among the giants of the ring. A disturbance, possibly triggered by a passing meteor or other body, over the course of centuries might alter the complex orbit, cannoning one or more of the huge rocks into one another. Iltekinov had flown into the cloud of particles from one of these celestial accidents, ranging from microscopic grains of sand to chunks larger than his ship. Unlike most of the belt, the matter was much more concentrated, giving rise to a real possibility of an accident, but Iltekinov intended that it should befall the other ship, not his.

“That way,” he instructed Poldin. “Let’s warm some of th’un up, see if we can lay a false trail and ge’ a moment’s grace. Send some more hails out there.”

Delius fluttered his tongue. “Still no replies, Cap.”

“Keep tryin’. It’s got to be a mistake. Tell ’em we’re traders. Show ’em t’merchandise. Offer ’em a discount!”

Little Darling
dove into the clutter. Whining from the reactor fueling the dispeller screens forward testified to the increase in hits on the shield. Iltekinov crossed his fingers, hoping it wouldn’t give out. At the speed they were traveling, even a minute hole would cause a massive implosion. Once they came out the other side of the heliopause, the computers ought to have readied the nav for Yolk.

His hands rocked back and forth on the gunnery controls, pipping off laser blasts aft at friable boulders, hoping to slow down the stranger by filling space still more with obstructions. He knew it was the equivalent of pulling down cardboard boxes in a warehouse pursuit, but what choice did he have?

“We’re losing the signal,” Poldin warned him.

The captain knew it. As it would be for his enemy, his own scopes were blocked by the flying debris. He saw a blip behind them, but the running text along the side broke up and dissolved into gibberish.
Why
wouldn’t the other ship respond to their communications?

Ahead lay an enormous hollow, fairly clear of debris. Crossing it laid them open to easy attack, but beyond were cheese-holed planetoids they could weave through, and maybe lose the stranger. He shut down all external lights;
Little Darling
didn’t need them to see to maneuver. In the meanwhile, he could hear Delius sending distress calls to Boske, Portent’s Star’s main inhabited planet, and every beacon. He knew little chance existed for rescue—no one could scramble out of orbit from there or any of the stations throughout the system in time to come to their aid—but at least they could get the word out that there was a predator in the heliopause.