In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 30

  Most of the technicians and their multi-armed maintenance bots ignored me as my sniffer area-scanned the hanger. A red warning indicator flashed into my mind, pointing to the right, outside my peripheral vision. I turned, drawing the needle gun and aiming at a man with a red targeting reticule framing his head. He wore a technician’s uniform, but was pulling a JAG-40 from beneath his coat. I didn’t remember him, but my sniffer did, from the Merak Star. His assault gun was halfway up when I fired, sending his head snapping back as the needle struck his forehead dead center. The clatter of his gun hitting the deck as he crumpled caught everyone’s attention, warning the other mercs that I’d arrived.

  I ran to the side of the hanger, using one of Aphrodite’s guest transports for cover as a shot whizzed past my head and struck the bulkhead behind me. The engineers, realizing they were in the middle of a gun fight, fled to the workshop, crouching to avoid stray slugs.

  “Skipper,” Jase’s voice sounded in my ear, “we’re alongside. I don’t have docking permission, so … hurry!”

  “I’m almost there,” I whispered, dropping flat to the deck to look under the hulls of the parked craft. Multiple pairs of boots were running for safety while one pair moved quietly the other way. Returning to a crouch, I crept alongside the transport, periodically checking beneath its hull. At its thrust nozzles, I stopped to listen. The hanger was quieter now and the hunters had gone to ground, waiting for me to show myself. Knowing time was on their side, I edged around the engines, then crept alongside a cargo ferry toward the taxiway that ran down the center of the hanger to the space doors.

  “You’re not getting out of here alive, Kade,” a familiar voice called out. It was Julkka Olen, Trask’s lieutenant who’d shattered my skull and left me for dead on the muddy streets of Nisport. “Give it up and I’ll make it quick!”

  My listener analyzed sound reflection and distance, calculating Olen was near the hanger’s inner space door. He’d hidden himself where he could ambush me as I went for the airlock, forcing me to go after him first.

  Halfway along the cargo ferry, my listener detected the faintest click of a boot on deck plating behind me. I crouched and turned toward the sound as a woman stepped around the ferry’s tail section holding an assault gun at eye height. My first shot took her in the shoulder, knocking her aim off as she sent a burst of heavy slugs whizzing past my ear. My second shot drilled her throat, severing her spine, then she folded like a rag doll, gurgling blood as she hit the deck.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Kade,” Olen yelled, his voice ringing hollowly through the hanger. “Now I’m going to do you slow.”

  He was a talker. Maybe he thought it was psychological warfare. Maybe he liked to taunt his victims. What he didn’t know was every time he spoke, my listener improved the accuracy of its location fix.

  Hoping he’d continue blabbing and while I said nothing in return, I crept toward the ferry’s bow. The last of the engineers were gone now, leaving the maintenance bots to carry on unsupervised and make occasional mechanical sounds that broke the silence of the hanger. When I reached the taxiway running through the center of the hanger, I listened for any sign of the fourth merc, wondering where he was hiding. They were playing a waiting game and I was out of time. The Nortin platforms might not fire on the Silver Lining while she was hugging the Aphrodite, but the more time they had, the more chance there was they’d find a way to cripple her without damaging the starliner.

  The taxiway was wide enough for one craft to get to the space door. That made it risky to cross, but Olen was on the other side with the airlock in his sights, leaving me no choice. I took a breath and sprinted across. When I was almost halfway, a shot rang out narrowly missing my chest and giving my listener a clue to its source. I immediately dived into the gap between two cargo lighters as a second shot struck one of their hulls.

  The clink of a grenade bouncing on deck plates sounded behind me, then I threw myself under one of the lighters and rolled behind a landing strut. When the grenade exploded, shrapnel peppered the small transport’s hull while the landing gear shielded me from the blast. With my ears still ringing, heavy boots began pounding the deck as the merc charged toward me, spraying my hiding place with his JAG-40. It was standard assault tactics: disorient with a grenade and charge. It was what he’d been trained to do, what he was good at – and it was a mistake. He should have waited, gone for a sniper kill shot from cover, but that wasn’t his way.

  It was mine.

  I aimed at his boots, fired and missed and fired again, catching him in the ankle. He stumbled and fell, continuing to shoot as he hit the deck. Heavy slugs drilled the lighter’s hull and ricocheted off its landing struts, then I put two needles into him above his chest armor. He coughed blood, then his assault gun clicked empty. I stole a quick look past the landing strut to where the Orie merc lay face down, motionless.

  “Not bad, Kade,” Olen yelled. “Too bad twenty just like him are on the way. We’re going to have a party and you’re invited!”

  He was trying to flush me out, to get me to run for the airlock so he could pick me off. Olen was more patient than the others, and smarter. That’s why he was Trask’s lieutenant. Too bad he was also a talker and my listener had his position triangulated.

  Slipping out from under the cargo lighter, I crept between the workshop and the parked spacecraft. At each vessel, I checked the hiding spaces ahead, matching them to my threading’s target finder. Now that it was just down to the two of us, Olen had gone quiet, knowing I was stalking him, that my only way out was through him.

  At one of Aphrodite’s white and gold passenger shuttles, I paused beneath its thrust cone to listen. There were only two craft left between me and the space door and according to my threading, Olen should have been in front of me, but he wasn’t. I began to wonder if he’d moved, if he’d drawn me into a killing zone with his chatter, then silently relocated to target me when I approached his old position. The hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle as I anticipated a heavy slug coming from the shadows, then my listener detected the merest rustling sound, causing me to freeze.

  Olen was above me!

  Now that I knew where to look, I spotted the very tip of a JAG-40 barrel protruding above the shuttle’s port engine housing. It was a good sniper position, on top of the transport with an elevated view of the airlock. If I went back, the shuttle’s hull would block my shot and if I went forward, he’d see me.

  “Skipper, Where are you? Aphrodite control is threatening to blast us if I don’t undock immediately!” Jase yelled into my ear.

  Olen was so close, I didn’t dare respond, even with a whisper. Instead, I climbed into the port engine’s cone-shaped thrust nozzle and pulled myself silently over the upper side of the cone with one hand. I saw Olen’s boots first, then discovered him lying on his stomach, sighting on the airlock. I brought Anya’s small gun up over the edge of the thrust cone, considered putting one into the back of his skull, then wondered if he could help me find the Mavia. I knew roughly where the old depot ship was, but she was running on dark energy and I had no way to track her if she’d moved.

  “Drop the gun!” I said.

  Olen froze, not even turning his head. Slowly, he pushed the JAG-40 away, letting it slide down the side of the shuttle to the deck, then I pulled myself up onto the top of the engine nozzle.

  “You’re a dead man, Kade,” Olen growled, turning to face me.

  “You had your chance.” He frowned, confused, then I added, “On Krailo-Nis, right before you killed Tiago Sorvino.”

  Olen looked puzzled, then he studied my face with growing realization. “You’re him! That spacer! But I killed you!”

  “You didn’t kill me enough.”

  Finally, he figured it out. “You were his contact?”

  “Now you’re going to help me find the Mavia.”

  “The hell I am!” he growled, snatching a grenade from his belt.

  I shot him in the head. “That�
�s for Sorvino,” I said grimly as his lifeless fingers opened, revealing a grenade with its detonator flashing. The silver metal sphere rolled from his hand and over the side of the hull as I jumped down into the shuttle’s thrust cone. The grenade struck the deck and exploded, blasting a hole through the shuttle’s side and spraying the thrust cone with shrapnel.

  “Skipper!” Jase yelled urgently. “If I don’t undock in the next thirty seconds–.”

  “That’s all I need,” I said into the communicator as I jumped onto the deck and ran to the airlock. As soon as I’d cycled through into the Silver Lining, I yelled into the communicator, “I’m aboard. Go!”

  “Releasing Aphrodite,” Jase said with audible relief. “Go where?”

  “Duranis-B,” I said, “then straight to Earth!”

  Chapter Eight : Duranis-B

  Type 1A Supernova Progenitor

  White Dwarf Star, Duranis Binary

  Evacuation Zone, Outer Draco

  16.2 billion kilometers from Duranis-A

  Uninhabited

  We unbubbled in the blue ice giant’s orbital wake, quickly spotting the Mavia with optics alone. The old depot ship was parked well beyond the harshest effects of the giant planet’s immense gravity, clearly visible in the light of the white dwarf’s swirling accretion disk. Above the Mavia’s reinforced hull, the Hrane tunneler’s curved arms were unfolding like the petals of a flower while the trunk of the tower slowly lengthened, moving the arms away from the ship.

  “They’re not wasting any time, are they?” Jase said, impressed at how fast the tower had been installed. “What is it?”

  “Our ticket to Earth,” I replied.

  Izin sat behind us, watching with interest. “The tower appears to be stretching elastically.”

  “Quantum weirdness,” I said as the tower’s arms locked into place, forming a hemisphere a thousand meters across.

  When the tower’s apex was nine thousand meters from the Mavia, it stopped extending, fixing the entire structure rigidly in place. Electrical energy began leaping from the tunneler’s arms toward the center of the imaginary sphere they cradled. Where the streams of lightning met, a brilliant point of light appeared, small at first, but growing rapidly, dimming as it inflated. Once it had expanded to half the width of the arms, a thin beam of sparkling blue light shot from the tower’s needle-like apex up into the heart of the sphere, pouring exotic matter into the darkening wormhole mouth.

  Izin turned to his control console and scrolled through one engineering screen after another studying the nascent wormhole. “It’s emitting powerful gravity waves.”

  “It’s creating a micro-singularity,” I said.

  The sphere continued to expand, filling three quarters of the space between the arms and darkening to an inky blackness.

  “Spacetime is collapsing sharply toward the center of the sphere,” Izin reported.

  “You seriously want to fly into that thing?” Jase asked anxiously.

  “Do you know a faster way to Earth?” I replied as a pair of navigation beacons blinked on at either end of the Mavia, emitting red beams that crossed above the dark sphere. “That’s our entry point.”

  “Theoretically, a wormhole sphere can be entered from any angle,” Izin said.

  “Except we don’t want to fly through the tower’s arms or the exotic matter,” I said, deciding to play it safe.

  “The gravity’s increasing exponentially. Unless you want a long run in, Captain, we need to go now.”

  “Right!” Minimum safe distance for a bubble, even a sub-second one, was being pushed steadily away from the Mavia by the micro-singularity’s gravity.

  “The Cyclops is out there!” Jase exclaimed. “She’s way over toward the edge of the system.”

  I glanced across at his sensor screen. The Cyclops was hiding on low power, waiting for her launch to return.

  “She might come after us,” Izin said, “once they see us approach the Mavia.”

  “No, she won’t protect Separatist ships.” My brother had made that abundantly clear during the meeting on the Aphrodite. “Ignore her, she’s not interested in us and she won’t fight for them.”

  I took one last look at the long range sensors, reassuring myself the Super Saracen fleet had not yet arrived, then we blinked to a point twenty thousand kilometers above the Mavia. The wormhole mouth lay in the center of our screen, flanked by the old depot ship’s bow and stern beyond. She was protected by a military grade defense shield that extended several hundred meters from her hull while her sides appeared to curve and grow brighter amidships. It was an optical trick caused by the wormhole’s gravity, bending and amplifying light coming off the Mavia’s hull like a lens.

  “We’ll be a sitting duck if she starts shooting,” Jase said apprehensively.

  “She won’t. The Mavia’s unarmed. Big shield, no guns,” I said, diving the Silver Lining toward the intersecting beacons at full power.

  “And an enormous acceleration field,” Izin added, studying his console. “It’s offsetting the singularity’s gravity.”

  “Can our fields handle the singularity?” Jase asked.

  “Once they finish tunneling, they’ll shut it down.” I turned back to Izin. “When we make our run, record everything, all the way to the Solar System.”

  “What for?”

  So I could pass the data to Lena for the boffins on Earth to study until their heads exploded. “I know people who’d pay a fortune for that data.”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  The wormhole’s black sphere was rapidly filling our wraparound screen, framed by lightning streaming from the Hrane tower’s cradling arms, revealing a single blurry dot directly ahead.

  “What’s that light?” Jase asked.

  Izin took a moment to answer. “The micro-singularity’s gravity is lensing light from the other side through the opening in the exotic matter. I can correct for the distortion.” After a moment, the point of light expanded into a field of stars with a large golden orb at its center.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

  “Yes, Captain. That’s Earth’s sun.”

  “We’ve got company!” Jase declared. “It’s a Super Saracen, no transponder, directly behind us. Make that two! Three!”

  In the next few seconds, thirty two Super Saracens appeared with Earth Navy precision in line ahead formation, already on a trajectory aimed at the wormhole entrance. Aligning their entire fleet with the wormhole while in another system was some fancy navigation. It showed how well they’d mastered the kind of formation flying nav-tech Earth Navy used.

  We’d seen some of the Super Saracens at Acheron, most we had not. As soon as they’d all arrived, they began accelerating toward the wormhole at a stately five g’s, showing they preferred keeping formation to a fast transit. We had a minute’s head start and were accelerating seven times faster, but I was planning to roll and decelerate down at the halfway point. Having no idea what was inside the wormhole, I couldn’t risk diving into it at high velocity. I wanted to creep through slow enough to maneuver, if required.

  “We’ll reach the wormhole fourteen minutes ahead of them,” Izin said, “assuming they start braking halfway.”

  “That’ll keep us out of weapons range long enough to get off a warning to Earth Navy,” I said.

  “Suppose they don’t believe us?” Jase said unconvinced. “You know how stubborn those navy types are.”

  “They’ve never seen a wormhole before. They’ll listen.” And I had a recognition code up my sleeve that would set alarm bells ringing all the way to Earth. “We’ll have front row seats when Earth Navy blasts those Super Saracens to bits,” followed by nearly eight months bubbled up to get back out here the old fashioned way.

  “Perhaps not, Captain,” Izin said slowly, transfixed by his console. “The gravity waves emanating from the wormhole are not diminishing. They’re increasing.”

  We could see Earth’s Sun, proving the tunneling was comple
te. “They should be shutting it down,” I said, puzzled.

  “The exotic matter has stabilized the wormhole, Captain, but the micro-singularity is blocking the exit mouth.”

  Damned tamphs, always spoiling the party.

  “They’re trying to stop us going through!” Jase declared.

  “The Mavia shows no sign of even knowing we’re here,” Izin said. “We’re a small target and interference from the tower is hiding us from them.”

  “Why is the gravity increasing?” I asked uneasily.

  Izin’s slender fingers ran over his console with lightning speed. Suddenly, he froze in an instinctive ambush predator response to danger. If he didn’t move, his enemy couldn’t see him.

  “Izin?” I said, trying to snap him out of it. “What is it?”

  He breathed again. “The stars on the other side, and the Sun, are not where they should be. The wormhole’s in the wrong place!”

  “Where is it?” I demanded.

  Izin touched his console, throwing an astrographics overlay onto the main screen. “The exit mouth is here.” The dark sphere was on one side of the screen and the blue-green orb of Earth was on the other.

  “You calculated it wrong!”

  “There’s no error, Captain.”

  “They’re attacking Earth?” Jase asked incredulously.

  “Earth’s defenses would blast those ships the moment they appeared,” I said, confident Earth was safe from a fleet attack by a mere thirty two cruisers – even a surprise attack.

  “Their fleet can’t attack Earth,” Izin said calmly. “The micro-singularity is blocking the exit mouth. Any ship attempting to use the wormhole will be destroyed. Us and them!”

  That wasn’t what Trask, the Chairman or the Separatist Leaders had in mind when they’d planned this little party. “How close to Earth is the wormhole?”

  Izin studied his console a moment. “Twenty two thousand kilometers outside Earth’s orbit.”

  I relaxed. “At least Earth’s not going to hit it.”