The Huralon Incident Read online

  “No hits with our lasers,” said Piper.

  “Copy that,” said McCray. “Continue firing. How many anti-missile batteries does Brazil have?” Hoping for at least a single hit from the missiles to chase them off, he watched the movement of Springbok’s outbound weapons in the tank.

  Warwick shrugged. “Two, maybe three clusters at most. She’s a pirate. They’re not prepared for return fire from a warship.” Switching her screens to different scans, she shook her head. They’ve got two anti-missile batteries at least, but I see only one HavePalm fire control radar coming up. Poor maintenance probably. Only one defensive battery is covering them.”

  Zahn shook his head. “That’s unexpected. They haven’t got a chance.”

  In a stern chase, the pursuing ship suffered a distinct disadvantage. Missiles fired at them approached on a reciprocal course, allowing the least time possible to establish a radar track on the weapons before they activated. A much larger destroyer, with six anti-missile emplacements would have its hands full with Springbok’s volley.

  McCray watched the action in the tank, suddenly realizing his combat reflexes had utterly doomed the pirate ship. At anywhere from ten-thousand to five-thousand kilometers, the fusion hearts of the missiles would expend all their fuel at once. Each missile-head drew power from the ten megaton nuclear explosion before being obliterated. Three-hundred gigawatt lasers would fire through the sixteen lasing rods of the head, reaching out like death.

  “One hit,” said Piper. “Another. Defenses got one. The Mind help me; three hits! Switching to optical in the tank.”

  Viviane Brazil had broken up into pieces. After such catastrophic damage, the controls for her fusion drive must have failed and all the fuel cooked off in an instant. For a brief moment, the ship became a small star, signalling Viviane Brazil’s total destruction.

  Chapter 03

  McCray leaned against the bulkhead of his stateroom, arms crossed. “That idiot! Why couldn’t Liu have just veered off? Such a waste.”

  “He’s a pirate,” said Aja, settling onto the rack, elbows on her knees. “Going after helpless merchies is what they do.”

  “Well, weren’t helpless were we? Some merchants are armed, you know, and they aren’t hiding it. With Liu’s piddling defenses he might not have survived even one of them. What a fool! He doomed everyone aboard that ship.”

  Aja held her hands out. “That’s pirates for you. They operate on the margins with crap equipment. It’s not like in the holoflicks where pirates are rich and have the finest ships and the finest guns and some exotic world-killing alien weapon. They’re usually dirt-poor, operating with gear that belongs in museums.”

  McCray held his hands out in a gesture to stop. “I know, I know. I read your book.”

  She leaned back with a smile. “You liked it?”

  “Yeah, very informative.” The light moment passed, and McCray felt his frustration resuming. “But I can’t help thinking that you got so much data from captured live pirates, not incincerated ones.”

  Aja nodded. “True, but those were the smart ones who surrendered. Vann, you’ve seen combat before. You’ve killed whole ships before. I don’t understand the emotionalism here.”

  Beside McCray on the bulkhead, an access line led to a jutting firefighting fitting. He leaned against it, using it as a back scratcher. “Yeah, but those were professional fighting men. They trained for war, knowing they might pay the ultimate cost. They had the wits to know when it’s time to retreat or surrender.”

  “Okay. What about pirates? Your file says you destroyed twenty—”.

  “You read my file?”

  Aja stared at him with surprise. “Hello? IS-3, here.”

  “Okay, I might have read some of yours too.”

  Aja just smiled. “I know.”

  McCray cleared his throat. “Well, as I was saying, Liu was no professional warrior, and the lives lost under his mismanagement are a travesty. I may have killed before, but I reserve the right to hate it, especially when it’s pointless.” He shrugged. “It must be easier for an assassin like you. You’ve killed boatloads of people.”

  Aja stood up suddenly, dark eyes flashing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, I mean I kill ships, you kill people. Maybe it’s easier for you.” As soon as he said the words, he wished he could pull them back. The transition of Aja’s face from soft, angelic lines to vengeful demon took him by surprise.

  “How dare you?” she hissed. “You make it seem like I’m some indiscriminate murderer. I’ll have you know none of my missions involved ‘collateral damage’. I have never killed an innocent. I don’t like unnecessary deaths either, Vann. I may be a weapon, but I’m a good one. I make a surgeon’s scalpel look like a blunt weapon.” Aja threw up her hands. “Mind it! What must you think of me?”

  McCray cringed. He’d done it again. He knew how to fight a ship, but as he had so many times before, he’d socially done the worst thing possible. Now, he’d pissed off the last person in the universe that he would ever want to hurt. He held out his hands placatingly. “Aja, Aja, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” Slowly, carefully—because the woman’s combat reflexes could be quite fatal—he embraced her. “I’m an idiot, and I never meant to imply anything about you.” Slowly, he could feel the incredibly dense muscles in her back start to loosen. “Did I mention nobody wants me in the diplomatic corps for a reason?”

  Aja pulled back, still looking unhappy, though she held onto his hands. “What about the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “The part about how much you love and adore me.”

  He could safely say no previous lover would’ve let him off so easily after his mistake. With her warm, forgiving ways, she stood head and shoulders above any other human being he’d ever known. She may have been a killer, but she was the most level-headed, most compassionate person he’d ever met. Things like this were why he really did adore her. “I do, most completely.”

  “All right.” She let go of his hands and gently pushed him back, brushing at his eyebrow. “You know those killer space caterpillars of yours need a trim.”

  McCray brushed at his brow. “You think I should? But I like my eyebrows.”

  “Is that any way to answer your queen’s command?”

  “Queen?”

  Aja swatted his shoulder hard enough to knock him off balance. “Lighten up, McCray. You’re too tense about what the snails think back at the Admiralty. We’ll get this mission done.”

  McCray rubbed his sore shoulder and joined her as she sat on the rack. “Eyes on the prize, right?”

  “Yep.” Aja patted his knee. “You’ve been stressed out. Losing hyperdrive capability couldn’t have made things easier.”

  McCray shook his head. “Unbelievable. What will the Joint Chiefs say when word of this gets back. ‘A mere sloop crippled his ship? Throw him on the beach’, probably.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Aja’s eyes suddenly looked cold and flat. “I’d break the neck of anyone who tried.”

  McCray looked at her blankly for a moment. She said things like that, sometimes. Knowing she was a trained assassin, he was never sure if she was kidding or not. “I feel safer already.”

  “You should. Anyway, I thought you were getting some rack time.”

  McCray shrugged helplessly. “I’m too wired to sleep. Besides, I have a meeting with Gui in engineering in just over an hour.”

  Aja’s fingers started a slow slide from his knee towards his crotch. She may have a prudish public persona, but in private, she was a tigress. Her smile spoke volumes. “Well then, I can think of a way to pass the time.”

  ***

  When McCray climbed into his sarco for the meeting with Gui, Aja slipped out of his stateroom and into her quarters. Her personal space reflected her tastes. She’d refinished the paint in bands of blues and tans, and hung sheets of tie-dye
d silks for decoration. Hand-knitted banners she’d made herself, depicting agrarian life from her home planet of Curassus, completed the transition from barren walls to a livable home.

  For a moment she gazed at her art wistfully. Feeling a little homesick for the family farm, she longed for dirty nails, a belly full of wholesome food, blistered hands, and songs around a fire. Unfortunately, reconnecting to the simple life must wait.

  She placed a white, thimble-sized recorder on the foldout table, and sat on her rack before it. A holofield opened, showing her face as feedback while she recorded her report.

  “Status Report 014 regarding Mission 2232/g,” she began, shifting on the rack to correct her position.

  “Prototype 0108 Delta experienced its first combat today. Ship and crew are fine. We encountered a Jade-class sloop with custom armaments. Subject Arthur…”

  Aja paused for a moment. With each day, she felt a certain irony in that McCray seemed much like his mythical namesake. A principled man, passionate about his work, yet flawed in a way that might yet prove his downfall.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she felt about that. Their relationship was still new, and, after so many failed romances in her life, Aja wondered if this latest try could survive. One never knew. So she hoped for the best and planned for the worst.

  She continued, “Arthur returned fire after the sloop of war forced an engagement. The pirate was totally destroyed during the subsequent exchange of fire. 0108 Delta received a freak hit that disabled the hyperdrive. Repairs underway. Overall, the prototype proved an effective combat system.”

  Aja paused to consider her words. She didn’t like saying anything bad about McCray, but submitting a complete report was her job. That meant she had to phrase things carefully.

  “Mission challenges: Though Mordred is expected to arrive in a larger and better-armored frigate, this operative is concerned the weight of this ship’s fire might destroy Mordred’s vessel outright, ruining the mission goal of capture.”

  Aja shook her head. From what she knew about the Madkhali Elite, Stephen Mallouk aka: Mordred, she didn’t give a damn if he got blown into little tiny pieces. Space would be a better place without him. Still, a mission was a mission.

  “This operative will attempt to convince Arthur to use less destructive means to engage his opponents. That said, and though the Navy demanded that the cerebral destruct system Jutland be made available to me, this operative sees no indication such a ‘nuclear option’ for managing Arthur is necessary. It may seem the pirate’s destruction is a sign of Arthur’s overt aggression the Navy warned of, but Arthur’s defense of his recent actions demonstrates an acute awareness of operational security. This operative expects he will prove an exemplary partner for intelligence work going forward. Authentication follows: 11984: Jaguar at Mt. Fuji.”

  Aja leaned back with a smile. That last bit should help McCray a little.

  ***

  McCray enjoyed going EVA once in a while. The galactic plane’s sea of stars, viewed from the ship’s outer hull, never ceased to fill him with wonder. With one hand on his tether and Van Der Waals boots holding him to the hull, he walked around the catwalk at the top of Hyperengine #2. From there he could see the other two enormous hyperengines of the ship. Each rose over seven-hundred meters vertically from the horizontally arranged main hull. The engines, comprising sixty percent of the ship’s mass, looked like three blunt knives, edges facing each other, rising from a shallow mound. The arrangement reminded him of the enormous masts of ancient wind-powered sailing vessels.

  Alone with his thoughts, he sighed with pleasure at the sights. His ship was beautiful. Like all Elysian vessels, it was more ‘grown’ than manufactured. Clouds of nanites, kilometers wide, assembled the ship at the molecular level using cellular growth algorithms. Because the ships weren’t built with the squarish lines of manufacturing expediency, Springbok’s lines swept along in elegant curves and gentle swells.

  He activated the zoom function of his EVA suit and watched the last meter of chimeralite armor growing to close up the hole torn in the ship’s skin. The area hadn’t been armored before in an effort to save weight, but the freak hit that crippled her hyper capability proved it was needed. Though the interior still required many repairs, at least the exterior was better protected now. With a grunt of satisfaction, he followed his tether back to the airlock.

  McCray returned to the bridge just to check on things for a while. Springbok sailed just outside the heliopause of Gershon. They could have cruised deeper within the system, but if a hostile vessel arrived, it could pin her up against the planetary bodies, restricting her ability to maneuver and thus, escape. Beyond the heliopause, Springbok could maneuver, but this was also the location where ships would arrive via hyperspace. If a large warship—a powerful destroyer or in the worst case, a cruiser—arrived, their best move would be to run and try to enter hyperspace soonest. Springbok was heavily outmatched by a cruiser or larger, but what were the odds a cruiser would arrive right on top of them while hyperdrive repairs were underway? Vanishingly rare, that’s what. Waiting in the heliopause seemed the wisest strategy.

  At present, everything appeared normal with no contacts in the tank. He needed a little sense of normal just then. The meeting with Chief Engineer Parsamayan went as he expected; Gui had placed armor over the newly-revealed weak spot, but needed one more day to get the hyperdrive back up and running. It made him nervous knowing a run for hyperspace wasn’t possible. While IS-3 claimed nothing larger than a Madkhali destroyer might enter the system, McCray’s years of experience told him IS-3 wasn’t always right. Until Springbok’s hyperspace engines returned to service, he would stay on edge.

  He looked around at the crewmen, busy at their stations. Warwick’s small and delicate hands flitted like quick butterflies across her many screens, unusual for a woman with such a muscular, athletic body. Ando appeared to be in a trance as he constructed another computer-generated avatar for a crew member. Piper’s teeth gritted beneath his handlebar mustache as he ran another battle simulation.

  At least the Alpha bridge team had gelled as a unit. They even seemed like a family of sorts, arguing over the silliest of things like siblings. Since Alpha had learned McCray was a volunteer for the EHRP (Earth History Reclamation Project), they had developed a fascination for the topic. After the Cataclysm, and the centuries it took to recover, humanity had spent many decades trying to recover its lost history. Work continued, but histories had been published by many independent organizations, resulting in a variety of competing, incomplete histories. As he watched, this sparked yet another heated debate.

  "You're mad," said Ando. As comms officer, he had the least to do in such a remote location. That left him more time to run his mouth. "The Patel-Lehman-Hemphill history is as complete as we'll ever get. There's no point in calling it Earth's Lost History anymore. It's been recovered as well as can be. Everybody uses the PLH. "

  "Everybody in the Degrasse-Tyson province," said Warwick, dark eyes flashing. "That's just one area. No one's ever heard of it in the Gagarin province."

  "Gagarin? They're always behind the times. They still think Texas was part of the United States."

  "It was!"

  "There you go, see?” said Ando, gesturing theatrically. “The latest information proves that the Republic of Texas was a sovereign nation. Just look at the historical social media posts of Texans, always waving their national flag around. They wanted little to do with the old United States’s nanny-state laws. Anybody that hasn't kept up with that is clearly out of date."

  Piper chimed in at last. "We don't use it in the Hawking Province. We're still teaching the tried and true Willstedt-Pulovski history. It's the most logically consistent work to date."

  "You Hawking lot are hopelessly conservative!" grated Ando.

  Piper, a senior officer, simply raised an eyebrow.

  "Though universally understood to be extraordinarily wise," Ando hurriedly offered for his superior.


  "Does your...history," Piper made the word sound like a term for an extraordinarily revolting insect, "...include anything about Sir Elton John?"

  "Oh! I know," said Warwick. "He was a knight."

  "Yes, he was knighted."

  "What does that mean?" said Ando. “Did his eyes get the night vision upgrade?”

  "It means," said Warwick. "That he performed an ancient sport called jousting. It started as a fighting style in medieval times, but continued on as entertainment and sport even into the space age. Jousting involved horses and very long poles."

  Ando winced. "Then I feel sorry for the horses."

  "The poles weren't used on the horses, you pillock," grated Piper. "They were used on the human opponent."

  "Sounds even worse."

  "The point being, that Sir Elton John was an expert on fighting," continued Piper. "He even wrote a song about it. Apparently fights were held on Saturday nights."

  "I think I'm missing something," said Ando with a blank expression.

  "I would suggest to you that today is not Saturday," said Piper. "Thus, today is not all right for fighting." Piper's expression suggested punishments involving bare hands and zero-gee toilets were in the offing. "A little peace and quiet if it's not a bother, Mr. Ando?"

  “Emergence!” called Warwick. “Cripes. It’s almost on top of us. Eight light-seconds away.”

  McCray popped out of his seat and advanced on the tank. The last thing he wanted to see right now was another ship. “Gimme everything you’ve got, Warwick.“

  "Target ship is above us and off the starboard bow, bearing 0-5-6, mark 0-3-3. She's moving at a good clip, accelerating at 280 gees, course 3-2-7, mark 3-5-1, True. She's not on an intercept course, but it’s close.”

  Ando chimed in, “I’ve notified Commander Zahn. He’ll join us shortly."

  "Very well,” McCray said. “Warwick, anything else? Tell me it’s just a merchant."