Chase
Captain Jacques Sherdzu contemplated the glowing red dot that popped into existence in the main vidscreen on the bridge of his ship. It was at the right time and the right place, almost three-fourths along the 34-parsec track from the Association world of Esmeralda and the independent colony world Neue Deutschlandt.
A ship in parallel space was invisible to anything in normal space, and vice versa. The ship was in another universe, a tiny one created by the field surrounding the ship. The exception was gravitic distortions of the space-time continuum; a tiny fraction of that energy leaked into other universes. A gravitic scanner close enough to the mass could detect it, but the mass of a spaceship even as large as a worldship was too weak to be visible at more than a few light-hours. This was too small a detection cross-section to be very useful in interstellar space.
Unless the gravitic energy was modulated by the vibration of microscopic black holes. A matching receiver could detect those gravitic waves almost a light week away.
Which was exactly what had happened here. At Esmeralda an automated cargo handler had added a small crate to the cargo loaded onto the freighter Milena. The crate contained a gravitic beacon set to periodically turn on for a few milliseconds once enough time had passed to put it near the right place in interstellar space
Sherdzu smiled a shark’s smile. His navigation officer twisted around in her seat with a satisfied smile on her face. “I’ve got the coordinates!”
Sherdzu frowned but kept it slight. Just because they were sleeping together was no excuse for her to break procedure like this. But then they were sleeping together and he was not tired of her yet. He let it go.
“Lay in an intercept course,” he said. And saw on the repeater screen at his command console that she had already computed it and put it in the computer ready to execute. That efficiency was another reason to give her a little latitude.
“Execute,” said the captain and the pilot did so.
Minutes then dozens of minutes passed. At almost two hours later Claw was less than a 1000 kilometers away and was matching its paraspace field phase with the freighter’s. The target put on a burst of speed, going from a lumbering 350 times the speed of light to an only slightly less lumbering 380. It had detected him when he came in phase.
Captain Sherdzu’s Tiger’s Claw was a good knock-off of the Association’s Merodeodor-class light cruiser. Its normal pursuit speed was 850 lights. Sherdzu saw no need to stretch the Claw’s legs.
In 25 more minutes the freighter’s speed suddenly dropped to 190 lights, then a minute later increased to 285.
The navigator whooped. “She lost a drive module!” So much was obvious to the captain; the freighter class they were pursuing had four modules.
The captain was not pleased. An efficient pirate did not want to destroy or discourage freighters or their personnel unless necessary. They wanted the freighters to continue in business. To do otherwise was to kill the golden geese who laid - or in the case of freighters, shipped - their golden eggs. Losing an expensive drive module and maybe skilled engineering personnel could bankrupt a one-ship outfit like this one.
The pursuit continued almost another hour, with the freighter modulating its paraspace field phase to prevent the warship from sharing the same parallel space. Twice the Claw matched long enough to fire a missile across the bow.
The second missile was aimed very close to the freighter. Minutes later the blue light blinked out. The freighter had cut its drive and powered down its paraspace generator. It had given up a hopeless chase and waited to be raped.
It took half an hour for the Claw to match courses with its target, but at last the slender 350-meter light cruiser approached the fat 1600-meter-plus freighter close enough to match personnel tubes. During that time Captain Sherdzu had negotiated the freighter’s surrender by normspace vidphone with the tired old woman who captained the freighter Milena.
Suddenly the freighter’s image disappeared. In its place was a flat, lumpy ellipsoid perhaps 1000 meters long. Captain Sherdzu felt a spurt of fear as if a frigid wind blew through him.
Sherdzu was a retired Association Spaceforce officer. He had seen such a craft before. This was a Star Ranger, controlled by the most advanced robotic mind in existence, its pilot fused intellectually with it so that it had the nanosecond reflexes of a computer and the judgement of a human. Built to roam beyond the periphery of the Association into strange and dangerous territory, it was built to meet that danger. Ton for ton it was the fastest and deadliest weapon ever built by man.
The normspace vidphone lit up. A woman - somehow he knew she was tall - sat in her own command chair but with no command console before her. Her uniform was dark forest green, her midnight-black hair cut in a military pageboy that showed blue highlights, her very pale face handsome. Her eyes seemed to bore into his.
“I am Regulador Silvana Arau, Asociación Departmento de Regulación,” she said. “Surrender or we will destroy you.”
The Claw’s blond navigator screamed and slaved the weapons officer’s interface to her nav console. Captain Sherdzu’s ceremonial pistol leaped into his hand and jerked to full extension. A red slash of light fried every nerve in the nav officer’s beautiful blond head. Her body slumped in its flight restraints and the odor of burnt hair tainted the air.
“Admirable reflexes, Captain,” said Regulador Arau. “Prepare to be boarded.”
Captain Sherdzu replied in a monotone. “Preparing, Regulador.” With two hands he activated two controls on opposite sides of his console that responded only to his living fingerprints. Then he shut down the drive power and the weapons consoles. Keying his all-ship comm he said, “I have surrendered to the Regulation Department ship -“
”Miriám,” said a voice over the vidphone that was not the Regulador’s.
“ - Miriam. This is a Star Ranger. If you don’t know what that is, believe me you don’t want to find out the hard way.
“Stow all weapons in the weapons locker. Sergeant of Arms, supervise this. And I mean every weapon. If I find you with so much as a paring knife close to you I will shoot you myself.
“Regulador Arau, this will take a few minutes. Please wait until I tell you that we are ready.”
“Very well, Captain. Simply address Miriám when you are ready.” The vidphone shut off.
Boarding
Silvana Arau closed the last lock point on her armored spacesuit and mentally cued the neural web in the armor to key all the locks in her suit. A barely audible chorus of clicks marked the last stage in completely enclosing her. The dry air of the spacesuit’s air processor very lightly touched her face with a hint of the pine scent of desiccant before the air adjusted flow speed and humidity and slowed to imperceptibility.
Silvana twisted her neck, stretched, swung her arms, and stamped her feet in an practiced loosening exercise. Her suit reacted by settling into a perfect fit.
She ran the weapons out of their recesses in both arms of her spacesuit. One of them was a neural disrupter, not destructive of the life-protecting shell of the spaceship she was about to enter. The other was an automatic rifle with selectable light and heavy armor piercing shells for tougher targets. Silvana neurally cued the weapons diagnostics, gave the weapon indicators superimposed over her vision a comprehensive glance, and retracted the weapons as the diagnostics signaled them ready and disappeared from her sight. The whir of the weapon’s actuators was a quiet purr in her earphones.
It had taken her not quite a minute to suit up and check out. She now wore the price of a small anti-personnel car and, with her training and internal equipment, was just about as lethal as one.
Finally! said Miriám over the neurophone in Silvana’s head.
“Don’t get your drawers in a twist.” Silvana had recently discovered that the robot, who had never had a physical body, was inordinately insulted by a suggestion of having bodily attributes.
I still think this is an unnecessary risk. said Miriám. My remotes should be enough.
“Nope. I’m still going.” Doctrine in the Association Regulator Department was that there was no substitute for the Mark One eyeball (and ears and nose and kinesthetic sense and etc.), no matter how good the a teleoperated remote or robot-controlled one.
Privately Silvana had reservations about this doctrine since she was enclosed in armor and all of her sensory data were piped in. She might just as well be in the ship remotely operating the suit. But there was a feeling of immediacy in actually being on location, and her responses seemed quicker, her senses sharper, and her mind clearer.
But at least let me send my remotes in first.
“I am. They’ll be in front of me.”
Yeah! About two meters in front!
“Don’t get your drawers in a twist.” Silvana felt that if you’re going to use a phrase you might as well get full value for it.
She triggered the communication channel to the pirate ship, sending a synthesized image of herself in ship dress without armor.
“I’m ready to send someone aboard,” she said. The captain’s image flicked into existence in front of her.
“We’re ready, Regulador Arau. There is a reception committee waiting at airlock 3. We’re opening it now.”
In another channel in Silvana’s head - after several years of using the incredibly expensive neural circuitry connecting her to the ship she was able to switch her attention among many channels as easily as glancing to left or right - a closeup image of the pirate ship showed a brightly lit opening in its hull.
She stepped into Miriám’s airlock. Its inner door closed behind her and most of the air inside the small room was sucked back into her ship in a whistling roar that faded away in seconds as the lock became near-vacuum. The door in front of her opened and the remaining percent or so of air puffed out of the lock before her. Ice crystals sparkled briefly as the moisture in the air froze and spread into the vacuum of interstellar space.
Silvana looked toward the distant airlock, yellow light visible inside it. Suddenly it winked out as its door closed. Miriám had sent two of her smaller remotes inside. Within a few seconds Silvana suddenly acquired an image of the inside of the ship and seven humans waiting in a medium-sized cargo bay.
Silvana half-stepped, half-jumped into that terrible emptiness. Her suit thrusters propelled her toward the distant lock, where more of Miriám’s egg-shaped remotes were clustered, their force-field enhanced battle-steel shells gleaming a dull green in star-lit interstellar space.
Two of the biggest, their surfaces broken by several round holes which were weapons ports, entered the airlock just as she arrived. She stepped inside behind them, several more remotes entering behind her.
She keyed the inside door open. She heard the outside door close with a clang and heard the familiar hurricane inrush of air as the airlock pressurized. The inside door flicked open and the two big remotes preceded Silvana inside, then floated to left and right to clear the way. Silvana stepped through the inner door and examined the reception awaiting her.
Six of the people stepped to two sides, leaving an aisle between them, and faced inward. They braced and saluted and held their salutes, as if they were an honor guard presenting weapons. Between them and closer to Silvana a young man in a light grey uniform matching the “guards” snapped her a salute and said. “Welcome aboard the Tiger’s Claw, Regulador. I’m Lieutenant Ashgrove.”
Silvana lifted an ironic brow that none of the seven people could see inside her blank helmet. Well, aren’t they ducky? said Miriám.
“Ducky?” said Silvana over her indetectable paraspace channel to Miriám, who obviously had recently been having fun examining a dictionary of archaic slang.
Definitely ducky. Quite all at drakes and ganders.
Silvana ignored this esoteric nonsense and spoke to the young man in front of her. “Take me to the captain.”
Nodding his head, the young man about-faced and walked off along the floor of the cargo bay toward a distant double door. The honor guard waited for her to follow him then wheeled into line behind her. Behind them all Miriám’s two biggest remotes, floating like balloons rather than the weapons platforms that they were, disgorged several dozen tiny remotes which fanned out like midges to infiltrate the ship.
This behavior is unusual, I take it, said Miriám.
"Yes,"
Silvana said. "The captain is acting like I'm a visiting VIP. Maybe it's to make him feel less like a
caught criminal."
I don't like
it, said Miriám. Anything unusual is potentially dangerous. You shouldn't be there.
"Give
it a rest, Miriám. I'm
here - and here's the bridge."
Interrogation
Writing
