Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya (22 page)

Tanya had no idea what Malcomb was planning, only knowing he would be planning something. She could hardly forget the steely look
t
hat
came into his eyes when she
demanded he not follow her.

Tanya was not particularly worried about Starfire being attacked before crossing the Kievor’s protected zone. Only a fool would tempt the Kievor’s incredible weaponry in such a manner, and if someone did violate the rule and actually
shoot her
down
then she would at least be comforted knowing there would be revenge. The Kievors were quite diligent about enforcing their Safe Zones and the security it afforded their customers. If she were attacked the aggressor would not live to gloat over his treacherous victory.

After reassuring herself that neither of her heavily armed enemies were waiting for her and wanting to be away from Malcomb and the children as quickly as possible, she gave her little ship everything it had and was instantly glued into her crash seat fo
r the few moments until they
reached jump velocity, and then Tanya and Starfire prepared to depart real space kilometers before the limit of the Kievor’s Safe Zone.

The massive acceleration and the crushingly overbearing inertia slamming her into her crash seat was actually for herself; as a physical personal reminder of how fiercely she loved life and wanted to live. The sensations of fighting those gees, the rush of adrenaline, the intense pressure hammering her chest, was akin to the physical battle against the forces of nature, the feeling of aliveness during battle brought memories of
how
that fierce desire to live had been created within her, since her childhood that she remembered so clearly now.

A brilliant light erupted in space directly in front of Starfire and then they were gone into the ether of inner space. The snap and brief nausea of the conversion, along with the feeling of being nowhere at all and everywhere at once was something that Tanya had never completely become used to.

Whether it was a different dimension, a twist of time or even just another physical plane, its mechanics and physical properties were not fully understood yet- by human scientists at least. They could still only surmise and theorize of its true properties, and so it was mostly an enigma to mankind.

That didn’t prevent its use. Humans had learned to manipulate gravity to some small extent, enough to create internal gravity in ships and had advanced enough recently to be able to create the gravitational wave anomalies- extremely dense fields of highly charged particles the dense mass of which creates the powerful localized gravity field required to dimple real space and open the jump portals- which in turn has allowed the opening up the Universe at large to mankind’s expanding hordes.

Now, with the ability to escape the slums of ruined planets along with a proclivity for insane breeding rates, manki
nd was
expanding exponentially in every direction. It sounded like a familiar story to Tanya. She was sure she had heard it before. Real space vanished behind her as the opening snapped shut behind her like the closing of an eye.

Chapter 59

Jason wasn’t surprised when the monstrous armed freighter arrived out of jump and after only a moment began to turn in a direction that would take it past Adjudicator’s hiding place in the rubble field of the far-flung orbital rings of Patoria, a nearly uninhabited planet that apparently wasn’t much good for anything.

There were a few gas mining operations going on in the rings but only three small mineral extractions and one research station on the surface of the inhospitable freezing world below. Jason had thought it an excellent place to hide out until he could formulate a plan but the monstrous ore hauler set every internal alarm he possessed to ringing
danger
.

Why an ore hauler
here
would send a shiver running up his spine, his instinctual alarms to warning of danger, Jason couldn’t immediately guess. Despite the fact that the mining operations here were small scale, compared to some places at least, he had still seen dozens of smaller ore haulers coming and going since he had been there.

But none had been armed to the teeth as was this one, he noted, as passive scans tripped alarms aboard Adjudicator. Th
ey weren’t mining anything
they had to guard from pirates. Such a heavily armed ship was definitely out of place here, Jason decided, and such a ship could easily find more lucrative work.

And suddenly Jason knew; it was Felone, and there was no question about it. Only Felone could have found him this quickly. Jason immediately brought Adjudicator up to power and, not caring what anyone at the controls of the ore freighter thought, ran a wide open full-spectrum scan of the advancing vessel.

The freighter’s photon cannons charged and readied to fire as Jason read the displays and simultaneously spun the nimble Adjudicator away from the approaching behemoth, which was still too far out of range to fir
e on Jason’s ship even if it
possessed a super dreadnaught’s fusion capabilities. By the slow acceleration of the massive ship Jason was sure that it did not.

The scan completed and Jason finished reading all of the specifications as Adjudicator completed her maneuver and was given one quarter thrust, her main fusion thrusters so powerful that even at low power Jason was still pressed back in his crash seat, the inertia felt even over the efforts of internal gravity. This would be all it would take to outrun the monstrous ore hauler, but Jason wasn’t quite ready to depart the area. If he could find no weakness to exploit he would
have
to run from the much more heavily armed ship. Adjudicator stood no chance whatsoever against the four photon cannons of Felone’s ship.

The freighter immediately turned and began to follow Adjudicator, but it was instantly obvious it would be a losing race. Suddenly the incoming jump signature warning flashed on Jason’s screen and another ship entered real space directly behind the freighter, it appearing on Jason’s live zoom feed as a sudden brilliant point of light less than a kilometer behind the freighter at exactly the point in which the big ship itself had appeared moments ago. The freighter had obviously been followed by a first rate pilot, but the question in Jason’s mind was whether it was friend or foe.

That question was answered almost immediately as Adjudicator labeled the ship on his screen, but it was only visible on Jason’s long range feed for a moment as it entered, the image of the ship itself little more than
a black dot in the center of the bright fusion emission blazing behind it as it burned at full thrust. Then the freighter began pouring green plasma back at the intruder, clouds of it that instantly obscured Jason’s view.

Chapter 60

Tanya was slammed back into her crash seat as Starfire converted from jump and her fusion thruster once again found purchase upon the tangibly solid vacuum, and the incomprehensible laws of inner space were left behind.

Confusion was once again exchanged for the regular, understandable and immutable laws of the known physical Universe. Tanya slammed the stick over sideways in anticipation of the incoming plasma cannon fire that she knew would momentarily be pouring back in her direction as soon as Felone’s recognition program identified Starfire. The merest touch would be sufficient to destroy her little St
arfire and Tanya with it
, which necessitated the extreme maneuvers, and the sudden inertial change nearly
took her consciousness
as she pushed Starfire and herself to their mutual breaking points. The little ship shuddered and groaned under the intense lateral stress, but Starfire was a strong ship.

Somehow Tanya herself retained that tiny pinpoint of the visible universe to which her awareness was suddenly constricted, her vision tunneling, blackness closing in from all sides and consciousness trying to flee as she forced Starfire to slew sideways and down upon the freighter, and then the monstrous ship’s many plasma cannons were
pouring their green plasma back at her, the green fire barely missing. The plasma flew straight as an arrow but as Starfire slewed to the side it appeared to Tanya’s senses as if the plasma was curving away from her.

Too close for comfort
, thought T
anya as Starfire flashed down
on the massive freighter, her single plasma cannon now erupting as Tanya’s finger settled on the actuator stud under the grip of Starfire’s stick, the vibration of the powerful weapon upon such a small ship thrumming throughout Tanya’s bones and Starfire itself as she fired far too early according to her targeting grid and even her own senses
;
the long stream of super-heated plasma exploding out from her cannon as she held the actuator down, flaming towards the massive freighter’s four huge engines even as Tanya was pulling Starfire away.

The plasma continued to arc away to Tanya’s senses, and she saw the trail of it splash across two of the freighter’s engines out of the periphery of her vision even as she was pulling on the stick between her legs with everything she had while dozens of auto targeting plasma cannon tried to paint Starfire all at once. Alarms lit up all over her console, but Tanya did not notice, nor could she notice, as she was fighting a battle the very outcome of which would be her life.

The auto targeting system of the freighter was much more sophisticated than Tanya had predicted she realized belatedly as she watched helplessly as dozens of streams of green fire arced out ahead of her and began
falling
towards her, a fisherman’s net of glowing green fire that Starfire would never survive.

There was no way to make it through; Tanya was flying straight into the expanding streams of plasma and there was nowhere to turn and no
time to turn to get her out of this scrape. Worse, her present velocity was not enough for jump, and she was moments only from her destiny.

Tanya flipped the switch that charged the superconducting trinium mesh array located on the front of the ship and then let the stick fall free. Starfire straightened herself out, flying directly into the oncoming green death. Though she hadn’t reached minimum jump velocity, her speed was still tremendous; the slightest miscalculation at the wrong moment and it was the end. Tanya watched calmly as the green fiery net settled towards her, a second or two more at most as she continued to flash down the side of the freighter, and then, just as the net was about to close she activated jump.

Her universe was twisting and Tanya immediately had to turn and puke up her guts all over the flooring of the deck next to her crash seat. She ignored the mess and wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and tried to comprehend what she was experiencing. Her head was spinning so terribly she could barely focus her eyes. Everything was just a blur of strange, shifting colors, barely perceptible designs with the aspect of desperate, half-formed ideas twisting through her throttled consciousness as her corporeal body was subjected to stresses and physical laws that the human body
hadn’t been
meant to endure. The sickness did not go away as
normal jump sickness would
after a few moments but continued unabated and seemed even to be getting worse, wearing her down.

Tanya’s eyelids suddenly dropped and her eyes closed momentarily, only
to snap back open with a start
as Tanya’s unconscious mind reacted to the da
nger. They were immediately droo
ping again, as she slid off into an unconsciousness that was certainly a death from which
she could never wake. Her instrumentation was unreadable, and every audible alarm and warning seemed to be grasping at the remnants of her awareness.

She was flying blind and there was nothing she could make sense of. Why was everything so impossible to understand? Fighting her eyelids now more than the twisting sickening sensations of the slow jump, she did the unthinkable, and deactivated the trinium mesh array. She felt the immediate sensation of Starfire beginning to exit, and that was the last thing she remembered.

Chapter 61

Felone watched her rear feeds, enraged as the puny ship striped her upper main thrusters with the green fire of the corrosive plasma. She instantly deactivated the two engines and stunned, tried to fathom how Tanya’s one shot could have struck the only place her ship was vulnerable!

Felone was not a big believer in luck and that meant that Tanya’s shot had scored successfully not out of sheer providence but out of the absolute competence of the shooter- Tanya herself. It was something to consider, and Felone was someone who always attempted to deliberate everything, a person who left no stone unturned, at least to the best of her ability. She was well aware of her limitations, even her complete ignorance of many things, and that why she had grown to be such a careful hunter.

Felone watched her feed helplessly and in morbid fascination as the plasma ate into and crumbled away the upper cones of her thrusters, leaving them inoperable except in the case of a dire emergency- they could explode if she tried to ignite them- but with the ponderous nature of her ship in the first place Felone could not imagine a scenario in which she would
need
to ignite them. Their added thrust would get her out of no tight scrapes, but just until moments ago she had also thought herself impregnable in her massively and heavily armed ship. She had learned otherwise.