Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (47 page)

‘Why?’ Alex asked.

‘Well, skipper – it’s the probes,’ Jonas explained.

Alex continued to look perplexed. They had only brought thirty two comms probes in the hold, but it only took the artificer’s workshop three and a half hours to manufacture one, and they had sufficient materials in hand to make at least another thirty. Micky Efalto, indeed, was running ahead of their usage, anticipating an ongoing need, so they currently had forty eight probes in hand and another one already under manufacture.

‘Well, if we do run out,’ Alex observed, ‘we can explain that and ask to make other arrangements, but at current usage I don’t see an immediate concern, Mr Sartin.’

‘No, it isn’t that, skipper,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s just that they
do
cost more than twenty eight thousand dollars each and firing them off like this is making quite a dent in the comms budget.’

Alex and the other command officers burst out laughing – impossible to say who laughed first, but they all did, Alex giving a helpless snurge while Buzz whooped, Martine Fishe guffawed, Tina Lucas dissolved into hoots and Very Vergan just howled.

Jonas looked a little affronted for a moment, which only made them laugh even more, then he too saw the funny side and cracked into an abashed chuckle. Here they were, after all, in space that no League ship had ever reached, before. They were handling a first contact situation so delicate that their ship might be destroyed at any moment. In the circumstances, budgets were not high on anyone’s priorities.

‘Oh!’ Alex still had a huge grin on his own face as he attempted to call the meeting back to order. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’ As they did their best to compose themselves, he gave Jonas Sartin a bright-eyed look. ‘Thank you, Mr Sartin – your concern is noted. However, I feel confident that either the Diplomatic Corps or the Sub-Committee will reimburse us for the cost of the probes.’

Jonas foresaw yet another financial entanglement, but accepted it with good humour.

‘Yes, skipper,’ he said, and added, ‘I’ll get started on the forms,’ which made them all chuckle again.

No, Simon had to concede, they did not appear to be suffering from any kind of intolerable strain. They were just waiting, relaxed, accepting that the Samartians needed time to consider the proposal of a mutually beneficial relationship, and to process that through whatever form of government they had in order to reach a decision. If they had to sit here waiting for a month, they would not consider that unreasonable.

In the event, though, they got an answer, at least a kind of answer, later that day. Again, it was a one word signal, and already familiar to them.

‘Pursos.’

So, they followed, as the eight ships broke their holding pattern and took up an orbital course. They were remaining on the edge of the sensor array, evidently intending to stay in communication range with their central authority. Gunny Norsten set their own course so that they would track the Samartian squadron, while remaining on their own side of that border.

Aboard the frigate, everyone was speculating, from the hum of discussion on the mess decks to the ops meeting on the command deck.

‘We can only guess where they’re taking us,’ Davie observed. ‘My guess would be to meet with someone more important – perhaps a flagship, something of that sort.’

Alex nodded agreement. That seemed to be the most logical explanation.

It was, indeed, entirely logical. It was also a hundred per cent wrong.

Sixteen

They had been following the Samartian squadron for just under five hours when, without any warning at all, the Samartians whipped around and tore away, accelerating far beyond the ability of the frigate to keep up.

‘What do we do?’ the question was on every face, looking at Alex either directly or via the command deck feed.

‘Follow them!’ Alex said, without hesitation, and at the same time, tapped his hand onto the control that brought the ship to action stations.

The Heron’s crew did their best. They had mastered a technique for rapid manoeuvring which used the thrusters on the fighters docked to their belly. It made the hull groan and some lights flickered red, but by doing that they were able to get their turning arc nearly a second faster. Those members of the crew not yet suited up were scrambling to stations even as the frigate yawled around and powered up to full acceleration. The Samartians were already vanishing off their scopes. They were heading away from Samart on an apparently random course – nothing out that way but several hundred light years of uninhabited systems.

‘Perhaps it’s some kind of X-base,’ Jermane gasped, arriving on the command deck in something of a fluster. He had been working on the matrix in the lab, a quieter environment than the command deck for long, concentrated work. He was a slightly comical figure, pink and breathless from his frantic wrestling into a survival suit and ping-ponging through the ship. Jermane had a unique approach to traversing in freefall. Despite all their efforts to teach him controlled, graceful manoeuvring, he persisted in pushing off with all his strength, hurtling at high speed with arms flapping ineffectively, and more often than not cannoning into walls, ladders or furniture. The duty rigger was helping him to his seat at the command table, even then, grinning as he shoved the linguist into position and clipped his freefall harness on.

Alex, however, took no notice of the civilian slapstick – he was so used to that that he really
didn’t
even notice it. Instead, he gave a quick acknowledging nod for what was, in fact, an intelligent suggestion. The League, after all, maintained quite a number of secret bases beyond their own borders. It was possible that the Samartians had decided to trust them sufficiently to take them to such a base of their own.

That, though, did not explain their tearing off at a speed that they must have known the frigate could not match. Something was different, here. And something just didn’t feel right.

‘Follow their vector,’ Alex confirmed, as the astrogator looked to him for orders. So Gunny kept them following along the course that the Samartians had been on, even though they could no longer see them.

When they had been doing this for about ten minutes, Alex could feel his crew starting to relax. It was almost subconscious, a sense of the ship picked up from a half-glance at the comms screens and awareness of background sound. With the ship at full alert there were no conversations going on, just an odd murmur here and there.

Alex could almost feel the crew coming down off their toes, though, watching screens now with an air of interest but no great urgency. Some even looked dismayed, apparently thinking that the Samartians were ditching them.

‘Stay alert, people,’ Alex spoke on the comms without looking up from monitoring long range scopes. His tone was calm, but warning. Heads lifted and turned, all across the ship. Quick, searching looks were directed at the skipper. He looked totally focussed, poised as an athlete on starter blocks.

When the attack came, though, it took even Alex entirely by surprise.

Blobs appeared on the edge of their scopes. There were eleven of them, now – three being escorted by the eight familiar needle-thin shapes of the Samartian squadron.

No, Alex realised, in the two seconds it took him to make sense of what he was seeing, there. They were not being escorted. They were being
pursued
. Herded, almost – he saw one of the three new blobs attempt to dart away to one side only to be forced back onto a course which was bringing them straight to the Heron.

In exactly the same moment, he recognised the size and heatscan signature of Marfikian Thorns.

There was no time to discuss it, no time to comment or even to swear. The Marfikians had seen them, too, and they were coming at the frigate with their cannon firing.

Alex slapped ‘live target’ authorisation on all three Marfikian ships and heard himself shouting, ‘Fire!’

It was the first time he had ever fired at a live target with the intention of destroying it. He had often wondered, of course he had, what that would feel like, giving orders to kill. He had imagined that it would be a matter of duty, personal morality overcome by the need to protect his crew and others.

In the event, he didn’t even have time to think about that. There
was
no choice. He knew only too well how many full-impact strikes from a Marfikian cannon his ship could take before it lost integrity. It was not a number that ran to double figures. And the Marfikian ships were already firing.

The first impact caught the Heron on the port bow. The whole ship jerked and shuddered, with a screech of tortured duralloy and the characteristic bang and roar of blowout. The second strike raked across their starboard side, adding a crackling splutter of electronic shorts to the noise, quickly followed by a ship-rocking bang, the dull roar of an explosion, and a fire alert on mess deck two.

The third shot hit them on the belly. It was only later that Alex would be able to see that it had been aimed at the fighter occupying the for’ard docking bay – Firefly. Shion, though, seeing it coming, had launched the fighter and spun it out of the way with superhuman speed. The shot struck Firefly’s docking bay, but obliquely, ripping off a docking arm and searing off the paintwork, but not penetrating the hull.

The other two fighters were just a second behind her, racing into one of the tight formations perfected during their training for combat displays. All three fighters and most of the frigate’s guns managed to fire, too, as the Marfikian ships ripped past them.

Alex could hear fire and blowout alerts shrieking in different parts of the ship. He could hear the urgent voices at work on damage control. He even heard the word ‘casualties’ and from somewhere a scream, quickly broken off.

All his attention remained on the scopes, though. The half-second of relief he felt as the Marfikians shot past them gave way to a blood-chilling moment of realisation, as he saw what the Samartians were doing.

Their ships had whipped past even faster, getting ahead of the Marfikians and forcing them to turn back. They were firing waves of missiles, giving the Marfikians no choice but to flip around or run straight into the blast.

They
were
herding them, Alex saw. And they were herding them straight back at the Heron.

‘
Fire!’
he shouted again, as if anybody would need telling. They were already firing, in fact, all but two guns on the port bow stabbing bolts like eye-searing lightning at the oncoming attackers.

For Alex, there was a moment of almost dream-like unreality. They had been through scenarios like this
so
many times, on the way out here, playing games with the Stepeasy’s tender. The Heron’s crew were reacting automatically, no need for any orders to be given, no
time
for any orders to be given. All three Thorns were coming back along their starboard side so the rating at the helm immediately put them into a broadside spin, rolling the ship rapidly to enable all of their guns to fire in continuous blast. At the same time, missiles were firing as fast as they were loaded in the tubes. Their fighters, Alex saw, were going with strafe pattern kappa 39. They had got themselves behind the Thorns and locked on to the rear-most. The Thorn already had its one big cannon targeted at the Heron and could not fire at the fighters as well. Alex saw Firefly blasting away at them with cannon and missiles, and knew that the question of whether Shion would be able to fire at live targets had been settled, once and for all.

A blinding flare where the third of the Marfikian Thorns had been showed that Firefly had found its target. In almost the same moment the leading craft span out, blasting debris and gas from a great gash torn along the port side. There was only just time to see that before the crawling blue flicker of dephase became another silent flash.

In the next second, with only one target left, every gun on the Heron and all those on the fighters locked on to the last of the Thorns. It span and writhed in a frantic effort to escape, but every route was blocked by the Samartians.

They would not be able to tell, later, which of their shots or missiles took out the third Thorn, or even whether it blew itself up, seeing that defeat was inevitable. At the time, Alex just registered the third garish flash. He was aware of some remote part of his mind, curiously detached from the rest of him, thinking
three for three
. Most of him, though, was watching scopes, looking at the Samartian ships.

His heart beat three times while he was watching to see if they were going to come in for the kill, and he felt every beat like a punch in the chest. He only drew breath when he saw that they were turning away. They had done what they’d intended.

And they had not done so undamaged, themselves. As he watched, Alex could see that one of their ships was out of control, tumbling end over end and spinning sideways. Even at this distance, it was obvious from the sudden stabbing, stuttering brilliance of the heatscan readout that the damaged ship was going into dephase.