“Phase transition complete,” the voice announced in a neutral tone.
It was a melodious and distinctly feminine voice, and pleasant even without particular inflection.
“Nav beacon verifies Verion outer marker five-four-nine stellar north” the voice continued. “True speed zero-point-zero-five c. Stowing phase umbrella. Deploying ram scoop array. Preferences?”
Elijah Cale nodded quietly. “We’re not in any hurry,” he mumbled to himself. Then, in a slightly louder voice, “Give it two percent.”
There was no rush. His delivery window for this run gave him a hefty margin of error for a change. He’d run her up to around point oh-eight c, kill the engines, and deploy the scoop to full. He’d coast most of the way to the target buoy, allowing the drag of the scoop to gradually slow them back down to phasing speed, all the while gathering mass for his next hop. Meanwhile, he’d only need enough deployment to catch anything in their path that might cause damage, before it could make contact.
The magnetic scoop flared to shimmering life in a steep cone nearly three hundred meters deep and one hundred in diameter.
“Ram scoop deployed,” the voice announced. “Phase umbrella stowed.”
“Acknowledged,” Elijah responded unconsciously. He’d no real need to answer Seraphim’s announcements. She was only a ship’s computer after all. The response had been automatic — a vestige of ten years of military service and the discipline with which it had been instilled. He didn’t really have to interface verbally with her at all, come to that. Anything he might need to do he could simply key in. Or even Jack in directly. Voice command was no more than a convenience.
He stretched and yawned, scanning the display field that filled the forward end of the cockpit and wrapped around his acceleration couch, visually verifying that they were at least close to where they were supposed to be. Then he craned his neck to look out the main forward viewports.
Verion lay off to port and up high, around ten o’clock, looking more like a satellite than a star. She was a blue-white dwarf —a type A4V main sequence star— and that was the single interesting thing about her. If that could be called interesting. She was common as dirt. No planets, no interesting features, nothing of any value in all the vast space she controlled.
Her single claim to utility was her astral signature. She made a good reference point, and so had become a crossroads of a sort — the region just outbound of her Kuiper zone home to thousands of navigational buoys.
Off in the distance to starboard, he could see —just barely— the lights of the nav buoy, strobing blue red blue green in the particular staccato pattern that visually augmented the radio beacon proclaiming its location.
Seraphim had dropped a little short and a little shallow, he decided. Still, not bad for her fifth ever long phase jump, and safely clear of the star’s gravity well. It would probably take a good ten or fifteen more jumps of varying length before the computer finished calibrating itself for this new ship — particularly as she was a patchwork of cobbled together parts scavenged from a couple of dozen wrecks, some of which weren’t supposed to be compatible with each other, over the course of nearly four years. Needless to say, she didn’t match any normal performance profile that might have been pre-programmed.
Still, she was a stylish bird, if he had to say so himself. And not just because of the sweat, blood, tears, time, and money he’d sunk into her.
At twenty MMU, or Meloran Measuring Units, by Terran measure she’d go just over one hundred and forty-three feet nose to thrust nozzles with the ram scoop and phase umbrella stowed. She had a narrow, swooping fuselage whose smooth lines blended into wide, variable geometry swept delta wings paired with smaller canards flanking her cockpit. Her main thrusters were inset into her stern, flanking large vertical stabilizers along both her dorsal and ventral planes.
She was absurdly small for a Terran ship. She was even on the lower edge for the Meloran ships whose heritage she bore. Ostensibly, she was a Meloran Syoutieng Z854tRphA6WR (Terran designation Osprey), although, in common parlance, Terrans tended to call the model a Putcha Bird. In point of fact, the ident plate was about the only mark of similarity between Seraphim and her professed configuration. Fortunately, so long as he stayed clear of the Meloran sector, nobody important was likely to notice. Not many Putchas in the wild outside their home systems.
They were only around six months out, Terran Standard from her maiden lift, and he’d spent most of that ambling around New Madrid with only the occasional short hop outbound to pick up near system cargo. He hadn’t the cash left for a straight up calibration course, so she’d learn as she went or she wouldn’t learn.
Satisfied for the moment that they wouldn’t plunge into the star at least, he glanced left and right, reaffirming that Seraphim was intact. Not that he needed to. She would have alerted him if there’d been any damage.
“We’re going for the Trans-sector Sixteen-eighty-five buoy,” he said. “Plot us a vector.”
“Acknowledged,” Seraphim responded. “Establishing transit vector to waypoint. “Displaying.”
A string of coordinates flared to life in the display field, a gently flashing line hovering beneath them, strobing its own sequential harmony. Elijah eased the throttles forward as he shifted the helm over, rolling Seraphim slowly to starboard until he could lift her nose along the vector. A soft chime sounded as the forward point of the triangle that represented Seraphim in the display field aligned with the heading.
Manual controls were another thing that were more vestigial than they were necessary. As a matter of law, their use was strictly proscribed in occupied sectors. Every jurisdiction he was aware of mandated their lockout while in commercial space lanes. And where pilot controlled flight was allowed at all, direct interface was energetically enforced. But Elijah was who he was, and preferred to fly manually where and when he could get away with it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Vector achieved,” Seraphim confirmed. “Acceleration sixteen point seven-five G. Inertial dampers steady at sixty percent. Temperatures well within operational parameters. Current velocity, zero point zero—
“Elijah!” Seraphim’s voice rose abruptly. “I’m picking up heat readings astern!”
“The hell?” Elijah jerked upright in his seat, twisting his head all around. “Who is this? How are you transmitting through my navcom?”
“One hundred-fifteen thousand, two hundred-sixty klicks off our seven o’clock!” the voice continued, bleeding urgency. “It reads like engine flare, Elijah. Somebody’s coming online from cold shutdown!”
Oh, hell! Cold shutdown in the vicinity of a phase nav buoy almost certainly meant interdictors. What were the odds? Still, he wasn’t about to take this news on faith, considering the source. He’d make sure this wasn’t a joke before calling out the prankster. “Seraphim, give me visual.”
“Negative!” the excited voice responded. “Too far away. I’m barely picking up the heat, although it’s getting easier as he warms up. I only caught it at all because we’re so far out from Verion.”
“Wait!” he shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “You’re trying to tell me that you’re Seraphim?”
“Who else would I be, Elijah?,” the voice demanded. “There are only the two of us here. For now, in any case. The unknown contact is accelerating at nearly thirty-nine G’s. He’ll be here shortly.”
Thirty-nine G’s? he thought, forgetting the anomalies in his computer for the moment. Not human norm then. Xeno or augment, most likely. 0r somebody who’s pretty casual with his own life.
Thirty-nine gees meant military grade tech — and pretty high end even for that. How did interdictors lay hands on that sort of equipment intact?
“What sort of signal is he broadcasting?”
“He isn’t,” the voice replied. “No hails, no beacons, no transmissions of any sort. Not Friend or foe, not transponder, not nav info... not anything!
“I’ve got solid heat spectrum reads now. Four engines. Big ones. Really big! Pellan rad signature— they read like Eboro class light frigate engines. Four-nineties, maybe. Could be Five-twenties. Return pings incoming... mass reads between one hundred-fifteen and one hundred-forty thousand kilos.
“That’s not big enou—”
“Elijah, I’m picking up targeting strobes!”
That did it. If this was for real.... He stabbed his fingers into the control field, pulling up his own displays and manually verifying what he was being told. There it was — a vague oblong blob stuttering in and out of view in cadence with the scan pings, centered in an obscenely wide heat bloom that told him more surely than anything else that the craft was indeed big enough to mount those engines.
Whether this excitable voice really was somehow Seraphim or not, he was in serious trouble. He’d have to address that first. He’d get to the bottom of this other thing if they— he. If he lived.
“Increase scoop diameter to eighty percent.” he hissed as he full-stopped the throttles, “Affirmative,” the anxious voice replied. “Eighty percent.”
“Increase power to the inertials,” he ordered. “Keep us below three G felt, at least for now. Let me know when we’re getting close to ninety percent output.”
“Shifting power... inertials at sixty-five percent, felt acceleration, one point four gee and climbing.”
“Targeting strobes narrowing.
“Inertials at sixty-eight percent. They’ve got lock! Elijah, I’m reading four missile launches!”
“Depl—!”
“Deploying mimics!” the voice overrode his. “Mimics away and accelerating. Mimics at five k dispersion and broadcasting. It’s no good, Elijah. Missiles still tracking!”
Gritting his teeth, Elijah squared himself in his cradle and buckled in. So much for easy money. He quickly tabbed a few commands and jacked himself into the ship systems, feeling his stomach lurch as it always did when he entered VR while overclocking.
When his vision cleared, nothing seemed immediately to have changed, but he could feel it in his gut — the vague unreality of his surroundings that told him he wasn’t in the real world anymore. He’d be moving much more quickly now relative to the outside, although, from his perspective, it would be the universe slowing down.
“Call them in,” he rasped as he gripped the stick and throttles tightly.
“You’re clocking too high, Elijah,” Seraphim warned, still sounding distraught, which in itself was disconcerting. “Six hundred is too fast! You’ll burn your brain clocking so—”
“Call them in, damnit,” he hissed. “I’ll worry about my brain when and if I live through this.”
“Closing at point zero nine five c,” the voice announced, subdued. “Accelerating at five hundred G’s. Forty-five seconds to impact.
“Inertial dampers at eighty percent. Felt acceleration one point nine gee. True speed, zero point zero-five-zero-zero-one-three c.
“Impact in thirty-five seconds.”
“Give them some flares.”
“Flares away. Deploying chaff and secondary mimics. Thirty seconds... two of them chasing the mimics!”
“Put the last two up.” Elijah demanded, sweat beading his virtual forehead.
The missiles sparkled to life in the display field before him, coming in low, hot, and slightly to port.
Seraphim rippled two more bursts of chaff without prompting. Too close now for more mimics, even if they’d had any.
Elijah gave her side stick, rolling up and away the instant the chaff cleared the launchers. One of the missiles veered, losing track. The final missile reacted a fraction of a second later and they thought for an instant that they’d made it. But only for that instant before the missile swung back towards Seraphim’s tail.
“Twenty seconds... missile tracking again. Fifteen seconds....”
Elijah threw Seraphim into an axial roll and hauled back on the stick the instant she inverted. “Inertials to one-twenty and hold them for three!”
He thumbed a hat button on the stick, dumping hot shots into both engines, whispering a clipped prayer that the released Peequayan fissionables wouldn’t simply blow them to bits. The sudden boost smashed him back into the acceleration couch, filming his vision red. He could feel Seraphim’s hull shaking — hear her groaning with the strain.
No good! The missile corrected, losing only a little headway. How much fuel did that bastard have?
“Ten seconds,” Seraphim announced. “Inertials at one hundred percent. True speed zero point zero-five-zero–zero-one-four c. Felt acceleration two point nine-nine gee and climbing.
“Impact in seven... six... five...”
“Inertials to one-twenty-five and hold them there!” Elijah shouted, hauling back on the throttles —the port engine a fraction slower than the starboard— shutting down all power to the engines. Seraphim skewed to starboard.
“Flood the tubes with coolant! Kill the scoop!”
He hauled the stick around and mashed the starboard rudder pedal to the deck plate. Seraphim’s slew increased exponentially as her attitude thrusters flared, twisting her around on her own axis, almost pivoting at the nose. Elijah felt the weight of a mid sized moon smashing into the side of his head and everything went grey. He had an instant to note the red track of the missile as it shot past Seraphim’s icon in the display field before he kicked her in the ass and banked hard to bring her in and behind before it could correct.
The missile didn’t correct. It exploded.