The Price - Part 2
29 Oct 2018Da5id Weatherwax
"Guys, we've got a poison Ark."Just like that, the good mood was gone. This was every spacer's nightmare. Somewhere out there was a ship with people or livestock on board who had slipped the quarantine. As a skipper you never broke those rules. Ever. It was bad enough sneaking in on anonymous access when your ship might have annoyed the local law, or dodging scans if you thought they might object to some of your cargo or passengers. This was a class of illegal passenger you never took. Once your ship was labeled a poison Ark there was one port you could approach without getting blown out of space and only one. Back at your port of origin to face charges. In some jurisdictions not even that. Where being pilot or passenger on a poison Ark was a capital offense they'd save themselves the bother of a trial and fry you before you docked. And any life pods too. Any skipper who got suckered wouldn't think twice about venting that cabin and then jettisoning the entire module, along with its former occupants, into the nearest black hole.
There was a reason that dead generation ships were off limits. You could scan them, probe them or even use them as target practice but you couldn't board them. Most of them, whatever had initially kicked off their unique and personal disaster, had eventually succumbed to disease. There was a reason we never cracked a lifepod we scooped up, even if the med-stats showed the occupant in critical condition, just turned it over to the nearest SAR agent unless we knew the ship, knew the pilot and knew how the pod came to be floating there. Crack a contaminant on your ship and maybe yours would be the next vessel to come out of hyper with a dead hand on the controls, fall too far into the stars well and then the gravity dance take over in normal space. The lottery of your n-space vector after the grav got strong enough to shell out the FSD and how far it ended up offset from the stellar mass dictating where your ship would go. The odds were hugely in favor of the dead ship and all its deadly contents vanishing into the nearby fusion furnace, of course, but anything less than a 100% chance was a chance nobody wanted to take.
So yeah, for a poison Ark to actually be in flight, everybody aboard had to be all-in and they had to be extremely lucky to even get into space untoasted in the first place. The only good news about the whole situation is that it wasn't going to be one of ours. No Pilot's Federation commander would ever be party to setting one in flight. We had too much to lose. The spaceways and our ships were where we lived, not stationside or dirtside. Some things just came way too close to crapping on your own cabin-floor.
"What happened?"
"Some guy hangared his Beluga here before heading off into the black about two months ago. Near as the station can tell, somebody stole its cabin modules and just welded them into the hold of a bulk ore-carrier, jury-rigged a power tap for them and relied on the cabin modules built-in environment systems to keep them livable. No spin-mounts so they'll be zero-G but it looks like they smuggled around two dozen people aboard. Station got suspicious when the carrier didn't drop at its scheduled pickup point but they were long gone. They cycled up to SC for the insystem hop as usual and must have hypered out midway. Turns out it wasn't even the carrier supposed to be on that run. They were squawking a fake transponder ID, but they undocked from the right place at the right time so nobody looked any deeper until it was too late. Then they saw the emissions signature didn't match up and some people came up missing. They don't even know which ore carrier it was. There's at least twenty unaccounted for and the jury-rig in the hold has given it a radically different emissions profile than anything they have on file They've asked if there's anything we can do."
"Hell no! That's a Navy job."
"First, the only Imperial Navy vessels in the system are hospital ships and two obsolete destroyers. The destroyers have up to date sensor suites that can find somebody who doesn't want to be spotted but they've got their hands full policing the system. If they go jumping off in pursuit that leaves us as the only ones capable of supporting the system security force so they'll be asking us to do that instead. Second, we're right on the edge of Imperial space here and tensions have been high lately. Sending a Naval force across into Alliance space on any pretext is going to be like juggling metallic hydrogen. Third, the station manager has another point in favor of asking us."
"Oh I'm just sure he does. Which one was it this time?"
"He asked me who was more likely to run them down, a wet-behind-the-ears Navy skipper with a pole up his 'Imperial dignity' or a commander who's had plenty of experience bounty hunting or even being hunted himself?"
"Ok, that's actuallly a fair point. But what he really means is still that he doesn't want to lose face by reporting this until he can simultaneously report that it's contained. And he'd have to if he called on Navy resources from outside. But that's just a fact of life in the Empire, isn't it? He may be an oily little flunky but he is at least a fairly honest one and he's handled this well enough that it really wouldn't be fair to let him suffer 'Imperial displeasure' over stuff that wasn't his fault, would it? Do they have interdictors for us?"
"Yep."
"Let's get 'em moduled in and hit the vacuum, then."
***
The smart-table in my office was displaying a star chart, liberally overlaid with notations from the stylus in my hand. Three routes were highlighted, two in yellow and one in red. At least initially we'd managed to be lucky. Based on the schematics of an ore-carrier and what we knew about the passenger modules they'd stolen we had everything we needed for our ships computers to feed the right variables to jump-calc. The short answer was that their range was going to suck. They couldn't dock to refuel but they knew that, because they'd stolen the Beluga's small emergency fuel scoop too. There were only four systems they could single-jump from where they started in that hacked-together config. As a bonus, all four systems were inhabited and one of the nav beacons had caught a sniff of their aberrant emission signature. We knew where they'd been and the approximate vector they'd departed on. With that and thinking like a fugitive their destination was obvious. There was a little cluster of anarchic worlds sitting like a pustule on the skin between the Alliance and the Federation. Neither side had got around to squeezing that zit yet and it was the perfect place for an undocumented ship to vanish and its passengers disperse. If they had any sense, where they'd disperse to would be Federation-side. The Empire and the Feds hadn't been technically at war for longer than anyone alive could remember but they still loved to score points off each other by sweeping up "refugees" from "that repressive regime." With new identities, easily obtainable at any of those anarchies, a little judicious money-laundering to extract their assets from the Empire, these folks would do just fine. So long as they were all clean. Problem was, the incubation period for Hydran encephalitis was measured in weeks for an otherwise-healthy individual and they were infectious for another week before they started to show symptoms. If even one of them was infected they all would be by the time they split up and then they'd disperse as disease vectors into the densely populated Federation - and its shipping lanes.
We were all pretty good but unless we stayed concentrated, the locals would swarm us. This made picketing these destination systems impossible - there just weren't enough of us to cover them all. However, given the availability of scoopable stars and the scow's execrable jump-range there was one other option. A little ripple in the galaxy where there were only three places our target could cross it and all three had uninhabited systems at both ends. That was why we'd split into three wings and were sitting at all three arrival points, emissions cut to a minimum and making lazy circles in supercruise at zero throttle. Phil and Deb had winged up to cover Alpha, Monica and I at Beta, which left Andy and Jerry to cover Gamma. Monica and I had drawn Beta because of the three it had the most possible arrival vectors at this particular bottleneck and we had the longest range sensor suites of the six of us. I took one last glance at the chart display then cut the magnets in my boots and kicked off back towards the bridge. I'd get any sensor alerts no matter where I was in the ship, but responding to them promptly required me to be in my chair. If they hadn't shown up in one net or the other in the next 12 hours I'd start thinking we'd missed our fish.
We hadn't.
It was only a couple of hours later the typical sensor flare of a hyperjump arrival tickled the sensors. Two seconds after that an alarm sounded and the scanner blip flared a brilliant red. It was an emissions match and it was accelerating towards the stars grav-limit like the Devil himself was on its tail. He wasn't of course. Something worse was. Us.
"They've seen us. Punch it!"
Monica's voice over the com stated the blindingly obvious. My throttle was already to the firewall aiming to breach the grav-limit as close as possible to where our target would cross it. The g-stress would give me a small repair bill and it was going to get a little toasty but I was betting that the Radius mounted better radiators than an ore-carrier and I was already charging a heatsink. Monica was tight on their tail as they vanished from our scopes. I had a small angle to use and I nudged the stick just a little to offset my course a bit at the last minute.
BOOM!
The thunderous sound of the emergency interlocks kicking in on my massive FSD seemed to shake the entire ship like a rat being scragged by a terrier. Even before my instruments cleared up I was punching the button that dumped my heatsink and cutting my throttle to zero to go ballistic.
This close to the photosphere even the best sensors were degraded. I quickly had a lock on Monica but that was only because we had each other's beacon codes. Our target was a ghost, lost against the background of the star's fury. I kept an eye on my own cooldown timer. For as long as my drive hadn't reset, neither had theirs and there was no way they could spool up and jump out. Monica was slowing, I kept my speed and carried on drifting in.
"Hang on the mass limit. You've got guard, I'll play beater."
Our target was riding a very fine line. Too close and they'd cook. Too far out and they'd show up on our sensors. The uncertainty circle marking their possible position was steadily growing as time passed and I had to make its interior inhospitable before it got too wide to cover. There was a trick I'd learned from my mentor at the Pilot's Federation, so that was why I charged up the hardpoints, selected the fire group that held only the big accelerator slung under the Radius' belly and then reached out to the panel and dropped my landing gear. My flight controls obediently reconfigured themselves for the finer-grained controls used on approach to a pad allowing me to take very careful aim indeed.
Now, from that kind of range it's a little difficult to miss a star, but that wasn't what I was aiming at. Far "below", the star's enormous magnetic fields were twisting ribbons of glowing plasma into majestic arching prominences and one particularly proud one strained against the cosmos below the area where our target was trying to sneak away. At its very apex the invisible fields compressed and twisted creating a point of brightness and heat that even my cockpit filters were hard-pressed to damp out to safe levels. Only my finger moved, slowly compressing the trigger until the accelerator's discharge echoed through the fabric of my ship.
The charged slug of glowing plasma seemed to arc down towards the glowing prominence agonizingly slowly. This was far beyond the normal range of my weapon, only the intense magnetic field of the star allowing the bolt to hold coherency long enough. It dwindled,becoming an ever smaller and hard to see dot against the much more powerful fires below and then it vanished from my sight completely. A full thirty seconds later I knew I'd hit my mark. That bright spot on the apex of the prominence winked out, my plasma charge having contributed just enough disruption to the magnetic fields at that point to trigger a rupture. In a kind of weird slow motion the two sides of the prominence flailed like the tentacles of some sea creature and collapsed back to the surface of the star, having given up their energy in one cataclysmic burst. Racing outwards from that event was a stellar flare. A tiny one on the scale of such things but perfectly adequate for my purposes. I wasn't watching. I was frantically flipping switches, stowing and retracting everything on my ships surface that could be withdrawn within its shielding and armor, then shunting every spare milliwatt of power to my shield generator.
My instruments and com broke up as the flood of charged particles sleeted past my position. My sensors were blind for several seconds and then I saw our target rising up past me shedding heatsinks. I couldn't chase them. My thrusters and drives were going to be down for at least another 15 seconds. They were running for the mass limit where Monica was waiting, but their drive was already charging. They must have taken out all the safety interlocks.
"I don't have a shot..."
"Go after them! I've a navlock on your beacon. I'll be less than thirty seconds behind you!"
(to be concluded...)