Starhold Read online

  “We did?”

  “Yes. We escaped Commander Mullenhoff’s wrath. She’s probably still sitting there, fuming at the board,” he joked as the lift doors opened.

  “Captain on the bridge” a computer voice announced as the tall black man strode off the turbolift and moved to the command chair. He had a handsome, rectangular face and an attractive smile, which he used more often than most commanding officers might. Chaz Pettigrew had been captain of the heavy cruiser Tempest for almost a standard year. Most of the crew felt he was a strong but fair CO, and he had worked hard to keep the Tempest one of the finest warships in the Union fleet.

  “What’s the good word, Commander?” asked Pettigrew, addressing the officer of the deck, Taylin Adams, as she handed him a datatab with the ship’s status on it. The Tempest bridge crew continued about their duties, but several of them snuck a look the captain’s way to gauge his reaction to the news.

  “Receiving a distress signal from our outpost on planet Uritski in the Luoyang system, sir,” Adams reported. “They’re under attack by a single vessel of unknown silhouette and origin. The station is reporting that their two garrison frigates have both taken severe damage.”

  Pettigrew finished scanning the datatab before he responded. “How long for us to arrive at Uritski under full speed, Ms. Adams?”

  “Approximately two hours forty-five minutes standard, sir. We are relatively close to the Luoyang system now and most probably the closest Union warship.”

  The captain did some mental calculations. “The time stamp on this message from Uritski Station is ten forty-seven standard. That means by the time we get there, they will have been under attack for how long? About six hours?”

  Knox had initially reported to his bridge station, but had wandered back over to the captain and Adams. “Gods, by the time we get there, there won’t be any station left.”

  “I’m afraid you may be right, Mr. Knox, but I hope you’re wrong. Helm, adjust course for Uritski, full speed. Ms. Adams, apprise Central Command of the situation and send a message to Rusalka Station informing them that our arrival will be delayed. Notify all departments we will be going to General Quarters in approximately two hours thirty-five minutes.” The captain tapped his comm badge. “Ms. Mullenhoff?”

  A moment passed before a voice responded. “Mullenhoff here.”

  “Commander, you and Mr. Huang wouldn’t by any chance still be in the wardroom, would you?”

  “We are, sir.”

  “And the Arimaa board wouldn’t by any chance still have our game intact, would it?”

  “As it happens, Captain, the board’s just as you left it.”

  “Good,” Pettigrew grinned over at Knox, who clearly did not like the direction this was going. “Mr. Knox and I will be down to finish our game. Afterwards, I need to speak to you about something. Pettigrew out.”

  Knox was resigned to his fate. The captain appeared amused and slapped his executive officer on the shoulder. “It’s the best and worst thing about space travel, Mr. Knox,” Pettigrew consoled him. “One has so much time between anything actually happening. Now, let’s go see Commander Mullenhoff and take our medicine.”

  * * *

  One standard hour later, the captain returned to the bridge. He and Knox had taken their Arimaa loss in stride and Pettigrew had addressed an issue with Mullenhoff regarding what might happen upon arrival in the Luoyang system. He spent the next ninety minutes on the bridge reading while addressing a variety of small issues brought to his attention by the crew. He was a model figure in his dark blue uniform, with its epaulets of four gold stripes stitched into each shoulder. Pettigrew could have stayed in his stateroom doing ‘paperwork’ in the lead up to Uritski, but he hoped to be a calming influence on the bridge.

  The Tempest had not been in a full-fledged battle during his tenure as commanding officer. There had been a few skirmishes with pirates, but nothing major. He was sure there would be jitters among the crew, especially having to wait through more than two hours of uncertainty.

  “What are you reading, sir?” Parker Knox asked, breaking Pettigrew’s concentration. The captain had been staring at his bookpad, but in his mind, he had been mentally fighting the ninth or tenth possible scenario of the upcoming battle.

  “Oh, Commander—yes, it’s a book written by a man named F. Scott Fitzgerald called Tender is the Night. Do you know it?” Pettigrew was a prolific reader and the only person Knox knew who read books from antiquity.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. Sir, we’re coming up on ten minutes to translation into the Luoyang system and you asked to be informed.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Knox. Bring us to General Quarters.”

  The Sarissan Union was comprised of six colonized worlds in six different star systems: Sarissa in the Artemis system, Arethusa in the Sequoya system, Quijano in the Zavijava system, and Odessa, Tezrina and Rusalka in the Rousseau, Bonaventure, and Hybrias systems respectively. In addition, the Union claimed one more planet onto which they were attempting to place a colony—Uritski. Because such an early settlement like this had a very small population, it was not granted full colonial status, instead being officially designated as an outpost.

  Tempest dropped out of hyperspace about 750,000 kilometers from Uritski Station. Captain Pettigrew wanted enough distance to get the lay of the land before making any decisions—or being shot at. The cylindrical Class I station, a Bernal sphere, hung in orbit above the small desert world. It was designed to house up to three thousand people at a time if needed, as the world-building terraformers struggled to prepare the surface of Uritski for habitation. A civilian facility, Uritski Station had some limited armaments to stave off any would-be pirate activity, but the station wasn’t meant to hold off a full-scale military assault on its own.

  “Report,” Pettigrew commanded as the crew brushed off the effects of translating from hyperspace into realspace. It hit different people in different ways, but it always hit, causing dizziness, nausea, headaches—something. The effects passed quickly in some people and Pettigrew was usually lucky in that regard.

  “Translation complete. Ship secured, all stations report green,” Knox said as he clung to his console off to the captain’s right, fighting away the last of his vertigo.

  Taylin Adams spoke up from her station, located in front of the captain’s chair. “Picket drones away. Sensors constructing visuals of Uritski Station. On viewer.” A 3D viewscreen popped into sight at the front of the bridge and what it showed was not encouraging.

  Parading in front of Uritski Station as if it were taunting any onlookers was an unidentified vessel. Whereas Tempest and other Union warships were oriented horizontal to the elliptic plane of a star system, this vessel seemed to adopt a vertical orientation—it was ‘tall,’ while Tempest was ‘wide.’ The unidentified ship was about the same size of Tempest, and from top to bottom, its silhouette looked like a crescent moon. As it passed back and forth in front of the station, the ship periodically discharged what looked like some sort of energy beam. Farther out from the station were two separate clusters of floating debris, the remains of the two frigates assigned to protect the outpost.

  Pettigrew waited for data to be collected and analyzed. “Ensign Davis,” he turned to the communications officer. “Make challenge on that ship. Order them to stand down.” He knew that probably wasn’t going to happen, but he wanted to play it by the regs, at least for now.

  “Captain,” Commander Knox reported. “No other hostiles in the system. Several civilian ships are outbound, but none of them appears to have been attacked. They’re all just running away.”

  “Have either of the settlements on the planet’s surface been hit, Mr. Knox?”

  “Negative, sir. No evidence the station has been boarded either.”

  Taylin Adams took a deep breath and spun in her chair to face Pettigrew. “Captain, preliminary report on Bandit Alpha. Origin unknown. Configuration is unfamiliar and many elements of this vessel do not
conform to any known spaceship technology. They’re running some sort of sensor block that we’ve been unable to penetrate—so far. Engine type unknown. Crew compliment unknown. Hull composition…”

  “Ms. Adams,” interrupted Knox, “is there anything you can tell the Captain that we actually DO know?”

  “Yes, sir,” she responded, shooting Knox an icy glance. Most of the crew understood that there was no love lost between Knox and Adams. Some felt Knox was threatened by her competence and many felt she should have gotten the position of XO when it became available four months ago. “We DO know that the unidentified ship has a mass tonnage roughly equivalent to Tempest. We’re also reasonably sure those energy weapon’s they’re firing at the station are some type of particle beams. All of the station’s weapons have been destroyed, but the station itself has sustained only minor damage.”

  “Yeah, that’s odd to me,” Pettigrew commented as he rose and walked closer to Knox and Adams. “Look at those two frigates, both of them totally destroyed. But there’s Uritski Station, which has been under attack for how long, around six standard hours now? Roughed up, but essentially still in one piece. How does a Class One space station survive for six hours, when two armed frigates were blown apart long ago?” Pettigrew pointed at Knox as if he were a professor in a classroom demanding a student answer his question.

  “Trap?” replied Knox tentatively.

  “Trap,” said Adams without hesitation.

  “Trap,” agreed their captain. “They could have destroyed that station a hundred times over, but they haven’t. And another thing—I’ll bet anything they could be jamming the station’s distress call, but they’re not. No, they wanted a warship to play with.”

  “And here we are,” mumbled Knox.

  Pettigrew sat back down in the captain’s chair and pondered for a second before calling Chief Engineer Mullenhoff. “Commander, that idea we talked about earlier, is it ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do what we can to produce the effect you requested. I think it will be convincing.”

  “Good,” said Pettigrew. “Coordinate with the helm and take your cue from that station. Pettigrew out.”

  Parker Knox had been in on the planning for this maneuver, so he knew what was coming. Taylin Adams and the other bridge staff stared expectantly at their CO.

  “Ms. Nyondo,” the captain addressed the lieutenant at the helm. “I want you to access the engineering library and prepare to execute pre-programmed flight maneuver Uritski Able. Here’s what we’re doing everyone: when Lieutenant Nyondo executes this program, the computers will fire up the engines to a full burn, as if we just can’t wait to get at the enemy. We’ll go charging toward them at top speed and then the engines will cut off abruptly, simulating an engine crash. When that happens, engineering will start venting the appropriate gases to convince our friends out there that we have indeed blown out our I-drives.”

  “Why the deception, sir?” asked fire control officer David Swoboda.

  “I want to lure them away from the station in case things get nasty. It will limit collateral damage. Besides,” the captain grinned, “deception is good. A voice from the past tells us to ‘create confusion and use this confusion to further our own goals.’”

  Knox glanced at the bookpad lying beside the command chair. “Scott Fitzgerald?”

  “No, Mr. Knox, it was a fellow named Sun Tzu. Lieutenant, are you ready?”

  Nyondo quickly reviewed her console. “Aye, Captain.”

  “Execute.”

  The Tempest engines flared as the ion drives slowly climbed to maximum capacity. With Nyondo monitoring at the helm and Mullenhoff in engineering, the sequence ran flawlessly as the heavy cruiser steadily gained speed. The large warship took about four minutes to achieve flank speed, which was redlining the engines to the discomfort of the engineering staff. Eighty seconds at maximum velocity and then—nothing. The computer shut down the I-drives just as instructed and Tempest’s momentum slipped away into the darkness of space.

  Nyondo concentrated on her controls. “We’re drifting, Captain. Losing system plane lock, should I correct?”

  “Negative, Lieutenant. Just let her go. We want to look like we’re in trouble—big trouble.”

  Minutes crawled by as the crew watched and waited. Routine chatter was conducted in hushed voices around the edges of the bridge. The hostile ship continued to rake Uritski Station for a brief period, but the rate of fire decreased and then totally stopped. Pettigrew ordered comm officer Davis to begin broadcasting a distress signal, including the ‘fact’ that Tempest’s I-drives had been damaged.

  “They’re thinking it over,” Pettigrew said, sitting in the command chair with hands clasped, fingers interlocked. “They think we’re playing possum, but maybe, just maybe we’re not.”

  Adams looked up from her station. “Playing what?”

  The captain grinned. “Possum, Ms. Adams. A marsupial native to Earth, which has been transplanted to many human worlds. When confronted with a dangerous situation, this animal will feign death to trick an enemy into passing it by.”

  The Commander scrunched her face. “I’m a Tezrinan, sir. I didn’t see a lot of passive wildlife growing up. Most of the animals on my world are too busy trying to kill you.”

  Parker Knox unsuccessfully tried to suppress a small laugh. “That explains a lot.”

  “Meaning, Mr. Knox?” Adams’s eyes bore into the XO.

  “I simply meant,” Knox fumbled for words “that your planet sounds somewhat, well, uninviting.”

  Adams turned away from him, attending to her station. “Perhaps you should visit it sometime, then you’d be better informed—sir,” she said loud enough to make sure everyone heard.

  Ten more minutes went by with nothing happening. “He’s not going to bite,” Adams said. “I advise a straight forward attack, before he decides to destroy the station and make a run for it.”

  “Not yet, Commander,” Pettigrew disagreed. “He just needs a little more incentive to believe us. Ms. Nyondo,” he addressed the helm, “very slowly and very clumsily, turn us around a hundred-eighty degrees, like we were going to do a turn and burn, but make it look like you’re really having trouble with helm response.”

  “Aye, sir.” Nyondo slowly rotated the ship, but the enemy did nothing. Once she had completed the turning maneuver, Pettigrew ordered the Tempest to proceed away from the hostile vessel.

  Both Knox and Adams left their consoles to stand on either side of their captain’s chair.

  “Make it very slow, Ms. Nyondo, no more than six percent I-drive and vary the speed a bit. I want it to look like we’re struggling just to go that fast,” Pettigrew instructed.

  “Sir,” began Adams in a quiet voice, obviously wanting to keep the conversation private. She also had her hands clasped behind her back. It was a gesture that Pettigrew recognized as her ‘I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear’ stance. “If that ship destroys the station while we’re pretending to run away, that could get a lot of people killed, not to mention the court-martial. Your head would be on the block.”

  “Probably ours too,” Knox squirmed. “And another thing, sir—the longer we wait to attack, the more likely it is that enemy reinforcements might arrive.”

  Pettigrew knew they both had valid observations, points he had already considered. Whoever these people were, they were nothing if not stubborn. Also, many of the thirty-three officers and 340 crewmembers aboard his own ship were probably having their doubts about the Old Man right now. Perhaps he had over—

  “Enemy ship turning toward us and increasing speed!” called out Lieutenant Commander Swoboda from his console. Knox and Adams dashed back to their stations.

  “He’s coming fast—very fast! I’ve never seen a warship accelerate like this,” Adams reported. “ETA to intercept is just nine minutes.”

  At the helm, Lieutenant Nyondo seemed slightly unnerved by that last report. “Orders, sir?” she asked h
er captain.

  “Steady as she goes, Lieutenant. We’ve worked very hard to get him to do this, now let’s see it through.” He turned toward the fire control officer. “Mr. Swoboda, prepare to deploy stealth mines.”

  “How many, sir?”

  “All of them.”

  The distance between the two antagonists shrunk as Pettigrew ordered the mines released. The Tempest disgorged two hundred mines whose micro-thrusters deployed them in a pattern across the path of the oncoming vessel. If the enemy had not detected the subtle wake of the small mines’ deployment; if Sarissan stealth tech was better than the enemy’s detection tech; if Tempest got lucky… There were quite a few ‘ifs,’ even for a gambler like Pettigrew.

  Knox spoke up from his post. “Sir, we have missiles ready to fire at your command.”

  “Not yet, Mr. Knox. If we fire missiles prematurely, he may counter by changing course and if he does that, he’ll miss the minefield.” Pettigrew spoke to Swoboda again. “Fire control, I want a full missile spread ready to fire at Bandit Alpha just as he makes contact with our minefield, but not before. He’s got to hit the mines before he sees us launch.”

  “Aye, Captain.” Swoboda programmed his missiles, factoring in the minor delay caused by the speed of light. The enemy would actually hit the mines just slightly before the Tempest saw it happen, but of course that worked both ways—the Sarissan missiles would be launched just a beat before Bandit Alpha’s contact with the minefield. In space combat, every millisecond was important and accounted for.

  Adams looked around at the CO from her console. “Sir, if we slow down a little, the missiles will have less time to target after they’re launched.”

  “Negative,” Pettigrew replied. “If we do anything different, their captain’s going to wonder why and then they’ll start thinking. I don’t want them to think, I want them doing exactly what they’re doing right now—heading toward my minefield. Helm, maintain course and speed.”