Wings of the Seraph Ch. 04

This was a whole hell of a lot worse. The Convectorate had an open bounty on psychics, especially non-human ones. A Velothi with her telekinetic abilities would be worth...I didn't even know, but probably more than Gol Zabras was paying us. If anything, she was suddenly a bargain.

For a split second, I considered shooting her in the back with a stun blast and turning her in myself. But my anger at being duped quickly evaporated in light of the situation. We had just killed a Convectorate officer and several Rakashi security agents—we were way past the point of claiming any bounties. The only thing that mattered now was getting out of here in one piece.

And then, I promised myself, I would finally figure out who Kaveri Saalu really was.

***

"All systems coming up," I announced as I dove into the pilot's chair and began flipping switches. "You know, you could have at least run a pre-flight check before you got captured."

"We're fortunate I had an opportunity to reinstall the fuel rods," Raxyl replied mildly as he took his seat. "Perhaps next time you should consider reasoning with your brain instead of your genitals."

I scowled and glanced back over my shoulder to Kaveri. She had settled into the lone passenger seat, and I suddenly had second thoughts about allowing an apparent psychic assassin to sit behind me with a plasma rifle in her lap.

"If I wanted you dead, you would already be floating outside the window," she said without looking at me. She stared down at her lap, her luminescent eyes narrowed in concentration. Was she trying to sense something with her psionic powers? "How do you plan to deal with their tractor beams?"

"We will not have to," Raxyl said as his control board finally lit up. "This is not a military installation. Their tractor beams are designed to move cargo from one hangar to another, not incapacitate starships."

"Those doors are a bigger problem," I said, glancing out the cockpit canopy at the enormous double thorotine doors sealing us into the hangar. The hangar wasn't wide enough for us to turn around—which was why I'd backed us in when we arrived. It as good as told anyone watching that we were thinking about making a quick getaway, but Vrassk-Ka Space Traffic Control had better things to do than monitor landing practices. "I have a sinking feeling that their control tower isn't going to just open them for us."

Kaveri grimaced. "Open a channel. I might be able to persuade them."

"Not without flashing your tits at them," I growled as the HUD flickered to life. "Just hold on."

The instant the engines came online, I retracted the landing gear and transferred all shield power to the forward grid. This wasn't going to be pretty...

"For the record, I disapprove of this plan in advance," Raxyl said.

"Noted," I said. "Here goes nothing."

I grabbed the flight stick and squeezed the trigger. A barrage of blue-white energy bolts erupted from our forward cannons and pounded the doors. Alarms screamed throughout the hangar, emergency bulkheads slammed down behind us, and a glowing containment field flashed into place over the hangar doors. But the field wasn't meant to repel weapons, just to prevent accidental decompression, and when it failed, I kept firing. As the metal finally melted into what I hoped was a big enough hole, I punched the throttle. We shot out of the hangar like a torpedo, losing whatever paint the Gazack still had in the process.

"Echu tari," Kaveri breathed from behind us. "Are you insane?"

"Considering I just watched a helpless Velothi slave girl dismantle a half dozen Convectorate mechs with her mind...yeah, probably." I gritted my teeth as I twisted the flight stick and threw us into a tight roll along the station's superstructure. "Please tell me we don't have a Vec battleship waiting for us out there."

"There are no obviously hostile targets on the tac-holo," Raxyl said. "This must have been a small operation. That, or they were simply attempting to keep this quiet."

"Regardless, we can't possibly get away this easily."

The words had no sooner escaped my lips than the tac-holo between us warbled a proximity warning. As we pulled away from the station at maximum acceleration, I risked a quick glance down to see four new, yellow-tagged signatures coming up on our stern. New but already upsettingly familiar.

"More reclamator drones," I hissed.

"And no asteroid field in which to evade them," Raxyl added sourly. "They will be in firing range in twenty-one seconds."

Kaveri leaned forward and grabbed the back of my chair. "How long until we can jump into hyperspace?"

"We could jump right now, but those drones can overtake us just as easily in hyperspace as at sub-light. And once we're in deep space, there's nowhere to hide."

"There's nowhere to hide here, either! This piece of scrap can't possibly evade them for more than a few minutes."

I turned my head to glare at her. "This 'piece of scrap' is the only reason you're still alive!" I growled. "Well, that and the fact you can apparently kill people with your mind."

"Ten seconds," Raxyl warned. "I suggest we—"

As usual, the premonition hit me like a brick to the face. Raxyl's voice cut out, and my mind flashed with images of an enormous convoy of ships flooding out of a nearby jump corridor. There were hundreds of them: light freighters, cargo barges, pleasure yachts, and everything in between. I had no idea what conflicted sector they were coming from that merited traveling in convoy, but it didn't really matter. The point was that maybe we didn't need another asteroid field after all.

"Transfer all power to the engines," I said, turning back around to focus on flying. "I have an idea."

I yanked back on the stick. Thrusters fired, and our vector gradually curled until we were shooting almost straight "up" toward the Yassalian jump corridor some twenty million kilometers from the station. At the moment, the space around it was completely empty...so empty that if I was wrong about this, we would be just as screwed here as we would be in deep space.

"What the hell are you doing?" Kaveri blurted out as her restraints pinned her against her chair. Our inertial dampeners normally negated most g-forces, but not when they were operating at minimal draw and we were burning full-out. "You can't outrun them!"

"Yeah, no shit," I snarled, though part of me was reveling in the weight pressing me back into my seat. "Where is that engine power?"

"I have transferred every nonessential system except shields," Raxyl said, a shimmer of fearful yellow rippling across his arm. "Despite our unexpected maneuver, they will still be in range in—"

He paused when a volley of green-blue fire burned past our cockpit and slammed against the dorsal shields. The system monitor on my left warbled in protest, and the power readout on the HUD began fluctuating wildly.

"Shields aren't going to save us," I said. "Speed might."

"Are you mad?" Kaveri sputtered. "You just admitted we can't outrun them!"

"We don't need to outrun them—we just need to keep them off balance for a few more seconds."

I slapped my hand on the controls and transferred all remaining shield power to the thrusters. The entire ship seemed to whine in protest—I swore I could actually hear the bulkheads groaning—and I nervously watched the HUD as we gradually approached three-quarters light speed. The drones would still overtake us, of course, but not quite yet.

And hopefully not before we reached the corridor.

"If you plan to jump through the Yassalian corridor, I strongly advise against it," Raxyl said, his voice strained as his control panel began shaking. "Without telemetry data from the hyperspace beacon, we could crash right into a convoy heading this way."

"That's the idea," I said.

He turned and looked at me, his yellow, serpentine eyes blinking in confusion. "Are you absolutely certain you did not suffer a blow to the head during the firefight in the hangar?"

I grinned. While most ships possessed standard hyperdrives, many smaller ships—and mercantile ships in particular—relied upon jump corridors to move at faster-than-light speeds. In effect, the corridors were tunnels burrowed through normal space on a narrow, highly specific path. Flying into one without telemetry data would be like manually piloting a lift into a shaft network without knowing where any of the other lifts were headed...only vastly more catastrophic.

But at the moment, it was our only hope. I glanced back at the tac-holo to confirm that the drones were rapidly accelerating back into weapons range. Based on the computer's estimates, we weren't going to make it. With shields, we could probably take another hit or two; without them, just one would almost certainly fry the computer and half the other systems on the ship. I didn't know exactly how close we needed to get, but my gut told me I needed to figure out a way to buy us another ten or fifteen seconds.

"This is going to be close," I said. "Seraph protect us."

I twisted the stick and threw us into a spin, hoping it would confuse the drone's targeting computers for at least a few seconds. It didn't. They started firing, and as their shots drew closer and closer, I bit down on my lip and braced myself for the inevitable—

And then the convoy appeared. One by one, the ships winked into existence in front of us, and the Gazack's proximity alarms screamed like the world was about to end. I immediately disengaged the thrusters and threw us into another corkscrew while simultaneously ducking behind the enormous bulk of the star galleon freighter directly in front of us.

Kaveri screamed something, and even Raxyl let out a yelp as we whipped between the convoy ships like a drunken krekball player with a jetpack. I didn't even think about the movements before I made them; my hand just reflexively moved the stick exactly where we needed to go.

The drones weren't so lucky. One of them smashed into a freighter's shields, exploding in a brilliant ball of light. The others split apart and attempted to regroup, and given time, they probably would have caught up with us. But the Krosian destroyer in their path wasn't interested in allowing any Vec drones to buzz around its hull; its point-defense turrets unleashed a salvo of fire, shredding two of the reclamators and severely wounding the third.

"How...?" Kaveri breathed as the tac-holo showed images of the debris. "How did you know?"

"It's a long story," I said, readjusting our course and boosting the thrusters just in case the Krosians decided to start shooting at us, too. "And probably not the most interesting one we're going to hear today."

She was still staring in amazement at the tac-holo when I twisted around in my chair and pointed my holdout pistol at her chest. "I think it's finally time for you to start talking," I said. "You have a lot of explaining to do."