Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (46 page)

Alice didn’t bother
holstering her weapon, but mentally sent a short report about the
incident to the bridge then led her security people from the room.
All the while, she kept tabs on the three crew members who attempted
escape, to make sure they were heading back to their posts with all
haste.

The ship shuddered as
the fighter launch systems activated, sending seven Uriel fighters
and the boarding teams they carried into space. The biggest fight the
ship had seen so far was beginning, and she was chasing down a
dangerous traitor. The records for Juno Lathi revealed that she was
one of only five ship’s stewards. Her job was to direct the bots in
cleaning the ship and to assist in the galley.

“Let her into the
recycling compartment,” Alice said. She was just around the corner
from Juno, and she signalled for the two officers behind her to slow
down. She watched through ship scanners as Juno activated a tiny
surveillance scrambler.

Alice rushed the
compartment, signalling the two officers she had inside to reveal
themselves and stop whatever the woman was doing. When Alice came
through the hatch, followed by two of her officers, Juno was backing
away from the pair of guards who were already there. The recycling
centre was dormant, with piles of scrap metal and a few bins of waste
organized in line for the industrial processors.

Juno reached into one
of the bins, where she’d stashed a small but powerful cutter used
for hull plating. She pressed the activation button, flaring the
small white emitter on the end as if to warn them. Her gaze flicked
from one soldier to the next, coming to rest on Alice with scorn.
“I’m not going to be stopped by a child.”

“What’s your
purpose here?” Alice asked, the only question that would come to
mind at the moment.

“Disable as many of
the ship’s systems as I can from engineering,” Juno said. “That’s
what I was sent here to do, and I still can from this cabin.” She
held up her comm unit and activated a sequence on it with her free
hand. Alice’s suit detected a power build up coming from the
woman’s communication unit and realized that she’d fashioned a
small electromagnetic pulse bomb.

Without taking a second
to think, Alice sprinted across the room and pushed Juno into the
mass recycler then activated it mentally. A multitude of mulching
teeth and molecular reclamation tools set to work at a frightening
pace to recycle Juno and her comm unit as Alice shut the thick
insulated door. A power surge marked the detonation of the improvised
electromagnetic pulse device on the controls for the recycler, but
there was no outer effect.

“Gor blimey, you
recycled her!” Nesh exclaimed.

Alice was as surprised
as anyone else. “I thought I could contain the blast in the
machine. I didn’t think it would try to recycle her. These things
have safety measures so they don’t process living things, don’t
they?”

“Not industrial ones
like this,” Nesh laughed. “I know, I shouldn’t be laughing,
but, God!”

“You’re right,
that’s the only safe place to set off an EMP in the room, but you
still recycled her ass,” Timmerman chucked as he opened the lid to
the settling machine. Red lights blinking on the recycler’s display
indicated that something had gotten stuck, and Alice immediately
regretted looking. The mass recycler had strands of Juno’s vacsuit
stuck in its mulching teeth, and there was just enough evidence of
the woman left to tell the rest of the tale.

Officer Timmerman
closed the lid and crossed himself. “This story’ll live on, I’m
sure of that. Guess she shouldn’t have called our commanding
officer a child.”

“Sergeant Valent,”
Finn said through Alice’s comm. “We just detected a minor pulse
down there, everything all right?”

“We caught our
traitor,” Alice replied.

“And? Are they in
custody? Sensors are dodgy in that section. There’s some kind of
interference.”

“We took care of
her,” Alice said, deactivating the counter surveillance chip laying
on the deck at her feet.

“Are you taking her
to the brig for interrogation?” Frost asked, interjecting from the
bridge.

Alice closed the lid of
the mass recycler and thought for a moment before answering. Her
officers were watching her, hanging on what she’d say next, she
assumed. “Not enough of her left for interrogation, Sir. Sorry.
Resuming normal security operations.”

The channel to the
bridge closed and Alice couldn’t help but look at the recycler and
shake her head. “Well, that was a learning experience.”

All Or Nothing

Minh-Chu watched as
three of the Warlord’s missile pods, launched into place long
minutes before, fired hundreds of small electromagnetic pulse flak
missiles at the imposing Order of Eden destroyer. His fighter wing
reduced their power output levels, just as they’d practiced in
simulation, and fired their own EMP flack missiles, adding hundreds
of their own projectiles to the impending display.

The Barricade’s
countermeasures came to life, small rapid-fire cannons sweeping their
fire across the thousands of incoming targets, and only one of its
flak cannons belched exploding pods of magnetically charged shrapnel
ahead of the ship. It all worked in their favour, it was all noise,
and there was so much to fire at that the Barricade’s green crew
didn’t know to focus on the five incoming fighters instead of
trying to repel the incoming missiles. “I couldn’t believe the
intelligence the first time I saw it, and I’m still having trouble
swallowing it,” Minh-Chu said.

“What’s that,
Ronin?” Jake asked from where he and his squad were pressed into
the small personnel carrier compartment affixed to the bottom of
Minh-Chu’s Uriel fighter.

Minh-Chu activated his
antimatter projectile cannons and began powering up the disruptor
beam emitter mounted on the front of his fuselage. “They really are
sending destroyers across the Iron Head Nebula with green skeleton
crews,” Minh-Chu replied. The clash of exploding micro missiles
against the forward shields of the Barricade made for an impressive
fireworks display. He easily guided his fighter around the narrow
flak cannon fire. The destroyer had forty such cannons, and they
should have all been firing. Minh could only assume that they didn’t
have the staff aboard to operate them. “This is going to be the
biggest piece of candy anyone has ever taken from a baby,” he said
before addressing the other four fighters in his formation. “Dump
the rest of your electro mag missiles onto their hangar shields, I’m
going to punch through.” He spared a glance from his instruments to
admire the jagged front of the ship, with edges that spread out from
its general rectangular structure that looked like forward-facing
teeth. There were heavily shielded weapons, emitter systems and
receiver arrays built into the ends of those arms. Between four of
the main emitter arms was their target: a hangar deck made to launch
state of the art Violent Encounter Resolution fighters, the new craft
Regent Galactic was building for the Order Fleet.

“My scanners are
giving me no good readings in that direction, there’s so much
electrical and flak garbage in the way, they’ve gotta be blind by
now,” replied Tempest, the pilot flying the Uriel on Minh’s port
side. “And we’ll be landing on their deck using eyes only thanks
to our mess. We’re all crazy.”

“Mad as escaped
mentals,” Moira McFadden replied from where she was, in the small
troop compartment attached to Minh’s fighter. “Can’t believe
I’m going along with this.”

“Counting down from
eleven seconds,” Minh-Chu interrupted as he watched the planned
path of the stealthed antimatter mines from the Warlord close in on
the Barricade. The pair of corvettes was just coming out of their
wormhole beside it, and the cargo hauler wouldn’t be far behind.

Minh-Chu’s shields
registered a graze from two of the beam weapons mounted along the
sides of the destroyer. The front of the ship lit up as it opened
fire on all five of the Samurai Squadron fighters in his formation,
sending suppressive energy fire in broad arcs around the ship.

“Antimatter explosion
number one in three,” Minh-Chu said, realizing that he was gripping
his controls harder only as he felt the white-knuckled pressure on
his fingers. “Two,” he counted. rechecking his distance. His
fighters were right where they should be, any closer and their
shields would not protect them. “One.”

The first antimatter
mine burst directly beneath the fore section of the Barricade, and
there was a heartbeat’s time when the antimatter drifted freely in
the cold void before it made contact with tiny particles of matter
clinging to the vessels’ shields. The explosion radiated outward,
bathing everything for thousands of kilometres in waves of light.

“-won’t have a
chance for our sensors to recover before the second one hits,”
Tempest said as her comms came back online. “Predicted activation
in three.” Minh-Chu watched as his sensors started reporting
shadows, the barest of gravitational measurements pointing out the
two corvettes and the destroyer.

“Two,” Tempest said
over their scratchy communications channel. Minh-Chu hoped that the
second mine was in position, then saw a glimpse of it, or what he was
sure must have been it. Its cloaking had failed, and he watched as
its powerful chemical thruster blasted it across the black of space.

“One,” Minh-Chu and
Tempest said at the same time as the deadly self-propelled mine
finished its relatively short trip between the pair of corvettes. It
exploded with the full fury of the first antimatter mine directly
behind them, further away from Samurai Squadron than the first. He
couldn’t see the pair of Samurai Squadron fighters that were set up
behind the wormhole, but if they were where they should be, they
would be far from harm. He wouldn’t be able to cut through all the
noise in the area to check, and they were supposed to be shut down so
they would be difficult to detect, meaning he wouldn’t know their
fate until it was time to escape the area. That wouldn’t be for
some time.

Minh-Chu’s sensors
recovered within seconds of the detonation, and he checked his people
first to find that two of them had suffered minor damage, and that
all the boarding team members checked out fine. All pilots reported
ready, and he could hear a couple of them laughing, and Tempest
saying, “Corvette One and Corvette Two’s shields are fried,
they’ve taken minor damage from the torpedoes. Time for us to split
off, Ronin.”

“Stand by with your
payload, execute defensive manoeuvres while I make my run,”
Minh-Chu said as he verified that the Barricade’s shields were
almost down across the ship, but they were starting to recharge.
“Time for a real show.”

“Better hurry, Ronin,
that disruptor cannon’s capacitor module is glowing,” Moira said
from the bottom side of his hull.

“Do we have cover?”
Minh-Chu asked as he glanced at several mission counters. The one he
was really looking forward to was just dropping to zero, and the
Warlord revealed itself. Its antimatter enhanced ion thruster pods
and the new main engine at the rear of the dark hulled ship powered
the vessel towards the corvettes. Big bore launcher holes released
self-propelled electromagnetic pulse mines that pushed off in several
different directions. The front of the ship lit up as its massive
stationary railguns fired in quick succession and hatches opened
revealing rapid-fire electromagnetic pulse guns. “We’re here,
Hun,” Ashley replied. “You go make an impression on that
destroyer, guys.”

The mines already set
up in the area began firing short-range missiles and draining their
power cells as they fired beam weapons at the pair of corvettes. The
area was alight with the deadly weapons they’d brought to defeat
the Order ships. “Aye, aye,” Minh-Chu said as he thrust towards
the front of the destroyer. The first few shots at his Uriel fighter
came when he was only five thousand kilometres away, and they were
wide of the mark. By the time he closed to two thousand, anti-fighter
rounds pounded on his energy shields as though they were the hammer
and he was the anvil. “Okay, they seem to have some kind of reserve
scanners. A gunner has a lock on me.” Both his port side fore
thrusters took damage before he reached his target, a place right
between the four major arms reaching out from the front of the ship.

“Just get the door
open,” Jake said.

Minh’s targeting
computer locked on to the main hangar doors of the Barricade and he
fired his disruptor beam weapon, the capacitors humming loudly as
they fed the white beam, and a neat square was etched deeply into the
forward hangar doors. Minh-Chu tried to ignore the hits his shields
were taking from the gunner aboard the enemy ship, and pulled the
trigger on his antimatter enhanced auto cannons, marking a violent
line of damage across the front of the hangar doors ahead. He fired
another pair of bursts and a section of the hangar doors large enough
for his fighter to enter exploded outward. “Not bad, almost looks
like I used a plasma cutter,” Minh-Chu muttered to himself. His
damaged thruster pods ripped free of their articulated arms, escaping
in separate directions and sending his fighter spinning towards the
front of the destroyer.

“Oh crap,” Jake
said from beneath the fighter.

“Yup, dead, we’re
going to splat agains’ the front of tha’ thing,” Moira added.

“Shhh, no backseat
driving,” Minh-Chu said as he fought to compensate for the missing
thruster pods and get the fighter clear of the blast radius. He was
down to backup power and what was left in the shield capacitors, and
those started draining as soon as the destroyer’s anti-fighter guns
got a shot at him.

“Wish I believed in
the Almighty right about now, would love a prayer,” Moira quipped
as Minh-Chu manually fought for control of his fighter’s spin. The
gunner seemed to lose his bead for several seconds, and he was able
to right his fighter. Pinging against his lower aft thruster pods was
a clear indication that the gunner on the Barricade had found his
mark again, and he meant to pick the wings off his fly.