Wings of Pegasus Read online

  Now, she wasn’t sure. It didn’t make sense, didn’t seem possible.

  But it was eating at her gut, and a bad feeling was growing stronger with each thought.

  “Scanners at full power, Drusus. We’ve got what, three scanner buoys left?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Launch them all. I want maximum coverage of the surface. If anything but one of our sleds comes up, I want to know…and long before it reaches orbit.

  She wasn’t going to take any chances. Phantasia was strong enough to take on anything that could be down there…as long as her people were ready.

  There was just one question boring its way through her skull.

  Who the hell is in that ship?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Free Trader Pegasus

  Somewhere in the Endless Sea

  Planet Aquellus, Olystra III

  Year 302 AC

  Pegasus lurched hard, toppling end over end as it tore through the wild seas. The detonation had caused a massive tsunami, and the ship was enduring its impact. The delayed fuse had given Andi and her people a bit of a head start, and Lex Righter had massaged the reactor to full power faster than she could have imagined. Still, they were caught up in the force of the disaster they had unleashed, and Andi clung to her seat for a tense few seconds, her harness holding her in place as she waited to see if Pegasus—if any of her people—would survive their own attack on their pursuers.

  A stream of water flew across the bridge. The breach was smaller than the earlier ones, the flow intensity the result of the enormous pressure outside the vessel. She wasn’t sure if it was a new hole in the hull, or if one of the patch jobs had given way. But she was pretty sure it was manageable, as long as it remained the only one.

  She felt relief, or at least something vaguely like it, as she felt the ship’s buffeting seeming to slow. “Lex…cut the engines.” The thrusters had given all they could give, done all they could do to facilitate their escape. They’d either gotten Pegasus far enough from the detonation or they hadn’t. There was little to be gained by pushing her tortured ship any harder, or adding a reactor breach to their list of problems.

  “On it, Andi.” The ship shook again a few second later, and she could feel the vibrations slowing as the engines shut down. A few seconds later, she felt another lurch as she tapped the positioning jets, and righted the ship.

  “Gregor, as soon as the ship settles down, see what you can do about whatever leaks we’ve got again. Looks like just one up here on the bridge, but we need to check the whole ship.”

  “Yup.” She could hear his boots pounding loudly on the deck through the comm, and she knew he’d followed his one-word answer by springing into action.

  “Gregor, wait until…” She let the words trail off. Her comrade had already grabbed the patch kit, and she could hear him pushing through a blast of water toward what sounded like at least one leak on the lower deck.

  She reached down to her comm unit, switching to the general channel. “Vig, is everything okay down there?” She hadn’t realized just how worried she’d been until she heard his voice a few seconds later.

  “Yeah, Andi. We’re okay. We’ve got a couple small leaks, but Gregor’s on them already. Anna and Jackal are heading up to the bridge with the second patch gun. We should be airtight in a few minutes.”

  Andi let out a soft sigh. She’d been worried about leaks on the lower level, too, but Vig’s tone had told her, any problems down there were manageable.

  She wanted to do down, see for herself, but she had other things to do. The Sector Nine ship was still waiting somewhere…and even if the torpedo had destroyed the lander that had been chasing Pegasus, there could be others out there.

  And they still had to find the imperial facility, assuming the location data she had was even close to accurate. She felt the urge to make a run for it, to forget about artifacts, to trust in Pegasus’s engines to get her people out of the system. But she’d told Durango she would do her best. She’d given him her word. And for all her reputation as a scoundrel and an ill-tempered rogue, Andi Lafarge kept her promises.

  “How’s that looking over there?” Anna Fasarus had splashed through the bridge door and over to the leak. She was already spraying the breach, and the flow of water had slowed to a trickle. The job looked a little sloppy, maybe, but as Andi watched, the leak stopped entirely, so Anna’s work also appeared to be effective.

  “All set, Andi. It was one of the earlier leaks. I covered it up good this time.”

  Andi nodded. Yes, you certainly did. The giant glob of patching medium extended close to half a meter around the breach. Her mind couldn’t help but guess at the cost of the stuff, but it didn’t seem like the time to have a shipwide sit down to discuss economical use of supplies.

  “That’s good, Anna. Now, head to the lower deck, and make sure they’ve got things under control down there.”

  “I’m on it, Andi.” Anna headed swiftly toward the hatch at the back of the bridge, and she disappeared into the hallway, the sounds of her feet clanging on the ladder reverberating through the bridge a few seconds later.

  Andi turned toward Barret. “Let’s see if we can figure out where we are in relation to these nav instructions I got from Durango. We shouldn’t be too far from the facility.” I hope…

  If it even exists…

  “It’s not going to be easy to figure just how far we went since we hit the water. We can only guess how far we drifted when we were sinking, and that last run, courtesy of the torpedo, isn’t going to be much easier. If we could go to the surface, get some star sightings, we might manage to…”

  “No chance on that, Barret. When we get out of this ocean, it’s going to be a dead race to the transit point. We can’t risk surfacing and opening ourselves to detection, not until we’re ready to go.”

  “That doesn’t leave much in the way of navigation, Andi. It’s more like…instinct.”

  “If instinct is what we need, then it’s what we’ll use.” Andi had always had a strange combination of grim realism…strangely tempered with an amorphous belief her people could do what they had to do. It had never made much sense to her in pensive moments, but it was how she felt nevertheless.

  “Let’s start with the real data we’ve got. If we can figure out where we were when we first hit the water, that’s the first step.”

  And the second will be taking a wild guess where these crazy ocean currents have taken us since…

  * * *

  “There’s definitely something there, Andi. We’re still pretty far out, at least with the scanners so beaten up, but I’d say that is definitely some kind of vessel.”

  Andi nodded, an unconscious expression of her agreement. Her eyes, and most of her focus, was on her own small screen, on the incoming data, searching almost frantically for any details, any images she could make out through the heavy interference. The scans were fuzzy, and as much as her gut agreed with Barret’s assessment, she knew it was still mostly guesswork.

  We’d have reliable scans by now, if we hadn’t lost most of the dishes and antennae. We’re going in almost blind, and that’s asking for trouble. But what choice do we have?

  The whole state of affairs was a stark reminder that Pegasus had been roughly handled on the mission so far. Andi trusted her ship, knew the old vessel was tougher than she looked, but she also knew it could only take so much. And they already faced a deadly challenge once they emerged from the sea. A mad dash for the transit point at the very least, one that would take every bit of thrust Pegasus’s savaged engines could produce. But Andi didn’t really believe the enemy would let their guard down enough to allow for such an escape. And that meant a fight, a desperate battle against a larger and stronger vessel. One that would be all the more hopeless if her people couldn’t get Pegasus’s scanner suite a lot closer to normal operating levels before the ship surfaced and headed back into space.

  She renewed her focus, pushing the vessel no
doubt waiting in orbit out of her mind and staring at the screen as the image in front of Pegasus slowly sharpened. Suddenly, the indecipherable figure on her display became clear, at least in her mind. She realized two things, almost instantly. First, the initial contact was a ship, a landing sled just like the one they had destroyed with the torpedo.

  And second, she wasn’t looking at one contact. There were two of them, the second tucked in just behind the first.

  “Barret…”

  “I see them, Andi.” A pause, as both of them stared at the steadily sharpening images. “They’re disguised, made to look like old freight shuttles…but those are Union landers, I’d bet my pension on it.” An empty gesture, Andi knew. Whatever sequence of events had led Barret from Confederation naval service to his place on Pegasus, had cost him his pension, and probably a lot more. But she took the point as he’d intended it.

  “That makes sense. That ship that chased us down…it’s too big to be a rival outfit’s.” She’d suspected Sector Nine since she’d first set eyes on the enemy ship. Now, she was sure. “We’re up against Sector Nine again, Barret.” She tried to keep the concern out of her voice…and she tried to tell herself it was only tension and not fear she felt. She wasn’t sure either effort had been entirely successful.

  “Looks that way.” Her shipmate did an even worse job of hiding his fear. Sector Nine was ruthless, an organization that had spent almost two centuries building an image of coldblooded savagery. That was bad enough, but Andi’s concern was more specific. If Sector Nine had deployed a vessel as large—and expensive—as the one Pegasus had encountered, her people were almost certainly outmatched as well as outnumbered.

  There might even be combat-equipped Foudre Rouge in there…

  “It doesn’t matter who’s in there. We’re going in.” Andi rode a surge of defiance, and she fought back almost immediately against the reflexive regret that followed. Part of her still wanted to run, to face the danger of escaping from the system, but not to seek out more.

  But her integrity was all she had. Maybe if Durango hadn’t paid her the ten thousand in advance, but he had done as he’d promised, and more. She couldn’t do less.

  They had to go in.

  “Alright, Andi.” Barret sounded a little shaky, but she knew he’d be ready for whatever happened.

  “We’ve got to take out those two ships before we land.” She had no idea how many of the Union personnel were in the ships and how many had gone inside the facility she was still only assuming was there. But she couldn’t leave those landers. She couldn’t give them a chance to launch and engage Pegasus.

  “The lasers are fully operational, Andi, but the scanners are shit. Even at a range this close…”

  “You can do it, Barret.” It was a simple statement, devoid of any facts or evidence to back it up. But it was the kind of thing human beings needed sometimes, and it was all she had to give her gunner.

  “We should come in closer, Andi. The water is going to attenuate the hell out of our laser blasts…and the lower the range, the more chance we’ve got to hit those things.”

  “We don’t have time. We can see them, and that means they’ve almost certainly spotted us. We may have caught them by surprise, but that’s not going to give us very long. If they get launched, we’re going to be fighting moving targets, with their own lasers and intact scanners. We’ve got to hit them now, Barret. You can do this.”

  The gunner didn’t answer. He just sighed softly and pulled down the targeting scope. He pressed his face against it, his hands reaching out, taking hold of the controls. Andi could feel the tension gripping her shipmate, even as her own ratcheted up as well. She was waiting for activity on the screen, for the instant the enemy ships began to move. She knew that was probably only seconds away, and even as Barret stared into the scope, she had to hold back the urge to try to push him along.

  No…he knows the situation. Trust your people. That has never led you astray before…

  She stared across the bridge, her eyes fixed on the rumpled mass of sandy brown hair on the back of Barret’s head. It was half soaked in sweat, and she could see the grinding tension in his arms, in his hands, wrapped so tightly around the firing controls, his fingers were stark white.

  She knew only a few seconds had passed, but it seemed like hours. Pegasus outgunned the landing ships, and assuming Barret could effectively target with the scanners little more than a pile of twisted wreckage, she knew her ship could blow the enemy out of the water.

  Come on, Barret…

  Andi’s eyes were fixed on the screen, searching for any data Pegasus’s tortured dishes could provide. For a few more seconds, the two enemy ships remained still, no sign of any response to Pegasus’s approach.

  Then, she saw an energy spike. The closest ship first, and then a second later, the other as well. The landers were lifting off. They were out of time.

  Barret…

  She could feel the sweat pooling up under her hairline, and she realized her hands had balled into tight fists. Barret was going to have a hard enough time dealing with Pegasus’s battered scanners and the swirling ocean currents shooting at stationary vessels. If those ship got off the ledge, he’d have to hit moving targets.

  Andi held her breath as she saw the closest enemy ship begin to move slowly upward.

  The next few seconds were almost a blur. She heard the familiar whine of Pegasus’s guns, and her eyes dropped again to the screen. The scanners were having as much trouble tracking the laser shot as they were the enemy ships, but there was no mistaking the movement of the first vessel, back down to its initial position…and an instant later, a billowing explosion, vast currents of water buffeting Pegasus, a torrent that could only have been caused by an explosion.

  One down.

  She felt a wave of excitement at what she knew in her heart was a kill, even as she instinctively reached out for Pegasus’s controls, activating the positioning jets, trying to stabilize the ship. The lasers fired again, but Andi didn’t even have to look to know the second shot had missed. Pegasus wasn’t wildly out of control as she had been earlier, but she was jerking around wildly in the onrushing currents, making targeting a virtual impossibility.

  She shifted the controls, pulsing one of the jets, and then another, trying to stop the ship’s movement, to give Barret a decent shot at the last enemy vessel.

  It was a struggle. She’d never piloted a ship in the water before, and she fought hard to gain control, even with the navcom’s help. Finally, she managed to right the ship, and the wild rocking stopped. Barret would have a shot now, a chance to take out the second enemy ship.

  She turned her eyes back to the screen, to the fuzzy depiction of the rocky ledge. There was wreckage all around, debris that confirmed the first shot had, indeed, been a kill. There was just one problem.

  The second ship was nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Unidentified Imperial Ruin

  Somewhere Under the Endless Sea

  Planet Aquellus, Olystra III

  Year 302 AC

  “Hold your positions.” Nicolas Caron was crouched down behind a stack of metal crates. The room seemed to be some kind of supply facility, and he’d been about to order his people to search thoroughly for artifacts when the two Foudre Rouge he’d posted to guard their rear reported sounds approaching.

  Caron’s first reaction had been undisciplined, and the fear almost gripped him. They’d fought one partially operable security bot, and suffered four casualties, two of them dead. They’d lost another two dead when a second bot, also only partially operable, attacked them in another compartment. He’d known, of course, that imperial bots and other security mechanisms were deadly dangerous, but it was something different entirely to encounter them in reality, to feel their deadly projectiles ripping by over your head. Most imperial ruins were long dead, their protective features expended long ago, in the endemic fighting of the later Cataclysm. Caron had hoped th
e second bot would be the last, but he wasn’t sure he believed that. As soon as the Foudre Rouge gave the alert, he was sure they faced another attack.

  But now he heard sounds, not those of an ancient warbot, but voices. For a few seconds, he couldn’t make out what was being said, but then he recognized the distinct barking of Foudre Rouge battle language. The special form of communication used by the clone soldiers sounded like gibberish to him, but it was distinctly recognizable for what it was. He tapped his comm unit, switching to the general channel. “All Union forces…this is Nicolas Caron. You are approaching our position. All Union forces are to maintain maximum caution before engaging.” Caron wasn’t a soldier by trade, but he knew well enough how easily friendly fire casualties could result without strong communications. His people were certainly on edge, ready to blow away anything that showed itself down the corridor. And he couldn’t imagine whoever was heading his way was any less tense.

  “Nicolas…it’s Louis. I’ve got the second team. We came past the remains of two imperial security bots. Your work?”

  “Yes…costly work. We can hear you coming down the corridor, so you’ve got to be close. Make sure your people know we’re up here. The last thing we need is to lose more people fighting each other.” A pause. “And hurry up. We’ve found what looks like a cache of artifacts, but I’m at half strength now. We could use some more hands and eyes up here.”

  “On the way.”

  Caron turned and looked out across the room. He hit the comm again. “You all heard that, so stand down. We’ve got friendlies approaching, so hold all fire.”