A Call To Arms: Chapter Twelve

    Manticore had come and gone, and was no more than a faint dot in the Izbica’s aft viewer.

    And Captain Shresthra, in the quaint old vernacular, was not a Happy Camper.

    “You said there would be bales and bales of cargo to be had at Manticore,” he grumbled yet again to Grimm, punctuating his rant with an accusing finger. “You remember? That was exactly what you said: bales and bales.”

    “I know,” Grimm said in as apologetic a voice as he could muster. It wasn’t easy, when what he really wanted to do was take hold of that jabbing finger and break it off. Patience, he reminded himself firmly. “But that really was how things worked eight years ago, when I last passed through this region. There was no way I could have known that freighter traffic had picked up so much since then.”

    Shresthra gave a contemptuous sniff. “A dozen or so ships a year hardly qualifies as traffic, Mr. Grimm. At the very least you should have asked the Havenite freighter at Casca whether he and the other freighters had this route sewed up. If I’d known, we could have gone directly to Minorca instead of wasting three weeks with this side trip.”

    “I know,” Grimm said again, doing his best verbal grovel in front of the annoying little man. In fact, he had talked to the Havenites, learned that Manticoran trade was indeed well covered, and had been careful to leave them with the impression that he would pass on any relevant information to the Izbica’s captain and crew. The visit to Manticore was the whole reason Grimm and his partners were aboard; the last thing he’d wanted was for Shresthra to bypass the system.

    Just as the last thing he wanted right now was for Shresthra to make a stink that would force him to kill the little man and his crew. They were still close enough to the planet — and more than close enough to the ships plying the route between Manticore and Sphinx — that there might still be some need for communication. There was nothing like an abrupt switch to a new and unfamiliar voice to make people curious.

    “But there is also the planet Gryphon,” he continued, gesturing outward. “Not to mention all the Manticore-B mining operations. We could make a quick microjump over there, send out a query to the mining factories, and see if they’ve got some product they want to sell.”

    “No,” Shresthra said firmly. “The Star Kingdom had their chance. We hit the hyper limit, we’re heading straight to Minorca.”

    Damn. “Certainly, if that’s what you want,” Grimm said. “I was just trying to salvage something useful from this trip.”

    “You want to salvage something, salvage your breath next time you have a bright idea,” Shresthra growled. Grabbing a handhold, he spun himself around in midair and gave himself a pull toward the bridge.

    Grimm waited until he’d floated out of sight. Then, glowering, he headed back to the hold.

    Bettor was floating in front of the analyzer, watching as it ran the latest batch of data though its electronic hoops. “Well?” he asked.

    “We’re going to Minorca,” Grimm told him. “Do we care?”

    “Afraid we do,” Bettor said. “Rough estimate is that we’ll need ten to twelve more hours than we’re going to get if we leave on the Izbica’s current schedule.”

    “Twelve?” Grimm echoed, frowning. “I thought it was only six at the most.”

    “That was before Shresthra had Pickers goose a few more gravs out of the impellers,” Bettor said. “The man’s serious about trying to get back on schedule.” He raised his eyebrows. “Time to let loose the Merripens of war?”

    Grimm pursed his lips, seriously tempted. But his earlier concern about changing personnel in possible future communications was still valid. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve already gimmicked the interface with the hyperdrive. That should buy us the rest of the time you need. Once you’re finished, I’ll find the magic fix, and Shresthra can make course for wherever he wants.”

    “Sounds like a plan,” Bettor agreed. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t figure it out.”

    “He won’t,” Grimm said. “We’ve introduced enough glitches on this trip for him to put it down to yet another bit of balky equipment.”

    “If you say so,” Bettor said. “Just be ready if he isn’t as naïve as you expect.”

    “Don’t worry,” Grimm said. “I’ll be as ready as Merripen is.”

    “And Merripen’s always ready?”

    Grimm smiled grimly. “Yes. Always.”

 

---

 

    “This is a drill,” Captain Castillo’s voice boomed across Phoenix’s intercom system. “General Quarters, General Quarters. Set Condition Two throughout the ship. Repeat: set Condition Two throughout the ship. This is a drill.”

    Travis was the second of his crew to reach their station in Forward Weapons, right after Spacer Second Skorsky. The rest of them were no more than two minutes behind him. Luckily for them.

    Two minutes and twelve seconds after that, the missiles, beam weapon, and all of the functional support equipment showed green.

    “Nice,” Fornier commented, checking his chrono. “I make that as a hair under an eight percent improvement. Excellent work, Lieutenant Long. At this rate, you’ll be dropping that awkward jay-gee from your rank within a couple of months.”

    “Thank you, Sir,” Travis said, scowling a little to himself. That eight percent might look good on paper, but the bottom-line fact was that the improvement was mainly due to Phoenix now being down to a single forward tracking sensor, several major components of the second system having been cannibalized to fix the balky EW assembler.

    And it took zero time to bring up, check, and confirm a system that wasn’t working in the first place.

    All of which Fornier knew, of course. But like everyone else in the Navy, he’d learned how to put good spin on anything capable of being spun.

    “Sounds like the aft autocannon’s still coming up,” Fornier continued, cocking his ear toward the commentary stream coming from the intercom. “Let’s try giving the tracker something to track.”

    “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. Grabbing a handhold, he gave himself a pull and floated over to the main display.

    As usual, there wasn’t much out there. There were three contacts showing in the inner Manticore-A system — a couple of local transports, plus HMS Salamander, out on some kind of training cruise.

    And between Salamander and the transports was a single contact: the Solarian freighter Izbica, heading out from her cargo-hunt on Manticore.

    She would do nicely.

    “Give me a track on bogey bearing one-four-six by two-two-nine,” he called toward his crew.

    “A track, Sir?” Skorsky asked, sounding confused. “Sir, she’s way out of range for that.”

    “She’s out of range for radar and lidar, yes,” Fornier said with an edge of deliberate patience. “They’re also blocked by the aft quarter of the dorsal wedge. So what else have you got?”

    “Gravitics, Sir,” Skorsky said, belatedly catching up. “Yes, Sir. Tracking via gravitics.”

    “And don’t think this is just make-work,” Fornier added, raising his voice so the whole compartment could hear. “Yes, tracking is usually CIC’s or the bridge’s job. But there might be a time down the road when communications get cut off, and you’re on your own.”

    “Understood, Sir,” Skorsky said briskly. “Track plotted and on the board.”

    Travis craned his neck to look at the display. Izbica’s position and a rough estimate of her vector were now displayed, within the limits of the gravitic data for something that far away. He ran his eye down the numbers…

    And frowned.

    “Confirm position,” he ordered.

    “Confirm position, aye.

    “Trouble?” Fornier asked quietly from behind him.

    “I don’t know,” Travis said. “Look where she is.”

    “Outside the hyper limit,” Fornier murmured.

    “Considerably outside the hyper limit,” Travis agreed. “A good three hundred thousand kilometers, and she hasn’t made her alpha translation yet. She’s not accelerating, either.”

    “She does seem to be just coasting,” Fornier agreed. “You think she’s in trouble?”

    “Could be,” Travis said. In the back of his mind, he could hear the echo of Chomps’s voice as he laid out his theory about the Cascan mass-murderer being aboard the freighter. Could he have been right?

    No. The theory had been ridiculous. And even if it hadn’t been, that could hardly have anything to do with this current situation. The last thing a killer on the lam would want was to draw attention to himself by fiddling with his ship’s operation. Especially not this close to an inhabited system.

    But while Travis might not know much about freighters, he did know that they lived by their schedules. No captain would waste time doodling along past the hyper limit unless he didn’t have a choice.

 

---

 

    “You think we should signal Salamander?” Travis suggested. “She’s in range to head over and see what’s going on.”

    “She’s also got the same sensor suite we do,” Fornier reminded him. “Don’t worry — if there’s anything worth investigating, Fairburn’s already on it.”

    “I hope so.”

    In the background, the XO’s voice came on the intercom: Phoenix was now at full Readiness One.

    “Meanwhile, we have a drill to run,” Fornier said. “Let’s get to it.”

 

---

 

    “I assure you, Captain Lord Baron Fairburn, we have no need of assistance,” the voice of Izbica’s captain came over Salamander’s bridge speaker.

    Captain Fairburn, Fairburn corrected him silently. Or Baron Fairburn. Or Lord Fairburn. Pick one and stick with it.

    Maybe the man assumed Baron was Fairburn’s given name. Maybe he was just an idiot who didn’t bother to read up on the proper protocol for the places he was going to visit.

    Fairburn was betting on the second option.

    “One of our passengers has seen this before,” Shresthra continued. “He says it’s just a matter of taking the interface apart, cleaning it and checking all the connections, and reassembling it. A few hours, and we’ll be on our way again.”

    “Very well, Captain Shresthra,” Fairburn said. “Again, we’re only a couple of hours away from you. Don’t hesitate to call if you decide you’d like us to look over your equipment.”

    It would be another minute and a half before there was any response. But Fairburn wasn’t expecting anything except a polite farewell from the freighter. Shresthra apparently had everything under control, and the matter was closed.

    And yet…

    “Com, were you able to find that report?” he asked.

    “Yes, Sir, I think so,” Chief Marulich replied from the com station, touching a key on her console. “Is this it?”

    Fairburn peered at the report. It was a couple of weeks old, filed with System Command by Phoenix’s XO, Commander Vance Sladek. Someone aboard had come up with some scatterbrained idea about the Cascan mass-murderer being aboard Izbica. For some reason Sladek had thought it plausible enough to kick an enquiry back to Manticore. “That’s the one,” he confirmed. “Did you find any follow-up?”

    “Not much of one,” Marulich said, peering at her display. “It looks like Customs checked Izbica’s backtrack and then compared her crew and one of her passengers to the image of the Haven murderer. No matches, so it was marked concluded.”

    Which was all Customs could reasonably be expected to do, Fairburn knew, especially given the source of the suspicion. He’d heard his share of ship’s scuttlebutt over the years, and was surprised that the theory hadn’t included the Flying Dutchman among Izbica’s secret passengers. And without anything more solid, Customs certainly wouldn’t have called in their big brothers in MPARS to board the vessel.

    On the other hand…

    “How many passengers are there?” he asked.

    “The personnel file lists three.”

    “And Customs only checked one of them?”

    “The other two never came down to the planet, so they were never scanned.”

    Fairburn frowned. Izbica had been a full week in orbit, and he’d never seen a freighter crew yet where everyone wasn’t off the ship and on the ground as fast as they could physically get there.

    Yet two of Izbica’s passengers had never left? “She came from Casca, right? Do we know if those two passengers left ship while she was there?”

    “I can check, Sir,” Marulich said doubtfully. “But I doubt we have that information.”

    “And Shresthra said it was one of the passengers who was working on the hyperdrive interface,” Commander Todd murmured from behind Fairburn.

    “Meaning?” Fairburn asked.

    “No idea, Sir,” the XO admitted. “It just seems odd that Shresthra would be letting a passenger into the guts of his ship.”

    Fairburn ran a finger over his lower lip. Odd. Not threatening or suspicious, just odd. Certainly nothing Salamander had reason to look into.

    Then again, there was also no reason why she couldn’t look into it.

    “Helm, plot me a zero-zero intercept course to Izbica,” he ordered. “Make acceleration one point two KPS squared.”

    He swiveled around and eyed his XO. “Let’s go be neighborly.”

 

---

 

    “How much longer?” Shresthra asked, his hands opening and closing with barely-controlled impatience.

    “Two minutes less than when you asked two minutes ago,” Grimm said as soothingly as he felt like being right now.

    Which wasn’t very much. He understood Bettor’s need to continue compiling data and was fully prepared to drag out this interface project as long he needed to. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t starting to wish Shresthra wouldn’t keel over from a heart attack or something.

    “You said it would take three hours,” Shresthra bit out. “It’s already taken four, and you’ve barely started.

    “You did say it would only take three,” the engineer, Pickers, added.

    “That was before I realized how filthy everything in here was,” Grimm countered, waving the board he was working on for emphasis. “I don’t think either of you appreciates just how much this amount of caked grime can affect the current flow. These things are extremely delicate –”

    “Captain?” the voice of the helmsman, Nguema, boomed from the crawlspace intercom. “That Navy ship — the Salamander? — it’s heading our way.”

    Grimm felt his stomach tighten. What the hell?

    “What for?” Shresthra asked. “Damn it all — I told them we don’t need any help.”

    “They know,” Nguema said. “They say they’re just running crew drills and might as well run them this direction.”

    “Very convenient,” Grimm said, his mind racing. At all costs he had to keep that Navy ship out of here. If they came aboard, for any reason, they might take it into their pointy little heads to look into the cargo holds.

    And with Bettor’s sampling equipment unpacked, assembled and sucking in data, that would be a disaster. The very fact that someone was running a secret experiment would be enough of an excuse for Captain Fairburn to commandeer the freighter and haul it back to Manticore for further study.

    “Also potentially very pricey,” he added. “Some systems charge a fee for rescues, you know.”

    “We don’t need a rescue,” Shresthra insisted.

    “Of course we don’t,” Grimm said. “We’ll have this back together in no time.” But not before the Salamander arrived, he knew. Not unless the Izbica got off her rear and opened up a little more distance. “Best way to show them that would be to throw a few gravs on the fire and get moving. Sooner or later, they’ll get tired of chasing us.”

    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nguema scoffed. “I’m not going to blow off energy for that.”

    “They’re not going to charge anything anyway,” Pickers added. “The fee-for-rescue thing is a myth.”

    “And there’s no point in getting any farther out than we already are,” Shresthra concluded. “Especially if we find out you can’t put that back together.” He jabbed a finger at the disassembled interface.

    Grimm clenched his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to do this, certainly not here and now. But the very fact that the Salamander was heading in their direction showed that something had made the captain suspicious. And once the destroyer was alongside there would be nothing he could do except hope and pray that the Manticorans didn’t find Bettor’s precious instruments.

    And Grimm had never been much for praying.

    “We need to get moving,” he told Shresthra, keeping his voice low and calm. Merripen would be on the bridge, he knew, keeping track of things up there. “Please.”

    The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Do we, now,” he said, matching Grimm’s volume. “Why exactly is that?”

    “That’s not important,” Grimm said. “Just call Nguema and have him get us moving.”

    “I see.” Shresthra took a deep breath. “Nguema?”

    “Yes?”

    “Shut down the impellers,” Shresthra ordered. “I repeat: shut down the impellers. Then call the Salamander and request –”

    “Merripen?” Grimm cut him off.

    “I’m here,” Merripen’s voice came faintly from the intercom.

    “Do it.”

    Shresthra frowned at Grimm. “Do what –?”

    He broke off at the soft, distant-sounding crack from the speaker.

    “Nguema?” he called. “Nguema?”

    “I’m sorry,” Grimm apologized. “But I did say please.”

    And before the captain could do more than open his eyes wider in a disbelieving stare, Grimm drew his own gun and shot him. Pickers had just enough time for a surprisingly feminine squeak before Grimm shot him, too.

    “Merripen?” he called again.

    “Bridge is secure,” Merripen’s voice came back, as stolid and emotionless as always. “He didn’t get the wedge down. Want me to get us moving?”

    “Immediately,” Grimm confirmed, slipping the half-cleaned board back into its slot in the interface. “Then go finish off the rest of the crew. I’ll send Bettor to the bridge to watch things while you do that.”

 

---

 

    “Right,” Merripen said. There was a short pause. “Okay, we’re up and running — ninety gees acceleration. How soon before you get that thing back together?”

    “A couple of hours at least,” Grimm said, wishing now that he hadn’t been so thorough in his disassembly. “You just worry about your part of the job.”

    “On it.”

    Keying on his uni-link, Grimm punched for Bettor. “Status report.”

    “It’s coming along,” Bettor said, his voice tight. “Was that a shot I just heard?”

    “It was,” Grimm confirmed. “That RMN ship — the Salamander — decided they needed to get up close and cozy. Shresthra wouldn’t get us moving, so I relieved him of command.”

    “And we’re moving now?” Bettor growled. “Great. That’s not going to look suspicious or anything.”

    “Bottom line for you is that we may have to cut your sampling time short,” Grimm said, ignoring the dig. “Will two or three more hours be enough?”

    “I guess we’ll find out. You want me to lock down here and go to the bridge?”

    “Yes, at least until Merripen finishes his sweep.”

    “Okay. What do I do if the Manticorans call?”

    “Just pipe it down here,” Grimm said. “I’ll handle it.”

 

---

 

    “They’re running?” Fairburn demanded, part of his brain refusing to believe the evidence of his eyes.

    “Confirmed,” Tactical Officer Wanda Ravel said. “She’s up to point eight KPS squared. Seems to have leveled off, though a ship of that class ought to have another few gravities in reserve.”

    “Probably waiting to see our response,” Todd murmured.

    Fairburn scowled at his displays. There was no reason for Izbica to be doing this. None. She was a freighter, damn it, and freighters had only one purpose in life: to fly cargoes back and forth and make money doing it. Izbica was beyond the hyper limit and on her way to Minorca, and the next item on her checklist would be spinning up her hyperdrive and hitting the Alpha band. This extra n-space acceleration made zero sense.

    Unless her new purpose in life was to get away from Salamander.

    Smugglers? Ridiculous. Izbica had been in Manticoran orbit for nearly a week, with every hour bringing the possibility that Customs would suddenly decide to drop in and take a look at her cargo. Granted, the probability that anyone would do something like that was pretty small, but it was still possible. If Captain Shresthra hadn’t been worried about an examination then, why would he be worried about one now?

    The Cascan mass-murderer? Same logical problem.

    So why run from Salamander? And why run now? Could it be because Fairburn, unlike Manticoran Customs, was definitely talking about boarding her?

    Mentally, he shrugged. He could speculate all day without coming up with anything. Sometimes the best way to an answer was just to ask.

    “Increase acceleration to one point four KPS squared and recalculate zero-zero,” he ordered. “Com, get me a laser on Izbica. Let’s see if Shresthra has a logical explanation.”

    “And if he doesn’t?” Todd asked.

    “Then we’d best be ready, hadn’t we?” Fairburn countered. “Bring us to General Quarters, if you please.” He smiled tightly. “We’re on a training exercise, after all. Might as well run the crew all the way up.”

 

---

 

    “Damn,” Grimm muttered.

    “Yeah, I think damn pretty well covers the situation,” Bettor’s tight voice came from the intercom. “Now what?”

    “Let’s not panic,” Grimm soothed as he eased the board he’d just finished back into position. Just three more to reassemble and replace, and the interface would be up and running again. “They can’t possibly catch up with us before we’re ready to get out of here.”

    “They could still fire a missile.”

    “They won’t,” Grimm assured him. “They have no reason to attack and nothing to gain. And missiles are damned expensive.”

    “Yeah.” For a moment Bettor was silent. “Though, you know…maybe we should give them a reason.”

    Grimm blinked. “Come again?”

    “I’m trying to come up with a good reason why we’re running,” Bettor said. “I mean, a reason from their point of view. We can’t be smugglers — if we weren’t worried about Manticoran Customs finding some special cargo a week ago, we shouldn’t be worried about the Salamander finding it now. We can’t be accelerating just for the fun of it — merchant ships run too close to the margin to waste energy that way. What’s left?”

    Grimm pursed his lips. Unfortunately, Bettor had a point. It would take a huge leap of intuition for the Manticorans to guess that the Izbica was secretly collecting data on a wormhole junction that no one even suspected was here. But in the absence of any other reason, someone could conceivable wander off down that path.

    And Grimm’s team’s job wasn’t just to collect data, but to make sure no one knew that they were collecting it.

    “I guess what’s left is the most obvious one of all,” he told Bettor. “They still waiting?”

    “Yes.”

    “Okay. Patch me through.”

    There was a brief pause — “You’re on.”

    “Hello, Captain Fairburn,” Grimm called toward the intercom. “This is Captain Stephen Grimm of the Solarian Merchantman Izbica. How can I assist you?”

    There was a long silence, longer than the normal light-speed time lag for their current distance would account for. Grimm had the third-to-last board halfway reassembled by the time the Salamander finally responded. “Apparently, our records are in error,” Fairburn’s calm voice came over the speaker. “We have Stephen Grimm listed as a passenger, not the captain.”

    “There’s been a slight shake-up in the chain of command,” Grimm told him. “None of your concern. What do you want?”

    Silence descended as his words began their slow, speed-of-light journey to the distant RMN vessel. “What exactly are we going for here?” Bettor asked. “You hoping to convince him we’re pirates?”

    “That’s the big buzz word around here these days,” Grimm reminded him. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get them to that conclusion. Once they do, they won’t look for other possibilities.”

    “What are you going to do if he asks why we didn’t take the ship sooner?”

    “Probably spin some nonsense about hoping Shresthra would pick up some high-tech stuff at Manticore we could add to our loot,” Grimm said. “But I doubt he’ll ask. Their focus now should be on doing whatever they can to catch us.”

    “But they can’t catch us, right?” Bettor asked, his voice sounding just a little apprehensive. “You’re going to have that interface finished in time, right?”

    “Don’t you worry your little head,” Grimm soothed. “A Salamander-class destroyer can pull a maximum of two hundred gees, but they’re not going to go over one-seventy. We can safely do about eighty. At our current vector differential — look, you can run the numbers yourself if you want. Bottom line: we’ll be out of here before they can get even close to a zero-zero.”

    The speaker hissed with a sigh. “If you say so,” Bettor said. “You’d just better be right.”

 

---

 

    Grimm’s — Captain Grimm’s — message ended, and for a long moment Salamander’s bridge was silent.

    Not for lack of anything to say, Fairburn knew. But merely because everyone was thinking the same thing.

    Izbica had been hijacked. And there was only one reason why a simple freighter with no ransom-worthy people aboard would be seized.

    Grimm and his fellow passengers were pirates.

    Pirates.

    The word seemed to hang in front of Fairburn’s eyes. After all these years of sifting through flight data, listening to rumors, and traveling across interstellar space, he and Salamander finally had found real, living, breathing pirates.

    And unless he did something fast, those pirates were going to get away.

    He squared his shoulders. “Increase acceleration to one point eight KPS squared,” he ordered, wishing briefly that his voice was the deep, resonant type. This was history in the making. “And recalculate for zero-zero.”

    There was a brief silence, and he knew what they were all thinking. Eighty percent of maximum acceleration was one point six KPS squared, and standing orders were to stay below that line unless at dire need.

    But Izbica held the proof that would finally and permanently shut up Chancellor Breakwater and the rest of the doubters in Parliament. There was no way in hell that Fairburn was going to let that proof get away.

    The rest of the bridge crew knew that, too. That, or they knew better than to argue with their captain. “One point eight KPS squared, aye,” the helm confirmed.

    “Recalculating zero-zero,” Ravel added.

    “Good,” Fairburn said. “And go to Readiness One,” he added. “Izbica appears to have taken by pirates.” History in the making… “We’re going to take her back.”