Command Authority, page 30
part #5 of Last Hunter Series
He produced a pistol from the small of his back and aimed it toward the two of them. Professor Prescott raised his hands, but she didn’t move. She’d halfway been expecting this, so it didn’t shock her that badly.
“Don’t you think it will cause problems if we disappear? Particularly since the two of us are somewhat critical to the war effort?”
“It is less than optimal,” he admitted. “I wish you hadn’t pushed the boundaries in this particular way. You see, the people I work for would be very unhappy if the information on those data chips became public knowledge.”
“We’ve already recovered the ship the data came from,” she offered. “In fact, we probably have more access to the information you’re talking about than you did at the time. What’s so secretive that you have to betray the Confederation like this at a time of war?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m betraying the Confederation, but there’s more at stake than you realize. Those data chips contain information that would be very embarrassing to certain parties. I’ve come to the conclusion that what they’re doing will run into serious complications, but it’s already too late to stop what’s in progress. There’s also a large amount of money involved in the matter.”
“Ah,” she said with a slight smile. “This has something to do with the conspiracy.”
“That business with Vice Admiral LaChasse? What makes you think that?”
“What else could it be? Tell me, Mister Rowe, are you part of that same conspiracy? We thought it was Rear Admiral Allen because he had information he shouldn’t have had. Now I’m wondering if he got it from you.”
“You’re far too perceptive for your own good,” he said as he pulled the trigger.
Instead of a gunshot, there was the sound of air being expelled under high pressure, and she felt a stinging in her side. Before she could do much more than yelp, Rowe had twitched the gun to the side and shot the professor.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said with a smirk as she felt numbness shooting through her body. “It’s a paralytic. You’re not going to lose consciousness, but I’m afraid you’ll lose the ability to move your limbs. As for what I’m going to tell the others, I’m not sure. Considering everything, it might be best if I pretend the cutter crashed and we all perished. You’ve caused me a lot of problems, Miss Gane. I assure you I’ll make you regret having done so by the time we’re finished.”
He rose and put the pistol into his waistband. “I suppose I should go back up front and make certain that we’re on course. I’ll erase the data about our flight path from the traffic control systems before we vanish, and then I’ll have to make certain the cutter crashes with enough force that they won’t be finding anybody after we’ve departed.”
By the time he’d departed, leaving the door open, she couldn’t even twitch a finger. All she could do was sit there and stare at the door through eyes that wouldn’t move.
Regex? Can you still hear me?
I’m not sure. I’m trying to move my hands, but nothing happens. I suppose it’s a long shot, but can you move them?
Nothing happened for long minutes, but without warning, her hand rose from where it was sitting, and she seemingly examined it where it now hovered in front of her face.
It looks like you’re having some luck and are immune to the stuff. Can you move more than my hand?
She thought about that and wasn’t sure what the answer was. Neither she nor Regex knew how to fight. If it came to a physical confrontation, they would lose. She attempted to move her body, but nothing happened. This was even more irritating than usual.
Take out my comm and see if we can send a message to David or Tina via text. Tell them what’s happening to us.
She tried, but the very first thing she noticed was that there was no connectivity. Her comm wasn’t connected to anything. The cutter was shielded. So much for the easy way of getting the information out.
I suppose we’re going to have to do this the hard way. As long as he doesn’t suspect we can move, we may be able to make something happen. Get on our hands and knees and crawl over to the door and look inside. We need to see the situation without letting him know we’re mobile. Make no noise and don’t rise because he might see movement over his shoulder.
Regex moved her body much more delicately than she would have, but she wasn’t going to complain because slow was better. When they got to the door leading into the pilot’s compartment, she saw their attacker was seated in the right-hand seat, and the other was empty. She couldn’t tell if he was strapped in at this point, but he was manipulating the controls, and there was a fair amount of space around him that they could use to get at him.
There was a fire extinguisher by the hatch, which might be useful. Unfortunately, the metal clamp holding it in place would make noise if they messed with it.
How certain are you that you could grab it? Does it have a safety? Could you fire it if you had to? That seems pretty chancy.
He wasn’t wrong. I suppose we don’t have a choice. Do it.
Regex crawled up behind the chair and leaned to the right-hand side enough so that she could see the pistol protruding out of Rowe’s belt. It was dangerous for him to have a weapon inserted into his pants. What if it went off? Considering what might be hit, she wasn’t sure she’d have risked it.
His shirt was partially draped over the weapon, so until they had it in hand, she wouldn’t know how it worked. Surely it had a safety.
You’ll have to grab it fast because we can’t afford to have him get hold of our hand. If he gets a grip on us, we’re done for. Grab the weapon and move back as quickly as you can. Keep the gun in your line of sight so I can try to figure out how to disarm the safety. Once that’s done, aim it at him and pull the trigger.
Regex grabbed the weapon like a striking cobra. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as adept at manipulating her hands as she was. Or, maybe she would have been just as clumsy. He ended up grabbing the shirt around the weapon, and it didn’t pull cleanly free when he tried to draw it out.
Rowe grabbed her hand with a startled oath, and the two of them struggled for the weapon. He wasn’t strapped to the chair and started to rise. That’s when the gun went off. Rowe screamed and tried to strike at her but fell over the back of the chair after taking a couple of swings, only one of which struck her with a glancing blow on the shoulder. He lay sprawled there, unmoving as the drug took effect.
Put the gun down before we accidentally shoot ourselves. We need to find a way to tie him up before we get to where we’re going. In fact, we need to change course because he’s probably got associates at the destination. We don’t know how much time we have left.
There wasn’t anything that would work for tying him up, but she was able to talk Regex through putting Rowe in the other control couch and securing the restraints. They left Rowe’s hands under the seat belt, so hopefully, he’d have difficulty moving them when the time came.
That done, she had Regex sit in the pilot seat and set the weapon on the side away from their kidnapper. She wanted it handy if she had to shoot him again.
She considered herself a technical person, but looking at the controls, she wasn’t sure what she needed to do to get them off autopilot and headed somewhere else. Or even if they were on autopilot. He had been messing with the controls. The craft was flying over the city on a level course, so she had no way of knowing.
This wasn’t going to work. They needed someone that could fly a cutter. The only person she knew could do so was the professor, and he was paralyzed.
Search that guy’s pockets and see if he has an antidote to the paralytic. It’s a long shot, but he may have something that could bring us out of this.
Let’s look for it first.
Somewhere, there would be an antidote. It might be at their destination, which wouldn’t do them any good.
Regex found an autoinjector in Rowe’s right breast pocket. A check showed it had half a dozen doses. It wasn’t labeled, so there was a risk in using it. What were the odds that he had poison in his pocket? It was far more likely this was the antidote to the paralytic, but she’d be taking a chance with someone else’s life if she used it.
Or she could take a risk with her own. Without considering the matter further, she pressed it to her arm and activated it. It stung as it injected something into her body. If it was the antidote, she hoped it had more than one dose, or this wouldn’t do them a lot of good.
After a few seconds—even though she didn’t feel that much different—her fingers twitched a little when she tried moving them. That was a good sign. She kept doing that, and within a minute, she’d regained control of her hand.
Retaking control of her body, she staggered back to the professor and injected the antidote into his arm. He quickly started twitching and, in a few minutes, regained the ability to move.
“That’s a convenient side effect of having Regex inside your body,” the older man said. “I assume you’ve captured him.”
She nodded. “We don’t want to go where he was taking us, so if you could turn this cutter around and get us somewhere safe, I’d feel much better. Maybe you could also find what’s jamming us and turn it off. This is one of those times where I wish I had the knowledge to fly something like this, but I don’t.”
He smiled. “Since you’ve saved our lives, I’d be happy to teach you to fly a cutter. It’s not that hard. In fact, why don’t you stand behind me, and I’ll explain what we’re doing as I change course and take us back to where we came from?”
Even though the professor told her what he was doing, she found herself more focused on watching Rowe. Who did he really work for, and what were his end goals? Now that he’d made the mistake of revealing himself, they might get some answers to long-standing questions.
If, of course, Commodore Romanoff managed to defend the planet against the Novarites. Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter.
32
Derek varied the power he gave the independent quantum drive by the teeniest amounts and noted slight differences in the distance traveled. He was leery of giving too much energy and potentially putting them into a catastrophic position if the drives developed some kind of harmonic resonance, so he restrained himself.
They were arcing around the incoming Novarite warships, and he had noted where they’d be when he arrived. Those plans went awry almost immediately as the five smaller warships changed course toward Hunter. With the enemy splitting their forces, they had to engage one set and allow the other to proceed onward.
He shot an updated battle plan to Amanda, and they discussed the various options. With the smaller ships just having phased packet plasma guns, the risk to the ship itself wasn’t too great. They’d be able to destroy some weapons on the surface and pit the hull, but it should be something they could handle. The larger warships and their potentially more powerful weapons would be a lot more dangerous.
At least this would allow them to test battle maneuvers with the skip drive, as the commodore had called it. They had no idea what the boundary area would do to the incoming plasma packets, and he looked forward to seeing if they had any effect. If the energized boundary disrupted the packets, they would do much less damage. At least he hoped so.
Since he couldn’t vary the distance they took with each skip, he varied the time between skips to keep the enemy guessing when they’d arrive. He also discovered he could change where they popped out by minor alterations to the ship’s course. That allowed him and Amanda to plot out where they’d arrive more accurately and make a pass at the enemy that wouldn’t directly go through the center of them.
“We’re about ready to make our run, sir,” he said. “Three skips should get us along their periphery and allow us to open fire. We’ve targeted their outbound side, so the larger ships won’t be able to fire at us even if they have something with that kind of range.”
“As soon as we come out, I’ll start the timer on our weapons,” Amanda said. “We don’t know how close we’ll be, so we might not be in laser range. The phased packet plasma guns have a longer effective firing envelope in any case.”
“Remember this is a test pass,” the commodore said. “We just want to see what happens. If we can damage them in passing, that’s great, but we don’t want to do anything that would cripple ourselves. Make the first two jumps at the same exact interval and then delay our arrival by four seconds. Let’s see if we can make them fire early and waste some of their ammunition.”
Derek laid out the course and initiated the skips. He put twenty seconds between the first two skips and then twenty-four in the last. They were already under fire when they came out near the Novarite warships. Apparently, their trick hadn’t worked as well as they’d hoped, but he had to admit that what was happening was spectacular.
The energized boundary area was scrambling the packets of plasma, and they were coming apart, sending their energy everywhere. Even more interesting, it seemed the boundary was absorbing some of that energy and flushing it out all along the coverage area from one side of the ship to the other and from front to back. He suspected they were glowing a lot more than they had before.
Amanda fired her missiles and lasers as soon as possible, and once the boundary became less of an obstacle, the enemy weapons fire began slamming into their hull. He wouldn’t say it was a fair exchange because their nuclear missiles were much more potent than what the enemy was shooting at them. That didn’t mean they escaped without damage, but he held off on skipping away because they were coming out ahead in the exchange of fire.
The damaged enemy warship exploded first, quickly followed by two of its companions. One of them veered off course as Amanda continued firing lasers into it, but the last one charged ahead and continued hounding them with packets of plasma even as Derek rotated the ship to try to spread the damage.
He half expected the commodore to order them to skip away, but he didn’t. He must have grasped what they were trying to do and agreed. In another fifteen seconds, the fight was over. All five ships had been crippled or destroyed. Three were gone, and the other two were floating wrecks. They’d have to pry the survivors out since they were determined to kill anything that came after them. It wouldn’t be fun, but it had to be done.
That left the two larger warships for them to deal with. Those were continuing toward the planet and showed no inclination to slow down. They weren’t anywhere close to being within weapons range, but the planet was in danger, nonetheless.
“Damage report,” the commodore said.
The engineering officer rattled off the information, but it sounded like other than just some losses to their weapons on the surface, they were still intact. There had been no hull breaches. That was good.
“That was a good plan, Derek and Amanda,” the commodore said. “But I’m not sure we’ll be able to repeat it safely with the larger vessels. We don’t know what kind of weapons they have, but they’ll have an opportunity to fire them. I think the safest thing we can do is come out directly behind them. Odds are whatever they’re shooting will go up forward, and we don’t want to allow them to test it on us at point-blank range.”
The comm on his chair chimed for his attention. “Bridge.”
“Engineering. It looks like taking all those little jumps one after the other did start a bit of resonance, and I need to take time to go over the engines and make sure we’re not about to suffer a catastrophic failure without any warning. I realize doing this in the middle of a battle is a bad idea, but there you are.”
The commodore grimaced. “Your timing is pretty bad, but you’re right that we can’t take a chance. How long are you asking for?”
“Ten minutes. I’ll try to do it faster, but I’m not making any promises.”
“Do the best you can. I don’t think that will allow them to get in firing range of the planet, but we don’t know for sure. It’s a lot closer than I’d prefer, and I don’t want to worry everybody on the surface.”
“I’ll call you soon as I know. Engineering out.”
Romanoff turned his attention to Derek. “I assume you can use different power levels to affect how far we go with every skip. How much were you able to vary our distance?”
“Not as much as I’d like, sir. Worse, we’re sitting ducks once we come out, and they’ll have time to react to our presence. I don’t know how nimble those big ships are, but we can’t rule out the possibility that they’ll be able to spin in place quickly enough to bring their weapons to bear before we can skip away. Even if we pop out right where we want to, we’ll be there for a minimum of twenty seconds before we can get out if we stick to the conservative limit.”
