HWS Quebec-One, East Yuan Reef
“Dropping, sir.”
With the usual stomach-turning lurch, Quebec-One, now masquerading as the mership Marta Jacovitz, dropped out of pinchspace precisely into the center of the drop zone for the transit across East Yuan Reef. Its hull flared from gray to yellow and purple and back again in the flash of its brilliant orange anticollision strobes.
Commodore Monroe nodded in satisfaction as the ship’s sensor team quickly rebuilt the command and threat plots, the holovids in front of him painting the thin spread of green vectors tracking the few merships crossing the East Yuan. Two red vectors marked the positions of two FedWorld Skipjack class light cruisers, the Seadevil and the Nautilus. Monroe’s pulse sped up a bit as he watched. He could not help himself. The Seadevil and the Nautilus might be two of the oldest warships in the Fed’s order of battle, but they were still a force to be reckoned with. One of their sister ships, the Bonito, had given his ship, the heavy escort Jaguar, a hell of a mauling at the Battle of Cord’s Deep the last time around, a mauling he had been lucky to survive. Still bitter, he remembered the many who had not.
The Seadevil’s officer in command appeared on the command holovid, the flat tones of his heavily accented Standard English interrupting his thoughts. The man in the gray shipsuit looked bored; he sounded bored.
“Merroneth system mership Marta Jacovitz, this is the FedWorld Warship Seadevil. Good morning. Chop vidcomm channel 67. Over.”
“Seadevil, Marta Jacovitz. Roger. Going to 67. Out.”
Monroe braced himself. If they wanted to board and search, Quebec-One’s captain had only seconds to alter vector away from the East Yuan to jump into the safety of pinchspace before a rail-gun salvo took them out. With one eye on the plot, Monroe watched as the duty officer in command ran through the formalities with Seadevil as the ship’s false registration details squirted by laser tightbeam across to the Fed warship.
The Seadevil obviously was not in the mood to worry about a ratty tramp ship from some obscure system out galactic west. With an offhand good-bye, Monroe’s ship was dismissed. “Enjoy the day while you can, my Fed friends,” Monroe muttered, “because things are about to get a whole lot worse.”
Monroe turned back to the command plot. Leaving the drop zone and heading across the reef ahead of them was a FedWorld mership, Liberty of Man. Monroe snorted. Liberty of Man!Watch this space, you Fed pigs, because any minute now Quebec-One will be taking a few liberties of her own, he thought.
“Commodore, sir?”
It was Quebec-One’s captain, a depressingly younglooking lieutenant commander. The man made him feel a million years old. “Yes, Captain?”
“On vector, sir. Target positively identified as the Fed mership Liberty of Man. Closing on target at 1,000 meters per second. Rail guns have a valid firing solution. I intend to fire as soon as we are clear of the reef.”
Monroe smiled as he stood up. It always felt good to send another shipload of Feds to the damnation of Kraa. “Roger that. I’ll be in my cabin. Call me thirty minutes before we leave the East Yuan.”
“Sir.”
The captain of the Liberty of Man yawned. It had been a dull trip so far. Sadly, he had more of the same to look forward to. He yawned again as the navigation plot ran off the seconds until their next jump. Once safely in pinchspace, he would do his daily walk around the ship in an attempt to find out what his first officer-the laziest and most dishonest spacer he had worked with in over thirty years as a mership officer-had been up to behind his back.
He did not get the chance. A single tightly grouped rail-gun salvo from the Merroneth system mership that had been behind them all the way from the Delfin Confederation 200 light-years back ripped into the Liberty of Man’s hull.
The Liberty of Man’s captain did not have time to think before the massive fusion plants powering his main engines lost containment, vaporizing his ship into a huge ball of incandescent gas. Cursing, the officer in command of the Seadevil belatedly sent the ship to general quarters, but it was much too late.
Quebec-One had jumped into pinchspace, with only a fading flash of ultraviolet left to mark her presence.