The Prodigal Emperor (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  “Captain Penwaithe,” Mason said, “Any time now...”

  “We're trying, Commodore,” Penwaithe's voice was distorted from interference. “They've got damned good jammers on those missile platforms, we're having difficulty picking them up at this range.”

  “Captain Oronkwo...” Mason said, his voice pitched to show the impatience that Stavros would feel. They had some visual scans, but at this range they couldn't tell the difference between a research platform and a missile array.

  “We can't get close enough,” Oronkwo's voice held a matching level of impatience. “Their sensors are too good, they're picking off every probe we send and my ships won't last long enough to get anything if we go in ourselves.”

  “Well, my ship won't last much longer under this kind of sustained fire,” Mason growled. This base was supposed to be lightly guarded with just automated systems. None of Halcyon’s intelligence had hinted at this level of firepower for what was supposed to be a minor research facility in a safe star system.

  The wave of missiles came in, but the training Mason had put his squadron through paid off. They didn't have the fire discipline that a military crew would, but they were almost up to standards that he would have tolerated back when he had worked as a pirate in earnest.

  The privateers didn't use interceptor missiles because they were expensive and hard to replace and they used up valuable cargo space. Instead, the Kraken maintained an outer kill radius while the other ships of the squadron operated under that umbrella. Captain Oronkwo's corvettes acted as spotters for that fire, just ahead of the formation and dispersed enough that they couldn't be taken out by an unlucky hit.

  The fifty missiles died well clear of their targets, but some of Mason's ships were dangerously low on projectile ammunition. They have to run out of missiles soon, Mason thought, Nova Corp is a company and no matter how important this place is, accountants always keep their eye on the bottom line.

  On that cue, Mendoza looked up, “Captain Stavros, the enemy missile platforms have gone quiet.”

  “It's about damned time,” Mason growled. Those defenses had fired over five hundred missiles. While some were almost certainly single shot platforms, they had identified at least ten larger platforms that had to have substantial missile storage capacity. Every one of those missiles they had fired added up quickly. They must have something pretty damned special here that they were willing to put up with that level of expense in defending it, Mason thought.

  “Jamming is still up,” Captain Oronkwo said. “But we're able to focus more on their facilities without trying to track inbound. They're rotating their jamming platforms but I think we've identified three of them, coordinates coming online now.”

  “Captain Penwaithe, if your Hammers would engage those platforms,” Mason said, his tone light. “Feel free to burn as much ammunition as you think necessary.”

  “Engaging,” Garret Penwaithe's voice was still tight. Then again, his Hammers had sat idle for most of the fight so far, without any targets. They were big, slow gunboats designed to kill larger ships. Their missile racks could have served as interceptor fire, but the total inbound fire made that almost pointless, a drop in the bucket by comparison. He had to be feeling frustrated.

  A moment later, the jamming cut off with brutal finality. Mason gave a predatory grin as sensor data began to pile up. Thankfully, Nova Corp still went by their profit margins. The company had purchased or constructed weapons platforms, but they had relied on their jamming and weight of fire as their main defense. Their defense screens were strictly civilian grade, more to prevent damage from a collision with debris than any real protection against enemy fire.

  Even better, they had cut corners by building separate energy, sensor, and missile platforms. On that cue, without prompting, Captain Penwaithe took out the sensor platforms and left the weapons platforms blind. “Captain Oronkwo, if you would do the honors by verifying that their weapons are blind?”

  Another flight of drones went out from Oronkwo's corvettes. Mason waited patiently, though he made certain to outwardly fidget. Stavros, after all, wasn't a patient man.

  The probes swept over and around the facility and, after a few minutes, they confirmed that the platforms were blinded. “Message the facility,” Mason said. “Tell them we will graciously accept their surrender and that if they power their weapons platforms down now, we won't destroy them and cost Nova Corp still more money in a useless endeavor.”

  ***

  Captain Garret Penwaithe growled as he looked over the cargo inventory. “What the hell is this?” he demanded as he looked up at the privateer who had delivered the manifest along with the stack of crates ready to be loaded up in the War Dogs transport ship's cargo hold.

  “Don't ask me,” the woman said, “I just checked things off the list. Hell, I don't know what any of that shit is, anyway. I just hope I didn't break anything, it's all labeled with fragile and half of it is in foam cases we found the stuff with.”

  “You should hope you didn't poison yourself or kill yourself from radiation,” Garret growled as he pointed at some of the markings on the cases. “Half this stuff is labeled as hazardous and toxic, the other half is radioactive.”

  “What?” she asked. She looked back at the crates, “Me and my crew, we didn't know nothing about that!”

  Garret bit back a pointed remark that he could see the labels and that the facility probably had similar labels on their storage lockers. “Well, you better get someone to check your people for exposure right away.” He grimaced as he realized the implications. “Leave it all here, I'll get some of my crew suited up to check it all out and make certain it is secure for storage.” He glanced at the manifest and saw that there was specific packing instructions on several of the items. Knowing his luck, if he signed for it now, it would be his people blamed if any of it was damaged in transit.

  The woman had backed away already, her face worried. “Screw my crew, I'm getting checked out first. They can wait in line.” She hurried away and her people followed her out of the hangar bay. Garret restrained a sigh and looked over at Tyrone Barrion. “Get some of our flight crew over here and have them suit up, full hazard gear. We need to go over all of this stuff and make certain it was packed right.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tyrone said quickly.

  Garret looked over to see that Abigail Gordon stood nearby, her perky face serious. “Sir,” she said, “I've some experience around hazardous materials, want me to supervise?”

  “Yes, Ensign, that works,” Garret said with a nod. The last thing he wanted just now was to expose his ex-girlfriend's little sister to whatever was in those crates, but she probably did have more experience with it than anyone else on his crew. Her father had run the safety team at Halcyon's chemical processing plant and she had mentioned that she worked under him for a few years to pay for school. Granted, Garret thought, she told me that when she interviewed for the War Dogs, so I really hope she wasn't exaggerating.

  He transferred her a copy of the manifest and then stepped back and let her take over as the flight crew arrived already suited up in their protective gear. She ran a quick inspection of their gear even as she donned her own and Garret nodded in appreciation before he turned his attention to the rest of his job.

  His Hammers were gunboats designed to engage any ship up to capital size, with mass drivers sized for much bigger ships. They hadn't burned through much ammunition in this fight, but they had stressed the hulls of their gunships. Every time they fired their mass drivers it required a complete inspection and maintenance run. The Nova Corp facility had a full maintenance and servicing bay and since it was far enough out in the Kied system that they hoped no one had noticed the attack yet, Garret had ordered his Hammer crews to make the most of the free parts and the state-of-the-art tool sets.

  He would have been more worried about getting the job done and leaving, but the entire squadron seemed pretty confident after taking the facility. The facility's logs co
nfirmed that the base didn't have any kind of ansible system and that Stavros's jamming had prevented any radio message from getting out to the local garrison.

  That last was the important part to Garret. Kied was officially a holding of the Centauri Confederation. The system had two inhabited worlds, one of them a life-bearing, blue-green orb that was home to over fifteen billion inhabitants and the other a mineral-rich rock with “only” a couple billion. The Centauri Confederation presence was mostly centered around those two worlds, but it was almost certain that they would have patrols to check in on the various mining colonies, fabrication plants, and other facilities throughout the system. It wasn't a military system like Delta Pavonis or Centauri itself, but the forces present would be more than capable of defeating Stavros's squadron.

  The Nova Corp facility seemed fairly secretive, for that matter, Garret thought. The defense and research platforms were hidden within a small debris cloud, the remnants of a dead comet or some other bit of stellar detritus. He wondered if Nova Corp had kept the place secret from the Centauri Confederation's government in order to keep any of their research findings to themselves, rather than being forced to share them with the government-run corporations.

  “Six and Seven both show signs of microfractures,” Warrant Officer Jude Derstele said as he brought the mass spectrometer data up. “I think we can weld them, neither set is at a critical point just now, but...”

  “Nine is the one that we need to be worried about, yeah,” Garret said as he brought up the display. The Nova Corp facility had some very nice evaluation systems for their maintenance work, and Garret had already put in a request to Stavros to see if they could pack those systems up, somehow.

  Hell, he thought, better that than everything on that manifest.

  “I don't think we can weld those fracture points,” Garret said as he refocused on the task at hand. “And we don't have the time to machine new braces for the mount on Nine, much less to replace them here.”

  Jude nodded, his face morose, “She's deadlined, then?”

  “Main gun, anyway,” Garret said, “emergency fire only and we need to remind Caela to go cautious on the throttle too, but I think Nine is flyable. Thank God we found those fractures,” It was a good thing they had the time to do the scan, he knew, else they wouldn't have found them. Over time, the mass driver's fire had torn part of the weapon mount bracing, but on the inside where a physical inspection wouldn't have seen it, not without a full tear-down.

  Until they replaced the bracing it would be extremely dangerous to fire Nine's mass driver. It could rip completely free and tear the gunboat in half... or worse, tear only partially free and shred the entire ship as the grav-plates went out of alignment and generated counter-force across the entire frame.

  Caela was Nine's pilot and she had been with the War Dogs since long before Garret. She was an excellent pilot and gunner and Garret was damned glad that they had caught this before it went any further.

  “Right,” Garret said, “Once they're done inventorying that cargo, make certain our flight crews are briefed on the work and then lets get our birds buttoned up again. I want to be ready to go as soon as the rest of our squadron is finished.”

  He had turned away before he realized that he had referred to Stavros's squadron as “ours” and not “them.” It was an odd realization, for while Stavros had saved Garret's life, he was also a murdering piece of scum, a pirate, and probably perfectly willing to kill Garret when he saw any profit in it. For that matter, most of the rest of his squadron was made up of pirates and privateers who were as bad or worse. Somehow, though, his training had made them work together, something that was entirely unexpected to Garret.

  For that matter, Garret thought, sometimes it's like Stavros is almost a good leader in spite of himself. Certainly there were times that it almost seemed that his flamboyant exterior slipped and revealed a level of thought and consideration that was entirely unexpected.

  Before Garret could think about it anymore than that, Abigail Gordon came up to him, “Well, sir, we've finished the inventory. Nothing broken and the seals on all the really nasty stuff are all still intact. Some of the rest was packed badly, but we got it squared away.”

  “Good,” Garret said. He glanced at the manifest again and his eyes narrowed at the long list, most of which was merely alphanumeric tags. Why in heaven's name they had chosen that other privateer to pack it and deliver it to him he hadn’t a clue. Hell, he thought, there are a couple civilians from the briefing whose job this probably is, why aren't they doing it? The pair hadn't spoken much during the brief on the facility, other than to caution against damage of any of the research labs and the valuable equipment they contained.

  His eyes widened, though, as he did recognize something. “Hey...” he asked in as nonchalant voice as he could manage, “Some of this is alien stuff, right?”

  Abigail gave him a nod, “Yes, sir, I recognized that right off, but the manifest has those items highlighted as priority. I'm not certain why, exactly, the data on the crate just has them listed as 'nonfunctional artifacts, miscellaneous' and the datapad in the crate lists them as non-hazardous.”

  “Right,” Garret nodded. Yet what stuck out to him was the origin of the alien items. They came from Tybar in the Carran system, which was where one of the bigger Zarakassakaraz excavations lay. Garret had read up on what he could find on the extinct alien race after finding an article that said the alien artifacts found at Halcyon were thought to be of Zarakassakaraz origin.

  From what Garret had read, the Zar – as almost everyone without multiple doctorates called them – were a humanoid alien species who had lived in the region of space which contained the Anvil, Carran, and Garris Major systems, though some of their ruins were found as far afield as Nova Roma space. They had died out in some ancient cataclysm or war almost a million years earlier... and their working artifacts were generally considered extremely valuable because their technology was generally usable or adaptable to humans.

  If those parts came from Carran and if they were as important as he suspected, then this might just be the clue that Commodore Pierce needed to put this all together. “Well, before you load it all up, I'd like you to take some pictures of the alien stuff, just to make certain our ham-handed friends didn't break anything. It's nice to have proof that it was like that when we got it, right?”

  Abigail cocked her head at him for a moment, before her eyes went wide and she gave him a nod. “Yeah, I'll get right on that, sir.”

  I had better talk to her again, Garret thought, when we get a bit more privacy and see if she knows any more than she's told me about what they found at Brokenjaw Mountain.

  ***

  “Ah, this is the life,” Commodore Stavros said, his feet up on his console and his black leather boots polished to a high sheen. He puffed at a cigar, taken from the facility administrator's office and blew smoke rings into the air.

  Lauren Kelly just rolled her eyes as she ran down her checklist. Most of the rest of the crew had become so inured to his activities that they would take it amiss if he didn't act that way. For that matter, Lauren had come to compartmentalize her thoughts of Mason and Stavros. The one was a chauvinistic, self-indulgent pig and the other was the man that she could privately admit that she was coming to love. One was the public appearance and the other a persona adopted in an effort to make right after years of villainy every bit as bad as Stavros. Lauren had spent many long, wakeful hours thinking about the nature of love and redemption.

  It was Mason who had cautioned that the facility's senior administrator had become entirely too cooperative, pointing out expensive parts and equipment that would take “only a little longer” to get loaded up. As Stavros, he couldn't express those cautions, but he had been able to exaggerate his own eagerness to stay to the point that most of the other ships captains got anxious to leave. Still, Lauren worried that it was too late. Granted most of their cargo ships were away already, but Captain Montago an
d his crew were still at work disassembling a replacement main battery for his ship.

  Lauren privately doubted the advanced energy weapons used by Nova Corp's automated defenses would replace the antiquated main gun from Montago's elderly Independence-class light cruiser. Still, she wasn't an engineer, so she couldn't say that it wouldn't work.

  “Captain,” Mendoza said. “I read ten vessels that just emerged from shadow space at seventy thousand kilometers.” The sensor officer's voice was tight. “They're bringing their targeting systems online!”

  Stavros's feet dropped off his console with a smooth motion and his voice was relaxed despite the tension that surged through the bridge, “Orders to all ships, defense screens online and commence jamming. Transports are to move to course...” Lauren could see him do the rough calculations in his head, “Three one eight. We'll begin plotting our shadow space jump as soon as all ships are up and operational.”

  Lauren pursed her lips at that. If it were up to her, they would jump now and leave the pirates still too busy looting to their fates. She'd seen enough of their “skills” to know that they were no more than dead weight in a surprise fight like this.

  As if to underscore that thought, Captain Montago's voice came on the net, “Commodore Stavros, we'll need as much time as you can give us. We've got the weapon off its mount but it'll take us some time to get it transferred to my ship.”

  Stavros leaned into his display and Lauren saw anger loom in his eyes, “Montago, get your people back to your ship and get it moving. My sensors show three battlecruisers, two heavy cruisers, and a screen of five destroyers. If your ship isn't under way in the next three minutes, we'll see if you can handle that all on your own.” His threat was all the more ominous from the way he didn't even raise his voice, Lauren thought.