Misjump Read online

  Gregor headed to the cockpit several hours before the ship was due to reenter normal space. If the jump had been sloppy then there could be a degree of unpredictability, but this was a well-mapped route even if the entry had been at speed. He watched the timer count down, his hands on the controls. At one minute to emergence, he patched the comm through to Fumi. “Fumi, need you to go inactive for emergence, yes? Will need AI to be responsive.” He watched the screen, expecting her to freeze in place.

  “Yeah, about that, I have been thinking. I don’t think that is the way to go here,” said Fumi.

  “We have not much time. Discuss later, please. Will you please free up AI?” asked Gregor, more giving an order than asking.

  “Greg, I can see things from the inside, and I know the AI better than anyone on this ship. I know what it is good for and what it isn’t. It doesn’t cope well with unknown situations, it is barely half trained and it might do something unexpected. I don’t think that you should use it here.” Fumi’s words were clipped and flat.

  Gregor grunted. “If trouble, you think that I should have everything aboard be on manual? Not a good idea. Not happening. Not have time to argue.”

  “No,” said Fumi. “When you were navy, you relied on crewmates rather than an AI system. Well, I have more access to the ship than anyone else and I have read every manual that we have on the systems. I will be more useful to you than the AI could ever be. Trust me, Greg. I can help here.”

  Decisiveness was considered an asset in combat pilots. Gregor looked at Fumi’s simulated face for a long second. “You have disabled my access to the priority system, haven’t you?”

  Fumi looked both smug and guilty at the same time. “Well, yes, while we were still discussing it. Is it going to be a problem between us?

  Gregor looked over at the timer. It read 00:00:11. “Later maybe.” He sounded the re-emergence warning and switched to the set of information displays. He would want dust shields up and in-system drive operational as soon as he could after emergence. He looked up to the corner of the status screen where the countdown was shown. Four seconds, three … the number froze as the main screen changed from neutral grey to a starscape. The stars seemed motionless except for one point of light that was moving relative to the Sarafina. Displays changed without Gregor ordering them as Fumi operated some of the non-flight systems. The moving dot acquired a tag that followed it reading SDB1. That would be the system defence boat and they often worked in pairs. A status window overlaid the starscape showing the in-system drive and dust shield as operational. It did not usually appear there. Gregor reached for the touch screen that displayed the comms system and switched to the standard frequency.

  “SDB, SDB, this is Sarafina, a Camel II trader. Have jumped from Neuholme. Please advise for permission to enter this system.” Gregor waited for a response. A few seconds later, numbers appeared under the text giving a vector for the guard ship, the acceleration rapidly increasing.

  Fumi’s voice came over the cabin speaker. “The SBD has not sent any radio signals and they look to be raising their shields and powering up weapons.” At the same time, the secondary display changed to graphs.

  Gregor glanced at them. He knew how to read them and what they meant. That was a ship expecting to be in a battle. There was no way that the Sarafina could fight, but it could run. Gregor pushed the in-system drive to the maximum. A message flashed on screen almost too quick to read, asking for confirmation of emergency power before it was gone. The Sarafina accelerated along the vector that it already had from the rolling jump, the hull vibrating as the cooling systems went into overdrive. The SDB was also accelerating, but it was a stern chase and that would make it harder for them. There was no way that the merchant could outrun the compact fighting platform that was a system defence boat in the long run, but there was nothing that it could do if the Sarafina made it to the jump point. The reason that a ship the size of an SDB could carry so much weaponry and armour was that they didn’t have jump capability or the mass of jump fuel. They would be fine as long as the SDB didn’t launch a missile. As Gregor thought that, a second moving dot appeared on the display, accelerating away from the hostile ship. It was making 80g, much better than even a lightly loaded trader could manage. Gregor sounded the emergency stations alert. There wasn’t much that the rest of the crew could do, but it might help to get Ivo in the engine room. He looked at the vectors and started to dead reckon a vector that gave them a chance against the missile and still retain a hope of getting to the jump point. With the relative accelerations, he didn't see anything that looked at all hopeful. Just at that moment, multiple alarms sounded with status messages popping up on numerous screens in searing red.

  “ATMOSPHERE BREACH: Passenger deck

  AIRLOCK FAILURE: Passenger Airlock

  WARNING: Unsafe waste jettison.

  WARNING: Abnormal event to rear of ship.”

  Gregor mumbled half a curse, trying to figure out what had happened. The missile was nowhere near them and couldn’t possibly have hit yet. Was it a laser? They were nearly impossible to aim at that range. He didn’t have time to look with a missile on them. He yelled into an open comm channel. “Ivo, check damage and fix leaks NOW!” Gregor fired attitude jets as well as changing the vector of the in-system drive, hoping that at least one of the systems was still working. Both responded well. The main screen switched to show vectors of objects in the area without him asking it to, and he noticed a lot of small hot chunks of something behind the ship. Was that wreckage? A civilian ship like this would be hard-pressed to survive a hit from an SBD, but there didn’t seem enough junk for major damage. The missile had not yet changed course to follow the Sarafina. He could hear that Fumi saying something, but he couldn’t make out what the words were over the alarms. The alarms stopped abruptly, faster than he could have cancelled them, and Fumi repeated what she was saying, her words speeded up to the limit of understandability. “Resume previous course. Make for the jump point.”

  Gregor’s eyes flicked over the displays, looking at the options. If that missile hit them, they were dead. There was debris behind them that might confuse the missile and, on about the same vector, the SDB, which would be dangerous if it got in range. Peeling off from their previous vector took away the only cover that they had. The old vector might be the best one now. He pushed the controls over, sliding back into the chosen course. The missile was still closing.

  “Ivo, what is damage? Can we still jump?” Gregor shouted in the direction of the audio pickup.

  “Err … Yes to jump capable. Explosive decompression in passenger section and life support has issues. Working on them,” replied Ivo, clearly moving as he spoke.

  “Do you have impact point for me?” asked Gregor.

  “No,” said Ivo, “No hull damage that I can see. I think we have hull integrity.”

  “Air got out somehow, Ivo. There is a hole,” said Gregor.

  “Opened both airlocks rigged safety good for jump,” the words were flat, fast and barely recognisable as Fumi.

  Gregor looked back at the display to see a flower of flame silently opening on the rear-view display. The caption over it changed to “Missile contact lost.” It must have hit or been triggered by some of the debris. Given the range and the Sarafina’s acceleration, the explosion was not going to be a problem for them, but it was in the middle of the flight path for the SDB. The pilot of the SDB must have realised the same thing as the vector was changing, swinging wide of the volume of space affected by the high-speed debris from the Sarafina and the missile. As he watched, a second dot appeared from the SDB labelled “Missile 2.” It pulled away from the accelerating ship. It would need time to get to them. Without the velocity retained from the rolling jump, the Sarafina would already be dead. The label changed, adding a vector and a time to intercept with the trader: 93 seconds +/- 2 seconds. The pattern of fuel usage changed the mass and acceleration, but the simple mind controlling the rocket motor would usually push
for the shortest intercept. The time to intercept for the SDB was showing as 204 seconds +/- 24 seconds. Gregor’s eyes flicked back to the navigation screens. The second jump point was 97 seconds away, +/- 0. He needed to find another four seconds to have a chance, six seconds to be safe. The SDB was not going to be in effective range, but the missile could reach them.

  A military ship would have had options, but this was a civilian trader. There were no electronic countermeasures or casters to send out a spray of small objects to interfere with missiles or lasers. He could use the attitude jets to get a little boost, a very little. He selected the rearward jets and set them to full thrust. The time to intercept for the missile changed to 91 seconds +/- 3 seconds with two seconds elapsed. That was better than he had expected. They must have lost a fair bit of mass when the atmosphere left the passenger deck. The jump point was now showing as 93 seconds away, uncertainty one second. That was almost enough if the uncertainty worked out in his favour. At that moment, lasers started from the SDB, the gunnery officer apparently coming to the same conclusion. The initial shots were wide of the hull according to the display, the beams invisible in the vacuum. Gregor threw the ship into a roll around its axis of movement, reversing the direction a second or two later. The ship was roughly oval in cross-section, and shots that were not on the centre of mass would be likely to miss. Those that hit would still do damage but spread over a larger area. It was a tactic of desperation, designed to protect core systems. He took a breath, trying to think what else might help. Reducing the mass further could help, but stripping the atmosphere from occupied sections of the ship wasn’t an option. They had already dumped waste. The beacon was back in deep space so they couldn’t jettison that.

  Gregor noticed a tiny course correction applied by the AI or by Fumi. “Ty che, blyad?” he swore. They were already on an optimal course before the correction. If anything, this lined them up better with the missile. Yes, perfectly with the missile and the SDB. The realisation showed on his face. The SDB was now having to fire past its own missile at a spinning ship and were as likely to hit the missile as the ship given the uncertainties involved. The correction was a work of genius but added another second to the time to reach the jump point. As the missile closed, it would be easier for the SDB to target them, but this still improved their chances. The rate of fire from the SDB dropped to occasional shots of opportunity. Some of those might hit, but the hull could take a little abuse as long as the field projectors stayed intact and the atmosphere stayed inside the ship. That was a point. “Suit up now!” he shouted towards the comm. The inside of the ship was not vacuum hardened, but the crew would probably survive a slow decompression in suits.

  The intercept time for the SDB started to increase and the vector changed. They were trying to get a better angle of fire, but it would increase the range, making it a marginal tactic. The distance meant that they would need a good twenty seconds to be sure of a clear shot. Gregor didn’t like the numbers even though the missile was the main threat. At the range that the SDB was at and with the irregular spin, they would need luck to get a disabling shot. Gregor remembered something that he had heard in training. “When they are attacking, they need to get lucky once. When you are defending, you need to be lucky every time.” He had hoped that he would never need to know that again. Civilian piloting was supposed to be safer.

  Gregor continued to spin the ship, reversing or changing the rate of spin randomly in the hope of confounding the enemy gunnery officer. There were a few flashes of vaporised hull plate as invisible beams intercepted the Sarafina, but they were glancing strikes that scarred without penetrating deeply. The seconds slipped away as the missile got closer. It wasn’t like the holos; battles in space were made up of brief periods of complex activity and then long waits. It couldn’t be any other way given the distances involved. The time to intercept for the missile dropped to thirty seconds then twenty, the uncertainty falling away as it got closer. There were eighteen seconds to jump point and seventeen seconds to intercept. They were dead if nothing changed. His hands stayed still on the controls, letting the missile close as he thought. He rapidly started setting up a course change, racing to enter it in time. Halfway through the entry, the rest of the changes appeared, faster than he could enter them. Fumi was helping in ways that the AI never could. He waited, the seconds crawling by as the missile closed. At four seconds to impact, he triggered the sequence. The primary in-system drive went off and the underbelly thrusters fired, using almost the last of the manoeuvring fuel. The ship lurched upward relative to its alignment and the missile passed under its belly, a handful of metres away. It crossed in front of the bridge still accelerating but cut its jets a moment later as it executed a high G turn. It was a wide arc, the missile’s velocity suddenly a burden. The Sarafina was off track for the jump point and Gregor slammed the controls over to get them back to the invisible point in space. A section of hull flashed to vapour as he turned and re-engaged the in-system drive, a victim of a laser. The missile completed its turn as the cargo ship started to accelerate away and new intercept numbers flashed on the screen. A warning blazed at the bottom of the screen “Safe flight envelope exceeded. Caution recommended.” Gregor ignored it, pressing the joystick harder as if somehow that would give the ship more speed. The missile shimmied as it overcorrected its turn and reignited the main rocket. The Sarafina lurched forward, the beams of the SDB raking the hull, leaving trails as if from a huge claw. Damage reports started to fill the screen. Alarms sounded and the main screen blinked out, replaced by a featureless grey. “Entry successful, all systems in jump mode,” appeared on the screen.

  Gregor slumped back in the pilot’s chair and ran his hands over his sweat-streaked face. He ached as if he had run a marathon. He should look at the damage reports, but it would have to wait a moment. Gregor waited for his heart rate to slow and swallowed hard, aware of a sour salt taste in the back of his throat. He took a deep breath and addressed the comm.

  “Ivo, have you more damage report, please?” His voice sounded calmer than he had expected.

  “Yes. I have isolated the passenger deck systems and I should be able to get the system back online for the … okay, that is … life support is restarting for the bits of the ship that are still holding pressure. I don’t understand how it reset itself," said Ivo.

  A polite throat clearing sound came over the comm. “That was me,” said Fumi. “I boosted my run time to help with the systems but getting life support back was a lower priority and—”

  “The hell it is!” interjected Jax. “Maybe you don’t need air anymore but we all do.”

  Fumi sighed, loudly and obviously. “Yes, I know, which is why there is still air in the bit of the ship that you are in. The damage to the passenger decks is not that bad and it stopped us getting a missile in the ass, which would have removed the same air that you are so very fond of. Ivo, I think we can run about twenty percent pressure into that area. Will that prevent more damage?”

  “Yes, I think so. We can shunt nitrogen and CO2 in there preferentially as no-one is going to be breathing it,” said Ivo. “We are going to get through filters faster than I would like,” he added. “Less total air means that we have to cycle it faster.”

  “Alive is good,” said Fumi. “I am seeing multiple hull damage reports, but I don’t know what that means for the jump field. It seems to be holding and so I am guessing that it is good enough.”

  “Better than not holding, for sure,” said Gregor. “I will check the integrity where I can get to. Anyone want to help, feel welcome.”

  “On it,” replied Ivo.

  Chapter 14

  The damage report was longer than Gregor had hoped but shorter than he had expected. The Sarafina had come away from a fight with an SDB with all essential systems intact and, for an unarmed trader, that was little short of miraculous. The warp field was holding even if it was thinner than it should be in spots. They had lost a lot of oxygen when the passenger deck was dep
ressurised and the scrubbers were having to work flat out to keep the quality within specification, but they would last past the end of the current jump. The main problem with the ship was simple. They would have dry tanks when they re-entered normal space. That gave them manoeuvre drive only, and if they couldn’t get fuel, then that was the end of the line. No ship did a double jump without topping off the tanks if there was a choice. This would have been less of an issue if the destination system was one where fuel was easy to get, but the nearest jump point out of Ironstone was to a mining colony that was working a dense asteroid field. Given their experience at Neuholme, none of the crew were confident that it would be there when they arrived. Gregor sighed. There wasn’t much that he could do about the damage and less that he could do about the fuel and whatever lay at the end of the jump. He rubbed his eyes, grimaced and pulled up the report from Fumi. He had skimmed it, but it was time to give it some serious attention.

  There were captures from cameras and sensors throughout the report. It read strangely to Gregor and it was evident that Fumi didn’t have any experience with this sort of analysis, but she had done a remarkably good job considering. There was only so much that the sensor package on a civilian vessel could pick up, but if it could be read, Fumi had logged it. As he read through the data, a pattern started to emerge. There were things that the rest of the crew should know and they might have some ideas on what it meant. He scheduled a meeting for the afternoon of the next day. That would give him a chance to go over the data again after a night’s sleep. He didn’t think that he would make a lot of sense in his current state. He climbed out of the pilot’s chair and headed to his bunk. In theory, the alarms would wake him if anything happened, but ships move fast. By the time the alarm went off, most things would be over, often lethally over, before he was out of bed. He didn’t let it worry him.