The Lunar Gambit: Starship Fairfax Book 1 - The Kuiper Chronicles Read online

  A scream welled up inside Lucas, one he didn’t have the strength to voice. His jaw locked and he cursed through his teeth. The pirate ducked into his shuttle, and the doors to the chamber hissed shut.

  It was all a blur. He was running to the bay doors, pistol out, firing at the glass. No good. It was built specifically to block that class of weapon. He was screaming now, pounding on the doors with his fists, feeling the cold steel bruise his hands. Sock’s voice was as cheerful as ever, oblivious.

  “Chamber decompressing. Shuttle away in ten, nine, eight…”

  Lucas tried to comm the bridge, but no one answered. As soon as the shuttle was free of the Fairfax, it was clear why; the deck rocked and he swayed, struggling to stay on his feet. They were being fired upon. He turned and ran back to the corridor. Another hit and he fell forward against the wall. He tried his comm again.

  “Odin to the Bridge, do you read?”

  The response was a garbled up mess of sirens and shouts. He thought he heard Caspar in the background, complaining she didn’t have enough ordinance left for proper defenses. Randall’s voice cut in and out.

  “Officer Odin… with you?”

  “Say again Bridge, you’re half-static.” Lucas puffed as he jogged down the hall toward the lift.

  “Is Captain Harris with you?”

  He reached the lift and clutched the stitch in his side, grimacing. “No,” he panted. “Harris is… he’s dead, Randall. They shot him.” He stumbled into the lift. Just a few seconds away now.

  Randall was silent for a moment. Then, “Orders, Sir?”

  “Orders?”

  He shook his head to clear the shock. Of course—he was the captain now. He was in charge of this whole sloppy operation.

  “What kind of ammo we have left?”

  The scent of lavender still lingered in his memory, an he made the connection.

  Over the comm it sounded like a fight had broken out. He caught snippets of Randall telling the crew the bad news, and then for a moment it seemed like everyone was shouting at once. Caspar was going on about how she had just enough juice to take out the bastards who’d shot Harris. Lucas realized she meant to shoot the shuttle out of space, and his mouth went dry. Randall made the order. The doors opened and Lucas lunged onto the bridge.

  “No, stop!” he shouted. “Hold your fire!”

  As one, the crew turned to look at him in confusion. Randall pointed at Caspar.

  “Belay that order, Lieutenant. Fire when ready.”

  “Belay that belayment!” Lucas rushed to the chair, which the helmsman was standing beside. “Sock, what are the current whereabouts of Ambassador Taurius?”

  Caspar looked at Randall, an eyebrow quirked. Her eyes burned for blood. “Sir? Shall I belay the belayment of the belayment?”

  Randall shook his head, his mouth hanging open. “I can’t keep up. What’s going on, Sir?”

  “Ambassador Taurius is not onboard the Fairfax,” Sock said.

  “They took him.” Lucas sat on the edge of the chair. “Alive, I think. That’s their bounty.”

  “Or what they wanted all along.” Tompkins had reached the bridge.

  “Gunner, grab the second munitions station.” For once, the kid didn’t correct Lucas about his name. Good. He probably would have thrown something at him this time. “Lieutenant.” He eyed Caspar. “What have we got?”

  She sighed, a bitter, stressed sound. “A bunch of headaches.” She swung back to her console. “I can get you a half-charged plasma burst or two, and a quarter array of non-nuclears.”

  “How many quarter arrays?”

  “A quarter array. Just the one. Sir.”

  Things just kept getting better and better.

  “Missile offensive detected,” Sock announced. “Impact in seventeen, sixteen…”

  “Evasive maneuvers, Sock!” Lucas gripped the sides of the chair, and the dispenser beneath his console dinged.

  “Order confirmed. A plate of transducers.”

  “Are you serious right now?”

  He sat back and strapped in. “Helm, hard to port! Grab something, people!”

  Randall punched in the orders and Lucas felt the pressure of several G’s pushing him into the corner of the chair. He fought desperately not to vomit. He turned at the sound of a startled yelp and spotted Tompkins, his hands gripping the back of the chair at his station, his feet pressed to the floor, trying not fly across the bridge.

  “Strap in, Gunner!” Caspar yelled. “Get it together.”

  The Fairfax spun into a tight turn, and the pirates’ volley went wide. Lucas breathed a sigh of relief. “Sock, hail the hostile vessel.” He ran a hand over his short hair. This time they didn’t have an ace to their name. He racked his brain for options. All he knew was that they couldn’t dance around missiles indefinitely.

  The same shadowy figure appeared, the same modified voice spoke as before. “That’s some fancy flying, Fairfax. Not going to hit back, though? What’s the matter? Did someone knock you down and take all your shiny bullets?”

  “This is…” Lucas swallowed a lump and forced himself to say it. “Captain Lucas Odin of the Kuiper Fleet Starship Fairfax. Are you taunting us, unidentified vessel?”

  “Oh come now—we’re a little past formalities at this point, don’t you think?”

  Unbelievable. They murdered Harris in front of him, and now they wanted to play games?

  “Alright, stow it,” Lucas growled. “Yes, we’re outgunned and you could blow us out of the sky if you wanted. But the way I see it, you’ve already made yourselves a mark for the Fleet in taking Ambassador Taurius. In a couple of hours, the embassy on Mars will receive transmissions detailing everything that’s happened here, including a minute description of your ship. You really want to up the price on your heads by making yourselves responsible for the destruction of a Kuiper flagship?”

  The pirate was silent a moment, considering.

  “No?” Lucas went on. “Didn’t think so. So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to return Taurius to us, along with enough munitions to defend ourselves for the rest of our journey, and you’re going to surrender yourself to us, Captain, to stand trial for the murder of Captain Ronald Harris, and in return, I’ll let your ship and crew fly away. For now.”

  The pirate scoffed. “You’ll let me fly away? Hang on a second.”

  The feed cut out, and another volley of missiles appeared on tactical. “Helm, let’s go starboard. Hard!”

  As before, Randall’s evasion took them out of the line of fire, but this time the second pirate ship was waiting for them. It made a pass across their stern, firing kinetics—Lucas wondered if it was a rotary—right up their engine shafts. A new round of emergency lights flared to life on the bridge.

  “Damage to engines,” Sock announced. “Engine power critical. Alert: nuclear damage. Core unstable. Recommend jettisoning core immediately. Estimated time to meltdown in thirteen, twelve, eleven…”

  Lucas slapped his comm and hailed engineering. “Adams, jettison the core! Do it now!”

  “…seven, six, five…”

  “Adams!” The engineer wasn’t responding. Lucas pulled up the engines on his console, his eyes searching frantically for the command override.

  “…three, two…”

  Chapter 4

  There.

  He punched it. A second later there was a flash on screen, and the Fairfax rocked forward from the force of the explosion. But tactical confirmed it had happened outside the ship, even having a chance to shoot out several hundred meters before going critical.

  A collective sigh went up from the bridge. Caspar caught Lucas’ eye and nodded. “Well done, Sir.”

  “Yeah, well. At least Sock’s countdown mechanism still works.”

  “Hostile ship hailing,” Sock chirped.

  “On screen.”

  “You were saying, Captain Odin?” Somehow a tone of light mockery managed to make it past the voice filter. Lucas frown
ed in disgust.

  “Sir,” Caspar yelled. “Permission to unload our hidden nukes on this piece of garbage?”

  Even shadowed, the figure seemed to shrink back into his chair. But then he relaxed.

  “Even if you did have said nukes, you’ve already said yourself why you won’t use them on us.”

  “Prove it,” Lucas growled.

  For answer, the pirate held up a scrap of fine purple fabric and waved it around half-heartedly. “From our prisoner.”

  Lucas ground his teeth and bit back bile. After everything that had happened in the last hour, he wanted nothing more than to go berserk and ram the Fairfax straight through the hull of their assailant. But even if the lives of his crew didn’t hang in the balance, he knew they couldn’t risk harming Taurius. The summit was everything for the Council, and the ambassador’s safety was their sole duty now.

  “Now let me tell you what’s going to happen,” the pirate said. “We are turning around and leaving this god-forsaken piece of space, and we are leaving you here. And there’s not a thing you can do about it, because you just lost your engine.”

  “You’re marooning us?”

  The figure shrugged. “You might survive. Maybe your friends at the embassy with pick up those transmissions and send a rescue. Or maybe not. Maybe we have people already making sure that no one sees the message.” He held out a hand, his fingers splayed. “Who knows? Either way, not my problem. Good-day, Lucas Odin.”

  The feed cut and the two mystery ships moved out into space. The bridge grew quiet. Everyone hunched over their console, waiting for an order. Waiting for him. Lucas looked down at his dispensary and pulled out the plate of tiny transducers. Their stunt to find a backdoor into Sock so they could mod the stupid sims had almost gotten everyone killed. If it had been anyone but Randall at the helm…

  He threw the plate to the deck. It shattered, shards of ceramic shooting across the floor with the transducers. Still, no one said a word. They all understood.

  He unstrapped himself from the chair and breathed.

  “Adams,” he said into his comm. “What’s the situation down there? Everyone alright?”

  After a silence—during which Lucas imagined the entirety of engineering as a gaping hole in the hull, open to the void—there was finally a crackle and an answer.

  “We’re ok, Sir. Managed to evacuate before the core got too hot. I’m sorry to say we took a lot of damage from their guns, though. Wireless transformers are all fried, so there’s no power and there’s no way to move power around. We’re dead in the water for now, and I don’t know what we can do without a core.”

  “Helm.” The knot in Lucas’ stomach tightened. “How far to the nearest port?”

  Randall flipped through a few infoscreens. “At full power, we would have passed under the inner belt in four hours. Now…” He flipped to another screen and entered some numbers. Would they get anywhere with what little momentum they had left? Or drift aimlessly? “We’re off course, Sir. From combat. Heading… nowhere.”

  The knot tightened some more. “What if we could correct our course, Randall? How long until we’d reach the belt?”

  The helmsman stared at his numbers. “On course, with no other acceleration? A week, maybe ten days.”

  Caspar let out a low whistle.

  The summit wasn’t slated to open for a month, but a lot could happen in ten days. Meanwhile, they were floating off into the void, headed for uncharted space at a snail’s pace with no way to stop. Lucas heard his old professor’s words again, rattling in his head. “Please understand, off the record there are a number of reservations.” He slumped in the chair. Who had he been kidding? He’d known all along he wasn’t ready for a command post. He shouldn’t be in charge right now. Shouldn’t have been in charge during combat. Shouldn’t have—

  His eyes settled on one of the tiny transducers, a simple device that altered electrical energy.

  “Anyone have any wiring experience?” he asked.

  Eyebrows raised. Most of the systems on the Fairfax operated on wireless power. Caspar cleared her throat. “I’ve done some wiring, Sir.”

  He nodded, standing. Randall, you have the bridge. Comm me if anything happens. Caspar, you’re with me.” He bent and picked up a transducer, smiling.

  —

  “It won’t give you much, Sir. Captain.” Adams was holding the tiny transducer in his hand. It must have felt strange to call Lucas Captain. It felt strange to hear it.

  “No, it wouldn’t. That’s why I need you to cobble together a few larger models.”

  “Larger?” The engineer smiled patronizingly. “We don’t exactly have a production factory on board, Sir. Where’d you get this little thing, anyway?” He rotated it, a puzzled look on his face. It looked even smaller in his meaty hand.

  “That comes courtesy of Sock’s 3-D printing. I believe if you inspect it closely you’ll discover the casing is made of a nearly indestructible nutrient-rich shell.”

  Adams held it up, sniffed it, and tested a corner with his teeth. “Ah, right. Ramen.”

  “Too bad the printers for the dispensaries aren’t bigger.” Lucas took it back.

  “I think,” said Caspar, “what you mean to say is ‘too bad we can’t mod the dispensaries so Sock manufactures our energy converters in pieces.’ Sir.”

  “Lieutenant!” Lucas smiled. “You’re a genius.”

  “I have my moments, Sir.” She smiled back and Lucas found himself studying a very important piece of the floor almost immediately. “Ah, I’ll get right on the mods, then?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Adams, you have some men who can assemble the bigger transducers?”

  “I do, yes, but…” Adams fumbled at the air with his hands, looking for words, then ran a hand over his balding scalp. “Sir, pardon my doubts, I just don’t—”

  “—Understand where we’ll get the source energy? Got it covered.” Lucas patted the engineer’s shoulder. “Get to work, Adams. Leave the rest to me. And Adams?”

  “Sir?”

  He tossed the transducer back to the engineer. “Fix my engines while you’re at it, will you?”

  —

  Unfortunately, silicon wasn’t an ingredient in Sock’s dispensary apparatus. That left foraging, but happily Lucas knew exactly where to go. Every bunk on the ship came standard with synthetic-woven sheets and a light silica-coated comforter for maximum heat retention. It turned out that after millennia of sleeping under animal furs and woven plant matter, humanity had discovered the ultimate bed-spread was plastic.

  He ordered all comforters on board be brought astern to the loading bay, and then he employed a number of privates in sowing them together with dental floss. More than once in the process, Lucas verbally thanked the gods for dental hygiene.

  Copper for electrical wiring was much harder to come by, and in the end he was forced to order they strip it from the casings of their kinetic hand-gun ammo, a decision that left Caspar less than pleased. They kept a minimal supply of blaster pistols and rifles aboard that would now have to suffice for any close combat situations. “As long as you leave my missiles alone,” Caspar finally said. And that was that.

  They rigged some shoddy-looking insulation from rubber hosing they found in the washroom.

  “This had better work,” Tompkins said. “Otherwise we’ll be floating out into space for the foreseeable future, and we’ll have no clean laundry.”

  “You wash your clothes, Gunner?” Caspar said. “Huh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tompkins asked Lucas. When Caspar was out of earshot, the private nudged the captain. “I think she likes me.”

  Lucas snorted in feigned amusement. And tried, for what felt like the thousandth time, not to shove the kid.

  By the time the comforters had been sown into one big silica-coated sail, enough wiring had been procured and enough transducers assembled to justify a spacewalk. The sail had to be fastened to the hull, facing the sun, and secured w
ith wiring to carry the heat to the transducers inside the ship. Lucas himself would go out, of course, and he was bringing his wiring expert. He asked for volunteers after that. A handful of engineering workers and a smattering of privates, including Tompkins, joined him in the stern loading bay. A few minutes later they were all suited up and waiting in the decompression chamber as the air cycled.

  Lucas stared at the steel floor, the scene from earlier playing itself over and again in his mind. The masked men. The moment he thought he was about to die. The sight of his captain falling like a sack of rations.

  “Sir, you feeling alright?” Private Tompkins nudged him with his arm. Lucas shook himself out of it.

  “Fine.” He sniffed. “A little indigestion. Had too many of Sock’s weird concoctions lately.”

  “Ha.” Tompkins shifted his weight and adjusted his grip on the length of rolled-up silica sail he was holding. “Guess we’re pretty lucky you guys hacked in that way though, huh? I mean, for this to work.”

  Lucas grit his teeth and tried to forget how his hacking had almost gotten them shot out of the sky. “Yeah, guess so.”

  “You boys need a room?” Caspar’s voice cut in over the comm. “Don’t go and forget who did all the hard work, now.”

  “With the hack?” Tompkins eyed her with awe. “That’s your handiwork?” Lucas snorted again. Tompkins turned to him. “No? Not feeling generous with the credit?”

  Lucas shrugged. “The Lieutenant helped, I suppose.”

  “Ha. Ha.” Caspar mock-laughed. “Anyway, don’t look so impressed, kid. Your girlfriend seems to know a thing or two.”

  “My girlfriend?” Tompkins looked around, his face a mask of confusion.