Night Raiders Read online

  “Channel open, sir,” Moriarty informed him.

  “Unknown vessel, this is the Expedition Clipper Nova, under Lieutenant—” Anders hesitated for the briefest moment over whether to use his real name. What if they were Golden Throne sympathizers?

  Frack.

  “Sector 8 is recognized deregulated territory. No one has a claim here!” he continued tersely. “Explain your actions!”

  The control screen glitched, and a squeal of alien static filled the cockpit.

  “Ahh!” Jake shouted from behind them. “So, so angry!” He was sobbing.

  “Weapons systems, sir!” Moriarty announced as more lines of fire and escaping gases exploded out from the side of the craft. Only this time, it wasn’t firing missiles or rockets or torpedoes, it seemed to be firing spears.

  “What in the ever-loving—” Anders gasped, pulling back hard on the flight handles to pull the Nova up. I guess that’s their answer. He gritted his teeth as first one, then two, and then the third metal spike shot underneath them.

  Anders was wheeling the clipper around above the vessel as it started to lift its bulk, monumentally slower than they were.

  From this vantage point, the lieutenant could see that each of the metal spears seemed to be segmented, and they only extended for a few hundred meters from their mother craft before they flailed and were suddenly drawn back on thick, industrial chains.

  “Those things aren’t spears,” Anders said. “They’re harpoons…”

  “Firing,” Dalia announced, squeezing the triggers on the undersides of her flight handles. The Nova juddered slightly as the twin laser batteries fired. Anders watched as bolts of bright light shot out from either side of their cockpit toward the craft. The targeting vector on the digital overlay was still jumping and wobbling, but the Ilythian was using dead-eye reckoning.

  And her aim was near perfect.

  The laser blasts erupted in two lines of flame and exploding plasma along what would have been the thing’s prow.

  “It doesn’t have any shields!” Anders realized. There had been no blue flash of a field generator trying to absorb the force of the blast. Those explosions had been direct hits to the thing’s hull!

  But it kept on rising.

  “Keep at it, Dalia. Let them know to think twice before they pick a fight with us!” Anders said fiercely as he rolled the clipper over, making their strange enemy craft seem to whirl above and below them. Dalia fired again—another dead-eye shot that burst along the front of the thing.

  And still it kept coming toward them.

  But we’re faster and more agile. Anders’s brow knitted. Our weapons are faster, our engines are superior, we have shields—we can keep this cat-and-mouse game up for hours yet…

  But none of this made any sense. Why would a craft with such obviously strange, possibly advanced, technology that it could hide it from their scanners not even bother to generate shields for itself? And why use out-of-date 17G field technology at all?

  “Sir! Proximity alert!” Moriarty announced.

  Suddenly, there on their digital overlay, was another glitching, doubling, and phasing craft as matte-black and silent as the first one. And it was right beside them.

  This new shadow-craft hadn’t jumped. There had been no ripple of broken photons and space-time membrane. It had snuck up on them while they had been engaged with the first.

  “Frack!” Anders rolled the Nova, but it was already too late.

  Under his gloved hands, the lieutenant felt the shudder through the flight handles as the second craft’s harpoons slammed into them, puncturing their shields and outer hull plate alike.

  2

  Deregulated Space

  Anger. Teeth. Shouting. Screams…

  The youth nicknamed Jake recoiled from all the noises that had erupted inside his head. They were far louder in his mind than the alerts and sirens of the Nova as it rolled and swayed.

  The meshwork metal floor of the clipper’s main hull compartment threatened to slide out from underneath him, but the youth had wedged himself between the last of the webbed chairs on his right and one of the equipment lockers on his left. His muscles strained as he held on, until the floor gave up trying to turn itself into a wall and once again became the floor again. Jake thumped back down to his knees, but the pain was nothing compared to the torment inside his skull.

  How can I hear this? What is going on!? An isolated sane thought bubbled up from part of the sea that was Jake’s mind.

  The youth, who had been designated as J-14, was a naturally gifted psychic—or PK, as the Golden Throne called his kind—but he had never been one of the ones who had mastered the arts of remote psychokinesis.

  Everything required skin contact, he knew. When he had taken Dalia’s pain at seeing one of her Ilythian ring-worlds destroyed, he had to seize onto her temples. But he wasn’t touching anything at the moment… This shouldn’t be happening to him!

  Shouts. Cries. Fury…

  It was like there was a storm inside his head. A storm of many voices, and most of them were ferociously, terrifyingly furious.

  But what was worse even than that, Jake quailed as the Nova’s alarms called, was that the anger was mingled with screams and cries of desperation and terror. Somehow, they were coming from the very same voices, or seemed to anyway.

  How can anybody be so broken? Jake thought for a moment, before the next wave hit him.

  “Boy! Boy, get up!” It was the Ilythian, standing over him and holding onto the overhead grab-handles with one hand while her other held a heavy laser pistol. Jake’s eyes ached with the psychic pain as he looked up at her.

  “Take this. You have to defend yourself,” the Ilythian hissed savagely, pushing the heavy pistol into Jake’s hands. Her own, alien hands were gloved, so there was no need for either to fear the boy’s wild PK abilities.

  “But—” Jake looked at the pistol oddly. Just a few days ago, he had been floating in the sedated dream of a bio-containment tube. He had no idea whether he even knew how to fire one.

  “I’ve already deactivated the safety. Just point and pull the trigger,” Dalia told him as she turned to grab another weapon from the emergency locker.

  —and turning just in time for steam to burst into the main hull compartment.

  “Breach!” Dalia shouted to Anders, as the lieutenant desperately tried to wrestle back control of his ship.

  The second shadow-craft had struck them with its harpoons, and despite the full force of Anders’s thrusters and propulsion engines, it was slowly winching them toward it.

  In fact, as Anders looked up out of the main cockpit viewing window, he could see precisely what awaited them. The panels on the side of the shadow-craft slowly rose and fell, revealing a darkened hold. It looked like the open gullet of a monster, one that intended to gobble them up.

  “Moriarty, drop ship shields. Divert power to main engines!” Anders said. What use are the shields now, anyway, he thought.

  As soon as the blue line around the Nova’s digital display clicked off, Anders felt the judders of the ship only increase, but he got the power that he wanted. The Nova leapt forward another twenty meters, before slowing over another ten to finally reach a burning standstill at thirty meters out.

  If he could have stepped outside to look, the lieutenant would have seen the bright blue fire of the Nova’s main engines flaring like a small star.

  But it still wasn’t enough.

  “The stationary inertia of the enemy vessel is too great, sir,” Moriarty announced. “Even at full thrust—”

  But Anders wasn’t the sort of man to accept defeat—and presumable death—so easily. He reached quickly to pull the stopper and filter controls for the combustion mix, infusing the rocketry parts with high levels of dangerous chemicals. Even taking his hands off the flight handles for that brief moment meant they were winched back another fifteen meters toward the craft. “Fire positioning thrusters,” he growled, and the X-arms of the clippe
r lit up with the cherry-red and white burn of combustion engines.

  The Nova moved forward another handful of meters toward freedom, but then stopped.

  “Propulsion rockets at sixty percent, fifty-five percent, forty-two percent…” Moriarty counted down. That was the problem with combustion, which relied upon physical chemical compounds, in a sustained reaction.

  When the fuel tanks dried up, they would sputter out…

  “Come on, there must be something!” Anders was shouting now. “Cut navigation, sensors, all secondary systems and divert power!”

  Moriarty did so, and the inside of the Nova was plunged into an instant chill as the life support dropped to bare minimum. The lieutenant could see his breath clouding as he hissed between his teeth, and his face tingled with cold.

  All the internal lights dimmed and went to their lowest yellow haze of stand-by mode, and the digital display—everything apart from the icon of the Nova—went blank.

  But Anders couldn’t care about the loss. He was thrown back into his seat as the clipper jumped forward with the new energy.

  Twenty-two meters out, twenty-eight—

  And then paused.

  If they had cargo, Anders could jettison it, but the clipper didn’t have anything. Anders growled.

  “Propulsion rockets at twenty percent, fifteen, ten...” Moriarty said, which Anders didn’t think was helpful at all…

  Frack. Anders’s face was a mask of fury and despair. “Prepare to repel boarders!” he shouted, just as Moriarty announced the inevitable.

  “Propulsion rockets at five percent, two—”

  They cut out completely with a shake that wobbled the entire craft, and the Nova was being pulled backward, meter by protesting meter, toward the alien craft. All the hard gains they had just won vanished, and there was nothing they could do.

  I’m sorry, the once-policeman thought, but he didn’t know who he was saying it to. To Dalia and Jake, for not being a good enough captain? To the long-dead Terevesin envoy and the murdered clones back home on Hectamon 7, whom he had been attempting to get justice for?

  Or to Cassie and Sibbi? The thought blossomed into his mind as it always did when he was at his wit’s end. His murdered wife and their murdered daughter, both dead for many years, and for whom he still did everything.

  “Urgh!” Anders was suddenly jostled violently in his chair as the Nova was apparently spun around on its axis. Behind him, he could hear the grunts and shouts of pain from Dalia and Jake as they too were thrown by the sudden impact.

  Only it wasn’t an impact… Anders now saw that the shadow vessel was directly ahead of them, and one of the heavy chains of a harpoon had broken, leaving only one underneath their nose!

  But that chain didn’t break at all— Anders’s eyes caught sight of the flailing edge of the heavy industrial chain, the end of its broken link still glowing a bright, molten red.

  It had been cut.

  But there was no time to give thanks or pause for celebration. “Fire laser batteries!” Anders snarled. He hadn’t deactivated the weapons batteries in his quest for more power, thankfully, and the twin bolts of laser shot erupted from under their nose and slammed into the one remaining chain.

  It was a point-blank shot, and the Nova shook and twisted like a caught fish as the chain started to shatter, but still held. The clipper was no longer being winched forward, but it was still stuck by this malicious tether line—

  Until there was a sudden lash of brilliant crimson light as the arc of a solid-state laser beam swept between the shadow-craft and the clipper, neatly severing the chain holding them.

  “Full engines!” Anders called as the Nova spun with released torque.

  “Ah, sir, we were already at full engines…” Moriarty responded in his impossibly smooth voice.

  Anders said something very unproductive about Moriarty’s robotic parentage before pulling down hard on one of the flight handles, careening them to one side, toward the shadow vessel.

  The matte-black hull plates zoomed larger right beside the cockpit window. For a terrifying second, Anders could make out the dappled pentagon material, pocked and scarred from the rigors of space travel. And then he was pushing back on the lowered flight handle, and the clipper burst forward, almost scraping the hull of the larger shadow-craft that had tried to entrap it.

  They were free, spearing out behind the second craft as both it and its predecessor tried to slowly turn after them. But the Nova was far too fast, and, like a wasp being chased by gorillas, it was already gone from their reach.

  3

  Ozymandias Station

  “Restoring systems,” Moriarty announced as the internal lights of the Nova started to come back on and the temperature started to rise, degree by shuddering degree. In front of Lieutenant Corsigon, the control board flashed and started to once again light up with the more normal—and essential—commands and controls.

  The clipper was slowing a fraction as the main field engines lost a chunk of their power, but ahead of them was still the endless black of the Night’s Quarter, Sector 8. The only things that disturbed the velvet of the Void were the far-off, distant, and just-barely visible lighter hazes of solitary stars.

  Anders had never been this far out. And from what the first half-hour has been like, I don’t want to go any further!

  When the sensors and navigation systems came back online, the digital overlay pinged to life. It showed the little green icon of the clipper in its center, but it also revealed that they weren’t alone.

  “Proximity alert!” Moriarty said helpfully.

  “I can see that, Moriarty,” Anders growled. “Reduce thrust by twenty percent and increase rear shields by twenty percent.” Beside him, Dalia was clambering back into her copilot seat, her hands already seeking the trigger-handles.

  “What now?” the Ilythian said.

  “Don’t target them. I’m just being cautious,” Ander said as he looked at the scan image of the vessel that kept pace with their flight. “I think these might be the people who helped us escape…”

  But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be any nicer to us, thought the ever-suspicious side of him.

  The scan image of the craft didn’t blur or double, phase-out or glitch as the two shadow-craft had done. It stayed a steady ‘alien’ warning orange and revealed its shape to be long and tubular.

  Almost three times longer than us, but not much wider, Anders thought as he studied the craft. It looked more like a missile or a rocket than it did a spacecraft, but it had the 18G ‘blue’ burn of a standard field engine emitted from its aft, as well as smaller flares of orange flame scattered along its body, allowing it to rotate and turn as it matched their trajectory.

  “Enhance image,” Anders breathed, and the sensors at the rear of the ship displayed a close-up of the tube-craft that had apparently saved them.

  It was made of different sections with the fat rings of bulkhead connectors between them. Simple rectangular porthole windows dotted its length, but it was the prow or open ‘mouth’ that intrigued Anders the most. It was clustered with antennae and field generators around its edge and appeared to shield a hollow opening. The frill of its sensor arrays made Anders think of some sort of deep-sea creature or anemone.

  It certainly didn’t look like any Golden Throne craft that he had ever seen.

  “Open a channel,” Anders said as he eased down on the engines when he thought that they were far enough away from the slower shadow-craft, turning in a soft blue about-face to face their accomplice.

  “Nova to unknown vessel,” he decided to forgo the hassles about who he was. “We are sure glad for the help back there.”

  In response, the green icon of the miniature soundwave of his channel suddenly flashed as a holo-image of the other ship’s captain appeared in its place.

  “Holy ancient freaking Moses!” said a familiar voice. “It’s true. It’s all true. It’s you, policeman!”

  Anders blinked several
times in stunned shock as he recognized the blonde features of the young twenty-something man. The MPB officer had last seen him on the Challenge world of Hecta 3, where he had saved the young Voider from being gutted by an enraged Mondrauk.

  “Patch? Patch McGuire?”

  “It’s a new prototype. We call it the Whistle!” Patch said proudly, referring to the vessel he was currently in charge of.

  “The Whistle,” Anders said. Perhaps, for all the long months between seeing him in the mud and leaf-litter of Hecta 3, the optimistic Voider hadn’t changed at all.

  “Yeah, it’s because it—” he said animatedly.

  “I get it,” Anders said dryly. It was good to see a familiar face. The last time he had seen the Voider was as Commander-General Cread had stopped the Golden Throne deathmatch known as the Challenge in its final moments because of the supposed Ilythian attack, when he had immediately court-martialed Anders and thrown Dalia in military jail for being an Ilythian. Anders had no idea what had happened to Patch at all.

  “But I can’t believe that it’s really you, policeman!” the young Voider laughed. “The message said we were to meet an old friend here, but I never thought that it would be you!”

  “The message?” Dalia’s eyes narrowed. “From a human girl? PK abilities?” She shared a look with Anders.

  “That’s the one!” Patch nodded. He still looked like the same pale and callow young man he had been before, but now he sported silver-gray fatigues that were too baggy for him and a bulky set of goggles with what seemed like miniature field generators flaring and humming. He sat on a stool-like seat in what must have passed for the Whistle’s cockpit, although to Anders, it looked the innards of some computer, with wires running here and there to control boards and even stranger equipment.

  “We call her the Oracle,” Patch said enigmatically.

  “We?” Dalia asked pointedly.

  “The Void Collective. We know about the war, we monitor everything, you know,” he said with apparent pride. “We started receiving the Oracle’s messages a few cycles back, and each and every damn one came true! Just like she said, that we were to meet old friends if we rendezvoused at this location.”