Night Raiders Page 6

  ‘You are a thoroughbred! Unique!’ she recalled the head of the Gene Seers, Architrex Vasad Aug’Osa, proclaiming on more than one occasion.

  Black Rose let out a small sigh through her nose and set the Code-X recon craft, still almost invisible behind its heavy cloak of shields, on an intercept course with Ozymandias.

  She was a machine that had to do its job, after all. What else was she, if she wasn’t her work?

  9

  Bonetown

  Sector 8 (Outer Territory)

  “Policeman! Ahead on your eleven o’clock,” the voice of the young Voider Patch McGuire came over Lieutenant Corsigon’s suit intercom. Anders followed the tiny green vectors on his helmet’s internal HUD to see the distant dull blue glows of his team’s field generators. They looked tiny compared to the backdrop of the Night Raiders’ home.

  “I’m coming.” Anders shot forward, increasing his own suit’s propulsion as much as he dared without making it too obvious.

  We’re too small to be seen on ship scanners, right? he kept telling himself. And anyway, the Night Raiders were still using old 17G orange field technology, weren’t they? No way they would be able to detect them.

  Anders wondered if he was desperately trying to convince himself of the fact.

  He spotted Patch hanging in mid-vacuum, and just a little way away was Jake, tethered to a stationary Dalia.

  “Run into some trouble back there, sir?” Patch asked, throwing him a very sloppy salute and a grin.

  “You have no idea,” Anders groaned, just as Jake suddenly flinched.

  “Guys? Uh, it looks like trouble has followed you out, Anders.” He pointed back to the accretion disk of the debris field to see the bright glows of a handful of scavenger drones leaping from the edges of broken and torn metals. Each of them had their four arms around the chest of an angry, gesticulating Night Raider as they charged toward their prey.

  “Will they never just give up!” Anders growled.

  The crew of the Nova turned and flew as fast as they could toward Bonetown, with the squad of Night Raiders chasing after them.

  A line of orange-red fire shot past Anders’s right shoulder, and he rolled, turning on his back to shoot behind him with the only pistol he had left.

  Six of them, four of us… He growled as his first shot missed the Night Raider that had fired the laser cutter.

  It’s just like ship-to-ship combat, he told himself, and instead of trying to sharp-shoot them as he would have done on a planet, he fired a line of laser bolts ahead of them.

  There was a sudden explosion of sparks as he must have hit one of the drones carrying a scavenger as if the human were its child. Anders saw the scavenger flail and kick, but it was no use. The drone lurched crazily off course, trailing plasma-steam.

  Five of them, four of us, Anders corrected.

  But five against four were still bad odds, especially since each one of the frenzied raiders was armed with one of those bulky rifles. And they were gaining on them, as their drones had far larger field generators than any suit could power.

  Anders heard a growl of frustration over his suit-to-suit from the Ilythian as Dalia turned to one side with one sweep of her arm, firing exact and precise shots that Anders could watch searing through the night toward the group. But the policeman could see that the Ilythian agent couldn’t fight as she might want to. She was still tethered to Jake and could only perform sudden, random attacks before moving to cover the youth with her own body.

  Anders watched Dalia’s laser bolts spear toward their pursuers.

  But everything is so slow about space combat! he fumed.

  The Night Raiders had time to break apart and form a wide, scattered cloud as the laser fire shot through the middle of them.

  And now that they aren’t bunched together, they are much harder to strike. Anders flew back as the first two raiders started to edge closer. Lines of orange plasma fire burst across and under him as the scavengers apparently had a similar problem to him.

  “Lieutenant!” It was Patch’s voice, rising in alarm as the other two Night Raiders edged closer, one below and one above. It was like herding cattle, Anders imagined. They were firing on their outer edges to keep them bunched together and make them easy targets.

  “Keep going!” Anders snapped at his squad, recalling his basic zero-G maneuvers from his Marine training.

  “Full propulsion,” he said, raising his knees to his chest and then kicking out into a jackknife, while at the same time spreading one arm to the side. The blue glow of his suit’s field generators suddenly grew brighter, and the movement spun Anders off from their collective course, darting outward, straight at the nearest raider.

  “Take that—” Anders grunted as he shot toward a human man with a shaved head behind his own bubble-helmet. The Night Raider clearly hadn’t been expecting the sudden change of trajectory so didn’t correct his drone’s flight in time, just before Anders threw out one hand as he shot past.

  “Gotcha!”

  He grabbed the scavenger by the shoulder-guard and tightened his grip as the sudden momentum spun them around.

  Anders suddenly released his grip on the drone-attached scavenger, sending the duo shooting out from him like a strange shotput, straight into the next raider.

  Anders was still spinning in the vacuum as the two scavengers collided in a mess of limbs and banging helmets, driving them back. The force of their collision wouldn’t even be enough to register as a suit impact, he was sure, but it bought the others a little time.

  “Anders!?” It was Dalia’s worried voice over the suit intercom. The others had kept on fleeing, and Anders realized the downside of his plan. The others were now over thirty meters from his location, leaving him behind.

  “Full propulsion!” he said again, and this time maintained the burn of the field generators as he straightened his arms at his sides and launched forward like a human missile.

  A line of laser fire shot out in front of Dalia. The Ilythian was close enough to the Night Raider home that it filled her vision, and she could clearly see the laser shot burst into a spray of sparks and flame harmlessly on its hull.

  “Dalia!” Jake was shouting in panic.

  “Control your breathing!” the Ilythian said through gritted teeth. But she wasn’t surprised. The human boy had been through much already in his short time in the ‘real’ world, and his PK abilities only made him more sensitive and vulnerable to not only his emotions but everyone else’s as well.

  Right now, Dalia knew that she couldn’t afford to have a panicked PK on her hands. And she had other problems with the boy, mainly that his tether was a drag factor on her flight.

  “I see an entry!” Patch had already made surface contact with the bronze-colored hull of the behemoth, and she could see him racing up the side of the interlocking panels toward where a line of rounded bulkhead doors sat. Some kind of service chute system? She knew they would have to make entry quickly, and that the Night Raiders behind them would follow.

  “Anders!?” She checked the grossly-uncomfortable suit’s HUD to see the vector of Nova 1—Anders’s suit—still far behind them but approaching at speed.

  And then a powerful wave of fright washed over her, making her gasp for air. It was Jake. She had swept in front of him, dragging him behind her on the poly-filament wire tether, and, as she turned, she saw that one of the Night Raiders had managed to close with him and was hanging off his boot.

  Yvee’l! Dalia blistered the recycled atmosphere inside her suit with a very, very bad Ilythian curse.

  But Dalia had trained in zero-G combat, even more than Anders had. She was, after all, an agent of the Ilythian Council, tasked with protecting the heritage of Ilythia in all situations and environments.

  But these suits are rudimental, to say the least. She easily manipulated the controls so that only the field generators on her heels were firing as she forced her body to jack-knife. She rolled back, spinning as she did to grab the tether l
ine between her and Jake, pulling herself along it at speed as they looped.

  Dalia saw Jake’s frightened face clearly visible for a moment underneath her, and then she was colliding with the snarling, struggling raider as they were trying to raise their laser-cutting rifle in one hand.

  “Oooof!” Her body thumped into his, knocking the laser rifle away as she swiveled and spun her legs to grapple the drone. The two humans and one Ilythian became a dizzying ball of speed as they rolled through the vacuum.

  SLAM!

  Dalia thumped into the side of Bonetown’s hull with a jolt that sent shockwaves up her spine.

  >>SUIT IMPACT!

  >>>Back Plate Integrity 75%

  Cheap, yvee’l human materials! She gasped as they rebounded from the hulk, but her plan had worked—the impact had been fast and powerful enough for the Night Raider attached to Jake’s boot to let go, and now he was flailing a few meters out from them.

  “Good night,” she said, firing her laser pistol repeatedly into the snarling man’s chest until a jet of steam mingled with bright sparks sent him flying backward, stilling as he did so.

  Which only leaves one left, if Anders dealt with the other two. Dalia searched for the remaining scavenger.

  Only to find the final woman right beside her, and with her laser cutter already raised and pointed straight at her.

  PHZZT! Before Dalia could react, a shot of laser fire had punctured the woman’s suit and slammed her into the side of Bonetown before sliding down the hull plate. The shot had come from Anders, flying toward them with his pistol outstretched in both gloved hands.

  “Thought you needed some help,” he said as he landed on the side of the hulk.

  10

  Service Tunnel

  “I’m sure that I don’t need to tell anyone how quickly we have to move,” Anders murmured as he pushed himself down the rounded tunnel of the service chute that Patch had found.

  “I wasn’t planning on hanging around, policeman,” Patch said.

  The tunnel was barely wider than Dalia was tall, and it looked to be some kind of disused maintenance system. Disused, but not forgotten. Anders saw the ripped-open wall panels here and there, open to exposed modules, with only the leftover fragments of gutted wiring.

  This place has been ransacked of anything useful. Anders grimaced. For some reason, it annoyed him. The society that must have built such a super-structure—and he presumed that it was an Old Earth society, at the dawn of the inter-stellar age, because the stenciled corridor designators were all human numerals and letters—had clearly put in vast amounts of effort to build such a thing.

  And in a time without field energy or FTL drives! Anders’s mind boggled at the thought. Such a grand effort must have been for something, but what?

  The tunnel was lit only by the dull blue glow of their field propulsion systems and the steady white lights under the collars of their suits. They must have already passed through several hundred meters of corridor, as Patch had synced his node scan with the Nova suits.

  Anders checked and saw a pulsing orange triangle like a magnetic compass, pointing in one steady direction, slightly off to one side. As he had no idea of the internal layout of this place, all he could do was head in that direction and hope this wasn’t a maze that would lead them to a dead-end.

  “Try the next right,” Patch murmured. His voice sounded even more subdued than Jake’s, when the sullen teenager talked, that was.

  I’m not surprised… Anders grimaced again. Patch was the only one who really knew the danger that they were in, with his greater knowledge of these so-called ‘Night Raiders.’

  It had been something of a shock for Anders to find such a large and clearly very capable rogue community out here in the Void. Oh, he had known that there were any number of rogue worlds and pirate bases out on the fringes of the throne’s reach, but these Night Raiders appeared almost as strong and formidable as the Voiders themselves.

  Another entire faction of humanity, the MPB officer in Anders’s mind thought, trying to assess what this meant for everything that he had left behind, and for the war. Maybe the Golden Throne wasn’t as all-powerful as it had always presented itself to be? Maybe there were many such groups here and there, throughout this side of the galaxy, hidden away and just biding their time.

  They reached a T-junction of the same perfectly circular tunnels, and Anders swung out, laser raised, as Patch covered him in the other direction. No welcoming party.

  Yet.

  “We’re not far, I don’t think,” Patch whispered.

  No humans blocked their path, the lieutenant saw, but three small, orange LED lights did.

  “LEDs? Who uses those anymore!?” Anders couldn’t stop himself from saying.

  “They were common when this thing was made, I reckon,” Patch said.

  The three lights were in fact the indicator lights over a bulkhead door, blocking their path. “Damn!” Anders said. “Moriarty—” he began, about to ask the simulated intelligence to hack the door for him, before he realized that he didn’t want to burden the intelligence’s processors as it fought off two of the larger shadow-craft.

  “If the Nova is still even in one piece,” Anders muttered to himself.

  “What was that, sir?” The smooth voice of the simulated intelligence reappeared, only this time, it was cut through with static. “I appear to be experiencing some interference.”

  “It’s probably the distance,” Anders said. “How goes the battle?”

  Another snarl of static, as the glowing ‘M’ icon flashed on and off several times, reconnecting with his suit. “…difficult, to be honest, sir,” he heard. “I am afraid that the ship is slightly worse off than it was when you left it in my care.”

  “But you won?” Anders frowned.

  This time, thankfully, the connection was stronger. “Oh yes, sir. I collided the two craft into each other in what I am sure that you will agree—given that I am not an official aeronautics intelligence—a spectacular display of tactical processing skills.”

  “Good job. What’s your current location and status?” Anders asked.

  “Well, currently on route to your location, but in a very wide vector, almost one lightyear circumnavigation,” Moriarty said. “I’m afraid that we lost the privacy shields, sir,” Moriarty explained, “and I want to stay out of direct scanning range until I have to perform your extraction.”

  “Very wise, hold course,” Anders said. “I have no idea how long this will take, so—”

  Moriarty interrupted him, which was something that he had never done before. “I should also inform you, sir, that if you were planning a quick getaway, I will have to encourage you to reassess your strategies.”

  Oh no. “Moriarty? What happened?” Anders said.

  “As well as the privacy field generator, the Nova has also lost FTL drives, I’m afraid. We won’t be able to jump anywhere until an extensive repair and rebuild has taken place. Sorry.”

  Oh great.

  “What’s that, boss? Trouble?” Patch had pushed himself closer to the lieutenant.

  Do I tell him? Anders wondered for a moment. It will only spook the young Voider further and might even cause Jake to have a psychic attack.

  But Anders was, if nothing else, an honorable man. “The Nova’s on route, but she’s lost FTL engines.” He grimaced. “It sounds like she’s limping.”

  Patch’s already pale face did blanche whiter as he swallowed nervously. “Okay,” he said, then repeated himself. “Okay… Okay. Well, your ship outran them before, so there’s nothing to suggest she can’t do it again, right?”

  “Right,” Anders said, and then, to take the Voider’s mind off it, if nothing else, “Can you open this door?”

  Patch blinked several times, looked at the bulkhead door, and then nodded distractedly. He floated past Anders, raised the node on his wrist, and started tapping it. Anders saw the Voider’s eyes scan and dart across the internals of his visor as he select
ed and clearly re-programmed the door controls through the scanning connection of his node.

  “Anders?” It was Jake, hovering into view. “Something bad is happening.”

  Oh, great! Anders grumbled to himself. Do I really have to tell Jake this might be a one-way mission? The ex-officer’s brain was already trying to figure out alternative solutions to the Nova’s predicament.

  But, as it turned out, Jake hadn’t been making a statement about Anders’s news at all, as there was a sudden noise, clearly audible over the suit’s receivers.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. It was the sound of drums, reverberating through the walls.

  “What the crap is that!?” Anders could see his own reflection in the helmet-visor that he wore. His eyes were round.

  Patch, similarly on the verge of hysteria, shook his head. “I have no idea, policeman.” He tapped twice in the air, where his node had created a set of holo-controls, and one by one, the three red LED lights flashed once, twice, and then went green as the bulkhead door opened.

  It revealed a small room on the far side that was a perfect box of silver aluminum. Hooks were still in place along one wall, and another, much thinner door sat at the far end, with an ancient style circular wheel-lock in its center. It looked to be a fairly standard equipping room, for whatever strange work teams would have been tasked to go into the service tunnels that snaked through the super-structure.

  “That thing is prehistoric!” Anders nodded at the wheel-lock. Back then, you had to manually winch doors closed to create a pressure seal. Above the wheel was a rounded porthole, also truly ancient, though some in the Golden Throne still placed them in their own habitat doors, and it was to this window that Patch was the first to get to, before suddenly startling and stumbling back.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. The sound of the drums once again echoed from beneath them, and much louder this time.