“Wake check is negative, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said.
“All right. Boyer, bring her back around and light the drive. One gravity, nice and leisurely.”
“Turn around and burn for one g, aye,” Midshipman Boyer acknowledged.
A dozen decks below the AIC, Minotaur’s plasma drive came to life with a low thrumming sound. Dunstan felt his own weight again as the acceleration pushed him back into his gravity couch, a welcome sensation after a few hours of weightlessness. He unbuckled his harness and got out of the couch, then stretched his legs and back slowly with a low, satisfied groan.
Over by the plot table, a flashing red message popped up above the situational display.
“Incoming priority transmission, sir,” Lieutenant Bosworth called out.
“I see it.” Dunstan walked over to the plot table and plucked the message off the display, then expanded it to see the content. When he was finished reading it, he let out a breath he didn’t remember holding.
“It’s a crash buoy signal,” he told the AIC crew. “It’s from RNS Danae. Just the automated broadcast, nothing else.”
He flicked the message over to Lieutenant Bosworth’s station.
“Bosworth, check where Danae is supposed to be right now, and see if you can get a hold of them on comms.”
“Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied. He brought up a screen and started populating it with data. Dunstan looked at the plot, which showed every ship in a ten-million-kilometer sphere around Minotaur. The situational display had no hint of trouble—no other warships, no unidentified contacts, just dozens of civilian freighters and transports plodding from planet to planet on the lowest-energy transfer routes and going about their business.
“Maybe it’s a malfunction,” he thought out loud. “Danae popped one of her crash buoys by accident.”
“Their last position update was two hours ago,” Bosworth said. “They were just short of Oceana space and getting ready for turnaround.”
“What about comms?”
“No luck, sir. Their node is offline. They’re either running silent, or their comms gear is malfunctioning.”
“All the way down to the tertiary circuits? Doubtful.”
Dunstan looked at the display and tried to ignore the unsettling feeling that had lodged in his middle suddenly.
“Whatever happened to them, we have to go and render assistance. Bring the gravmag system online. Helm, lay in a course for the location of that buoy and prepare for a full burn. Everyone will be suited up and in their couches in five minutes. And let fleet know that we’ve picked up a crash beacon from Danae and intend to investigate.”
“Aye, sir,” Boyer and Bosworth acknowledged at the same time.
And let’s hope it’s just a spectacular tech glitch, Dunstan thought as he walked over to the suit locker on the far bulkhead of the AIC to put on his vacsuit. There were other explanations for a fleet unit dropping off the network and releasing a crash buoy, but he didn’t want to contemplate those. Danae was a light cruiser, twenty years newer and twice as big and powerful as Minotaur. Light cruisers were designed to hunt and kill pirates, even well-armed ones, and they didn’t fall prey to ambushes, especially not ones so sudden that the crew wouldn’t be able to get a detailed distress call out. But when Dunstan looked at the flashing red text of the crash buoy broadcast, that unsettling feeling in his middle intensified.
“And see who else is in the neighborhood,” he said. “Check with the Oceanians, too. I’d feel better with some backup behind us. Even if it’s just one of their little patrol corvettes.”
Even at nine gravities, it took Minotaur four and a half hours to intercept the source of the automated crash buoy signal, and with every passing hour, Dunstan’s feeling of unease grew. Halfway through the intercept trajectory, Minotaur had to flip around and counterburn, which turned the main sensor array away from their direction of travel. On the plot, the crash buoy sent out its signal with the mindless regularity of a computer brain, one broadcast every thirty seconds.
Thirty minutes out, Dunstan connected the oxygen feed of his suit to the couch and reclined into the high-g position.
“XO, sound action stations. Tactical, energize the point defense and set it to standby mode. Send out the recon drones for an active sensor sweep. No point staying quiet. If someone’s waiting for us, they’ve seen us coming already.”
The sharp, grating klaxon sound of the action stations alarm rang out in the AIC. Every member of the crew was now buckling into a gravity couch and plugging in life-support lines. Even an armored warship was a fragile object in the hostile environment of space, and in the history of zero-g warfare, no ship had ever been in a shooting engagement without taking at least some damage. The couches kept bodies from crashing into things while the defensive AI maneuvered the ship, and the supply umbilicals kept them breathing if the hull got pierced by shrapnel or rail-gun projectiles. But Dunstan knew that he wasn’t the only human with an instinctive aversion to being strapped to a stationary couch in the face of danger. It went against the fight-or-flight instinct, and no amount of training or experience would ever make him fully comfortable with going into a dangerous situation immobilized on his back.
“Point defense is energized and on standby,” Lieutenant Mayler said. “Drones away.”
On the tactical display, two dozen red triangles swarmed out from the center of the orb and rushed outward at a hundred meters per second in a wedge-shaped formation. The recon drones extended the eyes and ears of Minotaur and allowed her crew to see the area of space that was obscured by the visual and
