Thing was, Starrunner wasn’t protected from pot-shot hunters. Easy for Baer and his goons to do a hyperclasson trace on the heat signature, if they so desired. Triangulate from last vector before light speed. I’d have to jump worlds to give them the slip.
With such thoughts crowding my mind, I programmed the Varwol light drive for Mixraen, in the meantime coasting on steady impulse power toward Brisis’s moon, knowing I’d have to clear planetary gravity before I could risk engaging the light drive.
I gazed with pride upon my rack of guns, from small pistol to semi-automatic RX series to Uzi to remodeled AK to modern high-blaster. A weapon for every day of the week. Even experimental ray guns at the end of the rack. But I tended to go for the older-generation guns. Call me a traditionalist.
My attention drifted back to the view in space. Several monstrous cylinders hovered before me. I eased past the now hulking derelict remnants of ancient planetary defense systems, orbiting Brisis. Their nuclear powerplants had winked out of existence ages ago, their pulse ray cannons, at one time able to destroy star cruisers, now iced and inert. Many half shorn barrels looked back at me. Though hollow and scavenged by junkers or freelancers for parts, they still sent shivers down my spine.
A blip appeared on my sensor readouts. I frowned. A bright object reeled in behind the nearest cylinder. At first I thought it was the actual derelict coming to life.
But no. Raiders! Clinging to the underside, piggy-backing off the defense probes like tics, eluding my sensors.
The klaxon rang from the overhead bulkhead and Molly’s computerized voice began beating out an insistent monotone, “Red alert. Enemy in pursuit. Pulser waves to hit in five seconds.”
What the bloody hell! They weren’t active when I flew down to this god-forsaken planet.
I activated shields and banked Starrunner in a steep dive away from the pulse beams arching my way. It gave me a few more seconds. But the impact grazed the starboard thruster and sent me in a tailspin. Shit! The Varwol couldn’t engage this close to planetary gravity, so I was scuppered.
“Great, Molly. Skgurian raiders? What this time?”
“Databanks report high probability of Skgurian origin.”
Two more bogies popped up out of nowhere on my short range scanners. Three old, refitted craft with high stems, bullet noses and gray bodies. No match for Starrunner on a good day, but a risk now with her in a side slew. I maxed out the stabilizers and with help of the ship’s computer, managed to pull her out of her tailspin. “Molly! Lock weapons on their engines, now!”
“Affirmative.”
As the forerunner gained ground, I caught a glimpse of the raider’s forecannon. Large and lethal. Nothing less than heat-seeking missiles, spiked cubes with wicked guiding systems. They’d pulse Starrunner to immobility, then blow me open like a tin can with one of their torpedoes, with the added bonus of being able to scavenge at their leisure with the crew dead.
My mind worked in furious calculation. Raiders as these went for the small fry like myself and left the big freighters alone—the big cargo transports moving world to world selling their ores, raw materials and contraband on less impoverished worlds than Hoath.
The Skgurian stalkers turned on an intercept course. I sent out a high-energy fareon beam, after Molly had done the math. The first enemy craft careened left too late as concentrated pulser made contact with metal, and a bright orange ball burst outside my starboard viewport.
I cheered. The lights dimmed and reserve power took a hit, and the shields took a beating upon the return fire. But the other two banked off.
I struggled to gain control of the fluctuating sensors. “T minus 10 to escape window,” Molly droned. Like slow leaps into infinity, the seconds ticked by. Just as the next spiked missile came a ghost’s breath away, the Varwol kicked in, and the universe slipped sideways. Colored lights dazzled my visual space, a million sparkles of bright light licked out at me from the void ahead. Then blackness. Starrunner had entered the no-zone of singularity. Running again. Rusco’s signature.
Yet something was off. The last hit must have damaged the singularity stabilizers. My heart did a dive.
Odd thing about warp is that sound is often distorted. One’s movements seemed blurred around the edges, as if reality is skewed, impinged by an external force. A human hand moves a little too late, or an extra finger appears on that hand but it’s just a blur of five fingers moving at once. The mobilitor’s tech corrected and tried to adjust for the time-dilation effect, but even that was never infallible and created little glitches of speech and movement. Exaggerated now with the mobilitors impaired.
“Molly, do something.”
“Mobit tech at 82% and dropping. High impulse beam was sustained by shield at 40%. Compensating.”
“Do what you can!”
A sudden dark thought edged my mind. I clawed at my pant’s pocket. Still there. I grabbed a soft cloth and extracted the phaso and lay the disc on the bridge console with extreme care.
The object sat there in its weird way, shimmering with a dull iridescence. I eyed it as a tiger might eye a steel-rimmed trap. Something about the thing did not seem natural, or of any human world, with its unreadable script and its strange symbols writ along the curve’s inner edge. Hieroglyphics? Numbers? Coordinates? I shook my head. Inscribed on the light hyperbarsol they reeked of heavy mystery. I daren’t touch the script, for it looked as if it might be where the last schmuck had fingered it, and gone into hyperspace.
I shivered, moved the evil talisman into a metal strongbox I kept in the storage bulkhead. I closed the
