There was a chair of sorts in the cockpit, too high and narrow to be comfortable for a human, but Samson was too agitated to sit. He leaned on its back and stared at his datapad.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ Samson said. Still no sign of altering course.
If only he could transmit something from the scout ship. Its power signatures might not be noticed on a passive scan if the aliens had all their attention focused elsewhere.
He tapped his datapad to open the depot’s communications system. He transferred the alien sound file, and overlaid several interference filters. It would be garbled, but identifiable. It wasn’t a distress signal, but all he needed to do was get their attention. He boosted the transmitter’s power to maximum, and sent the signal on all bands. With luck, it would be odd enough to provoke curiosity.
He waited the few seconds it would take for the signal to get to the ship, and had to remind himself to breathe as he did. It always struck him as odd that he could send a message to the Admiralty at Mare Crisium on the moon almost instantaneously, but there was a delay in cross-system communication dictated by the speed of light. The power required to send a message through the Nexus was enormous, and it was far too expensive to use for in-system messages when the delay was only a few seconds with normal communications transmitters.
Try as he might to distract himself with the complexities of long-distance communication, his eyes were locked on the information the depot’s scanner relayed to his datapad. He blinked twice to see clearly when he first thought he saw a deviation in the alien’s course. He smiled and let out a sigh of relief as the change of direction became obvious. That was short-lived, though, as the realisation hit him that the hard part was yet to come.
‘Looks like it’s coming this way,’ Harper said. ‘Fast. That thing can really accelerate.’
Samson nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see him, so transmitted an acknowledgement. There was no getting away from it now. He was stuck in a ship he could barely control, and surrounded by cases of primed explosives. He pantomimed his movement to the detonator control, and to the airlock, then reversed the order—airlock, detonator, then airlock again—and repeated the practice. He realised it only took a second, but it felt like far longer. Far more than the five seconds he had.
‘We’ve coasted out to position and are going dark,’ Harper said. ‘Good luck, sir.’
‘Good luck, Harper,’ Samson said. ‘If it looks like everything’s going wrong, get out of here as fast as you can. There’s nothing more you can be expected to do in the Bounty.’
‘We’ll be ready to pick you up when you’re done, sir. Bounty out.’
He appreciated the sentiment, but couldn’t lose sight of the fact that he was planning to use a slingshot to attack an alien warship. It almost seemed comical.
The wait had felt like an age, but when the alien ship finally came into view, Samson vowed not to let fear get the better of him. He couldn’t stop his heart and breathing from quickening, though. The ship had slowed, and moved forward like a cat prowling up on a mouse. They must have suspected a trap, but the fact that one of their ships was sitting next to a human depot had clearly made them curious.
It was the first time Samson had had the opportunity to give it a proper look—on the previous occasion when he had seen it, there had been more pressing things on his mind. There was an aggressive beauty to its design, but no one, not even a member of an alien race seeing it for the first time, could mistake it for anything other than a warship. For the first time he could see a number of holes on its fuselage that bore the scorch marks of weapons ports, not to mention several turreted weapons that looked as though they were retractable.
Samson watched it grow ever closer, and tried to judge the right moment to fire the tractor magnet and blast his small, explosive-packed vessel into the alien warship. How quickly could its impressive array of weaponry destroy him? Samson took a slow breath and waited, his hand hovering over his control tablet. The alien ship inched nearer.
It was time. Samson hit the control on the tractor mechanism. He had already set it to target the alien ship, and felt the slight judder as he was propelled forward by magnetic force. He hadn’t gone far when he lost his connection to the depot’s system. He had known that he would, but it left him with a feeling of isolation that was deeply unnerving. He tried to focus his attention on the diminishing distance to the alien vessel, and wondered what they were thinking. Might they view the ship as being delivered as a peace offering? It would be ironic if they did.
Samson moved over to the airlock and detonator control panel to get ready. He could see the growing spectre of the alien warship on the viewscreen well enough from there—its size was the only thing he had to judge his timing for the detonators.
The ship juddered and
