She thought about hiding it from them. They didn’t need to know. It would be her decision, whatever happened; her responsibility, whatever they did. She had to balance the interests of her crew against the duties of basic humanity. That was why she was captain.
Jorgun made the decision for her, glancing with curiosity over at her console and puzzling out what the insistent, dire little light meant.
“A distress beacon,” he announced.
“Just one?” Garcia, practiced at the art of deception, was instantly suspicious.
Her console told her Melvin was panicking, trying to do a radar sweep despite her direct orders. But she’d already disabled his console, so he would get no further than another complaint.
Counting breaths, she waited for it.
“Pru, I’m gunning blind up here. Turn on the targeting system.”
“For what, Melvin? What are you going to target?”
“I don’t know.” He did exasperation very well. “If you turned on the system, I’d know what there is to target.”
“Not yet,” she said. “They might not—”
Another light.
Nobody thought to ask who “they” might be. Whoever did this. Whoever was still out there, and was now coming for them.
“Powering up, Melvin. We have company.” She routed her detector into his targeting display. Someone out there had turned on their gravitics. Something was moving. And they weren’t coming from the planet. Whoever or whatever it was had been lying in wait, in deep space.
She was still too far out to do anything meaningful. Right now the
“I don’t see anything on the targeter.” For once, she found Melvin’s commentary deeply interesting.
“Then it’s not a ship.”
“Maybe it’s Fleet. I heard they have a cut-out signal that disables standard targeting systems.” Garcia believed every trick and cheat he heard about.
“We don’t have a standard targeting system,” she reminded them. Her ship had not been built on Altair. It had been built on a planet so many hops away that no one on Altair had ever heard its name.
It was a testament to the laziness of man that her Altair-trained engineer could maintain the ship despite its foreign origin. The basic designs, refined into perfection over untold centuries, no longer evolved. Only the electronic protocols changed, like dialects of the mother tongue. The computer could learn to translate those quickly enough, so that was rarely a problem. And sometimes, like now, it was a benefit.
“If it’s not a ship…” Garcia was still waiting for her to fill in the blanks for him.
“Then it’s a mine,” she said. Let him stew on that.
Melvin started swearing again.
Her gravitics detector wasn’t accurate enough to tell her if the mine had locked on to them. She might still be able to slip away, but without knowing what signal it was using to track her, she didn’t know if it was safe to turn on her own gravitics.
Garcia’s gossiping might be helpful here.
“What’s the standard signal for Altair defensive mines?”
“Grav,” he answered immediately. “For Earth’s sake, don’t turn on the engine.”
“I haven’t. And it’s still coming. What are their secondary triggers?”
“Uh. Maybe thermal…”
Altair was a technologically sophisticated system. They would use the best. But she had passed through worlds with plenty of tech, and a lot more interest in combat than Altair had. The chaffers were supposed to be proof against all known targeting systems. Hopefully targeting technology was as stagnant and unchanging as the rest of the space-faring designs.
She launched one of the expensive pods. It floated off of the ship, out into space, pretending to be the ship itself. It used gravitics to drive itself, and to fake a mass signature. It put out the same amount of heat. It generated internal static to appear as typical radio-signal leakage from electronic circuits, including canned intercom communications with Prudence’s voice announcing bogus course changes. If the black-market dealer who had sold it to her was to be believed, it even faked cosmic ray scattering. She had believed him. She’d paid enough for competence and honesty.
Five minutes later, when the gravitic detector said the mine hadn’t changed course, she stopped believing.
“Why isn’t it showing up on targeting? How can it see us and we can’t see it?” Melvin was outraged at the unfairness.
“Maybe it’s not locked on.” Garcia said, looking for the easy out.
But Prudence was used to things being hard and unfair.
“Less chatter, more ideas. I’m going to try a course correction. Hang on.”
She brought the engines online and slammed the controls hard to starboard. Her warning was wasted. As far out as they were, she couldn’t feel the motion through the ship’s passive grav-plating.
Cutting the engines, she went back to silence and waiting. Two minutes and the console gave its answer.
“It’s tracking us,” Melvin squealed. She was sorry she’d left his display wired into the gravitic detector.
“Come on, boys, think. What else is it locking on to us with?”
“Screw that,” Melvin cut her off. “Bring it up on target, so I can shoot it.”
The laser beam was a half centimeter wide. The mine was probably less than a meter broad. At a range of a million meters, even a computer wouldn’t be able to make that shot.
“Seriously, Pru. Let me defocus the beam and spray it.”
“Defocus to what, Melvin? A kilometer across?” At that level of spread, the laser wouldn’t even give you a suntan.
“Just a meter. It’s worth a try, damn it.”
No it wasn’t. Melvin didn’t understand even the most basic physics. Defocusing the beam more than a few centimeters would weaken it to just a bright flashlight. And if the mine was hardened to military grade, even a tight-beam hit from the laser might not matter.
“Wait till it’s closer, Melvin.”
No point in measuring the distance in meters. All that mattered was time until impact. Her future had been reduced to ten minutes.
At five minutes she set off two more chaffers, to no effect. She hadn’t expected any.
At three minutes she turned on the engines and started evasive maneuvers, a complex series of course changes. Each one extrapolated to a unique vector, but the sum total of them all was the real path the ship would wind up taking. If her random number generator was smarter than the mine’s random number predictor, they might throw it off.
For this pass. It would turn around and come after them again. But at these velocities, that would buy them more time. Time to get closer to the planet, where she could really maneuver. Or possibly hide in the atmosphere.
“Stop jerking the ship,” Melvin shouted through the intercom. “Let me aim.”
At what? She could see his targeting display was still clueless. But she had promised him his chance. She turned off the random autopilot. The detector showed it wasn’t confusing the mine, anyway.
“Go ahead, Melvin.”
“Are we gonna be okay?” Jorgun asked. He’d been so quiet she had forgotten about him.
“We’ll be … fine. Just close your eyes and count to…” She looked at the readout and its bleak display: sixty seconds to impact. “Count to sixty-one.”
Over the whisper of his chanting, she heard the hum of the laser. It drained power at a phenomenal rate. Because of its modifications it bypassed the usual circuit breakers. The lights went out, and life support shut down.
Jorgun was trying not to cry. That was no way to spend your last sixty seconds as an ordered collection of
