Invardii Box Set 2 Page 7
The dust that had been blasted into the atmosphere during the battle for the surface of the planet, and the fires that followed, would take months or years to settle. Only then would the levels of light on the surface return to normal.
When he was clear of the planet, and his long-range scanners showed no sign of drone activity in the K'Sarth system, Fedic laid in a slow course for the asteroid belt. This was not the time to draw attention to his ship, and he had cautioned his K'Sarth pilots to take similar care that the freighters moved unnoticed through the K'Sarth system.
At the rendezvous point, Fedic slaved the freighter systems to the navigation console on the Lucky Streak. This would give the pilots sufficient control for normal operations, but allowed Fedic to take control of the freighters if it was a matter of life and death.
“Be prepared” was a mild understatement compared to the training Fedic had been given as a stealth operative, and his teachers had developed in him talents even he had not known he possessed. The belief that the battle was won or lost in the preparation, and understanding what enemy forces might do, had been drilled into the very core of his being.
Not even Cordez knew where Fedic had been trained, or who had trained him. “I am the eternal calm,” he reflected for a moment, “that uses only the abundant energy around me. I take nothing, I leave nothing. I am not, and I never was.”
He felt his awareness sharpen, his thoughts become more balanced, and his whole being become one with the mission.
Then it was time to lay in an unobtrusive course for Rokar, the Sumerian planet.
The freighters had just acknowledged Fedic’s navigation plan when a muted chime sounded, and a tiny light glowed orange on the console before him. The Lucky Streak had the best long-range sensors of any Earth ship, and almost certainly any Sumerian ship as well. The orange light meant something was out there.
Easing a little closer to the asteroid belt, Fedic herded the freighters into a position where the faint signals from them would be lost among the rocks and charged fields of the belt. Until he knew what was out there, he wanted the freighters to hunker down and stay quiet.
Fedic was a master in the art of passive detection, and he was about to use the current circumstances to see without being seen. A direct probe in the direction of the faint signal would be detected, but a careful collation of signals bouncing off the asteroids around them could be reassembled into a coherent signal.
Fedic had to wait a while, but eventually the shadowy shape on his screen firmed up. He stared at the result, not understanding what he saw. Then he realized what it was.
An Invardii drone! He was looking at a circle of ice and rock fragments that rotated eerily some distance away, on the edge of the debris and rock fragments of the asteroid belt. It gave off no energy signature, and had no apparent central body, but a regular circle of glistening ice pieces over a rocky core was never going to be a natural event.
Cordez had passed on Finch’s description of the drone he had seen at the mining site, and every detail fit perfectly. Fedic knew the drones were trouble. Not only could these things alert Reaper ships to the whereabouts of the freighters, but they had some form of armament themselves.
Should I try to destroy it, he wondered. Did it have subspace radio, and would it report it’s position if he attacked it? Almost certainly a yes to both questions. If the Druanii had sub-space radio, then the Invardii would have it too.
The main problem for Fedic was that he had the freighters to think about. It meant that his only course of action had to be a retreat.
He slaved the freighters entirely to his ship, giving the pilots no discretion at all, and began to edge further away from the drone. He edged along the fringes of the asteroid belt with the freighters in tight formation below him. Then he checked the long-range sensors again, and discovered the drone had changed its position. It was creeping forward, aiming for the position they had just left.
“Dammit!” swore Fedic out loud, “it’s picked us up, somehow.”
This was unbearably frustrating. He needed to do something, but he was hampered by the inexperience of the K'Sarth pilots. Fedic discarded plan after plan as it became clear his pilots didn’t have the level of flying skill required.
There was nothing for it, he realized at last, the convoy would have to make its way into the asteroid field.
CHAPTER 11
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Fedic reconfigured the automatic pilot for the Lucky Streak, adding proximity awareness programs he had long held in readiness for situations like this, and downloaded the new directives to the freighters.
The convoy sank into the danger zone, trying to utilize the ever opening and closing lanes within the asteroids. Each path they followed was clear of hazards for a while, but then it would close out as the fields of rubble shifted once again. It was a risk they had to take. He set the freighters a new rendezvous point on the other side of the shifting fields of rubble, and then dispersed them to find their own way through the belt.
Fedic kept in close contact with the freighters, and had to concede some time later that the proximity awareness programs seemed to be working. Whether the drone had followed the freighters into the asteroids was something he was unable to determine.
They were soon well on their way to the new rendezvous point, despite the fact the fields of rock and frozen gases were getting denser. It must be hell for the K'Sarth pilots, thought Fedic. With the freighters running on autonav, they weren’t able to take any part in saving their own lives. They had to stand by the controls and feel completely helpless.
The destination point grew slowly closer. Fedic checked the scanners again. It looked like there was a fairly well-defined edge to the field not far ahead, and it was just before the rendezvous point he had picked.
Moving cautiously, Fedic led the freighters out of the asteroid belt. The sensor console on his ship instantly lit up in a mass of blinking signals. Fedic flipped the long-range scanner onto the overhead screen, and changed the signal to visual, at extreme magnification.
The screens were filled with Reaper ships. It was another armada, similar to the one that had already destroyed the Sumerian home planet. It was somewhere outside the K'Sarth system, keeping to the vast open spaces between stars.
Fedic stepped the magnification back by a factor of ten to get a broader view, and still the unmistakable orange shapes filled the screens.
Groups of five and six seemed to be traveling together, interspersed with single ships traveling back and forth between the groups, and all spread out over immense distances. The overall impression was rather chaotic, but there was no doubting what he was looking at. A vast armada of Reaper ships was heading out of the Core and into Sumerian space.
He looked again. Several larger ships were traveling in the middle of the armada. Mother ships perhaps, or command ships, something like that? Were they simply tactical support, or were they supply ships? He didn’t have time to ponder that now.
Fedic wanted to know where the armada was headed. The navs computers projected a path along the current heading of the Reaper ships. Fedic’s heart sank as he looked at the result. The armada was traversing Sumerian space on its way to Earth.
It had always been just a matter of time. Now that the Invardii occupied Uruk, the Sumerian home planet, Earth had to be next. The armada’s presence near the K'Sarth system made sense too. It was on the most direct route from the Core to Earth.
This had also been the case for Saurok, another planet the Reaper ships had attacked, and HK42, the binary system where they’d built a shipyard. Though Sumerian forces had destroyed that one, with the Sumerian losses being devastatingly high.
At least the freighters seemed to have lost the Invardii drone. Fedic considered his options. The convoy was probably safe if it stayed in the shadow of the asteroid fields, because that would scramble sensor scans from the Reaper ships.
But his first priority must be to alert Earth. Would a sub-s
pace signal be picked up by the Invardii? Probably not. The Prometheus team who had developed sub-space capabilities believed the signals traveled ‘outside’ normal space, independent of each other. He decided he would have to act – Cordez had to be told.
Fedic reached down to the slim compartment that had been fixed to the side of his communications console. His message was brief. It gave the heading, position, and estimated number of Reaper ships, and their speed. There was a brief fluttering of sub-space receptors, which was the standard acknowledgment.
That was that. He couldn’t help Earth fight the armada, not until he had discharged his duty to the K'Sarth freighters. Fedic sent a brief message to the convoy, and it sank back into the asteroid belt to wait for the vast armada to pass by.
Two days later Fedic guided the flotilla of freighters into the Rokar system. He had used the sub-space radio to keep up with the dramatic engagement in the Solar System. Balancing that with his duties as mentor for the freighter pilots.
It was a test of his training that he kept his mind on the task in front of him, and stored away information about the tremendous battle between the Earth forces and the attackers for later examination.
Fedic had guided the eleven freighters in a roundabout route to their destination, making short hops through empty regions of space and checking his long-range scanners frequently. So far they had traveled unnoticed by the Invardii, and now they were entering the Rokar system his job was almost over.
As they passed within the orbit of one of the outer gas giants, Fedic heard a familiar muted chime, and a tiny light glowed orange on the console in front of him.
He growled quietly to himself. Something was playing hide and seek out there. An Invardii drone, if he was not much mistaken.
What were his options? The freighters were close enough now to their destination at Rokar to make their own way into planetary orbit. They had, in fact, already received clearance from Rokar to do so.
I think I’ll go hunting, thought Fedic, a fox-like smile playing across his features as his eyes narrowed.
He cleared the freighters to proceed on their own, then cut all his systems and waited patiently for the freighters to move further into the system. Once they had disappeared toward the bright dot of Rokar, he activated his ship’s photon deflection shield. That should make him invisible to anything in the electromagnetic spectrum, and it had worked with the drones before.
Then the waiting began. If he couldn’t get a clear fix on the strange energy signature his sensitive long-range receivers had picked up, he would have to wait until it revealed itself in some other way.
This wasn’t a battle of wits to be won by the reckless, or the brave. It was going to be won by those with the most patience, and the best interpretation of the data. He ran another passive scan, looking for something that was not quite right, something out of place.
There it was! Among the debris circling the gas giant he had just passed was something that didn’t quite fit. A loose cluster of fragments in a decaying orbit about the giant planet had the mineral signal of a low-grade meteorite, but it also showed traces of super-heavy elements.
Fedic glanced at the scanning program. It was slowly collating more and more details. Every faint echo, reflecting off the atmosphere of the gas giant, or off the debris in orbit, was painting a picture, like an image reborn from a thousand pieces of broken glass. The ‘low grade meteorite’ Fedic was targeting looked to have an unknown energy signature, and the scanning program was slowly closing in on the same location.
Then the source of the strange signal moved. Something detached itself from the debris around the gas giant, and moved almost lazily onto a new trajectory. Then it slowly unfurled, turning into the same circle of ice and rock fragments, rotating eerily in space, that he had seen the drones become on previous occasions.
He wondered idly if it was the same drone. Probably not. That one had been some sort of scout for the armada that was now invading Earth. It didn’t really matter which one it was. The problem was what part of the damn thing to target, and what to hit it with. There was no sense in blasting away at the pieces of rock. He had to hit the nervous system of the thing, the brain that drove it.
He had less than a minute until the drone would be at its closest position as it passed the Lucky Streak. His ship drifted silently in space, waiting for the passive sensors to give him a better picture of the thing. Then Fedic only had moments left to make his decision, as the sensor program tried to make sense of the scattered signals it was receiving.
Then the data dropped into place. All of the six irregularly-shaped chunks of rock and ice had a cylindrical core composed of complex super-heavy elements, but only two of them had raised cubes that almost met across the gap between them.
When the drone was at the closest point of its bypass, Fedic fired the cright beams, or ‘corrosive light’, that his ship had been fitted with at Prometheus. The modulated laser beam acted as a carrier wave for a super-hot particle discharge, and the middle of the drone flared rainbow fire.
The response from the Invardii drone was almost immediate. Orange fire bled from the circle of fragments into the center of the circle, then lanced out towards the spot where the Lucky Streak had been moments before. Fedic hadn’t waited around to see if his strike was a killing shot, and had moved as soon as he had fired.
He was glad he had done that, very glad indeed, but there was no time to waste. Despite the photon deflection shield, the drone now knew roughly where he was from his cright beam, and now it would be following the energy trail his engines were leaving behind him.
What do I need to do to stop this thing! growled Fedic savagely, as he kicked in the little device he had borrowed from the Mars miners. His engines appeared to fire in several directions at once, and then he was coasting in shut-down mode.
So the cubes aren’t the thing’s brains after all, he decided. He had to find something else to disable, and fast! He glanced at the scanners, which had been bouncing signals off the drone while he’d been firing at it.
He was getting high-resolution images now, and he took a quick glance at the result. There was something above the plane of the circle, a diamond-shaped shadowy blade that spun around the circle faster than he could see with the naked eye. That had to be the drone’s intelligence system!
Targeting the diamond shape wasn’t easy, but the cright beam stabbed away at it, adjusting each shot based on the results of the previous one. Fedic sat ready to move the ship if the drone showed any signs of powering up its weapons systems again.
He needn’t have bothered. The central unit of the drone, spinning above the circle of ice and rock fragments it controlled, exploded in a smear of white and yellow smoke and flame.
Fedic scanned the area once the gases had dissipated. The ice and rock fragments were now floating disjointedly in space, and had already begun to drift apart. In time, they would end up scattered through the Rokar system, if they didn’t fall into the gas giant and burn up.
An insistent chiming sounded from Fedic’s control banks. He called up a display from the long-range scanners and placed it on the overhead screens. His head snapped up. There were Reaper ships entering the Rokar system, pinpricks of light appearing in groups of five and six from the edge of the system, beyond the gas giant.
Could the destruction of the drone have brought them in? Fedic didn’t think so. Even with instantaneous sub-space radio, the Reaper ships would still have had to travel to this system. It was just bad goddammit luck!
Turning hastily toward Rokar, Fedic set out in pursuit of the freighters. Damn slag-spawn, he cursed. It looked like the Invardii weren’t finished with the Sumerians yet.
They were coming for Rokar.
CHAPTER 12
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Fedic brought Cordez up to date on the Reaper ships while he pushed the Lucky Streak in pursuit of the freighters he had shepherded in from K'Sarth. Cordez acknowledged the bad news, but he didn’t s
eem surprised at what Fedic said.
The stealth operative wondered if Cordez had already thought of the possibility of Reaper ships in the Rokar system. A smile flickered across his face. There wasn’t anything Prometheus would be able to do about it, but Cordez was on the ball, as always.
The freighters showed clearly on Fedic’s long-range scanners. They had come out of star drive some time ago, and were slowing for an insertion into planetary orbit. The Rokar sun was a bright dazzle above the curve of the planet behind them.
Fedic flicked the scanners off. Something didn’t feel right, and he didn’t know what it was. He brought up the last images his scanners had of the Reaper ships, as they rounded the gas giant and followed him into the Rokar system.
That was what was bothering him. There were too few of them to be an invasion force, and besides, they hadn’t had time to get to Rokar from the battlefield above Earth. This had to be an independent group that had nothing to do with the armada fleet. What were they doing here?
Fedic came to a decision. There was no point in committing the K'Sarth freighters to Rokar orbit. An attack by the Reaper ships was almost certain, and that meant the freighters wouldn’t have time to unload their supplies. He could also see them getting in the way of whatever defense Rokar was able to muster.
Fedic began to transmit the stand down signal, an operational code that meant the freighters should wait for a change of plans.
He caught up with the freighters on the night side of the planet, and followed them as they overshot the huge industrial space station where they would normally have unloaded their cargo. Using Rokar as a shield from the approaching Reaper ships, he ordered them to pick up speed again as they looped around the planet.
Not far from their current position the Sumerian military were responding to the approaching threat as fast as they could. The huge dry docks, and space stations where the Sumerian Barauks were normally housed, were a hive of activity. Crews for the warships currently located at Rokar were trying to get them functional, whether they had finished refitting or not. Shuttles were streaming up from the planet to get the Barauk personnel to their posts in time.