1740 hours CST, June 22nd, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

“New contact! Four fighters moving along the reverse vector of Tango one through four.”

“Roger, what’s the distance to the nearest asteroid?”

“Asteroid is ten thousand metres away,” Able Davids reported, sitting for the first time on the bridge as the VSO.

“Good. Lieutenant Bell, what’s our vector to make a zero relative velocity intercept?”

“Three G to get us to the same velocity, and one hundred metres on this side of it.”

“That’s fairly close. See what you can do to get us closer.”

“All hands,” Murphy said into the intercom after he turned on the ship-wide channel. “We are about to dock with an asteroid. Three-G manoeuvring will commence in fifteen seconds.”

Crew members all over the boat spent those fifteen seconds securing the most important loose objects on the boat: themselves. Murphy grabbed the three remaining straps on his harness and buckled them into place. The members of the boat’s night watch woke up at the sound of Murphy’s voice, grabbed the netting that was wrapped up on the side of their bunks, and pulled it over them to strap themselves to their bunks. They did not have time to find proper seats and five-point harnesses. The morning watch was sitting down to their supper and quickly grabbed their plates and covered the meals as best they could. No one wanted to clean up the mess after manoeuvres.

The Skate accelerated quickly to the same velocity as the asteroid and came to a relative hover fifty metres away, which was less than a quarter of the boat’s length. The asteroid was not a very big asteroid, only about four hundred metres long and a hundred and fifty wide. It still out-massed the torpedo boat by several orders of magnitude. The manoeuvre showed there was still some skill in the helmsmen of the fleet.

“Helm, see if you can grab it with the tethers, and pull us gently against it. Extend the landing gear.”

“Aye sir.”

At the bow and stern of the boat, hatches opened and spears were fired out toward the nearby rock. Each spear was barbed and trailed a strong cable behind it. They held the Skate close to the asteroid, and the helmsman used the manoeuvring jets and gentle pressure from the tethers to draw the ship against the surface.

Asteroids are not normally homogeneous masses of rock or iron; instead, they are usually made up of clumps of rock together by their gravity and force of long habit. Over time the rocks form one unit, but they could still be pulled apart if the boat was not careful. Murphy did not want that to happen, so the helmsman moved the boat almost entirely by manoeuvring thrusters, using the tethers only as a guide.

When the boat touched down on the asteroid, the vessel went silent. While the boat was undetectable without a laser imager, any vibration from it could cause the asteroid to vibrate very slightly. Hiding the torpedo boat was the highest priority, so the crew kept as quiet as possible.

Murphy had a look at the plot and expanded the view to focus in on the fighters as they approached the asteroid.

“Helm, apply some forward thrust, just a touch. Let’s see if we can get the asteroid rotating a bit.”

The rotation of the asteroid, if enough, should keep the Skate on the far side away from the oncoming patrol. At present the incoming fighters should pass at least a quarter of a light second from the boat and its hiding place, but there was no sense in taking any chances.

Minutes passed as the fighters continued to accelerate and moved closer to the asteroid. They approached their closest point and then started to pull away. The radio antenna were the only sensors the boat had operating that had any idea where the fighters were, and they listened into the scrambled chatter between the pilots. This group of pilots was more talkative; maybe it was the beginning of their patrol, or maybe this lot was less disciplined. The ESO kept updating bearings and strength of the signals.

Murphy set the sensor assumptions of one-G acceleration with a constant heading. With these assumptions he plotted out the fighters’ course and that they were now more than half a light second away. If he was wrong—if the fighters were accelerating slower than one G or if they changed their course—they could be much, much closer.

The minutes turned into a half hour, and then an hour as the fighters moved farther and farther away from the Skate before the camera operators picked up the heat signatures of their engines. Murphy’s assumptions were right this time. The fighters had not changed their course and kept to a standard one-G acceleration.

“Helm, release the tethers. Lieutenant Bell, get us back on course. Take it slowly. We lost the other fighters, but they should not have changed course that much. I want the HHE, MAD, GAD, and cameras all fully manned. I do not want us being surprised by anything. Have the radar powered but dormant.”

He waited for the rest of the bridge crew to acknowledge the order and gave the watch over to Ridgard. He waited to make sure Bell was done with his tasks and was heading to the hatch before he left the bridge himself and went to his cabin, to return to whatever commanding officers did in in the privacy of their cabins. For Murphy it was mainly a mixture of naps, paperwork, and planning.

Lieutenant Bell had made sure that the course was set for the next four hours and went off to get his supper before returning to the junior officers’ cabin to get some sleep. He only took the occasional naps. Every hour to hour and a half, he woke up and checked the plots. He sent the occasional update to Lieutenant Ridgard.

* * *

1900 hours CST, June 22nd, 2673; pirate ship Hades’s Conqueror

Captain Wilmore landed his fighter and then fought off the debriefers. He did his best to avoid the inevitable confrontation with his superiors about breaking the patrol profile and making a call to control for no reason. He stood by his actions and got out of the briefing room with his skin intact.

“This place is going downhill,” he said to the rest of his flight as he walked with them through the modified heavy hauler toward the boat bay. The comment was not something he would have shared with his flight a decade ago when they first started their mission.

The Hades’s Conqueror used to be known as the Sweet Sally. That was before it was captured two years ago during a raid on a system three jumps away. The Sweet Sally was a large vessel, at least two kilometres long. It was a container carrier that hauled standard twelve-metre long boxes filled with general produce from port to port. Most often these containers were not pressurized and carried perishable goods. Food was generally not carried, but the goods carried in the containers could still be damaged in the vacuum of space. The Sweet Sally had large internal bays that stored the containers in a pressurized environment.

Vacuum damage was not the only hazard that the large cargo vessel was built to deal with. Goods transported inside the vessel had to be protected from all the hazards of space: temperature extremes, radiation, and other similar hazards that a planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere protected it from. These requirements called for a thick hull that was well insulated.

After the large freighter had been captured, it became a very good candidate to become a pirate carrier. Hades’s Conqueror inherited an interstellar curve drive, large engines, large fuel bunkers, and several large pressurized bays to house fighters. It was notably lacking in weapons, but the heavy hull was thick enough to mount heavy cannons. One-third of the ship’s holds was converted to hold generators, fuel, and living spaces for the pirate crew. Another third was converted to hold the support systems to launch the fighters it carried. The rest of the ship’s cargo-carrying capacity was left intact.

Jorge looked to get away from the pirate ship at the end of his patrol. The fighters were junk, and the ships were not much better. At least the ships had some of their original equipment; engines that took up half the mass of the ship and a third of the interior space were notoriously hard to replace.

He turned to look at the leader of his second element. “How sure are you that you saw something in your camera, Sara?” he asked. She had shed her vac suit and was wearing a less-than-uniform uniform. Like most of the Fourth Fleet, the pilots used what they had and made do.

“That’s just it, Jorge. The rear cameras on those fighters suck. It looked bigger than normal static, but it might have been static.”

Jorge could not hold back his sigh. He let it out since he did not have to hide his feelings from the pilots he had been with for so long.

“We may have a patrol boat out there, but if we do, it’s probably a small one. One of those Rakes that Terrace has been throwing away.”

“Not likely. They’re not very good at hiding from us, even with those crappy fighters.”

“On the contrary, they’re very good at hiding if you have a decent pilot and an aggressive commander who’s willing to work the boat.”

Sara shrugged and said, “Perhaps, but every time we’ve encountered one, it was just going through the motions.”

“If there is one out there, Charlie Flight will be able to take it out. Come on, we have a chance to get something to eat before the shuttle leaves.”

* * *

0115 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

The Skate had spent several hours dodging between asteroids as it hunted along the path of the lost fighters. The crew was moving the boat with growing confidence as they became used to its abilities. Lieutenant Bell’s confidence was also growing, and he started to get more aggressive with his course plotting, moving closer and closer to the asteroids as he began to trust the helmsmen of the afternoon watch and then the evening watch. He was only getting the occasional nap for an hour or two, as he wanted to make sure everything was going well from his station. He hated to admit it to himself, but he had started to enjoy the close approaches.

Murphy was taking a smaller role on the bridge as Bell continued to improve his courses. The Academy training was something that was hard to overcome, and with the navy at peace, the Academy had begun training the astrogators to be more and more conservative. Murphy was still watching the reports from his quarters, but now he was watching his astrogator to make sure he did not get too aggressive with the courses. Unlike Bell, he was able to catch the occasional moment of sleep, deeper than a nap, but nowhere near enough. He also split his waking time between his quarters and the bridge.

Two hours after the watch change found both Murphy and Bell on the bridge, along with the watch officer, Lieutenant Sinkovich.

“Very good, Kory,” Murphy said as he complimented Bell on the last set of asteroid approaches. “Continue along here for another couple of hours. If we have not spotted any more fighters or their base by then, we’ll have to think about something else. Just remember your watch officially starts in six hours, and make sure you get at least four hours of sleep beforehand.”

“I will, sir, thank you.”

“I’ll be making a few rounds through the boat. Page me if something pops up.”

“Aye sir,” Lieutenant Sinkovich said as she moved from the signals console to the watch officer’s chair when Murphy gave her the watch. Bell had not moved from his spot at navigation, as he was working through the plots for the next few hours.

Murphy shook his head and left Bell alone at his station. He was happy that Bell was taking a more active role in navigating the boat. During the exercise Bell had only been on the bridge during his watch, or when Murphy had called a drill. With only the helm, electronic sensors, and defensive fire manned, the only other people on the bridge were the two junior officers. There was not much for Murphy to monitor. It was more important for him to let the junior officers man the watch while he wandered about the boat.

“Just don’t crash us into anything, Lieutenant Bell.”

“I won’t, sir,” Bell said with a distracted voice.

Despite having his prenavy life aboard stations in the Midway System, Kory started to become more proficient with this type of navigation, it was a different mind-set than most space-born people. The station where Kory spent his preadult life, Midway IV, was a gas prospecting station around one of the gas giants. The gas giant was one of those lucky planets that was rich in the forms of hydrogen that made the best fuels in hydrogen fusion reactors.

The station was the fourth of six similar stations, all orbiting the same gas giant. Each was a huge station that housed the families of the work force. The station was about the size of a space colony, and it had a lot of people, though it did not have the living spaces to house the millions of people a space colony did. A good portion of the population never left the station once they set foot on it, and with the station being over two hundred years old, many of the residents were born there and planned to die there.

Lieutenant Kory Bell was different; he felt the wanderlust that infected the paternal side of his family. Often members of the Bell family found it necessary to leave where there their family had set down roots and go off to find their own place in the galaxy. That was how Kory’s father had come to Midway IV in the first place, met, and then married his second wife. Kory’s skin was a golden colour, the same golden colour that showed that some of his ancestry came from the Middle Eastern areas of Earth. This was a gift from his maternal side.

Growing up on a mining station like Midway IV made Kory into a meticulous person. There was nothing he liked more in navigation than to have the entire route plotted out from start to finish, and his stay at the Academy only encouraged that part of his personality. This would have made him a perfect candidate for the navigator on a tender or another support vessel, but his wanderlust made him reject that path. Why would he want to continuously go from one port to another when he could see so much more?

Working the asteroids was a new experience for him. He could only plot the course out generally and was not able to plot it out five or six stages in advance like he was used to. He had to keep it to just one or two, possibly three, stages. As the cameras picked up more and more of the orbiting rocks, he had to constantly update his course. Each new update caused him to re-evaluate and often change the course of the boat as something better appeared.

Not only did he change the course of the boat, but he also had to keep track of where the fighters had appeared to go. As more asteroids appeared in the path, he had to make more guesses on where the fighters had gone. His orders were to use the asteroids as cover as much as possible; he often had the boat down and getting ready to dock with an asteroid as the camera scanned the area for any threats. In fact, while he felt more aggressive, his approach might not have been called the stalking of a predator, but the timid path of its prey. He was always ready to hide the boat if something was reported.

Bell looked up from his station and at the tactical plot. The projected path of the fighters was getting broader; instead of pursuing them, it might be more worthwhile to get back to a search pattern of the area.

While the helm was executing his last set of instructions, he plotted out the next course. But to keep things interesting, he also started to figure out how a search pattern could be set up that used the vectors the Skate had already travelled along.

“Heat source detected!” Able Spaceman Miller reported from the ESO station. She was covering the duties of the VSO during the night watch.

Lieutenant Bell’s head snapped up to ask for clarification, but he was slower than Lieutenant Sinkovich. It was her watch, after all.

“Where and what, Able?”

“Bearing off our port bow by ten degrees, down two. Still trying to get an identification.”

Lieutenant Bell looked back at Sinkovich.

“Kostya, you should call the CO.” Her fingers were already flying over the ship-wide intercom to call Lieutenant Murphy back to the bridge.