The captain of the mership Pasternak had been cursing sotto voce for a good hour, a steady stream of profanity that derived its considerable color and diversity from a long career as a mership officer. Not that cursing made the slightest difference, even though it did make him feel better. Fact was, he was well and truly screwed, and no amount of swearing would change that.
With only a fraction of a second left to run before Pasternak was scheduled to leave pinchspace, the ship’s error-prone navigation AI lost lock, precipitating an emergency drop into normalspace. Now, rather than tying up alongside a planetary transfer station to off-load passengers and cargo, the ship was coasting through farspace at a leisurely 150,000 kph on vector for Ashakiran.
That was the good news. The bad news was that Ashakiran was a depressingly long way away. It would be days before they decelerated into orbit around the second of the Federated Worlds’ home planets, and nothing would make it happen any sooner. The only way of getting home any faster would be to trust the navigation AI that had dropped Pasternak into the shit in the first place; since that risked emerging inside Ashakiran itself, he was not going to chance it.
That left Pasternak a long way out in farspace, very much on its own. It was not a good feeling. He hoped that the armistice with the Hammers still held. Ashakiran Farspace Control, though sympathetic, refused his request that a Fed warship—ever hopeful, he had asked for at least three—be sent to escort him in. So there they sat in farspace, alone and defenseless should a wandering Hammer warship happen to pass by, a tiny bubble of life sitting at the heart of a sphere of electromagnetic radiation that expanded at the speed of light screaming “Defenseless mership; come and get me.” Anyone who imagined the Hammers would stick to the terms of the armistice when presented with a soft target like poor old Pasternak was a damn fool. They would have to be saints, and he had never met a Hammer who came even close.
He hated the idea that he might end up having to beg some Hammer spacer to spare his ship thanks to a useless navigation AI. It would be just his luck if one of the worst trips in his long career ended in being captured by those bastards.
He was not happy, his crew was not happy, and worst of all, the self-loading cargo—a bunch of arrogant, overbearing xenobiologists returning from a field trip to Kanaris-IV with a mountain of equipment and thousands of samples—were not happy. “Miserable jerks,” he mumbled under his breath. What else did they expect from a clapped-out mership? Why did the penny-pinching bozos think the Pasternak charter was so cheap in the first place?
Pasternak’s captain fidgeted in his seat, trying hard not to think about how quickly the profit from the trip—never huge to start with—was disappearing. If there was any left at all by the end of the trip, it would be a miracle. Why did he bother? he wondered despondently while he made himself settle down to wait.
Five minutes later, a wall of gamma radiation from two antimatter warheads fired hours earlier by a Hammer cruiser smashed into the aging mership’s hull. The radiation ripped through the mership and raced away toward Ashakiran planet. Less than a nanosecond later, the fusion plant driving Pasternak’s main propulsion lost containment; the hellish energy released by the fusion plant’s failure expanded in a huge blue-white ball of ionized gas.
The ship had ceased to exist.