CHAPTER 8

The yoke bucked in Eli’s hands as he pushed the Cav’s throttle to its limit. The whole ship was vibrating like a washing machine with an uneven load, rocking from side to side. Nova’s thermal layers could be murder if you took them too fast. But right now, there were only two options: fast or dead.

Beside him, Taylor had opened her eyes again and turned, businesslike as ever, to the consoles in front of her.

The speakers squawked to life suddenly. “ST321, this is Yamanaka Tower. You have not been cleared for liftoff and are in violation of Commonwealth airspace regulations. Set down immediately.”

“Not bloody likely,” said Eli through gritted teeth, eyes on the altimeter. They’d already passed five thousand feet, but breaking atmo would take another several minutes, even at maximum speed. Too much time. They can have a missile lock on us or scramble interceptors before we even hit the stratosphere. And there’s nowhere to hide.

Taylor glanced over, as if reading his mind. “What’s the status of countermeasures?”

“Should be ready to go… assuming Mal got them back online after the other day.” No wonder this all feels so familiar. They’d almost been shot out of the sky by their own people after Mal’s new transponder spoofing system had fried half the Cav’s systems.

Eli’s mind spun suddenly at the thought. “Wait – we might have something better. Commander, point me towards the nearest commercial shipping vector.”

The commander, to her credit, didn’t ask why, just brought up a holoscreen and panned around. “Heading 130, mark 57, distance about twenty klicks.”

Eli adjusted course, swinging the ship in the direction she’d given.

“ST321,” said the voice over the speaker, “your course change is unauthorized and presents a collision risk with commercial traffic. Spinnaker 1 and 2 are inbound to escort you to a landing.”

“I’m guessing they’re not going to be offering us their arm,” said Tapper.

“Oh, they’re going to be arming something.”

“Really? Now?”

“Sorry. OK, Addy, on the flight engineer console there should be an interface for Mal’s spoofing program.” User-friendliness had probably not been high on the list of the tech’s priorities, but hopefully it wasn’t an inscrutable mess.

Addy spun to her left, tapping the controls. “Got it. Wow, there’s a whole database of codes in here. Commonwealth passenger ships… Hanif couriers…” He could hear her eyebrows rising. “Illyrican dreadnoughts? Who’s going to believe this ship is a dreadnought?”

“Hopefully, the Illyricans,” said Tapper.

“Traffic control still has our position,” said Taylor, shaking her head. “Even if we change transponder codes, they’ll still know it’s us broadcasting a different signal. It doesn’t stop them from shooting us out of the sky.”

“That’s just part one,” said Eli, more assuredly than he felt. “Next, we have to find the nearest ship in this vector.”

Taylor opened her mouth, then paused. “I think I see where this is going.”

“And?”

“I don’t love it.” But she turned back to her display anyway. “There’s a cargo hauler at point three-five. ID Bravo One-Nine.” She slid the information across to Eli’s own display: a Niguruma class Mark Seven bulk freighter.

Just what we need: big and slow. “Copy, matching course.”

A rapid set of beeping alerts came from a station behind Eli, and he didn’t have to look to know what it meant: nothing good.

“We’ve got those interceptors inbound,” said Tapper, pulling up a sensor display. “Closing fast. Maybe a minute before we’re in their weapons range.”

Eli glanced at his own HUD; they’d reach the bulk freighter a hair before that, which meant they had no time to lose. “Commander, send the freighter’s transponder code to the flight engineer console – Addy, there should be an option to clone and broadcast.”

Silence fell over the cockpit, leaving just the thrumming of the engine and the beeps of the various stations. “We’re going to pretend to be a commercial cargo ship?” said Addy, a note of disbelief in her voice.

“That’s part two of the plan.”

“How many parts does this plan have?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”

Addy didn’t respond. Just as well: Eli was running out of answers. “Transponder code is cloned,” she said. “Ready to broadcast.”

Eli leaned forward. “OK,” he said under his breath, “this next part gets a little tricky.” Waving a hand at the HUD, it isolated and magnified the commercial ship, which otherwise would have been little more than a shiny dot streaking contrails behind it. Zoomed in, it proved to be a much larger shiny dot: a long cylinder with cargo pods hanging off it like feet off a centipede. Ungainly, to say the least. A tag in his heads-up display showed the transponder ID and a few other relevant details, like course, speed, and – most crucially – distance.

“Ten klicks away,” said Taylor, looking at the same readout. “Thirty seconds.”

“Those fighters are about forty-five seconds out,” Tapper added.

Sucking in a lungful of air, Eli grasped the throttle and eased up just slightly. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the speed tick down until it was just the same as the cargo hauler.

“Uh, that ship’s getting pretty close,” said Addy.

Indeed, the hauler had suddenly filled the cockpit window, a whale of battleship gray, as much larger than the Cavalier as an Illyrican dreadnought was to a starfighter. It hung eerily still, given that their relative speeds were almost the same.

“Matching course and speed,” said Eli, maneuvering the Cavalier even closer. A series of alarms started chiming with increasing frequency as he closed. A dialog reading COLLISION ALERT popped up on the HUD and he waved it away. The hauler, clearly getting the same alert that Eli had, attempted to drift away, but it was far bigger and less agile than the Cavalier and Eli had little trouble adjusting course to match.

“Jesus, kid,” said Tapper, gripping the back of Eli’s seat, “is your escape plan to crash us into another ship? Because that’s a little more final than I’m looking for.”

Just a little closer.

“OK, Addy… broadcast now.”

There was a series of beeps and Eli held his breath, waiting for the entire cockpit to go dark, but whatever work Mal had done had apparently paid off. He expelled the air from his lungs.

“Did it work?” said Addy.

“We’re not dead,” Tapper pointed out.

“The sensors on the ground aren’t fine-grained enough to separate the Cav’s small mass from the hauler’s shadow,” Eli explained, pointing at the heads-up display. “So all Yamanaka Tower can see is two identical transponder signals coming from the same location – it doesn’t know which one’s real.”

“What about those incoming fighters?” said Addy. “Can’t the pilots just look out their canopies and see us?”

“Nobody’s ever satisfied with what they have,” Eli muttered.

“Brody.”

“I’m working on it!”

Tapper took that moment to helpfully chime in. “Ten seconds.”

Eli nudged the yoke up until there was nothing to see through the cockpit viewport but the cargo ship. He gingerly twitched the controls, keeping the ship level with the hauler, even as he could feel the vibrations from the ship’s wake making the Cav buck and shudder.

“Interceptors are in weapons range,” said Tapper.

As one, all four of them held their breath. If I’m wrong about the capabilities of those fighters… or we’re not quite close enough…

“No contact,” said Tapper. “Looks like they’re closing to visual range, but that’s going to take a couple minutes.”

“We’ll break atmosphere in less than that,” said Eli. “Which raises the question: where exactly are we going, commander?”

Taylor sat back in her chair and rubbed a hand over her mouth. “We need to get out of the system.” She grimaced. “Preferably out of Commonwealth space entirely. Can you make it to the Badr gate?”

The wormhole to the Badr sector was halfway across the system – getting there would take a few hours, and it was unlikely they could shadow the cargo ship the whole way there – if that was even where it was bound. “And here I was hoping you’d ask for something easy, like taking down those interceptors in a dogfight.” Eli rubbed at his eyes, which suddenly felt gummy, like he hadn’t blinked in several minutes. “There’s a whole lot of empty space between here and the gate. Plus, even if we get through, it’s nothing more than a head start – they’ll be able to track us on the traffic network.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” said Taylor. “But one thing at a time. Look,” she craned her neck, taking in Addy and Tapper as well as Eli. “I realize these are extreme circumstances, so if anybody’s got any objections, now’s the time.”

Nobody said anything for a moment, then Tapper cleared his throat. “I can’t speak for anybody else, but I just want to point out that we’ve already made the choice to run, and everybody back on Nova, they’re going to be assuming we’re guilty of… well, of whatever bullshit they’re accusing us of. We’re not going to be able to clear our names – or the boss’s – if we’re looking over our shoulder for the bullseye on our back.”

“I mean, I think sarge overloaded his metaphor at the end there, but he’s right,” said Eli. “After what we saw with Page and Alys Costa, I can’t say I trust the system to find the truth.”

As Kovalic had relayed it after their confrontation on Station Zero, Costa – Nova Front’s leader and a former CID operative – claimed she’d been hung out to dry after a particularly shady black ops mission. More to the point, she’d decided to frame Page for the bombing of a ConComm communications hub.

Addy snorted. “You’re just figuring that out now, huh? Yeah, I’m in. Sticking around for rendition to a black site seems like a bad deal. Let’s get gone.”

“All right, then,” said Taylor, nodding and turning back to her console. “Lieutenant, set your course.”

“That still leaves the problem of how we get there,” said Tapper. “The second we leave the cargo ship’s mass shadow, they’re going to be over us like ants on honey.”

Eli rubbed his chin, the bristles stiff against his fingers. He hadn’t gotten to shave in a few days, what with all the running around and trying not to die, and he was getting perilously close to a beard. Or whatever he could grow that passed for one.

What we need is just a way for them to not pay attention to us. They could shut off the transponder entirely, but that would just flag them as an unidentified ship to all parties, which would be like politely asking to be shot down. Switching up the transponder code to clone another ship could work, but they’d still only be prolonging the inevitable – the Commonwealth navy was more than capable of interdicting two vessels and sorting it out afterwards.

An alarm beeped on the console. More unwelcome news.

Tapper had already picked up on it. “The cargo ship’s reducing speed. Changing course, too.”

“Yeah,” said Eli. “I’m guessing Yamanaka Tower directed them to heave to.” But something Mal had said the other day was niggling at his brain, worming its way in there. Something important about what their system upgrade could do…

“So, now you can broadcast a clone of any transponder the Cav has seen,” they’d said. “I could make it look like the secretary-general of the Commonwealth’s personal transport. I’m telling you: nobody would know the difference.”

He almost whirled around to look at Addy before remembering that he was keeping the ship from crashing into a gigantic cargo hauler just meters away. “Addy, there should be a catalog of transponders in the system… see if you can find one with the call sign CSG1.”

There was a sharply indrawn breath from Taylor. “Brody, that cannot be a good idea.”

“No, no, trust me! I know what I’m doing.”

“First time for everything I suppose,” muttered Tapper from behind him.

“It’s here,” said Addy. She paused. “Uh. You want me to turn this on?”

The rumbling from the Cav started to die out, and ahead of them through the cockpit, Eli watched the blue sky darken to the black of space, pinpricks of stars flitting into existence like holes in the firmament itself. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“OK, here goes nothing.” There was a click as Addy hit the broadcast switch, and then… nothing.

Eli heaved a sigh of relief. “There’s a target lockout on official government transponders. You can override, but it’s a lot of paperwork because who wants to be the one to order shooting down the leader of their own government? Anyway, right now, there are a lot of people down there yelling at each other and by the time they’ve cleared it all up, we should be long gone.”

There was a brief sensation of settling in Eli’s stomach as they hit space proper and the ship’s systems began their switchover process: flying through vacuum wasn’t quite like flying through atmosphere – for one thing, there was effectively no drag – and though the controls did their best to abstract the difference, a good pilot could always tell.

Eli reached out and brought up a navigation holoscreen, outlining their course in dotted green lines towards a point near the edge of the system. “Once we’re clear of Nova’s defense perimeter, our best option is to switch off the transponder and do a hard burn towards the gate, then kill most of the ship systems.”

Taylor’s eyebrows went up. “That’ll essentially turn the ship into an asteroid. We’ll be flying blind.”

“True, but it goes both ways. Any sentry ships near the gate won’t be able to see us either. Just in case they do manage to sort out the paperwork.”

The commander nodded. “Do it. ETA to the gate?”

Eli’s fingers danced over the navigation computer. “Two hours. With a two-hour gate transit to the Badr system, that gives us four hours to figure out where the hell we’re going and how we’re going to cover our tracks.”