Rogue Orbit by Joshua Guess

Author:Joshua Guess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joshua Guess
Published: 2019-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

20

“Um, Iona? Please tell me I’m hallucinating right now,” Crash said, sitting up in her chair as alerts sounded across the bridge. The threat assessment display populated instantly with half a dozen ships, then doubled. Then doubled again. The numbers kept on climbing.

“You aren’t,” Iona said. “Gonna be kinda busy.”

Crash knew she was only on the ship in case something happened to Iona. She was the only other fully qualified astrogator and pilot they had left. Everyone had learned at least the basics of each person’s job, but there was a wide gulf between being able to keep the damn thing straight and experience that came only with hundreds of hours behind the stick.

The threat board lit up with yet more new foes, leaving their deep geosynchronous orbit over the Vault surrounded. They were Children technology—had the alien defenses on the planet sent anything up here after them, they wouldn’t have been in stealth mode and certainly wouldn’t be stationed at relative stops. It was a threat, not an attack. Yet.

“Options,” Crash said. “Where did they come from and why aren’t they attacking?”

Iona considered for less than a second. “They must have been in deep stealth, sneaking up after that damn mind worked out where we were. I’d really like to know what they have for armor. They turned it off to become completely visible to our sensors. As for options...they’re not attacking. They’ll read our power curve if we cycle up for anything big like a warp jump.”

They were relatively safe this far from the planet. The ground-based defenses targeting anything manipulating gravity were less effective at longer ranges. The orbital platforms in this area had been cleaned out by the Originators, giving a small but useful bubble of clean space to work in.

Crash mulled that over. “What could we do with a brief Slip drive burst? I mean, the capacitors for it are already charged, so if we run the drive on a trickle and then dump a bunch of power into it, that should give us a burst, right? No ramp-up of the power curve?”

Iona came fully alert, though Crash knew she was still integrated with the ship. There was surprise on her face. “That’s brilliant. Normally we cycle the fusion plant up to keep each bank of capacitors topped off as it runs. I never thought of that.”

Crash grinned, waving a hand at the enemies surrounding them. “What can I say? Threats to my life make me pretty creative. What’s the count, by the way?”

“Sixty-eight,” Iona replied at once. “They seem to have stopped coming. Why are they waiting?”

Crash suppressed the urge to laugh. The sim was amazingly capable, but her relative lack of experience sometimes showed through in startling ways. “Either they’re waiting to attack all at once, or someone is about to give us an ultimatum. Only reason I can think of for not shooting us out of the sky as soon as they could is because we’re leverage.”

Iona’s brow wrinkled. “How could you possibly know that?”

Crash shrugged.

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