Chapter 9: Deep Space Chess

Just because we jumped to hyperspace didn’t mean we had gotten away. It really depended on just how fast the computers on the other ships were at calculating trajectories. They saw where we were and where we were pointed. The only thing they didn’t know was the distance. The problem was there were vast databases that looked at engine sizes and fuel consumption rates, travel speed, and a bunch of other number-crunching algorithmic mumbo jumbo. Look, I don’t know that kind of stuff, I’ll admit. I’m just a weirdo who plays with corpses and gets run out of town for it. It was almost like it was taboo or something, which was wild because of all the other stuff I’d seen the last few years.

The point is, we had a lead on them, but only because they had to guess where we were going to pop up. There were a series of factors helping the Revaulos and Valraithi make educated guesses, not least of which was there were an awful lot of their ships. They could each pick a point in space and jump there, look around for us, and move to the next all along the trajectory we left them. The only thing we could do was make a short jump, reposition, and then jump again at a different angle. Bradley did just that.

“Keep a watch on the radar, Karla,” he said as we fell out of the quantum soup of space-time whateverness I didn’t understand.

“I’m staring at the screen. What, you don’t want me to blink or something?”

“Don’t even breathe. I’m lining up the next jump and need to know the second those pirates show up.”

“What makes you think they’ll get here before we’re gone?” I asked.

Bradley laughed. It was a nervous bark, more than anything else. It was the laugh of someone who knew enough to properly scared. “You know how the Valraithi got so big? They aren’t just one ship or one crew. They’re an armada.” He fired the engines, spinning us just under ninety degrees to the right and about thirty degrees up, relative to our original alignment. There wasn’t an official “up,” in space. Everything was relative to stars, but we were jumping the gap. There weren’t any stars. “The reason they got so big,” he continued, “is because they didn’t spend their money on fancy guns like all the other privateer outfits across the system. They spent their money on quantum computing. Used to, you could outrun a pirate crew. That didn’t work when the Valraithi tracked you. They knew your most likely jump destinations based on a billion factors, each weighted individually. They could damn near predict the future.”

“Yeah, but they were still only one ship catching up to you. If they don’t have the guns, just blow them up and run away.”

“That might have worked ten years ago, but with each win, they got more money and more ships. Now they’ll swarm out and either shoot us out of the sky or run us out of fuel.”

As he said it, I saw a blip appear on the radar behind us. “Someone’s here!”

“Figures. Right before the jump too,” Bradley grumbled and slammed his fist on the big, red hyperspace jump button on the cockpit’s console. We accelerated to speed, and phase shifted out just before the sudden burst of speed would have turned our insides into Vibraxian jelly. We stopped only twenty seconds later. Bradley began spinning us in a different direction before we had even slowed to cruising speeds. Normally that would be extra dangerous, but since we were so far away from any known space debris or objects, the likelihood of us running into anything or catching drag from a gravitational well was pretty low.

I locked my eyes on the radar, and sure enough, I saw a blip appear just before we jumped again. This time, however, the blip split into two just the instant before we left range. “There were two this time.”

“They’re running us in. Were they Revaulo-sized blips or Valraithi?”

“What does that even mean? I’m a necromancer, not a radar technician.”

“Were they big ovals or small ovals?”

“Small ovals,” I replied.

Bradley sighed and pulled us out of the hyperspace jump again. “Damn. That means it’s Revaulo. The pirates must be feeding them information.” When we slowed this time, I didn’t have to wait for the blips to show up. They were already there, staring us down, and their plasma cannons looked white hot on the thermal feed next to the radar.

You are reading story Dead Reckoning at novel35.com

“Nice knowing you, trash man,” I said, leaping from my co-pilot seat and taking off down the hall to the arsenal. We had used most of our ammunition in the fight with the Revaulo zombies, which seemed like days ago.

“Don’t waste ammo on shooting the ships. When they fire at us, try to shoot their plasma blasts,” Bradley called over the speaker system.

I jumped into the comfy arsenal chair and strapped in. “What will that do? It’ll just melt our little needles like the crap they are.”

“We don’t need them to stop the plasma, just deflect it enough to keep us safe getting close.”

I was loading the guns with what little ammo the screen showed we had left and had to stop to figure out what the hell Bradley was talking about. “We’re closing with them? Are you crazy?”

Sure enough, and without answering me, the engines flared back to life, and we charged the Revaulo ships. They wasted no time and fired a volley of melted plasma slag our way, hoping to punch a hole in our hull. I fired off a burst of pressurized needles from our tiny twin-stick cannons. The first few needles impacted, but did little more than make the plasma a little wobbly on its way towards gutting us. Luckily, the next burst knocked the first off course, and I followed up with a third and subsequent burst on the next glob of plasma slag heading our way.

I didn’t hit all of them, or even many of them, but I knocked enough off course to give Bradley a path to fly right up amidst the Revaulo ships. There were more of them now, with reinforcements falling out of hyperspace all around us each second.

This looks like a whole lot of effort for just little old me.

“You stole nothing else while we were there, right, trash man?” I asked, suspecting there was more to the story than he had told me.

“Well, I mean, kinda,” he replied. The next volley of plasma slag shot across at the ship from the sides. We were in the heart of the Revaulo squadron now, and they swarmed around us. Plasma isn’t smart ordinance. People could program rockets to ignore friendly ships or change course to chase a target. Rockets were expensive. Plasma was just super-heated metal mined from dead planets. It also doesn’t care what is in front of it when it hits a target.

In this case, we were right in the middle, and I was out of ammo. I felt the pressure drop suck the air from my lungs when the first one punctured the hull, and everything shook as the ship’s seals tried to maintain pressure. It worked for a few seconds, but as soon as the tenth piece of molten plasma rocketed through our ship, I knew we were screwed. The lights clicked off as we lost power, and the engines sputtered to a halt. We were drifting.

Never fight angry. That has sort of been the smart person’s mantra since the beginning of time. I guess the Revaulo home world never developed that particular strategy, or else had skeleton crews on each ship (you know, with their hive intellect and all), because I saw a small consolation prize as I looked out the window. There were nearly fifteen Revaulo ships out there now, and an almost equal number of Valraith pirate vessels, too. Of those fifteen Revaulo ships, it looked like only three or four were undamaged. They had fired on us in haste and knocked out their own ships in the process. Bradley’s suicide run had at least partially worked.

One of the undamaged ships matched our drifting speed, and I saw an airlock arm extend towards our hull. It wasn’t coming towards our airlock, I might add. These jerks planned on attaching to the side of our ship and cutting their way in to make sure we were good and dead. Bradley floated down the hall to the arsenal, since without power, our gravity drives were down. “Nice job,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my voice like bile. “What’s the plan now?”

He shook his head. “I’m just making it up as I go along. You got any ideas?”

We could always try to turn the boarding party.

“Well, there is one,” I replied.

You can find story with these keywords: Dead Reckoning, Read Dead Reckoning, Dead Reckoning novel, Dead Reckoning book, Dead Reckoning story, Dead Reckoning full, Dead Reckoning Latest Chapter