Hunting the Dark: Reeling In

The people who design alert klaxons for starships go out of their way to make them loud, irritating to the ear, and impossible to ignore. Considering the consequences of ignoring one, you can understand this design logic, but they are uniformly disliked by every spacer. They are the audible harbringer of awful tidings, signalling a sudden pressure drop, a fire aboard ship, noxious fumes in the air, poisonous radiation bathing the ship and her crew, a critical power plant overload, or some external threat like a pirate vessel.

This particular alert kalxon was doing its job admirably. In the constrained space, the alarm echoed and the echoes formed a discordant wall of sound almost strong enough to burst an eardrum.

Jurgen Stihl made as much haste as his constrained surroundings permitted, pulling out his shiptab, unlocking it with a swipe of his thumb, and the electronic version of the alert message immediately jumped to the forefront, flashing and demanding his attention.

Another swipe of his thumb and the alert application was kicked into the background and the audible alarm cut off throughout the ship.

Momentarily, almost complete silence ensued. Or at least it seemed that way given the ear trauma Jurgen had just endured. He wasn't sure his hearing would ever return to normal.

A flick of a finger brought up the ship's synthetic sensor display, albeit on the shiptab its data content was significantly reduced and prioritized compared to the main bridge viewer or even the normal foldaway screen at the Captain's workstation. What Jurgen saw on the display explained the converging course alarm. There was a ship gaining fast from astern on a course essentially parallel to that of The Hole Card.

Jurgen's guts rumbled and a cold claw felt like it dug into his stomach. Out here, in the systems Outer zone, there wasn't a good reason he could think of for another ship moving that fast to be coming up behind a solitary merchant ship. It was ill-mannered enough it might provoke a shot across the bow from a nervous merchant Captain.

Jurgen could see, even with the shiptabs' limited screen real-estate, that the ship was closing quickly and would overtake within about 15 minutes. The ship's signature was outlined in yellow and mass and power estimates were similarly yellow, tinging towards orange. It seemed like the passive sensors on The Hole Card were having some trouble pinning down the particulars of the vessel approaching. That could indicate a problem with The Hole Card's sensors or it could be the ship closing had taken additional precautions against identification as well as against detection.

The sort of ship that might have need to do such a thing and which might also be closing on another ship was not the sort that would give a merchant captain a good feeling. Jurgen's gut felt like ice.

He tapped the screen to superimpose the helm popup over the sensor synthesis display. He set the helm for an additional 0.3 Gs, just the sort of thing a startled merchanter ought to do. Of course, when you didn't have firepower to speak of and were not a combatant vessel, running faster was your only option, even if it wouldn't be enough.

The ship behind appeared to accelerate to keep pace, perhaps piling on a few extra tenths of a G to close faster.

Jurgen was breaking a sweat and his insides cramped. Any merchanter caught out in the Outer zone by a raider, of whatever stripe, could expect there would be no prisoners taken. Sometimes they'd take slaves, but most often there would be some new merhcanter bodies floating through the airless void. A salvage without witnesses could not easily be characterized as anything else.

Jurgen knew The Hole Card still had a few tricks up her sleeve. He adjusted his reactor shielding and began quietly feeding power to the capacitor bank that fed the pulse lasers. If he was lucky, the other ship wouldn't detect this trickle of power to the ship's energy ordinance.

Jurgen brought up another combat subsystem overlay, banishing the helm overlay. He fed an even smaller amount of power into the subsystem to start the ordinance combat readiness cycle.

The Hole Card had some external compartmentalized storage on top of the hull and beneath. With a bit of effort, it appeared to all inspections as several long thin spaces with internal subdivisions and with potentially different cargos in each, fully isolated.

At the moment, however, all of the internal subdivisions had been removed. It turned out the front and rear facings could also be dropped automatically from the shiptab. That left the long spaces open to space on both ends, a somewhat convenient circumstance given that each of these long, thin external storage holds now contained a Phoenix 7A antiship missile. The missile would launch out of one end and the exhaust would harmlessly exit the other open end during launch.

Of course, no merchanter would have shipkillers, even dinky ones like the Phoenix. That's what the ship gaining on Jurgen would be counting on. It was also what Jurgen was counting on.

Jurgen felt as if he'd been kicked in the belly and he continued to sweat. His misery was amplified by another sharp internal cramp.

This situation could end badly for him and The Hole Card despite the fact that he'd worked hard to setup just this sort of meeting. Jurgen had known there was a predator in the system's Outer zone and he'd deliberately brought The Hole Card through the Outer zone on the kind of course that was totally in line with normal merchanter operation, yet impossible to miss by any other ship with sensors, especially one sitting in wait for a nice, relatively-defenseless merchantman.

The presumed predator closed. Zero-distance intercept would be in about 7 minutes and distant combat range for his lasers would be reached in about 2 minutes. Jurgen wouldn't be showing his hand that soon though. He wanted the vulture to close in, sure that its fleeing prey had no options but to run ineffectively.

The Hole Card was built to look like a freighter. Cosmetically and externally she did look like one and a lot of the time, she carried on life as if she was one. But if you could see behind the outer hull shell, see behind the carefully orchestrated signs of poor maintenance and neglect, look to her heavy-duty spine and her oversized power runs, see her surprisingly new CentaCore main datasystem, and see the sorts of internal displays as could be brought up at the duty stations or on the shiptabs, you'd begin to realize her pedigree may have been freighter, but her purpose was something far different.

If you could see the adjustable core shielding, the layer of scan blocking material on her hull and the second one under it, the multiple military-grade laser emitters and the multi-target military fire director, the ordinance launch system and the as-yet-not-extended sensor extensor grid, you'd realize she had at least as much in common with a small warship as with a merchant.

And if she ever really decided to run, you'd see another G and a half of thrust. If she ever decided to shoot, you'd find she'd hit much harder and more accurately than any merchanter had any right to and she could take hits better than most as well.

The Hole Card was a hunter. She hunted the vultures that preyed on merchant shipping.

Jurgen Stihl soloed his ship because she could be run by one man, if that man had the skills to cover all of the onboard departments. Jurgen could handle himself at least adequately in all of the required areas of expertise. To be effective, the man had to have the mind of a predator, the strategic wit to pick fights he could win and the tatctical acumen to time the engagements so the fight was on his terms and kicked off on his schedule.

Jurgen relished the work of hunting the hunters. He hated the vultures more than most merchanters and most hated them through and through.

Jurgen's cramp struck again as he watched the shiptab show the predatory ship cross into the outer range band of his pulse lasers. The batteries were showing 70% charge. Another minute would put them up over 90%. He held off initiating the engagement. A good hunter made his first shot count because he wanted to be sure he got to take successive shots.

Very shortly, the vulture would find out that the desperate little merchanter that was now squawking for help from anyone who would be listening (as if that would work....) wasn't really the prey that was expected.

The murderous pirate would find that out about the time the pulse lasers blew one of his thrust nacelles to slag. It would be further confirmed a few tens of seconds later when the Phoenix missiles, having soft-launched and drifted some, went to full thrust for the final homing attack. And then, quite likely, there'd be an expanding debris and gas cloud where the vulture used to be.

The vulture probably was a former merchanter with a lot of extra firepower, but with merchanter bones and power systems, albeit with some auxilliary batteries. That sort of ship wouldn't be able to take the kind of damage The Hole Card could dish out.

The Hole Card would, if everything went to plan, then collect enough evidence to collect the cluster-wide bounty for the vulture currently preying on this system's traffic. The reward paid just as well for the destruction of the enemy vessel as for its capture. Jurgen was more partial to the not-so-alive option. 

All of this was the stuff of a gripping holovid, except for one small exception. There's never been a holovid yet made where the dramatic space battle, complete with the good ship triumphantly blowing the bad ship to smithereens, was commanded from a shiptab. Ficitonal commanders always commanded from their command workstation on the bridge.

This being the more burdensome real world, Jurgen was commanding the engagement from his shiptab, from a small enclosed space rather than a spacious bridge.

There just wasn't a market, or so the thinking of holovid producers undoubtedly went, for space battles commanded from the confines of the Bridge Deck Sanitary Unit. Nor was there likely to be a lucrative starring role for a Captain who traded coherent light and multi-stage ordinance with the enemy in between raging bouts of food poisoning caused most likely by some bad beef in the beef madras ratpack he'd consumed some eight hours beforehand.

That sort of stuff just didn't sell to the holovid public apparently. The holovid viewing public had no idea what it was missing.

The cramps hit again, doubling Jurgen over momentarily, and then the capacitor bank blinked a status of 100% and the real battle began. This situation was just a further illustration that it was always challenging to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously.

© Lux Mentis, May 2012. All rights reserved.