Free Battlecruiser Alamo: Not One Step Back by Richard Tongue Page B

wouldn’t be the first time.”
     Marshall had to prevent himself from chuckling; he had to admit that she had a point.
     “I assure you, Lieutenant, I plan on obeying my orders from Commodore Tramiel to the letter.” Complete honesty there. “We’re simply stocked up because I and the Commodore were not inclined to have Alamo dependent on Spitfire Station for anything – technically, we don’t even need the fuel, though I’m going to take it. Between you and me, I suspect that the station administration is likely involved with this pirate activity.”
     “That was my suspicion as well, Captain.” She glanced at the clock – there were only a couple of minutes to go. “You think this mission could take that long? We could easily arrange for a resupply by tender if necessary.”
     “I have been informed that our auxiliaries are already overstretched supporting our efforts at Jefferson, Ragnarok and Sagdeev.”
     “But…”
     Another voice broke in over the speaker, the crisp tones of Sub-Lieutenant Kibaki, “Transition to normal space in one minute.”
     “They’re singing my song, Lieutenant. We’ll have to continue this discussion later.” Without waiting for her to reply, he walked out onto the bridge, sitting down at the vacant command chair. Caine was sitting at Tactical and threw him a quick sympathetic look before returning to her station, and Orlova was loitering at the rear.
     “Thirty seconds, Captain,” Kibaki said, focused on his station. Midshipman Makarova had her hands poised over the controls, like an animal waiting to strike; if she was nervous, she was at least hiding it well. She stared up at the clock, watching the countdown, ready to act if the computer failed, but her care was not needed; with a flash of light, the universe reappeared in the viewscreen.
     Marshall turned to look at the holodisplay as a map of the system winked on, the stars and planets leaping into the positions calculated by the computer, then imperceptibly flickering as the data immediately corrected. He looked closely at Kumar, the gas giant they were making for; its orbital track was littered with debris, a thin scattering of asteroids and numerous abandoned space platforms and ships.
     There’d been a few battles fought here during the war, as well as a lot of skirmishes, and it showed – but what showed more clearly was that humans had been in-system for decades, and without any regulations against littering or clean-up operations. The place was a mess. A course track leapt from Alamo to Spitfire Station, their objective, and despite the best efforts of the midshipman at the helm, dozens of tiny course corrections were marked in sulky orange, tainting the otherwise smooth green line.
     Lots of small ships in-system as well, quite a few of them heading around the gas giant, probably skimming. Standard enough money-saving scheme in the commercial interstellar fleets, if you didn’t mind waiting around for a few weeks while shuttles laboriously drew the fuel from the atmosphere. Before he could order Makarova to implement her course, Caine turned to him.
     “There’s something strange going on around Freighter Two-Four.”
     Marshall peered at the numbered target, “I don’t see anything.”
     “You aren’t looking at the course projections. Here.” She manipulated controls, and elements of the holoprojection faded away as the image zoomed in, a maze of lines flooding his view then disappearing as she removed targets. Only five lines were left – and all of them focused on the freighter, which seemed to be trying to vector away.
     “Sensors…”, Marshall began.
     “Already on it, sir,” the spaceman replied, not glancing away from her screen for a second. Zebrova walked over to stand behind the technician as she examined her readouts. “Targets are...fighters, sir! Five fighters, Starslammer class.”
     “Confirmed, sir,” Zebrova agreed. “Those