Sun Chaser: Dark Galaxy, #3

By Brett Fitzpatrick

The Tarazet Galactic Star Empire should be a realm without hunger, disease, violence or suffering, with plenty for all, but the greed of those at the top, terraforming entire planets just so they can hunt the best game with their cronies is sucking the vitality out of the economy. In the future, as now, and also as in the past, uncaring nobles laughing in the faces of their starving subjects is a recipe for... rebellion.
Over the course of three books, the most prominent young scientist in the empire, a young soldier and a humble logistics robot are sucked into this rebellion, then rise to become its leaders, and this sci-fi series is primarily the story of their adventures.  
There are plenty of space battles, unknowable aliens, and galactic power struggles in the series and this third book is no exception. This is not a dry old book full of visionary concepts but dull on action, plot, and characters. It is a series that combines the action of militaristic science fiction with the heart of good space opera.
The only reason the heroes - Altia, Knave and Jay - have any chance of surviving in the face of the repression of the Tarazet Star Empire is the alien starship they discover in the first book. Just what this spaceship is capable of becomes apparent through the second book, and in this third installment the entire star empire and at least one neighboring alien culture is being slowly destabilized by this new force in the galaxy. It seems, at last, as though the empire might topple, bringing a new utopia, or possibly just political chaos in its wake.
The ancient aliens, the source of the destabilizing technology, remain enigmatic throughout, even as more is discovered about them, with just the right amount of mystery and suspense to keep you captivated the whole way through. Sun Chaser is book 3 in the Dark Galaxy series and is about 115,000 words long.
So join Altia and Knave as they try to found New Tarazet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett Fitzpatrick
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386833413

Brett Fitzpatrick

I am an author living and working in Venice. I love the flexibility that epublishing gives me to live where I want and get my books to people all over the world. I like to read sci-fi and fantasy, and allow my imagination to create the amazing visuals that the writer describes. I'm a child of the 70s and so Star Wars type space opera will always find a warm welcome in my reading stack. I grew up in the UK and this has given my sci-fi a very British taste. It is more Doctor Who than Battlestar Galactica. It also means that my political consciousness was forged in the battles of 80s British political life, like a few other, more famous, British sci-fi writers. For example, I try to make sure every book passes the Bechdel test. The greatest joy of writing for me is to be able to dive into a world of the imagination and come back up to the surface with something to show for it. I love feedback, even of the "This book sucks!" type. If somebody is interested enough to want to influence my work, I am interested enough to want to include their feedback.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Cur was on the lowest deck of his spaceship, at the point where the belly airlock was punched through the hull. He was watching the landscape speeding past below and getting ready to jump. Though naming it landscape was to call up connotations of the picturesque that it simply didn’t deserve. It was mostly rock, damp and dark from the most recent downpour, with divots of turf and tufts of hardy grass poking out from the cracks.

Whichever company terraformed this powers-forsaken planet, Cur growled to himself. They did the absolute bare minimum to make it habitable by humans.

His spaceship was called Sun Chaser, a Wanderer-class pursuit ship, and the ship’s computer was called Chaser. She wasn’t sure if Cur was talking to her, but she decided to answer anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Starwave Imperial Contracting, she said, the words echoing distorted from the cheap speakers mounted in the airlock walls.

Hmm? Cur reacted, slightly confused by what the ship’s computer had just said.

Evidently the words hadn’t been directed at her, Chaser thought ruefully.

The company who terraformed this planet, she said, its name is Starwave IC.

Fascinating, Cur grunted in reply.

Chaser was close enough to AI to know sarcasm when she heard it, but she ignored him. She tried to let him concentrate on the jump, what he was about to do wasn’t without its dangers.

Cur’s head had raised when he answered the ship’s computer, an involuntary and unnecessary tic, and his eyes had ended up being caught for a moment on a mirror in the airlock. He noticed that there was a sign above the mirror to remind any crew who were about to carry out extra-vehicular operations to make sure their vacuum suits were secured properly.

Check your seals, the sign said, and underneath. Run a suit systems diagnostic - NOW!

It was completely unnecessary, in Cur’s opinion, a useless piece of molly-coddling. Anyone who couldn’t be bothered to check their suit seals and run a diagnostic to make sure all life support systems were functioning correctly deserved to have the hard vacuum of space reach for them, freeze dry their lungs and turn them into a human popsicle.

Then below the annoying sign in the mirror, he saw himself. He wasn’t wearing a vac suit because, theoretically, this planet had an atmosphere that could support human life. The terraforming company, what had Chaser said its name was? Starwave IC, that was it. They had cut so many corners he wouldn’t want to be exposed to the atmosphere for more than a few months, but he certainly didn’t need a vac suit. Instead he was wearing the closest approximation to military grade wargear he thought he could get away with if he ran into local law enforcement. The trick was to wear armor that didn’t look too much like armor. No helmet, and a heavy jacket with armor panels in a fashionable gold and black stripe with solid green arms.

This was worn with rubberized black pants, which had armor panels. These could be a bit more obvious. Shin pads, knee guards and even armored thigh panels were in fashion right now. He wore an ostentatious holster too, because he didn’t want anyone not to notice he was packing. Most planets only allowed civilians to carry a pistol, but there weren’t usually any rules about caliber or capacitor size, so he had chosen a doozy of a pistol. It was so big, with such heavy recoil, that he had to hold it with two hands if he wanted to fire with any degree of accuracy.

He smiled at himself in the mirror and the reflection smiled back, a man in his thirties with a fashionably sculpted mass of black hair and pockmarked, olive skin. He would never get hired to be in a hologram entertainment but he had a certain rugged charm, he liked to think.

We’ll be above the drop zone you designated in a couple of minutes, Chaser told him, rousing him from his idle thoughts.

Okay, Cur acknowledged with a swift nod, focusing again.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out what looked like a set of big brass knuckles. It wasn’t a weapon though, it was a grav engine, small and powerful. He threaded his fingers through the holes and squeezed the grip tight. Then he pulled out his pistol and took an equally firm grip on that.

Three... two... Chaser started to count down, and Cur knew he couldn’t hesitate. Every second’s hesitation would mean missing the drop area by hundreds of meters, one... GO!

Cur dropped through the aperture, out into the planet’s atmosphere and started plummeting like a stone. He hit the power button on the grav engine and gritted his teeth. This was the difficult bit. The grav engine was calibrated to decelerate him and drop him slowly and gently to the ground, like a parachute. Without it, throwing himself from a spaceship would surely mean breaking his legs, or his neck. The problem was that first moment when he switched it on. He couldn’t switch it on inside the airlock or he wouldn’t be able to make a quick, clean exit from the spaceship, so he was already accelerating when he hit the button. The instant the engine engaged, it felt like it was being wrenched upwards, as it no longer felt gravity’s clawing embrace, and the result almost tore his arm out.

Gah! he yelled into the wind. His shoulder hurt like it had been kicked, but he held on.

As he slowly descended, hanging from the grav engine by one arm and floating gradually lower, like the windblown seed of some giant plant, he had a good view of the Sun Chaser disappearing into the overcast distance, leaving him alone on a planet he couldn’t even remember if he had ever visited before.

Whoever designed this atmosphere should be shot, he yelled into the screaming wind.

The wind howling past him was frigid, bringing horizontal rain so cold that about fifty percent of it had the consistency of crushed ice. At last his boots came crunching down onto the rocks of the surface, and the wind wasn’t so bad down near the ground, still terrible, but not quite so bad.

Some kind of local creature was watching him. To Cur’s expert eye it had at least a little rat in its ancestry, one of the most invasive species in the galaxy, carried almost everywhere on human spaceships. This one had obviously been breeding with the local fauna or gone through some spurt of divergent evolution, because it didn’t look like any rat he had ever seen before. The thing was huge, with bright stripes on its nose and carnivorous looking canines.

Cur instinctively pointed his gun at it, but he didn’t fire.

Stealth mission, he whispered, reminding himself.

And the creature seemed to take the hint, disappearing again among the hard, rocky landscape of the inhospitable world.

***

Merton looked out over the windswept, damp rocks with an occasional copse of lanky, naked trees that passed for landscape on Vain Tempest. No matter how often he looked out at it, there was no getting used to how ugly it was. Merton was a young man, slim, with epicanthic folds to his eyes. He was sitting in a grav chair, floating above the ground at just the right height to allow his feet to rest comfortably flat on the floor. In front of him was a reception desk with a transparent armor panel separating his little office from the corridor outside. He had his back to the corridor so he could look out the window, but that didn’t matter. Nobody would be coming in at this time of night.

He shuddered at the sound of panels rattling in the wind and the horizontal rain that was lashing the windows of his office space. He turned away from the grim view, back to the hologram entertainment he was projecting from the room’s information console, a popular show set on a sunny, desert world. Merton was having trouble concentrating on his show, and he had a suspicion that he had watched this one before. He was toying with the idea of loading a news stream instead when his wrist unit chimed. He groaned, took a swig of his caffeinated drink, and bit a chunk out of his sweet, shortbread square.

It is time to start your third patrol, his wrist unit helpfully reminded him, and continued, You have numerous infractions this quarter. It is therefore inadvisable for you to miss another patrol.

All right, he yelled, slammed down his mug and got to his feet, I’m going already... okay?

Merton settled his gun belt on his hip and closed his thermal coat. He reluctantly left the office, the only heated area in the entire complex at this time of night. The office people weren’t due to start their shifts for another four or five hours and the heating wouldn’t come on until a short while before that.

Merton locked his little room behind him and started his rounds. He walked the corridors of building number one, which took fifteen minutes, then went to the door of the main shed. It was here, during the day, that work was done checking drone production. There was a team of four or five engineers who were there during the day doing quality control and monitoring of drone manufacture, but it was deserted now.

It was on Merton’s round however, so he had to take a look inside. He entered through a large pair of blast doors, wide enough to get a grav tank through, and waited for the lights to come on. The cheapskates who owned this drone production plant had the automatic lighting turned down to the lowest possible sensitivity, so it took a while for the sensors to decide he wasn’t just a particularly large rock rat and activate the illumination for him. There was an audible pinging as the primitive light fittings, the cheapest possible available, flickered into life, and Merton was finally able to glance around.

The space was mostly empty, just three or four drones in various states of dismantlement, and a few droids fussing with some tasks they had been left by the engineers before they had gone home. The floor was painted different colors to show him where it was safe to go and where it wasn’t, red for danger, green for safe, with wasp-stripe borders between. He wandered into the room, sticking to the corridor of green. He mostly saw wolfhound-class drones, large and powerful military machines, planted firmly on two thick legs. There was a bulbous body hung between those legs, all sensors and weapon systems.

Merton had seen plenty such drones by now, after all the facility he guarded produced them, so he was used to them and he hardly glanced at them. But then something caught his eye. He stopped at another shape, one he hadn’t noticed before on his previous patrols. To his eye, it was a more advanced looking drone. It was humanoid, a little taller than him, with two legs, torso, two arms and even the suggestion of a face on the front of its head. It was the most human looking drone he had ever encountered, though that didn’t mean much on a backwater planet like this.

Merton stopped to take a look at it, after all the company liked it when his patrols took longer than the minimum mandated in his contract, so there was plenty of time for diversions. The drone had an unusual surface, shiny, expensive looking, like silver. He couldn’t see any detail because it was deep within one of the red-painted areas of the floor, so he couldn’t walk up to it and take a really good look. Losing interest again, he carried on with his patrol.

He crossed to one of the shed’s external blast doors and raised his hand, but his hand hovered near the door controls without actually touching them. This was the worst part of his patrol. Now he had to go out into the weather. The shed was cold compared to his office, his breath hanging in front of him in little clouds, but at least it was dry. Once the door was open, the terrible weather of Vain Tempest would scream in, drench him and chill him to the bone. There was no way round it though. He had to go outside, cross the entire length of the drone storage yard, swipe his ID card through a reader attached at the furthest point of the furthest fence and, only then, could he go back to his warm office to get some heat in his bones before his next patrol.

He placed his palm on the door controls and activated the mechanism. The outer layer of the door’s armor slid up while the inner layer split down the middle and started to move to the side. He touched the palm reader again after about a second, to stop the door opening completely and giving the evil wind completely unrestricted access to the drone shed, then went out into the driving wind and rain.

Outside was a vast area of concrete, surrounded by a fence and lit from above by towering poles with clusters of powerful lights at the top. Arrayed in ranks across the concrete apron was an army of metal statues, a huge number of drones, parked and awaiting delivery. Most of the drones were the squat and powerful Wolfhound design, in various configurations. Almost all of them, whatever other variations of communications gear and secondary weapons they had, had the imposing muzzle of a large mass driver protruding from the snout. Almost all of them were painted in the nondescript mix of gray and black favored by the Tarazet military, their main customer, but there were some clumps of more colorful ones too. There was even a phalanx that were still unpainted, standing out against the dark in their bright yellow undercoat.

Those shouldn’t be outside, Merton muttered, but that decision was above his pay grade and, hey, what did he care if the product got rusty.

Merton pulled his coat tighter against the cold and hurried through the ranks of drones. Theoretically there was a wide, safe path he was supposed to take, but the drones almost never moved at night so he just cut right through them, weaving through the metal giants in the dark. He knew his way pretty well, he’d done it a million times before, but he pulled out a flashlight anyway, to make sure he didn’t trip over some scrap of metal or other, left lying about where it shouldn’t be by the engineers. At last he reached the perimeter fence, his ID card already in his hand, ready to swipe through the reader.

Hello, a voice said from the darkness beyond the fence.

What the f... Merton gasped, and took two or three involuntary, stumbling steps backward.

It wasn’t unheard of for people to contact him at the fence, local criminals usually, bribing him with beer to skip a patrol so they could strip some valuable copper from the wiring of the perimeter fence. He usually didn’t take the beer, but he would turn a blind eye to their thievery anyway. The drone manufacturing company wasn’t paying him enough to even live, so what did he care if people stole their stuff, to hell with them. But this was different. The voice that had said hello didn’t have a local accent. It didn’t sound like a local criminal, it sounded like the voice of an offworlder. Male, by the sound of it, confident, probably trouble of some sort.

Hello, Merton replied, hesitantly, his eyes scanning the area beyond the fence, looking for a human shape among the dark rock.

You Merton? the voice asked.

Definitely trouble, Merton decided, but he had spotted the stranger now, and the more he looked through the fence, into the dark, the more his eye adapted to the low light beyond the powerful yard lamps, the more he could make out. The stranger was dressed in some kind of stripey coat, obviously containing armor panels, and he was armed with the biggest pistol Merton had ever seen. He looked like he was dressed for a firefight.

Depends, Merton told the man, noncommittally. Who’s asking?

The man approached the fence, his nose coming right up to the chain-link.

The name’s Cur, the man said, and I’m not here for you. It’s your brother I’m interested in.

My brother?

Yes, your brother... Knave. There’s a price on his head.

Are you a bounty hunter? You’re crazy. I don’t know where my brother even is. Last I heard he was missing in action, and even if I did know where he was. There’s no way I would give him up to a bounty hunter.

There is a heavy bounty on young Knave’s head, Cur said. It seems he’s gotten himself mixed up in something serious. He’s a bigwig in the rebellion now, did you know that?

I don’t know anything about it, and I wouldn’t help anyone capture my brother, no matter how big the bounty is.

Cur reached into an inside pocket in his armor jacket and pulled out a data stick. He threaded it through the chain-link of the fence, so Merton could take it, if he wanted to. Merton’s arm twitched, and Cur smiled, but Merton didn’t quite reach for the data stuck, not yet.

The details of the bounty on your brother’s head are on here, and it also mentions how much of that bounty money could be yours, if you deliver your brother to me. My contacts are in the file too, in case you want to take me up on my offer.

Merton didn’t reply and the two men spent long seconds staring at each other, in the dark, shivering as rain dripped from their chins.

C’mon, Cur growled. It can’t hurt to just take a look at the data, now can it?

Merton slowly reached out and took the data stick, and Cur disappeared into the darkness beyond the fence.

Can’t hurt to look, Merton whispered to himself and pocketed the data stuck.

He quickly turned round and hurried back to his warm office.

Chapter 2

Several systems away, Captain Kale was stalking through dark, empty corridors to the bridge of his spaceship. Kale was deep in thought as he navigated the dimly lit corridors of his deserted craft, already evaluating strategy and tactics in his mind. He was completely alone on his frigate, the Miranese, except for the ship’s computer. This was an extremely powerful AI called Mira, his only company on the hyper-modern, fully-automated frigate. The other two frigates in his squadron had crews of hundreds, but he preferred the solitude.

Kale’s squadron of three frigates was slipping into the Pharmachidas System, easing out of faster than light travel with plenty of space to slowly decelerate before entering orbit around the target planet, a place called Pharmachidas 4, the scene of the revolt.

Emerging from FTL jump in two minutes, Mira told him.

Okay, Kale murmured. Call the other two captains. Have their holograms waiting for me on the bridge.

Contacting now, the computer said, acknowledging his order.

Kale kept the lights dimmed to a minimum and the temperature low when he was the only one aboard, only raising the illumination and temperature for visitors, which gave the Miranese the feeling of being a ghost ship. Kale didn’t notice anymore. He just continued walking the last few corridors till he was on his bridge. The door glided upwards to admit him and he stalked across to take his usual position. Ghostly and transparent, the glowing holograms of the other two captains of the small squadron flickered to life to take position with him, one standing either side of him. On his left was captain Boomer and on his right captain Deezyil, two of the most capable women he had ever served with.

It is one of the most ridiculous and desperate of attacks I’ve yet seen, Deezyil said. It’s the sort of engagement that only happens when people have nothing to lose.

I don’t need commentary, Kale told her, sternly. This is a strategy meeting.

Okay, Deezyil nodded. The first encouraging fact is that the rebels are confined to a single planet, Pharmachidas 4.

It’s a shithole by any yardstick, Boomer grunted. The majority of the population work in huge complexes, called grow sites, refining Q-berries.

How is this strategy? Kale asked.

It’s not, I guess, Boomer mumbled.

Q-berries are an ingredient in a dish popular across the whole of the Tarazet Star Empire, Deezyil said, and the whole planet is given over to their cultivation, with landing sites for rogue traders. So, from that point of view, it could impact strategy because the rebels will have a ready supply of money. The Q-berry trade and the even more popular Q-berry oil trade will continue, rebellion or no. Providing these insurgents with enough money to buy military equipment.

Hmm, Kale raised a curled finger to his lip, an unconscious gesture that indicated he was thinking. Is there any sign that the rebels have started buying weapons yet?

Hard to say, Deezyil told him.

Explain, the captain hissed.

Like I said, the berries are produced at locations called grow sites, Boomer took over the briefing again. Each grow site is a building that is a sort of a cross between an oil refinery and a cooling tower. Each one has its roots in the deep swamp, where the special nutrients for the Q-berries are sucked in. It’s a mess. A difficult environment to gather intelligence using aerial drones.

The captain nodded.

And conditions among the shanty towns are just as bad, if not worse. They are located in the swamps and they provide the labor for the grow sites, Deezyil said. The rebellion is likely to have spread like wildfire down there.

Confirmed, Mira added, her disembodied computer voice drifting through the bridge. Local forces are reporting grow sites across half the planet have been lost.

The captain cocked his head as he listened to the ship’s computer. He nodded, but his expression was grim.

Recommendations? he said, as he turned to look first at Deezyil.

We won’t be able to quell this revolt on our own, Deezyil said. We should make sure we have control of everything outside the planet’s atmosphere. Then establish a toehold on the planet’s surface. While we’re doing that, the admiralty can send out a carrier with enough drones to wrest back control of the planet.

The captain nodded noncommittally and turned to Boomer.

Things are out of control down there, she mused, so I would advise a more direct approach. Transmit a few warnings over the local communications grid, then, if they don’t stop this stupidity, we start burning settlements from orbit. We can take the fight out of them in a couple of days.

The captain nodded again, but this time there was a smile of approval on his face.

Agreed, he said. It’s worth a try at least. The last thing I want to have to do is call in a carrier then spend months babysitting it as it tries to put down an insurrection.

Both holograms nodded their agreement, not one word of dissent from either of them at his ruthless decision.

Boomer, the captain added. I want you to script the warnings. Make them nice and frightening.

Yes captain, Boomer nodded.

The captain turned and left the bridge again, pausing a moment at the door to issue an order to the ship’s computer.

Mira, he said, take us into orbit.

The captain exited and the bridge door slid down behind him, leaving the two holograms alone on the bridge.

I’m not sure it’s going to be as easy as that, Deezyil said.

Probably not, Boomer agreed, but, like the captain said, it’s worth a try.

Unless, Deezyil caught Boomer’s eye, you think that burning their settlements from orbit might actually motivate the rebels, rather than cowing them into submission? It might make them fight even harder.

Boomer’s hologram didn’t reply. It simply faded away as the communications connection was cut.

Okay... Deezyil murmured, that’s a no then.

Her hologram also faded away as she cut the connection, leaving the bridge empty, dark and cold.

***

Kale was stalking back to his quarters, just a few moments later, when the silence of the frigate corridors was broken. A warning siren started bleating.

I’m the only crew member aboard, Kale said. It would be easier to just tell me what’s going on than activate that damn siren.

Some of this stuff is hardwired, Mira said, so there’s not much I can do about it.

Kale grunted resignedly and turned round. He started hurrying for the bridge.

So, what’s going on? he asked.

The tactical computers have spotted a possible hostile.

Hostile? Hostile what? Kale asked. I thought we were the only spaceships in this system.

It’s hard to say, Mira told him. There are no Tarazet Navy ships anywhere near here, except us. And certainly not within this system, so it’s most likely some spaceship operated by the Q-berry company, to protect their assets, scare away pirates, that sort of thing. I doubt they’ll be any kind of threat to three Tarazet Navy ships of the line.

I should hope not, Kale muttered.

The bridge door slid up in front of him to allow him back onto the bridge he had so recently vacated. He moved quickly to the center of the room and sat in the single acceleration couch. He glanced out through the transparent armor, but the only feature of local space big enough to pick out was the planet itself, so Kale called up a tactical hologram to fill the space in front of his acceleration couch. At his command, luminous flat screens sprang into being, along with an orb to mark the position of the planet and various points to represent ships and other orbiting structures. He immediately picked out the three pulsing points representing the three frigates of his small squadron, but the rest of the units in orbit created a much more difficult to understand mess.

What is all this? Kale asked, waving his hand at all the structures in various orbits around their target planet.

Processing plants, Mira told him. Millions of tons of produce comes up on space elevators, to be turned into oil mostly, but a bunch of other products as well.

Great, Kale grunted, plenty of stuff for our hostile to play hide and seek among... Highlight it will you, Mira? I’m having trouble picking it out of all this mess.

A large blue circle appeared round one of the faster moving points in orbit.

Ah, there it is, Kale growled in satisfaction. Boomer, Deezyil, are you two seeing this?

Yep, came Boomer’s disembodied voice, neither woman was bothering with a hologram this time.

Is it worth capturing? Deezyil asked, Or should we just shoot it down?

Kale made a movement of his fingers within the haptic field associated with the tactical hologram and one of the holographic screens, floating a little way to his right, was suddenly filled with a flood of information. The screen told Kale that the hostile was classified as a system defense barge and didn’t have an FTL engine.

Blow it out of the sky, Kale said, contemptuously.

***

The Drifter Ship came plunging through the Pharmachidas system at speeds beyond the imagining of all but the most experimental of craft on the Tarazet Navy roster, and more importantly, it was completely unobserved. The bridge of the Drifter Ship was crowded, compared to the dark and empty environment of Kale’s bridge, but like his, it was built round a central hologram. The colors of this hologram were more muted, all shades of brown, bronze and gold, but the information it presented was essentially identical.

Arrayed around the hologram were three acceleration couches on plinths. Each seat was surrounded by control consoles in a semicircle, blank and bronze and alien with more colorful human technology grafted here and there. There were joysticks, yokes and sliders, all hardwired into a more complex and more alien substrate.

Opposite the acceleration couches there was a collection of hexagonal screens, one large one surrounded by several subsidiary screens, all showing different views of local space. In the seat on the left was a woman with a proud bearing and determined set to her features. She had black skin and nappy hair and was dressed in metallic shades of bronze, her clothes obviously a product of the same manufacturing processes that produced the rest of the spaceship’s architecture. Her name was Altia.

The man in the middle was dressed in the same way, a loose, bronze jumpsuit with a light pattern of gold hexagons across it. He was muscular and had epicanthic folds at his eyes. His name was Knave.

In the chair to the man’s left was a towering, alien-looking robot. This machine was the same bronze as most of the rest of the architecture and technology of the bridge, but perhaps just a little darker. It was humanoid but everything was elongated, head, torso, arms, legs and fingers. There had been no attempt during its creation to make the robot’s face look human. It was just a scattering of sensors mounted haphazardly among the bronze. The robot’s name was Jay.

There are three ships of the Tarazet Navy, the woman said, her voice melodious and confident.

Hardly a threat to this ship, the man said.

They are hunting a system ship, Jay said. It isn’t capable of faster than light travel, and it is outgunned by the three Tarazet Navy ships.

Why don’t they just blast it out of space? Altia asked.

Because, Knave said, adopting a cynical tone that came very easily to him, they have undoubtedly been told not to damage any of the facilities in orbit. Typical Tarazet Navy, all they care about is the property owned by the merchant princes.

Jay and Altia both nodded, and Knave’s explanation certainly helped give a reason why such an undergunned system defense unit had survived more than a few minutes against the three warships.

There are a lot of refinement and production facilities in orbit for it to hide among, Jay noted.

But that’s still some pretty fancy flying from the rebel boat, Altia mused. Okay, let’s even the odds.

The three of them shared a telepathic connection while they were on the bridge. The ship’s computer picked up their thoughts, in an almost magical process that was far beyond anything human technology could achieve, and relayed them to each other. It was a disconcerting process, disturbingly intimate, no matter how often they used the technology. Like so much of the technology of the spaceship, it was so powerful it was unsettling, but it was undeniably useful in combat situations.

Both Jay and Knave received half-formed plans and intentions from Altia’s mind, and were able to contributed and suggest their own ideas, and a consensus rapidly formed.

Altia took control of navigation. I’m going in, she muttered grimly, and pushed her joystick forward.

Weapons all online, Knave assured her, getting ready to do some shooting.

Shields are up, Jay added, though the spaceship was usually quite happy to operate shields itself during combat, it was navigation and gunnery where it had to be cajoled into being aggressive.

Okay, Knave said with a smile, his previous cynical mood evaporating, let’s help that rebel system ship. Let’s do some good.

New Tarazet, Altia yelled the battle cry of the rebellion, accelerating all the time.

New Tarazet, Jay repeated, in the growl that was the voice produced by his robot body.

***

Kale had decided he would deliver the kill shot. It was the sort of critical maneuver he didn’t like to delegate. His two subordinate captains acted like beaters in a hunt, harassing the system ship and scaring it out of cover, while he waited to destroy the slow and undergunned spaceship being driven towards his guns. It was difficult work, and the captain of the system defense barge certainly knew the facilities in orbit better than Kale’s squadron captains did. They also had orders to get this done without too much shooting. The industrial facilities the action was happening among were to be left as unscathed as possible, but their prey was running out of places to hide.

A few stray missiles and blaster bolts had done some cosmetic damage to the precious orbital facilities, but nothing that would have a lasting impact on the economic output of the planet, once this ridiculous rebellion was finally put down and production resumed.

The captain forced such mercenary thoughts from his mind, as the rebel ship was being chased out of its last hiding place and would soon be exposed to a surgical strike that would kill it and allow him to carry on with his mission.

Acquiring target, Mira said, her disembodied computer voice echoing through Kale’s dark silent bridge.

Kale’s present vector was bringing him round an absolutely huge orbital facility, which he would clear in just a few seconds, and then he would be able to bring his ship’s main guns to bear. Whatever vector the rebel captain chose now, the enemy ship would be exposed to fire from one or more of the three ships of the Tarazet squadron.

Fire as soon as the target is acquired, Kale said.

Confirmed, came the computer’s voice again, and then there was a moment of silence.

Kale’s entire attention was riveted on the tactical hologram, watching the positions of his three ships update, weaving between the orbital facilities, closing in on the system defense barge. He saw the last facility, a refining plant according to some glowing text hanging in space beside it in his hologram, slowly sliding out of the way, his gun targeting computers already calculating optimal firing patterns to use against the target once it emerged.

Second target... acquiring. Mira’s computer voice rang out, shocking Kale out of his trance-like concentration on his prospective victim.

Second target? Kale bellowed an incoherent question, a vague intuition forming that perhaps a second system defense barge or some drone fighters had been hiding, powered down, among the chaotic collection of orbiting industrial facilities.

While the captain yelled out his question, Mira