Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

Tenkor, this would be a good time to tell me you have another surprise up your sleeve.”

“I do, but it’s going to cost you a bottle of that Earth bourbon you’ve got stashed in your cabin,” the Pikith gunner replied.

“Get us out of this without hull damage and it’s yours,” the captain replied.

“Done and done, sir,” Tenkor replied, letting go of his left-hand joystick just long enough to lean forward and smack a red button on his panel. Bek’ah watched in amazement as every radar signature save the Sniper and the Gritloth ship winked out of existence at once. All the fighters, the half dozen missiles streaking toward them, and the battlecruiser—all gone in the blink of an eye.

“What was that?” she asked, looking down at the Rincah sitting beside her.

Harmbo chuckled, his voice a rumbly grunting thing. “That was Tenkor’s modification to my radar decoys—an EMP generator. When Timsif banked us hard, I fired two dozen decoy globes about a hundred centimeters in diameter from the bottom of the ship. They were programmed to mimic the radar signature of fighters, and when they were far enough away from the Sniper, to link together to form up into a decoy battlecruiser.”

“So there were no fighters?”

“Not even one,” he said with a nod. “It was all electronic signatures and scramblers to make it look to the Gritloth’s instruments like they were suddenly in a firefight. Then when Tenkor took out a few of their fighters, they believed the illusion even more. Nobody uses their viewscreens in a space battle. It’s too confusing, and most beings can’t process all the information coming at them. So everyone trusts their instruments. We can’t fight our way out of a wet paper bag, but we can make almost anyone think we’re a lot bigger and badder than we are.”

“Like arching your back and fluffing out your fur before a fight to make yourself look bigger. Makes sense. But then what stopped the missiles?”

“Each decoy had a little something extra wired in—a networked EMP web generator. When Tenk hit the red button, each transmitter fired off an EMP, with overlapping fields that acted as a force multiplier. Because each pulse built on the one before it in a wave, the resulting blast had much more power than any of the decoys could create on their own.”

“Frying the missiles and the real fighters,” Bek’ah concluded.

“Exactly,” Captain Tinbrak chimed in. “And since we’re the fastest ship in a dozen star systems, we’re already out of range of any more missiles, and we should be able to reach the nearest Gate well in advance of the Gritloth, even if they don’t stop to pick up their drifting fighters. Now we just need to figure out where we’re going to get away from your slaver friends.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Captain,” the doctor said from where she stood by a far bulkhead. She’d remained silent through the brief engagement with the Gritloth, but now stepped forward. “The coordinates in the chip on Bek’ah’s knee are to something the Gritloth have designated as ‘The Vault.’ It appears to be an asteroid in the far outreaches of the Gleekum system.”

“The Vault, huh?” Captain Tinbrak said, scratching his chin. A wide grin spread across his face as he looked around the bridge, nodding. “Well, the kind of things beings keep in vaults are exactly the kind of things that we would be very interested in. Doctor, please share those coordinates with Timsif. Let’s go see what the Gritloth are keeping locked away.”

“Well, that doesn’t look like much,” the communications officer Harmbo said as the image of an asteroid appeared on the bridge screen.

Bek’ah had to admit she agreed with him. Even as asteroids went, it wasn’t much. Not that she’d ever done much space travel, just a few quick jaunts up to dance on a party barge Dax rented out to big customers now and then. But this? This was just a big hunk of cold rock floating through space, without even a rudimentary atmosphere to make it look appealing. What the Hells could the Gritloth have stashed way out here that would be worth cutting her open and hiding the data inside her?

“Anything on the scans, Doc?” Captain Tinbrak asked. Doctor Skarper sat at one of the command stations on the bridge, her perpetually frizzy hair once again escaping its braid to form an auburn halo around her head. With no one in sick bay, the science officer had taken up her post on the bridge, running environmental systems on the ship during their trek through the Gate to the Gleekum system, and now she ran long-range scans of the asteroid in hopes of locating this mysterious “Vault.”

“No life forms so far, Captain. The asteroid seems to be solid, mostly nickel and titanium with a fair chunk of iron, gypsum, and trace amounts of hematite. Whatever the Gritloth are so interested in, it certainly isn’t the makeup of the rock itself. There does seem to be an unnaturally high concentration of aluminum and titanium on the far side of the asteroid, so if we could maneuver around to the other side, I could get a better reading on that. Could be some type of structure on the surface of the rock.”

“Bring us around, Timsif,” the captain ordered, and the Pikith pilot pressed buttons on her control panel. Bek’ah watched the display shift as the cameras and scanners built into the hull of the Sniper ran over new angles of the asteroid’s surface.

“There it is, Captain. That structure is most definitely not natural.” Skarper pointed at the display, where a hard-edged rectangular shape stood in sharp relief against the rocky surface of the asteroid.

“It must be some type of storage locker,” Bek’ah said.

“Bigger than that,” Harmbo said over his shoulder. The Tedibian had taken to standing by the stout Rincah’s comm post. Since there was no one they wanted to communicate with on this trip, his only job