Crossover - Michael Jan Friedman [57]
“What is it?” asked the proconsul.
T’racc shrugged helplessly. “The … the human,” he stammered. “He’s gone.”
His anger mounting even higher, Eragian whipped out his own communicator and established contact with the base. He would soon straighten this out.
“Commander Barnak!” he spat.
A moment later, the base commander responded, his voice tremulous. “I don’t know what to say, Your Eminence. The human was under the watch of—”
“Then Trace is right?” the proconsul bellowed. “The human managed to escape?”
“No, Your Eminence. Not escape,” Barnak insisted. “He is still somewhere on the base.”
Lennex darted a look at Eragian. “Taking notes on the outpost’s defensive capabilities, no doubt.”
The proconsul could barely contain his fury. “I want you to find him, do you hear me? Find him and contain him, or you will wish you’d never been born!”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” the base commander assured him. “It is only a matter of time before we—”
Suddenly, Barnak stopped. Eragian could hear someone else speaking in the background. Immediately thereafter, there was a considerable amount of shouting.
“What’s going on down there?” he demanded.
“Proconsul,” said the base commander. His voice sounded frantic, strained. “Sensors show that one of our transport vessels has broken orbit without authorization—and is leaving at maximum speed.”
Eragian couldn’t believe it. He terminated the communication and initiated another one—this time, with Hajak, the commander of the Vengeance.
“This is the proconsul,” he raged. “Bring me and Commander Lennex aboard—now!”
In a matter of seconds, he found himself on the warbird’s bridge, the Tal Shiar still beside him. He turned to Hajak, who had risen from the center seat to attend them.
Eragian made a gesture of dismissal at the viewscreen, which showed him some arcane technical graphic. “There’s a transport vessel that’s just broken orbit. I want you to pursue it.”
Hajak nodded and barked some orders. Immediately the bridge crew set to work. Before the proconsul could take up a position in front of the viewscreen, its perspective changed—displaying an image of the departing transport.
The Vengeance was a good deal faster, Eragian assured himself. The human would not get away, despite everything.
“I want the pilot of that vessel taken alive,” he warned Hajak. “He owes me an explanation—and a great deal more.”
“I understand perfectly,” Hajak replied.
As usual, there was a note of confidence in his voice— an air of efficiency. At least someone in my employ knows what he’s doing, the proconsul remarked inwardly.
As a youth, Eragian had hunted scavenger birds with a pet hawk. He recalled vividly the way the scavengers had fled their pursuers, seeming to tremble in midflight, as if they could foresee that their efforts would end in failure. And of course, they always did.
To the proconsul’s eye, that was the way the transport ship looked now. Tremulous, afraid. Caught in the grip of increasing despair. The human had almost slipped their grasp—but in the end, he would fall well short.
“Target the transport’s warp drive,” Commander Hajak instructed calmly.
“Warp drive targeted,” came the reply from his weapons officer. “Photon torpedoes ready.”
“Fire,” said the commander.
As Eragian watched the viewscreen, he saw the transport ship wracked by a barrage of photon torpedoes—all of them focused on the portion of the vessel where the warp drive was most vulnerable. He smiled as the transport dropped out of warp.
“Good work,” he told Hajak.
The commander inclined his head. “Thank you, Your Eminence.”
That’s when the transport blew up, in a massive conflagration of matter-antimatter pyrotechnics. The shards of the vessel’s hull went careening in all directions, including right at the viewscreen.
The proconsul realized that his mouth was hanging open. He shut it, then cast a glance over his shoulder at Hajak. The commander had gone white as a mollusk shell on the shores of the Apnex Sea.
“I said I wanted him alive,” Eragian