Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [94]
He peeled sideways again, just as a pale violet beam transected the portion of space his ship had occupied only moments before. Gravity beam!
These creatures, whoever they were, were heavily armed. He didn’t recognize the design of the ship, and he’d been through all the military identification courses. Daleks, Sess, Scumble, Drahvins, Falardi: names, shapes and regis-tration details of every ship in their fleets memorized. But this one was new.
Damned aliens, always trying to put one over on the Empire. Slap them down hard, that was the only language they understood.
The craft had reorientated itself, and was coming after him again. The pilot was good, for an alien. Really quite good. Probably trained by humans. Yes, that would explain it.
Beltempest examined his options with finely honed tactical skill. If he tried to jump into hyperspace, the ship would just yank him out again. It had that capability. However, if he destroyed that capability . . . All he had to do was to shoot off those tentacles and, as the old phrase had it, Robert would be his interlocutor’s father’s brother.
Except that Dis had strict rules about armed ships attempting to come within range of its laser turrets. The Moorglade’s weapons had been removed before it left Purgatory. Not just disarmed. Removed.
‘Damn! Damn and blast! Damn and blast and –’
Instinctively he threw the ship into a corkscrew turn, just as the gravity beam flashed past. The beam spiralled with him, always a few hundred metres behind but in perfect synchronization. He counted seconds, anticipating the operator’s reaction time, then, at the moment the operator manually dragged the beam across the spiral, he broke away and took the ship in a curving path away from the alien craft, downwards, under its belly and up towards its rear.
Where another gravity beam caught him in its violet grip. The Moorglade rang like a cracked and rather old bell.
Two gravity generators. That looked suspiciously like overkill to him.
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‘Imperial Landsknecht shuttle,’ a voice boomed in his ears. He’d turned the communications systems off, so they were probably using some sort of modulation on their gravity beam. Smart. For aliens. ‘Imperial Landsknecht shuttle, heave to. We are about to board.’
Standard Landsknecht message format as well. They must have been on the end of it themselves a few times. That gave him some clues. Obviously a race that had felt the sharp end of Imperial justice before. Not that it narrowed the field much.
The alien craft grew in his screens. He bent to retrieve his weapons from the floor. Try to board his shuttle, would they? He’d show them how the Landsknechte reacted to that kind of thing.
Chirell Tensen refastened the access plate and sat back on his heels. ‘Never understood why they can’t get a bot to do this,’ he grumbled, disengaging his heavy diagnostic unit and glancing around the room at the hulking but eerily silent null-grav generators. He didn’t like being down in the lowest level of the towers. Too close to the Undertown for his liking, what with the riots and all.
‘What?’ his colleague Trav Chan shouted. He was still working on the other side of the unit, and the constant high-pitched whine of the generators made it difficult to hear.
‘I said I don’t know why they can’t get a bot to do this,’ he shouted.
‘Accountability. If we screw up, we’re responsible. If a bot screws up, there’s nobody’s butt in the sling.’
Chirell rubbed his temple. His head was throbbing fit to burst, and the strap of the diagnostic unit was biting into his shoulder. His wife had bought a cheap body-bepple kit as a surprise birthday present for him, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the new softness of her skin and the fresh curves of her body. She was probably still asleep, curled up in the warmth of their bed.
Goddess, he wished he were back there with