Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [21]
“I see,” Ballard said, sounding like he didn’t see at all. “Let me talk to the captain and the lieutenant again, would you, please, Madame Consul.”
“Of course, Sir Admiral.”
Carstairs and Jackson each picked up a headset and mike. “What the hell is she talking about?” Ball-Breaker demanded.
“Some kind of defensive shield, sir,” Jackson explained. “It’s new and revolutionary. Very high tech. She indicated the Shamani might be willing to share some of the secrets with us if they can only get it back.”
“Damn it to hell! We’re on a mission here!” The transmission went silent, and the two officers looked at each other, wondering if Ballard had gone off the air. “All right,” he barked after the long pause. “I’ll authorize twenty-four hours. See what you can find out. But by God, don’t waste another second and make the jump to the fleet so you can meet us in the Arcton system.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Message received and understood,” Carstairs replied.
“All right. Jackson, Carstairs. That will be all. Over and out.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the two officers said in unison. Carstairs again pushed the transmit button and then turned the device off before any follow-up message could be received.
“We’ve got a reading on that pirate ship,” Carstairs reported to Jackson a few hours later. “Seems they veered away from the star far enough that we could pick them up. They were making a course for these asteroids, about three hundred million klicks out from the star.”
“Any idea where in the asteroid belt they went?” Jackson asked, intrigued. He had told Carstairs about the shield technology that had been removed from the Shamani ship, and he knew the naval officer was as eager as he was to have a look at it.
“As a matter of fact, we have a pretty good idea,” the captain replied. “There’s one rock out there about ten times larger than any of the rest of them—large enough to have some gravity even, maybe point one G.”
“Do you want to go there and have a look?” Jackson asked.
“Well, it’s practically on the way back to the Pangaea,” the captain replied. “So I’ve had the course already plotted.”
“Good idea, sir. Er…” Jackson let the pause grow long. “Have you talked to the admiral?”
Carstairs grinned, looking a bit like a buccaneer himself. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” he said.
Five: Kicking Asteroid
Despite his protestations about the pirate base being “practically on the way” to the Pangaea, Captain Carstairs elected to take an oblique approach, guiding the frigate toward the target while using the asteroids themselves as cover. A burst of acceleration propelled the Pegasus away from the massive star, and then the ship reversed orientation and decelerated hard as she approached the asteroid belt. She was moving relatively slowly, with the crew in a zero-G state, as she slipped into the belt of drifting rock in orbit around Alpha Centauri.
Like a submarine moving silently through shallow waters, she relied mainly on passive detection systems to avoid the hazardous planetoids drifting to all sides. Her crew primarily employed high-resolution camera images, pictures collected by nanotech lenses and magnified to a power of 100,000 or more, to pick a path, backing up the visuals with low-power radar signals. Steering rockets burned briefly, easing the silver spaceship past one obstacle after another as she closed steadily on the target Captain Carstairs had identified.
“Fortunately, these asteroids aren’t quite as densely packed as those in our own system,” the captain remarked to Jackson. “But any one of the damned things could do us a world of hurt.”
The SEALS lieutenant could only nod, marveling at Carstairs’s calm while his own hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists and he pictured, at any moment, a jagged and lethal chunk of ice-crusted rock smashing through the hull and ending their mission and their lives in an instant.
Still,