Again, the cabin filled with the brutish sound of surging generators, and the deck began to vibrate beneath his feet. He glanced at Ursis, who grinned and yanked his thumb in the air.
"Let's go, Wilf Ansor," the Bear growled in a huge voice.
Brim winked and returned his attention to the controls. He no sooner released the gravity brakes when the beacon—and all of Red Rock 9—instantly vanished astern in a bellowing surge of power from the generators. Zero-gravity takeoffs all tended to be rapid, but the captured STS was in a class by itself! He grinned—he hadn't had so much fun since he'd flown the little JD-981s at the Academy.
During their next two watches, the team worked tirelessly, exercising each of the ship's flight systems at high speeds, first in free space, then through a crowded asteroid reef orbiting the gas giant at a slightly lower altitude. After two close brushes with disaster (the last of which badly pitted a quadrant of the ship's unprotected Hyperscreens), Brim began to get the hang of things.
"Voof!" Ursis exclaimed admiringly as the Carescrian completed a particularly complex course. "'Wind and cold seek lakes and trees, but Bears claim only wolves,' as they say on the Mother Planets. Wilf Ansor, my friend, you exceed yourself!"
Brim laughed and cranked the skittish-little ship into a vertical turn across the reef, huge rock clusters scorching past on the port side in an avalanche of riotous color. "Once you do something like that on a Carescrian ore barge," he yelled over the thundering generators, "it seems pretty easy in anything else."
"You will concentrate on flying, not talking, Lieutenant Brim," Amherst warned through tight lips.
"Have you forgotten quickly what you did to the Hyperscreens?"
Brim glanced up at the pockmarked screens. "I haven't forgotten, Lieutenant," he acknowledged, biting his lip to control his voice. At the same time, he noticed that sweat was now running freely from Amherst's face. The man was afraid! On his way back to Red Rock 9, he fairly skimmed the surface of a particularly jagged asteroid—and smiled with satisfaction as he watched Amherst squeeze his eyes shut.
The Universe kindly provided more than one way of extracting life's little dollops of revenge, he noted with silent satisfaction.
The eleven Truculents passed a second set of watches exercising the ship's weapons systems (during which, Barbousse accurately torpedoed a ship-sized asteroid), then invested a short period in Hyperspace running on the Drive crystal. When they finally returned to Red Rock 9, an abrupt message recalled them—immediately—to a meeting with Colonel Dark.
"Welcome, gentlemen," the almond-eyed woman said as the tired crew clambered into the conference room still dressed in battle suits. "It seems my call for assistance from the Fleet was answered this time with reasonably competent Blue Capes."
She smiled—for the first time that Brim could recall. "Sometimes we get the best," she continued,
"often the worst. It depends on the captains involved, I suppose. Regula Collingswood has done us proud."
"You mean we qualify for the mission?" Amherst asked, a genuine look of concern on his face.
"The team has indeed qualified, Lieutenant," Dark answered, "but only in the merest nick of time. At that, I have been forced to delay your departure until commencement of the second watch tomorrow my ground crew needs additional time to replace Hyperscreen panels damaged by the initial sloppiness of your Helmsman, Lieutenant Brim," she said pointedly.
The Carescrian felt color rise in his cheeks as he mentally braced for more criticism. Instead, for the second time he watched Dark's face break into a smile as she turned to face him. "Don't take the
'sloppiness' too much to heart, Brim," she laughed suddenly. "No one expected you could do what you've done at all—and you've triumphed." Then her face darkened. "But it also means you now have the actual job to accomplish. And when your crewmates hear all the details, they may wish your Helmsman's talents ran more toward singing or sculpting, perhaps, than piloting a small starship.
At that moment, Brim noticed Theada and Ursis glance uneasily toward Amherst—he followed their gaze. The First Lieutenant had again broken into profuse sweating—though Dark kept temperatures low in her conference room. The Carescrian winced to himself. Somehow, trouble was coming—and he was reasonably sure the least of it would be with the League. But before he could fret about the situation, Dark began her final briefing, and no time remained for anything but the mission.
During the remainder of that watch and well into the next, Dark described their task in detaiclass="underline" flying the STS to the very heart of Triannic's League—almost within sight of the great capital planet of Tarrott itself—executing a tricky landfall on a barren mining planet to board an important Imperial spy, then retracing their steps to a rendezvous with an Imperial warship. "On the surface, it sounds simple," she said. "We've set up three time windows for the pickup. You determine which one to use after you arrive on the basis of safety—yours and the operative's." She fingered her hullmetal fragment absently and frowned, staring bleakly across the room. "Unfortunately," she continued, "I have only described the easy part—your mission as originally planned was quite straightforward and relatively free from risk.
However, recent developments have made the job somewhat more symmetrical in that it now involves a difficult part, too."
Brim looked at Ursis and grinned in spite of himself. The Bear silently rolled his eyes to the bubble ceiling. "First, you must be there and back in a little more than three Standard days' time," Dark continued. "That's when the Leaguers will discover these STSs of ours are missing from their inventory."
She paused a moment, then shrugged. "We acquired them in a rather unusual fashion we'd rather you didn't know about," she added. "Just in case you find yourselves guests of our black-suited friends, the Controllers."
Amherst abruptly excused himself from the room.
"The second unknown is the real reason we have set up this operation in such a hurry," Dark explained, ignoring the First Lieutenant's hurried exit as if he never existed. "We very much suspect our agent has been compromised," she said, "and I am sure you understand what this means to you. If it is true, they'll be waiting with open arms and give you a very special reception, one with every trick they can muster."
Early in the first morning watch, Dark resummoned Amherst, Ursis, Brim and Theada, this time to her office—which was just as cramped as Collingswood's aboard Truculent. E607 was moored just outside a transparent wall section behind a console. "You're scheduled out today, gentlemen," she began when the scuffling of chairs ceased. "And I have a few last-moment items you'll need to complete your mission." She smiled, caressing the hullmetal fragment with her fingers. "First," she said, turning to point to the ship, "see if you can find anything different about your Leaguer scout since you last saw her. I'll even provide a hint—concentrate on the control cabin."
Brim peered at the raked-back structure, taking in every detail he could see, naming every appurtenance and protrusion. Nothing looked different or even out of place. He turned to Ursis—who met his eyes, frowned, and shrugged in resignation. From the corner of his eye, he disapprovingly watched Amherst studying Dark herself instead of the ship, then scanned the control cabin one more time before he finally gave up. When he looked, the Colonel's eyes were directly on him.
"Well, Lieutenant?" she queried.
Brim gulped and shook his head. "Whatever it is you've done, Colonel," he said with a resigned smile, "you have certainly hidden it well from me.
Grinning with obvious satisfaction, Dark swiveled her chair to face the room. "Good," she declared,