Ghosts (Gauntlet Prime #2) - Barry Solway Page 0,2
so can you just chill out? If this is too stressful, you can go back into the cabin. No one will judge.”
“I’ll judge,” Anna cut in. “You’re a useless, flaming asshole. My preference is that you go into the bathroom in the back cabin. There aren’t any cameras back there, so I can actually get away from having to look at you for five seconds.”
Does that mean there were cameras in the main cabin bathrooms? Mel wondered, but she suppressed the question. Jon was about to yell at Anna, when Mel pointed out the window.
“Look, the ship has changed course,” she said.
“I’m aware of that,” Anna said. “It’s heading to the hyperport.” The holographic image of her head popped out of existence. Mel thought she sounded stressed. “I’m turning off the holo-image to save computing power. The ship is of unknown type, but I have a few comments, if Jon can resist interrupting. I’m going to assume this is a classified ship with military or law enforcement capabilities. The interesting thing is that it’s not coming from the direction of the nearest hypergate. So that means it was already in this system, or it has its own hyperjump technology, like Kathor’s ship. As Mel said, if they are chasing us, which is looking very likely at the moment, it seems they’ll want the ship back in one piece. So I don’t expect they’ll start shooting at us without warning.”
“You don’t know that,” Jon said.
Anna paused and Mel thought her reply was a bit slow. “It’s a logical conclusion,” Anna said. “They think we won’t get permission to jump at the port. There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
That brought Jon up short. It made sense. But it left the obvious question.
“So, how are we going to get through the gate?” Mel asked.
A pronounced delay from Anna, and slow, drawn-out speech patterns made her sound drunk. “My… scintillating… brilliance…” she said. “Leave me… alone to… figure… it… out.”
Mel realized what was happening. Anna had turned off the holo-image and her speech had slowed. She was routing all her processing power into figuring out how to get through the hyperport.
A few moments passed. “Ha… cracked the encryption,” Anna said. Seconds later audio played from the other ship, quickly translated to English by the translators that Kathor had implanted in their heads months ago.
“—vessel Utopia. We are in pursuit of recreation class six vessel, Spirit of Valor. This vessel has been compromised and is strictly forbidden from hyperjump access. Repeat. Agprith hyperport three-dash-one-five, this is the OPS Utopia—” The transmission cutoff as Anna’s holo-image popped back up.
“We should be good now,” she said, her voice sounding normal. Maybe a bit smug.
“What did you do?” Jon asked.
“I broke their encryption so I could hear their transmissions to the hyperport. As you heard, the Order starship Utopia is chasing us. We’re less than thirty minutes from the port now. The Utopia is traveling faster than we are, but we’ll still get to the port an hour ahead of them. They can likely go faster, but there’s no reason for them to hurry, so I’m not going to speed up either. They think they have us trapped.”
“Tell me they don’t have us trapped,” Mel said.
Anna laughed. “No. I have their channel sequence, encryption, and identification codes. I’ll send a message to the port when we get closer to give us clearance. I still need to come up with new codes for our ship, but I’ve got plenty of time for that now. Sorry for the small panic there. The encryption codes were a beast to break.”
“You did a great job, Anna. I’m really appreciating how impossible this all would have been without you,” Mel replied. “I’m going to go back and tell the others what’s going on. You two try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”
“She’s already dead,” Jon muttered.
“Why did we bring him along?” Anna replied.
“He’s our asshole,” Mel said, slapping Jon on the shoulder. Jon grunted and ignored them both.
Mel walked back to the main cabin and told the others what had just happened. As they gathered around the windows to look at the ship chasing them, Beats pointed to a planet about the size of a tennis ball with a small potato-shaped moon off to the side. A diamond-like cluster of glowing lights floated to the side of the planet. Mel would have thought they were stars, but Beats indicated this was the hyperport.