Babylon 5 02 - Accusations (Tilton, Lois) Read online

  "We're trying to make it back to the jump gate," the desperate pilot reported. "It's our only chance; we can't run from them. There's too many of them and they're too fast! But I don't know if we'll make it. They've got us cut off. They were on us almost as soon as we came through the gate. Waiting for us! It was a setup!"

  "Try to hold on, Cassini, help is on the way!" But when he turned away from the communications screen, Sheridan's expression was grim. He knew, as the transport's pilot had to, that there wasn't much hope of Ivanova reaching the endangered ship before it was too late. After Alpha Wing came out of hyperspace into Section Red 13, the fighters would still have almost three hours in normal space before they could reach the transfer jump point where the transport had been ambushed, even at a Starfury's maximum acceleration.

  The Cobra bay doors stood open wide, ready. C&C had already cleared them for immediate launch, priority. Ivanova ran quickly through her preflight check. "Alpha Wing, ready for drop?"

  With all nine ships signaling readiness, "Prepare to launch. On my mark, Alpha Wing. Let's go! Drop!"

  The cradle swung down, and the F23 Starfury dropped free of the station, falling out into space in the curved trajectory imparted by the station's spin. Then Ivanova fired the thrusters, and the fighter blasted away from Babylon 5. One by one, the rest of Alpha Wing joined in behind her, falling into formation as they accelerated toward the jump gate.

  Ivanova's hands were tight on the fighter's controls, as if she could propel the ship by the sheer force of will. Time was the crucial element in these situationstime to launch the fighters, to get to the jump point, even more time to reach the endangered ship once they were through. Through her command helmet, she was monitoring Sheridan's exchange with the Cassini's pilot, and she could already tell the situation wasn't good. The transport was too far away, the raiders were too close on its tail. By the time Alpha flight got there, it might already be too late.

  Too often, lately, they'd been too late. Angrily, Ivanova thrust away the memory of what they'd found on those occasions.

  Ahead was the jump gate, the permanent hyperspace installation maintained by Babylon 5. "This is Alpha Leader, prepare for jump," Ivanova ordered, heading for the gate's center at the head of the fighter wing. As her Starfury entered the gate, an immense power surge opened the hyperspace vortex, warping space, time, light, pulling the ship in and through. Simultaneously it disappeared into the jump point's infinite black center and into the dark red nightmare of hyperspace, and emerged from the blue-shifted funnel of energy into Section Red 13, light-years from Babylon 5 in normal space. One by one, in order, the rest of Alpha Wing followed, taking up formation again behind Ivanova.

  "This is Alpha Leader, let's get to that transport! Maximum burn," she ordered. "ETA to the Cassini's last recorded position 166 minutes. Warm up your weapons. Let's be ready for the raiders when we get there!"

  But when she tried to raise the transport to report that she was on the way, there was no response. "Any transmissions from the Cassini?"

  "Negative," reported Alpha Two, Gordon Mokena, her wingman and the designated scan/communications ship for the mission.

  Damn, she said under her breath. Not good, not good at all.

  She opened up a direct subspace tachyon channel to Babylon 5. "Babylon Control, this is Ivanova, we're out in 13, and I can't raise the Cassini. Are you still in contact? Do you have a current fix on their position?"

  Sheridan's voice responded, "Ivanova, we lost contact with the Cassini about the time you went through the jump gate. Their last reported position was 470 by 13 by 18. They were trying to make it back through the jump gate."

  Grimly, Ivanova made the course correction, just as if there were still a realistic odds on the transport's survival. There was no question of turning back. You had to see it through, no matter how bad it looked. For the chance that some other ship might come onto the scene and manage to chase off the raiders. For the chance of saving a survivor. And if all that failed, for the chance of revenge, of getting just one raider ship in your sights and seeing it disintegrate, lit by the brief flare as its fuel went up with the oxygen from its ruptured tanks.

  Vengeance was supposed to be something you left to the Lord, or so she'd been taught as a child, but Ivanova didn't care. She wanted those raiders.

  Sometimes it seemed they would never be able to stamp them out. Wipe out one nest of them, another would pop up in a different sector of space. The more trade grew between the stars, the more the opportunities for piracy, the more the profits in it, feeding the black market. Humans and aliens greed seems to be one thing we have in common, Ivanova thought grimly.

  The raiders were typically hit-and-run operators, snatching what was valuable from the transports they hit, killing the crews, and abandoning their victims to the cold void of space. They had started out as opportunistic pirates, roaming the shipping routes and hitting whatever random targets they came across, but after the destruction of their main force, they were becoming more desperate. These days, they didn't like to leave their profits to chance. The remaining pirate consortiums operated from mother ships large enough to create their own jump points in space. And they preferred to choose their targets in advance, relying on bribes to obtain cargo manifests and routing schedules. There didn't seem to be any information that wasn't for sale if the price was high enough.

  Angrily, Ivanova diverted her mind from this train of thought by querying the computer for the current ETA at the Cassini's position.

  "ETA for coordinates 470 by 13 by 18 is twenty-four minutes."

  Close enough. She opened her command channel. "This is Alpha Leader, all ships activate long-range scan," she ordered. "Let's see if we can pick them up out there."

  For several minutes she watched the screen while the scan turned up nothing. Then Alpha Two reported in: "I'm getting something! Looks like raiders! Four . . . no, I think five of them!"

  "I'm getting more! They've got another ship with them! Something big, like a transport!" Alpha Five announced.

  "Location?"

  Both pilots sent the coordinates and other scan data. The data matched with what Ivanova's own instruments were picking up. The raiders were obviously heading for the Red 13 jump point. Then they didn't come from a jump-capable carrier.

  "What about the Cassini?" Ivanova asked, but there was still no communication from the ship they were trying to save.

  At their current acceleration, the raiders would be at the jump point in less than fourteen minutes. They were close, but the transport they were escorting was clearly slowing them down. Alpha Wing's Starfuries, with thrusters on maximum burn, could make it there in twelve minutes. But what about the Cassini? Had the raiders captured the freighter, taken her in tow?

  Then, from Alpha Two: "Commander, I'm picking up a mass of about 850K tonnes at 470 by 13 by 18. Reading just mass, no acceleration, no life sign."

  The Cassini. Ivanova knew it. Her worst-case outcome, realized again.

  Now it was decision time. "Alpha Two, Six, Ten check it out. If it's the transport . . . you know what to do.

  "The rest of you, close up formation. Activate weapons. We're going to cut those bastards off at the jump point and burn them down."

  As the three designated Starfuries pivoted out of the main formation, the remaining fighters closed up as ordered, following Ivanova's thruster flares on an intercepting course, to reach the jump gate before the raiders and their hijacked cargo. If she could do it, cut them off at the jump gate, the raiders were already hot ash, with nowhere to run. The Starfuries were faster, and there was no sanctuary in empty space, no safety but engines and firepower, and Alpha Wing had the raider ships outgunned. Their situation would be as hopeless as the transport Cassini had been when they attacked it.

  Ivanova's voice over the command channel never lost its clipped, cool tones, her orders were by the book, her hands on the controls were steady, but there was a tightness in her jaw, a look in her eyes that promis
ed no mercy on the raiders once she got them in her sights.

  Because it was procedure, she opened a wide-band comm channel. "This is Earthforce Commander Ivanova to suspected raider ships. Cut your engines or I will attack."

  There was no response. Then it was all or nothing. The raiders continued their flight toward the jump point, and Alpha Wing's formation, a fusion-powered spearpoint, flung itself at its targets, phased plasma guns fully charged, closing in.

  But the targets weren't blind or helpless. As soon as they detected the Earthforce fighters bearing down on them, the raiders reacted, a half-dozen of the small wing-shaped fighters peeling off to engage their pursuers. On her screen, Ivanova could see the transport and its remaining escort begin to increase acceleration as they raced for the safety of the jump gate.

  Whatever was in that transport, whatever they were guarding, had to be valuable if the raiders were willing to risk themselves to save it. "This is Alpha Leader. Three, Four, Nine, Twelveengage their rear guard. The rest of you stay with me. We're going to take out that transport. Open fire as soon as you're in range."

  The larger ship was not, she could see clearly now, the Cassini, but a leaner, faster type of freighter, designed for the rapid loading of stolen cargo and a fast escape, and undoubtedly armed. A fleeting thought passed through Ivanova's mind that the raiders had been well prepared to grab this cargo, whatever it was. But she had no time to think of anything but the coming fight as soon as the ready indicator on her weapons system finally showed the closest fighter in range.

  "Lock on target. Fire."

  Superheated plasma shot from her guns, intercepted by the transport's defensive weapons. From the formation around her came more fire as Alpha Wing engaged the enemy. A raider ship bore down on her from straight ahead, but Ivanova had it in her sights, fired, and had the savage satisfaction of seeing the incandescent gases of its death-explosion fill her screen. Another raider took a hit, spun crazily for a brief instant, then disintegrated into flying debris.

  Ivanova's command channel was filled with voices.

  Raider at ten o' clock.

  I've got him, Ten!

  I've lost an engine, Alpha Leader. I'm falling back.

  About twenty degrees away and behind them, Ivanova's tactical screen showed the smaller formation of Starfuries led by Alpha Three engaging the raiders' rear defenders. Around her, the main body of Alpha Wing was in pursuit of the rest, taking out the raider fighters one by one. With some part of her brain she was aware of all this activity, tracking it, making the correct responses. But most of her attention was focused on the raider transport, the rapidly decreasing distance between it and the jump point, and the slower rate with which she was inexorably closing the gap between them. The transport ship was well armed. As it fired one of its rear guns, Ivanova's Starfury was rocked by a plasma burst a lot closer than she found comfortable. But she returned the fire, and one of her shots made a direct hit, blowing away a rear cargo section and one of the transport's thrusters.

  Seeing that, the rest of the raiders seemed to figure that their hijacked cargo was lost and it was time to save themselves. The leading pair of raider ships accelerated ahead, through the jump gate, passing into hyperspace with sudden successive flares of light. Damn! Ivanova cursed to herself, but they were beyond her reach now.

  Now panic started to spread through the surviving raiders. They broke off the fight, racing each other for the gate, followed at a rapidly increasing distance by the abandoned, limping transport. "Damn!" Ivanova swore again in frustration as one more passed through and escaped her, then another.

  There was still the transport, crippled and outgunned, with Alpha Wing closing in. Ivanova opened the channel again to call for its surrender. But before the cargo ship could respond, two of the last raiders, both diving for the jump gate at the same time, collided, both fighters obliterated in a single explosive fireball. A third was unable to veer away in time to avoid the blast wave, which slammed it into one of the jump gate's extended arms.

  "Pull up!" Ivanova ordered her ships urgently, and they broke off the pursuit, evading the massive energy surge that flashed out from the damaged gate's power node.

  Ivanova's scan readout broke into static as the energy level went off the scale. She watched in a kind of horrified awe to see the disabled transport, out of control and unable to change course, slide inexorably into the intensely charged field. There was a blue-white flash that struck at her eyes even through her polarized viewscreen, and then the ship was gone.

  She let out a breath. "This is Alpha Leader, all ships return to formation. Let's check out the damages."

  Mokena in Alpha Two had reported somberly, "We've found the Cassini, Commander. The crew's dead. They gutted the ship, tore the cargo section open to get at it."

  Now Ivanova was seeing the devastation for herself, the ruined, lifeless ship, the gaping hole in the cargo hold. Her fighter drifted almost motionless past the wreckage, close enough that she could see the carbon-scoring from the raider's blasts along its hull, the ruin of the flight cabin's interior, the empty hold. What had it been carrying, what was worth so much destruction, so many lives?

  There were sometimes moments, like seeing the raider transport drift helplessly to its destruction, when Ivanova would start to feel doubt, to wonder if the killing could be justified. Sights like this one made the doubts disappear. Some things had to be fought, had to be put down.

  The other ships had already taken the Cassini crew's remains onboard, salvaged the ship's records, its log, the black box. Once they got back to Babylon 5, they might reveal something.

  Ivanova activated her command channel. "This is Alpha Leader. Form up. Nothing more we can do here. Let's go home."

  CHAPTER 3

  They started out looking for a fugitive. Not such an easy job, not with Babylon 5's population crowding a quarter million sentient beings. Eliminate the methane-breathers, narrow it down even further to humans, and the scale of the problem still was a lot to contend with. The alien sectors of the station still had to be included in the search, just in case this Ortega fellow might be hiding in there, maybe inside an environment suit.

  But this was part of Michael Garibaldi's job description, and there was no one who knew the ins and outs of Babylon 5 better than he did. He wouldn't deserve to be chief of security if there was, would he?

  The job meant just about everything to Garibaldi. He figured it was his last chance, and he'd given up most everything he had left to come here and take it. Given up Lise and any chance of working things out with her and now he'd never know whether they might have made it together. She was married now, and he supposed he wished her well.

  But he'd been on the long slide down for a long time, ever since the mess on Europa. Came close to hitting the bottom more than once. And then Jeff Sinclair had pulled him off the slide, given him this job, this chance Chief of Security on one of Earth Alliance's most sensitive outposts. Only now things had changed again. Jeff Sinclair wasn't commander of Babylon 5 anymore. He was ambassador to the Minbari, and Captain John Sheridan had the commander's desk now, and Sheridan had seen Garibaldi's file, had to know the kind of man who was holding this jobalmost certainly not the kind of man he would have chosen himself.

  So here was the bottom line: Garibaldi knew he couldn't afford to screw up. This Ortega case was a big onePriority One fugitive alert. Earth Central wanted this guy real bad. Garibaldi called in his entire security staff on it.

  "All right, listen up. This is our man. J. D. Ortega. You all have a copy of his file, right? Study it carefully. You can see that he's wanted for terrorism and conspiracy on Mars. Probably related to last year's uprising, Free Mars, the separatist movement.

  "Now, somehow, he got onto Babylon 5 without triggering our scanners, and that brings up the possibility that he may have some kind of forged identicard. Also possibly confederates here on the station. You'd better believe we're going to be looking into that. But right for the mome
nt, our job is to find J. D. Ortega and take him into custody. That means we search this station until we've crawled through every ventilation duct and unbolted every wall panel, if that's what it takes. All right, you all have your assignments. Are there any questions?"

  There weren't any, to Garibaldi's relief. Because of the nature of the charges, because of Commander Ivanova's involvement, there were aspects of the case he didn't want to discuss with his whole staff. Just as there were parts of the file he hadn't distributed to all of them a matter of security clearances. Earth Central wanted this one kept shut tight.

  They were looking for a fugitive, and so when Command and Control called in on his link that someone had reported a body in one of the fighter maintenance bays, Garibaldi deputed one of his subordinates, Ensign Torres, to check into the matter.

  A few minutes later, Torres called back. "Chief, it's him. The bodyit's him!"

  "Him? You mean Ortega? He's dead? You mean he was killed?"

  "That's what it looks like, Chief."

  Garibaldi's first thought was that this didn't really solve anything. So they'd found Ortega; now they had to look for his killer. And what about Ivanova? When she found out her old friend was dead?

  But he reacted according to the book. "All right, Torres, I hope you have the area sealed off. Good. Keep it that way. No one in or out, nobody says anything to anyone until I get there. You've got whoever reported the body? Good. I want you to hold them for questioning. Whoever's seen the body, whoever knows it's there. Got that? I'm on my way. Remember, nobody into that area except me and Dr. Franklin from Medlab. I'm calling him right now."