by Bobby Adair
“With any luck.” Brice leaves the half-spoken thought hanging over the comm.
Tarlow starts jabbering about the technicalities of why the idea is the worst one ever.
Phil and Penny are talking between themselves in clipped phrases before Penny blurts, “Everybody, hold on!”
The fields flash blue.
“They’re firing!” shouts Phil.
Vertigo spins my head.
Momentum reverses. The grav lens fires up. All my sense of gravity outside the bridge goes blind.
I feel the wash of a grav tornado blow past, jolting everyone.
The ship lurches twice in rapid succession.
Phil whoops.
“Was that them?” asks Penny.
“Two!” shouts Phil, barely able to contain his excitement. “One turned away. Two disintegrated when they hit the grav lens.”
Nobody tells me I’m a genius ship captain, but that’s okay. We’re not out of the shit yet.
Phil cuts power to the grav lens.
“Ninety-degree spin,” I tell them. “And then, Penny, step on it.”
We need to put some distance between us and our pursuer while he slows down to come back after us.
“Brice,” I ask, “is everyone strapped in up front?”
“Don’t worry about them. I’m on that.”
I glance quickly around the bridge. “Everybody buckle up. Things are going to be bumpier before they get better.”
“Nick is fine,” Phil tells me even though I didn’t ask about the Gray.
I grav tight to the floor between Penny and Phil. There aren’t enough seats on the bridge for all of us. “Penny, push the drive plates harder.”
Several pairs of worried eyes look at me. They don’t approve.
I can’t blame them. “Phil, spare all the power from the inertial bubble you can.”
I feel the change like a punch in the chest as he immediately complies.
I hear grunts and groans sound over the comm.
“Tarlow,” I ask, “any more coming up from the surface?”
“I… I’m trying to reorient.”
“Get back in the game!”
“We’re pretty far away from Iapetus.” Phil tells me. “But those grav plumes, they were powerful. We’ll be able to see them.”
He’s talking about him and Nick the Tick.
Tarlow is fumbling with his computer controls.
I have no patience. “Tarlow—your radar is the best chance we have if there are more missiles out there.
He’s shaking his head vigorously. “We’re probably going too fast, and we’re probably too far out for chemically powered rockets to have a chance of catching us.”
“Unless that ship fires some,” I counter. “Jablonsky, are you trying to hail these ships?”
He looks at me like it’s the stupidest thing I’ve said yet.
“They’re not Trogs or Grays. Not with this tech.”
“They’re not humans,” Tarlow argues.
“Tarlow,” I remind him, “you have your job.”
He mutters something and goes back to work.
I turn back to Jablonsky. “Hail them. We need to know for sure.”
Interior grav is stabilizing. It’s pulling hard against Penny’s acceleration, but it’s steady.
Brice unstraps and hurries over to take up a position beside Tarlow, setting his suit to grav tight once there.
Brice gives me a glance to let me know what he’s up to. Tarlow knows the tech, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Brice will make sure he’s focusing on the right threats, which are sure to multiply again.
“That ship has adjusted its course, and it’s coming in fast,” Phil warns.
“Close?” I ask.
“Pretty far away,” answers Phil. “His momentum took him well beyond us. There’s a lot of velocity to accelerate against.”
“Stop talking physics, Phil, and give me an intercept estimate.”
“Two minutes, maybe two and a half.”
I turn to Penny. “He won’t fall for the reverse-spin trick that just killed his buddies.”
Penny laughs. “I’m surprised it worked the first time.”
“They were too aggressive.”
“We might need to keep our bow pointed at him,” says Phil. “The grav lens will protect us from his railgun.”
Shit. I forgot about that. “You said he fired?”
“Six rounds in rapid succession,” answers Phil. “Big slugs, right out the front of his ship.”
“So, he’s like some kind of fighter plane?” I correct myself immediately. “Fighter spaceship?”
“Seems that way.”
“And his railgun?” I ask. “We need to worry about it?”
“Big slugs,” Phil answers. “High-velocity. Enough energy to turn us into a cloud of debris.”
Crap.
I turn back to Jablonsky. “Anything on the comm yet?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you scanning all frequencies?”
“No, I’m waiting for someone to dial me up.”
Brice laughs. Tarlow chuckles.
Point taken. I apologize with, “Just checking.”
“Phil, can you think of any way we can outrun this guy?”
“No.” Phil sounds certain.
“Penny,” my next idea coalescing even as the words come, “pick a spot in the sky far away from everywhere and drive toward it.”
The ship swerves as she adjusts course.
“Okay, Physics Boy Phil and Penny, as soon as the fighter has us lined up in his sights again, cut power to our drive array and spin us to keep the lens pointed at him. Nothing he fires at us can penetrate that field.”
“What are we doing, then?” asks Penny. “Hoping he’ll chase us until he runs out of railgun slugs?”
“Or runs out of H for his reactor,” answers Phil, nodding as he’s catching on to my current stroke of starship genius. “In a craft that size, the reactor has to be smaller than ours. And less efficient. Much less. That ship can’t be designed for bubble jumping and not for interplanetary travel. He’ll have to turn back at some point. What’s better, the more we make him maneuver to get a shot at us, the more H he’ll burn, and the sooner he’ll have to turn back. We’re already moving fast as hell, so with every second that passes without Iapetus launching more fighters, the harder it will be for them to reach us.”
“That’s my plan,” I tell them, looking around the bridge as I come up with at least a dozen ways it could fail. “Any better ideas?”
Crickets.
Something with at least a hint of foolproofery would have been nice.
Chapter 21
Dogfight in space?
Sure, if one dog is a three-legged hound in a neck brace and the other is a sharp-toothed slobber mutt.
Maybe an exaggeration.
“He’s swinging wide to make his turn,” Phil tells us.
Necessary information but not news. Our attacker just finished his third strafing run with all rounds deflected into space by the powerful field of our well-directed grav lens. As soon as he passed, Phil reoriented the ship to point down the vector of our escape, and Penny juiced the drive to accelerate us to a faster speed.
“Let me know when,” Penny tells Phil.
“Another few seconds.” Phil is tense. He and Penny both are. They’re doing the work to keep us all alive. “Now!”
Penny cuts power to the array.
The hull plates pulse uneven blue through the bridge as the internal g fluctuates drastically.
“Damn!” curses Brice.
“Sorry,” Phil shakes his head. “He’s getting quicker about bringing his ship around to re-aim at us.”
The deck is shifting beneath my feet so fast I feel like I’m falling, and I push more power to my suit’s g.
Everything stabilizes.
Phil has the shi
p lined up again, pointing at the incoming attacker.
I glance at Penny.
She takes on the fault of it. “We didn’t get much speed that time.”
I shake my head. “You’re both doing a good job. We’ll make it out of this.” I turn to Jablonsky. “Any luck yet?”
“Still trying,” he tells me. “I’m picking up high static on a few bands. I think it’s encrypted radio traffic.”
“Radio?” Brice’s question is full of speculation. “Grays and Trogs don’t need radio.” He looks at me. “Can this be SDF?”
Tarlow gulps. “Did Blair send us into an SDF trap?”
I shake my head. “This can’t be an SDF fighter.” Though I can’t piece together any line of logical steps to disprove my hope. “Jablonsky, have you tried hailing in Korean?”
He turns away from his panel to show me his mocking silence. I’m pretty sure he’d punch me if he were in arm’s reach.
“Of course,” I answer for him. “We’re all frustrated. Keep trying.”
He turns back to his panel.
“He’s slowing and turning,” Phil tells me.
“Different tactic?” Without a doubt. “Keep the bow pointed at him.”
“He’s coming in behind us.” Phil shakes his head. “Not behind us exactly.”
“You’re keeping the bow on him?” I verify.
“Right,” Phil tells me. “He’s coming to a stop, relative to our position.”
“You mean he’s following us?”
“Yes,” answers Phil. “A quarter mile back.”
“We’re flying backwards.” Penny confirms. Two ships, ours pointing backward, the attacker rocketing forward, both careening through space in excess of twenty thousand miles an hour, both in the same direction.
Tarlow has a clear picture of the other ship on his screen. “What’s he waiting for?”
“He doesn’t want us to accelerate any more.” I’ve already run through the progression of possibilities, and I’d hoped our assailant would take a while longer to run through them as well.
After we survived the first pass, keeping our bow pointed toward him to protect our ship, I knew we’d be safe. He could try different angles and different speeds, yet Phil didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping the grav lens between him and us. What’s more, he was losing ground after each pass because we accelerated a little while he was turning.
He was going to lose that game, and he figured it out.
One of his only alternatives would have been to come in close, orient his ship’s gun toward us, and fire while he tried to use his hull plates to shift sideways for a better angle. Geometry was against him in that endeavor. No matter how close he maneuvered the vessel, he’d have to traverse some span of space to set up his next shot. Our ship only had to spin on its center of mass. And when his passion for a kill overcame his good sense, he’d move in too close, and we’d have the opportunity to ram him.
Unfortunately, he skipped right over that tactic.
Instead, he positioned his fighter between us and Iapetus. The best choice, assuming reinforcements are coming. Now we can’t turn, or we open up our flanks. We can’t accelerate, or we slow and eventually fly back toward Iapetus.
Our only hope is that no reinforcements are coming.
I already know they will. Otherwise, the enemy ship wouldn’t have chosen this tactic.
Tarlow hasn’t thought through the possibilities. “He has to know he can’t win doing this.”
I turn for a better view of Tarlow’s computer monitors. “Keep a close eye on Iapetus.”
“Bullfight?” Brice looks at me with a question on his face. He’s a ground game soldier, not a fleet battle naval type. He hasn’t worked through it, either.
“Physics.” I shrug. “Tactics.” I shake my head. “For the moment, a stalemate we’ll win by default.” I turn to Penny and Phil, however, I know the answer to the question I’m going to ask. “Can we ram him from here?”
Phil shakes his head.
“I can try,” answers Penny. “But he’s smaller and faster.” She doesn’t want to give in.
While we’re waiting, my curiosity turns to another question. “Phil, why was that ship anomalous?” With the grav lens blazing brightly on the bow of the ship, I can’t sense the fighter out there.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “It should be glowing bright back there. I can only make it out because it’s close. Its grav field is mostly what I see.”
“Any ideas as to why?”
Phil shakes his head. “Some kind of stealth technology we don’t know about.”
“Oh, no,” mutters Tarlow, pressing his finger to one of his monitors.
I look to see a trio of smudges moving on the screen with Iapetus in the background.
Chapter 22
“Same type of ships?” I ask Phil.
“Seems that way.”
“Tarlow?” I ask. “Can you make out enough detail to tell?”
He points to the small, accelerating smudges, turns to me, and shrugs.
“Something you should know,” says Phil. “Nick can tell it’s a human inside that other ship.”
“The Tick can?” I ask. “By himself. Not you two working together?”
Phil doesn’t answer.
It was both of them. “Good to know, but it doesn’t do me any good.” I slap Penny heartily on the back. “You’re up.”
“You hit me that hard again, and I’ll break your arm.”
“Don’t act like a sissy,” I laugh. “You’re the toughest one on the bridge.” I point down the ship’s axis. “I want you to try and ram that ship.”
“But—”
Phil glares at me. “We talked about this.”
“We’re not trying to hit it. We just want it to look that way. Penny, try and ram that bastard, and keep at it until you’ve decelerated us to zero speed with respect to Iapetus.”
“What?” Tarlow shrieks. “We’re giving up?”
I shake my head. “Planning for the next phase.”
“By giving up?” he reiterates. “You’re going to let them shoot us out of the sky?”
“We don’t have a choice in that, Tarlow. They’re going to catch us. They’re going to shoot us. There’s nothing I can do except delay them. I choose to spend our efforts on the next phase.”
Phil tells us, “Those three ships are pegging the dial at fifteen g’s, just like the ones that first attacked us.”
“Are you sure the drive array is toast?” asks Brice. “What are the odds if we chance a bubble jump?”
“One-hundred-percent we’ll die,” answers Phil.
I turn to Brice. “We’ve been through worse.”
He laughs again.
“Comm the squads up front. I want them to load up with as much H and C and ammo as they can carry. I want them all as close as possible to the backside of the grav lens, strapped in tight. Hopefully, when the shooting starts, our friends will aim for our drive array or reactor.”
“Yes, sir.” He knows I have a plan.
“Tarlow, you go, too.” I glance at Penny and Phil. “You two as well, as soon as we’re down to zero speed. I want all power shut down back here. Leave the grav lens powered up and the defensive field around the platoon compartment maxed.” I look at Jablonsky. He’s already looking at me with a frown, awaiting his instructions. He’s guessed what’s coming. “You stay back here with me, just in case they get talkative once they see we’re giving up.”
Jablonsky bravely accepts my orders.
Scanning across their faces, I tell them, “I think they’ll shred our drive array. The front half of the ship will survive.” I’m betting on it. “Once the carnage back here is done, there’s no reason for them to hang around. They’ll go back to base. After that, we’ll wait a day or so, and then we’ll say goodbye to the Rusty Turd and use suit power to grav down to the surface of Iapetus. We’ll go commando on these
bastards and make them pay.” I glance toward Phil. “The Tick says they’re human, which means their ships have the life support we need if we steal a few. Now, everybody go.”
Penny and Phil coordinate between themselves, and our ship’s inertial bubble strains as they run their first ramming maneuver.
Tarlow needs no convincing to go forward, he’s out of his chair and wobbling across the bridge in seconds.
Brice has a wide hero streak in him. Our discussion on the matter turns heated through a second ramming attempt. In the end, it’s his duty to keeping platoon members alive that convinces him to go forward. He has experience on a trip through space with only suit grav to keep you moving. He needs to stay in the game and to lead the others in case I don’t make it.
Jablonsky works a steady rhythm on the comms, hailing the other ships, shifting frequencies, and trying again.
Over a private comm, Penny tells me, “I’m not leaving you up here to go down with the ship, Captain Ahab.”
I laugh.
She doesn’t know about my irrational belief in immortality in war, and I know trying to explain it to her will only serve to expose the folly of the concept. “I’ll be fine.”
Penny hammers hard on the drive array for another ramming attempt.
I struggle to take over Tarlow’s abandoned seat to keep from falling over in the rough grav.
“Sorry,” Phil apologizes.
They really are trying to hit that other ship.
“Did you get close?” I ask.
Penny shakes her head.
“How’s our speed?” I’m trying to stay calm. “Will we be able to shed it all before those other ships arrive?”
“Yes,” Phil answers.
“Leave when they get close,” I order Phil. “Make sure you have enough time to make it all the way forward.”
Phil ignores my order.
I don’t need to be a mind reader to know he’s not going anywhere either. “Why?”
He rolls his eyes. “I can keep the railgun slugs from hitting the bridge. I’ll make sure they impact where you want them to.”
“You seem awfully confident when you say that.” I don’t believe him.
Phil snorts and turns his attention back to his console. “I can be as confident as you can be.”
