by Dean Henegar
“Roger that, Captain Slater. Get this crap moved over, Privates,” Lieutenant Camden ordered to his two remaining privates. They moved the weapons and other devices left in the shooting range back into the dining hall area. The three kept a close watch on Illissa to make sure she didn’t approach any of their weapons. Slater sent over a copy of the final ship’s plans to his humans, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the layout while it was being built.
Once everyone was clear, Slater gave the orders to begin transforming the ship. The drones would break down the gnomish ship first, using it to provide the necessary raw salvage while at the same time trying to glean any additional knowledge from their systems. To speed up the process, Slater scrapped all the bilge rats—except for Mr. Bitey—to free up the power to build another half dozen construction drones. The work progressed quickly, Slater sending the feed of the progress to the rest of his crew.
As the gnomish ship was torn apart, his new corvette began to take shape. The salvage from the gnomish ship ran out when the front half of the hull was complete. The drones then began to break down the Tuxpam. The salvaging of the Tuxpam went a bit faster, as its crucial systems had already been stripped. When the point-defense railguns were installed on his ship, Slater gave each a test fire. The small bursts of fire didn’t use up much salvage since the rounds for point defense were small. The powerful kinetic energy they contained didn’t require a huge chunk of metal in order to deal catastrophic damage to a missile or small craft.
His main battery comprised the pair of larger but rather pathetic railguns he had created earlier. They were power hogs, and Slater had high hopes that his research would make them not only more powerful but also more efficient. When the positioning thrusters were installed, he took the time to feel out the system. On each of them, Slater could move the vector of thrust in any direction, save for toward where they were attached to the hull. The small engines made him agile, if not fast. When the main drives were complete, he found he didn’t have enough available power to fire them up.
The ship build was nearly complete, the exterior and available weapons systems were done, and over half of the interior was completed. Slater scrapped the extra drones he had produced, as the bulk of the salvage work was done; only a small portion of the Tuxpam remained. He decided to also reprocess the defilers and the eviscerator boss. Those changes freed up enough core power to fire up the main drive.
Slater put the ship through its paces, pleased to have decent acceleration. The maneuvering thrusters flipped the ship over smoothly, allowing the main drive to face the opposite direction so its thrust could now be used to slow the ship. It didn’t take long until flying the ship felt as natural as walking had been in his old body. The nanobot-infused hull dampened the inertia to a level that was comfortable for the human passengers. From a visual perspective, the ship was beautiful. The sleek lines and weapons protruding from the hull gave the Franklin a predatory look, one he heartily approved of. As a final touch to the exterior, the name USS Franklin was placed over each boarding hatch.
“That’s really cool, sir. Can I give it a try?” Private Harris asked as he watched Slater maneuver the ship through the video link. The private shut up when Lieutenant Camden glared at him for his outburst.
“I think you should leave the driving to the navy for the time being, Private. You stick to shooting the bad guys and I’ll make sure we’re heading in the right direction,” Slater replied. He realized that he had slipped into a very informal relationship with his crew. Somehow, with the situation they were in, it just felt like the right thing to do.
When the internal buildout was complete, he set his humans—and one elf—free to explore their new and larger home.
The kobolds were spread out in the unused crew cabins around the top deck. He would tweak their placement later when he had the time. Slater found he had a greater level of control over them than before. He could order the captain or the taskmasters to perform more complex tasks, and they could now effectively command the simple-minded warrior kobolds. After trimming two of the warriors in order to free up some more power, Slater organized them into units. Each taskmaster commanded a squad of four warriors, and the captain kobold commanded the taskmasters.
The missile system research had finished, and the buildout was completed while his crew went about exploring the vessel. He pushed the freed-up research into upgraded shields, the progress of which was moving very quickly due to the data he had discovered while dismantling the other ships. The new missile launchers were simple affairs, able to use a burst of power to push the missile out of the tube and past the shields at an optimal speed before the missile’s main engine fired up. The missiles themselves were a huge improvement over the makeshift system he had on the original version of the Franklin. They could be guided close to the target by the scanners—which weren’t quite ready yet—where their internal targeting system would take over during the final attack. Once a missile was fired, the launchers would haul up another from the small magazine and prep it for launch. The whole reload process took precious time to complete, but it was all he had to work with.
While taking apart the gnomish ship, his drones had unlocked an interesting upgrade for the armor on his hull. It appeared as though the gnomes used a specialized coating on the exterior of their hulls, and it was designed to deflect and absorb some of the energy from a hit from laser-based weapons. Slater had his drones begin to coat his hull with the same material. It was a rather large salvage expense but could be a lifesaver in a long fight.
The nanobots didn’t seem to have a problem with the thin coating. He did run into a problem when he tried to increase the thickness of the hull armor. After another half-inch or so of armor, the nanobots began to reprocess any excess as salvage. Slater tried to find a way to turn off that feature, but it was hardcoded into the nanobots. Perhaps he could change it if he eventually found a way to upgrade them. For now, he was happy to have at least some additional thickness of armor as well as the new exterior coating. While his hull was no longer impervious to damage, tests ran with samples from the Tuxpam and the gnomish ship proved that his current nanobot-infused armor was nearly twice as strong as the same thickness of armor from any of the other ships. Coupled with the slightly increased armor thickness, his ship’s defenses should significantly outperform those of any similarly sized vessel.
The other research completed in short order. The shields were upgraded and would provide improved protection but were still not great. The main gun upgrade was a pleasant surprise. It improved the weapons’ damage, fire rate, and accuracy. The weapons themselves looked intimidating when they were dual-mounted in their single turret. As a bonus, both upgraded systems were more efficient, drawing less power from him than the old designs.
After some final tweaks, his new sensor system was also ready to fire up. Before doing that, he reinvested his research, placing another twenty percent into jump drives, twenty percent into his kobolds, ten percent back into shields—he really wanted them up to par—and ten percent into the med bay. Slater also set the jump drive research as the dump point. If another research project finished and his attention was elsewhere, available research would automatically be directed to the jump drive. The sensor suite had been the last to finish, being delayed a bit as he incorporated data gleaned from the gnomish ship. The combination of tech took some time to synchronize but would give him a more powerful and efficient design. The scanner came up and he began to get his first look around the system.
“Woohoo! Check it out, Long. We got chocolate cake!” Private Harris shouted, pulling Slater’s attention from the scanner system. The private had been perusing the newest additions to their food dispenser, courtesy of the Tuxpam. The private ordered several plates of the dessert and handed them out to the others. After a bit of reluctance, he even passed one to Illissa.
“Not the best I’ve had, but mediocre chocolate cake is better than having no chocolate cake, I suppose,” D
octor Cheng added, licking the last of the frosting from her fork.
“I’ve never tasted anything like it. This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this . . . chocolate flavor,” Illissa said, obviously enjoying her first taste of the Earth favorite. Slater was a bit disappointed he couldn’t join in; enjoying a meal with his crew was yet another thing that had been taken from him.
Hostile contacts detected.
His attention was pulled from the mess hall and back to his scanner feed. The scanners had picked up something at the edge of their range. Slater looked at what they had found and sounded general quarters; there was another fight to win.
— 6 —
“I take it the small ones are gnomish ships like the one that was attached to the Tuxpam and the large one is the mothership for them?” Slater asked, pushing his scanner readout to the others. His scan showed a half dozen of the small gnomish ships moving toward what he assumed was the mothership. The rectangular mothership was five times the size of the Franklin and had six docking points for the smaller assault ships.
“Yep, that looks like one of the smallest classes of raider support vessel. The motherships usually have some crazy gnomish names, but we generally refer to them by the number of raiders they support. We’re looking at what we call a six-pack. These are used for recon and raiding lightly defended areas. Might even be the ship that attacked and destroyed the Tuxpam,” Lieutenant Camden replied.
“I don’t think these are the ones that attacked the Tuxpam,” Illissa interjected. “Look, no raiders are missing. The gnomish support vessels represent their clan. In this case, it would be a very small and poor clan since they’re using the weakest mothership class. They don’t carry spare vessels and would have to dock at an orbital shipyard to have a replacement raider produced. Whatever happened with the Tuxpam was recent, and there wouldn’t be enough time for them to replace their loss even if they could afford it, which would be unlikely for such a small clan.”
Camden looked at her, then slowly nodded in agreement.
“So these might be a separate group of gnomes, but what happened to the ones that killed the Tuxpam?” Doctor Cheng asked.
“I’m not sure, but it looks to me like these gnomes are about to bug out. The raiders don’t have jump drives, and they’re all heading back to the barn,” Slater said, watching as the small raiders approached the large support ship, two having already docked.
“Not likely, Captain Slater,” Illissa began. “The gnomes are an extremely aggressive and greedy species. They can detect us now that our scanner is active and will attack what they will see as a single, small human vessel. We look like a warship but of a class that should be easily overcome by their numbers. They are docking with the support vessel to take on more crew for boarding operations. The gnomes will seek to disable your vessel and board it for slaves and whatever useful items they can take and sell.”
It made sense to Slater; the Franklin would look like a normal corvette, all alone and easy prey for six raiders. A normal corvette could probably handle three or even four, but six to one favored the gnomes. From what he saw, they had only a small hull-mounted laser as a primary weapon. Individually, the laser wouldn’t fare too well against a warship, but six lasers hitting the ship would be a different story. There was no dedicated point-defense weapon he could see, but the smallish main laser battery was likely doing double duty to target incoming missiles.
“How fast are they?” Slater asked.
“The support vessel is very slow, but the raiders have good acceleration profiles for their size. I’m not sure how fast our new engines are, but a pack of raiders can easily overtake a standard corvette,” Camden replied.
Slater knew that his engines were less effective than those on a normal human vessel, so the raiders would catch him—but they were not going to like the reception he had planned for them.
“We can beat them,” Slater said with confidence. “For now, I’m going to try to delay them as long as possible. I think we have the advantage in a ship-to-ship fight with our more powerful weapons and the heavily armored hull. We’ll whittle them down at range and prevent them from closing to boarding distance. Once the raiders are taken care of, we go for their support ship. That thing should have more than enough supplies to keep us running until we can find our way home,” Slater said.
“Where do you want us, sir?” Camden asked.
“For now, wherever you think you might do the most damage to boarders. I intend to bleed them dry on the upper deck with my kobolds, so if you could stay on the lower deck to provide a final defense, that might be best,” Slater advised.
Camden ordered the pair of privates to break out the heavy stuff and began setting up a kill zone in the long hallway that led from the aft hatch on the upper deck to the front of the ship. Slater then had every drone begin producing the new and improved human-style rifles and ammunition for his kobolds. A few drones were assigned to the task, but he needed it done before the impending fight.
“How many boarders can we expect from each raider?” Slater asked.
“Depends on how prolific their little clan is. The average for this size of a raider vessel can be anywhere from sixty to eighty. Gnomes are small and they can really pack them in there for a short haul. Gnomish warriors are considered expendable, and the motherships carry as many as they can to replace losses in the field,” Camden told him.
“What kind of weapons do they use, and are they any good at boarding actions?” Slater asked, still unsure of the capabilities of his new foes.
“They’re fearless and aggressive, but their equipment isn’t the best,” Camden advised. “They have a laser carbine that fires around five shots before needing to reload, and their extra power packs are cumbersome to replace. They will usually fire their weapons dry and try to swarm a foe using a type of long knife as their preferred weapon. They’re small, but they know just where to stab those little blades. It’s never a good idea to underestimate them.”
While the gnomes took on more crew for their boarding parties, Slater began to organize his kobold defenders. In the passageway just past the boarding hatches, he had one squad of kobolds set up a defensive point. A waist-high metal barricade was placed to block the hall, giving covered firing positions for his kobolds. He didn’t have any heavy weapons researched yet, and the humans needed the one they currently possessed for their own defense of the lower deck. He was able to get a half dozen grenades from the human soldiers, though he was unsure how good his kobolds would be at using them. He passed out one to each taskmaster and one to the kobold captain, figuring they were more likely to score some kills with them.
He didn’t have schematics for mines or any powerful defenses yet, but he did order the drones to place tripwire traps liberally throughout the main path the invaders would have to take to reach the lower levels. They would start on those once the weapons upgrades for his kobolds were finished—if the gnomes gave him the time he needed.
The gnomes were efficient, and it took them only a short time to board additional personnel and detach from their support ship. The six raiders began their approach, forming into two groups of three in a V formation. They were closing rapidly, and in order to gain as much time as possible, Slater moved away from the attackers as fast as his meager acceleration would allow. The raiders were still gaining on him and were about to enter missile range.
“What kind of range do their lasers have?” Slater asked.
“The ones on ships that small will not be that effective until they’re pretty close,” Camden said as he worked. “You’ll outrange them with the railgun. Lasers don’t dissipate much in a battle unless there is debris between them and their target. Their main problem at long range is keeping them on target as you evade and maneuver. It takes time to burn through the shields and hull of a vessel. Their smaller ships don’t have the best gear when it comes to targeting systems. When they close in, though . . .”
Slater watched his drones efficient
ly turn the long passageway into a death trap for any boarders, but the humans would still glance at their screens occasionally to check on the approaching enemy.
He could feel that the enemy had reached missile range. It was strange to just know these things and not have it announced by a crew member manning the sensor console on his ship. He assigned the first volley of missiles to a random pair of raiders and began the firing sequence. Normally he would fire multiple weapons at the same target in an attempt to overload their point defense, but for this first volley, he wanted to find out how strong their point defense was before firing his other weapons.
The hatches over the launchers pulled back, and the first pair of missiles were ejected from the tubes. The missiles moved a hundred yards from the Franklin in less than a second, the velocity from the launchers pushing them away before they fired their engines and began to close in on the attacking gnomes. Slater guided them toward their targets using his sensors and would pass control over to their internal targeting arrays when they neared the enemy vessels.
Their main burn completed, the missile engines cut out, saving their remaining fuel for the final approach to their target. The initial burn had been barely enough to overcome the velocity his fleeing ship had imparted to them when they left the launchers. The weapons were moving at what seemed to be a painfully slow pace as they homed in on the enemy. Slater would need further upgrades to make these weapons more effective in the future. The only redeeming factor was that the enemy ships were closing fast; their speed combined with the crawling approach of his missiles would bring the two together quickly.
The missiles had finished closing in on the raiders before his main battery entered firing range. Slater watched as the missiles lit up their engines once more and used their remaining fuel to begin their final charge toward their assigned targets. The gnomes began to fire their lasers at the approaching missiles; small maneuvering jets on the raiders kept the vessels pointing toward the approaching missiles while they maintained their pursuit of the Franklin. First one and then the second missile were blotted out by the incoming fire; his missiles’ simple design did not have any sort of evasion protocol.
