by Dean Henegar
The next pair had finished loading up, and he targeted them onto a single enemy ship this time; hopefully one of the pairs would make it through the enemy’s defensive fire. His main guns were now also in range, so he pulsed his maneuvering thrusters to bring the bow of the ship over a bit and allow his turret to point toward the approaching raiders. He assigned a target to the main battery and opened fire. The turret swung toward its intended victim and hurled a pair of rounds downrange toward the raiders. Vibrations shook the hull as the weapons fired, the humans pausing in their work to watch the battery unleash on the approaching enemy.
Firing the weapons felt natural. Slater could tell what was going on, but the computations were handled in the back of his mind. The schematics he had developed included the necessary software to allow him to target the main battery. His railguns didn’t fire at the same time, the leftmost weapon activating nearly a half-second before the other did. He searched their targeting algorithms to find out why, even as the next volley was prepared and unleashed.
It turned out that the staggered fire was designed to overcome evasive maneuvers from an attacking foe when the weapons were engaging at longer ranges. The first round could be easily dodged by a ship at this range if it was maneuverable enough and the crew was on the ball. The second round was fired at where he predicted the enemy would move to as they evaded the first round. As he analyzed the movement patterns for each enemy ship, the accuracy of the following volleys would improve.
The first pair of railgun rounds missed. The enemy raiders were maneuverable, and the crews were competent at their jobs. His second volley was more effective; he had accurately predicted where the enemy would juke to avoid the first round. The second round sparked against the raider’s shields, collapsing the smaller ship’s weak shielding. Continuing its path of destruction, the round deflected off the hull, leaving a gouge in the armor, most of its kinetic energy having been spent in collapsing the shields.
Slater felt something touch his vessel as one of the enemy lasers locked onto the Franklin. With a thought, he began evasive maneuvers, trying to keep the lasers from locking onto him for as long as possible. The burning sensation left him as the weapon lost its lock and the ship firing at him turned to engage the approaching pair of missiles. This revealed the superiority of the turreted weapon design over the hull-mounted weapons his enemies were using. The weapons on the gnomish vessels were limited in their field of fire while he could execute defensive maneuvers much more effectively and keep all weapons on target.
The railguns coughed out another pair of shots as the missiles began their final approach. Only four of the gnomish raiders could bring their weapons to bear on the missiles as two ships were engaged in violent evasive maneuvers to avoid his railgun fire. One missile broke apart as a laser found it, but the second crashed into the raider, exploding against the enemy shields.
The explosive force collapsed the raider’s shields and burned into the hull. A blast of atmosphere was released from the vessel as the weapon vaporized hull armor and dug deep into the gnomish ship. The raider went dark, drifting for a moment before consuming itself in a blast as something critical failed inside. Slater sighed at the wasted salvage even as he fired his last pair of missiles at another target.
His railgun was also beginning to score more hits as the distance between the combatants closed. The ship with the collapsed shields was being pummeled to death by repeated blows; its drive and weapons systems were offline, and the vessel was drifting helplessly. Slater made a note of its location and vector of travel before changing targets. He could try to chase it down and gather up the remaining salvage if it didn’t drift too far away.
The enemy hadn’t been idle during this time. Two of their ships began to fire at the approaching missiles as the other pair opened fire on the Franklin between dodging his own return fire. The laser blasts became harder and harder to dodge as the distance closed, and Slater could feel the beams lock on and his shields begin to fail. His guns had disabled another raider and began to work over the other that was currently firing at him.
With a snapping sound, his shields failed, and he could feel the laser on the enemy ship begin to burn its way into his armored hull. He started to rotate, keeping the laser from latching onto the same point of his hull. The ablative coating he had stolen from the dead raider vessel began to powder away under the blasts, dissipating some of the laser’s energy. Despite the coating, divots in his armor were being burned out. A pair of railgun rounds hit his attacker as the raider became fixated on killing the Franklin and ignoring its own defense. The first round collapsed the shields and deflected off the hull. The second punched through the armor and deep into the enemy vessel. The damage must have been severe, as the atmosphere vented for several seconds, indicating multiple compartments had been breached. A follow-up volley left that raider drifting dead in space.
As for the remaining raiders, they had gotten lucky and knocked down both missiles, turning their attention, and their fire, back onto the Franklin. Both lasers began to burn into him as he engaged the pair of attackers with his main turret. The range was point-blank, and none of the weapons missed. His hull was too durable for the lasers to burn through quickly, so the remaining raiders then concentrated their fire on his railgun, seeking to pull his teeth before killing him. Slater kept up his fire, pounding one of the remaining raiders to scrap as the laser of the other did its work, melting through the armored railgun turret and turning the weapons to slag.
The raider matched his speed and closed in on the starboard boarding hatch. Slater felt no pity for the raider vessel as he activated the point-defense weapon. At range, the small, rapid-fire railgun was useless against a vessel the size of the raider, but when the target was this close to his ship, the weapon couldn’t miss. With a whirring sound, the multi-barrel point-defense gun began to turn, pumping out small bolts of dense alloy at the approaching raider. The shields on the enemy ship sparked as the rounds hit. Each individual shot was too puny to have any hope of punching through, but the dozens and then hundreds that pelted the vessel were able to collapse the shields.
The raider hung there, indecisive for a moment, almost as if contemplating whether it should pull back and engage the point-defense weapon with its laser or if it should pull in close and dock where the gun would have trouble coming to bear. Its decision made, the raider used maneuvering thrusters to close with the Franklin, matching his violent evasive efforts and enduring a barrage of fire the whole way in. It chose a good position to dock: a spot where the bulk of Slater’s ship blocked all but the rear of the raider from attack.
The point-defense turret punched several holes in the enemy as it closed in. Wisps of atmosphere leaked out, letting Slater know he had done some damage before the main bulk of the ship was hidden from his weapon. He turned his fire on the raider’s exposed main engines. The rear of the enemy ship was slowly shredded, and the drives soon went cold, the gnomes likely shutting them down to prevent a catastrophic failure.
Slater felt the enemy ship attach to his own and watched as the boarding hatch began to spin open. It was time to put his kobolds and their new weapons to the test.
— 7 —
Even as he fought the space battle, Slater had been working on positioning his kobold MOBS where they could do the most damage. The boarding hatches on the Franklin led directly to the main passageway that ran through the ship. The first leg of the passage stretched thirty feet before the first of three turns, where it made its way aft, flanked by the crew quarter compartments. He had one squad of kobolds set up a barricade where the passage turned, and another squad was broken up and placed into the flanking crew compartments, ready to fire through gun ports at any attackers.
Drones finished setting up a pair of tripwire traps across the first section of the passage, moving away from the impending fight as the boarding hatch opened. The drones had been re-tasked with building defenses after completing their production of the new and impro
ved weapons for his MOBS. Each of his kobolds was now kitted out with a human-style rifle and a total of seven thirty-round magazines. One mag was in the weapon, and six were stashed in tactical vests his drones printed up as they made the ammo. There just hadn’t been enough time to duplicate human body armor; that would have to wait until he finished off the current invaders.
“Here they come!” Private Harris yelled, watching the attackers on his feed while checking the operation of the machine gun that had once been used by the late Sergeant Gonzales. The humans had nearly finished setting up their defense of the lower deck in case his MOBS failed to do the job on the upper deck. Slater turned his attention back to the boarding hatches, avoiding any distractions that the humans might cause him. He watched as five gnomes moved from their ship and into the compartment passage linking the boarding area to the main passageway. If not for their strangely oversized heads and four fingers on each hand, Slater might have mistaken them for a group of twelve-year-old humans playing at war. The gnomes were about the same height as his kobolds, so there shouldn’t be much of a physical difference in a melee fight. They all held laser rifles and wore an armored vest festooned with ammo pouches and slots for various devices.
The gnomes proved they were smarter, or at least more cautious, than most of the other boarders thus far, watching the area for traps and not exposing themselves with a careless charge. Two of the gnomes pulled cylinders from their vests before popping up and hurling them into the main passageway. Their brief appearance was met with a hail of gunfire from the kobolds behind the barricade at the end of the passage. A round hit one of the attackers in the arm, the bullet penetrating the unarmored appendage and exploding with a loud pop. The arm was severed just past the elbow, and the gnome began to shriek as it ran back toward its ship, blood spurting from the stump.
A second member of the initial group yelled for his screaming comrade to return but did nothing to help. Another squad then emerged from the raider. The lead gnome of this new group raised his rifle and fired a laser bolt into the wounded gnome, dropping him to the deck. These gnomes were not the happy, friendly fellows portrayed in myth and legend, and Slater doubted they spent their free time baking cookies in their treehouses. These were cold, cruel beings without mercy, as far as Slater could tell.
The two cylinders the gnomes had thrown made a popping sound and began to spew out a cloud of thick smoke. Slater could feel his nanobots working overtime to clear the air, but for the moment, the entire area was obscured. The two groups of gnomes left the cover of the entry corridor and charged down the main passage, using the smoke to conceal their advance. His kobolds looked confused by the unexpected smoke. The squad manning the barricade ducked down behind the waist-high metal shield despite the lack of incoming fire.
Slater grasped his connection to the kobold taskmaster assigned to the squad, willing him to stand up and fire. He could take much more control than he had in the past, and after hearing his call, the kobold taskmaster chirped at the warriors as he stood and began firing down the passage. The others popped up over the lip of their cover and added their own fire. It was complete spray and pray, but in the confines of the narrow passageway, the fire was deadly. One after another, gnomes were dropped by the inaccurate yet heavy fire. The new weapons and ammo his MOBS wielded were devastating; only once did a gnome’s armored vest deflect an incoming shot. With their explosive core, even rounds that hit an extremity caused horrific and usually fatal injuries.
As the gnomes charged past, the two tripwire traps the drones had time to set up before the attack went off. The steel bolts were set around chest high for a gnome, and both bolts deflected off armored torsos. Slater ordered the drones to drop the height of the other traps they were setting around the ship so the bolts would hit unarmored legs. Running dry on ammo at nearly the same time, his kobolds began to fumble with reloads as the gnomes arrived at the barricade. The taskmaster dropped his rifle and pulled the pin on his grenade, dropping the weapon when a laser bolt smashed into him. The gnomes swarmed over the barricade, rifles blazing while the kobolds extended arm blades and met them in close-quarters combat.
The taskmaster’s dropped grenade went off, the blast shredding his remaining kobolds as well as two of the gnomes that had already hopped over the barricade. There were three gnomish survivors of the short fight, and the trio spent a long time reloading their weapons. To Slater, the gnomish reload process looked overly complicated. A large lever on the side of the weapon was pulled down, releasing the magazine. The bulky box that held the energy for the weapon had to be unscrewed from its place before a fresh reload was screwed in. By the time the locking lever was moved back into place, the reload process had taken over twenty seconds—a lifetime in combat.
“Lieutenant Camden, why are the gnomish rifles so cumbersome to reload?” Slater asked as the three survivors waited for reinforcements to emerge from their craft.
“We’re not really sure. Some of these races are kind of crazy about how they do things. Most of them blindly follow tradition and are reluctant to make changes, even if they seem obvious to us. There might be something else to it, but we never figured out what,” Camden replied.
“You are mostly correct, Lieutenant,” Illissa added. “The gnomes are creatures of habit to a certain extent, but typically, they are more inventive than many of the other races. The reason they often employ suboptimal weaponry is more due to their miserly nature than pure stubbornness. Gnomes are notorious for being—well—cheap. They refuse to spend money on upgraded gear when what they have is ‘good enough.’ Some of the more prosperous gnomish clans wield advanced tech, but these small groups are considered the bumpkins of their race. Normally they would be boarding ships that were already heavily damaged from their attack and would face minimal resistance.”
“Looks like they’re ready for another push,” Slater said as another two squads of gnomes moved to join the remnants of the first groups. Like his kobolds, they seemed to operate in small detachments of five; the number balanced combat power and maneuverability in the confines of a starship.
As the reinforced gnomes made their approach down the passage to join their fellows, the kobolds stationed inside the crew quarters made their presence known. Small firing ports clanged open, and Slater’s kobolds began to blast away at anything they could see in the passage. The soldiers had helped him with the placement of the firing ports, so their overlapping fields of fire allowed the kobolds to cover each other’s blind spots. Four of the gnomes went down immediately as the others began to hug the side of the passage in order to avoid the fire. There was nowhere for the attackers to hide; avoiding the fire from one kobold inevitably brought them into the aim of another.
The three gnomish survivors at the barricade responded quickly to the attack and moved to help their fellows. Since the barricade was at the end of the hall, his kobolds in the crew compartments had no direct line of sight to it. Camden had insisted on this feature to prevent an enemy from taking over the protected positions inside the compartments and using the firing ports to attack the barricade from cover. The trio spun the hatch on the compartment nearest to them—the kobold stationed there had neglected to dog the hatch—and rolled into the room, blazing away at the defenders. Slater’s kobold was so focused on the targets in the passage that he didn’t even see the enemy that killed him.
The kobolds’ weapons, once again, all went dry around the same time; the full-auto barrage had been an effective but wasteful one. Slater would have to work with his MOBS on staggering their fire so that they all didn’t end up holding empty weapons at the same time. The human weapons were quicker to reload than the cumbersome gnomish devices, but not quick enough to avoid some enterprising gnomes from firing back through the gun ports and into his defenders. The fight was short and brutal, but his kobolds were outnumbered, and as each compartment fell, their ability to cover each other dwindled. By the time the last kobold died, they had taken ten of the gnomes with them. If
they hadn’t been surprised by the smokescreen, Slater felt the barricade forces, when supported by the kobolds in the compartments, would have stopped the attack cold.
The gnomish survivors of the attack regrouped and summoned enough reinforcements to assemble three squads for the next assault. Slater kept a tally of how many gnomes were left. According to Lieutenant Camden, if the gnomes packed them in tight, a raider of this size could hold, at most, eighty boarders. His forces had killed or disabled around seventeen, leaving a max of sixty-three remaining.
Slater suddenly felt like an idiot, realizing that with his newfound freedom, there was nothing preventing him from printing up replacements for his casualties. He gathered most of the drones that were creating traps and had them begin printing up replacements for his losses. If his supplies of biomass and salvage held up, he could keep the enemy fighting kobolds and avoid any danger to his humans. The only downside was the time it took to print up new MOBS and their equipment, and from what he saw of the gnomes as they prepared their next assault, they weren’t going to delay any longer than necessary.
The three gnomish assault squads stacked up in front of the next stretch of passageway. One of the squads had brought a pair of what looked like riot shields. Slater sent a command to the taskmaster guarding the next barricade to shoot for the legs or heads if the shields proved too tough for his rounds. The gnomes lobbed another pair of smoke grenades down the passage and renewed their assault. More crew compartments were housed off this passage, and another squad of his kobolds was spread out inside, ready for the assault.
His kobold defenders were prepared for the smoke this time, and as soon as he heard boots charging down the deck, the taskmaster had his troops fire single shots down the passage, avoiding his late comrade’s mistake of mag dumping his kobolds’ weapons. The taskmaster then pulled his grenade and hurled it before the enemy closed. The kobolds in the compartments lining the passage popped open the firing ports and began to pick targets from the shadowy figures flitting past them in the smoke.
