Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  They weren’t traveling through hyperspace. Ia didn’t want the Salik to know a ship as large as hers could do that, just yet. She could use it to get close to this particular patch of nowhere, situated about four hundred light-years from Earth and over nine hundred from Sanctuary, yes; they had used hyperwarp to get to within a light-year or so, but the last leg had been plain FTL.

  In control, Ia closed her eyes for a moment, dipping part of her mind into the timestreams. She didn’t want to overshoot their target but she did want to come in as close as safely possible. She also wanted her crew to be certain of what were viable targets.

  “Captain to all gunnery teams. Your tactical displays have been loaded with two sets of targets. Shoot the red ones all you like but avoid shooting anything tagged green. We’re here to smash and grab communications databanks. I’d like to have those databanks intact for grabbing. You have four cannons slaved per pod. Use them wisely. Heads up in…twenty seconds, mark.” Off-mike, she spoke as she started powering down the warp panels. “Spyder, Morgan, keep an eye on who’s firing on what. We’re coming in hot and fast and barreling right past before we’ll turn around. Lasers only for the first volleys. Let’s not outpace any projectiles, today. Coming out of FTL in three…two…”

  The slow streak of stars on the screens flared into a pulse of dotted white. Within a blink, the screen was filled with a stippling of near-static pinpoints of light. Ia’s main screen lit up with tactical analyses of the objects barely lit at this distance by floodlights designed solely to keep incoming ships from hitting anything while maneuvering nearby.

  “Resolving lightspeed, sir,” Private Loewen said from the navigation post, checking her scanners. “We have targets, almost dead ahead. Three-fifty-six by three-fifty-nine.”

  “L-pods, fire at will,” Ia directed, watching the distance-to-target numbers spin down swiftly as they hurtled toward the installation. Morgan nodded and relayed the command.

  They were still slowing down, thruster fields pulsing subtly against the laws of reality. Between pulses, the Hellfire’s L-pods started to fire. Bright reddish orange streaks of light darted out from the ship. With the Hellfire speeding into range right on their tail at a large fraction of Cee, the speed of light itself, the lasers could be seen moving as a bolt rather than a beam as they arrowed straight and true at the organic-looking station.

  That station was huge, too, though mainly due to its function. Layers of solar panels angled out from the central pod, interspersed with five ship-sized arms that served as crew quarters, docking gantries, manufacturing facilities, and so forth.

  Ia knew the station was home to over eight thousand Salik. She also knew the facility was underdefended, relying more on its extremely remote position between star systems for protection than on gun pods, fighter craft, and other things. With their resources limited to whatever raw materials they could mine or steal without the Alliance’s notice, the Salik had to juggle the needs between creating more ships and weapons with their limited resources and expanding their infrastructure, such as this station, in the hopes they’d be able to find more materials to justify the expansions.

  Two of those ships were in the system now, a tanker filled with hydrofuel and raw materials, and a frigate, small but fast, the kind useful for gathering lightspeed information at the extreme edges of a particular system. Naturally, they were on Ia’s red-painted list. Red-painted, and red-targeted, with a spinning stream of numbers appended, counting down the distance in light-seconds to each enemy ship. As the dozens of lasers struck en masse, three of them hit spots that caused silent explosions to rip through the hulls of the frigate and the tanker.

  “Spyder, launch one volley of projectiles the moment that station is aft,” Ia ordered. “Coming up on midpoint in thirty seconds. O’Keefe, count it off.”

  Her right hand thumbed one of the console controls, and her left hand twitched to the right a tiny bit. The ship strafed sideways by a hundred meters as it raced forward, just enough to avoid the dark chaff blown outward from the solar panels. Bright red continued to cross the screens as the L-pods kept firing.

  Lasers were quiet weapons, unlike the clunkier noise of projectiles being launched. They did, however, require extra energy, enough that the ship thrummed with the efforts of several extra hydrogenerators cycling on and off. The slower the ship went, the shorter and darker those beams became, redshifted from the Hellfire’s reduced speed.

  Slow in this case was still a significant fraction of Cee, the speed of light. In Ia’s Harrier-class ship back on the Blockade, Cee hadn’t been a concern; Harrier-class ships traveled via OTL and never actually needed more than half the speed of light. The Hellfire, by contrast, had started several billion kilometers away, but those billions were now almost gone.

  “Coming up on turning point,” O’Keefe warned the others. “Estimated ten seconds.”

  Bright chartreuse dots stabbed at the ship. They missed, but only barely. Ia flexed her fingers, sliding them slightly dorsal. That dodged another set of blueshifted lasers aimed their way.

  “Incoming!” Loewen warned, her head shifting in little snaps as her eyes flew over the data streaming into her screens. Her warning wasn’t for the lasers; those could not be dodged, since they traveled at the speed of light. Instead, it was for the missiles that followed. Lasers aimed at their narrow, end-on silhouette weren’t a concern, not when missiles could track the mass of a ship and divert course to intercept.

  “Five,” O’Keefe counted.

  “Firing chaff!” Morgan announced, pulsing the trigger on his controls. Rapid noise thuthuthunked down the hull from the bow. The battered communications hub filled their viewscreens, then popped somewhat smaller as their proximity forced the scanners to cut back on their magnification.

  “Three!”

  “Aft P-pods,” Spyder called into his headset.

  “One!”

  They dove between the tanker and a tumbling cloud of laser-scorched debris from the solar panels, close enough that proximity alarms beeped loudly in warning, though not quite close enough to trigger the emergency claxons.

  “…Fire! L-pods, fire at will!”

  Parts of the solar panels were now shielded, visible where some of that debris struck the repeller fields with sparks of energy. The undersides of those vast panels were more heavily shielded, but it wouldn’t do them much good; lasers penetrated shields. They didn’t do as much damage as missiles did, but they could damage the nodes projecting those shields.

  As it was, some of lasers from the aft-pointed pods struck before the missiles did. Others struck after. Several explosions blossomed silently to their rear, though it would take a few seconds for their tactical computers to discern which ones were just from the missiles impacting on the shields and which ones were from missiles that made it through to the actual station surface.

  “All hands, brace for maneuvers,” Ia warned over the intercom. They were still going a significant fraction of Cee, and she was about to pull something complicated.

  On a more compact ship design, she would have physically turned the ship in a loop, swapping bow and stern so that they were pointed the other way, but the Hellfire was nine hundred meters long. A turn at their current speed would bend, if not break, the hull. Flexing the FTL fields, Ia greased the laws of physics in a bubble around the ship. Only then did she make the port side greasier. Left hand wrapped in the glove, right hand splayed over the console, she massaged both sets of controls.

  They had entered normal space pointed downstream—toward the core, in relation to the spiral of the galaxy, if one considered the stars as “draining” toward the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They remained pointed that way, but like a hummingbird or a dragonfly, the vector change swerved their momentum so that they were flying backwards. The field shielded them from most of those vector change forces, but not all.

  Everyone and everything not bolted to the ship pulled to the right for several long seconds, then s
wung around to the bow. The G-forces eased after several more seconds; pleased everyone had locked and webbed their stray supplies, Ia worked on angling the axis of the ship a little as they headed back toward the station and its two half-crippled ships.

  Morgan and Spyder gave orders to their gunnery teams. The aft and starboard pods fired as soon as the full field dropped, allowing them to reacquire targets between pulses. More enemy shots were fired; eyes on the screens, hands on the controls, toes in the timestreams, Ia sideslipped most of the lasers. A few scored the sides of the ship. A few telltales turned yellow, mostly exposed FTL panels and one sensor antenna. Ia nudged them sideways, aiming a little closer even as she angled their ship to strafe down the side of the hub.

  They weren’t the only ones attacking now. Caught by fast, close launches from the frigate and the station, the Hellfire’s shields vibrated down into the hull from missile explosions. Here was the difference between reality and entertainment shows like Space Patrol. Real interstellar combat was relatively quiet, so long as one wasn’t getting hit. Now they were, and now the P-pods fired anti-missile volleys and chaff grenades, trying to detonate the incoming munitions before they could hammer their way through the shields to the actual hull.

  “Coming up on midpoint,” O’Keefe warned them. “Twenty seconds.”

  Again, Ia slipped the ship sideways. They weren’t passing nearly as closely this time.

  “Focus your fire on weapons and generators—brace for maneuvers.” Ia swirled her fingertips. Rolling the ship on its long axis sent their stomachs slinging sideways, down, and out. It also lessened the scorch impact of a large laser attempting to target and burn through their hull. More telltales popped up on her tertiary screens, glowing yellow from the damage sustained. “Morgan, switch to targeting priority display 2, and load up twelve P-pod blossoms. Fire on our third midpoint pass. Add regulars on this pass.”

  “Midpoint in three…two…” O’Keefe counted down. Another set of missiles hit their shields, shuddering the ship.

  “Forward P-pods launching,” Morgan announced a moment later. The ship whumped several times, starting in the distance, racing past their position, and down to the stern.

  Again, they strafed sideways and down, dodging incoming attacks. Ia warned the crew one more time, then pulsed the FTL panels, mindful of the damaged ones. They swerved around until they were speeding forward, this time aiming down the other side of those solar panels, if slightly above. They no longer faced their original entry-point orientation, thanks to her careful, slow tilting of the ship.

  “We’ll be moving fast in a few moments,” she warned the others. “Launch the blossoms at midpoint and brace for acceleration.”

  “Aye, sir,” Morgan said. “Blossoms are prepped and ready for launch.”

  “Brace for acceleration,” Ia warned.

  “Ten seconds,” O’Keefe warned them. “Glad we’re not sticking around. Five…four…three…”

  The long, slender missiles launched with a near-unison stutter of clunks just as they soared over the battered but still-firing station. Ia scraped her right-hand fingertips up the thruster controls, thrumming the engines in a rippling wave of increasingly swift field pulses. Occasionally she flexed one side of her left hand or the other, lifted it up slightly or pushed it down, either straight or angled. That allowed them to dodge most of the damage from the few L-pods still capable of return fire.

  The increased speed was necessary; when the blossom missiles hit, they impacted zones that had lost shielding. Ten lodged in the panels next to each segment that served as living quarters, just to either side. Two more smacked into the central sphere that housed the vacuum-sealed hyperrelay units, which permitted the routing and rerouting of messages from one end of known space to the other.

  For several seconds they did not detonate, though their engines did pulse, attempting to drive them deeper into each section of the overall structure. When they did, they slammed scores of smaller, needle-sharp bombs outward, blossoming like fireworks. Those bombs in turn stayed dormant for a few more seconds, giving the ones driven into open areas more time to travel outward. Then they detonated.

  This time, the detonations were explosions, ripping huge holes in the station. The force hurled debris in all directions, making the space near the communications array dangerous to transit. With the Hellfire already headed outbound, the only things they had to dodge were a few still-functioning lasers. Even those ended a few seconds later, as the damage cracked the station into pieces.

  Once the enemy fire stopped, Ia slowed the ship again, intending to guide it around and into reverse as she had before. As she did so, she checked the timestreams. The answer she sought came within a handful of seconds, and it was a satisfactory one. Minimal damage to the exact units we’ll need. I know the information we want is buried in those particular comm-traffic files, though I don’t know exactly what we’re supposed to be looking for…mainly because the subject matter recursively hides itself from me.

  The best analogy she had was being sent into a grocery store with a list of spices. Those were usually kept with the baking goods, but that entire aisle could be located anywhere in the store. Once the right aisle was located, then the right shelves had to be found, and finally the right spice jars. Ia knew where the store was located—this station—and an idea of which aisle to check. The rest of it, she didn’t have time to search for herself.

  That was what the others were here for.

  “Private York, please inform Lieutenant Rico to get his salvage teams ready. We’ll be taking potshots at enemy weaponry for the next twenty minutes, disabling everything they can still throw at us. Those teams need to launch as soon as I give the all clear. We do not want to be here an hour from now.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  And at that point, I can rest, she thought. Once we’re under way and I’ve plotted our next course, O’Keefe can have the helm back, and I can go sleep for nine hours straight.

  Opening the intercom, Ia addressed her crew. “Captain Ia to the crew. Good job, everyone. Third watch will be free to stand down again in twenty minutes. Maneuvers should be light between now and then. Exercise caution in moving about the ship for the next hour and a half. Ia out.”

  On the one hand, energy from the food she had eaten was now keeping her awake. On the other hand, the post-battle adrenaline slump threatened to steal that energy away. Now that they were aimed back at the crumpled bits of station, she had a few seconds free. Slipping her fingers under the little door, Ia jolted herself with a little bit of electricity.

  “A good day’s fight, meioas,” she murmured, praising her sparse bridge crew. “Let’s keep it up.”

  FEBRUARY 5, 2496 T.S.

  SIC TRANSIT

  The boot that hit her did not belong to her brother. It did, however, break Ia out of her timeplains trance. Standing in her socks on the deck of the stern cargo hold, she blinked at the mangled glob of crystal in her hands. Being broken out of molding trance always did that. She could fix it, but she had left orders with Harper on when to interrupt her, and why.

  “Fire, famine, flood, or finally cracked the code?” she asked, turning toward the door. Harper stood there, but so did Helstead, her shorter frame peering around his taller one.

  “Finally cracked the code…we think,” Harper said. The other lieutenant commander tried to squeeze past him. He checked her with his elbow, rolling his eyes. “Helstead! You’re not allowed in this hold.”

  “How can I be an effective spymaster if I’m not allowed to spy on her?” Helstead shot back, trying to dodge the other way. He checked her by spreading his legs—and she darted under them, only to be grabbed by the back of her shirt.

  “Sorry, Captain,” he apologized. “Want me to throw her out?”

  “I want to know what’s so…Wait a second,” Helstead said, green gaze darting around the hold. “There were at least forty of those things loaded into this cargo hold. I only see thirty-six.”

&nb
sp; Back on her homeworld, Ia had ordered the sprays lashed to the outer walls, with large lockboxes stacked and secured down the center. The extra flights had added a day to their itinerary, but the successful early integration of the hyperwarp system had given them an extra day. Some of those lockboxes now contained crysium wreaths, shaped in her spare time since leaving Sanctuary.

  Helstead narrowed her eyes, staring at the lump of crystal in Ia’s hands. “Is that…?”

  Harper hauled back on her collar, interrupting her question. “You are in a restricted area, Lieutenant Commander. Only myself and Captain Ia have access to this part of the ship.”

  Twisting, Helstead broke his grip with a sweep of her arm. She didn’t grab him back, just planted her hands on her hips. “And maybe I should report you for keeping secrets from the Command Staff! I did some research on this crysium stuff when it was brought on board. It’s the hardest substance known to sentientkind. So how the hell did the Captain reshape it? She’s quite clearly holding a re-formed chunk of it in her hands.”

  “I don’t like the implications that you’re a spy,” Harper countered, hands going to his own hips. “Your loyalty is up through the chain of command, to me, to Captain Ia, then to the Command Staff.”

  “I’d believe you a lot more,” Helstead snorted, “if every time you looked at her, you didn’t look like a lovesick turtle. You don’t hide it nearly well enough, soldier.”

  He flushed at that. Sighing, Ia interrupted the pair. “Enough, both of you, or I’ll make you clean the lifesupport filters while all the off-duty privates watch. Helstead’s not the spy on this ship. I know exactly who they are, and she’s not one of them.”

  That got Helstead’s attention, swinging the shorter woman around. Ia lifted the glob in her hand.

  “As for what I’m doing with it, I’m borrowing technology from the future to alter the crystals. That technology is not the property of the Terran United Planets…and I cannot in good conscience explain that tech or share it with anyone else. That’s why this cargo bay is off-limits.”