“One light-minute,” El-Amin reported. “Contacts?”
“Nothing,” Nguyen reported. “Drones are getting us visibility on the back of the moon…now.”
New data flashed across the screen, but it was mostly what Morgan and her people had expected. Beta-A had a native ecosystem, even if most Imperial biologies would die painfully within minutes of breathing the air.
“What’s that?” Morgan demanded, pinging a location.
“Matches up with our listed location for the secondary Precursor station,” Nguyen replied, “but…yep. Refined metals, energy signature. That is definitely a ship.”
“Get Company Commander Hunter,” Morgan ordered. “We want that shi—”
“Contact!” Nguyen snapped. “I have…something?”
Morgan didn’t bother asking for more details. If the tactical officer had known what she was looking at, she’d have reported that. Instead, she pulled up the data and looked at it herself.
Her first impulse was that she was looking at stealth ships. The signatures were very similar to the ones Vichy’s stealth shuttles had shown when they were heading toward the planet, but that wasn’t right.
“What am I looking at, Commander?” Morgan asked.
“I really don’t know,” Nguyen admitted. As she was speaking, new energy signatures flared to life. “Well, that’s a bunch of fusion engines, but I can’t find a source for them.”
“That’s not possible, Commander,” the Captain said. “Give me what you can.”
“I think we’re looking at between twenty-four and thirty contacts,” the tactical officer told her. “Engine signatures are mixing together. Looks like about a thousand kilometers per second squared in acceleration.”
Even with those godawful heat signatures, the ship’s computers were having problems resolving the targets. Radar, visual…even their tachyon scanners were insisting there were only ghosts attached to the engine plumes.
“Energy and acceleration suggest about a quarter-million tons apiece, but I’ve got nothing on the main sensors,” Nguyen confirmed. “Radar is going right through them. I’ve got vague shapes on visual and a suggestion of contact on tachyon.”
“Lock them in, Commander,” Morgan ordered. “Standby Bravo and Charlie Batteries.”
Those were Defiance’s paired plasma lances and her batteries of hyperfold guns.
“I can’t, sir; I don’t have a lock,” Nguyen snapped. “I don’t have a large enough magnetic field to target the plasma lances.”
Plasma lances used a magnetic guidance tube to contain their burst of artificial star-stuff. The tube would follow its target once established, nearly guaranteeing a hit, barring extreme measures.
The only way they wouldn’t be able to lock on to the strange contacts was if they had almost no metal in their structure.
“Give me something, Commander,” Morgan told her subordinate.
“I can scattergun the hyperfold cannons and I’ll hit something, but our sensors and computers are failing to register the damn things, even with those engines.”
A thousand kilometers per second squared was an incredible acceleration, but the contacts were still barely up to five percent of lightspeed as Defiance’s crew continued to try and analyze them.
“Are they a threat?” Morgan asked. They were almost in hyperfold-cannon range now. She didn’t want to fire first, but…
“If they weren’t firing off the most powerful fusion engines I’ve ever seen, I’m not sure I’d be convinced they exist,” Nguyen replied. “I don’t know, sir, but…”
A plasma cannon wasn’t quite a lightspeed weapon. Defiance had just over three-quarters of a second’s warning before over two dozen bursts of plasma hammered into her shields.
“Shields are failing,” Rogers snapped from secondary control.
“El-Amin, evasive maneuvers now,” Morgan ordered. “Nguyen?!”
“Firing.”
A spray of white pinpricks appeared on the holographic display as Nguyen used twenty-four of the most advanced weapons in the Imperium’s arsenal like a planet-scaled shotgun. Several of the engine signatures cut out as the blasts of energy hammered into their targets.
“Hit them again,” Morgan ordered. “All batteries clear; engage with whatever works.”
Missiles joined the second salvo as the Alpha Batteries came to life at rapid fire. Every six seconds, Defiance flung missiles downrange at eighty-five percent of the speed of light. More of the ghost icons disappeared, but another salvo of plasma answered.
Morgan felt her ship’s scream in her bones as the shields went down. Plasma bursts slammed into the cruiser’s armor, and she was once again grateful for her father. It had been Elon Casimir, after all, who had realized the potential of the mistake one of his production techs had made while producing exotic matter.
Compressed-matter armor was far short the true neutronium the news liked to label it as, but it was tough, tough stuff.
“Breaches on multiple decks!” someone reported and Morgan inhaled a curse.
What the hell were they facing?
“El-Amin, open the range,” she ordered. “Maximum speed.”
Six seconds. With the drive online, it took six seconds to change the direction of their velocity vector in any angle they wanted.
In those six seconds, the ghost-like contacts accelerated another two percent of lightspeed toward Defiance and fired again. Most of the shots missed this time, but more red flashes appeared on Morgan’s damage-report diagram.
The plasma pulses were burning clean through her compressed-matter armor, vaporizing the super-dense material and stabbing into her ship. The armor was minimizing the true damage so far, but Defiance’s armor was being peeled away, section by section.
More of the ghosts vanished under the pounding of Defiance’s weapons. Over half of the drive signatures were gone now—but Defiance was outright running now too.
“Get me thirty light-seconds, El-Amin, then match their velocity,” Morgan ordered as another hit—the only one of this salvo—rocked Defiance. “Engineering, get me my shields back.”
Each of the blasts paled in comparison to the two ship-killing plasma lances that ran the width of Defiance to support their wing-tip emitters, but Defiance had been hit at least fifty times now.
“Salvo dissipating before contact,” Nguyen suddenly reported. “Hostile range appears to be about twenty-two light-seconds.” She paused, then continued grimly. “I estimate ten contacts remaining. They’re continuing to accelerate toward us, Captain. What do we do?”
“Finish them off,” Morgan ordered. “Are the IDMs able to target them?”
“Negative, we’re guiding them in by remote, which is a bitch at this range,” Nguyen admitted. “None of our systems can register them as a target; we’re aiming at the area around the engine flare.”
They were still inside the minimum range of their hyperspace missiles, too. At this range, only her interface-drive weapons could reach the targets, and their hit ratios were sucking. She watched an entire salvo of missiles dive into the pursuing swarm. Targeted on a single one of the ghosts, Morgan wasn’t sure any of them hit.
The following salvo was more effective and a ghost’s engines went silent. Nine pursuers.
“Sir, that contact on Beta-A is moving,” Nguyen reported. “They’re heading away from us, point-five-five light.”
And keeping the ghosts between themselves and Defiance. Morgan could take the ghosts easily now she was out of their range, but if she went around them, she’d never catch the freighter.
If she tried to take Defiance through the ghosts, they’d rip her ship to pieces.
“We have to let her go,” Morgan decided aloud. “Continue to maintain this range and tear them up with missiles. Even if it takes three salvos apiece to kill these buggers, we have the missiles to burn.”
In a straight missile engagement, after all, it was estimated that it would take Defiance ten to twelve salvos to take do
wn a modern destroyer—and her missiles were far more capable than those the Imperium had possessed even twelve years before in the Taljzi Campaigns.
Another ghost vanished and Morgan shivered. Ghost was feeling particularly apt. At least twenty of the strange ships were already gone, and they clearly couldn’t catch Defiance before Morgan’s ship destroyed them.
All their deaths would achieve was protecting the freighter’s escape, but they didn’t even seem to be blinking. What kind of crew would fight that suicidally in those circumstances?
Just who were these people and what were they protecting?
Chapter Eleven
!Lat’s skin was pure black with fear, the A!Tol administrator pressed into the corner of the upstairs office the prisoners had been stuffed in. Unless Rin was misreading his boss’s skin color and body language, the A!Tol was done.
The squid was going to need serious help to be able to function again in the future, let alone run an archeological expedition outside technically known space.
To his own surprise, Rin was handling the situation relatively well. There were three members of the admin staff who’d been in the building with him and !Lat when the Marines had landed, and they had all been stuffed in one of the offices next to the data center.
“Be calm,” he told them. “The Marines are here, which means it’s only a matter of time until we’re rescued. It’s all going to be fine.”
The building was soundproofed to make communications cleaner, and he could still hear the distant sound of plasma fire. At least some people with serious weaponry were in the building.
“They use…as hostages. Kill to buy time,” a young Pibo with pale gray skin replied in halting English. “Marines can’t rescue from that.”
“Tova…it’s Tova, right?” Rin asked. The Pibo neuter made an affirmative gesture with their hand. “The fighting is already in this building. That means the Marines have the camp. Our friends are fine and the Marines are already here. There isn’t time for hostage-taking.”
The sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway gave the lie to Rin’s words. Shouted words in a language he didn’t recognize without a translator echoed into the corner office. He glanced around desperately.
There was a desk. That was it. The strangers had even taken the chair out to make sure it wasn’t used as a weapon. He suddenly found himself regretting !Lat’s catatonia for a new reason: even an A!Tol male was physically stronger than most of their captors.
Rin certainly wasn’t, but he took up a position behind the door anyway. Tova looked at him with big black eyes…and then made the same affirmative gesture with their hands.
The door swung open and Tova screamed. Rin had never heard anything like it. The Pibo was only about a hundred and forty-five centimeters tall, but he’d have expected that sound to come from a machine the size of a tank.
Whoever was entering the room paused in sheer shock at the noise, and Rin slammed the door into them. When he still heard them moving, he did it again. And again. Finally, a hand grabbed the door.
A cloaked human, the hood knocked back onto his shoulders, dragged himself around, looking for his attacker with angry but dazed eyes.
Rin punched the man in the face. As he recoiled, the scientist slammed the door into the stranger’s head again. That sent him reeling backward into the wall.
He stopped moving as Rin stepped forward, breathing heavily. He’d never even hurt anyone before in his life. Gulping air, he checked the man’s pulse. It was ragged but present. Unconscious, with potential brain damage, but alive.
“Tova, tie him up,” Rin ordered as he carefully extracted the plasma pistol the man had been carrying. He looked at the weapon with distrust as the Pibo set to work.
“You know how to use this?” he asked. “Kosel?”
Kosel was a broad-shouldered amphibian with dark brown fur whose dryness warned of dire health consequences if the Indiri didn’t get to a pool soon.
“I…count,” he said in English even more halting than Tova’s. “No shoot.”
“God, do I miss translators,” Rin muttered.
“I no better,” Tova told Rin. “He…not good.”
That “he” was !Lat, a sentiment Rin could only agree with.
“We can’t move him,” he told the others. “We can’t leave. Get back in the corner,” he ordered as he found the safety on the gun. Imperial weapons had heavily adjustable grips and controls, but this one had been set for a human male of much his size.
“I’m pretty sure I can shoot through a door, if nothing else,” he said grimly as he took cover behind the desk. “Let them try and take us hostage. Beyond that, we wait for the Marines.”
A distinct echo of plasma fire continued to hold out hope of rescue.
“Karl!” an accented voice shouted down the corridor, followed by a spiel in a language Rin didn’t recognize.
“Anyone know the language?” Rin asked. He was glad his companions understood English without the translator. He could fumble through written Pibo if he had to, but his understanding of Indiri was limited to “sorry” and “where’s the bathroom?”
From the blank looks he got back, neither Tova or Kosel was catching the language any better than he was.
“Karl?” the voice demanded from outside the door, and Rin took a deep breath, steadying the pistol with two hands and trying to remember a long-ago lesson from a date at a gun range.
The door shifted, and the voice said something confused and angry before flinging it wide open. For a moment, the cloaked form of what Rin thought was an Ivida stood framed in the door, glaring in. Whatever the pirate was expecting, it wasn’t to have Rin pointing a gun at him.
That gave the archeologist a critical second to process the situation before the stranger went for their gun. The desire not to die overwhelmed hesitation, and Rin pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession.
He missed twice, but the second of the three shots hammered into the stranger’s chest. The Ivida jerked backward, their own weapon falling from their fingers as they stumbled…and fell.
“My god,” Rin whispered. He’d just killed someone. He was a scientist, a student of ancient history and the Precursors, not a soldier.
“More coming,” Tova told him. The Pibo neuter had better hearing than he did. “No panic. Fight.”
The gunshots had drawn attention, and the people he could see running down the corridor beyond the open door were carrying weapons. Heavier ones than the pistol in Rin’s hand, but they still weren’t sure what was happening yet.
He was sure and lifted the gun again. It had a lot less kick than the chemical burners his teen boyfriend had dragged him out shooting—and Rin hadn’t been good at shooting those, either.
Lacking in accuracy, he made up for it in enthusiasm. Lining up the gun as cleanly as he could, he pulled the trigger and kept pulling it until the gun stopped shooting.
Three cloaked strangers were down, but a new figure appeared behind them…and Rin realized it didn’t matter that he was out of charge for the gun. If the tiny pistol in his hand could threaten power armor, he didn’t know how to change the settings.
The armored figure was unmarked, its surface changing color as they advanced down the corridor. They were carrying a plasma weapon but weren’t firing it. Instead, something on their left gauntlet started to glow—and then the entire front of the suit of armor lit up red-hot like forging metal.
The armored stranger fell forward, revealing a second suit of armor that had emerged from the corner behind them. That figure stepped forward, studied the bodies, then turned a featureless helm toward Rin.
Rin helplessly pointed the gun at them, hoping to somehow intimidate them. Instead, the armored figure held up a hand, palm forward. A second figure appeared, conferred silently, and then proceeded into a different corridor as the first suit of armor approached.
The scientist kept the empty pistol trained on them, and to his surprise, the soldier locked their weapon to
a rack on the back of the armor and put their hands up.
These had to be Marines. Before Rin found the nerve to say something, a third armored figure arrived by the efficient method of smashing through the building wall from the outside. This one had already locked their gun in place and studied Rin like a raptor studied a field mouse.
Their helmet retracted with an audible thunk, and the scientist looked up at a tall, dark-haired man with hawk-like features.
“Dr. Rin Dunst?” he asked in a distinctively French accent. “You can put the gun down. It is generally a sign that things are secure when Marines start using flight systems. Flying soldiers make for easy targets.”
Rin hesitated.
“My name is Battalion Commander Pierre Vichy, Doctor,” the Marine told him. “I am the commanding officer of Defiance’s Marines, and for reasons I’m not cleared for, you are our primary target for extraction.
“The site is mostly secure, but my mission requires me to get you to a safe location and…” Vichy paused, then managed to visibly shrug in the armor. “Plasma fire is not conducive to sustained structural integrity. We need to evacuate this building.”
“We…we have a prisoner,” Rin said, almost feeling embarrassed to raise it. Vichy and his people had just stormed the entire compound, in the face of what Rin was pretty sure was at least fifty or sixty of the pirate attackers. What was one prisoner?
“Show me,” Vichy ordered instead.
Laying aside the empty gun, Rin gestured for the Marine CO to enter the office and waved at their unconscious captive.
“I beat him in the head with the door,” he said uncomfortably. “Might be brain damage; he hasn’t woken up yet. Name’s Karl, I think, but I don’t know anything.”
“Bien, bien. Très bien,” Vichy told him. “Dr. Dunst, we have now fought these people twice in two systems. We don’t know anything about them either, but I can tell you that we have less than a dozen prisoners because those cloaks are proofed against stunners.
“Karl here may provide answers the others don’t have. I’ll have Marines take care of him. Any damage you have done, we can treat. Certainly more easily than plasma burn-through, n’est-ce pas?”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 7
