Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm

by Doug Dandridge

  “Give it five minutes and drop to V,” ordered the Captain. He looked back at Sean. “This might not work, your Majesty. They might just be able to maintain tracking on us, and come in on our location. I’m hoping they might have too much trouble in normal space to find us, but that’s not a guarantee.”

  “Nothing is guaranteed,” said Sean, nodding his head. “Right. I will guarantee something though. Get me back to the sector HQ, and I will lead the force that comes out here to avenge our losses myself.”

  * * *

  Mei Lei watched the sine wave as Jean de Arc decelerated through hyperspace. There was no way to see the enemy ships on visual until they reached about five light minutes relative to this space. About the same maximum range of light amp weapons, though firing at anything that distance was a waste of effort, as most of the photons making the beam would have dropped into normal space at that range. At the current closing rate they would be in visual in about one half hour.

  Can’t even send a spread of missiles at them, she thought. Normal space missiles didn’t carry hyperdrive, and would catastrophically translate to normal space as soon as they left the battle cruiser’s hyper field. She had ten of the large hyperdrive capable missiles on board, and had already ordered the largest possible warheads placed on them. But with only ten she wanted to be able to pick her targets, rather than send something down the pike that they would see coming for minutes ahead of time. Not that I really expect much from them in the first place.

  “Hostiles have started to decelerate, ma’am,” came the call from the sensor officer, sitting at her station, getting the direct feeds from the techs on their rooms.

  “Thank you,” she replied, looking over at the engineering station. “How are the systems?”

  “Lasers at ninety-eight percent,” said the assistant engineer sitting at that station. “Still some minor damage to electromag projectors on the port bow area.”

  Not that we’re going to need them here, thought the captain. Electromag shields didn’t work well in hyper, and were thought by some to use more power than it was worth.

  “Prepare to go into fusion state,” she ordered, as she relaxed her own mind for the link that would make the crew one with their ship. There were a number of acknowledgements, voice and com link. The link was something new, and was not universally accepted by the fleet. But the Jean de Arc had it incorporated into her command and control systems. The crew had trained with it, but the Captain hadn’t trusted it enough to use in the past combat situation. Now they were in the classical hopeless situation. And the Captain didn’t see how it could hurt them in a hopeless situation.

  Mei Lei let herself slip into the link, letting her individuality flow into the mass of the ship’s crew. Then she was part of the group mind, linked through the connection of the thousands of other minds that made up the ship, as well as the central computing system. She was diminished in some respects, as a community now controlled the ship. But she still had the majority vote in that community as captain. She saw through the sensors of the ship, the skin transmitting all of its information into the processors, and from there to her mind. At the same time she saw, heard and felt through her own body, aware of the bridge surrounding her while she basked in the universe beyond.

  The group mind drilled on scenarios while they waited for the enemy to close. Some turned out better than others, though none were ideal. All ended with the battle cruiser destroyed. The worst outcome was the warship destroyed while the enemy got by them with minimal damage. The best was the enemy getting one intact ship by while the others became wrecks. And the problems with simulations was that the enemy didn’t always do what the computer thought they would. Which was another reason to not have computers running ships.

  Visual obtained on the hostiles, came the thought through the system. And there they were on visual, just as Lei remembered them. Much larger than Imperial heavy cruisers, each maybe half the size of the battle cruiser. Four of them. She looked closely at the hulls of the enemy. Their ether paddles were of a different form, and they had hyperdrive nodes scattered over the hull, not in the two massive constructs that Imperial ships used. They were intimidating as hell, and the Captain could feel the fear and concern of the crew through the link. Those are the targets, thought the Captain, her thoughts echoing throughout the system.

  The enemy ships were also decelerating, allowing the battle cruiser to close, while making sure they could follow her into normal space if that was necessary. Lei had been hoping they could just shoot through with a rapid closing rate, but the enemy was not going to cooperate. In the time remaining the ship and its crew ran another series of simulations, using the speed of the processors to fight scores of battles in the minutes remaining. They tried going with everything at one enemy. Spreading their fire power around to all. Accelerating at the last moment. Different angles of retreat. In every instance the Jean de Arc was destroyed, while at least two of the enemy forged on through hyper.

  The distance closed. There was no way to retreat. Even if the battle cruiser went to full acceleration the other way, they would still continue toward the enemy ships for some time. It was as inevitable as falling into a black hole. And maybe just as deadly.

  Fire, ordered Mei Lei through the collective mind. Faster than a human could measure time the battle cruiser, still technically under human control, prioritized targets and aimed weapons. Within microseconds the four laser rings, all fully charged from a dozen emitters each, fired concentrated beams of coherent energy. Three lanced out for one target, while the last, which couldn’t be brought to bear on that one, fired at a different target. At the same time five of the hyperdrive missiles were flung from their tubes to aim at the fourth target.

  Enemy beams impacting, came the voice of the system. Lei did not need that voice. She could feel the beams impacting the hull of her ship. Tons of matter vaporized within seconds. A bit of the input from the skin, the sensory organ of the ship, went dead and the image from outside shrunk just a miniscule bit. Then the nanobots in the hull reconfigured its reflective abilities to match the incoming beams, bouncing most of the energy back into space. Within seconds the frequency of the incoming beams changed, as did that of the outgoing, in a game to try and stay ahead of the protective systems. Jean de Arc shuddered and twisted as jets of material, converted to plasma by the enemy beams, acted like thrusters.

  The five missiles moved toward one of the enemy ships, the closest to the port side. That ship turned most of its beams toward the incoming missiles, scoring two catastrophic hits on one missile that turned it to plasma and radiation as the antimatter warhead exploded. Sensors on all ships were overloaded for a moment, taking several seconds to recover. One of the missiles was fried by radiation and continued past the target into hyperspace, where it would cruise until it ran out of power and translated back into normal space, most probably as a plasma cloud. Another missile was knocked spinning into space by the explosion of the first warhead, its hyperdrive field going down and throwing it out of hyper. The fourth was hit by the enemy’s close in weapons and detonated seven kilometers from the ship, flooding space with heat and radiation. The enemy’s sensors were swamped for another couple of seconds, which allowed the fifth and final missile to get in close, within four hundred meters, before it was taken out. The side of the alien ship superheated from the blast. Metals and plastics vaporized and set the ship into a spin that took her temporarily out of combat.

  The other three aliens continued to pump lasers into the battle cruiser. All of the ships, still light seconds apart, were shifting up and down and side to side to throw off the aim. Jean de Arc aimed for the presumed hyperdrive nodes on her primary target. It was hard to hit with all the movement, and mostly the beams ran roughshod over the hull of the other ship, at times hitting something vital, but mostly just doing general damage.

  Jean de Arc was taking terrible damage from the enemy beams. Mei Lei experienced the empty feeling, along with the rest of the
crew tapped into the system, as consciousnesses disappeared, their physical selves destroyed. About a third of the crew had action stations in the three central capsules of the ship. The best protected areas, containing quarters, the computer core, and medical, they also contained the central control stations of the ship. But two thirds of the crew were outside the capsules, in engineering, weapons or damage control. All crew were battle armored. But personal armor would not stop gigawatts of laser power through a hull rupture, or a blast of plasma sweeping through corridors after a direct hit. Personalities were dropping off the net with alarming frequency. But the group mind could only adjust and go on. It had no other choice.

  Alarms sounded through the system as lasers ate through the upper hyperdrive array, knocking out cell after cell of the gravitron emitters. The hyperdrive field dropped partially, but enough field strength remained in place to keep the ship in hyperspace.

  Impact in ten seconds, said the alarm over the circuit. Lei watched the schematic as her ship slid toward the closest of the enemy vessels, looking very much like a collision was going to take place. At the last second Jean de Arc decelerated just enough to avoid the other ship. But the hyperdrive fields intersected for a second, and the battle cruiser fired a spread of missiles at that moment. The missiles were able to go from hyperdrive field to hyperdrive field without intersecting hyperspace, allowing them to exist all the way to their target. They came too fast for the enemy to react, striking the hulls and burrowing in before coming to a rest. As soon as they were released the battle cruiser accelerated away, trying to put as much distance as possible from the other ship. They got twelve kilometers between them and other vessel before the warheads detonated.

  The detonations of a dozen multi-gigaton warheads, several meters inside the hull of the ship, were devastating. There was nothing to be done on the enemy ship but die, as the explosive power ripped that side of the vessel apart. Great gouts of plasma ran through the corridors of the vessel, incinerating everything and everyone they came across. The ship was kicked away at a hundred gravities of acceleration imparted by the explosion, then ripped apart as the internal power systems ruptured and spilled their own antimatter into the ship. In an instant the ship disappeared in a flash, all of its matter and most of the energy kicked out of hyperspace as the hyperdrive fields disappeared.

  The ejection of the other ship saved Jean de Arc, just as the Captain had hoped. In regular space the explosive force would have severely damaged the battle cruiser, maybe destroyed her. She still took a good hit of heat and radiation that damaged her skin and surface systems. A few of the crew closest to the skin blinked out of the net, taken out by the radiation that overwhelmed their internal defenses.

  That’s why no one wants to fight in hyper, thought the Captain as she planned the next move through the group mind, checking on her ship’s status and seeing what resources she still had. Several hyperdrive missiles looped in from the other ships, far enough off that the battle cruiser was able to take them out with lasers. Jean de Arc released her last five hyperdrive missiles, then dove and looped. Laser ring A had lost half its capability, emitters knocked out, while ring D had lost a third of its. The rest of the rings and the diminished ones continued to fire, locking onto the one enemy ship that had not yet been damaged.

  Hit, thought Mei Lei in exultation, as the lasers took out four of the enemy’s hyperdrive nodes, then lanced out to take out four more. Suddenly the ship wavered in space for a moment, then disappeared with a flash, leaving only two enemies to deal with.

  A couple of missiles came in, along with the lasers of the remaining ships. Space was so flooded with static and distortions, the sensory skin of the ship so damaged, that it could not get a lock on one missile. As a laser took out more cells from the lower hyperdrive array, the missile was knocked out a mere hundred meters from the top array. Particles and radiation flooded the array, taking out over half the cells. Suddenly the worst was happening, and Jean de Arc was forcibly ejected back into normal space from Hyper VII.

  The group mind panicked as mind after mind dropped off the net. Mei Lei felt herself pulled up in her seat by a gravitational anomaly. She watched in horror as her helmsman was pulped in his armor, blood splashing against his face plate, which shattered outward after cracking. Gravity was going wild across the ship as it slipped through the hyperspace barriers. Decks and bulkheads cracked, crew were slammed into walls with enough force to kill. One of the computer cores shattered under the stresses, while the second core went dead as its power feed and battery backups were shredded. In the hangar deck vehicles flew at each other as they broke through their restraints. All across the ship emergency beacons were coming on, at a time when the crew could do nothing about them.

  Mei Lei was thrown out of the group connection, along with every other living crew member. Her head felt like someone had struck it with a very large blunt object. She knew that other crew members would take days to recover their wits from an unexpected disconnect. She didn’t have time for that. Her ship was in danger.

  Pulling up a schematic through the local processor she saw that the ship had hundreds of broken conduits, hundreds of hull breaches, and a total mess of downed systems. She had lost over a thousand crew in the translation and the battle, and there were almost a thousand serious injuries. Catastrophic is right, she thought, almost overwhelmed by the damage. But we made it. That in itself was a minor miracle. Ships did make the enforced transition. Less than ten percent of them, and they were always damaged. In fact, while she was thinking about it the main viewer came back on, focused on the spreading plasma cloud that had been an enemy ship that had gone through the catastrophic translation. But we made it.

  Alarms went off all over the bridge. A secondary computer system had finally been brought online, all the local processors joining through whatever bypasses the system could find. The Captain checked that system and felt a shiver of fear run up her spine at what she saw. “Containment breaches in progress,” stated the system over the speakers. “Containment breaches in progress.”

  One of the two large reactors, three antimatter containment pods and a half dozen warheads were all blinking red on the ship schematic. A quick look at a display showed that there were still engineering personnel near that reactor. And there was nothing else she could do except what she had to.

  “Authorization on my command, jettison containment risks,” she ordered, feeling a sinking sensation in her stomach.

  Subsystems grabbed the warheads in question and moved them swiftly to the nearest missile tubes. The warheads were ejected through the magnetic tubes used to impart the initial acceleration to the missiles, tumbling out into space. Large armored hatches swung out in the engineering section and the three containment vessels sent out into space on their built in grabber units. Toward the rear center of the ship the hull section was blown off into space. The reactor separated from the deck as rockets fired and sent the huge system away from the ship. Two dozen engineering crew accompanied it, including the chief engineering officer, caught by the ejection of air and flung into the cold depths of space. All were in their battle armor, able to survive for days. None would live past the next couple of seconds.

  “Move us out of here,” yelled the Captain at the navigation officer. “Best possible accel, down.”

  The navigation officer looked at her with a shocked expression, then back over at the crumpled form of the helmsman. The armored suit was crunched like light foil, and blood was all over the floor beneath the mangled body.

  “Move us, dammit,” yelled the Captain, as she sprung out of her couch and ran the three steps to the helm console. She pushed a couple of buttons and felt the heavy press of acceleration. Only two hundred gravities, she thought, and it was still too much for the abuse compensators to handle. She fell to the floor under the load, her lungs laboring to lift her chest against the nine gees that were leaking through the compensators. Her vision began to go dark, then focused again as the nanobubb
les in her blood stream released oxygen to her starved brain.

  Mei Lei was not a religious person, but at times like these, when her life and so many others were on the line, her upbringing in the Reformed Catholic Church came back. She said a prayer over and over, not for herself, but for all the people she commanded, especially for those in engineering who had been ejected into space at her command.

  The ship shuddered, the effect of something slamming into the hull at high speed. And then the pressure went away as the navigator took away the acceleration. The Captain could breathe again, and took a few moments to see if any part of her might be injured. When she could locate no pains other than the minor ones she expected, she forced herself up from the floor, looking forward toward the viewer. Bright light still struck the hull, the remains of a dozen antimatter explosions. There was some more damage to the hull, but the ship had survived. She said a short prayer of thanks, and asked forgiveness of those she could not save. Then she forced herself to her feet and stumbled back to her command couch.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” stammered the navigation officer, looking back at her with downcast eyes, glancing several times at the remains of the helm officer.

  “I wish you had responded,” said Mei Lei is a soft voice. “But I understand. We were all in shock.”

  “You weren’t,” said the com officer, her own eyes red and wet. “Thank the Gods, you weren’t, or we would all be dead.”

  And not just some of us, she thought, remembering those engineering personnel who had been sent out of the ship with the reactor. She felt a twinge of guilt, even as she realized that if she hadn’t ejected that reactor they would all be dead, after it exploded and ruptured the stored antimatter. She stabbed a switch on her couch arm, activating the com.