by Rick Partlow
One of the asteroids shattered into bits and the Truthseeker surged forward for the next one, but Julie didn’t follow her, hanging back and waiting, knowing what would be coming next.
“Want to make a bet?” she asked me, the corner of her mouth quirking up. “Five bucks says it’s a carrier.”
“Do they even have any left?” I wondered. Then I shrugged. “Fuck it, I’m in for a cruiser. But make it a steak dinner. Not in Vegas this time, though. Let’s go back to Tampa. I know a great place there, Bern’s Steakhouse.”
“Where’s the bet in that?” she asked me. “I mean, win or lose, you still get a great steak dinner, a few drinks and then get laid afterward.”
“And so do you,” I pointed, grinning, “which is the beauty of the whole thing.”
“I’m gonna call HR,” Baker muttered. “You two are making this an uncomfortable work environment.”
“Ha!” Julie snapped, pointing at the image on the forward screens. “Pay up!”
It was, as she had guessed, a carrier, but I was too busy to think about our bet. Translation through hyperspace caused a few moments of disorientation, and that was exactly how long I had before those fighters launched. I targeted the carrier and fired, jamming my thumb against the blue circle like I was trying to squish a tick. The beam struck barely two seconds after I’d fired, but it was a half a second too late to be perfect. The carrier had no shields, no real armor, very little in the way of maneuvering power, and when the focused burst of photons struck it, the skeletal frame began to come apart at the seams, its stress points superheated and separating.
But the fighters had already started launching and, there being no atmosphere to propagate heat or shockwaves, the laser had left most of them intact.
“They’re going after the Truthseeker,” I warned Julie. “I’ll try to take some out, but the rate of fire on this thing is pretty damned slow, and I can’t control the point defense turrets from here. Maybe Baker could try to find the right station for them?”
“Just let me take care of it,” she said, her expression hardening.
“How?” I asked, frowning. “Do you have weapons control from that console?”
“This whole fucking ship,” she reminded me, her fingers drawing shapes on the touchscreen, “is a weapon. Hold on.”
We jumped into hyperspace. It was bad enough when I was ready for it, but this time, it caught me between one breath and the next and squeezed. And then, before I had the chance to gasp in another lungful to replace it, we jumped again.
“What the fuck?” Baker croaked, then dry heaved.
I agreed, but I was afraid if I said anything, I’d paint the console with the protein bars I’d wolfed before we’d left the Truthseeker, and I hadn’t eaten enough the last couple days to part with the few calories I had managed to get. I dug my fingers into the arms of the chair and tried to focus on the display in front of me. We’d micro-jumped, that much was obvious, and the Truthseeker was now only a light-second off our portside, on our starboard…was the wreckage of at least a dozen Tevynian space fighters. They’d run straight into our drive field and torn themselves to pieces, ripped to shreds by the tidal forces of the gravimetic energy twisting spacetime.
“Nice,” I admired, but she wasn’t through.
Another cluster of space fighters was trying to flank Joon-Pah as he lined up for a shot on the next asteroid. If they’d gone after us instead, ganged up on us the way they had the other Helta cruisers, focusing their lasers on one spot on our shields, they might have been able to take us out. Instead, Julie plowed through them with the drive field and they popped like balloons.
She was flying a 100,000-ton starship like an F35 fighter jet and I was reminded of why I’d fallen in love with her in the first place. But the problem with those little Tevynian pieces of shit was that there were just so damned many of them.
“We got about forty more space fighters aiming straight at us,” I told her. “They’re firing.”
Something shook the superstructure of the Two Angels like a hand on her shoulder, waking her up from a nap. It was the combined impact of the laser weapons on the drive field, destabilizing it ever-so-slightly, just enough to remind us they were there.
“I’m going to draw them away from the Truthseeker,” she declared, turning the ship away from our Helta ally.
Another asteroid was blown to fragments by a relativistic shard of tungsten.
“Uhh…” Baker said, hesitant, not as if he were unsure of himself but more like he didn’t really want to share bad news. “I got some of the power meter things dipping into the red. That’s bad, right?”
“How far?” Julie snapped. glancing around at him before turning her attention back to the controls. “How many?”
“Three…four…” Baker counted softly. “Okay, I got six of them dipping down, three like all the way in but now they’re starting to come back, two were like halfway into it and then came back up. And one is just stuck there.”
“Not too horrible,” she judged, though I personally had no idea. “It’s the micro-jump fucking with the power couplings. We’ll be okay as long as most of them hold.”
“Most of them?” Baker repeated.
“Shut up, Baker.”
“They’re following us,” I informed her. “Still firing.”
As if to confirm my report, the drive field shuddered, slightly harder than the first time. I tried to find an aiming point that would line up more than one of the things, not wanting to waste a shot meant for a cruiser on a single fighter, and when I thought I had one, I fired. The ship’s main gun was so powerful, it vaporized the space fighters, leaving nothing behind but a dimly-glowing nebula of burning gas, but then it had to build up its capacitors for long, impotent seconds. By the time it was recharged, the fighters would have gone into evasive maneuvers and scattered and I’d be back to shooting one at a time.
“How much reaction mass you reckon those things carry, Andy?” Julie asked me.
“Can’t be much,” I said. “No more than one of our shuttles, I’d imagine.”
“Yeah, though they probably weigh a bit less. I’m gonna say they can’t go on a heavy-g boost for more than a few minutes before they’re bingo fuel.” She smirked. “They still following us?”
Another gentle shove.
“Still there.”
“Just a little more boost,” she said in a singsong chant, fingers edging the drive field’s power output up. “Not too much, don’t want to scare them off and make them think we know what we’re doing.” Another few seconds, her foot tapping rhythmically on the deck. “And that should do it.” She shot me a grin. “Sorry about this, boys.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Baker exclaimed, and this time I doubled over.
The micro-jump had taken us out at least thirty light-seconds from our previous position, if I was reading the sensors right. I mean, I couldn’t read them, but I was guessing the distance from an earlier estimate and it seemed we were around five million miles or so farther from the Truthseeker than we had been.
The fighters were about where we’d left them, except they’d cut off their drives and were probably doing a skew flip and getting ready to decelerate to try to make it back to the Helta ship. Which they probably wouldn’t have enough reaction mass to do.
“Power meters are buried in the red again,” Baker reported once he’d managed to swallow the lump in his throat. “They’re coming back…except now a second one isn’t.”
“What the hell are you doing up there, Andy?” Pops’ voice scratched and crackled in my earpiece. “One of these funky column things here in engineering just started sparking and smoking and shit. Is it gonna explode? Do we need to get the hell out of here?”
“Julie, are the power conduits in engineering going to explode?” I asked her.
“Probably not,” she told me. I stared at her, distinctly un-comforted.
“Probably not?”
“Did you just say ‘probably not,’ Andy?
” Pops demanded.
“I’m not a fucking engineer,” Julie protested. “I think we’ll be okay as long as we don’t push this bucket of bolts too much. God alone knows how well these Tevynian assholes keep the thing up. Wouldn’t be surprised if they bang stones on the walls to fix an electrical short.”
“Let’s just try not to do any more micro-jumps for a while, then, okay?” I suggested.
“Sure,” she acceded, waving it off as if I was being paranoid. “I’ll just cruise back in on the drive field. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so without pushing her too hard.”
I was about to call Pops back and let him know he had nothing to worry about when life decided now would be a good time to fuck with me and I saw what could only have been four Tevynian cruisers drop out of hyperspace nearly on top of the Truthseeker.
“Move away from the power conduits, Pops,” I warned him, knowing what Julie was about to do.
“Shit,” she muttered, massaging the controls. “I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do against four of them.” Her expression was dejected. “I suppose I knew this day would come, but I was hoping not quite so soon.”
“Pinball maneuver,” I told her, an idea germinating in my subconscious, filling me in on the details as I spoke them. “Bounce them off our drive field.”
Julie scowled at me.
“That only works if you have something close to bounce them into,” she reminded me. “Like the Moon, for instance, which we don’t have out here.”
“Don’t we?” I asked, grinning. “What about those other cruisers?”
“Damn,” Julie drew the word out into three syllables, her eyes lighting ups. “I knew there was a reason we kept you around.”
I couldn’t see what she was doing on the controls, but her fingers looked like she was tying a square knot while making shadow puppets. On the tactical display, the Truthseeker was already taking fire and my guts clenched in sympathy. I wondered if we’d be in time.
“Heads up, boys. Jumping now.”
Muscles spasmed in my chest, my neck, my face and I wondered if there were physiological consequences to this shit. Besides the whole maybe dying part. My vision took a moment to clear, and by the time it did, we were barreling down on one of the Tevynian cruisers, the one at the starboard edge of their formation relative to us and the orbital plane of the solar system, less than five thousand miles away.
The sublight drives kicked in with a flick of Julie’s right hand and those five thousand miles vanished in an instant. They didn’t even shoot at us, probably because they were frozen in disbelief that anyone could be crazy enough to try ramming one starship into another, but that wasn’t the plan.
We’d first used the maneuver with the Truthseeker back in Lunar orbit, when a Tevynian cruiser had followed her into the Solar System. The two ships were evenly matched and the Helta could have survived the encounter, but they couldn’t be sure of keeping the Tevynians from escaping with the knowledge of Earth and the humans who lived there. I’d asked the simple question of what would happen if one drive field hit another, just a glancing blow, and the answer had been that both ships would be propelled away from each other at relativistic speeds.
That had been months and months ago and I found it was a lot like women I knew who had decided to have a second child: enough time had passed that I’d forgotten how damned painful the whole thing had been. Imagine someone hanging you up by your ears, hanging a hundred pounds of weight from your ankles and smashing a baseball bat into your stomach, but the very next second, you were standing on the ground and none of it had ever happened, leaving only the vivid and visceral memory of pain, and you’ll have some idea how it felt.
Alarms were sounding, or what I assumed were alarms. They sounded a lot like wolves howling if the wolves had inhaled a lungful of helium first and I would have mocked the Tevynian choice of klaxon, but then again, where did we get ours from? The weird alarm whoop was the first thing to penetrate the fog over my thoughts, and when I tried to shake my head to clear it, I almost screamed at the agony spearing through my temples.
“What the fuck was that?” Baker moaned, cradling his head in his hands.
“Did it work?” I rasped, trying to get my eyes to focus.
“Either it worked,” Julie said through teeth clenched with pain, “or the Tevynians just decided to put on the galaxy’s biggest fireworks show.”
I squinted at the view on the main screen and saw what could have been a second sun lighting up this section of the asteroid belt, a glowing ball of gas a hundred miles wide, where two of the four enemy cruisers had been only moments before. And I saw it drawing away from us very, very quickly, because we were careening away from the explosion at a good fraction of the speed of light.
“Get us back there,” I urged Julie, leaning forward in my seat as if I could do something to slow us down. “There are still two cruisers going after Joon-Pah.”
“Right, give me a second,” she said, cracking the knuckles of her right hand and shaking it out as if she’d lost feeling in it. “These damned ships aren’t designed for stunts like that, you know?”
“Neither am I,” I assured her.
“Drive field is propagating.” Her eyes danced over the readout, “Let’s put on the brakes, shall we?”
“Hey,” Baker cut in, his words still slurred, his eyes blinking fitfully, “the power level thingies…you said yellow was really bad, right?”
“What?” Julie snapped, eyes locking on his readout.
God took the ship in His tight little fist and shook us like a maraca, then tossed us aside, bouncing the whole ship off the wall of the universe.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Metal screamed its death agony and I was fairly sure we were next.
The shudders that had racked the ship from taking enemy fire had been nothing compared to the rending, shrieking oscillation now. Cracks spiderwebbed from the overhead through the front bulkhead, and the main viewscreens went blank, the projectors either losing power or simply breaking from the vibration. I thought for a second that our chairs would come off their moorings, but once the shaking stopped, everything was quiet but for the groan of metal bent out of shape slowly returning to its original position.
“What the fuck?” Pops again, though his voice was louder, clearer. There was less interference now. “What the hell are you doing to this ship? Every single one of those damned power conduits just blew! I mean,” he clarified, “they didn’t explode, thank God, but they all burned up and the whole damned compartment is full of smoke!”
“Yeah, this whole ship is toast,” Julie said, unstrapping and rolling out of her seat, stopping long enough to grab her helmet. “All the control boards are dead.” She shrugged. “I hope Joon-Pah can shake those cruisers, because he ain’t getting any help from us. The reactor hasn’t flushed, but none of the power is going to the drives or the weapons. We’re lucky we still have gravity and atmosphere.”
“There’s no way to fix it?” Baker asked, bracing himself against his chair as he rose, limping back to his armor.
Julie rolled her eyes.
“I’m sure there is, Commando Cody, but I am a pilot, not an engineer or a physicist.” She shot me a look, shaking her head. “We’ve done all we can with her, Andy. Time to abandon ship.”
“Pops,” I called, already strapping into my Svalinn suit, “we’re driftwood out here. We’re going to have to abandon ship.”
“How’re we gonna get back to the shuttle with the passage blocked?” he asked. He hadn’t even mentioned the dead and wounded. He would get them out, somehow, because that was who he was.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to recall the schematics I’d seen before we launched.
“Are your suits still airtight?” I asked him.
“Well, we can rig them up for a while with the sealant spray,” he said, sounding doubtful. “Why?”
“Because the only other way from engineering to the docking bay i
s across the hull of the cruiser.”
“Oh, shit, sir, I was afraid you were gonna say something like that.”
“For us, too?” Baker asked from behind me, sealed into his suit and holding the helmet in place, ready to latch it into the neck gasket.
“Yeah, for us, too,” I told him, then switched back to Pops. “You need to head for the utility lock two levels up from engineering. Just follow the passage back the way you came, but take a left at the first intersection, which should take you up to the service and maintenance crawlways. We’ll meet you there.”
“Roger that. Be careful, though. We didn’t kill all those fuckers trying to ambush us. They could still be out there looking for trouble.”
“Well, they better hope they don’t find it, then.”
The blast shield would only go up about four feet, probably because the track had been warped or cracked by the drive field overload. I ducked under it with my KE gun ready, half-expecting one of the Tevynian wounded we’d left outside to take a shot at me. They didn’t. They weren’t moving at all, though I heard a couple moaning and saw what was undoubtedly vomitus staining the floor beside one. The micro-jumps and the drive field deflection and the overload had been rough on us, strapped into the acceleration couches. For the poor bastards outside the blast shied, lying unsecured on the deck, already with broken bones and concussions…well, I was surprised any of them had lived through it.
“Clear,” I reported.
Julie duck-walked under the barrier, carbine at her shoulder, then grabbed one of the laser pistols, shoving it into her suit’s equipment belt. I didn’t say anything. It probably wouldn’t penetrate Tevynian armor any better than it did ours, but maybe she wanted a trophy. After all, how many pilots got into running gunfights with the enemy?
Baker was last, pulling Grunewald’s body out behind him, then tossing it over his shoulder as if it didn’t weigh anything. Outside the armor, Baker could barely walk, but inside, he was Superman again. And it was a good thing he could, because if he hadn’t been along, I would have had to leave Grunewald’s body behind. One of us had to be on guard.
