by Evan Currie
“Receipt confirmed,” the helm officer said instantly. “Engage immediately?”
“Might as well. We’re already dark. Time to get lost.”
“Yes ma’am. New vectors input. Thrusters engaged.”
The Bonny shuddered a little as they dipped their prow below the plane of the solar wind, going nose-down to the elliptic and accelerating.
“I hope this works,” Sheila whispered, low enough that no one would hear her.
She turned her focus to the Heroic vessels she was leaving behind and swore, surprised as they abruptly shifted from their standard colors to the full regalia of the ship’s individual colors, the Odysseus’ blue and silver in the lead.
“Holy hell! The commodore isn’t pussyfooting around this time, is he?”
Sheila shook her head, not looking over to her first officer. “It seems not, Grant.”
Grant Mitchel whistled as the three ships finished running up their colors and went to full military power, diving downwell. With their lights beaming out as bold as brass, there was no way even a passive scanner could miss their approach, which he supposed was entirely the point.
“What part of escorts does Weston not understand?” Mitchel grumbled. “We’re supposed to be providing cover for the Heroics, damn it.”
“He did this the last time too, from what I understand,” Sheila said, sighing. “The commodore doesn’t consider the Heroics to need escorts in the traditional sense. He’ll run his ships to their strengths, as he sees it. That makes the Heroics the swords and shields of the formation, so that’s exactly how he’ll use them.”
“What does that make us?”
Sheila smiled humorlessly. “The daggers that get stuck in the enemy’s backs, Grant. Best send the word down to containment. We’re going to want a full load out in the tubes.”
Grant winced but nodded. “Aye aye, ma’am.”
She didn’t blame him as he followed her orders. Those things were nightmares incarnate.
► Eric glanced at the plot. They’d been dropping in system for the better part of twenty minutes now, accelerating all the while. The plot they were scanning showed the fighting had peaked about an hour and a half after arrival, then faded substantially but had not stopped.
He wasn’t quite sure what to make of the data, but there were few good reasons for that to have happened. He just hoped that it didn’t mean a lot of good people were already dead.
Futile hope.
“Light-speed scans should be picking up the fighting shortly, sir,” Commander Heath said, approaching from her station. “You wanted to be advised, sir.”
Eric glanced up from the display. “Thank you.” He rose to his feet. “Commander, stand by for FTL Pulse.”
“Aye Skipper,” Heath said, straightening and pivoting. “Scanner! Prep for FTL!”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” the scanner tech responded. “Standing by.”
Eric stepped into the center of the command deck. “Then light this whole system up.”
“Pulse out!”
► Tachyons were the bastard children of a universe that despised their very existence. The massless particles were more than merely rare by any definition of the natural universe, and technically it could be argued they didn’t exist even when created via technological means. They did not exist when measured by time, their existence effectively ending in the same instant it began, but during that Schrodinger’s instant, they could be measured to exist in space.
Unlike many Doppler-based scanners, tachyon detection gear didn’t measure distance by bounce time, but rather using a parallax method. When individual tachyons bounced off an object, they would briefly light it up to gear capable of detecting the energy pulse. Two, usually more, scanners would register the signal and then compare their findings to determine range to target.
To anyone with detection gear, a tachyon pulse might as well be a stick of dynamite set off across the street. You couldn’t miss if you tried.
► Misrem was hunched over the tactical station as another rake of laser slashed across the port flanks of her squadron. Damage reports went from a trickle to a flood.
“Move destroyer cohort two to cover our port flank,” she ordered, ignoring the distant shudder of air explosively escaping the hull of her ship. “Focus our fire on the lead element of the enemy formation as they pass. I want to cripple as many of them as we can so we can sweep this mess up without tracking these pests across forty light-years to do it.”
“Yes Navarch. Destroyer cohort two is moving to seal the breach in our port formation,” her tactical commander responded. “We’re prioritizing the—”
A warning squeal across the deck snapped Misrem upright as she spun toward the long-range scanners.
“Report!” she barked, already striding in that direction.
“Translight scanning pulse, Navarch. Hold on.” The scanner tech frowned and leaned into her work. “We are compiling visual signals now.”
“Already?” Misrem asked. “That is impressive timing. How far out are they?”
“Fourteen light centals,” the tech responded. “They timed their pulse right to the moment we’d pick them up anyway.”
“Professional,” Misrem replied. “Show me.”
“On display.”
She looked up to the large screen, and her face twisted slightly as she recognized the gleaming armor and colors of the lead vessel closing on her ship’s location.
“It is them,” she said with a hint of wonder to her voice.
It was the anomalies, unless she was very mistaken. Oh, a mistake was possible, given that the Oather vessels appeared to use the same ship design, armor, and various other specifications as the anomalies did, but she could read the confidence in the enemy formation without any trouble at all.
They were spoiling for a fight, unlike the desperation the Oather vessels had shown as they made their moves.
These anomalies were almost . . . Imperial in how they thought.
“Recall our destroyer squadrons,” she called as she turned from the plot. “I want to reestablish our formation well ahead of their arrival. Disengage the fleeing Oather vessels. Let them go.”
“Navarch?” Her second looked at her, clearly surprised. “They are only three of them.”
Misrem laughed. “If there are only three of them, I will eat my own sidearm. Increase scanning, all sectors.”
► “Translight pulse!”
“Localize it!” Druel ordered, pushing sweat-slicked hair back from his eyes as he pored over the tactical positions of his ships and the enemy’s deployment.
He was surprised a moment later to see the Imperial destroyers begin to break off, giving his vessels some breathing room.
What is going—
“It is the Odysseus, Captain!”
Druel snorted. That would explain it.
He turned from the tactical display. “Her location and vector?”
“Intercept vector, twenty marks out, closing extremely fast,” the scanner technician answered. “They are pushing their space-warp to the limits, Captain.”
“Is it their full squadron?” he asked as he walked across the deck.
“No, sir, only three ships. The Odysseus, the Boudicca, and the Bellerophon.”
Odd names, Druel thought, but he put that aside for the moment. “That is their entire squadron, Stel.”
“Sir?” Stel Avira, the scanner tech, blinked. “I thought they had a nine-vessel squadron.”
“They do. The Terrans run their own class of ships alongside the cruisers,” he explained. “They will have gone dark, but they’re out there . . . somewhere.”
“I am not seeing anything on gravity detection,” Stel said doubtfully.
“And you will not. Those ships do not have cores. They run on reactors similar to the Odyssey. With the reactive armor the Terrans developed, we will not see them until they fire,” Druel said. “Do not concern yourself; we are not the ones they will be targeting.”
He turned
toward the helm. “Prepare for maneuvering! I want the entire squadron ready to come about in a hundred seconds or less!”
“Captain, we are bleeding atmosphere from every deck,” his second said quietly, coming up to him. “So are many, if not most, of our squadron. We need time to run repairs.”
“We will run them as we fight,” Druel ordered, his face set. “It is one thing for the Terrans to fight our battles with us; it is very much another for them to fight our battles for us. Get the squadron back in formation and bring us about.”
“Yes Captain.”
► The Tetanna was adrift, atmosphere bleeding from every deck faster than even her generators could keep up with, when the pulse hit their sensors.
It was ignored at first. Drey had more important things to concern himself with, and if they had more enemy ships targeting them . . . well, there wasn’t a lot they could do.
“Get those decks evacuated and sealed,” he ordered his damage repair teams. “They’re nonessential at this point, and we don’t have the atmosphere capacity to waste on them. We can worry about those areas if we live.”
“Captain!” his second called from across the command deck. “You should see this.”
“If it is more bad news, I don’t have time for it,” Drey growled.
“I believe it may be good news, Captain.”
“Then I really don’t have time for it. Good news can take care of itself.”
“It’s the Odysseus, Captain. The Terrans are in the system.”
► Eric pored over the return signals that were showing him just what they were charging into.
“Well, this is certainly a thing, isn’t it?” he asked softly as Commander Heath approached him.
“It is at that, Captain.”
They were looking at two mauled squadrons, with the Priminae having clearly gotten the worst of it, but they’d also managed to score some hits of their own. The larger force matched Imperial configurations, though the destroyers were new.
We’re going to have to figure out how to fight those things now. Eric sighed.
As if he didn’t have enough problems to deal with.
“Enemy destroyers are breaking off their engagement, Capitaine,” Milla called from her station, where she was monitoring the tactical situation. “It seems they’re drawing back to the main formation.”
“I see it, thank you,” Eric said. “Well, they seem to be taking us seriously, if nothing else.”
“I would rather be underestimated, sir,” Heath told him dryly.
“Increase in scanning energy from the enemy vectors, Capitaine,” Milla went on, as if neither of them had spoken. “I believe they are looking for the Rogues.”
“I would also rather the enemy be stupid,” Heath added.
“May as well ask for Murphy to not be involved in the battle, Commander,” Eric said. “I mean, as long as you’re wishing.”
“I’m an optimist, Captain,” she told him simply, “not a recruit.”
Eric chuckled. “Duly noted. Well, we’ll leave the Rogues to their business for now, but there’s no reason we can’t give them a bit of a hand just the same.”
“What do you have in mind, sir?” Heath asked, more than a bit wary about the look on her captain’s face.
► On the Bellerophon, Captain Jason Roberts shook his head slightly, more in exasperation than any real objection, as he read off the orders he’d just received.
Eric Weston was nothing if not an unconventional thinker, but there were times that he would very much prefer to be serving under a far more conventional thinker despite the commodore’s laundry list of befuddled enemies that lay adrift in his wake. It would certainly be less stressful.
Sadly, that was not meant to be.
The former Army Ranger rose from his bolstered seat and walked out to the middle of the command deck.
“Stand by for combat maneuvering,” he ordered. “The commodore has an assignment for us.”
The low chuckling coming from the pilot’s pit did nothing to calm his apprehensions.
“Lieutenant Commander, if you have anything to share with the rest of the class, now might be the time,” Roberts said, earning some surprised snickers of his own as the pilot twitched a little.
“Sorry, Captain,” Ray “Burner” Little said from where he was already plugged into the Belle’s computers. “Just a nervous habit when I hear that Raze has a job for me.”
Roberts sighed. “You and me both, Commander. You and me both. Let’s see to it, however, without any more interruptions.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Clear some maneuvering distance from the Odysseus and the Boudicca,” Roberts ordered. “We’re going to be taking fire shortly, so let’s leave ourselves room to evade as we can. Gunnery station, are you ready?”
“Aye Skipper,” Lieutenant Marcia Sanderson responded instantly. “Capacitors primed, cannons locked and loaded, and HVM banks are green across the board.”
Roberts nodded slowly.
He rather wished that they had a few pulse torpedo launchers as well, or maybe a few dozen in this case, as much as those things terrified even him. However, they would make do with what they had. It wasn’t like a Heroic packed light.
“Lock computers with the Odysseus and Boudicca,” Roberts said, not that he thought it would really matter at this point.
“Computers locked, sir.”
“Fire on the commodore’s command.”
► “Fire.”
Eric’s voice was oddly quiet, considering that he had just ordered enough firepower into space to put a serious hurt on a planet.
“HVM banks firing, Capitaine,” Milla said from where she was standing watch at the tactical station.
The slight shudders of the launch couldn’t quite be felt through the deck of the big ship, but they all imagined they could feel them. Shivers ran up the spines of everyone on deck as the weapons were fired into space via gravitic acceleration rather than the magnetic rail guns the Odyssey had once used. As the ten-ton weapons cleared the space-time warp of the ships, solid rocket motors ignited along with powerful CM fields, and the already-fast projectiles accelerated to upper C fractional speed in an instant.
“Time on target firing in T minus ten seconds,” Milla said calmly, as though she hadn’t just sent the equivalent of several extinction-level kinetic weapons into space. She counted down the last few seconds aloud, then closed her eyes as the computers took over and coordinated the firing of the big lasers with the other two Heroics. “Time on target fire mission, out.”
The three big Heroic Class cruisers practically hummed with power as they unleashed their lasers, first in a series of pulsed bursts that lanced out and across the black toward the enemy as they regrouped well beyond the normal minimum effective range considered for such weapons.
“Stand by for maneuvering,” Eric ordered. “Heroics begin deceleration on my mark. Make our course and relative speed to the enemy, zero zero zero at ten kilometers. Put us right in their teeth.”
“Roger, zero zero zero course and relative velocity to the enemy formation,” Steph said from where he was now plugged into the Odyssey’s computer. “You want a slugging match, Raze, you’re gonna get one.”
CHAPTER 9
Priminae Colony Space
► “Gravity shift, Navarch!” the scanner tech said. “Enemy vessels are maneuvering.”
Misrem scowled, tempted to pulse the enemy formation, but she knew that it wouldn’t net her much more information or arrive faster than the forthcoming analysis of the gravity shift.
While gravity waves propagated at the speed of light within the normal universe, gravity was a function of a dimensional fracture caused by mass. Scanners sufficiently tuned to that dimensional shift could detect gravity changes well ahead of their normal propagation according to the laws of the normal universe. The process wasn’t as precise as visual analysis, to say nothing of more advanced real universe scanners, but it was more than she wo
uld need to determine what the enemy commander was up to.
“They are . . . decelerating, Navarch.”
Misrem blinked.
That she had not been expecting.
“On what vector?” she asked, her attention now focused on the new arrivals.
It only took a moment before she got her answer.
“They are on an intercept and matching course with us, Navarch.”
She could feel the blood run from her face as she considered that, but refused to react until she’d taken a couple of deep breaths.
“Confirm that,” she uttered through clenched teeth.
“Confirmed, Navarch. I’ve run the numbers three times. Confirmed.”
She refused to blurt out her thoughts, but the urge to call that an impossibility was very hard to resist. No ship’s commander, no squadron commander, would ever put such a small task group into a slugging match with a battle squadron. It was insanity. More than that, it was stupid insanity.
These anomalies are most certainly insane, the navarch thought, but nothing I have yet seen would indicate that they are stupid as well.
“Increase scanning!” she said. “All ships, find their destroyers! They are out there—I know they are. Find them!”
► “They are insane.”
Druel snorted at the words his second in command had blurted as the track of the Terran ships became apparent.
“I do not think that you’d find many people who disagree with you on the surface of it,” he said. “However, I rather think more is going on here than we’re aware of. The Terran Heroics travel with smaller destroyers of their own. Do you see any, Pol?”
The officer looked back at the telemetry data and slowly shook his head. “No. But—”
“But indeed,” Druel said thoughtfully. “Even with their six escorts, assuming that they are somewhere waiting to strike, I doubt that the Terran ships could easily survive a face-to-face exchange with a group this size. I would agree, incidentally, that Eric Weston is most insane by any standard I am familiar with. He is not, however, suicidal or stupid.”
