by Evan Currie
“But what do we do? We don’t know his plans, and it would be suicidal for us to rendezvous with the Terrans on that course!”
Druel slowly nodded in agreement with his second in command. Whatever strategy the Terrans were putting into action, he was not privy to it nor would he be anytime in the immediate future. Without that information, he could not risk his people so flagrantly for so little apparent gain.
“We will provide cover and support from a more . . . sane distance,” he said, “and leave the good captain’s plan unfettered by our own unknowing interference. We continue as planned.”
“Yes Captain.”
► “Do we have an identity on the foundering ship?” Eric asked as they waited, the numbers falling with an inexorable advance toward contact.
“It is the Tetanna, Capitaine,” Milla answered first, drawing his attention. “I decoded her identification while analyzing threat profiles.”
“Priminae or Imperial?” he asked, unfamiliar with the name.
“It is of the Colonies,” she confirmed. “A new ship, a Heroic by the Terran designation.”
That was more or less what he’d been expecting, but Eric winced all the same. He was aware of just how much of a beating a Heroic could take and still remain functional, so seeing the Tetanna obviously crippled and bleeding air into the black like it was could almost be described as a physically painful sensation.
“Have SAR crews ready to scramble the second I give the order,” Eric said. “We may not have much time to get the people on that hulk, so we can’t afford to waste any of it.”
“Aye sir,” Heath answered. “They’re on alert now, but I’ll be sure to have them heating up their reactors the second we get in range.”
“Good. None of our people, or our allies, go out like that if we can help it,” Eric said firmly.
Dying in space was bad enough, but he had nightmares about what happened to the crew of a Priminae cruiser that suffered a core collapse. It was almost funny, he supposed, that he considered them as insane as they considered him for wanting pulse torpedoes installed on the Odysseus.
Both were nightmarish ways to go out if anything went wrong, he thought. What you’d already assimilated into your worldview made the horror personal. Being blown up in an antimatter explosion was something he’d come to terms with a long time ago. Sucked into a black hole? Not so much.
“Capitaine,” Milla broke into his thoughts, “it is almost time.”
Eric looked up at the plot, checking the countdowns that were running, and nodded. “Right you are. Show our broadsides to the enemy and stand by for FTL Pulse!”
“Standing by,” the scanner tech answered instantly.
“Coming about,” Steph said, twisting the big ship in space while maintaining the warp vector on their previous course.
The Bellerophon and Boudicca both followed suit, the three ships hurtling sideways through space as their transition cannons were brought fully to bear.
Eric checked the clock, waiting for the right moment.
“Pulse out, one ping only,” he ordered finally. “Mark!”
“Pulse out!”
“Targeting solution to the cannons!” Eric snapped.
“Targeting solution updated,” Milla responded. “Ready to fire.”
“Fire!”
“Fire out,” she said as the Odysseus opened fire with her t-cannons just a hair ahead of the Bellerophon and the Boudicca as they did the same.
“Repeat! Repeat!” Eric ordered.
“Pulse out!”
“Fire out.”
The three ships again painted the targets with tachyon pulses, then opened fire with the t-cannons.
► For all their speed, augmented by solid rocket propellant, CM fields, and the initial gravity launch, the kinetic-kill high-velocity missiles (HVMs) were the slowest weapon in the arsenal of a Heroic Class starship.
Crossing the void at just over eighty percent of the speed of light, the ten-ton missiles massed effectively nothing while the CM fields were in operation. With a small sensor package in the nose, HVMs were able to, in theory, track slightly to acquire moving targets but, in practice, they were line-of-sight weapons similar to lasers.
Fired first, the HVMs were almost upon their targets when the lasers of the Heroics overtook them and lanced on ahead. Bending through the warp fields the ships used for propulsion, most of the beams were attenuated or redirected away from their targets.
Some, however, struck true and bored through armor and hull as the HVMs entered terminal guidance and abruptly reversed their CM fields to vastly increase their effective mass just before slamming into their targets.
That was when the transition cannons deposited live nukes on short fuses into the chaos of the situation.
► The alarms that suddenly tore through her ship, and presumably her entire task force, caused Misrem to bolt upright in recognition.
“Laser strikes across the—”
A boom was felt more than heard, and the deck actually lurched under their feet. Misrem and her people grabbed whatever they could, more shocked than actually thrown around, but still wide-eyed and unsteady.
“That was no laser,” she snarled. “What hit us?”
“Kinetic strike,” her scanner officer said. “Timed to arrive with the laser—”
“Translight detection!”
Misrem felt like she couldn’t get a handle on what was happening. Too much was coming at her all at once. She turned to the scanner officer, a new demand on her lips, just as several screens around the command deck flared white before going dead.
“Now what?!” she thundered, striding across the deck with purpose in every step.
“Nuclear submunitions, Navarch, detonating all through the squadron.” The scanner technician stammered out, “They are detonating inside our warp fields!”
Misrem blanched white. “How did they get those things that close undetected?”
“Unknown. Computers are still analyzing, but they must have been part of the kinetic barrage.”
Misrem seethed, considering what that meant. Nuclear devices outside the warp fields were negligible. The radiation and energy release would be entirely attenuated or captured by a ship’s warped space. Inside, however, they were somewhat more serious. It would take weeks to clean out the radiated sections of armor and render the ships safe again.
That was just adding insult to the injury of the kinetic strikes.
The timing, however, was impressive.
These are people who know how to fight, she decided as the scanners rebooted from the flash shutdown caused by the nuclear detonations. “Give me damage reports!”
“We are bleeding air on eight decks, Navarch,” her second said, coming up to her. “No laser strikes hit us, but we have at least eight hundred tons of irradiated armor that will now have to be stripped, cleaned, and replaced as soon as we make it back to the Empire. If that takes too long, we will lose fifteen percent of our lower crew to radiation sickness.”
Misrem groaned slightly. “And the rest of the squadron?” she asked, almost not wanting to know.
“We lost a destroyer,” her second admitted. “It seems that one of the nuclear devices may have detonated inside her hull.”
“HOW?”
“Unknown.”
“Go on,” Misrem waved, suppressing her anger.
“The most damaging at this point were the kinetic strikes,” her second continued. “Lasers were attenuated by the warping of space, but the kinetic strikes that hit did so with . . . startling power.”
That caught her attention. Misrem looked over. “Show me.”
Her second wordlessly handed her the report, tapping a section to highlight it.
Misrem stared for a long moment before looking up. “What did they fire at us? Small planetoids?”
“We would have detected that, Navarch. Still analyzing; however, the kinetic vehicles either impacted and were destroyed or are long gone now, so we real
ly are not sure,” he answered, shaking his head.
“Who are these people?” Misrem asked softly, so as not to attract any attention from the crew around her. “They are not Oathers, Jachim.”
“No Navarch,” her second agreed. “They are not. They use similar technology; however, the more we deal with them, the clearer it is they have either bartered for, or stolen, some of it from the Oathers.”
“Bartered,” Misrem said. “The Oathers have similar changes in both their technology and their tactics, though they are clearly unused to the potential of it yet. That is not the case with these . . . anomalies.”
She hissed the last word, thinking of the report given to her by Aymes so long ago. She’d then considered the term to be unnecessarily histrionic in nature. No matter what they were, they were just people. Few were those who truly deserved to be recognized as being truly different.
Even the Oathers and the Empire were not really so different, she was well aware. It was merely a point of philosophy and superstition that had driven the wedge between their ancient ancestors.
At the moment, however, she did not have the time to analyze the differences that were becoming evident.
“How long until they enter our engagement range?”
“At their current vector, Navarch? Very soon.”
“Continue reforming our squadron. Have all ships stand ready to fight.”
► “Initiate evasive maneuvering in”—Eric paused to check the clock—“four minutes. They’re not likely to be too happy with us right now.”
Heath managed to maintain her composure, unlike some others around her.
“I can’t imagine why not,” she said, rather proud at having kept her voice level. “Touchy sort, you suppose?”
Eric smiled thinly, tipping his head in her direction. “I believe I’d bet on it, Commander.”
“Then I suppose we had best plan our maneuvers accordingly, yes?”
“I suppose we should, yes.”
Combat in deep space was a peculiar sort of thing, Eric mused as they settled in to wait. A petty officer arrived with steaming coffee from the mess. He accepted his with a polite nod and took a sip as he contemplated how very far he’d come and how strange his life was.
As a Marine on the ground, he’d once judged action by minutes of terror, hours of tension, and weeks of monotony. In the air as a Marine aviator, it was seconds of terror, minutes of tension, and weeks of monotony.
Since he’d first taken command of the Odyssey and now the Odysseus, the ratio of terror to tension and monotony had again changed. Instants of mind-numbing terror happened, but the worst were the hours of ever-increasing tension that could just eat away at a man’s psyche while he waited for something, anything, to happen.
The weeks of monotony seemed nonnegotiable, no matter what his role.
Must be one of the unwritten rules of the universe, he supposed as he sipped his coffee. The hours of monotony on a job were probably a fixed value, whether you served fast food or your flag and planet. What made jobs really different were the smaller instances of terror and tension.
The ships of the formation shifted casually as the countdown reached the end of four minutes, just in case the enemy had decided to lash out with a retaliation strike. After a few more minutes, however, it was clear that hadn’t happened. Eric frowned into his coffee as he considered the implications.
They’re not like the Drasin. They’re unpredictable, measured, deliberate.
That was a bad thing.
A deliberate enemy was rarely stupid or foolish. Sometimes being deliberate would slow you down, make you inflexible in how you respond to situations, but in space combat, you had time to consider your options.
He would have preferred it if they had been rash and unthinking.
It would make things easier, if nothing else.
► The bridge of the Juraj Jánošík was quiet and dark, her captain intent on the passive telemetry plots they were relying on as the Rogue Class vessel continued its plunge deep into the Priminae star system.
Captain Aleska Stanislaw was a reserved woman by any measure, a trait that had served her well during the end of the Block War when she had been commanding her Blue Navy destroyer in the Arabian Sea. It was one she expected to serve her well now that she had been assigned the first starship to fly the flag of her homeland as well as her world.
She and her fellow Rogues had gone dark on Commodore Weston’s orders, spreading a wide formation as they fell inward toward the system primary. Normally this would mean that the available scans of the immediate area around them would be somewhat limited due to the nature of passive scans.
With the power being chucked around by the enemy and the Heroics, however, Aleska found that her Jánošík was compiling a detailed set of scans for the system and its current population of skirmishing starships.
The enemy, in particular, was blasting space with enough power to make her cringe. As they got closer, the real danger was the Jánošík and her crew absorbing more radiation than was strictly healthy as long as they maintained black hole armor settings.
For the moment, however, the inverse square law protected them both from detection and significant radiation exposure. They had still been forced to close off the outer decks, pulling people into the core of the ship to protect them from cosmic radiation or the occasionally unpredictable solar storm.
“The Heroics have engaged the enemy forces,” her scanner officer, Lieutenant Jurgen, said softly.
Everyone was talking quietly, though it was patently pointless to do so. It just felt like something they should do, she supposed. Like a scene on a submarine in the movies.
Aleska smiled at that thought, but when she spoke, she too kept her voice pitched low.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Do we have information on the results?”
“Some strikes, unknown damages,” he admitted. “However it seems to have rather . . . annoyed the enemy, ma’am.”
I’ll bet it did, she thought, amused. “How so?”
“They’ve vastly increased the power they’re putting into their detection systems,” he said. “Most of it is focused along the same vector as the Heroics approach, however.”
“Good,” she said. “They know we’re here, but they think we’ve deployed ahead of the Heroics, as the Rogues did in the last encounter. We will, unfortunately, be forced to disabuse them of that belief, so let us be certain that we get good value for our money, yes?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She reached to one side and tapped an icon on a control screen, calling up an image of the ship’s chief almost instantly. He had been waiting for her call.
“Ma’am.” The chief nodded politely.
“Are they charged and loaded?” she asked with a glance at another screen.
“Aye,” he told her. “And I’ll be well pleased to have them on their way, Captain.”
“As will I,” she assured him. “It will not be long now.”
“Can’t be too soon,” he said gruffly. “Most of us are not as foolish as Doohan.”
She couldn’t resist rolling her eyes a little at the mention of the Confederate chief engineer of the Autolycus. The man had already become something of a legend, especially among the Rogues. Intentionally collapsing antimatter containment on board his own ship made the man a hero to a few crazy people, mostly engineers, and the boogeyman to damn near everyone else.
She had heard that Commodore Weston had flat-out refused to allow the man to set foot on the Odysseus, though whether it was serious or in jest, Aleska did not know.
“I will let you know the moment we can fire,” she assured her own chief. “Thank you.”
► Hidden in the near impenetrable depths of the black, the six Rogues were converging quietly on their targets as the much more flamboyant Heroics opened their end of the right with the first thrown blows of what appeared to be little more than a slugging match.
In the silence of space, the screams of
rage from the Imperial ships were implied and explicit, though unheard. The power of their scanners testified to that, but without having any idea of an approach vector, there was little chance of their beams hitting one of the approaching Rogues with enough time and focus to cross the detection threshold of the small ships.
The captains of the Rogues agreed about one thing—the enemy panicking was a mixed blessing.
Certainly, it would be very bad for any Rogue spotted while still using black hole settings on their armor.
As useful as the extreme stealth setting was, it had drawbacks. The biggest was that it absorbed as much of the energy spectrum as possible, including light, to prevent a bounce-back signal the enemy scanners could detect. This kept the ships hidden, but it also made them vastly more vulnerable to all sorts of radiation, from lasers to cosmic sources, as little of it would be reflected away from the ship and its crew.
Even without the added complexity of flying into battle where lasers and high-intensity scanning radiation were being thrown around at such extremes, just the regular cosmic background radiation and stellar wind would eventually force the Rogues to “resurface.” Converting their armor back to a more reflective state was necessary, or they would face long-term radiation sickness among the crew and possibly be forced to put the ship into port for a significant refit to replace contaminated armor sections.
That was the nature of space.
CHAPTER 10
► “All ships report in formation, Navarch.”
Misrem glanced up, then waved her second in command away with a casual gesture. She was focused on the approaching squadron and was already splitting her attention between what they were doing, what they had done in the last encounter, and where in the black abyss those missing destroyers were hiding.
“Keep them moving,” she ordered. “The enemy is more than willing to take their shots at extreme range, so I expect more fire density as they close. Standard evasion patterns for the moment.”
“Yes Navarch.”
She resisted the urge to pace, barely, as she continued to consider the oncoming onslaught. The Oathers were predictable, slow to anger, and not especially good at fighting in general. They weren’t cowards by any measure, despite what some in the Empire believed. They simply didn’t have the affinity for combat that was common in Imperial circles, and it showed.
