by Evan Currie
“Laser baked the wall he was standing in front of,” a Marine answered without looking back, gesturing across the deck as he watched for enemies ahead. “See for yourself.”
Conner and the corpsman looked over and both flinched when they saw a shadow baked into the wall opposite where the strike had impacted.
Jesus, these people have no damn common sense at all! Who uses weapons this powerful on board a ship, of all places?
“Okay, pull him back a bit and see to his armor as best you can,” she said. “Then get back to the evac point. Call for a dustoff if you need it. The shuttles have better medical gear.”
“Yes ma’am,” the corpsman answered as she prepped the armor for movement and signalled a couple of others to help her. “Good luck, ma’am.”
With her Marine and the corpsmen out of the area, Conner moved up to where the remaining Marines of first squad were holding up.
“What’s it look like?” she asked.
“Honestly, ma’am, I’m not sure,” Sergeant Gallows answered her. “We think they’re aiming for the bridge, right?”
“Best guess, Sergeant, that’s right,” she said.
“Then they’re being a little half-assed about it, ma’am,” the sergeant told her.
“What makes you say that?” Conner asked, frowning under her armor as she called up everything they had on enemy movements.
The sergeant pointed down one corridor at the junction they were occupying. “Best route to the bridge is that way. They went this way.” He pointed down the next junction before going on. “Now, it could be they’re just turned around a bit. The gravity warping down here makes keeping your orientation difficult.”
That much was true, as she was well aware.
The decks of a Heroic Class ship had to warp with the gravity of the cores. That meant that while they seemed straight while you walked them, the floors and bulkheads actually twisted severely in places in order to keep the floor pointed “down.” The effect was most pronounced the closer to the cores you got, and both command and engineering were buried deep in the ship for protection.
Getting turned around while navigating the inner decks wasn’t merely common—it was expected until one got truly used to the layout.
“The path they chose will get them to the command deck, but it’s a fair sight longer, ma’am,” the sergeant told her. “Hard to say if they were just unaware or what, though.”
She shook her head. “We have to assume they have layout schematics of the general designs. They seem to use similar base designs, so they’d be fully aware of the problem and come in prepared. What else is down that route?”
Her last question was more rhetorical, as Conner was already running her own data search for the route. Practically every vital system was buried as deep in the ship as possible, which meant that everything from environmental control, command, engineering, weapon controls stations . . . They were all dotted around her HUD overlay map of the area.
They could be after anything down here. It’s an intel goldmine, if nothing else.
That thought set off a bad feeling that she felt run down her spine.
“Intel,” she said softly.
“Pardon, Colonel?”
“Intel, Sergeant. Where’s the library core?” she asked, mostly of her own computer.
A yellow dot appeared on her HUD, and Conner instantly shot it off to her Marines.
“Oh shit,” the sergeant swore. “You thinking a core dump? What do they have in the computers of this thing?”
“More than we’d like,” Conner answered. “I don’t know if Earth’s location is in there, but it wouldn’t shock me either way. Transition drive details won’t be there, but the basics will. Weapon schematics, armor specifications . . . Jesus. There’s a lot in here we’d rather they not have.”
“Shit.”
CHAPTER 14
► “Pulse torpedoes, fire on the mark!” Aleska ordered as the Juraj Jánošík bore down on the enemy formation.
“Aye Captain. Mark in twenty seconds . . . Count down to the main display.”
Aleska nodded curtly before focusing her attention elsewhere, knowing that they were about to be exposed. Things were going to get a lot more interesting in the coming moments. The countdown to firing had almost completed when a flash of light from one of the displays startled her, and she looked up just in time for someone to scream.
“That was the Kid! They got the Kid!”
She swore viciously in her head, trying not to let it reach her mouth, but a glance at the data confirmed the announcement. The William H. Bonney had been spotted during terminal maneuvers, and there was no way her crew even saw the laser that killed them. With their black hole armor still absorbing all forms of radiation, the laser would have vaporized most of the hull in an instant.
“Reconfigure armor!” she ordered as the countdown ended. The Jánošík fired a barrage of antimatter charges into space. “White knight settings! Go to full acceleration, swing us back into formation with the Heroics, link up our defense network!”
More lights showed on the displays, these less shocking as the remaining Rogues opened fire with their own pulse launchers, setting gleaming death loose in the universe.
► The death of the Kid shook the crew of the Bellerophon, but Roberts refused to show it as he stood his station. Inside, though, his thoughts were a mix of rumbling anger and sorrow, but he had a job to do.
“Rogues have begun firing and shifting back from black hole armor settings!”
“Good,” Roberts said. “Flush our HVM banks. All military power to the lasers. Don’t baby the tubes. We can refit when we’re done.”
“Yes sir!”
The Bellerophon opened fire, with the Boudicca following suit just seconds later. A rain of destruction poured down on the enemy position from multiple quarters as the Terran vessels threw everything they had into the assault.
If there had been atmosphere around them as they fought, the rumble of the weapons would have shaken the world. As it was, all they heard was the distant whine and click of capacitors discharging and the almost imperceptible vibration of the gravity acceleration systems chucking HVMs into the black.
Combat in space was a lonely, quiet experience.
► “Negative matter detected!”
Misrem clenched her fist. “Fire countermeasures!”
“Countermeasures firing!”
Her ship shuddered, something she’d never felt before on the deck of her vessels. Misrem didn’t like the sensation.
There was no way around it, however, as the systems had been hurriedly installed and the normal care hadn’t been possible either in the short time or because of the nature of the systems themselves.
Actual physical devices launched from the ships of her squadron as she watched, tracking out intercept courses with the incoming negative matter projectiles. Misrem truly hoped this worked. If not, things were about to become rather uncomfortable on her ships in the very near future.
“Countermeasures deploying!”
On the screens, the devices exploded as planned, scattering matter in a cloud just as the negative matter came reeling in. The enemy weapons collided with the clouds of matter the devices deployed, and, in a brilliant flash of light and energy, the two mutually annihilated.
The gambit wasn’t perfect. Some enemy weapons slipped through, making Misrem clench her fists as negative matter rained down on her ships, tearing them to shreds. In the brief cataclysmic exchange, she lost another cruiser and two destroyers.
It was far better than it could have been.
And now it was time to return the favor.
“Track and response,” she ordered. “Kill those pests. Consign them to the abyss with my regards.”
The ships of her squadron responded flawlessly, lasers snapping out, tracking the vessels that had fired on them as they appeared from the shadows like glittering specters arising from the night.
Before their lasers could
cross the relatively short range, another set of alarms went off.
“Enemy projectiles inbound, Navarch!”
► Roberts rocked back, shocked by what the scanners were telling him.
He wasn’t as surprised by what the enemy had done, actually, as he was that he hadn’t thought of doing it first.
They deployed chaff, he noted, jotting down a reminder to look at similar systems for future ships deployed from Earth.
It seemed, according to what he could scan, that they’d really just launched some jerry-rigged explosives packed with plenty of shrapnel. Against a pulse torpedo, that would do the job, if you could get it in front of the weapon. Any sort of matter would self-annihilate with the antimatter in the torpedo, so chaff was effective.
That might render one of our best weapons almost worthless if they can improve their deployment system.
The move was already pretty effective, from what he could tell. They’d blocked well over sixty percent of the incoming weapons, which defanged what remained of the Rogue’s arsenal.
“They’re firing on the Rogues, Captain,” Little said from the pilot’s pit. “Permission to provide cover?”
“Granted.”
► Aleska held on to her station as the Jánošík twisted in space, trying to evade the lasers that had lanced out from the enemy formation.
She knew that even with white knight armor, the Rogues simply didn’t have the mass to absorb much of the level of power now being thrown in their direction. They’d taken a glancing blow that had scarred the ship all the way down her port flank, taking out more systems than she wanted to think about just then. Another hit on that section would be the end of the Jánošík, and her crew with her.
A flash on the scanners made her wince automatically, as it meant that they’d almost been nailed again; if the enemy was able to adjust, the next time they probably wouldn’t get to see the flash. She counted down the seconds, figuring that if they were still alive when she got to thirteen, the enemy hadn’t been able to adjust.
At twelve, a shadow eclipsed the local sun, which meant something really big or really close had moved in. She checked the main display in time to see the Bellerophon put herself between the Jánošík and the enemy as a flash of laser light erupted off the big ship’s armor.
“The Bell took that one for us, Captain!”
“I see it! Helm, sling us around the Bell’s negative well,” she ordered as she looked over to the weapons station. “Tactical, what do we have left?”
“HVMs are out on the port side, Captain. We’re loaded on the starboard, however,” the tactical officer told her.
“Helm, you heard him. Favor the port side, show starboard to the enemy,” she belted. “Tactical, hammer them when we come around the Bell!”
Both stations acknowledged the orders as the Jánošík began to move.
“Hold on tight,” the pilot called. “I’m going to kill our CM as we drop into the Bell’s gravity sink.”
He’s going to what? Aleska thought, cringing. She didn’t say anything aloud, however, because they were already committed. There was a time to second-guess your specialist, but that time was not when fractions of seconds counted.
Thrusters flaring, the Jánošík turned in space and accelerated into the gravity well that existed ahead of the bigger ship. Using the sink to accelerate hard, the Jánošík shuddered as it dived into the gravity trough at full mass until it reached turnover and brought its CM field back to full power.
Shooting out of the gravity well like a Polaris missile from under the sea, the Rogue Class ship slung out from around the Bellerophon at high speed and flushed everything they had left in a single barrage of firepower.
At the now almost point-blank ranges, the high-velocity missiles crossed the range in seconds rather than minutes or hours, slamming through the chaff that had stopped the antimatter of the pulse torpedoes and hammering the enemy formation.
Lasers from the Bellerophon burned past the Jánošík as the smaller ship turned to bring its starboard cannons to bear and opened fire with the last of the nuclear submunitions in its stores.
► “Enemy has engaged with . . . surprising ferocity, Navarch.”
Misrem nodded, noting effectively the same thing across her update boards. The ships of the anomalous species, assuming she was right about them, were fighting with a distinctly different set of tactics than the Oathers.
They were more creative, by far, but more importantly, she was seeing a vastly improved level of coordination between them, though that insane death charge seemed to throw other evidence in the face of that conclusion.
They are a strange people, as judged by their fighting prowess at least. She didn’t know what to make of them.
The initial contact was more indicative of a barbaric berserker species. Not something one normally saw in a spacefaring culture, to be frank, but not entirely unknown either. The Empire had dealt with at least one species of that nature—well before her day, of course—about a third of the way around the galactic rim from their current position.
They’d been dogged adversaries, but their insistence on personal glory in battle had been far more expensive than their culture could maintain over even a slightly elongated campaign. Replacing starships cost time, if nothing else, depending on the nature of a society’s economic structure. The investment in time alone was too high to just throw ships away like detritus.
So while she’d been taken aback by the initial berserker assault they’d endured, Misrem would have preferred it to what she was seeing now.
The enemy vessels were fighting in close formation, covering one another and making good use of their individual strengths. That would magnify their effectiveness several times, and the costs to the Empire would be similarly magnified.
They needed better information.
“Tighten our formation. Evacuate anyone we can from the damaged vessels,” she ordered, preferring not to leave people behind as a general rule. “All ships are to continue returning fire as we maneuver.”
Not every commander in the Empire felt the same, and even she wouldn’t hesitate to cut her losses if called for, but trained forces were investments as well.
“Yes Navarch.”
“And tell the expedition force that if they are not off that Oather vessel in time to be picked up,” she growled, “I will personally order that ship burned to cinders with them on board.”
The communications technician looked pained, but confirmed the order. “Yes Navarch.”
Retrieving crew was all fine and good, but missions had to be accomplished.
► “Dogged bastards,” Captain Hyatt growled as her Boudicca shifted to cover the Rogue Class destroyers as best she could, laser fire burning between the cruiser and enemy ships.
“Yes ma’am,” Commander Jennifer “Cardsharp” Samuels gritted out from where she was locked into the NICS interface in the pilot’s pit.
Hyatt could see the commander flinch occasionally and wondered just what she was experiencing. The NICS system wasn’t entirely bidirectional. No one was dumb enough to design an interface that let the user feel sensory input as actual pain, limiters be damned, but it did send return data along the nerve endings of the user as part of the control system.
Flashes of light, laser strikes along the hull of the Boudicca, and various other stimuli were all part of what allowed the pilot as much real-time information as possible for quick maneuvering decisions.
From what she was told, not being NICS-compatible herself, it could be an incredibly distracting environment to work in. One of the key things pilots and operators were tested on was the ability to focus through an extreme level of information overload while parsing out the vital bits that just couldn’t be ignored.
Hyatt shifted her focus back to the fight, noting that the enemy had begun to maneuver to break contact with the squadron.
This was a critical point in the fight, and unfortunately they were going to have to play a lo
t of it by ear with the Odysseus on the other side of the fight and out of real-time contact with the rest of the group.
The smart move was obvious.
Let the enemy break contact and run them out of the system, but ultimately let them go. The Odysseus had taken too much damage in their initial mysterious run. With their other losses, the enemy simply had them outmassed and outgunned to a level that made forcing an engagement stupid and suicidal.
Playing the smart move wasn’t always the commodore’s strong suit, however, so Hyatt wasn’t sure how the Odysseus would move.
Not that they’d have much choice if Captain Roberts and I made the call before the commodore got close enough to issue orders, she supposed.
The decision would technically be a joint call. She and Roberts were of identical rank, but traditionally he had time in service over her as she had been a blue-water captain until recently, and he had been the XO of the Odyssey.
Time in rank meant a lot, but time in service would trump it in this situation, given the significant differences between Blue and Black Navy operations.
Not that she suspected that she and Roberts would be at odds. The captain of the Bellerophon was known for solid decisions, taking risks when needed but generally following the book a lot more than his former captain.
► “The enemy is maneuvering to break contact, Captain.”
“I see it,” Roberts told the officer standing the scanner watch. “Signal the Bo. We’ll stick with them until they clear the Priminae vessel they disabled earlier. Let’s keep them thinking about us and not the people on that ship.”
“Aye sir.”
Roberts was mildly concerned about the enemy breaking contact so readily, but though they would almost certainly win this fight, he was certain that they knew it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. He was also sure that they didn’t know just how much the loss would hurt the Priminae and Terran forces, which was why they weren’t going to press the fight.
