by Evan Currie
► “They’re breaking formation! Going to full military power. I see a break! Milla, are you with me?”
“I am with you, Stephan. Lasers and remaining missiles firing,” Milla answered calmly, her tone not as detached as the pilot’s, despite all his excitement, but far more subdued than his.
The Odysseus accelerated just ahead of her sister Heroics, the Bell and the Bo hot on her heels. The trio charged into the enemies’ teeth as the formation ahead of them opened up with full lasers at near point-blank range.
“Armor adapting, Captain. They’re coming fast, though. I do not believe we’ll be able to continue this for long,” Milla said immediately.
“We don’t need long. Keep firing.”
“Aye Capitaine.”
The lights dimmed as every laser discharged, pulling power from their reserves, only to come back a moment later as the bridge systems drew directly from the cores.
On the screens, computer-aided simulations showed a crisscrossed cage of photons as the lasers from both the Allies and the Empire lit up the star system.
The Odysseus shuddered when lasers burned through the heavy armor of her bow, the attacks blunted by the forward gravity sink as Steph pushed the system to maximum military levels and urged them beyond. His demand for acceleration overruled protocol, best estimation, and common sense.
The pilot felt the Odysseus fight him again, but was ready for it this time and compensated instantly. He didn’t know what was wrong with the ship he was driving, but now wasn’t the time to take any crap from a recalcitrant starship.
“We’ve a fight to win, you heap,” Steph mumbled under his breath. “You’re the warrior king, damn it. Act like it.”
He didn’t know if the Odysseus heard him, but after that, Steph managed to wrestle the defiant systems of the immense starship back into playing nice.
“That’s more like it. Let’s show them what we’ve got,” he whispered, grinning as the lasers fired under Milla’s direction sliced through the exposed armor of one of the enemy destroyers, bringing light to the black.
Burning, purifying, righteous light.
► “Hold steady,” Aleska ordered, gripping the edge of her station for stability as the Jánošík shuddered again.
They hadn’t been hit. Even with their armor adapting as fast as the combined gestalt of the Allied ship computers could manage, a direct hit would have done far more than send shakes and shudders through her baby.
They were, however, flying through the gravity wash of three large and pissed-off Heroic Class starships right into the teeth of an enemy fleet. She was counting her blessings, even if the lack of gravity controls meant that the Rogue destroyer was riding like a small ship in high seas.
Too much more of this, Aleska thought, and I might even get seasick. Space sick? Oh, it hardly matters. It can’t be any worse than transition sickness.
She was grinning, and she knew it, but couldn’t quite wipe what she expected was a more than slightly manic look from her face.
“Stand by the torpedoes,” she ordered firmly over the creaks and groans of her ship’s protesting hull and bulkheads. “I want to be right in their face this time. We’ll see how well they handle a point-blank barrage. I’m willing to gamble that their little trick with the chaff won’t be quite so effective this time around. If the enemy can learn from their mistakes, never let it be said that we can’t match it and then teach them a new lesson.”
“Aye aye, Skipper!” the big man standing the tactical watch responded with enthusiasm.
He was in better shape than most of her crew, who were alternating between looking at her and looking at the main telemetry plot with varying degrees of horror. Oh, they were doing their jobs, of course, or she’d lose her grin in short order and introduce them to some real horror, but it seemed that their hearts just weren’t in it.
“That’s the spirit, Lieutenant!” she told the tactical officer. “Hold for my orders. Not until you see the whites of their eyes, yes?”
“Yes ma’am.” He matched her grin with one of his own, very nearly as manic.
She almost sighed but managed to maintain her enthusiasm. She would have to have words with the man. When the captain grinned like a maniac, there was a certain gravitas to the moment. When a lieutenant did it, it was really just sort of sad in a creepy way.
He’ll learn, she supposed.
“Hold a little longer . . .” She put the thought aside as the ship bucked under her again.
Without the gravity cores of the larger Heroics, Rogue Class ships could get really bucked around in gravity waves. She’d read about some of the events surrounding the Autolycus’ first voyage, and was surprised in her own way that the crew of that ship had managed with as few blunt-force trauma injuries as they had.
Of course, if her chief tried to detonate antimatter on board her ship, she’d feed him to his own reactors and be done with the man.
How Morgan puts up with that lunatic, I have no idea.
► “Blast it, here they come!”
Misrem glanced over to where her second was stealing a look at the display showing the enemy assault from their rear and caught his eye with a glare.
“Pay attention to your own task and leave them to me!” she snapped, pointing to where the damaged Oather vessel was looming in the distance.
At the speed they were moving, they were now only moments from their only opportunity for capturing their boarding craft. If they overshot, she was now convinced that it would take a clean sweep of every enemy ship in the system before they could come back around and attempt another try.
If they missed because her second was too busy trying to second-guess her job, he would have a rather cold reception upon their return to the Empire, assuming she allowed him to live that long.
“Secure all nonessential areas. Bring our people deeper into the ships,” she ordered. “They’re going to land a few blows before this is over, so let us mitigate the damage.”
“Yes Navarch.”
She ignored the acknowledgment, walking across to the tactics command officer and leaning in. “Your strikes are surprisingly light, Krin.”
“I know.” The man looked frustrated. “I do not understand it. We have analyzed the power of their weapons versus our own, and we have an edge, Navarch, but it is not translating into real-world results. We are missing variables, but I cannot be sure what they are.”
“We know that they have superior armor,” she said, “some reflective system that is more effective than any I have heard of, clearly.”
“Perhaps,” Krin said, “but that does not cover the whole of the story. Their strikes are landing harder than they should as well. If I didn’t have the raw numbers right in front of me, Navarch, I would swear that they held a power advantage on their weapons as well.”
She hissed. “Well that makes acquiring better intelligence on our foes even more of a priority. We will have to make certain that we do not miss our chance.”
He looked at her seriously. “We must not miss, Navarch. There is too much here we do not understand. Without knowing more, a true Imperial incursion into this region is impossible to recommend.”
She nodded reluctantly.
That was a fact she didn’t want to acknowledge, but one that she couldn’t deny either. Imperial Intelligence would veto a full incursion just based on the lack of solid data on the new species, whoever they were. Without knowing more, the Empire could walk into anything, blindly, and take utterly ruinous casualties in the process.
Personnel, they could lose. There were plenty more available from any number of worlds, but ships had value. They could lose a few, even more than that, but each one was a real and noticeable investment of Imperial resources. Lose enough and even the normally blind senate would start to squawk in outrage, masking most of the outrage as complaints about casualties, of course, but that was just the way of politicians.
“We will not miss,” she said firmly.
The
Empire would not be stopped, not even slowed, not by her hand.
Yet Misrem knew that it wasn’t entirely in her hand. The men on that damaged starship held the key now, and until they passed it along, her options were . . . limited.
► In the small command deck of the boarding ship, Kiosha, the commander of record, paced in a circle, only pausing every few seconds to look over and see if any new information from the boarding team had become available.
The group, led by Half Centure Leif, had encountered heavier resistance than they’d calculated but had so far managed to execute the mission by the numbers. If not for the jamming that both sides were using, the commander was well aware that the mission would likely already be complete, with the vital data having been sent off to the navarch and the fleet withdrawing to regroup and analyze what they’d found.
That, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, in a twisted way, had yet to happen.
Fortunately, the commander supposed, because he was under no illusions concerning how valuable his ship was once that data was put on it. At best, the chances were very strong that the fleet would leave them to be captured. At worst, well, detonating the destruct charges on the Parasite this close to an already crippled cruiser was certainly one way to distract an overly sentimental foe.
He was in no hurry to find the answers at the end of it all, but if that was what the Empire demanded of him, then so be it.
In the meantime, however, he was hoping that the centure’s team made it back to the ship as planned.
A hero’s return, limited though it might be, was far superior to the alternatives.
“Commander!”
The panicked tone in his subordinate’s voice did not bode well.
“What is it, Nil?” he asked, breaking his circle of pacing and crossing to the communications officer.
“Signal from the centure. They’re under assault!”
The commander grimaced. “Unfortunate but hardly a surprise. Can they make it back?”
“Commander, you do not understand. They’re under assault on the flight deck!”
That was not what he’d expected to hear, not at all. The commander twisted and glowered at the man standing at the security watch station. “You should have warned me that the deck had been taken!”
“There’s nothing on my screens, Commander, I swear!” The man’s protests sounded hollow to the commander’s ears, and he stepped over to glare down at the screens himself.
He froze, noting there really was nothing on them.
“How is this possible?” he muttered, looking back up and over to the communication officer. “Can you confirm the centure is right?”
“Their trackers indicate that they’re straddling the flight deck and an adjoining space that they burned through,” Nil said. “Plus the centure confirmed this himself.”
“Blast!” The commander paled, rushing to his own station and slapping his hand down on a communication control. “Security, we may have boarders! Search the ship; eliminate any intruders you find.”
► Lieutenant Hadrian tilted his head, frowning under his environmental suit.
“Do you guys hear that?” he asked the closest Marine.
The Marine nodded. “Activity, lots of it. Boots scraping the deck, armor scuffing the bulkheads. I’d say they know we’re here.”
“Damn!” Hadrian swore. “Oh well, it was good while it lasted. Gird up, boys. Trouble’s come looking for us!”
“Already here, LT,” a Marine snapped as a door swung open just ahead of him and an Imperial trooper in light armor stepped through the opening with as much a look of surprise on his face as Hadrian felt was probably mirrored on his own.
The closest Marine, thankfully, was less stunned by the sudden turn than his lieutenant and closed the distance in an instant. He slammed the butt of his rifle into the head of the Imperial, sending him thudding into the bulkhead as he leveled his carbine and opened fire through the door.
Hadrian assumed that the Marine could see something he couldn’t and shouldered his own rifle, advancing as the others followed suit. The lead Marine dropped to one knee, opening room for Hadrian to fire over his head just as Hadrian arrived at his back to see a small squadron of Imperials finishing a mad scramble for cover.
Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to be surprised by the encounter, Hadrian thought as he sighted down the optics of his weapon and opened fire.
Caught in the open, with little to no cover to rush to, the Imperial soldiers were on the short end of a very painful stick, and soon only the echoes of the fight were left rebounding through the hall.
“We have to move,” Hadrian said firmly. “If they didn’t know we were here before, they do now. Which way to the command deck?”
The Priminae security man nodded down the hall they’d just cleared. “If they build to similar specification as we do, and it seems they do, then it will be that way.”
“You heard the man, let’s move!”
“Oorah!”
Hadrian caught the confused look shot in his direction by the lightly armored security man and shrugged. “It’s a Marine thing.”
► The commander of the boarding vessel snarled. Reports were still blank on whether they had boarders of their own, but losing contact with one of their security teams would seem to have stilled any doubt on that point.
He didn’t know what the enemy wanted on his ship, though he didn’t really need to know. They would try to either sabotage the vessel in the reactor rooms or come for the command center. Those were really the only two targets of value on his ship, and he was sitting on the highest value of the two.
“Issue weapons,” he ordered, turning to the security officer standing watch at the back of the deck. “All command officers and all crew in sensitive areas.”
“On your order, Commander,” the man said stonily.
That acknowledgment was something of a dual-edged sword, the Commander knew. The security man was acceding to his order, certainly, but he was also setting the record as to who had issued it. Usually this was more of a formality, a tradition from older, simpler times.
This time, however, issuing weapons to many of the crew who might not be fully trustworthy, well, it took on a somewhat more sinister meaning.
The commander didn’t care. He had more things to concern himself with at the moment, and the reactions of the officers’ corps would only matter if they all lived through this.
► Misrem growled as another series of bursts from high-level laser fire cut through one of her destroyers, leaving it drifting in nearly two separate pieces as the enemy continued to charge in. The three ships they’d tentatively identified as belonging to the anomaly species were leading the charge with their own destroyers in tow, while the Oather ships provided cover from the rear guard position.
It was a good strategy, but more important to her, it seemed to confirm the psychological split she had observed and further seemed to correlate the psychological predictions of Imperial Intelligence for the Oathers.
They were hesitant to engage, particularly without a strong showing of force on their own side. It was, or seemed to be, this new group that was urging them on, pushing them to be more aggressive.
We will need to deal with these unknowns first, then, and the Oathers will fall as expected once that has been accomplished.
Of course, as her own ships shook with the effect of a high-powered laser strike, Misrem was reminded that would not be so easy to accomplish.
“Shift sub squadrons to cover the main fleet,” she ordered. “Focus available fire on the lead cruiser. We can deal with the rest when the lead vessel has been handled. They were the ones insane enough to charge us alone. Likely the others will be broken if the bravest among them is handled neatly.”
“On your order, Navarch.”
► Beams hotter than the core of a star lanced out from the Imperial Fleet, all targeting the Odysseus herself as the big ship led the charge. Refractory displays brilliant
ly lit up the black as the big ship’s armor valiantly worked to deflect the worst of the energy, but more than enough was absorbed to flash away her prow.
Many times more than enough.
The Odysseus shuddered in space, plasma plumes erupting from the holes burned through her, but the ship didn’t falter this time. It didn’t change course, didn’t unexpectedly boost ahead.
She continued her charge as intended, implacable into the fire, with the cavalry riding right along behind her.
► “The Odysseus, she can’t take much more of this, Captain!”
Aleska didn’t bother to respond. She could see that for herself. In her old duties, this would be unthinkable. A destroyer, or a hunter submarine might be a better description of her lovely Rogue, didn’t use their primary as cover. The idea of a sub letting an aircraft carrier take this level of damage while sheltering behind the brute was simply unthinkable.
She held her tongue on the matter, though, both because it was her orders and because she saw no other real possibility.
“Hold,” she ordered through clenched teeth. “Just . . . hold.”
“Aye Captain,” her weapons officer said reluctantly.
Aleska noticed, though he likely did not, that he’d dropped the “Skipper” honorific.
She didn’t really blame him. She wasn’t feeling much like the skipper right then herself.
The Odysseus was taking a horrific beating. Lasers that would have cut her lovely ship in two and then vaporized the remains were burning through decks of ablative armor, penetrating into the areas people worked and lived, wreaking an unholy carnage on the big ship.
It was almost enough to bring tears to her eyes, not that she would have ever come clean about that if it had.
“Captain, please.” The ship’s pilot was hunched over her controls.
Aleska didn’t need to see her to know how she felt about things.
“Just a little closer,” she said, stony-faced.
To flinch now would be to ruin the commodore’s entire plan. And after the sacrifice his Odysseus was giving to put this plan into motion, that would be a crime greater than she was willing to contemplate.
