Pointer was on the ball. “Internal life support readings show we have everyone onboard. I’m sealing the forward ramp.”
“This isn’t going to be easy,” said Blake. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage the weapons as well as piloting this thing. I’ve never been in charge of a Galactic before, let alone an Obsidiar-cored one.”
Neither of them suggested bringing Lieutenant Rivera back. There was no telling what he’d do.
“I’m sure you’ll manage, sir,” said Pointer.
He looked at her, expecting to see the usual calculating expression on her face. For once, there was only sincerity. She’s changed.
The warm-up gauge on the gravity engines climbed steadily. The Lucid wasn’t quite ready for take-off and Blake wanted the engines to be as close to maximum as possible. If it responded sluggishly, the warship would be an easier target.
He checked the upper sensor feed. The bunker doors were closed above them and with the Tillos Gallenium generators offline, there was no way to open them. It was the unspoken question he’d seen on the lips of every one of the soldiers. To Blake, it wasn’t something to worry about.
“Use the comms,” he said. “Find Sergeant McKinney and tell him to get Lieutenant Cruz up here to the bridge. If she knows how to work the main comms hub on Tillos, she can help out up here.”
While Pointer did her stuff, Blake did his best to bring himself up to speed with the operation of an Obsidiar-cored ship. He’d been to classes and sat in a simulator, but there were always slight differences when it came to the real thing, which introduced an undesirable element of delay into a combat situation.
His main concern was knowing how far he could push matters once the firing started. If he went too hard against the Vraxar, he might drain the Obsidiar core too soon. If there was a way to stop the Vraxar neutralising the ship’s Gallenium power source, he would simply leave the Obsidiar to maintain the energy shield. At which point, the ES Lucid would become something of a juggernaut.
“Lieutenant Cruz is on her way, sir.”
“Good. Next step is for you to contact Fleet Admiral Duggan. Use override code 23Blake-162C. Let him know our situation and ask what his orders are.”
A few seconds later: “Fleet Admiral Duggan wants to speak to you.”
“Don’t keep him waiting.”
The Admiral’s voice reached the bridge, projected through a series of speakers so that it seemed to float in the midpoint of the bridge, just in front of the captain’s console. Duggan didn’t waste time on niceties or pointless details. His voice was strong and clear.
“Captain Edwards. How confident are you?”
“I’m not familiar with the Lucid, sir and I’m lacking a full crew. I will be able to achieve lightspeed once we break out of the Tillos bunker. If ordered to, I will engage the enemy.”
“You have avoided answering my question. How confident are you?”
Blake cursed his mistake. With men like Duggan, you responded to exactly what they’d asked, not the question you thought they’d asked.
“Sir, I’m very confident. Some have told me I am too confident.”
“Captain Kang was scathing of your efforts.”
Blake sensed a test in the words. Everyone knew tales about Admiral Duggan’s exploits in the Ghast and Estral wars. He was a fighter, not a diplomat.
“Captain Kang fled the scene, ensuring our defeat and the deaths of many of our personnel. If I see him, I will punch his teeth out.”
“What do the Vraxar want?”
“They need us, sir. They do something to the bodies of the races they conquer to make new Vraxar. It’s their only way to survive.”
“Then we face all-out war.”
“Victory or extinction, sir. There will be no inbetween.”
“Atlantis is already doomed, but I will not abandon the people. Destroy the Vraxar, Captain Blake. Free Atlantis and buy us some time.”
“Yes, sir.”
The connection ended. Blake turned at the beeping sound of the bridge door activating. Lieutenant Cruz arrived, supported by Sergeant McKinney on one side and the squad’s stand-in medic Armand Grover on the other.
“How are you feeling, Lieutenant Cruz?”
“Absolutely outstanding, sir!”
“That’ll wear off in a few hours,” said Grover. He lifted up a portable med-box. “It’s given her something of everything, I reckon. On top of that it filled her with her so much battlefield adrenaline, she could probably carry the Lucid home on her shoulders.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” said Cruz.
“Take a seat, Lieutenant. You’re on the comms.”
“Sir?”
“Sit.” He checked the status of the engines. “You’ve got approximately two minutes to familiarise yourself with our comms and sensor arrays. It shouldn’t hold any surprises.”
Cruz hopped over and sat.
“I can help you out,” said Pointer. “Look at this screen here, this is where you…”
“You did a year as weapons ensign, didn’t you, Lieutenant?” said Blake, cutting in.
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated, struggling with pride. “I failed and got shifted to comms. There’re a lot more openings in comms than weapons.”
“Now’s your chance to prove how wrong they were to fail you. I need you to take some of the load, so get onto the weapons console.”
She blinked.
“Do it now!”
Pointer did as she was asked and her eyes darted this way and that over the different screens, while Blake reminded her of the important details.
“Remember the Lambdas and Shatterers failed to target reliably during our previous engagement, so you’ll need to instruct the Bulwark tracking system to aim at anything hostile, rather than just missiles.”
“Yes, sir.”
Grover appeared at Blake’s shoulder, holding a flexible tube with a fat needle at one end. The man raised an eyebrow in question. Blake nodded and the medic shoved the needle into his thigh.
“This will act as a temporary flush for that radiation, sir,” he whispered.
Blake felt a large quantity of fluid enter his blood. He tried to ignore it and continued addressing Lieutenant Pointer. “The Lucid has two first-gen Shimmer launchers, which the New Beginning lacked. Keep your fingers crossed they target more reliably than the other missile systems.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have four particle beams. The front and rear ones will overcharge. Don’t fire the overcharge unless I tell you – it’ll likely knock off a chunk of our power reserves. We’ve got an eight-bank disruptor chain with a two hundred thousand klick range. That’s going to do the same thing to our power gauge as the particle beams.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pointer looked dazed. It wasn’t an ideal situation and the Space Corps didn’t normally let semi-trained officers loose on their newest heavy cruisers and particularly not the ones with New Earth’s GDP worth of Obsidiar in the hold. Blake couldn’t handle everything himself and he hoped Pointer and Cruz would rise to the occasion.
“Lieutenant Cruz, how are you doing?”
“I’m good, sir! Most of this onboard kit is familiar, with a few boosters and extra top-secret options.”
“What exactly did that med-box give her?” he asked Grover quietly.
“It judged her in need of some mood-enhancers as well as everything else, sir,” he replied, equally quietly. “She could be the most miserable bastard in the fleet and you’d never know it.”
Wondering what he was getting himself into, Blake waved Grover away to perform a radiation flush on Pointer and Cruz. He was beginning to feel light-headed himself and considered asking if the med-box had decided Captain Blake was also in need of some mood-enhancers.
“Better to die happy,” he muttered.
The gravity engines finished their warm-up procedures and just in time.
“The ship’s sensors are reporting a series of explosions on the surface
above us,” said Cruz. “I’m certain that’s what these codes are telling me.”
Blake cursed. “They’re looking for the Lucid. The Vraxar warships must have got the message there’s something down here and they’ve decided to blow us up.”
“They’ve missed,” said Pointer.
“The bunker is shielded. I imagine there’s some trial and error involved in locating us.”
“There’s a lot going on,” said Cruz. “Hundreds of explosions.”
“We’re going, before they get lucky,” said Blake. “Sergeant McKinney, Medic Grover, I suggest you get to quarters.”
The two men hurried off, while Blake cobbled together his thoughts. “Lieutenant Pointer, please target the bay doors above us with a grid pattern of thirty Lambda missiles. Don’t question it and launch at once. The explosion won’t significantly harm the Lucid from this distance.”
Pointer responded with impressive speed. “They’ve fired.”
“Upper sensor feed shows the bunker doors are still intact, sir. There was no explosion.”
It took Blake a moment to understand. “We’re too close, The Lambda warheads don’t activate for a short time after they exit the launch cluster. To prevent accidents.”
“The Vraxar missile strikes are coming closer, sir,” said Cruz. “I wouldn’t like to be on the surface.”
“What do we do?” asked Pointer.
“We’ll have to break out through the roof,” said Blake.
The ship’s autopilot wouldn’t countenance what he planned without going through numerous overrides. With time running out, Blake took hold of the Lucid’s manual control rods. There wasn’t much of a gap between the spaceship and the walls, but in theory it should lift off at an exact vertical if the pilot used the control bars correctly.
“Here goes nothing.”
The ES Lucid’s engines vibrated as power flowed through them. The sound reverberated within the hangar, setting furniture throughout the complex buzzing in sympathy. A gap appeared between the ground and the landing feet – first a few inches, then several metres. The warship’s wedge-shaped nose crunched partway through the opening into the storage area, smashing away several hundred tonnes of metal and wall. A contact warning bleeped on Blake’s console.
There was no point in trying to fine-tune the spaceship’s position. Instead, Blake went for broke. He hauled on the control stick, feeling it glide through its slot with the perfect amount of resistance. The ES Lucid climbed, creating a wide, rough gouge in the hangar bay wall as it went. It struck the underside of the bunker doors, pushing them outwards and buckling the alloy. The Lucid had a tremendous amount of inertia, but the bay doors were thick, solid and designed to soak up repeated missile strikes.
In the cockpit, the crew felt little more than a slight shaking though the floor – the life support systems on a fleet warship could shield the occupants from more or less anything this side of a hull breach.
“They’re holding,” said Blake. “I’m being too damned cautious.”
He tried again and power coursed through the gravity engines. This time, the Lucid accelerated upwards at a tremendous rate. It crashed through the doors, bending them upwards and ripping one of them completely free of it gears. A series of sonic booms followed, their sound joining with the storm of plasma outside.
“Oh, shit,” said Cruz.
The already-damaged Tillos airfield was no longer an expanse of torn and cratered concrete. Now it was a furious sea of plasma fires, from which tendrils of white flame reached into the sky. In the briefest of instants during which Blake was able to look at the external sensor feeds, he saw a thousand additional explosions adding their own unquenchable anger to the tempest.
The onslaught was greater than Blake was expecting. The Lucid’s energy shield was turned off in an attempt to conserve the Obsidiar core’s energy until it was needed most. Consequently, there was nothing to stop two of the Vraxar missiles striking the warship’s rear section as it rose at immense speed from the flames. The missiles detonated, tearing deep holes into the heavy cruiser’s armour plating.
“We’re meant to soak,” Blake muttered.
He threw the control bars forward and the ES Lucid’s gargantuan engines threw it away from the surface. The planet Atlantis fell rapidly behind as the spaceship reached maximum gravity drive velocity. Two-thousand one hundred klicks per second, Blake saw on the gauge. Obsidiar power already down to ninety-five percent.
“I can see some Vraxar ships,” said Cruz.
Under her guidance, the Lucid’s sensors detected the enemy and sent the data to Blake’s tactical screen. “Three of their mid-sized ships,” he said. “Where are the others?”
“And most importantly, where’s the Neutraliser?” asked Pointer.
“Three will do for the moment, Lieutenant.”
“Are you going to activate the stealth modules, sir?”
“There’s no point. They know we’re coming.”
Rather than seeking to escape, Captain Charlie Blake aimed the ES Lucid directly towards the enemy warships. He felt no fear, only an all-consuming desire to destroy everything they sent at him. In his head were the beginnings of a plan – something he hoped might turn the tables as long as he could pull it off.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The three Vraxar warships made no attempt to get away. Originally stationary above the Tillos base, now they accelerated rapidly towards the ES Lucid. The odds weren’t great, but with the energy shield available, Blake had hopes the heavy cruiser would do more than bloody the Vraxar noses.
“Give it your best, folks. I can’t ask for anything more. Don’t spread our firepower. I’ve assigned a target already - we hit it until it breaks up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Target Shimmer missiles and fire.”
There was no launch and he heard Pointer banging her fist angrily onto her console. “They’re locked down,” she said. “The battle computer tells me I don’t have the required authority to commit this resource.”
“Shit,” said Blake. “I was relying on giving them a trial run.”
He’d only read the spec sheets on the Shimmer missiles and never flown on a ship which had them equipped. The warheads were fitted with an Obsidiar guidance chip and carried a monumentally high payload. Each missile was so expensive it was rumoured Fleet Admiral Duggan had to personally sign approval for them - one at a time.
There was a good chance Blake could override the lock on the Shimmers. In other circumstances, he would have been delighted to attempt it. However, with the Vraxar ships closing fast, his efforts were needed elsewhere. Putting his irritation to one side, he checked the range between the Lucid and the Vraxar. It wouldn’t be long until they could target and fire the rest of the cruiser’s arsenal.
“The Bulwarks are activating,” said Pointer.
With those words, it started. Fifty-two of the Lucid’s Bulwarks had line of sight and they emerged through the armour and began firing at once, sending a high-velocity stream of slugs towards the target Vraxar warship. The enemy craft began evasive manoeuvres, twisting and rotating, while the Lucid’s battle computer tried to predict and adjust.
“Fire whatever Shatterers and Lambdas will target.”
“I’m trying, sir. There – sixty Lambdas away and seven Shatterers.”
“I’m loading up for a short-range transit. Holding on three of our cores. Ready in less than twenty seconds.”
Blake was already struggling with the amount of incoming data and again he cursed Lieutenant Rivera for his actions on the Determinant. That fourth officer would make all the difference. In the absence, Blake had to keep an eye on damage reports as well as manage the SRTs and attempt the rerouting if any major system failed.
“There’s the enemy,” said Cruz, locking the sensors onto it at last. “It’s jumping about like crazy.”
It was another of the tapered cylinders. With faint satisfaction, Blake noticed the Bulwark scars across its h
ull from the earlier confrontation with Response Fleet Alpha.
“This time you’re not getting away to lightspeed.”
He activated the Lucid’s energy shield in anticipation of what was to come. An invisible barrier sprung into existence, encompassing the entire ship and coming no closer than a few hundred metres from the hull.
The Vraxar ship had no intention of breaking off. High-intensity particle beams jumped out from its batteries. They struck the Lucid’s energy shield, which dissipated the attacks, keeping the warship unharmed.
“Obsidiar core down to eighty percent already.”
“We’ve had five confirmed Shatterer impacts on the enemy’s shield,” said Pointer. “Plus a further sixteen Lambda hits and approximately eighteen thousand Bulwark strikes.”
A good engine tech officer would likely be able to predict how close to failure the Vraxar shield was. Stop it, Blake told himself.
“There’s something coming from the third Vraxar ship,” said Cruz. “This one looks different to the others. Missiles! It’s missiles! Four hundred!”
This Vraxar ship hadn’t been in the previous engagement. Blake guessed its main use was surface bombardment and the missiles it launched travelled comparatively slowly. It seemed the Vraxar weren’t ahead in every field.
“Splinter countermeasures away,” said Pointer.
Splinter interceptors raced away at forty thousand kilometres per second, seeking to collide with whatever their guidance systems identified as a threat.
“Divert Bulwarks to the incoming missiles,” ordered Blake. “Drop shock drones.”
“Done.”
At Lieutenant Pointer’s command, shock drones spilled out in their thousands. The drones spewed forth an ever-changing stream of signals and white noise, intended to confuse or jam enemy weapons systems. Meanwhile, their circular, reflective bodies flashed with lights along every wavelength.
The wave of enemy missiles closed on the Lucid. Dozens of them were intercepted by the Splinter countermeasures, whilst dozens more were punched from the sky by the Bulwark cannons. Many of the remaining missiles detonated fruitlessly into the shock drone cloud. A few came through and they exploded against the Lucid’s energy shield, depleting the gauge further.
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 24
