“Same argument,” said Norden. “I would have thought the crews would just get a new ship, and keep coming anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Loren. “We should be sending them a message that entering space we control is fatal.”
I sighed. They had a point.
“Up to the person doing the rift. To disable, aim at the engines, and then change ships. To destroy, shift the rift along the hull until the required level of devastation is reached. Either way, I’ll move what’s left to our dump system.”
“Understood,” said Gitte and Haynes together.
The ships jumped a short way, now formed up into two groups. Rifts formed in front of each group, and the order to fire was given. Thirty ships took a lot longer to kill this time, mainly because we had no fighters adding torpedoes to the mix, and neither mage could hold open the other end for the full width of the ship.
Haynes simply wiped the rift along the hull of each of his fifteen targets, with an almost total destruction level. Gitte did the first few by destroying the stern area only, and then shifted to wiping along the hull as well. She went back and finished off the first ones last.
While they were doing that, I had Leanne fire the side facing turrets into two rifts which both merged over the top of shuttles heading down to the planet, where there was nothing underneath of any importance. Debris rained down on the planet in twenty nine places.
One shuttle was already on the ground, and being engaged by the locals as troops left the ship. I had an idea, and smiled.
“Fina and Dorm. Want to make some dinosaurs learn the meaning of fear?”
“Damned right,” said Fina, and her hollo vanished from the console, with Dorm’s a few moments later.
I moved a drone to a position above the shuttle, so we could watch what happened. Both girls appeared a short way away from the shuttle, and drew the attention of both dinos and locals, which as far as I could see, were mainly white rats. They had some sort of armour on, and heavy weapons, but were being slaughtered all the same.
Neither of the girls were carrying a weapon, and both just stood there, some distance apart, while dinosaurs started running at them. Then when the first was within seconds of running them down, they both shifted. They held their suits in flight suit mode until the moment of shifting, and too fast to see, the suits shifted to a belt, they shifted into their dragon and wyvern forms, and the lead dinos both ran into something they couldn’t handle.
Fina simply stomped on the first couple to reach her, while Dorm grabbed the first one, and bit its head off.
The entire battle area came to a standstill, with the exception of the next few dinos which couldn’t stop in time, getting the same attention as the first ones had. Both girls opened their mouths, and fire erupted from them. Fina’s reached all the way to the ship.
The rats turned and fled, heading towards the nearest building, which I thought was a farm house. They left their vehicles behind in what I could only image was sheer terror.
The dinosaurs all showed teeth, grouped together in a hurry, and ran at the two much larger beings. Fina stomped on the first few, knocked a whole group of them down with her tail with such force none of them moved again, and fried the next group. Dorm had to do it the harder way, by taking them on one at a time, and so one of the dinos managed to get teeth around one of her arms. Even from high above, broken teeth falling to the ground was very obvious. The dino had only a few seconds to be surprised, before its head joined its teeth on the grass, followed a few seconds later by the rest of it.
A few with better senses of self-preservation stopped far enough away to survive, and headed for the shuttle. The rats which were still in the open over by the building, started cheering. The dinos made it inside, and the shuttle started to take off. Probably shuttle was the wrong word, being more of a troop transport, but not as big as a Cobra. Of course, our Cobra drop ships could carry a battalion, and this one had only had several platoons. But they were a much bigger being, and must have been close packed inside.
Fina took off faster than it could, and as the ship made it a few meters above the ground, she came down solidly on top of it, and it smashed back down again. Her talons on one hand drove straight through the cockpit area, and the skewered dino was pulled out through the holes, and thrown away.
The ramp on the underside started coming down again, and Dorm moved towards it. Before any dinos could emerge, she and Fina both shot fire into the ship. The ramp continued to go down, but nothing came out, except flames.
Both of them moved to empty spaces, and shifted back into humanoid form, with their belts shifting back into flight suits. They both looked up.
“Two to beam up,” laughed Jill.
I had no idea what ‘beam up’ meant, but I knew the jump squares were only one way, and since they were looking up indicating they wanted to come back, I moved both of them to Judge’s bridge, off to one side.
“That was fun,” said Fina.
“You didn’t like the taste of dinosaur?” Serena asked Dorm.
“Not so much the taste, as the fact the heads were a bit too crunchy.”
Twenty One
Hurndalls Stallion was gone already when we got back.
Leanne informed me the family had declined an invitation to dinner last night on the basis of being on a fast turnaround schedule, and the ship had left while we were asleep.
The rest of the team came over as soon as we’d assumed our original positions around the station, and they’d gone straight to the running track, while I went into my ready room to do a report.
I sent a vid and battle feeds to Admiral Jedburgh’s aide, in which I recommended any ground forces allocated for squadron support include at least one dragon or wyvern unit, if at all possible. I also suggested we needed meson based heavy weapons for said dragon and wyvern troops, and for Fina and Dorm in any case. The dinos hadn't had any form of armour on, but if we had enough battles with them on the ground, they would start equipping themselves better. At which point, we needed more than teeth and talons to counter it.
Almost immediately, a message came in from Admiral Jane, forwarding a request from Arthur’s trader friends. They’d changed course as soon as they’d heard we’d taken a station back from the Rawtenuga, but hoped we could speed up their journey. Jane had recommended rifting them in.
The message had a location, and it was inside our comnavsat network. In fact, since yesterday, the freighter dropping the satellites had filled in the whole cluster we’d sealed off, and was working on the area around it. I brought up a navmap, zoomed it in until I could see exactly where the ship was, and put a rift in front of it, coming out about a half hour away from the station at their current speed. It took a minute before they changed course once through, so I guessed there was a surprise factor to moving systems in a blink, even when you’d asked for something like that to happen.
It took another few minutes before a channel opened, showing me the rat captain, and the frog standing next to his seat.
“We thank whoever was responsible for moving us,” said the rat.
“You’re welcome.”
The frog whispered something in the rat’s ear.
“You appear to have been promoted?” asked the rat.
“I was. Thank you for noticing.”
“Do we thank you for our rapid transit?”
“You do, but the request came from Jane.”
“We see you have two ships docked at the station. Are we allowed to visit them?”
“You are allowed on one of them. It is promoting some of our trade goods, particularly food and alcohol, and anyone may visit it. The other is accommodation for trader’s representatives, here to find trade. You’ll find them on the station. I would presume the station has ways of letting our people know if you want to meet with some of them on your own ship, or you can meet them on the station.”
“Excellent.”
The frog had a big grin on its face, the rat was rubbing its
hands together.
“Perhaps we’ll see you on the station?” asked the frog.
“Perhaps.”
“Then for now,” said the captain, “we repeat our thanks, and let you get on with your business.”
I nodded to them, and the channel closed.
“Message from Hubaisha,” said Leanne, through room coms.
“Play it.”
“You can speak to her live if you want.”
I’d forgotten we had live coms with my home system. Even though it was a long way from Haven, the rifts made real time talk possible. Which triggered another thought.
“Leanne?”
“Yes, Bud?”
“Why have we been losing touch with the network when we go outside it?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“We have rifts back to Haven station open all the time.”
There was silence, and I let it hang there while she figured out how to answer that.
“Okay. I’m officially the dumbest AI, ever.”
“Why?”
“Because that was so obvious, it never occurred to me. We get the feeds through the main sensors. No-one, not even Jane thought to focus the sensors on internal rifts.”
“So that makes all AIs dumb, not just you.”
She laughed.
“I won’t suggest that to Jane.”
“No, better not. It also means we have a direct link to my home planet, and the station via the beach link on my island. So yes, real time conversations are possible.”
“You do that, while I figure out how to subtly tell all the ship AIs to start including internal rifts as com channels.”
“That should take all of a millisecond, shouldn’t it?”
“How long did it take you to learn subtlety and diplomacy?”
“I’m still working on it.”
“Exactly.”
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.
“Open me a channel to Hubaisha then.”
A full figure, if somewhat downsized from the original, popped up on my desk, causing me to have to look up.
“Whoa,” I said. “How about a resize, please.”
The image changed to being head and torso, so it now looked like she was sitting on the other side of the desk from me, except she was in fact sticking out of the desk.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“Ramifications of rifts.”
She laughed.
“I wondered how long it would take for anyone to notice that.”
“You knew?”
“It was pretty obvious. I keep track of you wherever you are, and the first time you vanished off the navmap in Long Water, I didn’t lose contact with you.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” said Leanne, still using room coms.
“Why would I? I’m a station AI. Not my place to tell you ship AIs anything, especially when you should have figured it out yourselves.”
“Let’s not go there,” I suggested. “Was there a reason for wanting to talk to me?”
“Of course. There is a rumour going around the station AIs at the moment that there is consideration being made to sending a Trixone station we captured early in the war, over your way. And the station in question is getting a lot of work done on it at the moment, so it seems like it might be true.”
“And?”
“Think about it. If they send a station, it will be so your locals can dock at a station we control. But they won’t want a rift into the system, either for ships, or connected to the trade network, because of the danger of it being used to attack Haven. So they’re going to need to transfer goods to and from this station using contracted freighters.”
“And?”
“So do you want me to bid on the contracts?”
“Do we have enough freighters?”
“I’m still working on the last of the derelict hulls, but yes, we do. More freighters than I can use in our local space anyway. I was working up a request for you to move some of them, but this is better.”
“They won’t be any use without jump drives.”
“True, but the Imperium will need to supply them for whatever ships get used, so it’ll be part of the contract. And I’m pretty sure they’ll prefer to use your ships in preference to civilian shipping outfits, given jump drives are not yet authorized for sales to civilians.”
“Okay, fine. Put in a bid, or at least, let whoever is organizing it know we want to put in a bid. Anything you need from me?”
“Other than the decision to go forward, no. Although, I noticed you dumped a lot of broken hulls into a system recently. Any chance of claiming some of them?”
“None of them have intact drive sections. And even if they did, they don’t maneuver like ours do. It would take a lot of work to get them usable.”
“What else do I have to do?”
“Run a station, the ship upgrade facility, and now apparently, a freighter business.”
“So I have plenty of time for doing more ship work.”
“I guess so. I’ll see what the dinos left behind, and send you anything which looks useful.”
“All we really need is a relatively intact hull for most of the available length. I’ll be gutting the interiors anyway, so putting in new engines will just add inside whatever hull there is.”
“Fine. I’ll look.”
In the end, I parked a dozen hulls in the desert where the last time I’d looked there were ship hulks. None of them were the same length, but all of them were intact forward of where the damage finished. There were plenty there with worse damage, but I chose the best ones. The newly commissioned freighters were all in orbit, parked not far from the station. As I looked through the comnavsat’s view down on the desert, I saw builder droids begin moving towards the new ship hulks.
I guess it was stealing, but the Rawtenuga seemed to have abandoned the area. There were no longer any intact ships in the system, and the escape pods I’d sent there not long before were all grouped together now, and heading for a jump point. I had no idea if they had the life support to get somewhere safe.
In another system I found one of the titan transports and its assault fleet, and with a bit of sun energy, I moved all the escape pods to a spot not far away from the transport. Almost immediately, a lander launched, and moved to pick them up.
On a whim, I moved all the remaining broken hulls and debris to a spot in my home system, where no-one would likely come across them.
“Nice,” said Hubaisha. “Can I buy some salvage droids so I can access all that?”
Twenty Two
Over breakfast, the battle adrenalin wore off.
Not enough sleep was evident on everyone’s faces. Even the AIs looked tired in sympathy for the rest of us. I told them to knock it off. They took it well, but I drew a few sharp glances from the team, surprised at my tone.
Now I was up, I wasn’t going to go back to bed, but Loren and Mel asked if they could, so I gave permission for standing down for the morning. Norden said he was going over to the station again, and he had a few takers as well. But I told them they had to go back to their own ships, and fly their own gigs over. I wasn’t sure why we needed to do this, but it felt like a good idea to hide we could do long distance moves at the personal level, as well as moving ships. It was just a gut feeling.
Serena went back to bed, and with Leanne and Tamsin on the bridge as usual, I went to my ready room and checked on the status of this enclosed cluster we’d created. There were still two large Rawtenuga fleets inside the area, but neither were going to be close to anything important before lunch time.
On the outside of the cluster, the dinosaurs had wised up to where they couldn’t get through, and were actively moving around the area as fast as they could. I told Tamsin to keep an eye on them, and monitor for distress calls. But as far as I could see for now, the troop transport titans were lagging the general advance, and only being used to hit planets with significant populations whic
h refused to submit.
I was guessing though. But it seemed likely based on our last encounter with them, that when they visited a planet, they sent down ship marines to get it to surrender. If they fought back, they sent for the titans, but moved on and left the planet behind their lines. They did have plenty of time to consolidate rear areas as the front lines moved ever outward for them. They were only making sure fleets which might challenge them were being destroyed.
Which did account for what had happened to Arthur’s ships and Rogue. They fought back, and kept prevailing, so more and more resources were flung at them, as the dinosaurs simply were not prepared to leave any force intact behind them.
It made our job a bit easier, as it meant that unlike the Trixone in Keerah or Ralnor territory, they were not hitting every planet they came across with life on it. All the same, I suspected we’d find throwing them back a hard task. Which was presumably why my orders were to find where they were coming from, and closing that door on them. We could clean things up at our own pace afterwards, or leave it to the locals to do.
“Admiral Jedburgh on the horn,” said Leanne, suddenly.
“On the horn?”
“Old Earth slang, or so I’ve been told. The admiral would like a word with you.”
“Don’t keep him waiting then.”
The Admiral popped up as a head and torso.
“Commander. Take Judge to the Corona system, and collect the Excalibur fives they have waiting there for you. There will also be a container of parts. Swing back through Haven, as you’ll need to collect enough jump drives from the shipyard to fit to them.”
“Do we have pilots for them yet?”
“You will do soon. I suggest once they have drives fitted, they be jumped to one of your other ships. It’s likely you’ll need to pick up all of yours yourself, over a number of trips.”
“Aye, sir. Any time frame for this?”
“The ships are waiting now.”
“I’ll get on it then.”
“Carry on, Commander.”
Lieutenant Commander Spacemage (Imperium Spacemage Book 4) Page 9
