by David Tatum
“That’s not who I meant,” Beccera said, tapping the monitor still displaying the Chihuahua.
Meier shook her head. “Now, Commodore. There’s nothing our fleet can do to help them. Besides, which is more important, a squadron of our Allied ships, or a single broken-down old corvette?” She smiled patronizingly. “I’ll just signal the other ships that we’re beginning the retreat.”
Beccera had reached his limit. “As I just stated, that is not the order I am giving. I do not appreciate having to repeat myself. Return to your post, Captain, and while you’re at it, put this display here on the main monitor. We need a plan that doesn’t leave the guys saving our butts out to die.”
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EAS Chihuahua
“Solar activity is within expected parameters, sir,” Emily reported. “Sensors indicate no surprises... yet. Solar flares could erupt at any time without warning, though, and we’re certainly going to get close enough for that to be a concern.”
Chris shrugged. “Not much we can do about that now.”
“Our squadron has completed their assault on the enemy orbital facilities, sir,” Langer reported from his tactical station. “With great success.” He paused. “Sir, it appears as if the squadron is now moving to assist the Cygni fleet.”
Chris shook his head. “As expected. I asked them to stay away, remember? We’re on our own for this one.”
Rachel sighed. “I don’t like it. In theory, I agree your plan could work, but when you factor in how precisely you have to time everything... I don’t think we can do this, Chris. I don’t think I can do this – not with this much precision.”
He just smiled at her. “Rache, all you have to do is maintain a steady pace for one orbit around the sun and then rotate the ship so we can open fire. At this speed, it’ll only be a few seconds, maybe a minute at most. The computers will figure the rest out, and the program’s already set. I took into account your inexperience at the position. It will work.”
She frowned. “But maintaining a steady pace when we have to worry about things like solar flares, enemy fire, maybe even sunspot activity blinding our sensors... Chris, we’re going to have to make evasive maneuvers, and I’m not sure I can make them.”
“If you can’t make them, you can’t make them. Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it?” Rachel repeated incredulously. “But the enemy’s weapon is devastating – a solid blow will destroy us, and our shields can only hold it back for so long! Not to mention what happens if the damned star decides it’s going to shoot fire and plasma at us. The ship won’t survive it!”
“Rache,” Chris answered, his voice sure and steady, but also quite depressingly final. “I know this is risky. I know we probably won’t survive this mission. Do you think, for one moment, that I didn’t realize how badly this could turn out? Hell, we’re all just guessing that those shields work the way we think! But if we don’t try something, our odds of keeping them from attacking our fleet are virtually zero, and our probability of survival is about the same. This guy won’t let us escape. We’re too dangerous to him, even if we aren’t a match for him by ourselves. And he’s too dangerous for us to let him live. We probably won’t survive this plan... but I don’t see any alternative.”
Rachel paused, then sighed. “Okay, Chris. If this is our last chance to talk, I don’t want to spend it fighting with you.” She turned to Lt. Tarbell, who was making the final refinements to the fire control program at weapons control. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” the new firing control officer said, grinning half-heartedly. “I’m pretty sure this won’t work, and we’re all going to die fiery deaths engulfed in the middle of an enemy system’s star, but I’ll give it my best.”
“That’s the spirit!” Chris cheered. “Let’s get moving – a person shouldn’t be late to his own funeral. Begin combat maneuver program Monitor Storm One!”
“Initiating!” Rachel called.
Langer started ticking down distances as the Chihuahua got closer to the sun. “Ten thousand kilometers distance. Six thousand kilometers. Four thousand. We are now inside the chromosphere, and closer to any star than any ship we know of. One Thousand. Five hundred kilometers. We’re actually touching the photosphere, sir!”
“Now in orbit,” Rachel reported.
“The enemy ship is matching our orbit... now!” Chris called. “Initiate firing pattern program.”
“Initiating,” Diana replied. “Well, we’re committed now.”
The enemy ship tried firing on the Chihuahua, but missed wildly. “Looks like the star’s gravity is messing up their targeting,” Langer commented, grinning.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t affect ours. Execute now!” Chris shouted, his ringing voice a match for any ancient war cry.
“Firing!” Rachel called. “Sixty seconds to impact. Fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty seven...”
The Chihuahua was an old ship, but many of her most obsolete systems had been removed as Chris and Jacques Rappaport had conducted her refit. Most of them were ‘repurposed’ in some way, such as the shock chair electronics packages being turned into the primary component of the streaming particle cannons. A few of them were abandoned altogether. One or two, however, they were unable to remove, thanks to the lack of any time in either a dry dock or a ship tender.
One such system was the Chihuahua’s missile launchers. Missiles were a fine technology to use in the days when ships were still so slow that simple chemical fuel engines could actually hit enemy ships. They were more effective than just about anything else – a high yield thermonuclear warhead was more powerful than even a battleship’s entire rail gun broadside or a cruiser’s entire weight of fire with particle cannons. However, their inability to actually hit a target made them little more effective than mines... which were cheaper, even more powerful, and easier to conceal. They were still often used by Army forces for attacks on fixed position targets, but the era of ship to ship missile combat had long passed. Unless one was aboard a century old warship which just happened not to have had its missile tubes removed yet.
Space demands had left the Chihuahua with just two missiles, which were always loaded into the tubes because there was nowhere else to store them after all of the modifications. Both of which had just been launched.
“Three, two one...” Rachel spun the Chihuahua around, straining to keep their shield between the ship and the star. The enemy warship had no time to react before Chihuahua fired its particle cannons at point blank range, straight into its bow. Its own weapon charged up, and a spark of fire left it.
Using Chihuahua herself as bait, Rachel’s careful flight plan and Tarbell’s precision firing program, they had been able to predict exactly where the enemy would be at this moment. The two slow-moving missiles, fired a full minute in advance, now struck the enemy vessel from behind, a hundredth of a second apart. Chihuahua’s particle cannon continued to dig into the enemy ship’s shield from the bow, having no immediate effect but drawing strength away from the shields on the opposing side. The same opposing side where two nuclear warheads were detonating.
Amazingly, the weakened shield still deflected most of the blast from the missiles, but it then collapsed completely. Without the artificial gravity of the shields supporting them, the enemy ship’s engines weren’t powerful enough to resist the star’s pull at such close range. And so, as Chris had planned, the unknown warship was, for all intents and purposes, sunk, spiraling into the burning hot plasma storm of Alcyone B.
The enemy’s parting shot, however, managed to slip through Chihuahua’s defenses.
Fires, debris, and electrical sparks shot across the bridge. This time, while the lights went out, and smoke filled the bridge, there was nothing like the devastation of the previous hit. The bridge had not been the target.
“Report!” Chris said, trying to see if everyone was unharmed by the dimmed light of various control panels. He could make out Rachel, still moving
about, and was quite relieved, but he couldn’t see anyone else in the darkness.
“I have confirmation that the enemy ship has been destroyed,” Emily called from... somewhere hidden in the smoke. “We’re pretty much blind outside of short range detail scans, however. Long-range sensors and hyperspace sensors are both gone.”
“Damage reports coming in, sir,” Tarbell said. “In addition to various shorts in the electrical system, that last blast severed the keel-mount tower from the ship.”
Chris winced. “So, our hyperspace sensors, long range sensors, and hydrogen collection are completely gone?”
“Yes, sir,” Koivu replied dutifully. “Worse still, we seem to be getting reports that the cold fusion plant is down. As are the fusion drives and the magnetic rudder.”
That sent a chill down Chris’ spine. “Time until repairs are complete?” he asked.
“The cold fusion plan can be repaired in a couple hours, if the hydrogen collection tower can be restored to any functionality. I’m told, however, that the fusion drive needs dry-dock time, sir.”
Chris paused for a long time. “Well... it looks like we are the Virginia, after all,” he sighed.
“Chris?” Rachel called. “What’s wrong?”
“Rache... have you got any ideas for how to get our escape pods past the star’s gravity well?” Chris asked softly. “Because I’m all out of ideas.”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “What do you mean?” she asked – not angry, but worried. “What’s this about escape pods?”
“Without the fusion drive,” Chris explained, “we can’t leave the star’s orbit. The quantum wheel system will keep up alive in orbit, here, for some time... but we’ll be stuck here. Until the power systems give out, that is.”
“Well, then, we’ll just have to figure out how to restore the fusion drive,” Rachel snapped, although the finality with which Chris was speaking was starting to make her wonder if that was possible.
“Given enough time, we might manage that,” Chris agreed, to her surprise. “After all, who would have thought we’d be able to get this old dog flying again in the first place? But I’m not sure we have that much time.” He paused. “We’re duty bound to keep the technologies and secrets we have on board this ship from slipping into enemy hands. She must not be captured... even if we have to destroy her with all hands to prevent that capture. So back to my earlier question, have you got any ideas how to get our escape pods away from the star? At least we might be able to avoid the ‘with all hands’ part of this mess....”
“But the rest of the fleet—”
“Who could rescue us?” Chris argued. “They’d need to devote a battleship, probably, or at least a heavy cruiser, and there’s still an enemy fleet they have to contend with. The battle was just too even. The only way a ship would be available to rescue us is if there had been one pre-positioned to save us outside of the main part of the battle zone. “
Rachel was now seeking a rebuttal somewhat frantically at this point, but she had none to give. She opened her mouth a few times to say something, but nothing came out... because she had nothing to say. Nothing, except, “Well... how long can we afford to wait out here to make sure?”
Chris considered that question for a moment. “Estimating the top speed of enemy battleships as 0.16c, I’d say we’re about twenty minutes away from their nearest ship. It’ll take them about ten minutes to detect what happened out here and arrange to come get us, and as I said – there’s still a battle going on. So... perhaps an hour.” He paused. “Like I said, not enough time to fix the engines.”
Rachel sighed, sitting back in her chair and letting go of the controls for the first time since Captain Burkhard had gone down. She swallowed nervously. “So... we’re going to die, aren’t we?”
Chris paused for a while before answering. “Maybe not. There are alternatives.”
Rachel and the rest of the bridge crew turned to stare at him hopefully. “What alternatives?”
“You might not think them much better than death,” he began uncertainly. “Option one: We could boost the power to the shields, shut down all non-essential systems, and move in as close to the sun as possible. So close that we can’t be towed us out. The problem with that is we’ll only survive for as long as our quantum wheel nodes are capable of producing a shield strong enough to protect us from that star – a few days, at most, before they start to fall out of tune under all the strain. It could give us time to repair the engines, but if we get close enough for that plan to work we’d almost certainly never be able to escape the star’s gravity even at full thrust.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’d rather die the quicker death of scuttling the ship now than that futility. What else?”
Chris looked even more hesitant as he laid out his next idea. “Well... I have a theory. One I could probably get working in just about an hour, but I’m not sure it would work.”
“Spill it. I want to know all of our options, even the ones which might not work.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s kind of based on the Azumah Station Incident. I know a theory about how to take our artificial gravity generator and use it to make a miniature black hole. That black hole would last for a few seconds, at most, but in the process – if we timed it right – it would consume a large portion of the star we’re now orbiting. It would reduce the mass of the star considerably before collapsing into itself and exploding. The end result would be a much weaker pull of gravity from this star, allowing us to potentially break orbit with the quantum wheels alone.”
Rachel turned a little green. “Which would drastically alter the amount of heat and light it gives out, too. Slowly freezing to death all three worlds inhabiting this star system....”
“We are at war with them,” Tarbell noted, listening in. “And they started it. That would bring a quick end to it.”
“And we’d be responsible for the destruction of three inhabited planets and over ten billion people,” Rachel reminded her. “Branding us war criminals. We’d live just long enough for our trial and execution. It wouldn’t matter how innocent some of our crew members might be – we’d all be equally guilty in the court of public opinion, and politics would force any government to demand all our deaths in retribution for such an action.”
“The final option,” Chris intoned, hoping to keep the others on the bridge from thinking too hard on that choice. “Is to allow the Pleiades Navy to capture us. We’d all live, albeit as POWs. The worst part is I’m not even sure there are any real technical advantages we’ll be protecting by scuttling the Chihuahua, if that ship we just ‘sunk’ is any indication.” He paused. “I doubt the Navy would even blame us, considering we’re just Academy students called up on an emergency basis. We’re not expected to have to make these kinds of decisions at this point in our careers.”
Rachel considered it for a long time. “No,” she finally said. “I think protecting the secrets we built into this ship from an enemy is worth our lives.”
Emily sighed, and then smiled tiredly. It didn’t reach her eyes, and her voice shook slightly, but she tried to keep a tinge of humor into it. “I would hate to be the first member of the Mumford family tree to be involved in a surrender of any kind.”
Tarbell coughed. “I, for one, think our lives wouldn’t be spared even if we surrendered,” she said. “I read the intelligence report provided by the Larkin Triumvirate. They have a lot of reports on Pleiades citizens being ‘disappeared’ when they become inconvenient to their government. The government appears to be trying to protect certain information. What, we don’t know, but it’s a good guess it has something to do with the technology in that ship we just fought. Our chances of staying alive after surrendering probably disappeared the moment we figured out enough about that ship’s shields to destroy it.”
Chris sighed. “That clinches it. No surrenders. Even if we could figure out a way to get the escape pods out of here, the Pleiades government will kill the survivors.”
Rachel felt her heart drop. They were going to die, and she wasn’t ready. There were so many things she hadn’t done, that she had wanted to do, but now there wasn’t the time for it. She had wanted to get married, have kids, make a name for herself in the Navy, retire into the Orbital Guard and maybe get placed on the same station as her parents... all those things that every person dreams of doing some day. And none of it was going to happen.
Well... maybe one of those things would happen. “We’re going to die, right?” she asked, looking hard at Chris.
He looked back unflinchingly. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”
“Then, like all people sentenced to die, I have a last request,” she said. “One only you can fulfill.”
Chris checked a clock he’d set to time down the last few minutes they had before they would be forced to scuttle the ship. “Well, name it. We’ve got fifty minutes left.”
Rachel stood up from her station, walking over to him. He stood up to face her. “There are a number of things I’m going to miss out on, being dead. A few of those things, though... well, I want to go into the afterlife knowing I managed to accomplish at least one of them.” She paused, and then stared straight into his eyes. “I want you to—”
“Message coming in!” Emily cried. “From Commodore Beccera aboard the Natsugumo. Someone on board that ship must have figured we’d need a rescue before we did, because he says he was following us here and just caught up. He was wondering if we might want a bit of a tow?"
Epilog:
Resetting the Pieces
Sol System, New Gosport Commercial Spaceport
Admiral Michael McCaffrey stood alongside Acting-Commodore Andrew Beccera as the two of them watched the Chihuahua limp into the space dock. Beccera stared in horror as he caught his first visual glimpse of just how crippled his old ship was.
“Where did you hide what remains of Home Fleet, anyway?” Beccera asked, astonished at how unusually empty the traffic lanes around Earth appeared to be, even to a novice spacer like himself.
