Dark Humanity
Page 213
Still, he found himself unable to shake the melancholy that held him in its grasp.
He looked out through the ship’s sensors at the stars twinkling across the void. Out there, colonies were being settled. Beyond them, the Future Generation Terraformer worldships were plying the deep black between stars, building worlds for colonists who would not arrive for hundreds of years.
That was where the real adventure was, not threatening civilians who just wanted a bit more bang for their tax dollar.
Joe knew the odds of getting on a colony mission. They were slim to say the least. The Sol System was home to trillions of humans—plus a lot of things that weren’t exactly human anymore. Even the largest colony ships only carried a million or so colonists.
The number of people who got to ply the deep black was far smaller than the birth rate of even one world.
Joe asked.
Honora said.
Jackson said.
All the doubt and uncertainty of the previous hours washed away in an instant. The duty he felt to his fellow pilots, to his ship, and to his commanding officers kicked in. He was a Terran Space Force pilot; he and his were being threatened. Indecisiveness was abolished and crystal clear focus kicked in.
Joe acknowledged the order and he selected one of the flight paths he and Crassus had prepared in case of just such an eventuality.
He gritted his teeth as the cells in his body turned crystalline and nano threads tensed throughout his soft tissue, prepared to take the thrust from the full burn his wasp was capable of producing. The squadron cleared the Normandy and surrounding ships as forty-two fusion drives came to life.
The small moon of Ouke grew rapidly in the forward view as the fighters used its meager gravitational force to give them a pivot point. For less than a second, he could see the buildings and structures on the moon’s surface as he shifted his fighter, its engine’s pointing away from the moon like a comet’s tail as it rounded the sun.
Then it was behind them and they raced toward the Normandy, past the picket line of enemy rapiers, and over the Normandy and pulled up their orders on tight-beam.
The directive: shots across the bow.
Joe and Crassus assigned targets. Flights one through three were to fire warning shots, missing by mere meters, at the leading civilian ships, while flights four through seven would make direct strikes on the military vessels, but leave the beams wide and unfocussed.
The squadron had reached speeds of over seventy kilometers per second and it only took them nine seconds to pass over the approaching Scattered Worlds’ ships.
He made two shots on the cruiser and took no return fire, but as the squadron passed over the trailing destroyers, beam fire lanced out at them—focused strikes that were intended to disable shielding.
Three of the fighters suffered shield failure and the squadron reconfigured to protect them during recharge.
During the time it took to send those thoughts over the combat net, the destroyers continued to fire at the wasps as the distance between the ships expanded. Then the orders came in.
Following those orders to the letter would be easier said than done.
Joe expanded his view of the battlefield to encompass the whole planet-moon system. Behind them the Normandy was on the move, forcing the approaching ships to shift vector and chase it. A maneuver likely intended to give the carrier time to disgorge all of its fighters.
Joe could see that seven-hundred and twenty-three fighters and thirty elephants now sat between the Normandy and the approaching ships. If the Diskers were smart they’d realize that their numbers were no match for even the fighters alone. Most of the merchant ships only had shielding capable of deflecting rocks and space junk, and were without ablative plating. Tactical on the Normandy estimated that each fighter could destroy nearly twenty of the civilian ships, before running low on armament.
He returned his focus to his squadron’s task, the rails.
The one threat the Normandy could not easily handle would be the dozen rails surrounding Makemake, firing high-velocity kinetic grapeshot at it. Even with its shielding and defensive beams, the grapeshot could tear the ship to ribbons.
Joe monitored his squadron’s progress. Their primary targets were the seven rails that currently had clear lines of sight on their carrier. Once those were disabled, they would loop around both sides of the planet and disable the rest.
Grapeshot was better at destroying capital ships than fighters. In space, the spread was wide enough that a fighter could slip between the pellets undamaged. But if just one sand-sized grain hit a wasp head on, it was likely to be game over.
Lieutenant Saren announced.
A few other pilots reported hits, and then scan registered two explosions. Two wasps were gone in a flash.
The update flashed across his virtual console. Tiny Sue and Saren were gone, but not from the grapeshot, several of the destroyers behind them had taken advantage of his squadron’s lowered rear shields.
those were random. Those destroyers were targeting.
The squadron weathered the grapeshot with only a few more glancing impacts. Following those tense minutes, they closed to within a few thousand kilometers of the rails and the fighters were able to out-maneuver the rail platform’s targeting with ease.
Joe gave the order and the leading edges of the two groups peppered the platforms with beams, jinking wildly to avoid anti-fighter chaff and beams, and to reach past the refractive clouds that the platforms were throwing into the space around them.
He was in the second wave of his group and let fly with two Hellseeker missiles, as did a dozen other ships.
The missiles snaked across the space between the ships and the rail platform, careening wildly to avoid defensive fire. Several were destroyed, punctuated by small explosions blooming between the fighters and the platform. He counted the missiles that failed to reach their target.
Two, three, five, nine, eleven, twelve…
Then the first missile hit its target, flame and plasma splashing across the rail platform’s shield, which wavered, and then winked out. Two more explosions followed closely and scan confirmed direct hits. The muzzle end of the rail platform was a twisted wreck.
The necessary damage was done. The remaining missiles spun off into space, detonating harmlessly away from the rail platforms.
Joe checked the other half of his squadron, operating under the guidance of Lieutenant Drew. They had met with similar success. Two rails down, ten to go.
Joe sent an acknowledgement to the AI, and confirmed that the TSF repeater satellites in orbit around Makemake were functional. Once the two groups of fighters were on opposite sides of the planet, Crassus would need those repeaters to maintain his distributed network. He would slow a touch, but still be faster than even the most augmented of Joe’s pilots.
The wings drew near to the next platform, and Joe returned his attention to the attack run, which was as successful as the first. Before they reached the third, he spared a moment’s attention for the battle raging in the Normandy’s picket lines.
The engagement was in full swing, and more than a few civilian ships were disabled, adrift in high, slowly decaying orbits. Not a small number were leaving the battle—having discovered that the Normandy was not as soft a target as they had been led to believe.
Still, against all logic, a second wave of ships was leaving the blockade to join the battle. Joe hoped they were going to help the disabled ships and not join the fight.
Then his attention was consumed by the squadron’s next target.
The fifth and sixths platform fell as easily as the first four, but scan showed that the next would not be such easy targets. A dozen destroyers were moving out of the blockade on a course to directly obstruct the next target.
These ships were not participating in the attack on the Normandy and likely answered to who whoever was still running things in the military—someone unwilling to see their entire world’s defenses destroyed.
Trust was in short supply in the black. Should the rest of the Diskers join the fight, it would be a decision they would immediately regret.
5
Calamity
STELLAR DATE: 3223495 / 07.13.4113 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Makemake
REGION: Makemake, Scattered Worlds, Sol Space Federation
The Nostra’s cockpit was silent, neither pilot moved, even their breath was abated. Periodically one of the two women would shift, and the creak of their shipsuits or the movement of the viscous fluid in their acceleration couches would break the silence.
Katelyn eyed her sister’s avatar in her mind. Always calm and constrained, Rory was the foundation of their operation. But she also held back too often when opportunity knocked. Opportunity like now.
Although Rory believed in the principles of the Cause, Katelyn still had to spend weeks cajoling her sister into actually joining the movement. Over time, Katelyn knew that Rory had come to believe as strongly in the separatist movement as she did. The Diskers had to break free of the Terran’s grip. The disk, the gateway to the stars, is where the true opportunity lay, where untapped resources drifted in the dark.
The profits of which flowed toward Sol, toward the Terrans.
Rory didn’t respond immediately and Katelyn decided to take her silence as acquiescence.
She activated the pre-planned flight path and the tug’s engines ignited, boosting the ship out of the blockade and toward their selected target, an asteroid recently pulled into high orbit around Makemake.
For a long thirty seconds, they were the only tug boosting out of the blockade, but then another pulled free and a minute later all eight tugs were accelerating at max g toward various high-orbit asteroids.
Katelyn focused on their target, ignoring her sister’s quiet cursing as Rory prepared the grapple and thumpers.
The local traffic control AI was calling their ship repeatedly, increasing its urgency with each failed contact. The flashing token in her vision was becoming distracting and Katelyn dismissed it and put a ten minute block on the caller. After that local traffic control would have other things to worry about.
Rory only nodded from her couch, while giving the grappling arms one final spin to account for the asteroid’s slow tumble.
The seconds ticked by quickly, and, with a bone jarring shudder, the Nostra made contact with the million tons of rock that was their target.
Katelyn activated her plot and slid the fusion drives up to full burn. Helium3 pouring into the reaction chamber from the full tank, which their co-conspirators had provided just hours before they joined the blockade. The Nostra couldn’t produce a light show like the Terran carrier could, but it was certain to make a show in the night sky below.
Within a minute, once the other ships had grabbed their rocks, it would look as though an octet of new stars had appeared in the skies of Makemake.
The Nostra arced around Makemake, hanging low, gaining thrust from the planet’s gravity well, before breaking free and entering a gentle parabola that would put them on a collision course with the Normandy.
Katelyn knew that there was no way a single ship could approach the carrier and survive the assault that would come its way, but eight s
hips, eight ships with a hell of a distraction? That may just work.
The tugs had all cleared Makemake’s gravity well and Katelyn found herself wondering where their required distraction was. The rocks they pushed protected them from the Normandy’s beams, and could weather a significant missile barrage, but the tugs themselves were vulnerable to the fighters that swarmed the battlespace.
Rory replied.
Katelyn refreshed scan once more and the active ping caught a brief echo, a shadow against the stars.
The shadow grew, and resolved itself into a ship, an old hulk, long forgotten in the dark spaces between Makemake and Eris. Its name had once been Pathfinder, a mighty warship of the second AI war, but the resistance had named it Vengeance.
Four heavy lifters were attached to its hull, and their engines lit up in a brilliant burst of plasma, driving the vessel toward the Normandy.
The Terrans reacted as expected, their fighters disengaging from the attacking armada, which in turn began to move away from the battlespace.
Rory said breathlessly—if one could do so with a mental projection.
Katelyn found herself holding her breath as she watched the Vengeance close the gap between itself and the Normandy.
The fighters were swarming it now, their beams and missiles battering what minimal shields the resistance engineers had managed to erect. Once down, the four tugs were next—their meager shielding only lasting seconds under the punishing barrage.
The Normandy shifted its vector, out of the way of the Vengeance’s drifting hulk, its fighters looping around the wreck, moving to re-engage the resistance armada.