The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  “Reading eight cruisers and seventeen frigates on the near side,” the tactical officer announced, highlighting them on the tactical holo layer. “Only one cruiser and three frigates currently underway. Assess active ships as the planetary combat orbital patrol.”

  Ava checked her interface, confirming that all the ships could receive orders directly from her holo. She ordered an acceleration to attack speed, primary targets being the four active vessels. Their plan remained mostly intact for the moment. They’d focus fire on any ships that were currently underway and then continue on a high speed pass around the planet, destroying warships as they went.

  She opened a separate window to the privateer ships.

  Initial scans from the near side of the planet showed four very promising targets. The stations sprouted long lattices from every surface. They held cargo containers designed for quick loading into Gray freighters or easy docking with the warships they were intended to replenish.

  She decided to detach one privateer to each station as they passed. They might not be as efficient with the alien containers, but the converted freighters would be able to use their load rails to fill their holds in short order. The captains already knew to prioritize the units with green ordnance glyphs as well as those with engineering red.

  It was one thing to seize warships from the Grays, it was quite another to keep them supplied with parts and ammunition and they’d be going through a lot of both in the months to come.

  “The COP is heading for us,” Tactical announced. “Based on standard doctrine, I believe they’ll try a micro-jump in the next milli-day. Come at us from the side.”

  “Very well,” Ava acknowledged, reaching back into the display to change the selection of the first four privateers. “Changing the lineup for the first smash-and-grab,” she advised. “We’ll trade cargo capacity for guns by putting the Walter Currie in the group and taking the Flower of Rotterdam out. All four to begin their deceleration now and stand by to fire on the COP, if it appears on our flank.”

  She frowned at the display for a moment and then reached out to add one frigate to the smash-and-grab team – Robin Metzker’s ship. They could use the extra firepower against the COP and it wouldn’t hurt for them to have a little insurance while the rest of the fleet was travelling around the planet.

  She hoped Metzker didn’t just get elected captain because she’d been one of the two crewmen who’d rescued Paul and Julia from the Grays.

  Her newest order icons went green as the five captains involved acknowledged.

  “If they’re going to jump us,” Tactical warned, “their own template would suggest it’ll happen any micro now.”

  “Understood,” she replied. “We’re going to speed up and turn for the secondary orbital insertion. Changing formation to arrowhead.” She watched as the icons went green again. The main group was now pulling away from the first grab team but that would be very difficult for the enemy to see at this distance.

  As would the course change.

  “They’ve jumped!” Tactical declared. He updated his view to show the general area surrounding the two groups of Human ships. “No sign of them. They’re either running or they’re doing a second jump to come at us from behind.”

  “Well, they’re sure as hells not running from their assigned station,” Korolev growled. “So they’ll be up our backsides in less than a milli, or at least they’ll be sitting where they thought our backsides would be…”

  “There they are!” The tactical officer was gripping the sides of his console. “Just over a hundred klicks behind us – we’re about twenty degrees outside of their firing envelope.”

  “But they’re smack in the center of our five ship’s envelope,” Ava said, zooming in on the trace. The five Human ships fired on the cruiser first and the effect was devastating.

  Hitting the Gray ship from behind, the rounds impacted on the engines and mechanical compartments. Power levels would be severely impacted throughout the ship and her weapons were all based on linear acceleration. Gray guns were devastating, but they were power hogs. After firing their current loadout, it was doubtful they’d be able to recharge even one capacitor bank for a main gun.

  In fact, her chief engineer was likely trying to convince the captain to give that stored power back so they could use it to keep the systems running.

  The frigate captain, assigned overall control of the small human group, must have come to the same conclusion because the second salvo now streaked toward one of the Gray frigates. She made a mental note to commend Metzker, if they both lived through this raid.

  The second target took its medicine with even less grace. The smaller ship appeared to have completely lost her engines and one round even over-penetrated, coming out the bow without even vaporizing against any part of the ship.

  The firing shifted to the next Gray frigate, but Ava suddenly realized that the firing rate, held in check by Metzker to gain the psychological effect of coordinated salvos, meant they wouldn’t have time to hit the fourth frigate before it could open.

  The enemy ships had begun turning quickly when they realized they’d missed their targets and that they now had hostiles aft of their position. It would certainly be too late for the first three ships, but that last Gray frigate was going to get a chance to shoot back.

  Ava could hardly be angry with Metzker for something she’d only just noticed, but it was hard to watch nonetheless. It was far too late to send a warning. All she could do was hope for the best.

  It wasn’t as though the coordinated fire would only give psychological benefits – dubious against Grays – there was also the fact that it efficiently removed ships from the equation. Four damaged enemy ships could do more return damage than one undamaged ship.

  The third Gray frigate withered under the focused fire and stopped turning to meet their threat.

  That left one enemy ship and her bow was swinging to point directly at the primary threat, the Human frigate.

  As Ava watched, the Gray frigate vomited a cloud of plasma as her mains fired. The rounds impacted almost immediately as the two forces were only a few kilometers apart. The front of Metzker’s frigate was obscured by a cloud of debris and a large section of one of the engines was cartwheeling off into the void.

  The privateers opened fire, scoring hits on the enemy’s engines and imparting enough force to throw her off axis, her guns aiming off impotently into the blackness.

  And that was where they parted ways. Ava sent the privateers a command to continue on to their assigned targets. They needed to complete their objectives quickly rather than hang around a debris field. She would have to organize a rescue attempt on their way out.

  She released the remaining enemy stations and ships on the near side for gunnery and portioned them out to her ships to avoid wasting time on overlapping fire.

  As soon as the icons began turning red, Korolev leaned forward slightly, eyes roving over the display like a kid in a candy store. “Tactical – weapons free. Mains on the cruisers and secondaries to concentrate on frigates.”

  They had two stations, three cruisers and six frigates to kill. The Grays would have been caught with their pants down, if they had any use for pants. As it was, the ships were all in various states of resupply. Several were even being worked on in open space docks and Ava was pleased to see the tactical team had put those vessels at the bottom of the priority list.

  A soul-rending scream vibrated the decking as the two-hundred-kilo-slugs of depleted uranium went streaking down the gravity well of Tel Khorgo, trailing a brief flash of plasma. Two slugs were targeted to each of the first two cruisers.

  “Time to impact?” Korolev kept his eyes glued to the holo display.

  “Just over three milli-days, sir.” The tactical officer looked back to the captain. “Next rounds will be up any moment now for the mains. Should we target the third cruiser?”

  “Give her two and one each for the two stations.”

  Streaks o
f vapor slipped past the bridge windows. Even the Grays were unable to contain all of the cooling carbon dioxide in their weapons.

  “Mains are pumped,” Tactical declared. “Vacuum confirmed. Firing.”

  Again the shriek, and again Ava’s bones rattled. She knew it was normal for these ships, but it still surprised her that the supposedly superior Gray engineering seemed so similar to its Human counterparts.

  “Coming into the range for secondary guns,” Tactical announced.

  As if in agreement, the secondary batteries began to howl at each other like a graveyard filled with demented souls. Each fired as soon as its rails could be cooled, pumped and reloaded with the smaller ninety-kilo slugs. The sound was probably easily ignored by the Grays but it raised the hair on the back of Ava’s neck.

  “Three certain impacts on the first targets!” the sensor officer crowed. “Clean hits and multiple secondaries in the engineering sections. Looks like their magnetic fluid went up.”

  “Quiet on the bridge!” Korolev roared over the sound of cheering. “We’ve got a lot more shooting to do before we can call this a win. Our next targets might even be in the mood to shoot back, just to be friendly, so keep your minds on the job.”

  “Seeing hits on the frigates,” the sensor officer declared, sounding more businesslike this time. “Two broken up entirely, and one looks to be venting atmo from several areas. The fourth hasn’t…” He leaned in closer to his holo, squinting up at the image. “Correction on the fourth; multiple hits now and the bow, as far back as the gunnery capacitor bank, has sheared clean off.”

  He opened his mouth to say something but stopped, making a distinct effort to master his reaction. “Impact from our mains on the third cruiser. One hit. Vaporized a ten meter hole, dorsal to ventral, just forward of the engineering spaces. I’d say she’s probably a dead’un.”

  It was a quirk of Gray weapons design that the smaller rail systems could handle higher muzzle velocities. Once you closed to within range of the secondary batteries, the engagement was often over before another salvo from the mains could reach the target.

  Ava reviewed the overall situation, silently chiding herself for focusing on Korolev’s fight. Destruction of the remaining targets on this side of the planet seemed well in hand. She selected all of her ships and grouped them into seven teams of two each.

  As the targets came into view over the horizon, they’d be assigned a group. She didn’t want to miss a target because everyone had fired at a previous target and were too busy reloading their main guns.

  It was easy enough to get colonial privateers to fire on an enemy, but getting them to stop firing and switch to something else could be an exercise in frustration. Far better to hold some in check, giving each their turn, but always having several ships ready to take on new targets.

  She took another look at the icon for Metzker’s frigate. It showed little information, but that didn’t mean they were all dead. She’d have to figure out how to mount a rescue attempt on the way back, but it was going to be tricky, with the fleet moving in the opposite direction to the stricken warship.

  Some might just cut the bullshit and call it impossible.

  Grab and Run

  “No,” Robin said calmly but firmly. There’s no use having Damage Control working on the weapons if they can be used to help fix our drives. If we get them going, we’re not staying around to fight; we’re gonna show ‘em our cute little asses and scamper.”

  “I don’t have any teams working on the engines, Captain,” Little, the chief engineer, told her. “That hit tore our port assembly clean off and smashed the entropy shunts. No way of getting underway short of a six-month stay in a good dockyard.”

  “So, there’s nothing we can do except shoot at anything that happens to drift past our guns?”

  “If we can even get them working,” Little said dubiously. The forward ends of the mains are a mess. We’d have to cut…” He stopped talking as Metzker grabbed his arm and led him over to the main holo. He wasn’t offended, just pragmatic enough to know when his boss was about to drop something batshit-crazy in his lap.

  It was the kind of drinking story every engineer loved to tell but hated at the time.

  “If we can’t get our ship running,” she said, pointing at the disabled Gray frigate, “how about that one?”

  Little was shocked, but only for the briefest of moments. Then professional pride stepped in like a traffic cop and began marshalling his thoughts. “That last hit wasn’t too severe,” he allowed. “They should really be underway by now, but they aren’t, which tells me they probably lost their coaxial stabilizers. If they had spares, they could fix that in a heartbeat.”

  He shook his head, lips drawn tight. “Dammit, Captain. They probably don’t have the parts or, same thing again, they’d be turning their guns on us right now, assuming they’re even aware we’re still alive over here.”

  “Do we?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do we have the parts?”

  Little shook his head.

  “So our stabilizers were hit as well?”

  “Captain,” Little began, taking great care to avoid using the voice engineers often use when trying to explain technical matters to barely-educated combat officers, “they’re intact but, if we pull them, we kill life support.”

  Sometimes you just had to point out the blatantly obvious.

  Robin was having that same thought.

  “Are you telling me that the enemy ship probably has no life support? That any living crew are bundled up in EVA suits, just waiting for us to come over and shoot them?”

  “Well, I suppose…”

  “Well then, that settles it.” Robin gave him a satisfied nod. “Computer, ship-wide intercom.”

  She waited until the speakers overhead hissed into life. “All hands, this is Captain Metzker. Our ship is finished, so we’re going to take the enemy frigate home instead. All personnel not needed by Chief Engineer Little to pull some equipment are to suit up and report to their assigned escape trunks. On my command, we will abandon ship and commence boarding operations.”

  She turned back to Little. “If we’re not staying here, we don’t need the stabilizers installed on this ship, right?”

  His ears were slightly red as he chuckled. “Well, when you say it like that, it seems obvious!”

  “Tactical,” Robin shouted over the clamor of a bridge crew getting suited up for a pulse-raising adventure.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Put your best fighters on the command shuttle. I’ll take them in through the ventral engineering trunk and secure the self-destruct. When I give you the all-clear, you take the rest of the crew over. Secure the bridge and then we’ll come at the rest of the crew from both ends.”

  She was pleased to see that her orders had been taken seriously. When she arrived at the forward shuttle bay, her command shuttle was packed with troops. There was no room left to stand but she didn’t really want to pull anyone off.

  “Mosh pit!” one of them shouted and, before she could respond, they grabbed her and pulled her in above their heads. It may not have been the most dignified way for a captain to travel but, with your own ship dying and a fight to the death ahead of you, who had time to worry about prestige?

  She nearly got wedged between shoulders when the shuttle exited the ship and banked hard to head for the target. With a little jostling, they managed to keep her aloft. The ten-kilometer trip went quickly and she thanked her luck that they’d been drifting closer together rather than farther apart. At the start the fight, she’d ordered a further deceleration for her small force so they’d have more time to fire on the enemy.

  She frowned in the privacy of her helmet. That part had worked, but she wasn’t certain she’d made the right decision in focusing fire on one target at a time. Intellectually, she knew there was no way to know if she’d been right or wrong, but she still had a hundred twenty three dead crewmen. Though the number may have been higher i
f she’d fired on all targets simultaneously, it offered little comfort.

  She still had hundreds of people depending on her to make the right moves now. Even a half-assed or bad move, as Julia had once advised her, could mitigate a disaster. A commander who froze up and stopped making decisions was sure to get her people killed.

  She looked up with relief as the overhead light, a few centimeters from her face, turned green – the Gray color of blood and warning. Time to go and she was fairly certain she was making the best decision out of a pretty limited set of otherwise terrible options.

  The rear ramp opened, the frigate hull filling the entire view, and she was carefully handled out to float in front of her team. The ventral escape trunk was five meters away and she grabbed a rail at the top of the shuttle opening. With a light push she crossed the distance, catching one of the handrails around the trunk and flexing her arms to slow her body.

  One foot hit the hull with a light thump but she doubted it could be heard inside an engineering space filled with machinery and frantic technicians. She waited as her advance boarding party crossed over. One of them held up a portable spot-welder and she gave him a thumbs-up while silently chastising herself for forgetting the need.

  She waited till he moved next to her and then opened the outer hatch of the escape trunk. The hatch snapped out of the way, oddly silent given its violent speed.

  The crew inside would probably have heard that. Time to abandon stealth in favor of speed.

  Her crewman reached into the housing and put a temporary spot-weld on the door retaining clip. He pulled back immediately and Robin reached in to pull off the access plate inside the trunk. She yanked on the lever for the hydraulic bypass before pulling back out of the way.

  She’d just caught a glimpse of the disappearing inner hatch and the rush of internal gasses or, rather, the dust kicked up by the gasses. She held onto a railing as the shimmering atmosphere vented past her and her team. Three Gray crewmen tumbled out the trunk in their EVA suits.