“Do what you can to get us clear as quickly as possible, without,” Captain Laurent said, stressing that last word, “exposing our engines to droid laser strikes, Helmsman.”
“Aye, sir,” DuPont said with relief, “we’ll be out of range in another two minutes.”
I pursed my lips. As far as I was concerned that was two minutes too long.
“We’re going to take damage in battle, Admiral,” Laurent reminded me, as if wasn’t already aware of this fact.
“This isn’t my first space rodeo, Captain,” I shot back and then took a deep breath and popped my neck, “but your point is well taken.”
Just then a powerful, six-pronged laser strike from the spinal mount of the nearest of the droid mother-ships broke through our shields.
“Laser strike on the rear starboard facing; they’re trying for the engines just like you thought, sir,” reported Tactical.
I glared at the Flag Captain and then turned my furious gaze back on the droids where it belonged. I couldn’t afford to have this ship shot out from under me. She was tough and she had shields nearly as strong as a Dreadnaught Class, but she wasn’t a battleship and her hull couldn’t stand up to nearly as much punishment as I was used to.
I hadn’t realized until then how much that knowledge was knocking me off my game.
“No significant damage to the ship,” Damage Control reported after several tense seconds, “it looks like all it did was scorch the duralloy; nothing more, sirs.”
The breath whooshed out of me and I wasn’t sure if it was just me or if the bridge felt a little relieved at the report.
“This ship is fleet of foot and she can take a hit, Admiral,” Laurent advised me quietly.
“This is a medium cruiser, Captain,” I grunted, careful to keep my voice down, “and no matter how fast she is, right now we’re in a slugfest and speed counts for little. She can’t take the kind of damage we’re used to absorbing, Laurent." I hoped I didn’t sound as worried as I felt when I said this.
Laurent grimaced and then shrugged. “She’s no battleship, but she is a top-of-the-line Strike Cruiser measuring a full four hundred fifty meters from stem to stern. And between you and me, sir, with that girdle the Chief Engineer slapped around her middle—that Duralloy II,” he stressed, “not to mention our weapons upgrades—I’d say the Phoenix would qualify for Heavy Cruiser Status in any halfway decent shipyard at this point, no question. Barring a few lucky hits like on the shuttle bay, it’s going to take more than just a few hits to get through all that duralloy.”
I still wasn’t pleased with the situation, especially when another hit blasted through our shields scorching a line along our starboard side a fourth of the way down our hull from the forward section to the middle-top of the ship before cutting out, but it helped.
“We’re clearing the enemy’s estimated spinal laser range right now, sir,” reported the Tactical Officer.
Of course getting back out of range of the enemy lasers helped even more than the pep talk did, I thought with a smile.
“Blast if these droid ships aren’t slow, Admiral,” the Helmsman said with a shake of his head, “they’re almost as slow as freighter!”
“That’s good for us,” I said with a nod and turned to the First Officer at his position in Tactical, possessively clutching his microphone down to the Gunnery section. “Tell Gunnery to pour it onto those mother-ships while the Helmsman keeps us out of their range. I want to wrap the last of this enemy division up before heading deeper in system. We’ve already swept up most of their gunboats, now that we’ve pulled their teeth it’s time to crush the jaw that spat them out.”
“Will do, Admiral,” Eastwood said with a growl.
I leaned back in my chair and considered the situation’s myriad variables.
Chapter 39: No Escape in the Escape Pod
“How long is this going to take?” Bethany demanded, sitting down primly in one of the acceleration couches built into the side of the escape pod, the tone of her voice at dire odds with her face and body posture. Of course, she chose the one right next to the pilot’s chair, or at least what passed for a pilot’s chair in the pod, so she’d be right in his ear.
“It takes as long as it takes, Princess,” Tremblay said, flashing her a smile that went unreturned before said smile quickly wilted.
“There’s no need to be rude or short with me, Lieutenant,” the Princess-cadet-cum-Sector Representative said strictly.
“Sorry,” he said, ducking his head and wonder why he did so even as he straightened back up, “but our job is to sit and wait. Only the Droids know when they’re going to show up to pick us up…” he frowned down at the pod’s limited sensor suite before muttering, “if they plan to pick us up.”
“Is that pessimism I smell?” Bethany sniffed. “If so, take it somewhere else; this mission will be a success.”
“Gonna wave your magic wand, are you?” the Intelligence officer snorted. “Besides, I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet but other than the head there’s nowhere private in this pod.
Bethany opened her mouth for a doubtless scathing retort when the sensor suite lit up like a Christmas tree indicating that the pod was being scanned by targeting systems. They were being scanned!
Tremblay’s mouth went dry as what had to be the largest ship he’d seen—outside of a Settlement ship—showed up on the pods relatively myopic sensor suite.
“Sweet, crying Murphy,” he breathed.
“I knew we wouldn’t have to wait long,” Bethany said with such confidence that he glanced at her with disbelief.
The faintest look of uncertainty flitted off her face as he looked at her and in an instant it was gone as if it had never been and her mouth made a thin line.
Lifting her chin, she stared down her nose at him until he turned away. “This is a diplomatic mission and I am the Diplomat. As such I will be in charge of this contact and you will be my military attaché,” Bethany informed him, as if by simply saying it she made it true.
While her words and tone rubbed him the wrong way, if there was one thing the Intelligence Officer had learned during his time in the service of two separate Montagne’s it was this: the nail that stuck its head up got pounded down.
He cocked his head. “Suits me down to the ground, your Worship,” he said with a blank face and turned on the pod’s communications suite. It was time to see if they could increase the odds of surviving at least long enough to get on the droid ship.
Chapter 40: It’s a Spalding
“All hands: brace for impact,” had rung through the speakers in the Locker less than five minutes earlier, but now, once again, an emergency siren sounded.
Growling with irritation, the old Engineer marched over and slammed the button to silence the irritating sound and did so hard enough to leave a dent.
“Confounded noise operators don’t know when to leave an old man in peace,” he snarled at the now silent console. It was outrageous, that’s what it was! The Locker was a secret place and supposed to be isolated from the rest of the ship—and in its previous life that’s exactly what it had been. But while no one else onboard the ship could look inside and see what was going on inside, the same was not as true when it came to looking out.
The gad-blasted sirens and klaxons sounding all over the place were set to give him a headache. “They should never have installed you,” he shouted at the irritating piece of technology, and once again seriously considered removing it—along with the rest of the speakers on the half-deck. Of course, that would have taken too much time away from his current projects so he once again dropped the idea. He would just have to keep it in his hip pocket though.
Irritated beyond his ability to cope, the old engineer clomped over to the very same console he’d just decried and called up a pair of images. The first was of what, exactly, was going on outside the ship while the other showed Main Engineering.
“A Fleet action, is it?” he said, his eyes widening and for half a
moment the blood started flowing. They needed him down there! He started strapping back on his tool belt and snatched up his plasma torch, but then his eyes snagged on the view from Main Engineering—a scene over which Junior was standing tall and issuing orders like something resembling a proper Chief Engineer—and he deflated.
The sound and faint shudders as those newfangled plasma cannons went to full rock and roll for the second…or was it third time today? Well, however many times they had fired their aftermath left him feeling just, plain, old.
“I would have killed to get my hands on this Imperial tech back in the day,” he sighed wistfully. In fact, if he were on his beloved Lucky Clover he would have been industriously installing every new one of the bits and pieces he could have fit into, or on, the old girl—but, of course, he wasn’t onboard his ship. Every moment he looked around reminded him of that inescapable fact.
“I used to think that walking around a place where everything was subtly wrong was the worst torture a man could experience…but I was wrong,” he declared kicking, the wall hard enough that the resulting clang of his droid legs impacting the wall left a dent. “It’s all this mono-Locsium-based, fleet-footed little racing sled we’re stuck in. Why, in a way, it’s almost as bad as being stuck inside a Station!”
He nodded wisely to his own words and despite themselves his eyes turned back to the view in engineering and his finger twitched, showing their eagerness to go and get his hands dirty.
“Nope! Can’t do it,” he declared fiercely, “it wouldn’t be right to go and step all over the boy’s toes while he’s still getting’ his feet wet. This might be his only chance to be the official Chief Engineer of a warship, and besides, his old Pa is just another glorified supernumerary,” he snorted and firmly turned away. Barring battle damage near his duty station down in the Locker, he wasn’t about to budge. “Can’t do it to him,” he declared a second time as he felt himself wavering from his previously steadfast position. After all, he reminded himself, his shoulders slumping, the boy might never get another chance to run an engineering department and old Spalding was too wise to know he’d be anything but a burr under the skin in any department Tiberius was running. Having a supernumerary under foot was an irritation no cream could cure, it was the itch a man just couldn’t scratch, the…
“Besides…he’s dead to me,” he said his voice breaking as he considered the likelihood that his boy had a plan to take control of this ship in the name of that accursed Parliament. A tear rolled down his single, remaining, non-droid eye. “Of course the boy has a plan—I raised the lad,” he muttered before silently correcting, well, at least some of the time.
O’ course when the young one took his step and made his move, an engineer twice as wily and with ten times the experience would have no choice but to be ready and waiting to put him down like the rabid, mutinous dog he would prove himself to be. Another tear rolled down his cheek, this one unnoticed by the aged engineer.
“Nope, can’t take away the lad’s moment to shine,” he said, his shoulders slumping as he turned back to the secret project squirreled away on the half-deck. He knew all too well the fires that burned in a misguided mind like the boy’s; after all, he’d been young once his own self. Having the Old Man down barking orders and generally raining on the parade would spoil the moment for anyone.
Resolutely, he returned to the worktable in his own private hangar and bent down to pick up an oversized duralloy plate and toss it over his shoulders. Even having his strength back, he barely managed it but he was in a might bit of a mood and the clang as it landed behind him barely registered.
Once again, his eyes swept the pile of armor parts scattered before him and he wondered how those fools back on Gambit figured he could make an entire suit of power armor out of Duralloy II. The tolerances just didn’t work the same way; it didn’t have as much bend and give to it as the older Mark I stuff.
He shook his head piteously. Why, it was just plain impossible, that’s what it was; they weren’t going to be able to put in just one factory onto making a new design of power armor. They were going to have to build one for each and every piece of the articulated suit….well, a line for several pieces probably, but even so that was just plum dumb.
And besides that, they didn’t have the resources back at Gambit to squander building a dedicated factory for every piece of armor in a battle suit!
The ship rocked and shuddered around him, letting any fool onboard her with two brain cells to rub together know that the shields had taken a right beating if shots were getting through. But he rolled with the motion, hardly even noticing the motion. And, o’ course, why should he notice? That mono-Locsium might be strong and thin, but the Duralloy girdle he had slapped around her midsection to cover up the damaged sections was nice and thick—the proper dimensions for any lady worthy of the title!
At first he had thought they could just machine the individual parts in a full service workshop, like they had in the Clover—at least for limited runs. But that hadn’t panned out like he had thought it would. For a substance twice as strong as the old stuff, it took ten times as long to rework it which just slowed everything down.
If only there were a way to work it that wasn’t so labor- or factory-intensive…but the more he looked for high-tech solutions, the more impossible the idea seemed—at least in practice. In theory it worked just fine.
Then he snapped his fingers as he had a Murphy-blessed epiphany: maybe he’d been looking at it all wrong! Had he fallen into the trap of looking for a miracle solution in all the tech goodies—like certain Chief Engineers who should remain nameless, but just so happened to reside on this ship? Not only did the nameless one reside there, but he had installed virtually untested plasma cannons into this ship’s broadside while an old man was busy transferring designs and setting up work crews for his old ship?
He slammed a fist down on the table, knowing that when the new tech failed to provide a solution, an engineer had to get creative and look into his bag of tricks.
He had to get…old school.
Yep, that was exactly it; he didn’t need a miracle cure. He needed a solution like he’d done with the Phoenix: an old, upgraded substance to cover up the patches and problems with a top-of-the-line, but damaged, Imperial cruiser.
Or rather, his eyes lighted up, what I need is exactly the opposite. I don’t need to build a whole new suit out of Duralloy II; I just need to modify an old power suit with a duralloy chassis!
He rolled the thought around, laying out the framework for a solution which had been staring him in the face since he’d set foot on the Furious Phoenix. He could strip the outer armor off the older unit and replace it with Duralloy II or, if that proved too problematic, he could simply bond the stronger, less malleable stuff to the outside of the older armor.
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’m onto somethin’ here…” he mused. The old power systems were strong enough to handle an increased load, or could be made to do so with slight modifications. And while it might be best to make newer, lighter plates of old duralloy with special, flat surfaces to bond the harder plates to, they could just do a slap and dash to start with for what the eggheads liked to call ‘proof of concept.' When they got back he could have the factories turn out specially designed under-armor of the old, plain, Duralloy and then bond the new, upgraded material to the outside!
Muttering happily under his breath, he snatched up the data slate with all his designs to date and deleted the whole lot of them. Then, typing and drawing furiously, he started to work up a whole new concept. Instead of trying to design and build a whole new suit, he would instead just take the existing suits and upgrade them. If the series ended with a Caprian Battle Suit Series 2 Mark D, then the new suits would be the Series 2 Mark E modification. “Yes, that will do nicely,” he muttered as a gleam entered his eye. Of course the power assist systems would have to be beefed up.
Whistling happily to himself, the old engineer set about breathi
ng new life into an old design.
“Course…if we’re making an upgrade, those Imperial suits we saw back in the First Battle for Easy Haven had built-in blasters on the forearms of their suits. I figure the boys over in the Lancer corps will want an answer to that,” he muttered, putting a stylus in his mouth and chewing on the end. “Anything they can do, we can do as good or better—so long as we’re not trying to race them to the top of the tech pile.”
With new fire in his eyes, the old engineer pulled out an old-style, Caprian, suit of the same design as he’d hidden away onboard the Lucky Clover originally. He loaded the cumbersome suit onto a cart and wheeled it out of the hangar’s corner where it had been stowed.
“I’m sure the Admiral would like to have a new suit, seeing as how the old one was destroyed,” he said, activating his multi-tool before stripping off the outer plates. Realizing what he’d done, he stared down at his own hand with horror and disgust, “You know…back in the old days if a man’s hand offended him, he’d cut it off!” he declared angrily, turning back to the bench and snatching up the right tools for the job.
He also pointedly didn’t think about the fact that when the old lunatics who used to cut off hands back on the home world talked about cutting off the hands that offended them, they were usually talking about other people’s hands—not their own.
So while the battle raged around him for control of the system, the old engineer launched into a battle of his own: a battle to produce power armor that could not only stand up to the best the Imperials had to offer—as seen during the First Battle for Easy Haven—but could even beat them.
At least, they would if old Papa Spalding had anything to say about it!
Chapter 41: For all the Aqua-colored Marbles
Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine Page 31
