by Bobby Adair
He laughs.
Penny does too, once she sees I’m smiling.
“Will do.” Brice heads forward.
“Phil,” I ask. “What’s the status?”
He’s still working at his console. “All systems seem to be functioning, yet I have warning lights that won’t go off.”
“Is the hull leaking?”
“Maybe.”
“Track it down,” I tell him. “We need to know if we have a problem and if we fried a few sensors. How’s the drive array?”
“Seems fine,” he tells me, turning the question over to Penny. “Does it feel alright to you?”
“No problems I can feel.” She’s looking at readings off her console gauges. “I suppose we’ll know for sure when we jump back to Trinity Base.”
She’s right about that. Imperfections in the drive array might produce nothing but a barely perceptible jitter when zipping around at max grav chasing enemy ships, but flaws could easily turn into disaster once we make a jump at 30c.
Tarlow says, “Maybe running those two tankers down through the atmosphere wasn’t the best idea.”
Ignoring his comment, I ask, “Are you still scanning? Do you see any movement?”
“The cruiser is where we left it,” he answers. “Most of tanker number three is still skipping off the atmosphere. Numbers one and two are too deep or they’ve broken up into pieces too small for me to see. As for number four, it’s stuck in an orbit on the other side of the planet.”
Looking around the bridge or opinions, I ask, “Any reason we need to track it down and finish it off?”
Everyone agrees that though the crew might well be alive, the ship won’t ever be leaving Cygni Saturn’s orbit unless someone comes to rescue it. Even then, salvage is questionable.
Chapter 52
Eleven percent. That’s all we used of our ammo load in the battle. All that extra space and weight dedicated to plasma gun slugs was worth it. I don’t feel the least bit of anxiety at going into the next battle with an 89% load, and I run through an unrealistic extrapolation and decide we have enough slugs onboard to kill another forty-five Trog cruisers.
The assumptions to support that outcome break down at every turn. Still, it’s entertaining to think about while I’m waiting for the crew to do their work.
“How do you want to handle the attack?” Phil asks.
I’ve already been pondering the question between reports on the status of the ship. “We put our tech advantage to use.”
Penny swivels in her seat to face us and take full part in the conversation.
“I think,” I tell him, “we power out to a safe distance from Cygni Saturn and plan three fast, computer-controlled jumps. One to get us from here to the area near Trinity Base, another to jump us close in, and a third dangerous jump to pop out right on top of them.”
“On top?” Phil asks. “How far out?”
Turning to Penny, I ask, “At max acceleration, how much distance can we cover in three seconds?”
She hesitates, not sure that I’m asking a rhetorical question before she tells me, “I’ll need to calculate—”
“Not enough,” Tarlow tells us, spinning his chair to join the conversation. “It’s physics at work. No matter what your acceleration force, you’ll cover the least distance in the first seconds as you’re building up speed.”
“Not enough for what?” Penny asks.
Tarlow has already guessed the plan. Cutting his eyes toward me as he answers. “He wants to bubble in so close to the protoplanet’s surface that he can start our attack run and finish it before the Grays can react. Foolproof.” He smirks. “Except we’re skipping some details.”
“We don’t want to be nearby when the nukes go off,” says Phil, not wanting Tarlow to garner all the intellectual glory. “And they’re ballistic weapons. No drive systems, no control systems. Which means we have to accelerate toward our target, release them on that path, separate from them as they fall, and then accelerate away.”
"Only," Tarlow cuts back in, "once we let the weapons loose, we can’t decelerate too hard to achieve separation, or our grav field might knock the ballistic weapons off-course."
“Same happens when we try to escape," says Phil. "If Penny accelerates too hard to our getaway speed and we’re too close to the falling nukes, our grav field will push them way off target. Getting in too close means we have less time for our maneuvers, which means we have to push more g through our drive array, which means we miss our target.”
“Okay,” I surrender. “The three of you get on the calculations. With the computer control system, we’ll be able to bubble through our jumps so fast, the Grays won’t know what’s happening until we come out of our last one and we’re bearing down on them. You three figure out the closest distance we can be and still make all this work.”
“Plus a few seconds for human reaction time,” says Phil.
“Maybe five,” adds Tarlow, ganging up with Phil.
I exaggerate a sigh as my brilliant plan suffers from the constraints of reality. “What do you figure is the fastest a Gray bridge crew can react?”
“Based on what we’ve seen….” Phil leans back and scratches his chin. “We didn’t record any data on that during the battle.”
“We were preoccupied,” Penny tells us with a smart-ass smile.
And she’s right.
"Plus the time-dilating effects of being in battle," she adds.
“We don’t move fast enough at sub-light speeds to dilate time," Tarlow scoffs.
Phil glares at Tarlow. “She’s talking about the psychological effects.”
I nod. People can’t make accurate time judgments with so much excitement and terror running through their veins. “When we ran that first attack over Arizona—”
"Not relevant," Tarlow tells us. "Anything in that attack can’t be included in whatever argument you’re going to make, because in that case, the Trogs hadn’t seen these kinds of ships. Nobody had ever rammed a cruiser before. You’d have to give them time to deduce your intentions. In the subsequent battles, they knew what these ships could do, so they could react faster."
“Only,” says Phil, “this is the first time these Trogs and Grays will see anything like us.”
“But…” Tarlow trails off.
“Speed of light and all,” says Penny. “And the top speed of their cruisers in bubble jump. Not one Gray in this system can possibly know anything that happened back on earth. If the Trogs had sent a ship back along their supply route to inform their bosses on the home world, that first ship is still months from reaching this system.”
Tarlow nods slowly, accepting his mistake. “Yeah. You could be right.”
Of course, Penny is right, one-hundred-percent so.
“So,” I say, “maybe that first battle is our template. Throw in some complacency, because I’ll bet no Trog expects an attack here.”
“Thirty seconds to a minute,” Phil concludes. “Maybe several minutes. I think there’s some arrogance wrapped into the equation. After we rammed that first ship during the attack over Arizona, the other two ships in the bombardment didn’t react like they should have. They didn’t run away, and they didn’t attack us. To them, what we did was inconceivable. They probably thought we were such stupid little humans we’d accidentally crashed into that first cruiser.”
“Yeah,” Penny agrees, “humans too stupid to fly an assault ship, right?” She smiles grimly, vindictively, some of her long, pent-up hatred coming through.
You can only keep your foot on a human’s neck for so long. Eventually, we find our feet. We take our revenge.
“So if we pop out of bubble,” I suggest, “and pour on the heavy…” I look around at the other three.
Phil picks up my thought. “We’ll be blindingly bright. At least to the Grays’ grav sense. The intensity alone should stun them for a moment.”
Nodding, I say, "And they’ll be trying to figure out what we are. Hell, for the first fe
w moments, they might even think we’re another cruiser arriving late. They’ll have to think we’re a lot bigger than we are, right?"
Shrugs and nods.
Doesn’t matter. I go on. “We race up to optimal speed for our nukes let them go, and then get out of there. With any luck, all of it happens before the first Gray bridge crew can react.”
“Once we loose the nukes,” says Phil, “they become ballistic weapons. That’s the kind of warfare Grays have been fighting for millennia. They won’t know what the nukes are, but they’ll know we think they’re dangerous. I think that’s the beginning of the decision window for them, one they’ve probably practiced for. I think that’s our short timeframe.”
I agree. “You guys get busy.” I get out of my chair. “I’m headed outside to see how things are going with the crew.”
Chapter 53
I stop on the way through and chat with the gun crew. Everything with the prototype axial weapon has performed spectacularly. In all the rounds we’ve fired so far, we haven’t experienced a single bug in the software, haven’t had a misfire. The only troubles are in reloading the magazines. The gun has a rate of fire that will empty them in a hurry when Penny gets trigger-happy—their words, not mine. Loading the magazines from the storerooms down the hall gets hairy as the ship’s interior grav fluctuates during high-g maneuvers. Hauling the weighty slugs is difficult under those circumstances.
All understandable. All unavoidable consequences of what we do for a living.
I work my way up the length of the ship, through the airlock, past the partially empty nuke racks, and exit through the open assault door.
Three nukes are mounted. Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Peterson are working a fourth into alignment with the bracket.
“The zero-g is deceptive,” Silva says to me as she catches a glance of me coming over the curve of the hull.
“Mass is still mass,” pontificates Lenox. “Once you get seven hundred pounds moving, you still have to stop it.”
I hear them heaving to push the torpedo-shaped bomb into place.
Moving closer, I run a gloved hand over the hull and realize how hot it must have been down in Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere. The rough rust is gone. What’s left is steel, blued in the heat and chemicals, blacked with carbon deposits, and streaked as smooth as a shiny bullet.
“These mounts,” Brice tells me, “They’re a bit glazed.”
“Glazed?” I ask.
“The rough edges are worn smooth and shiny,” Lenox explains. “The latch and release mechanisms have us worried.”
I float over for a closer look and illuminate a bracket with a suit-mounted light. “Jeez.”
“Sticking out from the hull,” Brice explains, as he heaves the heavy nuke, “they got the worst of it.”
I run my hand over the bracket’s latching mechanism, pushing on the levered system, but I’m unable to move anything.
“You can’t,” Silva tells me, seeing what I’m doing. “With the weight of the nuke pressing down on it, with a little momentum, it’ll lock into place.”
“Do they stay?” I ask the group.
The nuke they’re working with latches in and they all float back as they pull their hands free and examine their work.
"For now," Brice answers. He looks at me, and I see his grim grin in reflected light as he drifts my way. "The hydraulics all seem intact. No reason to expect them to fail.”
“Except the metal is all a little thinner now,” adds Lenox.
Nobody mentions that these are the same brackets that hold the tank ring in place—the tank ring we’ll need for fuel if we ever expect to see earth again.
Chapter 54
The first jump is the longest. Nearly eight minutes.
“Do you feel it?” Phil asks, staring at nothing I can discern.
Penny nods. “Something isn’t right.”
“The nukes?” I ask. “Are they throwing the ship off-balance?”
"The mounts?" suggests Penny. She’s aware of the glazing they received down in Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere, and she feels some guilt over it.
“Whatever it is,” I say, “we’re in bubble. We haven’t disintegrated yet.” I look at the timer on my d-pad. “We’ll be rid of the nukes in another seven minutes or so.” I shrug to make the others on the bridge think that I think the tiny vibration is no big deal.
I’m not fooling anyone.
The comm goes quiet.
Chapter 55
We flash out of bubble and back in so fast, I almost miss it.
“This next jump will go quick,” says Phil, telling us what we already know.
It’s not the length of time that concerns me. It was whether we’d pull it off without a hitch. A hitch being something like light-speed disintegration, leaving my ship and everyone on my crew as a nebulous streak of glittery dust smeared across a few light minutes of space.
Penny is watching a timer on her console, one bolted on when the computerized nav system was installed back on Iapetus. She’s preparing herself. Her moment is coming.
The blue grav field inside flickers off and pulses bright again as our second jump ends and the third begins.
“Two million miles,” Phil warns us. “Eleven seconds.”
Over the crew comm, I say words that for some reason I never thought to utter before, “Battle stations.”
Tarlow glances over his shoulder at me. He thinks it was a stupid thing to say.
“Three,” says Phil. “Two. One.”
The jump bubble’s steady blue fizzles away in a silent puff of dead nothing.
The nav computer surrenders control.
Penny punches power into the drive array as Phil brings up the inertial system and grav lens.
I’m mashed into my seat as all the g’s blasting out of the drive array shove our ship through vacuum, and the inertial field tries to compensate. As usual, the grav lens has washed out any detail I might hope to see in front with the bug in my head, but Trinity Base, the Trog fleet, or the protoplanet are nowhere to be seen
“Uhm,” says Tarlow, the one whiney syllable telling me something’s fucked.
“What?” I ask, ice calm riveted to my question.
“We’re not where we’re supposed to be,” says Phil.
Tarlow jumps straight to what he thinks is the cause. “The nav computer—”
“How close are we?” I ask, cutting Tarlow off, getting right to the meat of the problem.
Phil is tapping on his console. “Penny, that’s the heading.”
She’s scanning her screens as the ship veers.
“You’ll see it come in from the right,” says Phil.
The ship is still getting up to speed.
I feel the pull to my left as Penny brings us around to the right.
Phil glances my way, finally answering my question. “Maybe twenty thousand klicks farther out than we expected to be.”
I ask, “How many extra seconds does that give them to prepare for us?”
“To shoot at us,” adds Tarlow.
“Do your job,” I tell him. “Get the radar array focused on the target.”
Tarlow accepts the scolding without a word of rebuttal. He hunches over his keyboard and taps furiously.
I ask, “Anything yet?”
Phil knows I’m talking to him. From the distance we’re flying in from, he’s the only one who’s likely to make anything out. “No reaction from the Trogs.”
I glance at my d-pad for the elapsed seconds. “You are recording?” I ask Tarlow.
“Yes,” he grumbles as his center screen clarifies into an image of Trog cruisers lined up in formation over Trinity Base—ten rows of six, one row of two, four docked at the base, and three outliers. “Jesus, sixty-nine fucking ships.”
“The biggest fleet yet,” observes Penny.
“Some of those live here,” I tell them. “They’re guarding the base. We killed one already. I’ll bet it’s those three out of formation.”
As if
to confirm my assertion, one of the ships bursts in red flares, only I know they aren’t flares, they’re red-hot railgun slugs, fired toward us.
“Penny?” I ask.
The ship surges as she tempts fate with five more g’s. She lets off almost immediately and evades to the left before putting us back on course. No point in soaring down our bomb run vector at a constant speed and direction. We’d only need that at the very end, just before we let the bombs go.
“Another sentinel is firing,” says Tarlow.
“The third is accelerating,” Phil alerts us.
“Running away?” I ask, knowing how unlikely that is.
“Moving for a better shooting angle,” suggests Phil.
I glance over at Tarlow’s screen again. On Penny’s, Trinity Base is still too far away to make out any detail. "Have the rest moved?"
“Not yet,” Tarlow answers.
“They know we’re here?” I ask.
Phil says, “Some of the ships in the fleet are powering up.”
“Penny,” I say, “spray a few hundred rounds their way. They need something to think about.”
“I can’t hit a ship from this far out,” she tells me.
“In that big formation,” I disagree, “I think you might land some rounds. They might panic. That could work to our advantage.”
Penny sends a short burst at the formation, followed by another, and another.
Chapter 56
We’re so far out that the first of the Trogs’ railgun rounds has not yet reached us. Yet all three defenders are firing, throwing up a hail we’ll have to fly through.
Our rounds, traveling through space at two to three times faster than a Trog railgun slug, are raining down on the formation of waiting cruisers. Most miss and impact the protoplanet below them. Many hit hulls with enough force to send the Gray bridge crews into a tizzy. Defensive grav fields bloom bright blue through the formation. Ships start to flee with no order, no plan, just bridge crews collectively deciding to take measures to move their ships out of harm’s way without linking to the bridge crews in the other ships.
