Desperate Times (Lost Planet Warriors Book 1)

by McLaughlin,K.

  There was more than one way of picking up extra particles, though. My course had us zipping through the Oort Cloud, which would help us grab some extra debris. And...

  "Kim, this course," Kara said. "We're getting awfully close to the sun, aren't we?"

  "Yup. Just inside the corona." Particles. All of the lovely particles you could ask for.

  "We can't navigate with that much accuracy," Kara protested. "We're only accurate to about plus or minus a million miles. If we're off by that much, we could slam into the sun instead of passing through just the corona."

  "True," I said. "The way I see it, you and Aeron have about ten minutes to figure out how to synch our computer systems so that we can use the data from his nav computer to course correct our drives. Better get on that."

  "You're shitting me," Kara said.

  "She's mad," Aeron said to Kara. "This is madness."

  "You're telling me?" she replied to him. "C'mon, we'd better get to work."

  She ushered him clear of the bridge. He was still mumbling something about madness as the doors hissed closed behind them both.

  It wasn't insane. It was highly unconventional. The risk level was a lot more than I would usually have allowed. If anything short of the continuation of two species - one of them mine - was at stake, I would have looked for another way to roll the dice.

  But this was pretty much it. Either we won this fight, or everyone I knew back home was toast. And the last Cymtarran battleship would be gone as well. Along with it any chance of humanity surviving the plague of the Skree.

  They'd be coming our way. Of that I was certain. Oh, it might take a while. But if I was understanding what Bran and Aeron had told me, they'd already obliterated the main opposition in our neck of the woods. Humans might survive unmolested for a while, but we were nothing but a speed bump for a race like the Skree. Sooner or later, our turn would come.

  If we managed to survive this fight, and united with the Cymtarrans, then it might be another story entirely. We had people, and raw resources. They had the tech we needed to even the odds. And I think we also had the sort of unconventional thinking to do the crazy thing, to take the risk no one thought was possible. Like I was doing right now.

  Sometimes that sort of thing blew up in your face. But sometimes it was the key to victory.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bran

  The tactical situation was desperate. I’d managed to maneuver the Nova Song away from envelopment three times now, but the Skree were excellent at the tactic, and our screens were fluorescing in a rainbow of color, a sign that they had absorbed far too much energy from incoming plasma weapons.

  “Screens beginning to fail in the aft section of the ship,” Carrick warned.

  “Rotate the ship thirty degrees to starboard.”

  The smaller ships’ weapons were one thing. Our screens would resist those for quite a while. But the mothership was another matter entirely. The Skree had mounted truly massive weapons on the thing, and even at this range the screens were taking a beating. If I could rotate the back end of the ship, moving in a bit of a zig zag forward motion, I could perhaps shift the point of impact and allow other screen generators to take the load for a while.

  “They’re closing the distance between us more quickly now,” Carrick said.

  Which was the natural side effect of our no longer traveling in a straight line. The enemy ship was cutting directly across the zig-zag path w were taking. They would overtake us if we continued. Of course, we didn’t need to keep this up much longer, but they didn’t know that.

  The Skree mothership was like a massive predator sensing blood. When we turned and ran, they gave chase with everything they had. All they were seeing was their target running for it. As much as that ruse galled me, I had to admit that it was working. They were chasing us with everything they had. Now all I had to do was find a way to stop them at precisely the right moment.

  “Sir, are you very sure that the Terrans will come through?” Carrick asked. He had come to stand very close beside me, his voice almost a whisper.

  “I trust Kim with my life,” I replied.

  His eyes grew wide. “Oh,” he said. “And…with the survival of our race?”

  I laughed without mirth. “Our race is dead, Carrick. All of us know that. What remains to us is to attempt to make the Universe remember us in some small way.”

  “If we can take them with us, then that alone would be something,” I said, pointing at the Skree mothership on screen, “But if Kim has another plan in mind, we will buy her the time she needs. These Terrans have courage and ingenuity. They give me hope.”

  “Hope for what, sir?” Carrick asked.

  I could tell from the look in his eyes that he wanted hoped. That he hungered for even the smallest shred of a chance at a brighter, better future. I couldn’t give him that. Not yet, anyway. Would an alliance with the Terrans provide us with what we needed to take the battle back to the Skree? I had no way of knowing.

  “For a future,” I said. Best to keep my answer simple for now.

  According to the graphics on screen we were almost in position. The point where the enemy ship must stop was marked by a brilliant yellow sphere on the main screen. It was time to take the battle to the enemy. At last.

  “How many phase torpedoes remain?” I asked.

  “Five, sir.”

  “Prepare all five to fire. Full spread. Target their screen generators.”

  Phase torpedoes were a relatively new invention. They used a small bit of jump technology within their drives, allowing them to effectively bypass screens. We’d had a small number allocated to our ship as a test shortly before the Skree attacked. It had taken fifty of the things to destroy one mothership, during the great battle for our home system.

  We had only five left, and for all I knew they were the last five in the galaxy. It might have been enough to smash the Skree jump drives, if we were lucky. Then we could have jumped away, run again to some other system and begun repairs. But I refused to abandon these people to an angry, damaged Skree mothership. Even never having met another Terran, I knew that there was no way I could do that to Kim.

  In the old days we would never have even considered retreat. We would simply have fought, and died if necessary, to fulfill the dictates of honor. I would have to watch carefully that desperation did not turn what remained of our race into something that it was not.

  The Nova Star entered the yellow sphere on my tactical display. This would either be the finest hour of my race, or the worst. And it was up to me to decide. I prayed to the Goddess that I was up to the challenge.

  “Spin the ship!” I roared. “All plasma beams, focus fire on the mothership. Launch shuttles to engage the smaller craft.”

  My ship pivoted almost in place, inertial dampers allowing a course change which would have been impossible without them. Our powerful forward beams licked out through space, smashing the surprised Skree. They returned fire, their plasma splashing across various screens as we pivoted, diverting most of the impact.

  “Fire phase torpedoes!” I said.

  “Torpedoes away.”

  The five missiles become new tracks on the screen, streaking away from my ship toward the enemy as we turned to grapple with them. Then they blinked out of existence, narrowly avoiding the counter-fire the Skree launched to destroy them. They appeared a moment later, just meters from their targets. At five different points around the Skree ship brilliant explosions lit the starry night.

  “Screens down across sixty percent of the mothership,” Carrick reported.

  “Hammer them with everything we have,” I growled. Then I entered new course directions which would take us even closer. We would close with the foe. We’d smash them to bits. And if all else failed, I still had the drives programmed to overload in a few moments notice. We could still take the ship with us into the abyss if we needed to. I prayed that we would not need to. In my heart, I knew that Kim would come through. S
omehow she would find a way.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kim

  As we streaked ever closer to the sun I found myself strangely wishing Bran were here, and worrying if he was still alive. As much danger as we were in aboard my ship, his ship was at much greater risk. After all, I didn't have crazy alien bugs trying to blow me up. Yet. That would happen shortly, if we didn't get the navigation issue solved. I punched the communications link on my console.

  "Kara, how's it going?" I asked. "We're about four minutes from the corona."

  "Fucking asshole Cymtarran bullshit POS goddamn..."

  They were still working on it. I let the link go. Then I fired up our own navigation systems, to see if I could fine tune the course any more than I already had. We needed to get in close to the sun, to pick up enough particles. But even in jump space, warping space around us, passing through an object like the sun would obliterate us instantly. Hitting any object with more mass than your ship was a Bad Thing.

  Gravity waves created navigational hazards, screwing with the ability to precisely target a route. The closer one got to a large mass, the harder it was to avoid becoming a pancake against that mass. That's why most ships entered at the very edge of the solar system. Worse yet, we had no active sensors while in jump. I was relying on the data we had uploaded from pre-jump.

  Harder didn't mean impossible. I churned through pages of gravitational data, the most recent data sets we had from Earth's astrogation satellites. I ran the numbers, double-checking everything. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to envision what those waves would look like, how their impact against the bubble of space/time around my ship would impact it. I was building a three-dimensional model of gravity waves and impossible space in my head, and it was giving me a headache.

  I wondered if travelers from the age of sail had tried to do anything like this - had attempted to see the wind as it flowed around them and filled their sails. What would they make of how we were sailing now? It was something of a Scylla and Charybdis moment. Too far one way, and the ship would be destroyed by the sun. Too far the other and we'd never pick up enough particles to destroy the Skree mothership, which would also result in my ship's destruction. I needed to sail the middle path.

  We were closing on the sun. Thirty seconds until we entered the corona. Or didn't.

  "Kara, anything?"

  No reply.

  "We can still pull away," Tim offered. "Just continue the jump, get clear of the fighting and then work our way back to Earth."

  That wasn't an acceptable option, although I couldn't easily explain why. This was about more than just Earth now. Bran was counting on me. I knew he would be there, waiting. I knew that he would trap the Skree, draw them in, position them just where I'd asked him to. Without really knowing why I was so sure, I had faith in him.

  I wasn't going to let him down. We would be there at the time I'd promised.

  I tapped the control console, entering tiny little corrections based on my mental model. Kara and Aeron hadn't managed to synch the systems yet, so it was up to me.

  "Heat building up on the outer hull," Tim warned.

  "Are we within tolerances?" I asked.

  "Barely."

  The ship groaned and shook as the engines labored to keep us on course through the high gravity near the sun. For a long moment I wasn't sure we were going to make it after all.

  And then we were through. In one side and out the other, cleanly through the corona. I wouldn't be able to see how close we'd managed to come to the sun until after we exited jump and I got a proper data downlink, but I had the feeling I'd squeezed it a bit close. Almost too close. But we were through.

  "Heat level is dropping," Time said, sighing with relief. "That was cutting it close."

  "Shit, Tim. I don't think anyone's ever come that close and lived to talk about it," I said.

  "True, that," he replied with a smile. "Good thing our shitty navigation systems have someone good running them."

  That wasn't going to be enough to target the destination coordinates properly. We needed those Cymtarran nav systems. Damn it, where was Kara? Their computer systems couldn't be so radically different from ours that she couldn't hack some sort of connection by now? I knew shit about making computers talk to each other. That was her genius, and I was usually happy to leave her to it. But we were fast running out of time.

  The bridge doors snapped open. I turned to see an excited Kara rushing across the deck toward me. She was holding a big boxy thing in both hands, wires trailing from it.

  "Got it!" she said.

  "I can see that," I replied. "The question is, what is it?"

  "Shush, you," she said. Then she plunked the device down on the floor next to my console.

  "It's my shuttle's navigation computer," Aeron said from the doorway. He looked horrified. "She ripped it out."

  "Wasn't enough time to write code connecting the systems," she explained. "So I detached it and brought it up here. And it still works!"

  She tapped the screen, and it came alive, showing the ship's current location in our solar system with a level of detail I'd never seen before. Somehow, the Cymtarrans were able to achieve much more precise location coordinates even while in jump space.

  "I'm impressed, Kara," I said, peering at the numbers on the screen. They were alarming, and I could feel new knots forming in my back. "Am I reading this right? Are we that much off course?"

  She looked down over the device. "Shit."

  My fingers flew over the control console, tapping new course adjustments into my control systems. All the while I was trying to watch the real time responses of my corrections on the Cymtarran nav computer. It wasn't easy to make sense of both systems at the same time. But unless I acted quickly we were going to exit jump a million kilometers away from the target.

  "All hands, strap in," I said into the intercom. "This is about to get bumpy."

  Kara grabbed Aeron's arm and guided him to a seat. "When she says bumpy, she means 'oh god, oh god, we're going to die'. Sit down."

  He looked decidedly unhappy, but he took her advice.

  The ship rocked and bucked as I bent space around us, warping the bubble to change our exit site. If I were off by even a little bit then everything we'd done would be for nothing, and all of us were dead.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bran

  Sparks blasted from the overhead lighting and it went dead. The bridge was cast into half darkness, emergency lights cutting in to slash through the smoky gloom. Sirens blared out warnings. We were venting atmosphere badly.

  “Forward screens are failing!” Carrick said.

  “Rotate ship to shift the impacts to ventral screens,” I ordered. “Maintain the fire on their ship. We need to keep their screens down.”

  My fingers hovered near the controls which would activate the self destruct sequence. We were close enough. The enemy’s shields were in tatters as much as ours, and the two ships were simply pummeling each other with weapons, blasting away with everything they had in hopes of tearing the other apart.

  A few quick keystrokes and it would all be over. Part of me wanted that end. No more suffering, no more agonizing over my failure to save my home planet. All of those lives lost, because we had failed them in their moment of need. Everything that Cymtarra had once been was gone. It was easy to touch the despair, to feel the depths of that depressive hell.

  But always there was a little spark sitting there between my consciousness and that final immolation. Kim’s light, her life, her capacity to keep hoping and trying even when it seemed hopeless, was a like a beacon in the night for me. She could have hidden when the Skree attacked. Instead she fought. She could have fled this battle and left us to fend for ourselves. Most species I’d met would have. But again she had turned desperation into a fighting chance.

  I smiled at the thought. I would not give up hope.

  A series of crashes against the hull brought my full attention back to the battle. Im
pacts that I knew all too well.

  “Fighters have driven their noses into the ship,” Galadrin warned.

  “They’ll be disgorging boarders,” I said. “Sound the alarm and get teams there to fight them off.”

  The Skree fighters were built like torpedoes with guns. They were armed, and could dart about in a way that made them hard to target. They had little firepower, but the main threat they posed was that they could ram a ship and then release a team of Skree into the ship. We’d been boarded in a similar manner in the last battle, and some of the enemy had managed to hide away inside my ship, waiting for the chance to strike. That was the Skree we’d met and defeated near the engine room.

  “We’ll need to ensure we get all of the damned things this time,” Carrick said, echoing my thoughts.

  “Teams are on their way,” Galadrin said. “We’ve got reports of at least six hull breaches though. That’s a lot of Skree.”

  I grunted acknowledgement. If Kim didn’t show up soon, I was going to have to blow the ship whether or not she made it. If those Skree broke through to the engines they could disable them, blocking my ability to overload them at all. I looked at the time stamp she’d sent for the millionth time. She would be here in seconds.

  The seconds crawled past. I heard myself suck in a breath as the last one ticked away without any register of new jump activity. Then we were at plus one second. Plus two. Plus four. Plus ten.

  She wasn’t coming. Something had happened. Perhaps her ship had some sort of mishap. Terran jump drives were using old technology that could easily have failed. Or she’d misjudged something small, some little bit of data that had been off by just enough. When trying to coordinate an attack like this, even a fraction of a percent was a huge variable.