Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  So as slow as it was going to be, Zony decided she had to do this landing by the book.

  “Uhhh–” The patch thumped again. “I’m not sure. I just got here and–”

  Lieutenant Tixia closed her eyes and tried to smile. There was nothing better than civilians who locked out in mid-sentence. Every time they tried to transmit, the ten-second hailing clock reset. Zony had only fifteen seconds to align her approach with the instrument landing system, if Starhaven actually had one. She wasn’t going to make it, and as pleasant as she felt about the whole thing, she also wasn’t willing to circle the village and make another approach. The problem was, if she went active and used her fighter’s onboard SRS and targeting systems as a self-generated ILS, it was likely to cause all kinds of problems with the local broadcast nets, weather equipment and communications.

  But the fine people of Starhaven were just going to have to learn to live with it for a few hours. Jackrabbit 994 went active, lighting up the Starhaven spacefield with its entire SRS bank. A one-centimeter-resolution three-dimensional model of the spacefield appeared on Zony’s combat projector. She identified a good candidate for a set-down location at the southeastern edge of the field and banked her starboard wing two degrees negative.

  Buck Four roared across the spacefield perimeter and yawed 80 degrees as it slowed to an engines-down hover. Dust and debris billowed into gray and tan clouds in every direction as the Yellowjacket’s landing lights snapped on. Red rotating globes strobed at center hull and along the fighter’s wings. Struts extended and large composite alloy treads rotated to their locked positions a few seconds before Jackrabbit 994 settled on to the cracked asphalt of Starhaven’s spacefield. Atmospheric turbines cut down from maximum power and whined as the rumble of the engines and the electromagnetic hum of the interstellar drive field dissipated into the cool afternoon air.

  It came as no surprise to the Argent’s acting skipper the only ground crew present consisted of two portable-life-support-equipped cows and a nervous-looking native bird that resembled a fat seagull. All three stared from a grassy field apparently belonging to the spaceport’s neighboring farm.

  “Okay, Aibreann, it looks like we’re on our own.” Zony’s co-pilot was busy attaching her portable life support and mask. She wasn’t likely to forget to check its remaining capacity again any time soon. “Let’s hope we can find a car of some kind or we’re going to be hoofing it back to your farm.”

  Forty-One

  “Every time we run one of these I want to kick myself for not bringing Diamonds along.”

  Captain Hunter and Colonel Moody were both keyed to their paladin’s short range motion and emissions scanners, and neither officer could make heads nor tails of what they were seeing. As usual, Cerylia’s plans for setting up her strike were impeccable. She had picked a magnificent location between three relatively stable asteroids on the EM-heavy side of Magellan’s pass. The Shrike and three of her heavy escorts were all hovering at station-keeping nearby and monitoring the transmissions of the tiny motion probe they had deployed at the far end of the pass. Officially, the squadron was under Skywatch jurisdiction, at least for the next few hours. Among the various perks of having a command rank, Captain Hunter enjoyed the right to “deputize” pretty much any ship and press it in to service. Captain L’Orleans was still likely to assert command if push came to shove, however.

  The moment the freighter column came within thirty million miles range, the probe would gather as much information as it could from its elaborate sensor suite and then transmit a compressed burst of telemetry on an LOS beam a few milliseconds before self-destructing. Even if the freighters picked up the detonation, they would put it down to anomalous sensor readings first and a natural debris collision second. Only the ambitious and slightly paranoid junior officers would see the possibility of an ambush, but the lazier senior officers would chuckle to each other and overrule them in order to make themselves sound worldly and experienced, as usual. The Condor Pirates had been making an obscene living off the older, fatter and stupider captains for almost fifteen years now.

  Once they had collected the telemetry, L’Orleans’ ships would have a perfect passive track of the column until it blundered into Magellan’s pass. Nine times out of ten, Cerylia’s squadrons could waylay as much as 100 times their own tonnage without firing a shot.

  But this time, due to the more sensitive instruments aboard the Argent mech, things were looking like they might be a bit less straightforward.

  “I wish she was here too. I can’t get a fix on the lead freighter. I’ve recalibrated these scanners three times and every time they boot back up I get the same shifting readings,” Moo said. His tone was both annoyed and a little concerned. He hadn’t seen his SRS bank act like this before.

  Captain Hunter had always fancied himself a little bit more capable than most when it came to combat tracking. Although he didn’t have anywhere near the aptitude of his signals officer, he was no slouch when it came to aiming computer-controlled weapons or gathering useful information about unidentified ships in tight situations. As a ship’s captain, his training required him to be able to take over any bridge station at need. Signals and tactical were among his strongest skills. He could pass basic officer’s ratings on engineering, spacelane control and flight operations, but he knew early on they weren’t really his callings. Recognizing his own weaknesses was one of the main reasons Captain Hunter had made a point of seeking out superstar officers to do the jobs he wasn’t quite as good at. That wisdom led to his discovery and rapid recruiting of a certain white-haired orbital combat engineer and a young medical prodigy with dreams of piloting space fighters. Once those three pilots were flying together, it was only a matter of time before Hunter found two more hot shots and formed the Bandit Jacks.

  But now, even the Captain was stumped. His paladin commander was right. There was no combination of SRS passives that gave him even a two-point lock on the lead freighter in the approaching column. Practically speaking, the paladin’s kinetic weapons needed a six-point waveform at any range beyond point blank. At this rate, they’d be lucky if they hit anything but empty space or really big asteroids.

  “Moo, reverify all of the Rushmore contacts. Start at the far end of the column and see if we can zero down the forward-most vessel by narrowing the collector angle.”

  “Affirmative, cap.” The colonel did a quick recalibration of his passive scanner suite and then brought the entire system back up one antenna at a time. One by one, the electromagnetic emissions of the approaching freighters re-registered and were cataloged by the mech’s targeting systems. But the longer the contacts registered, the more confused the readings became. First range fluctuated. Then the mass and spectrometry numbers started to waver. By the time the colonel had run a complete cycle, the only number he could count on was how many contacts were out there. The rest of the numbers could not be successfully processed by any of the warship’s targeting or navigational systems.

  But there was one reading that caught his eye.

  “Cap, I’ve got an unusual energy source present in the second convoy ship designated Rushmore One Eight. My best guess at a range is just under 40 million miles. I have fifteen contacts closing in formation on an oblique course and vectoring six five mark zero. All contacts are on parallel courses to waypoint Magellan One.”

  “My instruments confirm, colonel. What do you make of the energy source?”

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t belong in a Gitairn freighter column. Something on that second convoy ship is generating enough transmission interference to disrupt their drive field.”

  Captain Hunter activated his commlink. “Highlander Ten to Tall Bird.”

  “Yes?” Cerylia answered in a sweet voice. It wasn’t Skywatch regulation communication protocol, but some things were to be expected in what was technically a mercenary squadron.

  “What do you make of the energy source on Rushmore One Eight? We’re looking at a ton of subspace int
erference, and my pilot over here thinks it might be affecting our targeting systems.”

  “Sure it isn’t standard ECM? These guys might be sloppy, but they occasionally flip the right switches.”

  “Not on these wavelengths, captain,” Moo replied. “Whatever they’ve got over there, it’s generating dense ionized particles that aren’t just disrupting our SRS systems. They’re likely to start having an effect on our drive fields if we get too close.”

  “What’s the safe range?” L’Orleans asked.

  “Tough to say,” Hunter answered. “I’d be surprised if the crews in those ships weren’t equipped with some kind of environmental suits. If we’re reading increased wave density at this range, being aboard those ships might be dangerous.”

  “What are they hauling?” Moo asked. “If Rushmore One Eight’s freight bays aren’t shielded, whatever this thing is it’s going to start breaking down their manifests unless it’s made out of heavy elements.”

  There was a pause. Hunter and Moo presumed the Condor crews were discussing their options.

  “Stand by Highlander. We’re going to do a millisecond-active ping on our decoy probe. If you’re right, we’re going to stand down. Whatever they’ve got isn’t worth risking our entire squadron.”

  “We have to recover the information that column is carrying about Atwell’s plans.”

  The Shrike did not respond. Moo and Hunter waited patiently.

  “Will we know if the decoy repeater goes active?” Hunter said, watching the nearest Condor ship for any activity.

  “Only if their beacon is–”

  There was a brief flash of the brightest light Jason Hunter had ever seen. It hit the two officers like a solid wave of ice water. Their sense of time slowed so abruptly it was as if reality had been submerged in some kind of invisible syrup.

  “Cap, all my instruments have gone haywire! I’m not reading anything!”

  “Moo! Check your visual tracking! Ten o’clock!”

  The marine colonel was as confused as he had been since the Gitairn mission began. It wasn’t just space or an asteroid field he was seeing. In fact, it reminded him of the structure he ran through just before he landed on Barker’s Asteroid and found Yili and Zony. It looked like there was some kind of solid grade leading up to a plateau. Above the paladin mech was an intense light that appeared to be emerging from a structure. Perhaps a surface installation?

  Hunter leaned closer to the paladin’s flight canopy window to see if he could figure out what could possibly have caused solid ground to appear in open space. It was then he saw the Saratoga.

  “Moo, how can we be seeing this?”

  “I don’t know, Cap. Our life support integrity is unchanged. Whatever it is, it’s not having any effect on the mech itself.”

  Hunter realized he still had a communications channel open. He keyed his transmitter. “Cerylia, are any of your ships reading this?”

  There was no response. The captain ran a passive SRS sweep to see if he could detect any other nearby ships. Nothing registered. Even the Magellan asteroid field was gone. Hunter glanced back in the direction of the phenomenon and could see what he presumed were the interior decks of the Saratoga as if he were standing inside one of them.

  “This is impossible, Moo. That ship is almost 100 light years from–” Another flash of light strobed. Hunter saw and heard Commander Doverly give the order to cease fire. He watched five members of the Nightwing crew race down one of the cruiser’s engineering passages. With them were Captain Islington and two well-armed marines, apparently from the Minstrel .

  “Annora!” Jason leaped out of his crash couch and ran, more out of instinct than anything else. It took a moment for him to recognize he had just “run” into open space, but at the same time he could feel a solid surface under his feet.

  The Commander stopped and turned as if she had heard a sound she couldn’t identify.

  Lieutenant Curtiss descended the steps from the Copernicus engineering corvette into what looked for all the world like an underground tunnel lit by a distant intense light. Somewhere deep beneath the surface of Bayone Three, she could hear the unmistakable sound of her captain shouting Annora’s name.

  Zony held Aibreann’s hand a little tighter. What initially looked like a spaceport office with the lights turned off became on closer inspection an open port leading to some kind of spacecraft deck. A voice was audible somewhere aboard. Lieutenant Tixia’s sensitive hearing told her it was close. Perhaps twenty yards away. She knew instantly it was the captain.

  “Can you hear us!?” Moo shouted. To one side, it looked as if he were standing on the tarmac at the Bayone Three spaceport. Behind him, he could see the far away haze of the Lethe Deeps base. Above, he saw the sleek lines of DSS Saratoga’s enormous missile batteries. He was floating in space and standing on a planet at the same time?

  “Moo!” Annora replied. Hunter saw the doctor squinting, as if she were trying to identify someone from a distance. To the captain, it felt as if the sound was changing the fabric of space around all of them. The more they talked, the closer they got. He decided to try the basics.

  “All wings sound off! Squadron order! Hunter! Captain Jason M!” Reality compressed around him once again. He couldn’t be sure, but the captain thought his shout might have brought the others closer once again.

  “Moody, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas R!”

  “Doverly, Commander Annora C!”

  “Curtiss, Lieutenant Yili!”

  “Tixia, Lieutenant Zony!”

  Each voice changed both the acoustics and the air pressure. The colors and shapes above and below the captain shifted, appearing and disappearing. And then, all five Bandit Jacks were standing in a circle together in a well-lit space. Everything around them was white. The ceiling seemed to soar into the sky and vanish in the distance.

  “This is just like that place I was in before the asteroid,” Moo said with a tone of reverence. “Same light. Same temperature. Everything. There were millions of these little windows.”

  “Jason, our crew is missing. The ship is still in orbit over Bayone Three, but Hatch and the rest are all gone,” Zony said. “We also had a little dust-up with the Sarn.”

  “So did we,” Annora added. “They followed us to the Saratoga. Minstrel chased them off, but once we got aboard, we found two crew members who were affected by some kind of disease. They went berzerk and attacked. Minstrel’s security marines tried to get a fix on one of them with a handheld scanner and the next thing I knew I was running down a corridor to here.”

  “Copernicus just did an active surface sweep of Lethe Deeps,” Yili said. “Captain, what were you doing just before this?”

  “Cerylia’s decoy beacon–” Moo whispered.

  “Zony?” Yili asked.

  “I was at the Bayone spaceport. I had to run a scanner sweep to land.”

  “That’s it,” Annora concluded. “We must have activated whatever was powering those devices like the one Zony found.”

  “By activating our SRS scanners?” Moo asked. “How could the SRS system activate anything?”

  “Remember the Dunkerque?” Yili said. She was speaking more quickly now, trying to put all the pieces together while her engineer’s mind was focused on the details. “Zony overloaded the ship’s SRS bank and the whole ship seemed to shift back to wherever the captain had been transported. Maybe our SRS power wavelengths combine with whatever emissions are present at points where this technology is in use.”

  “Harmonics,” Zony concluded. “When two power wavelengths combine, they can create a third unique wave. Just like sound.” Yili nodded.

  “Explain,” Hunter said.

  “Remember your basic music theory, captain,” Zony replied. “If I play middle ‘C’ on a piano, I get one waveform. If I play the key up a major third, I get ‘E’ and a second sound wave. But if I play both together, I get a third wave unique from the first two. Hypersonics work the same way, but instead of combini
ng sounds to form additive harmonics, that technology uses directional speakers to create sound at a specific location. The application is different, but it’s the same principle of combining two sound waves to get a third. A science known as harmonics.”

  “They’ve found a way to do the same thing with energetic waveforms, like the ones our scanners use.” Yili started working intently with her handheld sensor pack.

  “So their technology depends on some kind of unique energetic or electromagnetic wave?” Moo asked.

  “We knew the Bayone system would be–”

  “Cap! Look!”

  Beneath the five Argent officers, open space fell away, revealing a nearby primary star and a spacecraft of some kind approaching the system’s edge beacon.

  “What is that ship?” Annora asked.

  “Skywatch. Frigate class. I’m not familiar with the markings,” Hunter replied. “What the hell are they doing all the way out there?”

  “That looks like the Raleo system,” Moo added.

  “Better question. Why can we see them?”

  “They must have run some kind of scanner sweep of–”

  At that instant, a column of impossibly bright light momentarily connected the ship and an object too far in the distance to identify. The ship winked out and the column of light disappeared with it. Moments later, the view of space around the beacon faded from view as well.

  “What the hell did I just see?” Hunter asked with a hostile tone in his voice. “Where did that ship go!?”