“They’re being towed,” Edwards said, making the connection at the same time Thomas did.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Thomas said softly.
The scans continued to work on the objects. Finally, they had an answer. They were both metallic asteroids. Big ones. Nowhere near as large as the ships tugging them along, they were nonetheless big enough to do significant damage to Earth. Hell, if those rocks were dense enough and moving fast enough by the time they reached the planet, they could potentially wipe out the entire surface.
“Well, that answers the question about what to do next,” Thomas said. “Send Earth everything we have on those objects and get the jump drive ready for another hop. We’ve got no choice, now. We’re going in.”
Eighteen
Ghost Squadron was first into space - again. Sam felt the rush as her Wasp accelerated away from the Intrepid at top speed. She wanted to whoop with joy at the sensation of zipping through space so fast, but it didn’t seem appropriate to the situation. After all, there were two enemy ships just a short distance away. Big ones.
“All right, everyone. You know the drill. We dump these torpedos and then boogie. Keep your throttle to max. We’re burning hot all the way through this run,” Sam said.
They’d launched as soon as the Intrepid came out of jump-space, each Wasp armed with a single massive torpedo. The best guess was that their usual missiles wouldn’t do anything against the dreadnoughts. These heavier weapons might, but they also slowed the fighters down a little and made them a hell of a lot less maneuverable.
“I’ve got movement from the enemy ships,” Grim called out.
“I see it too,” Harald replied. “They’re dumping fighters. Lots of fighters.”
Holy shit, they sure were! Sam couldn’t count all the little red blips filling her radar screen. There was a swarm of the things flying out from both sides of the big ships. How many fighters did they have? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that.
“Stick to the plan. If they get danger close, drop your torpedos and go to guns,” Sam said.
The swarm of fighters swirled free from the dreadnoughts and raced through space toward the Wasps. They were going to be on top of them in seconds, and there was no way they could outfly those enemies with the torpedos attached.
“Deploy weapons!” Sam all but shouted across her radio. She released her own torpedo. Dozens of the things shot across space, building speed as they closed with the alien fighter wing.
The fighters spotted the incoming missiles, but instead of dodging they converged on the weapons. Several fighters veered off toward each torpedo. One of them converged with the weapon in a brilliant explosion that took out torpedo, fighter, and a second nearby fighter in the blast.
“They’re going kamikaze on the missiles!” Grim said. “They’re nuts. That’s crazy!”
Maybe crazy, and not something most humans would do. But it was working. The fighters were acting as literal point defense for their motherships, diving into one torpedo after another. Each blast took out more than one enemy fighter, since they were packed so tightly together. But none of the projectiles were getting through.
“Shit. Intrepid, we need a new plan,” Sam said.
“We see the situation. Stand by, Intrepid is engaging,” Admiral Stein replied.
Sam’s screen lit up as more missiles fired from the Intrepid. They accelerated far faster than her Wasp, overtaking her ship and passing by it. But the enemy fighters just swarmed those and took them down the same way. Small dots of explosions appeared on the dreadnoughts’ hulls where railgun rounds hit, but it was nowhere near enough damage.
Then Sam’s fighter was in the middle of the mass of alien craft. She fought to find a clear path through the mess, dodging beam weapons and fighters alike. Beside her, a Ghost blew up. She wasn’t sure what had taken it down, but there was enough out there to smack into that it could have been anything. Another Wasp was destroyed, and another. Then they were past the mess, pulling out ahead of the dreadnoughts.
“Stay on your present course,” Stein ordered. “Intrepid will jump ahead to your position and pick you up.”
“Understood, sir. Sorry,” Sam said bitterly. They’d failed completely. The enemy had barely been scratched. Sure, they’d lost a lot of their fighters, but the big ships were barely hit at all, and those two asteroids were still being yanked along behind them.
“No worries, Ghost One. We’ll find another way,” Stein replied. “Intrepid out.”
Thomas wanted to slam his fist down on the console in front of him. It should have worked! Those missiles should have been enough to blow the hell out of the dreadnoughts. Coming in from behind, at the least they would have disabled or destroyed the ship’s engines, making them incapable of further acceleration. That would reduce the threat of their kinetic strike, which relied on them building up a lot more velocity on the way to Earth.
But he hadn’t reckoned with the aliens’ lack of concern over loss of life. They’d thrown away dozens of fighters to stop all those missiles. About half the alien fighter wing was blasted to bits in the engagement. But it wasn’t enough, not nearly.
Why were they like that? The lack of concern over individual lives was strange, and it was becoming more apparent every fight that it was a consistent trait. It reminded him a bit of honeybees. Bees would swarm out of a hive if it was attacked, the worker bees stinging their attackers even though they died in the process. Even if a hundred bees died defending the colony, it was fine so long as the hive itself survived.
The hive - and the queen. Was there some sort of queen alien inside those ships, giving direction to the others? Thomas didn’t want to equate them too closely with an Earth creature. They were alien; he could be misreading them badly by attributing bee-like qualities to them when they were their own unique species.
But it was still a possibility worth considering. If there was a central command of some sort on board those dreadnoughts, taking it out might be the answer they needed.
“Jump the ship ahead to pick up our people,” Thom said.
“Aye, sir,” Melson replied.
“Then we’re going back to Earth. Those ships are still days away. We’ve got time. I want to have the Intrepid up at full fighting strength before we go back in there,” Thomas said.
He also wanted to check in on the secret project: a second jump-capable ship. That might give them precisely the edge they needed to beat these things if it could be brought out in time to enter the engagement.
“I’ll be in the conference room. Edwards, you’ve got the bridge,” Thomas said. He pushed off from his chair, already composing the message he was going to send. Damn caution. He needed to get more assets in the field yesterday. If today’s battle had shown him anything, it was that what they had wasn’t enough to deal with those dreadnoughts.
Once he was seated in the conference room, Thomas tapped out a quick email to the person running the development of that other ship. Captain Knauf needed to get the lead out and finish up. They needed him out there - yesterday.
Nineteen
If he had a body, he’d have been sweating after reading the letter from Admiral Stein. It wasn’t blistering in tone, but it managed to blister his virtual ass anyway. Captain Max Knauf spoke over every loudspeaker on the ship that was his new body. His voice echoed through the halls, and every worker heard him.
“Listen up, folks. There’s a big bad coming our way. Earth is going to be a floating chunk of burnt toast if we can’t get into this fight. I need the Andromeda launch ready,” he said. “I know you’re all tired. This is the final push. It’s go time.”
He was ensconced in the ship’s computer systems already, so Max could feel every inch of the vessel. Every camera was one of his eyes. The thrusters and main engines were his limbs. But the damned jump drive was giving them kittens.
Earth didn’t have enough of the exotic matter required to build a second Alcubierre drive. Di
dn’t, at least, until they’d blown up the first alien ring. It turned out the rings used a heaping pile of the stuff, more than enough to get a second jump ship running.
But the aliens’ exotic matter wasn’t precisely the same as the stuff humanity had been using. He didn’t have the math to understand the difference, Knauf was told. Which would have made sense, if he wasn’t a digital mind capable of doing equations literally in his sleep.
Understanding the nature of the problem didn’t make it easier to solve, though. Altering the exotic matter to match human drive specifications would take far more time than they had, which left modifying the human jump-drive to use the alien exotic matter.
It was not a match made in heaven. The three test drives, shot out on missiles, had exploded on arrival. Since Knauf wasn’t interested in exploding on arrival, he had every processor he could spare working the problem alongside the engineers on board.
“Admiral Stein is counting on us, people. We can’t let him down,” Knauf said.
This was the last test probe they had. If the newest drive configuration didn’t work, they were going to need to ship up another batch from Earth. It ought to function as desired! But then he’d thought that about the last three attempts. Each one had failed, and Max still wasn’t entirely sure why. For all their attempted explanations, he was pretty sure the engineers working on the problem were baffled, too.
“Ten seconds until launch,” Amy called out to him. She was the lead engineer for this crew. Hell, for every crew, now that they were all merged and working just about around the clock finishing the ship. She was a good person, and Max would miss her once she was done fixing him up. She’d go back ground-side, and he’d go - out there, to face whatever was coming their way.
“Here we go,” Max said.
The probe fired from one of his missile bays. The Andromeda wasn’t a big ship, and it didn’t carry any fighters. But what it lacked in those ways it made up for with missiles. Lots and lots of missiles. The entire crew space had been converted over to armor, missile tubes, and magazine. He was going to have an insane amount of firepower at his disposal, and his armor should be thick enough to sustain direct hits from the alien particle beams.
If this worked, and he could get out there in battle.
The probe shot away, its own drive picking up where the launcher left off and propelling it far away from the ship and Earth. A few of the tests had been extremely explosive. Nobody wanted to do another trial too near their home planet. Just in case.
Once the probe was a safe distance, Max sent the signal to trigger its Alcubierre drive. It flashed and was gone.
“Damn, did it blow again?” Max asked.
“Yes? Maybe? Wait a sec,” Amy said. She was looking at data on her tablet. “No! Look!”
There was another burst of light, this one even farther away. The probe popped back into real-space. It was the most beautiful thing Max had seen in a long time.
“We did it!” he said.
“We did,” she replied, smiling at one of his cameras.
Max liked that about her. A lot of the engineers would speak without looking at anything in particular. Amy always treated the camera like it was his face. He had cameras installed all over the ship, so it wasn’t hard to find one. Amy always made the effort.
“Now for the tough part,” Max said. He activated the PA system again. “All crew please disembark. Final test will commence in ten minutes.”
That should give them all enough time to get off in the shuttles. The final test was, of course, to see if the ship would handle the jump as well as the drone had. It ought to. The drive parameters they’d set up for the Andromeda matched those in the probe. But if Max had learned anything from the weeks of effort making this project work, it was that when it came to a jump drive ‘ought to’ was insufficient.
Humanity didn’t really understand the tech it was messing with. The underlying principles of the warp drive had been understood for decades. Actually building one was completely beyond human capabilities, at least until the aliens had shown humans the way. Now he was stuck trying to reverse engineer the whole thing when he didn’t completely understand how it worked in the first place.
Max noticed Amy hadn’t moved from her post. “You should probably get going with the others. Don’t want to miss your shuttle.”
“No, I’m sticking around,” Amy replied.
“What? Why? You shouldn’t be here for this,” he exclaimed. He had to stay, of course. Someone had to fly the ship and respond to any emergencies that cropped up. There was no way to remotely pilot a ship through jump-space, or at least not one he’d discovered yet. Max had to risk himself in this test. But Amy didn’t need to be there.
“I’ve got faith this is going to work, Max. All the tests say we’re green. The drone worked. It’s time,” she said. “Besides, if something goes wrong, you might need me. Who else is going to turn a wrench for you if you need it?”
“I’ve got a ship full of repair bots for that,” Max said.
“But none of them are as charming as me,” Amy replied, beaming at him.
She had him there. “No, they are not. All right, if you’re sure?”
Amy nodded.
“Fine. Let’s start the countdown,” Max said.
There were still a few minutes left. He could still call this off. Do more tests. Launch more probes. But there wasn’t time. Admiral Stein said he was needed right away. The Intrepid had arrived back at Earth, battered and chewed up. It was going right back out again. Their people weren’t going to get time off. They didn’t get to chicken out. Neither would he.
“Here we go. Hang on…!” Max said.
He gently increased the flow of power into the jump drive, igniting his main thrusters at the same time. The ship slipped forward, slowly at first, but then the lights hanging in space in front of him seemed to stretch, and then vanish entirely.
“Oh shit, we’ve done it,” Max said.
“We really did,” Amy replied.
The Andromeda popped back out of jump-space with a small burst of agitated particles. They hadn’t gone far, so they hadn’t picked up too many. But looking back in rear cameras, Earth was a lot farther away than it had been.
“Time to call Admiral Stein and give him the good news,” Max said. And time for him to get back into battle again. The idea was thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
Twenty
It took three days to get the Intrepid back up to full strength. During that time the dreadnoughts had continued their inexorable approach toward Earth. They were close now, so close that Thomas imagined he could see their drive plumes out there among the glittering stars. That wasn’t possible, and he knew it - they were still much too far away for that. But the sense of foreboding in his heart made it seem that way.
“Andromeda ready to break orbit?” Thomas asked over the radio.
“The last personnel have debarked, Admiral,” Captain Knauf replied. “I’m ready to go.”
Saying that the Andromeda was an unusual vessel was an understatement. Instead of a crew, the ship had one mind controlling it: the digital brain of Max Knauf. Like the Wasp pilots, his mind had been downloaded into the computers on board the Andromeda. But where the Wasps were small fighters, Knauf’s new ship was so much more.
It had been a light cruiser once, with a crew of two dozen. No longer. The crew areas had been removed, replaced with enough missile tubes and ammunition to make big holes in whatever the ship met. More important, the drive was enhanced with jump capabilities that Knauf swore were finally working. They’d better be; Earth’s only chance was to meet the enemy far away from home. If they got close enough it wouldn’t matter if their defenses took out the dreadnoughts; the rocks they were hauling would still hit Earth with all the acceleration they’d been building up.
“All right. Synchronize our jumps. We want to arrive at precisely the right time to deal maximum damage,” Thomas said. “Melson, synch with the Andr
omeda.”
“Already done, sir. We’re ready to roll.”
Everything was prepared. Why then were his hands sweating so badly? It wasn’t the first time the future of humanity had been in his hands. Thomas had dealt with this sort of stress before. He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, trying to vent a little of his tension in the simple movement. It wasn’t helping much.
No, nothing he’d done had ever prepared Thomas for this sort of action. These battles were all do or die. There was little room for error or failure. The first attack hadn’t worked. There might not be time for a third, if they took damage during this strike. It had to work.
“Jump,” Thomas said.
The screen flashed as the ships entered jump-space. A timer on the screen indicated how long until they exited jump-space. It was ticking away seconds. Less than a minute for the entire transit. The moments seemed to stretch out, each one lasting a little longer than the first. Thomas glanced around the room, taking in each crew member at their stations. We can do this, he told himself. We can win this.
Then they were out of jump-space, exploding back into the real world just above the dreadnoughts. The massive ships had light screens which blocked most of the damage from the jump-charged particles, something Thomas would have killed for. It was going to be up to their missiles and gunnery to win this fight.
He’d chosen to come out at point-blank range. The enemy had obligingly maintained a steady course since the first engagement. It was like they were daring him to come after them. Well, if it was a fight they were looking for - he was ready to give them one.
“Fire!” Thomas shouted.
Guns opened up, a steady thrumming he could feel through the deck as the battery of massive cannons struck out again and again. Thomas watched the holotank screen begin displaying data from local space. The enemy ships were only about a hundred kilometers away. Better still, their noses were pointed in the wrong direction to fire their powerful fore-mounted guns.
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