Isaac studied the tactical screen.
“We’ll be in range for about six seconds,” he concluded, “and I don’t want Mr. Wehr to survive them. They’re going to pound us, too,” he warned, “but we need to take the hits and keep going.”
“Pursuit course as soon as we’re past them?” Renaud asked, the young woman’s fingers flying across her terminal.
“Exactly. A stern chase is a long chase, but we’ve got enough of an edge that we can catch up before they reach Auburn Station.”
That was when this was going to truly hurt. There was a small but measurable chance they’d make it through the high-speed pass unscathed. The slugging match of a stern chase that was going to follow had no such chance.
Settling in his chair and bringing up his repeater screens, Isaac checked over all of Scorpion’s status reports. His ship was as ready for battle as she could possibly be. More ready, in fact, that he’d have guessed from the readiness reports he’d been reviewing mere days before.
“Pulse-gun range in fifty-seven minutes, thirty seconds,” Harris announced. “Missile firing sequence programmed, and we’re spinning up the secondary fusion plants to keep the guns fed.”
Isaac nodded wordlessly, his brain still poking at the question of just what the Coalition was planning.
“Giannovi,” he pinged his XO. “Send me everything we have on Auburn Station and this region of space. There’s something here. Something they’re after other than the exotic matter. And we’re missing it.”
“Missiles staged. Multi-salvo impact in five minutes,” Harris reported softly.
“Course change in thirty seconds,” Renaud added.
“Watch their response,” Isaac ordered. An hour’s study of everything they had on the outer limits of the Conestoga System hadn’t given him any answers. There weren’t even any new clues, other than potentially the fact that Auburn Station was only five years old.
Most of their data from out there, in fact, came from the station itself and the powerful sensor array it had been equipped with. That fit with the pattern that Isaac had, but it remained just that: a pattern drawn around an answer he couldn’t quite see.
“Course change now.”
It wasn’t much of a change, a few degrees of angle and a handful less kilometers per second squared of acceleration. It was enough to change the minimum-distance approach between Scorpion and the Coalition ships from ten thousand kilometers to almost half a light-second.
Suddenly, this wasn’t going to be a knife fight after all. Isaac focused on Uriel like a laser. What would ex-Captain Daniel Wehr do now? Scorpion could adjust course if the Coalition tried to use her maneuver to evade action, but the Coalition now had the chance to do that.
Isaac didn’t expect “Justice” to do anything of the sort—and he was right.
“All three ships are adjusting course,” Harris reported. “Feeding the data to navigation.”
“Adjusting to compensate,” Renaud snapped. “They can play all they want, but we’ve got bigger engines. Holding minimum approach at maximum pulse-gun range.”
“Missile course adjusting as well. Coalition ships are firing on the missiles.”
Anti-missile lasers were invisible to the naked eye but all too clear to Scorpion’s scanners. The computers drew neat white lines on the plot to mark the defensive fire from the Coalition destroyers—whose icons rapidly started to resemble porcupines.
“Penetration EW is operating above expected levels,” Harris said crisply. “They have not updated the software or emitters from the original construction specs. Sixty seconds to impact. Three missiles down.”
The missiles were running on their own suicidal electronic brains. The firing pattern for the pulse guns was programmed in.
The only human contribution at this point was Renaud keeping the range open, making sure that Poseidon wasn’t in position to fire on Scorpion. Uriel and Michael were going to be more than enough trouble for Isaac’s ship.
Thirty seconds from the point of contact.
Twenty.
Ten.
The screens dissolved in a blur of light and motion as the warp cruiser slid into range of her enemies. Pulses of pure-white plasma flashed out from her broadside and her enemy responded, the energy weapons going to rapid fire as the four ships blurred past each other.
The hundred-megaton warheads from the pair of surviving missiles detonated first. Out of fifteen weapons launched, only two made it through the Coalition defenses—but that was two more than Isaac had actually expected.
Uriel reeled from the explosions, her pulse guns cutting off after the first salvo. Scorpion’s weapons were not so generous.
Plasma bolts worked their way along the hundred-and-twenty-meter length of the destroyer, vaporizing armor and hull plating and working their way deeper and deeper into the rebel warship’s systems.
One moment, she was a mobile wonder of technology, testament to the skill and expertise of her builders.
The next, a pulse-gun capacitor ruptured and plasma erupted inside her armor. Chunks of hypertensile ceramics spun off into space as her exterior hull shattered, ripped apart by the explosions that guttered her interior.
Scorpion danced through her own firestorm, red warning lights flashing up on Isaac’s screens as plasma pulses struck home. Armor cratered, sensor and ECM emitters vaporized, and the entire warp cruiser jumped sideways under the impacts.
None of that made it through to the calm quiet of the cruiser’s bridge. Inertial compensators and safety systems did their job to perfection, and the only reason Isaac even knew his ship was under fire was because his systems told him so.
“Report,” he barked.
“We’re clear of their range,” Renaud told him. “Bringing us about on a pursuit course.”
“Target destroyed,” Harris noted after a moment’s examination of his files. “Uriel is gone. Michael and Poseidon are…changing course.”
He paused thoughtfully.
“They are no longer decelerating towards the station,” he concluded. “That will extend our chase.”
“Accounting for it now,” Renaud snapped.
“What’s our status?” Isaac demanded.
“I hope you liked those missile hits, because that’s all we’re getting,” the tactical officer noted grimly. “Waiting on an update from Engineering on most of it, but we’re down three of five missile launchers. Two birds aren’t going to ping anybody.”
“And the pulse guns?”
“We lost a couple on the starboard and upper broadside,” Harris confirmed. “About ten percent of our overall firepower, but if we adjust our approach vector, we can still put full broadsides on target. To get all of our guns in play, we’d basically have to fly between them.”
“I haven’t ruled that out as an option,” Isaac said dryly. “Engineering, what’s our status?”
“Repair drones are in play,” his chief engineer replied. “Forty-three-second scramble time, I’ll note.”
Isaac chuckled. That wasn’t just better than the last readiness reports he’d received. That was thirty seconds better than the original reports he’d received when he came aboard.
“I’m guessing Harris gave you the spiel on the weapons, but the rest of the news is pretty clean,” the engineer reported. “We’ve got armor burn-throughs in twenty-two places, but the drones will have those covered over in fifteen minutes.
“Engines are fine, remaining weapons systems are fine. Long-range sensors are degraded about seventy percent until we can emplace new sensor emitters, ECM is down twenty percent, same issue.
“I’ve already ordered the electronic warfare emitters replaced, but I’d like to hold off on the sensors until after we’re done being shot at,” the engineer concluded. “If we’ll need long-range scanners before then, we can put them out, but no point getting them vaporized for nothing.”
Isaac nodded his understanding, but then his gaze was drawn to the Coalition ships’ new cour
se. They were still going to pass Auburn Station, but it wasn’t going to be the hour-long stop they’d needed to steal all of the holding towers. They’d probably still be able to sever two or three and take them under tow, but they weren’t going to get the full stockpile.
They were heading somewhere past Auburn Station, and that…that also fit the pattern.
“I need eyes, Chief,” he said quietly. “There’s still a question here. Deploy those sensor emitters.”
The radio was silent.
“Wilco. I’ll pass the orders now.”
Chapter Six
Isaac ran a new set of numbers, ones he’d looked at in passing before. Knowing that his mother owned a large portion of Auburn Station explained why it had been built the way it was: First Admiral Gallant hired professional paranoids for her designers as a rule.
Auburn Station was nowhere near well-armed enough to stand off even a single destroyer, but her sensors gave her a near-perfect view of the empty space around her for over a light-hour, and her handful of missile launchers were loaded with weapons with enough reach to cover most of that space.
An armed freighter or the cutters the system governments were limited to couldn’t have threatened the station—but at the same time, the station couldn’t stand off the Confederacy Space Fleet.
No one had expected someone in the Conestoga government to squirrel away destroyers for over a decade. If they’d hidden them for this long, why strike now? What was so important here as to risk losing a secret fleet over?
What was inside that light-hour radius?
He ran through the reports again, looking for oddities that had shown up in that space…and found the clue he was looking for.
During the surveys to build Auburn Station, the CSF ships checking out the area had repeatedly suffered from sensor ghosts. They’d thought they’d seen ships, but when they’d gone to check out the signatures, the ships had been gone.
The first captain had thought they were being watched, but a failure to find any actual ships and a drop-off in the reports over the survey had led to the conclusion that the ship’s systems had been corrupted. Following through on that, though, Isaac found the records of the ship’s refit after the project.
There had been no sign of a software or hardware problem. No one had followed that back to the fact that those ships might well have existed.
Vanishing ships weren’t a normal thing. He could see why the survey had assumed it was a system glitch, but what if it hadn’t been?
Auburn Station had the full records of the survey and its scans, and he looked at the data.
There were no warships among the ghosts. No pirates. Nothing even remotely strange or abnormal, just regular cargo freighters…that had no business being that far out into the middle of nowhere and vanished before the CSF could investigate to see if they were okay.
“Commander Giannovi, I’m sending you a list of sighting reports from the original surveys to build Auburn Station,” he told his XO. “I think I see something, but I want you to look at it independently. Compare it to our friends’ new course.”
“Sir…these are random ghosts.”
“Humor me, XO,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
He leaned back in his chair. If his suspicion was correct, the Conestoga government had some explaining to do…but other than answering the question niggling at the back of his mind, it didn’t change his main problem.
Knowing where his enemy was heading would help, but he needed to take on two ships that between them outgunned him three to two.
“Time to range?” he asked Renaud and Harris.
“Twenty-six minutes. We’ll reach minimum approach just before they reach their range of Auburn Station,” his navigator reported.
“The evacuation?”
“Complete,” Harris confirmed. “The closest transports are well clear of any range at which the Coalition can range on them.” He shrugged. “It’ll take them three days to reach the planet, but they’re off the board now.”
Isaac nodded, considering.
“What transports are they using?” he asked out of curiosity. “Do we have any data on their sensor range?”
His tactical officer looked at him like he was crazy, but looked at his data.
“They’re standard Corellian-type ships,” Harris noted. “I don’t see any evidence of their sensors having been upgraded, so they’ve probably got the standard suite, which is just mid-range thermals and proximity radar. They wouldn’t pick up anything smaller than a warp ship at over a million klicks.”
If there was something out there you wanted to hide, the evacuation transports weren’t the problem. The Coalition ships needed to take out Auburn Station’s sensor arrays.
And, of course, now they were going to need to take out Scorpion.
“There’s definitely something there,” Giannovi admitted a few minutes later. “I’m not certain of exactly where, but the areas those ghosts appeared in is unquestionably where the Coalition is headed. I’m just not sure what could possibly be there.”
Isaac exhaled, his executive officer’s assessment agreeing with his own and filling in the last few pieces.
“Anything humanity can synthesize can, at least theoretically, exist in nature,” he pointed out. “Even the things we’re used to thinking of as the signs of our mastery over the laws of the universe.”
“Wormholes,” Giannovi said instantly. “You think there’s a natural wormhole out there?”
“Assuming it’s permanently open, we’d only detect if we stumbled across it,” he pointed out. Only opening a wormhole was detectable at all. A stable, maintained wormhole could be detected only by comparing the radiation passing through it to the radiation coming from around it and realizing that you were looking at the light from a completely different star.
“If Conestoga found it years ago and kept it secret, we’d never have known it was there—and then we put an exotic-matter station right inside its orbit,” he concluded. “Auburn Station cut them off from the other side. They needed to either destroy Auburn or reveal their secret colony’s existence.”
“Which this ‘Free Worlds Coalition’ definitely wasn’t going to do,” Giannovi agreed. “But why now? If they’ve had those destroyers all along, hidden in the asteroid belt, presumably, why attack today?”
“Because Scarab went in for a refit five days ago, and Ladybug was reassigned from Battle Group Calypso to Battle Group Reliant six months ago,” Isaac pointed out. “This is the first time since Auburn Station was built that there was no warp cruiser in Conestoga or assigned to the rapid-response fleet.”
His XO was silent for several seconds.
“That suggests disturbingly complete intel on the CSF,” she noted.
“No, just the support of the Conestoga System Defense Force,” Isaac replied. “They knew what Calypso’s escorts were, and we keep the SDFs informed of the strength of Battle Group Enterprise in case they need assistance.
“And our little exercise was unscheduled. If we hadn’t been within half an hour’s flight of a wormhole station, no one would have been able to intervene before they destroyed Auburn Station and her sensors. They’d steal the exotic matter to ‘explain’ the attack, and then disappear through the wormhole with it.
“That would give them a secret base in the shadows where we’d never look, just like Wehr said,” he finished. “But because we’re here and we put this together, they’re done. Package up our conclusions in a neat report for me, Commander, and beam it back towards Conestoga Wormhole Station ASAP.
“No matter what happens to us, we’ll get this secret out, and this Coalition’s efforts are doomed.”
Giannovi paused.
“You think there’s an entire colony on the other side?” she asked.
“There has to be, or it wouldn’t be worth this risk,” he concluded. “They’re trying to reopen the shipping lanes and communications.”
“What’ll happen to the
m now?” his XO asked.
“They’ll be invited to join the Confederacy, to come out of the shadows,” Isaac told her.
“Invited. Right.” The cynicism in her voice was heavy.
He sighed.
“It’s not our call, Commander. That will be the Senate’s decision. We’ve done our part—now we just need to finish the job.”
Isaac wished he could see something useful in the tactical plot. The two destroyers had moved closer together to prevent Scorpion attacking one while avoiding the other’s range again. Auburn Station’s missiles weren’t even worth considering as a factor.
The only option he could see was to fly straight up the middle and hammer the two rebel ships as hard as he could. That wasn’t a fight Scorpion would win.
It wasn’t a fight the Coalition would win, either. Their edge in firepower wasn’t big enough to carry the day with ease. The most likely result was that Scorpion would be destroyed and the two Coalition destroyers hammered into wrecks.
They might manage to sneak through their wormhole before the warp cruisers currently cooling their drives at the Lagrange point caught up with them, but that wouldn’t matter now. It was all over, bar the screaming.
“Do you think there’s any chance they’d surrender if we told them the game was up?” he asked conversationally.
“Not a very big one,” his XO replied. “Any brilliant ideas?”
“Shoot them until they stop shooting us,” Isaac told her. “You?”
“About the same. I’m wishing they’d given Auburn Station about, oh, ten times as many launchers.”
“Then they might have been tempted to get stroppy with the CSF and we couldn’t have that,” he said. “Besides, lightspeed delays will cause all sorts of problems if we try to control them. Auburn Station may have incredibly powerful scanners, but her computers aren’t smart enough to run missiles themselves…”
He trailed off, staring at the screen.
“Sir?” Giannovi asked. “You have an idea, don’t you?”
“Someone get me the full specifications on the sensor array on a Flight Eight Archon-class destroyer,” Isaac ordered. “The most powerful radar array in this star system is on the other side of the enemy from us. There’s got to be something we can do with that!”
Ashen Stars Page 5
