by Nick Webb
“She’s ready, Captain.”
Jake relaxed his grip and leaned forward in the chair, gazing up at the front viewscreen which displayed a vast star field behind the small red dwarf star they orbited. “Ensign Roshenko, engage gravitic drive.”
“Engaging now, sir.” Roshenko’s hand tapped a button, and immediately the star field disappeared, replaced by blackness. Usually their target destination snapped into existence all around them instantaneously, but this time the blackness lingered. Jake’s balance swayed. Behind him, in the ops section, he heard someone vomit as the shifting gravitic fields wreaked havoc with the internal gravity field.
And suddenly, the viewscreen came to life, with far more than just another star field.
Intense flashes of light lit up the screen. Jake nearly ducked as a small cruiser, weapons blazing, flew within a few dozen meters of the forward tip of the Phoenix before veering away towards another, larger vessel, blasting at it with pulse after pulse of a shimmering energy weapon that Jake did not immediately recognize. But the blasts seemed to nearly stop just a few dozen meters from the larger ship, giving it time to veer out of the way.
“Evasive maneuvers, Ensign! Get us out of range of the combatants!”
Po swore. “What the hell is this?”
Jake shook his head. “Looks like we’re crashing a party.”
“Yes, but who are they?” Po jabbed at her console, scanning for transponder signals.
As if in answer, a brilliant flash filled the screen and the deck plate rumbled beneath them. The already-loose wall panels rattled.
“One of the larger vessels fired at us, sir,” said Ensign Ayala. “It appears there is a fleet of larger frigates attacking a fleet of smaller cruisers. Still no read on transponders. Looks like there’s a jamming signal.”
Jake eyed the viewscreen, trying to gauge the sizes and deadliness of the other ships. “How big are the larger ones?”
“About fifty million metric tons. Maybe a fifth the size of the Phoenix. And the smaller ones maybe half that.”
Po whistled as several smaller ships ganged up on a larger one. “But they look more than three or four times as deadly.” With fire coming in from multiple directions at once, the larger cruiser couldn’t simply veer away, and the incoming pulses, though still slowed by some invisible field around the ship, hammered down onto the target. Explosions ripped across its hull before it found a path to escape.
Jake turned to tactical. “Ayala, what kind of armaments are those?” He watched as a brilliant purple flash erupted from one of the larger ships as it ducked away. A smaller one nearby took the blast square on the nose, and erupted into a fiery explosion, quickly muffled out by the vacuum.
“Ion-assisted lasers. Only megawatt class, sir. Nothing compared to our gigawatt beams.”
Jake grumbled. “Maybe. But I don’t want to risk it. We’re in no shape to—“
“Sir,” Ayala interrupted, “one of the larger vessels fired on us again.”
Jake grabbed his armrests, his fingers clenched white. He was angry. “Damage report?”
Po glanced at her screen. “Minor structural damage on deck six, aft.”
Jake drummed his fingers on his arms as he weighed the options. “Engines? Bernoulli, we ready to shift again?”
“No, friend. Cap banks won’t be ready for even a short range shift for another fifteen minutes. That long range shift drained us completely. Like any good hooker on Saggita—“
“Thank you, Bernoulli.” He looked back at Po. “What do you think?”
The ship rocked again from another blast. “Talk to them. Buy us some time. It would be unwise to get us involved in another firefight. Not now. Not in our condition.”
“Agreed.” Jake stood up. “Ensign Falstaff, open a broadband channel.”
“Opened, sir,” said the slender young man at the comm.
“Unidentified ships, explain yourselves. Why have you fired on my ship?”
The speakers projected static, and nothing more. More explosions. More rattling wall panels. “The jamming signal won’t let our broadcast get through, Captain. Attempting to determine source.”
“Captain, the larger ships are gaining the advantage over the smaller ones, and several are breaking off towards us.” Ayala, usually unflappable, began to sound rattled.
“Dammit.” Jake sat back down and turned to the tactical octagon. “Target the nearest one with lasers and ion-beam cannons. Fire when ready.”
On the viewscreen, deadly beams of red and blue leaped out from the bow of the Phoenix and raked across the three ships rapidly approaching.
In response, the opposing cruisers erupted with barrages of their own. Wall panels shuddered even more, and explosions rang out from the decks below.
“Sir, more ships are breaking off from the main battle and are flanking us.”
Jake mumbled. “Fine, you bastards, you want to play it this way?” He turned to Po to order the fighters scrambled, but hesitated. The last time they were in a space battle, she hadn’t followed his orders. It was as if she were unable to order her people into battle. Into danger. She caught his glance, and pursed her lips as she seemed to understand, and looked away as he jabbed at his comm button. “Anya, scramble the fighters. Take the bastards out.”
Lieutenant Grace’s voice sounded out through the speakers. “With pleasure, sir. Any particular order? Quickly? Slowly? Should I tease them a bit? A little foreplay?”
“Just get everyone back in one piece, Lieutenant. This isn’t our war. We’re just passing through. When they retreat, let them go.”
A flash on the screen told him he was wrong. It was very quickly becoming their war. “Captain! Eight more larger frigates just shifted into the area!” Ayala pointed towards the viewscreen, and Jake saw them. Still several clicks away, but closing fast.
“Anya!” he yelled at the comm, “Where the hell are my fighters?!”
***
“Where the hell do you think they are, dumbass?” Anya Grace muttered under her breath. “Right where they were thirty seconds ago.”
“WHAT?!” came the Captain’s frantic voice through the comm.
“I said, coming, sir!”
Anya ran across the deck, which swarmed with techs, pilots, and gunners as they all scrambled to get the birds out the bay doors. “Chief! Prep my bird too. I’m going out! Nivens!” She pointed at her young rail-thin gunner, “get in. I’ll join you in two.”
Lieutenant Quadri bounded over from his bird. “Spitfire, you’re the wing commander! Who the hell’s going to be here directing—“
“Have you looked out the fucking window? There’s nearly a bajillion cock-sucking cruisers out there and we’ve still got twenty minutes until we can shift the hell out of here. MOVE!” She grabbed him by the collar of his flight suit and thrust him towards his waiting bird.
Son of Hera, what the hell was wrong with them all? She kicked a stray tool out of her path as she marched down the bay, screaming orders and smacking terrified techs with her data pad. “Move!” she shouted at a young woman, her hands smeared with black grease. Son of Hera—she grimaced. It was something her mom used to say. Her euphemism for son-of-a-bitch, or something like that. Damn the woman. Anya’s mind darted back to the data file she’d seen on her mother several days ago, and the data field with the missing information. Family members serving in other Imperial Agencies, or some shit like that. What the hell was that suppose to mean?
“Commander?” A timid voice called after her.
“What now?”
She turned, almost colliding with Gavin Ashdown. “Uh, sir, I still don’t have a gunner.”
Anya paused. “Right.” Damn. With Floppychop dead and with the hectic training schedule she’d assigned them all the previous three days, she’d completely forgotten to assign him a permanent gunner.
“I could fly alone. You know, put the essential systems on auto-pilot while I both fly and shoot. It’d be just like in my video games. O
nly, uh, a little more real.”
“Newbie, you’re an idiot.” She resumed her march towards her fighter—one of the last still on the flight deck.
She could hear the indecision in his steps as he followed her. “Uh, sir?”
Anya called out to the open door of her bird. “Nivens!”
Ensign Nivens’s head popped out the hatch. “Sir?”
“You’re wing commander for the day. Get in there!” She jabbed a finger at the open door to the conference room and glanced back at Ashdown. “It’s your lucky day, Newbie. You’re my temp gunner. Please try not to be a giant disappointment.”
Ashdown’s face broke out into an annoying smile. “Yes, sir! I mean, no, sir!”
Several harried minutes later they were shooting out past the bay doors.
“Look sharp, kid. Contacts to starboard. Be ready.” Anya fingered the gravitics and plunged the ship down, weaving in and out of the larger cruisers, changing course with alarming frequency—at least, she could tell Ashdown was alarmed, by his ever-widening eyes. But to his credit the kid kept up without even blinking, laying down an oppressive and deadly accurate firing pattern.
“Nice, Newbie. Say, can you handle some thruster-assisted gravitics?”
He turned to her. “You mean, we’ll feel the inertia changes?”
She grinned. “Yeah, kinda.” She didn’t feel too bad about under-exaggerating. The kid wanted to see adventure, after all. “Ok, targets one, two and three,” she said, pointing out the viewports at three different cruisers, each blasting away at the Phoenix. “I’ll plunge towards the first and throw us into a tight orbit. After you’ve blasted the shit out of her I’ll break towards the second. When she’s as fucked as the first, I’ll grab shift to the third. Aim right at the power plants—we’re not taking survivors at this point. Got it?”
A single, nervous nod told her all she needed to know as she plunged towards the first target. Purple flashes illuminated the cabin as the other ship seemed to sense what was about to hit it and unleashed a barrage of fire at them, but Anya swerved too fast for it to get a weapons lock.
Throwing both the gravitics and thrusters to full, they swung into a tight, high speed orbit around the cruiser with their nose still pointed squarely at the other ship, and Gavin squeezed on the controls, pelting the target with a barrage of red streaks. Anya yelled into her comm. “Quadri, come in after us and clean up my mess!”
“Aye, sir—what the hell are you—“
But before he could finish, she broke off the tight orbit and launched at the next target, throwing them both hard into their harnesses. “You with me Newbie?”
In answer, he locked on to the other ship and raked it with fire, and for good measure, a torpedo, which found its target just under a laser turret. With a blinding flash, the cruiser erupted into a violent, white blast.
“Shifting …” Anya glanced down at the proximity detector, “now!”
In an instant the viewport changed to show not a violent explosion expanding up to meet them, but the third cruiser, waiting haplessly in front of them, with the Phoenix as a gigantic backdrop. In her peripheral vision, she noticed the Phoenix firing at the smaller cruisers with all of its laser batteries, but each blast seemed to almost stop just before it hit its mark, giving the target enough time to maneuver out of the way of the incoming blast. Anya cocked her head in confusion before she shook herself and focused on their target.
“Remember—power plant, Newbie,” she yelled, glancing over at Gavin. For a moment she wondered if he’d let the dizzying inertial changes get to him as his face seemed overcast with a shade of green, but he gave another curt nod.
His fingers squeezed the controls and let fly another blistering barrage of red streaks at the third target which danced on its hull and slammed into where the sensors indicated the power plant should be. But no bright flash indicated the target had been hit, as the blasts had gone wide.
“Dammit, Newbie!”
Ashdown winced. “Sorry. Swing around again.”
Anya rolled her eyes. “Get your head in the game.”
Gavin glanced at his console, and his eyes widened. “Two contacts moving to intercept. Fast.”
Swearing under her breath, Anya swung the fighter around and dodged the strafing fire of the two incoming cruisers, which had ceased their assault on the Phoenix and now focused on the gnat-like fighters stinging them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw more laser blasts come from the Phoenix, targeting the two ships, but as before they stopped just a few hundred meters short as if moving through thick molasses, giving the ships just enough time to move out of the line of fire.
“I don’t know how the hell they’re doing that, but I want it,” said Anya, gripping the controls, struggling to outmaneuver their two new pursuers.
***
Jake spun towards tactical. “How the hell are they doing that? That thing with the shielding?”
Ensign Ayala threw her hands up. “No idea, sir.”
He yelled over to the science station. “Szabo! How the hell are they doing that?”
The science officer was jabbing his fingers at the console in front of him, trying to figure out the technical specs of the defensive fields of the other ships. “Unknown, sir. It appears to be some kind of dispersive energy field. It’s like the laser beams get within a hundred meters and then slow down to nothing, like they’re running into molasses or something.”
Jake pounded his console. “Molasses doesn’t stop a laser beam, Ensign. I want answers or we’re dead. Again.”
He grit his teeth. How many battles had they been in? How many times had they pulled out a victory by the skin of their teeth? It seemed like in each instance they’d had an inordinate amount of luck. But luck tends to run out.
“Megan, are we really out of railgun slugs?”
She nodded. “Nothing, sir.”
“And the ion-beam cannons?”
Ayala answered. “Capacitor banks are still drained from that last grav shift, sir.”
He rolled his eyes and collapsed into his seat. He watched the viewscreen as another deadly laser blast darted out from the bow of the ship, and just short of the target—a bulky light cruiser—it slowed to a crawl as the other ship darted out of the way. Another light cruiser shot across the bow and opened fire, and the ship shuddered with the impact of the weapon’s fire, even as low powered as they were. “Dammit, people, I want options.”
Silence. They all watched the viewscreen as their fighters engaged the enemy—or at least the side they had chosen as the enemy—and collectively groaned as they saw one of their birds erupt into a fireball of debris as one of the cruisers caught it in a deadly strafe of fire.
Seconds later, another fighter from the Phoenix swung towards the cruiser that had just shot down the bird and descended into a tight, incomprehensibly fast orbit around the other ship, blasting at it with its weapons. The cruiser soon erupted into a field of glowing debris.
Jake asked aloud, “Why aren’t their defensive fields having any effect on the fire from the fighters?”
Ensign Szabo slapped the armrest of his chair. “Torpedoes? Just the standard warheads, not the quantum field torpedoes. Maybe its the mass of the weapon. Whatever field they’re using might slow a massless weapon, such as a laser beam. But a torpedo, like the weapons fire from the fighters, might be unaffected.”
“Brilliant.” Jake stood back up and ran over to tactical. “Commander Po, get the crews loading those torpedoes,” he said to his XO, who was now leaning into her comm and issuing the orders to the torpedo crew. Jake leaned in to Ayala. “Ensign, while they’re loading, you’ll be trying something else. Pick a cruiser, and fire at it with three beams at once, all at one-twenty degrees from each other.”
Ayala turned to face him. “But sir, that might blow out the laser caps.”
“Just try it. Don’t use full power. Fifty percent each. But I’m betting that they won’t be able to avoid all three at once.”
Jake turned to watch the viewscreen as three shimmering pulsed beams shot out from the bow, diverged slightly from each other, and intercepted the defensive field of the nearest cruiser. As expected, the beams slowed abruptly, and the cruiser moved away from two of the beams.
Right into the path of the third. The beam, albeit still slow, raked across the side of the ship, ripping a long, gaping hole out of which flew fire, debris, and bodies.
Ensign Szabo called over from the science station. “Sir, that ship’s defense field just cut out.”
“Great. Ayala, target it again. Full power. Hit their engines. Blow the fucker up.”
“Aye, sir.” She tapped her console and glanced up at the screen.
In a blaze of quickly extinguished fire, the cruiser erupted, showering their own hull with wreckage as they plowed through the debris field.
He slapped Ayala’s back. “Nice work, Ensign. Now pick your next target. We’ve got work to do.” He turned to the sensor officer. “What’s the count? How many left?”
“Out of twenty-two cruisers of this type we registered when we arrived, eighteen remain. And the other ships sir? The smaller frigates fighting the cruisers? They’ve lost five more ships in the last several minutes. They’re down to twenty.”
Jake pointed at the communications officer, Ensign Falstaff, “Still no contact with any of the ships?”
He shook his head. “Not a word, sir.”
Po swore, and looked up. “Captain, Lieutenant Grace’s fighter has been hit.”
“Grace? What the hell is she doing out there?”
Po sighed. “Her bird was the last to leave. Apparently she left her gunner in charge as the acting wing commander.”
“Dammit,” he muttered. Watching the screen, he eyed another approaching light cruiser, its weapons flaring and impacting their battered hull. An insubordinate wing commander was the last thing he needed right now. But he’d take an insubordinate fighter jock over a dead one any day.
