Starcruiser Polaris: He Never Died

by Richard Tongue

  Chapter 25

   Mike looked at the damage reports flickering in, a smile on his face as the data streamed through the display. Kani’s formation might only have placed a dozen small missiles on target, but each had managed to hit a critical system, and the enemy flotilla had been forced to pull back, just enough to give them time to press home their attack. He looked across at Ortiz, doubt still filling his old roommate’s face as he looked back.

   “They’ve still got the edge, skipper, and they’ve got a few fighters coming in now. I can’t get a clean signal from Polaris, either. Looks like both their primary and secondary comm lasers were damaged, and we’re in range of enemy jamming now.” Throwing controls, he added, “That works both ways, of course, but it still isn’t promising. They already know where they’re going, and they’re going right for us.”

   “Contact Liberty, and have them move into tight formation. We’re going to shield Polaris and let them take their punch. If we can knock out Perseus without taking too much damage ourselves, then those Commonwealth cruisers don’t stand a chance, and they know it.” Turning to Petrova, he added, “I want all hands on both ships to head as far from the outer hull as possible. Only essential personnel out there. And pass the word to damage control that they can expect multiple impacts in a matter of minutes.”

   “On it, Mike,” she replied. “Still nothing new from the surface, but there are large crowds gathering outside the conference hall, and reports of both Commonwealth and Federation troops on the streets, working together. I guess if there was any doubt about what exactly is going on, we can forget about it.”

   “Your father?” he asked, his eyes laden with concern.

   Shaking her head, she replied, “I haven’t been able to raise him. He’s a tough old bastard, and he’s lived through firefights before, but...”

   Nodding, he said, “I know. If you want to take a shuttle and go down there...”

   “My place is by your side,” she replied, her words flowing quickly.

   “All decks are cleared for action,” Ortiz said. “Firing range in one minute, ten seconds.”

   “Helm,” Mike said, “I want this ship to dance through the sky when the rocks start flying, but whatever else you do, keep us between the enemy and Polaris. Our mass driver cannons won’t make enough of a difference to matter, but theirs will.” He paused, then added, “Feel free to set up another ramming attack if you get a chance.”

   “Aye, sir, but I doubt they’ll let it get that far this time,” the young officer replied, gesturing at the viewscreen. “They’ve dispersed their formation a little.”

   “Interesting,” he said, rubbing his chin. “That might give us a bit of an edge. There must be some holes in their defensive armament.”

   “Sensors are at full resolution,” Ortiz said. “If there is a gap, I’ll find it.” Grimacing, he added, “I think someone over there’s had the same idea as you, skipper. They’re moving the Commonwealth forces up to cover Perseus. This is going to get tougher.” His hands danced across the controls, and he added, “Preparing defensive barrage as soon as we get within range.”

   “Cannons to the right of them, onward and thundered,” Mike muttered.

   “What was that?” Ortiz asked.

   “Nothing, Bill. Nothing.” Looking up at the sensor display again, he took a deep breath. This was precisely the sort of battle he’d always been trained to avoid, leading an inferior force against superior strength in open space, no further chance for guile to come into play. All he could do was hurl his ships against the enemy and hope that brute force and determination could carry the day.

   And luck, as well. They’d need a lot of that if they were going to get through this alive.

   “Firing range in fifteen seconds,” Ortiz said. “I have locked in with Liberty’s tactical officer, but I still can’t get through to Polaris.” Gesturing at the screen, he added, “We now have a fighter escort, though.”

   “How many?”

   “Three,” he replied with a grin. “You never know. They might make all the difference. Firing range in five seconds. Here we go.”

   Mike settled back in his chair as the battle began in earnest once again, the familiar patterns of force dancing across the sensor display, curtains of fire shimmering on the screen as the gunners on the six warring ships struggled to find a critical weakness, something they could exploit to destroy the other. The scars of battle weighed heavily upon them all, hastily repaired hull breaches still yielding air, savage wounds on their sides, blackened and burned from the brief ghosts of flame from impact damage.

   The battle waged back and forth as he watched, the few fighters that had managed to catch them dancing around in an aerial ballet, each removing the others from the conflict one at a time, brave soldiers sacrificing their lives for a second’s advantage. Then came the critical moment, a fighter diving towards one of the ships, the telemetry indicating desperate damage, the pilot choosing to end his life in glory as he slammed into the side of Hector, catching it close to the secondary oxygen reservoir.

   A cascade of air escaped into space, tossing the ship to starboard and opening up the briefest of gaps in the attack pattern. Mike leaned forward, a smile on his face, knowing that there was now a single chance to crack through the enemy formation.

   “Helm, take us in.”

   “What?”

   “Through the gap, at maximum acceleration. We’ve got to get underneath their firing pattern, and you’ve got seconds to do it. Move!”

   The young officer’s eyes widened, but he obeyed the order, throwing Castro deeper into the fray, breaking out of the defensive formation and speeding into the brief gap that the lucky strike had made. Their shots couldn’t hit home, but the enemy gunners had to compensate for the course change. Even the weakened defensive screen would still wreak terrible damage on Castro, and Mike gripped the arm rests of his chair, waiting for the onslaught to begin.

   The hull rattled with the force of a hundred impacts as the helmsman struggled to keep the ship on course, rotating her to spread the damage as widely as he could, pinpoint adjustments with what was left of his thrusters to avoid the worst of the impacts. Their defensive turrets continued to fire, desperately pounding particle beams into the void at the approaching swarms of rock.

   Then, all at once, they were through. Inside the firing arcs of the enemy formation, with a perfect window of opportunity to do maximum damage. Castro’s gunners had known this was coming, the survivors on the outer hull given just enough time to adjust their weapons, and the full, terrible force of the combined offensive and defensive armament pounded into Hector, savagely tearing into her hull, bodies hurled from her side by escaping air.

   Behind them, Liberty had followed the same course, her commander a second slower than Mike, and his ship was paying the toll as Perseus fired again. Her target was the other Commonwealth ship, as Hector nosily died, scattered debris hurled in all directions as her superstructure ruptured, the final end mercifully swift.

   A second flare, this time from Liberty, but she’d died well, doing her job, and as the screen cleared, only three vessels remained. Castro, Polaris and Perseus, and now Polaris could bring her primary armament into play, hammering into the side of her sister ships.

   Castro’s systems status panel was a sea of red, her helmsman desperately jabbing at his control panel in a bid to bring her under control, her course now a lazy spiral dance through the cosmos. The trajectory tracker was stuttering as the systems began to crash, one after another, but through it all, Mike’s eyes were locked on the viewscreen, on the sensor images that showed the battle in progress, and the damage control projections from Polaris and Perseus, both of them doing almost equal damage to the other.

   Finally, Castro’s shattered power grid could take no more, one final impact catching her in her side, sending her tumbling further out of control as the lights flickered and d
ied, the control systems crashing and rebooting with angry crimson alerts flashing on and off.

   “What’s the story,” he asked, turning to Petrova.

   “Not good,” she replied. “The main reactor scrammed automatically, but it’ll take hours, days to bring back online. We have a hundred and ninety-seven separate hull breaches, and that last blast took out our remaining turrets. No attitude control, casualty reports flooding in.” Shaking her head, she added, “It’d probably be faster to tell you just what’s working around here. We still have life support and some internal communications, but that’s about all.”

   “Any shuttles?” he asked.

   Turning to him, Ortiz said, “You wouldn’t get ten feet out there, Mike!”

   “No, but their sensors and communications might still be working. The network should have linked over automatically, but if we’ve had this much damage...”

   “I’m on it,” he replied, leaning over his console. “Wait one.”

   “Listen,” Petrova said.

   “What? I don’t hear anything.”

   “Exactly. They’ve stopped shooting at us. No sign of activity at all.” She glanced at a clock, and added, “If Hoxha obeyed orders, she’ll be on her way back already. Scheduled to arrive in two hours. There’s a chance that she might be able to finish the job.” Turning to him, she continued, “I’m not an expert, but those two ships looked about evenly matched to me.”

   Nodding, he replied, “That’s about what I figured, as well. It’s going to come down to a single lucky shot.” Sitting back in his chair, he looked down at the status reports, the panel flickering on and off as the internal network struggled to remain online, and sighed. “Thirty-seven dead, and that’s just a preliminary estimate. It could easily be twice as big.”

   “They knew what they were getting into,” she said. “Even if you’d told them before the battle that they weren’t coming back, most of them would have gone in regardless. You know that.”

   “That doesn’t make it any easier.” Looking up at the black viewscreen, he continued, “If we won the battle, that’s enough justification for me. We can’t lose. Helm, any control, anything at all?”

   “Not a thing, sir, and even if I did, I don’t have any sensor inputs at all now. We’re flying blind.” Looking down at his instruments, he added, “We weren’t on course to run into anything, and we had good orbital velocity, so I’d say we can probably stay on this trajectory for a while.”

   Petrova whistled, and said, “I’m glad to hear it. We just got the first provisional estimate for systems restoration.”

   “How bad?”

   “Twenty-nine hours, with all hands working around the clock. And that just gets the primary systems working. She’s a wreck, Mike. I think she’s fought her last battle.”

   “Speaking personally, I rather hope that I have, as well. Bill, do you have sensors yet? Anything at all?”

   “Almost there,” he replied. “I’ve got a technician running physical connectors to the lateral data relay. That’s the only one in anything even remotely resembling operational readiness.” His hands moved across the controls, and he added, “I’ll have to feed some of our battery power to make this work. It’s going to cut down our life support.”

   “If we’re not on our way to the surface within the next few hours, we’ve lost anyway,” Mike said. “Just get me that picture. I’ve got to know what’s happening out there.”

   “Why?” the helmsman asked. “There’s nothing we can do, anyway.”

   “I’ve got to know,” he pressed. “And don’t give up so quickly, son. There’s always a chance.”

   “Got it!” Ortiz said, and the viewscreen flickered back into life, fading first for a second before returning once again, strong and steady. The image on display filled Mike’s heart with dread. As he’d feared, Liberty was gone, her first battle also her last. Polaris and Perseus were still in space, the latter listing to the side but still diving towards her goal. Larson Tower. The Titan space elevator.

   “My God,” Petrova said. “If he crashes into it...”

   “Then the tower will collapse, and wrap itself around the equator a dozen times before it stops. Maximum strength earthquakes, everywhere. Nobody on the planet could survive that.” Turning to Ortiz, he said, “We’ve got to get our main engines back online, now.”

   “Not a chance, sir. I’m not even sure how long we’ll have life support, never mind propulsion, and we’re only going to have sensors for the next five minutes. Even if we could get moving, we’d have no attitude control at all.”

   “Wait a minute!” Petrova yelled. “Polaris. She’s on the move. Heading in at full speed.” She looked at the damage reports, her eyes widened, and said, “Her forward guns are out. I’m surprised she’s moving at all with the hits they’ve scored on her.”

   With a deep sigh, Mike said, “I know what’s he’s doing. He’s going to ram.”

  Chapter 26

   Cordova sprinted through the corridors, the elderly Nakamura keeping surprising pace as she raced towards the conference room, praying that she would make it in time. The other party she’d dispatched were meant to be reinforcements, she the decoy, but it had been obvious for the last few minutes that she’d failed in that, with no sign of any guards for some time. She knew why, and that knowledge filled her heart with dread.

   If the delegates died, then even if they defeated the Commonwealth and Federation forces in orbit, the result would be interstellar anarchy. It had been a minor miracle that they’d managed to assemble the group they had, and the calls for vengeance from their respective worlds would demand nothing less than war, endless war until they’d sated their blood-lust. They were close to it already, millions of voice screaming with righteous anger, demanding vengeance for the manifold wrongs done them by the Federation.

   A part of her agreed, and though there was ample justification for their fury, the little girl who had watched her father gunned down by Federation troops looked back at Nakamura and wondered why the adult she had grown into had betrayed her by letting him live. Yet the elderly politician had stood by her side during the fight in the corridor, was wielding his pistol with grim determination on his face. Commodore Curtis had claimed that he’d been his biggest ally in the peace talks. That he’d truly wanted them to succeed.

   And they had to succeed.

   They were the last chance to restore some sort of order from the chaos into which she had thrown all of human space. Technological civilization was a fragile thing, even on nominally habitable worlds such as Earth and Caledonia, neither of which could live for long without access to space-based resources. Billions would die of starvation, plague or simple systems malfunction in any prolonged collapse, whole worlds depopulated while the people waited for the starships that would never come. She could see it in her mind, as though it had already happened. No matter what it took, she had to prevent it, or die trying.

   Turning a corridor, she increased her pace, gasping for breath as she reached out for a set of stairs to the lowest level, to their destination. A janitor was loitering by the wall, hearing aide dangling loose, lackadaisically cleaning the floor, his own fear undoing all of his work as he looked up to see the rifles aimed at him. He dived for cover behind a bench as Cordova leapt for the stairs, taking them in long bounds in a desperate attempt to gain speed. That she hadn’t seen any guards since she’d rescued the Chairman could mean only that they were preparing for their massacre.

   Through the walls, she could hear chants and cries from outside, the local population gathering, somehow aware of what was taking place within these walls, that the very future of their world depended on the next five minutes. Finally, she reached the final corridor, a trio of guards at the ready, opening fire as soon as they saw her, not waiting to confirm her identification, only eager to protect the secret they were hiding within.

   Bullets flew thro
ugh the air like migrating birds, and her instincts told her to dive for cover, try to hide herself from the onslaught, but she knew that she didn’t have time, that they’d use any spare second they could get to complete their deadly work. She forced herself onward, weaving from side to side, muttering prayers to half-remembered gods as she returned fire. Behind her, Nakamura had made the same decision, and his exalted status was proving to be no defense against the ruthless men who had, until just moments ago, been assigned to his defense.

   As she closed the range, her bullets found their mark, while those of the guards continued to go wide, as though they couldn’t quite believe that she was still pressing her attack despite all the odds. The leftmost one fell with a bullet in the shoulder, clutching at the wound as blood liberally spilled onto the deck. Nakamura took another with a shot to the leg, the figure tumbling with a scream that comprised rage and pain in equal measure. Only one remained, and as he saw the cold determination in the eyes of his two attackers, his nerve failed him and he fled.

   Cordova didn’t even try to open the door with the release mechanism, instead firing a short burst into the lock, the magnetic system disengaging to allow them entry. She sprinted inside, moved to the wall, and covered the room, evidently with only a handful of seconds to spare, a dozen gunmen standing before the delegates, ready to shoot. Cordova and Nakamura fired neat bursts to send them diving to the decks, and the eight men and women who had been about to die quickly recovered. Most of them were rebels, had spent their lives fighting guards like these, and began to demonstrate their well-honed skills.

   The room was filled with the sound of gunfire and the stink of cordite, bullet holes ripping up the walls as wild bursts of automatic fire filled the air. Cordova dived behind a table, then looked up to see the rear door open, her reinforcements finally arrived, Petrov leading a charge that brought down the last knot of resistance in the corner of the room. Gasping for breath, Cordova gestured with her gun to the delegates.