by Evan Currie
“Stephan would not permit me to remove it,” Milla said. “So I replaced the system with a Priminae gravity accelerator. It is far more efficient than the magnetic acceleration that was in use, with higher yield. I . . . I am afraid that I may have depleted our stock of tungsten spars from storage in order to provide the ammunition. Ship’s maintenance is rather irritated.”
“I’ll tranship some replacements from the logistics vessels the admiral sent,” Eric said. “Don’t worry.”
Milla nodded, looking relieved.
Eric didn’t blame her. Having the ship’s NCOs irritated at you generally meant for a long, irritating cruise. Even he wouldn’t go out of his way to put himself on the wrong side of the non-coms, and he was the captain. A young lieutenant would just as likely find herself mysteriously without hot water, or with odd power fluctuations in her nonessentials.
He let his gaze sweep the flight deck, coming to rest on the gleaming white drones now lined up in the ready-launch positions as well as others still under construction.
“Will those fly too?” he asked with a tip of his head in that direction.
“Oh, with certainty, Commodore,” Milla said firmly. “Those were far simpler to build than this.”
She gestured over her shoulder to the Frankenstein beast that had been Steph’s Archangel as she spoke, then started walking toward the finished drones with Steph and Eric in tow.
“The most difficult part of the drone construction was the antimatter storage units,” she said, “and even those were effectively off-the-shelf, only altered slightly from your own containment designs for the Rogues. We use containment bottles and do not bother attempting to remove the antimatter from those, merely load the whole package into the transition cannon. Since we hardly care about what form the material transitions back into, adding a little more matter to the mix should have no detrimental effect.”
Eric nodded, understanding the gist of that.
“And the drones themselves?”
“Extremely basic. They will follow commands from the designated flight leader, in this case Stephan, or operate autonomously to some degree. However, all of your people insisted that the weapons absolutely not be permitted to be controlled by the computer.”
“I should hope not.” Eric shook at the idea of putting that kind of firepower under a computer’s control.
Milla glanced at him oddly. “As you wish. I fail to see much difference between fire control being automated and the navigation systems. You are aware that, should the drone decide to destroy something, it merely needs to fly into the target, correct?”
Eric winced. “Point, but at least then it’s over. How many shots can the drone take with the cannon?”
“They are, in the parlance of your crew, ‘six-shooters,’” Milla answered. “That is primarily a design choice based on available munitions production rather than any integral limitations. I suggested five shots, but your crews were insistent that they would work harder on antimatter production to supply an additional shot per drone. I do not understand your people sometimes, Commodore.”
Steph and Eric both laughed, but it was Steph who answered.
“We’ll do a movie night,” he said. “I have some old Westerns that will cover what you want to know, but for now just call it tradition.”
“Very well,” she said, gesturing mildly, still confused but accepting the answer for the moment. “The flight control mechanism is very standard. Either your technology or the Priminae’s could have done the job equally well. However, I used Priminae designs because they would better interface with warp generation. Now that we have the basic design for the cannon system, we could produce these in massive numbers with little problem. Antimatter, of course, is another issue entirely.”
“Detail your design, transmit it back to both Ranquil and Earth Command,” Eric ordered.
Milla nodded absently as he looked over the assembled flight of drones.
Eric’s personal comm whistled, causing him to draw it from his pocket.
“I need to get to the bridge,” he said. “We just received contact from the Bell. Keep up the good work, and Steph? You need to get these in space, and soon, for test flights.”
“You got it, Raze. I’ll be spaceborne as soon as we finish the final checks on my new ride,” Steph told him firmly. “Go find out what the hell the Bell and Bo have been up to—we’ve both got wingmen flying with them.”
“Roger that,” Eric agreed as he started off down the deck in as much of a hurry as he would allow himself short of a flat-out emergency.
AEV Bellerophon, Deep Space
Deep space, out well beyond the fuzzy existence of a star system, was a stark place to view from almost any angle. Light from distant stars shone with steady perfection, no hints of flickering and twinkling, unless a distant nebula happened to be occluding them. Into that environment, the Heroics and Rogues of the temporarily shorthanded task group transitioned in a silent moment of defiance of physics.
“Helm, confirm coordinates,” Roberts ordered. “Scanners, locate and project the Imperial course. Everyone else, get to work. I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to be.”
A chorus of confirmations from the majority were his reward as he set about following his own orders.
The deep black was not a particularly comfortable place to be parked, though he supposed that might well be his planet-bound upbringing. Like some new seamen, he knew he had a preference for being within sight of land. The ocean of space was vast, however, and he wanted to deliver a message to the enemy that they were not safe anywhere in it.
“Transition target met, Captain,” Commander Little announced from the helm. “We’re right on target.”
“Thank you. Scanners!” he called sharply, knowing that they had transitioned closer to the approaching enemy than he would prefer under most circumstances.
“Got them locked, sir. No deviations in course to report. We’re good.”
With the Imperial formation barreling down on them at significantly over the speed of light, they were officially on the clock once more. As soon as Roberts got confirmation of the Imperial actions, he sent out the order to his own crew as well as the other vessels.
“Deploy. Deploy. Deploy.”
The ships of the task force quickly set about their work, flushing the mines they had been building since the last group had been deployed. The Rogues, in particular, had elected to leave packages of their own in the clear black.
Deploying antimatter charges along with the CM mines, the squadron quickly left a mesh of death in the path of the oncoming enemy fleet. The whole process went as smoothly as possible, and in just a few minutes the well-drilled teams had finished their deployment. Each ship reported back that they were entirely empty.
Roberts watched over it all with approval before ordering the withdrawal.
“Aleska,” he said over the squadron network, “you know what to do.”
“Roger, Bellerophon.” The cool voice of Aleska Stanislaw, captain of the Juraj Jánošík, answered back quickly. “We have this. Good flying, my friends.”
The Juraj Jánošík shifted on-screen, moving under power as its hull plates changed frequencies. The Rogue vanished into the black, only the occasional occlusion of a star marking its passage as the ship all but entirely disappeared from even the Bellerophon’s scopes.
“All ships, transition to the target system,” Roberts ordered.
AEV Odysseus
“Report,” Eric ordered, stepping onto the bridge.
“Transition event, about a third around the elliptic plane,” Miram responded, clearing the command station for him as he approached. “Signal from the Bell shortly after. The squadron, all aside from the Jánošík, have reported in and are standing by for orders.”
“What happened to the Jánošík?” Eric asked sharply.
“Roberts ordered her to remain behind to observe the results of another of his little ambushes,” Miram said. “A
ll goes well, she should transition in shortly.”
“Sounds like a story,” Eric said. “Alright, inform the squadron that we’ll rendezvous along the estimated arrival track of the Imperial forces. I have files prepared for the captains. Send those along as well.”
“Aye sir.”
Eric settled into his station again and examined the reports, skimming the titles quickly before reading the more important ones with a closer eye. Roberts had apparently been busy—he approved of the man’s work ethic.
Ambushing the fleet out in the black might be a bit of a mixed blessing, at least in theory. So far the capabilities of the transition drive had remained secret. That wouldn’t hold forever, but while it did, that gave Earth’s forces mobility over the enemy and the ability to appear more numerous than they were.
If the deep black ambush worked as planned, Eric expected that it would slow down the Imperial Fleet and make them far more cautious. That would work in Earth’s favor—there was no question of that in his mind. Time was the ultimate commodity, which the admiral had charged him with acquiring.
“Good work, Jason,” Eric said softly, checking the details on their hastily rigged-together mines.
They’d improved the designs since the first version, using cam-plate technology to make the small devices as difficult to detect as possible. Frankly, he wasn’t sure that a Heroic on full scan would have much of a chance of detecting it at anything less than point-blank range, and unlike the Imperials, Heroics had detailed files on the cam-plate technology.
Adding antimatter charges into the mix felt like it was only rubbing a little dirt into the wounds, given that Eric didn’t think the negative matter particles were likely to make it through the forward warp of a large ship but instead would get caught there and become a hazard that the crew would eventually have to deal with. Still, anything that caused them a headache was fine by him at this point.
Eric began making adjustments to his new plans and doctrine based on the changes in designs coming from the Bell and Bo. He seemed to be doing that a lot of late.
Putting full fabricators at the fingertips of a bunch of motivated engineers and experts in their field and telling them to go nuts makes for a pain in the commodore’s butt. So noted, he thought with some amusement.
Trying to keep up with the changes his people were making to their equipment was becoming a full-time job on its own.
If these machinations gave them any edge against the Imperials, that was fine with him. The big issue, however, was that shipboard fabricators were simply not intended for mass manufacture. They might have enough of the new munitions for a single short engagement. If he allowed the battle to go on at length for any time, however, they’d be back to slugging it out with lasers against much larger numbers . . .
And that could end only one way.
We’re going to have to sacrifice territory for time, Eric knew without question.
A lot of people were going to suffer in the process, but he saw no other option.
AEV Juraj Jánošík
Aleska had ordered the Jánošík to drift after they’d cleared the predicted track of the enemy approach, silently gathering light through their passive scanners as they waited. She knew that the vessels would arrive before the scanners would detect them. It was one of the contrary natures of faster-than-light travel, similar to how old supersonic aircraft would arrive and be gone long before the boom of their travel reached observers.
The first the crew of the Jánošík would see of the enemy fleet would be a flash of Cerenkov-blue radiation. That was the equivalent of a superluminal “boom.” Immediately thereafter they would begin scanning the light of the passing ships, which would dump tons of shifted data into the computers in a fraction of a second.
Just decompressing that into something that resembled imagery a human could make any sense of would take all of the Jánošík’s computer power for the better part of an hour.
It should make for a fun show, Aleska thought with a bit of grim humor as she looked to the ship’s clock.
“Anytime now,” she said, eyes on the screen, though she knew that there would be nothing to see on the live feed. Computer decoding was needed to make any sense of what was to come, and at least then they’d have a recording they could rewind.
Even with her attention on the screens, she almost missed the flash of Cerenkov blue as the decoded imagery went live. The energy flash would probably be visible for a thousand years in all directions, and might be mistaken for the birth of a new star.
Ouch, something contacted antimatter, she thought, reflexively reaching up to shield her eyes even though the screens had adjusted their brightness almost instantly.
Initially there was nothing to see, really. The light coming from the Imperial Fleet was so absurdly blueshifted, and then briefly, for a single instant in time, normal, and then abruptly redshifted as the fleet smashed through the field at insane velocities apparently in excess of a hundred times light-speed. Honestly, at those speeds no one was sure if any of the mines they’d dropped would have much effect.
The sudden acceleration would possibly pulverize them before they could be initiated, which was one reason why she and the other Rogues had elected to add antimatter to the mix. Despite other issues, acceleration would have zero impact in antimatter’s effectiveness.
“We’ve got a snapshot!”
“On-screen,” Aleska ordered.
The single image of the fleet as its Doppler shift was reduced to zero was the easiest image to decode, and it was an interesting one to say the very least.
Most of the fleet was blurred, since the scanner technician had settled on a focused image of one particular ship that seemed to have picked up a star in its forward wake. Aleska assumed that was one of their antimatter canisters, having had containment fail. There was no indication of whether it had been able to damage the vessel, however, which was more than a little disappointing.
“Continue recording, track their path,” she ordered. “Get everything you can.”
She shook her head as the Jánošík came around to follow her orders.
They just slammed right through it like a freight train on a track. Unbelievable.
Absently, Aleska sent the kill codes to the mines. No sense leaving them floating around, waiting to nail some random passerby in a year, or a century, or however long the power cells held up. It was unlikely, of course, given the sheer size of space, but the possibility remained. Explosions flashed in the black as containment failed on the antimatter charges as well, briefly eclipsing the Jánošík as the ship began to track in the path of the enemy fleet with its scanners searching intently.
CHAPTER 20
Lord’s Own Dreadnought, Empress Liann, Deep Space
“What in the Imperial abyss was that?!”
Jesan was picking himself up off the deck of the big starship, eyes wide with honest, naked fear and shock. He had never felt turbulence on a starship before. If he’d been asked before this moment, he would have sworn it wasn’t even possible.
Normally, at the speeds starships habitually traveled, anything significant enough to alter your velocity unintentionally was also more than significant enough to plaster every human body within across the decks with nothing left but greasy smears and particulates of bones and teeth. That had happened, especially during the earlier days of space travel in the Empire, but being shaken enough to toss him out of his seat and across the floor, a painful but survivable experience?
That was new.
“Unknown!”
“Useless response,” Jesan growled under his breath as he checked himself for injury before hobbling over to his chair again.
Slumping into it, nursing bruises and scrapes he’d received, he split his focus and started looking at the scanner information everyone on board was poring through.
They’d crossed paths with something, that was obvious. Something that hadn’t been scanned ahead of time and yet was dangerous enough to
have an effect on the drives. That narrowed the list significantly, as any sizeable gravity sources would have been located in the quanta long before they passed.
Most gravity sources, Jesan corrected himself.
However, if they’d slammed into a young, yet stable singularity, then he would be lucky to be a smear on the deck.
“I . . .” One of the officers around him spoke up, sounding hesitant. “Did we somehow scoop the corona of a dwarf neutron star?”
Everyone looked at the officer, one thought on all of their faces.
Is he mad? Or just stupid?
“I know how it sounds, My Lord,” the officer said, defending himself. “However, look at the scans from our warp trough! I’ve only seen readings like that around Lian Cora Twelve!”
Jesan glared mildly, but did a quick check and comparison before responding. He wound up staring incredulously at the screens for a moment, shocked by the apparent match.
“There is clearly no way we flew that close to any star, let alone a neutron star,” he said finally. “However, I do see what would make you draw the comparison.”
The radiation was intense, and that was saying something for the leading edge of a warp drive. It was normal for all manner of high-energy particulate to gather into the sink of space-time that the ship plunged into as part of the mechanism of the warp drive. Over long distances, in fact, enough could accumulate to make the art of decelerating to sub-light speeds a tricky matter of bleeding off energy in harmless ways in order to avoid murdering everything in your path with extreme levels of radiation.
The readings he was looking at now, however, were evil from the abyss itself.
If any of that had gotten through to his ship, it would have killed half his crew, and they would likely be the lucky ones.
“My Lord! We have an issue . . .”
“What is it?” Jesan said, scowling at the communications technician, irritated by the distraction.
“We can’t contact three ships. They dropped off our network, and because everyone was distracted by the energy pulse, even the computers didn’t note the disappearance. Well, they noted the phenomenon, but it was logged as a temporary disconnection, My Lord. Yet they haven’t come back.”
