The Complete Intrepid Saga: Books 1 - 4: Aeon 14 Novels
Page 117
Sabrina boosted away from the Intrepid, Cheeky threading the arcs of the colony ship’s super structure like it was something she did every day. Once in open space, she spun out the AP nozzle and boosted toward Fierra’s northern hemisphere.
Sera smiled to herself. No one needed to ask where she wanted to go. She had a score to settle with Rebecca.
“Incoming signal,” Flaherty announced from the new scan and weapons console.
He turned to look Sera in the eyes. “You’ll never guess who it is.”
Sera stood. “Put her on.”
The holo shifted its display of the space around the moon to a secondary tank and Rebecca appeared on the bridge, as clear as though she were really there.
The pirate leader’s eyebrows rose and she smiled. “I see you’ve appropriated some of my style.”
Sera looked down at her gleaming crimson skin and shrugged. “If I’m going to kick your ass, I’m going to do it in style.”
“We’ll see about that,” Rebecca smiled. “I have to admit; I’m pleased to have both prizes in one place. My new ship out there, and the power module you stole from me. It’s going to be a good day.”
“What about me?” Sera asked with a faux pout. “I thought I was your prize.”
“There’ll be time enough for you, I promise,” Rebecca stepped close to Sera, her holographically projected hand tracing down Sera’s breast, along her side and to her hip. “I am very curious how you survived stealing my clothing—though you don’t seem to have escaped unscathed.”
“I wanted to thank you for that,” Sera replied. “You may be the dumbest bitch in the galaxy, but you do have a sense of style—I’ll grant you that. If your flagship survives, I may raid the rest of your wardrobe. There were some shoes in there I’d kill for.”
Cargo replied sourly.
“If you think you’re going to take out even one of my ships, you have another thing coming,” Rebecca spat back. “I’m not just going to sit there and take it like that moron Padre did. By the way, thank your friends on the Intrepid for me. It’ll be good business taking over all his operations.”
“You can thank her yourself,” Sera said as Tanis joined the conversation.
“Nice to see you again, Rebecca,” Tanis said with a smile.
A look of confusion washed across Rebecca’s face. “No! You’re that navigator woman on Sera’s hunk of junk…who are you really?”
“General Tanis Richards, XO of the ISS Intrepid, at your service,” Tanis replied with a nod. “It’s really time for you to go now. You saw what we did to Padre’s fleet. You don’t stand a chance.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rebecca said with a swipe of her hand. “We know a few tricks that fool Padre never even dreamed of. I’ll be sleeping in your quarters tonight, General Richards.”
Rebecca cut the communication and Tanis looked Sera.
“What do you think she has up her sleeve?”
Sera raced through the possibilities, of which there were many. One, however, stood out.
“She said that we wouldn’t damage even one of her ships. I think they may try a shield lock.”
“No!” Cheeky shouted. “She wouldn’t be so stupid. This close to a mass like Kithari? She’s just as likely to create a singularity.”
“What does that mean?” Tanis asked.
“With some skill—and guts—it’s possible to merge the shields of multiple ships into a multi-layered, shifting shell of protection. If she can pull it off with her fleet, it’s going to be pretty hard to punch through.”
Tanis glanced away. “Damn, that Boller admiral is calling, and he seems upset—you’d think they’d be happy we took out Padre.” The general paused and frowned, thinking for a moment. “The Thracia and Babylon are already on their way to the moon’s northern hemisphere. I’m sending the Enterprise as well—show her we mean business. Amanda will get you onto their tactical net. You’re the only one with a stasis shield till the 42nd squadron gets back into play, so use it wisely.”
“Wise is my middle name,” Sera replied with a roguish grin.
Tanis laughed in response and cut the holo connection.
Count on it, Sera thought to herself.
She sat back in her chair and connected to the tactical net Amanda had opened up to her.
A virtual space opened up in her mind and she saw the captains of the four capital ships, as well as three fighter group commanders.
Usef shrugged.
Captain Espensen said.
“That’s definitely an unfriendly posture,” Tanis sighed.
The Bollam’s World Space Force was upping the ante as the minutes ticked by. Their initial blockade of fifty-two ships had ballooned to nearly four-hundred. More took up positions in a defensive grid near the AST dreadnaughts than the Intrepid and The Mark fleet.
Even with the Black Death’s demonstration of near invincibility, it appeared that the Bollam’s World Space Force was more concerned about the AST ships.
“The nano probes we shot out of the rails earlier have started to send in some interesting data. So far we’ve picked up seventy-two rail platforms in the system—more than Se
ra thought there would be. They’re all pointed at us and the AST ships,” the scan officer reported.
Tanis nodded and added every rail platform within thirty light minutes to the priority target list. The second the Bollers turned hostile, half-ton slugs would be fired at each of those platforms. They probably wouldn’t all hit, but it was better than leaving them there, firing on the ISF fleet.
For added insurance, the Andromeda was quietly seeding relativistic missiles throughout potential paths of approach for enemy ships. If there was one thing no one objected to after the Battle for Victoria, it was an oversupply of RMs.
“Well, if that’s not a clear sign, I don’t know what is,” Captain Andrews said. “What’s the latest on our stasis shield?”
“Abby reported that they’re working through some kinks. She wouldn’t give me a time, but based on her level of surliness I don’t think that we should count on it right now.”
If the pressure stemming from the overwhelming force encircling the Intrepid wasn’t so great Tanis would have laughed.
“There,” scan pointed out. “Three of their ships just slid over three kilometers.”
Tanis began mapping trajectories, but Amanda beat her to it.
Tanis sent the signal across the fleet for all ships to institute gamma-pattern jinking.
The Intrepid’s helm and ships fleet-wide signaled their acknowledgement and Tanis settled in to wait. If a shot passed through the Orkney’s former path, then she would not wait for further provocation.
Barely a word was uttered on the bridge as the five minutes passed. Then, right on cue, scan picked up a three hundred kilogram slug travelling at a quarter the speed of light.
Across the fleet fifty-two rail guns opened fire, sending half-ton slugs hurling into the black. In less than a minute, two hundred and sixty slugs were en route to their targets. Scan showed Boller ships changing position, attempting to intercept and lase the slugs before they reached their targets.
Several fired rails at the ISF slugs, hoping to impact and deflect the incoming projectiles.
“I bet they didn’t think we knew about quite so many of those,” the admiral chuckled.
“I read a dozen slugs passing through positions our ships would have been occupying right now,” scan reported.
“Well done in seeing the significance on that ship movement,” Tanis said. “Your team just saved the fleet.”
The scan officer sat up straighter and smiled in acknowledgement before turning back to his console and the never ending streams of information being fed from the NSAIs which handled the raw sensor data. He gave a word of encouragement over the Link to the humans and AI on scan.
“Incoming from the Boller fleet admiral,” the comm officer said. “Should I put it on the main tank?”
“What the hell,” Tanis sighed. “I expect we could all use a good laugh.”
The figure on the display was a woman this time, and her expression was less than pleased.
“You’ve just sentenced thousands of Bollam’s citizens to death,” she said in soft, icy tones. “There will be no more treaties. We will reclaim our new world, take your ship, whole or in pieces and crush your pathetic little fleet.”
Tanis turned to Terrance. “At least when we were dealing with the Sirians, they had proper megalomaniacs. This pales in comparison.”
“Our ancestors were from Sirius! They were caught in Kapteyn’s Streamer hundreds of years before you. They earned these worlds.”
“Sirians…that explains a lot,” Tanis shook her head before turning back to the admiral. “You say that we killed hundreds, but thousands would have died on our ships had your kinetic rounds connected.”
“They would not have!” the woman exclaimed. “You have advanced shielding, what we fired was merely a shot across the bow.”
Tanis couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Are you seriously going to attempt to paint us as the aggressors? Until your unmistakable act of war, we have only taken defensive actions. You are brigands, you attempt to seize whatever drifts past your system to better yourselves. You’re nothing more than well-established interstellar bandits.”
Tanis hadn’t even finished speaking her final words before the woman was yelling so loudly that the bridge’s audio systems lowered her output.
“You sanctimonious, dusty old bitch! Our people built this system out of nothing. We worked for millennia to create what you see. You would come here and pick our best worlds for yourselves in trade for trinkets. No one will have your tech. Not those pirates, not those core-world bastards and certainly not you. I’ll—.”
Tanis cut the connection.
“She seems excitable,” Captain Andrews said. “Though you may not have needed to goad her quite so much.”
“Needed is just the word,” Tanis replied. “It was clear that she opposed any sort of deal with us—but that cannot be the case across the entire system. I’ve just made her look the fool in front of her fleet. When the time comes for hard choices, it may be that not all of her people make the wrong ones.”
Tanis reviewed the battlefield. One squadron of Arc-5s patrolled the field of destroyed and disabled ships that was Padre’s fleet. The other twenty-two squadrons in the fleet’s first wing had formed two picket lines, one leading Kithari and the other trailing the gas giant.
The Pike and Gilese anchored the first group, and the Condor anchored the second with the Andromeda lurking nearby. Closer to the Intrepid lay the Orkney and Dresden with their own fighter shields deployed around them.
Armed with deadly antimatter and fusion engines, the Intrepid’s eighteen heavy tugs provided the final layer of protection.
Scan called out impacts on the first rail gun emplacements, an event that kicked off the Boller assault.
“Looks like a quarter of their force,” Sanderson commented. “Thirty-six cruisers, forty destroyers and a mess of corvettes. No fighters, though.”
“From what Sera says, no one uses fighters anymore…though I wonder if that might change after they saw what our Arcs can do.”
“The odds look worse than when the Sirians invaded,” Terrance said softly. “And we had three times the ships we have now.”
“Like the admiral said,” Tanis replied. “Our fighters count for a lot—especially given that there are nearly five hundred of them between us and the Bollers. Seventy-two are Arc-6’s as well. They can park right in the engine wash of any of those cruisers and lance their ships to pieces.”
I just hope it will be enough, she thought.
“Hell, they can probably fly through those ships if they had to,” Sanderson grunted.
There’s a tactic no one will ever put in the books, Tanis thought to herself, worried that they would ultimately have to resort to just such an attack.
“Sirs? The Mark’s ships are doing something,” the scan officer reported.
Sera looked to Cheeky, Cargo, and Flaherty. “God, I hope this was the right play,” she said softly.
“There is no right play, here,” Flaherty replied.
The Mark ships shifted into a large sphere with the three cruisers at the center. Sabrina’s scan showed streams of gravitons flowing from the center ships to the corvettes on the perimeter. Those gravitons where harnessed and amplified by the corvettes and a kilometer-thick shield snapped into place around the armada.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Sera whispered. “She totally nailed that.”
“They’re going to wrap their shield around the Intrepid and storm the ship,” Flaherty said.
“I believe you’re right,” Sera nodded in agreement.
The ISF ships were engaging The Mark’s shield bubble with little effect. Even the near-luminal impacts of relativistic missiles only slightly altered the trajectory of the sphere—movement that was quickly corrected as The Mark ships accelerated toward the Intrepid.
The fighters darted close to the enemy fleet, lancing out with lasers and missiles, but the beams did no damage and few of the missiles even reached the shields. The cruisers did what they could from a distance, but without stasis shields, it was certain death to approach The Mark ships and their thousands of beams.
Only the single squadron of Arc-6’s dared dance close to the enemy, but even at less than a kilometer away, their weapons had no measurable effect on the armada’s super shield.
A desperate pilot arched away from the battle, taking a long loop around Fierra before coming back at a hundredth the speed of light, smashing his ship into the pirate fleet’s shield.