Archangel One

by Evan Currie

  Probably not going to matter, Jennifer thought with a cringe, I don’t think we could have done nearly that much damage if we had.

  Fires were burning in the vacuum of space, glowing balls of plasma that clearly wanted to take on the spherical form that zero gravity would prefer but marred by the kinetic push given by the jets of fuel streaming from the hulls of the damaged warships.

  “Who taught these idiots to fly?” her wingman, Lieutenant Erik “Viking” Skar, bitched as he guided his fighter through the growing debris field in her wake.

  “Stay focused. Ask useless questions after the fight,” she growled, bringing her fighter around in a tight turn to survey the situation, keeping her speed as high as she dared while flying close to so much debris. “They’re panicking, and that makes them more of a threat at this range, not less!”

  “Roger that.”

  Belj Fleet

  “Captains, get your ships under control!” Mir snarled out the order over the squadron frequency, furious at the error he was seeing play out before his eyes.

  It was, of course, one of the risks of flying tighter formations this close to a fight. Normally, he would never have asked that of his captains in the first place, but as the range to targets decreased, so too did the effective coverage area one could spread ships over without weakening their own fire density.

  They weren’t, however, supposed to be that close.

  They weren’t supposed to be dealing with small, high-speed attack vessels blasting through so close as to have their gravity fields interfering with one another either.

  Mir actually thought that was likely the problem as much as anything else. He would have to examine the telemetry readings later, but it seemed probable that the gravity interactions with the enemy’s fast-moving vessels had thrown off internal navigation.

  “Spread formation,” he ordered.

  It was pointless trying to run a close formation for the attack now that it was clear they were running into a trap.

  He glanced aside at one of his assistants. “Determine if those ships are able to maneuver, please.”

  “Yes Admiral.”

  It didn’t matter, he supposed, whether they could or not. There was no possibility of stopping to put them under warp, as the rest of his squadrons were already accelerating away.

  This is a minor disaster.

  Now he just had to keep it from becoming a major one.

  Imperial Third Fleet

  “Well, now,” Jesan said softly as he watched the fighting play out, “isn’t that interesting.”

  He was pleased to have stumbled on the fleet a little too late to intercept them. Watching the battle in the lower part of the star’s gravity well was proving to be informative.

  “Someone out here is innovating,” Jesan said, checking that every possible aspect of the fight was being recorded.

  The Empire would want those scans.

  “Yes, Fleet Commander,” his second replied. “But who? And why would they be using such small ships?”

  Not a bad question, Jesan knew. Normally, any vessel below the mass of a destroyer was considered too vulnerable and ineffective for combat. The Empire didn’t field anything below the cruiser range, in fact.

  “Do we have mass specifications on the unknown class?” he asked, pitching his voice to reach the signals and scanner stations.

  “Still analyzing, Commander,” the scanner officer replied. “We’re estimating right now less than ten percent the mass of the local destroyers.”

  That was small.

  The local destroyers were not the largest of the class he’d encountered either. Once, when the Empire still put such things in space, the largest Imperial destroyers were easily twenty to thirty percent larger than what the locals currently used. Those numbers put the unknown ships well below the active-duty requirements for any Imperial warship within the entire history of the Empire.

  This conclusion nagged at him, however, because Jesan had seen smaller craft in action not all that long ago.

  He walked over to the closest computer station and called up the records of the invasion into Oather space, comparing the silhouettes of the unknown ships with those put into space by the anomalous species.

  Not even a close match. These are considerably larger, of course, he noted with a mild sense of mixed relief and disappointment. Those small ships used by the anomalies were surprisingly powerful, but not truly a threat to a warship. These appear to be a threat, judging from the data we’re scanning from here.

  On a whim he ran a signals comparison, looking for any sign of either Oather or anomalous transmissions, but those came up negative as well. They were only reading Free Star transmission protocols from the battle below them.

  Jesan nodded slightly to himself.

  “Just getting desperate, then,” he murmured.

  “Commander?” his second asked, walking over. “I’m afraid I didn’t hear that.”

  Jesan shook his head. “Nothing important, Sub-Commander. I was merely commenting that the locals are showing more signs of desperation. They’re building smaller, likely much cheaper ships in an attempt to field more power for lesser cost.”

  The sub-commander nodded thoughtfully. “They appear to have succeeded.”

  “Yes, and that is bothersome,” Jesan confirmed. “But not a particular concern. What is the result of the battle?”

  “The Belj have gone to full acceleration and have adjusted their course to evade contact as best they can. They won’t entirely succeed, by our analysis, but they will preserve most of the fleet in the process.”

  Jesan grimaced. “Pity. Very well, full power to our drives. Take us into the system, signal fleet-wide, prepare for battle.”

  “As you command!”

  Gaia’s Revenge

  Three of the enemy destroyers were burning in space, drifting without warps as they continued on their paths through the asteroid cluster. Most of the rest were arcing away from the Aerin Star Kingdom destroyers as best they could while being raked by laser fire incessantly.

  The commander of the local squadrons was intent on making the Belj pay as dearly as possible for their attempt on the Aerin homeworld as well as for this assault.

  Not that I blame him, Steph thought as he eased back on his own fighter-gunboat’s acceleration, letting the enemy gain some distance as he signalled the rest of his squadron to do the same.

  Body count wasn’t his goal; reputation was. The more of them that got away, the better it would be for the short- to mid-term. He was a little concerned about the long-term results of that; leaving living enemies at your back was a questionable move at the best of times, but Steph would play that out as it came. For the moment, they needed the legend. Anything else, well, they’d deal with it. The Archangels always did.

  “Stephan!”

  Steph twisted in place, feeling the ship jump in response to his surprise, and quickly got himself under control lest he do something stupid while in control of a warship.

  “What is it, Milla?” he asked, recognizing that it wasn’t in her personality to yell without due cause.

  “We have a problem. Look to the long-range scanners!”

  Steph refocused his attention, unmasking the long-range overlay that he’d had hidden so it wouldn’t distract him during the fight.

  He saw what she was excited about almost instantly and viciously suppressed the urge to start swearing and yelling himself.

  “Archangels, Revenge,” he called automatically. “Break contact and fall back, let them go. We have bigger problems. Look to your long-range scanners and stand by for orders.”

  The others immediately signalled their acknowledgment of the order, but Steph was already opening a signal to the locals.

  “Gael, Revenge,” he said. “We have an issue.”

  “Why are you not pursuing the enemy, Revenge?” Auran responded almost immediately. “We have a deal.”

  “Deal is still on, but if we all want to live
to enjoy it, we might want to pay attention. I strongly advise you evacuate the system along one of the following trajectories.”

  He sent a range of courses over the signal to complement his words.

  “What? Why?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, those are Imperial cruisers coming our way, and I doubt they’re just being friendly,” Steph said. “Our contract did not include mixing it up with the Empire.”

  “What?!”

  The channel went dead, but Steph left it open anyway as he shifted his focus and started running the numbers. The Imperial ships were hours out still, but that didn’t mean that he and his were in the clear. There was a lot going on, and just bugging out wasn’t a possibility.

  We have time, and we have better acceleration than they do, Steph thought grimly as he ran the calculations. We’ve got it. Just wish it hadn’t happened this soon.

  “Revenge, we confirm your scans,” the shaken Auran came back. “We are breaking off contact and fleeing the system. Thank you for the advisement.”

  “Not a problem. We’ll leave on a different path, meet you back in the Kingdom,” Steph said. “Acceptable?”

  “Eminently.”

  “Good luck. Revenge out.”

  Imperial Third Fleet

  Jesan grunted in mixed amusement and annoyance as the pests began to scatter as soon as his fleet signals reached them.

  They noticed us slightly quicker than expected, he noted with mild interest.

  The Belj fleet that he had tracked to this system were already fleeing, of course, but he could see the signs that the remaining vessels had also begun preparations for withdrawal from the system with some degree of urgency.

  “There goes the first of them,” his sub-commander announced.

  Jesan nodded as he watched the first of the destroyer squadrons break contact with the Belj, accelerating away from his fleet on a course he knew they would not be able to intercept.

  A mild irritation, but really, just sending them scattering like the pests they were was a mission win based on his current orders.

  “Track them, standard procedure,” he said. “What of the damaged vessels?”

  “Several will not be able to evade us, Fleet Commander.”

  Jesan nodded. “Good. Vector as ordered.”

  “Yes, Fleet Commander.”

  Gaia’s Revenge

  Tyke paused as he looked over to where Steph was standing, staring at the telemetry data with an odd look in his eye.

  “You okay, Crown?”

  With no response forthcoming, Tyke walked across the flight control deck to where Steph had the holographic displays focused not on the Imperial ships but on the disabled Belj destroyers.

  “Crown.”

  “Huh?” Steph half turned. “What?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Steph said, sounding bothered by something as he reached out and accessed the shipboard comm channels. “Hey Milla?”

  “Yes Stephan?” she answered immediately.

  “Full scan, active sensors, target the disabled Belj destroyers,” he ordered simply.

  “Roger, Stephan. Pulse out.”

  At their current range, the pulse return was almost instantaneous, and soon the screens were filled with more information than Tyke could decipher as he looked over Steph’s shoulder.

  “Can you make heads or tails of that?” he asked.

  Steph nodded, gesturing. “Those two are dead in space—they’ve lost drive mass. This one over here is still under power, but they’re drifting just the same. They’ve lost scanners and comms, see there? The instrumentation clusters were burned out, probably by our lasers. They’re blind and deaf, but probably mostly intact beyond that.”

  “Alright, so?”

  “So those are Imperial cruisers coming downwell, Tyke,” Steph said grimly.

  “I’m not following, sorry.”

  “Imperials don’t take prisoners,” Steph said, toggling the squadron-wide communications. “Archangels, stand by to offer rescue to the Belj destroyer crews. We have seven hours before the cruisers get here, considerably less if we want to entirely evade contact. Do this by the numbers, do not overly risk yourselves, but if we can get those people out of here, I want it done. Archangel Actual out.”

  Chapter 17

  Belj Destroyer Baphon

  Smoke filled the bridge, the ship’s filtration system whining and rasping as it tried to clear the contaminants from the air. But those sounds were drowned out entirely by the alarms screaming for everyone’s attention from all sides.

  At least the fires have been extinguished, the ship’s second in command thought grimly as he kicked aside a broken chunk of seating and slid into the free communications console.

  The strike that took out the scanners and communications had caused a back channel burst to feed through the armor at its weakest point. The conduits that brought data back from those systems had served well enough to funnel energy of a different sort. Buffers designed to limit such events were entirely incapable of standing up to the sheer power of a warship’s lasers. No one had ever really thought they might need to. The target was so small that it was impossible to reliably strike at such a point across conventional fighting ranges, after all.

  The new ships had either proven that wrong or, more likely, just gotten incredibly lucky.

  The explosions of energy blew out systems all across the deck, overloading buffers intended to protect against stray cosmic energies that weren’t specifically directed at the ship.

  “Primary scanners and communications are entirely off, Sub-Commander.”

  Jerich Mas glowered at the young crewman who was spouting the obvious.

  “I find myself entirely aware of that, crewman,” he barked. “Try to route to the backups.”

  “We can’t.” The crewman shook his head. “The lines are all melted to scrap. There’re puddles of silicate cooling on every deck from here to the forward plates. We have nothing to route signals through.”

  Jerich swore under his breath but couldn’t say he was entirely surprised.

  “Pull lines from storage. We’ll have to run a bypass,” he ordered.

  The crewman looked pained.

  “What?”

  “We don’t have enough in storage, Sub-Commander. Logistics didn’t assign us sufficient replacement parts during the last resupply. They said we didn’t need them.”

  Abyss be damned bureaucrats.

  “Fine, gather up what we do have and get it to the forward deck,” Jerich ordered. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Yes Sub-Commander!”

  Jerich ignored the man as he left the deck, pushing himself away from the useless communications terminal. The Baphon was deaf and blind. For all they knew, the battle was won or lost. By the abyss, they might be on a direct course for an asteroid twice the size of the ship. They couldn’t tell.

  He had to get as much back in running order as he could, as quickly as possible.

  The fact that we’re not being shot at is a plus, he thought, though he was fully aware it could just as likely mean that the enemy currently had other concerns than that they’d won the battle.

  He was about to grab some more crew to start hauling gear forward when the entire ship abruptly rang like a bell. The deck shuddered under him.

  “What in the abyss was that?” he snarled, grabbing a rail to steady himself.

  No one seemed to have the slightest idea, which seemed about as expected given the current state of things. Jerich grabbed at a ship-wide communication system, thankful that those at least were still intact.

  “All decks, report. Does anyone know what that was?”

  Gaia’s Revenge

  “Saddle up, Marines!”

  Master Sergeant Buckler marched down between the row of men and women, looking over their armor and arms with a fast professional glance. He was less than happy with what he was seeing, but it wasn’t the fault of the men.

  The
gear they had was supposedly top-of-the-line, but it was all new and all distinctly nonstandard. He paused at the end of the row and sighed, but refrained from saying what he wanted to, knowing there was nothing to be done.

  Why do they all have to look like rejects from a sci-fi film, though?

  For obvious reasons, standard firearms were not an option. Those had been used enough against the Empire that they’d be tracked back to Earth instantly by even a cursory examination and analysis through Imperial Systems. Unfortunately, that requirement also left out the Priminae gravity cannons, as those were distinctly Priminae in nature, and leaving a trail back to them was almost as bad.

  Instead, they got death rays.

  The sergeant had just barely managed to keep from rubbing his palm across his face when he’d heard that. The weapons were close enough to Imperial standard that they would look like some offshoot, something developed by a particularly creative or desperate group based on known technology. Technically, they were called pulse rifles, but to his mind there was no way in hell he was going to give them the credit of being called a rifle.

  The pulse aspect was true enough, however. They fired a burst of amplified electromagnetic energy, powerful enough to scramble everything from electronics to brains, but also delivering enough energy to boil water in an instant. The resulting impact was nasty enough that he wasn’t embarrassed to be carrying one himself, but Buckler still wanted his battle rifle.

  “Sergeant, are we ready to go?”

  Buckler turned, eyes widening as he recognized the commander stepping down onto the deck.

  “We, sir?” he asked with trepidation.

  “We, Sergeant,” Steph said. “The ship is in good hands. I’ll be handling this myself.”

  Buckler bit his tongue.

  Literally bit his tongue.

  It was someone’s job to tell the ship’s commander that they had no business on a boarding party to an enemy ship, but it wasn’t his job.

  “Yes sir,” he strangled out finally.