Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “This sim will end and repeat soon,” Derek pointed to the ‘Loop’ indicator that was showing active. “We could-”

  Alarms blared and the simulation on their displays froze, then the consoles switched to show real-time images. “Hey! The Jeraptha are back,” Derek announced excitedly, recognizing the outline of the Deal Me In even though the displays and controls in front of them were now all in Ruhar common language script. “Damn, I am glad to see those beetles again,” he shot a guilty glance at the flight recorder module, and decided to pretend he hadn’t said anything noteworthy. They were aboard a Ruhar ship, and he knew the hamsters had their own nicknames for their Jeraptha patrons.

  “Hands off,” Irene lifted her fingers away from the controls, which should not respond to her anyway, as she did not have the proper access code or biometrics. Even if she did, the auxiliary control center needed to be authorized to have any effect on ship systems, and that authority could only be granted by the senior officers. When the ship was maneuvering, the aux controls were supposed to be manned anyway, and Irene nervously looked toward the hatch for their instructor to return. “Maybe we should get out of these seats. Oop,” she added as artificial gravity began to fade. Cutting off gravity meant the ship could potentially be performing hard turns and accelerations. The display flashed to Alert Condition Two. “Where is the klasta?”

  “Regs say we remain in these seats until we are officially relieved,” Derek pointed out, his tone reflecting his uncertainty. “We are supposed to put our helmets on,” he reached under his couch for the hardshell helmet, “and button up.”

  “Derek, we are not pilots,” Irene sighed and reached for her own helmet. “Not yet,” she waved a hand at the consoles that were all showing the odd-looking Ruhar script. “I can barely read this stuff.”

  “Me neither, but when Splunn comes back, she will see we followed regulations to the letter and have nothing to bitch,” he remembered the flight recorder was still active, “to reprimand us about.”

  “Ok,” Irene agreed as her seat was the best place to watch the unfolding drama. “Wow,” she gulped as the ship suddenly slewed to one side, leaving butterflies in her stomach. “Those ships are really moving.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I’m reading this right,” Derek squinted at a blinking notice from the Toaster’s bridge, “but I think the beetles ordered all ships to perform combat latching again. They must really be in a hurry to jump us out of here.”

  “Derek,” Irene figured out the controls for the sensors and zoomed the image in on the Deal Me In. “Look at those ships attached the star carrier.”

  Derek leaned over to watch her display before she mirrored the images on his console. “Whew,” he whistled as he took in the view of battered and in some cases crippled warships. There were only four Ruhar ships attached to the star carrier, but seven ships had jumped into action. Three ships were missing. “They were in one hell of a fight. Oh, damn, look at that. The star carrier took hits also,” he noted scorch marks and jagged holes in forward and aft hulls. Amidships, the spine had cables flopping around and pieces of the scaffolding bent or missing. “This is big F-ing trouble. Damn. Who has the balls to hit the Jeraptha?”

  Before Irene could respond, Derek’s answer appeared in the form of Bosphuraq battlecruiser, jumping in close. “Oh, shit.”

  Klasta Splunn flailed her arms in a futile attempt to steer toward a handhold, missing as she flew by in the zero gravity. When the Jeraptha star carrier jumped in unexpectedly and the alarm sounded, she had been finishing a snack and chatting with a cute senior cadet. She wasn’t that much older than the cadet, she told herself, why, she had graduated from the academy less than a year ago. Splunn had been struck with guilty panic when the alarm sounded, knowing she was several minutes away from her human students, and without artificial gravity functioning the trip back to the aux control center would take longer. The aux control center was not her action station when the ship was under way, but she knew the senior officers would rightfully fault her for leaving a pair of aliens alone in a vital part of the ship. When the gravity cut off, she had been racing headlong down a passageway and clumsily stumbled, sending herself awkwardly soaring through the air out of control. The passageway where she needed to turn left had gone past without her being able to catch a handhold, and her plight only got worse when she crashed into a trio of frightened cadets. The four of them struggled to separate and the cadets got out of her way, helping her turn in the correct direction, No sooner had she launched herself across a side passage when the ship lurched, making her bounce off a bulkhead and bending a wrist painfully. The ship was already maneuvering, and no one was available to provide backup to the bridge helmsmen!

  Splunn finally hooked a foot painfully on a doorframe and halted her tumbling flight. With determination, she pulled herself along the correct passageway, seeing with dismay the two adult crewmen coming in from a side route. They were assigned to the aux control center, and now she had no chance to get the aliens out of the seats before anyone saw they had been left alone. Wordlessly, she gave them a quick wave between handholds, trying to make clear they were all going to the same place.

  She slowed to avoid a collision just as a Condition One alert sounded! The three of them stared at each other for a heart-stopping moment. Enemy ships had jumped in, or their own ship was about to jump into combat. No longer waiting for Splunn, the two crewmen expertly pushed off hard with their legs, zipping down the passageway toward where the open hatch to the aux control center could be partially seen.

  They almost made it. Splunn saw no point to the three of them trying to jam through the hatch at the same time, so she gave her aching wrist a break and eased up slightly—

  She never saw the railgun dart that was moving at an appreciable percentage of lightspeed. The first dart of the pair slammed into the Toaster’s shields that were already weakened by hits from enemy masers, forcing the shields to absorb and dissipate gigajoules of energy. The second dart, hitting less than two meters from its companion, was also mostly deflected by the straining shields. Mostly. Eight percent of the dart managed to penetrate all the way through to the cruiser’s hull, having been turned into plasma that burned its way through the ship’s light armor like it was tissue paper. After punching through the armor with little trouble, the hellish globs of plasma burst in a cone-shaped fountain of death, burning and destroying everything in a sixteen degree arc and only stopping when they encountered the inner surface of the armor plating on the other side of the hull. Three of the objects burned by the plasma jet were Splunn and the two crewmen.

  Irene was startled not so much by the violent shaking of the ship as by the hatch behind them crashing closed. The quick automatic action of the hatch was not fast enough to prevent air being sucked out into the passageway and Irene’s flightsuit inflated to compensate, with air hissing from a reserve tank in the helmet even before the visor could swing down. The flightsuits they wore were based on combat skinsuits, but were even less capable than flightsuits used by crews aboard dropships and combat aircraft. When issued their new flightsuits aboard the Toaster, Irene and Derek had assumed the Ruhar fleet’s thinking must be that, if a ship were hit in deep space, a tougher flightsuit was not going to be of much help.

  And Klasta Splunn had not been wearing a flightsuit at all, instead being dressed in the simple coveralls that were the standard crew uniform. Unless that hamster had been able to pause long enough to don an environment suit, she might already be dead. “Derek-”

  “Incoming!” He watched transfixed in shock as missiles streaked in toward the Toaster, with the forward section of the ship being pounded by repeated maser fire. Unknown to Derek, impact of the second railgun dart amidships had pushed the cruiser just far enough to avoid another pair of darts that bracketed the forward hull, with one barely striking the shields a glancing blow. As the two human pilots watched helplessly, their cruiser’s point-defense masers exploded one missile at a safe distanc
e, then another but damage from the railgun hit amidships had knocked out defense cannons and sensors in that section of the ship, leaving a gap in defense coverage. Recognizing their vulnerability, the command crew fired thrusters to roll the ship, exposing the undamaged defense cannons on the other side. Unfortunately, the enemy also adjusted to circumstances and the incoming missiles arced around to aim at the damaged area. The missiles were faster and more nimble than the bulky old cruiser so they had the advantage. Still, the defense masers kept pouring megajoules of energy at the missiles and sheer numbers were on the side of the defense; eleven maser cannons against only two missiles. Technology was on the side of the missiles, the ship was Ruhar while the missiles were manufactured by the advanced Bosphuraq. With invisible maser bolts streaking past, the smart weapons rapidly changed course and speed, ejected decoys and projected false images to fool Ruhar sensors. Derek’s stomach tied in knots while he sat rigidly in the couch, wishing he could do something, anything. “Yes!” He pumped a fist as one missile stumbled into a hail of maser beams and exploded. In its death, the missile had one last move to play and it detonated its warhead in a shape charge directed forward at the cruiser. High-density warhead pellets travelling a quarter of lightspeed blasted the cruiser’s energy shield, heating the degraded shield generators near the point of failure and lighting up that vulnerable area of shield like a beacon for the missile coming behind.

  As the last high-tech missile jinked sideways at three thousand Gees toward the weakened shield, a nearby Ruhar destroyer exploded, its jump drive coils having been punctured by a pair of railgun darts from the enemy battlecruiser. To Derek’s terror, the blast of high-energy photons and particles washing over the battlespace blanked out the Toaster’s proximity sensors and the cruiser lost track of the last missile for a crucial second.

  The missile, for all its advanced technology, also lost track of its quarry but that was of little importance, for the missile knew the target’s last position and the big cruiser could not move far in a short time. Dropping all evasive maneuvers, the missile fired its engine for emergency thrust, on a course that took it straight into the heart of where it knew the Ruhar ship had to be.

  Derek had no time to give voice to his terror, no time to shout a warning in case Irene had not seen the same data on her console. The Ruh Tostella was tossed aside like a child’s toy, spinning around so hard Derek’s head hit the back of his helmet as the couch’s restraint system automatically held the helmet steady to prevent him from snapping his neck. His brain rattled inside the shell of his skull, he struggled to make sense of simply who and where he was, the flickering displays in front of him forgotten.

  “Der-Derek, you Ok?”

  Derek coughed. “Shook up,” he admitted. In combat, he could not indulge in any macho bullshit, the other pilot needed to know he was not a hundred percent right then. “You?”

  “Seeing double,” Irene blinked slowly to clear her vision so she could understand what she thought she saw on the ship status display. “The front of the ship, gone?”

  Derek instinctively wanted to shake his head, he also knew that more jarring was the last thing his brain needed right then. The ship was moving enough on its own, making the couch shake regularly with intermittent hard bumps. The shaking was probably caused by the ship’s thrusters attempting to control the wild spinning of the ship, which was flipping on all three axes. Derek assumed the bumps were secondary explosions, a notion confirmed by new lights flaring on the ship status display. Components were overloading and exploding all over the forward half of the hull. That is, the forward half of what was left, for a quarter of the ship’s original hull was missing entirely. “Yeah, it’s gone. Everything forward of Frame Thirty Five is just, missing.” The sensors were showing an extensive debris field around and mostly in front of the cruiser, wreckage blasted away from the ship by an advanced-technology warhead. “We’re dead in the water,” he weakly lifted a hand to point to the status display which showed half the defensive maser cannons were offline and only half of those were even in a restart cycle. Shields were weak and one shield, toward what was now the nose of the ship, was disconnected from a power source. “Why haven’t the birdbrains finished us?”

  “Because we’re just a training cruiser,” Irene guessed. Tapping the tactical display she added, “They have more important targets.”

  Outside the ship it was hell, with maser bolts, particle beams and kinetic ordnance flying around thick and fast. The Bosphuraq battlecruiser had already destroyed or disabled most of the Ruhar warships, the main fight now was between the Jeraptha and Bosphuraq. The beetles had their star carrier responding with every weapon they had, missiles ripple-firing from launch tubes and masers burning continuously, but the superior strength of the enemy’s heavier ship gave them an overwhelming advantage. Damaged Ruhar ships were ejecting from their hardpoints, adding their own weapons to the fight, knowing they had little chance for survival. Survival was not their goal and escape was impossible, as the enemy had the battlespace blanketed in a strong damping field. Two Ruhar destroyers were flying directly at the enemy ship on a collision course, hoping to ram the battlecruiser. Their suicide tactic was intended to provide a gap in the damping field, allowing the vital star carrier to get away. Alert to the danger, the Bosphuraq were slamming the destroyers with concentrated railgun fire. One, then the other destroyer was struck several times until their shields were entirely knocked out, exposing them to the comparatively weak maser bolts that seared deep into the noses of the destroyers, making the forward armor bubble and melt, opening holes for the maser energy to wreck the unprotected interiors of the ships.

  The first destroyer veered away, corrected back on course, then veered in the other direction, its engines offline, drifting uselessly away into deep space. The crew of the second destroyer, knowing it would be crippled and out of the fight before it could ram the enemy, activated a self-destruct mechanism to drop reactor containment. A half second later, as the white-hot fusion plasma burst outward and contacted the fully-charged banks of jump drive capacitors, warheads of all missiles still in the ship’s magazines detonated to add their energy to the maelstrom. The destroyer was replaced by a small, short-lived sun that expanded outward in a sphere so only part of the wavefront washed over the enemy battlecruiser, and at such distance the Bosphuraq warship shrugged off the assault with only a minor fluctuation in damping field strength.

  With all Ruhar ships inside the damping field either destroyed or disabled, including the unimportant training cruiser near the edge of the field, the Bosphuraq turned the full fury of their weapons on the hapless star carrier that was making a futile attempt to run away. Jeraptha star carriers had reinforced shielding and armor protecting the critical engineering components of the aft hull. Knowing that bit of tactical intel, the Bosphuraq aimed masers, particle beams, railguns and missiles just forward of the aft hull where it attached to the long spine of the ship. The only break in their focus on the star carrier was to direct two missiles at the training cruiser, to kill it before its mostly aimless course took it beyond the reach of the damping field.

  “We should jump,” Derek advised. As he spoke, more missiles launched from the enemy ship, two of them curving toward the Toaster and accelerating hard. The inbound missiles were highlighted by blinking red symbols and red streaks projecting their courses. A pair of missiles were projected to impact the training cruiser, and point defenses were mostly showing as offline.

  “Jump? We can’t do anything, we’re just running a sim-Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Derek tapped his console where an alert was flashing that the simulation had been abruptly ended, and the auxiliary control center now had full authorization to maneuver the ship. “Command authority automatically transferred to the auxiliary station when we lost the bridge,” he declared, remembering that tidbit of info from the Welcome Aboard package they received when they’d been assigned to the cruiser. Derek never imagined he would need to remember such
an obscure piece of trivia. “We’re the pilots now, everyone aboard is counting on us.”

  Irene turned to look at the hatch, hoping trained Ruhar crew would come in to relieve them. That, she saw with a shock, was not going to happen. The hatch had scorch marks on the inner surface, and the upper left corner appeared bent, bowed inward. Whatever had happened in the passageway outside, it must have been bad. Very bad.

  “Ok, all right, yeah, sure,” Irene’s mouth babbled as her mind caught up with the situation. “We’ve never performed a jump. Or been trained in jump procedure.”

  “We’ve both read the jump manual a dozen times or more,” Derek’s voice was more squeaky than the soothing tone he tried to project. “We can do this. If we can’t,” he swallowed hard, “the ship is dead anyway.”

  “Right, Ok, good,” Irene took deep breaths to psych herself up to do the impossible. “We’re caught in the edge of a damping field,” Irene noted, even as her fingers called up the jump drive controls. She had only ever seen those controls on her laptop, not ever in a simulator and never for real. “Local damping field strength is, uh,” reading Ruhar script was not her best skill, “thirty two percent?” She struggled to recall something she had read only once. “What’s the safety limit for a successful jump?”

  “Twenty eight percent,” Derek stated. Or was it twenty nine? Or thirty eight? Other than casually scanning a high-level briefing document about jump operations, he had no experience with the system.

  “We can’t risk a jump.”

  “The red thingies are getting closer to the green thingy!” Derek jabbed a finger at the display in front of him, where red symbols for incoming missiles were homing in on the Toaster. “We need to jump now.”

  “If we jump inside a damping field, the drive could tear itself apart.”