by Grant, Peter
As Bravo came within two hundred and forty thousand kilometers of the shuttles, eight seconds before reaching them, the battle computers activated the shuttles’ electronically scanned radar arrays. A torrent of electromagnetic energy began to bathe Bravo from bow to stern, illuminating every point in line-of-sight on her hull – including the hump of her reactor compartment cover, three-quarters of the way down her spine. As Bravo drew nearer and the computers received more precise targeting information from the radars, they fed course corrections to the missiles in mid-flight, aiming them more accurately, telling their small, relatively simple terminal guidance systems what to look for and where to find it. At the same time, the shuttles’ electronic warfare system jammed the frequency Bravo’s fire control radar had used to target the small patrol craft.
On Bravo’s bridge the missile launches hadn’t been noticed. They’d been outside effective radar range, and hadn’t used gravitic drives that emitted detectable signatures, while the shuttles had been invisible to radar thanks to their stealth features and electronic warfare systems. The sudden flood of radar signals therefore came as a complete surprise. Alarms shrieked their atonal warning as pirates bent to their displays and consoles, trying to identify the new threats that had suddenly appeared so terrifyingly close to them.
The helmsman reacted instinctively without waiting for orders. He reached over to the gravitic drive controls with his right hand, cut the gravitic shield and rammed the power handle through the gate to maximum, even as his left hand slammed the helm control hard to starboard. The full power of the drive began to nudge the ship away from the threat… but it had only a bare fraction of a second to do so before she entered the killing ground.
The pirate manning the weapons console slammed his fist down on the ‘Automatic’ function button, thereby instructing the fire control system to respond to the new threats based on whatever it calculated it could hit fastest, using whatever sensors were still working in the face of the jamming. The antiquated system’s job was simplified by the fact that only the two laser turrets on the lower outer edges of the ship’s hull could bear on the threats. It slewed each of them towards the shuttles on either end of the intercepting line, using the targets’ own emissions as aiming points.
A laser beam bloomed at light speed between Bravo and the assault shuttle on the starboard end of the line. It cut through the shuttle’s armored steel as if it didn’t exist, penetrating all the way to the fusion micro-reactor compartment, blowing out its containing mag bottle. The reactor was tiny by spaceship standards, but that didn’t mean it was any less deadly when it let go. Everyone aboard the shuttle died instantly in the small-scale thermonuclear holocaust as the vehicle, its weapons and its passengers were reduced to their component atoms.
The shuttle to port of the intercepting line was luckier. The laser beam from Bravo’s second turret ripped down its side. It burned out the phased array radar panels, sheared off the stub wing with its now-empty missile pylons and all the port-side reaction thrusters, and sent the craft tumbling out of control. The strike instantly shorted out the shuttle’s electrical systems and put its fusion micro-reactor into emergency shutdown… but its armor’s sandwiched layers of battle steel, ceramics and nanosynthetics protected those inside.
Bravo’s turrets didn’t have time to realign. Even as they fired, the incoming missiles were dropping almost vertically towards her spine. Her sudden course change, embryonic though it was, meant that more than half of them missed her altogether – their chemical rockets couldn’t adjust their trajectory or velocity quickly enough. Those that missed wavered for a few moments, then self-destructed. The others hit all around the reactor dome. Much of the kinetic energy of their strikes was dissipated, Bravo’s sheer speed grinding the lightweight missiles to fragments against the hull as they landed, destroying some before their warheads could detonate. Even so, hull plating and structural members were blown off the ship as craters appeared in a ragged pattern around the reactor, and the entire vessel shook to the repeated blows.
The missile that struck closest to the reactor didn’t hit its protective dome, but it did the next best thing. Its nosecone struck right on the seam between the front of the dome and the spine. The kinetic energy unleashed by its arrival and the blast of its warhead ripped off the entire dome as if it were a flattened hemisphere of rind peeled whole and entire from the top of a grapefruit. More alarms screamed in Bravo’s Engineering Department and on her bridge. The reactor vessel itself wasn’t penetrated, but the shock of the explosion and the loss of the upper stiffening layer of its supporting framework sent a massive tremor through it. Power levels aboard the ship fluctuated wildly as the reactor’s automated control systems initiated an emergency shutdown without waiting for operator intervention.
As the last missiles landed, Target Bravo entered the fire zone for the plasma cannon. The radar spectrum was temporarily blinded by the explosion of the first shuttle in the line, but the surviving shuttles’ battle computers had already locked in their fire plan. They’d even been able to allow for Bravo’s fractional last-second course change. The barbettes swung wildly, motors whining, trying to keep their cannon on target as the pirate ship flashed past. The three barrels of each cannon spun in a frantic frenzy of firing, emptying their twenty-round magazines in a single second. Their breeches were an orgy of thermonuclear plasma conversion as each deuterium-tritium pellet was laser-ignited. Inside each shuttle the noise was a deafening roar, louder than any of their occupants had ever heard during training, a continuous ripping BRAAAAAAP! Abha, mind still reeling in shock at seeing their neighbor expunged in a two-kilometer-wide fireball, couldn’t help comparing the noise fleetingly to the slow, steady ‘blurt’ of spaced single shots that Steve had fired at Blanco some months before. She knew such rapid fire would burn out the cannons’ barrels – but that wasn’t important compared to stopping Bravo.
Like the missiles, the plasma bolts arrived in a pattern around the reactor. About half missed the ship altogether, because the cannon barbettes were unable to traverse fast enough to stay on target as Bravo whipped past. All those that hit were off-target to a greater or lesser extent, but they struck hammer-blows to Bravo’s hull, destroying several compartments in and around the Engineering section and rocking the reactor vessel in its exposed and weakened framework. If its shutdown had not already been in progress, it might have lost containment; but the emergency procedure was far enough advanced to avoid an explosion.
One plasma bolt smashed in below the reinforced spine, penetrating the much thinner hull plating just beneath it, and burst through an outer compartment into the reactor control room. The control panel, its operator and everything else inside vanished in a pulverizing flash of raw energy. It would be impossible to restart the reactor until emergency controls could be rigged and its structural supports repaired.
The final plasma bolt to strike home ripped into the capacitor ring circling the hull behind the reactor control compartment. The blast destroyed three capacitors, ruptured four others, and severed the ring’s wiring harness and all its backups and fail-safes. Bravo was instantly deprived of its most important – and only immediately available – backup power source. Every one of the ship’s systems shut down instantaneously.
~ ~ ~
Dan cursed as he stabbed at his control panel. “That exploding shuttle reactor’s flooded the spectrum with noise! I can’t see a damned thing on the radar, and all radio frequencies are full of static. We won’t be able to communicate with the other shuttles or the mining ship until it passes.”
Abha tried to remember what she’d learned about that problem during training. “It’ll take several minutes for the interference to clear. What happened on the other end of the line? I saw a flash of light there, but it wasn’t an explosion like the shuttle next to us. I’m afraid that one’s gone.” She saw the flicker of sorrow on Dan’s face, and put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Dan. They were your people. It hurts to lose the
m. I know.”
“Yeah, it does.” He took a deep breath and shook his head angrily. “OK, we can’t talk to anyone for a while. We definitely hit Bravo, but we don’t know how much damage we did, and we can’t follow her. All we can do right now is go to the far end of the line, to see what happened to the shuttle there and render assistance if they need it.”
“Good idea. I hope the shuttle to port does the same thing – we can’t pass orders to them until the spectrum clears.”
“Let’s hope so. Pilot, head for the last known position of Shuttle Four. We don’t have radar, so we’ll have to start a visual search.”
“Yessir!”
The shuttle’s gravitic drive whined to full power as the craft turned, rising higher to clear its neighbor in case they hadn’t seen the maneuver. They needn’t have worried. Five kilometers ahead of them, they saw the flashing lights of Shuttle Three wink into life in the blackness of space as it also turned towards its stricken sister ship.
As they reached the tumbling, spinning, lurching Shuttle Four, Dan tried the circuits again and breathed a sigh of relief. “The spectrum’s clearing.” He tried to call them, but got no response.
“If they took severe damage, their internal systems may have shut down,” Abha pointed out. “We’ll have to stabilize them with our tractor and pressor beams to stop them spinning like that, then send a boarding and rescue party over to see how they are. It doesn’t look like the hull was penetrated.”
“I’ll get right on to that. While I’m coordinating it, will you please draft a signal to the mining ship, telling them what’s been happening here?”
“I’m on it. Let’s hope we did enough damage to Bravo to stop her hitting them, otherwise we won’t have anywhere to go back to.”
“Amen to that!”
Abha reached for her microphone and set her console to recording mode. “Lieutenant Sashna to Mining Control. Target Bravo was hit by our attack, but we have no indication of what happened after that due to disruption of the electromagnetic spectrum. Recommend you urgently transmit Bravo’s last known track to SysCon, including the slight course change to starboard that she appeared to make in the seconds before our weapons struck her. One of our shuttles was destroyed by pirate fire and a second disabled. Known casualties are ten dead aboard Shuttle One, from which there were can’t have been any survivors. Lieutenant Labuschagne is coordinating rescue operations for Shuttle Four right now.
“Be advised that at least some of the crew appeared to escape from the patrol craft before Bravo destroyed her. We suggest that the second patrol craft should rendezvous with the lifeboat from her sister ship to recover survivors. After we’ve recovered those from Shuttle Four, we’ll return to you for rearming. Please have base personnel break out more missiles, and new sets of barrels for our plasma cannon. We’ve burned out the old ones. Finally, please advise Senior Lieutenant Maxwell at SysCon that his wife is uninjured. Over.”
She waited until Dan had a free moment, then played back the recording to him. “Is that OK with you? Anything you’d like to add?” she asked.
“Sounds fine to me. I’m pleased you asked them to tell your husband you’re OK – he’ll be worrying about you. Send it.”
While they waited for a response, their pilots stabilized Shuttle Four with tractor beams and sent over troops in battle armor to investigate. They were overjoyed to learn that everyone inside was safe, although extremely nauseated by the shuttle’s violent tumbling motion after it was hit. Dan ordered the rescue party to rig lines between the surviving shuttles and the damaged ship, and the survivors began to make their way across to the intact vessels.
As the first of them arrived, the receiver warning light lit up, and Dan and Abha scanned the display eagerly.
‘Mining Control to Lieutenant Sashna. Well done to all of you. You hit Bravo hard – all her systems shut down as she passed your line. We’ve already advised SysCon. Sorry to hear of your losses. Come home to mother. The beers are on us as soon as we can arrange the party. Advise ETA. Over.’
Dan shook his head. “Do my eyes deceive me? Are Spacers really offering to buy beer for ground-pounders?”
“It looks that way to me. They must be really grateful!”
“That’s something to look forward to. As soon as all the survivors are off Shuttle Four, we’ll take her in tow with our tractor beams and head for home.”
Abha at last had time to think about Target Alpha. What’s happening out there? Steve, are you OK?
~ ~ ~
The atmosphere in Syscon was every bit as electric as that aboard the shuttles had been. The operators waited, watching their displays, knowing that whatever they were about to see had already happened, and was being shown to them only after light-speed delay. There was nothing they could do to affect the outcome. Senior operators had taken over the consoles, but their former occupants had not left the room. Instead, they lined the walls, watching intently, sometimes conversing in low voices. Steve’s trainees still sat at their consoles, monitoring the action avidly.
Steve stood with Colonel Houmayoun, the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister. They watched as a pinpoint of light, well ahead of Lieutenant-Commander Le Roux’s patrol craft, headed straight up the course line of the approaching Target Alpha. A second pinpoint followed it, halfway between it and the ships. The Prime Minister touched Steve’s sleeve and murmured, “What are those?”
“Their drones,” Steve replied equally quietly, so as not to break the concentration of those at the consoles. “They’ve launched them towards where the enemy’s expected to appear. They’ll tell the first one to begin radar transmissions as soon as Alpha’s likely to be almost within range, so they can get an early look at her and give their missiles more accurate targeting instructions. The second is there to backstop it. If Alpha shoots the first one out of space, the second will take over; and if Alpha maneuvers to avoid the first, the second will change course to keep track of her and make sure our missiles have up-to-date target information. That also makes the patrol craft harder for Alpha to target. If she can’t track them by their drive or radar emissions, she can’t aim her own missiles at them.”
“Can the other two patrol craft fire from where they are?” He pointed to the two vessels that had departed from the depot ship, still hundreds of millions of kilometers behind the first two.
“In theory they could, Sir, but they’re far outside powered missile range. Their missiles would have to coast on a ballistic trajectory until they were much closer to the enemy, then restart their drives for final attack maneuvers. Meanwhile, the enemy would have detected their launch and maneuvered to avoid them. Instead, the second two patrol craft will stand by to backstop Lieutenant-Commander Le Roux in case anything goes wrong and he misses.”
“And you think Target Alpha still doesn’t know it’s about to be intercepted?” the Defense Minister interjected.
“Based on their actions, Sir, I don’t think so. Syscon puts out an update on traffic in the system every five minutes. We’ve continued to do that, using a computer-generated composite plot showing our ships where they were, or on their previous courses. If the pirates are relying on that update to track other ships, the way most merchant vessels do, they’ll see everyone behaving as usual and nothing for them to worry about. If they have more sophisticated sensors and are tracking ship movements themselves, they’ll know something’s wrong, because all our ships went under stealth as soon as we ordered them to move, so they would have dropped off their system plot. If the pirates had seen them vanish, they’d probably have restarted their gravitic drive and commenced evasive maneuvers to prevent our ships intercepting them. The fact they haven’t done that is pretty strong evidence they don’t know we’re coming.”
“But they’ll know as soon as that drone starts transmitting radar signals?”
“Yes, Minister.”
“And once all the ships are emitting signals we can track – radar, gravitic drive, whatever - we’l
l see their actual movements in the Plot rather than predicted ones?”
“Yes, Sir, but long after they’ve taken place. Light speed delay is a real bitch in situations like this. In fact, what you’re seeing in the Plot is old news. The initial engagement’s already over. We’re just waiting to see what happened.”
Holloway grimaced. “I suppose there’s no hope of developing sensors that can work faster than that?”
Steve shook his head, grinning despite his tension. “No, Sir. Trillions of credits have been spent trying, but since electronics radiate at the speed of light, no-one’s found a way to track them any faster than that. There have been some very esoteric experiments claiming to have done so, but they’ve never produced anything usable in the real world.”
The Prime Minister interjected, “But we travel faster than light all the time! Isn’t that what a hyper-jump’s all about?”
“No, Sir. That’s basically an artificial wormhole, a bending of space and time. Imagine two points on a sheet of paper, one at the top, one at the bottom. The shortest distance between them appears to be a straight line along the paper from one to the other: but if you fold the paper over to put one point physically on top of the other, so that they touch, that’s a much shorter distance between them than the straight line. That’s what a hyper-jump does, Sir. It’s not faster-than-light travel at all – just a way of moving between two points without covering the linear distance separating them. Some people call it ‘folding space’. I guess that’s not a bad description.”
An operator’s voice cut across their conversation. “Plot to Command. Primary drone has commenced radar transmission.” His warning was superfluous. In the Plot, they could all see the pulsing icon that indicated an active target. It was now within one million kilometers of the onrushing Target Alpha – less than fifteen seconds away at their combined closing speed.
