by Blaze Ward
“Locked and engaged,” the Science Officer called without looking up.
The Tactical Officer needed to know that the bad guys were going to have a hard time finding them.
“Pilot, take her in,” Phil ordered, watching his screens. “All ahead cruising speed, stay atop the station and keep the ring centered until we get close.”
“Aye, sir,” the pilot replied.
Unlike Heather, Phil had always let his pilots handle the fine tuning. Aim them at a target, but let them dial in the nose and the speed, rather than providing exact angles. Here, something like that would make West stop and think at a time when every moment was critical. Let him fly things. Phil hadn’t forgotten ship handling when he added his third stripe.
They were just about perfect with their timing as they came out of Jump. The station below them was utterly wreathed in fire as 405’s bow came into line and surged ahead. Evan added a circle on the screen to indicate where his sensors picked up the cutter, just about to pass the fireball the man had unleashed.
Phil shifted all extra power forward into the bow shields.
“Turret Boren, engage the station now,” Phil ordered.
They were outside of effective range, and everybody knew it, but right now, he wanted to start tapping on their shoulder over there. Veitengruber was in close and had stirred up a hornet nest. But he couldn’t survive long in this atmosphere.
CS-405 needed to come to his rescue. And they had the shielding to handle some level of incoming fire.
“West, start a port roll,” Phil said. “Keep me zeroed, but I want to spin on the hook if that bastard has anything left.”
The screen wanted to lock the target on the station, but Phil overrode and let it rotate on his screen, so he had an actual feel of the situation below him.
“Turret Chester and Wiley, hold for defense,” Phil continued, keeping the two innermost turrets passive for now. That bastard had missiles, if he remembered how to use them with all the crap going wrong right now. “Turret Yalu, engage as you bear.”
Why the hell not? West was going to be shifting the bow around as he maneuvered. It was possible that the stern would come around enough for a deflection shot. Plus, once Phil turned his back on the station, if it still existed, that crew would need to be locked in anyway. Might as well start them on it now.
“Evan, get me a damage report of the station,” Phil said, probably louder than he needed to, but that was the adrenaline and mad energy in his system. “And find Veitengruber, too.”
Long enough pause that Phil took a breath and stepped back in his head.
Act like an Admiral, too. Remember that. You’ve got a squadron that needed to be commanded, not just a deck here.
“Station has suffered severely, Tactical,” Evan said. “Several sections appear to be off-line, but others are trying to lock weapons on us. We’re negotiating now.”
Phil laughed, imagining a hectoring Buran weapons tech trying to do something while Evan slapped him about the head with a tree branch. Silly, but the sound of the voice was just there.
“Where’s Persephone?” Phil asked.
“I think she’s been hit, sir,” Evan said. “Hard to tell, but she’s not maneuvering like she should, and all outbound fire has ceased.”
“We need to buy Veitengruber time, then,” Phil said. “West, accelerate in closer. We’re going to have to beat those bastards to death here.”
“Roger that, sir,” West yelled. He was also too loud, but this was his first time flying something this big in a situation this messy.
Graduation day, Yeoman.
“Tactical, I am getting launch warnings from the four stations at our horizons,” Evan said. “Inbound missiles, but we’ve got time, and they’ll probably be ballistic by the time they get here.”
Ballistic.
Phil chuckled to himself.
Launched at a set of coordinates and maybe a little terminal tracking capability, but certainly not capable of doing anything, with their fuel long since burned out. At least it would give Chester and Wiley something to do, if anybody guessed even remotely accurately.
Phil had no intention of staying around here. But every missile some range officer launched now was one less later on, when it might be important.
He could just see some base commander standing behind the weapons advocate, yelling at them to do something, anything. Even stupid things.
Boren hadn’t let up on her fire, metronomically woodpeckering as the guns got closer and the focus got good enough to maybe hurt.
“Gun crews, I have launch warnings on our bow,” Evan yelled.
Phil relaxed. He didn’t need to speak.
Evan had given the alert they needed.
Chester cut loose now, even without a target through the expanding gas clouds. You might always get lucky and hit a warhead in the tube or just coming clear. It was a bad time for a missile to suddenly explode, since it was so close to others, and you had a bay door open for all that plasma to roll back into.
CS-405 was a Corvette/Scout. An escort who never got the fancy jobs or the glory when hanging out with bigger, meaner cousins. Chester’s gun team might even have a little bit of a chip on their shoulders about that, and be in a position to maybe answer the critics today.
The hull crunched hard with a flash of light that filled the whole bridge. Station gun had finally found them. Wasn’t a square hit, but ran down a flank. Like maybe the ship they were shooting at was dodging and spinning away from the gunners trying to hit it?
Gosh.
“Turret Boren, overload your gun,” Phil ordered.
“Tactical, please confirm overload,” a woman’s voice answered a second later.
Boren’s Gun Captain, asking if he was sure he wanted to risk the gun blowing up right now, when they started firing faster than the cooling systems could keep up. It was frequently a recipe for disaster. And it would absolutely cause so much wear that they would have to replace the entire gun well ahead of the regular schedule.
Add that to the list of things at the Court Martial, First Lord. One of mine’s down there without anybody but us to protect him.
“Boren, override confirmed,” Phil said. “Go to rapid fire and damn the torpedoes.”
Risk.
Balanced against need and reward. Maybe the gun would overheat and have to completely shut down in the middle of battle. Maybe something would explode, like had happened to the JumpMatrix generators and controls.
Shit happens, the cry of all commanders, to the anguish of their engineers.
Chester’s fire had pulsed hard once, and then fallen into a regular pattern as missiles began to climb out of the gravity well at them. That was the hardest shot in the world to make for a missile gunner. The damned thing had to climb against gravity, appearing to sit perfectly still in the sky below as the gunners tracked it. Only CS-405’s roll would affect defensive fire, and even then they were staying in a tight enough circle to keep the shots well-centered.
Boren picked up their rate of fire, a mad writer pounding away at the keys as he approached to the end of Act Three.
Flash of light, crunch of damage. This one had been more square, rather than that first, almost-ranging shot. Phil watched his shield readouts flicker. Dorsal had taken most of the first, with only a few places where energy had hit hull, and most of that insulated.
This one had been starboard side and nearly nose on. Which was actually a better result for Phil. All the extra energy forward in the shields had absorbed a lot of it, letting only leakage through again. It was like getting stabbed to death with an icepick, doing this, but those batteries were roughly equivalent to the Type-4’s he would have faced back home. He could handle losing insulation and outer chambers when the blows got softened along the way.
“Secondary explosions on the station,” Evan said aloud. “Chester got a missile in the tube. Two more incoming.”
“Boren, shift to defensive fire now,” Phil yelled.
Lights began to dance on the station’s hull as Phil watched. More beams hitting bare metal rather than splashing on power absorbers. Who in the hell…?
Ha. Yalu had a clear shot as the spin had gotten a little too wide, and tagged the station.
“Evan. Station status?” Phil asked.
“Wide-spread failures of the defensive array, Tactical,” the man replied. “Something just broke over there.”
“Pilot, ride the gyros now,” Phil commanded in a voice that wouldn’t brook argument. “Cut your drives and bring the bow about until you lay me a broadside. Boren, return to normal fire. All guns engage as you lie.”
Assents up and down the scale as everyone checked in. Probably with a hint of maniacal laughter, with what was about to happen.
This was the best part of the new corvette designs. The old destroyers and light cruisers barely had enough gyros to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. Heavy cruisers were a little better, but not much. Trying a bootlegger in anything but CS-405 probably would have resulted in complete systems failures and street pizza across the entirety of orbit.
Fortunately, he had awesome engineers, and the craziest crew in the fleet.
CS-405 began to turn. Her engines had stopped pushing, but the bow was flaring, and the mass of the ship was rotating inside that, an arrow falling off the flight and beginning to tumble.
Except arrows can’t fire at someone as they go.
Boren hadn’t let up her mad fire, but slowed now. Chester was actually almost in a perfect reciprocal, snare drum and bass going back and forth. Yalu had kept lock and West had been smart enough or lucky enough to slew the bow out along the line that let the aft station keep firing.
And then Wiley got into the act.
Phil hadn’t gotten to listen to all four Type-1-Pulse batteries light it up at once since that idiot Nightmaster had flown right through the middle of the squadron at Trusski. The symphony of destruction brought a smile to his face.
And time for ship-handling now.
“West, ahead slow only,” Phil ordered. “Balance us out and push us just a little off line with the station. Then figure out how to keep the broadside on arc as we pass. All batteries, continue firing until the station comes apart or they surrender. Maintain your guns, though. We’re not done here.”
Four lights flickering green on his board. Possibly the equivalent of all four gun captains rolling their eyes at the man suggesting they didn’t know how to kill things.
“Evan, how’s Persephone?”
“Stand by, Tactical.”
Freefall (February 17, 403)
Suddenly, he was back at Samara, and seven years hadn’t passed. His fighter was dead in space and there was nothing he could do but watch an enemy destroyer close and wonder if it was going to destroy or capture him.
Except this was the present, not the past. Granville was aboard Persephone, and the planet below him was Mansi-B.
The ship was still dead to the controls.
“Isiah, I need power,” he roared as loud as he could.
The internal radio in his suit would have transmitted a whisper right now, but Granville wasn’t in that place in his mind.
At least he still had atmosphere around him. If they had suffered a square hit, all the air would have rushed out and left him with a poofed up suit and stiff joints. And a lot more panic as things fell silent around him with no air to reverberate.
So, somewhere aft, a shot had grazed something. It wasn’t like he had shields capable of stopping whatever that bolt was. Hells, a Type-1 might have gone through those deflectors.
“Working,” came the faint response. “Lost all aft arrays at the fuse.”
Granville had no idea what that meant, except that his Systems Engineer seemed to understand how to fix it.
They were still in freefall right now, going towards the unforgiving surface of the planet at too high a rate. And accelerating.
From the feel of gravity around him, the bow of Persephone was pointed almost straight down right now. That made sense, with the narrow, smooth cylinder of the ship providing the least amount of resistance. There was still a small amount of roll going on as well, but softer than the one he had been attempting under fire. Not even enough to make him throw up. He couldn’t speak for the rest of the crew.
A noise behind him sounded suspiciously like one of the flank guns.
“Who has power?” Granville said.
“Port gun,” Spier replied. “And we’re being chased by at least one missile right now. Engaging at max range.”
“Bardeen?” Granville called.
“Surge overload, Commander,” the engineer aft replied. “Isiah and I are trying to patch it.”
There was nothing like sitting in a semi-dark bridge, lit by only the emergency lights, and counting the kilometers you were falling, utterly blind. Still, he was in command. Panicking wouldn’t do anyone any good.
He reached out and touched Deni’s picture once more, noting how little his hands seemed to shake.
More fire aft, plus a lot of cursing over the radio.
“Morgan, you should be live,” Isiah’s voice came over the line.
Sure enough, the hull began to ring in harmony as the starboard gun also engaged.
“Anyone?” Granville asked in a conversational voice.
“Getting close,” Bardeen growled. “Figured guns first would be a good idea right now.”
“Agreed, Arla,” Granville said. “Just wondering.”
“Working my ass off, top,” came the reply.
He let that one alone. They were. This crew had been trusted by Admiral Kosnett to do the single most difficult job imaginable, and do it well.
Based on the size of the explosion before he lost all his aft cameras, they might have even succeeded. Now they just had to avoid slamming into the ground at orbital speeds, if they could.
The mission was already a success if the station was gone. Kosnett and his people could rescue everyone below.
It would have been nice to be there to say hello to the people he was about to rescue, though. And hold Deni one last time.
“Got you, you bastard,” Spier snarled over the radio.
Must have. Fire ceased. Hopefully for lack of targets and not failure of whatever systems his engineers were trying to fix.
Lights came back on.
His console lit up and rebooted.
Gravity suddenly began to change its mind about down.
“Bridge, did that work?” Isiah called.
“Affirmative,” Granville said. “I have power now. Positive control in twenty seconds.”
“Roger that, bridge,” Isiah replied. “Everyone stay suited. We’ve had to reroute life support out of the mix until we can take something apart and pull out whatever piece cooked when the system arced. Maybe a fix on the ground, or we can ask Kam for help.”
“Understood,” Granville said, typing his password furiously into the screen. Then slowing down and typing it correctly the second time.
The control screens came up and warned him that the ship was currently inside an atmosphere and in freefall. Did he wish to activate the engines?
Granville suppressed the phrase that he wanted to answer with. The judges at his eventual Court Martial might insist on ordering his mouth washed out with soap.
One tap, and thrusters found aft.
Spin settled as he let the autopilot nag him about unsafe maneuvering.
Sensors came live. Communications lit up with a whole bunch of scrambled transmissions, plus a few where people had apparently forgotten they were on a clear channel.
“Persephone, this is CS-405, answer please,” Evan Brinich’s voice came suddenly through the ether. Granville wasn’t sure anything had ever been more wonderful.<
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“Persephone,” Granville said. “Recovering from total power failure now. Not sure our status. Give me sixty seconds.”
“Roger that,” Evan said. “Standing by.”
Gravity had a solid, if queasy hold now, tugging his butt into his chair even as he wanted to keep falling forward into the bow of the ship.
“All hands, stand by for maneuvering,” Granville said. His voice even sounded unremarkable, which was the remarkable part.
Now the fun part.
The ground was two thousand kilometers below him, and he was approaching it at four thousand kilometers per hour. And accelerating. Heather had calculated a flight path that involved spiraling down across a cylinder several hundred kilometers across, but he was supposed to have started that about ten minutes ago.
He engaged it anyway, and then overrode the polite parameters she had put in and let the tail of Persephone drop down further than it wanted.
“About to light the engines hard. Everyone strap in tight,” Granville said.
He counted to ten and pressed a button, watching the fuel feeds slowly increase with burn, until the force of gravity seemed to be the back of the ship. He went ahead and cut the grav-plates out of the mix, just to keep people from having three possible downs as they got lower.
Outside hull temperature was well above normal, and climbing. And why the hell not? At least he wasn’t trying to bleed off speed with friction by gliding, although they had been doing that before.
Harder thrust now. Down became aft as Persephone stood on her ass and the engines tried to push her back into space. Wouldn’t, but the predicted elevation at which the ship reached zero vertical velocity stopped being kilometers underground, which was good.
The air was thicker now. Better media for the engines to push against. He could feel the increased bite. He eased off the throttle as the velocity of the fall approached zero, passing into a slight climb instead of the galaxy’s biggest and worst Immelmann maneuver, the hammerhead stall.
He pushed Persephone’s nose over and suddenly down felt right. Gravity even lined up with the horizon of the deck.
“Persephone, this is CS-405,” Evan broke his silence. “Missile launch signals detected, transmitting flight coordinates now. Looks like someone wants to try to shoot you down. Be advised when landing.”
