This is not to say everything went smoothly for the six months they patrolled the shipping lanes. With only two men and eighteen aggressive women in close quarters, things often became heated and fights did occasionally break out. The usual punishment was extra watch duty for all parties and eventually tempers settled down again for a while.
“Captain to the bridge.” Beau was on watch. “Captain to the bridge.” All of their conquests had started with that simple request.
Beau was intently staring at the displays when Captain Darwin and Sabrina arrived. He silently pointed at a portion of the display. His face was unusually pale. Several rows of tiny circles were plainly visible. This was not the sort of thing they usually encountered.
“What do you think, Beau?”
“Drones. Lots of drones.”
“The first wave of the assault. Sabrina, what do you think?”
“I think we should go take a look. Drones doesn’t sound like Swordsmen. It might be something else. Swordsmen ships are always fully staffed. They don’t really trust the machines to make decisions. I’ll bet it’s the Third Force.”
“If every missile we owned hit one of those drones, we would still not be able to kill them all.”
“There’s another way.” Sabrina said. “We know there has to be a control ship in the middle of the drones.” She detailed a complex plan whereby the four P I ships could maximize their missiles, take out the control ship and by having drones fly into the debris field of their destroyed companions eliminate enough of the formation that their lasers could deal with the rest.
“Beau, send a courier to Commodore Townsend. Request reinforcements. We are engaging.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Sound battle stations!”
A recording of a klaxon from a World War II battleship sounded through the ship. “Battle stations! Battle stations! All hands to battle stations. This is not a drill.” The announcement was repeated a total of three times. It was followed by a call that summed up the crew’s attitude. Ripped from an old television show, the speakers sang out, “It’s clobbering time!”
In the heat of battle or in the moments leading up to it, sometimes thoughts which had been floating around formlessly coalesce into a cohesive whole. The four P I ships raced to intercept the incoming fleet so they could determine who they were and what their intentions might be. They had eight hours in standard drive flight time to intercept. This time driving at flank speed gave Sabrina lots of opportunity to ponder what it was about this particular P I ship made her suspect it was somehow different from the others. She swapped places with Tina, her fire control officer, so she could think quietly inside the shell of the fire control position’s displays. Located directly behind the pilot, the fire control position included a spherical array of displays which when closed was completely sealed so that in the event of a hull breach the fire control officer could still operate the ship. In the incident that Captain Alina Darwin killed Sabrina’s brother, even the shell had become damaged which was why she wore her EVA suit without which she would not have survived.
Sabrina closed the shell and noticed where it had been repaired. Fire control display shells didn’t get damaged except in very rare instances. This one had been damaged more than once and at least one of the repairs was not very well executed. Intrigued, she pulled up the ship’s maintenance records on her monitor. The shell had been damaged on four separate occasions. The first had been in a training accident involving a Space Force Academy cadet and trainer. A dummy missile had penetrated the hull and lodged in the shell killing the two crew members on board. The ship had remained in administrative limbo as beyond economical repair for a few years before it was “liberated” from the bone yard by a squadron trying to replace lost ships without breaking its budget.
The repair was hastily and badly done. It failed in combat six months later. The crew died. The ship was repaired again in a remote fleet service center. The ship was hit again in combat and damaged again, but the crew survived by operating the ship from the safety of their EVA suits.
A year later, the ship collided with a fighter interceptor and while neither was seriously damaged, both crews were killed. The shell was repaired yet again.
Two years after that, the ship took a missile strike directly through the view port. The pirate missile failed to detonate, but the hull breach was enough to kill the solo pilot who was not in the shell at that time. Had he been in the shell, he would have survived. Something about the timing of that incident resonated with Sabrina. She pulled up the ship’s logs and listened to the pilot’s report of the battle and then, absolutely stunned, she remembered. She had put that missile through the view port. Suddenly she realized she was flying a ship she had once tried to kill. Instantly obsessed now to find more about this man she had killed in combat, she scanned through his logs listening to his routine reports and his daily logs until one of the reports stopped her cold.
He was flying formation with another P I ship and was suggesting that they dock so that they could “dock”. The pilot of the other P I ship was Lt. Darwin. The former pilot of the ship Sabrina now flew was Lt. Darwin’s husband. Sabrina had killed Captain Darwin’s husband. Her heart skipped a beat when she realized the enormity of that discovery.
“He was already my ex by that point,” Alina replied to Sabrina’s apology. Radio silence was not an issue. The emissions from their drives would be all the approaching ships’ sensors would need to know who was coming and how fast.
“Remember Townsend’s comment about cannon fodder. The guy was a bonehead. I told him that going after you like that would get him killed. I told him to wait for us. Stupid fool. Cost him his life. I had to tow the ship back to be serviced. What a pain that was.”
“You knew the whole time?”
“Yes, I wanted you on our side. You were too good to be left out there on your own. You were much more valuable to us alive on our side than dead.”
While they were talking, Sabrina made another observation in the logs. “Alina, what model are the reactors in your ship?”
“A pair of Thermonuclear Industries Mark Ten’s. Why”
“There’s a note on the logs about having trouble finding the special fuel rods for this reactor. Why would that be, the reactors in the P I's are all the same. What are on the other ships?”
“Mark Ten’s. Are yours different?”
“Yeah, they’re Tactical Nuclear Technologies Mark Five’s.”
“How bizarre.”
“My thinking exactly. Send me over the specs on your reactors. I am curious what the differences are.” Alina transmitted the specs and Sabrina reviewed them carefully.
“Alina, do you have data on ship ID codes? Do you have the numbers for Avelina Bardwell, Greg Solomon and Myra Myrakova?” There was a pause then Alina replied, “Greg Solomon was 1098 B, Avelina Bardwell was 1658 C and Myra Myrakova was 1156 B. Why?”
“Following a hunch. Those are the squadron assignment numbers. There’s a bunch of pirate legends about those three and their ships. Something about the reactor being weird. Do we have the serial numbers on their ships?”
“The manufacturer’s serial numbers?”
“Yeah.”
“Alina ran the search on the data base of ships not to fire at. Greg Solomon’s ship was Saturn Industries Model 2251A Serial 405. Avelina Bardwell’s ship was the same model Serial 411. Myra Myrakova’s was Serial 415.”
“I’ll be a son of a sea horse. Alina, what’s the manufacturer’s model number of your ship?”
“It’s a 2251.”
“No letter afterwords?”
“No.”
“This ship is a 2251A, serial number 414. Let’s talk legends. According to legend, Greg Solomon, Avelina Bardwell and Myra Myrakova were so successful at pirate interdiction because their ships could do something no other ship could do. That something is the short hyper jump.”
“Short hyper jumps are impossible.”
“No
t true. There have been several accounts of battles where short jumps were successfully used by P I ships to attack and defeat entire fleets of pirate vessels. The pilots in these stories are Solomon, Bardwell and Myrakova. There is a rumor that short hyper jumps were material to the success of the defense at Homestead against the Swordsmen. The key is that only three ships have been reported to have been able to use the short hyper jump.”
“The three we’ve talked about.”
“Yes.”
“The legend goes on to say that only a few ships were built that could do the short jump because the reactor was so much bigger than the normal reactors. According to rumors, someone has been buying old P I ships and they are especially interested in the ones with the bigger reactors. I also heard they didn’t find them all and are still looking for the last one or two they don’t have.”
“So?”
“So two things. We have a ship that I believe is capable of short hyper jumps and we have a ship that is worth far more on the black market than we could make in our lifetimes.”
“Now that we know this, what do we do about it?”
“You know the plan I so carefully spelled out before we left?”
“Yes.”
“Forget it. New plan. Look at simulation 41. I’ll take the six. You take the twelve.”
“If you say so.”
They still had a few hours to missile range but suddenly the approaching cruiser, which had been becoming more and more distinct on their sensors, blossomed and eight fighter interceptors popped out of launch bays.
“Things just got real ugly,” Sabrina said.
“Roger that!” Alina replied.
“Oh by the way, their course is not for the central system. It’s for our mother ship,” Sabrina observed.
“All this hardware for our mother ship?”
“We must have struck a nerve. I wonder which nerve,” Sabrina said.
“The slavers?”
“Could be.”
“As soon as we hit missile range, I’ll split off,” Sabrina said.
“You better come back!”
“That is the plan.”
All four ships extended their weapons pods in preparation for battle.
Sabrina and Tina had returned to their normal seats. Sabrina had spent the last two hours deep in the ship’s software documentation. She finally found the piece of code she was looking for. With minutes to spare, she keyed in the commands, “Disable all reactor overload warnings. Disable all reactor overload limits. Engage all reactor cooling pumps in simplex. Authorize full power reactor operation. Set reactor duty cycle at 100%. Disable navigation lock out. Enable all navigation solutions.” As expected, after each command the error message appeared on her display, “Are you sure you want to do this?” For each command she keyed in the word “YES.”
“Command accepted.”
“Tina, stand by for a rough ride!”
“Roger that!”
As the sensors provided more detail, they had determined that their opponent was not Swordsmen as they had anticipated, but rather the Third Force. The drones had glass bodies. Glass made them less visible to the ships’ sensors with only slight sacrifices in strength. There were those who believed the third force was aliens from elsewhere in the galaxy. Pirate legend had more likely scenarios. The majority held the belief that the third force was some megalomaniac industrialist who wanted to conquer it all. A slightly smaller group of pirates held that it was the son of such an industrialist who wanted to show Daddy how much smarter he was than the old man.
Over a hundred drones, eight fighter interceptors and one cruiser with more firepower than everything else put together faced four P I ships with twelve missiles and twelve lasers each. For reasons only an accountant would understand, these ships had not been equipped with the outboard missile launchers available for many other P I ship models. This was fixing to be ugly.
Sabrina struck out first. Federation rules of engagement required that Federation ships not fire until the opponent presented a clear act of hostility. Targeting radar had been flying around for an hour, and Sabrina was in no mood to wait to be shot at while she sat on her hands. She programmed a vector and a distance. Previously, the navigation system would have popped up an error message at this short a distance at that vector, but this time it merely blinked its acceptance of the order.
Sabrina pushed to “Go” button.
The lead P I ship whisked out of sight with the familiar blur of a jump to hyper drive. Traveling faster than light, the ship would arrive at its destination mere seconds later. In the transition the ship would be invisible to visual sensors and undetectable by any current technology.
Transition into hyper drive was considered one of life’s more unpleasant events. An unavoidable feature of interstellar travel, it was tolerated as best one was able. It has been compared with a belly flop into a pool of water from a six story building and then hitting the bottom of the diving well. This transition was all that and more. Sabrina and Tina screamed in pain as the ship executed its pre-programmed transitions into and then almost immediately out of hyper drive. However painful the transition into hyper drive was, the immediate transition back out was worse. Much worse. Every cell in every soft tissue in their bodies screamed in pain on the transition back out.
In spite of the pain blurring her vision and making every move an ordeal, immediately upon dropping out of hyper drive, Sabrina fired the missiles she had prepared an hour ago for exactly this moment. The missiles fired in sequence, three seconds apart. The four missiles, all heat seekers, were aimed at the same target, a specific point between the cruiser’s four reactors. The emergency self destruct explosives secured in that box were designed to separate a failed reactor from the remainder of the ship in case of a catastrophic reactor failure. Theoretically this separation would allow the ship to survive until the crew could be rescued. The monitoring electronics kept the box warmer than the rest of the hull, but cooler than the better shielded reactors themselves. This temperature differential allowed it to be detected specifically by the heat seekers.
The goal was to disable the reactors without detonating them, because detonating the reactors at this distance would destroy Sabrina’s ship as well as the cruiser. While that would have been a spectacular show, it was not one that Sabrina cared to put on.
One of the advantages of Federation missiles as opposed to the pirate missiles is that they really did go where they were programmed to go and Sabrina watched as four missiles found their targets in rapid order. Most capital warships shared the same weakness. If you could get close enough to put a missile into the ship’s propulsion system, there was nothing there to stop you except possibly a fighter interceptor. Due to the stresses of the fields necessary to support hyper drive, the propulsion system could not be shielded and therefore was vulnerable. Sabrina had exploited that vulnerability. Traveling though the path cleared by the first three missiles, the fourth missile apparently found its way into the cruiser’s munitions magazines. A series of internal explosions ripped the ship apart.
Score one for the home team!
Sabrina had eight missiles left as four of the interceptors homed in on her. Rather than hang around as the rapidly expanding debris field over took them, Sabrina entered a vector and a distance and punched the “Go” button. The jump back was every bit as painful as the jump out. Psychologically, it was even worse since they now knew what to expect.
Unfortunately they still had over a hundred drones and eight interceptors to deal with and they only had 44 missiles left in their entire squadron.
Once having lost the control signal from the cruiser, the drones shifted to heat seeker mode. Roughly two dozen of them headed for Beau’s ship. Sabrina hyper jumped back to the freighter to defend it. The other P I ships could not get back to the freighter in time to protect it and were heavily engaged with the interceptors. Even with the few missiles she had left, her lasers and the freighter’s lasers, four of the
drones got through and detonated the cargo ship’s reactor. Beau had separated the crew module from the rest of the ship before the reactor blew and was able to minimize the casualties, but no one on the ship escaped completely unscathed and some of the injuries were severe.
The three remaining P I’s also engaged the interceptors. The interceptors were well trained and fought ferociously, but eventually they were all destroyed at the cost of both of the other two P I ships.
Reinforcements arrived in time to finish mopping up the remaining drones and tow the survivors home.
DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER FOUR
R & R ON A SMALL out-of-the-way planet with little to entice travelers except for freight marshaling yards did not turn out as planned. Sabrina dragged her thoroughly drunk and marginally coherent commanding officer out of the “Space Lizard’s Thrust Lunge” as fast as her small stature would allow her to haul a woman half again her size who was not being particularly cooperative. In spite of her best efforts, Sabrina had let Alina get drunk. It was not a pleasant sight.
The explosion behind them, which obliterated the lounge they had just left, jumbled Sabrina’s thoughts. She knew she needed to focus on getting as far away from the blast as possible, but her mind kept jumping around. She didn’t understand why men had to be such beasts. It was true that her C O, Captain Alina Darwin, was one of the most beautiful women she had ever met. It was also true that Captain Alina Darwin was one of the most lethal Pirate Interdiction Specialists since Captains Avelina Bardwell and Greg Solomon. It was also true that she was trained in a dozen forms of martial arts and could kill with her bare hands, a skill she had just demonstrated rather dramatically. If Sabrina had her numbers correct, tonight’s victim would be number four in hand-to-hand. There was no way to know how many in ship-to-ship. Her boss was a first class killer, no doubt about it.
Solomon Family Warriors II Page 68
