Battle Force (Captain Jason Hunter and the Bandit Jacks Collections Book 2)

by Shane Black

  “What the hell was that!?” Mallory barked.

  “Weapons fire port!” someone shouted in response.

  “Veer us off, pilot! All engines back full. Give me a port reversing turn! All battle screens to maximum power!”

  “Too late!”

  For only a moment, the fireball-trailing frigate filled the screen and then another incredible blast plunged the Fury bridge into complete darkness.

  “Auto alarm! Fury’s been hit!” shouted the weapons officer on the bridge of DSS Spruance. “I have weapons fire bearing one zero five!”

  The mighty cruiser’s captain calmly shifted into action. “Sound fleet-wide general quarters, Ensign. Helm, bring us about, course seven seven mark one five! All ahead one half power! Comms, bring us up on the J-A. Patch us in as Zero Juliet Four. Signal all ships. Task Force Perseus. Code Zero Zero Black. I say again Code Zero Zero Black. Engage battle conference on this channel and stand by for strike operations.”

  The communications officer responded with precision efficiency as he performed five tasks at once. “Affirmative, Captain. Coding your message.”

  Encrypted LOS channels opened across space in all directions. The jangling clear channel alert tone sounded.

  “All stations, this is Spruance Force Command on emergency channel. Acknowledge Code Zero Zero Black and report alert status to Signal Station Zero Juliet Four. Standing by.”

  “Affirmative, Spruance, this is Revenge, acknowledging strike alert at time out three zero mark. Vessel at your command.”

  “Constellation acknowledges.”

  “Minstrel is at point five. Station Eight Juliet Four. Standing by.”

  “DSS Jefferson acknowledging. Battle alert engaged!”

  “Rhode Island at your command, sir.”

  “Exeter acknowledges.”

  “DSS Ajax has the point, Spruance. Acknowledge battle stations code Zero Zero Black. Standing by.”

  “Comms, raise the Fury as soon as you are able. Tactical, report all contacts.”

  A chorus of “ayes” responded, one for each of the Spruance Skipper’s commands. Lieutenant Commander Francis Teller swiveled back to examine the main viewscreen. An atmosphere-fueled fire was burning on Fury’s dorsal section just aft of the bridge. Teller’s jaw tightened. He knew what that damage meant.

  “CIC, I want an origin point and a firing solution for that weapon in ten seconds.”

  The Perseus Task Force went from station keeping to a perfectly choreographed swirl of motion all at once. Three destroyers and three frigates moved to screen their flagship from further weapons fire while the two heavier cruisers pounded away with their active scanners, combing nearby space for the source of the weapons fire.

  “New contact! Eight eight mark five! On a collision course with the Rhode Island!” The tactical officer on the Spruance bridge jumped to his feet. “This doesn’t make any sense! Where the hell are they coming from?!”

  This time, the command data net gave seven vessels a track on the suicide attacker all at once. The Exeter, Constellation and Jefferson opened up first, firing hypervelocity point defense missiles from their efficient and deadly rotary mounts at the inbound target. Then the Rhode Island’s energy batteries joined in. In a matter of seconds, 80 missiles were in space and screaming towards the attacking starship. Jamming signals managed to confound some of their their weapons locks, but did nothing to protect the attacker from DSS Revenge.

  The Fury’s escort cruiser calmly pivoted all four of her heavy weapons mounts to bear on the diving enemy frigate and opened up with a hurricane of proximity blasts. Ten megaton explosions shocked and pounded space for a thousand cubic miles around the inbound track of the wildly swerving vessel as the point defense missiles began to impact. A savage storm of incredible destructive energy streamed through space and finally faded. There was no wreckage.

  “CIC, talk to me!” Teller shouted. “I want to know who is shooting at us and I want to know now!”

  “I have an indeterminate series of targets at extreme range, sir, but I can’t vouch for any of this data. Nothing on my screen makes any sense!”

  “Blast it, ensign! I don’t want to hear about your theories! Give me something to point my guns at! If they can target us, we can damn well target them!”

  “That’s the problem, sir. We can’t lock up any of this! Every time we match bearings, the waveform changes!” The tactical officer wore a frantic expression.

  “That’s impossible!” the pilot shouted. “How the hell can a ship change its composition and EM signature?”

  “Incoming!”

  The bridge of the Spruance buckled and shuddered as the lights flickered ominously. A thundering explosion rumbled through the huge vessel’s interior decks.

  “Overload your forward screens, tactical!” Teller shouted. The cruiser’s shields glowed with excess energy. Another gigantic blast pounded the vessel’s port side and the bridge crew pulled themselves back upright in their shock harnesses.

  “CIC! Report!”

  “Sir, I can’t give you what I don’t have!”

  “Then give me a direction and range! Anything!”

  “Acknowledged, bridge. Our best guess is–”

  “New contact, Zero Five by One! Range point one! Collision course!”

  This time Minstrel and Ajax banked in pursuit of the suicide ship.

  “That’s not a frigate this time!” the Ajax Signals officer warned. “The angle is closing too fast! Veer off, Constellation! Veer off!”

  The Minstrel angrily launched a full spread of track-on-signature shipkiller missiles. All sixteen warheads managed an instant waveform lock on their target, but their overtake time was plus five impact. Too late to save their fleet-mate.

  “Kill that ship now!” Teller shouted, jumping to his feet. A full-size War Destroyer hurtled towards the evading Constellation. Explosions bracketed her hull and debris started to trail, but destroying a ship this size was going to take time, and the range was closing too fast.

  “Constellation! Evasive!” Teller screamed.

  Out of nowhere, a full power war shot speared the oncoming suicide destroyer amidships. A blinding explosion shook the very fabric of space as two more shots blasted hundred-foot breach points in the spinning vessel’s disintegrating hull.

  DSS Fury’s other two main batteries swiveled silently and opened fire.

  Shot four blasted the destroyer’s engines into a cloud of spinning debris, fire and trailing radiation. Shot five missed. Shot six detonated across her ventral hull, igniting a screaming, shrapnel-ejecting hypernova before the seventh shot impaled her fusion assembly. An impossibly bright explosion flared to life briefly and then vanished, leaving a ghostly after-image, a long trail of radioactive fuel and an expanding wake of fast moving debris.

  The scene on every Perseus bridge was the same. It wasn’t often they got to see their flagship unload. When she did, it was a sobering event. Where a 70,000-ton vessel had once been, there wasn’t a single piece of wreckage larger than a coffee can.

  “Spruance, report! Come in, Spruance!”

  Teller finally looked down from the scene of utter destruction on his bridge viewscreen and activated the intership.

  “Good to hear a friendly voice, Fury. We have multiple targets on the board. Firing solutions are imminent. What is your status?”

  “We’re hurt, but we’re still in the fight. Transfer Force Command to One Juliet Four and prepare to re-establish an attack posture. Acknowledge!”

  “Affirmative. Fury has the ball. Spruance shifting to Force Escort on Zero Juliet Four. Vessel at your command, ma’am.”

  “They’re gone, sir!”

  Teller turned back to his screen. The tactical officer was right. All their previous tracks were gone. There was nothing in space except the nine ships of the task force.

  “What the hell am I looking at, Ensign?”

  “I don’t know, sir. One second they were there. The next they were gone.�
��

  Eight

  “Are you certain, Argent?”

  “Affirmative, Captain. They’ve been actively targeted for the last two minutes, forty seconds.”

  “And no response at all?”

  “Negative. No change in aspect. No emissions. That ship is dead in space,” Annora replied. “Confirmed and re-checked, Captain. Shall we run a life signs check?”

  Hunter sat at the pilots controls aboard his gunship. T-Hawk Eight was parked 300 yards off the Dunkerque’s starboard quarter. At the navigator and tactical stations sat Zony and Yili. Behind them stood eleven armored marines. They were ready to commandeer the renegade Skywatch vessel and return it to fleet control.

  “Go, Argent. Let’s find out what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Scanning.”

  “There’s no running lights either, Skipper,” Moo said. “I don’t think anyone’s home.”

  “This fits in nicely with Atwell’s story,” Hunter muttered. “I got the distinct impression Hughes marooned the crew somewhere. Perhaps they’re on Barker’s Asteroid manning that ground station.”

  “Or maybe they’re on Barker’s Asteroid as prisoners,” Yili offered. “With all due respect to the Admiral, it sounds like the man has gone right around the bend.”

  “T-Hawk Eight, Argent.”

  “Go ahead, XO”

  “No life signs aboard the Dunkerque”

  “Goodness,” Zony whispered.

  “What did he do, kill the crew?” Hunter blurted out. Moo winced. “There are 170 men and women on that ship!”

  “Not any more, Skipper,” Annora replied. “No life signs. No bodies. No nothing. That ship is completely abandoned.”

  “Does it have an atmosphere? Is life support functional?”

  “We’ve got signs that reserve power systems are operating at a greatly reduced power level. Mains are off-line. No reactor signatures or heat signatures in her plants. No engine trail either.”

  “Sir?”

  “Hold on XO.” Hunter muted the intership.

  “What she just said doesn’t make any sense. If all that is true, how did the Dunkerque get here?”

  “That, engineer, is a very good question.” Hunter replied as he opened the channel to the Argent again. “XO? Keep us on scanners. We’re going to board her as planned. Hunter out.”

  The Captain closed the channel and set the ship on auto-approach. “Alright, let’s suit up. Make sure we’ve got hatch clamps and everyone’s weapons are charged and ready. Neek, take us to five meters, engines at station keeping, channels open.”

  “Affirmative, T-Hawk Eight on approach.”

  The small company turned their equipment over and over, snapping, opening and closing the control mechanisms, checking and re-checking the indicator readouts. Hunter, Zony and Yili all donned their own power-armor and pressurized their tac-suits.

  “Engage triple-S. There may not be an atmosphere over there,” Hunter said.

  “Affirmative. Watch your pressure and temperature differentials and don’t touch any surfaces without your anti-static and heat-fields up. Any exposed metal over there could be two hundred below zero. We don’t want your gloves or precision surfaces to freeze and get stuck,” Moo added.

  The marines all nodded while Zony worked through their comms checks.

  “T-Hawk Eight to Argent. Boarding party in space.”

  Meanwhile on the bridge of the Argent, everyone’s attention was riveted on the real-time video feeds from the boarding party’s helmet-mounted cameras. It wasn’t often a commanding officer led a space walk, and many of the younger crew members were in a combined state of utter shock and complete disbelief as they saw Jason Hunter float out the airlock of the gunship and maneuver his tac-suit in the direction of the Dunkerque’s much larger external hatch.

  Then the impossible happened.

  “What did I just see?” Annora said with an urgent tone in her voice. The rest of the bridge crew went back to their instruments, trying for all the world to decipher the data that would explain how the Dunkerque faded away and then reappeared.

  “Report!”

  “Ma’am, these readings don’t make any sense. One second she’s there. The next she’s gone.”

  “Argent to boarding party!” Nothing happened. Commander Doverly whirled on her comms officer with a look that demanded answers.

  “Channel is open, ma’am and you are five by five.”

  “Doverly to Hunter, acknowledge!”

  The Dunkerque faded and then reappeared again.

  “This is impossible! Mass can’t just vanish like this!” the tactical officer exclaimed. “It’s like that ship is changing its atomic structure moment by moment!”

  “Are we in contact with the boarding party or not!?”

  “We’re transmitting, they must be hearing us.” The young ensign switched her console over to a diagnostic cycle. Every indicator showed green. “No fault in the equipment ma’am. We’re broadcasting in the clear on all frequencies.”

  “Jason!”

  Meanwhile, Captain Hunter was confidently listening to Commander Doverly’s calm advice on how to open the Dunkerque’s external airlock. One by one, four Argent officers and ten marines boarded the abandoned cruiser.

  Ten seconds later, the Dunkerque vanished from the Argent’s instruments.

  This time, she didn’t reappear.

  Nine

  Jayce Hunter heard a commotion outside the records lab. Weapons fire preceded the sounds of small engines and shouting. Then a banging sound. She checked her weapon and leaned far enough into the mangled doorway to see what was going on.

  The intruders appeared to be engaged with an enemy behind them. Flashes of more weapons fire strobed in the hallway. A few seconds later, Echo came barreling up the corridor, emergency lights in full operation and sirens blaring. Butterfly was escorting her from a few feet overhead.

  “Acey! Acey! There’s bad guys back there!” Echo screamed through the door and skidded sideways to a halt. Butterfly arrived a moment later and pivoted in the air, apparently ready for more action.

  “Are they hurt? Are they hurt? They’re hurt!” she exclaimed. “Echo, we have to help them!”

  “Okay!” Echo said, revving up alongside Lieutenant Sutherland.

  “Klivers first,” Jayce said. “He had the worst injuries. We didn’t have the equipment to stabilize him.”

  “Acknowledged,” Echo said as she swerved around and parked by the wounded man’s shoulder. Her wheels locked and she deployed her sensors over his face and chest. An indicator panel rose from her dorsal chassis and began to display the wounded officer’s vital signs. A small clamp reached out and fastened itself around his arm. A pressure-operated intravenous system went into operation and began to restore blood volume, fresh plasma and oxygen levels. Almost immediately his condition improved.

  Lieutenant Sutherland stared in blatant disbelief. She thought the words “mobile trauma unit” were just talk. But here she was: a robot with the apparent personality and voice of a girl not yet out of elementary school treating her wounded comrade like a veteran battlefield medic.

  “Don’t worry! He’s going to be okay!” Echo said, her little lightbars still going. “He’s just tired ‘cause he got hurt.”

  Sutherland couldn’t help but smile. Echo sounded like she was on a weekend excursion to the park to fly kites. Butterfly had landed nearby and was busy monitoring the local area communications channels. Little indicator lights blinked all around the lower edge of her airframe.

  “Our transmissions and reception are still being jammed, Acey,” she said. “I can’t hear Rebel, Wave or Lunar!”

  “We’ve got to find that jamming unit,” Hunter said. “Until we put it out of commission, we’ll never be able to re-establish communications with the Fury.”

  “What about the rest of the mini-bots?” Huggins replied. “They can’t take on the entire enemy force alone. Can that VLF unit communicate with the task
force net?”

  Jayce shook her head. “Range is too short. We can get short messages from one side of the station to another, but we don’t have the power to transmit very far beyond that.”

  “Next time, we’ll just have to remember to bring more army with us.”

  “That’s affirmative, XO,” Hunter said. “But you know, there’s still one thing we can try.” She pulled out the VLF transmitter again. “Butterfly, did you see any airlock facilities on Deck Five on the way over here?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” the little helicopter replied.

  “Yeah!” Echo agreed. “There’s an emergency one right by the corner at the end of that hall!”

  “Lunar, this is Acey. Can you hear me?”

  The progress bar on the unit moved gradually from one side of the screen to the other as the antenna converted the message to data and slowly transmitted it across the limited bandwidth available. Seconds passed. A light appeared on the unit and another progress bar crawled across.

  “This is Lunar! Standing by!”

  Commander Hunter keyed her message into the unit manually, using Lunar’s op codes instead of his voice interface. After several dozen keystrokes she hit the “enable” key and closed the channel.

  “What’s the plan, Skipper?”

  “I planted a message for the Task Force in Lunar’s memory. He’s going to open the airlock and fly it out to the Fury courier-style.”

  “Yay! Lunar gets to go to space!” Echo cheered. “I love it when he talks about going to space.”

  “Then all we have to do is hold out for reinforcements,” Huggins said.

  “And hope Rebel and Wave don’t get vaporized in the meantime,” Hunter replied.

  Epilogue

  “I want that ship found, Lieutenant. I don’t care if it takes every fighter, gunship and corvette we have. I want the Dunkerque located within the hour. Doverly out.”

  Annora waited impatiently for the magneto-lift doors to open. There was one man aboard who could shed light on the events of the last thirty minutes, and he just happened to be locked in the Argent’s brig. When the lift doors opened, a detachment of marines was waiting.