by Jake Elwood
“Let me speak to your captain,” Gundegmaa said when she paused for breath.
“Captain's busy, Division Leader.”
“I'm afraid I have to insist.”
Gabrielle stuck her tongue out at the microphone, then held it at arm's length and turned her head. “Captain!” she said loudly. “A Division Leader at the station wants to talk to you.”
Franz, raising his voice so the microphone would pick it up, hollered, “You're my communications officer. You talk to him. That's what you're here for.”
“He's quite insistent.”
Franz, giving a perfect imitation of a Dawn Alliance accent, managed to load his voice with a pitch-perfect blend of exasperation and disgust. “You tell that jumped-up twit that some of us don't live in a comfortable space station day and night. I've lost eighty percent of my thrust, this ship has no fewer than ninety-four separate serious damage report incidents, and fifteen that are critical. Tell him I'm pretty damned busy just keeping my ship flying. But if he really wants to distract me, then in about five minutes maybe we’ll be crashing into his precious station instead of docking with it.”
Gabrielle brought the microphone back to her mouth. “I'm sorry, Division Commander. The captain says-”
“Heave to,” said Gundegmaa. “You are not cleared to dock with the station.”
Ishida at Helm One looked up, gesturing at his screen. Tom checked his own navigational display. The ship was nearing its turn-around point where they would have to decelerate to match velocities with the station.
“Bring us around,” Tom said softly. There was little danger the microphone would pick up his voice at anything lower than a bellow, but he wasn't about to take a chance. “Tell him we're heaving to.”
“Heaving to, Sir,” Gabrielle said into her microphone.
“Maintain a range of ten kilometers,” said Gundegmaa. “We're sending inspection teams aboard.”
Damn. Tom shrugged inwardly. The enemy was not as trusting as he'd hoped, but still, this gambit could have gone a lot worse.
“The ship is full of smoke,” Gabrielle said into the microphone. “We're going to need extra firefighting equipment. We've also got thirty-five injured crew in urgent need of medical attention.”
“You've been missing for nine days,” Gundegmaa said. “You can wait another thirty minutes.” Grudgingly he added, “I'll have the inspection teams bring medical staff.”
Gabrielle set down her microphone and turned to Tom. He winked, and she beamed at him, looking relieved and delighted by his approval.
“The fleet is moving to intercept,” said Dietrich.
Tom checked his display. Five ships were in motion, heading for a point between the Icicle and the station. “Two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and a carrier?”
“Might be three heavy cruisers,” Dietrich said. “I'm not sure about Charlie. The carrier’s pretty big, too.”
Tom nodded. If the carrier had a full complement it would launch at least a dozen birds. But this was a battleship, a behemoth so sturdy it could ignore small fighters.
The disc of the planet, already much larger, drifted sideways as the Icicle began a ponderous turn. The ship was absurdly difficult to maneuver, especially now with many of her navigational thrusters destroyed. A flashing light on Tom's console told him the main engines had powered down while the ship came around. He was used to much smaller, much faster ships that could spin around with all engines blazing, realigning so quickly that the brief moment of sideways thrust was inconsequential.
He wanted to ask if his gun crews were ready, if the missile bays had birds loaded. That was just nerves, though. Everyone knew their jobs. He could only undermine the confidence of the crew by double-checking.
Vaughn at Tactical Two spoke into a microphone, telling gun crews all over the ship to stand by, reminding them not to fire until he gave the order. “This will be a target-rich environment, kids. Let's not leave any ammunition behind for the enemy.”
“Oh my God,” said Gabrielle, and Tom stiffened. What now?
“I thought the waiting was bad before,” she said. “This is unbearable!”
Some of Tom's stress left him in a surprised chuckle. “You were brilliant,” he told her. “No, you were magnificent. You had me half convinced this was still a Dawn Alliance ship. Don't go to pieces now.”
“I'm not going to pieces,” she said, miffed. Then she laughed at her own reaction. “I'm just … extraordinarily wide-awake.”
“Do you mind if I change the display, Sir?”
Tom looked around, not sure who had spoken. The main display showed nothing but the stars behind the ship. The Rime Frost was back there somewhere, engines cold, almost certainly undetected. She wouldn't participate in the coming battle. Her job was to watch, then slip away and report back to New Panama. The Trickling Brook was already gone.
“Yes, change it.”
The stars flickered, the constellations changing. Twin suns blazed from one edge of the screen for a moment before vanishing as the ship continued to turn. Novograd almost filled the screen. Tom could even see the station, a glittering point of light against the dark side of the planet. He made an automatic attempt to figure out the range before reminding himself that this was the view from an aft-facing camera. With no idea how far the camera was zoomed in, there was no way to calculate range.
His navigation screen could have given him a range accurate to within ten meters, of course. It hardly mattered. They would plunge toward the station tail-first, engines blazing.
And then all hell would break loose.
“Incoming message,” said Howard Short. Tom gestured, and he tapped his screen.
A woman's voice came over the bridge speakers, cold and condescending, the voice of someone accustomed to command. “This is Captain Artag of the H154.”
One of the heavy cruisers, then.
“You are decelerating too slowly. You need to match velocities at a range in excess of ten kilometers.”
Tom turned to give instructions to Gabrielle, but she grabbed the mic before he could speak. “We're decelerating just as fast as we can, Captain. Perhaps you missed the earlier part of the conversation where we talked about taking excessive damage.”
Artag said, “Why do you have auxiliary rockets attached to your hull?”
“The rebel colony fleet was kind enough to provide those.” Gabrielle still looked frazzled, like her nerves were on the verge of snapping, but her voice dripped with amusement. “We scavenged them and hooked them to our hull. If it wasn't for the boosters, it would have taken us another month to get here.”
“You need to increase your rate of deceleration.”
“We'll get right on that, Captain, just as soon as the laws of physics change.”
“You are addressing an officer with the rank of Divisional Unit Leader,” Artag said sharply.
“And you're addressing a communication officer who thought she was going to die in deep space. The air is barely breathable, and I've got friends dying in the surgical bay. I didn't really think we were going to make it back. Frankly, we've been through hell, so you'll forgive me if I'm not perfectly respectful in the face of ridiculous, impossible demands.”
“Let me speak to your captain.”
“Absolutely,” snapped Gabrielle. “You can talk to him as soon as we’re safely docked at the station, the last of the fires is under control, and the injured have been moved to a proper medical facility. Until then, he's kind of busy.”
“Adjust the angle of your approach,” Artag said. “If you come within ten kilometers of the station, you will be fired upon.”
Gabrielle gave Tom a helpless glance. He shrugged.
“Understood, Captain,” Gabrielle said, and set the microphone down.
“Fire a couple of port-side thrusters,” Tom said. “Make it look like we're trying to comply.” Anything to buy them just a little more time.
Sixty seconds crawled past in a taut silence.
“B19. You need to adjust your course.”
Gabrielle, her voice hoarse and strained, said, “Captain, we're doing our best.”
“We're coming alongside,” said Artag. “Don't make any sudden maneuvers.”
It's a battleship, Tom thought. Sudden maneuvers?
He watched on his tactical display as one heavy cruiser broke away from the rest of the fleet. The cruiser, far more nimble than the battleship, raced toward the Icicle, then spun around to reduce velocity. Once the two ships were side-by-side the cruiser swapped ends one more time. Both ships plunged toward the station tail-first, decelerating.
“They want to dock with us,” O’Reilly said. “Range is fifty meters and dropping.”
Tom said, “How long until we reach the station?”
“Eight minutes to the station. Just under four minutes until we reach the rest of the fleet.”
It'll have to be good enough. “Clobber them,” said Tom.
Jennifer Smith grabbed a microphone. “Missile Bay Four. How's your targeting?”
“They're just aft of us,” said a faint, tinny voice from her console. “They're overtaking us, though.”
“Blast them as soon as you've got a straight shot.”
Tom's console turned to static, then reset. Instead of detailed graphics he had nothing but text menus.
Gabrielle said, “H154. Why have you turned on your Benson field?”
There was no reply.
O’Reilly glanced at Tom. “Should I turn on our field?”
Tom shook his head. “Not until the moment we fire.”
“Give us a five-second warning,” O’Reilly said.
“Firing in five,” said a voice from Smith's console. O’Reilly mashed a thumb against his screen, and the Icicle’s Benson field generator came on, scrambling every electronic system on the cruiser.
“Missiles are away,” Smith said. She leaned over her console, then straightened up and grinned. “We got four good hits, and the guns are making short work of what's left.”
“Incoming missiles,” said O’Reilly. The rest of the fleet had opened fire.
Tom looked down at his tactical display, which had reset to show crude, chunky graphics. A cloud of missiles rushed toward the Icicle, and his fingers tightened on the arms of his chair, bracing for impact. Gunners like Law would be firing aft, opening up with everything they had. But missiles were tiny, fast-moving targets, almost impossible to hit without computer assistance.
He had forgotten the sheer volume of fire that a battleship could generate. One missile after another winked out on his display. But, with only seconds remaining before impact, it would never be enough.
His display screen went dead. It was back a moment later, the blocky squares that indicated missiles replaced by crisp, precise outlines. The heavy cruiser’s Benson field was down, which meant-
Missiles vanished from the screen, one after another, as the battleship's AI took over targeting. The guns, fired with a precision no human could ever attain, tore their way through the cloud of incoming missiles.
It was almost enough.
Tom planted his feet against the deck plates and pressed his back against the chair, ready for a violent impact as one last missile slipped through the Icicle’s defences and detonated against her engines.
The tiniest hint of a vibration shook Tom's chair. He blinked, startled, then relaxed. Wow. This tub can really take a punch.
“Direct hit to Engine Three,” O'Reilly said cheerfully. The Free Neorome fleet had crippled Engine Three when they first disabled the battleship.
Tom brought up a menu of hull cameras, scrolling through the list until he found a view of the heavy cruiser. The H154 was a devastated ruin. It turned slowly as it drifted away from the Icicle, chunks of hull plate in a cloud around it. Tom could see exposed girders and deck plates, and a figure in a vac suit, arms splayed wide, floating free. A chunk of the cruiser’s nose had been blown away completely and floated in its own cloud of debris nearby.
“One down, five to go, someone said. “Plus the station, of course.”
“Cut engines,” said Tom. “Bring us around.”
The battleship began a ponderous rotation. “We're coming in pretty fast,” said O'Reilly.
“That's fine.” A fast approach meant less time soaking up incoming fire. And the way the Icicle had shrugged off a missile strike had him thinking that his original plan – to cripple the station with missiles and shells – wasn't going to work.
He had a backup plan, and it called for plenty of velocity.
The ship straightened out at last. The station was the largest thing on the forward display, with just the blackness of the night side of Novograd behind it. The station was saucer-shaped, the upper surface mostly smooth steel plates with gun turrets showing here and there and a forest of antennas at the very top. The hull plates were a dull gray in color, with shuttered windows showing white.
The underside of the station was similar, except for the stabilizing vane, half a kilometer long, that descended like a stalactite. There would be docking ports and repulsor pods around the base of the vane, but those were invisible from where the Icicle thundered in from above.
“They’re pulling back,” O’Reilly said. “Smart of them.”
Tom checked his tactical display. The five remaining ships that had come forward to intercept them were retreating toward the station. Four more ships joined them, the remainder of the Novograd fleet.
“Looks like a couple of destroyers,” Smith said. “A heavy cruiser, I think. And the little one must be a corvette.”
Nothing we can't handle. But the station, though ….
“Missiles, Captain?”
Tom glanced at Smith, considering, then shook his head. “No. We'll save them for point-blank range.”
Moment by moment the range closed, and then the fleet and the station opened up together. Beeps and warbles sounded as damage reports came in, and the ship vibrated with a particularly heavy impact.
“Wow,” said O’Reilly. “That one punched straight through the armor in the nose.” He tapped his console, and shook his head. “Looks like we won't be using the wardroom anymore.”
That had to be a shot from the destroyer. Well, the Icicle couldn't very well dodge. There was nothing to do but forge ahead. “Target the destroyer,” he said. “Let's see if they can take it as well as they can dish it out.”
“We lost Turret Three,” O’Reilly said, and Tom winced. One turret didn't have much tactical significance, but there was a pretty good chance a gun crew had just died. He thought of Law and hoped she was all right.
Blows from the destroyer were striking the nose of the battleship now, regular as a metronome. Most of the shots deflected from the ship’s armor plating, but several more punched through, and the nose of the battleship began to disintegrate.
“Turn us broadside,” Tom said. It would spread the damage around, and allow more of the Icicle’s guns to bear.
“I think the destroyer is dead,” said Vaughn.
“Target the station,” Tom said. Then, “The destroyer doesn't look badly hurt.”
“Her nose is tilted up by almost five degrees,” said Vaughn. “It means she can't hit us. Not with her magnetic guns.”
“We're taking laser fire from the station!”
Tom didn't see who spoke, but the voice was shrill with fear. When he checked his tactical display he saw why. A dozen lasers were targeting the forward port quarter of the ship, and one beam had already cut through.
Those are some powerful lasers. “Give us some waggle,” Tom said. It would play hell with the targeting of the Icicle’s guns, but it would spread the laser fire around and make it more difficult to burn a deep hole.
Navigational thrusters fired, rocking the ship ever so slightly, spoiling the aim of the lasers.
“Why didn't they hit us earlier?” O’Reilly complained.
Inferior laser technology, Tom realized. The United Worlds ships, a
nd some of the better Dawn Alliance ships, had lasers with practically unlimited range. It took incredible precision, however, to make a laser with a beam that wouldn't diffuse over distance.
And that's why we're still alive.
“We're almost at their Benson Field range.”
Tom nodded his acknowledgement. “Give me a full missile barrage as soon as we hit the field.”
His tactical display turned to static, which meant that electronic systems aboard the station were being similarly scrambled. The main bridge screen, using simpler technology, only flickered for a moment. Tom watched the bright glow from a dozen missiles as they streaked away from the battleship toward the station.
Half the missiles got through. They exploded against the hull of the station, looking downright inconsequential against such a broad expanse of steel. A couple of missiles blasted away hull plates. One missile punched straight through and exploded inside, blowing away the shutters on several windows from inside. Flame glowed briefly through the ruptured windows before vacuum sniffed it out.
But a couple of missiles exploded without any visible effect other than scorch marks on the station's hull. Tom scowled and made his decision.
“Course change. Ram the station.”
The view tilted as the ship changed course. Tom couldn't hear the engines, but glowing icons on his console told him the engines were firing.
“All guns, target the fleet,” Tom said.
O’Reilly and Smith leaned over their consoles, giving orders to the gun crews. The guns on the port side didn't have an angle on the fleet, and continued to fire at the station. Tom saw a laser turret break apart under a withering barrage.
The rest of the guns focused their fire on a heavy cruiser, which blew apart with gratifying speed.
“Fighters,” said Vaughn. Then he said into his microphone, “Ignore the birds. Focus on Bravo.”
The fighters looked dashing and dangerous, sleek triangular shapes that swept in close to the Icicle’s hull, guns belching fire. But there was little they could do. One fighter loomed on the main bridge display as it raced close in front of the camera. Then it jerked sideways and broke apart. Tom grunted in surprise. “That was friendly fire.”
