Orion Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 2)

by B. V. Larson

  “Agreed,” I said, “what’s a good rate of speed for an attack pass with our phase-ship?”

  Miller spoke up, as I knew he would. “About a thousand miles an hour in variation between the target and the ship. That will ensure our fire-control systems have time to get a firm lock.”

  “Okay. Chang, project them with an appropriate deceleration arc, matching our specs.”

  Miller caught my eye. “Their fire-control system might be able to calculate a solution faster than ours can.”

  I shrugged. “It’s the best guess we have.”

  “I’ve got it…” Chang said, updating the image again.

  This time, it was less alarming. We had about half an hour before the enemy ship would be in position.

  “Here’s what we do,” I said. “First, we have to ask Ursahn to jam local transmissions around the battle station. Then we can position ourselves and wait for the enemy to appear.”

  “Why would they come out of hiding if they can see that we’re not at the station?” Miller asked.

  “I’m assuming that they won’t know that. They started pretty far out, and they’re moving in fast. But they can’t see clearly when they’re phasing, just like us. They’ll be operating on old data.”

  The group looked tense, thinking it over.

  “I’m open to suggestions, or anyone wanting to point out flaws. We never gamed out a fight like this. We were supposed to be the silent Hunters, not the prey.”

  “Well…” Gwen said, speaking up next. “What if Fex decides to screw us openly and tell the Imperials we’re gone?”

  We all looked at her in surprise. Some hadn’t gone that far in their thinking, while others like me hadn’t realized she’d figured out what was going on.

  “If that happens,” I said slowly, “there’ll be a recording of the incident. I don’t think Fex wants to move so openly. I don’t think the Imperials promised to make him a baron or something.”

  There was scattered laughter at the idea.

  “The most he might do,” I continued, “is delay the station gunners when they spot the enemy. Maybe he’ll claim it’s another human ship or something, giving them just long enough to slip away again.”

  “We just don’t know for sure,” Miller said.

  “No. We have to guess. I’m for taking up our post and employing the plan I’ve just laid out.”

  “Wait a minute,” Major Henderson said.

  She’d just come onto the bridge, but I didn’t order Dalton to stand down. I let him keep the station. She looked at him awkwardly. I reminded myself that Dalton wore an ensign’s line now, while Henderson was still a silver button. As far as the Rebels were concerned, she was a junior recruit.

  “Is there something you want to add to the conversation, Henderson?” I asked.

  “Uh… yes. I was listening on the way up here.”

  My eyes slid to Miller, then back to her. Had he quietly summoned her? I hadn’t ordered that. But if she was listening into our tactical discussion while rushing to get to the bridge, it had to be Miller who was relaying the audio.

  Miller avoided my eye and looked directly at Henderson. His expression was wisely blank. I had to admit, he was learning fast.

  “Well?” I prompted Henderson.

  “What keeps Fex from making some kind of transmission to warn off the phase-ship—assuming it’s even out there?”

  I smiled. “If you listened closely, my plan consisted of two steps. One of those steps was to get Ursahn to start jamming local space.”

  There was no more argument after that. We contacted Ursahn in the clear. I kept the transmission short, as it would give away our position. We’d still be invisible, but there would be a solid frame of reference after this.

  Before I made any transmissions, I slowed our vessel further. We were crawling then, almost stationary in space.

  “Captain Ursahn,” I said, “I require your assistance. Please jam local radio transmissions on all frequencies.”

  She considered my request on the vid screen after my message reached her.

  “I don’t have any such orders from Admiral Fex.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m making the request, one captain to the next. We’re commanding the only two warships in this system. I need your help.”

  “Fex won’t like it.”

  I smiled. “Maybe not—but at least you won’t have to listen to his complaints until this action is over with.”

  Ursahn stared at me for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, her transmission cut out.

  “The channel is broken, sir,” Gwen said. “I can’t get it back. There’s interference on all channels.”

  “Surprising,” I said, “maybe it’s a natural phenomenon.”

  There were a few chuckles from the command staff. We all went back to watching our screens. I ordered Dalton to steer us clear of our current position. We’d given away our position, and we’d best get away from that spot quickly.

  Taking up a new position several thousand miles away, we turned our nose around, aimed it at the battle station, and waited.

  The waiting was hard to do. Did the Imperials have the power to detect us? If they did, we were sitting ducks.

  Was Fex somehow pinpointing our position? At least we couldn’t hear his complaints, which I’m sure were being beamed all over the star system.

  The truth was, I didn’t have all the answers when it came to the Rebel Fleet or the Imperials. They had tech I knew about—and some things I didn’t.

  Half an hour passed, and the Imperials remained hidden. The battle station was spinning slowly, but she launched no fighters or probes.

  Then another hour passed—and two more after that.

  Ursahn kept jamming, and she had a squadron of fighters on combat patrol, but otherwise she was waiting as motionlessly as the rest.

  We sat quietly, with only the decks thrumming under our feet. The engines were kept hot, idling, but doing nothing more. We had no shields while phasing, and if they did find us, we’d be destroyed quickly.

  “This is killing me,” Gwen said in a whisper.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “Vibrations don’t travel through the vacuum of space.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” she said, then she closed her eyes and sighed. “Sorry Captain. I’m getting snappy.”

  “That’s okay. Dalton looked like he wants to kill someone. That’s normal for him—but also it’s a sure sign that we’re all feeling tense.”

  It was about fifteen minutes later that Samson, of all people, came up to me.

  “So you did make it back aboard after all?” I asked him.

  “Yes sir.” His face was twisted up in a confused frown, and he was staring at a tablet in his hands.

  He was usually assigned to active defenses and support systems, so I respected his input.

  “What is it, Ensign?” I asked him.

  He perked up a little at my observation of his rank. He was proud of the silver thread-line on his shoulders.

  “Something strange, sir,” he said.

  “Don’t listen to him!” Dalton called out from the helm. “He’s gone and wet himself, that’s all.”

  “Shut up!” Samson shouted back angrily.

  “Just show me what you have, Ensign,” I said patiently.

  “I was off-duty below, but I kept getting a funny reading. It’s not supposed to be this high of a number.”

  He showed me his tablet. It was full of numbers, mostly green, some yellow, one orange. He tapped at the orange one. A real time trend-graph came up, showing a recent spike in the reading.

  “You see this?” Sampson asked. “This is wrong. Our shields are reading like they’re on—but they aren’t on. We don’t have enough power to run shields and the phasing device at the same time.”

  I stared at the data, then I looked up and around. The walls—they were all opaque. They were still displaying the course-prediction data that Abrams and Chang had
worked up.

  “Kill that graphic!” I shouted.

  Chang lurched upright in his seat. He didn’t ask any questions. He reached for his console, and the graphic vanished.

  The old fighter version of Hammerhead had been cannibalized, not just dissected and duplicated on a larger scale. One of the rare technologies we’d lifted intact and installed directly on this new bridge was the seemingly transparent walls of the fighter.

  Only the bridge of this new, larger vessel had a transparent hull, but it was enough.

  There, gliding not a mile off our flank, was another phase-ship. She was close enough to reach out and touch. Samson had been detecting shields all right—Imperial shields.

  “Battle stations!” shouted Miller, hitting every alarm on his console.

  The whole ship lit up, and people on every deck scrambled into position—if they hadn’t been sitting there already, waiting.

  “No one fire!” I shouted. “No one touch those helm controls!”

  Dalton’s hands sprang up into the air as if stung. At least he could follow an order properly when his life was on the line.

  “They’re right there, Captain!” Samson said, his mouth hanging open in shock. “I can’t believe they’re so close. Why haven’t they fired at us yet?”

  “Same reason we haven’t fired on them,” I said, “they’re studying their instruments, searching for us with computers instead of looking out their portholes. I don’t even know if an Imperial phase-ship has portholes, actually.”

  “Captain,” Chang said, sounding as calm as everyone else did excited. “The odds of them finding us here are astronomical. They must, therefore, have a method of divining our location. I would suggest we take action quickly before they pinpoint our position.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, looking at the sleek phase-ship. It was hard to order the battle to start when I didn’t know how it would end.

  “Chang, how long until Killer could get a fighter out here to help?”

  “Nine minutes.”

  “Too long… One of us will be dead by then. Are we inside of the battle station’s range? For the main batteries, not the missiles.”

  “We’re just outside that, sir.”

  “Damn,” I complained. “Did you recommend this ground, Chang?”

  “No,” Miller said, “I did. It wasn’t an error. It was a wise precaution. If Fex is truly working with the enemy, we can’t trust him. We can’t be spotted fighting next to his battle station. It would be too easy to make a minor error and blow up the wrong phase-ship.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “Good job, Miller.”

  Every Rebel Kher alive hated phase-ships. How hard would it be to convince a gunnery crew that blasting us both out of existence would be a good thing for the universe as a whole?

  “Okay then. We’ll do this alone. Can we use chemical jets? To spin us around gently?”

  “That will increase our visibility,” Miller said.

  “We can already see them,” I pointed out. “If they look over here, they’ll see us.”

  “Not necessarily. Our tech isn’t identical, ours is homegrown. Perhaps Abrams has improved upon their design—even though they obviously have better sensory equipment than we do.”

  My head felt too full. I had to think clearly and make a fast decision.

  At the back of my mind, I knew right then Earth should have put a Navy sub commander in this chair. The Air Force had bullied its way into the seat by standing on service history, but I was wishing I had a real Navy commander with me right then. His experience and tactical expertise would have been invaluable.

  But new services were rarely born perfect. I had to deal with what I had.

  Sucking in a deep breath, I looked at Miller. “Man the main gun and burn that bastard down.”

  He gave me a tight smile. He knew I was giving him the honor of the kill.

  Moving to his station, he sat and placed his hands on the console. The turret on the top of the ship began to travel, swinging to its maximum arc in order to target the enemy vessel.

  That’s when they spotted us at last.

  It was the motion of the turret. It had to be. We hadn’t known they could detect that. How could we have known?

  The exact physics of the situation evaded me. At this distance, however, I knew we were at the threshold of being in the same “phased-space” as the other ship. Essentially, we were generating a field around us that warped space, and the other ship was doing the same. This made us semi-blind, as it did for them.

  But when another vessel came close enough, it entered the field with the phasing-ship. It was partially in normal space and hyperspace at same time—just as we were.

  The closer we came to one another, the closer we were to synching up and spotting one another.

  When we began moving our primary turret, that tiny change, that ripple in the pond that was the space around us, was altered.

  The Imperial detected it somehow. Maybe it had made us visible to them, as they were already to us. Or maybe, the motion itself had triggered some kind of detection system we had no inkling about.

  Whatever the case, the Imperial ship came alive. She no longer glided serenely off to our port flank. She spun, and her own weaponry moved to lock onto us.

  “Dalton—!” I shouted, but I got no further.

  He was an experienced pilot. He’d been in a number of tight battles at the helm of a fighter. He wasn’t the sort of man to wait for orders when his own butt was on the line.

  He’d already set us to spinning too, to coming around to get our gun in line before the enemy got his lined up.

  All of space went white then. I’d never given the order. That was my last conscious thought.

  And if I hadn’t given the order to fire, then who had fired? It could only be the enemy.

  As I collapsed, my mind hummed oddly and somehow I felt the extra particles in my skull that had been shaken loose by a sudden bombardment of radiation. There was a taste of copper in the back of my mouth. Sudden, and intense.

  Then, there was nothing at all.

  =29=

  Waking up slowly, my first thought was one of amazement.

  I was still alive.

  “Captain?” someone asked me, shaking my shoulder. “Captain, can you hear me?”

  It was Abrams. That much I knew. I opened one eye, but it seemed swollen and there was blood running over my face. I tried the other one, and light flooded in, no blood.

  Better.

  “Doc?” I managed to croak.

  “Ah… you’re alive. That’s a relief. We lost Henderson, and Mackel. I barely knew Mackel.”

  He seemed to be rambling. I tried to lever myself up on one elbow, and I managed it after two tries.

  “What hit us?”

  I could see his face, it was red. That seemed odd. Was he flushing?

  “I—I made a mistake. It was in the design. You have to understand, no one had ever fired a radiation weapon while phasing before. It just wasn’t practical to test back on Earth.”

  Confused, I rolled over and got to a sitting position. “My joints hurt. I taste metal… That’s radiation poisoning, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so. Most of the bridge crew were hit. The rays were rather random. It was positional. If you were standing in such a way that there was a hull transparency between your body and the projector head, you got a dose.”

  I heaved a painful sigh. I dug at my uniform, finding seared flesh over my ribs, down low on my left.

  “I bet my liver is cooked,” I said. “How long do I have to live?”

  Abrams thick eyebrows crunched together.

  “What? How should I know? I’m an engineer.”

  “There are mathematical formulae to determine such things, Doc,” I said. “Distance from source. Rads delivered. Length of exposure…”

  “Oh—right. Don’t worry about that. You’ll survive, but it will be like having an extreme sunburn for a t
ime, and you’ll suffer some confusion if your brain swells.”

  “Is that right? Why will I survive this?”

  “Your sym will regenerate the dying cells. The biomass in your bloodstream is distributed and radiation-resistant. It will regrow the patches of dead cells, rewrite most of the DNA that’s been damaged, and generally clean things up over time.”

  “Engineering, huh?

  I looked around. There were two bodies on the bridge, Henderson and Mackel. They’d both been forward, very close to the big front transparent parts of our hull. In fact, if I were to guess, I’d say Henderson had been standing between me and that forward projector…

  “The hull-transparency effect,” Abrams explained. “The hull is thinner here to facilitate—”

  “What about the Imperial phase-ship?” I demanded suddenly. “Where is it?”

  “It was destroyed. I thought that was clear. Our weapon discharged first, and struck the enemy before they could line up their turret. At point-blank range, the enemy vessel was transformed into vapor and fragments instantaneously.”

  Finally, at long last, I had a clear picture of what had happened.

  “They didn’t hit us—we hit them? That means these burns are from our own weapon?”

  “Yes, of course. We suffered reflective blow-back. We shouldn’t have fired with the bridge hull exposed. That’s what I’ve been saying. Are you feeling mentally disabled, Blake?”

  I let his insults slide off me, only shaking my head slightly. “I’ll put your head in a microwave for a few minutes and then ask you what happened afterward.”

  “That would be pointless and counterproductive,” he snapped.

  I chuckled and groaned as I heaved myself up into a chair. He didn’t bother to help me. He rarely touched others.

  “All right, Doc,” I said. “Your weapon did this, but why?”

  “Normally, it would be safe to use. We experimented back on Earth. We built this ship based on the original Hammerhead, and we lifted her weaponry and shielding. The difference in this case was the addition of the phasing effect. Firing a high-radiation weapon while phased caused some of the energy released to scatter, striking through the hull in this localized region.”