Orion Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 2)

by B. V. Larson

  “If that happens, we’ll phase out.”

  It was a plan, but no one aboard looked happy about it. I knew what they were thinking. The Hunter might decide to target us at any moment, destroying us as a mere nuisance. We knew the friend-or-foe system worked to mask ships that harmlessly passed the Hunter—but we had no proof of how the AI would react when attacked by a ship it was programmed to ignore.

  The Hunter grew and grew. It felt like we were too close, but that was just because of its incredible size. When we reached optimal range, Mia began firing—she didn’t even ask for confirmation as her orders had been clear.

  If there was anyone aboard who loved to handle a large gun, it was Mia. The people of Ral had the instincts of violent predators. They especially loved ambushing an unaware foe.

  The first salvo caught one of the starboard engine ports with a direct hit. The enemy ship was shielded—but with so much mass to cover, the shielding was far from perfect. Visible debris streamed away from the Hunter like a streak of blood trailing behind a wounded fish.

  “Recharge,” I ordered. “Same target—fire at will.”

  Mia worked her weapon excitedly. It was her first time at bat with something so powerful and effective. Everyone else on the deck looked sick with worry—but not her. She was alive at last. If I’d put my ear to her chest, I would have probably heard a rumbling growl that went on and on.

  We fired twice more. The enemy shield didn’t buckle, however. In fact, it strengthened, changing from a glimmering orange to a glassy blue-white.

  “The Hunter is reacting!” Gwen said, chewing on her lower lip. “That’s a clear response.”

  “Yes, but it’s purely defensive,” I said. “We’re pulling this off. Maybe this is the way to kill these things. Next time, we’ll put a friend-or-foe system on every ship in the fleet and knock it to death with a thousand shots while it stands by idly.”

  “I want to be there when we do it,” Mia said, releasing another salvo.

  The deck heaved and rippled under us, but with the anti-gravity turned on, it was barely noticeable.

  Perhaps encouraged by our example, the Rebel ships rushed closer on the far side of the enemy ship. They rained fire down on the front of the hull. Some blasts penetrated—but then disaster struck.

  One of the big missiles the Hunter had fired—a spine miles long—caught one of our three battleships and took it out. The missile was so large, it seemed immune to countermeasures. It disintegrated into flechettes and tore the battleship apart.

  “They’ve got to break and run—right now,” I said. “Keep firing, Mia.”

  She did so, launching her seventh salvo. After that one struck home, the enemy’s shielding over the exhaust port we’d been pounding this entire time flickered out.

  A few grunts and guttural cries went up as my crew released pent-up anxieties.

  “You see?” I asked. “The Hunter—”

  “Captain!” Dalton called out. “She’s rotating her flank turrets!”

  He was right. The Hunter was armed with numerous batteries of turrets that encrusted her hull. These tightly bunched arrays of guns looked like spiny sea anemones, placed at regular intervals. Two of them in the aft portion of the massive hull were now swinging their clusters of guns to target us.

  “Phase out Miller!” I shouted.

  “It will take a bit, sir,” he said, battling his controls. “The main gun drains our primary power capacitance down to—”

  That was as far as he got with his uninteresting excuses. The enemy had us aligned, now, and the turrets were firing. They appeared to be rail guns, tubes that accelerated projectiles to terrific velocities.

  “Shields up,” I shouted. “Dalton, evasion pattern four.”

  We began to slide from side-to-side. Mia’s weapon was robbed of power, and our forward shields sprang into life. Samson was working his defensive measures, deploying everything we had. The blast shielding closed like a clamshell over the bridge, turning the hull opaque again.

  Miller shook his head. “Sir, we can’t phase for seven more seconds if we engage the shields.”

  “We don’t have seven seconds, Ensign,” I said.

  As if to illustrate my point, Hammerhead was struck violently. One of the rail gun shots had landed, knocking out our belly-shield and gouging a hole in the lower decks. We went into a barrel roll, a reaction to depressurization.

  Then the bridge’s power failed, and we were cast into darkness.

  =62=

  Emergency lights flickered on, casting a wan reddish glow over our instruments and faces.

  “Damage report,” I called out.

  Samson answered, as he was my defensive countermeasures officer. “We took it hard in the prow, lower deck. We lost a forward compartment, and we have a bulkhead breach.”

  The ship was divided into three decks from bow to stern, each with five compartments. These compartments were separated by bulkheads—heavy walls with sealed hatches linking them together. We’d lost the two forward compartments of the lower deck, which housed our forward shield generators—main and auxiliary.

  “We’ve got no shields in front of us now, Captain,” Samson said. “We can’t take another hit on the nose—we’ll be knocked out.”

  “Timing, Miller?” I asked in the calmest voice I could muster.

  “I need another thirty seconds, Captain.”

  “Dalton,” I said, “spin us around. Aim our stern toward the enemy.”

  The shielding of the engine sections was lighter than those that had protected our prow, but any shield was better than nothing.

  “Roger that,” Dalton said, working his helm controls.

  He expertly continued his evasion pattern, despite the fact we were now inverted and effectively hurtling backward.

  Mia, for her part, sat back in disgust. She could only fire her main weapon forward—and now the enemy was behind us.

  “Seven…” Miller began counting. “Six… Five…”

  “They’re firing again,” Chang said in his typical, calm voice. I’d always thought the man would die without even bothering to shift expressions.

  “Four… Three…”

  I gritted my teeth. We couldn’t afford to get hit hard in the tail. Even if we survived it, we’d probably lose our engine and be almost helpless.

  “Two… One…”

  There was a flash, and a report. The walls shook, but the anti-gravity and inertial-dampening systems kept us from feeling the full brunt of it. Only the air pressure inside the ship transmitted the impact to us.

  “Phasing out,” Miller said.

  “Have we got engines?” I asked.

  “Helm is responding,” Dalton said in relief. “Veering off to new heading.”

  We dove away at a random angle, getting away from our last known position so the Hunter couldn’t nail us with a lucky shot.

  For a few moments, I continued to feel panicky inside. The Hunter had turned on us, breaking our cover. Could it have technology to pierce our phasing effect? If it did, we were all dead.

  The damage reports were already coming in. We’d lost another compartment on the mid-deck. That last hit hadn’t nailed our engines, fortunately, but it had gouged a streak down our hull. I barely listened as Samson relayed this to me and took appropriate actions to control the situation. I kept watching the Hunter, wondering what it would do next.

  Our entire attack had been a big gamble. The whole point of the friend-or-foe hack was to slip by the enemy and hope the AI ignored us. I doubted it would be fooled again.

  “Captain,” Chang said. “The Rebel Fleet is breaking off. They’re forming rifts and exiting the system.”

  I nodded. We had no such options. We weren’t going to be able to do much now, other than watch the Hunter in action.

  When the last of the Rebel ships vanished, the Hunter slowed down. It turned slowly. We all watched, breathless.

  “I don’t think she can see us,” Chang said. “I’m plott
ing her course, and she’s not going in our direction.”

  We heaved a collective sigh of relief. “Display her course as soon as you nail it down, Chang,” I said.

  He worked, and the rest of us all pitched in on repairs. I dispatched most of my crew to the two damaged compartments. We’d lost three crewmen down there. They’d been blasted out into space, and there were no pings coming in from their emergency suits.

  It wasn’t a surprise. Sudden decompression and exposure to open space with the full physical effects of our ship’s rapid maneuvers would kill just about anyone. They’d probably bounced along the side of our ship—maybe burning up in our exhaust, or being crushed by what was left of our layered deflector shields.

  Gwen looked glum. “The external radiation alone…” she said, trailing off.

  “They’re gone, I know,” I said. “But we did what we could to help the Fleet, and this ship is still functional.”

  “Captain,” Chang called out. “I have the projections you requested now.”

  “Display them, main screens.”

  He did as I asked, and we all stared in disbelief.

  “But…” Gwen said. “You put down a friend-or-foe unit on Gondwana, didn’t you?”

  “I did indeed,” I said, feeling a cold, sick sensation grow in my guts.

  “Then why is the Hunter bypassing all the other worlds?” she demanded. “Why is it heading directly toward those harmless giraffe-people?”

  I didn’t answer right away, but I knew the reason.

  “Could they have stupidly turned the unit off?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “If they’d done that, the Hunter would have gone back to destroying the worlds farthest out from their sun. But it isn’t—it’s skipping several planets to get to Gondwana. It clearly plans to devour the inhabited world next.”

  “But why?” she demanded.

  “It has to be that we taught the AI—no, I taught it—to reclassify our signal. It’s prioritized any object that emits that signal.”

  “Reclassify…” Miller said. “I get it. From friend… to foe.”

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even look at him. I felt sick. I’d killed all those people.

  Here I sat in a crippled ship, unable to do battle. Unable to leave the star system unaided. We were going to be treated to a front row seat when the Hunter reached Gondwana and erased it from the cosmos.

  “Dalton,” I said. “Swing around and follow that Hunter.”

  He glanced at me, giving me an expression that clearly indicated he thought I’d gone mad, but he didn’t say anything. He did as I’d ordered.

  The big ship zoomed by us, having reversed course. It was bearing down on Gondwana without remorse.

  “Can we keep up?” I asked.

  “Plotting…” Chang said. “Yes. We can maintain phasing and match its pace. The Hunter isn’t very fast—but it seems to be unstoppable.”

  Truer words had never been spoken. We sat glumly, watching reports and anticipating at the coming calamity. I had Gwen send warning messages, but if the people on Gondwana were listening, they didn’t reply. They didn’t turn off the friend-or-foe system, which had converted them into a big fat target.

  Abrams came up to harangue me after a time. He told me I was six kinds of fool for having deprogrammed the enemy AI.

  I endured his bullshit stoically. It was the least I could do, a sort of penance for having destroyed a world full of innocents.

  Another hour went by. My coffee went cold, but I was too upset, too torn up inside to care.

  This had to be my single greatest failure as a human being. Sure, I’d done lots of things wrong in my time. You could ask any one of a hundred girls I’d taken on a date for an easy confirmation of that.

  But this was big. It wasn’t about a ship, or a crew—or even a fleet. I’d hastened the deaths of… how many? There had to be millions down there.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Samson said, sensing my mood. “At least, not entirely. You took a shot. That’s all we can do with incomplete information. What if you’d blown the tail off that Hunter? That would have been a big win.”

  I shook my head. “I was a fool. I was too cocky. I took too big of a chance.”

  “Nah… listen,” he said. “That’s not real. You’re blaming yourself for killing that planet, but the truth is, it was doomed anyway. The Hunter is just speeding things up by a few days, that’s all.”

  Dalton cackled.

  “Is that right?” he asked. “Think again. We trained the AI on that ship to hate the friend signal, rather than avoid it. If we’d left well enough alone, it would have eaten every other planet in this system, burped, then moved on to fresh game somewhere else.”

  I listened to this exchange, but I didn’t join in their conversation. I was frowning, thinking hard. There had to be a way out of this.

  “Captain?” Chang called out several minutes later.

  “What have you got?” I asked him.

  “A rift. Behind us—someone has just come into the system.”

  I looked at his data, and I came to a fast decision.

  “Helm, engines reverse,” I said. “Decelerate at full-power. Give me some distance between the Hunter and our ship, Dalton.”

  “Now you’re talking, Captain!” Dalton said, making the vessel shiver as we slowed down and stopped tagging along behind the Hunter.

  “Miller, as soon as we’re out of range, phase in. Gwen, the minute we do, hail that ship.”

  “On it,” Miller said, putting his hands on his console.

  We waited tensely. My crew had fallen quiet again when they’d heard we were phasing back in. They’d thought they were in the clear, but now they weren’t so sure. I knew what was going through their minds: Blake is never going to be happy until we’re all dead.

  After several painful minutes, Miller killed the phasing system. We were in normal space a moment later. Gwen hailed the ship that was behind us, and she looked surprised when the channel was accepted.

  “It’s Killer sir,” she said, looking at me. “Ursahn wants to speak to you.”

  I used my sym and talked to her quickly. I filled her in on the situation, and I told her how we might be able to save Gondwana.

  Right from the start, she was against the idea.

  “Captain Blake,” she said. “You are still part of my task force. I came back as a matter of honor, to retrieve your ship. The Rebel Fleet will be stronger with you among us.”

  “Listen to me—” I said.

  “No, you listen to me. Come alongside my ship and join my formation. My ship will form a rift, and we will jump out of this doomed system.”

  It was reasonable—even inevitable. But I didn’t want to give up on those gentle people down there.

  “Message received,” I said. “Message understood. We’ve sustained damage, however. Please move to our position so we can exit the system more quickly.”

  Ursahn hesitated, then agreed.

  The moment she was out of my head, I turned to Dalton. “Chase that Hunter. Don’t make it look obvious. Mia?”

  She sat up suddenly.

  “Warm up your gun,” I said. “We’re going to need it one more time.”

  Happily, she did as I asked.

  =63=

  We caught up with the Hunter about an hour later. The moment we were within our maximum range I ordered Mia to shoot the huge vessel in the ass.

  “Captain,” Miller said, “I must point out that we can’t do any damage at all at this range. We can’t even knock down a single shield.”

  “I’m aware of that, Ensign. That’s not our purpose.”

  “What are we doing then?” Gwen asked. “Pissing it off?”

  I pointed a finger at her and nodded. “You’ve got it.”

  Mia fired about then without further orders. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was attacking things.

  A shot of heavy radiation lanced out, traveling for several seconds before
it splashed harmlessly over the enemy exhaust port.

  “I targeted the same one as last time,” Mia said, smiling.

  “The Hunter is slowing down,” Chang warned.

  We watched tensely for a moment.

  “Hit it again, Mia.”

  She did so, but she looked a little worried. She knew she couldn’t do any damage at this range.

  The shot flew true, however, and made the enemy shielding flash and buzz momentarily.

  “It’s changing course, Captain,” Chang said, “coming about.”

  “Perfect. Dalton, reverse course and run for Killer.”

  Miller cleared his throat. “Captain? Should I engage the phasing system?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “If we do that, we’ll lose it again.”

  They were all tense, but they didn’t complain further. We ran, first decelerating then heading back the other way. After some time passed, we got a call from Ursahn.

  “Don’t think I didn’t observe your actions, Blake,” she told me, speaking in my head.

  “Sorry, Captain?” I asked. “I’m heading back to rendezvous with Killer. Our ETA is—”

  “Belay that excrement!” she boomed at me. “You disobeyed an order, and I’m considering leaving you here.”

  “That is your prerogative, Captain,” I said. “But we will reach your position in about twenty minutes—I suggest you form a rift now, whether you intend to run from battle or not.”

  “Run from battle?” she sputtered. “What’s this? Insults on top of injuries? You suggest I’m a coward?”

  “I’m only making observations, sir. Your ship is leaving this system, while mine is engaged in battle against an enemy. True, that enemy appears to be large and frightening. There’s no shame in running under such circumstances. No shame at all.”

  Ursahn became increasingly irate as I spoke these words. No warrior among her people liked to be told they were cowards—hell, no one else did, either.

  “It’s not cowardice if you can’t defeat a foe,” she said, displaying an alarming number of large, pointed teeth.

  “We can defeat the Hunter. Not directly, but we can engineer its demise.”