It was a nightmare. The enemy threw together three formations of ships to harass us, each formation consisting of a patrol cruiser accompanied by a pair of destroyers. The groups of warships took turns running at us, firing weapons and dodging away. Behind us in relentless pursuit, the heavy cruisers coordinated their railguns to create a shotgun blast effect, so even as Valkyrie turned to dodge the salvos, we couldn’t escape all of the darts. Our aft shields were taking a pounding and the enemy knew it, concentrating their fire on our engineering section. Part of the enemy’s targeting of that area was a deliberate decision, and part of it was forced, because they were behind us.
We went into the fight with an initial velocity advantage of eleven kilometers per second, or forty thousand kilometers per hour. At eleven kps, we could cross the state of Texas from east to west in two minutes. On Earth, that sounds like a huge number. In space combat, it is nothing. Every second, we crawled only eleven klicks farther from the maser cannons that could shoot focused beams of high-energy photons at the speed of light.
Four minutes after we jumped in, the enemy had gotten their shit together and were accelerating hard after us, while Valkyrie’s mighty engines pushed us as hard as they could. It wasn’t enough. On the main display was a variety of information I could select from a menu, one number I focused on was relative velocity. It was down below ten kilometers per second. Our overall speed was increasing, the enemy was catching us. “Reed,” I demanded, “why aren’t we moving like a bat out of hell?”
“It’s not her fault, Joe,” Skippy answered. “We’ve got several problems working against us. The jump not only blew that drive, it ruptured power connections in the aft end of the ship. I’ve got bots working to feed more juice to the engines, but they can’t work on the power conduits while they’re hot. So, I’m shutting down the feeds one by one, which makes us even slower.”
“How long to restore full power?”
“I honestly don’t know yet, Joe. The bots haven’t finished assessing the damage. That’s another problem, we’ve already lost three bots to over-flash damage from railgun impacts. The shields are blocking the darts, but you know some of that kinetic energy is converted into heat that bleeds through to the hull. We’re taking a lot of hits, and the shield generators are dumping excess energy overboard. My bots are getting caught in the crossfire. Even the ones that don’t get hit can’t work as efficiently. The heat and vibration are also reducing the efficiency of the engines. But the worst problem for us are the field grid disruptors.”
“Shit!” I pounded the armrest with a fist. Reactionless engines worked by pulling on the grid that underlay local spacetime, and they relied on establishing a solid connection to that grid. The Maxolhx had a weapon that could make the grid vibrate so that an enemy ship’s connection became chaotic. That device was one of the exotic weapons Skippy couldn’t fix after we used the bagel slicer to create Valkyrie; the action of slamming closed an Elder wormhole played havoc with the device and we didn’t have any spare parts. “Ok, but those disruptors take a lot of power, right? And they only work at short range?”
“Correct. Two of the heavy cruisers are using most of their power output to feed their disruptors, that’s why they are not firing directed-energy weapons or railguns at us. As we get farther from those cruisers, the effect will fade. Also, the effect is in the shape of a cone focused on us and affects any ships in that cone. That is why the patrol cruisers are not getting close to us.”
“Bottom line, Skippy. How long until we get far enough from those heavy cruisers, so the disruptor effect is no longer slowing us down?”
“Unknown at this time, Joe. Hey, sorry! I don’t have enough info right now.”
“Colonel?” Simms caught my attention. “Your orders?”
I stared at her, and closed my mouth. What she had said was not important. What she had not said was important. She asked for revised orders. The unspoken subtext was ‘What else are we going to do, because this shit ain’t working’.
What else were we going to do? I had no idea. I didn’t know that we could do anything other than run and try to get away. Did we have other options? Not that I knew of.
“Stay the course,” I heard myself saying. In my mind, I heard myself shouting ‘LAME’ because that was true. Maybe we had a decent chance to get away. We had knocked two more patrol cruisers and three destroyers out of the battle, so the only ships harassing us were a single patrol cruiser with a destroyer on one side, and a pair of destroyers on the other side. Each formation of ships was continuing the tactic of dashing in, firing weapons and turning away. We were no longer turning to meet the threats, as that only slowed us down. “Skippy, how long until we can jump?”
“Right now, never,” he sighed. “We’re trapped in a damping field. The jump drive might be capable of a short transition within, oh, maybe ten minutes? A very short jump, I warn you, and I can’t guarantee where we will emerge. It doesn’t matter anyway, unless you can kill the ships projecting the damping field.”
We had tried that. Twice, when a formation of patrol cruiser and destroyers dashed in, we had turned to meet them, hoping to blast them out of existence and create a temporary gap in the damping field that saturated the area. No such luck. The overlapping fields were too strong. Because the creation of a jump wormhole was a delicate process, it was easy to disrupt. Damping fields didn’t require a lot of energy to be effective, and even after the ship generating the field was destroyed, the chaotic vibrations roiling through local spacetime kept echoing around.
Stay the course. That might have been the weakest thing I ever said. If we had a choice, I would have suggested doing something better.
Like I said, we were trapped in a nightmare. The heavy cruisers behind us were slowly getting closer, as they could accelerate hard in a straight line while our limping engines strained to push us along and duck out of the path of railgun darts. Plus we had to spin and weave through space, to avoid exposing the shields on one side of the ship to smart missiles that coordinated their actions. At one point early in the battle, Skippy counted eighty-seven missiles in flight, and those were just the enemy weapons. Eighty-seven also was just the number he could count, he estimated possibly another dozen out there somewhere that he had lost track of.
The only good news for us was that after initially letting fly missiles like they were going to expire unless they were used, the enemy changed tactics and only kept enough missiles in flight to harass us. They had seen how effective our point-defense system was, knocking missiles out of the sky like swatting flies. It helped that the first volley of missiles came in dumb, bunched together for maximum striking power but making them easy targets for our cannons. Exploding one missile sent shrapnel tearing into its companions, like killing multiple birds with one stone. After that first volley, the missiles coming at us were a mix of decoys, sensor jammers and ship-killers. We took only four direct hits during that phase of the battle, and none of those four happened close together. If we had taken two ship-killer impacts at the same time, that likely would have blown several shield generators and left our armor plating exposed. Valkyrie was a powerful ship but not invincible, and we were fighting the Maxolhx. A few months before, we would never have considered coming close to a single warship of that senior species. When the heavy cruisers fell behind beyond effective range of their deadly masers and antienergy pulse cannons, they changed tactics to harass us with their smaller ships, and the trailing cruisers launched only enough missiles to keep us dodging so we couldn’t keep a straight course away from them. In my judgement, they were keeping their large but limited supply of missiles for when Valkyrie had been trapped and could not escape.
So, all we could do was stay the course. Literally, stay on a course away from the heavy cruisers, a course that was taking us roughly toward the nearest star system. Without jumping, it would take us over a month to reach the orbit of the outermost planet, not that any of that mattered. The battle wasn’t going to last that
long, couldn’t last that long. Not even Valkyrie could continue generating and consuming power at combat rates for more than a few hours. Space combat is intense and battles tend to be short. We just had to tough it out and hope for the best. I figured the Universe owed us one anyway.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At seventeen minutes, forty-three seconds into the running battle, we took two railgun hits to a portside aft shield, then an antienergy beam struck the same area, and that shield generator went offline to reset. The more efficient power boosters Skippy had installed could feed far more power to the generators than the original units, and the extra capacity allowed the generators to cycle back on faster, but each generator still had a limited capacity to take abuse before burning out. That generator had reached its limit, and the cycle from reset to full power was an agonizing four point two seconds. A lot can happen in four seconds.
Three missiles that our sensors had lost track of saw their opportunity and burned hard at the exposed area of our hull, racing each other to claim the glory of a direct hit. One missile drew the short straw and sacrificed itself by exploding to blind our sensors, and the other two were detonated at point-blank range by our point-defense cannons. The warheads had blown as soon as the missile detected particle beams locking on, with the focused explosion sending jets of super-heated plasma to splash against the armor panels. If Valkyrie’s armor plating did not have a layer of reactive materials, the deadly jets of plasma would have burned through to cause havoc in the ship’s vital engineering section. The fact is, we got lucky. The reactive armor panels exploded outward, dispersing most of the plasma jets, and the hot material that did burn through severed power conduits that Skippy had already taken offline to work on the engines. Our luck wasn’t perfect, the missile impacts caused the damaged shield generator to cycle back to reset again, and when it came back on, its frequency was not coordinated with the generators on either side. Until Skippy could fix the damned thing, that shield could not rely on help from the rest of the network that surrounded and protected the ship. Did the enemy see that weakness? A maser beam aimed directly at that shield gave us the answer we didn’t want to hear.
Without being ordered to do anything, Reed saw the problem and slewed the ship in a tight turn so the bulk of the ship masked the exposed area where the shields were weak. On that side at that moment, we only had a destroyer and a patrol cruiser harassing us. According to the data provided by Skippy, the patrol cruiser had a railgun and the destroyer did not. “Simms,” I gestured wildly at the main display. “That patrol ship! Hit it with everything we’ve got.”
“Aye,” she acknowledged, and the main display lit up with bolts from our pulse cannon.
Something was wrong. While we concentrated fire on the cruiser, making it stagger in flight as its shields flared and flickered from absorbing hellish energies, the destroyer dodged aside, wary of our big guns. Then, instead of continuing a turn away, the little ship curved around so it was headed straight toward us.
No.
It wasn’t flying toward us, it was leading us a little. That ship was aiming for the point in space where Valkyrie would be when the destroyer got there.
It was going to ram us.
“XO!” I tried to rise out of my chair, held in place by nanofabric restraints that were smarter than I was.
“I see it,” Reed said before Simms could respond, skidding our fierce battlecruiser around in a tight turn. Valkyrie was a mighty ship, a heavy ship. It wasn’t a sports car or a fighter jet. In a turn, it was ponderous, momentum wanting to keep flying straight ahead.
Simms didn’t say anything, she just directed the weapons teams to switch their fire from the already-staggering cruiser to the suicidal destroyer. The same distortion field that prevented our engines from applying full thrust now slowed our turn away from the destroyer that had become a weapon. The half-dozen heavy cruisers altered course to close the gap, as Valkyrie was no longer running straight away from them. They were able to cut the corner and even if we survived the destroyer’s attack, the big guns of the cruisers would soon be within effective range again.
Having shot at the patrol cruiser, our antienergy pulse cannon needed to recharge and wouldn’t be available until it was too late. That left our railguns, maser and particle beam cannons, and the missiles I had been saving for a special occasion. “Simms, missiles are authorized. Weapons free. Kill that ship!”
Even with Valkyrie’s bulk, the launch of four missiles was felt as a slight shudder that was distinctively different from the shuddering as our shields fended off enemy fire. We hammered that little destroyer, which really was little compared to a Kristang ship of the same type. Maxolhx engineering was so advanced, they could pack everything a destroyer needed into a compact package, with a typical crew of only thirty rotten kitties managing the highly-automated warship.
Little, but powerful. That ship continued onward relentlessly under the concentrated fire of every weapon we could throw at it. The crew must have adjusted their shields on double-front, wrapping the aft shields around and over the forward energy fields. That left the destroyer’s flanks and engineering section vulnerable, a fact our smart missiles took advantage of immediately. They talked with each other and, after a brief argument that ended with three of the missiles calling the fourth one stupid and all of them getting into a shouting match that required Skippy to intervene, they attacked as a group from the destroyer’s port side. The first missile converted its warhead into a fragmentation chaff device that blew into a fireball eleven thousand kilometers from the target, temporarily blinding the destroyer’s sensors in that direction and allowing the three trailing missiles to match velocity and approach at the same time. By the time the destroyer’s point-defense system sensors recovered, our missiles were locked on and went to maximum acceleration.
Around that same time, our directed-energy cannons burned a small hole through the suicidal ship’s forward shields and the destroyer’s nose began melting and exploding. Pieces were flying outward as secondary explosions rocked the little ship. Something big blew up about fifty meters from the nose and-
The destroyer blew up.
That was not a good thing.
Our cannons had not done enough damage to make the ship explode, there were no missile magazines in that ship’s nose. Our three missiles were still racing at the target when with a single cry of ‘WTF?’ they were caught in the expanding fireball of the destroyer’s reactors and aft magazines all erupting at once. The explosions vaporized the rear section of the ship but, because the crew had dumped the stored energy of their jump drive capacitors, the forward section of the hull was shattered rather than being turned into subatomic particles. In the blink of an eye, the destroyer’s crew had turned their ship and themselves into shrapnel that was propelled forward by the force of the explosion.
“Reed!” I warned helplessly. She didn’t reply, her actions spoke for her. Our chief pilot was already trying to get our massive battlecruiser turned away from the deadly cone of shrapnel and the key word was ‘massive’. Valkyrie’s mass had considerable momentum that wanted us to go forward in a straight line, and that pain-in-the-ass law of physics wasn’t allowing us to veer away from danger fast enough. Parts of Valkyrie’s structure was made of exotic matter that had less mass than normal atoms that were created by stars, and that helped. We also had help from fields that reduced the effect of inertia acting on the ship’s regular mass. What help did we get from Isaac Newton? Zero. That guy was a jerk.
Valkyrie ducked downward, though ‘down’ has no real meaning in space. Reed judged our best chance to avoid getting smacked by the biggest chunks of destroyer stew was to turn ninety degrees from our prior flight path so that’s what she did, analyzing the trajectory of incoming debris and allowing it to impact along the ship’s ventral spine, where the structural frames were dense and strong.
We got smacked, hard. Valkyrie lurched as our shields deflected debris until the shield generators blinked o
ut from the onslaught. The four largest pieces of jagged debris flew above and below us, saving our battlecruiser from utter destruction. What we got hit with was bad enough, the speed of impact instantly turning the material into plasma that burned through our armor plating. The layer of reactive armor tried to help but in many cases, the computer controlling those panels decided to deactivate them, as the panels were bent inward and their detonation would have been directed at Valkyrie’s more delicate inner structure.
One hundred and seventy meters of our hull was caved in, with droplets of plasma splattering all the way to char part of the ship’s central frame. We lost two shield generators, six point-defense cannons, a railgun, and almost took a direct hit on a missile magazine. It was fortunate there were no missiles flying at us right then, because there was so much air and other crap venting from the rip in our hull, the sensors could not see through the cloud.
Oddly, on the bridge we did not feel any major effects from the impact. My chair did not rock side to side. Consoles did not explode in showers of sparks. Panels and cables did not cascade down from the ceiling. It felt like the ship was engaged in violent evasive maneuvering, which is what Reed was doing. For a split-second, I wondered if we had dodged a bullet.
Then the main display lit up like a Christmas tree, if you ever saw a Christmas tree with strings of yellow, orange and red lights. “Skippy! BLUF it for me!” I pleaded. There was too much information on the display for me to make sense of.
“Valkyrie can fly, Joe,” he snapped irritably. “We can’t take another hit in that area. I am extending shields to cover the gap, that leaves us thin. Reed, roll the ship to keep our ventral spine away from direct fire from those heavy cruisers.”
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 21
