by Adam Gaffen
“Sweet Titania save us.”
“OKAY, BOYS AND GIRLS, now’s when we earn our pay,” Daniela said over the squadron frequency. “We’re outnumbered and they’re bigger, but they’re also slower. Split into two-ship formations and stick to your wingman; they’ll cover your six so you can kill those bastards before they kill you. Ashlyn, you and Red Squadron hang back and take on any leakers.”
“Got it, boss.”
“Game faces on.” She closed the channel. “Boomer. Capacitors?”
“One hundred percent.”
She clicked to her wingman.
“Me Up, we’re going to start whittling them down at 10 kiloklicks.”
“How close are you planning to take us in?” asked the Ensign.
“Knife fighting range.”
“Jesus,” he said, echoed by Boomer’s “Lords of Kobol watch over us.”
Then they were into the fray, the first Direwolf to engage.
The first Artemis fighter they tagged staggered but didn’t stop coming. She lined up for another shot, targeting the center of the vaguely plus-shaped ship.
“Tone. Firing.”
This shot had more effect; the accel fell off sharply, down to half it had been pulling before, but still it came on.
“I’m going for an up-the-kilt shot,” she commed to Me Up.
“Got your back.”
She threw her Direwolf into a high-speed turn as she flashed past the fighter, noting in passing the cockpit.
“All ships, the cockpit is forward. Adjust aim accordingly,” she commed as she slewed around, her OAS firing hard, Me Up close behind.
She pulled back on her throttle, cutting her speed advantage down and giving her a more stable platform. As the seconds and kilometers ticked away she pulled every detail from her sensors she could about her opponent. Two engines, stubby sort-of wings, and –
“Missile launch!” Boomer announced.
“Vampire, vampire!” she yelled into the net. “They pack missiles!”
Around her her pilots were dying in silence, their deaths punctuated only by a sudden cessation of signal as the combination of lasers and missiles caught them by surprise. She couldn’t note them, though, staying focused on her target even as the missiles completed their turn to head directly at her.
“Tone. Firing.”
This time there was no doubt of her fire’s effectiveness; the twin lasers bore in through the engines, into the body of the fighter, and through. Her target, dead or crippled it didn’t matter, went tumbling into deep space.
The missiles her now-dead opponent had launched were still picking up speed and had definitely locked onto her ship. She pushed the throttle to full military power and pulled back on the joystick, launching herself away from the threat.
Me Up, following only a few kilometers back, wasn’t as quick on the stick. In a matter of seconds he’d been blotted from the sky.
THE WOLVES COULD SEE the battle raging overhead but were in no position to intervene, much as it pained them. They’d finally closed to within a handful of kilometers from the surface and were screaming across it towards their target.
Kendra, though, could do something.
“Hopalong,” she commed.
“Go.”
“You’re on your own.”
“Kinda figured. Get some back, Admiral.”
“Will do.”
She changed course yet again and returned to her weapons checklist.
“Kendra, what are you doing?”
“The Wolves are fine, but the Direwolves are getting hammered. I’m going to see if I can cut the odds some.”
“Kendra, this isn’t what I signed up for!”
She felt a pang at the statement. “True. But right now I’m in the best position to do anything to help.”
“Kendra, Admiral Whitmore’s comming,” said Brie.
“Davie, I’m busy.”
“I noticed. So are we. The UE has launched the ships you were renovating for them.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I wish. We have a little time but they’re on an intercept course for Njord.”
“Evacuate –”
“How? Every mobile unit I have is engaged, and Defiant is half torn apart for maintenance. Hecate’s trying to patch her up, but she might hold four hundred, really uncomfortably. We’ve got close to forty thousand people aboard.”
“Averroes.”
“What about him?”
“Let him take out the missiles and redeploy the D2 to take out the threat from astern. They’re just hulls, Davie, nothing more.”
“There’s a whole bunch of them, Kendra.”
“Then stop arguing and redirect Averroes! The Wolves are about two minutes from target. If they can get to the Empress, we can end this thing fast. We just need to hold on until then.”
Kendra could almost see the look of consideration on Davie’s face.
“Right. Don’t get yourself killed, Kendra.”
“Don’t you get dead either.”
“I’ve no plans to. Out.” She turned in her seat to face Cass.
“Sweetheart, we’ve got to do this.”
Her answer was full of bitterness. “I know. I hate it, but it’s because I feel helpless back here.”
“Brie?”
“Kendra.”
“Walk Cass through basic sensor operations.”
“Certainly.”
“Cass, I’ve got a blind spot on my six. Brie and I can’t cover it, but you can.”
Buoyed somewhat by the thought of doing something, Cass said, “I can do that. Pity you don’t have rear-facing weapons, I could do more.”
“Next generation. Now hang on.”
“ORDERS FROM ADMIRAL Whitmore,” said Ensign Bonagua from Communications. “’Redeploy to intercept targets’, and she gives us coordinates.”
“Send the coordinates to Glover.”
“Sir.” A brief pause. “Sent.”
“Glover. How far?”
“Twenty million kilometers, plus or minus,” Glover replied.
“Warp it is. Can’t waste time,” Newling said. “Taz, bring the warp drive online.”
“Thirty seconds, Captain,” she said from her station.
“Ensign Glover, when the drive is online, engage and run us up to warp four.”
Good as her word, Taz had the drive primed in under thirty seconds and she passed the information to Glover. He, in turn, triggered the course he’d laid in.
The warp drive received its command and began to spool up to the ordered power. The Averroes had a Carnahan drive, it having been decided impractical to replace it with a newer Roberts-style drive, and so produced a much larger field. More importantly the tachyon radiation produced by the drive spread outward at FTL speeds, priming the satellites Artemis had emplaced.
Their generators primed to spin up.
The Averroes, per Federation procedure, eased into warp and began to accelerate. As it accelerated the field grew larger. When they passed the first satellite the field was nearly two thousand kilometers across, easily engulfing satellites on both sides. The satellites were already primed to react and their generators crackled to life. Massive static warp fields popped into existence, just catching the back edge of the field from the Averroes as it streaked through a trap it didn’t know existed.
That fleeting contact, though, was sufficient.
The warp fields collapsed catastrophically, leaving the accumulated energy in the generators no place to go.
The warp satellites simply vanished.
A fraction of a second later Averroes, Newling, Cantillo, Mickey, Taz, and the rest of the crew were nothing more than the universe’s brightest, and briefest, funeral pyre.
Then nothing.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tycho Under; Cislunar Space; Habitat Njord; Artemis City
Stardate 12009.14
The gas crept through the cubic, inextricably mixed with the air and being pulled into
everyone’s lungs.
Initial onset of symptoms is deceptively mild: reddened skin and fever, dizziness, and blurred vision. The onset of the more serious symptoms depended on the dose inhaled.
The Free Luna headquarters was tapped into one of the primary air ducts; the BZ concentration quickly rose past the LD50 levels.
Autumn missed the fever but was suddenly struck by a wave of dizziness which nearly knocked her off her feet.
“Mistress Newling!” cried one of her staff, and she felt arms wrap around her from both sides.
“I’m fine,” she protested, trying to push the hands away. “Just tired.”
“Then you should sit down, Mistress,” said a voice. A male one. Damn, why couldn’t she remember his name? It was on the tip of her tongue. Her protests ignored she was guided to a seat.
This was better. Much better. Maybe she should just sit for a bit.
Pity Nicole wasn’t here. Where was Nicole?
Oh, right.
The raid.
Why wasn’t Sharon leading it? Or Nour?
And where had Caitlin disappeared to?
“DIANA, WHAT HAPPENED?” Whitmore demanded as the glare from the destruction of the Averroes faded from the exterior views.
“Unknown, Admiral. Analysis of data is underway.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Whitmore amended. “Forget the Martian fleet; they’re too far away to be any threat right now. Continue to move the D2 to support the conversions. Rob, bring up the lasers. We’re going to have to take care of them on our own. Prioritize the largest ships.”
Two of the six primary lasers could bear on the incoming ships; at six petawatts each, they had power to spare. The problem, as Whitmore saw it, was three-fold. First, lasers were lightspeed weapons, and even though their targets were less than half a light-second away, they were also closing the gap at 200 KPS. They were coming in stupid, on straight-line, least-time courses, but they were still changing positions. Second, they were coming in straight, which meant they were presenting the smallest possible cross-section for the lasers to target. Admittedly this was still tens of meters, but meters at multiple thousands of kilometers meant a tiny misalignment would result in a miss.
Both of these concerns paled in comparison with the final one: lasers didn’t work the way Kendra’s old ‘movies’ showed them to work. When you hit a target with a laser, especially with as much energy as they could produce, there wasn’t typically an explosion unless an energy-sensitive volatile was ruptured. No, what you got was a hole the size of the beam; in Njord’s case, four centimeters wide.
One solution was what Shooting Star had done to the Worden: hold a position and allow the target to pass through your laser, essentially turning it into an energy knife. That was only effective if there was lateral movement, and while the lasers could be aimed the precision needed to ‘slice’ through the hulls effectively was staggering. Possibly beyond even Diana’s capabilities.
What it essentially boiled down to was going to be how quickly Njord could cripple the engines on the ships and whether it would be sufficient to knock them off-course.
“Lasers ready.”
“Fire as you bear.”
The Miller and Kennedy were by far the largest targets; the two Ford-class aircraft carriers were massive, their hull 97 meters at the widest point and measuring 86 meters from superstructure to keel. Additions to the landing deck had extended them from the original 330 meters to almost 400. They were difficult to miss.
Neither laser did.
The outer layers of the hull, a six-centimeter layer of Kevlar, vaporized almost instantly, while the steel beneath took little more time. But then the beam cut off; they had been built to fire in half-second bursts, not continuously, so Diana had to adjust her aim as they went through their brief cooling cycle. Then they fired again.
And again.
And again.
“Admiral, we don’t seem to be having an effect,” O’Toole reported from Diana’s feeds.
He was correct. The bow of both ships were pocked by a dozen holes, the edges still glowing faintly from the heat transfer, but their projected paths were still locked onto Njord.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Whitmore said.
“Continuous fire? Keep pouring energy into them until we punch through the other side?” opined Colona.
“Diana?”
“The longest I can maintain continuous fire at full power is 9.3 seconds before requiring cooling.”
“Do it,” Whitmore ordered.
“Firing.” An eternity later, which happened to be less than ten seconds, Diana said, “Cooling. Assessing damage. We do not have penetration.”
“Damn. Can you hit the same spots? Drill further in?”
“I can hit the same entry points, yes, but the deeper into the hull the laser penetrates the further askew the beam will be from the previous shot.”
“Oak and ash. It was worth trying, Colona. Anyone else?”
“Lightning missiles,” said Pipher. “They are armed with fission warheads and can be selectively dialed up to fifty kilotons yield, which should be sufficient to destroy most of them.”
“They’re in range,” McKnight said. “Debris?”
“My thoughts too,” Whitmore agreed. “But we can probably survive multi-kilogram chunks of steel better than thousands of tons of ship. Firing solutions, people. Two missiles per ship, double that for the largest ones, and then prepare a second salvo. Move!”
DANIELA DIDN’T KNOW how she was still alive, let alone fighting, but she was. Her topside engine was dead, not from enemy fire but from her own overexertion. She’d simply blown it out, something neither she nor Boomer thought was possible, and now was limited to 400 g acceleration. What was worse was the damage to her compensators. That 400, which should have only been transmitted to her as about 3, now felt like double that. But she still had her lasers and she’d be damned if she couldn’t outfly these pricks.
She also still had seventeen of her Direwolves, including the Admiral, Locksmith, and Ashlyn. If she were being honest, it was the Admiral who’d made the difference between where they were now and what looked to be a total annihilation. Kendra might not know jack about flying formation but Daniela couldn’t fault her fighting abilities. She pushed her Mark II past any sane limit, willing the fighter to execute maneuvers which should have sent her tumbling into the black. And then she did it again.
And again.
And again.
It still hadn’t stopped the carnage, her sudden savage appearance, but it had slowed it, given the battered squadrons a chance to regroup and rally. She couldn’t help counting the cost, though. Too many friends.
Zero was gone; a laser burst to her canopy cut her last transmission of defiance off mid-yell.
Bun-Bun. Tunnel Vision. Gold, Wrong Way, Rat, Doc. All of them and more, a total of 32 of the 50 in the combined squadrons. Those left were still fighting, even if some, like Frak Me, were flying on a single engine, or were relying on their suit because their enviro systems were dead, like Beaver. She wasn’t sure how much longer it could last, though, as there were still 40 of the tough Artemesian fighters left.
And D2 wasn’t any help, not at the moment. Oh, they’d arrived, but had immediately turned to assist the Federation’s local fleet. She didn’t blame them; each capital ship carried a crew of at least fifty, and the math made sense. But they’d been hammered before the D2 was fully engaged. Even discounting the loss of the Averroes, the only ship left fighting was the frigate Young. The Roosa and Bean were gone, and the Dick, no, after this battle she ought to be polite. The BonHomme Richard was a wreck, drifting, her forward third gone, blasted away by Huygens missile near-miss.
They’d earned an honor guard, hammering the Union ships mercilessly until they’d been overcome one by one. The Union ships were nearly as badly off, down to a single Gemini, two Apollos, and two Copernicuses. One other Copernicus was adrift as well but showed signs of returning to the f
ray.
It was keeping D2 busy.
But the Wolves were on the ground and had disgorged their troops, and now Hopalong was on the comm.
“Danni, we’re clear. What say we sucker these jerks?”
“What’s your plan?” She jerked the stick hard to the left, barely avoiding a chunk of debris the size of a Wolf. The fighter on her tail, alas, also managed to avoid it and remained in pursuit.
“Simple, you break through their lines and lead ‘em to the surface. We’ll power upwards and interpenetrate. Catch ‘em by surprise.”
“There’s only sixteen of you, and they’re faster.” That had been a nasty shock, when the first of them had jumped from 200 to 250 g.
“Yup. Just the way we like it.”
“You’re crazy, but what the hell. We’re not going to win showing them our tails.”
“See you in a minute.”
“Direwolves, head for Luna. The Wolves have cooked up a little surprise.”
One by one her pilots acknowledged the order, Commander Cassidy calling in for 1314, though she noted Kendra took an extra moment to finish off the fighter she’d been pursuing before joining the remains of the squadrons.
They were still outnumbered; the fighters had paired up, so there were two on each Direwolf. One led the pursuit with the second hanging back some kilometers, positioned to cut the chord should their target attempt to veer away. It was a tactic Daniela and Ashlyn had drilled into their own pilots and it galled to see it used against them.
Drifter was caught by a pair of missiles, their firing delayed just enough so his evasive maneuvers against the first brought him directly into the second. The rest of the Direwolves held on; then it was the Wolves’ turn.
The Artemis fighters, hyperfocused on the apparently-fleeing Direwolves, never noticed the shuttles.
The closing speed was measured in dozens of kilometers per second, but even that wasn’t enough to spare them. The Wolves’ phased particle emitters might be short-legged but they packed a physical punch lasers couldn’t. Sixteen Wolves fired, sixteen Wolves hit, and twelve fighters were removed from the equation, either with dead pilots or dead controls.
