Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  Sam stopped and looked at the faces of twenty-nine ship captains, four of whom he knew: Larry Goldjune of Puebla, his face an expressionless mask, Kropotkin of USS Arleux, Ranjha of HMS Exeter, and of course Rockaway of the Fitz. He saw captains and flag officers from four Human, two Varoki, one Zaschaan, and one Katami navies, and he had to swallow the lump in his throat. This mix of species and nationalities had never before gone into battle together. It took a common enemy, a terrible enemy, to force it, but it was here, it was happening, and he wondered where it would lead.

  “I just took a moment to look over all of your faces, and you should do the same. Some of us won’t be alive in two hours, perhaps a lot of us, but what we’re about to do together makes us brothers and sisters. I hope that whoever of us survives, and whatever comes after today, we all remember these two hours. Now Admiral Stevens has a few words for you.”

  But as Stevens rose, the hologram flickered and then became heavily pixilated. The background noise took on the sound of loud, uneven static.

  “Bitka, where’d you go?” Stevens asked, looking directly at Sam.

  “I’m still here sir,” Sam answered, but the confused look on the admiral’s face suggested Sam’s hologram was no longer visible.

  “Captain Rockaway,” Sam transmitted on his commlink. “Is something wrong with our tight beam transmitter?”

  Negative, Bitka. We’re picking up some electromagnetic radiation from the Troatta fleet. It looks like directional ECM jamming. We’re not in their jamming arc, and probably too far away to have much effect on us anyway, but it’s flooding the receivers on the fleet. We can pick up their transmissions, but they can’t receive from us.

  Admiral Cedric Goldjune felt the vibration of his commlink and opened the channel. “Yes?”

  “Sir, I have a holocon request from Senator Ramirez y Sesma. Are you in?”

  “Patch him through.” Cedric sat back and waited for the connection. What did the senator want now? They couldn’t make any sort of move until they knew what the outcome of the fleet action was. Cedric didn’t have a lot of faith in Stevens’ ability to win this fight, especially considering what a mishmash of ships he had to work with. Still, they didn’t lose anything by waiting. Maybe Ramirez y Sesma had found out something useful about the Varoki special envoy. The senator’s image materialized in Cedric’s office. He looked upset.

  “Good morning, Senator. What can I do for you?”

  “Explain to me why you didn’t see fit to tell me that your Captain Bitka had returned.”

  Cedric stared at him for a moment but tried to hide his surprise. Bitka back? What sort of crazy rumors had the senator been listening to?

  “That’s impossible, Senator. Captain Bitka is still a prisoner of the Guardians back in the Destination system.”

  “Are you lying to me?” the senator said. “Or can it be you don’t know yourself? I have it from a reliable source that, as we speak, Captain Bitka is with your battle fleet and is serving as the planning officer for Admiral Stevens.”

  “Bullshit! That’s crazy talk. That’s . . . wait, let me pull up First Fleet’s staff roster. We’ll see who the N-5 is.” Cedric touched the smart surface of his desk, searched for the latest update of the staff roster, and opened it. N-5 Planning Officer: Lieutenant Commander Bitka, Samuel M.

  Cedric felt the room sway around him. How could this be? Was it a mistake? A joke? How could it happen and Stevens not tell him? He felt his face grow warm with a mixture of shame and anger. Stevens had fucked him! He didn’t know how or why yet, but he’d done it. Gordo Stevens!

  The senator’s hologram disappeared.

  Ninety minutes later, Sam felt unsettled, nervous, and at first he wasn’t sure why. This was more than pre-battle jitters. He felt a growing anxiety and sense of helplessness he had never before felt on the eve of battle. Part of it was they still did not have workable jump drives. The extra ten hours had not been enough. That was part of it, but not all. Then he realized what it was: this was the first time he had prepared to enter battle when he was not in command of a ship. He was just a staff wonk, a passenger. He hadn’t realized the extent the responsibility of command had distracted his thoughts from his own personal danger—not that there was much of that, sitting in K’tok orbit.

  Maybe he should have asked for a command, but which one? They sure weren’t going to give a cruiser to a brevetted lieutenant commander. Maybe the Bay. Why not? It was there in the task force, along with its sister ship USS Spratley Islands. Everything with a coil gun or a missile rack was. Too late to ask now and besides, he’d heard good things about Beauchamp, its new skipper. Instead he sat in the TAC One chair on the Fitz’s bridge.

  “Captain,” Chief Turnbull, the senior sensor tech, reported, “USS Puebla is accelerating harder than the tactical plan calls for.”

  Sam shifted the view on his workstation display and saw the heat signature of Puebla’s fusion drive, and the shifting length and angle of its course vector. Was Goldjune bugging out?

  “What the hell?” Rockaway said. “What’s he up to, Bitka?”

  “No idea, Ma’am.”

  Sam watched Puebla continue to accelerate. It wasn’t running away.

  “Crazy son of a bitch,” Rockaway said. “Stevens will have Goldjune’s ass, if he lives through this.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Sam said. “If he lives, Larry will use the ECM jamming for cover. No direction from the admiral due to the comm blackout so Larry acted on his own initiative. Trust me, nobody who survives this fight is going to get in trouble for running toward the Troatta.”

  She turned and looked at him, her expression cautious. “If he survives.”

  Yeah, Sam thought. And if he didn’t survive this stupid stunt, he’ll have taken Sam’s old crew with him—Moe Rice, Marina Filipenko, Rosemary Hennessey, all the others. Elise Delacroix, Chief Menzies’ fiancé, was out there on Puebla, too. The next hour was going to be tough for her to sit through.

  “Range from the Troatta to Task Force Eleven has closed to one hundred nine thousand kilometers,” Chief Turnbull reported. “One minute to their firing point. Um . . . energy spike from enemy battle line,” he added. “May be accelerators firing.”

  Rockaway turned and looked at Sam. “Too far out for meson guns. You think they’re firing sand?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Task Force is firing its coil-launched missiles,” Turnbull reported.

  In Task Force Eleven all the coil gun ships were US Navy: two General-class heavy cruisers, two assault transports, and one beat-up destroyer, USS Arleux. The other five cruisers in the task force would join in with their missile racks once the decoy cloud was on its way, as would the three Varoki cruisers, now several thousand kilometers off their port quarter.

  Rockaway turned and began talking on her commlink. At the same time Sam’s own commlink vibrated. He squinted and saw the ID tag for Lieutenant Commander Nightingale, head of the jump drive working group.

  “Bob, I hope this is good news.”

  We’ve got the code. We’re ready to transmit.

  “Do it!”

  Sam bumped Rockaway’s shoulder, who turned from her conversation with a scowl. Sam gave her the thumbs up sign and her face broke into a broad grin.

  “Now we’ll show those bastards what we can do,” she said. “COM, as soon as you have a complete signal package from K’tok, pass it to TAC and engineering. TAC, feed that package to our missile carriers as soon as you have it.”

  “Troatta fleet is changing formation,” Turnbull reported. “One squadron turning to face Puebla, two turning to face Task Force Eleven. The Task Force Eleven ships with missile racks have opened fire. Thirty-two hot missiles outbound.”

  Sam checked the battle clock: forty minutes. Jesus, where had the time gone?

  “All Troatta ships maneuvering,” Chief Turnbull said, “have turned to one seven zero degrees relative, angle on their bows forty-two degrees.”

 
“They must have picked up the incoming buckshot from the Varoki task group and are turning to face,” Sam said.

  “Warhead detonations,” Turnbull said, and Sam could see them on the situation model on his workstation, blotting out the Troatta battle fleet but also blotting out the task force’s own missiles from the Troatta view. These first missiles had detonated before they were in range, to mask the ones coming behind them.

  Rockaway stared at the large tactical monitor and shook her head.

  “Look at Task Force Twelve. Kittyhawk has released her destroyers. Why? She’s supposed to jump with them in-cradle, come out behind the Troatta, and then release the boats.”

  Sam looked and then understood.

  “Oh shit! The ECM jamming. They can’t receive the jump descrambler code. The Troatta are jamming the hell out of them, so none of them have their jump drives up. They’re back to a head-on attack and just try to plow through that wall of sand and meson gun fire.”

  “Oh my god,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “But we’re still in business.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Moments later, on board Troatta Ship One-Two-One

  6 October 2134

  Tatak-who-had-been-Kakusa grew increasingly uneasy. Using the stardust weapon as a shield against their hellstars was a brilliant innovation by Y’Areez, and it also seemed to disrupt the formation ahead of them as it scattered in three directions to escape the dust-which-kills. But then they had detected approaching enemy stardust and the entire fleet had turned toward it to deploy their anti-dust armor. But that had meant that the golden squadron, in which Tatak/Kakusa’s Ship One-Two-One was the down-weakside vessel, had had to turn away from their own targets, the enemy squadron approaching from the system’s large gas world. There would be time to turn back after the dust-that-kills had passed, but still, she felt the situation was becoming confused.

  Helm, have we been reinforced from home? The Ship asked.

  “No, Ship. Why do you wonder this?”

  There is a jump emergence signature within our formation.

  Tatak/Kakusa brought up the close tactical display and saw the red hostile signature between the lead squadron and the reserve, and then saw the reserve sweep by it, too soon to react to it. The red signature then became five red signatures.

  Kakusa nearly took control of the ship and turned it to face the new contacts, but she did not. The dust still came. It was a known threat. These were unknown, and how could they be hostile? P’Daan and Y’Areez had taken the life from the enemy’s star drives.

  And then the threat became known, as four red dots turned into rapidly blooming white globes of star-hot plasma. Hellstars!

  Sam checked the clock: forty-five minutes.

  “Second jump emergence inside the Troatta formation,” Turnbull said.

  “What sort of damage are we seeing?” Captain Rockaway asked.

  Sam had been checking the sensor reports, which were faint at this range anyway, and badly garbled by some of their own warhead detonations and the jamming, but he knew the warheads were hurting them. “Ma’am, our first package of four warheads definitely left a mark. Two of their ships are completely off-line, cooling and not firing their meson guns. I think we have probably a dozen more hits, but no way to assess damage.”

  “There goes the second cluster,” Turnbull said and Sam saw four more hot radioactive debris clouds mushroom seemingly in the middle of the Troatta fleet, and then saw one of the Troatta ships break in half.

  “That is damned good shooting, Bitka,” Rockaway said. “What are those courier missiles running these days? About a half-billion dollars each?”

  “A lot less than one of our ships, Ma’am. Sure as hell less than what it takes to build one of those Troatta battleships.”

  “Well, I have to hand it to you, Bitka, you earned your pay the day you thought to strap four Mark Fives to a jump courier missile and throw it at them through J-space. I just hope it’s going to be enough.”

  “The task force’s own missiles are entering their meson gun range, sir,” Turnbull said. “They’re taking scattered fire, but some of the Troatta ships are reversing direction, to fire to the stern, and two squadrons are turning back toward Task Force Twelve. Their missiles are getting close as well. Whoa! What the hell?”

  What the normally unflappable chief reacted to was a very large ball of white-hot energy in the middle of the Troatta formation, which momentarily obscured the entire central squadron. Sam immediately knew what happened.

  “Annihilation event,” Sam said. “Our third jump missile must have come out right inside a Troatta ship.”

  “All right!” Rockaway said.

  Sam felt a surge of excitement as well, but he knew they weren’t home free, far from it.

  “Incoming tightbeam from Task Force Eleven Actual,” the communication officer to Rockaway’s right called out. “Text reads: To USS Kennedy from COMKTOKFLEET. We cannot receive but assume you can as you have operational jump missiles. We are approaching heavy wall of high velocity sand, expect high damage rate from transit same. Pour on the missile fire. Good hunting. Signed, Stevens.”

  “You heard the man,” Rockaway said, and as she did the tactical screen lit up with a ripple of exploding fusion warheads.

  “Fourth cluster detonating,” Turnbull reported.

  There were still a lot of Troatta ships out there and from what Stevens had said, the taskforce was taking a beating. This wasn’t going to work. Sam pinged Menzies on the commlink.

  Sir? She answered.

  “Check firing,” he ordered.

  Aye, aye, sir. Check firing.

  Rockaway turned to him, eyebrows coming together in part question, part challenge.

  “I know,” Sam said, “But this isn’t working. We’re hurting them but not enough to stop them. They are going to just keep on going and then fry K’tok.”

  “Well . . . what the hell do you suggest?”

  “You said it yourself earlier: kill that son of a bitch. Retarget our last two clusters. We can’t see much anymore, but we need to hit the trailing ships, not the leading ones. That’s where P’Daan is. Chop the head off the snake . . . or in this case the tail.”

  “Okay, we’ll try it. TAC, feed the targeting information for the trailing Troatta squadron to Chief Menzies.”

  “Aye, aye, Ma’am,” Turnbull answered as Sam triggered his commlink again.

  “Chief Menzies, new targeting information coming. Load it and fire our last two clusters in succession.”

  Tatak-who-had-been-Kakusa had seen the disaster of the annihilation event on her tactical display, had seen the core Ship of the Silver Squadron become a miniature sun, saw the damage to the other five Ships in the squadron, one of them broken in half, one dark and without power, and the other three damaged to some degree. The reserve would normally have moved forward to fill the gap, but the reserve did not accelerate. The reserve of four Ships consisted of the command vessels of P’Daan and Y’Areez and their two escorts, and Tatak/Kakusa did not expect them to accelerate. Guardians do not become directly involved in the killing.

  Then the hellstars had come again, but this time slashing at the reserve squadron. When the screens cleared, one Ship was dark and the other three showed signs of damage.

  Helm, the Fleet Guide is sending a holomessage.

  “Very well, Ship.”

  The Fleet Guide, painted nightshade the same as interlocutors because he was privileged to speak for Y’Areez, appeared in her bridge, as he did on other bridges at the same time.

  “Iron Squadron, engage the enemy force to trailing. All other squadrons close formation and engage the enemy force coming from the target world. Defeat them and our path is clear. Concentrate all fire on the enemy hellstar missiles, even after the enemy ships are within range. The hellstars are the greater hazard. Leave the enemy ships to the stardust.”

  He disappeared from her bridge, and then two of the four Ships of the res
erve task force did so as well, bending space to wink out of existence here, and materialize presumably at the fleet rally position. One remained, other than the dark wreck. This must be the second escort vessel, left behind by the two departing god-Ships.

  Helm, the Fleet Vice-Guide is sending a holomessage.

  The Vice-Guide? He served P’Daan. Had Y’Areez left and P’Daan stayed?

  The Nightshade-painted Vice-Guide appeared on her bridge and spoke.

  “Continue as ordered. The God P’Daan accompanies us and shares our fate. Never before has a Troatta fleet been so honored. Fight, and know he watches.”

  Fight? What was left? All six Ships of the Iron Squadron responded to the Guide’s order. Of the twenty-four Ships in the remaining line squadrons, only seventeen still showed on her tactical screen as under power and capable of maneuver. Still, seventeen Ships made a formidable force. The battle was not lost unless the enemy had more of the space-bending hellstars which had nearly torn their formation apart, but she had not seen any more for several minutes. Perhaps they had survived the worst the enemy had to offer. Perhaps Y’Areez had been too hasty in fleeing. She would like to see how he reacted to a battle lost under his command and then won back in his absence, commanded by the inept P’Daan. Oh yes, that would be a thing to see.

  She felt the slight acceleration from side to side as the Ship swung its nose to engage target after target with the meson gun. Tatak/Kakusa could not really tell how much damage they were doing to the swarm of hellstars. It was hard to know how many of their targets were genuine missiles and how many were decoys, harder still to tell which were anything but twisted metal after passing through the stardust, and the occasional detonations of hellstars clouded her sensor picture. The enemy ships had crossed the outer boundary of their engagement range but the Fleet Guide was correct: kill the hellstars first. There would be time to deal with their ships soon enough.