Starship Doi

by Alex Deva

  "The what...?!" came the confused reply.

  Gaines muted ship-to-ship to speak on the intercom again:

  "Tac, find me an attitude where we can keep number one gun on the Monnet, and number two gun on the new bogey. Transfer to helm, announce and execute hard when ready." Then he unmuted the call.

  "Karl, you lying sack of shit, don't play idiot with me. You wanna talk to me about death? You ain't seen death yet."

  The cruiser yawed and rolled violently, pushing the crew hard into their restraints, and forcing Gaines to stop talking.

  "What are you doing, Steve?"

  "Fuck off," Gaines managed to blurt out, ending the conversation.

  XVII.

  A thunderous hail of large caliber bullets impacted the hull of the starship, at speeds nearly the same as their muzzle velocities, as they encountered no friction on their trajectory; nothing to slow them down except for the lunar gravity. Loud, formidable bangs resonated throughout the air-filled, empty rooms of the ship, as their attackers probed the exposed area, looking for a soft spot.

  Doina recoiled violently, almost as if she had been hit herself, and raised the static field instinctively. A flurry of coherent light beams erupted from the ship's hull as they automatically joined with each incoming bullet. Designed to defend the ship against micrometeors at near luminal speeds, the system had no problems coping with the incoming attack.

  "What's going on?!" asked Aram.

  "Stupid Yanks are shooting at us with no warning!" Mark said.

  "Shooting with what?!"

  "Some high caliber ordnance, far as I can tell!"

  The Englishman was tense and distraught, clearly not expecting their welcome to come in the form of an outright, unprovoked attempted slaughter.

  Aram grabbed his shoulder and forced Mark to face him.

  "You have to calm down and explain this to me."

  Mark seemed to look through him at Doina, but after a few seconds, his eyes focused on the blond Dacian.

  "Doi, can the ship keep this up?" asked Aram, guessing the other's thoughts.

  "For now, yes," she said.

  "Can you turn edgewise towards that big ship, so we present a smaller target?" asked Mark.

  "Yes," she said. "But why are they trying to hurt us? We've only just arrived!"

  "Looks like we got ourselves mixed in the middle of a war, and they're shooting first and asking questions later," he said.

  "Explain," Aram asked again.

  "That big ship over there is American," Mark said, pointing at the huge cylinder with the United States flag painted on its side. "They were one of the strongest military powers on Earth, in my time. Some of those smaller ships seem to be theirs, too. I don't know what the other ships are, or why they're shooting each other."

  "What are they shooting us with?"

  "Looks like regular guns to me," Mark said, then explained. "Impact projectiles, fired using small, individual explosions inside of a gun, and propelled through long barrels."

  "You had stuff like this in your day?"

  "Yeah, we did. Too much of it."

  "Is it gonna kill us?"

  "It probably will, if it eventually goes through the hull. I have no idea how big a pounding this ship can take. And I have no idea what other weapons these idiots have."

  "The hull is fine, for now," said Doina. "But can't we just talk to them?"

  "Sure, but how? Do you have a radio? Any means of ship-to-ship communication?"

  That confused her. "I'm sure Doi must have something," she muttered.

  "Like what?"

  She brought up a wall of symbols and began inspecting them frantically.

  * * *

  "All Wings, all Wings, be advised, new bogey at ten thousand feet in orbital direction, on higher orbit, assigned target ID X-Ray One. Assumed Eurasian. The Kennedy has engaged with one gun, ship has laser defences that seem to target and destroy each individual bullet."

  "Each individual bullet?!" asked Wing Eight in disbelief. "How is that even possible? Those fuckers fly at five thousand feet per second and there's a whole bunch of 'em!"

  "Six, Two, this is Leader. Disengage from the Queens and go take a look at our new friends up there. You are still weapons free, weapons free. Stay out of trouble, boys and girls. Report directly to the Kennedy by laser link only. Go, go, go."

  The two sleek ships abandoned their battered targets, already outnumbered ten to four. Firing their manoeuvring thrusters, they changed their attitude, and then engaged their primary thrusters to climb to a higher lunar orbit.

  "Two, Six. Helen, what do you say we split and arrive at the X-Ray from two different directions, and I would suggest, way out of Kennedy's line of fire."

  "Fine by me, Jack," a female voice responded. "We'll break left, you guys break right, let's try to arrive at this thing from opposite directions in a plane perpendicular to the Kennedy's aim."

  "Roger that. Let's both compute trajectories to be there in about two minutes. You want to go dark?"

  "Let's just keep secure comms. With a fuckton of lead crashing down on them, I really doubt they don't already know we're here."

  Aboard the smaller Wings, most crew members have two jobs. The commander is also the pilot, and the navigator is also a tactical officer. The weapons officer, in charge of the single gun and the missiles launcher, also does targeting. The master chief is the only one with another engineer under his command, who also looks after comms, and two more ordnancemen who make sure there's always something for the gun to shoot, or for the launchers to fire.

  With the alien starship prominently visible on radar, the navigator plotted an approximate course involving a number of turns in two of the three planes. Since this was a recon mission, not a combat one, he took human and mechanical duress into consideration, programming them in a way that would not subject them to too much acceleration.

  They started with a starboard translation, a positive pitch and a gradual acceleration on the main engine. Then, as they approached the alien starship's orbit, they yawed away from it, putting a few hundred feet of distance between them, and then they yawed back, shutting down the mains and free-flying, while changing pitch so their main gun was always aiming in the general direction of the black torus, but without actually acquiring laser telemetry.

  It was spectacular. The Kennedy had stopped continuous firing and was instead trying to sneak in short bursts, at random intervals and aiming at random spots on the outside of the black torus. Ordnance took nearly two seconds to fly from one ship to the other, but blinding white and impossibly long laser beams, seeming to originate directly from the hull of the torus, destroyed the bullets not even half way through.

  "From this angle, it seems like they destroy most of their incoming at pretty much the same range," the copilot said. "I guess we could actually measure that," he said more to himself, and then went to work.

  "Get me commander Broughman," lieutenant commander Helen Dole asked.

  The comms officer kept track of both Wing Six and the Kennedy, relative to their own spacecraft. As orders were to use encrypted laser comms only, their radios were passive, transmitting nothing.

  The lieutenant fired up a low-power laser beam, targeting Wing Six's receiver mirror. Once the two computers exchanged digital handshakes, the background of his screen turned green.

  "Go for Wing Six," he told his commander on the intercom. They were all on ship's air supply, but the cabin itself was unpressurised, so the comms were considered secure. No sound vibrations could've been intercepted from the outside, because there was no atmosphere to vibrate.

  "Six, Two." Identification was not needed since the link was digital, but she said it anyway, out of habit. "Notice anything interesting?"

  "My chief here says the X-Ray pitched down to present a smaller profile," Broughman's voice came from the Wing that was approaching in a similar arc, from the opposite direction. "That might suggest that they're more bothered by our fire than they'd
like to pretend."

  "Sam here says the ordnance gets busted at a pretty much constant range," she said, looking questioningly at her copilot in the left seat. He confirmed with a firm nod. "That could also mean that their lasers have a fixed effective range, so if we can somehow get inside that range, they may be ineffective."

  "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "Well, let's see. First, they pitch to offer a smaller profile. So if we engage them on their maximum profile, they might have trouble with that. Then, their defences seem to have a fixed range. If they have trouble enough for us to squeeze in a couple of rockets past those lasers, we might be on to something."

  "I'll speak to Gaines," said Broughman.

  XVIII.

  "Can we get away from here?" asked Aram.

  "And go where?" said Mark.

  "Anywhere but."

  "And then?"

  "OK. Can we fight them off?"

  "With what? Doina, do we have any offensive weaponry?"

  She pondered for a second.

  "I'm not completely sure, but I don't think so."

  "Let's ask the ADM anyway," suggested Aram.

  She shrugged and touched the relevant symbol.

  "Does this ship have offensive capabilities?" asked Mark.

  "No," answered the voice from the walls.

  "How long can it withstand this attack?"

  "Approximately six hundred and thirty hours," came the answer.

  Mark divided by twenty-four. "That's about a month," he said with considerable relief.

  "What if they call for reinforcements?" asked the Dacian.

  "ADM, calculate maximum efficient defence for an attack ten times this force," said Mark.

  "Approximately one hundred hours."

  "Four days," said Aram.

  "Something tells me they have more bullets than we have time," said Mark.

  "Yes. But do they know that?"

  "They're Americans. Half of that huge ship is probably full of ammo."

  "We have more company," said Doina suddenly. She reduced the starfield and changed the angle to keep their ship in the middle with the Moon surface underneath. From the edges, two American ships were approaching, with engines switched off.

  "How could you tell?" asked Aram.

  "I don't know, I guess I felt them... Doi-the-ship felt them," she said. "But they're also hitting us with something, like ripples in a pond. Waves of some kind."

  "Radar," Mark said. "They're painting us."

  "Well, if that's what they're doing, we're being painted by a lot of people," she continued. "Even by some of those ships that are being attacked."

  "Wish I could hear what they're saying," mused Aram.

  "Well, I don't suppose we could?" ventured Mark.

  "Not that I know of," answered Doina.

  "So, what do we do?"

  "We must get them to stop shooting at us, and then try to communicate."

  And at that moment, the pounding stopped.

  They all looked at each other, not knowing what to believe.

  "The big ship, the Kennedy, is changing position," announced Doina again.

  She readjusted the starfield to include the big American ship. It was now firing its main engines, accelerating to climb higher than them, and once it had achieved its higher orbit, it pitched hard, head over tail.

  Then, both its guns swivelled outwards and backwards, both of them pointing at Doi. And then, they started firing.

  And then, the two smaller ships on both their sides started firing, too.

  The defensive lasers erupted from almost all around the hull of the starship, pulverising the ordnance that was incoming from three sides at once. The attackers were not aiming at the same spot, but slowly turning the four guns in order to cover as much of their target as possible.

  And then, among the sphere of explosions around them, new, big blasts emerged, apparently randomly, bursting in blinding white flashes that hurt their eyes if they looked directly at them.

  "Now, what?!" asked Aram.

  "Missiles," said Mark. "Don't look like nukes, probably conventional warheads. Whatever 'conventional' means in this day and age, anyway."

  Aram looked at him curiously.

  "So you had things like these in your day, too?"

  "We weren't in space very much in my day. But yeah, we had missiles."

  "And was everyone so good at guns and war as to quickly tell what they are, even in space, or do all English teachers know about missiles?"

  Mark ignored the question.

  "Doina, let's ask the ADM how this changes things."

  "I don't need to," she said.

  When they looked at her, she had a strained expression, as if the ship's defensive efforts reflected directly upon her. Her face was white and her eyes had a harrowed look.

  "We're not made for this," she said, unconsciously using the plural to talk about both her and the starship. "This has to stop, and soon."

  "Can we get away?"

  "We're pinned down," she said. "The Moon is on one side, the big cruiser on the other, those two ships are on the sides, and everywhere else, there's a war going on. We don't have enough room to accelerate -- not through that barrage of bullets and missiles and ships," she said.

  "How long?" asked Mark, softly.

  "A few hours."

  And that's if they stick to conventional warheads, he thought.

  "Right. What do we do?"

  "Defend ourselves, that's what!" exclaimed Aram. "There has to be something we can throw at them!"

  "What, how?"

  "Can't we build a big gun of our own, and blow them to hell?"

  "We can't build anything outside the hull," she said.

  "Can we make one inside and then carry it out?"

  "Do you know how to make a space gun? asked Mark.

  "I thought you did!"

  "I might be able to explain the workings of a gun to the ADM, but anything large enough to make a difference will take far too long to make," Mark said. "Anything that goes boom is bound to be at least as complicated as food."

  They looked at each other.

  Doina, deeply connected to the ship, was tense, worried and frightened. Tears started welling in her eyes.

  Mark had his fingers to his temples and was looking down, trying to come up with something.

  Aram's fists and jaw clenched and unclenched. He stared at the starfield, his eyes darting from one object to another. His lips started moving in silence.

  "Fuck it," he said, suddenly. "Fuck it. I'm gonna do something about this."

  He looked at Doina and Mark and repeated:

  "The guy from the third century is gonna do something about this."

  * * *

  "I'll come with you," said Mark.

  "No. I need you to talk to me from One."

  "You won't have enough time."

  "I don't need time. We don't have time anyway. I'll have plenty of time. Stop talking about time!"

  "Are you sure about this?"

  Aram stopped in the middle of the room as the floor iris opened.

  "Didn't you say so yourself? We're all here for a reason. Maybe this is mine."

  "That's not what I meant."

  "I know."

  "Let me come with you," Mark said again.

  "You stay the fuck here and you look after her. Whatever happens. You get it?" Aram looked the Englishman straight in the eyes, then grabbed him by both shoulders.

  "I've seen how she is around you. She almost thinks you're her father. And I've seen how you treat her, too. She needs you, so just fucking do it."

  Mark was lost for words. Aram flashed him a quick smile and said:

  "Or I'll break your legs when I come back." Then he threw himself into Room Three.

  XIX.

  "I think some of our rounds are getting through, sir!" the targeting officer said, excitedly.

  "How can you tell?" asked Gaines.

  "I can't, sir. But Wing
Six has visuals on some rounds hitting their hull, and the ballistics indicate that they're coming from us."

  "Where are they getting through? Which area of the target?"

  "The centre, sir."

  "Very good, lieutenant," smiled the commander. "So commander Broughman was right, they did have a good reason to give us a small profile. Keep pounding them. In the meantime, what's the word from our remaining Wings?"

  "They've disabled or destroyed all enemy vessels. The Monnet is dead in space. I have two Pinions still trying to put up a fight, but they haven't got a chance, sir."

  "Fine. We'll deal with the Monnet once we're done here. Comms, tell Wing Leader to bring the whole gang up here once they've finished having their fun with the Queens."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I don't know when, where and how the Eurasians have built this damn thing or what they hope to do with it, but I sure as hell plan to stop it."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Tactical, put together a visual report of X-Ray One, encode it and task a drone to fly it back to Washington."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Sir, I still have the Monnet hailing us on VHF."

  "Nevermind the damn Monnet. Anything on the laser mike?"

  The communications officer, master of his own antennae, laser emitters and receiving mirrors, had pointed a low-power beam towards the enemy starship, scanning its outer hull. If the interior of the ship had atmosphere and the occupants were talking, minute fractions of the air vibrations would be transmitted through the hull. The laser beam reflection would suffer from those tiny surface vibrations, and its echo could be analysed and converted back into sound. It was not accurate in any way, but it could help to generally point out where people were, if they were speaking.

  "So far I've got two male voices, apparently speaking English," the comms officer said. "I can't understand what they're saying, but the intonation seems British." He checked his screen and continued: "There's also one female voice. I think she may have been speaking Italian at some point, but I can't tell for sure, sir."

  "Damn Eurasians. Anyone else? No Russkies? No Chinks?"

  "That's all I've got for now, sir, but I'm keeping scanning."

  Gaines was about to comment, but then the targeting and tactical officers spoke at once.