One day, he’d encounter another ship with similar capabilities to Phantom’s. The Legion must surely have some protected by such abyssal-deep security that even he’d never heard of them. The ease with which the Legion had refitted his ship at Joint Sector High Command was proof that someone in the Legion still understood Phantom’s tech.
He eased the throttle from the second stop through to the end of its traverse. The pressure on his chest was uncomfortable now, like a fat man bouncing his butt up and down on his ribs.
Phantom hit turbulence as she passed through streams of relative heat in the KM Region, and she couldn’t dump energy quite as effectively. At lower acceleration, the unevenness of the KM was too minor to notice. At max thrust, it gave him kicks that felt like Arunsen was whacking his ribs with that war hammer of his.
The screen read 68G acceleration in large, red text. Below, it had updated to give him a closing time of sixty seconds. At this infernal rate of gees, a minute was all the ship’s twin engines would take to overcome the rearward drift and then catch up with the enemy until they were within touching distance.
Sixty-eight gees. They were worth the discomfort of having his eyeballs rammed up against his optic nerves.
“They’re responding,” Izza warned. “Both are turning about.”
Invisible laser beams pulsed from the enemy’s rear-facing weapon ports, setting Phantom’s shields ablaze with light as they absorbed the energy. They held for now. If the enemy got their forward-facing weapons to bear, it would be different matter.
“Fitz to turret gunners, on my command, concentrate fire on Osree. Wait until we see the brushstrokes in their paint.”
“What’s that in meters, sir?” Bronze asked from the dorsal turret.
“Brushstrokes is 500 meters, Mr. Bronze.”
To his credit, the pipe smoker only hesitated momentarily before giving a crisp “Aye, sir,” that belied the extreme acceleration stress they were all suffering. Good man.
Fitz lapped up the screams and hollers from Phantom’s crew and new Marines. His magnificent starship closed on the former Legion frigate at a rate that took their breath away. Even better, when he amplified the sounds from the Deck Three cabins, he heard gasps of fear from some of his new human comrades.
“You’ve all picked a seat on the greatest thrill ride in the galaxy,” he announced to the ship. “And you…” He was going to say they were getting paid for the privilege, but regular remuneration was an awkward topic. One best avoided. “And you get to dine with her ace pilot and copilot afterward.”
“Aren’t we going to slow down?” asked Bronze. “At this rate we’ll shoot straight past, and I’ll have only a fraction of a second to fire on Osree.”
The targets had extended force keels and were pushing against the higher dimensions, coming about like cumbersome wet navy ships. Those force keels would heat up the local KM, and that might cause a problem when Phantom got there. Perhaps he was going too fast. No need to worry his new gunner with such details, though, he decided.
“You’ll get your shots in, Mr. Bronze. Our attack run needs to be fast, though. Phantom is a torpedo bomber, after all.”
“Outrageous!” griped Nyluga-Ree from the acceleration station she’d installed in the lounge when she’d owned the vessel. “Fitzwilliam, you’ve turned my personal transport into an ugly machine of war.”
“I resent that, Nyluga-Ree. She is a beautiful war craft, and we are at war. That is not my doing.”
“You might be at war, but it is not my conflict.”
“It will be for the next few seconds, Nyluga. All hands, hang on to your lunches, we’re about to get Radical.”
“Was that humor?” asked Izza.
“Barely. Ready torpedo.”
Izza extended the launch cradle beneath Phantom’s belly. Within was a 12-ton irhenium kinetic torpedo. He would only have one left in reserve, but the unstable iridium-rhenium composite was already past its use by date.
“Launch on my mark. Ready…”
The fire control intelligence added a targeting overlay to the tactical plot. The white target box told him the payload would pass through Radical’s engine exhaust plume.
“Fly past in ten seconds,” Izza warned.
Fitz patted the flight console. “Come on, old girl. Time to show ’em what you can do.”
After cutting the engines, Fitz switched the secondary KM horns from energy dumping duties to force keels. Out of sight, behind the flight deck cockpit, the long, black secondary horns twitched and flicked to one side as they dug into the upper dimensions like rudders.
Phantom came to starboard and, with her plot now leading Radical by a few hundred meters, the white target box flashed red.
Before he could issue the launch command, Izza released the torpedo. He could see it out the cockpit window as it slowly drifted to port.
He’d had the torpedoes made at an asteroid mining station. If he’d had the money, he would have added a missile engine and some targeting intelligence. As it was, the ‘torpedo’ was a dumb lump of superdense metal to which Phantom had bequeathed her velocity before cutting it free to drift into the target.
From the Radical’s perspective, ‘drifting’ meant closing at 8 kilometers per second.
As was Phantom.
The enemy fire was becoming more deadly by the millisecond. Lasers were quickly draining Phantom’s shields. Point defense cannons were hitting too, some of the tungsten pellets passing through the shields and rattling against Phantom’s armor.
Fitz pulled the throttle back to the stop position and yanked hard on the brake lever he’d had Catkins install the year before. The shiny, new, primary horns would be glowing blue with the effort of dumping the entirety of Phantom’s momentum into the KM Region.
The ship slewed round as it passed through the gap between Radical and Osree, coming to a halt 600 meters off Osree’s stern.
Not quite brushstrokes, but damned impressive. “Fire!”
Bronze and Sinofar opened up from the turrets with their quad blasters, sending brilliant bolts of energy streaming into Osree’s engine cones.
With Osree attempting to turn as rapidly as possible, her main engines had shut down. Fitz capitalized on that. Blasters would have been much less effective firing through a plasma torch.
“Torpedo hit!” Izza screamed. “Ditch one frigate!”
Fitz was too busy fighting to control Phantom to look. The massive release of energy through the horns had heated the local KM into a fiery hell. He didn’t understand higher-dimensional physics, but to his simple mind, a hot KM was less dense. The force keels were struggling to find a resistive medium to push against, and he didn’t dare rely on the inertial dampeners until they’d moved to a cooler region.
Izza’s excitement was too much for him. He glanced at the Radical.
The torpedo had staved her starboard beam, ripping through the frigate, and had half-poked out the hull on the opposite side. The ship’s force keels were still active. They were weak, but enough for the ship to peel open its own wound as it turned, spilling atmosphere, fire, and crew into space.
Far Reach Navy Ship Radical. It had been a proud Legion vessel once. If it truly were a Corrupted ship, then it wouldn’t be his former comrades falling into space. It would be the disgusting travesties they had mutated into.
He told himself it was a merciful release, but he couldn’t share Izza’s glee. In a re-roll of his life, it might have been his body tumbling out of that frigate.
Turning his attention back to the Osree, he opened up the throttle a little, trying to keep station off Osree’s starboard stern and inside her turn.
Phantom wasn’t playing ball. With the turbulence in the hot KM, she was flying like a drunken skater on ice.
Fitz had hoped to disable Osree’s engines and then use Phantom’s maneuverability to zip away and snipe from her rear. He withdrew the force keels and deactivated the primary horns, now that was no longer an option.
/> Luckily, fine shooting from Fitz’s turret gunners had overwhelmed the aft shield and destroyed Osree’s only point defense cannon that could bear at this angle. Phantom was safe for the moment, and all he had to do was keep her that way until they left the hot KM region.
A sudden bright light made Fitz look out of the cockpit. The void outside had turned a coppery turquoise. Something was hammering hard at the shields.
“Redirecting aft shield capacitor,” said Izza.
The console reported fore shields at 10%. Izza’s reinforcement brought them back to 35%, but they were dropping again. Fast.
His hand moved over the missile launch control…and hovered there. Missiles were so expensive.
Fore shield integrity read 19%.
He was on the cusp of firing both tubes when a massive explosion blinded him. Fire scattered with debris washed over Phantom’s fore shield.
And the shield integrity was inching up. Osree’s lasers must have shut down.
The fireball cleared swiftly, revealing the reason why. The turret gunners had done even better work than he’d realized. The stern of the ship had blown away, taking Osree’s engines with it and probably the power supplied to the lasers.
The explosion caused the ship to flip nose over stern.
“Gunners, keep firing,” he commanded.
In the dorsal turret, Bronze was dealing destruction to the Osree’s rear. It looked like the aft compartments were still pressure sealed, but Bronze was hitting soft targets now. Sinofar couldn’t get a firing solution on the same weak spots, but her quad blaster fire was barely weakened by the dying remnants of Osree’s shields, which flared sickly green. Scorch marks raked the ship’s upper hull as its armor vaporized under the onslaught from Sinofar’s ventral turret.
Osree couldn’t take much more punishment.
“Now, you’re mine,” Fitz told the old corvette. “And your anguish will soon be over.”
Four missiles blasted out of Osree’s front tubes.
Panic seized Fitz. Through the cockpit window, he could see exhaust trails as the missiles flew a short distance, stalled, and then began to turn toward Phantom.
“Izza!”
“I’m firing missiles,” she said.
“Good. But I need you to get us out of here!”
“Missile launches failed. Must have picked up damage.”
“Damn!”
On instinct, he fired the twin P-Shooters at maximum cyclic rate.
Beneath each wing, a 20-foot-long 6-barrel rotary coilgun whirred into life, firing a stream of 770-grain tungsten balls at a muzzle velocity of 44 kilometers per second. In normal operation, they fired up to 5,000 rounds per minute, and with the 10-ton magazines fully loaded since the refit at JSHC, that was over half an hour of continuous fire.
Fitz fired at the full 30,000 cyclic rate, which would only last for a few seconds before the barrels declared thermal shutdown and stopped playing.
With those missiles inbound, he only had a few seconds.
Osree’s shields were so weak, they had minimal effect. Fitz stitched a line of destruction along the upper hull, letting the P-Shooters linger over where the main magazine store was on the Excross-class corvettes.
With small caliber rounds, but high muzzle velocity, P-Shooters were fantastic for delivering impact energy. Phantom’s pair delivered just shy of a hundred gigajoules per second, vaporizing hull armor and ripping through to mince the soft parts that lay below.
But he couldn’t watch. His head turned sideways of its own accord, and Fitz stared at the missiles coming to kill him.
Outrunning them was impossible. If the horns were active, he could. But he’d screwed the local KM Region by dumping all that energy into it.
“No!” he screamed. With his naked eyes, he could see the blue painted nose cones on the harbingers of their deaths.
Izza was already on it.
The space in front of the cockpit squeezed into a tunnel and they jumped through.
“You scream like a little human girl,” she told him.
Fitz muted the flight deck out of the intercom circuit. “I do not. In any case, where did you learn such an offensive phrase?”
“Flux City. We went back while you were solo.” She hesitated. “Bylzak! Pyruula was under orders to capture us and bring us to the Nyluga. I’ll have to explain to Catkins that Ree mustn’t learn what happened on Flux City.”
“And Green Fish,” Fitz pointed out. “I expect the others to understand already.”
“No. Our little fish is smart enough to figure that out for herself. Oh, and for the record, she’s been learning to fly Phantom and wants to run her own ship one day. So, watch her if the crew gets mutinous again, or she’ll take your seat.”
Fitz wondered how the young Militia scumlette had transmogrified so quickly into a magnificent, freebooting space rogue.
Then he looked at his wife’s smiling face and realized he was staring at the answer.
“I think getting a ritual Littorane spearhead thrust through her insides will turn out to be the best thing in that young lady’s life,” he said. “It meant she was granted time to learn from you.”
“That was amazing, Captain.” Fitz forgave Bronze’s interruption over the intercom because the awe shining from the gunner’s words was delicious. “I had no idea what Phantom could really do.”
“Given your murky past, Mr. Bronze, that bodes well indeed. We know the Legion understands her technological secrets. And if Nyluga-Ree could acquire this ship, so can others. One day, Phantom will meet her equal. Your rapture gives me confidence that day remains far off.”
The jump tunnel squeezed tighter than a subatomic particle, and they shot back into normal space.
Fitz turned the Phantom around and reactivated both sets of horns.
The scopes showed the battlespace now half a light second away. The Radical was in her final death throes. As he watched, Osree erupted into a brief fireball, then was gone too.
Horn sensors reported the local KM region had cooled. Still, Fitz felt a pallor of fear as he spun Phantom back toward the scene of the fight and edged the throttle forward. Five gees. Fifteen. The KM heat readings remained cool, but there were pockets of heat ahead. He limited thrust so they didn’t exceed 15g acceleration.
“I know we’re here on a mission for Lord Khallini,” said Izza, “but I want to know who was aboard those ships.”
“As will Khallini,” Fitz agreed. “And Kanha Wei, who we decided was top of the pyramid of people claiming our loyalty. We’ll send Bronze and a team to check out the remnants of Radical and Osree.”
Izza put a hand over his and looked into his eyes. “I’m sure they were Corrupted spacers, Fitz. But we need to be sure.”
She gave the crew an update. Fitz left her to it. He didn’t feel as triumphant as he deserved to. It wasn’t just the sliver of doubt concerning who they’d faced in battle. The galaxy had been springing far too many unpleasant surprises on him, and he dreaded what awaited them on Doloreene’s surface.
The payment Khallini had promised was, on the other hand, insanely generous. He made some rough calculations on his wrist slate and worked out how many shipkiller missiles those credits would buy. Then he closed his eyes and imagined the gargantuan warehouse that would be required to store that number.
His mood lifted.
“Fitz! Trouble.”
The plot showed a ship blasting off from the planet and curving around the south pole on a breakout to space.
Fitz threw the throttle forward to a cautious 50g acceleration. With all those extra bodies aboard adding their mass, that meant Phantom’s engines were generating 83 million pounds of thrust. Intercept with the target would be in eight minutes if it held to its current acceleration. Most pilots considered it suicide to jump anything less than one planetary diameter out. The tactical plot placed the intercept at 0.7 diameters above Doloreene.
It was too tight. A desperate pilot might gamble and jump at that
distance. Fitz didn’t want word getting out of Phantom’s arrival.
“All hands. Strap in. Brutal acceleration in thirty seconds.”
Fitz eased the throttle forward further. He would have liked to run diagnostics on the KM horns first, but the cautious bird never enjoyed the juicy worm, so within half a minute, the throttle was back against the final stop. The two engines roaring in perfect harmony was a sonic delight, providing a devilish 666 meters per second squared of acceleration. Now they would intercept the ship about 1,500 kilometers closer to the surface than the previous intercept plot.
“I suppose,” said Izza, “that this could be a ship escaping the Corrupted on the surface.”
“Damn, you’re right. Get on the blower to them while I double-check the weapon systems. Remember, listen for telltale Corrupted phrases such as ‘Grrrrrrr’ and ‘Unnnngghhh.’ Get a visual too. Watch out for feathers, fangs, and drool.”
“Hellspawned dogs! They’ve gone.”
Fitz couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The ship had vanished, and there was no sign of an explosion. They’d made a successful jump. And that required more than just fancy jump calcs. The ship must have had jump drive technology he’d never heard of.
“Let’s get our dirtside business done quickly,” said Izza. “Before that ship comes back with friends.”
* * * * *
Chapter 34: Osu Sybutu
Doloreene Equatorial Zone
Laborers of a dozen races toiled on the construction of the fence. Humans, Zhoogenes, and Xhiunerites dug dark trenches with miniature tracked digger machines, following lines laid out by Pryxians and Slern. Humanoids slotted together the lattice foundation of the fence while Littoranes filled the ditches to either side with a milky liquid and then ran tubes over and through the lattice.
The workers were silent, hunched over, and kind of weird looking. Corrupted, for sure, but a basic instinct left in the Littoranes drove them to wallow in the ditch liquid.
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