by Marko Kloos
“They’re running dirty. Because of course they are. Open comms and give me a link.” Dunstan picked up his comms set.
“You’re on, sir,” Mayler said.
“Attention, unidentified vessel,” Dunstan said. “This is RNS Minotaur. You are in Rhodian space without a valid transponder ID broadcast or transfer-lane exemption. Identify yourself and state your destination and intent at once.”
The comms remained silent. On the plot, the icon for the unknown ship plodded along on its trajectory, still without a transponder identifier. Space-traffic transponders sent their ID automatically every few seconds. They had backups for redundancy, and unless the ship had suffered a complete loss of all power sources, there was only one reason why a civilian ship would turn off their transponder.
“They’re not even trying the ‘broken comms gear’ ruse,” Lieutenant Bosworth said. “As if we’ll leave them alone if they pretend they can’t hear us.”
“Well, there isn’t much they could be saying, Bosworth. We’re a long way from any of the transfer lanes. ‘We just happened to be drifting around in the neighborhood’ won’t cut it, and they know that.”
He considered the plot for a moment.
“Helm, lay in an intercept course. Weapons, keep a lock on them with the fire-control system. Just so they don’t have any misconceptions about our willingness to play games.”
“Aye, sir,” Mayler replied.
“Sir, the bogey just changed heading. They’ve turned away from us and gone to three and a half g.”
“Guess they noticed the target lock.” Dunstan watched the green icon on the display make a ninety-degree course change and increase speed.
“Match their acceleration and put in half a g on top,” he ordered. “Let’s have them in intercept range in twenty. No need to rush things.”
“The AI is still working on an ID, sir. It’s a commercial medium-output plasma drive signature. We aren’t close enough for a good hull profile scan yet, and their drive plume is muddling things up now.”
“No worries, Mayler. We’ll catch up with them soon enough. If three and a half is the best they can do, it’ll be a short chase.”
“Why would they even try to run? They’re too far inside our intercept envelope. It wouldn’t make a difference if they burned twice as hard.”
“People do dumb things when they panic, Lieutenant. They know they can’t fight us. So they went for flight.”
Dunstan shook his head at the sight on the plot. Minotaur was now burning at almost four g, and the gray icon was no longer increasing the distance. The skipper on the bogey was either supremely optimistic or terrible at math, because there was no way he’d be able to outrun the Rhodian warship bearing down on him.
“If he turns, we turn right along with him,” Dunstan said. “Nice and easy. He’s got nowhere to run.”
The other ship continued its futile flight as Minotaur closed the gap slowly but steadily. With every passing minute, the sensor AI got a better picture of the ship they were chasing.
“We got ID on the bogey,” Mayler said after a few minutes. “She’s an Oceanian merchant. OMV Winds of Asterion.”
“What does the database have on them?”
“It’s a supply ship. Part of the civilian merchant component for their spacelift command. She’s supposed to be laid up in the reserve fleet yard.”
“I guess someone took her out for a joyride. Any armament on that type?”
“Negative, sir,” Mayler replied. “Not from the factory anyway. But it’s really hard to bolt something to a merchie hull that’ll hurt a warship.”
“They’re trying to take delivery of a nuke, Lieutenant. I’m not trusting any blueprints. Not after Daphne. Assume they’re armed to the teeth and getting ready to blow us out of space.”
The chirp of a notification alert drew Dunstan’s eyes over to the tactical display. Another green icon had appeared, this one in the general path of Winds of Asterion’s heading and well in front of them.
“New contact,” Mayler called out. “Bearing 23 by negative 39, distance eighty-five thousand kilometers. Designate Sultan-2.”
He turned to look at Dunstan.
“Sir, contact Sultan-2 is accelerating. At ten and a half g.”
Dunstan stared at the new icon on the plot. The numbers next to it that showed bearing, acceleration, and velocity increased so quickly that the unknown ship could only have a military-grade drive and a gravmag generator.
Guess they brought backup, he thought. He’d been expecting an unpleasant surprise ever since they came out of their burn, but it still sent a chill down his spine to see that his paranoia had been justified.
“Get me a course projection and target ID for Sultan-2 now. And put out all the drones and set them to active recon mode.”
“They’re headed for a shortest-time intercept with us,” Mayler said. “At our closing rate, time to engagement-range limit is nine minutes. The AI is working on an ID right now.”
Dunstan took a deep breath to steady himself. The most agonizing part of being the commander of a warship was the weight resting on his decisions, and right now he had very little time and data to make his next call. The commander of the unknown ship either had strong suicidal ideations, or he was confident he could take on a battle-ready Rhodian frigate. Or it could be a ruse, and the new contact was a small ship with a powerful drive, intending to throw Minotaur off their pursuit and then outrun them. But if he waited for the AI to come up with a definitive ID, it would be too late to make that call. The odds were low, but if he rolled the dice wrong, he’d be forced into an engagement on someone else’s terms, with no way to control the situation.
Sometimes it’s not the odds that make a bet unwise, he decided. Sometimes it’s the stakes.
“Helm, bring the drive to emergency power. Have the AI plot us a trajectory that will keep the distance between us and Sultan-2 as wide as possible for as long as we can.”
“Aye, sir.” Boyer looked pale, but she jumped into action without hesitation, her hands flying over the data fields on her control panel. When the drive fired up to maximum output, Dunstan could feel the tug-of-war between the plasma rocket that was subjecting them to ten g of acceleration and the gravmag array that countered the g-forces to keep the crew alive.
On the tactical screen, Winds of Asterion continued her slow flight, her icon moving from ahead of Minotaur to her port side as the frigate made a wide turn. A few moments later, the icon for Sultan-2 changed its direction as well, nudging the predicted trajectory to converge with Minotaur’s new course.
“They are coming back on track for a shortest-time intercept,” Bosworth reported. “They have almost a full g of acceleration advantage. We won’t be able to keep them at bay for very long.”
A message screen popped up in front of Mayler’s station, and Dunstan could see the tactical officer’s face blanch even in the semidarkness of the AIC’s red combat illumination.
“The AI has positive ID on Sultan-2,” he said. “Sir, it’s GNS Sleipnir. The Gretian gun cruiser from the internment yard.”
There was a moment of absolute silence in the AIC.
“Show me that ID assessment,” Bosworth said sharply. Mayler opened another instance of his screen and flicked it over to Bosworth’s station, then repeated the process to put another copy in front of Dunstan.
“Eighty-eight percent certainty on the hull,” Bosworth read. “The drive profile is a ninety percent match. That can’t be right. Where did they get a crew trained for that thing in three months?”
Every set of eyes in the AIC turned toward Dunstan. He knew that the eerie calm he suddenly felt was out of place for this situation. If the AI was right, and the contact bearing down on them was really GNS Sleipnir, they were about to head into a fight that would be all but impossible to win. The Gretian heavy-gun cruiser was almost twice the mass of Minotaur and far more heavily armed. And it had been designed to hunt and kill frigates and light cruisers.
The Gretians had preferred to operate their ships autonomously as commerce raiders, so they had been equipped to outgun everything they could catch and outrun everything that had more firepower.
“Lieutenants, I hope you still remember the simulated scenarios you ran against that ship a few months ago,” he said to Bosworth and Mayler. “Because we’re about to need that knowledge.”
He turned his head toward the helm station.
“Boyer, get ready to hand the conn to the AI for evasive action. Fully autonomous mode.”
“Aye, sir. Preparing for AI conn, full auto,” Boyer replied. “We can’t outrun them forever, sir. Not with their acceleration advantage.”
“We don’t have to outrun them forever. We just have to keep them at range so we can let our point-defense AI chew up their ordnance. Mayler, how many gun mounts does that thing have again?”
“Six double mounts, sir. Four-and-a-half-second cycle time. One hundred and sixty rounds per minute for the full broadside.”
“Damn,” Dunstan said. Minotaur only had four single mounts, each with eight-second firing cycles, which added up to only thirty rounds per minute.
“And theirs are two hundred millimeters to our one fifties, sir. They have more broadside weight than any two of our cruisers put together.”
“They’ll want to get in close so they can tear us up with those quick-firing two hundreds,” Dunstan said. “With that rate of fire, even the AI can’t avoid everything. Not if they get inside a hundred kilometers.”
On the plot, the symbol for contact Sultan-2 had changed to the bright green, denoting a hostile Gretian warship, something he hadn’t seen on the hologram in almost five years. Minotaur was burning her drive at full power, but the Gretian cruiser was closing the gap a little with every passing moment.
Five years ago, we could have outrun them, he thought. On the spec sheet, they were faster than the Gretian cruiser. Minotaur’s maximum design acceleration had been almost twelve g when she was brand-new, but that was thirty years and many tens of thousands of reactor hours ago. Now she couldn’t break ten g even if they ignored all the safety margins and pushed everything to the limit.
“Four minutes until they are in engagement range, sir,” Bosworth said.
Dunstan looked around the AIC. Every face he saw showed the same anxiety and fear. These were the pre-battle jitters, the brain trying to process the reality of impending mortal danger. He knew the junior crew were looking to him to give them reassurance. He was only forty-six, but so many of these officers were not even half his age. To them he was the Old Man, the only member of the crew who had lived through the entire war. He was supposed to know what to do, what to say to make them feel a little less afraid. A lie wouldn’t do, but he could put an optimistic coat of paint on the grim reality.
“Bosworth, all-ship announcement,” he ordered.
“You’re on, sir,” his XO said.
“All hands, this is the commander,” Dunstan announced.
He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts.
“We are about to do something nobody has done in half a decade. We are about to engage a Gretian warship. The last Gretian warship. The only remaining ship of the fleet that killed our brothers and sisters, our friends and comrades. The fleet that we defeated, that’s now radioactive debris between Rhodia and Tethys. And once we are done with this ship, there’ll be nothing left of their fucking navy.”
He was satisfied to see a grim smile on the face of Lieutenant Mayler.
“I don’t know who stole that cruiser,” Dunstan continued. “I don’t know who’s crewing it right now. But I do know that we are better at this business than they are. We’ve been doing this for a while. And we know our ship inside and out. They haven’t even had time to get used to theirs. Everyone stand to your posts. Let’s give these people an object lesson on why the Rhodian Navy won the war. Commander out.”
He nodded at Bosworth and leaned back in his gravity couch.
“The nearest fleet unit is far away. We’re on our own. And we can’t go up against a heavy cruiser by ourselves and expect to come out in one piece,” Bosworth said in a low voice.
Dunstan shook his head with a sigh.
“No, we can’t. I think this old girl is about to fight her last battle, Lieutenant. However this plays out.”
“Let’s make sure it’s the last one for that fuzzhead cruiser, too,” Bosworth said.
For the next four minutes, Minotaur’s AI played a cat-and-mouse game with the helm controller of the Gretian ship. The frigate changed course at random to throw off the intercept angles and force the enemy cruiser to respond with a new course change. But with the acceleration advantage the other ship had over Minotaur, it was clear that they’d run out of angles for course changes very soon. On the display, the bubble showing the projected range of the Gretian cruiser’s armament crept ever closer to the range of Minotaur’s own weapons. Physically, there was no limit to the range of a missile or a rail-gun projectile in a vacuum, but in practice, hit probability increased as distance decreased. The point-defense AI could fry warheads and dodge shells with near-absolute accuracy if the flight time of the incoming weapon was long enough.
“Twenty seconds until engagement threshold,” Mayler said.
“Open hatches on missile tubes one through twelve. Set tubes four and six to intercept pattern Theta Two Niner and launch as soon as they get in range.” Dunstan watched as the two range-marker bubbles approached each other’s thresholds.
“If we’re lucky, they haven’t had a software update for their point-defense AI since that ship was commissioned,” he said.
“Their PDS is a slug system,” Mayler said. “If the database is right, they never got directed energy mounts.”
“That’s good. If their point defense is all guns, it means they can run out of bullets.”
“Ten seconds. Standing by for launch on tubes four and six. Intercept pattern Theta Two Niner is laid in,” Mayler said. He was all business now, surrounded by half a dozen tactical subdisplays, a focused expression on his face.
“Let’s stick to the protocol. Give them a warning before we start flinging war shots,” Dunstan said. “But don’t let on that we know what they are.”
Bosworth nodded and opened the comms panel.
“Unidentified vessel on intercept course, this is the warship RNS Minotaur,” he sent. “Power down your drive and cease your approach immediately, or we will assume hostile intent and open fire.”
The reply came just a moment later. It was spoken in Rhodian, not run through a translator AI, and Dunstan could only make out a faint accent that could have been Oceanian or Gretian.
“RNS Minotaur, this is Valravn. Here is our counterproposal. Shut down your weapons grid and your active transmissions and set your reactor to standby. Comply in the next thirty seconds, and we will spare your crew. Fail to comply, and we will close in and destroy your ship, and every escape pod you launch. Valravn out.”
“Valravn?” Mayler looked at Bosworth and Dunstan.
“The Raven of the Slain,” Dunstan supplied. “From Norse mythology. If my memory serves me right. It’s been a while since I took that class.”
“Well, the Raven of the Slain just crossed into engagement range, sir,” Bosworth said. “One hundred twenty kilometers. What’s our response?”
“We will send it their way. Lieutenant Mayler, fire tubes four and six. Midshipman Boyer, hand helm control to the AI.”
Mayler flipped the safeties off the hardware buttons for the missile-launch tubes.
“Firing four. Firing six.”
The igniting drives of the heavy antiship missiles sent a low vibration through the hull. On the tactical display, two more icons appeared next to Minotaur and rushed toward the incoming contact.
“Missiles away at fifty g. Both seeker heads are tracking Sultan-2. Time to target, twenty-two seconds,” Mayler said. “Range is down to one ten. Sultan-2 is coming about to two hundred degrees relat
ive.”
In response to the incoming missiles, the Gretian cruiser had altered its course to show its broadside to the warheads and bring the maximum number of point-defense guns to bear. From now on, it would be a duel between computers, both ships’ AI systems trying to outwit and outmaneuver each other, analyzing data and making decisions far faster than any human could.
“Fifteen seconds to impact. Sultan-2 has reduced their burn to under five g.”
“Diverting energy for their point defense,” Dunstan said. “I thought you said they didn’t have a directed energy PDS.”
“No, sir. And no way they could have gotten one fitted. Not in three months.”
On the plot, several new contacts popped up between Sultan-2 and the incoming missiles from Minotaur.
“Sultan-2 is firing at our ASMs,” Mayler said. “With their rail-gun mounts.”
“At that range? That’s a waste of slugs,” Bosworth said.
On the plot, the missiles changed course to avoid the incoming rail-gun fire. They weaved through the volley of tungsten slugs and reacquired their target with ease. Rail-gun shot moved at five kilometers per second, which was slow motion to a seeker-head AI at over fifty kilometers, when the computer had ten seconds to calculate an evasive maneuver.
“Welcome to postwar tech,” Bosworth commented. “Too bad about those five years of missed software updates.”
“Ten seconds to impact,” Mayler narrated the plot display. “Sultan-2 has increased burn to eight g again. Seven seconds. Five seconds.”
Maybe this won’t be a hard fight after all, Dunstan thought.
On the optical feed, the flank of the distant Gretian cruiser seemed to erupt into flame as hundreds of thermal bloom signatures lit up the hull. One of the missile icons disappeared from the tactical display in a blink. The other changed course, but a second later, there was a brief flash on the infrared spectrum, and the second ASM was gone from the plot as well.
“Both birds are down,” Mayler said. “Successful intercept by the enemy at two point five kilometers range. Doesn’t look like the ballistic debris scored a hit either.”