Captive Embers (The Wardens' Game Book 1)

by Brian Mansur

  Not a breath later, Claire said in a monotone, “Spectroscopic analysis indicates air leaks from both craft.”

  A shiver gripped Sean as he imagined the desperate scene inside. He heard Rafe cursing and seconded the sentiment.

  As the lifeboats rolled and diverged, Sean made out crumpled patches in their skins. Faint jets of air spilled into the black nothingness of space. Unless the panicked passengers sealed the breaches quickly, they’d asphyxiate.

  Sean looked behind him again and saw Rafe holding a wall grip, his chest heaving.

  Moving closer to the distraught man, he said, “Commander, I can get you a line to your daughter on the White Knight whenever you’re ready.”

  Rafe’s head lolled subtly one way and then the other. Sean wondered if the intelligence officer was about to throw up.

  Paulson said, “This isn’t over yet, Hastings. They might be able to patch the damage. And if the Capable’s missiles take out the Godavari, she can make a rendezvous inside of twenty minutes.”

  Rafe didn’t acknowledge either of their attempts at comfort. Instead, he continued to stare silently at the video of his daughter’s lifeboat as it bled atmosphere. For several seconds, the only other noise in the room was the whirring of fans and hum of electrical equipment.

  Then Claire spoke again. “Showing a decrease in outgassing on both lifeboats consistent with compartmentalization. They must have closed off the breached sections of their cabins.”

  There was still a chance Rafe’s kid made it.

  The plotter said, “Capable is accelerating. And she’s pulling in her high aspect cooling fins.”

  Sean’s attention switched over to the tactical map. The acceleration factor next to the destroyer’s icon had jumped to three meters per second squared. Her course had also adjusted to more quickly intersect with the stricken refugees. It worried Sean that this caused the Mykonian warship to present more of her flank to the Godavari.

  Memories of Lima Juliet 12 punching notional holes into the side of the Tsunami revisited him. At the present range, neither the Capable nor the Godavari could hurt the other with a laser.

  But what if the Godavari really does have a long-range nuclear lance?

  “Captain?” he said with a note of alarm.

  “I see it,” Paulson said with a distinct lack of concern. “Comms, ask Capable what their intentions are.”

  Shortly after, the tech replied, “They want to link up with the damaged lifeboats, ma’am. They plan to begin braking maneuvers after their strike reaches the Godavari.”

  Paulson said, “Very well. Advise them to use all haste once they’ve rendezvoused.”

  The remark made Sean narrow his eyes. He envisioned the Capable flitting back-and-forth between the lifeboats, exposing its poorly armored sides to the enemy.

  Does the Godavari have a Casaba-Howitzer? he wondered. He studied the tactical situation, trying to calculate the odds. Although the Godavari had wiped out the initial Mykonian attack, they were completely ignoring the follow-on body of sixty-eight missiles.

  They’re certainly acting like they’ve got aces to play, he decided. But if they have the nuclear lance, why haven’t they used it to take out the Capable yet?

  He noted the Godavari’s own second wave of ten missiles still inbound to the lifeboats. The Capable’s counter-missiles streaked toward them.

  Another nail-nibbling minute ticked by before the two clusters of map icons merged. The Capable’s telescope caught rocket nozzles flaring in sudden, final maneuvers. A close-up tactical grid showed several counter-missiles spraying tungsten buckshot into the enemy’s path. Since the ordnance flew at a relative speed of over five kilometers a second, each pellet delivered more energy than its equivalent weight of exploding TNT.

  Most of the Lakshmian missiles died in the Mykonian gauntlet. A few erupted into clouds of shrapnel with little to no chance of hitting another object for years. Only three continued to plunge toward the lifeboats.

  Seeing this, the Capable cut her drive and pointed her nose at the survivors. She waited a short while for the hull’s residual vibrations to smooth out, then unshuttered her main laser optics. The destroyer let loose with multi-megawatt brilliance.

  Incandescent flecks burst like fireflies wherever the ten-centimeter laser spot shone. At over two-thousand-kilometers’ distance, it took several pulses to ruin a missile. The highly reflective, steeply angled armor of their nose cones shrugged off tremendous punishment. They also rotated and jinked to minimize the time the pulses could drill into any one place on their metal hides. But the final outcome was never in doubt. Eventually, they all succumbed to the Capable’s fury. After stabbing each cylindrical hulk with a final blast for good measure, the warship reoriented and fired up her drive again.

  Around the CIC, people pumped fists and muttered words of bravado. All the while, the Godavari flew unflinchingly at a wall of missiles. At last, Sean experienced a flash of unpleasant insight.

  He drew close to the captain’s side and, in a hushed voice, said, “Ma’am, if the Lakshmians wanted to disable the Capable with a Casaba, it would make sense to do it after the destroyer matches vectors with the lifeboats. That way, they’d all be headed straight for Lakshmi.”

  “If the enemy has the means, yes,” she said.

  Sean regarded his commanding officer, nonplussed. “Ma’am, you wanted me to let you know when I thought we were doing something questionable.”

  Paulson turned to give Sean her full, intimidating attention. “Go on, Lieutenant.”

  Sean noted the switch to formality and fought to ignore the cottony sensation suddenly clogging his mouth. “Respectfully, ma’am,” he persisted in an even quieter tone, “this is tempting fate, and that didn’t work so well in the wargames a few days ago.”

  Paulson tilted her chin sideways, saying, “Lilith doesn’t get to win this fight, Sean. Not strategically. Like I said at the briefing, if she hits the Capable, we get intelligence on those Casabas. If she lets us offload our lifeboats, then innocent people live, and we score points for morale.” The captain glanced meaningfully at Rafe who remained fixated on the viewers. “He’s not the only one with loved ones aboard those transports.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Sean replied, but the mental pictures of his failure against Lima Juliet 12 persisted. “I’m only suggesting the Capable keep her nose pointed at the enemy once she gets into position.”

  Paulson folded her arms before saying, “It will slow them plenty to scoot around on just their attitude jets. They’d never get to all of the lifeboats before reaching Lakshmi.”

  “Have them stay cautious for the first few.”

  Paulson steeled her jaw. “I’m not giving up on getting more people out of there,” she said. “And if possible, we need the Godavari to use a Casaba.”

  The lieutenant held his ground. All of his instincts screamed that he was right. He whispered, “Ma’am, after what we went through on the Feni, it wouldn’t surprise me if Lilith is playing with us by having the Godavari hold fire. Let’s at least give the Capable the best chance possible of surviving a hit.”

  Paulson opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. She pursed her lips and flicked another glance at Rafe, then considered the plot again for a few beats. At last, she blew air through her nostrils and nodded.

  Sean felt a smidgen of tension leech from his shoulders. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  The captain eyed Sean from the corners of her sockets. “Comms,” she said, “advise Capable that as soon as she matches vectors with the lifeboats, she is to keep her bow to the Godavari for the first few pods. No matter what.”

  To Sean, Paulson mumbled, “We’ll try it your way, L.T. We’ve tempted this much fate. Why not a little more?”

  Sean felt a new tension move in to replace the old as he caught the subtle reminder that, in scant hours, the Tsunami would face Lilith’s mysterious war machines blind.

  The plotter eventually said, “Missiles now at two thousand klicks
from the Godavari. A beat later he added, “Godavari is painting them. New contacts. Missiles launched. They’re bearing on the Reapers.”

  Sean’s chest grew tight. Moment of truth.

  The frigate shone low-intensity lasers onto the Mykonian missiles so that its counter-ordnance could home in. He noticed that there were only twenty-two of the new threats.

  “That can’t be enough for them to stop everything, can it?” Sean asked.

  Grunting, Paulson replied, “It must be a point defense variant of the Casabas. Either their skipper has guts, or he’s been ordered to rely on an untested weapon.”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the enemy missile icons flashed yellow. The radar had detected some change in their configuration.

  “Talk to us, scopes,” Sean demanded of the plotter. “Anything on the high-gains?”

  “Nothing definite, sir. The missiles have cut thrust and seem to be getting bigger.”

  Graphs measuring the radar return and albedo of the targets appeared on the master screen. Sean looked at the data and frowned. The Mykonian missiles were less than fifty kilometers from the enemy’s and still almost a thousand out from the Godavari.

  “Are the things turning?” Sean asked.

  Before anyone could say another thing, a blinding flash from the Capable’s telescopic feed drew the entire CIC’s attention.

  “Detonations!” the plotter shouted. “Multiple detonations!”

  “We see it, Crewman,” Paulson said in a deliberately nonchalant voice.

  All around the CIC, however, people shifted and cursed in alarm. Sean doubted the captain’s soothing Nuevo Texan drawl would be enough to calm the ranks. The Lakshmian frigate had destroyed every missile the Capable had thrown at it.

  “Claire,” Paulson said, “Tell us about their new toy.”

  “Each of the enemy missiles simultaneously triggered four nuclear devices in the five-kiloton range with around ten percent of the energy directed into the beam.”

  Sean said, “That explains why they changed size. They must have stacked the nukes for the boost phase then fanned them out. They probably aimed off of a central targeting scope.” He didn’t bother to add how even a microsecond of difference in one device’s detonation could have thrown the targeting off for the other three.

  Impressive.

  Paulson demanded, “How much damage can they do, Claire?”

  “Spectral analysis indicated a roughly point zero one radian area of effect from each weapon.” The A.I. displayed a table with the beam diameter and energy density that the devices could deliver at various ranges.

  Sean said, “They could use those things to knock out a missile from fifty kilometers away.”

  Paulson nodded. “And at only ten kilometers they could put a good-sized hole through the Capable.”

  The man at scopes interrupted them. “Godavari is turning.” Seconds ticked by, then he said, “She’s flipped for home. She’s thrusting hard.”

  Sean called up a projection of the battle and ran it forward in time by several minutes. At the cost of three or four hundred tons of propellant, the Lakshmian could stay outside of the Mykonian destroyer’s effective laser range.

  Sean said, “She’s giving the Capable some space. That doesn’t make sense. The Godavari should still have dozens of missiles in reserve. Using the Casabas, they might slip one by any counter-fire.”

  The plotter said, “Maybe they think they’ve made their point for us to stay away from Lakshmi?”

  As much as Sean wanted to agree with the man, he shot him a disapproving glare. “Stow that attitude, astronaut. This can’t be the best they’ve got. That Casaba makes an interesting point-defense or anti-ship weapon, but it isn’t something we can’t overcome with enough missiles.”

  He thought briefly about how the Wardens gimped human lasers so that even battleships like the Tsunami had to close to nine-thousand klicks to start doing damage. Despite that limitation, most warships still boasted fifty to a hundred times the range of effect over what one of those Casaba mini-bombs had displayed.

  Paulson added her own confident declaration to Sean's. “This doesn’t stop us from assaulting Lakshmi, people.”

  From across the CIC, Rafe spoke up. “Lilith will have worse waiting for us.” Everybody turned to the intelligence officer. “Like I said before, she told Prime Minister Dalip she’d only enough Casabas to scare us off. So, if this isn’t doing that, she must have a small number of more powerful devices in reserve.”

  While Rafe spoke, the blue icon for the Capable winked white and slowly shifted direction. The destroyer was beginning its braking maneuver to rendezvous with the lifeboats.

  Paulson said, “We’ll see shortly if the Godavari brought a longer lance to this joust.”

  Over the following minutes, Sean barely blinked, anticipating disaster at any moment. But the Lakshmian frigate kept hosing propellant out its back end until it succeeded in pulling away from the Mykonians. At its point of closest approach, some six-thousand-kilometers distant, Sean felt sure that the enemy would spring their trap. He remained certain of it as the Capable used a series of drones to grapple and bring under control the most remote of the two derelicts: Lifeboat 47.

  It made sense from a safety standpoint to dock with that lifeboat first. If the Godavari blew the Capable up, no one wanted the debris’ epicenter any closer to the other shuttles than necessary. Still, Sean kept glancing worriedly at Rafe. He feared that the man might make a scene over the delay in helping his daughter’s ship. To Sean’s surprise, the commander acted as if he wasn’t aware of the rescue in progress. Instead, he gazed intently upon the live image of the withdrawing Godavari.

  Maybe he’s afraid to know what has happened to his little girl.

  Not long after the Capable docked to the lifeboat, the casualty report arrived. Most of the passengers had died from the accident. The collision had ruptured the air-tight compartments fore and midline. It turned out that many of the refugees had crowded the forward airlock in hopes of being among the first to escape. Very few had made it to the rear before the bulkhead doors condemned them to die in vacuum. Sean tried very hard not to think about what the news implied about Karen Hastings.

  The Capable’s crew quickly removed over a dozen battered survivors and detached. Keeping her nose pointed at the Godavari, she used her control jets to begin a glacial drift toward Lifeboat 19.

  And that was when Rafe shouted, “Movement!”

  The icon for the Godavari flashed a brighter red, and a new arrowhead icon appeared. Sean barely registered the new contact before both Claire and the scopes tech called, “Missile launch!”

  The lieutenant’s eyes darted to the Capable’s icon. She remained pointed at the Godavari. The new missile would be just close enough to take it down if the destroyer could keep a beam on it.

  “This one’s bigger,” Claire warned. “Unknown class.”

  “Capable is being painted!” the plotter shouted. “She’s firing her primary!”

  As often occurred in space combat, the battle was decided in a handful of seconds. The Capable’s seven-meter-wide mirror directed a two-hundred-ninety-nanometer laser onto the threat. At six thousand kilometers, the one-hundred-megawatt beam shone a sixty-centimeter-wide circle onto the missile’s reflective armor.

  The Casaba winked into a spear of plasmatic death. Nuclear flame stabbed across space at ten-thousand-kilometers-a-second to strike the edge of the Capable’s bow. Where the Casaba’s beam touched, the hull flash-heated and exploded. Within a millisecond, searing slag began to blast through bulkheads, machinery, storage tanks, and people.

  The hapless survivors of Lifeboat 47 were among the first to die. They’d gathered in the pressurized crew quarters beneath the destroyer’s arrowhead shield. One moment they were huddled in bunks or along the walls of the makeshift sickbay. The next, they were pulverized bits of crimson biomass interspersed with glowing blobs of matter.

  While the bow section s
hattered, shrapnel continued to travel aft into the vessel’s interior. Propellant tanks, armor, and layered shields degraded the onslaught somewhat. By the time the shockwave reached amidships, it had spent enough energy so as not to completely destroy the CIC. One of the astronauts there would live long enough to scream in pitiable agony before succumbing to her wounds several minutes later. Farthest aft, the engineering section with auxiliary control fared best. Its survivors were thrown about as the ship reeled from the hit, but only a few died from shrapnel.

  Across the Tsunami’s CIC, displays switched to feeds from a pair of observation satellites that the Capable had released before the battle. Claire put the destroyer on the main viewer.

  Pixilated white rays of debris drifted from the bow’s gaping wound. Elsewhere along the ship’s hundred-meter length, gases and fluids vented. Toward the rear, attitude jets fought to correct the seven-thousand-ton ship’s lateral rotation.

  For a muted instant, the CIC staff wore masks of shock, disbelief, and horror. Then a quiet voice spilled into the silence. “God help us.” For another long moment, no one spoke again. Everyone knew that in a little while, they’d be facing down Lilith’s super-weapon.

  “Claire,” Sean eventually said, his voice low, “Status of the other lifeboats. Are any of them taking flak from the Capable?”

  A window with the radar plot for the refugee flotilla opened. The transports flew in a ragged cluster over twenty kilometers across. Lifeboat 19 and the Capable stood off to one side of the group.

  “Difficult to be certain,” Claire said. “Do you want me to redirect the sat’s telescope?”

  “Yes, please,” he answered. The picture pulled back and refocused on Lifeboat 19.

  Rafe said in a gravelly voice, “She’s spinning more than before.”

  Claire immediately said, “No new venting detected on any of the escape craft. The blast hit the Capable on a side away from the other ships. Chances are low that any of them will be damaged.”

  Sean said a mental prayer of thanks.

  “Comms,” he asked, “Any contact with the Capable?”