by Brian Smith
Keith seemed understandably preoccupied today, and not overly inclined to talk. As usual, however, the junior officers were more in the mood to banter. Despite the doom-and-gloom briefings from Marshal Hutton about the state of affairs on Mars, Tanner mentioned that she was looking forward to shore leave there when their deployment ended. She had joined the ship midcruise and heard stories about how much fun it was.
“I’m getting pretty excited about seeing it—for real, I mean, not in virtual. I spent my whole first enlistment in the 3rd Fleet, knocking around between Earth, Luna, and their Lagrange points. Never got much more than a single AU from home.”
“What was your rate?” Ayers asked.
“Electrician’s mate. Spent my whole enlistment in the Concord.”
Ayers nodded approvingly. “Good ship, by all accounts.”
Captain Keith smiled indulgently from the head of the table, looking up from his lunch. “Everyone knows the two best ships in the navy—the one you’re in, and the one you’re from.”
Ayers raised her coffee bulb in salute from the far end of the table. “Wisdom of the ages.”
LTJG Yoon, head of the ship’s deck department, finished up his lunch and glanced at the captain. “Permission for watch reliefs to be excused, skipper?”
“Granted. Have the BMOW send me the noon report in virtual and sound eight bells on schedule.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Yoon and Tanner took their leave to relieve the bridge watch, while ENS Ferrell excused himself to relieve the engineering watch. LTJG Gordon headed for CDC to relieve that watch as well, leaving the table seemingly half empty. The officers they had relieved would likely wander in to eat in the next half hour or so, but by then everyone else would be finished and would have already gone about their business.
Captain Keith got up almost on the heels of the watch reliefs, but waved for everyone else to stay seated. He flipped down his snoopers, checked something that had just been sent to him, and grunted slightly. He looked at Ford.
“CDC just passed me the classification on track Omega-2. She’s a freight hauler—commercial torchship Aurora—and her keps show her on a definite course to rendezvous with 5111 Omega. As the good marshal claimed: the game’s afoot.”
“That’s the same ship we got a report on last quarter: missing and suspected hijacked,” Ford replied. “That muddies the waters a bit.”
“Some, but not too much,” Keith replied, taking it in stride. “We’ve got four days to work it out. I’ll be in the CDC, XO. Bring Hutton and Staff Sergeant Vargas into the loop on this. Get their take on what we should do about it and we’ll compare notes in a few hours. That ship’s been off the grid for long enough that it’s doubtful any of her crew are still alive, but we can’t discount the possibility out of hand. It also raises the question of potential hostages or abductees at 5111 Omega.”
“Aye, aye, skipper.”
Chapter 5
May 2093 (Terran Calendar)
USS Reuben James
Asteroid 5111 Omega
The plan of action they decided on was largely Diane Hutton’s, with the details being hammered out by XO Ford and Staff Sergeant Vargas.
Vargas was the NCO in charge of the small contingent of Marines that had transferred over from Marineris. Their flagship’s embarked Marine detachment was normally platoon strength and included an aerospace detachment of two dropships, but Reuben James couldn’t take on that many extra personnel or dock even a single dropship. In the case of the latter, the frigate was too small to burn for any appreciable length of time against that sort of center-of-mass imbalance, and that was the end of it.
A cruiser or destroyer with its own MARDET and auxiliary craft would have been the perfect size for this assignment, which had suddenly and unexpectedly grown beyond a simple scouting mission. Unfortunately, there were none of that description within range given the timeframe they were looking at, and even the other frigates from their own squadron couldn’t make rendezvous with enough propellant mass remaining to do any good. The solar system was vast—much more so than the human mind could really appreciate. A squadron spread out on patrol in the asteroid belt really amounted to ships operating individually—they were spread so far apart that immediate mutual support was next to impossible, and their flagship/tender was constantly occupied keeping them all fueled and supplied. Reuben James was going to have to handle the situation on her own unless Captain Keith wanted to abort the mission entirely, and that was the one option he wasn’t willing to consider.
As they saw it, their original problem had split into two: not only were the original mission objectives still relevant, there was now the matter of recovering the freighter Aurora. Hutton had proposed using one problem to help them solve the other, and with some skillful maneuvering and a little sleight-of-hand they felt the plan had a reasonable chance of success. Rather than decelerating to rendezvous with asteroid 5111 Omega, Reuben James had stayed dark and coasted on past, still running under EMCON and remaining undetected.
They were on a trajectory now to intercept Aurora, and several judicious, finely calculated burns of their RCS thrusters had put them in position to mask themselves from the asteroid when they began a hard-burn to rendezvous, and to match velocities with the freighter. They had positioned themselves on a line between Aurora and 5111 Omega so that, when they throttled up, their own torch plume would be undetectable to anyone watching from the asteroid. It would be pointed away from the asteroid, with the bulk of the ship eclipsing most of the light, and any visible portion would be washed out in the glare of Aurora’s plume, which was aimed directly at 5111 Omega as she decelerated.
Of course, Aurora would spot them almost immediately, but by that time the frigate would be in the perfect position to jam any communication attempt between freighter and asteroid. The plan was to take her intact while hiding that fact from anyone on 5111 Omega. Any captured crew would be interrogated for intelligence, and the ship herself would be their Trojan horse to infiltrate and access the asteroid. From the humanitarian perspective, any live abductees at either target site would have a fighting chance of survival and rescue.
As always, the main problem was one of mathematics, trajectories, and fuel. Reuben James and Aurora were converging faster than rifle bullets fired toward each other. The laws of astrodynamics were unyielding, and torchships didn’t make U-turns as a general rule—but that was essentially what Reuben James would be doing here.
The velocities involved were no small matter: even sitting dead still relative to 5111 Omega, a ship was still moving around the sun at roughly sixteen kilometers per second. A literal course reversal to match Aurora was extravagantly wasteful of propellant mass and would require high accelerations for tactical feasibility, but there was no way around it if they wanted to execute this plan. Had Reuben James been coasting at a much higher velocity than she already was, the plan would have been untenable. Even so, it was still a gamble: since they were going to expend so much deuterium on the intercept, they were counting on being able to tank off Aurora once they took her or, failing that, on finding a supply of deuterium at 5111 Omega. Without a fuel supply, they were going to be in the position that torchship officers strived to avoid at all costs: sitting in the middle of nowhere with near-empty mass tanks.
The fuel numbers this plan required made Ford, as astrogator, queasy at his professional core. Captain Keith, by taking the risk, was showing a measure of daring that illustrated why he’d been selected for early command of a frigate in the first place.
Now, eighteen hours after passing 5111 Omega and leaving it in their wake, it was time to execute the plan. Captain Keith would direct the action from his station in CDC while the exec handled the bridge from the astrogation station. The crew had been briefed, and everyone was clear on commander’s intent: the idea was that if their senior leadership were taken out of action, those next in the line of command could step in and execute the mission.
Keith watched
the chronometer tick down to the appointed time, and then it all began.
“Bridge, this is the captain. Go to Condition I.”
LTJG Yoon currently had the deck and the conn. “Aye, aye, sir,” he replied. “Bosun’s mate!”
“Bosun’s mate, aye!”
“Sound general quarters. Set Condition I throughout the ship.”
The bosun’s mate of the watch (BMOW) repeated the order verbatim. A moment later, the long wail of the boatswain’s pipe echoed through Reuben James, followed by the sound of the general alarm.
“General quarters, general quarters! All hands man your battle stations! This is not a drill! Set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. Rig battle suits for hard vacuum. All stations report manned and ready!”
Normally, it would take the crew several minutes to don battle suits and report to their stations, but Reuben James had gone to Condition II a few hours before, so the crew was already suited up and in position. It was less than a minute before all stations reported manned and ready. At the astrogation station, Ford and QMC Sandler quickly buddy-checked each other’s suits and helmet seals one last time before strapping firmly into their acceleration couches; around the bridge, the others did the same.
“Sir, condition Zebra set,” the bosun’s mate finally reported. All compartments were sealed.
“Very well. Pass the word for combat depressurization.”
Once again, a slightly different note of the bosun’s pipe trilled throughout the ship. “Now hear this! All hands stand by for combat depressurization!” As soon as the warning was issued, Yoon ordered damage-control central to depressurize the ship. Ford felt his pulse quicken as his armored battle suit expanded slightly around him, and external audio cues faded out until all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, along with the transmitted reports coming through his eardots.
There were advantages and disadvantages to depressurizing before a fight, but the former outweighed the latter. You couldn’t suffer a compartment fire or an explosive decompression in a vacuum, and fighting in a vacuum tended to limit the damage from railgun rounds to their points of impact. A railgun round piercing the hull into a pressurized compartment could cause the atmosphere to ignite, resulting in a flash fire that would cook anyone inside until the subsequent decompression vented the compartment and extinguished the conflagration.
They weren’t expecting much of a fight from a hijacked freighter, but the captain was going by the book and not taking any chances, a plan Ford heartily endorsed. Aurora had been missing for long enough that any number of modifications could have been made to her—the addition of weaponry included.
“Prepare to commence jamming,” Captain Keith ordered. “Launch preliminary salvo.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” LTJG Gordon replied. He issued the appropriate commands, and Reuben James’s considerable electronic-warfare suite swung out wide from the hull, clearing the obstacle of her torch bell and aiming itself at Aurora.
The ships were closing stern to stern; in order to communicate with her destination, Aurora would also have to swing hardware out past the curve of her bell. It made jamming Aurora a lot easier, as well as surgically targeting her communications array if it were deemed necessary.
In response to Keith’s firing order, the first of a trio of remote lidar drones spat from the frigate, along with four torpedoes. They would utilize the frigate’s higher preburn velocity to get a substantial head start—they would reach Aurora well in advance of the frigate.
These were smart weapons with AI guidance packages. One was a heavy EMP round designed to take down the freighter’s electronic systems if Keith deemed it necessary. Another was a high-yield explosive that could be directed against any portion of the ship. The last two were defensive counterfire weapons, designed to be the first line of defense if the freighter had been modified with any sort of one-shot torpedo or missile tubes.
All the weapons went out in standby mode; they wouldn’t be activated unless by direct order or, in the case of the defensive weapons, their AI brains detected enemy fire that was to be intercepted. None of the weapons were completely autonomous, according to the rule of law—their employment and activation were subject to direct human orders. Additional lidar drones would launch at programmed intervals as Reuben James decelerated, taking advantage of her varying speed at their launch times, to space themselves out in the most effective way, taking up intermediate positions between the two closing vessels and giving the frigate an early look at her quarry in the form of high-resolution imaging scans.
“Astrogator, captain. Final keplers check. What’s the plume threat?” Keith asked.
If Aurora was too close aboard as they matched velocities, she could precess and melt the navy torchship with her fusion plume—hardly an acceptable outcome. QMC Sandler had already computed it; he sent the numbers to the XO’s snoopers with a finger flick. Ford reported enough lateral offset—the freighter wouldn’t be able to use her torch plume as a weapon.
“Very well,” Keith replied after receiving the report. “OOD, captain. Throttle up on the mark.”
“On the mark, aye,” Yoon replied. “Pilot, throttle up on the mark.”
“On the mark, aye,” the pilot repeated. She slapped the acceleration alarm; the klaxon went over the ship’s comm net, since sound didn’t carry in a vacuum.
Ford heard it in his ears and took a deep breath in painful anticipation. High-g burns hurt at the best of times; after several days in null-g, they were all going to feel this one for days afterward. He spared a passing thought for the well-being of Marshal Hutton, who’d spent most of the past few years on Mars. He knew the Marshals Service required their deputies to spend a minimum of thirty days a year in Earth-normal gravity for health and conditioning, but he had no idea when Hutton had last done that. The bottom line was that this was going to hurt even with normal g-tolerance. Without it, it was going to be physically dangerous.
Everyone aboard was suddenly mashed into their couches as the pilot throttled them up to 6-g. Their battle suits helped them tolerate the forces by squeezing their extremities and increasing the oxygen content and pressure in their helmets. Suit injectors released stimulants and respirocytes into their blood streams to keep them oxygenated, conscious, and functioning. In sick bay, the ship’s corpsman was monitoring the vitals of everyone aboard.
In space, Reuben James’s blue-white torch plume erupted behind the ship, star-bright and impossible to miss if anyone aboard Aurora had an optical sensor pointed down their trajectory. They had literally just shown their ass, and the surprise was sprung.
“Signals, transmit our orders to Aurora and then commence jamming,” Keith said—the order came out as more of a grunt, under the circumstances. The signals rating acknowledged the order, then sent the following:
ATTENTION, TORCHSHIP AURORA. THIS IS REUBEN JAMES, A UNITED STATES WARSHIP. YOU ARE ORDERED TO THROTTLE DOWN YOUR TORCH IN EXACTLY NINETY SECONDS AND ASSUME A FREE-FALL TRAJECTORY. PREPARE TO BE BOARDED; ANY REFUSAL TO OBEY OR RESISTANCE WILL RESULT IN THE GRAVEST CONSEQUENCES. YOU HAVE SIXTY SECONDS TO RESPOND.
Keith ordered jamming to commence as soon as the message went out. There was no reply from the freighter, and within a few minutes the first of Reuben James’s remote lidar drones closed to imaging range and began transmitting data back to the ship. Classification of the freighter was confirmed, but it was immediately apparent that something was amiss: there were two regular-shaped bulges flush with Aurora’s hull on the imaging scans. As they watched, both shapes detached from the hull and maneuvered outboard, and two new fusion plumes lit up the heavens. All hell broke loose.
“Captain, combat: two new tracks, designate Omega-3 and Omega-4! Lidar imaging classifies them as C4-F1–series corvette gunships—PEA Triglav exports. They’re maneuvering to engage!”
“Omega-3 and -4 are declared hostile. Take tracks Omega-3 and Omega-4,” Keith snapped. “Commence firing as they bear! Stand by on all point-defens
e batteries. TAO, you are weapons tight—do not hit Aurora unless she directs fire at us!”
Orders began flying simultaneously from different quarters.
Attention, all stations, pilot has the conn,” Yoon added from the bridge. “Combat maneuvering authorized.”
“Pilot has the conn,” WO1 Santos grunted, slapping the acceleration alarm. “All hands stand by for combat maneuvers!”
The words were barely out before the crew felt the first sideways jerk against their straps—a lateral, defensive jink of RCS thrusters in combination with their 6-g hard-burn.
“Going active on radar and lidar systems,” LTJG Gordon announced from CDC. “Salvo two away!” he added a moment later. Between the hard-burn and a couple of RCS jinks, nobody felt anything as the next round of torpedoes left the tubes. “Vampire! Vampire! Incoming fire!” he barked a moment later.
Everyone whoofed as the torch suddenly throttled down, leaving them momentarily in free fall. Inner ears resisted as the frigate rapidly yawed ninety degrees and rolled the same, unmasking her defensive batteries. Among most of the crew, biomonitors triggered the dispensation of antinausea meds to counter the effects—puking in a battle helmet was something to be avoided like the plague.
“Combat, astrogation,” Ford sent. “Possible zig on track Omega-2 based on optical-bearing rate change. She’s easing off on her deceleration burn to keep her velocity up—she’s going to pass us. Captain, if she gets between us and 5111 Omega—”
“—we can’t jam her comms,” Keith finished for him. “Weps, target her reactor with our particle-beam turret. Try to throttle them down. If she passes us, put a tungsten round through her torch bell.”