Reaper's Crossroad

by Timothy Ellis

  "I need popcorn!" announced BA, getting a laugh.

  A few minutes later, the AI I'd met up on the station strode over to us carrying a large box, which she set down, and started distributing popcorn and other entertainment nibbles around the small tables between the chairs.

  "Thanks Hubaisha," said BA.

  I looked at the AI.

  "Really?"

  She laughed at me.

  "I like it."

  I grinned, and shut up. Aline punched me gently on the arm.

  It was a three hour battle all up. We sat there cheering on different sides, predicting which ship was going to be destroyed next, high fiving when right, arguing about what they did wrong when not, and a good time was had by all.

  Well not all. My mood was darkening again. There was only one way this was going to go. I'd never played this sort of situation when I was a kid, but I'd been a wiz at blocking point defense. This was just a more complicated version than I’d ever seen before.

  When there was nothing left from all three sides but debris, we went to bed, spreading out along the bedrooms behind the dunes.

  Angel had had a long day's play, and went off to sleep again as soon I put her on the bed. She didn’t even wake while Aline and I made love, and didn’t notice me leave the room after Aline fell asleep.

  Jane and Hubaisha nodded to me as I arrived back at the screens. Jane threw a glance there, and I saw what I expected.

  Within hours of the battle ending, they were doing it all again. Two fleets each this time, which was going to be tough on the Ralnor, but I guess it was all they had left. Their fleet was heading for the plants, but was taking missiles from both.

  A half hour later I knew that wasn’t correct, as the Ralnor jumped in another four fleets. Not long after, more fleets started arriving, and by the time the originals were in gun range of each other, fleets were jumping in randomly from all three jump points, and just keeping on coming.

  I sighed.

  "What?" asked Hubaisha.

  "I really wish we had comnavsats through this entire region of space."

  "You think the entire fleet strength of three empires is coming to us," asked Jane, "all at the same time?"

  "Not all. It would take too long, and they need to keep forces where not having them would be a bad idea. But if they take a significant amount of ships from everywhere within say a month's travel time, and just feed them into Crossroad as fast as they arrive, that system could be a meat-grinder for a long time. If they send ships from up to six months away, this might never end."

  And it was worse than that. The longer this went on, the more likely one of them would get in enough ships to actually win for a while, and then we'd have to deal with them.

  And it was worse than that. Sometime, someone would figure out what I had years ago, and what the Darkness had near the end, and would get a major battle fleet in there all at once.

  And when they did that, we'd be right royally screwed.

  Eleven

  "Jon?"

  "Aline?"

  We were sitting up in bed, although it was still not long after sun up here, and Angel was still asleep. Aline hadn't yet made a move for the shower, and I was waiting to see what she wanted to do.

  The last thing on my mind was bonking.

  Apparently it wasn’t on hers either.

  "Jon? I've been thinking about us having a baby."

  "OH FUCK NO!" I exclaimed, with zero thought.

  "WHAT?"

  She hit me.

  And not just a slap on the cheek, or a pound on the arm. She king hit me so hard my suit went into protection mode a fraction of a second before impact, but all the same, I flew off the bed and cartwheeled into the wall. The suit relaxed just enough for my face to show. It wouldn’t be long before a bruise formed.

  "I didn’t mean it that way!" I yelled.

  Her suit was now in full protection mode as well, except for her face, and she jumped off the bed half way towards me, both fists clenched up, and looking like she'd added metal gauntlets to her hands.

  "What DID you mean?"

  "I don’t want to lose you!"

  "What the fuck are you talking about? No-one dies in childbirth anymore."

  "It's not that!"

  I’d never seen this side of her before. Even in battle she'd never been this terrifying.

  "What then?"

  "If we get pregnant, you'll die before the child is born."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Every damn novel I've ever read, and most of the entertainment vids as well."

  "What ARE you raving on about?"

  "It always happens in sequels. The hero gets the girl, and is supposed to live happily ever after. But they don’t. She gets pregnant in the sequel, and then gets killed. All so the hero goes on a revenge thing, and runs amok for the sake of some stupid writer's plot. Happens all the damn time!"

  She looked at me like I was a cat turd not in the litter box.

  "That’s your story? You're going to stick with that?"

  "It's true! Didn’t you watch Deadpool Two?"

  My voice was high and scratchy, and I was about to lose it.

  She lost it first.

  My suit protected my face as her left hand grabbed me by the arm, and hauled me up on my feet. She let me hang there for a moment, looked me in the eyes with murderous intent, and slammed her gauntleted fist into my face.

  I went through the wall.

  Twelve

  And became aware again on the beach.

  My legs scrabbled hard at the sand, propelling me backwards as fast as I could go.

  Straight into the tree the rift was in.

  About two meters out from the rift on Thorn's station, I finally realized it had been a dream while I lay on the beach, and there was no threat. I looked around, seeing faces looking at me showing everything from surprise to serious amusement, picked myself up, dusted sand off my rear end, and walked back through with as much dignity as I could muster.

  No-one was waiting for me on the beach.

  I peeked in to see if Aline was awake, and found her still asleep. Angel jumped off the bed, and followed me back to the eating area, where Jane was preparing breakfast.

  "You have sand all over you," she said.

  I looked to see if she meant anything by it, but apparently it was a statement of fact. I shifted to protection mode, and back again rapidly. The sand fell away.

  "Rough night?" asked BA, grinning, as she sat down where she'd been last night.

  I nodded. She looked like she'd run around the island twice already. Maybe I should have joined her.

  "What's been happening Jane?"

  "I've done highlights to show you when everyone is up, but the battle still rages in there."

  "Anyone looking like winning for long enough to hit us?"

  "Hard to tell. But the only space clear of debris now is each jump point, and a good chunk of space near ours. At some point, the battles will come to us anyway, simply because it's too dangerous everywhere else in the system."

  I nodded. It was only a matter of time.

  People started arriving, and they were not those still asleep behind the beach. Eric and his family walked up, with Susan and Annette. Slice was coming along behind them with three generations of his, and behind them was David Tollin and his family.

  Jane started making more breakfast.

  By the time everyone was up, not a single one of my ships had a captain on it, and all my senior officers and some of their families were here too.

  Aline sauntered up as if nothing happened, had seen my mood was worse, and didn’t sit in my lap as she'd intended.

  Hubaisha sent more chairs, and brought out more food and drink. The highlights waited on the kids not being here. But when I popped up a hollo screen only I could see, Jane sent them to me.

  It was total carnage. I fast forward through most of it.

  This is what you get for doing something explainable only
in a way which made them want what you had all the more.

  This was insane!

  And it had only one ending. Unless we came up with something new. And even then, I didn't think it would matter.

  I did have an ending in mind which didn’t require us being dead. But it would mean my soul would be damned to hell for the rest of eternity. And no angel was ever going to be able to pull me out again. I collapsed the hollo, rose, and headed off to the beach.

  "Leave him be," I heard Jane say, presumably to Aline.

  I started running, reached the beach, turned right, and kept on running. My suit shifted into shorts, and I kept running in bare feet.

  I ran, and ran.

  As I came back around, I could hear Amanda.

  "Listen up! The beach out front is designated family. Around the point to the right is designated clothing optional. So if you don’t appreciate public nudity, please stay on this end of the beach."

  I kept running.

  On my next pass I saw kids making sand castles, people having fun in the sun and mild surf, and Angel sitting on top of a platform looking like she thought she was the life guard on duty. Maybe she was.

  I kept running.

  By the time I approached people again, I saw a rotund man in shorts and unbuttoned beach shirt, sitting on a deck chair under an umbrella, sipping on something with a tiny umbrella in it.

  I was so surprised to see Bob there, I lost my footing, and went down face first into the sand. My suit didn’t shift, so I had to spit sand out of my mouth as I pushed myself up.

  Bob was laughing.

  "Join me my boy? Lots to talk about."

  Hubaisha dropped a chair next to him before I was even back on my feet, making me wonder how she'd done it so fast, but on reflection, Jane had probably figured seeing Bob there would make me stop running, and I'd need a chair. Maybe that was why he was here. Jane's idea to get me to stop. I was feeling like I'd had a good run, but could have made a couple more laps at least. But if I had, I suspected people would begin noticing something was wrong with me. Or not.

  "Who gave you time off?" I said to Bob in a grouchy voice.

  He grinned, and tapped his nose.

  "Even a genius needs to sit on a beach and do nothing every once in a while."

  "Fine. When I find one, I'll send him here."

  He laughed so hard his belly shook. I looked down the beach. Nothing much else had changed. Bob got a grip, and his face became serious again.

  "I've managed to turn the Excalibur into a fighter bomber."

  "Really? How?"

  "It meant taking out the cargo airlock completely. There's only room for six capital ship missiles, and the rear of the cargo bay had to be reinforced to take their launching stress, but they fit. Well almost fit. The missiles stick out the front a bit. No reload, but a squadron can fire seventy two of them as a salvo. Your three squadrons with coordinated fire could do a lot of damage."

  "How many are upgraded?"

  "Your three squadrons. I left yours and the ship captain's alone, figuring they were less likely to be used that way, and more likely to want to carry some cargo at some point."

  "Reasonable thinking. What else is new?"

  "Lacey is out running drills at the moment, which is why you don’t see any fighter pilots here." He was right, I couldn’t see any. "I've made two upgrades to the Gunbus. I removed the big guns off the sides, and replaced them with a new mosquito launcher with a twenty magazine. I'm still working on a five version for the Excaliburs, but where to put it is the big problem."

  I nodded. The big guns were really nothing of the kind, barely a frigate turret intended for fighting other corvettes. They'd never really been any serious addition to ship to ship firepower, although against fighters they added some punch to the point defense turrets. Replacing them with mosquitos was a huge change which might keep a Gunbus alive if it got out of mosquito range of a carrier. Bob went on.

  "The other thing I've done is taken about a third of the hanger deck, and converted it into a capital ship missile launcher bay. It will only dock an Excalibur and a shuttle now, but you get twenty capital ship missile launchers firing forwards, with four reloads. Reload time is not real good, but it will give them a solid punch against any capital ship now, at a much longer range than torpedoes."

  "Sounds good. How many are finished?"

  "One. Lacey is running his through trials now. And since we need to live fire them, he's doing it in Haven in the asteroid field, with mining ships standing by to collect whatever the missiles leave intact. Yours is in the shipyard being done now. As are all the Japanese super-Gunbus'. Since those are really four ships merged together, and only had a single repositioned hanger in the wrong place, I needed to do some reconfiguring, but they each get forty capital missile launchers with four reloads."

  "How long?"

  "Should be out tomorrow."

  "You two will want to see this," pinged in from Jane.

  Thirteen

  This, was a Ralnor fleet, less than ten minutes out from our jump point.

  There were thirty ships, but none of them were undamaged, and they had no fleet cohesion at all. The Keerah already had more ships jumping in, but this lot had fought off everything else, and managed to make it to us.

  One of the screens shifted to show our side of the jump point.

  "I think you’re going to enjoy this, my boy," chuckled Bob.

  "What's that?" asked a dripping wet BA, in a micro bikini, as she flopped down into a chair.

  "That," said Bob, "is the prototype of our new battlestations."

  And it was. With only minor changes from what we'd discussed, it was pretty well exactly what the initial designs had shown it would be.

  A central spindle had eight arms coming off it top, middle, and bottom, with each arm ending with top and bottom battleship sized ball turrets, with four guns each. Even I could do the math. Forty eight turrets, with one hundred and ninety two battleship guns. Plus all the usual point defense, and capital missile and mosquito launchers.

  Of course only twenty four of the turrets could fire in a single direction at once, but that was the equivalent of two dreadnaughts.

  As we watched, and people were dropping into seats rapidly now, the station began to spin.

  It was then I noticed Orion's Belt was missing. And the four other titans were not in their normal position, but well back from the jump point, none of them in combat mode. I looked across to Susan Bentley, and she was looking worried.

  "Wait for it," said Bob, but as he spoke, a Gunbus and three squadrons of Excaliburs took position on the edge of torpedo range of the jump point, in front of the titans, and what looked like the entire rest of our fighter force formed up above and below them.

  The battlestation itself was off to one side of the down jump lane, so it was in no danger of collisions, and about the same distance we'd had the titans in the past.

  As the Ralnor formed up jump formations, the station and Redoubt started launching mosquitoes. All of their ships fired every missile they could in one big broadside, and all of them jumped more or less together. The mosquitoes met them less than half a second after appearing, and the down jump lane boiled. Nothing made it through.

  As the first formation of fifteen ships started towards the jump point, the battlestation began firing.

  "What the hell?" exclaimed George.

  Bob chuckled even louder than before.

  The station was firing like a Gatling gun as it spun around, turrets firing in what looked like a precisely timed spacing, making it look like there was a wall of continuous fire heading at the jump point.

  But that wasn’t the amazing thing. Each gun was firing three times in the same time it took a normal battleship gun to fire once. And the pulses were all bigger.

  Bob now looked like the proverbial cat who ate the canary.

  The first pulses arrived at the exact same moment the ships appeared, and the entire middle of the formation
simply vanished. The outside ships took the next pulses as if they'd been aimed at them specifically, and they probably had, and they too vanished.

  The next set of pulses had nothing to hit but debris and dust, and a lot of them didn’t hit anything at all, but continued on into the distance. The ones after did the same, but the next lot repeated the carnage on the second rank of ships, and the salvo after completed the job.

  "Damn you Bob!" exclaimed Lacey, and Bob actually lost it, not that he was capable of falling out of his chair laughing, like most of us would have done.

  The station had taken care of all of the ships on its own, and barely five seconds of battle time had been needed. As we watched, the station lost its spin, and Lacey led his squadrons off to do some more training.

  "New guns?" I asked Bob.

  "New guns. Prototypes only though. Each turret has a pulse buffer which is charged in about the same time as normal guns, allowing three pulses to quick fire. And each is harder hitting than our current guns. So where you see forty eight turrets, there is the equivalent of one hundred and forty four old ones."

  George whistled, and a few others did as well.

  "Any problems at all?"

  "None," answered Jane. "Perfect first live firing. Where do you want it?"

  "Karn."

  "Confirmed."

  The screen showing our side changed to showing part of the other side, and we could see the Keerah were now on their way.

  Something had changed. Sometime during the battle, the priority had changed from blockading the other jump points, to being first into ours again. But then, there was so much debris in the system now, getting to the other jump points was now really dangerous. In time, a lot of it would drift off into interstellar space, but for now, the only really open tracks were to us.

  "Navmap," I ordered, and a third screen changed to show me everything we could see out there.

  I zoomed it in on Karn, then Kelewan, and both ends of Thorn's space. All of them looked clear of immediate threats. I nodded to Jane, and it went back to showing what it previously had.