“Then I think I’ve got it,” Nguyen reported. “There’s a series of large impact craters on the far side of Delta’s moon that combine to create a series of peaks almost twenty kilometers tall. I have what might be artificial materials at the top of several of those peaks.”
“Launch a drone pattern, get me clearer data,” Morgan ordered. “And tell Vichy his drop is go.”
She had her suspicions about what was going to happen next, and she and Vichy had drawn up a plan. The stealth shuttles flashed on her scanners as they dropped away from Defiance, their launch hopefully lost amongst the twenty drones launching at the same time.
The drones oriented and shot toward the moon at seventy percent of the speed of light. They didn’t have instantaneous coms, but they were still sending more detailed information than Defiance could get from nine million kilometers away.
“Confirm that; I have definite Precursor installations in those peaks,” Nguyen reported. “And— Contact!”
“Report!” Morgan snapped as red icons began to appear on her screen, flashing up to meet her drones at eighty percent of the speed of light.
“There is a modern installation using the peaks for cover from scanners from anyone who isn’t at exactly the right angle,” the tactical officer told her. “They’ve opened fire on the drones with point-eight missiles.”
Point-eights were old and obsolete weapons—but still effective enough when shooting down sensor drones that Morgan had intentionally not bothered to hide.
“Partial contacts are following,” Nguyen continued after a moment. “Activating ECM systems on remaining drones and ordering them into evasive patterns. They should keep us informed.”
“Understood. Partials are our ghosts?” Morgan demanded.
“Yes, sir. At least twenty, but more are launching from around the peaks.” The Vietnamese woman paused for a moment, swallowing hard. “I’m reading at least thirty contacts comparable to what we saw before, but the second wave is only six…and my sensors are estimating them at almost triple the size of the others.”
“Well, then,” Morgan said calmly. “Commander El-Amin, please open the range. Commander Nguyen? Target those big bastards with our hyperspace missiles. All batteries are clear; fire at will.”
She wasn’t in range of the bioships today—and she had no intention of letting that change!
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Defiance’s tactical team had had over twenty cycles to refine their data on the bioships to the point where they could target the strange creatures. As they fired their first salvo, Morgan was forced to the conclusion that there was only so much they could do.
The twenty-gigaton antimatter warheads of the hyperspace missiles certainly made an impression, lighting up the skies of the planet and the moon like newborn suns, but only one of their targets actually died.
The HSMs scored the only kill of that first salvo. As the sublight missiles swarmed toward the bioships, the creatures opened fire on them. Defiance had a limited number of interface-drive-missile launchers, an intentional compromise in favor of hyperfold cannon and HSM launchers.
The creatures pursuing her shot down most of the missiles. A handful made it through, but the hostile bioships were tough. They didn’t have shields, so they had to feel those hits, but somehow they were still coming.
“Rogers, I need an analysis,” Morgan said calmly as she watched. “Are any of the ships we’re seeing too large to be transported in the freighters we’ve seen the Children using?”
Defiance shivered as a second salvo flashed into space. Only her missiles were in range, but if Morgan tried to bring the cruiser’s energy weapons into range, she’d let the hostiles into their range of her.
“No,” Rogers said softly. “The bigger ones would take most of the capacity of the ships we’ve seen and require some refitting, which might explain why there are fewer of them.”
“The Children are carrying the bioships around with them,” Morgan concluded. “Presumably, they’ve worked out how to base and feed the things. What does a million-ton living starship even eat?”
“Organic compounds, elemental carbon, elemental hydrogen, and as many types of metal as you could find,” Dunst suggested. “The cloner on Arjtal required organic biomass, but even waste matter from normal farming was enough.
“I’d imagine these guys need a metal-heavy diet, but they do have to eat.”
“Rocks and dirt, most likely,” Rogers suggested as their third salvo crossed the distance. “Appetizing to them, if not to us. I just wish they were as dumb as I’d like them to be.”
New and ever-varying evasive patterns had been added to the bioships’ maneuvers, costing them a measurable percentage of their forward acceleration—but they were still accelerating at nearly ten thousand gravities.
“I’m guessing they lost at least one to Guidance’s missiles,” Morgan said. “She didn’t have HSMs, so they’re improvising a defensive response to that. Which isn’t helping them as much as they’d like.”
Nguyen had been adjusting her fire concentration as the strange ships pursued them. Her second salvo had been more of a test than an actual attempt to take down the bioships.
Her third was a different matter entirely.
Morgan could see now that the last HSM salvo hadn’t even been intended to hit anyone. Nguyen had been herding the bigger bioships into a specific position, slightly farther back than the rest of their swarm.
Now six HSMs bracketed each of the four trailing monsters, and there was no chance they could evade. Armored and tough and big though the trailing bioships might be, they couldn’t stand up to being trapped amidst multiple twenty-gigaton explosions.
One of them survived. Somehow. Even from this distance, it was clearly leaking fluids in a way that Morgan wouldn’t have expected a regular ship to survive, let alone one that was definitely alive.
As the swarm recoiled from that loss, the sublight missiles arrived. Two dozen missiles flung themselves through the creatures’ defenses, their electronic-warfare systems cycling through a dozen different programs as Defiance’s tactical team continued to try and find a trick that would work.
This time, they were targeted on a single bioship, charging forward like homesick meteors. The ship had slipped forward from the rest of the swarm, a difference of a few dozen thousand kilometers at most.
It was enough to degrade the shared defense, and six of Nguyen’s missiles made it through. That, it turned out, was more than the natural compressed-matter scales could take, and the target vanished.
“Well done, Commander,” Morgan told her tactical officer. “Keep it up. El-Amin, are we going to have a problem?”
“That depends on whether they’ve got the delta-v and the armor to get up to point six c,” the headscarfed navigator replied. “Right now, it would be easier to leave them behind than to stay in range, but they’re gaining speed fast.”
“How much fuel can they even carry?” Rogers asked. “They’d have to have…half or more of their mass as fuel to pull that off and have a chance of slowing down.”
“Assuming they care about slowing down or can’t coordinate with the Children to pick them up,” Morgan replied. “Plus, based off even our crude autopsy? They might just contain that much fuel…and those scales are compressed matter.”
Her senior officers turned their attention back to the tactical display as a fourth set of HSMs tore through the last surviving large bioship and shattered several of his companions.
“The problem, sir, is I’m not sure I’m killing them fast enough,” Nguyen admitted on the command channel. “There’s still over thirty of the smaller units left, and I’ve burned a sixth of our hyperspace missiles already.
“We’ve got interface-drive missiles for days, but they’re just ignoring everything I can throw at them in terms of ECM. Whatever they’re using for sensors, it isn’t fooled by any of the tricks our missiles can pull.”
“We keep drawing them out until we
’ve expended half the HSMs,” Morgan ordered. “We have to assume there’s more threats in play than this.”
“Surely, we can finish them off with another eight salvos of HSMs?” Rogers asked. “The big ones were taking six each…”
“And the little guys are still taking six each,” Nguyen replied as another salvo blasted out. Four of the smaller bioships disappeared. “It’s more reliable, but it’s still not guaranteed we’re going to finish them off before they start catching up.”
“They’re not trying to catch us, anyway,” Morgan reminded her people. “The bioships might think they can take us—they’re being smart enough to improve their survival chances but not necessarily smart enough to know they can’t win—but the Children have to know better by now.”
“If they’re not trying to catch us…the Children are running, aren’t they?” Rogers asked.
“It had to be a toss-up for them,” Morgan admitted. “If we’d come in closer, like Serene Guidance did, the bioships could have jumped us while they were already in range. The bigger units could potentially have gutted her at close range.
“As soon as we turned this into a stern chase, the bioships couldn’t win. After Guidance came through, unless they’re idiots, they had a backup plan.”
Another four bioships died. Nguyen wasn’t even using the IDMs to try and kill them anymore, Morgan noted. Now the timing had changed so the sublight missiles came in as the FTL weapons arrived, sweeping through space to limit the swarm’s options and keep them in the target zone for the hyperspace weapons.
“They’re going to run,” Dunst concluded, the civilian catching up. “They’re just using the Alava ships to get us far enough away.”
“We’ve been falling back for nearly four minutes, and those things are getting damn close to our own speed,” Morgan said. “We’re over two light-minutes away now, and if they’ve got a decent drive on a ship, they can outrun anything except HSMs already.
“I expect to see them rabbit in the next minute or so,” she concluded with a shrug. “Even with half the bioships gone, we can’t charge through the buggers. Their range envelope is still too dangerous for us to enter, so our options are limited. We can shoot them when they run, but they know we’re bound by peacetime rules of engagement and they’re technically criminals and we want to ask them questions.
“They’re quite correct to assume I’ll attempt to pursue rather than blow them away, and with the bioships in play, we can’t intercept or even get into hyperspace fast enough to chase them. It’s the same plan they pulled at D-L-K-Six.”
“So, it works and they just get away?” Dunst asked.
“No, it doesn’t, does it, sir?” Rogers said after a moment as Morgan grinned. “You were expecting this.”
“It seemed very likely,” Morgan agreed.
“Contact!” Nguyen snapped. “I’ve got a new ship launching from the moon. Freighter—big freighter, one of ours.”
“Ours, Lesser Commander?” Morgan asked.
“Military-built fast support collier; hauls ten megatons of cargo at point-five-five c,” the tactical officer replied. “She’s big, she’s fast. Even without the bioships, I’m not sure we could catch her.”
“And that, Dr. Dunst, Commander Nguyen, is why Battalion Commander Vichy is in orbit of the moon with six stealth shuttles,” Morgan said calmly.
“Let’s finish off these bastards, Commander,” she continued. “I trust Vichy to do his job. Let’s do ours.”
Chapter Thirty
“Et nous voici,” Pierre Vichy said cheerfully. “Viens dans mon salon.”
If Company Commander Comtois thought his boss was insane, he was wise enough to keep his mouth shut.
“That is a monster of a freighter,” he noted instead. “Do we have a plan?”
“The plan, Commander Comtois, is to take her,” Pierre replied. “Suffisant, oui?”
“I was hoping for something more substantial,” his subordinate noted, the shuttle around them vibrating as it began to move. “If she’s what the database says she is, she’s fast.”
“If she’s what the database says she is, we have full schematics,” the Marine CO responded. He’d been working on a model only he could see while he teased his subordinate, and he threw it on the command channel with Hunter and Comtois.
“A Rising Tide–class civilian support freighter has its primary engine control here, its life support here, and its bridge here,” he told them. “I performed a boarding exercise on a ship of this class when I was a Speaker. Those three points are almost impossible to move. Armories, d’autre part, are potentially easily moved but would be here, here, and here in the original design.”
Six icons glowed on the model.
“We have six shuttles, three platoons from each company,” he continued. “Commander Hunter, you will take your force and hit the bridge. It’s well embedded, near the center of the ship, so you will face heavy resistance. We need prisoners, people, but anyone shooting at you is a valid target.
“Commander Comtois, one of your platoons will go for Life Support,” he continued. “Once there, the platoon will see what they can do to make people sleepy.”
The atmospheric makeup of a ship was entirely artificial. It would take some time for an adjustment to the O2 and CO2 to knock the crew out, but it was just as effective as stun fields.
Less safe, but he wasn’t the one who’d issued stun-blocking cloaks to everyone.
“Your other two platoons will accompany the two of us as we punch straight for Engineering,” he ordered. “While I assume at least some of these people don’t want to die, their leadership has so far been quite willing to suicide and take everyone else with them.
“We want this ship intact. As many prisoners as possible, as many computers as possible,” he concluded. “We have to assume they sanitized the ground sites, which means this thing is our only hope of finding out where the damn bioships are coming from.”
“So, we take the ship, we capture the crew, and we ask all kinds of questions. Simple enough, non? Questions?”
“What if they have heavy weapons?” Hunter asked.
“Expect them,” Pierre countered. “They have a military ship, people. Let’s assume we’re facing military hardware. But they won’t have Marines, and they’re not expecting us. We hit them hard, we hit them fast.”
A moment of disruption rattled through the channel and he swallowed a curse.
“What was that?” Hunter demanded. Pierre was already accessing the shuttle’s sensors to confirm what he expected.
“Multiple fusion-reactor overloads,” he told his subordinate. “Plus nuclear bombs. They sanitized the ground site, all right.”
The Children had obliterated the ground site. The sensors were showing at least thirty different explosions, ranging from fifty kilotons to several megatons. The latter had the telltale marks of fusion-reactor plants that had been specifically designed to go up like bombs when set to overload.
“That does increase the importance of taking the freighter, n’est-ce pas?” Pierre asked softly. “En avant, mes Capitaines. Le destin nous attend.”
“Destiny can hang; let’s do the damn job,” Hunter replied. “Bravo Company, moving in now.”
The planning session had also served the purpose of letting the Children’s escape ship get closer to the stealthed shuttles. Pierre’s craft were moving at an easily hidden five percent of lightspeed, but the freighter was getting close enough to detect them.
The Children never had a chance. At six hundred thousand kilometers, the shuttles went from idling at five percent of lightspeed to charging at sixty percent of lightspeed.
They closed the range to the fleeing freighter in less than four seconds, specialty systems cutting the interface drive in the final instant before impact. Energy flares of collapsing drive fields blasted out behind the shuttles as they made contact, and plasma cutters woke up in the same moment.
The freighter’s hull had a thin laye
r of compressed-matter armor, but Imperial Marine assault shuttles were designed to board warships. The Children’s ship could have withstood missiles—or, at least, a missile—but against speciality tools it didn’t stand a chance.
“We’re in,” Comtois told him. “Marines, forward!”
Pierre and the Company Commander were in the middle of the shuttle and in the middle of the pack as the Marines stormed onto the fleeing freighter.
“Remember, stun anyone you can,” Pierre told his people. “We need prisoners.”
Hopefully, the Children were less universal in wearing anti-stun gear aboard their own ship. Only time would tell.
“The schematics are matching up so far,” the lead team reported. “Engineering should be this way. No contacts so far; we are moving in.”
Pierre started to move after them and his suit sensors reported multiple flashes of stunner fire.
“Contact,” the Lance in charge of the lead team reported. “Unarmored crew; we have successfully stunned them. Leaving them for the next team to secure; we are moving forward.”
Pierre didn’t need to give orders to the individual fire teams. At this point, even his company commanders didn’t need to give much in terms of orders. His Marines were a well-oiled machine; they knew how to safely capture a starship.
Pierre’s role would come in when things started going wrong. For now, he mostly let his power armor follow along with the platoon as he ran a tactical map of the entire ship in his HUD. Their initial contacts had all been pretty consistent: unarmored crew that either hadn’t known the ship had been boarded or hadn’t had time to get ready.
That wasn’t going to last, especially as they pushed closer to the critical sections of the ship. His Engineering force was going to reach their destination first, which both made them likely to encounter real resistance first—and gave them the best chance of reaching their destination without resistance.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 18