by T. R. Harris
“Oops!” came the tinny voice over the speakers.
“Oops? Oops what? What’s happening, Pogo?” Adam asked. Simultaneously, he’d noticed that the last set of laser beams failed to leave the ship.
“It’s not me…it’s the firing circuits. They couldn’t handle the increased load so quickly. Two of the batteries are down. If I engage the other two, their circuits will also burn out. I’m just a personal service module. I wasn’t built for this kind of work!”
“Shields! Charge the standard cannon. We do have standard cannon, don’t we?”
“Double banks of four,” Paulson replied.
“There are still seven of them, and only one of us,” Riyad pointed out.
“What’s the status of the three we hit, but are still listed as active?”
Riyad checked his screen. “High-rez shows they took strikes, but the beams hit non-critical areas. Two have reduced generator output, which will make them slower. Weapons systems still hot, though. The third ship is fully functional. By the way, they just engaged their field dampers. Oh, and did I mention, four of the Juireans just launched flash bolts our way. Just thought you should know.”
Riyad’s calm demeanor only irritated Adam. He was only acting that way because he knew Adam would save the day. He probably would…but that wasn’t the point. It’s just that Riyad assumed he would. That put a lot of pressure on a person, hero or not.
With the dampers active, Adam couldn’t escape into a full gravity-well. He could still use the microscopic black holes for maneuvering, but he couldn’t create one deep enough to produce a light-speed-capable event horizon. That was just one of his problems. The most-immediate, however, were the four incoming flash cannon bolts headed their way.
The Juireans had fired the bolts at maximum range, more out of desperation against the longer range laser beams of the Vengeance than with any real hope of hitting their target. Cannon bolts traveled at just under light-speed and dissipated after three thousand miles or so. A maneuvering starship at distance could easily avoid the unguided plasma bolts. The preferred strategy for cannon warfare was to send out a spread of deadly bolts at close range. If a few could contact the target ship, then it was possible to disable the vessel to a point where more concentrated fire could be leveled at the craft.
In this case, Adam simply corkscrewed the Vengeance out of the path of the incoming bolts, while moving in closer and lining up on one of the Juirean Class-3’s. “Launch spreads at your discretion, Mister Paulson.”
The ship jerked four times as eight cannon bolts departed the ship. At this range, and with that many bolts, there was little the Juirean ship could do. It tried to evade, but was still hit with three bolts. Two contacted the forward screens, overloading them and allowing the third bolt to reached the hull. It hit near the bridge. Readings showed the engines were still operational, but the ship spiraled away from the battlefield, having lost her command crew.
“They’ve launched their own spread. Forty bolts, Captain.” Paulson reported calmly. He was a pro. To a normal person, forty incoming bolts would have been cause for panic.
Adam was a pro, as well. He didn’t panic, but he was desperate. He pressed the control stick all the way forward and dove for the surface of Worak-nin, eighteen thousand miles below, hoping to use the planet’s gravity to mess with the Juireans’ targeting calculations.
When launching their spread, the techs aboard the Juirean warships calculated the maximum distance the Vengeance could travel from release to contact. This determined the range of the spread. With just a little boost from the planet below, Adam hoped it would be just enough to move them beyond the range of the spread.
With a sigh of relief, the maneuver worked.
Then they all gasped as they entered the planet’s atmosphere traveling at close to nine thousand miles per hour. The hull of the Vengeance wasn’t built to handle such reentry heat. Within a second, the nose of the ship was glowing red.
Adam shifted the gravity-well ninety degrees above the ship, creating an instant course change. The inertia compensators couldn’t handle the stress, not completely. Adam, Riyad and Paulson strained in their harnesses. Travis Morgan—sitting unrestrained in a standard chair at the back of the bridge—found himself pressed against the rear bulkhead and sliding toward the ceiling, as the ship continued along its arc and back into the cold of space. When Adam leveled out, and the compensators took over again, Travis was on the ceiling. He fell the ten feet to the hard metal deck with a heavy grunt.
“You okay?” Adam yelled over his shoulder.
“I think so. How about a little warning next time, Captain?”
“I’ll try. Now find something to tie yourself too. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
There were six Juirean warships in space above them. Having seen the Vengeance dive for the surface, they now formed a barricade, taking the high ground in the battle. More cannon bolts rained down toward them.
“Pogo, we don’t have a choice. Charge the two remaining batteries. We’ll deal with the fried circuits later. Tom, take out the two maneheads the farthest away. Then lay down a barrage of cannon fire at the closest ships.”
“Aye, sir.”
The forward viewports lit up again as the laser beams lashed out. If they hit their targets, then only four of the enemy would remain. Adam didn’t wait around to find out. He skirted the top of Worak-nin’s atmosphere at just under light speed.
The ship jerked as another eight bolts were released.
The Vengeance was struck by four incoming balls of plasma energy. Fortunately, they contacted three separate diffusion screens. None were overloaded. In the meantime, it took some fancy piloting on Adam’s part to avoid the other enemy bolts streaking after them.
The shields would need a full minute to regain complete integrity. Until then, just one more hit would short them out.
Paulson’s latest spread took out another of the Juireans. Now there were only three. Adam was hoping that at some point the mane-heads would decide to cut tail and run.
“Pogo. Status on the beam circuits?”
“As predicted, they’re gone.”
“Don’t we have some super-secret torpedoes onboard?”
“There are nine. But they were designed for truly long-distance attacks, able to jump through space much as the Mark VII.”
Adam grimaced. They still had a long way to go before reaching Juir. It would be nice to keep as much of their major firepower in reserve for future battles. Of course, they had to survive this encounter to make it any future engagements.
“Prep a torpedo. If we can take out just one more ship, that should send the last two scurrying away.”
“Ready for launch in thirty seconds.”
“More incoming,” Paulson reported. “Shields at full, but two hits on one screen and the official phrase is we’re all fucked.”
Adam twisted the Vengeance again, overloading the compensators once more. He glanced over his shoulder to see Sergeant Morgan with his arms thread through the belt to his trousers, which he’d removed and looped around a console support leg attached to the deck. He lay on the floor, smiling at Adam, giving him a thumbs-up.
Two bolts struck the Vengeance again, both on the portside, second aft screen. It went down. A damage control crew could repair the shield within minutes, but Adam didn’t have a DC team. He also didn’t have minutes to spare. The screen was down and would remain so for the duration of the battle, however long that was.
“Incoming!” This time there was concern in Tom Paulson’s voice.
“Commander…launch torpedo. It’s guided. We’ll send the target coordinates once it’s on its way.”
“Yessir.”
On the forward screen graphic, the torpedo was shown leaving the Vengeance—and then it disappeared.
“What happened?” Adam asked the room.
“The torpedo jumped, Adam,” Pogo replied.
“Shit! Can we still contact it?”
“Send it a damn target before it gets too far away!”
Moments later, one of the last Juirean warships vanished from the threat screen. Yet it wasn’t simply hit; it was consumed in a huge fireball, one that reached out as far as its wingman and beyond, taking out that ship as well.
Now a roiling fireball came churning toward the Vengeance.
Fortunately, Worak-nin had a moon, and it was dead ahead. Adam aimed his ship for the gray ball of rock and whipped around the horizon just as the leading edge of the huge nuclear explosion raced by. The radical maneuver sent Sergeant Morgan once more banging against the rear bulkhead and deck, straining to hold onto his life-saving leather belt.
“And then there was one,” Riyad said. He looked at his screen. “Remaining bogie is bugging out.”
Unlike in the movie Top Gun—where the same news was met with an eruption of cheers in the CIC—there was no celebrating aboard the Vengeance, just a lot of tired sighs. The team’s mission was barely off the ground—literally—and already their laser weapons were down, and they’d spent one of their nine deadly torpedoes, to the point of almost being consumed by its way-out-of-proportion explosion.
There were a lot more enemy warships between them and Juir. They were going to need all the resources they could muster.
Adam was going to need a new plan. Then he laughed under his breath. He never had an actual plan to begin with, let alone a back-up plan. A first plan-of-action would come in handy about now.
9
“This, my friends, is Pogo,” Adam said with pomp and ceremony, holding his hands out to the tiny, greenish metal globe sitting on a console in the engine room.
Lt. Commander Paulson frowned. “What is it, a type of compact super-computer?”
“Technically, it’s called a personal service module, created over three billion years ago by a long-extinct race of super-beings.”
“Bullshit…sir.”
“No, really. This was what Copernicus Smith was after and why he got me and Riyad to leave Worak-nin in the first place.”
“What does it do?” Travis asked. He reached out a hand and touched the orb with his finger.
“A lot of things,” Adam answered, “but primarily it can produce energy out of empty space, in fact, enough to power the laser beams you saw.”
“Speaking of that, Captain, what was that all about?” Paulson asked. “I’ve never seen anything that powerful in a laser weapon.”
“It’s something T&D’s been working on. It sends flash bolts along a laser beam, causing them to increase in energy, and with about six times the range of conventional cannon bolts. Pretty cool, huh?”
“If they don’t burn themselves out after a couple of shots.”
Adam grimaced. “Yeah, that’s something we’re going to have to work on. As I mentioned, the Vengeance is experimental. Until now, it’s basically been a boondoggle for lack of a powerful enough energy source. Pogo has solved that problem. Of course, there are still some bugs that have to be worked out of the systems.”
“It communicates through the computers?”
“Actually, he can talk to me through my ATD—the brain-interface thingy, as Tom so aptly refers to it. But recently he’s found a way to tap into the computers so the audio feature can broadcast his words.”
“You keep referring to it as a he?”
“That’s because Pogo has a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence—”
“It not artificial, I keep telling you that,” Pogo interrupted, his voice booming from the speakers on the console.
Adam smiled. “He also has feelings and quite the irascible personality.”
“Should be a she in that case,” said Paulson. The two newest crewmembers looked at each other and shrugged. “What now, Captain?”
Adam looked at the orb, getting the feeling Pogo was looking back at him. “First of all, we have to find replacements for the laser firing circuits. They’re our most-effective weapon against the mane-heads, but not if the boards get fried every time we fire.”
“It could be the same solution as with the jump-drive,” Pogo offered. “A reduced power input could reduce the heat moving through the circuits.”
“What will that do to range and efficiency?”
“Range will be reduced, possibly in half. But the intensity should be the same. It would be a tradeoff of sorts.”
“Ten thousand miles is still almost three times the range of conventional flash bolts,” Paulson offered.
Adam nodded. “Okay, reduced input will work. But now we have to find replacement boards. Pogo, have you checked the onboard inventory?”
“There are none. Recall that the laser weapon was non-operational when placed within the ship. There was no reason to include replacement parts.”
“Any workarounds or substitutes?”
Pogo hesitated before answering. “As I said before, this kind of work is not what I was built for. I supply energy—and other things—to my master, yet I am not what you refer to as a super-computer. Other devices were made for that purpose. I’ll do my best to come up with a solution, but don’t be disappointed if I fall short.”
The three Humans looked at each other, thin grins on their faces. “It’s all right, Pogo,” Adam said. “You’re doing a great job. Just do the best you can and I’m sure everything will work out fine.”
“I recognize patronizing when I hear it, Captain Cain,” said the orb.
“I’m being serious.”
“Sure you are. Now…I will get to work. I’ll do my best; I always do. However, I would appreciate some help, if it’s within the Human’s capacity to provide any.”
“Snarky little thing, isn’t he,” said Sergeant Morgan.
“Now be nice, Mister Morgan,” Adam said. “Pogo is doing the best he can. He can’t help if his abilities are limited.”
“Nice try, Adam. But it won’t work. Now leave me alone to think, since I appear to be the only entity aboard the ship with the ability to do so.”
Paulson twisted his face into a painful grimace. “As I said: he should be a she. He sounds like my ex-wife.”
10
With four men aboard and only two staterooms, hot-bunking became the order-of-the-day. Adam was alone in the one he shared with Riyad when he contacted Pogo through his ATD.
You there, buddy?
So now we are buddies?
Don’t take it personally, Adam thought. We kid you only because you’re part of the team now. It’s how we show acceptance.
Very strange behavior, yet I appreciate being considered a member of the team.
So…anything yet? Can circuit boards from other modules be used on the lasers?
That was a simple survey I did, and the answer is no. These boards are very specific.
Well, we can’t go back to Earth for spare parts.
If you are willing to travel—other than to Earth—I may have a suggestion.
Adam perked up. Of course I am. Go ahead.
The Incus.
Where have I heard that name before?
They are the race of beings who found me originally, and who were working on a method of duplicating my power panels when I was stolen by the Gradis Cartel.
Go on, I’m listening.
They have a sophisticated level of electronic technology—at least for this age.
You think they’d have the necessary circuit boards?
Most probably not, yet if given the opportunity, I could provide them with plans to construct boards that could overcome the heating problem.
They won’t do it voluntarily, and aren’t they in the Kidis Frontier? That would put them under Juirean jurisdiction. If they’re as advanced as you say, I’m sure the place will be swarming with mane-heads.
It was just a suggestion.
I’m not saying we won’t pursue it, just that it won’t be easy. Where is Incus from here?”
One-thousand, eight hundred l
ight-years, near the Rison Void.
Adam knew the Rison Void was the far side of the Kidis arm, opposite the Orion-Cygnus spur.
Six hundred jumps. Can the Vengeance handle that at full power? he asked Pogo.
It may take a slight modification of that figure, possibly a thousand. But by reducing the jump distance, the recycle time could remain the same. The trip could be done in thirty-three Earth hours.
Is Riyad still on the bridge?
Yes.
Give him a plot and tell him I said it was okay. Get us going. We don’t have any time to waste, and just floating here above Worak-nin is doing just that.
Aye, aye, Captain Cain, sir. See…I’m learning.
Well done, Mister Pogo. Carry on.
The next day-and-a-half were spent carefully monitoring the power levels for the jump-drive, making sure they didn’t burn out another battery pack. Pogo’s more careful feeding of the generators appeared to be working.
Adam modified their flight path some, adding another day to the journey. Knowing that the Juireans had transit buoys out monitoring traffic throughout the Frontier—and the jump-drive did leave a trail—he jumped towards Visidor first, before switching to conventional gravity drive for the remainder of the trip to Incus. With the laser weapon down, it wouldn’t pay to walk into a hornet’s nest of angry mane-heads, all expecting their arrival.
The crew also spent the time trying to find out if the Mark VII experimental starship had any other secrets they didn’t know about. The laser beam weapon was a coup, if they could get it working again. And the nine—now eight—super-torpedoes was another. Yet after an extensive reading of the data files in the computers, they didn’t find anything else.