Amelia Fraser didn’t respond to Sikander, but she hadn’t been caught sleeping. The instant Polarstern fired, the Aquilan destroyer jinked and dodged wildly. The range was close, but Polarstern’s first salvo managed nothing more than a single graze across her back, a glancing blow that hurled a brilliant spray of molten droplets into the void but only seared a channel two centimeters deep in Decisive’s armor.
“Velocity of those K-cannons?” Sikander asked Tolbin.
“One moment, sir,” said the petty officer, studying the sensor display. “Thirty-two hundred kps. Damn, those are light-cruiser guns! Only three mounts on the broadside, though.”
“So it would seem,” Sikander agreed, his heart sinking. A K-cannon’s effective range depended on the velocity at which the weapon could hurl its tungsten-alloy penetrator—large cannons generated higher muzzle velocities, which meant they covered more distance in the same flight time than smaller weapons. Small and nimble targets could dodge K-shots as long as the flight time measured at least a few seconds, but Polarstern was well within her guns’ range; sooner or later, she’d score, and no destroyer ever built wanted to be on the receiving end of a cruiser’s cannons. Sikander fought the temptation to get on the command channel to try to tell Amelia Fraser what to do. She understood how to fight the ship as well as he did, and he’d left her in charge of Decisive. It was up to her to conduct the battle for his ship’s life.
Marti and Penguen split up, each swinging wide as they charged in closer, seeking to get within range of their smaller K-cannons. Decisive ignored the Zerzuran gunboats, turning to bring her full main battery to bear on the much more significant threat posed by the armed survey ship, and replied with a full salvo of her own. Eight Orcades Mark IX K-cannons fired as one, brilliant shot trajectories taking shape in the tactical display to show the line of fire. A single hit landed on one of Polarstern’s sliding panels, wrecking the false side and gouging the armored casemate behind it without punching through.
“Meduse, Zyklop,” Amar Shah called. “Captain, what should we do? We’ve got to help Decisive!”
“Maintain course and speed, Zyklop,” Sikander said, speaking to himself as well as his chief engineer as he worked out his responsibilities in the engagement. “Our job in this fight is to align these cruisers for warp transit and build velocity as quickly as we can. The longer we remain in Dahar, the longer Decisive has to remain here to protect us.”
“But it’s going to take us hours to reach any kind of transit velocity,” Shah protested. “Surely there must be something we can do, Captain.”
“Stay in formation, Mr. Shah. Decisive is in good hands,” Sikander repeated, but he looked around Meduse’s bridge—he certainly shared Amar Shah’s desire to help out. We’ve got three heavy cruisers here. Any one of these ships could wreck Polarstern with a single salvo … but we don’t have the manpower we need to operate the gun mounts, and Meduse’s weapons console is completely disassembled at the moment. Well, there might be a way around that problem, at least. Every Aquilan gun mount had some provision for firing under local control in case the bridge was knocked out by battle damage; he had to imagine that Dremish weapons systems incorporated the same level of redundancy.
He selected Meduse’s internal command circuit and called Master Chief Vaughn. While she currently served as Decisive’s command master chief, she’d come up through the ranks as a gunner’s mate. “Master Chief, where are you right now?”
“Searching the crew berthing spaces for any more stowaways, Captain. What’s going on?”
“The Dremish survey ship is firing on Decisive—it turns out she’s armed like a light cruiser. We need to find a way to help out the XO. Can you take your team back to one of the after main-battery mounts and see about getting it into action?”
“Damn it, I knew that Dremish ship was up to no good,” Felicia Vaughn replied. “Aye, sir, we’ll give it a try. That means suspending our sweep for holdouts or survivors—I’ll need all the hands I can get to operate a main mount. And I don’t know if we have any ammunition on board.”
“I understand. Maybe there are some practice rounds in the magazines. Have a look, and see what you find.” It wasn’t much, but at least Sikander felt like he was doing something.
He returned his attention to the battle developing behind Meduse. Decisive veered back and forth across the rear of the formation, evading vigorously while firing at high speed. She carried more guns than the Dremish auxiliary, and her lighter weapons could maintain a higher rate of fire—for every three-round broadside Captain Fischer fired, Amelia Fraser sent two eight-round broadsides back in return. Polarstern tacked more slowly, content to maintain the range instead of pressing too close. Sikander could see that it was a wise choice on Fregattenkapitan Fischer’s part, considering the fact that she carried the heavier guns and closing the range would only improve the effectiveness of the Aquilan destroyer’s weapons. Marti and Penguen charged forward boldly to make the most of their smaller K-cannons, until Decisive opened up on Penguen with her secondary battery of lasers and drove back the Zerzuran with a dozen glowing burns in her flanks.
“Good God,” Amar Shah murmured over the command channel. “How much longer can Decisive keep it up?”
“Longer than you might think,” Michael Girard told him. “It’s hard to land a clean hit on a dodging target. During the fight at Gadira Hector dueled Panther for more than an hour.”
“One lucky hit can change that in a hurry,” Sikander warned. “If you have any trained mount crews aboard, have them try to get a gun into action—as Mr. Shah suggested, maybe we can find a way to help out without diverting from our transit course.”
“Aye, sir,” the two department heads said.
Decisive scored on Polarstern’s nose, landing a shot in the heavy bow armor that protected a ship from radiation and microscopic impacts during warp travel. The larger ship shrugged it off and replied with a fresh broadside of her own. Two of her K-cannons missed again, but the third hammered the Aquilan destroyer just aft of her midsection, blasting through the armor belt and causing an eruption of incandescent gas and shattered steel from her wounded side.
Sikander’s heart hammered in his chest as he watched his ship stagger under the blow. “Decisive, Decisive!” he shouted over the command channel. “Damage report! Decisive, respond!”
No one answered for a long moment … and then Amelia Fraser’s face reappeared in the comm window. Her expression was fixed in a tight frown of worry, but she seemed unhurt. “We lost generator two,” she reported. “Power’s out to mount three, but Chief Ryan’s working on it. Dr. Ruiz confirms that we have several killed in action and some serious wounds—I don’t know the exact number. We’re still here, Captain, but we can’t take too much more of that.”
Do I order her to break off? Sikander thought furiously, searching for a way to carry out the operation while preserving his command. If he ordered Decisive to turn away, the Dremish would be faced with the choice of pursuing the destroyer or continuing after the cruisers, their real target. Without Decisive’s threat in her way, Polarstern could pull ahead of Sikander’s cruisers and foul their transit course, forcing them to turn away … or perhaps Valentina Fischer would decide that inflicting some damage on the cruisers to prevent their removal from Dahar was worth it, and shoot out their drive plates or warp rings. That’s what I would do, he realized. And when she reduces our maneuverability to zero, she can send over a boarding party at her leisure. If we lose Decisive, we lose this encounter—and likely the whole sector, too.
“Very well,” Sikander answered. “Carry on, XO. If you see an opportunity for a torpedo attack, take it.”
“Understood, Captain. But those stupid Zerzuran gunboats are actually serving as a reasonably competent screen for Polarstern, whether they mean to or not. Should I shift fire and chase them off?”
“Stay on Polarstern. You don’t dare let her take shots at you without having to dodge your return fire.” Sika
nder tried to think of something else he might try if he were in her place, and came up with nothing other than shoot faster and don’t get hit. He was pretty sure that Amelia Fraser could figure that out for herself.
“Captain, Master Chief Vaughn,” his shipboard channel crackled. “Sir, we’ve got the number-five mount manned and powered. There isn’t much ammunition, but we can try at least a few shots. What’s our target?”
Sikander straightened up and looked aft, as if he could somehow see the master chief through the bridge and all the compartments between him and her. He’d almost forgotten that he might be able to participate in the battle after all. “Hit Polarstern with whatever you’ve got, and keep shooting until you run out of ammo or I tell you to stop,” he told her. “Fire at will, Master Chief!”
“Engage Polarstern, aye.” A moment later, Meduse’s after turret swiveled into position and opened up with a dull, distant boom that set the deck under Sikander’s feet quivering. Instead of the stiletto-like trajectory line of a normal shot, the tactical screen displayed a strobing blur that flickered through half a dozen flight projections before hammering into the Dremish auxiliary’s flank. The blow struck her on her forward starboard-side casemate and left a ragged five-meter crater where one of Polarstern’s heavy guns had been mounted.
“We hit her, sir!” Petty Officer Tolbin shouted. “We knocked out one of her K-cannons!”
“That’s more like it,” Sikander said with a fierce grin. “Good shooting, Master Chief! What in the devil was that?”
“A big-ass combination wrench, sir. Only thing we could find around here that was about the same size and shape as a main-battery round. We’re ripping up a power-distribution panel now to get at the bus bars, they might do. It’s going to be hell on the actuating magnets, but it isn’t my gun.”
“Master Chief Vaughn, do you mean to tell me that we just hit Polarstern with a ten-kilo wrench moving at thirty-six hundred kps?”
Vaughn chuckled over the shipboard channel. “I bet it left a funny-looking hole in that Dremish bastard. Oh, wait, we just found a little crowbar. It’s only a kilo or so but it’s good hard alloy—we’ll try that next.”
Sikander gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Hah! Master Chief, you’re a wonder-worker. Remember to document everything you jettison, that’s impounded Zerzuran government property.” Vaughn merely snorted in reply.
“Sir, Drachen’s firing on Polarstern!” Petty Officer Tolbin reported. “And Zyklop is illuminating her with fire-control systems!”
“Good!” Sikander turned back to the tactical display. Drachen’s shot went wide, missing the Dremish survey ship by a few hundred meters, but he didn’t mind. Wrecking Polarstern wasn’t the mission at hand—holding her off was all they needed to do. He had to imagine that the prospect of dealing with the intermittent fire of the heavy cruisers in addition to Decisive’s constant barrage presented Fregattenkapitan Fischer with a much more complicated tactical picture than she’d faced just a few minutes ago.
“Captain, Lieutenant Shah,” Amar Shah called. “We’ve got a fire-control system working aboard Zyklop but it’s just for show, sir. We don’t actually have anyone to man a turret. I’m illuminating Polarstern in the hope that they’ll believe we might open fire at any moment.”
“This is Drachen. We’re bringing a second mount up to power, but we’ve only got a dozen K-shot in the magazine and we’re firing in local control,” Michael Girard said. “We won’t be able to sustain our fire for long.”
“Good work, Drachen and Zyklop,” Sikander told his officers. “Polarstern might not appreciate your limitations. Keep at it—if we can force her to break off, we win.”
“Mount five ready to fire again, Captain,” Master Chief Vaughn announced.
“Fire!” Sikander ordered.
Meduse shook once more with the powerful recoil of the heavy K-cannon in her after turret. This time the sensors tracked a dozen outgoing shots at once, a mismatched collection of projectiles that blasted through Polarstern’s patch of space like a sleet storm. “What in the world?” Sikander said, startled by the instant salvo … and then he realized that his gun crew must have loaded the K-cannon with an assortment of improvised projectiles in the absence of any standard penetrators. Bolts and hand tools and even ferrous metal shavings could all serve as ammunition in a pinch. They might not do much damage against a heavily armored target, but they’d already seen that Polarstern was a little thin-skinned, and just about anything moving at thirty-six hundred kilometers a second could inflict substantial surface damage. Most of the junk flew past the Dremish ship, but a thumb-sized hex nut impacted right in the middle of a drive plate and cracked it in half, while a tumbling screwdriver holed one of the ship’s hangar bay doors and wrecked a launch in its docking cradle.
A moment later, Decisive’s next salvo arrived. This time two Mark IX penetrators scored solid hits in the forward hull, hammering through the light armor to incinerate the captain’s cabin and scythe through one of the repair lockers before blowing a three-meter hole on the opposite side of the hull. Polarstern shuddered under the rain of blows, streamers of molten metal spilling from her wounds amid jets of escaping atmosphere—and then she suddenly turned away, flipping end over end to point her main drive plates in the direction of her travel and decelerate with all her power. In a matter of seconds, the Dremish auxiliary began to fall behind the fleeing squadron.
“Captain, they’re breaking off!” Girard exclaimed. “They’ve had enough!”
“So I see, Mr. Girard,” Sikander said, and breathed a sigh of relief. He looked to see whether the Zerzuran gunboats intended to continue the action on their own—without the Dremish ship to draw Decisive’s fire, they wouldn’t last long. Their commanders quickly came to that conclusion for themselves; less than a minute after Polarstern broke off the action, Penguen and Marti likewise spun to point their bows away and begin braking.
Four and a half hours later, Sikander gave the order for his battered squadron to activate their warp generators and leave Zerzura behind them.
24
Baybars City, Meliya Prime
Omar Morillo’s vid call woke Elena Pavon shortly after three in the morning. She did her best to ignore the insistent chirping of the bedside comm unit, but finally she rolled over in her luxurious bed and slapped the screen to answer. “Omar, you’re fired,” she mumbled through her disheveled hair.
“Well, I figured you’d fire me if I didn’t wake you up for this,” her assistant said with a shrug. Somehow he was awake, dressed, and alert despite the hour. “Since you were certain to fire me either way, I decided I’d at least savor the opportunity to drag you out of bed in the middle of the night. Turn on the news, Elena—you’re going to want to see this.”
Elena sat up, reaching for the vidscreen remote. No doubt Omar was getting an eyeful of her nightie, but it wasn’t like he would be impressed. She activated the two-meter screen on the opposite wall of her palatial bedroom, and propped a pillow behind her back as she settled in to watch Meliya’s planetary news channel flicker to life. The first thing she recognized was Meliya Station and the familiar green curve of the planet below. Three large warships painted in the black, green, and gold of the Zerzura Sector Fleet drifted on mooring tethers above the scaffolding that covered the damaged naval post on the station’s upper surface, while the smaller teardrop shape of a warship painted in Aquilan white, buff, and red hovered nearby. Blackened scars pitted her flanks; Elena was no expert, but she could tell at a glance that the ship had been in a battle recently.
“Holy crap—is that the Decisive?” she asked Omar.
“And Marid Pasha’s new cruisers, formerly Drachen, Meduse, and Zyklop of the Dremish navy. They unbubbled in-system about three hours ago and just made orbit.”
“I don’t get it. What are they all doing here?”
“If you’d actually watch the newscast instead of asking me to explain it to you, you’d find out,” said Omar. Elena shot him
a hard look; he sighed and went on. “Fine. As the crawl is reporting at this very instant, the Aquilans are surrendering the three cruisers as prizes to the lord arbiter’s office to be interned under antipiracy laws. Apparently they seized the vessels from the naval shipyard in Dahar and brought them here to observe the legalities.”
“You mean to tell me that Sikander North stole Marid Pasha’s cruisers and handed them over to the Velaran government?” Elena stared at the screen in amazement. She’d figured that the Aquilan captain would do something with the evidence she’d handed him—after all, she knew that he shared her disgust at the Zerzuran government’s corruption. But seizing the pasha’s new fleet? That certainly escalated in a hurry! “Can the Aquilans do that?”
“Short answer: None of the talking heads on the newscast know, but the ships are here. Longer version: The Aquilan diplomat who was negotiating with Marid Pasha—Darrow, the special commissioner—claims that they can. He’s here, too. In fact, he just issued a statement that establishes the legal underpinnings of the seizure and goes on to explain that Aquila’s got proof that the highest levels of the Zerzuran government are complicit in piracy. I have to imagine that’s based on the evidence we turned over to your friend Captain North, which means that Pegasus-Pavon’s role in this whole affair may very well become public knowledge. I have no idea what that means for us, so I woke you up.”
Elena slipped out of bed and reached for a robe, gazing out the window at the bright lights of Baybars City in the distance as she thought over the implications. Her snap reaction was that Marid Pasha was going to be pissed, and that he’d take it out on anybody involved in the situation. That’s what we get for trying to do our civic duty, she fumed. It’s all going to blow up in our faces anyway. Marid Pasha’s going to seize our shipping. Then again, she’d already anticipated that possibility, so it wasn’t like cooperating with Aquila had really cost her anything. Passing her information about Rihla Development over to Sikander North had just ensured that Marid Pasha paid a price for his unsavory business relationships … a very public and humiliating price, she reminded herself.
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