by Evan Currie
Imperial Forces were disciplined. They had to be as serving the empress was a harsh life.
These anomalies, however, were something entirely different.
They were willing to fight with a reckless abandon that was utterly alien to the Oather mentality and clearly had enough discipline. Yet a measure of . . . unpredictability seemed to defy all attempts she made at decoding their actions.
It is almost as if the enemy commander lets his people make their own plans and execute them without oversight.
She pushed that thought away, however, because it was ludicrous to consider. You couldn’t coordinate space battles if your individual commanders were all flying around on their own cognizance. No battle network could possibly keep up with the chaos, not over the extreme delays caused by the limitations of FTL communications.
And even if they had managed to compensate for that, she shuddered at the idea of letting some of her captains off their leashes. Incompetence tended to rise to the top in every organization she’d seen, or at least to a level commensurate with its severity. She had far more captains who were decent managers rather than excellent combat commanders, and she doubted it was any different in other established fleet organizations.
No, Misrem expected that they were just dealing with more creative maneuvering and combat formations than the Empire was generally used to encountering. It wouldn’t be the first time. Such tactics had been used before with varying degrees of success, but ultimately the Empire always won. Creativity was sometimes useful, it was true, but it didn’t trump power, discipline, and numbers—three things the Empire had aplenty.
Now, all she needed to do was find those damned destroyers!
► “Maintain fire on lasers,” Eric ordered. “All Heroics. Check fire cannons and kinetics.”
“Aye sir,” Milla responded. “Check fire, kinetic and cannon. Lasers continuing. Maximum continuous rate, sir?”
“That’s right, Milla,” he confirmed. “Don’t burn them out. Just keep the enemy on their toes.”
“Aye aye.”
Milla was settling into the command structure of a Terran ship, Eric decided idly as he ran the numbers of the closing distance. He’d had some concerns when she was transferred to his command or, rather, when he’d inherited her from the previous commander, the admiral, of the Odysseus.
He didn’t doubt her competence, but the young woman’s sometimes startling naïveté made her occasionally seem less intelligent than she was. That, combined with the Priminae’s general dislike for confrontation, wasn’t exactly what he looked for in an officer, particularly one in charge of the ship’s weapons.
A pacifist in command of enough firepower to fry a planet, with plenty left over to do the moon for an encore. That’s oddly more reassuring now that I’ve put it into words. Eric smiled at the thought, though strictly speaking, he supposed that Milla wasn’t quite a pacifist.
The Drasin had burned away a lot of her ideals, he suspected. That made him a little more somber than it should, given that they needed every fighting hand they could lay their hands on at the moment. Honest idealism was something Eric had always admired in almost every form it took. It wasn’t something he ascribed to himself, but he recognized its value.
When he heard Milla swearing a moment later, Eric pulled his focus from the calculations he was running to see what was wrong. The slight woman was muttering under her breath and practically hammering at the interface as she worked. Something was clearly not going to plan.
“Lieutenant Chans?” Eric asked as mildly as possible.
“Sorry, Capitaine,” she said, falling back into her accent more than usual. “The laser systems are over-discharging. I am having difficulty keeping them below critical overheat levels. The control systems are not as responsive as they should be.”
“Odd. We haven’t had any issues with them before, as far as I know,” Eric said, taking a walk over to check. “Is it showing up in any of the other Heroics?”
“No Capitaine. Not yet, at any rate, but the Odysseus has seen more combat hours than any, save possibly the Boudicca and Bellerophon. It is possible that this is a glitch in my software and is only developing now.”
“Well, find it and kill it,” Eric said. “Then determine if we need to make a fleet-wide patch or if it’s unique to us.”
“Yes Capitaine. But for now I will have to maintain manual power control,” she grumbled, cutting the computer off from the weapons capacitors. “Thankfully, target acquisition is unaffected.”
Eric nodded, knowing how much of a loss in efficiency would be involved in calculating and aiming the lasers by hand.
“Very well. As you were,” he said, stepping away from the weapons console and back to the center of the bridge, where he could keep an eye on everything as it happened.
Let’s hope that’s our appearance of Mr. Murphy for this battle, Eric thought, being very careful not to articulate such a sentiment out loud lest he be overheard.
“Steph,” he called, “distance and closing rate.”
“We’re down to a half AU, Skipper,” Stephanos answered instantly. “Closing at point three C and decelerating. We’re inside their known maximum range now.”
“Well, they’ll be firing on us soon, then, if they haven’t already. Engineering”—he glanced over—“how’s our armor diagnostics? No glitches?”
“No sir,” the engineering chief responded. “White knight settings holding to the letter of the manual.”
Eric didn’t respond. He hadn’t really expected anything less. The chief would have told him otherwise—that was a given. White knight settings were the best general reflection settings available, but they wouldn’t hold up for long to the level of power the enemy would throw at them.
Best we don’t give them much to shoot at, then.
“Steph . . .”
“Skipper?” Steph glanced back.
“Make ’em flinch.”
“Aye aye.” Steph grinned wide, tapping into the squadron network. “Burner, Cardsharp, let’s play. Full power to drives, controls to manual. Follow me in.”
Eric didn’t hear the response over the network, but he could imagine it easily enough. He glanced over to Milla. “Lasers, check fire.”
“Aye Captain. Lasers check fire.”
Heath looked up. “Bellerophon and Boudicca report lasers check fire. We are now accelerating into the enemy formation . . . ETA revising . . . ten minutes to point-blank contact . . . eight minute point-blank . . . seven minutes . . . Damn it, Commander, you’re redlining two point singularities! If I’m to die today, I would prefer that the enemy do the job.”
“She can take it,” Steph said, without looking up from his task.
“She might be able to, but we’re losing the Bellerophon and the Boudicca!” Heath snapped.
“What?” Steph blinked, shifting his focus to check the actual numbers. “Holy shit.”
Judging from his tone, Eric was glad he couldn’t see his friend’s face. Something told him that Steph had just blanched.
“What is it, Steph?” he demanded.
“I’m not tapping this much power in my program, sir. I swear I’m not,” Steph called back, now working furiously at his console. “Someone give me manual control over power draw!”
“There is no manual control over reactor draw, Commander!” Heath left her station, heading for the engineering board. “Chief, what’s going on?”
The engineering rating shook his head. “I don’t know. We’re exceeding the theoretical power capacity of our reactor cores. I . . . I don’t know where the power is coming from.”
“ETA to contact . . . three minutes!” Steph said, calling an update. “We’re starting to lose fidelity on our battle network with the Bo and Bell. We’re gonna be on our own in a minute!”
“When the hell did Murphy become a mind reader?” Eric hissed under his breath as he tightly gripped his station to hide his reaction.
“What was that, sir?” Heat
h looked up in his direction.
Eric took a breath and made himself settle back in his station. “I said there’s no going back now. Let’s ride with it. Steph, you have the helm. I said make them flinch, Commander. I meant it.”
“Aye aye, Raze. You’ve got it.”
Eric got up and walked over to the engineering station. “Commander, you and the chief find that problem. Fix it.”
They nodded. “Yes sir.”
He stared for a moment, then curtly turned and made his way to Milla’s station.
“Lieutenant, this is going to be hairy,” he said calmly as he leaned in over her shoulder. “I need you to check fire until we’re right on top of them, then unload everything we have. That little problem with the laser power levels?”
“Yes sir?”
“Forget it. Burn them out. Clear?”
She swallowed, hard, but nodded.
“Clear sir.”
“Then make it happen,” he said. “There won’t be time for me to issue orders, so fire control is now yours, Lieutenant.”
“I understand, Capitaine. I will not fail.”
“Never crossed my mind,” Eric lied blithely as he straightened and walked back to his station. He would now force himself to sit down and do what he could for the coming fight.
Which was, in effect, be useless ballast holding his seat down to the deck.
I want my fighter back.
► “What the hell are they doing?” Roberts growled as the Odysseus began to outpace the Bellerophon and Boudicca by a significant margin.
“More to the point, sir,” his first officer said from his right side, “how the hell are they doing it? We’re at full military power, and they’re leaving us in the cosmic dust. No way that ship should be that fast, Captain.”
“What do we have on the network?” Roberts glanced over.
“Unknown malfunction,” the commander answered with a helpless shrug. “That’s all they know right now.”
“Shit. Who taunted Murphy?” Roberts asked, looking around briefly.
No one seemed willing to cop to that, so he refocused on the task. “Alright, barring new information or orders, we stick with the plan. Make sure the Bo is with us and start adjusting our tactics to take advantage of whatever the commodore can do in the meantime.”
“Aye Captain.”
Roberts scowled at the screens as the Odysseus continued to pull away from them, a runaway meteor with the mass of a small planet buried in its hull.
At least they’re aimed at the enemy, he ruminated, then winced at the thought.
“Godspeed, Commodore.”
► Alarms blared again through the ship, bringing Misrem’s attention back to the present from the future conflict she had been trying to map out.
“What now?” she growled, stepping into the center of the command deck.
“Gravity detection has shown that the enemy ships are accelerating again, Navarch.”
That was actually a bit of a relief, she thought. At least they are not suicidally insane.
“What course?”
“Unchanged.”
Of COURSE it’s unchanged. Whatever could I be thinking? “Clarify that. They’re still on an intercept course?”
“Yes, Navarch, they—one moment,” the officer said, staring at his instruments in confusion.
“What is it?”
“The lead element is accelerating away from the squadron, Navarch. Course unchanged, but acceleration is . . .” His eyes widened as he trailed off in surprise.
Misrem, tired of asking what was going on, strode up behind the rating and roughly shoved him aside. “Is it really so hard to—”
She paused, checked the numbers again, and then rechecked them.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “No ship that size can move like that. It’s impossible.”
“Navarch, my lady, I’m more worried about where it’s moving to,” the officer said with a quavering voice, pointing to the vectors that were now showing on an intercept.
No. Misrem had to check her assumptions as she reexamined the vector.
The ship was on a collision course with her squadron.
Is this a standard tactic for these lunatics? she wondered, remembering their last encounter, which had left her in a nearly dead ship because she’d assumed no one was insane enough to risk a collision between two vessels carrying singularity cores.
“Break formation,” she ordered through gritted teeth. “Get out of the way of those maniacs. Fire as they pass.”
“Yes Navarch,” the helm officer said, clearly relieved.
She wasn’t surprised. He’d been on the bridge the last time too, one of the survivors pulled off when Aymes came for her.
► Druel stared, blinking rapidly as he tried to parse what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe it, no matter what the numbers said.
“Are we sure this is not an instrument failure? Ghost echoes showing them in the wrong location?” he asked tentatively, simply because he not only didn’t believe what he was seeing, but also didn’t want to believe it.
It was one thing for the Terrans to have somehow modified the drives of their cruisers above the theoretical maximum, assuming one hundred percent efficiency, but for them to be suicidal on top of that was . . . incredibly discomforting.
“I have checked the instruments. They are operating correctly, Captain,” the scanner chief assured him.
“I was afraid you would say that,” Druel said dryly, taking a deep breath. “Very well. Cover their charge.”
“Captain?”
Half the command staff looked at him as if he were the crazy one.
“From a distance,” he clarified. “We are not flying into that mess.”
They were all visibly relieved, and he sighed.
The Terrans are infecting us all if my crew thought I would be that insane.
► “Launch SAR groups,” Eric ordered as the Odysseus approached contact in T minus one minute. “Tell them to get as many people clear of the Tetanna as possible.”
“Aye sir,” Heath said, transmitting the order. “SAR groups launching.”
Good. At least a few will be off this death ride just in case things go as badly as they might, Eric thought darkly. “Any word on the malfunction?”
“None, sir.” Heath continued to check the data feed from engineering. “They aren’t even sure it is a malfunction at this point.”
That made him twist around and give his first officer an odd look. “What do they think it is?”
“Complete unknown phenomenon,” Heath told him. “All instrumentation passes diagnostics, and everything they’ve checked by eye is in perfect condition as well. They’re pulling and replacing parts anyway, but it’s having no effect.”
Great. Eric balled his fists but kept them under the console where they wouldn’t be seen. “Tell them to stay on it.”
“Aye sir.”
He hated this about commanding a ship, especially when something was going wrong. The part where he had to just sit down, let his people do their jobs, and do his very best not to get in their way.
A glance at the telemetry display showed that they were now only seconds to knife range.
As the seconds ticked down, he kept sneaking a look over to where Milla was standing at her station. He wanted to jump in, give her the final orders to fire, but it was in her hands now. She knew her weapons best and, at the speeds they were closing, it was all down to her and Steph’s cooperation. They had more access to information than he had; they could make the call. He couldn’t, not in the seconds this one would have to be made.
Eric forced himself to sit still and look like a captain.
A sack of potatoes sitting in this chair could literally do my job now, he thought grimly.
“Now, Stephan!” Milla said crisply as her fingers danced over the console in front of her.
“Reversing thrust! Hold on, we’re going to be testing the inertial systems!” Steph responded.
Eric felt his stomach flop around in his gut, unsure whether it was from the sudden change in acceleration or from Steph’s words. “Testing the inertial systems” was not something you wanted to hear when you were on the ship being tested. The phrase “tested to destruction” could ring far too true when one small error could leave the entire crew pasted across the rear bulkheads.
If it happens, at least it’ll probably be quick.
CHAPTER 11
► Objects that exist within the sidereal universe are defined by their mass in relation to other aspects. The only true exception to that rule was what humans called tachyons, massless particles that technically exist for an instantaneous period that defied measurement.
While ship technologies, such as the CM innovations used in early human starships and the more sophisticated versions of the same integrated into Priminae starships and post-invasion Terran vessels, could affect the way mass interacted with the universe, nothing could be done to render anything—from the smallest photon to the largest construction—truly massless.
So when the Odysseus barreled into the enemy formation at a significant portion of light-speed, and Stephanos reversed thrust, the change in acceleration didn’t amount to much in the limited time before they were right in the midst of the enemy ships.
What it did do, however, was alter the configuration of the Odysseus’ powerful space-warp generators, specifically putting their positive warp bubble in front of them.
To fly a ship the size of a Heroic efficiently required two specific warps in space-time. The bubble in the direction of travel was a negative bubble, or a hole in space that the ship could fall into. The bubble behind the direction of travel was positive, or a hill that was constantly nudging the ship forward, like a perpetual wave for the vessel to surf.
By throwing the ship’s acceleration in the opposing direction of flight, Stephanos started the process of slowing and reversing the ship’s direction, but he also created a wall of space-time between the bow of the ship and oncoming fire—a wall powerful enough to bend and attenuate lasers.