Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “We’re not clear from his friends,” said Erik. “Three more minutes.”

  “Captain, the obstacle density in here is the worst I’ve ever seen, I can’t even guarantee the threat isn’t worse than I’ve…”

  “I heard you Kaspo.” Erik did not raise his voice, having neither time nor spare attention for temper. Besides, Kaspowitz was just doing his job, which in this circumstance meant stopping Phoenix from running into a rock. If that meant berating the Captain, he’d do it, and such dissent only made Phoenix safer. But Erik had seen something Kaspowitz hadn’t — firepower and speed on a scale that was technologically beyond anything he’d known possible. Rocks were lethal too, but rocks were at least not trying to kill you. Deepynine warships had intent, and it was hard to imagine anyone escaping once in their net.

  “Styx,” he said, “I want you to talk to Lieutenant Geish on Scan and calculate how hard we can thrust in this mess without being seen. We are going to need to manoeuvre at safer V or we’ll never get out of here.” And he kicked the mains again, to dodge something Scan showed looming too close for comfort.

  “Captain,” Geish said thirty seconds later, “Styx and I agree on one-point-two Gs, no more. The rocks give us some cover, but their scan-tech is really good.”

  Of course it is, Erik thought. And finally, when he figured he’d pushed their considerable luck far enough, he did what he’d normally have done long ago and far outside the debris field, and dumped V down to still-dangerous but not completely suicidal levels. Still too fast, he gave them a half-pulse to lose some more, and could feel some of the tension release from the crew around him.

  Rocks previously racing by in a blur of annihilating speed were now cruising up quite sedately — still entirely lethal if struck, but so much easier to see, plot and avoid, even as they multiplied. Phoenix’s speed was still several times faster than usually wise, but then, being chased by deepynine warships intent on your destruction had a way of recalibrating your perception of risk, Erik thought. He swung Phoenix sideways and ignited a burn at one-point-two Gs, turning them away from their previous course as fast as he dared. Blind or not, he had to assume that the deepynine warship had seen their V-dump, given the amount of energy it released, and so could fix that location and the trajectory beyond it. Phoenix now had to get as far away from that trajectory as possible, without burning so hard that their big main engine would light up space and give them away regardless. But now, V-dump or no V-dump, they were still travelling fast enough that even perpendicular thrust, at only one-point-two Gs, would take an hour to significantly change their heading.

  “Okay,” Erik said, once they’d run through damage assessment and other strategic essentials. Lords he felt tired, muscles shaking with adrenaline overload, in the aftermath of a very bad fright. His voice was hoarse, as were all the crew. “I want assessment. What the hell was that?”

  “One of Admiral Janik’s deepyines,” said Suli. “Looks like.”

  “Captain, I’m still getting very little coms traffic,” said Shilu. “There’s more of them here, I can smell it. I think they’ve hit a few people, or given the local parren some clues as to what they are, and now everyone’s shutting the hell up.”

  “Damn smart of them,” Karle muttered, with one ear to assessments from his armaments team on remaining ammunition, and wear on the guns. “I’ve never seen anything that size pump out firepower like that.”

  “Okay, options,” said Erik, determined that they should not get trapped into talking about how hopeless it looked, being out-muscled like that by a smaller ship. “Can we run? Engineering, what do you say?”

  “Oh, I think we could run in an emergency, Captain,” came Rooke’s voice, in the distracted way of someone who was working on ten problems at once, and stressed because the ship might have to move suddenly once more, with little warning, and send his Engineering crew smashing into walls. In the background, Erik could hear people shouting, and the crash of equipment being hauled — back in one-G from thrust alone, and Engineering were already scrambling to fix damage. “I won’t know what our odds are of surviving it until I’ve had a chance to inspect it properly… the jump lines are holding stable enough for now, but if the polarity’s weak or the axis has shifted, we won’t know we have a fatal fault until we power up full… and then it’s too late.”

  “Captain, if I may,” said Styx. “I fear we have a worse problem. I am familiar with the capabilities of those ships. Their jump engines are considerably more advanced than ours, using understandings of hyperspace physics that have since been lost to spacefaring civilisation. Even if we did find enough clear space to run for jump, I am certain that these ships would predict our destination, overtake us in jump, and be waiting for us when we arrived. In which scenario, we would be ambushed once more, just as we were ambushed here, by the very same ship that we’d jumped away from. I doubt we would survive it twice.”

  “We’re trapped here,” Suli said flatly.

  “Yes. Unless we, or someone else, can first deal decisively with all the deepynine vessels in this system.”

  There was silence on the bridge, from those not engaged in operational chatter with their off-bridge crew. Just one of those ships had nearly killed them. And they had no idea how many more were here, hiding amidst the rocks and ice of Brehn System.

  Trace met Charlie Platoon One-Three (as the abbreviation had it for First Squad, Third Section) in the corridor off Engineering G Bulkhead. Everyone was in full armour, the usual practice when Phoenix was on red alert, if for no better reason than armoured marines had a better chance of surviving a catastrophic hit and decompression than unarmored ones. Spacers ran past unsuited, facemasks dangling prominently from harnesses that would keep them alive in a slow decompression, but not a full vacuum, shouting to each other and cursing marines who got in their way.

  Third Quarter was largely sealed from D Bulkhead down to H, not too far from here, and it seemed that ship diagnostic wasn’t giving the crew a good idea of exactly where the breach was, or how bad the total damage. The crew cylinder was rotating again, the Captain having shut down their one-G burn… but G was good either way, because zero-G was actually a pain for fixing things, giving no leverage for spacers to put shoulders into, hauling open doors and hammering open panels. The initial phase of handling major ship damage was remarkably low-tech, something marines understood well, given how much of their supposedly high-tech job devolved into sweating and lifting the moment anything went wrong.

  Marines typically looked down on spacers as soft, right up until something like this happened. Now it was the marines who were relatively protected in their big armour, while spacers risked corridors that could at any moment turn into high-G death traps if Phoenix had to move suddenly, and stuck themselves physically into structurally unsound parts of the ship that could at any moment turn to vacuum or fire. All through the war, Trace reminded her marines often, casualty rates for spacers and marines had been roughly equivalent, and there were more ways to demonstrate bravery than handling firearms.

  Most of the time, marines would get quickly out of spacers’ way, but now up the corridor came one marine who was not getting out of the way for anyone, shielded in front by Private Gonzaga. Trace hit the hatch open behind her, and stood aside as Lance Corporal Graf entered the Engineering bay, armoured gloves clasped around a spherical object of grey steel. Within, Staff Sergeant Kono led Command Squad in assisting the setup — all the Engineering crew were busy, and so Trace had assumed responsibility in securing the object for which they’d gotten themselves into this mess in the first place.

  There was a big clasp and frame bolted into the floor between work benches, designed specifically to hold delicate machinery for repairs and analysis. Within the frame, someone had fast-fabricated something to fit the described dimensions of the data-core — a high-stress frame to hold a sphere and secure it on all sides, in the event of forces up to twenty-Gs or more. Graf put it in carefully, with much talk, gu
idance and advice from others, tightening the clasp one section at a time.

  Jalawi appeared at Trace’s elbow as she watched, faceplate up, looking simultaneously grim, tired and triumphant. “How close was that?” he asked her, meaning Phoenix, and the ambush. The recently-disembarked platoons had ridden the whole thing out in Midships, having just had time to leave the shuttles before jump. The data-core, Trace heard, had been stuffed into the smallest equipment locker the marines could find, with a bunch of surplus impact padding, cargo nets and spare uniforms to stuff it so tight it couldn’t get damaged in manoeuvres. They’d hoped.

  “Kaspowitz won’t tell me,” Trace replied. “Pretty close.” Kaspowitz, alone of the bridge crew, had some comprehension of how much the marines hated being stuck down in the holds, unable to see what was going on. Over the years he’d taken a moment to send Trace some details her command feed wouldn’t show her, and make sense of bridge-crew stuff that might otherwise have gone over her head. This time, he hadn’t. That was bad.

  “Well fuck,” Jalawi summarised. “We finally get the alien gizmo, and we nearly lose everything. Is that good luck, or bad?”

  “Scratch your left ass cheek, good,” Trace told him. “Scratch your right, bad.” Jalawi grinned. It was a running joke between them, as Jalawi insisted that her understanding of karma must give her some cosmic clue as to whether the fates promised good or ill, as though she were some kind of charlatan fortune teller with a crystal ball. Trace had given up explaining to him that the whole point of karma was that it didn’t care what she thought, realising only too well that Jalawi just liked stirring people for entertainment. Now she only gave him answers on his usual level of seriousness. “Good job down there. You got it.”

  “Wasn’t me,” Jalawi said happily. “My people rock. Best damn platoon in the Fleet.”

  “Give me three lines,” said Trace, determined to get some kind of mission report out of him, given she’d not have time to read the full one for a while, even if Jalawi found time to write it.

  “Three lines,” Jalawi agreed, and ticked off his fingers. “Lieutenant Jersey rocks, best shuttle pilot we’ve got. Sergeant Hoon does play well with others, which is good to know. And I’d have loved an aerial drone to give early warning in case we got bounced, but we seem to be out of aerial drones.”

  “Wasn’t in the last mission profile,” Trace agreed, watching as Command Squad now focused a couple of cameras on the surrounding workbenches, and began playing with analysis sensors they didn’t really understand. “We’re still outfitted for the Triumvirate War, but I’m sure Rooke can make some more.”

  Jalawi nodded. “Last line — I’d have loved a hacksaw drone like you had on Kamala.” Trace glanced at him. “Seriously — doesn’t need air, doesn’t need the toilet, or food, multiple arms, doesn’t mind cold water, has technical knowledge, multi-tasker, lots of lifting, lots of high-tech tools… damn, we’d have finished cutting that hole in half the time, for one thing. Two of those things in the hole would have done it, but we needed eight. Plus it could have handled encrypted coms without all our messing around with the damn buoy. That’s six lines, but whatever.”

  Trace looked at him thoughtfully. For all his flippancy, she knew the fight at Argitori had hit Jalawi hard. He’d lost eight of his precious marines, and another ten wounded, some of whom were only recently back on full duty. Certainly he was no fan of Styx, nor hacksaws in general. But here he was, advocating this. “Thanks Skeeta. Get some sleep.”

  “Ha!” said Jalawi, to show what he thought were the odds of that. “Oh yeah, we still handing out medals?” He pointed at Lance Corporal Graf. “Eggs.” He yawned hugely. “That’s it, I’m done. Good luck with that thing.”

  He stomped off, back into the crazy corridor and running spacers. Trace contemplated helping her marines with the sensors, but in truth she didn’t know any more than they did, and figured they’d do better as a collaboration between equals. Whenever she involved herself, she ran the risk that they’d defer to her, and assume she held all the answers. Thus her policy to only take charge in non-command matters when she was certain she knew better. Choosing movies on movie nights, for example, was always someone else’s job.

  A spacer came through the door with a facemask on… or not a spacer, she saw, but Stan Romki, looking rattled and holding onto things for balance. “Stan?” she said.

  “Major.” His voice was muffled in the mask, and he pulled it off. Beneath, he looked pale and sweaty, despite the cold. “My quarters are in the damage zone, I only managed to get out just now. I was trapped in there for half-an-hour.”

  There was residual fear and stress in his voice, understandable for a non-spacer, without spacer uplinks or communications, trapped in quarters after a series of harrowing manoeuvres and weapon strikes. And there was an undertone of indignation, that she and others were just standing around here, doing something else instead of rushing frantically to rescue him. Well, everything on a warship happened by procedure, and procedure in a decompressive strike was to stay where you were and let the spacers handle it. Doors had to be reopened in careful sequence to avoid another decompression, while searching for all the leak’s locations.

  “Are you okay?” Trace asked diplomatically. Obviously he was, or he’d be in Medbay.

  “Yes yes, fine,” Romki said distractedly, wiping cold sweat and stowing his facemask with trembling hands… and already his attention was shifting to the object the marines were fussing over. “The air pressure only dropped a little… is that…?”

  Phoenix interrupted them with a sudden burst of evasive thrust as she dodged a rock — just a tap, and the marines all caught supports for a second. Trace caught Romki, who flailed… and recovered as the thrust stopped. Remarkably, his attention barely shifted from the data-core.

  “Yes it is,” said Trace. Romki staggered over, grasping supports to hold his weak legs, worried about another evasive thrust. Quickly he took over the placement of cameras and sensors, and began a conversation with Styx that got her involved in the discussion. It struck Trace that Styx could surely have gotten herself involved, and told the marines what to do, but even now seemed reluctant to puzzle her way through human group behaviour. Soon Hiro joined them, having spent a lot of time with Romki on Drakhil’s diary, and somewhat familiar both with the sensor tech, and with Styx herself.

  “Hello Major,” came Commander Shahaim’s voice in Trace’s ear. “I see you’re working on the data-core, can you give me a status update?”

  “Yes Commander, nothing yet. We’re rigging it up so that Styx can take a look at it, it’s Stan and Hiro taking the lead, plus us grunts for backup. Engineering’s busy. I’ll let you know when we have anything.”

  “Please do that.”

  “How are we doing up there?” Trace pressed before the Commander could sign off.

  “For now we’re okay, we’re playing hide and seek. You’ll be talking with me about this, Major, the Captain’s busy.”

  It was the true reason Trace had asked — any update on why Shahaim was talking to her, and not Erik. Logically Erik was busy… but Erik was also intrigued with the data-core, and the broader mission, and being an A-plus multi-tasker would usually take advantage of a pause like this to enquire personally. And, Trace thought to herself, Erik had jumped away from Cephilae after stabbing Aristan in the back, suspecting that such action would likely get Lisbeth killed. Thus her true reason for concern. Concern at what it meant for all of them, in his present mental state… whatever that was. But mostly, concern just for him.

  “I understand, Commander,” she said.

  “And Major,” Shahaim added an afterthought, “have you been through Medbay lately? We’re hearing reports of injuries in the manoeuvres, but Medbay says otherwise.”

  “I’m sorry Commander,” said Trace, “I’ve nothing to report.”

  “Thank you, Major,” said Shahaim, a little sourly, and disconnected. Medbay sometimes didn’t tell the bridge how many inju
ries had been caused by the latest manoeuvres, in case the bridge got cold feet and didn’t dodge so hard the next time. Trace knew of two marines who were currently in Medbay for bad bruises and possible fractures from Erik’s wild moves, but was in no mood to tell the bridge that. Rule of thumb on a warship said that in a truly desperate situation, if the captain didn’t put people in Medbay, he wasn’t trying hard enough.

  Trace moved to a small gap by one workbench where she could see the object that Phoenix and all her crew had risked their lives for. It was the size of a medicine ball, but looked rather more like a tennis ball, with curving grooves that snaked their way around its surface. It did not look particularly high-tech, with nothing that glittered or flashed, and no obvious signs of an access port. At first glance it looked to be made of grey steel, dull and rough, though Trace thought surely it would be something far tougher and more interesting than that.

  “Well,” said Romki, peering at the workdesk display, “it has a very strong magnetic field for such a small device. Ridiculously strong, in fact. Styx, can you see anything?”

  “These sensors are inadequate,” Styx complained, on room speakers and ear coms simultaneously.

  “Poor baby,” said Hiro. “So hard is her life among the barbarians.”

  “Truer than you know,” Styx retorted. Trace nearly smiled. “Until you can arrange something better, my analysis will be limited. I can tell you for certain that it is definitely a data-core. The precise model is unknown to me, which in itself indicates that it was manufactured for a special purpose. From the level of magnetism, I can surmise that it is powerful, likely a mimetic alloy processor, packed to a density approaching that of a planetary core.”

  “What’s the powersource?” Corporal Graf wondered.

  “Heat,” said Styx. “The density produces heat, and the alloy is superconducting. The shell is something you have no words for — it is the strongest and least conductive material drysines created, so none of the pressure or heat escapes. I would estimate that the core loses one degree of heat every hundred thousand of your years.”