Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2)

by B. V. Larson

  “Hail that ship, Yamada,” I said. “And keep hailing it. Maybe they’ll change their minds at some point.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  I watched her for a moment. Her body language was uncomfortable. Right there, I knew I’d made the correct decision. She was flustered about the results of her flirtation, and so was I. How could two commanding officers do their best work when they were distracted by thoughts of sex? The fact that I’d rejected her had done damage enough.

  Turning away from her with an effort of will, I took my command chair again and waited out the final minutes.

  The bridge entry point loomed. It was invisible to the naked eye, but our instruments identified it and outlined it with a luminescent bluish glow on our screens. The opening had a diameter the size of a small moon. It was a weak point in normal space that constantly shifted its exact shape and dimensions. It was a theoretical spheroid of nothingness—but a different sort of nothingness.

  When we punched through at last, I felt a now-familiar sense of exhilaration.

  Were the star charts right? Was this route safe? Would we be able to navigate to the other end faster than our pursuers, even though they’d probably traveled this way before many times?

  Self-doubts, thoughts of Yamada, the Connatic, Chloe—even of Zye… all of these twisted in my mind during the dreamlike moment when I passed between states of existence.

  Time paused when we went through. That was a known, measurable fact. We lost about six minutes in what seemed to all those aboard to be a single flashing moment.

  What happened during those six minutes? Did we cease to exist, or were we frozen like statues? No one knew the answers, although theories abounded among theoretical physicists. Each was certain he was right, as had been every other physicist throughout the history of science before him.

  Whoever was right about the details of passing that barrier, when we came to life again, the universe was six minutes older.

  And we were somewhere else entirely.

  -20-

  My crew quickly began probing our new reality, attempting to take stock of our surroundings.

  This time, hyperspace was different. There were objects in here with us. Debris of some kind.

  “Captain!” shouted Yamada, “I’m picking up small objects, regularly placed—”

  “Zye,” I interrupted her, “shields to maximum power. Helm, hit the braking jets hard.”

  Zye turned to me. “The shields are coming up, sir. But it will take time to ramp up to a full charge. It’ll be eighty seconds at least.”

  I bared my teeth in a grimace. We’d again run into an age-old problem. Every ship had only so much power to go around. While running, we’d dropped our weapons power to near zero, flowed every watt of juice we had to the engines and lowered the shields to half-strength. Now, we needed the shields more than our weapons or our engines.

  Shields were standard equipment on any high-speed modern spacecraft. One of the biggest dangers any ship had to deal with was the risk of running into a stationary object at great speed. At ten percent of the speed of light, even a rock the size of a marble could punch through any normal ship’s hull and every crewman’s body in between with ease.

  Defiant, like all large interstellar vessels, had several defensive systems to prevent accidental destruction from such mundane causes. The first of these systems was a specially treated hull. It was laced with fullerene tubes. Much as lead stopped radiation, the dense layers of Defiant’s hull served to protect her against smaller grains of errant matter.

  But while that had proven to be enough to stop sand-sized objects, it didn’t stop bullet-sized ones. Electro-magnetic shields had been developed to repel obstacles that couldn’t be absorbed or deflected by a tough hull alone.

  Over time, shield technology had been refined and improved to the point where it was capable of stopping more than just grit. Our shields could stop incoming fire as well.

  This was a good thing, as I strongly suspected the objects we were about to plunge into were, in fact, mines. They’d doubtlessly been laid here in hyperspace to catch the unwary. They might be easy to avoid for pilots who knew their pattern of dispersal. Unfortunately, we didn’t have such knowledge.

  “Unidentified object directly ahead,” Zye said calmly.

  Rumbold worked his boards like a devil, and the deck heaved under us—I could tell by the screens it was too late.

  “Impact in four… three… two…” Zye said, but she must have missed something, because she never made it to the count of “one”.

  A terrific flash bloomed directly under our bow. The ship bucked, and we went into a spin.

  “That one hit us in the belly!” Rumbold called from the pilot’s chair.

  “Get us back onto an even keel, Rumbold.”

  “I’m working on it, sir!” He fought the controls, and we soon stopped our sickening spin.

  “Have we got more mines in front of us?”

  “It doesn’t look like it at the moment,” Yamada said. “I’m not tracking any.”

  “Good. Damage, Zye?”

  “We’re okay. Forward shields were knocked down to fifteen percent, but they held.”

  “Proceed with caution, helm.”

  Zye got my attention again. “Sir, the Beta ship will be right behind us. We have to accelerate.”

  I returned her intense gaze with a calm glance of my own. “We aren’t going to run any further. This minefield will do their work for them if we try.”

  “What are your orders then, sir?”

  “Helm, turn this ship around. Keep braking. We’ll do a little ambushing of our own when the Beta ship crashes through.”

  Zye’s face became tight with concern, but she turned back to her station. She worked the controls with mechanical efficiency, but I could tell she was thinking very hard.

  I couldn’t blame her if she was feeling distress. She’d thrown her lot in with Earthlings because her own people had rejected her. She’d killed a number of her own kind over the last year due to this switch in allegiance. But still, preparing to ambush a ship crewed entirely by her twin sisters had to be difficult for her.

  “Zye,” I said, “do you wish to be relieved from duty?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Why, sir? Have I made an error?”

  “No,” I said gently. “But this battle might become grim in nature. If you don’t want to be part of it, I’d understand fully.”

  She looked around at the rest of the crew, who were watching the exchange.

  “You’ve shamed me with that suggestion, Captain,” she said. “I don’t feel I deserve to be dishonored in this way.”

  “That wasn’t my intention… very well. You’re to man your post until this action has been concluded.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said, refusing to meet my eye again.

  Fine. That made two of them. Both Yamada and Zye were miffed with me. I thought that perhaps, if I survived long enough, I could piss off Rumbold as well. Managing that would hardly be a challenge. He was usually the most oversensitive of the lot.

  Before the Beta ship broke through the barrier, we’d turned and come to a full stop. We trained our weapons on the region of space where the ship should appear and waited. I felt like a hunter in a blind.

  Guilt touched my mind now and again. The Beta ship wasn’t our real enemy. They were, from their perspective, pursuing pirates who’d captured one of their ships and dared to return with it to the scene of the crime. I was certain that every member of that crew was fully convinced that they were in the right, and from their point of view, they were.

  That cast me in the role of the bandit. We were the interlopers, the intruders. We were supposed to be a force for peaceful meetings, but it hadn’t yet worked out that way.

  “She’s here,” Yamada said suddenly. “Down low—not where we expected.”

  “Weapons free,” Durris said. “Lock on and fire at will.”

  “Belay that o
rder!” I boomed.

  The crew looked at me in surprise.

  “We’re not firing first,” I said.

  Durris slapped at his boards, and red lights were converted to glowing yellow. Every gun we had was hot, but it wasn’t releasing a deadly payload yet.

  “Sir,” Zye said, “I feel I must point out that you’re endangering this ship by hesitating. I assure you, my sisters will not show you the same courtesy.”

  “I believe you,” I said, “but I’m not going to have it recorded in any ship’s log that we coldly ambushed a Beta vessel without being fired on first.”

  The crew fell silent, but I knew some of them were thinking that I was mad. Support came from an unexpected source.

  “Good play, William,” my aunt said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. “The bravest man is one who dares to risk it all for peace.”

  I glanced at her in surprise. I hadn’t even known she’d returned to the command deck. She’d been unexpectedly quiet during the tense moments preceding this critical predicament.

  “Yamada,” I said, “keep trying to hail them.”

  “I am, sir. No response.”

  Lady Grantholm put her lips near my ear. “Why don’t you have the Beta try it? They are her people, after all.”

  I considered the suggestion. Zye wasn’t doing anything else at the moment.

  “The Beta ship’s shields are coming up,” Durris said. “She’s braking, turning—she’s spotted us, sir. She’s pinging us with active sensors.”

  “Zye,” I said, wheeling to face her. “I want you to try to hail them. Give them the secret Beta handshake, or something.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Convince them you’re in earnest. That you’re a sanctioned crewmember on this ship.”

  “Ah, right sir.”

  Yamada transferred the com control over to her with a shrug. She leaned back and crossed her arms.

  Zye looked uncomfortable, but she squared her shoulders and began to transmit.

  “This is Beta unit Epsilon-Phi-Tria-Zeta, crewmember of Battle Cruiser S-11—”

  “Her gun ports are opening, Captain,” Durris said urgently. “Do I have permission to fire?”

  “Permission denied. Keep talking, Zye. You can convince any Beta of anything, remember?”

  She glanced at me, and a secret smile played on her lips. “I’m a surviving member of Eleven’s crew,” she broadcast. “We were attacked by Stroj, but they were repelled. I—”

  “She’s firing, sir,” Durris said in defeat.

  “Full power to the forward shields.”

  Before I could get those words completely out of my mouth, the ship was struck by powerful beams. They raked our bow, and our shields buckled. A few thin wisps of vapor puffed from Defiant’s hull where finger-like lines were drawn across her.

  “I repeat,” Zye said, “this is Epsilon-Phi-Tria-Zeta. You’re firing on a sister ship.”

  Finally, the screen lit up. I looked up in amazement. Zye had done it!

  A twin sister of Zye’s stared at us. Her eyes were cold, intelligent and dispassionate.

  “Basic humans,” she said. “I should have known. Zye, you are known to us. You are a Rogue, a pathological liar. That’s why you were imprisoned. Not everyone else on your crew died—the few survivors were thoroughly debriefed—I was one of them.”

  Zye stared at her sister. “They gave you another command?” she asked. “After you lost your first one?”

  “I’m an Alpha, Zye,” the captain said. “We are born to rule. Others are born to toil, or to be expunged.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Zye. “You know this Beta?”

  “Do not insult her, Captain. She’s an Alpha, not a Beta. She is known as Okto. She was the captain of this ship once. Now, she commands another.”

  “Captain Okto,” I said, “I’m Captain William Sparhawk. Please talk to us. We haven’t fired on your ship. We found this battle cruiser—Eleven, I believe you called her. She was derelict and adrift. We repaired her and—”

  Okto made a waving motion as if my words hurt her ears.

  “Stop that bleating,” she demanded. “You humiliate yourself, Earthman, with your lies and omissions. I doubt in fact that you are an Earthman. You’re almost certainly a Stroj draped in the flesh of a Basic.”

  “That’s not true. Allow me to prove—”

  “I will not,” Okto said. “I will give you two options: surrender, or die.”

  Everyone aboard stared at me. I couldn’t think of another path out of this, so I accepted Okto’s ultimatum.

  “So be it,” I said. “Earth sees the Beta people as allies. Therefore, destroying your ship will be a stain upon my honor. I hope that historians will at least recall that your ship fired the first shot.”

  -21-

  My heart pounded as our two ships squared off. Already, the battle was unprecedented in nature. We were fighting in abnormal space at close range. Worse, my ship couldn’t maneuver without risking a mine strike.

  We were thus limited to a confined region. Both ships were very similar in capabilities. This was going to be a duel of two titans trapped in what amounted to a pocket universe.

  The Beta ship immediately accelerated, using her most significant advantage over us. Knowing where the mines were located, she didn’t have to sit still and wait for our weapons to lance into her hull.

  My diplomatic entreaties had bought us one small gain. Our shields had been given time to recharge after taking a hit from the minefield. They were at ninety percent when Okto’s beams reached out for us again.

  “She’s circling around us, sir,” Rumbold said, working the helm controls. “She’s going to try to hit us in the butt.”

  Our aft shielding was less formidable for obvious reasons. I couldn’t allow the enemy to strike at our relatively unprotected stern.

  “Turn with her, Rumbold,” I said. “Keep her in front of us.”

  Our ship began to rotate using steering jets, keeping our forward shields and armor aimed at the enemy.

  “If you get a shot at her flank shields, take it Durris,” I said.

  “Firing… now!”

  Beams leapt out, momentarily connecting our two vessels—but nothing happened.

  “We missed,” Zye said. “No more than a hundred meters aft of her.”

  “Dammit,” Durris said. “This space is heavily warped. Computing and adjusting.”

  “Durris,” I said, jumping up and joining him at his station. “Let’s not hit them with everything we have. Fire our three main batteries in sequence. Adjust for warping errors each time until we get a lock.”

  Another set of beams crashed into us a moment later. Firing freely now, Okto’s ship connected again and again while we kept spinning in place to face her. Not all her beams struck home, but she was having better luck than we were. As a stationary target, I supposed we were easier to hit in warped space.

  Finally, we landed a punch on her flank. Okto’s starboard shield buzzed and flared orange.

  “We drew a few lines on her hull that time,” Yamada said excitedly. “But I’m not reading any debris or venting. We didn’t punch through.”

  “Keep trying,” I said. “Work the math, people. We need a firing equation that’s reliable.”

  Seeing that we weren’t going to let her get around us for a stern rake, the enemy switched tactics. They came about hard and flew right at us.

  “Hold your fire!” I ordered. “When they get in close, our odds of hitting will grow due to proximity. We’ll hit them hard as they pass by.”

  Beams lanced toward us, flashing past in most cases. It was nerve-wracking to have an enemy ship charging directly toward us, firing as they came. It was difficult to hold back our own cannon shots. But my crew was well-trained, and they managed it.

  At the last moment the enemy closed, and they hit us square-on. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  “They’ve released their missiles, sir,” Yamada s
aid. “Point-blank.”

  “Fire all passive-defense systems. Release countermeasures. Time to punch them in the belly—on my mark… Mark!”

  All three of our cannon banks gushed power at once. The snap and thrum was deafening. The enemy shields were struck dead-on, and they flickered out. I saw bright blue-white fire as our beams dug into the thick hull beneath, leaving scorch marks and deep furrows in the ship’s skin.

  “Direct hit, sir,” Zye said.

  “She’s venting,” Yamada called.

  “Bring us about, Rumbold,” I ordered.

  “Hold on!” Durris shouted. “Those missiles, sir—they’ll ram right up our tailpipe if we turn our backs on them.”

  “I’m well aware of that. Helm, proceed.”

  Rumbold did as I ordered with sickening speed. We watched as the enemy ship limped away, trailing burning metals and gases.

  “Cycle our cannons,” I ordered, “hit them in the stern before they can get away.”

  “Weapons charging—I’ll fire the moment they go green.”

  “Fire them on yellow, Zye,” I said. “We can’t wait for them to get more distance. We’ll start missing again.”

  Our cannons began firing again, erratically. They were cycling and firing as soon as they could without overheating. Each cycle, however, increased the chance we’d overload them and turn any given cannon into a heap of slag by firing it too early.

  Long before that could happen, however, the Beta missiles slammed home into our own stern. Our shields were thinnest there, and they went down quickly. They got inside our guard and hit us with more than half the energy of eight close-range, ship-to-ship torpedoes.

  The deck lurched under me, and everyone was thrown against their harnesses. The running lights flickered and then dimmed to a deep red.

  As I’d been standing, I’d been dashed to the deck. I climbed back to my feet and helped Durris to stand up. He clutched the planning table like a man holding onto a life raft. Blood had filled his mouth, but he barely seemed to notice.