After that, it would be one damaged frigate against three cruisers. He shrugged. That was Captain Metzker’s problem. He’d give his captain the best situation he could engineer; the rest was up to her.
The ship appeared deceptively close. Little knew he had to resist the urge to ‘eyeball’ it. Like some cartoon character running out of momentum halfway through jumping a canyon, he didn’t want the weapon to intersect the ship’s path after the vessel had passed.
He wanted it to go off as close to the engineering spaces as possible. Given her low velocity, now that she was inside the debris field, the time to throw the nuke was…
“Now!” he ordered quietly but with unmistakable urgency.
Karkada and MacAdam heaved, almost in unison, and the self-destruct device went tumbling toward the enemy’s shields.
Little pushed off with his left foot and drifted over to them. Karkada grabbed his suit to position him in the middle of the hole. With one hand clutching the comm-link that was holding the weapon’s firing circuit open, Little wasn’t keen on trying to grab anything. Reflex might kick in and ruin his clever scheme.
“Thanks, Vik.” Little watched the nuke grow smaller. He had no way of knowing the range of the comm-links in open space, but he knew it wouldn’t reach as far as the cruiser. This time, he was eyeballing it, and he’d better get it right. He pulled a second comm-link from a utility pouch at his waist and handed it to Karkada.
The two techs pulled him out the hole in the hull and stood on the outer hull using the mag-plates in their boots. It was indecorous and they were loving every minute of it. With a second heave, they sent their chief hurtling toward their new ship before pushing off behind him. Two other techs had already reached the ship and were working at installing the scrubbers.
“That should be close to halfway, Vik,” Little advised. He watched on his HUD as the comm-link icon separated from Karkada, creating a link in the chain that would extend the reach of their emergency communicators. Little would rather have sent all of his men on ahead, just in case the links didn’t have enough range, but he didn’t trust himself to keep the trigger pressed on the dead-man’s switch he’d rigged to the link while jumping off.
He passed through the shielding and concentrated on trying to grab on without forgetting the dead-man’s switch. He’d considered a simple press-to-detonate scheme but preferred the absolute certainty of detonation afforded by the dead-man. He got his left hand onto a tie-off railing a heartbeat before the rest of his body slammed into the hull with all of the force imparted to him by his two techs.
The air was forced out of his lungs and, when the ducts finally cleared the fog from his visor he looked back at the enemy ship in alarm. “Chto za huy?” he yelled. “What are you fools doing? I go to all this trouble to buy us an advantage and it’s for nothing?”
He watched, mind racing through the variables with furious speed as the slow-moving nuke passed the enemy shield and bounced slowly aft along its hull, grabbed here and there by the lateral bleed from the grav-plates in the ship’s decking. He looked down at the link in his hand as the blue shield shimmer announced the safe arrival of Karkada and MacAdam.
“Polnyi pizdets!” he muttered. The best shot was probably to go for it and try to pre-empt what his crewmates were doing. He let go of the trigger.
The Cavalry
“The other three are still coming our way,” Tactical advised. “Tango charlie one still investigating the debris field. Metzker’s ship is swinging around to bear on them as slowly as they can without looking like it’s on purpose.”
Ava dismissed the urge to hail Metzker. An approaching enemy force made a good distraction for those four cruisers but, if that force suddenly started trying to make contact with someone in the debris field… “Very well,” she replied. “Focus fire on tango charlie three.”
They’d come here expecting combat losses. That was the nature of the game they were playing, but they’d gotten lucky. Most of the enemy warships had been caught in the middle of replenishing. It was an ironic weakness, the efficient nature of Gray logistics. Few ships were waiting their turn in orbit with alert crews.
She’d begun to hope that the single frigate would be her only loss and she’d still held out hope of rescuing some of the crew.
Now it looked like they’d take a few more lumps after all. She’d have simply ordered a jump out of the system, if not for her crippled frigate crew. If only there was a way to know for sure whether they were alive or dead.
“Targeting solution active and disseminated to the fleet,” Tactical announced. “First target is tango charlie three. Fleet will switch focus to tango charlie two on our signal. Maximum effective envelope in one-six millis.”
“Helm…” Ava began.
“Lords ‘amighty!” Tactical exclaimed as an orange haze doubled the size of the icon representing tango charlie one. “Looks like a nuke went off inside their shield.”
“Stay on target,” Ava ordered. “We’re still starting with tango charlie three.”
Job Satisfaction
Little’s visor darkened as the cruiser suddenly disappeared behind a brilliant, shield-contained glow. The glowing shape was roughly twice the volume of the ship and almost the same form. Sheets of violent energy escaped along some of the weaker seams where the shields met.
The engineer knew that tendrils of destruction were also worming their way into the ship, killing crewmen and shattering bulkheads. He flinched as one of those tendrils reached an aft shield generator and vaporized it. The force was released, propelling the quickly disintegrating forward half of the vessel, still shielded for the moment.
It raced past the frigate he clung to, smashing into the one they’d been forced to abandon. He reflected that it would have been nice if the damn thing could have crashed into one of its other companions, but you can’t have everything.
At least it had missed this ship.
He started pulling his way over to the nearest escape trunk.
Fighting Chance
“What the hells?” The tactical officer, to his credit, began re-targeting the main guns before Robin could even voice the order, despite the sudden and dramatic destruction of his original prey. The ship had swung almost all the way around to face the incoming cruiser. Now it began swinging back toward the other three enemy ships.
“Fire on the next closest vessel,” Robin ordered, just to be sure they were on the same page. “And we can thank our chief engineer for preserving our element of surprise for a precious few seconds.” She sincerely hoped he’d made it back before the explosion because the wreck he’d been scrounging in had been torn apart by the blast.
At least two of his techs were back aboard, installing the scrubbers.
Still, it looked like they’d finish sometime after they lost this fight, so running wasn’t going to be an option. She was about to give the order to open fire when the sensor officer interrupted.
“Fleet is coming back our way,” the tactical officer announced. “The three enemy cruisers are turning to meet them.”
“We hold fire,” Robin ordered, frowning at her tactical officer. He was staring intently at the holo, his finger hovering above the fire control panel. “You hear me, Mister Merton? We hold fire till the moment is right.”
Merton looked back to Robin, breathing rapidly, the understanding slowly working its way across his features. He jerked his hand away from the panel. “Understood, ma’am. Holding fire.”
Robin didn’t want to simply shoot at the enemy and do as much damage as she could before her ship was destroyed. She wanted to wait until the enemy were committed to another target, the Human fleet in this case, before adding her own contribution. It also might just give the engineering techs enough time to get the distortion drive running again.
She opened the damage control channel. “Comms are still offline?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Little’s voice replied, “but we’ll have that fixed in a few micros. Distorti
on is almost ready to go as well. Another couple of millis and we’ll be ready to jump, though we might still explode a little bit…”
Robin grinned. “Little, you magnificent bastard! The whole crew’s gonna get you roaring drunk when we get back!”
She closed the channel. Ordinarily, she’d wait until they were out of danger before patting anybody on the back but she thought it might help morale for the bridge crew to hear that some things, at least, were going well.
“Our fleet is firing their first long-range shots,” Tactical advised. “Looks like they’re focusing on the ship nearest them.”
“Good,” Robin walked over to the tactical station, stopping where the operator and his officer could both see her.
“I want you to concentrate on the other two,” she told them, reaching up into their holo display as she spoke. She activated the two icons. “Port secondaries open up on this one, starboard on this one.”
She looked at both, waiting for the nods. “Find the shield seams and put one main round into each. They’ll be drawing power from the aft shields to reinforce forward. With that many contacts coming at them, they’ll barely have anything at the rear.”
“We’ll have to be very quick,” the tactical officer advised. “If we take too long firing on the seams, the enemy’ll have enough time to shift power back to the aft sections.”
She nodded. “So fire as fast as you can. Do we have enough traverse in those two mains to hit both targets at once from here?”
Tactical shook his head. “At this distance, we’ll have to rotate the ship and use the elevation and depression instead. The yuben Grays keep on putting shuttle bays right in the middle of the bow. Cuts eight degrees from traverse toward the centerline.”
“Very well. Helm is still under your control. Put us in firing position and find those shield seams.” She started back for her own station. “Crack em open, gentlemen. Let’s beat ‘em like rented mules.” She had no idea what a ‘mule’ might be. It was just another archaic word from the mists of time, but it sounded good, for the crew’s sake.
The ships showing in her holo began rotating as the frigate moved into a firing position that would let her shoot at both assigned targets simultaneously. Though the main guns were limited in their side-to-side traverse by the shuttle bay, they could elevate and depress more than enough to put the two targets in their firing envelope.
“Firing,” Tactical stated calmly.
The mournful howl still made the small hairs on her neck stand up, but it felt good to be firing at the enemy. She enlarged the view of the two closest ships just as the deeper wail of the main guns vibrated her feet.
The wait was relatively short, given how close the targets were. At roughly fifteen kilometers, the rounds arrived on target in roughly the time it would take to say the word ‘kilometer’.
The target to starboard had a relatively weak section of shield seam and the round penetrated easily, smashing its way into the heat exhaust from one of the pitch drives. The round, now converted into an ignited vapor, must have struck the magnetic shielding for the main distortion drive because it was channeled out the side of the vessel’s hull, preventing any further damage.
The ship’s thrust was thrown out of balance with the loss of the engine and she veered toward the other targeted cruiser, just regaining control in time to avoid a collision.
The round targeting the ship to port failed to penetrate the shields but, with weakened power to the aft shields, the grip that the energy fields had at their overlaps became weaker. Rather than dissipating the force of the impact over the entire shield, a jagged orange pattern showed where slippage occurred in the protective fields.
The slippage was too much and two of the aft shield generators were torn loose from their mountings, crashing through bulkheads, severing conduits and, of course, failing to emit their shields anymore.
The secondary batteries kept up their fire, now tearing into the cruiser’s stern with ruthless brutality. The smaller rounds had less penetration and kinetic energy, but they chewed away at the ship like a swarm of carno-bats.
“Portside target, now the ventral target, has lost propulsion and shields,” the tactical officer declared. “She’s coasting but she can probably still fire her weapons. Starboard target, now the dorsal target, is underway but at reduced velocity. Venting atmo in the area of the starboard pitch drive compartment. Assess as still combat capable and the greater threat.”
“Very well,” Robin replied coolly. She realized she should’ve insisted on having Tactical give proper target designations at the start of the engagement. Even with three enemy targets, it was becoming unwieldy. “Focus on dorsal target first, then we’ll…”
“She’s coming around!” Tactical interrupted. “Firing on her flank. I think we’ll find… Bingo! A big gap in her shields over that hole we made. Firing the mains…”
The shriek rattled her bones again and two heavy slugs sliced into the hole in the Gray cruiser at fifteen times the speed of sound. An orange flash showed on the far side and a small cloud of debris began appearing from behind the ship.
“Overmatched!” Tactical warned, his lips drawn back to show his teeth. “Both rounds went nearly all the way through before vaporizing. The real damage is coming from our secondaries.”
“Understood.” Robin could see from the holo that the secondary batteries were now making a scrapyard of both ships. Getting them from behind, while they focused on a Human force to their front, had been what she would describe as an incredible stroke of luck.
It didn’t occur to her that she’d manufactured that luck by ordering Tactical to hold fire and wait for the right moment.
“As soon as we get the mains reloaded, let’s save ‘em for the third ship,” she ordered.
“Aye, ma’am.” The tactical officer nodded, his eyes alight with the thrill of not being dead.
“Distortion alert!” The tactical operator called out. “The last target is spooling up her jump drive!”
“Quiet on the bridge,” Robin shouted. Maybe she was just caught in the adrenaline of combat, but she didn’t want that ship getting away. It was just one more ship to fight later and they had her stern.
There was no better place to be. The enemy’s mains were in her bows and the engines took up most of the aft sections. Critical target plus minimal defenses.
The other two cruisers – she really had to enforce proper target designation protocols – were drifting hulks, barely keeping their crews alive. “Bring us around. Target all gunnery on that last cruiser. I’d rather destroy her now, while we’re behind her, than a month from now in a head-to-head engagement.”
In That Case, Never Mind
“Looks like tango charlie three is going to jump before our rounds impact.” The tactical officer raised an eyebrow. “Captain Metzker is turning her ship to fire on them. At least, I’m assuming that’s her and not a ship crewed by extremely confused Grays.”
It had to be her. Ava had been worrying about how to rescue them on their way out of the system and here they were, plastering four cruisers with a damaged, captured frigate. From the rate of fire, it looked like two of their four main guns were out of service and, yet, they’d seen an opportunity and they’d jumped on it like a pack of wolves.
No need to worry about giving their position away by contacting them. The Grays certainly knew they had a hostile ship behind them. “Hail that frigate.”
“Commodore,” Metzker’s voice crackled from the bridge speakers, “we thought you might need a hand with these cruisers.” The moan of the captured ship’s main guns increased the background static for a moment. “Crippling hit,” Metzker said approvingly. “Good shooting, Tactical.”
The casual cheek of her opening comment had brought a surprised laugh from Ava and her crew.
“They’ve disabled tango charlie three,” Tactical confirmed. He glanced back at Ava, shaking his head in bemused admiration.
“It’s good to see you�
�ve managed to find a working ship, Captain. How badly damaged are you?”
“Ma’am, we’ve scrounged enough parts from the other ships to get this one operational. We should have clean power for the jump any moment now.” A static filled chuckle filled the pause. “If we’re wrong about the power, we sure won’t care about it for very long.”
“Do you need assistance?” Ava turned to open an inventory screen. “We might have parts.”
“No need, Commodore. We have the parts. It’s more a question of what else might have taken damage that we can’t diagnose in the time available. My chief engineer assures me that the probability of a successful jump is in the high nineties, which is a hell of an improvement over our original situation.
“The chances of you running into trouble if you stop to take us all off is much higher, so we’ll take our chances on the Brawler.”
Ava grinned, though Metzker couldn’t see it. “An appropriate name for your new ship, Captain.”
“Thank-you, ma’am. We’ll just mop up here before jumping. Metzker out.”
Loose Ends
“So we’re the Brawler now?” the tactical officer asked with a chuckle. “It’ll still have to pass a vote with the crew, but I don’t see any problems there.”
It was standard privateer procedure. The captain nominated senior officers as well as ship names. If the crew didn’t like the choices, then she had to keep coming up with alternatives until one of them got approval.
“Captain, Little here.” The engineer’s voice sounded a little clearer. He must have a damage control team working on the comms system.
“Go ahead, Little.”
“Scrubbers are installed. We’re ready to jump.”
The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 17