Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine

by Luke Sky Wachter

Still I made a mental note to double the guard on that man. I decided that even in the depths of my most foolishness, there was no need to be stupid about the matter; two Quads of Lancers should be able to handle anything he could throw their way. But even so, I remained leery.

  I forcibly turned my thoughts away from treachery and back toward the real enemy out there: the inhuman, mechanical invaders. The Droids.

  I looked back up at the main screen, checking for any sign that we were about to be attacked by a surprise force of droids. Or, more likely given the poor technology we’d encountered so far, a small task force diverted to delay us. But there was nothing.

  “It’s just a matter of waiting now, sir,” Laurent advised me in a low voice.

  “This is not my first battle,” I said coolly.

  “Of course, sir,” he said his face stiffening.

  I relaxed slightly and released the breath I’d been holding. “The waiting is tedious,” I finally allowed…reluctantly.

  “That it is, sir,” he replied fractionally less stiff and stepped back.

  I suppressed a sigh. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy, I decided as I sat back in my chair. There really was nothing to do but wait.

  **************************************************

  “Ten minutes until contact,” called out the ship’s Navigator, verbally reminding us of what anyone with two working eyes could see.

  “Thank you, Mr. Shepherd,” I said cordially. On the outside I worked hard to project a pleasant demeanor, but on the inside my blood was pumping.

  The Navigator straightened at his console, looking pleased to be recognized.

  “What’s the latest count on the enemy gunboats?” I asked calmly, expecting the worst.

  “Current estimated strength of enemy gunboats is 1537,” Laurent replied.

  I suppressed the urge to curse. “We won’t lack for targets,” I said, working to project a light tone—an attempt which I must have failed.

  “If we go up against them all at once we’d be swamped,” the Captain observed tightly.

  “I’m well aware that, despite their puny weapons, lack of shields, and thin hulls they are still a threat we can’t take lightly,” I said, tensing slightly as I considered going head to head with 1500 of the things. I didn’t care how low-powered their ‘light lasers’ were; fifteen hundred of any relatively modern weapon mounts was more than enough to drop our shields and drill our hull until it looked like Swiss cheese.

  “Even though the Uplifts possess old tech gunboats which they’ve refurbished, the boats in our fleet are an order of magnitude more combat effective than the droids boats,” the Captain said confidently.

  “Quantity has a quality all of its own,” I mumbled sourly.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said, waving my hands irritably. “Continue, please; we both know the droid boats are so much scrap metal compared to our ships. And while I’d be quite interested to find out why they have such funky, inferior tech, we both know that we can’t deal with hundreds and hundreds of the things—and those spinal mounts on their mother-ships are nothing to sneer at. We were lucky the last group came in waves rather than all at once, or we likely wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Accuracy and precision are going to be important,” the Captain admitted after considering silently for a long moment, “but speed is the key.”

  “Stick and move?” I laughed.

  He nodded solemnly, wiping the smile off my face and damping the humor.

  “They’ll arrive first and, if past history of our two battles with the creatures is anything to go by, aim for the most powerful combatant on the field,” he replied.

  “The battleship,” I frown with concentration.

  “Indeed, and it gives us options,” he said, smiling tightly, “even when we show up, the majority of their attention should be fixed on the Aqua SDF battleship. If we cut the corners of the enemy formation, raking the edges with the Fleet’s combined firepower and move out of range again in rapid passes, each firing run should winnow the enemy ships and gunboats a little more each time.” “And if they overrun the battleship while we’re dancing around the perimeter avoiding damage?” I asked, genuinely interested in his answer.

  He shrugged. “That’s what battleships are made for. And besides,” he said, his face darkening, “even after speaking with Representative Kong, they’ve made it clear they’re too suspicious to be easy friends of ours. Even saving their destroyers from certain death and annihilating a squadron of the enemy hasn’t seemed to do much to lighten their suspicions.”

  “A definite point,” I said dourly, “we show up, ride to the rescue, and instead of thanks they ignore us completely up until the point they’re ready to tell us they’ll consider amnesty and a pardon for our reputed actions in another Sector. No. you’re right: they aren’t eager to be our friends. At least, not just yet…” I trailed off a slow deadly smile crossing my face as I considered that soon, if the chips fell right for me and wrong for the locals, they might have cause to rethink their position.

  But when they did they would find their pleas falling on deaf ears. They’d had their chance to hail the mighty relief fleet as we rolled in for Murphy-sainted heroes and they blew it. They didn’t just blow it—they blew a big raspberry and laughed scornfully in said fleet’s face.

  So while I wasn’t going to try to go out of my way to screw them over—after all, humanity had to hang together against the machine plague or we’d all hang separately—by the same token I wouldn’t weep any tears if they got steamrolled while I was doing my blasted best to save them despite themselves. No, I would do what was best for my fleet first, and what was best for Aqua Nova second. I could only pray to the Space Gods that the two were one and the same thing, because they’d had their chance to play to my inner self-sacrificing hero and they blew it. If they wanted me to be a villain then I was more than happy to play the role. I would have preferred the roll of hero riding to the rescue, but we don’t always get to pick and choose.

  “No, you’re right, Laurent,” I said seriously. “When we had the battleship we acted as the anvil of known space and I didn’t hear any cries of ‘thank you’ along the way. Which either means people are an ungrateful lot of sods, or that’s just the role a ship of the line plays and there’s no point complaining about it,” I paused in consideration. “I must say, I far prefer the second interpretation on so many different levels,” I mused before nodding as I came to a decision, “we’ve did our time before the mast and, having run though several of our own capital ships by now, we’re down to just a Strike Cruiser. I guess that means it’s their turn to take the hammer strikes. Karma’s a real witch and no one wept for us when we took on the Pirates of Omicron Station with just a hope, a prayer, and the Lucky Clover. It was no different when we went head to head against a Bug mother-ship and two of Jean Luc’s purloined battleships with just the Armor Prince. So I won’t weep for them now either; that’s just the way we battleship commanders roll.”

  My Flag Captain looked disturbed and his mouth twisted disapprovingly, but the iron had entered my soul. I didn’t care. Oh, in the abstract I absolutely cared for the helpless hordes of humanity teeming on Aqua Prime and would do my best by them, but that was it.

  “We should do what we can for them,” Laurent said finally.

  “Oh, we will,” I agreed easily, because after all it was the right move tactically speaking, “after we’ve thinned the herd enough, so to speak, we’ll do what we can for that battleship.”

  Laurent still looked uneasy and less than satisfied with my words, but eventually nodded. By that time we were mere minutes away from combat, proving the adage that ‘time flies when you have a little back and forth to distract you.’

  “The main body of the Droid Fleet is making its attack run now, Admiral!” exclaimed the Officer in command of Sensors. “We’re reading multiple strikes on the SDF Battleship’s shields from the mo
ther-ships’ spinal mounts.”

  “If only we knew the names of their ships,” I sighed.

  “But we do, Admiral,” exclaimed Lisa Steiner in surprise, “they sent us their IFF codes so we can avoid a friendly fire incident.”

  I turned to her in surprise as I inquired, “Then why doesn’t the Screen reflect that with the accompanying little name tags?”

  Steiner turned red. “I don’t know, Admiral; I forwarded them to the Sensor section already,” she replied, squirming in her seat.

  I turned back to the Sensor Section. “Warrant Officer, if you could attach the names of the SDF ships to their icons, I’d appreciate it,” I said dryly. I then activated the collapsible screen built into the arm of the command chair. There was no way I could read the names on the main screen without straining my eyes; that’s what the little one built into the chair was for.

  I smiled with satisfaction as the names popped up and then smirked as the name Poseidon popped up underneath the icon of the battleship. An ancient water deity indeed, I mused silently.

  My smile was wiped out when the hurricane that was the Droid Fleet advanced on the much smaller System Defense Forces of Aqua Nova.

  A hail of laser fire raged between the two Fleets as several of the droid mother-ships opened fire with their spinal mounts. Mere moments after that, the SDF Battleship Poseidon surrounded by a dozen destroyers, a pair of corvettes, and a handful of armed merchant ships which wheeled hard over and blasted them first with its long range turbo lasers. Then, as the rest of the SDF Fleet came within firing range, they also added their lasers to the mix.

  Battleships are built tough, and Poseidon was no exception, but when fifteen cruisers all target the same ship at once bad things were bound to happen. In this case they were happening to the SDF battleship.

  “Battleship’s shields are spotting!” exclaimed one sensor operator.

  “Her port shields are collapsing,” cried another.

  “She’s turned her initial slew to bring her turbo-lasers on target into a roll; Poseidon is trying to bring her starboard shields around to cover,” reported the Tactical Officer.

  “She’s taking multiple raking strikes to her port side; the Battleship’s just lost multiple laser mounts,” reported a sensor operator as the litany of damage and destruction being bestowed on the SDF’s most powerful ship continued to rise.

  Behind a patented, Royal mask, I was clenching my teeth. It wouldn’t do us much good riding to the rescue if there was no one left to rescue when we arrived. Worse, if the battleship and its escorts were gone the Droid Fleet would be free to turn its entire attention onto us.

  “She’s turning over hard and going beyond full burn to emergency speed,” DuPont broke in, slamming the palms of both fists onto his console. “Go-go-go; hard over to cut off the engagement!”

  I looked over at him with surprise, seeing as he was normally much more unflappable than this—or at least silent during battle.

  “Enhance your calm, Helm,” the Captain growled at him and DuPont’s head whipped over.

  For a moment he stared with seeming incomprehension at Laurent before realization swept his face and he melted back into his seat, red-faced and crestfallen.

  “Sorry, sir,” the Helmsman said ducking his head and avoiding eye contact, “too long driving battleships, I guess.”

  “They’ll either make it or they won’t. There’s nothing we can do about—” Laurent consoled the younger man only to be interrupted.

  “Leading edge of the enemy gunboat wave is entering light laser range now, sirs!” cried the Warrant in charge of Sensors right before that part of the screen between the battleship and the gunboat swarm light up with an almost solid wall of color.

  Unable to help myself, I scowled at the screen knowing there was no way even a battleship could survive that maelstrom of death and destruction. Fifteen hundred shots of anything would be more than enough to bring down the Clover’s shields; I couldn’t imagine the Poseidon was in any way superior to my ship…’

  “Movement detecte—“ one of the sensor operators exclaimed, jumping out of his seat right before the space around the battleship lit up.

  “Fusion core detonation, Admiral,” shouted another sensor operator, “looks like she’s toast.”

  “Multiple fusion core overloads,” cut in another operator.

  “Yes, of course,” retorted the first, “the battleship has multiple cores—”

  “No, you imbecile; they’re too far apart to all be from the battleship and besides the energy released is too small!” scoffed the second sensor-man, as the forward leading edge of the blob that was the gunboat wave interpenetrated with the SDF Fleet.

  “The destroyers!” I exclaimed, popping out of my own chair in surprise and taking two steps toward the Sensor Section to verify the information myself before I realized what I was doing. I turned red in the face and hurried back to my seat. “Tell the men to stay in their chairs,” I said irritably, not happy to have been infected by my men with the urge to jump up and down.

  Angry, more at myself than anything, I sat back down and strapped myself in making sure to pull the belt tight.

  “Of course, sir,” Laurent replied.

  “Yes, Admiral,” the Tactical Officer said, still sounding enthusiastic, “multiple destroyers moved at the last second to place themselves between the battleship and those gunboats.”

  “Good work, that,” I said, keeping my eyes peeled and focused on the battle taking place over Aqua Prime. I was unwilling to risk missing so much as a micro-second if I could avoid it. Placing yourself squarely in front of certain destruction with only the possibility of survival took guts. I knew, because I’d done something similar when I signed my own death warrant to try and save my crew when Sir Isaak offered me the Demon’s Bargain back when I was stuck in durance vile.

  “What’s wrong with the screen, Sensors?” Laurent demanded as everything went blurry.

  “There’s too much going on and too many core dumps in too small an area. We can’t get a good resolution, Captain,” the Warrant said respectfully.

  “Clear it up, man,” Laurent growled.

  “On it, sir,” the other man said right before the screen started to clear.

  A cheer went up around the bridge as we saw the battleship appear out of the maelstrom of death and destruction, like the fearsome Titan of Battle she was named for.

  However, as things cleared up more the cheer withered and died.

  “Just getting the numbers now, Sir,” Tactical spoke in a shaken voice. “Survivors are listed as four SDF destroyers all with significant battle damage and the battleship…” he trailed off.

  He didn’t need to say more. I’d already zoomed in on the little screen built into the arm of my chair and not only was the Battleship totally unshielded she was limping along on one of her secondary engines and streaming air from more than a dozen hull penetrations. I could only imagine the hailstorm of fire they had to have taken to penetrate that hull with only light lasers—and to do it more than a dozen times…It was a testament to battleships everywhere that she was still moving under her own power.

  “Steady on, bridge crew,” I said grimly, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better." I could tell right away no one had been in any way comforted by this utterance, and I knew they needed something to take their minds off the fate of a task group nearly as many hulls as we had and far more in weight of metal, “Tactical, if you could get me an estimate on just how many gunboats were destroyed by the SDF?” I asked.

  The Tactical officer gave himself a shake. “Right…on it, Admiral,” he said, still staring at the something on his console for long moments before giving himself a full body shake and starting to pull of the figures. “Initial estimates are upwards of a hundred and fifty gunboats are gone, sir,” the other Officer said professionally, as if the mere utterance of that small a figure of enemy destroyed wasn’t a staggering body blow. For all intents and purposes, the
entire remaining SDF Fleet had just been knocked out of the fight—and all they’d done was take a tithe of ten percent on the enemy boats. “Half of them were probably caught in the cascade of core detonations, and the SDF likely could have gotten more of them if they hadn’t managed to skirt the leading right edge of the boat formation.”

  Left unsaid in his report was the certainty that if they hadn’t skirted outer portion of the massive formation, they would have been destroyed.

  It took me a moment to realize that Laurent was standing at my elbow. I looked up at him and cocked my head.

  “Do you want to issue new movement orders to the Fleet?” he prompted.

  “You’re right,” I said straightening in my chair. The droids were coming around for a second pass at the crippled SDF survivors, and if we didn’t adjust course for maximum effect their sacrifice would have been lost. This may not have been what the captain intended when he prompted me, I realized after half a second, but it did little to change my mind. “Helm, prepare to adjust course,” I said, firing off the new coordinates we would need to skirt the outer edge of the enemy gunboat formation.

  Between last minute course changes by both the boats and the mother-ships—the first to keep after the battleship no matter what and the second to skirt around the blast radius of the core explosions—there was a small chance that we could hit just the boats and keep to such a range that they and the mother-ships couldn’t respond.

  “On it, Admiral,” DuPont said his mouth hardening into a hard straight line as he input the change.

  “You heard the man,” Laurent snarled, “sound action stations; any fool that hasn’t already realized we’re in a fight need to lock him or herself down and do it now.”

  It’s difficult to describe, but I could almost feel the bridge drawing strength from me. Their thoughts were almost certainly in the vein of, ‘if that crazy Montagne’ thinks we can do it, we have a definite chance!’

  I shook my head disgustedly. If they were counting on me to pull something out of my hat, they were doomed to disappointment. At that moment I wasn’t sure what we could do to win this thing. My original plan had been based on the idea of using the local SDF forces as the anvil with us serving as the hammer. I had hoped we would somehow pound the droids into dust between us, but as things stood that wasn’t going to be a possibility.