Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine

by Luke Sky Wachter

  He still had a flashing, blind spot in the field of his vision from the flash, so he had to tilt his head to see out of the corner of his eyes to look at his team.

  But where the repair team had been located only moments before, there was only a darkened line of hull metal a man’s length deep and several man lengths wide. There was no sign of his repair team, and the airlock they’d been headed towards was no longer present. It, like the rest of the repair team, had been destroyed by the laser strike.

  For long seconds he stood stalk still, unable to believe his eyes and then when he finally did believe, he wished he hadn’t.

  Shaking his head to clear it, Parkiney jerked into action. Scrambling toward the next nearest airlock for all he was worth the Petty Officer didn’t even realize he was swearing until he reached the outer hatch and started slamming the entry controls repeatedly with his fist when it demanded his identity code before opening.

  “Blasted, no good, demon-cursed, blighters,” he wheezed, sucking breaths in deep and fast after his charge across the hull to safety even as he entered his pin.

  No sooner had the outer door started to cycle open than he forced his way through the still-opening doors and leapt over to the inner airlock’s control panel.

  The outer doors shut, and the inner doors cycled after once again requiring he enter his unique identity code. But when those protocols were satisfied, he was back inside the ship.

  Reaching the com-panel outside the airlock on the inside of the ship, he activated it.

  “Petty Officer Parkiney,” he identified, himself still panting for breath. The panel beeped the particular sound the Imperials had for a priority override and while the link was being handed over for a connection he steadied himself. He reminded himself that he was safe within the ship.

  “Parkiney, report,” came the no-nonsense voice. “Good work on the shield generator, we avoided a meltdown.”

  He absently noted the sender was from Damage Control on the bridge as he unconsciously shook his head.

  “Repair completed; new coolant line run and a faulty heat sink was replaced,” he reported, surprised to realize that mechanical-sounding voice speaking the words was his own. He had never felt so detached from his actions as he did in that moment.

  “Good work, and tell the team ‘good job’ from me; they may have just saved the ship,” replied the Damage Control Officer.

  “The team is gone. A laser strike while we were on the way back to the ship took them all out, and damaged or destroyed the airlock we exited from. I’m the only survivor,” he replied, clenching his hands into fists as he spoke.

  There was a pause on the other side of the com-panel. “I hate to hear that,” the woman on the other end of the line said finally, “I’ll put them in for a commendation…" There was pause, “Are you still able to function, Chief, or do you need a down check over at medical?”

  “Commendations do nothing! It—they…,” he sputtered before finding his voice again, “doesn’t do any of those men out there any good now, whether they saved the ship or not, Damage Control,” he cursed, molten fury rising up inside him at the calm almost dispassionate voice of the Damage Control Coordinator.

  “No,” she agreed in cool professional voice somehow calm despite what had happened and for a moment, just a moment he hated her for it. “But it will increase the pension allotment their families will receive if it goes through,” she added, and although he still wanted to spit and fume at her—at anyone—over the deaths of his team, the words themselves were like a punch to the gut.

  Now that they were dead, of course his men would want their families to be taken care of—and it was his job to make sure that he did this one last job for them to the best of his abilities.

  The wind taken out of his sails, he leaned forward and placed his head against the wall for a moment.

  “Draw it up and I’ll countersign it with my recommendation,” he finally sighed.

  “I will, Petty Officer,” the Damage Control Coordinator said firmly, “now, are you still able to function or do you need to get back to me?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, straightening his shoulders and hardening his voice until he was once again the competent and always in control crew chief, “what do you need, Damage Control?”

  “I’ve got a team that lost its officer to an exploding power relay box,” she replied speaking quickly, “if you’re up to it I’d like you to go and take them in hand. I’ll load your data slate their current work orders now.”

  Seconds later, his slate beeped indicating it had received a data package.

  “On it now, Damage Control,” he said, cutting the connection moments later and striding down the corridor.

  By Murphy, he had a job to do.

  Chapter 49: Jazz to Moon Base II

  “Starboard side coming around now,” reported DuPont just in time for a laser strike from the spinal mounts of three droid ships.

  “Shields on starboard side at 73%,” reported the Shield Ensign.

  “Excellent work keeping the port shield generator from overloading, Mr. Longbottom,” Laurent said.

  “You can thank Engineering and Damage Control,” the Ensign replied.

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit,” the Captain said right before another series of laser attacks from the mother-ships.

  “Enemy vessels are entering the estimated range of the moon base’s planetary suppression ordinance,” the Tactical Officer said in a rising voice. “By the time we can get up to speed they’ll be well inside the window, sirs!”

  “Get us out of here, Mr. DuPont,” I exclaimed, but of course it was far too late for that—we were committed. However, that didn’t mean that we couldn’t juke and weave for our lives.

  “Fire!” raged the First Officer into his microphone down in Tactical, and all around us the rest of the fleet fired.

  “Mother-ships are moving into position for a fleet firing pass on our formation, and the droid gunboats are closing the distance. The second wave of gunboats will follow closely on the heels of the mother-ship pass,” reported Tactical in a clinical voice.

  “We’re deep inside the estimated throw range of the bombardment center,” reported the Sensor Warrant, “still no sign of activity. It’s possible the base was closed down and put into standby at some point.”

  “Steady on, bridge,” I ordered as if my somehow telling people what to feel would have some kind of effect, I would have rolled my eyes but I was too busy, “our job was to suck them in; we’ve done that. Now it’s up to the Aqua Novans.”

  “I’m getting some kind of sensor shadow entering orbit from the opposite side of the moon. It’s intermittent, so I can’t get a good read on it,” reported one of the sensor operators, “there it is again…and now it’s gone fully into the moon’s shadow. It could just be a sensor ghost,” he added, coloring.

  “With these sensors?” I scoffed, referring to the Imperial-grade sensors this ship had come equipped with. They were the best in known space, and while early on in my career I might have attributed the anomaly to operator error, by now my boys and girls in the Sensor department were the one area I felt confident had fully trained in. Still, there was nothing to be done for it, “We’ll hope its reinforcements and plan for it to be more droids, stragglers most likely. But regardless there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We’re committed to a battle over the moon base.”

  “The more, the merrier, Admiral,” Laurent said, adding his strong voice to the side of truth, justice, and the Confederation way—and, not coincidentally, encouraging everyone present.

  Including, I reluctantly admitted, me. Oh, I knew intellectually that such utterances did nothing to change the actual odds we faced, but just the feeling that I wasn’t doing all of this alone helped. Being the sole linchpin upon which everything hung got old at times; it was nice to share the load, even if only on a metaphorical level.

  “Droid Fleet is lining up in a firing formation; thi
s one’s going to hurt, Captain,” Tactical said, looking a little white-faced.

  “Contact!” cried a sensor operator. “Multiple Contacts rising from the surface, Admiral!”

  “Yes!” I said, clenching my fist and pounding it on the arm of my chair. Pay dirt! Our gambit had paid off.

  They had confirmed the presence of a moon base, filled with slow-moving, planetary bombs—along with people possessing the will to turn them on a Droid Fleet that could fight back. The droids would almost certainly level the base in retaliation, instead of hammering civilian targets filled with their own people…helpless people who couldn’t fight back. So despite my anger at the base’s existence, I had to grudgingly acknowledge the actions of its soldiery.

  “One hundred. One fifty—two hundred bombs, Admiral!” cried the Sensor Warrant.

  I nodded with understanding.

  “Within the spread are a variety of bombardment types, ranging from small, tactical, bunker-busters up to full-on city killers,” the Tactical Officer reported.

  “Unless they happen to have shield generators over their cities,” Eastwood grunted.

  “How many Sectors outside the Imperial Provinces can boast a planetary defense network that includes shield generators large enough—and potent enough—to protect even a low-tier metropolis?” Tactical said scornfully.

  “A few of the larger Core Worlds inside the old Confederation Sectors still have ’em,” Eastwood grunted.

  “Only to maintain past glory; they haven’t been upgraded in the Space Gods know when. Who knows if they even still work—” argued the Tactical Officer.

  “Enough,” Laurent cut the two of them off abruptly, “the hypothetical planetary defense which the Aqua Novans—and, more immediately, their moon base—do not possess has no bearing on our current battle. Man your posts and fight the battle in front of us: save your thunder for the enemy.”

  There was an embarrassed silence from the two men, and then there was no more time for interpersonal issues as we saw that the droids were moving.

  “The Spire ships are coming about,” the Tactical Officer all but yelped.

  “Spire ships?” I asked with alarm.

  The Officer colored but otherwise ignored his embarrassment except to answer. “Apologies, sir, it’s just that with their spinal mounts and general hull shapes once their gunboats detach from the rest of the ship, that they look more like one big, angry, spire to my eyes than anything else,” he said and then his head shot around. “They are firing on the moon base; the mother-ships are firing!”

  Fire lanced out from the droid ships, striking the fixed position base on the moon.

  “A second wave of bombardment missiles is launching,” Tactical said triumphantly, “they must build them deep here, Admiral!”

  “The better to oppress their own people should the need arise, I’m sure,” I said sourly. Sill morally offended at the thought that, after all our sacrifices, some idiot in political office could decide to wipe away all our hard work against the droids with the flick of a switch and a voice verification routine.

  “That’s above my pay grade, Admiral,” the Tactical Officer said with a shrug, although the tension in his shoulders gave the lie to his attempt at a dispassionate response.

  Whatever he felt—I wasn’t sure exactly what that was—but whatever it was he definitely had an opinion on him.

  “I’m reading seventy eight new bombs having been launched from the base and are now heading toward the Droid Fleet, sir,” reported the Tactical Officer.

  “The gunboats have diverted their course toward the bombs and the mother-ships are moving away as fast as they can manage,” reported Sensors.

  I could see that the mother-ships—which did look slightly like spire-ships—were running away parallel to us, and I blinked in confusion.

  Up until then, the Droids hadn’t turned away for anything. They hadn’t backed down from a potent SDF battle fleet, shied away from a pair of powerful planetary defense fortresses, or even balked at the certain destruction of four of their ships and accompanying gunboat swarms at the hands of my much smaller fleet. Nothing had caused them to so much as turn for anything except to cut a straighter course towards the biggest target they could point their ships towards.

  So the question I had to ask myself was this: what changed? I couldn’t imagine it was fear of us. They’d shown that they were willing to chase us anywhere we went, so the MSP as a threat was instantly discarded. The bombardment moon base—or, more specifically, the two waves of just under three hundred bombs—bore more thought. But even though it appeared to be the obvious answer, I was hesitant to accept it. What changed? I wondered again.

  “You don’t think it was the threat of imminent destruction?” Laurent asked in surprise and I flushed, realizing my last thought had somehow made it past my lips without my instruction.

  “I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud,” I muttered with embarrassment and then took a breath. “The bombs are a threat but they haven’t shown very much concern for losses—not even when we annihilated that group of four mother-ships,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” Laurent agreed, “however, that was just a subset of the total group and not a particularly large one. Depending on how they look at things, of course.”

  “Who knows how a droid thinks?” I said contemplatively, trying to put myself in the shoes of a metal head and coming up blank. It was just too far outside my frame of reference, except in cheap holo-vids I had nothing to base those hypothetical shoes on.

  “It might not be the loss of individual units that concern it, no matter how many,” Laurent said after a moment, “these are machines, after all. Maybe they’re more worried about mission failure than they are losing some—or even all—of their units.” I frowned. “They didn’t seem to hesitate to throw themselves away…I mean, that first mother-ship we met all by itself and it charged headlong into the fray,” I said.

  By then the bombs had closed in on the furiously accelerating mother-ships. The droids had been suckered into the moon base’s attack range good and hard, but unfortunately a significant fraction of the bombs had diverted course towards the MSP once it became clear the mother-ships were going to escape their range.

  Essentially, the entire second wave of seventy five bombs was pointed at us.

  “Evasive maneuvers, Mr. DuPont,” I said calmly, as if he hadn’t just been doing exactly that.

  “Yes, Admiral,” the Helmsman said without even a hint of irritation.

  “Shield power stabilizing on both sides at 60% and climbing,” Longbottom reported crisply, the unusual, unbidden report breaking the moment.

  I took a deep breath. It didn’t matter what reason the droids had for turning away from us; now was the time to press the attack.

  “On second thought belay that order, Mr. DuPont,” I instructed my eyes turning hard and cold, “and push us straight toward those mother-ships. It’s time to finish this.”

  DuPont looked over at me and back toward his console and then instead of arguing with me about how one turn from those mother-ships could gut our fleet he looked back up at me and said, “are you sure you don’t mean a converging course, sir? Going straight at them right now would only put us further behind.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. I hated to admit I was wrong—and this would be doing so twice in the same minute—but I wanted these droids dead and buried a whole lot more.

  “I leave the particulars in your competent hands, Helmsman,” I said, baring my teeth, “just get us there in the least time possible.”

  “Yes, sir!” he said with a sharp nod.

  As I watched the bombs closed their approaches on the struggling Droid mother-ships, and light laser fire raked out from the bellies and flanks of the droid ships.

  A slew of bombs were swept from the sky by the light laser fire, and for a moment it looked like the dozen droid warships were going to sweep the sky clean of the slow-moving bomb. Then the light lasers must have started to
overheat, as thunderous explosions began to rock the enemy fleet. The flares of light occluded the area where the droid mother-ships were located as the main screen’s pickups filtered out the dangerously powerful light.

  A cheer went up on the bridge, despite the fact we had well over eighty of those very same bombs blasting their slow pitiful best towards us. Unfortunately for us, pitiful as it was, we were still going too slowly when they had launched. Our increased thrust was extending the time until they reached us, but that was it.

  When the screen cleared, my heart soared…right before my stomach dropped. It soared because half a dozen broken, droid, mother-ships appeared on my screen followed by another two which were battered and broken, but still limping. As for the remainder of the droid fleet, I initially assumed they must have been vaporized or broken up into component parts.

  Which is why the bottom fell out of my stomach at the realization we were facing the very same menace right behind us: a second bombardment wave aimed squarely at us and would leave us in no condition to deal with the massive swarm of angry gunboats coming fast around the moon.

  I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, but with the main droid fleet having been annihilated—for all intents and purposes swept off the board by the moon base’s sucker punch—I needed to pull something out of my hat fast.

  “I’m picking up a transmission in the clear,” Steiner stiffened in her chair then her face became animated, “it’s from the SDF Battleship and they’re…talking to the moon base!”

  “Put it on,” I said quickly.

  “Jazz to Moon Base II; Jazz to Moon Base II! This is Captain Jazz of the Poseidon; you have launched a missile attack wave at allied ‘human’ warships. Redirect that attack wave over to those droid gunboats. That’s an order,” barked a deep-throated voice over the com-channel.

  Then the channel went to static and squeals.

  “While the captain of the Poseidon is broadcasting in the clear, ‘Moon Base II’ is using an encryption we can’t yet break,” reported Steiner.