Jethro: First to Fight

by Hechtl, Chris

  Now was the moment. Now was the time to seize the initiative, while the enemy on the station was off balance and focused on the battle outside, they had to act, Rasha was sure of it. She was tired of waiting, tired of watching people die, helpless to stop it.

  Rasha was excited. “We have to chance it,” she said firmly, gathering the requested data. “They'll need detailed plans of the station, plus the location of every pirate on board. Everything we've gathered on their weapons and command structure as well. We'll have to coordinate with them the best we can, keep them up to date as well as our allies.”

  The pirates had secured most of the antenna on the station, but of course not all. Nor all the satellites in the system. The station and system were vast, and the people on the station quite clever. They knew how to get around their own system after all, and how to send a brief burst signal to an intended destination. That was how they had kept in touch with assets in the system as well as keeping the government on the planet up to date.

  Governor Randall hadn't been much help, assuring them he was marshaling forces, but what could he do at the bottom of the planet's gravity well with no shuttles to speak of? Yan Fu had held out that the proper authorities would deal with the pirates. Some on the council had counseled patience and negotiation. At least they had shut up after witnessing the first series of executions. Murmurs of it all being a 'mistake' and 'misunderstanding' had also died off when the pirates were recorded gleefully raping and killing people. It sickened quite a few people.

  Two of their council hadn't been able to handle the stress. Marisa and the ancient Gashg Ripper hadn't been able to handle the stress of the pirate attack and destruction of their beloved home for a second time. Marisa had dissolved into quiet hysteria and then voluntarily shut her life support off while in a deep well of depression. Ripper had seen his beloved park set ablaze with people inside and in impotent rage he had locked the hatches shut on the pirates in the compartment, then shut off the fire suppression system and life support. By the time the pirates had broken in everyone was dead. Ripper had sent Yan Fu a defiant “I'm not sorry,” letter before he terminated his own life support.

  Other counselors were on the edge, long time lovers Nina and Elyria were considering death. Their boss D'red had so far talked them out of it and kept them busy.

  “We'll need to keep a running plot on them.”

  “Which we've been doing. Or we've been trying to do anyway,” Gwen said. The Taurens, AI, and cybers were all interlinked in a virtual council of war.

  “Package finished. I'm sending it now. We can send an update later,” Rasha said.

  Over the past ten days they had managed to keep their people under wraps, helping the Taurens and other aliens fight back. The AI had fought off the pirate viruses designed to take control of the computers on the station. In a last ditch effort they had firewalled off the critical systems and then created a virtual world for the viruses to occupy. The pirates thought they now had control of the computers. Little did they know that the inhabitants were echoing their commands to the computer with only a microsecond of delay.

  A few on the council had wanted to surrender or commit suicide, but their ally in Hishina and surprisingly her husband Yan Fu, along with a few other others had prevented that. The pirates had also shown them that they weren't interested in such things as fair or honor, the public executions of any alien or Neo captured, along with the execution of two human personnel managed to show them that.

  They had laid low, keeping as many of the non humans safe as they could, while aiding in the fighting of the guerrilla war while keeping the enemy off balance and out of the control room. Fortunately their centuries of playing ghosts and their fighting on their own home ground for their people gave them quiet an advantage.

  “It's time. It's time to kick ass,” Warner said grimly.

  “No, not quite yet, but close,” Hishina said, eyes hard. She was surprised to see more than one former pacifist nod or indicate agreement.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Firefly received the response from the Warners. It wasn't unexpected, but the comm officer and the AI did independent identity checks on the signal.

  Admiral Irons had sent along a complete download of his adventures in Antigua, complete with sets of information about the reservists. Firefly checked their files against what the admiral had sent and then informed his Captain.

  “Are you sure they're legit?”

  “Aye skipper. IFF responses and counter responses authenticated. Both what we had on file as well as what the admiral and Commander Sprite had set up before they left the system.”

  “All right then. Get a download from them and make sure 'Major' Pendeckle and the Marines get a copy soonest.”

  “Aye aye Captain.”

  “They want to know how they can help Captain,” the comm officer said, looking up with one hand on his ear.

  The Captain frowned and then looked over to the comm officer. “Tell them if they have any shuttles or other craft, prep them for possible SAR duty soonest. And keep their people on damage control. When these people figure out they aren't going to win it could get ugly. We can dodge, the station can't.”

  “Um, aye aye Captain,” the comm officer replied. He spoke softly into his hush mike.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Rasha Warner received the third signal, thought about it for a moment and then nodded. She passed it on silently to her husband and the others and then sent another out, this one a brief burst of data to a set of rocks between the solar farm and the yard. Mairi needed to be alerted to what was going on.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Governor Randall received the signal from the station. “It's a trick!” his aide said. He shook his head. “We can't trust it sir! We don't know if it's true!”

  “Trick or not, something's happening. We need to be ready for it.”

  “Sir, we can't just take this on faith. We have no basis of understanding any of this, we don't know the people involved!”

  “I understand that,” the governor replied stubbornly. “Put the space defenses on alert. Those that are left,” he said bitterly. The pirates had been clever, dropping rocks on the defensive installations just as the admiral had predicted. The rocks that were chewed up by the planetary defense centers had still rained down on them, just in broken masses instead of one big lump. Those that were intercepted at least, they'd found that shooting the rocks down was hard, the ancient planetary defense fortresses hadn't been well maintained over the years, their targeting systems quite frankly sucked.

  Also he'd had some political issues. Some mayors had howled when their electrical power had been shunted to defense. Two mayors had flat out refused to shunt the power until rocks had gotten perilously close to the atmosphere, only the imminent threat of the rocks falling directly on their heads had woken them to the danger.

  “Alert the militia. Have them standing by.”

  “For...”

  “For I don't know!” he replied in exasperation, tired of the attitude. He threw his hands up in the air. “For the sky to fall, for space to give up it's dead, for an invasion, I don't know. Just get them mobilized!”

  “Yes sir,” the aide said, scurrying off.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Rasha Warner kept Firefly up to date with intel. The station had recorded every transmission between the pirate vessels as well as between the vessels and the pirates who invaded the station. A lot of it was encrypted, but they could still tease some details out of the mess.

  The communications to the station, planet, and other natives were of course not encrypted. Nor were the conversations pirates had with each other inside the station. All of that was zipped and sent to Firefly in one massive upload.

  One of the things she passed on was a force appreciation. According to their intel the pirates had converted two of the freighters to transports in anticipation of seizing star systems and holding them. When they had heard about Antigua they
had beat feet to the star system. The better part of two thousand pirates were on the transports, the station, and in control of the yard.

  “Lovely,” Captain Mayweather said, reading the news. She passed it on to 'Major' Pendeckle. “I guess you and your people have their work cut out for them,” she said.

  “Seems that way ma'am,” the 'Major replied, scowling.

  “I guess you're going to earn your pay the hard way,” Shelby said softly, eyes troubled. The 'Major' nodded.

  “At least we know the enemy and have a small peek at their command structure. Their ground force leader on Antigua Prime is a Major Zimmer.”

  “Zimmer huh?”

  “Yes. I've got some work to do. I need to get a handle on this video. I've already dumped it to my intel specialist and Lieutenant Valenko ma'am, but we...”

  “Excused. Dismissed 'Major',” the Captain said airily. “Now let me fight my ship,” Captain Mayweather said in anticipation.

  “Aye aye ma'am. Good luck, goddess speed,” the Major replied as he saluted and about faced.

  Mayweather ignored him, eyes glued to the main display.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  “Captain, they are within the outer range of seeing through the decoy,” Tr'j'ck stated, waving a truehand.

  “I see that,” the Captain said, leaning in close. They were steadily creeping in close but they were still two million kilometers out, not quite in the outer edge of Firefly's energy weapon engagement basket, but close. Still, it was a lot closer than she'd thought she'd get. “We're going to hammer this Sirius into scrap.”

  “You don't want to capture her?”

  “Oh hell no, I'm not the admiral. Besides, you pointed out we're outnumbered. No, no pussy footing around here. We're going to take her down, not pussy foot around.”

  “Aye aye Captain.”

  “Get ready to drop stealth. When we drop, helm, I want to go full bore as soon as you have full power. We're going to cut right in on the destroyer.”

  “They had edged down on the task force's negative Y axis, coming in from their five o’clock low. “Guns, get as good a lock as you can get. You're not going to have a reset on this one.”

  “One pass should do it. Both broadsides?”

  “Both. And hit anything close to us in passing as we go. Helm, once she's dust, corkscrew. Guns, toss chaff when we begin to spin.” What she was proposing was using the ship's spin to cut down on exposure on any one of her shield quadrants.

  Energy weapons inflicted damage by a simple formula of Energy applied, plus the density plus the rate of delivery. In other words, if a beam was to do damage, it had to have enough of a punch or it was worthless.

  A part of that problem was the apertures of a weapon. To do enough damage at a distance over a hundred kilometers a laser had to have an aperture of a meter or wider and used nearly a gigawatt of energy to do appreciable damage. Any range beyond a hundred kilometers and the beam ran into diffraction issues, where the beam began to spread out, thus negating it's damage ability. Lasers were considered hard killers, they vaporized or did 'front door damage' to a target, melting it.

  That was why most hand held energy weapons were plasma based. It took a lot of juice to kill someone, which was why capacitors were treated as magazines in hand held energy weapons.

  There were seven different forms of energy weapons mounted on a ship. Plasma weapons were common, but they were short ranged, under a hundred kilometers and required force beams to steer and contain them. Force beams were soft damage weapons, good for taking down shields and inflicting wedge damage, but required massive amounts of power and were again, short ranged.

  Particle weapons were limited to Neutron beams. The idea of charged particle beams had been disproven as an effective weapon in the late twentieth century. The electrostatic repulsion of the beam tended to create a massive divergence of the beam spread. Also the charged particle beams were heavily influenced by magnetic and force shields.

  Neutron beams were different. Coupled with force beams they were a powerful capital weapon, used for strategic ranges beyond one hundred kilometers but limited to about a half a million kilometers.

  The final hard damage system was the graser. It was a powerful system, combining a Neutron particle beam with a force gun and a plasma weapon all rolled into one package. Grasers were the top beam weapons, they could not only hammer through a shield, but do massive damage to the armor of the ship as well, all in one shot.

  Microwave and Ion beams did soft damage to a target, either by heating the target until a weak point failed, or addling it's computers, jamming it's systems. Ion cannons disrupted electrical flow in the system, cutting through shields and burning up electronics.

  Some ships still mounted rail guns. The linear catapults weren't beam weapons, they fired a kinetic payload at a target.

  Firefly had a mix of weapons, most of them Graser and Ion beams. She mounted two microwave beams and of course a healthy number of point defense lasers strategically placed all over her hull for self defense. She couldn't fire all of them at once, not while keeping her shields up and her drive running.

  Spreading and jitter were always an issue with a warship's energy weapons, which was why they ran constant tracking system diagnostics and exercises during peace time.

  Since no ship could keep a beam going to do a slicing action for more than a millisecond they relied on capacitors. A capacitor bank was arranged near each energy weapon. It would draw a charge from the ship's power net and then release it in one massive energy burst through the energy weapon to provide the amount of energy and density at a fast rate of delivery.

  But it took time to charge the capacitors, and the larger the weapon the longer it took to charge her capacitors. Unless of course you had a lot of power in reserve. Which, a cruiser had when you compared it to smaller ships like destroyers, frigates, and corvettes.

  “Aye aye Captain.”

  “Essentially Bushwhacker three, with a little four in it for luck,” Purple Thorn teased.

  “Right. And execute!”

  They had let the pirates chase the drone like cats stalking an unsuspecting mouse. But it was the cats that were the prey. Firefly lit off her drive when they hit 1.4 million kilometers out. She swooped up like a hungry shark, her shields, ECM, and weapons coming online moments after her drive went to full power.

  She fired a tidal wave of missiles from both broadsides and her bow, at such a short range they went into sprint mode, not even bothering with evasive maneuvers.

  Their own ECM and chaff pods went to rapid fire. It gave the surprised pirates a massive 'here I am' sign, but it also threw their plot into chaos.

  In less than two minutes the thirty missiles had crossed the one million kilometer distance and had slammed into the tin can before her shields were fully up. They hammered the Sirius into wreckage, breaking the ship into two pieces.

  Firefly had unmasked and the fight was on with the smaller ships. She was already arching up over the wreckage of the tin can, corkscrewing and firing every turret on any target they could find.

  “Let em know where here,” Mayweather said. She gave Firefly's avatar a long look. “See what you can do there too Commander.”

  Firefly nodded and disappeared.

  “Once they get our IFF, jam all communication channels they are using,” the Captain ordered. “Don't let their fleet know what's going on.”

  “A bit brash aren't we?” Janice asked as the comm officer keyed their IFF. The communications officer looked up in confusion, a lot more went out than the basic IFF.

  “Just putting the fear of us in them.”

  Jane studied the read out. “They don't strike me as scared Captain,” she said doubtfully.

  “Oh they will be,” Purple Thorn retorted.

  “They are scared, they're running Captain,” the sensor officer reported.

  “See?”

  “Hello, we're bigger than them? We out mass the frigates by what? Ten to
one our favor?”

  “True.”

  “They have numbers...”

  “Quantity has a quality all on its own Captain,” the sensor officer said, clacking his mandibles at her. “Remember what we witnessed on Agnosta? I watched a pack of wolves take down a moose. Quite impressive. The moose weighed in over a ton, had massive antlers, and yet the pack brought it down.”

  “It misstepped. We won't.”

  “Mistakes happen.”

  “There had better not be any mistakes. Get it right the first time people!”

  “Here they come!”

  “Anything?” Mayweather demanded. The AI returned. Silently he shook his head. “Well then, we do this the old fashioned way. Guns, it's on you.”

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Firefly had a stiff fight ahead, with multiple ships against one. After they announced their presence with a 'bang' they corkscrewed through the stunned formation, picking off smaller ships before they arched back in.

  The three frigates recovered first, moving together as one. The corvettes followed suit. Two of the gunships had been destroyed by Firefly's main guns, another two were tumbling wrecks, with their main engines torn apart.

  The Captain brought the ship around and then matched the tin can's old course and speed. They used the wreckage of the first tin can as cover, turning on her side bow on to the ship and using drones and decoys to look out over her improvised screen like periscopes.

  The Elf tactical officer fired a broadside from both flanks, one of decoy and ECM missiles the second of real missiles. As the enemy fired into the wreckage of their own ship Mayweather abandoned it, firing a decoy up to draw the initial fire as her ship yawed to the port and dropped low.

  Firefly was a dancer, pitching, spinning, and working her way through the enemy fleet. Her turrets spun and fired, cutting down enemy ships or over heating shields to allow missiles or other beam weapons through, or cutting down the small amount of counter missiles the pirates counter fired.