Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  “I’ll say this much, skipper. You sure have some colorful friends.”

  Approaching from deep in the Sinisish bazaar was a dangerous-looking woman wearing an outer cloak made from long brightly-colored feathers. Her uniform was both tighter and quite a bit more revealing than either of the two officers’ regulation outfits. The twin swords sheathed across her back inspired images of exotic danger. She wore a fanciful wide-brimmed hat decorated with yet another enormous feather. The ensemble was set off by a gleaming silvery triluminum necklace featuring an elaborate raptor medallion.

  Escorting her on either side were large, dull-looking humanoids armed with what looked like crosses between muskets and heavy clubs. The crowd swarming the bazaar gave them all a wide berth.

  “I see there’s no point in expecting you to blend in, captain,” Hunter said with a smirk. “Nice of you to meet us on such short notice.”

  Cerylia L’Orleans looked Hunter up and down. “I see my cloak and dagger sensibilities are sharper than certain Skywatch officers. You two look like the latest graduating academy class looking for a place to buy your first post-basic drink.”

  Moody raised an eyebrow at one of Cerylia’s bodyguards. He wasn’t used to looking up to make eye contact. The bulging humanoid stared straight ahead, eyes betraying little emotion or intellect. Lucas gently let his hand rest on his blaster.

  “Nice necklace.”

  “A present from a generous scoundrel. You should see the new corsair that goes with it.”

  “That’s what I came out here to talk about, captain.”

  “You flew 90 light years to talk about my new ship? Come on, Jason. Even you aren’t that interested in king and country.”

  “Let’s step into my office. The colonel and your–” Hunter stepped around one of L’Orleans’ gorillas. “–colleagues can watch the door and get to know each other better.”

  Moody pinched his eyes together and sighed. Hunter and Cerylia ducked into an unused merchant’s shack. Inside was a rickety wooden table covered with scribbled-upon papers, a half-working space heater and an empty hanging wooden cage. Apparently whatever had been sold here recently necessitated the merchant’s rapid escape right behind their customer.

  Once the canvas flap had fallen back into place to cover the door, Cerylia dropped her feathery cloak and hat to reveal a skin-tight bandoleer, a scandalous pair of crimson chaps that desperately hugged her hips and a pair of tall black boots. She pressed her body up against the captain’s and shuffled him against the far wall.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you really came here to talk about?” she purred.

  “I want to defect and devote my life to bootlegging, larceny and pillage.”

  “Splendid. What do you offer?”

  “I have a big ship.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Don’t you have an application I have to fill out or something?”

  “If you want to be a pirate captain, you’ll have to prove you can take what you want.” Cerylia put her arms around Hunter’s neck and pressed herself closer.

  Hunter lowered his voice. “That could be dangerous.”

  “You have no idea.” Cerylia’s smile would have crushed a lesser man’s resolve. She brushed Jason’s lips with her own.

  Hunter leaned in and whispered in her ear. “Won’t your crew be disappointed?”

  “Half of them already want you dead. But if I corrupt a Skywatch line captain into a life of outlaw adventures, songs will be sung about me for a thousand years.”

  “That’s true. Together we could rule known space.” Hunter’s eyes twinkled. Cerylia bit her lip. She knew Hunter better than he suspected. Every ambitious officer had a rebel’s streak somewhere inside. The allure of building an empire was not limited to malevolent conquerors and warlords. The two captains’ combined tactical genius would be nigh-invincible, even without Argent. Captain L’Orleans spotted the pirate in Jason Hunter seconds after their first meeting.

  “You’re teasing me.”

  “Well, maybe a little,” Hunter replied with a rascal’s grin. L’Orleans reached back to slap the captain’s face. He caught her wrist and shoved a data pack into her hand, then pulled her close again. His eyes were hard and his expression strong. He wrapped his arm around her waist and held her tight. “I know the score, captain. You and I need each other and we both need plausible deniability for now. I’ll make you famous but to do that I have to keep you alive. Someday I will take what I want.”

  Cerylia caught a breath.

  “In the meantime, I have something you want. Guard it like your most priceless treasure and I’ll deal you in.”

  Somehow, Captain L’Orleans managed to ignore the sudden heat in the small shack and recovered her composure. “I’m listening,” she exhaled.

  “The colonel and I aren’t buying the alien invasion of Gitairn story. I can’t prove it yet, but I think the whole thing is a power grab by disavowed former fleet officers, and I think it’s going to lead to a multi-front war if we don’t get ahead of it. I think they murdered Admiral Hughes. I had Annora do an autopsy against orders. He was pumped full of hallucinogenic drugs for weeks.”

  “And they haven’t court-martialed you yet?”

  “I’m sure a half-dozen members of the admiralty will disagree, but regulations regarding hostile action are clear. Hughes died aboard my ship. I have wide latitude to conduct an investigation into the cause, and interfering with that investigation is a court-martial offense, even for a flag officer. I also want to know what the hell happened to the crew of the Dunkerque.”

  “Why tell me this?”

  “Because you can go where I can’t.”

  “You’re too fetching for undercover work, aren’t you?” Cerylia looked into Hunter’s eyes adoringly.

  “I’m too Skywatch. Nevertheless, I just got a tip the Sarn column you’re going to hit at Magellan’s Pass is being escorted by a Q-ship. You go in there hot and you’ll never get out alive.”

  “Every Sarn column divulges that same information ‘accidentally.’ It’s the only way they can survive. It keeps the weaker raiding fleets away.”

  “This time they’re not kidding. I have a credible informant that just bought life insurance with confirmed scanner readings.”

  “Sauce for the goose. Now that I’ve got the firepower and the hauling capacity I can sell off the whole column. A Q-ship just makes it a fatter kill. I’m building a base in the Alaska sector and this score puts me over the top. I’ll be the number three boss on the Frontier and I’ll never have to fly another raid.”

  “That column is protecting Atwell’s new fleet tactician and their order of battle. I want them both. You’re going to get them for me.”

  “Will I now?” Cerylia tried to squirm away but Hunter caught her again and pulled her back against his body. “And why would I do that?” Her eyes flashed with growing anger.

  “Because I’m going to arm your task force.”

  Cerylia’s eyebrows rose. She stopped struggling. “Aiding and abetting a known criminal? Why Jason I didn’t know you had it in you!”

  “You don’t know all my secrets yet, captain.”

  “Well,” Cerylia hugged him around the waist again. “Perhaps I should investigate.”

  “After I beat Atwell and his Sarn aggressors, I’ll make sure you get your base.”

  “They’ll hang you if you get caught.”

  “The officers and crew of the battleship Argent formed an alliance with able mercenaries willing to assist Skywatch in defeating a dangerous and reckless enemy.”

  “You make it sound so proper and heroic,” Cerylia said with sarcastic emphasis. “Where’s the spice? Where’s the danger?”

  “The captain didn’t mention he planned to put a little something extra in the mercenary commander’s pay envelope.” Hunter leaned close and whispered again. “That’s the part we keep to ourselves.”

  “Ooh, now that’s more like it.” Cerylia snuggled the
captain. “I’m all yours.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Commander Annora Doverly floated towards her enemy. She consciously controlled her breathing and kept her attention locked on the fixed point of the trailing edge of the closest Sarn frigate’s hull as she floated forward at a velocity of three feet per second.

  On her wrist the manual communications link with Nightwing One’s bridge switched its status to an amber color. There would be little voice communication on this trip, as they would be far too easy for the enemy to detect if they didn’t configure the transmission exactly right. If she needed to, the Argent’s XO could key a message to her crew, but if her mission went as planned, she shouldn’t need to do anything except attach the three weapons she was carrying to the enemy ship’s hull.

  The theory of the “undetectable powersuit” had been debated at exhaustive length in strategy conferences and on vessel bridges for years. It was a brazen strategy, provided the ship from which the attacker emerged had sufficient knowledge of the battlespace and the equipment to do what Nightwing One was about to attempt.

  Annora understood the process much more clearly than everyone aside from the roughly two dozen people who had graduated from SAR training as her contemporaries. The incredible ECM suites on Nightwing vessels and the ability of forward-thinking officers to integrate those technologies with what was already known about powersuit combat only added to the intensity of the debate right up to the moment when Doverly’s instructor demonstrated a no-contact approach against a live vessel’s point defense. After properly configuring his suit’s scattering field and combining it with standard ECM installed on a ship of the line, he managed to approach more than two miles without setting off the sensitive proximity alarms installed on an orbital defense station and sign his name on its hull with a marking pen.

  It was later observed his technique only worked if the space station wasn’t actively trying to obtain a waveform detection and didn’t expect to be approached, but the principles were the same. All the research operated under the “sea water” metaphor. Simply put, if a vessel could create the same basic conditions in the space around a ship that a submarine faced in the water around its hull, then it would become possible to approach the ship without being detected by defeating the cruder mechanisms that ship was forced to use to find other vessels. Those mechanisms were often easily defeated by simply making the approaching target too small to detect.

  When the Nightwing was invented, one of the first things its early crews attempted was the no-contact approach. Their results were rapidly concealed, and for good reason. They showed an officer like Commander Doverly could configure a Nightwing’s ECM suite to make her powersuit all but invisible at ranges of nearly 40 miles.

  And once that powersuit penetrated the drive field of an enemy ship, it would become even more difficult for it to be detected due to the various combinations of physical properties inherent in starship design. The bottom line was the Sarn formation had no idea they were being stalked by the spaceflight equivalent of an invisible great white shark armed with lethal explosives.

  Meanwhile, aboard the Argent SAR vessel, Doverly’s crew watched in frozen silence as their commander became smaller and smaller in comparison to the three-ship formation she was approaching. None of them could answer for why the Sarn formation was just sitting there.

  “What if their salvage ships arrive before she gets back?”

  “If those frigates start to maneuver and their drive fields shift, they’ll vaporize her,” Joss replied.

  “There’s no way for her to defend against that?”

  “Not without making herself visible. Any expenditure of power has the potential to disrupt our ECM field. She has to stay emissions silent or her mission will end in one shot from a Sarn point defense battery.”

  “I wish we had a tractor beam or a tether.”

  “Either one would make us both detectable at this range. All we can do is wait.”

  Commander Doverly performed her final arming checks on her hull charges. The three weapons were powered and standing by. All it would take to set them to detonate would be a single counter-clockwise turn of Annora’s arming key. She was now close enough to the Sarn ship to sense the much larger vessel’s drive fields and their magnetically-repelling force slowing her approach. Once she penetrated, the repelling force would cease, but until then, she was bound to slow considerably. This was one of the things the crew of Nightwing One was counting on. Without it, Doverly would be moving too fast when she reached the strike point.

  The slightest miscalculation would result in one of the frigate’s point defense cannons opening fire on her position. The shot wouldn’t necessarily be fatal, as weapons the size of a frigate’s point defense cannons were not designed to engage individual humanoids, but if the energy discharge passed close enough it would very likely cook Commander Doverly in her suit in a matter of a few fractions of a second.

  Annora could tell her pulse was well into the three-figures. The sensation of her approach to the frigates was not unlike being lowered into an active volcano at the end of a rope. A mistake would be disaster, as there was nowhere to run. The only way to get back to the Nightwing was to push off from the Sarn vessel and use a half-second burst from her powersuit’s EVO jets to get the velocity necessary. The jet burst would hopefully be so close to the ship’s hull as to be undetectable as anything but surface static energy. Her movement would be masked by the drive field and the SAR vessel’s advanced cloaking technology.

  Everything was going to be fine, as long as she didn’t make any obvious mistakes. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  Just after she slowed to one foot per second, Commander Doverly penetrated the frigate’s drive field. The repelling force vanished, as expected, and she began her final approach to the ship’s hull. The vessel was now truly gigantic compared to its appearance from her ship’s vantage point. She verified her hull charges were magnetically neutral so they wouldn’t clamp on to the ship’s hull when she landed. Fortunately she didn’t have far to go. The ship looked brand new, which was understandable. The Sarn had lost so much of its fleet in the first Praetorian conflict they would have had no way to launch an attack of this magnitude without considerable new construction.

  What Commander Doverly was counting on was the high likelihood that the Sarn crews were just as green as their ships. In about thirty seconds she would know for sure. She magnetized her boots only a few feet from the enemy ship’s hull and soft-contacted at a velocity of two feet per second. It was likely to be far too quiet a noise to be heard inside the vessel. From Doverly’s standpoint, the only system that detected the contact was her own triple-S inside her suit.

  She crouched against the aft ventral quarter’s trailing wing section. At this position, she was far enough away from the engines to avoid any unplanned emissions or temperature change problems. She started the timer on her wrist readout. Sixty seconds.

  Doverly went through the arming checklist for charge one quickly, setting the device to automatically magnetize itself and do a pressure scan of the vessel’s hull to try and detect any seams or weak points prior to detonation. Although they were improvised, each of the hull charges contained a directional explosive and a LASER-assisted detonator which would automatically try and “point” the explosion at any detectable weak spots. The relatively bulky charge’s case was a little clumsy, but Annora was finally able to get it pointed base-down. She allowed it to drift towards the smooth dark gray hull and activated the electromagnetic seals when it got close enough. The charge latched on to the ship with a satisfying “thump” sensation. The detonator configuration panel began to blink, awaiting orders.

  The Argent XO planted the other two charges in series leading towards the hull junction between the engine housing and the aft quarter. If they were detonated in sequence in this configuration, it would put maximum stress on the point where the port-side aft quarter of the ship’s hull connected to the engin
e section. With luck, the failure of that section of the ship would expose one or more of the engines or power systems to space during a catastrophic decompression. The resulting damage would either cripple or destroy the ship completely, and quite possibly do considerable damage to the other two frigates as well.

  Commander Doverly turned the arming key on the third hull charge and verified her configuration when the entire status console went from amber to red. She felt an unusual vibration from the vessel’s hull and realized she had seconds at best to get out of the drive field before it burned her unshielded powersuit to carbon-rich ash. She demagnetized the suit’s entire outer surface and pointed herself in the general direction of her origin coordinates before closing both fists on her booster throttles. A tiny flash of light appeared briefly. Moments later she had accelerated to a speed of fifty feet per second. She was rigid and straight, her body collapsed into a torpedo-like shape as she raced back into Nightwing One’s ECM field. Unexpected reactions with the vessel’s transmitters caused a faint purple glow to appear around her faceplate, but it was too late to worry about being detected in real-time. Her navigational repeater projected the position of the SAR corvette on her heads-up tactical display. Her timing had to be perfect.

  She watched her range timer in the corner of her heads-up display. Twelve seconds had passed. She was already almost a quarter-mile from the enemy ships and only three miles from the projected location of Nightwing One. Naturally she wasn’t able to detect the exact position of her ship since it was cloaked, but her powersuit’s navigational systems knew where she started from, and she knew her ship hadn’t changed positions for obvious reasons.

  For another fifteen seconds she silently rocketed through space. Finally the numbers on her range timer shifted to red. She was out of the blast radius of the weapons she had just armed and she was only ten seconds from the moment she would have to fire her braking jets to slow her approach to the Nightwing softlock.