“Fire in the hole.”
Startlingly bright flashes illuminated the surface of her suit and reflected from the inside of her faceplate. A few moments later the teeth-rattling sounds of several massive explosions filled her helmet. The sight-sound-system environment gave her the full experience of being only a few thousand yards from three highly destructive blasts. The system even reproduced the residual heat and sympathetic production of the “rumbling sound in the distance” that was often the result of a similar explosion in an atmosphere. After the initial shock passed, Doverly closed her fists again to fire her braking thrusters. She turned to observe the situation behind her as she slowed to a much more manageable seven feet per second.
The vessel she had targeted was trailing atmosphere and radiation and was nearly seventy degrees off its original pitch. Another white flash indicated a devastating secondary explosion near the engineering section. Frigate Two was falling away, trying to avoid a collision with the drifting Frigate One. Unfortunately for the Sarn, Frigate Three apparently wasn’t prepared to be attacked. It remained at station keeping until the dorsal surface of Frigate One’s hull bumped it hard enough to crack the ablative armor of both ships. Debris floated away from the impact point. Then a another hull-rattling explosion went off deep inside Frigate One. The blast ejected pieces of the vessel’s hull and external mechanisms, some of which ripped into the port edge of Frigate Three. Another small explosion registered towards that ship’s forward edge. Annora estimated they were perhaps half as much a threat as they were before. Now that she was on her return trajectory, communications were much easier to configure. The commander activated her LASER-assisted LOS communications transceiver.
“Doverly to Nightwing.”
“Affirmative, Commander. Standing by,” came the quiet response.
“Power up our engines and plot an evasive course to the Saratoga. As soon as I normalize the airlock, engage the mains. Doverly out.”
Another secondary explosion blasted through the dorsal hull of Frigate Three.
“Compliments of the Jacks, gentlemen,” Doverly said quietly as she activated the airlock seal and slipped inside.
Thirty
Yili Curtiss sat on a rocky outcrop roughly sixty feet above the terrain to the southeast of the Copernicus crash site. Her recon bike hummed quietly, hovering over the ground at exactly the right height for the engineer to steady herself with one of her mechanically-reinforced feet.
Her tac suit’s heads-up display was not only being driven by the bike’s on-board systems, but it also provided data overlays from both her lookdown probes and Argent’s newly operational space-to-surface sensors. Five members of her crew were huddled together in a clearing roughly two hundred yards to the southeast, exactly where Zony’s coordinates said they would be.
The problem was the five other humanoids on the ground nearby. Three of them seemed to be working on some kind of field mechanism. The other two were armed with heavy-looking rifles of some kind. A quick life signs scan indicated they were human. It also indicated at least two of the Copernicus crew were in need of medical attention. One of them had critically reduced blood volume and was unconscious. The other had two broken legs and looked to be only half-conscious.
Lieutenant Curtiss had a number of options. She could perform a frontal assault and likely take out all five enemy personnel, but that would put her crew in considerable danger in the crossfire. She could call down a ground strike from Argent, but that would be dangerous for both the prisoners and herself.
She remembered the many times the Jacks had been up against superior numbers and firepower. Somehow they always managed to either win or escape, and when they did the former, it was usually by going small instead of big. As a trained combat officer, Yili knew battles were not always won by superior firepower. Sometimes they were won by one smart cookie coming up with a plan to sidestep the firepower and take out the enemy forces anyway.
Her lookdown probes were her ace. They gave her a staggering tactical advantage, even if she were up against ten times the numbers she faced. Without her crew, there was no chance of getting Copernicus One to its target LZ, and once there, without the crew it wouldn’t be able to do much. Yili’s orbital combat engineering team was hand-picked for their knowledge and expertise, and they still had a job to do. Power on the ground at the coordinates of the unusual structure two hundred and eight miles to the northeast was the top priority, and the Jack of Spades wasn’t going to let five random guys with some toys and rifles stand in her way.
If she could put one of those lookdown probes on the ground inside the compound, it would give her some possibilities, provided the enemy riflemen didn’t blast it into fine carbon dust the moment it hit dirt. Lookdown probes all had sound systems. They were built in to the machines to act as cheap de-icing mechanisms. Properly programmed, they could easily replay a series of subsonics that might overwhelm the enemy personnel with drowsiness. The key was to make it as non-obvious as possible. Subsonic emitter patterns weren’t audible in the traditional sense. They felt more like invisible ants on the skin for a few seconds before the precisely targeted low-frequency waves produced a disorienting sleepiness. The only potential problem was the Bayone atmosphere. The pressure and element balance were quite different from standard shipboard conditions for human crews. Curtiss would have to take her best guess as to how to compensate, since she didn’t have access to Argent’s library computer and Copernicus One still wasn’t fully operational.
She keyed her datalink transmitters to activate the second probe to redeploy to a position directly over the compound. Thirty seconds later, she uploaded the programming to activate its subsonic playback circuits at maximum volume. It would knock her crew cold as well, but this was going to be the best she could do on short notice. Once probe two was in position, she set a timer and cut its counter-grav. It fell from the sky like an acorn falling from a two thousand foot oak tree and landed with a soft bounce in the pale grass only ten yards from her crew members.
Nobody even noticed it. Twenty seconds later, everyone in the compound was unconscious.
Thirty-One
Zony Tixia assiduously avoided taking the center chair on Argent’s bridge. In command or not, she wasn’t Jason Hunter and wouldn’t dream of pretending she was. Ensign Grant was grateful for her decision however, as he got to watch her do things with Argent’s signals station he never imagined were possible.
He also wouldn’t have imagined there would be a nine-year-old girl tagging along with the acting skipper and enjoying an ice cream cone with strawberry, butter pecan, chocolate chip and caramel swirl flavors stacked one on top of the other. Keeping such a towering frozen confection from tipping over seemed impossible until Zony informed him they had used all kinds of advanced galley technology: Said technology consisting of an improvised stabilizing framework constructed out of sugar glaze. The acting captain had made sure the newest member of the Argent pilot’s club was definitely the crew member of the day. So far, the only other order Zony had issued was the one to put the ship back in a standard stable orbit over Bayone Three.
“The skipper sent Commander Doverly and a Nightwing to rendezvous with the cruiser Saratoga. We received a distress call from her not long after we arrived. It sounded like they were experiencing many of the same anomalies we discovered aboard the Dunkerque,” Zony said as she brought Argent’s entire communications system up.
“What happened to Argent’s crew?” Islington asked. “When we arrived, everyone was gone and the ship was dark. It’s taken us this long to get reactor four to thirty five percent power. We’ve got the entire power system on restart cycles, but it will be at least a day before we’re back to full operation.”
“I don’t know, but we’ve put together some clues,” Zony said as she switched the intraship system over to automatic and patched in Minstrel and the engineering section so Hollis and Chief Brogan could hear their conversation through their commlinks. “Captain Hun
ter reported while he was boarding Dunkerque he heard Commander Doverly giving him status reports she never transmitted. Yili’s best guess was the power field the alien technology was connected to also gave them the ability to transmit false signals.”
“And mimic voices?” Grant asked.
Zony nodded. “If the system is sophisticated enough, and they had enough voice samples, they could make any of us sound like we were transmitting and make us say just about anything. This power field gave them the ability to pilot starships interdimensionally, making them appear and disappear practically anywhere, and I suspect they were using their communications system to control them too.”
“And that’s what the Saratoga was after?” Lieutenant Meier asked over the viewscreen intership channel.
“Their distress signal reported they had found the source of the power field, or at least had some kind of a scanner fix on it. Their signals officer reported they were engaged by an unidentified ship, and that some kind of monster had attacked several crew members in their engineering section. Then we lost contact.”
“I have to ask,” Grant said. “How do we know it was a real signal? Could they have just transmitted that to lure the Nightwing out there?”
“That’s a good point, Ensign. I would have thought of that too. But they wouldn’t have known Hunter would send an SAR corvette. For all they knew, he might have responded with Argent herself,” Captain Islington added. “Where is Captain Hunter?”
“He and Moo took a paladin to the Sinisish outpost at the south end of the Frontier,” Zony replied. “He left Hatch in command with orders to investigate the unidentified structure on the surface of Bayone Three. Yili and I were sent down to establish a power base and LZ near the structure’s coordinates, but our engineering corvette went down. Lieutenant Curtiss is still on the surface and should be back–” The signal station incoming transmission indicator lit up.
“–come in Argent. Landing party to Argent.”
“Argent, Tixia. Go ahead, Yili.”
“I’ve located and evacuated the rest of the Copernicus crew. Combat engineering will be back in action in an hour.”
“Outstanding, Copernicus. Stand by.” Zony switched channels back to the local net. “Sounds like Spades is making progress.”
Captain Islington got to her feet. “Lieutenant, it seems the answers to most of our mysteries are likely to be found aboard the Saratoga. Minstrel will track Doverly’s course and link up with the Nightwing. I expect her plan was to recover the ship and pilot her back here. I’ll leave my marine detachment aboard Argent for security purposes, but I’m going to take my engineer in case the cruiser needs repairs.”
“Acknowledged, captain,” Zony replied. “Thanks for yours and Minstrel’s assistance. You saved our ship.”
“Yeah,” Aibreann said. She had worked her way through about a third of her ice cream, which was apparently far more important to the pilot’s club membership than all the grown-up talk about spaceships and more spaceships.
Thirty-Two
With the frigate squadron likely already blasting distress calls to any nearby rescuers, Commander Doverly’s Nightwing One was on a desperation course towards DSS Saratoga.
“If we get this approach exactly right, gentlemen, we’ll have minutes at best to power up the ship and get out of town,” Annora announced calmly. Her SAR vessel’s hull vibrated alarmingly around her and her crew. The formidable little corvette’s drives had been pushed to their limits within the cloak envelope provided by her wideband ECM transmitters. Any faster and no matter how much power was being pumped through the static channels, her “wake” as it were, would be visible and detectable by her pursuers. The combination of the enhanced drive field her ship was generating and the need to keep that drive field as invisible as possible applied maximum stress to the hull.
“Signal all hands to gear up. I want powersuits in combat configurations: Weapons loaded and equipment charged up. Have Ensign Beckers configure the Angels to go to automatic rescue mode and launch when we hit the deck. Each squad should have one of the look-bots for heavy lifting.”
The signals officer went to work notifying the rest of the Nightwing’s crew.
The Nightwing’s pursuers had the firepower to rip Doverly’s rescue vessel in half with a single shot. Frigate One had been left burning in space while its squadron-mates had launched a semi-random overlapping search pattern for their invisible enemy between their original picket position and the ostensibly disabled Skywatch cruiser.
“They think the attack came from the Saratoga, Commander,” Ensign Aherne replied. “From their point of view, it’s the only logical choice. They couldn’t possibly know about us yet. Even after that first scanner sweep they never pinged us for range, and they spent 20 minutes watching the beacon traverse back and forth on their scopes. They’re probably looking for a shuttle or a drone of some kind.”
“We’re going to have a short enough time to accomplish three things when we hit deck aboard that ship. We need to be powered up and ready to navigate to the jump gate. We’ll put the Nightwing back in space for ECM defense and we need to be ready to go to war against that picket formation.”
“Are the Kovacks cruisers set up for missile defense or are they all sword and no shield?” Ensign MacBride asked.
“Saratoga is designed to operate in a battle group. She’s got a ton of firepower, but the bulk of her defense comes from other ships in the formation,” Aherne replied.
“Which is where you come in, Aislin,” Commander Doverly said as they crossed the Saratoga’s defense perimeter and began their final approach. After we pile out of here and start powering up, I want you and Joss to lift off and park yourselves 100 miles off our gate-side quarter. I want those Sarn bastards chasing false scanner contacts well into next week.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the red-haired electronic warfare specialist replied. “I wish we had more time.”
“Affirmative, ensign. Affirmative.”
“Approaching Saratoga soft-lock. No power readings. No ILS detected,” Aherne said.
“Very well. Decelerate us to three FPS and activate our power beacon as soon as you have range and bearing,” Doverly said.
“The Sarn picket will detect the signal, ma’am,” MacBride said.
“All we need to hide for the time being is the Nightwing. Any signal from the Saratoga will be interpreted as noise or an attempted repair. By the time they realize we’re back in the fight, it will be too late.”
“That’s assuming they will even be able to see us, considering we’ll be blasting static all over the sector,” Aherne added.
“Ten seconds to power beacon range,” MacBride announced.
The Argent SAR corvette decelerated as it approached the disabled missile cruiser. Its two determined pursuers were still criss-crossing their approximate escape course roughly 40000 miles behind, frantically looking for some evidence of an attacker aside from their nearly destroyed squadron-mate. The advantage of being nearly undetectable in a combat situation was you were unlikely to be shot at. The competing disadvantage was the high likelihood your pursuers would do something unexpected and trip over you.
The practical reality of the situation was the main thing on the minds of the crew of the Nightwing. The theoretical and tactical situation was, however, the more pressing issue for Commander Doverly. All the question marks were aboard Saratoga. If she was repairable and could maneuver, it would well and truly be a race to the jump gate, and a fine prize if they won.
This was ultimately her goal in the sneak attack on the Sarn picket. Three frigates would have been over the Saratoga’s head no matter what they found. Two were manageable if they discovered what Doverly had always suspected was the case aboard the ostensibly crippled vessel: The ship itself was likely not heavily damaged and there might even be a fair number of survivors who had decided to batten down and go silent instead of draw attention to their increasingly precarious situation. The closer her Nightwin
g got to the ship, the more her hopes were confirmed. There was only one major external blast impact point visible just aft of the forward control structure, which tended to confirm the initial reports Saratoga may have been disabled by a freak mine impact and ended up tangled in enemy territory at the worst possible time. The report of the monster and the cut-off distress signal only made things more confusing. There was other evidence things were not all well aboard, but all were mysteries with little coherent information and certainly nothing to draw conclusions from. A full scan would have to wait until they were aboard.
“Report enemy contacts.”
“Pattern unchanged, Commander. Present course and speed puts them on our front porch in eight minutes,” Aherne replied.
“Very well. Activate softlock and set us down in their main landing bay. Signal all crew members to be ready to disembark in sixty seconds.” Doverly swiveled her command chair around to face the signals console. “Alright MacBride. You and Sara take the Nightwing and park yourselves at Point Shadow. Exactly two minutes after you receive the standard antenna cycle from Saratoga’s transmitters, light up the sector with everything you’ve got. From there we’ll caravan at best speed to the jump gate. Under no circumstances will this vessel de-cloak or approach Saratoga without a direct order from me, is that understood?”
“Aye, ma’am. We’ll be there when you call.”
“Very well, stand by to disembark.”
Nightwing One re-appeared foot by foot and seemed to glide out of thin air as it rolled nearly 40 degrees to port in order to orient itself to the larger cruiser’s attitude. The only power to the landing systems was coming from the smaller vessel’s beacon, so only the emergency lights were operational, leaving the rest of the bay dark and murky looking. There was no pressure or atmosphere present. What had escaped when the bay decompressed left a thin film of eerie looking frost on most of the heavy equipment. The shadows cast by the Nightwing’s running lights made the relatively spacious bay seem like the ground floor of a haunted house.
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