The news was mixed for the captain. They could survive for at least two years, possibly up to four if they restricted consumption from the start. But, they weren’t going anywhere on their own, and who knows if they would ever be rescued. “All right, Ben. Good work. Put your damage report together and get it to me. I need to send out an SOS drone.”
“Aye aye, Captain. I’ll have it to you shortly.”
It was thirty-one hours later when one of the sensors technicians called out, “Contact! Two, no three, ships twenty-eight degrees negative ecliptic, bearing 282! Range eight million.”
Captain Sprigg’s heart sank, “What’s the range and closure rate?”
“Two of them are slowing, Captain. The third looks like it intends to do a flyby. Bogey Three will be on us in two hours if he maintains his current acceleration profile. The other two will be here closer to nine hours. They’re decelerating hard,” Thompson reported in a withering voice as she realized the horror of being captured by an alien race.
“Hang in there, Thompson,” the captain told her in a voice far more confident than he actually felt. His emotional state on his avatar was locked into a solid green, with streaks of blue. Everyone knew it was a lie, but it still helped the bridge crew to see a calm and focused captain, even in a crippled ship in the middle of an attack. “What’s the status of Tubes 1-4,” he asked, knowing they were loaded with anti-ship missiles, but wanting a confirmation from his weapon’s technician.
“All tubes are green and loaded with Mk VII’s, sir,” she reported with a flare of sheer joy in her avatar’s emotional state. She looked back at the captain with a big smile on her face.
If the captain had not already hardened his heart as to their fate, a spark of hope might have been lit from that smile. But, he knew better, “Very well. I want one missile each to target the slowing bogeys, and two on the bogey doing the flyby. Set up an automated reload and set it to autofire unless it receives a positive no-launch order,” he told the weapons tech, under the assumption they may not be able to give the command at the time. What he did not say to Michaela Thompson is that he would also be putting the ship’s self-destruct system on an automatic detonation sequence if any of a number of events took place. If he lost connection to the virtual ship’s command system, if the virtual system failed, if the ship lost power, or even if the ship took a serious impact. The captain’s orders were clear: under no circumstances was he to allow the ship or crew to be captured by the enemy. Self-destruction was mandatory in the event the ship was threatened with boarding and unable to defend its self. He continued to look at Thompson’s avatar. She was a beautiful young woman he had always been attracted to but never said anything. As her captain, he couldn’t. She always made him laugh and had more positive energy than the blue giant star whose system they were in. Resigned, he knew what her future was and he couldn’t see any way to change it.
They had nine hours. The captain looked at the countdown timer the navigation officer set up and decided he was not going to stand there and watch that pot waiting to boil. Instead, he handed control of the bridge back to the officer of the deck and the captain exited the bridge to make his way to the commons. Most of the crew was there, excepting the personnel standing bridge watch and the engineers working on repairs. There wasn’t anywhere else they really could be. The entertainment systems were all shut down as was standard when transiting an unexplored system. The choices remaining were to be at a workstation or logged out of the VR system and in your EGG Habitat.
No one shouted Captain on deck! as they were required to do. The crewmembers in the commons were all engaged in a number of conversations. Some were doom and gloom, and some were about repairs to the ship. The members of the crew aware of the incoming ships were all on the bridge, so these crewmembers did not yet know what was coming. A few of the younger technicians, and oddly, the Senior Medical Technician, who must be forty years old, were talking about the time they were going to spend in dungeon crawls until a rescue ship arrived. When you spend as much time in virtual reality immersion as Exploration Service members, MMVR gaming was such a part of the culture few outsiders would understand how it made sense they were talking about playing games at a time like this.
The captain listened to the young men and his Med Tech discussing their plans like they were looking forward to it. Normally, he would be tearing into them for not being focused on their jobs, but right now the only thing he could think of was, good for them, for not knowing what was about to happen. Spinning around, the captain left the commons and entered his private suite where he opened a channel to the weapons officer, “Thompson,” he called.
“Yes, Captain.”
“I want you to launch our last drone,” he said, then, before she could speculate the reason, said, “But, I don’t want it to fire its engines. Use the thrusters to launch it away from the direction of the inbounds and put it on a slow burn to the far side of the debris field with as much distance between us and the drone as you can without it being detected,”
“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged, understanding he was taking the last measure of their impending destruction, without giving up the last hope.
“Put a laser comm on it so if it loses contact for more than five minutes it will return to the rally point. It’s the best we can do,” he said, knowing Thompson was knowledgeable of the protocol of ships sending their own obituary on their last drone when there wasn’t any hope of survival. Of the three launched drones, he hoped at least one would make it home.
“Aye aye, Captain,” she acknowledged, then, “We got this, sir.”
“Let’s hope so, Michaela,” he agreed, using her first name while speaking with her for the first time ever. It wasn’t lost on her.
The captain let the lead ship do its flyby unmolested. Better to let it pass to give them a better chance of destroying the two slowing ships than to attack it now and still have two to fight. When the two trailing Chzek-kin ships arrived, one of the two trailing ships hung back at a hundred miles distance while the other made an approach to board the exploration ship and salvage any technology they could. The first of the three ships reported the human ship was dead and drifting. The three Chzek-kin ships were all warships; unable to do any significant salvage, but still capable of assessing the value of sending out a salvage ship when they returned to base. They were excited as this was their first engagement with the humans and the reward for recovering their technology would be substantial. The three captains were sure to be promoted.
Even after eighteen time segments, the captains of the Chzek-kin ships maintained combat stations per standard Chzek regulations; the crew was tired and unfocused. Displayed on the ship bridge monitors of all three ships were the boarding pods of the nearest ship to the Human vessel. They all watched eagerly in anticipation of their launch to make the boarding. It was the Chzek-kin fixation with the boarding pods that gave the launch of the Human’s devastatingly lethal Mk VII missiles more than enough time to do their grim deed. The overwatch ship standing back saw the brilliant flare of light on the cameras directed at the boarding pods as the ship conducting the boarding was vaporized. It was three time segments later when the Chzek-kin ship that initially buzzed the human ship, and now heading back to their base on a small planetoid orbiting one of the gas giants, saw the first and then second nuclear detonation within seconds of each other.
“Vagodt!” shouted the captain of the Chzek-kin ship, Brutaul, “Bring the ship about and start a full-burn back to the human ship. All hands to combat stations!”
The crew of the Brutaul was awakened from a dead sleep after more than a day at their combat stations. The blaring general quarters alarm elicited a biological reaction in the Chzek-kin to release endorphins and adrenaline to increase the crew’s responsiveness. Knowing they were just in combat with the humans, the crew reacted with vigor and was able to throw off their fatigue from the long day and rushed to their stations.
It would take another forty tim
e segments to bring the ship about and make their way back to the position of the remains of the human ship and vaporized remains of its two sister ships. The captain was certain of their destruction as all efforts to make contact were met with silence. He kept his crew at their combat stations, afraid to be caught off guard like the other ships obviously were.
Seven time segments later, an automated alarm at the sensors station began to clamor. On the main screen the image shifted from a long-range view to a tracking board of at first two, then four, hostile missiles inbound. The Chzek-kin sensors officer’s head snapped from the long range scanner to see the hostile missiles on his tactical monitor.
Vagodt, the captain thought, “damn” becoming his word of the day. “Time to impact!” he shouted.
Fumbling at his station, the sensors officer finally looked at the screen in front of him and read off the red time to impact readout, “One point four segments, Captain!”
“Target that vagodt human ship and fire a full spread of anti-ship missiles. I want nothing left of that gol-vagodt trag!” he shouted once again, furious, as well as afraid of the human’s display of the toughness of their ships.
“Firing!” declared the weapons officer as the captain felt the eight missiles cycling through the launch tubes.
The captain and crew of the Brutaul watched as the four Human Mk VII missiles closed on them. Reports they had received were proven correct when their anti-missile lasers detonated each of the missiles in turn and the ship’s sensors showed them break up into hundreds of smaller objects still coming at the ship, “Evasive!” shouted the captain, “Full thrust ninety degrees perpendicular! Activate maximum spatial compression!”
The captain’s order caused the ship to quickly roll into the new vector and jolt as the engines fired with emergency thrust. The crew could feel the acceleration even through the ships inertia dampening system.
Inertia dampening systems on all Chzek-kin ships were “on loan” to the subservient species by their Chzek masters. The systems allowed the Chzek-kin to create their own faster than light ships several hundred years prior to when they would have been able to if they had to develop the technology themselves. From what the captain knew of the humans, they were a much younger space-faring race. He was curious to see the salvage of the Human ship to find out how they overcame the problem of intense acceleration during space travel. Now he may never know. It was a shame for him to think he may never learn more about the humans, even while he wished they were all burning in the core of the nearest star.
Bringing his attention back to the combat display, the captain could see they would easily avoid the hundreds of incoming kinetic penetrators from the first two missiles. Even the objects that were obviously maneuvering would not strike them as the most threatening of them were targeted by the ship’s defensive lasers. It was that moment another alarm sounded and the sensors officer announced four more inbound missiles. The four larger contacts trailing the now hundreds of objects dispersed by the first four missiles were going unmolested in their attack runs on his ship, “Fire on the trailing missiles! Vagodt you fools, take out those missiles!” he screamed. “Increase thrust!”
Three of the four remaining missiles were successfully targeted, and each broke up into hundreds of smaller targets the same as the first four. The last missile broke up on its own once it came within a thousand miles of the Chzek-kin ship and closed the remaining distance in a fraction of a second. Several guided kinetic penetrators tore chunks from the armored hull after punching through the ship’s shields, but the damage they caused was insignificant compared to the proximity detonation of the nuclear warheads within a few feet of the Chzek-kin ship’s hull.
A cheer rang out from every person on the bridge of the Asimov as the third enemy ship was destroyed; giving the crew hope they could be rescued. Only the captain was thinking of the enemy ship’s likely counter-missile strike that was sure to be incoming.
In a last-ditch effort, the exploration ship’s captain ordered the crippled exploration ship to fire a spread of Mk VII missiles at the inbound missiles fired by the Chzek-kin ship before it was destroyed. It was not meant to be, thought the captain, as he watched the remaining missiles track into his ship. The laser defenses, although operational, were ineffective as the ship’s active sensors were thrown out of alignment during the initial attack; the inertia dampening shield generator was destroyed along with the engines. Several ten megaton blasts rendered the human ship and its doomed crew into an expanding cloud of highly energized particles. Five minutes after the blasts the ship’s last drone, now hundreds of miles distant, engaged its engines and Epson Drive and began its journey to deliver the obituary of the XSS Asimov.
Chapter 21: Mobile Base Ship Yukon, Rheas System
Admiral Ben Tomkin, commander First Fleet, was standing in his quarters aboard MBS Yukon, currently concealed in a canyon on the backside of the smaller of the two Rheas moons, Duroshat. The oversized cabin was a luxury found on only two ships in Earth’s space fleets. The other, another MBS, was being held in reserve. The admiral’s usual place of command of First Fleet was from inside an EGG Habitat aboard the UEAF First Fleet Flagship, Hartford, a Saturn Class Cruiser. With steam coming off his body from a hot shower, the first place in space outside of a base he had ever had one, the admiral was pleased with the overall progress of operations and planning for the defense of the Rheas System. Forty-six missile platforms were deployed around the solar system; all armed with Mk VII multi-warhead missiles. The cruiser class ships of the fleet were deployed closer in-system, in orbit around Rheas, its moons, and with several hiding in and around the same two large asteroids utilized by the Cousteau and support vessels during the Battle for Rheas.
The chime of the ship’s communication system pulled Tomkin from his thoughts and he crossed the living quarters to accept the call, “Tomkin,” he said.
“Good morning, Admiral. Lt. Givens in CIC. We’ve detected the Rool Ambassador’s ship and made contact. Ambassador Cent has requested to come aboard and will be here in six hours.”
“Six hours? How far out were they when they were detected?” Tomkin asked, concerned at either a delay of his being notified of their presence or in the fleet’s inability to detect the Rool warship from long range.
The lieutenant, having served with the admiral for the last two years, knew what he was concerned about and agreed, “They were detected at 1.2 million miles, sir. Their ship has a low profile and they seem to be using some kind of light camouflage that spoofs the long-range passive sensors from collecting accurate backscatter. We’re working on a full analysis as they make their approach.”
Not happy to hear the large heavy cruisers, by human ship size standards, used by the Rool were not detectable at even one-quarter of the range a UEAF cruiser could be detected. The admiral chose not to engage in a pointless interrogation of the young lieutenant, “Very well. Let me know what they come up with,” he replied, leaving unspoken his opinion of the outcome of this war if the Chzek were able to limit detection of capital ships to that degree.
With the ambassador arriving, Admiral Tomkin decided it would be a good time for a full update from all of his ships and the diplomats down on the planet, “Communications,” he spoke into the comm set sitting on the table.
“Lt. Guinness, yes Admiral?” came the reply.
“Send to all ships to report status and put me through to Mr. Hillary down on the surface,” he ordered.
“All ships report status and patch you into Mr. Hillary. Aye, aye, sir,” sounded back the lieutenant.
Several minutes later Tomkin’s personal communicator notified him he had an incoming call from Mr. Hillary. Rather than take it, the admiral made his way to the command center and plugged into the VR system so he could review the overnight activities of the fleet while he spoke with the glorified project manager, Mr. Hillary.
“Mr. Hillary,” said Admiral Tomkin, finally picking up the call, “How is the Rheas industr
ial transition coming along?”
“About the same as I reported yesterday, Admiral,” said the man with a sneer. “The Rheas are dragging their feet and pitching a fit every time we ask them to do anything.” He sounded just as frustrated and impotent as he did the day before.
Admiral Tomkin listened to the same whining from the Corps of Engineers bureaucrat every day for the last month and it made him grind his teeth. Technically, the admiral was in charge of the transition, but it was made clear in his orders to not interfere with the Corps’ efforts and to let Mr. Hillary run his own show. In the end, he would be the one to look bad for their failure, even though he was powerless to fix the problems. The job needed an iron will and Mr. Hillary was a paper pusher and a coward as far as the admiral was concerned. He recorded as much in his last report to Earth three weeks ago, which was still in transit and no one would read it until the problem became far larger than it already was.
“Well, Mr. Hillary, you will be happy to know that Rool Ambassador Cent has arrived in system,” said the admiral, with a poorly hidden gleam in his eye. “I believe your orders place you under his authority. Is that right?”
“Ahh,” began Mr. Hillary, caught off guard, “I thought he wasn’t due to arrive for several more months.”
“Apparently not, Mr. Hillary. The ambassador will be on board the Yukon later today. You may want to prepare something to bring him up to speed on your transition efforts.” If this Rool is anything like Ambassador Dek, the Rheas are in for a rude awakening with an above average chance of several funerals, thought the admiral, Mr. Hillary may be one of the ones in need of a casket.
“Uhh, yes. I should be able to have something ready for him. When do you think he’ll be coming down to the planet?”
“Mr. Hillary, if I were you, I would not wait for the ambassador to come to you,” Admiral Tomkin replied in all seriousness. He wanted Mr. Hillary to be put in his place, not summarily executed upon the ambassador’s arrival. It would not look good for the Rool to kill one of the “protectors” of the Rheas right in front of them.
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