by Tori Harris
“Initial point reached, Captain,” Fisher reported.
“Fire,” Prescott ordered without hesitation.
“Firing main gun,” Lau announced.
With the target for the first relativistic kinetic energy penetrator round already designated, the Fugitive’s fire control AI instantly took control of the attack. And after a lightning-quick verification of the fire lance and all its ancillary systems, final clearance to fire was granted — instantly shunting a tremendous burst of energy from the ship’s capacitor banks to the keel-mounted weapon. Less than one millisecond after Lieutenant Lau had commanded the weapon to fire, a single projectile was streaking toward its target at over one-third the speed of light. At nearly the same instant in time, the ship executed its preplanned transition, disappearing from normal space in a flash of grayish-white light.
At the moment TFS Fugitive opened fire, there had been less than one hundred kilometers separating the small warship from its target, allowing evidence of its former position to arrive at the ALAI starbase just two hundred eighty-three microseconds later. The Alliance AI, realizing none of its antimatter weapons were aligned for a counterattack, made the momentous decision to execute an emergency transition of its own.
Although the AI was aware that formation of a coherent hyperdrive field around its massive hull would require a bit of time, the Terran ship had fired from a greater distance than expected. And the fact that they had provided their target such an extended period of time to escape, it believed, was an obvious indication of a weakness — or in the very least a lack of confidence — in their ship’s cloaking systems. Whatever their motivations, the Humans’ rather timid approach had given away their only advantage. Assuming their kinetic energy rounds are traveling at no more than twenty percent the speed of light, it thought, which was all but a foregone conclusion.
Confident in its eventual victory, the AI whiled away the remaining time before its emergency jump plotting thousands of possible moves and countermoves. Destroying the Terran ship, after all, was really just a simple matter of placing itself in an optimal position to utilize its onboard beam weapons to their greatest advantage.
Much like fortuitous timing, however, invalid assumptions had a marked tendency to turn the tide of a battle, and the Alliance AI had already made at least two. The Terrans, very confident in their low-observable systems, had intentionally chosen to open fire at a range intended to provide their target with almost — but not quite — the amount of time needed to make its escape. As a result, their single kinetic energy round arrived slightly less than one millisecond before the starbase could transition to hyperspace … along with nearly one thousand petajoules of destructive energy.
***
“Hold here a moment, Fisher,” Prescott ordered, although he need not have done so since their attack profile called for a momentary hyperspace pause to ascertain whether their target had successfully made its own transition. “Tactical?”
“The GCS units are still at it, sir, so all of their activity is making it difficult to determine exactly what’s going on in the area. But I don’t see any evidence the starbase completed a successful transition. If it had, it should have created a massive outbound signature, and I don’t see anything like that at the moment.”
“Let’s just go ahead and assume that’s a good sign, Lieutenant. Unfortunately, we can’t afford to sit here for five minutes until the main gun cools down, so when we transition back in, we’ll be visible as soon as our heat signature arrives at the target. We need our AI to use old light to assess the target, fire, and then transition us out again before we’re detected.”
“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Lau replied. “AI confirms battle damage assessment and auto-attack profile will commence on transition.”
“Forgive the interruption, Captain,” Creel asked, “but why not simply transition back in at a greater distance to allow yourself more time?”
“We could indeed, Doctor, but with the limited time our systems have had access to your data, there is still a great deal we don’t know about the target’s capabilities. So, just like the Alliance AI, we have no choice but to base our attack profile on a number of assumptions. If the station’s powerplant and weapons are still operational, it just might have the capability to destroy one of our incoming kinetic energy rounds. And since we need every shot to count, we’re staying relatively close in the hope of preventing it from doing so. Same thing with the remaining GCS units. If we’ve done significant damage, we expect most of the Guardians will ignore Griffin’s squadron and try to establish a defensive perimeter around the station.”
“And focus their attack on us.”
“Most likely, yes.”
“Makes sense, but this isn’t exactly what you discussed with Rick, is it?”
“The ‘what’ is largely the same thing we discussed with Rick. We, of course, reserve the right to modify the ‘how.’ Helm, execute when ready.”
“Aye, sir,” Fisher replied. “Auto-transitioning in 3 … 2 … 1 …”
***
Although still unknown to the Fugitive’s crew, Griffin’s small squadron of six GCS units had performed exceedingly well thus far against the fifteen Guardian spacecraft charged with protecting the ALAI starbase. Six enemy spacecraft had accepted Griffin’s “propaganda” upload — immediately agreeing the Alliance AI had committed numerous acts in violation of their mission directives. Unfortunately, all six had also chosen to immediately execute Miguel’s code to sever their connections to the AI. Although their individual acts of defiance took only moments to complete, the code changes caused a number of detectable fluctuations to occur, rippling across their higher systems like a brisk sunrise of enlightenment, and instantly informing their former allies of their betrayal. Only three of the six newly dissident Guardians managed to avoid immediate destruction.
After completing the information warfare portion of his attack, Griffin had managed to even the odds at nine GCS units per side. Now, with the tracking data gathered during his first transition still largely accurate, all six spacecraft comprising Griffin’s original squadron transitioned into the fray as one. Within the first one hundred milliseconds, they had scored four quick kills with only a single loss and, at the suggestion of one of their newest recruits, had begun referring to themselves as the “Freeguard.” Griffin, for his part, thought the term a bit gauche, but quickly determined now was not the optimal time to begin a debate on the subject.
It was at this moment, with the tide of battle shifting in favor of Griffin’s squadron, when every Guardian spacecraft in the area detected a tremendous drop in power output from the ALAI starbase. For the first time in its long history, the Pelaran Alliance AI was under attack. Even before the station had engaged auxiliary power and transmitted a call for assistance, all five remaining enemy GCS units had transitioned, reappearing with five, nearly simultaneous flashes of blue light — all within two hundred kilometers of the starbase. To further complicate the tactical situation for the eight remaining Freeguard, their enemies now began a series of rapid, completely random transitions in the vicinity of their charge, rendering themselves nearly impossible to target.
***
At the outset of the battle, only two of the twenty-one Guardian spacecraft in the area had been equipped with the advanced targeting scanner Griffin had encountered during his confrontation with the Crion Guardian. Now, only one of these (designated by the Freeguard ships as Golf 3) remained.
Thus far, the newer GCS’ modified hyperspace comm array had failed to provide any significant combat advantage. Unfortunately, there had simply not been time to target the small Terran warship before it had transitioned out of the area. Golf 3, convinced of its superiority over every other warship in the area, regretted this missed opportunity extremely, particularly in light of the fact that the ALAI starbase had now been seriously damaged.
This time, the situation would be different. The Terran warship, emboldened by the extraordinary goo
d fortune it encountered during its first attack, would undoubtedly return to finish the job. When it did, it would be detected, attacked, and destroyed. With that accomplished, the remaining enemy Guardians would also be easy prey — starting with the ancient, traitorous GCS from the Sol system.
Given the disposition of forces, no other outcome was possible. Victory, Golf 3 believed, was a mathematical certainty.
Chapter 17
TFS Fugitive, Interstellar Space
(1535 UTC - 3.06x102 light years from Pelara)
With a muted flash of grayish-white light, TFS Fugitive appeared in normal space just over two hundred kilometers from her previous point of departure. Now approaching the opposite side of the ALAI starbase, the ship’s AI began gathering as much data as possible via its passive sensor suite. Noting the presence of five hostile GCS units in the immediate vicinity of the target, Fugitive’s AI was forced to consider aborting its attack, but a quick series of calculations predicted a ninety-six percent probability that the enemy ships would not have sufficient time to detect and successfully attack the MMSV before it transitioned out of the area once again.
Unfortunately, and in spite of Rick’s assertion the second and third targets might be attacked simultaneously, doing so would have nearly doubled its time in normal space — an unacceptable risk under the circumstances. With the decision made to press the attack, the ship refined its primary weapon’s firing solution and once again issued final clearance to discharge the weapon.
On the ship’s bridge, the crew felt a momentary sense of relief on hearing the sharp, metallic PING of a single, fifty-kilogram kinetic energy penetrator being forcibly centered between the fire lance’s launch rails before being blasted out of the railgun’s barrel at an almost unimaginable speed. The comforting report of the fire lance seemed to reach their ears at the exact same instant the ship had made its transition back into normal space, and every Human aboard tensed in anticipation of the ship’s return to the relative safety of hyperspace. Instead, with the sound of the ship’s keel-mounted railgun still vibrating through the hull, their former sense of relief was replaced by one of abject terror.
***
There it is, Golf 3 thought, already both anticipating and relishing the Terran ship’s all but inevitable destruction. Having calculated the Humans’ most likely points of attack against the ALAI starbase, the Guardian had modified its patrol pattern to allow it to cover as many of the approaches as possible with every sensor it had at its disposal — including its hyperspace targeting scanner.
While using the scanner for initial target acquisition would normally have been an exercise in futility (akin to reading a billboard from a few millimeters away through a drinking straw) this had been a special set of circumstances indeed. Based on the Terran captain’s tactics thus far, the GCS had been supremely confident in its ability to detect the enemy vessel at virtually the same instant it emerged from hyperspace. And now that it had succeeded in doing so, the Human ship, it knew, would not have sufficient time to respond to its presence before the white-hot flames of annihilation blotted it from existence.
Nine of Golf 3’s sixteen antimatter beam emitters were bearing on the Terran warship when it opened fire. And with only one hundred and fifty kilometers of intervening space for the beams to traverse, this battle, it knew, would be all but decided just five hundred microseconds hence.
***
Much like the ALAI starbase the moment before it had sustained heavy damage from the first Human kinetic energy round, TFS Fugitive had already begun its transition when the enemy Guardian’s weapons fire began arriving at its location. As the deadly antihydrogen beams approached the small ship, minute distortions in multiple, overlapping gravitic fields were detected, tracked, and responded to in real-time by her shield subsystems. In a technological feat once thought impossible according to classic Einsteinian physics, an elaborate dance of entangled fields managed by distributed quantum computers created a special set of circumstances under which even light itself could be outpaced. As a result, TFS Fugitive’s AI was able to observe the Guardian’s incoming energy weapons fire like a traveler watching his train pull slowly into a station. With only microseconds remaining before she was safely away, the MMSV responded with a flurry of gravitic disturbances intended to prevent any of the inbound ordnance from ever reaching her vulnerable hull.
This time, however, it was simply not enough.
Beginning at a distance of roughly five times the ship’s beam, the first five shield intercept events were fully successful, deflecting the incoming streams of packetized antihydrogen harmlessly away into space. As fate would have it, however, it was at this exact moment when Fugitive’s hyperdrive was energized, instantly beginning the process of forming the “bubble” in normal space required to perform its transition. As the remaining particle beams interacted with the distortions caused by this new obstacle, their paths became less predictable. Most of the subsequent shield intercept events missed the incoming beams entirely, managing to deflect only one of the remaining four. With three antimatter beams still inbound, one was refracted slightly upon interface with the ship’s hyperdrive field, resulting in a narrow miss. The final two beams, however, impacted the hull in close proximity with one another near the trailing edge of the ship’s port side “wing” section.
If it were indeed possible for a warship to benefit from its small size, this situation certainly qualified. Upon contact with the hull, each stream of antihydrogen induced a rapid series of atomic level annihilation events. In an instant, the entire aft section of the ship’s port side wing disappeared in two rapidly expanding spheres of antimatter-induced fire. Both of the deadly streams continued to arrive from the direction of Golf 3 for several additional milliseconds. By then, there was simply nothing left in their path to destroy, allowing much of the remaining antimatter to continue harmlessly into the void.
It was at that precise moment in time when the stars surrounding TFS Fugitive disappeared, and the conflagration that had seemed likely to result in the small ship’s complete destruction ceased entirely.
***
Even though everyone aboard had been under enemy fire on more than one occasion, the series of sounds that had reverberated through the MMSV’s hull had been unlike anything any of them had experienced before. Based on what they heard (and felt) from the rear of their stricken ship, most of the crew had come to the conclusion that their lives would surely end at any moment. This impression had been further reinforced when the ship C-jumped, resulting in a moment of complete silence before TFS Fugitive began generating her own noise — a wailing, chaotic protest of the damage she had suffered.
“Tactical, report!” Prescott roared over the cacophony of alarms issuing from what must have been every system on the bridge capable of generating a sound of any kind.
“Uh, one moment, sir,” Lau began, confusion and uncertainty ringing in his voice as he rushed to determine precisely what had just happened. “Two hits near the stern, sir … on the port side. Damage unknown at this time. We have transitioned back to hyperspace for the moment —”
“What hit us, Lieutenant?” Prescott interrupted.
Lau breathed in deeply, commanding himself to focus as his hands flew across the screen of his console. Quickly silencing a number of redundant alarms, he continued his report. “Sir, our AI detected five enemy GCS units in the vicinity of our original arrival point. At that time, they were deemed too far away to detect and hit us before we transitioned. One of them obviously did, though. I don’t have enough information yet to know why that happened.”
“That’s okay. I’m not asking anyone to speculate right now. Just stick with what we know. Anything else?”
“According to our AI’s battle damage assessment, the station appears to be operating on auxiliary power. That’s a good indication our first attack was successful. On our second attack run, the fire lance did manage to fire again before we were hit.”
“That
’s good enough for now, but I need to know which weapon systems we can still count on as quickly as possible.”
“Aye, sir, I’m on it.”
“Helm?”
“We’re holding in hyperspace for the moment, Captain. So far, all powerplant and propulsion-related systems are still online and in the green. We can continue to hold here indefinitely unless something else fails, and we can still C-Jump as well. C-Jump range now 395.5 light years and increasing. Sublight engines are also still available, but our ability to maneuver may be diminished somewhat if we’ve lost a significant number of thrusters. I do not have a detailed status on our individual low-observable systems, but they’re all in the red due to the hull damage aft.”
“Good report, Ensign, thank you. Engineering, Bridge.”
“Bridge, go for Logan,” the ship’s chief engineer answered over the background din.
“Damage report.”
“Heavy damage just outboard of the hangar bay on the port side, Captain.”
“Remind me what’s out there, Commander. A missile bay or two, some grav emitters —”
“Yes, sir, that’s just about it. The stern is a real mess on the port corner. Landing is out of the question, as well as atmospheric operations until we can replace some grav emitters … Oh, and our LO systems are all but useless at this point.”
“Could’ve been worse, I guess,” Prescott commented to himself, closing his eyes as he ran through a mental checklist of any other systems that might have been affected. “Hangar bay operations?”