by Joshua Guess
The tac array tracked his eye movements and, using the port in his skull, functionally read his thoughts. Years of tiny adjustments to its ability to scan and interpret the electrical activity in his brain made his union with the weapons systems almost as effortless and quick as Iona’s with the rest of the ship. With the speed of thought, PDC barrels moved and locked on targets. Not one or two, but every gun nestled on the dorsal face of the Seraphim. The rest of the ship’s armaments were again being controlled by the rest of the crew, but Grant only trusted himself for this job.
Torpedoes flashed into shrapnel. Missiles exploded. A sweep of one cannon took out an entire flight of heavy penetration missiles in a single go. Grant took straightforward shots into oncoming projectiles, and just as easily switched to leading fire with an instinctive feel for where the PDC rounds needed to be at the perfect moment to intersect the swarm of fiery death trying to rain down on them.
In thirty seconds he destroyed nearly a hundred of them, but they just kept coming.
“Fen,” Grant said.
“Boss,” came the instant reply.
He paused a moment and set four turrets to fire in a predetermined sequence at an especially dense cloud of torpedoes. “Get the EM torpedoes ready. We’re gonna have to do our cowboy thing.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Fen said.
Oh. Right. She might have been raised around humans, but Fen wouldn’t have the centuries of cultural obsession to draw on needed to understand. “We’re switching over to playing bait and guarding the rest of the fleet,” Grant said. “It’s early, but until we can get in formation, we’re the only ones who can sustain multiple hits without getting all blowed up.”
“Roger that,” Fen said. “Just give me a target and I’ll take care of the rest, sir.”
Grant smiled. “You won’t need me to give you one, trust me on that. You’ll definitely see it. Iona? Let’s do it.”
There was no response, but the field in front of his eyes shifted at once as the ship turned to race toward the nearest of Threnody’s dozen or so space stations. It also happened to be the largest of them; the central command hub for the defense network.
Grant continued picking off targets as best he could, but with that sudden move toward a priority target—one they had carefully plotted to be within striking distance of from the start—the priority of every piece of hardware in the defense net changed at once. Missiles and torpedoes veered madly as they changed course to intercept. Plumes of propellant exhaust thrown by microfusion reactors turned the black sky blue as they ratcheted up their speed to insane levels.
The total number of threats grew so large that Grant’s display couldn’t keep up. The field turned to an endless sea of red dots.
“Krieger, get ready!” Grant shouted.
The only reply was a muffled curse in German.
*
Krieger wasn’t used to piloting using a headset. He was of the old school, preferring to operate manually where possible and using his monitors for judgment. Lacking a military-grade neural port, Krieger relied solely on eye movements and basic brain scanning for this work. He was current on both as the captain required, though he had never considered systems only kept up with for an emergency would be used for anything quite like this.
Their flight took them within a few meters of the space station. In this, Krieger was not concerned. Iona was a better pilot by all technical definitions. She would not miss and send them crashing through the station, he was sure. Only time and practice would give her the instinctive feel for the ship experience brought, but that was a matter of finesse. For this mission, he was perfectly happy to rely on precision.
The cloud of weapons would not strike before they passed the station. Iona had done her work well. While they could have done so, the Seraphim moved too close too quickly. The approach was a near one specifically for that reason; drawing the attention of the missiles and torpedoes but forcing their automatic safeties into not delivering the deathblow too close to the station. It was a risky, dangerous maneuver Krieger could not have pulled off on the fly, and it worked.
Leaving the other drones at station keeping with the ship, he picked one and took control. His view changed from a mosaic feed from every one of them to a single camera. Well, a single suite of them. The drone was well-outfitted. As they drew close, he flicked the controls and sent the thing spiraling—spiraling, for the love of god—toward the station. These advanced drives, and he reminded himself to ask what they were actually called, could do amazing things. Move in ways that would change the way human beings viewed space travel.
The drone deftly wove between defensive PDC bursts from the station, responding with microscopic accuracy to every command, every minute tweak of the controls. With one final twist, it slipped close enough that the station PDC net could no longer target it. Weapons systems generally weren’t designed for firing on the structure they were trying to protect.
“Drone secure,” Krieger said, switching back to his mosaic view. He casually swiped a command and entered a numerical pass code. “Overload is armed.”
One bomb placed, and on the primary target. This was working out well, so far.
Then the cloud of death, seeing the Seraphim pass close by the station, resumed its screaming passage across the void. Once the targeting systems recognized the ship wasn’t going to swing around and make a second pass, some would disengage and acquire new targets. The other fleet ships.
The trick was not letting that happen.
“Krieger, I’m ready,” Fen said on a private channel.”
“Ja,” Krieger replied. “As am I. Fire at will.”
The trio of torpedoes burst from the launcher with incredible speed and clustered together tightly. Ready for this, Krieger had slaved the engines of a drone to the ID signature of the three specialized torpedoes. His work was mostly fine-tuning as the drone expanded its field to cover them, then kicked the whole thing into full speed.
Under normal conditions, the three weapons would have had no chance in the maelstrom ahead. The travel time for the EM torpedoes would have been far too long for them to be used effectively. Thanks to the drone, they covered the distance at close to warp speed. They broke off a mere handful of kilometers from the edge of the cloud and went to full burn as the pair on either side veered sharply to maximize the yield.
There was no blinding flash as they did their work. Quite the opposite; the electromagnetic pulses killed every electrical system in range. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of control systems, engine management systems, navigational systems—everything—went offline. Fried into uselessness. The dead weapons didn’t represent all or even most of the pieces on the field, but it was a lot. Enough to allow the fleet ships the breathing room not to be overwhelmed.
Krieger giggled like a child at his birthday party as the chaos propagated through the partially dead cloud. The sudden shorting out of systems threw many of the weapons off course. Quite a few collided with missiles, exploding and sending shrapnel spinning in every direction in random distributions. As a pilot—someone who had to think hard about random scatterings of particulate matter that might be in his flight path—Krieger knew the sort of merry hell it would play with the remaining pieces on the board.
And would you look at that! Some of those new pieces were now being placed on their squares. Drive plumes announced the arrival of quite a few Threnodian warships moving through the defense net.
“Well, don’t you look angry,” Krieger said. He knew his job. They had planned this out in great detail. But it still felt odd not to be given the order. This business of acting on his own as the rest of the crew did the same without any centralized command rubbed his fur the wrong way, as his mother used to say. It was unnatural. Then again, so was the fighting. Krieger had never been a combat pilot before the Children came along.
Three large ships with ludicrously heavy shielding bore down on the Seraphim, small bursts of light and heat visibly flashing a
gainst the shields even from so far away. They were plowing their way through the debris cloud. Truly, they must have been constructed to endure anything to take missile explosions on the nose and shrug them off.
Or nearly anything. Krieger had his orders, after all.
“I would guess you’re not quite ready for this,” he muttered with a dark smile.
Another drone gracefully spun in place, orienting itself to the exact center of the enemy’s metal shield from a distance great enough to require laser targeting as well as the larger passive arrays. Once the lock was confirmed, he let the drone coast forward for a few hundred meters, getting any friendly hardware free of its gravitational wake.
Then it went to full power. It happened before he could process the sequence of events. From one instant to another, the drone vanished along its flight path. Then the incoming ship was a symphony of light and fury as the kinetic strike obliterated the central portion of its shield and the shrapnel of the impact blew backward through the enemy vessel like a shotgun placed directly against a skull before both barrels unloaded.
“Mein gott,” Krieger muttered, stunned into horror. He had done it. Without thinking—with a small, guilty measure of joy, even—he had done it. Knowing he would kill these people was different from actually doing it. Understanding the act came with an instantaneous and abiding guilt no matter how vicious they might be.
Especially considering what he knew of Dex. How many reluctant children had he just killed?
It almost didn’t matter what the number was. One was too many.
But Krieger had his orders. He knew what was at stake.
He readied another drone.
37
Even the best defenses will falter if an enemy appears inside them, but victory did not come without cost.
Grant picked himself up from the floor, hot blood coursing down his face. The sudden impact and disconnection from the tac array left him unprepared to stop his head from slamming into the console as he fell. “What the fuck was that?”
“You almost had them all,” Crash said. “One torpedo got through. It...Grant, it hit the ventral hull. It ripped a hole three meters wide and just as deep. It went through our skin. The bulkheads sealed off, but Batta had two of the assault team helping him with repairs in there.”
Grant’s heart skipped a beat. “No. Was he wearing his suit? He always wore his suit.”
Crash nodded. “I don’t know if the other two had their emergency suits on, but even if they did, chances are they got pulled into space. We need to get people into EVA suits to go take a look as soon as we can.”
He nodded, not fully able to process the potential loss. Training kicked in, taking over where logical thought failed. “Status? How long until we can safely start rescue?”
Crash’s eyes scanned the display. “We’re down to eighteen ships, but the Threnody fleet is gone. The drones did the job. We still have half a dozen of ours on cleanup firing rail bursts at the defense platforms from range, but everything within then thousand kilometers of the planet is clear. We should be okay.”
“And Blue? What does the outer system look like?” Grant almost didn’t want to know.
Crash grimaced. “Blue took heavy damage, but reports that the mercenary fleet is ninety percent destroyed or disabled.”
A dark thrill ran through Grant’s veins. That last barrage from the defense network had been brutal and coordinated. They’d had to give the destruct command to the drones seeded on the space stations. That was a last resort; the intent was always to hold the stations hostage. They’d been too eager and too clever, though. Someone decided to take control of the defense net and start targeting manually. That decision left the fleet only one choice.
“Good enough for me,” Grant said. “Make the call.”
He knew Iona heard him. She was currently the ship, after all. An acknowledgment popped up on the display, and thirty seconds later a Destroyer dropped out of warp fifty kilometers away. They’d been waiting deep outside the system for the all-clear or something close to it.
Grant keyed open the channels and made sure every speaker on the ship was ready to play what came next. “Crash, you have the bridge. I’m going to head down to the airlock and see what we can find.”
She couldn’t rise from her seat, but the injury and new limb were still fresh enough that she tried to without thinking. Crash flopped back in her seat with a grimace. “Sir, there’s all sorts of debris out there. Not to mention the last remnants of the defense network might still get off a lucky shot.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Grant said. “Great thing about being in charge? I get to do what I want and you can’t stop me. I’ll go alone. If Batta is in that section of ship, he’s probably trying to haul anyone still alive back in with him. If that’s the case, he’ll need a hand.”
He left without further explanation. Time was wasting. If Batta was out there, it was unlikely he was in good shape. Otherwise the grumpy bastard would be bitching all over the comm for someone to move their ass to help him.
Grant was still in the lift when the planetary announcement began.
“This is Commander Jamel Sharp of the Planetary Alliance vessel Ueshiba,” it began. “An hour ago—” Had it only been an hour? Grant shook his head in amazement. It felt like a lifetime. “—a force of thirty free company ships hired by the NIA were given clearance to begin an assault on your system with the assistance of an NIA asset.”
An asset. Grant smiled grimly as he moved toward the airlock and stepped into the bottom half of his EVA suit. That was a hell of a way to say ‘giant fucking AI ship capable of reducing your planet to cinders if it really wanted to,’ though of course Sharp was more diplomatic than Grant.
“We made this decision based on bedrock evidence that Threnody has been kidnapping and experimenting on PA citizens in preparation for an invasion of at least three of our member worlds. My sensors tell me that our planetary assault has been successful. Our attack on your ships is almost complete. Your ability to make war is, for the moment, nonexistent.” Sharp paused, taking an audible breath. That was intentional. It had to be since comms normally filtered out that sort of noise. “You’ll note that while the free companies completed strikes on your infrastructure, we’ve stayed clear of population centers. Consider this the friendliest warning you’re going to get. Next time you decide to join up with our enemies or come at our people in any way, we’ll drop of rock on you from outside your solar system at half the speed of light.”
Grant sealed up the suit and stepped into the airlock, thumbing his comm on just in time to catch the last bit.
“When your people left the Alliance, we let you go. You can be independent all you want. But you’re no longer allowed to be an enemy. As a precaution, we’ll be watching. Constantly. If you agree to these terms, disable the remainder of your defenses. If not, the PA will declare a formal state of war with Threnody, and we just killed all your ships. You have five minutes.”
The airlock cycle didn’t even finish before the surrender signal came through, though Grant trusted that about as far as he could throw the ship.
*
Grant switched the comm over when Sharp’s message began to repeat. Instead he sent out a constant stream of pings to Batta and any other suit radio he could find. The fact that Iona hadn’t sent a message confirming contact was...not great.
Walking along the skin of the ship got him to the ragged wound in her hide in half a minute. Working his way over its lip was trickier, but Grant managed.
If anyone had been directly inside this section, they would have died instantly. The torpedo’s shear had been immense, judging by the damage. The interior was mangled beyond recognition. The nearest sealed door was immediately on his left, so Grant took off to his right. The corridor itself was relatively intact.
He found them just around the corner, sitting against the other door sealing off the section. Batta was there with one of the assault team, their suits linked to
share air but otherwise appearing dead. The possibilities spun through Grant’s head instantly. They must have been hit by the shear. It would have shredded the delicate circuitry needed to make the suits do more than serve as pressure vessels.
And even that, Grant noted, was up in the air. Batta’s suit leaked from a badly-sealed patch. Grant didn’t need to do the math.
“I need someone out here to help me,” he said into the mic. “I need someone right now. They don’t have long.”
As fast as he could manage it, Grant attached a tether from his hip to both men. Making sure the attachment points were solid, he hauled the pair toward the rent in the hull. They were dead weight—Batta’s suit was basically a statue without power to manipulate its heavy exoskeleton—and pushing them into space took some work. He waited, boots mag-locked to the deck, until the tether went tight. He’d bled off some of the momentum from his shove by holding onto the tether, but the shock still strained his body. They floated back some as Grant climbed through the hole, though he was able to secure his boots again before the movement became a problem.
Once at the airlock, he hauled Batta and the unknown soldier in and hastily pressurized it. Steeling himself, Grant pulled their helmets just as the inner door opened to reveal Dex and Fen, who helped him haul the pair into the corridor beyond.
“Hypoxia,” Dex said, eyes going narrow as he picked Batta up, suit and all, and ran him to the auto doc.
“Holy shit,” Fen said. “Did he really just—that’s got to be a hundred and fifty kilos.”
Grant nodded. “He did. Let him worry about Batta. Let’s see to...” God, he couldn’t remember. The new crewman’s name escaped him in a way one of the old guard never could.