Imperium Knight Chaos Rising (The Hunter Imperium Book 6)

by Timothy Ellis

  With cruising speed determined, I pushed the slider to the final stop, and the twenty percent became thirty five beyond normal fleet flat out. I was waiting for a yeehah or something similar, but the girls didn’t seem to have noticed. Tanith was looking a bit confused, and I gave him a wink, which made him look even more confused. I grinned.

  I made a show of fastening my seat restraints. The others took the hint, and I waited for the right number of clicks, before suddenly worrying about Nut.

  “Don’t worry about Nut,” said Chaos. “As long we have power and he has claws, he isn’t going anywhere no matter what the ship does.”

  “And if the power fails?”

  “His suit will protect him no matter how far he gets thrown.”

  That was true at least. He was wearing the same suit I was, but as a collar. The only time he’d be in more danger than I was, was if the ship was destroyed. My extra suits as armbands would save me, but he only had the one. Something I really should get George to fix. Which brought me up short, since he was missing, and thus wouldn’t be doing any suit changes anytime soon. My mouth twitched in annoyance. First things first.

  I yanked the speed slider back to stop, and flipped the ship right over, ramming the speed slider back to the stops, sending us back the way we came. There’d been no difference from doing it to an Excalibur or Fearless. I did it again to put us back on course for the asteroids, and engaged the strafe, turning the ship through every direction I could as fast as I could, while listening for the sounds of explosive vomit. None came, and I didn’t look.

  I left us pointing ninety degrees around and thirty degrees down when I disengaged the strafe, and the ship jerked us around dramatically, but continued on without missing a beat. Still no vomit. I looked around this time, and saw nothing but bored expressions.

  “Are you going to test this ship?” asked BA. “Or do we die of boredom?”

  I shook my head, and turned back to the front, where Nut was yawning. He rose, turned around a few times, and settled again turned the other way. Chaos popped up a screen only I could see, showing the girls now grinning. Which figured. They loved the sort of thing which made most people puke. I glanced at Tanith, and he had a straight face, nodding to me as if to say, ‘I’m fine, continue testing.’

  I brought up the gun selection system, and found my defaults in place. A lot of these were from Fearless, but added to for the new guns, and I’d based them on Chris’s selections for Claymore. Having more groups of guns than anyone else, I grouped them according to varying degrees of firepower, and added quick select icons to the HUD. I then added full broadside and gatling fire options, and selected timing of fire from simulations I’d run on scenarios of attacking various Trixone fleets. Only a live test would determine if I had these right or not.

  First of all though, I selected all the forward facing fixed guns, and pulled the trigger.

  “Holy WOW!” exclaimed BA, as a wall of pulses flew away from the ship.

  I confirmed with Chaos all the titan and battleship guns had fired, all had the correct power setting, and the buffers had all gone down the correct amount. So far, so good. I pulled the trigger again, and held it down this time for a full firing, getting four more pulses before the buffers ran out of charge, before I released it. Score another one for Bob. He’d managed to improve the buffers again.

  While waiting for the guns to recharge, I set all the mounts to gatling fire. When the buffers were full again, I pressed the trigger once more, and held it down while each mount cycled through all ten guns five times, and they all stopped together when the buffers were empty. The titans had four to cycle through, fired slower, and less times. The twenty gun circle only had two and a half cycles. Not as impressive as full broadsides, but all the same, a matter of seconds firing at any given ship should be enough to either destroy it, or leave it badly damaged. Which was what I wanted.

  I had Chaos target an asteroid in the distance ahead of us, and I found it already in range of two groups of launchers, which were both now where decks zero used to be. The missiles loaded popped up with a name I hadn't seen before.

  “What’s a Shrike?” I asked Chaos.

  “One of Bob’s new missiles. It’s a cap ship missile on steroids. Twice as big, goes twice as fast, and twice as far, with twice the hit. But the downside is we only have ten launchers, and the magazine only holds fifty. We can make more, but not quickly.”

  “Can we fire a set?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do so.”

  Ten very large missiles shot past over the top of us on each side, and were rapidly lost to sight ahead. Several minutes later, the asteroid simply blinked out on the HUD.

  “Successful test,” said Chaos. “No misfires, all of them exploded, and the target was destroyed.”

  “Can we jump into range for the standard cap ship missiles?”

  “Sure. Jump now?”

  “May as well shortcut the distance, and now is as good a time as any.”

  The jump screen popped up, showing where we were, and where Chaos wanted us to go to. She looked at me for confirmation and I nodded. The ship was suddenly much closer to the remaining asteroids.

  “Jump complete. Spot on. No noticeable effect on the crystal used for magic augmentation.”

  I looked at Tanith, and he was looking both amazed, and proud of himself, and well he should be. The hugely larger ship hadn't made any difference to the jump.

  The HUD popped up missile in range icons, and we fired all the normal cap ship launchers, followed by the anti-fighter launchers, and lastly all the mosquito launchers. Everything launched as it should, and a set of asteroids were reduced to dust. I looked over at Chaos.

  “Did you say one of Bob’s new missiles?”

  “I did.”

  “Do we have others on board?”

  “Just a Raptor.”

  “What’s a raptor?”

  “Anti-fighter bird. Again, they fire from the Shrike launchers, but these ones split into ten when close to the main target, and each one chooses a different fighter to aim at a few seconds out. The punch is about the same as three FF’s all hitting at once. But on ten different targets at the same time.”

  “Also fifty in the magazine?”

  “Yes. The idea is you load shrikes at long range to attack capital ships, and change to raptors once fighters are launched.”

  “I guess they’re slow loading?”

  “Slower than cap ship missiles, but not by much.”

  “Fine.”

  I didn’t bother testing them, but instead pulled the slider back to a crawl, and spent some time making sure the fabricators were working on replacement missiles. I stopped us nearby the mess left from our attack, and sent out the salvage droids to collect some dust, to provide the fabricators with some raw material. We didn’t need it, but it was worth testing everything worked in that regard as well. In the meantime, I went through the menus hunting for anything which might be not working correctly, and found nothing wrong.

  Bob seemed to have delivered yet another ship combat capable straight out of the bay. No-one had any idea how he did that. It simply defied belief. Yet he did it every time.

  “Are we done?” asked Amanda.

  “I want to do some actual flying on the way back, without using the strafe, but for now, I guess we’re done.”

  We weren’t, as none of the smaller turrets had been tested yet, but they were next on my list after I had the chance to throw the ship around for a while.

  But I didn’t get the chance.

  A channel opened.

  “The Claymore task force could use some assistance,” said Chris. “We launched for what we thought was a three fleet target, and as soon as we did, another five came through the jump point. Unless someone can rift in now, we’re going to have to turn and run. Anyone available for a rumble?”

  “Grace?” asked Amanda.

  I nodded to Chaos, and she opened up the channel for a reply.<
br />
  “Claymore,” I said, ignoring Amanda. “On our way.”

  Twenty Two

  First things first.

  “Tanith. When we come out of the jump, do we have any control over it?”

  The only jumps we’d done so far, we’d come out in the same line as we went in. I didn’t mind the limitation, but some control would be better.

  “Sure. Takes longer, but you should be able to zoom the destination in, and point the way out.”

  “Confirmed,” said Chaos.

  “Load us with Raptors, and fire the lot at the biggest concentrations of fighters when we get there.”

  “Will do.”

  Admiral Bentley’s head and shoulders popped up as a hollo over the main console.

  “The Imperator is off the map, Chaos. How do you…”

  “Go!” I commanded, interrupting her. “Give me the final out with the rear fleet line below and in front of us.”

  Chaos jumped clear into the next system, and kept on jumping every few seconds. The navmap updated with where we were as we arrived in each system, way too fast for anyone to keep up with, and the ship walked across the map, and along the new line of systems Claymore had been exploring.

  In the time it took for me to put both hands back on the controls, and pull the speed slider back to half, we emerged slightly above and before a line of tree shaped ships heading to our left.

  I strafed immediately, pointed us at the first destroyer, and pulled the trigger. Eleven battleship guns and a titan fired, blowing down the shields at point blank range, with the second battleship guns on each mount firing a second later and finishing the demolition. I adjusted slightly for the next ship in the line without taking my finger off the trigger, wasting a salvo, but walking the next two over the next destroyer with the same result.

  Missiles were firing from above and behind us, the right side ones looping around us as the ship moved along the straight line we’d come out on, and I ignored them, working my way along the fleet. The first cruiser had the middle third blasted apart, and I took that as a sign the battleships would need more, and so gave the first one a full load of the front cap ship missiles as well. The second battleship survived, barely, as we went over it too fast and before the cap ship missiles had reloaded. I forgot all about the front torpedoes. Doh!

  Pulses were now going in all directions with small explosions all over the place, the smaller turrets and mosquito launchers now all firing, as the plants started to respond to our presence with missiles. By the time we passed over the last ship in the line, and I shifted aim to straight ahead and released the strafe, only the one battleship had survived, and it blew a few seconds later anyway, as Chaos had fired our rear cap ship missiles at it once we were passed the other cruiser.

  I let us go forward to give myself a minute, although I shoved the speed slider to the stops so we wouldn’t be too easy a target. I needed to tweak the firing time on the gatling, speeding up the rotation around each mount, so we’d get three battleship salvos instead of two in the same time.

  “Same thing, front line,” I ordered after pulling the speed slider back to half again, and a second later we were back on the other side of the plant fleets, and lined up with the first one, catching most of the turrets out of place as they were trying to track us on the other side.

  I repeated what we’d just done, this time firing more salvos faster, and while we wasted more of them this time, even both battleships were torn apart without needing missiles.

  “Go again,” I yelled, and the ship jumped to the middle line going back the other way, and we tore through them exactly the same.

  “Out of Raptors,” said Chaos calmly, as we came off the end of the fourth line.

  “Shrike whatever lines are going to be last,” I yelled back, as we jumped again, and I changed the aim slightly and kept on firing.

  More missile launches now, and I ignored them again, although I was vaguely aware of red dots plinking out on the ends of the remaining lines, and as we continued down each line, more salvos were effectively wasted on debris instead of active trees.

  With eight fleets in total ruin, I checked on things I should have been looking at, like shields, and found them around eighty percent, in spite of being in the middle of an enemy fleet where they had to have been able to hit us a lot without even aiming at times. The guns buffers were not even drained either. Nor were there any signs of hot barrels or anything else overheating through overstraining.

  I expanded my awareness beyond the fleets, and found there was still a large cloud of fighters out there, with Claymore and her destroyers, corvettes, and Excaliburs barely a quarter the way in, with the rear half on our side already turning back towards us.

  “Side on, middle, go,” I yelled, and we jumped again, coming out pointing into the middle of the rear half of the fighter cloud.

  I hit strafe again, pulled the trigger once more, and hosed the battleship guns across the fighter mass as we blazed a hole through, with every other turret on the ship, and all the anti-fighter missiles, firing in all directions including behind us.

  Out the other side and I didn’t need to say anything to Chaos, as she simply jumped us back the way we’d come further along the cloud, without me even taking my finger off the trigger for a moment.

  Two more passes cleaned away more than enough to safely leave the fighter force, and I found Chaos grinning at me. The shields were down to fifty percent now, mainly through debris and direct fighter impacts, which was what happened when you went through a cloud too fast to avoid hitting what made it up.

  “Go,” I said, and before anyone really had their wits about them again, we’d jumped all the way back to Haven, where I pulled our speed off in time to pull up just off the shipyard where we’d started from.

  We all sat there in silence for a moment.

  “No-one fucks with my boyfriend but me!”

  I blinked in surprise for a moment, wondering who’d said it, before realizing I had. The girls and Tanith burst out laughing.

  “You go girl!” exclaimed BA, and with a click of her restraints coming off, she bounded over to me, and we high fived.

  The rest of the girls all did the same, and then started hugging each other, and bouncing around. I looked at Tanith, and he grinned at me, and nodded.

  Bob popped up on a hollo.

  “How did your testing go?” he asked, as if nothing had just happened. “You’re back so fast I assume something major went wrong?”

  He looked confused with the bouncing girls around me.

  “Ah, no,” I said, focus coming back to me as I exited the zone finally. “I’d call that a successful test.”

  “Bloody oath on that,” said BA.

  “I don’t follow,” he said, obviously now very confused.

  Bentley popped up next to Bob, making me realize she’d not been there the whole time, and almost at once, every other captain did as well, with the exception of Jon and Chris.

  “How did you do that?” Bentley demanded.

  “Do what?” asked Bob.

  “The ship just made its first kills,” said Chaos.

  “Sorry what? Kills? You were in the system the whole time playing with asteroids.”

  “Actually no,” said Jane, although I didn’t know which ship it came through from. “Ninety six confirmed capital ship kills, and two thousand and seventeen fighter kills. In slightly less than five minutes.”

  “But how?” asked Bob, Bentley, and several others at the same time.

  “The jump drive officially works,” said Tanith. “And with an AI doing the jump settings, a ship can get a long way in a very short time, just by doing same place to same place across systems. It needs testing now to see how far a jump can be made in one go, but we just proved it works far better than even Dreamwalker was asking for.”

  Bob grinned.

  “And the ship?”

  “Was perfect,” I said. “The speed sliders need a notch for standard fleet sp
eed since ours is faster, but that’s the only thing I’ve found needing a change so far.”

  “Excellent.” He rubbed his hands together vigorously. “Let’s have Chaos back in the bay for now, and I’ll check all the diagnostics. Tanith, you better come over and we can start on the first production run of the jump drives. Grace m’dear, you look like you need a nap, so unless someone has any objection, you better take the afternoon off.”

  “No objections,” said Admiral Bentley. “How fast can we all get the drives?”

  “They’ll need testing as they’re completed, but within the next couple of days.”

  “Carry on Bob and Tanith,” said Marshall Bigglesworth, who with Jon not in the loop, was the senior officer.

  The hollos vanished, and Chaos started lining the ship up with the bay, ready to back in.

  Chaos started chuckling. The girls were sitting again now, and all eyes went to her.

  “What?” I said.

  “Claymore sent me a vid.”

  “And?”

  “You should see it.”

  “Fine.”

  A vid screen popped up.

  “What the fuck was that?” said Chris, sitting in his command chair, hands still on his controls.

  “Chaos,” said Claymore.

  “I can see that. What caused it?”

  “Not a what. Who.”

  “What?”

  “No, who.”

  “Who then?”

  “Your girlfriend. Chaos.”

  There was a moments silence while he digested that.

  “Oh.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And she thinks I’m scary?”

  The vid ended, with the girls laughing their heads off.

  I was not amused.

  Tanith vanished before the laughter stopped, and the girls took themselves off to the living room on deck two for an early lunch and drinks.

  Nut was still asleep. I sat there thinking for several minutes.

  “Jane?”

  Jane watched everything. I knew she’d answer if I said her name.

  “Grace?”

  “You know what to do with the first batch of jump drives, don’t you?”