The Intrepid was already abuzz with activity before Thomas and Keladry arrived by shuttle. Word had spread that something was up. He watched people murmuring to each other as he swung aboard and saluted the watch officer, imagining what they were saying to each other. The ship wasn’t due to depart for several days yet - if it was really ready then. They were running into one problem after another with power modulation. The Albucierre drive was based on alien technology that didn’t want to play nicely with their tech. The resulting mess was an engineering nightmare the best minds in the world were staying up late into the night trying to solve.
“Sound action stations,” Thomas told the watch officer. He gawked, and Thomas clapped his hands together to spur the man into motion. He shook his head. Too many raw, new people in the Navy now. Too few who recalled what real war felt like. That was going to change soon. Sadly, there were probably going to be far too many people who understood the nature of war, before all this was done.
Alarm bells blared through the ship, and people raced to their stations. Kel turned to Thomas and gave him another quick hug. “See you soon,” she said, and then raced off to the fighter bay to ready her people there.
Most of the ship’s complement was already aboard. The shuttles ferrying the last few in and taking away most of the crews who’d been working on the Intrepid’s construction would dock shortly. Ready or not, the Intrepid was about to make her maiden voyage.
Thomas made his way to the bridge. Fairhaven was already there, waiting in his seat. She vacated it as soon as the doors hissed open and he floated into the room.
“What’s our status?” Thomas asked.
“I’m told the Albucierre drive should work, but no guarantees we won’t blow ourselves to bits,” Fairhaven said.
“Well, that’s a comfort.”
“Main engines are at full power. Our primary railgun batteries and missile tubes are also drawing power properly,” she added. “The secondary batteries and anti-missile systems are still not syncing with the power generator though.”
“We’ll do the best we can with what we have. Fighters?” Thomas asked. Without the secondaries and anti-missile guns, the fighters would be the only defense they had against enemy missiles.
“Full complement of sixty ready to fly from four operational bays, sir,” Fairhaven said.
“That’s excellent work,” Thomas replied.
“Mostly thanks to Commodore Stein,” Fairhaven said. “She promised hellfire and brimstone on the engineers if her fighters weren’t all locked, stocked, and stowed properly.”
“That does sound like my wife talking,” Thomas said. He chuckled, imagining what that conversation must have sounded like. Kel could be a veritable firestorm when she wanted to be. “We’ll stand by while the shuttles dock and debark with the extra crews. Which reminds me - time to let the crew know what the hell we’re doing.”
He slipped into his seat and strapped himself down so that he wouldn’t drive away. Then Thomas tapped a console, opening a channel to speak to the entire ship.
“Attention all crew and workers. This is Admiral Thomas Stein. Due to new intelligence received about the crisis out by Neptune, we can no longer afford to wait on further construction before launching the Intrepid. Three shuttles will be arriving shortly. If you’re not crew and want to head back to the station, be on one of them when they depart,” Thomas said. “No one will think less of you. You didn’t sign up to be part of a battle. But anyone who stays will be much appreciated. We could use the extra hands to help keep this ship from falling apart during her first flight!”
Thomas took a deep breath before going on. “You’ve all done stellar work to get this ship as ready as she is. Right now we are the last, best hope humanity has of stemming this alien threat before it turns into something we can’t stop. Man your stations. Remember your training. We’re not just fighting for each other this time. This is for everyone we’ve left behind down on Earth, Mars, and Venus. Our homes are in danger. We will rise to the challenge and defend them.”
He shut off the speaker system and looked up at Fairhaven. “How’d I do?”
“On the scale of most inspiring speeches, it rates maybe a six, sir. But I think it’ll do the trick,” she replied.
“A six? A six?” Thomas looked around the bridge for support from the other crew there. They kept their faces studiously turned away from him. “That’s not a very nice thing to tell an admiral, Captain.”
“You keep me around because I tell you the truth, and we both know it,” she replied with a thin smile.
“Best hit one of those shuttles. They won’t wait,” he said. She was non-combat staff, not crew.
“I think I’d like to stay on board, if that’s all right with you, sir?” she replied.
He didn’t even have to think about it. He merely gave her a nod. She was a smart person with superb organizational and people skills. They might need her before all this was done.
“Grab a chair and strap in then, Captain. We’ll be leaving as quickly as we can. Navigation, plot me a course for Neptune,” Thomas said.
“Where would you like to arrive, sir? We can place the exit coordinates with a great deal of precision,” the young woman manning the station replied.
“Right on top of that ring,” Thomas said with a snarl. “I want to smash it into shrapnel with our arrival.”
19
Sam didn’t understand. How could all of their shots have done no damage at all? No matter how strong the structure of the ring might be there ought to have been some impact from all of those explosives. She continued closing on the thing, blazing away with her railgun as rapidly as it could fire. The shots just weren’t hitting the ring at all. Or they were - but something was reducing their velocity to near zero just before they struck. The little shards of iron bounced off harmlessly, all their speed somehow bled away.
“The thing has a shield!” Sam called out.
“Shit. Now what do we do?” Grimalf asked.
“I’m open to ideas,” Sam replied.
What could they do? Their weapons were useless against this thing. No matter how much damage they did, it just shrugged everything off. She skimmed past the thing’s enormous surface. Small construction bots drifted here and there, working on the structure. She picked a couple of them off with her railgun. Those things weren’t shielded, at least. Maybe if she blew up enough of the bots, it might slow the construction down some?
But the ring looked completed, or very nearly so. Where there’d once been gaping holes in its structure, now it was whole. The thing had to be almost ready for use. They were too little, too late. She fired at another construction drone, grimly determined to do whatever small damage she could.
“Sam, we’ve got incoming. A wave of fighters headed our way,” Harald said.
“And their mothership. It looks like we’re now considered a bigger threat than the Hermes,” Xiang added. “We need to go.”
Her scans showed the incoming enemy ships. Sam had the computer run probably course dynamics. At their current acceleration it was already too late. By the time her fighters overcame their current velocity and turned around to run, the enemy ships would be on top of them. They were neatly trapped.
“No time to withdraw,” Sam said. She sent the others the computer’s analysis.
“Shit,” Harald said. “Not great odds for a fight.”
“I’ve got another way,” Sam said.
“I’m all ears,” Harald replied.
“You’re not gonna like it…” Sam said, smiling to herself. It felt good to poke jibes at her old friend. Felt more like old times than ever.
“I usually don’t. But you usually get us out of whatever mess you put us in,” Harald said. “Let’s do this.”
“OK. All fighters continue on the current path and accelerate at maximum,” Sam said. “Follow my lead.”
“We’re headed toward the enemy fighters?” Xiang asked incredulously.
“
No, not quite. We’re going where they can’t go,” Sam replied.
“Oh. Shit,” Grimalf said, finally realizing where her course would take them.
The vector they were on was an almost straight line from Triton to the ring - which lay about halfway between Triton and Neptune. If they accelerated on their present course it would take them directly toward the planet. With its supersonic storms of slush and half-frozen gases. The enemy fighters could follow them in. But would they? Sam wasn’t sure her Wasps could survive in that soup, but at least they were designed for some atmospheric flying. The alien craft didn’t look like they could fly in an atmosphere well at all.
They rocketed on, burning their engines with every bit of energy they could pour in. Twenty gravities of acceleration were more than any human could survive for more than a brief time. The Ghosts could handle it indefinitely, though. They sped past the spot where the alien fighters’ course would intersect theirs long before the enemy was in firing range.
The alien ships fell in behind them, losing a little ground to change course and follow. This was now an enormous game of chicken. Did the aliens think they would call her bluff, force her to turn and face them rather than entering the atmosphere? They were in for a real surprise if that was the case. She never bluffed.
“Here we go!” Sam said. “Hang on! Follow the pre-plotted course as best you can. We’ll rendezvous at the exit coordinates. Communication might be shitty in there.”
“See you on the flip side,” Grimalf said.
The first winds buffeted her small craft. Sam kept the throttle up as the atmosphere thickened. She was coming in at an oblique angle, letting the wind carry her along as she skimmed through the upper atmosphere. If she’d been human, the flight controls would have been torn from her grasp. Her body would have been pummeled to bits by the battering her fighter took, and her body would have been cooked by the friction heat against the fighter’s outer shell.
She was somewhat immune to all of those things, though. A processor went offline, which pinged an alert to her. Backup systems took over the strain of keeping her mind running before a cascade failure sent the entire system into shutdown. That would be bad - akin to falling unconscious while flying through this mess. In other words, certain death. The planet would suck her down into the thicker atmosphere with even a moment of distraction. The winds and ice down there would tear her ship to pieces in seconds.
The only comfort Sam took from the rocky ride was that if any of the alien fighters had tried to follow them, they all had physical bodies inside. Insect or not, she didn’t think they were likely to survive the elements in this mess. Any aliens who followed them were dead.
She poured on speed again as she neared the exit point. The planet seemed to grip at her ship, slowing her ascent out of the windstorm. Gravity tugged at her, she could feel the pull fighting her engines. But the fighter was more than strong enough - the gas and wind around her thinned, and then vanished.
“Yes!” Sam shouted. It felt so good to be out of there!
The scan was clear. No enemy fighters. The big ship - yes, there it was, still a long distance away. It hadn’t tried to pursue, returning instead to guard the ring. Where were her people, though? For a terrible moment Sam thought she was the only one who’d survived, that she’d led everyone else to their deaths.
A Wasp shot up from the planet, and then another. More followed. Soon all eleven other fighters were right behind her, building up velocity again as they shifted course to reunite with the Hermes. They’d all made it. The relief Sam felt was palpable. She wanted to shake with reaction and couldn’t. Her Wasp body didn’t have the capability. But she felt the shudders in her mind anyway.
“Good plan, Sam,” Harald said.
“Any plan we all walk away from is a great plan,” Grimalf added.
“Thanks, guys. It was all I could think of to get us out of that mess on the fly,” Sam said.
“It was more than enough,” Xiang said. “Well done.”
But what were they supposed to do now? The ring was shielded well enough that their missiles did nothing. The torpedoes had been blocked, but Sam wasn’t sure they would have accomplished much more. That was the heaviest firepower their fighters could carry. The Hermes had missiles as powerful as the torpedoes, but nothing stronger. How were they supposed to shatter the ring if they couldn’t even scratch it?
Sam went over the data her scans recorded during her fly-by. It looked like the field around the ring sucked all the energy out of whatever hit it. The railgun pellets had just glanced off after their velocity was bled away. The explosions likewise had done nothing more than warm the surface of the ring a little. There wasn’t anything else she could glean from watching the data, but maybe Max could see something she didn’t. She packed the scan data into her radio and sent it on to the Hermes.
Max was exhausted from the fight. The last thing he wanted was a cryptic set of orders from Earth, especially when the orders made no sense at all. He rechecked the verification codes. There was no doubt - the new orders were deliberately authorized by Admiral Stein himself. But they made no sense. Worse, by the time his request for clarification reached Earth, was heard, and he got the reply, eight hours would pass. That was far too much time to be sitting on their hands, but he prepared the recording anyway.
“Orders received, but need clarification,” he said. “Why are we supposed to stand down? Our primary mission objective is not yet accomplished and the alien ring is nearly completed. Our remaining personnel are still mission capable. We are ready to engage the enemy again as soon as our fighters have resupplied. Please acknowledge.”
He sent the message but wasn’t expecting much. If the admiral was sending orders to stand down without any more information, there was probably a reason behind it. Max couldn’t fathom what it might be, but Stein wasn’t someone to issue a command without reason.
That didn’t mean he had to like it, or that his pilots were going to appreciate being told to stand by rather than fight. The ring wasn’t dead, which meant Sam’s part of the last mission had failed, but he knew her. She’d want to try again as soon as possible. So would the rest of them.
Another message ping reached him. At first, Max hoped it was a follow-up from Earth. It was far too early for them to have gotten his recording, let alone replied. But he had hopes they might have realized more information would be useful for him and sent it along after the first order.
No, this was a data packet from Sam, showing the events of her last fight at close range. Max took in the entire sequence of events. The ring was protected by some sort of shield. That was going to bollox things up. He checked the energy readings on her scan. The ring emitted a constant energy signature which had to be caused by whatever that protective barrier was. Right after the missiles struck, the energy spiked and then waned. It did the same, but to a smaller degree, when the railgun shots impacted.
It wasn’t invulnerable, just resistant. Massive impacts made the field flutter. If they could hit it hard enough, or enough times rapidly, they might be able to overwhelm the thing. But it was going to take a ton of firepower to deal enough damage to take the shields down completely. Max thought he might have enough missiles on the Hermes to take the shield down, but he doubted there would be enough remaining afterward to deal with the ring itself. And that was assuming the enemy ship and her fighters stood idly by and did nothing. Maybe that was why Earth had ordered him back? They’d realized that the only sort of attack that could win against the ring was for the Hermes and all her remaining Wasps to launch a full-scale and likely suicidal assault.
The Wasps were docking again. Max noted that Gurgle had already dispatched repair drones to check on their ships, several of which took damage on the mission. Gurgle was doing a damned fine job in his new role. One of the better decisions Max felt he’d made lately.
He gave a mental sigh and prepared himself to break the news of their new orders to his pilots. He didn’t think the
y were going to be especially pleased.
20
“What do you mean, we’ve been ordered to stand down?”
If she’d been a physical person, the room would be shaking from the volume and tone behind Sam’s voice. She was furious, as were most of the other pilots. Their avatars in the virtual ready-room were programmed to display body language appropriate for their mood. None of them were pleased.
Xiang was the only person present who knew why the orders arrived and he wasn’t at liberty to pass along that particular bit of information. While some of the other pilots might support him, his sense of Commander Knauf was that the man would be far too much a stickler for the rules. That didn’t suit Xiang’s plans. Neither did getting trapped on board the Hermes when Stein finally decided to show up.
Which would be soon. The only reason the admiral would issue orders for the crew of the Hermes to stand down from fighting was if he’d managed to connect the uploaded mind of Xiang to one Choi Xiang, former president of the United Nations. He wondered how that had been done. Xiang was ever so careful to cover his tracks on the matter of a digital upload. That was as much for political expedience as anything else. Uploading one’s mind was still considered a strange thing to do, even if most of the wealthiest people made a secret practice of it. How else to ensure one’s long-term survival? Certainly the laws of the time forbade the minds to own property or leave their virtual worlds, but laws changed.
Just as important, Xiang had wanted to keep his upload secret for precisely the scenario he faced now: his enemies becoming aware of the fact he was still alive. At least, becoming aware before he was ready to deal with them.
He thought over options, his mind cool as ever. There was no memory of how he’d died. The last recollections he had of his physical life were of the day before, the last time he’d backed up his psyche. Xiang only had second-hand accounts of what happened on Luna, but they all agreed on one thing. He’d died at the hands of a younger Thomas Stein.
Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4) Page 11