“When you’re going through hell, keep on going,” Max muttered. He poured on the acceleration instead, altering his course to veer toward Neptune’s upper atmosphere.
The Hermes couldn’t fly through the gaseous layers of Neptune’s air like the Wasps had. She wasn’t designed to fly in atmosphere, and the stress would tear her apart. But he could use the gravity assist from the planet to slingshot around in a tight orbit and come out on a beeline for Earth.
Of course, that also meant flying straight past the enemy fleet slowly forming up outside the portal.
“Max, you’re building speed instead of braking. What the hell?” Sam asked.
“I can’t stop in time. Going to do a fly-by past the planet. Can you cover me?” he asked.
“We’ll try. The new ships don’t seem to be firing. I’m not sure why not, but I’ll take it. We’re staying engaged with that first ship. It’s keeping us busy,” she said.
“No power,” Gurgle said.
“What?” Max asked, alarmed. Was there a problem with the power output on the Hermes?
“New ships no power,” Gurgle said.
An image appeared on Max’s scan. Gurgle was right. There were no power signatures from the three enemy ships that had exited the portal. As he watched, he saw the bloom an energy source start up on the first ship. It wasn’t disabled - it had powered down for transit! All of the enemy ships were powered down.
“Sam! The new ships are powerless. They must need to shut down whatever their power sources are for the wormhole jump. They glided into the bubble - but they’re just now restarting their reactors,” Max said.
“Understood,” she replied. “All fighters, with me.”
Max watched as her wings broke away from the alien ship, which was leaking air from a dozen spots and bleeding liquid of some sort into space. There were only ten fighters left. A third of their original pilots remained. All of them hit maximum acceleration - directly toward the ring.
“Um, Sam, what do you have in mind?” Max asked.
“We’re going to hit that ring with everything we’ve got. We used up all our missiles, but maybe it’s more vulnerable than it was. Railgun shots might have an impact,” she said. “Worst case, maybe ramming it will work.”
“No ramming, but try a pass. I’ll do what I can on my end,” Max replied. “I mean it, Sam. We can fight another day if need be. But we need you all alive if possible.”
“We’ll do what we can.”
Max hoped she would follow his orders. There was nothing he could do to stop them if they decided to try a kamikaze run at the ring, but the little squad of remaining Ghost Wing pilots were damned good after all they’d been through. The previous battles had weeded out the slow and unlucky. The ones remaining were flat-out amazing to his eyes.
He set about calculating firing coordinates. The ring was in range for his missiles, and though he had few left, he figured he would add everything he had to the mix. If they could take down the shields covering the ring, they might be able to shut off the wormhole - at least for the time being. Slowing the invasion was their best hope for survival at this point.
Max set every launcher firing on rapid, each chambering a new missile as quickly as the machines could and releasing it. A veritable cloud of the things shot toward the ring, wave after wave of missiles. But Max had tweaked their course settings. The first wave launched at a slower acceleration than the second, and the third was faster still. Each wave boosted a little more rapidly than the one before so that by the time his swarm of missiles was closing on the ring, they were flying practically on top of each other. All forty weapons would impact within a few seconds of each other.
The Wasps made their run. Max observed his scans as they shot a steady stream of iron into the shield. It wavered but didn’t break. The weapons were just too small. But the explosions caused by his missiles might damage the Wasps if they stayed around much longer.
“Sam, return to base. All Wasps return to the Hermes. I’ve got enough inbound missiles to make our own little sun there in a minute, and you do not want to be around when they hit!” Max said.
“We see them,” Sam replied. “Breaking clear now!”
The Wasps shot past the ring rather than slowing down to make another pass. They were going fast - they’d be clear of the area before the missiles hit. Max held his breath through the last few seconds. The first super-dreadnought had been joined by two more. Both of the newcomers were beginning to power up. The first one looked like it was already underway, but he didn’t detect a shield on the thing. Was it too small for a shield? Or did the shield simply require more power than the ship had available yet? He didn’t know, but it occurred to him that the ships were a helpless target and might have been a better destination for his missiles.
Too late now. They were almost to the ring. The last few seconds ticked by. The missiles started striking home. One after another they detonated, each one virtually on top of the other’s point of impact. Some of them blew each other up, they were so close together. The explosion was so massive it made scans of the target impossible. Max couldn’t see if the strike did any damage or not.
But the bubble never wavered. “Shit. We didn’t break the ring.”
“Shield gone,” Gurgle said.
Max looked at his scans, which were just starting to clear. Gurgle was right! They’d punched a massive hole in the shield, blowing away a considerable part of the ring’s protection. So close to taking the thing out! If only he had more missiles…!
A ping caught his attention. A message from Earth? Max almost set it aside to listen later, but if those big ships got moving and chased him down he might not have a later. Better to listen now. It was a recording from Admiral Stein.
“When you get this, you will have sixty seconds to clear the vicinity of the ring. I hope you’ve followed orders and stayed clear. If not, get your people out now. We’re blowing that thing to kingdom come. Stein out.”
The Intrepid was coming. That had to be what he was planning. The first human use of the Albucierre drive was as a weapon. A ship using the drive picked up particle matter along the way, charging each with enormous energy as it became trapped in the warped-space bubble around the ship. When the object exited warped space, the bubble collapsed - releasing all of the particles in one massive explosion. Albucierre missiles had been a devastating weapon of mass destruction in the last war. Max wasn’t sure the particle wave would break through the ring’s shield. But the ring’s protection was still down.
“Sam, full burn! Get clear now!” Max yelled.
“We’re moving as fast as we…”
Space lit up like a supernova.
The coursing energy of a small sun flared to life a few kilometers from the ring.
23
The navigation console exploded, sending sparks showering across the bridge of the Intrepid. Secondary overloads shorted half the rest of the systems on the bridge. Thomas covered his face with an arm as a wash of hot bits of metal pelted him, singing his uniform. People were yelling. At least one crewman was screaming. The chaos was total. He needed to get a handle on things! He sucked in a deep lungful of air to calm his nerves and ended up coughing on the acrid smoke-tinged air.
“Medical to the bridge,” Thomas ordered into the intercom. At least that was still working. It was hard to tell what was still functioning and what wasn’t. His watch comm-link still worked, though. There was one person he could call who might be able to buy them the time they need to get the ship back in order. He opened the link.
“Kel, how are the hangars?” he asked.
“Thom? My god. The ship’s in a shambles. I had my pilots in their fighters ready to launch. Bay Four is gone, Thom. Just gone. Something blew near the engines and the secondaries…they’re all just gone.”
He inhaled sharply and regretted it just as quickly, coughing louder than before. The bridge was filling up with smoke. “The other bays?”
“One and Two ar
e fine. The doors are jammed on Three, but they’re working on it,” Kel replied.
“Launch all Wasps. Screen the ship while we get some semblance of order in here,” he said. “Get the Bay Three fighters out there too as quickly as possible.”
She was in Bay One with her Wasp, but Kel could just as easily have been in Bay Four when it blew. He’d come that close to losing her - the luck of the draw was all that saved her. What the hell happened? They’d made the jump into a warp bubble with the Albucierre drive without trouble. The course toward Neptune had taken them reasonably close to the sun, which was good news in his book. Solar proximity meant they would pick up more particles to release on exit and do more damage to the damned ring.
But something had gone horribly wrong. The exit hadn’t been the gentle shift back into regular space they’d expected. Half the ship’s systems had fried themselves. Feedback from the particle release? A failure in the drive itself? He didn’t know, and there was no way to find out in the middle of what was probably a battlefield. The drive was still mostly untested technology. Only desperation had driven him to run the first flight of the ship like this.
On the plus side, they’d made it to Neptune. He’d recognize the planet floating out the front of the ship anywhere. Now they just needed to get the Intrepid back under control again and see what damage they’d done. Fire suppression systems finally became active and the ventilation turned itself up to high power, sucking the fumes and smoke off the bridge. Breathing easier was a huge plus. Backup lights were flickering on.
The front of the bridge was a mess. Navigation and helm were utterly destroyed, but the bridge was modular. Any role could be performed from any station. Not that they had power to their drives at the moment anyway, but once damage control teams restored it they’d need to move the ship.
The bridge doors snapped open and a medical team rushed in. Thomas pointed to the front of the room, where the two worst wounded were being treated by other bridge crew. The medics nodded and went to take over care of the injured. The rest of them all had some small burns, cuts, or bruise, but those could wait until after the crisis was over.
“Secondary scans are coming online, sir,” Sergeant Xiva said.
Thom nodded acknowledgment to her. He checked the holographic display panel in front of his station. Miraculously, it was still working. He routed the scan data into the console and lit up the display.
“Let’s see what we’ve got out there,” Thom said.
The ring was shattered. The particle wave the Intrepid released on exit must have smashed into the thing and broken it in two, then continued to tear up one half of the thing until it looked like it had been savaged by a dinosaur and then discarded. Chunks of floating ring scattered in a cone-shaped pattern away from the Intrepid’s nose. Thomas felt a surge of hope. It had worked! They’d killed the ring!
But pieces of the ring weren’t the only nearby encroachments. Thom spotted four other large shapes nearby, two of which were truly massive! At first, he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. They were too big to be ships! But one of them was moving under power, slowly coming about to face his vessel. The second large ship wasn’t moving. Computer analysis showed massive structural damage. It was leaking air from a hundred spots, and its power levels were near zero. They’d been hurt badly by the Albucierre wave.
Thom assumed the other two objects were smaller ships. But the way they were drifting looked wrong. The computer flashed back an assessment based on video and trajectory analysis. Those two parts had been another one of the supermassive ships, but it had been struck amidships by a large piece of the broken ring. The impact had cracked the spine of the vessel in two. Both parts were powerless, slowly drifting away from each other.
“The big one that’s moving is disgorging fighters,” Xiva said.
“Understood. How’s our fighter deployment coming?” Thomas asked.
“Twenty birds in space, ten more on their way,” she replied. “Bay Three is a mess. Damage control is working on it.”
“Patch me through to the CAG,” Thomas said.
“Aye, sir.”
A moment’s pause, then Kel’s voice came over the speakers. “Kinda busy out here, Admiral!”
“You’ve got company out there.”
“I see them. We’re engaging in ten seconds,” Kel replied. “CAG out.”
Silently, Thomas sent her the luck and well-wishes that she knew he was feeling, but couldn’t say over the radio. Everyone on the ship knew they were married, of course. But it wasn’t proper protocol to act any differently toward her than he would any other officer while they were on duty. Even her presence in his chain of command was a breach of norms. Only their need to have the best people they possibly could on board allowed for them both to be assigned to the same ship. Well, that, and Thomas usually got what he wanted if he pressed for it hard enough, but he’d have rather use his rank to keep Kel away from the fight than send her into the thick of it. If she’d been in Bay Four, he might never have forgiven himself.
Foolish, and he knew it. Keladry was a fighter because she wanted to be. He didn’t make her that way, and he wouldn’t change her for anything. She was perfect just the way she was. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t worry about her when she was in her Wasp, in harm’s way.
“Do we have any secondary batteries alive to engage those fighters?” he asked.
“No, sir. We hadn’t hooked up the secondaries yet when we left Earth’s orbit,” Ensign Javis said from weapons.
The ensign was kind enough - or smart enough - to keep the ‘I told you so’ tone out of his voice. He’d expressed his concerns before they departed about potentially going into battle without their secondaries. Thomas had accepted his advice but elected to proceed anyway. Getting all the secondary guns operational might have taken days, and they didn’t have days. Still, in the chaos he’d forgotten that half the ship’s weapon systems were effectively useless lumps of metal. Thomas cursed silently. He had to be sharper than that.
“Primaries?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Primaries are charging. Power in twenty seconds.”
“Target the moving ship and prepare to fire as soon as the guns are hot.”
24
REBOOTING.
Sam gradually returned to consciousness. The last thing she recalled was seeing a flash of light brighter than even the ring’s activation had been. Then - nothing. She didn’t understand what had happened. Her thoughts felt sluggish, groggy, unfocused. What the hell?
A systems check showed her the answer. The computer housing her mind had been hit by a massive bombardment of charged particles. The computer had shut down from the overload. Only the fact that the drives containing Sam’s identity were heavily shielded had saved her life. A precaution taken against random solar flares or other space radiation had also kept her from being erased by the barrage.
The computer was slowly coming back online, but it was taking time to get everything running again. Some of the processors were damaged and might have to be replaced entirely, but her consciousness was run by an array. Enough of the array was active that she could think, if slower than usual.
“Anyone else out there?” she asked. “What hit us?”
There was no immediate answer. She activated her radar to get a view of her region of space better than the flash of Neptune she saw every few seconds through the forward camera. Her Wasp was in a spin, but she could fix that as soon as she got her drive functional again.
The radar image was a shock. The ring was shattered into two large pieces and a whole lot of little ones. One of the big alien ships looked like someone had taken a massive sword and sliced it in half. Another was smoking and burning. Only one of the big ships was actively moving around. It and the smaller one they’d been fighting for days were both engaged against a human vessel. At first Sam thought it was the Hermes, but she spotted her home base sailing toward Triton. Max was out of missiles - he didn’t have much left to of
fer in a battle, so it was good that he was getting clear. That had to be the Intrepid fighting the other ships.
It didn’t look like the battle was going well for her side. Fighters from both sides darted around, blowing each other to bits while the Intrepid and the alien dreadnought hammered at each other with their primary guns. The Intrepid had massive railguns, like the ones on her Wasp but firing shots a thousand times heavier. They slammed into the alien ship, cracking armor and breaching hulls with every shot.
But the main alien gun was even more effective. Sam couldn’t see it firing, but the evidence of its impact was unmistakable. It had to be some sort of particle beam like the one they’d seen from the smaller alien ship. Like the Intrepid’s gun, it was just…bigger. Each shot cut into the Intrepid’s hull like a hot knife slipping into butter. Molten metal streamed into space from the gaping wounds cut by that beam. She wasn’t sure how much more of that abuse the Intrepid could take.
If it died, then the aliens would be free to repair both their dreadnoughts. Those two ships alone probably had enough firepower to take down humanity’s entire space fleet. They were certainly more than enough to protect the ring while it was rebuilt.
“Ghost Squadron, anyone reading me? We need to get back into this,” Sam said. She played with her throttle, trying to activate the Wasp’s engines. No dice. There was damage to the rear of her fighter. The engines weren’t responding to her at all. Most of her steering thrusters were still working, which let her stabilize her flight and stop the spin, but she was stuck on her current vector.
“I’m up again,” Xiang replied. “Looks like the others haven’t rebooted yet. They should be restored soon.”
Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4) Page 13