The salvo incoming on Red Falcon was terrifying. The sixty-four missiles might be a generation behind the modern weapons the Navy had given David and his people, but Red Falcon only carried twenty-five antimissile turrets.
Under normal circumstances, he’d expect to stop twenty incoming missiles. Today, he had to stop over sixty, and he wasn’t sure his people could do it. He remained silent, his hands gripping the sides of his chair with white fingers, as Jeeves and LaMonte set to work.
Decoy drones fired into space, a half-dozen shuttle-sized electronic emitters blasting clear of the freighter’s shuttle bays. They’d never used that system before—only the Navy was supposed to have systems new enough to be truly effective—but today it was needed.
LaMonte was using the decoys like an artist, dancing electronic emissions from decoy to decoy and back through Red Falcon, confusing the missiles as to just where their prey actually was. The confused missiles were easy prey to the RFLAMs, but there were so many of them.
David blinked as even thicker lines were drawn on his displays, Jeeves bringing the freighter’s ten battle lasers online. The five-gigawatt beams weren’t designed for the antimissile role, but any missile they hit was instantly blown to vapor.
A handful of missiles made it through everything only to fling themselves on LaMonte’s decoys, sharp bursts of white antimatter flame wiping two of the emitter platforms from existence.
Two more came directly at Red Falcon, and for a handful of seconds, David thought he was going to die.
Then the fist of an angry god slammed into his chest as his ship spun in space, her engines going to maximum emergency thrust for a few fractions of a second.
Her engines and structure couldn’t take fifteen gravities for long…but she took it for long enough to force both missiles to miss by over half a kilometer, their inertia carrying them off into the deep.
“One down,” LaMonte said grimly. “Eight more salvos incoming.”
David inhaled sharply as he studied the screen. Another salvo launched from the monitors even as he watched, bringing the total Aristos had fired to ten, six hundred and forty missiles.
A single Phoenix VII was worth millions on the black market. Whatever Aristos’s “new employers”—presumably LMID—had offered him to kill David, it was more than David could match.
And if Aristos was willing to spend money and missiles like this, David wasn’t sure he could keep his people alive.
“Ideas, people?” David asked softly as their last six decoys shot out of the shuttle bays. “This isn’t an exchange we can keep up for four hours.”
“I’m trying to hack them,” LaMonte admitted. “They’re using a nonstandard encryption on the command channels, but they do have them open.”
“You can’t do that, run the decoys, and fly the ship,” David pointed out. “I’ll take over nav. Pass the decoys to your second and link Kellers in. If the two of you can’t do it, nobody can.”
“I could take some long-range shots at them with the lasers, but our odds of doing anything useful are piddling,” Jeeves suggested. “Plus, well, if they return the favor, they’ll do a lot more if they do hit.”
David grimaced, watching their own second salvo slam into the brick wall of the Golden Bears’ defenses. The radiation hash from the first salvo wasn’t enough to even the odds. They were throwing far too few missiles to have any chance of punching through the mercenaries’ defenses.
“What happens if we charge them?” he asked. “We have more beams still. The odds of landing a hit are in our favor even if their guns are bigger.”
The monitors were built around guns from old cruisers. Their ten-gigawatt beams would rip Falcon in half.
“Two hours to range, boss,” Jeeves pointed out. “We won’t live that long.”
The Bears’ second salvo was passing through the radiation hash now, and their RFLAMs were lighting up the incoming missiles. With ten decoys out, the junior engineer running the electronic warfare didn’t need to be as good as LaMonte to do as much.
Which was good, since the engineer wasn’t as good. He still managed to draw off most of the missiles through the radiation hash, sending them careening off onto courses that would never threaten Falcon.
Others ran headlong into RFLAM fire as Jeeves’s people targeted the ones that remained a threat. David twisted his ship through another series of emergency acceleration maneuvers, ignoring the grunts of half-complaint around him as he danced around the missiles.
It…wasn’t enough. Two missiles detonated within a kilometer of Red Falcon. Even nuclear warheads wouldn’t have been enough to cause damage, but these were antimatter weapons. Gigaton-range explosions sent waves of shock and radiation into the big freighter and she lurched.
And then kept going. Sensors and ECM emitters were fried and the big ship was reeling, but she still responded to David’s commands and danced away from the radiation cloud.
“Report,” he barked.
“Sensors are fucked. ECM is fucked. We’re still here, but we’re half-blind and our little jingle dance isn’t working so well anymore,” Kellers told him grimly. “We’re going…shit, we got it!”
“James?”
“We broke their encryption,” LaMonte told him. “Hang on and buy me time!”
David took his XO at her word, diving the ship at ninety degrees to their previous course and forcing major course corrections on the part of the incoming missiles. It wouldn’t buy them much, merely seconds really, but…
The closest wave of missiles simply detonated. Then the next, and the next.
One moment, hundreds of missiles were bearing down on Red Falcon. The next, the space between Falcon and the Golden Bears was a massive wasteland of debris and radiation as David’s people cheered.
“Bloody amateurs,” LaMonte finally noted. “They bought a super-secure encryption and used it…but they only bought one.”
“I don’t think they were counting on us having MISS’s decryption algorithms and supercomputers,” David said drily. “Well done.”
Their own missile salvoes continued to crash down on the mercenaries, and as David turned back to study them, the MISS ship finally got lucky. A single missile made its way through the radiation hash and the defenses and hammered into Bandit Two.
The monitors’ designers had built them to avoid being hit, sacrificing armor for acceleration and defensive turrets as well as overwhelming firepower. Even if they hadn’t, only the Martian Navy built ships that could stand up to antimatter missiles.
The front third of the monitor disappeared and the rest spun out of control, the pocket destroyer falling out of formation as the other ships continued their charge at David.
“They’re not firing,” he said quietly.
“They’re disabling the receivers on their missiles,” LaMonte told him instantly. “If they don’t have a sequence of encryptions to run through, then that’s their next step. They’ll lose efficiency…but we won’t be able to do that again.”
“So.” David studied the screens. “Next set of ideas?”
50
“I can’t even leave you lot alone long enough to take a decent nap, can I?” Maria Soprano grouched as the channel from the simulacrum chamber reopened. “How deep a pile are we in, Skipper?”
“Deep,” David confirmed. “There are seven of the Bears’ monitors out there, and my last math says you’re still a few hours from being able to jump.”
His Mage closed her eyes in a way he’d learned long ago meant she was assessing her internal reserves, then sighed and shook her head.
“Three hours, maybe two if I push, or maybe five if I do too much to defend the ship,” she admitted.
“Do what you can,” David told her. “But we may have this in hand.”
Soprano arched one elegantly maintained eyebrow at him.
“Really?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I’m not asking anyone to die for me today, either.”
“T
hey’re spreading out, clearing their defensive lines of fire and getting clear sight around the radiation fog,” Jeeves reported. “I don’t think we’re going to get another lucky hit, boss.”
“Feel free to fling some lasers their way,” David told the other man. “I’m running out of ideas.”
He was still running as best he could, but without turning the ship around and taking most of his defensive laser turrets out of action, he could only move so fast. The Bears were gaining on him at nine gravities.
New lines drew into his screen as the big battle lasers spoke. Even at thirty-plus light-seconds, there was no way for the Bears to anticipate the beams. On the other hand, there was also a full minute between when the light Jeeves was using to target them originated and when the lasers arrived.
To David’s surprise, they actually hit the ship they targeted, all ten beams bracketing a single monitor. At this range, they didn’t do much damage. The monitor lurched sideways and started leaking vaporized metal and atmosphere, but she kept coming.
“And there they go again,” Jeeves noted grimly. The mercenaries returned the favor, thankfully with less luck as their lasers flashed through the space around Falcon, but they also opened fire once more.
“Aristos has a lot of those damned missiles,” David replied. “How’s our stockpile?”
“Two more salvos, then we need to reload the magazines,” the gunner replied. “We have enough missiles to do so, twice, in that container we have tucked in under the hab ring, but… it’ll take time.”
David nodded grimly as the first of those two salvos shot out.
“Or we can do what we did with those fusion missiles way back,” he said as inspiration and memory struck. His gunner stared at him blankly, but he turned to LaMonte.
“Kelly, we dumped an entire cargo container of fusion missiles at those pirates way back. They got away by jumping—and I don’t think these guys can jump any more than we can. Can we do that with the Phoenixes?”
“Neither the missiles nor the container is designed for it,” she said slowly. “But…if we eject the container into space and slice it apart with the lasers, we shouldn’t lose more than ten percent.
“The rest won’t have our updates and we can’t control that many missiles—but we can feed them telemetry.”
“Our telemetry sucks right now,” Jeeves pointed out.
“Then we’re not losing much by hamstringing our missiles,” LaMonte replied. “Launching the container into space is manual; I’ll take care of it.”
David considered telling her to send someone else for a moment, but she really was one of the best qualified for every part of this.
“Go,” he instructed. “And the rest of you…” He turned to look at the rest of the bridge. “Let’s keep everyone alive, shall we?”
The first salvo arrived several minutes after LaMonte had headed back into the ship, missiles sweeping down on the big freighter like suicidal vultures.
Red Falcon herself had ceased firing. They were out of missiles in their ready magazines now except for a small number of Rapier fusion-drive missiles—weapons that didn’t have the range for this fight.
The siren song of the drones danced across space around Falcon, luring missiles off-course and leaving them vulnerable to missing or laser fire. Their onboard ECM emitters were trashed and the usual jamming was missing, though, which gave the missiles a new edge.
Their lack of updates after launch weakened them. Many would have missed on their own, and the decoys made it worse. The first salvo came apart, shattered under the defensive fire.
Others followed, but they had no advantages over the first salvo. David knew the odds weren’t in his people’s favor, but they could hope.
Then…
“We got one!” Jeeves crowed. “Bandit One, the one we tagged with the laser. Didn’t zig fast enough, bitch!”
David checked the scanners and confirmed his gunner’s cheers. The damaged monitor had taken a single missile amidships, almost exactly where the laser had hit. With the middle third of the ship missing, two chunks of it spun off into deep space.
Twenty-five percent of their enemies were gone. It had taken every missile in their onboard magazines, over four hundred weapons, and their enemy was still firing at them. Hundreds more antimatter missiles were in space, yet…
“Wait, did they stop firing?” David asked.
“Checking,” Jeeves replied. Several seconds passed. “Yes, sir. They have ceased fire. Looks like they finally ran out of damn Phoenixes.”
Even with the lost ships, Aristos had fired over eleven hundred Phoenix VIIs in the last hour. The range had fallen to “merely” nine point three million kilometers.
“Can we hold off the missiles?” he asked his gunner.
“Maybe?” Jeeves replied. “Let’s not forget they almost certainly have almost as many Rapiers and those big lasers.”
“We can jump before those lasers get into useful range,” David replied. “Let’s worry about the damn Phoenixes.”
Another salvo collided with Falcon’s defenses as they spoke, antimatter explosions and distracted missiles flickering across the sky.
The ship shook as the last missiles died just barely far enough away to count as a miss, radiation still washing over the ship as David shuddered.
“Jeeves?”
“We’re down a decoy and some more sensors,” the gunner reported. “This…isn’t going great, boss.”
“Captain, it’s LaMonte,” the XO’s voice suddenly echoed onto the bridge. “We’ve programmed the missiles and are ejecting the container into space. Jeeves should have the control link on his console…and the firing pattern he needs to open the box up as efficiently as possible.”
“Jeeves?” David repeated, turning to look at the gaunt gunner.
“Got it. Waiting for the container…there it is.”
Seconds ticked by and David swallowed his impatience as his people worked, then Jeeves pressed a single command on his console.
A dozen of the RFLAM turrets lit up simultaneously, slicing into the container spinning through space at minimum power. The cuts were almost delicate, compared to the usual devastating energy transfer of even the defensive weapons.
For a few more seconds, that was everything…and then five hundred missiles lit up their drives.
“Now, that’s a sight,” David breathed.
“Not really,” Jeeves complained. “There were eight hundred missiles in that box. Checking the links, seeing if I can get any more on—”
A Rapid-Fire Laser Anti Missile turret like Red Falcon’s defensive systems used a five-hundred-megawatt laser. That wasn’t enough to vaporize most missiles completely, but it was enough to deflect them or ignite their fuel storage to finish the job.
The missile that came screaming in out of the night had been hit and flagged as destroyed by Jeeves’s computers. Instead of being vaporized, the beam had detached and destroyed the warhead. The explosion had registered as destroying the weapon, leaving the computers confused when the engines came back online a few moments later and entered terminal acquisition.
Red Falcon’s forward dome was the only truly armored part of her hull. Even the engine pod at the rear of the long “mushroom steam” of the ship’s spine was only lightly armored, but the missile came in off-angle and late and missed the dome.
It tore through the engine pods like an avenging angel. Multiple antimatter chambers shattered, their safety measures engaging to vent their contents into space. Engines broke apart, pressure chambers overloading and detonating.
The entire ship was flung out of position, hurtling away from her original course even as her drives failed and her primary power cores ejected into space. A halo of antimatter explosions lit her up, bathing her in radiation and burning away many of her remaining sensors and emitters.
With the magical gravity runes throughout the ship, it had been years since David had felt enough force in the ship’s bridge to need his safe
ty restraints, and he’d lost the habit. That mistake caught up to him now as his ship jumped underneath him and he was flung from his chair.
He managed to avoid hitting his head and struggled back upright, dazed by the impact.
“Jeeves?” he snapped. “Are you okay?”
All he could hear on his bridge for a moment was his own heavy breathing, and then his gunner exhaled a heavy sigh.
“I think everyone is fine but you, Skipper,” the ex-convict replied. “You would have torn a strip off anyone else who forgot their restraints.”
“What happened?” David demanded as he stumbled back to his chair. The room was dimly lit with emergency lighting, but at least the magical gravity didn’t need power to stay operational.
“We got hit,” Jeeves said flatly. “I don’t have enough sensor resolution left to tell what happened to the rest of their missiles, but the fact that we’re still breathing suggests that the hell that just enveloped us took care of most of them.”
“Get me Engineering,” David barked. “We’ll need more than emergency…”
The lights came up as he was speaking, and he turned in his chair to see Kelly LaMonte standing by the often-neglected engineering panel at the back of the bridge. His XO was pale, and her arm was twisted at an angle that told him everything he needed to know.
“The dome has its own power,” she said in a somewhat faint voice. “It can’t fuel the main engines, but it can power the guns and the secondary thruster suite.”
The secondary thruster suite. The one for if they blew half of the damn ship off.
“Do we have engines?” he asked.
“I can’t tell,” she admitted. “Data links to Engineering are gone.” She blinked. “I’m…not in great shape, but I think I can get us sensors back.”
“How?” Jeeves demanded.
“Your thermals are gone, but your radar receivers are fine. You just don’t have transmitters,” she snapped. “The decoy drones do, even if that’s not what they’re designed for. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll give you eyes.”
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 31