This Corner of the Universe

by Britt Ringel

  Blackheart’s captain had been expecting a charge from the corvette when he moved against the mining station. That arrogant navy captain might be able to ignore his demands for surrender but he surely couldn’t fail to defend the civilians in the RALF 13lm away. It came as no surprise when a crewman called out that the little ship had burst from the asteroid field. Seconds later, the watchman updated his combat plot and he found that Anelace’s projected position was a mere 107ls from the pirate flagship. Slightly panicked at how fast Anelace was closing, the captain hastily ordered Blackheart to turn her starboard broadside toward the enemy.

  The schooner’s thrusters touched off seconds after her captain gave the command and pushed the bow of the large ship hard to starboard as the missile doors on the starboard side retracted. The weapon systems, which had been energized and placed into standby mode, went active and began their search for a target as soon as they were unmasked. The entire process took twenty-three seconds as Anelace screamed another 7ls closer toward her prey. Although she was now just slightly over 100ls from the schooner, her target was much closer.

  “Diane, start the turn when we’re thirty light-seconds from Ketch Two. Just skim the edge of mass driver range like we did with Raptor,” Heskan commanded as he stared at the main screen. The optics showed all three pirate ships turning to starboard. It looked like the schooner was stopping her turn to face her starboard broadside toward Anelace while the ketches were continuing to fully come about. It’s working better than I had hoped, he thought. The schooner is still drifting away from us at point one light while the ketches are slowing down to try to close with us. They’re already twenty-seven light-seconds from the schooner and getting further apart.

  Blackheart’s captain was livid at the developing situation. The corvette had been within missile range for over two and a half minutes and Blackheart still had not fired a single shot. When finally told they were prepared to fire, the captain screamed the command so loudly his entire bridge crew cringed. Two second-generation Interceptor-B-IV missiles spit out from their starboard ports. Although antiquated compared to current military missiles, they were still lethal reminders of the Brevic-Hollaran border skirmishes of twenty years past. Once clear of their launchers, the missile engines fully engaged their drives and shot toward Anelace, quickly reaching their .45c top speed. Containment fields snapped over the open missile ports and once the missile control system verified an airtight environment, the launchers opened their rear portals to begin the thirty-second reload sequence.

  Anelace continued to charge Ketch-Two, the ship closest to her. She was 1lm from the pirate ship with a combined closure rate of .54c as both ships dashed toward each other. Unless the ships changed velocity or course, Anelace’s mass driver would be in range in ninety-five seconds. A long time to wait, thought Heskan.

  Blackheart’s starboard missile port containment fields blinked off as her computers were given the order to fire once again. Two more missiles raced out of the ports and accelerated within seconds to their top speed, just thirty seconds behind the first pair. The containment fields re-engaged and the loading process began again.

  A half-minute later, another pair of missiles discharged from Blackheart’s broadside. A total of three pairs of missiles were now in flight, their homing computers locked soundly on Anelace. The 16ls interval between each pair spanned a total distance of 32ls, starting from the most recently fired missiles nearest Blackheart to the first pair, which was now only 52ls from Anelace.

  “Eyes sharp, Mr. Truesworth. You know they’ve fired missiles at us; we just haven’t seen the light yet,” Heskan cautioned his sensor officer. “Assuming they launched as soon as they saw us move, we should be picking them up soon.”

  Heskan knew the immense distances this fight would play out over would give time lag a significant role in the engagement. For the same reason that Anelace could initially run toward the pirate ships undetected, he knew that the schooner had probably already fired several volleys of missiles that he could not yet see. The ships were 86ls apart and the light from Blackheart’s first launch still would not have crossed the distance to reach Anelace. When Truesworth finally did detect the first incoming missiles, Anelace would quickly compute the firing characteristics and flight times and begin to plot lighter shaded “ghost images” of other predicted, more distant, inbound missiles. Truesworth’s sensor section would change the predicted ghost images into solid symbols as they confirmed the missiles were real, or remove them from tactical if Anelace’s predictions were untrue. The solid symbols of real missiles mixed with the ghost images of predicted missiles combined with each ship’s vector lines and uncertainty zones made for a complicated tactical plot that took years of training to process.

  Fifteen seconds after Heskan’s caution, the call came. Time lag had worked against Anelace, allowing the first pair of missiles to cover over half the distance between them and come within 41ls before her crew was even aware of their launch. “Vampires!” cried Truesworth, using the archaic warning for incoming missiles. “They’re second-gen Interceptor-B types judging by the emissions and flight characteristics.” The stress in Truesworth’s voice was apparent. “Ana recommends switching to ECM Suite Delta, switching electronic countermeasures over now.”

  “Very good, Mr. Truesworth,” Heskan said in what he hoped was a reassuring voice.

  “Captain, point defense is active.” Vernay’s calm and confident voice was a stark contrast to Truesworth’s.

  Vernay had recovered from the events of just a half hour ago. The loss of her section members still stung terribly but the grief had been set aside. From the moment Anelace charged out of the Beta Field, she knew the entire ship would be depending on her section to knock down any incoming missiles. Unlike the railgun rounds from Cloak, she knew she could actually do something about the missiles and she was grateful she had trained her crew relentlessly on point defense procedures. Due to the loss of the mass driver crew, she had assumed total control over its functions whereas normally she only locked the weapon on target and then issued the fire order while her driver crew took care of the rest. Now, she had to supervise everything from temperature control to reloading procedures in addition to the other tasks of a section commander. With the addition of a point defense role in the engagement, Vernay was also the weapons director for her four Lyle GP pulse lasers. Her function was target management while the actual gunners would exercise control over their individual weapons. In essence, she would tell each laser turret what to fire at but the crewmember controlling the specific turret was responsible for locking on to and destroying the target without further assistance from her. As each side of Anelace had two GP turrets, Vernay had paired a petty officer second class and a spaceman per side. These remaining four crewmembers comprised the surviving half of her entire weapons section’s gunners. The last man in the weapons section, her petty officer first class and section chief, was currently in Auxiliary Control and while he assisted her during battle, his primary duty was to assume command of the weapons section in the event Vernay herself fell during the battle.

  Vernay had directed the starboard turrets to one missile and the portside turrets to the other for each incoming volley. That way, each missile from Blackheart’s twin salvos had a petty officer, who was presumably more skilled and experienced than the accompanying spaceman, assigned to intercept it. While the first pair of missiles raced toward Anelace, she had labeled the missiles Vampire-A and Vampire-B but the weapons section merely addressed them as “Alpha” and “Bravo.” As Anelace and the sensor section began plotting predicted missiles based on the thirty-second launch cycle of the Interceptor-B, the next two incoming missiles became “Charlie” and “Delta” and so on.

  “Initiating starboard turn, Captain,” Selvaggio said as she guided the corvette into a starboard yaw.

  Just 30ls from Ketch-Two, Anelace veered hard to her right. As she turned, she once again rolled on her port side to keep all four pulse lasers un
masked at her enemies. The ship’s momentum still carried her toward the pirate ketch at .33c but her drives began to push her laterally in an effort to ensure she would skirt by the pirate ketch within the 10ls mass driver range but not drop into the knife-fighting range of lasers.

  While Anelace was just ten degrees into her ninety-degree starboard turn, Blackheart belched its fourth pair of missiles at the corvette. The schooner shuddered with each launch as the seven-and-a-half meter long missiles touched off their drives. The captain’s earlier ire forgotten, he now smiled confidently at his combat plot. The ability to launch two missiles every thirty seconds made Blackheart’s throw-weight very light in military terms but in the world of pirates, she was a queen among serfs. He had never fired a fifth volley at the same enemy before. His toughest foe to date had been a Marquee class schooner that had been used as an enforcer ship for a rival pirate faction. Just as he had been about to order the launch of the fifth volley against it, his first pair of missiles had so gutted the opposing pirate ship that the last volley he had fired that day had nothing left to maintain a weapon’s lock on. He fully expected a better fight against a true military vessel but the corvette was only half of Blackheart’s size and without missile armament. Her amazing speed had come as a big shock initially but as more salvos poured from his ship, he felt increasingly confident. Furthermore, he had decided the corvette’s main battery, the mass driver, was probably inoperative. Poor Cloak had never really had a chance at destroying the corvette but had served a useful purpose with its lucky strike on Anelace’s bow. The pirate captain’s first mate had estimated that while the actual gun appeared undamaged, the delicate computer equipment controlling the weapon was almost certainly destroyed. He anticipated a fine reward for salvaging such a magnificent weapon. If they could mount it on Blackheart’s bow, she would be one of the most powerful enforcer ships in the entire sector.

  “Starboard missile tubes reloaded,” his weapons officer told him, bringing him back to the moment.

  “Fire!”

  The fifth volley left Blackheart. Thirty seconds later, a sixth pair cleared the schooner’s missile ports.

  As the engines of both missiles in the sixth volley burned to maximum, the first two Interceptor missiles had nearly spanned the distance between Blackheart and Anelace. One had already lost its lock on Anelace. The electronic countermeasures streaming from the tiny ship had so thoroughly saturated the missile’s targeting sensors with hundreds of false targets that it had effectively blinded it. The second missile had stayed true to its course and honed in remorselessly. All four of Anelace’s GP turrets fired within a second of each other and both missiles disintegrated underneath the initial burst of pulse lasers 4ls from the corvette. Each laser turret on Anelace recycled and was ready to fire two seconds later. As the gunners quickly trained their weapons out toward the next pair of missiles, they focused on their next targets assigned to them by Lieutenant Vernay.

  On the bridge, Vernay resisted the impulse to announce the successful interception of the first two missiles. Anyone looking at the tactical plot would see their negation and it was nearly impossible not to fixate upon it during battle. Keeping her concentration on her mass driver’s target lock on the ketch, she counted down the seconds until she could fire. Anelace was just 12ls away and her targeting computers predicted they would be in firing range in five seconds.

  The captain of Ketch-Two, known as Cutthroat to her crew, was concentrating on his own combat plot as if his intense concentration would will his ship to move faster. Cutthroat was making .21c, very respectable for her size but it wasn’t going to be enough. He had been late anticipating the corvette’s right turn; consequently, the damned thing was going to just briefly pass through his railguns’ range. He had hoped he could close to within 5ls and add the fire of his single B-pack laser mounted under the bow. He knew the corvette’s own lasers were too busy attempting to knock down incoming missiles to turn their attention to his ship and even one hit from his laser against a ship as small as a corvette could deliver a significant blow.

  Four minutes and fourteen seconds since the beginning of her charge from the Beta Field, Anelace finally lashed out against her foes. Her mass driver barked once and an iridium round moving two-thirds the speed of light hurdled toward the ketch. Cutthroat returned fire with both railguns a second later. Multiple projectiles streamed from each barrel, reaching out for the corvette.

  Vernay concentrated on the reload procedure of the Kruger while trying to remain cognizant of vampires Charlie and Delta bearing down on her ship, just 15ls away. Beyond those, she saw four more pairs streaking toward Anelace at roughly 16ls intervals. After waiting for the next round to be seated into the mass driver’s breech and for barrel temperatures to reach acceptable levels, Vernay’s right index finger twitched and the mass driver pulsed again. In the background, she heard Captain Heskan ordering navigation to fire the bow thrusters and return to the Beta Field.

  Anelace and Cutthroat were within weapons range for only eight seconds. During that time, the distance between the two ships closed to 8ls before Anelace altered course. As the range began to expand, Anelace’s mass driver fired a third and final time at the ketch from a distance of 12ls. After the shot, both ships had reached a safe distance to avoid any new weapon’s fire but the rounds fired earlier closed on their respective targets.

  The first mass driver and railgun rounds struck their targets less than a second apart. The iridium round struck the bow of Cutthroat nearly straight on and shattered as it passed through the hull. The dozens of fragments tore open the ship and rained death on the men inside her bridge. The shrapnel continued nearly straight down the line of the ship, being pulverized into smaller pieces as they smashed through bulkheads, equipment and crewmen. Cutthroat’s atmosphere blew out of the multitudes of hull fractures and turned briefly to fire as the iridium dust combusted in the shower of sparks from destroyed electronics. The last of the iridium fragments once again punched through Cutthroat’s hull at her fourth frame, halfway down the ship, and continued their journey through space.

  As Cutthroat’s bridge was incinerating, her railgun bursts struck Anelace. The first rounds assailed her fully charged AIPS defense screen and each round emitted a burst of light as its kinetic energy transferred to the shield. Bullet after bullet strike caused the Turner AIPS generator to draw more and more power from Anelace’s power plant, in a losing battle to maintain the screen’s integrity.

  Overall, the AIPS shield did quite well, stopping seventy percent of the incoming railgun rounds. As Anelace’s thrusters finished their burn to spin her bow back toward the Beta Field, the shield generator finally cut power to the screen to avoid burnout. Petty Officer Deveraux, monitoring the defense screen from the AIPS control compartment, commanded it to enter its cooling subroutine and begin the slow regeneration of the shield once again.

  After the AIPS screen dropped, the remaining railgun rounds slammed into Anelace. Her massive drives now faced Cutthroat and the incoming rounds as she pointed back toward the Beta Field. Four, twenty-centimeter metal balls sliced through the armor surrounding Anelace’s second drive and the upper starboard engine choked as the metal cut through its delicate mechanisms. The remaining railgun shots went wide as Anelace completed her course change.

  In the first portside turret control compartment, Gunner’s Mate Second Class Jamison was feeling like an extension of his GP laser. Twenty-eight seconds ago, he had nailed vampire Bravo 4ls from Anelace. He was unsure if Spaceman Parker’s shot from the other portside turret would have hit it and he knew that Lieutenant Vernay would scrutinize this action ad nauseam after it was over. Now assigned vampire Charlie after the first pair was destroyed, he had a solid lock and was determined to maintain it even through Anelace’s maneuvering. He found combat simultaneously thrilling and terrifying but he was looking forward to the stories he could tell when he started Officer Training School in just under a month. He and Spaceman Gables were due to hi
tch a ride out of Skathi on the next freighter so they could reach New London before their “report no later than” dates. Now, they would both be going into OTS as combat veterans. His weapons lock holding, a small smile spread across Jamison’s lips as he thought poor Spaceman Parker was going to have to wait for the next set of missiles to get his first kill. He was four seconds from firing when his turret stopped slewing. Jamison’s targeting computer beeped in frustration at him, indicating its loss of weapon’s lock due to the incoming missile flying outside the pulse laser’s line of sight.

  “Port lasers are masked!” Vernay cried, giving warning that Anelace’s two portside lasers could not fire at incoming missiles because her own hull blocked their line of fire. Heskan’s stomach lurched. How the hell did that happen? “Diane, roll us one-fifty now!” shouted Heskan as the main screen optical of Ketch-Two showed Vernay’s second iridium round smash into its port drive, exploding it into scraps under the blow.

  Vampires Charlie and Delta rocketed toward Anelace barely two kilometers apart. Although fired simultaneously from missile tubes within fifty meters of each other, the separation between the missiles as they approached their target was extremely small. Tiny variations in course and engine speed, as well as differing evasive maneuvers performed to defeat point defenses during the final seconds of flight, usually caused separation of missiles in the same volley to be tens of thousands of kilometers when they finally reached their target. Given the extreme distance and speeds of interstellar combat, even those distances were considered so minuscule as to be irrelevant. In this instance however, the two missiles had flown nearly identical paths to Anelace and when she maneuvered to a heading to return to the Beta Field, her own hull had blocked her port lasers’ line of sight to both missiles. The missile designated by Vernay as vampire Delta vaporized under the skillful laser fire of Anelace’s starboard gunners. Yet, no point defense was available to stop vampire Charlie.