by Britt Ringel
“Mike, put out that fire!” Heskan screamed over the turmoil. “Chief, vent the smoke from the bridge…Stacy can’t shoot if she can’t see!” He looked at his bridge officers. “Diane, let go of your leg and get us pointed toward Ketch One while Ana still answers the helm.” His voice sounded cruel but he no longer cared. “Jack, either bring sensors back online or transfer control to the main sensor room.” He savagely punched commands into his console as he snarled at his weapons officer, “Stacy, I’ll handle the reloads, you focus on shooting and don’t you dare miss!”
Anelace entered her mass driver’s range of 10ls just as Blackheart fired her fourteenth missile volley. The missiles broke free from the schooner and activated their drives less than a second later. Even though Anelace was now inside the Interceptor-B’s standard engagement envelope, both missiles locked onto Anelace immediately via the targeting information Blackheart provided at launch. As was the norm, each missile was propelled slightly off course by the actual launch from its missile tubes and from the incredible torque experienced as its drive touched off. Normally each missile’s internal guidance computer corrected the deviations easily over several seconds of flight time.
After suffering Blackheart’s withering missile barrage for eight minutes and fifteen seconds, Anelace fired her first shot in anger. From an internal weapons camera feed, Heskan watched the first round flash from the barrel and began to manually guide the ailing weapon system through the reload procedure. First, each barrel’s temperature and curvature were measured and compared to the acceptable limits of variance immediately after a shot was fired from the mass driver. Next, the breech retracted and an iridium 0.762 meter projectile was placed into the main barrel. As it seated, it too was analyzed a final time to ensure its shape and integrity would hold up under the tremendous stress of accelerating from 0c to .66c in under a second. The push pulse barrels energized as the breech slid shut. Each barrel’s temperature and curvature were now measured continuously as the system waited for all readings to reach tolerance levels before Anelace’s weapons computer blinked the status light from red to green. Heskan guided Anelace through each step, even bypassing automatic control when it balked at closing the breech. Waiting for the mass driver safeties to confirm the barrel was ready for fire, he looked over the driver’s targeting suite. Incredibly, Vernay had maintained a lock on Blackheart despite the bone-jarring impact on Anelace five seconds earlier. The first mass driver round had fired true and was hurtling toward the schooner. Heskan’s peripheral vision caught the status light change color as he watched the first mass driver dot symbol on the tactical plot shoot by the incoming inverted “v” symbols of Blackheart’s fourteenth missile salvo.
“Up!” Heskan cried and Vernay’s hopeful “On the way” responded like an echo.
Had Vernay the time to scan her point defense screen, she would have seen Anelace label the latest incoming missile salvo as vampires Alpha and Bravo. They had rolled through the alphabet and had come full circle. Both missiles were already inside point defense range and screaming toward the battered corvette. Both of her GP turrets remained silent as each gunner lay motionless in his shockseat. The vampires turned over sixty G’s, accelerating to .45c while simultaneously trying to make their course corrections in the extremely limited distance they had left until impact.
As Heskan repeated the loading procedure and Vernay concentrated on keeping the mass driver aimed at her adversary, Riedel fought the fire with a handheld extinguisher from the small damage control locker on the bridge. The electrical fire had lost its vigor after Brown had cut the power to the panel but the last of the stubborn flames died only after Riedel sprayed it down with smothering, non-conductive foam. “Fire’s out,” he reported behind Heskan and began to move back to his station.
Heskan waved an acknowledgment to Riedel without looking as he roared “Up!” a second time. Vernay’s gentle keystroke of the command-accept-execute button was a stark contrast with her fierce reply, “On the way!” The third mass driver round spit forth from Anelace’s Kruger and an instant later, sensors along each barrel began their examination of shape and temperature once again.
On Blackheart, the captain had just watched the light from his twenty-sixth missile detonate over Anelace but knew nothing could now prevent that demon-spawned ship from closing to mass driver range. He heard a high-pitched voice scream for evasive action and realized it was his own. He no longer cared about the boost in reputation destroying a true naval ship would bring him. The processing operation in Skathi no longer mattered to him either. That damned corvette could have the Euphoria refinement facility and she could have Merciless too; all he wanted was to survive the next fifteen seconds.
By the time vampire Bravo had corrected its course, Anelace had slipped inside the missile’s turn radius, causing it to streak past the ship harmlessly. Alpha, which had a truer path to Anelace, had just enough maneuverability to cut the corner to the corvette. It had started well underneath the fast ship but arced up in an incredible seventy-three G twist to strike Anelace’s bow like a boxer’s uppercut. The violent maneuver crushed most of the missile’s circuitry, including its proximity detonator, but the missile’s impact detonator functioned properly. The missile tore through the bottom of Anelace’s bow and exploded inside the already shattered mass driver control room.
The bulkhead between the mass driver control room and the ship’s mess ran parallel with Anelace’s second frame, adding considerable strength to the front of the ship. Still, the blast tore apart the bulkhead and snapped the frame like a toothpick. Anelace’s bow, already weakened, folded completely and sheared in two inside the ship’s mess. As the concussive force blew off the first twenty meters of the ship, the conical bow summersaulted away, shedding tonnes of debris as it spun. The mass driver attached to it crackled with the residual power in the pulse barrels charging for what was to have been its fourth shot.
The ship’s mess changed in an instant from the frozen quiet of space into a hellish furnace as the explosion ripped the room into two halves. Behind the mess, DC-Two became an unnavigable twisted labyrinth of shredded metal, circuitry and conduit. The containment field inside the ship’s small gym failed and Anelace once again gushed atmosphere. Her third frame warped upward one and a half meters grotesquely as the room came apart under the stress. The quarters of the enlisted crew closest to the gym rattled, causing their secured furniture to break free from their moorings and toss violently about inside the tiny rooms. The containment fields along the enlisted living spaces flickered and failed up to Anelace’s fourth frame but held at the fifth, massive frame. Nearly the entire front half of Anelace’s lower deck was either missing or had been opened to space. Just seven meters aft of the fifth frame, Spaceman Gables was thrown across the room but luckily onto one of the quarter’s beds. Her useless helmet crashed against a wall, smashing a mounted holo-picture. Gables bounced off the bed and landed with a hard thump on the floor. She righted herself and stared at the door in mute frustration. The room was a death trap but she knew she could not leave since the vacuum of space waited on the other side of that door.
As the bow ripped from Anelace, it crushed the leading edges of her upper deck “wings,” destroying the first six meters of the upper deck and demolishing her forward stores and several banks of computers in the process. However, her starboard laser turret compartments were safely behind two additional bulkheads, a full fifteen meters aft of the destruction.
Heskan actually heard the explosion when vampire Alpha hit. In conjunction with the deafening noise, the entire bridge lost power just as the bridge rocked in the shock wave. Knocked violently around in his shockseat, Heskan heard several cries over the clamor as he tried to bring an arm up to re-close his visor. However, the forces throwing him about were so ferocious he found he could not control his movements and decided to just grip the arms of his chair and hold his breath until the end came.
The shaking did stop, in mere seconds, but the e
xpected decompression never arrived. Ears ringing and body aching, he sat in a pitch-black silence.
As Anelace reeled from the direct hit, her first iridium round struck Blackheart. The schooner’s entire profile was available to the projectile since the missile boat had continued rotating to keep her broadside facing her enemy. Had the schooner offered a narrower target, the round may have missed to starboard. However, the iridium round shattered the last ten meters of the schooner, sending deadly fragments through her engine compartment.
Although originally a civilian ship, Blackheart had been heavily modified. She was now an enforcer ship for a pirate organization and great steps were taken to make her lethal and survivable. She had double the number of containment fields originally designed and the fields themselves were stronger. Despite being unarmored, her retrofit included reinforced bulkheads and her captain had instituted several standard combat procedures that were routine on military ships but unheard of on civilian vessels.
When the hundreds of fragments sliced through the engine compartment, Blackheart’s computer sensed the pressure differential and activated the required containment fields. Even though the engine compartment would leak its entire atmosphere, the rest of the schooner remained secure and the eight engineers inside the compartment had pressurized suits in preparation for the event that their compartment lost its atmosphere. What they were not prepared for was the incredible kinetic energy in each fragment. The fragments knifed through anything in their paths. Four engineers died instantly, ripped apart. The shrieks from the injured were all but drowned out by the noise of exploding equipment. Each fragment that cut through engineering equipment, including Blackheart’s power plant, shattered into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces destroyed the power plant’s cooling system and breached the restraint shield for the power cells dozens of times. As the iridium fragments reduced further to dust, sparks from failing engineering systems combusted the particles into a flash fire. What had once been a calm, normal operating engine control room became a living hell in seconds.
The wavering power on the pirate bridge made the first mate’s cry superfluous. “We’ve been hit, Captain!”
Blackheart’s captain growled, “I know we’ve been hit, you idiot! Tell me something I don’t know like how bad!” In his heart, he was just relieved to be alive… and surprised. The hit had not been bad at all for him. In fact, other than the lights dimming, he would have never known. He looked at the optical of Anelace; the ship was angling away and would soon be out of mass driver range. His confidence returned as the corvette opened the distance and he believed he had surely found his calling if he could shrug off the mortal danger imposed by an attack from a Brevic naval vessel. Then he saw the corvette’s mass driver spit a second time.
The reduced time lag between the ships meant Blackheart’s captain watched Anelace’s second shot just five seconds before it hit. He spent that time contemplating how he could orient Blackheart to best protect the bridge. After some hesitation, he decided there was not enough time for maneuvers so, instead, he screamed at his missileer to continue firing. The missileer was about to tell him that the next volley would be ready in nine seconds when the second iridium round hit Blackheart amidship.
Vernay’s second shot was a bull’s-eye. The round hit one meter from the missile boat’s center point and just three meters from one of her port missile launchers. The fragmenting projectile opened the schooner’s side like a gutted animal, punching a two-meter hole into her and leaving a six-meter hole exiting. Of her four, only one of Blackheart’s missile launchers survived the hit. The closest port launcher vaporized in the heat and energy transfer along with both starboard launchers as the fragmentation pattern spread out like a shotgun blast. Only the second port launcher made it through unscathed. It still would never return fire.
In between the launchers on each side of the ship, Blackheart’s retrofitters had inserted the missile magazines. They had hoped that placing the magazines in an armored central compartment deep inside the ship would keep them safe in combat but no amount of armor or size of shield generator that could fit into Blackheart could fully protect its cargo from a mass driver hit. To the retrofitters’ credit, most fragments bounced off the thickly layered armored coat that Blackheart wore around her ammunition. Nevertheless, three large pieces penetrated through the armor with pitiful ease. Ultimately, the fragments passed through the mostly empty magazines but struck and disabled the loading system rails that each Interceptor-B rode upon on its way to the launchers.
The bridge missileer closed his mouth when his launcher status lights simultaneously switched to steady red hues. He looked blankly at the indicators, confused, and then reported, “All launchers are down? Is that where we were hit?” Thinking it was a computer error, he pressed the reset button and the computer blinked as it rebooted.
“Captain, Engineering reports heavy damage!” another bridge crewman alerted.
Panicked, the pirate captain asked, “How’s the core? Do we have propulsion?”
The crewman began rapid-firing questions into his mic as the captain looked on in frustration.
The fire had died inside of Blackheart’s engineering room, not because of the recently installed fire suppression system, which had failed, but because the atmosphere had vacated the compartment. The lone survivor, the third engineer’s mate, had managed to crawl over the wreckage and bodies of his fellow crewmen to reach the main power plant control panel. The situation indicated on the panel was not good. Blackheart’s power plant was both melting down and overloading. The meltdown would occur in less than ten minutes unless they could restore the cooling system inside the power cells. The overload would take place in half a minute when the restraint shield failed. He was clawing his way up the instrument panel toward the core “FLUSH” safety controls that would solve both problems by killing the inductive energy in the core and bringing the whole reaction to a stop when Anelace’s third shot roared through Engineering.
There was neither the blast of decompression nor the inferno of a flash fire the second time around. Most of the engineers and equipment had already been broken and the additional damage was negligible. The greatest amount of damage done to Blackheart by the third shot was to her starboard hull as the widely spread fragments exited the schooner and ripped even larger holes from her side. Compared to the devastation already present in the aft of Blackheart, the death of one third engineer’s mate seemed almost inconsequential.
Chapter 20
Anelace silently zoomed past Blackheart at .26c. As the distance between them grew, neither ship had fired a shot for nearly thirty seconds. Anelace’s last act before the direct hit was to obey the course change from Ensign Selvaggio’s adjustments to intercept Ketch-One, 105ls ahead of her. The ketch, still on course to reach the RALF, 10lm away, was moving at her maximum speed of .2c. All of Anelace’s drives had darkened and although her momentum carried her forward, she was essentially adrift.
Heskan sat in perfect darkness as Chief Brown struggled to restore minimal power to the bridge. He had already impressed, with great urgency, the need to get the bridge operational. As the chief worked, he turned toward the direction of Riedel and spoke into the blackness, “Mike, if we can’t restore ship communications, I’m going to need you to get down to Engineering and get me a status report.”
While waiting for a reply, Heskan fought the urge to release his shockseat restraints even though he knew stumbling around the bridge in the dark would serve no purpose. Instead, he sat in his chair, feeling helpless, until the bridge lights began to flicker.
“Gettin’ it now, Capt’n. This is just power from the bridge’s batteries. I still got nothin’ comin’ from Engineerin’,” Brown said as the lights flickered again and then stayed lit.
“Mike, get going,” Heskan ordered as he looked over to his first officer’s seat. It was empty. That’s right; he was fighting the fire when the missile hit, Heskan remembered. He turned to look behind h
im and saw Riedel’s crumpled form near the back of the bridge. “Mike!” Heskan shouted as he popped his seat’s restraints. Heskan covered the five steps to Riedel in an instant and knelt next to the man. There was blood from his ears, nose and mouth. He tentatively placed his fingers to Riedel’s neck to search for a pulse. Finding nothing, he moved Riedel’s head slightly for better access and pushed harder against his friend’s neck as he murmured, “No, no, no, come on, Mike.”
Nothing. Heskan stared into unblinking eyes and realized his friend was dead. Slowly, he pulled his hand away.
He stood up and turned back to face the bridge. Everyone was looking at him. He paused to search for the right words, something that would inspire the crew and make all the deaths aboard Anelace be easier to accept.
“Chief, what is the power situation on Ana?” he finally asked in a quiet, somber voice.
“Dunno, sir. The bridge is runnin’ off batteries an’ I can’t get through to Engineerin’.”
Heskan looked down as he thought. He realized he was staring at Riedel’s body and forced himself to look away as he considered the situation. It had been well over a minute since the last missile impact. There were two possibilities: Blackheart was unwilling to return fire or unable to return fire. He needed to know which one it was and quickly. Even though he wanted to talk to Lieutenant Jackamore desperately, he realized he could not leave the bridge in a combat situation. “Boats, is there anything else you can do up here to restore power so we can see outside?”
The chief looked at Heskan with frustration and shrugged helplessly. “Not really, sir.”
“That’s okay. I need you to get to Engineering and inform them of our situation on the bridge. Tell Jackamore his first priority is restoring power and communications. We’re blind and crippled with at least one, probably two enemy ships out there.” The chief nodded as Heskan talked. “If you can do more good down there than here, stay and help Jackamore get Ana on life support but send a runner back here to give me a status report and an estimate on when power and comm will be restored.”