BOB's Bar (Tales From The Multiverse Book 2)

by Jay Allan

“‘And, of course, you’re going to land on the planet?’”

  “‘If I wish to conduct an external check of the ship, I am authorized to land on any non-restricted planet or Navy ship to conduct said check,’ I said, holding my breath. The CO was pretty cool, but he was a stickler for the regs.”

  “‘You know as well as I do that you planned this. I’ve already sent for AT3 Frye. If either of you has falsified records...suffice it to say, it won’t be pretty. The instant you return from your check flight, I want you standing tall in front of me in my office.’”

  Rika giggled and said, “Can you do that? I mean, stand tall? Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  Beth just rolled her eyes, then continued, “I was scamming the system, sure. And maybe Josh made up the problem with the synch comb, but if it was even a miliscosh out of alignment, he had every right to reset it, and that required the check flight. And I had every right to choose New Cebu. But if they could prove there was nothing wrong, we’d probably get brig time before being discharged. I knew the CO liked me, but he’d do his duty, whatever he thought that was.”

  “He cut the connection, and I lowered my flight suit. He had to have seen that I was naked, at least from the waist up, but he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “I wasn’t going to be naked for long. I pulled out the orange dress with matching bra and panties, then started the contortions to get them on. It took five minutes, but at last, except for being barefoot, I was dressed as well as I could be for the wedding.”

  “So, you’re in a fighter in a civilian wedding dress?” Bethany Anne asked.

  “Why not? People fly in space in civilian clothes all the time. The flight suit is to help with the Gs and protect us in case our cockpit is breached. I was just gliding in for a nice, easy landing, no high-speed maneuvering. I was already in the glide path for entry, and the Tala had taken over. I was hands-off, trying to apply a little makeup when the call came through.

  “‘Navy Foxtrot-six-mike-zero one-niner, this is New Cebu Control.’

  “I tell you, my heart sank. I figured the commander had contacted them to deny me landing rights. That didn’t sound like him, but you can never tell with officers if they think you’ve dissed their authority.

  “‘This is Navy Fighter Six-six-mike-zero one-niner on a check flight. What do you have for me?’ I asked the system control, trying sound innocent.”

  “‘Maybe nothing, Navy. We’ve just had some strange readings for the last hour, and we can’t make heads nor tails of them. Then you popped in, and the director thought that since you’re Navy, maybe you’ve seen this before or have better scanners.’”

  “My heart skipped a beat, and a sense of foreboding swept over me. The person on the other side of the comms hadn’t given me much, but still…

  “Give me the coordinates, New Cebu. I’ll check it out.

  “‘Tala, full sensor array,’ I ordered, then sat there biting my lip as the systems came online. I’d only had nav, gate synch, and comms online. I wasn’t on a combat mission, after all.

  “It took about thirty seconds for the Tala to be completely operational. I inputted the coordinates and went right to the TSM-4, the main scanner array. I saw what was bothering them on the Kilting band. Nothing concrete, but a definite flux in the wave, something that shouldn’t be there...and something heading straight for New Cebu, like a bow-wave of a torpedo closing in on a wet-water ship. The torpedo might not be visible, the bow-wave sure was.

  “This was exactly what we’d seen at Niue, and before we’d figured it out, we’d lost four fighters. That was a quarter of the galaxy away, deep into the center, but I knew the two anomalies were FALs and their crystal ships.

  “New Cebu Control, go to General Emergency Condition Alpha!” I shouted as I adjusted my course to bypass the planet and intercept the approaching ships. “And contact the Navy Command Center. Give them my ship designator and my current heading, and tell them two crystal ships have appeared in the system.”

  “‘Crystals? That’s impossible. They’re on the other side of the galaxy,’” the comms operator said.”

  “‘Impossible or not,’ I told him, ‘They’re on their freaking way to you right now. Just do what I told you!’”

  “To be honest, I didn’t know if the FALs were on an attack run or not. They could be on a recce. Hell, they could be FAL tourists, if that even existed. But I had to stop them. Without any defenses, New Cebu could be devastated by even two of their fighters—and my family was down there.

  “I armed the Tala and turned on the new clone projector. We didn’t even know if the thing worked yet. It wouldn’t be the first new system R&D developed that was rushed into service and ended up being useless. The clone projector didn’t try to hide my Wasp. We hadn’t had much luck with stealth tech against the FALs so far. What it did was clone twenty more Talas, each slightly different than the other. It was designed to hopefully make the FALs break contact and run at best, or target the cloned images at worst. The thing is, we didn’t know if it worked yet.

  “I had to report in, no matter what happened. I couldn’t trust the civilian Traffic Control to do it without going through all the steps up their reporting chain, and that could be too late.

  “‘Commander Tuominen, this is Petty Officer Dalisay—’”

  ‘I know who you are, Dalisay,’ he snapped at me. ‘What do you want?’

  “‘I’ve got two FALs, sir, heading into the planet. I told Traffic Control to report the contact to the Navy, but you know civilians. It might take a while.’”

  ‘Is this some sort of BS game, Dalisay, to cover up the fact that you are on an unauthorized flight just to get to your brother’s wedding? If it is, so help me God, I’ll have your hide, no matter how much you think you’re the public’s hero. This is just too far.’”

  “‘Pull up my telemetries,’ I told him as I started running fire-control solutions for my three weapons systems. ‘Check my TSM-4.’

  “I had a choice at this point. I didn’t even consider my L-20 laser, which had so far proven to be about worthless against the crystal ships. I had my G-21 railgun, and I’d gotten two of my four kills with it, but that had been an anomaly. The railgun was only for close-in fighting, atmospheric air-to-air, or ground support. The rounds, even at hypervelocity speeds, were just too slow. Fire too early, and even a mining barge could dodge out of the way.

  “That left two choices, my M-57 torpedoes or my P-13 Hadron Coil Particle Beam. Of the two, the P-13 was a light-speed weapon, but it took a while to knock out a crystal ship, and if it was fired for long, radiation and heat buildup in the Wasp became problematic. The torpedoes locked onto and chased the crystal ships, and if they hit, they could knock any ship out, FAL or human. Getting them to hit, however, was the problem.”

  Rika reached back and tapped the barrel of her GNR. “Sounds like my gun-arm and your ship have a lot in common. Granted, I’m hardened against the rads.”

  “The commander came back and said, ‘Try to divert the FALs. If not, engage, Dalisay. Keep them off the planet. We’ll have three flights there in three hours, and I’ve already set the alert with HQ. If they have anything closer, I’ll let you know.’

  “‘Aye-aye, sir. Understand.’ And I did. At interstellar distances, a battle might barely advance over three hours, but this was in-system. Three hours was a long time, and whatever was going to happen would have happened by then. All I could hope for was to beat the two crystals, or if they were going to splash me, divert them away from the planet long enough for the cavalry to arrive.

  “You still in your pumpkin dress?” Bethany Anne asked. “That had to be comfortable.”

  “Yep. I thought about trying to change back, but the flight suit is far easier to take off than get back on. Normally, we needed someone to help with the final connections, although it could be donned in an emergency—but probably not sitting in a cockpit. I decided not to risk getting tangled up trying to get it on. Besides, I could beat th
em around the planet and intercept them at the speeds the compensators could handle—I thought.

  “I was still one-point-eight million klicks from the planet when the FALs upped the ante. If I thought they might be a recce flight, they dispelled that notion when they fired one of their round torpedoes, not at me, but at the planet. The torp was immediately visible as it exited whatever hid the crystal ships, and it was a big one; bigger than any I’d seen before. The mass and speed alone could make this an extinction event like with the dinosaurs on Earth. But that was my family down there, not dinosaurs. I was not going to let that thing reach the planet.

  “Without thinking, I hit G-shot and increased my speed. I was below the orbital plane, while the FALs were above it. I had to close the distance if I wanted my torps to have a shot at diverting the thing. I could eventually disable it with my hadron projector, but the hulking thing would still continue on its trajectory, and even a dead lump of crystal would cause a tremendous amount of damage.

  “What’s G-shot?” Cain asked, wincing.

  “I thought she said G-spot for a moment there,” Amanda added with a smile.

  Beth looked confused for a moment, then said, “G-shot. You know, so a person could survive heavy G? Without it, my body would be smushed into red jelly at the Gs we were already pulling.

  “It would have been better if I was in my flight suit, but it was what it was. And if you don’t know what a G-shot is, you wouldn’t know that it hurts! It’s like fire was injected into your veins. We only do it as a final option.

  “The Tala jumped forward like a racehorse, and we closed the distance. My comms lit up from the panicked Traffic Control. They’d have seen the torpedo as well, but with the G-shot taking over, I had neither time nor inclination to calm them down. I had to focus.

  “‘Keep running the firing solutions,’ I told Tala. I would never get a hundred percent probability of a kill, so I had to take my best shot. The graph kept changing as more data poured in, but it looked like my best would be seventy-two percent. Good, but when I’m dealing with five hundred million on the planet, that wasn’t good enough. I started to target all three of my torps, but what if the FALs had another one? I had to keep back one of the torps for that.

  “My first alarm went off. I was under fire from their beam projector. The eggheads were still not sure just how they worked, but they were deadly. Somehow, they found the molecular resonance of a Wasp’s shields, then the outer skin, and set up a resonating frequency that vibrated the molecules, building up heat until the fighter came apart. Cooked. The Tala had a latticed polycarbon web surrounding the hull in hopes that it would slow down the resonance. It hadn’t helped Mercy on her last mission, though.

  “Or maybe it had. She lost her fighter, but she survived,” Beth added, a little quieter. She shook it off and continued, “But I didn’t know if I would last long. Only one of the crystals was firing at me, best I could tell, but my shields were ablating. In only ten seconds, I was down to eighty-eight percent.

  “I had to fire. The torps did not have the same shielding as the Tala had, and they could not survive long. I’d already programmed a divergent approach, coming in on the FAL torp from different directions. The probability of a kill hit sixty-four percent but started dropping as the combat AI considered the enemy projector.

  “‘Fire one and two!’ I shouted before turning in and up to the two FALs. With the combined closing rate of the three torpedoes, two of mine and one of theirs, I’d know in thirty-three seconds if I’d taken it out.

  “Immediately, the FAL projector shifted from me to one of the torps. I had to keep their attention on me. I still had one torp and my hadron cannon. I targeted the torp on where I thought the second crystal was and opened fire with my cannon on where I thought the one firing at my torp was. I had to make it take evasive action.

  “With our dogfights so far, the winner was generally the one whose shields could outlast the others’. We could maneuver to break contact for a moment, but the effects were cumulative. I couldn’t break contact. I had to bear in, to make them break contact. A big game of chicken to see who’d blink.

  “The enemy fighter didn’t blink. My cannon beam disrupted its scan shielding enough that it failed, and suddenly two crystal ships popped on my display. The one firing looked like a normal crystal fighter. The second one, the one that had fired the torpedo, was twice the size. I didn’t know what that indicated, nor did I have time to contemplate it. I had to disrupt the smaller one, and with them visible, now I could focus my beam tighter to put more energy on the target in hopes of burning through. There was no maneuvering now, just three ships closing on each other.”

  Bethany Anne tapped a finger to her lips. “Sounds like knights jousting.”

  “Yeah, maybe it was at that,” Beth said as if considering the imagery for the first time. “If knights jousted two against one. And had long-range weapons.

  “And it was the smaller FAL fighter’s weapon that drew first blood. At nineteen seconds to impact, my first torp was knocked out. I had one left to take out the FAL torp, and I regretted only firing two. I was already past the perpendicular to the enemy torpedo, and while I could spin on my axis and fire the third one, instead of closing, it would be chasing, and with the two FALs much closer to it.

  “I had to stop the crystal that was firing. If that FAL torpedo got through to the planet, I didn’t want to imagine how many lives would be lost. I switched the target of my third M-57 torpedo to the smaller crystal and fired. The Tala was already at point-seven-two-C, and my torp had a good lock. As it shot ahead, it would reach the FAL crystal in ten seconds—but would it be soon enough? I came close to redlining my cannon as I poured power into it, and my radiation levels were climbing dangerously.

  “My mind was getting fuzzy around the edges from the G-shot and acceleration, but I was latched to the first torp’s telemetry. Its little shield started to fail just as my third torp hit the FAL ship. The pilot had played chicken and lost.

  “I shifted my course to cut off the bigger ship when my first torpedo hit the planet killer, exploding it into its component atoms. Part of me, the part that was still sane, wanted to cheer, but it took all my effort to focus on the second ship. My brain felt like it was in a bag full of cotton, and I wanted to sink into its embrace of oblivion.”

  “‘No, Floribeth! Not yet!’ I had to scream. I told Tala to target the ship with the beamer, then max the acceleration to close the distance. I didn’t know how long I could stand it. I had taken the G-shot, but I was in the pumpkin dress, not my flight suit. Normally, maybe three minutes. Now?

  “But I was closing. I thought about ramming it, but the numbers were wrong. If it remained on its course, I could get within forty-two-thousand klicks, a stone’s throw by interstellar standards, but not nearly close enough to ram. I had to keep pouring the hadron beam into it and hope for the best.

  “The Tala shuddered, and alarms blared. I couldn’t concentrate, and it took me a moment to realize my P-13 cannon had been knocked out. The Tala started bleeding acceleration, alarms blaring for my attention. My hand automatically reached up to check my helmet seal before I remembered I wasn’t in my flight suit, and that struck me as funny. I started laughing until a blip appeared in front of the FAL ship and started to accelerate. Death on the way. That shocked me sober, the cotton mind gone.

  “The second enemy torp was almost a million klicks away and separating. The Tala was at point-seven-three-C. All I had was my G-21 railgun, which fired depleted uranium rounds at five thousand meters per second. Add on the Tala’s speed, and that was three hundred thousand meters times point-seven-three and an oblique of...hell, even with a clear mind, I didn’t have the math for that, and I couldn’t mumble the commands clearly enough for the targeting computer to do the calculations.

  “The railgun was fixed in place and aimed by spinning the entire fighter around. The ship would keep traveling on its previous course, but the prow—and railgun—would no
w be aimed at the target. With shaky hands, I switched the targeting system to manual, spun the Tala around, and using the crosshairs and more than a bit of Kentucky windage, fired off three long belts of ammo, sending six-hundred quarter-kilogram inert rounds at the enemy torpedo as it started to accelerate to New Cebu, which was hanging large in the black of space.

  “The gods of war are a capricious lot, and they loved nothing better than to screw up the strategic experts who have a plan for every contingency. Sometimes, they also love to reward the stupid and unprepared. I must have been their quota for that second category. Somehow, against all odds, one of those six hundred rounds hit the enemy torp as it sped off. Even a quarter-kilo traveling at those speeds is deadly. The torpedo split into a million pieces. They’d still reach the planet, but most would burn up in entry, giving the people a nice show.

  “But there was still the last FAL ship. I didn’t know how many torpedoes it had. The Tala’s alarms went off again, this time from the FAL projector. My shields were down to thirty-four-point-one and dropping. I really didn’t care about that. All I could think about was the enemy ship. We’d be at our closest point in about ten seconds. I could have told Tala to target the enemy ship, but like I said, my mind was pretty much shot by then. All I could think of was to kill it. I spun the Tala around, zooming in the railgun’s targeting scope, and targeted it. At forty-thousand-whatever kilometers, even on manual with the targeting assist, I couldn’t miss. I started firing, emptying the last twelve hundred rounds. The FAL ship seemed to realize what was going on, but it was too late. It started to move to the side when the first rounds slammed into it, and that’s all she wrote.”

  “Wait a minute! You hit a torpedo, and then an enemy fighter, with a manual slug-thrower at a million klicks?” Rika asked. “ I’m not gonna go so far as to call bullshit...but that’s hard to swallow.”

  “I believe her!” Kelsey declared.

  “I’m here. New Cebu is still here. Either I hit the sucker, or it blew up spontaneously,” Beth replied, shrugging before reaching out to take her drink and relishing the long swallow.