by Peter Nealen
But going inert wasn’t an option right at the moment. Between the threat of the dust and debris inside the accretion disc and the need to finish this quickly, the Dauntless had to make a snap shot. Which meant lasers. Directed energy weapons were the only ones that could reliably dump enough energy into a Bergenholm field to do actual damage, and they didn’t need to be deployed outside the hull.
Ramping up the thrust even higher, Mor sent the Dauntless hurtling toward the fleeing pirate ship at almost fifty percent the speed of light. Bigger rocks hurtled past with gut-wrenching blurs. Mor had to remind himself that even if they hit one square, the Dauntless would just bounce off, though any extended contact at that velocity could still very nearly vaporize the ship just from friction. But the human instinct to try to avoid hitting a massive object was hard to overcome.
The enemy ship was suddenly visible in the scanners, its drive flaring yellow as it ran for the pirate station. It wasn’t a large ship; it looked like it might have housed a crew of only a dozen at most. It was a simple hemisphere atop four tightly-packed cylinders with a single drive bell in the center.
“Take the shot, Fry,” Mor snapped.
He needn’t have given the order. The tactical officer had already touched the firing key.
The Spear-class ships usually used lasers primarily for point defense, but the two emitters nearest the nose were high-energy lasers that could still do some serious damage to a ship, particularly one that size. Nothing like the 30cm powerguns or missiles, but Mor and Fry were both hoping that it would be enough.
Faint scintillations flickered as the laser blasted dust and micrometeorites into incandescent gas between the Dauntless and her prey. Then a bright point of light flared just to one side of that glowing drive bell.
Sublimating metal blasted off the pirate ship’s hull, slewing it slightly, though not enough to offset its course much. The pirate suddenly twisted hard to one side, trying desperately to get away from that probing line of intolerable light. For a moment, the beam lost contact, but Fry quickly adjusted.
Hundreds of pulses of coherent light per second hammered at the pirate ship’s hull. The pirate was trying to shoot back, but it was firing hard pellets that were going wild as soon as they left its Bergenholm field, coming nowhere near the pursuing Caractacan starship.
From what he could see in the holo tank, Mor was pretty sure that Fry was trying to knock the pirate’s drive out. But it wasn’t the engine that failed first.
The ship’s Bergenholm failed, and it was suddenly thrusting at twenty Gs, right into a dust cloud. What had happened was obvious when the Dauntless suddenly flashed past the pirate ship as it reverted to its inert vector.
The ship’s intrinsic velocity wasn’t high enough to result in a truly catastrophic impact, not at first. But since the crew had almost undoubtedly just been turned into red paste by the G forces of its drive, there was no avoiding a catastrophic impact later on.
The ship’s inert vector had been considerably off-axis from its current thrust, and so it was flying almost sideways, though its vector was changing as the drive continued to fire, uncontrolled. Small flashes of impacts were already starting to flicker along its hull as micrometeorites slammed into it at ever increasing relative velocities.
Mor didn’t say anything, but the rest of the men on the command deck crossed themselves at the same time he did. It was, in a way, fortunate that the pirates had died the way they had; there hadn’t been time for them to suffer. It had been over in a fraction of a second after the Bergenholm failed.
That didn’t mean it was a good way to go.
He killed the drive, pivoted around, and started back to rendezvous with the other ships, only a light-minute away. There would be a lot more dead pirates before this was over.
The Caractacan Brotherhood and Fortunian task force came out of the clouds of debris in time to see the exodus from Ktatra already in progress. Ships were burning hard away from the station, scattering in all directions. That wasn’t all, however; there was a tight formation of what could only be fighting cruisers already gathering at one end of the cylinder.
“I’m sure that ship didn’t get a message off that could make it through this murk,” Mor snarled.
“It wasn’t necessarily that ship, Captain,” Maruks said gravely. “It could have been another of the pickets spotting one of the other groups. It could have been another ship that lay doggo and didn’t try to run for it. Or, they were supposed to check in, and when they didn’t, the locals decided to run for it. There’s no helping it now.”
Another comm window opened. The completely hairless visage of one of the Fortunian commanders appeared. His collar seemed to go all the way to his jaw, making him look like he was immobilized by his shipsuit. “Caractacan Brothers,” he said respectfully, his rolling Fortunian accent sounding strangely pastoral compared to his severe appearance, “have you observed the ship fleeing toward the accretion disc’s rim, current bearing zero one eight, minus twenty, distance nineteen point three light-seconds? It appears to be the ship that the Nemesis’s reconnaissance identified as a Unity cruiser.”
“Fry?” Mor called, but the tactical officer was already highlighting the ship and bringing up the Dauntless’s active sensors to get a better look. The icon for the indicated target blinked, and a zoomed-in view leaped up in the holo tank. It showed a gray-painted, blunt and angular pyramid of a ship, driving hard away from the station and the protoplanet.
“That’s our target,” Scalas’s voice came over the intercom. The Centurion had been watching the feed the entire time, doubtless chewing on something to keep from losing his mind at being little more than a passenger.
“That’s the ship you saw?” Mor asked.
“You saw the ships in the Valdek system in more detail than I did, Brecan,” Scalas replied acerbically. “You tell me.”
“That does appear to be a Unity cruiser, though the markings are wrong,” Mor admitted.
“Captain Fasolt,” Maruks put in, “can your maulers continue the assault on the station from here without us?”
“Yes, Brother Legate,” the Fortunian commander replied. “I take it you intend to pursue the Unity ship?”
“That ship is why we came here, Captain,” Maruks agreed. “I want it. But Ktatra needs to be secured as well.”
“We will carry the attack through, Brother Legate Maruks,” Fasolt said gravely. “Be assured of that.”
“Very well,” Maruks said. “All Brotherhood ships, that Unity cruiser is our target. Pursue and shoot to disable. Lasers only. I want that thing’s drives excised from its hull.”
Mor’s fingers danced over the controls, trying to predict as much of the headlong course they were about to fly as possible. Space combat in open space was more often than not an exercise in timing and careful calculation. In this murky, close-in environment full of dust and debris, it was like planning a knife fight that was going to unfold faster than human reflexes could imagine.
Still inertialess, the four starships plunged into the belt of thicker debris around the protoplanet. The Unity ship was almost around the other side of the protoplanetary mass, driving hard toward the southern pole, away from the thickest parts of the belt. There wasn’t a lot of finesse on display in the Unity pilot’s flying; he was trying to get as far away as possible, as fast as possible. The debris in the system was going to make that more difficult, but this was going to be a stern chase. And the Unity ship already had a substantial lead.
“Are you ready for this, Fry?” Mor asked as he ramped up the thrust again, steering around an asteroid twice the Dauntless’s size and streaking toward the Unity cruiser. “Take the shot as soon as you can. Preferably taking out the drives instead of the Bergenholm this time. I think Brother Legate Maruks wants prisoners.”
“Get us closer then,” Fry said seriously, the banter lost in the concentration on the task. “This will have to be some very precise shooting.”
“Doing the best
I can,” Mor said tightly, through clenched teeth. Another asteroid plunged past, less than a kilometer from the hull, a hair’s breadth at the velocity the Dauntless was moving. And while they were gaining on the Unity ship, they were gaining slowly.
The protoplanet and the brilliant flashes of the intensifying battle around it were falling away behind them. Mor couldn’t spare the attention to watch them at all; he had to focus on the chase. The Challenger was barely fifty kilometers off the flank, the Herald of Justice and the Vindicator slightly more spaced out, each at over a hundred kilometers. Still very close for space flight, but in that accretion disc…
“He’s throwing a lot of jamming out,” Fry muttered. That much was visible in the holo tank. The blip indicating the Unity ship kept fuzzing and jumping; their adversary was not going to make this easy on them.
Mor glanced at the numbers in front of him. With the Dauntless inertialess, it was entirely possible to run the thrust up to get the ship right to the speed of light. The only limits were the amount of power to spare and the need to avoid the debris in the way. And there was a lot of debris in the way; the relative density was getting bad as the velocities involved increased.
But the chance had to be taken. They could take some serious damage just from the friction of the dust and micrometeorites, but the sooner this was ended, the better. Mor dialed up the thrust, sending the Dauntless leaping forward toward the Unity cruiser.
Hwung-Tsi had evidently had the same idea. And the Challenger had bigger engines.
“Firing,” Fry said dryly. The dead-straight line of the laser beam lit up with flickering lights as it punched through the dust and micrometeorites. “Miss.” Fry’s voice was a frustrated growl.
The Challenger was veering off, her drives blazing blue white. Hwung-Tsi was trying to hem the enemy ship in, keep it moving in one direction. Titus was taking the Herald of Justice off to another flank, while the Vindicator dove “down” toward the surface of the accretion disc.
The Unity ship’s captain had to see what was happening. The ship was blazing in the infrared as he increased his own thrust, his hull heating up as he tried to bull through the dust clouds for open space.
Suddenly, they burst out of the protoplanetary disc, heading south of the ecliptic and toward interstellar space. Any moment, the Unity cruiser was going to go tachyonic and be gone.
Fry was firing steadily, filling space around the pyramidal ship with laser pulses. Some hit, the hull flaring momentarily with green, coherent light. They were still almost three light-seconds away; they were gaining, but not fast enough.
The Challenger suddenly flickered, and was abruptly just ahead of the fleeing ship. Mor blinked, just as the big Sarissa-class ship lashed out with three HEL beams from point-blank range, practically carving the Unity cruiser’s entire drive section off. The drives flickered and died, and suddenly the ship was inert, drifting through space at almost the same vector as Ktatra’s orbit.
“Did they just…” Carne asked in the sudden silence.
“They did,” Mor said, in some awe. “They went tachyonic for a tiny fraction of a second, just long enough to catch up and end it.” It was an astounding bit of piloting.
He stared at the holo tank in shock. He knew he was one of the best pilots in the Brotherhood, and he took some pride in that fact. But he was an honest enough man to know that he couldn’t have managed that maneuver, not in a thousand years.
Chapter Twelve
The four Caractacan Brotherhood starships surrounded the stricken Unity cruiser like a pack of predators around their prey. All were inert, coasting on the same vector, moving away from Ktatra’s orbit toward interstellar space, the better part of four light-minutes away from the protoplanet and, depending on perspective, either above or below the surface of the accretion disc. Clouds of dust, ice, and rock formed a seemingly impenetrable carpet beneath them. The four silver blades and one gray pyramid looked tiny compared to that immensity, never mind the vast, glowing clouds of dust and gas of the bigger nebula.
Scalas was watching the scenery only peripherally. His focus was on their target, centered in the display just above his acceleration couch aboard the dropship.
“Two Centuries for one cruiser seems like a lot, doesn’t it?” Kahane asked quietly from his couch just to Scalas’s right.
Scalas glanced over. Like him, the squat, massive First Squad sergeant was back in his own armor, his helmet sealed. While the Caractacan Brothers bore no nametags or other insignia besides their rank stripes on their pauldrons, Scalas would know his squad sergeant at a glance, and not just because of his build. That scar that lashed across his helmet from a coilgun round on Preken was an immediate identifier. He bore a similar scar on his own helmet now, from a clone’s cone-bore round on Valdek.
The armorers sometimes despaired of the Brothers’ insistence on keeping every scar in the chameleonic coating of their armor like a badge of honor. But the practice had another purpose; it made it easier to tell each other apart.
“Better to be cautious,” he said. “There might not be clones on that ship; then again, there could be. And you remember as well as I do how they fight.”
He saw Kahane suppress a shudder. It was little more than a twitch, and his face was hidden behind the sharp-edged prow of his helmet’s visor, but it wouldn’t even take the years that Scalas had known Kahane to understand the reaction. No one who had been on that doomed planet could help but feel the same. The clones had swarmed like ants, fighting without finesse or tactics. They had thrown themselves at the defenders with nothing but sheer, animal ferocity, until they had all been killed. They’d exhibited no sign of any sense of self-preservation at all.
The horror of those scenes of carnage had not faded in the months that had followed.
“I’m just thinking of the space involved,” Kahane said, though there might have been an echo of that same horror in his voice. “That’s not a big ship, and it’s going to get mighty crowded, mighty quickly.”
“If need be, we’ll have Rokoff hold the breach point while we push in,” Scalas said. The smashed, scorched remains of the Unity ship’s aft section was looming large in his display, blotting out the sky and the accretion disc beyond. Twisted, melted girders and blackened, blasted metal that had exploded under the energy dump of the Challenger’s lasers seemed to form a barrier between the dropships and the interior of the hull.
“What if Centurion Rokoff argues the point?” Kahane asked quietly, hopefully too quietly for his voice to carry far through the dropship’s troop compartment. Fortunately, between the hum of the air circulation system, the low murmur of Lathan’s radio chatter, and the occasional burps of maneuvering thrusters, there was enough background noise that Scalas was reasonably sure that Kahane’s words couldn’t be heard much past the two of them.
He knew why Kahane had asked the question, too. Rokoff had been the senior surviving squad sergeant from Century XXXIV. Dunstan’s Century. Without so many words, Kahane was asking if Dunstan’s glory-hounding and disdain for the Code had rubbed off on Rokoff.
“I don’t think he will,” Scalas replied. “Rokoff was never comfortable taking over from Dunstan. At first, I thought it was just because Dunstan was still there, pushing him.” Dunstan had, in fact, tried to retake command of the Century from Rokoff after Kranjick had been killed. “But he’s continued to be quiet and hesitant even since Dunstan got recalled to Caerfon to face the court of inquiry.”
Kahane just grunted, but Scalas knew what he was thinking. The fact that Dunstan had been recalled to the Central Keep of the whole Brotherhood, instead of facing disciplinary action at the hands of his Legio’s new Brother Legate, was strange. And when his thoughts turned dark, Scalas could not help but wonder if it was a sign of worse things to come.
That he wasn’t loudly voicing that very thought meant that Kahane was more disturbed by it than he was letting on. The heavy-worlder was hardly subdued when it came to making his opinions known.
/> “Twenty seconds, Centurion,” Lathan called. “Provided I do this right.”
“Slow and easy, Lathan,” Scalas told him. “Don’t get us hung up. And we haven’t taken any fire yet, so there’s no urgency.”
“At least, no more than usual,” Kahane muttered. Scalas shot him a glance, but the squad sergeant was staring fixedly at his own display.
Lathan eased them in toward what looked like an open maintenance shaft, nudging the dropship a few meters at a time, keeping his closure rate to about a fast walk. There was a lot of debris still floating out there from the hit the Unity cruiser had taken, not to mention the bulk of its drives still drifting slowly away from the wreck.
The tumble wasn’t an insignificant problem either.
Finally, Lathan fired the anchor cables, which shot out and smacked into the hull where it was still intact, clamping down and reeling the cables taut. “That’s about as good as I can do, Centurion,” he confessed. “There’s just too much wreckage to try to dock. We’d tear up the docking collar.”
“Good enough, Lathan,” Scalas told him. “That’s what we have zero-G maneuvering units for.” He punched the release on his harness and reached for his own maneuvering unit, swinging it around to clamp onto the attachment points on his sustainment pack. “Give us two minutes, then commence depressurization.”
Lathan acknowledged. It was a testament to the training and discipline of the Caractacan Brotherhood that no one needed prompting or orders at that point. Almost as one, as soon as the anchor cables had attached to the Unity ship’s hulk, the Brothers had clambered out of their acceleration couches, and were busily checking their equipment and preparing their maneuvering units.