Pandora’s Crew

by Gorg Huff

  Inevitably, not everyone was properly tied down for free fall. There were fourteen injuries reported, three of them serious and one spacer had been outside working on a power conduit. It might have been the plasma dump or the enemy’s sand or the rotation, but Spacer Dickens was gone. And a spike in the stresses on the wings shortly after the rotation suggested that what was left of Spacer Dickens was now going thataway at a noticeable fraction of the speed of light.

  The wings picked up plasma and dust, anything, and imparted velocity to it. But the more dispersed the mass, the greater the effect. Plasma left at ninety to ninety-five percent of the speed of light. As the particle got bigger, the percentage of lightspeed got smaller. Sand got up to a bit under fifty percent of the speed of light if everything went well. Chunks of not particularly magnetic matter were even slower. Spacer Dickens was probably not traveling more than one or two percent of the speed of light, if that, but he was accelerated to that speed in around a hundredth of a second. The hoary old chestnut about being caught in a wing ship’s wings being a fast way to die flashed through Tanya’s mind.

  Tanya kept one eye in the augmented reality of the shipnet as she made her way from her cabin to the bridge. They must have known. Admiral Huffington must have gotten word of Admiral Frankin’s plans. It was the only way they could have arranged this. The Drakes must have come through jump 37,472,326 dark, and stayed dark all the way across to 37,472,325.

  Tanya checked the vectors of Huffington’s squadron. No, most of the way. She grabbed the side of the hatch to the bridge as she read the pattern of the Jonesy’s wings. Givens did the right thing, concentrating on keeping a plasma screen between them and any sand and keeping the flap pattern random enough to be hard to predict.

  “Good job, Chuck,” she said as she slid into the captain’s chair. She took another heartbeat to confirm the pattern and motion of both her squadron and the enemy. There were no orders yet from the flag. She used her interface and her hands on the controls to map out a route that would put them behind the Hercules and let them build velocity. “Put us on the track.”

  The A-B laser array fired and one of them caught an incoming hunter-nuke. The nuke wasn’t dead but it was blind, deaf, and dumb, and the Jonesy was slipping behind the Herc, so the nuke wouldn’t be able to find their ship.

  It was twenty-seven seconds since the Drake fleet exited the jump.

  Time: Ten Minutes Later

  Tanya flashed orders through her link into ship’s systems and felt the responses. The Hercules was gone. So were the Batman and the Audie Murphy. Now it was just the Shiva, the Harriet Tubman, and her Jonesy. But Hurk, Murph, and Bat hadn’t died alone. One of the Falcons was gone and a Dragon was badly damaged. Not that it was a survivable rate of exchange. The Drake ships were a bit better than Cordoba ships close in.

  Their squadron, what was left of it, needed to get space room. That was clear to Tanya. So clear that she sent a request on the fleetnet suggesting that they pull back. The response—aside from blistering the decks—made it clear that Senior Captain Rodriguez wasn’t letting the plan go. He had too much invested in the plan to step back from it. Retreating now would be the end of his career.

  People were going to die.

  Tanya was going to die.

  Even Rodriguez was going to die, all because he couldn’t face being wrong.

  The logical thing to do was to get her people out of here. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was an officer in the Cordoba Spaceforce, under orders. So maybe Rodriguez wasn’t the only idiot on the fleetnet. Tanya fought her ship.

  Fortunately, her bridge crew didn’t receive his response. They weren’t tied into fleetnet, but shipnet. She could feel them through the shipnet, complete with side bands of emotional reaction to the events surrounding them.

  The wings were controlled and coordinated by sixteen ratings backed up by computers. The ratings were supervised by four petty officers, commanded by SPO Carpenter. Senior Petty Officer Carpenter hated the drills, and Tanya had almost demoted the woman. But she was doing well now. They all were. The laser clusters were manned by four specialists under SPO Gunderson. The fusion plants—two of them, one forward and one sternward—were under her chief engineer, Lieutenant Boatright and Warrant Officer Second Boyes.

  Tanya was tied into it all through the shipnet. She was aware, in the back of her mind, of every injury, every damaged conduit. And the crew could feel her too, feel her confidence in her orders. They were in tremendous danger; they could die at any moment. A bit of sand or round shot could get through and take out their lasers, open up a route for a hunter-nuke to get in.

  Lasers weren’t effective ship-to-ship weapons. Between the spreading of the beam over ship-to-ship distances, and the protection that the plasma of the wings provided, the energy a laser delivered to the target simply didn’t compare to the energy of a kinetic strike. On the other hand, hunter-nukes had to get close and at a range of a couple of hundred or even a thousand kilometers, a laser was plenty powerful enough to blind a nuke or even slag it, with enough time on target.

  Once the lasers were gone, it was duck or die—and at these ranges ducking was out of the question. That was what killed the Murph. That first sand the Drakes threw just after they emerged got through and killed most of its lasers. It had just been starting its rotation when the hunter got in range of its wings.

  It was more luck than skill that saved the Jonesy in those first seconds of the battle. But then the drills Tanya insisted on came into play. They killed four hunter-nukes with lasers and their fluctuating flap patterns stopped most of the round shot that was thrown at them. Her crew was doing well. Better, honestly, than she expected. The drills lacked the level of intensity of a real battle, and the crew’s resentment of being placed under the command of a “Stockholder Captain” had been a cancer in the shipnet. That cancer was gone now, cut away by the terror of real battle.

  “Shift us, Chuck,” she sent, along with a schematic of the adjustment in the flap cycle. The Drake ships just launched another load of grapeshot and she wanted her wings in position to scatter what was left after Rodriguez deflected them. Senior Captain Rodriguez put his wings where they would do the Shiva the most good, and he wasn’t much concerned with where the shot went after he deflected it. Tanya learned that in the first few salvos of the battle.

  She sent an order to guns to launch another load of grapeshot. She would have liked to coordinate, but Rodriguez didn’t care for “puffed-up grand stockholders who thought their stock was brains.” His instructions were to stay out of his way “since she didn’t have the stomach for a fight.”

  Salvo after salvo were exchanged, and the two fleets slowly got closer and closer together.

  Tanya concentrated her fire against the smaller Drake ships. The Falcons were about the same size as the Jonesy, but they had twelve laser arrays rather than the eight the Hero-class ships sported. But their wings were a bit smaller and less powerful, and lasers weren’t very effective against sand or round shot.

  Tanya kept an eye on the entire battle, not just the fight the Jonesy was in.

  Throughout the battle, she and the other smaller ships focused their fire on the Falcons and left the Shiva and the Hercules to fight the Dragon-class ships. Mnementh and Faranth traded blows with the Shiva and Hercules until the Herc was lost. Now it was two dragons against the Shiva. The Faranth was spilling air and its C5 wing was down, but the Mnementh, Huffington’s flagship was undamaged.

  There! Tanya was expecting it, hoping for it. One of the Falcons shifted wrong and she got a good hit. Its center D wing went down, and it turned to avoid attack through weakened defenses. But wait . . . it was pushing. . . .

  Tanya, using her interface, ran calculations, graphed vectors and positions, timed flaps and projected flap patterns. The Falcon was shifting and rotating to hide its damaged wing and was pushing up against the wings of another Falcon. Not a big problem, but that other Falcon was commanded by a nervous sort.
Tanya had already seen that, and the Nervous Nellie was showing it again. She was moving out of Falcon One’s way, farther than was truly needful. In just a couple of minutes, that would force the dreadnought to shift out of her way. The whole maneuver was available to Tanya. The computer calculated, and Tanya decided. She sent flashing orders to her gunner and the wingmen under Carpenter. Confusion and consternation came back at her, and she repeated the order with emphasis.

  A double shot of canister went out, was caught by the wings, then thrown. Not at one of the smaller ships, but at the Mnementh. Specifically, at a gap that was going to open up in the Mnementh’s wings in thirty-three seconds.

  Tanya then turned her thoughts back to the Falcons and was so engrossed in the battle that she didn’t even notice—thirty-three seconds later—when over fifty magnetized BBs, traveling at a considerable fraction of the speed of light, ripped a hole in the Drake flagship Mnementh’s bow big enough to fly a ship’s boat through.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “What the fuck was that?” Rear Admiral of the Gold John Huffington jerked up out of his thoughts. He was overseeing the battle and contemplating the political advantage that this victory was going to bring him. Until just a second ago, everything was going swimmingly. He was given a cause bellum by the Cordoba swine, and given it before his fleet ever entered Cordoba space at all. Now anything he did was clearly in response to their attack on his peaceful exploration. And who could prove who shot first? That glorious imagery had made the interruption all the worse. “How the hell did the Cordoba’s get through your wings, Captain?”

  Quickly, he scanned the data and couldn’t tell. Couldn’t even tell with certainty which of the Cordoba ships scored the hit. But it had to be the Shiva. The Cordoba Heroes had been concentrating on his Falcons.

  A cold finger of terror swept through the admiral. He knew that people died in war, but not him. Not Admiral John Huffington! And to fight that icy fear, came boiling hot rage. “Kill that ship, Captain.” He indicated the Shiva through the link. “Use the hunter-nukes. A full salvo.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “They’re launching hunter-nukes,” shouted Ensign Gallagher from the gunnery station.

  “Get us the hell out of here!” shouted Senior Captain Rodriguez. “Order the Heros to shield our retreat.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “New orders, Captain,” came flashing into Tanya’s mind from her communications officer, and then came the orders themselves, with all the proper codes attached.

  They were ordered to shield the retreat of Shiva and block the nukes.

  In a way, it wasn’t a bad tactic. Hunter-nukes were set to attack a specific ship. They might not go off if they encountered her wings instead of the Shiva’s wings.

  Might.

  Maybe.

  If they were incredibly lucky.

  But orders were orders, and she started shifting Jonesy.

  It wasn’t in time, not entirely. Two of the nukes got past her and went on after Shiva. The other four impacted her wings, and three were thrown away, so much scrap. The fourth blew, and took out her forward A wing. The feedback blew out the control runs to the whole forward section B, C, and D wings, and melted a fair chunk of the nose of her ship.

  Tanya tried to shift her ship to get away, but it was way too late. Two more hunter-nukes came after her, taking out her center row of wings and crashing the fusion drive that powered them all.

  When a hunter-nuke goes off against a wing, it’s almost a hundred miles away from the ship that is projecting that wing. The power transfer does the damage, and there’s very little additional radiation. But the last hunter-nuke didn’t go off against a wing. It closed to within half a mile of Jonesy before deciding it was close enough and blowing up.

  Even half a mile is a long way, and a hunter-nuke mostly doesn’t have much in the way of a warhead, only a megaton or two. Besides, space doesn’t transmit concussive force at all well. But it was close enough to fry any electronics that were still operating on Jonesy, not that there were many. The circuit breakers held, for the most part. The EMP was stopped before it fried the brains of most of the crew. But they were a live crew in a dead ship, destined to die from lack of air in a few days. Less, really. The nukes that took out the wings caused lots of secondary explosions, and much of their atmosphere vented into space, as well as Chief Weber and a dozen others.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Shiva kept running but Admiral John Huffington was having none of that. He didn’t want any witnesses, and besides, he was pissed. For now, he left the light cruiser alone and concentrated his force on the heavy. Shiva ran for three hours before he took them out with a salvo of hunter-nukes. The electromagnetic energy of those nukes fed back into Shiva and her fusion plant blew.

  There was not the least possibility of survivors.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Tanya pulled the sheet of shieldgold loose. It wasn’t a lot harder than natural gold, but it was almost as heavy and in quarter-inch-thick sheets. She didn’t have a lot of time . . . or a lot of hope. But she was a Cordoba-Davis. She kept at it.

  She was in a non-regulation flexsuit, which helped. The musculature built into the suit was mostly there to keep her skin from stretching from internal pressure, but it also gave her a little extra strength. The micro-gravity of the slowly rotating hulk helped with the work, but the shieldgold still had mass, so she was careful of how much force she imparted as she passed it to Private Fairbanks. Fairbanks was part of Jonesy’s exspatio force, the space-going equivalent of marines. When they were organizing the force, someone looked back into history and found the Latin for “from space,” and it caught on for the spaceborne combat forces.

  Fairbanks caught the two-meter-long strip of shieldgold with difficulty. He was in exspatio space armor, but its external muscles didn’t quite compensate for its extra mass, and doing this sort of work in it was exhausting.

  Tanya turned back to the Mid C wing generator and started tearing a new strip of shieldgold off the ruined piece of equipment. Meanwhile, Fairbanks would take the strip she had passed him to the midsection of the hulk that had once been Jonesy, where Master Chief Gunnery Sergeant Jimmy Dugan would be busy lining the walls with the shielding material.

  The med section was the safest place on the ship. It was inboard from their water storage and next to life support. By the time she had the next sheet loose, Spacer Markum was there to take it. She had been at this for three hours now and she was surprised that she hadn’t already run out of time.

  Tanya knew that the Drakes fired the first shot, and she knew enough politics to be fully aware that the Drake commander would not want witnesses. They were in the gray lanes, not in Drake space. Firing without warning, as the Drakes had, was an act of war. So they were probably going to get nuked again, and this one would be set to go off a lot closer.

  She was pulling shieldgold off the stern C wing generator when the blast came, and it was just chance that she was shielded by it. Fairbanks wasn’t so lucky. His armor had some radiation-shielding properties, but it was nothing like as good as being in the shadow of shieldgold.

  His armor froze, and Tanya knew what happened. She grabbed Fairbanks by the arm and started dragging him back to the med section. She wondered, as she bounced from corridor wall to corner to ceiling to floor, if the Drakes would send another nuke. And, if they did, whether she would be in shelter when it arrived. And whether that shelter would survive the blast.

  As it happened, the Drakes were apparently satisfied by the nuke they sent. There were no more blasts.

  Location: Pandora

  “Multiple nuclear explosions at the next jump, Captain,” Pandora reported almost two hours later as the light of the battle reached them.

  Danny didn’t need the report. He was plugged in and saw the events through his link with Pan.

  They watched the battle. Even a couple of light hours is a very long way, and details like who was throwing round shot were effectively invisible.
Still, this was the closest Danny ever came to a full-scale battle. Mostly—in fact, almost always—the jump was too long to see what was happening on the other side. But this jump was only a little under two light hours. Close enough so that with their present velocity and acceleration of one standard gravity, Pan’s standard running speed, they could skip the jump and reach the other end of it through normal space in only nine days. This end of the jump was only about another four hours at their current vector and acceleration.

  They watched the battle and it was quickly obvious that someone had screwed the pooch. It was six to nine, and the nine had gotten off the first shot in a coordinated volley. Put together with what they had seen of the Drake fleet before it jumped, it was not going to be a good day for the Cordobas. Most battles in the ongoing conflict between the Cordobas and the Drakes were two to four ships against two to four ships. Six to nine wasn’t the biggest disparity Danny ever heard of, but it was bigger than usual.

  “What are two fleets doing in the gray?”

  “It’s apparently not as gray as we thought.”

  “Pan, adjust our accel. Buy us some time before we have to decide whether to take the jump. It’s possible it might all be over before we get there.”

  Location: CSFS Indiana Jones

  “How long has it been?” a crewwoman asked.

  Tanya consulted her internal clock. “Two hours and fifteen minutes. If they were going to hit us again, they would have already done it.”

  “Why don’t I take a look around?” Master Chief Dugan offered.

  “Make it quick, Master Chief,” Tanya said. “I’d guess the walls are glowing.”

  Jimmy grinned and waved. “I’ll be careful, Skipper.”

  A few minutes later, he was back. “It’s hot out there all right, Skipper. And the ship’s boat is melted.”