Last Measure of Devotion (TCOTU, Book 5) (This Corner of the Universe)

by Britt Ringel

  Covington began to gesture as Truesworth responded. “Coming up now, Captain.” He turned to face Vernay. “Commander, Hawk’s standata doesn’t have much on that salvage ship.”

  Hawk’s main wall screen divided into the system plot on the left and the zoomed-in optical of the salvage ship on the right. Darlane Salvage One-One was oriented away from Hawk, making for an obstructed view of the freighter attached to it. The recovery vessel possessed two, massive arms that jutted forward, away from her center mass. Between those twin extensions rested the mostly hidden freighter, Mirific.

  “Damn,” Vernay cursed. “We can’t see her.”

  “What do you think that freighter is, Captain?” Covington asked curiously.

  “The restraining bonds between them seem secure,” Selvaggio noted. “Mirific wouldn’t be able to break them herself. The salvage ship would have to collapse the fields first.”

  Vernay, standing next to Ivers, played with the controls on the first officer’s station before giving up completely. “Jack, can you use the tunnel point station’s optics? They’ll have a better view.”

  From behind Heskan, Tannault muttered irritably in a loud whisper, “Who’s Hawk’s captain again?”

  Covington shot the Seshafian commander a nasty look as Heskan winced at the implication.

  “It’ll take us at least a couple minutes to get something, ma’am,” Truesworth stated.

  “Not enough time,” Vernay grumbled while looking at the system plot. Hawk was 1lm from the station, and slightly less than that from the freighter.

  “At present course and speed, we have about five minutes until we would cross into weapons range,” Selvaggio noted.

  “Weapons range?” Nguyen exclaimed before looking crossly at Heskan. “What’s this about, Captain?”

  Truesworth looked back toward Vernay. “But explain how they would know we’re on Hawk?”

  Vernay shrugged in futility. “I can’t.”

  “Captain Heskan.” Tannault’s brash inflection stopped all action on the bridge. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Joseph, your tone,” Covington cautioned his friend.

  “No,” Heskan stated. “He’s right. Captains Nguyen and Covington, may I have a word with you in private, please?”

  Tannault bristled at being excluded but remained silent.

  “Scott, she’s your ship,” Covington said, passing command as he walked through the crowd near the bridge’s portal.

  Lieutenant Ivers slipped off his chair and moved to the captain’s chair. Vernay seized the opportunity to take his place at the first officer’s station.

  Heskan hurriedly followed the two officers. Behind his back, he heard Vernay’s voice. “Have you got the standata on the freighter yet, Jack?”

  The trip to privacy was a short one by design. Once inside Covington’s quarters, Heskan glanced between the two officers. Finally, he said, “Yon, in order to explain, I need to tell him the truth.”

  Nguyen paled at the declaration. “Are you sure that’s wise, Captain?”

  “I don’t have a choi—”

  “Does this have something to do with Anelace, sir?” Covington blurted out.

  Heskan tripped over his words and looked incredulously at the young man. Finally, after a long pause, he asked, “How do you know that name?” Heskan’s deathly tone answered Covington’s question.

  A despondent Covington looked away from him. “My God, it’s true then. You’re… you’re all Brevic.” Covington mustered the strength to look back into his hero’s eyes. The hurt-filled expression the young officer wore hit Heskan harder than his simple statement. “You can’t be. Tell me it’s not true.”

  “It’s not as black and white as you might think, Clayton,” Heskan answered quickly. “Things never are.” He pointed at the “windowed” wall screen in the quarters. “See out there? It might look like a colorless void from a distance but we both know that when you choose to look beyond the first impression and move close enough to really see those stars, they’re every color imaginable.”

  Covington was slowly shaking his head. Hawk’s battle-stations alarm sounded from the hall.

  Heskan grabbed the man by the shoulders with both hands and bore deep into his eyes. “Look at me, Clayton. See me.”

  Chapter 14

  “Break your bonds, Monty,” Captain Sycamore ordered over the communications channel. The pirate captain turned and grinned fiercely at her helmsman. “Z-plus five thousand then rotate to face our target.” She swiveled her captain’s chair slightly to face her first officer. “As soon as we’re at a safe distance, blow the panels and raise our screen.” Sycamore grunted with satisfaction as Mirific’s first officer nodded acknowledgment and set to work at his station. The Q-ship’s crew was ready to go and the wholly improvised operation appeared to be panning out.

  Less than three weeks ago, Captain Kalene Sycamore had been resting comfortably planet-side in the New London star system. Having spent sixteen of her eighteen years sailing as a smuggler for the Roberts Clan along the Republic-Federation border, these star systems held the same familiarity to her as her tiny backyard while growing up on Carme. Back then, she split her childhood between that dry, weed-ridden yard and the cold, drab environment of a juvenile detention center. After emancipation from her parents, Sycamore left Carme on the promise of riches and fame.

  Awaiting her instead was hard and dangerous work as a ship hand on a freighter that ran drugs and other illicit cargo across borders. She had spent her entire adulthood performing a job that had a “life expectancy” of seven years. After sixteen years, Sycamore was finally promoted to relative safety, managing a small recruitment and logistics arm in the Clan’s distribution system near the southern border. Arrest and incarceration were still real threats but dying of hypoxia in the vacuum of space or of blood loss from a rival’s stiletto had been left in her wake. Her more probable future was another decade of service followed by an extravagant retirement. It was what every clan member dreamed of; she had become a poster child for the recruitment of the next generation of pirates.

  Those dreams were catapulted forward when she received an urgent, coded message from her patron. The message, which spoke of great risks but even greater rewards, contained orders for an improvised wet-mission. The organization had acquired a rare, lucrative contract from a government source that was a golden ticket to any clan manager who could execute a wanted man of known whereabouts. For a natural risk-taker like Sycamore, it was a siren’s call she could not ignore.

  Given the constraints of the mission and its exceedingly short window of opportunity, Sycamore found herself the only clan manager capable of pulling it off. She had immediately ordered the nearest three armed pirate ships to rendezvous with her in New London, where an additional freighter was already urgently casting off for the Nyx star system on her authority.

  To her disappointment and ire, only two of the armed vessels dove in-system before she was forced to make way to Enyo to catch her objective. Still, between the two Q-ships and the knowledge that her target was oblivious to its impending assault, Sycamore could not help but plan her early retirement during the twelve-day voyage to Enyo.

  Mirific and Salvage One-One had beaten their prey to Enyo with twenty-seven hours to spare. Posing as a freighter captain whose ship was being towed for repairs deeper inside the Federation, she requested a berth at Enyo’s main orbital in heliocentric orbit near the system’s third gas giant to make minor corrections to Mirific’s failing life support system before diving on. While docked and awaiting her quarry, she received word that the standard freighter she would use during her escape had dove from Enyo to Nyx three days earlier. With the pieces of her trap hastily positioned, there had been little left to do but impatiently count time for her mark, a small, corporate warship named Hawk.

  The cynical part of her had refused to believe the ship would actually appear. It had taken a near herculean effort to organize her ambush party while al
so placing pieces that would give her an escape route back to the Republic. However, the coded directive she had received from leadership contained tantalizing phrases such as “enduring personal gratitude of Jordan Roberts for being the instrument of his revenge” and “renown greater than The Grinning Reaper.” This was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. It seemed almost too good to be true. Destroy a single starship, make it back to the Republic and live like a queen for the rest of her life. Promises such as these were what she made to recruit up-and-coming pirate captains and were, always, unkept.

  It was to her utter astonishment when Hawk arrived and began its four hour, fifty-two minute cruise toward the Nyx tunnel point. After careful calculation, she ordered her ambush force to cast off from the main orbital one hour, thirty-eight minutes later. The timing would place her roughly five light-minutes ahead of Hawk. That distance would give her ample time to separate her two ships but not enough time for the prey to catch wind of the danger and flee.

  “We’re free, Captain.” The announcement releasing Mirific from One-One’s restraining fields brought her back to the moment. She had never served aboard a dedicated enforcer ship but she was not a complete stranger to ship combat.

  “Maser is nominal. In range in fifty-one seconds,” Mirific’s first officer stated coolly. “One-One is turning with us… she’s blowing the panels hiding her coil guns.”

  Damn, Sycamore thought in hindsight. I should have told them to wait until Mirific’s maser was in range.

  * * *

  “I have the bridge,” Covington announced as he strode purposefully past Ivers. His first officer and the bridge crew were hastily donning shocksuits, retrieved from the compartments in the backs of their chairs.

  Behind him, Captain Nguyen ordered, “Commander Tannault, Lieutenant Hall, accompany me to auxiliary control, please. I’ll explain on the way.” Heskan waited for the group to pass through the narrow portal before entering the bridge.

  Beginning the retrieval of his own shocksuit, Covington proclaimed loudly, “Captain Heskan, I would appreciate any assistance you and your officers could give my crew.” The compartment in the back of his chair was open but Covington glanced at the system plot, cursed and slammed it closed. “Damn, there’s not time.”

  Truesworth, still standing near the sensor station, twisted and said, “The salvage vessel broke her bonds to Mirific.”

  “That’s when Commander Vernay insisted we go to battle stations, Captain,” Ivers added. “I can’t say that I’m in a position to disagree with her.”

  Heskan took the four steps necessary to stand next to Covington’s chair. A glance at the ship’s status screen on the chair arm told him the crew was still racing to their combat stations. His eyes shot up to the wall screen. “Tactical,” he ordered. An instant later, the large system plot on the left side of the main wall screen was replaced with a much narrower, top-down view of Hawk and the immediate space around her. We’re only fifteen light-seconds from them. At least our AIPS is going up.

  On the tactical plot, both the salvage ship and the freighter were rotating ominously toward Hawk.

  “Decompressions along the salvage ship!” Hawk’s sensor officer warned.

  On cue, the optical displayed twin blasts of atmosphere gushing from the vessel’s outstretched arms. No flame or debris was expelled, only the facades designed to conceal what was hidden behind them.

  “What is it?” Covington said as half a question, half an order.

  Both Hawk’s sensorman and Truesworth answered in near tandem. The first voice was full of uncertainty; the other possessed a deep calm.

  “Uh, starting my analysis.”

  “Kinetic weapons for sure, Captain.”

  Covington cursed a second time as he noted Hawk was still not fully readied for battle. The alert had been a complete surprise but it was taking the crew too long to react. “Can we strike our lights and pay the ransom?” he asked to no one in particular.

  Vernay’s cold soprano sent chills down his back. “They aren’t interested in ransom, Clayton. Welcome to war without honor.”

  The statement hung over the bridge, creating an unnatural silence, broken only by Selvaggio’s urgent whisper to Hawk’s helmsman. “You need to begin evasive maneuvers without changing your heading.”

  Hawk’s six port thrusters fired in unison as the brig broke inside of 10ls. Each thruster generated sizeable amounts of delta-V but altering the vector of an object the size of Hawk took massive effort.

  Ten light-seconds from Hawk, Salvage One-One opened fire with her twin coil guns. Each gun, more aptly referred to as a magnetic linear accelerator, was comprised of six hundred and fifty powerful toroidal electromagnetic coils. Placed in perfect alignment, the barrels extended the lengths of the vessel’s 210-meter repair arms. The antiquated coil gun was far cheaper than a rail gun and demanded considerably less energy to operate. The tradeoffs were the extreme space required to position enough linear coils to accelerate a projectile to relativistic speeds and a comparatively slow rate of fire.

  After confirming a green panel, One-One’s weapons officer initiated the firing sequence and a ferromagnetic shot was loaded into the first coil. The coil immediately energized and repelled the projectile as the second coil activated to attract it. The one-gram, dime-sized bullet reached the second coil, which instantly switched to repulsion mode while the third coil activated to begin attracting the malevolent disc farther down the barrel. Each new cycle propelled the shot faster and faster until, when the projectile left the 650th coil, it jetted away from the weapon at .54c. Less than a second later, another shot gushed forth from each barrel and the pattern repeated itself five more times. After the seventh shot, the weapons computer automatically entered into a diagnostics cycle that would pause the firing routine and inspect each of the barrels for imperfections that might result in a catastrophic failure. Five seconds after the automated inspection sequence, both coil guns energized again and the pirate ship fired a new burst.

  During the delay, Hawk sailed 2ls closer. The brig, moving at a speed of .2c, now had a fully charged AIPS defensive screen but was still waiting for her crew to energize her weapons.

  “Come on, come on,” Covington softly exhorted as he monitored the ship’s status display impatiently. After punctuating his urgings with a curse, he looked sheepishly at Heskan and offered, “Captain, at least take my chair. If we take a serious enough hit, you might be tossed about.”

  The image of Mike Riedel’s face flashed through Heskan’s mind but he waved his hand. “That’s your seat, Clayton. Let’s just work hard to not be—”

  “Blueshift particles!” Hawk’s sensorman alerted.

  Selvaggio checked the brig’s slowly changing vector against the incoming fire and cautioned, “Hang on.”

  * * *

  Although Hawk’s crew had only just witnessed the firing of the coil guns, the first projectiles ushered from the twin barrels were a scant 3ls from impact. Five light-seconds behind those speeding rounds, Mirific finally entered the fray. Concealing panels blew from their seatings along the Q-ship’s dorsal spine. What once appeared as a loading crane and its control tower now revealed its true form.

  Mirific’s single maser was one of the few heavy weapons still legally purchasable by Brevic-sanctioned civilian armed escorts. Although slower firing and with less range than standard heavy lasers, masers offered private Republic escort companies their only option for a directed energy weapon with a range greater than 5ls. While coil guns and their more modern brethren, rail guns, could extend the reach of an armed civilian ship to 10ls, both kinetic weapons were dependent on a finite supply of ammunition and limited by shot speeds well under the speed of light. The latter fact ensured that an agile opponent had a fair chance to evade such fire. Masers offered acceptable range, roughly 8ls, and the highly desirable trait of a speed-of-light “projectile.”

  Mirific’s single, dorsal maser reoriented from its vertical position to begin trac
king her target. After fractional corrections, it spat several bursts of energy before entering its painfully long, fifteen-second recycle mode. Four seconds after Mirific’s initial maser salvo, One-One added her third set of coil gun bursts to the accumulated invective hurtling toward Hawk.

  As those projectiles escaped One-One’s barrels, the first grouping approached Hawk’s fully charged AIPS screen. During the fifteen seconds needed to reach their target, physics asserted itself upon each of the fourteen bullets as they collided with sporadic particles in space.

  Although referred to as a vacuum, space is not empty. Each coil gun projectile slammed into roughly one atom per centimeter of travel. Those particles collided with the hypervelocity bullets and fused with their atoms, producing a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles. The gamma rays and debris expanded outward in a bubble of incandescent plasma around each speeding projectile. This cycle of fusion and emission at the leading edge of each projectile ate roughly halfway through the bullet before encountering Hawk’s AIPS.

  The first hits to the defensive screen were not the projectiles themselves but the expanding sphere of gamma rays and plasma. The screen pushed aside ninety percent of the x-rays, the rest effortlessly stopped by the brig’s standard duralloy armor. Plasma ejecting from the first projectile struck two nanoseconds later, also easily deflected by the defensive screen. An instant later, five of the half-gram projectiles crashed into Hawk’s AIPS with the force of about half the energy released in an average Terran thunderstorm.

  Hawk’s AIPS strained to meet the energy requirement necessary to fend off such an assault, succeeding three times before cutting out to circumvent critical overload. The first three coil gun rounds defeated, the next two bullets passed unimpeded through the collapsing screen on their way toward Hawk.

  Both rounds penetrated Hawk’s hull, barely clipping the port side of her bow. Each tiny projectile struck the warship at severe angles brought about by the vessel’s evasive efforts, serving to augment the ship’s last line of defense, her duralloy armor. Equal parts traditional armor, Bremsstrahlung armor and Whipple armor, the two half-gram projectiles exploded upon impact with the duralloy coating and turned into a spray of plasma. Given the extreme angle at which they struck, eighty percent of the energy deflected away from the brig with the remaining energy directed inward. The destructive sphere from the expanding plasma pierced Hawk’s hull at the forward stores and adjacent life support recycler compartment. Both compartments were decimated in a fiery hell of plasma and shrapnel, replaced quickly by the icy cold of space. The initial vapor cloud and debris struck the opposing bulkheads and traveled just one additional compartment deeper into the ship before expending the remaining energy, spalling the inside bulkheads of the adjacent interior compartments. The remaining nine rounds in Sycamore’s opening coil gun salvoes slipped wide to port.