by Rick Partlow
Spools of superconductive cable were stretched out across the chamber ready to install, while engineering crew ripped charred lengths of it from burned-out conduits leading to the main trunk line from the fusion reactor. Scorched carbon streaks lined the deck below where the conduits had exploded under stress, filling the chamber with deadly shrapnel that had sent a dozen men and women to the medical bay. On the central station display, he could shuttles hovering near the midsection of the ship, using loader arms to insert antimatter fuel pods into the heavily armored ports there, while other technicians in vacuum suits oversaw the seating of the pods into the evacuated portion of the engineering bay.
Radio traffic filled the air, a cacophonous racket of overlapping conversations as dozens of men and women worked at a dozen different major tasks. In the center of it all, maintaining a Buddha-like calm in the eye of that storm, was Lt. Commander Maria Infante, the ship’s Chief Engineering Officer. As he watched her, Franks was amazed at the way she seemed to be able to keep track of all those separate conversations and respond to each question while still monitoring the various displays at her station.
He was loath to disturb her when she was obviously insanely busy, but he had a job to do as well, and this wouldn’t wait. He pushed off from the wall and floated across the chamber, twisting in midair to avoid being sideswiped by a preoccupied technician, then stopping himself against the side of the engineering control center console.
“Commander Infante,” he interjected and she looked up at him, still droning orders to three different people.
“Yes, Lt. Franks?” she said, automatically muting the audio inputs to the microphones at her station.
“You’ve seen the effects of field intersect now,” he said, trying to be quick and brief. “I need to know if you can come up with any way we can do it repeatedly without almost destroying ourselves.”
“Why?” she cracked, “Are you planning on making a sport of it?”
“Ma’am,” he went on seriously, “I don’t think the Protectorate is going to quit at two of those things. Eventually, they’re going to throw everything they have at us, and we can’t be knocking a star cruiser out of commission every we have to take out one of those ramships. I need to know how to take them out.”
“Lieutenant,” she said soberly, shaking her head, “there is no way we can harden the power systems on this ship enough to survive multiple field intersects. We can jury-rig it to barely make it through one, but that’s it without access to a full dry-dock. The gravito-inertial feedback is just too intense. I’d need a whole secondary power trunk, and we just don’t have the equipment to build one… or the time, most likely.”
Franks scowled, wondering what the hell Colonel… oops, that’s General now… McKay would do. He was still wondering when Infante spoke again, her head cocked thoughtfully. “You know, though, Lieutenant, there is something else we might try.” She tapped her chin with a finger, forehead scrunched up. “I’ll need to have a little talk with Lt. Bevins…”
The words were barely out of her mouth when a klaxon began sounding over the ship’s speakers, accompanied by the announcement: “All hands, battle stations!”
Franks saw Infante’s eyebrow raise, her mouth quirking in what might have been annoyance.
“Better have that talk now, ma’am,” he suggested. “It looks like we’ve run out of time.”
* * *
“Are we certain they can’t see us, Commander Witten?” Captain Minishimi asked quietly, staring at the Tactical display, watching one icon after another appear out of the wormhole gateway only a few thousand kilometers away.
Witten glanced at her, feeling a rush of gratitude that she was on the bridge and in charge instead of him. She still looked a bit pale, but her voice was strong and she didn’t seem to be in pain. “Fairly certain, Captain,” he responded. “We’re running cool… minimum reactor output, minimum thermal signature. We should be indistinguishable from the background radiation. And we’ve seen no indication that they’re equipped with gravimetic sensors, so they shouldn’t be able to pick us up that way, either.”
“Higgs, what are the chances we can get a message to Fleet HQ without them picking up on it?”
“It’s chancy, ma’am,” Higgs warned. “I think it’s about even odds one of their ships will detect it.”
Joyce Minishimi was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed on the display. Then she sighed softly. “There are only two Fleet cruisers insystem right now,” she said, half to herself, “and the Brad isn’t ready to sail yet.” She looked back to Higgs. “Send to Fleet HQ: Enemy ships are transitioning the wormhole; numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds. We are going to move to engage. End of message. Attach a copy of our current sensor scans.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Higgs acknowledged, turning back to her station.
“Lt. Witten,” the Captain said to the Helm officer, “prepare to activate the drive field and take us in toward the wormhole at one gravity. We’re going to use our drive field as a weapon until they figure out we’re there.”
“Aye, Captain,” Witten responded. “One gravity acceleration at your word.”
“Commander Gianeto,” Captain Minishimi continued, “I want you to launch every Area Denial missile we have right into the wormhole immediately, set to detonate just outside its event horizon.”
“Aye, Captain,” Gianeto was hitting the controls even as he spoke. “Launching all AD munitions now.”
On the Tactical screen, they could see the swarm of small missiles emerging from the weapons pods, accelerating away from the mass of the Decatur, one wave after another launching only seconds apart. It seemed the missiles would never stop, but finally the last were gone, leaving only the glowing stars of their drives slowly fading as they drew away.
“One hundred Area Denial Munition missiles away, ma’am,” Gianeto announced. “We’re cleaned out.”
“Mr. Witten,” she addressed the Helmsman formally, “take us in.”
* * *
“Jesus Christ that’s a lot of ships,” Lt. Wolford muttered, shaking his head as he stared at the sensor display.
“At ease on the bridge!” Commander-acting Captain, Franks reminded himself-Tandy Lee snapped. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed young officer with cafe-aux-lait skin and soft, rounded features-and she was as tense and raw as an exposed nerve. She had even less experience than Perez, and when Franks had told her that the Captain was dead, he thought she was going to go into shock. “Commander Infante,” she said a bit too loud and harshly into the intercom pickup, “how much longer until we can activate the drives?”
“We have the fuel pods loaded, Captain,” Infante replied, unflappable, “and the new power conduits have been installed… we just have to get the shielding in place. It should just be another few minutes.”
“We have fusion detonations near the wormhole!” Wolford announced, stabbing a finger at the white globes that were popping up in the Tactical projection. Franks moved around behind the man, looking at the readout.
“Those are Area-Denial Munitions,” he said confidently. One of the many things he’d been doing in his spare time to try to make himself more qualified to be a field agent was studying the signatures of various Fleet weapons. “That has to be the Decatur attacking.” He paled as he realized what that meant, turning to face acting Captain Lee. “She’s all alone out there, Captain.”
“Lieutenant,” she ground out impatiently, clearly unhappy about having him on the bridge at all, “we are doing everything we can to get under power and help the Decatur…”
“That’s not what I mean, ma’am,” he cut her off, earning a dirty look. “If she’s engaged with the enemy, they’re going to…”
“Eysselink drive signatures detected!” Wolford exclaimed. “It’s more of those ramships, ma’am… they’re breaking away from the rest of the enemy formation and heading this way!” He swallowed hard as he glanced between Lee and the Tactical display. “There are six of them
at least, from what I can read.”
“They’re going to do that,” Franks finished, letting out a sigh.
“Commander Infante!” Lee’s call was almost desperate. “Did you hear that?”
Infante sounded, for once, affected. “Yes, Captain… I’m powering up the drive now. My people can install the shielding on the move.” Franks winced, knowing exactly what that could mean: if they had another field intersect without the shielding in place, everyone in the engineering compartment would be fried instantly.
“Lt. Bevins,” Lee said-trying, Franks thought, to sound more confident than she felt, “plot an intercept course for the ramships and take us to 1g acceleration.”
Lt. Franks braced himself as the acceleration alarm sounded and gravity pressed his feet to the deck, a welcome feeling after days of zero gravity. He stepped over to the Captain’s station and hovered a hand over her communications console, looking a question. She sighed with exasperation but nodded.
“Commander Infante,” he called. “Did you and Bevins have time to work out that modification?”
“I believe it will work, Lt. Franks,” Infante confirmed. “The only way to know for sure is to try it.”
“What will work?” Lee demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Franks told her. “With the alert, we didn’t have time to tell you. Commander Infante was working with Lt. Bevins to try to come up with a new way to stop the ramships… other than, well, ramming them.”
`“What did you come up with, Commander?” Lee asked the engineer.
“Lt, Bevins and I made some adjustments to the gravimetic sensor emitters, Captain,” Commander Infante explained. “Theoretically, we should be able to use it to destabilize the ramships’ Eysselink drive fields, if we can get close enough.”
“How close?” She asked and then scowled and added: “Theoretically?”
“At least a hundred kilometers or so,” Infante said. “And yes, theoretically because it’s never been tried outside a research station. It’s a lucky thing I read about that study… I doubt there’s anyone else in the Fleet that would have thought of it.”
“It’s the only chance we have, Captain Lee,” Franks reminded her. “Intercepting just two of those things almost destroyed this ship and killed Captain Perez… and there are at least a half dozen of them.”
Lee hissed out a deep breath. “We’ll have to try it,” she decided. “Tactical, work up an intercept plan that will give us time on target with as many of the ramships as possible and get us on course.” She shook her head. “I just hope the Decatur can handle the rest of them…”
* * *
It felt inexpressibly good to Francis Witten, after weeks of crawling between wormholes on plasma drives, naked to whatever the enemy wanted to throw at them, to be surrounded once more by the protective sheath of the Eysselink field… even if they were accelerating directly into the midst of hundreds of enemy ships.
“Thirty seconds to the first wave of enemy ships,” Gianeto announced. “Twenty ships, mostly lighters”-converted freighters-“with about 100 kilometers between them.” His eyes darted to the right, to another section of his Tactical display, where a series of white globes was erupting like a fireworks display. “We have positive detonation from the first of the AD munitions, Captain! I’m reading several secondary explosions too… don’t know how many of them we took out. Some of them are going through the gate… they must be keeping it activated with a series of fusion triggers.”
“Mr. Witten,” Minishimi directed, “sweep through the first wave of Protectorate ships, starting with those closest to us… do as much damage as possible before they realize where we are.”
“Aye, Captain,” Witten acknowledged. “Ten seconds to impact with the first target.”
The enemy ship expanded impossibly swift on the viewscreen, growing from a barely-perceptible dot to an ungainly, bulbous collection of jury-rigged armor and weapons pods… and then expanding into a ball of glowing plasma as the drive field ripped it to shreds. Witten blinked at the explosion and then it was gone, whisked away along with that particular wave of space-time, and the next ship, almost identical in design, was coming into view. It was gone just as quickly, and Witten tried not to think about all the human lives he’d just ended.
“That’s two of them down,” he announced, touching the controls and dragging the icon of the ship into the course he desired. “Swinging around for the next pair in this wave.”
“Captain!” Gianeto interjected. “I’m picking up multiple Eysselink drive fields near the gate! It looks like five… no, six are splitting off and heading insystem at high g’s.” He glanced back at her. “There are at least two more heading straight for us.”
“How long till they intercept?” Minishimi asked, her voice calm.
“At current acceleration, approximately…” he glanced at another readout, “twenty-two minutes.”
“Stay on course, Commander Witten,” Minishimi ordered, eyes on the screen, voice resolute. “Increase acceleration to 2g’s, but keep on the ships. We’re going to have to count on the Bradley to engage the ramships that headed for Earth; we are it out here until the cislunar gunboats get close enough to engage, so we have to do as much damage as possible.” She called up the connection to the Engineering section. “Commander Prieta, we are most likely going to be experiencing one or more drive field intersects. If there’s anything you can do to make sure we survive them as a combat-ready asset, I swear I will buy you a drink in Paris.” Her mouth quirked into a wry smile. “If we live.”
“I’ll do my best, Captain,” Prieta assured her, chuckling appreciatively.
“Increasing acceleration to two g’s,” Witten fed power to the drives and was crushed into his seat as the Decatur leaped ahead toward the next set of enemy ships.
* * *
Drew Franks felt claustrophobic constrained in the acceleration couch behind the Captain, but a memory of Perez’ lifeless body kept him securely strapped in, even at 1g.
“The bogies are in a globe formation,” Lt. Wolford said. “Three thousand kilometer spread between each drive bubble. Closest bogey is…” He double-checked the display. “…three minutes out at current acceleration. My best intercept course is to take the lead ship, then circumnavigate the globe formation from north pole to south.” He shrugged. “Until they react to us, then it all goes out the window.”
“How long before we can try to disrupt the drive field on the closest target?” Lee asked him.
“From the specs that Commander Infante sent to my station,” Wolford guessed, “we will be in range in two minutes, fifteen seconds.” He shook his head. “It’s going to be close: if we want to use Gauss cannons on her, we’ll have to shut off our drive field and that’s going to make it even trickier to intercept the others…”
“Why bother?” Franks wondered out loud. He reddened a bit at Lee and Wolford’s questioning and annoyed glances, but he pushed the embarrassment aside and expounded. “Look, we have to stop them either way… so, don’t shut down our drive field at all. Use the modified sensor beams to shut down theirs, then just ram them. If their field shuts down, they’re toast and we keep right on going.” He shrugged fatalistically. “If it doesn’t work, we can at least take out one of them before we’re incapacitated.”
“Sound strategy,” Wolford said with a nod, a bit of surprise and perhaps respect in his voice. “It might work.”
“You’re awfully cavalier about risking all our lives, Lt. Franks,” Lee commented quietly, regarding him with an expression that he thought might have been hiding a profound fear.
“Ma’am,” he reminded her, “my butt’s sitting right behind yours.” He laughed wryly. “I’m twenty-five years old; trust me, I don’t want to die. But this is our job, right? If we don’t do it, who will?”
Lee didn’t respond immediately, staring for a moment at the viewscreen and the approaching enemy ships. “Do it, Lt. Wolford. It’s the
best chance we have.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Wolford said. “Requesting helm control to my station.”
“Helm is yours, Tactical,” Bevins told him, releasing the controls to his station.
“Coming into range,” Wolford murmured, eyes glued to the display, where a pale red globe around the ship’s icon indicated the range of the modified sensor emitters. That red expanse was just ready to overlap the drive bubble of the first bogey, a wickedly Spartan silver wedge in the projection. “Firing gravimetic pulses now.”
Had someone been watching what happened with the naked eye, they would have seen precious little. Perhaps they might have noticed the distortion of the starfield as the Eysselink drives stretched and folded and spindled the fabric of space-time, but little else. The ship’s computer, however, gave a much more satisfying recreation of events: the blocky monolith of the Bradley plodded forward, surrounded by a shimmering globe of unreality that represented the drive field, approaching another, identical globe with the silver wedge of the ramship at its center. Then a wavering line of uncertainty connected the Bradley to the ramship’s drive field for a fleeting moment and suddenly the ramship was naked to the universe, its drive field dissipating in a wash of quantum foam.
“Her drive field’s down and…” Wolford’s booming announcement cut short as their own Eysselink field rammed directly into the unprotected ramship and it abruptly ceased to be, torn to subatomic particles in a sun-bright release of energy.
“Yes!” Franks yelled exultantly, pumping a fist, his cheers echoed by the rest of the bridge crew.
“At ease on the bridge!” Lee ordered, but Franks could see the grin brightening her face. “Take us to the next target, Lt. Wolford! Increase acceleration to two g’s!”