by Adam Gaffen
“We’re working the problem, Admiral. Back off and let us do our jobs!”
Kendra took a deep breath, then another. Then she returned to the hologram.
“Diana, visual.”
The station AI’s avatar appeared next to her.
“Admiral?”
“Show me the last time we have the dreadnoughts on scanners.”
Two blue lights appeared in orbit around Luna.
“Time?”
“Twenty twenty-seven, thirty-one point six.”
“Eight thirty last night.”
“Only approximately, Admiral.”
“And it’s nearly noon. Okay. We didn’t pick up their warp signatures, did we?”
“No, Admiral.”
“Then assume they’re trying to sneak, running at low power with their transponders off. Get into position for, well, for something. With those parameters, where could they be, now?”
“Calculating.”
Two tracks extended outward from Luna, along the orbital track and then blossoming into a roughly conical shape before fading away.
“Those are my best estimates of their possible positions, Admiral.”
“They could be anywhere!”
“Possibly, Admiral, but if I may?”
Kendra nodded her permission.
“They have relatively efficient sublight engines, and their acceleration is only limited by their inertial compensators. My analysis of the Averroes systems indicates the possibility of up to 5 g acceleration without a noticeable footprint, within one light-hour. In kilometers, that is one billion, seventy-nine million...”
“Just call it a billion kilometers. Okay, so?”
“Increased acceleration would reveal their presence, as would jumping to warp. The maximum distance they could have achieved, so far, is less than eighty million kilometers.”
The hologram shifted to show the furthest possible reach of the dreadnoughts.
“I suspect they dove inside Earth’s orbit, to maintain the ‘shadow’ effect, then headed in-System, towards the Sun.”
“The Sun? Why?”
“If my calculations are correct, they are moving in excess of 2700 KPS; they could be planning to use the gravitational well to slingshot them around and pick up more speed, to make a sublight run at Njord. Nothing we have will be able to catch them except our own starships, and moving at any substantial percentage of c will impact their targeting ability.”
Two dotted lines extended from Luna’s orbit, past Earth, around the Sun and intercepted Njord further along its track.
“And the Copernicus?”
“A Judas goat, Admiral. A distraction.”
“Frak me with a hamster wheel. It worked to perfection.”
“This is all speculation, Admiral.”
Kendra waved it off. “And how often are you wrong? No, this sounds right. Davie!”
When Whitmore arrived Kendra had Diana repeat her speculation; halfway through, Whitmore was nodding to each point.
“Makes sense,” she finally said. “If they encounter a starship they can jump to warp and run.”
“I am concentrating my scanners on the most probable paths of the ships,” Diana continued. “I would recommend dispatching both Defiant and Defender to increase our scanner efficiency. Their sublight engines will leave a trail which can be followed, but they dissipate quickly. Time is of the essence.”
“With Enterprise and Endeavour back, that’s not an issue,” Kendra said. “Colonel, take care of it.”
“Right away, Admiral.”
Launching the two smaller starships was a rapid process, one which practice had worn smooth. Inside ten minutes both had departed the station and were in pursuit of their quarries. Between their sensors and Diana’s predictions both ships had locked onto the dreadnoughts. They had taken reciprocal courses, one North of the ecliptic, one South, and both projected to cross behind Njord’s orbital path. They were still more than fifty megaklicks distant; even at their current speed they wouldn’t be in effective energy weapons range until late afternoon.
“Warn them off,” ordered Kendra.
Diana began broadcasting on the known Union frequencies, hoping for an answer while the starships closed the gap from astern. While the Scimitar-class dreadnoughts were more heavily armed than any other ship in the Union, their firepower was concentrated forward and into broadsides. They mounted two chase lasers, but they were fixed mount and designed more for intimidation than effect.
“No reply, Admiral,” Diana reported. “Defiant is within 40 kiloklicks, Defender 30 kiloklicks.”
“Paint the bastards,” said Kendra.
The sensors on the Defiant-class starship were designed for maximum effectiveness with minimal transmissions, inspired by the submarine experience of the Federation’s senior Captains. However, like a submarine, the starships also mounted powerful active sensors. At close enough range they could melt hulls from the intense energy.
A Captain who failed to answer getting their hull painted was either asleep or dead. It was the stellar equivalent of a bucket of cold water tossed on a sleeping man.
“No response, Admiral. Wait. Defiant’s target has begun to power up their drive.”
“Do we let them run?” asked Whitmore.
Kendra was torn. She didn’t want to open fire, not yet, not when they were still so many millions of kilometers distant. However, they had nearly gotten away with their planned attack, or at least what she assumed was a planned attack.
When in doubt, ask the experts.
“What do you think? Nicole?”
The youngest member of what Davie referred to as the ‘Artemis Ex-Ministry of War’ frowned.
“No. They didn’t actually do anything.”
“Jake?”
“I disagree. If we let them go, they’ll try again.”
“Davie?”
“Close to a thousand kilometers, give them a warning shot, and demand their surrender. Then, when they don’t reply, blowing them out of the sky is totally justified.” Whitmore paused, then added, “Bring their warp drives to standby, in case they try to run for it.”
“Concur. Do it.”
Both ships were warming their warp drives now. Kendra knew from experience the Scimitars took ten minutes to power from a cold start. It was a side effect of the less-advanced design Carnahan provided. Not only was it slower to power up, but it was also less efficient all around, resulting in warp fields which were easily twice the size of the Federation-designed drives.
Additionally, they could guess fairly well at the intended speed based on the size of the warp field generated. The larger the field, the higher the speed. Until the field started to flex, though, there was no movement, simply potential. SOP for Federation vessels was to enter warp gradually, expanding the field outward smoothly, instead of jumping from sublight to a higher warp factor. They could, of course, but the chance to bring along an unexpected hitchhiker within the field was too great to ignore.
“Colonel,” Courtney Colona said from her position at defense. “Defender is in position.”
“Have them execute the plan.”
Colona passed along the orders. In a moment she looked up, shaking her head.
“No reply to the message, no response to the warning shot.”
Whitmore glanced quickly to Kendra, who responded with a millimetric nod.
“Whitmore to Defender.”
“Go, Colonel,” replied the voice of the Defender’s Captain, Petra Orloff.
“ROE Alpha approved. Take them down.”
“Colonel!” Horst Pipher called across the CCIC. “The dreadnought’s jumping to warp!”
“Pursue!” shouted Whitmore, and Orloff passed the order to her crew, even as Diana was adding her own voice to the sudden chaos.
“NO!”
It was too late.
Warp fields acted on reality by removing whatever they enclosed from the normal physical laws of the universe; they did this t
hrough the application of tremendous quantities of power. That kind of power deserved a healthy dose of respect, and so it had become a fundamental tenet of Starfleet that no warp drives were ever activated within ten kiloklicks of Njord, or another starship, to prevent the possibility of two drives interacting. Dr. Roberts had speculated as to what would happen, and most of her models suggested that it would be like connecting two batteries together at the same poles: a massive short-circuit. The result, she believed, would be two megacredit warp drives fused into lumps of metal.
There were other equations, though, which pointed to a more energetic response, as the fields collapsed like soap bubbles and the energy they had contained seeking an outlet. These equations indicated that the power, instead of being directed to liquefying metal and vaporizing volatiles, would feedback to the annie reactor and blow up the ship.
The Defender’s warp drive spooled up to jump, expanding a warp field in a blink of an eye out to a hundred kilometers from the ship. At that point it ran into the warp field from the dreadnought, which had ballooned outward in an instant. Both fields collapsed.
As it turned out, Roberts was half-right.
In a heartbeat the Defender’s drive melted. That was the extent of the direct impact of the collapse, as Roberts had been correct about her drive and warp field design. The power was entirely contained within the drive itself.
That didn’t make the secondary effects less devastating.
The decks and bulkheads, all made of durasteel, vaporized, and a fireball of superheated metallic gas expanded outward from the heart of Engineering. The only factor which saved the ship was the placement of the drive, relative to the hull. Only two bulkheads separated the drive from vacuum, and once those were breached the remaining force followed the path of least resistance.
The dreadnought, the El-Baz, wasn’t so fortunate. The Union engineering wasn’t up to Starfleet standards, and the drive design was Carnahan’s, not Roberts. Power fed back through the drive and into the body of the ship, bursting through conduits, liquefying power runs, and knocking every safety interlock offline on their twin annie reactors. Both magnetic bottles failed in under a half-second, and a half-second after that the entire ship and her crew of five hundred and twelve were a glowing, expanding ball of plasma.
Kendra was the first to recover.
“Defiant, break off! Do not pursue!”
“Admiral?”
“Let them go,” she ordered Resler. “Assist the Defender.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
Whitmore was in motion now, watching the hologram as the other dreadnought successfully scrambled into warp.
“Endeavour,” she commed.
“Go,” answered Commander Sanzari, the XO.
“I need you out of dock two minutes ago.”
“I, yes, Colonel. We’ll be underway momentarily.” The voice grew muffled as she relayed orders. “Colonel, Captain Stewart isn’t aboard.”
“No time to wait,” Whitmore said. “We’re tracking a dreadnought in warp. I need you to follow it and keep it the hell away from Njord.”
“We’ll take care of it, Colonel.”
“Admiral? Further orders?”
Kendra looked around, then locked on Whitmore.
“What about?”
“The other dreadnought. What should Endeavour do?”
Kendra had a moment to think as Sanzari commed in.
”Njord, permission to depart.”
“Granted, Endeavour,” Diana said. “Good hunting.”
“Roger that.”
“Admiral?” prompted Whitmore.
“We can’t touch them in warp,” she mused. “But if they come out of warp within an orbit of Njord, shoot them down.”
Whitmore relayed the order to Sanzari.
Spurgeon was directing the Wolves to assist with the SAR while dispatching both Direwolf squadrons to take over all CAP duties. Pipher was analyzing his data, and Colona helping him.
The Copernicus, the instigator of all these events, quietly slipped from orbit and headed towards Earth.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Habitat Njord
“The Defender’s a total loss.”
“Fuck. Casualties?”
“Twenty-three dead, eighteen injured. Most of the injuries were minor; nobody caught in Engineering when the drive went survived.” Whitmore glanced up from her padd, which was purely a prop. All the information was accessed through her ‘plant but she felt the need not to look into Kendra’s eyes, shadowed again with grief.
Davie knew what Kendra was feeling. In the year-plus since her rescue and recruitment she’d seen the pain whenever one of her people was hurt or died. She was doing better at accepting it as a necessary evil, dealing with the knowledge that her orders had led to this death, but it still didn’t come easy. Davie respected her more for it.
“We can’t salvage anything? Hecate?”
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” said the construction AI, sitting in as her usual pigtailed teenage avatar, though her voice was much more subdued than usual. “The hull was damaged too badly to be repaired; the extreme heat on the one hand, the vacuum of space on the other, led to deformation in the durasteel and CeeSea I didn’t think was possible. By my estimates I would have to pull the nacelles, replace the pylons, cut away the after half of the hull, then replace everything from the bridge back.”
Regaining some of her usual tone, she continued.
“But that’s not to say we can’t salvage anything, Admiral, I didn’t mean to give that impression. I can put the Defender into the fabricator and pretty much break it down into component parts before building a new ship from the pieces, I won’t have to worry about welds and joins and strengthening the connections, and she should come out better than new.”
“What will that do to the production schedules?” Davie asked.
“It might slow down bringing the second fabber on line but I haven’t calculated exactly how much, Colonel.”
“Hmm. This may be a better question. Would it be faster to complete production of the Defiant-class which has already started, or rebuild the Defender?”
“I can have the Defender rebuilt in six weeks, with the exception of the warp drive, which needs to be produced by Dr. Roberts and her team, but she already has one prepared for the Defiant-class I’m building so there’s no delay there. As for the Defiant-class, that’s being constructed by my bots and extensions, it will take at least four months at crash priority to finish her.”
“I think we have our answer. Admiral?”
Kendra, who had been staring at the bulkhead, came back to the conversation.
“Six weeks beats four months. End of August versus late November. Do it, Hecate.”
“I’ll start right away,” she said, and winked out.
“I still find that unnerving,” Davie said.
“It takes some getting used to. We’re down a ship for six weeks, but we still have most of the officers and crew. Cross-train replacements on Defiant and supplement her crew for a while?”
Davie nodded. “The way it works, Admiral, is I make the suggestions and you approve them, not the other way round.”
“Right. I keep forgetting that. You want my job?”
“Not on a bet, Admiral. I’ve been there. As for being down a ship, remember, the Union’s down a ship too. They’re down to one Scimitar-class, and nothing else in the pipeline.”
“That’s not quite accurate,” Nicole said. “There’s one other warp ship.”
“What?” Davie spun around to face Crozier. “Why haven’t you said anything about this before?”
“It’s a piece of crap!” Crozier shot back. “The junk you ordered built before you stepped out and left me holding the bag! Why didn’t you say anything about it?”
“I did! But they were going to take years to build it!”
“Until they brought in Carnahan.”
“Oh, oak and ash!”
“Would someone like to fil
l me in?” Kendra said.
Crozier’s head tilt was enough to get Davie to answer.
“Just before the first attack, on Diana, the Primus ordered me to start construction of our own warp ship. So I got the ball rolling, but it wasn’t much more than some plans when I had to relocate. Nicole?”
“Prescott got the project; you remember him?”
“Arrogant jackass?”
“You remember him. He worked up a design with Kreitzer’s help and started construction. Meanwhile I snatched the Scimitar-class from the Union, and when Carnahan came over I decided to put her drives into them. That left Prescott’s project superfluous, and in October I cancelled it. Then I traded it to Kreitzer’s MinTech and forgot about it.”
An incredulous look crossed her face.
“Would you believe his design was a sphere? And he was going to use the warp drive for sublight propulsion?”
“Okay, okay, nice story. So the Union might have another warp ship? Diana?”
“Admiral?”
“Crash priority. I need data on any warp ships the Union is still building, and I need it yesterday.”
“Right away, Admiral.”
“We’re still in better shape than the Union, even if their sphere flies,” said Davie. “Three starships to two, and Pioneer coming in three months? I’ll take those odds.”
“What happened to the other Scimitar?”
“He dropped from warp on the far side of Luna, so Captain Stewart, sorry, no, she wasn’t aboard.” Davie actually grinned. “She was angry enough to chew durasteel and spit nails.”
“I saw her,” agreed Kendra with an answering smile.
“At any rate, Commander Sanzari followed orders and let him return to Lunar orbit.”
“What do you think about enforcing the embargo more strictly, Davie?”
“We do hold the high ground. I can see there might be issues with the UE, given the pressure the Union has been putting on them, but there might be a way around it.” She thought for a moment before speaking again.
“Diana. Under the Artemis Accords, does the UE need to ensure the, well, let’s call it ‘tribute’, actually arrives in Artemis?”