“Fire when ready,” the captain of the Bōken sha Ichi called out confidently, feeling the crumps of vibration as the rippling line of warheads erupted from their firing ports.
“First salvo away,” Sarvanto said as his fingers danced over the console, ready to fire the next wave as soon as the tubes were loaded again, “adjusting target coordinates… second salvo fired,” he said, as the familiar shakes translated up through the deck, into the chair and were interpreted by the captain’s body.
“Comm bursts transmitted,” the communications officer reported.
Before the report of the third round of nukes could reach Torres’ satisfied ears, the yell of warning came from the ensign at the tactical station.
“Three enemy signatures on our six, they’re firing on u…” The ship shook unimaginably hard as impact after rapid-fired impact pounded their shielding. Torres was almost knocked out of his chair by the savagery of the unexpected onslaught.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Torres yelled pointlessly.
“Sir,” Sarvanto cried as the sudden movement of the ship forced him off balance, “shall we return fire?”
“Yes!” The captain replied as he regained his wits, “gun teams lock on and fire at will. Helm, evade. Tactical, talk to me.”
“Six ships, standard attack pattern; two coming directly at us and the others flanking each side,” the ensign snapped back just as another burst of heavy ship to ship fire slammed into them and rocked their vessel violently.
“Get us away from them, Lieutenant,” Torres ordered the pilot.
“Trying. Can’t shake them!”
“You’re thinking two-dimensionally,” the captain responded, “drop us down and punch it.” The pilot did just that, evading their Va’alen ambushers for maybe half a minute before the hits started to batter their shields once more.
“We’ve lost the outer shield,” tactical shouted, “seventy-three percent.” Another flurry of direct hits rocked them at their consoles and in their seats. “Fifty-eight percent!”
“Guns, give me something,” Torres growled.
“Working on it, Captain,” Sarvanto answered through gritted teeth.
“Direct hit on nearest pursuit ship,” Eze called, gripping onto the arms of her unfamiliar chair as she monitored the progress of her people manning the turrets.
“Destroyed?” Torres asked with visible concern. Eze paused, looking at the console for the sensors to refresh.
“Yes.”
“Full rear shields,” Torres cried desperately, “fire everything before that second ship ra…”
He didn’t get to finish giving his orders before the solitary Va’alen accelerated impossibly hard into the belly of the Ichi, crushing its way through what remained of their shields. The lights on the bridge flickered and blinked into darkness before returning the room to an illuminated state. Shouts echoed all around the bridge as everyone tried to call out reports or give orders at once. The gravity failed for a few seconds, raising all of them up in sudden weightlessness, before the power was restored to the grav emitter and they dropped back down.
“Damage report,” Torres breathed.
“Shields restored to twenty-five percent; we’re down to our last emitter,” the ensign at tactical said. “Hull breach on lower deck… we’re venting atmo. All damaged compartments are sealed off.” Torres grimaced, shutting his eyes for a moment to compartmentalize the pain of the loss he knew would sting him for the rest of his life. He opened his eyes, cutting away from the momentary flash of self-pity, and gave his next orders.
“Tell me the Fold Drive is online?”
“Affirmative, Sir,” replied the helmsman, “but we can’t jump at these speeds; the sensor array is on the fritz after that last hit and I wouldn’t be able to program it safely enough.” Torres thought for few seconds, not wasting time but investing it in a better plan than they currently worked to.
“Can we restore the Shroud?” Another pause.
“Yes, Sir,” came the response from tactical, “but I don’t know how good it’ll look.”
“It doesn’t have to pass muster for long, Ensign,” Torres told him, “helm, at your discretion, full stop and radical course change. Tac, as soon as he hits the brakes you get us under Shroud. If we can throw them off for long enough to calculate the jump, then do it.” He didn’t wait for a reply, instead hit the ship-wide intercom and called out a warning to his crew.
“All hands, brace for emergency jump. Damage crews stand by.”
~
“Captain Torres,” Dassiova said coldly, “I am all for tenacity in leadership, but let me be absolutely, one-hundred percent crystal goddamned clear on this; the next time you go off half-cocked and show a lack of planning and good judgement in your decision making, put yours and the lives of other ships’ crews in danger I will personally remove you from command of that ship and put someone there who is more worthy of it. Hell, in fact I’ll give it to Wright and make you serve under him as a Lieutenant. How does that sound?”
Torres didn’t like the sound of it one bit and hoped that the question was rhetorical. Luckily, it was.
“You know where the term ‘half-cocked’ comes from?” the admiral asked him.
“No Sir,” Torres lied, knowing that it wasn’t wise to interrupt an admiral in the process of chewing his ass off with a smart-mouthed answer.
“It stems from an infantry term way back in the sixteen or seventeen hundreds,” he said, “way before the old United States fought for independence against Europe, back when there was an army and a navy – no air force as the only things flying back then were birds – and the soldiers’ personal weapons had to be loaded for every shot. You see, they had to prime the firing pan, pour the charge and the wadding and the bullet down the barrel from the business end, then use a bit of metal called a ramrod to tamp it down so the damn thing didn’t fall out. Inexperienced troops, you know, young kids and battle virgins and the like,” he said, watching Torres for a response to his goading, “well, they had this habit of panicking and firing their gun without remembering to take the ramrod out. That meant they fired it at the enemy and generally couldn’t use their gun again because it was useless. That is what I mean by going off half-cocked.” He paused, taking a few long breaths to recoup his oxygen loss during the rant.
“Now I’ve got enough problems with missing ground teams, enemy fleets, slow-moving space station builders, complaining friendly aliens, and the purse-holding puppeteers both here and back on Earth, without your incompetence causing me a fresh new stomach ulcer, so you fire your goddamned ramrod at the enemy again and you’ll be commanding the mess hall on a support ship, or else making Wright’s goddamned Earl Grey onboard a ship that used to be yours. Dismissed.”
Torres stood fractionally taller, and despite the standing orders not to salute the admiral while at sea, he cracked off a crisp one and held it for three seconds before dropping it and walking out of the room with his face set in a stony mask.
Nothing the admiral could say could assuage the guilt and pain he felt for the loss of his people, something which he knew he felt even more keenly as the Tanto was still missing, like he was stacking failure upon failure, but the loss of his command would sting him forever. It would disgrace him, effectively end his career and even if they let him keep his relatively new rank, which he doubted, then he would likely find himself shut out in the cold from the warm and influential embrace of the UNID, the Intelligence Directorate, who had advanced his career so far in a short time, to see him commanding water resupply runs to Mars without a Fold Drive or access to television archives.
He stalked the corridors of the Indomitable as he headed for the nearest of the three shuttle bays onboard the enormous carrier. Out of one of the rare portholes he saw the progress of the space station, over halfway done he guessed; at least the external construction, anyway. As he neared the shuttle bay, a dark blue figure in a flight suit pushed off lightly from one wall and drop
ped in behind him to match his pace among the busy decks where so many people wearing the same or similar uniforms were going about their tasks. Torres, no stranger to covert surveillance work in crowded areas, made his tail after a hundred paces and two turns. He stopped a junior rating, a kid in comparison, who couldn’t have been much older than he had been when he was first posted to the Lunar base, and asked him for directions to the place he had memorized already. The kid, seeing the commander’s rank on Torres’ flight suit, stammered and pointed as he babbled out the directions and managed to get them wrong. Torres thanked him anyway and carried on, having taken the opportunity to face back the way he had come from during the brief conversation, and seen nothing of any surveillance.
Pretty good, he told himself before resuming his journey.
He arrived at the nearest shuttle bay and cut the line waiting for transport, as he had a dropship waiting for his return. None of the waiting officers and ratings shot him a look for doing so, mostly because anyone with the authority to have their own dropship on standby wasn’t someone you wanted to have pissed at you for an attitude problem. Torres stopped at the foot of the ramp and watched the door behind him, expecting his shadow to appear at any moment, so was startled enough to jump slightly when her voice sounded close behind his ear.
“Boo,” she muttered.
“Dammit, Amare!” He complained as he held a hand on his chest briefly. “Don’t do that. How the hell did y…?”
“Would you ask a magician to reveal the truth behind her tricks?” Eze asked with a wolfishly playful smile. Torres ignored her question, as he wasn’t in the mood to be drawn into the conversation. He didn’t feel much like talking at all, not after having to check he still had an ass, in case the admiral had inadvertently chewed too hard and removed it for him. He hit the button to seal up the ramp, evidently annoying the dropship’s loadmaster, who had just had his only job done for him by a senior officer, and he held the handrail above his head with both hands for lift off.
“Bad, huh?” Eze asked him. Torres gave a slight nod and a grunt which hinted at an affirmative. As the dropship phased through the single layer shields of the carrier and set off towards the Anvil, he remained in unhappy silence. His ground commander, his lover, remained in companionable silence beside him as they crossed the distance to the massive forge vessel where their much-loved Ichi was currently suspended in a dry dock, undergoing emergency repairs.
They had a ceremony for the eight crew members lost during the Va’alen ambush but only had two bodies to bury at sea as the other six were sucked out violently into the void of space, where they instantaneously froze solid as they suffocated. As far as violent deaths go, it must have been pretty awful to know you were going to get vented. As for their attempt to degrade the enemy numbers, the sensor data had been pored over by, not only their own crew but by that of the dedicated intelligence cell on the Indomitable, and their hopes of destroying forty percent or more of the Va’alen strike fleet were dashed when the true estimation was closer to twelve percent.
Twelve percent of an armada still too big to defend against was pointless. It wasn’t worth the near catastrophic damage to their recon ship, which was useless in defense of the rest of the fleet when it was in dry dock, and it wasn’t worth the lives of eight crew members.
“That’s nineteen now,” Torres said with a dry throat. Eze said nothing, knowing what numbers he was referring to. “Nineteen of my crew dead or lost. My ship battered to hell, my shuttle lost along with some of our best people, and my command heading for the crapper.” Eze, unsympathetic to any hint of self-pity, said nothing. She knew she should have said something; Brandt would have told him to get a grip, to focus on things he could have a positive effect on and forget the rest, but the words escaped her. Not caring if the sulking loadmaster saw her or not, she took a step closer and snaked an arm around him to give comfort to both of them.
Chapter Fourteen – Abandoned Va’alen outpost
Zero’s obsessive organization of their defenses was a fieldcraft masterclass in fast-forward. Within thirty minutes he had fixed to get the supplies from the recovered crate brought down by pairs, as one lot carried and the other covered, he had secured the two gaps found in the perimeter fencing and cleared every inch of the T-shaped building that appeared to be a small alien outpost and was probably designed for research. Brandt had been working with Paterson on their biggest discovery; biggest since finding a half-dead but still lethal Va’alen warrior and a trio of carnivorous ostrich-type birds, that was, and she focused on the energy reading Specter had first detected.
“Okay, smart guy,” Brandt said either hand on her hips and taking bigger breaths to suck as much oxygen from the nitrogen-rich air as possible, “tell me what I’m looking at.”
“Okay,” Paterson said, his own helmet removed also, “the eddy current caused by the magnet generates a braking force against the copper.”
“Dude,” Brandt said with an eyebrow raised, “English.” Paterson thought for a moment, his face resetting before he began again affecting a voice like a dumb but excited cartoon character.
“Err, duh magnet inside duh copper ball goes, err, spinny-spinny and err–” He stopped quickly as Brandt took a pace towards him and turned her body slightly sideways. He was smart enough and still recalled enough of his time in active service to know when he was about to get smacked.
“Alright, alright!” he said backing off with his hands up, “Way back when, like the 1800s I think, a guy called Lenz figured out that overlapping magnetic fields did… stuff…”
“I assume by ‘stuff’ you mean complicated physics shit I won’t understand?” Brandt said in a dangerously measured tone.
“Exactly,” Peterson answered, continuing before he fetched a lesson in cranial kinetics, “basically, the two objects spinning against each other are generating electrical fields. This is a generator, and I think it’s the same kind as they put in their ships.” Brandt had a whole dropship full of questions, but she limited them to what she needed to know right then and how it affected their mission. She looked up at the brassy-looking sphere which seemed to hum imperceptibly as it spun lazily. Through the round holes in it she could see the darker, almost blue shade of the cube of metal suspended inside. The inner piece, the powerful magnet as she had been informed, also spun around but faster than the spherical housing it hung inside of. The pattern of the spin it was in seemed almost random, but as she widened her eyes and allowed her sharp focus to fade, her vision melted a little to show the magnet more clearly, instead of concentrating on the glimpses through the holes. She had no idea how a spinning magnet inside a metal ball could generate power, let alone enough to power a space-faring ship, but she knew enough to know not to concern herself with too many ‘hows’ and focus more on ‘whats’ and ‘whys’.
“So,” she said, changing the subject back to something more pressing, “can you turn it into a battery bank for us?” Paterson frowned, as though his friend had suggested pulling pages from a rare and treasured book they had found to use as toilet paper.
“I need to study it a little,” he said reluctantly, “figure out the controls so it doesn’t go boom.”
“It could do that?” Brandt asked, her eyes widening.
“Remember the sensor readings of the booby-trapped ship back on b?” He asked, unnecessarily shortening the name of Proxima b, the dark planet under the glow of the red dwarf, and confusing her for a moment. She did remember, and nodded to Paterson for him to go on.
“Well that was either a separate bomb rigged to blow on a kind of anti-tamper device or it was the energy source …collapsing.”
“What are the odds?” she asked him, wanting things simplified as she always did to make her decisions quicker and easier; a born officer.
“Best case? This thing malfunctions and we’re looking at an EMP the size of our ship. The Ichi, that is. Worst case?” He said nothing but opened his eyes wide, puffed his cheeks out like a hamster a
nd mimed an explosion with his hands growing outwards until he stopped them and slammed them back together with a sudden clap. Brandt understood.
“Try not to screw it up,” she told him simply as she walked out of the chamber and cycled the menu options on her forearm device to find Zero’s suit on the comm link. She ordered him to her and heard him realigning their temporary defenses to cover his position. Brandt waited for him outside the small structure, built like on a single level in the shape of a T and raised from the ground on adjustable legs like landing gear. It annoyed her how much she relied on the HUD instead of on her senses as Zero approached and startled her slightly. She shook it off, annoyed with herself for becoming reliant on the technology, especially as she was running at less than forty percent battery charge.
She filled him in on what they had found, and added that hopefully it could be used to charge their suits and mech.
“It’s going to be an issue if we can’t,” she told him, “because the temperature alone will seriously damage us if we have to walk around in our own skin.” Zero didn’t need that explaining to him but he kept his mouth shut. He had removed his helmet with the eye controls to talk to her, revealing scruffy hair that looked even worse than usual, but power was a serious concern of his too. He had adjusted the temperature controls of the suit by a few degrees, which he knew he could cope with; too cold in the night and too hot in the day meant that the suit was working constantly to maintain a steady body temperature, which drained vital power.
He was less concerned with his own comfort, as the sweat caused by the humidity under the tree canopy proved, but more concerned with losing the HUD capability of his suit and the uplink it had to his rifle’s scope. He needed that power to give him targeting arcs and calculate trajectories as well as emit the faint scrambling fields that minimized the chances of his prone form being detected by the enemy before he had the opportunity to offer group discounts on lobotomies and decapitations via the medium of fast moving 12mm.
Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3 Page 14