Susan obsessed over the tactical plot, desperately searching for something, anything she might have overlooked that could give them an extra sliver of hope against what was coming down on her and her friends and crew a thousand kilometers behind her.
Ansari would take the brunt of it, but Halcyon had to be ready for any strays that got through and reverted to targets of opportunity, and it had a much less robust CiWS system and no counter-missiles for the task. In all likelihood, Ansari was about to fall to the swarm of predators coming their way and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Then, exposed and alone, she’d have to order her little hijacked frigate, never designed or intended for extended operations in deep space, to bubble out to God-only-knew where as a fugitive, without hope of support or resupply, onboard a ship where her allies numbered less than a dozen and the original crew was sure to try and retake their home.
If she’d ever been in a more precarious situation, it didn’t spring immediately to mind.
“Ansari just deployed their reflector cloud,” Okuda said. “Our sensors are blind to anything happening on the other side of it. We’re tied into the feed from their towed array and surviving recon platforms, for as long as they last.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Culligan, get our countermeasures ready for launch. Charts, charge our rings and be prepared to bubble out at a moment’s notice.”
“Course, mum?” her pilot from the assault shuttle asked. Like all marine aviators, he’d been cross-trained in handling capital ships, because in combat, you just never knew who the next man up would have to be. Not that his instructors had ever guessed they were training a pirate. No, not a pirate, Susan reprimanded herself. Perez had resigned her commission the moment she ordered the shuttle she believed Susan on destroyed, whether she realized it or not, making Susan the rightful, legal ranking officer in the combat area. Her people were not pirates. They were in the right. They’d liberated the Halcyon from mutineers.
Whether a court-martial inquiry would agree was a question for a later date. Right now, she’d be grateful just to live long enough to see one.
“Our antimatter stores are down by a third. Make course for the AM factory in Grendel orbit. We can probably top off before Allen realizes where we’ve bubbled to. Maybe even offload our potential troublemakers.”
“Aye, mum.”
Unspoken was the fact off-loading their “troublemakers” would leave them below a skeleton crew for even such a small ship, but it was important to prioritize existential crises and tackle them one at a time instead of all at once.
“First contact with the missile wave in T-minus five minutes, four-three seconds,” Culligan said. “Ansari main laser array is engaging the leading missiles.”
Susan fought the urge to order the Halcyon out of line to try and pick off a few birds with her own laser, but the Zephyr-class fast frigate didn’t have emitters in the rear forty-five degrees of her aspect, and its thrust vectoring was limited to fifteen degrees off-bore, so she couldn’t crab-walk the ship enough to get a firing solution with one of her lateral emitters, which would mean cutting thrust, turning to face the threat, shrinking the distance between them and the Ansari protecting them, and reducing their response time for any missiles that did get past.
No go. All there was left to do now was run for their lives.
“Bubble burst! Bubble burst!” Culligan shouted. “Bearing ahead two-one-eight by zero-zero-seven. Range, seventeen thousand kilometers. Four-hundred-thousand-ton range.”
Susan’s heart sank through the deck plating. So, Perez had a reserve in hiding and called it up, and they were running straight into the teeth of it. They had twelve missiles left onboard after the surprise attack on Carnegie, in addition to their laser array. A paltry sum for dealing with anything bigger than a corsair’s cobbled-together defenses. But if she was going to die, it would be with empty magazines.
“Okuda. Get our remaining birds in space and warm up the primary—”
“What the hell?” Culligan abruptly cut Susan off.
“You have something to share, Lieutenant?”
“Sorry, mum. The ship, it’s not CCDF. It’s … it’s a Xre. Unknown configuration.”
Susan jumped out of her chair, pulse racing as a glimmer of hope punched through the despair, and looked at the raw data coming in from their sensors. Of course it registered as unknown. The fleet recognition database hadn’t had time to go through an update yet.
“It’s not unknown, that’s the bloody Chusexx!” she shouted triumphantly. Then, a very scary thought occurred to her. “Open a channel to the Xre cruiser.”
“What?!”
“Just do it!”
Culligan’s face looked down in disbelief at her hands as if they were moving of their own volition. “Channel open.”
“Derstu Thuk! This is Captain Kamala onboard the Zephyr-class frigate. Repeat, aboard the frigate. We’ve taken her over. The Zephyr is a friendly. Do not engage. Please acknowledge.”
Susan’s breath caught in her throat as she waited for a response. Finally, the speakers crackled. “Susan Captain. How did you respond ‘Forked Path Lament’?”
Her brain raced. It was Thuk’s voice, probably. She was as sure as she could be with such limited experience with the species. He was testing her. But forked path? What the hell was he talking about? Forked path, different paths, taking different roads, splitting up. Ah! The song they sang when they parted ways.
“A twenty-one-gun salute,” she yelled into the mic.
“Much well. Move frigate and Ansari to side. We salute enemy.” The line went dead.
“Captain,” Culligan said. “They’re charging their rings again.”
“Oh, shit. You heard him, get out of the way. Tell Ansari to follow our lead, questions can wait.”
The nimble little frigate answered the helm and dove hard to port to clear the path for the newcomer to engage the Paul Allen. Ansari followed suit more slowly, owing to her larger mass and the grip Newton continued to have over objects in motion.
“Chusexx, we’re clear. You are free to maneuver.”
No one was prepared for what came next.
“Two sling bolts are in position, Derstu,” Kivits announced. “The weapon is charged.”
“Nearing alignment with the target,” said the tiller attendant.
Thuk watched the display with both excitement and something like sympathy. The enormous human assault ship, the Paul Allen according to Susan, continued charging forward heedlessly to close the range and engage the new threat without a care in the world. And why shouldn’t they? Even outnumbered now three-to-one by the Chusexx, Ansari, and Halcyon, one of those behemoths could be reasonably confident of victory in any normal engagement.
What no one outside of Thuk’s harmony knew was just how abnormal this fight was going to be. Provided everything actually worked.
“Alignment achieved. Ready to loose.”
Thuk looked at Kivits, then pointed at the icon of the Allen. “You wanted something to test it on. We could hardly ask for a better target than one of their newest assault ships running straight for us.”
“Agreed.” Kivits rubbed a mandible. “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be while coming to the rescue of a human ship, however.”
“The universe is infinite. Dulac, you may loose the weapon.”
As had happened hundreds of times in the past, and would hundreds of times more in the future, warfare changed with the pull of a trigger. Outside, in the small rings built into the Chusexx’s main rings, a “sling bolt” the length of five adult Xre was enveloped inside its own miniature seedpod and given a push. It was not a javelin, what the humans called a “missile.” It had no onboard propulsion. Indeed, from its vantage point, it never moved at all. It had no warhead of explosives, either conventional or nuclear, because it didn’t need them. It had no guidance system, because it couldn’t maneuver even if it wanted to. It had no AI to help it identify decoys and defeat countermeasures. It scarcely had a computer at all. Instead, its entire interior was filled with spool capacitors and a tiny amount of negative matter to let the bolt pierce the seedpod, tripped by a very clever proximity sensor built to detect the slightest changes in the seedpod’s shape that would indicate it was interacting with a mass outside.
And that’s all it needed to be.
What happened next occurred in a space of time so brief as to defy description. Traveling at many hundreds of multiples of light-speed, the bolt covered the distance between the Chusexx and the Paul Allen near-instantaneously. The moment the seedpod contacted the hull of the carrier, the sensor inside tripped and tore open the seedpod. There was no explosion in the conventional sense, at least not at first. Instead, the collapsing seedpod warped and distorted a small area of local space with such violence that anything within the field of effect was torn apart down to nearly the molecular level.
This occurred between the Allen’s gamma ray shield cone and its first tier of antimatter containment vessels, rupturing them and releasing an apocalyptic amount of energy, instantly destroying the fusion rocket cluster, AM and He3 storage tanks, and shattering the great ship’s keel. Usually, even a loss of antimatter containment wasn’t enough to destroy an entire ship, as the shield cone was designed to direct the force of the explosion away from the engineering and primary hulls, leaving half a ship unable to fight or maneuver, but still with reserve power for life support and communications.
But a third of the shield had been ripped apart by the seedpod collapse, channeling the force of the blast deep into the engineering hull, setting off secondary explosions as drone platforms, probes, counter-missile magazines, and eventually shuttle fuel reserves and ground support munitions all added to the cascading carnage.
In the span of a breath, all that remained of the Paul Allen, the most powerful warship humanity had ever put to space, was a gutted, drifting shell of armor plating and melted structural steel.
There were no survivors. There was no reason to loose the second bolt.
The stunned silence in Ansari’s CIC was total. Long faces stared at the tactical plot, at each other, or at nothing at all. Miguel was the first to compose himself. “We still have birds incoming, everyone.”
That snapped them out of it. There were indeed still seventy-three orphaned missiles from the Allen coming their way. But with their mother’s datalinks now silent and reverted to autonomous control, they quickly lost cohesion and became easy prey for Warner as her fingers danced across the CiWS and counter-missile controls. She stopped the last missile a few hundred meters short of optimal detonation range. The only injury they sustained was from missile fragments peppering the hull like birdshot.
“Damage report,” Miguel requested calmly.
“We’re down a lidar array portside forward. And one of our CiWS modules took a hit to its independent radar, but we can tie it into the rest of the sensor net. Minor damage to half a dozen compartments, showing loss of pressure in four of them, but slow. Holes can’t be very big, they’ll be easy to patch. One casualty reported, a boomer tech took shrapnel to the calf. Headed to the infirmary now, not life-threatening.”
Miguel shook his head in disbelief. By rights, he should be surrounded by fire and screaming and alarms, if he was still alive at all. Instead …
“Sir, Halcyon Actual on the line.”
“Put her through.”
“Miguel?” Susan’s voice said through the room. “Are you seeing this?”
“Seeing it. Still not sure about believing it.”
“I know what you mean. We’re showing some light venting coming from your hull. How’s the damage?”
“Minimal. All hands accounted for. We made it. Now I’d just like to know how we made it.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Susan asked. “Our new Xre friends were holding out on us. Those little rings in their rings weren’t for FTL maneuvering. They’re an Alcubierre railgun.”