| |
Delacor drummed her fingers on the chair’s armrest as she waited to hear if Coral Sea had been successful. The conversation between the shuttle and the station had stopped. The last transmission from the station suggested that the Base CO had been brought up to date on the sighting. What his reaction had been was unknown.
“Coming up on the next target,” said the HO.
“Good. Let’s get the team aboard fast, Helm,” said Delacor. Two frigates had been taken so far. This would be the third. She had already decided not to bother staying in the moon’s shadow. If the station knew about the Quentin Magnus, then she might as well just go for the nearest frigate that they had access codes for.
––––––––
“FLIGHT OPS TO TRUMBULL. Get your tail back here asap. HQ had been notified, so the alert frigates should be here in about twenty minutes. I don’t think you want to be out there when the shooting starts.”
“Damn right, I don’t! We’re heading back now!” said Trumbull.
––––––––
DELACOR CURSED UNDER her breath and at the same time thanked the Gods of War for this break. The station shouldn’t have revealed the fact that their message got through. By listening in on the transmissions between station and shuttle, she was now alerted to the fact that reinforcements were on their way. Unfortunately, that meant that the operation would have to be cut short. The 20 minutes they had left before trouble showed up wouldn’t give them enough time to snatch six more frigates. But wait, might they have enough time?
The station CO should have realized that transmitting an omnidirectional signal in the clear to the shuttle would risk it being overheard by the hijackers. The station could have sent the message by tight-beam comlaser or used a coded signal. Delacor tried to put herself in the boots of the station CO. If the station’s L-wave array had been destroyed before they could alert Earth, the CO might have deliberately allowed the transmission to be overheard in order to scare the hijackers away. Another possibility was that the CO knew that the reinforcements would be minimal, resulting in a high probability that those reinforcements could be overpowered by more than one hijacked frigate. It was even possible that Earth had sent a response ordering the CO to send the omnidirectional message. Longitudinal waves would have covered the distance between Triton and Earth in less than two seconds.
With the latest Intel reports suggesting that Arronax was gathering all available naval assets in preparation for an attack on Corona, Delacor concluded that it was highly likely that enough frigates would be on alert status in Earth orbit to pose a serious threat to the mission. She had to assume that the reinforcement threat was real and adjust her actions accordingly. After all, trying to grab six frigates was only part of the mission.
“Mission Leader to Team Three Leader.”
“We’re ready to board Dogger Bank, Mission Leader.”
“As soon as you confirm that you have control, I want you to power up the ship and execute Blowback. Looks like reinforcements are on the way, and I don’t think we’ll be able to grab any more frigates.”
“Understood. How long do we have before the company shows up?”
“Not sure, so let’s assume fifteen minutes from now. Make sure you’re not still in orbit when the time runs out.”
“Got it! Looks like we’re about to dock with the Dogger!”
“Good luck, Xavier,” said Delacor. “Mission Leader to Taranto.”
“Taranto here, Mission Leader.”
“We’ve run out of time. Reinforcements are on their way. Commence Blowback now and be out of orbit in less than thirteen minutes.”
“Thirteen minutes, understood.”
“Keep this channel open. I’m waiting to re-establish contact with Coral Sea.”
––––––––
TERRANOVA NODDED WHEN the tactical display finally found the Quentin Magnus as she left the shadow and was already partway around the other side of the moon.
“Coral Sea to Mission Leader.”
“What took you so long, Marcus?” said Delacor in a peeved tone.
“Orbital mechanics took me so long. Station antenna array has been destroyed.”
“Apparently too late. We overheard the station warn the shuttle to head back to the barn because reinforcements have been called in. Their ETA is now less than ten minutes. Taranto and Dogger Bank are already executing Blowback. You’re ordered to do so as well, but be out of orbit before the posse arrives. Clear?”
“Yes, that’s clear, Mission Leader.” Terranova turned to Martell. “Okay, Judith, you know what to do.”
She nodded. “I guess this would be what you’d call a target-rich environment. I have a possible target coming within optimum range. All three lasers are charged and are locked on. Firing...now!”
Terranova watched the tactical display. Martell had targeted the nearest frigate. At this range, with the target following a known ballistic trajectory, there was no risk of missing at all. All three lasers hit the ship. The green icon on the display began flashing to indicate debris and venting of atmosphere from the target. Blowback was the operation to prevent Earth from using the frigates that couldn’t be hijacked. With only three frigates under control and time running out fast, he doubted if all 52 remaining frigates could be damaged, but at least half was a feasible goal.
––––––––
DELACOR WAS PACING again. Quentin Magnus was not trying to dock with another frigate. There just wasn’t time for that. What she really wanted to do was order the freighter to leave Triton’s orbit and head for home, but as Mission Leader, it would be irresponsible for her to leave the field of battle while three of her teams were still executing Blowback. Yet pulling them away now would leave far too many frigates undamaged, which would call into question the success of the whole operation. No, she had to stay for a while longer. The question was how long. Freighters, because of their size and larger power plants, could generate a steeper L-drive angle in the space-time continuum and therefore accelerate faster than frigates. But the ship had no defenses against a missile attack, and her hull was much thinner than a frigate hull. If it was hit by a laser, the damage would be far more severe.
There were six minutes until her deadline, and then the five minutes that she’d kept as a safety factor, before the estimated arrival time of the reinforcements. The tactical display showed that Taranto would soon start to curve back around Triton, which would leave it facing the wrong direction when the Navy ships arrived. That must not be allowed to happen.
“Mission Leader to Taranto. Adjust your trajectory to stay pointed away from Earth. Leave orbit if you have to. If you continue your orbit, you’ll be heading towards the enemy ships when they arrive.”
“Understood, Mission Leader. We’ll decelerate to zero and let the targets come to us. Over.”
“That’s fine, but don’t stay past my deadline. Out.” The sidebar now showed four minutes to the deadline. Seven frigates had been damaged so far. With Taranto now slowing down, Coral Sea and Dogger Bank would soon catch up to her, and that meant that lots of frigates would be safe from attack while on the other side of the moon, but it couldn’t be helped. Delacor sat back down at her command station and tried not to look at the chronometer again.
––––––––
SUKHOV LEANED FORWARD to get a better look at the tactical situation as far as the ship’s optical and radar instruments could determine. Savo Island was 277,000 kilometers away from the station and still decelerating. Radar data was intermittent due to the distance. By the time the radar signals returned, the signal strength was so weak that the ship’s receivers had trouble picking them up. Signal strength would improve as the ship got closer, but it was still about four minutes away from a zero-velocity rendezvous with the station.
“Still no response from the station?” he asked the com technician.
“No, sir. Either they’re not able to respond, or their main antenna isn’t working. They do have secondary transmission systems, but those are low-power with limited range.”
“And nobody’s scanning us?”
“No, sir.”
“Okay. Let’s send the ship to Battle Stations, XO.”
It took almost two minutes to get the ship to Battle Stations, and Sukhov made a mental note to conduct drills more often. Radar returns were now showing one ship boosting out of orbit on a heading that suggested they were trying to run for it. Their velocity was still low relative to his ship. If he wanted to catch it, then his ship should stop decelerating and start accelerating again. But doing that would mean not being able to check on the condition of the station and its crew. For all he knew, they might have been attacked and need assistance.
“Anything from the station?”
The com tech had a look of intense concentration. “I’m not sure, sir. I’m hearing very faint voice transmissions. Can’t make out what they’re saying.”
“Keep trying to contact them. I need to know what’s happening on that station.”
––––––––
TERRANOVA WATCHED THE tactical display update itself with the latest data. Someone was scanning the whole area with radar from a distance, and it looked like that someone was decelerating too. It had to be the reinforcements that the station had mentioned, but there was only one source of radar signals. Did that mean there was only one ship, or that the commander of a group of ships was being cagy in order to deceive the hijackers?
As the last ship to leave orbit, Coral Sea had taken on the role of rear guard. Delacor’s orders had been straightforward. Don’t let any pursuing ships catch up to Quentin Magnus, and avoid combat if possible. He didn’t bother to point out to her that those two orders could be mutually exclusive. His interpretation was that protecting the freighter came first. Coral Sea was accelerating as fast as it could, but it was clear that the incoming radar source still had a much higher velocity.
“Can they see us?” asked Terranova.
“Affirmative, Commander.”
“Then we won’t be losing any advantage if we start scanning them. Activate rear radar. Let’s see how many of them there are.”
The answer came back two seconds later. One ship? Fifty-five ships in Earth orbit and they only sent one ship? He didn’t see how that was possible, unless there hadn’t been 55 frigates in Earth orbit when the call for help had arrived. If that was in fact the case, then it strongly hinted that a large part of that fleet was on its way somewhere else. I wonder how aggressive that frigate commander is. He’s got the velocity advantage and could catch us if he wanted to, but we have positional advantage. His frigate will enter our missile range before Coral Sea enters his. Do I want him to try to intercept us? No, I don’t think I do.
––––––––
SUKHOV STEPPED OVER to the Communications Station. “Let me hear what the station is sending us.” The com tech handed him a set of headphones. That static was awful. Whatever transmitter the station was using was so low power that most of the words were garbled. He thought he heard ‘station life——undamaged’ but wasn’t sure. If the station’s life support was operating normally, then that implied that the hull of habitable sections of the station hadn’t been breached, and no station personnel were injured. He hoped his deduction was correct. It wasn’t so much that he really wanted to go after that fleeing ship. It was more the case of his suspicion that his superiors would expect him to give chase even if that other ship was a captured frigate and therefore equally armed. He handed the headphones back.
“We’re going after that ship. HO, stop our decel and orient our heading for a long-range interception, then step on the gas.”
With the Helm Officer’s acknowledgement, Sukhov decided it was time to inform the crew of what was happening and what was about to happen.
––––––––
TERRANOVA LOOKED UP when the tactical display pinged to notify a status change. The incoming frigate had stopped decelerating! He held his breath as he waited to see if his hunch as to what would happen next was correct. The display pinged again. The ship was now accelerating, and its projected course had changed to more closely match Coral Sea’s.
“He’s coming after us,” said Martell quietly.
“Yeah. Look’s like you and I are going to get some valuable combat experience.”
On the surface, the words were positive, but Martell thought she might be hearing a note of foreboding, too. “At least we’re not outnumbered,” she said.
“And I thank the Gods of War for that. Let’s see both our effective missile ranges.”
Two white circles appeared on the tactical display. The circle around Coral Sea was larger because it had the advantage of running away from any missiles fired by the other ship, while the other ship would be moving towards any missiles fired by Coral Sea. The other ship was still outside of Coral Sea’s effective range.
“With his velocity overtake advantage, it won’t take him long to bring us into his range,” said Terranova.
“That’s right, Commander. If his overtake is big enough, he can cut his acceleration to zero in order to launch missiles and still reduce the range while he coasts.”
“But we don’t have to stop accelerating in order to fire missiles if we first flip end for end and engage our rear L-drive,” said Terranova.
Martell nodded. It was a bizarre way to fight a space battle all right.
Coral Sea, like all FTL ships had two methods of propulsion. For short term maneuvers at modest speeds, there was the electro-gravitic drive, which caused electrons to migrate from the front of the ship to the rear, giving the front a positive charge and the rear a negative charge. This caused the space-time continuum in front of the ship to dip and at the rear to rise, which effectively made the ship ‘surf’ down the ‘wave’ of the fabric of space. And since the ship itself was generating the wave, it would keep right on surfing as long as the electrons were bunched up at the front. Maximum acceleration using this method was a modest 5Gs.
The other method used beams of longitudinal waves to intersect at a point in front of the ship. This had the effect of distorting the same space-time continuum but in a more structured and radical way. Instead of a gently curving slope, the distortion took the shape of a steep slope with a constant angle. The steepness meant that the ship would accelerate much faster, and the constant angle of the slope meant that the entire ship would be subject to exactly the same amount of acceleration, including everything and everyone in it. Given that maximum acceleration could be as high as 987Gs, it was important that the rear of the ship be pulled forward at the same rate as the front of the ship. If the slope of the continuum had followed the usual curve, the effective pull of gravity would have declined the further back one travelled in the ship, and the stresses on the ship’s hull and spine would have potentially caused catastrophic failures.
What physicists were astonished to discover was that special relativity did not apply when a ship was sliding down the steep slope generated by the longitudinal waves. It took them a while to understand why. Any method of propulsion that did not affect space-time, such as chemical rockets, pushed an object through the ether of space and at relativistic speeds; the ‘time’ portion of the space-time continuum stretched, thereby causing time to pass more slowly for the object. When a ship was sliding down the continuum slope, it was the shape of the continuum that was pulling the ship along, and therefore the ‘time’ portion was not stretched, and no slowing of time was observed.
This property of longitudinal propulsion was not limited by the speed of light. As long as the space in front of the ship had a steep slope, the ship would continue to accelerate right past the speed of light, and once past that mark, the ‘effective’ acceleration—as defined from the point of view of a hypothetical external observer—multiplied exponentially. Virtual velocities of hundreds of times the speed of light could be achieved within a few days time and were referred to as uber-space. At the halfway point, the longitudinal beams would be pointed aft, and the steep slope down would instantly flip to a steep slope ‘up’ that would cause the ship to decelerate just as quickly. The slope of space-time generated by the L-drive was shaped in such a way that particles of dust or gases in the ship’s path were diverted around the ship, and if those particles had a positive charge, they would be pulled in behind the ship and accelerated along with the ship. Whenever a ship dropped down below light speed, the tailwind of charged particles would continue to move faster than light for a fraction of a second and would generate a burst of blue light that was called Cherenkov radiation. Quentin Magnus had gone sub-light far enough away from Earth that its burst of Cherenkov radiation had not been detected.
––––––––
SUKHOV HAD A HUNCH he knew what the other ship’s CO was up to when the fleeing ship cut acceleration to zero and then resumed acceleration about a minute later. I’ll bet he’s flipped the ship so that his missile tube is pointed aft. That means he can fire missiles and keep accelerating backwards at the same time, and that also means I’m chasing another frigate, not a freighter.
He checked both ships’ relative velocities. Savo Island’s current speed was now up to 3,466 kilometers per sec while the bogey was only at 1,734 kps. Both ships were adding 9.6 kilometers per second every second, which meant the difference between the two velocities would remain constant as long as both ships continued to accelerate at 987Gs.
“How long until that bogey is in effective range?” asked Sukhov.
“Ninety-seven seconds.”
“And until we’re in their range?”
“Fifteen seconds,” said the TO.
“Okay, fire lasers at their missiles as soon as TacComp says it has a lock, TO.”
“Understood, sir. They’ve fired a missile!”
––––––––
CORAL SEA’S DISPLAYED pinged again. Terranova nodded. The other CO was doing exactly what he would do in that position. The other ship was no longer using its L-drive to accelerate. It had just switched over to the EG-drive with only 5Gs of acceleration, which was low enough that it could still fire missiles. Plus, it now had a limited ability to conduct evasive maneuvers to complicate his own missile’s terminal guidance calculations. His first missile was accelerating at 1,597Gs. It had launched with the same backward velocity as the ship, and it would take three minutes forty seconds to neutralize all that backward momentum, but that didn’t actually matter. With the enemy ship bearing down so quickly, it would encounter the missile as it was still moving backwards.
“Thirty-four seconds to interception!” yelled Martell. “Second missile is loaded!”
“No sense in holding on to our missiles, Lieutenant. Fire them as soon as they’re ready.” With only four of the damn things on board, we’ll shoot ourselves dry pretty damn quick.
––––––––
“A HIT! WE GOT THAT MISSILE!” shouted the TO. The cheer from the rest of the Bridge personnel died away quickly when the bogey fired its second missile. He’s trying to destroy us before we can launch any of our own, but we’ll get at least one off!
“As soon as we have the range, fire and keep firing,” said Sukhov.
Coral Sea’s second missile was hit by Savo Island’s lasers just after she fired her own first missile. Unlike the first missile hit by her lasers, this time the lasers didn’t just damage the guidance system thereby making the missile useless. The warhead of the second missile was hit in just the right way to detonate the fission device. The explosion was powerful enough to damage Savo Island’s first missile’s guidance system but not the ship itself. Sukhov’s Tactical Officer was smart enough to realize that firing his second missile would have to wait until the ship was past the exploding warhead’s blast radius to prevent it from being damaged too. By the time it was safe to fire that second missile, the other ship had already fired its third and was now firing its fourth.
Terranova looked at Martell. “Lasers ready?” he asked.
“Ready as they’ll ever be. It’ll be nice if we can do some evasive maneuvers too.”
“At the rate that ship is closing the range, if we drop down to five fucking Gs now, we’ll end up in a laser duel before you know it.”
“Here they come,” said Martell. “Lasers are locked on! Firing!”
“We got a hit!” she said. “Missile is no longer maneuvering! They’ve just fired number three!”
––––––––
“WE MISSED!” SHOUTED Savo Island’s TO. “Recharging! Firing again!”
The tactical display flashed as the warhead of the bogey’s third missile exploded, but this time it had gotten a lot closer to Savo Island. The ship bucked as the blast wave overpowered the inertial dampeners. As the dampeners regained control, Sukhov waited for the display to come back to life, but it remained dark.
“What’s happening, TO?” He tried to keep his voice calm.
“Targeting radar is shorted out! We’re blind!”
Sukhov felt a shiver go up his spine. With no targeting radar to pinpoint the position of incoming missiles for the lasers to aim at, there wasn’t a hope of stopping the fourth missile, which was only seconds away now. “No. We’re not blind. We’re fucked.”
––––––––
TERRANOVA WATCHED AS his fourth missile and the bogey’s third passed each other. His missile would reach its target first, and to his surprise, the other ship failed to stop it. The missile icon merged with the ship icon and both flared into an expanding blast circle with nothing left when it faded. That just left their third and final missile to deal with.
“We’re locking on,” said Martell in a now very calm voice. “Locked and firing. A hit. That missile’s coasting now.”
Terranova shut down the L-drive, activated the EG-drive, and told the auto-pilot to veer off to avoid the highly-unlikely chance that the damaged third missile would collide with the ship.
He activated the ship’s internal com system. “Terranova to crew. The pursuing ship has been destroyed, and the battle’s over. Stand down from Battle Stations. That’s all for now.”
