Blackbeard superbox, p.36
Blackbeard Superbox, page 36
“This is not my fight. I’m warning you, I’ll go. You won’t see me again.”
“Commander,” Drake said to Tolvern without taking his eyes off Catarina. “Get engineering. Tell them to shunt all available power to the plasma engines. We’ll need all the acceleration we can get.” He noted the dismay on Catarina’s face and wondered if he was seeing her for the last time. “I wish you all the best, Captain Vargus.”
He cut the link to her ship.
“Manx, send a message to Vigilant. Tell Rutherford we’re coming. Tolvern, I want us cloaked, and that means you two—” a nod at his pilot and subpilot— “will need to take us there indirectly. We don’t know if those alien craft have detected us, but there’s no need to make it easy for them.”
Drake made the call to engineering himself. He gave Barker a brief sketch, and told him to come to the war room in twenty minutes for more instructions. But just then, Nyb Pim sent over his best estimate for when they’d be in range of the enemy weapons. The answer was, too soon. They were energy weapons and traveled at the speed of light.
“No, hold that,” Drake told Barker. “Don’t come up, go to the gunnery. Call the bridge when you get there.”
“Orient Tiger is coming around, sir,” Tolvern said. She didn’t sound pleased. “Vargus is following us. So much for her precious tyrillium barge.”
Drake glanced at his computer to confirm that Catarina was following. Good.
Chapter Nineteen
Once Drake had sent word to Rutherford, his old friend sent back a series of hasty messages with sketchy information about the enemy. Not Hroom, not human. The ships had apparently destroyed an empire sloop of war and a smaller merchant vessel. A surviving Hroom, frothing in the grip of a sugar withdrawal, had raved something about “Apex”, but Rutherford could make no sense of it.
Meanwhile, the two pursuing vessels had been jumping in and out of range to probe and attack Vigilant. Yes, jumping; the aliens seemed capable of creating their own jump points at will. Drake didn’t have time to fully consider the ramifications, but it was disruptive technology. It could change everything. Further, the craft had energy weapons that could penetrate tyrillium armor, and they seemed able to slap down Vigilant’s torpedoes and missiles.
Rutherford’s only advantage was his ship’s greater speed. The enemy didn’t have equivalent engines, but didn’t need them, either. Their jump points were loose, and they passed through them at roughly five percent light speed. The way the two slender craft kept coming and going, Rutherford thought they were toying with him, could destroy him at any time.
Drake was troubled by this information and wished he had time to take his officers into the war room to settle them. Worry marked their faces, and even Nyb Pim was licking his lips with his long, purple tongue. Barker’s voice was tight with stress when he called in from the gunnery. Drake closed his console before addressing them so he wouldn’t be distracted by the stream of data.
“We don’t know what we’re facing,” he said, “but there’s no reason to panic. Any enemy has limitations, and it’s our job to figure out what those are. Some of you must have ideas. Talk to me.”
“We haven’t seen what kinetics do,” Barker said over the com. “Shooting down a missile or two is one thing, but can these aliens handle a barrage of cobalt and depleted uranium from our main batteries? They look fragile.”
“First, we’d have to get close enough for cannon,” Drake said. “How quickly can they jump away from us? Smythe, see if you can figure out how long it takes them to make their jump points. Is it instantaneous? A predictable distance ahead of their ships?”
“I’m checking, sir.”
“What about a laser?” Tolvern asked.
“What about it?” Drake asked.
“If they have energy weapons, if they have some way of burning through tyrillium, then maybe they’re vulnerable to laser fire themselves.”
“It’s worth a try. Barker, what have we got?”
“Not much,” the man said through the com. “A 50-kilowatt laser is our strongest. Good enough to finish off injured craft, but any sort of shielding at all is going to block it.”
“Get it ready, just in case. Also, load our heaviest shot into the batteries. Those ships can’t have much mass. When we hit them, it had better be hard. Knock them around a bit, and maybe Rutherford or Vargus will get a clear shot before they pick themselves off the floor.”
The thought of mass and inertia brought something else to mind. Or rather, almost to mind. There was an idea niggling at the edge of consciousness that he couldn’t quite grab.
The door to the bridge opened, and in walked one of the two Hroom that Drake had hired on San Pablo. It was the taller one, the female, and she approached in long strides. She said something in passing to Nyb Pim, and he responded likewise, both of them speaking in the Hroom tongue that sounded like words mixed with hoots and whistles. She nodded at the captain in greeting.
“I understand you might know something about alien tech near this sector,” Drake said.
“I have heard of it.”
“From recent encounters?”
“Not that I’m aware of. But the empire is big. And old. Humans are not the first species we have encountered. Nor even the most dangerous.”
Drake studied her. She had the deep reddish purple of a Hroom who had never been an eater, but she spoke English well, so she must have spent years around humans. “What is your name?”
“Sal Ypis, sir.”
Drake felt a twinge of recognition at the name. “You are from Ypis III?”
Hroom had three names: a first name, a surname that corresponded with their planet of birth, and something else that had to do with their maternal line that couldn’t be pronounced without difficulty. Hroom generally dropped it when speaking with humans, which sometimes led to duplicate names and subsequent confusion.
“That is right,” she said cautiously. “I believe you know the planet.”
“I do.”
Drake and Rutherford had won a great victory at Ypis III. After demolishing the empire force, Drake’s fleet had bombarded the planet from orbit while royal marines landed to occupy the surface. Millions of Hroom fled the world in a vast, rickety fleet of overcrowded merchant vessels, mining ships, barges, and anything else that could carry them offworld. Hundreds of millions more stayed behind to face the occupation. Perhaps this one was one of the refugees, and that’s how she’d ended up on San Pablo, looking for work.
Drake brought up Rutherford’s messages, then turned the console so Sal Ypis could read them. “Tell me if this means anything to you. And look at what we’ve seen so far—have you ever heard of this kind of ship?”
He turned back to the other officers, suddenly finding the idea that had eluded him moments earlier. That distracting thought about the capture of Ypis III had diverted his conscious mind long enough to allow his idea to coalesce and bubble to surface.
“Pilots, those temporary jump points—how long do they stay open?”
“Most of them are still open,” Nyb Pim said. “There’s a string of them across a hundred million miles of open space. Gradually decaying, but not quickly.”
A string of them. Wow. That was some kind of technology. It almost seemed like magic from what he knew of the physics.
“So we could follow them through to wherever they’re lurking between attacks on Vigilant,” Drake said.
“Don’t see as how that does us any good,” Capp said. “We jump through, we’d have no idea where we’d end up. Then we come out the other side with the trips, trying to pull our heads out of our asses while they shoot us full of holes.”
Yet the alien craft had performed a multitude of jumps without apparent physical effect on the crew. Maybe they had tech to deal with that, too.
“I agree with the ensign,” Tolvern said. “We come out blind, and meanwhile, they’re waiting to pounce. Don’t you think we’d better stick to chasing them off until we know what we’re dealing with?”
“No. I want to defeat them. Sal Ypis, you have something?” Drake asked. The Hroom had looked up from reading Rutherford’s messages and was studying him with her big, liquid eyes, as if waiting for him to address her.
“I know this word,” she said. “‘Apex.’ They’re aliens, yes. There was a war, a stalemate, and the alien fleet . . .” Her voice trailed off.
She turned to Nyb Pim, and they briefly spoke together in Hroom. The Hroom put their hands together, palm to palm, as their species did to indicate a conversation where two sides were sharing information.
“No, I haven’t,” Nyb Pim said, switching to English. “I was raised by humans and never heard of them before now.”
“I don’t know anything about their tech,” Sal Ypis said, also in English. “Or their tactics. Only that they were reputed to be dangerous. There are stories about what they wanted from us—I don’t know if they’re true.”
“ ‘Apex,’ that’s a translation, I assume?” Drake asked. “Is that the name they gave themselves, or a Hroom invention?”
“Hroom, I believe,” she said. “But I do not know for sure.”
“We’ve only got ten minutes,” Smythe warned nervously from his station, “and then we’ll be in the thick of it.”
Drake acknowledged his tech officer with a nod. He turned back to Sal Ypis. “Thank you, midshipman. Return to your post.”
Capp pointed at the viewscreen. “There they are, the bastards.”
The long, slender ships had jumped in again and were swooping once more to test Vigilant’s shields with a series of energy pulses.
Ten minutes. Not much time, not even to explain what he was planning. “Barker, are you still there? Shunt whatever power you can find to the rear shields. Make sure they can take a hit.”
“Rear shields, sir?”
“Yes, Chief. Rear shields. I’ll send more info shortly. Tolvern,” Drake said, when Barker was gone from the com, “send a message to Orient Tiger. Simple instructions. I want her right behind us, as close as she can get without colliding.”
“That’s pretty damn close,” Tolvern said. Her fingers were already composing the message. “You saw Vargus charging that tyrillium barge.”
“Exactly. The instant those ships jump, we’re going through after them, and I want Orient Tiger glued to our tail. Be prepared for a bump on the other side—the more Vargus can do to strengthen her forward shields, the better. And ready her torpedoes.”
While Tolvern finished sending, Drake prepared one final message for Rutherford.
Prepare your main batteries. Watch where I go and follow. Remember the battle of Ypis III.
#
By now, Blackbeard and Orient Tiger were racing to join the fight between the big royal cruiser and the two smaller alien craft, who had been darting in like a pair of wolves nipping at a wounded moose. Testing its hooves and horns, weakening it by attrition for the final kill. A strange and ironic turn. Normally, Vigilant would be the hunter; her prey, Hroom sloops of war.
The alien craft had been following a pattern of sorts, with each attack lasting several minutes, but at the sight of the newcomers, they broke off early and opened a new jump point. Perhaps they only meant to flee, but Drake doubted it. There had been something almost teasing in their attacks so far, as if they had been holding back. He thought they would soon come back around, so confident in their ability to evade and damage their enemies that shortly all three human ships would find themselves under assault.
Drake waited until the second of the alien craft had gone through, then he barked his orders to go after them. Orient Tiger was hugging his rear as he accelerated toward the jump, and Vigilant changed course, banking hard to come around behind the other two. Blackbeard was already at speed and hit the jump point less than two minutes later.
Drake woke, groggy and stunned from the jump, trying to remember where he was and what he was doing. Warning lights flashed, and he was lying on the floor. Some dim part of his mind said that the stabilizer fields had momentarily been knocked out of action. A woman spoke in his ear, her voice confident, assuring, yet somehow insisting that he pay attention.
Only gradually did he realize that the woman was really Jane, the computer. “Additional damage from the collision to rear shield, eleven percent.” She sounded disapproving, as if better attention would have prevented the mishap. “Damage includes a plasma leak at—”
Her voice turned into a drone as he recovered enough to hoist himself off the floor and stare at the flashing lights on his console. It was coming back to him, now. A jump after the alien ships. Blackbeard had been bumped in the back and must have taken a knock up front, too.
“Commander!”
Tolvern hadn’t yet recovered. She lay on the floor, groaning and rubbing her head. Nyb Pim was down, too, and Smythe slumped over his computer, while Manx looked down at the tech officer with a slack-jawed expression, then took him by the shoulders and shook him.
Capp regained her feet and staggered to her seat. Her fingers worked sluggishly at her console. She thumped her forehead with the heel of one hand, as if trying to knock away the aftereffects of the jump.
“Ensign,” Drake said, to get her attention. His head was growing clearer by the moment, but he still couldn’t remember why he needed to get the engines online quickly, only that it was necessary. He thumbed the viewscreen. “Engines up. Now.”
The ship shuddered, and now he remembered everything. They’d come through the jump point, one after another, each bumping into each other. Orient Tiger and Vigilant must still be jostling him. That was the origin of Jane’s disapproving analysis of the collision damage.
But what about Apex?
He searched with his instruments until one of the enemy ships came into focus on the viewscreen. The long, slender craft tumbled end over end away from them. Balls of energy dripped out the back end like sickly green droplets of blood, dissipating slowly in the vacuum. He’d come out on top of her as he’d hoped, and then Orient Tiger and Vigilant shoved him into the enemy craft. She’d taken serious damage.
Smythe was awakening, and looking at his computer, and the first thing he did was find the second ship, or rather, the first that had passed through the jump point. She was accelerating rapidly away from them.
Finally, Blackbeard edged into motion. Vigilant lay off starboard, and the two ships ground together as they separated. Data and communication started to flow in from both the navy ship and the pirate frigate. Drake ignored it for now.
Instead, he shouted to get Capp’s attention. She turned, bleary eyed.
“Follow that ship!” He called the gunnery. “Give me the main battery! And the laser, too. Barker? Are you there? Wake up, dammit.”
“Aye, sir. I hear you. Dropping shields.”
By now, Tolvern was up, still looking stunned, but seeming to recover as she made her way to her chair. Drake sent a quick message to the other two ships: finish off the crippled ship, I’m going after the other.
Blackbeard was soon in pursuit of the uninjured alien craft, her more powerful engines thrusting her toward her prey. Although she was still losing ground in absolute terms, she was accelerating faster. They were already up to five hundred miles a second. Drake didn’t know how fast the enemy needed to be traveling to punch through a jump point, but he didn’t intend to give them a chance to show him.
Drake’s console lit up like the fireworks over the St. Lawrence River on Settlement Day. Jane protested in his ear. It was the enemy craft firing its energy weapons at Blackbeard. Within seconds, it had punctured several holes in the tyrillium armor, and word came of hull breaches under emergency sealant protocols. Smythe cried that the enemy was warming its battery for another attack.
But Blackbeard returned laser fire, and that forced the Apex craft to veer away. She slowed as she performed maneuvers.
“Now we have you,” Drake muttered.
Blackbeard came in from above, and Barker let loose with the underside battery. Cannon fire raked the long, slender craft from bow to stern. Explosions lit up her surface. Again, the alien craft tried to peel away. There was nothing cocky in her movements now, but neither was there panic, as there would have been with a Hroom ship. Instead, she twisted and shimmied like a fish trying to free itself from a hook. Drake’s pilots followed every jerk and twist.
And then they were alongside the enemy craft, which presented a full profile to Blackbeard’s broadside cannon. Drake ordered them to fire. Blackbeard rolled to her side as the full force of her cannons roared to life. The ship shuddered beneath him.
Explosions ripped into the alien ship. Some internal ammunition or energy source detonated. The ship exploded. Debris pounded Blackbeard. More warning lights.
But when it was over, there was nothing left of the enemy but scattered debris. Blackbeard was wounded, her new armor pierced in multiple places, but all decks were intact, and there were no casualties anywhere on the ship.
As his officers celebrated on the bridge, Drake ordered Blackbeard around. He returned to the jump point to find Rutherford and Vargus still fighting, launching missiles and torpedoes. But they weren’t shooting at an alien craft. There were none to be seen. They were shooting at each other.
Chapter Twenty
Drake roared into the conflict with all the patience of a male lion breaking up a fight among two brawling lionesses. He fired a missile at each of them, catching Vargus’s ship on the belly shield and slamming Rutherford’s exposed main battery, which surely dismounted or destroyed several cannons.
With the fire, he sent a warning: whoever didn’t stand down at once would face his full wrath.
The bluster worked. Shortly thereafter, the two ships had disengaged and sat at a distance, sulking, while their captains pleaded their case to Drake.
Captain Rutherford, Vargus insisted, had ordered her to stand down instead of destroying the enemy craft, as she’d tried to do. Instead, Rutherford wanted to harpoon and board it. When Orient Tiger fired anyway, Vigilant tried to destroy her to protect the prize.
