Collateral effects drop.., p.20
Collateral Effects (Drop Trooper Book 14), page 20
“Yeah, then once we get to this planet, the boats take up a patrol orbit… cislunar, maybe, if it has a moon.”
“That’s fine for the Intercepts,” I pointed out, “but the assault shuttles and armed landers don’t carry enough reaction mass to do much patrolling after thrusting all the way from the gate to the planet.”
“Then they could cruise the atmosphere,” Wojtera suggested, picking the thread back up. “That wouldn’t take any reaction mass… their jets just run air through the reactors. As long as they saved enough to get back to the Orion in orbit, they’d be okay.”
That was some wishful thinking if ever I’d heard it, but it was also the only chance we had. I licked my lips and touched the intercom control.
“Dr. Hallonen, are the flight crews up and around yet?”
There was no response for a moment, and I was about to call again when a male voice came over the speaker.
“Cam, this is Brandano. Dr. Hallonen says she’s busy, but yeah, the flight crews are all up now and she’s working on the Marines.”
“Brandano, we have Nova ships approaching from the Homecoming wormhole. We don’t have the fuel to increase acceleration, even if we weren’t right in the middle of reviving the crew. What we’re going to do is get the Intercepts, the assault shuttles, and the landers launched, have them match acceleration with us, and open up with everything we’ve got until we’re through the gate. The enemy is burning hard for us, so it’ll take them an hour just to get turned around to chase us. We just need to keep them from concentrating fire on us until we make the passage.”
I expected him to object, since it was his ass I was hanging out in the wind, but I’d underestimated Brandano. I knew him as a strait-laced, by-the-book type, but I’d forgotten he was also a Fleet attack command pilot, with all the attitude that entailed.
“You want us to separate from the Orion under relativistic speeds and fight a bunch of octopus-alien cruisers in just our boats?” Brandano laughed softly. “Damn, Alvarez, this shit is why I fly cutters in the first place. We’ll be ready to launch in ten minutes.”
“Damn, I can’t believe I’m stuck here on the ship while they’re having all the fun.”
I eyed Vicky, wanting to ask her if she was serious but not bothering. I already knew she was. Victoria Sandoval might be as traumatized as I was by the loss, the apparent hopelessness of our quest to get back to the Commonwealth, but when there was a fight, she wanted to be at the front lines of it.
“Don’t feel like you’re missing out,” I told her, staring at the blue IFF beacon indicators on the Tactical display as they parted from the Orion. My stomach dropped for just a moment as it seemed they would fall away, left behind like parachutists from old-style airplanes like I’d seen on history videos. But their drives ignited and carried them along beside us, the physics of a vacuum offering no air resistance to slow them down. I shook the feeling away and finished the thought. “Once we get to the planet, they’ll be coming after us. I’m going to have to go in with the command team, carrying as much of Dwight as we can squeeze into a quantum computer core. Which means you’re going to have to run the company and keep the Nova mecha off of us.”
“Stop trying to cheer me up,” she said, the corner of her lip turning up in a half-smile.
“Thirty seconds until we’re in weapons range,” Wojtera announced, back to his concise, professional demeanor now that there was a battle to conduct. “Another thirty seconds after for them.”
And thank God for small favors. Or maybe I should have thanked the Resscharr, since it was their gun that gave us a range advantage on the Nova.
“Captain Nance,” I said, louder than I had to so the whole bridge could hear it, “she’s your ship to fight. My only command directive is, get us through the pack as quick and clean as you can.”
Nance nodded curtly, peering at the sensor display for another few seconds before he spoke again.
“Helm,” he said finally, “they’re concentrated at the center of the wormhole. Alter our course ten degrees northwest. Comms, pass that on to the boats.” An unconscious scratching of his beard was the only sign Nance might have been nervous. “I seem to recall from the fight we had with them a few weeks back that their command vessel is at the center of the cluster. Tactical, I designate Bandits One through Six.” Nance tapped at his armrest control and the numbers sprang to life beside the red icons on the screen. “Target Bandit One and fire as you bear.”
I clenched my teeth against an urge to direct the Intercepts and assault shuttles to target the ships at the edge of the globular formation, first because I’d just told Nance the battle was his to fight, but second because I realized that their weapons were much shorter ranged than the energy cannon. It would be minutes before any of them could do more than scratch the paint on one of those cruisers.
“Steady, Alvarez,” Vicky said softly, and I nodded, put on a poker face against the raw stress scraping at the edges of my nerves.
“Firing,” Wojtera said.
Besides how long they took and how helpless I felt, the worst thing about space battles was how silent and unspectacular they were. The Tactical system enhanced the blue lance of the energy cannon, but the ship didn’t vibrate with its discharge and no cinematic thundercrack accompanied the shot. It was a potentially fatal video game, and not even one of the fancy virtual reality ones. More like the free time-wasters that they included on the cheap tablets the megacities gave away in the Underground. Barely suitable for keeping pre-teen kids occupied on the train.
I wondered if the Nova crew thought of it as boring and unspectacular when the energy beam splashed across the surface of their spherical superstructure. We were too far away for the shot to penetrate their shields and armor completely, but the effects were obvious. Pure, virginal white charred black, metal sublimating to gas, the glowing halo crackling and sparking as it interacted with the ship’s electromagnetic deflectors. Their shields were similar to what our ship had used before the Resscharr makeover on Decision, effective against kinetic weapons, plasma, and charged particles, but not so much against a photon beam or a laser. I still didn’t know what the energy cannon actually fired and, more concerning, neither did our engineering crew. Dwight had tried to explain it, but it had something to do with scalar energy and it was all Greek to me. But whatever it was, the shields didn’t do much against it.
“Pour it on,” Nance said, pounding a fist against his armrest. “Before they get the range to fire back. Take that fucker out!”
“He’s maneuvering,” Wojtera warned, and a quick check of the screen confirmed it.
The command ship retreated further behind the cluster and the other ships tried to close in around it, shielding their leader from fire.
“Give me Helm control,” Wojtera snapped.
“It’s yours,” Yanayev said, raising her hands off her board symbolically.
The Tactical officer’s fingers danced and the maneuvering thrusters jolted the Orion forward of the bridge, adjusting her orientation.
“Firing.”
My fingers dug into the armrest, the tension more from the fact that I wasn’t pushing the button than wondering if Wojtera knew what he was doing. The man was the best at his job that I’d ever seen. A lance of actinic fury threaded the gap between the blocking ships and struck the command vessel in the exact same spot as the first shot. This time we were close enough that the blast cored the spherical ship like an apple, blowing out the back of the drive bell only a fraction of a second before their antimatter storage failed.
They’d been trying to shield the command ship, but it backfired for one of the loyal defenders. When the stricken vessel blew, the supernova engulfed the closest of the ships in its corona of destruction, eating away at its armored hide until burning oxygen spewed through the gaps in the hull. The drive didn’t cut out, but the jets of burning atmosphere took it off course, and no one tried to push it back in the right direction.
“Scratch Bandits One and Five,” Wojtera declared, lips peeled back from his teeth in a feral grin. “But now it’s their turn.”
“Oh, yeah,” Vicky murmured. “I’d forgotten the part where they were gonna be able to shoot at us now.”
“All boats, spread wide,” Nance barked into his armrest speaker. “Intercepts and assault shuttles, fire as you bear.”
The Intercepts and assault birds both carried proton cannons, which were pretty much of a range with the Nova plasma guns, but the lander coilguns wouldn’t do anything this far away… though if I were giving the orders, I might have had them try their luck anyway and hope for a “Golden BB” shot.
“Helm,” Nance added, “avoidance course but stay on the beam for the gate. Tactical, targets of opportunity.”
The gate was close now, filling the background in the main screen, the muted glow from the rip in spacetime backlighting the four surviving Nova cruisers. It wasn’t quite bright enough to drown out the starburst of the plasma discharges from the Nova ships… and it disappeared entirely when one of the blasts touched our shields.
Now, the battle took on all too much visceral reality. The Orion shuddered as if she’d been physically struck, another arcane aspect of the tech we’d been gifted that I still didn’t understand. A fat spark came off the metal surface of my armrest and snapped at my finger, and I cursed reflexively.
“Damage report!” Nance barked.
“We’ve got a burn-through on Level One,” Lt. Walker said quickly. “Pressure doors have sealed. No casualties.”
“I’ve got the fucker,” Wojtera snarled, taking the hit personally.
His middle finger stroked the control, and the cannon fired as if it were an extension of his anger. The muddled collage of glaring energy weapons and glowing drives made it harder to pick out the target of Wojtera’s shot, but the flare of white when it struck was unmistakable. The cruiser didn’t blow immediately, just faltered in its course as the vaporized metal made its own, improvised steering jet… and left it open for Villanueva and Brandano.
They were coordinating their attacks, even if I couldn’t hear their interplay, and Intercepts One and Two fired simultaneously, both of them targeting the same spot where our energy cannon had struck, where the armor would be the thinnest and the electromagnetic deflectors had already been overloaded. Twin coruscating showers of protons stabbed into the wounded cruiser, this time penetrating completely.
They were almost too close. The antimatter eruption clawed for them even as the Intercepts’ steering jets lifted them upward, desperately seeking a safe distance. Tendrils of glittering energy whipped through space toward the twin cutters and I held my breath, thinking not just the human thing, how badly it would suck to lose our crewmates, but also the commander thing, how badly we’d miss the Intercepts if we lost them.
Whether God was more interested in my human compassion or our weakness without the cutters, or maybe it was all just blind chance, the talon swipe fell just short.
So caught up was I in the fate of our cutters, I didn’t notice the incoming fire until the violent shudder threw me against my seat restraints.
“Shit!” Vicky exclaimed, wincing, and I did as well in empathy. Her shoulder had been treated, but without spending a few hours to a day in the autodoc, the damage wouldn’t be repaired until her body did it the old-fashioned way.
“Burn-through on Level Eight,” Walker said before Nance had the chance to ask him. “Hangar bay. Didn’t damage anything, no casualties, but we’ve sealed the bay and it’ll have to be patched before we can repressurize.”
“Woj?” Nance asked, gaze flickering back and forth between the Tactical officer and the main screen.
The gate shimmered ahead of us, smearing the lines of reality around everything else, yet even with the distortion not just of the optical view but the sensors, it was clear that the remaining Nova cruisers were just a couple of degrees from the plane of our approach, their drives winking out as maneuvering thrusters began to flare.
“No joy,” Wojtera grumbled, his finger twitching like he really wanted to shoot back. “We’re past our firing arc. They’re turning around to take more shots at us, but if you want to hit them back, we’re going to have to cut thrust and maneuver.” He tapped the control screen in front of him and a red line appeared just ahead of us. “We only have thirty-five seconds until we’re out of their range, since they switched off their drives.”
“Sloppy,” Yanayev murmured. “If they were smart, they would have decelerated after passing through the gate and been ready to pursue before they opened fire.” She shrugged. “Of course, they still couldn’t have caught up with us with the velocity we’ve built up, but…”
Something caught my eye from our boats, which had tucked into a diamond formation. Their drives cut out and I almost gasped in horror at the idea of leaving them behind, until I saw their maneuvering thrusters flare, turning them as one, like they were mounted on the same turret. And firing as one.
Four proton beams collimated at a single point on the closest of the cruisers and the ship’s deflector shields lit up like a jack-o-lantern on Halloween before one pinprick of red burst out of the ball of mottled white and yellow. And spread to the forward steering jets. It wasn’t fatal, didn’t reach the antimatter core, but it was enough, an eruption of white flame that spun the hip in a lazy circle, putting it out of the fight.
The Intercepts and assault shuttles spun again, their steering jets never halting, bringing their drive bells back around before plasma flares lit up in the engines and rocketed them forward again. Faster, maybe three or four gravities just for a few seconds to catch back up with us.
“Brandano, that was fucking genius,” I told him, knowing I’d promised Nance I’d let him run the space battle but unable to contain myself.
“I’ll expect you to mention it in my medal recommendation,” the pilot said. I cocked an eyebrow. Humor, from Brandano? Maybe this was the end of days after all.
“Jumpgate passage in forty seconds,” Yanayev announced.
“Get ready, Tactical,” Nance said, pointing at Wojtera. “They might have left a welcoming committee for us across the threshold.” He leaned over his chair speaker. “You guys too. Get ready for evasive maneuvers and engagement.”
“All due respect, sir,” Brandano replied. “The Intercepts can bleed off our momentum with a micro-Transition, but if the shuttles don’t dock with you before you start deceleration, they’re going to have one chance at a gravity-assisted braking maneuver before rocketing off at unrecoverable velocities into the aether. My recommendation is that you take them aboard before you attempt deceleration.”
Nance’s face reddened and so did mine, though he perhaps had more reason than I did since he’d been doing this space stuff for decades. He shot me a look, like screaming silently make a decision.
Bastard. I pushed the comm control.
“If we don’t hit opposition on the other side, we’ll cut the drives and bring them aboard,” I told him. “Then hit a micro-Transition to cut our momentum. If we do…” this was the part that sucked, the reason Nance didn’t want to be the one to make the call, “… then we’re going to have to engage. Worst-case, I want you to dock the Intercepts with the other ships and try to Transition with them aboard.”
“That’s…”
“Nuts, I know. Hoping it won’t come to it.”
“Wormhole passage!” Yanayev warned.
I tensed up, not for the sensation of the passage but for what we might find on the other side. This was Homecoming.
Our last chance.
24
On the other side of the wormhole was…
“Nothing,” Wojtera reported, the word tilting upward at the end as a sign of his confusion… which I shared. “Not a single sign of Nova spacecraft. No electromagnetic activity at all, except on the planet.”
Not a word from anyone else on the bridge as everyone scanned the sensor displays themselves, as if they didn’t trust Wojtera’s assessment. Or maybe just because they couldn’t believe we were actually here.
The system wasn’t remarkable, just a typical, G-class star like so many we had seen so far, with a single habitable. It glowed blue and green, beckoning, but silent, no ships in orbit, not so much as a whisper in response to our presence.
“We getting any indications of occupation on the planet?” Nance asked.
“Nothing obvious,” Wojtera told him. “There’s energy signatures, but they’re low, almost background.”
“That’s good news, right?” Vicky asked, nodding at the screen. “No bandits. We can take the shuttles aboard.”
I nodded to Nance and he gave the order.
“Helm, cut thrust. Flight ops, get those shuttles and landers into the bay.”
“It’s good news on the short term.” I answered Vicky’s question, pausing in the middle as the acceleration gravity fell away and my stomach surged into my throat after so many hours under heavy boost. Remembering the spent drug patch on my neck, I reached up and peeled it off. “But there’s got to be a reason for it. They had ships on this side waiting for us, but they don’t have a colony here.”
“It could be taboo or something,” she suggested. I gave her half my attention, the other half keeping an eye on the docking procedure. The bay had been damaged, and I wanted to make sure there were no problems getting the birds on board. “Maybe they’re afraid of this place.”
“Yeah, but haven’t been too reticent about stealing anything not nailed down on any of the other Reconstructor planets. What’s so special about this one?”
“Automated defenses,” Dwight answered unexpectedly. That was the problem with the damned AI. Sometimes he talked so much I thought he’d never shut up, and then he’d clam up and I’d forget he existed.
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“I’m already in contact with them.” His avatar nodded at the planet on the portion of the screen beside him. “They’re still active.”
