A Sword Into Darkness (51 page)

Group 2 breached the plasma shield with a similar butcher bill, and Admiral Henson had to take a moment to allow the shock to dissipate as he saw all the damage that had been wrought on the fleet.  Out of two cruisers and eighteen destroyers, only the two cruisers had made it past the shield relatively mission capable.  Of the 17 surviving destroyers, five were all but blackened frames to which a few dismal lifepods clung, ten more were in various states of distress, and two—
Sword of Independence
and the
NAE Paul Teste
—appeared virtually undamaged aside from their damaged radiators, but their lack of cooling capability still rendered them almost immobile and with a very brief attack window before their systems overheated.

It horrified the admiral.

He could not dwell upon it yet, however, because the now exposed Control Ship—which already looked less distressed under the silver clouds of repairing nanotech—opened fire with multiple lasers and assemblor beams.  The battle had only just begun, and though they had wounded the enemy severely and survived his surprising defense, their victory was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Calvin Henson glared at his tactical screen and snarled, “All vessels, FIRE!”

“Move faster, damn it!” Nathan yelled.  The crew streamed up the corridor before him, just short of panic.

Their initial attempt to escape the wardroom had been stymied for a time when the violent shaking of the
Sword of Liberty
and the Control Ship that surrounded it had jammed the doors between them and their destination and made opening them next to impossible.  Then the shuddering largely stopped, and they all worked with nervous intensity, worried they had missed their opportunity to join with their compatriots from Earth, worried that now when they had committed themselves and there was no way to hide what they were up to, the stasis would return and all would be lost.

Nathan and Dave Edwards, channeling the spirit of Christopher Wright proceeded to yell and berate the fragile crew until they began working again, struggling to open each and every pressure door, step by step closer to their objective.  Now, as they finally set to work opening the last door, the wide loading doors leading into the hangar, the concussions and shaking of the Control Ship being subject to pitched battle began anew.

Kris looked to Nathan.  “Second wind?  Think our side took a little breather and now they’re back to fight?”

Nathan shrugged.  “I have no idea, babe.  But if the Navy brought enough firepower to re-engage after being repelled once, then they may well have enough to finally crack this ship down to whatever protected core we’re in.  And that’s good and bad for us.”

“Yeah.  Good that maybe we’ll have a clearer path out of the belly of this monster.”

Edwards chimed in after her.  “Yeah, and bad because they ain’t gonna be likely to hold fire if and when we bust out.  Hate to go all this way to end up a victim of friendly fire.”

Nathan looked around them.  “I don’t know.  I’m not feeling the big hits like the missiles would make.  These are taps like kinetic rounds.  Maybe the battle isn’t going as well as we could hope after all.”

Edwards grinned.  “Then maybe our boys need a little help.  Your girly’s got a prescription for some heavy duty mayhem against these bastards.  I say we let it loose and deal with whatever comes.”  The Master Chief turned to the techs working on cranking the powerless door open.  “Or I would if you idiots could just open a goddamn door!”

With that, the door sprang open and people began to rush through toward the SSTOS.  Edwards pushed off the overhead and pulled himself through the doorway.  “It’s about friggin’ time!  Well, don’t wait on me, boys and girls, get aboard!  Because I promise I will kick your ever-lovin’ asses—legs or no legs—if you let me board that shuttle before you do.”

The crew flew aboard the shuttle, unencumbered by any luggage or supplies.  Kristene and Andrew Weston shoved their way to the front of the boarding throng so they could finish the preps for launching and initiating her plan.  Edwards went aboard as the last crewman to enter, leaving only Nathan aboard the
Sword of Liberty
, the captain about to abandon his post.

Nathan stood half in, half out of the shuttle, braced in the frame and looking back at what he had worked so long to build, at what had sustained them and protected them for so long.  The
Sword of Liberty
was not just a ship.  It was a part of him, a part of them all, and the final part that he could touch of Gordon Lee, his last link to the great man and his friend.  After this, live or die, the past would be gone, laid to rest.  Did they have a future?  And if so, what did it hold?

“Stop the sentimentality and get your overpaid ass on the bus, sir.”  Edwards clasped his hand, drawing Nathan in.  Nathan nodded and swam into the shuttle, turned and shut the hatch.  He checked the seals, glanced around to assure to himself that everyone else had strapped in, Edwards included, and pulled himself to the cockpit.

Weston had brought the reactor online and the engines were warmed already.  Kris had negotiated a link to
Liberty
’s bridge and monitored the conditions aboard her.  Nathan drifted behind her.  He felt the vibration of the shuttle through his palms as he held himself in place, followed by a sharp shudder, transmitted through the SSTOS, through the ship, and presumably through the alien vessel.  “I’m feeling missile strikes, Kris.  It’s time.”

Her fingers hovered over her screen’s connection with the
Liberty
.  “Nathan, you know this whole scheme is nuts.  I got the damn idea from a freakin’ Niven story I read as a kid.  We’re probably either going to be blown up, or else it won’t do enough and we’ll still be stuck in the middle of this Patron prison.  This is a huge gamble.”

“Kris, I’m CO, so it’s my gamble and I choose to gamble on you.  Do it.”

Without another word or hesitation, Kris stabbed down on the button, initiating the
Sword of Liberty
’s final program.  All the power cells, batteries, and capacitor banks for the power conditioning system, the empty missile modules, and missing railgun and laser emplacements suddenly reversed their flow of energy and fed electrons back into the destroyer’s grid.  This energy circulated about, bypassing shutdown system after shutdown system, seeking a lower potential and somewhere to expend itself.  Finally it found an objective and flooded in, energizing the twelve enhanced photon drives of the auxiliary propulsion and maneuvering system.

Despite merely being the actuators for the forward half of the hull, they were still powerful photonic rockets on their own.  All twelve fired at beyond full power—their safeties removed—and their radiance punched outward into the atmosphere surrounding the bay enveloping the wrecked forward half of their ship.  Just like with their initial launch and that of the Promise, each thruster fired like a continuous stream of nuclear firecrackers.  Twelve blowtorches lit with a fire that only existed at the heart of quasars poured energy into nearly every outward direction, and just like the nuclear missiles attacking from outside, their transfer energy propagated outward from the point of application.

Here within the protected inner shell of the Control Ship, where no attack had ever reached, the Patrons had left their hostages one of their most powerfully destructive tools to act as a weapon.

Calvin Henson winced as another laser bit deep into
Trenton
and more lifesigns flashed red.  “Captain Everest, your men have GOT to get those missile cells back online.  This little trickle of an attack we’re putting out isn’t doing enough.  I need more than one missile at a time and two railguns!”

“Admiral, my men are doing what they can, but the shield plasma fused together too many of the VLS hatches, and hardly any of the missiles in those cells are communicating with the weapon control system.  Even if I send someone EVA, the birds won’t work!”

“Captain, if we don’t have any missiles then our only option is to become a missile.  I will order this group to ramming spee—”

“Admiral!” a new voice cried out on the battle net.  Henson thought he recognized it as his Flag Captain’s Weapons Officer.  “The Control Ship is starting to swell!  We’re seeing a massive thermal bloom at her core and she’s ceased firing.”

Henson flipped his screen back to the data in question.  Sure enough, the smooth, hard core at the center of the crustacean-like ship of overlapping plates, which they had thus far been unable to scratch, swelled and cracked.  Molten metal and flame gushed outward from spot after spot.

He did not know what was happening to it, but he dare not let the opportunity get by.  “All remaining units:  Fire for effect!  Everything you have left, overheating or not.”

The shuttle bay of the
Sword of Liberty
disintegrated around them.  Their SSTOS flipped end over end, banging into flaming, flying debris, a leaf in a hurricane of furnace light.  Nothing, not even the auxiliary drives themselves, could hold together in this maelstrom.  Abruptly the brilliance of the photonic drives cut out and all that could be seen was the burning, collapsing bay where their ship had been held captive.

Weston deftly stabilized the battered SSTOS and spun the shuttle slowly about.  All three sets of eyes in the cockpit darted about, each of them trying to find a way out.  Nathan soon jabbed a hand forward, pointing past Weston’s shoulder toward a fissure through which debris streamed, beyond which was the deepest, blackest night.  “Andrew, can you get us through that crack?”

“Skipper, I damn well will get us through.  Can’s got nothing to do with it.”  Weston punched up maximum thrust, rocketing the SSTOS forward and turning the shuttle to align their frame with the fissure.  The spaceplane crashed through, ripping free their wings and tail, and causing a terrible cacophony of alarms and screaming passengers.

Nathan and Kris screamed too, but for entirely different reasons.  “Hell, yes!!  Andrew!  We’re free!  We made it!”

“Admiral!  The Control Ship is breaking up and the plasma shield is dissipating.  We have chunks of debris ejecting from the core, but we have no way of knowing what’s just damage and what might be a Deltan escape pod.”