Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

The pirates sensed our fire when it struck one of the outside ships of the formation. They began weaving in a random pattern after that.

“Damage?” I asked Yamada, who was studying her sensor data closely.

“Not much. We have some dust and debris, mostly metallic. But the ship seems to be operating with no degradation of efficiency. It’s difficult to measure damage precisely from this distance, sir.”

I nodded and began to pace the deck, looking over people’s shoulders. The whoosh and singing sound of our main guns kept going, every minute or so, as our batteries fired in a slow, rhythmic fashion. The sounds made by the big guns were impressive.

Defiant’s
primary armament consisted of three banks of heavy particle cannons. They’d been upgraded over the preceding year. We’d improved both the fire-control system and the punch the weapons could deliver. As a result, they created more heat, noise and even some recoil when fired.

In addition to firepower, we’d upgraded their operating options. I could now override safety systems and direct them to fire individually, or in unison. The original Beta-designed fire-control module had been simple and, like the Beta’s themselves, more rigid in performance.

Durris waved me to his side, and I joined him at his planning tables.

“Captain, the enemy is releasing obscuring aerogels.”

“A predictable countermeasure. What about incoming fire?”

“Nothing yet. I’d predict we’re at twice their effective range, still.”

“Doesn’t do any good if we can’t take them out. We’ve got them ducking, but they’re still closing and not taking any—”

“Sir, we’ve got another hit,” chimed in Yamada. “Same ship, but now she’s leaking gas.”

I rushed to her side. Durris was right behind me.

“That’s gas all right,” he said. “She’s got a hull breach.”

“That’s excellent shooting, Zye,” I said.

She flashed me a tiny smile.

Then, the enemy ship blew up. We sucked in our breaths.

“That changes everything,” Durris said, moving back to his tactical planning boards. “Either we got lucky, or the enemy ships are more lightly armored than I’d assumed.”

“Update your battle predictions.”

“Uh… we’ll take most of them now, before we’re destroyed. Six at least, maybe as many as eight.”

I frowned. I’d hoped for victory. “What’s the turning point?”

He shrugged. “The moment they get within effective range. We can keep firing, getting closer every minute, blowing them down. If we can take them at this rate and a little faster, we’ll get maybe three more—but then they’ll be able to hit us in return. They’ll outgun us and destroy us.”

I knew math didn’t lie, but I also knew that tactics could drastically change the math.

“Everyone get to their seats and harness-up,” I ordered.

After a fraction of a second, they were all rushing to obey me. “Sound emergency maneuvers. Get everyone into a seat in thirty seconds.”

All over the ship, klaxons sounded and lights spun. The crew buzzed in my ear as decks reported in. Some wanted to know what was going on, others were confirming that they’d complied.

I gave them their thirty seconds, then another ten. Finally, I figured they’d had all time I could spare.

“Zye,” I said, turning to her. “If we black out, take over.”

“Will do, Captain.”

To the helmsman, I said: “Helm, hard about. Take us away from these pirates. Dive away from the plane of the ecliptic and don’t look back. We’re bugging out of this fight.”

After that, the engines began to thrum, then roar, then scream. The ship shook, and the lights dimmed—or was that my vision going?

We plunged through space, using what was perhaps the greatest asset
Defiant
possessed—sheer speed.

-16-

We’d left the pirates with a difficult decision. They could continue to chase us, or they could turn away and bore in on the station. They chose as I’d hoped they would.

“They’re going directly for the station, sir,” Yamada said.

“All engines stop,” I ordered. “Begin braking, gently, we’re turning around again.”

A few of the command staffers exchanged glances and shrugs. Maybe they thought their captain was crazy, but I didn’t care.

Durris stood next to me, nodding. “Hit and run, sir?”

“What else can we do? We can’t plow into them and die. If we keep harassing them, picking them off—”

“Sir,” Yamada said, “the Connatic is calling.”

I glanced at her in surprise. “I’ll take it privately.”

Stepping into my private conference room, I activated a much smaller screen. A distraught young woman faced me.

“I can’t say that I blame you, but your retreat from battle has left us worse off than before, Captain Sparhawk.”

“How so?”

“Normally, these pirates would only demand tribute. Now, after the wanton destruction of one of their vessels, they’ll demand blood—literally. Rather than allow my entire people to suffer, I’ve opted to allow Captain Lorn to meld with my flesh and take what he will. I don’t—”

“Hold on, Connatic,” I said. “I’m not running, I’m maneuvering.”

She cocked her head and stared at me. “We’re watching closely. You are slowing down… why would you behave in this fashion?”

“It’s called tactics. The enemy will shortly be between us. Please use your weapons. Make the best of this difficult situation.”

She thought about it, then shook her head. “I cannot do that, as much as I’d like to. The Stroj are angry. They’ll have to be appeased.”

I stood up, becoming angry myself. “If you won’t stand up for your own defense, you can hardly blame us for our tactics.”

Her eyes stayed downcast. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Think of me in your final moments. I promise to do the same.”

The channel closed before I could come up with a suitable response. I slammed my fist on the desk, then stood and straightened my uniform. I walked out of the room with a forced smile.

“Any news, sir?” Durris asked.

“Yes. I suspect they’ll help when they see we’re winning. I’m sure no one expected anything else, did they?”

Their faces fell. My crew had been hoping the Connatic would cast her lot in with us immediately. That wasn’t to be, but I tried to put the best possible spin on it.

“Are we closing again?” I asked.

“Yes sir, but at a slow rate. We’re behind them now.”

“Open fire, concentrating on the hindmost target as soon as we’re within effective range.”

The wait that followed was interminable. Space was a grim place in which to do battle. You could often detect your enemy, but you couldn’t always do anything to him. Instead, one was forced to watch them maneuver and destroy things at great distances with nearly perfect visual and instrumental acuity.

It was maddening. The pirate ships were within range of the station’s guns, but they didn’t fire. Their fighters hid behind the station as well, like children gripping their mother’s skirts.

Finally, we reached effective range. Our biggest guns spoke, and after several minutes, the hindmost ship of their formation was blown to atoms.

“There’s a message incoming from the pirate leader, sir,” Yamada said.

Smiling, I waved to her. “Put it on screen.”

A mask of feral rage appeared. It was Lorn, and he’d clearly had better days.

“You’re a jackal, Sparhawk,” he said. “They didn’t tell me that. You nip at my buttocks and run crying when I wheel upon you.”

“Perhaps they didn’t school you on basic tactics, Lorn,” I said comfortably.

“You move me to take drastic action,” he growled. “I’m giving you one more chance to comply with my wishes before I do something we’ll both regret.”

Frowning, I spoke as if barely interested. “Drastic action? Like what?”

“I’ll have to destroy the station. Millions will die.”

This did concern me, and I’d been worried he might try it. Fortunately, I had already decided how I was going to deal with this threat.

“It’s about time,” I said, shrugging. “Get on with it, by all means. We’ll gladly destroy your ships one at a time while you waste your firepower on civilians.”

“My threat doesn’t end there,” he said. “I must end you as well.” He said this last with remorse. “I’d hoped you would see reason. I’d hoped you would allow me to feast upon you—but no, I can see now you’re too stubborn and short-sighted for that.”

The channel closed. My brow furrowed in irritation. Two people in a row had seen fit to end my conversations with them rudely.

That was my last thought, unfortunately, before disaster struck. I had an inkling of what was to come, but not enough of one.

“Captain!” shouted Yamada suddenly, “there’s something wrong in the engine room. The heat levels—I’m getting a radiation spike.”

“Get my engineer on the line.”

O’Donnell had been replaced by a junior officer. I’d liked the new man the moment I met him, but it was possible that he was incompetent. There was no particular strain on the engines at this moment. No obvious reason why they should fail us now.

“I’m trying, sir,” Yamada said. “No one in engineering is responding.”

As I digested that statement, Zye wheeled around and reached toward me with a long, thick arm. She caught my spinning seat and forcibly spun me to face her. “Sir, they’re dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“The engineering crew. All of them. The core has been breached. Radiation and heat are flooding the ship. Captain… we’re on fire.”

Automated systems began going off, sounding the alarm. Damage control reported in, their teams were on the way, but they couldn’t even get to the engine room.

Rumbold was acting chief of the damage crew when he wasn’t running the helm. As he wasn’t on the command deck now, I contacted him personally to see what was going on.

“It’s awful, Captain!” he cried. “We’ve got burned bodies, and the air is sparkling. We can’t even get close to engineering. Worse, it’s spreading every minute. Sir, we might have to abandon ship!”

Stunned, I looked around me. Every crewman on the deck was in full panic-mode. Could this truly be the end?

And how had that pirate managed to reach out across a million kilometers and cripple my ship, anyway?

The moment I posed the question, I already knew the answer. O’Donnell and her crew of Stroj engineers had done more than blow apart a compartment and abandon ship, they’d left something else behind.

We’d searched. We’d done everything we could to find it, but we’d missed it. Now, the entire ship was in danger.

“Sir,” Yamada said, “we’re losing power. We’re cruising but we’re no longer capable of acceleration or making significant course changes. The main engines are dead, we’re down to our steering jets.”

She looked at me. I could tell she was frightened, but she maintained a professional attitude.

“What are the enemy doing, Durris?” I called.

My first officer looked worse for the wear. He was bent over the charting table, battling the planning computer.

“They’ve reversed course,” he said. “They’re not going after the station any longer.”

I nodded, unsurprised. “How long until Lorn reaches us?”

“Six hours, sir, maybe less. I can only go by the speed they’ve mustered so far with their engines. They may have been holding back in previous engagements, but I doubt it.”

“So, Captain Lorn will have his revenge in six hours. Time to earn our pay. Bring
Defiant
about and target
Blaze
—Lorn’s flagship.”

Durris shook his head. “That’s not normal Star Guard policy, sir. If you kill the one man you have contact with, you don’t have anyone to negotiate terms with when the battle comes to a conclusion.”

I let out a bitter laugh. I didn’t mean to, but I wasn’t in the best mood right now.

“Lorn won’t accept our surrender, and he won’t offer his own. But if we can knock him out, the rest of his ships may suffer from the resulting confusion. Lock onto his ship and wait for him to come into effective range.”

It would be several hours until the firing began again, so I got up and headed below decks. It was time for me to examine the damage personally and determine what, if anything, we could do about it.

From the start, the damage control people were less than encouraging.

“You can see the leak from here, sir,” Rumbold said, standing next to me in a corridor that was full of flashing blue sparkles.

We wore radiation suits, but no one thought the protection could be one hundred percent effective. The leak was too significant.

“Flush the atmosphere on this deck out into space,” I ordered.

“That’s a lot of air we won’t get back anytime soon,” Rumbold cautioned.

I looked down at him. Sometimes, my crewmen were short-sighted.

“If we can’t get past this leak, we aren’t going to be needing an air supply.”

Still, he hesitated. “Sir, if anyone’s alive in there, needing help—”

“Flush the atmosphere now,” I said in a hard voice. The odds were no one was alive, and even if they were, they couldn’t be in good shape. Asphyxiating them now would be a mercy.

Without another word, he activated the hatches and pumps. In that moment, all hope of rescuing injured engineering people vanished.

The hard vacuum outside the ship effectively sucked all the air off the deck, and much of the radiation with it. The leak was still active, but without an easy gas medium to drift around on, the dust particles weren’t as much of a problem.

We advanced to where the cooling jacket had ruptured. A shower of bluish steam still vented from the spot, but it froze into a crystalline mass almost as fast as it came out of the hole.

“The cold vacuum is working to contain the leak, at least temporarily,” Rumbold commented. “That was probably a good call, sir.”

“Let’s go,” I said wading through the shower of frosty particles and into the engine room beyond.

He looked startled, but he followed me quickly enough. A wary team in yellow hazmat suits followed us. Every one of them winced when they got near the frozen fountain of radioactive coolant, and I couldn’t blame them for that. We’d all be eating potassium iodide tablets by the handful tonight—unless we died sooner.

When we reached the engine room we discovered a ghastly mess. Seven crew members had perished. They’d been burned and then frozen stiff when I’d opened the hatches. A few of them might have been alive, it was hard to tell. Their bulging eyes and bloody, frothing lips might have indicated death from any number of causes.

We pressed past the drifting dead and examined the engine core. This was the key to our survival—to the survival of
Defiant
herself.

It didn’t look good. The engines had suffered a serious blast. Something had been placed under the core, possibly an explosive device, and it had gone off when Captain Lorn had commanded it to.

“The device can’t have been very large,” Rumbold commented, climbing underneath the cowling and grunting while he worked. “But it didn’t have to be. It was placed with expert care. We didn’t find it due to the shielding all around here—sir, I think this thing was planted very deliberately by experts.”

“No kidding,” I said. “A parting gift by O’Donnell and her crew, no doubt. The question is, can you fix it?”

“Fix it? Maybe, given half a year’s time at a well-equipped dry-dock. This engine is dead, sir.”

I heaved a sigh. The enemy had taken out Earth’s first starship without hitting us with a single salvo.

“Do what you can. I need some kind of power. Anything, even just give me enough to maneuver.”

“I might be able to do that,” Rumbold muttered. He was already at work. Only his feet stuck out from beneath the cowling.

His nervous damage control crew filed in and began following his barking commands.

I left the engine room with a heavy heart and headed back up to the command deck. We had less than five hours before the enemy caught and destroyed us.