Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. (17 page)

“I asked you a
question, Miss Romanov,” said the commander, maintaining eye contact with the
young woman despite the urge to look away.  Or at least trying to.  Shame was
warring with fear and anger within her, despite knowing that she was taking the
correct action, and she dropped her gaze to the floor.  “Can we make it there?”

“I think so,”
said the Navigator.

“Then I want us
behind that thing as fast as you can get us there, Mr. Garibaldi.”

“But, our
orders,” stammered the Helmsman.

“You have your
orders, from me,” yelled Cinda, jumping up from her chair and storming over to
the helm station.  “Now follow them, or I will relieve you of duty.”

The Captain
stomped back to her chair and threw herself back into its embrace.  She forced
herself to look straight ahead at the viewer, avoiding the eyes of the bridge
crew, yet still feeling their eyes on her. 
They think I’m a coward,
she
cried within her own mind. 
And they’re right, to their manner of thinking,
the young firebrands.  I don’t want to die.  Not for no reason.  Can’t they
understand that going out with that battle cruiser will make it a sure thing
that they don’t make it home and see their loved ones.  And for no payoff,
except making the enemy waste some missiles.
  She slammed her hand into the
chair arm and glared at the plot
.  If we’re going to die, we’re going to
accomplish something other than stopping a missile or two.  Damn if we aren’t.

“Are you sure
you want to do this, Captain?” asked her Exec, Lieutenant SG Marcus Frobisher,
talking over the private link from his station in the combat information
center, the CIC, which also served as one of the auxiliary control stations on
the vessel.

“Those are my
orders, Exec,” she replied in a cold voice.  “And I expect no questioning of
them.”

“Just doing my
job, Ma’am,” said the second in command.  “That idiot is the ranking officer in
the system, after all.”

“And our orders
from Fleet are to avoid action if we can’t accomplish anything,” said Cinda. 
“The most I can see us accomplishing here is to hide and gather data, and bring
it back to the Fleet.”

“Sounds good,
ma’am,” said Frobisher in a cautionary tone. “In theory.  But the officer you
report to after this may not take that view.”

“I’ll have to
take that risk, Exec.”

“What do you
want us to do when we reach the comet?” asked the Helmsman.

“How big is it?”
she asked, wondering if her crazy notion would work.

“It’s a big
one,” answered the Sensory Officer, Ensign Schmidt, looking at a holographic
representation on his board.  “Over forty kilometers in diameter.”

“Get us directly
on the side away from the Cacas,” she said after a moment’s thought.  “Match
velocities, and then get some drones into the dust tail so we can see what’s
going on.”

“And then?”
asked Lt. SG Jakardo, the Tactical Officer, giving her a look of disgust.

“And then we sit
and wait.” 
And maybe they’ll just pass us by, do their business, and
leave.  Then we can report back to base, and I can go through my court martial
for cowardice and disobedience in the face of the enemy, while my crew is
safe.  And then we’ll see if it’s more important to obey a fleet directive, or
some higher ranking fool on the spot.  Or maybe we can actually accomplish what
command would want us to do, and actually cause a little bit of harm to this
enemy.

*     *     *

One second space
was empty.  The next, twenty-five million tons of warship exited at point three
light from a hole in that space, an almost perfect circle showing the red
background of hyper I.  The ship was a cylinder three kilometers in length, her
grabber units, the space drive of the ship, arranged in a skirt around her
length.  Forty domes were arrayed on the hull, her light amp weapons, while
ports and hatches concealed missile tubes and particle beam projectors.  The
rest of the available skin, like that of most modern vessels, functioned as a
sensor array.  Now it drank in every photon that impacted on it, and gave the
vessel a view of the space it had entered.

“There is
nothing out here,” said the Ca’cadasan Weapons’ Officer with a sigh of relief,
his eyes locked on the holos hovering above his board.

“Stay alert,”
warned the Captain, his lower hands gripping his chair arm, while his upper
arms were crossed over his chest.  “They have ships that can fade to almost
undetectability.  
Somehow they solved the heat radiation problem with those
small stealth ships
,
he thought, recalling the latest brief on the
humans. 
But not their normal ships.
  A stealth ship couldn’t handle his
vessel in a heads up fight, but it could get in a crippling blow from cover, if
he didn’t know it was there.

“We have a fix
on some of their ships insystem,” said the Sensory Officer, the lowest ranking
male on the bridge.  “Or at least where they were three hours ago.”

The tactical
plot came alive, showing two vessels in orbit around the planet, gleaned from
visual sensors.  A couple of moments later the plot updated from graviton
emission readings, showing two ships coming out toward them about twenty light
minutes from the planet, while the two vessels they had initially plotted
remained in orbit.  And finally, a fifth ship was plotted in the far reaches of
the system, on the other side of the star.

“Preliminary
identifications,” called out the Sensory Officer, looking over at the Weapons’
Officer.  “The ships coming to meet us appear to be a scout capital and a very
small escort.  The two ships in orbit are commercial vessels of some type.”

“What about that
other ship?” asked the Captain, leaning forward in his chair, lower arms still
gripping the chair rest, upper arms both pointing at the tactical plot.

“It appears to
be another very small escort,” said the Sensory Officer.  “Nothing to worry
about.”  The officer looked back at the Captain.  “Do you want me to do a
complete visual sweep of the system?”

The Captain
thought about that for a moment.  A complete visual scan would entail checking
out every object in the system.  Every planet, moon, asteroid and comet,
including those in the Kuiper belt.  Billions of objects, and still no
guarantee they would see anything trying to hide.  A waste of computer power.

“No need,” said
the Captain, giving a head motion of negation.  “This is a minor system.  What
we see is what we get.”  The Captain pointed his upper right index finger at
the plot while his left upper hand scratched at one of his horns.  “Put us on a
least time profile to orbit.  We’ll take those two ships out on the way in,
then orbit the planet and kill the humans there.”

There were feral
grins and looks of triumph across the bridge as the Pilot put them on the
ordered course.

“We have missile
tracks,” yelled out the Sensory Officer.  “Ten missiles.  No, twenty.”

“Give them a
couple of spreads, Weapons,” ordered the Captain, leaning forward in his seat
to watch the red arrows blossoming on the plot.  Another ten arrows appeared,
and the Captain guessed that the enemy ships were flushing all of their
missiles.  Missiles were most effective at long range, where they could build
to relativistic velocities, making them both harder to hit, and packing a
devastating kinetic punch when they hit.

Another moment
passed, and numbers appeared under the vector arrows, indicating an
acceleration of five thousand gravities, about what he expected.

“Match them
missile for missile,” ordered the Captain, sure he was carrying many more than
the enemy scout capital ship was.  According to his intelligence, they carried
at most a hundred weapons, maybe half again as many, while his magazines held
over nine hundred of the long range weapons, all much larger and much more
capable than those their foe possessed.  His missile defenses were also an
order of magnitude more effective.

His own missiles
started appearing on the plot, twenty at a time, vector arrows showing an
acceleration of eight thousand gravities.  They would reach the enemy force
well before the human missiles got to his. 
They will die a long time before
they know the result of their attack. 
That thought was satisfying to the
Captain in a manner he couldn’t explain.  Except that maybe it was fitting to
let them keep the hope that they might blow him out of space, just before they
died.

*     *     *

The bulk of the
comet was comforting, in a way.  There was no way an enemy was going to see
them through forty kilometers of ice and rock, unless they got a look around it
with a drone.  The drones that
Joel Schumacher
had sent into the tail
were getting a delayed visual of the actions the ship couldn’t see.  The bridge
crew sat in silence as they watched the tactical plot that was tracking
everything by graviton emissions through hyper VIII, giving them an almost
instantaneous look at what was happening.  It took the enemy missiles almost
ten hours to engage the two human ships.  Ten hours in which the crew of the
frigate vicariously sweated out the tension that had to prevail aboard those
two ships that were targets.

The battle
cruiser, of course, kept calling for them on the com, demanding to know where
they were, and why they weren’t there to die with the other two ships.  Cinda
ordered no response, expecting any minute for someone on her crew to mutiny. 
Fortunately, that didn’t happen, because there was nothing she could do to
prevent it, and then some fool would move them out of cover so they could be
destroyed at a distance.

The crew all
watched in horrified fascination as the missiles approached on the plot.  They
had both ships on visual, but they were now a light hour away, and they were
seeing what had happened over an hour ago.  They also had the enemy missiles on
visual, or as good a visual as they could get on objects streaking in at point
nine light, maneuvering furiously to avoid counter fire.

Cinda sweated
along with everyone else, with the exception that she also had to endure the
stares of her crew, or the furtive glances that displayed the same emotion. 
There were looks of shame, switching to anger, then relief, and back to shame. 
The looks of people who thought they should be doing something, but happy that
they were not going to die with those they should be dying with.

Some icons
dropped off the plot, missiles hit, their destroyed drives no longer producing
gravitons.  But not enough.  A hundred missiles were coming in at the two human
warships, and they had only picked off a dozen at long range.

“They’re gone,”
said the Sensory Officer with a cracking voice as the icons representing the
human vessels dropped off the plot, along with most of the enemy missiles. 
About thirty of them continued on, without targets.  They would continue on
through the system, without the energy to decelerate, to become wanderers in
interstellar space for the next twenty thousand years, after which time they
would leave the galaxy.

Almost four
thousand men and women had died in those few instants.  People out here serving
the empire to the best of their ability, many with families back in the safety
of the Core worlds.  Some with families out here on the frontier.  Never to
return to any of them.

Forty minutes
later they caught the first visuals of the missile attack.  There were some
bright flairs of light here and there in space, missiles being hit with light
amp weapons or counter missiles, or those same defensive weapons going off on
close misses.  Cinda sat with clenched fists, hoping that the holo would show
enough missiles being blown apart for the human ships to survive, and knowing
that it was pure fantasy, since the ships were already gone.

Cinda didn’t
want to watch the visual of the end fifteen minutes later, but she couldn’t
force her eyes away.  She watched as the missiles came in, a dozen more taken
out by close in counter missiles, some more blotted from existence by lasers
and autocannon.  The first strikes were not direct hits.  Missiles that missed
went for proximity kills, detonating gigaton range antimatter warheads that
sent waves of heat and radiation into the hulls of the two ships.  The eight
million ton battle cruiser weathered that storm.  The eighty-five thousand ton
frigate spouted gas from multiple hull ruptures before her own reactors went
critical, and she flared into a miniature sun for several seconds before the
plasma spread into space and the ship was gone.

Moments later
two missiles hit the battle cruiser, their kinetic energy making the antimatter
warheads redundant as they shattered the capital ship.  Its own stores of
antimatter breached containment and propelled the plasma into a swiftly
spreading cloud.

The bridge crew
stared in disbelief.  Someone cried.  No one knew who.  They were too busy
staring at the holo.  Cinda stood up from her seat and forced herself to walk
with steady steps toward the hatch, while her mind tried to force her to
stagger in shock.

“I’ll be in my
cabin,” she told the crew after turning to them for a moment.  The hatch closed
behind her, and she felt the first tear bead in her eye.  They were freely
flowing by the time she reached her quarters and threw herself onto her bed.

There was
nothing we could have done
,
she thought, laying back and staring at
the ceiling. 
We would have just died with them, and the enemy would still
be on their way to kill the people on that planet.  Fifty thousand more deaths,
and I still can’t do anything about it.
  She had thought about trying to
lay missiles in the path of the enemy ship, like mines.  But they would most
likely be detected before they could do any harm.  There was nothing her small
ship had that could make a difference.  No matter what they tried.