Exploration (21 page)

"Attention all fighters affiliated with the Modos Syndicate. This is Admiral Catherine Kimbridge from the Galactic Coalition of Planets. This ship and its passengers are under our protection. You are separated from your support fleet. We are prepared to render assistance and allow you to land in our cargo bay. No hostile action will be taken against you should you agree to surrender. Failure to comply will be met with all necessary force. Please signal your intentions."

Her comm squeaked and a static-filled voice filled the cabin of her fighter. It seemed strange to her that no matter what advancements were made in technology, comm systems always seemed to be filled with static.

"Admiral Kimbridge, this is Commander Kolauth. The Galactic Coalition has no jurisdiction here. Surrender your vessel and you will be guaranteed safe conduct back to your territory."

Cat smiled. "Commander, neither of us knows exactly where 'here' is.  We outnumber you and we have a mother ship to return to. Be reasonable and stand down. We have no desire to take lives needlessly. You may not have noticed but our sensors are not showing any habitable worlds in this star system. We need each other."

Suddenly an alarm went off in her cockpit. Cat's arm flew out with blinding speed to silence it. It seemed six of the enemy fighters were attempting to establish a weapons lock.
So much for a peaceful resolution,
she sighed to herself.

"Kimbridge to the
4400
, the enemy is going weapons hot. Do what you can to avoid casualties, but we need to end this sooner rather than later." 

Cat scanned the LIDAR display in front of her. Her internal AI, Cal, automatically converted the text displayed in archaic Suhtii to English in her visual cortex. She knew this was an advantage that the other pilots didn't have. As a result, the Modos engineering team had quickly mounted secondary displays in each of the fighters. They served the same purpose but she knew it was a kludge at best. Their advantage in numbers needed to be weighed against their opponent
s’
better experience and equipment.

The LIDAR showed the six ships lining up on her fighter and her fighter alone. Apparently their systems had been able to identify which of the rebel ships was transmitting.   Cat made an adjustment and now her transmissions started coming from random members of her personal battle group. Her Heshe enhancements allowed her to establish a virtually instantaneous quantum entangled FTL link, which made the trick possible.

"Stand down, Kolauth! There will not be another warning."

Three of the ships that had been going for a lock veered off to face the decoy that had just transmitted.

Cat jinked her ship to the right and fired her engines. They were essentially powerful Wakefield Plasma Accelerators and could push the fighters far faster than their momentum compensators could adapt. The result was that the upper limits of acceleration were a function not of the fight, but of the pilot and his or her ability to withstand the acceleration.

Of course Cat and her twelve fighters were not under the same constraints. She engaged her engines at 90 percent and within seconds was traveling at over a thousand KPH. As she and her group accelerated out of the area they had been in she saw the tell-tale trail of interstellar dust flaring up as powerful plasma beams and X-ray lasers bathed the area they had just been in.

Her fighters wove an intricate and highly coordinated flight pattern around the enemy fighters. They fired repeatedly. Powerful energy beams and High Acceleration Kinetic missiles (HAKs) dominated the space around the melee.   A few managed to hit Cat's squadron but in each case the fighter's shields had managed to hold.

Cat's forward display showed a complex and rapidly moving pattern of ships. She and her AI were doing the best they could to herd the Modos fighters away from the
4400
. As her targeting reticle lit up she would take an opportune shot at the enemy craft. Her goal was to try and damage the ships without killing the occupants. Regrettably this was a near impossible task given the nature of the engagement.

Her proximity alarm went off and she jinked hard to the left and threw in a barrel roll for good measure. She could hear energy bubbling off her shields. A quick glance at the display and she saw they had fallen to 63 percent. She wasn't going to be able to take too many more shots like that. She pulled back on her stick and rotated the nose of her fighter. This caused her to flip and face the direction she had been coming from. She hit her thrusters and pushed her Wakefield Plasma drive to the limit for three seconds.  She reengaged the melee from the opposite side.  

Meanwhile, the Modos rebels, far more limited in their ability to accelerate, slowly joined the engagement. This actually presented Cat with a problem. The rebel fighters were much more vulnerable to attack. She was having to pull some of her ships out of their formation in order to run interference for some of the slower fighters. 

A sudden shutter shook Cat's cabin. A HAK had impacted her shields and overloaded an aft section. There was some minor structural damage, but nothing that would seriously threaten the ship. She ordered the combat computer to automatically balance the shields using the remaining undamaged hypefield nodes.

Cat targeted the lead ship attacking her and fired a plasma beam. She knew that her opponent's shields would have no trouble handling the energy dissipation of her plasma cannon, but it would serve to momentarily blind that pilot's sensors. She followed up her cannon a mere millisecond later with a 5 kg iron-cased slug from her forward railgun. It would be much slower than the plasma beam but as it was still traveling a sizable fraction of the speed of light it would impart a massive amount of kinetic energy. So much so that Cat was surprised by the drop in her own forward momentum as a result of firing the railgun. She had forgotten how much lighter a fighter was when compared to a full-sized battle ship. This may have been the reason the GCP had never mounted railguns on their fighters.

The plasma beam splashed across the enemy's shields. They glowed brightly with colors swirling violently between a florescent green and a deep purple. Suddenly there was a brilliant white flash as the kinetic missile following behind the beam overloaded the ship's shields and splashed the fighter's naked hull with superheated metal.   The fighter turned in slow motion to point accusingly at Cat's fighter before the heated metal burned through the hull and ruptured the containment field of its small reactor. The resulting explosion, as spectacular as it was, was soundless in the void of space. Cat said a prayer for the soul just lost.

Chapter Twenty One: Battle Stations...

The Suhtian elder Farnin watched the unfolding battle on the large holographic display in the CIC.  He had six squadrons of fighters ready to launch from both
Sky-Shield
and
Sacred-Duty
as well as an equal number of
Final-Freedom's
drones. The station's AI was of the opinion that the participants in the conflict were as yet unaware of the Suhtian presence.

The entire planet of New Hope was cloaked in a shield that effectively prevented it from being seen directly. True enough, an analysis of the orbits of other objects in the solar system would inevitably lead one to discover the planet and its inhabitants, but the simple fact was that in the hundreds of generations his people had been here no one had ever bothered to visit. Until today.

The ships battling it out near the edge of the solar system seemed to be oblivious to anyone but themselves.
Final-Freedom
had sent a series of cloaked probes the moment the hyperfold terminus had been detected. The data they were supplying was frightening. The ships in question seemed to come from two different groups of fighters. Even more distressing was that both groups seemed to be using enslaved Suhtians!

***

Cat's hands flew at blinding speed across her controls. She had already lost two of her drone fighters. Yhsi
f’
s squad had lost four of their manned fighters. Two of them had ejected at the last second, so Cat was hopeful they might have survived. She was determined that they would not lose any more. Her shields were holding at 37 percent. She had taken damage to over half her node array. Her AI, Cal, was installing a nanite generated bypass conduit to bring power back online to a cluster of otherwise functional hyperfield shield nodes. If he was successful her shields would be restored to something just north of 60 percent.

"I could really use those shields Cal."

"Sixty seconds, Admiral."

"This is
Bluefin Six
, I've got two of them on my tail! I can't shake them! They have missile lock! "

'Damn,' Cat thought. "I don't have sixty seconds!" she yelled. She rotated her ship about its axis until she brought
Bluefin Six
into view.  Yhsif had deployed his team's fighters in an insane configuration that didn't allow them to protect one another. She was going to have to spend some quality time teaching the Modos pilots how to function as a team...that is, if any of them survived!

"
Six
this in
Angel One
. I have a bead on the one closest to you. Roll left and fire your thrusters hard. You'll pass out for a second, but I'll cover you."

"Roger that,
One
,
Six
is rolling left on my mark...MARK!"

The small fighter rolled to the left. As he did the pair of fighters lining up to fire on him came into Cat's crosshairs. She fired a kinetic missile at the first fighter and used the kick to reposition her to fire on the second with her plasma canon. At this range the shields were quickly overwhelmed and failed. Cat's AI cut power to the beam weapon immediately so the ship in question would be disabled but not destroyed. Unfortunately the kinetic payload from her railgun could not be dialed back after it was fired. The Syndicate fighter it hit was obliterated.

Cat was not happy but there was little she could do. So far, she had disabled five of the Modos fighters and killed four. The
Bluefin
contingent had taken out another six.

"Shields now at 61 percent, Admiral," Cal announced.  

"Thanks, buddy," Cat answered as she scanned her LIDAR for additional targets.  The Syndicate fighters were holding their distance for the moment.

"Syndicate fighters. This is Admiral Kimbridge. At this point you are grossly outnumbered. I again offer you a chance to surrender."

"Admiral," a tired voice said over the commlink, "This is Kolauth. What are your terms?"

Cat was about to answer when every alarm on her ship seemed to go off at once.

***

The Captain of the
Syndicate Dreadnaught Maelstrom
watched in his mind's eye as the bulk of the deployed fighters currently in system simply disappeared in a massive hyperfold that swallowed not only the fighters but also the huge rebel ship as well. It was if a giant razor tooth had swum up from the depths and engulfed its meal whole with no warning.

Captain High-Tide shook his head as he walked back-and-forth impatiently across his bridge. That image had been from eleven hours ago. He had immediately ordered the
Maelstrom
to execute a blind jump. In a blind jump a ship attempted to follow another ship's hyperfold jump by using the residual perturbations in the local hyperfield. It was not as accurate as calculating jump coordinates but if the original hyperfield was big enough and the blind jump were executed soon enough, the jump could land you within a few thousand AU of the first ship.

The
Maelstrom
had emerged after many hours in the hyperfold conduit. As hyperjumps were typically near instantaneous events, this could only mean the jump had been trans-dimensional. High-Tide had no idea where they had arrived. The star patterns did not match anything in his navigational database. There was, however, a star system a few hundred AU away. His guess was that was where he would find the rebels and any of the Syndicate fighters that had survived the jump. As a result he had his navigator calculate the short jump needed to arrive at that system. Finally the words he was waiting to hear were spoken.

"We have a jump solution, Captain."

High-Tide sat in his command chair and faced the main holographic display. "Engage the jump drive. Weapon systems hot. Shields to maximum as soon as we jump. Sensors I want a full scan of the surround space."

"Aye, Captain!" The bridge personnel answered in unison.

***

Farnin watched the holographic battle continue to unfold. His entire senior staff, including Admiral Tuti watched in equal awe.

"It seems odd the one group of ships seems to be going out of its way to avoid causalities, whereas the apparent aggressors seem far less concerned," Farnin commented.

Admiral Tuti grunted. It was a rude sound but then the Admiral was known far better for his tactics than his tact. "It could simply be incompetence."

"I thought so as well..." Farnin said slowly.
"…
but watch how tightly integrated this group of eleven is functioning. I've watch the ship in the lead take incredible shots with pin-point accuracy.  No, my friend, I think if they wanted those disabled fighters destroyed they well could have. Compassion in battle is a rare virtue. In any case, it seems as if mercy is going to prevail this time. The one group of fighters seems to be surrendering."

"It may be as you say, but begging the Elder's pardon, in my experience, compassion in battle is a good way to get yourself dead!"

Their discussion was interrupted by the sudden sound of the battle station's AI. "Jump Terminus forming!"

As soon as the words were spoken another much larger ship exited a hyperfield within a scant one hundred kilometers of the dogfight. Immediately dozens of additional fighters began to stream out of its launch bays. Regrettably they appeared to be joining the side that appeared more aggressive.

Admiral Tuti turned to face his superior. "This is not good news. I recommend we launch our fighters and raise ground-based defenses to level one readiness."

"I concur, Admiral. Make it so. Have our fighters stay within the cloaking field for the moment. With any luck these two groups will duke it out and leave us."

"You don't serious believe that, do you, sir?"

Farnin used his trunk to scratch behind an ear. "No...no, I don't suppose I do."

***

"Where the hell did that come from!" Captain Running Stream yelled from the Bridge of the
4400
. A Dreadnaught class starship had suddenly appeared on their screens. Even worse, it was launching fighters. Cat, who had been on the verge of victory, was now facing three to one odds.

"Sir!" Commander Ben said in a worried voice. "That brute is powering up its beam weapons."

"Bias the shields. Get more power to the side facing them," Running Stream barked.

The D'lralu engineer worked the controls in front of him. Like Cat, his cybernetic implants allowed him to translate the Suhtii displays into GCP Standard English on the fly.

"Shields biased per your orders. This crate has got some pretty hot gamma-ray lasers and anti-proton beams. Do you want to use them?"

"The Admiral seemed to think it was a bad idea, but given how the situation has changed I think we had better," Running Stream answered.

"See if you can target the launch bay on that dreadnaught. It may not be as heavily shielded."

"Aye, Captain." He pressed a button and twin beams of pure gamma-ray radiation slammed into the shielding protecting the dreadnaught's launch bay. Their shields lit up like a Christmas tree, but they did not waver.

"No effect, Captain. Firing anti-proton beams in three second bursts."

Again the shields on the other ship lit up but this time there was a fiery display as superheated metal sputtered off the side of the big ship. Significant amounts of energy were getting through.

"That got their attention!" Sassi yelled from the sensor station. "They just lit us up with their targeting LIDAR. Six of their forward mounted railguns are lining up for a shot."

"Aft thrusters to full! Let's not give them too easy a target."

"They are continuing to track us. They just fi..."  Sassi's sentence was interrupted by a bone shattering rumble. 

WHOOMP! WHOOMP! WHOOMP!

The floor shifted beneath their feet. The lights on the bridge of the
4400
flickered and then stabilized.

"Status!" Running Stream shouted while picking himself up off the floor.

"Three kinetic rounds hit us. Shields at 38 percent. Moderate damage to some of the forward section
s—
fortunately they were not occupied," Ben reported.

"Sir...they are getting ready to fire again!" Sassi yelled.

"Helm...get us out of here! Full evasive! Ben, rotate the ship. Keep the strongest shield between them and us. Weapon's...unload everything we've got at them. Full lasers and particle beams."

"Damn shame we don't have any SJ rounds," Ben said.

"What's an SJ?"

"Suicide Jumper, a miniature hyperfield generator in a missile designed to create a backwash from a sun or black hole. Makes a rather nice unidirectional bang."

"I'll bet it does."