Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (27 page)

“Go be a pretty-boy in the spare gunnery spot,” she ordered, sitting down and strapping in. Unlike Rico with his longer legs, she didn’t have to readjust the chair forward. Her legs were slightly longer than Spyder’s, but not enough to bother her. “Corporal Morgan will coordinate forward gunnery efforts. Lieutenant Spyder will coordinate the aft-ward vectors.”

Sighing, Spyder finished clipping into his seat, then powered the whole station around so that it faced backward. Both gunnery posts and the pilot’s station could be rotated for just such a need, so that the Human inner ear wouldn’t be thrown out of balance by the disparity between physically moving one way and facing the other. Normally, Ia’s station also would have swiveled as the backup piloting position, but the security requirements for the main cannon controls had it locked permanently in place.

She activated the all-hail again.
“This is Captain Ia, three
minutes to combat. Lock and Web, meioas. Lock and load. This is not a drill. Three minutes to combat; Ia out.”

There were four differences between Ia’s console and the pilot’s version. One was the number of tertiary monitor screens; her seat had five of the transparent panels above as well as five below the transparent main and flanking secondary screens. The second was the control panel that released the main cannon. It was locked under a double-lidded security box, with a palm- and DNA-scanner sandwiched between the two lids. Anyone who tried to activate the main cannon other than Ia would set off an unstoppable chain reaction in the hydrogenerators, turning the ship into a brief, bright, miniature nova in one minute.

The third difference was the way that security box locked the station in place, preventing it from rotating, unlike the pilot’s seat. And the fourth was an odd, recessed socket with two exposed metal tabs, its sole purpose to provide energy when the circuit between those two tabs was connected. Nudging up the cover, Ia stuck her right hand inside and pressed her fingers against them.

Electricity snapped into her arm, stinging up through her nerves. Like a jolt of caf’ to taste buds, it woke her up, sharpening her senses. She didn’t take much, just a few seconds’ worth, then pulled her hand out and let the little door slide shut. Left hand fitted into the thruster glove, right hand on the power controls, she nodded.

“I’m ready for the helm, O’Keefe,” she said.

“Aye, sir,” the freckled pilot stated. “Transferring helm to your control in five.”

They weren’t traveling through hyperspace. Ia didn’t want the Salik to know a ship as large as hers could do that, just yet. She could use it to get close to this particular patch of nowhere, situated about four hundred light-years from Earth and over nine hundred from Sanctuary, yes; they had used hyperwarp to get to within a light-year or so, but the last leg had been plain FTL.

In control, Ia closed her eyes for a moment, dipping part of her mind into the timestreams. She didn’t want to overshoot their target but she did want to come in as close as safely possible. She also wanted her crew to be certain of what were viable targets.

“Captain to all gunnery teams. Your tactical displays have been loaded with two sets of targets. Shoot the red ones all you like but avoid shooting anything tagged green. We’re here to smash and grab communications databanks. I’d like to
have
those databanks intact for grabbing. You have four cannons slaved per pod. Use them wisely. Heads up in…twenty seconds, mark.”
Off-mike, she spoke as she started powering down the warp panels. “Spyder, Morgan, keep an eye on who’s firing on what. We’re coming in hot and fast and barreling right past before we’ll turn around. Lasers only for the first volleys. Let’s not outpace any projectiles, today. Coming out of FTL in three…two…”

The slow streak of stars on the screens flared into a pulse of dotted white. Within a blink, the screen was filled with a stippling of near-static pinpoints of light. Ia’s main screen lit up with tactical analyses of the objects barely lit at this distance by floodlights designed solely to keep incoming ships from hitting anything while maneuvering nearby.

“Resolving lightspeed, sir,” Private Loewen said from the navigation post, checking her scanners. “We have targets, almost dead ahead. Three-fifty-six by three-fifty-nine.”

“L-pods, fire at will,” Ia directed, watching the distance-to-target numbers spin down swiftly as they hurtled toward the installation. Morgan nodded and relayed the command.

They were still slowing down, thruster fields pulsing subtly against the laws of reality. Between pulses, the
Hellfire
’s L-pods started to fire. Bright reddish orange streaks of light darted out from the ship. With the
Hellfire
speeding into range right on their tail at a large fraction of Cee, the speed of light itself, the lasers could be seen moving as a bolt rather than a beam as they arrowed straight and true at the organic-looking station.

That station was huge, too, though mainly due to its function. Layers of solar panels angled out from the central pod, interspersed with five ship-sized arms that served as crew quarters, docking gantries, manufacturing facilities, and so forth.

Ia knew the station was home to over eight thousand Salik. She also knew the facility was underdefended, relying more on its extremely remote position between star systems for protection than on gun pods, fighter craft, and other things. With their resources limited to whatever raw materials they could
mine or steal without the Alliance’s notice, the Salik had to juggle the needs between creating more ships and weapons with their limited resources and expanding their infrastructure, such as this station, in the hopes they’d be able to find more materials to justify the expansions.

Two of those ships were in the system now, a tanker filled with hydrofuel and raw materials, and a frigate, small but fast, the kind useful for gathering lightspeed information at the extreme edges of a particular system. Naturally, they were on Ia’s red-painted list. Red-painted, and red-targeted, with a spinning stream of numbers appended, counting down the distance in light-seconds to each enemy ship. As the dozens of lasers struck
en masse
, three of them hit spots that caused silent explosions to rip through the hulls of the frigate and the tanker.

“Spyder, launch one volley of projectiles the moment that station is aft,” Ia ordered. “Coming up on midpoint in thirty seconds. O’Keefe, count it off.”

Her right hand thumbed one of the console controls, and her left hand twitched to the right a tiny bit. The ship strafed sideways by a hundred meters as it raced forward, just enough to avoid the dark chaff blown outward from the solar panels. Bright red continued to cross the screens as the L-pods kept firing.

Lasers were quiet weapons, unlike the clunkier noise of projectiles being launched. They did, however, require extra energy, enough that the ship
thrummed
with the efforts of several extra hydrogenerators cycling on and off. The slower the ship went, the shorter and darker those beams became, redshifted from the
Hellfire
’s reduced speed.

Slow in this case was still a significant fraction of Cee, the speed of light. In Ia’s Harrier-class ship back on the Blockade, Cee hadn’t been a concern; Harrier-class ships traveled via OTL and never actually needed more than half the speed of light. The
Hellfire
, by contrast, had started several billion kilometers away, but those billions were now almost gone.

“Coming up on turning point,” O’Keefe warned the others. “Estimated ten seconds.”

Bright chartreuse dots stabbed at the ship. They missed, but only barely. Ia flexed her fingers, sliding them slightly dorsal. That dodged another set of blueshifted lasers aimed their way.

“Incoming!” Loewen warned, her head shifting in little
snaps as her eyes flew over the data streaming into her screens. Her warning wasn’t for the lasers; those could not be dodged, since they traveled at the speed of light. Instead, it was for the missiles that followed. Lasers aimed at their narrow, end-on silhouette weren’t a concern, not when missiles could track the mass of a ship and divert course to intercept.

“Five,” O’Keefe counted.

“Firing chaff!” Morgan announced, pulsing the trigger on his controls. Rapid noise
thuthuthunked
down the hull from the bow. The battered communications hub filled their viewscreens, then popped somewhat smaller as their proximity forced the scanners to cut back on their magnification.

“Three!”

“Aft P-pods,” Spyder called into his headset.

“One!”

They dove between the tanker and a tumbling cloud of laser-scorched debris from the solar panels, close enough that proximity alarms beeped loudly in warning, though not quite close enough to trigger the emergency claxons.

“…Fire! L-pods, fire at will!”

Parts of the solar panels were now shielded, visible where some of that debris struck the repeller fields with sparks of energy. The undersides of those vast panels were more heavily shielded, but it wouldn’t do them much good; lasers penetrated shields. They didn’t do as much damage as missiles did, but they could damage the nodes projecting those shields.

As it was, some of lasers from the aft-pointed pods struck before the missiles did. Others struck after. Several explosions blossomed silently to their rear, though it would take a few seconds for their tactical computers to discern which ones were just from the missiles impacting on the shields and which ones were from missiles that made it through to the actual station surface.

“All hands, brace for maneuvers,”
Ia warned over the intercom. They were still going a significant fraction of Cee, and she was about to pull something complicated.

On a more compact ship design, she would have physically turned the ship in a loop, swapping bow and stern so that they were pointed the other way, but the
Hellfire
was nine hundred meters long. A turn at their current speed would bend, if not break, the hull. Flexing the FTL fields, Ia greased the laws of
physics in a bubble around the ship. Only then did she make the port side greasier. Left hand wrapped in the glove, right hand splayed over the console, she massaged both sets of controls.

They had entered normal space pointed downstream—toward the core, in relation to the spiral of the galaxy, if one considered the stars as “draining” toward the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They remained pointed that way, but like a hummingbird or a dragonfly, the vector change swerved their momentum so that they were flying backwards. The field shielded them from most of those vector change forces, but not all.

Everyone and everything not bolted to the ship pulled to the right for several long seconds, then swung around to the bow. The G-forces eased after several more seconds; pleased everyone had locked and webbed their stray supplies, Ia worked on angling the axis of the ship a little as they headed back toward the station and its two half-crippled ships.

Morgan and Spyder gave orders to their gunnery teams. The aft and starboard pods fired as soon as the full field dropped, allowing them to reacquire targets between pulses. More enemy shots were fired; eyes on the screens, hands on the controls, toes in the timestreams, Ia sideslipped most of the lasers. A few scored the sides of the ship. A few telltales turned yellow, mostly exposed FTL panels and one sensor antenna. Ia nudged them sideways, aiming a little closer even as she angled their ship to strafe down the side of the hub.

They weren’t the only ones attacking now. Caught by fast, close launches from the frigate and the station, the
Hellfire
’s shields vibrated down into the hull from missile explosions. Here was the difference between reality and entertainment shows like
Space Patrol
. Real interstellar combat was relatively quiet, so long as one wasn’t getting hit. Now they were, and now the P-pods fired anti-missile volleys and chaff grenades, trying to detonate the incoming munitions before they could hammer their way through the shields to the actual hull.

“Coming up on midpoint,” O’Keefe warned them. “Twenty seconds.”

Again, Ia slipped the ship sideways. They weren’t passing nearly as closely this time.

“Focus your fire on weapons and generators—
brace for
maneuvers
.” Ia swirled her fingertips. Rolling the ship on its long axis sent their stomachs slinging sideways, down, and out. It also lessened the scorch impact of a large laser attempting to target and burn through their hull. More telltales popped up on her tertiary screens, glowing yellow from the damage sustained. “Morgan, switch to targeting priority display 2, and load up twelve P-pod blossoms. Fire on our third midpoint pass. Add regulars on this pass.”

“Midpoint in three…two…” O’Keefe counted down. Another set of missiles hit their shields, shuddering the ship.

“Forward P-pods launching,” Morgan announced a moment later. The ship
whumped
several times, starting in the distance, racing past their position, and down to the stern.

Again, they strafed sideways and down, dodging incoming attacks. Ia warned the crew one more time, then pulsed the FTL panels, mindful of the damaged ones. They swerved around until they were speeding forward, this time aiming down the other side of those solar panels, if slightly above. They no longer faced their original entry-point orientation, thanks to her careful, slow tilting of the ship.

“We’ll be moving fast in a few moments,” she warned the others. “Launch the blossoms at midpoint and brace for acceleration.”

“Aye, sir,” Morgan said. “Blossoms are prepped and ready for launch.”

“Brace for acceleration,”
Ia warned.

“Ten seconds,” O’Keefe warned them. “Glad we’re not sticking around. Five…four…three…”

The long, slender missiles launched with a near-unison stutter of
clunks
just as they soared over the battered but still-firing station. Ia scraped her right-hand fingertips up the thruster controls, thrumming the engines in a rippling wave of increasingly swift field pulses. Occasionally she flexed one side of her left hand or the other, lifted it up slightly or pushed it down, either straight or angled. That allowed them to dodge most of the damage from the few L-pods still capable of return fire.