Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (35 page)

Other points in the interstitial night now blossomed in their wake. Fire boiled outward from several red-outlined ships. The projectiles Ia had ordered from the Dlmvla, the weapons which Harper’s engineers had cobbled together in just over a day, turning them into missiles which Bagha’s teams had loaded into the launch bays…those warheads had contained dozens of head-sized, machine-rounded rocks. The crew’s engineers had cobbled them together with attitude thrusters, basic targeting scanners, navicomp relays, and small explosive charges set to break each capsule apart when it came within collision distance of any object larger than a fellow missile, postlaunch.

Under ordinary launch conditions, they wouldn’t have been dangerous. Most ships possessed decent, functional shields that could have warded off the mass of the intact missiles, never mind the smaller masses of each individual rock. But those were at insystem combat speeds, which were usually well below one-tenth the speed of light.

Released at near-Cee, however, even the biggest shield generators would be hard-pressed to keep out inbound rocks less than half the size of the ones the
Hellfire
had launched. Only the physics-warping fields of FTL panels could have saved those ships. Unfortunately for the Salik, most of them had been either cruising the area at insystem-patrolling speeds or parked at a dead stop relative to the station.

Insystem thrusters, while capable of shunting aside modest
interstellar debris, were not the same thing as FTL warp fields. The Salik never stood a chance under that devious an attack.

Her headache eased further as they watched, proof several of the ships had been damaged badly enough to cancel their own anti-psi emanations. Some were still active, but not many. Pulsing the FTL panels, Ia checked the timestreams for a moment, then dropped back fully into her body, satisfied.

She didn’t have to send the ship back in for a second, slower, and much more dangerous round of attacks. The biggest dangers on this first pass would have come either from not going fast enough to avoid the few unexploded inbound missiles—which were too crudely cobbled together to ignore detonating near their own ship, though she could order them to detonate from a distance—or from not shifting far enough to miss that one ship. As it was, the only yellowlit telltale on her upper tertiaries was a warning light for a stressed shield panel at the bow of the ship. Not a single, hastily aimed shot by the enemy had harmed them during their too-fast strike.

“Rammstein, did you get all of that recorded?” Ia asked the operations tech. “Inbound, attack, and lightwave confirmation?”

“Aye, sir,” he agreed.

Satisfied, she brought the warp fields back up to speed, slipping them one last time over the Cee border. “Bundle it up and hand it off to Mysuri for transmission to Admiral Genibes,” she ordered. “We’ll drop out of FTL in a little bit for that when I’m sure we’ve escaped pursuit.”

“Aye, sir,” he said.

“Can I be sick now?” Sangwan asked, glancing over his shoulder at Ia. “Or do we still have more fighting to do?”

“We have more fighting to do, Yeoman, but not for another fourteen or so hours,” Ia told him. “The next battle will be slightly uglier. Ng, plot a hyperwarp course for Point B, starting half a light-year from here.”

“Already on it, Captain. Correct course to…22 by 317, sir.”

“Heading 22 by 317, good work, Private,” Ia confirmed. This time, instead of curving around to the right, she curved the ship to the left and up a little.

“I don’t see why you’re still upset, Sangwan,” Helstead murmured to him a few moments later, apparently catching
sight of his frown. “We came out of that with barely a scratch. You should be pleased.”

“Yeah, but only after the Captain managed to pull off maneuvers that would’ve made Shikoku Yama himself sweat,” he muttered back. “Did you see how close we got to that ship? At near lightspeed? Sir,” he added respectfully to Helstead.

“I’m sure the Captain knows what she’s doing,” Helstead said. “Right, sir?”

“I have far too much to do, gentlemeioas, to risk my life carelessly. That includes your lives as well,” Ia told both of them, guiding their ship onto the indicated course. “After being shot in the shoulder with a laser cannon at a mere three percent probability, I have learned to be a lot more careful in calculating the odds. I know I cannot always beat them, but my tasks are too important not to try.”

“You were shot in the shoulder with a laser cannon, sir?” Rammstein asked her, curious.

“Handheld cannon at point-blank range,” Ia explained. They had reached maximum speed, and were more or less on course, so she set the ship on autopilot and relaxed. “It was back when I was in the Marine Corps, our first mission on Oberon’s Rock while I was with Ferrar’s Fighters. Hurt like a slagging son of a
shakk
, too. You can ask Lieutenant Spyder about it if you’re curious. He wasn’t in the Company at the time, but he heard the others’ reports after he joined Ferrar’s Fighters.”

“Is that where you learned how to pilot like a madmeioa, sir?” Sangwan asked dryly.

She knew he didn’t mean Basic Training; he meant actual combat flying. “Nope. I learned how to do that while serving two years on the Blockade.”

“And all of it precognitively guided,” Helstead observed.

“Most of it. The first time I encountered an anti-psi machine, I had to wing it. I was on an OTL Harrier-Class,” Ia confessed. “We could only go as fast as three-quarters Cee at max speed, and had no FTL panels. Unlike now, I didn’t know that FTL could cancel the anti-psi effects. I also didn’t know what I was up against at the time.

“But I got myself, my crew, and both halves of my ship out of that mess—Delta-VX,” she added in explanation, meaning a type of ship that was actually two vessels coupled together. “I did so by evaluating the situation and coming up with a viable
solution based on the resources I had available. Which was double-rifting the Salik capital ship as I flew us past at maximum speed.

“That is why I insisted on having hyperspace nose cones installed both fore and aft on
this
ship. Dangerous as it is, that little trick will continue to save our lives. Now, are you feeling well enough to fly, Yeoman?” she asked Sangwan.

He sighed and nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Then prepare to receive the helm. Write up your tactical analyses of what just happened and hand ’em up the chain of command for your weekly Squad and Platoon debriefing and discussion sessions,” she ordered. “I need to get back to my daily regimen. Flab and foe wait for no one.”

Helstead
snerked
. A couple of the others bit back smiles of their own. Sangwan was too busy preparing his station for control of the ship, though his shoulders didn’t look quite as tense as before. “Aye, Captain. Helm to my station in ten, sir.”

INTERSTITIAL SPACE
SOMEWHERE NEAR THE K’KATTAN-GATSUGI BORDER

The
Hellfire
slipped below Cee, fired off its homemade rock missiles, and slipped up again mere seconds later, analyzing the lightwave data. Instead of widely spaced ships, however, the twenty or so vessels protecting the station were patrolling it in a close sphere, with none of them actually docked. Tiny by comparison, shuttles moved back and forth between the lumpy station and the sleeker ships, no doubt transporting supplies and other goods.

The Salik hadn’t moved their main anti-psi manufacturing facility to the Tlassian-K’kattan border, one of the two choices decoded from the stolen data nodes; instead, they had moved those facilities to
both
locations. Like one of the Delta-VX Harrier ships Ia had served on before gaining command of the
Hellfire
, this style of Salik station could be separated into several pieces and moved independently. The Salik had chosen to do so. That was why the odds had been so evenly fifty-fifty.

They had also chosen to pepper the local patch of space with hyperrelay-equipped scanner probes. The nearest one was three light-seconds off from the
Hellfire
’s entry point. As they
slipped back above the speed of light, Ia didn’t have much time to weigh her options. A few seconds was all she needed, though.

Wrapped in an FTL field, she was free to use the timestreams at full mental capacity. What Ia found brought her out of the timeplains with a feral smile.

Well, well, well,
she thought, very carefully turning the attitude of the ship. Once again, she was not going to fly it straight like a javelin but rather at an angle like a crowbar.
Looks like they’ll be overlapping their FTL fields to shunt the incoming missiles to either side. A fancy bit of static formation flying. It’ll work, too; those rocks will be scattered off to either side despite their near-Cee velocity.

But that
also
means they’ll be lined up in a few moments…and it won’t harm the future to unleash the fury of the
Hellfire
upon them, today.

Her right hand left the controls for a moment, long enough to lift up the cover and press her palm to the lockbox scanner that differentiated her console from the others. It took a second for the security system to triple-check her DNA, palmprint, life signs, and the ship’s interior recordings of her movements, then the box unlocked with an audible
click
. Lifting the clear, hard case up out of her way, Ia flipped the switch that authorized the use of the main cannon.

“Ah, Captain?” Corporal Morgan asked from his position at the gunnery station. “Aren’t we going to drop out of FTL soon, sir?”

“Change of plans,” Ia told him. “All gunners, hold fire.”

“Aye, sir.
All gunners, hold fire,
” he relayed into his headset.

The ship’s attitude reached eighty degrees relative to its vector. Ia dropped them below Cee, ship still angled to travel on the diagonal. The pain came back, blindingly strong now that they were relatively close to the station. Vision misted by the timestreams, she plunged into her own downstream and read the lightwave they would see in just a few moments, before pulling out and adjusting their aim ever so slightly

“Station midpoint in fifteen seconds,” Yeoman Yamasuka warned her. “Are we slowing down, sir?”

Now,
the timestreams all said. At the same moment, Ia’s thumb flicked, activating the cannon switch with a single tap. Unless she deliberately kept the button pressed, it would fire
for one-twentieth of a second once charged. But first, it had to charge.

Corporal Crow, seated at the operations station, choked as his displays abruptly changed. The lighting on the bridge dimmed a little, and a strange, almost ominous
hummm
crept into their ears. On Crow’s bank of screens, the bars gauging the ship’s various energy outputs abruptly shifted, rescaling themselves.

Ship operations turned from long green and yellow bars into tiny green ones. A bank of new lines sprung up, shifting quickly from green to yellow, exponentially greater than the previous ones. Other graphs opened as well, detailing the heat being expressed along the axial core of the ship.

Along with that
hummm
, something
whoosh-thumped
. It did it again, and again, growing louder and faster as more joined the first, working in concert. Those were the Sterling heat differential engines; they pumped hydrofuel from the inner core to the outer hull and back, cooling the thermal bleed from the main cannon and recapturing some of that heat as yet more energy for the ship.

The combination of
hum
and
whoosh-thump
started to rattle the deckplates—and at the ten-second mark, every forward-pointed screen lit up for a fraction of a second, bathing the cabin in a flash of bright blood red.

Terran lasers fired at the low end of the visible light spectrum, with their beam tuned to have sympathetic, harmonic “wolfs” lurking at near-infrared lengths. Other weaponmakers tuned theirs closer to orange or even yellow to try to get several such harmonics, but the Terrans believed too many wavelengths diluted the impact. Like striking a C major note and hearing the harmonics for a G fifth, the tuning added extra heat to their punch. That made their weapons a signature red, and the Godstrike cannon was no exception.

Traveling just below lightspeed, it took only a second or so to see what that single brief pulse of light did, a pulse that arrived at a somewhat diagonal angle, despite its short length. Most of it scorched through the formation of ships attempting to shield the station from the incoming missiles. Some of it kept going. Ia didn’t pay much attention to that, though; with a dispersion rate of four light-months, the excess energy wouldn’t harm anything. The Salik had chosen better than they
knew; this location was in a large chunk of interstitial space half a light-year from the more-commonly-traveled flight paths and visited systems.

The
humming
sound had shut off, but the engines still
whooshed
, putting that excess heat into capacitors dotting the length of the main gun. Ia’s hand shifted slightly in the feedback glove, changing their attitude again as well as slowing the ship a bit. Everyone swayed in their seats from the vector changes to their inertia, though not as strongly as during the other fight.

This time, Ia added a sideways slip, massaging the FTL fields to sneak them in behind the station. The move also pointed them at it and the remnants of ships lying beyond. Again, her thumb flicked the cannon’s switch. Again, the humming rumble came back, and the engines picked up speed, shuttling superheated fluids to an array of pipes just under the space-cooled hull of the ship and back again.

The moment their slowly rotating nose pointed hindward at the station, those ten seconds of buildup ended in a twentieth-of-a-second burst that flared through the bridge. This time, the glow was very dark and lingered far longer than it should have. Blinking, straining to see through the green-and-red afterimages, Ia checked the lightwave readings. They came after several long seconds; as the red blob finally cleared from their view, the navicomp magnified and highlighted the two halves of the station, and the rock-damaged chunks of ships tumbling beyond.