Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (39 page)

“I’m presuming you’re worried about the hyperrift mouth,” Ia said. Ishiomi nodded. “Don’t be. There’s only a seven percent chance someone will hit it after we exit, and none before. If that happens, I’ll simply shoot the ship forward, and the gunners get to readjust their aim a bit.”

“If you say so, sir,” he muttered, his tone somewhere between tactful and dubious. The pilot wasn’t one of the half dozen crew members who had asked to see the future a week ago. Ia didn’t blame him, nor fault him for his skepticism.

Instead, she switched on the intercom.
“All hands, this is the Captain, prepare for hyperspace in five minutes, followed by one to two hours of nasty combat, depending on whether you’re manning the ships or boarding the station. Be advised, some of you
will
be injured; this is unavoidable. However, if you keep your wits about you and heed my precognitive commands, none of you should die. Please do not disappoint me. Five minutes to jump. Ia out.”

“Captain, Yeoman O’Keefe reports everyone is on board the drop ship and prepared to launch,” Private C’ulosc stated.

“Good. Let’s get the ship down out of FTL and ready for OTL speeds,” Ia directed.

NEARSPACE, BEAUTIFUL-BLUE
SUGAI SYSTEM

Their oversized, lumpy silver needle of a ship emerged from the grey streaks of the hyperrift into a stuttering cage of bright orange and yellow. Thankfully, all of the Salik projectiles were aimed outward. A few of those lasers were firing through the dotted cylinder of the enemy formation, but none of them
actually struck the
Hellfire
. Ia had timed the pattern and spaces perfectly. She sighed in relief.

Somewhere out there, five of the ships did have large anti-psi generators active, but they were nowhere near as strong as a station filled with hundreds of the machines being activated and tested. Ia had only a modest headache this time, a mild impediment at best as she dragged her toes through the waters in her mind.

The L-pod gunners were already firing the moment they were free and clear, aiming their lasers at a set list of priorities: shield panels, gunnery pods, FTL and thruster panels, and sensor arrays. The ship thrummed, vibrating gently with the efforts of the hydrogenerators powering all those lasers, but otherwise their entry into the big opening act of the war was fairly quiet.

The chaotic view of the battle contrasted with that quietness. At least, until the first hastily reaimed projectile hit. Their shields absorbed most of the blow, though some of the kinetic force of the explosion rattled into their hull. Ia relaxed a little at that. “Right on time…and now that the hull’s been scratched, I feel a lot better.
All hands, brace for maneuvers. Yeoman O’Keefe, shuttle launch in two minutes ten seconds. P-pods, launch!
”

The ship
whumped
with the simultaneous launching of scores of missiles. Counting to three, Ia ramped up the FTL field, slipping forward. The hyperrift tunnel had closed without incident behind them, but now, easily fifty or more lasers and projectiles were being aimed their way. The missiles weren’t a problem; the FTL field would shunt them and their impact explosions aside. It was the lasers that could do them the most harm; their wavelengths could still cause damage even if that field greased matter out of the way.

Telltales scrolled through her upper tertiary screens, echoing the ones Private Nelson was monitoring at the operations station. Several flickered yellow, indicating solid hits. She increased their speed with a jolt, forcing the interior safety fields to catch up for a rough-squeezed moment. Half a dozen more items showed up in yellow, and two turned red, then they outstripped the incoming fire.

Not because they needed to outdistance
the Salik gunners’ ability to aim and fire, but because they needed to outdistance the effects of the missiles the
Hellfire
’s own gunners had just launched. Every projectile-pod bay had five blossoms locked in its hold, and every projectile pod had just fired one of those five.

It didn’t matter how good the Salik shields were. Eighty blossom bombs implied a lot of kinetic impact force. With at least a third of those shields damaged by intense L-pod fire from the
Hellfire
, that meant a lot of the secondary blossom bombs would get through.

Her right secondary screen lit up in more yellows and oranges, this time puffballs of silent explosions on enemy hulls instead of streaks of laserfire. That was, if one didn’t count the
Hellfire
’s aft-facing guns, which were thumping away. Ia didn’t spare the rearward view on her right screen more than a brief glance. Instead, she flexed the FTL field, tricking physics into ignoring their forward momentum long enough to tilt their long axis a bit more toward the right, and a bit more still.

By the time they were sliding fully sideways through space to the oncoming Salik fleet, it was time to launch the shuttle. Cutting the field, Ia flicked the switch for the bow-bay doors, sliding them open.
“Yeoman O’Keefe, you are clear to launch. Godspeed, and follow the flight path I’ve plotted for you.”

“Aye, aye, sir,”
the other woman replied.
“Launching now.”

The projectile pods continued to
whump
around them, shaking the bridge faintly. Ia nodded.
“Lieutenant Spyder, contact station personnel and have them take you to the spot I marked on your map as soon as you arrive.”

“We’re on it, Cap’n,”
he agreed.
“Smack-dab central in
their hull-minin’ efforts. We’ll take ’em out from within, or your nickname ain’t Bloody Mary.”

“We’re free and clear, Captain,”
O’Keefe told her. The forward view on Ia’s main screen showed the small silver bulge of the shuttle escaping ahead of them.
“Locked and loaded, and on our way to the
Freely Flowing.”

Several more ship systems turned amber on her list. Three more turned red, not nearly enough to hamper their capacities yet. But that was no reason to keep exposing the same surfaces to enemy fire.
“Acknowledged, O’Keefe. Acknowledged, Spyder. All hands, spinning the ship.”

A swirl of her left pinkie managed the trick, manipulating the ship through the attitude glove. Acting in angled opposition, the ripple in the insystem-thruster controls rolled the
Hellfire
on
its long axis, presenting new surfaces to absorb the incoming damage and new guns for opening return fire. Lots of return fire. Once they had the Salik fleet’s attention, Ia backslipped the ship, swaying everyone on the bridge forward and to the right against their safety harnesses since they were still inward-bound toward the blue-brown pebble in the distance on their left.

“Alright, meioas,” Ia murmured half to herself, half to her bridge crew. She spared a few seconds to call up a list from her files. “Let’s reel in some of those bigger ships. C’ulosc, get on the comm with the ships I’m sending to your first tertiary. Suggest the battle plan in the first folder to their captains. I want to herd that star-side clutch of ships closer together.”

“Aye, sir,” he complied.

She switched on her headset.
“Captain Ia to Private Redrock, you have one minute thirty-five seconds before you must abandon L-pod 45 or risk serious injury. I repeat, abandon your L-Pod in one minute thirty seconds.”

“Sir?”
she heard the gunner query in her left ear.
“Abandon
it?”

Ia rolled the ship again, this time adding a brief FTL twist that both shunted aside incoming missiles and allowed their bow to shift more toward the still inward-bound enemy.
“The
shield panels in your sector are failing. They’re going to score a direct hit on your primary pod with both projectile and laserfire. You’re going to get a feedback surge that’ll overload the capacitors. Retreat to L-pod 47 and resume fire in one minute. Beware of maneuvers.”

“Uh…aye, sir!”

“Yesss!” Private Shim exclaimed from his position at the navigation console. “The GCMS
Bright-Falling Death-Wings
just stomped the lead capital ship with two megablossoms, Captain. Plotting debris vectors to your third tertiary.”

“Thank you, Shim.” She didn’t bother to look; the purpose of sending them to her console was to sync the navicomp’s information with the helm computer, which would light up her main screen with the necessary collision warnings if those chunks came close. “Eyes to the boards, thoughts on your tasks, gentlemeioas.”

The ship rocked gently under several more missile strikes. Ia dodged and swerved the ship, timing the thruster and FTL fields to the needs of dodging and returning fire. The ship shook
with a louder
boom
, testament to her warning. Several red telltales blipped onto her upper-center tertiary screen, warning her they now had a small hole in the hull. Not deep enough to vent the sector but enough to cripple the L-pod in question.

A brief temporal peek at Private Redrock’s position showed him in the corridor outside his L-Pod station, shaken but not zapped by feedback energies. He was squeezing past repair teams sent by Lieutenant Commander Harper to seal off the damaged subsectors and reroute the fueling conduits.

Contrary to the illusions of the entertainment business, there would be no such zaps in here, where Ia sat. There were far too many capacitors and circuit breakers sheltering both the bridge and engineering compartments to allow that. Plenty for most other positions on the ship, but the L-Pod’s circuits had already been damaged, allowing a little too much energy to bleed and arc past its safety systems. Ia liked that her bridge wasn’t located in a physically vulnerable location, such as in some sort of control tower or windowed segment of the hull. That sort of nonsense was best reserved for vidshows.

There were half-silvered windows found on luxury starliners and orbital space stations; those windows had blast panels ready to close at a moment’s notice. The narrow openings compared to the overall size of those vessels further reduced the chance of lasers targeting them. But battleships weren’t built to be vulnerable like that. Even if the energy only pierced at half strength, windows were an open invitation for laserfire to bypass the entire purpose of a ship’s silvery, tough hull.

“…Looks like they’re herding about…nine Salik vessels into the requested formation, Captain,” C’ulosc told Ia.

“Good. Tell the GCMS
Like-Love Hammering Hard
to adjust course immediately to three by sixteen off its current heading. Let them know they have twelve
klis
to get out of the way.” Shifting her right hand from the thrusters to the lockbox, she flipped up the outer lid, scanned her palm, opened the inner lid, and thumbed the switch. “Private Nelson, have the water pipes around the remains of L-Pod 45 been rerouted?”

“Uhhh…getting the last one now, sir,” the woman manning the operations station told her, coordinating with the engineering crew’s repair teams.

“Good. C’ulosc, sound the retreat to our allies. Firing the cannon in ten.”

The deck thrummed as the communications tech complied, passing her directive on to the Gatsugi ships through his headset. The Sterling engines began their
whooshing
, audible warning of the power being raised. Ia adjusted course slightly, a tiny bit more—and blood red blasted from the nose of their ship, barely missing the
Like-Love Hammering Hard
.

The holes it left behind in eight of the Salik ships were gratifying to see, as the navicomp scanners magnified the view from ship to ship on her left secondary. Strafing slightly sideways as they were, the distance between those eight chunks of enemy ship wasn’t readily apparent just from the view alone. The hindmost target, however, was almost five light-seconds away.

“And that’s all she could do,” Ia murmured, sparing a hand from the controls to flip down the lockbox. “Nothing else will align in this battle just right.”

“
Shakk
—sorry, Captain,” C’ulosc apologized. “That’s the fifth Gatsugi ship the Salik have blown up, their third biggest.”

“Ten enemy ships are now down, with twenty-plus to go,” Ishiomi reported.

“Captain, incoming fighters, 190 by 165,” Shim warned Ia. “They’re a mix of both sides.”

“Looks like the Salik are going to try to play hide-and-seek with our hull,” Rico observed.
“Aft P-pods, you get two shots. Pick your targets carefully. Double-check your missiles are set to friend-foe recognition patterns, Salik only for foe.”

“As much as I’d like to give the Gatsugi fighters some close cover,
not
with an amidships hole in my hull,” Ia told her crew. “We’re slipping out of this mess as soon as your teams fire their second volley, Lieutenant. Eyes to your boards, thoughts on your tasks, meioas. We still have a lot of fighting ahead of us.”

MARCH 4, 2496 T.S.

GATSUGI COMMERCIAL STATION
FREELY FLOWING III
BEAUTIFUL-BLUE ORBIT, SUGAI SYSTEM

Wearing her four Gatsugi medals along with her half glittery of one pin representing each category, Ia was given enough respect from the harried station personnel to pass from the
public sectors through to the inner medical facilities without much trouble. She had more difficulty making that transit physically, as those facilities overflowed with patients needing tending. Some had wounds that could wait, while others had to be rushed through as priority cases. More than once, she had to squeeze up against a wall, among the lesser patients resting in chairs and lying on portable beds, while a team of corpsmen rushed a patient through on a hovergurney.

Ships were still limping in from the outer edges of the system. The Salik had finally retreated when their numbers had been whittled down to thirteen vessels. They had taken heavy potshots at everything in their way as they ramped up to FTL speeds and vanished. The remnants of their crippled fleet were now being boarded by Gatsugi soldiers, and that meant the wounded were being cycled out of combat via insystem shuttles and sent wherever emergency services figured they could be saved.

The damaged ships in the Gatsugi Motherworld’s nearspace weren’t the only problem. Three of the largest ships had managed to sling their cargo planetward. Some had been shot down, but more than a hundred dropships crammed with combat robots had made landfall in or near major cities, tying up ground resources. Like most of the races in the Alliance, the Gatsugi had an aversion to artificial intelligences, and that meant tying up a lot of resources to crush the invasion: military, medical, and transportational.