“Prime the guns,” Penae said. “Solve for the fleeing craft; fire as the numbers say.”
“Guns priming. Permission to clear the safeties?” Penae’s weapons commander asked.
“Granted.”
He’d have preferred to take the small ship intact, for the intelligence asset it presented if nothing else, but his orders from the captain left Penae more than enough room to eliminate the craft if they were at risk of letting it go.
Pity. You seem like you might have made an interesting acquaintance.
►►►
Shuttle
Eagle One
► A new series of alarms, ones that Steph was intimately familiar with, blared mercilessly through the flight deck of the shuttle. Milla looked around, disconcerted and concerned, clearly not recognizing them.
“We’ve been targeted,” Steph said stiffly. “Active range-finding gear, probably a lidar variant. They’re about to open fire.”
“Oh.” Milla’s voice was soft, barely audible as she sank a bit deeper into her seat.
“Lasers are junk in the atmosphere,” Steph said, talking to organize his own thoughts, “even ones as powerful as the Priminae’s.”
“Especially,” Milla corrected. “Overly powerful laser fire will warp the atmosphere and attenuate the energy of the weapon.”
“Okay, so what else will they use?”
Milla blinked. “Pardon?”
Steph looked over sharply. “You heard me.”
“How am I to know?” Milla asked. “They are not known to me!”
“Bullshit.” Steph’s tone was flat. “You know these people. You may not know how, but you
know
them.”
Milla fell silent, a mix of emotions crossing her face. Finally, she sighed. “They are using antiquated parasite frigates. Expect projectile weapons.”
“Hypervelocity missiles?”
“No. Slower, but guided,” Milla said, frowning. “If they are using the historical weapons from the records.”
“Guided?” Steph looked a little skeptical.
Guided weapons were fine when dealing with planetary distances, a few hundred kilometers—even a few thousand. However, spacecraft had to engage weapons at millions of kilometers and speeds that made most guidance systems utterly useless. If you didn’t aim them right to begin with, there was no guidance system in the universe that had the Delta-V to manage more than extremely minor corrections.
The Double A fighters had used guided missiles, but they were a knife-range platform. The frigates he was dealing with seemed like they should be solar system range at least.
If he could get into space, Steph felt he could probably get enough space between him and the enemy to negate their missiles. That really only left lasers, and at the sorts of distances you generally fought at in space, laser engagements were more of a chess game than a martial fight.
“Secure armor. Calculate cam-plate settings needed to negate their targeting frequencies,” Steph ordered.
“Aye,” Milla said. It was an easy order, one that the shuttle’s computers were designed specifically to handle. “Done. Shall I engage?”
“Not yet. Let’s hold that back for a moment. They’ve already got a pretty good lock on us, and they could use passives if they needed to anyway. Do the missiles use the same frequencies?”
“That I truly could not say. I know of historical weapons. I could not tell you how they were designed specifically.”
“Great. Alright, hold on tight. I figure this is going to get fun in a second or two,” Steph said as the alarms redoubled, signaling that more active targeting sources had locked them up. “Incoming!”
Milla unconsciously tugged on her seat’s restraints, assuring herself that they were strapped and taut, though in all truth they probably wouldn’t do much good. There was a relatively narrow window during which restraints were both useful and nonlethal, and she knew that without the CM generators operating to reduce the effective mass, and thus the inertia of the shuttle and its occupants, being crushed under acceleration was a real possibility.
So when Steph told her that things were about to become “fun,” Milla just really wished that his definition of fun were not so removed from her own.
►►►
PC Parasite
Five
► “Bracket them and fire. Try to disable them, if you can,” Penae ordered. “Still, I would rather have them falling through the atmosphere in shards than exiting in one piece.”
“On your orders, Subaltern!”
The parasite frigate shook as its missiles were ejected out into the atmosphere of the gas giant, lancing on ahead of them. The shock waves of missiles crashing through their own sonic bubble rocked the vessel again. Penae watched as cloud trails condensed in the weapons’ wake, pressure waves sucking water from the air.
Six, ten, twenty—enough missiles rocketed away to bracket the enemy craft twice over, but he wasn’t certain it would be enough.
The pilot was clearly skilled and certainly reckless, a bad combination to face off against. Not a great combination to have on your own side either, in all honesty.
He and the crew of the frigate watched as the condensation trails from the missiles lanced out, arcing upward toward the target vessel. As the first three tracked in on the enemy, a burst of explosive energy caused Penae to flinch away and, for a split second, wonder if the craft had been struck ahead of his projections.
The screens equalized quickly, however, and he saw that a series of explosive bursts had been launched from the craft. Then he realized what he was seeing.
“Countermeasures.” He nodded before speaking up. “Are they effective?”
“Not appreciably, Subaltern,” his weapons officer answered. “We’ve lost some resolution on the lead missile, but the swarm is effectively immune.”
That was unsurprising, but he had wanted to be certain. The missiles they had fired worked in conjunction with one another, feeding each other data and sharing information as much as possible. The lead missile would be the most susceptible to countermeasures, but the overall swarm would quickly compensate.
The missiles blew through the countermeasures, only the first one detonating prematurely as its scanners were fooled into thinking the target was closer than it was.
It was a decent try,
Penae thought idly as he watched the remaining missiles home in.
At the last possible instant the vessel almost
lazily
heeled over and shifted course, diving back into the gas giant’s atmosphere, causing missiles to scream past as most of the swarm tried but failed to anticipate the new course. The craft wrenched wildly, shaking the next wave of missiles that had managed to stick with them, then leveled out and waggled its wings a few times before burning hard for the upper atmosphere once more.
“Brazen bastard,” Penae muttered, more amused than anything else.
“As you say, Subaltern.”
►►►
Shuttle
Eagle One
► The skies ahead of Steph and Milla were beginning to darken from the blue green of the lower atmosphere to give way to the blue black that signified the edge of air. Steph could feel the control systems change, shifting from atmospheric resistance to extra-atmospheric reaction systems. Microthrusters and gyroresistance controls took over from ailerons and elevators, stealing some of his feedback from the controls.
Steph preferred flying in an atmosphere, though there were charms to be had in microgravity and zero-resistance flight, simply because you could
feel
the craft in atmosphere. In space, with full counter-mass powered up, it was more like flying an overhyped video game ship than the real thing.
Except for the consequences.
Those were all too real.
“Can you find me the third frigate, Milla?” he asked, tracking the missiles that were still in the air.
Those were tracking back around, clearly operating on internal guidance from what he could see, but probably also getting updated targeting data from the frigates. Stephen wasn’t too worried about them. Based on their velocity, missiles that size wouldn’t have enough fuel to dog
Eagle One
’s steps too far. They’d be a threat for a few passes, though, unless he did something about them.
Electronic countermeasures didn’t do much, and neither did the flares.
Steph wasn’t too pleased about that. He hadn’t expected much out of the flares, of course, not with active tracking on the inbound birds. Flares were effective mostly against passive heat seekers, but he’d held out more hope for the ECMs.
“Holding position at the edge of the atmosphere, maneuvering to maintain a CAP over our position,” Milla responded.
“Good move,” Steph acknowledged. Though he disliked dealing with an intelligent enemy, putting a combat air patrol over them was going to make things a lot harder on him and Milla. “They’re trying to get us in a pincer. They should have more ships to pull this pincer off properly, but against this pig, three might just be enough.”
He didn’t know enough about their maneuvering or weapons to be certain, but Steph was fairly confident that three would, in fact, be more than enough. The two tagging them from below were going to force him to run the blockade of the third, which was waiting in the bird-dog position. As soon as
Eagle One
entered into range, the CAP frigate would simply open fire with lasers or missiles, or try to lock the shuttle in with the sort of tractor beam. At that range, and closing fast, there was no way in hell the shuttle would be able to outmaneuver incoming missiles, let alone lasers and whatever the quantum lock was.
Once he and Milla broke out into space, they needed to get as far away from their pursuers as they
possibly
could. Lasers didn’t give a warning before they vaporized your hull and left you sucking vacuum.
“Okay, I’ve got the frigate in sight. I want you on missile track now,” Steph said, tapping the throttle back a little as he lined up his course.
“Missile track, aye,” Milla said automatically, shifting her instrument readings as she called up the information from the targeting beams of the still-active and lethal missiles. “On them. We appear to have lost three more. They overcompensated and went too deep into the planet’s atmosphere after we turned. The rest are now tracking back on course.”
“Read me the approach vectors,” Steph said, eyes focused out through the screen on a light in the distance that was the frigate flying CAP overhead.
“Roger,” Milla said, reflecting on how odd it was to call someone Roger when she knew his name was Steph. Terran military habits were bizarre, but she’d learned them dutifully in order to hold the role she wanted. “Main pack now approaching from Zero Nine Thirty, thirty degrees high. Impact in sixty seconds . . . mark.”
Steph didn’t respond as he pushed the throttle all the way forward, causing the shuttle to once again jump to full military speed as they bore down on the enemy frigate on a collision course.
If you can’t evade them, try and freak them the hell out.
►►►
PC Parasite
Five
► “They’re accelerating on a collision course with parasite
Eight
, Subaltern.”
Penae could see that for himself, much as it baffled him. He quickly checked the mass estimates on the enemy craft as well as what they could scan of its composition.
There is no way they’re going to cause significant damage, even if they impact. What are they doing?
“Show me my sky,” he ordered.
“Yes Subaltern.”
The displays shifted, showing the entire sky around them along with the plotted tracks for everything moving. Penae examined the various tracks, then relaxed slightly.
“Tricky, but this flyer clearly has no idea what he is up against,” he said finally.
“I’m sorry. I do not understand, Subaltern,” Penae’s second said.
“He is leading the remaining active missiles toward parasite
Eight
, either hoping they’ll take out the frigate or we’ll take out the missiles, I suppose,” Penae said.
“Why would we do that?”
“Not every species has systems as precise as ours,” he explained. “Many would be forced to destruct their own missiles, or risk losing the parasite. It’s not a bad gambit to play, given his situation.”
“It will gain him nothing,” the second-in-command of the parasite said, mystified.
“True, but he doesn’t know that.”
►►►
Shuttle
Eagle One
► Milla had a death grip on her heavily bolstered seat, eyes wide as the parasite frigate loomed ahead of them, growing larger by the second. She didn’t know what Steph had in mind, but she did know that she no longer wanted to be a pilot. Not for the moment anyway.
Give her the heavy armor and, more importantly, the heavier weapons of a Heroic Class starship at her touch; now that was her place.
She hoped she would get back to her post, though at the moment that seemed less and less likely.
“Stephan . . . ,” she murmured, her tone not
quite
panicked.
“Quiet now. I really need to focus for this,” Steph said, actually looking away from the screen for a moment to flash a grin at her.
“Ahead! Ahead, look ahead, please!”
His rolling chuckle was an alien sound amid the thudding of her heart and the constant alarms sounding through the shuttle’s flight deck, but it quickly became what she focused on. Even when the laughter passed, Milla felt she could hear the sound’s ghostly echo hanging in the air, making light of everything that was happening.
She had no idea how he could be so calm about it all, but Milla realized that she very much preferred that to the alternatives.
A proximity alarm began to sound, softly at first, but with quickly growing enthusiasm as
Eagle One
closed on the enemy frigate. A nearly forgotten program on Milla’s station lit up, and she jerked her head down to see what it was before letting out a surprised cry.