FTE - Ch 9

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The Kraken was very ugly, even as far as freighters went. Most of the patchwork and parts were from a dozen different worlds, and almost nothing matched. Indeed, she was ugly, and slow, and about as maneuverable as the asteroids she ferried ore from; but still, her captain thought of her as his big, beloved rust bucket. She made her routine trips between the asteroid cluster and the orbital refineries, day after day, year after year. And boring wasn’t so bad after all. Captain Hanif loved walking up and down her cramped berths and talking to his beloved freighter as he would to a loving spouse whom he had spent his life with.

Asteroid Cygna Epsilon, outermost in its group, was covered in ice. It paid for itself by rendering up mountainous glaciers that would produce fresh water for the dry planets in the Pollux system. It was a simple matter of cleaving off a huge pylon of glacier ice, then making precise cuts along the crystalline faults until it rendered a chunk small enough to fit in the Kraken’s cavernous holds. The asteroid was also rich in lanthanide elements and other heavy metals, and Hanif’s family had gotten in the first claim on its northernmost shore’s mineral rights three generations ago.

Hanif whistled to himself as he climbed down the main access ladder to the larger cargo hold to inspect the floor latches that had been giving him trouble lately. On the last cruise, one of the latches had given out completely, and a particularly large block of ice had shifted nearly enough to sever the outer doors. It would cost him a small fortune to replace the latch, so he chose to reinforce the remaining latches and jury-rig the broken one to act merely as a stop, holding the cargo pinned against the other latches. Perhaps if he pushed his engines a little bit more, he might just make this run in under a week, which would earn him a tiny bonus from the guild for coming in under schedule. Of course, he would then have to make the next run even quicker to pay for the damage he would do to the tub’s worn out ion drive. Ah, there just never seemed to be enough pay to fix everything at once. Still, he thought dreamily, if he could just pay off the parts of the boat that he owed repair costs on, there was a possibility he could give his daughter and soon to be son-in-law a rather nice gift for their wedding.

Satisfied with his efforts, he ascended the ladder once more and made his way to the bridge. As he stepped into the compartment and crossed to his command chair, he paused to check the engineering displays. The engine room temperature had risen another half degree over the last hour, which meant the ion drive couplings were wearing thin again. He sighed and decided that someday he would need to replace those too.

“Captain?” He looked up at his son and first mate, who was accompanied by the master of the boat. They were looking up at a sensor display panel above the engineering monitor station. “Could you have a look at this, Papa?”

Hanif crossed to the engineering station, frowning at Walee and wondering what chunk of his precious ship had broken off and floated away this time. Or perhaps Walee had discovered some new knickknack of floating detritus to ogle over.

“What is it now?”

“There is a ship out here. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear I’m picking up a drive field.”

“A drive field? Out here?” Hanif tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“Yes, sir. Its frequency matches nothing in our database.” Huaath waved at his display. “And judging from the power curves, it’s big. Look for yourself.”

Hanif brushed the younger men aside as he studied the readout for himself. His eyes widened, for the instruments did indeed show that there was a drive field out there. Hanif’s sensor suite was woefully inadequate for determining anything reliable about the ship he was seeing--he should probably upgrade that too someday--but the signature burned clear and sharp, and Hanif had a sudden, terrible suspicion.

“Speed?” he asked quietly.

“It’s moving slowly ahead at space normal,” Walee said. Hanif scratched his bald pate, where he once had as much hair as the young man in front of him. If it was a pirate…

“Incoming missiles!” someone screamed. Hanif stared at the display in shock. Missiles were coming at his precious tub--not one, or two, or a dozen, but scores of them.

“Why would they be shooting at Kraken?” Hanif asked, almost to himself as his mind began to catch up with what he was seeing. He was too far out from the Antares base to call for aid, and he had no shields to protect himself from the impact of those weapons bearing down on him. His last thought was of his daughter. He wouldn’t even get to walk her down the aisle.

* * *

“Commander, three more just showed up on the long sats.” Commander Wainright walked to the duty officer’s station and looked over the ensign’s shoulder.

“So far, I see four ships--no, make that five--that have just entered the system’s outer perimeter--” he looked over at the chrono “--eleven minutes ago. At first, I thought it was freighter traffic. It matches the vector from the Sidium asteroids, but then the ship counts started increasing. The sensor grid’s calling it a ‘light task group,’ but the class sizes don’t add up.”

“Are we expecting company, Lieutenant?” Wainright asked.

“No, sir. And we’ve got nothing on the SECCOM channel about this either.”

“Sound alert condition beta until we know for sure what we’ve got. Call the old man. Maybe he knows what’s going on.”

* * *

“Oh, Space!”

Captain Yeargin stepped onto the bridge and crossed to the battle tank. Four minutes had passed since Commander Wainright had signaled the general quarters alarm. The heavy cruiser Wizard’s Bane had just barely begun to shake down into battle stations when four dreadnoughts, two battleships, and three strike cruisers opened fire. By the time Yeargin’s assistant TAC officer had identified the ship classes at tactical, over eighty missiles had closed half the distance to his ship. For all intents and purposes, the destruction of his task group was all but assured.

Yeargin’s crews were still scrambling frantically to their stations when the first wave came in. Of the group’s three heavy cruisers, two never got their point defense online at all. The two frigates assigned as escorts managed--somehow--to bring their defensive beam cannons up under manual control, but only Wizard’s Bane got off a single salvo of counter-missiles. Not that it made much difference. Five incoming missiles were intercepted before they reached the cruisers; the other seventy-five raced in to twenty thousand kilometers and detonated in one massive blast of destruction.

Antimatter explosions pocked space, each one gouging entire hull quadrants from the defense force’s outnumbered starships. It was beyond massacre, for there was absolutely nothing they could do against the tidal wave of destruction that poured over them. It took less than four seconds for all eighty warheads to rain down on the stunned cruisers, and when the last of them had detonated, the Antarian defense force had lost three heavy cruisers and two frigates without a single answering volley at their attackers.

Commander Jennifer Dorset sat frozen in her command chair, staring with numb silence at the carnage she had just witnessed. Hers was one of two scout vessels assigned to help the main refinery platform of the Antares asteroid extraction industry. It was an important facility for ensuring the Sagittarius arm had enough water and metals, and it was over fifty light-minutes from the Antarian fleet base, well away from the course the enemy had vectored on his way in-system. Which meant that Dorset’s two ships had survived… and that she was now the system’s senior officer. The academy had not prepared her for this. Her exec looked up from his display and into her shocked face. What in Asgard’s halls could she do?

The Antarian defense squadron was gone. Only her scout ships remained, and they would be less than useless against the force slowly moving in-system and decelerating toward the fleet support base, which now had fresh, huge chunks of starship debris in its parking orbit. Some of the debris produced a beautiful light show as it continued past, burning out its remaining oxygen. She had just witnessed the most brutal annihilation of a Terran fleet in recent history, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

A slow, dull headache told her that her teeth were clamped like a auto-vice, so she drew in an enormous breath and willed her jaws relax. Then she felt a shiver down her back, and shook herself, like a dog throwing water from its coat, and turned to her exec. Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus was still staring at the plot, his normally dark face pale, and Dorset cleared her throat loudly.

Dreyfus twitched as if she’d hit him with a stick, and then closed his eyes for just a moment. When he opened them again, the shock had been dragged under a ruthless pretense of control, and he met his captain’s gaze squarely.

“Pass the word. We’ll hyper out to Altair ourselves. Instruct Jewell to head directly for Spica.”

“But--” Dreyfus paused. “That won’t leave anyone to picket this system, ma’am,” he pointed out quietly.

“If we don’t leave now, there will be no one to warn sector command.” Dorset’s tone was as bleak as her expression. “I don’t know what the merchant schedule was, but I do know we’ve got to stop any more of them before they transit in and run into that! There is nothing in our immediate sector that will stand a chance against a force that size, but at least they can fall back to Spica and link up with Fourth Fleet. The merchies won’t like it… but Logistics Command is bound to stage and reroute them through Spica or Acamar. Which means we have to catch them in one of those systems and warn them off in time. Besides--” she managed a slight smile, “--we’re all there is. Someone’s got to alert the other local pickets about what’s happened here, and the only people who can do that are us.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Dreyfus beckoned to the comm officer, and Dorset heard the urgent, low-pitched murmur of his voice as he passed her orders on to her sister ship, Jewell. She knew she should be listening to be sure her officer had gotten those orders right, but they’d served together for over six months after completing officer candidate school, and she trusted him. He wasn’t the sort to make mistakes, and even if he had been, it was physically impossible for her to look away from her display and the icons of the invading warships settling into orbit around what was now left of the fleet base.

Captain Yeargin’s task squadron was gone, and there was nothing she could have done, even had she been in range. Scout ships were designed for scientific work, not combat, and her two ships had been doing geological surveys on the wrong side of the system when the enemy had come in.

Jewell has receipted her orders and is ready to pull out, ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus reported quietly, and Dorset nodded.

“Very well, Ernie. Send our intentions to the fleet base and get us underway,” she said. “I just don’t know if there is anyone left alive there to receive the message.”

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