Never actually read any Moon myself, in fact I can't name a single one of her titles >_< Only "modern" SFF authors I have any particular familiarity with are Weber (my primary inspiration for this story) and Flint.
Spoiler
“This is a ridiculous exercise,” Archer muttered.
The PLS Valiant was in the Ibers system, doing her best to imitate one of the captured asteroids that made up part of the ring around the gas giant Calpe. Which was no mean feat, seeing as how a large warship with a running reactor and maintained at room temperature for the benefit of her crew emitted much, much more heat than an asteroid sitting in space 1.5 AUs from its K3 primary.
To circumvent the problem, the cruiser had found a suitably large real asteroid to hide behind while she deployed remote sensors to keep an eye on what was happening on the other side of it (not much, at the moment). The asteroid also doubled as a convenient heat sink. Of course, it’d only work for so long before someone noticed why this particular space rock was noticeably warmer than the others around it, so the Valiant would have to shift to another one every several hours. And if someone happened to be looking in that direction while she did this…
Grumble grumble awful idea grumble grumble how did I let myself get talked into this grumble grumble.
“Oh, quit fidgeting, will you, Captain?” Rollyn Bracket said. Which was rather more undiplomatic - insubordinate, even - than what Archer had expected from the usually meek junior officer, but Bracket was clearly one of those engineers who got their hackles up when some mere “shooter” (or anyone else, really) dared criticize their elaborate designs. “Nothing’s gonna happen! Relax.”
“Exactly!” Artemis jabbed a finger at the main display. “Nothing’s happening. We’re sitting here in the middle of nowhere, twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the pirates to come to us. And even if something did happen, we wouldn’t see it anyway. Our dinky little sensors would be lucky to spot a nuke going off a hundred meters in front of them.”
“Don’t call them ‘dinky little sensors,’” Bracket said peevishly. “You’ll hurt their feelings.”
Archer stared at the younger woman, but could detect no trace of irony in her expression. Then she exhaled, shaking her head. “Sorry, Rolls. I’m just tired. Tired and frustrated.” Easing her expression back to neutrality, she turned back to the plot. “Very well, Commander. You have the watch. Hopefully we’ll come across something interesting today.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the engineer said formally. “I have the-”
“Drive signature!” Lieutenant Fong barked from the assistant tac officer’s workstation. “Range 130,000 klicks, bearing zero-zero-three by zero-five-one!”
As it turned out, another ship had also been hiding in the asteroid ring. This one had a much easier time of it, seeing how much smaller it was.
“A Mule,” Loz Sequeira said in a low voice. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Captain?”
“We don’t have much of a choice.” A grim-faced Adela Sybitz eyed the 3D display of the ISS Carronade. “We’ve only got a week left of supplies, and there’s no guarantee we’ll come across another ship in that time.” Smiling thinly: “Besides, we’ve got a good team here. I think we shouldn’t have a problem taking on one lone Mule.”
“Just let me at ‘er,” Valentina Dragunova growled. “I’ll send his cheap hull to the breakers in ten seconds flat.”
“Not yet. Merchant skippers are always jittery coming into a place like this, because they know someone is likely to ambush them. Lots of rocks to hide behind, and the gas giant’s radiation screwing up their sensors.” Sybitz drummed her fingers on the armrest. “On the flip side, once he knows it’s safe, he’ll let his guard down and we’ll rush him then.”
“And we want to make it as hard as possible for him to duck under the cover of the hydrogen station’s guns,” Sequeira added thoughtfully.
Dragunova scowled. “Fine, but he better not take too long. I hate waiting.”
It took only thirty minutes, in the event. The Carronade docked and got filled up, and its skipper took a moment to do some quick trading with the station’s proprietor. Soon enough, it was pulling away from the station, ambling at a leisurely 200,000 kilometers per hour.
“Coming up at ambush point in three...” Sequeira counted off, “two… one…”
The moment came, and the Lasher-class frigate shot out of Calpe’s ring like a bat out of hell. She bore down on the Mule at maximum speed, guns primed and hot, and targeting radar and lidar locked up the freighter with deadly precision.
“ISS Carronade, this is the Armed & Reckless,” Sybitz spoke into the audio pickup. “Halt your ship relative to Calpe and prepare to be boarded. Cooperate, and you will not be harmed.”
The freighter’s response to the challenge was simple, and largely expected: it bolted straight for the nearby hyper point, not even bothering to send a reply. “He’s not making it easy for us, is he?” Loz muttered to no-one in particular.
“No matter,” Adela said, leaning forward in her seat. “He can’t avoid action no matter what he does, and he knows it. We’ll just run him down and… persuade him to see things our way.”
“And if he thinks he can beat us in a fight,” Dragunova bared her teeth, “we show him the error of his ways.”
At such a close starting range and with the Reckless’s huge speed advantage, it took no more than three minutes to bring the armed freighter into weapons range. Two more orders to the Carronade to come to a halt and accept boarding had been met with stony silence, and Sybitz waited with a cold detachment for her prey to give up the futile attempt to run and start fighting back.
The Mule came banking hard to starboard, its maneuvering jets lighting up as it brought its main weapons to bear. But where the PLS Valiant had been taken by surprise with a similar maneuver, the ISS Armed & Reckless had long anticipated her target’s movements, and reacted accordingly.
The frigate’s shield came up, and Sequeira took the small vessel charging through the four Salamander missiles the larger ship had thrown at her. One went down to a short, sharp burst from the chin-mounted dual LMG, and two more were similarly swept out of space with remarkably accurate Vulcan fire. The fourth one swept around to the rear and came burning in for the disabling engine hit, but the Lasher sidestepped it with grace and punched it out with another quick volley.
She turned around again and closed in swiftly, the shield stopping the pulse laser bolts she could not evade, further missile throws handled with the same efficient combination of fleet-footed maneuvering and lethally accurate point defense. Her machine gun pelted the Mule’s own shield, straining its flux capacitors, and the moment the barrier went down the armor beneath it was pocked and cratered with a series of HE shells from the light assault guns.
“Surrender, damn you,” Sybitz muttered. “I don’t want to have to rip a huge gash out your side with a rocket volley.”
Now under five kilometers from her target, the frigate maneuvered straight for the freighter’s rear, away from the pulse lasers and towards the vulnerable engines, ready to incapacitate her prey…
“Hyper footprint!” Dragunova’s head snapped up from her console. “Range one point three hundred thousand kilometers!”
“Uh oh,” Sybitz said simply, bringing up the newcomers on her own plot. “Looks like two frigates and a destroyer. Still getting jump distortion.” The comm console started chirping, and she hit the receive button.
The image that appeared on the main display was concealed in shadow by artful use of CGI. It did look vaguely male, but that too could have been the work of the masking software. “Frigate skipper, this is Adze One of the Black Hatchet,” a deep, distorted baritone came through the speaker. “This freighter is ours. Leave or be destroyed.”
The Hatchet? Holk’s group?
Adela Sybitz leaned forward, keeping her suddenly clenched fists out of view, and looked straight into the visual pickup. “Your freighter, you say? Sorry, I don’t see your name on it anywhere.”
“We do not have time for your games,” the voice came again in liquid helium. “We will deal with the Carronade. Your continued interference will not be tolerated. There will be no further warnings.”
The screen went blank.
Sybitz gritted her teeth. Pirates, as a rule, weren’t a group known for their trustworthiness, but they did have their own codes of honor - and poaching someone else’s kill went against every single one of them. Did Holk think he could throw the rules out the airlock, just because his was the biggest pirate fleet in the subsector?
“Skipper,” Loz suddenly said sharply, looking back over his shoulder at her. “The comm profile - it matches the people who attacked the Marigold.”
“Damn.” She looked over at Dragunova. “Tina, can we identify the new ships yet?”
“Analyzing now,” the gunner replied, fingers pounding the keyboard. “Looks like a Hammerhead, a Cerberus, and… a Tempest?! Are you freakin’ *** me?!”
“We’ve got to withdraw,” Sequeira hissed. “We can’t take on them.”
“And then what?” Dragunova said testily. “If we don’t get that cargo, we lose the ship. And probably our lives, too. I’d rather go out with a bang, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Wait.” Sybitz held up a hand, as two pairs of eyes swiveled to stare at her. “I… I might have an idea.”
She brought up the comm system, and after several seconds of pinging, another face appeared on the display. This one was of a thick-jowled, heavily bearded merchant captain, the sweat on his forehead belying his efforts to appear stoic and stalwart in the face of a mortal threat. “What do you want?!” he asked testily.
“Listen, buddy,” Sybitz said, looking him straight in the eye. “You see those other pirates up there, by the hyper point?”
“Yeah…?”
“Well, it turns out I know these people.” Her lips drew back in what only a shark would have considered a smile. “If they get their hands on you, they’ll *** you and all your crew - they aren’t picky about gender, by the way - then they’ll mutilate you for kicks, shoot you in the head, and dump your bodies into space when they’re done. Me, I’ll just take your ship and your cargo; I’ll even drop you off at the nearest station with enough credits to get home.”
“W-Why are you telling me all this?”
“Here’s the deal. Neither of us can fight them alone, but if we work together we might be able to force them to back off at least. I get your ship and everything it’s carrying, you get to live to see your families again.” She smiled again, somewhat less menacingly this time. Somewhat. “How about it?”
He stared at her, wiping a raised brow. “And why should I trust you?”
“You shouldn’t. But if you don’t, I’m out of here - and my ship runs lots faster than yours. Which is also what I’ll do if you try to double-cross me, just so you know.” She glanced briefly at the tactical display. “You’re in a pit here, captain. You’ve got nothing to lose - except, in two minutes, your life. I suggest you decide quickly.”
“Alright, alright,” he said unhappily. “But if this is some sort of trick-”
“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” Sybitz snapped. “Just hurry up and get back into the ring; we need the asteroids for cover.”
This, at least, was accomplished quickly, the Mule turning with remarkable alacrity back towards where it had come from. Its unexpected escort followed it into the dense rock cover, the Black Hatchet hot on their heels.
“You’re nuts, Skipper,” Sequeira muttered as he guided the Reckless in a weaving path around a particularly dense clump of asteroids.
“Sometimes you gotta be nuts to survive,” Sybitz answered. “Got a read on their weapons, Tina?”
“Looks like a graviton beam, heavy blaster and Harpoons on the Tempest,” Dragunova said, studying her display intently. “Mauler, railgun and LMGs on the Cerberus. Hammerhead’s carrying sabots, PD lasers and a pair of assault chainguns.” She paused. “Looks like they’re fanning out. Trying to hem us in with the frigates while their destroyer moves in for the kill.”
Adela nodded. “Clever. But it also opens them to a defeat in detail.” She studied her plot for a few seconds, finger tracing a path through the rocks to her chosen foe. “Loz, flank the Cerberus and get us into knife range. When that happens, Tina, I want it mission-killed on the spot. Understood?”
“Roger,” the two pirates answered as one, and Adela Sybitz smiled. In a moment like this, they were not the three heads of a motley, ragtag crew, often disagreeable, seemingly always bickering over something or other. They were one, a finely honed blade with a singular purpose, ready to slide deep between the enemy’s ribs.
Two vectors converged, and the Reckless lunged forward as the Cerberus turned to confront her, opening fire with its deadly bow guns. A mauler round shattered a meteoroid not twenty meters away from the Lasher, and the railgun’s iron-tungsten shells crackled as they struck her shield, but the agile frigate was now zipping in and out of the rocks, declining to present a clear target to her larger foe.
The Hatchet vessel tried to do the same, maneuvering amidst the clutter while continuing to track its target. But it was slower, less agile, and its helmsman was nowhere near as good as Loz Sequeira was. Few people in the Sector were… which was cold comfort when the Reckless made a final turn and came to within a hundred and thirteen meters, seven o’clock low from her target.
In open space, and with a sufficiently alert helm, the Cerberus could have simply run. A single burn drive, taking it swiftly far away from the foe flanking it, giving it room to turn around and engage from a position of parity once more. But this was no open space - it was the ring of a gas giant, and a particularly rocky one to boot. There was nowhere to run… and nowhere to hide.
Dragunova squeezed the trigger, and a volley of Annihilators surged forward in a blaze of fury as the light assault guns went to maximum rate of fire. With no shield to interdict them, the low-caliber shells battered and pummelled the heavy frigate’s armor, and then the rockets struck home.
The chain of explosions, and the rain of HE shells that followed it, gutted the Cerberus. Crewmen dead and alive alike spilled from ruptured compartments belching atmosphere into space, while power circuits flickered and died. The ship was still alive - technically - but it was no longer in any condition to fight, and Sybitz’s grey eyes gleamed as the broken hulk spun away from her.
“One down, two to go,” she said. “Now where’s our friend Mr. Tempest?”
“There-”
The shield came up just in time - barely - and the energetic bolt from the heavy blaster vanished in a brilliant sparkle of light. The Reckless dove for the cover of another asteroid, the blue stream of a graviton beam slashing at her… and found her port aft Vulcan cannon suddenly blown out by a few energy hits from the awaiting Terminator drone. Hissing, Dragunova brought the other point defense turret around, spitting fire at the diminutive attacker… and cursed as the 20mm shells sailed harmlessly through their target, the drone slipping smoothly into p-space where no weapon could reach it.
More blaster bolts hammered at their makeshift ablative armor, fragments of rock pelting the Lasher’s hull, as her foe’s automated companion chipped her plating further. She dove deeper into the ring, zig-zagging wildly to avoid presenting her vulnerable aft to her foe, the hunter and his falcon continuing to nip at her heels.
“No good,” Sequeira said. “He’s too quick for us to sneak up on him like we did to the other guy, and if he lands just one or two good hits on us with that blaster we’re dead meat. And if we don’t close, he’ll just catch us between himself and his little friend and give us the fatal thousand cuts.”
“Regroup with the Carronade,” Sybitz ordered. “Let’s see how much he much he likes the other guy having a friend of her own.” And ours is bigger than his.
Pursuer and pursuee took off, both ships pushing their thrusters to the limit. As they turned an arc through a clearing in the rocks, the Mule appeared from behind the particularly large asteroid - practically a tiny moon - where it had taken cover. Its gunners were decent for a freighter’s crew, if not particularly adept, and the Tempest suddenly found itself forced to jink wildly as pulse bolts flashed on its shield.
The pirate crew were competent enough, but they were also in many ways analogous to bullies, unused to fighting with odds that favoured their opponent rather than them, and it showed. Distracted once by their new opponent, they were caught off guard a second time when the Reckless wheeled around and charged, guns blazing.
A hastily fired blaster bolt went clear of the Lasher, serving only to strain the high-tech ship’s flux capacitors, and even as it got off another shot (hitting the shield this time), a burst of machine gun fire pushed it into overload. Behind the bullets came the explosive shells, carving wounds into the thin armor, as the panicked pirate skipper turned his ship frantically away in an effort to evade. The Reckless gave chase, sprinting after the fleeing Tempest even as its drone moved to cover its escape, fresh lasers from behind knocking one of the low-tech frigate’s verniers into emergency shutdown.
Of course, because Adela Sybitz had spent a decade plying her trade in the sector, she was only mildly surprised (in hindsight, at least) when the other shoe chose that moment to drop.
The Hammerhead abruptly made its own appearance, having finally closed into attack range, heralding its entry with a volley of Sabot SRMs. The Carronade’s defense officer, inexperienced in the ways of ship-to-ship combat, instinctively raised the shield before he realized what exactly was coming at them, and before he could lower it again the shotgun-like hail of uranium penetrators had sent a powerful surge through the Mule’s flux conduits, shorting out most of its systems… and leaving it defenseless against the 25mm explosive rounds shredding its armor.
“Get us behind that destroyer,” Sybitz said grimly. “We need to take some of the heat off the Carronade.”
“Negative,” Sequeira said. “If we do that, we open our six to that Tempest and his heavy blaster.” He grimaced. “It’s all we can do to keep track of his movements as it is.”
“Ugh.” She felt her fingers curling up into fists again, staring at the tactical display with hard eyes. And here he comes again...
The console beeped loudly, and she jerked upright in her chair, her back ramrod-straight as another contact suddenly appeared on her screen. My god! That’s a cruiser-
None of the combatants had spotted the newcomer approaching. They were too preoccupied with their own battle, and there was too much clutter to see very well anyway, especially with their sensors half-blinded by the charged particles swirling in Calpe’s magnetosphere. The cruiser, too, found its vision clouded, but its more powerful detectors could pick up the telltale indicators of ships at max thrust and firing high-energy weapons easily enough, and it only needed to follow these signs.
Now it was here, and it took decisive advantage of the element of surprise it enjoyed.
Four penetrator rods smashed into the Tempest’s belly from below and aft, cleaving everything in their path - fuel feeds, shield emitters, power conduits - and shorting out just about anything that wasn’t. Its flight controls disabled, the crippled frigate careened past the Armed & Reckless and crashed at full speed into an iron-nickel asteroid. The slender bow caved in as the ship buried itself halfway into the surface, crushing countless critical systems; the mangled wreck was now basically useless to anyone except a spare parts dealer.
At the same time the kinetic projectiles had left their barrels, six Harpoon missiles shot out from wingtip racks, headed straight for the Hammerhead’s exposed aft. The point defense lasers stopped two; the other four all struck a circle no more than a meter wide on the destroyer’s spine, blasting a deep cavity in hull and armor alike. Into this gap shone a phase beam, searing straight into the ship’s fusion chamber, and Adze One exploded with the fury of a miniature sun as its reactor went up.
On the compact bridge of the Armed & Reckless, three people stared at their displays in deathly silence. The cruiser - the computers had identified it positively as an Eagle, now - hadn’t killed them yet, but the lidar locking them up and the beam turrets trained on them made it clear that it could do so very quickly if it wanted to.
“It’s the PLS Valiant,” Dragunova said in an uncharacteristic near-whisper, “... and it’s hailing us.”
“There’s always a bigger fish,” Sybitz murmured.
“Why is this always happening to me?” Sequeira whined.
Author
Topic: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31) (Read 51261 times)