Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit (11 page)

Fire from the Primans was already on the
way, and laser blasts were soon splashing off Avenger's shields.

Elco had a split second to decide on a
course of action: make for open space and hope they could avoid an EMP torpedo
hit, or head for the only cover in sight; the mothball shipyard.  The Primans
were all emerging from the back side of the moon instead of sending at least
one out in front of him.  They were obviously confident their torpedoes would
stop his ship from running. 

He watched the displays as six inbound
torpedoes raced towards Avenger, juking and weaving to avoid the AA/point
defense fire from Avenger's turrets.  The rapid firing, three barreled turrets
swiveled and elevated, streamers of laserfire chasing the enemy torpedoes
across the ever-shrinking gap between them and the ship.  Elco saw one explode,
a small fireball of propellant that was snuffed out a heartbeat later by the
vacuum.  A second Priman torpedo died a moment later.  Elco was almost
beginning to let hope sneak back into his thoughts, but that stopped when his
bridge crew called out.

"Fifteen seconds to impact!"
Elco heard Lieutenant Caho and the weapons officer call simultaneously.  The
torpedoes would soon be so close that Avenger's hull would block most of the
point defense turrets from tracking them.  There was no clear winner between
his two options, no magical signpost to guide him or cosmic hint that would
show him the way.  He made his decision, letting intuition and his churning gut
guide him and wishing with every fiber of his being that he was following the
right instincts.

"Helm!  Change course.  Bring us
around behind the moon and into the shipyard.  Try to keep the moon between us
and the Priman ships."

"Heading back into the
shipyard?" asked Captain Vol as his brow furrowed.  He wasn't  sure what
they could hope to accomplish by doing so.  His own ships could keep tracking
the Confederation ship even through the scrambling effects of the tractor
field, and he had assumed the Confed captain would simply try to make his best
efforts at outrunning the torpedoes.  Heading for the shipyard only prolonged
the inevitable; his torpedoes would hit, and the ship would still be picked
apart piece by piece.

"Pursuit course," he commanded
as he watched the various data feeds.  "Keep at their maximum laser range
for now, and once our torpedoes hit we'll close the distance.  They might even
make it to the edge of the shipyard, but they'll be coasting inside dead and
burning."

Elco hadn't been this close to fear in a
long time.  The deadly Priman EMP torpedoes were a handful of seconds from
impact, and even now their long range lasers still pounded Avenger's aft
shields.  The briefs were all very clear: an impact would wipe out all the
ship's active electronics; there was just no counter.

He saw a third Priman torpedo get cut in
half by intersecting fire from two different point defense turrets, but he know
it wasn't going to be enough.  There were three torpedoes left, and all they
needed was one to get through.

Suddenly a thought struck him; he needed
to call Corinne Sosus.  He stabbed at the comm panel on the control board in
front of him.  "CAG!" he called as the connection lit up on her end,
her puzzled face appearing from a panel in her hangar.

"We're going to get hit by an EMP
torpedo; shut your fighters all the way down," he said in a rush, clock
ticking away in his head.  "You might have to launch and screen us while
we reboot the ship if it comes to that."  He didn't wait for her to
acknowledge, another idea swirling from nebulous wisps into the beginnings of a
plan.

In an instant, one insane, ridiculous
idea had percolated to the surface of his consciousness.  EMP effects could
often be minimized if the electronics in question weren't in operation.  If
there was no power flowing through the circuits, there were no fields to
disrupt and overload.  It was one of the crazy theories forwarded by Confed's
R&D people, but it was just that; an idea.  That was why he'd ordered
Corinne to turn her fighters into bricks.  He harbored the faintest of hopes
that somehow they'd be able to bring them back to life and send them out to do
whatever they could to hold off the Primans if Avenger was crippled by the EMP
torpedoes.  But why stop with just the fighters?

"Helm; max acceleration into the
yard," Elco began, knowing he had just seconds left.  "Lay in a
straight course away from obstacles but keep us inside the tractor field. 
You're going to lose all controls in a second."

Elco punched the direct line to his Chief
Engineer, a feed that would broadcast through the entire engineering spaces. 
"Chief Fyr!  Emergency-scram the reactors right now!  No drill, no
kidding.  Kill 'em!"

Then Elco waited.  A full-on emergency
scram only took a second to initiate.  The idea was that if something inside
the ship, whether energy cells, fuel lines or something similar, was about to
completely let go, the ship could completely shut down and become a big
floating armor pile, totally inert and nonreactive.  He desperately hoped it
would keep Avenger's systems from getting fried by the EMP if they were all
unpowered.  The problem was that with shields down, the Priman laser blasts
would all impact the hull.  If they'd mixed in some conventional torpedoes,
they'd penetrate right through the hull as well.  Engines were out, so there'd
be no helm control.  Emergency manual reversion of the maneuvering thruster
pods would come back quickly, but it would be a bumpy ride.

The bridge went dark with no fanfare or
warning; just a few clicks as the light ballasts went dark and the decreasing
revs of the ventilation and equipment cooling fans spinning down.  The gravity
plates would hold their charge for a few minutes even without a power source,
but the bridge crew was going to have to buckle up, provided they survived the
next couple of seconds.

Elco felt the torpedo impacts and
grimaced as he wondered what was happening to his ship.  One, two, three times
he felt the hull reverberate.  The first two must have been the EMP torpedoes,
because other than the initial explosion of the self-forging penetrator charge
pushing  whatever payload the torpedoes carried into the hull, there were no
follow-up tremors.  The third one, however, was most definitely a traditional
penetrator backed up by a shaped charge, high explosive warhead, and it tore
through Avenger with a vengeance.

Captain Vol watched in morbid fascination
as the Confed captain completely cut power to his ship.  Vol understood in an
instant what his adversary was trying to do; if there were no systems powered
up to damage, the EMP torpedoes might very well have no critical effect on the
ship.  On the other hand, the darkened vessel was now closer to a crypt for the
doomed Confed crew.

Avenger's final turn presented her aft
dorsal port quarter to the Priman ships and their weapons as she arced behind
the moon that formed one end of the mothball shipyard.  The three remaining
torpedoes impacted on the aft dorsal portion of the hull, just after the rear
torpedo battery. 

The first two detonated just before
impact on the hull plates, explosives in the warhead forming a penetrating
spear out of an alloy plate in a process known as a self-forging penetrator. 
This projectile was propelled ahead of the torpedo milliseconds before impact
with the intent on fracturing or penetrating the plate armor.  They were the
new EMP design, and the second stage of the torpedo was focused on that
effect.  It was an armored spike designed to crash deep within the target
before radiating an electronic payload.

The third torpedo was a conventional
high-explosive armor piercing device.  The second stage, following the
penetrator, was a large, high-explosive shaped charge.  On detonation, the
white hot plasma jetted out of the front of the torpedo body, liquefying even
the robust Confed armor plates.  The white-hot stream of super-heated metal
raced into the ship, penetrating bulkheads, machinery, and crew.  On the way,
it created secondary explosions from spall and shrapnel damage, ignited
oxygen-fed fires, and generally tore a great hole deep into the Confed ship.

The explosion passed through the few
outer decks and into Engine Room #2, the reaction chambers of which exited the
aft end of the ship as the second hyperdrive engine exhaust cone.  The actual
mixing chambers and manifolds where the drive energy was first created were
buried in an armored citadel in the deepest part of the ship, but the drive
exhaust was still explosive and an uncontained reaction was as deadly a fate as
a starship crew could ever hope to not face.

The engine exploded, torn apart by the
last energies of the incoming explosive charge from the Priman warhead. 
Machinery ripped apart, flying in all directions and causing even more damage. 
Finally, something ignited the energy stream coming from the main reaction
chamber as it passed through the ever-expanding calamity that was Engine Room
#2. 

The entire cavernous room was vaporized,
and the energy had to go somewhere.  The explosion shredded the exhaust nozzle
at the rear of the ship, while the remaining explosive force escaped out the
bottom of the stricken ship, a short-lived oxygen-fed mushroom cloud of fire
and high-speed debris ripping out through the underside of Avenger, a dozen
frames aft of the hangar bays. 

Web surveyed the mess hall yet again. 
With nothing else to do other than study the compartment, after an hour had
passed he imagined he could now find his way through the room blindfolded and
hanging from the ceiling. 

He'd catalogued the pirates that stood
watch over them.  There was one on each door; one human and one Qualin.  The
human was the one who'd taken him to the cargo control center earlier, still
wearing his EVA chest plate.  That one was the real risk; Web could see it in
the man's eyes.  He'd probably killed people before, and if he hadn't, he was
ready to start here.

"Web," he heard his name whispered quietly.  He
recognized Halley's voice, and simply nodded a tiny bit so she knew he'd heard
her.

"Another problem," she stated
simply.

"Joy."

"Walk with me."

They casually made their way around the
compartment separately but close enough together.  There were some loose knots
of crew, and some were even making passable attempts at conversation.  Halley
wanted him to see something, but he wasn't sure what.  Then it dawned on him as
they finished their circuit and came to a stop by the stim-caf carafes at the
galley pass-through. 

"Captain and FO are on completely
different sides of the compartment," he observed, and received an
approving smile from Halley.

"Exactly."  She set her
personal data pad on the counter's surface between them.  "I've been
monitoring the cargo pod exchanges," she said.  "Video is completely
disabled, not just blocked, so I can't hack in.  However, I can still see the
manifest data.  Computer shows they've already removed three pods, so we should
be down by three, right?"

Web nodded dutifully, then glanced at her
display.  It showed the exact same number of pods as they'd started this leg
with.  "What, they're putting pods back on as they remove them?" he
asked.

"Your guess is as good as
mine," she replied.  "But this isn't a normal robbery, and my
bad-news meter is creeping ever higher.  Something's going on, and it's time we
found out what it was.  Look at all the little signs we've seen slowly, spaced
apart; an unscheduled course correction, ship's guns dismantled early, pirates
even using our company frequency.  Speed the events up and mash them together,
and something smells rotten."

"Alright," Web said, eager to
finally do something other than stand around consuming recycled oxygen. 
"What do we do?"

"Well, you and the captain seem to
be getting along so well, I think it's time you got him to tell you what was in
those files you moved."

"I thought of that," Web
admitted, "but I'll need a terminal with hardwired access.  Data pads
won't cut it."

Halley looked thoughtfully off at the
bulkhead, gears turning.  "In the meantime," she said distractedly,
"I'm going to find out what the story is with those cargo pods and why our
FO doesn't care what happens to them."

"What's our play?" Web asked. 

"Whatever it needs to be, because
the fact is we're covert operatives on the way to Callidor to put a rusty spike
through the heart of the Priman invasion effort.  Nothing can stop us from that
goal."

Web was still working on his strategy
when he bumped back into Captain Two-Swords.

"Captain," Web said, almost by
way of apology.  The captain looked at Web, then recognition dawned in his eyes
and he motioned for Web to head to the end of an unoccupied table.

"Mr. Barazian," the captain
started as he hunched over the table on his elbows.  "These men haven't
come back for us, so it seems their cargo operations are going well.  But I
don't know what it means about my personal data buffer and safe."