Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) (14 page)

Yamada shook her head. “They’ve closed the channel. They’re not accepting our hails. We can’t talk if they don’t want to listen.”

Yamada turned back to me while Grantholm breathed in whistling gasps. For once, the older woman was speechless.

“Orders, sir?” Yamada asked me.

“How long have we got?”

“Until impact? Several hours, sir.”

“Good. Time enough to think.”

Putting on a confident expression, I began reviewing the data.

-19-

My aunt walked up to me and put a claw-like hand on my bicep. She whispered in my ear in a harsh tone. “You can’t believe you’re going to get away with this. Not again!”

I turned to her and nodded. “Unfortunately, it looks like diplomacy has failed this time, Lady.”

“And you relish that fact, don’t you?” she asked bitterly.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve got no more wish to die than you do. Possibly less.”

Moving back to the planning tables, I considered my next move. The situation had turned deadly remarkably fast. Before coming to this system, we’d naturally considered the idea that the Betas might not be happy with the fact we were cruising into their system with one of their own lost starships. But we’d always assumed we could talk them out of an immediate attack. Such had proven not to be the case.

Durris and I put our heads together and crunched numbers. We essentially had two options. We could fight, or we could run. Given that we were supposedly on a diplomatic mission, I decided to take the latter course of action.

“Let’s run the numbers on a race back to our point of entry,” I said.

“Already done, sir. We can’t make it. We’re headed in the wrong direction. Reducing speed, turning around and heading back will take too long.”

“I see. Where else can we retreat?”

“I’ve been scanning the system and examining the star charts the Connatic provided us. There are several bridges that lead out of this system that we could reach in time.”

“Are the destinations known?”

“No. Two, in fact, are listed as terminal—meaning no one has ever come back from them alive. The third goes to a system that the Stroj allegedly occupy.”

I pondered the options briefly. “What if we ride out their missiles?”

“That’s not advisable, captain,” Zye interrupted from behind me. I turned to find her standing nearby.

“Why not?” I demanded. “We’ve suffered strikes before.
Defiant’s
hull is tougher than any earth-built ship in history.”

“That’s true, sir,” she said. “But Beta missiles are built for precisely this kind of thing. They’ll have fired hundreds of them, not all of which we can even see yet. They’ll converge and destroy this vessel with gigatons of applied force.”

Nodding, I went back to the planning table. I tapped the hyperspace bridge Durris had selected.

“Let’s run for this one. Select the course of your choice and relay it to the helm. I’d suggest you give the widest berth possible to the Beta homeworld.”

Durris hurried to obey. Wearing a grim expression, I listened while my flight crew performed their duties flawlessly.

They were doing the work, but I’d been tasked with the hard decisions. Knowing we may all live or die based on the path I’d chosen wasn’t easy, but in this case I didn’t see any other viable options. We couldn’t stop their missiles, much less do battle with the naval forces they were no doubt deploying even now.

Flying obliquely, we cut a huge arc across the system. This way we didn’t have to stop, turn around and build up momentum again. The missiles tracked us, predicting our path and moving to intercept. We were safe, however, unless something changed. They wouldn’t have enough time to catch us before we reached our escape point and exited the system.

After the next dozen hours, some of the tension left me. No new threats had appeared. The deadly birds in our wake were now almost directly behind us. They were still gaining, but slowly.

“Four hours to go, sir,” Yamada said. “Permission to be relieved until we hit the breach into hyperspace again.”

I nodded to her. “Good idea. We’ll all take a break. Durris, begin rotating the command crew.”

Leaving the command deck with Yamada at my side, we made our way directly to the mess hall, where we found the remains of a cold dinner waiting for us. We ate in a brooding quiet.

“It’s not your fault, sir,” Yamada said after a time. “No one could have done any better.”

“That’s impossible to know for sure, but I appreciate your vote of confidence.”

She put her fork down with a clatter and pushed her dish away. “You’re too hard on yourself, William. You’re the best. The smartest captain I’ve ever served under. You’ve always done amazing things with practically no support, no clear path to success.”

I put up my hand to stop her. “You’re biased. Anyway, we should be getting to our bunks for some rest.”

She looked me over, and right then for the first time on this mission, I thought she might be entertaining some unsanctioned ideas.

I cleared my throat and yawned. “Aren’t you tired?”

“No,” she said. “In fact, I was wondering if you might want some companionship.”

There it was, out in the open. She wasn’t meeting my eye, but I knew immediately what was going on. I’d been stalked before, even by Yamada. She’d clearly seen my carnal interest in the Connatic, a small woman not so different from herself. Perhaps she figured out I’d given up on Chloe back home, and saw this as an opportunity.

For a moment, I was tempted, and I didn’t respond right away. After a man gives in once to temptation, the second time was twice as easy, they say.

Finally, I shook my head sadly. “It wouldn’t be right,” I said, “we’ve got a ship to run. This mission must be executed with the utmost professionalism.”

“What wouldn’t be right, sir?” she asked.

Her lips were pinched tightly together, and her eyes were angry.
Great.

“Nothing,” I said quickly, and I got to my feet. I put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’ll see you back on station in two hours.”

I walked out of the mess hall. I could feel her eyes on me, but I never glanced back.

Reaching my cabin, I flopped onto my bunk and stared at the ceiling, thinking about women, Betas and missiles.

Moments later, or so it seemed, I heard a buzzing sound in my ear. It was my implant.

“Sir, we have a problem,” Durris’ voice said.

“On my way.”

Springing out of the bunk, I staggered to my feet. I was half way across the cabin before I was fully awake. I paused to splash water into my face and then headed out into the main passage.

I’d planned on a shower and an aspirin before returning to duty, but I could tell that wasn’t going to happen.

The command deck was humming with activity by the time I got there. I frowned at my first officer.

“You let me sleep? What’s the nature of the emergency?”

“Sorry sir—the danger wasn’t obvious at first. We thought it was only a blip, a mining ship, maybe. There are so many asteroids and ice chunks out here... It could have been anything.”

“
What
could have been anything?”

He put his hands on his screens and caused a projection to spring up in three dimensions. It hovered over the planning table like an ugly wedge-shaped rock.

I knew that outline immediately. It matched
Defiant
—almost. The configuration of the weapons was different, as were the aft sensor arrays.

“Another Beta battle cruiser,” I observed. “Where is it?”

“She’s moving to intercept, sir. She must have been on deep patrol out here. She’s matched our speed already, and soon our courses will fully converge. I’d hoped we might be able to outrun her—but it’s not happening.”

“Of course not,” I said. “The ships are the same. If she’s closer to the hyperspace bridge than we are, then she’ll intercept us.”

“No sir,” he said quickly. “That’s not what I meant. We’re ahead, and we’ll get there first. But she’s on the same course that we are, and she’s showing no signs of steering away. It’s my belief that she intends to penetrate the barrier and enter the bridge. After that, she’ll attempt to catch us—in hyperspace.”

I looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re telling me the Betas plan to fight a battle in hyperspace? Are there any precedents?”

“Not in Earth history. There were a few recorded run-ins with pirates in the old logs, but nothing like two capital ships engaged in an all-out struggle.”

“Hmm… another first for this ship and her crew. Someday we’ll be asked to give lectures on this situation at the Academy—provided we live, of course.”

The next hour went by quickly, despite our tension. We’d found a way to escape their missiles, which didn’t have the tech to follow us into hyperspace. The Beta battle cruiser was a different matter entirely.

Lieutenant Commander Yamada made an appearance as we neared the bridge. She looked disheveled. She glanced at me, but then cast her eyes down to the deck. She hurried to her post and began working the boards.

“Hail that ship, Yamada,” I said. “And keep hailing it. Maybe they’ll change their minds at some point.”

“Will do, sir.”

I watched her for a moment. Her body language was uncomfortable. Right there, I knew I’d made the correct decision. She was flustered about the results of her flirtation, and so was I. How could two commanding officers do their best work when they were distracted by thoughts of sex? The fact that I’d rejected her had done damage enough.

Turning away from her with an effort of will, I took my command chair again and waited out the final minutes.

The bridge entry point loomed. It was invisible to the naked eye, but our instruments identified it and outlined it with a luminescent bluish glow on our screens. The opening had a diameter the size of a small moon. It was a weak point in normal space that constantly shifted its exact shape and dimensions. It was a theoretical spheroid of nothingness—but a different sort of nothingness.

When we punched through at last, I felt a now-familiar sense of exhilaration.

Were the star charts right? Was this route safe? Would we be able to navigate to the other end faster than our pursuers, even though they’d probably traveled this way before many times?

Self-doubts, thoughts of Yamada, the Connatic, Chloe—even of Zye… all of these twisted in my mind during the dreamlike moment when I passed between states of existence.

Time paused when we went through. That was a known, measurable fact. We lost about six minutes in what seemed to all those aboard to be a single flashing moment.

What happened during those six minutes? Did we cease to exist, or were we frozen like statues? No one knew the answers, although theories abounded among theoretical physicists. Each was certain he was right, as had been every other physicist throughout the history of science before him.

Whoever was right about the details of passing that barrier, when we came to life again, the universe was six minutes older.

And we were somewhere else entirely.

-20-

My crew quickly began probing our new reality, attempting to take stock of our surroundings.

This time, hyperspace was different. There were objects in here with us. Debris of some kind.

“Captain!” shouted Yamada, “I’m picking up small objects, regularly placed—”

“Zye,” I interrupted her, “shields to maximum power. Helm, hit the braking jets hard.”

Zye turned to me. “The shields are coming up, sir. But it will take time to ramp up to a full charge. It’ll be eighty seconds at least.”

I bared my teeth in a grimace. We’d again run into an age-old problem. Every ship had only so much power to go around. While running, we’d dropped our weapons power to near zero, flowed every watt of juice we had to the engines and lowered the shields to half-strength. Now, we needed the shields more than our weapons or our engines.

Shields were standard equipment on any high-speed modern spacecraft. One of the biggest dangers any ship had to deal with was the risk of running into a stationary object at great speed. At ten percent of the speed of light, even a rock the size of a marble could punch through any normal ship’s hull and every crewman’s body in between with ease.

Defiant
, like all large interstellar vessels, had several defensive systems to prevent accidental destruction from such mundane causes. The first of these systems was a specially treated hull. It was laced with fullerene tubes. Much as lead stopped radiation, the dense layers of
Defiant’s
hull served to protect her against smaller grains of errant matter.

But while that had proven to be enough to stop sand-sized objects, it didn’t stop bullet-sized ones. Electro-magnetic shields had been developed to repel obstacles that couldn’t be absorbed or deflected by a tough hull alone.

Over time, shield technology had been refined and improved to the point where it was capable of stopping more than just grit. Our shields could stop incoming fire as well.

This was a good thing, as I strongly suspected the objects we were about to plunge into were, in fact, mines. They’d doubtlessly been laid here in hyperspace to catch the unwary. They might be easy to avoid for pilots who knew their pattern of dispersal. Unfortunately, we didn’t have such knowledge.

“Unidentified object directly ahead,” Zye said calmly.

Rumbold worked his boards like a devil, and the deck heaved under us—I could tell by the screens it was too late.

“Impact in four… three… two…” Zye said, but she must have missed something, because she never made it to the count of “one”.

A terrific flash bloomed directly under our bow. The ship bucked, and we went into a spin.

“That one hit us in the belly!” Rumbold called from the pilot’s chair.

“Get us back onto an even keel, Rumbold.”

“I’m working on it, sir!” He fought the controls, and we soon stopped our sickening spin.

“Have we got more mines in front of us?”

“It doesn’t look like it at the moment,” Yamada said. “I’m not tracking any.”

“Good. Damage, Zye?”

“We’re okay. Forward shields were knocked down to fifteen percent, but they held.”

“Proceed with caution, helm.”

Zye got my attention again. “Sir, the Beta ship will be right behind us. We have to accelerate.”

I returned her intense gaze with a calm glance of my own. “We aren’t going to run any further. This minefield will do their work for them if we try.”

“What are your orders then, sir?”

“Helm, turn this ship around. Keep braking. We’ll do a little ambushing of our own when the Beta ship crashes through.”

Zye’s face became tight with concern, but she turned back to her station. She worked the controls with mechanical efficiency, but I could tell she was thinking very hard.

I couldn’t blame her if she was feeling distress. She’d thrown her lot in with Earthlings because her own people had rejected her. She’d killed a number of her own kind over the last year due to this switch in allegiance. But still, preparing to ambush a ship crewed entirely by her twin sisters had to be difficult for her.

“Zye,” I said, “do you wish to be relieved from duty?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Why, sir? Have I made an error?”

“No,” I said gently. “But this battle might become grim in nature. If you don’t want to be part of it, I’d understand fully.”

She looked around at the rest of the crew, who were watching the exchange.

“You’ve shamed me with that suggestion, Captain,” she said. “I don’t feel I deserve to be dishonored in this way.”

“That wasn’t my intention… very well. You’re to man your post until this action has been concluded.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, refusing to meet my eye again.

Fine.
That made two of them. Both Yamada and Zye were miffed with me. I thought that perhaps, if I survived long enough, I could piss off Rumbold as well. Managing that would hardly be a challenge. He was usually the most oversensitive of the lot.

Before the Beta ship broke through the barrier, we’d turned and come to a full stop. We trained our weapons on the region of space where the ship should appear and waited. I felt like a hunter in a blind.

Guilt touched my mind now and again. The Beta ship wasn’t our real enemy. They were, from their perspective, pursuing pirates who’d captured one of their ships and dared to return with it to the scene of the crime. I was certain that every member of that crew was fully convinced that they were in the right, and from their point of view, they were.

That cast me in the role of the bandit. We were the interlopers, the intruders. We were supposed to be a force for peaceful meetings, but it hadn’t yet worked out that way.

“She’s here,” Yamada said suddenly. “Down low—not where we expected.”

“Weapons free,” Durris said. “Lock on and fire at will.”

“Belay that order!” I boomed.

The crew looked at me in surprise.

“We’re not firing first,” I said.

Durris slapped at his boards, and red lights were converted to glowing yellow. Every gun we had was hot, but it wasn’t releasing a deadly payload yet.

“Sir,” Zye said, “I feel I must point out that you’re endangering this ship by hesitating. I assure you, my sisters will not show you the same courtesy.”

“I believe you,” I said, “but I’m not going to have it recorded in any ship’s log that we coldly ambushed a Beta vessel without being fired on first.”

The crew fell silent, but I knew some of them were thinking that I was mad. Support came from an unexpected source.

“Good play, William,” my aunt said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. “The bravest man is one who dares to risk it all for peace.”

I glanced at her in surprise. I hadn’t even known she’d returned to the command deck. She’d been unexpectedly quiet during the tense moments preceding this critical predicament.

“Yamada,” I said, “keep trying to hail them.”

“I am, sir. No response.”

Lady Grantholm put her lips near my ear. “Why don’t you have the Beta try it? They are her people, after all.”

I considered the suggestion. Zye wasn’t doing anything else at the moment.

“The Beta ship’s shields are coming up,” Durris said. “She’s braking, turning—she’s spotted us, sir. She’s pinging us with active sensors.”

“Zye,” I said, wheeling to face her. “I want you to try to hail them. Give them the secret Beta handshake, or something.”

“Excuse me?”

“Convince them you’re in earnest. That you’re a sanctioned crewmember on this ship.”

“Ah, right sir.”

Yamada transferred the com control over to her with a shrug. She leaned back and crossed her arms.

Zye looked uncomfortable, but she squared her shoulders and began to transmit.

“This is Beta unit Epsilon-Phi-Tria-Zeta, crewmember of Battle Cruiser S-11—”

“Her gun ports are opening, Captain,” Durris said urgently. “Do I have permission to fire?”

“Permission denied. Keep talking, Zye. You can convince any Beta of anything, remember?”

She glanced at me, and a secret smile played on her lips. “I’m a surviving member of Eleven’s crew,” she broadcast. “We were attacked by Stroj, but they were repelled. I—”

“She’s firing, sir,” Durris said in defeat.

“Full power to the forward shields.”

Before I could get those words completely out of my mouth, the ship was struck by powerful beams. They raked our bow, and our shields buckled. A few thin wisps of vapor puffed from
Defiant’s
hull where finger-like lines were drawn across her.

“I repeat,” Zye said, “this is Epsilon-Phi-Tria-Zeta. You’re firing on a sister ship.”

Finally, the screen lit up. I looked up in amazement. Zye had done it!

A twin sister of Zye’s stared at us. Her eyes were cold, intelligent and dispassionate.

“Basic humans,” she said. “I should have known. Zye, you are known to us. You are a Rogue, a pathological liar. That’s why you were imprisoned. Not everyone else on your crew died—the few survivors were thoroughly debriefed—I was one of them.”

Zye stared at her sister. “They gave you another command?” she asked. “After you lost your first one?”

“I’m an Alpha, Zye,” the captain said. “We are born to rule. Others are born to toil, or to be expunged.”

“I don’t understand,” I said to Zye. “You know this Beta?”

“Do not insult her, Captain. She’s an Alpha, not a Beta. She is known as Okto. She was the captain of this ship once. Now, she commands another.”

“Captain Okto,” I said, “I’m Captain William Sparhawk. Please talk to us. We haven’t fired on your ship. We found this battle cruiser—Eleven, I believe you called her. She was derelict and adrift. We repaired her and—”

Okto made a waving motion as if my words hurt her ears.

“Stop that bleating,” she demanded. “You humiliate yourself, Earthman, with your lies and omissions. I doubt in fact that you are an Earthman. You’re almost certainly a Stroj draped in the flesh of a Basic.”

“That’s not true. Allow me to prove—”

“I will not,” Okto said. “I will give you two options: surrender, or die.”

Everyone aboard stared at me. I couldn’t think of another path out of this, so I accepted Okto’s ultimatum.

“So be it,” I said. “Earth sees the Beta people as allies. Therefore, destroying your ship will be a stain upon my honor. I hope that historians will at least recall that your ship fired the first shot.”