Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (47 page)

“Oh, dear God,”
Moira said. “I know this plan is crazy, but please grant us grace
so we don’t die like idio-“

Her prayer was
interrupted as a large chunk of armour plating from the destroyer’s
hangar bumped against the trooper carrier compartment. It couldn’t
be helped, and Minh knew it wouldn’t cause serious damage. “Ronin!”
Jake shouted, alarmed.

“Don’t worry, a
little filler and paint and she’ll be good,” Minh-Chu replied. At
long last, he closed on the opening on the destroyer’s hangar doors
and flew straight in, firing his thrusters hard to decelerate and
land on the deck. To his surprise, the landing was soft and graceful.
“Welcome to the hangar deck. The vacuum outside is a balmy twelve
hundred degrees, but it’s cooling fast folks, so get your kit and
get in gear.”

Two Uriels came in
right behind him. They had troops to drop off as well, and would be
leaving. Minh-Chu rechecked the condition of his fighter and shook
his head. “I’m afraid I’m writing my bird off for the rest of
this mission. I’m joining up with Jake and his people. Take over,
Tempest.”

“I hear you, good
luck.”

* * *

Alice entered the
bridge and took her place at her station. It felt strange to have a
post on the bridge to return to at all, but someone from security had
to be there when they could. Her people were posted strategically
around the ship, so she had no reason to wander the corridors. A
quick check of the mission status screen confirmed what she already
knew from being directly connected to the ship – that Jake and his
team had landed safely aboard the destroyer.

It was something she
needed to confirm; Alice needed to know that they’d made the
perilous journey there and that Jake’s fate was back in his own
hands. She loved Minh-Chu like an uncle, but that didn’t relieve
the uneasiness she felt at her father being carted through dangerous
space in a tiny trooper carrier compartment on the underside of a
Uriel fighter. With her father’s location confirmed, she felt
comfortable disconnecting from the ship’s computer and using her
station as well as her comm unit to keep in touch. The noise level
from the combat operation was rising by the minute as everyone
followed the master plan, and it was starting to feel like there was
pressure building in her head as more voices, more signals, joined
the racket.

Alice sighed at the
sudden silence in her mind and focused on what was happening on the
bridge.

“Port aft shields
down to twelve percent,” announced Finn.

Ashley guided the
Warlord into a quick roll crossing the front axis of the three
corvettes that revealed themselves and began pounding the ship’s
shields. Alice could hear the click and scrape of their large
munitions launchers firing as they were reloaded with mobile missile
magazines that sped away from the Warlord in all directions, turning
towards their enemy targets and rapid firing hundreds of deadly
projectiles per second.

Alice’s station was
the most boring place on the bridge, with her captured crewmember
marked with a crossed X. The crewmembers she had marked for high
scrutiny were circled on the ship interior map, and she could see
exactly what they were doing at the damage control stations, which
wasn’t much at the moment. They weren’t even talking to each
other.

“Hard shunt power
from reactors five and six to the aft shield array,” Frost said.
“Need to recharge those quick. Any good analysis on what they’re
firing?”

“Their main weapon is
a complicated energy burst cannon with some kind of component in the
beam that turns some of the power they’re transmitting into solids.
The part that’s damaging us isn’t travelling near the speed of
light, but it’s energy. Never seen anything like it,” Kadri
reported. “I’ve got no counter.”

It took a moment for
Alice to realize that the Warlord wasn’t fighting the corvettes
that had come through the wormhole, something she’d overlooked
while she was connected to the ship computer because she was focusing
on internal security. They were fighting ships that had just
decloaked and entered the fight, ships that had been watching all
along.

“That’s not human
technology,” Frost said. “Give me all the power you can for
forward shielding. We have to destroy all three of the new
corvettes.”

Alice flinched at the
sound of a weapon rapidly impacting the hull several times. Her
security screen marked several cabins in the lower aft section of the
ship as a hazard.

“Small hull fracture
and damage from a disintegration weapon,” David announced. “We
have a steward cabin breached, the adjacent hallway is open to
radiation, and supply compartment twenty-four C is breached. Sealing
the section off.”

“Good, now focus on
forward shields a minute,” Finn told David. They worked at their
stations quickly, diverting power from several reactors to the
forward grid. After a few seconds of artful rerouting, the forward
section of the Warlord’s grid was nearly overloaded.

A status shift in
Alice’s station alerted her and she read the report aloud. “A
damage control team is reporting they can seal those breaches from
the inside using a liquid ergranian patch.”

“They’re clear to
go,” Finn replied, still busy with his duties.

“Ordering them in,
then,” Alice said as she did so from her post.

“Ash, let’s cannon
them down,” Frost said, activating the manual tactical controls for
the forward-facing railguns. The weapons were well beyond what anyone
would expect to see on a ship in their class. When the railguns
running under the bridge of the Warlord fired, the crew could feel it
throughout most of the ship, and there were whole sections of decks
dedicated to the deadly projectile weapons. From where she was
sitting, Alice could see the railguns were loaded with special
warheads that were all slug for the back half, with a shaped
explosive at the front.

Ashley’s reply was
expressed through the movements of the Warlord, as she flipped the
ship end-over-end and turned so the nose of the fighting vessel
pointed at the three strange corvettes. One of them hadn’t fired
since Alice arrived on the bridge, and it was venting atmosphere. The
other two had their broadsides facing the Warlord, firing weapons
that seemed to require wide glowing emitters instead of a contained
barrel.

The deck under Alice’s
feet rumbled as Frost fired each of the railguns in turn. There was
only a second and a half between the last weapon firing and the
sequence starting over. The Warlord’s fore shields took fire, but
Ashley kept the ship in a strafing pattern with the nose pointed
directly at the enemy vessels, giving Frost a long opportunity to
rapidly fire the biggest guns aboard for over forty seconds before
Finn announced, “Fore shields down to thirty-five percent.”

“Evasive action,”
Frost said as he released the manual tactical controls. “Tell me
they don’t have some kind of heavy kinetic damper or gravity
countermeasure.”

“Gravity
countermeasure? That’s not even possible,” Finn said.

Only the first round of
shots were stopped by energy shielding, the rest ripping through two
of the cruiser class ships, leaving broad breaches in their armour.
“So glad those ships haven’t proven you wrong,” Frost said.

The third cruiser broke
away, only grazed by the torrent of explosive projectiles. It
returned fire with an unexpected barrage.

The hull whined under
the pressure of heat damage and pinged as solid matter impacted its
surface. “All dorsal shields are down,” Finn reported. “We lost
some emitters in that last attack; we’re missing coverage we can’t
compensate for.”

“Bring us about, get
that ship in front of us,” Frost said. “All weapons focus on that
ship.”

The enemy ship pointed
its nose downward, exposing the top surface to the Warlord as it
accelerated at them, firing weapons installed across the dorsal side
of their vessel. Flashes of light across the dark green and blue skin
of the enemy vessel were punctuated by the sounds of hull impacts on
the Warlord, and the sounds of the ship systems changed, rising in
pitch. “Multiple breaches across our aft dorsal sections and aft
port sections. Sending damage control teams in with temporary
shielding,” David reported.

The Warlord finished
turning towards the enemy ship and Frost fired the railguns at the
centre of the vessel. The delay between the rumble under Alice’s
feet and the visible impact on the enemy vessel grew shorter and
shorter as it closed the distance. A glance at Ashley working at the
helm revealed that she had rotated all the Warlord’s thruster pods
so they were firing in reverse.

There was no noticeable
delay between Frost firing the railguns or the Warlord’s missiles
and the visible impacts on the enemy ship by the time Frost’s
rounds began breaking through the middle section of the enemy ship.

“That’s it! That’s
all the time I can give you!” Ashley said as she sent the Warlord
in a sideways arc so that it was out of the enemy ship’s way. She
spun the Warlord around so Frost could fire the stationary guns at
the rear of the enemy vessel, and he hit it several times before the
power readings from the enemy ship dropped to a negligible level.

“Why was that bugger
so much tougher than the others? It had the same profile, near the
same mass.”

“Scans results coming
back from breaches in the enemy ship,” Kadri reported, “Edxi
crew, evidence of several major internal explosions. I read
twenty-nine survivors, though I can’t tell what condition they’re
in. Ship systems seem disabled, but there are several very low
powered objects still running between eighty and one hundred and
fifty watts apiece.”

“What about backup?
Any signs of incoming ships?” Frost asked as he looked through the
ship status and command hologram projected in front of half of his
field of view. The other half of his view was purely tactical, with
an interactive map, strategy assistant software, and targeting
system.

“The same two signals
are coming in, backup will be here in a hundred and twenty-three
minutes at the earliest,” Kadri replied. “This plan is working. I
can’t believe it, but it’s working.”

“Can’t say that
yet, we’re still waiting on Captain’s results with that
destroyer. Get us along side that ship, let’s make an impression.
How are my damage control teams doing, Alice?”

Alice was startled at
being called on; she wasn’t trained to fill in for David, who was
busy helping Finn find workarounds for systems that were damaged or
destroyed. She looked at her panel and focused on the damage control
teams marked on her security map. “One sec,” she said as she made
sense of their short status reports. “Okay, they’re all on
assignment, most are patching minor breaches and approaching sections
of inner hull that registered heat damage. They report two injured,
medical has already gotten to them. I’m going to send two of my
security people to help a team working on the aft dorsal section.”

“Good, keep an eye on
it while the geniuses behind me work on the bigger problems,” Frost
said.

“Aye,” Alice
replied. A direct message came through her station from Remmy Sands,
whose team had boarded the Sunny Shifter, the military cargo hauler
they were after. She answered it using her personal comm unit.
“What’s up?”

“Why aren’t you
using your neural interface?” he asked. Pulse weapon fire sounds
sizzled and popped in the background.

“Turned it off when I
got to my post, it was getting hard to concentrate,” Alice replied.
“Why?”

“I could use a hand
breaking through this system, they’ve got some kind of hardware
lock set up and I need to find the system they use to control it. It
would be fantastic if you could get it open while you’re in there,
too.”

“You can’t do it
from there? You’re right on the ship.”

“My interface is
reporting twenty hardware locks on their system, each linked to
different programs. I know there’s only one real lock, but I don’t
want to waste time manually figuring out which one it is. I can give
you a relay connection to the trunk line from my position.”

Alice immediately had a
mental picture of what Remmy was seeing in the system. It was as
though the computer aboard the Sunny Shifter was representing the
single hardware lock securing the system with twenty doors, but only
one of them led to the location of the main processing unit. Remmy
could crack them one after the other and hope to get lucky, or he
could get help. “Lemme assign my post to someone else and send a
message to Frost telling him what I’m doing.” She activated her
neural node and took control of the flow of data, then assigned her
post to Havernash, an experienced security officer who was guarding
one of the hallways leading to the bridge. It only took her a moment
more to send a message to Frost with the details of the situation.

“Activate the link,”
Alice expressed through her comm channel with Remmy.

“Wow, your neural
voice sounds a lot older,” Remmy said before activating the direct
line to the Sunny Shifter’s computer systems.

“All right, time to
find out which door hides the prize,” Alice replied. “You should
look into getting a neural node put in, you could do this yourself.”

“Nope, had one.
Forgot to eat for a while and woke up in an addiction treatment
centre,” Remmy replied hurriedly. “Gotta keep a safe distance
between me and the data.”

“I know what you
mean,” Alice said as she got familiar with the Sunny Shifter
hauler’s operating system, which tried to reject her several times,
but she easily found her way around. There was an artificial
intelligence inside, roughly trying to block her, reporting a digital
incursion to the bridge staff. She tried to activate several weapons
systems aboard the hauler, and the primitive artificial intelligence
shifted its attention to block her attempts. With a thought, she
activated a piece of software from the Warlord’s library that
continually attempted to infect and control the Sunny Shifter’s
weapons systems, distracting the artificial intelligence. It tried to
execute programs to assist with the computer’s security outside of
the bridge, and she halted the processes.