Edge of Redemption (A Star Too Far Book 3) (12 page)

The starscape shifted once more and the barren planet was wide in the screen. Before the blink it was scarcely brighter than the starscape behind it. Now a band of light showed the terminator line. The edge looked like stirred up dirt mixed with old milk.

Turrets slid and tested limits. The railgun powered up with a dim shudder. The lights winked for a moment as the capacitor bank charged to maximum. On the rear the missile batteries loaded with a resounding
ka-chunk
. The grav shields powered up, but only barely. It was the one downfall of the design: they sacrificed grav shields for mass.

The ship came close to the planet, or as close as one could get and still be in space. The gravity well acted like a slingshot, like a ball bearing rolling down a funnel and gathering speed. Below them the surface was dark, empty, devoid of anything. In front the curvature of the planet marked the edge.

“Weapons program is live,” Shay said in a low voice.

William nodded. Soon. It’d happen before he even expected it, the weapons would be off. Then, he knew, it’d be over quick. The wall of slugs that the mass driver could throw was immense. “Get ready on the roll, Mr. Bryce, I want to get all the mass drivers in the fight.”

“Yes sir!” Bryce snapped back quickly.

A light blinked and then it began. Instead of coming in on the same plane as the
Garlic
, the Hun cruiser was in a polar orbit. The ship was curving from below. Both ships opened fire immediately. Mass drivers slugs punched through vacuum while railguns fired and left trails of singing plasma.

Missiles erupted from both ships and blossomed out into space. From a distance it would look almost beautiful, like a light show in the midst of the darkest night ever. Instead, the rounds punched and shattered, missiles exploded and the brawl was on.

The wave of adrenaline washed over William. Surprise was followed a second after. The Hun cruiser had altered course and changed planes. He felt stupid for not thinking of doing it himself. Trapped in two dimensions, a true pilot would say. “There it is!” he shouted out.

“Rolling!” Bryce called out.

The display shifted and drifted down as the
Garlic
pivoted upon the center and presented the thickest spot forward. The railgun was a fixed mount model, now the muzzle could be brought to bear. A second after the computer produced a solution, servos adjusted the aim, and it fired.

William watched as the mass drivers expanded and stitched the hull of the cruiser. His missiles were mostly intercepted as they came closer.

He jumped when the railgun fired. It drew a plasma trail from one ship to the other, he’d never seen it like that before.

Like a laser line it smashed into the starboard quarter of the Hun cruiser. Sparks gouted out with a surge of white frost. Atmosphere, the most precious thing, was being vented.

Shay whooped and leaned forward into the console. “Two minutes!”

Bryce rocked from side to side as he worked the nav control. Icons above him showed where the Hun rounds were intercepting and eating away at the asteroid core. Grav shields had long ago surged into the red. The
Garlic
had nothing but its mass protecting it.

“Captain, nanites are up eighteen percent,” Engineers Mate Pope called out over the comms.

William scrunched his brow. That meant that there was a breach somewhere and the nanites were sealing it. “Where’s Huron?”

“He’s with the reactor,” Pope replied.

The reactor. William felt his stomach drop a bit. Whatever it was, Huron didn’t see fit to notify him so he wasn’t about to micromanage. “Keep me posted, Pope.”

“Second round coming up!” Shay called out. Above her lines and displays showed the ordnance heading through space. Reload times were bracketed next to firing solutions. Everything was broken down into the physics of the moment. Math at its most violent form.

The Hun cruiser was passing behind the Garlic with its nose presented front on. Atmosphere had ceased venting from the cruiser, but the entire section was dark. They’d hit something critical. The
Garlic
was pocked and still rolling. With every angle turned, new mass drivers presented themselves and more fired.

“Getting hot, Captain,” Bryce called out. The mass drivers were like miniature railguns. But because they fired so quickly, heat buildup was the main issue.

The moment was close, he could feel it. “Save the guns,” William said. “Don’t burn ‘em out. The next rail shot will give ‘em hell.”

The two ships passed and the distance grew. The Hun ship would arc above the upper pole while the
Garlic
would continue on an orbital plane around it. Gunfire stretched out a farther distance. Missiles seemed to make the least impression on either ship. The
Garlic
had too many mass drivers to screen it and too few missiles to break through the Hun defenses.

William watched the railgun count and didn’t focus on anything else. His damage console was blinking yellow in a few spots, but yellow meant non-critical. The violence the little potato could put out was stunning. He didn’t like the ship initially, but now he was growing attached to it.

“Here we go!” Shay yelled.

The countdown for the railgun dropped to zero. The bridge dropped into instant darkness. Darkness so deep it was like a pool of ink. There was silence for a moment, then the silence was replaced with a steady booming and shuddering. The Hun cruiser continued to pummel the
Garlic
. Emergency lights blinked on throughout the ship. A dull blue illuminated the bridge giving hard edges to everything and everyone.

William snapped his head down the hallway and felt the gravity begin to dissipate. Shit, he thought. “Huron!”

Voices called out throughout the ship. Grgur poked his head into the bridge before beginning to float away. He caught himself and hugged the edge of the bulkhead.

A voice called out down the hall. “He says it’ll be a minute, Captain.”

The knockout punch was ready, and he didn’t have any power. Anger rose, a prototype design rushed into war. Or did they send him out with a bad boat? He shut the thought out—he had no evidence, just anger. “Seal hatches!” William shouted, his voice cracking.

The booming of the impacting rounds grew louder. Grgur stepped onto the bridge and swung the bulkhead door shut with a clang. The silence seemed deeper, more detached. The booming echoed but seemed far away.

The gravity continued to drop slowly and everyone found themselves pushed into one side of their chairs. The
Garlic
was still rolling. The artificial gravity continued to bleed away leaving the crew feeling the centripetal forces.

William had once heard the term, “fail like an escalator, not like an elevator”. The rational being that if a system failed, it should still function, just not as well. He gazed around the blue tinted bridge and felt helpless. A starship was not an escalator, and when it lost power, it lost everything. It hit him that unless Huron did his job, they’d all die. He could hear the impacts growing farther apart, the cruiser would be dropping away, the distance growing. “We’ll have one orbit, then they’ll nail us,” he said.

“Is there anything we can do?” Bryce asked nervously.

William shook his head.

The bridge felt like a cocoon. The still air grew warm as the body heat from the four occupants and the dead computers, warmed the space. Normally the UC built ships with redundancy, but not this time. Centralization allowed for specialization.

“How long ‘til the air goes?” Shay asked.

“I think we’ll be hulled before that happens,” William replied.

Bryce shifted in his seat and stood quickly. He pushed up against the wall and looked around wildly. “But, what can we do?”

“Sit, dammit. Huron’s working on it,” William said.

“But what if he can’t?” Bryce asked.

“Then we hope they take prisoners,” Shay whispered.

William strained to see Bryce’s eyes. The blue gave everything a deceiving tone of clarity. But in the moment he knew he had clarity, clarity into a moment where Bryce was tested. A dark place for anyone, he knew it himself. “Bryce, sit down.”

Bryce began to sob lightly and slid himself back down into his seat. A few steps away, Grgur cracked his knuckles, stifled a yawn, and relaxed against the door. The hefty Marine seemed unfazed by it all.

“It’s a matter of faith,” William said. “Huron’s got this under control.”

The booming stopped as suddenly as it began. The artificial gravity was almost totally wound down. The room felt cramped and tight as the air grew warmer. Without external heat sinks functioning even a few bodies could overwhelm a room.

Shay wiped her forehead and smeared her hand against her trousers. “Fuck,” she said. “Want me to check on him?”

“No,” William replied. “If he needs the help, he’ll ask. The last thing he needs is a few officers looking over his shoulder.”

Shay sighed. “Fuck, it gets to you—right, Captain?”

William wondered if it did. He felt a sense of urgency, but little regret or fear. If the reactor came back online, it was because of the competence of another, not because of some inner willing or longing. He had a cruiser to kill, a ship to save, and a crew to get back before the ship disassembled. “Yes,” he lied. “It hits us all. But once we’re online, get that railgun rolling.”

Bryce sat up and nodded. The midshipman straightened his rumpled shirt, smoothed out his pants and cleared his throat.

It started as a low whine. A subtle tingling that danced on the edge of the audible range. A moment later it rose higher, deeper, richer, like a drum that was beaten too fast. It paused and the sound ebbed into the stone of the asteroid.

“What was that?” Shay asked in barely a whisper.

A console winked on and flashed through sequences of code. Startup code. A second later the artificial gravity settled back in like a rigid cushion.

“Get ready! We’re going live!” William yelled.

A second, and a third console flickered to life. Lights rebounded above spreading out a sweet yellow light. A moment after the ventilators kicked on and blasted cool air inward.

William felt some tension drift away. He reached over and gently patted the wall next to him. His eyes drifted across the panels and watched the startup count down. A click in his ear told him that the comms were online. “Huron! About damned time,” William called over the mic.

“Hoo! Well, a few bugs yet, I think,” Huron replied.

“No more surprises,” William called back.

The displays stabilized and the starfield expanded outwards into a near planet view. They had swung around through two thirds of an orbit. Maintenance and damage alerts were past yellow and into the red. Automatic repairs were progressing on a pair of mass drivers and the missile launcher.

“Railgun?” William asked.

Shay clicked and looked back over her shoulder to William with a smile. “Primed and ready, Captain.”

That, at least, made him feel better. They had taken a beating and he knew it. He looked down to Bryce and saw the young man’s hands shaking, uncertain. “Bryce?”

Bryce’s head snapped around and nodded. “Sir?”

William looked him in the eye and nodded. “We’ve got this.”

Bryce nodded and smiled nervously.

William’s fingers flew over his console as he mashed together bits and pieces of weapons programs. He pushed the mass drivers to the edge. The railgun program he left as Shay had laid it out. Two shots, he thought, they’d need two more. He tried to ignore the nanite rating, which hovered painfully high. They had some serious damage on the outside. He wondered how exactly he was supposed to repair an asteroid hull. “Bryce, halt the roll and alternate between mass drivers. Don’t expose both pairs at once.”

Bryce nodded and leaned over his console. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

He debated changing course and drifting lower or higher. But he was going to play dumb. Let ‘em think he was still drifting. “Get ready.”

The words were barely out of William’s mouth when the displays lit up with gunfire. Mass driver slugs pushed through the void and smashed against a wave of incoming missiles. The Hun cruiser opted for an early launch of multiple waves of missiles and let them all coalesce into a ball. Bryce slammed the console and the
Garlic
rolled between both quadrants. The thudding rumble of the mass drivers was unceasing.

“Bingo!” Shay cried out. The Hun cruiser appeared from a different angle, the missiles had been launched early to confuse them.

“Hold! Wait until they’re closer, then roll the rail towards action. Got it, Bryce?”

Bryce nodded quickly without taking his eyes off of the console.

Mass driver rounds cracked into the
Garlic,
followed by a massive shock from a railgun. A resounding boom racked through the bridge. Shay hunched her shoulders up with every sound. The range came closer but the icon showed the cruiser to be decelerating.

William looked up and watched the plots converge. The bait was too much for them, he thought. They were coming in close. A straight on course that would snuggle the two ships. His eyes snapped to the clock and back to his console. If they fired now... they’d get one more point blank. “Roll and fire!”

Bryce slammed his hand onto the console and the starscape shifted. A moment later the weapons program stitched out a path of mass drivers followed by the whining sing of the railgun.

William’s heart felt relieved as he saw the stream of plasma mark the path. He dared not think of another reactor failure. He watched, satisfied, as the railgun punctured another wicked wound into the cruiser. Another spray of atmosphere billowed out from another sector of the ship. “Huron! We got another shot in us?”

The comms crackled and fizzed. The voice on the other end sounded patched up. “We uh, yeah, one more Captain.”

He was about to ask about the sound when he saw the vacuum alerts. The engineering area was breached. Huron must’ve been in a suit. He had focused too tightly on the railgun and had neglected to tend to his ship. Too much for one man, too much information, delegation. Delegation. “Shay. You’ve got weapons.”