Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. (19 page)

Some
modifications had been made to
Joel Schumacher
while she waited for the
enemy ship to arrive.  The crew, with the assistance of ship’s robots, had
moved electromag projectors from one side of the ship to the other.  Those
augmented fields were raised, a thirty meter wide layer of cold plasma riding
in that sheet of negative magnetism.  Holes were opened in the field to allow
weapons fire to go through, while the computers prepared to close them if
necessary to reduce incoming beams.

The behemoth
they were fighting had massive electromag shields, even at one quarter
strength, though they hadn’t had the time to inject cold plasma into the
defensive screen.  They were still strong enough to attenuate the beams of the
frigate, bending them, spreading them, turning them from ravening points of
energy to spotlights that did little more than pump heat into the hull.  The
particle beams, originally made of accelerated protons, were stripped of their
charges at the ejector port of the weapon, turning them into neutrons which
went through the electromag screens as if they weren’t there.  Unfortunately,
they didn’t do much to the ten meters of alloy and carbon fiber composite armor
they struck, doing little more than scarring damage.

The battleship
returned fire.  The only thing that saved the frigate was the understandable
reaction of the enemy’s crew, only firing what they thought would be enough
weaponry to destroy the tiny ship, despite the orders of the Captain.

Before the beams
struck the frigate sent the signal to the missiles she had deployed in the
tail, along with the other platforms stationed there.  Twenty missiles, eight
sensor probes, and ten repair robots turned on their grabber units and jumped
out of the tail, darting for the enemy ship.  Each of the missiles was capable of
accelerating at five thousand gravities for twelve hours.  Instead, they had
been jury rigged to pull ten thousand gravities for ten seconds, as long as
their internal systems could stand the load of inertia, and more than they
needed.  The probes could only pull a couple of thousand gravities, and had
been set to become jamming and spoofing platforms.  The robots could pull even
fewer gees, and were there mainly to just add more clutter, and hopefully spoil
a killing shot.

It took five
seconds for the missiles to close the one thousand two hundred kilometers to
the relatively slow moving target, traveling in a mass of dodging targets,
using every penetration aid known to the Fleet.  They weathered the ill
prepared defensive fire, most of them, and struck.

*     *     *

Lt. Commander
Cinda Klerk stared in wide eyed panic at the Goliath they were battling. 
Everything her ship was putting out was striking the monster, and she saw that
it was having absolutely no effect.  The
Joel Schumacher
shuddered as
lasers struck her hull, tearing through the cold plasma field with some
spread.  Gigawatt lasers could still do a lot of damage hitting as expanded
spotlights, and damage klaxons sounded through the ship.

“We’re venting
atmosphere,” yelled the Chief Petty Officer in charge of damage control over
the com link.  “Multiple locations.”

The ship bucked
again, hull breaches turning into atmosphere jets.  Casualty figures started
coming through the link, and Cinda winced as she looked at the names of people
she saw every day.  A side holo showed a representation of the ship, blinking
red showing the damage.  The stern laser ring was off line, as was one of the
bow grabbers.

The ship
shuddered in a different manner as she was struck by particle beams, protons
ripping deep into her hull through the weak electromag field.  “Get us out of
here,” yelled the Captain to her Helmsman.  “Behind the comet.”

The man
acknowledged and sent the command, and the frigate started to drop back behind
the ice ball.  That was his last action in this life.

The three meter
wide particle beam ripped through the ship, past eighty centimeters of armor
and hull, into the ship’s machinery, penetrating the thick skin of the central
capsule and through the bulkhead of the bridge.  The helm and navigation
stations were in the path of the angry red beam.  One moment Lt. Romanov and
Ensign Garibaldi were at their boards, sitting in their armor in the most
protected part of the ship.   The next they were gone, converted to vapor where
they sat, while the beam continued through the opposite bulkhead.

Cinda stared in
horror as two officers she worked with on a daily basis were converted to
superheated steam and ash.  The remains and the molten metal were immediately
pulled from the chamber as all of the atmosphere evacuated.  The Captain saw
the rest of the crew staring through their suit armor faceplates at the place
where their crewmates had sat, and she realized they would all be dead without
the armor they wore.

“Auxiliary
control,” she shouted into the link.  “Get us behind the comet, and keep it
between us and the enemy.”  She received the acknowledgement from the petty
officers at that station and turned her own attention back to the tactical
plot, just before all bridge systems winked out.

“Everyone to
CIC,” she shouted to the rest of the surviving bridge crew over the link. 
Without power the bridge hatch refused to open.  The Com Officer pulled open
the emergency crank, pushed an extension of his gloved hand into the opening,
and engaged the mechanism.  The door slid open, a little slower than it would
have with its own motors, revealing a corridor that had been splattered with
pieces of melted bulkhead.

“Where’s the
nearest working lift?” she called out to damage control over the link.

“There are none,
Ma’am,” replied the Chief, his voice tense with tension.  “The corridor you are
in is blocked about fifty meters around the next curve.”

“Grab the damage
control equipment in that locker,” said Cinda to her Tactical Officer,
motioning toward the small marked door on the side of the corridor.

Jakardo nodded
and ran to the locker, pulling it open and removing the pack.

“We’re going to
try to make it to the CIC,” she told the rest of her people. 
I’ve got to
get to a place where I can do something to affect this fight.
  She was
linked into the Combat Information Center, which was now functioning as an
auxiliary bridge, and could see everything they saw through the link into the
occipital cortex of her brain.  But it wasn’t the same as being there.

A moment later
they were at the blockage, and Cinda wondered if she hadn’t made another
mistake not trying to go around.  A thick structural beam was protruding from
the bulkhead and forming an obstacle they couldn’t get through.  Jakardo didn’t
hesitate.  He opened the pack and pulled out the nozzle of the emergency laser
that was attached to a power unit in the case.  He flipped it to cutting and
engaged the beam, sending sparks flying as he started to slice through the
tough alloy.

Cinda, linked
into Damage Control, saw that many other such small battles were going on all
over her ship.  People trapped, or trying to rescue crewmates, or get systems
online that had been smashed in the couple of seconds she had engaged the enemy
battleship.

She glanced at
the take from the tactical, at the strike at the battleship, and almost cheered
in triumph.

“We have another
problem, Ma’am,” came the voice of the Exec over the link, and that feeling of
triumph died as quickly as it had birthed.

*     *     *

The Captain
cursed as the tiny enemy ship disappeared behind the great ice ball to his
front.  A score of lasers and a dozen particle beams struck the comet, burning
through the halo and into the ice and rock that were now in the way of the
enemy ship.  There was no way they were going to burn through that much
material in time to engage that ship. 
Cowards,
he thought, dismissing
the bravery it had taken for a ship that size to engage his battleship in close
combat, when it would have been better served to stay in hiding.

“We have missile
tracks,” yelled out the Weapons’ Officer, his four hands working furiously,
hitting the panels on his board.

“Where?” asked
the Captain, his horned head turning toward that officer.  That was the last
word he would ever utter.

*     *     *

Frigates carried
destroyer class missiles, fifty tons of grabber units and crystal matrix
batteries, with two hundred megaton warheads.  But where a destroyer would
carry about sixty of the missiles, most frigates only had magazine space for
twenty.  It was still enough firepower to devastate a continent, enough to take
out a frigate class pirate, but not enough to overwhelm the defenses of a
capital ship.

The missiles had
a flight time of five seconds from standing start to impact, a distance of one
thousand, two hundred kilometers.  At ten thousand gravities they built up to a
velocity of four hundred and ninety kilometers a second, an insufficient speed
to accomplish much in the way of penetration against the ten meter thick
armored hull of the Goliath.

The ship’s
defenses were not ready for the attack from the stern side.  Still, in the
couple of seconds they had to engage, they took out nine of the missiles.  They
also targeted and destroyed all of the slower probes and repairbots that had
been sent their way.  Something that accomplished nothing but the wasting of
their firepower on things that couldn’t hurt them, just as the human captain
had planned.

Seven missiles
hit the stern side of the ship.  Again, their velocity was negligible, not
enough to penetrate the armor of the vessel.  The two hundred meg warheads were
something else entirely.  Each blasted into the hull, their antimatter warheads
acting like shape charges, blowing holes tens of meters wide and injecting
superheated plasma into the interior of the ship.  Hundreds of Ca’cadasan crew
died in an instant.  Internal machinery was vaporized, and corridors filled
with that hellish vapor, making it a living hell for a couple of nanoseconds. 
Given time, the blasts would have dissipated within the massive structure of
the vessel.  There was no time.

Hangars, landing
spaces for shuttles, fighters and even small hyper capable vessels, had been
left open to space, only their cold plasma fields separating them from vacuum. 
When readied for battle the hangars would have been protected by eight meter
thick doors, which had been left open so that the shuttles and fighters could
be quickly launched.  The brains of four of the missiles located the opening,
something they had been programmed to seek and hit.  Two missiles hit the hull
of the ship along with the other seven of their brethren that had struck the
stern, just missing the opening.  The other two streaked through the opening,
into the hangar, and detonated with four hundred megatons of fury.

Even that would
not have killed the massive ship.  Two courier vessels in the hangar, twenty
thousand ton hyperdrive messengers, added their antimatter stores to the blast,
which vaporized several holes through the armored deck and into the missile
magazine below.  Scores of warheads went off, their antimatter breaching
containment and setting off still more missiles.

That was more
than even the massive ship could handle, and microseconds after the human
missiles detonated the vessel was expanding plasma and particles, a miniature
sun that only died when its constituent matter had spread far enough to cool. 
The thinning blast wave hit the comet, pushing it away while hundreds of
thousands of tons of ice flared into vapor.

Just before the
ship exploded a quartet of Ca’cadasan missiles sped from their launch tubes,
the last strike of the ship, initiated by the alert Weapons’ Officer as his
last act.

Those missiles,
two hundred ton capital ship killers all, left the forward tubes, through one
thousand meters of magnetic accelerator at thirty thousand gravities.  They
also carried the momentum of the ship, point zero one light.  The missiles
didn’t accelerate from this point, they decelerated, trying to kill that
momentum so they could head back and look for the target they had been
programed to seek, an enemy ship in hiding near the comet.  Their computer
brains set them into a series of changing vector corrections, curving them
through space, taking off some velocity here, adding more there, until they
were shooting around the comet and scanning for the target.  That target was
not hard to locate, radiating the heat of a small star against the background
of the cold body of the comet.  The missiles made the final vector correction
and pushed all of their acceleration into a straight line, heading for the
damaged frigate.

*     *     *

Cinda blanched
as she looked at the profiles of the incoming missiles. 
Time till impact,
forty-five seconds
, said the ship’s computer in her mind.  Cinda looked at
the schematic of the ship and her heart sank further.  One laser ring out, half
the counter missile tubes on the least damaged side of the ship gone.  Hangar
deck wrecked, and over half of the life pods destroyed or out of action.

“All crew who
can make it off, abandon ship,” she called out over the com.  “The rest of you,
man your stations and fight the ship.”

She wondered how
many would just run for it, no matter her orders.  She was gratified to see the
acknowledgements coming back that let her know most of the crew were staying at
their stations.  She wasn’t sure it would make any difference, but there was
always the chance.

“We’re through,”
yelled Jakardo over the com.

The Captain
turned to see the beam now lying on the floor of the corridor, a couple of
bridge crew making their way over.  Cinda pushed ahead and jumped over the
obstacle next, then ran down the corridor.  The artificial gravity was
fluctuating, her steps throwing her into the ceiling at times, pushing her hard
into the floor at others.