Homeworld (Odyssey One) (5 page)

Sun nodded. He’d seen it as well as anyone, but something about it was bothering him.

“They didn’t support each other,” he murmured.

“Excuse me, Captain?” Shi half turned. “Did you say something?”

“Nothing.” Sun shook his head, almost absently. He was having a hard time believing it. There was no modern force on Earth that wouldn’t use their own point defense to cover their allies. You just didn’t fight like that.

“Captain! Multiple laser coronas detected! Both squadrons have engaged us fully.”

“Mark the beams as best you can!” Sun ordered, attention refocusing.

Things would be getting violently rough now. With both squadrons firing, they’d be able to bracket the
Weifang
in.

“Lock in all aggressors!” Sun ordered. “Ready to go to automatic fire on all tubes!”

“Targets locked into the computers!”

“All tubes report ready!”

“Fir….” Sun frowned, pausing. “Hold!”

The crew ahead of him paused, glancing at each other and then back over their shoulders to where Sun was glaring dead ahead, seemingly at a random point on the wall.

“Captain?”

They’re not supporting each other. Why aren’t they supporting each other?
Sun scowled, wondering if there was some kind of bizarre trap being laid.

He almost ignored the information, almost opted to go with standard procedures developed for fighting a
Confederate battle squadron during the last war. Instead, though, Sun slowly shook his head.

“Reprioritize targets,” he ordered. “Target closest ship fore and aft!”

“Targeting, Captain!”

“Fire all forward tubes to the fore target, all aft tubes to the aft,” he ordered. “Then retarget for the next closest targets in each arc.”

Sun felt the crew hesitate for a second and knew the cause. You didn’t usually put your missiles into a predictable approach vector like that, not against a Confederate battle squadron at least. They’d tighten right up and share the point defense tasking so that you wouldn’t be able to fit a playing card in between their defenses.

This wasn’t a Confederate battle group, however. Sun was now convinced. Whatever else these things were, experts on ship-to-ship combat wasn’t one of them.

“Fore and aft tubes firing!”

We’ll take them apart one at a time if they’ll let us
, Sun thought fiercely, though mentally he was beginning to agree with his counterpart on the N.A.C.S.
Odyssey
. There was something very wrong with these things. They did not fight like people.

“Retargeting!”

Sun tuned out the calls across the deck, focusing on the mapping of the enemy laser strikes. Getting a read on the exact strength and vector of a laser beam that
missed
you wasn’t an easy task. The first clue you had would be from the coronal bloom, assuming it was close enough to hitting you to cook some of the external sensors and thereby trip the alerts. After that you could probably plot a locus of origin, but that was only a job half done. Getting a precise beam required a little more work and a fair amount of luck. Space wasn’t empty
the way people thought. It was just very,
very
sparsely populated, so to speak.

When the beam crossed paths with a stray molecule or even an atom, it would dump a ton of power into the bystander and make it jump energy states. While the beam itself was very focused and hard to detect, those high-energy state particles in the beam’s trail weren’t remotely as disciplined.

So it didn’t take long for his men to have a partial lattice constructed in the computers to show where the enemy lasers were crossing space around the
Weifang
.

Ancestors. One would believe that they were firing truly at random.
He glared at the plotter, unable to quite believe any of it.
This is insanity.

He knew that he shouldn’t be complaining. It was insane, but it was insanity in his favor. One thing he’d learned during the war, however, was that when something was too good to be true, someone was playing you.

“Direct hits to lead elements, both fore and aft! They’re dropping back!”

“Third salvo clear and away!”

“Second salvo reports terminal guidance!”

There was nothing he could do, another thing that grated on Sun’s nerves. The enemy was using no pattern, as near as he could tell, so course modifications would be just as aimless. The firing orders he’d given were working, and the
Weifang
was now beginning to pull away.

Too easy.

“Shi, full power to long-range scans,” Sun ordered suddenly. “Narrow beam, dead ahead.”

“Yes, Captain!”

He’d give real money, and honestly a lot more, for the tachyon technology of the Confederation, but without it Sun
knew he’d have to rely on more traditional RADAR, LIDAR, and other infra and ultra bands of EM detection gear.

There was a general once, who told one of his soldiers: Ask me for anything but time.

Sun, ironically, had very little but time now.

“Target three hit! Acceleration falling!”

“Are we destroying any of them?” Sun demanded.

“No, Captain! Crippling strikes at best.”

Sun shook his head.
Those missiles could sink a fleet of the Confederacy’s best wet navy battle groups. Damn, these things are tough.

“Number four’s point defense took out most of our warheads,” Shi reported. “Minor hits, no loss of acceleration.”

“Reengage,” Sun ordered. “Continue targeting by proximity to the
Weifang
.”

“Yes, Captain, reengaging.”

Something was wrong about the whole situation, but for now he was going to stay with what was working. Picking the enemy off one at a time was better than throwing thinner volleys against the entire force, at least until he got the readings back from the forward scan.

“Captain!”

Speak of devils….

“How many of them are there, Shi?” he asked calmly, a vague smile on his face.

“Two more squadrons, Captain.” Shi half turned, staring at him. “How did you know? How did they even divine our course?”

“They didn’t,” Sun assured him, now comfortable that he knew what was going on. “I expect that if we had power to scan the whole system, it would
crawl
. We were nudged in the right direction by the initial intercept vectors and apparently
random nature of their laser fire. Mathematically, our choice was obvious.”

“Yes, Captain,” Shi turned back, obviously confused and more than a little stricken.

Sun didn’t blame him for the second part. The math was now looking a lot uglier for their chances. With two more squadrons dead ahead, they had no real clean escapes left to them. In another fifteen minutes or so, the trap would be snapped shut and Sun knew that the
Weifang
would be finished.

Now, however, we do have one reasonable option.

He opened the ship-wide comm, keeping his voice casual. “All crew are to stand ready for damage control operations.”

“Helm, bring us about to One Forty Nine, Radian Twelve.”

Silence reigned for a moment before the crew on deck twisted to look at him, apprehension in their eyes. He was proud to note that while nerves were clearly there to see, no real fear showed as they turned back without speaking and prepared to follow orders.

“Coming about, Captain.”

“All forward tubes, go to rapid fire,” Sun ordered as the
Weifang
stopped dodging wildly and pointed her bow right towards the short squadron that was still accelerating forward.

“All tubes…rapid fire. Yes, Captain.”

The course of the
Weifang
turned into a short, sharp parabola that broke them clear out of the incoming trap but sent them barreling head first into the teeth of the closest of the enemy ships. Sun was determined to close the range to the damaged squadron as quickly as he could, hopefully before any of the other squadrons recognized his intent.

It was a risk, but what was life without risks?

“Forward,” Sun said softly, “into the storm.”

“Captain?”

“Nothing,” he said, louder this time. “Do we have any reads on the enemy laser frequencies?”

“Partial frequencies on three ships.”

“How close are they?”

“Widely varied.”

Sun grimaced. There went the idea of just evening his armor to the average of the enemy frequencies. Whatever else they may be, it was clear that these…things, people, whatever they were, were not totally predictable.

“Pick one,” he ordered.

“Captain?”

“Pick one, and adapt our armor to it,” Sun repeated. “Don’t care which one, just be lucky.”

“Yes, Captain.” The man looked more than slightly unnerved by the order, for which Sun did not blame him.

Sun was too busy to commiserate. They needed an escape from this be-damned system and the potential routes were closing at an alarming rate. He was about ready to trust his ship’s fate to a power higher than himself, and he could only hope to get a little lucky.

With one eye on the screens and another on his personal display, Sun began to make some very rapid calculations with his terminal. His intentions were against every protocol, violated every safety procedure on the books, but at this point he was willing to toss them all out the proverbial and literal airlock.

“I need maximum power scans, dead ahead, and all passive scans for same!” He called out, “Get them here
yesterday!
”

He didn’t bother to look up or even listen to the acknowledgements. He knew that his crew were working, they knew he was working, and they were all aware that the enemy was working.

Let’s see who finishes working first.

“Laser coronas!”

“Continue evasive maneuvers!” Sun ordered, not looking up. If they were hit, they’d never see the beam that killed them. “All thrust!”

“Yes Captain, all thrust!”

The ship was corkscrewing through space, twisting and turning at seemingly random intervals as it tried to stay out of the crosshairs of the enemy firing at it. Intellectually, Sun and everyone on board were well aware that a starship, no matter how large in human scale, was a tiny target in the scale of the battle they were fighting. The odds of a lucky shot hitting them, miniscule.

As they closed the gap, however, and the light-speed reflection time continued to reduce…well, the enemy would have to rely far less on luck. Those odds started getting ugly.

He finished his calculations as the distance between the
Weifang
and the squadron ahead of them had closed to just under thirty light-seconds. Much closer and he knew that things would probably not go well. As it were, they were close enough to make evasion almost as much a matter of luck as the enemy successfully aiming their lasers.

On the other hand, their own weapons were guided and they’d been hammering the squadron the entire time. It was down to half strength, with only three of the original six ships still under power, and two of those were smoking.

We may just be able to pull this off without getting crazy.

“Captain! Two more full squadrons detected at extreme range! They’re closing on high speed intercept!”

So much for that.

Sun hesitated a moment, then sent his calculations to the helm.

“Lay the course I just sent you,” he spoke up. “And stand by to warp space-time.”

The entire crew of the bridge turned to gape at him, shock easily filling their expressions. He ignored them all. They knew better than to question him.

“Engineering,” he called down over the comm. “I’m going to need full power to the CM coils momentarily.”

Another long hesitation before anyone answered.

“Yes, Captain. Captain, are you….”

“Sun out.” He closed the connection. He didn’t need people trying to talk him out of what he was about to do. They might just succeed.

A glance at the screens told the story. They were now within twenty light-seconds and staring down the bores of two enemy ships, with more bearing down on them. They might be able to hammer these two into dust, but it would leave them dealing with whatever else is left in the system, and he knew that wasn’t going to end well for the
Weifang
.

“Secure for FTL,” he ordered, grimacing at the idea of warping space-time that much within the gravity field of the star.

In theory, actually, it should work. There was an issue with maintaining course, however, since the space-time warps of the star and planets would affect the warp of the
Weifang.
He didn’t care about that, not really, since he’d picked a course well and away from Earth mostly at random.

The more pressing concern was the fact that they couldn’t
see
while in FTL, let alone actually
dodge
any debris. The space-time warps used to propel the ship should redirect most of the smaller debris away from the ship, but if they were to cross trails with something the size of, say, a small car…well, it might just punch right through.

At FTL, Sun doubted they’d ever know it happened.

“Helm. Engage space-time warp, maximum CM!” he ordered, partly before he could second guess himself again.

He felt the shiver run down his spine as the CM generators wound up and the screens went black just as the
Weifang
rocked violently.

“Laser strike!”