Ashen Stars Page 6
Chapter Seven
“They have us dialed in,” Harris reported. “Evasive maneuvers and ECM are only doing so much. I figure I can generate a thirty percent miss rate…but seventy percent of a hundred and fifty percent is still more guns than we’ve got left.”
“Let them keep their eyes on us,” Isaac ordered. “We’ve got a lovely surprise planned for them now.”
Even if his plan worked, Scorpion was going to get pieces of her hull ripped off and handed to her. There was no way he was making it through this with his ship intact.
What he might be able to do was make it through this with his ship intact enough that most of his crew made it home—and his enemy didn’t.
“Ninety seconds to pulse-gun range,” Renaud reported. “We’ll continue to close from there, reaching a minimum approach of just under five hundred kilometers in two hundred and five seconds.”
One way or another, that wasn’t going to happen. Pulse guns grew more powerful as the range dropped, their plasma pulses having less time to weaken after leaving the ship. At five hundred kilometers, he’d be better off flying Scorpion directly into a star.
“Commander Giannovi?” he asked.
“Program is loaded into Auburn Station’s systems. Initiating five seconds before weapons range.”
“And our side?”
“Ready to go,” she confirmed.
Isaac nodded silently, waiting as the range dropped down. His “prey” had turned to present their broadsides, but Scorpion continued a headlong rush. They could bring fully half of their guns to bear on her, and he could only present about forty percent of his…but everyone “knew” he’d rotate before he reached range.
Twenty seconds.
“Commander Renaud?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Execute.”
Scorpion’s forward acceleration vanished, the ship twisting into a broad spiral that, exactly as he knew his enemy would expect, presented her full undamaged broadside towards them.
What the Coalition ships wouldn’t have been expecting was that Scorpion was now emptying her water tanks. Her waste tanks. Reflective flakes of specialty chaff sprayed out with every drop of liquid the cruiser could spare as Renaud spun her out to create a thousand-kilometer-wide glittering mirror in space.
It wouldn’t do much on its own. The Coalition ships already had Scorpion locked in, hard radar pulses still reflecting off her hull as she spiralled.
And then the hideously overpowered radar pulse from Auburn Station’s scanners arrived. Passing over the rebel destroyers, it temporarily overloaded their receivers, losing their lock for an infinitesimal fraction of a second.
That wouldn’t have been enough to cause trouble. Not on its own—but then the pulse hit the massive mirror Scorpion had built around herself. For a few seconds, a massive sun of artificial radiation lit up behind the warp cruiser—and she flashed into range of the destroyers.
Pulse-gun fire lit up the empty space on the edge of the Conestoga System again. The destroyers had completely lost their lock, passive and active sensors alike completely blinded by the mirror behind Scorpion and the repeating, overwhelmingly powerful pulses from Auburn Station.
They could adjust. They could adapt and use Auburn Station’s sensor pulses against Isaac—but Scorpion was already using the Station’s radar for targeting.
Full broadsides tore into Poseidon, almost every pulse from Scorpion’s guns hitting. The two rebel ships were firing in random patterns, only a handful of bolts striking him.
Warning lights flickered on Isaac’s status display as the three ships hurtled toward each other. They were hammering the one destroyer, but she was still with them…and then the Coalition finished updating their targeting computers.
Their trick had bought them twelve seconds.
Twelve seconds was…enough.
“Poseidon is coming apart! Switching targets!” Harris barked aloud. Only a single combined salvo from both destroyers hit home before the first destroyer came apart, but Scorpion leapt under the impact.
Inertial compensators did their job, but waves of rippling force crashed over everyone regardless as Scorpion’s warp drive ring shattered. Even mostly discharged, severing the exotic-matter ring could be felt through the entire ship, and Isaac forced down a wave of nausea.
“Hammer them!” he snapped—and Harris obeyed.
Renaud twisted the warp cruiser through an insane series of acrobatics, forcing the entire next salvo from Michael to miss. Harris’s guns automatically compensated for her maneuvers, however, and his pulses continued to hammer home on the less-maneuverable destroyer.
Ten seconds later, it was over. One of Michael’s fusion plants lost containment, gutting the destroyer in a single blast of stellar fire.
Scorpion reeled. Her warp ring was broken in three places. Her armor was leaking atmosphere, and the damage reports on Isaac’s command chair told him most of her guns were gone.
She was a wreck.
But she was a victorious wreck.
Chapter Eight
“The Third Admiral is waiting for you, Captain Gallant,” the polite young Lieutenant Commander told Isaac.
“Thank you,” he told her, glancing at the viewscreen behind her showing the massive yard complex anchored on Phobos, the larger of the two Martian moons. Scorpion hung in one of the nearer slips, the distance reducing her scars to blurry dark smears on her hull.
There was no sign of the slow and agonizing process of towing his ship home now. From here, he couldn’t even see the swarm of shipyard drones flitting around the ship. She might almost have been undamaged—except for the fact that her warp ring was very clearly missing sections, visible even now.
He stepped past the receptionist and through the door into the office of Third Admiral Caroline Riesling, the third-ranking officer of the Confederacy Space Fleet. She was a tall, gray-haired woman who reminded him of his mother in more ways than one.
“Captain Gallant,” she greeted him. “Take a seat.”
He obeyed in silence.
“What is Scorpion’s status?” she asked.
“Battered and broken, but reparable,” he summarized. “The failsafes worked and we retained over ninety percent of our exotic matter. They tell me they’ll be able to rebuild her drive ring relatively easily because of that; it’ll just take time.
“Six months or so,” he admitted.
“That’s better than I was afraid of,” Riesling admitted. “Good to hear, though that means you won’t be returning if she’ll be out of commission for six months.”
“I see, sir,” he said, concealing his reaction. He thought he’d done well, but they were going to take his ship away?
“Shepherding her through will be Captain Giannovi’s task,” the Third Admiral continued with a smile. “There’s plenty of credit and promotion to go around, Captain Gallant; don’t worry. You saved Auburn Station and delivered the Waterloo System to us on a platter.”
“Is that what they called it?” he asked.
“Indeed,” she confirmed. “Sixth Admiral Cohen and Battle Group Enterprise have secured the system. The local government was being difficult, but a few demonstration orbital strikes seemed to have sorted that out, per his last reports.”
Isaac was getting better at concealing what he truly thought. Before the Battle of Auburn Station, his mental wince might have actually made it to his face. He’d hoped that whatever secret colony Conestoga had set up on the other side of the wormhole would be peacefully brought into the Confederacy.
Clearly, Admiral Cohen had had different priorities.
“I see, ma’am,” he said calmly instead of saying what he really wanted to.
“The media is lapping up this story, you know,” she continued. “You’re quite the hero, and your relation to the First Admiral doesn’t hurt—the details of why you had to insist on the evacuation haven’t been released, of course, but the high level of you being determined to see everyone safe ha
s.
“You’ve probably done more good for the government’s reputation than an entire battery of PR flacks working for a decade,” Riesling concluded. “That, of course, is to your benefit as well as ours.”
“Ma’am,” he said noncommittally, letting her get to her point.
“You realize, I’m sure, that there was never any problem with your skill, competence or actions as an officer,” she told him. “Bluntly, if we hadn’t been determined to make sure Adrienne’s son had the most average of careers, you’d have made Captain two years ago.
“Now, of course, you have dragged yourself into the public eye and, I and several other Admirals think, have thoroughly answered the question of who Adrienne’s heir apparent should be.”
Isaac’s new self-control was getting a workout, and he could feel his fists tightening under the desk.
He’d saved his mother’s prisoner-run industrial facility and enabled the invasion of a system that had just wanted to be left alone. For this, they wanted to groom him to take over the Confederacy?!
Riesling slid a box across the table.
“Your mother signed off on this,” she told him, “but, of course, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to give these to you…Rear Admiral Gallant.”
Isaac opened the box, looking at the matching collar pins of a single gold star, and all he could taste was the ashes of his faith in the government he served.
Nonetheless, his hands were steady as he removed the insignia and pinned them to his collar.
The Coalition had had the wrong plan. Running and hiding wouldn’t change anything. Secret ships and stolen fleets would never be able to make it through the wormhole network.
The only way to undo what had been done was the same way the Confederacy had been corrupted in the first place: from the inside.
Other Books by Glynn Stewart
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* * *
Exile
Ashen Stars (prequel novella)
Exile (upcoming - July 17, 2018)
* * *
Castle Federation
Space Carrier Avalon
Stellar Fox
Battle Group Avalon
Q-Ship Chameleon
Rimward Stars
Operation Medusa
* * *
Duchy of Terra
The Terran Privateer
Duchess of Terra
Terra and Imperium
* * *
Vigilante (With Terry Mixon)
Heart of Vengeance
Oath of Vengeance
* * *
Starship’s Mage
Starship’s Mage: Omnibus
Hand of Mars
Voice of Mars
Alien Arcana
Judgment of Mars
* * *
Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon
Interstellar Mage
Mage-Provocateur (upcoming)
* * *
ONSET
ONSET: To Serve and Protect
ONSET: My Enemy’s Enemy
ONSET: Blood of the Innocent
ONSET: Stay of Execution
* * *
Changeling Blood
Changeling’s Fealty
Hunter’s Oath (upcoming)
* * *
Fantasy Stand Alone Novels
Children of Prophecy
City in the Sky