First Principles: Samair in Argos: Book 3 (6 page)

              She started to walk down the corridor toward the spine to head to Engineering when suddenly she felt queasy and weightless.  The grav plates under the decking were malfunctioning, most likely due to damage.  Then she smiled. 
That’s it.
  Picking up the pace, she hustled to the armory.

              “Captain, excuse me, but what the hell are you doing with that missile?” al Fakhir demanded.  “We got way more important things to worry about a fucking missile.  If that ship turns toward us, we’re dead.  We’ve got no shield coverage along the spine and we’re really weak structurally there.”

              “Grav plates,” she said, working to attach the small pod about a meter square onto the nose of the missile.  “I removed the warhead from this one,” she said, tossing aside a small screwdriver.  “Help me!” she said, and the man sighed, came over and held up the pod while she secured it to the weapon.  Once that was done, in less than a minute, she attached it to a hoist and jacked the missile up off the deck.  Pulling out her datapad, she linked the cables into the grav pod and began typing frantically.

              “Captain!” al Fakhir bellowed.  “What the hell is going on?”

              Tamara wasn’t listening; she was watching as information, macros and figures scrolled down the screen of her datapad, until finally it stopped and she nodded in satisfaction.  “I’m sorry, Chief.  I think I might have just given us a knockout punch.”

              “What?”  The dusky-skinned man put a hand to his forehead and then shook his head in confusion.  Then he eyed what she’d been working on.  “You attached a grav pod to the warhead of a missile?”

              “I removed it,” she explained.  “And yes, I know it’s crude, but the design is sound.”

              “Design?” the man asked, dumbstruck.  “You didn’t design anything.  You just slapped a grav pod on a missile.  And why?”

              “Because we needed a serious punch to take down that battlecruiser,” she said, starting to push the hoist.  “Give me a hand.  We need to get this to the starboard side launch tube, number three.  It’s the only one still active.”  He stepped up and grabbed the opposite side of the hoist and the two of them started pushing.  While she did, Tamara pulled her communicator out of her pocket and flipped it open with her thumb.  “Bridge, this is the Captain.”

              Leicasitaj answered immediately.  “Yes, Captain.  I’ve been studying the battlecruiser and I think we have a chance to strike.  Our last strike on their stern took out two of the heavy lasers protecting there, and the fighters have been forcing them to keep their shields up with their harassing attacks.”  She could hear the mirth in his voice.  “They aren’t letting up.  Never letting them breathe.”

              Tamara smiled.  “Very good work, XO. It’ll take me another minute to get this loaded, but then we need to turn back.  We need to reengage the battlecruiser, but again, come in at the stern.”

              “Captain, the minute we start turning back to fight the
Leytonstone
, they’re going to turn toward us and they’re going to blast us apart.”

              “Captain,” al Fakhir put in, his voice low, “we can’t take another pounding.  With the damage to the spine that we’ve taken, a good hit even to a shielded area will crack us open right down the middle.”

              She nodded.  “I know.  But that ship is going to reach the Kutok mine in only a short while and there’s no one else who can stop them.”

              “So we get to die to save the company a few bucks?”

              She rounded on him.  “I’m not fighting for the company’s balance sheet.  I’m fighting to save our people’s lives.  The people who launched that ship did so because they didn’t like me or Eamonn’s way of doing things.  And they didn’t like that our business was ever expanding.  The only ones who send warships to settle business disputes are pirates and cowards, Mister al Fakhir.  And they’ve already killed too many of our people.” 

              He stood and stared at her for a long moment.  Then without another word, he continued to push the hoist.  “Can you supercharge our forward shields, Chief?” she asked.  “I’m going to need a few seconds to launch this baby, then we can run for it.”

              “Can you get this to the launch tube on your own, Captain?” he asked.  Taking a deep breath, he stopped pushing and turned to rush off down the corridor in the other direction.  “I have some work to do.”

              Tamara didn’t spare him a glance.  It took a few more minutes to get hoist with the missile from the armory to the missile tube. 
Please let this work
, she prayed silently.  She was fairly confident that it was going to.  It wasn’t as though the technology was all that new or innovative.  Well, it was innovative for military tech nowadays from what she’d seen, at least out here in the Argos Cluster.  Who knows what kind of cutting edge tech they might have over in the Republic, or even the Federation?  It had been two and a half centuries since she’d been a serving officer in the Republic Navy, after all.  But her jury-rigged weapon had just been slapped together in a matter of minutes.  It was crude and ugly and wouldn’t perform anywhere near as well as something that had been properly engineered.  But that was all right.  As long as it functioned to within fifty percent of her expectations, then the crew of the
Leytonstone
had a serious surprise coming.

              “
Grania Estelle
, this is Leader Korqath,” the zheen pilot said.  “We’re in position and are ready to advance on the battlecruiser.”

              “Very good, Leader,” a female human’s voice responded. 
Hmmm,
he thought,
I wonder where the Captain went?  No matter
.  “But you need to hurry.  That ship will be in range of the station and this ship any minute.”

             
What do you think I’ve been trying to do?
  “Understood,
Grania Estelle
,” he responded.  He keyed the squadron channel.  “All right, First flight,” he said, addressing his five remaining pilots.  “Escort formation, everybody keeps moving, no one stops.  We’re going to bring the shuttles in underneath the chin of that big bastard and then we break off.”

              “Let’s bring it, Lead!” one of his pilots said excitedly.  A chorus of similar sentiments came from the rest of his pilots and he waggled his antennae in amusement.

              The Aplora pilots maneuvered their ships in a complicated pattern, always shifting, never moving predictably.  It was a maneuver that the Leader had drilled on mercilessly, requiring that his flyers work on it for at least two hours every day, knowing that he wanted to actually use such a maneuver at some point.  He knew that Captain Samair approved of the training, but didn’t much approve of this particular maneuver, but she’d given him full authority to train his zheen and she hadn’t stepped on his toes about it.  They closed on the battlecruiser, which had been zigzagging around, though his Second Flight pilots had been keeping clear of the ship’s engines, peppering the shields on the sides but staying away from the forward section, where the ship’s heaviest concentration of weapons were located.

              “First flight, pincer attack, port and starboard,” Korqath ordered harshly and his ships wheeled around, pivoted and then raced forward.  Their last remaining missiles streaked out, exploding against the forward shields of the battlecruiser, opening holes in the already depleted screens.

              The shuttles lumbered forward as quickly as they could, their engines redlining.

              “Damn it!” Gants hissed.  The forward shields were shredded, and his forward armor had taken some minor damage from the wash of energy emitted from the blasts.  It was as though the
Leytonstone
’s rusted face had received a pair of jabs from a determined opponent.  She wasn’t down, but she was stunned.  Six fighters had braved the battlecruiser’s forward weapons to attack.  He cursed himself for not having his gunners lay down a blistering level of fire forward, but he’d been focused on the other fighters nipping at his flanks and that thrice-damned corvette which he saw was turning back to engage again.  “Just what the hell does it take to
kill
that fucking ship?” he demanded.

              “Sir!  Incoming shuttles on intercept course!” the sensor officer called out urgently.

              “What?” he quickly pulled up his display.  Indeed, two cargo shuttles had been hiding behind the starfighters and had raced forward as the fighters had performed a pincer attack, which was probably little more than a distraction for some reason.  But why…

              “Shift fire!” he ordered energetically, turning to face Paxton at tactical.  “Shoot those shuttles down!”  Gants’s bellow echoed over the bridge. 

              Paxton stabbed frantically at his control, retasking his fire control and he shouted into his mic to the gun deck to get the turbolasers and heavy lasers to blast apart the incoming shuttles. 

              His actions were too slow.  The guns swung around and opened up, filling the space forward of the battlecruiser with coherent light, illuminating the hull and the two small ships that were coming in on a converging vector.  But they weren’t able to track the two shuttles, were unable to lock on until they were less than five hundred meters from the ship.  One of the shuttles was ten meters ahead of the other and they were spaced about two hundred and fifty meters apart, both moving in at a blistering speed of one hundred eighty.  A heavy laser blast clipped the port side of one of the shuttles, putting it into a flat spin on its x-axis, which rapidly turned into an out of control spiral.  Another shot pumped into the small ship, blowing it apart and detonating the bomb inside. 

              The explosion hit the underside of the forward hull at a mere one hundred meters.  Damage sparkled at the blast site, scoring the metal and ripping apart one heavy laser emplacement.  It also blinded the gunnery sensors to the other shuttle which had made small adjustments to its course to keep the gunners working hard to catch it. 

              The shuttles were being controlled by Stella, the AI of the
Grania Estelle
and with the enhanced comlink set up in the shuttle, she was able to maintain nearly real time communications over the ever-shrinking distance between the battlecruiser and the bulk freighter.  Her sensors were blinded as well by the explosion but she didn’t need a perfect clear view.  She knew exactly where the ship was, where the shuttle was, and how far it had to go before impact.  Three seconds more and with two small adjustments to course, she crossed her mental digital fingers as the shuttle rocketed ahead, slamming into the underside of the
Leytonstone
, barely forty meters from the bow.

              The one hundred and fifty megaton blast crumpled the hull armor inward, then tore it open and the energy of the blast ignited the atmosphere inside, which blasted in, then erupted back out, reminiscent of a backdraft fire.  Four of the heavy laser cannons were knocked out of action as the blast wave expanded and shredded them.  Two turbolaser batteries were damaged and stopped firing. 

              “Damn them!” Gants yelled, thumping his fist on the arm of his chair.  “Damage report!” he bellowed.

              “Hull breach, sections four, five and six,” Hakami reported.  “Engineering is attempting to seal them off.  Two turbolaser batteries are out, four heavy cannons are out.  Shields are down, forward ventral section.  It looks as though two of the shield nodes are completely blown out.  Unable to restore.”

              “Shit!  Shit!  Shit!” Gants swore emphatically.  His eyes were wild, bloodshot.  “Are we in range of those targets yet?”

              Paxton frowned.  “The fighters, sir?”

              “No, stars damn it!  The fucking station or that blasted freighter!” the colonel almost shrieked.

              The tactical officer blinked and then checked his display.  “Y-yes, Colonel, we are with our turbolaser batteries.  The bulk freighter is in range.  Two minutes for the station.”

              “Well then lock on that freighter and give them a salvo,” he ordered, yelling over the noise of the thumping in his ears and the howling of damage alarms.

              “Captain!” Stella cried, her holographic fingers clawing at her holographic cheeks from her place above the projector on the forward part of the bridge.  Eamonn whipped around at the intensity of her cry.  The shuttle trap had worked perfectly, he had to admit.  He’d been pissed that Ka’Xarian had been mixing up bombs on his ship without so much as speaking with his captain or even his Chief Engineer about it, but the purple bug had really come through, giving that battlecruiser a sharp uppercut her crew wouldn’t soon forget.  In fact, the bridge crew on the bulk freighter had cheered at the explosion that hit the aggressor ship.  But now Stella was clearly seeing something they weren’t

              “What is it?” he demanded, but the AI didn’t answer.

              Stella, despite appearances, wasn’t human.  She wasn’t even organic.  She was a digital construct that technically didn’t need a form, but sophonts found it easier to relate to an AI if it had form.  Tamara, being human, programmed something that she found easy to relate to, in this case a teenage human female, almost a kid sister to help with the running of the
Grania Estelle
.  But Stella, especially now with her recent upgrades, could operate hundreds of billions of calculations per second, could perceive and act on things in a fraction of a second before the organics around her could even realize that something was happening.  In fact, in the time it had taken for her to cry out to Vincent Eamonn on the bridge, she was already working.