The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (9 page)

What are they doing?

*****

USV Terra

“Battle stations!”

“Battle stations, aye, sir!”

Post jump, the last thing anyone on board wanted to do was move around. Jump sickness wasn’t usually crippling—most spacers got used to the disconnected feeling that jump space gave them—but moving around quickly was a sure way to feel like crap just out of a jump point. The crew of the Terra and the Canada were among the best that the Solarian Organization could find, however, and they’d been through jump drills many times before.

They got the job done.

“Enemy starships, still four light hours out.”

Pierce nodded. “Good. Standby for GPD deployment.”

“Aye, sir, all stations standing by.”

“Signal the Canada, begin deployment.”

“The Canada signals ready, sir.”

Pierce glanced over the digital reports himself, then waved a hand to his senior officer. “Deploy.”

“Deploying.”

The two Terra Class ships began spitting probes into their wake as they accelerated out of the jump point in tight formation. Pierce didn’t bother watching the deployment reports, he trusted his people to handle their end. His next worry was the approaching ships that were most assuredly capable of slapping his two-ship cohort down like insects.

“Standby to come around to two-three-niner, mark five galactic south,” he ordered, spotting what he was looking for.

“All stations standing by, sir.”

Pierce glanced around, making sure that everything was in order, then nodded. “Engage new course, full speed ahead.”

“Aye, sir, full speed ahead.”

The Terra and the Canada’s drives flared, massive gamma ray bursts erupting from the shielded engines just ahead of the particle emissions of the powerful VASIMR drives. For all the innovations brought on by captured and reverse engineered alien technology, the human ships still relied on the Variable-Specific Impulse Magneto Rocket drive (VASIMR), a technology so old it was born less than a decade after men first walked on the moon.

The VASIMR design had several key advantages over the alien gravity drives, including the fact that humans knew it inside and out and could literally keep it running with a few rolls of duct tape and a computer probe. For one, the system actually had a marginally higher initial acceleration than current human gravity systems could match. It took time to warp space, and a matter/antimatter explosion was reasonably abrupt if you were in a hurry.

More importantly, though, was that the heat buildup of a VASIMR drive was mostly controllable. Over the past century, humans had perfected the system to a high degree. In fact, heat was mostly directed away from the drive and ship as part of the impulse that pushed the ship ahead, the rest used to generate power for the onboard systems. Gravity drives, even those used by the Alpha species, directed insane levels of heat inwards and required massive shielding technology that human scientists had yet to crack. In fact, as best as any researchers had been able to determine, the
only
limit on a gravity drive was how much heat you could manage before the system cooked your crew.

It was entirely possible that the alien gravity drive was even able to go to FTL without a jump point, assuming it didn’t turn every living thing on board to ashes in the process.

*****

Parath watched the numbers change, no expression on his face.

“Enemy vessels have shifted heading. New course indicates an intercept plot with the eleventh planet of this system.”

I can see that,
the master of ships thought.
The question is why? There is nothing there, we scanned every world in this system as a matter of due course. There is nothing here of any import. Why go there?

Actually, if he wanted to follow that line of thought, why bring only two ships through? They couldn’t engage his fleet with so few, and if he was right about the earlier signals, then they had to be aware that his fleet was approaching. In fact, they should have been able to calculate the arrival time of his fleet to a reasonably precise degree.

Which means that they knowingly sent two ships through the gateway, despite the approach of my taskforce.

“All ships, reverse acceleration. Bring us to station-keeping mode,” he ordered abruptly, rising from his station.

“Master?”

“Follow my commands.”

“Yes, Master.”

The ships of the fleet responded to his commands swiftly enough, he supposed, but had they been closer, he would not be so generous. Parath made a mental note to drill his ship’s commanders on procedures again in the near future.

“I want full scans of the gateway,” he said. “Every spectrum, including from the Ross gravispecular systems. Make that very clear to them, I want the raw scans from their systems.”

His aide swallowed but nodded seriously. “On your order, Master of Ships.”

The Ross would balk, Parath knew, they always did, but the agreement they had with the Alliance made it clear. In Fleet maneuvers they had to answer to the Master of Ships in command of the formation. Parath wasn’t sure what the enemy was up to, but he was quite certain that they were doing
something
he wasn’t going to like.

Hopefully they merely mined the gateway. The Ross can clear any type of mine in instants, but I doubt that I am that lucky.

*****

USV Terra

“Enemy ships have reversed thrust. They’ll come to a zero/zero stop relative to the local system in fifteen minutes.”

“Damn,” Pierce said with a rueful grin.

He hadn’t expected much else, in all honesty, but he’d have liked to seen the enemy ships fly right into the GPD field they’d laid in. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, would have happened to them, actually, but it would have made for some interesting data to take back to Earth.

Once we manage to get home.

“Transmit the signal, initiate the GPDs.”

“Aye, Captain. Signal transmitted.

*****

The Gravity Pulse Devices, or GPDs, were single-use, nuclear-pumped gravity weapons. In close enough proximity to a ship or, in extreme cases, a planet, they would act as a poor man’s version of the alien Gravity Valve technology. By creating a pulse warp in the local gravity field, the tidal effects of their detonation could, and would, tear apart almost anything in their range.

Their range was, however, too short to be of significant use in ship-to-ship combat.

The field pulse devices did have another use, largely theoretical in nature, but the mathematical solutions were proven so the devices had been built and issued to Task Force Seven as part of their last ditch defense plan.

When the signal from the Terra triggered their detonation sequence, each of the eighteen weapons floating near the Hayden jump point detonated in a brilliant flash of light and radiation that appeared only for a few seconds and then vanished as abruptly as it had come.

The nuclear explosions of each weapon were captured and sent into a single-use version of the Gravity Control Valve reverse-engineered from the alien technology. All of that power was sucked up and turned on local space-time with a vengeance, growing in local influence until it was enough to actually suck in the
light
of the explosions itself.

The multiple-phase-arrayed devices went off in staggered order, turning the local space-time field into a chaotic mush of violent and counter-opposed fields.

Sailing through the tidal effects of such a place probably wouldn’t be enough to seriously damage a ship, though the stress would be far greater than normal wear and tear, so it was of limited use as a method of slowing enemy vessels.

One thing it did do, however, was utterly destroy any chance of forming a stable jump point.

In an single blinding instant of power, the two ships of Task Force Seven had just shut the door to the Hayden system and locked themselves out in the cold with their enemy.

*****

“What in the infinite abyss is that?”

Master of Ships Parath said nothing to reprimand his subordinate. He was thinking much the same thing in even less polite terms himself.

Whatever they did, it wasn’t a mine field. Even our limited gravity-based systems are showing that little slice of hell as something not to be trifled with.

“Scans and raw data from the Ross ships, Master!”

“To me.”

Parath glowered at the numbers, mentally trying to do calculations that no one but the Ross could manage without immensely powerful computational aides. He uncrossed his eyes after a few minutes, forcing himself to skim the data while waiting on the data being processed by his own ship’s computers.

I don’t know what they did, but I’m not taking my ships into it anytime in the near future. The entire region is a snarled mess. It appears that they literally gathered up space-time and tied it in tangled knots.

If he was reading it correctly, the aliens had actually sealed a jump point. That was something he’d never even considered before, which, now that he was looking at it, seemed absurd. It was suddenly the most obvious idea in the world, yet he was aware of no one…not even the Ross, who had ever even attempted it.

“Master!”

“What?” Parath half snarled as he turned, glaring at the officer who had interrupted his train of thought.

“The Ross ships have broken formation!”

“What?” This time his voice was filled with incredulity, though a moment later he wondered if he should have really been that surprised. Parath rose from his position and made his way to the main station, looking over the course plots with a practiced eye.

The two Ross ships that were part of his fleet had indeed broken formation and were now accelerating away on a fast intercept course with the two enemy ships. Parath swore when he noted their speed, recognizing that his main group would never be able to keep up with them.

“To the eternal singular abyss with them!” he swore, shaking his head as the light feathers along his blue-skinned neck twitched with his anger.

He finally sighed, forcing himself to calm down.

“Detach our interceptors and escorts to provide them with cover, have the rest of the fleet adjust course to intercept the alien ships at best available speed.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The Ross are forcing my hand, but their move is the only one available to me at this point anyway.

That wouldn’t stop him from putting in a complaint against the Ross fleet and black marks against the commanders of the two ships, of course. Unfortunately, he doubted it would do much. It took a medical examination to tell one Ross apart from another, and the Alliance had long suspected that when a Ross commander accumulated enough black marks to be a liability the Ross governing body merely changed his name rather than actually do anything about him.

Sometimes I honestly wonder if we shouldn’t have just flattened over the Ross worlds and been done with it.

Genocide wasn’t something that Parath was normally wont to consider, but the Ross pushed him sorely.

*****

USV Terra

“Movement on the enemy ships, sir. We’ve got two Alpha destroyers…check that, unknown Alpha Class ships heading our way.”

“Unknown?” Pierce asked, walking over to check the scans himself.

“Unknown. They’re definitely Alpha make, the design influence is clear, but they don’t quite match anything in our database,” Lt. Sandra McPherson told him. “A little more mass, and they’re moving faster than anything we’ve rated to date.”

“Lovely,” Pierce muttered. “All right. Sound the call. I want all weapon systems live and ready in five minutes or less. Wake everyone up, we have company calling.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The general quarters alarm sounded again, pulling everyone back to their stations from the brief break he’d authorized. As long as the enemy were focused on the jump point, there hadn’t been much need to worry about them. Any move they could make in the direction of the Terra and Canada would be telegraphed far in advance.

That said, while light did indeed move faster than any of the enemy ships, he was a little concerned by the fact that the two currently moving toward them were faster than they’d seen before. That made it very hard to predict the actual moment of interceptions and, far more importantly, the actual current position of the ships in question.

The eleventh planet was approaching quickly, but he wasn’t sure that they’d be able to complete the maneuver before they were overtaken.

Damn. It’s always something.

At the distances and speeds involved, the difference between ship speed and the speed of light became a huge factor. If his estimation of the ship’s rate of travel was off by even a fraction of a percent, it would likely mean missing any shot he made by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of kilometers. That made engaging in combat problematic, since he needed direct hits to score any damage.

In space, without an atmosphere to absorb energy and convert it to kinetic power, even a nuclear weapon didn’t get points for “close.” The simplest of starships were shielded against radiation, they had to be, and the blast of a nuke was a warm day’s sun compared to some of the things that existed this far out. He needed accurate information on the rate of approach to make a battle plan, otherwise he’d have to wait until they were practically into knife range before he could engage.

Against Ghoulie weapons, that was just asking for a swift death in the heart of gravity-induced fission.

*****

Parath scowled at his screens, watching the Ross ships pull effortlessly away from the rest of his ships despite his orders to bring them back to the formation.

What is wrong with them? Even the Ross are not normally this intransigent. This is enough to count as defying authority in the order of battle, should the Alliance choose to press it.

It wasn’t likely that they would, given that the Ross ships were running
toward
the line of battle rather than away, but it was still a diplomatic risk that was unusual for the Ross to take. They were defiant, to be sure, often pretending to be oblivious while outright ignoring all sorts of minor orders. This, however, was far beyond that. The Ross normally were careful to stay within the larger laws that governed the Alliance, and disobedience in a time of war certainly didn’t fit that psychological profile.