Valor At Vauzlee (37 page)

There was another consideration as well. While FTL speed was provided by electrical energy produced with the ship's antimatter process, and the ship could effectively remain underway for up to half a century without returning to a base for refueling, the sub-light engines relied on hydrogen for propulsion. The most common element in the universe, hydrogen was normally harvested in the dense upper atmosphere of gas giants, where it was most plentiful, or in various nebulae where heavy concentrations were found. Huge tanker vessels with enormous scoops and collector systems spent weeks collecting hydrogen and then offloaded their supply at tank farms before heading out again. But hydrogen was also available in trace amounts in open space. Stationary warships could collect hydrogen on their own, but their processing systems were small since their needs were ordinarily limited. They normally only had to refill their tanks for the amount of fuel expended during their approach to a station, or for the small amount used when maneuvering around the ships they stopped for inspection. Following extensive maneuvers, warships would always fill up from a base's supply. The Song had used up more than half its supply while maneuvering in sub-light during the Battle at Vauzlee, and the month they'd spent at the battle site hadn't been long enough to replenish even a small part of what they'd used. And it wasn't possible to collect hydrogen while cocooned in a DATFA envelope traveling FTL.

Once it reached Higgins, the Song would have to quit the battle when it ran out of fuel for the sub-light engines. Deviating now would exhaust still more of the precious commodity when the Song reached the location of the transmissions, and thus reduce the time that it could participate in the fight at Higgins. The conundrum of what was behind the mysterious transmission of signals originating at a place where there should be no signals, more than provoked Jenetta's curiosity, but the prudent course of action was definitely to ignore the unexplained com signals and continue on to Higgins as ordered.

"Dammit," Jenetta muttered almost silently under her breath.

~ May 18
^th
, 2268 ~

"Helm," Jenetta said, after silently cursing herself a half dozen times for her folly, "make for the source of the communication signals, but not directly at it. Make your heading a hundred km off to starboard. When the source is three-hundred-twenty degrees off our larboard, drop our envelope and accelerate directly towards the source at maximum sub-light. Tactical, prepare to fire a full spread from the bow tubes as soon as you have a target lock. You'll have just five seconds to identify your target or targets, get a lock, and fire. If there are multiple ships, target the largest ship or ships first. Deploy a sensor buoy as we go sub-light. Helm, as soon as the torpedoes have been fired, resume course for Higgins at our fastest possible sub-light speed while you reform our envelope. Resume maximum FTL as quickly as possible."

"Aye, Captain," the helmsman and tactical officers said loudly.

Most eyes on the bridge were glued to the front view-screen as the ship, traveling at its top speed of 94.6 million kilometers per second, drew ever closer to the source of the com signals. Jenetta, her heart beating at twice normal, did her absolute best to appear composed and icy calm. To the bridge crew she appeared as cool as the surface of Vauzlee, the ice planet nearest the scene of their last battle. While others licked their lips nervously or swallowed imaginary lumps, she seemed to be calmly contemplating the color of the coffee in her ever present coffee mug.

From the corner of her left eye Jenetta saw a face that shouldn't be on the bridge. Catching Lieutenant Ashraf's eye, she nodded her head slightly toward the first watch astrogator who was standing near the rear bulkhead. Lt. Ashraf turned her head in the direction of the nod.

"Lt. Merdana," Lt. Ashraf said loudly, "what are you doing up here?"

"Uh, nothing, ma'am. I'm just observing."

"Didn't you learn anything from our last engagement? You know that all officers not on duty have no place on the bridge when we're about to go into action. Do your observing from AC&C. Now get your donkey out of here in ten seconds or you go on report."

"Yes, ma'am," the young lieutenant(jg) said nervously as he hurried towards the corridor door.

Lt. Ashraf looked over at Jenetta and shook her head. The corners of Jenetta's mouth turned up momentarily before she turned her attention back to the front monitor.

* * *

The ship's DeTect system spotted the Song and sent a message to the ship's ACS which caused a warning buzzer to sound on the lead tactical officer's console. He immediately stabbed at the button to silence the buzzer for this contact and checked the plot. The approaching ship was almost four minutes away in FTL. It was large, and had to be either a freighter or a warship, but since it was neither coming from the direction of the space station nor heading towards it, it obviously wasn't a Space Command or Raider vessel. It had to be some fool freight hauler who hadn't heard the Space Command broadcast to avoid this area until further notice. Since its course would take it well wide of the stern, it presented no danger of collision. The lead tactical officer breathed a sigh of relief and returned his full attention to the battle.

* * *

Finally, the Song helmsman said, "Five seconds to sub-light. Three. Two. One. Sub-light."

As the ship emerged from its temporal envelope, the helmsman engaged the sub-light engines. The enormous ship leapt forward in n-space, accelerating as if shot from a catapult while the gravitative inertial compensators kicked in to keep the crew from being spattered against the rear bulkheads. At the same time, the enlarged CG image of a single battleship, a thousand kilometers distant off the larboard bow, appeared on the front view-screen. And what a battleship! It was the largest warship anyone on the bridge had ever seen, or even envisioned. The tactical computer put its length at three-thousand-two-hundred-twenty-seven-meters with a beam of four-hundred-twenty-meters. Having an estimated mass of almost three and a half million tons, it was like a floating island in space and out-massed both the Prometheus and Chiron combined. Space Command's newest class of battleship only measured one-thousand-nine-hundred-seventy-meters in length, had a beam of two-hundred-ninety-two-meters, and massed nine-hundred-thirty-two-thousand tons. The Song, at only nine-hundred-eighty-meters in length, and massing four-hundred-seventy-six thousand tons, was positively dwarfed by the gargantuan vessel. In fact, the Raider battleship was wider than all the destroyers in the Space Command fleet were long. The Franklin Class frigates, the largest warships before moving up to the light cruisers, were only six-hundred-twenty-four-meters in length.

Jenetta's heart skipped a beat when she first saw the battleship, but she maintained her composure. The configuration of the ship was unlike anything she had seen before, but since it was in a battle zone, and wasn't Space Command or Nordakian, the warship had to be presumed to be an enemy ship. "The bigger they are, the harder they fall," she muttered to herself.

As the Song continued to accelerate at a phenomenal rate, it turned directly towards the battleship. Two tac officers were already hunched over their equipment, painting key target points on the battleship's hull that would be stored in the electronic brains of the torpedoes. Once released the torpedoes would be on their own, since the Song was already late for another appointment.

Five-hundred kilometers from the battleship, the Song eructed a full spread of torpedoes from its bow tubes. Twelve cylinders of death burst almost simultaneously from the heavy cruiser and streaked towards the enemy battleship, their heat trails visible on the front viewscreen. A second later, as the Song's helmsman swung the ship to resume course for Higgins, the lead tac officer said, "The battleship has just scanned us, Captain."

* * *

As warning buzzers assaulted the ears of the lead tactical officer aboard the Raider battleship Glorious, he realized that the ship he had chosen to ignore was not a freighter after all. "Admiral," he said loudly and nervously, "a warship has just appeared off our larboard side."

"What?" Admiral Nazeer said as his attention was distracted from the front view screen. "One of ours?"

"No, sir. The computer identifies it as Space Command. It's a Kamakura-class heavy cruiser."

"Impossible. The only Kamakura-class heavy cruiser in this deca-sector is the Song. And we know that the Song was severely damaged at the site of the convoy attack."

"The Prometheus and Chiron are defending the space station sir. Perhaps the rest of Gavin's task force is out here searching for us. The cruiser has launched torpedoes."

"Red alert," the admiral bellowed. "Tactical, launch torpedoes as soon as you have a lock. Com, alert the fleet that we're under attack. Tell Captain Wolff to break off two destroyers and dispatch them to us immediately. Helm, get us moving."

* * *

"They've launched torpedoes, Captain," the lead tactical officer aboard the Song announced.

Jenetta just sat in her command chair, calmly watching the forward viewscreen. She had already made her decisions and given her orders. There was no changing them now.

As ordered, the helmsman had begun to form the temporal envelope as soon as the torpedoes were away. Accelerating rapidly under the power of its straining sub-light engines, the Song was quickly distancing itself from the battleship. The torpedoes from the battleship were likewise accelerating rapidly as they flew in pursuit of the Song, but it would be several minutes before they could hope to overtake the ship.

"A day late and a credit short, I'd say," Jenetta murmured as she glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her chair's left monitor. The envelope would be formed before the torpedoes could catch them. As the Song disappeared from both sight and torpedo targeting systems, she said, "Tactical, let's see the image recorded by the sensor buoy you deployed. Put it on the front viewscreen.

The images from the buoy, transmitted on the IDS Communications band, appeared a second later as the tactical officer isolated the correct azimuth and inclination to project from the collected data. When the CG images created from the buoy's sensors appeared, the Song could be seen moving away on a course directly towards the battleship, firing its torpedoes.

Being so far from the battle zone, most of the battleship's laser gunners had wandered away from their consoles to talk and joke with their fellows. The GQ alert sent them scrambling for their stations, but only those who had conscientiously remained at their assigned posts aboard the Raider battleship were able to rake the starboard side of the heavy cruiser as it turned towards Higgins. They then turned their fire on the inbound torpedoes. They were good, and there were quite a few of them, so they managed to knock down three or four of the inbound torpedoes. If the Song had only fired four, if the Song had fired them from a greater distance, or if the laser gunners had been more disciplined, the battleship might have remained undamaged. But there were only seconds between the time the Song was scanned, and the time the torpedoes began to explode against and inside the hull of the enemy ship. The Raider admiral had barely enough time to give orders to his com operator and his tactical officer. If he'd known just how close the Song was when it emerged from FTL and turned towards the battleship, perhaps he wouldn't have bothered.

The Song had expended all its fusion warheads at the Battle of Vauzlee, and, unlike the Prometheus and Chiron, hadn't had an opportunity to re-supply. So the torpedoes fired at the Raider battleship only carried high-explosive warheads. The acceleration of the ship towards the battleship, coupled with the acceleration of the torpedoes themselves, provided sufficient impact force for two of them to punch completely through the battleship's extra-thick titanium armor and explode well inside the ship, while the others only managed to rip away sections of armor plating and perhaps pierce the hull sufficiently to evacuate the air in some of the outermost sections. Two huge holes suddenly appeared in the battleship, belching fire for the briefest of seconds and then simply bleeding atmosphere as alarms sounded throughout the ship. The gargantuan ship was wounded, but neither out of the fight or even seriously damaged. And the Song couldn't return to fire again. It might have been suicide anyway, now that the Raider crew was alerted to their presence.

That could very well have been the end of the Song's attempt to disable the battleship, if one of the two torpedoes that pierced the hull hadn't fortuitously ruptured a liquid fuel storage tank supposedly protected by reinforced titanium bulkheads. Sparks from a smashed housekeeping bot working in the area when the torpedo exploded, ignited the gushing fuel, and a massive explosion promoted secondary explosions that began to ripple through the ship. The tiny, insignificant bot, performing a self-test diagnostic routine, had unintentionally finished the job begun by the Song's massive torpedoes. As the lights from the explosions dimmed, bits of wreckage from the enemy ship could be seen radiating outward in every direction.

The torpedoes launched from the Raider battleship lost the Song as it disappeared at Light-322, and they exhausted their fuel trying to reacquire a target long gone, before entering ballistic flight and eventually self-detonating.

The Song's twelve torpedoes might have seemed like overkill initially, but there hadn't been time to wait around and fire a second or third salvo if a first salvo was shot down, or failed to disable the target. There were a few light claps and small cheering noises at the death of the battleship, but it was fairly subdued. The crew knew that the real battle was still just minutes ahead of them.