Chapter 48: War |
The very first thing he asked for was direct communication with the colony, which he promptly got.
“What’s the closest to a real-time location as we can get?” Derek asked.
The answer he got was somewhat less than helpful.
“Uh … Boris has a real time zone of visibility of like two light-minutes, I think, but he’ll take a while to get out there, so we can get you the location in like an hour, but if Jack takes him, then it’ll only take half, but … oh, shoot, we can’t move the comms …”
All in all, it took five minutes and a whole lot of tangents for Derek to lay his hands upon all the relevant facts.
Firstly, the FTL communicator they were talking on was the only one present, and it could not be moved, resulting in a situation where whoever went scouting would have to fly back to the planet before Derek would learn it.
Secondly, they did have someone who could ascertain the real-time location from two light-minutes away, a safe distance against all but the most absurdly exotic weapons, but with the comms issue, that really just meant the scout would have a more up-to-date location from further away, but that was just about it.
Thirdly, there was a teleporter who could chain jumps to get the first guy outside the star’s zone of interference really quickly, so …
All in all, getting far enough from the star to use [Alcubierre Bubble], then actually getting close enough to the alien starship to get an exact location, and finally returning to the communicator to report it would take around twenty minutes, leaving the information he’d get outdated by that much.
Nowhere near enough to drop out of FTL right on top of the robotic death machine and ram a railrun round into its engine, then use the ultra relativistic electron beam to fry whatever was left in what would have hopefully been both the first and last firing run of the entire battle.
But if an ambush from FTL wasn’t going to work, getting more up-to-date location information should, at least, ensure Derek didn’t drop the Dragonfly right on top of the enemy, or wind up so far away that it’d take too long to engage.
Which meant they had plenty of time to get up to speed, because at the velocity they normally puttered around, the alien vessel would speed away from them in an instant, getting out of effective range in a matter of seconds.
They also did not want to directly match its velocity either, as that would make it rather difficult to escape its range if things started to go badly, and even between the four of them, they did not have the mana to endlessly hop around with [Alcubierre Bubble] despite being well outside any interfering zone of gravity.
So while Derek ran diagnostics for the dozenth time, made sure the magical rounds were, in fact, loaded into the railgun, magical capacitors for the spatial contraction full … hell, he’d even wound up re-reading [Skill] descriptions, as though those could have changed at some point in the past half-hour.
All just to make sure it felt like he was doing something useful while being pressed back into his chair by the force of the Dragonfly’s acceleration.
The plan? The plan was as simple as it could be, at least if you ignored the complexities of physics-breaking magic, FTL movement, magitech weaponry, and general complexities of space travel.
Drop out of Alcubierre as close to right behind the alien vessel as possible, and dump every shot they had into its main propulsion.
Not clever, not elegant, and most certainly not something that would wind up studied in the future, but it should work … right?
Then, finally, the alien starship’s position changed in an instant, jumping nearly two light hours forward, changing from the position indicated by the old light they’d been directly getting to the position scouted out by the folks from the colony.
“Everyone, we have a location as close to real time as possible, jumping in five seconds. Five, four, …”
Derek counted down as he began to trigger [Alcubierre Bubble], the Dragonfly vanishing from normal reality, staying in that twisted version of the universe for a mere minute before exploding back into the blackness of space, one and a half light seconds behind the enemy vessel.
Very close, but sadly, they weren’t quite aligned, quite in a position to fire immediately, and even as the Dragonfly’s bow slewed around, the enemy ship began to move.
Derek would have said that someone over there had reflexes like a cat, but he knew it was automated; the damn thing had reflexes like a computer, thrusters firing to spin it to face them even as the preprogrammed course upon emergency aligned his ship.
The next few seconds gave him his first proper, close-up view of the enemy vessel.
Four times as long, three times as wide, seven times the power output of the Dragonfly, an absolutely massive starship by the standards of anything that wasn’t a kilometer-plus-long capital ship.
Space between the two ships briefly collapsed, an entire light second’s worth of distance vanishing in an instant, the snarl in space existing only for the amount of time it took for the railgun round that had been fired the same instant to pass through, beginning to travel normally the rest of the way, nevertheless overtaken by the Dragonfly’s electron beam, a microsecond before impact.
It wasn’t entirely clear just why the enemy ship barely even tried to dodge, whether it was a restriction from its maneuverability, an inability to detect the attacks, or it had outright decided the warp in space and the projectile that came out of it had to be a sensor glitch. But the key point was that it didn’t move in any way other than trying to move its engines away and guns towards the Dragonfly, and it paid the price for it.
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The electron beam hammered into the ring of armor prominently wrapped around the stern of the AI-controlled vessel and punched clean through, leaving behind a white-hot circle of glowing metal, much of the energy having continued straight through and started bathing the inside with enough gamma radiation to kill an unenhanced human ten times over. With any luck, alien computer systems weren’t any more tolerant than human ones were.
But Derek didn’t get to see any of that; he wouldn’t even see the ring of molten metal until he replayed the sensor footage, as it was all wiped away in a titanic explosion as the railgun round impacted, the resulting rush of atmosphere quickly revealing a massive gaping hole torn in the armor, revealing exactly two things:
Firstly, the electron beam had trashed the inside, or at least everything visible through the hole.
And secondly, the reason why the black hole round had only burrowed into the outermost layer of the enemy vessel before overloading and exploding.
“What the … how … what bloody berk builds armor like that?” Atticus growled, his mother’s accent bleeding through far more strongly than normal as he kept the Dragonfly’s bow pointed straight at the enemy vessel while strafing sideways on thrusters alone while Ye-in played their secondaries across the enemy hull, melting radiators like ice underneath the hot summer sun.
For all that their enemy did seem to have not only thick but also effective armor, some kind of alloy that was nearly as good at shrugging off energy weapons as what humans had achieved via enchantments and [System] metalurgy, there were certain pieces of equipment you couldn’t just slap a slab of metal on and call it a day, as they required exposure to the outside to function.
And what do you know, radiators were quite prominently placed on that list.
It wasn’t entirely clear how much of a difference their destruction would make, or what kind of redundancy the ship had been built with, but if the ship had that, that meant it needed them. And that meant that losing them should do something.
The Dragonfly trembled, then, as a few enemy lasers impacted, some splashing cleanly off the armor, deflected by the mirrored outer layer but leaving behind superheated, less reflective patches, while the enemy particle beams were sent careening away, the electromagnetic deflectors around the ship doing their job exactly as intended.
Derek watched the numbers scroll down the screen.
Four minutes, forty-nine seconds until the capacitors of the primary beam were full again.
Four minutes, thirty seconds until the mana capacitors for the railgun’s spatial warper were ready.
Twenty seconds until the railgun was capable of firing on its own, far more vulnerable to evasion, but if they hit, it wouldn’t matter how long they’d spent in space prior to impact.
Oh, and they had ten minutes of non-stop fire before the secondaries started overheating, though that was unlikely to become a problem.
Magic to Derek’s left as Atticus cast something to boost the ship in some way that wasn’t immediately clear, while Ye-in continued to control do her damndest to wreck as much of the enemy ship as possible, even as it added a roll on top of its current evasive maneuvers to get the damaged section out of the line of fire as quickly as possible.
Suddenly, the small extra screen sitting next to Derek’s seat flashed brightly as the enemy vessel’s main armament opened up. Or at least he hoped that was as big as they got.
Whereas most of the Dragonfly’s sensors were fed through the computer, that one showed the outside in a far lesser quality, as it was technically just light from the outside fed through a fiber-optic cable and projected against a very basic, old-school plastic screen.
But since it was still the light from the outside, not a digital interpretation of what said light looked like, it counted for the purposes of [Cosmic Gaze], and allowed him to see anything that was happening within two light seconds in real time.
So even though the alien beams were crossing the distance between the two ships at light speed, he could see them before they hit. Yet another violation of the laws of physics to make Einstein spin in his grave, yet another one for the list …
Derek’s left hand came up, the motion entirely superfluous as the twisted space before the Dragonfly, a sheer warp that would take anything that flew into it and send it careening off into the depths of space … for all of two seconds.
“Ye-in, warp us out of here, I’m out of mana!” he snapped, the second part of the order having wound up being utterly unnecessary, as she was already triggering her own copy of [Alcubierre Bubble], tearing the Dragonfly out of the path of the attack barely a fifth of a second before his defense collapsed.
“Holy …” Atticus breathed. “Where the hell was it hiding those?”
“Valid question, wish I had an answer,” Mimi muttered over the comms.
Derek cursed internally. He wished he knew too. Glaring at the image on the main viewscreen, he tried to come up with a solution.
“So, what, we keep jumping in every time our primaries are charged, wait until it can bring its primaries to bear, then hope we can jump back out before we’re blown to dust bunnies?” Ye-in suggested.
Derek was about to agree when he spotted the problem.
“That won’t work. Look at the plot.”
As he said that, he highlighted the star’s zone of interference in said plot.
For all that they had little under five hours left to chase this thing, the planet the colony was on was almost directly on the opposite side of the star from their current location, meaning they’d have to dive deep into and through the spherical zone of interference where the star’s gravity would be too strong to use [Alcubierre Bubble]. In fact, almost four hours of the time they had until the ship would make its first firing pass at the colony would be spent with them unable to leap around, and a traditional firing pass would see them cut to pieces by those monstrous guns.
“So, go after the engines, then, when they can’t dodge, lob railgun rounds from range until it comes apart?” Atticus suggested.
It made sense, spacecraft maneuvering was mostly a matter of using thrusters to line up the ship, then using the main propulsion to actually move, if they destroyed it, they’d massively cut down the maneuverability and therby its ability to dodge long-range kinetic projectiles … but would it be enough, if they did so from outside of energy range … going after main propulsion was a good idea anyway.
At the very least, wrecking the primary propulsion would limit the enemy vessel to a single firing pass on the colony. Oh, sure, they might be able to return on thrusters alone, but not do so before Isaac got here.
Hell, if it was traveling at anything close to point three light when it was crippled, an entire division of battleships could be brought here from the other end of human space before it became a threat again.
It was Mimi that interupted his thoughts.
“GOT IT!”
He winced as the speakers, apparently, decided to transmit her exclamation at the original volume, from a point less than a meter from his head.
“Got what?” he asked.
“The guns. They’re not turreted, they’re built into the hull, and have like a … I don’t know the full field of fire, but it can’t be more than ten degrees.”
“Thank you,” Derek replied immediately, fingers dancing across the controls as he pulled up the video of what had just happened, when those monstrous beams had fired.
The feed had been badly distorted by his spatial manipulation (no regrets), but between the computers, the undistorted images that had been previously recorded, and a little ingenuity, finding the weapons and determining where they’d be able to fire, and, more importantly, where they could not …
He threw it all up on the main screen.
“If we show up right behind it, we have fifteen seconds before it cuts us to pieces,” he said. “We also have fifty minutes when we can dance around it in FTL. So …”
He trailed off, leaving it to the others to complete the sentence.
“… Wrecking the propulsion should be doable,” Atticus announced, taking a brief second to double-check the numbers. “Four minutes until we can hit them with both primaries, Captain. I’ll jump in when they’re ready.”
Hopefully, it would be enough.