Chapter 49: Duel in the Dark |
The second firing pass once again began with [Alcubierre Bubble] putting the Dragonfly right behind the alien starship, but the [Skill] turned out to be too imprecise for a perfect firing run.
Just like the first time, it took a couple of seconds to spin their ship to line up the primaries, then Derek’s ship once again bucked, unleashing the second singularity round, yet once again, the alien ship was already moving, twisting and rolling away, the round actually clipping the very edge of the inside of the massive thruster that acted as the vessel’s main propulsion and detonating, tearing a huge chunk out of it … but it was unlikely to be crippling.
“Retarget the electron beam,” Derek snapped, simultaneously highlighting the point where he wanted it aimed instead.
Instead of doing it herself or responding verbally, Ye-in passed over control over that gun, while Atticus re-aligned the Dragonfly, allowing him to plant the electron beam squarely on the site of the nearest enemy primary.
Once again, the external damage wasn’t too bad, but an interior explosion, followed by the remains of the gun spewing out of the firing port, proved quite definitively that they had, in fact, done something. Hopefully, they’d even gotten nearby thrusters and other critical systems, but Derek would be cool if all they’d reached was the gun.
Because whoever had built that ship, they’d done so under the assumption that, in space, you’d be able to see all threats coming, or, at the very least, all threats requiring a response from the primaries, and then be able to pivor the ship to bring it to bear, while anything small enough to sneak up on them would also be small enough to fall to the lighter secondaries.
And it was far from the worst idea, in a world ruled by the laws of physics … something that hadn’t been true for over a hundred years. At least not entirely.
“Jump,” Derek ordered, seeing the enemy superlasers fire once again, them being two light seconds distant this time around, giving them the space to leap away without needing to spend mana to warp space to deflect the attack.
“Can we burn off enough guns and thrusters to let us strafe around it safely?” Atticus muttered, loudly enough for everyone on the bridge to hear, though he was clearly doing those calculations himself, as evidenced both by the way he was furiously typing and what was visible on his screen at the same time.
Five minutes later, they jumped in again, the railgun round once again detonating against the armor protecting the propulsion until, tearing yet another hole in the armor but most likely doing little to no internal damage, while their primary beam weapon blew apart yet another heavy laser, the fact that a nearby thruster also went dark at the exact same time most likely a lucky side effect. Unless the AI over there was screwing with them, something that Derek was desperately hoping wasn’t the case, but also feared very much could be within its capabilities.
It was now, after the third semi-unsuccessful firing run, that the peanut gallery really got involved.
“Captain Thoma, stop going for the propulsion, get in front of it, out of the range of the lasers, and put a railgun round in its bow!”
“We don’t know if they have an even stronger primary in their bow; going for main propulsion while stripping the weapons around it is the correct choice here.”
“Captain Thoma, I am ordering you to …”
Yep, it was a contradictory mess.
After checking the comms, Derek was able to determine that, yes, everything was still being fed through only one of their comm nodes, the inherently point-to-point nature of the magically paired communicators forcing that, but beyond that, there were a lot of connections from the naval switchboard being funneled through the node on Squidworks station, the Dragonfly was directly connected to.
And while military information security did heavily limit his ability to see where people were calling from, the caller IDs spilled the beans.
There was Rear Admiral French, on the HQ on Mercury, technically in command of the whole situation, a couple of other officers who were there with him, most likely in the same room, even, a Vice Admiral on Zheng He naval base, the nearest one to the mess currently unfolding in the Horizon system, which made it his responsibility only on the most technical of grounds because that still put them nearly seven hundred light years away.
Somehow, Derek had the feeling that if he’d been a member of the military, he’d have gotten concrete orders, and those orders would have come in a clear format that he could easily understand and follow.
But he wasn’t. He was, as far as they were concerned, a “civilian idiot in over his head,” and as such, at least some part of protocol seemed to have gone out of the window.
There was also the small issue of him not having actual military training that would have allowed him to probably figure out just what was going on here in (relatively) short order, and directly translate orders into action.
It probably also didn’t help that, outside of the initial battle with the Assai, and various smaller-scale skirmishes with pirates, the navy hadn’t exactly had much practice with battles.
“We’re reengaging in thirty seconds, I’m muting this channel,” Derek finally declared.
Fourth firing pass.
Once again, the railgun struck armor, a glancing blow that dug a deep divot but failed to even penetrate, while the electron beam blew up yet another heavy laser, though that one wound up being in an entirely new and previously unengaged portion … and then the Dragofly shook.
“We just lost a deflector,” Ye-in cursed.
Well, shit, that wasn’t good. The generators for the electromagnetic deflectors could be armored, unlike, say, radiators, but there were still hard limits on how much protection you could slap on top of them if you still wanted them to be effective.
And not only would their loss result in the enemy particle beams start to hit, but said beams would also be vastly more effective against the armor than the lasers said armor was specifically designed to foil, more than capable of tearing open gaps the lasers could then slip through.
That was the one big weakness of modern warship defenses. Once they started taking damage, things quickly snowballed.
Then, for the briefest of moments, the hull breach alert began to howl, squelched before its first note could even finish, along with a brief text message from Mimi that simply said: “closed.”
This time, it was Derek who yanked the Dragonfly away, half a dozen damage warnings flashing on his display.
“Mimi, how long do you need?” he asked immediately. “And do you need any help?”
“Just keep going, I’ll be back in engineering in four minutes.”
Derek sighed in relief. The last thing they needed was to have someone out near the hull, fixing the ship, during a firing pass.
And with that, he unmuted the comms, resulting in him almost being bowled over by a series of commands, leaving him wondering if they could even hear each other and were aware of the fact that there were other people talking.
So he muted it again.
“This isn’t helping, I …”
And then someone overrode his settings, bypassing them via some kind of emergency exemption that applied to all military comms channels. Probably a good idea under most circumstances, high command having the ability to give orders even when there wasn’t an active path of communication available, but right now … right now, it was the thing that pushed him over the edge.
“Everyone. Shut. Up.” Derek growled. “If one more person overrides my message settings, I’m smashing the communicator, consequences be damned.”
Everything was silent for a long moment, him having ceased to speak, and everyone else temporarily muted and not yet willing to test him on his declaration.
“Look, I know I’m no one’s first choice for this. I am not my first choice to deal with this mess.
“But that’s the situation we have, and that’s the situation we have to deal with. So, stop barking contradictory orders at me, move your arguments to separate channels, and make suggestions I can actually follow.”
“Listen here, you little …”
The voice cut out when Ye-in yanked the comm node from its socket, something that would, to the people on the other end, look very much like it had been destroyed.
So Derek called them back, using the other comm node. The last one, as far as they knew.
“We’re willing to accept help. We want help. Us getting treated like kids isn’t getting us anywhere.”
For a long moment, there was silence.
“You got the ability to make illusions over there?”
That had been Captain Grey.
“Yes,” Derek said.
“I’m sending you something that should look like a stealth missile launch to your opponent. Might make it flinch and look for those, instead of you. “
“Stealth missile specs are classified!” Admiral French snapped.
“And I’m not sending them, because we need something an alien computer with no knowledge of magic will be able to recognize as a threat,” Grey calmly explained. “Now, Captain, can you project this image?”
Derek pulled up the file, seeing something that was more an emissions profile than an actual image, but it was both doable and could work …
And while he prepared that, their fifth firing pass was set up.
Warp, empty the capacities for both primaries, create the illusion …
The computer aboard the enemy ship clearly had grown at least somewhat wise to their tricks, beginning the turn towards them the very microsecond the Dragonfly appeared … and then promptly began firing at nothing, attempting to try and shoot down missiles that had only ever existed as digital noise in the Dragonfly’s computer.
Main propulsion was already out of sight, but slamming the railgun round into a heavy weapons mount worked too, especially as it wound up, finally, penetrating, only detonating when it hit some kind of internal armor capable of foiling the black hole round, the resultant explosion leaving a massive, cylindrical, hole in the enemy vessel, while the particle beam blew up an open, leaving hte enemy ship down maybe a third of the heavy guns they’d identified.
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Derek re-cast the illusory missiles and, for some reason, the enemy ship still reacted, apparently interpreting the way they vanished at the edge of his range as functioning stealth fields, rather than them being wholly illusory.
So focused was it on those that he even managed to recharge the railgun and fire it for a second time, the lack of spatial compression between the two ships sadly resulting in a mere glancing blow.
It seemed that, at the sorts of ranges they were sticking to right now, the enemy was at least theoretically be able to dodge kinetic weapons.
Also, from one moment to the next, the alien warship switched from trying to shoot down imaginary missiles to hammering the Dragonfly, though once again, Derek’s ability to see space around him in real time allowed him to warp the ship away.
It seemed like two light seconds was the sweet spot for being able to dodge light speed weapons with [Alcubierre Bubble], assuming he was the one to do the dodging, as the delay of verbally ordering someone else to do so would likely result in them getting cut to pieces.
Suddenly, the power curve of the enemy vessel skyrocketed, nearly half again what it had previously been.
Shit.
“Are they charging some kind of superweapon?” Derek asked to no one in particular. And if so, why the hell hadn’t they done so previously …
“No clue,” Ye-in muttered.
Together, they worked to try and make sure the weapons would continue to work going in the next firing run, all the while glancing up at the main viewscreen as if now was the moment the alien ship would reveal what it was doing … and then the power curve dropped down to almost nothing, and Mimi started laughing on the comms.
“It was charging capacitors! It doesn’t have the radiators to keep the reactor on at a normal level without frying itself. And here are those capacitors.”
Several points on the enemy ship flashed orange, though it only took a couple of seconds for Derek to realize that those points also lay under a significant amount of armor.
This really wasn’t working. They were doing damage, and not taking much in exchange, but their defenses were falling apart, and their time was running out.
What [Skills] did they have? Any kind of active attack ability they would not only require them to go out there, into space, and hit a starship across a distance greater than that of the Earth to the moon, but also do less damage than even the Dragonfly’s secondaries. Hell, the currently unused point defense suite might be able to hit harder.
As for cooldown [Skills] that could work with the ship … Ye-in could cloak it in a defensive nebula or allow them to survive ramming the enemy vessel, though the latter would also protect the enemy from damage, it would be more akin to two billiard balls thwacking together and going careening off into different directions. Derek could see that work, but some quick mental maths revealed that even if they managed to ram the enemy in such a way that allowed for maximal diversion, sending the enemy starship as far away as possible, it would still be able to return before reinforcements arrive, and getting close enough to ram would likely see the Dragonfly trashed.
Also, achieving such a course in the time they had available would require using Atticus’ instant course change [Skill].
Two cooldown [Skills] for a temporary, maybe-solution that would likely result in the only ship capable of doing anything crippled.
But what if they managed to use the redirection and Ye-in’s other cooldown [Skill]?
What they got close, redirected themselves in a completely new direction, rather than the incredibly low relative velocity they were moving through space at, nearly motionless compared to each other, despite the fact that they were moving at nearly a third of light speed at the moment.
If the Dragonfly suddenly tore off into a new direction, in a way that would make Isaac Newton spin so hard in his grave that he could power all of London for a decade … maybe they could get a clean shot at the enemy stern.
They couldn’t warp into place and get an immediate shot at it; [Alcubierre Bubble] wasn’t accurate enough.
But if they warped in front of the enemy, right in its path, let it get bow on them, using whatever they had to protect their ship from the heavy lasers, then had Atticus reverse their vector in an instant … it might work. It’s see them get incredibly close to the enemy ship, a close-in firing pass, but at the relative speeds they’d be going … might work.
Yet when he laid out the plan, Atticus was quick to pour water onto that.
“At those kinds of speeds, relativistic distortion will make a mess of everything, even if the targetting computer wouldn’t crap out if we tried making it work at that kind of pass.”
And, unfortunately, the pilot was right. A relative speed of nearly point six light would render their targeting computers utterly incapable of getting anything done. In fact, anything above point four light would be well beyond what they could currently handle. More [Skills], better [Skills], extra enchantments … there were solutions, but not ones they could implement right now. Or any time in the next year.
“Does anyone have any [Skills] they could buff us with that’d help here?” he asked via the comms. He’d have hoped that if that was the case, they’d have said so without prompting, but, well, stuff happened, and he didn’t want to rely on it …
“No, but I could empower a software patch; it’ll work if you use it at any point in the next hour,” a new voice called out, noticeably more distant from the mike than the others.
“Mr. Siegel?” Grey asked, giving Derek a surname that … meant absolutely nothing to him. It was a German surname, and the man had had a slight German accent, but that was all.
“I was told some engineering advice might be needed,” Siegel said.
“Oh, hey Uncle Karl,” Atticus suddenly called out. “Yeah, an hour should be enough, right, Derek?”
“Yes …” Derek said slowly, the addition of the first name having made him realize just who had just walked in.
Karl Siegel was a well-known magitech engineer, and one of Isaac’s old friends, Atticus’ mother’s too, as far as Derek knew, and he was most famous for exactly two things: having built humanity’s first moon base, and being caught on camera bitching about how annoyed he was at all the “fucking dents in the ceiling” he had to fix because of all the “morons who don’t understand the concept of ‘lesser lunar gravity’.”
Though he’d done a hell of a lot more than that, starting with the invention of the mana to electricity converters that powered much of the modern world, a silly clip of a silly complaint had an unfunny way of burying actual achievements in the minds of the people as a whole.
Derek swallowed. This was an insane stunt.
But it was the only play they had, short of going “fuck those colonists” and bailing …
“Software patch is in, course is programmed in, weapons will be charged in thirty seconds,” Ye-in reported.
“I’m ready too,” Atticus added.
“Just done reinforcing the bow, I’ll be back in engineering … now.”
In other words, she was as safe as she could be aboard a ship about to dive into the mouth of hell.
And then space warped once again, planting the Dragonfly right in the path of the enemy ship, bow aiming straight at the enemy, which was currently moving “sideways,” though orientiation did not matter one bit in space unless you were activating your main propulsion, but it was already turning, light lasers and particle beams sparkling off its hull, beginning to bring its heavy lasers to bear … while the Dragonfly was rotating, turning its stern to face the enemy …
Two [Skills] activated in an instant, Ye-in’s [Forceful Nebula] wrapping their ship in shockingly solid clouds that moved with it, while Atticus used [Instant Redirection] to slam the ship into reverse, sending it straight at their alien opponent, heavy lasers burning away the protection provided by Ye-in, then Derek created another twist in space to direct the enemy heavy weapons away, his mana pool emptying like punctured fuel tank.
A split second before he ran out, Atticus threw his mana into the fray, blocking the next wave of energy, yet they were so close now that some of the enemy beams still leaked through, the outer hull beginning to liquify in places, the Dragonfly continuing to rotate, to point its bow backwards.
And then, they were past, out of range of the heavy lasers, enemy secondaries beginning to tear into their hull as Atticus dropped the warp to prevent their own shot from being fouled by the defensive magic …
In an instant, in the single nanosecond during which the Dragonfly’s spine was aligned with their target, it fired, the highly illegal, highly destructive, railgun round purchased from the home of freedom, individuality, and insanity, flew straight up the enemy ship’s rear and slammed straight into the depths of its main propulsion.
Something exploded.
It wasn’t clear what, or even how deep, the stream of smoke, debris, and atmosphere hiding the actual damage, but two things were clear: main propulsion was both off and decidedly unfixable, at least in time to do anything.
Then, a second explosion, shaking Derek’s seat, followed by the howling of the decompression alarm, the infernal noise dying down after only five seconds.
“That’ll only hold for a few minutes,” Mimi reported. “I’m sealing off that entire section of the ship.”
“Thank you,” Derek said. “Do you want any help?”
“Nah, I’m good until this is completely done.”
Yes, this wasn’t finished, but they’d still done just about everything they had to. Derek sighed as he leaned back in his chair. Everyone alive, ship fixable … just about everything he could have realistically expected.
***
Five minutes.
Five goddamn minutes.
That was how long it took for things to get to hell in a handbasket once again.
“Uh, Derek? I think it’s using its thrusters to aim for the planet. It’s going to ram.”
“Thank you, Atticus,” Derek sighed.
God. Fucking. Damnit!
Why … oh, shoot. It didn’t know they wouldn’t be able to jump around like that in ten more minutes. The enemy computer had decided it was doomed, that it could not adequately defend against their particular flavor of bullshit, and as such, it’d just trash the entire goddamn planet.
“Smart.” But also very, very, evil.
And sure, they could jump around and try to shoot at it a few more times, but their accuracy would be terrible, even with the software patch. They’d known where they’d been, they’d known where the enemy ship had been, they’d known of their vector would be changed … all that had combined to let them hit the enemy even though their relative speed was far too great to get good scan data.
Unfortunately, due to the inaccuracy of warping, they wouldn’t know exactly where they were, and also their knowledge of where the other guy was also heavily limited and colored by relativistic distortion, due to their donwright absurd relative speed … the “solution” would be to have someone static relative to both of them feeding them targetting data, but even if they’d had a drone to deploy for that purpose, by the same said drone had matched the enemy’s velocity, it would be too late.
They needed proper location information … yeah, that might work.
And with that, Derek had at least the beginnings of a plan, so he withdrew a mana potion from his storage ring and downed it, then activated [Alcubierre Bubble] and took the Dragonfly “up,” or, at least, away from the system ecliptic, the plane on which the planets orbited, past the star’s zone of interference.
As they flew, he explained the insanity that had just occured to him, then deactivated the warp ability and launched the Dragonfly back “down,” planting them back on the opposite side of the zone of interference from where they’d started, albeit quite far from the area in which they could no longer warp as they needed some space to redirect themselves, the engine roaring to life in an instant to start shifting their vector, bending it so that when they hit the enemy, they’d strike at angle, rather than head on …
***
Nearly two hours later, they were on final approach, barely even fifty lights seconds from the planet, being sent a direct feed of both their and their enemy’s locations from Boris, whose face Derek still hadn’t seen, the man’s far superior ability to see things happen in real time, without any light speed delays, allowing them to aim the ship straight for the enemy.
Straight for them.
Another near-suicidal attack, with the only ace left to play being the one that would make this work in the first place, no real defenses outside of more spatial warping, and the fact that both he and Mimi had spent most of those hours reinforcing the hull.
But without its main propulsion, the enemy could not dodge adequately, and it had, for whatever reason, decided to keep its bow aligned with the planet, clearly guarding against something that, as far as it knew, might pop out of nowhere in its path, resulting in most of its heavy lasers being aimed at nothing …
Yet it was still a cruiser, built by an incredibly advanced alien species, designed to depopulate planets.
Even damaged, with them burning mana like there was no tomorrow trying to warp space between them, the Dragonfly still shook, a second deflector being torn to pieces and the rate of impacts redoubling, the decompression alarm opening up yet again and staying on, the entire ship seemingly on the verge of coming apart … and then both vessel’s collided, only Ye-in’s [Absolute Ward] keeping the Dragonfly intact, simply transfering momentum as though they were marbles being smashed together by children, rather than several thousand tons of metal hammering into each other, bouncing, flying apart, the enemy ship still firing, tearing into their tiny little destroyer at point blank range …
Another explosion shook the ship, computer screen went dim, the lights went out, and just about everything save the gravity, which was magical in nature and entirely separate from the fusion reactors, went out.
But they’d seen the enemy vessel go flying, so they’d at least achieved that …
Derek slammed his hand on the mana converter beneath his seat and poured the last few remaining drops into it, causing the bridge’s lights to return just as the emergency lighting finally kicked in.
“Atticus, the moment you can, get us away from the enemy, if they can still reach us, we’re a sitting duck. Ye-in, try and see if you can charge the capacitors for the thrusters with your mana. I’ll go help Mimi on damage control,” he declared.
Though even before he’d reached main engineering, they’d gotten comms back and from them confirmation of the enemy’s course, as relayed by Atticus.
And that was that. The alien ship was careening off into the distance.
Now, it still had quite a few thrusters left; it could return to menace the colony again … eight months from now at the earliest. Isaac would be here by then.
They’d won … so, time to help Mimi fix the ship.