Shall Not Perish (Lincoln's War Book 1) Page 5

   “Is there anything we can do, ma’am?” Romano asked. “My battle station doesn’t seem to exist any more, so I thought...”

   “Lieutenant, your face….” she began.

   “It stings a little, Captain,” he interrupted, with an earnest, eager smile. “We’re both fit for duty, ma’am.”

   “Assist Lieutenant Fox,” she said. “McBride, ride Flight Engineering. Monitor the distribution feed to the port turrets. Commander Gorgas is trying some sort of a trick, and it occurs to me that we might be able to boost the power to the proton cannons.”

   “They won’t hold under an overload for long, ma’am,” McBride replied, his face breaking into a frown. “We’re running ‘em hotter than design specifications as it is.”

   “Do what you can,” she said, turning back to the tactical display, watching as Lincoln dived towards the two enemy ships, neither of the PacFed cruisers showing any sign of changing their flight path, or trying to dodge them. The idea of using a carrier as a ballistic missile was certainly not found in any manual she’d ever read, and she could believe that the enemy commander wouldn’t imagine that she’d actually be trying it.

   There had to be another way. There had to be. But she couldn’t think of it, and there were less than three minutes left before they made contact. She looked across at the hyperdrive regulator, watched as the power rose, way beyond overload, another series of warning lights to add to the sea of red that was dominating the status board. Lincoln had already taken more than her designers could have imagined when she’d been on the drawing board.

   The power levels. That was the answer.

   She stabbed a control, opening a channel to Auxiliary Control and said, “Bridge to Lieutenant Brooks. Felix, you on?”

   “Captain?” the young officer asked. “Ma’am, I’m in the middle...”

   “Never mind that now. You’re the only person on this ship even remotely qualified to answer my question. Take a look at the current power levels on the hyperdrive, and tell me what would happen if we tried to open a hyper-dimensional portal with that sort of load.”

   “Wow,” Brooks said. “Skipper, I’m not an expert. Really. I’ve got a Masters, but...”

   “That’s the best we’ve got, and I need an answer now, Lieutenant.”

   “You’d rip a hole in the fabric of space-time ten, twenty times bigger than anything normal. You’d actually expose our universe to raw hyper-dimensional space. Captain, there’s a reason we have safety protocols on the hyperdrive.” He paused, then said, “We’d lose the ship. And probably every other ship within a thousand miles. What would happen to them is anybody’s guess. I wouldn’t like to speculate. Though I think that probably answers your question, ma’am.”

   “I guess it does. Leave Chief Hubbard in charge of Damage Control, and get everything set up for the overload in,” she looked up at the tactical display, “two minutes, ten seconds.”

   “Will do, ma’am,” he replied. “Pity.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “This would have made a hell of a topic for my doctoral thesis.”

   “Save it for the next world, Lieutenant. On your way.” She looked up at Singh, and said, “Did you get that?”

   “I got it. I’m not sure I believe it.”

   “Helm, maintain current course,” Forrest said, looking at the screen. “At all costs, keep us within a five hundred miles of both enemy ships. I want a margin of error. If we’re going to do this, then I want to make damned sure that we get it right. We’re not going to get a second shot.”

   “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, turning back to his controls, now with renewed glee. That they were going to die seemed certain now, but somehow it was better knowing that they’d be taking the enemy down with them. She turned to Todd’s station, watching him try and contact the flagship, his face a mask of frustration and barely-control rage. They were going to win the battle despite them, not because of them, and their tardiness to the action was going to cost her crew their lives.

   “Sixty seconds to firing range, Captain,” Merritt said, working the helm. “We’ll have to get through thirty seconds of hell to get there. I’m going to struggle to keep our good side towards the enemy. Is there any way we can get the turrets working?”

   “Not a chance,” McBride replied, before Forrest could reply. “It’d take hours. We’ve got seconds. Nowhere near enough time. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. We’ll be closing the range too fast.”

   “Implement an evasive pattern as soon as we get within range,” Singh said. “They’ll be expecting us to barrel right in. That might buy us a little time. And swing around at minus-ten seconds, cut the engines, expose our good side to the enemy.”

   “On it, sir,” Merritt said, while Forrest watched, offering a nod of approval to her second-in-command. He was a good officer. It was a good crew, and they deserved better than this. Better than to go down in the first battle of what would likely be a long war. The Pacific Federation had a slight numerical disadvantage, but far more of their ships were state of the art. Even odds.

   “Thirty seconds to firing range,” Singh said. “No point trying for the escape pods. They don’t have the thrust to get clear in time, and there are enough PacFed fighters flying around who are going to be pretty eager for some payback when we pull this off.”

   “Bridge to Auxiliary Control. What’s the story, Felix?”

   “Ready to go, ma’am. For the record, we’ll probably blow half the ship’s systems doing it, but I guess that isn’t going to matter. I doubt Saint Peter will be conducting an inspection.” Forrest smiled, knowing that she had chided the irreverent officer for his attitude more than once, his wisecracks now a momentary relief from the crisis they had found themselves in. “I’ve got Commander Gorgas riding herd on the regulator, and Commander Kirkland’s gone forward to set up the rift generators. I guess that’s about all she wrote, ma’am.”

   “Thanks, Felix. Safe ride.”

   “You too, ma’am. See you on the far side.”

   Forrest settled down in her command chair, looking around once more at her crew, laboring at their stations, determined to make the last moments of their lives count. Only a couple of them were combat veterans, the long peace taking its toll on their preparedness, but from their cool, calm demeanor, it was almost impossible to tell that most of them hadn’t ever done this before.

   “Five seconds. Executing lateral roll,” Merritt said.

   “Full power to portside turrets, Captain,” McBride added. “She’s running smooth.”

   The proton cannons began to fire as they dived towards the enemy ships, the all-too-familiar green balls of the plasma discharge hurtling towards them, seven pulsar cannons working at maximum charge. The enemy commander was still holding his course, but heat discharges from the thrusters demonstrated his readiness to dodge at the last minute. Before Forrest could order a course change, Merritt threw the ship to starboard, just enough to give the portside turrets their best possible shot at the enemy, and sufficient to convince the enemy commander that they’d blinked first, decided not to risk a direct impact. They didn’t have to. Not now.

   The early salvos dissipated, pounded into submission by the proton cannons, but they were closing the range rapidly, and the inevitable happened as the fourth salvo found its mark, slamming into the lower hull, breaching the armor in a dozen places as the plasma melted its way through the metal. The ship rocked to the side as escaping air forced itself through the breaches, but Merritt was faster, using the force as part of his evasive sequence, making the damage inflicted on Lincoln by the enemy work to his favor.

   It was all coming to a climax so quickly. Perhaps the enemy commander finally worked out what she was planning, but at the last second, both ships turned away, trying to gain some distance, trying to force themselves clear of Lincoln. It was all too late. All of it was far, far too late. A final, desp
erate salvo of pulsar bolts struck the aged vessel amidships, red lights running up and down the status monitor, but finally, desperately, they made it into position, and somewhere below decks, Brooks hit the button.

   She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. A hyper-dimensional transition was a strain on the senses at the best of times, and this one had already promised to be far worse than usual. She could feel the ship straining as the engines kicked in, pumping terawatts of energy through the rift generators to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time. Normally, Lincoln would have slid inside, emerging seconds later at its destination, but this time, the hole kept growing, larger and larger.

   Time seemed to stand still, the clock freezing in position, every breath taking an eternity. Nobody had ever done anything like this before, and Forrest could almost feel the very fabric of her being torn asunder, could hear strange whispers in her ears, odd flashes in her eyes, her senses breaking down under the strain of unreality to which they were being subjected.

   A chorus of alarms wailed through the air, damage control updates still flickering on the screen as the power grew, and grew, and grew. The viewscreen showed the rift, strange patterns and impossible colors dancing on the monitor, the whole image wrong in a fundamental yet intoxicating way, until finally, it all came to an end, and with an earth-rending crack, the portal collapsed.

   Silence.

   Darkness.

   And then she opened her eyes, and looked around the oddly calm bridge, her crew still at their stations, the screen clear once again. Nobody moved for a long minute, and finally, she broke the reverie, turning to Clayton.

   “Report,” she barked. He hesitated, and she repeated, “Report, Specialist!”

   Nodding, he looked at his controls, and said, “No sign of enemy activity in the local area.” He frowned, then added, “No sign of anything at all. No debris, nothing.” Looking up at his controls, he added, “Interpretation systems are working fine, We’ve got reduced bandwidth, but...” He stopped, eyes widening as he looked at his readouts.

   “What is it?” Forrest asked,

   “The stars, ma’am. They’re wrong. They don’t match anything in our system.”

   “Work the problem, Specialist,” Forrest said, turning back to the viewscreen. They were alive. That was more than she’d expected. At this stage, anything else was a bonus.

  Chapter 6

   The blinding flash rippled through the night, and Senior Lieutenant Natalya Volkova looked up at the magnificent display, the light briefly bright enough to cast strange shadows on the ruins of her escape pod, a suited figure stepping outside to watch. She reached up to her helmet controls, throwing maximum magnification into her image intensifier, and got her first look at the strange ship drifting into orbit above her.

   “What is it?” Petrov asked. “Reinforcements from Zemlya?”

   Shaking her head, she replied, “I don’t think so, Sergeant. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Larger than anything we’ve got.”

   “More Guilders, then?”

   Turning to her subordinate, she said, “If they’ve got ships that large, we’ve already lost this war. Not that we aren’t doing a pretty good job of that already.” Looking at the depressingly small pile of equipment, she added, “Is that all you could salvage?”

   “The buggy’s a write-off, ma’am. Ruined on impact. As well as the oxygenator, most of the water and all but one survival tent. We’ve only got enough atmosphere to inflate the cursed thing once anyway.” Waving a holdall, he added, “Emergency transmitter’s still working, though.”

   “Turn it off!”

   “I never turned it on, ma’am. Too many people might be listening out for it. It’s got enough of a charge to last at least twenty-four hours, and a couple of the solar cells are working. It’ll probably be able to transmit long after we’re dead.”

   “You know what I like most about you, Sergeant? Your unhesitatingly cheerful attitude.”

   “Just trying to be realistic, Lieutenant. Have you seen any of the other capsules?”

   “Not a one. If anyone else got off Gagarin, my guess is that the Guilders managed to snatch them before they could get down to the surface. I’m surprised we made it through.” She gestured at the horizon, and said, “According to the charts, there’s an old relay station about ten miles in that direction. Our orbital pass showed it nice and dark, so either the Guild didn’t know about it, or they simply haven’t bothered using it. Sensor scan showed it intact, at least after a fashion.”

   “I can probably patch it up, ma’am. Most of my toolkit’s intact.”

   “Then that’s where we’re going.” She looked out at the horizon again, and said, “They’ll probably have search parties out by now. We take different paths. Stick to the gullies, and if someone tries to follow you, throw them off as best you can. Help will be on the way, but we’ve got to stay free long enough for it to arrive. You read me?”

   “I read you, ma’am.”

   “Fine. You take the left, I’ll take the right.”

   “Will do, Lieutenant.” He tossed her a second holdall, and said, “Your half of the rations and supplies. Enough for a few days, anyway. I just hope there’s more at this station. Good luck.”

   “And to you.”

   Without another word, she set off into the wilderness, hefting the holdall in her hand, taking one last look at the crashed escape pod before she departed. Two hours ago, she’d been Tactical Officer on a scout destroyer, CSS Gagarin. Now she was a hunted animal, fleeing her pursuers. She looked up at the ship again, frowning. There was something familiar about it, after all, some vague memory in the back of her mind, but she didn’t have time to worry about it now. The Guild would be coming. Watching everywhere, waiting for her to make a move.

   They had bases on this world. Scattered resource settlements, most of them worked by slave labor, prisoners captured from raids on the shipping of a dozen worlds over the years. The Zemlyan Commonwealth had some ideas about freeing them, liberating the local population and depriving the Guild of one of its prime resource sites, but it had been a futile gesture from the start, and most of her crew had known it. Certainly Major Koslowski had been loud spoken on the subject, an attitude that had probably forced the Central Committee into giving him the lead.

   He’d been right, of course. They had barely enough ships to defend their homeworld and its few in-system outposts, and the Guild had been getting increasingly aggressive of late, sensing weakness and doing their best to exploit it. Perhaps it had been sheer frustration at their apparent inability to defend themselves that had urged them onto an offensive that had already cost a fifth of their remaining fleet strength.

   A long gully stretched out into the wilderness, almost all the way to her goal, and she eagerly clambered down the rock-strewn slope. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a light, rising from the surface, and the heads-up display on her helmet rapidly identified it as a surveillance drone, a Guild design, sweeping across the landscape. There was no orbital satellite network, not any more. She’d seen to that personally with Gagarin’s maser cannons before they’d been shot down. That meant they’d have to find the survivors the old-fashioned way.

   For a moment, the reality of her situation hit her, and she stopped dead, leaning against the rock. Thirty-nine of her shipmates, her friends, were dead. Her homeworld was seven light-years away, and as soon as the Guild realized that Zemlya had committed its forces to this engagement, they’d be able to destroy them in detail.

   Her mother had worked as a deep-cover operative on a Guild farliner, back before she was born. She’d told her stories about the sights she had seen, the worlds the plutocrats held in subjugation, the slave labor camps holding thousands of workers, many of them working all of their lives without even the taste of freedom. Their tentacle-like shipping lanes reached across the corpse of the Terrestrial Federation, from Tau Ceti to Del
ta Pavonis, and every year, one more world fell under their control, one last light of freedom extinguished from the galaxy. Their subject worlds might theoretically be free, but everyone knew the cold reality of their subservience, the overseers that dominated them. Zemlya could all too easily prove to be the next domino to fall.

   And the only way she could even attempt to prevent that was to stay free, stay on the run. She carried in her pocket the precious data Gagarin’s sensors had scavenged, information about every site on the planet, every installation, every defense system. Enough material to guarantee the success of an attack, if they could possibly muster the strength to make it work. There had been a time that Zemlya might have pulled it off. As their fleet had dwindled, so had their hopes. Gagarin had been the vanguard of the first expedition to leave their system for a year, and the reward for their dreams, their hopes, had been cold, calculated slaughter.

   Koslowski had surrendered. Unconditionally. Desperately, in a bid to save his crew, perhaps to fight another day. They hadn’t even bothered to reply. Standard Guild policy, to show no mercy, and to teach a lesson to those that might resist. That, and to guarantee that there was no chance that the remainder of the Zemlyan forces were ambushed when they entered the system. The Guild monitors that had brought her ship down were still out there, hiding in the swarm of moons surrounding this planet, ready to strike again.

   Taking a deep breath, she walked along the gully, winding and twisting her way across the barren surface, periodically looking up at the ship in orbit, her lines easily visible at full magnification. It was obvious that she had been in a major battle in the recent past, outgassing atmosphere from a dozen hull breaches, the force of the pressure sending her swinging back and forth. She marveled at the design, even in its battered state, larger than any warship she’d ever seen before.