I floated among the stars, taking a moment to savor their beauty before I got to work. I averted my eyes from the broad band around our midline and focused on the stars above the ship. Their hard, bright glow soothed me, calmed my unsettled stomach, and brought a flickering sense of enlightenment. The feeling refused to coalesce, so I sighed and got back to work.
"Echidna, give me a map of the system with our enemies plotted, and give me an observational stellar map with estimated jump times."
"Jump times, sir? Will those make a difference?"
I stopped, taken aback by my ship's lack of basic human slang. Tiamat would have known what meant when I said, 'jump time'.
"Recharge time based on estimated power usage."
"Oh!"
Two maps flashed into existence to my right and left. On one, Echidna herself sparkled green and brown at the center, with deep purple-red 'Sect icons crawling closer moment by moment. On the other, our current system glowed the dull red-gold of the system's primary, with systems spread around us, each marked with a number of hours color coded green, gold, or red in decreasing shades of confidence. The patterns teased at me, again with that coalescing comprehension, but again they refused to gel, and with every second the 'Sects crept closer.
"Okay, Kid, let's put them through their paces, see if they can catch us if we want to evade them. Evasion pattern Delta, fifty percent speed."
The system map shifted around Echidna's bright gem. For a moment, the 'Sects lagged behind, then they matched our acceleration. The Materner lagged furthest, with the other three 'Sect mother ships spreading slightly as they continued gaining on us. I split the map into two copies: one real time display of the 'Sects attempts to box us in, one frozen in time at the moment they reacted to us. I scrolled the recording back and forth in time, watching as the 'Sect formation slid apart.
The Mutterchen-Ter pulled away from the Materner, sliding slightly outward as well, but did so with a smooth, practiced motion which hinted at previous association between these two. The other pair mimicked the action of their mature siblings, lagging by the speed of light limitations of their perceptions. Each of the Soros stuck by a particular mother ship, but again a pattern emerged. Two of the scouts snuggled up to the Materner, and one did the same with the -Ter variant. Two of the other three trailed along behind the two Madrecita variants, and the final Soro first tried to follow one of the Madrecitas, then swung completely around to race back to the bigger ship trailing behind. I berated myself for missing the opportunity to destroy her; Echidna could more than overcome a single Soro now that we'd repaired her projectors, and she had some power reserves.
Another thought swamped my brief self-flagellation. Running almost on instinct, I labeled each of the enemy ships and started muttering commands to my ship.
"Alter to evasion pattern Delta-Four-Alpha. All available Cadets to Armor. All variable configuration armor equip with detection countermeasures. All remaining available Cadets to Damage Control Stations. All Remaining Cadets to Battle Stations." Echidna's evasion pattern, a relatively simple set of twists and turns around a base course away from our enemies, took on another dimension as she began jinking and weaving around the track set by her evasive course. Each move altered her position relative to the Madrecita who had nearly stolen her sister's Soro. On the real-time display, the Mutterchen-Ter and the Materner fell into a line, with the Mutterchen almost directly between her bigger sister and Echidna. The other pair slipped further out of formation. One of the pair made an obvious correction to put her closer to her sisters. The other doggedly pursued Echidna, trying to make up for coordination with persistence. The three Soros with the Materner closed in so tight Echidna lost the ability to track them separately. The other three each followed the path of their chosen companion with similar results.
Working with the accelerated precision only available in a virtual interface, I shoved the time slider forward to well past the current time. My enemies' positions shaded through yellow into red, fading as they did so.
"We're getting sporadic, long-range weapons fire. Not worth mentioning, except the core of their formation is coordinating their fire, trying to force us out of our evasion pattern."
"Alter course to zero, thirty, zero. Alter evasion pattern to Delta-four-Alpha-ten-Bravo."
The jagged, swooping lines of our future course became a nearly incomprehensible jangle of acceleration vectors, and the whole thing swung around to put the Materner between us and her errant siblings. I tagged a series of points along Echidna's future path, marking each with a unique designator.
Words I'd memorized, expecting to be quizzed on them by Commandant DeLann, slipped out of my mouth without thinking. "Prepare launch pattern Star-Trio-Mark, on Delta-four-Alpha-ten-Bravo Mark. Attack pattern Trapdoor on concentration Niner Five."
On the real time screen, our pursuers' formation decayed further as our course, designed after centuries of fighting 'Sects, taunted the least controlled of our enemies further and further from their formation. One of the Madrecitas and two of the Soros lost the formation entirely, following after us at full acceleration in a frenzied attempt to close the gap. Tiny green sparks dropped away from Echidna, rapidly shading to blue and then violet as the on-board stealth systems in each squad hid them from our sensors, even when we knew where to look.
"Prepare Microjump to..." I brought up our future plot again, traced its complexities, and ballparked my desired point in space. "Here!" My finger stabbed out, a highlight appearing at its tip. On the real time screen, a jagged line traced backward from that spot to our current location, writhing as we warped the fabric of space time with our passage.
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"Captain," Card's real-world voice filtered through the VR control space, distorted more by my own perception of time than the gel between us.
I opened a window in the VR to show me my bridge medic. She swam through liquefied acceleration gel, delivering thermoses to my runners. I took a moment while she finished with them to think about that anomaly. Two older Juniors were assigned to my bridge as runners. I didn't recall assigning them, and even without augmentation I could just as easily pass a message through Echidna. If Kid couldn't even pass a message, we had bigger problems than something needing runners. Even with the two of them helping, Card couldn't carry me to the infirmary.
I'd been against the idea initially, but Guy and Quick had both insisted. Originally my runners would have been older Middies, but I'd put my foot down; we needed those Cadets doing real jobs, not just sitting around. We'd reached a compromise of older Juniors, because neoincarnate Juniors weren't useful for much else except waiting and watching.
As I stared at them taking their turns sipping their lunch, one watching the door and the other watching me, I realized I'd been duped. These two weren't neoincarnates. They also weren't runners. I had Marine guards, just like Captain De'Lann. Card pressed a thermos into my hand; I had a personal medic and steward. A Captain didn't defend herself or make her own lunch. She kept her attention focused on the big picture, so everyone else could do their jobs secure in the knowledge she wouldn't waste their hard work and sacrifice.
A smile stretched across my face unbidden, my perceptions still twisted by the peculiar time sense of an immersive VR interface not tied to a real clock in any meaningful way. A ghostly touch on my real hand prompted me to lift the thermos to my mouth and drink.
The concoction's awfulness nearly pulled me out of immersion. I scrambled to instruct my essie to turn my sense of taste down as far as it would go. Inside the VR environment I could just barely ignore the remaining foulness if I concentrated on something else.
I had something else to concentrate on, too. The tiny sparks in the real time plot coalesced, forming into violet clouds. The rogue Madrecita had nearly reached the cloud; when enough of the armor reached attack range to ensure a ninety five percent chance of a kill, they'd open fire. Imperial Marine ambushes usually ran with lower numbers; a fifty percent kill likelihood meant a near certainty of a cripple to be finished at the fleet's leisure, but we had neither the time nor personnel to risk on cleanup.
"Prepare to micro-jump on my mark. On micro-jump, cede all weapons, drive, and comm controls to me." I stared as the Madrecita crept toward the edge of the violet cloud; one Soro followed close behind her, one trailed a fair bit behind. I superimposed Echidna's best estimate of kill percentages over each ship. The Madrecita raced upward from seventy-five already, the Soro behind her began to rise from an apparent baseline of ten percent. The other seven ships, now all keeping a decent formation, hovered around five percent. I supposed that many sets of armor, all firing at once, would have a chance of saturating the area if they fired, and the first shot would come as a complete surprise.
Of course, even with the best countermeasures Imperial technology could produce, energy weapon fire pinpointed its source fairly well. The return fire might not hit, but fire into a crowd that dense couldn't help but hit someone. I had a plan to avoid that, but it hinged on our Marines taking the enemy by surprise, something they'd fail to do if they waited too long.
The number hit ninety-five. I ached to send the command to micro jump, but if for some reason my Marines weren't quite where we thought, I could alert the enemy at the worst possible time. I needed confirmation, and that had to wait for light speed. The near edge of the violet Marine cloud hovered ten seconds away by light speed, the far edge nearly twelve. I linked the variable time display twelve seconds ahead of the real one and watched the real time number creep up.
Ninety-six. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. They couldn't be far from where we'd projected; even with countermeasures we'd see their drives if they tried to alter their course that much. Ninety-nine. Maybe the neoincarnates among them had balked, fear overcoming their orders? A second's thought about the natural instincts of young Marines, the instinct to attack a threat the moment it appeared, keep attacking until it no longer threatened, and that idea left, but I couldn't see why they hadn't attacked.
I nearly blew the whole ambush by sending a query before I saw. The number superimposed over the Madrecita rolled over into three digits, indicating ensured overkill, but the one above the nearby Soro had just crested into the nineties. I hadn't known which ship would be in the kill cloud when I gave the order, and the Marines had decided to go for both. I ran the numbers again; both dropped by at least twenty percent if the Marines split their fire. I swore quietly, not knowing if I swore in admiration at their audacity or frustration with their foolishness.
"Captain?" Echidna's quiet question intruded, and I waved her back to her evasion pattern. My attention focused on the trailing Soro, and I scrambled to plot firing solutions for all of Echidna's available projectors. In my variable time display the leading Soro's number came up to ninety-five, and the violet cloud flashed green as over three hundred suits of powered armor fired as one rippling mass.
"Mark!"
Minds screamed in the timeless darkness. At the far end of the hole, Echidna's systems slid into my control. I shouldn't notice the difference between that and donning a suit of armor, but it still almost overwhelmed me in the first second. On instinct, I activated my projectors, my firing solutions already chosen. Twice, three times I fired, adjusting for my own motion and the Soro's without thinking.
"Echidna Marines: Recall. All Marines: Recall. I say again, all marines recall. Get your flaming butts back in my bay, or you're scrubbing the heads with your bare hands." The fierce joy of combat filled me, coupled with the exultant relief a second later when my words reached the near edge of the cloud of Cadet Marines. They swept toward me, and I turned and loped coyly away. Given our vectors, they could catch me without a problem, and I just plain couldn't pull off evasion patterns like Echidna could.
I focused my attention back on the enemy. The Soro I'd fired on slid through space, lifeless, surface charred until it resembled a carbon asteroid. The Madrecita had suffered a similar fate, but with more weapons firing under less local control, they'd scorched completely through some areas and left others only mildly roasted. Either way, it had died just as dead. I could find no evidence of the other Soro. I flicked my attention for a moment to the variable time display...
The Marines were more coordinated than I'd thought. The Madrecita had received all their energy fire. They'd gifted the Soro with their missiles. The small missiles each set of armor carried for fighting similar sized opponents weren't proper anti capital ship missiles, but they'd fired over a thousand of them. Even with its weapons swatting them from the sky, several hundred had still gotten through. Hitting in sequence, they'd torn the ship into fragments too small for me to see.
The last Marines slid into the bays just as I felt Echidna waking up. For the first time in what could have been minutes or days, I looked at the actual time readout. Since my First woke me, six hours had passed.
Time to go see how he'd progressed on armoring my crew.