Brooks strode onto the bridge. Decinus had been swept away to a medical bay for emergency surgery, but Dr. Zyzus had given him and Logus a brief treatment that had largely fixed their hearing. Things still sounded odd, but he could have his eardrums repaired properly later.
“Status,” he asked, striding to his seat.
“We’ve got over two hundred missiles still trying to follow your ship,” Urle said. He had not sat in Brooks’s seat, but stood next to it.
Brooks took the chair, and surveyed the command center.
He knew he still looked a mess; his uniform was damaged, with blood splatters still on it – both his, from some minor cuts, and Decinus’s.
Kell appeared, Brooks feeling his presence before seeing him.
“We’ve launched some counter-missiles to theirs,” Urle told Brooks. “Should we launch more?”
“Belay that,” Brooks said. “They’re just going to launch more at the Craton now.”
Cenz turned around. “Wouldn’t they have done that already, Captain? They had to have seen that we had picked you up already. It would make no sense to wait-“
“Launch too soon after their last wave, and their new wave of missiles will risk hitting our defensive measures. It will also give them time to load more missiles and launch a strike that actually threatens us. What is our likely intercept rate for the three hundred?”
“Given that they are in three waves, we have a 99.7% chance of intercepting all missiles, with a 0.3% chance of missing one to three-“
The threat board lit up.
“We have multiple launches!” Jaya said, her voice bordering on frenetic.
Which was understandable. Brooks could see the screen lighting up; one after another, from nearly every Hev ship in Ks’Kull’s armada.
“Counting – 11,274 is the initial number, but we may have missed some,” Cenz said, his voice taking on a tone of alarm that was novel for the being.
“How many can we intercept?” Brooks demanded.
“Predictions suggest a 58.7% interception rate – oh my, that will let through far too many through . . .”
Urle looked at Brooks. “We take even a fraction that many hits and we’ll be lucky not to break up.”
Brooks was looking at the plotted paths. The missiles were swinging wide in all directions, to come at the Craton from every side. It would mean they could bring more defenses to bear in total, but that hardly mattered with this many simultaneous launches.
“Revising numbers – 11,954 missiles. A lot were visually lost in the blasts of others . . . revised interception prediction rate at 56.2% . . .” Cenz said, his voice a pale shadow of its normal self.
“They have to have emptied their magazines,” Urle said. “This is a hell of a commitment.”
“They’ll be reloading, but slowly,” Brooks said. “As far as they believe, they have us. How long until the missiles reach us?”
“Twenty-eight minutes, thirty-one seconds,” Cenz replied. “Plus or minus five seconds.”
“How much power do we have in the jump coils?”
“Our jump in was brief, which saved a miniscule amount of power – we are currently at 38% of charge necessary for opening a zerospace portal,” Cutter said. Despite the situation, the Beetle-Slug sounded calm. This was, to him, merely another problem to be solved, Brooks thought.
And that was the truth of it.
“We require at least one hour and thirty-five minutes to make up the rest of the charge,” Cenz said.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Do you have any thoughts, Captain?” Urle said.
“They may launch another wave of just as many in a few minutes,” Brooks said. “Ks’Kull would love to take this ship intact, but clearly he wants bloodshed. And even the Craton’s scrap would be invaluable in trade.”
“To the Fesha,” Urle said, disgusted. “Do you think they pushed him to attack?”
“Possibly. Where is their ship now?”
“It has left orbit of the seventh planet and is moving closer,” Cenz told him.
“Come to watch the fight,” Urle commented. “Are they within strike range?”
“Only by long-range missiles, sir. It would take even those several months to reach them.”
“They want to see what the Craton can do,” Brooks commented.
Jaya turned around to look at him. “And with respects, sir, what do you plan to do?”
Brooks was silent a long moment.
“Prepare for a zerospace jump,” he said.
“But sir,” Cenz said. “We do not have enough energy-“
“To make a successful jump, that’s right. But we’re not going to make a successful jump. We’re going to slingshot.”
Silence met his words, and it was Urle who broke them. “Sir, you mean get the gravitational pull to get a burst of acceleration? It won’t help us escape the missiles, it will only give us pseudo-momentum that will rapidly decay and we’ll be-“
“We’re not moving away from the missiles,” Brooks said. “We’ll move towards them.”
He stood, reaching and bringing up a three-dimensional visual of the situation. “Right now the Hev missiles are spreading out away from their fleet – this is normal, so that we can’t destroy hundreds with a single nuclear blast, and to keep our counterfire from coming straight at their fleet.”
He pointed to the path directly between them and the Hev. “That means there is a gap here where there will be no missiles. And the pseudo-momentum we can gain from a failed jump will move us fast enough – I believe – that the missiles will not be able to correct in time.”
He looked to Cutter, then Cenz. “Do my numbers check out?”
“Yes,” Cutter replied.
“In theory!” Cenz cried. “But there are still so many other issues! We cannot go through a partially-opened portal aperture, or the ship will spaghettify-“
“Yes, so we’ll have to sling ourselves just around it.”
“The angular momentum might tear the ship apart!” Urle said, standing up.
“The Craton will hold together,” Brooks replied.
“And if she does, we will then be in the midst of the Hev fleet,” Cenz said. “Captain, this . . . I do not understand what we are hoping to achieve with this maneuver.”
“There are still so many other problems with this plan,” Urle added. “Calculations that we’ll have to do on the fly – we’ve never even simulated this. There’s a reason it’s not an accepted maneuver in any fleet book! We might spaghettify, we might all be crushed by the g-forces, we might ram into a hundred missiles at a fraction of c, we might-“
“When outnumbered and trapped, we attack,” Brooks said, interrupting him. “That is the only way to win against impossible odds.”
Jaya nodded, her face calm but eyes flaring. “I am with you, Captain,” she said.
Urle took a long and deep breath. “Just give the word, Captain.”
He nodded slowly, looking across the whole of his crew. Perhaps some of them thought he was mad, perhaps a screw had been knocked loose in the explosion in the diplomatic station.
Perhaps it had.
But if Ks’Kull wanted blood, then he was going to drown in it.
----------------------------------------
“ALL HANDS, TO EMERGENCY SHELTERS. PREPARE FOR HIGH-G MANEUVERS.”
The voice, calm but very insistent, could not be missed; it was in every room, every corridor, every device.
Apollonia’s system was also broadcasting the alert, and she found herself barely aware of her own actions.
She didn’t remember going into the bunker, but she found herself fumbling with the straps on her seat.
She needn’t have bothered; they moved by themselves, slipping from her numb hands and locking about her.
There were a dozen others in the bunker with her, though there were also a lot of empty seats. She hoped that didn’t mean some people were getting trapped outside. Or maybe the Craton had a lot more of these than actual crew? She didn’t know. Maybe she should know that?
Her heart was beating as the door to the room closed. A moment later the wall didn’t even look like it had a seam, it was so tightly sealed.
Apple turned, surveying the room again, and found that an older-looking woman was next to her. She recognized her face as working at one of the restaurants she had gone to a few times.
The woman smiled at her nervously.
Apollonia smiled back, hers feeling weak.
“You’re a Volunteer?” the woman asked.
What was her name? Apollonia wracked her brain but couldn’t remember. It might have been Ann.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. She had put on the jumpsuit, preparing to suit up. They had said to expect hull breaches. She started to reach for her tablet again to look at it, but a drone beeped at her.
“No loose objects during high-g maneuvers,” it told her. It was not the floating kind, but built into the ceiling, almost flush with it. She reckoned that it was secure enough that they’d all be paste before it busted loose and started flying around. She wasn’t sure if that thought was consolation or not.
She put her tablet into a drawer that sealed shut, regretting it instantly. Unlike everyone else, whose system was fully integrated into their bodies and clothes, she was entirely cut off from the augmented reality systems.
“It’s so brave of you,” the woman said, startling Apollonia.
“It is?” she asked, the question just slipping out.
“Oh, yes. It’s dangerous work – I just wasn’t brave enough,” the woman said.
“BRACE,” the system said. Apollonia felt the restraint straps tighten, and she tensed in her seat.
She didn’t feel brave.