Whiskey Grain took a well-earned drag on his half-cigar. Although his ship was decidedly inferior to the monster chasing her, he had the advantage of being on his home field. He knew every scar and bruise in and around the space of Hammer’s Tomb. He had been in physical contact with every planet in the system, even the ones that better resembled fields of debris instead of worlds. He considered the dying red star at the center of his stomping grounds a brother of sorts. Aside from the most obsessive astrophysicists, he had compiled more knowledge about the crimson sun and its would be assassin at the center of the 100 AU event horizon that crept closer every moment.

His objective was obvious, at least for the band of outlaw prospectors he led. Skywatch didn’t belong out here. In fact, humanity in general wasn’t supposed to be snooping around beyond the cosmic “no trespassing” sign Omicron was supposed to be. Spruance’s sudden arrival at a position only a few megaclicks off the wandering asteroids of the Focal Cluster was more than a navigational blunder or explainable encroachment. It was provocative in all the wrong ways, and it had to be dealt with immediately.

The “Roidbusters,” as they had come to be known, were not a sophisticated tribe. They were, for lack of a better description, the combination of spaceflight technology, a junkyard the size of Canada and a devil-may-care population of radiation-poisoned fortune seekers who had forgotten more about materials science than most professors of the subject matter would ever learn. They had entirely unorthodox ways of getting from place to place, using what they found in bizarre and surprisingly effective ways, and defending their turf with a combination of sociopathy and resourcefulness that strained the definition of the word “unpredictable.”

Captain Grain’s ship was the Maiden’s Ransom. She was a specialized combination of a frontier enforcement frigate and an extremely capable cobalt prospecting vessel. The ship had facilities aboard that could package cobalt debris together with an innovative detonator that turned the entire affair into a concentrated cloud of fast-moving and viciously superheated radioactive debris. They were the spaceflight equivalent of cluster bombs with extra features, and they were nightmarishly effective against crews that weren’t prepared for them. The static versions of Grain’s weapons were used as standoff mines in contested areas of space. The kinetic versions were “launched” like depth charges. Crews in pressurized hazard armor physically rolled the devices through a shielded airlock directly into space. Once they emerged from their ship’s magnetic field, they activated a set of precision sensors that looked for enemy vessel drive fields and then used those fields as polarized supermagnets. The weapon actually “pulled itself” towards its target until it reached optimium range, then it exploded into a cloud of astronomically hot ionized spinning debris that formed a massive wall in the path of an oncoming ship.

The results of the collision between that cloud and an enemy vessel were rarely pleasant, at least for Grain’s enemies.

The Roidbusters honestly didn’t give two dragoons for what shoving matches were taking place between Imperial forces, Skywatch, the pompous felines of Proxima or anyone else for that matter. They were perfectly content to distill their terribly bitter alcoholic beverages, listen to music that had been declared virtually illegal in every sane jurisdiction and break their rocks to look for hot minerals and the occasional precious stone. They were civilization’s edge case: maintainers of markets where the exiles from polite society went when conventional ways of life turned sideways. They were the galaxy’s truck drivers. Every one of them was in possession of at least three categories of contraband, hiding a shotgun somewhere on their person, and carrying enough cash to establish an unlicensed open-air liquor store on three hours notice.

They were also all suffering from varying types of radiation sickness. Fortunately, they were also one of the most accomplished groups of space travelers when it came to treating exposure to radioactive substances. Among their advancements were an entire class of mineral alloys that served as almost perfect shields against all kinds of dangerous elements, a highly experimental branch of chemistry that allowed numerous species to use rare serums to treat exposure and tissue damage and electronics that were so sensitive they could detect and classify valuable ionized metals at extreme ranges.

It wasn’t often a Roid ship angered a Skywatch crew, but when they did they had a few tricks up their soiled sleeves. The most important was stolen and heavily modified drive tech that made their ships unusually fast. This often baited enemies into pursuit gambits, which were always riskier for the pursuer than the pursuee. Captain Grain was about to make that last point the central reality in the lives of every member of Teller’s crew. He took the burning cigar fragment out of his teeth. Smoke rose to surround his grizzled face.

“Release.”

Maiden’s Ransom dove away as three cobalt contact mines drifted into her wake. All three obtained nearly instant locks on the furious oncoming drive field that surrounded the Skywatch cruiser Spruance. They accelerated into the larger ship’s path exactly as designed.

“Threat board!” Teller’s tactical officer rose to his feet. His shock harness fell away as he lunged forward, desperately trying to maintain sight of the horror story being told by his instruments. “Weapons in space! Vampire! Vampire!”

“Helm! Hard over! Emergency evasive!”

Spruance’s pilot knew his ship had about a 2% chance of surviving the order her captain had just given, so he split the difference and attempted a roll maneuver that wouldn’t create the same course delta but would potentially keep the cruiser’s lateral edges out of the path of whatever was coming their way. The problem was Roidbuster weapons didn’t work like missiles. They operated more like ink clouds from octopi. Simply touching them was enough to plunge an enemy vessel into the interplanetary equivalent of a zone of darkness.

Cobalt weapon one detonated at a range of only 727 miles. Spruance had hundredths of a second to react, which made humans ineffective practically by default. The time it took for human nerve impulses to reach muscles was far too long for such narrow tolerances. Weapon two detonated 0.6 seconds later. Spruance veered port, sidestepped the fast moving cloud of death released by weapon one and screamed directly into the center of cloud two.

The vessel’s battle computer, which was able to react quite a bit faster than the men and women who programmed it, scrammed the ship’s weapons systems all at once. Sixteen overloaded fusion torpedos fired in one massive barrage and instantly impacted the dense wall of junk that cobalt mine two had jettisoned into space. The closest torpedo detonated at nine miles and flattened Spruance’s starboard shields. A second fusion burst went off aft of the cruiser’s position and knocked out her engines. Teller’s drive field fluctuated and collapsed. The sudden re-introduction of Newtonian physics almost overcame the automatic safety mechanisms built into Spruance’s shields. The ship expended the very last watt of energy in its battle screens to keep its hull in one piece. The remaining torpedos slammed and yanked the cruiser as it spiraled out of position. A final blast punched the port hull and threw the ship into an uncontrolled flat spin.

Lieutenant Bart Morley staggered to the conn and knelt by the captain. He turned Teller over and saw the bloodsoaked face of a man who had given the last of his strength to defend human populations. The commander was alive, but he would need heroic medical intervention.

“XO to sickbay! Medical teams to the bridge!” Something that sounded like a combination of a faraway shout and growling static crackled over the 1MC. “Get me a damage report!”

All Morley could hear was coughing and the thrum of below-decks energy and automatic defensive systems attempting to address the near-fatal impact Spurance had just suffered. “Helm! Status! Does the bridge have positive control!”

“Aye, sir. Bridge has control of the rudder!” came the tentative reply. There was too much smoke drifting through the bridge to see the helm clearly from the conn. A fire had broken out at navigation and was being put out by two able crewmen with a portable suppressor.

“Thrusters and engines at station keeping!”

“Negative, lieutenant! Engines off-line! Only aft thrusters are responding. Our drive field is down. Screens are down. Spruance is drifting!”

What Morley and his remaining officers didn’t know was Maiden’s Ransom had reversed course. She was approaching Spruance’s position with the rest of her weapons fully charged and locked.

TO BE CONTINUED

Fusion Cruiser Spruance CL+ 76
Hammer’s Tomb Deflection Zone
CDR Francis Teller Commanding
Mission Time 3887.16 Tango Zulu

“Hold your course, helm! Thirteen degrees inclination!”

Deck one was rigged for red. The ship was at general quarters. An Alliance upgraded fusion cruiser, carrying one of the most advanced weapons loadouts ever authorized for a Skywatch warship, hurtled through space at alarming speeds, straining against its own drive field. Its enemy was on the run, headed into a star system that had been gradually torn to pieces by the leviathan only one light-hour from its outermost planet’s orbit. The Omicron 474 singularity was not quite in the same kind of hurry as the tiny spacecraft that had spent the better part of two hours navigating past its treacherous gravity distortions, but within a hundred millennia or so, it was expected to tear the insides out of the doomed red sun that dominated the system known as “Hammer’s Tomb.”

The system was technically inside Atlantis space, which made it generally off-limits for Core Alliance vessels, be they military or civilian. That meant it was a secretive haven for the kinds of ships and operations that preferred to remain invisible to Skywatch. There were five planets, only two of which remained intact. The impossibly powerful gravitational forces had pulled the entire system into what amounted to a choreographed decaying orbit. This presented more than a few challenges for guests, not the least of which was the fact that the tidal forces aimed at intact planets or large asteroids were intense enough that surface temperatures were often as much as 200 to 300 degrees higher than normal. The star was gradually accelerating into its decline, pulling everything with it while Omicron applied lateral gravity. While the solar wind from the oversized giant accelerated and gravitational forces created lensing effects that made true navigation by the stars almost impossible, time itself sped up and slowed down at random intervals.

The tactical realities were beyond imagining. Only a madman would voluntarily order their ship into such a place, even if it weren’t marked with the name “Tomb” on star maps. Then again, there was an equally compelling case to be made only a madman would pursue an enemy into the spacetime equivalent of Hell itself.

“We are now inside Atlantis space and in violation of Skywatch regulations!” the XO shouted.

The skipper of DSS Spruance looked ready to leap out of his command chair. His crew wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he did. The roar on the bridge of the recently upgraded Alliance warship was almost unbearable. Only the vessel’s massively overbuilt energy systems were keeping her drive field intact as she howled through space at the edge of one of the most unpredictable systems on Skywatch charts. Only a few hundred miles ahead of her the plasma trailing shadow of her target flickered as it ran for its life. Instruments were unreliable. Inteference was everywhere. Tiny asteroids were burned to ash as they impacted the cruiser’s battle screens.

Not far ahead was contact Reflector Six, the vessel confirmed to have opened fire on both of Spruance’s escorts without provocation.

“Weapons status!” Teller barked.

“Fusion overloads holding, but just barely sir!” the tactical officer responded.

Francis Teller had ordered his cruiser’s newest and heaviest weapons to arm themselves inside their launchers. Spruance was holding eight globes of barely restrained destructive power inside precision tuned magnetic fields so delicately balanced, a variation of half a percent in relative polarities would disrupt the containment shielding and turn a cluster of unrestrained supernovas loose inside the ship’s hull. They were essentially Molotov cocktails that had to be held while lit, at least until the firing ship had a target solution. Overloaded torpedos, on the other hand, were designed to be launched at once, preferably at unimaginable speeds along a vector directly away from the ship and crew. But Teller’s mind was elsewhere. He knew the capabilities of the system, and he knew he could push them if necessary. He didn’t just want to damage his target. He wanted to vaporize it. One thing working in his favor was the fact the space equivalent of an eternal typhoon with 200 foot radioactive waves might do the job before he needed to pull the trigger.

“Go to one hundred ten percent! Shift all reactors blue offsets! Maximum ambient!”

Aboard the new upgraded class of Skywatch warship, an energy officer was posted to the bridge. Their job was to balance fuel and capacitance flows throughout the sleek vessel’s gigantic transmission and storage matrix. Spruance was no longer just a formation cruiser assigned to gunnery in support of a flagship. Now she was a rabid pack animal, engineered for blood hunger and swiftly overtaking prey. Her captain had driven his crew through a 12-week crash course in pure ship versus ship violence while he studied the capabilites of the brand new Jaguar fusion torpedo banks Spruance had acquired. At the moment, however, it was that energy officer who was looking to the XO for help. Commander Teller had ordered his ship’s entire battery to overload status, something which had never been attempted in combat and certainly was never meant to be held in capacitance for long. The stability of the dampening fields was nearing critical.

“Sir, we’ve got thirty seconds before all the line temperatures reach maximum tolerance!” the XO shouted. The rattling and thunderous subsonic vibrations were threatening to create spikes in the bridge’s pressurized atmosphere. The air temperature was approaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit despite the environmental controls’ feverish attempts to restore proper humidity and circulation.

“Get me a target lock, tactical!”

“We can’t close range, sir! Reflector Six drive field integrity is two points above amplitude and climbing!”

Teller pounded his fist on the arm of his command chair. “Damn the weapons lock! Maximum overload aspect for proximity targeting! Bracket pattern!”

“Weapons one and two calibrated. Red charge!”

“Fire!”

The bridge lights dimmed as Spruance’s forward fusion banks each launched two dangerously overloaded bolts of ravenous contained plasma. The weapons shrieked across the inky gloom of space, crossing tens of thousands of miles in fractions of a second. Each punched a strobing hole in the darkness as it detonated. The cruiser heedlessly tore through its own weapons’ shockwaves and continued bearing on its enemy.

“No effect! Reflector Six maintaining range!”

“Fire two!”

Again the power systems fluctuated as the cruiser’s secondary banks each fired twice. Again a barrage of blinding weapons lanced through the void. Painful eruptions of unstable energy flashed and burned in space. Teller’s ship blasted through the unbearable heat and radiation once more, its shields ripping gashes in the spherical bursts. Spruance emerged. Its instruments cleared and rapidly re-acquired their target.

The unidentified attacker was losing speed. Teller’s ship was closing. The commander’s fingers closed tight around the edges of the command consoles on either side of the center seat. If he could overtake Reflector Six his energy banks would have a clean shot at its engines. He needed another ten seconds. Just ten more seconds and his crazed pursuit would bring the enemy vessel within range of his guns.

It was the single-minded fixation on gaining those last few hundred miles that put DSS Spruance squarely inside her enemy’s target envelope.

What Commander Teller didn’t know was that the enemy ship was preparing the kind of attack that didn’t require the enormous energy loads of a fusion cruiser’s weapons. The Jaguar Torpedo system was tremendously capable and far more versatile than most weapons of its type. The Alliance had invested catastrophic amounts of labor, materials and risk to bring them to the battlefield. Fusion torpedos were the weapon that had to work, because the alternative was unthinkable. They were supposed to give captains the option to fire an “energy missile” that didn’t require fuel, guidance systems, complex electronics or a physical vehicle and warhead. Fusion torpedos were weapons with their own modified drive fields guided by the firing ship and its sophisticated targeting scanners rather than on-board tracking. The tradeoff was that the firing ship had to become essentially a fifty-thousand-ton capacitor built around an absolutely massive reactor structure covered with high energy targeting arrays. It did what it was supposed to do, but at a cost. In the great balancing act of firepower vs. defense vs. speed, the super-fast weapon-encrusted fusion cruiser had to give something up.

Unfortunately, Spruance’s enemy and its choice of weapons were about to expose her primary vulnerability.

TO BE CONTINUED