A New Enemy Opens Fire on DSS Spruance

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