Honor Bound

“What?” Minishimi frowned. That was monumentally stupid, even for a Protectorate captain. The Eysselink field warped the space-time around the starship… the same effect that had shunted aside the Gauss gun rounds would rip an enemy ship to pieces if it got that close. “Well, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake,” she shrugged. “Maintain course, prepare for high-g decal… we want to do maximum damage when the drive field hits him.”

“Preparing for high-g deceleration, aye,” Helm responded, sounding the alarm klaxon.

“What the fuck?” Gianeto blurted, staring at the sensor display. “Captain, I’m reading an Eysselink drive signature on the trailing ship!”

Joyce Minishimi felt her stomach drop away from her in a manner not unlike transitioning to zero g, as a hundred thoughts overlaid themselves on her brain at once, coalescing into a stunning realization in less than a second: the Protectorates had a stardrive, but not enough antimatter to use it for propulsion, so they were going to make a suicide run with it, ramming the fields into each other in an effort to make them collapse.

“Helm!” Minishimi shouted, instinctively trying to rise from her chair but restrained by the safety straps. “Emergency burn, 30 degrees at seven g’s, now!”

There was no time for acknowledgements, no time to sound another warning. Witten followed the command as if he’d been thinking it himself and everyone on the ship felt their body crushed by the sudden, brutal acceleration… but only for a moment, because it wasn’t quite enough…

There was a wavering uncertainty on the main viewscreen as the two Eysselink fields touched and then Joyce Minishimi felt as if she had been turned inside out. She knew she was screaming in agony, but she couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel her body.

Is this what it feels like to die? She wondered.

Then reality snapped back like a rubber band that had been stretched too far and she was back in her acceleration couch, back in zero gravity and hurting everywhere. She heard a quiet, agonized moan coming from somewhere on the bridge and finally realized it was coming from her. The holographic displays were all dark, the only illumination coming from emergency chemical ghostlights that threw the bridge into a sharp, shadowed relief. The bridge crew were floating limp against their restraints, only one or two showing signs of consciousness.

“Eng…” She tried to talk but it came out a barely audible rasp. She coughed and shook her head, both of which caused far more pain than she’d imagined. “Engineering!” She called as loud as she could. Nothing. The engineering bridge officer was a slender, fragile-looking young Lt. Commander named Mehta, and from what she could see in the gloom, he was unconscious, his head lolling.

Forcing her hands to work, she touched the button on her ‘link’s ear bud. “Captain to Engineering.” Nothing. “Captain to Engineering, is anyone there?”

“Cap… captain,” a voice rasped in answer. She barely recognized it as belonging to Commander Prieta, the Chief Engineering Officer. “What happened?”

“They had an Eysselink drive,” Minishimi told him. “We touched fields.”

“Ah,” he sounded analytical, as if it were some fascinating experiment he’d been performing in the lab. “That makes sense. Our drive field projectors… as near as I can tell, every single relay is slagged, ma’am. The antimatter stores automatically ejected and our reactor flushed and shut down. All we have is the emergency batteries right now… and the automatic switches are burned out. Hold on for a minute, ma’am.” A long pause. “There you go.”

The bridge lights returned, and so did some of the sensor displays.

“Tactical,” Minishimi said. She saw Gianeto shaking his head, hands going to his forehead. “Commander Gianeto, I need a tactical report right now.”

“Ma’am, aye, ma’am,” he stuttered, trying to force his eyes into focus. “About half our active sensors are inoperable… we’re getting nothing from the gravimetic scans.”

“The drives are down and the reactor is offline. What can you see?”

“Ummm… yeah, there she is. The bogey with the Eysselink drive is still intact, as far as I can tell. I’m getting reactor signatures here… I think he has a fission power plant running. And he’s activated his fusion pulse drive. He’s heading towards us, ma’am.”

“Damn,” Witten swore. “How is that thing under weigh already? We’re trashed… I’ve got nothing but maneuvering thrusters right now.”

“Because he was built for that attack, Mr. Witten,” Minishimi said with grim admiration, shaking her head. “Antonov suckered us good. Put it onscreen Lt. Higgs.” The main display tank flickered fitfully and then the image of the strange, wedge-shaped enemy spacecraft solidified, with the green and blue of Peboan behind it. “Tactical, have we got anything to shoot at him?”

“No Gauss guns without the reactor, no lasers without the Eysselink field to focus them,” he shook his head. “I’m not even sure we have enough power to energize the EM launchers for the missiles, ma’am. We can launch some countermeasures, but that’s about it.”

“Engineering,” Minishimi called into her ‘link. “Any chance of getting the auxiliary drive back online?”

“I’m working on it, ma’am,” Prieta reported, still unflappable. “We have to build up a charge in the capacitors though, and it’s slow on batteries. I can get the fusion reactor online in another…” He hesitated, checking his figures. “…call it seventeen minutes. Then another few minutes before the plasma drive coils are charged. Less than half an hour.”

“Oh, I don’t think we have quite that long to live, Commander,” Captain Minishimi told him. “I am sure we’d all appreciate whatever you could do to expedite matters.”

“I’ll do what I can, Captain,” he assured her cheerfully.

“I don’t think the bogey has Gauss guns, Captain,” Gianeto said thoughtfully. “She might not have the room for weapons pods with the gear for the Eysselink drive and antimatter storage crammed in there. I’m not seeing anything that looks like Gauss guns or lasers on her hull. She might have missiles, or…” He looked back at her. “She might be intending to ram us.”

“Time?” She snapped, staring at the display.

“Not much,” He shook his head. “She should be well past us and heading the opposite direction, but when our fields touched, I think it absorbed all of our momentum and fed it into the gravito- inertial spectrum as gravity-analog stress. That’s what knocked us for a loop. It left us both drifting pretty slow in the same long orbit around the primary star. She should be able to match velocities with us in less than twenty minutes.”

“That’ll be suicide for all the crew,” Witten protested weakly.

“Not if their Eysselink generator is still working,” Minishimi corrected him. “Then it’s just us that gets crushed.” And didn’t it feel shitty to be on the other side of that equation. Well, no use letting the clock run out with time outs still on the board. “Helm, full maneuvering thrusters… whatever we have left. Aim us for a lower energy orbit. Maybe we can buy some time.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Witten replied without enthusiasm. They could barely feel the gentle jolt as the maneuvering thrusters-solid-fuel rockets powered by small, isotope reactors-began nudging them slowly out of the way of the enemy ship. It was pointless, but it was all she could do…

“What the hell…” Gianeto breathed, staring at the sensor readout in disbelief. Minishimi opened her mouth to chide him for cursing when she saw the monolithic shape of a Republic starship appear on the main viewscreen, its image distorted by an Eysselink drive field as it brushed within a hundred kilometers of the Protectorate vessel.

The Republic cruiser was gone in an eyeblink and the Protectorate vessel was quite abruptly ripped to shreds, consumed in a savage explosion of fused hydrogen, fissile uranium and matter/antimatter. But many of those shreds were still headed their way…

“Tactical, are we going to clear this orbit before what’s left of the ship hits us?” She demanded quickly, snapping Gianeto out of his amazed speechlessness.

“Umm… yes, ma’am,” he stuttered. “It’s still got the same heading more or less, but it’s not accelerating anymore. It’ll take over an hour to get here.”

“Who the hell was that?” Witten asked what the rest of them were thinking.