Honor Bound

“At current acceleration, approximately…” he glanced at another readout, “twenty-two minutes.”

“Stay on course, Commander Witten,” Minishimi ordered, eyes on the screen, voice resolute. “Increase acceleration to 2g’s, but keep on the ships. We’re going to have to count on the Bradley to engage the ramships that headed for Earth; we are it out here until the cislunar gunboats get close enough to engage, so we have to do as much damage as possible.” She called up the connection to the Engineering section. “Commander Prieta, we are most likely going to be experiencing one or more drive field intersects. If there’s anything you can do to make sure we survive them as a combat-ready asset, I swear I will buy you a drink in Paris.” Her mouth quirked into a wry smile. “If we live.”

“I’ll do my best, Captain,” Prieta assured her, chuckling appreciatively.

“Increasing acceleration to two g’s,” Witten fed power to the drives and was crushed into his seat as the Decatur leaped ahead toward the next set of enemy ships.

* * *

Drew Franks felt claustrophobic constrained in the acceleration couch behind the Captain, but a memory of Perez’ lifeless body kept him securely strapped in, even at 1g.

“The bogies are in a globe formation,” Lt. Wolford said. “Three thousand kilometer spread between each drive bubble. Closest bogey is…” He double-checked the display. “…three minutes out at current acceleration. My best intercept course is to take the lead ship, then circumnavigate the globe formation from north pole to south.” He shrugged. “Until they react to us, then it all goes out the window.”

“How long before we can try to disrupt the drive field on the closest target?” Lee asked him.

“From the specs that Commander Infante sent to my station,” Wolford guessed, “we will be in range in two minutes, fifteen seconds.” He shook his head. “It’s going to be close: if we want to use Gauss cannons on her, we’ll have to shut off our drive field and that’s going to make it even trickier to intercept the others…”

“Why bother?” Franks wondered out loud. He reddened a bit at Lee and Wolford’s questioning and annoyed glances, but he pushed the embarrassment aside and expounded. “Look, we have to stop them either way… so, don’t shut down our drive field at all. Use the modified sensor beams to shut down theirs, then just ram them. If their field shuts down, they’re toast and we keep right on going.” He shrugged fatalistically. “If it doesn’t work, we can at least take out one of them before we’re incapacitated.”

“Sound strategy,” Wolford said with a nod, a bit of surprise and perhaps respect in his voice. “It might work.”

“You’re awfully cavalier about risking all our lives, Lt. Franks,” Lee commented quietly, regarding him with an expression that he thought might have been hiding a profound fear.

“Ma’am,” he reminded her, “my butt’s sitting right behind yours.” He laughed wryly. “I’m twenty-five years old; trust me, I don’t want to die. But this is our job, right? If we don’t do it, who will?”

Lee didn’t respond immediately, staring for a moment at the viewscreen and the approaching enemy ships. “Do it, Lt. Wolford. It’s the best chance we have.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Wolford said. “Requesting helm control to my station.”

“Helm is yours, Tactical,” Bevins told him, releasing the controls to his station.

“Coming into range,” Wolford murmured, eyes glued to the display, where a pale red globe around the ship’s icon indicated the range of the modified sensor emitters. That red expanse was just ready to overlap the drive bubble of the first bogey, a wickedly Spartan silver wedge in the projection. “Firing gravimetic pulses now.”

Had someone been watching what happened with the naked eye, they would have seen precious little. Perhaps they might have noticed the distortion of the starfield as the Eysselink drives stretched and folded and spindled the fabric of space-time, but little else. The ship’s computer, however, gave a much more satisfying recreation of events: the blocky monolith of the Bradley plodded forward, surrounded by a shimmering globe of unreality that represented the drive field, approaching another, identical globe with the silver wedge of the ramship at its center. Then a wavering line of uncertainty connected the Bradley to the ramship’s drive field for a fleeting moment and suddenly the ramship was naked to the universe, its drive field dissipating in a wash of quantum foam.

“Her drive field’s down and…” Wolford’s booming announcement cut short as their own Eysselink field rammed directly into the unprotected ramship and it abruptly ceased to be, torn to subatomic particles in a sun- bright release of energy.

“Yes!” Franks yelled exultantly, pumping a fist, his cheers echoed by the rest of the bridge crew.

“At ease on the bridge!” Lee ordered, but Franks could see the grin brightening her face. “Take us to the next target, Lt. Wolford! Increase acceleration to two g’s!”

“Aye, ma’am, increasing acceleration.”

Franks felt the hand of Newton pressing him back into his couch with twice his normal 75 kilograms and saw the Bradley rushing forward on a hemispherical curve toward the next ship in the globe formation. Through a pounding pulsebeat in his head he heard Wolford: “Firing emitters at second target.”

And just as quickly as before, the next wedge-shaped enemy vessel was nonexistent. For a moment, Franks dared to hope that they might be able to take out the whole flight of ramships, but then… “They’re breaking!” Wolford warned, and on the display Franks could see that the four remaining Eysselink drive ships were breaking out of the globe formation, two of them increasing to 3g’s acceleration and maneuvering straight down from their previous plane of inclination while the other two…

“Two of them are trying to pincer us!” The two ships were on opposite sides of the Bradley‘s line of advance, trying to trap the Republic cruiser between them.

“Shift course to follow the other two and increase to 3g’s!” Lee barked.

Franks tightened his stomach muscles and tried to prepare himself, but the crushing weight still squeezed the air from his lungs and his vision was reduced to a narrow tunnel. For a moment, he was certain he was going to pass out, but then he forced himself to drag in a shallow breath and clenched the muscles in his gut and his vision widened out again enough for him to see the Bradley pursuing the two ships that had cut downward.

“Dammit,” Wolford grunted out, barely audible. “The two that were trying to trap us broke off now… they’re heading insystem again, at 4g’s.” There was a shallow rasp as the man struggled to get a breath. “Ma’am, we’re not going to be able to catch them all in time…”

Lee didn’t speak for a moment, and Franks thought perhaps she couldn’t, that the acceleration had rendered her unconscious. But then she said, with amazing clarity despite the g-forces: “Pursue the two ahead of us, Lt. Wolford. It’s the best we can do.”

Shit, Franks wanted to scream it but he couldn’t even whisper it. Shit, shit, shit!

How many people were going to die because he couldn’t do enough?

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“You should be in bed, Tom,” Shannon chided the man quietly as he leaned his head back against his seat, closing his eyes tiredly.

“And I suppose you’ve just been lying around relaxing this last week, ma’am?” Tom muttered in response, not opening his eyes.

Shannon squinted against the morning sun as the flyer headed east into the Texas sunrise, endless brown plains unfolding beneath them. “To be honest, Tom, I can’t remember the last time I slept more than an hour. But then, I didn’t get shot to shit just three days ago, and you did.”

“The docs say it’s healed up enough for me to be on my feet,” Tom said, shrugging slightly and wincing as it tugged at the healing wound in his neck. There was still an ugly red weal there, but that too would fade as the medical nanotech continued to do its work over the next few days.

Shannon shook her head, too exhausted to argue the point further.

“I still don’t know how that bastard snuck away,” Ari Shamir growled from the pilot’s seat. “I mean, you dropped him off in the middle of fucking nowhere Nevada, right? How the hell did he slip satellite coverage?”

Roza reached over from the copilot’s seat and patted his arm. Ari had been growling quite a bit the last