“All weapons charged and loaded. CiWS is hot. Decoys and AMMs charged in their tubes,” Warner barked a little too eagerly.
Susan looked to each member of her bridge shift in turn, taking a moment to consider their expressions. There was the anxiety everyone felt before combat, even the captain herself. But, lurking just below the apprehension was a hunger, an eagerness, even excitement. They were predators, after all. Patiently waiting at the center of a web spanning hundreds of millions of kilometers, ready to pounce. Their prey had become entangled once, only to slip free of the trap. And that just wouldn’t do.
Scared as they were, everyone present was thirsty for the rematch.
“Governor Honshu’s shuttle has reached minimum safe, mum,” Broadchurch announced. “We’re clear for maneuvering. Beta and Gamma rings queued up and ready.”
“Send the navigation alert, then blow our bubble.”
“Yes’m.”
“Lieutenant Warner.” Susan leaned forward in her chair just a hair. “Don’t be too itchy on that trigger finger.”
“Just put some cream on it before my shift, mum.”
“Uh-huh. Charts, if you please, blow me.”
Broadchurch smirked. “As you wish, mum.” They twisted a virtual icon, and Susan’s jaw started to hurt in the old familiar way. This time, honestly, she didn’t even mind.
If my jaw must hurt, let it be because I’ve tired it chewing on their bones, she thought with venom. Or is it their shells?
The tiny universe the Ansari created for itself popped before she could even finish the thought as they reemerged into the real cosmos almost thirteen AU from where they’d just been. The Xre ship had taken up position on the far side of the system from Grendel this time, so their drone data at the moment the bubble burst was a hundred and six minutes behind. Anything could have happened during the interim. Susan’s stomach did backflips while she stared intently at Ensign Mattu as she rushed to collect updated sensor data.
“Bandit One reacquired. They haven’t budged an inch. Wait one…” Everyone turned to face the Drone Integration Station. “They’re on the move. Drive plume just lit off and they’re changing their bearing to match our position. Heading for the Red Line.”
“Have they deployed drones?”
“Nothing on the scopes, mum. If they’re present, the Xre have them running passive.”
Susan rubbed the side of her jaw where the ache from the bubble lingered. They’d been here for the better part of two hours. It would be criminally incompetent not to have used at least some of that time getting recon platforms in place, and whoever was skippering the other boat had already proven themselves to be anything but.
“Well, it would be rude to keep them waiting. Helm, all ahead full. Reciprocal bearing to Bandit One.”
“Helm, all ahead full, reciprocal bearing to Bandit One,” Miguel echoed just below a shout.
“All ahead full, reciprocal bearing, aye!” Broadchurch completed the cycle. At the Ansari’s aft, an array of five radially mounted fusion rockets lit off simultaneously and throttled up from idle to their full capacity in less than a second. The ship’s artificial gravity adjusted automatically to compensate for the sudden acceleration so that the crew never felt more than the preprogrammed eight-tenths gravity, but it wasn’t instantaneous. For just a moment, Susan felt her ship pushing against the soles of her feet like a spurned beast.
At her fingertips was more combined combat capability and firepower than all but the most powerful nations of Earth at the turn of the last century. Her home could bring entire star systems to heel by itself if she so ordered it. And it was on the move, doing what it had been built to do, charging toward the enemy it had been designed to fight.
Despite the tension on the bridge, it made her smile.
“Aspect change!” Mattu shouted. “Bandit One’s acceleration just spiked. Gamma emissions indicate a full emergency military burn. Repeat, full emergency burn.”
That raised eyebrows. Susan looked up at Miguel’s face hovering as it always did just over her shoulder. Concern traced in lines across his forehead, but somehow managed not to reach his eyes.
Both human and Xre technology were close to evenly matched. Of course, if it had been otherwise at the moment of their intersection, one would have lost quickly and definitively to the other. Both species moved about the galaxy at FTL speeds using equivalent Alcubierre drive systems. And both moved about in normal space using antimatter/fusion hybrid rockets that under normal circumstances used small quantities of antiprotons as a catalyst to trigger a fusion reaction burning traditional deuterium or helium-3 fuels.
But, under extreme circumstances, a captain had the option to bypass the fusion reaction and move to direct matter/antimatter annihilation in their rocket plume by dumping raw antimatter into the reaction chamber. This provided half again as much thrust by converting nearly the entire volume of reactant mass directly into high-energy gamma radiation and allowed for higher acceleration rates than any fusion process. It was analogous to fighter jets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their afterburners. However, it also chewed through precious antimatter reserves at a simply scandalous rate, and bathed a ship’s vital components aft of the rad shielding in corrosive amounts of hard radiation, to say nothing of the inevitable seepage into the habitable compartments.
There was a reason it was called an emergency burn.
“Someone’s in an awful big hurry,” Miguel mused.
“Did we agree to a second date I’m not aware of?” Susan asked.
“Must have. Glad I shaved today.”
“You shave every day.”
“Not talking about my face, mum.”
Susan looked up and smacked him on the shoulder. “A time like this and you’re putting that image in my head? Seriously?”
“Just lightening the mood. What do you think they’re up to?”
“I think…” Susan paused, acutely aware of getting burned the last time she’d tried and failed to anticipate her opponent’s move. “… I think they’re trying to draw us past the Red Line. I think they’re baiting us, trying to get us to rush out to intercept them in free space.
