“All hands, this is the XO,” Miguel’s voice boomed through the 1MC. “Battle stations. Repeat, battle stations. This is not a drill.”
“Warm up CiWS, get the counter-missiles in their tubes, and prep our shipkiller birds. Charge railgun and laser capacitors. Go full active on radar/lidar. They’re not bothering to hide so we may as well paint them like a fresco,” Susan said.
“CiWS and counter tubes hot. Ready boomers, bangers, and beams. Crank actives to eleven, aye!” Warner echoed with barely constrained glee.
Broadchurch turned in her chair to look at Miguel. “Alpha and beta rings charged, course plotted and laid into nav computer.”
“Blow the bubble, Charts,” Miguel said.
And they were off to the races.
Susan’s jaw tensed against the usual discomfort. She ignored it, the bubble popped an almost imperceptibly brief time later, and the angry glowing ember of Bandit One blazed directly ahead of her in the plot.
“Deploy drones, standard defensive shell formation. Put a monocle between us and Bandit One.”
Miguel repeated the order, Mattu echoed it, and the Ansari bucked ever so slightly as eight recon drones were booted out of their nests and raced out to form a sensor perimeter. One platform was a little lighter and faster than the others as it streaked through the black to take up position ten thousand kilometers ahead of its mother and in direct line of sight between Ansari and the Xre interloper. It was already in the process of deploying a flat lens made of multiple, concentric, metamaterial rings twenty meters across. All lasers, no matter how powerful and focused, diffused over long-enough distances, reducing their offensive power. The “monocle” drone was the CCDF’s answer, refocusing the beam in midflight so it hit the target with the same punch as if it had closed to knife-fighting range.
It was a devilishly difficult trick to pull off, keeping three independently maneuvering combatants in perfect alignment, especially when the one on the receiving end was so strongly motivated to keep it from happening. It was usually reserved for an ambush role. Most commanders wouldn’t even bother putting a monocle into play in an active battlefield.
But Susan wasn’t most commanders. To her, the “common knowledge” that it was useless to deploy one in a hot zone was the strongest recommendation she could think of to try it. If her own people wouldn’t expect and plan for it, neither would a Xre.
“Helm, take us three degrees off reciprocal bearing with Bandit One, but keep our keel guns pointed down their throat,” Susan said.
“Three degrees off bore, aye mum.” Broadchurch punched the command into their station. The Ansari answered the helm almost instantaneously and imperceptibly. The fusion rockets at her stern could vector their thrust up to twenty-seven degrees using the same magnetic constriction rings that kept the inconceivably hot plasma from contacting, and thereby vaporizing, their internal components.
“Status of Bandit One?”
“Unchanged, mum,” Mattu said. “Still burning hot and heavy straight for the line.”
“Have they deployed drones?”
“None that our platforms have picked up yet, mum. Not that it means much. They’re damned hard to spot even in ideal conditions.”
“Keep looking, Scopes. If we can poke out a few of their eyes, all the better.” Susan punched a string of commands into her chair. The data readout above the main plot changed to a countdown to the projected moment Bandit One would cross the treaty line, counting down both time and kilometers in bright crimson numerals.
“That’s our deadline, people. We have to scarecrow big and loud enough before then to turn them away so we don’t have to kill them.”
“We know the drill, mum,” Warner said.
“Respectfully, Weps, but I don’t think they’re running a drill this time.”
“CL on deck!” the marine guard called out. Nesbit stepped through the hatch into the CIC with confidence, centered, in a freshly pressed shirt.
“What do we have here, Captain?”
“Incursion attempt number three,” Susan said. “I think they’re serious this time.”
“Well, you did shove a giant rock up their … do they have asses?”
“Cloaca, technically,” Miguel said to a round of nervous laughter from the assembled crew.
“You think they’re really going to cross the line?” Nesbit asked.
“We’re operating under that assumption. With their oiler scattered across an AU, their backs are against the wall. They may not even have enough left in the tanks to get home. If they’re running on fumes, their only chance is to go through us and pillage the factory over Grendel and bolt before fleet HQ sends reinforcements.”
“Why hasn’t that happened yet?” Nesbit asked. “We’ve been fucking around out here with an unknown cruiser class that out-masses us by fifty percent for weeks. The Admiralty seriously couldn’t shake a frigate loose to back us up?”
“I’ve asked that very question several times at ever-increasing volume,” Susan said. “Their answers have not been inspiring.”
“They’ve just kicked up to emergency burn, mum,” Mattu reported, professionalism tamping down on the anxiety lurking at the edges of her voice.
“Match them.”
Everyone in the CIC looked at her. They knew Ansari was capable of emergency flank speed, they’d been the first crew to take her out after refitting. Running at full military thrust was part of passing her space trial certifications.
But that had happened in the safety of the fleet’s testing range with a chaser corvette monitoring their progress, not with an alien cruiser bristling with weapons and threatening death bearing down on them. The order to go to emergency flank speed, even more than destroying the oiler remotely, brought the true gravity of their situation crashing home.
“Well?” Miguel barked angrily. “Don’t just sit there staring into each other’s slack-jawed cake holes. You heard the lady, start burning antimatter!”
“Yes, sir!” Broadchurch answered, the spell broken. “Ramping up to emergency flank speed.”
“Our monocle will have trouble keeping up at these relative velocities if we start maneuvering very hard, mum,” Mattu said.
“Noted, Scopes. Do your best,” Susan answered without taking her eyes off the countdown. The distance and time fell away with renewed enthusiasm under such hard acceleration. Much longer, and both of them would build up so
