“Someone want to read off what this is telling us?” Roslyn suggested. “Jordan?”
Mage-Lieutenant Jordan coughed and studied the screen.
“We’re looking at the offensive laser suite,” the pale blonde officer with the watery blue eyes noted. “Batteries Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta.” She gestured at each section as she indicated them. “Each section has four ten-gigawatt battle lasers, and the color-coding is warning us that the capacitors are only at one-third charge.
“Oh.” She paused with a questioning tone as she looked at the notations. “That’s handy. It’s showing the current capacitor charge rate and how many shots until we’re dry with current levels and charge rates.”
Jordan chuckled.
“That is, if anyone didn’t know it already, one.”
Roslyn joined in the general amusement at that. At battle stations, with the fusion reactors at full, the lasers would be charging fast enough to offset the Book’s set rate of fire for the weapons. With the capacitors charged, they could double that rate of fire for a very small number of shots.
“All right, everyone comfortable with the laser screens?” she asked.
“I need to play for a bit in the practice software, but I think most of the detail pages haven’t changed much,” Samuels noted. She held primary responsibility for the lasers and the teams who handled them.
“Good. So, next is…”
Roslyn swapped to another screen and looked at it for several long seconds.
“Okay, what am I looking at?” she finally asked. “I don’t recognize half of this iconography, and I’m reasonably sure I know all of our weapons.”
“Bombardment, I think,” Westcott said slowly. “That’s the standard impactor icon, but I’m not sure what the other four are.”
“Did we miss a memo?” Roslyn asked aloud, and one of the other Chiefs coughed. “Chief Trevis?”
Chief Janez Trevis was the juniormost of her three Chiefs, but he held the vague title of Weaponeer. He’d come up through the ranks as a missile operator and was responsible for coordinating with Logistics to make sure they had all of the weapons they needed.
“You might have missed it, yes,” the tanned man told her. “We received the new Talon Tens during our layover. They’re modular weapons, with multiple warhead options.”
He gestured at the screen.
“So, we can adjust the number of projectiles from five to ten and switch the warheads on each projectile.”
Roslyn studied the TOS display and nodded slowly. Now she knew what she was looking for, she saw the section of the report that told her that Song of the Huntress actually carried both the new Talon Ten and the older—but still new, introduced in the war—Talon Nine.
The Talon Nine was a nine-warhead MIRVed precision kinetic impactor, capable of taking out anything from an armored bunker to a city depending on dispersal and velocity.
The Talon Ten options were…complicated.
“Okay,” Roslyn conceded. “I’m guessing these new icons as cluster, penetrator, airburst, explosive and…”
The last icon looked like a crossed-out network transmission symbol.
“Electromagnetic pulse, sir,” Trevis confirmed. “We retained the standard impactor, but we gained two options for small and mid-size antimatter warheads for area destruction, as well as three specialty munitions.
“We now have an anti-vehicle munition that turns a single impactor into forty-four smart anti-vehicle missiles, an anti-bunker munition that is significantly denser and capable of penetrating up to four kilometers of stone, and an electromagnetic pulse warhead to disable enemy electronics.”
“I’m reasonably sure any enemy we’d run into would have hardened electronics,” Westcott pointed out. “What’s the point of an EMP warhead?”
“Depends on the enemy, I suppose,” Trevis replied. “We used to deal with a lot of terrorists, after all. Knocking out all electronics for a few hundred square kilometers might be necessary there.
“Plus, well, keep overloading it and even our electronics can shut down.”
“We can turn them back on if they do,” Roslyn countered. “But that can provide a few moments of critical vulnerability.”
She shrugged.
“It’s useful to have options, at least. Though god knows I have no desire to ever fire a planetary impactor!”
There was a chorus of agreement. Even in the war, the RMN had done everything in their power to avoid having to use their ground-attack munitions. Even the most basic mode of the new Talon Tens could easily destroy a city—and if Roslyn was reading the data correctly, Huntress now had the ability to deliver ten one-hundred-megaton warheads with near-perfect precision from a single missile.
That wasn’t killing cities. That was killing continents.
7
“Jump complete,” Roslyn reported, wavering slightly as the exhaustion washed over her. “Welcome to the Sorprendidas System, everyone.”
“Take your seat, Lieutenant Commander,” Daalman ordered gently. Roslyn was still on watch, though the expectations were always low for a post-jump watch.
Chief Westcott was already at her station, pulling the default information the Captain would want now that they’d arrived at their destination. Roslyn dropped heavily into her seat next to the NCO and tapped a command to mirror the Chief’s screen.
“What are we seeing, Tactical?” Daalman asked.
“Chief?” Roslyn said, clearly passing the question to Westcott to make sure the NCO got credit. She could read the analysis Westcott was doing off the screen in front of her, but that would be rude as far as she was concerned.
“Geography is as expected,” Westcott reported crisply. “Two balls of burnt rock, a habitable planet named Sorprendidas, two balls of frozen rock, an asteroid belt and two outer gas giants.
“Scans show Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice is in Sorprendidas orbit,” she continued. “Flagging space installations throughout the system, but nothing materially off from the reports we received prior to our arrival.
“Thank you, Chief Westcott,” Daalman said. “Chief Zaman? Fire up the Link and inform Command that we have arrived.”
Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice was a pre-war design that lacked anything resembling faster-than-light communication. Before the war with the Republic, the only form of interstellar communication available to humanity had been the Runic Transceiver Arrays, large and complex magical installations that only transmitted the voice of a Mage.
But the
