Orion Among the Stars

When I returned to the bridge I asked Frede, “How close to the planet can you put us?”

She looked up from her navigational screens, bleary-eyed from concentration and lack of sleep. “Fifty planetary diameters,” she answered. “Half a million klicks. Right smack in the middle of their major defense belt.”

“Good,” I said. “Perfect.”

Then she added, “If the ephemeris data in our computer’s memory files is up-to-date.”

“It should be,” I said.

With a sardonic grin she replied, “Right. It should be.” She put a slight but noticeable accent on the word should. “If it’s not we could hang our asses on the wrong side of the planetary system. Or crash into the planet’s surface.”

Pleasant possibilities.

The ephemeris data was correct and Frede’s navigation was practically flawless. The only factor that we did not foresee—could not have foreseen—was that the Skorpis had decided to attack Loris without waiting for us to appear.

We slowed out of superlight and into the middle of a full-scale battle. The sky was filled with warships and orbital battle stations slashing at each other with laser beams and nuclear-tipped missiles.

Apollojounced and shuddered as a Skorpis dreadnought loomed directly before us, firing its main battery at a Commonwealth orbital station, but turning its secondary laser banks squarely upon us.

I barely had time to yell, “Battle stations!” Control of the ship automatically went to my command chair; the keyboards set into the ends of my armrests now directly controlled all the ship’s systems. The rest of the bridge crew were there strictly as backup for me.

My intention was to get to the surface of Loris, but in the midst of this battle that was going to be impossible. The planet’s defensive shields were up, powered by every mega-joule their ground-based generators could produce.

Swiftly I took in the situation. The Skorpis attackers were not bothering with the planet. They were trying to knock out the belts of defensive stations that orbited Loris. With fanatical bravery they had come as close to the planet as we had before slowing below superlight, risking collisions and even crashes into the planetary surface in their eagerness to surprise the Commonwealth defenders.

Their tactic had worked. They had bypassed the outer rings of defenses, farther out in the Giotto system. Those massive battle stations were in fixed planetary orbits tens of millions of kilometers from Loris. They could be moved, but it would take most of the power they needed for their weapons to activate their propulsion systems and bring them into the battle. And it would take time, too much time for them to make a difference in the battle’s outcome.

Most of the Commonwealth fleet was elsewhere, fighting the war on other fronts. The Skorpis had gambled virtually every ship they possessed, as I feared they would, for this one killing stroke at the Commonwealth’s capital. Now they were fighting to knock out Loris’s belts of defenses and the few ships that the planet could send up. Neutralize the Common-wealth’s orbital defenses and the planet itself lay open to bombardment and invasion.

No telling how long the battle had been going on. In the display screens I saw the hulks of blasted ships drifting lifelessly, saw an orbital station riddled with holes, its spherical hull ripped open and bubbling hot metal. Fragments of shattered ships and stations swirled past us; some of them might have been the bodies of humans or Skorpis, they blew past us too fast for me to tell.

I saw a Skorpis dreadnought slugging it out with an orbital station, laser beams lancing back and forth, splashing off their defensive screens in wild coruscations of light. I slipped the Apollo under the giant Skorpis warship’s belly, probing with our sensors for a weak section in her screen. They were putting most of their power into the forward screen, where they faced the orbital station.

I found a weak spot and fired our one and only bank of lasers at it. The screen went blank and the hull of the dreadnought began to blacken and peel back, curling like leaves in a flame. The dreadnought shuddered; then a huge explosion racked its innards and it stopped firing. The orbital station kept on blasting at it, and the dreadnought broke apart into molten chunks of metal and plastic and flesh.

We had killed it like a foot soldier slips his stiletto between the armor plates of a mounted warrior.

“Six o’clock high!” sang out one of the sensors as the ship shuddered from a direct hit. Our screen held, barely, as a deadly battle cruiser sailed past us, firing another salvo. We fired back, to no effect.

The battle lost all semblance of cohesion. It turned into a thousand separate fights between individual ships and the massive orbital stations. I saw one of the few Commonwealth warships capable of maneuver exchanging shots with two Skorpis dreadnoughts at the same time; it bloomed into a brilliant flare of radiance as it exploded. Then one of the dreadnoughts was caught in a crossfire from two orbital stations. The heavy laser beams carved up the Skorpis vessel and left it drifting helplessly. Another ship burst apart in a titanic explosion.

There were no sounds on the bridge except the beeping of sensors, the tight, quick breathing of my crew and the steady background hum of machinery. No one said a word, their eyes riveted to the display screens as ships fired, turned, exploded in the deathly silence of space.

I drove the Apollo through the thick of the battle, desperately trying to maneuver closer to the planet’s surface, but it seemed as if every ship in the Skorpis fleet stood in my way. I knew that we were no match for dreadnoughts, neither in firepower nor defensive shielding, yet the battle was raging all around us, whether we liked it or not.

We could try to run in the other direction, get away from the fighting and seek safety by accelerating back to superlight velocity. Then a new fear struck at me. If it appeared that the Skorpis were going to win this battle and then attack Loris itself, Aten might very well leave the planet, escape to some other point in the continuum, leaving the rest of us here. Leaving Anya weak and dying.

I had no choice. I had to stay and fight and try to help the Commonwealth win.

I dove the Apollo toward the nearest orbital station, a huge massive globular structure studded with sensors and weapons. Hoping that my ship’s automated identification signals would keep the orbital station from frying us, I maneuvered as close to the station as I dared, taking up a minutes-long orbit around it like a bee circling its own hive.

Three Skorpis warships approached, firing as they came. Two of them were battle cruisers, the third a dreadnought. While Frede and the rest of the bridge crew watched silently, I darted our ship down below the two battle cruisers and scanned their defensive shields. Just as I had expected, they were shifting power to ward off the heavy blasts coming from the orbital station’s main batteries. I located the weakest part of the first battle cruiser’s shield and poured everything we had into it. The cruiser veered away, exposing its weakened belly to the orbital station. One salvo from the station’s heavy guns blew the Skorpis warship to pieces.

But the second battle cruiser turned to engage us, jolting the Apollo with hits from its main battery. Leaving the orbital station to duel with the lone dreadnought, I raced through the swirling carnage of the battle with that determined battle cruiser on our tail, firing at us steadily. No matter how I jinked our ship back and forth that cruiser stuck to us, as if the only thing in its captain’s mind was to avenge its sister ship.

Stubbornness is not an asset to a captain. I checked the display screens and saw that the battle had concentrated on one side of Loris’s defensive belt. There were stations on the far side of the orbit that were not being attacked. This made good sense, from the Skorpis point of view. They were concentrating all their forces on a part of the Commonwealth’s defenses, intending to overwhelm them and then destroy the remainder afterward. The orbital stations could not maneuver quickly; those on the far side of the battle could never reach the attackers in time to do any good.

But I could bring at least one of the attackers to the idling stations on the far side, if the Skorpis captain did not suddenly acquire a dose of good sense.

She did not. She followed me, closing, firing, making the bridge rattle and our defensive screens buckle. But she followed me for a few seconds too long. I zoomed the Apollo into range of the quiescent orbital stations and three of them opened fire on the Skorpis warship at once. It blew up in a giant fireball, the scattered fragments like blazing meteors all across the sky.

“Battle damage,” reported Dyer, from her damage-control console. “Hull open to vacuum in starboard stern. Sections fourteen and fifteen of deck two have been automatically sealed off.”