War Angel: part thirty-five

“Fire!”

Sarah watched her screens light up as the War Angel’s energy cannons flared to life.

“The energy cannons on the War Angel and her class of ships were really basic,” Jack had told her when they first began seriously planning the mission. “There are four of them, and they have pretty much a 360 degree firing radius. Very difficult, if not impossible, to get below them. Made it tough for Omegan fighter craft. They had to directly engage and hope to not get shot down. One cannon near the front on the top of the hull, one on the port side, one on the starboard, and one near the rear and on the bottom of the ship. It extends on a hydraulic arm when necessary so that it can hit targets behind the ship.”

She whistled. “Have to give the First Perioders credit- they weren’t kidding around.”

“Only eight ships, I imagine they had to go for broke in every aspect of building.”

“Do they fire bursts, or are they straight laser cannons?”

Jack brightened. “Both. Tactical officer sets the mode. Laser for specific targeting, bursts for bombardment.”

Cannon one and cannon four’s beams struck the Omegan ship with full force. The red bolts of energy pounded the enemy’s hull, sending chunks of twisted and damaged metal flying off the craft and spiraling into the distance. The Omegans, caught off-guard by the War Angel’s unexpected resistance, flailed about for a moment as their ship listed on its axis.

As the B-class cruiser suddenly struggled to right itself, though, the Omegans caught their first bit of good fortune as the War Angel caught their first bit of bad.

“Oh no!” Sarah yelled. “Missed shot! Missed shot!”

“What?!” Jack yelled.

“The first two hits moved their ship, making cannon four miss. And cannon three didn’t fire! I’m showing a malfunction in the energy transfer circuits!”

“We’re fucked,” Gina said glumly.

“Belay that!” Jack snarled at her. “Move us with them. Keep our weak side away from them, close in and be prepared for-“

The War Angel lurched and rocked as the Omegans opened fire and scored direct hits on their target. Alarms began wailing throughout the ship.

“Shield status?” Jack screamed above the din.

“Holding!” Sarah replied. “Strength is fine, but at this range, we’re going to feel the pounding. Inertial dampeners can only do so much!”

“Everybody strap yourselves in!” Jack ordered. “Return fire, Sarah! We’ve got to hit our target. Gina- pull in at point blank! If we’re right on top of them, their fighters will have no room to maneuver.” He looked back at Sarah. “Just in case they get some launched.”

She nodded at him. “Ready, Captain.”

“Fire at will,” he replied.

War Angel: part thirty-four

The comm speaker crackled to life as Sarah walked across the bottom of the War Angel’s outer hull. “I cannot believe,” she muttered, aggravation flowing from her voice, “that we have been doing this shit for two weeks.” The heavy space suit and magnetic boots made the walk slow-going, but they held her in place as she stared down at her feet. “First rule of not vomiting,” Jack told her, “is to look down and not out at the stars and lack of a horizon.”

It had proven to be good advice.

“Oh, come on,” Jack’s voice came back to her, hissing and popping through the speaker in her helmet. “You can’t tell me this hasn’t been fun.”

Sarah stopped in place and turned to face him. Jack was making his way from the other side of cannon four, their work finally completed. “There is absolutely not a single place in the universe where this would be considered ‘fun’, Jack.”

He snorted. “You are such a spoilsport! How many other college students are walking around doing E.V.A. right now? We’re lucky!”

“None. Not a single one. And you know why? Because they’re having fun you big jerk! They’re partying and having a good time! While we’re stuck… here.”

“You are sucking all the joy out of life, Sarah,” Jack said, walking up beside her. “We’re on the moon, woman! And soon we’ll be at the edge of the solar system. If that doesn’t qualify as awesome, I’m not sure what does.”

She held up a gloved hand and began counting on her fingers as she spoke. “Hot showers. Cold beer. Sitting on a beach and watching the sunset. A nap in the middle of the day. Discovering that you have more money than you thought. An ice cream sundae with extra whipped cream. Sex that leaves your body quivering. Those things, Jack,” she said, sarcasm rising up, “qualify as awesome. Scrubbing laser cannons clean and rebuilding their wiring systems while everyone is having fun do not. Period.”

Jack let out a heavy sigh. “Fine. Hey, look on the bright side- we’re basically done. All we have to do is check the relay systems along the hull and if they’re working, then we go hit the bar. Okay?”

“Let’s just get it over and done with,” she said, staring down at her feet again. “And we’re walking…”

War Angel: part thirty-three

“Coming around the final corner, Jack,” Kate yelled. “They’re going to have us on sensors any second now!”

“Hopefully their sensors won’t be able to read through the heat signature until it’s too late!” he responded. “With any luck, we’ll look like an asteroid until we pop out of the atmosphere!”

“Port shielding well past overload, Captain!” Sarah said, panic creeping into her voice. “The shock of exiting the atmosphere will probably kill multiple biogel packs.” She stopped, then added, “even the inoculated ones can’t take this pounding.”

“Understood,” Jack grimly replied.

“Exiting atmosphere in five seconds,” Gina announced. “And… mark!”

The War Angel entered a steep upward climb, creaking and groaning as it moved to escape the planet’s pull. They each grabbed onto something as the stress and strain of breaking away made the ship begin to shake furiously. Finally, with a sensation that felt like a rubber band had just been snapped, the ship found itself free and clear and racing ahead.

“Status!” Jack demanded.

Kate stared down the sensor screen and whistled. “Damn. That thing’s three times our size.”

The Captain turned his attention to Sarah. “Tactical?”

“Thirty seconds to firing range, Captain.”

“Orientation?”

Sarah took a second to look at her readout. “She has her top to us.” The young woman tapped the targeting screen. “Taking aim.”

“Jack!” Kate’s voice had a sense of urgency it had previously lacked. “Sensors show that their alarms have gone off and they are actively scanning us.”

“Are they preparing to send fighters?”

Kate shrugged. “Who knows? The landing bay is on the flip side of where we are and our sensors aren’t getting through all their shielding.” She continued parsing the data readouts that were rolling in, then suddenly shoved herself away from the console with a “Whoa.”

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

She pointed at a blinking light. “Comm is lit up. We’re getting incoming from the Omegan ship.”

Keys stood from the Captain’s chair. “Sarah- be ready. Gina- steady as she goes. Kate,” he took a breath and exhaled, “put it through.”

The deep and snarled voice that came through the comm speaker gave Richard chills. “Commander Earth vessel. You will slow down, pull alongside and prepare to be boarded for your journey back to Earth space. Do you understand and comply?”

Jack pressed down on the send button and mustered as much fake sincerity as he possibly could. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

The Omegan boomed in response. “You will prepare to be boarded or you will be destroyed. Comply!”

Sarah waived at Jack and held up eight fingers. Jack nodded at her, then tapped Gina on the shoulder. He pointed to Sarah, then pointed to the helm and drew his hand across his neck in a slicing motion. She nodded at him in understanding.

“Unable,” Jack said in a monotone, “to comply.” He reached down and shut off the comm system completely.

“Gina- now!” Sarah said. The young astrophysicist hit the full braking thrusters, and as she did, Sarah looked at the screen in front of her. Four laser cannons, four blinking buttons waiting to be pushed.

Jack’s head whipped around and he spotted Sarah anxiously awaiting the word.

And it was given.

War Angel: part thirty-two

The ride across Saturn’s upper atmosphere was extremely unpleasant.

Jack wiped the sweat out of his eyes as the War Angel careened through layers of gases and debris. The temperature inside the ship had risen past 130 degrees as the shields were sucking in power from multiple ship systems including the environmental controls.

“I’ve had worse days than this!” Jack yelled over the cacophonous sound that the heated metal of the hull was making as it was buffeted by high winds and combustion. “This is nothing!”

Sarah yelled back at him. “Your motivational skills are terrible!”

“You may have had worse days, Jack, but I haven’t!” Gina screamed, and then leaned over to vomit on the floor next to her station.

Seeing the nasty puddle on the ground, Jack began to re-think what he had just said.

“So how did this thing wind up here?” Sarah asked Jack as they completed their first tour of the War Angel. “Hard to believe it sat here all this time with no one knowing it.”

He nodded. “I was baffled by that, too. I read through the archives, and all they said was that the War Angel and her crew were lost in battle in 2035.”

“How many crew?”

“42.”

Sarah found herself impressed. “That’s pretty small for a ship this size. They must have worked really hard to keep this old bucket going.”

Jack stopped to look at a dead computer terminal. “From what I read in the family journals, that’s about right. I think they’d have loved to have more people on board, but the population had taken a pretty big hit at that point and qualified bodies weren’t easy to come by.”

“So how many do you think we’ll need for our little adventure?”

He scratched his chin. “Good question. If we throw a bit of modern computer equipment in here, we can automate most system functions. I’d say a small crew- maybe a dozen. Assuming we get it flying, of course.”

Sarah walked over to stand next to him. “What’s so interesting about this dead terminal?”

His hands slid across its face and down the front of the wall where the computer had sat lifeless for over a century. Jack’s fingers left a trail in the dust as he allowed his curiosity to guide him. “I don’t know. Doesn’t something about this seem… wrong… to you?” He knelt down on the floor.

Baffled, Sarah sat down next to him. “Wrong how?”

Jack stared at the wall. “I… this computer station. What did it do?”

“It could have done any number of things.”

His eyes went wide. “That’s just it. It really couldn’t have. Comm controls are elsewhere, and besides that, internal communications equipment wasn’t computer based. There are no real systems in this area of the ship. Nothing about this area suggests that it was of any importance except that it was on the way to being or doing something else.”

“Big deal. Ship design is full of redundancy and oddity.”

He turned to look at her. “Not back then. In that era, equipment and supplies were at such a low ebb that nothing was ever wasted. These things were only built with the necessities. They were stretching it pretty thin to get eight of them built.” Jack began probing the wall again with his fingers, tracing along until he stopped with a sudden jerk.

“What?” Sarah asked.

Jack’s face lit up and he began wiping away the dust from what appeared to Sarah to be a natural seam in the wall’s construction. As he did, though, she noticed that it didn’t quite match completely. “Is that seam raised?” she wondered. Jack nodded and began blowing dust out of the way to expose it. He stood as he went along, Sarah following his lead, until he had it completely wiped clean.

He pointed toward an area of the wall near to where the seam and the wall met at the floor. “See that?” She nodded. It was slight, but there was no mistaking that not only was the seam raised- more prominently as it got closer to the ground- there was also a small dent in the wall. A dent that pointed outward instead of inward.

“Jack, what the hell was inside this wall?”

“The better question,” he said quietly, “is who was inside this wall?”

War Angel: part thirty-one

A bead of sweat dripped down Richard’s nose. “10 seconds….” He wiped his hand across his face. “5 seconds… 3… 2… 1… scoop shutdown!”

The ship lurched and shuddered as the scoop released the tachyon and re-entered normal space. “Success…” Richard whispered to himself.

Jack jumped out of his seat and moved forward to the sensor station. “Status?”

Kate’s hands were a blur as they moved back and forth across keyboards and panels. “Hold on.”

“It’s kind of important…” he replied.

Her head snapped around. “Then I’d better not fuck it up. So HOLD ON,” she said with a glare.

Jack backed away and turned his attention to Gina. “Helm?”

She turned toward him, wearing a look of astonishment. “As hard as it is for me to believe, our course is exactly what we programmed.” She pointed at Richard. “His crazy thing didn’t tear off or send us spiraling.”

Richard held his hands high over his head in a mocking sign of victory.

“I hate to interrupt your moment of triumph, Clover,” Kate interjected, “but we’re in deep shit.”

“What? Why?” Jack asked.

Kate jabbed a thumb in Richard’s direction. “His little toy didn’t come with proper brakes.”

“Braking thrusters are on,” Gina calmly replied.

Stinson shook her head. “Not enough for the speed we’re carrying. In about ninety seconds, we’re going to round Saturn, come right up behind that ship for about half a minute, then whip right past them and keep going. By the time we make a second pass, they’ll have launched and be ready for us.”

A sickening silence crossed the bridge. Finally Jack spoke up.

“How do we slow down right now?” he asked.

Gina stood up from her chair, her eyes closed tight. Suddenly her hands began tapping against her body in rhythmic fashion, and she began talking to herself, lips moving but making no sound. Baffled, the rest of the crew watched until her eyes flew open and she dropped back down into her seat. “We dive,” she said. “We dive.”

“Use the atmosphere…” Richard said. “It’ll have to be done right or we’ll fry…”

Sarah began making calculations on the shields screen as Gina began plotting a course to skim them along the atmosphere. As she typed, Sarah became more and more distressed. Her brow furrowed as she re-did her math. But nothing changed.

“Captain, the ship’s shields and armor were designed to handle the energy of laser cannons and the impacts of small asteroids. But the heat and energy from an atmospheric burn? No. We do this and at bare minimum we’ll lose the shields almost completely on whatever side of the ship we skate on.”

Jack looked at Gina. “Helm?”

“I’m out of other ideas.”

Kate’s voice was flat as she spoke. “We don’t do this and we lose the element of surprise. We’ll be facing a lot more than one single ship.”

Jack swiveled around to look at Sarah. He hoped she would offer another idea, give him a way to not damage the ship and yet maintain the shock needed to complete this mission. Instead she gave him a look of cold pity, a look that said “you wanted to be captain and play hero, so now you’re stuck with it.”

“Make your dive, helm,” Jack said, never taking his eyes away from Sarah.

“We’ll protect our crispy side as best we can once we attack.”

War Angel: part thirty

Jack had called them to the dining table to lay out his plan.

“As you can see on screen, there is a single B-class battle cruiser in orbit around Saturn. Compliment of 1000 Omegans, 200 individual fighters. That’s the bad news,” he told them.

Kate, freshly showered and shoveling down a plate of food, asked the question that they each on their mind. “There’s good news?”

The new captain of the War Angel smiled. “Oh, yeah. One, the Omegans are a lot like us. They need water to survive. It isn’t perfect for them, but they can breathe Earth atmosphere. The atmosphere in their ships is pretty close, and their systems recycle the air the way ours does. They are omnivores, but their ships travel mostly with packed rations and freshly grown- what we could consider- vegetables. Most of it is consumable by the human digestive tract.”

Richard was incredulous. “So what? How do you propose to get our hands on it? Ask nicely? Perhaps you’re overlooking the 1000-to-5 ratio of us versus them? Not to mention what will happen when they launch those fighters?”

Jack walked around the table until he was standing over Richard. He placed his hands on Richard’s shoulders and gave him a pat, then continued circling the table. “Not at all. But they’re never going to have a chance to launch those fighters. Gina?”

Gina coughed and then pulled up a schematic of the Omegan ship on screen. “Okay, I went over this as best as I could, and the way I see it, our first objective has to be to take out the launch and landing bay.” She pointed to a large area along the bottom of the ship, the rear part attached to the engine housing, the launch window facing the front of the ship. “We have to prevent their warriors from being able to get to us.”

“I can’t imagine that’s not ridiculously fortified,” Sarah jumped in. “Do we have the firepower…?”

Jack shook his head no. “It’s probably the most shielded part of the ship.”

“Then how the hell…”

Jack cut her off. “Wait for it. Trust me.” He nodded at Gina. “Please go on.”

She continued. “We won’t be able to blow up the launch bay. Not unless we were inside it, at least. But we can make it inaccessible. We can make the entire ship inaccessible, I think. We just need some good shooting.”

Sarah shrugged. “That’s my department. What do I need to hit?”

Gina pointed at a small spot on the top side of the ship. “Here first.” Her finger them slid along the picture until it came to rest on a spot near the craft’s nose. “Then here. It’ll have to be precise.”

“May I point out,” Sarah replied, “that neither of those spots will be easy to hit? And that, just from looking, I can tell you that they don’t control any aspect that ship’s weaponry, life support, or shielding? So what the hell am I shooting at?”

Jack snorted a laugh. “Something even more vital.”

War Angel: part twenty-nine

As Sarah peeled herself off the bulkhead behind her station, she took note of what she knew would be the first repair project she and Richard would need to undertake. “Inertial dampening system not up to fully dealing with FTL acceleration. Check.”

It took the better part of a minute before the system compensated and everyone was able to move freely again.

Still, the ship shook as it traversed space at speeds man had never achieved before. Jack spun around to Sarah, a worried look on his face. “Is she going to fly apart?”

Sarah checked the data screen. “I don’t think so. Shield system adapted to the speed way better than the inertial dampeners. The running shield is at maximum.” She looked out at the rest of them as she spoke. “Before you ask- the running shield also acts like a tourniquet. It keeps things out, but it also maintains structural integrity. We’re fine.” Her next words were spoken only inside her head. “For now.”

Richard eyed the tachyon system carefully, watching for any signs of damage to the physical pieces of the scoop or surrounding systems. That was the real test of what he had created.

“Look,” he had explained to Sarah early in the mission. “I don’t think there’s any real question that faster than light travel is possible. Certainly we have seen that ships can come exponentially close. The Omegans are proof of it. They beat our long range sensors and probes because they’re flying faster than our equipment can follow. We spotted anomalies each time, but never quickly enough to make a difference.”

“I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming on, Richard,” she said.

He smiled. “But the real issue is that the Omegans were, I believe, limiting themselves. They’re extremely long lived. Their ships went as fast as they cared to. In part, I think, because they use actual fuel cells to feed propulsion. The cells are energy based, but they still have to collect that energy. So every once in a while they have to stop or slow down and fuel up.”

Sarah looked skeptical. “In case you forgot, so do we.”

“Not as often,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe more frequently if we were trying to leave the solar system. But with the tachyon scoop, once we drop a particle into the field and absorb its momentum, it’s pretty much perpetual until we eject it. At that point we’ll drop back to regular space and be dependent on fuel. But as long as we ride the scoop in active mode, we’ll be zipping along nicely.”

“The risks?” she asked him, knowing he had to be hiding one last “but”.

“That the scoop tears off in flight. That the speed and energy are so powerful that even the running shield can’t hold it together. If it tears even partially, it could change our course and send us spiraling into a planet or a star.”

She felt a headache coming on that never quite went away.

Richard began to talk but found himself without a voice. He took a swig of water and tried again.

“51 seconds to scoop shutdown,” he rasped at Jack.