Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (62 page)

The ‘smoke’, which consisted of sensor-reflective streamers, semi-intelligent decoy drones, and a dozen types of EMP flash-bombs, obscured the
Beowulf
as the warship pivoted through 180 degrees and used her main engine to brake, applying enough power to keep out of effective firing range, but not so much that she fried Charlie Company in the quantum-effect cone extending hundreds of meters out of her zero-point engine.

Within minutes, Arun had left the
Beowulf
far behind and drifted slightly to one side. The smoke had dissipated, and the kinetic torpedoes — which were on a parallel vector to the Marines — were dark in the visible spectrum, though still launch-hot in infra-red.

None of that mattered. What counted was whether the enemy warship had seen the Marines. That would determine whether most of them lived or died over the coming hours.

Beowulf’s
attack plan was simple. The enemy ship was 20,000 klicks ahead and Charlie Company was on an almost identical vector to the enemy ship, except the
Beowulf
had been moving slightly faster. That extra velocity was enough for the barrage of torpedoes to hit in about an hour, and the Marines to arrive, ready to board, about ten minutes later.

Missiles and x-ray bombs from their sister ship, the
Themistocles
, had crippled the enemy’s main propulsion in a brief firefight as she’d flashed past 26 days earlier. The hostile ship’s maneuvering thrusters could spin it in any direction and nudge to either side, but that made negligible difference to its velocity of nearly 15% lightspeed. Unless the enemy repaired her main engine, the target ship was essentially headed in a straight line that would not stop until the end of time.

Barney estimated they would reach long range for beam weapons in approximately ten minutes. Until then, Arun was alone with only the sound of his breathing, and the fears in his mind for company.

He tried to get a visual on the target, but at this range it was no more than a faint dot. So he stared instead at home. Tranquility, or rather its sun, was still less than a light year away, making it the brightest object in the blackness of interstellar space. He thought back to happier times, messing around with his mate, Osman, in novice school, and chatting late into the night with Springer. Then there had been that night on the moon when he held in his arms the most beautiful woman he’d even known.

But his maybe lover, Xin Lee, was on the
Themistocles
, only about two light days distant, but the difficulty in matching vectors meant she might as well be a galaxy away. As for Osman, he had been killed in the rebellion Arun had helped to put down. Springer lost her leg in the same fight, and was out there now, practically within touching distance, but as invisible to Arun in her stealthed battlesuit as, hopefully, they all were to the enemy.

He smiled. Thinking of Springer always did. Arun’s life had mysteries and threats by the bucketload — not least the mysterious purple girl that the pre-cog Night Hummers had talked of — but thinking about them wouldn’t help him now.

Springer would be by his side in the fight.

As she would be afterward, when they celebrated victory.

That was more than enough.

——

After closing for fifteen minutes, when the target vessel had grown enough for Arun to see it was a rough cuboid shape, the enemy opened up with lasers.

The kinetic torpedoes were dumb bullets, without maneuver capability of their own, which made targeting them child’s play.

Unlike in an atmosphere, there was nothing in space to scatter a beam weapon, robbing it of power. What limited a laser’s effective range was diffraction, the inevitable spreading out of beam diameter. What started as a tight beam at the laser’s focal point, had spread to a five-meter diameter disk by the time it played over the torpedoes.

Diluting the laser’s energy over a wider area turned it from a death beam to a pleasant heat lamp.

Nonetheless, in the near-absolute cold of space, that relentless heat lamp was deadly, warming the torpedoes in an uneven way.

After another ten minutes secondary lasers opened up, pulsing their energy, so that the torpedoes rapidly heated then cooled

It didn’t take much longer before the outer surface of a few torpedoes cracked. The material pitted, ejecting little plumes of debris.

To Arun, the effect looked so gentle, but it was enough. The torpedoes slowly tumbled and drifted.

There! The first collision. One torpedo had knocked into another, causing both to fly off on a new vector, narrowly missing others on their way out of the barrage spread.

And with every meter they grew closer to the enemy ship, the business ends of the laser beams narrowed, increasing the effect.

Arun grinned. The torpedoes were only a distraction, cover for the most deadly weapon in the
Beowulf’s
armory: its complement of human Marines.

The fact that the enemy hadn’t fired on the Marines meant they hadn’t seen them.

Yet.

Oh, but they would do soon.

By the time they were ten minutes away, Arun was counting down the seconds before boarding, impatience adding a rasp to his breath.

He’d been bred and engineered to fight.

3,000 klicks and closing.

He couldn’t wait

The story continues in INDIGO SQUAD…

available Jan. 2015

HumanLegion.Com

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Thank you.

Tim