Test of Mettle (A Captain's Crucible Book 2) (24 page)

“A darkness generator,” Barrick said. “What I call a tartaan. Don’t let go of it until you’re aboard the Dragonfly. Not unless you want them to recognize you.”

“What about when I’m in the medical bay?” she asked. “Can I set it aside then?”

“No,” Barrick told her. “It is of paramount importance that you grip the device
at all times
while aboard, especially in the medical bay. And remember, no matter what happens, you must be off the ship by oh seven thirty.”

She wrapped her hands around the cylindrical object.

Black mist swirled from the tartaan and enveloped her. The fog seemed to pulse, alternating between opaque and translucent.

“Goooo.” It was Barrick. His voice sounded low-pitched, distorted. His movements were ridiculously drawn-out, as if he moved in slow motion.

The far bulkhead opened and she stepped into the airlock.

B
ARRICK WATCHED THE hatch seal with a resounding thud behind her.

Most of life was a series of long sedentary moments, a build up toward the short times when action was needed.

One of those moments of consequence was imminent.

Bridgette’s piece had been set into play. Would his careful planning prove enough? The fate of humanity hung by such a precariously thin thread. In the many visions of the future the dead Raakarr had awoken in him, rarely did the path lead the current way. Still, he knew there was a chance, if a small one. He must stay focused on the end goal.

He could feel the leader of the rogue faction reaching out to him. Valor, Barrick called him, because when the telepath asked its name, the alien returned that word.

Barrick interpreted the three dimensional point cloud sent by Valor to read:

We must act soon.

Barrick sent a point cloud back.
I have released the caged bird. When the executioners come, I will be ready.

He retrieved the small laser weapon Valor had given him. It was a human blaster with a suit attachment, meaning it could be handled while wearing the gloves of a spacesuit. It had been modified to penetrate Raakarr shielding.

When the aliens arrived for Bridgette, they would be in for a little surprise.

J
onathan had his left arm folded over his chest to grip the opposite bicep. The right arm was hooked toward his face, and the thumb, index and middle fingers of that hand tapped the stubble on his chin and upper lip.

He stared at the tactical display, and the view from the external video feed beside it. He felt both awe and dread.

On the video feed the view was consumed by two bright spheres: a cooler red subgiant and near its horizon a smaller, yet hotter blue main sequence star. The cool companion had a mass of four solars, and a surface temperature of ten thousand degrees. The hot companion had a mass of sixteen solars, and a surface temperature of thirty thousand degrees. Tidal forces pulled material away from the weakly bound outer layers of the subgiant toward the main sequence star so that the subgiant appeared to bulge on one side, and the long stream of matter from it accumulated in an accretion disk around the smaller, oblong-shaped sun. The radiation emitted from the accretion cloud was more intense than that given off by both stars combined.

Jonathan felt so small, so inconsequential beside those stars. The fleet under his command seemed little more than microbes compared to the giant, radiating masses.

And he was taking those microbes ridiculously close to them.

The tidal forces were already so high that the usage of fighters by either side was out of the question. The Delta-V requirements necessary to transit into the higher orbits would cause the controls to seem extremely sluggish, and would rapidly exhaust the relatively low-supply of propellant carried aboard the Avengers. While the heat shields might protect them for a while, any fighter dispatched out there ultimately wouldn’t return home.

For the same reason, missiles launched from the Avengers would behave closer to mortars than anything else, able to deviate very little from their launch vectors. Assuming the X90s didn’t detonate prematurely from the extreme heat. Still, he wanted to have the option to fire those missiles if need-be, which is why he had kept the fighters mounted to the hulls.

The Avengers had attached to the shadowed regions of the starships, away from the suns. While the heat shields of the fighters were rated to withstand atmospheric reentry, Jonathan preferred not to test that rating, if he could. Besides, the radiation armor on a typical Avenger, while good, wouldn’t protect the occupants very well under the current conditions. But he was more worried about the tidal forces: he knew it wouldn’t take much to peel away one of those crafts from the hull. Maxwell and the engineers had promised that the Avengers would readily stick, but Jonathan knew it would only take the failure of one or two grappling hooks and a couple of mounting magnets to lose a fighter—and any pilots aboard.

He remembered Rail’s objections during the conference.

“You’re going to leave the Avengers mounted out there while we travel to the suns?” Captain Rail had said. “They’ll be out there for days. It makes no sense.”

“I want their missiles ready to fire at a moment’s notice,” Jonathan had told her. “After the first battle, only the unmanned drones will mount to the hulls. And any pilots who elect to volunteer.”

Rail had laughed. “Only madmen would volunteer.”

Unsurprisingly, all the pilots had loaded up on anti-rads and volunteered.

“Ops, status on the Avengers?” Jonathan asked.

“They’re holding steady,” Ensign Lewis answered.

Jonathan nodded slowly. “What about our hull? Is it stable?”

“Stress readings are within tolerances,” Lewis said. “Despite the haste of our repairs.”

“External temperature?” Jonathan asked.

“Continuing to rise,” Lewis returned. “We’re at six hundred degrees Kelvin, starboard side. Heat armor is holding.” At that distance they had to keep the port section pointed away from the suns at all times, because with all the breaches cut into the armor there, it would fail under the high temperatures. Due to conduction, the heat would still transfer a short distance from the starboard side to the bordering hull sections of course, but it would quickly dissipate into the surrounding space.

The external video signal on his aReal was occasionally interrupted by small flashes and streaks of light, thanks to the impact of energetic protons on the sensitive optical electronics that were only partially embedded in the radiation armor.

“Radiation penetration?” he asked.

“As expected,” Lewis answered. “The armor is filtering out most of it, despite the high levels emitted by the accretion disk. But let’s just say, you wouldn’t want to go out there on a spacewalk. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the rads will.”

Jonathan glanced at the small, square-shaped bulge situated on the underside of his right forearm. He’d installed a subdermal anti-rad under his skin, which would drip-feed radiation treatment into his bloodstream based on the levels expected to penetrate the hull. He’d ordered the medics to distribute similar subdermals to the crew and the
Callaway’s
civilian dependents, and instructed the other captains in the task group to do the same. He had asked Maxwell if suiting up would help, and the AI had laughed for the first time ever, telling Jonathan that if the several layers of hull armor and the intervening bulkheads between compartments wouldn’t hold off the expected rays, the thin anti-rad coating found in a spacesuit would hardly make a difference.

Jonathan’s understanding was that there were different layers to the radiation armor, meant to protect against the two subsets of rays: electromagnetic versus particle, and the different wavelengths and energy levels possible within each subset. The outer layer was composed mostly of steel and lead that protected against the majority of the electromagnetic radiation, including the gamma ray weapon the enemies possessed. The inner layer was liquid water sandwiched between a combination of concrete and high Z materials that provided shielding against everything else, including any high energy particles such as protons and neutrons that penetrated the outer layer.

The issue with the inner particle layer was that the armor itself became radioactive over time. That problem was abated by the radiation scrubbers inherent to that layer—basically the liquid water was constantly cycled out. Ordinarily the scrubbers could pass muster even during a solar storm, at least when operating a safe distance from the sun. But with what Jonathan planned, not even Maxwell believed the scrubbers could keep up.

The bridge was theoretically one of the most heavily-shielded compartments aboard, thanks to its position at the center of the ship. It contained some extra radiation armor, essentially turning the compartment into a bunker. For that reason, the bridge personnel probably didn’t need the subdermal anti-rads embedded in their skin. He had decided to order them all to wear one anyway, despite the discomfort.

The only other area more shielded than the bridge was Maxwell’s central core. The last thing the crew needed was for energetic protons to flip bits in the AI’s memory. In theory, the multiple layers of error-correction and redundancy would prevent phantom commands from executing, even if an errant particle made its way through the shielding. Incidentally, that heavily armored AI core was located right underneath the bridge.

“Lazur, is the radiation affecting communication between the fleet?” Jonathan asked.

“Somewhat,” the comm officer replied. “But we’re close enough together that it’s not making too much of a difference.”

He thought he heard the subtle groan of metal coming from somewhere outside the compartment. His chair began to shake very gently.

Jonathan addressed the
Callaway’s
AI: “Maxwell, please tell me you have a final update from the engineering team.”

“I do, Captain,” Maxwell returned. “The engineering team reported in mere moments ago. They’ve completed the reinforcements to the most structurally relevant areas of the damaged hull. We still have several breaches of course, but the
Callaway
should survive subjection to the estimated tidal forces, as long as we keep our starboard side facing the binary suns.”

Jonathan nodded. “Thank you, Maxwell. And what about the
Marley
and
Maelstrom?
”

“My contemporaries aboard either vessel are reporting excellent durability thus far,” Maxwell replied.

The structural armor on the civilian Builder
Marley
and the frigate
Maelstrom
had been the weakest in the task group. As such, the human and machine engineers of those vessels had been working as frantically as those aboard the
Callaway
to reinforce the hulls. The
Grimm
, though a civilian vessel like the
Marley
, was surprisingly well-armored, with exceptional hull stability—as a Harvester it was designed to operate for days on end in the extremely radioactive and gravitationally intense upper atmospheres of gas giants. Still, flying as close as Jonathan intended to the two stars would test the durability of even that ship to its limits, no doubt.

Several minutes passed. His mind wandered, and not for the first time he questioned the wisdom of his tactics and the particular choices he had made, and planned to make. There was so little margin for error out there. One mistake, one miscalculation in a trajectory, would spell the end of the fleet. And it was literally the end: like the Avengers and missiles, no lifepods would escape the gravitational pull of those twin stars. And even if a lifepod managed to eject at the right speed and angle, the heat armor was designed for atmospheric reentry, not low solar orbit. By the time any ships could turn back to retrieve them, there would be no one left to retrieve.

Yes, there could be no mistakes.

Such was the burden of command.

He stared at the flashing dot that represented the
Callaway
on his tactical overlay. The pulsing indicator proved calming somehow. Entrancing. For a moment he could swear he heard the phantom tone of the heart rate monitor from intensive care accompanying it. BEEP. BEEP.

The bridge shuddered more strongly, snapping him out of his trance.

“External temperature is now eight hundred degrees Kelvin, starboard side,” Lewis announced. “And... the combined alien fleet has closed to the five hundred thousand kilometer mark behind us.”

He returned his attention to the positions of the ships on the tactical display, and prepared to engage in the highest stakes game of poker he had ever played.

The first enemy task unit, fleeing the human ships, had slowed down and allowed the other unit to approach. All thirty-three ships had proceeded onward as a single task group, slowly catching up to the humans.

The day before, six of the heat signatures had begun braking maneuvers. According to the powerful telescopic lenses, those signatures belonged to two long, cylindrical laser vessels and four dart escorts. One of the laser ships and two dart vessels halted entirely, assuming an orbit around the twin suns that was roughly sixty million kilometers behind the current position of the human fleet. The second laser ship and its two escorts had diverged on a mirror course to the human fleet that would eventually take them around the opposite side of the binary suns. It was an attempt at a pincer maneuver, Jonathan knew. The aReal labeled the stationary three as ETU-F1 behind them, and the trio engaged in the pincer maneuver as ETU-F2: Enemy Task Units Far One and Far Two.

It had taken the remaining twenty-seven vessels a day and a half to reach their current distance of five hundred thousand kilometers. There was still a third and final laser ship with that group. In the Vega 951 battle, the enemy had deployed their laser ship at the five hundred thousand klick range, with the individual lens segments separating until there were five of them spaced a hundred thousand kilometers apart, with the closest halting one hundred thousand klicks from the human fleet before it opened fire.

“Any signs that the laser ship has begun separation?” Jonathan asked.

“Negative,” the ensign replied.

“Perhaps they don’t need to separate,” Robert said from his position beside the captain. “Maybe they only did that last time out of caution. They didn’t know our weapon capabilities at that point, after all, and probably wanted to keep their main ships well out of range.”

Jonathan nodded. Robert had been in command of the
Callaway
for that battle, and his intuition was probably right. “If so, that laser’s effective range is likely still one hundred thousand kilometers, regardless of whether it separates into individual lenses or not.”

The
Callaway
, and the ships with her, were grouped together near the binary star. They were passing the suns in a maneuver that brought them dangerously close to the solar event horizon, that region where the gravitational pull would make it impossible to achieve escape velocity. Not to be confused with the event horizon of a black hole, which was the point at which even light could not escape.

Beneath the solar event horizon resided the death zone, where the tidal forces between the two masses became so strong that any passing ship would be ripped apart by the competing forces.

Six more friendly dots were located approximately four hundred thousand kilometers away. Those six had separated from the main human fleet an hour ago, and would be traveling between the two suns dangerously close to the event horizon, though well within the lower point of no return that had been computed for the more powerful engines of the enemy.