The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) (38 page)

Chapter
57.

Santana Nexus Station, weightless gymnastics arena, January 13, 2599.

Back in the weightless arena Carlisle heard a
voice over the intercom.

"Look behind you and you will find a weapon and
two retractable tethers attached to the hatch door. Arm yourself and prepare to do battle!"

Carlisle turned around and saw a small bag taped to the hatch door. Inside she found two standard retractable tethers
and a knife. The tethers were of an older design and were a bit more massive than the ones she was used to but they would do. A quick inspection of the knife revealed that it was a dull practice weapon, the sort that was used to train for weightless combat. The knife had a thin loop of meta-kevlar cable attached to it through a hole in the end of the handle. The cable was used to hold the weapon loosely around the user's wrist and would keep the knife from floating free if she should lose her grip on it. She slipped the loop over her right wrist and secured one of the cuffs of the two tethers to each of her wrists before removing the cord that had been tied around her waist.

Crouching against the wall of the arena, next
to the door she had been pushed through, she attempted to take stock of her condition. With her head still a little muzzy from the stun rod strike, she was about as unprepared as she could be for whatever was happening next. As she looked around the arena and turned to face her opponent she was struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, immediately followed by a bolt of pure panic.

This was the damned dream
that had been haunting her!

Only this time it was real! She was facing the Sheik of Barsoom's female killer in single combat
!

She could see that Fahada also
was equipped with two tethers and...something else. Carlisle recognized the handle of a quantum knife! Rather than a practice blade, her opponent was armed with a real weapon! A very deadly one, in fact. So this was to be their "contest," a virtually unarmed victim against a trained killer who probably didn't even need the quantum knife. Carlisle shook her head.

If anything, t
his was even worse than the dream!

She fought the feeling down and steeled herself for the fight to come.
Fahada had said that this was to be public contest. With almost everyone watching this "gladiator show" Carlisle had no choice, she would simply have to try and last as long as she could. If she could keep the Sheik and his forces distracted, her companions would have that much more time to follow through with their plans for liberating the Station without the enemy interfering.

She
double checked the cuffs of the tethers secured to each wrist. She had the practice knife, with the safety thong looped around her wrist, grasped in her right hand. She knew she was far from ready to go into combat but also knew she had little choice. The few preparations she could make to do so were inadequate but they would have to suffice.

"I told you we would meet again,
my little Spacer killer!" Fahada called loudly across the arena. "This time you die!"

Carlisle said nothing
. Instead, using the rapidly depleting time she had remaining, she began to subtly perform some basic stretching and warming up exercises as well as she could managed while clinging to the wall of the arena. The ribs that had been injured during her earlier fight with Fahada were stiff and she knew that any sort of sudden or extreme movement might re-aggravate the old injury. She gritted her teeth against the pain and forced the tender area to fully extend for the first time since she had suffered the injury. Then she forced herself to do it again. Time was running critically short. These meager preparations would have to be enough.

Fahada noticed
the activity. "Yes, my little Spacer, get yourself ready to die!" With that, Fahada coiled her legs up underneath her and launched out into the arena, directly at Carlisle. Carlisle waited until her adversary was only about five meters away before she launched herself off in a different direction. Fahada showed the extreme level of her weightless fighting skills by deploying one of her tethers and utilizing a tug on it to bring her close enough to take a slash at Carlisle as the Ensign went off in her own direction. The tactic came perilously close to working. The quantum knife nicked Carlisle's calf just above the ankle. She felt a sharp pain and immediately noticed that the wicked slash had left a gash that penetrated the suit and her skin.

The wound
began to ooze blood. As she sailed towards the opposite wall of the arena, she flexed the leg and ankle experimentally and discovered that the wound seemed to be, thank goodness, only superficial. In a flash, Carlisle realized that her opponent didn't know that. Maybe she could use the minor injury to her advantage. She deliberately caught most of her mass on her uninjured leg when she reached the opposite wall of the arena and made what she hoped was a convincing act of wincing in pain as she absorbed only a portion of the shock with the newly injured leg. Let Fahada think she was badly hurt, perhaps the assassin would get overconfident and make a mistake!

The two adversaries faced each other across the arena again, this time from the opposite sides
of where they had started.

Chapter
58.

Santana Nexus System, Whitney hyperlink zone, January 13, 2599.

The
Nasr
had arrived at the hyperlink zone and was maneuvering towards the
Beastie
with the supposed goal of transferring repair parts. The cutter from the
Hercules
, with the inspection crew onboard, was about halfway between the cruiser and the masquerading Federation ships. At that moment, the
Asimov
and the
Perseus
flashed in through the hyperlink zone. Before the
Hercules
could hail them, the
Nasr
fired two pulses from her main battery at the cruiser. The bolts were specifically targeted at the top portion of the cruiser's bridge, where the long-range dish antennae for the Stage I and Stage II communicators were mounted. At such extremely close range,
Nasr's
gunners couldn't miss. In less than a heartbeat, the cruiser's two communications dishes were gone and
Hercules
could no longer contact the Nexus Station!

The temporary commanding officer
of the
Hercules
, suddenly realizing that he was not only under attack but that he was badly outnumbered as well, began barking orders.

"Engineering?
Get those shields up,
now
!" he shouted. Through the front viewscreen he could see that strange, unlovely ship coming straight for him. The odd-looking ship was in the process of sprouting an extremely formidable-looking front turret! In addition to this strange ship with unknown capabilities, he was also facing three destroyers!

On
board the
Hercules
, one of her two reactors was currently dedicated to maintaining basic ship operations, while the output from the other was being channeled to the mysterious module in the front hold of the ship, the module that maintained the lock on transfers to and from the Sol-Terra Quadrant. If power was interrupted to the device, the Santana Quadrant would be open to invasion by the full force of the Federation Navy!

The temporary commander of the Sheik's cruiser began to taste fear!

The mighty
Hercules
was suddenly faced with a nearly impossible task! She had only one reactor to operate everything, including shields and weapons, against a simultaneous attack by four enemy ships! At point blank range! Given this handicap and knowing how rusty his crew was, the temporary Captain did not like his odds. His engineering crew managed to get the shields up just as the gun crews on the two newly-translated destroyers opened fire on her. A moment later they were joined by the guns from the
Nasr
.

The shields on the
Hercules
lit up from the impact of multiple pulse beam strikes stabbing repeatedly at her from several different directions. There were so many targets that the gunners on the cruiser were totally confused as to which of them to fire upon first! They weren’t helped by the fact that the command staff had also been taken totally by surprise and were every bit as confused as they were! The gun captain in the front battery of the Hercules elected to fire at the
Beastie
since she was the largest of the potential targets.

Two pulse beams lashed out and struck the prototype cruiser.
The
Beastie's
force shields, totally untested until now, proved to be up to the task. The shield flared to a bright violet hue before beginning to immediately dim back down.

"Shield status?" shouted Helmsford
, from the bridge of the
Beastie.

"Shields are...holding at eighty-five percent
!" replied Harris, who had replaced Frank Talbot down in engineering, "This is one stout little ship!"

"Keep me informed if there is any change," said Helmsford.

Seeing that the impact from her main battery seemed to have had virtually no effect on the odd-looking vessel, the gun crew on the
Hercules
couldn't decide to fire at her again or choose a different target.

The
hesitation was to prove fatal.

"Target the front main battery, boys," shouted
Helmsford, "Maximum rate of fire! Let's pull her teeth! Fire when ready!"

"Firing both main battery projectors, maximum rate of fire!" echoed
Conrad Lieber, the gun captain. He pressed the firing stud and held it down.

The unconventional weapon
, operating at full capacity, spewed a horrendous, rapid-fire barrage of six-thousand gigajoule pulse bolts at the stationary cruiser.

At the distances they were operating from, the
Beastie's
gun crew couldn't miss. With the weapon targeting a more or less single assembly on the heavy cruiser and the alternating beams from port and starboard projectors firing at the combined rate of
ten pulses per second
, the front turret of the
Hercules
was jackhammered with more than thirty pulse bolts in a little over three seconds. The cruiser's shields, already struggling with the pulse impacts from the three destroyers, had flared to incandescence and subsided to nothing during the first second of the barrage and the next twenty or more pulses had impacted on a virtually unprotected turret. When the
Beastie
ceased firing, the front battery of the
Hercules
was simply...no longer there! In its place was a smoking hole with a few jagged remnants of the once proud turret ringed around the damaged area.

"
Good Lord!" said Kresge, from his position near Helmsford on the bridge. "You said this weapon was powerful but that doesn't seem to be the half of it! I didn't expect anything like this! Are they still powering that damper module?"

"Affirmative, Commander," came the reply
from the sensor operator, "I am still detecting that strange frequency."

Kresge
mulled that over for a moment and was suddenly struck with an inspiration.

"
Jennifer?" he said, "I have a suggestion. What if we swung around and attacked her from the side. If we come in a little towards the front of the ship, they won't be able to target us with the rear battery. When we're aimed right at him, if we to roll the ship ninety degrees to starboard and swing those projectors across her from top to bottom, I'll bet we could cut her entire bow end right off! That would almost have to interrupt power to the damper module."

Helmsford immediately grasped what Kresge was suggesting.

"Gun crew?" she said, over the intercom, "We're going to attack that cruiser from the side. When we get lined up, we'll execute a ninety degree roll. After that roll, I want you to swing that gun across the fuselage of that cruiser from top to bottom. Let's see if we can cut her in two!"

"I think I know what you want, Commander," replied
Leiber.

The
Beastie
swung around from her eleven o'clock frontal attack on the cruiser to a vector that aimed her towards the enemy ship from the cruiser's port side. The crew of the
Hercules
had managed to get her shields back up but the three destroyers were keeping her occupied with constant fire from their main batteries. The
Asimov
, in particular, was maintaining heavy pressure with her rapid-fire 2000 gigajoule main battery projectors. The cruiser's shields were glowing an ominous violet color again. As instructed, the helmsman of the
Beastie
made sure that the ship was forward of the extreme firing arc of the rear main battery. As soon as the
Beastie
was lined up with the
Hercules,
the helmsman rolled the ship ninety degrees to starboard.

Meanwhile, i
n the Bofor's turret, the Conrad Lieber swung the emplacement to port, which aimed the port side projector at the very top of the cruiser and the starboard projector somewhere lower on the hull. He then initiated the extreme rapid firing sequence combined with a slow swing of the turret to starboard.

"Firing port and starboard projectors, full
emergency firing rate, in three, two one, firing!"

The results were devastating...

The rip of God's own chainsaw again rattled through the prototype ship. Debris and atmosphere seemed to be flying everywhere from the bow end of the hapless cruiser. Again, the cruiser's shields went down within the first few seconds. With the enemy's shields down, the gun captain, per instructions, calmly walked the rapid fire cannons down across the side profile of the
Hercules
. Debris continued to spew violently out of the impact area. When the turret had traversed the width of the ship, the gun captain stopped firing and saw that the cruiser was...cut into two pieces! The bow, which had been chewed off just in front of where the front battery had been, was trailing debris and crewmen while also venting atmosphere and fluids as it began to drift slowly away from the stern section. In the meantime, combined fire from the point blank broadsides of the three destroyers had destroyed the now unshielded rear main battery as well.

The
Hercules
was a mess. Main power was down and the ship was frightfully damaged. The
Beastie
completed her flyby and arced back, as if to make another pass. With his ship in two pieces and both turrets of his main battery destroyed, the acting Captain of the
Hercules
knew he'd had enough and surrendered before the
Beastie
could make another pass and complete the total destruction of his once proud ship. With his communications out, he used a spacesuit radio to contact the Federation forces.

"Enough!
Hercules
surrenders! For the love of Allah, cease fire!"

"Cease fire for the time being everyone," said Helmsford, "I repeat, cease fire!"

The ships of the Junkyard Dogs Strike Force called off the attack.

"
Foul Beastie
, indeed!" said Kresge, "I'm keeping this ship for the defense of the Scrapyard!"

"I want status reports on everything!" said Helmsford.

"Reactor one is operating normally," reported Harris, from down in engineering, "Shields back at one hundred percent!"

"
Reactor two be barely working hard, Commander," said Hawkins, also from down in the engineering section.

"
Thank you, engineering," replied the Captain. "Stay on top of things, you know we'd be foolish to count on this string of luck to continue!"

"Aye, Captain," said Harris.

"Turret systems are all well within normal limits, Commander," said Leiber. "That cooling system ain't much to look at but it sure does seem to work. These guns are only heated up a little bit and are well below maximum operating temperatures. We could fight at least another eight to ten minutes at that rate of fire, maybe even longer if we had to."

"Let's hope we don't have to," replied Kresge.

"I'm not reading that odd transmission any longer, Commander," said the sensor operator.

Kresge called Captain Nesbitt,
"
Asimov
?" he radioed, "It looks like we've managed to deactivate the hyperdrive field damper. Use your Stage two communicator to inform the Federation that the Sol-Terra hyperlink should now be functional again. Request that they send reinforcements immediately!"

A few minutes later, Kresge got a message back from the
Asimov
.
"Reinforcements on their way, Commander. Can we hold out for another couple of hours?"

"I guess we'll have to,"
replied Kresge.

"Let's all microjump towards the Nexus Station, we have some more of the Sheik's ships to deal with.
With communications down, they aren't going to know about the destruction of that cruiser for several hours yet. We should still be able to surprise them. We need to take out as many of the Sheik's destroyers as we can before anyone gets on to us.
Asimov
? Contact the Scrapyard and tell them to send those two mining ships and the
Dingo.
They can wait out here by the hyperlink point until it's safe to come in to the station.
I want them here and ready to unload our forces as soon as it's feasible."

"Aye, Aye, Commander!"
radioed Nesbitt.

The four ships of the Junkyard Dogs
Strike Force microjumped towards the Nexus Station leaving the ravaged hulk of the
Hercules
behind.