The hostile ordnance would soon begin the necessary alterations to thrust and propulsion to reacquire Phoenix. So long as they had fuel, they would pursue.
But before the enemy missile computers could even compute the necessary changes, Phoenix’s own computer executed a timed command to coincide with the evasive maneuver.
The enemy missiles were traveling on a dorsal plane relative to the pursuing vessels. The kinetic barrier discharged a burst of gravitic charges at a pre-calculated angle and exploded, pushing the missiles off course and on a ballistic course towards the pursuing ORA ships.
The resulting gravitic effect seemed to scramble the hostile missiles’ computers. Whereas they should have detonated—because they were now dangerously close to allied targets—they continued.
Two hundred missiles detonated across twenty hostile vessels. The bewildering outcome wrought heavy damage across some of them. The others escaped with minor damage. Unsure of what occurred, they immediately began a hard deceleration.
Phoenix surged past the enemy ships attempting to corral her from the front. As she passed, several parting railgun bursts and havoc heavy missiles crippled three of them and severely damaged the others.
She was beyond the interdiction field. Her bow facing port relative to her vector. Six minutes had seemed like forever.
Aaron slapped Flaps on his shoulder. “Punch it.”
He didn’t have to tell him twice. Flaps, engaged an emergency jump to light-speed.
And Phoenix was away.
Chapter 19 – That Looks Painful
“Pretty sure I felt that hit from the bridge” – Aaron Rayne
Engineering
Phoenix
Aaron stared at a visual feed of the damage in the starboard section.
Where there was once a hull, now opened to space twelve meters in diameter. The surrounding compartments were a mess. Bent and broken bulkheads, scatterings of debris, smashed internal components. That was the hardest hit section.
The sudden image of a giant, wild, indestructible elephant rampaging through the ship formed in his mind.
The residual damage scorched and hammered the adjacent sections. One of which housed a power matrix that controlled the flow of power to starboard ship systems. A jagged piece of bulkhead painfully wedged inside the main assembly.
Max stood next to Aaron.
“That looks painful,” he said.
Aaron gritted his teeth. “Pretty sure I felt that hit from the bridge.”
Aaron and Max were in engineering. Flaps and Lee remained on the bridge. The rest deployed throughout the ship, visually inspecting damaged sections the computer highlighted.
Garrett—as chipper as ever—listed his repair schedule like he was ticking off a grocery list. “—then half a day to clear this section. Meanwhile the fabricators are printing a new unit. That’ll be ready in a day. Another half-day to install the system.”
Fabricators were just a fancy name for twenty-fifth century 3D printers. All industrial manufacturing was carried out by these large machines. The fledgling technology in the twenty-first century used to print pieces of everything from cars to planes and marine vessels. If the raw materials were available, it could be printed. All Fleet ships carried a finite number of resources to build replacement parts, railgun munitions and generally any piece of Fleet equipment.
Phoenix also carried twelve mk-82 repair drones. These heavy-duty drones carried out external repairs along the hull. After the nanites re-sealed and reformed the damage surfaces to a point the mk-82s took over.
Each ship also carried a set of mining drones. If a ship didn’t have the raw materials to create spare parts or whole components, the drones could mine the necessary materials, and the fabricators would process it. The entire engineering deck was devoted to processing and manufacturing.
For larger parts, the fabricators would build them in smaller components, and the repair drones would take them outside the ship. From there the nanites and the repair drones would work in tandem.
Garrett tapped his personnel device as he continued. “All four starboard point defense batteries are wrecked. Some completely blown off. It will take the repair nanites a week to bring the hull to a state of readiness in those areas to receive new batteries. Then we’ve still got this breach here,” he nodded toward the image on the monitor, “and several other spots to shore up.” Garrett looked like he wanted to say more.
Aaron felt deflated. Starships didn’t carry spare point defense batteries. The fabricators could assemble them with the raw material they had aboard, but it would take days. Days they didn’t have. Garrett was still looking at him, like he wasn’t done with the bad news yet. Could this really get any worse? He dreaded the answer.
“What is it, Master Chief?”
“The kinetic barrier is out of commission. The hit we took in the ventral section damaged the interface between the dark-matter reactor and the entire system. The good news is we still have a full complement of gravitic charges which the reactor already prepared, but we won’t be able to charge more. What’s there is what you have left to work with for now.”
Aaron had his fingers crossed hoping this was the worst of it. When Garett looked like he was finally finished, he breathed a sigh of relief. “Very good, Mr. Garrett. Your priority is the power matrix, focus all your efforts there first. After that, start replenishing our railgun munitions. Then, get the fabricators started on some point defense batteries. And then the hull breaches. We’ll use the emergency seals on them for now. We’ll have to improvise without the kinetic barrier.”
The engineer nodded and sauntered off to begin the monumental task ahead. Unfortunately, the ORA wouldn’t wait until they repaired their ship. And the longer they held Endeavor and her crew—there was no way to know what horrors Vee and his crew faced at the hands of the ORA.
***
Aaron took the lift to the bridge. Max was still with him. There’d been no bad news from Rachael or the others inspecting the rest of the ship.
“What are we going to do now? Can we even complete the mission?” Max asked.
“We’ve mainly sustained structural damage. Aside from the power matrix, the ship is fully combat capable.”
“What about what he said about the starboard point defense?”
Aaron cut his eyes at Max. “Aside from the power matrix and the starboard point defense, we’re fine. We’ll get the matrix up before we reach Indri. Yes, I’m worried about the starboard vulnerability without the point defense in place, but it can be mitigated. So long as we aren’t surrounded on all sides again.”
“I’m pretty sure they’ll be more cautious the next time they see this ship.”
“It’s possible. But there’s something about this Outer Rim Alliance that’s not sitting right with me. Who starts a shooting war right off the bat for no reasons—or at least, for no reasons they’ve cared to inform us about.”
The lift doors parted to the bridge before Max could answer.
Lee was at his station. He turned when the lift doors parted. “Commander.”
“Lieutenant, status please.”
“We’re on our projected course. Gravity wave dispersion functioning. No sign any of the ships we’ve detected at range have changed course to attempt an intercept. There’re three ships on the same course as us from the wormhole. But I don’t think they’ve detected us. It’s more they’ve assumed it’s the first place we might go, or they have something valuable there.”