“No doubt. Tactical status?”
“We’ve got forty havoc missiles left. Eight reloads of tungsten ammunition for the guns. I’d be more comfortable with the maximum twenty. But I understand the fabricators have other priorities. The starboard armor plating is severely compromised. There are minor gaps in some sections, other sections are severely stressed, and of course there’s that new observation port the enemy gave us. The entire starboard quarter is a lost cause for now. I wouldn’t want anyone shining anything hotter than a flashlight on it.”
Forty havoc missiles left. The things were so expensive to produce. Bottlenecked by the fact that dark matter powered the missiles’ propulsion. Aaron would have laughed at the part about the “new observation port” if it hadn’t been his ship.
Thinking about the reloads left for the railguns, he wasn’t surprised they’d fired so much tungsten. A ship firing projectiles couldn’t have infinite amounts of ammo. Where would they put it? Along the corridors and decks?
The munitions stored aboard one ship simply weren’t designed to take on a hostile squadron itself.
Phoenix had fired enough slugs to destroy one ORA ship a hundred times. It’d been necessary to force her attackers to back off. Normally it was a more precise affair. Phoenix was a rabbit which had just run through a field pursued by a pack of wild dogs.
Except this rabbit had razor sharp claws and fangs the size of an otter. Something the ORA wouldn’t soon forget.
“Zane, any progress?” The scientist had been working on ways to detect the antimatter mines.
“I’ve got several working theories, Commander. I don’t want to give you any false hope. But I hope to have more to report in a few hours.”
Aaron nodded and leaned next to Lee. “What have you been able to discern about the enemy vessels, Lieutenant?”
“In my analysis so far, I’ve detected three distinct classes, and something else.” He called up the images and analysis on his console while he explained.
“The ships which pursued us appear to be armed with close range plasma cannons. Which is what they fired at Endeavor and Pilum. Their missiles are standard heavy missiles. Not unlike our old hornet types. I would class these ships as destroyers on the smaller scale. They are quick, though not as quick as us, and decently armed. The ships we charged at, the happy-missile goon-squad—we didn’t record any other ordnance besides missiles from them, so definitely missile cruisers as suspected. The missiles they fired, however, were different from the ones fired by our pursuers. The explosions registered fusion reaction in shaped explosive charges.”
He adjusted the console, and it displayed a different ship schematic. “These ships are frigate sized. Far superior acceleration to the others, again still not as quick as us. But they were able to close to pointblank range on our starboard because of the shallow vector. They were about sixty degrees off our starboard relative on arrival and about two hundred thousand klicks.”
The screen flashed a new image. “There’s a huge space station under construction. We got a basic read on it. It’s sitting about thirty light minutes from the wormhole. Can’t tell you much more about it from the distance we pinged it. The last thing . . . we got a hit on something nearby in deep space. It was traveling at high warp towards the wormhole. The gravity waves are pushing forward at an extreme intensity. Only something huge in mass at high warp could push powerful gravity waves of that magnitude. Far beyond the norm even for our biggest battleship. Initial returns suggest something with a length of three kilometers. Not even sure I want to find out more.”
The screen now displayed a planetary mass.
“I got a sensor return on a small structure orbiting Indri-3. The planet itself is tundra and habitable. Immediately, the computers registered what I was looking for.”
“What is it?”
“Endeavor’s beacon piggybacking on a gravity wave. It seems like Vee left us a bread crumb.”
Indeed.
***
The crew had assembled in the briefing room. Time was short.
Aaron made sure everyone was on the same page regarding the ship’s status and repair efforts. He filled them in on all the new tactical data regarding the enemy ships, the behemoth they detected, the planet, the orbiting space structure, and Endeavor.
“Our primary mission has always been to learn the fate of Endeavor and bring the crew home. Our secondary mission is to gather intel on this Outer Rim Alliance. If they plan to continue waging an undeclared war, whatever we learn while we are out here, could mean the difference between a successful defense of our sector and the alternative. Hopefully, we’ve given them cause to pause, and re-think what it is they hope to accomplish.
“Over extending ourselves is always a risk. As a covert operations crew we were meant for quick operations, get in get out, hit fast, hit hard. But we’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt. Lieutenant Delaine and Reyes will take Reliant and head deeper into the sector. Beginning with an area of high traffic and a colonized planet. She knows her role.
“Sergeant Dawes, his men, and Lieutenant Lee, will deploy aboard Hammerhead with Ensign Miroslav at the helm. They will execute a covert insertion onto Indri-3. Their goal will be to establish whether Endeavor’s crew is there, and if not, determine a possible location the ORA might be keeping them. If the crew is planet-side, Dawes and his team will proceed with an extraction. Once back in orbit, we’ll commandeer Endeavor and ex filtrate the system. The individual teams will hammer out additional strategies. This is more to brief you all on the way forward. Any questions from anyone?”
There were none.
“Dismissed then.”
Chapter 20 – The Man
“Silent treatment? I’ll just nap then” – Avery Alvarez
The air escaped again. Avery had another visitor.
There was a scraping sound which scrawled his skin. Something dragging on the floor or deck. He still didn’t know which.
The noise stopped.
How much time had passed? In this dark place a minute could feel like a day, and a week could sometimes feel like a minute.
Finally, the light flickered.
A man sat staring at him. He didn’t say anything.
His new interrogator’s head was shaved clean. He wore a dark uniform with a strange red symbol above his left breast. A circle with straight lines extending to the center pointed to something resembling a planet.
“Did James figure out where the sun doesn’t shine yet?” Avery really wanted to know.
The man didn’t answer. He sat on a chair he’d apparently dragged into the room and just stared.
“Silent treatment? I’ll just nap then. Nothing else to do.”
Avery closed his eyes.
Moments later he felt something press against his neck. A stinging sensation burned his neck. He still couldn’t so much as flinch in these restraints. Against his will, his eyes reopened. He no longer had control of them. Whatever the silent man hit him with, he couldn’t even shut his eyes now.
The man continued staring. Avery wanted to say something but his mouth wouldn’t cooperate.
He didn’t know how long the man sat there staring, it could be five minutes, it could be five weeks, he lost all sensation of time.
***
Alpha Centauri