Trident couldn’t make the jump to light speed within that boundary due to the system’s tidal forces. They had to reach interstellar space.
“Contact!” Lee shouted. “Appeared from behind the gas giant. It’s accelerating hard and beyond the freighter. Direct intercept vector to us!”
The new contact was over two light-hours away. Trident could exit the system and transition to warp before then.
Aaron looked back. “XO, analysis?”
“Unknown configuration again. Same power signature as the ones who attacked us. Length, two hundred and thirty meters. Cruiser sized, but on the smaller scale. Nothing else. Wait—reading a massive power build up!”
Miroslav swung around to face Aaron. “They can’t be firing from that distance!”
Aaron swung around to Alvarez. “XO?”
“I don’t know,” Alvarez said. “Nothing else is happening. Just a spike in power. Similar to a surge caused by a ship going to warp. But they can’t be going to warp inside the system!”
No one had any theories on that either.
“They’re gone!” Lee shouted.
Half a second later, the interloper reappeared. “Commander! They’re back, right on top of us one million kilometers and closing . . . incoming ordnance! Fast movers in the black!”
A hasty withdrawal was no longer an option. Aaron returned to the command seat and re-engaged his harness. “PDCs full coverage astern. Deploy railguns. Maintain speed and course for heliopause.”
The PDCs ripped into approaching high-speed missiles. The explosions radiated heat, gasses and kinetic energy, which washed over Trident, carrying its occupants for a wild ride.
“Point defense screen is holding the missiles for now, sir, no more incoming. But target is closing the distance fast,” Lee said.
Aaron focused on the tactical readout on his monitor. “Helm, cut power to engines. Adjust our bow ninety degrees port. Lieutenant Lee, commence firing, .25 firing rate. We just want to hold them back and give us time to get out of this system. XO, dump the logs, everything into a data packet. Relay it to Orion Prime. Send a comm burst to Fleet Command as well just in case.”
Alvarez nodded. It was probably clear only to the XO where this encounter might be going. Trident’s port railguns once again volleyed more rounds at a hounding attacker, scoring direct hits.
“No effect,” Alvarez reported. “They’ve slowed slightly, but the impacts didn’t have any appreciable effect on its armor.”
“Increase to .5 firing rate, Lee,” Aaron said.
“Aye, sir. Increasing to .5 and maintaining.”
The XO sounded a little brighter now. “Now we’re getting somewhere, beginning to shred the armor plating. Concentrate fire on . . . wait—”
He fell silent.
“Vee!”
“Never seen anything like this,” the XO said. “Gravitic distortions forming outside and ahead of the pursuing vessel. The distortions . . . are slapping our salvos aside now!”
“Increase firing rate, empty the port magazines. Reload port and stand by starboard batteries,” Aaron ordered.
Aaron watched the tactical monitor wide-eyed as the railgun salvos just veered off from their target. The computer interlaced a graphical representation for the gravitic effect which appeared as tiny ripples in space.
Trident was still on her original vector out of the system, but she had veered her bow to port and now drifted along on momentum with the port side positioned to the enemy ship’s bow.
“Helm,” Aaron said. “Full lateral roll one eighty. Bring the starboard guns over. Lieutenant, commence firing as soon as you’ve locked.”
Trident rolled, still oriented sideways relative to her relentless pursuer and blasted another railgun salvo toward its bow. They never reached.
“Same as before. The rounds are being pushed aside, they’re ineffective,” Alvarez said. “The gravitic distortions are altering the trajectory of our munitions!”
“Deploy forward torpedo launchers and ready missile salvo,” Aaron said. “Helm, bring our bow another ninety degrees to port. Put it right on them.” The ship’s most potent weapon—unguided fusion torpedoes—were located in her bow. The primary reason Aaron ordered the ship to fly “backwards”. They could still run—and fight.
Trident now looked her pursuer in the eye while still moving away at the full speed they’d accelerated to before cutting engines.
“Fire hornets. Two-second intervals. Lieutenant, time the railgun salvos to provide a wall of protection for our torpedoes and missiles. Fire when ready.”
Trident rattled, as she spat a hail of rounds preceding the unguided torpedoes, and the guided missiles. Lee could loop the missiles around from different directions and attempt to negate point defense from the enemy ship. The torpedoes were unguided weapons. The virtual wall of tungsten steel—courtesy of their railguns—might mitigate any enemy point defense.
The target didn’t engage point defense. The torpedo ordnance continued towards the target trailing a hail of railgun rounds. The mass of tungsten rounds shrouded the missiles and accelerated almost in a perfectly lined convoy. When the gravitic distortions again slapped the rounds and torpedoes away, the missiles although knocked off their flight paths, re-aligned and struck the target.
That’s the good thing about missiles—they have their own propulsion.
“Direct hit!” Alvarez said. “Definite and serious damage to the target’s armor. Odd, Commander, no appreciable armor penetration but I’m reading a power falloff, and major power fluctuations throughout the target.”
Aaron felt a rush, he’d pulled everything out of the hat and it paid off. The short-lived euphoria vanished in a puff as the belligerent fired its own railguns.
“Incoming!” Lee yelled.
“Lieutenant, another volley of torpedoes—fire!” Aaron ordered. “Helm, hard to port, full thrust, bring us around! Engage engines to full as we angle away.”
“Hard to port, coming around relative to target. Punching it, Commander!” Miroslav replied.
“Firing!” Lee acknowledged.
It would be an odd spectacle to any exterior observer unfamiliar with the dynamics of space travel. The thrusters would reorient the ship, but it would still be vectoring in the same direction until the engines reengaged and pushed the ship along its new vector.
Trident reoriented her bow to point in the direction she was traveling, but the engines engaged before doing so, pushing her off vector from most of the incoming projectiles. But all good tactical officers programmed a target’s possible avenues of evasion into their railgun bursts. Primarily based on known capabilities of the targeted ship.
Now the deck itself seemed oriented the wrong way and a searing heat burned the back of Aaron’s head. He found himself staring at the deck. An inch closer and it would have rearranged his nose for the worst. He pushed himself up, waving his hands at the rising smoke now burning his eyes and stinging his lungs. Alarms, he couldn’t recall hearing for many years, now pierced his ears.
“Massive damage, rear and dorsal sections, Commander,” Alvarez reported. “Plasma leak on deck three, main power’s offline, containment is compromised. It won’t hold for long, sir, we took a nasty hit.”
The hostile ship’s volley had knocked them out in one punch. But why hadn’t the aggressor fired at them before? And why is someone beating my head with a hammer?
“Sorry, Commander?” Alvarez asked.
“I was saying why didn’t they fire their railgun volley before we bruised them?”
Alvarez helped him off the deck and returned to his station. “No idea.”
“Status of the target?” Aaron asked as he struggled into the command chair.