The timing had to be just right.
“Ensign. Stand by,” he held his breath and waited.
Three, two, one.
“Ensign, delta dine maneuver . . . hammer them, Lieutenant!”
Hammerhead launched all ten of her anti-capital ship ordnance, from her single forward micro-torpedo launcher. Immediately, the dorsal and ventral railgun turrets thundered a destructive hail of projectiles on target which accelerated ahead of the slower torpedoes.
The target emerged from the nebula, like a leviathan from the ocean. It fired some kind of point defense, but there wasn’t enough time for it to track and destroy Hammerhead’s volley of torpedoes. This close to the nebula, gases still extended slightly outwards and the rounds from the railgun left long streaks in their wake before they slammed into the target.
The predator was now visible to Hammerhead’s equipment.
“Commander! Target is Imperial Emperor-class Dreadnought—designation Phalanx. We scored strikes along their forward section,” Lee reported.
An Emperor-class warship was a behemoth, just short of eighteen hundred meters, and the limited railgun fire from Hammerhead was not very effective.
Moments later the heavier ordnance reached.
The first four torpedoes missed entirely. The next three compromised the obviously impressive armor protecting the oversized belligerent. Despite the ordnance having a smaller yield than her larger counterparts on Phoenix, Hammerhead’s torpedoes were one weapon you didn’t want impacting weakened hull armor. The target’s compromised forward armor buckled when the remaining three torpedoes struck. The contact finally reacted and now veered to starboard. But that didn’t save them from catastrophic damage. The Imperials clearly had no intelligence about the Fleet’s latest weapons systems.
“Reading massive power fall off, Commander,” Lee reported. “The big beast is definitely wounded! One moment . . . I’m detecting several destroyer-sized ships emerging from the nebula! Same power emissions—tracking.” He adjusted and tweaked the returns from the sensors as the computer assisted him in analyzing the data. “One of them is leaking deuterium—I guess we found what we were looking for!”
“And more it would seem,” Aaron said.
“Three contacts, each 200 meters in length,” Lee reported. “High power curve, unknown design, but definitely Imperial power signature! They’re pursuing. The dreadnought has veered off.”
“Ensign, new course; one-six-zero mark three-zero,” Aaron said. “Ahead full, by now Phoenix should be nearing us from that vector.”
“Aye, sir. Engaging new course one-six-zero mark three-zero and ahead full.”
Hammerhead, fired a maximum burn, her antagonists—minus one behemoth—hot on her stern.
Aaron adjusted his tactical view resolution. The cruisers hadn’t fired yet. At least not that he could tell. They’d bloodied the dreadnought’s nose with a hit and run. Then the situation turned complicated with the appearance of three more Imperial vessels and there was nothing in the USSF database about these new ships. He saw no indication the pursuing vessels had fired. Hammerhead was definitely within firing range of known Imperial weapon systems.
“Lee, what are they doing?”
Lee was no operations expert. Aaron would have to be patient as the tactical officer struggled to interpret the numerous graphs, waves, and readouts on his instruments. It was one thing to view a tactical layout as displayed visually by the sensors, but another to interpret the raw reception of data received. He was playing the role of ops and tactical now.
“Chasing us, Commander?” Lee responded.
“Lieutenant!”
“I don’t know, Commander. They aren’t doing anything. There’s nothing here telling me they’re doing anything else. No LIDAR returns for near objects, no motion detection or proximity alerts—nothing.”
“We’ve got to go outside the box here, Lee.”
Lee shook his head, he was getting frustrated. “Sir, the PDCs are active. All scanning astern. The moment they launch any warheads the guns will take care of them. I don’t know why they haven’t fired lasers, maybe these new ships aren’t equipped with any. Like us, Imperial ships retract main batteries inside the hull for protection when they aren’t firing. I can’t think of any other reason not to finish us. We know the Empire made recent breakthroughs with laser weapons, but we haven’t exactly, ah—measured these breakthroughs.”
Aaron’s chest tightened. “We’re missing something. Go strictly thermal. Give me a view of the pursuing vessels on the tactical holo-imager.”
Lee tapped a few commands into his console. A 3D holo-image, showing an outline of the three pursuing ships appeared above the center forward area, projected from the imager in the overhead.
“Now, enhance the resolution of the space between our ships to maximum. Leave their ships at normal resolution.”
As Lee adjusted the image according to the parameters given, several barely noticeable orange spots—indicating far less heat output than the hostile vessel—appeared in-between the pursuing ships and Hammerhead’s perspective. Space was cold, starships generated extreme heat, and didn’t have cold spots, or any particular surfaces drastically cooler than other puts of the hull. Those insignificant and hugely varied specks of heat shouldn’t be there blocking the full thermal image of the pursuing vessels.
“Damn! Flaps, hard over! Go starboard! Angle us down z-minus thirty degrees. Lee, set PDCs to manual fire—direct astern. Aim along the vector from the enemy contact, fifteen-degree field of fire only. Keep it narrow and protect our tail. Fire!”
As Flaps threw the ship hard over to starboard and angled down below their current plane, Hammerhead rumbled slightly as the PDCs rattled off rounds astern. The ship rocked, deep tremors reverberated throughout. Those little blots had changed course to match theirs.
“Registering multiple explosions, above and to the rear of our position, only a few thousand kilometers. Detecting matter/antimatter traces. What the hell?”
The enemy was firing antimatter warheads, but Hammerhead was at flank speed heading away. Somehow, the projectiles avoided detection by all but one of their sensors. The thermal overlay colored the outline of the unknown ships in orange and red, ranging from nearby detected minimum temperatures, in this case the void and the highest detected value: the enemy ship. But small lightly colored dots along a direct vector from Hammerhead and her pursuers indicated something else very small—given the distances involved—was between them and the contact. The thermal sensor could not scan through a physical object and see beyond it to the pursuing enemy contact. The contrasted high-resolution image against the backdrop of the thermal image of the enemy ship, revealed the ordnance.
“Feed that data directly to the PDCs. Have it target any anomalous or mismatching heat readings anywhere near us,” Aaron ordered.
Their pursuers didn’t accelerate, but Aaron was certain these enemy ships could overtake Hammerhead. That they hadn’t already done so puzzled him.
Nothing was as it seemed.
Chapter 24 – Surrender