What do you say to that kind of courage? “Thank you, Fearless.”
“Godspeed to the rest of you. Be sure one of you gets home to let them know what we did here,” Fearless said as she swung her corvette around to behind the jump point.
“We will,” Kris said. She had no right to believe that any of them would make it home. Not now. But at that moment, she swore to any listening god that one of them would.
The first enemy ship came through at that moment, lasers firing wildly. The Wasp’s shield got nipped by a near miss before the Fearless put two torpedoes into the rear of the ship and it blew to pieces.
There was a minute pause before the next ship shot through the jump point. It withheld fire for a moment until it could establish situational awareness.
Bad idea. The Fearless hit one of its engines with a laser burst. It was already exploding when two torpedoes finished it off.
By now, the three fast-moving ships of PatRon 10 were reaching extreme laser range. A long two minutes passed while nothing happened.
Three more ships popped out of the jump point in rapid succession. The Fearless lasered the first one’s engines. It blew.
The second one got the same treatment.
The third one immediately began to rotate ship and fired its lasers into the area behind it.
Fearless’s shields took the first hit, which gave it time enough to fire two full laser blasts at the smart skipper and his deadly ship. Torpedoes arrived at the same time. Of four launched, two hit the rotating ship and it blew to gas.
But the Fearless’s shields were gone, and one of the enemy ships had clipped the Fearless good.
Kris wanted to turn the sensors off, give the Fearless the privacy to die in peace, but she couldn’t. She owed the ship and its captain and crew. The coin she would use to pay that debt would be to bear witness to their courage.
Bear witness before all humanity. All intelligent species of the galaxy.
That, Kris’s tiny fleet deserved.
The next enemy ship backed through the jump point. He flipped ship on the other side of the jump after putting acceleration on. He also came through with lasers blazing.
His wild shooting got the Fearless with three hits. The shattered corvette hung there, drifting in space for a moment, then blew herself to gas.
“Somebody shut down the reactor’s containment field,” Drago whispered. “They won’t get anything from examining that wreckage. May I have the courage to do the same when my time comes.”
But the Fearless hadn’t just rolled over and died. She’d hit the alien with at least one laser blast . . . and a final torpedo salvo that smashed into it even as the Fearless was blowing herself to hot vapor.
The alien wasn’t destroyed, but it wasn’t under control, either. It careened into a chunk of damaged hull from one of the earlier arrivals at the brawl. It drifted there, surrounded by the wreckage of a battle won at a terrible cost.
And when the next ship came shooting out of the jump point, it plowed into that wreckage. The collision ended with both of them in a slowly growing explosion.
The next ship came through slowly and tiptoed through the mess before it put two gees on and gave chase to the survivors of PatRon 10.
There were over fifty ships strung out in pursuit of them by the time the Wasp approached the closest jump.
“What are your intentions, Commodore?” Captain Drago asked Kris.
“To get as far away from here as possible,” she quickly answered him. “Preferably in the opposite direction from Earth.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Drago said. The Wasp was doing over two hundred thousand klicks an hour. Much more than it had for any of the jumps during their voyage of discovery.
“Sulwan, put twenty clockwise rpms on the ship and let’s see where this jump takes us,” the skipper ordered.
“ Aye, aye, sir. Hell, here we come,” the navigator answered.
44
All three of the surviving corvettes of PatRon 10 made it through the jump. Under Kris’s orders, they fled for the nearest jump point, watched by a blood red sun.
Once Chief Beni located them on the star charts, he estimated they’d jumped close to fifteen hundred light-years. They were on the far outer rim of the Milky Way. And as best as either the chief or Nelly could tell, the system should not have had a jump point into it at all.
That they were very likely lost ranked as the least of their problems.
They were a third of the way to the next jump when the aliens began pouring through the jump behind them. Most of them held to a solid two-gee acceleration. A few tried to put on three gees, but most of those soon fell back to something less stressful on engines and hulls.
Sulwan held the Wasp at 3.75. They expanded their lead over their pursuers.
Then the Intrepid began to fall out of formation.
“Commodore, we have a problem here,” Intrepid reported.
“Battle damage?” Kris asked.
“Engineering thinks it’s just an old-fashioned material failure,” he said, not that the difference between them made either any less deadly.
“Can you fix it?”
“Not without banking down the reactors for a couple of hours,” he said. “We can hold two gees, which should keep us ahead of the thundering herd. At least for a while,” he added sardonically.
“You want us to fall back and pick up your crew?” Kris offered.
“No. One of us has to get back. You keep going hell for leather. We’ll keep up as best we can.”
The Wasp and Hornet gradually stretched out their lead.
“How are we going to take this next jump?” Kris asked Sulwan and Captain Drago. Before that last jump of theirs, no one had ever taken a jump at much over fifty thousand klicks per hour, and they were rapidly edging up toward four hundred thousand klicks.
“We were thinking of hitting this next one at what we’re doing now,” Captain Drago said, thoughtfully. “Keep accelerating for another third of the trip, then decelerate for the last third.”
“Will our next system be in this galaxy?” Kris asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sulwan said. “But if the aliens continue to hold to only two-gee acceleration, we might jump farther than them.”
“I guess it’s worth the risk,” Kris agreed.
Captain Drago hunched over his board for a moment, eyeing it like he might a potential traitor. “We won’t be able to keep this speed up for too much longer. We’ll need enough reaction mass to slow us down. Otherwise, we’ll end our days drifting around real fast, going nowhere.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kris admitted.
“That’s what they pay me for,” Captain Drago said with just the hint of a smile.
“How long do you think those alien ships can keep up this chase?” Kris asked.
“The reading I got on them is that they are pretty dense,” Chief Beni put in.
“There didn’t seem to be a lot of tankage for reaction mass on that one we shot up,” Captain Drago noted. “It’s just possible they may have to break off their chase for lack of fuel if we can keep this up a bit longer.”
“What are the chances they want to see us dead so much that they will chase us until their tanks are dry? What if the fellow doing all the talking on those videos doesn’t give a fig about his minions so long an anyone different from him does not live in this galaxy?” Penny asked over the net, ever the speculating intelligence officer.