“Can we make 3.5 gees in our present condition?” Kris asked.
“Condition?” Jack echoed.
“The Wasp is pregnant with the Hornet,” Kris said.
“I was wondering where the Hornet went and why the Wasp has all these bumps and lumps,” Jack said.
“You didn’t think I’d abandon two perfectly good reactors, did you?”
Captain Drago cleared his throat. “We can’t make over 2.5 gees in our present state. We’ll need to drop our load to show them our heels in a run.”
Kris mulled that. “Has any other ship jumped in?”
“None so far, but remember, we’re only getting our information from that jump point at the speed of light, so it’s been a while.”
“Captain Drago, will you please join me in my quarters,” Kris said, and wheeling herself in microgravity, pushed off the closest station and launched herself for the door to her day quarters. Captain Drago did not look happy, but he followed her, Jack right behind him.
“You don’t intend to fight, do you?” the captain demanded, as soon as Jack closed the door behind them.
“There is only one ship.”
“Maybe. That could change any second.”
“We have the 20-inch lasers. We should outrange them.”
“We suspect that. We don’t know for sure,” Captain Drago shot back.
“We’ll need to find out the answer to that sooner or later. Why not now?”
“My ship is loaded down with a wreck and my sick bay full of barely alive survivors. Do you really want a fight just now?”
“We’ve never had a one-on-one fight with one, not since the first fight. Admittedly, this is probably one of those four- or five-hundred-thousand-tonners the aliens are so fond of. Still, it’s even odds. I’d like to take this one alive, or at least separate it from its reactors enough that it isn’t blown to gas.”
Captain Drago didn’t fire back a response to that but settled down at Kris’s staff table. “Know your enemy, huh?”
Kris nodded. “Have we had a better chance? They think they’re coming in on a badly damaged hulk. Likely, they intend to board it for intelligence. Maybe they even think they can capture the crew.”
“They’re looking for one ship,” Jack said, settling into the chair across from the captain. “They only found one.”
“Yes, but we’ve got our lasers charged and our reactors online,” the captain pointed out.
“So maybe they won’t be all surprised,” Kris agreed, “but if our 20-inch lasers can outrange them, we could do damage to their lasers while we run away and keep the range where we want it.”
“Assuming they can’t do more than two gees,” Drago said. “Remember, the 20-inchers are our surprise. What kind of surprise do they have up their sleeves?”
“We can always dump the Hornet and run faster,” Kris said. She’d hate to do that, but if needs must, she would.
“I’m disliking this idea of yours, Your Highness, a bit less than most,” Captain Drago said slowly. “But I have a few sneaky tricks we can add to your pot.”
For the next half hour they laid their plans. For the next half hour, no reports came into Kris’s quarters of a second ship. As it began to look like they might, indeed, have their first ever even fight, a grin slowly spread on the captain’s face.
“Yes, we might just have the souvenir Professor Labao would just love to field-strip. Your Highness, would you care to take Weapons again, just for old times’ sake?”
“Why, I don’t mind if I do,” Kris said, sounding less like her commodore self and more like her old self.
Together, they headed back to the bridge.
41
The alien did have a few new tricks up its sleeve. A bit before the halfway point, it flipped ship and began to decelerate. The navigator plotted the course. It showed the alien warship coming to a dead stop in space a good five hundred thousand kilometers short of orbiting the planet.
“You can’t park a ship there,” Jack observed.
“I doubt they intend to,” Captain Drago said, rubbing his chin. “However, with less energy on their ship, they can choose how they’ll close with us. I doubt they intend to give us a shot at their vulnerable stern.”
“Yes,” Kris said. “They’ll come at us headfirst, with lasers blasting. Does this change anything for you, Captain?”
“Not at all. I don’t think our plan requires them to be as dumb as usual.”
The Wasp continued its predictable path in orbit. They did drop off probes to keep an eye on the alien when they were on the other side of the planet, and relays to keep them in the loop. At a million klicks out, the alien began to adjust its deceleration.
“She’s aiming to arrive just as we’re coming around the planet,” Captain Drago reported. “That will cause a problem. No way do I want to let them have a whole half orbit to shoot at us.”
The plan Kris and the captain had hatched depended on their ducking behind the planet right after they got their first shots off. Being stuck in an orbit that kept them in the alien’s crosshairs for an hour was not healthy for them.
As they vanished behind the planet for the second-to-last orbit before the battle started, the Wasp flipped, applied a retro burn, and dove toward the planet. As they did, they went to a modified Condition Zed, collapsing all the space not needed for battle and sending the Smart MetalTM off to the ship’s sides to be honeycombed with near-frozen reaction mass.
The Wasp was going to war.
“Now, we’ll see how he likes that surprise,” Captain Drago said, a tight grin on his lips.
Forty minutes later, they were looping out toward the alien ship. It was still braking. Suddenly, it went to a full 2.5 gees deceleration that appreciably slowed its approach.
“You don’t like that, do you fellow?” Kris said as she used optics to range the alien. “You thought all the moves were yours. Didn’t expect us to make one, did you?” A plot on the main screen showed their orbit beginning to fall back some two hundred thousand miles short of the present predicted point of meeting the alien.
“Now,” Captain Drago muttered, leaning forward in his command chair, “how will you take to us eliminating our final orbit? Will you charge us or choose to trail us. Your move, bastard.”
The alien began to cut back on his deceleration, gradually dropping from 2.5 gees down to 1.5.
“He’s going to come up on our rear,” Kris said. Normally that would be a smart fighting move. They’d have first shot at the Wasp’s vulnerable jets and reactors.
Assuming the Wasp kept her rear pointed that way.
The Wasp reached the apogee of its orbit and began to fall back toward the planet, picking up speed as she went. The alien was still decelerating, but closing the distance on the Wasp that, having once applied thrust, seemed just as dead in space as it had before.
Of course, the alien’s sensors must have told him the Wasp’s lasers were charged and ready. But with the Wasp’s reactors at minimum power, the alien might assume their intended victim had one shot left and could not reload.
What were they guessing? Were they guessing any better than Kris? In a few more minutes, whoever survived the coming battle would know who had guessed right.
Whoever guessed wrong would be dead.
The alien was coming up on 150,000 klicks, and closing. The Wasp was falling back faster and faster toward the planet. If no power was applied, she’d graze the atmosphere of the planet, 150 klicks up. Would the aliens follow them or go higher, cutting down on the time they could keep the Wasp in their sights?