A Prayer for the Fallen: A Space Adventure of Starships and Battle (The Blacksword Regiment Book 3) by J. L. Doty

Author:J. L. Doty [Doty, J. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, military, space battles, Space Marines
ISBN: 9781951744151
Publisher: Telemachus Press LLC
Published: 2020-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

23

Intransigence

“ANOTHER DETONATION, MISTRESS. It appears they’ve taken out another relay buoy.”

“Bloody hell,” Taugrim swore. “I should have anticipated that. And they’re timing them with their skip-jumps. Let’s get away from that relay chain. No sense in making it easy for them. And make a hard turn. Give ’em lots of signal so they can follow us.”

Ships in transition were virtually blind and could detect only the strongest of transition phenomena, like the detonation of a warhead, or another ship nearby maneuvering hard, or up-transiting, or down-transiting. Thankfully they could also detect stellar masses and avoid them. On the other hand, if Drakan Helgis changed course in a long, slow turn, it didn’t generate enough transition noise for her three pursuers to see the slow, steady change in her track, and correct their courses to match. If they didn’t do something to update their data on a regular basis, they could lose their prey. But the captains of warships had long ago learned to be creative.

Eight hours later, Drakan Helgis’s scan tech announced, “Another down-transition, mistress. And right on schedule.”

Every eight hours one of the three hunter-killers following Drakan Helgis down-transited in what Taugrim called a skip-jump maneuver. They decelerated hard down to about five hundred lights, then forced the down-transition, which lit up nearby space with a healthy flare and dropped them into sublight running just under one light. They released their drones to increase their scan accuracy, spent about a half hour gathering data, then pushed their sublight drive hard and up-transited again about an hour behind their comrades.

In that way they acquired accurate and up-to-date data on Drakan Helgis’s position and vector, but it put that one ship an hour behind the other two. They didn’t make an effort to correct that, because eight hours later one of the other two took its turn at the skip-jump maneuver, and lost an hour of drive time, which dropped it back near the first ship. And when all three ships had taken their turn, they were once again clustered closely together. They then repeated the process.

The main disadvantage of the skip-jump was that they lost about one hour of drive time every day. That slowed their effective drive advantage, which meant that instead of converging with Drakan Helgis in three days and twenty-seven light years, it would be a little over four days and forty light-years. Another disadvantage for them was that every time they down-transited and up-transited, their transition flare gave Drakan Helgis an extremely good fix on their position, even while in transition. That didn’t matter so much as long as they weren’t within targeting range, but that would soon change.

“This is the one I want,” Taugrim said, startling Nikaela.

Falkenberg had assigned her to train at Nav that shift, with John at Helm. They had raced ahead of the hunter-killers for over a day, and Nikaela couldn’t stop computing and re-computing the ever narrowing gap between them. If they didn’t do something to change the equation, they’d converge in another thirty light-years and start slinging warheads at each other.

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