Breach the Hull by Mike McPhail

Author:Mike McPhail [McPhail, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780979690198
Google: _dc5PwAACAAJ
Publisher: Dark Quest
Published: 2009-06-15T04:34:25+00:00

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COMPARTMENT ALPHA

Jeffrey Lyman

COMMAND TO ALL AFT GUN BATTERIES.” THE XO’S MESSAGE FLASHED ACROSS MY MIND ON THE ship’s neural link. “Alert, five minutes to flares away. Countdown to Operation Slowdown begins now.”

Alarms brayed for general quarters across the Glory. A five-minute countdown timer ran behind my right eye.

There was a lot of chatter on the neural link and I tuned it out. My nerves were tight enough. The engineers had struggled to keep us elevated in hyperspace his long. We should have fallen out hours ago, but they were milking the batteries for all they were worth. Forty-seven hours and counting, and now we were out of time.

I was the gunnery sergeant in charge of the aft, port gun, nicknamed “Annie”. I hadn’t left her remote feeds for all of these forty-seven hours. Other avatars came and went, quick as a wink, checking on our pursuit, but I remained at my post. I had stayed awake for longer periods before. With our bodies suspended in the core of the ship we didn’t require much downtime from the link, and I needed to keep my eyes on the enemy. Our sister gun-cruisers had died getting us this far.

Square in Annie’s sights sat Bandits 1 and 2. The Aylin destroyers glowed in the dim, roiling light of hyperspace. They weren’t gaining and they weren’t falling back; they were biding their time. They knew we would fall out of hyperspace before we reached inhabited space.

It had taken twenty-nine gun-cruisers to bring down four of their destroyers and three of their big carriers, so what could the Glory do alone? We had lost Upsilon Station, we had lost the Tarish system, and that was only the tip of the Aylin incursion. We had to warn Fleet. We had to survive in realspace long enough to launch a message-drone. That was the captain’s orders.

Operation Slowdown was a crazy scheme cooked up by the navigators. It relied on the accuracy of the Aylin tracking computers. Those computers were waiting for us to drop out of hyperspace. They could calculate the emergence-time for a ship of our mass vs. a ship of their mass and drop in behind us with guns firing. We wouldn’t have enough time to launch the message-drone. Unless we could somehow drop into realspace faster than their tracking computers calculated.

The navigators were going to hook us on a heavy gravitational mass, use it as a momentum yoke, and drop into realspace half a second faster than standard. The destroyers should over-shoot us by a kilometer. Then our forward and midship gunbatteries would rake them from behind while the message-drone sped away. The Captain made it clear we were protecting the drone. He didn’t mention survival. So I remained at my post, unable to take my eyes off my killers.

“Eight-five seconds,” I said to my targeting techs. “Let’s push these flares up their noses.”

Back in basic training I used to fantasize about being a hero. I figure everybody does at some point. Now at my final battle, my entire contribution would be a bunch of EMP flares.

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