Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1 by Doug Dandridge

Author:Doug Dandridge [Dandridge, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. Socrates

“How the hell did he get in so close?” yelled Lt. Commander Kathomas Hubbard, throwing an angry glance at her tactical officer. The HICS (His Imperial Czar’s Ship) Ekaterina shuddered again as the terawatt lasers of the unknown enemy struck at her hull.

“Increasing electromag shields to port,” yelled back the tactical officer, his fingers dancing over his board. “Venting more cold plasma into the shield matrix.” The rest of the bridge crew was performing admirably, trying to stay cool under fire, fighting the ship to the best of their abilities.

And it won’t be enough, thought the Captain, tapping into her link for a private conversation. That ship has to be at least three times our mass. And her weapons are hitting too damned hard, even for a ship that size. They have some tech that we don’t, and home needs to know about her.

“How the hell did they get on top of us?” she asked her sensor chief over the link. “They shouldn’t have known we were there. Right?”

“I’m not sure, ma’am,” said the Senior Chief Petty officer from her room toward the bow. “I’d never seen anything like them before, and was still trying to firm up a reading…”

The ship shuddered again as the alien hit them with another blast. Circuits sparked for a moment, then went silent as the ship shunted them around to undamaged hardware.

“C Ring at fifty percent,” yelled the tactical officer.

“Keep the A and B rings on target,” said the Captain. The helm nodded his head as he maneuvered the vessel, keeping the functional rings on target as the Ekaterina fired everything she had.

“He was in Hyper VII when we picked him up,” continued the chief on the private link. “I’d never heard anything like that resonance. The ship didn’t have anything in its memory like it either. But I assumed from the power that it was a capital ship, at least a battle cruiser.”

And much further off, thought the Captain. Same as I thought when I looked at the readings. The ship’s computers had nothing to compare the energy signatures too, and thought he was much further off, even if he was coming toward them. And a good tech; and the chief was a good tech; could read things from the resonances that even the ship’s computers could miss. But only if they had a frame of reference. So when they thought they were safe and undetectable, they had crept into the range of the enemy’s scanners. And said enemy dropped down into Hyper VI and caught them off guard.

“Fire off all of our hyper capable missiles,” she ordered, looking at the tactical plot on the screen. Her ship had suffered some superficial damage. But it would start to add up quickly. While she really couldn’t tell how much damage the other ship had taken. Not bloody much, she thought, looking at the energy signatures. The surface of the enemy ship was blurred under electromag and cold plasma, same as her ship.

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