Ivan Kal - What War Had Wrought

Aileen turned to her group. “Shut down all your suit electronics, set your suits to shield modes,” she ordered over the comms, and then did the same. Her implant was shielded extremely well inside her brain, but the suits would suffer if they were hit with the pulse. Even though they did have defenses against EMPs, the skim pulse this close was something more powerful than what those defenses could handle.

The shuttle skimmed. In a blink of an eye, it shimmered and then disappeared, leaving behind a shockwave that spread all over the city. In a moment the lights on the streets died, grav-cars lost their controls and crashed into each other. Chaos was all around her. Aileen turned to her group as she rebooted her suit’s systems.

“Let’s go,” Aileen said, and together they disappeared into the masses.

Ship Master Vota sat on board the Jewel, her crew working furiously to get them away from the planet.

“The shuttle is on board, Ship Master.”

“Good,” Vota said. “Lucas, did you find it?”

“No, Ship Master. They trapped us,” her Navigation Handler reported grimly.

Vota shook her head. The Erasi must’ve set this up days ago. Her ship was unable to skim away from the planet because the Erasi had stealthily moved traffic to block their path. The Jewel was surrounded by stations on the sides, and traffic was constantly moving ahead of them in unpredictable ways, making it impossible for them to skim with no risk of hitting something. There was a reason why the Empire’s ships always moved away from everything and skimmed only when they had a clear line of sight. The ship in skim could survive small objects in its paths—dust or small pebbles were simply evaporated by the forward field—but anything more massive than a shuttle and the result was much different. The energy released related to the amount of mass inside the skim field, and Jewel was large enough that any collision would release energy sufficient to blow a small station apart. Although the energy released was nowhere near the size it should be for an object traveling at speeds faster than the speed of light. The skim field bent the space and time around the object, so technically they were not moving at FTL. When a field impacted an object large enough to disrupt it, the field broke, tearing apart the object inside of it and throwing it back into normal space.

“Keep looking,” Vota ordered, then turned to her Communications Handler. “Anything?”

“They are still not responding, Ship Master.”

Vota grimaced. There were three Erasi battleships on their way, and they would enter firing range in less than a minute. The station had surprisingly not yet fired on them, but Vota assumed that they didn’t want to provoke her ship. The stations were not solely military in nature; there were traders from many different races on them, both from the Erasi and independent. They must have believed that she wouldn’t fire on them unless fired upon. And they were right. The Empire was ready to make hard choices when forced to, but firing upon a station filled with innocents with no provocation from them was another thing. The battleships, on the other hand, were another story entirely—they were military ships.

“The enemy battleships have fired missiles, Ship Master!”

Vota looked over her c-board. There was no way out. They could risk and try to skim, but she wasn’t yet ready to order that.

“Bring the point defense net online. Lock proton turrets three through eight on the closest battleship—designate B-1, four seconds cycle,” Vota ordered. Her ship’s proton beams were already in range. “Arm missiles, swarm-type loadout. Navigation, put us on a course out of high orbit.”

The crew followed her orders immediately. Her c-board updated as her people targeted the Erasi battleship, and she designated the two other battleships as B-2 and B-3. She couldn’t use her ship’s kinetic weapons; she couldn’t risk hitting some of the civilian stations or ships, and most of their other weapons were close range, which meant that they were forced to use only proton beams and missiles.

“Proton beams and missiles locked, Ship Master.”

“Fire missiles.”

Vota watched as her ship fired four standard loads of missiles, while the enemy missiles sped towards her ship from two different directions. There were a little more than a thousand enemy missiles coming for her ship, with about half that following behind the first wave. Each of her ship’s loads contained one hundred missiles, for the total of four hundred Swarm MK IX missiles, the newest in the Swarm series. She had a load of ion missiles as well, designed to take down shields, but they were very situational. They simply stood out too much, and she had too few of them for this instance. The Erasi would take them down before she could utilize them. Her Swarm missiles, on the other hand, were faster than that of the Erasi, and soon they crossed two thirds of the distance.

Suddenly the tracks on her c-board increased in number as the first load of the Swarm missiles entered their second phase and each missile split into six smaller ones. Instead of one hundred missiles, the enemy battleship was faced with six times that number. Vota knew what that could do to a defensive system. Their computers would be confused for a moment, and then they would try to acquire targets that were no longer there, and then finally they would start targeting the new missiles.

And that was exactly what happened. The Erasi defensive net started firing on the new missiles, but it was too late; dozens of missiles from the first wave passed through to impact the shields. Each missile had less power than what the Empire’s other types had, but these missiles were designed to overwhelm enemy point defense and shields.

“Watch their shields. As soon as you see an opening, open fire with proton beams,” she ordered just as the enemy missiles reached the range of her ship’s point defense.

The Jewel’s point defense opened fire and lasers started taking down missiles, but there were too many of them coming from three different directions. Soon the missiles started hitting the Jewel’s shields.

Vota glanced at her c-board and watched as the second wave of her missiles struck at the enemy battleship, then the third and the fourth. The consecutive hits paid off and Vota saw the battleship’s forward shields fail, several missiles passing through to impact the hull. In the next instant, her Weapons Handler opened fire. Proton beams struck the enemy ship, gouging holes into the Erasi battleship that was rotating its saucer shape to bring to bear an area where they still had shields.

“Ship Master, I have a possible course,” the Navigation Handler said. “It’s not a clear path, but it is the best I can do.”

Vota glanced at the course and saw that this course had a sixty percent chance of successful skim, but that it would require them to get through the Erasi battleship.

“Change course, full power towards that battleship,” Vota ordered. “Charge ion turrets and k-turrets three and four.”

The Jewel had already left the planet’s high orbit, and the ship veered off towards the Erasi battleship. The other two battleships were coming in from behind her now, and Erasi drives were better. They would overtake them eventually.

“Incoming fire from B-1!” the Sensor Handler reported.

Vota saw that they were now in the range of the Erasi battleships’ particle weapons. Her shields were still taking a beating from the enemy missiles as their second wave reached them. The shields had dropped to 53% and were dropping even faster now that the enemy battleships’ particle weapons were in range.

Vota did the math in her head. She knew that the shields wouldn’t survive until she entered point-blank range of the Erasi battleship, and she needed to get past it.