Chapter Thirty-Two
Despite the handicaps the Drifters had inflicted on the Kozun, Raven was almost a quarter million kilometers distant when the first cruiser finally died. Everyone, including Henry, appeared to have underestimated the shield upgrades the Kozun had installed on their new warships.
“Remaining ships are breaking off,” Ihejirika reported. “Guardians are pursuing.”
“That’s going to be painful to watch,” Iyotake said from the CIC. “The cruisers have point four KPS-squared on the Guardians, but they’re not going to make it.”
Even as Henry’s XO spoke, the Guardians finally started launching missiles. The range was short enough that they would be coming in slowly. Without surprise, they’d be vulnerable to Kalad’s missile defenses. Some would get through anyway.
Raven continued to open the range at point seven KPS2. It was all the battered starship could take, and Henry was praying for every second Kalad’s ships could buy him. The Drifters might just be enforcing the peace as they’d promised…but nobody was talking to Raven.
“Ser, we have a problem,” Moon told him. “The skip drone…”
“Commander?” Henry asked. “What happened?”
“I launched eleven skip drones at the Ra-Seventy-Oh-Five skip line,” she reported. “We also had one prepositioned eighty percent of the way there. Paranoia, I thought…but they’re all gone.”
“Gone,” Henry repeated, turning his attention to that section of the display. There were no skip-drone icons on the display…and there was a glittering array of new red hostile icons near the Ra-175 skip line.
“Data is limited,” Moon said quickly. “But it appears that someone positioned laser satellites along the line to Ra-One-Seventy-Five. They were tracking our skip drones as they were sent home before, so when new drones went out…”
“They shot them down.” The satellites were millions of kilometers away, well outside the range at which Henry could do anything about them. The presumably robotic craft would be no threat to Raven in her normal state, but right now…
“Launch a new spread,” he ordered. “At least twenty drones; send them as far around as you can.”
“Yes, ser,” Moon confirmed. “Already programming the courses and messages.”
“Include all the data we have on the mines,” Henry told her. “They shouldn’t be able to threaten Battle Group Scorpius, but let’s make sure.”
“The Kozun just lost another cruiser,” Iyotake reported as Moon set to work. “It’s almost over.”
“What’s their maneuver cone?” Henry asked. “Are we out of their range?”
“Their vector is away from us now. Combined with our own acceleration, we’ll be clear of their laser and plasma range in two minutes,” Ihejirika reported. “Maneuver cone is similar. We have a small thrust advantage, less than we’d have normally, but…”
The vector cones appeared in the virtual screens around Henry. He could keep the range open for a while. In the long run, the Drifters would be able to spread out and cut off his escape routes…even ignoring their fighters.
“When was the last drone dispatched to Scorpius?” he asked Moon.
“The light from its skip arrived thirty seconds before the Kozun launched,” she told him after a moment. “They were watching for that.”
“Forty-eight hours,” Henry concluded. “Twelve hours for that drone to arrive. Twenty-four for them to realize they’re not getting more messages, and then twelve hours for Scorpius to skip here.”
He shook his head.
“Let’s hope the second wave of drones gets through,” Iyotake reported. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get two days.”
“New bogeys, ser,” Ihejirika reported. “Multiple bogeys. I am detecting fighter wings deploying from all three Guardians. Estimate sixty, six-zero, starfighters…vectors hostile. I repeat, vectors hostile.”
That meant they were on an intercept course and weren’t communicating. Sixty starfighters…
“Acceleration?” Henry asked.
“Two point…” Ihejirika swallowed. “Two point two KPS-squared, ser.”
“Understood.” Raven’s captain looked at the icons and wished he could change something, anything, about the situation unfolding around him. Two point two KPS2 was ten percent higher acceleration than any Vesheron or El-Vesheron starfighter the UPA had on record.
It was less than the Lancers Raven carried and that was their only hope.
He closed his eyes. With the data coming via his internal network, it made no difference to what he was seeing but it made him feel better.
“Designate Drifter contacts hostile,” he ordered. “Leave the Kozun hostile for now; there’s not much we can do either way there.”
“Understood,” Iyotake said softly. New data codes flashed across the display and Henry took a moment to take status of the entire situation.
New red icons started to glitter out by the skip line as he watched, and he simply nodded as his expectations were confirmed. There were at least a hundred laser platforms blocking the route to Battle Group Scorpius. In her current state, those mines were a threat to Raven herself.
The skip drones didn’t stand a chance.
The Drifter starfighters needed to shed their motherships’ velocity before they came after him. They carried full-size missiles and could engage at long range, though. If they wanted to chase him down, they could do so—but everything he saw said he still had missile launchers.
The real weapon against them was his own starfighters, though, and he checked their status. The line of red icons that answered his mental query was not what he expected, and he swallowed a curse.
“O’Flannagain, report,” he snapped.
“When we get back home, I am going to hunt down the ratfucker who designed the Lancer’s storage protocols, and I am going to carve their genitalia out with a rusty fucking spoon,” Raven’s CAG snarled into the radio.
“Report,” Henry repeated, though he suspected he was going to agree with her assessment.
“The SF-One-Thirty does not run its internal compensators while in storage status,” O’Flannagain ground out. “None of our starfighters do. Every other fucking fighter I’ve ever flown, however, could take a fucking hit.
“The Lancer is too fragile,” she concluded. “The GMS system is carefully aligned. An unexpected impact throws everything out of alignment. So, I have eight multi-million-dollar starfighters that can’t fly until we fully recalibrate their engines.
“Which we can’t do under subjective thrust.”
“There are sixty starfighters chasing us, O’Flannagain,” Henry said mildly. “Slowing down isn’t a great plan.”
“No shit,” she agreed. “My techs are throwing the manual out and attempting recalibrations via remote drone while under eleven pseudogravities of subjective thrust. The worst case is we write off a starfighter, and, unfortunately, I can spare one. Two of my people are in medbay. Gaunt is dead.”
Henry could have seen that, but he couldn’t look at casualty reports right now. He was keeping his grief compartmentalized, both for his crew and for Todorovich.