My Other Car is a Spaceship (13 page)

“Captain, the last of the squadrons has arrived. The entire fleet is assembled.”

“Excellent. Get me all of the other squadron leaders,”
Senior Captain Tra Mastul ordered.

The leader of Squadron 1
wanted to be sure all the other Senior Captains understood their parts in the battle plan. The Thorian was acting as admiral for this assault—a rank that didn’t exist in the Unity. The other Senior Captains were his commodores, each leading a squadron. Normally, policing activities were coordinated from the commissioner’s office. However, due to the magnitude of this assault, Commissioner of the Fleet Boutan’Mourn’Froul felt that during the attack there must be no question about who was in charge. And someone had to have the authority to change the battle plan as needed while the fleet was out of touch with HQ. As the most senior of the Unity’s ship captains, Mastul got the nod to head up the fleet.

Once the conference call was set up
among the eight ships, he began. “Ladies and gentlemen, unless any of you have a mechanical problem that would prevent it, we jump in an hour.”

“Tarl, sensors have detected several large disturbances in hyperspace. The Unity ships appear to be coming from eight different vectors. They will reach the system within minutes.” Ishtawahl appeared calmer than Penrod would have expected.

“And so it begins. Do we know where they’ll arrive in the system? I know they’ll end up here eventually, but do we know where they’ll be staging from?”

“Not yet. I will let you know as soon as we determine that.”

“Good. Tell all the pilots to stand ready.
When this happens, it’s gonna happen in a hurry.”

Adventurer
re-entered realspace just inside the system’s Kuiper Belt. Having billions of ice objects at their back masked the presence of the fleet from anyone viewing from a distance, at least temporarily. Nearly five billion kilometers distant, the yellow dwarf sun of the Borhtar system appeared barely larger than the stars that served as a backdrop.

Kalen knew that e
ven if there were sensors nearby to register the fleet’s presence and transmit the data to the fortress, the radio signals would take more than four hours to arrive. By then, the battle would be well under way.

“
We’ve arrived, Captain,” Hal announced. “Scanning for bogeys.” He waited for the data. “Nothing way out here. It looks like there’s several dozen ships in the general target area. I count…thirty-seven bogeys. There may be others obscured by asteroids or in hiding. That’s a lot more than the reconnaissance holos show is normal. I guess they’re waiting for us.”

“That’s not surprising. The pirates clearly have a mole or two inside Unity HQ. Still, they can’t
know our battle plan. Only the Senior Captains and a few others were privy to that before we left. We didn’t expect this to be easy; now we know it won’t be. But that doesn’t change the mission.”

“No sir.
Still, we know they have a lot more ships than we’re seeing. I wonder why there aren’t more of them in-system.”

“
Could be they don’t think they need any more, what with the fortress to cover them. Besides, they have pirating to do. If they keep all their ships here waiting for our arrival, then we’ve effectively won already. Or perhaps they’re lying in wait somewhere else. As soon as we jump in, they’ll do so as well. Keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, what’s the status of the squadron?”

“
All sixteen ships present and accounted for. The other squadrons are on schedule, coming in on different hyperspace vectors. The combined fleet should be gathered in another twenty-seven minutes.”

“Excellent.
Coordinate with the other squadron pilots so we all jump together on schedule. If we do indeed have the element of surprise, we need to take advantage of that with a synchronized attack.”

“Will do.”

“
Is everything ready, Jern?”

“Yes, sir.”

We’re back to ‘sir’, are we? So he’s feeling the pressure after all.

“Good. Then all we have to do is sit back and wait.
This is going to be fun.”

Over the next forty-plus minutes, the eight commodores coordinated the activities of their respective squadrons. Finally, it was time.

“We’re jumping i
n ten. Everyone hold onto your hats.” Hal took a moment to compose himself. He’d survived dozens of battles before, through a combination of skill and luck.

W
ill that be enough this time?

He signaled Conflict Alert, sounding the klaxons and raising the shields.
“Five…four…three…two…here we go!”

At the designated moment, all
eight squadrons, comprising 128 ships, pounced from eight different directions at once. Square in their figurative crosshairs was a rather large asteroid, surrounded and obscured by a cloud of smaller asteroids—asteroids festooned with the nastiest surprises the pirates could dream up.

T
hus began the battle for control of the spaceways.

“X marks the spot, Captain,” Hal said, referring to the target highlighted on the main holoscreen. “We’ve arrived at the designated coordinates. The fortress is somewhere inside that mess of asteroids shielding it.”

H
e scanned for pirate ships. “I count thirty-nine bogeys. Make that forty. They’re coming out of the woodwork. There are over fifty bogeys now. Sixty, and more coming.”

“
This is it, ladies and gentlemen,” Capt Jeffries announced over the intercom to the rest of the ship. “We all know our duties. If we do them to the best of our abilities, either we’ll be victorious or we’ll lay a beating on these cutthroats they won’t soon forget!”

Hal announced,
“Engaging the first bogey. Let’s see how these enhanced weapons and shields do.”

H
e said a quick prayer and launched a shield-seeking quem at the nearest ship—a small one, only two-thirds the mass of
Adventurer
, but bristling with energy weapons. Hal immediately followed with a burst from the quad antiproton cannons. The missile struck the pirate broadside, weakening the shield. The supercharged APC blasts smashed past the shield and burned a hole right through the ship. An enemy missile still in its cradle detonated in a secondary explosion. The ship blew itself apart in a spectacular incendiary display.

“Ye
e-hah! Take that, you bastard!” Hal wore a face-splitting grin. “
That
was easy.”

Let’s not get too cocky, son. That’s just one ship. There are sixty
-seven others out there where he came from.

Even as he exulted, three pirates launched missiles at
Adventurer
, and a fourth hit her with a gamma ray laser. Hal managed to evade all but one missile and the laser burst. “The new shields are holding up like a champ. She handles more like a drunken sailor now than a racehorse. But maybe that’ll work to our advantage. The pirates know these ships. They know how they
usually
handle. Our unbalanced configuration might inject a note of unpredictability into the mix, at least for a while, until they figure out how to compensate.”

Hal
continued to fire and evade while he spoke. He launched missiles at two more pirate vessels and mass driver slugs at another. He followed the missiles with bursts from the APCs and fired a second round of slugs at the third ship. Two of the slugs penetrated the shield like armor-piercing bullets through window glass. The shock wave of the impact literally shook the ship to pieces.

“Yes! That’s two!”

“Let’s not get overconfident, Hal,” Kalen admonished gently. His smile showed that he, too, was pleased by how well the fight was going.

“I know, I know. I just wasn’t expecting it to be this easy.”

Calm down,
Hal. You know what they say: when things are going too perfectly, remember Murphy’s Law.

The longer the battle continued, the more obvious it
became that the first pirate ship’s destruction wasn’t a fluke. The enhanced APCs were more than a match for the enemy shields, and the Unity shields in return were up to stopping multiple strikes by the pirates’ weapons. In short order, the Unity battle fleet destroyed or crippled fourteen others.

Damn. We might just clean up the whole pirate fleet
, or at least the portion that’s here in the Borhtar system, in this one assault. Why didn’t we think of this approach sooner?

After
twenty minutes of fighting, more than thirty pirate vessels were out of the fight compared to only two of the Unity ships—one due to a high-speed collision with a pirate ship that destroyed them both. Too many ships zigzagged in too little space.

“
That’s nearly half of their ships, Captain. We outnumber them almost four to one now. This shouldn’t take long to mop up.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we initiate Phase 2? Our ships are taking a terrible beating. How much longer are we going to allow that to happen?” Jern Ishtawahl’s scaly face showed his concern by a tightening of the skin around the eyes.

“I think we’ve waited long enough, Jern. Begin Phase 2. I wanted to get a feel for their tactics and armament before committing to
it.” Tarl Penrod sat back in his command chair, deep in the heart of
Smuggler’s Cove
, the pirate fortress, and smiled as he thought of what was to come.

“It is time.” Captain MimKestal pursed her lips.
This battle has gone those Unity bastards’ way for far too long. It is time to even the odds—and then some.

“Pilot,
give the order.”

“With pleasure,
Captain.” Pilot Tom Slovensky made the call and the other ships of
Task Force 2
slid from behind the largest moon of the third planet.

As soon as the ships cleared the gravity well of the moon, they jumped in unison.

“Whoa! More bogeys entering the fray
, Captain. They just jumped in from somewhere.” Hal counted quickly. “There’s more than sixty of them. That brings their number up to about ninety ships. That evens the odds a bit. No matter. We still have superior firepower and shields.” He paused as he checked the sensors. “And here comes the cavalry!”

From behind the fourth planet where they had awaited the pirates’ counterattack,
Wave 2
, consisting of
Squadrons 1
through
4
, who had thus far stayed out of the fight, jumped into the area beyond the newly arrived pirate ships, catching them in a pincer move between the ships of
Wave 1
and
Wave 2
.

“Hoo-boy!” Hal exulted. “
The pirates are in for it now!”

“
Now
, Tom,” Captain MimKestral ordered without a trace of strain showing in her voice.

The pilot
eased the bulk of
The
Sword of Sestra
out from behind the third moon.

Formerly the passenger liner
Thelvian Moonbeam,
The
Sword of Sestra
had undergone a startling transformation. Gone were the zero-gee ballroom, the luxurious dining halls and staterooms, the swimming pool and the sporting arenas. Of all the fun-and-games amenities, only the casinos remained, for the amusement of the pirates.

Filling all that unused space were industrial-sized power generators and a full two dozen shield generators, as well as armories, banks of missile launchers, and arrays of energy weapons not typically seen on any vessel short of a battleship—certainly not on a “police” vessel of the type the Unity had at their disposal. The remaining space was outfitted for storing cargo
—“cargo,” in this case, meaning slaves and swag.
The
Sword of Sestra
was equipped to haul a
lot
of cargo.

As soon as
Sword
left the moon’s gravity well, the pocket battleship jumped.

“What the hell? Another ship just arrived and she’s a
big
mother. It’s three times our length and ten times our mass. Holy
shit!
It’s got some monstrous power readings and a whole lot more missile doors than we do.”

“Damn.” Kalen thought for a moment. “
Inform the other ships, in case they haven’t spotted it yet, and do what you can to stay out of its way. Can you keep some pirate ships between us and the big one?”

“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best. Between attacking and dodging, and with all the other ships weaving in and out, I can’t swear Goliath over there won’t get a shot or two in.”

“I understand, Hal. Do what you can. Maybe if the fleet can whittle down the number of smaller vessels, several of us can gang up on Goliath and take her out later.”

“I hope so. It’s gotten a lot tougher to keep track of everything that’s going on at once
.”

That was an incredible understatement.
With more than two hundred ships engaging one another, tracking the motions of all ships in both fleets was like trying to keep track of all the kernels in a bucket of popcorn popping simultaneously. With hundreds of ships, missiles, mass driver slugs, and assorted energy blasts whizzing by in every direction, accidental hits were inevitable. Some of those hits resulted in the destruction of a ship.

“Goliath’s opened up on
Wave two
. The ships are scattering. So much for our flanking maneuver.”

Kalen shrugged. “That’s war. Amazingly enough, the enemy doesn’t always do what you expect.”

Hal snorted between shots. “Ain’t
that
the truth! It would sure make life easier, though. It’s starting to look like we brought a knife to a missile fight.”

Vessels were being destroyed even faster than before. However, the results were
no longer as one-sided. With the pocket battleship for backup, the pirates could afford to have several ships gang up on one Unity vessel.
The
Sword of Sestra
could target one Unity ship and send a dozen missiles its way, or a massive pulse of energy from sixteen huge APC cannons, and the Unity ship would go up like a moth flying into a candle. Or it could target half a dozen Unity ships at once, to supplement the pounding the other pirate ships were administering.

As quickly as that, the tide changed. A dozen Unity ships died in the first ten minutes, compared with only eight pirate vessels. In the next ten minutes, fourteen more Unity ships fell victim to the one-two punch of the small, nimble ships and the battleship sitting back and picking off Unity targets one by one.
It even held off a charge by eight Unity ships at once.

After thirty minutes, the pirate ships for the first time outnumbered the Unity ships.

“
Captain! We have nineteen missiles incoming! I can’t…lose…them all. Nothing’s working. There are too man—”

No ship could withstand the impact of seventeen missile strikes within seconds of one another
, not even one with enhanced shielding. Just like that, Senior Captain and Acting-Admiral Tra Mastul and his ship
Hurricane Force
ceased to exist.

Minutes later,
Senior Captain MarLekzol and her ship had even less warning. Eight tremendous jets of antiprotons emanating from
The Sword of Sestra
sliced
Emancipator
into nine pieces, each spraying debris in every direction as it tumbled.

“That’s fifty ships down, seventy-some-odd to go.” Tom Slovensky grinned to see the Unity ships being destroyed faster and faster now.

He and
The Sword of Sestra
had personally accounted for more than twenty kills. “This is like shooting fish in a barrel. A
big
barrel, maybe. But they’re just as dead.”

“Less talk, more shooting,”
Captain MimKestal admonished. Her long antennae vibrated from her agitation.

“Aye,
Captain. With pleasure. There’s a nice, big, fat target now.”

“Captain,” Hal relayed, “incoming message from Senior Captain Jesthentar.”

“Put him through to my console.”

“Roger.”

Kalen flipped to the external channel. “This is
Jeffries.”

“
Captain, this is Jesthentar. With Mastul and MarLekzol gone, I am the senior officer. We cannot continue to take losses like this. Soon we will no longer have the firepower to complete our primary mission. We must take out the pirate fortress while we still can. I am ordering
Squadrons 5
and
6
to begin the assault on the fortress, while the other squadrons provide covering fire to keep the pirate ships off your backs. Once you are through, we will follow. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.
”

“Good. Senior
Captain Wessel will take the lead.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good fortune, Kalen.”

“Thank you, Jes. I think we’ll need it. Good luck to you, too.”

Kalen closed the communication channel. “Hal, inform the rest of the squadron that it’s time. We’re going in. We’re to close ranks with
Squadron 5
.”

“Roger that.”

Senior Captain Kalen Jeffries closed his eyes for a moment.

Heaven help us.

Hal
toggled the intercom to reach Senior Munitions Chief Tremden Vo. “Chief, it’s time to release the hounds. We’ll be needing them in a few minutes.”

“Yes, sir. You will have them.” The Melphim’s deep voice betrayed no hint of fear. That was always a good sign.
Fear unchecked was a killer.

“Thanks, Trem
. Load the missiles as soon as they’re armed.”