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Chapter TEN
"They're coming around again!" Lieutenant Commander Hughes snapped as a fresh salvo of missiles ripped down on Gudrid. "Get those gravitics back now!"
ET/1c Wanderman felt sweat dripping down his face as he crouched over his diagnostic probe, and the harsh flow of combat chatter washed over him as the surviving LAC skippers maneuvered hard to intercept the raiders' latest pounce. The attack had come as a complete surprise, and it was obvious they were up against an entire squadron of privateers, not run-of-the-mill pirates. Hughes' tac team’s first warning had been the missile salvo which blew one of their escorting destroyers to splinters, and then the enemy had come charging down his missiles' wake.
"I know they're out there," Lieutenant Wolcott, Wayfarer's assistant tac officer, snarled, and Aubrey felt a stab of inadequacy. Whoever these people were, they had excellent electronic warfare systems of their own, and that EW was playing merry hell with Wayfarer's active sensors. They also had at least one heavy missile platform, which was engaging the convoy escorts from beyond Wolcott's active detection envelope. Sensor range was always degraded in hyper-space, and Wolcott needed her gravitics to pick her enemies' impeller signatures out of the background hash of charged particles, jamming, and the EMP of detonating laser heads. But the entire gravitational detection system was down, and he couldn't get it back.
"We've lost Thomas!" someone a
"Targeting change! Stand by port!" the tac officer snapped, punching keys at her console, and Wayfarer's massive energy batteries quested hungrily as someone finally entered their range.
"Breakdown on Graser Five!" someone barked, and Aubrey heard terminal keys rattle. "Damn, damn, damn! It's operator failure!"
"Crap!" Hughes bent over her terminal. Wayfarer's people were still too raw, and it was showing. She input a query and spat a silent curse. "Override Five! Try to slave it to central!"
"Slaving," the first voice a
"Tracking!" Hughes' chief yeoman said. "Tracking... tracking... lock!"
"Fire!"
Eight grasers, each as heavy as any ship of the wall might mount, fired as one, blazing away through the "gun ports" in Wayfarers sidewall, and a battlecruiser-sized raider vanished in the brilliant flash of a failing fusion bottle.
"That's one!" someone snarled.
"Yeah, but now they know what we're armed with," someone else said grimly.
"Permission to deploy pods?" Wolcott called, but Hughes shook her head violently.
"Negative. We still haven't found their missile platforms."
Wolcott nodded unhappily. Gudrid had lost her after cargo doors to a freak hit early in the attack, crippling her missile pod system. That meant Wayfarer had the only heavy missile capacity left to Hughes, but if she revealed it against the targets she could see, the ones she couldn't see would concentrate all their fire on her.
Given Wayfarer's fragility, that would be disastrous, and Aubrey swore under his breath as the panel of his diagnostic flickered. Numbers and schematics cascaded across it as it interrogated the gravitic systems software and test programs examined the hardware. He needed Ginger and her instinct for troubleshooting, but Ginger was a casualty down in Gravitic One, and...
A red light flashed, and his display froze. His eyes darted across the schematic, and he swore again. The hit which had destroyed Gravitic One had spiked the main array. The fail-safes had protected the array itself, but the spike had bled back through the data transmission chain and burned out the primary data coupling from Gravitic Two. Fixing the problem was going to require complete replacement, and that would take hours.
"There goes Li
"They're coming in on us now, Ma'am!" Wolcott said suddenly. "Bogies Seven and Eight coming up from astern and low, two-four-zero by two-three-six." Her voice was already taut; now it went even harsher as she completed her report. "Thirteen and Fourteen are swinging in from starboard and high, too, Ma'am. One-one-niner by zero-three-three. Looks like they're trying to overtake and cross our T!"
"Show me!" Hughes snapped, and Wolcott dumped her data onto the main tactical plot. The lieutenant commander studied the icons for an instant, then nodded. "Roll port and come to three-three-zero, same plane!"
"Rolling port, coming to three-three-zero, same plane, aye," Chief O'Halley acknowledged, and Wayfarer began a ponderous swerve.
"John and Andrew just nailed Bogie Nine," Hughes' yeoman reported, but the tac officer said nothing. Her eyes were glued to her display as the lumbering converted merchantman rolled up on her port side, presenting her belly to the threat from starboard, and turned back across the convoy's track. The maneuver brought her port side down toward the two cruiser-range raiders coming in from "below" her, and Hughes' fingers flew over her panel.
"Radar lock on Bogies Seven and Eight," her yeoman a
"Fire as you bear," Hughes replied grimly.
"There goes Gudrid," someone groaned. "She's breaking up!"
"Carol, find me those missile ships!" Hughes said, and Aubrey closed his eyes while his mind raced.
The raiders had caught the convoy at its most vulnerable moment, as it transited between grav waves in the depths of hyper-space. The two waves were over a half-light-day apart at this, their closest approach. At the convoy's best h-space speed it would take thirty hours to make the transition, and by catching the convoy here, the raiders had been able to come in under impellers. They'd not only intercepted when the merchantmen were slowest and least maneuverable but done so under conditions which let them use their own sidewalls and missiles. Worse, no one had spotted them because of the poor sensor conditions and their unexpectedly good EW until their opening salvos had savaged both destroyers and crippled Gudrid's pods. The fact that they weren't currently in a grav wave had at least let Hughes get her LACs away, and their unanticipated appearance, and power, had given the enemy pause, but it hadn't driven them off. Apparently they'd decided anything this heavily defended had to be worth capturing, and despite their own losses, they were still driving in hard. Without their missile support, Wayfarer and her remaining LACs could still take all of them, but doing anything about their missile platforms required the ability to at least see them, and with the coupling down, how the hell did Aubrey...
Wait! His eyes popped open, and he punched a query into his probe, then gri
"Port battery firing, now!" Hughes' yeoman snapped, and fresh energy howled from Wayfarers grasers as they came to bear. Two more raiders blew up, but one of them lasted long enough to fire back. Her weaker lasers blew right through the Q-ship's underpowered sidewall and nonexistent armor to rip Graser Three, Graser Five, and Missile Seven and Nine apart, with near total casualties on both energy mounts.