Benjamin Gold

Location: CWS Argo, Hahn System, Eastern Block of Nations

“Transition.” LT Briggs announced as if the jolt of the ship exiting Alcubierre wasn’t enough notice.

Ben watched attentively as the holo began to expand to its one-light-minute bubble radius. “Confirm our location, Navigation.” He ordered.

It took thirty seconds for CPL Diez to get back to him, which was the first sign that something was wrong. “Sir, we’re…”

“Fifty thousand kilometers off course,” the XO finished when the CPL failed to finish his sentence.

Ben took several deep breaths, tried to keep his face composed, but gripped his command chair tightly to vent his frustration. “Corporal, explain to me why we missed our exit point by more than the circumference of planet Earth?”

The CPL didn’t have an answer. He just looked at his station and shrugged.

“It’s my fault, Sir. I didn’t double check his calculations carefully enough.” The LT came to the rescue.

Technically, she was right. As the direct supervisor of the bridge crew, she was responsible to make sure everything ran smoothly. She was responsible for checking the Alcubierre jump calculations. Without a Launcher, things were already trickier, but that still wasn’t a good excuse for the CPL. The XO had her hand in a half dozen different things at the time of their transition. As the subject matter expert, the CPL should be pretty close to the mark. A few thousand kilometers here or there were acceptable. Fifty thousand was not.

“This is a bad start to a critical operation,” Ben raised his voice so the whole bridge could hear. “Get it together, now.”

“Yes, Sir.” The crew acknowledged and got back to it.

“Sir,” the LT walked up to stand next to his command chair. “I’ve got some good news.”

Ben watched their progression farther into Hahn System.

“We’re out of position, but we still made the elliptical and are headed on the correct heading, we’re just farther forward then we planned.”

As bad as things could get with a bad transition, this was as good a scenario as he could hope for.

“Engineering, reduce speed so we don’t outrun the rest of the task force when they transition. Navigation, replot our escape routes to adjust for our new position. Weapons, get me a green in the next few minutes, and, Coms, start listening for any traffic. XO, deploy the drone screen.”

“Yes, Sir.” Acknowledgements rang throughout the bridge as people got back to work.

Even as Argo slowed down, Ben’s view of the system grew as the high-speed drones shot out of the gunboat’s belly and streaked toward their targets last known location. Ben had thirty minutes to get a fix on the enemy’s position and strength before the task force arrived.

As the screening elements rapidly pushed forward more of the system came under Ben’s watchful gaze. Ten minutes after transition he had a decent view of the system’s outermost planet.

“Angle Drone Five toward the planet.” Ben remembered from his briefing that the Mobile Dockyard was supposed to be orbiting the frozen moon of the planet.

Six more minutes passed. “I’ve got contact.” The XO announced as red icons started to populate the holo-tank at the center of the bridge. “It looks like they were trying to hide in the shadow of the moon when they detected our transition.”

“Reposition the Drone to get as much data on the enemy as possible, but keep one on each of our flanks. We don’t want someone sneaking up on us.” Ben watched as the crew executed and nodded. It might have been a rough start, but things were looking up now, and it felt good to be doing simple gunboat operations.

“We’ve got a good read on them, Sir.” The XO informed as their system registered the ripple of the task force’s Alcubierre arrival behind them. “We’re reasonably confident in the two battlecruisers flanking the dockyard. We’ve also picked up three other signatures. We’ve got two pegged as destroyers, but the emissions we’re picking up on Bogey-Five are inconsistent. It’s either another destroyer or a small cruiser. We’ll need to get closer to get a better read.”

“This is going to have to be good enough. Good work everyone,” Ben congratulated the crew and waited for the might of the task force to arrive.

They did with a vengeance. Lancelot led the way looking deadly and impossible from a pure tonnage standpoint, followed by Andromeda and her four sister battlecruisers, the missile cruiser Deluge, and the Star Kingdom’s cruiser Benjamin Disraeli bringing up the rear. It was nine against five, or six if you counted the mobile dockyard’s defensive capabilities, but that didn’t mean anything. In terms of energy cannons and missiles the two forces could put into the air, the Commonwealth-Star Kingdom alliance could throw nearly three times more in both categories.

The Blockies realized this quickly because they started to change course and head away from Hahn-Six’s gravity well so they could jump to Alcubierre. Ben did the calculations and smiled.

“We caught them with their pants down everyone.” A small cheer went up from the bridge crew. “They’ll be in our engagement envelope for a full twenty-two minutes before they can reach a safe Alcubierre distance. We’ll pound them to rubble, take the water reserves from the moon base, and then destroy the infrastructure there. This should go well for all of us.”

He didn’t address it directly, but with Argo’s prior service record they could use a win.

“Helm, start to bring up around to course one-one-zero. Let’s make some room for the task force. We don’t want to be caught…”

The holo-tank abruptly changed. Lancelot vanished from the plot and was replaced by dozens of blinking escape pod icons.

“What the hell?” Ben’s jaw dropped as the biggest ship in the system suddenly became finely dispersed star dust. “Was there a reactor failure?” His mind immediately went to the recent repairs the battleship had just completed.

His eyes were still glued to the holo-tank as the acceleration of one of the battlecruisers abruptly fell and the eight-hundred-meter war machine spiraled out of formation.

Then the plot lit up like a Christmas tree as a volley of missiles erupted from Benjamin Disraeli and streaked toward the task force. There were only ninety of them, but they were so close that they cut through the scattered point defense of the Commonwealth ships and crippled another battlecruiser.

Ben just sat there in horror as the battlecruiser disgorged escape pods into a growing debris field. The next change to the holo-tank was less lethal, but just as frightening. The supposed allied cruiser’s icon went from friendly blue to hostile red. The former ally took out ten times its tonnage in less than thirty seconds, so it was no wonder the CIC back on Andromeda was updating the status and pushing it out to the remaining Commonwealth ships.

Benjamin Disraeli fired another broadside, but this time the remaining battlecruisers were ready. They still took a pounding. Ben analyzed the sensor data and saw that a lot more missiles were making it through the countermeasures than the most pessimistic techs thought possible when they first started to analyze the Star Kingdom’s missiles effectiveness after the battle in System 1552. Andromeda bucked under the weight of focused antimatter blasts, but she kept on fighting. The flagship coordinated its fire with the missile cruiser Deluge and sent back the Commonwealth’s first response to the betrayal: one hundred and eighty missiles strong.

It only took a few seconds for the barrage to cross the distance between the warring ships. They were in knife fighting range, but Ben still watched in amazement as the enemy cruiser’s point defense chewed through the incoming ordinance. He’d never seen anything like it. Argo’s sensors couldn’t pick up any railgun rounds, but the point defense lasers were spitting out faster than he knew possible, and they weren’t missing. Of the one hundred and eighty missiles, fired at near point-blank range in terms of space combat, only forty made it through.

That should be enough to badly damage a cruiser, even one as large as the Star Kingdom’s, but again Ben got to see something new. The space around the ship flared as lasers, pressure waves, and duro-steel rounds from can openers impacted the space around it.

“They’ve got fucking shields!” Chief Yates was the first to say it. “How the hell did they pack something like that onto a cruiser?”

But it got worse. When the cruiser cleared the cloud of sensor-blocking destruction the forty explosions had created, it looked completely unharmed.

“Sir, I have Captain Jacobson on TACCOM.” SP2 Olvera’s voice was shaky.

“Put her through. On video if you have it.” Ben sat back down in his command chair.

CAPT Jacobson’s face appeared on the holo hovering in front of him. It looked like she’d aged ten years in ten seconds. “Lieutenant Commander,” she sounded calm, but Ben saw an awful lot of smoke in the background behind her. “Change of mission. You are to return to New Lancashire with all haste and inform Admiral Nelson of the Star Kingdom’s treachery. We will hold off the Disraeli so you can escape and then follow once we’ve gathered the escape pods. Please acknowledge.”

“Receipt of mission change acknowledged. Argo will return to New Lancashire and tell the Admiral what happened here.” He had a bad feeling that Andromeda following them wasn’t in the cards.

“Good luck, Gold.” Jacobson cut the link just as more fire was exchanged between the embattled ships.

There was no plume of a reactor gone critical and destroying a whole ship with all hands, but Andromeda took another pounding and was starting to list dangerously to port. Something big had been broken. One of her sister ships was putting on more speed to get between the battered flagship and the enemy, but Ben didn’t know if they were going to make it in time. That thought was reinforced as a massive energy blast from Disraeli’s main cannon shot through space and practically cleaved Deluge in two.

Despite the new orders, Ben couldn’t take his eyes from the holo-tank. A single overweight cruiser was battering the crap out of a far superior task force.

Suddenly, he didn’t feel so comfortable in the force supremacy of the Commonwealth in York Sector.

“Sir!” CPL Diez shouted.

Ben dragged his eyes away from the task force and refocused on the original threat. The Blockies had changed course and were heading straight for the struggling task force.

Ben didn’t know, but it looked that way.

“Grab as much sensor data as you can.” He knew the order was superfluous, but he said it anyway. “That data is going to be more important than all of our lives. Helm, we better be at full military power.”

Argo was a lone, blue spec caught in the open between two opposing forces. It was the fastest ship in the system, unless the Disraeli was hiding some hidden acceleration capabilities, which Ben wasn’t willing to rule out.

For the second time in his six-month deployment, Ben was running for help. He didn’t like it. It made him feel like a coward, but as he watched the wreckage of the bisected Deluge finally splitting apart and spinning off into space, he knew he had to follow orders. What had begun in Hahn System was just the start.

The rest of the Commonwealth needed to be warned.