Chapter 45

Narval star system, outer system.

High orbit over Narval-8.

"So. We've been here for two weeks now, and we are fairly confident we've seen everything we could at least detect in this star system." Said Sarah to her assembled officers in her office. "Some of it is very worrying, the rest is a bit more...complicated. Still, I believe we will not get anymore benefits from observing what is going on. Elteria?"

"Normensk has gotten me a flight plan, and it looks good. We're going to take the ship out of the gas giant's rings on low acceleration and position ourselves near their divinium freighter route. We'll be close enough to generate an intercept while they're still deep in the outer system, but far enough that active scanner sweeps from the inner system or the freighter on emergence won't detect us. Once we've gotten one of the freighters we want, we accelerate to an intercept course, then cut our accel and coast to them. Most of the plan relies on us getting close enough to be able to neutralize their reactor and various other systems in a few seconds, and that means we'll have to use our point defence guns."

"That's knife fighting range." Commented Hector.

"Correct." Said Sarah. "But it's the only range at which we can pull it off. And yes, that means we're going to fire before raising our shields, so if they fire back immediately..."

"We're going to take damage." Turral sighed. "The armor should hold...hopefully. But I can't guarantee anything if they hit a missile launcher or a point defence gun ma'am."

Sarah nodded.

"I know. Hopefully it won't happen, but..." She shrugged. "Murphy's law applies to all sides in a battle. Still, hope for the best, plan for the worst."

"Right."

"Hector." Continued Sarah. "Once we've neutralized the ship, we'll need you to deploy the nanotech canister."

"That should be fairly easy. Just find us an airlock and get us close enough, my marines and I will do the rest."

"Are you sure? Sally isn't going to be combat capable for a long time."

The sergeant smiled.

"Sally might have been our demolition specialist, but we all know how to plant a breaching charge. Once it's through the hull...the nanotech will do the rest. Won't even need atmosphere." Sarah shivered at the casual reminder of the fact that if the self destruct code didn't work, the only thing that would be able to purify that wreck would be plasma fire. "Our suits can handle space work just fine. We just need to be close enough and have a velocity match. This job is paying enough we can even justify pulling out the good stuff in breaching charges. Believe me captain, we will go through, even if we have to open that hull like a tin can with fusion charges."

"Right. The problem is that, well...we might get a bit too close." Sarah sighed as Turral and Hector looked at her worryingly. "We have reasons to think they are holding to a single, predictable vector, because one of the solar stations is dialed in to shoot them. Its hard to tell, but that's what we think. In that case...we need to get them off course, fast."

Turral licked her lips.

"You want to...to ram them?"

Sarah nodded. Ramming another ship in space was...insane. The distances involved meant that it was practically impossible unless the enemy really didn't see you coming, and they were effectively immobilized or on a predictable vector.

"At a low velocity. We don't need to impart them much momentum, just enough to throw off the defence platforms' aim."

"That's...I'll see what I can do to mitigate damage, but the ship is not going to like that. Even with the inertial compensator."

"I know. Just do your best. But have a defusal team on stand by as well. If they're ready to go that far, they will have some kind of nuke onboard. Quite probably separate from the reactor, in case someone takes it out in an attempt to prevent an intentional overload." The freighter wasn't using a gravitational confinement reactor, which if destroyed would detonate like a fusion bomb, instead relying on a vastly cheaper but less powerful and mass efficient magnetic confinement reactor, simply because their cover would have been blown in a heartbeat if they'd used the former, as they were too expensive to maintain, especially for a civilian ship, let alone a bulk freighter. The problem was that even if it was safer than a gravitational confinement fusion core, it could still be overloaded to flood the ship with plasma, and destroy everything in it.

"Right. We'll do our best ma'am."

"I can ask of nothing more. Hector, your objectives are simple: grab the astronavigation database, and if possible eject the most precious cargo for us to take. Otherwise I quite literally do not give a shit about the rest, if you have any doubt just take the data core, and leave ASAP."

"Yes ma'am! Should we, ah, deploy alongside the nanotech?"

Sarah firmly shook her head.

"I wouldn't trust it that far even if it was fresh from the factory, let alone 6 decades after! No, we'll have to take the risk to wait for it to finish."

"Right. Still, I'll have my marines go along the hull. One team goes for the bridge and the data bases, while another goes for the cargo hold. It will save us some time and we won't have a single egress point, just in case."

"Good. Any questions?"

Seria, who was still taking notes on Turral's behalf, meekly raised her hand.

"Yes Seria?"

"What happens if they just start firing randomly, trying to get us with the solar stations?"

"We'll probably give some bursts of the main drive. It won't be pleasant, but if we just push against it we should be fine. Right, Turral?"

"We should be able to handle that, yes."

"Excellent. Anything else?" Sarah waited for a few seconds. "Alright, then brief your people. It's time to earn our payday!"

*****

"Definitely a Q-wayfarer." Said Elteria as the ship on the system display accelerated on the now familiar course. "It looks like we have our target."

"Indeed. Normensk?"

"Course laid in ma'am." Said the navigator. "Ready to intercept."

"Then fire up the drive, and let's get started."

"Aye aye ma'am!"

*****

Even in the outer system, and with their acceleration, it took over an hour for their vectors to match and the ships to meet.

"Alright. Enemy ship at 100 thousand kilometers and closing."

Sarah forced herself to relax as she looked at the display. They were so close they could read the name of the ship painted on the hull with their visual pickups.

"Approaching engagement range...Preparing to power up drives and raise the shield...targets locked...NOW!"

Sarah gripped the armrests of her command chair as the ship shook around her, the drive going to full combat acceleration, and the weapons spoke.

The battle laser reached the enemy ship first. The freighter leapt as the beam collided with it, and punched straight through like it didn't even exist, tearing a ghastly hole right where the reactor had been. Emergency systems tried and failed to contain the catastrophe, and the ship vomited superheated plasma out of the now melting wound in its hull, while the rest flooded the engineering sections and nearby corridors, killing everyone unlucky enough to be in its path.

Two seconds later, the projectiles from the point defence guns arrived. A rain of slugs moving at 15 percent of Terra's old speed of light impacted the ship. Some missed, others hit the wrong part...but they only needed very specific sections of the ship intact, which meant that Elteria had been more than ready to spread her fire to guarantee hits on what she wanted down.

The Q-ship's grav drive came apart in a hail of shrapnel under the onslaught, and the ship began venting atmosphere as communication systems, sensors and weapons were shredded alongside everything around them.

The crew probably never realized what happened...but whatever programs they had loaded into the ship's computer did. It had less than two second to act between the laser announcing their presence and the slugs destroying them, but two seconds was enough. A split second before being reduced to pieces, some of the lasers simply fired through the hatches protecting them from prying eyes.

Most of them missed.

One didn't.

Sarah swore as her ship lurched. The shield hadn't had time to properly form, and while it did reduce the energy from the laser...it wasn't enough.

"Damage report!"

"Ma'am! We took a hit from one of their lasers! No hull breach, but point defence gun 3 is not responding."

"Stars damn it! Time to impa-"

Sarah didn't even have the time to finish her sentence as the Eternal Seeker collided with the freighter, and the ship rang like a gong as the shield collapsed in a flare of energy and their hull met the freighter's. Shields were a strange technology, more akin to a bubble of not-quite-realspace surrounding the ship, rather than an energy barrier like it was depicted in popular media, and some of the kinetic energy carried over from the hit. At least the velocities involved had been minimal, as Elteria and Normensk had carefully calculated the collision to be just enough to nudge the enormous mass of the freighter ever so slightly off vector, and for the Eternal Seeker to hit with an area not occupied by a weapon or sensor system if the shield completely failed. Thankfully the inertial compensator was made to absorb these kind of forces...once. They were going to need to take it apart and rebuild it before pulling off that trick again, but if it enabled them to get their prize, then it was worth it.

The Eternal Seeker bounced off the freighter, the shield having taken virtually all of the impact, before accelerating once more, and closing in until a few meters were left between them. The cargo door opened, and the marines streamed out as-

"Energy flare!"

Sarah looked at the display as Elteria yelled out, and swallowed as she saw the beam connecting one of the solar space stations...and where the freighter should have been had they not knocked it off-course. The AI they had controlling those stations must have been twitchy as hell to have reacted this fast!

Paranoid indeed.

"Estimate on the power of that beam?"

"Trust me. You don't want to know." Simply said the AI.

"Right."

"This is Hector!" Her communication implant sprang to life. "We have arrived at an airlock. Deploying breaching charge...Done. Sending in the nanotech!"

"Excellent." Sarah turned towards her bridge engineering officer. "Status?"

"Well, we've had better days. The impact definitely finished off PDG 3. It got straight up ripped off. We've locked onto it with a tractor beam, but...its going to take forever to repair ma'am." The engineer shrugged. "Otherwise, we're fine, more or less."

"Good. Any status on the nanotech?"

Elteria nodded, and gestured at the system display, which became replaced with a partial schematic of the enemy ship.

"We've gone fully active. I can confirm that its working."

Sarah nodded grimly as she saw the symbols denoting life forms winking out one by one.

"Alright. Is Turral's defusal team ready?"

"They're in the cargo bay, ready to deploy."

"Excellent."

*****

In the end, it took less than three minutes before the nanotech was done with the crew, mainly because they were concentrated in specific areas of the ship, but still.

"We're in." Reported Hector. "We're making our way to the bridge. Team Beta is going for the cargo holds."

"Copy. Any sign of resistance?" Answered Sarah.

"Negative. It's...not pretty, but there's no one alive here." Sarah winced. She'd seen the aftermath of those nanoswarms, and if anything 'not pretty' was a considerable understatement. "A few automated defenses, but the heavy stuff never came online. Destroyed the turrets regardless, but I think we got the captain or the XO before they could make their way to the bridge."

Sarah nodded. All of her bridge officers could take full control of the ship and its internal defense systems, and most militaries gave that authority to at least the officers of the watch, but the TRF might simply not trust their junior officers this far, at least in term of competence. Or they'd simply never gotten to that point before the nanoswarm had made it to the bridge.

"That's good. Alright, keep me posted." She looked at Elteria. "Status?"

"Well, we definitely got the attention of the system defence force. Every frigate and half their corvettes are accelerating towards us. Their solar platforms seem to have come fully online as well. There also seems to be a ring of sensor platforms hidden in the asteroid belt as well."

"Will they be a problem?"

"No. They're Low Verge tech. Even with active sweeps they're going to need some serious precision to get us."

"Alright, how long do you think it will take for them to start firing with the platforms?"

"A few minutes, probably. They seemed to have one on stand by, but the rest was completely cold. Even while not trying to hide, aiming at us is going to be a pain in the ass." She shrugged. "I'm giving short bursts of the drive. It's not much, but at this distance even a few meters per second will throw their aim way off. Still, they'll get lucky eventually."

"Right. Good to keep in mind."

"Yeah, and-Energy spike! Fuck! There's a nuclear charge under the bridge of the Q-ship! The ship is trying to charge the capacitors to trigger it!"

Sarah immediately triggered her implant.

"Hector-"

"I got the message. We're double timing it. Turral's people are crossing over, we'll do our best."

"Good." Sarah looked up at her AI. "Is there any way we can help?"

"Not without destroying the navigation database in the process, no. The bomb is right in the bridge's computer cores, and I can't trace where its getting power from, not with how fucked their power grid is after we shredded the reactor."

"Damn it."

Sarah looked at the display. Looked like it was up to her marines now.