1512 hours CST, June 24th, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

“Five frigates identified as NTF Spear class, block two, and one destroyer of the Cavier class.”

Murphy watched the plot. The Spear class were still in service in New Terra Firma, but all had been reported upgraded to block III, or block IV. The Cavier class was undergoing final decommissioning, with only a handful left to be scrapped.

“DFC, engage the fighters first.” Murphy looked at the range and bearings of the fighter groups coming toward the Skate, making sure that the defensive fire coordinator was prioritizing the incoming craft properly to protect the boat.

Torpedo boat combat doctrine stated that a boat should not engage any ship except its target, and should avoid fighters at all cost. The laws and commandments had petrified since before the Rake class torpedo boats had been laid down. The doctrine was well-known, so Murphy had the element of surprise on his side.

The fighters were expecting a tail chase, and were not prepared for a head-to-head engagement with the torpedo boat. Lead Hart had accelerated the boat to five G again, matching the acceleration of the incoming fighters. It had become a game of chicken, and the group that flinched first would lose.

The thick forward armour of the Skate was designed to protect it from the radiation of a sun dive and against anything small that the boat might have flown into. The armour was thick enough to hold off the incoming fire from the fighter’s guns. The weak lasers were also ineffective against the shear mass of the bow. The stealth system of the Skate also helped as Murphy ordered it activated for the bow.

Lasers caused damage by applying sustained heat to an object and melting their way through. The stealth system built into the hull of the Rake class torpedo boats relied on running liquid hydrogen through the surface to cool it down. As the lasers heated up the mass of the boat’s hull, the liquid hydrogen fuel soaked it away as it evaporated into gas. The Skate would have to vent the excess gas, but that was not dangerous with nothing to oxygenate it and make it explosive.

The light rail guns carried by the Javelins were also ineffective. The three-millimetre shells struck hard, but did not have the momentum or penetrating power to do more than pit the surface of the Skate’s forward armour. The bow of the torpedo boat was angled back by sixty degrees, causing the slugs to just bounce away.

The four point defense lasers with firing arcs to the front of the Skate were not as ineffective. They were about three times the bore of the lasers that the fighter carried and had larger capacitors behind them. Unlike the continual fire lasers of the fighters, the Skate carried pulse lasers. They had a larger bore than sustained fire lasers, and while not as powerful over time, they hit harder. Pulse lasers fired a laser burst one fiftieth of a second long, ten times a second. Each burst delivered as much energy as a continual fire laser in about one-twentieth of a second.

The lighter fighters did not have a chance against the Skate as it ran straight for them. For some reason the Javelin fighters did not fire their missiles. The fighter pilots had it easy for eleven years and had been raiders for five of those years. Something strange goes on in the human mind when presented by what seems like a madman charging straight for him; they kept firing their ineffective guns. Missiles were also expensive, and the fleet did not have a source for replacements. Faced with a madman, they forgot their out-of-date training and simply forgot to fire their missiles.

The next group of fighters learned from the mistake of the first. They launched their missiles at the Skate from farther away and were able to get into a tail chase with the torpedo boat. The rear of the boat was also protected by point defense lasers and thick armour, though not as thick as the bow, and it was not sloped. The fighters did not come close enough for the point defense lasers to target them effectively, but the lasers were still effective against the missiles coming in.

The lasers were not effective enough to stop all the missiles, though; there were just too many of them. The Skate’s last weapon came into play then, the rail shot gun. Besides the Mark 15 torpedoes, the RSG was the largest weapon that the torpedo boat carried. The long barrels of the RSG turned toward the incoming missiles and fanned out to five degrees.

A massive thump went through the boat as the first seventeen projectiles were sent on their way. Rail guns shot metallic projectiles at high speed; the impact alone would be enough to destroy any of the missiles coming toward the torpedo boat. Each twelve-millimetre-wide shell sped out at one-tenth the speed of light. The spread of the projectiles would be enough to stop the remaining missiles on their own, but the twelve-millimetre bore of the barrels was large enough to make the shells explosive. The gunners and the computer had set the shells to explode just after they passed the targeted interceptor missile. Each twelve-millimetre shell filled a small area of space around it with shrapnel, making an effective flak shell that removed the threat of the remaining missiles.

Small groups of fighters were not a problem for the Skate crew. Frigates and destroyers were a much bigger threat. The ships in the immediate area were closing in on the Skate, and she needed to get away before they closed the range. The heavy lasers on the frigates would be able to damage or destroy the torpedo boat without being hindered by the boat’s armour, but a laser’s effective range was limited by the focal length of the barrel.

There is no such thing as a perfectly focused laser; limitations in optics and other materials always limited how well it could be focused. Over longer distances, a laser’s beam dispersed more and more. The same amount of energy was being delivered, but over a much larger area. At the range the Skate was from the frigates, their lasers could only deliver the effective energy density of a sun tan.

Over great distances lasers also had another limitation. They travelled at the speed of light, so they could not be dodged or evaded, but the targeting ship could guess where they were aimed at. A continuous fire laser needed to be held on target for enough time to deliver enough energy to do damage. If the computer or the gunners guessed wrong in which way a target was going to move, that energy was spread over the target and did negligible damage. The farther away a target was, the higher the probability that the guesses would eventually be wrong.

Rail guns also suffered the same limitations as lasers and could not be reasonably accurate over great distances when firing on a manoeuvring target. The Skate was accelerating and manoeuvring at five G, and Lead Hart was piloting for all she was worth. Luck also had a lot to do with it and so far, the torpedo boat had survived undamaged.

Fortunately, the cloaked area was within the asteroid belt around the sun, and there were several asteroids in the area. The Skate was accelerating as fast as it could toward one of the large chunks of rock.

“Thirty seconds to the asteroid,” Lieutenant Bell reported. “Should we decelerate?”

“Negative.” He opened the channel to engineering. “Engineering, prepare to activate the gravity drive.”

The tri-drive of the Skate was three drives combined into one. The sub-light acceleration drive was the one used the most. The largest portion of the drive was the interstellar curve drive, and the third was the gravity drive. The gravity drive was a failed experimental drive. Its purpose was to amplify the waves of gravity that came toward the vessel and help speed it along.

It was a failure since it only amplified the gravity coming toward the tri-drive itself. The increased gravity did not accelerate anything but the drive, and it was much less efficient than the standard sub-light drive that was already part of the boat’s engine. It was kept as standard equipment for a variety of reasons. It did not interfere with the operations of the other two portions, the Rake class vessels had been needed to get into service quickly when they had been commissioned, and the board approving the design got larger kickbacks. Besides, the engineers and board liked the name tri-drive, and they would look silly certifying the drive with that name if it only had two components.

“ESW, prepare a decoy. Helm, kill the engines as we pass the asteroid, then fire up the gravity drive for two seconds, full power. DFC, retract all the turrets and close the hatches. We’ll go to full stealth.”

Murphy continued to pass the orders as the Skate got closer to the asteroid. The decoy was launched seconds before the asteroid passed by. All emissions from the boat were mimicked by the decoy, and then the boat went quiet. All the turrets were withdrawn into the boat, and the acceleration was cut.

The decoy continued to speed away at five G, accelerating away from the Skate. As the boat moved past the asteroid, the gravity engine came online and pulled the boat around to a new trajectory. The crew had to deal with the sudden shift in forces as they were pushed heavily against their chair straps.

The gravity drive worked by amplifying all the gravity coming toward the boat. Since the asteroid was the closest and biggest source of gravity, the boat went into a small and brief orbit around the rock. The drive did not amplify the force of gravity leaving the boat, so the asteroid and decoy were not affected. The benefit of using the drive was that it changed the direction of the torpedo boat without leaving a noticeable and traceable trail behind it for its pursuers to follow.

The NTF fighters and frigates continued to pursue the decoy as the torpedo boat drifted away on a different trajectory, hidden by the shadow of the asteroid. The fighters were not close enough to keep track of the Skate by radar when the hull’s continuous curve was unbroken. The Skate was already far enough away by the time the frigates closed the distance not to be picked up by the more powerful and sensitive radar and sensors they carried. The pilots onboard the fighters and officers onboard the frigates continued after the obvious target, the decoy.

* * *

1545 hours CST, June 24th, 2673; pilot quarters on the Franklin

The alarms throughout the fleet jolted Captain Wilmore awake. He was so surprised that he nearly hit his head on the top bunk. Jorge shared the room with the other three pilots of his group, and they were all on their feet racing to their lockers. Years ago, the drills had been discontinued as being too costly for the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet to maintain the high level of readiness, and everyone knew what to do when the alarms rang. There were no new recruits in the fleet; every one of them had been with the fleet for over a decade.

“Hey, aren’t we supposed to be on crew rest right now?” Sara asked as she grabbed her vac suit from her locker. The Fourth’s vac suits were different than the ones they wore while posing as pirates. These were custom fitted and in remarkably good repair. The expeditionary fleet did not have the facilities to make new fabric skin suits, but it did have enough pieces to custom fit vac suits for the pilots. While still cumbersome, they fit better. For most of the past decade, the pilots had been trading and interchanging the pieces till they found the optimal fit.

“I’ll call up to flight control,” Jorge said to the others. “We might as well continue to get dressed, and I’ll see what I can find out.” He stepped away from the other three and went to the room’s communications station and put in the call to the carrier’s flight operations centre. He rejoined the other three pilots less than a minute later.

“Keep getting dressed. Flight ops is checking for us. We’ll find out in a few minutes.” The four pilots were much more familiar with their vac suits than those on the Skate were with theirs. The pilots had been wearing the same suits for close to a decade since their fabric skin suits had worn out to the point that they were more dangerous to wear than not. Donning the suits took the pilots only ten minutes.

By the time they were finished, Jorge had the answer from the flight operations centre, which he shared with the other three pilots.

“Some idiot in a torpedo boat is attacking the fleet single-handedly. He shot what looks like a massively upgraded Mark 15 that took out one of our cruisers and disabled two of the fleet’s shield ships. They want all the fighters out searching for him.”

“They haven’t found him yet? What have they been doing out there?” Sara asked as she helped Jorge with the last piece of his vac suit. The three pilots helped their group leader with the last of his suit since he was distracted with figuring out what was going on. The four had made a good team. Being together for so long, they knew when others needed help.

“There were three flights of fighters out there on fleet defense, and they launched the ready fighters. All of them converged on the torpedo boat. The first group learned not to go head-to-head with a Rake without launching their missiles.” Jorge’s voice was underlined with frustration, and the three pilots winced.

“Orders have been changed. Missiles are to be expended. We have no idea how good a look that boat got of the fleet, and we need to take it out before it reports back to Clearwater. Even if it means we are going to be short on missiles later.

“The second group of fighters went into a tail chase with the torpedo boat. It was pulling five Gs. The group could have caught up at maximum acceleration, but the time to do so would have severely degraded our pilots’ performance. The Javelins fired missiles, but the boat shot them down. It then aimed at an asteroid and used it to break contact somehow. A decoy was used to distract the Javelins and frigates while he changed his vector without using his engines. At least, that’s what flight ops tells me. All the fighters are going out to scan the asteroids in the area. We have frigates moving, so he shouldn’t be able to get away.”

Jorge led the other three down the short hallway to the launch tubes that held their fighters. The carrier was still manoeuvring at one G, so they had to walk. The four were out into space ten minutes later, launching over an hour after the Mark 15 had penetrated the fleet’s cloak.