1435 hours, June 25th, 2673; the Skate

The nine hours since the main generator had been destroyed had been exhausting for everyone on the boat. After all the hard work they had put in, they were better off than they were. Petty Officer Butler’s morbid plan had worked, though it took a while to implement. Murphy had ten dead crewmen on his hands, which meant he had ten power packs that were fully charged.

The power packs were small, but they still had enough to power a suit for twenty-four hours. Powering a suit was not light work. The thermal body stockings had to handle both heating and cooling and find a way to radiate extra heat. The stockings also had to double as G suits for the wearers. The equipment had to manage the oxygen and atmosphere supply and run the rebreather that recycled the carbon dioxide to more breathable air for the wearer. There were also life monitors, pressure sensors, and adaptors to help fight off decompression sickness. All that was just for the life support functionality for the suits. The suits also had a whole suite of electronics and electrical tools built into them.

The ten power packs were stripped down to their raw batteries, and the batteries were hooked together to get the voltage close to right for the jolt needed to start the secondary generator. Butler was extremely lucky, as were the rest of the crew. He was able to get the generator fired up the first time. The batteries from the power packs were useless after the exercise.

The secondary generator did not provide enough power to run the engines or power the sensors. It was hooked up to the secondary power bus, which was only run to life support. Fortunately, that included the lights and the suit adaptors for charging both the oxygen and power supply. The secondary bus did not include the weapons, cameras, or computers.

Bridge, engineering, and the torpedo bay were without power apart from lighting. The light anti-ship rail gun round had entered the boat through the back of the bridge and had passed through the top and back bulkhead before it continued through the corridor floor and then through engineering. The hole in the bridge did not concern Murphy. He had bigger issues to deal with.

The boat had been drifting for nine hours, and they had no idea what their speed was, relative to the asteroids in the belt. Without the antigravity plates running, they were also subjected to the gravitational pull of the sun.

Murphy and Bell had to pull out the books on orbital mechanics from the boat’s library. Both officers had to refresh their knowledge on the laws of physics, and they had to use educated guesses to figure out their current orbit. If they were right, they would be moving inward on a highly elliptical orbit toward the sun. They should leave the asteroid belt in two days. In five more days, what little cooling the secondary generator offered would not be enough to prevent the crew from suffering heatstroke from the sun.

Lieutenant Ridgard did not have much to do personally. He supervised the repairs to the boat, but that did not take too much time. He was usually back in the torpedo bay, running tests on the one remaining Mark 15 torpedo. It was powered down, but intact. The crew thought at first they could use the torpedo to provide some power since it had a small fusion generator, but the fifty-metre-long torpedo did not have the proper power connector or power specifications to power the primary power bus.

What surveillance capabilities that Murphy had at his disposal were reporting that some points of light near the sun were moving. They could not tell what was going on, since the glare of the sun was interfering with their sightings. They were lucky just to spot them moving when one of the crew members moved to wipe his brow, forgetting about the helmet he wore, and blocked out enough of the glare that he saw something move. More crew members confirmed it after more effort was spent. The sun was bright, and the crew members on the deck had to have their solar visors down to protect their eyes, which did not help with their ability to spot things.

The moving points of light could mean that someone else had come to the system, or that one of the fleets had moved closer to the sun. They could not tell what was going on. Murphy never realized just how much he relied on the technology at his fingertips, and he felt like his eyes and ears had been amputated with the loss of power to the equipment. He was still debating authorizing rerouting some of the secondary power bus over to the primary circuits so he could figure out what was going on.

He never debated a point like that for long. He knew keeping what remained of his crew alive for the present was more important than calming any nervous desires for information that the commanding officer had.

He was surprised that the NTF force had not come by to capture them yet. The crew members would make good hostages, and he assumed that the NTF forces were in the system to set up an invasion of Clearwater while the fleet was distracted. There were still too many questions that needed answering for him to be sure of the reasons. The fact that he and his crew were still drifting was a good sign. Maybe the NTF fleet had something bigger to worry about now.

* * *

2030 hours, June 25th, 2673; Clearwater fleet

When the four fighters that were around the transition zone had refused to surrender, the pursuing Terrace interceptors had disabled them. Assault shuttles had been launched and had docked with the fighters to capture the pilots. The marines onboard the shuttles found the four pilots dead when they extracted the cockpits.

The recognisance shuttle from the Rapier was still on its way toward the asteroid belt with its escort of fighters. Accelerating and decelerating at 1.5 G was tiring for the crew, but they were finally getting close enough to start scanning the asteroid belt.

“Admiral, the recon flight is reporting!” the space operations officer reported. “A wave of fighters is approaching them from the asteroids. The escorts are moving to intercept, but they are outnumbered two-to-one!”

“Calm yourself, Major,” the admiral said, though she did not feel all that calm herself as she watched the holographic plot of the star system. The fleet was still near the transition point to Clearwater.

“Order the fleet to move toward the fighters, one-point-five-G acceleration,” she said. The 1.5-G acceleration was the highest the slowest ship in her fleet could achieve.

“Also order the recon flight and escorts back. Tell them to avoid the approaching fighters at all costs.” She did not want to lose the expensive recon shuttle; that line item in the after-action report would be too hard to justify. “There’s something over there, and there’s no point in risking them on the off chance that they’ll get through to see what it is.”

Was this what the torpedo boat found? Why is it drifting toward them now? she asked herself as she looked at the various icons on the displace. She winced as she watched the recon flight. It was close to a light minute away, and showing the first indications that it was beginning to increase its deceleration. By the time word came back, they had already moved another 33,000 kilometres closer to the incoming fighters.

The recon flight boosted its deceleration to 2.5 G, even though it was capable of five G. They were moving at 330 kilometres per second away from the fleet; coming to a relative stop would take them almost four hours. With the assistance of their suits, they would be able to survive the deceleration at 2.5 G, but they might not survive five G for two hours.

The admiral winced; there was no way for the group to avoid a confrontation. The pirate fighters were accelerating toward her interceptors at a meagre one G, which meant the two forces would meet in space before the recon flight could start accelerating away from them.

“Order a fleet-wide combat warning alarm as well,” she said and then pulled open one of the checklists on her console. The warning was premature. Only long-range missiles and torpedoes could travel the space between the recon patrol and the fleet, and they had detected none of those heading toward the fleet. It would be close to ten hours before the fleet even closed half the distance to the asteroid belt.

The combat warning alarm still rang throughout the fleet, and most of the fleet rushed to their quarters to don their space suits. The gunship squadron and Senior Lieutenant Li were already in their space suits and were waiting for this.

* * *

The hours passed slowly for the admiral. She had never seen combat firsthand before, and had never lead anyone into a firefight. To her it was all numbers, almost like a game. The munitions and interceptors cost real money, and the pilots were not cheap to train or to equip. Close to four hours of 1.5 G had pushed the fleet only five light seconds closer to the asteroid belt, but they were building up speed and were travelling at over 200 kilometres a second.

The four-hour mark was also the start of the running battle between the interceptors escorting the recon shuttle and the junk heaps that the raiders were using as fighters. Despite being outnumbered two to one, Rapier’s interceptors kept them away from the valuable shuttle. They lost four interceptors and claimed ten of the enemy fighters. They were still outnumbered, but both sides had expended their missiles, leaving them only their guns to continue the engagement. The raiders had decided not to get to close to gun range, and the interceptors kept guarding the recon shuttle. They had finally finished their deceleration, and reached a zero relative velocity; they kept their engines running and started to accelerate away from the asteroid belt.

The rescue mission was fourteen hours into its trip and had executed its rollover. The two assault shuttles and the two passenger shuttles were escorted by another set of the gunship’s interceptors. There was a complex dance during their rollover. Instead of a single minute and then the start of deceleration, the manoeuvre took an hour. The pilots of the interceptor took turns spacewalking to the shuttles to catch a hot meal, clear their waste, and take twenty minutes to stretch. Sitting in the same position, even in an ergonomically designed cockpit, can be harmful, so the pilots needed a chance to stretch and relax.

The admiral had finally left the flag bridge at 2300 hours. The fleet combat warning alarm was also cancelled, but everyone knew it would be called again. They were still five hours from the rollover to start decelerating. The admiral wanted, and Commodore Brown agreed, to be at roughly zero relative velocity to the asteroid belt when they got there.

The fleet conducted the rollover during the night watch, without the admiral on the flag bridge. The senior tactical officer coordinated the manoeuvre with all the ships’ captains. The rollover started at the rear of the fleet with the frigates and the few corvettes that were stationed back there. When they were safely decelerating, the larger destroyers ignited their engines to begin shedding velocity. The fleet’s formation elongated as the ships at the front were the last to begin decelerating. The manoeuvre was started at the back to mitigate the chance of collision. The fleet was uniformly decelerating in time for the admiral to have her breakfast and morning tea.

Anna had left the bridge when the call to battle stations had been cancelled, and she went back to her quarters. Unlike most of the other members of the crew, she elected to sleep in her fabric skin suit. She had not done so since the war, and the uncomfortable feeling of it, along with all the worry of the encounter, made her toss and turn all night long.

She spent the night fretting about Phillip. She hoped that the rescue mission would be in time. The admiral had refused to let one of the smaller ships of the fleet lead the rescue mission. She was frustrated and peeved with the admiral. If anyone other than Commodore Brown had recommended it, one of the smaller ships would have gone. The shuttles that were part of the mission were not designed for long-distance travel. TBC-473 was a light minute away from the fleet, which meant it was a two-light-minute round trip.

The shuttles had to be loaded down with fuel, oxygen, and other supplies to make the trip. Overloaded, they were restricted to an average of 0.75-G acceleration on the way to the disabled boat. As they burned off the fuel, their acceleration increased. The trip was scheduled to take roughly twenty-eight hours. If the crewmen were still alive, their suit packs would have been dead for at least eight hours before the shuttles arrived.

The SSB agent had spent part of the night trying to pick up the helmet communications from Phillip’s boat, but she had to be careful when she did it. While she could use the entire hull of the ship for an antenna, it was not very directional. Theoretically she could get some more gain if she adjusted the gun turrets and opened some of the outer doors, and even adjusted the ship’s own antennas. Any changes she made to the surface features of the ship would change how reception of her instruments would work, but doing so would make it obvious that she was more than a simple signals officer.

She made do with her headphones and listened to the static. Her fingers were active on the tuners of her receiver, always moving through the various helmet channels, trying to pick up any form of transmission from the boat, apart from the emergency beacon. She paused when she thought she heard something, but there was so much radio pollution in the area from the fleet and the sun that she was not sure she heard anything at all.

During her watch Anna sat and listened to the ships around her, looking for anything that should not have been there, such as transmissions from the fleet to the pirates and to the asteroid belt they were heading toward. She detected nothing, nothing since the remnants of the recon patrol had made it back to the fleet and landed.

The signals officer had to force herself to the mess to eat some breakfast. She did not have a hard time making sure it was not too heavy; she just did not have the appetite for it. Her gut was telling her that missiles and rail gun shells would be exchanged today, and she had learned during her brief tour of duty on the front line in the war to trust it. She did not want to be distracted by hunger pains during action, and she did not want to lose the contents of her stomach into her helmet either.

The hours of waiting frustrated Anna, but she was used to it. Space operations were like that. The distances were vast, and it took a long period of time for engagements to start. She distracted herself with her duties and her special receivers.

* * *

The time went by slowly for the admiral as well. She was not used to it, and she sat nervously, fretting about what was going to happen next. Four hours into the morning watch, sensor reports started to come in, this time from things that were not asteroids. They were large, they were heavy, and they were moving toward the fleet.

“Sensors are reporting at least thirty ships heading toward us,” the senior tactical officer reported from beside the admiral. “It looks like a battle fleet, ma’am.”

“Any identifications on the ships yet?”

“Negative.”

“When will we be in firing range of each other?”

“We are within range of guided missiles. We are also within range of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. We are about two and a half hours at present rate of closure from effective range for lasers and rail guns.”

“Why didn’t we detect them earlier?”

“They were running silent, and they were hiding in the asteroids.”

“The camera and radar operators still should have detected them earlier.”

“Aye ma’am, we can investigate what happened. I recommend we send out a fleet-wide combat alarm, ma’am.” The fleet had not been called to battle stations since the night before. “And we should launch a second wave of fighters.”

The admiral glared briefly at her senior tactical officer. He was right, and he had the gall to bring it to her attention; she should have ordered it before. She almost disregarded the recommendations and ordered the fleet directly to battle stations instead.

“Very well, send out the combat warning alarm, but change it to battle stations in twenty minutes. Launch the second wave of fighters, and tell John Charlie to launch the torpedo boat squadron with a full load of torpedoes.”

The fleet’s two carriers began launching their second wave of interceptors. Each carrier carried eight full squadrons. The third and fourth of those eight squadrons were now launching. That put another seventy-two fighters forward into a protective screen in front of the fleet. The dreadnoughts also launched another trio of interceptors each, with two waves out in front of the fleet. There were now 216 men in small craft between the incoming contacts and the Clearwater fleet to defend the larger ships from missiles, torpedoes, and other fighters.

The pirates put up their own screen of fighters, but their number was only forty, which put them at a significant disadvantage when it came to fighter coverage. Being outnumbered did not seem to disturb the incoming fighters as they continued to accelerate at one G.

The first surprise came after another hour, when the fighters closed with each other. The first salvo of missiles was fired, the flight of missiles coming from the centre of the raider fleet. The size of the salvo shocked the members of the Terrace fleet. Over 450 missiles were detected coming out the sides of a single ship, and they spread out as they accelerated at over 400 G toward the screen of fighters.

The distance between the fighter screen and the radar fleet was still several light seconds. In the ten minutes that the missiles took to travel the distance, a second salvo of missiles was fired at the Terrace fighters. The forward element of the Terrace corvettes, frigates, and destroyers cut their engines to halt their deceleration. They flipped over and accelerated forward, trying to get far enough forward that their point defense guns and missiles could defend the fighters from the incoming missiles. The fighters themselves increased their deceleration to five G to get back under the protective umbrella of flak rail guns and point defense lasers.

The aftermath of those two missile salvos brought the opposing sides of fighters to rough parity in numbers. The overconfident Terrace fighters had expended their own interceptor missiles to defend themselves and now had to fight for their lives with only their guns, which distracted them from their primary duty of defending the Terrace fleet from missiles and torpedoes.

The next salvo of missiles was fired from the pirate fleet. This salvo was only 250 missiles strong, but was made up of heavier anti-ship missiles. The Terrace fleet had not launched another wave of fighters in time to intercept the incoming missiles, so the fleet had to deal with the threat with only their point defense armaments. As the anti-ship missiles came in, the Terrace fleet finally fired their own missiles in anger.