1150 hours, June 26th, 2673; TRFS Glasgow

The command ship was drifting, which made moving through the corridors a challenge for Anna. With the three command and control areas of the ship taken out, the battleship-sized vessel was headless for the moment. The ranking officer was the chief engineer, a junior commander, and it did not take long for him to start asserting control and calming the situation onboard.

The chief engineer kept the engines idle till he could get some idea what was going on around the ship. Moving the ship now could cause a collision with another ship. He did power the antigravity plates manually to keep the vector of the ship as straight as possible, without it being affected by the gravity of the sun. The ship’s speed and direction should remain constant, and that allowed the rest of the ships of the fleet to avoid her.

Anna moved through the corridors with purpose. She was not going to the bridge. She could have checked in there with her radio easily. She was going toward her quarters. The equipment there might be of some use, and she did not want any of the other commissioned officers to know about it. She also had the sidearm that Beth had given her in her quarters. It was obvious to her that someone had betrayed the command ship and had planted explosives all over the flag bridge, and that same person had probably done the same to the other control points on the ship.

The signals and sensor departments were spared the destruction on the flag bridge. That made her suspect either one of her subordinates or one of the crew members who had clearance to the flag bridge but not the sensitive compartments. The communications equipment was some of the most secretive and sensitive equipment onboard the flag bridge, followed only by the computers that managed the sensors.

Signals officers throughout time were highly conscious of the sensitive nature of their equipment and guarded their secrecy like a t-bear guarding her cubs. They grudgingly let the admiral into their realm, but they did not let anyone else in, not even the captain of the ship. Whenever engineers and technicians had to enter the space to do maintenance, they were watched very carefully and often not allowed in. The three signals officers usually did whatever maintenance was needed to be done, and if they absolutely had to have outside help, they did their best to keep the help outside the compartment and give the three signal officers directions.

The paranoia probably protected the three signals officers from the sabotage, but the main power bus for the flag bridge had been damaged in the explosion, leaving the equipment in the signals section useless. Anna needed to do something to keep from feeling useless.

The SSB agent entered her quarters, immediately found her pistol, and strapped the belt and holster around her waist. She pulled the pistol from the hip holster, loaded one of the three magazines she had, and ran a round into the chamber. It was a slug thrower with a powerful kick, but she knew how to compensate for it. It was not quite a Magnum, but it still had enough stopping power to take any man down outside of marine armour. If there were any NTF agents onboard, then she would be as ready as she could be.

She opened the panel that she hid her equipment behind and pulled out the control for her receivers. She still had them running, and they still looked to be tuned to the ship’s hull. That meant there was not any significant damage to the hull.

“Good, let’s see what we have here,” she said to herself. She disabled the filters and wrote new ones. With the control systems of the ship down, she started to send remote control commands to the turrets and hatches, slowly tuning the hull.

She could not tune it any great amount, since the hull was not designed as an antenna. With the ship’s communications systems down, the front end of her receivers was not getting overwhelmed as it had before. She started searching for helmet communications signals; she adjusted the tuning so she could focus on TBC-473’s emergency beacon.

She wanted to make sure Phillip was all right, but she also wanted to see if she could get the intelligence on the cloaked NTF fleet from him. With it still being cloaked, the Terrace Navy was having a hard time fending off the missile attacks.

She took some time, but she was able to localize the helmet signals from the torpedo boat. She did not worry about being subtle now. She just patched into the command signals of the command ship and made sure it was tuned like she wanted. Having an antenna two thousand metres long with sensitive equipment made the chance of detecting the faint signals much easier.

“…this is Lieutenant Murphy. We’ve sent a message to the fleet. We don’t know if it has been received, but a little while after sending it, the pattern of explosions changed, and one of the sets of stars we’ve been watching changed its vector. This tells me we’re not alone in the system. The twelve ships coming toward us came from that fleet, so it’s a high likelihood that rescue is on the way.

“Before they get here, I just want to thank you all for your hard work, and say that I’m proud to be your commanding officer, however brief it was. Through your actions we may have saved Clearwater Prime and given our fleet a fighting chance.”

Anna could not keep the smile off her face and the sob of relief from bursting from her throat as she heard Phillip’s voice. She knew where he was, but she needed to get into contact with him. She had plenty of receivers, but only a few transmitters.

The best transmitter for the job was in her helmet. She pulled it off and then disassembled the radio. She was quick to pull the vital components. She had a soldiering iron in her tool kit, and she had always been good with the fine detail that it required. She was part of SSB, after all, and being able to rewire a radio when needed was part of her training.

She had the transmitter and microphone from her helmet hooked up to the monitoring equipment she had attached to the hull of the ship. The transmitter was not that powerful, but one of the receivers she had available was an old superheterodyne, and the parts from that could be used to make a low-noise amplifier. She could also use it to change the frequency to get the right one for the torpedo boat’s helmets. The relative speed of the fleet was high enough that the frequency had to be adjust. Most importantly, the equipment she had could be used to tune the ship’s hull to make it a perfect antenna for the transmitter.

There were two ways to increase the power of a transmission: put a big amplifier on it, or a big antenna. As the frequency increased, it became harder to create an amplifier, but easier to make an antenna. The ship’s two-kilometre length made for one very big antenna. The problem with her rig was that she would not be able to have two-way communications; she would be able to listen but not transmit at the same time. She did not worry about being interrupted, not with a one-minute delay built in, but she was afraid she might miss some transmission.

The final thing she did with her setup was to key in the personal encryption code that she had made for Phillip. It was not SSB’s strongest encryption, but she doubted that anyone in the fleet could read it. And only two people had the keys to the code.

“TRFS Glasgow, called TBC-473, Senior Lieutenant Li here. Communications is simplex only. Please respond, over.” Even in their own private code, she kept the conversation formal. She watched the time; it was almost two minutes for the response to come back. When it did, she almost shouted at the sound of the voice.

“Anna…” It was Phillip’s voice. He paused to clear his throat. “Glasgow, this is Lieutenant Murphy. I didn’t think you were close enough to access our helmet radios, over.”

“We’re roughly a light minute away, Lieutenant,” she responded. “I need to know what your situation is and what you can tell me about the NTF fleet. Over.”

“Glasgow, are you still there? Over,” Phillip said half a minute later and then after another thirty seconds. “I guess you aren’t that close after all, over.”

Minutes passed, and Phillip reported the situation. Anna wrote down the information, but it was all based on what the torpedo boat commander could remember, so it was not as accurate as it could have been.

“The information might still be in your communications equipment, Lieutenant. Here’s what I want you to do…”

* * *

1220 hours, June 26th, 2673; the Skate

Lieutenant Sinkovich was working on her console on the bridge. She floated over it, trying to get at the back to free up the connections that held the modular console in place. Two enlisted men were holding onto her legs and hips to make sure she did not float away. Murphy could not help but to find humour in the situation.

The two men were the ones who had their fabric skin suits decertified. They were wearing the gel skin suits, which they still had not gotten used to. They had gotten used to the feeling of the gel, as if it were a second layer of skin. It did not have the constant pressure of the fabric skin suits. The two enlisted also had their hands on a superior female officer in places that might not be considered appropriate. They looked as uncomfortable as they could be; at least the thermal stockings and jumpsuits gave them some sort of protection.

The bolts holding the panel in place had oxidized over time, despite the special coating of paint to keep them from doing so. The junior lieutenant needed all the leverage the two enlisted men could give her to get the bolts free. Being the signals officer and being inducted into the paranoid society of signals officers, she refused to let anyone touch her sensitive signals equipment. It took her some time to reach behind the console and free the RF connectors. While the console was modular, it was only modular when connected to the power and data buses of the boat; it was unique when it came to connecting to the antennas.

Murphy and Sinkovich made the trip outside and onto the hull of the boat and made the trip over to the message beacon. The crew had pulled more of the rocket free of the launch tube, exposing two-thirds of its length, to clear the main data port and auxiliary power connectors. The two lieutenants had to fight with the cables to hook up the console.

“Glasgow, this is Murphy. We have the communications module hooked up, over.”

“Roger, Lieutenant,” Anna’s voice returned two minutes later. “I have a list of commands for you to type in.” She did not wait for the acknowledgement; she read out the commands, and Sinkovich started to input them.

* * *

1245 hours, June 26th, 2673; TRS Rapier

Commodore Brown was peeved with the admiral, first for ordering the breakup of the fleet and then for getting herself killed. The Glasgow was falling behind the rest of the fleet, and Brown had to take over.

The Commodore’s first order was to reform the fleet into something like a proper order of battle. The point defense ships and fighter groups were rebalanced so that two-thirds of them were facing the largest threat, the side with the cloaked NTF fleet. He had only a hint of where the fleet was, and that only came from when the missiles appeared on his threat display.

“Robert,” he said as he looked to his senior tactical officer, “split off Captain Daniels’s dreadnought division. Task him with one of the carriers and our rear point defense flotilla. I want to see him take those dreadnoughts to the centre of the raider fleet and blow it back to Sol. Keep them off our back.

“The rest of the fleet will accelerate away from the cloaked area. We need to make sure we don’t run into their shield buffer.”

With how the admiral had ordered the fleet to return to Clearwater egress, Brown did not think he could have won the engagement with the NTF. He was also going to have words with Lieutenant Murphy about assumptions the next time they met. The NTF fleet was heading toward them, not to the egress point. They had a higher velocity than his fleet, which meant that they were about to have a fleet mix, if the Clearwater fleet could get through the fleet cloak. That was the type of battle his gunships excelled at, and he had no fear he would win.

For centuries naval engagements had followed an old rule that Brown liked to quote: “He who wins gets there the firstest with the mostest.” The person who got his heavy ships into position to blast the enemy to dust first usually won. Sending the escorts ahead would have left them vulnerable and left them open to whatever massive firepower the NTF fleet had.

“Message coming in, priority one, Commodore. It’s flooding our tactical channels,” his signals officer reported. The tactical display started to blink and fade. The blob of red that was the projected position of the NTF fleet started to fade away.

“I didn’t order for us to accept the transmission. Kill it.”

“I can’t, sir. It’s past all our firewalls and codes. It has flag priority and Glasgow’s override. It has us locked out.”

The commodore swore. Without the Glasgow in action, there was no way the transmission coming in could be valid. They had no way to override it, and his stomach dropped as the plot faded away and went black.

He stopped swearing as the tactical computers caught up with the data, and the display snapped back into place. Instead of one single blob of red on the display, there were now smaller and more defined spheres, each with a designation of ship type and class. Some of the spheres were very tight, with the “ShldS” designation tagged to them, the shield ships. The computer processed what it knew. With the raw intelligence from TBC-473 and with the knowledge of the era of the doctrine that the fleet was using, it projected the most likely places for the shield ships.

“All right!” the commodore shouted, like a man forty years younger, and then he looked at the other information as it was filtered in. His face took on a positively feral grin as he saw the piece of information about the use of NTF technology and doctrine from eleven years ago. The incoming missile salvos from the enemy had been too large for them, to be sure.

“Guns! I want the gunships to prepare full broadsides on the fleet shield. Have them target the projected weak points. We’ll shatter that shield and bring it down.”

The fleet’s point defense ships and fighters fired up their engines and pushed their acceleration to maximum to clear the plane between the dreadnoughts and the fleet area. The nine dreadnoughts still with the fleet were preparing to fire their guns, and the smaller ships wanted to be well out of the field of fire. The nine ships turned their beams toward the NTF fleet, exposing the large bore rail gun cannons that lined their sides.

“Ready to fire, Commodore,” his offensive tactical officer reported.

“Fire!” Not since the war had the commodore had a chance to order a fire mission like this, and even then, he did not have a squadron of gunships at his beck and call. He felt and heard the guns on his ship open fire. Hundreds of shells were fired at full speed from the sides of his ships, and then each ship rolled ninety degrees to present a fresh broadside to fire again.

The rail gun shells were special explosive shells. The high acceleration of a rail gun would have made conventional contact, timer, and proximity-fused triggers useless. The shells fired from the rail guns were instead a special two-part explosive. The core was mostly inert, but when mixed with the proper amount of oxidizer, it exploded violently.

The outer segment of the shell was the oxidizer, a special mixture of oxygen-rich chemicals that burned uncontrollably when ignited. When the burning oxidizer heated and liquefied, it mixed with the inert core explosive. When the saturation was just right, the shell exploded; the mixing took only a few milliseconds. A metal sheathing prevented the two portions of the shell from mixing too quickly; the thickness of the sheathing could be adjusted to provide for different timings before the shell exploded.

A rail gun accelerated its warhead by running a huge amount of electricity from one rail to another rail, and it used the shell’s outer skin as the final conductor. The large amounts of energy used to accelerate the shell to high speed also ignited the outer casing of oxidizer, which made each shell appear to glow as it travelled through space to its target.

The shells had been set to their maximum duration and the capacitors that powered the rails had been charged to their maximum. They shot forward toward the shield protecting and hiding the NTF fleet. As they impacted on the shield, the gravity pulled the shells apart like taffy. The metal preventing the mixture of the two parts of the explosive was deformed, buckled, and broke, allowing the two parts of the explosive to combine and explode.

The shells had been aimed at the interface points between the shield ships’ generated fields. The resulting explosions briefly overloaded the shield ships’ capacity and caused enough of a disruption that the shield ships lost synchronization with one another.

The Fourth Expeditionary Fleet still had a trump card: the world destroyer. The Terrace fleet had ceased its acceleration, and the dreadnoughts had moved to coordinate their fire. They had also ceased manoeuvring as they started their fire mission.

The entire length of the world destroyer was one single cannon, and a lot of effort had gone into the design to make sure it was as accurate as it could be over long distances. An error of a millionth of a degree over a ten-light-minute distance could cause it to miss its intended target.

When the dreadnoughts moved into position to fire, the world destroyer fired. Its ammunition ball, which measured two hundred metres in diameter, shot forward at great speed and covered the distance to a dreadnought in just under a minute. It moved fast, and it did not light up its path like a treaty-conforming rail gun shell did. The only thing marking its path was the shattered remains of a dreadnought.

The eight remaining dreadnoughts ceased their firing and reformed with the rest of the fleet. The Clearwater fleet returned to its attempt to pull away from the NTF fleet. Salvos of missiles were fired from the Terrace fleet as they tried to get through before the shield ships resynchronized their shields. The magazines of the Terrace fleet were starting to run dry, but now they knew how to defeat missiles fired by the NTF fleet.

Brown’s force claimed a handful of escorts, a cruiser and one of the point defense dreadnoughts before the fleet was reformed. They could bring down the shield again at the cost of another dreadnought.

The two fleets settled into an unstable stalemate. Brown was unwilling to risk another dreadnought with his magazines running low. He would have to wait for the NTF to get closer so he could take down the shield and penetrate the fleet with his dreadnoughts.

The best choice of tactics right now would be to get the six remaining torpedo boats around behind the NTF fleet and make a surprise attack, to destroy some of the shield ships and the world destroyer. Then he would be able to get in with his dreadnoughts and rip it apart. He doubted the competency of the torpedo boat squadron commander to carry off a mission like that, especially with his orders to do a frontal assault on the pirate fleet.

“Get me the fleet signals officer on the horn, encrypted channel,” he said.

* * *

1315 hours, June 26th, 2673; the Skate

“Glasgow to TBC-473. This is Senior Lieutenant Li, over.”

“Murphy here, what’s up, Glasgow, over?”

Murphy was moving toward the main air lock of the Skate. One of the rescue shuttles was docked there, and its crew was tending to the four wounded crewmen he still had on board. There was enough room on the shuttles for him to get his entire crew out, with a good portion of their personal belongings. He was a touch upset that they were abandoning the boat, but it probably could not be saved.

“You have one remaining torpedo, correct? Is it operational? Over.”

“Yes it is, but we can’t fire it, Lieutenant, our main generator is down. And even with the rescue shuttles here, I don’t think we have the power to bring the targeting computers online, over.”

“Understood, but you can set it to fleet control. We need to take out that world destroyer, and you’re the only one in position to do it, over.”

Murphy thought for a moment. He did not think they were close enough to the fleet for proper control of the torpedo by the command ship, but Anna seemed to be doing miraculous things with signals today.

“Lieutenant Ridgard! Can you get the Mark Fifteen exposed? Release it from the ship and set it to fleet control?”

“Aye sir, I can.”

“Do it.” He switched back to the channel he had with Anna. “Glasgow, we’re going to attempt to get the shot set up. The shuttles are here now. We’ll set up the shot and abandon ship, out.”

The gunners and the torpedo technicians still on the boat moved aft to the torpedo bay. They walked through the corridors of the boat and along the hull. None of them wanted to be left out of the final shot from their boat. They did not try to manhandle the doors open; instead, they used the explosive bolts to blow the hatches out into space. The group of men and women swarmed into the seven-metre-wide hole in the side of the boat and attacked the clamps holding the torpedo in place.

“Glasgow, that torpedo is massive. We won’t be able to move it from the bay, so you’ll have to order it to use its manoeuvring jets to clear the ship. It’s now set to fleet control. There’s nothing more we can do here. We’re evacuating the ship. See you back at Clearwater Prime, Anna. Skate out.”

Anna waited for the shuttles to clear the boat and get a safe distance away. The shuttles did not have to worry about the skin of the torpedo boat. It was not fragile, and they were abandoning it. Anna had control of the torpedo and activated it. She had no way to control the AI, so she left it unhindered. It was best to leave it that way, since she did not know the path between the torpedo and its target.

The orders she gave the torpedo were simple: the origin point was programmed, the current position of the NTF fleet was programmed, and the suspected location of the world destroyer was entered. The mission was simple: use its manoeuvring jets to leave its mother ship, go from the origin to its destination, and destroy the target.

The AI accepted the mission and exited the dead hulk of the Skate. It paused for a few seconds to align its internal guidance and then positioned itself straight at the enemy fleet. At maximum acceleration it took an hour for it to reach the edge of the NTF fleet. By this time it was travelling at over five thousand kilometres a second, less than 2 percent the speed of light, and it had exhausted most of its fuel supply.

The shield-bore laser fired up early and used up more of its fuel, but it barely had time to fire for a few seconds before the torpedo penetrated the shield. The NTF fleet had gathered its point defenses toward the Clearwater fleet, ready to intercept any missile and torpedo that made it through. This left the rear flank of the fleet underdefended and unprepared for the Mark 15.

The radar only had to be active for a few seconds for the torpedo to find its target. At the speed it was going, it did not have long to select its target. Covering the distance between the edge of the fleet to the world destroyer took only a few seconds. The shield-bore laser fired the entire way. It did not have time to fine-tune its impact, and the AI calculated that at the speed it was travelling, the torpedo would penetrate right through the world destroyer before the contact fuse detonated its hundred-ton warhead. The AI rode the torpedo till the end and signalled the detonation scant milliseconds before impact.

The torpedo barely penetrated into the barrel of the world ship before the explosion blew it in two. The capital warhead was enough to split the keel of a dreadnought or a carrier. It was more than enough to break the world destroyer. The two sections would not be able to fire another shot at the Terrace fleet.

* * *

1000 hours, June 28th, 2673: Sigma Delta Four, boat bay of TRS Rapier

Without the world destroyer to menace the fleet, Commodore Brown pursued a direct engagement with the NTF forces. The velocities of the two fleets made it only a passing engagement, with both sides claiming kills and loses. The meeting was short. Another Terrace dreadnought was lost, but they claimed three of the NTF dreadnoughts and ensured the destruction of the pieces of the world destroyer.

The raider fleet had a higher acceleration than what Brown had expected, and it ran to keep away from the three dreadnoughts Brown had sent after it. Again, the vectors worked against a decisive engagement. The Clearwater fleet did not have the resources to complete the engagement, and the commodore was not going to split his forces to chase the fleets into other systems that had not been recently surveyed.

The Glasgow had also been evacuated, with the personnel moved over to the dreadnoughts. The fleet command ship had been towed into a safe orbit. A small portion of the fleet remained behind to protect it until a repair crew could be brought in to repair the control systems before it was brought back to Clearwater for repair and refit.

The shuttles that rescued the crew of the Skate landed on the Rapier. The crew of the torpedo boat was shocked to find the boat bay filled with a crowd of their fellow sailors. The crew members of the dreadnought were not exactly cheering, but the crew of the Skate were welcomed among them.

Murphy descended last, as he was the senior officer. He saluted the officer of the deck and requested permission for the remaining members of his crew to come aboard. The formalities and courtesies still had to be followed, despite the fact that the crew of the Skate was exhausted.

Anna had been aboard for some time. She was also in the boat bay when the shuttle landed. The two full stripes of her rank almost glowed on the jacket of her uniform. She walked over to Lieutenant Murphy and then said, “Lieutenant, your message was late.”

Murphy was taken aback by the abruptness of Anna’s tone.

“Well, ma’am—” he started to say, but that was as far as he got before Anna wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly.

All decorum was thrown aside as he stood there in surprise. He finally wrapped his arms around Anna and returned the kiss. His crew stood in shocked silence before Leading Spaceman Hart started a cheer. It was later, in the privacy of one of the corridors away from the main boat bay, that the two had a chance to talk.

“Phillip, you had me worried,” Anna said.

“I was worried for myself. I’m so glad to see your face. When you called me on the Skate, I was on the hull, and I almost jumped off when I heard it was you.”

“The Skate?”

“Yes, that’s what the crew called her. TBC-473 didn’t sound right for her.”

“Now, now, Lieutenant Murphy, you should know we don’t give boats names in the Terrace Navy,” she said in the same voice she usually used when she teased him.

“Maybe not,” he said seriously, more seriously than he usually spoke. “But she deserved the name, Senior Lieutenant Li.” He opened his mouth to say more, but Anna covered it with her hand.

“That had better be Senior Lieutenant Murphy soon.”