Defender

41

The alien did have a few new tricks up its sleeve. A bit before the halfway point, it flipped ship and began to decelerate. The navigator plotted the course. It showed the alien warship coming to a dead stop in space a good five hundred thousand kilometers short of orbiting the planet.

“You can’t park a ship there,” Jack observed.

“I doubt they intend to,” Captain Drago said, rubbing his chin. “However, with less energy on their ship, they can choose how they’ll close with us. I doubt they intend to give us a shot at their vulnerable stern.”

“Yes,” Kris said. “They’ll come at us headfirst, with lasers blasting. Does this change anything for you, Captain?”

“Not at all. I don’t think our plan requires them to be as dumb as usual.”

The Wasp continued its predictable path in orbit. They did drop off probes to keep an eye on the alien when they were on the other side of the planet, and relays to keep them in the loop. At a million klicks out, the alien began to adjust its deceleration.

“She’s aiming to arrive just as we’re coming around the planet,” Captain Drago reported. “That will cause a problem. No way do I want to let them have a whole half orbit to shoot at us.”

The plan Kris and the captain had hatched depended on their ducking behind the planet right after they got their first shots off. Being stuck in an orbit that kept them in the alien’s crosshairs for an hour was not healthy for them.

As they vanished behind the planet for the second-to-last orbit before the battle started, the Wasp flipped, applied a retro burn, and dove toward the planet. As they did, they went to a modified Condition Zed, collapsing all the space not needed for battle and sending the Smart MetalTM off to the ship’s sides to be honeycombed with near-frozen reaction mass.

The Wasp was going to war.

“Now, we’ll see how he likes that surprise,” Captain Drago said, a tight grin on his lips.

Forty minutes later, they were looping out toward the alien ship. It was still braking. Suddenly, it went to a full 2.5 gees deceleration that appreciably slowed its approach.

“You don’t like that, do you fellow?” Kris said as she used optics to range the alien. “You thought all the moves were yours. Didn’t expect us to make one, did you?” A plot on the main screen showed their orbit beginning to fall back some two hundred thousand miles short of the present predicted point of meeting the alien.

“Now,” Captain Drago muttered, leaning forward in his command chair, “how will you take to us eliminating our final orbit? Will you charge us or choose to trail us. Your move, bastard.”

The alien began to cut back on his deceleration, gradually dropping from 2.5 gees down to 1.5.

“He’s going to come up on our rear,” Kris said. Normally that would be a smart fighting move. They’d have first shot at the Wasp’s vulnerable jets and reactors.

Assuming the Wasp kept her rear pointed that way.

The Wasp reached the apogee of its orbit and began to fall back toward the planet, picking up speed as she went. The alien was still decelerating, but closing the distance on the Wasp that, having once applied thrust, seemed just as dead in space as it had before.

Of course, the alien’s sensors must have told him the Wasp’s lasers were charged and ready. But with the Wasp’s reactors at minimum power, the alien might assume their intended victim had one shot left and could not reload.

What were they guessing? Were they guessing any better than Kris? In a few more minutes, whoever survived the coming battle would know who had guessed right.

Whoever guessed wrong would be dead.

The alien was coming up on 150,000 klicks, and closing. The Wasp was falling back faster and faster toward the planet. If no power was applied, she’d graze the atmosphere of the planet, 150 klicks up. Would the aliens follow them or go higher, cutting down on the time they could keep the Wasp in their sights?

Then, suddenly, the alien flipped ship and presented its bow, bristling with lasers.

Surprise, surprise. Well, Kris had her own surprise ready.

“Flip ship,” Kris ordered as the alien crossed to within 120,000 klicks. Theory said the 20-inch lasers could do damage at that range and the alien lasers would still be out of range of the Wasp.

Kris fired Laser 1. It reached out, hit, and the alien ship became a blur.

“What the heck?” Captain Drago growled.

“Rock, sir,” Senior Chief Beni, ret., reported from Sensors. “Our lasers are hitting pumice. Volcanic rock. They’ve coated their bow with blocks of rock, sir, for armor.”

“Sneaky little bastards learned a lesson,” Kris said, as she fired Lasers 2 and 3 while beginning to recharge 1. The target shed more dust but seemed otherwise unaffected by the hits.

Kris switched to Lasers 4 and 5 and added the other two empty lasers to her recharge list.

More dust.

Laser 6 stirred more dust, then suddenly there was a flare, and something blew up.

“Maybe they needed more armor than they put on,” Kris said. “Flip ship again.” The Wasp turned its vulnerable stern to the alien. But the Wasp’s stern had four stingers. Now Kris fired all four of them at once, carefully aiming them for different sections of the bulbous alien bow filling her sights.

These sparked explosions as alien lasers and rockets blew up.

As soon as the lasers were exhausted, Kris put them in line to recharge.

“Flip ship, begin retrofire on my mark,” Captain Drago ordered. The burn would be short and carefully calculated. Instead of blazing past the planet below, the Wasp would risk the heat of the upper atmosphere, shooting through it at 110 klicks altitude.

It was going to get hot.

Behind them, the alien had again flipped ship and slammed on 2.5 gees deceleration, aiming to make orbit right behind the Wasp, where her lasers could overwhelm and destroy the human ship. But the huge alien ship dared not follow the Wasp, now tiny and tight, its outer hull cooled by its own reaction mass.

The alien reduced its deceleration and fell behind, disappearing below the horizon.

Kris watched as the lasers slowly reloaded. Second after slow second ticked by. Laser 1 showed fully charged after thirteen seconds. The other forward lasers took a full fifteen. This was the price of putting six 20-inch lasers on the bow of a ship whose power plant was designed for four 18-inchers. As the forward battery finished charging, the aft battery began to suck up the electricity. It was twenty-two seconds before all ten of the Wasp’s lasers showed red again.

For the moment, it didn’t matter. The Wasp was diving down, hastened by gravity, slowed by friction. Exactly what its speed would be coming out of this orbit change was anybody’s guess.

Where the alien would be was also a guess. How close would it follow? If it risked following them too close, what would the atmosphere do to his damaged bow? Questions piled up, but with ionized atmosphere blanketing the few sensors that the Wasp risked using, there were no answers in sight.

They blazed their way across the night of the planet below. Did the monsters look up and wonder at what the strange lights were in the sky? Would they care?

The outer hull of the Wasp heated up. Defense thickened the bow, changing the depth of the honeycombed armor from one to two, then three meters. The firing ports of the lasers were covered over.

Isn’t this new and fancier Smart Metal fantastic?

They vented cool reaction mass from the bow. It boiled away but protected the surface beneath.

The Wasp shot out into deeper space, and the hull began to cool. Quickly, they deployed their sensors, visuals, radar, and lasers.

There was the alien, right behind them. Its bow glowed red. Flaming chunks of it fell away. The alien captain had risked the low pass.

Kris could only wonder what price his crew paid for his desperate effort, but it was paying off for her. The alien was closing fast on a hundred thousand klicks.

“Prepare to flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered, ready for the Wasp to charge the alien.

But Kris was busy using the four aft lasers while she still had them aimed at the target. Short, split-second bursts speared at the already flaming ship, first here, then there. Explosion followed on explosion.

NELLY, ANALYZE THE ENEMY BOW. IS THERE ANYPLACE NOT BURNING? ANY LASER POD NOT HIT.

Nelly took the controls and applied the last two short bursts from each laser. Then she got out an even shorter burst. The reactors had already started to recharge them, and Nelly got every little bit available.

“If there’s anything alive and shooting in that hell, I can’t make it out,” Kris’s computer reported, as the lasers went silent and the reloading began.

The alien was staggered by the hits. Its acceleration out from the low pass faltered, coming not in a steady curve but with stutters and spurts. It was hurt.

“Flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered. Still at 3.5 gees acceleration, the Wasp turned to charge the alien. With any luck, it was blind, its sensors burned out.

Not quite, nor was the damage as complete as Kris had wished. First one, then several lasers reached out from the ruined bow to try to catch the Wasp. Most failed, their fire control unable to track the charging human ship, which now went into one of Nelly’s jinking patterns.

There were still enough lasers left in the mangled bow to crisscross the space the Wasp must pass through. Two connected. The Wasp rang with hits.

But the Wasp was committed to a course that crossed above the alien, pinning it between the planet below and the Wasp’s forward batteries. As they flashed by, Kris swung the bow of the Wasp to bear. Four lasers reached out to slice through the stern of the alien, separating its rockets obliquely from the ship it had powered. The engineering spaces with the reactors slid off, diving planetward, while they drove the rest of the alien ship into a spin as they left.

Kris had other targets to roast and took them under fire with the last two forward lasers. Two reactors showed along the central core of the ship. Those powered the forward batteries of lasers. If allowed to go critical, they’d blow the forward section to atoms.

Nelly had gotten the locations of those two reactors from Senior Chief Beni’s sensors. Now, as Kris sliced the aft reactors off, Nelly took a stab at disabling the amidships reactors.

It might work. It might not. Kris had explained to her computer beforehand that no one had ever succeeded in disabling a reactor. They had no idea where the controls were or what would vent the plasma directly to space without taking the rest of the ship with it.

Nelly had seemed to understand that this was not something she could approach with any hope of precision. Still, the computer had accepted the assignment. Now playing staccato notes on the two last lasers like musical instruments, she poked blasts of coherent light at the area around the reactors for fractions of a second.

First, she jabbed at where the forward reactors’ controls might be. Next, she slid her stabs aft, sending a few through the heart of the plasma. That might open up vents to either side for the superhot demons to flee through. Nelly aimed her final thrusts at the possible control spaces aft of the reactor.

Flaming plasma spewed from the sides of the alien ship, sending it spinning. Even in their death throes, amidship lasers tried to light up the Wasp. The wild gyrations of their ship made it impossible to aim, however, and their power quickly bled away.

The alien ship corkscrewed away from the planet, leaving Kris to breathe a sigh of relief. It was headed for a high apogee. They’d have time to correct its wild flight before it went crashing into the planet below.

The stern, with the four reactors, however, did dive into the atmosphere, glowing hot with entry burns before burying itself in a muddy plain and turning it into a blistering inferno.

Maybe the monsters below should have kept a better eye on the monsters above.

“Flipping ship,” Captain Drago ordered, then applied deceleration to cancel out their own dive into heated death.

“Your Highness, I hope you’re happy,” Captain Drago muttered, “because I sincerely never want to do that again.”

“Now that we’ve caught it,” Jack said, from his high-gee station beside Kris, “what do we do with it?”

“Didn’t you ever have a puppy follow you home, Jack? Now we entice it to follow us.”

“Remind me to quit asking dumb questions around you.”

“I don’t think that’s my duty as either your commodore or your wife.”

“I’ll have my computer remind me instead,” Jack said with a good Irish sigh.