Command Authority, page 27
part #5 of Last Hunter Series
That was good as far as it went, but Derek wished the alien machines had taken a heavier toll on the warrior race. Now they’d be difficult to stop before they got to Argent. The last time they’d fought, he’d been able to use the hyperdrive where they couldn’t and pinned them in place. When they came for Hunter this time, it would be an old-fashioned slugfest.
“Tell me we’ve got a plan,” he said quietly to Amanda. “If we have to go toe to toe with this much firepower, what kind of chance do we have?”
“Better than you’d think. I won’t say it’ll be easy, but we’ll probably survive the fight. Our hull is thick, and we’ve had a chance to repair the damage we took at New Copenhagen. Now that we’re stocked with missiles, we’ll make them regret coming here.”
“Yes, we will,” Romanoff said from behind them, obviously having overheard everything they’d said even though they’d been quiet. “Communications, open a channel to the Novarite vessels. Let’s keep it an audio communication and engage the translation program for me.”
When the officer indicated he was ready, Romanoff spoke again. “Novarite vessels, this is Commodore Jack Romanoff of the Confederation battleship Delta Orionis. You have intruded into Confederation space. You are instructed to withdraw, or you will be considered hostile. Any aggression will be responded to by lethal force. Romanoff out.”
Derek turned in his seat so he could look at his commander. “Do you think they’re going to back down, sir?”
“Stranger things have happened, but no. I expect them to lock onto our signal and come in as fast as possible. It’s too bad we’re not going to be able to use either of our drives this deep in the gravity well, so we’ll have to do this the hard way. Since they’re faster than us, we’ll have to use their numbers against them. Any chance you get to have one of their ships between another of their ships and us, do so as long as it doesn’t expose our vulnerable areas. Amanda, having fought those ships before and seen the sensor records of the large ship we collided with, how much tougher do you expect them to be?”
She shrugged. “They’ve got a lot more phased packet plasma guns than the smaller ships, but that can’t be everything. Just the increased number of weapons along its hull wouldn’t justify making such a significantly larger vessel. I expect that they’ve got another weapon we’re unfamiliar with. We didn’t have time to engage the other ship when it came for us, but I expect we’ll find out what their secret is this time.”
“I just hope it doesn’t leave us wrecked like the last couple of battles,” Romanoff said with a grimace. “Is there any way that we can attempt to move around them? If they’re smart, the smaller ships will come in first to absorb our fire, and then the large ships will engage us. I realize we’re deep inside the gravity well, but if it’s possible to move even the slightest bit—even theoretically—I’d like to know about it.”
Derek shook his head. “The only theory I know anything about is the independent quantum drive, sir. It won’t function this deep inside the gravity well. It won’t even try to turn on. The hyperdrive can work somewhat deeper than the independent quantum drive, but it has its limits too, and we’re at least an hour and a half away from the safest place we might try something like that. Even if we change course, they’ll catch us before we reach the jump limit.”
“Actually, we received a transmission from David Chen right before the enemy forces began emerging from hyperspace,” the communications officer said. “It wasn’t marked high priority, so I was holding it for an appropriate moment. He indicated it had something about a theory that the two drives might be able to be used in conjunction. I only skimmed the message header, so I don’t know anything more than that.”
“Send it to engineering and to Derek’s console. If there’s an opportunity to give it a look, let me know what you think. Make sure that Commander Danek gives it a look as well. If it gives us another option, I want to know about it.”
Derek brought up the message and began reading. There was a short note from Regex that indicated he believed the theory being expounded in the paper might work, but he had no personal experience that would suggest so.
Regex had been clear that engaging the hyperdrive too deep inside a stellar system with the safety systems turned off would result in the ship jumping to a high hyperspace band and likely killing everyone aboard. That seemed too great a risk to take, but the alien scientist wasn’t proposing it actually be engaged, only sending a pulse of power through it.
Did that make a difference? If the drive engaged, they’d die. Would pulsing it risk the same sort of thing? According to Regex, no, particularly if significantly less energy was used in the drive itself. Below a certain threshold, there wasn’t enough power to take a vessel into hyperspace. Nothing happened when it was done at those lower power thresholds.
It still sounded too risky to try. Even if it didn’t kill them right away, the idea of utilizing the two drives together seemed exceedingly dangerous. There was a lot of energy being tossed around, even at minimal power. If there was feedback, that could cause damage to their drives at a time when they could least afford it.
That wasn’t his concern, though. Commander Danek would worry about the safety of their equipment. He needed to focus on whether he could actually use the drives at the same time. The independent quantum drive was something that discharged its energy in one great burst, sending the ship from one location to another. The hyperdrive took the entire vessel into another dimension and kept it there until used again to shove it back out. One acted immediately, and the other was a continuous operation until disengaged. How could they work together?
He pursed his lips. If he activated the hyperdrive, it would immediately discover it couldn’t engage and turn off. If he did the same to the independent quantum drive, it would fail to function. The two would have to be bound together into a single control so that they are activated at the same time.
It seemed to him that if he used the lowest possible energy level for the independent quantum drive, it would reduce the risk of something going catastrophically wrong. There would be one moment of high risk as the two drives tried to operate together.
He didn’t think that would somehow get them into hyperspace or allow them to jump using the independent quantum drive, but the technology was far outside of his grasp. Combining them could have completely unexpected results.
Regex had a lot of experience with hyperspace, so Derek wasn’t going to say he was wrong. He’d just privately nurse his doubts until he found out for himself. Hopefully not the hard way.
Setting up the controls to attempt this was more challenging than he expected because the two drives were never meant to work together. In fact, they used entirely different systems and displayed on his console in separate windows. Could the two be linked? He didn’t know.
Leaving the technical aspects of what might be possible to the chief engineer, he focused on designing a hybrid control system to activate both drives simultaneously. The independent quantum drive engaged instantly when power was dumped into it. The hyperdrive had a brief delay where it transitioned the ship into hyperspace. Did that matter? Did the hyperdrive need to be activated first so it was fully in swing when the independent quantum drive engaged?
Supposing he did that, what would it do? Would it behave more like the quantum drive engaging and taking them to another system? Or would it be more like the hyperdrive and move them ahead through an alternate space? For navigational purposes, he needed to know. Did he need to aim the ship to make an interstellar jump?
Did it make a difference? Just sending a burst of power into this would likely do nothing. He probably should be cautious and set it up as if he would jump to another system. While they were deep inside the jump limit, if something actually happened, he wanted to make sure he had valid coordinates. The independent quantum drive could come out some distance away from a stellar system but not in truly deep space. It needed a gravity-based anchor point to engage the drive at all.
That was why they were trapped inside the cluster. If the quantum drive could take them halfway back to the rest of the Confederation, then make a second jump and go all the way, they’d have more options. The problem was they needed a sufficiently large gravity well as their target for the drive to engage and for the ship to emerge. Early test ships that jumped for deep space vanished, never to be seen again.
Honestly, that was a lot like what had happened to ships in the higher bands of hyperspace. Did a quantum jump into deep space end up in one of the hyperspace bands? Without a drive to get back out, that would leave them trapped. If the two technologies were related, that was possible.
The exploration ships had a greater range, and one of them could take a quantum gate back to the Confederation. The problem was that the gateway system was the closest approach to the rest of the Confederation. There was still a large force of Locusts in that area, and it wasn’t close to them. Even if they summoned the entire Navy to the cluster, it would only sign their death warrants.
He supposed they were making progress. They were freeing some systems, and at some point, they could attempt to reconnect with the rest of the Confederation. That would undoubtedly mean more experienced Navy officers replacing people like him, but his skills would still be in demand.
The comm on his console went off, and he saw it was engineering. “Calvo.”
“This is Danek. Have you had a chance to look over that information about trying to use the drives together? I think it’s crazy, but I want a second opinion.”
“I think it sounds crazy, too, ma’am. Whether it would work or not is your bailiwick, but I’m setting up the controls to give it a try. This deep inside the gravity well, we shouldn’t go anywhere unless you know something about the physics that I don’t. The hyperdrive has a safety system that would have to be disengaged, but as long as we don’t try to pump too much power into it, it shouldn’t turn all the way on and won’t take us into hyperspace and kill us. What I’m worried about is harmonic feedback that damages both drives.”
“That’s a risk,” she agreed. “If we use the minimum power possible in the independent quantum drive, and we stay far below the operational threshold of the hyperdrive, that should make this less dangerous, but it’s not going to be without risk. Do you think that the commodore will want to try it?”
“Two big Novarite ships have us pinned inside the gravity well. We don’t know what kind of weapons they have because we rammed the other one before it had a chance to fire. There are five of the smaller ships, though one of them is damaged. Even the phased packet plasma guns will tear us to shreds if they catch up. If this could potentially get the ship moving faster, I think it’s worth trying.”
She was quiet for a few seconds, and then he heard her sigh. “Without running a lot of simulations, this will be chancy. If things are that dangerous, I suppose we’ll have to try it, but anything we can do to mitigate the risk would be useful. We have to use the lightest touch possible and then try to assess what—if anything—happened. How long until we get into the enemy’s firing range?”
“Roughly an hour and a quarter, ma’am. If we’re going to try this, we need to do so now.”
“Fine. I’ll have my people standing by, and we’ll put out the fires if something goes wrong. Don’t blow my ship up, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll do my best not to do that, ma’am. Helm out.”
He turned in his seat and faced Commodore Romanoff. “I’ve got the controls set up to give this a try, sir. Commander Danek says there’ll be some risk, but if we minimize our power output, she thinks it’s manageable. I want to stress that this is all unknown, and we could wreck one or both drives by trying them together. Even though we’re keeping the power to the hyperdrive below the engagement threshold, it could still kill us.”
“Amanda, what do you think our chances are against all those Novarite ships in the condition we’re in?” Romanoff asked.
“Not good, sir,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’m worried about those big ships and what they might have to use as a primary weapon. I’m betting it’s something more than a lot of plasma guns. If they’ve got something like whatever punched through the hull of that Novarite warship that Confederation Intelligence found, it could cut through our hull like a hot knife through butter. I’d rather avoid getting shot with something like that.”
“As would I, Lieutenant. As would I.” Romanoff pursed his lips for a few moments and then nodded. “I want every sensor we have watching what’s going on, and I want the minimum power applied for just an instant. Let’s see if anything happens and hope we don’t blow up.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re not going to blow up, sir, but I’ll do my best.”
Derek swiveled back around to his console and picked the set of controls that would put power to the hyperdrive moments before the independent quantum drive activated. The one would normally take them forward, but the other would potentially jump them through space, so he set up one of the nearby systems as their destination and altered course to aim toward it. Then he took a deep breath and pressed the button.
His expectation was that nothing would change, but he was wrong. His insides twisted up like they’d made a jump with the independent quantum drive, though what actually happened was far stranger. The sensors went offline, and they briefly lost the Novarite warships. Everything snapped back on a few moments later, and they’d moved a short distance.
Well, short in stellar terms. They jumped ahead thirty thousand kilometers. That was far slower than the hyperdrive could move them but significantly faster than their fusion drives.
He wondered what the Novarites thought of what had just happened. What it looked like from the outside? He knew a ship entering and exiting hyperspace was different from one arriving via the independent quantum drive. How had this looked?
“Engineering, this is the bridge,” Romanoff said. “What’s your status?”
“We’re still going over everything,” Danek said. “There was a little stress, but the drives didn’t experience anything outside their normal operating tolerances. If we have an opportunity to do in-depth testing before we use them again, that will make me feel better, but nothing failed catastrophically.”
“How long would you need to do the testing?”
“If you could give me fifteen minutes, that would be good.”
“Call me back as soon as you’re done. Bridge out. Derek, what happened?”
“I’m still figuring that out, sir,” he said. “We traveled thirty thousand kilometers. Our sensors went offline for a few moments, and everything coming into them for a couple of seconds after that was squirrelly. I’m not sure why it was, but things were badly distorted.”
“We obviously moved through either hyperspace or quantum space, if those are truly different things,” the flag officer said. “We need to know if we were moving instantaneously or not.”
Derek tapped on the console and brought up the sensor logs. Everything was hard to interpret, but he could at least answer that question for sure.
“It looks like we moved instantaneously, sir. We jumped from one spot to another, but our sensors degraded for roughly five seconds afterward. It was worst immediately after the jump and quickly improved. Since we were back in normal space, I have no idea why the sensors would be affected that way. It’ll be problematic when it comes time to shoot something, though.”
“Looking at the sensor records, I think the boundary layer where the quantum field established itself around the ship discharged a lot of energy when we arrived,” Amanda said. “It took those few seconds to fully radiate everything away. That’s not what happens to a ship that uses either kind of drive, so I’m not sure what it means. Perhaps because we weren’t cleanly in one type of space or another, some of the energy from that other dimension bled through when the field collapsed.”
“That sounds more like a hindrance than a help,” Romanoff said. “If we can’t see the enemy when we arrive, we can’t shoot them. Hell, if the boundary layer is shedding energy, it might interfere with our lasers and missiles. How much energy are we talking about?”
“Unknown, sir.”
Derek checked what the Novarite warships were doing and wondered how they’d react to the sudden change. Hunter had been coming out to them in normal space, and then it had seemingly skipped ahead without any cause. They’d been putting out enough energy to show up on their sensors, too. That definitely wasn’t a way to sneak up on someone.
The only good thing about this was it gave them mobility. If they could use that ability to move quickly enough, they’d become more maneuverable than their opponents. Right now, the thirty thousand kilometer difference wasn’t enough to change things, but if they could use the effect more often, they’d be able to move rapidly indeed.
The biggest problem was that if they popped out in weapons range, they’d be able to be fired upon before they could even see the enemy. This hybrid tech allowed them to flee, but it didn’t necessarily guarantee them the ability to beat their opponents. In fact, it might just make it harder.
Thankfully, Romanoff was an experienced officer, and he could figure out how to make this work for them. The tactical situation had changed, but it would be up to their commander to thrash the Novarites before they did something lethal to them.
29
Jack did some mental calculations and grimaced. Even though they’d found a method to potentially give them a combat edge, their time to use it was too short. By the time Kelly finished doing her engineering checks, the enemy would be perilously close. Depending on what type of weapons those large ships had, they might already be in firing range by then.
Even if they weren’t, figuring out how to effectively use this new capability in conjunction with firing their own weapons would be challenging. Amanda was a talented tactical officer, but this was unknown terrain. They still weren’t sure what was happening, and it probably wasn’t the best idea to find out while they were being shot at.
