Past the Redline

Throttle Fifty-Nine

The response from the Bolgians was pretty much what Diana expected to see. They charged.

It wasn’t even the wrong thing to do, given the situation they were in. The Federation fleet, if left unchecked, would continue to pick away at them one ship at a time. The only option was to overwhelm the Federation now, while they still could.

“How’s that engagement going to pan out?” Diana asked.

“My projections aren’t going to be reliable. I don’t have enough data to construct an accurate simulation of the ships involved, nor do I know the attitudes and tactical doctrines of either side. For that matter, I don’t have profiles on the various captains and commanding officers to predict how they’d deviate from their own doctrine. I estimate a forty-three percent chance that my predictions are accurate.”

“That’s not so bad,” Diana said. If someone told her there was a forty-three percent chance it might rain, she’d still bring an umbrella. “So, what can you tell me?”

“In a full-frontal engagement, the Bolgians will likely surface victorious with a one to one-point-two loss ratio for ships of even tonnage.”

So, for every Federation corvette taken out, the Bolgians would lose one and a bit ships of similar mass. It made sense; the Federation ships were probably a few years ahead of the technological curve, and the charge the Bolgians were employing wasn’t a safe manoeuvre.

“I find it far more likely, based on behaviour so far, that the Federation fleet will begin to turn away from the Bolgian fleet. Their vessels are faster. Even with a full-burn though, the fleets will be within medium engagement range for several minutes. Both sides will suffer losses, but the Federation would be able to disengage from the battle. If they use their torpedo pods at an opportune moment, then might make that previous ratio even greater.”

“So, we just need to stall them, right?” Diana asked.

“No Mistress, we don’t need to do any such thing.”

Diana grinned.

The Federation fleet, now two corvettes bigger, was sweeping close to the second asteroid. The Bolgians ships sent to take that one out were firing entire salvos of missiles at the rock while executing a pretty hard turn away from the fleet’s predicted path.

Diana guessed that those Bolgian ships were going to get away, but it would take time for them to rejoin the fleet.

She sat up straighter and checked the system plotter. Her little group was right on track to pass by the third asteroid at about the same time they’d slip into the Federation’s maximum effective range.

With the size of the ships involved, and the way they were moving, the Federation would need to be lucky to hit them at that range, even with their many railguns. The sensible thing to do was to either wait, or just move on.

Diana shifted the Hercules around so that the front of the craft was pointing towards the fleet.

Her comms squawked almost immediately. “What are you doing?” Abatrath asked.

“I said that I wanted to give the Federation a black eye, right? So here’s the plan. We take out those two corvettes. I’ll even help, then you guys keep on going. I’m going to stay next to the asteroid. Don’t worry, I’ll be able to blow it up.”

“And when the Federation is on top of you?” he asked.

“I’ll give them a black eye.”

“What does that mean?”

Diana blinked. “Uh. I’ll hurt them in a way that’s very annoying, but not lethal. A black eye is a very visible bruise on a human like me. We don’t have fur to hide our skin, so it’s kind of a mark of shame, though it’s temporary.”

“You have a corvette. They have a fleet,” he pointed out.

“I know, it’s hardly fair for them,” Diana said with a growing grin. “Just keep going guys. Keep the jump ring warm for me. I’ll be right back.”

Abatrath was quiet for a moment. She could envision him shaking his head, or whatever his equivalent would be. “It is your death, you can choose how to go.”

“Thanks,” Diana said. “Starting our turn now. Weapons hot everyone, we’ll be in engagement range in a short minute.”

The group turned their trajectory towards one of the distant jump rings, cutting in towards the third asteroid and its two guardian corvettes.

The captains of the corvettes might have been clued in to their plan, or maybe they’d just been keeping an eye on the passing group of racers, because both warships turned towards the fighters and lit up their aft-thrusters to pull back.

Unfortunately for the two captains, they were heavily outnumbered, and even if they outgunned most of the ships in the group, that didn’t amount to much against so many.

Diana fired a few cursory rounds at the corvettes, nailing their shields and leaving a mark before the combined firepower from the other ships broke through and ripped the corvettes apart.

The return fire died down nearly as soon as the shields popped. They couldn’t return fire effectively when their hulls were being poked full of holes.

“Got anything for the asteroid?” Diana asked. “I could scrounge something up.”

“I still have some missiles left,” Zil Rossi said.

A few others chimed in that they had heavier ordinance left over, and soon space filled with a dozen trailing missiles which soon crashed into the asteroid and burst apart. The massive stone cracked, then splintered, huge chunks of rock moving away as the impacts lent the asteroid enough angular momentum that its remains were flung apart.

“Nice work,” Diana said. She flipped the Hercules around and started a hard reverse-burn. “Good luck, you guys. I’ll be with you in a bit. I need to collect my trophy later.”

“They’ll see you coming,” Abatrath warned.

“Probably,” Diana said. She slowed, then reversed directions, heading towards one of the bigger chunks of the asteroid even as small pieces pinged off her shields. The growing cloud of debris was going to pass within a hundred kilometres of the fleet soon. She just had to time her exit.

Diana switched the comms controls over to ChaOS. The AI would be able to take care of that better than she could, at least while she focused on flying.

“Is the EMP ready?” Diana asked.

“It’s ready to fire at your command,” ChaOS said.

“And the virus?”

“Also ready. Though it’s less a proper virus and more of a bypass and intrusion system. I will be connecting to the system myself. Assuming your idea works.”

Diana grinned, then checked around the sides of her seat. A pair of freshly printed handguns were waiting for her, held in place by two small clamps. “Don’t worry so much; when have any of my plans ever failed?”

“Your plans regularly fail, Mistress,” ChaOS pointed out.

“Which is how I learned to be so flexible with my planning,” she said.

Diana paused the snarking as the Federation fleet grew closer. She slammed the throttle down and shot out from the cloud of debris on a straight path for the fleet.

She’d started on the edge of their far-range and was quickly slipping into the medium range where most weapons would be effective.

“Mistress, we’re receiving multiple pings from the fleets. They’re demanding that we change course. Also, they’re aiming at us.”

Diana twitched her hand on the controls. A split-second later a lump of metal silently tumbled past where she would have been. “I think you can ignore their warnings,” she said as she started to fly through some evasive manoeuvres. “I really wish we had some decoys right about now.”

“We have the resources to build a few, though I suspect they’ll be necessary in the next part of your plan.”

“Right,” she said. Her attention was on other things. She twitched here and there, narrowly avoiding shots from the fleet.

The angle she was approaching in had her at the rear of the fleet, where most of what she saw was their thruster arrays. They couldn’t bring too many guns to bear on her, which was saving her for the moment.

The second they crossed into the fleet’s short engagement range, space lit up with lasers as point-defence guns picked up the slack. There was no avoiding the dozens of beams spearing into her shields.

Diana kept an eye on her shield information, aware that they were dropping at a precipitous rate.

“Power to shields,” she said.

The lights in the cockpit dimmed and a few non-necessary displays shut down. That saved them a rounding-error’s worth of power, but it was something, and every watt counted.

Diana grit her teeth, then shoved the throttle down even harder.

The laser arrays lost their tracking for a second as the Hercules jumped forwards.

And then she spun the ship around and reverse-burned until she was flying only barely faster than the fleet. Just like that, the Hercules was in the centre of their formation. She imagined she was now the centre of a few captains’ attention too.

“Get that EMP ready, we’re about to give these guys a surprise!”