Throttle Forty-Seven
Diana’s last broadcast was blasted out without even a hint of encryption. It was basically an invitation for the Bolgian fleet to move in to protect their flagship. Unfortunately for them, the way they’d laid out their blockade had most of their larger ships out by the outer edges, with their own escorts surrounding them.
The centre-middle of the blockade was filled by a grid of destroyers and frigates that were shifting to interpose themselves between the group Diana was with and the flagship Pride of Bolgia.
A few of the missile cruisers and frigates on the edges of the blockade launched another salvo which turned towards their group. ChaOS calculated their trajectories and marked the spot where the missiles would reach them on the graph next to Diana. Just a few hundred kilometres away from the flagship.
Abatrath pinged her over a tight beam. “You really stirred them. Are you trying to make it easy for the other racers?”
“No, I’m just trying to put on a good show. We need to accelerate a little. I want to be next to the flagship when those missiles are about to hit,” Diana said.
“Smart,” Abatrath replied. “I don’t know if the Bolgians have invested in remote controls for their missiles. They might be running off of conditional programs; they’ll likely self-detonate before getting too close to the flagship.”
“The fighters will be catching up with us long before we arrive at the flagship. The fleet is also launching more fighter craft to intercept,” ChaOS said. On the plotter, a hundred or so red dots flickered on and off for attention, then lines were drawn across space showing the eventual path the Bolgian fighters would take to reach them. Two destroyers were also moving in to intercept, though they were slow enough that Diana suspected they were just aiming to stand in their path and let loose with their superior firepower.
The destroyers would be a threat. Not to the Cerberus; her ship was armoured enough that she suspected she could fly loops around them without firing back for a few minutes before they damaged anything critical. The issue was all the point-defence and the guns designed to take out smaller craft.
The two would pose a serious threat to all the fighters flying alongside her.
“Abatrath, I’m heading out ahead. I’ll be the spearpoint here. Can you guys focus on the fighters as they come into range?”
“If our pace is increasing, we won’t have as much time to aim. We might not be able to take out their shields before we’re past each other,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Diana said.
The flight of racers repositioned itself as a cone, with her ship at the very front and Abatrath just behind. It seemed he was determined to at the very least be second, which she could respect.
“Diana,” Zil Rossi said over the coms. “Should I launch before we reach the flagship?”
Diana considered it. “It’s not a bad idea.” With a hefty chunk of the blockade pushing back towards the middle to reinforce the Pride of Bolgia… most of those were the smaller craft, the Bolgian equivalent of corvettes and fighter craft which could be spared. “Yeah, launch away,” she said.
A heavy clunk sounded from the Cerberus, followed by a hiss that was felt through the hull. A camera caught the Foxtail separating from its mothership, the ship’s stubby wing-mounted guns unfolding from their housing even as the long tail at the back of the fighter wavered left and right like a predatory cat preparing to pounce.
“I’m loose,” Zil Rossi said. She pitched the ship down and slightly away from the Cerberus, enough to move out of the bigger ship’s thruster wake.
“Well done. Keep an eye on your ammo count, we won’t be getting resupplies out here. Ah, and don’t burn too fast; I don’t think you can handle the Gs the Foxtail can pull.”
“Noted,” Zil Rossi said.
Diana nodded and put her out of mind for a moment. It was looking more and more like they’d have to slow down soon to slip past the swirling mass of ships ahead of them. There was no accounting for the constant motion of the hundred or so fighters and gunships around the flagship. Running into one of those at their current speed would be fatal, shields or no.
“ChaOS, how long until those missiles become a problem?” she asked.
“Approximately one minute,” ChaOS said.
“And the destroyers?” she asked. Her system map painted the two destroyers as being right in their path. She glanced ahead and out the front of the cockpit where a screen showed her space ahead. The planet they were racing towards was growing larger by the second. She could catch a few glimmers against it, tiny black specks that were likely the largest of the Bolgian ships.
“You have nearly twenty seconds until you’re within their range.”
“Right,” she said with a nod. “Decoy missiles out, spiral pattern. Fire one straight ahead, we’ll start counter-spiralling.” She flicked her coms with an absent thought. “Abatrath, about to pull off a simple manoeuvre. Do keep up.”
All along the length of the Cerberus, panels opened up on the ship’s surface, then they filled with smoke as a dozen missiles were launched from the sides of the ship. Micro-missiles, none of them much longer than Diana was tall. They had enough solid fuel to keep them going for a while, and each had a powerful antenna that started to broadcast some noise.
The noise was, essentially, a recording of all the signals the Cerberus and the ships following it were giving off, amplified to mask the fact that the signals were coming from a single point instead of a group of ships.
Once the missiles were a good ways away, their sides burst apart and long trailing filaments escaped them, bundles of wire with resistors set on them which would light up any IR sensor sensitive enough to pick out a ship in the cold of space.
They had a few more tricks besides to fool any dumb-targetting system into thinking that they were a pack of ships instead of merely a singular missile. Diana didn’t know every trick; ECM was ChaOS’s thing, not hers.
Within seconds of the decoys heading out, a few of the Bolgian missiles altered their course to meet them. Each one of those was one less thing to worry about.
Diana could almost read the indecision from the captains of the Bolgian destroyers as they tried to figure out which signal was real and which was a decoy. In the end, the fact that they had actual people behind the commands of the ship decided it. They likely had some way to see out of the vessel, and the decoys didn’t provide much to look at.
A modern AI-equipped missile wouldn’t have been fooled for even a nano-second, but the Bolgian were relying on missiles with simple minds and likely simpler sensors.
Diana flicked her thumb across one of her joysticks and brought up a targeting system. She shifted the ship just a little until the crosshair in its middle was hovering over the closer of the two destroyers.
She pulled the trigger.
The Cerberus shook slightly, a motion so slight she wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t paying attention to it.
In the same second, the shield in front of the destroyer lit up in a brilliant flash as it worked to prevent the slug she’d fired from perforating the ship it protected.
Diana fired again, then again. Four shots in quick succession, one from each of the railguns mounted on the Cerberus. The fourth round was enough to crack the shield, or at least one hemisphere of it.
The side of the destroyer opened up like a tin can with a stick of dynamite in it. Hull plates were rent apart, smaller components went flying, and a cloud of gas filled the void of space next to the ship for a fraction of a second until the cloud met a spark and turned into an expanding ball of flames.
The fire cut off relatively quickly, but it left its mark on the ship. The destroyer spun on its own axis, though judging from the constantly firing retro-thrusters, that ship would right itself eventually.
Diana hesitated before she could fire the killing blow. The crew was likely scrambling to stay alive already. It was unlikely that the ship would open fire on them now.
She turned her attention onto the other destroyer which had already started flying in evasive patterns.
That didn’t matter so much when her shots travelled from her ship to the destroyer’s shield so quickly that they barely spent any time in the space in between. The shields on the second destroyer cracked after seven shots. The ship’s rotating motion dispersed some of the damage.
The eighth shot punched a hole through the middle of the craft, and it immediately went dark. No fire, no explosion, just an instant shut down.
“What kind of firepower are you packing?” Abatrath asked.
“The fun kind,” Diana said with a grin. “Get ready, I don’t trust my aim with the smaller ships out there, and I don’t know if I have enough point defence to keep every missile off of us.”
Throttle Forty-Seven
Diana’s last broadcast was blasted out without even a hint of encryption. It was basically an invitation for the Bolgian fleet to move in to protect their flagship. Unfortunately for them, the way they’d laid out their blockade had most of their larger ships out by the outer edges, with their own escorts surrounding them.
The centre-middle of the blockade was filled by a grid of destroyers and frigates that were shifting to interpose themselves between the group Diana was with and the flagship Pride of Bolgia.
A few of the missile cruisers and frigates on the edges of the blockade launched another salvo which turned towards their group. ChaOS calculated their trajectories and marked the spot where the missiles would reach them on the graph next to Diana. Just a few hundred kilometres away from the flagship.
Abatrath pinged her over a tight beam. “You really stirred them. Are you trying to make it easy for the other racers?”
“No, I’m just trying to put on a good show. We need to accelerate a little. I want to be next to the flagship when those missiles are about to hit,” Diana said.
“Smart,” Abatrath replied. “I don’t know if the Bolgians have invested in remote controls for their missiles. They might be running off of conditional programs; they’ll likely self-detonate before getting too close to the flagship.”
“The fighters will be catching up with us long before we arrive at the flagship. The fleet is also launching more fighter craft to intercept,” ChaOS said. On the plotter, a hundred or so red dots flickered on and off for attention, then lines were drawn across space showing the eventual path the Bolgian fighters would take to reach them. Two destroyers were also moving in to intercept, though they were slow enough that Diana suspected they were just aiming to stand in their path and let loose with their superior firepower.
The destroyers would be a threat. Not to the Cerberus; her ship was armoured enough that she suspected she could fly loops around them without firing back for a few minutes before they damaged anything critical. The issue was all the point-defence and the guns designed to take out smaller craft.
The two would pose a serious threat to all the fighters flying alongside her.
“Abatrath, I’m heading out ahead. I’ll be the spearpoint here. Can you guys focus on the fighters as they come into range?”
“If our pace is increasing, we won’t have as much time to aim. We might not be able to take out their shields before we’re past each other,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Diana said.
The flight of racers repositioned itself as a cone, with her ship at the very front and Abatrath just behind. It seemed he was determined to at the very least be second, which she could respect.
“Diana,” Zil Rossi said over the coms. “Should I launch before we reach the flagship?”
Diana considered it. “It’s not a bad idea.” With a hefty chunk of the blockade pushing back towards the middle to reinforce the Pride of Bolgia… most of those were the smaller craft, the Bolgian equivalent of corvettes and fighter craft which could be spared. “Yeah, launch away,” she said.
A heavy clunk sounded from the Cerberus, followed by a hiss that was felt through the hull. A camera caught the Foxtail separating from its mothership, the ship’s stubby wing-mounted guns unfolding from their housing even as the long tail at the back of the fighter wavered left and right like a predatory cat preparing to pounce.
“I’m loose,” Zil Rossi said. She pitched the ship down and slightly away from the Cerberus, enough to move out of the bigger ship’s thruster wake.
“Well done. Keep an eye on your ammo count, we won’t be getting resupplies out here. Ah, and don’t burn too fast; I don’t think you can handle the Gs the Foxtail can pull.”
“Noted,” Zil Rossi said.
Diana nodded and put her out of mind for a moment. It was looking more and more like they’d have to slow down soon to slip past the swirling mass of ships ahead of them. There was no accounting for the constant motion of the hundred or so fighters and gunships around the flagship. Running into one of those at their current speed would be fatal, shields or no.
“ChaOS, how long until those missiles become a problem?” she asked.
“Approximately one minute,” ChaOS said.
“And the destroyers?” she asked. Her system map painted the two destroyers as being right in their path. She glanced ahead and out the front of the cockpit where a screen showed her space ahead. The planet they were racing towards was growing larger by the second. She could catch a few glimmers against it, tiny black specks that were likely the largest of the Bolgian ships.
“You have nearly twenty seconds until you’re within their range.”
“Right,” she said with a nod. “Decoy missiles out, spiral pattern. Fire one straight ahead, we’ll start counter-spiralling.” She flicked her coms with an absent thought. “Abatrath, about to pull off a simple manoeuvre. Do keep up.”
All along the length of the Cerberus, panels opened up on the ship’s surface, then they filled with smoke as a dozen missiles were launched from the sides of the ship. Micro-missiles, none of them much longer than Diana was tall. They had enough solid fuel to keep them going for a while, and each had a powerful antenna that started to broadcast some noise.
The noise was, essentially, a recording of all the signals the Cerberus and the ships following it were giving off, amplified to mask the fact that the signals were coming from a single point instead of a group of ships.
Once the missiles were a good ways away, their sides burst apart and long trailing filaments escaped them, bundles of wire with resistors set on them which would light up any IR sensor sensitive enough to pick out a ship in the cold of space.
They had a few more tricks besides to fool any dumb-targetting system into thinking that they were a pack of ships instead of merely a singular missile. Diana didn’t know every trick; ECM was ChaOS’s thing, not hers.
Within seconds of the decoys heading out, a few of the Bolgian missiles altered their course to meet them. Each one of those was one less thing to worry about.
Diana could almost read the indecision from the captains of the Bolgian destroyers as they tried to figure out which signal was real and which was a decoy. In the end, the fact that they had actual people behind the commands of the ship decided it. They likely had some way to see out of the vessel, and the decoys didn’t provide much to look at.
A modern AI-equipped missile wouldn’t have been fooled for even a nano-second, but the Bolgian were relying on missiles with simple minds and likely simpler sensors.
Diana flicked her thumb across one of her joysticks and brought up a targeting system. She shifted the ship just a little until the crosshair in its middle was hovering over the closer of the two destroyers.
She pulled the trigger.
The Cerberus shook slightly, a motion so slight she wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t paying attention to it.
In the same second, the shield in front of the destroyer lit up in a brilliant flash as it worked to prevent the slug she’d fired from perforating the ship it protected.
Diana fired again, then again. Four shots in quick succession, one from each of the railguns mounted on the Cerberus. The fourth round was enough to crack the shield, or at least one hemisphere of it.
The side of the destroyer opened up like a tin can with a stick of dynamite in it. Hull plates were rent apart, smaller components went flying, and a cloud of gas filled the void of space next to the ship for a fraction of a second until the cloud met a spark and turned into an expanding ball of flames.
The fire cut off relatively quickly, but it left its mark on the ship. The destroyer spun on its own axis, though judging from the constantly firing retro-thrusters, that ship would right itself eventually.
Diana hesitated before she could fire the killing blow. The crew was likely scrambling to stay alive already. It was unlikely that the ship would open fire on them now.
She turned her attention onto the other destroyer which had already started flying in evasive patterns.
That didn’t matter so much when her shots travelled from her ship to the destroyer’s shield so quickly that they barely spent any time in the space in between. The shields on the second destroyer cracked after seven shots. The ship’s rotating motion dispersed some of the damage.
The eighth shot punched a hole through the middle of the craft, and it immediately went dark. No fire, no explosion, just an instant shut down.
“What kind of firepower are you packing?” Abatrath asked.
“The fun kind,” Diana said with a grin. “Get ready, I don’t trust my aim with the smaller ships out there, and I don’t know if I have enough point defence to keep every missile off of us.”
