Blockade Running

Seth took a drink. It wasn’t like it made his work worse. He could be half conscious, and he’d still be the best damned mechanic across the Freeports. Possibly the best in the galaxy, but he didn’t know the new guys over in Astro. He let the beer settle a moment, then turned to his baby. The engine purred like a kitten. Hopefully this coming fight wasn’t going to be too problematic for her. Over his intercom, Captain Li gave her orders. “We need the engine operating at double efficiency. We’re going to be running through the blockade.” Seth clambered on top of the engine before him. “Seth here, give me a minute.” Then, after thinking a moment, he added, “Want me to turn the gravdrive to disrupt their targeting systems?” “Can you do it?” Li asked. Seth was inside the engine, tweaking the fuel intakes. They would run fast and powerful, but not for long. “Do it? Yeah. Safely? Maybe. The sheathe is only front to back. In theory, as long as the spatial distortion is purely perpendicular to our velocity, we shouldn’t tear our ship apart. Any slight deviation from a perfect perpendicular direction, though, and…” Rather than use his words, Seth made a loud cracking noise, followed by a whooshing sound. “Then no,” Li said, “Just keep our engines from blowing out in the meantime.” Seth took another drink, then settled into a relaxed position atop the engine, looking at his temperature, pressure, speed, distortion, and radiation gauges on his tablet. Captain Li couldn’t help but shake her head at the Chief Engineer of her ship. He was a lazy, licentious drunk with almost no useful skills. Almost. If it weren’t for the fact that he could make just about any scrap into a functional engine, he would’ve been fired years ago. Fortunately, his position meant he didn’t work on the bridge, and his lazy nature kept him chilling in the engine room most of the day. Li turned to her tactical console. Normally reserved for Service vessels, a friend of theirs found it fallen from a truck and sold it to them, out in Madidus a couple years ago. The console, combined with several stealth scanners positioned all around the hull, allowed for a full tactical display of a system, so long as they were outside of distorted space. Scans of distortion made for weirdness in any sensor suite, no matter how fancy. That was how to track vessels with engaged gravdrive. Exact position in space was near impossible to track, but directions were easy to see as the places where data simply makes little to no sense. Keeping from being followed risked being spotted by sensors, and vise-versa. Her display was not particularly pleasant. “Anders,” she asked her pilot, “Have a clear path?” Anders gave a curt reply, “Not yet. Pull up Trip-Ps.” Formerly a first lieutenant of the Service, Anders wasn’t the most pleasant person to be around. He was, however, a fantastic pilot. So when Anders said there wasn’t a way through currently, Li believed him. Li nodded, and ran the patrol prediction protocols, or Trip-Ps as the Service referred to them. On the display before her, a series of paths, colored based on percent likelihood, began to slowly get drawn out. Behind the scenes, thousands of thousands of scenarios were being run for each ship in the blockade. With a flick of her wrist, the paths were overlaid atop the view screen. “See our window?” she asked Anders. “One minute, fifteen seconds,” Anders stated. Not an answer to her question, simply a statement of their time frame. Li nodded. “Understood.” She pressed a different person’s image on her tablet screen and said, “Mike, are you set?” From the bottom of the ship, Michael Young sighed. “Been set since we came into system, Cap,” he replied, pressing the intercom button, “When’s LT putting the pedal to the metal.” Li responded quickly, “T minus one minute five seconds to accel.” Michael unlocked the turrets, giving himself manual control. Just because he wasn’t a Marauder anymore didn’t mean his eyes went dull. He was still a perfect shot. And it also didn’t reverse that hell that his old, now deceased captain had forced upon him. Settling into the specially designed bubble stolen from his last ship, Michael’s hands gripped the two separate control modules. Pulling down the visor, he gazed out into space. His left eye seeing a three axis full rotational view of the port turret, his right the same from the starboard. Any unenhanced mind wouldn’t be able to process the information, but his old boss didn’t care much for whether or not his crew had horrific, long-term mental trauma due to what had been done in an effort to streamline his old ship’s workings. Pressing the intercom, Michael replied, “Turrets live.” Back on the bridge, Captain Li nodded. One more check, and they would be ready to make the run. “Rach, is our sensor decoy in the tube?” Over her comms, Rach Valesco replied from the missile bay, “Yeppers. We’re all good over here.” Captain Li gave Anders a nod. “On your mark,” she stated. Anders took a breath. Not even a deep one. He didn’t need to set himself. He was watching the ships as they slowly moved along the predicted pathways. Then, on a dime, he maxed out their acceleration towards a slight gap between a destroyer unit and an orbital bombard. It would be a tight fit, but it completely avoided the larger guns of both big ships, leaving only the bombards defensive fighter units to contend with. Seth watched as, now in use, the central unit of the engine started to fry. It was their primary thruster, unmoving and responsible for most of their forward acceleration. It needed to cool down. It was times like this that Seth hated the LT. No respect for engines. He loved to go from nothing to all as though that didn’t contribute to their engines needing help nearly every port they parked in. He looked around for something to cool it. His homebrewing fridge was nitrogen cooled to maintain temperature. That could cool it. He had a stout brewing. Anders owed him two hundred and three for ruining this batch. Breaking open the back of the fridge, he unhooked the nitrogen tubing and coils, and brought them, with their battery, up to the central area of the engines. Wrapping them around the engine, near the intake, he checked the temperature. It wasn’t going down much, but it wasn’t going up either. That counted as a win. He sighed as he took another drink. Michael watched the fast approaching ships. He wasn’t worried. The big ones were Anders’s job to avoid. He just needed to keep the little guys from blowing them up. His left eye spotted the first of the stream of fighters coming out of the orbital bombard. He warmed up the port gun, spinning the barrels. Targeting the first fighter, he began to fire. The stream of small projectiles spat from the port gun, while he started spinning up the starboard one. The first fighter’s wing exploded violently, and it went into a spin off further to Michael’s left, driving the second towards his right. That’s when the starboard gun started to spit it’s ionized beams. This breached the cabin of the second fighter, a fist sized hole at most. But, that’s more than enough to cause explosive decomp. The fighter stopped its acceleration, while it’s tail didn’t. The third fighter’s pilot, realizing what happened just seconds too late, tried to veer off course. The crash split the second fighter in two and sheared a third of the third fighter off, lodging it in the wreckage. Michael kept firing, targeting the fighters as they came into range. This was going about as expected. Without breaking his defensive assault, he sighed and hoped the bombard would call off it’s fighters. Anders made sure to keep the forward engine on full blast. If they wanted the decoy to work properly, they’d need to be as obvious as possible on the blockade sensors. Kicking the port maneuver thrusters in, he shoved their ship as close as he could get to the destroyer. The bombard had no defenses pointed outwards, that was why it had fighters. The destroyer could target them, in theory. That meant keeping too close for any target lock to be maintained. Using the top and bottom thrusters as well, he weaved them between the larger and smaller turrets of the destroyer’s broadside. It was just the relatively simple matter of getting inside its thruster array and weaving through there before the destroyer thinks to do the clever but unusual move of warming up the gravdrive, as that would shred their ship into atoms. Relatively simple, compared to flying so close to the destroyer’s hull without crashing. He felt the captain looking intensely at the tac display. “Two minutes before the turn,” he informed her. Captain Li took a deep breath. “Thanks for the update, Anders.” Despite her attempts to sound relaxed and stress-free, Anders could hear the worry under her constructed tone. “Oh, stop it,” Seth complained at his engines. The port thruster didn’t like being used so aggressively. It was spitting out a pressure error. He hurried to it’s valve and checked. It had gotten locked into a closed position, probably during one of the jerky movements his arch-nemesis Anders had been doing. “Come on,” Seth quietly told his baby, “You’re better than this.” Giving the side of the engine a kick as he ran through a diagnostic resetting of the valve system, the release valve burst open, spraying out a massive jet of the warmed air that had been building up. He barely avoided the line of fire, ducking his head down as he finished the reset. Checking his tablet, he saw the central engine unit was starting to warm up. The nitrogen was helping, but it was a stopgap, not a permanent solution. Keying in the Captain, he asked, “How long are we running this hard?” Captain Li replied over the intercom, “Two minutes to the turn. One minute through the engines.” Seth shook his head. “Can we afford to cycle down during the engine run? We’re overheating in two and a half.” “No,” Li replied, “Make sure we’ve got three minutes.” Seth shook his head as he shut down comms. “Sorry,” he whispered to the engine, “You don’t deserve this.” Then, as he turned on the cabin AC to max, he added, “How about I make you a deal. We get through this, I’m gonna give you a nice upgrade. Okay?” He scrapped down several lockers, building a makeshift tunnel, funneling the AC entirely to the central engine unit. Hopefully, he thought, that’ll be enough additional cooling for thirty seconds of power. Captain Li watched the engine’s temperature cool slightly. As mean as she sometimes had to be towards Seth, she knew he could handle just about anything she asked him to do. She watched the small images of the fighters blip out one by one as Mike was removing them from the equation. She made sure to be nice to Mike, because he needed to know she was on his side. Pressing his image on her screen, she asked, “Mike, are you okay? Turn should be before they reach us, if you need a break.” Mike replied over her comms, “I’ll keep us clear, anyways. Thanks, though.” She watched the tactical display carefully. The engines would take them on an decaying orbit of the planet, and once they’d gotten below cloud cover, they could turn back on their thrusters and land. Everything was set. The ship abruptly veered into the destroyer’s thruster array. “Get ready, Rach,” she ordered over the comms. Just under a minute of weaving later, they were nearly out of the array. “Launch,” she said, pressing the comm unit. As the sensor decoy launched out of the front missile bay, she pressed a single button on her interface and all her ship’s systems turned off except the facade array, a series of low powered projectors that altered the ship both visually and digitally to appear as wrecked junk. She sighed as they drifted out of the engines, just more space junk among the wreckages of other blockade runners. The fighters chased after the decoy, as it zoomed off towards the moon, drawing other blockade ships to fire on it. They had two hours before they broke cloud cover. For the first time since they’d entered the system, Captain Li sat down and relaxed, even if only a bit. It had worked.