Starship Engineer - 173 - Escape with a Cost (Patreon)

Chapter 173 Escape with a Cost

The Brotherhood had us trapped unless we could micro-jump away.  The Sunheart met the same fate as us.  A battleship and one of the carriers appeared in their escape vector.  The Brotherhood battleships initiated subspace disruption again before Fateweaver could flee into subspace.  There was good news for my Fateweaver as we could only be targeted by a single battleship; the one blocking our path was the only one in weapons range.  The Sunheart was not as fortunate as the carrier sent dozens of fighters after it, quickly swarming it.

Our Fateweavers had excellent anti-missile and anti-fighter defensive weapons, so the Sunheart should last for some time.  Still, they had a limited crew, and everything was currently heavily automated.  The Brotherhood fighters were also heavily shielded and had improved hulls from our old data on them.  They were hard to swat down as I watched the battle unfold. My ship was rolling to keep fresh shields toward our attacker. Although the battleship had incredible range, our shields were excellent, and we would be fine.

I asked the bridge crew why didn’t they send more battleships to corner us and catch us in the crossfire.  It seemed they had the advantage since they knew when they would shut down the subspace disruption.  A few ideas were thrown out from the bridge.  The first idea was that only a few ships were ready to micro-jump to cut us off, as maintenance for subspace drives was extensive, and short jumps put just as much wear and tear as long jumps.

The second was whatever powered their subspace disruption interfered with them being able to jump.  The latter theory was partially confirmed as the two battleships that had intercepted us were not part of the initial sub-space disruption and had only powered it after cutting us off.

Shara at the sensor station confirmed that two battleships were currently not involved with generating the subspace disturbance, so we theorized they were preparing to cut us off again.  I ordered the Sunheart to launch their black widow bots at one battleship, and I would target the other with my own black widow bots using the delivery missiles.  My idea was immediately called off as Dante had been monitoring the enemy shields.  The shielding on the battleships was too strong to penetrate, and we could not use the skip-jump method as subspace had been locked down.  We would just be wasting the bots.

He was frantic at his station and thought the carriers might be susceptible to the spider bot missiles. He was not completely sure as the subspace disruption obscured his readings. I ordered the Sunheart to try it since the carrier was close to them. Minutes passed as we waited, and with marginal success, two of five missiles reached the ship, and nine active bots were cutting into the hull, programmed to do as much damage as possible. If they survived long enough, they might be able to destroy the ship from the inside.

The Sunheart was not in good shape; reports being fed to my station looked like she was only going to last minutes as cascading failures were now happening in her shield emitters. Captain Hercule was already sending crew and Marines to the shuttles in an attempt to save as many lives as possible. The remaining Slipstream fighters, already low on fuel, were racing to intercept and try and cover the fleeing shuttles when they launched.

We had another problem as the screening ships for their fleet, at least the remaining functional ones, were spreading out in a cloud around us.  Probably to prevent the shuttles from getting too far away. There were frigates designed for missile defense and corvettes for enhancing sensor range, and supply freighters were all burning hard.  The weapons officer noted the Sunheart was starting to take hits to its hull, its shield now missing in zones or too thin to stop energy weapons. The hull plating was holding, but breaches were flashing on my projected image of the ship. We were going to lose a second Fateweaver and a more valuable crew.  They fought valiantly and had destroyed a third of the fighters harassing them, but were now at their mercy.

This was my fault for not knowing what the Brotherhood was newly capable of.  I should have taken risks and sent agents deep into the core worlds like Edmund had wanted.  Now, after the initial victory, the table was slowly being turned.  The Brotherhood had either gotten pieces of our technology or observed it enough and developed something similar in the last sixteen years.

Communications said an unusual message just came from one of the Slipstream pilots.  It was sent to my terminal, and I understood immediately.  The fighter spun and engaged full thrust.  It was doing a suicide run on the battleship. The battleship harassing the Sunheart from range.  The fighter was almost out of fuel and ordinance.  If it could not jump, it would be captured.  So it decided on a kamikaze run.

I did not think it would do any better than our delivery missiles for the black widow bots.  But it was not just the one Slipstream fighter making a run on the battleship.  All remaining six heavy fighters were joining him.  One of the bridge officers thought it might work; two or three impacts on the shields should weaken it enough to get the rest through.

As the fighters shattered on the shields of the Brotherhood battleship, the Sunheart broke apart and then exploded as the primary reactor breached containment.  As if in angry response, the fifth Slipstream fighter penetrated the weakened shield, penetrated deep into the hull of the Brotherhood battleship, and exploded.  The sixth and last fighter followed the same path and got deeper penetration before exploding.  The battleship was crippled and shutting down systems, according to our sensors.  The effort had been too late to save the Sunheart.

The carrier exploded five minutes later, the black widow bots reaching and destroying the primary power core of the ship.  Space suddenly fell silent as the Brotherhood digested their losses.  The Fateweaver was at top speed, heading away, but we were expecting another Battleship to jump in our path.  We were monitoring the subspace interference emanating from the formation of battleships.  If it stopped, then we would be ready to micro-jump back to the Bradbury system.

A comm request came from one of the battleships of the Brotherhood.  I had no reason not to take it at this point.  When the image came, I could not make any sense of it.  A middle-aged man in a black uniform studied me.  Behind him was Lazarus.  He raised his hands and waved.  His hands were handcuffed, so I assumed he was a prisoner, but the smug grin on his face was unbearable.

My attention was drawn to the man in the uniform. He introduced himself as Admiral Caesar Kincade of the Brotherhood.  He made no pretenses of being friendly and was angry about losing so much of his forces to our surprise assault.  He demanded I surrender my ship and the entire Bradbury system.

We would have defeated his fleet easily if we had had all our Fateweavers available.  I told him that I was prepared to accept his surrender instead.  He had twelve battleships, three carriers, and ten heavy cruisers.  His support fleet was in shambles, but he still commanded force capable of spreading out in the Bradbury system, and making it impossible to defend with our resources.

Not taking my eyes off of him, I typed in a command for Zoe, and we veered toward a damaged and struggling corvette—one hundred Brotherhood crew on board.  We tossed threats back and forth, his sounding better to my ears but me not admitting it.  The corvette, seeing us bearing down, tried to escape.  We unloaded with our grazes, doing a passing run.  The corvette lasted less than a minute before imploding and then exploding.  I had us swing for a transport next—one of the large ones.

Admiral Kincade was getting angry.  He had dispersed his fleet because of the armageddon missiles and to intercept fleeing shuttles. Now, I was moving to pick them off one by one.  If this was a true Brotherhood fleet, then every crew member was highly trained and irreplaceable.  We had already killed thousands in the last eight hours.

We had three shuttles in space, currently being ignored as the battleship and carrier that had pursued the Sunheart were both destroyed. The shuttles had short-range subspace drives, so they were keyed to jump. Two enemy corvettes were closing in on them, and I ordered three Leopard ships to prepare to jump to their aid.

The sooner we escaped combat range, the sooner they may drop their subspace disruption to leap-frog another battleship in front of us.  Admiral Kincade called all his ships back into a higher formation after we destroyed the second transport.  He wanted to negotiate from a position of power, so the two corvettes were racing to capture the Sunheart’s shuttles.  We destroyed two more supply ships and another corvette before running out of targets.

The Leopard spy ships jumped in unison together and opened fire on the surprised corvette closest to the shuttles. The combined fire of three Leopard ships at close range was not a clear-cut victory. I had not put heavy weapons on the spy ships; only their surprise appearance balanced the battle. The second corvette veered away and was heading back.

I guessed many of Admiral Kincade’s ships were not ready to jump to subspace or simply needed to repair damage from the debris cloud created by the armageddon missiles.  But with him seeing the shuttles likely to escape and now three new enemy corvettes he acted.

The subspace disruption ended, and even before the Brotherhood Battleships jumped, the shuttles micro-jumped, and the Fateweaver did as well. The Leopard ships went full stealth and scattered. It would take time to cycle their subspace drives again. I did not envy the engineers on board. The fourth Leopard had remained at a distance to monitor the Brotherhood fleet.

The battleships never jumped to try and cut us off. Were they letting us go, then? As reports came in, they were licking their wounds. Their fleet came together to salvage, repair, transfer crews, and SAR. They never even attempted to find the three stealthed Leopard ships. I watched and read reports in the Bradbury system as I waited to see what Admiral Kincade would do. And how did Lazarus get on his ship? He should have long been executed along with Rae’Ver by the Human Federation. Was Rae’Ver free and running the Admiral like a puppet?

There were too many questions I did not know the answers. Every hour, I was reprioritizing production queues. We had no qualified Slipstream pilots and just one Fateweaver-class cruiser. The loss of so many men and women was gnawing at me as I had been the one in charge. Could the engagement have gone better for us? Was it worth inflicting as much damage as possible and losing two of our strategic cruisers? What did the enemy learn of our capabilities? Should I move my family to another system? I ordered a crew to the Void Phoenix and had it dock with the station over the planet.

If the Brotherhood moved into Bradbury and they were aware of subspace phasing, then we stood no chance. I received a relay message through gravimetric sensors. Captain Kenji was on his way back—seven days, four hours.

Could we hold out that long?