It was their first space battle together, in a new ship under ambush. They piled into the hallway that ran past the briefing room from the bridge to the living space, rushing to their roles.
“Saqr, Siladan, get to the bridge!” Al Hamra ordered them, and as the rest of the crew rushed to the airlocks to don their exo-suits the pilot and the archaeologist turned right and headed for the bridge. “Saqr, I want evasive action immediately, and Siladan, get counter-measures going for that torpedo. I’ll bring your suits.” He followed the rest of his team into the airlock area, yelling instructions as he went. “Delecta, get to the medbay and start prepping for injuries, insh’Ayquna there’ll be none! Olivia and Lavim, down to the engineering bays and ready for damage control. Adam, you’re on weapons. Don’t use the torpedos unless you have to, they’re expensive.” He shrugged into an exo-suit, not bothering to fasten it properly, and grabbed another from the rack, which he threw to Adam. Adam, trained in zero-g fighting and ship-to-ship combat, was already sealed into his own suit. He caught the gear Al Hamra threw him and dashed back towards the bridge, followed by Al Hamra carrying another suit. Behind them, crew-members were grunting acknowledgement of their orders, though they struggled to pull on their suits much more slowly than the soldier. “Hurry!” Al Hamra yelled as he disappeared down the hallway to the bridge.
Like everything else on the Phoenix of Hamura, the bridge was luxurious and expansive. A huge viewing screen swept across the bow end of the room, flanked by large monitors suspended from the ceiling. Tasteful potted plant arrangements lined the walls each side of the screen, so that the sensor operator’s operations chamber looked like a small, egg-shaped temple in a jungle rather than an installation on a starship. On the opposite side of the bridge from the sensor operations chamber was the gunner’s pod, which Adam was already climbing into. It was also surrounded by potted plants, though Adam had painted a crude silver skull on the inward face of the pod to balance their elegance. Each of the pods was a semi-enclosed space, capable of providing temporary blast- and decompression-protection and also designed for high-g manoeuvres should the ship’s graviton projectors fail. Behind each of those pods was a second spare chamber, not configured for any particular crew member but available for use if the primary pod was somehow damaged. Between those two pods, embedded in the middle of the floor, were the interconnected chambers for pilot and captain, which had extra controls and systems, as well as additional protective measures. These two pods were on the raised rear half of the bridge closest to the door, giving them a view over the bridge itself as well as the main viewscreen. Two steps separated the raised half of the bridge from the lower forward half, in the open centre of which were several ordinary control panels with standard chairs behind them, designed for managing salvage and repair operations and not intended to be used in combat. It was a slick, modern installation, and classically representative of the Harima shipyards from whence the Phoenix had originated.
As Al Hamra dashed into the bridge and began preparing his cabin the viewscreen at the front of the bridge split into four separate displays. On the top left was the star map with the inrushing torpedo, and now an additional red star further back towards the grey masses of the asteroids, representing the Avernum’s Fall. Next to it the top right panel gave a visual display from the bow of their spaceship, showing a perfectly peaceful field of stars. Most of the stars were vaguely blurred, as the distant asteroid belt drifted across their field of view. The bottom left panel showed a schematic of the Phoenix of Hamura, ready to report damage, and the right panel lit up in blue and red with ammunition, heat and electronic signature meters. They were ready for battle.
Once he was in his pod Al Hamra looked across through the connecting chamber to Saqr, who was strapped in and ready to go. He pushed her suit through with a nod, she gave him a thumbs up and left the suit in the connecting space. If the bridge suffered a direct hit now she would have at best a minute to get the suit on before her pod’s protective systems failed, but she seemed unconcerned. As his own pod’s front panels lit up with the same displays as the main viewscreen he watched the visual display suddenly spin and change and a series of brilliant explosions flowered in the dark and disappeared under the rapidly-changing perspective. Saqr’s evasive manoeuvres and Siladan’s counter-measures unfolding in the cold dark of space. The red dot of the missile sped past them and Siladan whooped with excitement.
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“Can I fire, captain?” Adam asked over the intercom. “I have the range.”
As he spoke a second red star appeared in the starmap, moving parallel to the first and a little behind it. Al Hamra gave Adam the permission he sought and then asked Siladan, “Is that a second ship?”
“Aye captain,” Siladan confirmed, “I’m scanning it now.” A moment later the visual display shifted to six panels, the top four the same and the bottom two showing outlines of two separate ships, small fighters no more than twenty metres long. “Avernum’s Fall is a torpedo boat out of Chelebs shipyard,” Siladan told him. “I don’t have a name for the second but it looks like it’s armed with a heavy cannon.”
The battle unfolded in strange disjunction, the graviton projectors of their ship preventing them from feeling the wild loops and turns that Saqr threw their slower, less agile ship into while Adam exchanged cannon fire with the two fighters as they closed range. In the frozen darkness at the edge of the asteroid belt, flying through clouds of dust and ice, lines of hyper-velocity metal shards glittered like dying stars, their torpedo counter-measures spread like squid ink in a starry sea, and torpedos streaked past their ship like vengeful demons. Finally they closed on the torpedo ship and rammed it, tearing it apart so thoroughly that the pilot’s ejector pod exploded in its mount, and the ship tumbled away in shattered chunks. The second ship would not relent and closed for the kill, damaging their weapon systems and tearing holes in their reactor housing, before Adam managed to score a lucky hit that blew away its engines and sent it spiralling off into the darkness. The pilot ejected and disappeared amongst the detritus of the belt, leaving their ship limping and bleeding oxygen.
The Firebirds’ cheers sounded across the intercom and in the bridge as the second ship disappeared into the depths of the belt. Olivia reported in to Al Hamra, informing them all that the reactor was damaged but not critical, and the hull leaking across the port side. “Cargo hold is intact captain, no damage to the cargo.” Everyone else sounded off one by one, confirming no injuries, and Saqr and Siladan crawled out of their pods to drag on their exo-suits. The Phoenix of Hamura slowed rapidly as cells in the reactor powered down, leaving it limping along on reduced power.
“We’re going to need to stop for repairs,” Olivia reported. “The reactor can manage life support but we’ll take weeks to reach our destination on this power level.”
“Do we have the materials?” Al Hamra asked her, flicking the damage report screen to full size on the forward viewscreen. Lines of amber and red warnings blinked along the port side of the ship, and when he zoomed in multiple red warnings flashed in the aft lower decks. “Are you safe down there?”
“No problem Captain,” the colonist replied, sounding surprisingly cheerful for a woman sitting on the edge of a damaged fusion reactor. “No significant radiation leakage, and it looks like nothing penetrated the core. If Saqr can get us into the asteroid belt where we have sensor screening we can power down to avoid detection and me and Lavim can get it fixed in a day.”
“A day sounds good. Will it cost us?”
“Not a lot captain. Well within the profits of this mission. Wish we could have caught one of those fighters though.”
The Phoenix of Hamura had its own fighter, a neat little gunship called the Urgent Intercession, which was docked in one of the armoured yacht’s two hangars, but they did not have a second pilot who could fly it effectively. Had they been able to launch that fighter they probably would have escaped the battle unscathed, though not without risk. They had space for a second fighter of the same size in that hangar, or in the other hangar with their atmospheric shuttle Kashmir.
“All in good time, Olivia,” Al Hamra replied. “We’ll have all the armaments we need eventually. We need more pilots first!” He turned to Saqr and gave her the instructions Olivia had suggested. “Get us under cover in the asteroids, in case there are more pirates. We’ll run on life support only with minimal signature until Olivia can fix the reactor and the hull, then we’ll head on to Rockhome 3. We should only be a day late.”
He set the intercom to open broadcast, and congratulated everyone. “Our first space battle, rafiki. We’ve baptised the Phoenix!”
