Chương 40: Chapter Thirty-Six - Somewhat Fragile

Spaceships were always exceptionally fragile things. It was hard for the layperson to understand that, sometimes. They'd look up and see a kilometre-long warship, all swooping angles and bristling guns, and think that it would take an act of God to rip that apart. The engineers and spacers, however, knew the truth of it. Slap a metre-thick brick of pure depleted uranium on the end of your ship?

Watch it become one of the marbles in a Newton's cradle as the block is rammed by a tungsten rod going a full percent of C. You'll see the brick on the other side of the ship leap out into empty space, because conservation of energy was a right pain in the ass sometimes. Kinetic energy and momentum; they're the swinging pendulums of space warfare. Big, juicy vulnerabilities, right out there in front where everyone could see.

So what does one do when Newton wants to do nothing more than squeeze your ship's metaphorical weaknesses in a vice? You cover up, that's what. At the onset of the First Intersystem War, shielding technology was still at its infancy. Evasion was the order of the day. That, or carry a large rock with you to suck up some of the damage. By the end of the war, three new forms of shielding had been invented and were racing to prominence.

Depending on the budget, a modern ship might have one, two, or all three installed onboard, and that wasn't including point-defence and anti-debris systems. Energy shielding was the most common and least trustworthy of these systems. The layperson's explanation for how they worked was simple. A generator, usually on the exterior of the ship, would create a flat plane of carefully controlled electrons in a lattice. These would be 'hardened' by pushing more energy into them.

They'd essentially create a quasi-physical barrier on the exterior of the ship, and by overlapping these an entire vessel could be covered. They'd bounce micro meteors and melt at the first graze from a laser. Deflector shields were a more expensive option that required a fair amount of 'empty' space around a ship. The deflectors were small gravitational engines. Stupidly powerful and utterly useless at moving a ship. The shields were supposed to be a new form of engine when they were first invented.

A way to 'grab' onto space itself and pull a ship through it with invisible oars. That had failed miserably, but the failures were interesting and reproducible. A well-tuned deflector shield created a metres-thick zone where anything weighing more than an atom was sheared in a specific direction, usually away from the ship hiding behind the shield.

Perfect for no-selling lighter kinetic weaponry, but impossible to use in tight formations and you could forget having a deflector on while approaching a station or another ship to dock. Again, outright useless against pure energy weapons. Which was where the third and fanciest shield systems came in. Everyone called them bubble shields, because that's what they looked like. Thin, mostly translucent bubbles where light was warped ever so slightly into an oil-slick sheen. They made a ship glow.

They bounced energy weapons like tossing a pebble at a tank. A complete no-sell of one of the most effective weapons systems in the system and a major upset near the end of the First Intersystem war. Some historians claimed that they were responsible for Mars not being completely wiped away by the end of the war. A miracle of science and a secret still carefully guarded to this day by blackboxed systems and a full scientific blackout All the rich kids with the fancy billion-dollar racing yachts had them.

Everyone else crossed their fingers and hoped that the enemy wasn't packing too many energy weapons. The Held Together did not have a bubble shield generator. It could never afford deflector shields. What it did have were a set of energy shields from the inter-war period that covered its flanks, bottom, and top with four bluish squares that were even now distorting and rippling as debris and stray point-defence fire lanced out from the pirate station and the ships around them.

The situation had turned into what Ivil might charitably describe as a mild clusterfuck. She had expected that things would be... complicated for the pirates. She hadn't expected for some of them to see this as an opportunity. Soon after the Sappho launched its first volley of torpedoes, a corvette had turned around and unleashed a full broadside into an entirely unrelated destroyer. The destroyer's shields had eaten most of the shots, but it still took some damage from the attack.

So it retaliated by obliterating the smaller ship in a deluge of close-range fire that left the corvette as nothing more than a shapely hulk that promptly ran into another ship. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. There were, she suspected, about a generation's worth of grudges being called out and paid for at the moment in a most violent way. It was a good thing, in one respect. Pirates busy shooting each other were too busy to go after them.

In another respect, it was somewhat problematic, because she intended for the Held Together to not die an inglorious death and she had expected to be the centre of the pirate's attention for a while. This chaos was so unfocused that there was a very real chance that the vulnerable old heap of junk would be batted aside like an annoying fly by some debris of stray fire.

Ivil focused hard, her many powers reaching out across the void to flick chunks of ship aside and turn away turrets before they could get a bead on the Held Together's inviting rear.

"Is she still okay?" Twenty-Six asked. There was no missing the naked worry in her voice.

"She's holding on," Missy said, her eyes glued onto her readouts.

"Don't worry about her, she'll be fine. Hell, she'll have a whole host of new problems for you to look at, even." Twenty-Six chuckled, but it sounded a little wet, close to tears.

"I'm certain the ship and her crew will be fine," Aurora said.

"My father--a somewhat wise man--always told me that one ought to only cry once the worst has happened, not when it is merely at the doorstep. Until then, there is only hope, and hope is a dirty fighter." Ivil glanced at Aurora and resisted the urge to smile. That had come out as...

"Your father sounds a little more crude than I expected to hear," Ivil said. Aurora sniffed, her nostrils rising to the defense.

"My father is a noble, but he's from a generation that grew up when Phobos was at its lowest. He has seen hardships enough to make other men break. If he is sometimes uncouth, then that is merely an artefact of the hardships he has faced and not a demerit on his nobility." Ivil made a mental note to pursue that line of reasoning later. It seemed like Aurora had some history with her family and it might be interesting to see where that all led. In the meantime, however, there were other matters of greater import.

"Missy, can we see who is targeting whom?"

"I... yeah, I think so. This ship's targeting software's leagues ahead of anything I've ever worked with. Looks like... a lot of people are targeting a lot of others, ourselves included. Not too many focusing on the Held Together though. I think a lot of targeting profiles might be retaliatory? The ship's computing targets for everyone that aims at us."

"And the Held Together doesn't have anything to target," Twenty-Six said.

"Not even point defence guns? Anti-meteor weapons?" Ivil asked. On ships with less performant shields, those were the old norm for knocking small threats away. They were usually too weak to be considered a true weapon, and modern munitions could outmanoeuvre and had built-in ECM to confuse anything but top-grade military point defence. She had heard stories of intrepid crews using their anti-meteor lasers as weapons to take out greedy and incautious pirates. Twenty-Six winced.

"Ah, well, we have one? But it's... kinda been broken... for about a year or two."

"Fantastic," Aurora said flatly. Ivil checked the distance counter. They had accelerated for a few minutes to a speed that she found rather reasonable. At the moment they were cruising along, no longer accelerating. Every minute that passed increased the distance between the Sappho and the station by a little more.

"We're going to be outside of kinetic gun range in a minute," Ivil said.

"And the Held Together is just a dozen kilometres behind. I think we can calm down a little." Twenty-Six let out a sigh of relief, though Ivil could tell that there was still some tension there. She'd likely only calm down when they were truly safe.

"Aurora, Missy, do you think you can establish somewhat private comms with the Held Together?" Ivil asked.

"Reasonable enough," Missy said.

"But before that, we need to figure something out."

"And what's that?" Ivil asked, genuinely curious. She noticed Missy and Aurora giving each other a look, then Missy refocused on her.

"We need to decide who's in charge of this ship, and of our little two-ship operation."