“Status!”
“Fighters, ETA: ten minutes.” Harrison barked back.
“Sublight engines: 87%” Anderton added. “Ready for full burn on your mark.”
Captain Lazar hunched sideways into his chair, peered out into the endless night, the swarm of silver and the hulls of the two warships as they seethed together among the stars. There were pilots out there, dozens of them, men and women who flew fearlessly into the maw of death every time he gave the order, every time he called on them to meet the enemy head on, to keep the Blueskins at bay, to hold them just that much further from the hull of the Wu Ang Hok.
“Keep a close eye on that mine, Harrison. I want regular reports.” Lazar tore his eyes away from the screen, pushed himself up. “Anderton, ease us off, real slow. Put our least damaged side toward them.” He paused, “Once the fighters are aboard, I want us as deep into the asteroid field Harrison spotted as you can take us.”
“Roger that.”
“Any progress with the tether teams?”
“Negative.” Baker responded, mentally flicking through channels, sifting through data, her eyes moving as if reading– impossibly fast. “Crewman Robson reports that the plating is still too thick for his teams to punch through and anchor the mine to the ship. He says it’s a good plan, that it should hold, but that he is still going to need at least another hour to core lines out far enough to reach the mine and lock everything down secure enough be able to bend space with it where it is.”
“Tell him he’s got ten minutes.” Lazar shot back, ignoring the way Baker’s face paled, almost dropped. He made a quick, definitive gesture. “If he can’t get it by then, we’ll have no choice but to go headfirst into Harrison’s asteroid field, and that’s going to make everybody’s day a lot more difficult– especially his.”
“Roger... sir.” Baker nodded, swallowed, immediately turning back to lose herself in the mind-visible stirrings of her console again. Lazar’s eyes flicked back to the screen, snared themselves on the twin cruisers again, the twin omens of chrome death that haunted the endless depths, each moment growing closer, more ominous. For the space of a slow-drawn breath he stood there, a monolith on the operations deck of the Wallace class Warship that was his responsibility, his charge, his command. All around him, the fingers of officers worked busy and frantic in looms of projected light, fragments of spoken sentences stirred, moved, filled the air with their high points and intricacies– and despite it all, despite the order, the polish, the hardness he’d forced across his face or the steel he’d put into his voice, Lazar felt the fear rising up from within him, seizing his heart, icy fingers crawling in lines of frost that threaded through and froze his throat. Swallowing against it, he did the only thing he could do, the only thing that seemed right, felt right.
“Kerrigan.” He said, turning and crossing the distance between himself and the tactical officer’s station in a clear, steady stride. Eyes met, gazes locked in solid, immovable stares. The words came simple, precise. “What can you give me?”
“Not much.” Came Kerrigan’s flat response, steely eyes never wavering. “The Coralate hasn’t left us much to work with.”
“Be resourceful.” Lazar suggested. “Surprise me. Sky’s the limit.”
“Well, sir...” Kerrigan sat up slowly, straightening his back as he considered his words. “Our ship to ship weaponry is at a pretty solid twenty-nine percent, way into the red zone.” He paused again, eyes glancing away from the Captain’s to flick across the console, fingers interacting with spare commands, sets of loose optical data. “And we’re at about a twenty-five percent coverage radius, with most of that on the port side– our least damaged side.” He shrugged. “If we move out of range, we’ll only have the fighters to deal with, but that won’t help much once we’re in the field. What we need is a solid defense so we can cover our ass while we withdraw.”
“I’m open to suggestions.” Came Lazar’s immediate response.
“Yeah...” Kerrigan’s fingers went to work again, darted and moved, hunted through more isometric data for the solution that had risen suddenly to tantalize the edges of his mind. Lips moved silently to unspoken words, parted in silent pauses. “I think we still can still pull it off,” Kerrigan’s eyes hung in the data for a moment longer, lost focus, then pulled themselves out to meet the Captain’s gaze again “It’s going to be difficult with so much damage to the ship, but I think I can create a sort of directed energy shield around the Hok that should cut the effect of the Coralate ship-to-ship weapons significantly and magnetically repel anything with a high conductive ore content in the asteroid field.”
“Including our rigs?”
“Well yes, unfortunately.” Kerrigan gestured futilely. “And the interference of having the emitters create a high-energy spread that close to the hull will effectively silence all comm chatter coming in or out of the ship, but as long as we send our QE distress burst and get all our pilots onboard before we turn it on, we should be fine.”
Lazar nodded once, firmly. “What do you need, and how long?”
“A, uh...” Kerrigan gestured loosely toward the forward section of Operations. “I can control the spread and scatter from here, so it’ll take just a few confirmations, a bypass command and thirty percent of our sensor data throughput from Harrison’s console, about ten percent of our drive output from Anderton’s, and a whole lot of praying from the rest of us that this whole mess doesn’t overload the handful of emplacements we have left and burn out the rest of our ship to ship emitters.”
“Effectively leaving us helpless.”
“Right.” Kerrigan looked away and swallowed, his face paling as his eyes met the Captain’s again. “Shouldn’t take more than about five, maybe ten minutes.”
Lazar nodded again. “Have you ever done this before?”
“Once, actually.” Kerrigan gestured loosely. “Well, it was in a simulator,” A weak smile cracked through his features, the fear threaded like steel wire into his expression. “Me and a couple of my Earthside academy buddies were playing around with the systems on a Wallace Class and–”
“Do it.” Lazar ordered, then turned back to his other officers. “Harrison, Anderton, give him everything he needs. Make sure we’re ready to go as soon as the last pilot is onboard.” He glanced at Baker. “Send out a QE burst to both the Von and Command, let them know exactly what our situation is.” The comm officer nodded once, her eyes lit with worry.
“I like the shield idea, but lets hope we don’t have to use it.” Lazar glanced back at Kerrigan, caught the serious eye with which he was hunting through data, bypassing systems, running calculations. “With a little luck, Robson will have that mine anchored by the time our rigs are aboard. I’d rather split than hang around waiting for the blueskins to tear us apart, but I’m not going to leave that mine behind or risk leaving it to come loose when we’re bending space.”
