Defeating the Aatarr

ADVENTURER: T-PLUS 1 HOUR
  Eleven hours later, the Adventurer caught up to the Dragon. Ty maneuvered the Adventurer to close formation with the fighter.
  “Dragon, Command,” Ty called.
  There was no answer.
  Ty repeated the call. “Dragon, Command, Vince?”
  “Dragon,” Vince finally answered. Ty tried to bring up telemetry from the fighter but there was no signal.
  “SitRep Vince.”
  “Ty? Took you guys long enough to get here. My sitrep is that I’m not good my friend. Got hit by a couple of railgun frags. Left shoulder is shot up. Got my suit patched though, so it’s not leaking, but I still am. Canopy and most of instrument cluster is shot away. Drive module took a hit. Main data leads and power busses are shot away, but the ship has switched to alternates. I’ve got engines and life support. Power cell is at seventy percent. I have a Plasma-Arc hung on the rail. It won’t launch.”
  “Yeah, we decided to go for a stroll around the neighborhood while Anderson tried to put some of our now, not so shiny, ship back together. Looks like your telemetry lines are down too. We’re not getting anything from you.”
  “Nah, works fine. I cannibalized the telemetry lines to restore data connection to the drive module. It’s my turn now, Command. How’s the ship? She looks pretty beat up from out here.”
  Ty thought for a second before answering. “We’re going to be delayed a bit getting the ship ready for picket duty at Beta Hydri.”
  “A bit, eh?”
  “The fantail bay is shot up pretty bad. We’re out of ammo ourselves. Our power system’s been hammered pretty hard too. Plus, our high-link antennas are gone. No way to phone this one in any more.”
  “Can we send through Mars Station?”
  “Not a chance, that Aatarr vaporized it while we were getting back here. Two hundred civilian scientists and families lived there, all are dead.”
  He could see the Alliance coming after him and his ship because of what he’d done to them today, but attacking a militarily insignificant science station made no sense. As much as anything, he wanted to teach the commander of the Aatarr a lesson just for that.
  “You know, for your first day on the job as captain you sure trashed your shiny new ship,”
  Ty chuckled. He could hear Vince give a painful chuckle too.
  “Yeah, a pukin’ noob for sure.”
  “Got that right. So what’s next boss?”
  Ty shook his head. He looked over the ship status display. There were hardly any green lights showing and a lot of red and yellow lights. His map of the ship showed the aft third of the ship was still depressurized due to battle damage.
  “We gotta get that Aatarr. But for the life of me, I don’t know what with, spit maybe?” Ty glanced at the mission clock over the display. The convoy ships were half-way through their deceleration maneuvers now. That’s where he would have gone instead of blasting a science station to plasma. There was a long moment of silence between them.
  “I got another hair brained idea, Ty.”
  “Sure, Vince, what?”
  “Throw a rock at it, just like we did with the rail gun slugs on the first Aatrixx.”
  “I’m out of slugs, Vince. Plus you can see the bay better than me. We can’t hold anything in there anymore.”
  “Wrong. I got me a twenty ton boulder right now.”
  Ty scrunched his face in concentration as he digested Vince’s words. The realization and import of his words registered. He shook his head no.
  “Not gonna happen, Vince. There has to be another way. I gotta get you home, too.”
  “I’m not as good as you are at the tactics thing, but I can tell that all you have in your hand is a pair and the house is holding a straight flush. I’m giving you an ace in the hole, Ty, so you can get everyone else home.”
  Ty glanced around the engineering room. Aside from the noises of the generator and machinery, all conversations had stopped. Everyone was making a point to not look at him, but he knew they were all listening. Ty nodded to himself and then he shook his head.
  Ty’s next words tore at him more than when he turned down the promotion, “Ok, you win this one, Vince.”
  “I still get the patent, Ok?”
  Ty chuckled and shook his head at the comment. “I’ll make sure your wife and kids get all the money.”
  “Thanks, Ty. You do that. Now, how do we do this?”
  Ty started to lay out the attack he had in mind. They waited until the Aatarr was on approach to Jupiter and about ready to decelerate into orbit around the planet.
  Vince flew the Dragon into the shattered bay and then the Ops team chained the fighter to the wrecked cradle. Next the Adventurer jumped across the solar system to make the course changes she needed to make iy far enough from the Aatarr so that when she jumped back, they wouldn’t know until she jumped, in which direction she’d be coming from.
  Once they made the jump, the crew in the bay removed the chains and pushed the fighter out by hand. Once clear of the bay, Vince lined up the Dragon behind the Adventurer and applied maximum power to his drive. The Adventurer, with its drive slaved to the Dragon kept pace in front of him. With nothing to serve as a point of reference, the two ships appeared to be motionless in space. The only indicator he had of anything changing was the steady drop in available power as the drive pushed the ship forward. He kept his attention focused on the mangled bay in front of him. He saw several suited figures in the bay. He couldn’t tell who they were, but he suspected they were his ops crew. One of them held up his hand to his helmet and then nodded. He extended the hand and blinked the flashlight at him. Two white flashes. It was the signal to go. In unison all of the suited figures in the bay stood at attention and saluted. They held it until Vance waved with his right hand. It was the best he could do. They then stood at attention as the Adventurer rotated around so it was moving backwards towards the Aatarr.
  It wasn’t long now. Memories of being with his family flooded his mind. Especially moments when he was with his wife. He could see flashes of light silhouette the Adventurer. She was taking laser fire from the Aatarr. Then pieces of debris came flying up over the ship and past him. He forced the thoughts out of his mind and focused on peering forward. He grasped the flight control grip and waited.
  The Adventurer’s thrusters fired white hot as they shoved her up and to his left. Directly ahead of him was a white dot. The Adventurer disappeared. Time slowed down for him. The distance indicator which till now had been counting down so fast he could barely keep track of the thousand digits, now seemed to be running slow enough that he could keep track of the tens. The ship soon turned to a speck and then took its familiar flattened elliptical shape. It began to swell quickly in size. He could see he was headed for the starboard side of the ship and that he was going to hit forward of where he wanted. He fired the starboard thrusters to push his trajectory to the left and at the flaring drive nozzles of the main engines.
  Vince and the Dragon fighter flew into the drive plume of the engine. Both man and machine were vaporized instantly and lost nearly a third of their velocity before striking the ship between its two primary nozzles. The impact velocity was still in the hundreds of miles per second. The massive ship shuddered and pitched over from the impact. Chunks of its hull the size of a large house flew away from the impact point. Secondary explosions blew the drive bells apart and sideways from the stricken ship. They pirouetted slowly away as debris scattered in a cloud around it. After a couple of minutes, thrusters began firing to bring the tumbling under control.
  In its final act before plunging into Jupiter, the Aatarr fired at the convoy vessels that were now in the middle of their turn around the planet. She scored direct hits on two freighters which converted them into expanding balls of plasma. Then she plunged into the planet’s atmosphere. From the convoy’s vantage point, the ship flared into a fiery point of light that burned steady for an instant, sputtered and then blossomed into a titanic explosion. A plume of gas and plasma, many times the size of the Earth was ejected from the planet only to fall back, most of it hours later.
  On board the Adventurer, they had little time to celebrate. Using the wrecked fantail bay as a shield of sorts had worked in limiting damage from laser shots to just the aft section of the ship, but the Adventurer had taken a pounding by the Aatarr’s lasers. While the Aatarr plunged into Jupiter, the Adventurer’s surviving crew worked feverishly to repairing internal bulkheads, gathering up injured and killed crewmen and repairing damaged systems.
  For a while Ty thought it was touch and go. Most of the time, he could only stand by and watch as McPherson and Williams directed the repair and damage control teams.
  After a couple of hours of intense work, McPherson motioned to Ty to join him at his engineering panel.
  “Just wanted to let you know where we’re at, sir. I think we got a handle on things now.”
  “Sure.”
  “Our biggest issue is power, both busses are either damaged or destroyed. Power cell three is a goner, two is severely damaged, and one is damaged but less so. The generator is running out of control and without the busses, of no help to us,” he said.
  “Do we have enough power to make the jump?” asked Ty.
  The man gazed at the power cell status and the navigation display before answering.
  “That’s what I was getting to, sir. We’ve got enough juice in the power cells to line the ship up for a jump, if we turn around Jupiter, but once we do, we don’t have any to make the jump.”
  “What about using power from the containment batteries?”
  “That’s a problem, sir, that means hot-wiring the batteries into the ship’s power grid which is risky enough even when the ship is in good shape. Additionally, once connected, the internal shorts in the power cells will drain power from the batteries too.”
  An alert sounded. “Alert: Alliance transition event detected.”
  Ty started repeating along with it, “At radial two seven seven, point seven AU from solar center. Ship detected…” he paused while the controller concluded with the word, “Aatarr”.
  Ty was ready to scream in frustration until someone in the engineering room spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Stupid A-tards! They aint got sense enough to know when to quit, Adventurer owns this system!”
  Several others joined in the chorus of jeers. When they died down, Ty looked at McPherson then glanced down at Anderson. She was watching him. She gave a thumbs up.
  I am left with just spit now, Ty thought. He said out loud, “Ok guys, we ran the house today and they know it. I’m done playing with these clowns for now. Let’s concentrate on getting to Beta Hydri. Open bar and pizza on me at ‘Tillies after we pull in to the station.”
  More jeers and catcalls erupted.
  Ty felt better as turned back to McPherson. “Is there enough power in them to make the jump?” he asked.
  “Yes, but we’ll severely reduce the time they can power the containment fields around the generator core. You know what happens when they fail.”
  Ty nodded. “Anything else?” he asked.
  “Like that’s not enough right?”
  Both gave dry chuckles.
  “Besides power, our stabilization system is shot. We don’t have enough thrusters left to align the ship. All we have are the gyros and they require power to run.”
  “We’re going to need them until we jump.”
  McPherson nodded, then said, “I get that, sir. That’s what I was going to suggest. It means we’ll start tumbling once we jump.”
  “All right, connect the batteries to the power grid. Let me know when you’re done. Let’s plan on disconnecting the batteries after we jump. I’m going to program in our escape course.”
  The man nodded and walked back to his station, giving instructions to his team while Ty started working on a departure trajectory. As he did, he kept an eye on the sensor data about the Aatarr. It was burning for an approach to Jupiter. There was no doubt in his mind now as to who they were after.
  After a few minutes McPherson walked over to him. He had a marker in his hand. He called up a display that showed two bar charts. He then drew a line through the shorter one on the left.
  “This line, sir, represents minimum containment threshold. This chart,” he pointed at the power level indicator, “shows how much power we have until we fix the busses, this is all there is. When this drops below that,” he pointed at the line, “ we’ll have containment failure.” He made a small exploding gesture with his hands as he did. “This other bar chart on the right, shows how much power we’re pulling out of the containment batteries. The shorter it is the better. You’ve got the power now. I’m taking a team with me to try and repair one of the main busses. I’m leaving Cambridge here,” he pointed at a young crewman behind him. Cambridge turned and nodded then turned back to watch the panel. McPherson continued, ”to run the panel while we’re below working on the busses.” With that he walked back to his post.
  Ty walked back to his station and keyed in the program and hit the commit button. Yet again, the Adventurer headed for Jupiter. Once the drive finished, the power indicator was one-fourth of the way down. Now they waited as the ship took an hour to swing over the North pole of Jupiter and down the far side of it from the sun towards Beta Hydri.
  He slumped to the deck and sat at the base of the display, with his back towards the display, knees up and feet on the floor. He thought about the events of the past two days. He thought of Vince and what he’d tell his wife and children. He thought of the now two dozen people he’d have to tell about the death of a loved one. He thought of what they’d learned about the Alliance and their access to critical Republic technology. The next thing he knew, McPherson was tapping him gently on the shoulder with a gloved hand.
  “Skipper, were in the turn. The controller just started squawking something about that Aatarr out there.”
  Ty woke fully at that. He muttered a thanks and turned to the display. This second Aatarr was faster than the first one, but it was staying in the planetary plane and burning hard to get to Jupiter before the Adventurer jumped. His ship would finish turning, but not jump before the Aatarr arrived at Jupiter.
  “Go save your Aatrix. It has survivors. The Frescos’ probably have survivors too. Leave us alone,” he said to no one in particular.
  Time passed. The countdown timer to start the acceleration to jump speed hit zero. The drive thrummed again. It took longer to accelerate because he’d set it at a lower power setting to use as little battery as possible. The drive quit after ten minutes of running. The level of power available on the indicator now rested just above the line McPherson had made on the display. Now they just had to wait for Jupiter to finish pulling their trajectory into the jump trajectory for Beta Hydri.