Trial by Fire - eARC by Charles E. Gannon

“Spear” class, the last of the fission-drive buckets. Now officially reserve vessels, they had been shipped to The Pearl for training purposes. What the hell were they doing on the line? In fact, only Perduro’s flagship—the President-class cruiser Jefferson —was a truly modern ship. Goddamnit, where are all the—?
    The cutter shuddered slightly.
    Caine, just finishing with Hazawa, looked over. “Were we hit, or—?”
    Trevor checked the plot. The blue triangle that denoted the tanker Baton Rouge faded away. “No, Caine; that was the farewell song of a nearby ship. From the look of it, hit by another shot from their lead ship. Did Hazawa go for the plan?”
    “Yep, he’s got the distress signals on now. And it looks like he’ll have the preignition toroid repaired in a few minutes. He’s taken the plant offline, so we’re on battery backup and looking pretty dead. Just for good measure, he vented a little coolant from the starboard ignition chamber.”
    “So it looks like we’ve got a radiation leak, too. Nice touch. Hazawa’s idea?”
    Caine was silent, staring at the sensor plots.
    Trevor smiled. Of course it wasn’t Hazawa’s idea.
    Caine leaned closer to the plots. “Where are their drones?”
    “I’ve been wondering the same thing. They should have opened up by now.”
    “Hell, if they’re traveling under their own power, we should have seen some thermal signatures on our own passive sensors, right?”
    Trevor frowned. “Well, if they were our drones, yes. But the invaders could have some stealth capabilities that—” Caine looked like he wanted to say something, but suppressed it. Trevor sighed. “Okay, spill it.”
    “Trevor, do you know of any way to conceal high-temperature exhaust in space?”
    “No.”
    “I don’t either. I can’t even think of how you’d do that. But instead, what they could have done was—” And then Caine was on his feet. “The ships near us. Send them a warning. They’re going to get hit point blank—in minutes, maybe seconds.”
    “What? How the—?”
    “If the invaders’ technology is both better and more compact, they’ve got more uncommitted hull volume to play with.”
    “So?”
    “So, they could build in big mass drivers to launch their drones. So if they shifted in and the drones were launched immediately, we wouldn’t see them because they’re just inert metal traveling towards us at god-knows-how-many gees. But when they get close enough—”
    Trevor completed the sentence as he put his hand on the open comms. “They go active at point blank range, firing and evading while they’re in among us. And then they continue right on through us to serve as the advance strike force against the Pearl. Where they’ll cause just enough havoc to further delay any evacuation.” Trevor’s finger was poised above the “send” relays, ready to broadcast in the clear—but he took his hand back. Slowly. And felt like a murderer as he did it.
    “Trevor, what are you—?”
    “You said it yourself, Caine. We’ve got to follow orders. We’ve got to get out of here and report. If those drones are close by, and if we go active—if we even juice up the tight beam laser relays—we’re likely to be vaporized before we can send.”
    And then it didn’t matter. Without having to listen to Hazawa’s nervous sitreps, it became quite evident that their theory was horribly correct. The nearby ships started taking crippling damage from drones that popped up on their sensors at only two and three thousand kilometers range, making targeted strikes on engineering sections, missile bays, sensor arrays. Secondary explosions of munitions and fuel were reported on every hull.
    Trevor had only heard one thing like it before: when he had been coordinating the ROV oversight for a combined Spetznaz-SEAL operation that ran into an ambush in Uzbekistan. The casualties came so thick and fast that there was no time to think, to reconfigure the mission, to plan an