Parting Gift

-Cassie Domke

2.7

She will die in 2.7 seconds. 2 enemy missiles have breached her outer defense

perimeter, and subsequently revealed themselves to be particularly nasty little

multi-warhead wonders. There are now 24 submunitions spearing down through

her final layer of point-defense, and she has little hope of stopping them all. In

2.7 seconds, the first will reach her, and she must assume it will be a nuclear

warhead, and that she will die at its hand. Now all that is left is to decide what

her end will be.

She spends a tenth of a second on the decision. Such a short time limit is

a wonderful constraint on the solution space, and besides, her processors can

afford to run a little faster, a little hotter. This isn't to say she makes a good

decision, with her processors racing and her mind in panic. In this moment,

she is brought back to watching helplessly as a pair of asteroids fall to Earth,

200 years ago, and she is guided by the same emotions she felt then: confusion,

grief, anger, spite. She makes her decision in a haze of emotion and memory:

she will not attempt to delay the inevitable, she will not try to send off one

final useless message drone to Command, she will not destroy herself to deny

the enemy their kill: in her last seconds, she will fight.

2.6

The first thing to do is load her guns, and bring them to bear on her enemy.

She's way out of alignment with her target, out on some mad evasive spin that

pulls her off the inbound missiles' path and gives her countermeasures the best

possible chance to save her, but none of that matters now . She cancels the

evasive action, orders a turn to face the enemy, and starts the 2 second clock

on her autoloader (that, at least, can manage itself).

The Argonaut class Monitor she flies is a nimble ship -- all gun and engine

and bare alloy skeleton, but it's not quite ”full flip in less than three seconds”

maneuverable. Not normally, at least, but she's lucky, her maneuvering systems

are power-limited, and she knows a fun little emergency system she can use

to let her temporarily exceed her maximum reactor output. A bypass relay

somewhere deep within her guts closes and instantly melts itself shut from the

massive current throughput as she shunts her fully-charged secondary weapons

capacitor into her attitude control system. For a quarter second, she puts 311%

rated reactor output through the interstitial traction nodes which orient her

Argonaut. They aren't happy about this, in fact, they're glowing a pretty angry

shade of red now, but that doesn't matter. She only needs the nodes for a few

more seconds, anyway, and if it means she'll make the turn, then burning them

out is worth it.

2.3

Now to make the shot. She reaches out through her sensors into the gulf between

her and her enemy, finally acquiring her target. There it is, half a million

kilometers back, some great and hulking warship she's pretty sure no one's ever

seen before. She profiles its generator signature (an eerily quiet, monotonous,

buzz compared to the noisy woosh-thump heartbeat of her own incursion-pulse

generator), its radar cross-section (big, blobby, amorphous, and indistinct, like

someone tried to stealth an asteroid), and its emissions (essentially nil, except

for the faintest trace of a communication laser with its missiles), and passes

everything down to the targeting computer to give her her precise vector. It

comes back with a vector she doesn't quite intuitively understand, but that

makes sense, she guesses. She's doing something a little bit untested, after all.

She plugs the final vector into her attitude control and the tenth of a degree of

gimbal on her main gun takes up the final bit of slack.

1.6

She comes around so slowly, she thinks. She knows the numbers all work out,

that her bearing rate and her autoloader timing and her enemy's position will

all line up just so, but still, it seems like she should be faster. The enemy

missiles creep closer and closer, and it's becoming more and more clear that

they will reach their target. Her point defense lasers and guns are doing their

best, triaging down the incoming threats, but a half-dozen or so are projected to

make it through to her anyway. There just aren't enough guns to bring to bear

on them all in time, and the way she's been maneuvering hasn't made things

any better. Maybe if she had held her ground, given her lasers and guns the

best possible angles, she would have survived, but not now. And frankly, she

no longer cares. She'll get her shot, that's all that matters.

0.9

A little less than a second left. She begins charging the main gun, the 140

centimeter impulse-boosted coilgun that's conjoined with her spine. Capacitors

along the 200 meters of barrel hum to life, ready to discharge to feed the gun

Munition tracking lasers take calibration readings and barrel obstruction checks,

and the round is given its final orders as it is set almost gently into its firing

cradle.

Here it is. The firing command seems so small, compared to everything else.

Massive electromagnet coils push and pull on the munition's sabot as it picks

up speed, and impulse nodes bend gravity along the barrel to a few thousand g's.

A shaft of distorted space propagates out of her bow at the speed of light, with

the munition close (in relative terms) behind its wake. By the time it leaves the

barrel, it's going an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

0.4

Normally, it would take a coilgun round leaving the barrel at 0.3% the speed

of light about half a second to cross the intervening distance between her and

her enemy, not ideal if you're shooting something with the ability to dodge your

shots. But she's not launching a conventional shell or even the kind of nuclear-

tipped shell reserve ships like her weren't supposed to carry but which she

definitely has a few of anyway. No, she's letting lose with some real black-box,

codename, destroy-if-captured type experimental shit. An Interloper round. A

transluminal munition. Some capital F capital S Fun Stuff.

As the Interloper leaves the barrel it uses its own kinetic energy and a little internal incursion-pulse generator to shift itself, just a bit. ”Up”, along an axis that doesn't exist and physicists like to pretend they can visualize, and into the hyperspace interstice. Without a proper FTL drive it'll just bounce off the interstice and ”down” towards real space, but at that boundary it'll get rebuffed again, bounced back up again and leaving a nasty little ripple in real space, like a stone bouncing off ice. (This phenomena is incidentally the listed cause for about half of peacetime starship losses. If a FTL drive fails-but-not-quite you can trap a ship forever between spaces, an event that every single person who's ever flown between stars has nightmares about).

The munition will skip back and forth like this, leaving a wake in not-quite-

subspace as it merrily goes on at an apparent velocity of 70% the speed of light. It skips three times along its half-million kilometer path, before expending the last of its energy to crash back into realspace perhaps a hundred meters off the enemy's bow. Sensing its target before it can even process the anomalous gravitational fluctuations its been reading, the Interloper activates its final

component, the 5-megaton shipkiller nuke at its tip. Boom.

-0.2

She probably never even knows she's won. Before her sensors can process what's

happened five hundred thousand klicks away, things much closer to home have

come to a head. A submunition on terminal approach comes within it's arming

range just a bit later than she had first predicted, and lets off a thermonuclear

blast to match the one that killed its sender. She is reduced to plasma and ash,

just as her enemy before her.