Free Serengeti by J.B. Rockwell Page A

ahead.
    More energy signatures appeared—weapons firing up all across the DSR fleet as the Meridian Alliance closed in. They’d halved the distance to Trinidad by now, and from the looks of things, the DSR seemed to be on to what Brutus had planned. Ships’ engines fired, DSR vessels sliding forward, tightening the crescent up a bit, diverting more ships to the center where the tip of the Meridian Alliance spear pointed.
    “Targets are coming in range.” Sikuuku flexed his fingers, wrapping them tight around the pod’s firing mechanisms. “ Brutus’s main batteries are on-line. He’s firing!” he warned.
    Flare of blue outside as Brutus opened fire with his cannons—massive, powerful weapons whose range outclassed anything else in the Meridian Alliance fleet. Bright bars marched in a straight line through space, slicing through the darkness as they tracked toward Trinidad and its entourage. Everyone waited, holding their breath, counting the seconds as Brutus’s shots crossed the gap between the two fleets and finally connected.
    Trinidad’s prickling hull lit up, charged energy munitions arcing wildly as they connected with the Heliotrope front end, crawling in spidering tendrils across his composite metal skin.
    Cheers erupted on Serengeti’s bridge. Kusikov opened up comms, broadcasting the yells and screams of victory issuing from the other ships in the fleet.
    “Targets coming into range,” Serengeti said calmly, cutting through all that noise.
    The cheers faded. Kusikov cut the comms as everyone got down to business.
    “Main gun primed and ready,” Sikuuku called. The gimbaled pod ticked to one side and then the other as he made a last few adjustments. Nervous movements. Nervous and excited—both came with the territory. Sikuuku was a veteran like Henricksen—the scars he wore, marks of pride and shame, earned in encounters just like this one. He knew what was coming and wanted it to come, because the sooner the battle began, the sooner the dying would be done. “Sir?” he prompted, awaiting the order to fire.
    “Wait,” Henricksen told him.
    He glanced over to the Artillery station and then returned his gaze to the front windows, locking onto the schematic showing the Meridian Alliance fleet and the DSR ships. A counter glowed next to it, spiraling steadily downward as Brutus pounded away at Trinidad. The fleet moved closer, bringing the Titans and Auroras into range. They opened up as well, adding their smaller weapons fire to the mix.
    Trinidad fired back, spitting out old-fashioned torpedoes of all things, tips glowing blood-red as the contents inside them swirled angrily. ‘Liquid laser’ they dubbed that weapon, but the torpedoes’ contents were chemical, not light-based—a toxic, corrosive substance that chewed through composite metal like a hot knife cutting through butter.
    Highly effective, that concoction, and extremely deadly. Once the torpedo connected, the chemical containment pod shattered, releasing the deadly contents inside, creating an outer layer of insulation to protect an inner layer of acid that dissolved the ship’s hull and worked its way to the vessel’s softer, more vulnerable insides.
    The Meridian Alliance had experimented with something similar, once upon a time, but ultimately given up. See, the thing was, the chemicals in that weapon weren’t only toxic, they were highly unstable. The Meridian Alliance had outfitted a dozen or so vessels with weapons like Trinidad’s , and all but four of them imploded when the gun’s chemical containers ruptured, spilling toxic goo inside the ship. Ships ended up being a total loss, and their crews were killed instantly by the fumes that worked their way into the atmosphere generators. The Meridian Alliance almost kept the damned things anyway, but the powers-that-be had run the numbers and worked their way through several cost-benefit scenarios before deciding the risk the guns posed outweighed the reward they offered.