Shepherd Moon: Omegaverse: Volume 1 by G.R. Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

than twenty minutes. Eric wanted to be there well before that could happen. Sharing credit for the kill was not part of his plan.
    He began working on one of the screens, bringing up his shields. They took the longest to initiate of any ship board system, about five minutes, and they also sent out the largest electro magnetic signature. Any shipping within about one AU would be able to detect him in about eight minutes at most, as the shield’s field emission radiated out at light speed. He set the shields at twenty percent of ship’s power. Weak, but he didn’t expect to be hit. Unfortunately, the power allocation had no effect on shield generation time. One hundred percent power to shields or twenty percent power both took around five minutes to generate or regenerate. The difference was in how quickly they were depleted after being hit.
    He wasn’t really concerned about shields, however, but wanted to be able to set the remaining, majority, of the ship’s power reserve toward the weapons. Unlike the merchant class ships, his class didn’t have to share power between engines and shields; he had a dedicated power source for the engines. But he did have to share between the shields and weapons, and his shields needed a constant power supply to maintain them, also unlike the merchant who could set shield power and forget it. His shields, though, could take a much heavier pounding as a result. But he had to choose between a heavy offense or a heavy defense, and he wanted the first shot to count. To be the only shot needed.
    “A quick short, sharp shock, they don’t do it again. Dig it?” he said in his best Cockney accent.
    “Are you asking me to play ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Captain?”
    “Sure, Number One,” laughed Eric, “but only until we reach waypoint one.”
    As he finished the initiation sequence for the shields, he moved to the monitor he had dedicated as the weapons station. He was going to put everything, eighty percent of ship’s power, into the plasma cannon. One shot should be able to take out most light pirates. For this kind of job, they usually used a small mining ship. They were small, relatively cheap, and had a decent sized cargo bay for loot. The controls for the torpedo were inside the weapon, and once activated and launched required no further input, so the pirates didn’t worry about buying any weapons systems upgrades for their ships.
    Where they did, however, tend to spend was in stealth. Surface coatings that could reduce the albedo of their ships to almost nothing. They also added active camouflage systems that received star light on one side of the ship and projected it on the opposite side, so you couldn’t find them just by looking for parts of space where stars weren’t. Unless they were moving fast enough that they couldn’t conceal either their engine emissions or the miniscule heat generated by encountering randoms atoms of space stuff, they were next to invisible; the only thing that gave them away was the wake, and subsequent explosion, of the torpedo.
    They also tended, for stealth and price concerns, to avoid any sort of combat shields. So while they were very very hard to detect if they were running silent, they were very very easy to kill when found.
    He finished bringing the weapons online and looked to the shield screen. They were at sixty percent. Three minutes. Right on schedule. Three minutes to go until jump. He moved to the navigation screen.
    “Number One. Overlay the jump locations I calculated earlier.”
    “Aye aye, Captain.”
    A grid like spread of blue letters, Greek, appeared. One was almost on top of the red dot.
    “Remove all but Delta. Add its coordinates to the jump drive control.”
    The map adjusted. He reached out and pulled down on the map screen, rotating the solar system ninety degrees from the ecliptic. His jump location was too “high”.
    “Reduce the ‘X’ coordinate by twenty thousand kilometers”
    The blue dot now sat almost