Andini peered closely into the main tactical display tank, her tactician’s mind racing the expert systems, busy analyzing any changes in Ileri space following the destruction of the orbital manufactory. It made a great excuse to not have to look at Dinata’s smug face; the minister had been practically euphoric when the inspection teams reported they’d positively verified a store of nanoware containing a Unity Plague variant. Andini and her tactical officer had unlocked the special ordnance store under Dinata’s beatific gaze. The expression on Dinata’s face as they watched the imagery relayed by recon probe, before radiation fried the optical pickups… Andini thought she’d have nightmares about that for weeks. Not that she didn’t believe in their mission, or in the necessity of preventing Unity from appearing in the Exile Cluster; far from it.
But Dinata’s low moan as matter’s annihilation washed across the screen had sounded positively orgasmic. Andini realized that the woman took pleasure in destruction. The minister was part of that faction driving the Star Republic towards not just ever more extreme enforcement of the Accords, but to the imposition of Saljuan technology-constraint policies in unaffiliated systems. Her party had pushed for the annexation of Indra, which had been easy, and of Para, where insurgents still resisted the annexation, twenty years later. “We must maintain the safety of the Cluster!” Dinata had thundered during one of their early mission briefings. Andini had no doubt the minister would direct her to use the special ordinance against Ileri itself if she felt necessary, because to one of the alat pembersih, the purifiers, there was only one way to guarantee that safety.
Andini swallowed anxiously, wondering how she’d respond to that order if it came. The question no longer seemed to be purely hypothetical.
She noticed the change in the orbital situation almost the same instant the tactical expert system did. “Eyes, confirm vector change and energy profile of target cluster London Kilo four-five-seven,” she ordered.
“Don’t let them concern you, Captain.” Dinata’s voice rolled languorously. “They have seen our power and won’t dare challenge us now.”
If Andini had believed that was true, Eyes’ response dashed that hope. “Vector change confirmed, Captain. They’re no longer maneuvering to intercept that formation of loyalist cutters burning in from the outer-system station. They’re bearing for us instead. Radiators are still deployed.”
Her belly felt tight. “Still the same composition?”
“Confirmed. One Solewa-class cruiser, three Protagonist-class frigates, and six cutters—stand by. Update, formation is pulling in their radiators.”
So much for not daring to challenge us. “Time to engagement envelope?”
“They’ll be in our missile range in thirty-seven minutes, fifty-six seconds. Best estimate is thirty-three minutes, forty-two seconds for us to be in their missile envelope.”
Andini grasped the handrail that ran around the command dais and pulled herself upright. “Fist, launch weapons bus waves one and two, set for defensive fire. Ears, record the following for broadcast.” She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then took another breath. “This is Captain Andini commanding the SDV Iwan Goleslaw to all vessels in Ileri space. Our sensors indicate Ileri warships maneuvering with apparent hostile intent against my vessel. Any attempt to interfere with my vessel or our mission will be met with lethal force. Any attack on the Iwan Goleslaw will be met with lethal force. There will be no warning shots. Andini out.”
As she finished speaking, she felt the vibration and fancied she could hear the distant clatter and rumble of the weapons busses being launched, each basically a miniature automated warship packed full of missiles, coil guns, or laser pods.
Dinata rose to stand beside the captain, her face now a mask of confused fury. “They dare?” she hissed.
Her belly still felt tight, but Andini reached for the calm of routine. Her vessel was already at Condition One, battle-ready but for pulling in her radiators so they wouldn’t be shot away in the coming fight. Time to deal with that. “Hands, keep the radiators deployed for”—she checked the countdown until the rebel vessels would be in range of her weapons—“fifteen minutes.” It would take seven minutes to tuck the radiators back within Iwan Goleslaw’s armored hull. Dinata still raged beside her, pounding on the handrail, but Andini ignored her for the moment. “Ears, message for all crew.” She paused until the communications officer signaled the channel was ready. “Attention, my children,” using the traditional mode of address from captain to crew. “Rogue elements of the Ileri forces appear to be set on engaging us. We shall meet them, and if they persist on their foolish course, I have no doubt we shall prevail. The eyes of our people are upon us all. We bear the torch.”
Across the CIC, and across the ship, Iwan Goleslaw’s crew murmured, or spoke, or shouted the response. “We hold it high!”
She nodded at Ears, who cut the signal, before she turned to face Dinata, who still ranted. “Minister, it’s time for you to relocate to auxiliary control,” she said, as calmly as she could manage.
Dinata spun to face her, fists clenched. “You must chastise these people, Captain. They have violated the Accords, brought the taint of Lost Earth back from the brink!”
Andini chose her words with care. “With respect, Minister, we cannot say for certain that the Ileri government is involved in this.” She gestured at the display, which now showed a second rebel formation maneuvering to engage them. “We do not yet have evidence of anyone’s involvement besides the owners of the manufactory, which appears to be a legitimate Ileri business.”
Dinata snorted. “Legitimate is hardly the word for those who traffic in proscribed technology. And besides, their ships are attacking us.”
“I apologize, I worded that poorly.” Andini shrugged. “But we don’t yet have evidence of any link between the rebel faction those ships belong to and the nanoware.”
“Why else would they react like this?”
“Perhaps,” Andini said carefully, “a political faction notorious for their xenophobic worldview objected to the use of an antimatter bomb within their system.” She squared her shoulders. “And now, I really must insist you follow protocol and relocate to aux control.”
Dinata allowed herself to be escorted off by the executive officer, whose unfortunate mission would be to babysit the minister during the course of the engagement. Andini took advantage of the brief respite to use the head before settling in to begin the largest space battle since the end of the Three-Planet War between Goa and Shenzen two decades past.
By the time she returned from the head, the crew had just about finished securing the radiators. She strapped herself into her command couch and brought up her personal tactical plot. A second rebel force had changed vector to engage her ship. The sum of both rebel battle groups converging would be a challenging fight even for a SDV. But if she could defeat them in detail... Seizing the initiative was called for. “We’re not going to just sit here,” she said over the CIC net. “Fist, you and Legs give me a plot that closes with the first formation and lets us give them a proper paddling before that second squadron gets in range.”
A bright orange line appeared, knifing right through the middle of the first rebel squadron. “Already plotted, Captain, and Chen gets to do my laundry for a week,” ‘Fist’, her tactical officer, said.
“Chen, what course did you think I’d pick?”
A purple trace leading away from both squadrons joined the display. “I thought you’d draw them into a running duel, Captain. Let them waste their misses against our point defense,” Chen, the maneuver officer— ‘Legs’—said.
“There’s a lot more of them than there are of us, Chen, and the closest depot to resupply our PDCs is eight weeks a-space travel away.” She thumbed the authorization. “Execute.”
Iwan Goleslaw rotated through two axes until its nose aligned with the new course while the acceleration warning blared. Then the main engines kicked into life, and the ship slammed forward from free fall to three and a half gs, its surrounding halo of weapon busses keeping pace like ducklings following their mother. The rebel formation shifted, adopting a computer-calculated, semi-chaotic dance as the ships executed the corkscrew-spiraling courses that made their exact positions more uncertain. Andini’s ship came at them like a knight atop a destrier riding into a mass of footmen.
When the engagement timer reached zero, she thumbed the authorization tab again. “Weapons free,” she ordered, and death leapt forth.
The opening rounds of the Battle of Ileri followed the course of most space engagements, with both sides pumping missiles at the other as their countermeasures tried to fool their opponent’s weapons. Brilliant lances shot out from laser-equipped ships, and counter-missiles rocketed out into the engagement volume. As the range closed, Iwan Goleslaw and the Ileri cruiser brought their particle beams into play, and then, at last, both sides resorted to their last lines of defense. Short-ranged point-defense cannons saturated the probability cones through which the incoming missiles had to pass with thousands of dumb slugs. They didn’t need to destroy the missiles, not entirely, just wreck their warheads, or their guidance systems, or their engines, letting the V-squared of the kinetic energy equation do the work.
Andini’s first barrage took out half the Ileri cutters and one of the frigates, and then her first wave of weapon busses joined the fray. “Focus fire on the cruiser, Fist,” she ordered, and a half-dozen mass drivers opened up on the unlucky ship at virtually ‘can’t miss’ range for a space engagement. The Ileri ship cracked open like an egg smashed onto a countertop under the concentrated fire.
The surviving frigates and cutters began to scatter before Iwan Goleslaw closed to effective range for its shipboard mass drivers. “All right, let’s deal with player two,” she said as her CIC crew cheered. The destruction seemed to satisfy even Dinata, who texted a congratulatory message.
“We haven’t won yet,” she said to the tactical officer as they burned at a relatively sedate one-and-a-half gravities towards the second formation, which had prudently begun decelerating to allow additional rebel ships to join before engaging Iwan Goleslaw. “We caught the first group napping and it still cost seven percent of our ordnance.”
“At that rate, Captain, we can take all the Ileri forces in the system and have three percent left over. And our beam weapons don’t need ammunition,” Fist said hopefully.
Andini snorted. “You’re forgetting about the three rail guns.” The tactical officer had the good grace to look abashed. “We’re lucky they’re still under Vega’s control, though I wonder why she hasn’t used them on the rebels yet.”
“Maybe she hopes some of the rebels will surrender, and she won’t have to destroy their ships?”
“Perhaps.”
The second stage of the engagement opened much as the first with missiles roaring forth. The results this time were somewhat less one-sided, though, and the SDV sustained several hits in exchange for smashing two Ileri frigates and several cutters. By this time, the rebels had committed nearly a third of their space force to attacking Iwan Goleslaw in what, in simulation at least, was something approaching an even fight.
One truism of space combat is that everyone can see what’s going on, but very few can understand what’s happening. Tactical plots on every warship around Ileri displayed the known trajectories and probable maneuver cones of the now thousands of missiles, weapons busses, ships, and major pieces of debris. Expert systems kept watch on more distant objects because even well-trained and experienced human minds tend to focus on the near and immediate. The problem with that is that distant and fast-moving can become near and immediate before one realizes it.
Andini angled her vessel away from the rebel flotilla, but that brought her track back into range of the surviving frigates from the first encounter. Those vessels, small and battered as they were, still had teeth. One of them had soft-launched a nuclear-tipped missile that drifted, engine stilled after its initial burst. The commander detonated the nuke in the middle of a pack of Saljuan weapon busses. This didn’t clear them out; nuclear weapons in space don’t inflict much damage to targets they aren’t in contact with, not in terms of blast anyway.
But the radiation burst had the effect of blinding sensors, which allowed a mass-driver-armed rebel bus to approach undetected and fire on the SDV.
Even this wouldn’t have been so bad except that Iwan Goleslaw was launching a fresh wave of weapons busses at that very moment. Two rounds struck an open launch port at four thousand meters per second, each five-kilogram projectile striking with forty million joules’ worth of energy—inside the Saljuan ship’s armor.
The projectiles drilled a path of destruction nearly two meters in diameter through the ship. Fragmentation and secondary explosions extended the damage along the path even as every weapon in the launcher’s magazine detonated.
SDVs are tough ships, though. Internal baffles and blow-out panels in the hull over the magazine contained the devastation to an extent. What might have been a killing shot on any lesser craft became, instead, “merely” a critical wound. In a flash, Andini lost one-fifth of her crew dead and another fifth to injuries. Fortunately for Andini and her crew, the remaining supply of conversion bombs weren’t in the affected areas, so the Saljuans weren’t converted into MC2 as the manufactory had been.
Helmet sealed against the vacuum now engulfing her CIC, her damage-control board awash in red, Andini belted out an order. “Fist! Option Zed! Execute!” The battered ship shuddered as the remaining launchers spat the rest of their weapon busses into space, followed by the onboard missile launchers, which fired half their magazines. Waves of death poured forth from the stricken warship.
Wounded, battered, Iwan Goleslaw cut its way free of the rebel flotilla. Behind it, the second Ileri cruiser fought for its own life as its escorting ships died. Andini took scant pleasure in noting the death of the frigate that had gutted her ship as a fireball consumed it.
Her comm pinged with an urgent message. Seeing it was from the surgeon and not, thankfully, Dinata, she answered. “What do you need, Bones?”
The surgeon, a sour-faced man at the best of times, relayed the initial casualty reports based on the feeds from the crew’s djinns. Andini winced to hear the numbers. “Get the worst into stasis,” she ordered.
“I can’t,” the surgeon said. “Bays six through ten were destroyed, and Gears tells me we don’t have power for the functioning bays, not enough, anyway. Both main and secondary heat exchangers are down, and tertiary is only running at thirty percent capacity.”
“Shit.” Her heart sank into her stomach. Until the engineers could repair the heat exchangers, her ability to maneuver and fight was severely curtailed. Without cooking the remaining crew and systems, that was.
“I can’t treat them all, Captain,” the man said plaintively. “We need to evacuate them.”
Guns cut into the call. “Captain, the loyalist ships are maneuvering. It looks like they’re going to engage the rebels.”
Andini switched her attention to the tactical plot, studying it intensely. What is Vega doing? Depending on which way the Fox of Tyngar turned her claws, the question of what to do with her wounded might be moot...
The vectors took the shapes she hoped for, and her belly unclenched the slightest bit. “I’ll have to call Vega and ask for succor under the Accords,” she said. “But she owes us a favor. We just gave her the opening to go after the rebels.”