Absen ran his eyes over the fleet’s deployment for the hundredth time and could find nothing to improve. In a layered sphere ten thousand kilometers across, his most vulnerable ships at the center, there was no better compromise between dispersion and mutual support. This arrangement of ships interpenetrated a cloud of StormCrows and their feathers, laser drones, armed tugs, grabships and even shuttles.
He’d made the decision to launch all the small craft because he believed EarthFleet had a decided superiority in fighters, drones and defensive missiles. If and when the Meme committed to battle, their usual tactics were to launch a steady stream of hypers on offense, and only expend their full living load when they were ready to run, to withdraw to eat and refuel, rearm and re-gestate. Absen had no reason to think this enemy commander would be different, especially one without experience fighting humans. The small craft would help pick off those hypers, and also ensure that losing another AC wouldn’t mean two thousand people dying at once.
Conquest’s bridge crew watched closely as the enemy ships maneuvered. Alien frigates now formed a loose concave hemisphere, slowly closing to two million kilometers range from behind. Cruisers waited in a similar, tighter formation in front, at about five million and closing. The planet and the Guardian were about five million klicks behind that – perhaps half an hour to close engagement, if they did not maneuver. Given the ungodly accelerations the Meme ships were capable of – roughly four times the human ships’ limits – the tactical initiative was theirs.
“Conn: Sensors. The Guardian is breaking orbit, moving toward us.” Its icon blinked, starting a slow trend forward. “Cruisers are falling back slightly and concentrating around it.”
The holotank computer predicted the Meme movement would result in a bull’s-eye pattern with the Guardian at the center and two rings of cruisers, like a target facing Conquest. “It looks like they are coming out to fight. Weapons,” Absen ordered, “launch the defensive spread.”
“Weapons aye.” Commander Ford touched a key and sent the preprogrammed instruction to the missile frigates.
Fifteen hundred defensive interceptor missiles launched and threaded their way through the fleet under careful positive control from their frigate missile officers, until they took up positions in the lead.
“Prep the offensive and the rear defense spread and stand by.”
“Spreads prepped.” As the range closed, it was safer and quicker to position missiles and drones early and control them via datalink, rather than to hold them in their firing tubes.
Absen waited, watching as the enemy held position, allowing the task force ever closer. When they reached two million kilometers, about seven light-seconds, he ordered, “Railguns, execute.”
Four battleships and, finally, Conquest herself opened fire with their Behemoth accelerators. Millions of steel balls sprayed forward at maximum rate, continuous streams with so much kinetic energy that the ships were obliged to use their engines to hold station against the pressure of the reaction mass. Stealthy and fast, these shotgun blasts were aimed at five specific target sets.
First was the Guardian itself. More than half of the ammunition traveled in a cloud arranged in hope that at least some of them struck the enemy’s flagship. Three more groups aimed at the remaining Hippo orbitals. The final set, from Conquest herself, laid small bursts on all of the almost forty frigates to the sides and rear, and kept firing, small defensive blasts designed to force the small enemy vessels to dodge or be hurt.
The task force cruised forward without maneuvering. The railgun blasts would take sixty to seventy seconds to reach their ship targets, much longer for the orbitals – and Absen was determined to do nothing to spook the enemy into dodging. Railgun fire was almost undetectable, after all, since little showed but a bit of electrical activity and the coated steel spheres themselves.
Nothing to see here, he whispered to himself. Just stupid humans cruising blithely forward into your kill zone.
The impact countdown on the Guardian passed sixty, then seventy seconds, then the seven or so seconds for light to travel back to their sensors – and the bridge officers watched as nothing seemed to happen at all to their enormous nemesis.
“No detectable effect,” Scoggins called, and frustrated sighs escaped several throats.
“Remember, that thing is much bigger than Conquest,” Absen reassured them. “It will be able to take a lot of punishment. This is just the long-range jabbing. Stick to the plan.”
Ford whooped unexpectedly, and an icon in the ring of enemy frigates flashed yellow. “Got one, sir! It’s damaged, falling back.”
“Good shooting. Keep it up, we want them to stay back as far as possible.” Absen observed the main enemy formation range closing. “Looks like they’re drifting toward us. Once we’re within a million klicks, start the focused beam barrage.”
“Aye, sir –”
Ford broke off in mid-response as Scoggins overrode him. “Missile launch! I have oh shit massive missile launch, one, two thousand, three thousand, five –”
The bridge crew sat there stunned for a full second, all except Master Helmsman Okuda who, linked to the computers as he was, immediately initiated all emergency protocols in the admiral’s name. Through the babble that followed he closed his eyes and, as fast as lightspeed, sent commands to the fleet with a flash priority override.
Absen watched as his missile frigates and Conquest expelled their entire ready loads of guided weapons, contingency-programmed for just such an extreme eventuality. They’ve never done anything like this before went through the admiral’s mind, and then, oh, this is really going to get bloody.
The defensive drones and missiles already in place shot forward like lancers to meet the enemy hypers – a mixture of classes ranging in size from a hundred kilos upward, all powered by those incredible living fusion engines. In such a target-rich environment they intercepted hundreds, but that still left thousands.
“Helm, fleet acceleration full forward!” This counterintuitive move was actually beneficial, as the enemy hypers gained damage-causing kinetic energy faster the farther they flew. A closer engagement was less lethal, like a shorter boxer stepping inside the reach of a longer-limbed opponent.
Preprogrammed, the backside offensive missile wave spread out to the sides and rear to engage the frigates now falling back after their missile launch. Another wave rolled forward behind the original defensive spread. Both of these offensive groups were armed with seekers and nuclear warheads designed to kill ships. Nevertheless they could be made into a blunt, field-expedient defensive shield.
Commander Ford sent flash priority override instructions to the missile officers aboard the launching ships, which triggered a protocol that sent the nukes into a barrage pattern to interdict as many of the incoming hypers as possible. No matter how fast they went, the enemy missiles could not outrun waves of enhanced neutron radiation sleeting through space, along with the accompanying EMP and their bomb-pumped gamma-ray laser modules.
By this tactic EarthFleet entirely gave up the offensive, but if ever there was a time to do so, this was it. They’ve fired their entire load, Absen thought, and now, they have to run. Clever bastard, he saluted his opponent commander. I might have done it in his place.
The enemy had sent his best weapons all in at once, to overload and do as much damage as possible, then withdraw to replenish, maintaining his “fleet in being” and tempting Conquest to assault the planet with the threat still out there.
This is always our difficulty: they are so much faster than we are.
Incoming thousands of hypers became hundreds as fusion fire raged across the heavens, and every interception weapon operated at full capacity. EarthFleet’s four broad-shouldered battleships threw themselves in front of the largest clusters, daring the missiles to strike them like jousting armored knights of space – and so they did. Hyper after hyper slammed at incredible velocity into the massive ships, whose sole purpose was to dish out and absorb as much punishment as possible.
Final defensive fire – miniature nuclear weapons detonated like reactive armor – blazed along the battleships’ lengths, scouring their own skin clean of irreplaceable fittings, installations and equipment – but better that than the death of whole ships. Dozens of heavy hypers slammed home at horrendous speed, and even hundreds of meters’ thickness of ferrocrystal laminate must at some point yield to physics.
Battleship Nanjing shuddered and bucked, spewing wreckage but cresting the wave of death like a breaching whale, losing half her railguns. Flensburg, by some twist of fate or expertise, accepted her pounding with stately grace and very few casualties. York absorbed a beating equal to her sisters before an unlucky strike reached deep inside to wipe out her command bridge, leaving her in the hands of auxiliary control, still fightable.
Hypervelocity missiles hammered brave Bukavu as bullets butcher a bull. She staggered, every weapon blazing, every system streaming frantic energies as she sought to avoid her fate. Yet as a light bulb burns brightest before its burnout, so the great battleship fell under an impossible storm of predatory alien weapons. Fusion reactors ruptured, the ship blew chunks of itself in every direction.
A collective groan and harsh curses echoed across Conquest’s bridge. Absen felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
The incoming wave of hypers, though much diminished, swept with still-terrifying speed down on the beam cruisers, and two of those eight embraced their fate, soon to spin broken and useless though the void. Hundreds of escape pods drifted, beacons flashing, for the busy grabships and tugs to retrieve.
Missile frigates, bereft of ammunition, did as before, releasing their weapon boxes, becoming slippery spindles among the many possible enemy targets. Only three perished as confused Meme sharks ate dozens of empty missile cubes.
Now came Conquest’s turn to suffer. As a mother hen gathers her chicks in the hailstorm, spreading her feathers to accept the impacts for her brood’s sake, so the dreadnought brought the assault carriers in beneath her great teardrop shape. She kept them so close the ships could have reattached themselves. Instead, she uncomplainingly bore the brunt of alien blows.
One after another, hypers tore into the dreadnought as she twisted and turned. Master Helmsman Okuda performed a virtual ballet, the great ship responding to his every thought and touch. With a born pilot’s instinct he spun to present a new piece of armor to every incoming weapon, in case it should win through the blast of final-fire nukes, electromagnetic shotguns, lasers and masers and grasers and charged particle beams by the dozen. On Conquest’s surface, plasma clouds dervish-danced among vapors of nuclear explosions and the remnants of expended weapons.
Vango and Helen in their StormCrow, mere tens of kilometers distant as they threw themselves at the incoming devils, marveled as they witnessed unseeable colors through virtual eyes. From their perspective, Conquest endured at the center of a tornado, within a cyclone of the energies of bursting alien fusion engines, ravening thermonuclear weapons and lancing beams.
Ranks of StormCrows surrounded their own ships, packed tightly as they could, forming a phalanx, a gauntlet to preserve their meager military homes and their steadfast support crews aboard the assault carriers.
Nineteen fighters died to the enemy, thirty-eight courageous jocks who would never see Afrana or the new colony. Yet they saved many lives, and in the brutal calculus of war, preserved more fighting ability of the fleet than their murder of Crows had sacrificed.
Shock-mounted and gimbaled, still the bridge of Conquest shook and rang with vibrations, rolling gongs of sonics transmitted through her skeleton under the ball-peen strikes of hypervelocity missiles. Though nothing penetrated her mountainous slabs of armor, some crew died simply from transmissional rupture as metal and carbon fiber flexed to take the strain. Mere human flesh, no matter how bolstered, was simply not made to take such pounding.
When the storm cleared, those who survived sailed proud.
There’s nothing so melancholy as a battle won, Absen recited to himself as he witnessed the aftermath, unless it’s a battle lost. He took a deep breath in concert with those throughout his wounded task force, amazed that the entire engagement had taken mere minutes. “Can we catch them?” he asked into the air, and Okuda answered him as expected.
“No, sir. They fired their missiles and lightened their loads. Now they’re running as fast as they can.”
“The Guardian too?”
“Yes, sir. It and the cruiser screen are withdrawing toward the planet.”
“Did we get those orbitals?”
“No, sir,” Scoggins answered flatly. “Looks like they are continually maneuvering to avoid just such a strike.”
Absen hissed through his teeth in frustration, then gave his orders. “We just took a pounding with very little to show. Make sure we get all the escape pods and lifeboats recovered. Try to put rescued crews onto similar ships so they have deeper rosters. Have shuttles bring people with wounds too severe for Eden Plague healing capacity to Conquest’s infirmary. Get the missile frigates re-boxed. Hop to it, people, we have two hours before we’re in range of those orbitals and whatever’s on the back side of the moon, not to mention the planet. Those won’t be able to run, but neither will we.”
Murmurs of acknowledgement from the various stations filled the bridge as the officers passed words, coordinating the damage control as best they could.
The admiral stroked his chin and spoke aloud, as he found airing his thoughts helped him think, and maintained his people’s confidence. “On the other hand, they just expended their entire long-range firepower, and declined to follow it in. If their fleet wants to defend the planet they will have to try to close, and slug it out with just their fusor beams. That means we will have the advantage again.”
The bridge crew listened attentively while monitoring their boards. They were used to the Skipper thinking out loud.
Absen went on, his voice firming. “How long until we are in range?”
“Two hours five minutes,” Okuda replied.
“Then pass my respects to all ships. Feed your people, take quick breaks in place for those two hours, but keep alert. And tell them, ‘Well done, that was the worst of it’.”
He hoped he was telling the truth.
***
SystemLord relaxed as he observed the planetary Underlings’ lack of active rebellion. When he had destroyed the Humans, he would punish the devolved Blends and their native slaves for their crimes. Until then merely ignoring them would have to be sufficient.
Tasting reports from Monitor’s many analytical sub-brains, he concluded that the enemy had lost several ships to his hypervelocity missiles, and had used up a great deal of ordnance. Without the ability to gestate new weapons, he knew that every expenditure the Humans made brought them closer to destruction. As long as the Empire’s fleet did not take excessive losses, steady pressure and threat remained the most efficient course.
I will force them to react to me, entice them to chase me, lure them after me, he thought with almost-poetic flavors of communication. Then I will strike with the Weapon.
Monitor calmed with its master’s good cheer.
Communicator remained skeptical.
***
“What? Are they insane?” Reaper’s blood seemed to boil. She shook the tablet at Bull ben Tauros in frustration, then spun it onto his tiny desk. “How can they pull me off my assignment now? I’m this battalion’s senior NCO, I’m mama arse-kicker and name-taker. We just went through a hell of training and waiting and I’ve lost Marines before we even fought. We may be just hours from a ground assault.”
Her commander straightened the display and sighed. “This comes all the way from the top. Signed by the admiral.”
“Screw the admiral. This has to be personal. I turned the key that launched the nukes that killed his family ninety years ago and he’s never forgiven me for it. So now he’s cutting my legs out from under me the only way he knows how.”
“Come on, SMAJ, think straight. If that were true he’d never have woken you up. And from his reputation he’s too much of a professional to screw over the line troops. Replacing you will measurably hurt combat effectiveness. Do you really think he’d do it if it wasn’t really important?”
Reaper kicked the inside of the door in frustration, her cyber-enhanced strength leaving a distinct dent. “Maybe not.” She mused for a moment. “I smell a rat, a Vietnamese rat. That’s the only way this makes sense.”
“What?” Bull ran his hand over his fat bald pate, a nervous habit. “What does that mean?”
“You ever hear of Spooky Nguyen?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “He’s a phantom to scare recruits. ‘Eat your protein and do your pushups or Spooky will get you’. What about it?”
“He’s here. I saw him in the wardroom.”
Bull looked at Reaper in awe. “He’s here on this ship?”
“Probably not on Temasek, no, I saw him on Conquest before the breakup. Now I wish I never had. He’s the only one with enough pull to do this, the only one who could convince Absen to change things around at the last minute. Damn!”
“Look, it says you have to report in thirty-five minutes with full kit. Swede Gunderson will be my acting Sergeant Major. We’ll be fine. You’ve got to do it, there’s no point in raging. We’ll keep your place warm for you.” Bull stood up, held out his hand. “It’s been an honor. Now get your ass in gear and drive on.”
“Ballocks.” Then she relented, slamming her sinewy palm into his callused paw with a sigh. “All right. Semper Fi, brother. God bless you, and I’ll see you on the other side.”
“You too, sister,” Bull echoed under his breath as he watched her march resolutely down the passageway. He dredged up a favorite Hebrew blessing: “Adonai, 'tatzilenu mi-kaf kol oyev v'orev v'listim v'hayot ra'ot ba-derekh.”
Lord, rescue us from the hand of every foe and ambush along the way.