Six hours. Three assaults.
The militia soldier closest to Mele on her right fell backward, already limp from the shot that had killed him. Mele aimed and fired, taking down the attacker who had fired that shot. As she sought another target, Mele realized that the invaders had fallen back again to regroup for a fourth assault.
“How do we look?” she asked Lieutenant Freeman.
Freeman had so far beaten the odds that said lieutenants had short life spans in combat. But he’d seen a lot of his militia hurt or killed, and sometimes seemed in as much pain as if he’d suffered physical wounds. “We’re down by about a third,” he said, his voice ragged with weariness and grief.
But they were still holding. Mele looked about at the grim-faced militia behind the barricade, impressed. “A lot of professional military forces would break with those kind of losses,” she told Freeman. “You’ve got some damned good soldiers.”
He nodded wordlessly in reply but then turned to pass on Mele’s praise to his people.
“How are things where you are?” she sent over the circuit dedicated to her Marines.
Corporal Gamba called in from her position with another militia unit. “Estimate twenty percent casualties with this bunch, Captain. And they’re pretty worn-out. They can’t take much more.”
“Understood. Yoshida?” No reply. “Yoshida? Buckland? Answer up.”
Yoshida finally replied, his voice thin with stress. “Buckland’s dead, Captain. I’ve got . . . ummm . . . I got hit. Can’t use my right arm or shoulder.”
Damn. Mele called her next words like a command, trying to snap Yoshida out of his shock. “What’s the status of the militia you’re with?”
“Ummm . . .”
“Answer up, Marine!”
“I, uh, twenty or thirty percent casualties, Captain.”
Mele wished she could pull up her faceplate and rub her eyes, but this part of the facility was in vacuum, the atmosphere having vented through the many holes created by active combat. “Giddings, I need you—Giddings?”
She realized that she hadn’t seen or heard from him since the last attack had ended.
And was relieved a moment later when Giddings came toward her at a crouch to stay beneath the top of the barricade. Giddings tapped the side of his helmet.
Mele looked and saw damage along the right side, where an energy pulse had slagged that part of Giddings’s helmet. The self-repair material in the helmet looked like it had expanded to fill the gap. “Have you got any leaks?”
He shook his head and made the hand sign for “say again.”
She made the hand signs for “leak” and “interrogative.”
Giddings shook his head again before signing more. “Comms. Negative.”
His communications capability had been knocked out, perhaps literally fried by that hit. So much for the idea of sending Giddings to help Yoshida.
Mele turned back to Lieutenant Freeman. “Has there been any more activity in the maintenance access shafts?”
“They made one more try,” Freeman said. “We tossed a grenade down that shaft and sealed it. Captain . . .”
“I think we should pull back,” Mele said.
He nodded again, not hiding his relief. “Yes. I was about to ask that. My guys are hurting. They need a little time to recover.”
Mele grasped his shoulder reassuringly before calling out commands. “We’re going to fall back to the next set of positions. Lieutenant Veren, Lieutenant Danzig, Lieutenant Freeman, designate five people from your units to take up hidden positions where they can cover the back side of our current locations. When the enemy forces make their next rush and get over the barricades, they’ll pause to regroup. The five-person rear guards will open fire on them while the enemy is exposed there so the attackers will drop back to use our own barricades as cover from the rear guard. That’ll slow them down. Make sure the rear guards know their job is not to hold their positions. They’re to hit the enemy, force the enemy to take cover, then drop back to join the rest of us.”
She switched to the Marine circuit again. “Yoshida? Can you fall back with your militia?”
“Yes, Captain,” Yoshida said, his voice steadier. “I’ll stay with them. Just fighting one-handed now.”
Mele recognized the false confidence of antishock drugs, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. “Good. Stay with them. Keep them steady when they fall back. Corporal Gamba, do the same with your militia.”
“Keep them steady,” Gamba replied. “Will do.”
“Giddings has lost comms, but he’s not hurt. He’s staying with me.”
Anything else she might have said was forestalled by more movement in front.
It was the worst possible time for another enemy attack, while the militia was falling back and another push might drive them into a panicked retreat. With more than half the surviving militia here already having left the barricade to withdraw, those remaining couldn’t hold. “Everybody back now!” Mele ordered. “Make sure those rear guards take their positions. Everybody else back!”
She’d half risen to join the retreat when Giddings jerked and fell. Mele caught his arm, seeing a hole in the chest armor, Giddings’s eyes wide through his face shield.
Mele knew she had less than a second to decide what to do.
“Lieutenant Freeman! Carry Giddings!”
“But—”
“I’ll only stay here a second! Get away!” Mele grabbed the weapon Giddings had dropped. A Springfield Armory Model Seven Pulse Rifle. Designed to be safe from any attempts by soldiers or Marines to mess with its controls and do something crazy like increase the power of each pulse shot to dangerous levels, or, even worse, set the power supply to release all of its energy at once and turn the rifle into a sort of super grenade.
Mele had been a private when those rifles began being manufactured on Franklin. It had taken the enlisted Marines less than a week before they’d figured out how to bypass all the safety protocols on the controls.
And how to enter the right commands in the wrong ways to make the rifle explode.
Her hands flew over the rifle’s controls, making the necessary inputs. “One thousand. Two thousand.” Mele rose up, Giddings’s rifle in one hand and her own weapon in the other. “Three thousand.” She aimed at the attackers who were very close to the barricade, “four thousand,” firing twice at the two closest, “five thousand,” not pausing as her two targets jerked from impacts and stumbled, raising Giddings’s rifle, “six thousand,” and hurling it one-handed into the center of the corridor, the attack was coming down, “seven thousand,” spinning on one heel and running all out to catch up with Freeman as he ran carrying Giddings.
“Eight thousand.” A shot clipped her side, glancing off the armor. “Nine thousand.” More shots came after her as the enemy reached the barricade.
“Ten—”
Giddings’s rifle exploded, tearing apart the corridor and the enemy soldiers packed near the barricade.
The shock hit Mele in the back, but she managed to keep her feet under her this time as she staggered from the blow. A piece of shrapnel wedged into the armor covering her upper left arm but didn’t completely penetrate.
She, Freeman, and Giddings reached the next set of defensive positions, where the squads left holding those locations stared anxiously at their battered comrades dropping down behind the safety of another set of improvised barricades. Mele paused long enough to give them a confident thumbs-up before leaning heavily on the top of the barricade, gazing back the way she’d come. “Gamba, Yoshida, talk to me.”
“We’re in place,” Gamba said, sounding comfortingly assured. “The rear guard has already engaged and is falling back to join us.”
“Yoshida?” Mele pressed.
“Here, Captain. Everybody’s back at the new position. The rear guard is just rejoining us.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m feeling frosty, Captain,” Yoshida said. “One thousand percent.”
“You’re doped,” Mele said. “Don’t let the meds make you too frosty. How are the militia with you? How steady are they?”
“Okay, I guess. Still ready to fight, but they’re tired.”
“So are the attackers,” Mele said. “Gamba?”
“I think my guys would have kept going when they reached the fallback position, but I stopped there right in the middle of it all so they stopped, too. Agree with Yoshi, Captain. The militia who haven’t been in the fight yet are rattled and those who have been fighting are worn-out.”
“Is the enemy pressing you?” Mele asked. “I’m not seeing anything on my net.”
“No, Captain. When the rear guard opened up on the enemy they took cover and haven’t come out again.”
“Good. Make sure the militia you’re with have forward scouts or disposable sensors to spot anyone coming. Rest while you can, and remember to look confident for the militia with you.” Mele switched circuits to speak to the militia lieutenants, who all sounded tired as well. Veren and Danzig both also sounded rattled by events and their responsibilities, but it wasn’t like Mele could relieve either one. She gave both brief pep talks and hoped that would be enough.
After that she sat down, wincing as her back protested. Lieutenant Freeman sat down next to her, calling on a private circuit so that even though their suits were sealed it was like having a conversation with the person beside you. “We evacuated your guy Giddings to the sick bay on Shark.”
“He was still alive?”
“Yes,” Freeman said. “That’s good news, right? I heard that if they’re alive when they make it to a medical facility, they’ll survive.”
“Not always, but usually,” Mele said, feeling relieved.
Freeman turned his head to look back toward the enemy. “If I ask how we’re doing, will you be honest with me?”
“Maybe.”
“How are we doing?”
Mele looked at the time on her faceplate display. “Sixteen hours to go.”
“We’ve lost about two-thirds of the facility,” Freeman said, sounding despairing.
“That’s okay,” Mele told him. “I mean it. When they first hit us we had a lot of territory to defend, and they were fresh and at their best strength. Yeah, they’ve pushed us back, but it’s cost them. They’ve lost more than we have, and being on the attack is physically tougher than defending. We’re tired. They’re more tired than we are.”
“If they hit us again soon . . .”
“Then we’ll face a tough situation,” Mele said, leaning her head back and looking up at a ceiling that seemed oddly clean and pristine after the fighting the rest of the facility had seen. “It depends if the enemy has reserves to throw into the fight. If they’ve been throwing everything they’ve got at us, and don’t have any rested troops to order in now, any attacks are going to be by exhausted soldiers at the end of their strength.”
“You think we’ll have time to rest some, then?” Freeman asked, sounding hopeful.
“I’m hoping we do. I think we do,” Mele amended her words. “If fresh troops had hit us when we were starting to fall back they would have overrun us. But the enemy soldiers who took that last position were worn-out, and no one has pushed on to hit us before we got settled in these new positions. So I’m thinking the enemy has been hitting us with everything he has, hoping it’ll break us, but we’ve held, and now he can’t keep hitting us.”
“What if he does?” Freeman asked.
“I keep forgetting you haven’t done this,” Mele said. “Put it this way. Suppose I ordered your militia into an attack now. Right this moment. How fast would they move?”
“Not very. They might have a burst of energy, but then they’d be burnt-out.”
“Yeah. And the enemy is more tired than your guys. If their commander throws them at us now, we’ll be able to knock them over with harsh words.”
“Really?”
“Lieutenant,” Mele said, “I have my faults, but I wouldn’t lie about something like that. If we talk tactics and the situation, I’m telling you what I really think.”
“Thanks. That’s okay to share with my guys?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Mele closed her eyes, trying to relax, but that effort lasted only a few seconds before the nagging tug of duty caused her to call up the other two militia lieutenants and give them the same updates as well as another round of quick encouragement. Afterward, she looked around at Lieutenant Freeman’s troops. The unit was a mix of those few who had made it out when the forwardmost defenses were overrun and Major Brazos killed, Freeman’s own personnel, the soldiers who’d been posted here to hold this place until the fight reached it, and several militia from the other units who had been cut off from their own people during the most recent retreat and instead found refuge with Freeman’s.
She studied the men and women she could see, trying to make out expressions through helmet face shields and otherwise trying to judge how much their drooping demeanor was the result of tiredness and how much it might indicate dwindling hope. Either way, if the enemy had been able to mount another attack right away with rested troops, Mele didn’t think these militia would have held.
But they’d done all right when properly led. Give them a few hours to rest, and maybe they (and she and her Marines) would get out of this alive.
The moment of cautious optimism shattered as Corporal Gamba called in. “We’ve got movement to the front of us! They’re coming again!”
Carmen flinched as the building trembled, a long, slow shaking that told of some portion of the structure collapsing. Probably the far end of the eastern wing, she guessed from the direction of the vibrations and sound.
The rumble only momentarily eclipsed the sounds of battle as invader forces pressed at the northeastern and southern sides of the government building that Carmen had helped recapture that morning. Night had long since fallen outside, but the conflict raged on regardless. She wondered how many defenders had already been lost in what increasingly felt like a losing battle.
But that concern was almost immediately replaced by worries about a very specific defender. Carmen moved cautiously down a darkened hallway, seeing a few defenders huddled over pads. That was surely a command group.
She recognized one of Dominic’s officers in the glow of the pads. “Where’s Captain Desjani?”
The officer, face lined with worry and weariness, blinked at her as if trying to grasp the question. “Captain Desjani? I . . . he got hit.”
“Hit?” Carmen said, hearing the way her voice choked off. The darkness of the hallway seemed to press in on her.
“He’s down at the medical station. In the basement.”
Dominic wasn’t dead, then. Or hadn’t been dead when he’d been sent to medical. Her own fatigue forgotten, Carmen turned and ran until she reached stairs and rattled down them so fast she nearly fell.
The building’s power had gone out long ago, even the emergency systems fed by solar cells and batteries lost when damage caused the circuits to trip. The belowground portions of the building were pitch-dark except where stickup lights had been slapped into place at wide intervals. Carmen hastened through the darkness, the sounds of battle muffled down here, dust filtering down from the ceiling as the building shook from nearby explosions and impacts on it.
She found the reinforced vault intended to protect vital documents but now pressed into service as a medical station. Carmen paused in the entrance, seeing the injured laid out side by side on the floor as medics triaged and treated them. Several maintenance carts with solid tops had been fastened together to serve as an operating table. A single trauma bed, probably an emergency unit normally kept in the building, sat in the corner with its lone, lucky occupant unmoving as the bed tried to save her life.
Carmen knelt by one of the medics. “Captain Desjani. Where is he?”
The medic barely spared her a glance. “Uh . . . over there. Are you next of kin?”
“What?” Carmen stared at the medic, paralyzed at what the question might mean.
“If you’re not, you can’t be in here unless you’re his commander.”
“Oh.” Carmen exhaled, realizing that she’d briefly ceased breathing. “We’re married.”
“That counts.” The medic bent back to work, eyes intent, expression numb as if all feeling had been momentarily buried to allow total focus on his task.
She made her way in the direction indicated, moving carefully among the injured, the smells of spilled blood and antiseptics and skin seal bandages mingling to make Carmen dizzy.
Dominic rested next to one wall, his eyes closed. She went to one knee beside him, watching his deep, slow breaths and knowing they meant he’d been sedated.
The reason why was clear enough, a tourniquet on Dominic’s left leg above where the knee and the rest of his leg had once been.
Carmen had enough first-aid training to read the status patch stuck onto Dominic’s forehead, the figures and codes flickering as they updated. Stable. That was the critical part. He was stable.
She fought off tears that threatened, looking around her. “Are any of the wounded being evacuated?” she asked the nearest medic.
The woman, looking too old to be working in a combat environment, shook her head. “Too much fighting outside, and the subway tunnels are blocked. They’re all stuck here with whatever we can do for them until either they die or our side breaks the siege of this building or the invaders come down here and shoot us all.”
Carmen looked down at Dominic. She’d almost forgotten that she was still carrying her rifle. “Hold on,” she whispered, leaning close to his ear. “I have to go and help fight. We have to win so we can get you to a hospital. I have to go,” Carmen repeated. “I love you, Domi.”
She picked her way carefully out of the medical station, staying out of the way of the medics and doctors and not jostling any of those hurt. Once in the gloomy hallway again Carmen ran for the stairs leading up, through the stretches of darkness punctuated by small lighted areas, gripping her rifle tightly.
The stakes of this fight had changed. It was no longer about freedom or peace or anything but one truth that filled Carmen. They had to hold this building, had to push back the attacks, or Dominic would die.
Tantalus was a red dwarf star, not far from Kosatka as interstellar distances go. Which meant it was roughly twenty trillion kilometers, or two light years, from one star to the other. Just a hop, skip, and a jump in a galaxy like the Milky Way, which was about one hundred thousand light years across. Even the time spent in jump space had been relatively short, just three days.
There were a lot of red dwarf stars in the Milky Way; which, now that Lochan Nakamura really thought about it, was an odd name for a galaxy. Red dwarfs were small, relatively dim, and relatively cool, burning their limited supplies of hydrogen at a rate that would keep them going for billions of years longer than hotter, flashier stars like Sol that warmed Old Earth. “Why did they name it Tantalus?” Lochan asked the captain of the Oarai Miho, who only shrugged in reply.
Relieved that they’d made it safely here, and with little else to do but worry about whether Carmen was all right while the freighter chugged across the expanse of Tantalus’s star system, Lochan looked up the name. Tantalus had been a greedy individual in old myths. Tantalus the star had a lot of objects orbiting it, and a lot of those objects were pretty close in, as if the star was worried about any of them wandering off. None of the orbiting objects were particularly impressive, rocks ranging from minor planets to belts of asteroids, but there were significantly more of them than usual for a star system. There were several theories about how and why Tantalus had acquired its hoard of useless rocks, but Lochan had to admit that the name of the star seemed appropriate. As to the strangeness and uniqueness of the star system’s configuration, humanity had spent millennia learning that the galaxy was full of things and places that deviated from any norm that existed. Given enough stars (and there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone), just about anything could end up happening somewhere.
But what should have been a curiosity, another strange thing in a galaxy filled with strange things that humans were often still trying to figure out, became something else when one of the objects orbiting Tantalus began accelerating.
“What is it?” one of the other passengers asked the captain.
“A ship,” she snapped in reply. “What else could it be?”
“Why didn’t we notice it before it started accelerating?” another passenger demanded.
“This is a freighter. We have sufficient instruments and sensors to run cargo and passengers between planets and stars. We don’t invest money in warship-grade sensors that would have scanned all those rocks in search of something that didn’t belong!”
Lochan spoke up as the captain tried to stomp away. “What sort of course is it on? That other ship?”
The captain paused, glaring at all of the passengers. “It appears to be accelerating on a vector to intercept us.”
“It’s not a warship, though? It’s not accelerating like a warship.”
“No. It looks like a freighter. Calls itself the Brian Smith. But it wasn’t going anywhere. It was lurking in rocks, and now it’s aiming to intercept us. What does that sound like?”
“A pirate,” one of the other passengers said with a gasp.
“That’s ridiculous,” another protested. Tall and thin, he had struck Lochan as the sort of man who was so sure of his own facts that no actual events would convince him otherwise. His next words confirmed Lochan’s assessment. “Piracy can’t work under these circumstances! It’s economically unfeasible.”
Lochan replied before the increasingly irate captain could. “The Brian Smith was taken by supposed pirates about three years ago. At Vestri. I know because I was on the Smith. They’re not really pirates. They’re privateers. They pretend to be pirates operating on their own, but they’re working for stars like Scatha and Apulu.”
“Oh, yes, another claim of interstellar conspiracy and aggression by someone from Kosatka!” the man scoffed.
“You saw what was happening at Kosatka before we jumped out of that star system,” Lochan said, surprised that he could speak so calmly. But people didn’t listen when voices were raised and anger or fear was obvious so he found the strength to sound composed despite the emotions tugging at him. “Didn’t that look like aggression to you?”
“I heard them announce that they were peacekeepers, there to oversee free and fair elections.”
“You believed that?” another passenger asked with open incredulity.
“It’s not a matter that concerns me,” the tall man replied. “Nor is this so-called pirate. I’ll need a lot more proof than the claims of Kosatka’s partisans before I believe that other ship is any danger to me.”
The captain surprised Lochan with a harsh laugh. “Proof? You’ll get proof. They’ve got augmented propulsion, better than ours. We can’t outrun them, and we’re not going to waste fuel cells trying. And you can bet they mount some weapons. When they intercept us, you’ll get so much proof it just might be the death of you.”
With that cheery last statement the captain physically shoved one of the passengers out of the way and walked off toward the freighter’s control deck.
“We should have expected this,” a woman passenger murmured to Lochan as the small group of passengers broke up and headed back to their rooms. “They planned everything else.”
“What do you mean?” Lochan asked.
The woman looked around to see if anyone else was close before replying. “They must have realized that any ships at Kosatka would flee when the invasion fleet showed up and that those ships might carry people trying to get away as well as valuable cargo being shipped out before the invasion force could reach the planet.”
Lochan nodded in understanding. “So they made sure there was a ‘pirate’ waiting here at Tantalus to catch any freighters fleeing Kosatka.”
“Backup plans,” the woman said in a very low voice. “Have you got one?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve encountered pirates before?”
“Yeah. At Vestri, like I said.”
She looked him over, then nodded. “Okay.”
Lochan watched her go back to her cabin, wondering what all that had meant.
“Captain Geary!”
Rob struggled back to awareness. Having finally forced himself to get some rest in his stateroom, it had probably been inevitable that something demanding that he be awake would happen. “Here,” he said, fumbling for the response tab on his stateroom’s display. “What’s up?”
“The enemy destroyer is accelerating toward us, Captain,” Lieutenant Cameron said, speaking with exaggerated clarity “It looks like an attack run. Estimated time to intercept forty-five seconds.”
“I’m on my way to the bridge. Lock all weapons on the enemy ship.”
It only took a few seconds to reach the bridge, drop into his command seat, and take in the sweep of the enemy destroyer’s projected path on the display before the seat. Hanging in orbit near the facility, Saber was hardly moving through space. Rob knew he needed more velocity to deal with an attack. “Accelerate to point zero one light speed.”
“Accelerate to point zero one light speed, aye. Taking into account our acceleration, we’re now twelve seconds from intercept.”
Rob ran his eyes across his display, confirming that Saber’s shields were at maximum strength and all of her weapons were ready.
“He’s been sitting there in orbit just watching us for hours. Why now?” Ensign Reichert wondered in a low voice.
“We know his fuel cells are low,” Rob said. “He can’t refuel as long as we’re a threat. He needs to try to take us out.”
Only a few seconds left as Rob’s thoughts raced. Should he evade the enemy attack, frustrate the attempt to disable Saber? But that would leave Kosatka’s orbiting facility past Saber, and Shark still in the dock there, wide open to attack by an untouched enemy warship.
Too late anyway. In one second they’d be—
Saber shuddered from a series of shocks as the two warships tore past each other and exchanged fire.
“Bring us around on an intercept,” Rob ordered. “Assume the enemy will continue on to hit Shark.”
“Shark’s shields are at maximum and all weapons ready,” Ensign Reichert reported.
Red symbols had appeared on Rob’s display to show damage to Saber from the encounter. Saber’s shields had held, mostly, but the hull had been penetrated in two places, and one of the grapeshot launchers was out of commission.
It felt weird to be maneuvering this close to a planet, to have that huge mass and the threat of its atmosphere hanging nearby, eager to clutch at and claw the little toys of humanity. All it would take was a miscalculation, a slight error, or damage that sent a ship plowing at extremely high velocity through rapidly thickening air until the friction vaporized the hull in a matter of seconds.
Saber whipped up and around, coming back to hit the enemy destroyer again.
But he could only watch as the enemy tore past Shark, space lighting up with the energy released as particle beams and grapeshot contended with shields and hulls.
“Captain, he only used one pulse particle beam on that attack,” Lieutenant Cameron said. “We must have taken out the other.”
“How’s Shark?” Rob demanded. “It looked like he was trying to hit Shark’s propulsion.”
“Her shields suffered some spot failures, Captain,” Cameron said. “Shark swung something between her and the attack that absorbed anything that got through.”
“Big plates of material from the dockyard,” Chief Quinton said. “They pushed them into place as sort of standoff armor.”
“Smart,” Rob approved. He realized he wouldn’t have thought of that because normally the idea could never work. Ships moved too fast. Any protection moving in a fixed orbit or trajectory would be very quickly left behind, useless. But not if the ship was itself stuck in a fixed orbit while being repaired. “Did Shark do any damage to the enemy?”
“He’s lost some thrusters,” Cameron said, grinning. “His shields didn’t have time to rebuild after the encounter with us before they engaged with Shark. He’s also lost at least one grapeshot launcher, and his amidships shields are rebuilding slowly.”
“Captain, our fuel cells are at thirty-eight percent,” Quinton warned.
“Adjust intercept,” Rob ordered as Saber finished the long loop above the planet and aimed to hit the enemy destroyer again. “He’s got less fuel than we do.”
Projected paths on Rob’s display shifted, the arcs altering their curves.
“He’s coming around to meet us head-on,” Reichert said.
“Make this one count, Ensign,” Rob said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, smiling slightly, her eyes fixed on her controls.
Another flash-quick moment of intercept, the two ships racing past each other, Saber shaking from more hits as the two ships exchanged fire.
“No damage to Saber,” Chief Quinton said. “All shields held. He’s lost enough weapons that he can’t hurt us on one pass.”
“His amidships shields are gone,” Lieutenant Cameron said, sounding remarkably calm. “He’s definitely lost an entire thruster group. Possibly two thruster groups.”
“Let’s get him again,” Rob ordered. “New intercept.”
“Sir, he’s not coming back around. He’s diving toward the enemy freighters and passenger ships.”
Why? They couldn’t offer any protection to the stricken enemy ship. “See if we can catch him.”
“Captain, we’re receiving a high priority call from Shark.”
That was a distraction he didn’t need. Rob almost told the comms watch to tell Shark to call back before realizing that Commander Derian must know how busy Rob was at the moment. If he felt the need to send a high priority call anyway, he might have something very important to say. “Link me.”
Derian’s image popped into view before Rob. Shark’s captain appeared to be simultaneously worried and elated. “Be careful! The freighter that we encountered had a hidden grapeshot launcher. Those ships might also have some armament that they’ve kept concealed until now. And don’t forget that they sacrificed a ship to try to destroy Shark. If any of the freighters are empty . . .”
“Damn.” Rob realized that he had said that out loud. “Thank you, Commander.”
Maybe those other freighters and the passenger ship weren’t armed. They hadn’t fired earlier when Piranha and Saber were attacking. But if Saber came close now, concentrating on the enemy destroyer, and got hit by grapeshot from several launchers, it could do a lot of damage.
And if one of the freighters overloaded its power core at the right moment to catch Saber with the shock wave, it could even the odds, or worse, again.
The enemy destroyer was braking velocity to match orbit with the invasion fleet. He’d be an easy target for an attack run by Saber.
Too easy a target.
“It’s another setup,” Rob told his bridge team. “They want us to dive into the middle of their formation to hit that destroyer again as soon as possible. Give me a vector change at the last possible moment to bring us along the outside of their formation instead of going straight through it.”
“Are we targeting one of the freighters, Captain?” Ensign Reichert asked.
“If we can swing a vector past one of them that wouldn’t have expected us to come close to it,” Rob said. He saw their reactions, trying to hide their puzzlement. “Remember what happened to Shark. These guys will sacrifice a freighter to take us out if they know what our trajectory is going to be.”
“We have a recommended vector change, Captain,” Cameron said. “In one minute, thirty seconds. We’ll be able to hit one of the freighters with particle beams as we pass the enemy formation.”
“Target that freighter and enter the maneuver in the system. I want it to occur automatically at the right moment.”
“Yes, sir. Maneuver entered. Request confirm.”
The confirmation command appeared on Rob’s display. He tapped it, uncertain whether he was being spooked by fears of what the enemy could do. Was he passing up a chance to finish off that destroyer for no better reason than what the enemy might do?
“Freighter targeted,” Reichert said.
“How’re repairs coming on number two grapeshot launcher?” Rob asked.
“Under way, Captain. No estimated time to repair as of yet.”
He focused on his display, watching Saber’s shields rebuilding.
Out in space, up and down were concepts that existed only because humans defined them in terms of the plane within which a star system’s planets orbited. But, close to a planet, down was always toward it, and up was always away. Saber was diving toward the enemy formation, angling down, the bulk of the planet offering an odd background to the space engagement.
The seconds counted down. Saber jerked as her thrusters fired, pushing her onto the new vector that would skim the outside of the enemy formation instead of diving through it. But the move had come so late that the enemy would have already had to react as if Saber were coming through. Any trap would’ve had to have been put into motion already, impossible to stop by the time the enemy realized that Saber was taking another path.
“Something’s launching from two of the freighters!” Lieutenant Cameron yelled as new threat symbols appeared on Rob’s display. “One . . . three . . . six . . . eight. Eight aerospace craft!”
Eight warbirds. Rob did some quick mental estimates, realizing that if Saber had held her course those warbirds would have popped out right on top of the destroyer as it plunged into the enemy formation.
Why hadn’t he expected that? How had he forgotten such a threat when Saber was close to the mother ships the enemy warbirds were using? The warbird activity had been screened from Saber’s view for the last couple of days by the bulk of enemy shipping, and in any event aside from one warbird that had covered the landing on the orbital facility, all other aerospace craft activity had been inside the planet’s atmosphere, and his attention had been focused on both the enemy destroyer and the fighting aboard the orbital facility, but none of those things were an excuse for his not remembering that the additional threat existed.
Though from the expressions on the rest of the bridge crew he wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten about those warbirds.
“Sir,” Cameron said in a calmer but worried voice, “eight warbirds exceed safe engagement parameters for a single Founders Class destroyer.”
“I’d already guessed that,” Rob said. Warbirds were useless in deep space, carrying too little fuel to go far or outaccelerate warships. But this close to a planet, with Saber at a relatively slow velocity, the conditions for aerospace craft to engage a warship were nearly ideal.
“Earth Fleet guidance in such a situation,” Cameron continued, “is to avoid engagement.”
“Run away?” Rob asked. “What will they do if we run? They were desperate enough to attack us with their sole destroyer. If we run, and leave that orbital facility unprotected, will they go after Shark?”
Ensign Reichert was already running the simulation but didn’t wait for it to finish. “Estimate they’d lose about half of their warbirds, but with Shark a sitting duck they’d inflict critical damage on her.”
Which meant Saber would have to fight, Rob realized. The enemy warbirds were already adjusting vector, angling up and out to intercept Saber’s new path through space. “Get me an optimum engagement vector. We need to keep those warbirds busy and take out as many as we can.”
“Sir,” Lieutenant Cameron said, visibly worried. “Yes, sir. But I feel obligated to warn the Captain that our chances in an engagement against eight warbirds are less than fifty percent.”
“Forty-two percent,” Ensign Reichert said. “If we get number two grapeshot launcher back online. If we don’t, the odds are—”
“I understand,” Rob snapped at them. Had he pushed this as far as he should? Saber had to survive, had to get back to Glenlyon. That was his duty. He had no obligation to sacrifice his ship and crew in defense of Kosatka, especially after doing so much to aid this star system. Had he come to the point where further sacrifice was senseless at worst and unwise at best?
Not that he could completely avoid the warbirds. They had a better mass-to-thrust ratio than even a destroyer, allowing them to outaccelerate and outmaneuver the warship for a short period before their fuel levels went too low. The warbirds would catch Saber at least once no matter what Rob did.
His eyes went to the image of the orbital facility and Shark on his display. Commander Derian would understand. Even Lieutenant Commander Shen would understand. She wouldn’t want Saber sacrificed in a battle facing such odds.
His responsibility felt all too clear: to run, having done all he could, and . . .
Mele Darcy.
“Marines and the Fleet have to depend on each other,” he’d argued with her during one conversation. “They have to know they can count on each other no matter what.”
“Sure,” Mele had said with a sardonic laugh, “right up to the point where other requirements enter the picture. Then the Marines get left holding the bag.”
“That won’t happen when I’m in command,” Rob had told her.
She’d been nice enough not to laugh again, but he’d seen the skepticism in her.
He’d sent those Marines to that facility.
If he abandoned them there . . .
Was this about Mele Darcy being his friend? Or about the need to set that precedent? That the Fleet didn’t run and leave the Marines in the lurch?
Rob realized that he didn’t really care which reason was motivating him and that his internal debate had taken less than two seconds. “We’re going to see how much damage we can do,” he told the bridge crew. “We have people on Shark and on the orbital facility. We won’t abandon them without a fight.”
“Five minutes to intercept,” Lieutenant Cameron warned. “Sir, if all eight hit us in a short interval—”
“I understand,” Rob said. “We can’t avoid this encounter.”
“Captain,” Ensign Reichert said, “they’ve started evasive jinking to confuse our fire control systems.”
“How effective will that be against our fire control systems? I haven’t dealt with that problem except for some drills in Alfar’s fleet.”
“It will complicate achieving hits,” Reichert said. “The small, random changes to their vectors are just large enough to ensure that Saber’s fire control systems can’t predict exactly where the targets will be when a weapon reaches them. If we pulse a particle beam at them at the right time, it’ll travel so fast that we can score a hit anyway, but if the targeted aerospace craft jinks just as we fire, we’ll miss. They’re too small for us to have any real margin of error in targeting.”
That left the grapeshot launchers. Or launcher, since number one was still out of commission. He remembered that grapeshot was his best weapon against the warbirds since it fired a shotgun-like pattern that would have a high chance of getting hits close in no matter how the birds jinked. And if the birds didn’t get close enough for grapeshot to have a hit chance, they wouldn’t be close enough to do much damage to Saber.
“Ensign Reichert, I want the pulse particle beams set to fire as soon as the fire control system gives a better than fifty percent kill probability.”
“Yes, sir,” Reichert said. “Sir, that kill probability will be based on some unknown variables, so it won’t be reliable.”
“It’s all we’ve got. Make sure the grapeshot launcher targets a different warbird than the particle beams.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Three minutes to intercept,” Cameron reported. “Recommend shutting off main propulsion and bringing our bow around to face the oncoming aerospace craft.”
That was doctrine. Warships had their strongest shields facing forward and could employ the most weapons against anything coming toward their bow. But Rob hesitated. “Lieutenant Cameron, can our bow shields hold against eight warbirds?”
“No, sir,” Cameron said. “There’s a one hundred percent probability the bow shield will collapse and incoming fire will impact the hull.”
Warbirds didn’t have the armament of warships and had no shields to speak of, but eight-to-one odds put Saber at a disadvantage.
Rob sat back, thinking, knowing he had two and a half minutes to decide what to do. Saber was standing on her stern, accelerating straight “up” away from the planet. The warbirds were coming in from Saber’s aft quarter, angling in to catch her as Saber climbed. If he did nothing, the warbirds would hit Saber’s weaker shields amidships and aft, and do even more damage to the ship. But pivoting the bow to face them wouldn’t prevent damage, and Saber had already taken some hits from the enemy destroyer. He had a bad choice and worse choices.
“Two minutes to intercept.”