Thirteen million kilometers sunward from Earth, three defending squadrons waited.
To spinward, the Meme of Task Force Charlie lurked on the flank of the enemy’s course. If neither side altered vector, the Scourges would sail by them just out of range of everything but the enemy flagship’s capital weapons.
Of course, that wasn’t the plan.
To antispinward, Task Force Alpha waited much farther back, its TacDrive-equipped ships able to rush in at any time to strike the enemy.
In front, blocking the Scourges’ advance, more than sixty EarthFleet cruisers, frigates and control corvettes positioned themselves, along with thousands of combat drones remotely controlled by experienced pilots.
Backing them up were over a thousand StormRaven manned fighters, whose job was to catch as many leakers as possible.
Flocks of missile bundles waited as well, deployed early to float across the enemy’s path, ready to be activated when needed.
“Why doesn’t the Scourge flagship alter course and move around to the flank?” Colonel Vango Markis heard Lieutenant Colonel Josiah “Token” Gaffney, ask over his comm. As commander of First Aerospace Wing, Vango was able to choose his wingman, so he’d tracked down and co-opted the man who’d accompanied him on the odyssey of thirty thousand Aardvarks against the Destroyers over a century ago.
“They’ve built up too much velocity. They’re already decelerating intermittently, and they can’t move sideways at any appreciable angle. They’re committed to this course if they want to hit Earth,” Vango replied.
Token grunted in acknowledgement, and then changed subjects. “Why’d you decide to drive a Raven instead of a drone corvette?”
“You have to ask? Controlling drones isn’t real flying. Besides, we have a hell of a lot better overview of the battle out here, and we get to shoot some bugs ourselves.”
“What about personal leadership?” Token needled him.
“That’s obsolete for anything bigger than an eight-ship once the Wing launches. You know that. All our people are pros, with the best cybernetics EarthTech can install. I don’t need to do more than point them in the right direction.” Vango chuckled. “I’d almost forgotten what a gloomy sonofabitch you were.”
“Realistic, I call it.” Vango’s radio crackled, and then Token continued, “Looks like that’s the go-code. Going VR.”
“Going VR,” Vango echoed, and the universe expanded around him as his brain and the chips resident there filled with the virtuality that allowed them to fight at speeds to rival computers.
Now, he was able to move his viewpoint to anywhere in the battle, in essence inhabiting a virtual holotank, though unable to affect more than his own local area. Still, the feeling was godlike, and was the unspoken reason he’d turned down command of a drone corvette. Maybe it was a cop-out, but he wasn’t nearly the best at remote control among the wing’s pilots...but from here, he might be able to make an important call at some critical juncture.
Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that, he thought.
***
“It’s gonna get ugly,” Ford said to no one in particular. “They’re coming into range of that flagship’s big guns.”
“Alpha’s too far away, and everyone else is taking random evasive maneuvers,” Scoggins said. “Ten million klicks is thirty light seconds. They can’t hit a maneuvering target at that range.”
“Unless they get lucky. They’re firing anyway,” Ford replied darkly.
On the holotank, Absen could see a plot of the enemy’s massive graser beam – one of them, he supposed – reach out and spear through Bravo’s formation. By sheer chance – space was vast, after all – it struck a missile bundle, causing a brief flare as it turned to plasma.
“The flagship is rotating slowly and decelerating intermittently,” Fletcher said. “It’s –”
At that moment, another beam licked out, destroying one of the many fighter drones spread out among the larger ships.
Fletcher continued, “It’s firing about every six seconds, apparently from a different weapon each time. Long-range optics show it’s punching loopholes in the expanded lattice from the inside to do so.”
“Can you get a look at what’s inside?” Absen asked.
“Not at this distance, but I’ll keep trying, sir.”
“How long until it’s likely to hit one of our ships?”
“More than an hour to close within two million klicks, sir. After that, hit probabilities rise above one percent per shot. Under one million, we can expect more than ten percent hit probability.”
Absen knew all this, of course; he’d run the sims many times. No matter what Task Forces Bravo and Charlie did, they could expect to lose a quarter to a third of their ships before the close battle between the swarm and EarthFleet began.
Now he knew what the four obsolete vessels of the Royal Navy must have felt like in the face of the German super-battleship Bismarck and its accompanying battlecruiser Prinz Eugen. In its one major ship-to-ship action, Bismarck blew the battlecruiser HMS Hood out of the water with its fifth salvo of long-range shells, and then drove off the outgunned battleship Prince of Wales after destroying its command center. The other two British ships had retreated as well.
By that time, Bismarck had taken only three minor hits, and sailed blithely away at the orders of its cautious flotilla commander, eventually to be hunted down by the entire Home Fleet and accompanying naval aircraft.
Absen had always wondered what might have happened had Bismarck attacked immediately as its aggressive captain had wished, instead of running as the admiral in charge ordered. Given its tremendous superiority, it was entirely possible she could have finished off the three surviving British ships and gone on to change the course of the war.
Well, the Scourge commander showed no sign of slipping off into the night, so it looked like EarthFleet, playing the role of the Royal Navy, was about to get pounded, and hard.
An hour later, Bravo had lost a few dozen small craft and one frigate to lucky graser shots. The Scourge flagship fired once every 6.32 seconds like clockwork, from a different weapon or turret each time, it seemed.
Fletcher reported identifying thirty-two distinct locations the grasers had originated, though the same weapon never fired twice in succession. Instead, it appeared the flagship rotated shots through different emplacements, probably building up power and routing it into each new system while the others cooled or recovered.
One of Absen’s greatest worries didn’t materialize for a while: losing one of ten Meme Monitors before the battle began. The graser beam would likely kill even a ship such as that – if it hit.
The Meme, though, had always possessed superior conventional acceleration, and the closer the flagship got, the more madly they dodged, spinning in constantly altering curves like oversized fireflies, burning their fuel as if there were no tomorrow.
Which, Absen admitted to himself, there may not be.
Now the admiral had a decision to make. Accelerating toward the enemy would minimize the time his task forces spent under the fire of those horrible big guns, but it would dramatically reduce the period in which they held the advantage against the swarm craft.
Conversely, falling back would extend the engagement time of the two fleets, favoring the Scourge flagship, but also giving the EarthFleet and Meme vessels a much easier time killing enemy assault boats, fighters and gunships.
As much as it pained him, the second choice was the right one, the more certain one, forcing a battle of attrition that, by the numbers, Earth had a good chance of winning.
That COA would also set up his sucker punch, the three suicide fireships.
Sending friends and colleagues to certain death would be the price of victory.
Why me? Absen asked the universe, or God, or...something. He’d never seen empirical evidence anything greater existed, but at times like these, when the weight of humanity’s future pressed down on him, it was hard not to cry out and hope someone answered, but no one seemed to.
“Pass to Bravo: begin the retrograde,” Absen said when the chrono hit its mark. “Transmit this: good luck and good hunting.” He felt like apologizing to the brave men and women standing in the way of oncoming death; they were the phalanx that had to bear the brunt, had to hold on while the cavalry got the glory of smashing into the enemy’s flanks.
At his order, more than threescore ships turned tail to the oncoming super-swarm and began to retreat. Absen had hoped this would prompt an undisciplined rush from the enemy, but the Scourges held their lines, their squadrons and their groups.
Once the ships of Bravo were backing up at the planned velocity, they turned back over and the larger vessels began desultory long-range fire with their heavy weapons. These constituted mere pinpricks, knocking down small craft here and there, more to buoy the morale of the EarthFleet crews than anything.
“Almost there,” Ford muttered, and Absen watched as the leading edge of the enemy approached a certain location in space. “Blow it, Michelle,” he said.
Almost a minute later the light from the detonation of hundreds of thousands of stealthed mines reached Conquest and TF Alpha, and a cheer broke out on the bridge. Only the Scourges’ unwavering Earthbound course had allowed the seeding of a minefield in their path.
Immediately afterward, the holotank blossomed with hundreds of thousands more small missiles, each locking onto a separate enemy craft. More than half of them survived to eventually impact their targets, aided by the confusion sown by the mines’ detonations.
Simultaneous with the minefield blast, the Meme had launched a wave of hypers. Hoarded until now, the weapons were largely ineffective against small craft, as they had no warheads and they were far less accurate than EarthFleet’s computer-controlled missiles.
What they did have, though, was incredible acceleration, on the order of nine hundred Gs. This allowed them to cover the distance to the enemy flagship much more quickly than the Scourge must have expected, for the wave of over one hundred thousand caused what could only be panic in the swarm on that flank. Every fighter in the area blasted to intercept and began firing frantically.
In response, the hypers twisted and jinked, all the while accelerating in the general direction of the enemy super-ship. “Come on, hypers!” Ford muttered, and soon the rest of the bridge crew took up the chant.
The dense flock of tiny-minded living rockets slashed through the swarm, losing tens of thousands to laser fire and collisions – yes, collisions, Absen could see, as the enemy craft deliberately or negligently got in their way – before closing on the enemy superdreadnought.
“I can’t believe it,” Scoggins said. “I never expected them to get through. We might win the battle right here!”
“The Scourge have fought the Meme before, Captain,” Absen said, on his feet in spite of his desire to present a cool image. He clasped his hands tightly behind his back and forced himself not to pace. “I’m sure they have some sort of countermeasure. In fact, I’m expecting it. The more intel we can gather, the smarter we can fight.”
To Absen’s eye it appeared as if Scoggins was right. At least fifty thousand missiles were poised to impact the enemy flagship, and he held his breath as the range dropped, clicking off the thousands of kilometers as fast as he could count aloud. “Five...four...three...two...one...”
A puff of pixels obscured the view of the flagship icon, and Absen snapped, “What just happened? Run that back!”
With the luxury of VR and Michelle’s control of apparent time, this was easy. The holotank record rewound and the view zoomed in to focus on the Scourge superdreadnought. In slow motion, the sheaves of hypers approached, hundreds of them slamming into the densely packed small craft vainly trying to form a wall against them.
And then, they passed through that barrier as if it were smoke, for the swarm held its distance from their command vessel. “How far?” Absen asked urgently. “How far away are they staying from the flagship?”
“About forty kilometers,” Michelle said.
In ultra-slow bullet time Absen watched the lead hypers. “Thirty klicks. Twenty. Ten...”
From ten thousand points on the porous skin of the Scourge flagship erupted domes of debris, propelled outward by what must be explosions. When the shockwave met the hypers, both dissolved in the chaos of thousands of impacts.
“Reactive armor,” Ford said. “Sort of.”
“More like our shotguns,” Scoggins said, referring to the old-style explosive charges affixed to the hull of EarthFleet warships, now made obsolete by the new laser modules. “The controlled blasts do far less damage than the incoming weapons would, taking them out en masse.”
“How much skin depth did they lose?” Absen asked.
“About five hundred meters on average,” Michelle answered immediately.
“Leaving them more than forty kilometers of latticework shield before we hit their hull. I’m beginning to see the reason they wrapped their ship in that stuff,” Absen mused. “It could be laced with antimissile and anti-boarding charges, small weapons, suicide troops...it’s a lightweight mobile fortress. It’s as if a ground tank were wrapped in a hundred meters of hardened ablative foam instead of three meters of dense armor. Brilliant.”
“It’s gonna take forever to drill through that shit, sir,” Ford complained.
“Not if we can shove Montgomery or Senegal down its throat,” growled a voice from the back of the bridge. Ford turned to lock eyes with Captain Riggin, who’d been silently watching the battle. “A half-billion ton ship striking at lightspeed isn’t going to be diverted by a bunch of ablative foam and explosives.”
“I hope so, sir,” Ford replied, turning back to his board. “I really hope so.”
Ten minutes later, the bloodbath began in earnest. Absen felt gut-punched as the heavy cruiser Quanzhou took a direct hit from that unstoppable graser, leaving a molten mass of bubbling ferrocrystal in its wake, and certainly no survivors. Five minutes after that, the frigate Astonish followed.
“Sir, we have to do something,” Ford said, eyes hot with anger.
“Steady, James. We knew this would happen. The sims said to expect more as the range closes.”
“On a positive note,” Michelle said, “they’re destroying a dozen of their own swarm craft with each shot, whether they hit one of ours or not.”
“Can’t we let the enemy catch up and start the engagement, sir?” Ford pleaded. “At least then those doomed ships would get some licks in before they die.”
“I know how you’re feeling, but we stick to the plan.”
Long minutes passed before the swarm edged into long plasma torpedo range. Two drone control corvettes and another frigate died, along with the first of the Meme Monitors. The huge ship did not disintegrate, but it succumbed just the same, its guts ripped out by ravening gamma rays.
“Now,” Absen said. “Johnstone, transmit for Bravo to reverse course and tell the Meme to move in to support, full assault. This is it. Okuda, synchronize our pulses and initiate.”
“Three, two, one, mark,” Okuda said, and the battle leaped toward them.