He got the answering chuckles he had hoped for…and then it was time. The flashing red icon showing the projected location of the Kenmiri squadron went solid as O’Flannagain’s fighters picked up their targets.
Six light-seconds wasn’t enough to require using the starfighters’ subspace communications for decently timed data, but it made a noticeable difference. Even with live communication to the starfighters, Henry’s preference was to let the strike commander make the call.
He’d authorized her to engage and given her the target parameters. Everything after that was the FighterDiv Commander’s call—and with only twelve seconds to make the shot, lightspeed coms wouldn’t have been fast enough.
Even subspace coms wouldn’t have, not really. In those twelve seconds, someone had to make the call, someone had to give the order, and eight UPSF starfighter pilots had to acquire targets and launch their missiles.
It wasn’t much time—but it was enough time and thirty-two new icons appeared on his screen.
And then froze.
“We’ve lost real-time data,” Ihejirika reported. “Dragoons are behind the planet; they did not come under fire.”
The lightspeed delay caught up—and showed that the fighters’ safety had been entirely a question of timing, as a salvo of laser fire cut through empty space and into the surface of the gas giant. O’Flannagain’s timing had been perfect.
“Missile flight time is forty-five seconds,” the tactical officer continued. “We have confirmed two, I repeat, two, gunships in the enemy line.”
“O’Flannagain targeted the closer one with everything, I presume?” Henry asked.
“Yes, ser,” the junior man confirmed. “Will that be enough?”
Henry didn’t answer. They’d know in less than thirty seconds and he had his suspicions. It might have been sixteen years since he’d flown fighter strikes against Kenmiri warships, but thirty-two missiles would have been iffy then.
And the Kenmiri might be fielding the same classes—and in some cases, even the same ships—as at the beginning of the war, but those ships had been upgraded and updated over the last seventeen years too.
Missiles were too small for subspace communicators. There was no space to spare in a weapon that needed to accelerate at ten KPS2 for 150 seconds and do something useful at the end of that.
“Kenmiri defenses engaging.”
“They’re slow,” Henry murmured. “Missile defense should have been online already when they came around the planet. We could have been stacking time-on-target salvos for ten minutes of the time they were behind it.”
If he’d had the logistics of an actual combat campaign, he’d have considered it. Right now, though, the only missiles he had for this entire mission were in Raven’s magazines. It wasn’t supposed to be a combat mission.
The reason the thought occurred to him, though, was because he’d seen Kenmiri commanders use it.
“They’re efficient enough,” Ihejirika replied. Starfighter missiles came in slowly at the best of times, and these had been fired from close range. The same forty-five-second flight time that was giving them any advantage of surprise at all meant they were vulnerable to the enemy defenses.
“We’re down twenty missiles alrea—warhead conversion!”
The missiles exploded ten thousand kilometers short of their targets. Carefully designed magnetic fields shaped a ten-megaton fusion warhead, converting the entire mass of the missile and its remaining fuel into a ball of coherent plasma that completed the rest of its trip in a tenth of a second.
The UPA couldn’t build plasma cannon like the Kenmiri yet, but their conversion warheads were pretty close to the same final effect at impact.
Ten missiles survived long enough to convert and three still missed outright, sending balls of plasma off into deep space, where they would dissipate into harmlessness in under a minute.
Seven blasts, each about half as powerful as the plasma cannon the ship was built around, hammered into the Kenmiri gunship. Henry had seen the results from close up in the past and shivered at the memories.
Armor plating would be vaporizing and splintering. Holes would be torn deep into the ship, where the plasma would disperse itself through the ship’s atmosphere, turning entire sections of the vessel into a subdivision of hell.
Seven hits wouldn’t be enough to destroy a Kenmiri gunship, but…
“Target is falling out of formation and leaking atmosphere,” Ihejirika reported. “Power signature is flickering. I’d say she’s lost multiple reactors and… There go her engines. She’s dead in the water, ser.”
Henry paused, his gaze fixed on the gunship. Two million kilometers would be a ninety-five-second flight for his main gun, but an un-maneuvering target…“dead in the water” was “blood in the water” for a ship with an artificial gravity railgun.
“Flag her as disabled and ignore her for now,” he ordered. He could see his people clearly through the screens surrounding him, and that had not been the order Ihejirika had been expecting.
“They’re not Kenmiri, Commander,” Henry told the other man. “They’re bandits. They might have been Vesheron. They might call themselves Vesheron still, but they’re bandits.
“And while I’ll shoot down bandits and I’ll kill bandits, we’re not at war with bandits.”
He smiled grimly and studied the remaining ships.
“Having said that, the rest of them seem to think that they’re going to try and capture a gravity shield out of this. Let’s disabuse them of that notion. Commander Bazzoli!”
“Ser!”
They hadn’t crossed the half-KPS2 line that would actually leak thrust into the ship and Henry didn’t see any reason to change that.
“Bring us about. Direct course toward the enemy, combat acceleration. Commander Ihejirika, engage the remaining gunship with missiles once you have the range. Only the gunship, if you please.”
Their missiles would come in far faster than the starfighter missiles had. On the other hand, they were a lot more expensive and Raven only had so many missiles.
“If the escorts still want to pick a fight after both of the gunships are down, we’ll engage with the grav-driver and the lasers. We don’t know what else this mission is going to bring us. Let’s keep our missiles for later if we can.”
The bandits were surprisingly silent for having lost one of their most powerful ships. They were also still determinedly coming on, and Henry mentally saluted their bravery. They were dumb, but brave.
“What was their plan?” Iyotake asked on their private channel. “I mean, six escorts with a dreadnought would be about an even fight, but just six escort-tier ships on their own?”
“Their plan was to only run their engines on the other side of the gas giant,” Henry replied. “They’d have come around the planet with about two hundred KPS of velocity and the gas giant’s heat signature behind them as they approached us. Against a Jaguar, they probably could have made it all the way to a light-second or even closer before we could pick them out from the background radiation if they were careful.”
At a light-second, without the grav-shield up, the escorts could potentially have knocked out the battlecruiser’s engines and weapons—or even just the power generators. That would have allowed them to board and capture a UPSF warship.
It wouldn’t have worked out that easily for them, even against the older battlecruiser whoever was in charge had been anticipating. Even if they’d managed to board, Thompson’s people would have massacred them in the close fighting to follow.
“So, their plan has been blown from the beginning?” the XO asked.
“From the moment Ihejirika picked them up,” Henry confirmed. “Assuming, of course, that your team in CIC is sweeping to make sure no one else is trying to sneak up on us.”
Iyotake couldn’t make an actual rude noise without the CIC crew hearing him, but the intent carried across the channel quite handily.
“I’ve got sensor drones spread ou
t now to get different angles on the approaches from the gas giants and the star,” he confirmed. “Recalling them will be a pain, but no one is sneaking up on us.”
“Then yeah.” Henry shook his head. “The commander over there is familiar with the Jaguar-class and misjudged us. Now, though, they’re committed to their course.”
“If they’re that familiar, though, you’d think they’d know they can’t fight us.”
“They know,” Henry said softly. “And I wouldn’t expect a group of bandits to be this determined. They should have broken off behind the gas giant. Without an active threat, we wouldn’t have pursued.
“Now, though…now we’ve punched them in the nose and they’re angry.”
“Or there’s something else going on,” his XO replied.
“The only thing I can think of is that someone is damned determined to make sure we don’t make it to the Gathering,” Henry admitted. “And…well. That gunship is still a pretty hefty threat, XO. And there’s definitely people out there who will pay through the nose for UPSF ship parts.”
That was why Raven’s fusion reactors could be overloaded as a self-destruct, after all. The UPA had sacrificed a lot to make sure that their gravity technology stayed out of Kenmiri and Vesheron hands.
Henry sure as hell wasn’t handing it over to an unknown new player…assuming that was what he was looking at.
If the attackers had been waiting for him, after all, then they’d known about the Gathering.
Chapter Fifteen
“Missile range in twenty seconds,” Ihejirika reported. “Permission to engage as specified?”
Henry chuckled.
“Engage the enemy, Commander,” he ordered. It was an unnecessary exchange, but the situation could have changed since he’d given the original orders.
Instead, the enemy had stayed on their course directly for him. They’d ignored Moon’s attempts to communicate the entire time and seemed undaunted by Raven coming about to meet them.
The growing relative velocity extended the range of his missiles in a way it really didn’t for his gravity driver or lasers. They’d have eight minutes in missile range before anything else entered weapons range.
“Enemy missile launch,” Iyotake reported from CIC. “Standard dispersal pattern, standard acceleration. Estimate ninety missiles inbound.”
Henry exhaled and nodded, watching as twelve green icons added themselves to his displays as Raven’s missiles fired. That was what he’d expected. A Kenmiri escort had twenty missile launchers. A gunship had ten.
Those missiles weren’t really a threat. Close detonation outside the shield could cause Raven minor trouble, but the gravity shield would tear missiles apart. He had special warheads for his own missiles that would punch right through a grav-shield. The UPA had never encountered gravity shields on somebody else’s ships, but that was only a matter of time.
“Permission to engage missiles with defensive lasers?” Ihejirika asked.
“Delegate it to your assistants,” Henry ordered. Probably redundant, but this crew was still too green for his taste. “But yes.”
Just because no one had demonstrated penetrator warheads yet didn’t mean they didn’t have them. Some kind of surprise would go a long way to explaining why the bandits were picking a fight like this.
New icons flickered across his displays as more heat radiators deployed out from the hull, these specific to the missile-defense lasers arrayed along Raven’s wings. A handful of seconds later, the missiles entered Raven’s outer defense perimeter and the lasers opened fire.
The Kenmiri-built ships’ defenses had opened fire a good ten seconds earlier. The Kenmiri had always had better lasers than the UPA.
They didn’t have better missiles…mostly because the UPSF had acquired lots of samples of intact Kenmiri weapons over the years. Functionally, Raven’s missiles were identical to her opponents’.
“Direct hit!” Ihejirika barked. “Two missiles converted, one missed, one hit. Target appears…materially intact.”
That was why they’d send six salvos flashing across space in the five minutes it had taken the first salvo to arrive.
“Hold fire on missiles,” Henry ordered. “At this point, they’ll be in range of the main gun before anything we fire hits them.”
Two missiles through the defenses of five ships was impressive. The Kenmiri had shot down ten of their missiles—and Raven’s crew had handled eighteen of theirs. That had still left over seventy.
Enough of them exploded into conversion warheads that he didn’t immediately realize they hadn’t all exploded.
“Ser, I need you to take a look at this,” Song cut into his feed.
“Show me,” he ordered, turning his chair to look at the screen showing him engineering’s data.
“Seventy-two missiles made it past the defenses. Forty-five were conversion warheads. We didn’t have a blowthrough, not a surprise with the power level involved.
“The other twenty-seven were either conventional warheads or kinetic-kill vehicles. They hit the shield.”
“We’re still here, so I’m guessing they’re scattered in pieces across a few thousand cubic kilometers,” Henry pointed out. “What did you see, Colonel Song?”
“We had some weird resonance bursts in the shield metrics as they hit,” Song told him grimly. “Strained the emitters pretty badly, actually. We’ve got secondary emitters if we lose any, but I don’t have the power available to keep them all up.”
“Wait, are you telling me they could bring the shield down?” Henry demanded.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We didn’t use resonance when we built our penetrator warheads, but the theory was discussed. They’re certainly straining our system with these things. With enough of them…”
“How many is enough, Colonel Song?” he asked as the second salvo hit home. He could see it on the display now, sectors of the shield emitters flashing orange warning colors.
“They’ve hit us with sixty of the things in the last minute and we’re still here, so I’ll say more than that,” Song said sharply. “I’m going to start swapping over emitters after each hit. That should spread the strain without risking burnout anywhere.
“These aren’t going to bring the shield down, Captain…but someone has been very clever.”
“Not clever enough,” Henry replied. “But enough, I suspect, to have convinced our friends out there that they did have something that worked.”
He smiled.
“Unfortunately for them, it didn’t. Commander Ihejirika!”
“Sixty seconds to grav-driver range,” the tactical officer replied instantly as a third salvo tore itself to death on the shields. “We’ve hit the gunship half a dozen times. She’s bleeding air and she’s bleeding power, but my scans say she’s still got a charge in the gun.”
“That’s not great, Commander,” Henry pointed out. The plasma cannon wasn’t a lightspeed weapon like the lasers, but it was a lot closer to it than the gravity driver was.
“Target her at three-fifty with the main gun and fire a conversion round,” he ordered. “Let’s see if we can breach that chamber before she shoots us with it!”
At three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, the slug would have a fifteen-second flight time. Hits weren’t likely…but they weren’t impossible, either. Not with a conversion round with a fifteen-thousand-kilometer kill zone!
“On your order,” the tactical officer replied. “Firing…now.”
There were very few things that a Captain could feel through the hull of his spaceship. Inertial compensators and a battlecruiser’s massively powerful engines combined to protect the crew from almost any exterior or interior force except for the skip drive itself.
Firing a gravitational linear accelerator that took a projectile from zero to 0.07 cee in a quarter-second still shook the ship. There was no recoil created by the focused gravitational field, but even the shields wrapped around the gun didn’t prevent the gravit
y field itself rippling as the projectile flashed by underneath their feet.
“Impact in fourteen seconds,” Ihejirika said calmly. “Round is tracking on target. If we miss, that’s it, ser. She’s in range for the plasma gun a few seconds after that.”
And the plasma cannon was the last thing on the board that Henry was actually worried about. The lasers might hurt Raven. The plasma cannon could hurt Raven. Battered as that gunship was, she was the only thing in the system that threatened him.
“Target is evading. Projectile thrusters are active.” The tactical officer continued his litany. “Thrusters expended. Five seconds. Four. Two…conversion.”
Every laser in the Kenmiri fleet had been focused on the projectile, but seven percent of lightspeed was enough to cause serious problems with their tracking. They’d probably even hit it, but the weapon was surrounded by a layer of ablative armor for just that circumstance.
Conversion on a grav-driver slug was even more impressive than on a missile warhead. The two weapons were roughly the same size, after all, and the slug didn’t need to worry about engines.
What hit the gunship was a plasma burst more powerful than its main gun could generate. But even as parts of the ship blasted away into space, Henry could tell that they’d failed at the main objective.
They’d hit the gunship in the rear third of the ship, gutting her engines and killing her acceleration…but she was already moving fast enough to bring the big gun into range.
“She’s firing,” he said softly. No one would report that when it happened—at 0.8 cee, there’d be no time.
The plasma bolt held coherence for just under three hundred thousand kilometers—twenty times as long as any plasma weapon the UPA had ever built—and Raven didn’t have time to dodge. It hit the gravity shield dead-on, a perfectly angled shot that maximized their chance of blowthrough.
And they got it.
“Blowthrough,” an NCO snapped, and warnings flashed across the bridge. Then…nothing.
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