by Jay Allan
You’ll know in a minute, at least, whether this ship was hit hard enough to knock out the cluster missiles.
That was the most important consideration to his people as they made their escape. If the enemy battleships were able to launch massive volleys of the high-speed missiles, his strike force would almost certainly be annihilated.
He angled his ship hard, and then again, more or less in the opposite direction. He didn’t know yet about the missiles, but it was clear the battleship still had operational point defense turrets. The fire was fairly light, perhaps a third of what it had been on the way in. That was a good sign, and it was a big break for his pilots attempting to escape—at least until they ventured into the defensive zones of other, less damaged ships. But he knew the real question was the status of the missile launchers. His people had a chance, at least, to evade missile volleys from the other enemy battleships, those that hadn’t been targeted or had taken less damage. But if the ship his group had just attacked got off a barrage of those damned missiles as his people were making a run for it…
Stockton focused on the laser fire, and he jerked his arm back and forth, doing all he could to give the enemy targeting computers the digital equivalent of a headache. But mostly, he was blasting at full thrust, bringing his ship around to a vector toward the transit point and back to the fleet waiting at Calpharon.
And checking every few seconds for any sign of a missile launch behind him.
* * *
“Condor, I’m picking up signs of internal explosions. I think we really damag…”
The voice cut off suddenly, replaced by static, and then simply by silence. Reg “Condor” Griffen knew with cold certainty what had happened to the pilot who’d been reporting.
Lieutenant Garavant…that was her name. Darkhound.
She wasn’t sure the pilot was dead, of course. Perhaps her ship had only been damaged or had lost comms. But, in a certain sense, she hoped not. Better to go quickly. She wasn’t sure any of her people were going to make it out of the system, but anybody whose ship was less than one hundred percent was dead, even if they were still breathing.
She glanced down at the screen, looking for Garavant’s ship. It was gone.
That was one more of her people lost, but at least not another voice to call to her on the comm if she managed to get closer to the point, voices crying out, gripped by the cold realization that they were being left behind.
More than half her people were dead already. The target ship had managed to launch a spread of cluster missiles just as her people were closing to attack range. She’d been sure in that instant that they were all dead. But her people hadn’t been entirely abandoned by luck. That is, if losing almost sixty percent of their number in less than two minutes could somehow be twisted into a version of luck.
It had been a disaster by any conventional standard, save only the one that mattered. Losing half her people was better than losing them all. And the survivors had screamed in like avenging angels, taking their vengeance by planting torpedo after torpedo into the target ship. Hardly a bomber had missed, and even the immensely strong and powerful Highborn battleship had been hard hit.
She saw another plume as she stared at the scanner, a massive explosion and ejection of fluids and gasses into space. Her stomach was tight, her hands gripping the controls so hard her fingers ached. It didn’t matter much, she knew, if the enemy ship was destroyed, or if it was simply crippled beyond combat effectiveness.
But it did matter. It mattered to her, and to her dead pilots…and to those that would die on the desperate trip back to the transit point. War wasn’t all about tonnage and guns brought to bear. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t the kind of thing those who’d seen battle talked easily about. But as far as Reg was concerned, anybody who didn’t like it could all go screw themselves. She wanted to see the Highborn ship destroyed.
She wanted to watch her enemies die.
She turned toward the small long-range scanner screen. She wasn’t sure she really believed she had a chance, that any of her people did, but her attention was far better deployed making the best effort she could instead of staring vacantly, hoping to see the enemy ship explode.
She was still decelerating, which meant she and her people were moving even deeper into the system, and the enemy fleet. With a little luck, in about fifteen minutes they’d at least be heading back toward…
Toward what? Not home, certainly. Calpharon had been the capital of her enemy not long ago. Now, she and her people were fighting, and many of them dying, to save it. It didn’t make sense to her…and it did. She understood the threat the Highborn posed, and she knew it would take all the strength the Hegemony and the Rim nations could muster to beat them back.
But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
She looked down at the small cover over the ship’s safety controls. She’d planned to order her people to overload their reactors as soon as they came to a stop and headed back toward the point. Her logic had seemed sound. The longer they pushed their hardware past its rated endurance levels, the more pilots she would lose to critical failures. But there was no time. They had to give it all they had, and they had to do it now. Not in fifteen minutes.
“All squadrons, listen up. I want you to break open your safeties now. Let’s get those reactors up to one ten.” The words almost felt as thought they had slipped out of her mouth involuntarily. Amping up the reactors was one thing, but one ten was a big overload.
But there was no choice, no other way any of them had a chance.
The gloom was all around her, difficult to fight off…at least until her AI’s alarm sounded, and her eyes darted to the screen. To where the enemy battleship was.
To where it had been.
She stared at the emptiness, at a section of space that now held nothing but a surging vortex of energy and radiation.
Her people had done it. They had destroyed one of the Highborn battleships!
Pilots who had done that deserved better than to die running from some cursed system. By God, whatever it took, she was going to get her people the hell out of there.
Some of them at least.
“You all heard me…all reactors up to one ten. No…to one fifteen. Now!”
* * *
Tesserax sat in his chair, looking out at the Thralls at their stations. He was furious, and the sight of so many of his newly arrived battleships ravaged by the enemy’s small craft threatened to push him into a wild rage. He wanted to lash out at the captive humans manning his ship’s stations, to punish them for the losses his fleet was suffering before it even completed the jump into the target system. It was his sense of pride and dignity held back the rage, not any realization that the Thralls were in no way responsible for what was happening. It was beneath him to appear anything less than fully in control in front of inferiors.
He knew his decision to race through the system without proper scanning and patrol operations had backfired. The enemy had once again shown unexpected initiative. For an instant, he was ready to blame himself, but his hurried efforts to push forward had been driven not by his own recklessness, but by the time constraints place on him by Ellerax and the Command Council. The damage the battleships had suffered—and it was significant, though, perhaps not devastating—was going to be hard to explain, especially since blaming one’s superiors was likely not the politic way to present an argument to them.
If he took Calpharon, if he could make an argument that he’d brought the war to the brink of a victorious conclusion, perhaps the damage to the main battle units would be less…controversial.
Yes, if I give them Calpharon, if I break the Hegemony’s back in one great battle, even losses among the heavy units will be an acceptable price.
He wasn’t entirely sure he believed that, at least to the extent that a victory at Calpharon would all but end the war. A thought was growing somewhere deep in his immensely capable mind, one with upsetting implications. The humans were not suppo
sed to be so difficult to defeat. They were faring far better than the mathematical models suggested was possible. They were technologically inferior, barely more than animals compared to the Highborn. But there was something about the way they fought, a savagery, a tenacity, an almost mindless courage he couldn’t really explain. It shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t make a difference, not in the face of the Highborn’s relentless superiority…but it did. And in the backwater of his brain that was constantly analyzing his enemy, judging their moves, concern was growing. It wasn’t a primary thought, not yet, nor anything that would affect his plans. His confidence, his belief in Highborn superiority, were still firmly in control. But the concerns were slowly growing, nevertheless, building in strength.
But just then, as he sat in the center of the flagship’s control room, one thought was primary among all others. It was time to move forward. Time to attack the enemy, to seize the Hegemony capital.
Time to show the humans their rightful place in the scheme of things.
Chapter Fourteen
CFS Dauntless
Planet Calpharon (Hegemonic Capital)
Sigma Nordlin IV
Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)
Another group, maybe twenty more ships…
Tyler Barron sat on Dauntless’s bridge, staring at the huge main display, watching as bombers transited into the system from Vexa Torrent. It had taken every bit of cold resolve he could muster to authorize Stockton’s wild plan to ambush the enemy fleet, to lead two thousand pilots on a mission that seemed nothing less than utter insanity. The idea had seemed crazy, reckless…a hopeless attempt that could only throw away thousands of lives.
That last part was still a possibility—only a few hundred of the two thousand ships sent into the adjacent system had so far returned, and none of those carried Jake Stockton—but there had been some good news as well, at least in the communications from the first squadrons to emerge. Those formations were battered, most of them at half strength or less, but they all reported versions of the same thing. The ambush had been a complete success, at least in terms of damage inflicted. The enemy had hurried through the system, disregarded proper scanning and patrolling operations…and Stockton had punished them for it, unleashing his hidden fighters just as the heavy Highborn vessels were moving past the asteroid fields.
The wings had paid a heavy price for their success, that much seemed a certainty from where Barron sat. Still, they had drawn enemy blood, and the fleet needed every edge it could find. At least two dozen of the Highborn battleships had suffered at least some damage, according to the reports, and perhaps ten had been badly beaten up. Even factoring in the tendency of fighter pilots to exaggerate, that was good news, better than Barron had dared to hope.
At least one of the huge enemy ships, again, if the information coming in could be relied upon, had been utterly destroyed. That was welcome news. It helped Barron just knowing that the hulking monsters, which he’d still only seen on scanning records, could be destroyed. The smaller enemy ships had been tough enough in combat, and he’d nursed growing nightmares anticipating the coming battle against the ships he knew were the Highborn’s equivalent of his battle line.
“We’re up to three hundred fighters transited through, Admiral.” Barron could hear the tone in Atara Travis’s voice, the intense effort she was making to try to sound like reaching fifteen percent of the strike force returned was a good thing. He appreciated his longtime comrade’s effort, but she sometimes forgot just how well he knew her. The pain and grief she was feeling, and the fact that, even as she spoke, she was guessing in her head what the final number of survivors would be, came through to him loud and clear.
“They’re still coming.” Barron’s own response was even weaker. He doubted anyone on the bridge, and Atara least of all, would believe the fleet’s commander was anything but distraught over the vast losses the strike force had suffered.
The strike force he had sent into Vexa Torrent.
Still, he knew as he watched, he would do it again. There were no easy paths ahead, no low cost strategies to win the war. This was no less than a fight for survival, and almost any cost was acceptable if the Confederation itself survived.
Tyler Barron liked to think that he thought of all his people equally, that he worried for each and every spacer in his command as much as he did for the officers who’d served at his side for years. But it wasn’t true. He was human, subject to emotions and loyalties…and there were some people under his command who were just more vital to the war effort, more indispensable to him.
Barron counted Jake Stockton among the tiny group he considered his real friends, but perhaps more importantly, the commander of his fighter corps was the best pilot he had ever known, perhaps the greatest in Confederation history. And Stockton had developed into an even better leader, commanding the waves of bombers in the Hegemony War, and now against the Highborn, with astonishing skill. He’d created new tactics, honed the squadrons into devastatingly effective offensive weapons. Barron would mourn for his friend, but the idea of fighting the war without Stockton, the leader, was terrifying.
“Another cluster, Admiral…it looks bigger than the others, about forty ships coming through.
Barron looked at the display, hoping to see Stockton’s ship among the new arrivals, but not really expecting it. He knew Stockton well enough to realize the strike force’s commander would be the last to transit…or damned close to the last. Barron had urged Stockton to stay back from the fighting, to remain close to the transit point, but even as he’d uttered the words, he knew his friend would ignore them. Barron had wanted to push harder, to give Stockton express orders to direct the assault from a safer position…but that treaded too close to outright hypocrisy. Barron himself had never been very good at sending others into the fire while he stayed behind, and he couldn’t bring himself to insist Stockton do what he’d never been able to do.
Not that it would have mattered if he had ordered his fighter commander to return first. Jake Stockton had always been a virtuoso at twisting orders, and sometimes outright disobeying them. The only way Barron could have kept him out of the center of the fighting was to lock him in the brig and send the squadrons in without him…and he needed Stockton out there, making magic with his wings, as he had done so many times before.
“More reports coming in, Admiral. It definitely looks like the wings did some real damage over there.”
Barron listened to Atara’s words, but he heard her true meaning, unlike everyone else on the bridge. The attack had achieved much, more than they could have expected…but not enough. The enemy was still coming on, still too strong to stop, and the reports trickling in also suggested the Highborn invasion of Sigma Nordlin would begin in just a matter of hours. Perhaps even sooner.
Barron stared at the display for another minute, but then he turned abruptly. He had hundreds of ships, tens of thousand of spacers, and they were all waiting for his commands. The battle he’d anticipated, discussed endlessly with Chronos, for which his people had been preparing night and day, was almost there.
“Bring the fleet to yellow alert, Atara…and get me a line to Commander Chronos.” The combined fleet didn’t have an official commander in chief. That would have been impossible. It was miracle enough that so many ships from different nations, so recently enemies themselves, had gathered together. Barron understood all of that, but he was a bit edgy about it, too. His years of combat experience told him one thing…confusion wasn’t going to help the defensive effort. He believed that so strongly, he’d fallen into an unofficial and informal willingness to follow Chronos as effective overall commander. His trust of the Hegemony leader had grown considerably, though it was still shaky and conditional. But throwing his people at an enemy like the Highborn without meticulous cooperation between the elements of the fleet would be suicide. He wasn’t’ sure they had a real chance of victory no matter what they did, but he was damned certain they didn’t unless they fought tog
ether as a single unit.
“All units acknowledge yellow alert, Admiral.” A few seconds later: “I have Commander Chronos on your line.”
Barron put his hand to the side of his headset, tapping the small control. “Commander Chronos, the bombers returning have provided some locational details of the approaching Highborn forces. It doesn’t look like we’ve got a lot of time before thing start heating up. I’ve brought the Confederation contingent to yellow alert, and I suggest you do the same with the Hegemony commands. I’ve transmitted the positional data to your flagship. It’s only partial, but I think the implications are pretty clear.”
“I’ll review it all, Admiral, but your yellow alert is good enough for me to bring the Hegemony forces to stage two readiness.” Barron could hear Chronos shouting out the orders for a few seconds, directing his staff to bring all units to the Hegemony’s rough equivalent of yellow alert. Then, the Hegemony’s Number Eight was back on the line, speaking to him once again. “It’s not our way to get terribly emotional about impending combat, but I think it is safe to say that we’re both on the verge of fighting the largest battle either of us has ever seen. I would say the most desperate, but of course, they all seem desperate at the time, do they not, Tyler?”
“They do indeed, Chronos.” Barron nodded, finding himself feeling closer than ever to his former enemy. It was hard to even imagine how someone as reasonable, as like himself as Chronos often seemed, could also be a Hegemony Master, and the commander who’d led his forces through Confederation space, to Megara itself.