The Last Stand
Page 19
He looked at the approaching forces, his eyes moving from symbol to symbol, analyzing, calculating, trying to find some advantage to his side, despite the constant assertions from his officers that the two fleets were almost exactly equally matched.
Villieneuve had to trust in his admirals, and that was something difficult for him to do. It had been bad enough during wars, when defeat meant retreat, perhaps, or even an undesirable peace. A loss in the battle about to begin could very well mean utter destruction for his cause…and death for himself.
And victory will mean the same for the other side.
The civil war, the disaster unleashed by Ciara’s coup, had become a deadly threat. It could end with his victory, almost immediately if the battle went well enough. In a matter of hours, perhaps a few days, he could see the traitors crushed, and order restored to the Union. And he could have his vengeance. He would have Ciara thrown to a pack of starving hounds if he laid hands on her, but his rage was even stronger, more unfiltered toward the admiral who’d been a thorn in his side for far too long. If Denisov was foolish enough to survive defeat, to fall into Villieneuve’s hands, he would suffer agony as no man ever had.
But Villieneuve knew his own defeat and utter destruction could come as quickly, that even as he imagined his revenge, the next hours and days could see his own death. He’d rarely spent a lot of time considering defeat. He’d always believed his skill and intellect could find a way to victory. He’d been written off by many during the chaos after the Confederation War, but though all his old comrades on the Presidium were all dead, he had emerged more powerful than ever.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t entirely banish the thought that his end might have found him. He detested Denisov, but he couldn’t ignore the admiral’s unquestioned skill. Ciara’s newest ally was more capable than any of his own officers. Villieneuve held on to his confidence, mostly. But he also promised himself, if defeat came, if the end was near, he would never let his enemies take him alive.
Never.
* * *
“Division Three, course modification, 8g thrust at 320.140.080.” Denisov snapped out the command, his voice loud, firm, the very sound of confidence. Ciara was sitting at her workstation, wiggling around, still trying to come to terms with how hot and uncomfortable the survival suit was.
She knew Denisov, for all his honor and dedication, was lying as much as she ever had. It was a tone, perhaps, and not words, but she was sure the admiral was hiding the fear he felt, the trepidation at the uncertain outcome of the battle. She was confident in his abilities, as much as she could be when her own fate was on the line along with those of the admiral and his spacers.
“Division Three acknowledges, Admiral.” Ciara looked up at the display, trying to make sense of the clusters of small dots. Each of the two forces had about two hundred ships, divided between battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and smaller escorts. There were smaller dots now, too, fighters, she realized. She was no expert in naval tactics, but she knew enough to realize the duel between the battle lines would likely decide which side won. The fights going on already, destroyer squadrons exchanging fire as they zipped past each other, and cruisers fighting along the flanks of the main formation, were just opening festivities. The real dance was yet to begin. The fighter wings would battle for temporary supremacy, and the battleships would close and fight it out until one side gave way.
She tried to follow the fighting on the two flanks, to get a feel for which side was gaining an edge. Denisov was unreadable, but she thought she’d picked up concern from some of the other officers. Whether that was just understandable fear and tension, or whether the battle was going poorly, she had no idea.
She glanced over toward the command station. She wanted to ask Denisov, but she knew her fleet commander was busy. Distracting him might make her feel better for a few fleeting seconds, but it could only hurt her chances of victory. She turned back toward the display, just as half a dozen small dots vanished almost at the same instant. They were on the extreme edge of the formation, but it was clear the battle was heating up.
“Fleet Captain Duquesne on your line, Admiral.”
Duquesne…she remembered the officer, and even the particular bit of bribery she’d employed to bring him to her side, but she wasn’t sure what group of ships he commanded. She scolded herself, and promised if she survived the battle, she would make more effort to understand her forces and their organization.
She felt a tightening inside as another three dots winked out, all from her force, and then, just a few seconds later, a fleeting taste of excitement as no fewer than six enemy ships disappeared less than a minute later. The battle line had remained in place, but the fighting on the flanks had grown in intensity. She wondered what Denisov was planning, and what his counterpart might do. It was difficult to sit and wait to see how her subordinate proceeded, but she was smart enough to realize she could only impede the progress of the battle with her interference…and reduce her chances of victory.
She watched the furious fighting for another few minutes, and then her head snapped around as Denisov uttered a new set of orders. She listened to his words, and she felt as though some phantom hand had closed tightly all around her.
“The battle line will advance, Commander. All ships forward at 6g.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
CFS Dauntless
Sigma Nordlin System
Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)
The Battle of Calpharon – Open Fire!
Barron watched as the scanners updated the results of Dauntless’s opening shot. The malfunction in the battleship’s main battery had delayed its participation in the Confederation fleet’s broadside, and while the range had not exactly been close, it hadn’t been extreme either. The chances of a hit would have been less than one percent without the new scanner mods, but even the latest in targeting technology only increased the chances to perhaps six or eight percent. But that didn’t take into account the strange mystique that seemed to follow Confederation ships named Dauntless into battle.
The blast had scored a direct hit amidships, all four primary beams striking the target. It was as good a first shot as Barron could have hoped for, and he almost let out a loud scream when he saw the initial report. He held it in, barely clinging to his command dignity, but half a dozen officers on the bridge had shown rather less control. Barron didn’t admonish them. There was a thin line between fueling the elan of an elite fighting force, and maintaining discipline in battle. It was a balancing act he’d mastered after nearly two decades in command positions.
Besides, he’d been a hair’s breadth from his own unseemly display, and he wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.
He watched as the AI updated the damage reports. He felt a touch of disappointment when it became clear the enemy ship was still there, that whatever damage the shot had inflicted, it hadn’t ruptured the antimatter core or caused other critical, ship-destroying damage. But his excitement at the hit remained, and it even grew as the reports of secondary explosions and expulsions of internal materials made it increasingly clear that the Highborn vessel had suffered significant damaged, even if it hadn’t been outright crippled or destroyed.
“Maintain a lock on that ship, Commander. Gunnery, you control navigation…bring us in and hit that thing again.” Barron felt a touch of discomfort at the venom dripping from his voice. It was his battle persona, he knew, at least in part. But he felt angrier than he had in past conflicts, and he craved the blood of his enemies with a savagery that was new to him. Perhaps it was resentment over being dragged away from his family, or exhaustion after so many years of almost uninterrupted war.
Or, maybe he knew this would be his greatest test, the hardest fight he’d ever endured. For six years, he had faced the seemingly unbeatable ships of the Hegemony, struggling to find a way, any way, to defeat them. Now, he looked out at an enemy whose weapons tore into those great battleships that had so ravaged his own fo
rces, slicing them open like used storage canisters. It had been difficult to accept an enemy with superior technology. That had been the Confederation’s place on the Rim for many years, the most advanced power. But now, Barron felt as though his people had lost two steps on that scale, and he wondered if they could catch up, if they would ever be able to hold their own against the enemy. Or next to their new allies.
“Primaries fully charged, Admiral.”
He stared at the enemy ship, and he felt his hands clench into fists. He didn’t know if his people could catch their enemy’s technology, or defeat them in the long run, but he knew what he was going to do just then.
“Very well, Commander. Fire.”
* * *
Reg Griffin sat in her cockpit, staring out at the black nothingness surrounding her ship. Her body was soaked in sweat, the survival suit slick and uncomfortable as it rubbed against her bare skin below. The perspiration had been more from stress than heat, but now, she’d turned her life support systems to minimal power, and the slickness turned icy and cold as the temperature in her fighter plummeted. She’d managed to set a course more or less back toward the fleet with her last drops of fuel, but with the battle line moving into a close-range firefight, she doubted there would be time to send out rescue ships to gather strays. If she was going to have any chance to survive, she had to buy as much time as she could…and that meant conserving her air and enduring the tooth-chattering cold.
She hadn’t activated her beacon yet, and that meant, even if Stockton and the rest of the strike force were looking for her, trying to get a location to send help, they probably wouldn’t find her. That was a problem, but with her ship moving at barely five kilometers per second, she was still closer to the enemy than she was to any friendlies. She figured there was a good chance the Highborn would ignore a single ship as small as a fighter, especially when it was moving away, but she didn’t think it would be a very good idea to ping away with her beacon and challenge that assumption.
She was scared, of course, as anyone would be, both for herself, and for the rest of the strike force. The pilots who managed to return, who reached their motherships and their landing bays, would only turn around and launch again…and this time they would come out in small groups, as their launch platforms were able to conduct launch ops in the heat of their own battle. The bombers would move forward again, but this time they would endure the brunt of the enemy missile barrages in far smaller waves. Hundreds would die, perhaps even more, before the survivors got close enough to launch a second round of attacks. It was a grim prospect, but as daunting as the future might appear to the pilots she’d so recently commanded, the shadows looming over her were far longer. Without fuel, her life support would only last a few hours, four or five at the most. That wasn’t long, not in terms of space combat. The pilots who would soon be heading back toward the enemy faced grave danger, but they had a better chance than she did, a reality she tried to ignore, if without much success.
She glanced down at the screen. It was dim, set to minimum power. She’d have turned it off entirely to conserve energy, but she had to monitor her location, pick the right moment to activate the beacon. It was probably her only chance, and as much of a longshot as it seemed, if she could manage to time it when the ships of the second wave were launching, she just might be able to get someone’s attention.
It was worth a try. She waited patiently, her eyes fixed on the screen as she shivered from the cold working its way ever deeper into her.
But cold wasn’t going to stop her any more than despair was. Reg Griffin had done many things in her career, but she’d never given up.
And she didn’t intend to start now.
* * *
“I want that transmission line functional in fifteen minutes, Lieutenant, and I’m only giving you that long because of the kindness of my heart.” Anya Fritz stood on a catwalk, about ten meters above Dauntless’s main engineering deck, shouting out commands one after the other at her sweating engineers. She’d felt a little foolish at first, crawling around the access tubes of Dauntless’s engineering section in her flag officer’s uniform, but she’d quickly found a solution to that problem. She had practically torn the coat from her back and thrown it to the floor. It was still down there, in the middle of the main deck in a crumpled heap. She had no use for it, and no one else had the guts to touch it.
“Commodore, we’ve got to test the new cables before we can reroute the power flow back.” The officer sounded the same as all her people did. Stressed, at their wit’s end…and not because they were in battle, facing a deadly enemy. No, the Highborn forces faced off against the fleet were an ethereal threat inside the battleship’s immense engineering section, at least next to the force of nature standing right there shouting at them.
“Then you’d better get on it, Lieutenant. You wasted twenty seconds already. You going to throw more of your time away bitching at me?” Her tone was harsh, some might say caustic, but Fritz was focused on the real enemy, and she knew, perhaps better than anyone on Dauntless, just what the Highborn’s deadly weapons could do to the Confederation flagship, and every other vessel in the fleet.
“Yes, Commodore.” The engineer didn’t elaborate. She hadn’t expected him to. There weren’t many out there who could stand up to her when she was driving forward at full speed. She’d had that reputation for years now, since her days as a lieutenant commander, and even earlier than that. Her ascension to flag rank had done nothing to blunt it.
There was an absurdity to a commodore running around directing repairs on a single ship, she knew that…but Dauntless was not just any vessel. It carried one of the best crews the navy had ever known, not to mention Admiral Barron, in her view, unquestionably the greatest commander the Confederation had ever seen, his illustrious grandfather included. Plus, it carried Admiral Travis, Jake Stockton…and, of course, herself. If Dauntless fell in battle, it would be little less than a decapitation blow to the Confederation war effort. And she knew well enough that Tyler Barron would never hang back, that the battleship would be in the thick of the fighting, as she’d always been before.
All that was only part of the battleship’s importance, though. The vessel had become a symbol to the spacers of the fleet, and she’d slipped into the place her predecessor had occupied, even gone beyond it. The old Dauntless had died saving the fleet from destruction, and the next vessel to carry the name—and much of the same crew—had inherited that glory, and added more.
The first hit Dauntless suffered had been a fluke, she knew, a lucky shot by some Highborn gunner or AI. The damage to the primaries had also been a case of extreme misfortune, one she’d now managed to correct. Fritz didn’t care for the superstition so prevalent among spacers, but she couldn’t ignore the chatter around her, the concerns that the early damage to the ship had been an unlucky start to the battle.
Fritz didn’t want to believe in luck, but she’d seen things she couldn’t explain any other way. Jake Stockton was an example, certainly. She wondered what the odds of his surviving as long as he had, battle after battle, one desperate mission after another. She remembered Stockton’s mentor, Kyle Jamison, himself an outstanding pilot. Dead. The original Blue squadron…twelve out of fifteen dead, and one of the three survivors was Stockton himself. She remembered dozens of pilots who’d served in the wars in which she’d fought, and none had endured as Stockton had.
He was skillful, the best by any measure. But was that enough? Did he have something else, something not really understood by humanity? Did Dauntless? The old ship had been destroyed, of course, but her crew had survived to transfer the flag to the next hunk of metal to carry the name.
The whole thing fought with her analytic mind, but she realized, somewhere along the line, she had begun to believe in luck, at least to an extent.
She wondered what it was, how it worked. And, most urgently, she wondered how long it lasted…and what happened when it ran out.
* * *
“”Yes, sir…we’ll have you ready in ten minutes, maybe less.” The gruff flight deck team leader shouted out a series of commands, as Stockton turned and walked across the deck toward the water station. He’d thought about grabbing a quick bite before he launched, but his stomach was too twisted in knots for that. But he was thirsty, and he reached out and filled a cup with cool water.
The launch operation was going to be a nightmare, he knew that already, and as if to emphasize the difficulties of sending out squadrons while the mother ship was in combat, the bay shook hard, and half the water in his cup spilled onto his flight suit. For an instant, he’d been afraid Dauntless had taken a hit, but then he realized it had just been a particularly hard evasive maneuver.
He stood for a moment, watching his crew already climbing all over his Lightning. He felt an urge to go back to flight control, to see Stara, even for a minute. The two had been together for several years already, after a fairly long period of start and stop flirtation, but they’d known precious little peace in that time. A few weeks of shore leave was just about all they’d known of life as a couple outside the rigors and danger of war.
No, you don’t have time now. You can see her when you get back…
Stara was his first thought, but his mind moved on to other desires, everyday things that seemed like unattainable luxuries. Sleep…hours and hours of it, uninterrupted. And a shower, the feeling of hot water stripping away days of recycled Jake Stockton…followed up with a fresh, clean flight suit. But all of it was out of his reach, at least at that moment. He’d just refilled his cup and sucked down about half the water, when the flight chief signaled to him his ship was ready.