Mage-Captain Kulkarni’s words echoed on the flag deck. On the main display, the Republic fleet orbiting Centurion had formed up behind a shield of gunships.
The defenders had once again combined gunships from multiple cardinal forts, though their losses had reduced how many the fortresses could spare. They’d also launched the gunships from the two heavy carriers in the battle group, allowing them to assemble a shield of roughly four thousand gunships.
That shield made it hard to see just what the capital ships were doing, but it was still clear that they were moving out.
“Their course isn’t toward us,” Roslyn reported as she studied the vector. “They’re vectoring for Decurion.” She shook her head. “Those gunships alone could overwhelm the defenses General Tone has taken control of.”
“And they quite possibly have some way to shut down Decurion’s orbital platforms,” Kulkarni agreed. “It looks like all of the cardinals are holding on to a thousand gunships and they’ve stripped the inner forts this time. We might be able to press through, but not easily.”
“We could disable the accelerator ring, but we’d lose half the fleet and they’d retake Decurion,” Admiral Alexander said calmly. “And then we’d be trapped against the gas giant by the RIN.”
Roslyn shivered. She could see how that would wrap up in her head. A battered and depleted Second Fleet, short on munitions and trapped by an enraged enemy. There’d be no retreat for them.
The destruction of the Centurion Accelerator Ring would wreck the Republic’s logistics for years, but if the Protectorate lost Second Fleet…it was possible, even likely, that the Republic would still have enough fuel to finish the war.
“They’re leaving the Ring vulnerable, but they know we can’t take the risk of launching an attack,” Kulkarni concluded. “Still seems rather…blasé about their most critical strategic asset.”
“They’re counting on their psych profile of me,” Alexander replied. “I haven’t even seen that profile, and I can tell you it says I won’t leave General Tone and her people to die when I can protect them.” She smiled wryly. “That would be because I won’t.
“Take the Fleet to battle stations and set an intercept course. If they want to give us a chance to reduce their mobile forces, let’s take it.”
Roslyn could think of a dozen reasons why that was a bad idea—not least among them the fact that the starships in Centurion orbit were very nearly a match for Second Fleet.
If they were concerned about not having a combat-capable fleet after attacking Centurion, the same concern had to apply to engaging the enemy fleet.
But the Admiral was right. There were thousands of Marines and Navy spacers at Decurion. The fixed defenses could stand off a few ships, but the Republic battle group would retake the planet in hours and kill or capture them all.
“Chambers,” the Admiral said quietly, gesturing Roslyn over to her.
“Yes, sir?”
“Everyone else is going to be watching the RIN battle group,” Alexander told her. “That’s their jobs. I want you watching everything else.”
“Sir?” Roslyn was confused. That was also part of the sensor crews’ job—but her job was to support the Admiral.
“They know as well as we do that the margin on this fight is razor-thin,” her boss replied. “If they’re courting it, something has changed—and I don’t know what. So, I want you to keep an eye open for their game.”
“I can do that, sir,” Roslyn promised.
“I know,” Alexander confirmed, then sighed. “Two more bloody days. All I needed was two more bloody days.”
“Until what, sir?”
“I trust you, Chambers,” the Admiral told her. “But I’m going to hold that card close to my chest a while longer. We’ve been too badly penetrated for me to completely trust anyone yet.”
“They chose their course well,” Kulkarni noted. “Just far enough off and pushing just fast enough that we’re going to need to jump to intercept them.” The black Mage-Captain shook her head.
“It’s not going to help them, since we can jump out to meet them,” she continued. “It’s like they’re courting a full fleet engagement.”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing,” Alexander agreed. “But why?” The Admiral shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a feint, we have to honor it.
“Move us out from Centurion, heading for here.” The Admiral flagged a point on the display. “Let’s call that Point Alpha.”
Point Alpha was almost sixty minutes’ flight away at fifteen gravities, well into safe territory for the Fleet to jump. It was also, Roslyn noted, in the opposite direction of the Republic fleet—but along the same line.
“From Point Alpha, we’ll jump to Point Bravo, here.” Another icon dropped onto the screen. “That will move our velocity to being directly toward them, and we will emerge inside missile range. Let’s avoid their range advantage if we can, shall we?”
Righteous Shield shivered beneath them as the battleship’s engines came to life.
“Fleet is moving as ordered,” Kulkarni confirmed. “Fifteen gravities to Point Alpha.”
“And send…”—Alexander considered—“TK-5331 back to the current RV point with the logistics fleet. Make sure the captains there are fully updated on everything we’re seeing.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was an odd order in Roslyn’s mind, though it wasn’t like a courier ship like TK-5331 was going to change anything. But the freighters at the RV weren’t really going to change anything either.
“Keep the rest of the couriers receiving full telemetry updates and cycling at ten-minute intervals,” Alexander continued. “If this battle doesn’t go our way, I want the Protectorate to know why.”
Roslyn glanced over at the Admiral in surprise. If they could dodge the problem of being in the Republic’s range before they were in their own range, then it didn’t seem likely they’d lose this battle.
The Admiral met her gaze levelly…and then winked.
Something was going on—something related to the two more days Alexander had wanted.
Right now, however, Roslyn’s responsibility was keeping an eye on Centurion. Fighting the battle was everyone else’s job.
Her task was to find out why the Republic had decided to fight at all.
Fifty-five minutes at fifteen gravities left the Protectorate fleet with a significant velocity away from Centurion and a rapidly growing distance.
The Republic battle group wasn’t accelerating as quickly, though they’d started sooner and had known their destination all along. If they’d been a Protectorate force, Roslyn would have been half-expecting them to jump toward Decurion in the near future.
Certainly, the jump that Admiral Alexander was planning was a tricky calculation, if safe enough. It was hard to teleport a ship less than a light-hour. Part of the reason for the hour-long delay accelerating away from the Republic ships was to give the Mages time to make those calculations.
It was also giving Roslyn time to go over the sensor data available from Centurion. There had to be a reason the Republic had chosen this moment to launch their breakout.
It might be as simple as they knew what the Admiral was expecting in two days, but it was more likely that they had something else in the works. Some plan that required getting Second Fleet’s attention.
And pulling them out of position. Roslyn swallowed a curse as the realization hit her. A few moments later, her attempt to check into her suspicion ran into a roadblock.
There were drones on the far side of Centurion, keeping an eye on what was going on. Right now, however, the telemetry from those drones wasn’t being processed. It was going straight into cold storage as the sensor teams focused their computer cycles on the enemy fleet.
“Tactical, I need the sensor feed from the far side of Centurion updated and fed to my console,” she said into her headset, linking herself to the tactical team.
“We’re a bit
busy, Lieutenant,” the Commander running Righteous Shield’s tactical department replied sharply. “We need our processing cycles for the battle, not your curiosity.”
“Myopia kills, Commander,” Roslyn said, equally sharply. “If we don’t know what our enemy is doing, we get surprised—and in war, surprise means death. I need that feed, Commander—or you can explain to the Admiral why we don’t have it.”
The channel was silent.
“I’ll have a Chief run it for you,” the Commander replied. “I don’t know what you expect to see, though.”
The channel dropped and Roslyn set up her console, waiting for the data to get properly processed. She had minutes before Second Fleet jumped, and if she was right…
There.
The drones weren’t smart enough to be able to flag any given set of data as more important. They encrypted everything they saw and transmitted it to a relay drone that packaged all of the data from its subordinates, encrypted it again and fired it off to Second Fleet.
Decrypting that data and turning it into something humans could process took computer cycles, a precious resource on the edge of battle, and that was what the Republic had been counting on.
“Admiral! We have a convoy breaking free on the far side of Centurion,” Roslyn reported. “Looks like four battleships escorting multiple antimatter tankers.”
Unless she missed her numbers, that was enough fuel to operate the entire RIN for months. It was probably every scrap of antimatter that had been produced since Second Fleet had arrived two weeks earlier.
The flag deck was silent as Alexander zoomed the main display in on the convoy.
“If there are four battleships there, the deployed battle group is weaker than we expected,” she said aloud. She sighed. “But still powerful enough that we can’t spare the ships to deal with four battleships. Damn it.”
Catch-22. To take down a hundred and sixty million tons of RIN battleships, they’d need to send two-thirds of either their battleships or cruisers. That would leave the remainder facing five battleships and twenty cruisers, plus four thousand gunships.
“Two days,” Alexander repeated. “I swear these people get the same updates I do.”
“Sir?” Kulkarni asked. “Jump is in sixty seconds.”
“Get a courier updated and send them to the logistics train,” Alexander ordered. “We might get lucky. For now…proceed as planned.
“We can’t stop that convoy, so we’ll take the advantage they gave us to get it out. We may pay for it later, but they’ll pay for it today.
“Second Fleet will engage the enemy.”
40
There was the usual moment of chill from a jump…and then everything was pain. Roslyn doubled over as her gut rebelled. Her lungs rebelled. It felt like every muscle was spasming as pain wracked through her body.
She’d been involved in short jumps in training, down to three light-hours. Those had been uncomfortable but tolerable. This jump was less than three light-minutes, the shortest jump she’d ever been on by an order of magnitude.
Everything hurt. She lost precious seconds to stifling the pain and trying to focus, and as she took a gasping breath and looked around, she realized she was doing better than most of the flag deck crew.
Missiles sparkled across the display as she looked, though, as the fleetwide targeting plan activated automatically.
They’d emerged close enough to fire on the enemy and far enough away that the enemy wouldn’t see them until well after they’d arrived. The unexpected consequences of the short jump had cost them that “free” time, even with the computers reacting faster than the humans.
It would be another thirty seconds before they saw the Republic force’s reaction to their movement, but the Republic force would have been aware of their presence before they fired.
There were Mages who could carry out shorter jumps than this—the Picard Maneuver had been covered in her classes, for example—but most of the records she’d seen on microjumping suggested that it was a task best left to Hands and the insane.
Alexander took longer to recover than Roslyn did, and the Flag Lieutenant was about to undo her restraints to check on the Admiral when she finally raised her head and smiled grimly.
“How bad, Lieutenant?” she asked.
“We launched at jump-plus-thirty-five seconds,” Roslyn reported crisply. The display was now showing where the Republican forces had been at roughly that time, and the gunships were shifting to new formations.
“Enemy initial reaction appears to be their new standard anti-missile doctrine,” she continued. “And…there we go. Incoming missiles.”
It was an insane number of missiles. The Republic’s gunships had almost no ammunition capacity, but for the three salvos they launched, they increased the firepower of RIN forces almost tenfold.
“Twenty-seven thousand–plus incoming.”
“Leave it to Kulkarni and the others,” Alexander ordered. “We have a doctrine for this now.”
Mostly, from what Roslyn could tell, the RMN’s doctrine for gunship strikes was to expend a lot of missiles in defensive mode. Their first two salvos had been launched offensively, but she could see the icons shifting as their next salvos went out looking for missiles.
“Look for the trick, Chambers,” the Admiral continued. Alexander’s gaze was focused on the display. “I need to run this battle, but you don’t. The itch on the back of my neck says they’re still playing games.”
“Watching like a hawk, sir,” Roslyn promised.
“That’s funny.”
The third Republican salvo was in space now, but missile flight times were long. Over two minutes had passed since the first salvos had launched. It would be five more before the first RMN salvo hit and six minutes before the first Republican missiles arrived.
Hopefully, the defensive salvos would reduce how many of the Republican weapons made it through. There were over seventy-five thousand hostile missiles on the display.
But Roslyn had been told to ignore all of that, and distracting as it was, she was trying. Her focus was on the enemy formation, and there was an odd energy signature.
“Tactical, can I borrow a sensor cluster?” she asked. “I need active sensors pointed at a very specific spot.”
“Fine.” The Commander didn’t say anything beyond the one word, and Roslyn wasn’t even offended. They were in the middle of a battle, after all.
Roslyn trained that one sensor cluster—Righteous Shield of Valor had some three hundred of the things—on her strange energy signature and pulsed active sensors as hard as she could.
Almost a minute round trip. Missiles were going to start blowing up and wrecking her ability to see what the RIN was doing, but she needed her answer.
And there it was. Speaking of things blowing up…
Where she’d seen the spike of mysterious energy, there was now an expanding debris cloud that, from the scans, had been a twenty-megaton Republican cruiser with a crew of a thousand people.
“Why did one of their ships just blow up?” Roslyn muttered aloud, then silenced herself. Everyone else was fighting the battle. Her curiosity wasn’t that important.
She pulled up the energy pulse she’d IDed. It was familiar…really familiar. Where had she seen it before?
Santiago.
The realization hit Roslyn like a ton of bricks. Santiago. She’d seen that energy signature before at Santiago, when the Republican transports had jumped to avoid the RMN capturing their jump drives.
It was the signature of a ship coming apart when they jumped—and there was no reason a single RIN cruiser would have jumped on her own. She pulled the historical data…and there it was.
“Admiral Alexander, sir,” she exclaimed, finally turning to the fleet commander. “The RIN starships are gone.”
“What?” Alexander demanded.
“They jumped just after the last gunship salvo, sir,” Roslyn explained. “They lost a couple of ships, but most of the battl
e group is gone. I don’t know where they went, but they left the gunships as sacrificial lambs.”
“But they’re still launching missiles,” Kulkarni said. “That makes no…”
“If the gunships are running on autopilot, they could dump their entire life support system and use the extra engine power to strap additional missiles to the hull,” Roslyn pointed out. “They don’t need to duplicate the full firepower of the gunship formation, just of the two dozen starships that are missing.”
Both of Roslyn’s seniors were now staring at the display.
“She’s right,” Kulkarni said grimly. “Where could they have gone?”
“It doesn’t matter where they fled to,” Admiral Alexander replied. “What matters is where they could hurt us most.
“Orders to the Fleet: Admiral Medici’s squadron is to jump to Decurion and reinforce the defenses there.
“The rest of Second Fleet is to immediately jump to the location of the logistics convoy!”
They’d fired off over half of the missiles Second Fleet was carrying. If the RIN had somehow located the munitions ships hiding a light-year from Legatus, they could end the siege in one strike.
Despite their fears, the supply fleet was alone and intact. Three dozen freighters of various sizes hung in deep space with no reference points. They’d been cycling in and out over the course of the siege, ships joining Second Fleet to drop off their supplies and then heading back into Protectorate space.
Without the thirty-six ships currently present and the twenty more somewhere between Legatus and Ardennes, the Siege of Legatus would have been impossible.
“Everyone’s still here,” Kulkarni reported. “Courier TK-626 is reporting in as well.” She paused, looking at the display suspiciously. “I didn’t think TK-626 was attached to Second Fleet.”
Roslyn was watching the Admiral and could see the tension leaving her shoulders.
“She isn’t. I know who she’s attached to, though, and that’s the best news I’ve had all day,” Alexander told the operations officer. “Someone get me a link to Commodore Iceni.”
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