by Jay Allan
Now…just don’t panic yourself…
* * *
“We’re picking up energy readings from the transit point, Captain.” Tarleton’s voice was guarded, but Eaton could sense the hope in it. She understood, but she wasn’t sure she shared his feelings, or at least that she should let herself dare to.
She hadn’t had a choice. As guilty as she felt about leaving Hayes and the last of his pilots behind, she knew there had been no other way. The Hegemony battleships would have obliterated her small, weak vessels in a matter of minutes…and she couldn’t allow that. Whatever happened, however many losses her people took, she had to keep her fleet in being.
She had to delay the enemy convoy, keep those battleships away from Megara until the battle there was over.
She looked at the display. Tarleton was right. Energy readings, weak ones. Just what a small group of fighters might give off.
Or a hundred natural phenomenon.
Transit points were poorly understood, and anything from heavier than normal cosmic rays to clumps of dust or particulate matter passing through could mimic the signs of ships transiting.
Eaton didn’t really think she was looking at an asteroid or something else of that sort in the tube. She suspected, as did Tarleton, and likely the rest of her people watching, that the energy readings were, in fact, caused by Hayes and his people.
Her real fear was how many of them would emerge, how many would survive the transit.
Pilots could get lost in the strange alternative space between points, or they could succumb to various effects in their poorly-shielded fighters. It was possible none of them would emerge, energy readings or not. Or ships could come ripping out of the point, flying on unchanging courses, their dead pilots transfixed at the controls.
Her mind raced, imagining every disaster possible, and preparing to endure the blame for all of it. None of her people would place the fault on her, of course, and neither would Hayes or any of his pilots who survived. Only one person would hold her totally, inescapably responsible.
Her.
As she wrestled with herself, tried to hold back the doubts and second-guessing, a contact appeared on the scanner. Even before the AI confirmed it, she knew.
It was a Lightning.
And a few seconds later, another one came streaking through, and then another.
She watched as ships burst out of the eerie darkness of the point, counting them softly under her breath until she realized they had all made it
She felt a wave of excitement, but it was stunted, held back. Ships emerging didn’t mean her pilots had made it. More than one unshielded ship had come out of a transit point with its crew dead, ghost ships flying back into normal space.
She waited, her eyes on the display, hoping. She found herself holding her breath, and she forced an exhale and sucked in a fresh lungful of air. Then, the comm crackled.
She snapped her head around, staring over at Tarleton’s station. Her tactical officer was wearing his headset, and for an agonizing few seconds, he sat there completely still, his face unreadable, like stone.
Then, she saw a smile forming, and she felt hope.
“They’re through, Captain…all of them.” His words, especially the last three, taking a moment to fully sink in.
A wave of relief washed through her, and she slapped her hand down on the armrest of his chair. All of them! Remember to talk to Admiral Barron when we get back. Stanton Hayes deserves a medal or a promotion…or something!
But first things first. She had to get her ships away from that point, and get them set up to hit the enemy as they came through. A good hard strike at the transiting battleships was just the thing to slow that convoy down.
And buy Tyler Barron the time he needed.
Chapter Thirty-One
CFS Hermes
Olyus System
Year 320 AC
The Second Battle of Megara – “To hell now…and if we’re lucky, back again”
Yes!
Barron hunched forward, staring coldly at the display, tense as he always was in battle. He’d heard the sound of the primaries firing again, and then he saw the AI’s representation of the shot, an electric blue streak of light…and then a glowing halo around the closest Hegemony battleship. A hit.
The range was still long, and Barron had ordered the fleet’s ships to cut thrust and remain in place. He had twenty Confederation battleships, all armed with the longer-ranged primaries and, positioned alongside that force stood Vian Tulus’s four upgraded vessels. Anya Fritz and the shipyard managers and industrialists she’d terrorized had gotten the work done on all of them, and now they took their place, in the only spot Barron expected Palatians to be.
The front of the formation.
The long-range duel had been light in terms of damage—both taken and inflicted. Targeting was difficult at such distances, and the vast majority of shots had gone far wide of the targets. Barron didn’t like wasting time…but he had two thousand bombers inbound against the battered Hegemony ships, and he saw no reason to put his battleships at any greater risk than they were already exposed to, at least not before the squadrons hit.
Stockton’s squadrons would do the job…and by the time they had completed their strike, the rest of the fleet would be in the system, the fleet’s massive transit operation complete. That meant over two thousand more bombers—perhaps veterans on average, like the pilots in the current wave, but a monumental force, nevertheless.
Barron moved his finger across his workstation, adjusting the perspective on the main display. He zoomed in on the area around the Hegemony battleships, just as two-thirds of Stockton’s squadrons were making the final approach. The rest of them had veered off, something that had confused Barron, for just a moment. Then, he’d realized Stockton’s ruthlessness, the cold-blooded tactics his strike force commander was employing. The ‘missing’ bombers had moved around the enemy flank…and positioned themselves along the prospective line of retreat. Stockton intended to destroy every one of the forward enemy battleships, and not to let even one escape to join the rest of the enemy fleet in-system, around Megara.
The enemy had been careless in their deployments, and they’d left a significant force exposed. Now, they would pay for that mistake.
Barron knew destroying a handful of battleships was only the start of the fight, and that even a total victory in this initial struggle would only marginally affect the outcome of the overall combat. His ships were still too far out for precise readings, certainly of ships hidden in asteroid belts and behind planets and moons, but he was sure, damned sure, there were a hundred Hegemony battleships out there at least, and maybe more.
And, for all his fire, and his grim determination, he just wasn’t sure his fleet—with the upgraded battleships, the massive waves of fighter-bombers, the frigates and other escorts—was strong enough to defeat the enemy’s monster warships…plus the platforms and fortresses as well, even if those were, as he suspected, only partially completed.
Still, this was a first step, and he intended to watch Stockton’s wings move in…and tear apart the line of enemy battleships and their few surviving escorts. Covington’s people had hit them hard…and now Stockton was going to finish the job.
Then, his eye caught something else…something unexpected.
Enemy ships, deep in the system, not far from Megara. They were flying all around, wild maneuvers…as though they were searching for something.
But what?
There was nothing else there, save for fifty or sixty Hegemony ships, mostly escort-size.
And then, suddenly, there was something.
A new contact, one that hadn’t been there an instant before.
He watched as the enemy ships all reacted, blasting thrusters, trying to bring themselves around to close on the new contact. Barron knew the AI was chewing on the data, analyzing the details coming in, but for once, his own human mind, a billion times slower by normal standards, beat the ship�
�s main computer with the ID. He heard it in is mind, as if he’d said it, as though some part of himself had shouted it out, inaudible to the officers all around, but almost deafening to him.
And, then the AI labeled the small circle, the name small, but the sharply rendered letters clearly visible.
Hermes.
* * *
“Come on, Lex…get that thing reconnected.” Andi stood there, in the bowels of Hermes, her eyes fixed on the strange apparatus, hastily removed from its place in the engineering station and thrown on a large palette. She looked behind it, to the large cable, the conduit that had kept the stealth unit connected to the power coming from Hermes‘s dying reactor. Somehow, her people had managed to move the stealth unit, fragile, cantankerous, power-hungry thing that it was, without a break in coverage.
Until just a moment before, when she’d ordered the cable disconnected.
“I’m on it, Andi…but I told you, this is going to be tight. This reactor is a lot smaller, and the generator eats a lot of power.” Righter paused, verbally only—his hands hadn’t stopped moving for an instant. “It might not work at all.”
“Just do it, Lex.” Andi knew damned well it might not work. It was a desperate plan, very desperate…but it was the only way she could think of to try to save her people.
Some of them, at least.
Hermes shook hard, and she reached out, grabbing onto a handhold attached to the bulkhead to stabilize herself. She’d known the enemy ships that had been pursuing her for so long would waste no time once Hermes popped up on their scanners…but that had been quick.
Part of her felt as though she should be on the bridge, but knew there was no point to that. She’d cleared the control center of all her people, as well as every other nonessential section. The AI had her nav program, a wild and random series of vector changes designed with one purpose in mind. To buy a little more time before Hermes’s hunters overwhelmed her, and delivered the final blow.
Her ship was doomed, and her people were out of options…save one. A crazy, almost insane idea, and one that would fail if a dozen steps didn’t all go off exactly as planned.
But it offered one thing fighting, running, or any other option didn’t.
Hope. At least some chance of saving her crew.
* * *
Stockton whipped his ship around, blasting his engines at full to adjust his course to the desired attack vector. He’d come about in a wider arc than he’d originally planned, mostly to avoid a cluster of surviving enemy escorts that had formed up in a last-ditch effort to protect the Hegemony battleships. It was a valid tactic, one he would probably have tried if he’d been in his adversary’s shoes, but he’d ordered the waves of attacking bombers to branch into two streams, blasting their engines hard as the wave parted and passed by the escorts, like water flowing around a large rock outcropping. It didn’t protect his people from all of the defensive fire—and the escorts would still be there when his forces pulled back—but it had dramatically cut down on loss rates during the approach.
And that was more bombs and torpedoes heading for those battered and dying battleships. His two thousand fighters had more than enough force to wipe out their targets, but Stockton had seen many times just how tough the Hegemony battlewagons were, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
He’d given his final speech to the attack wings, and he’d kept it simple, gritty, to the point. He hadn’t held anything back, hadn’t sugar-coated anything for his people. They deserved better than that. They’d earned honesty.
He’d said, simply, “To hell now…and if we’re lucky, back again.”
The thunderous response on the comm had left him confident his words had found their mark.
He’d already picked out a target for himself, a huge, hulking monster, already leaving a trail of refrozen fluids and vapors behind it as it struggled to accelerate along the enemy line of retreat. It was definitely one of the railgun-armed monsters that had so decimated the Confederation forces in the battles of the war, but one quick look at the close-range scans told Stockton the ship’s big guns were offline, if not already blasted and fused into useless globs of rehardened metal.
Still, a battleship that size was a danger to any ship in the fleet, and it would be until it was put down. He looked at his weapons console. His ship packed six cluster bombs…and he intended to plant the entire spread into the target. That meant coming in close, and as battered as the ship appeared to be, he could see that there were still point defense batteries firing.
“Watch these ships, all of you…even if they look like wrecks. They’re immense, and they’ve got multiple reactors and hundreds of turrets, and it only takes one shot to turn you into a depressing letter to your family. Stay the hell away from those guns!”
He checked the range. Under ten thousand kilometers, and a pair of quick flashes on his screen warned him to heed his own advice. The defensive fire was heavy, worse than he’d expected, and he let his hand move around on the throttle, allowing his intuition to direct the evasive fire as much as his reasoned intellect.
He flipped a switch on the board, initiating final arming for the bombs…and then another, opening the small bay doors.
Five thousand kilometers.
He stared straight ahead as his ship raced forward. He was still blasting his thrusters at different angles, small pulses along various vectors, just enough to confuse the enemy targeting systems as he made his final run.
But then he stopped…and came straight on. It was the most dangerous part of the attack, those two or three seconds, but it was the only way he could aim his bombs with the precision he needed.
One…
He was counting off in his head, fully aware it wouldn’t take long for the enemy tactical systems to adjust their targeting and blow him to bits.
Two…
He ached to launch and then to pull out of the deadly dive toward he Hegemony ship. But years of discipline kept his veteran’s hand steady, unmoving. Just another second…
Three…
His finger tightened, and his Lightning shook, six times in rapid succession, as each bomb blasted out of the bay and headed toward the looming bulk of the enemy ship. Stockton watched, for half a second maybe, and he was sure the warheads were going to hit.
Then he pulled back hard on the throttle, and angled it to port…wondering for an instant if he’d been on time, or it he and his ship were going to follow the bombs in.
He was sweating, and his heart was pounding, and he held his breath for an instant…until he saw the blackness of empty space ahead of him, where only the dull gray of the Hegemony ship’s hull had been less than a second before.
One glance at his scanner confirmed it. He had made it. He’d cleared the enemy by less than a kilometer…much closer than he’d intended to come.
That quick look at the screen told him something else, too.
All six bombs had hit…and over a hundred of his ships were coming in behind him, following his course, and planting their own warheads into the guts of the doomed battleship.
* * *
“Vig…get that system running, now! We’re almost out of time.” Andi pushed her way back through the overcrowded corridor, to where Lex Righter was still working on the stealth unit.
“I’m on it, Andi.” Vig’s voice sounded distant, partially blotted out by the nervous chatter of Hermes’s crew, pressed together like sardines, terrified…and most of them forced to wait and see what happened, with no control at all over events. It wasn’t a comfortable way to be, but it was their only chance to survive.
Andi understood, but just then, she wished they’d shut up, as she’d told them to do at least three times.
“Well, Lex?” she snapped out as she rushed back to the small space where her engineer was crouched over the stealth generator, his hands shaking as they held tools and moved across the top of the device. “We’re out of time, old friend…it’s your best shot now or nothing.” Andi’s voice seem
ed devoid of the fear that seemed to possess everyone else. It was a gift she’d always had, an ability to hide emotions, to push them aside when she had to clear her mind.
For the record, however much control she managed to exert, she was scared shitless. And, she was just as happy no one else knew that.
“I don’t know if this is going to work, Andi. If I had another hour…”
Hermes shook hard again, and the sounds of distant explosions rumbled down the corridor.
“You don’t have another thirty seconds, Lex…just do it!” Her voice was loud, rumbling, a command that practically defied its recipient to disobey.
She stared at the engineer, her eyes boring into his, intimidating and providing strength at the same time. She watched as he connected the conduit, plugging in the cable that would feed power into the unit…and then Hermes rocked again, twice in rapid succession, and she could hear the sounds of structural members snapping, and of whole sections of the dying vessel blasting open to the vacuum of space.
* * *
Barron watched the screen, absolutely certain the AI’s—and his—analysis was correct, that the blip on his screen was, in fact, Hermes. He watched as the ships surrounding it fired, pounding the small cruiser, hitting it at least a dozen times.
He felt an urgent need to rush to the ship’s aid, to save Andi…somehow. But Dauntless was six light hours from Hermes’s position, barely close enough to watch as the small ship’s death struggle. There was no way—none—to intervene.