by Jay Allan
His eyes caught the small gauge on the side of his screen. It had read zero for most of the time since the strike force had launched, but now it showed a small, red ‘3.’ Stockton knew three casualties was statistically almost the same as none, at least with a force as large as his. He could have lost that many to malfunctions on a bad day. But it was still three of his people, and every one of them hurt.
They weren’t necessarily dead, of course. It was possible they’d just gotten knocked off the net, and the AI had classified their ships as destroyed, but his many years of service had given him a good idea most of them had been hit.
He jerked his hand hard to the starboard, and then back again to port. He was closing on the line of escorts, and the defensive fire was getting thicker by the second. The ‘3’ on his readout a moment before had changed to a ’17,’ almost in an instant, as his squadrons closed directly into the withering fire of the Hegemony escort line.
Disorder or no, the enemy frigates and small cruisers were mostly in position, and they were blasting away as the bomber wings closed. Stockton had seen it all before—too many times—but it still hit him every time. He was scared himself, he supposed, somewhere in the depths of his mind, but he was mostly numb regarding the possibility of his own death. He’d seen too much suffering, fought too much endless war to have the energy to worry about his own life. He had a strong self-preservation instinct, of course, as did anyone who’d survived the years in the fighter wings that he had. But, in recent years, he’d thought more than once that death might actually be an escape. Living, pushing through each fight on the increasingly unreliable promise that one day there would be peace and a life without constant death and ruin, had started to feel like a trap, one that could reveal only how much of a lie all hope was in the end.
A shot streaked by his ship, about half a kilometer away. That was close by the standards of space combat, but he’d had nearer calls than that. He knew it would only get worse. He’d positioned himself in the center of the strike force, and he was bearing down on the heaviest concentration of enemy ships. He was close, and getting closer every second, his ship moving at almost half a percent of lightspeed as it raced forward.
He was running a gauntlet, as all his people were, driving through the escorts, without even taking time to return fire. His resolve almost weakened, and the thought of coming back through those same untouched ships almost compelled him to send a few of his wings to fire on the vessels that were extracting such a toll on his people. But he remained focused on what was most important…winning the battle. And that meant hitting those battleships as hard as he could. Every bomb or torpedo loosed against an enemy frigate was one unavailable to blast through the thick and strong hulls Hegemony battleships.
Stockton knew the attack he was leading was, in many ways, the most important of them all. The battleships of the fleet were coming on hard right behind his squadrons. They weren’t holding back, they weren’t playing complex games to try to avoid the deadly Hegemony railguns. They were coming on, a wall of force, ready to match enhanced primaries against the enemy’s main guns in a showdown with everything on the line.
His people, their skill and courage over the next hour, would determine how many railguns were still online, how much of an advantage would remain with the Hegemony’s larger fleet.
He was flying through laser fire so thick, it seemed like he could almost reach out of his cockpit and touch a pulse moving as it went by. That was nonsense, of course, and as heavy as the enemy barrage was, still, no shot had come closer than that initial half kilometer.
Then, the fire lessened considerably, and he knew he was passing by the enemy line of ships. It was harder for the Hegemony vessels to target his people when their own ships were intermixed along the lines of fire. If he’d been sending his people against the escorts, he’d have ordered them to advance to these coordinates, and try to stay in the dead zone while they completed their attack runs.
But they were just passing through, and a minute later, perhaps even forty seconds, the intensity of fire picked up again, this time coming from behind him. Technically, he knew it was no harder to evade fire coming from behind, but human psychology played a role that went beyond pure analysis, and it was impossible to argue with the statistics compiled from a hundred battles. Interdictive fire from behind had a higher kill rate.
Over two hundred of his bombers had been knocked out already, and the loss numbers continued to mount, the number on the display rising by several dozen with each hurried glance.
He’d given his people a speech right after they’d launched, but now he flipped on the comm again. He detested delivering motivational words, but he was too old a warrior not to realize just how profoundly they could bolster morale.
“All wings, listen up. We’re on our final approach, moving toward the enemy battle line. I know those escorts were tough, and they hurt us, but now we’re through…and we’re going to do what we came to do. We’re going to strike a blow to help win this damned war once and for all. I could lecture you all, remind you what is expected of you, speak endlessly about the Confederation, or Palatia, or the Far Rim…but you know all that already. So, I will say just one thing, and then I will look to you all to do what you are here to do.” Stockton paused for a second, and then he said, “Fight…fight as you have never fought before.”
He cut the comm, and he breathed deeply, centering himself, preparing for the trial that lay ahead.
He continued his evasive maneuvers, as he had during his speech, and his eyes scanned the massive formation following him in. The enemy battleships lay ahead, the greatest and most intimidating armada Stockton had ever seen. It was a fitting matchup for history’s largest bomber attack, and in just a moment, he was going to see what happened when the proverbial irresistible force met the immovable object. He wasn’t sure which side would get the better of it, but he was sure of one thing.
A lot of warriors on both sides were going to die.
* * *
“Get the datanet up and operating at full power, Kiloron. And, I want damage control parties on all ships standing by the railgun systems. We’ve seen it enough times…those small craft are looking to take out our main guns before their battleships move into range. All railguns are to be cut off from the power grids until they have targets. If those bombers want to knock them out, they’re going to have to do it the hard way, pounding them to scrap. We’re not giving them any avoidable power feedback kills.” Illius had just stepped off the shuttle, and he was snapping orders into a small handheld comm. He was angry. Part of that was frustration and surprise at the enemy attack, but even more was focused at what he perceived as sloppy—and entirely unacceptable—conduct on the part of the fleet’s senior officers. They were doing what had to be done, but far too slowly.
“Yes, sir…as you command.” The Red Kriegeri on the comm was a high-ranking officer, but he sounded like a freshly graduated cadet replying to the acting fleet commander.
Just wait until I get to the control center…
Illius moved swiftly across the shuttle bay toward the main bank of lifts. A pair of Kriegeri guards followed him, as did his two senior aides, but he hardly noticed. He’d seen the wall of enemy bombers approaching the battle line, and he was utterly dissatisfied with the three hundred or so that the escort line had managed to destroy. That was a lot of ships, but not compared to what was still coming. He suspected the casualty rate could have been doubled if the interdiction had been better coordinated.
A door opened, and he stepped inside the car, followed by his small entourage. He snapped out a hasty command to the lift’s AI, “control room,” and then he stood quietly, his mind racing from one thought to another.
The battleships had their own defensive armament, of course, and there were almost as many escorts clustered around them as there had been in the forward line. But no matter how he looked at it, the fleet’s heavy ships were going to take a hard pounding.
; It was his job to see that they came through it strong enough to defeat the Rim battle line approaching just behind their bombers. He was concerned about that—a little—but he figured his forces were strong enough, and he believed there was a good chance a total victory in the battle would lead to greatly shortened conflict and a total Hegemony victory. The enemy was taking a massive risk with almost all their available forces, and if that ended poorly, Illius knew they were in deep trouble. The prospects of a war far longer than previously imagined had weighed heavily on the Hegemony command over the past year. Now, he had a chance to turn that around, to crush the enemy’s ability to fight in one climactic confrontation.
The doors slid open, and he walked out onto the floor of the massive control center. Hegemony’s Glory was an immense ship, and it had been purpose-built as a fleet command vessel. There were over a hundred officers at workstations and, in the center, the fleet commander’s suite, a massive chair, surrounded by half a dozen positions for aides.
Illius walked right toward the setup, and he started snapping out orders halfway there.
“Order those escorts to break formation and scatter. They are to reform just behind the main battle line.” His voice was heavy with disgust. No one had issued direction to the escort line, and it was simply waiting where it had been to hit the Rim bombers as they returned to their launch platforms.
Not a damned officer on this ship realized the enemy battle line is going to get there first…
The Rim dwellers had never pushed an attack so aggressively, even recklessly forward, but that was no excuse for an ineffective response. Not to Illius’s point of view.
“Yes, Commander. At once.”
He reached the chair and sat down hard, letting out a deep breath born of frustration. It had been a careless error, perhaps, to rely on comm lines to connect with the fleet, for the senior officers to remain in the more comfortable ground-based facilities. Perhaps Chronos had been distracted by his personal matters, or maybe they’d all just become weary with a conflict that had lasted far longer than anyone had anticipated. He could blame it on Chronos, on himself to a degree, or on some of the others, but the truth was, the enemy attack had been a total surprise to all of them. That didn’t excuse carelessness, but Illius had to admit, the last thing he’d expected was for the enemy to take the offensive. It was a bold move…and for the moment, it was on him to make sure the gamble didn’t pay off.
He looked up at the display, realizing as he did, at least a good part of the escort line was going to fail to pull out in time. The Rim battleships were moving in-system at a significant velocity, and they were still accelerating. The enemy vessels weren’t a one on one match for the Hegemony heavies, but they would tear into the light escorts savagely. Normally, Illius would have been less concerned about the lighter ships, but the enemy’s bomber strike force was the largest he’d ever seen. The fleet was going to need every defensive gun it had to counter those wings, and to stave off the demon pilot who had led them throughout the war.
Raptor.
Intercepts of comm chatter had given his people the nickname the bomber commander used, and with that, it had been relatively easy to come up with a real name.
Jake Stockton.
He had likely done more than any other single Confederation officer to resist the Hegemony invasion.
“I said I want those escorts moving, and that means immediately!” He knew it wasn’t the comm officer’s fault, but he was angry and impatient. Distance slowed communications, and the ships themselves had been almost at a dead stop. They were fast, their engines capable of significant acceleration rates, but they were just about out of time.
Illius watched for a few seconds, staring, trying to calculate how many of the escorts might escape. But then he turned his attention elsewhere. He didn’t have time to worry about the escorts just then.
Not with thousands of bombers bearing down on the main battle line.
Chapter Thirty-Five
650,000,000 Kilometers from CFS Dauntless
Olyus System
Year 320 AC
The Second Battle of Megara – “The Angel of Death”
Fifteen…
Olya Federov was a cool customer, as stone cold as they came. But even she could feel a slight shake in her arms and her hands. She was coming in close, her ship screaming toward the enemy at an almost insane velocity. Worse, she had over three hundred fighters behind her, trying to emulate what she was doing.
Ten…
She was counting down in her head, ready to drop her cluster bombs and pull the hell out of her desperate and deadly dive toward the Hegemony battleship. She knew her approach was reckless, but she was doing it anyway. The cluster bombs were a useful new weapon, and they allowed a Lightning to significantly increase its payload, but they lacked one advantage of the plasma torpedoes. The older weapons lost the ability to maneuver when they were triggered and converted to plasma, but once they’d become pure energy, they defied all attempts to intercept them. The bombs were different. They remained physical constructs until impact and detonation, and that meant the targets’ defensive arrays could shoot them down right up to that point. She’d seen bombs picked off a few kilometers and fractions of a second from impact, and she was going to do everything possible to make sure her warheads made it home.
Federov and Stockton had come up with a simple solution to that problem, a way to minimize interceptions of bombs after launch. Pushing the already insane attack runs even closer, cutting out whatever safety margins remained, and, almost literally, taking their Lightnings down the enemy’s throat.
Five…
It was dangerous enough a tactic for veteran aces, but, unsurprisingly, even without orders, the pilots in the wings copied the actions of their heroes and leaders. Losses from collisions had gone up sharply, but so did hit rates. And every pilot who missed the pull out, who slammed into an enemy ship at such staggering speeds, only inflicted greater damage on the target.
Federov hated herself for thinking that way, for equating the deaths of her pilots with hitting the enemy harder, but she knew it was true. She would do all she could to help her people fly their ships as well as possible, to guide them to become skilled enough to avoid such disastrous errors…but she wouldn’t forbid them from pushing too hard. They were fighting a war, the most desperate one in Confederation history, and the numbers killed were astronomical. However bad it made her feel about herself, she knew on some level that a green pilot could likely do no more to serve the cause than to slam into an enemy battleship at half a percent of lightspeed.
Three…
Her hand was wrapped around the controls, and her eyes were locked on the targeting display. The vast gray bulk of her target filled her viewscreen as her ship raced directly toward it.
Two…
She drew a deep breath and held it, as she always did when firing.
One…
Her finger tightened, and her ship shook half a dozen times, as the bomb bay ejected her six bombs in rapid succession. The cluster munitions had some maneuver capability, but at such speed and with the range so short, it almost didn’t matter. The intrinsic velocity alone almost ensured all the warheads would hit before they could be shot down.
What was far less certain was whether she would be able to pull away in time.
She’d already slammed the throttle back so hard, her arm and shoulder ached. Her fighter was blasting every watt of power into the engines, and she could feel the immense impact of acceleration. She was still holding her breath, waiting for open space to appear before her, the sign that she had made it.
Or for her ship to slam into the enemy vessel. That would be quite the example to set…
She was on the verge of giving up hope when blackness and stars moved into her view in place of gray steel, and her ship zipped past the hulk of the great battleship, now being wracked by the six hits she’d just scored.
She leaned back in her seat, and breathed
again, deeply. She was ready enough to die if that was her fate, but she was just as happy to live another day.
And, perhaps even more, not to become the inspiration for hundreds of suicide attacks…
* * *
“Initial bombing results coming in, Admiral. The first wave has completed its attack run.”
Barron listened to Atara’s report, his eyes fixed on the display, waiting for the incoming data to appear. The first wave of Stockton’s attack included over a thousand ships, with a heavy proportion of veteran Confed and Palatian veterans. He expected good news from their attacks, but he’d long ago learned never to assume anything like that. Not in battle.
But this time there was something else. Every hit scored by Stockton’s people was a step closer to winning the battle, of course, but now, they were each droplets toward quenching Barron’s bottomless thirst for blood. A million Masters and Kriegeri dead wouldn’t bring back Andi, nor a billion. But he wanted them dead, all of them.
He could feel the tension of the bridge crew, and he knew it would only be worse elsewhere in the fleet. His people on Dauntless were veterans who’d served with him for a long time, even if few of them could boast pedigrees dating back to the early days when he commanded the old Dauntless. Many of those officers and spacers were gone, killed in the many battles Barron had fought, and others had gone on to higher positions, to their own ship commands. Barron liked to think he remembered them all, but there had been so many over the years since he’d ascended to command rank, names, faces, deeds…and for all his reputation and responsibility, he was only a man.