“I know,” Harriet said gently. “I’m looking for miracles, gentlemen. What have you got for me?”
Han and Ikil exchanged a long look.
“Ship for ship, those battleships are equal to Duchess and her consorts,” Ikil said finally. “They’ve sent four ships. We have three. They have seven hundred and fifty starfighters. We have six destroyers and twenty-one cruisers.”
“They have a three- to four-century technological advantage,” Han added. “If they haven’t chosen to send in more tonnage, they don’t think they need it. They might still be underestimating us, but…”
“But they might not be,” Harriet agreed. “No miracles, huh?”
“I suggest we focus fire on the battleships from the beginning,” Ikil told her. “We can handle the starfighters’ missile salvo easily enough; it’s their gun pass that’s going to hurt us. Killing one of the battleships is far more likely to make them pause and reconsider than even wiping the fighters out will.”
“It’s the best plan any of us have so far,” she admitted. “Make it happen.”
#
The Wendira battleships opened fire from well beyond the defenders’ range, showing the single advantage that Harriet’s people had over the incoming aliens. The four battleships had as many launchers between them as her three super-battleships—but they still had the cruisers and remaining destroyers.
The attacker’s launchers were enough better to make up much of the difference, but the Wendira still only had four hundred launchers to the defenders’ thousand.
“We’ve reestablished the triple echelon,” Ikil informed her. “We’re basically out of Buckler drones, Echelon Lord. If we survive this, we’ll be running low on ammunition, too.”
“Kurzman brought colliers with him, didn’t he?” Harriet asked, grateful for the distraction but still keeping one eye on the incoming missiles. “Check with his staff; see how many missiles and drones they still have aboard.”
“The Wendira will need to give us time to get rearmed,” the Indiri officer warned her. “That’s…unlikely.”
“We’ll do what we have to. If we’re still alive after this, maybe we’ll have bought some respect from our enemies.”
Duchess of Terra trembled under her feet as she spoke, the big ship’s launchers returning fire as the Wendira capital ships entered her own range.
Moments later, the Wendira missiles hit her defensive perimeter and the Bucklers lit up. Her holograms drew in the invisible lasers as clean white lines, marking the deaths of missiles with sparks.
There weren’t nearly as many missiles this time, but the battleship’s weapons were just as fast and had more time to get the feel of the defenses as they approached. They also, unless Harriet missed her assessment, had better electronic warfare and brains in general.
The first salvo was targeted on the drones themselves, too. That appeared to be something the Imperium was going to have to incorporate into its doctrine, Harriet realized, as almost her entire outer layer of defensive drones was wiped out in the first few seconds.
“Captain Sier.” She opened a channel to her flag captain. “Deploy our remaining drones and send them forward; pass off control to the escorts.”
“Yes, Echelon Lord,” the Yin confirmed immediately.
It wouldn’t buy them much. The second salvo arrived before the new drones were in place, and this one hammered into the second layer of drones—the one interlaced with her escorts.
Several of the cruisers took hits, their shields shrugging them aside so far, but they lost even more drones.
“They’re clearing a path for the starfighter missiles to take out our escorts,” Harriet concluded aloud. They needed the defense in depth to survive the missile strikes, but it left their escorts vulnerable.
“Pull them back,” she snapped, making a decision. “Formation Bravo-Three. Interlace the drone nets.”
They’d regain some of what they lost in depth in redundancy—and in having the super-battleships’ Sword turrets cover the escorts.
“We’re out of replacement drones,” Han reported. “Every Buckler we or the Militia brought has been deployed. Every one they kill now makes us more vulnerable.”
Their own salvos were beginning to strike home, blasting through the Wendira drones and antimissile lasers with sheer numbers. They were losing over ninety percent of their missiles—but that still left the lead battleship taking a hundred missiles at a time.
Unfortunately, like Duchess of Terra herself, the Wendira ship could take that. For a time.
Potentially for long enough.
“Fighter-missile range in thirty seconds.”
Harriet nodded. The capital-ship missile duel was a draw so far, but in this case, draws went to the Wendira. They were keeping her defenses focused on the incoming missiles, and they were about to add another two thousand missiles—a swarm she wasn’t going to be able to stop.
“Order all ships to maneuver as needed for their own survival,” she said quietly. “Our first objective must be to stay alive.”
Even as she spoke, however, two of her cruisers’ shields failed. They were the ones without the upgrades. No onboard antimissile defenses. No compressed-matter armor plates. Their shields failed and the missiles swarmed through—and the cruisers died in balls of fire as fusion and antimatter cores alike lost containment.
“Fighter launch in ten seconds,” Han reported.
Everything she could do was done. Now all that was left was to see if her people could weather the storm.
And then the lead Wendira battleship, its shield strained but intact under the pounding of her fleet’s missiles, lurched as if it had collided with something in space. Explosions glittered across her shields with no apparent source—and then her strained shields collapsed and missiles continued to appear out of nowhere, streaming into the gap and smashing her armor to pieces with the brilliant flash of warheads of some kind.
One moment, she was the lead incarnation of the death of Harriet’s fleet.
The next, she was an expanding ball of vapor as multiple antimatter explosions obliterated her frontal armor and gutted her interior.
#
“Nantekotta i?!” Harriet cursed. “Ikil! What am I seeing?”
“I am not certain,” the Indiri replied. “We have no source for those missiles.”
“They’re emerging from hyperspace,” Han reported. “The portals are brief and tiny, easy to miss, but when there’s dozens of them…”
“Hyperspace missiles? From where?” Harriet demanded.
“Unknown,” the junior officer said. “Their velocity is crap after emergence, maybe point one cee, but they’re carrying twenty-gigaton antimatter warheads.”
The Wendira battleships clearly had a defensive strategy for this situation. They were going much more evasive now, forcing the FTL missiles to make terminal approaches after emergence. They still only had fractions of a second, but those fractions were enough for the antimissile plasma cannon to do their work.
“They’re not having much luck with the starfighters, though,” Ikil said. “Their standard evasive pattern is too much. Whoever they are, they’re pushing the battleships, but the fighters are almost untouched.”
A second battleship’s shields flickered under the pounding but came back up. The underlying armor absorbed a series of explosions that Harriet was quite certain would have destroyed Duchess, and the battleship continued to maneuver.
At least they were no longer firing at her fleet.
“There!” Han barked. “Two light-minutes away, sixty-six by one-forty-five by two-fifty.”
The hologram shifted, lighting up with four new ships.
“I make it three Mesharom Frontier Fleet battlecruisers…and the Duchy of Terra ship Tornado,” Ikil added to his junior’s report. “The Frontier Fleet vessels are the source of the hyper missiles.”
“And the Wendira have seen them as well,” Harriet said as she watched the fighter strike swarmin
g towards her turn and head towards the new ships. “Why did no one see them?”
“They were running stealth fields up until the moment they fired,” Ikil told her. “Even the Mesharom can’t fire with a stealth field up, but it let them get within range of their hyper missiles.”
“Gods. Hyperspace-capable missiles.” Harriet shook her head. “Can we handle the remaining regular missiles heading our way?”
“I think so. It appears the Mesharom have now become the focus of our new friends’ attention.”
“Echelon Lord, incoming transmission from Tornado,” Piditel told her. “Broadband, addressed to you and Admiral Kurzman.”
“Everyone is going to see it. On the main display.”
The image of Annette Bond, managing to convey a cheerful pregnant glow despite looking utterly exhausted, appeared in the hologram.
“Echelon Lord Tanaka, Vice Admiral Kurzman. I hope at least one of you is still alive. Pull back to Hope and maintain a defensive perimeter. The Mesharom have promised to deal with the Wendira.
“The price was…obvious,” she said softly. “But in the end, we find ourselves with little choice and I’d rather sell that damn ship than have it taken. Tornado will rendezvous with you in Hope orbit.
“The Frontier Fleet detachment will see what they can do about the Wendira and then meet us there as well.”
Bond shook her head.
“I doubt I need to tell you this people, but you’ve done damned well and I only need one more thing from you today: stay alive until we get there!”
Cheers echoed around the flag deck, and even Harriet found herself grinning.
“Well, people, that is one order from a civilian I think we’re all perfectly happy to obey!”
#
Chapter 42
In theory, the hyperfold communicator the Mesharom had given them should have been air-gapped from Tornado’s computers, rendered unable to communicate with the Terran warship’s systems.
The ability to stay in live communication with her allies, however, had resulted in Annette overriding that entirely sensible precaution. She needed to know what the Mesharom were up to.
And it wasn’t like the limited information on, say, BugWorks Two, aboard Tornado wasn’t already limited to stand-alone computers with no wireless connection and no physical link to the main systems.
While she suspected that wasn’t necessarily enough to protect it, that was also why there was almost nothing about BugWorks Two anywhere outside the actual project itself.
For now, she was prepared to risk the Mesharom learning a few of Terra’s medium-priority secrets to be able to see what they saw as the battle for Alpha Centauri continued to unfold.
“We’re getting better information from the system net than we are from the Mesharom,” Amandine told her. “That’s…interesting.”
“We’re getting more detailed information from our system sensor net than we are from them,” Annette corrected. “They’re providing real-time data within a thirty-light-second radius of their ships, which is insane.
“But we have this system heavily seeded with scanner platforms. I’d be shocked if we weren’t getting more detailed data from that.”
The Mesharom used some form of scanner that Annette understood to be basically the tachyon equivalent of active radar. Its range was limited, significantly less than the hyper missiles they were pounding the Wendira with.
That was part of what was allowing the Wendira to survive. If the Mesharom had real-time data on their targets, they’d be massacring their enemy.
With their data almost two minutes old, however, even their faster-than-light missiles had a massive potential radius for the enemy to be in at emergence. Annette had to admit she’d expected the weapons to be more effective than they were.
“Those battleships are falling back to the main formation,” Commander Yeong Song, Amandine’s Chinese tactical officer, announced. Like many of the massive Chinese contingent in the Duchy of Terra Militia, the tall, gaunt woman had been a member of the China Party’s secret fleet. Instead of serving on one of the officially nonexistent battleships built to protect China from a rogue UESF, however, she now served on the military of Earth’s externally imposed world government.
“And the fighters?” Annette asked.
“They’re heading right for the Mesharom. Adamase’s people are focusing their fire on them, but…”
“But those starfighters are almost impossible targets for hyper missiles,” Annette finished for her. “I’m guessing that isn’t an accident.”
“The Wendira would have known more about the Mesharom’s abilities than we would—and the Laians, for that matter.”
They now had the data on the battle in this system, or at least enough of it to know that the Laians were clearly using hyperfold energy projectors as their main energy weapons.
The Mesharom hadn’t given humanity specifications for those. They’d just given Bond the specifications for the communicator…and some very large hints as to how to transform an instantaneous communicator with a forty-light-year range into an instantaneous energy weapon over a much more limited distance.
“That’s how they fought the Laians and won,” Amandine said. “They designed a weapon that even FTL systems couldn’t easily counteract.”
“Watch for when they reach the range of the tachyon scanners,” Annette suggested. “That will be the real test.”
“We’ll be joining Tanaka and Kurzman’s formation before then,” Tornado’s Captain replied. “Whatever happens next, Your Grace, you’ll be as safe as we can make you.”
“That’s not always the main point, Captain,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “That’s why I agreed to your damn risky ‘diplomatic mission,’ Your Grace. But the mission is done; we’ve made a deal with the Mesharom. Now I’m going to get you behind as many super-battleships as I can find!”
Annette chuckled, shaking her head.
“All right, Captain. I won’t argue that—but I’ll be keeping a damned close eye on this fight.” She glanced back over at the display, where three alien ships prepared to face off against a thousand starfighters.
What she wasn’t going to tell Amandine was that the Mesharom had only expected one star hive.
#
The three battlecruisers spread out as the starfighters closed. They were focusing their fire on the incoming fighter strike now, letting the Wendira capital ships retreat beyond their range.
Unfortunately, the Wendira starfighters had been designed to fight enemies with FTL weapons. The drone pilots took full advantage of every ounce of their vessels’ incredible maneuverability, carving a massive probability cone in space where they might be once the missiles arrived.
Watching the Mesharom’s much-vaunted hyper missiles in action, Annette couldn’t help studying their weakness as much as their strengths. The biggest was simple: their emergence point from hyperspace was set at launch. There was no way around that, no way to detect their targets during their brief journey into hyper.
The battlecruisers’ weapons had barely registered on the starfighter strike at all until the Wendira strike craft crossed the thirty-light-second mark. Suddenly, instead of having data that was as much as a minute old to target their weapons, the Mesharom data was real-time.
It still took the missiles a quarter-second to enter hyperspace and then fractions of a second to cross the distance at an equivalent of several hundred times lightspeed. But instead of their target locations being half a minute out of date, they were fractions of a second out of date.
Wendira starfighters began to die by entire squadrons. Single antimatter warheads obliterated three, even four ships—but there was only time for two salvos of hyper missiles as the strike craft closed.
The fighters launched their own missiles too, moments before the Mesharom demonstrated that, like the Laians, they had hyperfold energy projectors.
Mated with the tachyon scanners, their lethality was i
ncreased tenfold. The hyper missiles killed dozens of the strike craft once they had live data. The hyperfold projectors were firing at an energy level where they could cycle multiple times a second.
Starfighters died in the hundreds—and so did the missiles, the Mesharom using the same weapon system for missile defense as fighter defense.
The Wendira ships and missiles were dying so fast, Annette almost didn’t realize they weren’t dying fast enough. Tornado’s crew were staring at the fighter strike, a dying flower of fire and light reaching toward the Frontier Fleet ships, in awe.
Annette did the math in her head and realized that some were going to get through. Dozens of starfighters. Hundreds of missiles.
The missiles arrived first, smashing into the battlecruiser Secrecy in a deadly stream. The Mesharom ship’s shields were more powerful than anything anyone else in the system had, but each missile hit with the force of over twenty gigatons of TNT.
Secrecy’s shields survived the missile bombardment, but only barely—and then the remaining sixty or so starfighters swept over her, pounding her shields with close-range plasma cannon.
Her shields collapsed. Plasma burned into her hull, the active matrix moving compressed-matter plates around to absorb the energy—and then the fighters followed their plasma beams in, kamikazeing the white egg-like ship.
Something failed. It might have been the hull. It might have been something in the hyperdrive or the hyperfold projectors or some system the Mesharom hadn’t admitted existed to any of the younger races.
The battlecruiser simply disappeared. It didn’t implode. It didn’t go into stealth. It didn’t break or shatter. It just…no longer existed.
And thirty-six members of the oldest and most powerful species in the galaxy went with it.
Tornado’s bridge was silent.
“We are joining the super-battleship formation,” Amandine finally told Annette. “We are…as secure as we can be.”
#
When he’d first seen the A!Tol shatter the United Earth Space Force, Pat Kurzman had known he faced an unstoppable force, a juggernaut that no merely human endeavor could overcome.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 32