By the time Tornado and Subjugator’s second salvos arrived, hundreds of the platforms making up the constellation were gone and the A!Tol ships clearly realized there was a problem. All four destroyers charged out, actively trying to shoot down missiles with their own weapons.
“Ma’am, we have a ping from the fifth planet,” Rolfson announced. “Looks like the cruiser is coming out to play.”
“Leave the constellation and the destroyers for the smaller ships,” she ordered. “Bring us about and take us at that cruiser.”
She glanced at the screen and confirmed she didn’t need to reach out to Forel: Subjugator was making the same course correction. Both of the pirate heavies were turning to face the largest of their opponents, leaving their lesser companions to deal with the four destroyers—at over twelve-to-one odds, the smaller ships should at least be able to keep the destroyers occupied.
“Ma’am, you need to take a look at this,” Kurzman suddenly told her quietly over the link from CIC. “We’ve got a solid scan on the ship leaving that planet and we may be in trouble—that’s no cruiser.”
#
Annette Bond ran over the numbers the ship’s computer was assembling on the newcomer and a chill ran down her spine. An A!Tol Imperial Navy cruiser was a two-million-ton ship half a kilometer long, roughly the same size and mass as Tornado.
The ship now pulling fifty percent of lightspeed toward them was easily twice Tornado’s mass. It was an elegant thing, all curves and lines and extending nacelles, over eight hundred meters long and three hundred wide, with an energy signature that suggested she was going to be a headache.
“What am I looking at, Harold?” she asked her tactical officer.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “We don’t have a lot of detailed files on the A!Tol Navy; she’s smaller than the battleships they showed up at Earth with but bigger than the cruisers. Ki!Tana?”
“It did not occur to me to arrange more detailed files,” the A!Tol admitted. “Most piracy avoids heavier warships. It is likely one of their fast battleship units, designed for rapid deployment.”
“So, a battlecruiser,” Annette noted, mentally slotting it into a class she could hold easily in her head. “Heavier weapons or defenses?”
“Depends on the class,” Ki!Tana replied. “If they’ve assigned it as the lead defensive unit for a post like this, it likely has heavy shields and a lighter armament—but still heavier than a cruiser’s.”
“And shields are vulnerable to beams,” Tornado’s Captain noted. “Chan, link us in to Forel. We’re going to need closer coordination with Subjugator than planned. Amandine, set us on a direct intercept course; I want to force her into proton-beam range. Rolfson…she’s going to have more beams than we do. Kill her first.”
Her bridge crew leapt into action, a reassuring sign of competence and confidence as her ship went into action against a superior A!Tol warship for the first time since they’d fled Sol.
Annette herself carefully wiped her palms against her uniform pants, hoping none of her people spotted her sweaty palms. The last time they’d faced a real A!Tol military force, they’d been forced to flee their home. This time would have to end better.
“Captain Bond, my friends did not warn me about a vessel of this scale,” Forel admitted, his red-furred face appearing on her command chair’s small screen. “This is…”
“Within the capacity of our vessels combined,” she said swiftly. “We need to close together, force the battlecruiser to split her fire. She’s bigger than we expected, but we’ve come this far, Karaz Forel. Will you give up the prize now?”
The amphibious alien shivered, droplets of water flickering off of his fur onto the camera, then once again gave her a wide fake grin.
“You are correct, of course,” he told her. “We share the current, Captain Bond. Let us strike as one!”
#
The two cruisers shot toward the battlecruiser at half the speed of light, and the battlecruiser charged toward them at the same velocity, both calculated relative to the local star. The relative velocity between the three ships was only eighty percent of lightspeed, but it was still enough for the five-light-minute distance to melt away as they closed.
Both sides opened up with missiles while still two light-minutes apart. All three ships were carrying modern point seven five cee missiles, which meant they had effective closing rates of over ninety percent of lightspeed.
“Bogey is focusing fire on Subjugator,” Rolfson reported. “She has over fifty missiles inbound. I can deploy rainshower drones to protect her?”
“Negative,” Annette ordered. “Let’s not flash all of our new toys where Mister Forel can see them. Focus missile fire and charge the proton beams.”
The two pirate heavies had fewer launchers between them than the battlecruiser did. The battlecruiser was throwing over fifty missiles a salvo, but the pirates were only replying with forty-six. As the seconds flickered away, that still turned into hundreds of missiles flying each way—and the A!Tol missiles were focused on Subjugator.
“Let’s see how our friend holds up,” Annette murmured as both sets of missiles closed on their respective targets. “Let me know if any of those missiles start turning our way,” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The first missiles slammed home, dozens of weapons unleashing unimaginable kinetic energy as they hammered into each ship’s shields. Both ships took the beating with unsurprising grace, even these massive salvos insufficient to bring down heavy shields in a single strike.
Forel’s face once again popped back up on her command chair screen.
“Captain Bond, Subjugator will not survive many hits like that,” he said flatly. “I need your assistance.”
“We will see what we can do,” Annette promised, eyeing the tactical screen. “Rolfson!”
“Ma’am!”
“Redirect our offensive fire,” she ordered. “Intercept as many of the Imperial missiles as possible; let’s clear our friends a little breathing room!”
“On it,” he promised.
There was a limit to how effective that strategy could be, she knew. If nothing else, command and control were…problematic with lightspeed links, and missiles traveled at three quarters of the speed of light. But it should buy the furred toad on her screen enough of a breather to get him into beam range.
“My thanks,” Forel murmured before his image disappeared again.
“Keep the toad alive,” Annette told her crew with a sigh. Tornado had the heavier missile armament of the two pirate ships, but neither of them was planning on battering down the battlecruiser’s shields with missiles.
“Bogey is evading,” Rolfson reported. “She’s adjusting course to try and loop around us and support the destroyers.”
“Smart,” she acknowledged. She’d do the same in the A!Tol captain’s place: the battlecruiser could crush half of the smaller ships in a single pass, freeing up the destroyers to support the bogey against the pirate heavies that could threaten her.
“Let’s not let her do that,” she continued. “Amandine, take us in!”
“Do we go faster?” her navigator asked.
They’d been matching the same point five cee speed Subjugator was putting out. With their Laian upgrades, they now had a short-duration sprint ability of another five percent of lightspeed—something the A!Tol ship couldn’t match.
“No,” she finally decided. “We’ll cut her off well before she’s clear, anyway. Beam range?”
“Thirty seconds and counting.”
Again, Annette wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers and hoped none of her crew saw her nervousness. Unless the battlecruiser had lighter beams than she expected, the moment they hit range was going to be painful for everybody, including Tornado and Subjugator.
“I’m showing shield flickers on Subjugator,” Rolfson reported. “Wait, shit: her shields are down, she’s hit!”
There was a flash of energy release, a blast o
f atmosphere—then the other pirate ship’s engines cut out while she was still five seconds short of the battlecruiser’s beam range.
Annette swore loudly as she realized that Forel had abandoned Tornado to enter proton-beam range, the deadliest aspect of space combat, alone.
“Kill her!” she snapped as Tornado flashed across an invisible line in space and the deadly streams of energy flashed out from both vessels.
For a moment, both sets of proton beams flailed impotently into empty space, and then Tornado found her enemy’s measure. Multiple beams connected the two ships, invisible streams drawn in white on the tactical plot, pulsing vast quantities of energy into the A!Tol ship’s shields.
Barely a second more passed before the Imperial ship’s beams latched onto Tornado and returned the favor.
“Her beams are weaker than ours,” Rolfson crowed after a second. “We may just make it…”
The battlecruiser had more beams, though, and the first of them punched through Tornado’s shield as the tactical officer spoke, sending the ship lurching away as energy transferred into her armor with crushing force.
“Firing missiles!” the tactical officer snapped. “Intercepting the beam!”
Icons flickered on the screen as interface drive missiles flashed out of their launchers, interposing themselves in the path of the beams that were cutting through the cruiser’s shields. Without shields or compressed-matter armor of their own, the missiles lasted mere fractions of a second.
They were enough fractions. Tornado’s own beams broke through, the Imperial ship’s shields flickering and collapsing as the two ships closed—and Rolfson sent two missiles that hadn’t been sacrificed to defend the ship screaming across the gap at an unimaginable speed.
Compressed-matter armor had saved Tornado but the A!Tol didn’t have that defensive layer. Proton beams tore massive gouges in the battlecruiser’s hull, ripping out the responding weapons—and then those two missiles arrived, hammers traveling at three quarters of the speed of light that released their kinetic energy in blinding flashes.
When the light cleared, all that remained of the battlecruiser was drifting fragments.
Chapter 44
“Status report!” Annette barked, rubbing her shoulder carefully where the impact had slammed it into the edge of her chair.
“Armor held, barely,” Ki!Tana—acting as bridge engineering officer—reported. “Metharom’s teams are reporting minor vibration damage throughout the ship but nothing critical. Bruises, basically—to both people and machinery.”
“Good to hear,” she replied. “What about our moist friend?”
“Subjugator’s shields are back up but her drive is still down,” Rolfson reported after a moment. “Not picking up any more atmosphere venting.”
“Ki!Tana, Rolfson…what are the odds that engine failure was real?” she asked quietly.
“His shields went down and he took a single nonfatal hit?” the A!Tol asked. “If that was real, the Empress is my mother.”
That confused Annette for a moment, then she remembered that, if nothing else, Ki!Tana was at least four or five times the A!Tol Empress’s age.
“Rolfson?”
“I concur,” the tactical officer said after a quick glance over at Amandine, who nodded as well. “The drive is heavily distributed. A single hit could reduce her speed but couldn’t take out her drive, not without her being very badly designed. If that hit actually took out her engines, my mother is a virgin.”
That got chuckles from the human crewmembers, though Pondar, the only alien on the bridge other than Ki!Tana, looked thoroughly confused by both metaphors.
“Raise Forel for me,” Annette ordered.
A moment later the Indiri reappeared on the main screen, back in his regular focused view.
“Apologies, Captain Bond,” he began. “We had an unexpected power surge. We should have our engines back online in a minute or two.”
Annette gave the alien who’d tried to abandon her to her death a large fake smile.
“We took some damage ourselves,” she lied. “We’re in pretty rough shape, but we can still support the ground assault. As soon as your engines are online, we should both move to back up the rest of the armada against the destroyers.”
A quick glance at the tactical plot confirmed that at least some of the A!Tol destroyers were still intact, the smaller pirate ships engaging in a long-range, low-risk missile duel that had still managed to cost them eight ships so far.
“Agreed,” Forel said calmly. “Give me one hundred seconds, Captain, then we can be on our way.”
He cut the channel, and Annette turned back to her crew. “Close us up with Subjugator,” she ordered Amandine. “Keep our scorched side away from her, make it look like we’re being super-protective of a damaged section.”
“I can do that,” the navigator replied. “Can I just be super-protective of the whole ship? It does have my own personal skin aboard!”
#
With unsurprising convenience, Subjugator’s interface drive came back online just as Tornado was passing her, allowing the other pirate heavy to fall in a few tens of thousands of kilometers behind the Terran ship.
As the two heavies returned toward planet four and its orbiting duel, Annette studied the last ten minutes of the fight on fast-forward and realized that the pirates really had no clue how to fight a fleet action. They had, intelligently given the superiority of Imperial beam weapons to those most of the pirates had, refused to close, maintained a long range missile engagement.
Given that Imperial missiles were superior to those in the pirate magazines, it would have been a more even match than the numbers suggested, no matter what. To make matters worse, however, the pirates had split their fire across all four targets, and done so unevenly. One of the destroyers had taken over a third of the pirate fire, and had eventually come apart under the battering—but the four A!Tol ships had focused their fire on one pirate at a time, and six pirate ships had died before the first destroyer had been eliminated.
Now the three remaining destroyers had closed up their formation as tightly as possible and continued to focus their fire on a single pirate ship at a time.
“They started with the weakest-looking ships and are working their way up,” Rolfson noted, following the same data she was. “Scarily competent bastards.”
“So are we,” Annette replied. “Hold back four launchers around where we were hit, but open up with the rest. Pick one target, send it to Subjugator, then pound her to pieces.”
A minute later, the ship vibrated as twenty missiles flashed away, diving toward the most damaged of the destroyers. A few seconds later, Subjugator entered her own range and followed suit.
The two heavies’ faster missiles dove through the formation of smaller ships, hammering home on the weakest destroyer, plowing through her already-depleted shields and shattering the half-million-ton starship into tiny pieces.
“Destroyers are switching target to us,” Rolfson announced. “And moving; they’re trying to close to beam range!”
“Amandine, go evasive,” Annette ordered. “Harold: kill them for me?”
“On it,” he confirmed. “Transmitting next target to the entire flotilla. Let’s see if they get the idea!”
Tornado vibrated again as more missiles left the hull, and the tactical display flickered for a second before stabilizing, accounting for evasive maneuvers.
“We have three salvos inbound, twenty missiles each,” Amandine announced. “Permission to deploy rainshower defenders?”
“No drones,” Annette told him. “You are cleared to engage with hull-mounted plasma systems.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed, his attention already lost in the systems. Moments later, the new suite of antimissile defenses, the poetically named “deadly rainshower defenders” activated. In a sense, the weapons were glorified plasma shotguns, firing hundreds of electromagnetically charged, superheated packets of hydrogen into space.
Missiles started exploding well short of Tornado’s shield, and the destroyers had no such system. While not all of the pirates obeyed Rolfson’s targeting instructions, enough did to send a crashing tsunami of over three hundred missiles crashing down on the targeted destroyer.
By the time the destroyers’ third salvo ran into the plasma shower and disintegrated without even reaching Tornado’s shields, both of the ships that had launched it were nothing but debris.
Captain Karaz Forel’s pirate armada now controlled the Orsav system. Eleven of the smaller pirate ships had died dueling the destroyers, but the entire defending task group was gone.
“Major Wellesley,” Annette said calmly, opening a channel to the Special Space Service officer waiting in his landing shuttle. “You are clear to deploy. You know the drill: secure the target, set up for cargo extraction. Watch your back.
“Stay alive.”
Chapter 45
James Wellesley smiled as Bond’s command echoed through his helmet.
“Are we ready to go?” he asked his people.
“Yes, sir!” they chorused.
“McPhail,” he addressed the pilot. “Take us down. All of our shuttles should be hitting the northwestern corner; the big hangars there should have the automated freighters.”
“Roger.”
While the Terran-built shuttles Tornado carried were slower than many of the other landing craft in the armada, it wasn’t like most of that speed could be used on approach to a planet. James’s people would reach the planet last by a few seconds, but since none of the shuttles could approach the planet at forty or forty-five percent of lightspeed, the final few thousand kilometers would be crossed at a minuscule fraction of the spacecraft’s maximum speeds.
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