by S. H. Jucha
The controllers that replaced the ship’s SADEs were quite competent with calculations and ship system controls, but their lack of self-awareness necessitated the presence of bridge officers to manage orders and communication among the controller, the captain, and the commanders.
Edouard and Sheila observed one group of travelers detach from the Money Maker and circle Niomedes in one direction, and, a few moments later, the other group left the freighter-carrier and circled the planet in the other direction. The comms officer connected Captain Durak through the bridge speakers, and he summarized the plan to reinforce the Last Stand’s wing with the freighters’ beam-capable travelers and use the New Terran travelers to chase the Hand of Justice on its outward path. Captain Durak was careful to credit Mutter as the plan’s architect.
“That’s actually quite brilliant,” Sheila remarked.
“For what it’s worth, Commodore,” Ahmed added, “Mutter and I believe that the Hand of Justice’s high judge or captain or both are making an error by assuming that the Last Stand’s fighters will not have sufficient fuel reserves to cover the distance to Niomedes and take on the battleship. They might believe that your carrier’s travelers are the true ruse.”
For the first time, Edouard expressed a groan of disappointment.
“Something Captain Durak said?” Sheila asked.
“Who would have thought that I would come to regret not accepting the president’s invitations to join his card games? With all these ruses and bluffs, I’m not sure who is thinking what,” Edouard lamented.
“Don’t feel bad, Captain, I didn’t join them either, but I know someone who did. Comms get me Commander Thompson.”
* * *
Ellie listened to the update from Sheila and passed on the relevant information to her flight commanders. The addition of the Money Maker’s sixty-four travelers to her wing boosted her confidence, which was sorely needed. She was under no misconception. The UE battleship was a monster of the deep dark, and the estimates of its armament suggested it was powerful enough to destroy an entire world, much less a paltry wing-and-a-half of travelers. It was Ellie’s thought that the best the Harakens could hope for in the upcoming battle was a draw — neutralize the battleship at the cost of every traveler.
* * *
“The carrier’s fighters are maintaining their velocity,” Captain Chofsky said to Bunaldi and Theostin.
“Could they be coasting?” Theostin asked.
“Negative, Admiral,” Chofsky replied. “They’ve made subtle course corrections, which have corresponded to our course changes. Their most recent correction was made less than a half-hour ago. They’re still under power.”
“Recommendations, Captain,” Bunaldi asked.
“Having witnessed the devastating capability of these enemy fighters, we can’t risk them getting close to our ship. We will need our fighters to clear a path. I would recommend that we use a three-to-one ratio against their fighters, Judge.”
“Three to one, Captain?” Theostin challenged. “That would be most of our fleet.”
“It would be prudent, Admiral,” Chofsky replied. Those who knew the captain would have recognized the subtle clench of jaw that said he was losing his patience. “We must not just reduce the count of these strange fighters; they must be eliminated entirely. Since we have no idea what type of weapon their fighters emit, we can’t risk letting a single one of them reach our ship.”
* * *
Ellie was reviewing attack approaches to the battleship. Her greatest concern was that her wing’s short-range beam weapons would require her pilots to fly into the face of what she was sure would be the battleship’s short-range defensive weapons. If I built a monster like that, I would have added as much protective armament as I could, Ellie thought.
Ellie’s controller pinged, signaling the launch of fighters from the Hand of Justice — hundreds of them. “Scared you at the contest, did we? And you’re going to throw everything at us,” Ellie murmured to herself. She began running scenarios on her controller, based on the enemy’s count. Fortune was with her, the Money Maker’s travelers would join her wing before the engagement, which would occur within an hour. Still it would be two to one against them.
One by one, Ellie reviewed the scenarios provided by the controller and discarded every one of them. “Where are Alex and Julien when I need them?” Ellie asked herself.
During long flights, Ellie had adopted the habit of talking to herself. The sound of her own voice comforted her in the solitude. “So often you did the unexpected, Alex,” Ellie mumbled. “Or was it just that we would have played it safe while you sought a greater goal?” She sat in her pilot’s seat and her mind wandered over her time with Alex Racine. Then her error dawned on her. She was requesting scenarios that sought to minimize the loss of her wing. “But that’s not the goal, is it, Alex? You’re the goal,” Ellie said, indicating the Hand of Justice in her telemetry display, “and your fighters are here to punch a hole in our forces so you can get to New Terra.”
Deirdre Canaan reviewed the plan in detail with Ellie while the entire wing dropped velocity to extend the engagement window, as their adversaries were doing. The carrier wing would meet the UE fighters head-on just as the Money Maker’s fighters joined them. The freighter’s fighters would attack the right flank of the UE wing, and the carrier’s wing would shift to hit the enemy’s left flank, letting the majority of the UE fighters pass them unhindered. Deirdre’s sub-wing would take the brunt of the contact against the UE fighters and act as a blocking force for Ellie’s sub-wing. Her group’s task was the battleship. Sixty-four travelers would try to disable, if not destroy, the United Earth’s behemoth warship.
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Throughout the New Terran system, eyes were trained on the participants who would be involved in the most massive battle to take place in the 700-year histories of either the Confederation or New Terra.
The leaders aboard the Hand of Justice eyed the fighters coming around the planet behind them. “This group is not a danger to us, Judge, Admiral,” Captain Chofsky announced, “providing that we maintain our velocity. But it does require our fighters to clear the way so that we are not caught from behind and fighting on two fronts. To ensure that rearward group doesn’t close on us too quickly, I will be giving them something to think about.”
While they were talking, the telemetry officer signaled Chofsky, who nodded to his superiors to observe the monitor. An ancillary group of fighters was appearing from behind the planet and were racing to join the carrier’s fighters. The high judge and admiral exchanged concerned glances.
“The odds just dropped to two to one,” Theostin said into the silence, and apprehension spread among the three leaders as they saw their superiority winnowed.
* * *
Deirdre Canaan was energized by Ellie’s new plan. Prior to the sharing, she felt as if she was flying into the jaws of doom for no gain. Now, she grinned at the opportunity to take down the battleship, even if she lost her entire sub-wing to the enemy’s fighters. The possibility of defeating the UE monster galvanized Deirdre to take a second look at her own tactics.
Svetlana Valenko, the ex-copilot of an asteroid miner, made the jump to Haraken fighter training and never looked back. Robert Dorian, her training commander, categorized Svetlana as a brilliant pain in the ass, who rarely followed her assigned offensive or defensive scenarios, but then again often won the day.
If the high judge could have seen the carnivore-like grin on Svetlana’s face, he might have considered ordering his captain to reverse course.
* * *
Captain Timmion smiled as her controller refreshed its telemetry data and displayed the UE battleship continuing to head away fro
m her shuttle group. Her pilots had been chatting happily for hours about the effectiveness of their ruse when their controllers lit up their helmets’ displays. The Hand of Justice released a huge cloud of some sort of short-range defensive armament. There wasn’t time for the controllers to identify what the shuttles were up against and notify the pilots.
“Activate your evasion programs now!” Hailey screamed into her comm, and punched her evasion program icon, which sat on the upper left portion of the controller’s screen where most of her pilots placed it.
Immediately, the shuttles flew in myriad directions, twisting and turning to evade the battleship’s short-range defensive missiles that were fired at them. In the shuttle pilots’ favor, the missiles exhausted their fuel, reaching the extent of their maneuvering range. However, they were still dangerous as they closed on the shuttles on ballistic courses. The shuttle pilots, who reacted swiftly, activating their evasion programs immediately, safely cleared the swarm’s path, and the missiles, devoid of fuel, were unable to change course to reacquire their targets.
Two pilots were unsuccessful. One lieutenant, who took too long to access his evasion program, was hit by two missiles. The first missile cracked his traveler’s shell and the second ruptured it. The other lieutenant had developed a penchant for ignoring safety regulations and preferred to pilot his craft without the use of his seat harness. Naturally the controller repeatedly warned him about this error, but the enterprising pilot discovered the means to disable the controller’s detection algorithms.
When the evasion program actuated, the controller was unaware the pilot wasn’t safely buckled in and did its best to evade the oncoming missile swarm, pushing the craft’s inertia compensators to the limit. The pilot was bounced out of his chair and against the shuttle’s bridge bulkheads repeatedly before the traveler leveled out.
Mutter would have the Money Maker’s controller recall the wayward shuttle to one of its bays. Once the perfectly intact shuttle was recovered, the flight crew would remove the pilot’s badly broken body.
* * *
The UE fighter formation resembled a massive cone as it drove toward the enemy fighters.
As the three groups of Haraken fighters joined together, Ellie, Deirdre, and Svetlana established twin comm connections — one among themselves and one from each of them to their flight commanders.
Each of the three Haraken sub-wings held a loose formation, maintaining an undisciplined appearance, one designed to create overconfidence in their enemy. The women commanders were grim as they signaled the attack phase, and each sub-wing formed into a tight cone, with the group’s wing commander in the lead. As soon as the cones formed, Deirdre’s sub-wing swung away from the enemy’s center to engage the left flank, and Ellie’s sub-wing swung in behind Deirdre’s group, making an even greater vector change to evade all contact with the UE fighters.
Svetlana’s group veered to the right to attack the opposite flank from Deirdre’s group. Their unorthodox maneuver fractured the UE formation as the fighters on the cone’s flanks broke away from the main body to form defensive wedges.
Svetlana’s group slipped up and over the portion of the UE wedge that pointed her way, evading the missiles loosed at the group. Then her travelers dived into the enemy fighters that had turned to face Deirdre’s sub-wing. Fifty-eight UE pilots suddenly found themselves besieged on two sides by one hundred and twenty-eight enemy fighters, and beams silently sliced through them, one and all.
The UE formation fell into disarray as the defensive wedge, attacked by two Haraken sub-wings, disappeared in explosions of fire and debris, and the opposite wedge, which was overflown by Svetlana’s travelers, turned and hurried to rejoin the main formation.
Deirdre and Svetlana kept their sub-wings in tight cones, negating much of their enemy’s superior numbers. The two Haraken commanders wove through the periphery of the enemy’s fractured formation, often striking at the same group of fighters but from opposite directions. As each commander lost a traveler along the cone’s front, another fighter would take its place to keep the maximum beam strength at the front’s formation.
Most UE pilots could not launch their missiles for fear of hitting other UE pilots with the enemy fighters among them. With the loss of nearly one-third of his group, the UE commodore ordered his wings to separate and open the field of fire. Unfortunately for him, the Harakens’ superior technology, including controllers and implants, detected the shift in the UE formation, and the commanders joined forces to oppose one of the smaller enemy wings, eliminating those fighters from behind as they sought to open the space as commanded.
Deirdre’s quick count showed the Harakens’ combined wings of 128 travelers were down by 36, but they were nearly at a one-to-one ratio with the UE fighters. Unfortunately, as the enemy wings separated into squadrons, opening the space between them, the Harakens’ techniques became ineffective.
For the next half-hour, a desperate battle took place hundreds of thousands of kilometers outward of Niomedes, as two groups of fighters sought to destroy each other.
Despite their vaunted supremacy, UE pilots saw their numbers disappear from screens faster than their enemy’s and they began to panic, firing their missiles without firmly locked targets and sending hundreds of deadly, errant armament flying through the mêlée.
Haraken technology saved the majority of the travelers from the clouds of UE missiles. The controllers detected the enemy missiles and prioritized evasion tactics over beam targeting. In contrast, the UE pilots lost time as they reacted manually to missile impact warnings, often evading one missile only to turn into another before they could react to the second warning, resulting in an equal number of UE fighters destroyed by their own armament as they were by Haraken travelers.
At the point where the UE fighter count was reduced to little more than a pair of squadrons, the UE commodore ordered his remaining pilots to break off and make for the nearby planet. He ordered them to seek targets of opportunity and inflict as much damage as possible.
The Haraken pilots suddenly found themselves without targets as their adversaries flew from the battle zone.
There were no strategic targets on Niomedes. Except for a small standing force of Terran Security Forces, all installations were civilian. Most of the UE fighters were closer than the Haraken travelers to Niomedes when they broke off, and Deirdre’s and Svetlana’s pilots signaled their controllers for maximum acceleration. Several Haraken pilots sought to override their controllers’ protocols to achieve greater-than-max acceleration, but safety protocols locked them out. Their efforts were unnecessary. The Harakens began catching the slower UE fighters one by one. The last three UE pilots, which included the commodore, aborted their flights toward Niomedes and turned to face the Haraken travelers, whose beams obliterated them before they got an opportunity to lock their missiles on the enemy.
-29-
Aboard the Hand of Justice, the high judge and the admiral sat in their command chairs, shocked. Their fighters’ overwhelmingly superior numbers were ineffective against the strange enemy fighters, who managed to evade the UE’s most advanced missiles and then cut down their fighters with an unknown energy beam. Words failed them as they looked to the battleship’s captain for answers.
Captain Chofsky regarded his superiors and anger and lament warred within him. Throughout his career, he faithfully followed orders, and it had served him well, rising to the position of UE cruiser captain and finally tapped to captain the Hand of Justice, and he was proud of his service. But from the beginning, this mission had all the earmarks of failure. The enormous find of people and technology should have required the Reunion scurry back to Earth to report the speaker
’s findings. Instead, García called for support, which brought the high judge and his battleship. On his arrival, the high judge should have immediately ordered both ships back to Earth to report the tremendous discovery.
In the captain’s mind, Judge Bunaldi should have severely reprimanded Speaker García. It was the responsibility of the UE Supreme Tribunal to determine how best to deal with the incredible discovery. Instead, both the high judge and the speaker had coveted the possibility of promotion, hoping to develop the opportunity themselves. And here came the results of those machinations — sixty-four of the unearthly fighters were making straight for his ship.
While Captain Chofsky was considering his defense options, Admiral Theostin broke into his thoughts. “Captain, I suggest …”
“Quiet, Admiral,” Chofsky retorted abruptly.
“Captain!” Bunaldi said, shouting his rebuke as he rose from his command chair.
“And you, also, Judge!” Captain Chofsky ordered tersely. “Both of you sit back down and be quiet! You two and your ideas have slaughtered our entire fighter command, and we are about to be annihilated by a wing of those damned Méridien fighters.” Theostin sucked in air to fire back, but Dimitri cut her off. “If we survive, Admiral, you can ask for my head, and if we don’t, it won’t matter.”
“Can we run, Captain?” Bunaldi asked, forgetting the captain’s admonishment to remain quiet.
“And show them our vulnerable rear, drive engines and all, Judge? I don’t think so. These fighters have speed, acceleration, and maneuverability on us. Our ship-to-ship missiles are too ponderous to be of use against them, and our rail-slugs are ineffective.” Chofsky turned his back on his superiors and began orders for emergency conditions. His crew raced to seal all compartments and staff the short-range defensive weapons.
* * *