by S. H. Jucha
Z and Miranda furiously calculated options.
The holo-vid displayed icons representing the Omnian fleet’s trailing forces, the enemy fighters, the Freedom, and the moons and clump of larger rocks surrounding the city-ship.
Reiko was about to order Ellie’s forces to separate, as Z’s advice intimated, but Julien waved a hand in negation. He was focused on Alex, who was staring at the holo-vid.
Julien reviewed Z and Miranda’s calculations.
Tatia agreed with Alex and signaled Reiko. The vice admiral ordered Svetlana’s command to chase any fighters that flew above the rock field. Darius was assigned the fighters that attacked from below, and Deirdre was left to chase the fighters through the rock fields. Reiko divided the travelers into three groups to assist the Tridents.
The alien ships, which would be chased by Deirdre’s commands, would be forced to slow to navigate the thick screen of rocks and boulders that gently tumbled, as they orbited the ice giant. The admirals were hoping the more maneuverable travelers in Deirdre’s commands could catch the enemy fighters from the rear.
Renée, who had stood aside while the battles were fought, sent a shipwide message. She directed all nonessential personnel to clear the spaces near the city-ship’s hull.
Reiko’s last directive was to Ellie’s command.
Reiko tipped her head in acceptance, and Cordelia sent.
Alex visualized the city-ship, its beam weapons wrapped around the ship’s mid-decks and its vulnerable areas.
As a matter of operational procedures, twelve travelers remained with the city-ship to facilitate the transfer of passengers off the ship in an emergency. This was an emergency, but not the kind imagined. The travelers wouldn’t be of use to anyone if the ship was destroyed.
The SADEs and Franz raced from the bridge. Z sent orders to the flight chiefs to ready the launch of the remaining travelers. Franz ran down a roster of pilots, who were still aboard, and called to those with the highest fighter pilot rankings.
Crew members looked at their chiefs in alarm when they were passed the orders. It boded ill for the ship, if the remaining fighters were launched.
As the threesome separated to run toward different bays, Franz sent,
Cordelia detected the launch of her ship’s remaining travelers and monitored the positions that they took up to protect her vulnerable angles of approach. She slowly gazed around the bridge.
Most personnel were immersed in the holo-vid or the data spooling from the ship’s controller, as they observed the closing gap between the expedition’s forces and the enemy fighters. One person was closely watching her — Alex. Now she knew who had sent the fighters to guard her ship, where she had no beam coverage. She gave Alex a wink, and he grinned at her.
-12-
Ice Giant
Yumi stared openmouthed at her admiral, and Ellie merely smiled. The twins had found someone who thought and acted like them. He just happened to be a SADE.
The admiral’s controller blanked the bridge holo-vid and replaced it with a visual from Descartes’ ship. There was nothing in sight but rock debris, but Ellie expected that to change soon. Knowing she would have advance warning of her adversaries, she formed her command into distinct groups, spread them out in a grid, and assigned them quadrants. When Descartes’ squadron spotted enemy fighters skirting his Tridents, she would receive the images and send her ships to intercept them.
It occurred to Ellie that the plan had a significant weakness. There was the chance that each time she sent ships to intercept the incoming fighters, they might not be totally successful, which meant she would have enemy fighters racing past her position.
Ellie ordered sixteen travelers to post themselves forward of her command. They took up positions in the quadrants she’d marked and waited silently for the enemy to pass. It was doubtful the travelers would have time to engage the fighters from a rest position. Their job was to warn her command and let the Tridents deal with them.
* * *
Admirals Svetlana Valenko and Darius Gaumata were glued to their holo-vids, which maintained icon displays of the oncoming ice planet, its moon, its rock fields, and the enemy fighters fast approaching the same. Both of them knew they wouldn’t get a shot at every fighter. Their controllers calculated that the lead fighters would disappear into the mass of space rock before their commands reached them.
As much as Svetlana and Darius wanted their travelers, which were slightly ahead of the Tridents, to engage the enemy fighters first, they were ordered to join the commands’ wall of ships. There was too much danger of the Tridents running afoul of fighter wreckage if the travelers attacked the alien forces’ flanks.
Svetlana and Darius spread their commands out to enable every ship a clear target of the enemy fighters. Each Omnian ship would have time to discharge its beams once, and controllers positioned the Tridents to get an opportunity to target several alien ships with their twin, heavy-beam weapons.
As the enemy fighters decelerated hard to make entry into the rock fields, the commands of Svetlana and Darius swept past them. The combined Omnian forces eliminated most of the enemy fighters. Between them, they lost three more travelers, which had struggled to keep up due to damage from pieces of hull and engine debris encountered in the initial battles.
Cordelia thanked Darius and handed off the time stamp to Julien. He was linked to the Freedom’s controller and its detailed telemetry scans of the planet, its moons, the large asteroids, and the rock fields. With each new piece of information, Julien updated the attack scenarios for Cordelia. With Julien’s data, Cordelia planned her ship’s movements to prepare for the enemy’s charge.
Essential personnel, who were required to remain in the Freedom’s bays, were ordered to don environment suits and take positions behind heavy equipment for safety’s sake.
Tatia picked up on the positioning of Franz and his five traveler pilots atop the city-ship. She passed the telemetry link to Reiko, adding,
As the number of adversaries, coming the Freedom’s way, accumulated, Reiko wondered how successful Cordelia would be defending the city-ship. What scared her was that she anticipated the travelers, which guarded the city-ship’s top and bottom, had little chance of survival. They couldn’t withstand the tremendous impact of high-speed kinetic projectiles, while the Freedom could absorb a great deal of punishment before it succumbed.
After Svetlana and Darius’ commands executed their flybys, eliminating the vast majority of enemy fighters, their ships desperately reversed course to chase the few enemy ships that escaped. Unfortunately, reality said that the fighters would have ample time to severely damage the huge city-ship before their fleets arrived. It was understood that the kinetic weapons would penetrate multiple decks before their energy was absorbed. If enough fighters reached the Freedom, they could damage the main engines or burst power crystals in the bays.
Deirdre’s force decelerated to enter the rocky fields, moments after the enemy’s rearmost fighters disappeared among the debris. The travelers assigned to her command gave chase, while the Tridents reduced their velocity even further to navigate the crowded and dangerous place. Deirdre’s heart sank when her controller updated its telemetry. Her Tridents couldn’t catch the more maneuverable enemy fighters. Her final hope was that her travelers could.
* * *
Descartes and the twins skirted rocks, boulders, and large asteroids, heading toward where they anticipated they would intersect the center mass of the incoming enemy fighters. The Trident team had solidified around Descartes’ incredible capability to calculate options. The twins flew in support, positioned off Descartes’ port and starboard sides and often anticipating his movements. Occasionally, Étienne or Alain suggested alternative strategies, which Descartes readily accepted. The twins added improvisation to their gambits, which had often caught their training adversaries off guard.
However, the games were over. This contest was for real, but they communicated, strategized, and flew with the same intensity they always had. The threesome was an awesome blend of Descartes’ ability to generate strategic variations and the twins’ implementation of their hand-to-hand combat techniques, using powerful warships.
Descartes, Étienne, and Alain were under no illusion. Deirdre’s report told them that fully a third of the enemy fighters, which had survived the fleet’s initial attacks, had reached the safety of the rock fields. Although travelers pursued them, there was little opportunity for the Omnian fighters to do much more than catch the stragglers.
Descartes sent to the twins.
Étienne sent.
The Tridents shot around a small moon. Instead of merging into a tight formation, they took up the points of an equilateral triangle, separated from each other by hundreds of meters. Immediately, they initiated a spin, revolving around one another like a spinning top, and they flew at the mass of fighters that emerged from a thick debris field.
The Tridents, who had spotted the enemy fighters first, loosed beam shot after beam shot. They carved such a huge swath through the enemy that they had to abandon their swirling movement to dodge fighter debris and decelerate to navigate the field the fighters had just exited.
The Trident controllers totaled sixty-three enemy fighters destroyed. Then the tri-hulled warship controllers warned Deirdre’s approaching travelers of the Tridents’ presence. As the Omnian fighters flew past, they were updated by Descartes’ ships, as to the directions the enemy took to avoid the Trident squadron.
After the comm call ended, Descartes reviewed his squadron’s status. The Tridents had survived remarkably well, but they would need repair. The enemy’s kinetic projectiles couldn’t have been entirely avoided, and they had chipped the warships’ hard shells in many places and penetrated in others. The question was: Could Emile Billing’s clever faux shell technique be repaired as well as the Swei Swee had demonstrated in repairing their constructions?