“Not yet, sir. Recon drones are still working their way in.”
But as they watched, the Dominion blocking force saturated the area with its anti-missile defense and one by one, the recon drones fell before they could burn through the jamming and the decoys and get a clear picture of what the Dominions had.
“Not very anxious for us to see what they’ve got, are they?” Eder mused.
In the meantime, the four hundred and fifty Dominion missiles reached the outer range of the anti-missile drones, which fired small, fast rockets and guided them close enough to the enemy missiles so that the weak onboard sensors could lock on. There were a series of explosions, and then there were only four hundred and twenty missiles.
The anti-missile drones fired a second volley of the mini-missiles. More explosions, but then the Dominion missiles flashed past them and continued toward the Victorian ships, getting closer.
The second line of Victorian drones fired, and so the dance continued until the Dominion missiles reached reliable laser range and the frigates opened up. Thirty of the missiles locked onto two of the frigates and bore in on them. Captain Eder had kept the cruisers and his precious battleship just far enough behind the frigates so that they could not readily help them, and now one of the frigates paid for this tactic with its life. It turned sharply, and then used a full Hong Brake to sharply decelerate, hoping to break the missiles’ lock. Six did lose their lock on the hapless ship and began a long, curving turn, hoping to acquire a new target. But the remaining nine stubbornly closed in. Bofor guns took out two more while they were still fifty miles out and a lucky laser shot caught another, but the last six reached their target, exploding within five hundred yards of the frigate and hurtling shrapnel through the frigate’s hull and into the corridors and work spaces.
By chance, the worst effect was on the engine room. The magnetic bottle held somehow, but both of the frigate’s drive plants immediately shut down, ruined beyond repair. The frigate, the H.M.S. Jungfrau of the Black Watch, went ballistic, traveling in a straight line with no power, no lights, no ability to turn or stop, beginning the Long Walk that would take its doomed crew beyond Victorian space and into eternity.
“Dammit!” Eder cursed. He did not want to risk any more ships until they fully engaged the Dominion’s blocking force. “Tell the other frigates and destroyers to fall back within range of our defensive guns and stay in tight formation. And send out another group of recon drones. I think the Dominions are being a little too coy and I want to know why.”
He looked at the holo display. The Dominion crescent and the Victorian oval sped towards each other. Then, as he watched, the recon drones finally got close enough to burn through the enemy jamming. Some of the fuzzy shapes in the holo began to change and form distinct, crisp targets. Identification symbols appeared and targeting data streamed down the right side of the holo display.
“Mildred, enlarge display!” Eder ordered. The display revealed more than a dozen battleships and dozens of cruisers. A spurt of fear ran though him, but he pushed it aside.
“Chief Kunnin?” he asked.
Kunnin shook his head. “They’re fuckin’ with us, Captain. They don’t have that many battleships in their entire bloody fleet, and if they had all those cruisers their first volley would have been a lot worse.” He turned to the lieutenant who was commanding the reconnaissance drones. “Lieutenant, can you steer three of the birds in on just one of those battleships. Boost their gain and have them go to continuous pinging.”
Lieutenant Letizia glanced at Eder, who nodded. The active sensors would make the recon birds an easy target to the Dominions, but it was worth it if they could find out if they were facing real battleships or just drones.
“Another missile volley coming in,” Chief Kunnin warned. “Three hundred and eighty missiles. ETA eleven minutes ten seconds.”
“All ships! Fire anti-missile drones!” Eder ordered, but his mind was on the visual display from the three recon birds. As they approached the two enemy battleships, they increased their speed and bore in.
Anti-missiles reached out for the reconnaissance drones, but their profile was very small and the first group of anti-missiles passed by without locking on or exploding. Lines of light — the computer display for enemy lasers — stabbed through the darkness but missed. The recon drones were less than fifteen thousand miles from the Dominion battleships now, approaching from an oblique angle that made it difficult for the other Dominion ships to get a lock on them.
“Lieutenant Letizia, steer one of the birds in an arc so that it comes up behind the battleship,” Eder instructed. “Once you’re behind it and have a direct path, shut down the drone’s drive and coast in. Go to passive sensors until I give you the word.” He was hoping that the Dominion battleships would focus on the incoming pair of birds and that one might slip past their defenses. “Activate the cameras on all three birds, full magnification.”
As Eder followed the recon birds on their flight toward the battleships, the Dominion missiles met the first wave of Victorian anti-missiles. There were fewer incoming missiles this time and drones chewed them up. Anti-missiles exploded in spherical formations, destroying everything inside the sphere, lasers stabbed out, and a remote controlled Bofor platform filled the approach path with pellets. The Dominion missiles jigged, dodged and feinted and filled the space with jamming, but one by one they fell to the fusillade. Three survived the onslaught, only to be lured away by decoys.
Captain Eder stood, hands clasped behind his back. The main holo display showed the Dominions still coming straight at them, still filling the space before them with jamming drones. Dammit, he hated to shoot into a mess like that. It would make for a lousy hit ratio, but it was time to make the Ducks react to him for a change.
“All ships, fire fifty percent load. Concentrate on the center of the Dominion line. Fire now!”
Two hundred and fifty missiles blasted into space and raced for the center of the Dominion line. Now we’ll see how you like it, Eder thought grimly.
Then Lieutenant Letizia was shouting urgently. “Contact! We’ve got visual contact with the Dominion battleship!” And there it was, a clear, crisp image as the recon drone finally reached visual range. At first it was just a speck, but it steadily grew larger and larger.
Instead of a large, menacing battleship, bristling with missile tubes and laser pods, the camera was focused on an oval shaped object with a bulging nose where the decoy pod was located.
It was a decoy drone.
Captain Eder glanced at sensor readout: It still showed the sensor readings of a large Dominion battleship. He smiled at Admiral Douthat, who was staring intently at the picture.
“Good! They aren’t as strong as they appear. If a few more of these ‘battleships’ are really drones, that should go a long way to even the odds,” he said with satisfaction.
“Let’s get some facts first before we celebrate,” she snapped. Eder’s smile dropped away. The Admiral was…what? Nervous? “Move our reconnaissance drones down the line and see what we find,” she ordered.
Eder glanced at Lieutenant Letizia and nodded. She turned her drone to run parallel along the line of the Dominion ships and increased its speed. It was several more minutes before they had a good view of the next Dominion warship.
Another decoy drone. A distraction, but not a threat.
Meanwhile the Dominions fired another volley. Only two hundred and fifty missiles this time. Eder ordered another volley from the Victorian line. The Dominions continued to fall back. By now all of the Victorian ships had sent reconnaissance drones chasing after them and one by one the Duck “battleships” and “cruisers” turned out to be decoy drones. Finally, more than an hour after the first missile had been fired, the recon drones penetrated to the center of the Dominion line, where they found numerous empty missile pods, six frigates and two carriers. The carriers appeared to be empty of fighters, but were flying in very close formation, sided by side, so that
sensors from the Victorian ships showed them as one very large vessel.
The massive Duck strike force was nothing more than a paper tiger.
Using the guidance from the reconnaissance drones, Eder launched another volley of missiles, concentrating on the frigates and carriers. Twenty minutes later the enemy ships were dead or desperately limping away, trailing air, debris and bodies in their wake.
Meanwhile, Admiral Douthat was doing the math.
They had estimated that the Duck force chasing the Atlas had about one hundred and twenty war ships. They thought that sixty six or sixty seven Duck warships had gone in front of them to block the worm hole entrance, leaving a little more than fifty still trailing behind the space station Atlas. Those trailing ships were thought to be the Dominion’s smaller ships.
Instead, the Dominions had sent only eight warships to the worm hole entrance, leaving behind over a hundred ships following the Atlas. And even if they red-lined their engines, the Black Watch and Queen’s Own were almost five hours away from Atlas.
The blood drained from her face.
“We’ve been suckered,” she said, her voice numb and flat. “Atlas is virtually undefended. All that’s left is the Coldstream Guard.”
Chapter 66
Dominion Forces Trailing Behind Space Station Atlas
A strong man could shape the universe, if he had the will.
Admiral Mello had the will.
The Victorians had surrounded the Atlas with an insurmountable shell of mines and static defenses.
Admiral Mello intended to surmount it.
First, he sent in the mine sweepers, the most expendable of his forces. There were ten mine sweepers and they moved forward in a cautious wedge formation, four across, three up and three down. Each minesweeper had thirty turret lasers slaved to a master control. As they moved forward they shot the Victorian mines before the mines could sense them and detonate.
It was not a perfect process. Invariably, one or two mines would be missed or only slightly damaged, and when the mine sweeper got close enough the mine would sense a hostile presence and take its revenge. Fifteen minutes into the minefield, the first mine sweeper died. The rest pressed forward, drilling a large hole into the Victorian defensive shell, like a drill bit biting through hard rock. The second and third mine sweepers died ten minutes later, killed when one mine exploded and caused a ripple effect in nearby mines that were just close enough to the two ships to crush them.
Now there were only seven mine sweepers. The hole they made was smaller, but they pressed forward, firing methodically, slowing the rate of their passage so that they might have more time to find their targets.
But the Vickies had been clever. While the outer skin of the minefield had proximity mines, deeper in there were globe mines, sprinting mines, ripple mines and missile mines. The entire minefield was being carried along by a myriad of tractor beams, so it kept its position around the Atlas space station as Atlas desperately plodded its way to Refuge. The tactics the mine sweepers successfully used against proximity mines in the first layer of the mine field would not work so well against other types of mines.
The mine sweepers stoically crept forward.
They reached the first line of missile mines, missile platforms surrounded by a shell of sensors probing out a thousand miles in every direction. In ten minutes the remaining mine sweepers were destroyed, either by missiles or by stumbling into mines as they desperately tried to evade them.
Then Mello ordered in the frigates.
They went in cautiously, firing missiles and lasers and making the hole begun by the mine sweepers deeper and larger, boring through the Victorian defensive shell like a drill press. They moved slowly, but there were thirty of them and by the time the last fell to Victorian missiles and mines and lasers, they were almost a quarter of the way through to the space station.
Then he ordered in the destroyers.
Captain Pattin had watched in astonishment as Admiral Mello ordered in the mine sweepers and frigates, but when he ordered in the destroyers, she could no longer restrain herself.
“Admiral!” she whispered urgently. “You are killing your own ships! It is no good breaking through the mine field if we have no ships left to exploit it! And — ” she hesitated, afraid to say what she thought, but afraid not to — “if you order the ships’ crews to their certain death, some will refuse to obey. They might even turn their guns on the Vengeance.”
He looked at her, surprised at her naivete. He barked a laugh. “They will not disobey,” he assured her. “Each captain knows that the Intelligence Directoate has their families under constant surveillance. If they fail to obey, their families will pay for their treason.”
“Admiral,” she said urgently. “I beg you to reconsider. If we squander our forces here we are defeated. We must keep the Fleet intact, we must have enough ships to defend the homeland.”
Mello looked at her coldly. “I expected more of you, Jodi. This is the decisive battle. If we kill the Atlas, the Victorians will have no way to rebuild their navy, no way to restart their trading economy, no way to generate wealth. Don’t you understand? Without the Atlas, their new child queen will be nothing more than a homeless refugee and Victoria will be nothing more than a historical footnote. All their planets, all their people, all their wormholes will belong to us, and the Dominion of Unified Citizenry will the dominate the universe for a millennia to come!”
He gestured to the holo display, which showed the first squadron of destroyers entering the minefield. “Against that, the sacrifice of a few ships is nothing. Nothing! If I have to spend every ship in this fleet to destroy the Atlas, it will be worth it. We can build more ships, but if we kill the Atlas, we kill all of Victoria, now and forever!” He leaned close to her. “Do-you-understand?” he shouted into her face.
In his stateroom on the Dominion battleship Fortitude, Admiral Kaeser stared in horror. He had followed the battle through his hologram repeater, which his XO had either forgotten or been too polite to turn off. On the screen the destroyers slowly deepened the breach into the Vicky minefield, but at a terrible price. The rift was more than halfway through the minefield, but of the twenty destroyers that had gone in, only twelve remained. As he watched, another two flickered and disappeared, leaving only a red cross on the holo display to mark their destruction. A long, thick line of red crosses trailed behind, marking all of the other Dominion ships that had died trying to break through the minefield.
Sickened and furious, Admiral Kaeser strode rapidly to his stateroom door and punched the button to open the door.
Nothing happened.
He pounded the door with his fist. “Guard! Guard! Open this door!”
The door hissed open and a scared looking soldier stood there, hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Tell Captain Bauer I must speak to him immediately,” Kaeser ordered.
“But I have orders to-” the guard stammered.
“Do it!” Kaeser barked, but then, more softly, “Hurry, before we all run out of time. Hurry now, for everything you love and cherish, hurry.”
Chapter 67
Atlas Space Station
The alarm horns hooted incessantly, making it difficult to think. All throughout Atlas blast doors were dropping into place and sealing airtight. Hiram Brill stared at the holo display, trying hard to overcome his shock and the blaring alarms.
“Will somebody turn that damn thing off?” he shouted. Nobody heard him. He shook his head in frustration, then picked up a pen and threw it at his assistant, Nina, catching her in the head. She turned and glared at him. He pointed to the alarm horn and made a slashing motion across his throat. She nodded and bent over her computer and a moment later the horns made a last, low moaning sound and blessedly went silent. Hiram returned his attention to the holo display and the information coming in from the sensors spread throughout the minefield.
At first they thought the attack from the rear was simply another probing attack
. The Ducks had probed continuously, looking for a flaw in the minefield pattern that might let them slip through. But then the sensors had revealed the number of Duck ships involved and Hiram realized that they had been caught flat footed. The Dominion force blocking the worm hole entrance to Refuge was a feint; the real attack was coming from behind as the Dominions used brute force to bull their way through the minefield. He shook his head. For the Ducks, it was a huge gamble, but it looked like it was working.
The utter ruthlessness of the attack shocked him. The ten Duck mine sweepers had carved a deep channel into the mine field before being destroyed. As he watched, the enemy frigates were cutting into it even deeper, but taking a terrific beating. A cold hand seemed to grab his heart. The Duck admiral, he realized, had just ordered forty ships to their deaths in order to break through to the Atlas, and the sensors revealed that several squadrons of enemy destroyers were lining up to take their turn.
“Nina, send a courier drone out to Admiral Douthat and tell her we are being attacked in force by the Ducks. Estimate at least eighty ships in the attack, maybe more. They are about a quarter way through the minefield. Then call Peter Murphy of the tugboat guild and tell him to haul mines from the front of the Atlas to the rear. Tell him not to thin out any one spot too much, but we need more fire power in our rear.”
He watched for a while longer, counting ships, noting the deepening breach into the minefield. On the holo display, the first squadron of Dominion destroyers moved forward into the breach. “Gandalf?” he called.
“ Commander Brill?”
“Analyze rate of penetration of the minefield by Dominion forces and assume that they will use all available ships to complete the penetration. Estimate how long before they achieve a total breach.”
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