“They would have,” Geary agreed. “I’m not going to do the same thing. But the Syndics here may think I plan on doing the same thing.”
At time two one the main body of the fleet began splitting, forming into three flattened ovals. The largest oval, centered on Dauntless and facing the enemy, held the other three battle cruisers in her division along with twelve battleships and twenty heavy cruisers. That was fox five one. The oval forming above the main formation held the remaining seven battle cruisers and would be fox five two, while the oval forming beneath the main body contained the remaining thirteen battleships and all of the heavy cruisers in fox five three. The light cruisers and destroyers were divided among fox five one and fox five two, while the five auxiliaries were forming another subformation, which was fox five four, just behind the main body. The oval of the main body faced its flat side to the enemy, while the oval formations not far above and below the main body were at right angles to it, the entire grouping almost resembling a three-sided box open on two sides and the top facing the Syndic flotilla. “No escorts for the auxiliaries?” Desjani asked.
“The entire fleet is escorting them,” Geary replied. “This time around I’m confident that the Syndics won’t veer off and try to hit the auxiliaries first.” He focused back on the strike force, which since the ill-fated pass against the Syndic flotilla was down to the four full-size battle cruisers of Duellos’s division and the three remaining Adroit-class warships, Adroit, Auspice, and Ascendant. The strike force still represented a significant amount of firepower, but it would have to be employed carefully against the mass of the Syndic flotilla.
As the Alliance fleet settled into its new arrangement, the Syndics were barely two light-minutes distant, about ten minutes from engagement range at current closing rates. The Syndic box formation was back as it had been except for the loss of the one battle cruiser during the fight with the Syndic battleship. Once again, the Syndic battle cruisers were massed in the center, with the battleships in clusters at each corner of the box. He’s coming straight on. He expects me to whittle at the edges of his formation, just as I’ve usually done and as I did using these formations at Kaliban. There’s a countermove if I use that tactic, a countermove that would also set him up to punch straight through the middle of the formation in an attack centered on Dauntless. The fleet flagship, holding the guy who stole Shalin’s hoped-for glory.
And you still think you’re smarter than me, Shalin, smarter than anybody, and you hate my guts. Arrogance and hate. Bad combination. It’s going to cost you.
“All right. Let’s get slowed down to targeting speed. All units in formations fox five one, fox five two, fox five three, and fox five four reduce speed to point zero four light speed at time three zero. All units in fox five two, pivot formation down zero nine five degrees at time three nine and accelerate to point zero six light speed. All units in fox five three, pivot formation up zero seven five degrees at time three seven and accelerate to point zero six light speed. All units in fox five four, alter heading up zero nine zero degrees at time four zero.” He paused to take a breath. “Captain Duellos, accelerate to contact with the enemy on your current heading. Engage targets of opportunity.”
Desjani gave her display a startled look. “You’re not aiming for the edges of his formation to wear him down.”
“No. He expects that. Upper or lower edges, he thinks that’s what I’ll do.” Geary grinned at Desjani. “I do have a pattern.”
She slowly smiled as she thought through the maneuvers. “He’s planning to do what you did at the first battle at Lakota, right?”
“Probably. Concentrate and punch through the middle of this formation, where Dauntless and I am.”
Dauntless had pivoted around and was shuddering now as her propulsion units strove to reduce her velocity. Geary felt the strain, heard the ship’s structure complain, and knew that if the inertial dampers failed, the ship would come apart, and every human in it would be smashed to jelly. All around Dauntless, the rest of the Alliance fleet’s warships were braking as well.
The Syndic commander would expect that, too. Geary had often changed velocity right before contact, and this time he had to slow down, couldn’t accelerate without effectively eliminating any chance of scoring hits on the enemy.
Dauntless was pivoting again, bringing her bow around to face the enemy with only a few minutes left to contact, the subformations above and below the main formation pivoting to almost parallel with the main formation as the battle cruiser subformation above dove down just behind the main body, and just in front of the main body, the battleship subformation below climbed up in front of the rest.
Behind them all, the auxiliaries were climbing straight “up” and away from the path of the Syndics. “All units, weapons free as soon as the enemy enters your weapons engagement envelopes.”
The Syndic formation was altering at the last moments before contact, too, shrinking down to much smaller dimensions, concentrating the ships into a tight block aimed at the center of the main Alliance formation. “If we’d aimed at the edges of his formation,” Desjani observed, “we would have found ourselves too far out to score hits as his formation shrank. Good call, Admiral. Weapons,” she called that watch-stander, “target the enemy flagship.”
“One minute to contact,” the maneuvering watch-stander announced.
Missiles leaped from warships, filling the space between the flotilla and the Alliance fleet, followed within moments by barrages of grapeshot and hell-lance fire, then on the Alliance side, the battleships and battle cruisers fired their null-field weapons.
Instead of avoiding the glancing blows from the Alliance subformations and hitting the single thin layer of the main formation, the Syndic flotilla found itself running headlong into three layers of Alliance warships, the first and last layers moving rapidly at almost right angles to the Syndic movement and hard to target, but hurling out their weapons along the vector the Syndic flotilla was coming down.
Space flared bright as weapons clashed, and ships exploded, the Syndics ramming through the first Alliance subformation, which held more battleships than the entire Syndic flotilla, then hitting the main body with almost as many battleships and some battle cruisers, before staggering through the third subformation, with its battle cruisers and numerous escorts tearing at the weakened Syndic warships.
Coming close behind the Syndics, Duellos led the strike force through the Alliance formations in a heart-stopping maneuver that took only fractions of a second, then slammed fire into the rear of the Syndic flotilla.
It had taken less than a second for the two forces to clash, and now as they separated again, Geary felt Dauntless still shaking from the impacts of enemy hits. He tried not to focus on the damage to Dauntless, concentrating instead on the assessments pouring in from the fleet sensors as they evaluated the results of the clash.
“Have a nice trip to hell,” Desjani snarled at her display as she directed damage-control efforts.
He knew what she meant. All fifteen of the remaining Syndic battle cruisers were gone, including the flagship, torn apart or exploded into fragments by the successive layers of Alliance battleships and battle cruisers. CEO Shalin wouldn’t be ruling the Syndicate Worlds.
Of the twelve Syndic battleships, six were still lurching forward with heavy damage, but those were being overhauled and knocked out one by one by Duellos’s strike force. The rest of the enemy battleships were already out of commission and spitting out swarms of escape pods.
Out of nearly two hundred Hunter-Killers, less than a dozen were left, the small warships annihilated by the amount of firepower concentrated on the space they had traversed. Ten light cruisers had survived, five of them still able to run at full speed, and nearly twenty heavy cruisers were still operational, having been small enough to avoid fire aimed at the battleships and battle cruisers and large enough to survive the weapons that had almost wiped out the smaller warships.
Duellos called in, looki
ng quite pleased with events. “We might need some help on a couple of these battleships, but otherwise things went quite well. You might be interested in knowing that as my formation approached yours, and you exchanged fire with the Syndics, our sensors reported the heaviest recorded density of weapons usage and tried to warn us off.”
Inspire was opening the distance once more, but still less than a light-minute away, so something resembling a conversation was possible. “That’s another one of those things I don’t think I want to do again. I’m going to get the fleet turned around, so if you need any assistance, just call.”
He gave the necessary orders, pulling the four subformations back toward each other as they turned through wide swaths of space, then forced himself to face the hard part. Witch headed off toward an intercept with the crippled Agile, accompanied by the battleship Guardian, which should be all the escort needed now that the Syndic flotilla had ceased to exist.
On Geary’s display, red symbols and text told the tale of the price the Alliance had paid during the brutal exchange of fire with the Syndics.
The battleships and escorts in the fox five three subformation had been the first in line and taken the brunt of the Syndic fire. It only now registered on Geary that Dreadnaught had been one of those battleships. He had sent his grandniece into danger without even realizing it, caught up in the planning and execution of the battle. Dreadnaught had been battered but hadn’t sustained critical damage. Orion, still a bad-luck ship, had taken the most damage and would need a lot of repair work. Aside from them, the four battleships Fearless, Resolution, Redoubtable, and War-spite seemed to have been in the wrong places at the wrong time and received the most damage from the Syndic fire.
In the main body, the Syndics had tried to hit the four battle cruisers, assuming one held Geary. Even though the enemy blows had already been seriously blunted, the four battle cruisers had suffered. Daring took the most hits, but Dauntless was far from unscathed. “How many dead?” he asked Desjani.
She sighed. “Ten confirmed. Three more might not make it. We can get all the damage repaired within a week and be at full readiness again.”
Multiply those losses by how many ships in the fleet, and the price once again seemed far too high.
Amazingly, in the third layer the Syndics had penetrated, the most damage by far had been sustained by the new Invincible. I’ve heard of threat magnets, but it’s like the Invincible literally attracted enemy fire.
Like the battleships in fox five three, the escorts had caught hell, which was why he hadn’t put any destroyers or light cruisers in that formation. Four heavy cruisers, Menpo, Hoplite, Bukhtar, and Squamata, were either gone or clearly too badly damaged to repair. Another eleven had been badly shot up. In the other subformations, twenty destroyers had been knocked out or torn apart, along with six light cruisers. That was in addition to the battle cruiser Assert, lost earlier.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Desjani observed.
“You usually say that.”
“Because it’s usually true. We’ve crushed the Syndics here, in their home star system, and for the time being they have nothing left except those heavy cruisers and other surviving escorts running for their lives.”
Geary looked around, seeing the watch-standers exchanging grins, knowing that all through the fleet, personnel would be remembering the losses in the ambush before Geary assumed command and celebrating the turnabout in their fortunes as well as the vengeance on the Syndic CEO responsible. He tried to shake off the melancholy he felt over the men and women who had died to bring about the victories here and in other star systems, tried to lift his mood to match that of the rest of the people on Dauntless ’s bridge.
He hadn’t quite succeeded when that mood was abruptly shattered by the stunned voice of the operations watch-stander. “The hypernet gate is collapsing.”
NINE
GEARY jerked his attention back to his display, where the hypernet gate depiction was pulsing red in warning. Now? What kind of cruel joke would it be for everything to end that way after defeating every other challenge? “How much time left until it collapses?”
No answer. Geary looked back and saw the watch-stander, along with every other watch-stander, staring aghast at their displays.
Desjani’s voice, hard, louder than usual, cut across the bridge. “The admiral asked you for the system estimate of the time until collapse.”
The lieutenant jerked back to awareness. “I’m sorry, Captain. Sir, fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” Geary asked.
“Yes, sir. That’s all. It’s going down very fast.”
Geary closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then looked back at the display. “That’s not enough time to get the fleet into the defensive formation.”
“No, sir,” Desjani agreed, her voice quieter now.
Geary triggered the appropriate comm circuit. “All units in the Alliance fleet, this is Admiral Geary. As you are aware, the hypernet gate here is collapsing. We have been informed that the catastrophic-fail function has been disabled, but could not confirm that, nor do we know whether or not the safe-fail system is functioning properly. We cannot predict the level of the energy discharge. All ships are to position themselves bow on to the hypernet gate location and maximize forward shields.” There had to be something else to say, in what might be his last transmission. “If worse comes to worst, the remnants of central power for the Syndicate Worlds’ government and mobile forces will be destroyed along with this fleet. Our sacrifice will not be in vain, and our children will be free of this war.”
Rione burst onto the bridge and stood staring at the display before the observer seat, before dropping into it. Her eyes didn’t seem to be watching the display, though. Geary wondered what she was looking at in her mind’s eye. “How are negotiations going?” he asked, amazed that he could actually ask the question with sarcasm rather than bitterness.
Rione shook her head quickly, then focused on Geary. “The Syndics were as shocked as we were. When I left, they were screaming that they hadn’t done it, that no collapse order had been sent, that the catastrophic-fail algorithms could not still be operational.”
What to say to that? “Thank you.”
“Five minutes to collapse,” the operations watch-stander announced in a strained voice.
“Forward shields at maximum,” the combat-systems watch-stander reported.
“Very well.” Desjani was massaging her forehead lightly with the tips of the fingers of one hand, hiding her expression. She glanced at Geary and just for a moment smiled wistfully. “If worse comes to worst, it’s been nice knowing you.”
“Same here.” Possibly only a few minutes left, but they couldn’t even touch hands. They had maintained their honor up to now, and they would end that way if that was what fate decreed.
The hypernet gate had actually collapsed more than seven hours ago. The light from that event was finally reaching them, and any shock wave soon would as well. Geary watched his display, part of him marveling at the fact that everything on it closer to the hypernet gate might already be gone.
“One minute.” The watch-stander’s voice cracked.
“Very well,” Desjani repeated, her voice composed but getting louder again. “We will meet this as Dauntless and her crew have met every danger, with honor and courage.”
A chorus of assents from the watch-standers followed her words. Desjani gave Geary another smile. He nodded back to her. Rione was staring fixedly into space again.
“Thirty seconds until estimated arrival of shock wave . . . ten seconds . . . five seconds . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”
The moment came and passed, just as it had at Lakota. “Get me an updated estimate if you can, Lieutenant,” Desjani ordered.
“Yes, Captain, I—Captain?” The operations watch-stander was studying his display intently. “I think it’s happened. Yes. One second after the estimate. The energy discharge from the gate was so sm
all that our instruments barely registered it. We’ve got a clear view of where the gate was and all the intervening space. The gate is gone, but everything is fine.”
“I’ll be damned.” Desjani turned a baffled gaze on Geary. “Those Syndic CEOs told the truth.”
He felt light-headed as he nodded in reply. “It looks like they did. We’re all still alive.”
“A miracle,” Desjani said, shaking her head. “I mean, yes, we’re alive, but Syndic CEOs told the truth. I never expected that to happen.”
“I guess we owe the living stars thanks for that miracle and for the fact that we’re still alive.” Geary tapped his controls. “All units in the Alliance fleet, this is Admiral Geary. The safe-fail mechanism on the hypernet gate functioned properly. The threat is past. Continue previously assigned operations.” He turned back to look at Rione. “I believe you can return to your negotiations, Madam Co-President.”
Rione stood up, smiling. “I will do that, Admiral. I’ll also light a candle to Captain Cresida tonight.”
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