by David Weber
Lieutenant Alfy Washington lay back in his seat, looking up at the stars through his glassteel canopy, his arms crossed. Fighters, and especially fighters on minimum power, had very little signature. Spotting them at more than a light-second or so required visual tracking, and space fighters were a light-absorbing matte black for a reason. But they were very, very fast. At an acceleration rate of eight KPS2, they could pile on velocity in a hurry, and even their phase drive signatures were hard to notice at interplanetary distances.
He checked his toot and nodded silently at the data that was being fed to his division over the hair-fine whisker laser.
“Christ, Gajelis is dumb as a rock,” he muttered, lying back again and closing his eyes. “And I’m glad as hell I’m not in cruisers.”
HMS Bellingham rocked as another blast of coherent radiation slammed into her armored flank.
“Tubes Ten and Fourteen off-line,” Tactical said tightly. “Heavy jamming from the enemy squadron, but we’ve still got control of the missiles.”
For all their toughness, cruisers were nowhere near so heavily armored as carriers. Even a capital ship graser—or the forward-bearing spinal mount weapon of a cruiser like Bellingham—couldn’t hope to penetrate a capital ship’s armor at any range beyond forty thousand kilometers. Missile hatches and weapons bays were more vulnerable, since they necessarily represented openings in the ship’s armored skin, but even they were heavily cofferdammed with ChromSten bulkheads to contain damage. For all practical purposes, an energy-armored combat had to get to within eighty thousand kilometers if it hoped to inflict damage, and to half of that if it wanted decisive results. Missiles had to get even closer, but, then again, missiles didn’t care whether or not they survived the experience.
Cruisers, unfortunately, were a bit easier to kill, and Bellingham bucked again as yet more enemy fire smashed into her.
“Heavy damage, port forward!” Damage Control snapped. “Hull breach, Frames Thirty-Seven to Forty-six. Magazine Three open to space.”
“That’s okay. We got the birds out first,” Demesne said, rubbing the arms of her station chair. Her tubes were flushed, and all she was doing now was surviving long enough to counter the Adoula squadron’s ECM through the birds’ guidance links. “Just let them stay dumb a little longer. . . .”
“Here comes anoth—” Tactical said, and then Bellingham heaved like a storm-sick windjammer.
The combat information center flexed and buckled, groaning as some furious giant twisted it between his hands, and Demesne felt her station chair rip loose from its mounts as the lights went out. The next thing she knew, she was on her side, still strapped to the chair, and one of her arms felt . . . pretty bad.
“Damage Control?” she croaked as she hit the quick release with her good hand. That was when she noticed the compartment was also in microgravity.
“XO?”
Nobody else in CIC seemed to be moving. Ensign Scargall was still in her station chair, sitting upright, but she ended just above the waist. What was left of her was held in place by a lap belt. The others looked to have been done by blast and debris. What a damn shame.
“Bit of a scar, there, Ensign,” Demesne said. She was more than a little woozy herself, and she caught herself giggling in reaction.
“Captain?” her first officer replied in a startled voice. “I thought you were gone, Ma’am!”
“Bad pennies, XO. Bad pennies,” she said. “How bad is it?”
“Heavy damage to Fusion Three and Five. CIC took a hit—I guess that’s pretty obvious. Alternate CIC is up and functioning. Damage teams are on the way to your location.”
“We’re still fighting?” she asked, grasping a piece of scrap metal which had once been a million-credit weapons control station. Oh, well. There were others. Hopefully.
“Still in the game,” the XO said. “Local gravity disruptions.”
“Right.” Demesne pushed herself across the shattered compartment to the armored hatch. It was warped, and the readouts on the access panel were dead. She considered the problem for a moment, then pulled herself along the bulkhead to the large hole in the armor which had been supposed to protect CIC. She’d just about reached the ragged-edged hole when there was a flutter, and she got her feet under her just as gravity came back on. It was about half power, but better than floating.
She considered the breached bulkhead with a frown. The hole, while undeniably large, wasn’t exactly what anyone might call neat. The passageway outside CIC had been pretty thoroughly chewed up, and there was a gap—over a meter wide—in the deck. That didn’t seem all that far, but this particular gap lit up the darkened passageway like an old-fashioned light bulb with the cheery red of near molten metal. Besides, she was in no shape to jump any gaps under the best of conditions, and the jagged, knifelike projections fanging the bulkhead hole scarcely qualified as “the best” of anything. She didn’t like to think about what they’d do to her unarmored shipsuit if she tried to get up a run to vault across the gap and didn’t hit the hole dead center. She couldn’t afford any nasty little punctures, any more than she could afford to come up short on that handy-dandy frying pan. The compartment’s atmosphere had been evacuated—not surprisingly, since she could see stars through the meter-and-a-half hole in the passageway’s deckhead if she leaned over and looked up. The frigging hole had been punched halfway through her ship! And it wasn’t the only one, she suspected. That would have made her cranky, if she’d been the type.
But this wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. The problem at hand was how to get out of CIC and to the alternate bridge. And, okay, admit it—she wasn’t tracking really well. Probably the pain from the broken arm. Or maybe being thrown across the compartment.
She was still considering her condition—and the condition of her ship, which was just as bad or worse—when an armored Marine suddenly poked his head around the edge of the hole from the other side.
“Holy crap!” the Marine said on the local circuit. “Captain Demesne? You’re alive?”
“Am I standing here?” she snapped in a gravel voice. “Is this a red suit? Does anybody else get a Santa suit?”
“No, Ma’am,” the Marine said. “I mean, yes, Ma’am. I mean—”
“Oh, quit stuttering and lie down,” Demesne said, pointing to the glowing edges of the gap.
“Ma’am?” the Marine said, clearly confused.
“Lie down across the gap,” Demesne said, slowly and carefully, as it speaking to a child.
“Yes, Ma’am,” the Marine said. He set down his plasma cannon and lay down across the gap obediently.
Captain Demesne considered him for a moment, then crawled carefully across his armored back, slithering out of CIC and towards her duty.
Commander Bogdan jinked her fighter to the side as a missile from one of the cruisers to planetary north flashed towards her squadron. But the cruisers weren’t putting up their regular fight after the hammering they’d taken from CruFlot 140’s fire.
That was good, but her business wasn’t with Fatted Calf’s cruisers. Her job was to intercept the Fatted Calf fighters before they got close enough to launch their Leviathan anti-ship missiles.
Fleet fighters were basically the smallest hull which could be wrapped around a Protessa-Sheehan phased gravity drive and the Frederickson-Hsu countergravity field which damped the man-killing effects of the phase drive. The size of the Navy’s current Eagle III fighter also happened to be the largest volume which could be enclosed in a field capable of a full eight hundred gravities of acceleration.
All of that propulsion hardware, coupled with life support requirements, the necessary flight computers and other electronics, and a light forward-firing laser armament, left exactly zero internal volume, and the Eagle III was capable of only extremely limited atmospheric maneuvers. The phase drive would not function in atmosphere, and although the counter-grav could provide lift (after a fashion) it wasn’t really configured for that, either. Nor did the fi
ghter’s emergency reaction thrusters begin to provide the brute power of something like an assault shuttle. Then again, the reaction drive assault shuttles had the internal volume for a lot of payload, whereas the volume requirements of the fighter’s drive systems meant that all of its payload had to be carried externally.
Depending on the exact external ordnance loads selected, an Eagle III could carry up to five of the big, smart Leviathans. They were shorter-legged than ship-to-ship weapons. At 4,200 gravities, they accelerated forty percent faster than shipboard antiship missiles, but they had a maximum powered endurance of only three minutes. And, unlike ship-launched shipkillers, their stripped-down size left them with a drive which could not be turned on and off at will. Which meant they had a powered envelope from rest of approximately 667,000 kilometers and a terminal velocity from rest of 7,560 KPS. They were also much smaller targets . . . with very capable ECM and penaids. In short, they might be short-ranged and less flexible, but they were bastards to stop with point defense, so keeping them away from the carriers was a prime mission. And this time, everything was going right.
The fighters from the Fatted Calf units were slashing in at high acceleration, intent on closing the range to CruFlot 140 before launching, but Bogdan’s fighters were armed specifically for an antifighter engagement, unburdened by the bulky shipkillers. They could have carried up to fourteen Astaroth antifighter/antishipkiller missiles in place of those five Leviathans. Or, as in Bogdan’s fighters’ case, eight Astaroths and two Foxhawk decoy missiles. That would give them a decisive advantage in the furball, and they’d punched with perfect timing to intercept the mission. The Fatted Calf fighters had another fourteen thousand kilometers to go before they could launch on the cruisers. And by then, Bogdan’s squadron would be all over them, like a tiger on . . . a fatted calf.
“Coming up on initial launch,” Bogdan said, prepping her Astaroths.
“Commander,” Peyravi in Division 4 said suddenly. “Commander! Visual ID! Those aren’t fighters!”
Bogdan blanched and set her visual systems to auto-track, trying to spot the targets. Finally, as something occluded a star, she got a hard lock, and swore.
“Son of a bitch.” She switched to Fleet frequency. “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a—Mickey, Mickey, Mickey!” she shouted, calling for a priority override to the carrier squadron’s CIC. “These are Foxhawk-Two drones! Repeat, they’re Foxhawk-Deuces!”
“Blacksheep, Blacksheep,” Washington’s com said suddenly.
The Adoula fighter squadrons would have gotten close enough for a visual on the Foxhawks by now. The ship-launched version of the standard fighter decoys was big and powerful, but not big enough to fool sensors forever, and that meant it was time to go. Washington adjusted his chair to a better combat configuration and started bringing his systems online.
“Yes, Sir,” he said, deepening his voice. “Three bags full . . .”
Admiral Gajelis had just heard the “Mickey” call when the lieutenant commander at Tactical nodded.
“Eagle fighters lighting off,” she said. “They must’ve been blacked down. North polar three-one-five. Closing at four-three-seven-five! Range, two-five-three-two-five-zero!”
“Leviathan guidance systems coming on-line!” a sensor tech said. “Raid count is two hundred . . . five hundred . . . fifteen hundred bogeys! Vampire! Vampire, vampire—we have missile separation! Seven-five thousand—I say again, seven-five-zero-zero vampires inbound! Impact in six seconds!”
Commander Talbert’s belly muscles locked solid. Fifteen hundred fighters? That was impossible! Unless—
“Punch all defense missiles, maximum launch!” Gajelis snapped. “And get the fighters back here!”
“Like there’s time,” Commander Talbert muttered as he passed on the orders.
Gloria Demesne charged into her alternate bridge just as the fighter ambush sprang. It wasn’t just Fatted Calf’s fighters. Prokourov had sent his own fighters ahead under maximum acceleration even before he got his cruisers into space. And Kjerulf’s Moonbase fighters had reported for duty over an hour ago. There’d been plenty of time to get the speedy little parasites into position and shut down their emissions. Now they poured their heavy loads of Leviathans into the unsuspecting carriers from what amounted to knife-range.
Normally, fighter missiles had very little chance of significantly injuring a massively armored carrier. But, then again, normally the carrier’s commander wasn’t stupid enough to let fifteen hundred fighters get within twenty-five thousand kilometers of them with a closing velocity of over four thousand kilometers per second.
“Oh, no,” Captain Demesne said softly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
The Fatted Calf fighters, their racks flushed and empty, had gone to max deceleration on a heading back to their carriers leaving the field to the opposing cruisers. CruFlot 140, however, was badly out of position . . . and hopelessly screwed.
Both cruiser forces had taken heavy losses—Demesne had lost fifty-seven of her ninety-six ships—but CruFlot 140 had lost eighty-eight. They were down to fifty-six to her thirty-nine, they’d exhausted their own shipkillers, and even if their carriers had been in range to cover them with countermissiles, they were too busy fighting for their own lives against the fighter ambush to worry about their parasites. Which meant that the cruisers’ only real option was to bore on in for the kill on CruFlot 150’s remaining cruisers, hoping to reach beam range, where their numerical advantage could still make itself felt. Unfortunately for them, Demesne’s readouts indicated that all of them were gushing air. Worse, from their perspective, they were well inside the missile envelope of the Fatted Calf carriers.
Those carriers hadn’t gotten off unscathed in the missile holocaust. Captain Julius Fenrec’s Gloria was out of it. She’d been shot to pieces—not such a good omen for certain cruiser skippers, perhaps; Demesne’s mouth twisted wryly at the thought—and her surviving personnel were evacuating as rapidly as possible. It was an even bet whether or not they’d all get off before her runaway Fusion Twelve’s containment failed. But the other three carriers of the improvised squadron were still in action, and unlike Gloria, their damage was essentially superficial. They’d lost very few of their missile launchers, and while their fighters hammered Gajelis’ carriers, they were free to engage the surviving enemy cruisers undistracted by anything else. And that, Gloria Demesne thought, would be all they wrote.
Of course, in the meantime, there were all those missiles the fighters had sent scorching into CarRon 14’s teeth. Which ought to begin arriving . . . right . . . about . . .
“Detonations on the carriers,” the assistant tactical officer said. “Multiple detonations! Holy shit, Melshikov is just gone!”
“Admiral,” Lieutenant Commander Clinton, at Tactical Two said, coughing on the smoke eddying about the compartment. CIC hadn’t lost environment, and she still had her helmet latched back. “Melshikov is gone, and Porter reports critical damage. Everybody else is still intact . . . more or less.”
Victor Gajelis ground his teeth together in fury. Fighters. Who would have believed fighters could inflict that much damage?
He glared at Trujillo’s damage control schematic. The fighter strike had concentrated heavily on Melshikov and Porter, and for all intents and purposes, destroyed both of them. Porter was still technically intact, but she’d lost two-thirds of her combat capability, her phase drive was badly damaged, and her tunnel drive had been completely disabled. She could neither survive in combat nor avoid it, and if he didn’t order her abandoned, he might as well shoot her entire crew himself.
“It looks like Gloria is abandoning,” Clinton added, and the admiral nodded in acknowledgment. At least they’d gotten one of the bastards in return, but that didn’t magically erase his own losses or mean his other four carriers had escaped unscathed. Trujillo was probably the least damaged of the lot, and she’d been hammered hard. She’d lost a quarter of her missile launchers, almost as many of h
er grasers, and a third of her point defense clusters, and she was still an hour and a half short of Old Earth.
“Sir,” Commander Talbert said quietly, “look at Tactical Three.”
Gajelis’ eyes flicked sideways, and his jaw clenched even tighter as the last of his parasite cruisers was blown apart.
“Three of Fatted Calf’s carriers are still intact, Sir,” Talbert pointed out in that same, quiet voice. “Prokorouv’s cruisers will be in planetary orbit in another four minutes—with full magazines—and his carriers will be here in less than two hours.”
Gajelis grunted in irate acknowledgment. A little voice deep inside told him it was time to give it up, but he could still do it. Yes, his ships were damaged, but Gloria was gone completely now—the explosion had been bright enough to be picked out clearly at twenty six million kilometers—and the three carriers still guarding the planetary orbitals were as badly damaged as his four surviving carriers. And the Fatted Calf cruisers had been effectively gutted, while their fighters were dodging around for their lives with his own in pursuit. He’d have to deal with Prokorouv’s cruisers, as well as Atilius’ carriers, but it would still have been little worse than an even fight, if not for Prokorouv’s carriers. Still, if he went back to maximum acceleration, just blew past Old Earth and took out the Palace in passing . . .
“We have system recon platform access, Admiral,” Tactical called out.
“Incoming encrypted message from Moonbase,” Commu-nications chimed in.
“Admiral,” Tactical went on, without a break, “system platforms report heavy phase drive emissions closing on Old Earth,” Tactical called out. “Lots of electronics, Sir. Electronics are encrypted, and we’re having a hard time sorting it out. Looks like three squadrons. We’re getting IFF off of them. One of them is CarRon 14, but the other two are squawking ‘Fatted Calf One’ and ‘Fatted Calf Two.’”