First Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  A superdreadnought fell out of line and staggered away, bleeding plasma from a dozen open wounds. The crews were already trying to escape – the sensors were picking up hundreds of lifepods blasting free of the doomed ship – even though the Hegemony expected their crews to fight to the death. It was a mystery why they’d even bothered to install lifepods in the first place. Another superdreadnought, heavily damaged, was somehow still firing at the oncoming human ships. The remaining three were less damaged, their shields having held against most of the blast. They seemed stunned, even as the human cruisers fell on them like wolves on a flock of sheep.

  They’d learned from the last pass, Tobias realised as the two fleets came together once again. Their weapons fire was more targeted, moving rapidly from target to target, their computers trying to predict the random jinks used by human ships to evade incoming fire. Nimitz shuddered again as a phase cannon burst struck her forward shields, only to be repelled and evaded as the helmsman threw her into a tight turn. Her weapons were still firing, raking into her target’s hull whenever the phase cannon matched the enemy’s shield modulation. Someone on the other side had a brain, Tobias realised. He – more likely she – had been smart enough to start rotating their shields as soon as the first bursts of human fire slipped through their shields and into their hulls. It hampered their ability to return fire – they'd have to keep altering their weapons to match the shield frequencies – but it might keep them alive.

  The 2nd Cruiser Squadron swooped down on its target, one of the intact superdreadnoughts. It looked as if the enemy formation was falling apart, although it was impossible to be sure. The enemy flagship hadn’t been badly damaged, which suggested that their commander was trying to adapt to a situation she would have considered impossible. Tobias barked orders and the 1st Cruiser Squadron reformed and headed towards the enemy flagship. Once she’d been taken out, it was possible that the enemy would surrender. Intact superdreadnoughts would teach Earth’s engineers a great deal about the Hegemony’s fleet – and rescuing survivors would look good in front of the other Galactics. It would…

  “Admiral,” Jackson said, “Tirpitz…”

  Tobias looked – and swore. Tirpitz had one of the more aggressive commanders in the Federation Navy… and he’d taken her too close to the superdreadnought, which had lashed out hard enough to punch through the cruiser’s shields and destroy one of her drive nacelles. Unable to adapt in time to change course, the cruiser spun out of control and slammed into the superdreadnought it had been targeting…

  …And both ships vanished in a ball of fire.

  Chapter Nine

  Lady Dalsha had been trained to remain calm in all circumstances. No-one was permitted to command a starship, let alone an entire squadron, unless they were both loyal to the Empress and capable of remaining calm even in the worst of circumstances. But the disaster unfolding in front of her was utterly outside her experience. No one had seen an Association-designed superdreadnought destroyed in hundreds of years. Even the worst of the brushfire wars had never cost anyone a superdreadnought. Everyone knew that the ships were invincible.

  Except for the intruders, who were attacking her ships. Tactical analysts claimed that they were human-built vessels, even though that was obviously impossible. Humans couldn't have built such ships and yet surrendered Terra Nova without a fight. It was vaguely possible that someone else might have assisted the humans, but why? Impeding the Hegemony’s expansion would have delighted a dozen other races, yet it would have meant war, if their hand had been discovered. And even if they had, why would they have given new weapons to humanity instead of arming their own ships?

  The impossible ships closed in again, firing a second spread of torpedoes. Point defence fire reached out to target them, the gunners suddenly having become very motivated. A normal torpedo spread posed little threat to a superdreadnought, but each of those torpedoes was a deadly threat. She couldn't understand how the unknowns had managed to compress so much antimatter into such small torpedoes, yet in the end the how and why hardly mattered. All that mattered was defeating the enemy or extracting her command before it was completely wiped out. Terra Nova and the garrison on its surface would have to fend for itself.

  And there was so much disruption in normal space from the antimatter blasts that she couldn't even contact the Hegemony and warn them of the new threat.

  “Bring up the main drives,” she ordered. They’d have to run – and while no Hegemony fleet had ever run from an opponent before, no fleet had ever faced such a lopsided battle. Those cruisers were so small that losing one had to be only a tiny portion of the enemy fleet, while each lost superdreadnought cost the Hegemony dearly. Even the Association, back when it had been building superdreadnoughts, had never been able to build one in less than a year. It took the Hegemony more like two years to complete a superdreadnought. “Take us to minimum safe distance from the planet and open a gateway into quantum space.”

  Ripper’s very hull seemed to scream in protest as two torpedoes struck her shields, burning out two of her shield generators. There were a dozen shield generators built within the hull – the Association believed firmly in multiple redundancy – but they were all burning out. No one had envisaged weapons that rotated their frequencies until they found the one that would allow them to go right through the shields, therefore no one had bothered to design shield generators that could switch frequency instantly. Making the change placed extra wear and tear on generators that were prone to burning out if overloaded.

  One superdreadnought gone, another a powerless wreck, unable even to self-destruct. The Empress would not be pleased. The males on the ships would be forbidden breeding privileges and dumped on an isolated world without any females, one where their natural impulses would lead them to fight until they killed each other off completely. She… the Empress would not be merciful, if only to make it clear that failure would not be tolerated. There were worse fates than death and the clan that had ruled the Hegemony since First Contact knew all of them. She silently prayed to the gods her people no longer believed in that they could escape. The unknowns seemed to have them at their mercy.

  They closed in, dancing around her fleet in random patterns that her tactical computers couldn't follow or predict. They’d learned from the destruction of their comrade, making sure not to expose themselves for too long, twisting and turning to take the blasts that did hit them on unexposed parts of their shields. Association-designed shields were omnidirectional, creating a bubble that surrounded the entire ship. The intruders had shields that seemed to rotate, sharing the burden among several different shield generators. They could lose part of their shields without losing them all.

  Her ship shuddered again, and again. So close, the intruders didn’t seem inclined to use torpedoes – or perhaps they’d fired them all already. Her first command had been a destroyer that had barely carried ten torpedoes. But their phase cannon were digging deeper and deeper into the hulls of their targets, hunting for the vital systems that kept the ships going. For the first time, she grasped the essential weakness in simply copying Association-designed starships. All of her ships – and those belonging to most of the Galactics – had the same configuration as the Association had specified, thousands of years ago. Anyone who learned how to destroy one superdreadnought could destroy all of them.

  She showed her teeth in a gesture of defiance. Whoever they were, whatever they were really doing by attacking her fleet, the Hegemony had thousands of starships at its command. The Empress would lead her people to a war that would only end when they bombarded the enemy homeworld into debris, exterminating their entire race. They would…

  The lights flickered as one of the enemy beams sliced through a power distribution node. There was no hope of concealing from the enemy just how badly they’d harmed her ship, not now. Anyone with passive sensors – let alone active systems – would be able to monitor her ship’s power signature fluctuating wildly as power was diverted to d
rive nodes and weapons systems, even from life support. Her crew could live for hours before exhausting all the oxygen in the hull.

  And then the enemy started launching torpedoes again.

  And for the first time, she knew despair.

  * * *

  The Hegemony had boasted, when they’d bullied Earth out of Terra Nova, that they never surrendered territory they’d claimed. It was practically ingrained into their very genes. The concept of sharing what they had, of distributing wealth and resources evenly, was alien to them. It wasn't too surprising, given how hard they’d had to struggle to survive on their homeworld, but it made them dangerous. They were more unpleasant neighbours than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

  But now they were starting to retreat. The three superdreadnoughts that were still capable of moving under their own power were inching away from Terra Nova, their drive fields flickering in and out of existence as they fought to keep their drives operational. Their remaining escorts were forming a line and attempting to bar the human ships from reaching their larger consorts, an act that would have won them some respect if the Hegemony had been more inclined to be friendly to its weaker neighbours. Instead, they were merely a problem that had to be removed.

  Two of his own destroyers had moved closer to the drifting hulk, allowing Marines to fly out of their airlocks and board the derelict ship. It was a risk – there was no reason why the Funks couldn't turn off the containment chambers in their warheads and vaporise the remains along with the boarding party – but taking the hulk intact would be worth it. Even damaged, it would give the human race valuable intelligence.

  “Engage the smaller ships with torpedoes,” he ordered, as the fleet closed in on the enemy line. They were opening fire before the human ships had entered range, hoping to score a lucky hit. He didn't intend to give them the chance. Some of his ships had lost parts of their shields, leaving their hulls vulnerable if the enemy put a shot through the gaps in their defences. And his cruisers couldn't stand up to a heavy bombardment on their unshielded hulls. “Blow them out of our way.”

  The enemy destroyers attempted to evade as the spread of torpedoes roared towards their ships. Standard doctrine called for the torpedoes to concentrate on a single target; instead, his torpedoes spread out, each one going after a different ship. The enemy had to find it more than a little intimidating, particularly if they’d realised just how powerful his warheads actually were. There was a good chance that a single hit would be enough to cripple or destroy the smaller ships.

  He smiled as antimatter warheads started exploding. Some had been picked off before they hit their targets, but others had struck home… and destroyers vanished in flashes of brilliant white light. Several others were badly damaged, limping out of formation or coming apart at the seams. They hadn't been designed to do more than support the wall of battle, even before humanity had started rewriting the rule book. Two ships turned and fled, racing past the superdreadnoughts and trying to make it to clear space. Tobias ordered two cruisers to leave formation and try to run the enemy destroyers down before they could escape. Accurate data on what human weapons had done would make it much easier for the Hegemony to duplicate humanity’s inventions. Knowing that something was possible was half the battle.

  “Take us in,” he ordered. The superdreadnoughts were still firing, but their drives were crippled. They’d never make it to clear space in time to escape. “You may fire as soon as we enter range.”

  Nimitz’s phase cannon opened fire, digging into the enemy hulls. Tobias gripped his chair as the cruiser slipped closer, feeling a cold exaltation as humanity gave the galactic bully a bloody nose, proving that the Hegemony was far from invincible. They’d won the first battle through luck, skill and better weapons and the next battles would be harder, but the human race would find its confidence soaring once the reports reached Earth. No one would ever be able to refuse to take humanity seriously in the future.

  One of the enemy superdreadnoughts staggered out of formation as her shields failed, just before an antimatter torpedo struck her hull. For a moment, she still seemed to be struggling for life before the blast tore through her structure and vaporised the entire ship. Both of the enemy ships were now radiating flagship-style emissions, a cunning ruse that might have worked earlier, before his fleet had managed to identify the flagship. The antimatter dischargers hadn't been anything like powerful enough for his ships to lose track of the enemy flagship, even though her commander had managed to keep her intact despite Tobias’ best efforts.

  And then there were two, he thought. His formation closed in on its targets. It won’t be long now.

  * * *

  The sound that groaned through Ripper’s hull spelt the death-knell of the entire ship. Centuries ago, the Association had produced hull and structural metal that held up even in extreme circumstances, but it was not completely indestructible. The chain of explosions that had rippled through one of the lesser weapon bays had compromised the entire starship’s integrity. Internal structural fields that were supposed to reinforce the raw material were failing one by one. Another shudder ran through the mighty ship as her drives finally died, trapping her in the Terra Nova system. It was even possible that the planet’s gravity would pull them in and slam them into the surface. A belated revenge… except the intruders would simply vaporise the hulk if they didn't deem it worth salvage.

  Lady Dalsha saw the males starting to panic and knew that she’d lost control over the situation. They’d start fighting and tear the rest of the ship apart, if the enemy left them alive that long. The handful of other females on the ship wouldn't be able to regain control until it was far too late. Males had problems comprehending that someone was stronger than they, particularly when it came to fighting. It was females who provided the long-term thinking… and there was no longer any future for any of them. The males would understand that on a level that no female could match. And then they would destroy themselves in fighting.

  She flipped up a hidden panel in her command stool and tapped in two codes known only to her and her superiors. The first would activate the sleepy gas that would force the males into hibernation, a gas she’d been warned could only be used in the event of mutiny. Some females didn't have the knack for commanding large numbers of males, or were unable to maintain the balance between reward and punishment that kept the males in line. The second would do something that she would once have considered inconceivable. It would shut down her ship’s weapons and broadcast surrender, her surrender. The Hegemony had never surrendered before…

  …But there was always a first time.

  This won’t be the end, she thought, as she waited for a response – or an antimatter torpedo that would vaporise what remained of her command. The males were still twitching where they’d fallen to the gas. It didn't affect females unless there was a much heavier concentration in the air, for reasons tied to their biology. Females were studier than males. Whatever happens to me, the Empress won’t let this pass.

  The communications screen lit up and she found herself staring at a human face. She wanted to scream, to rend and tear at the air with her claws, but instead she kept herself under tight control. Humans would understand Galactic Three, one of the artificial languages the Association had devised for its client races. The Empress had talked of the days when the One Tongue would be spoken across the galaxy, but those days had yet to come. How had the humans grown so mighty? Had some of their entertainments been based on reality after all? Or had someone more advanced than the Association helped them?

  Or was the Association more interested in galactic politics than everyone believed? They were an old race, the oldest spacefaring society known to exist. Had they shared all of their technology, or had they kept a few surprises back for the day when the younger races tried to take their remaining worlds? There was no way to know, but the Empress would find out.

  “Great Lady,” the human said, in passable Galactic Three. Her – no, his – tone wa
s faintly shaded with an emotion she didn't recognise, but suspected was scorn. “You wish to surrender?”

  No, she thought.

  “Yes,” she said. The Hegemony would need her observations of the battle so the Empress could plan their counter-offensive. Whoever had given the humans such technology wouldn’t have very much of it, or they would have struck the homeworld directly. It crossed her mind that they had struck the homeworld and pushed it aside. “I offer you my ship and my submission.”

  It was an old ritual, one that had never been extended outside the race. But it was the only one she had. And if the humans refused to accept it...

  …The Empress would never know what had happened in the system.

  * * *

  Tobias studied the alien face, wishing he knew how to read her properly. Even the Association had had problems creating automatic translators that allowed different aliens races to understand one another, let alone follow body language from a thousand different worlds and races. A human shaking his head was saying no; an alien headshake could mean anything from ‘I hate you’ to ‘I want to have sex with you’ – if it meant anything at all. There were races so cold, so emotionless, that they were difficult for humanity to accept and understand.

  And the Funk wanted to surrender. Part of him wanted to press the offensive, to wipe her and her fleet out of existence, to avenge Earth’s humiliation in blood. But he’d told his subordinates that he wanted no atrocities. How could he demand that if he ordered an atrocity himself? And it would be an atrocity. There was no sound tactical reason for slaughtering a crew that wanted to surrender. They could take prisoners and interrogate them. A Great Lady would know enough to please even ONI.