His mind worked frantically, searching for a solution. There was no way they could break contact and hide, not with the aliens close enough to track them even if they shut down all systems and pretended to be a hole in space. The aliens would have a rough idea of where they were, allowing them to sweep space until they stumbled over the lurking carrier. And that assumed they managed to break contact for a few seconds in the first place. Nor could the other tramlines be reached…
He pulled up the in-system display and contemplated it. New Russia had five human-usable tramlines, three of which led to other human settlements. The aliens would have blockaded them by now, placing smaller forces in position to intercept anything that came through the tramlines — or Ark Royal, if she attempted to make it out. One more — the one he had intended to use — was also thoroughly blockaded, but the other…? He looked down at the reports from the drones and frowned. They might just be able to make it.
It could be a trap, he knew. Maybe it led to a red giant, utterly useless to anyone save astronomers who wanted to study, but it was still odd for the aliens to leave it uncovered. But it did make a certain kind of sense. The aliens didn't have unlimited numbers of ships, so they covered the most important targets, assuming that Tramline Five wouldn't be used by a human counterattack. They might well be right, Ted considered. Tramline Five led away from the core of human space and Earth. At the very least, Ark Royal was committing herself and her fleet to several months away from human contact.
“Set course for Tramline Five,” he ordered. “Maximum speed.”
He gritted his teeth. On the display, the alien starfighters were swooping back for another engagement. They’d already stripped Ark Royal of a handful of point defence weapons; now, they were taking advantage of the carrier’s blind spots to get closer to the hull and take out other targets. His own starfighters were chasing them down, at the risk of being accidentally picked off themselves by the carrier’s point defence. If the battering continued, the aliens would eventually render the carrier completely defenceless.
“Target the alien carriers with missiles,” he ordered, “then launch decoys. Confuse them as long as possible.”
“Aye, sir,” Farley said.
Ted forced himself to remain calm and composed on the outside, even through part of him wanted to panic and the rest of him wanted a drink. The crew couldn't see their commander panicking, not when they knew they were in deep shit. He cursed inwardly as one of the frigates vanished, even as the remainder opened fire. A second salvo of missiles headed towards the newcomers, forcing them to look to their own defence. Farley hastily reprogrammed some of the missiles to take out incoming alien starfighters, using the nukes to sweep space clean. The aliens rapidly adapted and spread out, refusing to allow the humans to pick them off again.
He felt a dull tremor running through the carrier as she altered course, heading up and away from the system plane towards Tramline Five. For a long moment, the combination of ECM drones and nuclear explosions seemed to confuse the aliens, but it didn't last long enough for Ark Royal to break contact. The ECM crews took advantage of the brief pause to launch additional drones, giving the aliens several possible targets to engage. Ted would take whatever distraction he could get, but he knew it wouldn't last very long. Ark Royal was the only target shooting back at the aliens, after all.
“Order the flotilla to cover our back,” he added. He’d started the operation with twenty-four frigates. Now, he had eighteen, several of which had taken heavy damage. But it would be a great deal worse, he knew, when the aliens got into weapons range. “And deploy the modified nukes, both types.”
One of the brighter eggheads on Earth had speculated that the alien plasma cannons used magnetic fields to keep the bursts of superheated plasma under control. So far, duplicating the technique had proven beyond humanity’s technology, but the egghead had gone on to suggest that an EMP might successfully disrupt the containment field, causing the aliens to lose control of their weapons. There might even be an explosion, the egghead had predicted, when the containment field failed. At the very least, the EMP would cripple the alien ability to keep firing.
Ted had his doubts. Humans had been building EMP-shielding into their technology since the day they’d first realised the potentially devastating effects of an electromagnetic pulse. The first use of EMP-weapons in war had only underlined the dangers, forcing the development of countermeasures forward at terrifying speed. Surely, the aliens would have gone through their own period of using nukes… but the egghead had doubted that the aliens could shield their magnetic containment fields. Now… Ted braced himself. The concept was about to the put to the test.
“Nukes away, sir,” Farley said. Unpowered, the missiles would slip through the cloud of alien starfighters… unless they got very unlucky and actually struck an alien ship directly. “Time to detonation, seven minutes.”
Ted nodded. The alien frigates were closing in rapidly, threatening to bring their plasma weapons to bear on humanity’s frigates. No matter the sheer weight of armour wrapped about the ships, Ted knew, the human frigates were doomed if the aliens entered firing range. He wondered, absently, how long it would take the eggheads to come up with a directed energy weapon humans could use, one that worked better than point defence lasers. Even a small level of armour could provide protection against the lasers.
The display flared red, suddenly. “The enemy got a clear shot at Rio,” Farley reported. “She’s badly damaged, sir…”
Another icon flared red, then vanished. “She’s gone,” Farley said.
Ted winced. Another human frigate, a crew of thirty men and women, gone in an instant. But there was no time to mourn. A moment later, the analysts started twittering for his attention. He hesitated, then keyed the switch to hear what they had to say. They seemed to believe that the aliens had fired at extreme range, damaging Rio rather than destroying her outright. It had been the secondary damage that had killed the ship. Under the circumstances, Ted found it hard to care about the difference. The ship was still dead.
“Nukes detonating now,” Farley said, sharply. “EMPs… underway.”
“Good,” Ted said. If the EMPs failed, they'd just wasted a handful of nukes for nothing. “Let me know…”
One of the alien craft flared white on the display, then vanished. Others seemed to stagger briefly, the sensors picking up odd flickers of energy on their hulls. The remainder stepped down their drives, allowing the distance between them and their prey to widen. Ted laughed as he realised that, for once, the eggheads had got something right. The destroyed ship must have been on the verge of unleashing a full blast of plasma itself, only to lose containment as the EMP detonated.
“Deploy the second set of nukes,” Ted ordered. On the display, the alien starfighters seemed to be pulling back, sweeping empty space rather than going after human targets. It looked odd, almost as if they were giving up the chase… it took him a long moment to realise that they were looking for other nukes. “Then launch powered missiles towards the alien starfighters.”
“Aye, sir,” Farley said.
* * *
Kurt felt sweat trickling down his back as he pulled his starfighter around and fired a burst of pellets towards a retreating alien fighter. They missed; he swore venomously as warning lights blinked up on the display, reminding him that he was critically low on ammunition. The aliens, damn them, could keep firing indefinitely, but the humans needed to reload… he glanced at the shared datanet and swore again. He was by no means the only pilot who needed to reload his weapons.
“Beta, return to the hanger and rearm,” he ordered. His pilots needed a nap, a shower and some food, perhaps not in that order, but they weren't going to get it. Ark Royal had won a breathing space, yet he knew better than to think it would last long enough for anything other than a quick reloading session. “Alpha; hold position and wait.”
The fighting seemed to die down as the aliens continued their withdrawal, clearly t
aking the time necessary to work out what had happened to their frigate and devise countermeasures. Kurt busied himself by supervising the reloading process, then devising a potential attack pattern of his own. If nukes could strip an enemy craft of its point defence — and it looked like they could — he could use a nuke to clear the way for the bombers. But it would only work, he realised numbly, if the aliens were actually charging up their weapons when the nuke detonated. Or were their weapons always charged? The records suggested, very strongly, that the aliens could discharge plasma bursts from all over their hull.
He felt his entire body aching as he returned his fighter to the hanger, then waited impatiently as the ground crew hastily reloaded his guns. They’d drilled, time and time again, until it took no longer than five minutes to reload and prepare for a second launch, but it was always different when they were under fire. At least the aliens still seemed to be keeping their distance, although both of their formations were starting to merge into one. It didn't look as though they had a third force in position to cut the humans off…
“I'm getting too old for this shit,” he muttered. “I should have volunteered for the home defence squadrons.”
“And then you would never have your pretty uniform mussed,” Rose said, sardonically. “And all the pretty girls would know you for a coward.”
Kurt cursed — he was too tired to remember that everything he said was broadcast to the rest of the squadron — as the other pilots added their comments. Most of them seemed to agree that being assigned to a home defence squadron was the same as being sentenced to a very slow death, even though it was quite likely that the home defence squadrons would last longer. But then, there had always been a tendency to undervalue such squadrons. They might not have been assigned to carriers, but that didn't make them cowards. Hell, Kurt honestly had never met a pilot who hadn't applied to serve on a carrier. It was always more exciting than being assigned to a home defence squadron.
“You ask me, sir,” another pilot put in, “it's the same in starfighters as it is in fucking.”
Kurt rolled his eyes. “Really?”
“Of course, sir,” the pilot said. “You get into your bird and take her to heaven, twice a day.”
There was a long pause. “I seem to recall,” Rose said, sweetly, “that both of your last two girlfriends ended up together.”
“Hey,” the pilot protested.
“They must have bonded over the trauma of dating you,” Rose added. “I think they were planning to get married, the last I heard.”
Kurt smiled, although he knew there was little true humour in the situation. They knew, they all knew, that death was likely to claim them soon enough. Joking around was their way of dealing with it. But, at the end of the day, it wasn't likely to matter. He spared a thought for his children — and Molly, no matter how much they argued — and gripped his stick as the starfighter was hurled back into space. The aliens were resuming the attack.
* * *
“They took out the powered missiles, sir,” Farley reported. “But the unpowered warheads are in position.”
Ted nodded. “Activate them as soon as the enemy come within range, keyed to detonate at the first possible moment,” he ordered. On the display, the aliens had reorganised their squadrons, their starfighters zooming ahead, coming in for the kill. The brief pause in combat hadn't been anything like enough for the damage control parties to perform anything other than brief repairs. “And then move our starfighters to cover our hull.”
He held his breath as the alien starfighters roared past the missiles, ignoring them completely. Instead, they rocketed down towards Ark Royal… he muttered orders, sending his starfighters out to engage them before they could slip into one of the new blind spots, then watched as the enemy carriers closed in on the hidden missiles.
“Detonation,” Farley snapped.
Ted allowed himself a smirk as the first warhead detonated, channelling all of its power into a laser beam that slashed into the alien hull. Ark Royal would have taken most of the blow on her armour, but the aliens hadn't seen fit to wrap their carriers in layers of protective shielding. The blast tore into one of the carriers, sending it rolling out of formation. Behind it, the alien frigates and battlecruisers spread out, searching for new threats. Now, Ted knew, they could no longer rely on their point defence to take out human missiles before they became dangerous.
He looked back at the in-system display, hastily weighing their chances. If they could last another thirty minutes, they could reach Tramline Five… but the aliens would follow them through the jump. He briefly considered attempting to mine the exit point, yet he knew that it would be a chancy operation. The aliens might not run into one of the contact nukes as they exited the tramline. Instead…
“Engineering,” he said, “I want you to prepare to eject as much debris as possible, as soon as we hop through the tramline.”
“Understood,” Anderson said. “You propose to trick them into believing that we destroyed ourselves?”
“Yes,” Ted said. If a Puller Drive was badly damaged, it wasn't unknown for a starship to arrive at her destination star system in pieces. Ark Royal was nowhere near that badly damaged, but it was unlikely the aliens knew that. And, if the explosion seemed big enough, it might well have swallowed the other ships too. “Let them think us gone.”
“We don’t have enough debris to pull it off,” Anderson said. “But we could probably create the illusion on this side of the tramline, if you don't mind losing the ECM drones.”
Ted smirked. Each ECM drone cost upwards of a billion pounds apiece and he was sure to face some hard questions from the beancounters when they returned to Earth, but the alternative was losing Ark Royal herself. No, he decided, shaking his head. The bureaucrats could go hang. If they wanted to complain, they could do it afterwards, when at least he would have brought his ship home.
“See to it,” he ordered.
The alien attack grew more savage as the human ships crawled closer and closer to Tramline Five. Thankfully, the alien capital ships seemed to be keeping their distance, but the starfighters pressed the attack time and time again. Ted watched, grimly, as two of his starfighters were lost because the pilots were too tired to focus properly on what they were doing. Between tiredness and the aliens, he might lose a third of his starfighters before they even managed to make it out of the cursed system.
Finally, Anderson called him. “Everything is in order, sir,” he said. “I recommend having the starfighters docked to our hull when we make the jump. And that we fire missiles and mass drivers at the aliens to keep them occupied.”
Ted nodded. “Do it,” he ordered Farley. Ahead of them, Tramline Five blinked on the display. “Launch the drones as soon as we reach the outer edge of the tramline.”
The alien starfighters pulled back as the missiles were launched, leaving the carrier alone as they engaged the missiles. Oddly, they didn't seem to care about the mass driver-launched projectiles, although they might simply have calculated that there was little chance of the projectiles hitting anything important. Ted gripped the side of his command chair as the drones went to work, skilfully creating a false image that should confuse the aliens long enough for them to jump…
“Jumping… now,” Lightbridge said.
Space seemed to twist around the massive carrier as she jumped through the tramline. Behind them, the drones created the illusion of the carrier’s sudden destruction, caught in a gravimetric fold that smashed her and her comrades into rubble. The aliens would want to believe it, Ted knew. But would they?
“Jump completed,” Lightbridge said. “No enemy contacts detected.”
“Activate full stealth protocol,” Ted ordered. The advantage of hitting the tramline at speed was that there was no way to predict their vector on the other side. Even their arrival point could be dangerously random. “I don't want a single hint of betraying emissions to reach their sensors.”
And then pray, he added, in the pr
ivacy of his own thoughts. If the aliens caught them with drives, weapons and sensors stepped down, they were dead.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kurt guided his starfighter into the landing bay then sagged, barely able to move. He was utterly exhausted. Part of him just wanted to close his eyes and sleep, even though he knew he had to move. The aliens could be on them at any moment. Somehow, he managed to open the hatch and stumble out onto the deck. None of his fellow pilots, even the younger ones, looked much better.
“All hands,” the intercom blared, “rig for silent running. I say again, rig for silent running.”
“Crap,” Kurt muttered. They were all exhausted — and yet, at least one squadron would have to remain on alert. He looked up, then keyed his communicator. “Move the bomber pilots to the spare fighters and prime them for immediate launch.”
Shouldn't be trying to combine CAG duties with flying duties, he mocked himself, as he led the way through the airlock and into the ready room. He knew he was right; the CAG should remain separate from his squadrons, not leading them into battle. But there just weren’t enough pilots onboard for him to refuse to fly a starfighter. And he didn't want to stand on his rights and refuse to fly. There was a reason CAGs weren't always taken seriously unless they flew every so often.
His fingers refused to cooperate properly as he wrestled with his flight suit. It took several minutes to remove it and leave it on the deck as he stumbled into the shower and gasped as icy cold water washed over his body. Behind him, the other pilots stumbled in, too tired to indulge in the laughing and joking they would normally have used to break the tension. He caught a glimpse of a female pilot’s breasts, then forced himself to look away, damning himself for staring. It was a breakdown in discipline his squadron could ill afford.
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