Ramming, in other words: a tactic they were only too willing to use. Ramming had accounted for their win over the Salamanders. The Salamanders couldn’t cope.
So, note to all ships, she thought. Keep our distance, or stay out of their front arc. In line with that thought, she made a quick amendment to the mission orders and pushed the update through the datalink systems, emphasizing the warning. Then she sighed, wishing she could go along and captain her ship, but the whole point of this magnificent flagship was to allow the fleet commander to look at the big picture and issue orders.
As the Breakers-Salamanders force entered extreme range, the Rhinos retreated around the back of the planet, just as she expected.
Speaking of orders… She activated her comlink, already set to the channel of the flag comms team, the section that would smoothly pass her instructions to their intended recipients. “Gray here. Initiate Phase One.”
These orders aimed the Breakers squadron toward the west, the antispinward side of the planet—in other words, if they were to follow through and take up orbit, they would be speeding over its surface with extra velocity, flying against the planet’s rotation.
The Salamanders’ squadron of six, on the other hand, was aimed at the eastern, spinward side. She’d insisted on this deployment, just as she’d insisted on being the overall commander of the space battle, above the Salamanders themselves.
Theoretically, this deployment made the Salamanders easier targets for the Rhino surface batteries of hypervelocity missile launchers, which could reach into orbit. The Rhino weapons used modified railguns to launch specialized guided missiles up through the thick, cloudy atmosphere. The combination of speed, accuracy and sensor difficulties made them a real threat.
The Rhinos, outnumbered and outgunned in space, and seeing two enemy forces, should logically choose to ambush one squadron at a time, as each rounded the planet. Gray wanted them to choose their rival, the Salamanders, the easiest to hit, the known quantity.
That’s what she would do in their place. Defeat the Salamanders, then deal with these newcomers.
In fact, they might also believe defeating the Salamanders would cause the newcomers to cut their losses and break off.
In other words, Gray was as sure as she could be the Rhinos would go for the Salamanders first… and knowing what the enemy would do was half the battle.
Stealthy recon drones, fired in looping courses far above the planet’s poles, gave her a view of the back of the planet, projected in the holotank. As expected, the Rhinos were deploying their ships to meet the Salamanders.
Closer and closer, with the Salamanders slightly in the lead by intention, the icons crawled across the holotank. As they approached the planet both groups slowed as if to insert into orbit. The top view, from the deep-space recon drone above the north pole, showed the firing angles as they began to intersect.
Less than a minute before the Rhino and Salamander forces would see each other around the intervening planet, Gray spoke. “Initiate Phase Two.”
The Salamanders ceased decelerating. Now they cruised in a ballistic course, their stronger prows pointing toward the Rhinos as they flew through space, increasingly crabwise. At the same time, the Breaker squadron sped up, using brute force acceleration to shove its ships down toward the planet, barely skimming the atmosphere in a slingshot effect.
And, sixteen icons which had been loafing along between the two forces dove straight into the planet’s atmosphere—and seemed to smash right into the ground.
The thought of the underspace-capable Ruxin skimmers passing through the planet itself filled Gray with chills, as if she were aboard. She wasn’t sure if it was sympathy with the cold the octopoids were experiencing, or was it fear on their behalf at the weird, unnatural state of the little ships.
These maneuvers put the Rhinos in the middle of three forces, though they likely knew about only two, yet.
The Salamanders would be flying sideways past them instead of charging straight into them, firing their beams but expecting little success. The shots were mainly to keep the Rhinos’ sensors focused on themselves, the obvious enemy. Their angled courses would keep them from getting rammed by the Rhinos or struck by surface battery missiles.
The Breaker squadron was there as the obvious threat. What would the Rhinos do? Chase the Salamanders away from the planet? Turn as one to fight the Breakers in low orbit, still with the support of their surface batteries? Or go forward and speed around the planet in orbit? This decision, Gray couldn’t predict.
Though she had a guess… which turned out to be correct.
The Rhino ships continued their acceleration toward the Salamanders, lunging suddenly toward them at high speed. This left the surface batteries without space support.
“Breaker squadron, engage the surface batteries,” Gray ordered. Her eyes roamed incessantly from screen to holotank to smartcopy, constantly watching for anything unexpected.
The Salamanders threw on flank acceleration, turning directly away from the Rhinos.
The Rhinos, now at medium range and closing, fired their weaponry—smaller versions of the surface batteries’ hypervelocity missiles. Thirty missiles ran down the Salamanders as if standing still.
The Salamanders point-defense destroyed half of them, and then the target ships cut acceleration. Shields snapped on, briefly obscuring the vessels behind shimmering spheres of energy. The remaining missiles slammed into the shields and exploded, or disintegrated, depending on their warhead type. When the discharge cleared, the Salamanders sailed on unscathed. They’d put all their efforts into defense as Gray had ordered. They’d done their job—as a diversion.
Now, the Breakers heavy squadron dove into low orbit—active sensors pounding away through the thick clouds. As they located the surface batteries, they triggered their railguns at maximum rate of fire for a single pass.
Railgun bullets ranging from tiny clusters to lances the size of shipkillers screamed down through the atmo, glowing with the heat of their passage. Defenses countered, high-velocity phalanxes of millions of tiny projectiles, spreading in clouds to intercept. But these defenses were designed to destroy missiles, not solid shot, which the Rhinos apparently didn’t expect.
So, a lot of our opening attack got through, to pound the surface installations with kinetic energy and smash launchers, buildings, gantries and reload points.
The return strike was already in the air, though. Breaker sensors showed hundreds of speeding missiles climbing out of the gravity well as if it hardly existed. These rockets, given free head-starts by their railgun accelerator launchers, could reach tens of kilometers per second almost instantly, and they kept accelerating with their own motors.
Therefore, flight time from the surface ranged from two to five seconds, an unusually short time to react. SAI-controlled point defense plucked many of them from the sky as they cleared atmo. One cruiser—Gray’s own Samarah, it looked like—used a shipkiller in defense mode, catching a group of more than twenty with a nuke as they closed in.
But more than half of them passed from short to point-blank range.
“Shields,” Gray snarled—to herself, since there was no point in trying to tell the ships what they already knew.
As one, the Breaker ships snapped on full shields. They could only hold them for a few seconds, but that was enough. The wave of missiles crashed into the shielded ships. Several showed low-yield nuclear effects, and caused some missile fratricide. The Breaker ships all showed light damage—sensors and secondary weapons on the hull, mostly.
So, the Rhinos were willing to employ nuclear weapons—at least, against space forces. Lucky they weren’t willing to put heavy, megaton-class warheads on them. She wondered if they’d use nukes on the ground—on their own territory, if it came to that.
But that was Straker’s problem, not hers. Fleet officers were used to dealing with nuclear blasts in space, for their effects in sterile vacuum were so much less destructive than in atmospher
e.
Suddenly, the icon for the Rhino dreadnought occupying the orbital shipyard flashed. “Warning. Bogey powering,” the Sensors SAI said in alert mode. “Weapons active. Danger close.”
The warning would be sent to the Breakers squadron, but how fast would they react?
Not fast enough. The Rhino DN, apparently playing possum and more ready than expected, launched a salvo of fast missiles from its position in geosynchronous orbit above the Rhino surface batteries. They screamed in and downward.
“I should’ve insisted on hitting that first,” Gray growled to herself. Again, there was no point in sending orders. The alarm klaxons would be shrieking already—and there’d be little power for shields remaining in the capacitors.
“Don’t blame yourself, ma’am,” Indy replied in her ear. “The Salamanders were adamant they wanted an opportunity to capture the Rhino dreadnought. All indications were she wasn’t ready.”
“I still should’ve taken more precautions. Now, they don’t have shield power.”
The missile salvo arrowed toward one dreadnought, the Battenberg. The big ship hastily swung her stern away, presenting her heavily armored prow with full reinforcement. Point defense beams picked off several missiles, but more than ten struck.
When the sensors cleared, the Battenberg sailed on, still operational. Her bow was deeply gouged, shreds of wholly twisted metal like bat wings spread in all directions. One more head-on strike and she’d suffer severe damage.
“Pass to the Battenberg: withdraw to the flagship soonest and begin repairs,” Gray said, perversely glad she could give a meaningful order. “Then tell them to—”
The Rhino dreadnought, shaking herself loose of her moorings, abruptly exploded in a ball of nuclear fire. Skimmer icons shot past, up from their passage through the planet.
“Target destroyed by float mine,” Indy reported. “Apparently War Male Roxon took the initiative.”
“I can’t fault him for that,” Gray replied. “The Salamanders might be annoyed at losing their prize, but... fortunes of war.”
The other skimmers accelerated to chase the Rhino squadron as it gave up its own pursuit of the Salamanders. Stealthy and small, until now they’d probably gone undetected, but if the Rhinos looked hard at the sensor data surrounding their dreadnought’s destruction…
Leaving their fruitless chase of the Salamanders, the Rhinos curved around toward the planet. The skimmer squadron remained in their wakes, even though they could’ve turned tighter and made underspace runs from the flanks. The problem with underspace attacks in this new age of shields was obvious: properly timed, raising a shield could block, even destroy a smaller ship using that cold dimension as it tried to pass through the shielded area.
A stray thought crossed Gray’s mind. What would happen if a larger, reinforced ship in underspace smashed into a smaller, shielded ship? Could that idea be used offensively?
The skimmers were still useful, though. They were hard to see, hard to hit, fast and slippery, and the latest models were equipped with shipkiller missiles for standoff attacks. Right now, sixteen of them were dogging the heels of the Rhinos—and the Rhinos apparently knew it, as they launched a smattering of missiles backward.
But the skimmers easily avoided these weapons. Nothing slower than beams was likely to strike an SAI-controlled skimmer, which skipped in and out of underspace with machine-speed reflexes. Now, as long as Roxon didn’t press too hard… Gray unconsciously reached out a hand toward the holotank and made a grasping motion, imagining they’d be crushed between two forces.
Or three, as the Salamanders were turning back as well. Everyone was re-converging on the planet.
What could the Rhinos do? They were outgunned and out-tonned, though they were still dangerous if they could remain within support distance of the surface batteries. In their place, the Salamanders had fled the system—and returned with allies. Would the Rhinos be that clever, that wise? They wouldn’t surrender…but they could descend for planetary landing, to preserve their ships for a later fight.
The Salamanders had mentioned the Rhino biotech that made them more aggressive, so Gray was betting they’d go down fighting. That was their choice—but it probably meant more damage to the Breakers. Until now, the Salamanders had skated by as a diversion.
But it was the Salamanders’ planet, the Salamanders’ fight. Time to get them involved.
“Pass to the Salamanders: engage the Rhinos more closely. We’ll hit them from the sides and rear.”
“They acknowledge receipt of the message,” the comms officer replied.
In other words, they might or might not comply. They weren’t actually under her command. The best the Breakers had been able to get from them was “cooperation at their discretion.”
The Rhinos were still heading for the planet. “More than one way to skin a cat,” Gray muttered.
“Ma’am?”
“Pass to the skimmers—continue harassment, but do not commit. Pass to Breaker squadron—loop around to their flanks at medium range. Keep them under continuous fire. I want them pissed off, with no good options. Force them to commit. Then pounce and try to rake them.”
“Aye aye, ma’am.” A pause. “All ships acknowledge.”
The two remaining Breaker DNs and three cruisers made a broad turn in loose formation, circling their opponents as the Rhinos returned to their planet. Salamanders chased them, attacking aggressively from the best firing position, from the rear.
The Rhinos tacked to their flank, flying crabwise to shield their sterns and aiming for the edge of their planet’s atmosphere. Their course would drag the pursuing Salamanders—and the skimmers—through the surface batteries’ engagement zone again.
Skimmers…
“Pass to War Male Roxon: pass through the planet to lay mines or launch missiles in front of the enemy’s predicted course.”
“Acknowledged.”
Within seconds, the skimmer squadron adjusted its course to aim directly toward the planet once more. They inserted into underspace and dove into the gravity well.
As the Rhinos and the chasing Salamanders rounded the planet in low orbit, the surface batteries launched another wave of hypervelocity missiles. These rose rapidly, spreading themselves among the six Salamander ships, which raised shields at the last moment in order to survive the blasts.
As the shields went up and the incoming missiles detonated, the Rhinos flipped end for end and waited… waited… When the Salamander shields dropped, all ten cruisers fired another wave of missiles, along with all their beams.
“Shit,” Gray heard from across the table. Through the transparent holotank she saw Straker, Loco and Winter rise to their feet and lean forward in concern as the missiles went home.
Just before they impacted, something happened that the sensors and holotank systems couldn’t interpret. The Salamander ships flared, and then explosions clouded the area for long seconds.
When the sensors updated and the cloud cleared, one Salamander ship was marked destroyed, but the rest sailed on with only moderate damage, surrounded by…something.
“Sensors! What the hell is that?” Gray snapped. “Give me a direct view. Indy, what do you see?”
A holoscreen nearby flickered, then showed a raw feed of one of the surviving Salamander ships. It was surrounded by a yellow nimbus of energy, like glowing ball lightning.
“It seems to be an energy defense,” Indy said. “Not a screen, exactly. Something else.”
“Make a guess.”
“A guess? I’m not given to guessing, but a preliminary analysis would call it a fixed-quantum plasma screen. It should disrupt matter and energy that attempts to pass through it—or it through them.”
The holotank showed the five remaining Salamanders accelerating directly toward five Rhino cruisers, who faced them, still flying ballistically backward.
“They don’t lack for courage,” Straker said.
Gray wondered which side Straker was talking a
bout. “The Rhinos are saving their shields for when the Salamanders hit them with those… plasma screens.”
“So it seems,” Indy replied. “I’m interested to see what happens when they do.”
Seconds later, they found out. The five Salamanders sheered slightly off-center at the last moment, so they blazed past their targets at close range—and the screens, like bubbles of liquid light, enveloped each closest Rhino ship for just a moment.
The effect was immediate. The bubbles clung to the enemy ships and remained behind, even as the Salamanders swooped past. The yellow plasma collapsed like popped bubble gum and ate at the Rhinos for long moments before it dissipated.
“Damage to the Rhinos?” Grey asked.
“Degraded hulls, degraded armor. Their externals have been burned off—antennas, sensors, point defense weapons. A nasty system, highly effective—part defense, part offense,” Indy replied.
The damaged Rhinos, still peppered by a constant barrage of shots from the Breakers squadron, fired their backward-facing engines, slowing precipitously.
“They’re de-orbiting, trying to land under cover of their surface batteries,” Gray said, recognizing the signs. “As they slow, they’ll fall. We’ve won the battle for high orbit.”
“Can we—” Straker started to ask, moving around the table toward Gray, and then stopped as traces surged up from the planet to intersect with the Rhinos’ projected courses.
The skimmers.
Straker’s eyes were bright with battle-lust, as were Loco’s beside him. Winter felt more composed, and Jilani hadn’t moved from her seat.
“There we go! Nail the bastards, Roxon!” Loco roared.
Straker clenched a fist as if to punch the air, attention wholly focused on the skimmers.
They spread out in a line and launched missiles—ordinary, slow-seeming missiles after the Rhinos’ hypervelocity versions, but each one a shipkiller or a decoy that looked exactly like one. They were perfectly placed, directly in the Rhinos’ path as the enemy ships descended into the thin upper atmosphere.
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