"You mean the mines we ran into?"
"My scans are id'ing them all as the very same."
"How did Morrigan manage to grab them at such a distance?"
"I can't tell, captain."
"They're splitting into four groups, captain," Feeney said. "Each is headed toward one of the RMN battlegroups."
"Do the Memnonians know they are coming?"
"No sign of that," Feeney said.
"I can't allow a massacre. Hail Admiral Wu."
The seconds passed with agonizing slowness as the Steadfast's hail traversed a distance still in excess of one hundred thousand kilometers. Wu's face appeared on the vidscreen once more. There was observable damage behind him, and he lacked his previous mask of complete confidence. Nevertheless, he maintained an air of superiority. It was the look of a man who believed he had won.
"We're still here, despite your best efforts, Captain More. The Royal Alfred is made of sterner stuff than you think. I can tell that your ships have taken damage. Are you ready to leave or are you asking to surrender?"
"Neither, Admiral. My ships have weathered your storm quite well. No matter what you think, we are not in control of Morrigan. She is under her own direction and power now. I suggest you leave her alone and depart the area immediately. Our sensors show that she is tractoring a huge number of the mines that you think that we laid in your system. They are minutes away. We believe that you are the intended targets."
Wu blinked rapidly, a look of incomprehension on his face. This was replaced by a wry smile. Then he laughed heartily. "I think you want me to believe that, captain," the admiral said. Then he scowled. "What do you take me for? A fool? There are no such mines coming our way. Soon we will be in gun range and we will settle this as warriors. I recommend that you jump out of harm's way before we reach you."
Admiral Wu's face disappeared from the screen.
"Transmission cut," Garand said.
"How can he be so blind?" More questioned. "Feeney, what are the ranges of the sensors on the Royal Alfred?"
"Not as good as ours, captain. It's an older ship. Not much more than half of Steadfast's."
"The idiot," fumed More. "He's so blinded by his desire to get his hands on Morrigan that he can't accept that we might be telling him the truth. So now he is going to sit there while his ships get smacked by nukes." More turned and keyed his squadron commchannel. "Tyler, how are your recovery operations going?"
"My fighters are back aboard Adonis," Captain Rahal answered, "and I'm not liking hanging here without a fighter screen. I'm good to go."
"Wu is going to be in a lot of trouble very soon," Augustine on the Theseus added. "I'm not detecting any predisplacement energy signatures. He hasn't got his ships prepared to jump. By the time he detects the nukes it will be too late to avoid them."
"That isn't our problem any longer," spat Carey. "This has gone on long enough. We ourselves have only a few minutes before the mines reach this area. I don't want to be around when those things pop, even if they aren't intended for us. With Morrigan in the game, we can't run all the way home. So where do we go?"
"You're right. We're not going to Halifax. We'll stay in-system, but well away from this mess. We'll jump ten million kilometers closer to the system primary. We'll wait for a while, fix any damage we have and then come back for Morrigan. I'm sending you rendezvous coordinates now. We should not be more than five minutes in hyperspace. Leave as you're able. See you soon."
The first Halifaxian ship to depart was the Golden Lion. A brilliant globe of rippling energies suffused the volume of space around her hull, obscuring her from view. When the globe faded after several seconds, the Golden Lion was gone, having ascended into a dimension sitting above the ordinary three. She was followed by Adonis, then Theseus, Cormorant, Kestrel, Kongo, and lastly, by the Steadfast.
More took one last look at the vidscreen as the mines soared through the intervening space between themselves and the Memnonian ships. "Poor bastards," he whispered. Then the Steadfast was gone.
The four RMN battlegroups left behind around Morrigan detected the mines at different times. The closest group, composed mainly of destroyers, corvettes, and system defense gunboats, alerted the others to the new threat. Wu's triumphant smile fell from his face as these warnings filtered in. Not long afterward, his own ship's sensors began to show the approach of the nuclear mines. Briefly, he allowed himself to hope that the mines, which he knew had been inloaded with Memnon's own IFF codes, would not harm his ships. Yet there were so many that his holoscreens refused to assign distinct ID tags to individual weapons, and instead depicted the thousands of atomics as a solid wall of hostile red entities. He could not help but doubt. He had not believed More when he had told him of the mines, thinking that the Halifaxian captain was playing him for a fool to save his ships and keep the prize that was the Morrigan. But if the ancient ship truly was behind this attack, a prodigious feat of tractoring many hundreds of thousands of kilometers, was it impossible to believe that she could not also have reprogrammed the codes herself?"
The admiral gave the order to the fleet's ships to flee as best they could. Make the fastest emergency jump possible. Better to be lost in space for a while, even a long while, than be destroyed utterly. No amount of defensive fire or protective shields could ward off so many nuclear hammerblows.
A handful of ships displaced to safety. The lesser vessels - the corvettes, the SDG's, and some destroyers - could jump more quickly, since they were so small. A few were fast enough to to outrun the mines via sublight speed alone, fleeing at high-g burns far away from the volume of space in which the fleet cruised.
The rest were not so lucky. Even emergency jumps required a few minutes of prep time, and time was precisely what the Memnon ships lacked. The laggard destroyers, corvettes, and system gunboats were vaporized by a rain of atomic fire, their shields buckling as hundreds of mines impacted upon them. Larger vessels, the light and heavy cruisers, resisted a little longer before their shields too were overwhelmed by repeated detonations. Up went the RMNS Corona, a heavy cruiser that had once plied the space lanes of the Great Sphere scouring them of pirates and other marauders. Gone too was the RMNS Culloden, a light cruiser. The Culloden's shielding collapsed, and within a millisecond the nuclear fire breached her reactor, causing the entire ship to explode in a white-orange blossom of expanding debris.
The last to fall were the battleships. The Scepter had not been harmed in the initial exchange of missiles between the Halifaxians and the Memnonian fleet, but she lay closer in space to the oncoming mines. Her CIWS struck out in ferocious anger, destroying hundreds of the mines before they could draw within lethal range. Several dozen others were burst open by nearly invisible walls of hypersonic magnesand. It was all to no avail. Thousands of other mines came behind them, and these struck the Scepter's shields like a swarm of meteors. A battleship was, more than any other ship in a fleet, built to withstand horrendous punishment and keep fighting. It was norm for a battleship to sport three armored hulls together with automated self-repair mechanisms. Vital systems were multiply redundant, and it was possible for such a capital ship to literally be cut in twain but continue to fight as long as power and targeting data were still being fed to weapons.
But the weight of fire currently directed against Scepter was orders of magnitude greater than anything her designers had envisaged. She lacked a protective screen of friendly destroyers performing picket duty, she lacked cover from fighters, which ordinarily would have prevented the launch of weapons at her or destroyed them themselves. Then there was the unheard of numbers of mines that were being flung at her. The best defensive weaponry would have been no match for so many. The battleship seemed to let out a final roar of defiance before it vanished in a blue-white eruption of fire.
Now completely alone, Royal Alfred fought as hard as had her sister. She had already taken a pummeling from the missiles that had been launched by Captain Andrew More's 34th Strike Squadron. Her
shields had been reduced to 70% effectiveness, and two of her railcannon turrets had been disabled by the Halifaxian attack. Admiral Wu understood that there would be no escape for him, his crew, or his ship. Tens of thousands of mines were still on there way, the Royal Alfred's sensors reported. He had to give due credit to More for his ruse. He had lured the Memnonian fleet to within close range of Morrigan where they would be sitting ducks for the mines he laid elsewhere. It was clever of him to pretend that Morrigan was not operational. He had known that Memnon would seek to capture the ship for itself, and hesitate before opening fire on it and his other ships, believing, quite correctly, that Wu would rather gain such a prize without fighting than do battle over what might be turned into a flaming wreck. Memnon would never have Morrigan, Wu understood as death came for him across the void of space. Neither would Halifax. Damn the Republic!
"All missiles, emergency launch. Target the Morrigan."
Salvoes of the Royal Alfred's remaining heavyweight antiship missiles emerged in fiery waves from the bays of ship, blazing forth on missions of individual vengeance. Wu was not finished. "All guns, fire upon Morrigan, all restrictions lifted." Dozens of massive, multi-ton penetrator slugs were accelerated by jolts of electromagnetic power. All of these weapons fled from the Royal Alfred, bearing down on Morrigan, which remained motionless at the center of the atomic carnage that surrounded her.
"Helm," Wu now ordered, "collision course with Morrigan. Best speed." The admiral looked around his bridge, as the crew looked to him. They all knew that this was the end. "I'm sorry," he told them.
Then the ship tore itself apart around him, followed closely by a titanic explosion as the enormous reactor that gave power to the grand ship burst, and the Royal Alfred was no more.
Aboard Morrigan
The stars around Julius Howell were gone, their small flickering lights hidden by the gargantuan flashes of thousands of atomic weapons and the death bursts of the ships of the Royal Memnonian Navy. None equalled the final flare of the Royal Alfred in either duration or intensity. He and the rest of the stranded crews of the Steadfast, Kongo, and Cormorant watched the unfolding destruction in openmouthed horror. The Memnonians might have been the enemy in this time and place, but what had just passed was not merely a massacre. It was an annihilation. There was a kinship of a kind among all spacefarers, and the Halifaxians could not help feel sympathy for the Memnonians who had been slaughtered.
There was a stunned silence that lasted for a long while after the Royal Alfred had brewed up. The space around Morrigan was strewn with the detritus of a once powerful fleet, parts of its ships floating haphazardly through the dark void.
After a long while, Venn breathed, "What shall we do?"
No one had an answer for her.
Then the voice of Morrigan rose once again, angry and stern. "What shall we do, you ask? This is war. We will make war. There are missiles heading for us. I could destroy them myself, but there is no need. We will not be remaining here."
Howell felt the familiar jolt of displacement as the ship, and every object within it, translated to hyperspace. In an instant, Morrigan was gone, leaving behind her only the dead husks of burning ships.
End Part Three of Four
The Memnon Incident: Part 3 of 4 (A Serial Novel) Page 6