by Chris Hechtl
The herd leader nodded once in reply.
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Once the fighters and bombers were in space once more, Adrienne split her force. Half of her fighters, most of them veterans, went ahead of the bombers; the remainder stayed with the bombers as their escorts. The first group targeted the enemy fighters immediately. They avoided the missiles from the ships with ease and then stooped on their intended prey. They attacked in pairs using their superior numbers and coordination to hit the slower Tauren fighters.
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The Alpha bull winced as he saw his brave bulls die in strikes. They were falling prey too easily to the enemy fighters, who were using their larger numbers to overwhelm his people's sturdier shields and armor. “Pull them back. Order them to get clear,” he ordered as a bull handed him a drink.
When the order wasn't passed on fast enough, his eyes flared. “Get them out of there!” he roared. A bull in the communications section rolled his eyes white and then hastened to obey.
He turned away realizing the order would come too little too late for some.
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“Sir, the enemy bombers are in retreat. We've got a shot set up,” Commander Fowler said, turning to Admiral Rutledge.
“You're sure about this one?”
“We're using conventional shape charges until we've whittled down their defense some more. But they are caught with their outer defensive line in rotation. We've got a hole, sir.”
“Then by all means, use it,” the admiral ordered, waving a hand.
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The exhausted bulls in the retreating bombers moaned as they saw the swarm of missiles coming up their wake. The bombers launched to cover for them were not in position yet to intercept. They watched impotently as the missiles passed them and then went into the fire of the reserve bombers.
Some of the battle-line missiles were torn apart but not enough. The bomber crews were inexperienced and hadn't had the time to set up their network. Electronic Counter Measures and decoys pulled some of the missiles away but not many. It was left to the cruisers to finish the job. Counter missiles leapt out in two waves, followed by the unseen beams of the point defense turrets.
Suddenly space was far more dangerous from friendly fire. Unfortunately, the bombers had little fuel to get completely out of the engagement zone. They knew their counterparts on the ships were too busy protecting the greater herd to try to avoid hitting them.
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The Alpha bull grimaced as all of five more of his defenders erupted in explosions. One moment they were defenders; the next they were expanding balls of debris and dust, returning to the void.
He had no time to mourn as the Terran bombers managed to get past his second fighter screen to engage in their final attack runs.
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“Now we've got you,” Lieutenant Kino Takahari murmured from the lead Terran bomber as the tone in his headset steadied. “Torpedoes away!” the bombardier called out triumphantly. “Let's get the hell out of dodge!” she crowed.
“Don't have to tell me twice,” the copilot said as the two pilots moved the yoke with one mind. Kino's mind shifted to his implants and the video coming in from the rear cameras. There was a filter of course, and the Artoo did it's best to adjust the camera as it jittered around. But when they steadied on their new course, he picked up the distant dots of the enemy ships and the fire they were spraying out from them.
“We should have done this from the get-go, not pussy foot around with the regular ordinance,” his copilot grumbled.
“Ten …,” the bombardier counted down to impact in an excited, almost husky voice of a lover.
Their target hadn't been one of the cruisers but a battle cruiser. It had been insane to go after her, but when he'd seen the opportunity, Kino had taken it.
One warhead went off in eye-searing fury short of the objective. She blinded Kino but also her intended target. She also destroyed one of the other torpedoes, but the remaining two got through in time to see the enemy ship's shields and trigger their own detonations.
Matter met antimatter and the Taurens learned a new lesson about how Terrans could adapt as the first antimatter torpedoes tore through the battle cruiser's shields, battered through the armor and into the ship's hull. They gouged out great gaping craters in the ship, so severe the ship's spine snapped in half spinning pieces in different directions.
Kino's ears rang with lusty cheers from his crew. “Now let's go back to the barn and load up so we can do that again!” Kino said when they settled down.
That earned a groan of mock despair, followed by a silence as they saw the threatening icons of enemy fighters drifting towards them. “We're in trouble,” Kino murmured.
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The ship's Alpha bull clutched at a pedestal in despair with one hand as he saw three lesser defenders and then a great defender erupt in hell fire. Then another great defender was destroyed; this one all too familiar to him. Just like that his father, the Delta bull, was dead. “No,” he murmured.
“So, they have put the hell warheads on their small craft,” the Alpha bull rumbled. He grimaced as he saw additional ships being torn apart.
The ship's Alpha bull turned slowly to the status board. All of the cruisers had been destroyed as well as one of the carriers, the one with the mixed load of bombers and fighters. Fortunately, the craft was not onboard, but he wasn't certain how many were still alive at all.
He wasn't certain if it mattered anymore though; they were terrifyingly exposed to the enemy. He still had more powerful ships, but they had the weapons to destroy them easily.
“They'll be back,” he said sickly.
The Alpha bull turned haunted eyes to him. He nodded once.
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Loading techs on the carrier accidentally pulled and loaded Dreamer's prototype gravity warheads on a pair of bombers. The bomber pilots saw the load and bellowed when they realized something was wrong. “What the hell is this?” the lead pilot said as he indicated the warheads. “What am I supposed to do with them?”
“They were there in front. We don't have time to reload …”
“Should we …?” one of the loading techs asked, indicating the warheads.
“What's the holdup?! Get that ship out of here! We have others to load and fuel!” a harried bull bellowed from across the boat bay.
The pilots turned to the angry bull and then to each other. “No, no. We'll go,” the lead bull said. The other nodded.
“They are untested,” the tech warned.
“No time like the present then. Besides, it is too late,” the bull said as he climbed into his cockpit with his copilot and engineer. “Lock and load!”
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Adrienne was too busy picking off a Tauren fighter with her wingman to see the explosions, but she heard the exultant reports and cheers over the radio. She swore as her wingman took hits from the fighter's dorsal turret. The unseen lasers splashed over her shields, draining them and forcing her to get clear so they could recharge.
Adrienne returned fire, but her shots went wide as the fighter jinked and then popped flares to distract her. She fired again, using her implants and instincts to guess where the enemy ship was. She hit the fighter's underbelly, but it turned on her, headed directly at her in a sudden suicidal charge that caught her off guard. Before she could evade, their shields hit and the force emitters in both craft overloaded. The Tauren's fighter was already dying; its overloaded systems erupted and took out both fighters.
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The Alpha bull grimaced as he read the reports from the latest furball. He had already ordered up the planetary reserves, but they'd been hit. Most of his fighters had been destroyed. Without them the bombers on defense would be easy pickings against the Terran fighters.
“Call the planet. Order them to send everything else they have. I don't care if it is just coming off the factory floor, get it up here! Now!” he barked. He wasn't certain if he sounde
d desperate; he hoped not. The tide of battle had turned and not in his people's favor.
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The reports of fighter and bomber reinforcements coming up from the planet to stage through the Tauren carriers surprised Jan. “He's not running,” she said softly, realizing they were going to be in for a battle much like the battle of Sol.
“No, not this time. He's backed into a corner,” Willard replied from her side. She glanced at him and then back to the main plot. “This just got potentially a whole lot uglier,” he said.
She grimaced and nodded once.
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“Sir! The bombers have taken out a battleship, a battle cruiser and the rest of the enemy's screen!” a tech reported.
Admiral Rutledge grimaced as he lowered his cup of soup. “And we're out of position,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Commander Fowler said. He was living on caffeine and amphetamines after spending over two days in uniform. “We won't be back in missile range for another …,” he checked the clock and grimaced, “nineteen minutes. And there is the other matter of their incoming missile and bomber strike,” he warned.
“Frack,” the admiral growled.
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The Tauren missile swarm went through the battle-line screen and this time went after the six battle ships and two dreadnoughts behind them. The screen picked off half of the missiles but a hundred got through everything they had.
The battleships and dreadnoughts picked off another fifty while the missiles were in their engagement zones, but the remaining fifty went off, spraying them with shotgun rounds of metal and stone, battering down shields and gouging their armor. Some of their sensors and exterior equipment was scoured away.
But they were the battle line, designed to take such punishment and return it in kind. The ships that took the hits recovered their shields within minutes, but the shields were not fully recovered when the Tauren bombers arrived on the outer edge of their scopes.
The Tauren bomber crews might be learning their jobs, but they had done their best to learn them fast and thoroughly. They were not short of bravery either as they charged through the screen and headlong at the enemy's great defenders.
The Terran ships spat invisible beams of energy that sparkled on their shields if they hit, overloading some. Yet still they kept coming, corkscrewing and evading the best they could to throw off a targeting lock while staying on their base course.
At fifty thousand kilometers, they began to fire off their torpedoes and then turn away. With them went sixteen untested weapons, the first gravitational warhead torpedoes. The Tauren attempt to replicate the Terran hell warheads had spawned various side branches of ideas, some of which had been followed and discarded, but a few had been followed up by Dreamer and other engineers. They had created two different warheads—the first was a crude grav lance and the second was a gravity warhead.
The Alpha bull had latched onto the idea and authorized the prototypes since they interfered with and tore shields down before they tore up an exposed hull.
Five of the grav lance warheads survived to get into attack range. Each warhead was a sandwich with a force emitter and plate in front of the nuclear warhead, then a force emitter behind it. The torpedo split up when it deployed, kicking the first force emitter clear briefly before the nuclear charge went off.
The nuclear charge detonated, but with the force emitter behind it, it redirected most of its force forward. That hit the kicker plate. Like an ion drive, the kicker plate propelled the forward force emitter to the enemy target before it was consumed.
The forward force emitters hit the dreadnought's shields and disrupted them as the nuclear charge came through a few microseconds behind it. The nuclear charge, unopposed, seared into the armor like a hot knife.
None of the crew of the flagship had time to react as the nuclear fire gutted the ship and then set off a chain reaction of her own warheads, some of which were antimatter warheads.
It all happened far too fast for an organic to see. One moment Bayern was there, thundering at the incoming torpedoes; the next she was exploding in terrifying silent thunder. Her explosion blinded the ships around her and threw their defensive coordination into momentary chaos and confusion.
Before they could recover, the second type of gravity warhead went off. Only one of the eight had survived to get to its target, Potemkin.
The second type of gravity warhead redirected some of the energy from the exploding nuclear charge into power converters for powerful force emitters. These created a massive gravitational force, on equivalent with a micro black hole before the emitters failed spectacularly. It tore at the battleship, ripping down her shields and then breaking its spine as it destroyed her as well as her sister ships Misaka and Victory. Other ships around them were hammered by the exploding cloud of debris and destruction before the terrifying force winked out. The remaining antimatter warheads lost containment in an instant, adding to the fury and carnage.
The massive gravity shadow tore down the shields of neighboring ships as far away as two hundred kilometers. The debris from the destroyed ships peppered them as did the radiation from their dying power plants and warheads.
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Gravitational energy, along with radiation from the dying ships, tore at Galahad first, bringing her shields down and exposing her hull. The debris cloud hit second, but at four hundred thousand kilometers out, she got only a fraction of the expanding debris cloud, enough to cripple the ship, not quite enough to kill her crew outright.
Instead, they were exposed to their irradiated hull as they rushed to dig out their fellow crew mates and insure what power and life support they could find.
With the systems on the bridge down, acting Captain Daringer made his way through the ship to main engineering. Along the way he was exposed to pockets of radiation. It wasn't enough to kill him, at least, not right away, but it would take years to recover from.
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The bomber pilots had one brief moment to cheer their victory before debris from the titanic explosions behind them tore down their shields and tore apart their craft.
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The Alpha herd leader saw the distant carnage and then turned to his own forces. His fingers flicked over the controls as he changed the camera feeds. He saw bulls pulling others out of wreckage, passing on orders, or doing what they could. They were valiantly struggling to continue the fight, but …. He turned slightly and saw the plot update as the sensor spoor confirmed that the Terran carriers had launched their craft once more. There were no more fighters to protect his fleet.
He realized with a start that he was tired. Tired and heartsick by the destruction and loss. The loss of so many ships and valiant herds on both sides seemed such a waste. There was no way for his people to win; if they did there would be only ashes. What would be left wouldn't stand up to the next force or the one after. The enemy was too good, too powerful.
He rose slowly as the ship's Alpha bull came over slowly to him. He could see the weariness in the other's eyes. “Communications, put a signal through to the Terran carrier force,” he said heavily.
All work and sound in the compartment ceased utterly. Startled eyes turned to him in shock.
“You heard me,” he ground out as the ship's Alpha bull raised a hand and then lowered it. After a moment he lowered his eyes and then muzzle.
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“Ma'am, we're receiving a signal from an enemy ship.”
“An enemy ship?” Jan asked, surprised.
“That one,” the rating replied, pointing to an icon on the plot. Ensign Lex blinked it for her. “It is most likely the enemy flagship.”
“Why would they identify themselves? Unless …,” Willard blinked.
“Is the signal clean?” Jan asked. The tech nodded. Her eyes cut to the ship's A.I.; his avatar nodded as well. “Open the channel,” she said, squaring her shoulders.
“This is Vice Admiral Jan Kepler. To whom am I spe
aking to?” she asked.
There was a long delay; there was at least twelve light seconds, roughly 3.6 million kilometers between their forces.
“This is the Alpha herd leader. I speak for the People of the Hoof,” a voice replied.
“Incoming visual transmission. It looks like they figured out our visual data protocols too,” the communications tech reported.
Jan stared at the image of the massive white bull. He had fur of sort and a braided beard. “If you are calling to negotiate, it's a little late. But, I'm all ears,” Jan said as she realized the alien was talking.
Ensign Lex muted the transmission as Jan talked, then played it back. “I call to negotiate peace,” the bull said simply.
Jan blinked. “Well, that was easy,” she said slowly. “Are you asking to surrender?”
Twenty-four seconds later she got her answer. “Yes,” the bull said heavily. “The herd will submit to your will. I am ordering my forces to stand down.”
There was a tumult of chatter from the bridge crew until Willard snapped his fingers to get their attention. “As you were, people!” he said sternly, reducing the compartment to silence once more.
“This might be a trick, ma'am. They might be trying to get more forces up from the planet,” Alton whispered softly to her.
“He can't hear or see you. I have it on pause,” Ensign Lex stated.
“Oh,” Alton said.
“He has a point. Any sign of that?” Jan asked, turning to Willard and then to the sensor tech.
“Nothing, ma'am.”
“Okay. Open the channel again. “You wish to submit. To surrender?”
“Yes,” the bull replied twenty-four seconds later. “Not just my … herd. I speak for all herds,” the Alpha bull said. “We will … submit to you in exchange for you not destroying our populations.”