“Why didn’t they dodge?” Desjani demanded, and Geary realized that she was referring not to the human battleships but to the bear-cow warships. “The Kicks must have known what that many kinetic projectiles of that mass could do . . .” She turned a look of dawning understanding on him. “They don’t. They don’t have kinetic projectiles aboard their own ships, they don’t use them because they have a defense against their being used against planets. Since ships can usually dodge rocks easily, there would have been no justification for their warships carrying rocks.”
“The oldest trap in the book,” Geary said. “Assuming that the enemy’s capabilities, tactics, and intentions match your own. Thank the living stars that gives us an edge.” They would need that edge, but he doubted that tactic would work a second time now that the bear-cows had seen it used.
The five battle cruisers merged with the rest of subformation Gamma One One again, Dauntless resuming her status as guide ship. The Kicks had swung wide to the left and up, trying to catch Badaya’s force, but they were still hampered by the sluggishness of the surviving superbattleships. Badaya was accelerating straight up, unable to pull clear of contact with ships limited in their propulsion capability, but prolonging the time needed for the bear-cows to catch him. Tulev’s force had come up slightly to aim for an intercept with the Kicks’ new course, while the spider-wolf ships swarmed everywhere, zipping through human formations with crazy nonchalance and ripping apart any bear-cow ships that had been knocked out of the armada by damage.
The eight battleships from Badaya’s formation were coming up and swinging back to try to catch up with their formation again, Dependable and Conqueror screening their more badly damaged sister ships, a welter of spider-wolf ships forming a weaving barrier between them and the bear-cow armada. Who ordered that charge? Geary wondered. Did Badaya tell them to make that move, or did Jane Geary start it on her own initiative? Whoever did it, it was the right decision. And who came up with the idea of using their kinetic projectiles against this enemy?
Putting aside questions he couldn’t address now, Geary brought his formation nearly straight on, aiming to catch the bear-cow force as it steadied out on the new intercept with Badaya. He should get there minutes after Tulev hit them.
“How have the spider-wolves kept the Kicks at bay?” Desjani wondered. “From their firepower and their tactics, they could never have stopped the Kicks from parading through this star system and using one of those jump points.”
“Good question. We’ll have to ask them once this is all over.” He could see the damage and casualty reports coming in from the eight battleships now, feeling a heaviness inside as the fleet systems automatically totaled up everything. The battleships had paid a heavy price for their success.
Here and there on his display, new damage warnings flickered to life as aging systems overstressed by the demands of combat failed on Alliance warships. But the burst of failures earlier had subsided. These failures weren’t good, but at least his entire fleet wasn’t falling apart as he watched.
Tulev’s formation tore past one side of the enemy armada, hammering at the bear-cow warships there and knocking out two more. But the attack barely registered on the superbattleship there, and the armada continued its charge toward Badaya’s force, closing at an increasing rate as the enemy continued to accelerate, and Badaya was held to about point zero six light speed by the propulsion casualties on Titan and Incredible.
Geary aimed his formation for the bottom side of the bear-cow force, Dauntless shuddering once again with hits and near misses as the Kicks threw out a heavy barrage. He half heard the damage reports streaming in to Desjani, telling of shields penetrated, hits on the battle cruiser’s light armor, and a few penetrations but no systems losses. On his display, similar reports flowed in from the other ships in his formation. None had been hit hard, but many had taken damage.
One more bear-cow ship was limping, unable to stop a spiral out of its formation that left it prey to the spider-wolf swarm. Other enemy warships showed damage.
But it wasn’t enough to turn aside the enemy.
Badaya had two battle cruisers left in good fighting shape, and now Inspire and Formidable swung away from the rest of his formation, twisting around to come at the Kick armada.
Geary weighed everything: Tulev coming around in a wide arc that took up large amounts of distance and time, his own subformation doing another swing up and over that would take too long, Badaya altering course to head directly away from the oncoming enemy and gain as much time as possible before being overtaken, and the eight battleships on the other side of the enemy from Tulev and Geary trying to claw their way back to Badaya, the entire battle heading upward from the plane of the star system. He ran some hasty maneuvers through the combat systems, coming up with an answer that was desperate but doable. “Dependable, Conqueror, this is Admiral Geary. Proceed at best speed on an intercept with the enemy.”
Two light-minutes distant, the two battleships would turn and accelerate, leaving behind their much more heavily damaged comrades. That might distract the bear-cows, but Geary didn’t think so. The important thing now was to hit that armada with everything. “Captain Tulev, I am assuming maneuvering control of your subformation.”
No time to run this through the systems, no time to figure out the ever-shifting time delays and distances. He had to depend upon his own skills, his own experience, and the unmatched ability of the human brain to handle this kind of puzzle on the fly. “Captain Badaya, detach all of your escorts at time one seven, order them onto an intercept with the enemy formation at point one five light speed.”
Desjani had noticed the moves, frowning at her display. “What are you doing?”
“Bringing a hammer down. If I don’t, we lose all of the damaged ships and undamaged auxiliaries in Badaya’s formation.” Besides Incredible, Titan, and Illustrious, that included Kupua, Alchemist, Cyclops, two heavy cruisers, and several light cruisers and destroyers.
Inspire and Formidable, moving too fast for the bear-cows to target well, slashed at the enemy but didn’t knock out any warships.
“Captain Duellos,” Geary ordered, “coordinate the movements of Inspire and Formidable with Dependable and Conqueror. Make your next firing run in conjunction with them.”
Desjani’s eyes darted about her display. “You’ve got us all coming in together. We’ll hit that armada almost simultaneously. Will that be enough?”
“It had better be.” His gaze swept from place to place on his display. Badaya’s core of damaged ships still going almost straight up, Badaya’s cruisers and destroyers braking to fall behind their comrades and facing the oncoming enemy, the bear-cow armada curving in from the right and below to catch Badaya, Tulev swinging in a wide arc that ended where the Kicks would be, Geary’s own subformation coming over the top of its own curve and steadying out to aim slightly upward at the Kicks, the small force under Duellos on the other side, also climbing but from the left of the enemy. “All units, we need to break their charge. Press your attacks and employ kinetic projectiles against the enemy formation as you close to contact.”
“If anything will make them turn, that will,” Desjani said.
“If they don’t turn, and we hit them with that many rocks, they won’t make it to Badaya.” How badly did the enemy commander want the crippled human warships with Badaya? Did bear-cows suffer from the target fixation that could drive human combatants to fly right into obstacles ignored in their total focus on the objective?
“You know,” Desjani remarked calmly as the several groups of ships rushed toward contact, “the Kicks haven’t taken one important fact into account.”
“What’s that?” Geary asked, not taking his eyes from his display.
“They don’t know how crazy humans can be. If we were sane, we’d be running. Badaya’s formation would have scattered. They’d be able to chase us down and smash us. But we’re crazy, so instead we’re going to hold together and blow their butts o
ff.”
Geary smiled, watching Badaya’s cruisers and destroyers volleying kinetic projectiles at the enemy.
The bear-cow ships shifted positions slightly, trying to dodge the rain of rocks. They probably would have succeeded, because no matter how many rocks there were, space was wide, but Tulev was coming in now as well, hurling rocks ahead of his ships, catching the bear-cows in a cross fire, and then Duellos’s small formation was tossing out rocks as well.
“Here we go,” Desjani said, as the combat systems in Geary’s subformation also began launching kinetic projectiles, so that rocks came at the bear-cows from front, sides, and a bit to the rear.
The last seconds were gone as everything came together, the Kick armada trying to evade without breaking from its track on Badaya’s crippled ships. The bear-cow commander had compromised, Geary realized in the instant before contact, trying to both continue pursuit and evade the human strike. It was the kind of compromise, the failure to choose one way or the other, that had doomed countless human commanders.
He saw one of the five surviving superbattleships lurch under several impacts, its powerful shields overwhelmed by the force of the kinetic projectiles before a single BFR tore into it and blew it apart. Then Geary’s subformation was through the enemy armada again, tearing past with the other human warships in the immediate wake of the kinetic bombardment.
This time he felt few hits on Dauntless. Damage reports streamed in from Tulev’s subformation, from Duellos’s small task force, from the other ships in Geary’s subformation, from Badaya’s escorts. Geary took a sudden deep breath as he saw a dreaded symbol appear with names next to it. No contact. Assessed destroyed. Brilliant. A hard-luck ship since Captain Caligo had been arrested for conspiring with Captain Kila, but it was hard to believe that the battle cruiser was gone. Heavy cruisers Emerald and Hoplon. Light cruiser Balestra. Destroyers Plumbatae, Bolo, Bangalore, and Morningstar.
Not all of the destroyed human warships had been annihilated in the fractions of a second during exchanges of fire with the enemy, denying their crews any chance of escape. Some had survived, broken and helpless, long enough for their crews to take to the escape pods that now awaited rescue.
But the Kicks had paid for their stubborn stand. Even the superbattleships could only take so much, and the multiple firing passes coming close on each other right after the avalanche of kinetic projectiles had devastated the enemy armada. Two of the four surviving superbattleships were only drifting wrecks, a third crippled, with spider-wolf warships already swarming about it to administer the kill, and a fourth spinning away, trying to regain maneuvering control, its main propulsion units torn and mangled. The smaller bear-cow warships had been decimated, with maybe forty remaining, and those streaming frantically toward the jump point from which the enemy had come.
The shield wall had broken.
Geary slumped back, feeling no sense of triumph.
“We did it,” Desjani said, but her voice was subdued, not jubilant.
“Yeah.” He agreed with both her words and her tone of voice. “Isn’t peace great?”
“Feels a lot like war to me,” she said.
Geary roused himself. First priority, those escape pods that held survivors from his ships that had been destroyed in the battle. Many of those survivors would be injured and in need of medical care. “Second and Fifth Light Cruiser Squadrons, intercept and recover all escape pods. Notify me immediately if additional ships are required.” That took care of the most immediate need. All that remained was to order the fleet to re-form, prioritize damage control, get help to the surviving ships that needed it most to deal with their dead and wounded and their battle damage—
“Admiral,” Desjani said in a way that caught his attention.
The last surviving superbattleship had partially stabilized its motion, but now thrusters had ceased firing even though the huge warship was still rolling away uncontrollably.
“It’s a sitting duck,” Desjani said.
“Let the spider-wolves—” Geary began, then sat up straighter again. “It can’t run.”
“Will it self-destruct?” Desjani wondered.
“We haven’t seen any of them self-destruct yet, have we? And there haven’t been any—” He broke off speaking again, suddenly realizing something. “We haven’t seen any bear-cow escape craft leaving any of their ships. None from any of the ships we crippled and destroyed.”
“I guess they don’t see those as cost-effective. When you’ve got that many billions of worker bear-cows, why worry about saving a few here and there? The herd is still strong.” Desjani raised one finger to point. “But, Admiral, if they can’t, or won’t, destroy that superbattleship, it’s ours for the taking.”
A huge warship full of bear-cow technology, bear-cow survivors, bear-cow literature, bear-cow history, science, art . . .
“The taking won’t be easy,” Geary said.
But he knew they would have to try.
EIGHT
“TELL them to leave it alone!” Geary said.
The images of General Charban and Emissary Rione, locked all this time in attempts to communicate with the spider-wolves, exchanged looks. “We’re not sure we have the means yet to tell them something like that,” Charban said diplomatically.
“Try. You’ve got the civilian experts down there working with you, right? All of you get that message across. We do not want that bear-cow warship destroyed. It is ours.”
Spider-wolf warships had clustered around the crippled superbattleship, but since the Kick vessel retained its shields, its armor, and its weapons, the spider-wolves were keeping at a safe distance, pinging shots futilely off the still-powerful defenses of the enemy.
Most of the spider-wolves, though, were harrying the surviving bear-cow warships still accelerating in a stampede for the jump point. It would be most of a day before the Kicks got there, even going hell-for-leather as they were, but the spider-wolves were making sure they kept going.
Ending his call to Charban and Rione, Geary sat back, rubbing his forehead. His eyes reluctantly went to his display to see the latest information. The human fleet was slowly drawing back together, licking its wounds, destroyers and light cruisers darting through the vast area of the recent battle to pick up escape pods carrying crew members from destroyed human warships. Geary hadn’t spotted any spider-wolf ships destroyed during the battle, leading to a rising bitterness in him, but when he replayed the last charge against the bear-cows, he saw that the spider-wolves had joined in, diving into the heart of the Kick armada to help break the enemy and losing several ships in the process. Small lifeboats from those destroyed spider-wolf ships had been scooped up by other spider-wolf craft almost as soon as they ejected.
But his first impression had been right. There had been no lifeboats or escape pods from any bear-cow warship.
Escape pods. He checked the status of recovery efforts on his fleet’s escape pods, seeing that the light cruisers ordered to carry out that task were well along at it. Except for—“Is there a spider-wolf ship picking up one of our escape pods?” He wasn’t sure what to feel. Gratitude? Outrage? Fear?
“The pod was heavily damaged,” Desjani said. “It’s off Balestra. Maybe the spider-wolves are seeing if it needs assistance. Quarte is on its way to that pod but still half an hour from pickup.”
“Get ahold of someone on that pod,” Geary ordered. “Let me know as soon as you do.”
Because of the distances involved, that meant nearly ten minutes of waiting before an image rendered jerky by damaged comm equipment on the pod finally appeared before Geary. He could see the interior of the pod, crowded with survivors from Balestra, both the survivors and the pod itself bearing wounds from the destruction of their light cruiser.
Some of the survivors drifted, too injured to act, while others flung themselves about the packed inside of the escape pod to patch up equipment and their fellows. Geary could see the emergency supply lockers open, their shelves already stri
pped of tools, medical supplies, and spare parts. The two rolls of duct tape that every escape pod carried as standard equipment were in use. A strip of duct tape already covered a patch on one wall, doubtless sealing a weak point or leak, and another band of tape was being used to help repair something inside an opened equipment panel. A corpsman, working frantically, was in the act of slapping duct tape over a chest wound on one sailor whose splinted arm was being bound up by another sailor.
At the air lock stood two shapes in space armor. Whereas the actual spider-wolves were incredibly repulsive to the human eye, their space armor resembled their ships in its smooth lines and beautiful engineering. The spider-wolves showed six limbs in the armor, but their appearance was otherwise concealed by the protective gear.
“This is Chief Petty Officer Madigan, combat systems, light cruiser Balestra,” a sailor with a bruise covering one side of his face reported. “The . . . the . . . aliens have boarded us, but haven’t done anything but watch. The situation in here is stabilized, but we need pickup soonest. Uh, senior officer aboard is Lieutenant Junior Grade Sidera, but she’s unconscious.”
Geary breathed a sigh of relief. “Chief Madigan, there’s a light cruiser on the way. Hang on. I think the spider-wolves came aboard to see if you needed assistance. I’ll get a battle cruiser over your way.” That was the fastest ship he could send with a large medical compartment and doctors aboard. It would take another several minutes for Chief Madigan to hear that reassurance, but he seemed to have the situation under control. “Good work. We’ll get you picked up soon.”
“Dragon,” Desjani said. “She’s the closest battle cruiser to them.”
He ordered Dragon into motion, then clenched his eyes shut, trying to refocus on other issues.
“What’s the name of the star?” Desjani asked. She looked tired, but relieved. Dauntless had taken damage, but aside from a few wounded had lost no crew members this time.
The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible Page 15