by S. H. Jucha
Tatia replied, before ending the call.
“Coordinate and take action?” Reiko queried Tatia.
“It’s never been directly discussed with me, but I’ve gleaned from subtle comments made by Alex and Julien, that the sisters know exactly what I mean,” Tatia replied.
“Do I understand this right?” Reiko asked, in surprise. “In some circumstances, such as the one you discussed with Miriamal, the sisters will take control of the fighters and move them to safe locations.”
“Yes, and that’s what Miriamal meant when she said the sisters are ready to take action,” Tatia acknowledged.
“When did this happen, and does Franz know about this?” Reiko asked in rapid succession. She was a product of Sol’s United Earth naval forces. It required many crew members to control their destroyers. She’d understood that SADEs added dimensions to many aspects of human lives, but it was difficult for her to accept that fighter control in a pitched battle would be claimed by a sister without the pilot’s consent.
“I think it began at the battle of the New Terra system,” Tatia replied and quickly added, “At least, the idea, I mean. Once the idea was born, the sisters probably adopted it as a natural extension of their duties to protect the fleet. Consider it from their point of view.”
“So, the sisters go from protecting the fleet from comm intrusion to protecting the fleet by controlling our ships,” Reiko shot back. “Where does it end?”
“Good question, Admiral,” Tatia replied firmly, reestablishing her command boundaries. “If you want an answer to that question, I suggest you talk to Julien. As for me, I’m more than happy to accept the Sisterhood’s efforts to save our pilots.”
The Freedom accelerated, moving from behind the protective wall of Trident commands to take the lead. The four admiralty commands of Svetlana, Darius, Ellie, and Deirdre had handed over control to Cordelia to arrange their squadrons into the wedge behind the city-ship.
Each admiral was viewing the fleet formation on their bridge holo-vid projection and marveling at the movement. Cordelia had sent the request for the formation to the sisters, who coordinated the Tridents’ movement through the ships’ controllers. It was beautiful in its simplicity and efficiency, something no human mind could emulate.
Contrary to the hopes of the admirals, nothing changed in the advance of the adversarial fleet. It remained relentless and unswerving. However, telemetry detected one subtle maneuver. The battleships tightened their formation, but they didn’t move so close that there wasn’t plenty of room for the Tridents to maneuver between them.
Cordelia kept a running update of the closing distances between the fleets on the bridge holo-vid for Tatia and Reiko. Most important, the SADEs fed vector possibilities that demonstrated the arcs the Trident squadrons could take, at any moment.
Reiko eyed Tatia, when the closing distance offered an opportunity for the Tridents.
“Not yet,” Tatia said quietly. “Those battleships have limited maneuverability compared to our Tridents. I want to give them as little time as possible to reorient themselves to our commands’ attacks.”
“Every moment we delay puts this ship and all aboard in greater harm’s way,” Reiko objected.
“And you don’t think Alex thought of that before he offered the suggestion?” Renée posited, from the back of bridge passageway, where she’d been standing for the last few minutes.
Reiko ducked her head. She was embarrassed that Renée had overheard her. One of the last individuals who Alex would wish to risk was his beloved partner, but more than anything, Alex would want to minimize the fleet’s losses. Each individual mattered to him, but the Omnians, as a whole, were who he strove to protect.
Tatia was linked to Cordelia, who managed a set of algorithms driven by the SADE community. The output hypothesized the optimum attack point. Their calculations were irrespective of which ships or who might be endangered. It was purely mathematical, and that’s what Tatia wanted.
The Trident admirals, commodores, and captains had watched a mirror image of Cordelia’s display on their holo-vids. The singular difference was the unique color coding supplied for each command or squadron.
The ships’ controllers followed their preprogrammed courses, and the Omnian Tridents swung out in arcs, covering three hundred and sixty degrees of a hemisphere. They flew up, down, left, and right of the ecliptic, but none sailed straight at the enemy.
Where the advancing battleships thought they faced an oncoming wedge, they unexpectedly were forced to protect themselves from all sides. And while the monstrous battleships opened their ports and shifted their launch tubes outward, they were unsure from which directions the initial attacks would come and with what armament. Even as they continued to sail forward, they faced the question of what waited before them in the guise of the enemy’s unusual-shaped, massive vessels.
The battleships launched smaller, more maneuverable missiles at the Tridents, as the warships closed on them. These missiles sought the reflection of metal hulls and the heat and light of engine flares. And the Tridents, which had closed their clam-shell doors over their interstellar drives and sailed on grav drives and whose hulls were nonmetallic, offered these missiles no targets.
Thousands of missiles from the battleships’ first salvos were easily evaded by the Tridents, as they completed the apex of their arcs and dove into the enemy formation. The SADEs had timed the attacks so that those from above and on the ecliptic were the first groups to intercept the enemy. They were designed to draw the battleship commanders’ attention and subsequent launches.
It was the second phase of the Tridents’ attack, those swinging from below the ecliptic, that sought out the vulnerable spots of the battleships.
In desperation, the battleships launched their heavier missiles. They operated on proximity detection, regardless of the object. For safety’s sake, the missiles were inactive until they achieved some distance from the fleet. In addition, the ships were protected by a constant output of signals that warned the missiles away from their vessels.
These larger missiles needed time to accelerate, and the Tridents were inside the battleships’ safety envelopes before they could be activated. Unable to be triggered by proximity, the missiles passed by the maneuverable Tridents. By the time they were live, their telemetry focused them on a nearby gas giant or the system’s star.
As the Tridents fired their beams, raking the battleships, the enemy rolled out short-range defense guns. Like the fighters at the New Terra system, they threw heavy metal slugs. Unfortunately, Omnian ships were susceptible to this type of weapon.
As the Omnian squadrons closed on the battleships, they launched their fighters, which joined in the attack.
The Tridents and the fighters were dumping beam shots by the hundreds into the hulls of the lead ships and tearing out great gouts of metal, material, and bodies. Despite that destruction, the battleships were shedding off the damage.
The close-in gunnery protection of the lead battleship shredded the bow of an attacking Omnian warship. To the battleship’s detriment, the Omnian controller was taken out of action, and the warship was unable to take evasive action. It stayed on its attack vector and plowed into the battleship’s underbelly.
Where the damaged Trident struck the enemy ship, a huge missile sat in its launch tube. The collision resulted in the detonations of the Omnian warship’s power cells and the battleship’s missile. The explosions ripped through the enemy ship, igniting missile after missile, until the ship was consumed in a ball of fire and expanding gas and metal.
The sisters detected the initial detonation and swung Tridents and travelers
out of harm’s way. It threw off the Omnians’ impending beam shots, but it saved their ships and crews.
The enemy had made a critical mistake. Its fleet had closed ranks to prepare for the charge of the Omnians’ wedge. When the Trident slammed into the lead battleship and subsequently detonated, the battleships to the left and right of the lead ship rode into a storm of debris. Their bows were heavily damaged, killing the bridge crews and disabling the ships’ abilities to strategically engage the enemy. In quick order, Tridents and travelers swarmed over the two damaged ships and ended them.
The remaining enemy battleships spread apart, opening attack lanes for the Omnian warships and exposing the two heavies in the center of the formation. In the same manner, the monstrous battleships in the center of the wedge formation now had clear access to the Freedom and the Chistorlan home world. Their large ports opened, and they launched missiles equal in size to a Trident’s central hull.
One by one, the smaller enemy battleships succumbed to the forces they faced, but not without casualties on the Omnians’ side. The close defensive fire, especially from the two heavies, was horrific, and fighters were chewed to pieces by the slugs thrown at them by the tens of thousands.
Many of these high-velocity rounds ended up piercing the hulls of other battleships. In one incident, those slugs were entirely responsible for a battleship’s destruction. The dense metal projectiles tore through the vessel’s hull, hit a missile’s explosive head, and started a chain reaction of detonations.
The sisters weren’t always successful in removing Omnian ships from the paths of battleship debris. Sometimes there wasn’t enough warning. At other times, there was too much metal in the area, and a fleeing fighter met a wall of metal.
With minor, central hull damage but beams offline, a traveler could abandon the fight and flee toward the Freedom. If a fighter was too heavily damaged to retreat, the pilot or sister took the opportunity to treat the ship as a missile, pointing it at a vulnerable spot on a battleship. In most cases, the enemy’s defensive fire shredded the oncoming traveler, but that left tons of debris and charged power cells slamming into the battleship. Four of the enemy’s massive ships died as a result of heavily damaged Omnian fighters ending their part of the fight in sacrifice.
Within less than an hour after the Omnians launched their attack, all sixteen warships in the wedge were either destroyed or completely out of action. These latter ships were adrift, or their engines were driving them aimlessly out of the system. The Omnians, recognizing these battleships were no longer dangerous, ignored them to take down the heavies.
The two remaining, enormous foes rode close to each other to prevent the Omnians from getting access to at least one side of each ship. In contrast to the enemy’s lighter vessels, these battleships put up solid walls of defensive fire. Travelers died by the handfuls. They were shredded and destroyed before they could make their beams count. The Tridents fared a little better, but the monstrous mass of each ship required many more beam strikes to damage them.
Svetlana’s command had approached the enemy fleet along the ecliptic. Her command, like Deirdre’s on the other side of the ecliptic, was suffering the greatest casualties. Svetlana saw an opening, when the nearest heavy shifted fire off her decimated squadron to a swarm of fighters off its port side. She overrode her captain’s control of the Trident and drove her warship under to attack from beneath the enemy.
In a tick, the sister aboard Svetlana’s Trident saw the enemy’s defensive cannons target her ship, and she resigned herself to share the crews’ fate. The first rounds tore through one beam hull and sheared that unit free of the warship. Enemy guns continued tracking the Omnian warship and devastated the bow, killing most of the crew, as the slugs ripped through the ship’s central axis.
The sister’s kernel recorded a vulnerable location on the battleship just before she lost the ship’s sensory input. Calculating for a minor adjustment, she corrected the dying ship’s course and applied full acceleration to the grav engines. Heavy metal from more cannon fire tore through her box as the Trident’s remaining mass buried through a wide armament port of the heavy.
The Trident’s impact detonated its remaining power cells, which exploded two of the enemy ship’s missiles. The resulting energy release sprouted huge gouts of flame from the heavy’s midship, accompanied by the ejection of metal and bodies. An enormous missile had its fuel source ignited. It launched, plowing through bulkhead after bulkhead until its warhead exploded. The front quarter of the battleship was ejected from the ship in the subsequent horrendous detonation.
From the moment Svetlana’s sister made her decision, every other sister still operating in the attack received her message and fought to extricate their ships from the impending disaster. Admirals, commodores, and captains lost control of their warships, as Tridents and travelers abandoned attack vectors, applied full power to grav engines, and shot from the battle area.
Behind them, human combatants watched a fiery explosion blast forth from the heavy’s midship. It was followed by a series of secondary detonations. The final massive one severed the ship’s bow. Then the entire length of the hull was pierced by multiple tertiary explosions that served to split the ship open.
The other heavy was punctured in hundreds of places, as the remains of its sister ship penetrated the hull. Small detonations ignited others. Soon, the second heavy was engulfed in a conflagration that spelled its doom.
Just over a quarter of the Omnian fleet had been lost, and many of the other ships had suffered various degrees of damage. But the survivors, humans and SADEs, were grateful to be alive.
Ellie’s link request to Tatia was blocked. She requested her ship’s controller shift the holo-vid view to pick up the telemetry toward the planet. She was horrified to see that the heavies’ most massive missiles were headed toward the planet, and the Freedom stood in their way.
Attempting to link to the other Trident admirals and warn them of the city-ship’s danger, Ellie received her second shock. Svetlana and her ship weren’t online.
Ellie choked back her sob. She managed to send,
The commands reformed, with the admirals adding the survivors of Svetlana’s command to bolster their numbers. They ran searches for drifting Tridents and travelers, chasing down the ones in the direst conditions. All the while, they kept an eye on the Freedom and its predicament.
* * *
Those aboard the Freedom were emotionally devastated by the fleet’s losses. Most painful to the senior staff was the loss of Svetlana.
Tatia would have liked a moment to mourn her dear friend, but circumstances weren’t going to allow it.
Cordelia had rotated the Freedom on its central axis, turning it ninety degrees. Then she spun the giant city-ship until it presented its narrowest profile to the oncoming missiles. It also allowed her the best opportunity to rotate her beam weapons, which would spread out the drain on their power crystals. Each pair of tubes that extended from bay doors was capable of firing multiple shots before it rotated out of sight of the oncoming missiles.
When the battleships were engaged by Omnian forces, Cordelia had opened her weapons ports, rolled out her beam tubes, and checked her targeting and activating sequences. As at the previous battle, with the federacy’s fighters, Cordelia requested help from the SADEs to manage the weapons’ targeting priorities.
Tatia ordered nonessential personnel to board the city-ship’s travelers. Priority was given to families with young children. Unfortunately, the travelers co
uld handle only a small percentage of the population, and the pilots were given strict orders from Tatia to stay with the freighters. If necessary, the freighters could cram the travelers’ passengers aboard their ships, drop below the ecliptic, and transit away. It would be up to the pilots to choose whether to fight or abandon their ships and join the exodus. The travelers were filled and launched before the first monstrous missiles came the Freedom’s way.
Captain Descartes’ telemetry identified fifteen missiles, each the size of a Trident’s primary hull, crossing the gulf of space toward the planet. As a SADE, he examined every conceivable option. The simplest one was for the city-ship to move aside, eliminating the threat. But Alex had ordered the fleet to protect the planet, and Admiral Tachenko would do just that.
Using the telemetry data from the fight against the battleships, Descartes calculated that it would take only one or two of the huge missiles to destroy the Freedom. A missile wouldn’t even have to contact the city-ship. By the time one of them entered the city-ship’s engagement envelope, it would be too close. The resulting explosion would seriously damage the vessel. Fifteen such events would cripple, if not destroy, the ship.
Running another scenario, Descartes postulated the probability of his squadron racing forward and trying to destroy the missiles. His calculations determined that the moment they reached optimum beam firing distance, they would be the ones who would be too close.
New scenarios were calculated and dismissed in the time it would have taken a human to count the missiles. Descartes discovered one concept that had a chance of succeeding. The two heavies were close together when they launched their enormous missiles. Importantly, they’d fired them from their protected sides, which were next to each other. He presumed the commanders had done that to prevent the attacking forces from destroying the weapons before they achieved significant velocity. As such, the missiles were lined up behind one another, as they headed for the same destination, the native race’s home world.