by Jay Allan
“Admiral, Conqueror and Endeavor have just transited.”
Barron felt himself exhaling, a bit harder than normal. He hadn’t really doubted his fleet would return when they received the orders—though every command officer in the force was effectively abetting treason—but it was still reassuring to see they begin to appear.
Still, Atara’s report, and the reality it represented, didn’t change the calculus for the next twenty minutes or so—the returning vessels were well behind his tiny vanguard, and the ships had low intrinsic velocities as they came through. But it still gave him a boost…and he suspected it was good for morale all around.
“That’s good to hear, Admiral Travis. This may be extraneous, but advise the new arrivals they are to proceed after us at full thrust and engage the enemy the instant they are in range. And I want full evasive protocols in effect. Those enemy weapons are no damned joke, and they’ll open up long before we get into range.” Barron wanted to believe his ships would come up from behind and avoid any heavy enemy fire until their own primaries were in range. But he couldn’t count on it. The enemy would still focus mostly on the far larger Hegemony fleet, but he knew he would order a few ships to spin around and fire at the new attackers coming in, if he was in their place, and he wasn’t going to be the enemy commander would do anything different.
“Yes, Admiral.”
An instant later, Barron added, “Advise Captain Devers on Conqueror, she is to pass these orders on to the other ships as they arrive.” That would save some time, a little at least. Conqueror was twenty light seconds closer to the transit point than Dauntless and her two companions. Not a big time savings, but Barron knew every second counted. Besides, he suspected he and Atara were going to get very busy, very soon.
“Yes, sir.” A few seconds later. “Done.”
Barron looked back at the display, watching as Stockton’s squadrons closed. They were will within point defense range—at least what had been point defense range when facing Hegemony ships—but they hadn’t been fired upon. Yet.
Barron let himself hope the enemy was baffled by his strike craft, that their immensely powerful ships were devoid of the precise weaponry needed to face bomber attacks.
It turned out, he was partially right.
* * *
“Commander, scanners show three of the Confederation vessels moving on the enemy flanking force. They appear to have launched bombers, and the strike force is moving into attack range.”
Chronos heard the words, and he felt a strange mix of hope and confusion. He’d hoped Barron would find some way to intervene in the battle…but then he’d realized, it didn’t really matter. The Confederation ships Barron commanded weren’t enough to turn the tide anyway. Part of Chronos still wanted whatever help he could get, but he also cheered Barron’s escape. It would serve little purpose, perhaps, save to allow the Confederation commander to die somewhere else, some other day. Chronos knew any hope of defeating the Others would die with his fleet, but he knew enough about Tyler Barron to bet he’d give the enemy a few surprises before he went down.
But now Barron was attacking with the last three of his ships that hadn’t transited. That made no sense, none at all.
Not until Chronos saw the first two Confed hulls emerge from the tube.
He’s bringing his ships back. He really is attacking.
He was confused, at first. He’d given up hope that Barron would violate his orders, throw his ships in to the hopeless fight. But then he understood.
Barron was hitting the flanking force, coming at them from behind.
He’s outflanking the flanking force…
It made perfect sense. The enemy had been about to catch his fleet between two forces…but now their own flanking force was about to be hit from two sides.
Chronos stared for a moment, his mind racing, analyses flying wildly around in his thoughts. The enemy was tough, and they had enough strength in the system to crush both the Hegemony and Confederation forces.
But if we hit that flanking force hard enough…we just might do some real damage, and then get through the tube.
Live to fight another day.
“All ships, maintain full thrust. All targeting routines at maximum power. Ignore the ships on our tail. We’re going to hit that force ahead of us…while the Confeds take them from behind.” He felt a burst of energy, and an excitement that reinvigorated him, drove away the defeat that had lain on him like lead.
“All ships acknowledge, Commander. Except for Megaron Ilius’s force. They are two light minutes behind us, and we are still awaiting a reply.”
That was two minutes until Ilius got the command, and more than an hour before his battered force could reach the tube. Chronos had planned to rip through the enemy flanking force, make a dead run to escape the system. But if he did that, Ilius and his people were as good as dead.
Abandoning Ilius and his ships probably made sense, despite the cost. Chronos’s forces would remain a fleet in being; they would keep the war going. He knew his younger self would have pressed forward in an instant, gone with what the numbers and the cold analysis told him, despite the fact that Ilius was his friend.
But six years of war on the Rim had changed him.
Fighting against Tyler Barron and his warriors had changed him.
He wasn’t going to leave his friend, and thousands upon thousands of Kriegeri, behind. Not without at least trying to buy them the time they needed.
“I want all railguns double loaded…and I want all secondary batteries online and firing as they come into range. We’re going in…and we’re going to blast that flanking force to radioactive scrap!”
* * *
Stockton’s fingers tightened, and his ship lurched hard, loosing its payload toward the enemy ship right in front of him. He’d improvised on the way in, changed his tactics on the fly. He’d decelerated hard as he approached the enemy ship, something that seemed completely unnatural, but there hadn’t been a choice. He wasn’t able to get a solid target lock beyond a thousand kilometers.
And he wasn’t able to get a really solid fix outside five hundred.
He’d let himself hope, for a few brief moments, that his bombers would be free from defensive fire as they approached. But that had been too much to hope for. The enemy batteries had opened up far closer in than he’d initially feared, and the weapons firing were cumbersome, clearly not designed for anti-fighter operations.
But they were deadly when they hit, and he’d lost over thirty of his ships since the batteries had opened up. And that number was almost certain to rise as his squadrons slowed almost to a standstill to deliver their torpedoes from a range so short, he didn’t know what to call it. ‘Point blank’ and other terms of the sort had long applied to vastly larger distances. The concept of a bomber coming in less than five hundred kilometers was something new, something he’d just made up. At normal attack speeds that was less than a fifth of a second to the target ship, far too little time for an assaulting ship to pull away in time.
His ships had to decelerate hard and come in to knife-fighting range. It was the only way they could get effective targeting.
They’ll probably call it the ‘Stockton Maneuver.’
The thought of it made him sick to his stomach.
He watched his torpedo moving toward the enemy vessel. It was strange, as well, to see a warhead moving so slowly, but it had gone out with the intrinsic velocity of his almost stationary fighter. He hesitated for a few seconds, scolding himself for it as he pulled hard on the throttle and maxed out his engines.
You got lucky there, Raptor…someone was asleep at the switch. You were a sitting duck waiting to see if that torpedo hit.
He felt the g forces slamming into him, pressing him back into his acceleration couch. His ship began to move forward, and even as it did, he swung the throttle around, pulling away in as wild an evasive pattern as he could manage. He realized he was holding his breath, waiting for the fatal shot to c
ome in. But it didn’t, and as he sailed back past the target ship, he saw his torpedo slamming into the hull.
He didn’t know how much damage, if any, he’d done…and he wouldn’t have even had confirmation of the hit if he’d been quicker to make good his escape.
We’re going to need some way to get decent scans and damage assessments…maybe a small probe or something to launch with the torpedo.
That was an issue, a problem that needed to be solved. But not just then. Stockton had to get his people out after their runs, and get them back to base to rearm.
And he had to organize the squadrons he knew would be coming in next. First, a mirror image of the initial one, the wings from the other three ships that had run the fake drills. And, after that, the squadrons from the rest of the fleet, six hundred more ships, hopefully benefitting from what he’d learned so far on the first attack.
He looked down and winced as he saw that twenty more of his ships were gone, pilots who’d been less lucky than he was, who’d gotten blasted as they slowed to a crawl to commence their own attacks.
The feel of battle against the Others was entirely different than it had been against the Hegemony, but Stockton knew then and there, with a sickening certainty…the fights ahead would be no less costly than those of the last war.
“All squadrons, back to base. Refuel and rearm.” But even as he gave the commands, he doubted there would be time for a second sortie. The mission was to get as much as possible of the Hegemony fleet out of the system…and then to run.
To run as quickly as possible, and then to regroup.
And to try to figure a way, any way, to stop the enemy next time.
* * *
“All ships, full thrust. Divert power from weapons, if necessary, but I want those engines at maximum output.” Ilius hated running. It wasn’t something he’d had to do very often, and he was finding the role as the underdog decidedly irritating. His first urge was to stay and fight, to fire his weapons with every last watt of power, to win where he was…or to die.
The problem with that plan was a simple one. The odds of dying in such a scenario were close to one hundred percent. His ships were outmatched, and with Chronos’s command heading toward the transit tube at maximum thrust, they were badly outnumbered, too. He was running for a simple reason. It was the only way to survive. The only chance to save even a portion of the Hegemony combat power he commanded.
The scene was a nightmare, the darkness of defeat coming down on him, the cold breath of death heavy on his neck. Ilius had overcome the fear he’d felt earlier, the vague and general panic at facing so mysterious an enemy. He’d regained control and the fear sitting in his gut now was more familiar, if it was also more severe than it had ever been. He was prepared to die, if that was his fate, but he couldn’t lie to himself, couldn’t ignore the fact that he was afraid.
He waved his hands at the various acknowledgements. His ships had all received the order. They would all fed what power they had into their engines. About half of his remaining force was still firing at least some of their weapons, but with every passing moment, every enemy hit, another ship’s guns went silent. How many had sufficient engines and reactor power to make a good run at escaping was a guess.
Ilius leaned back, feeling the pressure as the g forces generated by Anthrocles’s massive thrust overwhelmed the dampeners. His ship had suffered damage in the battle, but providence had spared her engines and enough of her power generation to allow her to blast away at full thrust. That gave the ship a chance, at least, to make it to the tube. But it was still a long way. The massive velocity of Ilius’s approach had plunged his ships deeper into the system than any other Hegemony forces, and that meant their route back out was just as long. He doubted any of his people would have made it out, but the intensity of Chronos’s attack on the enemy flanking force, coupled with the apparent return of Tyler Barron’s Confederation fleet, had distracted the enemy. Almost half the ships that had been bearing down on his battered and limping force had been diverted, sent to engage Chrono’s ships before the enemy flanking force was overrun.
It was a welcome respite, though one he knew his comrades would pay for as the diverted ships closed on Chronos’s command from yet another direction.
He turned to issue a new series of orders, but he never managed to get them out. Anthrocles suddenly shook hard, and the flagship spun wildly out of control. All around the bridge, and no doubt everywhere else on the ship, whole series of internal explosions erupted, one system’s destruction setting off that of the next in showers of sparks and billowing eruptions of black and gray smoke. The bridge filled quickly with caustic fumes, and Ilius found himself choking and gasping for air along with his officers.
Then, an entire section of the ceiling and the support superstructure collapsed, burying half the bridge crew—and the fleet’s second-in-command—under tons of metal and debris.
Ilius lay on the deck, feeling the pain of his broken body, gasping for a lungful of what passed for air on that tortured bridge, even as he wondered if his vessel had been mortally wounded.
If any of his ships would make it out. He didn’t reach a conclusion.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Forty-One
CFS Dauntless
Ettara-Mordlin System
Year 322 AC
The Battle of Pharsalon – “Carry on the Fight!”
“All ships, commence deceleration now! All primary batteries, maintain maximum fire!” Barron’s hands gripped the armrests tightly, sliding a bit on the sweat-covered leather. It was an affectation that had remained with him in battle, from his first desperate fight with the Alliance battleship Invictus, through all the wars he’d fought. It was harmless enough, though he could never explain exactly why he did it.
“Yes, Admiral. All units acknowledge. Deceleration full, primaries maintain fire.”
Even as Atara spoke, Dauntless’s bridge lights flickered slightly, a sign the main guns had fired. Barron remembered when firing primaries knocked out almost all power to the rest of a ship for three, four, five seconds. Confederation reactors, and even more crucially, power transmission systems had advanced rapidly during the wars. For a brief few months, there had been no detectable signs of a ship’s primaries firing, but then the enhanced guns were installed in the fleet’s battleships, and the increased power drain caused the slightest return to the old dimming.
Barron watched as the particle accelerator beams lashed out, slicing through space toward their targets. Dauntless’s four shots all missed, the closest of the beams coming within two thousand kilometers of the target. His ships had all been upgraded with what was being called the ‘Avia’ system, the advanced targeting routines Barron’s stubbornness had extracted from his would-be Hegemony allies. But even with the Sigma-9 detection procedure, it was damned hard to hit the enemy ships. Dauntless had scored a single hit, on the battleship’s first shot, but that early luck had not repeated itself. Repulse and Indomitable had also scored a single hit each.
That wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t going to get the job done, not unless the rest of the fleet got into range damned quickly. Barron had sent multiple communiques, urging the approaching units to push their engines to the max, and they’d responded by wildly abusing their power systems. Two ships, a battleship and a cruiser, had blown out their thrusters entirely. Barron had no idea if the damage was bad, or if the vessels had just ruptured a power line or something easily repairable. The answer to that question would determine if those vessels escaped with the fleet…or if fifteen hundred of his spacers were already effectively walking dead.
Barron was about to issue another order, or at least he was going to urge his gunners to focus harder, to do better. But before a word escaped his lips, he saw a flash on the display.
Indomitable was gone.
The battleship had taken a hit as the three ships approached the enemy line, a grazing shot, one that had inflicted significant but not cr
itical damage. But the fatal shot had been dead on, a direct hit amidships, one that split the great vessel open, and tore its containment apart before its reactors could scrag. The explosion was cataclysmic, almost as though a small star had been born, and had lived a lifespan of perhaps thirty seconds before dissipating. There was nothing material left of the battleship, no matter at all larger than scattered atoms. Only a cloud of hard and dense radiation, where one of the greatest ships of the Confederation had been, with its eleven hundred crew.
Eleven hundred twenty-three, Barron’s mind recalled, with unpleasant clarity.
He slapped his hand down on the comm unit, pulling up the direct line to Dauntless’s gunners. He had no place directing a single ship’s operation, though for a few moments more his entire effective command consisted of only two vessels.
“Listen to me, all of you. This is Admiral Barron. We need to draw some blood. I know those things are hard to hit, but you have to make this Hegemony targeting system work. You have to give me what you’ve given me so many times before.” Barron knew that wasn’t entirely accurate, of course. A lot of spacers had been through the crew rosters of the two Dauntless’s. He tended to think of them as all one group, even though he knew that was inaccurate. His normally complete recollection of such details eluded him, though, and he had no idea how may of the gunners down there were veterans of the Hegemony War, and how many were fresh transferees from the brief peacetime restructurings.
He didn’t even know if there was anyone in gunnery who’d served on the old Dauntless in the Union War, or even earlier, in the fight with Invictus, when his beloved ship had faced the Alliance flagship out on the Far Rim.
But he didn’t care. If they were on Dauntless now, they were members of that family…and he expected them to act that way.