“It is not my place or our place to defy Their Majesties’ orders or intentions,” Kim said. “It is our place to make tactical decisions in the moment. I am not prepared to risk our brave Marines attempting to storm active Clan facilities. If the locals surrender, we will secure surrendered bases, but our priority is to neutralize the threat.”
Kira smothered a grimace. The Admiral might not even be wrong, but it still felt vaguely wrong to plan to ignore the orders from their superiors.
It wasn’t her problem, anyway. The nova fighters would be tasked with dealing with hostile spacecraft, not shipyards and fabricators. As the briefing moved forward toward that part of the affairs, she started to assess what they knew of the asteroid cluster the fight would take place around.
At the end of the day, she was being paid to follow Admiral Kim’s orders. Outside of that, the only thing she was going to insist on was scattering “Warlord” Davies’ flaming pieces across a few thousand kilometers.
43
“Nova complete. Launching fighters.”
They’d practiced it exactly once since Kira had come aboard, but a full-deck launch was entirely automated. With fourteen fighters clearing the launch bay in seconds, it needed to be.
The most she’d seen launched in a single wave was forty-five fighters. Today was a third of that, and Conviction’s launch bay was just as large as the one aboard Perseus.
The launch went off without a hitch and her Hoplite-IV was back in space where it belonged. The sluggish feel of her Harringtons as she maneuvered away from the carrier was both new and old. She’d made sure she spent simulator time on anti–capital ship missions, but this was the first time she’d been in real space with a real torpedo in over a year.
Her fourteen nova fighters carried twenty-two torpedoes. The Lancers carried another six, and the Redward nova fighters slotted into her command network and formation as she watched.
Half of the sub-fighters also had torpedoes, but they were hanging back as a defensive perimeter around the carriers. The first pass would go to her people.
“Task Force is formed up, escorts advancing,” Estanza said in her headware. “First pass is yours, Commander. Time to show the locals what twenty nova fighters can do.”
There was enough activity at the target for Kira to be grimly certain they’d got there ahead of any evacuation order. It wasn’t resolving into easily identified targets—they were still almost ten million kilometers away—but there were definitely ships over there.
In a few seconds, the defenders would see the light from TF 31’s arrival and the activity would become chaos and then vanish behind multiphasic jammers. The first step was data.
“Nova group, form on my wing,” she ordered. The order was mostly unnecessary, but she noted a couple of the Lancers twitching their alignment slightly.
“First pass is scouting,” she continued. “Don’t waste your torps until we’re sure of what we’re looking at, but don’t hesitate to put plasma on anything that’s armed. Any questions?”
She gave them about two seconds—more than enough time for people with headware linked into nova fighter computers.
“All nova fighters,” she addressed them crisply. “Nova.”
The world curved around her as her nova drive pulsed. Ten million kilometers vanished in the blink of an eye, and an automatic countdown started in the back of her brain.
A thirty-four-light-second nova would take her drive three seconds to cycle. It wasn’t much, but in a combat environment, it could be life or death.
“Jammers are silent,” Sagairt barked on the general channel. They’d have had coms either way. They’d come through the nova in neat-enough formation to maintain laser links.
The moment the jammers came up and they broke that formation, they were on their own. Right now, twenty fighters formed a distinct line in space as they swept through Warlord Deceiver’s home base.
It was bigger than the data they’d seen. Not just new shipyards but new hab structures, too. The cluster had to have at least three times the space—if not necessarily three times the people—as the latest Redward intelligence suggested.
The yards had expanded too. They’d expected ten yards capable of building gunships and one capable of building corvettes. Those were all there, but three corvette-sized yards had been added—and so had two clearly capable of building destroyers.
Because they were building destroyers.
“Those ships are not live,” Kira barked. “Ignore the slips; find me the warships”
Gunships were bringing their Harringtons online, probably reacting as much to the light arriving from TF 31’s appearance as the unexpected arrival of nova fighters in their midst. Several of them sent plasma skittering across Kira’s formation, earning themselves massed return fire from half a dozen of Kira’s craft.
A gunship died. Then another—but that was incidental.
“We have the data. Nova group—nova!”
The close-range data was critical to planning the next phase of the mission. By the time Kira and her fighters had regrouped around the task force, multiphasic jamming had consumed the area around the Deceiver’s base.
But the nova fighters’ close-range pass meant they had data from before the jammers had come up, and they knew what they were facing.
“That’s a lot of gunships,” Sagairt observed as the data flickered between the ships and the fighters. “I’m reading at least forty, plus six corvettes.”
“We can take that,” Kira told him. “I was expecting worse.”
The power signatures suggested the corvettes were more advanced than the Clans had been fielding before, but they didn’t make it up to even Redward standards.
“All right, people,” she continued, widening the channel. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I hate flying around with a torpedo strapped to my hull. And my data shows this set of six nasty little ships I don’t want within a million klicks of my carrier.
“We’re going in and we’re going in hard and hot this time,” she told them. “Multiphasics online with the nova. Target is the corvettes, but I’m not going to cry too loudly if you put a torpedo into anything with guns, clear?”
“Yes, sir!”
A chorused reply, but it was what she needed to hear.
“All right, people. Range is dropping; this is only a twenty-light-second nova. Do not—I repeat, do not—spend more than ten seconds in the battlespace. We can stick around once the task force catches up. Darkwings, keep a torpedo for later, just in case.
“For now, burn those corvettes and haul for home. Clear?”
She didn’t wait for a response, spending her time checking that her own multiphasic jammers and nova drive were online.
“All right. Lancers, Memorials, Darkwings.” She grinned as she reeled off the squadrons under her command. She was in command of a nova combat group. Understrength and divided, with one of “her” squadrons flying obsolete trash, but hers.
Hopefully, she could live up to Jay Moranis’s long-standing claim that she could do his job just as well as he could.
“Nova and attack.”
Coms didn’t survive the transit. They might have had the formation for laser coms for a few milliseconds after emergence, but it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Kira was off her emergence vector in under a quarter-second, her own multiphasic jammers adding to the chaotic mess that any scanner would see.
Only close-range visual detection was meaningful in a modern battlespace, but her computers could at least help with that. After twenty years of practice, she knew where her prey should be and dove toward where the largest group of corvettes had been.
It took a critical two seconds to find them, two seconds that the corvettes and their gunship escorts spent filling space with plasma.
She deked around their fire with contemptuous ease, and she wasn’t the only one. Her fighters were weaving in and out of her awareness as she closed with her prey. There was no way to dis
tinguish which corvettes any of her people were aiming at, but she wasn’t even the first to fire.
A corvette on her screen died in a blaze of fire as two of the Darkwings focused their torpedoes on the ship. Counter-fire came near the fighter-bombers, but the gunners were slow.
The gunners were just plain bad, she realized. They had no idea how to handle a properly managed nova fighter strike. They had known she was coming, but too many of their weapons were clearly expecting less-maneuverable enemies.
Kira ducked “under” a salvo of fire from the corvette’s heavy main gun and clicked the mental trigger. Her torpedo snapped free of her hull as she vectored up and away, watching the weapon close with a quarter of her brain.
The torpedo only existed for about a tenth of a second after she released it, anyway. Then it vanished into a cone of thermonuclear flame as the shaped warhead detonated. The plasma blast hit her target like a hammerblow and punched through its hull.
She didn’t wait to see the final result. Even as the torpedo’s plasma blast was burning into her target, she was bringing her nova drive online.
Kira had been in the battlespace for ten point two seconds. The last thing she needed was to set a bad example!
44
“Memorials, check in. Darkwing Lead, Lancer Lead, check in with your pilots and advise,” Kira barked as they returned to formation with the rest of the task force. “Cross-reference visual data and confirm kills.
“We have the time.”
“Nightmare here. No damage, fuel at seventy percent, ammo at eighty,” Cartman reported immediately. “Torpedo expended. Recharging guns.”
“Longknife here. Same as Nightmare.”
“Dawnlord. No damage, fuel at seventy-five, ammo at sixty,” Patel continued. “Torpedo expended, recharging guns.”
“Socrates. Ditto as Nightmare but ammo at thirty-five,” Colombera reported.
“Geez, Socrates, did you turn your guns off?” Michel asked. “Fuel and ammo both at seventy, torpedo expended.”
Michel’s question was probably a good guess as to what Socrates had done, Kira reflected. Emptying sixty-five percent of his magazines would have taken six point five seconds of sustained fire—in a battlespace pass that lasted less then ten seconds.
“This is Gizmo,” Hersch said on the command channel. “No damage across the squadron. Fuel averaging sixty-five percent, ammunition at seventy. We’ll recharge ammo before the nova, and everybody’s got a torpedo left.”
“This is Helmet,” Sagairt’s voice added. “No damage to Lancer Squadron. Fuel averaging seventy percent, ammunition averaging eighty percent with torps expended.” He paused. “I haven’t flown a nova strike like that before, but did it seem weirdly easy to anyone else?”
“I expected better from veteran pirate gunships, but you might have put your finger on it,” Kira said slowly. “If you, who commanded the only complete nova fighter squadron in the Cluster outside of Conviction, haven’t flown a proper high-speed nova strike before…who in the Cluster would have seen the other side of one?”
The range between the main task force contingent—whose rapid advance was far from as slow as it felt—and the enemy base was shrinking by the minute. Over half of the distance was gone.
“Demirci, this is Admiral Kim,” the Redward flag officer’s voice cut in, overriding Kira’s main channels. “Camera footage suggests you’ve taken down the corvettes, but there’s still over thirty gunships out there, and analysis suggests fixed defenses on several of the new stations.
“I need you to get back in there and kick those pirate scum in the ass again. Move, Commander.”
Kira ran timelines in her head as she studied the fuel numbers for her combat group.
“Sir, if we go in again without refueling, we’ll be entering the final crunch at minimum combat reserves for fuel,” she warned. “And no torpedoes except the ones Darkwing saved.”
“The destroyers will clean up at that point, Commander. Can you do it or not?”
“We can do it, sir,” she confirmed with a mental sigh. Flag officers, it seemed, were the same the galaxy over. “Just warning you that we’ll be short on fuel and bombs if we do it.”
“Cut those gunships down to size, Demirci. That’s an order.”
The channel cut and Kira swallowed a curse.
“All right, people, good news,” she told her pilots with forced cheer. “Any of you who haven’t made ace yet get a second chance. We’re going back in ahead of the escorts. We’ll hold until we have full ammo charges, but then we nova in and hit the gunships.
“Flag wants the numbers brought down to a more reasonable level, and I can’t say I disagree with her.”
She wasn’t sure another unsupported nova fighter strike was the right answer, but she couldn’t argue with Kim’s wanting to face a more reduced gunship flotilla.
“I make it three minutes to full charge on everyone’s guns,” she concluded. “That’s about enough time to take off your helmet and grab two sips of coffee, in my experience.
“Do whatever floats your boat, people. Because in three minutes, we go kill some more pirates.”
“Nova and attack.”
The thrill of giving the order to an expanded command had already worn thin, Kira realized as she punched the controls and flung her Hoplite back into the battlespace. The task force she was leaving behind would be bringing up multiphasic jammers in the next minute or so. There wasn’t going to be much in terms of clear space or communications until the battle was over now.
The gunships were showing slightly better coordination this time. They’d assembled themselves into something resembling an anti-fighter formation, but they still looked like they were following a playbook they’d never practiced.
Kira yanked her fighter into a line on one of the gunships and emptied half a second of sustained fire at the ship before dodging around again. Her own maneuvers were almost unconscious, and she barely registered that the gunship had evaded most of her fire as she studied the battlespace.
The gunships weren’t veteran crews. It didn’t make any sense to her, but it was obvious. Their gunners were slow and their pilots were worse. These weren’t the elite crews she’d expected to be guarding Davies’s home base. These were the kind of third-line raw recruits she’d expect to see at a minor refueling base.
Two of those raw crews tried to catch her in a crossfire, holding her attention for a handful of seconds as she dodged around streams of plasma and then dumped two seconds of sustained fire into one of the gunships. The hundred-meter-long warship disintegrated and Kira was out of time.
Nova flashed around her, twisting her stomach as she tried to hold on to her thoughts. The attack had flashed by in the designated ten seconds, and every one of her people had broken clear again.
It hadn’t been a complete clean pass this time, she reflected as her people aligned on her and the reports trickled in. Several of the Lancers and Darkwings had taken solid hits and were down weapons and scanners…but everyone was still combat-ready.
They were also less than a hundred thousand kilometers behind the heavy strike force and following the capital ships in. The destroyers, at least, were large enough to sustain solid communications through the fight.
Most of the sublight fighters were hanging back with Conviction and Perseus, and a chill ran over Kira as she watched the main duel begin. There were guns on the asteroids, heavy installations with heavy guns that were probably more powerful than the destroyers’. The sub-fighters would be enough to handle them, she concluded—and watched as the pilots agreed with her and swarmed forward.
Something in the entire situation felt off. If this was the Warlord’s main base, it was missing the elite crews she’d expect from Davies’s protectors. Was he off somewhere else with his best? The sheer size of the yards suggested that this was exactly the main base Redward Intelligence had thought it was.
“Sir, does this seem odd to you?” Gizmo asked. “It seems like they
’re missing their best pilots and gunners.”
Pilots.
Pilots.
Why did that sound important to Kira’s brain?
…because gunship pilots were the only people a Costar Clan warlord would have been able to put behind the stick of a nova fighter.
“All fighters, form for nova,” she barked. “Set your course for Conviction and Perseus.”
“Sir?”
“Just do it,” Kira snapped. “Nova. Now.”
Because if Davies’ best pilots weren’t aboard his best gunships, it was because he’d found a better use for them. And that meant that the Costar Warlord had nova fighters—and if he’d let Kira rip his corvettes and gunships to pieces, he’d done it with a plan.
The exact same plan he’d tried to use to destroy Conviction once before.
45
Even if she’d guessed wrong, the main strike force had a dozen sub-fighters, six destroyers and half a dozen corvettes. They could handle the fixed defenses and less than twenty gunships Kira’s strikes had left behind.
At the point the heavy ships hit the battlespace, the nova fighters’ role was mostly done. Fourteen more fighters would help, but they’d already hammered the defenders as much as they were going to.
She hadn’t guessed wrong.
The nova fighters had probably been inside the base’s fighter hangars when she made her first pass, and then they’d novaed out under cover of the multiphasic jamming, waiting for the moment when the attackers’ escorts brought up their own jamming.
At that moment, no one in the battlespace could see what was happening at Perseus and Conviction. Only a hunch could bring anyone back to the carriers before it was too late—but Kira had had that hunch.
Her fighter squadrons emerged directly behind thirty-two Weltraumpanzer-Fünf heavy fighters. The sub-fighters they’d left behind to protect the carriers were sortieing to meet them, but they were both outnumbered and individually outclassed.
Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Page 25