The Brisingr-designed nova fighters had their jammers online at maximum power. No one aboard the carriers or sub-fighters could call for help. They outnumbered the defending fighters almost three to one. Neither carrier was heavily armed.
They knew they’d won—which gave Kira a precious handful of seconds to act.
“Nova fighters—break and attack!”
The Weltraumpanzers had no business being out there. They were superior fighters to anything in Kira’s flotilla, too. Only her Hoplites could outmaneuver them—but the heavy fighters had the guns to tear Perseus or Conviction apart even without their torpedoes.
The laser-com links broke before Kira received even a single response from her pilots, every one of her people acting before she’d even finished speaking. Twenty nova fighters dove at thirty-two, and Kira knew what the response would be.
Every nova fighter had the response drilled into them from the first day of basic training: if you’re spooked, be somewhere else. A fifty-thousand-kilometer nova didn’t even take you out of the battlespace, but it sure as hell screwed up someone’s attack run.
She was expecting the emergency escape nova so thoroughly, she almost didn’t fire when her sights settled on her target. The Weltraumpanzer was paying some attention: he was evading, he was flipping in space to bring his own guns to bear on her…but all of her maneuvers were sublight and her interceptor’s plasma guns shredded the heavy fighter across several hundred kilometers of space.
That was the end of her few seconds of shock before sparkling stars around her warned her that plasma fire was coming her way. She decided to be somewhere else.
A ten-thousand-kilometer nova put her in the middle of the sub-fighters, a stunt that only earned two near-misses instead of the four or five she was expecting before the Redwards realized who she was.
She flipped in space and spent a second and a half surveying the dogfight.
Only three of her fighters were still in the scrum, and they short-novaed out as she watched. Thirty-plus of Brisingr’s most advanced nova fighters had been reduced to fourteen in a single six-second engagement.
Plasma fire from Perseus’s heavier guns reached into the midst of the nova fighter formation as Kira watched, and the idiots finally, finally, novaed away from the killing zone they’d found themselves in.
That was what she’d been waiting for. Years of practice meant that she and her computer could take the minimal data she could pick up through the multiphasic jamming and guess a distance and destination.
She was only right three times out of four or so—but a computer on its own was only right one time in three.
And the fact that the course she estimated put them right on top of Conviction was all the confirmation she needed. A half-second of calculation and she novaed after them.
She emerged into an already-disintegrating fighter strike. The pilots weren’t bad—she’d bet her own fighter that they were the original pilots of the gunships her people had shredded at the main base—but they didn’t know nova combat.
Conviction had been waiting for them, and Gizmo’s idea had worked like a charm. Six torpedoes had been mounted on the hull, and when the nova fighter strike had begun, Estanza had pulled the trigger.
He’d only actually hit four nova fighters, but it was enough to disrupt their formation and leave the attack a mess as almost half of the remaining Weltraumpanzers novaed out.
They were learning—but they’d left six of their friends behind, and Kira wasn’t the only pilot in her combat group capable of following a short nova.
There was no way to give orders in an environment that blocked sensors and coms alike, but that was why they trained. She knew her Memorials were on her wing—and a moment’s attention confirmed she had two Darkwings and a Lancer, too—as she went after the nova fighters that were trying to press their attack.
One survived to launch a torpedo. Kira stared at it for an eternal quarter-second…and then her computer finished its calculations.
It missed, a gout of flame that would give Conviction problems with its sensors for days but didn’t even touch the hull.
She flipped her fighter again and surveyed the battlespace. It was clear. There were still four Weltraumpanzers out there, but she could leave those to the intact sub-fighter formation.
Hopefully, the rest of her pilots saw the same thing. The carriers couldn’t lower their jamming, not yet, but she had an agreed rendezvous with her people for just this situation.
Home base was safe. Now it was time to see how the mission was progressing.
It took a good fifteen seconds for everyone to nova into the rendezvous point after Kira arrived, by which point she and the squadron commanders were on a rapidly flowing information hookup.
“Those fighters shouldn’t be out here,” Cartman, acting as commander for the Memorials, said first. “Those are—well, were—Brisingr heavy fighters. Good ones.”
“I haven’t flown against Kaiserreich pilots, but I’m guessing they’re better than that,” Hersch replied. “They knew what they were doing, but it felt like they’d never flown a nova fighter before.”
“Gunship crews,” Kira told them. “The gunships we fought were missing pilots and gunners. We just ran into them here. They hadn’t seen a real nova fighter scrum yet and you could tell, but they were learning fast. Those last four birds have me worried.”
“I didn’t put together that link,” Sagairt said slowly. “Damn. You just saved Perseus, Commander. We owe you.”
“I saved Conviction. Your ride home just happened to be in the same area,” Kira replied. “Status report on your squadrons?”
The reports were instant—the entire conversation was taking place in seconds as thoughts were sent between ships with no need to actually vocalize anything.
“We lost nobody?” Kira demanded. A number of the fighters had taken damage. Migraine’s Darkwing was a wreck that she wasn’t sure should have novaed to the rendezvous point, and two of the Lancers weren’t in much better shape…but everyone was still there.
“Two of the sub-fighters didn’t make it,” Sagairt said grimly. “But we’re all still here. Is it…over?”
“Jamming field is still up over the main battlespace,” Kira replied. “Computers are trying to resolve visuals, but I’m not getting shit.”
A new set of data came out of her fighter’s attempt to resolve anything through multiphasic jamming thirty light-seconds away.
“But either that’s corrupt data or we have a real problem,” she said grimly. “Because I’m reading nine destroyers and we only sent in six.”
The command channel went silent.
“We go in?” Cartman finally asked.
“We go in,” Kira responded. “You have fifteen seconds, people. Assess which of your fighters can’t be risked and send them back to the carrier—Gizmo, that’s definitely Migraine, but I need as many of the Darkwings as we can manage.”
“Sir?”
“The Hoplites and Cavaliers only carried one torpedo apiece, Gizmo,” she reminded him. “Your One-Fifteens have the only torpedoes left, and we’re about to go destroyer-hunting.
“Memorial and Lancer squadron are covering fire,” she continued, aware that her subordinates would be making the call she’d ordered as she spoke. “Darkwing has the torps, Darkwing is the killer blow.”
Silence hung for several seconds and she watched as four of her fighters disappeared, Migraine leading half of the Lancers back to the barn.
“My people are getting the shit kicked out of them,” Sagairt said bluntly. “But if I’d been in command, we’d have lost the carriers. I’m with you till the end of the line, Demirci. Your orders?”
“Lancers and Memorials, form on the Darkwings,” Kira told everyone. “Form your laser links. We’ll lose formation quickly enough, but remember: there are hostile capital ships in the zone. We cover the bombers, all the way in.”
She took a deep breath, settling into her fighter and the
network with her comrades.
“All fighters, you have your orders. Nova and attack!”
46
The very nature of multiphasic jamming meant that any long-range scans of a zone under active jamming were vague at best and dangerously useless at worst. There had been a chance that Kira’s computers had drastically misinterpreted the badly distorted heat and visual signatures that were the only useful data out of a battlespace.
She’d hoped that her computers had made up contacts. That had been too much to hope for, but at least the errors had still been in her favor. Mostly.
There were ten contacts still in play in the ugly melee her people novaed into the middle of. Last Denial was clear on short-range visual scans, which also allowed her to break down the nine “destroyers” she’d seen as seven destroyers—and two large corvettes.
The problem was that only five of the destroyer contacts were friendly and none of the corvettes were. One of the RRF destroyers was just…gone. One of Shang’s ships was a reeling cripple, with gouts of burning atmosphere occasionally flashing out of breaches before being smothered by vacuum. All six of the RRF corvettes were wreckage and debris scattered across the battlespace.
The four active ships were covering the crippled mercenary destroyer and falling back toward Last Denial, but they were badly outmatched. Everything Kira had left behind was gone, gunships and fixed defenses alike obliterated by the destroyers and corvettes before the new ships had arrived.
The enemy ships were something out of Kira’s worst nightmares. She’d fed a Brisingr battle group into her people’s simulations because she had the data necessary to use Brisingr heavy destroyers in the sims.
She hadn’t actually expected to face a pair of D9C heavy destroyers. She didn’t know the corvettes—they were neither Costar nor Brisingr designs—but they were definitely up to par with the two Kaiserreich destroyers.
Forty thousand cubic meters of more advanced technology, a D9C heavy destroyer was more than a match for Last Denial herself. The regular destroyers were outgunned and outclassed.
And dying. A massive gout of flame burst from the RRF destroyer closest to the closing Brisingr ships as Kira spent a precious fraction of a second tracking the fight. The deadly precision of the closing destroyers’ fire told her the worst part of it all.
Either Davies’s absolute best were on those destroyers and were even better than she thought…or those two ships did have Kaiserreich crews.
“Gizmo,” she said softly over the laser link. “All One-Fifteens on the trailer. Leave the lead for Last Denial. Go.”
The Redward cruiser was badly outmatched in firepower per cubic meter, but she was almost half again the D9C’s size. She’d been hanging back to provide long-range fire support before but was now lunging forward to cover her smaller sisters.
She couldn’t take both of the Brisingr destroyers between her and the nova fighters—and Kira had no intention of making her try.
Seconds after her order to Gizmo, her entire formation broke up into a chaotic swarm.
A chaotic attack swarm—headed for the trailing Kaiserreich warship.
In the absence of gunships or fighters, the enemy ships had limited options to respond to the nova fighter attack run. Both of the corvettes moved to block her incoming fighters with admirable speed, and the targeted destroyer redirected a portion of her guns toward Kira’s people
They could only spare so much of their firepower from pounding the Redward capital ships. Kira’s allies might not have been giving as good as they were getting, but they were definitely still in the fight. Last Denial’s heavy guns were starting to have an effect too, and the lead destroyer’s power signatures were fluctuating.
If they split their fire, they were doomed.
If they didn’t split their fire, Kira was going to shove every torpedo her Darkwings had left up the closer destroyer’s exhaust port.
There were no orders left to give. She’d trained her people on this and she had to hope that the Lancers had paid attention to the briefings they’d managed to throw together. The PNC-115s had to get through to their destroyer target without using their torpedoes, and that meant that the lighter fighters had to take down the corvettes.
With just guns.
Tally-ho!
Kira led the way, with eight other fighters in her wake as she charged the closest destroyer at maximum thrust. This crew did know what they were doing for anti-fighter tactics, and she dodged through a tight mesh of perfectly coordinated fire.
A Lancer fell, their old Cavalier coming apart under the corvettes’ fire. A Memorial—Longknife, she was grimly certain—took a hit and went spinning off into the void.
Her own guns spoke again and again, white flashes of superheated plasma that burned away chunks of the corvette’s armor and hull. The ship only had four real guns, and she focused on them.
So did the rest of the Memorials. The last of the presumably Clan warship’s guns fell silent as she broke past Kira’s formation. The corvette wasn’t attacking now. With her guns disabled, she was running—and leaking atmosphere from her brutalized hull.
The second corvette wasn’t as lucky. Three of Kira’s pilots formed on the Commander in an unplanned wedge formation. They couldn’t sustain it for long, not with the corvette and the destroyer flinging plasma their way, but they held it for long enough to focus the guns of four Hoplite interceptors onto a single ten-meter-square section of the warship’s hull for at least two full seconds.
They burned clean through the armor and triggered secondary explosions inside the corvette. For a second, Kira thought they’d disabled the ship—and then the fusion core overloaded, a ball of newborn starfire to add to the confusion of the multiphasic jamming.
If she’d ever doubted the degree to which Mbeki had trained and encouraged his people before, she would never doubt it again. Gizmo led his seven PNC-115s into the fireball of the corvette’s death, covering them from the destroyer’s visual scanners for a handful of critical seconds.
The seconds he needed to get his bombers into range. Five torpedoes flashed in the night, hammering battleship-grade plasma into the destroyer. Two missed, but three hammered directly into the destroyer.
Three direct hits wasn’t survivable, but the destroyer didn’t seem to agree with Kira on that! She was struggling, but she was maneuvering to try to escape the enemies she’d been pursuing a moment before.
But even as Kira was about to curse the Darkwings for not firing all of their torpedoes, two of the fighters emerged from the fireball on a very different vector.
And then novaed.
The fireball had given Gizmo just enough cover to realign two of the fighters—one of them almost certainly his own—on the other destroyer, and their nova brought them to within five hundred kilometers of their new target’s hull before they launched their torpedoes.
There was no missing at that range, and the torpedoes were designed to be lethal at twenty-five thousand kilometers. The destroyer, already heavily battered by the duel she had been fighting with the Redward fleet, was gutted.
The surviving warship had somehow survived the body blow Gizmo’s fighter-bombers had inflicted, but it was now Last Denial’s sole focus.
The destroyer’s captain chose the better part of valor. As Kira’s fighters swarmed toward the surviving enemy ship, it vanished in the bright blue flash of a full-power nova.
47
Silence fell across the void. For the first seconds, it was just the lack of gunfire. Then, ever so slowly as each combatant made the call for themselves, the multiphasic jammers started shutting down.
This had been the final place where pure combat AI had failed. The human controllers couldn’t tell the AIs to shut down their multiphasic jammers…and a far-too-large proportion of them just hadn’t. Unable to communicate with their armed creations, the controllers had been left with no choice but to destroy them.
Most people agreed AI combatants were a terrible idea
now. There was always someone trying, Kira suspected, but most of those attempts would end very badly.
She had time for that introspection. It took over ninety seconds until the last multiphasic jammer—aboard Shang’s crippled destroyer, which likely didn’t have functioning sensors—finally shut down.
Even the defenders had shut down their jammers. It was hard to beg for mercy when no one could hear you.
“Commander Demirci, this is Captain McNee aboard Last Denial,” a vaguely familiar female voice told her within moments of coms becoming possible. “You have no idea how grateful I am to see you. Or how terrified I am of your predictive abilities, given what I heard of your training scenarios.
“Sir, I threw in D9Cs because I had sim files for them,” Kira admitted. “I wasn’t actually expecting them.” She exhaled a long sigh. “They had nova fighters, too. A full combat group of Weltraumpanzers jumped Perseus and Conviction.
“That’s why we were late.”
A long pause followed.
“My scans show they’re both still intact and their jammers are up,” McNee told her. “I don’t have rearming bays for fighters, Commander. If I did, I might have been able to save our sub-fighters.”
Kira grimaced. McNee, it sounded, would be spending some time talking to therapists about survivor’s guilt. The lighter units of the main strike force had been completely wiped out, fighters and corvettes alike.
“Most of the fighters with Perseus are intact,” she told the other woman. “Both carriers are undamaged, and I only lost fighters here.”
Part of her mind was already going over her losses. One of the PNCs was just…gone—she wasn’t sure who yet. It had been Longknife’s fighter that had been hit, and she had only the vaguest idea of his vector.
Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Page 26