by M. D. Cooper
“You say that we killed hundreds, but thousands would have died on our ships, had your kinetic rounds connected,” Richards retorted.
“They would not have! You have advanced shielding…. What we fired was merely a shot across the bow.”
Sini sent the ‘pause’ command over her Link. “Curious.”
“Are you seriously going to attempt to paint us as the aggressors?” Richards retorted to Senya. “Until your unmistakable act of war, we have taken only defensive actions. You are brigands. You attempt to seize whatever drifts past your system to better yourselves. You’re nothing more than well-established interstellar bandits.”
Senya was enraged. “You sanctimonious, dusty old bitch! Our people built this system out of nothing. We worked for millennia to create what you see. You would come here and pick our best worlds for yourselves in trade for trinkets. No one will have your tech. Not those pirates, not those core-world bastards, and certainly not you. I’ll see you burn in h—” At which point, she apparently realized Richards had already cut the comms.
By this point, the Bollers were forming up and advancing on the ISF ships barring the way to the Intrepid. The railgun salvo struck home on the Bollam guns, the sensor officers calling out impacts.
And all hell broke loose.
“Sir! Look, the Mark ships—”
“I see it, Commander,” Sini/Chan interrupted, their eyes narrowing. Three cruisers at the heart of the second pirate fleet were firing graviton beams toward a shell of corvettes, trying to generate a gravity bubble. “They’re crazy, that’ll never—I’ll be a son of a…”
This close to a gas giant, syncing ships’ gravity shields to shield a fleet would have been challenging for AST regular forces, but mere fringe-world pirates had just done the impossible for the second time that day: a barrier a kilometer thick materialized and advanced as one, forcing the ISF to split its attention and fall back in its orbit.
“Well, sir, wasn’t it you who said this was likely to be the most interesting battle of our careers?”
Chan snorted. “So I did.”
Rail slugs and beamfire slashed back and forth as the sphere advanced, the ISF ships struggling to keep the range open. Chan noted what Sini had already deduced: the ISF cruisers lacked the new shields, and some were taking hull damage from rail hits.
One squadron of fighters, though, was daring the odds, coming to close range to fire, but still ineffectually. One shot even struck the shield and bounced off.
On one side of the battlespace, two ISF cruisers and several dozen fighters snuggled close to their mothership as the Mark inexorably closed the distance. On the other side, Senya’s ships continued to push through the ISF lines. Try as the apparently few invulnerably shielded fighters might, the sheer numbers arrayed against them were taking their toll.
But then the courier ship Sabrina, burning hard for empty space almost a light minute away, reversed course and began boosting back toward them.
A BWSF cruiser exploded under fighter fire.
An ISF destroyer was struck broadside and boosted away from the battlespace, toward its mothership.
And then two things happened at once.
First, a pair of ISF tugboats—tugboats!—flew under the southern pole of the Mark’s shield bubble, reaching out with their graviton generators and simply shoving.
Second, the courier vessel exploded through Kithari’s upper atmosphere, arrowing straight into the shield.
For one brief moment, the sensors whited out as Sini/Chan gaped. When the radiation cleared…
“Scan, what the hell happened? Are the Mark ships—”
A high-velocity ram, shield on shield. It had been theorized, but to Chan’s knowledge, never demonstrated, and even if it had worked, it was self-immolation.
Another one bites the dust. Chan snapped his fingers.
The Bollers didn’t seem at all intimidated by the light show; instead, Senya had moved two squadrons from picketing the Mark into the firefight. Chan watched closely, waiting for his moment. General Richards appeared to be quite the clever tactician: she was using their enemy’s sheer numbers against them, sending fighters into the gaps between Senya’s ships to force them to either check fire or risk hitting their compatriots.
Many made that gamble. One unfortunate cruiser was holed twice in a minute by stray rail slugs from its companions.
And their swarm tactics…
“Her coordination is superb. General Marik?”
“Sir.” The grizzled grunt looked up from the starboard holotank, where he was conferring with his battalion commanders.
“If at all feasible, when we board that ship, I’d like your men to try to take General Richards alive.”
“For interrogation?”
“No, I want to shake her hand, Marik,” he replied, chuckling. “I’ll even get her a job at the Sol Academy, if she’ll have it! Whatever she’s doing with that weird battlenet, she’s as fine a commander as I’ve ever seen—imagine the mayhem she’d give the Scipians!”
“As you wish, sir,” the general assented, still stone-faced.
“Philistine,” Chan muttered, shaking his head.
Chan gaped at the marker his flag captain had sent to the holotank. Sabrina was still intact and docking with the Intrepid. Sensors said the reactor was offline, but still…an impact powerful enough to shatter a small planet, and the courier ship hadn’t even been dented.
The battle moved past another asteroid belt. He spotted the shift in the ISF’s maneuvers before Langdon did. Just like before, they were clearing paths for kinetic strikes.
“RMs going live!”
Dozens of relativistic missiles streaked out of their cover in the asteroid ring, trying for up-the-kilt strikes on the Bollers. Point-defense fire snapped out, and Senya tried to break off and evade; a few missiles died thousands of kilometers short, but most got through.
Hundreds of megatons of combined thermonuclear fire washed over Senya’s ships, shredding some and weakening the rest for the shotgun blasts of relativistic grapeshot that blew through the space the ISF had just vacated. Cruisers and destroyers caught in the open were decimated, their hulls torn to pieces by the impacts. If a pellet struck a reactor, they simply vanished in a single bright flash, a miniature nova that would just as quickly disappear in the vacuum.
“Bollam’s World Space Force, this is General Richards on the ISS Intrepid,” the woman’s contralto came on a widecast. “Enough people have already died today; you don’t need to join them. Withdraw, or be destroyed.”
A few BWSF ships did turn back. Senya’s battleship Freya wasn’t one of them, staying in pursuit of the Intrepid with forty companions.
Richards enacted her endgame as the Intrepid continued to boost toward Kithari. Its ramscoop’s magnetic field thrummed with power on Zhukov’s scanners, drawing in radiation from a van allen band excited by the Mark fleet’s earlier destruction.
A stream of radiation issued from the other half of the fu
nnel and slashed across the last few desperate attackers. Stripped of any escorts that could have spared it the full wrath of the scoop’s emission, Freya was caught in the open, its shields failing and its hull melting. Its reactor containment finally gave up the ghost, and the ship vanished in a single actinic flash to join its companions in Hell.
Chan started clapping quietly. “A brilliantly fought battle indeed.” He leaned forward. “Make to all ships,” he said aloud. “Advance on Target Alpha.”
“Sir, are you sure about this?” Langdon said. “I mean, you saw what they just did to the other fleets, right?”
“Yes, Captain.” Chan brought up the scans. “But half their fighters are disabled, and after a display like that, they’ve got to be running low on both ammo and reaction mass. And there’s no way they can maneuver to another van allen node without an orbit or a major course correction. We’re still fresh. Spread us out, evasion plan five, and then advance.”
“Aye, sir,” Langdon replied, still sounding unenthused. “And the rest of the Bollers?”
“If any try to get in our way, blast ‘em. General, get the boarding parties to their transports.”
Chan turned back to the holotank as the brigadier moved to carry out his orders. Around him, the ship began to vibrate slightly, humming with power as Zhukov's enormous main AP thrusters lit.
The second line of Bollam’s’ ships were still reorganizing as the AST’s BatRon 171 advanced in a shallow wedge eight thousand kilometers across. When Admiral Senya had arrived, she’d pulled rank on Rear Admiral Nespha to seize command. Now the Bollers were in shock and had too many damaged ships to face Chan’s eleven dreadnoughts. And Impervious-class ships lived up to their name: 360 laser batteries, 56 railguns, and thousands of RMs apiece, and each one carried the strongest gravity shields in the galaxy.
Until today, Chan reminded himself. He couldn’t afford to get cocky, though. Certainly, the ISF had pulled enough rabbits out of their hat already to make this interesting.
Still, if he lost just one dreadnought to the ragtag remnants of the BWSF or a bunch of colonists, no matter how committed, he’d never hear the end of it.
Five blasts rippled out from Olokun’s chase mounts. The laser beams themselves were normally invisible in space, but between the youth of the system and the battle, there was more than enough debris afloat now for the odd photon to reflect off as they flashed past a Bollam heavy cruiser.
Chan hailed them. “Bollam’s World ships, this is Rear Admiral Chan of the Hegemony of Worlds. You’ve lost half your fleet and you’re about to be caught between hammer and anvil, but what we’re after is not yours, so let’s have no undue fussing. I repeat, get out of the way, over.”
It didn’t have the intended effect; instead of taking the hint and dispersing, it seemed to focus the BWSF ships’ attention. They struggled to close formation and concentrate fire on Olokun, now flickering her side jets like a madman to jink as fast as something massing fifty megatons possibly could.
A ship as big as an AST dreadnought could take what they were throwing, but even at that scale, it cost less energy to evade incoming fire than to take it on the shields.
Chan shook his head in consternation at the Bollers. There was an honorable, admirable battle, and then there was sheer stupidity.
Olokun’s sister ship, Shango, seven hundred kilometers to her starboard, drew first blood; Zhukov added her fire seconds later. In less than a minute, dozens of hundred-kilogram rail slugs and 530mm laser blasts slammed into an isolated Bollam destroyer, pounding the lighter ship to flaming wreckage.
Zhukov turned her attention to a trip of enemy cruisers concentrating rail fire on the Giap, cruisers apparently built on contract by New Eden. The Edeners had an excess of shipbuilding capacity, courtesy of their military’s expansions over the last quarter-century, as the AST’s borders drew nearer, and her designs were highly sought-after by lesser regional states…which was their undoing. The Cait Sith-class cruiser was so prevalent now, it had been easy for Hegemony Intelligence to simply purchase a few for analysis, giving the military a comprehensive list of strengths and weaknesses.
Chief among the latter, a superstructure defect between frames sixty-eight and seventy-four, which Langdon now hammered with the entire strength of the fore and dorsal batteries. True to orders, he held back the slugs, just using the lasers.
The targeted cruiser’s shields failed, and Zhukov and the Giap raked its hull with laser fire. A secondary explosion blew a fireball through the other side of the hull, as its companions fell back. Somehow, the two sections stayed together, barely, but the aft section’s engines went dark, and the main fusion reactor ejected, the ship’s momentum carrying it free of the starburst that came seconds later.
“AST ships, this is BWS Vigilant. Hold your fire; we surrender.”
“Vigilant, this is HWS Zhukov Actual; I accept your surrender,” Langdon sent back, already retasking the guns.
Chan turned away from the firefight with the Bollers and focused the holotank on another group of signals.
What are those fighters doing? “Chuck, your analysis?” Chan queried the ship’s AI.
“The ISF is falling back—”
“Well, I can see that.”
“—and I believe they mean for us to… Wait. Course change in target. One ISF squadron is coming about.”
Chan squinted and zoomed in. It was one of the squadrons with the nigh-impenetrable shields. “Scan?”
“There was a small burst of activity over the ISF battlenet moments before they changed course. Admiral, I believe they are attacking us.”
“They’re confident, too,” Chan added, eyeing the plot with growing trepidation.
“They can’t seriously expect to knock out one of our dreadnoughts with a fighter,” Commander Firuzeh put in. “The Bollers are one thing, but…”
“Even if they get through the shields, our armor's too tough,” Chan finished. Unless…
The Bollers retreated further as the AST advanced. So did the ISF fighters.
The dreadnought’s lasers switched targets at eighty thousand klicks, lighting up the fighters at extreme range. Both sides were moving far too fast now to disengage easily.
“Weapons are ineffective,” Chuck announced, as the fighters continued their headlong charge
.
the captain answered.
The advantage of the Link was that what should have been a minute-long exchange passed in less than a second. The decision took Chan another precious half-second.
Chuck went to work as the ISF fighters blitzed past the last line of Bollam ships, now in full retreat ahead of the squadron. Every weapon on the forward battery filled the space ahead with energy and slugs, conservation forgotten. One fighter took a direct hit from a depleted uranium slug moving at a combined velocity of almost ten percent of the speed of light. The impact knocked it sideways almost a thousand kilometers. On infrared, its reactors blazed hot, cooling vanes working overtime to dissipate the heat.
It was the last serious hit any member of the squadron landed. In the next moment, the already loose formation of fighters broke up entirely, each wingpair heading for a different dreadnought. The first fighter struck the leading edge of Olokun’s shields seconds later, simply ramming through the gravity barrier far too close for the ship’s guns to come to bear.
They were in and out in a fraction of a second.
And they left something behind.
“We’re hit, we’re hit!” Tyrone called in. “Mayday, mayday! They used a disassembler—GAAAAAARRRRGH—”
The alarm was quickly shared by the rest of BatRon 171, and Chan looked on in horror as Olokun broke in half—no, was eaten in half amidships. A distress call from Shango came next. And Captain Motoko on Songtsen Gampo just had time to order her crew to abandon ship before she, too, was devoured.
Then a fighter and its wingmate ripped through Zhukov’s shields.
There was a thunderous crash and a jolt as one of the ISF ships smashed into the hull somewhere forward of frame three-twenty-seven, but the other released its deadly cargo.
