The enemy contacts had their force fields up, of course: nobody with any sense made an entry into hostile space without being prepared for battle. But all their defenses were controlled by automatic systems that wouldn’t respond as quickly or efficiently as living controllers. The Alliance Armada was as weak as it would ever be, with its ships clustered more closely together than in a regular battle array. That put multiple targets in range of every main weapon system in the American fleet. If the two forces had been anywhere close in numbers, the outcome wouldn’t have been in doubt. Unfortunately, even those stunned victims would take time to kill, perhaps more time than Seventh Fleet had.
Entire task forces focused their fire on single capital ships while fighter squadrons struck in unison, and one contact after another vanished from the tactical display, sometimes mere seconds after emergence. Other screens showed the gruesome reality behind the disappearing icons: a Gimp superdreadnought broke in half, vomiting flames whose exotic colors meant metals and alloys had been heated beyond their ignition points. Secondary explosions turned both halves into a cloud of spreading fireballs. Tens of thousands of lives were snuffed out like candles in a hurricane, and Kerensky imagined he could hear their dying cries. He felt nothing but cold satisfaction.
One down. Sixty-one to go.
For nearly a minute, Seventh Fleet had it all their own way. Even computers took that long to recover from long warp jumps. Six superdreadnoughts, five battleships and twenty-one lighted vessels died before the enemy fired a single shot in self-defense. They could have destroyed the entire armada in under an hour if those ideal circumstances had lasted.
The easy part was over too quickly, however. Seventh Fleet would have to earn the rest of its kills, and pay full price for them.
“Multiple launches detected,” a tactical officer announced as new contacts appeared on the screen. Very many of them. “Four hundred thousand missiles.”
That’s a record-breaker, was Kerensky’s first mordant thought, followed by: God help us all.
Seventh Fleet engaged the incoming vampires with their enhanced gun systems while a flight of ten thousand interceptor missiles burst forth from the American formation, their multiple warheads designed to destroy five to ten ship-killers apiece. Massive volleys continued to rake the Imperium and Lamprey ships, but a great deal of energy was perforce diverted to secondary gun batteries in order to handle the Sun-Blotter barrage. Only the American fighters continued focusing solely on the capital ships, hoping to destroy them before they could unleash more salvos. Another superdreadnought burst apart, followed by two more battleships, but by then a second swarm of vampires was on its way, three hundred and fifty thousand strong.
On average, each enemy missile took a hundred seconds to reach its target. Twelve thousand of the first wave made it to the final line of defense: Close-In Weapon System lasers mounted on every available hardpoint of the American ships. They had a pitiful effective range of a thousand kilometers and barely enough punch to damage their targets, but their rate of fire that made up for those shortcomings. The spinning multi-barrel lasers had a scant three seconds to make their kills, but there were a lot of them. Enough to knock out another seven thousand vampires, a few of them close enough to filter through warp shields and batter force fields.
Five thousand got through.
Odin shuddered under multiple impacts. Kerensky ignored the motion and the damage inflicted on the flagship; all his attention was on the fleet at large. Blue icons began to blink yellow, red, or black. The battleship Chappaqua lost eight of its twenty main guns and fell out of formation, its grav engines damaged, rendering it dead in space. Six luckless destroyers were blown away by direct hits. Half a dozen other vessels suffered significant damage.
Eight thousand vampires in the second wave struck.
There’d been fewer to start with, but the defenders had been too busy dealing with the first wave to properly target them. The superdreadnought Athena was targeted by one tenth of the barrage, and no ship could survive nearly eight hundred missile hits. Force fields were overwhelmed; her composite armor cracked open in a dozen spots, and even her heavy internal compartments and shields caved under the hammer of multiple plasma explosions. For several seconds, the massive ship trembled and burned; her end was marked by an explosion bright enough to turn the visual display into a solid field of white.
The icon of one of America’s greatest ships of the line turned black.
Kerensky’s eyes were fixed on the tactical screen. Odin staggered once again; the lights in the CIC blinked as missiles carved tunnels of destruction into the bowels of the flagship. A quick glance at the status readings showed him the damage was severe but not critical. He noted coldly that seventy-three crewmembers had been killed when several compartments were ripped apart by dozens of missile hits. Two battleship icons followed Athena into the dark; on one screen, he saw the USS Normandy and the nine thousand men and women aboard vanish in a cloud of plasma. Seven fighters were down after a handful of attack runs. Two of them had been destroyed by the enemy point defenses; the other five were simply… gone.
Wounded but still in the fight, the Odin consigned an enemy superdreadnought to the flames with a simultaneous salvo of all its main guns. One sixth of the heaviest Imperium vessels were dead, a mere three minutes into the fight, a loss of tonnage and personnel of historic proportions. On the other hand, the loss of the Athena represented one-third of Seventh Fleet’s equivalent ship class. The exchange rate had gone from one-sided to unsustainable in the space of a few minutes.
More Sun-Blotter volleys followed, but they were far smaller: the external missile magazines mounted on the enemy ships had been emptied in the initial salvos, and reloading them was impossible in the middle of a battle. The follow-up swarms were merely sixty thousand strong, and only a handful of them survived long enough to inflict damage. By then, however, the enemy energy guns were finally returning fire. Their gunnery wasn’t well-coordinated or aimed, since most of the enemy crews were still incapacitated, but their volume, while diffuse, was still enormous. Without Seventh Fleet’s warp shields, its ships would have been immolated it in a matter of minutes. With them, the hammering would go on for hours before the American ships fell.
The time for maneuver and stratagem was over; all that remained were broadside exchanges and missile swarms. Fireballs and bolts of energy lit up the endless dark of deep space as hundreds of ships continued their dance of destruction. The only weapons that could turn the tide were his War Eagles, darting in and out of the enemy formation to bring sudden death upon them.
* * *
Emergence.
Flight B came out shooting: a cloud of superheated gas burst from the warp nacelle of the Gimp superdreadnought, marking the spot where six 20-inch blasts had struck. Gus kept his eyes on the target while he squeezed a second shot, hoping for the brighter flash that indicated a secondary explosion, but nothing happened; the only lights he saw were the multihued flickers from dozens of point-defense lasers slashing the space around the fighters. Time to vamoose.
Transition.
Hey, Gus. I’m still under your bed.
He didn’t have time for this. “Go to Hell.”
The Foo laughed. Where do you think you are?
Emergence.
Enterprise was illuminated by its warp shield and the flashes from nearby explosions. Missiles were arriving every few seconds, and the Big E’s CIWS batteries were taking them out a mere few hundred klicks away. Gus ignored the fireworks display as he went through docking maneuvers. Everyone on Flight B was present and accounted for, although SOL’s crate had a few scorch marks on its fuselage. Some of those lasers had gotten through. Things were getting hairy.
The Gimps were still suffering from warp shock, so most the shooting was being coordinated by automatic systems. That didn’t mean as much when it came to space defense artillery, which was mostly automated anyway. The ETs’ sensors were getting better at locating and e
ngaging warp emergences, too. The only good news was that the aliens weren’t in a proper battle formation, with their cruisers and destroyers arrayed closely enough to engage fighters from multiple angles. When the tangos finally woke up, things were going to get a lot worse.
The grav grapples took Gus’ War Eagle and carried it to its cradle. Flight crew rushed forward and started working their magic. New power plant, new capacitor for the main gun, and a quick patch on a spot a laser had melted. Gus hadn’t noticed that. SOL wasn’t the only one who’d gotten singed on that pass.
“We’re going back to finish off Sierra-Seventeen,” Papa told them. “Us and First Squadron. We gotta take it out: that bastard is spewing five thousand missiles per volley, and it’s hurting our guys badly. So we’re going to stay on it until we splash it.”
They knew what that mean.
“We have to ghost, don’t we?” SOL said, being obvious as usual.
“Yep. We have to pour it on, and that’s the only way we’re going to do it.”
“Be nice if we got an assist from a battleship,” Gus pointed out.
“Almost half of them are gone or too damaged to fight,” Papa said.
“Already? Fuck.”
They’d caught the Gimps with their pants down, and they were still getting pounded. This wasn’t going to end well.
“It’s up to us,” the squadron leader went on. “If we don’t knock out the big missile platforms, we’re done for. So we ghost and we stay on target. What do you say?”
“Hooya.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“HOOYA! GO NAVY!”
There was a hysterical note in the mental shouts of the squad, but it was better than the feeling of doom that had been creeping up on them. If they were going down, they would do it screaming their defiance. Jarheads weren’t the only ones crazy enough to go into the fire with a smile on their faces.
“That’s better.”
“Cleared for launch,” the flight controller announced. “Starting countdown.”
Nobody mentioned the Foos that were circling the fighter pilots like so many sharks every time they went into warp. Navy pilots believed that talking about them made their appearance more likely. Superstitious, sure, but they were all surrounded by Fucking Magic, where the difference between superstition and good common sense was blurry or even nonexistent.
Transition.
Gus expected Monster Under The Bed to start talking to him as soon as he went in, but instead all he heard was laughter. Mocking, very human-sounding laughter. He ignored it and put his mind to the task at hand.
Non-Emergence.
Flights A and B hovered in the threshold between null-space and the ‘real’ universe and opened fire on the damaged but still operational superdreadnought. Sierra-Seventeen’s automated systems shot back, but the storm of lasers and plasma bursts had no effect. The War Eagles weren’t there, not really, but their graviton beams most definitely were. Five shots apiece: thirty battleship-grade corkscrews of singularity-level tidal forces tore through the Gimp’s outer and inner hulls, probing for the enemy’s vital systems. The final volley did the trick.
A torrent of pure whiteness washed over the fighters before they shuttered their warp apertures and returned to null-space. The dying souls of twelve thousand aliens followed them there.
Non-Transition. They had never left.
The newly-dead were all around Gus. He felt the aliens’ shock and terror, the echoes of their final agony buffeting him like hurricane winds. Sorrow and regret gnawed at him. That sort of thing had happened before, but never this badly. For a moment, he wanted to die. But only for a moment.
Not everybody was so lucky.
Gus and everyone else in Flight B stood by helplessly as a pack of Foos descended over Dan ‘Dude’ Kelsey. Grinner tried to reach him, but didn’t make it in time.
Commander Kelsey was devoured body and soul. His screams followed them all the way back.
Emergence.
Gus’ breath came out in ragged, harsh sobs. For several seconds, the only thing that mattered was the fact that Dude was dead and worse than dead, that his immortal soul had been seized by devils and consigned to the true darkness of deep warp.
“Bingo,” Grinner said.
He shook his head and savagely wiped the tears on his face.
“I’m here, Grinner. I’m okay.”
The overwhelming feelings were fading away, like memories of a bad dream. He knew how terrible those moments were, but in his head, not his heart. Which was a very good thing, or he wouldn’t have been able to go on living, let alone fighting. He focused on the here and now, and as he returned to the Enterprise he noticed the carrier had a jagged hole on its bow. A nasty one, big enough to fit a couple of fighters. A missile or heavy energy beam had gotten through. He could picture the rest: the fireball that would have consumed anybody unlucky enough to be near the breach, and the even less lucky bastards who’d been spared the flames but been sucked out into space by sudden decompression. Vac-suits were too cumbersome to be used for most ship duties, so those spacers had experienced death by hard vacuum. Nasty way to go.
Nothing like what Dude had suffered, though. Their horror had ended at some point. Gus wasn’t sure if Kelsey’s horror would ever end.
* * *
The battle still hung on the balance, and Kerensky decided it was time to go all-in.
More and more enemy crewmembers were beginning to recover from warp shock. Their reaction times and coordination were still sluggish, but were improving with every passing minute, and their missile launches were now under the control of live fire directors. The volleys were much smaller, but they were going after single targets, increasing the chance that some leakers would inflict damage.
Odin had been targeted by as many as twenty thousand missiles at a time; flagships always earned that dubious distinction, and they were always easy to single out because of the amount of comm traffic they generated. Both surviving superdreadnoughts had suffered a great deal of damage, and continued to be pounded by continuous barrages. By the same token, those ships had the most defenses, so the result had been a wash. The fate of the Athena served as a reminder that the heaviest defenses could be breached, however.
“New launch. Fifteen thousand vampires.”
“They’re running dry,” Kerensky said. “About damn time.”
The two fleets had been hammering at each other for over an hour, but the Imperium – the Lampreys were all gone except for a handful of drifting derelicts – had finally exhausted its missile reserves. It was time to play his final card.
A handful of fighter pilots had been left behind at Capricorn-Two, to serve as liaisons between Seventh Fleet and the tactical reserve Kerensky had left there: the Pan-Asian and Hrauwah contingents. All it took was a few orders and a few minutes: an additional fifty-three ships appeared from a new angle, effectively flanking the enemy force.
The Puppies were addled for a few seconds, but their missile magazines were full, and they volley-fired them at the surprised Gimps, while the Pan-Asians closed in behind their warp shields, their graviton batteries slashing into the surviving enemy capital ships. Neither formation would have survived for long under the hammer of Sun-Blotter missile swarms, but those were no longer a factor, and the new arrivals changed the balance of forces considerably.
The question is, will they change it enough?
Half of the enemy capital ships had been destroyed, but the remainder still out-massed and outgunned Seventh Fleet and the tactical reserve combined. The American formation was being savaged, and the enemy began to maneuver to counter the new threat. The Pan-Asians had warp shields, but the Hrauwah were going to suffer heavily when they started trading broadsides with the Gal-Imps. Their combined throw weight was a welcome addition, but even with them along, his fighter forces were the only factor that would win the battle, if the battle could be won at all.
This is it.
All his forces w
ere committed. It was do or die time.
* * *
Everything the humans touch turns into bitter ashes.
King-Admiral Grace Under Pressure didn’t pause to reproach herself for the thought, an echo of her musings during her previous battle. The horrors that she was watching were too raw and immediate. Once again, if two other more rational or civilized combatants had been involved, one side would have fled into warp. This far from the star whose gravity imprint created the fractures in spacetime that allowed FTL travel, such maneuver would be extremely dangerous, but the losses the retreating fleet would have incurred would be much lower than the damage this battle had caused. Both combatants had been worse than decimated; losses on both sides already exceeded forty percent, with no end in sight. The Lampreys whose ships had comprised a mere auxiliary force had already been annihilated.
And I fear my own ancillary fleet will soon follow the same fate.
Fleet Admiral Kerensky had conducted a masterful ambush, and his use of humanity’s new warp witchery to coordinate multiple formations across vast distances was truly revolutionary, but the correlation of forces remained extremely adverse for the Americans.
Still, they did far better than the Wyrashat, Grace considered as her flotilla concentrated the fire of all its heavy guns on a single Gal-Imp superdreadnought. The invincible armada that had run rampant over the Wyrms had been brutalized. Even if every American ship in the system perished in the next few minutes, the enemy would be crippled and unable to advance much further into human space until it was heavily reinforced and resupplied. Could the Imperium carry on after this battle? Grace wouldn’t have thought it capable of doing this much in the first place, so she couldn’t discount the possibility. Such fanaticism shook her to her core, and forced her to consider a gnawing question:
What if they are right to do this?
It was clear the Imperium’s leaders believed in the rightness of their cause to the point they were willing to destroy themselves to achieve their purpose. Such determination deserved some consideration. That would have to wait until today’s task was done, however.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 110
