While Blackbeard and her brawler ripped Foxtrot to shreds, Polaris swung wide, joined Trafalgar, and made a bold stand ahead of the two remaining star fortresses. Other allied ships rushed to reinforce, but it was no good. The enemy carriers were too strong. They threw aside allied warships like a pair of rampaging bull elephants. Soon, they broke past the outer moons and escaped the Rasputin kill zone.
Several dragoons escaped with them, but multiple enemy ships trailed behind the carriers. These fell into enfilading fire as they ran the gauntlet for open space. Attacked by three battle carriers and dozens of other allied ships, the lagging dragoons burst open like rotten pumpkins, and the area filled with so many broken hulls, exploding missiles, and plasma detonations that navigating it was too hazardous for several minutes.
To get through, Tolvern hooked three corvettes around Rasputin and had them chase down a final trailing dragoon. They hit its engines with missiles and darted in and out to rake it with cannon fire. By the time the corvettes fell back to the main fleet, the dragoon was a gutted wreck. Engines dead, atmosphere vented.
But the Alliance fleet had suffered too many damaged ships themselves to press a more continuous attack on the fleeing Adjudicators. During the next hour, a destroyer died during emergency repairs, her crew barely evacuated before the engine blew and detonated the ordnance stores. Void Queen needed critical patches to its armor, and Blackbeard more minor work that nevertheless necessitated sending crew onto the hull.
Bravo, November, and a handful of dragoons blasted downward on the Z-axis relative to Rasputin, then hooked up again in a big arc to connect with Delta and Lima. These two, in turn, were on course to rendezvous with Juliett and Echo. All six star fortresses were maneuvering to fall toward the Heaven’s Gate jump.
Tolvern called, with Fox on the screen as well, and the three battle cruiser commanders had a short meeting of the minds.
“I want them stopped here, in Lenin,” Tolvern said. “Destroyed, gutted.”
“Six star fortresses,” Fox said. “That’s a bloody powerful force we’re talking about.”
“And we’re a bloody well more powerful one. I think we just proved that.”
Fox nodded. “And you think we’re better positioned to take them now than if we wait for the admiral’s fleet and chase them into Heaven’s Gate?”
“When they reach Heaven’s Gate, those six carriers become twelve,” Tolvern said. “Plus bases and local patrols. When Dreadnought arrives, we increase our strength by roughly fifty percent—they’ll have doubled theirs. We’re better off fighting one battle here and a second there.”
Fox cleared his throat. “Yes, about the enemy’s reserve fleet. Any theories as to why the ghouls left behind half their carriers instead of bringing them here?”
“Arrogance maybe,” Tolvern said. “Underestimating our resolve—they’ve had their fill of weak systems and civilizations and pegged us as more of the same.”
Catarina frowned, dissatisfied with that answer. “We should have disabused them of that long ago. It’s more than obvious that the human-Hroom alliance has plenty of fight in it.”
Tolvern shrugged, and it was apparent that she didn’t buy the explanation, either. “Regardless of the reasons, our odds are better if we knock out those carriers here.”
Catarina had been studying the map of Lenin and the current position of the various fleets when Tolvern and Fox called. The two escaping star fortresses and dragoons had a good head start. The other four were positioned to rendezvous, accelerate, and escape before Void Queen, Blackbeard, and Citadel ran them down. That left only one possibility for stopping the enemy jump.
“Have you contacted Bailyna Tyn?” she asked.
A slight frown crossed Tolvern’s face. “Yes. It will be close, but she can just reach the Heaven’s Gate jump first if her pilots are up to snuff.”
“Six star fortresses,” Catarina said, in an echo of Fox’s comment earlier. “She’s going to take losses before we bring in reinforcements.”
“That’s no rump fleet she’s commanding,” Fox said. “There’s more than seventy warships under her command.”
Catarina nodded her acknowledgment. “Yes, but no battle cruisers. Almost all sloops and star wolves and destroyers.”
If Olafsen or Svensen had been on this call, they’d have protested vigorously, she thought. Even by themselves, two wolf packs had some bite. Throw in the colonel’s sloops, plus more than a dozen cruisers and corvettes, and they made a formidable force. But unsupported by capital ships . . . even a brief battle against the star fortresses would inflict heavy casualties.
Tolvern continued. “We’ll work out tactics once we reengage with the enemy, but this is going to be our general plan. Assuming all six star fortresses are in play when we arrive, Void Queen will lead an attack on the weakest, most damaged enemy carrier. Blackbeard and Citadel will hit whichever ship is strongest.”
Catarina thought about the various carriers and their known capabilities. “Right now the strongest enemy ship would be Bravo.”
“Yes,” Tolvern said. “Yes, yes it would be.”
Catarina raised an eyebrow. “Are you still thinking revenge for what happened in Moscow all those months ago?”
Tolvern thrust out her chin. “Revenge is why I’m attacking Bravo and not you. But we’re targeting that carrier for psychological reasons. We’re going to show the ghouls that we can wreck whatever ship we want. We’ll knock out the weakest and the strongest and the ones in the middle will know that they have no hope but to roll over and die.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
A few hours later, the initial elements of Colonel Bailyna Tyn’s fleet began to skirmish with dragoons as both fleets tried to take control of the jump point into Heaven’s Gate. Tolvern watched the first phase alone in the war room where she could gnaw on her thumb and pace out of sight of her crew.
When that got to be too much, she went back onto the bridge. Smythe spoke up right away.
“Captain, we’re down a sloop, two torpedo boats, and a destroyer already.”
“It’s enemy losses I’m most interested in.”
“The colonel clawed a couple of dragoons with serpentines, but they’re still in the fight. Problem is that Juliett and Echo are on the scene already, and the colonel can’t stay in place and slug it out.”
“I know the challenges, Smythe.”
He looked worried. “You’re sure about this? We’re several hours out. It’s going to get hotter before then. If we pulled the colonel back—”
Tolvern cut him off with a hard look.
“The Cap’n ain’t a fool,” Capp said. “She knows it’s gonna be ugly. Them’s the risks you run when you go to war, yeah?”
Nyb Pim gave a confident-sounding hum and whistle. “I thought Jess Tolvern sounded very self-assured when meeting with the captains Catarina Vargus and Algernon Fox. Didn’t you, Lieutenant Henny Capp?”
“Yeah, I sure did, Pilot Nyb Pim,” Capp said, exaggerating his full name in the Hroom style. The sarcasm seemed lost on Nyb Pim. “But what’s she gonna do? Get all worrying and second-guessing and the like? That ain’t how you win battles, mate. Sometimes you gotta bluff ’em. Sound confident, no matter what. Cap’n didn’t want ’em to see she was scared and doubting, yeah?”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Tolvern said. “We get the point.”
Nyb Pim cocked his head. “I am not sure I do. Are you saying you were bluffing your own fellow officers? Attempting to deceive Catarina Vargus and Algernon Fox?”
“Think of it more like a pep talk,” Lomelí said from the defense grid computer. “Like how she’s always assuring Ping how glad she is to have his technical skills at hand. And never mentions that Wang kicked him off First Dragon for flashing countermeasures on training and giving away her ship to the whole fleet.”
She and Smythe grinned at each other, and Capp snorted laughter. “Is that true, mate?”
Ping scowled and tapped deliberately at his
console. “It was a faulty charge, and I wasn’t even on the bridge at the time. I only forgot to do a final charge control before loading it. They weren’t supposed to launch, only simulate.”
“You screwed up, admit it,” Lomelí said.
Capp nodded solemnly. “That’s okay, mate. You know I was court-martialed once for belting my commanding officer after he cheated at cards. Gave me thirty bleeding months, and I’d have served ’em too if the cap’n here hadn’t roped me into a mutiny. Course Tolvern was only first mate at the time, and not too good at it, neither.”
“You know I love the lot of you, right?” Tolvern said. “Wouldn’t trade one of you for a thousand guineas. But so help me, if you don’t get serious, I’m going to ram the first enemy ship I see and put myself out of my misery.”
Up ahead, the battle was turning in Bailyna Tyn’s favor. The colonel had positioned fifteen sloops into a claw, an old Hroom position for charging Albion cruisers. She enveloped Echo and hurled hundreds of bomblets against the enemy hull with serpentine batteries. The star fortress was too powerful to pin down for long, but before it could break the claw, the Fifth Wolves and a pair of Punisher-class cruisers joined the fight.
The colonel’s corvettes were doing a good job holding off dragoons, and she’d positioned her two missile frigates in a well-shielded position behind an improvised destroyer screen. Unfortunately, she wasn’t using her torpedo boats to best effect. Tolvern thought she should charge them at Echo while the situation presented itself, but instead she had the boats making runs against Juliett. That helped distract the second carrier, but wasn’t inflicting much damage.
Meanwhile, Delta and Lima were already throwing dragoons into the fight and lobbing missiles over the defenses to get at the colonel’s frigates. A cruiser and a star wolf thrashed a dragoon, but the enemy took out a sloop. Seconds later, two dragoons caught one of the streaking corvettes and damaged its engines while she was still accelerating away from danger.
The corvette fell toward Lima, with the crew desperately trying to get the engines back online. A pair of nearby star wolves hurried to assist, but there were too many dragoons in the area and the wolves withdrew under heavy fire.
Minutes later, isolated and unable to engage her engines, the corvette died under a hail of missiles and kinetic fire. Blackbeard’s bridge fell silent for several long seconds. It was the first corvette loss of the war, and a reminder that for all the corvettes’ acceleration and maneuverability, they were not invulnerable.
No screwing around from Tolvern’s crew now, no chatter. Only short, terse communication, commands going down to the gunnery, updates from the striker wing, information passing back and forth from the fleet.
Bravo and November were on the fringes of the battle. But so were Tolvern’s forces. Void Queen was in the vanguard, and Vargus threw missiles forward to remind the enemy they were coming. They were close enough to the main action by now—a communications round trip of 111 seconds—that Tolvern personally took command of the battlefield.
She ordered the colonel to gather forces and hunker down. Bring in corvettes, wolves, war junks—everything. Concentrate firepower on Delta, but hold the torpedo boats until Void Queen arrived.
“Delta is the weakest carrier,” Tolvern said. “And Bravo is the strongest. Time to make those bastards pay once and for all.”
She waited until the last moment to split her incoming fleet. Void Queen peeled away with Polaris, Trafalgar, six destroyers, and a pair of war junks. They mowed through a collection of dragoons, brushed the side of Lima, Juliett, and Echo with a short, sharp exchange of fire, and struck Delta behind her rear missile batteries. Nearly two dozen torpedo boats began a charge from the opposite side, followed up by every bit of firepower in the colonel’s forces.
At the same time, Blackbeard and Citadel came down past November and hit Bravo. Supporting Tolvern and Fox were three corvettes, ten star wolves, a dozen destroyers, and a handful of war junks, led by Wang’s own First Dragon. The Singaporeans turned on their energy beams to soften the enemy’s armor.
Bravo, the biggest, most powerful star fortress, had been knocking around smaller Alliance ships with all the concern of a lion playing with a wounded gazelle as it maneuvered to position its heaviest guns against the colonel’s ships. It shifted sluggishly to meet the new attack from Blackbeard.
November was an immediate threat to disrupt the attack, as it came around to hem in Blackbeard and Citadel, supported by numerous dragoons. The two battle cruisers shifted their brawlers to absorb damage from that direction, and Tolvern threw up a screen of destroyers, which launched torpedoes. She sent the corvettes to halt the dragoon charge. Svensen, Olafsen, and the rest pressed down hard on Bravo, fearless in the face of withering fire.
Tolvern consulted with Wang, then got Fox on the fleet com. “Six minutes and forty-two seconds. Then unleash the plasma ejector. After that pour cannon fire into the wound.”
So far Blackbeard and Citadel alike were able to throw torpedoes and missiles against Bravo’s hull while taking minimal damage. But Tolvern’s star wolves were absorbing terrible punishment. They had stout armor, but nothing could withstand that kind of abuse for long. Two wolves fell back, venting gasses, and she ordered Olafsen to get the rest out of there while they still could.
Unfortunately, that change left Bravo free to target Blackbeard. November was sending most of its ordnance against Citadel, but even one carrier was a daunting foe.
“Too many incoming missiles to take them all down,” Lomelí warned. “We’re going to take some blows.”
“I need those falcons in the air,” Tolvern said.
She’d held them in reserve because they’d be vulnerable at such close range and with so much fire crossing from both sides. But she needed their ability to pulse down incoming missiles or she would shortly be overwhelmed.
Smythe touched his ear and looked up from the tech console. “Wang is thirty-two seconds ahead of schedule. Bravo hasn’t found her yet, so she’s kept her beam concentrated.”
“Thank God for small miracles. Capp, tell Fox.”
A flash of light and battle chaos from a side screen drew Tolvern’s notice. Void Queen and her cruisers had slagged Delta’s rear batteries, come into position underneath, and were tearing the hell out of its shield ring. Torpedo boats charged unopposed, launched their weapons, and fell back.
The wreckage of several Alliance ships littered the battlefield on that side, but Delta was as good as smashed already, and Vargus’s attentions turned elsewhere while smaller warships finished it off.
“One down,” Tolvern said. “Five to go. This next victory is ours.”
“Twenty-nine seconds,” Smythe said. “Armor is soft—we could go now.”
“Barker says the gunnery is ready,” Capp said.
“Hold.”
Had six minutes passed already? Tolvern lost track of time during battle if not made aware of its passage. Hours seemed like minutes. Seconds became hours. A day vanished in an instant, while simultaneously lasting forever.
Ping announced that ships were entering Lenin from Moscow. No time to see who, and they were too far away to affect the battle anyway.
“Time!” Smythe shouted.
Citadel exposed her belly array. Green globs of plasma burst like dozens of bubbles across the surface of her ejector. They raced out from the ship and expanded as they moved. One bubble hit a dragoon, enveloped its bridge, and ate through the tyrillium. By the time the dragoon shook it off, it had lost its entire front shield.
Other globules hit missiles and torpedoes and kinetic fire crossing from Bravo’s guns. The carrier shifted about, flashed some sort of burst from its torus ring that tore through some of the incoming green fire. But most of the plasma struck the enemy carrier. It splattered across perhaps a quarter of the length of the ship and oozed up and over two of the fin-like engine projections. When it had finally dissolved, the plasma had eaten through the enemy armor like boiling water pou
red over a sheet of ice.
“Broadside,” Tolvern said.
Even as the word came out of her mouth, her main guns were roaring. Hundreds of tons of penetrating shot raced toward the enemy ship. Blackbeard rolled to show her secondary battery. They briefly lost visual.
When the ship sensors corrected, they showed the entire upper deck of the Adjudicator ship on fire. Debris gushed into the vacuum of space. Bulkheads and bombproofs lay pierced and bleeding. Citadel had retracted its ejector, undamaged, and now unleashed its cannon. Star wolves pressed in eagerly, pummel guns thundering. Blackbeard fired her secondary battery.
Tolvern watched with grim satisfaction as they shredded Star Fortress Bravo. Her old nemesis was dying before her eyes.
“Main battery ready for another salvo,” Capp said.
“Let the others finish it off,” she said reluctantly. “If we don’t push November away, it’s going to wreck us.”
But November had had enough, and fought to withdraw from the fight, abandoning Bravo to its fate. Instead, it made as if to join the other three Adjudicator capital ships.
Make that two. Vargus was in the process of mauling Echo. She shattered its screen of dragoons, took out its torus ring, and disabled its engine. The ship fought back savagely, and sat among a small graveyard of Alliance ships. But it could barely maneuver, and the incoming firepower was too much to handle as dozens of Alliance ships pressed in for the kill.
Juliett, and Lima still presented a united front, but a clever charge by cruisers and corvettes forced November to react, and kept it isolated. Blackbeard and Citadel ran it down just as Void Queen turned away from the dying Echo to confront it from the front. Tolvern’s side had lost more than a dozen smaller ships already, but there were more dead dragoons. Each of the remaining carriers was at half strength with its riders, and she had their smaller ships scattered, unable to gather in force.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 49
