“Missiles entering defensive perimeter,” VK interrupted. “Engaging now.”
The red icons on the holographic display began to sparkle as the pulse guns across the allied fleet opened fire. None of the heavier weapons engaged and there were no specialized antimissile systems anymore.
Neither was needed. The rapid-fire plasma weapons obliterated the incoming enemy fire with perfect efficiency. VK’s assessment of the closest approach turned out to be pessimistic.
“First salvo destroyed,” the AI reported with audible satisfaction. “Second salvo will enter range in forty-two seconds. Similar results expected.”
Isaac nodded.
“Time to our weapons range?” he asked.
“Another twelve minutes and fifteen missile salvos,” Connor reported. “Should we adjust the plan?”
“Not yet,” Isaac replied. “Maintain course. All ships to initiate evasive maneuvers at three light-seconds and stand by to fire at five hundred thousand kilometers.”
Everything he’d seen suggested the Sivar’s lasers could only reach a single light-second. By the time they opened fire, perhaps Commandant-Key Dest would begin to understand just how bad a day the Sivar Governance was having.
Starships didn’t really have body language. Once a ship was on its course and heading toward its destination, the main maneuvers were all handled by computer.
In combat, though, evasive maneuvers were generally handled by an organic with their hand on a joystick, adding small random motions to the main thrust. If you had enough practice with it, you could start to see some signs of how that officer, at least, was feeling.
Isaac could tell the Sivar fleet was nervous. For ten minutes, the Republic and their allies had advanced into the teeth of their missile fire. Over twenty thousand missiles had crossed the gap and flung themselves at Isaac’s ships.
None had even come close to hitting. Plasma flashed out from the fleet’s pulse guns again as he watched, another salvo of missiles dying as the two fleets hurtled toward half a million kilometers.
“We’ll keep the range above four hundred thousand kilometers,” he told Connor. “Maneuver pattern Rho-Six. Maintain formation and focus on the battleships. Starting with Commandant-Key Dest’s flagship.”
“We have enough data to attempt to aim to disable, sir,” the junior officer pointed out.
“Make sure the Captains have it, but firing to disable is at their discretion,” Isaac replied. “Priority is neutralizing the capital ships. I’m more comfortable with our ability to take the escorts’ lasers than the battleships.”
“Understood.”
The formation didn’t change as they approached the line in space where they could reliably hit their targets. Isaac didn’t need to give more orders now. The plan was set and he trusted all of his Captains and battle group commanders to complete it.
“Range.”
Six battlecruisers’ main heavy particle cannons fired at a single target. Dozens of zettahertz and gamma-ray lasers joined them, alongside the lighter particle cannons mounted in the mobile turrets.
At this range, less than a quarter of the beams connected, but the Sivar battleship was physically flung backward from the energy transfer. Chunks of warship went spinning off as the forward third of the enemy vessel was peeled open.
“Impressive armor,” Isaac said quietly. “None of our ships could have taken that hit before we installed Assini ceramics.”
“Impressive or not, she’s toast,” Connor replied. “Energy levels dropping and I’m picking up active fusion reactors being ejected into space. Mission kill, sir.”
“Switch to Target Bravo,” the Admiral ordered. The entire ship trembled around him as the main gun fired again. “For salvo three, at least.”
The damage meant that Dest’s flagship wasn’t maneuvering. The wave of firepower washed over the battleship like a tsunami. When it passed, there was nothing left of the battleship but debris.
“Sivar force is increasing acceleration,” Connor reported. “We are adjusting course, but—”
“But we can’t get a good-enough vector away from them without giving up the main guns,” Isaac finished for his operations officer. “Order the battlecruisers to go to rapid fire. Three shots on each battleship.
“I don’t want to get into close range with these bastards. Not today.”
Emptying the cyclotrons would leave his heavy ships short their strongest firepower for at least a minute, but he wasn’t going to need those big guns against the escorts.
It took a moment for the order to be spread to all six ships. Then they fired as one. Vigil herself kicked backward in space, all of the engines and inertial compensation in the universe only so useful against the amount of energy being applied in the heavy particle cannon for a round per second.
The first and fifth salvos were accompanied by lasers and lighter particle cannon fire. Target Bravo managed to dodge or absorb most of the secondary fire, but only at the cost of taking eight direct hits from the heavy guns.
The back third of the ship ended up spinning away from the front half, the engines firing wildly as they flung the wreckage into the void. The two pieces didn’t make up a complete ship, and the missing pieces filled the space between them as what was left of Target Bravo ran out of power and just…shut down.
They were still luckier than Target Charlie. They dodged most of the first salvo, but one of the heavy particle packets hammered into her engines. They could probably have got her drives back online, given any amount of time at all.
The crew had less than two seconds before the entire massed salvo struck home. Some of the beams, targeted at an evading enemy, still missed.
Enough hit that Target Charlie just ceased to exist.
“Battleships are down,” Connor reported. “Your orders, sir?”
“All ships cease firing,” Isaac ordered calmly. “Get the video recorders back up. I think we’re done here.”
He was about to send a message demanding the escorts surrender when half of them suddenly vastly increased their acceleration.
“Multiple escorts inbound at major accelerations,” Connor snapped. “Their engines can’t take this for very long, but they’re on collision courses!”
There was no way they were going to make it that far, Isaac knew, but they were almost certainly going to get their shorter-ranged lasers into play.
“Target the lead ships,” he ordered. “Everything we’ve got.”
An everything that lacked the heavy particle cannon. He’d presumed that taking out the capital ships with no losses would convince the escorts to surrender.
He’d been wrong and laser fire began to lash his formation. Only eight of the Sivar cruisers were taking part in the suicide charge, but that would be bad enough if even one of them reached his line. Worse, there were a lot more lasers out there than they’d anticipated, and their acceleration was now as high as anything his fleet could manage. Even if the Republic fleet turned and fled, they couldn’t evade and the lasers would hammer them.
So instead, Isaac sat solidly on his flag deck and watched every weapon in his fleet open fire on the charging ships. LPCs. Lasers. Even the pulse guns as the ships entered the range of those systems.
“Targets neutralized,” Connor reported after a few seconds. “Closest is on a ballistic course that will pass within fifteen thousand kilometers of our line.”
“Adjust the fleet,” Isaac ordered. “I want that minimum distance at fifty thousand or higher. And get me damage reports.”
“Yes, sir.”
Looking past the wreckage of the suicidal charge, his glare settled on the eight ships that were slowly retreating toward the planet.
“Hashemi?” he asked.
“You’re on whenever you say the word, sir,” she confirmed.
“Let’s end this bullshit.”
“Surviving Sivar units,” Isaac began. “You can’t hurt me. Even a suicide charge by your fellows failed.”
&n
bsp; That wasn’t entirely accurate. It turned out that while Sivar beams were overall mediocre, they weren’t nearly as mass-intensive as the analysts had predicted. Their cruisers carried the same beams as their battleships—and given the missile focus of the bigger ships, they didn’t even carry significantly fewer beams. The eight cruisers that had charged into range had carried almost twice as many lasers as their scans suggested the three battleships had possessed.
They hadn’t lost any ships, but several ships—including, as the ESF was starting to regard as inevitable, Othello—had been badly battered. His battlecruisers had only taken light damage, but three strike cruisers were below half combat capability—with the attendant dead and wounded.
“If I am forced to engage you in orbit of the planet, I will destroy you without hesitation,” he continued. “If you attempt to run, I will intercept you and destroy you. Your only remaining option is unconditional surrender.
“The same applies to the civilian government of the Sonbar System.” They’d confirmed the name Dest had used. It was less of a mouthful than “Sivar-One” and would make more sense to the recipient of his message.
“If you surrender now, I will guarantee the safety of the Sivar population from reprisal from the local population,” he told them. “But you will withdraw all Sivar personnel to their barracks and prepare to evacuate Sivar civilian populations to isolation zones.”
He smiled coldly.
“I would strongly suggest that you make this process as simple and painless as possible,” he told them. “Your system is merely a stopping point on my way to your capital to punish your Intendant. If I am forced to spend too long here, I may get irritable.”
The message cut off and saved for transmission. Isaac took a moment to skim it, then nodded to Hashemi to send it.
“We’ll continue to advance on the planet until either we get a response or we’re in orbit,” Isaac told Connor. “If any of the cruisers twitch, they get one warning shot. If they keep twitching, target the power plants with zetta-lasers.”
“Understood. What about the planet?”
“Inform General Zamarano that one is up to her,” Isaac replied. “The assault wave is to move in from the rendezvous point. We’ll need to leave our damaged ships here, probably with Watchtower and some of the intact strike cruisers to provide fire support for EMC.”
A long time ago, then-Brigadier Kira Zamarano had been the senior Marine of Isaac’s allies when they’d moved against his mother. Now she was the senior officer of the Exilium Marine Corps and in command of the first dedicated warp-capable Marine Orbital Assault Transports ever.
Half of her troops were Vistans, but she had a solid core of six thousand human Marines as well. She couldn’t really conquer a planet with a single understrength division, but everything suggested that she wouldn’t need to.
“After all, once we’ve got the Sivar in line, we need to work out who to talk to among the actual natives to this planet,” Isaac continued. “That’s Amelie’s job, but in her absence, I’m delegating that to General Zamarano.”
He smiled grimly.
“The rest of us need to be in motion in thirty-six hours.”
58
None of the warships did anything to resist as Isaac’s fleet slowly corralled them and the Marines boarded them. There was no one, it seemed, to order them to surrender as a group. The squadron commanders had engaged in the suicide charge and left the surviving ships leaderless.
Initiative did not appear to be encouraged among Sivar junior officers.
It wasn’t until the last of the Sivar cruisers had been boarded and entered into a control course away from the habitable planet that Isaac heard anything from the planet itself—that started with salvo of com drones.
“A couple are heading for secondary star-lanes, but that’s at least thirty heading deeper into the Governance,” Captain Alstairs noted as his sensor teams reported in. “We made no attempt to intercept, though some of them are passing close enough I could hit them with pulse guns.”
Isaac snorted. The fleet remained at battle stations, but with the main Sivar fleet in the system completely neutralized, most of the tension had faded.
“And they’re still playing the silent game on the planet,” he noted.
“They don’t have much for orbital defenses,” Alstairs said. “Maybe eight stations? And if they’ve got four lasers apiece, I’ll eat my emergency helmet.”
“Don’t do that,” Connor replied. “It’s got hyper-compressed oxygen beads built into it. Either you can’t digest them…or you’d digest the outer casing and have the worst case of gas ever.”
“Surviving the human digestive tract was actually a design criterion for the storage beads,” Isaac said absently. “My father wrote the final specification paper, and he and my mother laughed over that one…before looking right at me and going ‘Yeah, it makes sense.’”
Connor looked at him.
“How old were you, sir?”
Isaac shrugged, his attention still on the close-up of the planet Onba. Data icons on each city represented the status of the Sivar ground troops there, and those icons were starting to change.
“Six? Seven? I was out of my swallowing-small-things stage, but it was apparently fresh in their minds. Commander Hashemi?”
“Sir!”
“Unless I’m misreading the sensor data, the Sivar are starting to follow my instructions,” he told her. “They’ll probably be—”
“Incoming transmission,” she cut him off. “We have a tachyon-com drone close enough for a live conversation, sir, but I suspect they’re expecting a twenty-second delay.”
“Insert the drone in the transmission and catch me up to real-time at one point five speed,” Isaac ordered.
A flat image appeared in front of him—with an icon noting that it was being played at fifty percent faster speed than it had been recorded.
The Siva on the screen wore a translucent toga-like garment wrapped around himself—Isaac still couldn’t ID Sivar genders on sight, but he trusted the note VK put on the screen. The fabric was more delicate than in many images Isaac had seen of the outfit on other Siva, and there were gold bands holding it in place at the wrist, neck and waist.
Even the Keepers of the Governance hadn’t gone for that.
“I am Still, the Prince-Key of Peace of Sonbar,” the Siva introduced himself. “Your arrogance and demands have been noted. But…I have no choice but to comply. We have begun the withdrawal of our troops to their facilities. I warn you that chaos will ensue. The local population has no concept of order without our guiding hands.
“I have also ordered the orbital fortresses to stand down and receive your boarding parties. But I must again—”
“The strong lead. The weak submit,” Isaac interrupted as the icons informed him he was now watching the Prince-Key in real time. The Siva stumbled to a verbal halt, staring at him.
“Those were the words your Intendant said to our Foreign Minister,” he continued calmly. “All that you have done, your Intendant has justified by claiming the strength of your Governance.
“But now your Governance is weak and must yield to the strong. Or does that only work in your favor?”
Still froze for several seconds longer before carefully bowing his armored head.
“That is the philosophy of some in our society, yes,” he conceded. “But these people here needed our guiding hand. Without our assistance, they would still be nothing.”
“With you, they are slaves. I’m not certain that’s an improvement,” Isaac replied dryly. “In either case, the Republic recognizes you only as the leader of the Sivar in this system. I and my people will negotiate with you in that respect and that respect only.
“If you can put us in contact with the legitimate government of this planet, that would be a point in your favor, but you are no longer the ruler of this world or this system.”
Isaac smiled.
“And as your Intendant’s ph
ilosophy clearly states, we are the strong here. You will submit.”
The call was silent for several long seconds, then Still’s bowed head lowered to almost level.
“You are not wrong,” he conceded. “I am not certain what would count as a local government. The Sonba were not unified prior to our arrival. My people will prepare for evacuation as per your orders. If you’ll permit, there are several locations I would recommend for the evacuation of my people.”
“Provide them to my staff,” Isaac ordered. “My Marine commander will be at your location inside an hour. Full cooperation will reduce any risk of…misunderstandings.”
“I understand, Admiral Lestroud,” Still told him. “I am charged with the peace of this system. I see only one way to preserve it, and that is to cooperate with you.”
The twelve ships that led the way as the fleet train caught up to Vigil and the other battlecruisers were relatively new. They’d come from Skree-Skree, where their passengers had been helping deal with the damage the Matrices had managed to inflict while being driven off.
Each of the Warp-Capable Orbital Assault Transports, the WOATs, was just over three hundred meters long and carried a thousand soldiers. Six carried regiments of Vistan Spears, now equipped to the same standard as their EMC trainers.
The other six carried the Second Brigade of the Exilium Marine Corps and the woman who ran the EMC. As the freighters and escorts settled into orbit under the fleet’s guns, the WOAT’s continued forward at carefully calculated speeds.
Shuttles spewed from them, but the WOATs were designed to do something very few ships could: land and take off again.
Isaac watched as they descended toward the cities marked as the largest Sivar concentrations. A dozen shuttles flashed toward the palace the Prince-Key of Peace had transmitted from, and he hoped that Still hadn’t done something stupid like run.
“No resistance so far,” Connor reported. “Shipboard Marines have secured the orbital fortresses. The Sivar seem to actually follow orders when told to lay down arms by their boss.”
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 38
