by Jay Allan
“Perhaps, together we can unravel some of the mysteries…and discover exactly what our enemy is, and where they came from.”
“Yes, perhaps. I will give the orders as soon as I leave here. And, please, if there is anything you need, any way to aid you in your work, you have only to ask.”
Barron turned toward Chronos, and he nodded. He knew, as he was sure his counterpart did, the value of information in war. The more they knew about the enemy, the better chance they had to find a way to endure the onslaught, even to defeat the invader.
That was a crucial, because Barron knew, as things stood just then, his people and their Kriegeri allies would fight hard, battle with resolve and courage…but, in the end, they would lose. The enemy was just too powerful to defeat.
Unless Ellia and her people could come up with some answers, a weakness or a way to defeat the Highborn…before the enemy subjugated every system from Sigma Nordlin to the galaxy’s edge.
Chapter Eleven
Asteroid Field
Vexa Torrent System (One Jump from Sigma Nordlin)
Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)
Jake Stockton watched the enemy fleet move steadily forward. It was vast, far larger than the force the Hegemony and Confederation fleets had engaged at Ettara-Mordlin. Stockton tried not to think too deeply about the fact that the smaller enemy fleet had won that battle, that the closest to success the combined Hegemony-Confederation force that fought there had come was escaping with heavy losses. Avoiding annihilation was unquestionably preferable to the alternative, but it was hardly the stuff of victory.
Now we’re looking at twice as many ships, maybe more. And fifty of those monsters…
He’d had a hard time pulling his eyes away from the enemy battleships. He had no idea what weapons they mounted, how deadly their fire would be against the Hegemonic and Confed ships of the line, but he knew just what they could do to his bomber squadrons.
Be patient…wait for the battleships to get close…
He had to hit the giant battleships…he had to hit them as hard as he could. But waiting meant letting the lighter lead vessels get closer, even to pass the places his wings were hiding. Every second that went by risked detection.
But Stockton waited. He was twisted in knots, and his muscles ached. He could only imagine how badly he stank to anyone who hadn’t been sitting for days in Jake Stockton’s recycled sweat. The forward scouts had given some idea of when the enemy would arrive in the system, but he’d needed to have his people in place and hidden before a single enemy ship transited. That meant getting there days early.
But fighters weren’t designed for extended periods of operation. Anya Fritz had worked up the ejectable life support pods, yet another miracle conjured by the fleet’s legendary engineer. That had increased the time a fighter could keep a pilot alive, but the problem of maintaining his people’s sanity as they sat for days in their cramped cockpits, fed intravenously and contorting themselves wildly to attend to bodily functions, had been Stockton’s alone. He’d managed to use a few modified freighters as makeshift landing platforms, so that a few dozen of his pilots at a time could get out of their ships and walk around for an hour or two, but beyond that, he’d resorted to tranquilizers…and to very strong amphetamines ready to counter their effect, ready to go on a moment’s notice to bring his people back to maximum alertness.
He’d given the injection order half an hour before. His pilots were wide awake now, in their ships and waiting. Hell, he suspected most of them were crawling the walls…or what passed for walls. He needed them as alert as possible, though he knew, as wired as they all were after the heavy doses they’d received, many would get themselves killed through recklessness.
He’d have tortured himself about that, save for the fact that he didn’t believe more than a handful of them were going to get back anyway. All that mattered was hitting the enemy battleships hard before they transited. He had two thousand fighters with him, an immense force by any standards. But there were four thousand more waiting in Sigma Nordlin…and if he could wear down the enemy battleships, they just might be able to make a difference in the fight to come.
He saw the lead enemy vessels beginning to move past the asteroid field. They were avoiding the navigational hazard, of course, just as Stockton had hoped they would. But they were still close. He found himself holding his breath, as if that could have any effect on whether the Highborn scanners detected his ship or not.
He felt the urge to give the command, to blast out of the small concentration of asteroids with the reinforced wing positioned all around his ship. That would be the signal to the others, to more than one hundred squadrons hiding all around, across sixty thousand kilometers of rock and dust filled space.
But he held. He needed to hit those battleships. And they were still ten minutes out.
Ten minutes was a short time, almost nothing. But it passed by glacially, even as more and more enemy ships moved by, heading toward the transit point. Stockton knew what was happening on the other side, seven lightyears and yet only a few seconds distant. Transit point three was the likeliest one for the enemy attack, the most fortified and defended approach. There was relief in that, at least, that the enemy was coming the way Barron and the other commanders had guessed. But Stockton saw the other side, the strength of the enemy, and their obvious belief that they had no need to search for longer, less well-defended routes. They clearly believed they could smash their way through any defenses that awaited them, and Stockton suspected that arrogance was also nothing but the cold truth.
But maybe we can give them something they’re not expecting…
He’d been worried the enemy would scout the system thoroughly. They were a single jump from the enemy capital, and the system was one almost perfectly laid out for an ambush. But time seemed more important to the Highborn than caution…and Stockton was less than three minutes from the chance to make them regret that choice.
He looked at his screen, at the roughly one hundred ships formed up just around his fighter. They were close, insanely close by normal standards, and he could see at least a dozen of them with his own eyes. They would spread out when he gave the word, move toward a more normal dispersion pattern. And when they emerged from the cover of the asteroid field, the rest of his force, most of it so well hidden that his passive scanners revealed nothing, would follow his lead. They would blast out from their cover and launch desperate attacks on the enemy battleships.
Stockton didn’t know if the cluster missiles had an effective minimum range, but his people would be almost at point blank range from the start. They would close in just minutes, and what defensive response they endured largely depended on enemy response times.
One minute.
His hand moved to his controls, but he did nothing. He would be crash starting his reactor, as would all his people. It was a dangerous move, one that would cost him 3-4% of his force almost immediately, at least according to AI projections. But there was no choice. His ships would never have remained hidden for so long if their reactors had been powered up. And stealth was the only thing that had kept them alive so long.
He pressed his finger down slowly on a small button to the side of his panel. He heard a pinging sound in his cockpit, and he knew the signal he’d initiated had gone out. It was short range, designed to simulate a natural occurrence. But the hundred pilots clustered around him in their bombers were waiting for it. And they knew exactly what it meant.
Fire up their reactors.
His fingers moved over his own controls, entering the startup sequence, and flipping the main reactor switch. He held his breath for a few seconds, even as he heard the loud whining sound and felt the cockpit vibrating. If the reactor lost containment, he’d probably never even know it. He’d be vaporized with his ship in an instant. But five seconds later, he was still there…and his power readings were rising steadily.
He grabbed the controls, even as he checked on the other ships. He
could see a pair of explosions, two of his less fortunate people obliterated in thermonuclear fury. Another five ships were flashing red on his screen, signifying various levels of malfunction and damage. It didn’t really matter how badly hurt the fighters were. Just about any level of damage was a death sentence on the current mission.
He pulled back on the throttle, feeding the accumulating energy into his engines, and he could feel the thrust pushing back on him as the dampeners struggled to compensate for the heavy acceleration. He’d been prepared, though, and he was surprised by the relatively mild intensity of the g forces. The new Black Lightnings were an improvement in almost every area of operation, force maintenance included. He wished his force had more of the new ships in action, but only two hundred of them had so far arrived via the long and tenuous supply line from Confederation space. He’d left half of them back with the forces in Sigma Nordlin, and he had the rest with him in the ambush force. They were only five percent of the total deployed, but he was ready to take any edge he could get.
He angled his vector slightly, increasing the distance between his course and a small group of asteroids. The field had been good cover against scans. The asteroids were rich in heavy and radioactive metals, and his ships had stayed close to them. But now it was time.
Time to do what they’d come to do.
His ship was starting from a dead stop, and even at maximum thrust, his squadrons would be coming in at relatively lower velocities than normal. That was a double edged sword of sorts. It would take longer to close, and give their targets increased reaction time, but his people would benefit from quicker and easier vector changes, increasing the effectiveness of their evasive maneuvers considerably.
He reached down and flipped on the comm unit. By then, he knew, all two thousand of his pilots had fired up their reactors, and probably forty or more had died in thermonuclear explosions. His people had managed to remain hidden longer than he’d dared to hope they could, but that part of the mission was over. The enemy knew they were there…and radio silence no longer served any purpose. His people deserved to hear from him before they went in.
Perhaps for the last time.
“Strike Force Black, this is Admiral Stockton. We have had a long wait, but now our patience has paid off. The enemy is here, and we have caught them flatfooted. I’m not going to waste your time with pointless blather and foolishness. You all know what to do. Let’s do the job we came here to do…and the drinks are on me when we get back.”
Stockton shook his head as he uttered the last bit. He didn’t really believe many of his people would make it back…and those who did would likely be rewarded not with a party in any officer’s club, but with a hasty refit and relaunch into what promised to be a deadly struggle around Calpharon. He knew his pilots would do what they had to do, as they had always done, but they didn’t need to deal with the cold reality all at once.
His hand was tight on the throttle as he continued to increase his thrust. His eyes were on the scanner, the screen constantly updating as his active scanners pinged away, sorting out the closest targets.
There it was. The one he wanted. One of the big new battleships, almost dead ahead. Less than thirty thousand kilometers from his ship.
He stared down, unmoving, teeth gritting tightly. He felt a moment of normalcy amid the hopelessness of the war. The cockpit, in many ways, was the closest thing to a home he’d ever known. It was where he belonged, and he was about to do what he’d been born to do. Lead his pilots…and kill his enemies.
His feral instincts flared brightly. His people had the edge, only for a fleeting few moments, perhaps, but surprise was definitely their ally.
For the next seconds, for a brief instant of time, his people were the hunters…and it was time to chase down their prey.
Time to kill.
* * *
Reg Griffin’s hand was wrapped tightly around the fighter’s controls. She was coming in on one of the lead battleships, and her velocity was increasing with every passing second. Her wing had been on the end of the line, closest to the transit point. That had been bad luck that had seemed superficially good at first. Her people had started closest to escape, but they’d been compelled to accelerate almost directly in-system to attack the enemy. With their vectors almost opposite those of the approaching enemy ships, they were rapidly closing the distance to firing range…and increasing it from their escape route.
Once they had completed their attack, their momentum would take them deeper into the system, farther from the transit back to Sigma Nordlin. Her people would have to decelerate hard before they could even come about, and she wasn’t the sort to fool herself about the chances any of them had.
But if they were all doomed, they were damned sure going to extract a price before they died.
“You all heard the admiral. We came here to do a job, and that’s the only thing I want any of you thinking about.”
And not that we’ll all probably be dead in the next hour…
“We’ve got two targets. Odds are going in with me, against the ship to our starboard. Evens, against that big bastard up front to the port side. And nobody launches until they’re damned sure they’ve got a hard lock…I don’t care what these bastards throw at us.” Her voice was hard, cold, dripping with venom for the enemy. She’d served under Stockton’s command for years, faced Union aces and then led her pilots against the deadly Hegemony battleships. But she’d never been as sure as she was at that moment, that she was battling a foe that would kill or enslave everyone she cared about if they prevailed.
If they got past the fleet. And she was damned sure going to do everything she could to make sure that didn’t happen.
She watched the velocity of her approach increasing, and the range to the target decreasing. She was within twenty thousand kilometers, no, eighteen thousand, when the target ship’s defenses opened up. She’d been waiting for—and dreading—the cluster missiles she’d read about in Stockton’s reports, but as she watched, it was point defense turrets that opened up first. She felt some relief, though that was quickly diminished, as six of her ninety ships went down almost immediately under the deadly laser fire.
She cursed under her breath, sorrow and anger mixing in her thoughts. At least half of the lost pilots had been sloppy on their evasive maneuvers. They’d gotten careless, no doubt hoping surprise would prevent any enemy fire, at least on their way in. They had been wrong about that, at fault, and she damned sure would give the whole wing a good tongue lashing abou tit if any of them made it back. But, at fault or not, it cut deeply at her that her pilots had paid for their errors with their lives.
Maybe if I’d told them one more time…
Her eyes were fixed on the targeting screen, even as her hand moved to the side, flipping the arming switches for her payload. Her ship was double loaded with plasma torpedoes, as was every bomber in the strike force. She didn’t know how many of them would make it in close enough to launch, but the total ambush force had started with four thousand of the warheads, and that was a lot of destructive power, even against a new and technologically advanced enemy.
The cockpit shook wildly as she enhanced her preset evasion routines with a number of random jerks on the controls. The enemy fire was getting thicker, and she was losing more ships as the force continued to close. But the range was down to ten thousand.
Time to do this…
She looked down at the enhanced scanner screen. The image of the enemy ship was dead center on her display, shaking around a bit as the strange radiation emitted by the Highborn vessels played havoc with her targeting systems. It was better than she remembered from the first fight. The adjustments made to counter the radiation were helping. But not enough.
She would still have to go in…all the way in. Down under five hundred kilometers. Any farther out, and she’d need wild luck to score a hit.
And Reg Griffin didn’t depend on wild luck to kill her enemies. She was going to take it right to the
m, all the way in, and damned the risk.
“Full evasion routines,” she snapped the command into the comm, even as she reached out and prepped the bomb bay launchers. Her firing stud was now active, and two quick flicks of her finger would release the bombs in rapid succession.
Five thousand kilometers.
She’d lost sixteen of her people. That was bad, but not as bad as it could have been, she told herself. She was going to get her wing in more or less intact. She could see the enemy battleships in her mind, exploding into miniature suns under the impact of dozens of plasma torpedoes.
Then she saw it. At first it seemed like a smudge on her screen, but then she realized what it was.
Cluster missiles. A full spread. Launching from the target vessel, and coming straight for her approaching bombers.
Chapter Twelve
Spaceport – Sebastiani City
Planet Sebastiani, Alexara III
Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“This is extraordinary, Sy. I didn’t know what to expect, but this certainly wasn’t it. I’d envisioned the Highborn as many things, but…” Andi’s voice faded off as she continued to look at the screen, her face a mask of utter astonishment. She’d been surprised enough when Sy had announced she’d been able to retrieve and translate some additional data from the chips, but now Andi was staring at the display on Pegasus’s lower level, and she was struggling to keep her jaw from dropping.
