by David Weber
"Admiral" Yoshinaka announced, "scanners report nine battle-cruisers leaving Zapata III. Evidently they've been hiding behind the planet--notow they're on course to intercept our screen from behind." Even as he spoke, the computers dispassionately added the newcomers to the display.
Things clicked in Trevayne's mind. Of coursel The rebels had known he was as likely as themselves to deduce that Zapata was the logical place for them to make a stand--so they'd decided to make it elsewhere! Iphigena? Probably. It didn't matter. What mattered was ti objective for this battle was to strip him of his screen for the decisive clash... just as their false "fortresses" had already stripped him of most of his SBMHAWK'S. And, he thought grimly, they were going about it in an ali-too-rational fashion. Caught between these new baffle-cruisers and the force with which he was already engaged, Remko would be overwhelmed before he could disengage.
But... the rebels had forgotten the onward-lumbering battle-line's heavy external ordnance load of SBM'S. Yet there was no time to lose, or the battle-cruisers would soon draw out of range. He gave the command, and the capital ships' external ordnance lashed outward, the salvos of SBM'S thickened by the supermonitors' internally launched HBM'S.
Trevayne sat back, awaiting further reports as the missiles speckled his display.
Those battle-cruisers were doomed. Nothing that size could stand up to that hurricane of missiles. Nothing. Yet there remained the unidentified worry nagging at the back of his mind, the sense of something overlooked. He was still scratching at the mental itch when Yoshinaka turned a carefully controlled face to him.
"Admiral, we've lost missile lock. Those "battle-cruisers" @u@u. it seems they were scout cruisers with their ECM in deception mode. They've dropped it and gone to evasive action." Their eyes met, and neither needed to speak.
The rebels had just stripped the battle-line of its external ordnance.
Somewhere in the back of Trevayne's mind a part of him reflected that perhaps he'd been too worried about his subordinate's cockiness to recognize it in himself. Or had he simply fallen into a belie pounds in the infallibility o pounds his own judgment? It was easy to do, when M'n'iam wasn't around.
It only remained to learn why the rebels had mousetrapped him into firing off: his missiles.
"hey've taken the bait, sir!" Tomanaga's voice was exultant. 'hey just flushed their XO racks at the decoys!" "Tracking reports at least ninety percent of their external ordnance fired, sir," David Reznick confirmed. "Sir, their battle-line's flank scouts will clear the planet in eleven minutes," Stravos Kollentai reported. "Very well." Han drew a deep, unobtrusive breath, remembering another battle aboard another ship. She glanced at Tsing Chang and saw what might have been a shadowy smile of memory on his imperturbable face.
"Yours is the honor, Admiral," she said simply. "Prepare to move out." "Aye, aye, sir. Immediately." "Admiral Windrider is launching!" Rezniek reported.
"Very well. Admiral Tsing, engage the enemy." "Aye, aye, sir." The superdreadnought TRNS Arrarat rumbled to life, drive field bellowing muted thunder through her iron bones as Battle Group Nine, Terran Republican Navy, moved out to battle.
"Sir! Admiral Trevayne! The scanners --to " Trevayne's head snapped around, his eyes flashing angrily at the hapless scanner rating whose incoherent report had shattered the silence. But his scathing retort died aborning as his plot altered silently. The disinterested computers updated the data quietly, and the menace of the new data codes flashed starkly on the screen.
A chain of lights crept around the disk of Zapata III in a sullen, crimson line of hostile capital ships. He sat quietly, his brain racing to assimilate the new data, as eight monitors and gventy-four battleships and superdreadnoughts abandoned their hiding place in the planet's shadow. They were too close and fast for his battle-line to avoid.
And even as they emerged from the shadows there came more reports--reports of swarms of strikefighters spewing out of the asteroid belt behind Fourth Fleet.
Of course, he thought coldly, filled with an ungrudging respect for his opponent's tactics.
Escort carriers. They had one advantage over larger carriers--with their power down and a little luck, they could be mistaken for asteroids by even the best scanner teams.
Not that they'd needed much luck, he thought grimly, remembering the cloaking ECM on the escort carriers raiding his communications. He'd thought it a financially extravagant way to build such cheap carriers--notow he understood why it had been done.
He was back on stride by the time the final report came in. He knew what was happening, understood the deadly ambush into wh he and his ships had strayed. This was no mere attempt to stop Fourth Fleet; it was a full-blooded bid to destroy it.
That was why they'd let him into the system unopposed- -comto catch his slower battle-line between warp points, unable to retreat, while they hit him from all sides. And with Fourth Fleet gone, the rebels could sweep into Zephrain at last. Oh, yes, he understood--and perhaps alone among all the personnel of the Rim's ships, he was unsurprised as the "battleships" Remko had been pursuing cut their ECM and appeared in their true guise: assault carriers, already launching against Stoner's isolated ships.
Trevayne watched the ruby chips of the outgoing rebel fighters with bitter satisfaction@u He'd been right all along @u.. the decisive battle would come at Zapata, but it would be such an engagement as none of them had dreamed of in their worst nightmares. On either side, he thought grimly. "Admiral," Yoshinaka was saying, "should I recall Commander Sandoval?" The ops officer was on his way to Togo to confer with his opposite number on Desafs staff. Trevayne shook his head.
Trevayne remained confident@u The rebel battle-line was powerful, but clearly no match for his own. The incoming fighters from the belt were a threat, but not enough to even the balance if Remko and Stoner could fend off the rebel carriers long enough. They were in for a nasty series of external ordnance salvos from the rebel's capital ships, but when they closed to energy weapon range his superior weight of metal would tell. And he could still draw first blood with his HBM'S before they entered SBM range.
But it wasn't that simple, as his first HBM salvo revealed. The Republic's RandD teams hadn't produced such spectacular results, perhaps, but they had not been idle. For the first time, the Rim encountered a Republican weapon that was as much a breakthrough as the grav driver. The rebels mounted shields which were outwardly identical to" those which had been in use for over two hundred years, and so they were, to a point. But conventional shields collapsed as they took damage and their massive fuses blew; these reset automatically and virtually instantaneously. They didn't "collapse" they simply flashed out of existence, then bounced back.., as good as new!
On the heels of that discovery came more bad news. While the survivors of the rebels' opening fighter strike returned to their hangars to rearm, the equally-strong second strike ignored Remko to converge on Stoner and his decimated fighters. A tidal wave of fighter missiles overpowered the point defense of Stoner's flagship, and a Code Omega message flashed on the plot with sickening suddenness. Trevayne hid a pang of dismay as TFNS Hellhound vanished in a brilliant ball of flame. If the rebel's first strike rearmed and joined the clash of battle-lines...i, Trevaynes communications section raised Arquebus quickly as Nelson and Arrarat lumbered towards one another. Capital ships were slow; even with the time lag, Trevayne had time to speak to Remko once more.
He outlined the situation in a few brief sentences, then looked squarely at the face of his embattled screen commander.
"It's vital that you hit those carriers hard-preferably while their first wave is aboard rearming. That means close engagement. I repeat, close." He paused, then leaned closer to the pickup. "Scan, you're in command of the screen because I happen to think you're the most aggressive combat commander in the Fleet. Now prove it!" Remko stared back at him unmovingly for long, long seconds as the transmission winged through space.
His face reminded Trevayne of one of Kevin's quotes from the
American Civil War--a description of General U. S. Grant: "He habitually wears an expression as ff he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it." Remko wore that kind of expression as he rumbled "Aye, aye, sir." Then he blurted out, "Admiral, I'm gonna personally shove a force beam projector up the ass of whoever's in command of those carriers and then cut loose!" He stopped, face redder than usual, and broke the connection.
"Well." Trevayne turned to Yoshinaka and smiled. "Whoever said Scan isn't eloquent?" Then he shook himself as the rebels approached SBM range.
"See if you can pick Kevin's brains while you're there." The intelligence center was Sanders' battle station.
"And hurry back. Things could get a bit tight in the next few minutes." Yoshinaka nodded again and stepped into the car. The doors closed, and Trevayne turned back toward his command chair and the battle as the first rebel SBM salvos began to launch. Most seemed targeted on Nelson. Yes, he thought, they'll try to begin by destroying one supermonitor, to show their people it can be done.
"Message from Admiral Petrovna, sir.
The Rim screen isn't breaking off. She's taking heavy missile fire." "Thank you, Bob." Han said calmly, watching the plot. She'd hoped the screen would fall back, for her ruse had been intended to destroy Trevayne's fighters and get her own battle-line in range of his without being devastated by long-range missile fire--not to match Magda against the screen in a ship-to-ship action. But it wasn't working out that way. The bickering fight had turned suddenly even more vicious, and that screen commander had kept his wits about him. The worst thing he could possibly do, from her viewpoint, was get in among her carriers and wreck those launch bays. Well, it had always been a possibility.
That was why Magda held that command. Anyone who went after her in close action was reaching into a buzz saw.
Hah only hoped that Magda wouldn't be among the chips chewed off by the blade.
"Signal to Admiral Windrider," she said suddenly. "Launch reserve strike immediately." The escort carri tilde ers and hangar "barges" hidden among the asteroids were supposed to be the final reserve as well as the rear jaw of the trap, but the Rim screen was doing too good a job of closing with Magla; she would need to retain most of her fighter strength to fend off those cruisers, and the diver- sion had to be made up from Jason's units.
"Aye, aye, sir." "Coming into SBM range, Admiral," Tsing Chang said calmly. "Captain Parbleu has a good setup." "Then you may open fire, Admiral." "Aye, aye, sir. Opening fire now." And Arrarat bucked as BG 9's XO racks emptied in a single massive volley.
The vast majority of the SBM'S targeting Nelson were stopped by BG I's awesome array of datalinked point defense stations--comb the laws of chance dictated that some would always get through, and the incoming salvos were massive. Nelson's dying shields were centered in a vortex of nuclear flame, and under those torrents of energy, the supermonitor's massive rmor boiled.
Her shields went down, and more salvos scorched in, seeking to exploit her weakening defenses.
Again, most were stopped. But dozens slid through the lattice-like intricacies of her point defense lasers and immolated themselves against her drive field in fireballs which gouged at her gargantuan hull.,, Glowing craters pitted her armor, snapped structural members, wiped away weapons... and personnel. And one of those craters, guided by the freakish improbability which rules the tides of war, ripped deep into the heavily armored compartments surrounding Nelson's flag bridge. "Many hits on primary target," Tsing Chang's chief of staff reported jubilantly.
Profiting from the confision caused by the hit, a second missile from the same salvo drew dangerously close before it detonated--not a hit, but a near miss which flooded adjacent space with lethal radiation. The rent armor of the stricken flag bridge couldn't shield the survivors from death, but again, Trevayne was lucky. The chair behind which he lay gave him some protection. The radiation poisoning he received was not fatal... instantly.
Genji Yoshinaka gasped as his suit pressurized. He'd been thrown against the wall of the intraship car by the concussion, but he was dazed only briefly and he heaved himself upright and slammed his fist on the override button. The buckled doors were jammed, and his hand went to the laser pistol by his side. He blasted the doors aside, cutting his way back onto the flag bridge the car had only just begun to leave... and into a scene from Hell.
Bodies sprawled amid the twisted, blackened metal Acrid smoke streamed toward the hungry rents through which atmosphere screamed into space, and severed cables lashed the escaping air like bullwhips, crackling and spitting and fountaining fire.
Yoshinaka's body responded before his numbed mind could understand. He snatched the nearest emergency kit and flung himself at the crumpled figure beside the admiral's chair. His hands moved with machine-like efficiency, slapping seals on the partially collapsing vac suit, and even as he worked he spoke calmly to the battlephone microphone in his helmet.
"Doctor Yuan to the flag bride! Damage control to the flag bridge! Use the emergency bypass route. Captain Mujabi, have corn raise Admiral Desai. Inform her she's in command.., details to follow." And then there was nothing he could do but wait, kneeling at the side of the semi-conscious figure in the IsvaRwcror fleet admiral's vac'suit with the blood-misted faceplate. He was still there when Doctor Yuan arrived.
"More hits on the primary target, sir," Tomanaga reported. "Her drive field is weakening and her fire's almost ceased. Permission to shift target?" "Granted." "Parnassus reports critical HBM damage, sir. She's withdrawing." "Acknowledge." Hah glanced at the' blinking data codes under the crippled superdreadnought's blip. Parnassus was done for--ff she had time to withdraw before she went Code Omega it would be a miracle.
"BG 14 reports loss of both escort destroyers, sir. Admiral Iskan requests additional fighter support." "Denied. We don't have it to spare. Tell him to tail in behind BG 16 aeaful, use them for cover." "Aye, aye, sir.
"External ordnance exhausted, sir. Closing to energy range. Force beams and primaries in range in two minutes." "Very well. Signal Admiral Kanohe: "Destroyers attack enemy line of battle." Signal all battle-lines units: "Stand by to engage with beams."" "Standing by, sir." "Admiral Tsing, your group will engage the enemy's lead battlegroup." "Aye, aye, sir." Sonja Desai was speaking to her chief of staff when Joeaa, quin Sandoval almost ran onto Togo's bridge.
They'll want to stay close--inside HBM range.
Sandoval waited impatiently. His cutter had come through the beginning of the battle on its final approach to Togo, and he was still oversupplied with adrenalin. But he had no intention of giving Desai an excuse for dressing him down by violating any aspect of military courtesy. Finally she turned back to him.
"Commander Sandoval," she began without greeting or preliminary, "I'd better bring you up to speed.
Admiral
Trevayne is seriously injured and out of action.
I've assumed command. Nelson's shields are down and there's not much left of her armor. She's taken significant internal damage, including the virtual destruction of her flag deck; she can still maneuver, but we'll have to get her inside our globe. Captain Mujabi has taken command of BG 1. We've lost Olqmpus, and Drake and two more superdreadnoughts have taken heavy damage.
At the same time, the rebels have taken considerable HBM damage, but they're still closing. They'll be in beam range shortly." Sandoval gaped at her. Mother of God, what did the woman use for blood? Formaldehyde?
Aloud, he asked, "And Commodore Yoshinaka, sir?" "Alive and well." "I'd better get back, rejoin him.... his "Out of the question, Commander. You can't fly a cutter through what's happening out there." Was it possible that there was a very slight ironic twinkle in her eyes?
"Welcome aboard, Commander... and strap in tight.
Things are going to get bumpy." "Sir, we can't stop them! They just keep coming!" Magda Petrovna regarded her fighter commander levelly. Commodore Huyler was a good man under normal conditions, but these weren't normal. His p
ilots were doing everything perfectly--but what could you do when your enemy suddenly began to ignore everything your fighters handed out while he concentrated on mauling your flight decks? And those damned improved force beams were just the weapon to do it with, she thought grimly.
"Admiral." It was the rating monitoring Han's eom traffic. "Parnassus is Code Omega--coms is Copperhead. Shiriken reports total loss of energy armament." "Do your best, Commodore," she told Huyler.
"If you can't stop them all, try to cripple as many as possible. Go for the heavy cruisers--you've got better odds there. The screen will just have to handle the battle-cruisers." "Aye, aye, sir." The screen blanked, and Magda glanced at her battle plot. She hid her fears well, she thought, for that was part of the game. Yet her carriers had to remain in support range of the capital ships.
If she let herself be driven INSU-AAECTON away, those mammbth monitors and supermonitors would overwhelm Han no matter what. She leaned over and touched a eom stud, opening an all-ships channel.
"Well?" Captain Joseph Yuan, M.D., rose and looked into Genji Yoshinaka's anxious face.
Repair parties labored furiously about them, rep left-brace essurizing the charnel house that had been a flag bridge. Since they and the medics had arrived, Yoshinaka had finally had time to worry.
For the first time since Yuan had known him, his control was perceptibly frayed.
