“Admiral, sir,” the junior officer said reappearing at Lewis’s elbow. “We’ve managed to make contact. It’s the heavy cruiser Freyia under Captain Hicks. She’s already on approach for the number seven airlock.”
“That will do.” Lewis replied. “Captain Holfe, if the fleet jumps, then jump Warspite to the supply fleet. Make emergency repairs then get this ship back into the fight.”
“Of course,” Holfe replied simply as Lewis headed for the hatch.
“Captain Hicks says he can’t stop,” the junior officer explained breathlessly as the two of them shot down an access way. “This will be a drive-by.”
Carefully controlled movements were what they taught for moving in micro-gravity, even more so when a ship was under power. But now Lewis threw caution aside as he raced to the airlock, collecting bruises as he went.
Sheehan awaited him at the open airlock.
“We don’t have long, sir,” he said as ratings clipped long-term survival packs onto their suits.
Lewis hesitated.
“You don’t have to come, Captain.”
“Duly noted, sir.”
Stepping through the lock Lewis looked aft, along the battleship’s scarred flanks. There was Freyia, less than a kilometre away, angling to get around Warspite’s wing. Below his feet, the entire universe beckoned. Step out, it said to him, leave it all behind and fall forever. Edging along the foot rail, the additional air tank clipped to his suit grated unexpectedly against the hull. The contact was enough to momentarily loosen his grip on the handrail and he snatched desperately at it. In the corner of his eye a red light in his helmet blinked on and off as the suit registered he was at the edge of hyperventilating. Pausing for a moment, Lewis forced himself to breath slower. With him and Sheehan hanging from the side, Warspite couldn’t take any violent evasive action that might be required. They needed to get off the ship.
“Well, this is new,” said Sheehan nervously as the two of them waited. Lewis grunted a reply as he watched the heavy cruiser approach. Beyond her, he could see flashes of gunfire and explosions. As Freyia rolled smoothly to starboard, Lewis caught sight of damage all along her side. As the cruiser approached he began to make out two small figures standing on the dorsal wing’s manoeuvring engine. The cruiser was in too close now to use the main engines to brake, as the plume would fry both of them. Instead, the docking thrusters were firing continuously.
They were close enough now for Lewis to see the crewman on the wing leaning outward, one hand reaching out, the other braced by his comrade. A small dispassionate part of Lewis’s mind admired the display of perfect ship handling, as the roll was arrested, bringing the manoeuvring engine down perfectly to the level of the airlock as the cruiser slid smoothly alongside of Warspite. The crewman of Freyia stretched out his arm, Lewis could see his mouth moving, urging them on. Lewis took a deep breath, and stepped out into space.
The other man’s hand closed around his wrist and with a twist shoved him into the arms of the second man.
“Sheehan, are you there?” Lewis asked as the second man clipped him onto a safety line.
“Just about, sir,” he replied with relief in his voice. “Can we please go inside now?”
As he walked down the wing towards an open hatch, Lewis felt main engines firing as the ship began to accelerate. Looking back, he caught a last sight of his flagship of three years. The hull had been speckled by impacts, one of the forward passive arrays was a twisted wreck and B turret had been opened up, while astern he could discern the haziness of leaking gas. As he watched, one of the remaining turrets turned and fired at a distant target. There was a hiss in his ears as his suit radio picked up the backwash. The great battleship looked like an old attack dog, scarred, maimed, mute, yet still ready to fight any takers.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” Hicks said as Lewis was escorted onto the bridge. “Coms, make signal to all ships, Freyia is now flagship of the fleet!”
___________________________
“Mutter des Gottes,” Berg breathed as the fleet appeared on the holo. The Home Fleet had left Earth with four battleships, twenty cruisers, four carriers and forty or so various other types. Now Berg could see barely half that and of those, only half a dozen weren’t flashing a damage code. Bleeding plasma from two engines, Black Prince had dropped into real space a good light minute out from the fighting. Nameless ships and missiles were throwing themselves forward in a way she wouldn’t have believed if she wasn’t seeing it with her own eyes.
“Bridge, Coms. Skipper, the Freyia is showing as fleet flagship. Admiral Lewis is still in command.”
“What the hell is he doing on Freyia? Never mind. Contact her now!”
“Yes, Captain.”
The distance added an agonising delay. Behind her, Berg could still hear half a dozen alarms sounding from the engine display. The heat sink was close to melting, one engine dead, another dying, Black Prince was in no condition to fight. Nearly three minutes later Admiral Lewis’s tired face appeared on her screen.
“Captain, I don’t know where you came from but you’d better keep whatever it is brief,” he said tersely, glancing away from the camera as he spoke.
“Admiral, I was ordered to pursue and maintain contact with the Nameless fleet as it retreated away from the front line and Landfall. Two days ago that fleet intercepted us just as we destroyed a fuel refinery. A superior force trapped us within a mass shadow, but once we destroyed the refinery they immediately retreated. Sir, it is my belief that the Nameless fleet is flying on fumes! They are running out of fuel! We are downloading our logs to you now.”
Over the past few days Berg had attempted to rehearse what she would say. She had no proof, only a belief and perhaps only minutes or seconds to convey that belief in a convincing manner. As she looked at the battered remnants of the once formidable fleet, she wondered whether she was too late.
Two, three then four minutes went past. Then finally came a perfunctory reply.
“Message received.”
And the screen blinked out.
Berg sat back in her seat, so many planned words unsaid.
“Captain, enemy ships are moving to intercept.”
Berg shook herself. She’d delivered the word. She’d done what she could.
“Navigation, calculate a jump over the heliopause. Get us out of here.”
___________________________
“That’s a lot of conjecture based on a very small amount of evidence,” Sheehan said as he and Lewis reviewed the data download from Black Prince’s communication. As he quickly scrolled through it, Lewis nodded but made no reply. By the time he made it to the bridge, Freyia was already receiving orders to jump out of the system, orders Lewis had quickly countermanded. Sekhar had yielded only reluctantly and it was plain the man was a spent force.
He wasn’t completely wrong, though. The fleet couldn’t sustain this battering much longer. The suicide runs had decimated what was left of their best anti-missile ships. Now with those gaps in the anti-missile screen, the cap ship missiles targeted at them from further out were getting through and their destroyer screen was suffering as they tried to protect the larger ships. The next wave of ships was coming up from astern. With the Home Fleet accelerating their overtake speed was low.
On the face of it Captain Berg’s information changed nothing. Their objective remained as before: stay on the field of battle and deny the Nameless the ground they needed to command. But, with an optimism he hadn’t felt in days, Lewis realised that this changed... everything. Missiles would only be used up if the Home Fleet stood and let the enemy throw them. Fuel was another matter, however, because fuel was being used every moment. They couldn’t help but use it. Lewis spun back to the main holo. Several ships had lost their jump drives but Sekhar’s orders had resulted in the fleet bunching up, ships without drives had been paired with those that still did.
“We’ll jump, Captain,” Lewis said, straightening up.
“Away, sir?
” Sheehan asked with surprise.
“No.”
Lewis pulled himself across the bridge to the navigation section.
“I want the fleet to jump to here.”
He pointed to a random piece of the solar system.
“We’ve stood and taken it long enough. I want a schedule of jumps to random locations around the system worked out. I want to be able to send individual ships back to resupply and then for them to be able to jump back to rejoin the fleet. I also want to be able to deploy what fighters and strike boats we have left as scouts. They’ll need to have the schedule, so that if they find something, they can jump back to us.”
“Sir?” Sheehan said trying to keep up with Lewis’s change in direction.
“We’ve been letting them use up missiles against us, but if Captain Berg is right, then their fuel is running out and we need to force them to burn it.”
Lewis glanced at the holo. The next wave of Nameless ships was closing fast and they had only a few more minutes before the he would have to turn the fleet to present their broadsides.
“Now get on with it, Captain.”
Nameless missiles, large and small, powered along in the Home Fleet’s wake. The few guns that would bear stabbed out, then the space ahead of the human ships opened up as they jumped out, leaving the missiles to burn through nothingness.
Ten light minutes away the Home Fleet dropped back into real space, Lewis waited patiently as Sheehan and the small staff he’d managed to assemble from whoever Captain Hicks could immediately spare, attempted work out a series of jumps. With orders issued, Lewis could only wait. He found himself sharing space against the bridge’s rear bulkhead with the embedded journalist.
“Jeff Harlow of…”
“I don’t care,” Lewis cut him off.
Jeff wilted, but only for a moment.
“How will this help? I mean, anywhere we jump they can follow.”
“They can eventually follow,” Lewis said in spite of himself. “But those FTL sensors of theirs are only good for a few light seconds and a solar system is much, much larger. Unless we jump in close to one of their ships, it takes time and fuel to regain contact with us.” The space immediately around the fleet remained free of any Nameless. “Just give us enough time to work this out,” Lewis murmured to himself, almost completely forgetting the presence of the journalist.
It took the Nameless nearly an hour to find them again. An hour for Lewis to reorganise what was left of his fleet and an hour to listen to Nameless FTL transmissions. The coms section on board Freyia lacked some of the facilities on Warspite, but their direction finding was enough to confirm the Nameless were spreading out. At least some ships had jumped as close to the edge of the solar system as their drives could manage, which in turn was as close to the Home Fleet’s support ships as they could reach, presumably trying to see whether their enemy had retreated there.
They also heard distant signals from the Nameless home worlds. Was there an element of hope in those transmissions? If so, it was crushed when the Nameless scout jumped in two hundred thousand kilometres from the fleet and, by pure good fortune, within a few thousand kilometres of a pair of screening fighters. It got the word out but was obliterated moments later. By the time Nameless cruisers began dropping in around the Home Fleet’s reported position, the humans weren’t there anymore.
17th May
For two days it continued. The Home Fleet made dozens of jumps, from one side of the system to the other and all the while the Nameless flailed after them – always one step behind. The drives of some ships struggled to keep up the pace but now there was the opportunity to send them back to the support fleet for repairs. Even as they left, other ships, hastily repaired, started to trickle back. Warspite arrived at the end of the sixteenth followed, to everyone’s surprise, by the cruiser Deimos with a scratch crew under the command of a fighter pilot. Others continued to join them and the fighting strength of the Home Fleet slowly grew.
The Nameless tried scattering scouts and escorts across the system to find their elusive target. These isolated and vulnerable ships were easy meat for even the small number of human fighters that remained. Ship after ship was burned down and when the Nameless did make contact with the Home Fleet, it was piecemeal, not the hammer blow they required. All the while, Lewis could feel the advantage shift as the Nameless lost momentum.
“The burning question is what will they do when they reach the point where, if they don’t leave, they won’t have the fuel to make it across the Rift,” Lewis mused out loud. “The point where they have to commit to one course of action or the other, with no ability to change midstream.”
“There’s no saying that point hasn’t already been reached, sir,” Hicks replied. “They may well have decided to commit to forcing us out to the last. Those ships could sit dead in the water for a while if they knew tankers were inbound. If they can force us out, then they only need one ship with enough juice to run the beacon for a few hours.”
In the background Lewis could hear the journalist taking notes, his presence just about tolerated.
“Fair point, Captain,” Lewis replied. “The Phantom task group confirmed that Nameless ships are waiting for an opportunity to jump the Rift.”
“A beacon has to stay on for six hours. That’s a long window,” Sheehan said. “Deimos’s skipper reports that they blundered into a squadron and she hit a tanker on the way out.”
“I’m not sure how much confidence we can put in that report,” Hicks replied. “Deimos is pretty beat up and the new skipper is beyond green.”
“There are two reasons they would risk bring a tanker into the combat zone,” Lewis said. “They had us on the ropes a couple of days ago, so it might have felt safe. Alternatively, it could be they didn’t have the resources any more to play safe and send ships back out of the combat zone to resupply. We simply have no way of knowing. No gentlemen, for the moment we keep jumping the fleet and avoiding contact. However, we will deploy our reconnaissance and fighter elements wider. If we can catch a section of their fleet resupplying outside a mass shadow, then we might be able to land the knockout blow.”
___________________________
19th May
Alanna didn’t respond at the first insistent shake. The second was a good deal less hesitant. With a groan, she returned to consciousness.
“Skipper, the officer of the watch is asking for you,” said a petty officer. “Something’s going down.”
As she made her way back towards the Damage Control station, the signs of hurried repairs were everywhere. Here and there lumps of sealing foam dotted the bulkheads, sufficiently closing off breaches so that the ship could at least hold atmosphere. Bits of broken cables drifted like seaweed, while other pieces hastily spliced back together and duct taped out of the way were visible everywhere. The whole ship was held together by tape and hope – and she was still in command.
When they’d been out beyond the heliopause with the supply fleet, she’d been promised that a new commander would be arriving shortly. The crew they put off the ship had mostly returned. The few remaining junior officers filled dead men’s boots, but no one arrived to relieve her and when Warspite lumbered back towards the figurative sound of gunfire, she knew Deimos had to follow. They’d patched the ship up enough to fly, but weapons control was a wreck. However, Coms had somehow avoided damage and they’d paired off with the badly damaged destroyer Voulgiers. She didn’t have a working gun left in her but her weapons control was still functional and the two ships could function together in a brains and brawn arrangement.
“What is it, Lieutenant Dolezal?” she asked as she pulled herself into the command centre.
“Skipper, we’re getting something odd from coms,” he said.
If you have woken me for ‘odd’ then prepare to die. Alanna suppressed the urge to say it as she pulled herself over to the communications display. The urge to punch Dolezal disappeared the moment she saw the screen.
&n
bsp; “Twenty-one FTL transmissions…”
“Now twenty-two,” interrupted the rating at the display.
They were dotted all over the system and as Alanna watched, another two appeared.
“All hands to battle stations,” she said before pushing off towards her command chair.
___________________________
“It’s levelling out at thirty-four signals, sir,” Sheehan said as he leaned over the shoulder of the communications rating. “The signals are consistent with the navigation beacon from the gate station.”
“Show me,” Lewis said as he buckled himself in.
Action stations hadn’t been ordered for the fleet, but crewmembers were already rushing onto Freyia’s bridge and struggling into survival suits. On the main holo, the blips for individual ships were lighting up as they reported as ready for action. It wasn’t just him. The fleet could feel it too. The Worms were making their last move. The holo zoomed out to display the entire system. Thirty-four signals were pulsing out.
“Are all of those signals the same?” Lewis asked.
“Yes, sir,” Sheehan replied after a moment. “All the same frequency, all the same strength.”
“What are your orders, sir?” Hicks asked.
In his mind’s eye Lewis could see the situation of his opposite number. Their fuel status had hit critical. Their salvation was only six hours of flight time away but with no mass shadows to hide in, any ship transmitting a beacon might as well paint a bull’s-eye on its hull.
So the Nameless were returning to the game they had played so many times before: the numbers game. The Home Fleet would catch and destroy ship after ship but with enough alien ships transmitting together, they could maintain their signal for the required six hours. But somewhere out there, there was a point, perhaps even a powered down gate, where the relief force would arrive. If the Nameless could make jump in, then after a very short time they could jump away again. If there was a gate, then dozens of the expendable gateships could solve their supply problem.
The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) Page 48
