The other two officers were silent.
“Yeah,” Barbados admitted. “Hell, I’d forgotten we could do that. I’m not sure it’s ever actually been done in a real fight.”
“Well, Colonel, if we don’t try something, those four corsairs are going to fly up to about half a million kilometers and start pumping half-megaton-a-second positron lances into us. We won’t survive that,” James pointed out.
“Do we even have that crap in storage?” the Colonel asked, looking at Colton.
She blinked, clearly checking her implants.
“Enough to arm forty Piranhas for one pass,” she concluded. “Eighty Javelins, forty frameworks.”
She shook her head.
“We’ll have the flight crews strip the rest of the armament,” Colton continued. “It’s all atmospheric or extremely short-ranged by space standards. A five-hundred-KPS railgun is death in an atmosphere and deadly in low orbit, but it’s not doing anything in this kind of fight.”
“Just missile platforms,” James agreed. “But that’s more than the bastards think we have, so let’s make it happen, people.”
“I’ll talk to my pilots,” Barbados confirmed. “Oorah, sir.”
#
Stormcloud didn’t have enough fuel to try and evade the incoming corsairs. Burning at Tier Three acceleration for as long as they had had consumed well over ninety percent of the transport’s reaction mass. Since she’d had half of her troop complement cut to fit her out as logistics support for the mission, she had the skimmer shuttles that could refill her tanks from an available gas giant, but that needed a gas giant and friendly space.
KDX-6657 was no longer friendly space.
The four ships heading their way were each barely a quarter of Stormcloud’s size, but they had missile launchers and heavy positron lances. The transport did not.
James and Colton waited on the bridge during the pirate’s inexorable advance, watching the corsairs accelerate toward them and then make turnover, slowly reducing their velocity as they closed.
“The Piranhas are armed,” she told him as the timers continued to tick down. “We only get one shot. What’s the call, Commodore?”
“We can’t let those corsairs reach half a million klicks, Captain,” he replied. “Launch the Piranhas at a million kilometers and target for missile intercept while the bastards are still at least five fifty out.”
“That leaves us almost no margin,” she warned.
“Captain, we have one salvo,” he said. “We already have no margin. We just have to trust Barbados’s pilots.”
And it was just pilots, too. Where a starfighter would have a crew of three, the Piranha was primarily an atmosphere fighter and carried only a pilot. Trading in the fighter’s additional fuel tanks and atmosphere-based weapons for the rack with its two Javelins actually increased their mass.
By air-breathing standards, the three-hundred-ton Piranha was an immense, heavily armed and heavily armored behemoth. By space combat standards, it didn’t even register as small. They were tiny.
And slow.
James watched as they labored their way out of Stormcloud’s hangar bays, the pilots clearly unused to operating in vacuum for more than brief periods, and light up their antimatter thrusters. Forty fighters was two-thirds of the complement intended to enforce air superiority for the landing battalions, but it was a small force compared to the numbers starfighters usually deployed in.
And those forty ships weighed less than a single squadron of starfighters would have.
“This can’t work,” he whispered. “They’re toys.”
Colton chuckled.
“Sir, I’ve watched those ‘toys’ destroy an entire planetary air force that outnumbered them ten to one in an afternoon. This might not be their native environment, but those are deadly fighters and experienced pilots. If this can work, those pilots will make it work.”
“And they know the stakes,” Barbados told James as he rejoined them at the heart of the bridge. “I let the pilots pick which of them flew this sortie. Their friends and their stuff are on this ship.”
“They’re still small and slow,” the Commodore replied.
“You don’t need more than Tier Two when the only purpose of your drives is to get you "mosphere,” the Marine agreed. “On the other hand, they’re designed to circumnavigate a planet inside atmosphere, so even pulling the secondary fuel tanks, they’ve got a lot of delta-v to play with in deep space.”
James nodded, continuing to watch the feed. The corsairs had almost certainly noticed the Piranhas, but they weren’t changing their course or otherwise reacting. Presumably, they were at least considering them as potential threats, but Stormcloud was their target.
Seconds turned to minutes, timers in James’s implant ticking away. Chariot was still forty minutes away, but if they survived this pass, the strike cruiser would be around before anyone else could reach them—and the only ship in the system fit to tangle with Chariot was Poseidon herself.
“Shoot straight, pilots,” James murmured as the range figures drop. “I make it range in thirty seconds?”
“We’re feeding them as much data as we can from the q-probes,” Colton told him, “but the Piranhas don’t have q-coms themselves. A lot of it has to be their sensors and their pilots’ judgment.”
By the time light reached the q-probes, the data was transferred to Stormcloud via entanglement, and then radioed to the Piranhas, it was easily three seconds old. The probes’ sensors were significantly better than the atmospheric fighters’ scanners, but that delay was everything in targeting.
“Missile launch! Confirm missile launch!” Colton’s tactical officer snapped. “I have seventy-nine birds in the air; Stormcloud Delta Six reports launch failure on her second missile. She has ejected it as a dud.”
“Those missiles were sitting in my magazines for two years,” the Captain murmured. “I was expecting more failures.”
James arched an eyebrow at his subordinate.
“And this wasn’t worth mentioning?”
“It wasn’t going to change anything,” she replied. “So no, no, it wasn’t.”
He snorted but let that go. She was right, after all.
“Piranhas are now pulling back; range is opening,” the tactical officer reported. “Time to impact, seventy seconds and count—
“We have lance fire!” he interrupted himself, Stormcloud’s computers drawing in the beams as simple white lines on the tactical feed. “Half-megaton beams; they’re sweeping space to take out the Piranhas. Pilots are maneuvering to evade.”
James heard Barbados’s sharp inhalation as the icons began to drop off the plot. With that much antimatter in the beams and the Piranhas’ miniscule size, even a near miss was deadly—and the Marines simply didn’t have the experience for this threat environment.
Five of the Marine fighters died. Ten. Twenty. James forced himself to watch, realizing they weren’t getting any of the Piranhas back and knowing that duty and honor alike required him to bear witness.
More of the fighters died, the icons dropping off the tactical like flies until there were none left.
“Semper fi,” Barbados whispered. “Tell me we got the fuckers,” he ground at Colton’s tactical department.
“Impact in ten seconds. Fifty-plus missiles still inbound.”
The missile icons were dropping too. The corsairs weren’t nearly as well equipped for anti-missile defense as James would have made them, but they had enough lasers and light positron lances to carve massive swathes through the incoming salvo.
Just not enough to stop all the missiles.
“Impact, we have impact,” the tactical officer declared as flashes of light lit up the tactical feed. “I’m reading eleven explosions; trying to identify targets.”
Seconds ticked by as the radiation continued to hash the sensor data and then the tactical officer looked up at the senior officers and gave a satisfied nod.
“They did it, sirs,�
� he announced grimly. “Three of the four are gone and the fourth is drifting, no power signature. We’re clear.”
James sighed in relief and returned the nod. They’d lost a lot of people today—but while the loss of the Marine pilots stung, they’d saved everybody.
“They could do the math before they went out,” Barbados said quietly. “They could guess what was going to happen when atmosphere-trained pilots ran into anti-starfighter defenses. But like I said, they knew the stakes.”
“Let me know if anything else in this goddamned system even twitches,” James ordered Colton’s people. “And keep me up to date on the repairs. I don’t care if we can only jump for half a day; I want to be out of Coati’s reach the moment we can be, understand?”
#
Chariot arrived exactly on time, to the relief of everyone aboard Stormcloud, as the other four corsairs had now started moving in their direction. The arrival of the Terran strike cruiser put an immediate halt to that, the pirate ships turning tail almost instantly.
“Captain Modesitt, we’re glad to see you,” James told Chariot’s commander. “Your presence seems to be having an appropriate effect on the junkyard hounds trying to dog us.”
“I’d like to have a far more immediate effect on them all,” she replied. “If I move in, I should be able to punch them out and retake Poseidon, sir.”
James sighed.
“They have Petrovsky, Captain,” he reminded her. “Right now, they’re mixing his overrides and a team of hackers to take over systems one by one. It will take them days to have her fully functional, but if we present an immediate threat…they can have at least her missile launchers online inside an hour.
“No, Captain Modesitt, if you go in, you will end up fighting Poseidon, and even with her half-crippled, that’s not a fight you can win.”
“We can’t just let them walk away with one of the Commonwealth’s most advanced battlecruisers,” Modesitt objected.
“We don’t have a choice,” James admitted. “We need to get the hell out of this system before they get Poseidon online, and then we need to come up with a plan. For now, however, all we can do is keep Chariot around as a watchdog while Captain Colton’s people get her ship in motion.”
“Where do we go from here?” Colton asked.
“Deep space,” James told her. “Somewhere no one is going to think to look while we decide what we do about the fact that a two-bit pirate now has one of the Commonwealth’s most advanced battlecruisers.”
“Fuck,” Modesitt snarled. “I hate this.”
“Believe me, Captain, I hated being repeatedly shot and waking up a triple amputee more,” James said dryly.
#
Chapter 36
Antioch System
15:00 November 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
Thoth once more led the way as the convoy arrived back at the Antioch system, erupting from warped space five minutes ahead of the rest of the ships and feeding data back to Kodiak and the other ships. Q-probes flew out from the cruiser, clearing a safe zone in front of the ship even as Houshian guided the rest of the convoy in behind her.
Unlike Salvatore, though, Antioch had its own network of q-com-enabled satellites and probes, which meant that Kyle had known what was waiting for him even before Thoth had emerged from warped space.
After the last few incidents, however, he didn’t trust anything that suggested things were safe and normal, so out ahead the cruiser went.
Kodiak followed her out, her own scanners sweeping space as Song launched a two-squadron combat space patrol.
“Everything is clear,” Taggart reported. “Nothing unexpected; two of Antioch’s gunships are orbiting at one million kilometers, keeping an eye on our emergence locus.”
“Good to see them,” Kyle agreed. “Send them my regards by radio and let Admiral Belisarius know we’re back. We’ve kept him updated, but if he has any questions, I’ll be available.”
“Yes, sir,” Jamison replied.
“Any change in the status around Antioch?” Kyle asked.
“They’re still clustering their ships and escorting the convoys from Orontes to Seleucus,” Sterling told him. “Those escorts are lighter now, but they’re still not letting things relax.”
“That’s for the best,” Kyle reminded them. “We may have shattered the force that came after us, but we have no idea how many ships this Coati actually has, or just what the Commonwealth has sent out this way. They could still have that damn Hercules show up.”
The tactical officer shook his head as he studied the system.
“If that Hercules shows up, they’re screwed, sir,” Sterling admitted. “Ten gunships, maybe three hundred fifth- and sixth-generation fighters? Unless their orbital platforms are better armed than they look, that one battlecruiser will walk right over everything Antioch has.”
“I know,” Kyle told him. “And if Belisarius doesn’t know that, I’ll make sure he realizes. We’ve dealt the pirates a body blow I doubt they’ll recover from, but the Terran involvement adds a whole layer of bullshit.”
“We got nothing from the debris and prisoners,” Taggart complained. “So, what do we do?”
“Exactly what we are doing. Make sure shipping moves safely, watch for pirates, see if Nebula’s people can track the ransoms back through Amadeus.” Kyle shook his head. “We don’t go home until the job is done, people. So, let’s keep our eyes open for any scrap of data we find.”
“Sir, I have Admiral Belisarius on the q-com for you,” Jamison told you.
“I figured,” Kyle agreed. “I’ll take it in my office. Commander Taggart has the con.”
#
Admiral Recep Belisarius looked far more relaxed today than he had any of the previous times Kyle had spoken with the man, his perpetual exhausted edge softened by the lessened threat.
“Captain Roberts,” he greeted Kyle. “It seems we underestimated just how much you could achieve in a single month.”
“We got lucky,” Kyle demurred. “We were clever and we had advantages the pirates couldn’t see coming, but we got lucky. And Alexander got crippled along the way.”
“My Premier has instructed me to make certain that our condolences are passed on to the families of those lost in the battles your people have fought on our behalf,” Belisarius told him. “Your victories have given the region our first true peace of mind in years, and the news arrived at a fortuitous time for Premier Yilmaz’s government.”
“Did it?” Kyle asked.
“Yes, the news of your victory over the pirates reached Orontes the morning of the election for the House,” the Admiral replied. “Instead of losing much of their majority, the Premier’s party increased their strength. We are better positioned than ever to sustain the Free Trade Zone through this difficult time.”
“That’s good to know,” Kyle said slowly. “Because the difficulties are far from over.”
“You crushed the pirates, Captain. Three quarters of their ships destroyed! How can they recover from that?!”
“Easily, Admiral, if they have more ships,” the big officer pointed out carefully. “According to my intel, in the last two years alone, the pirates have taken more than fifteen freighters. Each of those ships had four Class One mass manipulators. If they had the resources—and we have no idea of the extent or limits of their resources—those ships alone could have provided the most expensive component for over sixty corsairs like the ones we fought.”
From the silence and shocked expression on his screen, Belisarius hadn’t thought that through.
“Plus, Admiral, we now know the Commonwealth has ships here,” Kyle continued. “One of them a Hercules-class battlecruiser. That ship alone could conquer your star system, Admiral Belisarius. My guess would be that they brought two. This situation is not resolved, Admiral. The battle to save your Trade Zone has barely begun.”
“Damn,” the Admiral sighed. “I knew about the Terran ship,
but my analysts hadn’t dared suggest there were that many corsairs. I think…” He sighed again. “I think they were worried to hand the government news that was too bad. The worst-case estimate I was given was twenty of those ships, a number we now know was too low.”
“Hopefully, the bastards don’t have another thirty ships kicking around,” Kyle agreed, “but we have to plan for the absolute worst-case scenario, which is that they can still field a force equivalent to the one we fought at Salvatore, plus two Commonwealth battlecruisers.”
The Admiral looked pale and tired again now.
“What do we do, Captain?” he asked. “We bought our warships from you and the Imperium, neither of whom has ships to sell anymore. The Commonwealth would never have sold warships to us and that certainly won’t change now!
“No system in this sector can stop the force you describe. Even your own task group would fail in the face of that strength. If they have that kind of fleet, we are doomed.”
“And that, Admiral, is the surest sign that they don’t have it,” Kyle agreed. “If this Coati had another thirty ships, he’d have rolled over your systems by now. The Commonwealth doesn’t want to conquer you right now; they want to use you to draw our forces out of position.”
He sighed.
“Something we really no longer have a choice about doing,” he admitted. “I have been offered reinforcements, but…there are no guarantees on timing or numbers. If we wait for them, this region may come apart at the seams before they arrive.”
“So, what do we do?” Belisarius echoed.
“I need a target, Admiral,” Kyle told him. “If we find a base, an anchorage, I can hit it hard enough that even the Terran battlecruisers won’t stand a chance. But without a target, all I can do is guard your freighters.”
“Then I will redouble our intelligence efforts,” Belisarius promised. “With the Premier’s majority secure for at least two more years, there are options available we did not have before.
Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Page 26
