“And I’m not sure our fleet can handle twelve hundred Wendira starfighters.”
#
Somewhere in the system, two stealthed Wendira carriers lurked.
In Hope orbit, Harriet and Kurzman consolidated their fleet. Three super-battleships, all fully modernized with defensive systems. Four fast battleships, only half of them modernized. Two Terran Thunderstorm-class cruisers, with full modern defenses and plasma lances allowing them to punch well above their weight. Thirty-four remaining Imperial cruisers of various classes, twelve of which didn’t have modern defenses.
A dozen destroyers, ten of them fully modern Capital-class ships, mostly Militia, and two un-upgraded Descendants.
Fifty-five warships, seven of them capital ships. It was a more powerful force in any sense than the one Earth had been conquered with five years earlier. It was certainly a more powerful force than Harriet had expected to command for several more years, even if a third of its most powerful ships were Militia.
It was also, she was grimly certain, nowhere near enough for the task ahead.
Kandak had given them the Laian Republic’s full files on the Wendira space fleet, and they made for grim reading. The Flying Sword of Fire–class starfighter was capable of sustaining seventy percent of lightspeed for extended periods and carried two short-range point-eight-five-cee missiles, along with a plasma cannon vastly more powerful than the Imperium had dreamed could be mounted on such a small craft.
The star intruders, at least, had a noticeable weakness: to cram in an entire Grand Wing of starfighters, plus two battalion-equivalent assault transports, the ten-million-ton ships had no offensive weapons whatsoever.
A star hive, however, was ten times the intruders’ size with only four times the starfighters. They carried an entire division, ten thousand strong, of Warrior and Drone landing troops. Plus massed batteries of point-eight-five cee missile launchers and proton beams.
Laian intelligence, at least, agreed with Imperial intelligence that the Wendira didn’t have any secret superweapons. None of the faster-than-light weapons systems that they now knew both the Laians and the Mesharom had.
Just vast numbers of blisteringly fast, terrifyingly well-armed small parasite craft that the Imperial fleet had minimal defenses against.
“Echelon Lord?”
“Yes, Sier?” Harriet answered her flag captain before she realized that the Yin was standing in the door to her office. “Come in, sit down,” she instructed.
“Any brilliant ideas?” he asked, settling into a chair and gesturing at the floating data display showing the star hive specifications.
“Hoping they arrive after Tan!Shallegh?” Harriet replied with a chuckle. “I’m not worried about the star intruders now,” she continued. “We can handle two hundred starfighters, I think. But a hundred-million-ton carrier with a thousand starfighters?”
She shook her head.
“With Villeneuve here and our strength doubled, we can probably take her,” she told him. “If they get here before the Militia, though, all I can see us managing is a holding action. We might be able to keep the fleet together through the first pass, but they’ll just keep rearming the fighters and sending them at us.”
“Until either they run out of starfighters or we’re dead.”
Her flag captain shook his head, his dark beak glinting in the light.
“Should we consider evacuating the colony?” he finally asked. “It’s still relatively small…”
“If we packed our ships like sardines and risked the life support, we could evacuate about eighty thousand people,” Harriet said quietly. She’d run the numbers. “That would leave, roughly, a hundred and thirty thousand behind.
“Plus, we’d be giving up that ship, and my orders are to do no such thing. If I could get everyone off that planet, I’d blow the damn thing from orbit and leave, but…”
“We could just destroy it,” Sier suggested.
“Wendira psych profiles tell me that’s a bad idea,” Harriet replied. “The Royals, especially, are very…possessive. If they think something is theirs, they do not handle being denied very well. They’ll negotiate if they think they’ve been beaten, but to simply have it denied…”
“Wonderful. I like them less by the moment.”
“That’s why the Laians hate them,” she pointed out. “Laians look just enough like Wendira workers that, combined with the overthrow of the Ascendancy, the Wendira can’t help but see them as workers that have forgotten their place.
“The fact that the Laians won’t fall into line and obey like the Royals think they should…”
Harriet shrugged.
“Six wars,” Sier said slowly. “I’ve seen estimates of over a trillion dead. Because the Wendira think the Laians should be their servants?”
“Hence why I don’t think blowing up the ship is the best plan,” Harriet replied dryly. “No, Captain. They’re coming. We’ll fight them, hold them until Villeneuve gets here.
“Then we’ll kick their asses into next week and make Tan!Shallegh’s entire trip out here unnecessary.”
“Of course, Echelon Lord,” Sier agreed with a confidence she doubted he felt.
That was fair. She wasn’t nearly as confident as she pretended, either.
#
Pat knew he should rest. Eat. Sleep. Something.
About all he was managing to do, however, was get off the flag deck so he wasn’t pacing in public, adding to everyone else’s tension.
President Washington had a crew of fifty-seven hundred. Each Thunderstorm had a crew of six hundred. Seventy-five hundred men and women had died under his command in the last few hours, and he wasn’t certain what he could have done differently.
“Admiral, search and rescue is reporting in from Washington,” Captain Fang’s voice interjected into his pacing.
“Thank you, Captain,” Pat replied gratefully. “How bad?”
“Better than we had any right to expect,” Fang told him. The Captain sounded strained but not quite as heartbroken as Pat Kurzman felt. “When the Imperium designed these ships, they designed them well—our upgrades made them tougher, but the Imperium designed them to keep crew-sentients alive when they knew they could lose half the ship if something went wrong.”
“And?” Pat said slowly.
“They’re still chasing down escape pods, but the evacuation of the main hull fragments is proceeding,” his flag captain replied. “Current estimate is we pulled three thousand, two hundred and forty from the wreck, and there’s at least another twelve hundred we’ve either retrieved from pods or still in space.”
Pat made sure his camera and microphone were off, turning away from his desk to rub his eyes, hard.
So, his losses weren’t as bad as he thought. He still couldn’t shake the feeling he’d screwed up somewhere.
“Thank you, Captain,” he told the other man. He didn’t know Fang well, but he suspected the Captain had known exactly what his Admiral was doing. “I appreciate the update.”
“Part of the service, Vice Admiral.”
Before the intercom channel could cut off, a shout echoed in the background behind Fang:
“Hyper portal! Multiple hyper portals! We have incoming.”
Pat grimaced.
“I’ll be on the flag deck immediately,” he told Fang. “I’m guessing we have customers.”
#
Chapter 39
There was a certain arrogance, Pat concluded, when a stealth ship stopped bothering to hide. The two star intruders had been in Alpha Centauri for at least half a day, probably even longer, but they’d spent that entire time wrapped in the protective shroud of their stealth fields.
Now, however, both of them dropped their stealth fields. Each still had a wing of sixteen starfighters flying what humanity would have termed a combat air patrol around them as they headed to meet their big sisters, but they basically ignored any threat the Imperials could offer them.
Given those big s
isters, however, Pat couldn’t blame them. The image floating in the holographic display was a worse nightmare than he would have dared to allow himself to have. There wasn’t one hundred-million-ton alien supercarrier.
There weren’t even two.
There were three of the pyramid-like alien warships.
Three star hives. Each outmassing the entire defensive force. Accompanied, though it hardly mattered, by a dozen ten-million ton ships equivalent to an Imperial battleship. The Wendira name roughly translated as “star shield” but, unlike the two ships mothering starfighters, these did have equivalents in Imperial service.
Including the two intruders, four hundred and forty million tons of Core Power warships were now in the Alpha Centauri system. The star hives and their battleship escort were moving slowly for interface-drive warships, moving towards Hope at a mere ten percent of lightspeed while the two smaller ships headed to meet them.
“Well, Echelon Lord Tanaka,” he greeted the Imperial officer with a cheer he didn’t feel. “I’m glad you’re in charge. What’s the plan?”
Tanaka gave him a dirty look that he hoped no one else on either flag deck saw.
“Formation Foxtrot-One,” she said calmly. “No tricks or games for the moment. All escorts are to advance and cover the capital ships.”
The Imperium had minimal anti-fighter doctrine, but the influence of Terran Captains—like Tanaka—who had insisted on using proton beams for missile defense meant that most of the ships in the fleet had both the software and the mobility to use the heavy beams as an anti-fighter weapon.
What they would shortly discover would be if the Sword and Buckler lasers were capable of hurting the fighter craft. Pat’s bet was on “no”, but they were going to have to try.
“The command is yours, Echelon Lord,” he told Tanaka. “We’ll do everything we can.”
“For now, we hold position and we survive the first fighter strike,” she replied on a direct channel. “Three thousand of them.”
Pat hoped none of his crew saw his shiver of fear.
“The Imperium has never fought starfighters head on before,” he said. “The modifications you convinced the Navy to make to their proton beams give us a better chance than we would have had four years ago.
“We don’t know how effective they’re going to be—but neither do the Wendira!”
#
The command center at the dig site was fully linked to the sensors of the fleet above them, which meant Harold Rolfson knew exactly how screwed they were. He and Indus both studied the fleet of massive ships bearing down on them, and then turned to each other.
“We need to dig in,” she told him. “If we set up sufficient and dense enough fortifications, we can force them to fight us on the ground. They won’t want to bombard the site from orbit; they’ll risk losing what they came for.”
Harold checked the screens for the local area. All of the civilians were long gone back to New Hope now, but there was the better part of five thousand Imperial and Terran soldiers around the dig site.
“You’re right,” he allowed. “But if we’ve lost the orbitals, all we’re doing is bleeding them—and ourselves.”
“What else can we do?” she demanded.
“What’s our first responsibility, Battalion Commander?” Harold asked gently.
“The people,” Indus responded instantly, then snapped her beak in a half-laugh, half-sigh.
“Fall back to New Hope City and dig in there,” he told her. “Leave your automated systems in place with a token force; we’ll use the STS missiles and automatic weapons to hold as long as we can—but if the fleet is gone, I’m more worried about our citizens than this damned ancient ship.”
“Too many have already died for it,” Indus said.
“I won’t sacrifice two hundred thousand civilians for it,” Harold replied. “It’s your call, Battalion Commander.”
As the senior officer of the garrison, the landed Marine forces would defer to her regardless of regular seniority.
“Sunstorms,” she cursed, but there was no heat to it. “And where will you be, Captain?”
“Right here,” he told her. “Handling the STS missiles and the automatic systems. Someone has to.”
“But you would send the rest of us to safety?”
For a nonhuman, Indus could be very perceptive.
“What are you planning, Captain Rolfson?”
“What I must,” he replied. “And yes, I would get everyone else to safety. Too many of our people have died for this wreck already. Get them out of here.”
“Very well, Captain.” Indus shook her head. Technically, he was senior to her, but rank differences didn’t communicate well from space forces to ground forces, let alone from Militia to Imperial forces.
“We will withdraw to protect the city. But I warn you, I have no enthusiasm for explaining a heroic sacrifice to Dr. Wolastoq. Please stay alive, Captain.”
“I have every intention of it,” he said with a smile. “If I have my say, Battalion Commander, the only people who are going to die from here on out are Wendira.”
“And what tools do you have to guarantee that?”
“None whatsoever,” he admitted. “Just…hope.”
Indus nodded, calmly, as if he hadn’t just admitted he was likely to blow himself up with the ship.
“Sometimes, hope is the greatest weapon we have.”
#
It took longer for the Wendira to consolidate their forces than Harriet had expected, though she was hardly going to complain about the extra minutes. The two lighter carriers joined the three star hives in the center of the formation, and the battleships jockeyed around, establishing a defensive perimeter around the motherships roughly three light-minutes away from Hope—well outside the Imperials’ weapons range.
They drifted there for several more minutes while the star hives and star intruders spewed out starfighters in ever-increasing numbers. Harriet suspected they could launch faster if they needed to, but since they knew she wasn’t going to attack them, they took the time to deploy their ships safely.
Over thirty-two hundred starfighters formed up around the Wendira fleet, and Harriet still wasn’t entirely certain just what she was going to do about them. Six-thousand-plus missiles would be bad enough, though she was reasonably sure she’d have a fleet left after them.
She wasn’t sure how much of a fleet, and the starfighters themselves would close on their missiles’ heels. Whether or not Hope would have any defenders left after that was a question she wasn’t going to make bets on.
“Start pre-deploying missiles,” she ordered. “If they’re going to give us lots of warning of where they’re coming from, let’s use it.”
Pre-deployed missiles were usually a waste of time. They were hugely vulnerable, required more computer support than usual, and spent a disproportionate amount of their available flight time getting into position—when the flight time was under a minute, the fact that turning the drive off and back on again cost you eighteen seconds of flight time was important.
The fighters had to come to them and were almost as fast as the missiles themselves. The pre-placed missiles would have a third less range than her ship-launched weapons, but the starfighters’ missiles had even less endurance.
Hundreds, then thousands, of missiles spilled out of her ships’ launchers, moving delicately into shoal upon shoal of deadly fish.
“When do we stop pre-placing missiles?” Ikil asked after the second round went out. “If they wait long enough, we could end up with our entire warhead load sitting out in space.”
“They won’t wait that long,” Harriet told him. “But…if they wait long enough, we’ll hold at fifty thousand weapons.”
That would take almost ten minutes to deploy and would be the point at which their computers actually started to have problems handling the telemetry links. She didn’t expect the Wendira to give her that long.
The Wendira ships were almost invisible beh
ind the glittering swarm of starfighter icons. Her analysts couldn’t even count the tiny ships; they were simply too numerous and too far away.
One of those ships was Wing’s Nightmare, under Hive Commandant Ashtahkah. One of the other two star hives, presumably, carried the Fleet Commandant actually in charge of this operation. Likely an experienced Warrior-caste, someone whose entire life had been dedicated to war.
Someone who had fought Core Power fleets. What would they make of her defenders, she wondered?
Would they overestimate her people or underestimate them?
The Wendira had the firepower to wipe her fleet from the face of the universe. Her only chance for survival was for them to make a mistake—and everything she saw suggested that being underestimated was all too possible.
“They’re moving,” Han said softly. “All the capital ships are holding position, just starfighters coming forward and… Sir, can you double-check this?”
Ikil was at the human officer’s station before Han had finished asking, looking over Han’s data.
Then he laid a wet, furred hand on his subordinate’s shoulder and squeezed reassuringly before he turned his big eyes to Harriet.
“They’re splitting their forces,” he told her. “Holding at least four Grand Wings in a carrier defense formation over a thousand starfighters strong.”
“Who the hell are they afraid of?” Han asked. “It’s certainly not us!”
“If they’re only sending two thousand fighters at us, they may change their mind on that tune,” Harriet replied with a cold smile. “But you’re right, Speaker Han. They’re not afraid of us. They’re worried about the Laians coming back or the Mesharom showing up.
“We’re not a threat. We’re barely an obstacle. They’ve underestimated us—so, let’s all make damn certain they learn the error of their ways, shall we?”
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 30
