by Lee Guo
But what choice did he have? Mu Pei wondered. If he didn’t order the fleet to recombine, he would be killed anyway, since his ship was one of the slowest ships in the fleet. So, the choice was whether he wanted to do something that might save the rest of the ships within his fleet, or do nothing at all. In either way, he died.
It was an easy decision.
I have to do it…
…before the probe network was completely eliminated and he couldn’t message his ships at all.
Betelgeuse Combined Fleet
Beginner's Luck
Bridge…
“This is Admiral Mu Pei to all ships. The Evasion Protocol is rescinded. Our probes are losing the war against their probes. Our t-jammers are ineffective. All ships head for coordinates 89972, 51002, 28904, to reunite our ships into one fleet. You may coordinate your move by grouping with other ships to form protection packs, but you must all get there before the enemy’s main fleet of slower ships arrives there before us. Good luck on your journey. Further orders will be given out later. From now on, you may break communication silence. Mu Pei out.”
Vier sighed. That’s what she would have done. She was a bit surprised when that button on her right armrest suddenly beeped. She’d expected it to never beep, again. When she pressed it, she was relieved to see Admiral Mu Pei’s face and his message. But she also knew that…
The button beeped, again. She tapped it.
Admiral Mu Pei’s face appeared in front of her. This time, however, it was silent as it gazed at her. This was no fleetwide message, she thought. He’s looking at me directly.
“I believe I own you an apology, for not trusting your instincts in both instances,” Mu Pei admitted.
“But my instinct was wrong in the second instance, sir,” Vier replied.
“But not for the wrong reasons, Kleingelt,” Mu Pei bit his lips, then stroked his white beard. “I’m sorry it had turned this way. We could have saved the whole fleet if I had listened to your suspicions in that briefing room in the first place. You were right always. Your intuition is always on target…which brings me here.”
Vier was silent. She knew why he was talking to her directly. It wasn’t just to apologize. She knew the danger he was in for being the first to break communication silence. “Admiral…”
“Please, Kleingelt, call me Mu. I’m no different than your mentor at the academy.”
More silence.
“Mu.”
“Upon my death, you will take command, Kleingelt. I will try my best to defend my ship and I will even try to gather with a wolfpack but I doubt we’ll have enough to deflect whatever they send at me. Since you’re the second highest ranking officer in the fleet, it’ll be up to you to get this fleet safely home. However, the situation being as it is, there is no shame if you decide at some point in the future to abandon the heavier elements so your lighter, faster elements can move out of danger.”
Vier gazed back, her face solemn. “I understand, Admiral. I will do my best.”
“You’re the admiral, now. No point in suspending reality with modesty. Good luck and may you bring better decisions and fortune to this command than me.”
“Good luck, sir.”
Mu Pei nodded, then cut the communication. His face disappeared.
She wondered if she would ever see him, again—perhaps only in her memories. Then she wondered if she’d be able to have memories if she herself was killed in action. The Beginner’s Luck was the same class of dreadnought as Mu Pei’s Excalibur, slow and unmaneuverable.
When she did see him again, it was through a fleetwide message…again, encrypted…stating that upon his death, command of the fleet would transfer to Rear Admiral, Upper Half, Kleingelt. It was his official statement, even though everyone knew the chain of command. Usually, such a promotion and sudden responsibility gave her unrivaled excitement, but this time she felt nothing. A dull, numb — nothing. She went about her business, thinking about the plans she would implement.
Betelgeuse Combined Fleet
Flagship, Dreadnought Excalibur
Flag Bridge…
It didn’t take one hour, but two for the enemy to enter extreme weapons range of Mu Pei’s dreadnought, the HFSF Excalibur.
“They sure took their sweet time. I thought we were going to make it, admiral,” said Excalibur’s flag captain, Royal Sanford said as he stood beside Mu Pei’s admiral’s chair.
“I thought so, too.” Mu Pei found himself shaking his head. The odds really didn’t look good at all. He felt lucky that he’d found a pack of human ships that offered him protection. There were twelve ships within the pack. But the enemy had sent twenty ships to intercept his flotilla. Ton by ton, his group of warships outweighed the enemy by twenty to one. But Mu Pei knew that was a false sense of security. Several facts made him tense. One, in battle between the sacrificial fleet he sent to test the enemy’s 2400 forward ships, that fleet had been utterly annihilated. Two, in the battles between packs of human warships trying to make it to the gathering point and packs of enemy light attack ships, the humans had not fared well. The pack strategy seemed to be effective to a degree, but only when human numbers dramatically outnumbered the enemy. The tonnage difference did matter, but only when it was 80 to 1, did the humans win.
Thus, Mu Pei had all the reasons to be nervous. He was going to die. Oh, yes, he was going to die.
Mu Pei bit his lip. Kleingelt, if only I listened to you. So many good men wouldn’t have died. But I gambled instead, and I lost. It was a calculated gamble, but a failed one nevertheless.
In the six hours since he followed Kleingelt’s advice to retreat, Mu Pei had had a little time to think about his decision to go forward with counter offense. He wondered…if the exact situation happened again, would he have made the same mistake, again, given what he knew now? And the answer was…yes. At the time, all he knew were suspicions, nothing more. He would do it the same way, over and over again.
The irony of destiny was that he would always make the same decision because that is what he was. He couldn’t be anyone but himself. To think that he would be smarter or better or wiser or had a better intuition would be the same as believing that he could change his own DNA and childhood experiences.
To regret one’s mistake because of new knowledge gained in the future was a pointless act. It was far better to use that knowledge to make better decisions in the future and present.
Exhaling the recycled air of the flag bridge, he glanced at the holomonitor. They were coming at him, closer and closer. His entire body shook. Never had he sensed the frailness of his own mortality as he did now. Control yourself, Mu. Would you want the universe to know you died shaking like a trapped mouse?
He knew he stood little chance of making it back home to the main fleet, or—to his family on Mars Planetia. Before today, he’d been optimistic. He had known he would be well guarded against an enemy that didn’t outmatch humanity by much in hyperlight combat. Now…
Mu Pei glanced at his armpad. On it, he had written a quick goodbye note an hour ago. It was nothing too sentimental. He just wanted to be remembered by his husband in the calmest way that would create the least emotional trouble. The same thing for his kids. The message was sent through a drone courier that headed back to federation space at a speed of 100,000 SL. But did he miss something? Did he forget to write something important?
He shook his head. It was too late, now. Always too late.
Regret, again.
He shook it off.
On the holomonitor, he watched as the twenty feline cruisers enter the point of no return zone for his squadron’s antimatter missiles. Now, they couldn’t run away even if they wanted to.
“Let’s show them what we got, Sanford,” Mu Pei stated, glancing at his flag captain, with a sudden courage that surprised even himself. He pulled up his combat control interface. “Now, they’ll see how a federation vice admiral fights. All ships within the pack, fire missiles.”
Come get
me, you bastards.
For some reason, his fingers stopped shaking. He didn’t know why.
Betelgeuse Combined Fleet
Beginner's Luck
Bridge…
Vier watched Mu Pei’s battle in real time, herself paying attention to how the enemy responded to the Vice Admiral’s maneuvers. It was definitely one way, but it was clear that Mu Pei had devised the best approach towards taking out as many of the enemy’s ships as possible before his own ship got destroyed.
In the first five minutes, Mu Pei crippled four enemy light cruisers with his entire squadron’s worth of missiles. So when the twenty hunter-killers entered h-beam range, two were dead and two were heavily damaged. Then, that’s when things got deadly. The felines shot their h-waves and within the first volley, two of Mu Pei’s battlecruisers were heavily damaged as well. Before today, she’d never seen a weapon capable of doing that.
The twelve human ships continued firing nonstop with the only weapon they had, their h-beams, but as long as the two squadrons didn’t overlap each other, the felines deflected the h-beams with their h-shields. Another human warship exploded, then another. Finally, when things looked impossible, the two squadrons intermingled, and that’s when Mu Pei’s h-beams hit unshielded areas of the feline squadron. Feline ships had, at best, three h-deflectors that could block hits from a 360 degree angle, but often times those h-deflectors could not move into position fast enough before the h-beams hit the ship, especially in close-range combat of less than twenty light-minutes.
Mu Pei played like an animal, ferociously attacking each feline ship with his massive dreadnought sized h-beams. Each h-beam that hit, forced an entire section of the alien vessel to disappear from existence. However, just as it was impossible to block the h-beams from close range, it was just as impossible and even more so to block an h-wave at close range. The h-waves were so damaging that an entire face of a dreadnought could be annihilated from existence from just one h-wave hit. What made it worse was that Mu Pei’s squadron had no counter whatsoever to the sudden explosions that occurred inside their ships even when their h-deflectors and gravitron shields were at full. Ship after ship of humans exploded because of damage to their innards from this magical weapon that could transport energy as if a wormhole had opened up inside a ship.
After eight minutes of combat, clearly Mu Pei had lost, however valiantly. Vier watched numbly as the Excalibur exploded and then disappeared from existence when its bubble collapsed. The survivors of the battle were three heavily damage feline ships, who then headed on a course that rendezvoused with several other feline ships.
They gathered for an attack on the main human fleet that was still coalescing.
Three hours later.
Betelgeuse Combined Fleet
Flagship, Dreadnought Beginner’s Luck
Flag Bridge…
Vier had waited patiently. It took longer than three hours for the ships to reverse course, so they could coalesce together at a spot far away from the point where they had dispersed—actually five hours. The delay was because ships decided to huddle together into packs in order to create better defenses. This took more time, but the fleet still managed to become one before the enemy’s main fleet of 2300 heavies reached them.
Did the extra two hours work? Did combining into packs mean everyone in it had a greater chance of survival?
Yes, and no. Yes, having packs meant that ships were more protected against the enemy’s advanced weapons, but not by much. And no, because forming packs forced the ships to travel a longer distance, forcing them to expose themselves to attacks away from the main human fleet being coalesced.
Vier gazed at her monitors. Out of the 4500 ships that had made up the human fleet prior to the dispersion, only 3600 came back. Worse yet, the ships Vier had lost while being dispersed had been mostly the heavier, slower ships in her fleet…battlecruisers and dreadnoughts.
Now they were finally all here, Vier thought. One gigantic fleet, all under her command. They had sunk maybe 400 alien vessels during the entire fiasco. Now, they were really put up to the test.
For the past two hours since she became fleet commander, she had a lot of time to discuss with her fellow flag officers on what to do, much in the same way as Mu Pei had done in his holoconference. The choice was unanimous. They would counter whatever formation the enemy had with one of their own. Evasion through dispersion was not an option this time. And retreating the faster ships would only be done if it was an absolutely certain the biggest elements were lost.
They would fight, and they would stand together. They would all survive or all of them would die.
Eyeing the holomap, Vier wondered what the enemy’s light ships-hunter-killers—were doing. They were hovering outside of extreme missile range, not that she had many missiles left. Was this hesitation? Or was it the act of predators surrounding and intimidating a prey or were they making last minute communications with each other before simultaneously attacking?
She gazed at the enemy main heavy fleet way behind–the grouping of ships that had 90 percent of the enemy’s observable tonnage and—she shuddered. It moved towards her at a pace of roughly 14,000 SL, while her fleet of 3600 ships moved away at 16,000 SL. The only danger she felt was that when the enemy’s hunter-killers decided to engage, she would be pinned down and if the battle continued too long, the enemy’s main fleet would be able to touch her. She had an infinitesimal chance against the enemy’s light cruisers and destroyers, but if the big ships got here, her death would be absolute.
So…she waited, adjusting her formation to counter whatever the enemy would throw at her.
And then, when she thought they’d never attack—they did.
They surrounded her. Since those feline light craft had greater mobility, and since her own light craft could not come out of the protection of her heavies—otherwise, she’d be separating her fleet and weaken herself through partitioning and the enemy could surround her 3600 ship sphere before attacking from all sides.
Then, they attacked.
Vier immediately ordered her missiles to fire, the moment the enemy entered the no-return zone. The enemy had no missiles left after engaging the sacrificial fleet earlier, so they countered with nothing in the missile stage.
About 40,000 missiles exited the surface tubes of all her warships and sped towards the enemy on all sides. She knew her missiles could not take out a single feline ship if she diluted her targeting, so she ordered those missiles to focus on fewer targets. Fewer targets meant more missiles per target…about 50 missiles per enemy ship on average.
Hyperspace was pitch dark and could not show light, but her t-sensors could scan the insides of the warp bubbles of the enemy ships. Shields blew, entire sections cauterized on a scale unlike anything seen in a decade, and thousands of those feline warriors died. When her last missile hit and exploded its antimatter fury, Vier tallied the casualties—the end result was that she was able to neutralize or severely cripple 500 enemy ships.
That wasn’t bad, and perhaps in an alternative reality or in a miraculous future in which she survived this, she could recommend to all the sector commanders and the Fleet Admiral on Trantor Base that humanity’s only chance was to create missile ships. But for now, her survival was not remotely guaranteed as the remaining 1500 enemy light, but vastly superior, warships continued inward towards her 3600 ship ball.
When they entered h-beam range, Vier ordered three things. One: she told her fighters to launch from her carriers. Human hyperspace fighters were big vessels, much larger than their sublight counterparts. They carried a hyperspace suspender and at most, two h-beam ports. They had no defense whatsoever, except some minor grav shielding and a little nanocarbon armor. They certainly didn’t have h-deflectors. These fighters soon fell in position with the rest of Vier’s ships.
Two: she readied her Marine Assault Transports – the Valkyries – right behind her frontal surface. She believed these MABs, marine assault boats, would play a
crucial part in the battle and perhaps even turn the entire game around for her.
And three, she commanded all her ships to push outward in every direction because she knew her h-beams would do nothing if she attacked an enemy ship from just one direction, as was the case if the two fleets – the one in a ball and the one surrounding the ball – maintained their lines. The sooner they mixed their lines, the sooner she could start killing ships.
Naturally, the enemy fired their hyper-waves. Massive destabilization waves slammed into her ships, causing armor and hull to vanish. Every H-wave that was on target caused everything facing the hyperwave to disappear, and atmosphere to leak out, and power conduits to leak warship energy into the void. Her h-deflectors provided minimal protection, and she knew it. Her people died as ship after ship of humans were annihilated from the universe.
Then, six hundred thousand human deaths later, the two fleets interweaved.
It was havoc. It was on a scale of destruction few had ever seen before—and it was a great gamble.
Betelgeuse Fleet
Alpha-nine Wing, Squadron 8 “Night Shadows”
Fighter 1
“Go! Go! Go! Move! All wings, follow your designated patterns and weapons free!” the carrier controller’s voice yelled in Lieutenant, Senior Grade, Lucinda Sanford’s helmet.
Lucinda was irritated. Inside her cockpit, she tried everything she could to shake it off. That feeling… that miserable feeling when you lose someone close. Her husband for twenty-two years was the CO of the Excalibur, Admiral Mu Pei’s flagship. Throughout the years, she had lost a lot of close people, but never anything like this. Never in the world.
She glared at all those beeping and blinking instruments surrounding her. Outwardly, her face was blank, but she could hide her emotions well. Inside, she steamed. The love of her life was gone, just like that. She felt—she felt miserable and suicidal. She wanted to quit living.
