by Jay Allan
“Yes, Admiral. The AI is monitoring the readings.”
Winters nodded. Constitution’s primary artificial intelligence would pick up any energy spikes far more quickly than human eyes could…but he wasn’t trusting the evasive maneuvers to the computer, at least not entirely. He was going to add his own experience and instinct to the mix, and maybe—just maybe—give his people another chance to blast those railguns before they fired yet again.
“Energy spike detected, Admiral.” The AI’s voice was loud and clear all across Constitution’s bridge, and Winters was already reacting, even as the words continued to come from the speakers. He upped the engine power levels and blasted hard, the thrust vector almost directly forward.
Almost forward. He slipped in a mild angle in both he X-Y and Y-Z axes, just enough to add unpredictability to the maneuver, to slip Constitution just far enough from the enemy’s targeting plot to allow the deadly chunk of super-heavy metal to zip by his ship instead of crashing into it.
The railguns launched their projectiles at astonishing speeds, far beyond any hyper-velocity weapons the Confederation had ever possessed or faced, but they were still slow compared to speed of light-based systems like lasers. It took perhaps three or four seconds for the projectiles to cover the hundred eighty thousand kilometers from the Hegemony ships to Constitution. That wasn’t long, but Winters was ready, and even as he altered the ship’s vector yet again, the first three chunks of high-density metal zipped by. One came within a hundred meters of the ship, but all of them missed, and seconds later, another three followed.
Clint Winters let out a loud exhale, one far more audible than he’d intended, and he let his body slouch back into his chair. It would be two and half or three minutes before the enemy’s heavy guns were ready to fire again…and a glance at the countdown display told him he just might get off two shots with his primaries by then.
Two more shots. Two more chances to take out one of those railguns, before Constitution stared once more into the face of looming destruction.
* * *
“Yes!” Alicia Covington stood along the wall in the vast open space that was the main launch bay for Station Number Two, otherwise known as Fortress Bennett.
No doubt named after some local politician even more adept at graft and malfeasance than the average one…
Her eyes were glued to the small display screen on the wall, currently showing the space around Constitution and the enemy ships rapidly approaching Admiral Winters’s flagship…and Covington’s mother ship.
Covington had spent the last half hour racing all around the bay, shouting, cajoling, encouraging, threatening, and once or twice, even begging…anything she could think of to speed up the process of refitting her squadrons. Constitution and the rest of the fleet were hopelessly outgunned, as good as dead if she didn’t get another fighter strike launched. She might have managed to get interceptors back out by now, some at least, but all her ships were fitted for bombing runs. And loading the cumbersome plasma torpedo units took a lot more time than just topping off a fuel tank and relaunching.
She’d felt every second passing, almost cutting at her as each slid by into the next. But, Constitution had just scored a major hit on the lead enemy ship. Three of the battleship’s primaries had struck the target, and from the looks of things, the hits had been well-located. Confederation primaries didn’t hit as hard as the enemy heavies did, but they were deadly weapons nevertheless, and Covington dared to hope that Winters had managed to knock out the devastating guns on one of the three remaining railgun-armed vessels he faced.
She stood where she was for a few more seconds, savoring the joy of the hit. Then, she turned back and stared out over the bay, her eyes darting around, looking for the highest-ranking flight crew member she could terrorize. She had to get her ships back out at the enemy, at least some of them. She’d sent her pilots to grab some food, even an hour’s sleep, but she hadn’t left the bay herself. She’d wolfed down a sandwich one of her squadron leaders had brought her, but that was as much as she’d had time for.
“Lieutenant Foster,” she shouted, waving toward one of the crew commanders working on her ships, “I want six of these squadrons ready to launch in twenty minutes, max. Do you understand me?” She moved away from the wall, walking swiftly out toward the center of the bay, before the officer could pretend not to hear her and slip way. “Lieutenant…”
* * *
“Outstanding, Captain Holcott. Really good work.” Blanth stood next to the line of heavy guns, each of them almost completely buried under piles of fresh dirt and hastily constructed barricades. The hyper-velocity cannons were the heaviest ordnance Peterson’s division possessed, and Blanth had been shocked when he’d learned the massive weapons had been landed along with the Marines themselves. He couldn’t imagine what use Colonel Peterson could have had for the guns on a Confederation world. They were purely weapons of war, designed to target and destroy enemy ground armor and air assault units. But, whatever had urged the renowned officer to disembark the guns—most likely an overdeveloped sense of preparedness—it looked an awful lot like prescience right then.
“Your authorization to organize the locals into work details was a big help, Captain.” Holcott stood less than a meter away, looking every bit the veteran Marine Blanth himself was. The two men were of the same rank, indeed, Holcott might very well have had seniority…Blanth had purposely avoided checking such things. He was Tyler Barron’s representative in a manner of speaking, and that had proven to be enough to make him the de facto, if informal and enormously uncomfortable, commander of Dannith’s defenses.
And, the ‘authorization’ to—‘impress’ was a more accurate description than ‘organize’—locals had almost certainly been wildly illegal, despite the administrator’s signature next to his own, an addition he’d obtained almost at gunpoint. Blanth was fairly sure Holcott knew that as well as he did, but simply chose to ignore it, as he’d chosen to take orders from an officer who didn’t outrank him.
“Yes, I figured we could use help digging in, getting ready…but I was shocked to find that we had these guns available. They’ll be useful if the enemy lands armor, but I bet we can even shoot down landers with these, especially if we get some AI-assisted targeting.”
“They can definitely shoot down landers. We used them on Oldoran II, and we took out a good twenty percent of the Union landing craft, solely with these batteries. Took the bastards by surprise too, ‘cause they knew damned well that shit farming planet didn’t have a ground battery of it own hot enough to cook dinner over.”
Blanth smiled, but only for a second. He wished he had time to sit with Holcott and trade war stories, but the task Tyler Barron had given him—and that everyone around him seemed to go along with—didn’t leave him time for sleeping or eating, much less indulging in bragging contests with his comrades. The battle in space was still going on, but even Blanth’s meager knowledge about naval combat, he was pretty sure Winters’s forces, even including the forts, didn’t stand a chance. One way or another, he expected a ground assault.
Unless the enemy just decides to nuke the hell out of the planet from orbit.
That would be extremely unpleasant, of course, but even then, his entrenchments and fortifications gave at least some of the armored Marines on the surface a chance to survive whatever destruction the enemy rained down. It was notoriously difficult to completely exterminate a population from orbit. Possible, certainly, but the destructive force required was enormous.
“You’ve done a good job, Steve. You’ve handled the defense set up as well as Colonel Peterson would have, I’d say.” Holcott’s tone had changed, subtly but noticeably nevertheless. “I know you’re in a tough position.” It was the first time the other Marine had even hinted at a recognition that Blanth wasn’t some kind of general in uncontested command of the defense operation. “Tyler Barron chooses his people well.”
“Thank you, Vince. I’ve done everything I co
uld think of. Now, we’ll just have to wait…and see if it was enough.”
He took a deep breath. From what he knew of the strength of the attackers and defenders in the space around Dannith, he suspected he wouldn’t have to wait long.
Chapter Forty-Four
CFS Dauntless
75,000,000 Kilometers from Primary
Delphi System
Year 316 AC
Dauntless shook hard, the impact of the superhot plasma torpedo melting through the armored hull and into the internal systems beyond. Barron was already hunched over his comm unit, checking with Commander Glaven for a damage report. He’d hoped until about twenty seconds before impact that his guns could pick off the incoming warhead, but then the torpedo converted to pure plasma, and the chance to shoot it down was gone.
Next, he’d tried evasive maneuvers, but for a group he’d pegged as a bunch of rookies, the attacking fighter’s pilots not only showed considerable courage and determination, they also executed a textbook attack pattern. Dauntless’s gunners had shot down more than half of the approaching ships, but six had gotten through to launch their weapons. The turrets had taken out one of the torpedoes before the rest converted, leaving five heading for Dauntless, and Barron’s evasive skill the sole remaining defense.
That skill had proven capable of evading four of the five weapons, but in the final pass, he’d had to deal with three coming in at once from different vectors. With a nod to the unexpected skill of his attackers, he lurched the ship hard, giving the crew a hearty shakeup, and slipping past two of the three torpedoes.
But, it had proven impossible to evade the final one.
He’d felt the impact, and as soon as he did, he knew it had caused damage. Considerable damage. Not a critical hit, perhaps, not in the context of striking the reactors or knocking out the engines again, but bad enough nevertheless. It took out a couple of his starboard secondary batteries, he was sure of that. And, in this instance, ‘take out’ meant destroy utterly. The plasma was enormously hot, millions of degrees, and anything material—armor, hull, laser turrets—it struck vaporized in an instant. The lost guns couldn’t be fixed because they were gone, nothing left of them but refrozen chunks of metal.
He knew he’d lost the primaries too, even though Glaven hadn’t report that yet. Barron didn’t know the new Dauntless with the completeness and intimacy with which he’d known his beloved old vessel, but he’d served aboard both ships in enough battles to understand the fragility of the complex power transmission system required to operate the main guns. The weapons themselves were still intact, he was sure of that, just as he was also confident they were incapable of firing. He didn’t know if Glaven would be able to get them back online before Titania came into range—he wanted to guess 50/50, but his gut told him it was more likely a depressing 70/30 against—but he was sure there was nothing he could do about it. He had other things to do. His ship still faced swarms of interceptors, and even though the individual lasers mounted on the fighters were of limited power, he needed his defense grid up and running.
And, he needed to know, primaries or not, that Dauntless would be ready when Titania came into range.
“It’s not as bad as you probably think, sir. The power lines are pretty badly cut in several sections, and we’ve lost a couple secondaries and four or five of the point defense turrets, but we’ve still got engine power at seventy percent plus, and all three reactors are in decent shape.”
Barron almost asked what ‘decent’ meant, at least in terms of how much power his engineer could give him. But, he realized it didn’t matter, not unless he got the primaries back. The big guns were a huge energy suck, and he’d need everything the reactors could give him to charge them up while also executing some level of thrust or firing even the small defensive guns. But, without the big guns, he could manage everything else with considerably less energy flow.
“Primaries?” Barron had to ask, even though he knew the answer.
“Down, Admiral. I think we can get them back, but it’s going to take some time. There must be a hundred spots where lines and conduits are cut.”
“Before Titania is in range?” It was the important question, the only one that mattered. If Glaven couldn’t get the main guns back online by then, there was no point in working on them at all. The damage Dauntless would take fighting the other battleship, whether that fight was a victory or a loss, would almost certainly disable the main guns again.
A pause. Then: “I don’t know, sir. Maybe is the best I can give you now.”
Barron hated vague reports, but he knew this one was simply the truth. It was a gamble. Deploy scarce resources to the primaries…and take a chance on getting any gain from it. Or give up on the big guns, and use the available engineers and ‘bots elsewhere.
Barron considered the conservative approach, forgetting about the primaries and making sure the rest of his ship was in the best possible condition…but he’d always been somewhat of a gambler at heart, and his confidence in his people, and in their ability to accomplish difficult—if not almost impossible—tasks was all consuming.
“Get me the primaries,” he said, with a certainty in his tone that did not match what he was feeling.
“Yes, sir. We’re on it now.” The engineer sounded edgy, nervous…clearly not sure he could do what the admiral had ordered.
Barron cut the line, returning his attention to the bridge…and for all the respect he’d developed for Glaven, wishing fervently that he could have Anya Fritz there, even for the next hour.
* * *
“Cut thrust to twenty percent. Full power to the primaries.” Heaton’s voice was cold, emotionless, a state it was taking considerable energy to maintain. He hid his disappointment at the fact that his strike force had hit Dauntless with only a single torpedo. He had known all along how good Barron and his people were, but he’d still sat in mesmerized shock at the way the renegade admiral had maneuvered his ship, dodging four of the five torpedoes that had gotten past the uncanny marksmanship of Dauntless’s defensive gunners.
Still, even the lone hit had most likely caused significant damage, and that was on top of the hit he’d scored in the last system and the combined effects of the combat with the doomed cruisers. Dauntless had to be damaged, and possibly badly, and Heaton was betting that Titania was the only participant in the coming duel with functional primaries. It was an advantage, a big one, but he still had to score the hits against a crew with extraordinary expertise at dodging incoming attacks.
His strike force had requested permission to make strafing runs at Dauntless after the bombers had gone in, but he’d ordered them back instead. The chance of the interceptors doing significant damage to Barron’s ship with their small lasers was miniscule, and Heaton preferred to bring them back aboard before he engaged Dauntless in the final struggle. He wasn’t sure he’d have a chance to launch them again, but he was damned sure going to have them all outfitted as bombers in case he did. That would give the strike force more than enough power to eradicate Barron’s troublesome ship, and Heaton was finally convinced that Dauntless was, in fact, without her vaunted fighter squadrons. He regretted his earlier caution in sending out most of his fighters outfitted as interceptors. It had been a lost opportunity.
“Thrust down to twenty percent, Captain. Primary batteries charging.”
“Very well.” Heaton leaned back and sat quietly, waiting. Dauntless was already damaged, which gave him an edge in the coming fight….but he also knew Barron was better than he was, and the admiral’s veteran crew was the best the Confederation had. If he could score a couple hit with his primaries against an adversary whose long-ranged guns were offline, he was sure he could win the fight.
He’d allowed his rage to drive him, to override the uncertainty he’d felt at battling a former colleague. It had become considerably easier as he watched Dauntless gunning down the Confederation cruisers, but now, as the final struggle loomed so close, the unease returned. He was abo
ut to fight—to kill—a man whose exploits he’d followed with thrilled excitement for years.
He knew his duty, and he would see it done. And, whatever his recollections of Barron and his battles, the famous admiral was wrong here. Even if his prosecution had been a mistake, if he’d been unfairly targeted, he should have remained on Megara and fought to clear his name…not spilled Confederation blood to escape.
Heaton’s eyes narrowed, focusing on the gauge tracking the progress of arming the primaries. He’d never commanded a capital ship before, and though he was a combat veteran, he was in unfamiliar territory now, facing off against a man who was unquestionably the Confederation’s greatest battleship commander.
He’d analyzed the scanner reports, considered them from every perspective. The torpedo hit had knocked out Dauntless’s primaries, he was betting on that. He knew Barron would have his damage control teams working feverishly to get the weapons back online, but work like that took time, even for a crew like Dauntless’s.
He shifted in his chair, edgy, uncomfortable…and, if he was honest with himself, scared. He knew what he had to do, and he was going to see it done, whatever it took, but now he began to feel out of his depth, and the idea of Confederation ships firing on each other, Confederation crews killing each other, made him sick to his stomach.
His eyes moved to the display. The primaries were fully charged…and in another fifteen seconds, Titania would be in range of its target.
“Gunnery crews…prepare to fire.”
“Gunnery crew, prepare to fire.” The tactical officer repeated his command, and an instant later turned back toward him. “All crews report weapons operational and ready, sir.”
