by M. D. Cooper
The woman grew even more enraged, her face turning red.
“Our ancestors were from Sirius! They were caught in Kapteyn’s Streamer hundreds of years before you. They earned these worlds.”
“Sirians…that explains a lot,” Tanis shook her head before turning back to the admiral. “You say that we killed hundreds, but thousands would have died on our ships had your kinetic rounds connected.”
“They would not have!” the woman exclaimed. “You have advanced shielding, what we fired was merely a shot across the bow.”
Tanis couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Are you seriously going to attempt to paint us as the aggressors? Until your unmistakable act of war, we have only taken defensive actions. You are brigands, you attempt to seize whatever drifts past your system to better yourselves. You’re nothing more than well-established interstellar bandits.”
Tanis hadn’t even finished speaking her final words before the woman was yelling so loudly that the bridge’s audio systems lowered her output.
“You sanctimonious, dusty old bitch! Our people built this system out of nothing. We worked for millennia to create what you see. You would come here and pick our best worlds for yourselves in trade for trinkets. No one will have your tech. Not those pirates, not those core-world bastards, and certainly not you. I’ll—”
Tanis cut the connection.
“She seems excitable,” Captain Andrews said. “Though you may not have needed to goad her quite so much.”
“‘Needed’ is just the word,” Tanis replied. “It was clear that she opposed any sort of deal with us—but that cannot be the case across the entire system. I’ve just made her look the fool in front of her fleet. When the time comes for hard choices, it may be that not all of her people make the wrong ones.”
Tanis reviewed the battlefield. One squadron of Arc-5s patrolled the field of destroyed and disabled ships that was Padre’s fleet. The other twenty-two squadrons in the fleet’s first wing had formed two picket lines, one leading Kithari and the other trailing the gas giant.
The Pike and Gilese anchored the first group, and the Condor anchored the second with the Andromeda lurking nearby. Closer to the Intrepid lay the Orkney and Dresden, with their own fighter shields deployed around them.
Armed with deadly antimatter and fusion engines, the Intrepid’s eighteen heavy tugs provided the final layer of protection.
Scan called out impacts on the first rail gun emplacements, an event that kicked off the Boller assault.
“Looks like a quarter of their force,” Sanderson commented. “Thirty-six cruisers, forty destroyers and a mess of corvettes. No fighters, though.”
“From what Sera says, no one uses fighters anymore…though I wonder if that might change after they saw what our Arcs can do.”
“The odds look worse than when the Sirians invaded,” Terrance said softly. “And we had three times the ships we have now.”
“Like the admiral said,” Tanis replied. “Our fighters count for a lot—especially given that there are nearly five hundred of them between us and the Bollers. Seventy-two are Arc-6s, as well. They can park right in the engine wash of any of those cruisers and lance their ships to pieces.”
I just hope it will be enough, she thought.
“Hell, they can probably fly through those ships if they had to,” Sanderson grunted.
There’s a tactic no one will ever put in the books, Tanis thought to herself, worried that they would ultimately have to resort to just such an attack.
“Sirs? The Mark’s ships are doing something,” the scan officer reported.
* * * * *
Sera looked to Cheeky, Cargo, and Flaherty. “God, I hope this was the right play,” she said softly.
“There is no right play, here,” Flaherty replied.
The Mark ships shifted into a large sphere with the three cruisers at the center. Sabrina’s scan showed streams of gravitons flowing from the center ships to the corvettes on the perimeter. Those gravitons where harnessed and amplified by the corvettes and a kilometer-thick shield snapped into place around the armada.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Sera whispered. “She totally nailed that.”
“They’re going to wrap their shield around the Intrepid and storm the ship,” Flaherty said.
“I believe you’re right,” Sera nodded in agreement.
The ISF ships were engaging The Mark’s shield bubble with little effect. Even the near-luminal impacts of relativistic missiles only slightly altered the trajectory of the sphere—movement that was quickly corrected as The Mark ships accelerated toward the Intrepid.
The fighters darted close to the enemy fleet, lancing out with lasers and missiles, but the beams did no damage and few of the missiles even reached the shields. The cruisers did what they could from a distance, but without stasis shields, it was certain death to approach The Mark ships and their thousands of beams.
Only the single squadron of Arc-6s dared dance close to the enemy, but even at less than a kilometer away, their weapons had no measurable effect on the armada’s super shield.
A desperate pilot arched away from the battle, taking a long loop around Fierra before coming back at a hundredth the speed of light, smashing his ship into the pirate fleet’s shield.
“That had an effect,” Flaherty said, a small measure of excitement slipping into his voice. “The umbrella in that section lost a layer when the fighter hit.”
“How is the fighter, though?” Sera asked.
“Looks like its disabled,” Flaherty replied. “Though the dampeners did keep the pilot alive.”
Sera said to the fleet captains.
She outlined what she would need to the captains and left their virtual conference.
“Cheeky, set this course, maximum acceleration.”
Cheeky’s eyes grew wide. She looked up at Sera. “Are you serious?”
“I am. Sabrina can take it. I know this will work.”
“This isn’t like the rest of your super-secret special knowledge!” Cargo turned, his eyes filled with fear and worry. “The Intrepid’s scientists just invented stasis shields two days ago! This is our shakedown run, for star’s sakes!”
“You can get out and walk if you want to,” Sera replied to Cargo without breaking eye contact with Cheeky. “Do it now.”
Cheeky nodded and turned to her work. As Sabrina began to turn away from the battle, a call came in from Rebecca. Sera put it on the tank.
“Running away already?” Rebecca asked, her expression haughty as Sera had expected.
“I know when to cut my losses,” Sera replied. “Good luck storming a ship with a hundred thousand square kilometers of deck with your rag-tag band of miscreants. That is, before the AST comes in and exterminates you.”
“I’m not afraid of those core-worlders,” Rebecca replied. “I’ll have that ship, and I’ll use it to hunt you down and crush you. You’ll be back under my tender ministrations before you know what happened.”
“Sure, whatever,” Sera replied and cut th
e connection.
She let out a deep sigh.
“Let’s hope that riles her up enough.”
No one on Sabrina’s bridge replied as Kithari grew larger in the forward view.
Sabrina flashed past the jovian and raced out into the space beyond, Cheeky altering course until the planet obscured her from The Mark’s fleet.
The fusion engines were running at full bore, singing with the pure helium-3 the Intrepid had supplied. Between them, the AP nozzle was spun out to its maximum focal length, and at the ship’s bow, the grav drives were parting the thick interstellar medium before pushing it back together behind Sabrina for the other drives to react against.
After seven minutes, Cheeky cut the thrust and spun the ship, reversing burn and bringing their velocity, relative to Kithari, to zero.
She locked eyes with Sera, who nodded slowly.
Directly ahead, a tenth of an AU distant, the gas giant rotated slowly, its space lanes mostly clear, except for a cluster of ships around the orbital habitation.
Cheeky brought all engines to full, hurling the ship toward the planet.
Sabrina’s collision detection systems blared warnings, and Sera shut them off, only to see the comm board light up with calls from system traffic control warning of an impending impact. Defensive beams, meant to prevent asteroid impacts with the gas giant peppered the ship, but the stasis shield shrugged them off.
The seven minutes it took to travel the distance back to the planet seemed to take forever. Then, in the last few seconds, Kithari grew rapidly, and at a pre-programmed time, Sabrina twitched, sliding to the side of the planet, brushing past the jovian’s swirling clouds.
“Correcting!” Cheeky called out as she aimed the ship at The Mark’s armada as it chased the Intrepid around Fierra.
For a second, The Mark’s armada was visible as a small dot closing on the Intrepid, and then everything went black.
* * * * *
Nothing they threw at The Mark’s shield bubble had any effect. The pirate fleet just kept coming. At least it was moving slowly—relatively speaking—as it matched speeds with the Intrepid so they could envelope and board the colony ship.
Tanis had pulled the Dresden, Orkney, and their fighters closer to the Intrepid. If Rebecca was going to seal them inside her armada’s shields, she would enclose a lot of enemy ships in with her.
The Mark ships seemed to realize this, and were doing their best to neutralize the ISF cruisers before they made their final approach.
Given enough time, the enemy’s plan might work, but for the moment, refractive clouds of chaff kept their beams at bay, and the Intrepid’s scoop-turned-MDC tore the enemy’s missiles apart while a punishing barrage of rail slugs kept the enemy focusing much of their energy on their super-shield.
Tanis had to admit that Rebecca’s plan was not too bad—right up until the part where she thought that boarding the Intrepid could actually work.
Perhaps they really didn’t understand how large the ship was, or anticipate the four thousand Marines in powered armor who stood ready to repel any boarders.
“She hasn’t come through yet,” the scan officer reported.
“I don’t care. Get those tugs in position,” Tanis replied. “When she shows, they’ll need to grab that bubble and toss it high, or we’re going to be wearing a fleet’s worth of shrapnel.
Tanis glanced to the other tank where the battle between Bollam’s ships and her two defensive lines raged. Dozens of ISF fighters had been disabled, but so far her capital ships had not taken any serious hits.
The two squadrons of Arc-6s were making all the difference. The ships had destroyed half a dozen destroyers and two cruisers, even though the ISF ships had to continually retreat, lest they face overwhelming weapons fire.
“Just a little longer,” Tanis whispered.
“There!” the scan officer cried out.
Tanis felt the bridge slow down around her as she watched the events unfold one millisecond at a time.
Sabrina exploded from high in Kithari’s clouds, traveling at over ten thousand kilometers per second, on a course that would take it only a kilometer over the Intrepid’s stern.
At the same time, two of the heavy pusher tugs boosted hard, their stasis grapples reaching out and grabbing The Mark’s shield bubble. Fusion engines capable of nudging small worlds out of orbit fired on full burn and The Mark armada was pushed up, above the Intrepid.
The maneuver took only three seconds and then the tugs accelerated away from pirate fleet.
Sabrina lanced across the shrinking distance, perfectly aligned with her target.
A split second later, holo emitters dimmed their output as a blinding explosion flared. The Mark’s shield bubble, along with the armada within, was gone.
A subdued cheer sounded across the bridge at the apparent destruction of Rebecca and her entire fleet while scan searched for Sabrina.
“There!” the scan officer called out and this time the bridge really did erupt in cheers. “Their entire ship appears to be in stasis. No, wait, it’s out, it’s decelerating and turning around.”
“Going to take them a bit to get back here. They’re already a quarter million kilometers away,” Tanis said to herself, then aloud, “Any sign of our pirate friends?”
“No,” scan replied. “Unless you consider a field of pebble-sized debris a sign.”
Tanis expected the incredible show of power to cause the Boller fleet to draw back, but the rain of debris falling on Fierra’s northern hemisphere seemed to incense them all the more.
“They’re committing nearly half their fleet,” the scan officer announced, worry lacing his voice.
“So they are,” Tanis said softly, sharing a significant look with Admiral Sanderson and Captain Andrews.
* * * * *
Jessica gave a mental cry of victory as she punched through a cruiser’s shields and sent a missile into its engines.
Jessica schooled her emotions as she surveyed the battlefield, searching for her and Jerry’s next target. The Pike and Gilese were falling back behind a cloud of dust and gravel that Kithari had collected while orbiting its star. The cover kept the enemy ships from advancing too quickly, but, with no inertial dampening, the ISF cruisers were sitting ducks when in range of the enemy’s beams.
The Arc-5s were also having only limited success.
While they couldn’t jink anywhere near as fast as the 6s—or the enemy’s capital ships, for that matter—their pilots had discovered two key weaknesses in the enemy’s targeting algorithms.
The first was that they were not used to tracking such small targets at high relative v. The second was that when a ship jinked, they expected it to move a lot further. To the Boller targeting AIs, every move the fighters made looked like a feint. Given that a high percentage of their movements were feints, it was rare that an enemy beam fired at a location actually occupied by a fighter.
The erratic movement of the fighters was causing the Boller ships to continually tighten their ranks. Initially, they were spread out over more than six million cubic kilometers of space. That had tightened to just over a million cubic kilometers.
The fighters flitted through the region, creating enticing targets and placing themselves between enemy ships as often as possible. Entire fields of fire became unavailable to the enemy cruisers and destroyers, and ships that did not update their view of the battlefield fast enough contributed to an increasing amount of friendly fire incidents.
The ISF Arcs had no such issue. The squadron AIs were linked, providing an accurate view of the battlefield drawn from millions of sensors. Above that, Jessica could feel the combined hand of Tanis and Angela, guiding t
he ships in her fleet with lightning reflexes no human should possess.
Jessica knew what they were talking about, but had never experienced it first-hand. Several times since the first defense against the relativistic battle when the STR had attacked with in Sol, Tanis had spread her consciousness out across the ship’s tactical nets coaxing and guiding all the vessels under her command with one omniscient hand.
It was a thing that only AI could do, and even few of them could manage such a large network. Many believed it was actually Bob and not Tanis guiding them—that he put a friendly face on his actions, but anyone who had Linked with Tanis knew better. This had her touch—hers and Angela’s.
Jessica knew those two had been paired too long—everyone knew it, but no one spoke of it. Many had asked Amanda or Priscilla if Tanis was a full merge, and the avatars always responded in the negative.
Jessica had even queried Bob extensively and he emphatically stated that Tanis and Angela were two distinct entities.
Two entities that shouldn’t be able to spread their minds over a net like they had during every space battle since that first.
Every pilot in the fleet knew it was unnatural, that it probably violated the Phobos Accords, but no one cared. To them, Tanis was their savior, their guiding hand in the dark.
That hand directed Jessica to another target of opportunity, and she saw her entire squadron following the same path. They arched over one of the enemy cruisers, jinking and spinning at their pilot’s thresholds, before simultaneously firing proton beams at the ship, penetrating its grav shield in a dozen locations.
Then the squadron’s fighters rotated weapons and picked off three of the cruisers’ close-support destroyers.
Four ships taken out in seconds. Only a few hundred more to go.
She saw another cruiser go up as three squadrons of Arc-5s overwhelmed its shields.
The tactics and coordination would likely go down in the history books as one of the most brilliantly fought battles in hundreds of years.
