The Mutineer's Daughter

by Chris Kennedy

  As they achieved formation and pushed to group over-thrust, the opposing picket frigate received their transition signature and appropriately freaked out. The Terran ship immediately went to full active sensors on their threat bearing and broadcast the received tactical data full bore back to their other ships. As the situation and relative disparity of forces became more evident, the frigate’s crew decisively turned tail and ran, spinning ship and thrusting toward the shipyards at a flank thrust of a sustained three gravities, burning dark matter as fast as it could pull it out of the aether.

  The destroyers at the talon tips would be denied their first easy meal.

  Within 15 minutes, all the Terran ships were aware of them, and the Alliance forces finally had their first look at the full opposing TUN squadron. The destroyer hovering over the aptly named Morgan’s Rock—an ugly but resource-rich reddish world—came up to full power and broke orbit to range closer to their threat bearing and the shipyards at the planet’s leading Trojan point. At the yards, two frigates and two destroyers lit off and pushed out to meet them…along with the last mystery ship they had all fretted over—not another battlecruiser as they had assumed, but a fast lancer carrier instead.

  This was both a boon and a worry. The carrier was armed only slightly heavier than a destroyer, while having three times or more its mass. The remaining two destroyers’ worth of mass was taken up by lancers, individual ships smaller than rescue cutters but bristling with weaponry. In space, fighters made little sense, too small to carry weapons heavy or fast enough to be decisive in the long range, but too large to be nimble against drones or missiles unburdened by the acceleration limits imposed by a biological crew.

  Lancers were an attempt to hedge that bet. Larger than anything that could legitimately be called a fighter, they filled a similar role as a fighter/bomber. They were a crewed vessel but lacked almost every amenity needed to sustain a crew beyond a single mission. Instead, all their mass and space was given over to armor, engines, and a grotesque number of weapons—very nearly the equivalent of frigates in their throw weight, all of which could be employed faster and along many more axes in order to overwhelm the opposition’s ability to cope with incoming fire. Where Commodore Carter had entered the system with a decisive edge in assets, this mix turned that situation very nearly upon its head.

  The Puller would not be sitting this battle out after all.

  Where the eight Alliance ships formed an out-stretched claw, the five Terran ships pushing outward from the shipyard blossomed into a fleet of 17 units as the carrier’s dozen lancers launched. Together they formed a wall of battle, arranged in cells like a hexagonal lattice, the entire formation many light seconds across. Broader, but shallower, than the Alliance squadron, their deployment offered less in defense-in-depth and mutual self-protection but did set them up to envelop the now smaller claw arrangement and attack from all sides.

  Commodore Carter’s voice sounded across the void to his units as they closed toward the inevitable clash over the course of hours. “They’ll seek to overwhelm us through attack on multiple axes. Their now greater numbers will multiply still more as they pour in missiles all around us. Do not be distracted! Defend your sectors zealously. Trust that your fellow ships will defend your flanks as planned, so you don’t have to worry overmuch about it. And yes, we will take hits. We will be bloodied. But mutual defense-in-depth allows us an advantage they do not have. It gives us both a punch and a block, whereas they can only punch with no real defensive cover. And those tiny, fast units cannot long survive without cover. We have focus where they have only chaos. Coordinate and work as a squadron to concentrate fire on individual units. Chew them up methodically, and our small bites will soon enough devour the entire elephant!”

  As the two squadrons closed, the differences between leading the last battle as a singular unit and carrying out orders as part of a coordinated whole became more apparent. Where before, Benno and the bridge and CIC staff had relied only upon their training and instincts to guide them in a reasonably straightforward closing situation, this time their instincts had to take a back seat to the group maneuvering orders and decisions made by people on an entirely different ship. The Puller was only a secondary element in their overall plan. It was both a relief and an altogether new worry. It required a level of trust that none of the mutineers were sure they could afford.

  For their part, the tactical officers aboard the Libertad deciding things were determined to earn their pay. The group vector around which the claw formation oriented was continually adjusted. The hexagonal, flat, disk-like formation of the TUN units’ wall of battle tried to keep their wall perpendicular and centered against the claw as they approached, to better facilitate their eventual envelopment. The Alliance claw formation, on the other hand, kept adjusting so they could come around to approach the edge, to “cross the T” in the age-of-sail parlance. If they achieved that position, they could concentrate their fire on a few of the Terran ships, while those vessels blocked the fire from of the rest of the Terran fleet.

  Coupled with the dynamics and kinematics of the TUN squadron’s initial orbital position, and their own starting position deep within the system, with virtually no orbital component, the two groups had started off flying directly at one another. In the battle for Paradiso where the planet was the objective, this had resulted in a massive mutual closing velocity, which had required the opposing destroyer to flip around and counter-thrust so they didn’t pass one another in a flash. Here, with both formations maneuvering to gain positional advantage over the other and without a fixed locale as either fleet’s destination, their closure became more and more oblique…and more and more likely to result in an extended slugfest, with neither squadron’s elements breaking free until the opposition was annihilated.

  There would be no escape here, no clever breaking free once they came together to rally and try for round two. This could only end in absolute victory for one force or the other.

  Range finally decreased to engagement level. As if synchronized, railgun fire and initial missile salvos flashed out from both squadrons. Each tested the other’s mettle, trying to force a break in the opposing formation or reveal a weakness in one of the other’s squadrons’ units, to see who might flinch.

  Neither did. Auto defenses and coordinated maneuvering answered each salvo from both sides. The unremitting emptiness and darkness of the Morgana system lit in staccato flashes of nuclear fire, the flare of kinetic impacts, and the strobes of electronic warfare pulses.

  The three destroyers at the tips of the claw formation’s talons took the brunt of the assault, as designed, but they also provided better remote sensor data for the battlecruiser at the heart of the array. The Libertad and the destroyers fired as if there was no end, even as they continued to move in a coordinated fashion. The Puller, for her part, did not need to expend a single round. Benno and the crew watched and prepared as their tactical screens flared and fuzzed with both real and spurious sensor data.

  Looking at the impossibly confounding mess, Benno did not envy the engagement coordinators on the commodore’s staff.

  CDR Ashton shook her head. “You think this is bad. Just wait till we intersperse, and the formation finally breaks. It’ll be pure anarchy.”

  “The crew will hold. We have to,” he answered.

  She shrugged. “Yeah. He may have been an ass, but it’d be mighty nice to have LCDR Johnson here about now.”

  Benno said nothing.

  Trajectories of railgun rounds, cones of probable shrapnel position, and corkscrewing paths of missiles and warheads leaped out from either side’s formation on the tactical screen. Where before there had been only a vacuum fraught with deadly potential, there now emerged a treacherous landscape that threatened to chew them all up and leave none alive.

  The landscape rotated as the groups continued to jockey for position. Now, with the oblique approach and lack of sufficient space to maneuver without either encountering the volumes of
fire already bounding them or giving up the advantages of their formations entirely, the two squadrons came within actual striking range. The Terran Navy’s wall would neither be encountered edge on or at the center. Instead, they would come together at an angle to one side of the wall, with the majority of TUN ships having to cross further to engage or envelop. The Alliance claw would not be able to rend its way through the most vulnerable area of the formation’s fabric as planned, but their smaller, tighter formation would achieve its initial maneuvering objectives better than the Terrans could.

  The three destroyers at the talon tips concentrated their fire on the biggest Terran ship in the wall’s edge: a destroyer. The three frigates right behind them spread their fire to the lancers slightly further across the wall. The Libertad set up billowing waves of missile and railgun fire even further out, trying to force the wall to break or to prevent it from curving around and enveloping them.

  Benno and the Puller held fast, watching to see how things developed, as did the rescue cutter at the claw’s other spur.

  Missiles, warheads, and railgun rounds flashed out. Defensive UV laser beams and point-defense cannon chatter answered from both sides. Sparks of white lit the night as rounds and weapons died in mid-flight, taken out by the opposing squadron, though it was impossible for anyone unaided to make sense of the chaos that materialized in the rapidly shrinking space between the fleets. But not all the weapons died unspent, sacrificed to no avail.

  Blue-white, globular explosions of fusion plasma and smaller, yellow-orange blasts of stabilized octaazacubane chemical explosives bloomed into existence, expanding out and fading away, leaving behind wisps of incandescence and pulses of microwave and radio noise. Unseen, but sorely felt, these blasts also drove invisible shafts of x-ray laser light and wave fronts of shrapnel moving at meteoric velocities. The xaser beams took their toll first, moving at the speed of light, but the shrapnel and unitary warheads were not far behind.

  Gouts of vaporized hull alloy erupted from two of the Alliance destroyers, peppering all three ships’ Whipple shields, but they kept on. A telescopic view showed the Terran destroyer they first targeted several light seconds away as it flashed and split in two, both halves rotating away from the other, then all was lost in a brilliant globe of escaping fusion reactor plasma.

  Ever nimble, the lancers used their higher thrust-to-weight ratio to generate transient forces of 10-12 gravities, punishing their crews, but that was sufficient to avoid the vast majority of the long-range fire from the three Alliance frigates. Two of the five lancers first targeted ganged up on the nearest destroyer and attacked it from two sides. The other three lancers broke ranks, eschewed both the Alliance destroyers and frigates, and dove after the sole high-value unit—the commodore’s battlecruiser.

  The Puller and the rescue cutter answered this threat, along with the formidable secondary batteries of the Libertad. Railgun rounds and missiles leaped toward the three smaller fighter-like craft. And while they were nimble and closed in tighter than a destroyer might, employing their weapons like sharp knives in a back-alley fight…as single units, they were weak. Without coordination with other units of their kind, gathered in separate claw formations of their own, they could not stand toe-to-toe. A lucky bomb-pumped laser or unitary railgun round obliterated them one-by-one.

  While one edge of the Terran wall of battle crumbled, the other finally caught up and curved around, arcing in fire on the flanks and rear of the Alliance formation. Commodore Carter had anticipated this, however. The fire they had earlier deployed met the curving, enveloping wall of the Terran formation and gave it pause. They could not sustain their formation and the strength it offered without first succumbing to the ordnance laid out. And while larger capital ships might slog through, accepting the cost to maintain their wall, the lancers could not, and the destroyers and frigates were loath to.

  The wall of battle collapsed, and each Terran ship maneuvered independently. While they could then avoid the trap laid for them, it dramatically complicated their mutual self-defense. Chaos reigned, and the outcome hinged on a roll of the dice.

  * * *

  With five main enemy units and a total of 17 enemy warships to eight friendlies, the odds were a coin toss until one considered discipline, the strength of the units involved, and one side’s righteous fury versus the other side’s knowledge that the venture was only a gambit. After that, the outcome quickly became inevitable.

  The TUN wall of battle broke, their envelopment never came to fruition, and it quickly came down to individual ships versus one squadron. The commodore’s formation inevitably broke, too, once they had no coordinated mass into which to vector the claw. But the added time in formation attack allowed them to concentrate fire and provide defense for each other long enough to chew through the side of the collapsing wall’s center. They ultimately divided the Terran forces so they could be mopped up with relative ease. From 17 units, to 15, then 10, 8, 6, 3, and finally one.

  The lancer carrier was the last in contact, and the Libertad’s crew took its time ripping it apart, round by round, before mercifully administering the coup de grace with a capital-sized xaser. Seeing the collapse of their main strength, the remaining destroyer and the frigate that had first run from them pulled up their Marine contingent and hightailed it out of the system. They worked their way along the periphery and jumped back to Terran Union space, long before the Alliance squadron could re-orient and come after them.

  After long weeks of abandonment by their own, the Morgana system was free. The Battle of Morgan’s Rock was over, all at a cost of one Alliance destroyer, one frigate, and a smattering of damage throughout the rest of Task Force 757.

  The Puller didn’t suffer a single hit and expended only a bare fraction of her restocked ammunition. It could not have been in a better position to make for Adelaide and the rest of the Lost Six. Benno smiled at the cheers erupting on the bridge and echoing up from the passageways and the rest of the ship. Even CDR Ashton grinned.

  Despite some initial scares, Murphy appeared to have slept through the day.

  While the rest of the squadron performed mop-up and scoured the battlespace for escape pods, survivors, and intel, CDR Ashton asked for and received permission to proceed directly to the planet of Morgan’s Rock. And, inevitably, just as they had before at Paradiso, several of the crew—those from or with family upon the austere, rocky world—requested to be left on the planet.

  Including one Master at Arms Chief Ellen Dufresne.

  Benno held his tongue when he saw her pre-packed spacer’s bag, standing in line at the dropship hangar. She and five others waited patiently for the word to board. Chief Dufresne pointedly and purposefully refused to look at him. Finally, he sighed. “Chief, I know you feel an obligation to your brother and his kids; I know you want to check up on them, and I’d be the last to keep you from it. I’m going to have a tough decision of my own after we take Adelaide, but I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t speak to you.”

  Dufresne said nothing.

  He shook his head. “We wouldn’t have gotten here without you. And no matter what anyone decides about us in time, you are honorable, and you’ve been invaluable. But this fight isn’t over, and I can demonstrate quite readily this is not a unified crew. I need you, Chief, but I’m not prepared to pull you off that dropship. Is there any way you would reconsider? Can we get hold of your brother on comms, make sure he’s okay, and continue from there?”

  She chuckled and looked at Benno finally. “Tell me honestly; do you have any damn intention of continuing to lead this ship after you get ahold of Mio?”

  “I…” He frowned. “I don’t know. I’m committed to this mission. Maybe I’ll take a break to find her, ensure she’s okay…”

  Dufresne put out a hand and squeezed his shoulder. “Skipper, you’ve been straight with me from moment one when you first came into my cell, but that’s a goddamn lie and I think you realize it. I don’t hold it against you, though, bec
ause I think you’re lying to yourself more than you are to me.” She gestured at the passageway in which they stood. The mutinous crew walked about with purpose under a half gravity of acceleration toward the planet.

  She continued. “This lot has thrown in with you; they depend on you, and not even they’ll begrudge you bailing for Adelaide once it’s freed. Are Ortiz’s compatriots still looking for their shot? Sure, and that might be it. Will the loyalists be looking for any opportunity your carelessness might give them? Hell, yes, I’d expect nothing less. But do you think for one second that I or anyone else would honestly expect you to continue after you fetch Mio? Hell, no. We’re living on borrowed time, Benno. All of us. And if we don’t disappear at our first opportunity…we may never get another chance. I’m taking mine. You take yours.”

  Benno shook his head. He still was not certain of the truth behind her statements, but he’d be damned if he would put doubt or guilt in her heart now, not when she had been so steadfast. Instead, seeing the pilot, Jason Pierce—a limited duty flight officer who had remained aloof of the mutiny—approach to prep the dropship, Benno extended a hand. Dufresne shook it solemnly, then returned to the line, ready to board.

  Calling out to him with a sad smile, Chief Dufresne said, “Hey, you’re going to have your Mio soon. I know it. You hug her for me, right! Make sure she knows what a good dad she has.”

  Benno nodded and felt tears welling in his eyes, and he saluted her smartly. She returned it, then faced the bulkhead to hide her equally wet eyes from him. He turned and left.