For one, she’d never expected to see a Sun-Blotter missile swarm go off close enough to see with the naked eye.
“Missile launch.” The tac-officer paused for a second before rendering the verdict. “Fifty-three thousand, two-hundred and thirty-six vampires inbound, ma’am.”
“That’s not so bad,” she said, feeling a thrill of semi-hysterical giddiness as she spoke. “At Parthenon, Sixth Fleet had to deal with three times that number. Launch Interceptors; they’ll thin out the herd.”
“Yes, ma’am. How about point defense?”
“What would be the point?” she asked rhetorically. A couple of people in the tactical ops center chuckled. “Pun intended. Keep pumping power into our main guns. We’ll place our trust in God, our Interceptors and Tah-Leen technology. Not necessarily in that order, mind you.”
Her ships had gotten anti-missile upgrades before this cruise: boosted lasers with the same reach as a battleship’s main guns, although with a fraction of their power; improved fire control and targeting sensors which allowed her to track thousands of contacts even when operating outside a fleet’s tactical network; improved missile launchers that could fire volleys of fifty Interceptor rockets every ten seconds, with a total inventory of six hundred anti-missile munitions, each armed with Multiple Independent Targetable Vehicle warheads capable of prosecuting five targets apiece. In this war, the main purpose of destroyers was to help thin out just the kind of massive barrage they were facing, and the Statesman-class ships in the squadron were well-suited for that job. Even without the support of her energy weapons, each of her five ships could easily take out two or three thousand ship-killers in the two and a half minutes it would take them to reach her formation. Make it an even fifteen thousand, best-case.
If everything performed as advertised, that would leave almost forty thousand vampires in that first volley alone, more than enough to obliterate DESRON 91 ten times over. Might as well run up a white flag as launch the defensive volley; neither action would alter the outcome when the Sun-Blotter arrived. The only reasons she bothered to do so was that it might help the habitat’s force fields last a little while longer, and it would remove some explosive ordnance from her ships, ordnance that might blow up when the squadron began to take damage.
“Sierra-Eight in range.” The chosen target of her ship’s main guns was a battlecruiser, which was pretty damn ambitious of her. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though, and if she took out a ship of the line with her tin cans, she’d have earned at least a footnote in the annals of history.
“Fire.”
“Twenty-two direct hits. Three partials.” Every ten-inch gun in her squadron had been on target or close enough. Pretty decent gunnery at one light second. “Sierra-Eight’s shields are down by seven percent.”
“Pour it on,” she ordered. If everyone did their best and they were a little lucky, they’d destroy the Lamprey ship. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but better than curling up in a corner waiting to die.
Missiles flared up and died in the distance as the squadron’s continuous volleys reaped them by the hundreds. The enemy used its own secondary weapons to pick off her Interceptors, though. In the end, DESRON 91 barely reduced the Sun Blotter swarm by one fifth.
Not too shabby, she thought. But we could have done better. She made a note in her log to that effect, in case anybody who cared lived through this.
A few moments later, over forty thousand missiles struck within seconds of each other.
The comparatively paltry launch from the expendable alien task force had light up the sky with a cloud of fire. The Sun-Blotter salvo created a continuous raging inferno, two hundred kilometers long and wide – followed almost instantly by a smaller but closer firestorm. The outermost force field had been breached. Hundreds – thousands – of leakers burst against the second layer, a mere fifty kilometers away.
“Multiple penetrations.” It took a second to calculate the effect. “Six thousand missiles got through Force Field One. FF-1’s power is down to seventy percent. FF-2 down to ninety-five.”
There were three energy shields protecting Xanadu. Her ships were nestled in the gap between the second and the third ones; the final force field didn’t have enough room to fit a destroyer. Any missile that got though those two barriers would be far too close to engage with point defense. Fifty kilometers was a meaningless distance for space weaponry. Missiles covered three thousand kilometers in one second. They would only know a missile had gotten through when it hit them.
“Missile launch detected. Forty-nine thousand vampires inbound.”
“This time they’ll hit those shields with their direct-fire weapons just before the missiles arrive,” she said as if she was lecturing a class of cadets. “A lot of them are going to get through to us.”
“Divert power to shields, ma’am?”
“No. It won’t help, not against what coming our way. My orders stand. We’re taking that cruiser with us.”
I’d hoped to see my first great-grandchild. Lisa had finally taken some time off to become a mother; she was due three weeks from now. Benchley’s chances of meeting little Naomi – Lisa had always been fond of her grandmother – were the statistical equivalent of absolute zero.
“Major Zhang is hailing us. The… Ah, she’s named her ship the Totenkopf, ma’am. The Totenkopf is ready for action.”
Maybe the odds had just improved a little.
“Well, what is she waiting for? Tell her to engage the enemy at her discretion.”
“She’s already started, ma’am.”
The captain was experiencing a lot of new things. What she saw next made everything else seem downright pedestrian.
* * *
“Major Zhang is conducting an attack run on the Lamprey fleet.”
“One warp fighter isn’t going to make a difference,” General Gage said. “Even an ancient alien super-fighter.”
A moment later, the tactical display seemed to give the lie to his statement. The Lamprey flagship’s status icon started blinking yellow before going black. On another screen, they all saw a close up view of the dreadnought, flames erupting from several breaches in its mid-section before its power plant ruptured and it became a short-lived star. Less than a minute later, a battleship suffered the same fate. The little starship had decimated the Lamprey fleet with its first two passes.
The Marine general stared at the screen for several moments before muttering “Semper Fi.”
“Enemy is altering its formation. Frigates and destroyers are redeploying to protect their capital ships.”
“Someone’s been paying attention. Their lightweights are going to be ready for her when she comes back.”
“I only need fifteen more minutes,” Heather said. Unfortunately, she’d said the same thing twenty minutes ago. “For sure this time. We had a minor hiccup reconfiguring the system. More importantly, we needed to be sure we’d survive its use.” She paused. “The destroyer squadron may take some casualties even after we take precautions, unless we make sure everyone gets the word.”
“We’ll figure it out when you are ready to deploy the weapon. Meanwhile, we’ll try to buy you as much time as possible.”
* * *
“You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking, Sergeant Fuller.”
“Wish I could, Russet. Orders came from the top.”
“We only trained with those for like an hour,” Russell protested, gesturing towards the pile of oversized guns neatly lined up on the cargo pallet. “The Gunnies said they were too high-powered to use indoors.”
“Exactly the point.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Look, this is the deal. Our destroyers can’t handle the Lampreys, and in about half an hour we’re gonna have their fleet at our doorstep. They’re working on some defensive systems, but we gotta buy them time. The ETs are being careful not to shoot at the station. They want it in one piece. So after they get here, they are going to maneuver at docking speeds
to get past the force fields and send in their shuttles, also at below ninety-six kph. We’ll pick them off before they can breach the hull.”
“You want us to engage them. To lean out of an airlock and take potshots at starships.”
“This is crazy,” Gonzo agreed. “Craziest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“Have to buy time. It’s not that bad. They ain’t gonna send a dreadnought in. Just a few destroyers, frigates and their big intrusion shuttles. Each of them has a Battle Nest aboard. They’ll go for the sections that are under power, which means where we are at. We can’t let them deploy inside or we’re fucked.”
“And these guns can actually hurt a destroyer?”
“According to the specs, yeah. They are anti-tank weapons, and back in the day tanks were built like fucking battlecruisers. These things were designed to open them up. It’s going to be mostly robots outside, but we need a few grunts too. There ain’t enough robots to go around and they can’t shoot the really heavy stuff without frying their circuits.”
“I don’t like this, man,” Gonzo said.
Russell didn’t either. The tangos might want to keep the starbase in one piece, but if the Devil Dogs became too much of a nuisance, they’d use their warships for fire support. Even a destroyer mounted bigger guns than a Stormin’ Normie main battle tank. It was going to get ugly.
“What’s the matter, Russet?” Grampa told him. “Do you want to live fore…”
“Don’t even start with that shit.”
* * *
Transition.
It was completely different than every other warp jump she’d ever made. Lisbeth could actually see things, not just ghosts jumping in and out of the dark. She and her ship were in a river made of colors instead of water, pushing through eddies and currents that buffeted the Totenkopf as they rushed past.
“Pretty. Just the way I thought unicorn farts would look like.”
“Just the way you imagined it. Literally,” her guardian angel said.
“Great. So it’s my fault I’m swimming in a freaking liquid rainbow.”
There was something else in the water, or watercolor if you would. She couldn’t see it, but knew it was big and it wasn’t alone. Her nemesis and its ninety-three Tah-Leen minions, a whale-sized shark followed by a school of piranha, all out for blood. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.
Emergence.
Totenkopf came out of warp in the middle of the Lamprey formation, a mere thousand kilometers behind the dreadnought serving as its flagship.
“Eat shit and die,” she said.
Three solid bars of black light erupted from the eyes of the deal alien, combining into a single point, a miniature singularity moving at close to the speed of light. The twisting beam struck the Lamprey warship and punched a hole all the way through it. A few more shots like that was all it took. The warship went up with an earth-shattering ka-boom that she heard with her mind and not her ears, since sound doesn’t travel in vacuum.
A thousand kilometers was a wee close for safety.
Totenkopf shuddered. Shockwaves didn’t carry worth spit in vacuum, either, but shrapnel moving at near relativistic speeds traveled quite well. Most of the fragments that hit the Corpse-Ship were nearly microscopic, but they packed a wallop. The multi-spectrum radiation waves coming from the explosion were far worse. A War Eagle would have been vaporized by the deluge, but the Marauder ship handled it like a champ, at least for the fraction of a second it took her to jump back into warp.
Transition.
More watercolors. And the bogeyman was closer.
“I don’t have time for this.” Lisbeth flipped the ship to face her pursuer and shot it.
She hadn’t expected anything to happen. Plenty of ships had fired their weapons inside warp space, and none had reported having any effect on their surroundings.
The triple-beam behaved differently in the ether or whatever medium filled the Starless Path. The three beams lashed out like a whip, or maybe a pseudopod, striking the submerged figure coming in her direction. It screamed in pain and dove deeper into the rainbow sea, where it disappeared completely. The school of dead Snowflakes followed suit, except for a handful that got hit by the energy whips and were torn into itty bitty pieces.
“Holy shit.”
“You didn’t know? They can hurt you, but you can hurt them, too.”
“Wish you’d told me earlier.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Asshole.”
Emergence.
A battleship this time. The massive vessel was vomiting hundreds of missiles from the tacked-on box launchers that broke its original, elegant outlines. She flew alongside her target as she fired a weaker pulse this time. No singularity struck the Lamprey vessel, just an impossibly-powerful three-pronged graviton beam. The two ships’ relative motions turned the energy blast into giant sword that gutted the doomed vessel. She jumped before the first flames started pouring out of the gaping slash along the ship’s hull.
Transition.
No sign of the bogeyman and its little helpers. She’d killed it or scared it off. Either way worked for her.
Emergence.
The Lampreys were on the ball this time. She was greeted with a barrage of close-defense lasers and plasma from the fleet’s frigates and destroyers. That barrage would have shredded an American fighter, warp shields or not. The Totenkopf’s hybrid force field shunted aside ninety percent of the energies that struck it and absorbed the rest without any appreciable damage. She ignored the enemy fire and concentrated on hitting another dreadnought. She missed its power plant this time, but the punctured warship became a drifting hulk, pouring atmosphere from the through-and-through breach in its hull, dead in space.
Transition.
“Are you having fun, Christopher Robin?”
“It’s a totally unfair fight. I love it,” she replied, grinning like a fiend.
Emergence.
Five more jumps. Five more ships, destroyed or crippled, including all the dreadnoughts and most of the battleships. The Corpse-Ship was hit dozens of times, once by a twenty-inch grav cannon, and survived. She could do it. She could destroy the entire enemy fleet. There wouldn’t be enough room on the surface of the Totenkopf to stencil all her kills. Lisbeth Zhang was going to win this battle by herself. Screw the battle, she was going to win the entire damn war. She laughed maniacally.
Take that, Navy!
Final Transition.
“Oh shit.”
“Oh shit indeed, Christopher Robin.”
The Corpse-Ship had lasted for nine minutes of combat operations before it fell apart.
The fracture lines became wide fissures, concentrated at the points where dead alien and grafted hull met. Pieces of bone and superstructure peeled away, reminding her of the time she’d flown a broken pod over Kirosha. Except this time there was no land or even sea below her, just endless watercolors everywhere. The Totenkopf trembled. She felt it when it finally shattered. The Pathfinder bones broke away into a million shards, leaving her drifting aimlessly inside the modified Marauder cockpit.
Leaving her stranded in warp space.
Guess I’ll finally find out what happens to all the poor bastards that didn’t make it out.
The bogeyman was coming back, and she couldn’t shoot it this time.
Something huge bumped the sinking capsule and held it in place. Smaller critters began banging on its hull, making the whole cockpit shake. Cracks began to form on the inside as the tough alloy bent inwards under the continuous blows.
“Come and get some,” she growled.
The hull caved in. Colors flooded the interior.
* * *
“Totenkopf is gone, ma’am. The last detected transition was ten minutes ago.”
Captain Benchley started to speak but a coughing fit interrupted her. The bridge of the Ataturk was filled with smoke. Damage control parties had put out the fires sparked by a direct hit that penetrated the upper quadrant shie
lds, but the atmosphere scrubbers hadn’t quite cleared the air yet.
“She did well,” Benchley said after hawking out a wad of sooty phlegm. Not exactly a fitting epitaph for the Marine pilot but they’d be comparing notes soon enough.
Major Zhang’s little alien ship had cut a swath through the Lamprey heavy hitters. All the dreadnoughts and all but one battleship were gone. The battlecruisers had also taken serious losses. Win or lose, the ETs had paid a heavy price. And DESRON 91 had managed to kill the battlecruiser they’d picked for their escort to Valhalla and inflicted severe damage on several frigates. Unfortunately, Starbase Malta’s outer shields had been battered down and her squadron had gotten pounded to pieces.
“Churchill is launching escape pods, ma’am. Seventy-one survivors.”
“Hope they make it.”
With Churchill gone, only two destroyers remained. Her own Ataturk and the Carl Gustav. The others had been hammered to bits as the Lampreys stood off and pounded her squadron with coordinated salvos that tore through the Tah-Leen shields. One by one, her ships had fallen. It wouldn’t be long now. They were so closely packed together that when the Cromwell went up, pieces of flying debris damaged the Churchill, weakening her shields and hastening her demise. You weren’t supposed to fight with your ships a few tens of kilometers apart from each other.
“Sierra-Twenty-three has been destroyed,” the tactical officer reported, absently dabbing at a still-seeping pressure cut on his scalp. Onscreen, a Lamprey frigate burned merrily in the distance; their third kill in this battle so far.
“Not bad. Shift all fire to… oh, let’s make it Sierra-Thirty-one.”
“Aye, a…”
Ataturk lurched like a derailed locomotive. The direct hit overwhelmed the destroyer’s inertial compensators and flung Benchley out of her chair. She’d unstrapped herself during the bridge fire and forgotten about it. She didn’t have time to curse her stupidity; a crushing impact against the nearest bulkhead knocked her out for several seconds.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 31
