by Ian Douglas
But those Glothr ships swarming out from Invictus had been in hot pursuit of the Concord, no doubt about it. They must have thought they at least had a chance to catch her. . . .
Or were they simply planning on following Concord all the way back to the fleet?
Dahlquist didn’t know. All he did know was that right now, he was feeling terribly, nakedly exposed.
“Captain!” Concord’s tactical officer yelled over the link. “Something’s happening!”
“What’ve you got, Ben?”
But he could already see it over his in-head . . . misshapen blobs of light intruding within the faint bands of rainbow color ahead. As he watched, one suddenly twisted into a solid ring encircling space ahead.
“Proximity alert astern,” Concord’s AI warned. “Proximity alert astern . . .”
Whatever those things were, they were bearing down on Concord from behind, though the ship’s velocity shifted their light forward. The optical illusion was bizarre . . . and terrifying.
“Unidentified target now thirty meters astern and closing.”
Thirty meters! How’d anything get that close? “Aft batteries!” Dahlquist yelled. “Lock on and fire!”
Aiming a weapon at this insane velocity was problematical, but the ship’s AI should be able to sort it out. Dahlquist could feel the network considering the problem, but it felt sluggish . . . sluggish . . .
And then time stopped.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1826 hours, TFT
“Jesus!” one of the other pilots exclaimed. “Look at the Big-F!”
Magnified images transmitted from hundreds of battlespace drones gave St. Clair an up-to-date panorama of the entire battle: dozens of ships continuing to pound away at one another with volleyed missiles and beams. Alerted by Blue Two, he saw the Farragut hit, saw nuclear detonations pulsing and flashing along her spine, engulfing her drive projectors, her bridge tower, her hab modules.
“There she goes,” Jess Atkinson, Blue Nine, called. “God . . .”
St. Clair had noticed that the North American fighter pilots tended to give voice to some extremely improper sentiments during combat, specifically religious sentiments that violated the decrees of the White Covenant. The ancient adage was true, he decided; there were no atheists in foxholes . . . or in fighter cockpits either.
Lieutenant St. Clair wasn’t sure what he believed in, personally . . . if anything at all. He’d found himself attracted to the new religion that was exploding through Pan-Europe and the Confederation—Starlight—but had been keeping his feelings very much to himself. Starlight was still considered to be a European spiritual movement, and North Americans didn’t trust Europeans yet . . . not even expatriate Scots who happened to be flying with them. It was better by far to maintain a low profile and stay off potentially hostile lidar.
Religious sentiments or no, the squadron’s pilots were stunned by the image of the Farragut as she died. Half-molten fragments tumbled out from the blossoming fireball, as missiles continued to plunge into the maelstrom and add their destructive quanta to the holocaust.
“She was doing too good a job on the Tushies,” Lieutenant Ramirez said. “They had to take her out.”
“Yeah,” another pilot put in, “but where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us taking the Tushies out,” St. Clair said. “Let’s get our arses back in there!”
“What the fuck are arses?” Cambridge demanded, also pronouncing the normally-silent r.
“It’s what Scotty keeps covered up with his kilt,” Lieutenant Randles said.
St. Clair ignored the banter. He was already swinging his fighter back into line with the Turusch heavies in front of the TRGA and accelerating. Ramirez was right. The Turusch had concentrated their fire on the Farragut, which, so far as they were concerned, had been the most effective USNA ship in the task force. With the Farragut destroyed, the core of the Turusch war fleet was moving, now, trying to force itself through the encircling shield of USNA heavies. The focus of their fire had shifted now to the damaged New York. . . .
But St. Clair had already seen a tactical opportunity—a long shot, but a damned good one if it worked. . . .
Englobement.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1827 hours, TFT
“Fighters are moving back onto the attack, Admiral,” Fletcher reported.
“Good. Mallory! Order the task force to spread out farther . . . disperse and englobe.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Tell Valparaiso, Hessen, Mobile, Honshu, and Cincinnati to try to get in behind them, cut them off from the Triggah. Order Chicago and Boston to begin dropping back and the destroyers with them. Let ’em think we’re on the run . . . but make it a slow run. Captain Gutierrez?”
“Sir!”
“Us too. Fall back!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
While elegantly compelling in the planning tank, englobement was one of those tactical maneuvers that was almost impossible to implement in the real universe. More than many other fleet maneuvers, it demanded that the enemy do exactly what was expected of him. Any deviation from the script at all by either side could easily lead to disaster for the USNA fleet.
But Gray had seen his opportunity as the Turusch fleet began moving toward the center of the USNA task force, entering the space just vacated so spectacularly by the Farragut. The center of the USNA force was retreating in front of the enemy’s advance . . . but the flanks were stretching out and reaching around. In another minute, the Turusch fleet would be completely surrounded.
Something like this, Gray thought, had happened twenty-six hundred years ago at the Battle of Cannae, though in a mere two dimensions rather than three. There, on a hot day in early August, the center of a heavily outnumbered Carthaginian army under the command of Hannibal Barca had retreated before a superior Roman force while the flanks held firm. The Roman formation had become tangled and disorganized as it advanced deeper and yet deeper into the semicircle of Carthaginian forces, until at the critical moment Hannibal had ordered his wings to sweep around behind the Romans, enclosing them, trapping them . . . and destroying them.
Much the same was happening now to the Turusch fleet. Surely they could see what was happening? he wondered. But they were committed, now, unable to maneuver freely, many of them unable even to fire without hitting their own ships. The USNA heavies hammered at the Turusch vessels, hurling missiles in to detonate among the alien ships in a steady, pulsing fireworks display of silent light.
Gray watched the maneuver unfolding in a 3-D projection tank called into being on the flag bridge. The battle was too large and spread across too vast and sprawling a volume of space to be easily comprehended by any human mind, even by a human mind linked in with America’s powerful AI. Gray’s mind was working faster now as it melded with America’s tactical network, with instant recall and a perfect understanding of what was unfolding before him, but it was almost impossible to hold all of what was happening clearly in his mind. He was also struggling with incidentals—a common problem for people linked into a complex network. That bit of historical trivia on Cannae, for instance: he recognized it now as a kind of accidental sidebar that had slipped into the datastream, possibly in direct response to a stray thought he’d had about historical precedents.
History was great in its place, but right now he needed to stay focused.
It was also tough to know just how much to insert himself in the battle tactics. There was a nearly overwhelming urge now to micromanage, to reach out and direct each ship in the task force, each fighter, each man or woman and order them onto precise courses, with precise timetables, a glorious and powerful master plan . . .
He rejected the megalomania as another distraction, as insidiou
s as the historical data. Right now, his proper role was to follow the battle at as high a strategic level as possible, allowing his subordinates, the individual ship captains, to handle the details. His people, he knew, were well trained, and most of them were experienced and battle tested. They knew what they were doing. It was up to Gray to deal only with the big picture, not the details.
“Order the center to hold, Commander Mallory,” he said. “Hold . . . and kick the bastards where it hurts.”
“Another hit on the Clinton, Admiral. And another. We’re losing her.”
On one of the drone transmissions, the heavy cruiser Clinton was rolling gently as nuclear fireballs engulfed her. Much of her aft half was gone now, vaporized, and Gray could see sections of her inner framework twisting and deforming as they were relentlessly drawn into the maw of out-of-control gravitational singularities, once part of the cruiser’s power generation plants, now agents of her final destruction.
The heavy cruiser Valparaiso vanished in a savage flash of hard radiation. Clinton followed a moment later . . . as well as the Japanese battlecruiser Honshu.
The epic slug-fest continued, with small and quite temporary suns illuminating the extragalactic deep.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1828 hours, TFT
St. Clair fell through the heart of the Turusch fleet, jinking port and starboard, up and down, to avoid short-ranged defensive fire and anti-missile salvos. He glanced at his in-head display and bit off a curse. He was down to two remaining Krait missiles, plus just one of the larger VG-44c Fer-de-lances. Once those were gone, he would be limited to beam weapons and his kinetic-kill Gatling rounds . . . and those were damned near useless against these thick-hided flying mountains deployed by the Turusch.
Directly ahead, a kilometer-long Turusch monster forged its lumbering way toward the USNA fleet, its red-and-black paint scheme brilliant against the empty sky.
“Seven . . . target lock!” he called. “Fox One!”
His last remaining Fer-de-Lance dropped from his fighter’s belly, lit, and streaked into darkness. A Turusch fighter rolled out of the sky, trying to block the shot or kill the missile—St. Clair wasn’t certain which—but the missile, directed by its own on-board AI, swung wide, changed vector, and accelerated, flashing out of night and slamming into the Turusch capital ship with a brilliant flash of vaporizing hull and leaking atmosphere.
“Hit!” St. Clair called, exultant. “Nailed the wee bastard Sassenach!”
“Great shooting, Scotty!”
And this time he didn’t even mind the hated nickname.
The stricken Turusch capital ship was in a slow tumble, now, a crater in its starboard side glowing yellow-hot. As St. Clair streaked over the alien’s hull, he probed with his sensors. The ship wasn’t dead, not yet, but most of its power systems were down. It was out of the fight.
He looked about for another target. Two missiles left . . .
Before he found one, though, a pair of Turusch fighters dropped onto his six, coming in astern behind a salvo of fast-accelerating missiles. Spinning his fighter end for end, he triggered his pee-beep, targeting the enemy missiles, then loosed both of his own remaining Kraits at the pursuing fighters. One missile detonated early, hit by the enemy’s anti-missile defenses. The other looped clear of the fireball and struck home, detonating with a brilliant flash less than three hundred kilometers away.
Close . . .
Out of missiles, now, St. Clair locked on to the remaining fighter and triggered his Gatling, spraying a stream of depleted uranium rounds at the enemy fighter. More missiles were closing, however, and one detonated close alongside.
St. Clair never learned whether he’d hit the remaining enemy fighter. A nuclear fireball expanded in a dazzling pulse of raw energy just a hundred meters away, and St. Clair was slammed into black unconsciousness. . . .
Chapter Seventeen
7 August, 2425
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0135 hours, TFT
“Fighters incoming!” Fletcher called. “Two of them . . . VFA-96! Lieutenants Connor and Gregory.”
Gray surveyed the tactical situation in the 3-D tank. A pair of new stars had just winked on in the direction of Invictus. “Any comm from them yet?”
“Yes sir, and it’s trouble. Range now . . . four light-minutes.”
Half an AU. And by now, those Starblades would be decelerating in order to match vectors with the task force. It would take a while to get them aboard.
Gray bit off a curse. Another delay . . . but maybe it was a delay that was just in time. “What trouble?”
“Sir, Rand and his people appear to have been taken prisoner by the Glothr,” Mallory told him. “And a large number of Glothr ships were seen boosting clear of the Invictus ring system in pursuit of the High Guard ships.”
“How large a number?”
“They didn’t say. We’ll query.”
“Do it.” They had to know what they were up against. “Any word from Pax or Concord?”
“Only that they were last seen accelerating at maximum boost back to the Triggah.”
Which meant that they’d be coming in about twenty minutes behind the fighters. If they’d managed to get clear. Odd. There should be some sign of them by now on the long-range scans. So far, however, nothing.
His best guess, then, was that the Glothr had captured the High Guard ships, then turned back with their prizes to Invictus.
“One of the fighters reports picking up a fragmentary message,” Fletcher said. “It was unintelligible.”
“Comm loss at relativistic speed,” Gray said. Nothing they could do about that now. “Commander Talbot! Give me a fleet status update.”
Lieutenant Commander Henry Talbot was on Gray’s command staff, assigned to FC3 as the fleet’s status officer. Task Force One had been badly bloodied in the exchange with the Turusch hours before, with so many ships badly damaged that Gray had cancelled the planned deployment across fifty AUs to Invictus. The fleet repair vessel Vulcan—named for the smith of the gods, not the planet—had been turning out tons of repair nano and sending it out in streams to those vessels that had been shot up the worst. Her raw material storage bays were already nearly empty.
“Repairs are . . . proceeding, Admiral,” Talbot replied. “But the Vulcan is running out of rock. We really need some A-ram if we want to get anywhere.”
A-ram—slang for “asteroidal raw material”—was in distressingly short supply out here. Typical solar systems always had plenty of rock and ice floating around: asteroids and comets and even dwarf planets left over from the earliest days of system formation. A ship like Vulcan could send out clouds of nano programmed to harvest the raw material and turn it into useful things, like food, air, water, and weapons.
But things were different out here. Invictus had been ejected from the Milky Way alone—no sun, no other worlds, no moons . . .
. . . and none of the asteroidal clutter and debris that filled proper solar systems.
For a long moment, Gray stared into the vast, pale sweep of the galaxy, thinking. He then swung the view almost one hundred eighty degrees, centering on the minute patch of golden haze cloaking the TRGA, now about half an AU distant—seventy-five million kilometers—the cylinder itself made invisible by distance.
Almost half of the surviving ships of Task Force One—eight ships total—needed further repairs. America had come through that desperate fight in front of the TRGA unscathed, but New York, Ontario, Northern California, the Pan-European Victoire, and Churchill—plus three destroyers—all had been badly damaged, so much so that they weren’t able to put on any acceleration at all—drifting and all-but-helpless hulks.
And the ships lost—the battlecruisers Sonora and Honshu, the heavy cruisers Clinton
and Valparaiso, the medium cruiser Hessen, the light cruiser Mobile, and five of the smaller destroyers and frigates. Eleven ships destroyed out of the original thirty-two . . . and two of those were still unaccounted for.
Fighter losses had been heavy, too. SAR tugs were out now, catching up to disabled fighters tumbling into the Void, grappling them, and hauling them back. Five pilots had been rescued already, but eleven had been killed or were still missing.
They were still tallying up the casualties. The best guess at the moment was that the fleet had suffered some eight thousand men and women killed, another thousand injured.
All of that was stacked up against Turusch losses of an estimated nine capital ships. Exact numbers were hard to come by, though the AIs were going through the after-action data now to try to form a clearer picture of what had just happened. Some of the alien vessels—possibly as many as ten—had turned around and escaped back through the TRGA before USNA forces had completed the englobement maneuver and cut them off.
The attempt at englobement, Gray ruefully decided, had been only partially successful. Cut off an enemy’s one hope of retreat, and he likely will fight harder than ever, his back to the figurative wall, with no hope of survival at all save to attack and keep attacking until one side or the other is destroyed. The surviving Turusch heavies, when they’d realized what was happening, had turned back toward the mouth of the TRGA and smashed right through the USNA ships standing in their way. Three of the six USNA heavies lost in the battle had been destroyed in that rush, and Gray was still struggling with the knowledge that his orders had put them there in harm’s way.
Of course, that was what navies did and had done since humans first had sent warships to enforce government policy at sea, and it was no different now in interstellar space: go in harm’s way. And admirals had been putting their people there, and agonizing about their decisions, for very nearly that long. It was something Gray had already had to come to grips with.
