“Course is Bravo-Six, unmodified,” he snapped. “Full reverse, take us right back along our original path.”
“Sir…if we do that…”
“Bogey Alpha will engage us,” Kyle confirmed. “We’ll go right down their throats, starfighters and battleships first. Launch the bombers and prepare for close engagement.”
“Sir…”
“That gap, Commander Sterling, is a trap,” Kyle told them. “And I will take the fleet I know I can fight over the trap Walkingstick clearly thinks can beat us any day!
“Execute your orders!”
Michelle listened to the new orders and forced herself to stay calm. She needed to not merely appear calm to the crew aboard her own starfighter but radiate calm through the neural implant network. Most of the emotional side channels were shut down in combat anyway, but some “context” always snuck through.
“Bombers are launching.”
“All starfighters, all starfighters, all bombers, all bombers,” she recited, overriding the communication network to make sure everyone could hear her.
“We’ve got a new plan down from the Old Man,” she told them. “Our old friend Walkingstick is over there in Bogey Bravo. He thinks he’s clever. Well, he is clever—we all know that.”
It was a grim truth they all had to live with, that the man tasked to conquer their home nations was one of the best strategists the Commonwealth had produced in a generation. Michelle’s own estimation was that only the war with the League had robbed him of enough reinforcements to smash the Alliance a year or more earlier.
“But clever as the good Marshal is, he’s up against the Stellar Fox today, and the Fox smells a trap! The Terrans have left us a nice hole to slip through, not entirely safe, no—not that obvious.
“But the hole is there and we could escape through it…except it’s a trap,” she concluded dryly. “So, the boss says we turn the trap on them, and that, ladies, gentlemen and the rest of you, falls where it always falls: on the starfighters.”
She knew her people. Some of them had flown with the Fox before this latest campaign. All of them knew who he was, what he had done. If Admiral Roberts said there was a trap, they’d believe him. If she said she believed Admiral Roberts, they’d believe her.
“All wings, all squadrons, converge into Epsilon-One formation and maintain position at two-fifty thousand kilometers ahead of the fleet,” she continued. “We’re going to be playing anti-missile shield pretty quickly here, but shortly after that, well…
“We have some Terran battleships to kill.”
Missile fire resumed as Forty-First Fleet turned in space, hundreds of the massive smart weapons blazing into space at Bogey Alpha. The entire plan now hinged on punching through Alpha as hard and fast as possible.
Williams-Alvarez was already moving her starfighters and bombers where he wanted them, without his even needing to give specific orders. Competent subordinates were a treasure. As he watched, the battleships and battlecruisers shifted their formations, moving forward to form a seven-ship shield in front of the four carriers.
Their defenses and heavy lances would decide this battle. They’d either smash their way through Bogey Alpha and exit the system unharmed, or Bogey Alpha would pin them in place while the currently unseen Bogey Charlie maneuvered to trap them.
Charlie was presumably still in Alcubierre drive, which gave them almost infinite options of where to arrive—but once he destroyed Bogey Alpha, he had a lot more options to maneuver.
Eleven ships against nine. His were more modern. He knew in his bones that Bogey Alpha was doomed.
The only question was whether what was left of his fleet after killing them would be able to escape the next jaw of the trap.
The arrival of the first missile salvos from Bogey Alpha marked the true beginning of the battle. Launched before any of the Commonwealth’s tricks had been unveiled, they were a mere forty missiles per salvo. They weren’t harmless, but they were the smallest threat currently on the battlespace.
They collided with Williams-Alvarez’s fighters and died, their fireballs lighting up the darkness of the Leopold System as the fleets danced.
The same salvos from Forty-First Fleet were less badly calibrated to the strength of their target, but they’d been fired at an enemy Kyle had believed was weaker. They were split into three groups of sixty-six, each targeting one of the Assassins.
Faced with three older ships, it had made sense. Faced with nine ships, two of them top-of-the-line modern units, it was a recipe for wasted ammunition. There was only limited capacity to update missile targeting via Q-probes, so the first three salvos went in unchanged.
And died. A few starfighters went with them—more than the Terran missiles had achieved against Williams-Alvarez’s squadrons—but not many.
The fourth salvo was different. All one hundred and ninety-eight missiles lunged at a single target. With the older battlecruisers still in front from being used as a shield for the other ships’ drive signatures, they were the easiest target.
The fourth salvo took out the first one. The fifth took out the second. By the time the sixth salvo reached Bogey Alpha, however, the third Assassin had withdrawn into formation with the other capital ships. The massed fire of six capital ships saved her from that salvo.
The remaining four salvos of the first push focused on the closest Hercules, hammering almost eight hundred missiles at a single ship. Fire lit up the Terran formation, shredding missiles and starfighters alike, but the Alliance only needed to get lucky a handful of times.
They only got lucky once.
The battlecruiser reeled, her fire slackening as half of her missile launchers vaporized in a blast of antimatter, but she dropped herself back on course, continuing to lunge after Forty-First Fleet with her sister ships.
The two fleets had matched acceleration now. While Kyle’s velocity toward Katrina was dropping at two hundred and twenty gravities, Bogey Alpha was continuing to close with him at roughly one percent of lightspeed.
It would take him three hours to escape the system, and he’d reach zero range with Bogey Alpha in just under ninety minutes.
The gap in missile fire let Bogey Alpha breathe, but it wouldn’t last. Soon, both sides would be under fire by hundreds of missiles again—and this was just foreplay.
The real battle would begin when the starfighters clashed.
Kyle sighed.
“Orders to Williams-Alvarez,” he told Sterling quietly. “The fighter group will advance and engage the enemy.”
He’d been a fighter pilot before and he hated it, but the reality was that starfighters existed to die so starships didn’t have to. Duty required him to spend Williams’s people to save as many of his starships as possible.
He still didn’t know where Bogey Charlie was going to come out, after all.
BB-285 Saint Michael
“He’s reversed vector entirely,” MacGinnis reported. “They’re going to drop right down TF Thirty-Eight–One’s throat. That’s…odd.”
“No, it’s smart,” James replied. “He knows he can take Hopper. He’s guessed that we had a hammer ready to drop in the gap we’d left him. Smart fucker.”
“Hopper is going to get mangled,” MacGinnis said quietly. “What do we do?”
“Continue laying on the missile fire as hard as we can and maneuver to cut off his options,” the Marshal replied, flipping a course from his implant into Saint Michael’s systems. “This course will remove a good third of his possible courses. We probably won’t be able to engage him except with missiles, but that’s not the point.”
His operations officer threw the courses and probability cones up in the flag deck’s big holodisplay.
“Sixty minutes after he crashes through Thirty-Eight-One, he can go FTL,” she concluded. “We can’t catch him. Our missiles might take a ship or two, but it’s all down to Hopper…and he doesn’t have the firepower.”
“No, he doesn’t,” James agreed. “But Ad
miral Tasker does—and she can still adjust her emergence.”
He opened the q-com channel to Saint Brigit.
“Lindsey, I’m sending you a new emergence locus,” he told her. “I don’t expect you to hit it perfectly, but the closer you get, the more fucked the Stellar Fox is.
“We’ll see,” she replied. “We’re less than ten minutes from emergence; there’s only so much we can do!”
“Do what you can,” James ordered. “Let’s finish the job.”
36
Leopold System
09:15 October 9, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
Forty-First Fleet’s fighter force was dramatically understrength, but Michelle still had eight hundred starfighters and a hundred and fifty bombers. The Commonwealth fighter force outnumbered her, with just as many bombers, but she trusted her people’s skill over that of the local high guard.
“Bombers, hold your torpedoes for the capital ships,” she ordered. “Use your Starfires with the rest of us. We’re going to punch a hole for you—launch torps after we’ve cleared the fighters with the missiles.”
The Gemblade torpedoes would range on the capital ships before the two starfighter forces charging toward each other could use their shorter-ranged missiles on each other.
With Forty-First Fleet accelerating away from the closing starfighters, however, Michelle’s people would have a chance to gut the Commonwealth fighters and bombers before they could launch.
A stern chase was a long chase—but her fighters were now charging straight at the enemy. The Commonwealth fighters had waited until she’d begun her charge to come out to meet her, but the space between the two fleets was about to light up with fire.
“Twenty-eight minutes to missile range,” Eklund told her. “They’re just under forty from torp range of Forty-First Fleet. No luck pulling the bombers out of the mix so far.”
Hiding bombers as starfighters was such a basic use of ECM that Michelle would have been surprised if they could identify them now. Bombers didn’t have weaker defenses than the starfighters around them, but they were a much bigger threat to the capital ships the starfighters needed to take them home.
“Massed salvos as soon as we hit range,” Michelle ordered. “Save one salvo for the capital ships, but throw every other missile we’ve got right at the starfighters. Like I said, let’s punch a hole, people.”
Kyle’s focus was on the fighter strike, even the continuing three-way missile engagement a secondary priority in his mind as he watched Williams-Alvarez and her people charge forward. His implant, linked into Elysium’s computers, gave him a series of timelines and countdowns.
The whole thing was going to be rough on his starfighters. It was going to be rougher on the Commonwealth in the long run, but he was grimly certain he was going to lose more of his people than he’d like.
Of course, even one was more than he’d like.
“Alcubierre emergence!” Aurangzeb suddenly barked. “Multiple emergences, dropping vectors on the feeds now.”
Kyle’s focus changed instantly, refocusing the tactical feed running through his implant as he rose from his command chair to study the main display.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“Looks like the fleet that hit Midori, plus some replacements and reinforcements,” his operations officer told him. “Five Saints. Three Herculeses. Three Volcanos. Four Lexingtons. Four Oceans and two Resolutes.”
Seven battleships and an equal number each of carriers and cruisers. Twenty-one warships.
“Emergence locus?”
“About halfway between where we would have been warping space if we’d gone down the gap and our current target,” Aurangzeb reported. “This was their ambush and they tried to redirect it.”
But they hadn’t done it well enough. If Kyle didn’t change his course at all, the Commonwealth fleet’s fighters would catch him but the capital ships wouldn’t.
But…
“Adjust fleet course twenty-six degrees clockwise along the ecliptic plane and seven degrees up,” Kyle ordered softly. The course change would bring them closer to Bogey Bravo, but not quite close enough for torpedo range…and would remove them from Bogey Charlie’s range entirely.
They were still going to have to fight Alpha, but Charlie’s emergence had been just wrong enough to save them.
“I’ve got starfighter and missile launches from Bogey Charlie,” Sterling reported. “Course change…will keep us out of starfighter and bomber range.
“We’re going to start eating missiles from them in forty minutes, shortly after our bombers hit Bogey Alpha. Any change to targeting orders, sir?”
Kyle shook his head. His hundred and ninety-eight launchers were enough to be a threat to any single fleet facing him, but splitting his fire would waste his missiles.
“Maintain focus on Bogey Alpha,” he ordered. “We’ll punch them out and run for home. Keep your eyes on the bouncing ball, people.
“We’ve got to live through Bravo and Charlie’s missiles, but we cannot afford to be distracted by them.”
Missiles flashed past Michelle’s people in both directions and she shivered at the sight of them. Her people were doing what they could, but their relative velocity to the Terran weapons was too high for them to eliminate more than a tenth of the missiles the Commonwealth was flinging at Forty-First Fleet.
So far, the fleet was holding their own, dodging and destroying the salvos as they came crashing down, but that could only last so long. Outnumbered six to one, there was no way they could survive an extended missile engagement.
Which meant it was up to Michelle and her people to reduce those odds.
“We’re in torpedo range,” Eklund told her.
“Everyone, hold your fire,” she barked. “If we launch through the starfighters, we’ll lose too many of the torps. We need every hit we can get—our job is to plow the road for the fleet!”
The reminder was unneeded. Her bombers stayed silent, holding their fire as they closed. Four more minutes.
Then three more minutes. Then two.
And then it was time.
“All fighters, fire at will!”
Her Falcon-C command starfighter trembled as her four missile launchers fired, cycled to the next missile in their magazines, and fired again.
She held her last salvo—only three missiles instead of four on the command starfighter—and watched as her enemies unleashed their own firestorm.
The Alliance force had fewer fighters, but while her Templars had fewer launchers than the Terran Katanas, her Arrows had more. The Commonwealth launched four thousand missiles at her—and she sent thirty-four hundred back.
The Terrans weren’t holding missiles for a capital-ship strike, though. They sent three salvos of starfighter missiles at her people, and she only sent two back at them.
Twelve thousand missiles versus seven thousand. Somehow, she was grimly certain this wasn’t going to be a good day for her people—but they needed to hold together.
“Protect the bombers,” she ordered. “At all costs.”
That order was going to kill her people. She knew it. Her starfighters would have to sacrifice themselves to cover the bombers from the incoming missiles—but the bombers were her best chance at killing the battleships closing with her people’s only way home.
Being the starfighter strike commander sucked.
Watching the starfighter clash was the worst part of being a fleet commander. Kyle had been in those tiny ships in those deadly, terrifying moments, and he knew what he’d sent his people into.
But he was safe. Far behind the conflict, as thousands of missiles hammered down on the fleets of tiny ships like crashing tsunamis.
The cascades of antimatter explosions made it hard to see what was going on from the outside, even with the sensor feeds from the starfighters and the Q-probes accompanying them.
“Torpedo launch!” Sterling announced. “…Damn
. They must have launched just before the missiles reached them.”
Kyle nodded silently.
That was the best of the bad options. The bombers might still die, but their torpedoes wouldn’t have to pass through at many starfighters as before to reach the capital ships.
He hated to interfere in the middle of the battle, but he watched the losses stack up and came to a decision.
“Orders to Williams-Alvarez,” he said quietly. “She is to expend all of her missiles on the starfighters and fall back on the fleet. The torps will clear the way and the battlewagons will finish it. Her people’s part in this is almost over.”
Michelle’s Falcon writhed in the valley of fire and death. Dozens—hundreds!—of antimatter explosions pockmarked the space around her ships as she received the new orders.
They might not be the most tactically efficient order, but she couldn’t help but feel relief as she was told not to spend her people’s lives for the smallest of benefits. She was already losing people left and right, the starfighters burning like fireflies as they covered the bombers’ launch, clearing the way for the torpedoes that might, just might, save the fleet behind them.
“Launch all remaining missiles and reverse acceleration,” she snapped, passing on the order. “Kill these bastards and fall back to the carriers. The big guns are coming in to finish the job!”
The last gasp of her force blasted into space, barely two thousand missiles instead of the three thousand–plus from before. She’d lost a third of her ships in the first exchange—but the Terrans had come off even worse.
If the exchange rate continued, the lance duel that was rapidly growing on them was going to be well in her favor.
She forced herself to stony-faced calm as the reports continued to trickle in of shattered ships and lost lives. About twenty percent of those wrecked ships had launched their escape pods, blasting their crews clear before they were destroyed.
Operation Medusa Page 23
