Those “lucky” crews would be Commonwealth prisoners. There was no way that the Alliance fleet could retrieve most of the escape pods. Some might be close enough to be scooped up by daring S&R ships as the fleet passed by, but almost all of them would be left behind.
The second wave crashed down on her people and she focused on survival, twisting her Falcon through the incoming fire and letting Eklund line their lasers and positron lance up on the missiles.
Every missile she killed was one that couldn’t touch her or her people. Somehow, somehow, she danced through the second salvo alive.
And the third.
Two thousand starfighters and bombers had fired twenty missiles at each other, and barely five hundred from both sides survived to reach lance range.
Before Michelle could say anything, give any orders, the remaining Templars—forty-six Phoenix ships—suddenly shifted their acceleration, charging into the teeth of the closing Terran force.
The Templars were the only ships in her force to match the Katanas for lance range. Their shift in course bought them precious seconds before the Terrans reacted—precious seconds in which they shattered the forward squadrons of the Commonwealth force.
“After the Templars!” Michelle barked. “Down their throats with everything we’ve got—we punch these bastards out and we get to go home!”
In the back of her mind, she was watching the torpedoes hammer home into the Commonwealth fleet—but her own focus was on her lance and her engines, dodging around enemy fire as she unleashed havoc on them in turn.
She survived.
Only one hundred and eighty-two of her starfighters came through with her.
Even as part of Kyle mourned the fighter crews he’d lost, the rest of him—the cold-blooded bastard who’d earned an Admiral’s stars on the backs of more bodies than he could count—was focused on the torpedo strike.
Nine hundred torpedoes paled in comparison to the thousands of weapons that had just lit up space in a cataclysm of fire around the starfighters, but it was four times as many missiles as each of the earlier salvos his fleet had flung at Bogey Alpha.
Less capable missiles, true, but still more capable than the starfighter missiles that had been spent in their thousands to open a path. All nine hundred torpedoes made it past the Commonwealth fighters, swarming forward like an avenging storm.
The seven surviving capital ships spread out to better defend themselves, lasers and defensive positron lances alike lighting up space as they tore massive gaps in the formation of incoming weapons.
Kyle watched the attack hit, his entire flag deck silent around him. Torpedoes died in the hundreds—but there were hundreds of them to die.
The damaged Hercules went first, followed almost instantly by the last Assassin. The remaining torpedoes flung themselves at the four battleships at the core of Bogey Alpha, their suicidal brains driven by one determined mission: destroy themselves and take the enemy with them.
Two Resolutes staggered under the fire. One lunged forward to rejoin her companions. The other spun helplessly off toward Leopold, her engines shattered by the hits. Most of her crew had likely survived, but she was out of the fight.
She was probably the lucky one, Kyle reflected. His own battlecruisers and battleships were adjusting their formations, dropping behind the carriers to make sure their escortees were protected. He’d have opened the range even farther, but that would have left both sub-formations vulnerable to missiles.
His Titans and Conquerors outranged the Resolutes. Everyone knew how this battle was going to end now, but the Resolutes charged forward anyway, their missile launchers hurling death at Kyle’s fleet as they tried to close to the range of their own one-megaton-a-second beams.
They never made it. The two fleets crossed an invisible line in space, where intelligence suggested that the modern Federation ships’ one-point-five megaton positron lances would overwhelm the older battleships’ retrofitted electromagnetic deflectors.
The first beams missed and Kyle inhaled sharply.
“They’ve upgraded again,” he murmured. “That’s at least ten percent stronger than we anticipated.”
“Fully modern screens,” Aurangzeb agreed. “Should have guessed that was part of why Walkingstick held back his fleet.” The ops officer shook his head and flashed a predatory grin. “Won’t save them, though.”
The three ships danced in the fire, but four of the Alliance vessels had the range—and the Terran ships didn’t. A hundred massive positron lances flayed the space around the Commonwealth battleships, and even the best maneuvering and twisting would only save them for so long.
The damaged Resolute misstepped first, colliding with six lance-beams from Genghis Khan. The battlecruiser’s beams only connected for a quarter-second at most, but it was enough. Six hammerblows of pure focused antimatter smashed into and through the old battleship.
She reeled for a half second after the impact, then detonated as her antimatter containment failed.
A second battleship seemed to just…stop in space as she collided with Kronos’s fire. Even with Elysium’s computer support, Kyle couldn’t tell how many of the superbattleship’s thirty-six massive beams hit the Resolute.
There wasn’t enough left of the enemy battleship to judge.
One last ship remained. Either lucky or cursed, she dodged everything again and again—managing to survive the full light-second to enter Magellan’s reduced range.
Her luck could only last so long, and her captain and gunners knew it. There was no way to score reliable hits at this range, but her megaton-a-second lances spoke anyway. Fire flashed across space, flung aside by the massive powerful electromagnetic fields wrapped around the Alliance ships.
One lucky beam hit Avalon. The supercarrier lurched and Kyle’s heart leapt into his throat as his old ship struggled, but she swung around the damage. His data feed showed she’d lost lances and missile launchers, but she was still moving.
She could still make FTL.
Another series of beams slammed into Kronos. The massive battleship was among the most heavily armored modern ships in existence, and massive panels of ablative armor detonated under the blows. Antimatter met matter and converted it into energy—but the ablative armor kept the explosion away from her hull.
Beams vaporized and launchers were lost, but like Avalon, the big battleship was still flying.
The Resolute’s luck ran out at the same time as the latest salvo of missiles came smashing down on her. Without her sisters to defend her, it would have taken more luck than she had to stop all two hundred missiles.
The last of Bogey Alpha’s starships died in an immense fireball as missiles swarmed over her, and Kyle breathed a sigh of relief.
With Bogey Alpha gone, his fleet was clear out of Katrina’s gravity well to where they could warp space and escape.
And then the first synchronized salvo from Bogey Bravo and Bogey Charlie smashed over his fleet. Elysium jumped like a startled puppy as her own ablative armor tried to deflect the missiles making their final charge against her.
It failed.
37
Leopold System
10:00 October 9, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
The lights flickered back on after a few seconds, the implant network coming back moments later as the emergency power redirect ended. Sensors and the tactical feed took a few seconds longer, but the rough automated damage report was in Kyle’s head by the time they came live.
It wasn’t good.
Three separate missiles had hit Elysium, each carrying a one-gigaton antimatter warhead and roughly the equivalent in kinetic energy. Like Kronos, the supercarrier had massive armor and defenses, the ablatives only the first layer of countermeasures to attack, but six gigatons of force was more than they could take.
The rest of the fleet was continuing to accelerate away from Katrina at two hundred and twenty gravities. Elysium wasn’t accelerating at all, her
engines offline as she reeled from the damage.
As Kyle watched, the rest of the fleet began to reduce acceleration and he shook his head.
“Do we have coms?” he barked at Sterling.
“Yes, sir!”
Kyle didn’t acknowledge his chief of staff’s response, instead diving right into the mental network with the rest of the ships…and blinking as it told him he didn’t have a q-com link.
“Sterling? The computer doesn’t agree with you!”
His chief of staff swallowed, eyes glazing as he went through his implant, and then met his gaze.
“The q-com array is gone, sir,” he said quietly. “We still have the backup radio and laser connections.”
“Thanks.”
Kyle linked into those.
“This is Roberts,” he said calmly. “All ships will resume maximum acceleration. All starfighters will proceed to Avalon and the battlecruisers. Nobody lands on Elysium until we have a final damage assessment.”
He paused.
“If Elysium cannot keep up with the fleet, the fleet will leave without her. That order is non-discretionary.”
“We can’t just leave you behind,” Bai’al’s voice arrived via radio seconds later. “We can’t just abandon a supercarrier!”
“We can lose one supercarrier better than the entire fleet,” Kyle replied. “My orders stand.”
He turned his attention back to his flagship as some of her engines flickered to life.
“Captain Novak? What’s our status?”
“Not…great,” Elysium’s Captain told him. “FTL coms are down. Most of the engines are down. We can only pull about fifty gravities.”
Kyle nodded. That was unfortunate, but they might still be able to pull the ship out. She’d be under fire for a long time, though…
“That’s not the worst of it, sir,” she said grimly. “The reason we can only pull fifty gees is that the Class Ones are down.”
He winced.
“All of them?”
“Right now, all of them,” she confirmed. “Engineering is digging into if we can get any back up, but at this moment, sir, there is no way that Elysium can go FTL.”
He studied the vectors. Shuttles could pull five hundred gravities, but the fleet was drawing away at two hundred and twenty, and while he’d trust the Commonwealth not to intentionally shoot down evacuation ships, there were enough missiles flying…
“Sound the evacuation order,” he told her. “Everyone who can make it to a shuttle in under five minutes gets off this ship.”
“Yes, sir.”
Even as the message rang out across the ship, he could feel her hesitance over the link.
“Sir, that doesn’t include the flag deck. You’re at least…”
“Seven minutes, running and using the lifts, from the flight deck,” he confirmed cheerfully. “Elysium is a fine ship, Captain. Whatever happens, I think we’re both going down with her.”
Kyle remained standing, letting the chaos and activity of his flagship wash over him as her crew fled.
“Turn us about,” he heard Novak bark. “Let’s cover the shuttles.”
He didn’t hear the response, but the grim humor of her next comment suggested what it had been.
“If we cover them with our hull, we’re still covering them. We get those people out of here!”
None of their communications were real-time. The data feeds from the rest of the fleet and the approaching starfighters were already starting to be distorted by relativity. There were a thousand aspects of space travel that the q-coms allowed them to ignore, but the spike of fire that had shredded Elysium’s FTL communications had killed all of that.
“Sir, I have the report from Engineering,” Novak said quietly through his implants. It was a private channel, just the two of them. She wasn’t even speaking aloud on the bridge.
That was a bad sign.
“How bad?”
“Three of the Class Ones are gone,” she told him. “We might be able to get two of the others online, get ourselves back up to a hundred gees or so, but we aren’t going to be able to warp space.”
“I understand.”
He stared at the holodisplay. All of his options had shrunk down.
“Turn us around, Captain Novak,” he ordered quietly. “We’ll use Elysium to break their missile salvos, cover the rest of the fleet’s retreat.”
“Sir, the fleet can slow down, wait for a shuttle…”
“Negative, Captain,” he cut her off. “Every minute they delay is another missile salvo they have to stop. I will not put my people at risk for myself; am I clear?
“No,” he concluded softly. “We’ll cover the retreat. We’ll ram this ship right down Walkingstick’s throat, and the old bastard can choke on it.”
The channel was silent.
“Yes, sir.”
Obedient to his orders, Elysium turned at bay. Behind her, the other ten ships of Forty-First Fleet fled toward flatter space, space where they could engage their FTL drives and flee the Leopold System.
Starfighters and bombers streamed past her. Avalon alone could carry all of the survivors of the fighter strike, Kyle reflected. Williams-Alvarez, at least, would survive. They’d made it this far—he’d trade his life for the pilots who’d survived the strike that had saved his fleet.
“Sons of bitches,” Sterling snapped. There was no real heat in his curse, just resignation.
“Commander?”
“They’ve switched their missile targeting,” Sterling explained. “The missiles salvos are trying to bypass us and go after the rest of the fleet.” He paused. “To give them credit, that course change also minimizes the chance they’ll hit our evacuation shuttles.”
“I’ll give Walkingstick that much credit, yes,” Kyle agreed. “Can we still intercept them?”
“That’s a question for Novak’s crew, and I don’t want to interrupt them,” his chief of staff admitted. “It’ll be long-range, but I don’t see a reason not to try!”
“What about missiles? Can we return fire?”
Aurangzeb laughed bitterly as Kyle directed the question his way.
“Six launchers, sir,” he said flatly. “We’re not getting through anyone’s defenses with six launchers.”
“Release them to Novak’s control,” Kyle ordered. The entire fleet’s missile launchers had been linked to fire on fleet orders, focusing the missiles on a minimum number of targets. “She can use them for missile defense.”
Using all-up Jackhammers as counter-missiles was expensive but, well, he couldn’t use them for much else now.
Moments after the bridge regained controlled of the launchers, missiles began to flash out. He didn’t need to check their orders to know they were being sent out as counter-missiles. Even as he watched, Elysium adjusted her course, the big, crippled carrier charging into the heart of the missile fire from Bogey Bravo.
Bogey Charlie’s fire wouldn’t come anywhere near her, but she could gut Bravo’s salvos if they chose to ignore her.
And ignore her they did. Missiles slipped past—a single ship couldn’t stop those massed hundreds—but far fewer than would have hit Elysium if the salvo had been aimed at her. For five minutes, the big supercarrier was wreathed in explosions.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen.
Some missiles made it through everything, but Kronos and Gaia were trailing the rest of the fleet now, “dragging their skirts” to lure the missiles to them. Both superbattleships took hits, but they could.
“Gaia has lost a Class One,” Sterling murmured. “Thank the Stars for redundancies.”
Not every fleet gave their ships an extra Class One manipulator. The Federation had never stopped…and that had just saved one of their most modern battleships.
“There they go,” Aurangzeb added. “They’re clear.”
Cherenkov radiation flickered across Elysium’s scanners, and Kyle looked at the tactical feeds.
The big supercarrier wa
s alone in Leopold now, facing almost fifty Commonwealth warships.
“There are, what, fifteen hundred missiles still out there?” he asked conversationally.
“At least,” Aurangzeb confirmed. “We’re…well, we’re fucked, sir.”
“I know.” Kyle shook his head.
“Captain Novak?”
“Sir?” his flag captain responded, her voice tired. She knew what order he was going to give.
“Samson Protocols, if you please. Make sure everyone gets to a pod.” He smiled grimly, making sure his determination crossed the channel.
“That includes you. We got everyone clear; now we need to make sure the Commonwealth doesn’t get a Sanctuary to dissect—and you will not go down with her at this point, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
BB-285 Saint Michael
Hundreds of missiles swept across the Leopold System, obedient to James Calvin Walkingstick’s command. Already, they were all changing their courses, giving up their hopeless chase of the now-vanished Alliance fleet and hurtling toward the remaining Sanctuary-class carrier.
“I wonder,” James said aloud, considering. “Roberts always was a carrier man.”
“Sir?” MacGinnis asked.
“Two Federation carriers. Two Imperial carriers. I make the odds fifty-fifty that the Stellar Fox is on that ship,” James said conversationally.
“Then he is about to cease to be a problem,” his ops officer said with satisfaction, then looked surprised as James shook his head.
“If he’s aboard that ship, he’s already ceased to be a problem,” he pointed out gently. “And whoever is aboard that ship, they put themselves into a position where they were going to give their lives to protect the rest of their people.
“Besides, they’ll scuttle her before they let us capture her…but if we hold off the missile fire, they can evacuate in an orderly fashion before they do so.”
Part of him wanted to grind Roberts’s face in this defeat, incomplete as it had been. The rest of him knew the crew over there deserved more respect—and while James Walkingstick would admit, in private at least, that he was a Unificationist fanatic, he wasn’t a mass murderer.
Operation Medusa Page 24
