Three super-battleships and twelve battleships didn’t survive from the Kanzi fleet. They didn’t die alone, though, and Harriet saluted the brave search-and-rescue crews who swarmed Indira Gandhi’s shattered hull.
They didn’t get everyone off before the antimatter cores failed, and Gandhi’s chief engineer was there to the end…but they got over two-thirds of the damaged super-battleship’s crew clear before she went up.
The two Imperial super-battleships she’d lost hadn’t been as lucky. They’d come apart under the bombardment, and other search ships were sweeping hyperspace for escape pods. It wasn’t a hopeless task…but with only a light-second of visibility, it was an extraordinarily dangerous one.
“Detach a squadron of destroyers to back up the search-and-rescue,” Harriet ordered. “Then send a courier into Asimov. I need Rolfson’s ships.”
“And then, Fleet Lord?” Sier asked.
She gestured at the tactical plot.
“Then I have another five hundred Taljzi warships to take out, and this time, they know what we have to fight them with.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Hyper portal!”
Harold almost sighed in relief at the report. The continually passing hours were starting to stretch his nerves to the breaking point. He didn’t believe, not for one moment, that the Taljzi had just up and left.
That meant that they were waiting for something, and now, it seemed, the other shoe was dropping.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“Single portal, small ship…waiting on tachyon scanners.” Ling Yu shook her head as a wide grin spawned on her face. “It’s a Wet Marsh–class destroyer, Imperial design and IFF.”
“Seriously?” Harold demanded.
“Incoming hyperfold communication,” Xun Huang reported. “It’s flagged to your attention, sir!”
“Link me up,” he ordered, rotating the screens on his seat to show him the comm channel.
A tall and hairless humanoid with double-jointed arms and legs filled his screen, the Commander bowing as he saw Rolfson’s return channel.
“Warm waters greet you, Vice Admiral. I am Commander Stiroth of Small Amphibious Mammal Nest.”
Stiroth was an Ivida, one of the Imperial Races. His people had evolved on the desert plains of a homeworld that was about as dry as a habitable world could get. The A!Tol phrasing sounded strange coming from him—but not nearly as strange as the ship name after the translator was done with it.
“Commander,” Harold greeted him. “I take it Tanaka will be here shortly?”
“Not exactly,” Stiroth admitted. “The waters are murky. The initial Taljzi Return that you engaged has been destroyed, but a second, larger, fleet has been detected. I have encrypted orders for you, but my understanding is that the Fleet Lord intends to engage the enemy in hyperspace once more.”
Once more. Which meant that Tanaka had taken on the Taljzi Return in hyperspace already. Victoriously, from the sound of it.
“The news is never entirely good or bad, is it?” he asked, somewhat whimsically. “Send me the encrypted messages, Commander, then make for rendezvous with the Task Force. I suspect we’ll be returning to the Fleet Lord soon enough, and I’d hate to let you wander into trouble on your own when I have battleships to protect you with.”
Ivida faces were motionless, a hard shield against the weather of their homeworld. Their eyes, however, were surprisingly readable, even to an alien.
Fortunately, it seemed that Commander Stiroth also had a sense of humor.
Harriet Tanaka, thankfully, hadn’t changed noticeably in the days since Harold had left the rest of Seventy-Seventh Fleet behind to charge ahead to Asimov. Maybe a new worry line or two, but her dark complexion concealed them, to his eyes at least.
“Vice Admiral,” she greeted him. “We’re in hyperspace near Asimov, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to join you in the system anytime soon. We took lighter losses against the first Return than I would have dared hope, but we’re still sweeping for escape pods and survivors—and with hyperspace being what it is, if we leave them behind, they’re gone forever.”
He nodded. There was a very short window to try and find anyone who’d ended up lost in hyperspace. Once you’d left the visibility bubble of an object without an interface drive, it was unlikely you’d ever find it again.
“There is a second Taljzi fleet headed our way as well,” she continued. “Five hundred and twenty ships, one hundred and twenty of them capital ships. It turns out that Kanzi anomaly scanners get more information on the anomaly than ours do.”
Which was useful information all on its own, really.
“Your orders are to refuel and rearm—which, frankly, I’m assuming you’ve already done—and join us in hyperspace. We desperately need your cruiser screen. I just wish we could duplicate your hyperfold antimissile defenses in hyperspace.”
To do that, they’d have to lure the enemy into normal space, which Harold didn’t see a way to do without exposing the rescue operation already going on in hyperspace.
“It’s also my unfortunate duty to report the loss of Indira Gandhi to the enemy,” Tanaka told him. “We’ve confirmed the rescue of over two-thirds of her crew, but exact names and numbers are still uncertain.
“I wish I had better news for you, Admiral, but that’s the news I’ve got. I need your ships and their defense drones. This is going to be a nightmare either way, but even seventy cruisers and three battleships could make the difference between victory or defeat out here.”
The image of the Fleet Lord froze and Harold stroked his beard as he considered.
Tanaka was right in that his ships were fully fueled and armed. Once he pulled out, however, Asimov only had its orbital defenses for protection.
He trusted Tanaka, but they’d still have to be careful. He hadn’t fought as hard as he had for Asimov to lose the system and its hundred million souls by rushing.
Perseus and Herakles opened the hyper portal once again. Cruisers led the way, the Abrasion-class ships of Division Lord Iffa’s command. Destroyers and more cruisers followed, but the battleships remained in Asimov for several long minutes.
A plot on Rolfson’s flag bridge showed the telemetry being relayed from the escorts he’d sent into hyperspace, showing the unfolding tentacle of ships reaching out toward Tanaka’s fleet.
Someone over there had clearly recognized what he was doing, as a matching tentacle of hyperspace anomalies reached out from the fleet of unknown icons until a full chain of ships, each one light-second from the next, reached between the two fleets.
“We have a live link with Seventy-Seventh Fleet,” Xun Huang confirmed. “Thirty-second delay each way, though. Hold on. Message incoming from Fleet Lord Tanaka.”
“All right, Admiral Rolfson, you’ve got a link all the way home. I don’t blame you, not with Isaac’s population on the line, but we only have so much time. Can we get this show on the road?”
Harold laughed aloud.
“The Fleet Lord certainly knows how to make her point, doesn’t she?” he said aloud. “Orders to the task force: we will make rendezvous with Seventy-Seventh Fleet at maximum velocity.”
Bellerophon led the way, her hyperspace emitters unreplaced so far. The damage to her S-HSM batteries was looking permanent too. Harold’s new flagship was going straight into a shipyard when this was over.
For now, however, she had almost a hundred conventional missile launchers and a lot of missiles for those launchers. Everything else was pointless in a hyperspace fight.
“We’re getting the relay from the Kanzi anomaly scanners,” Xun Huang reported. “Looks like we’ve got better range, but they’ve got better resolution. I don’t think I knew that.”
“I don’t think any of us knew that,” Harold replied. “Please tell me we’re better once we’re in tachyon-scanner range?”
“Honestly? In hyperspace, they have about the same resolution as we get with the tachyon scan
ners. We just have real-time data at thirty hyperspace light-seconds. They don’t.”
Harold shook his head.
“Nice to know we have some advantages, though gods know we may have to share some tech if this war drags on.”
Several of his officers looked at him in horror.
“If we become full military allies against the Taljzi? We’d need them to be able to keep up with us, at least, and preferably be nearly as survivable.”
His ships shot over toward Seventy-Seventh Fleet at point five five cee, and he studied the telemetry stream coming in along the chain.
Tanaka’s calm list of losses had failed to mention that her super-battleships might be intact, but they’d taken a massive beating. It didn’t look like a single Imperial or Terran ship had managed to go undamaged.
All were combat-capable—but Bellerophon wasn’t going to be the only ship going into this fight who should have been going into a shipyard.
“I never thought I’d say this, but I hope the Kanzi are in better shape than we are,” he muttered.
The data he had suggested that the Kanzi ships that were left had taken fewer hits…mostly because the Kanzi ships that had taken hits weren’t around anymore.
Their tentative allies didn’t have compressed-matter armor. Once their shields went down, they were gone.
Which left Harold with some fascinating questions. The biggest one, of course, was just where the Taljzi had acquired their technology.
Somehow, he didn’t think they were going to have prisoners to interrogate. The Taljzi didn’t strike him as the surrendering sort.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Morgan watched the icons grow on her screen as Bellerophon rejoined Seventy-Seventh Fleet. The Terran and Imperial ships were marked in green. The Kanzi were marked in the gold of allied units, probably friendly but still marked distinctively on the screens.
As her battleship joined the line, a sparkle of new green and gold icons shot out from the formation as defensive drones, the Imperial Bucklers and their Kanzi equivalents, were launched to fill in the gaps.
Cruisers and destroyers passed through the line of capital ships, moving forward a quarter million kilometers, just inside the visibility bubble. The defensive drones moved farther out, stretching out as far as they could while remaining linked to the screening warships.
She checked her systems. A two-second communication delay each way meant she couldn’t usefully provide information from her tachyon scanners to the drones. A quick interrogation confirmed what she suspected: only the Bellerophons were carrying the Buckler-GD with an integrated tachyon-sensor array.
The rest of the defensive drones were using normal scanners. They didn’t even have the anomaly scanners that would give them a basic warning of incoming fire; the escorts would be relaying them that information.
The drones could function in that environment, but it wasn’t effective. A handful of tachyon scanner–equipped drones were slotting into the formation, but the tactics Morgan and Commander Masters had developed required hyperfold coms to relay the starships’ tachyon scanners to the drones.
Time and distance were both evaporating with disturbing swiftness as the two fleets moved toward each other. The Taljzi were adjusting their formation, not that the defenders could see any useful details of it.
“Division Lord Sier.” Morgan opened a communications link to the main operations officer. She was jumping at least three layers of chain of command, but there was no time. “The Bellerophons are carrying Buckler-GD drones with built-in tachyon scanners. We need to disperse those through the drone screen and use them as master sensor controls. It’ll buy the drones at least four or five seconds to aim.”
The drones would still only have about a third of a second to actually fire at the missiles, but those seconds of aiming could make all of the difference.
“Commander Casimir,” the Yin replied. “You know there’s a chain of command for this sort of suggestion, yes?”
“There’s no time, sir.”
“Agreed.” Even as they were talking, Morgan saw the orders going out and her drones being taken over by fleet command in exchange for regular Buckler drones from the rest of the fleet.
“I’m just reminding you,” Sier continued. “In case someone in that chain decides to complain later. It’s a good call, Commander, and I forgot the GD units had that. Thank you.”
Morgan looked up from her console to meet Masters’s gaze. Her superior shook his head and wagged a finger at her—and then went right back to targeting his missiles.
It was almost time.
The moment the Taljzi opened fire, Morgan realized they’d misjudged their new enemy once again. The data feed she’d been receiving from Justified included their estimate of the breakdown of the enemy’s hundred and twenty capital ships: roughly half and half super-battleships and battleships.
Those hundred and twenty capital ships, however, launched sixteen thousand missiles. It wasn’t half and half super-battleships—every one of the Taljzi capital ships was a super-battleship.
“Well, that’s going to get rough,” Masters grumped. “The computers don’t even want to resolve individual anomalies. What’s your guess on the escorts, Casimir?”
Morgan ran the numbers. Her boss was right: once the escorts had added their contribution to the tsunami of missiles the super-battleships had launched, the computers simply stopped being able to break down individual launches. Their anomaly scanners hadn’t been designed for major fleet actions in hyperspace.
“I’d guess we’ve got another eight to nine thousand missiles in play from the escorts,” she told him. “That gives us about twenty missiles per ship, so I’d guess a pretty even split between destroyers and cruisers.”
And almost twenty-five thousand missiles headed toward Seventy-Seventh Fleet that they couldn’t respond to yet. It had been over a century since an Imperial fleet had seen that kind of firepower in play.
Over a hundred super-battleships. The Imperium only had about four hundred total, and that was including the several Duchies, like Terra, that had super-battleship squadrons of their own. The Kanzi had fewer.
The eighty super-battleships gathered around Morgan represented a significant portion of the type available to the Theocracy and the Imperium…and the Taljzi had sent over a hundred and fifty, including the ships the Mesharom and TF 77–1 had previously destroyed, against them.
“Clones only buy them so much,” Masters muttered as a second immense salvo tore into space. “You can’t clone super-battleships!”
“But you can clone construction workers and miners and crews,” Morgan reminded him. “The biggest weakness of any galactic power is population…and if they have mass-produced clones, well…”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Good call on the tachyon scanners, Casimir. You may have just saved the fleet.”
Morgan didn’t think it was going to make that much difference…but then the missiles cascaded down on the drone screen. Three hundred–plus defending starships had deployed almost two thousand defensive drones.
Her computer projections said they’d stop about a missile each on average, and the main defense was going to fall on the screening cruisers and the capital ships’ shields. A lot of cruisers were going to die, but Morgan’s screens told her why they were in front.
The capital ships had shielded the escorts to preserve their launchers in the first battle, but they’d paid for it. None of the Imperial capital ships were undamaged. No one wanted to lose the cruisers and destroyers screening the big ships, but given the choice between losing a ship with thirty launchers and a ship with a hundred…
“Bucklers engaging,” she announced. By the time she’d finished speaking, the missiles were already through the line of drones—but they’d paid for passing and flashed into the firing paths of the cruisers as an already much-reduced force.
Firing through two visibility bubbles wasn’t an entirely practical option. The refraction caused b
y crossing through hyperspace was weird. Not attempting to protect the screen with the capital ships’ defensive turrets would have been untenable, however, and hundreds of laser beams cut through space.
Many missed. More hit cruisers and destroyers and were shrugged aside by shield segments that weren’t facing the enemy.
The escorts were far from defenseless themselves. The Thunderstorm- and Abrasion-class cruisers actually carried more defenses, ton per ton, than Imperial capital ships. Their Kanzi counterparts carried even more again, their systems updated far more readily and thoroughly than their bigger sisters’.
Thousands of missiles made it through, but they flung themselves at over two hundred escorts. Like the battleships in the battle before, the cruisers put themselves between the incoming fire and the destroyers. A hundred and fifty cruisers weathered the storm, each of them taking dozens of missiles against their shields—but this was the environment they’d been designed for.
And it turned out the Kanzi had a few surprises of their own.
“I’ve got at least three Kanzi light cruisers whose shields went down,” Masters declared. “All of them took solid hits to the hull—and they’re still with us.”
“Compressed-matter armor?” Vong asked.
“Not sure,” Morgan’s boss replied. Even as they were speaking, a second immense salvo hit the outer limit of the Bucklers. “If it isn’t CM, it’s something equally effective. They haven’t rolled it out to the bigger ships, whatever it is.”
The second salvo had no more luck getting through the interlacing fields of laser fire than the first, but the cruisers’ shields hadn’t had time to recover. More shields went down across the screen, and this time, ships began to die.
Morgan consciously tried not to read ship names. She had friends in the screen, and some of them weren’t going to come back from this. Ships from both fleets died, and she focused on trying to cover their sisters.
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 31
