Or the sight of the Free Planets Alliance being utterly undone, Chung Wu-cheng seemed to hear the old marshal say, not with his sense of hearing, but with his powers of insight.
III
On January 16 of that year, after countless preliminaries, the military forces of the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance met in a head-on clash.
The empire was using a standard convex formation, albeit one whose vanguard wasn’t too far out in front. The imperial forces were grinding forward, intent on overwhelming the enemy with the depth of their thick formation.
“Fire!”
“Fire!”
There was probably not a second’s lag between the shouting of those two orders. Tens of thousands of brilliant beams gouged through the boundless darkness, white fangs of energy bit into warships and ripped them asunder, javelins of light blazed, and combat screens on both sides became gardens overrun with wildly blooming blossoms. Each of those shining flowers consumed several hundred lives as they bloomed.
After responding to the initial assault, the ranks of the alliance fleet continued to lay down an orderly stream of cannon fire while already beginning a withdrawal. Grillparzer and von Knapfstein led the imperial vanguard in a furious charge, trading intense fire with the alliance force’s rear as they tried to retreat into the narrow corridor. After inflicting considerable damage, Grillparzer successfully stormed into the corridor at 1050.
At 1120, however, a wave of solar wind broadsided the imperial port flank with chaotic turbulence, and their formation began to lose its orderly configuration. Mittermeier, cracking whips of rebuke at discomfited allies, tried to rebuild the formation, but Grillparzer’s unit had dived deep into the corridor and was taking fire from alliance forces while in a bunched configuration. Unable to evade the assault in that cramped region of space, they were still trying not to hit each other as a chain of explosions erupted.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Reinhard. “Keep that up, and you’ll only erode your own force strength. Retreat, and draw the enemy back out after you!”
It wasn’t as though Reinhard’s rebuke had reached him, but Grillparzer, realizing the danger of letting a large force become concentrated inside a narrow corridor, began pulling back out. The alliance’s focused cannon fire could not have been more blistering, and bluish-white flowers of destruction bloomed all across the front line of Grillparzer’s fleet. Although he’d been braced to take some damage, the unleashed energy and the shattered hulls came riding in on the solar wind and bore down on the imperial force’s ranks from dead ahead, rubbing salt into their open wounds. Drenching the inside of his uniform with both hot sweat and cold, the young new member of the Imperial Association of Geography and Natural History barely managed to keep his ranks from crumbling, and escaped from the corridor under a rain of beams from wildly firing enemy cannons.
Bucock forbade pursuit. They had only had the advantage because they were fighting inside the narrow passage, and it was clear that if they emerged into the vast zone of navigable space, they would be enveloped by an overwhelmingly larger force. The moment Grillparzer was clear of the corridor, he scattered his formation and prepared for an attack from pursuing enemies, but since that pursuit ultimately failed to materialize, he reorganized his remaining forces and deployed them once more at the corridor’s entrance, all the while biting back the shame and remorse of having lost nearly 30 percent of his forces. It was 1210. By this time Reinhard, who had been watching the battle unfold on the screen of Brünhild’s bridge, was already giving orders to Senior Admiral Adalbert Fahrenheit.
“Take your forces, and flush out that old tiger.”
Fahrenheit, a seasoned veteran of many battles, required no tactical instruction more specific than that. With a gleam in his aquamarine eyes, he gave orders to his subordinates to fly through an asteroid-rich danger zone at maximum combat speed and, circling around to the back of the safe corridor, try to land a blow on the alliance force from behind. If struck on their rear, they would move forward, and thus be pushed out, as it were, into the overwhelming cannon fire of the fully arrayed Imperial Navy.
At 1300, von Knapfstein launched an incursion into the corridor in Grillparzer’s stead. This was a favored ploy for preventing an enemy from noticing a detour operation. Naturally, his job didn’t end with merely drawing the enemy’s attention; von Knapfstein also had the vital duties of eroding the enemy’s force strength and coordinating with the allies who had circled around to the enemy’s rear. This meant that von Knapfstein was going to gain valuable experience as a tactician—provided he survived the fierce combat, of course.
It was understandable when von Reuentahl murmured in his heart, Now, let’s see what he’s made of. Inside the narrow passage, von Knapfstein’s fleet had been struck by a concentrated fusillade of precise, targeted strikes, and had quickly found itself with its back to the proverbial wall. Von Knapfstein lacked any astrographical advantage, and the difference in experience between himself and Bucock was great. That he was somehow holding the formation together without it collapsing outright was actually rather remarkable.
Eyes still locked on his battle screen, the commander in chief, Imperial Marshal Mittermeier, directed his voice toward a subordinate displayed on a subscreen. “I hate to have to kill that old man, Bayerlein. He may be an enemy, but he deserves our respect.”
“I feel the same way, but even if we advised surrender, he’d never consent to it. If he defeated me, I don’t think I’d trade in the flag I follow, either.”
Mittermeier nodded, but his eyebrows twitched just slightly. “That you think so is well and good, Bayerlein, but do think twice before saying so out loud.”
Former enemies such as Fahrenheit and von Streit had sworn allegiance to Reinhard and gone on to become valuable assets—how they lived their lives was not a thing to be criticized. In their case, they had followed the wrong flag at the outset, and their true lives had begun once their enemy had recognized their ability and character. In any case, the alliance forces were putting up a praiseworthy fight. Based on strategic elements such as force strength and the ability of their frontline commanders, the imperial forces should have had the advantage from the very start, but Bucock had skillfully weakened their fighting potential and used his surroundings well, making up for the difference in numbers.
“So, the Alliance Armed Forces are going to show us a good time, are they?” Reinhard praised them, as though he were singing a verse from a lied. Although he was confident that his would be a complete victory, intricate tactics always pleased him, even when they were executed by the enemy.
Von Reuentahl smirked, although only for a moment. While he, too, had felt an ironic pleasure at the sight of the brave and mighty Imperial Navy fighting an uphill battle against a weak enemy force, it was his duty as the kaiser’s top staff officer to calculate the right moment to commit reinforcements and seize control over the entire battlespace. And although he had decided to use von Eisenach’s fleet for that purpose, choosing the perfect time to send them in was no easy task in a chaotic, closely matched fight like this one.
IV
It was 1540. Fahrenheit’s fleet, having successfully circled around to the tunnel’s rear entrance, fired its first volley of cannon fire at the alliance rear. The concentrated fire was directed into the inner reaches of the corridor, but the alliance’s return volley was unexpectedly intense. Fahrenheit tried storming his way in by brute force once, but at 1615, he halted his subordinates, who had been about to flood into the narrow corridor’s entrance, and began pulling them back. No middling eye for tactics could have accomplished what Fahrenheit’s had just done. Predicting that the alliance forces were about to make a massive reverse charge at them, he had pulled his own forces back so as to wipe out the enemy with a point-blank attack the moment they came at him.
To that extent, things went as Fahrenheit had expected, and i
t looked as if the alliance forces were going to emerge from the corridor’s back exit to be mowed down by his waiting forces. But at 1620, alliance forces that had been hiding scattered throughout the asteroid belt formed up into a single arrow of light, and struck Fahrenheit’s fleet on the back end of its port flank. Commanding this operation was Admiral Ralph Carlsen, who had fought bravely the year before in the Battle of Rantemario. His attack forced Fahrenheit into a reluctant retreat.
On the bridge of the armada flagship Brünhild, Oskar von Reuentahl’s widely famous black and blue eyes had narrowed slightly. The deep thoughts of a master tactician were racing through his inner space at the speed of light.
He hadn’t been expecting it, but there was something about the alliance force’s tactics that they couldn’t afford to take lightly. To think the enemy had expected imperial forces to detour around to the back of the corridor, and set up an ambush! And next, they would of course come out on the imperial forces’ rear, and…
“Von Reuentahl.”
“Your Highness?”
“What do you make of this? Von Knapfstein entered the corridor planning to strike an enemy in retreat, but now…”
“It’s well and good that he went in—the question now is whether he can make it back out again.”
“Your reasoning?”
“If I were the enemy commander, I would have mined its interior to halt the advance of invading enemies.”
“I concur. Now that I think about it, that’s a tactic we should have used.”
Reinhard’s voice and expression conveyed not so much a sense of crisis as a glow that brimmed with life. Von Reuentahl looked at him, and found his brilliance dazzling.
“Going forward, one possible tactic I could see the enemy using is to buy time using all their forces in this stellar region to confuse the battle. Then, during the opening they create, a reserve force would circle around to our rear. That said, I don’t believe the alliance presently has such an enormous reserve force. And even if they did circle to our rear…”
The imperial forces’ rear guard was commanded by the “Iron Wall,” Senior Admiral Neidhart Müller. If an enemy force of equal—or even 50 percent greater—size were to challenge him, there was no room for doubt that he could maintain his lines for a long time.
Reinhard’s elegant eyebrows moved slightly. “But where is Yang Wen-li?”
It truly appeared that for the genius, it was not an option to ignore the magician. Von Reuentahl was surprised at what he felt in his own heart at that. Somehow, it seemed like he felt ever so slightly jealous of Yang—of an enemy admiral who could seize hold of the kaiser’s consciousness like this, and not let him go.
“Even in the unlikely event that the reserve force’s commander is Yang Wen-li, he’ll try to divide us and cut off our way back, rather than attacking us head-on, won’t he?”
“It is as you say.”
Reinhard nodded, and his bountiful hair rippled with waves of gold. Yang Wen-li, a continent in the world of men, was a factor that the Imperial Navy should always take into account when honing its strategies and executing its tactics. However, since he had fled Heinessen, his force strength had been viewed as extremely weak, and as there had been no emergency alerts from Steinmetz, this time people were thinking it safe to discount him.
“In the event that Yang Wen-li did cut us off from our return route to Phezzan, it would simply be a matter of continuing our advance, wiping out the enemies in front of us, attacking Heinessen, and returning to imperial space via the Iserlohn Corridor. There would be nothing to fear whatsoever.”
It was a lavish expression of spirit, but at the same time, the fact that Reinhard had said it meant he was still unaware of the fact that Iserlohn had fallen.
Then, at 2010, the battle displayed yet another intense development. At that time, Carlsen’s fleet of alliance vessels charged clockwise toward the imperial forces’ rear. Neidhart Müller arrayed his entire fleet in a concave formation, and was boldly preparing to intercept them. At the same time, Fahrenheit was moving in on Carlsen’s back side like some bird of prey with its wings spread wide, but closing in on Fahrenheit’s tail was Bucock’s main force. The ring of double—no, triple—pursuit and combat was beginning to take shape.
For this reason, had von Knapfstein clung tightly to Bucock’s tail, the situation would have been entirely favorable to imperial forces, but von Knapfstein had taken damage from a swarm of delayed-action mines that Bucock had scattered in the corridor. Even now, he still hadn’t made his way out of it.
And so Bucock, having obtained a secure zone for his rear, turned his fleet’s course to the nadir, and avoiding the foolishness of pursuing Fahrenheit, slipped beneath Müller’s powerful formation and attempted to strike at Reinhard’s command headquarters.
“Go! Defend the kaiser!”
Realizing the danger, Müller threw 30 percent of his forces against Bucock’s fleet, all the while enduring a withering assault from Carslen’s forces, who were all clearly determined to fight to the death. Bucock’s advance was slowed, but then a portion of Carlsen’s fleet broke through a corner of Müller’s now numerically weakened force, and also flew toward the rear of Reinhard’s command headquarters. At this, von Reuentahl gave coolheaded orders for their defense, and a torrent of concentrated energy beams vaporized the alliance forces from point-blank range.
Carlsen’s forces were then caught in a fore-and-aft pincer attack by their brave opponents Müller and Fahrenheit, and were mowed down by swords of blazing energy and explosives. Ironically, Carlsen’s forces managed to evade utter annihilation only because the imperial forces, concerned that at such close range they would shoot one another, had restrained their fierce attack.
At 2118, Senior Admiral von Eisenach’s large fleet took a wide detour around the battlespace and appeared on Bucock’s tail, sending monsoon rains of beams and missiles against him. In the midst of those pulsating lights, the alliance fleet’s vessels were being reduced to their component molecules one after another.
Von Eisenach’s assault was extremely effective, and it looked as though the alliance forces were about to meet the same end as a lamb swallowed from behind and digested by a python.
It was 2200. The solar wind changed suddenly yet again, and in the chaotic wells of both natural and artificial energies, a vortex formed on the front end of von Eisenach’s port flank, disrupting his orderly ranks of warships. While the commander was trying to reorganize the formation, Bucock, using a powerful cone formation, grazed past the killing field where Müller, Fahrenheit, and Carlsen were still fighting, and bore down on Reinhard’s command headquarters once again.
“That old man is good!” Mittermeier said, marveling, even as he drove a sharp spear into Bucock’s flank and, with three successive blasts of cannon fire, opened up a hole in his formation, plunged his own train of warships into it, and began breaking it up on all sides.
As Siegbert Seidlitz, captain of the flagship Brünhild, was the one who bore the utmost responsibility for the running of this “mobile imperial headquarters,” he held the rank of commodore, though only as a formality. He was the only member of the admiralty in the entire Imperial Navy who commanded only one ship. After the first man to captain this ship, Karl Robert Steinmetz, had made full admiral and transferred to a frontier stellar district, Reuschner and Niemeller had succeeded to the post one after another, but their periods as captain had been brief. Seidlitz had commanded Reinhard’s flagship the longest of any of them. He was thirty-one years old, and from his brick-red hair (with a few strands of gray) to the tips of his boots, he was what might best be called a “purebred” spacer. The fact that “for six generations, no head of the Seidlitz family has died with his feet on the ground” was a point of pride for him, and it had an overwhelming effect on the trust the crew put in him. The only thing about him that his subordinates found irritating was the fact
that any time this normally solemn young officer got drunk, he was sure to start singing a particular song. The human race had written uncounted millions of songs, so out of all of them, why did he have to love singing a gloomy song like “Space Is Our Grave, Our Ship Is Our Coffin”?
Although this was said of him, the “seventh-generation scion of the Seidlitz family” possessed near-perfect abilities as captain of Brünhild, the jewel of the Imperial Navy, and had satisfied Reinhard in every campaign and every battle he had participated in. Compared to that accomplishment, his deficiencies as a singer were of little consequence.
Brünhild’s surroundings had been taken over by dancing clusters of fireballs and spheres of light. It looked as if some immense deity had overturned a jewel box onto a spread of black velvet. Thanks to Seidlitz’s skilled control of the vessel, Brünhild appeared to be sitting peaceably amid the scattered gems. For Reinhard, it had been an unpleasant experience to be driven to such a confused and difficult battle in spite of the vast difference in force strengths, but this song, too, was now approaching its finale. The alliance forces’ offense has reached its end point, Reinhard observed. Now, even if they spasmed with the last of their dying strength, the tiny bursts of energy that they could still manage were no longer enough to propel themselves forward. At 2240, in the instant that the alliance forces’ overextended battle lines seemed on the verge of beginning to contract, Reinhard’s lips—formed for the purpose of commanding massive fleets—gave orders, and together with Seidlitz’s signal, the battleship Brünhild thrust a silver-white javelin of shining energy into the ranks of the alliance’s forces. Almost simultaneously, a comm operator let out an odd cry, and then, blushing red as Captain Seidlitz glared at him, gave his report: the Schwarz Lanzenreiter fleet had just arrived at the battlespace.
V
“Is that so? It seems the Black Lancers have hurried over in quite the panic.”
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 7 Page 18
