Equilibrium, page 14
part #3 of Scattered Stars: Conviction Series
“All ships, this is Admiral Kim,” the Admiral’s voice cut into her thoughts. “I don’t see a reason to reply to the Deceiver, but I wanted to remind you all what kind of man we’re facing.
“Anthony Davies is directly linked to the capture or destruction of over a hundred and fifty freighters in the Cluster,” Kim reminded them all. “Thousands of dead, billions of kroner in theft and destruction.
“And remember that the man who speaks of defending his culture and people killed thousands of his own people to destroy the shipyards he’d built when it looked like Redward would capture them. Those were civilians, not pirates or soldiers, people we meant no harm—people he killed.
“His people.”
Kim paused.
“Anthony Davies was named the Deceiver for good reason. Do not let his claims of being a grand defender allow you to forget what he is and what he does. Men like him are why we are here, because we cannot trust the Clans to honor any deal that called for them to give up piracy.
“The age of pirates like Anthony Davies must end. He knows this and he will fight us till the end, no matter how many of the people he says he will protect get killed along the way.
“The point of today’s mission is to end the dying, the piracy, the raids and counter-raids, the violence and destruction,” Kim concluded. “I won’t claim we are here to save the Clans. We are here to crush the Clans’ piracy.
“We hope that the Clans’ people will benefit from this, but our priority is to protect the Cluster from monsters like Anthony Davies.”
There was a grim silence.
“And on that note, raise jammers and prepare for missile launch.”
Even as the multiphasic jammers turned Kira’s sensor feeds into a chaotic mess, she still turned a curious eye and her fighter’s optics toward the clouds of small spacecraft taking shape around Last Denial and Guardian.
In twenty years of service with the Apollo System Defense Force, she had never seen anyone use missiles. They were so vulnerable to multiphasic jamming that they were entirely useless. Anything that was slow enough that it could be easily targeted by something that couldn’t localize it inside the last light-second of the approach had more than enough defenses to vaporize an almost-infinite number of incoming weapons.
Since the Coalition Fleet had built the weapons, however, Admiral Kim had seen no reason not to use them. For the first time in Kira’s entire career, she watched over a thousand sets of Harrington coils light up simultaneously.
They blurred out of the jamming zone in short order, and Kira lost immediate track of them. She was still receiving updates via a serial laser link to a set of sensor probes positioned outside the jamming field.
Those probes and laser links wouldn’t hold up to the serious maneuvering of a real fight, but right now the Coalition Fleet was holding position while they studied their enemies—and Davies clearly had no inclination to start the fight sooner than he had to.
That made Kira suspicious, but it wasn’t like they weren’t expecting a trap.
Even through the multiphasic jamming, it was clear that the Clans had no idea what they were even looking at. Kira was a fully trained military officer with a background in military history. She was entirely familiar with smart munitions and their limited use in deep space combat.
The crews aboard the Costar Clans’ warships didn’t have that education. Their ships’ anti-meteor systems could handle the incoming fire on their own, Kira suspected, but the Clans’ warships were trying to expand their formation, visible in an expansion of the multiphasic-jamming bubble.
She wasn’t sure what they thought they were achieving, though she could see a logic to it. The ships could be trying to open up lines of fire and make it easier for them to engage missiles targeting the other ships.
Of course, the vast majority of the missiles weren’t aimed at the ships. It wouldn’t take much maneuvering to render the missiles’ targeting solutions on the ships useless. Most of the missiles were aimed at the handful of fortified asteroids defending Cluster 42K7.
Once the missiles entered the Clans’ jamming field, they were lost to the sensors of their launching ships. Long-range optics on the remote probes could establish some details of what was going on inside a multiphasic-jamming field, but not enough to track a smart munition barely three meters long.
They could track the asteroid station that came apart under a dozen hundred-megaton warheads, to the shock of everyone who’d been involved in the decision to fire the missiles. Their optics could roughly pick out explosions when the warheads actually managed to detonate, and the computers could interpolate multiple sets of data to estimate the presence, if not the location, of ships.
Out of over a thousand missiles, fired at a force that had no idea of how to handle the weapons and no doctrine for antimissile defense, twenty-six of the Coalition Fleet’s weapons had survived to detonate and taken out one asteroid fort.
That was twenty-six more detonations and one more kill than Kira had actually expected. She waited for the computers to make their final assessment and then checked that she still had a laser link to Colonel Sagairt.
“Helmet, stage two is go,” she told the Colonel. “Fly carefully.”
“Got it,” Sagairt replied. “Perseus-Alpha, Perseus-Bravo…nova and attack!”
Even a five-light-second nova had a full minute’s cooldown. They could see the moment that the two squadrons of fighter-bombers emerged, and Kira had to keep herself from holding her breath as the seconds ticked away.
Several explosions were visible through the jamming as she counted, too big to be nova fighters, and Kira let the cheers on the fighter network go on for several seconds.
“Belay that,” she finally ordered. “We don’t know what’s happened until they’re back.”
Normally, there’d be a rendezvous point in deep space where they’d lower their multiphasic jamming for updates. With the potential threat of Cobra Squadron, Kira had set the rendezvous point directly behind the Coalition Fleet.
If someone jumped the capital ships, the fighters would all be available. It delayed her update when they did nova back, which meant she was holding her breath after the sixty seconds elapsed.
Eleven seconds after the nova strike was completed, the laser com-links were reestablished.
“Helmet reporting in,” Sagairt greeted her. “Strike complete; downloading data on enemy formation and positions to the Fleet.” He paused. “Two ships down. I think Bravo-Six managed to eject the pods for both crew. I…don’t think Alpha-Four did.”
“Damn,” Kira murmured. “We’ll retrieve them, Helmet. You have my word.”
“Understood. Mark up two corvettes and four gunships for Perseus wing, sir,” Sagairt concluded. “We didn’t even get near the destroyer. That’s what got Alpha-Four killed.”
Kira could look up the callsigns and names of the four people on those two starfighters, but she held off. There would be time for that later.
“Take the Sinisters back to Perseus to rearm and hold for further orders, Helmet,” she ordered. “We’re still playing games with these people.”
The Coalition Fleet was still declining to advance and the Clans were refusing to come out. The worst part, from Kira’s perspective, was that the Clans’ force could afford to trade gunships for fighters at two to one. They’d still have gunships left afterward, though probably not enough to stand a chance against the Fleet.
“Commodore, it’s Kim.” The Admiral linked to her again as she reviewed the data from Helmet’s strike. “Your assessment?”
“About what you’d expect,” Kira replied. “The Clans have put their best on the decks today. They’re short on anti-fighter experience, but they’ve got enough firepower to make up for that. If we launch a mass strike, it’ll be more effective than sending in two squadrons but we’ll leave the Fleet unprotected.
“We’re reasonably sure Davies has at least half a dozen Weltraumpanzers of his own, but we haven’t located them yet. If we uncover the fleet, those ships could do a lot of damage.”
“Because we don’t have much more anti-fighter experience than they do,” Kim concluded. “Understood. We’ll go with Plan Cataphract, then, Commodore Demirci. Once the Sinisters are rearmed, we will commence the advance.
“I have faith in our cruisers to handle corvettes and one destroyer that outclasses us.”
“We’ll watch the Fleet’s back, sir,” Kira promised. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“I have full faith in the nova-fighter group under your command, Demirci. I’m not releasing you for an independent strike, but beyond that…nova-fighter operations are at your discretion. I do not expect you to remain with the battle line if you see an opportunity or a need.”
“Understood, Admiral.”
Kira turned her attention back to the feeds from the drones and the ships around her.
“All fighters, this is Basketball. Plan is Cataphract. Assume defensive formation around the Fleet, but keep your eyes peeled,” she ordered. “We’re watching for Davies’s Weltraumpanzers and we’re watching for Cobra Squadron.
“The Fleet can handle a bunch of raggedy-ass corvettes and gunships. We’re here to handle the fuckers with the nova bombers who jumped King Larry. They don’t get to the Fleet.”
24
Partly due to her own specializations and partly due to the nature of the war between Apollo and Brisingr, Kira had never been present for a straight-battle-line slugging-match fight between nova ships. Her involvement in that kind of fight had usually been preliminary, with the nova fighters softening up enemy cruisers and then withdrawing to cover the carriers as the Apollon battle cruisers moved in.
Today that wasn’t an option, and she held her Hoplite near Deception as the two multiphasic-jamming zones merged and the battle was joined. Communications were already growing spotty, even the largest capital ships maneuvering heavily to avoid incoming fire.
Deception was the first of the ships to open up. Her targeting optics were better and her guns were bigger and more modern, giving her a small but slight functional range advantage over even the D9C destroyer in the Clans’ formation.
The D9C design was of the same vintage as Deception, even if this one was probably newer than the heavy cruiser. She was the second ship to open fire—but Deception tagged her before she did, heavy plasma bolts hammering into the smaller ship’s armor.
More ships joined the fray as they ranged on each other, evasive maneuvers sending the majority of the bursts of plasma spiraling off into deep space. Kira was holding a fragile com network together with her fighters as they hung back out of the fight, their eyes open.
Then the gunships made their move, a wave of over a hundred smaller ships charging forward at maximum power to try and overwhelm the Coalition capital ships.
“Nova fighters, target the gunships,” she snapped as soon as she spotted the maneuver. “Break and attack.”
It was a trade-off. If they gave up the fragmented but mostly functional com network, the fleet was more vulnerable to a surprise fighter strike—but if the gunships overwhelmed the fleet, there wasn’t going to be anything left to protect.
Kira matched her actions to her words, flaring her Hoplite’s Harrington coils to full power and lunging forward. She picked a gunship at random, firing careful two-second pulses of plasma fire at the larger ship as she charged.
The gunship didn’t see her coming until her fire had torn off one of its turrets. Whoever was in charge was still good, and the ten-kilocubic vessel twisted in space, standing on her engines to dodge the next salvo of Kira’s fire.
The bigger ship’s main guns couldn’t really track a nova fighter, but that was why a gunship even had turrets. There were still three of them left spitting fire at her as she lined her interceptor up and released the torpedo slowing her down.
A flash of plasma filled the space between her and the gunship. She’d pulled close enough that the larger vessel had no chance to dodge, and a blast equivalent to Deception’s main guns hammered into the middle of the gunship, burning a hole bigger than Kira’s fighter through the ship.
Power signatures fluctuated for half a second and then the gunship blew apart as her fusion reactor lost containment.
One down.
Kira flipped her fighter instinctively, dodging a stream of fire from another gunship as she searched for targets. Even without the multiphasic jamming emerging from every vessel, the battlespace would have been a chaotic mess. She couldn’t track the course of the battle from behind the stick of a starfighter—that was why she’d hired Zoric to command Deception, after all.
She was just one more pilot, with her naked eye and some computer-enhanced optics to pick out threats. The gunship shooting at her had earned her attention, and she twisted across its fire, drawing its attention as the other spacecraft she’d spotted surged in.
Kira didn’t know which of her Weltraumpanzer pilots was on her flank, but their timing was perfect. The Weltraumpanzer-Vier had much heavier blaster cannons than her Hoplite-IV did, and the pilot didn’t even bother with their torpedoes.
The gunship’s attempt to shoot down Kira proved fatal as the heavy fighter’s guns blazed in the void. Their torpedoes might have been faster, but the Weltraumpanzer’s pilot held the gunship in their sights for a full five-second burst that tore the larger ship in half.
Kira flashed a thank-you via laser coms and jetted away, hunting new targets. The tempo of the battle was obvious to her—the Clans had more ships, but the Coalition Fleet’s ships were just that much bigger and better.
The D9C destroyer was reeling, a defenseless hulk battered to wreckage by Deception’s guns. She might be rebuildable—and Kira flagged the hulk as a possibility for retrieval later—but she was out of this fight.
Despite the cubage ratio being heavily in the Costar Clans’ favor, it was becoming rapidly clear that they couldn’t stand against the bigger ships the Coalition had brought at all.
And in the moment Kira thought things were finally decided, the nova fighters arrived. Even through multiphasic jamming, nova emergences were clearly visible, and she cursed herself.
She’d known they were going to be ambushed, but she’d grown so used to only dealing with gunships, she hadn’t held back any interceptors to defend the capital ships.
On the other hand, she was assessing the situation even as it took shape. There were only twenty flares, and she was already maneuvering toward them. While some of the Redward pilots had let themselves be lured away from the battle line, all of her veterans from Deception were still in position to support the fleet.
Kira couldn’t give any orders through the jamming, but she didn’t need to. She knew that even as she was turning her own fighter toward the newcomers, her old ASDF hands and the ex-Conviction pilots were doing the same.
So, she noted absently, were about a quarter of the RRF pilots. The rest were catching on as the first fighters changed their course, but many of the Redward pilots definitely had the right instincts.
Kira reached the first nova fighter just as the Weltraumpanzer-Fünf—presumably one of Davies’s fighters—pulled straight for a moment to launch their paired torpedoes at Perseus.
The nova fighter didn’t live that long, her guns tearing into the heavy fighter from below and detonating one of the torpedoes just as it cleared the fighter’s hull. A flash of ignited hydrogen and more superheated plasma tore the spacecraft apart, and Kira flashed on to her next target.
There were more Weltraumpanzers. Almost twice as many as she’d allowed for, and all too many of them had launched their torpedoes. There was nothing her people could do to stop the weapons that were already converting into plasma blasts, but the half of the fighters that hadn’t launched when her people arrived didn’t survive to do so.
Twenty torpedoes still savaged Perseus and Last Denial. The cruiser weathered her hits decently enough, but Perseus was a converted freighter.
Kira looked at the leaking atmosphere her computers were identifying, and a chill ran down her spine. The RRF had done a good job of refitting the ship, but she still had the bones of a sixty-kilocubic bulk hauler.
And the heavy fighters were pressing their attack, charging at the carrier with their heavy guns while her own fighters tried desperately to bring them down.
A Costar Clans fighter died under Kira’s guns. Two more to her compatriots. The RRF fighters were in the mix now, desperately trying to salvage their home base as plasma fire savaged the already-damaged carrier.
Then it was over, the surviving heavy fighters novaing out in a series of blue flashes as Kira exhaled a sigh of relief. Perseus was battered, probably a write-off, but she looked intact enough to bring her people home.
She pinged Deception with a laser.
“Did anyone get a vector on those novas?” she asked.
“Negative,” Davidović replied. “We’re a bit busy, sir.”
The remaining corvettes and gunships were making a hard push at Kira’s cruiser. They were paying for the privilege, with multiple ships dying every time the heavy cruiser opened fire, but they were pressing her hard.
Kira was watching the time. She wasn’t sure how many of the Weltraumpanzers had escaped, but they had a sixty-second cycle until they could return. They weren’t going to get a second pass at Perseus; she was grimly certain of that.
But there were twenty-three seconds left on that timer when the second wave of nova flashes lit up across her screens…and it wasn’t a mere half-dozen survivors of Davies’s squadron coming in now.
Fear froze Kira for a critical second as at least a hundred nova fighters arrived in the battlespace.
25
