Equilibrium, page 28
part #3 of Scattered Stars: Conviction Series
Theoretically, the cycle was by squadron. In practice, the chaos of a multiphasic-jamming battlespace meant that even smaller formations got shredded. She still sent the ping out to see if her squadron was there.
“Memorial-Alpha, report in. All other fighters, report by squadron,” she ordered.
“Backstab reporting in,” Bradley reported immediately. “Been clinging to your wing the whole way.” She paused. “Think I’d be dead if I’d done anything else.”
“Lancer here,” Janda joined in. “Was just behind Backstab. And I agree, boss; the kid needs a new callsign.”
“Can we argue about that after we’ve finished kicking Bengal ass? Swordheart here,” Asjes reported.
“Of course, Scimitar is here, boss,” Colombera added. “I don’t have visual on the other three, though. Not here…and not in the battlespace.”
“Understood.” Kira checked her headware and her fighter’s systems. Each fighter pilot that cycled through passed their reports on to the fighters remaining. It gave her a surprisingly detailed view of the battle—probably a better one than Admiral Remington had right now.
“Did anyone see Condor nova for Conviction?” she asked. “I don’t see him in the rec… Fuck.”
She’d found him. Condor—one of the trainees flying off of Theseus and the designated courier to inform Captain Estanza of what was going on—had been the first victim of the Cobra Squadron strike.
There’d been secondaries…but they were either dead or there. A ball had been dropped and everybody was fucked.
“None of the Screwballs made it out, sir,” Colombera told her quietly. “There’s still a ton of destroyers in the fight, but it’s Cobra Squadron that’s fucking us.”
“They need to rearm their bombers. That’s a ten-minute process minimum for us. Seven, maybe six for them, but we still have time…”
“To do what?” Lancer asked. “They’re massacring us to clear a path for when the bombers rearm. The Fleet can’t run…”
“We find the carriers,” Kira replied. A chill ran down her spine as she gave an order that might doom Seventh Fleet.
“All fighters, this is a hold order,” she barked as her own cooldown ticked past fifteen seconds left. “Nobody novas back into the fight without an order from me. Hold positions and assume formation by squadron.”
“Sir, that…”
“The interceptors are a threat to our capital ships but not a big one,” Kira told Scimitar quietly. “The bombers are the key and that means the carriers are everything.”
She knew everything that was within ninety light-seconds or so of their rendezvous point. She didn’t, thanks to the multiphasic jamming, know what was around the fleet and the actual battlespace.
The carriers weren’t within her time bubble, which limited where they could be. Not perfectly. Not enough to launch a strike, but enough…
“All fighters, I am transmitting three sets of nova coordinates,” she informed her people. She had sixty fighters, a bit over half Hoplites or Sinisters with a single six-ship squadron of Escutcheons.
It wasn’t enough…but it had to be.
“Designating locations to each of you. It’s a ninety-light-second jump; you have an eighty-second cooldown. Secondary rendezvous is here.” She pinged a location one light-minute from each of her scouting zones.
“Do not engage the enemy at your waypoint except in self-defense,” she ordered. “We cannot lose a single second here. Nova on my command…
“Nova!”
The three positions Kira had selected were very specifically not likely positions for the Cobra Squadron carriers. Instead, they were three points where the light reaching them over the preceding few minutes would fill the holes in her time-lagged visibility sphere and give her complete data over the likely location of Cobra Squadron's support fleet.
Which meant, of course, that the point she’d picked for her own squadron was only ten light-seconds from the three ships she was hunting. She had a perfect view of the converted Meridian-built freighters—and in ten seconds, they’d know she did.
“I have never been so glad that the carriers themselves can’t nova,” Kira muttered. “All fighters, stand by for incoming. They’re going to send whatever interceptors they have after us.”
“Jammers?” Scimitar asked.
“Negative, let them jam—I want clear coms and clear data for as long as I can,” Kira replied. She studied the Cobra ships as carefully as she could.
It was clear that the ships were from two different sources. Two were seventy-kilocubic ships with a smooth grace to them she’d rarely seen replicated out there in the Rim. Despite that grace, they were also pockmarked with decades of repairs and wear and tear.
The third ship was a problem. Kira had assumed—as had John Estanza—that Cobra Squadron was going to stick with their standard of picking up advanced freighters and co-opting their cargo-handling systems to launch fighters.
The third ship probably only carried the same fifty fighters as the other two, but where the converted freighters were barely less vulnerable now than in their original state, the third ship loomed with armor and weapons. At ninety kilocubics, it was barely smaller than Deception and was at least as well armed as Redward and Bengal’s new cruisers.
“That is an assault carrier,” Scimitar said grimly. “Griffon-built?”
“I’m guessing it came with the fighters,” Kira replied. “Helps pick the bomber target, doesn’t it?
“Scimitar, Backstab, Lancer. It’s on you—as soon as you’re cooled down, don’t nova to the rendezvous. Get to Conviction. Dump all the data you’ve scanned to Estan—”
The channel screamed at her as it dissolved into jamming. They were out of time as a dozen Manticore-Sevens burst out of nova to charge them.
The good news, to Kira’s mind, was that they’d drawn away the defensive carrier patrol. The bad news was that Cobra Squadron was as on the ball as any force she’d ever met. They’d detected her force, identified them as a threat, and sortied in under ten seconds.
With the ten-second lightspeed delay, that meant she had fifty-five seconds to keep her people alive. Hoping that her wingmen had received enough of her orders, she charged the Manticores again, fire spitting from her guns as she targeted the center of the formation.
Again, the Cobras were working in groups of three—a tactic Kira was going to incorporate into her training going forward!—to neutralize her people one at a time. This time, though, she had twenty fighters to their eighteen…and harsh as the day had been, the surviving pilots were either lucky or good.
Unless she missed her guess, Bradley made ace in the first pass, punching out her second Manticore and her third hostile overall while Kira supported.
Kira nailed a fighter of her own, leaving only a single pilot of the trio that had been focusing on Lancer. The disadvantage of their teamwork showed as the pilot clearly panicked for a moment—and a moment was more than enough for Scimitar to empty a series of plasma pulses into the Cobra pilot’s engines.
Her people were still dying, but for the first time since Cobra Squadron had attacked Seventh Fleet, they were giving as good as they got. As her own squadron tore three Manticores to pieces without losses of their own, the Redward squadrons with them traded five Sinister fighter-bombers for another three-fighter strike team.
And then the timer hit zero and Kira hit the button. Another battlespace flashed away and a new rendezvous point was around her.
From there, they could actually see the Cobra Squadron carriers. Her fighters flickered in around her, short the three pilots she’d sent to Conviction and the losses against the Cobra carrier patrol.
“Report in fuel and ammo status,” she ordered. “Does anyone have torpedoes left?”
Reports flickered in and Kira let them wash over her as the counter ticked down. Four Hoplite-IVs. Twenty-three Dexters, so twenty-seven interceptors. Six Escutcheon heavy fighters. Eighteen Sinister fighter-bombers.
And not a single torpedo across fifty-one starfighters.
“All right, people,” she told them grimly. “We can take down the junk carriers with plasma guns. Easiest for the Escutcheons, but we don’t know how many of their fighters they’ll be able to recall to cover for the carriers—and that assault carrier is almost certainly built to gut a fighter strike with flak.
“We go in hard and fast, target the two conversions with everything we’ve got,” she continued. “We have ninety seconds, people. Maybe less. Maybe more. But if we can take down even one carrier before they get their bombers back up, we might just save a cruiser. Take down all three? We might just save the whole damn fleet.
“They didn’t count on us having bombers, so we got Bengal’s cruisers. The destroyers can’t take our cruisers alone, so they need their own bombers.
“We’re not going to let them have them, people. This is it. These voidborn assholes have wrecked the peaceful lives of a dozen sectors and a hundred star systems in obedience to some godawful math that none of them even understand.
“It ends today. Cobra Squadron ends today.”
The timer was at five seconds and Kira bared her teeth, hoping her mood made it across the line. Hoping that Captain Estanza made it in time with the last bombers Kira had.
Hoping against hope that she wasn’t about to lead fifty people she’d trained to their deaths.
“Seventh Fleet Combat Group,” she said formally, watching the timer count down. “Nova and attack!”
54
There was no question about the jamming this time. Fifty-one multiphasic jammers flared alive in the same moment that the starfighters plunged back into reality, shredding any communication the carriers had with each other or anyone else.
Kira counted it as a blessing that there were no escorts. Even a handful of corvettes or gunships would have been a major complicating factor. As it was, the fact that she only saw five fighters in the carrier patrol was concerning enough.
They’d left six behind when they’d novaed away, which meant one had novaed to the rendezvous point for the rest of their fighters—and, as if in answer to her fears, another twenty Manticore-Sevens emerged from nova in that instant.
She couldn’t give any more orders. All she could do was charge forward to engage the fighters, relying on the rest of the interceptor pilots to follow her. A Hoplite swung in on her left flank and another on her right—the design of the fighters assuring her that they were from Deception but not telling her which of her pilots were with her.
The heavy fighters did as they’d been ordered, charging toward the two freighter conversions under cover of the rest of the fighter wing—but the junk carriers understood their vulnerability as well as Kira did. They’d pulled in close to the assault carrier, and Kira’s worst fears about the Griffon-built ship were realized as she opened fire.
The assault carrier probably had antiship weaponry, but the vast majority of the cubage not dedicated to her fighter wing was clearly dedicated to armor and rapid-tracking flak cannon like the Rim couldn’t even build.
She had eighty seconds left before the earliest the bombers could launch, and she could already tell they were in trouble.
Cobra interceptors flashed forward, almost disregarding her attempts to slow them as they targeted the heavy fighters. Kira tore into the side of their formation, plasma flashing both ways as she tried to protect her heavies from the enemy interceptors—and the enemy interceptors tried to protect their carriers from her heavies.
And then the next wave of novas arrived. Conviction slammed into the system like a belly-flopping whale, the Cherenkov radiation pulse of her arrival blinding already jamming-frazzled sensors.
But across from her were twenty more Manticore interceptors, and Kira began to wonder how badly they’d misestimated the capacity available to Cobra Squadron. She’d seen over a hundred and thirty fighters and bombers now.
Fighters were spilling out of Conviction’s deck as the carrier plunged forward to a range she had never been intended to fight at.
Kira couldn’t do anything. All she could do was hope that the orders Hoffman had given before launching his group were the same as the ones she would have—and she threw her rough collection of interceptors back at the Manticores.
More interceptors joined her, including one that slotted in under her wing that had to be Bradley. With Conviction’s fighters, they now had over a hundred nova fighters—and, critically, six bombers.
The assault carrier, unfortunately, did have antiship weapons, and those turrets opened up as Conviction closed. The old escort carrier’s pair of recently installed turrets returned fire, but she was outclassed—and the Cobra interceptors had recognized the bombers.
There was a swirl of death as Kira led the Hoplites against the Manticores. The pilots clinging to her switched in and out in the chaos, but she still had eight left when she hammered into the center of the Cobra formation. Three of the advanced starfighters died under her wing’s guns…but dozens more made it through, and a stone dropped through Kira’s stomach as a single squadron—maybe six Manticore-Sevens—caught up with the Screwballs.
The bombers burned like paper in a wildfire, and the deaths of all six Manticores a moment later as the Darkwing squadrons hammered into them didn’t relieve Kira’s fear. What was left of her heavy fighter strike was falling back, missing at least two-thirds of their numbers.
They’d battered one carrier badly and Kira guessed the conversion was no longer able to launch fighters, but there were still two carriers left—and only maybe forty seconds before they redeployed the bombers.
The bombers would nova out the moment they were clear of their carriers. Their fighters would get a tithe of them at best, leaving more than enough to shatter the cruiser fleet. Cobra Squadron might not win this battle, but they could wreck the force Redward needed to win this war.
And then Conviction fired her ace in the hole. Kira had forgotten about the array of torpedo launchers they’d rigged up for her previous operations, two dozen single-shot launchers that gave her the firepower of a heavy cruiser for a single salvo.
That was a salvo more than the undamaged escort carrier could take. The converted freighter broke apart under the pounding—but Kira’s attention was on the assault carrier now as the Darkwings charged toward it.
The PNC-115 fighter-bombers carried three torpedoes apiece, and they were the only hope she saw of finishing this battle in time. They were down to seconds—and the Manticores threw everything they had at the PNC-115s.
And Kira brought everything she had against the interceptors. The Cobra fighters swarmed her people in trios—and she smiled grimly as she saw that over half of her own people were returning the favor, even recently graduated trainees working in groups.
She was certain the two on her wing were Bradley and Colombera, not that she had any way to know. The two synchronized their fire with hers, hammering one of the Manticore-Sevens to pieces as she tried to clear a path for the fighter-bombers.
A new set of novas announced the arrival of the last fighters from the original main battle, and Kira was forced to dodge away from her attack run as new threat vectors opened up. With Conviction’s fighters in play, the numbers were about even now—but the Cobra fighters were just plain better.
Her numbers were evaporating and her people were being forced to break off. She cursed as she led her trio of fighters in a dance around the incoming fighters and realized they couldn’t do it.
Cobra Squadron had formed too effective a defensive formation and had too much of an edge in maneuverability and firepower. Even the fighter-bombers were being forced back, unable to press their attack against the enemy.
They were past her worst-case estimate of the bomber launch time. Cobra Squadron hadn’t launched them yet, but it could only be seconds. There was nothing Kira could do—given time, they might be able to wear the defenders down with hit and run attacks, but there was no time to nova away and reconsolidate.
Once the bombers launched, it was over. They’d have gutted Cobra Squadron—they already had gutted Cobra Squadron—but those nova bombers would gut Seventh Fleet in turn.
She held another Manticore in her sights for a few deadly moments as Backstab and Scimitar helped her tear it to shreds, but the victory was ash in her mouth.
And then something moved in the battlespace. A Manticore that was lining up on Backstab didn’t dodge fast enough and was blasted out of space by one of Conviction’s flak cannons, the plasma bursts tearing through the defensive formation as the carrier charged.
The old ship’s two antiship turrets didn’t have the firepower to take out the remaining Cobra carrier—but it was only when Conviction started shedding escape pods that Kira realized John Estanza’s intention.
Ivar Larsson didn’t realize it in time—and the hundred-and-sixty-eight-year-old escort carrier slammed into her enemy at literally world-shattering velocities.
Debris sprayed in every direction as the two nova ships came apart, highlighted a moment later when Conviction’s fusion reactors intentionally overloaded.
For a few seconds, the battlespace seemed frozen—and then the remaining Cobra Squadron fighters vanished as a single body.
55
John Estanza looked perfectly calm at the center of Conviction’s bridge. Red lights flared across a dozen panels, warning signs of closing fighters, incoming fire, and active damage alike.
“The fighters aren’t going to break through, sir,” Mwangi reported, the executive officer managing to seem equally calm, almost diffident, as the carrier wove her way through a battle she’d never been designed for. “Our torpedoes nailed Cobra Bravo, but Alpha is beyond our weapons.
“By Demirci’s calculations, we’re five seconds from bomber launch.”
