The oregon trail, p.34
Shield of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 5), page 34
She managed it in time, and the drones eviscerated the next salvo heading their way.
“We can’t keep this up for much longer,” Tanzi said. “We’ve lost a tenth of the Fleet already!”
As they spoke, Morgan felt the entire battleship lurch under her feet as a missile made it through everything—including the shields—to hit the hull.
“Made, where are my shields?” the Captain demanded.
“Localized failure; it’s back up,” the engineer replied. “Armor held. No major damage.”
“They’re targeting the capital ships, same as we are,” Morgan told Tanzi. “We’re getting hammered, but the Duchess can only get here so quickly.”
“Sirs!” Bale’s voice interjected, breaking in a way Morgan would only have expected from a much younger man. “Vindication!”
Morgan followed the tactical officer’s warning and focused her screens on the Ducal flagship.
Vindication was the first of her class, an immense warship almost rivaling the Taljzi super-battleships in size. She didn’t have hyperspace missiles, but she had Buckler drones, Sword turrets, compressed-matter armor, hyperfold cannons, tachyon scanners…
The only warships in the Imperial Navy more powerful were her sixty-four sisters that the Grand Fleet had put through a refit to have hyperspace missile launchers installed.
And Vindication’s luck had run out. She writhed in the fire as the Taljzi missile swarm moved across the defending formation. The Militia’s First Squadron was now the main target, and thousands of missiles poured in on the super-battleships.
The Grand Fleet couldn’t save any individual ship. Their hope was to save enough ships that Bond could carry the day when she arrived…but they couldn’t protect a specific ship.
Vindication vanished with the rest of her squadron, sixteen of the most powerful warships Earth had ever built obliterated in under a minute. The Taljzi missile swarm sought out new targets, as if they hadn’t just torn the heart out of the Militia.
“Is there any chance the Councilor made it out?” Tanzi asked.
“No,” Morgan said flatly, before Bale could even double-check his readings. She’d already been watching. “There were escape pods…but the Taljzi shot them all down.”
It probably hadn’t been intentional, but for that alone, Morgan Casimir wanted to kill them all.
Space battles didn’t really turn on determination. A loss of morale could turn the tide, as ships broke formation and fled, but the furious determination that filled the Duchy of Terra Militia didn’t have much opportunity to show through the mostly automated systems that loaded their missiles.
Morgan could feel the new tone on her bridge, however, and could see it in the “body language” of the ships around her. She watched as, ever so slowly, ship after ship slowly began to slide into the lower tiers of their sprint modes.
Those demanded more power than was usually deployed in battle, but the Grand Fleet wasn’t going to be launching any mass pursuits. A slow, almost-Brownian motion edged the range down as the Grand Fleet moved slightly faster toward their enemies.
“Orders from the Flag,” Lagos reported. “All ships are to stand by for maximum sprint on the Fleet Lord’s order. All capital ships are to engage at point six five and attempt to close to hyperfold-cannon range.”
Morgan concealed a smirk. The A!Tol Imperial Navy, it seemed, taught the same first rule of being an officer that the Duchy of Terra Militia did: never give an order you know won’t be obeyed.
Tan!Shallegh knew he couldn’t order his fleet to stop trying to close the range. But he could make sure they did in a coordinated mass, as part of a strategy.
“Are we ready, Casimir?” Tanzi asked.
Morgan glanced over her status reports.
“We’re out of HSMs and all of our Bucklers are deployed,” she noted. “The drones can move with us, our missile magazines are at fifty percent, the capacitors for the plasma lance are fully charged. We are as ready for a close engagement as we can be.”
“Good. Because we’re going to ram this battleship down those bastards’ throats,” the Captain said fiercely. “I’m not planning on leaving anything for your mother.”
Morgan chuckled, but she understood completely.
“Look at the timing, sir,” she said quietly. “Five imperial marks says that Tan!Shallegh gives the order when the tachyon scanners detect the Kanzi.”
The Taljzi, after all, didn’t have tachyon scanners. The only advantage the Grand Fleet retained over their enemies was real-time sensor data. With an entire second fleet about to drop on the enemy, that might well be enough.
“Sucker bet,” Tanzi said. “Damn, I guess we are leaving the smurfs some targets. Got an estimate?”
Morgan looked at the last scan data again.
“It’s hyperspace, skipper,” she said, as calmly as she could as another salvo of Taljzi missiles slammed home against Jaki’s shields. “Even this close, there’s minutes of variability, especially—”
Her sensors exploded with light as a massive hyper portal tore open in the Sol System and Morgan swallowed.
“Especially if they push how close they open their portal,” she concluded, watching in awe as the Shadowed Armada of the Kanzi Theocracy plunged into Sol space—inside missile range of the Taljzi fleet.
“Attack.”
Morgan doubted that Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh had ever given a more unnecessary order in his life. The entire Grand Fleet took the arrival of the Kanzi fleet as the signal for the charge they’d been preparing and lunged forward.
For a minute, they closed at a “mere” ten percent of lightspeed, the Taljzi maintaining the fifty-five percent of light that had kept them outside weapons range before. The smurfs weren’t denying the closer engagement, but they weren’t encouraging it, either.
Then the first missiles from the Shadowed Armada arrived. The Kanzi, Morgan realized, had upgraded their missiles.
Both the Imperium and the Theocracy had been using a point seven five c weapon when they’d last fought, in the skies of this very star system. The Imperium had developed a point eight c weapon, bringing them nearly into line with the Core Powers.
The Kanzi had developed a point eight five missile. Eighty-five percent of lightspeed was the theoretical maximum speed of the interface drive, and it wasn’t a sustainable speed. The drive field only had a life expectancy of about eighty seconds.
More than enough to cross the sixty-five light-seconds between the Kanzi and their cloned cousins. The missiles came screaming out of the night, and the lack of tachyon scanners meant the Taljzi had less than ten seconds’ warning that the Theocracy ships had even arrived.
Missiles tore their way through the Taljzi fleet from an angle they weren’t expecting. Ten seconds was enough to retask defenses…but not enough to do it well.
Caught between two fires, dozens of Taljzi ships died. Morgan’s scanners told her the grim truth, though: the Taljzi still outnumbered and outgunned the combined fleets.
“They’re bringing in the siege detachments,” Bale reported. “We’ve got a lot of cruisers and destroyers heading our way.”
“They only matter in the hundreds,” Morgan replied. “Watch the damn main fleet! They’re turning.”
The Taljzi had seen exactly what Morgan had seen and made their decision. They could probably have kept both fleets in missile range with a bit of effort, but that would force them to split their missile defenses.
They’d still win, but it would be a risky fight.
Instead, they were changing course and coming right at the Grand Fleet.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“Damn.”
Annette’s curse hung in the air of Tornado’s deathly silent flag bridge.
Captain Mamutse had informed the Duchess of Terra where his ship belonged in no uncertain terms. There wasn’t a single flag officer in either the Imperial Echelon guarding her or the Theocracy Armada she’d been lent that was going to let her be anywhere near the fighting.
Tornado was at the rear of the Kanzi formation, close enough to watch everything and even contribute missiles but far enough away that the entire Shadowed Armada would probably be obliterated before she came under fire.
The Taljzi commander was smarter than she’d hoped for. The degree to which they’d tried to keep the Grand Fleet at missile range had given her hope that they’d keep trying to stay at missile range. At that distance, being caught between two fleets would have seriously disadvantaged them.
Instead, they were attempting to defeat Sol’s defenders in detail. Worse, unless she missed her reading, they were now focusing their fire on the Mesharom Frontier Fleet warships.
Those were the only ships with weapons that matched their disruptors. Both sides had missiles, and the defenders had hyperfold cannons and plasma lances, but the disruptors were far deadlier inside their limited range.
“Any chance we can get into energy-weapon range before they get into disruptor range of the Grand Fleet?” she asked quietly.
“No.”
Mamutse didn’t attempt to soften it. The Captain knew perfectly well that Annette could do the math herself—or she’d have been opening a channel to Fleet Master Cawl and Fleet Lord !Olarski to demand they charge into suicide range.
The Kanzi didn’t have plasma lances, hyperfold cannons or disruptors. Cawl had been cagey on just what the Shadowed Armada was carrying for energy weapons, but Annette’s people’s scans suggested that they were next-generation proton beams.
Probably equal to anything even the Core Powers deployed for that system, but that was because the Core Powers had developed entirely superior systems.
“Time to disruptor range?” she asked quietly.
“They’re heading towards each other at full speed,” Mamutse told her. “A minute. Not much more.”
Missiles continued to hail down on the Taljzi, and so far, the Shadowed Armada was untouched. The Return was continuing to focus all of their fire on the Grand Fleet.
Annette didn’t like what she was seeing. Even if they somehow made it through this, the Grand Fleet was done as a fighting force. The remaining ships would take weeks to years of repairs—even the Mesharom ships, and the Imperium couldn’t fix the Mesharom ships.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” she whispered. “My daughter is in that fleet.”
Mamutse grunted.
“Brother. Sister. Uncle. Couple of in-laws, too,” he reeled off, his voice equally soft. “My kid isn’t old enough yet, but I’ve enough family over there.”
She nodded concession to his gentle point.
“We’re doing everything we can,” he told her. “The Kanzi missiles are better than I dared hope. They’re taking a toll.”
And even as Annette watched the fleet bear down on her daughter and the rest of her homeworld’s defenders, a thousand escorts swarmed their way. Those ships didn’t have the weight to change the balance, but they’d help—
“What the hell was that?” someone demanded.
The largest concentration of Taljzi cruisers, almost a hundred ships strong, had just disappeared. Where a moment before they’d been rushing to reinforce their main fleet, now there was a giant storm of tachyon static.
And when it cleared, Annette could make out the distinct signature of a massive hyper portal. Someone had used the portal itself as a weapon, ripping dozens of the cruisers in half with a single strike.
The fate of the rest wasn’t really in question, however, as Annette Bond stared at the icons that had emerged from said portal.
During the Centauri Incident, a single war-dreadnought of the Laian Republic had visited Sol. They’d later fought the Militia at Alpha Centauri, and the Republic had come away from the Incident with a grudging respect for the Imperium and humanity.
That informal nonaggression pact had allowed the Laians to gain the upper hand over their own enemies, and her intelligence suggested they’d been keeping a wary eye on the Taljzi.
She still had never expected to see ten Laian war-dreadnoughts in the Sol System. Two billion tons of Core Power super-warships now loomed just outside the asteroid belt—and if there was any question as to their intent, they immediately cut their course for the Taljzi Return.
They couldn’t get there in time to change what was going to happen to the Grand Fleet, but Annette was already running the numbers. The Taljzi couldn’t press a disruptor-range engagement with Tan!Shallegh’s force and evade the Republic fleet.
“I don’t know what they’re doing here,” Mamutse said aloud. “But I take back every mean thing I ever said about the Laians.”
The Taljzi must have seen them just as they crossed into hyperfold-cannon and plasma-lance range. They’d done everything within their power to avoid that range so far, and the Grand Fleet was demonstrating why as they tore entire squadrons to pieces—but the Return didn’t press the attack into disruptor range.
Instead, they turned again. Drives pushed up to point seven lightspeed, the fastest Annette had ever seen a starship move, as the Taljzi Return ran the numbers and realized they couldn’t win.
They could destroy the Grand Fleet, but with the capital-ship component of a Republic battle fleet in the system, they couldn’t win.
They couldn’t even survive if they courted that engagement—and even the Taljzi were unwilling to risk this fleet.
“Get me a channel to Tan!Shallegh,” Annette ordered as the truth struck home. “He is not to pursue. I don’t care what strings I have to pull!”
The A!Tol appeared on her screen.
“Dan!Annette Bond,” he greeted her. “It seems we have more friends than we thought. We’ll finish this, I promise.”
“No, you won’t,” she cut him off. “I’ll call A!Shall if I have to, Tan!Shallegh. Do not pursue. Let them run.”
“That is outside your authority to order,” the Fleet Lord said dangerously.
“Don’t be a damned fool, Tan!Shallegh. The Laian Republic doesn’t send war-dreadnoughts without escorts. You can be grateful for the arrival of ten war-dreadnoughts…but they should be accompanied by hundreds of attack cruisers.”
Tan!Shallegh paused, his skin flashing colors in confusion.
“It’s a bluff. Whose?”
“I don’t know, Fleet Lord, but I know your fleet can’t win this battle,” she said gently. “Let them go. Let them run. We’ll have our chance at them soon enough.”
Nothing except for the absence of the usual escorts supported Annette’s theory initially. The war-dreadnoughts swept majestically toward the Taljzi fleet, and the Taljzi ran. They ran fast enough that the Laians could never bring them to range, though not fast enough that the Grand Fleet and the Shadowed Armada didn’t batter them with missiles every step of the way.
By the time they fled into hyperspace, the handful of surviving super-battleships were crippled wrecks being towed by the barely two hundred surviving battleships. Even with the units that had been spread out around Sol, only fifteen hundred ships escaped Sol.
It was a crushing victory by any measure. That it had been bought with the complete destruction of half the Grand Fleet and the reduction of the other half to barely combat-capable wrecks made it a painful victory, but it was still a crushing one.
The Laians waited a full ten minutes after the Taljzi portal had closed before slowing to a gentle halt and dropping the illusion that Annette had anticipated.
Instead of ten war-dreadnoughts, ten attack cruisers hung just outside the asteroid belt. Attack cruisers painted a familiar red color.
“Incoming transmission,” one of Annette’s people reported. “It’s a radio signal, but we’ve IDed a nearby hyperfold relay. You’ll have live coms.”
“Put it on,” Annette ordered.
The Laian that appeared on her screen was even more immense than she remembered him. He wore a simple bandolier made entirely of gold, and it was clear that at some point in the past, his bulk had broken his carapace.
For a lesser Laian, that would have meant death, but the leader of Tortuga had apparently warranted truly incredible care. His carapace had been repaired, reinforced with cybernetic weaves.
Weaves that were, of course, washed in gold.
“I am High Captain Ridotak of the Crew of Tortuga,” he said simply. “I wish to speak to Duchess Annette Bond.”
“Greetings, High Captain,” Annette told him. She knew enough Laian body language to pick up Ridotak’s surprise at the speed of her reply. “There’s a communicator relay near you. It can’t pretend to be a war-dreadnought, but it’s useful in its own way.”
“So it is,” Ridotak agreed. “You know, I presume, that your daughter warned us of the arrival of the Taljzi in our system?”
“It was mentioned,” Annette said carefully.
“She did. They may have been mere words, but they saved us—and many would not have bothered,” the old Laian said. “So, we owed a debt to queen and hatchling alike, and I saw a way to pay it back.”
“Your ships fooled everything we had,” she told him. “I don’t think even the Mesharom saw through you.”
“It is a useful trick. It seems it may be the last useful trick left in our arsenal, but it is useful nonetheless.” He bowed, stiffly. “Our debt is paid, Duchess Bond. All debts, from all time, I think.
“Pass my greetings to Ki!Tana. Somehow, I’m sure she’s in the middle of this somewhere!”
“Thank you, High Captain,” Annette told him. “This will not be forgotten.”
“Please, forget, forget,” he replied with a mandible-chattering chuckle. “Think of our reputation if people realize we do even occasional good deeds!”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Jaki was one of the lucky ones. She was, by any reasonable standard, combat-capable.
