HMS Prince Adrian
Nightingale System
March 3, 1907 PD
“coming up on the firing point, Skipper,” Brian Chen said.
Alistair McKeon nodded and turned his command chair to watch the master plot as Sixth Fleet’s wall-of-battle drove steadily deeper into the Nightingale System. Admiral White Haven’s flagship had crossed the hyper limit almost two hours earlier and, assuming acceleration and deceleration had remained constant, could have entered orbit around Petrel, the system’s inhabited planet, in another three and a half hours. But it hadn’t worked out that way, because this time the defenders hadn’t waited supinely for his attack.
They’d obviously been better prepared than any of Sixth Fleet’s previous targets. In fact, they’d pulled their defending starships out of Petrel orbit sometime between the RMN’s last recon and today’s attack. From the look of things, they must have placed their defending force just over halfway between Petrel and the 21.12 LM Nightingale hyper limit, instead, to buy themselves extra reaction and maneuvering time.
It was clear they’d intended to stay between their base and any attacker, but their positioning had been off. It was easy enough to determine an attacker’s most likely vector, since he’d cross the hyper limit as close to his objective as he could possibly get, yet they’d been out of position for a perfect intercept on a least-time course to Petrel. In one way, that had helped them, though; they’d been outside the cone White Haven’s recon drones had swept, and their stealth systems had been good enough to hide their impeller signatures from Sixth Fleet’s shipboard sensors at extended ranges if they accelerated slowly.
It was also obvious they’d detected Sixth Fleet’s approach earlier than Samson or Mathias had, as well, since their velocity had been well over 10,000 KPS by the time Sixth Fleet detected them, despite an acceleration which couldn’t have been much over sixty or seventy gravities. But they’d also been far enough off the least-time vector Lieutenant Saldaña had plotted that they’d been forced to increase acceleration to something their stealth field could no longer conceal if they wanted to intercept White Haven short of the planet. In fact, the reason they’d finally been detected at all was that they’d gone to three hundred gravities on a heading which would have crossed Sixth Fleet’s track six light-minutes from the hyper limit, and roughly four light-minutes short of the planet.
That hadn’t happened, however, because White Haven had reduced his wall’s acceleration once he’d detected the Peeps’ impeller signatures. He’d also turned away from a least-time course, sheering away from both the planet and the defending starships while he studied the situation.
And some studying had been in order, since they’d encountered not the two superdreadnought squadrons they’d anticipated, but four of them.
It was possible the additional battle squadrons had been there all along and Commodore Breton’s drones had simply missed them when he’d reconned the system, but that was unlikely. Far more probably, White Haven’s suspicion that they’d intended to reinforce Nightingale had been accurate and the newcomers had arrived between Breton’s visit and Sixth Fleet’s attack.
However they’d gotten there, Sixth Fleet suddenly found itself outnumbered four-to-three instead of outnumbering the defenders by three-to-two. Worse, all of the Peeps were superdreadnoughts, whereas sixteen of Sixth Fleet’s twenty-four wallers were dreadnoughts. Admittedly, combat experience indicated Manticoran dreadnoughts were tactically more than equal to a Peep superdreadnought, but it was hard to know how much of that was inherent to the designs and hardware and how much was the result of unequal crew quality.
It looked like Sixth Fleet was about to answer that question, because rather than keep their distance, the Peep defenders—now labeled as Bogey One on Prince Adrian’s plot—seemed intent on forcing an engagement. Rather than taking the opportunity to see if Sixth Fleet’s course change meant White Haven had decided to withdraw, Bogey One had actually increased acceleration. Its units were up to 330 G at this point, right on the eighty percent of military power which represented the People’s Navy’s normal maximum acceleration rate.
Since it was evident the Peeps wanted a fight this time, Sixth Fleet was prepared to give it one, and the missile pods on tow behind its ships offset much of Admiral White Haven’s tonnage disadvantage. He was also outside Bogey One, closer to the hyper limit. Their vectors were converging, but once he fired his initial salvo, jettisoned the empty pods, and was able to resume his own maximum acceleration, he’d be well placed to hold the range open or even break clear back across the hyper limit.
Just at the moment, Alistair McKeon was happy the earl had ordered his screen to stay well clear of the scrum. His wall-of-battle was 29,801,000 kilometers, roughly a light-minute and a half, inside the hyper limit now, and its course change had turned it far enough away from Petrel to cut a chord across the hyper sphere. He’d further reduced acceleration to allow the Peeps to close, but his wall’s velocity relative to the system primary was up to 26,829 KPS. Bogey One’s present velocity was just over 18,000 KPS relative to Petrel, and the range between them had fallen to 14,275,500 kilometers.
If everyone involved maintained course, they would enter powered missile range—well over 10,000,000 kilometers, given their launch geometry—in about thirty seconds. Assuming they went right on maintaining course, their vectors would actually cross, with Sixth Fleet roughly 6,500,000 kilometers ahead of Bogey One, in approximately eleven minutes. Actually, 11.4 minutes at current acceleration rates, but once Sixth Fleet had emptied its pods, its current acceleration rate would climb by almost thirty-five percent.
At the moment, CruRon 33 and the rest of Sixth Fleet’s screen was 7,000,000 kilometers on Sixth Fleet’s starboard quarter, which placed Earl White Haven’s wall almost directly between it and Bogey One. From that position, the screen would be unable to bolster Sixth Fleet’s missile defenses against Bogey One, but these were wallers, not mere battleships. Their missiles were bigger, longer ranged, and carried far heavier laserheads than anything a battleship could cram into its magazines, and cruisers and battlecruisers had no business going toe-to-toe with that weight of metal if they could possibly avoid it. That was what their own navies’ ships-of-the-wall were for, so White Haven had opted to clear the range and get the lighter units safely out of harm’s way.
Now McKeon watched the final seconds tick away.
“Launching . . . now,” Chen announced as thousands upon thousands of missile impeller signatures spawned malignant fireflies across the plot.
Despite the numerical disparity, Sixth Fleet’s three-thousand-plus salvo was almost three times heavier than the Peeps’ opening fire. That much, McKeon had expected. But—
“Skipper!” Chen said. “The Peeps—”
“I see it,” McKeon growled. “Looks like somebody over there’s been studying the tac manual. Can we tell who the lucky prizewinner is?”
“Looks like BatRon Twenty-One,” Chen said, and McKeon nodded unhappily.
Of course it was.
He watched the missiles streak across the display. More salvos followed—one every twenty seconds from the Peeps; one every eleven seconds from Sixth Fleet—and the Peep fire was far more effectively concentrated than anything they’d yet seen.
No, he told himself, not “concentrated;” the word he wanted was “directed.” The doomed Peep battleships in Mathias had concentrated all their fire upon a handful of Sixth Fleet’s ships, pouring in everything they could in the time they had. But this wasn’t the desperate, despairing fire of those outnumbered and outweighed battleships. For the first time, Sixth Fleet faced the concentrated salvos of an even larger wall-of-battle, and as he watched, every bit of it rumbled down upon the superdreadnoughts of Battle Squadron 21—and completely ignored the dreadnoughts of White Haven’s other two battle squadrons. Clearly, they recognized the most valuable prizes.
Sixth Fleet’s initial, enormous salvo went in first. Counter-missiles raced to intercept the incoming birds. Decoys—not as good as their Manticoran counterparts, but still capable systems in properly trained hands—sang their siren songs, seeking to lure the laserheads astray. And as the surviving missiles steadied down on final approach, point-defense lasers stabbed out from the massive superdreadnoughts’ flanks, ripping into them, shredding the wavefront of destruction.
White Haven had spread his fire over the three leading Peep squadrons, yet his salvo was so much larger—over three times the size of Bogey One’s—that he’d actually put more birds on each of his targets. Despite everything Bogey One’s defenses could do, scores of them broke through, ripping and tearing. Energy signatures fluctuated as impeller nodes and active fire control arrays were torn apart. Battle steel hulls shattered, and McKeon knew those bomb-pumped lasers were shattering men and women, as well.
But then it was Bogey One’s turn. Even as Sixth Fleet pounded its enemies, the survivors of the first Havenite salvo broke past its own counter-missiles. It was Sixth Fleet’s laser clusters’ turn to spit coherent light, but the Peeps had chosen their target with malice aforethought. Battle Squadron 8 was too far astern, its point-defense lasers too short-ranged, to engage the incoming missiles. It was all up to BatRon 21 and BatRon 17, and they simply had too few clusters to stop that many missiles. Sheer weight of numbers swamped them, and the green lights of friendly ships flashed the spiteful sparkle of battle damage in Prince Adrian’s plot.
At 7,000,000 kilometers, it took twenty-three seconds for those damage codes to reach McKeon’s display. Twenty-three seconds in which the second Havenite salvo came roaring in upon the same targets.
Of course, the next two Manticoran salvos had gone home in that same interval, he reminded himself, and damage codes sparked and flared about the crimson icons of hostile starships, as well. Those codes represented only the Combat Information Center’s best estimate, which meant they lacked the certainty of the data coming to Prince Adrian directly from Sixth Fleet’s wounded ships. Yet they were based on the data from recon drones barely two thousand kilometers clear of the Peep wall, and the plot was clear enough. Half a dozen of Sixth Fleet’s wallers had been damaged, but most of that damage was relatively light, whereas three times that many Peeps had taken hits. At least two of them were badly damaged, indeed, judging from the way their salvos dwindled as launchers were ripped away, and McKeon waited for them to roll ship and turn away.
But they didn’t do that, and his eyes narrowed as they continued to fire back, instead. Wounded, broken—yes, they were both of those, and their defenses weakened in lockstep with their offensive firepower. Their point defense was weaker, and from their emissions signatures, one of them had lost at least half the sidewall generators in her engaged broadside. Yet they never wavered. They maintained course, pounding away.
“Can’t say I like this much, Skipper,” Lev Carson said over McKeon’s earbug from his own post in auxiliary control at the far end of Prince Adrian’s core hull. “This isn’t Mathias, for God’s sake!”
“No, it sure as hell isn’t,” McKeon grated, because Carson was clearly thinking exactly what he’d been thinking.
Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz and Citizen Rear Admiral Linton had been trapped in Mathias. They couldn’t have avoided or evaded Sixth Fleet whatever they did. But Bogey One’s units could have. Their wedges were up, their base velocity was two-thirds that of Sixth Fleet, and Sixth Fleet was outside them. They could break off, roll ship to hide their wounded sidewalls, and shelter behind the unbroken wall of their fellows while damage control worked frantically on repairs.
The fact that they were doing nothing of the sort was . . . worrisome.
“There, Skipper!” Lieutenant Commander Chen said. “That’s one!”
“I see it,” McKeon acknowledged as one of those crippled superdreadnoughts finally pulled out of Bogey One’s wall and rolled to interpose the belly of its wedge. But he felt less exuberance than his tactical officer.
From CIC’s estimates, that ship was a shambles, little more than a broken hulk that still had impellers. It hadn’t fired a single shot in the last salvo before it rolled, but its wounded sisters never wavered, and they should have. By all rights, that wall should have been shedding ships by twos and threes as their damage mounted, and despite the disparity in numbers, it was being hit far harder than Sixth Fleet. By now, every Havenite spacer, commissioned or enlisted, had to know about the superiority of Manticore’s missile technology. They had to know Sixth Fleet had every edge in a missile duel, and the fact that they were taking so much damage while so many of White Haven’s capital ships were mere dreadnoughts must have driven home that proof of their tactical inferiority with brutal force. That had to have taken the heart out of them, yet they were coming in anyway, taking their losses in ships—and lives—and never flinching.
A pair of Peep superdreadnoughts slewed suddenly out of formation. Not to roll ship, but staggering aside as their wedges went down. One of them still had her after-impeller ring; the other was naked in the storm, and a torrent of missiles roared down upon her and ripped her apart.
Five seconds later, her wounded sister followed in the blinding glare of failing fusion bottles, yet still Bogey One’s course never wavered, and Alistair McKeon knew why.
They did know how outclassed they were in a missile engagement. But they also knew they had a significant edge in numbers and tonnage, even with the losses they’d already suffered. The range between Bogey One and Sixth Fleet was little more than four million kilometers now, and they were trying to close all the way into energy range, force the devastating close engagement prewar theory had extolled as the decisive moment in a fight to the death between walls-of-battle.
They’re not going to get it, he thought. If they can turn away from us, then we can turn away from them, and now that we’ve dropped the pods, our acceleration’s at least as good as theirs. White Haven will never let them get that close!
Only . . .
The Peeps had to know that as well as McKeon did, and they were trying anyway, which made no sense. It would only allow Sixth Fleet to hurt them even worse before White Haven broke off. So why in God’s name—
One of the plot’s green lights suddenly flashed the red of critical damage as half a dozen Peep lasers blasted into HMS King Michael, and Alistair McKeon’s jaw clenched as the superdreadnought’s wedge faltered. But then it came back up again, and the 8.3-million-ton Leviathan continued to fire. McKeon relaxed slightly . . . then stiffened as the entire ship simply blew up, taking six thousand human beings into death with it.
He heard someone gasp, yet he never looked away from the plot as Sixth Fleet edged ever so slightly to starboard. White Haven wasn’t breaking off, he knew. The Earl was simply holding the range, preventing Bogey One from closing.
The missile exchange redoubled. But the weight of fire favored Sixth Fleet ever more heavily as more and more Peep launchers fell silent, and another Havenite fell out of the wall, covering herself with her impeller wedge as best she could.
That was five of Bogey One’s SDs out of action or destroyed outright, to only one of Sixth Fleet’s, and the surviving Peeps were far more heavily damaged. At this rate, White Haven would have a decisive edge even in energy range, assuming the Peeps could get that close, and Bogey One’s commander had to know that. So why was he still coming in this way? Nightingale was of only tertiary importance to the People’s Republic. It certainly wasn’t worth the destruction of a fleet Bogey One’s size! And even if it had been, any sane tactician would settle for driving Sixth Fleet off rather than seeking a close engagement which had to be suicidal! It made no—
“New contact, Skipper!” Chen snapped, and McKeon’s nostrils flared as a fresh rash of impeller signatures blazed suddenly in the plot.
“Designate this Bogey Two,” Chen continued, dropping back into the disciplined chant of a tactical officer facing disaster. “Bearing zero-four-five, zero-three-niner. Range niner-two-million klicks. One-eight million from the fleet Flag. Estimate twenty-four—two-four—ships-of-the-wall.”
McKeon slammed a fist on his command chair’s armrest as understanding blazed through him. No wonder the Peeps had held their course so unflinchingly! Bogey One had known exactly where Bogey Two was, and it had drawn—or perhaps a better term would be “herded”—Sixth Fleet directly into the trap. Now the untouched superdreadnoughts of Bogey Two had pushed their own drives high enough to burn through their stealth fields to accelerate into battle, and on their current vectors, Bogey One and Bogey Two would cross Sixth Fleet’s track in barely eight minutes.
At which point fifty ships-of-the-wall would pour a torrent of fire into Sixth Fleet’s surviving twenty-three.
“Orders from the Flag, Sir!” Lieutenant McCloskey said suddenly. “The wall will alter to two-seven-zero, zero-zero-zero at maximum military power and roll ship against Bogey Two! The screen will alter to nine-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero at maximum military power and roll ship against Bogey Two!”
“Acknowledge!” McKeon snapped, and stabbed a look at Lieutenant Pamela Irvine, Prince Adrian’s astrogator.
“Punched in . . . now, Skipper,” she said before he could speak, and he grunted approvingly.
“Execute order from Nike,” McCloskey announced.
“Make it so!” McKeon ordered, and HMS Prince Adrian turned away from the enemy for the first time in her entire existence.
Even as the screen came hard to starboard and broke for the hyper limit at five hundred twelve gravities, Sixth Fleet’s wall-of-battle broke in exactly the opposite direction, driving even deeper into the hyper sphere. Like the screen, White Haven’s wallers had redlined their inertial compensators, running them with zero margin against failure. That invited catastrophic damage should one of those compensators fail, but it also brought their acceleration up to four hundred nine gravities, and the earl was no longer attempting to avoid Bogey One.
Alistair McKeon watched his display, his jaw tight, as he realized what White Haven had done.
Bogey One had paid a hideous price to bait the Havenite trap, but Bogey Two had jumped the gun. Only by a very few minutes, perhaps, and probably only because Bogey One’s damage had been even worse than their pre-battle planning had allowed for. McKeon could readily understand how that might work. How watching Bogey One being ripped apart must have torn at the very heart of Bogey Two’s CO. And it wasn’t as if he’d lit off his drives all that much sooner than the plan had undoubtedly allowed for.
But it was—it might be—just enough, Alistair McKeon thought, punching numbers into the auxiliary plot deployed from the base of his command chair. If he was right, if—
The vectors came together on his plot, and his jaw clenched even tighter.
It was enough, but only barely, and only because Admiral White Haven had responded almost instantly. Given the comparative accelerations and the geometry at the moment Bogey Two revealed itself, Sixth Fleet could evade it. It would still bring White Haven’s wall into its extreme missile range, but it was “above” as well as “outside” Sixth Fleet, which meant Sixth Fleet could roll up on its side, presenting only the roofs of its impeller wedges to Bogey Two’s fire. Some Havenite missiles would probably get through, find targets through the Manticorans’ hidden sidewalls, but no more than a handful.
Yet there were prices for everything, McKeon thought grimly. The only course that would permit Sixth Fleet to evade Bogey Two would force it to cross Bogey One’s track at a range of barely one light-second, and an attitude that shielded White Haven’s wallers from Bogey Two’s missiles would force it into a broadside exchange with Bogey One well inside energy range. It would be a passing engagement. Even if Bogey One altered to extend the energy envelope as much as possible, Sixth Fleet would be through it and out of range once again in barely twenty seconds, and once past Bogey One, it could interpose its wedges against both Havenite formations.
But those twenty seconds would be carved from the heart of Hell itself.
Alistair McKeon didn’t know what the final losses were going to be, but he knew they would be horrendous.
And he knew the war had just changed.