CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bellerophon System
Free Worlds Alliance
January 12, 2553
The bedside comm chimed.
The soft, musical tone wasn’t all that loud in the silent sleeping cabin, but Lauren Carson’s eyes popped open almost instantly, with the spinal reflex of eighteen years of naval service, and her hand reached out to the touchscreen even as she sat upright in bed.
“Yes,” she said, accepting the call voice-only.
“They’re here, Ma’am,” Commander Michael Fleischmann, her chief of staff, said tersely from the display’s wallpaper.
“On profile for Horatius?” Carson’s voice was sharper.
“It looks that way,” Fleischmann replied. “At least we just picked up a hellacious Fasset footprint coming in on a least-time bearing from Sol.” Carson could almost hear his teeth-baring grin. “And from its strength and how far out we saw it, they’re loaded for bear.”
“We knew they would be,” Carson pointed out, much more calmly than she actually felt, then inhaled deeply. “Get us moving, Mike. I’ll be on Flag Bridge in five.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”
* * *
“Well, Alessandro?”
Admiral Regis Hathaway turned his command chair to face his chief of staff on TFNS Dione’s flag bridge and raised an eyebrow over one blue eye.
“Final readiness reports coming in now, Sir,” Commodore Covino replied, watching his own displays. He waited another heartbeat or two, then looked up and met Hathaway’s gaze. “All units report ready,” he said.
“Good!”
Hathaway nodded crisply, then turned back to his own console, wishing he felt remotely as confident as he sounded. Although, he conceded, “confidence” might not be the very best word for what he lacked. He wasn’t certain what the best word was, though. Although perhaps “hope” would have been a better one.
There wasn’t very much of that around, either, after all.
How had it come to this, he wondered. How had everything gone so totally off the rails? So completely into the crapper? Hadn’t anyone out here in the Fringe realized how it had to end? How the Federation had no choice but to make it end?
He thought again about the intelligence briefings. For all the good they were likely to do any of the people charged to deal with this mess. In fairness, he supposed, there hadn’t been a hell of a lot of hard intel for the briefers to share…and what there was had been preposterous.
Hathaway had never met Terrence Murphy. For that matter, as far as he could tell, not a single one of Ninth Fleet’s senior officers had ever served with Murphy. Not surprising in something the size of the TFN, if he’d spent his entire career in Survey. But according to the intel weenies, the man had never even seen combat…until that business at Steelman, anyway. And yet he was supposed to have kicked the Leaguies’ ass not just once, but twice? To have taken out a dozen League carriers and captured every single one of their parasites intact? Won the biggest engagement the TFN had fought in decades and then backtracked them to some secret shipyard on the back-ass side of nowhere… where they’d been building another forty damned carriers? And that didn’t even mention his lunatic ravings about the Rish!
At best, and being as charitable as Hathaway possibly could, the man had to be insane. But whether or not that was true in any clinical sense didn’t really matter, because whatever the reason for his delusions, what he certainly was was the spark that was about to plunge the Terran Federation into a spasm of bloodshed and chaos only too likely to piss away everything it had bought with sixty years of bloody warfare. It didn’t really matter whether or not he truly was the would-be warlord the Oval and Prime Minster Schleibaum’s government thought he was. In fact, it didn’t even matter if he’d rolled over and surrendered as soon as Task Force 804 reached New Dublin. What he’d already done—at Inverness and in the “Battle of New Dublin”—had obviously been the first shifting stones of an avalanche whose potential for disaster would be impossivble to overestimate. The lunatics in Bellerophon who’d chosen to go out of compliance had to have been inspired by something and there was no doubt in Regis Hathaway’s mind who the face of that something had been.
The need to somehow stave off that disaster was what had brought Hathaway and Ninth Fleet here, and he closed his eyes for a moment, his back safely turned to his staff, and wondered what the history books would have to say about what he was about to do. What he had no choice but to do.
Hathaway was a Heart Worlder, but he’d put in his time in the Fringe. He understood why so many Fringers were so bitter. And as far as that went, he was prepared to admit—off the record—that they had a right to that bitterness. But secession from the Federation wasn’t “reform;” it was treason. It was tearing the system down, not fixing its flaws, and if the system went down, the Federation went down.
That wasn’t happening on his watch.
He prayed the people of Odysseus would be smart enough to recognize the inevitable and accept it, because he was afraid of what someone like Taskin Alaimo would do to them if they didn’t. For that matter, a corner of his mind, one he tried not to look at closely, was afraid of what someone like Alaimo would do to them even if they did surrender.
Examples, he thought bitterly. There have to be “examples,” because that bastard Murphy’s let the genie out of the bottle and it’s not going back in without them. But doesn’t anyone back home in Olympia understand what letting someone like Alaimo make the examples is going to do?!
Obviously, they didn’t. Or, worse, they did understand…and didn’t care. And if Odysseus wasn’t smart enough to stand down, if Alaimo ordered Ninth Fleet to apply Standing Order Fifteen, then it would be Regis Hathaway’s finger on the button.
“Two minutes to sublight,” Commander Vaníčková announced quietly from Astrogation, and Hathaway nodded.
At Dione’s current velocity, two minutes ship-time would be almost three hours for the clocks of the Bellerophon System.
Assuming they got the system arrays intact, they’ve known we’re coming for at least an hour already. And the size of our footprint’s going to tell them we came loaded for bear. I wonder what they’ve been up to for the last hour—their time—or so?
* * *
“Point Alpha in fifteen minutes, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Gray said, and Commodore Carson—who’d never expected to be the commodore of anything, far less of something as powerful as what had been designated the Bellerophon System Navy—nodded at the reminder.
“Thank you, Chloe,” she said, and she was just a bit surprised by how level her own voice sounded.
It wasn’t as if she’d really needed the reminder. Every single person on TFNS Aurora’s flag deck was burningly aware of the digital timer counting down in one corner of the main display. But it was Gray’s job to give it to her, just as it was her job to project an aura of confidence.
The BSN had been accelerating for over two hours since picking up the incoming FTL signature of what had to be the Oval’s response to Bellerophon’s secession.
She’d been able to get underway so quickly because her ships had been waiting for its arrival in close company with the main gravitic sensor platforms that had detected it. She’d needed to be close to them to cut down transmission lag when the attackers’ FTL footprint was detected, which was why the Calloglou Consortium’s tugs had moved them to a point just outside the Bellerophon System’s 58.3 LM Powell Limit on a direct line with the most probable arrival vector for anyone coming directly from Sol. And they’d actually picked up the footprint earlier than Carson had counted on…which, unfortunately, undoubtedly meant the incoming force was even larger and more powerful than she’d feared.
Her ships’ initial position also had lain just outside the limit, where their full acceleration rate was available to them And while she couldn’t be positive of the exact range at which the attack force would drop sublight, its track told her the exact bearing to the spot upon which it would reenter normal-space, and she’d pushed her fans to 1,900 cee, a bit above their designed acceleration rate. Now, after two hours and twenty-five minutes, the BSN’s carriers were up to a velocity of 162,103 KPS relative to the system primary…and 39.2 LM out from the Powell Limit.
No way in hell anybody on the other side’s going to expect this one, she thought grimly. Mostly because it’s as crazy as anything Governor Murphy ever came up with. One thing about him, watching him in action does teach you to think outside the box!
And now, because it was so far outside the box—and if everything only worked perfectly—nobody on the other side would see it coming until it was too damned late to do anything about it.
Of course, as she’d told the civilians, that was assuming everything worked perfectly.
* * *
“Sublight…now,” Vaníčková said, and the display configured for external view was suddenly spangled with pinprick stars. “Range to system primary is…one-niner-zero-point-five light-minutes.”
“Very good, Aneta,” Hathaway approved, and it was. The astrogator had hit almost exactly their intended emergence point, which wasn’t remotely as easy as a layman might think. Not after a ninety-three-light-year voyage! “And the transport echelon?”
“We don’t have them on sensors yet, Sir,” Captain Naidu, Ninth Fleet’s operations officer, replied. “They dropped off right on the mark, though, so we should be seeing them…shortly.”
Hathaway snorted. If the transport group and its escorting task group had, in fact, gone sublight on schedule, they were five light-minutes farther out than the rest of Ninth Fleet. Given that his flagship’s velocity was 297,000 KPS, any light-speed emissions from the transports had only a 2,800 KPS overtake speed. Had both forces’ velocities held constant, it would have taken almost nine hours—well, only a bit over one and a half hours, shipboard time, thanks to relativity—for those emissions to catch up with Dione and her consorts. Of course, they weren’t going to remain constant, given that Dione was already decelerating hard.
General Alaimo had complained about Hathaway’s decision to drop him and Rear Admiral Jorgensen’s Task Group 901.3 that far out, but Hathaway didn’t need them underfoot while he dealt with any defending naval units.
It was remotely possible—unlikely, but possible—that he’d need Jorgensen in a worst-case situation. He had no intention of crossing the Powell Limit until he knew whether or not he would, and if he did, he’d hold off while Jorgensen and the transports caught up with him. But it wouldn’t have been that hard for any defenders to estimate his emergence locus with a fair degree of accuracy, assuming he wanted a least-time course to Odysseus. Five light-minutes should be an adequate safety margin, and he had no intention of letting anyone sneak into missile range of those transports and the Expeditionary Force until he knew exactly where any defenders might be located. Speaking of which…
“Deploy Heimdallars,” he said.
“Deploying now, Sir,” Naidu acknowledged, and Hathaway nodded as Ninth Fleet decelerated toward the distant, tiny pinprick of the star called Bellerophon at 1,800 gravities and the survey platforms coasted ballistically onward ahead of it.
* * *
“They’re sublight, Ma’am,” Commander O’Flanagan announced as the FTL footprint they’d been tracking disappeared from Aurora’s plot. “We won’t have them on light-speed sensors for a while, but it looks like they hit almost exactly on their projected emergence point.”
“Good,” Carson replied, and looked at the comm display. At the moment, it showed the COs of all eight of her FTLCs, including Aurora, and she smiled thinly at them.
“And now,” she told them over the tight, whisker-thin comm lasers, “we sneak up on the bastards and shoot them in the fucking face.”
“Works for us, Ma’am,” Captain Rodoulis told her from TFNS Freyr, and the others nodded in grim agreement…and anticipation, in a few cases.
There was a reason Lauren Carson had named her ops plan “Horatius,” and all of them recognized just how all-or-nothing, go-for-broke it was. But that very audacity was what gave it a chance of success, because no TFN flag officer had ever been crazy enough to try something like this.
Except for Terrence Murphy, perhaps.
The Bellerophon System Defense Force had accelerated for 160 minutes, to a velocity of 178,873 KPS, and then, just over an hour and a half ago, shut down its Fasset drives and gone to silent running. Their velocity had carried them 47.7 LM from the Powell Limit, 84.7 LM from the point at which the incoming fleet had just gone sublight. But they had shut down 100 minutes before that, which meant their last light-speed emissions had already passed the incoming hostiles before they ever dropped out of wormhole space.
At the moment, the BSN was closing with the new arrivals on a direct reciprocal at a combined velocity of 475,800 KPS, well above the speed of light, under complete EMCON, and at a range of 1,524,600,000 kilometers, over twice the distance from Earth to Jupiter, there was no way in hell their visitors could have a clue Carson and her people were there.
Now if it just stays that way, she thought to herself.
* * *
“Signal from Admiral Jorgensen, Sir,” Commander Sundqvist said, and Regis Hathaway raised an eyebrow at his comm officer. “He confirms sublight with all units at the designated coordinates.”
“Always good to know,” Commodore Covino said dryly, and Hathaway chuckled.
“Be nice,” he told his chief of staff quietly, and Covino snorted.
“I know,” he said. “But Jorgensen’s just so…so—”
“He doesn’t have a lot of imagination,” Hathaway acknowledged. “And you and I both know why I picked him to ride herd on the transports instead of Hendricks or Sumio. But he’s solid, Alessandro.”
“I know,” Covino repeated, this time with an edge of contrition, and Hathaway nodded before he turned back to the main plot.
It was true that Elijah Jorgensen was a tad short on both imagination and initiative. For that matter, he was a bit of a fussbudget, a chronic, compulsive dotter of Is and crosser of Ts. His transmission only underscored that. It had taken just under ten minutes for the light-speed message to catch up with Dione, and it hadn’t been necessary in the first place. The flagship’s sensors had picked up his ships’ equally light-speed normal-space emissions a clear twenty seconds before his transmission had arrived.
So, yes, Hathaway understood Covino’s comment. But as he’d just pointed out to the chief of staff, Jorgensen was also as solid and unflinching as a flag officer came. He might not be as…tactically nimble as Hathaway’s other division commanders, and no one in his right mind would assign him to a major independent command, but give him a clear set of orders, and he would execute them faithfully and well, come hell or high water.
Hathaway shoved Jorgensen back into his mental filing cabinet and returned his full attention to the plot. It would be a while yet before even the Heimdallars racing ahead of his decelerating FTLCs could give him any kind of close look at the inner system, but at the moment that plot seemed remarkably barren of transponder codes or emission signatures. No doubt the defenders—and there would be defenders, he was sure, since the secessionists had taken at least the four carriers of the Bellerophon picket—had followed SOP and gone to strict emissions control the moment his own incoming Fasset signature had been detected. That had been a given from the get-go. On the other hand, if they intended to intercept him anywhere short of the inner system, they’d have to be getting a move on sometime soon. In fact, they probably had started moving already and their emissions just hadn’t reached him yet. He’d only traveled 9.9 LM since going sublight, after all, which meant anything his sensors saw inside the Powell Sphere was still at least a two-hour look into the past.
He’d feel a hell of a lot more comfortable when he knew exactly where the bastards were—and, for that matter, how many of them he actually faced. Even in a worst-case scenario in which every single carrier in the Cyclops Sector had mutinied, his main striking force had a fifty percent advantage in FTL platforms, but he hoped like hell his edge was actually bigger than that.
* * *
“Point Beta.”
Commander Fleischman’s quiet announcement seemed to echo like a gunshot through the nerve-twisting quiet of TFNS Aurora’s flag bridge.
There were several reasons no one ever adopted the tactics Lauren Carson and the Bellerophon System Navy had chosen. The main reason—at least for most flag officers—was that one simply did not bring one’s FTLCs into a close-range engagement if one could possibly avoid it. They weren’t designed for that, they weren’t intended for that, and they were far too strategically valuable for that. In Carson’s case, the need to intercept any attackers—intercept them in a way that forced them to engage, deprived them of any option to evade her and avoid action—trumped the value of her own carriers. She had to strip them of the ability to simply stand off and threaten Odysseus with long-range bombardment. Like the ancient Roman for whom she’d named her ops plan, she had to bar the gate and keep it barred until Terrence Murphy’s reinforcements could arrive.
But there was another and far more nerve-racking reason most admirals would have avoided Horatius like the plague. At their closing velocity, the attacking carriers were so close behind their light-speed emissions that she wouldn’t even be able to see them until a handful of minutes before they actually engaged. Although the incoming FTLCs had presumably been decelerating for over half an hour now, their velocity was probably still close to 260,000 KPS, right on eighty-seven percent of the speed of light. Assuming that was true, their emissions signature, propagating at 300,000 KPS, was all of 2.4 LM ahead of them. So Carson still had no way to know just how heavy the odds against her command were.
Of course, the invaders were almost certainly blissfully aware of her silent-running task force. While it was true that any of her emissions would reach them far sooner than theirs reached her, there were damn-all emissions for their passive sensors to see, under full emissions control and with her own Fasset drives down. About the only thing that could give away her presence was an optical scan directly ahead of them, and no one bothered with optical scans, given all the other, far more sophisticated systems available. For that matter, every one of her ships had its smart paint dialed up to maximum absorbency, turning them into little more than dark blotches in space. Unless someone was looking in exactly the right instant one of her ships occluded a star, they should be virtually invisible. Which should mean there was no way the invaders could know she and her carriers were barely twenty-five minutes short of that head-on intercept…assuming her estimate that her foes were on a least-time heading for Odysseus was correct.
Not that either side actually had twenty-five minutes, given the relativistic effect of their velocities. At the BSN’s current velocity, what was twenty-five minutes for the rest of the universe would be only twenty minutes aboard its ships, and it was even worse for the attackers. For them, it would be less than thirteen minutes, and The Book set thirty minutes as the time requirement for an FTLC to deploy her sublight parasites. They could launch in less—the absolute minimum for a crash launch, assuming her parasites were fully prepped and manned, was about five minutes—but it would still take them another fifteen to reach their assigned positions in their carriers’ missile defense formations. And unless they were fully prepped and manned, they couldn’t even get them launched in less than fifteen.
And what are the odds the Oval could find an admiral stupid enough to not have her birds prepped? Carson thought. Hell, Yance Drebin would be smart enough to man all stations at the start of an attack run!
Her lips twitched ever so slightly at the thought.
“Deploy,” she said.
“Deploying,” Dominic O’Flanagan acknowledged, and Carson watched the status boards as the BSN’s parasites—and cargo pods of Casúr Cogaidhs—detached from the FTLCs’ racks.
There were fewer of those parasites than there might have been, partly because close to twelve percent of the Cyclops Sector’s sublight units had been significantly damaged when their crews mutinied in Bellerophon’s support. But there was another reason she’d embarked fewer than she might have, because each of her eight carriers had embarked four cargo pods stuffed with a hundred and thirty-two Casúr Cogaidhs apiece in the space the same number of battlecruisers might have occupied. In theory, that had cost her thirty-two sublight platforms, but Lauren Carson was fine with that, because it gave her 4,224 Casúrs in their place.
Now the missile pods spread out, using only their reaction docking thrusters and not their Hauptman coils. They settled into attack position, taking station well ahead of her carriers while her parasites formed up behind them.
* * *
“Still no sign of the bastards, Sir,” Alessandro Covino murmured, floating in Flag Bridge’s microgravity beside Regis Hathaway’s command chair.
“Well, we’ve only been sublight for thirty-five minutes,” Hathaway pointed out. In fact, by Dione’s clocks, they’d been sublight for less than eighteen minutes, but professional spacers learned to allow for time dilation.
“Agreed, but they had four hours’ notice we were coming,” Covino countered, “and we’re still over a light-hour and a half from the Powell Limit. If they’re out there and coming out to meet us, we should’ve seen something by now. Fasset drives aren’t exactly the stealthiest things in the universe.”
“That’s true,” Hathaway acknowledged. “But we don’t know what kind of flight profile they may have decided on, either. For that matter, they may not have decided on their profile ahead of time. It’s entirely possible they’re waiting until they get an actual count on what we’ve brought to the party. It’d make sense for them to be somewhere outside the limit with us, probably somewhere off to the side in a position that would let them generate an intercept, assuming we came in on a least-time vector. That would give them their best opportunity to assess the odds and decide whether or not they can afford to engage us before they actually do.”
“Maybe.” Covino nodded. “On the other hand, whether they like the odds or not, they’ve still got the planet to defend. Be pretty ballsy of them to risk letting us blow right past them if they guessed wrong or if we decided to just ignore them.”
Hathaway rubbed an eyebrow thoughtfully. On the one hand, a CO who knew he’d be outnumbered but couldn’t be positive by how much probably would be looking for a position that would allow him to generate an intercept but wouldn’t allow his numerically stronger opponent to force a sustained engagement. On the other hand, Covino had a point. A defending admiral who guessed right about his opponent’s approach vector could generate a crossing engagement, and if he came in at the right angle, the attacker would be unable to generate sufficient Delta V to bend his own base course enough to force any sort of sustained engagement. That sort of high-speed, hit-and-run engagement was far less likely to end in the weaker force’s destruction. But it also meant the defender couldn’t force the kind of sustained engagement that might actually stop the attacker short of the planet that was his true objective.
And Covino was also right that Fasset drives weren’t exactly hard to spot on passives.
“I imagine we’ll see some sign of them shortly,” the admiral said. “Because you’re right, they do have to stand and fight somewhere.”
He grimaced unhappily.
“I’m not looking forward to it when they do, frankly,” he said in an even quieter tone, for Covino’s ears alone. “I know they’re mutineers, and I know we’ve got it to do, Alessandro, but this is going to be ugly.” He shook his head. “God knows I never thought I’d be killing Federation starships, but—”
The sudden, shrill whoop of an alarm slashed across the flag deck’s quiet, and Hathaway’s eyes snapped back to the main plot as a crimson icon blazed suddenly upon it. It strobed the rapid, pulsing blank of an unidentified contact, and—
“Unknown contact!” Dione’s tactical officer announced sharply over the intra-ship comm from the big carrier’s CIC. “Single-point source, bearing zero-zero-one, zero-zero-four. Estimated range two-eight-point-six light-minutes!”
Hathaway stared at the plot in disbelief, then looked at Captain Naidu as the ops officer bent over his console, flying fingers working to refine the data.
“Whatever it is, it’s not radiating,” Naidu said.
“Then what the hell is it doing?” Covino demanded. “If it’s not radiating, how do we know there’s really something there in the first place?”
“May be just a glitch in the system, Sir,” Naidu replied, never looking up from his display. “May not be, too, though. Whatever it is, CIC picked it up optically.”
Hathaway frowned. Optically? At that range?
“Optically?” Covino repeated out loud, as if he’d heard his admiral’s thoughts, and his tone was skeptical.
“I think somebody in Combat Information was searching visually for our Heimdallars,” Naidu said.
“What?!”
Hathaway stared at him. Isabella Whitworth, Dione’s tactical officer, was fond of unscheduled training exercises at the most unexpected moments possible. It was one reason her department was so good. But the recon platforms were incredibly stealthy, and they’d drawn almost two and a half light-minutes ahead of Ninth Fleet as they continued ballistically at 297,000 KPS while the carriers decelerated at 1,800 gravities. Expecting her people to visually locate Heimdallars at 41,400,000 kilometers was a bit…demanding even for her. Oh, it wasn’t an impossible challenge—not quite—when they already knew where the Heimdallars in question were supposed to be, but it still came pretty damned close.
That was his first thought. Then he frowned. Whatever the hell CIC thought it had found, it was one hell of a lot farther out than the Heimdallars could possibly be.
“Sounds like a ghost to me,” Covino said.
“Yes, but on an optical search?” Hathaway shook his head. “That’s not your usual sensor ghost, and—”
He stiffened as another flashing icon popped onto the display. Then another. Then dozens of them!
“Bogies!” Commander Whitworth’s voice snapped from CIC. “Multiple bogies closing at four-three-six thousand KPS!”
Even as Hathaway stared in disbelief, icons began to stop blinking, and he inhaled sharply as CIC tagged them with identifiers. At least—at least—seven FTLCs’ icons glared at him, with dozens of deployed parasites riding shotgun.
“Jesus!” Covino muttered harshly from beside him, and Hathaway sucked in a deep breath.
He knew he was actually looking into the past, but he also knew CIC had allowed for that in the range information glaring in the plot. And according to that, the “bogies” were less than twenty-nine light-minutes from Ninth Fleet, closing at better than 436,000 KPS on a direct reciprocal. That meant their courses would intersect in barely twenty minutes—less than eleven minutes, by Dione’s clocks. And that meant—
“Alpha launch—now!” he barked.
“Alpha launch, aye!” Naidu replied almost instantly, and another alarm howled as every FTLC in Hathaway’s force launched its own parasites.
“They must be out of their goddamned minds!” Covino said. Even in his shock, he kept his voice down, but Hathaway heard the sheer consternation rattling around in its depths. “This is fucking suicide!”
“Not if Whitworth hadn’t decided to conduct her little training exercise,” Hathaway grated, watching the plot as the first of his parasites accelerated furiously clear of the carriers at ten gravities. “They’ve got all of their parasites spotted. If we hadn’t picked them up—if they’d hit us head-on this way, without warning and with all our birds still on the racks—they’d have ripped the ever-loving shit out of us. In fact, they’re still going to. The only difference is—” he bared his teeth “—that now we’re going to rip the shit out of them, too.”
* * *
The Oval hadn’t given Ninth Fleet anywhere near as much working up time as Arkadios Fokaides would have preferred or as Regis Hathaway could have wished for. But Hathaway had known that would be the case going in. That was why he’d drilled his personnel mercilessly on the month-long voyage from the Sol System to Bellerophon, and the consequences of that drill showed as his sublight units spread out around his carriers in far less time than The Book required.
The brains of the men and women crewing those parasites fought to catch up with the situation as they launched from an absolute cold start at maximum acceleration. They’d gone to their stations even before Ninth Fleet dropped sublight, but no one had anticipated launching this far out. They were still four hours’ flight short of the Powell Limit, much less the planet, for God’s sake!
As the acceleration crushed them back into their couches, they found themselves very much in agreement with Commodore Covino. This was insane! Navies didn’t fight this kind of battle. FTLCs had no business in point-blank combat with anybody, far less other FTLCs! But the only way Lauren Carson could get her parasites—and the Casúr Cogaidhs about which not a single soul in Ninth Fleet knew a single thing—into range of Regis Hathaway’s FTLCs was to carry them there aboard her FTLCs. Without those carriers’ lift and the acceleration of their Fasset drives, Hathaway’s starships could have evaded them with ludicrous ease, especially outside the Powell Limit. Indeed, if Whitworth’s “exercise” had spotted them even a few minutes earlier, he could still have evaded them. But only by holding his own parasites on the racks, where their point defense would be virtually useless, and he needed that defensive depth to protect his carriers against the parasites he knew she’d already deployed.
Unfortunately for Ninth Fleet, he didn’t know what else she’d deployed.
Not that knowing would have done him any good.
* * *
“Shit!” Commander O’Flanagan snarled. He turned toward Carson. “Ma’am—”
“I see it, Dominic,” the commodore said as the plot updated suddenly. She had more time, subjectively, than Hathaway to watch it at the BSN’s lower velocity, but that didn’t make it one bit better.
“I wonder what the hell they spotted.” Fleischman sounded far calmer than he had any right to sound.
“No EMCON is perfect,” Carson replied almost absently. “They could even have picked us up on optics. They’d’ve had to be looking in exactly the right direction, but if we occluded the primary, that might’ve been enough. Not that it matters.”
“We’ll still catch them before they’re fully deployed,” Fleischman said, watching the battleships and cruisers accelerating away from Ninth Fleet’s carriers. “Their defensive basket’s going to be a lot shallower than ours.”
“Oh, I’m confident we’re about to rip the absolute hell out of them,” Carson said. “They don’t have any clue what’s about to happen to them. Unfortunately, with all those additional platforms out there, they’re going to rip hell out of us, too.”
She looked at the plot a moment longer, then back at O’Flanagan.
“Fire plan Alamo,” she said.
* * *
“What the hell is all that little shit?” Hathaway demanded irritably.
The plot continued to change as CIC refined its data, and hundreds of far smaller Hauptman drive point sources had just appeared on it, frothing ahead of the mutinous carriers like some sort of bow wave.
“We don’t know, Sir,” Naidu replied, still working at his console. “They look like some kind of outsized drone.”
“Bastets?” Cosimo asked in a dubious tone, and Hathaway grunted. It would make a lot of sense for whoever was in command over there to get his anti-missile defensive platforms deployed well ahead of time, but nobody carried that many Bastet drones. Besides—
“Too big for that,” Naidu said. “Maybe even bigger than Heimdallars.”
“What the hell are these people playing at now?” Hathaway growled.
* * *
“Launch,” Lauren Carson said.
Three quarters of the Bellerophon Defense Force’s Casúr Cogaidhs were loaded with Bijalee shipkillers, each of them fitted with the Alysída self-defense system. Half of the remaining Casúrs carried Fallax missiles, EW platforms fitted with decoys and jammers, while the other half were loaded with Phalanx “escort” missiles to “plow the road” for their shipkiller sisters.
Now they launched, and 12,672 missiles erupted into Ninth Fleet’s face.
* * *
Oh, Christ. I guess that’s how the bastard did it.
The thought flashed through Regis Hathaway’s mind almost calmly as the plot exploded with an utterly impossible tsunami of missile signatures and he realized, almost instantly, exactly how Terrence Murphy really had defeated twice his own number of League carriers in a system named New Dublin.
And that his own carriers were doomed.
“Retarget,” he heard his own voice say. “Put everything on their carriers.”
“Retargeting,” Naidu replied a heartbeat later, and the admiral smiled bitterly. He knew what had waked the ops officer’s tiny pause.
“You’re sure about that, Sir?” Cosimo asked softly, and Hathaway looked up over his shoulder at the chief of staff.
Targeting only the mutineers’ FTLCs would leave their sublight units unscathed to deal with his own ships, but that wasn’t going to make much difference to Ninth Fleet’s fate. That many missiles, closing at 437,000 KPS—almost half again light-speed—were going to get through. Even under the circumstances, his defenses might stop a lot of them; they couldn’t possibly stop enough to save his carriers. And despite his greater numbers, his total weight of fire would be only a fraction of what was coming at him.
“I’m sure,” he said, equally softly, and actually managed a crooked smile. “We take out their carriers, and any of their parasites that get away don’t mean squat. Not out here.”
Cosimo looked at him for a moment, then nodded. No sublight warship ever built carried enough reaction mass to decelerate from the mutineers’ current velocity. Without carriers of their own, they could only continue helplessly into the depths of interstellar space.
* * *
“They’ve fired,” O’Flanagan announced, and Carson nodded in acknowledgment.
Of course they’d fired, she thought bitterly. And they’d gotten all those damned parasites off the racks before they did. Their targeting solutions would be rushed, without the tracking time refined the way her own ships had done, but they’d get at least two salvos off before her own missiles hit them, even at these velocities.
And she was grimly certain what they’d chosen to target.
* * *
Rival hurricanes of destruction screamed through space.
Ninth Fleet could bring 1,300 missile tubes to bear on Lauren Carson’s ships, while she had only 520 tubes that could reply. But she had the Casúr Cogaidhs, as well. That meant Regis Hathaway could put 2,600 missiles into space in the time he had…but Carson could fire almost six times that many at Ninth Fleet.
There’d been a term for it, back on pre-space Earth. Mutually Assured Destruction, they’d called it.
Unlike Regis Hathaway, Carson and her captains had known from the beginning what they might encounter. Had they been detected even a handful of minutes later, the slaughter would have been as one-sided as the one Murphy had wreaked upon Xing Xuefeng in New Dublin. But they had been detected, and along with its missiles, Ninth Fleet’s deployed parasites could bring almost a thousand K-guns to bear, with three times a missile tube’s rate of fire, and no counter-missile or point-defense laser could stop a K-gun’s solid SCM slugs.
They had almost six minutes, by the rest of the universe’s clocks, to shoot at each other before they interpenetrated—not passed each other, but interpenetrated—and ran out of range of one another again.
Six minutes.
Six minutes in which 16,276 missiles and over 7,600 KEWs ripped and tore and gouged. Six minutes of mutual, point-blank slaughter such as no Federation Navy flag officer had contemplated in over fifty years.
There were just over 102,000 men and women aboard Regis Hathaway’s ships, almost ninety percent of them aboard his sublight ships; there were “only” 60,080 in Lauren Carson’s.
Six minutes after the first missile fired, 132,586 of those 169,000 human beings were dead.
None of Ninth Fleet’s FTLCs, and only twelve of its parasites, survived, still coasting onward at 0.86 cee. Six of Lauren Carson’s carriers were destroyed outright. Only Freyr and Aurora survived, and Aurora’s Fasset drive was a shattered, broken ruin. Almost three quarters of her parasites were actually still combat capable, but as Hathaway had said, without carriers, they were useless for the system’s defense.