Captain Eder stood, hands clasped behind his back. The main holo display showed the Dominions still coming straight at them, still filling the space before them with jamming drones. Dammit, he hated to shoot into a mess like that. It would make for a lousy hit ratio, but it was time to make the Ducks react to him for a change.
“All ships, fire fifty percent load. Concentrate on the center of the Dominion line. Fire now!”
Two hundred and fifty missiles blasted into space and raced for the center of the Dominion line. Now we’ll see how you like it, Eder thought grimly.
Then Lieutenant Letizia was shouting urgently. “Contact! We’ve got visual contact with the Dominion battleship!” And there it was, a clear, crisp image as the recon drone finally reached visual range. At first it was just a speck, but it steadily grew larger and larger.
Instead of a large, menacing battleship, bristling with missile tubes and laser pods, the camera was focused on an oval shaped object with a bulging nose where the decoy pod was located.
It was a decoy drone.
Captain Eder glanced at sensor readout: It still showed the sensor readings of a large Dominion battleship. He smiled at Admiral Douthat, who was staring intently at the picture.
“Good! They aren’t as strong as they appear. If a few more of these ‘battleships’ are really drones, that should go a long way to even the odds,” he said with satisfaction.
“Let’s get some facts first before we celebrate,” she snapped. Eder’s smile dropped away. The Admiral was…what? Nervous? “Move our reconnaissance drones down the line and see what we find,” she ordered.
Eder glanced at Lieutenant Letizia and nodded. She turned her drone to run parallel along the line of the Dominion ships and increased its speed. It was several more minutes before they had a good view of the next Dominion warship.
Another decoy drone. A distraction, but not a threat.
Meanwhile the Dominions fired another volley. Only two hundred and fifty missiles this time. Eder ordered another volley from the Victorian line. The Dominions continued to fall back. By now all of the Victorian ships had sent reconnaissance drones chasing after them and one by one the Duck “battleships” and “cruisers” turned out to be decoy drones. Finally, more than an hour after the first missile had been fired, the recon drones penetrated to the center of the Dominion line, where they found numerous empty missile pods, six frigates and two carriers. The carriers appeared to be empty of fighters, but were flying in very close formation, sided by side, so that sensors from the Victorian ships showed them as one very large vessel.
The massive Duck strike force was nothing more than a paper tiger.
Using the guidance from the reconnaissance drones, Eder launched another volley of missiles, concentrating on the frigates and carriers. Twenty minutes later the enemy ships were dead or desperately limping away, trailing air, debris and bodies in their wake.
Meanwhile, Admiral Douthat was doing the math.
They had estimated that the Duck force chasing the Atlas had about one hundred and twenty war ships. They thought that sixty six or sixty seven Duck warships had gone in front of them to block the worm hole entrance, leaving a little more than fifty still trailing behind the space station Atlas. Those trailing ships were thought to be the Dominion’s smaller ships.
Instead, the Dominions had sent only eight warships to the worm hole entrance, leaving behind over a hundred ships following the Atlas. And even if they red-lined their engines, the Black Watch and Queen’s Own were almost five hours away from Atlas.
The blood drained from her face.
“We’ve been suckered,” she said, her voice numb and flat. “Atlas is virtually undefended. All that’s left is the Coldstream Guard.”
Chapter 66
Dominion Forces Trailing Behind Space Station Atlas
A strong man could shape the universe, if he had the will.
Admiral Mello had the will.
The Victorians had surrounded the Atlas with an insurmountable shell of mines and static defenses.
Admiral Mello intended to surmount it.
First, he sent in the mine sweepers, the most expendable of his forces. There were ten mine sweepers and they moved forward in a cautious wedge formation, four across, three up and three down. Each minesweeper had thirty turret lasers slaved to a master control. As they moved forward they shot the Victorian mines before the mines could sense them and detonate.
It was not a perfect process. Invariably, one or two mines would be missed or only slightly damaged, and when the mine sweeper got close enough the mine would sense a hostile presence and take its revenge. Fifteen minutes into the minefield, the first mine sweeper died. The rest pressed forward, drilling a large hole into the Victorian defensive shell, like a drill bit biting through hard rock. The second and third mine sweepers died ten minutes later, killed when one mine exploded and caused a ripple effect in nearby mines that were just close enough to the two ships to crush them.
Now there were only seven mine sweepers. The hole they made was smaller, but they pressed forward, firing methodically, slowing the rate of their passage so that they might have more time to find their targets.
But the Vickies had been clever. While the outer skin of the minefield had proximity mines, deeper in there were globe mines, sprinting mines, ripple mines and missile mines. The entire minefield was being carried along by a myriad of tractor beams, so it kept its position around the Atlas space station as Atlas desperately plodded its way to Refuge. The tactics the mine sweepers successfully used against proximity mines in the first layer of the mine field would not work so well against other types of mines.
The mine sweepers stoically crept forward.
They reached the first line of missile mines, missile platforms surrounded by a shell of sensors probing out a thousand miles in every direction. In ten minutes the remaining mine sweepers were destroyed, either by missiles or by stumbling into mines as they desperately tried to evade them.
Then Mello ordered in the frigates.
They went in cautiously, firing missiles and lasers and making the hole begun by the mine sweepers deeper and larger, boring through the Victorian defensive shell like a drill press. They moved slowly, but there were thirty of them and by the time the last fell to Victorian missiles and mines and lasers, they were almost a quarter of the way through to the space station.
Then he ordered in the destroyers.
Captain Pattin had watched in astonishment as Admiral Mello ordered in the mine sweepers and frigates, but when he ordered in the destroyers, she could no longer restrain herself.
“Admiral!” she whispered urgently. “You are killing your own ships! It is no good breaking through the mine field if we have no ships left to exploit it! And — ” she hesitated, afraid to say what she thought, but afraid not to — “if you order the ships’ crews to their certain death, some will refuse to obey. They might even turn their guns on the Vengeance.”
He looked at her, surprised at her naivete. He barked a laugh. “They will not disobey,” he assured her. “Each captain knows that the Intelligence Directoate has their families under constant surveillance. If they fail to obey, their families will pay for their treason.”
“Admiral,” she said urgently. “I beg you to reconsider. If we squander our forces here we are defeated. We must keep the Fleet intact, we must have enough ships to defend the homeland.”
Mello looked at her coldly. “I expected more of you, Jodi. This is the decisive battle. If we kill the Atlas, the Victorians will have no way to rebuild their navy, no way to restart their trading economy, no way to generate wealth. Don’t you understand? Without the Atlas, their new child queen will be nothing more than a homeless refugee and Victoria will be nothing more than a historical footnote. All their planets, all their people, all their wormholes will belong to us, and the Dominion of Unified Citizenry will the dominate the universe for a millennia to come!”