The superdreadnaught’s point defence opened fire as the missiles roared into their terminal attack vectors, boosting their drives forward as they sought mutual annihilation. The lights dimmed slightly as power was redirected to fission beams and other energy weapons, sweeping missile after missile out of space, but it wasn’t enough. Katy barely had a moment to grab the handles of her chair before the first missile struck home. A rolling series of thunderclaps shook the mighty ship.
“Report,” she snapped. Nasty-looking red icons had flashed up on the display, but nothing seemed to be failing dramatically. Of course, part of her mind whispered, if a fusion bottle had failed dramatically, the entire ship would have been so much vapour by now. “Damage report!”
“Minor damage,” the engineering officer said. Katy barely heard the details as she glared down at the enemy fleet in the display. They were struggling to survive her missiles, but they had far more ships than she had. “Admiral…?”
“Get the repair teams on it,” Katy snapped, and broke the connection. Either they could flicker out and escape within a minute, or they were dead. There was no middle ground, not this time. She refused to even consider surrender. There was no way she could allow a reasonably intact Independence to fall into enemy hands. “Tactical, fleet report?”
“We lost seven superdreadnaughts,” the tactical officer said, grimly. Katy looked at the display and winced again. She’d thought that the Jefferson was the focus of the enemy’s attack — that, somehow, they’d locked onto her as the flagship — but no, they’d barely been harmed. Other starships were sending damage reports, some of them far more serious… and seven superdreadnaughts and nine other ships were gone. “The enemy fleet lost four superdreadnaughts, but nine more are significantly damaged.”
Katy glanced at the timer. Thirty seconds to flicker. “Target their undamaged superdreadnaughts and open fire,” she ordered. There were still enough superdreadnaughts to seriously damage the enemy fleet, even though the battle would now sink down into more conventional patterns. “Contact all ships. As soon as the flicker drives are ready, we flicker out to the first waypoint!”
“Understood, Admiral,” the communications officer said. “Signal sent.”
There was a curious detachment, Admiral Wilhelm decided, to watching missiles raging in on ships that didn’t happen to carry his person onboard. They might have been his ships, under his command, but his life wasn’t at stake. It gave him a unique opportunity to study the rebel improvements in missile technology in action, while allowing him to remain out of the fighting.
“They’ve managed to improve their jammers,” he commented, to no one in particular. The point defence systems were being confused and forced to rely on their active sensors to track the incoming missiles, which in turn allowed to the rebels to confuse them still further with false returns. A handful of the missiles, he decided, would carry enhanced ECM warheads to confuse his systems, far more capable than the ones he’d put into production. The Nerds had either held the systems back, or they hadn’t known. He wasn’t sure which possibility worried him more.
His ships engaged the rebel missiles with their point defence. The sensor confusion meant that they had to engage every target… and, because of the relative sizes of the missiles, it was impossible to tell if they’d engaged a sensor ghost or just managed to miss a real missile. Wilhelm had seen a study once, conducted back during the days before the rebellion, that concluded that point defence weapons wasted ten shots for every shot that actually hit a target — it had been suppressed, of course. In the Battle of Cottbus, as he’d already named it in his head, he would have been surprised if they weren’t wasting nineteen shots out of every twenty.
“Impact imminent,” the tactical officer said, calmly. “They’re passing through the final line of defences now.”
I should have developed gunboats, Wilhelm thought coldly, as the missiles raged down on his superdreadnaughts. He had had the technology — they weren’t a great improvement on standard gunboats — but they required willing pilots, not men and women who suspected that they were being sent out to die. The death rates for gunboats that entered combat were horrendous… and he wasn’t comfortable asking for that much loyalty from his people. After all, if Colin Harper could rebel, who was to say that one of his subordinates couldn’t rebel either?
The display updated rapidly as the missiles struck home, reporting in cold clinical terms what was happening to the superdreadnaughts. He pushed the thought that they were crewed by living men and women, some vaporised with their ships, others desperately trying to survive as the air blew out into space, out of his mind. The damage was mounting, but they weren’t capitalising on their previous successes.
“Interesting,” he mused to Jake. “Why aren’t they finishing off the damaged ships?”
As soon as he asked the question, he knew the answer. The rebel commander, Katy Garland — one of his analysts had finally identified her as a former Commander, back with the Macore Observation Squadron before the rebellion — had realised that they couldn’t wipe out his fleet, so she was trying to inflict as much damage on his force as possible before she retreated. She had to be powering up her drives now, having decided to leave them on standby rather than permanently powered up and active, and trying to win time.
Time I am not going to give her, he thought, and smiled.
“General signal to 5th and 7th Squadron,” he ordered. He’d kept them deep within the gravity shadow, partly because that was what the raiding cruisers would have seen, right back at the beginning, and partly to keep her from becoming suspicious. “They are to advance at once upon the enemy.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. His hands danced across his console. “Message transmitted and understood.”
Wilhelm leaned back in his chair and watched, a slight smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as two fresh squadrons of superdreadnaughts, complete with Nerd-designed external racks, started to advance upon the enemy fleet.
“Admiral, the planetary squadrons have just become active,” the tactical officer said. “They’re leaving orbit and heading up towards our position.”
“Neat,” Katy commented, sourly. It was easy to see what Admiral Wilhelm was doing, but it was going to be too late. If she had considered a death ride into Cottbus’s gravity shadow, intent on destroying the shipyard at all costs, she would have launched it before the incoming fleet could intervene. She glanced up at the display and scowled. The incoming missiles had tapered off slightly now that all of the external racks had been shot dry, but the enemy still had over forty completely intact and undamaged superdreadnaughts. She barely had a ship that hadn’t taken damage. “Confirm; the entire fleet can flicker?”
“Apparently so,” the tactical officer said. He glanced down at his console. “Flicker capability in ten seconds.”
Another wave of missiles struck home against the Jefferson’s shields. They held, barely, against enough fury to burn off half a planet, but the starship couldn’t take much more of that. The hammering was burning holes in the shields and unleashing the primal power of nuclear warheads against her ship. The Jefferson was going to need weeks, at least, in a yard before she was fit for combat action again… and there was no suitable yard short of Earth itself. The facilities at Hawthorn simply weren’t up to the task.
Katy counted down the seconds in her head. “Flicker,” she ordered, finally. “Get us out of here.”