“Weapons locked on target, Captain,” the tactical officer said. Angelika could hear the quaver in his voice, but he was carrying out his duty. “We are ready to engage.”
“Place the damage control parties on full alert,” Angelika added. Her XO nodded. There was no way that the squadron was going to escape without damage. “And prepare…”
The red circle slowly touched the icons representing the enemy ships.
“Fire,” she ordered. “Full spread!”
“The enemy ships have opened fire,” the tactical officer reported. Colin nodded. The enemy ships had fully-loaded external racks and they had launched nearly a thousand missiles towards his ships. They seemed to be focusing in on one target, the General Grant. The commander of the lead superdreadnaught had requested the position as a reward for excellent performance on the gunnery drills. Part of Colin’s mind wondered if he was so pleased with his performance now. “I am breaking down the formation now…”
“Activate our point defence datanet and prepare to engage,” Colin ordered. The tactical system had been constantly updating itself in preparation for the engagement. Now, with the threat developing in front of them, they could at last take action. “Prepare to fire.”
He was tempted to fire back at once, but that would have merely exposed his missiles to a longer flight time than strictly necessary. He watched the timer, noting that it would take the enemy missiles nearly four minutes to reach his ships, adding a curious sense of slow motion to the combat. At three minutes, he would open fire, avoiding the danger of a lucky hit wrecking one or all of his external racks. Nuclear warheads didn’t detonate if they were hit, unlike some other warheads, but it would still pose a serious risk.
The timer ticked relentlessly down as the swarm of enemy missiles approached. Despite his calm appearance, Colin was nervous, for it was their first engagement against a genuinely prepared foe. The Annual Fleet had barely had seconds to fire back. The penal world had never fired and surrendered at once. The defenders of Piccadilly had been taken by surprise. Here… the enemy had as long as they could possibly need to prepare their weapons. The effects were right in front of him. The enemy missiles seemed to be one great harmonious mass. Sorting out the real missiles from the decoys would take time… time they didn’t have.
“Tactical,” he said, as the timer ticked down to zero. “You may fire at will.”
The superdreadnaught lurched as it unloaded its first massive salvo, leaving Colin to sit back in his command chair and watch as the enemy missiles flew into a maelstrom of fire. The problem with external racks — and with the arsenal ship concept — was that they were only one-shot weapons. An external rack blocked the inner missile tubes, meaning that it had to be used and destroyed before the enemy targeted the superdreadnaught, perhaps blocking the ship’s missile tubes and rendering it partly defenceless. It gave the ships a hell of an opening salvo, but once they were fired, the superdreadnaught’s throw weight fell sharply.
General Grant shuddered badly as several missiles slammed home, but the point defence network held true, preventing most of the missiles from getting through. The superdreadnaught suffered minor damage. Colin checked with the ship’s captain and was relieved to discover that damage control teams were already on the way. One advantage the Rim-dweller had over most of the Imperial Navy crewmen was that they knew more about the technology than merely the basics, or how to replace it. Given time, the Rim would become a far stronger threat than the Empire had ever dared fear.
He settled back in his chair and watched as the superdreadnaughts launched their second salvo towards the retreating starships.
“All hands, brace for impact; I say again, all hands…”
Violence rocked sharply as two missiles crashed home against her rear shields, powerful energies breaking through the shields to lick and tear at the starship’s hull. Her point defence weapons rotated and added their own fire to the datanet trying to cover the retreating fleet, but the sheer volume of fire the superdreadnaughts could throw was breaking the network down by main force. Angelika smiled, darkly, as her ship shook again. The rebels were cheating.
“Captain, Fantastic and Glorious Godley have been destroyed,” the coordination officer reported, through a coughing fit. The air on the bridge was starting to smoke as power surges ran through the ship, caused by overloading shield generators. “Vigilante has lost main drives and is stranded. The rebels will take her intact.”
“Not without a working drive,” Angelika snapped. The battlecruiser shook again, new red lights flaring up on the display. They had been exchanging fire for just over ten minutes and her fleet was being battered to pieces. Two of the smaller rebel cruisers had been destroyed and one of the superdreadnaughts was limping, suggesting that she had knocked out one of its drive nodes, but it was a poor exchange rate. It was far more likely that the rebels would simply destroy the crippled battlecruiser, unless they could find a tug to savage her and transport her back to their base. “Refocus the defence network and…”
Her ship rocked, violently. “Rear shields are down, Captain,” the tactical officer warned. Angelika swore under her breath. Without the rear shields, the enemy missiles could literally shoot through the hole and slam into the hull. The cadets at the Academy had a rude term for that, but somehow it seemed less funny now. “Our rear point defence array is offline and…”
“Bring up the flicker drive,” Angelika ordered. She’d risked overstressing the drive, knowing that when they needed to leave, they wouldn’t have time to power up the drive. “All ships are to jump out to the first waypoint on my command…”
She took one last look at the enemy superdreadnaughts, making their ponderous advance, and scowled. She hated to lose, even against vastly superior firepower. “Jump us out,” she ordered. “Now!”
The flicker drive engaged and they vanished from the Jackson’s Folly system.
“The enemy ships have jumped out,” the tactical officer reported. “They’re gone.”
Colin nodded. He wasn’t too surprised. “Secure from General Quarters,” he ordered. The damage report scrolled up in front of him. Apart from General Grant, which had lost two drive nodes, none of the superdreadnaughts were badly damaged. “Take us back to the planet at maximum speed.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Lightning flickered into the system, already moving at considerable speed. Khursheda heard the sound of retching behind her as the shock hit some of her crew — the drugs to counter flicker-shock were not always effective — and gave them what privacy she could by refusing to look at them. The secondary bridge crew would take over if any of her bridge crew were to be rendered ineffective by the shock.
“Jump complete, Commodore,” the helmsman said. “We have emerged at the targeted coordinates.”
Khursheda nodded. They’d planned their jump carefully, avoiding any large masses with their own gravitational field. Even now, centuries after it was developed, the flicker drive wasn’t understood perfectly, but the human race did know that large gravity masses interfered with precision. The small squadron had flickered from the main body of the fleet to its target, a handful of detected sources within the Jackson’s Folly asteroid belt.