“They rejected the officer,” Captain Faulding said, in tones that suggested that it was a personal insult. “They refused even to discuss it with us!”
“They would have been stalling,” Brent-Cochrane pointed out. He had half-expected the rebels to try just that, but he would have demanded that they powered down all of their systems before entering any discussions. They would doubtless have refused. “You may fire at will.”
His superdreadnaught shuddered as another salvo was unleashed towards the enemy ships, which were rapidly reconfiguring themselves into a new formation. In theory, they possessed equal firepower to Brent-Cochrane’s ships, which at least raised the possibility of the enemy commander electing to fight a duel with energy weapons. In practice, it wasn’t too likely that Commander Walker would dare. Both sides would suffer horrendous damage, but Brent-Cochrane was in a friendly system and Commander Walker was… not.
He watched as the rebel point defence started to engage his missiles and scowled. Their point defence was more effective than he had expected… and he suspected that their damage control was even better. The ships were over-engineered — the Imperial Navy Design Board was composed of professional paranoids — yet that didn’t explain the improved performance that the rebels were getting from some of their systems. For the first time, Brent-Cochrane had doubts about his chosen course of action. Would it not be wiser to put the plot to dislodge Percival to one side and unite against the rebels?
“Send a signal to Greenland,” he ordered, softly. “Tell them that I want their Household Troops out here supporting us.”
“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said. There was a long pause as the rebels continued to move away from the planet, and then opened fire in unison. Brent-Cochrane let out a breath he hadn’t known that he had been holding. There were no unexpected additions to their firepower. “Commodore, they’re refusing, citing safety concerns…”
“Fuck them,” Brent-Cochrane scowled. He smiled darkly. If the Household Troops refused to come and join the fight, they were damn well not getting any of the credit. “Continue firing.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Colin watched, as dispassionately as he could, as the first salvo of missiles from the superdreadnaughts roared into the teeth of his point defence. Missile after missile vanished as the datanet designated them as targets and picked them off, but there were always other missiles to take their place. The enemy commander had been canny enough to load his external racks before arriving at Greenland and it had given him the throw weight to take a massive toll on Colin’s systems. A handful of missiles slipped through the defence network and slammed against the shields, shaking the massive superdreadnaught as they struggled to remain on an even keel.
“No damage, but shields were nearly overloaded,” the tactical officer warned. Colin nodded, sourly. The tactical instructors at the Academy had warned them, time and time again, that the opening barrage was the most important and he’d wasted his opening barrage on the orbital fortress. It was damaged — the superdreadnaughts had hit it quite badly — but it couldn’t actually give chase. Moving with ponderous inevitability, the enemy superdreadnaughts were converging on his fleet, tightening the range. The only advantage the rebels had was that their missiles didn’t have to fly so far to hit their targets. Colin wasn’t unaware of the irony. He was in the same position as the enemy ships at Jackson’s Folly. “The damage control parties are moving up replacement shield generators now.”
The superdreadnaught rocked alarmingly as another missile slipped through the defences and struck the shields. It shouldn’t have been so dangerous, but with so many impacts in so short a space of time there was a good chance that one or more of them would overload and burn out a shield generator, rendering the hull vulnerable. Superdreadnaughts were the most heavily armoured ships in space, easily able to take one or more hits, but even they had their limits. When missiles started exploding inside the hull, the ship was very close to being destroyed or crippled. It wouldn’t make much difference, Colin knew; they were nowhere near friendly territory.
He looked up at the timer, counting down the seconds. He’d never intended to stay longer than an hour in the system, but he’d started recycling the flicker drives at once, just in case the defenders proved unusually robust. The enemy ships had ten minutes to cripple or destroy them before Colin could run; ten minutes… it might just be long enough. Their closing speed was slowing as Colin’s own ships fought to increase speed, but it wouldn’t be enough to save them from an energy duel. Two converging lines formed on the display as he ran through the tactical problem. The enemy ships would be within energy range for at least a minute before he could run, which meant… the rebellion was on the verge of failing.
I will not allow it, he thought, thinking hard. The smaller ships could escape, of course, but that would just leave the superdreadnaughts vulnerable to the enemy ships. The Imperial Navy was ignoring the smaller ships, choosing to concentrate on his superdreadnaughts, even though the smaller ships added a great deal of point defence to the formation. It wasn’t a poor tactic either. There were hundreds of rebel starships out there, but only nine of them were superdreadnaughts and, without the superdreadnaughts, none of the smaller ships posed a major threat. I will not…
He glared at the display, as if staring at it would somehow change reality. The basic fundamental tactics of space warfare hadn’t changed in centuries, even though the technology had been improved until there was little room left for improvement. He’d been trained in the traditional school… and all of his training was telling him that it would come down to a brute force encounter between two squadrons that were, at least on paper, equally matched. If the enemy had brought both of their superdreadnaught squadrons to the party, Colin knew, they would have had to surrender or they would have been certainly destroyed.
Or perhaps we don’t have to destroy them, he thought, suddenly. The tactical instructors had talked about the decisive victory, the victory that would destroy the enemy’s space navy and crush his systems in one blow. Small wonder, really, when the last war the Empire had fought against an alien race had been against one that possessed only nine star systems when they’d been discovered. The Empire had no concept of a long war, which meant…
“I want you to shift our targeting priorities,” he ordered. Both sides had been shooting at each other, merely concentrating on getting in a few hits per salvo. The damage, such as it was, would be largely random. “I want you to concentrate on disrupting their drive fields.”
The tactical officer looked up, new hope apparent in his eyes. Each of the enemy superdreadnaughts were surrounded by a drive field; knock out the drive field and the superdreadnaught’s speed would be instantly cancelled as the laws of physics reasserted themselves. It would take the superdreadnaught’s crew time to replace the damaged drive nodes and regenerate the drive field… the only risk was that the enemy ships would start doing the same to his ships. It couldn’t be helped. Given enough time, he was sure that the enemy commander would start thinking in the same terms.
“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said. His hands danced over his console. “Do you have any targeting preferences, sir?”
Colin hesitated. If they had been able to identify the enemy command ship, he would have targeted it on general principles, hoping that the enemy commander — it bothered him, absurdly, that he didn’t know who he was facing — would either relocate his ships to cover his ass, or would be killed. He’d checked the IFFs against the Imperial Navy registry, but the enemy commander — for whatever reason — had chosen to scramble his IFF signals, probably to prevent Colin from doing exactly that. It was against regulations, yet if he succeeded in killing Colin and breaking the rebellion, all sins would be forgiven.