The dark battle cruisers had only seconds to enjoy their victory. Tulev did not attempt to clip a corner of the dark formation, instead smashing nearly straight up through one side of it, seven human-crewed battle cruisers against five automated dark ships.
Geary barely had time to register explosions before Tanya took Gamma One through the same portion of the dark battle cruiser formation, slashing downward.
Dauntless rocked with hits but kept going.
He tried to focus on his display, tried to take in the results of the two attacks.
Geary heard Desjani breathe a single, despairing word. “No.”
Gamma Two, going through first, had taken the brunt of the enemy fire.
Leviathan was gone, reduced to a stream of wreckage spreading out along her former vector.
“Good-bye, Kostya,” Desjani murmured. “Your war is over.”
Captain Parr’s voice sounded, but his image did not appear before Geary. “Incredible got shot to hell. We’ve lost practically all systems except maneuvering. That’s damaged. We can keep up for now, but that’s all we can do. Fire control and weapons are all off-line, life support barely functional, comms marginal, numerous hull penetrations.”
One battle cruiser destroyed, and one out of the fight.
Clouds of debris marked the fates of two of the dark battle cruisers. Another had taken a lot of hits but still appeared operational.
It took all of Geary’s effort to put aside thoughts of Captain Tulev and set up the next engagement. The battleships on both sides had been out of the last fight, but now Gamma Three and Four came together to sweep past just below and just above one of the dark formations containing six battleships.
In the wake of that engagement, a single dark battleship swerved away from its companions, moving erratically, then abruptly exploded.
But as Gamma Three maneuvered for its next turn, the battleship Revenge lurched off vector, broadcasting massive damage.
“You’re doing what you have to do,” Desjani said, her voice steady, her eyes burning. “We’re taking out one of theirs for every one of ours we lose.”
He wanted to tell her that he didn’t know how much longer he could live with that kind of fighting but realized it did not matter. The odds that he would be living at all for more than a few additional hours appeared to be vanishingly small.
Victoria Rione’s image appeared before him. The battle had carried Dauntless more than three-quarters of a light-hour from the government facility, too far for a comfortable conversation under current conditions. She spoke without pausing for any replies from Geary, looking steadily forward, her voice as firm as her bearing. “Admiral, we have found files that confirm what Admiral Bloch told you. The Armageddon Option is real, and the most powerful so-called Defender Fleet ships do have the codes necessary to weaponize hypernet gates. At the moment we are locked out of all hypernet gate functions and are trying to access any of them that we can. We are still looking for any codes that might disable or divert the dark ships, without success. Every file on this facility is being copied on portable storage devices and also transferred directly to Mistral’s databases. We have discovered a large number of files pertaining to research on how to copy the Syndicate method of gate blocking, but any results were either never listed here or scorched-earth deleted from the systems before we reached this facility.
“We have found no command personnel and no researchers, contractors, or representatives. Records indicate the station had nearly four hundred people here before an emergency evacuation order was given. The remaining security personnel, who are all private contractors, have been disarmed and detained. The Marines have also freed a dozen prisoners from a high-security detention center, along with some medical personnel who stayed behind to look after the prisoners when the rest of the staff unsuccessfully tried to flee.
“We have discovered vast areas in the facility that have been untouched since construction. They contain equipment that is in working condition but decades obsolete. If the government had ever shown up here, they would have been in for some unpleasant surprises.”
Rione took a deep breath. “And we found my husband. The Marines are estimating they will be able to depart the facility in another hour, but Commander Young on Mistral says they will need to be sure they can reach the protection of your ships before they leave the dock.”
He wondered why Rione had provided no details on her husband, why she didn’t look happy at having found him, but had no time to dwell on either issue.
“They haven’t found anything on the facility to help us,” Geary told Desjani. “They did find files that confirmed what Bloch told us.”
“The one time I wanted him to be lying, he wasn’t. Do we go get Mistral now?”
“It will be at least another hour before Mistral can get underway.”
Desjani frowned. “I just thought of something. You should tell Mistral to stay in that dock. She is safe there, safer than if she tries to rejoin us while the dark ships are conducting attack runs on us.”
“Good idea.” He called Commander Young. “Stay in the dock until we call you out. If none of our warships survive the action, we will have hopefully destroyed enough of the dark ships to allow Mistral to make her way home. The information and the people you carry must make it back to the Alliance.”
The dark ship formation with three surviving battle cruisers whipped by Revenge, inflicting a lot more damage but not shattering the massive battleship.
Captain Duellos, now in command of Gamma Two, caught those dark battle cruisers and tore one apart, but at the cost of Implacable taking so much damage that she had also lost maneuvering control and most of her weapons. “Power core unstable! Abandoning ship!” Commander Neeson sent. Escape pods leaped from Implacable as her crew sought safety.
The Dancers were harassing the larger dark battle cruiser formation, making rapid individual passes to pick off cruisers and destroyers. But they had lost five ships and were suffering increasing damage.
Implacable, still racing through space, abruptly exploded as her power core blew. There was no way of telling yet how many of her crew had made it off Implacable or whether Commander Neeson was among them.
Geary directed Desjani to hit the larger of the two dark battle cruiser formations again, the Alliance formation angling past one edge to knock out a couple of destroyers and inflict heavy damage on another dark battle cruiser. But in the process Daring and Victorious both took a lot of hits, and Dauntless suffered lesser but still-significant damage.
The battleships were coming around again, all of the dark ships concentrating on Gamma Four, while Gamma Three tried to swing over and down in time to support the other battleship formation. Geary wondered which Alliance warships would be lost or disabled this time, which men and women would die, as the beleaguered First Fleet fought what would likely be its final, remorseless battle.
A different alert sounded on Geary’s display, accompanied by an urgent pulsing highlighting the last object he had expected to be worried about in this star system or any other. The alien superbattleship captured from the Kicks. “What the hell is happening on Invincible?”
Fifteen
Lieutenant Castries sounded even more baffled than Geary. “We are picking up indications that power sources are activating in multiple locations aboard Invincible.”