Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Consequence (21 page)

              "We're on his ship, and I have a plan," Loren said.  He reached into a small, concealed pocket and brought out the souvenir he took from the CSS Resilience; the ship's IFF transponder ID unit. 

              Velk looked at Loren with doubt.

              "It's the transponder from a destroyed Crusader class ship; it's what our own ships interrogate to get hull info and coordinate their movements, identify each other, all that.  It's already drawing power from this ship's wireless grid.  When I activate it, every scanner in the area is going to see a weak IFF signal of a Confed Crusader right here.  And 'right here' happens to overlay another cloaked vessel."  Loren waited for everyone to make the connection.

              "Scanners reveal a Confed ship among a Priman fleet.  That ship is cloaked so hopefully people buy the ruse.  And since Tash's flagship has a real, operating cloak, it looks one hundred percent legit.  Only problem is creating enough confusion to get them to forget that their Commander's ship is right in the same place."

              "I can disable our own beacon," Velk stated.  "We have a similar mechanism.  When will the time be right?"

              Elco spoke.  "When the fleets merge and the shots fly, Avenger will head right into the mess and towards your ship.  Once we get close enough, turn on the
Resilience
and off with the ship's actual transponder.  Hopefully the other ships just see another Crusader stupid enough to go diving right into a Priman dustup."

              "We get hazard pay for this, right?" Loren asked wearily.

              "If we live, I'll get you your own ship, Loren."

              Admiral Bak stood, hands behind his back, in the Flag Bridge behind the primary bridge of Majestic.  As he'd promised, he was standing at a comm station, waiting for an answer to his hails from the incoming Priman fleet.  And what a fleet it was; seventy capital ships, most of them the heavy cruisers they seemed to favor instead of the light cruisers, the rare destroyer sized ship, and even the big motherships which appeared to all be orbiting captured Enkarran worlds these days instead of taking part in fleet actions.  While his Fourteenth was arranged in a defensive spherical formation, the Primans were deployed in more of a cone shape, passing by on the starboard side of his own vessels.

              His analytical side looked at the tactical problem and decreed they were humped if the Primans got ornery.  He hoped his analytical side was wrong.

              His small staff bustled about the compartment, coordinating data, compiling notes for his review later, any number of tasks he'd assigned.  He felt alone at that moment, even surrounded by his people.  He wished there was something he could do to end this conflict, but that was wasted energy.

              An incoming hail request caught his attention.  The comm officer on the bridge had sent it back to him; it was addressed to the fleet commander.  He tapped the panel to take the transmission live and was rewarded with the face of a Priman naval officer, uniform an odd mashup of military and the ornate garments he'd seen Confed politicians wear. 

              "I am the Priman Commander," the man said.  "You are in charge of this Confederation fleet?"

              "That is correct," Bak replied.  "I am Admiral Nodam Bak.  Our treaty requires me to stand to, so here we are."  No need being chummy with the bloodthirsty invading aliens.

              "Excellent."  The Priman looked offscreen to something, then back to the admiral.  "In that case," he looked back off screen to one of his own people, "
open
fire
!"

              Seventy Priman capital ships unleashed an unholy barrage of fire on the Fourteenth Fleet.

              Loren watched the data screen at the view changed.  Instead of just Tash's fleet taking up the whole space, the image changed and zoomed far out to show a sizable chunk of local space.  Now, Loren saw another grouping of ships, data tags in the Priman language making it indecipherable to him.

              "Representative," Loren said, indicating the screen.  "Can you tell me what's going on there?"

              Velk looked at the information and seemed to age before Loren's eyes.  "It is a Confederation fleet, calling itself the Fourteenth.  There are some registry names I recognize, among them Majestic, Constellation-"

              "Majestic?" Loren interrupted.  "That's Admiral Bak's ship!  He can take us right to Delos!"

              "There is a problem," Velk said softly.  Before he could speak, Loren felt it; the ebbing thrum of power building up and surging through the ship.  He knew what that meant.

              "We've just opened fire on the Fourteenth," Loren finished.

              "I will disable this ship's beacon as soon as possible," stated Velk, who tore an access panel off the bulkhead and began tracing his finger over the printed processor cards and fiber optic pathways within.

              Admiral Bak had always feared such a betrayal, but until the Primans did something truly dastardly he simply couldn't act on that paranoia for fear of escalating things instantly into an all-out fight his fleets weren't prepared to fight at this time.  Now, he watched as the Primans opened up with concentrated fire on the starboard flank of the Fourteenth.  He saw ships outright disappear under the coordinated fire of dozens of Priman capital ships.  Priman fire burrowed through a wall of ships defending the Confed heavies, cutting a swath of death and destruction through the proud Confed vessels.  Two cruisers and a destroyer were cut to ribbons as Priman fire stabbed towards the prize, a Sabre class fleet carrier in the depths of the formation.  A Crusader drifted into the line of fire and was ripped into pieces as well.  The carrier shuddered and began to shed parts from its mile long hull as relentless fire from over a hundred Priman guns pounded mercilessly into the Confederation fleet.  Soon, the fire tapered off and there was a debris field where a carrier used to be, large sections of hull tumbling in opposite directions amid a cloud of wreckage. 

              "Fourteenth!" Bak yelled over the all-fleet address channel, "Emergency evasive; down sixty degrees and thirty to port!  Task Forces, break up and maneuver as needed."

              Admiral Bak's standing orders in a situation like this was to allow the fleet to break up into three Task Forces, each centered around a carrier or carriers.  Thus, each of the two Sabre class fleet carriers, along with a screen of Crusaders, cruisers and destroyers, would become Task Force 1 and 2.  The four escort carriers made up Task Force 3, with the same mix of escorts.  Each task force was commanded by a captain and had individual orders and objectives, falling under Admiral Bak's overall command.  At this point, however, their standing orders were to form up and separate in an attempt to break up the Priman fleet, whose concentration of superior numbers was almost unmanageable.  If they could split them up a bit, the idea would be to maneuver and re-form the task forces to gain temporary numerical superiority and then split apart again to keep the battle fluid. 

              There wasn't much for Admiral Bak to do at the moment; his fleet needed to fight itself out of this situation, and him micromanaging their efforts wouldn't help right now.  All he could do was wait as they maneuvered and hopefully take the fight back to the Primans.  Even worse was the fact that the ships of Task Force 2 had been the recipients of the initial Priman barrage; TF2 was a shell of what it should have been, the carrier having been destroyed with all hands in the opening barrage, which left only a battleship, two cruisers and a destroyer.

              He'd even tried to establish a comm lock on the transmission of this Commander fellow, but the source was obscured.  Majestic's computer seemed to think the signal originated from a blank spot in space within the Priman formation.

              From their differing vantage points, Loren, Admiral Bak and Tash watched the carnage. 

The Confed fleet broke up into three elements and separated, trying to split the Priman fleet.  A decimated element centered around a single battleship was left to its own devices as the Primans chased down the two task forces with carriers at their cores.

              The Confed fleet was on the defensive, maneuvering to open up the distance while returning fire at the Primans.  Coordinated fire finally scored the Confeds some hits in return, but for their efforts at knocking out two Priman cruisers the Fourteenth lost a cruiser, a destroyer, and an escort carrier.             

              Nobody had even bothered to launch fighters; the capital ships were all much closer than doctrine specified, and tossing fighters into the mix would have been a pointless sacrifice of pilot lives.

              Suddenly a potentially game-changing force arrived; the new Commander's fleet showed up on-scene and immediately adopted an attack formation.

              "What in the name of..." Ravine began, then forced herself to stop and evaluate the incoming data before making any more assumptions. 

              Captain Vol turned to the Commander at his side.  His ship, the Scythe, had served her as a Representative, and now as Commander she had given him the high honor of using his ship to command the Priman war machine.

              "Commander," he began.  They'd worked together long enough that they knew each other's strengths and shortcomings well and could anticipate what the other needed.  While some Commanders rode herd over everything themselves, Captain Vol thought it was much more appropriate to let the Commander dictate big picture strategy while allowing her captains to earn their pay the best way they knew how.  "Representative Tash's fleet has merged with the Confeds.  Scanners show a number of destroyed hulls already, more Confed than ours."

              "And he'll wipe out everything in this part of the galaxy before he stops," the Commander replied.  She turned to Vol.  "I need to broadcast my mandate from the Council to the fleet.  Can your comm officer bring up the master command channel?"

              Vol turned to look at the crewwoman, who simply nodded readiness.

              "Open the channel," the Commander replied.

              They were met with an ear splitting screech that rose and descended in tone, occasionally breaking up into static, then reverb, then back to the screech.  The comm officer shut it down a second later.

              "What was that?" the Commander asked.

              "It appears the Representative has locked out his fleet's comm system," replied the officer at the station.

              "Only the Commander can issue such a directive," Ravine said angrily.

              "He must have done it before they left the Callidor system," Vol replied, lost in thought as he pondered the tactical implications.

              "I cannot address our ships.  As far as they know, whatever Representative Tash tells them is the word of the Council.  We need to break through to let our people know they're being used."

              "If he has truly locked out external comms, the only way to alter that is on his flagship," mused Vol.  "Scanners, where is Harbinger?"

              "Unable to determine exactly," came the neutral reply.  "Best sensor guess is at the rear of the fleet."

              "Of course it is," muttered the Commander.  "Leading from the rear."

              "I don't understand," Vol said as he looked at the Commander.  "Why can we not see his ship?"

              "It is the last of a scrapped stealth program," she replied, not caring whether the rest of the bridge crew heard.  It might even make her rise to command more legitimate by displaying the insider knowledge that would befit the position.  "We built a handful of cruisers to emulate the Confederation Crusader class design, with magnetic shielding that gave them an incredibly effective cloaking and stealth ability.  Something about the technology didn't transfer to our program well, though, because while it worked to an extent, it was never as good as theirs and was quickly defeated.  A Confed force discovered and wiped out the cruisers while on their first shakedown mission, in fact.  The project was scrapped, but apparently the Representative found one to use as his personal ship."

              "Then why are we having a hard time seeing it?" asked Vol.

              "It was easy enough to make it hard to see to our own sensors; we know the specs and capabilities intimately.  There are things about Confed technology we still haven't deciphered, and how to stabilize the magnetic field is one of them.  It would be considered cheating, but I was told that in trials our sensor software was altered to make it harder to detect the stealth ships as well.  Training reasons, of course, but from what I know of the Representative he most likely prized hiding from our own people as much as from the Confeds."

              "So what can we do?" asked Vol.  "Fire on our own ships?"

              "No.  We will intercept and merge our fleets.  Our best bet is to cause our own forces to break off with us disrupting their formation."