Sol (The Silver Ships Book 5) (23 page)

Lucia said,

Ellie’s controller signaled her helmet — Z had relinquished control of the craft to her. In her display, the UE cruiser came toward her, leading five destroyers spread out in a semicircle to its rear. As a child she yearned to fly and couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than training in a fighter when the opportunity was presented.
One fighter against a fleet of warships … can’t get any more exciting than this,
Ellie thought with reservation.

Her Dagger carried a full load of missiles — two contained Z’s precious nanites minelettes and ten were armed with Libran-X warheads. As Ellie bored in on the fleet, she set her controller’s targeting sequence even as her controller signaled to her the launch of hundreds of enemy missiles. The last sequence she engaged was an evasion program to be activated the instant her pods were empty of missiles.

The UE missiles were approaching Ellie too quickly. Her controller’s calculations warned there would be overlap — missiles arriving before her engagement sequence was completed. Ellie yanked another time on her seat harness. Despite the fighter’s inertia compensators, it would be a wild ride, one she hoped to live to tell about.

At the Dagger’s first engagement point, the controller fired the nanites missiles. Two points of white-hot heat marked their flight from her fighter. The two missiles flew toward the fleet’s center and then angled apart, signaling the firing of the secondary stages. Twenty small warheads filled with nanites spread themselves across the front of the fleet.

The destroyers attempted to intercept Ellie’s nanites missiles and were partially successful. They managed to destroy the expended first stages of the Haraken missiles. The second stages were well on their way to their targets. Only 15 kilometers in front of the fleet, the twenty heads burst in a wide spray of millions of nanites globules.

While the UE destroyers targeted Ellie’s first launch and her fighter, her controller fired ten Libran-X missiles, which, instead of targeting the fleet, honed in on the cruiser. Alex and his people developed these missiles to defeat dark travelers with their high rate of maneuverability and incredibly hard shells.

The instant Ellie’s controller fired her Libran-X missiles, it dove the fighter below the ecliptic, the abrupt movement catching Ellie off guard, and she grunted as straps cut into her environment suit. She closed her eyes and thought of Étienne as her controller fought to evade the missiles seeking her craft. Ellie was shaken and jerked, despite her inertia compensation, as her Dagger spun and twisted, often in multiple spirals. A peek at her helmet’s display showed her fighter deep below the ecliptic, forcing the missiles to maintain their target lock and expend their fuel.

How much fuel can you have?
Ellie thought. Several moments later, her Dagger’s flight smoothed out and her display was clear of the trailing missiles. A giggle of relief escaped her lips. “Coming back, dear heart,” she whispered into the dim cockpit.

Sheila had the honor, or so Tatia termed it, of attacking the other UE squadron circling on the ecliptic. She was not as fortunate as Ellie. Her cruiser was buried behind a wall of five destroyers.
Not so brave a leader,
Sheila thought, eyeing the cruiser in her helmet.

The squadron’s formation presented Sheila with a thorny problem. Her job was the same as Ellie’s, and her Libran-X missiles didn’t have a chance of reaching the cruiser through the destroyers.
New plan
, Sheila thought and began reprogramming her controller’s attack sequence. Once complete, she signaled the plan’s activation.

Sheila received the same warm UE welcome as did Ellie — hundreds of missiles targeted her craft. At the first sequence point, her controller fired two nanites missiles. Both reached second stage, exploding into twenty warheads that burst into the millions of deadly metal-eating globules. Immediately after launch, Sheila’s fighter angled steeply upward, forcing the destroyers’ missiles to chase her.

In time, the fuel-expended missiles lost contact with Sheila’s craft and continued on into the dark of space. Then the controller executed the next program step, driving the Dagger back toward the ecliptic. Sheila’s fighter was headed straight for the cruiser and into the teeth of a second launch of the squadron’s missiles.

“Black space,” Sheila mumbled when she eyed her helmet’s display and realized she wouldn’t reach an optimum launch point for the Libran-X missiles before the second missile wave would be on her. Sheila waited until the last moment before she signaled the launch of her warhead missiles and activated her evasion program.

The controller twisted and turned, spiraled and jinked, managing to dodge the majority of the second missile wave until one struck her engines. The explosion threw her craft onto a new vector that effectively allowed her Dagger to evade the last of the missile barrage.

The crippled fighter passed behind the squadron, angled down, and headed below the ecliptic. Unlike her fellow pilot, Robert Dorian, who had sat in a cold cockpit when his fighter was cut in half by a dark traveler, Sheila’s Dagger was equipped with several of Julien’s upgrades. Not the least of which was a crystal power backup in the cockpit that enabled the pilot’s communications and telemetry even after engine power loss or, in this case, the loss of engines since Sheila’s craft was about 4 meters shorter than when she left the
Rêveur
.

Good job, Julien,
Sheila thought as she took stock of her situation.

Admiral Portland’s first inkling of the disasters to come began with the simultaneous and nearly identical reports from his commodores aboard the cruisers circling the flank of the Harakens. The timing was eerily coincidental.

Portland listened to the commodores’ reports of the Haraken fighters’ launch of their first missile salvos at the squadrons and the odd twin missiles that veered across the face of the ships. One commodore reported that one of the fighters launched a second salvo and retreated, but the other commodore reported his fighter altered course to launch itself above the ecliptic.

Silencing the beta squadron commodore to concentrate on the comms of the alpha commodore, Portland heard the defense officer report a second missile launch from the Haraken fighter, and the commodore was calling on his escort destroyers to intercept the Haraken missiles.

“What just happened?” the cruiser captain was heard to demand.

A voice on a cruiser’s bridge replied, “We counted ten missiles launched in the second salvo, Captain, but there’s been a secondary stage launch. Now there are 100 warheads, and they’re all coming our way.”

The alpha squadron commodore was heard calling on the destroyer captains to intercept the incoming barrage, physically if necessary, and a distant voice, probably belonging to the cruiser’s defense officer, was calling out something about spiral patterns.

What the UE officers couldn’t know was that Haraken probes in the area were utilizing Cordelia’s inventive algorithms to spiral the ten warheads of each missile in a complex pattern, first opening the complex interlacing pattern and then closing it on the intended target.

By pure statistical advantage, the UE missiles of the squadron managed to eliminate twenty-three of the elusive warheads, but the squadron threw more than a thousand missiles at the fighter’s salvo to achieve that result. UE warships were designed to dominate colonies, stations, domed enclaves, freighters, and passenger liners. The officers and their ships never had to face an advanced naval adversary and were unprepared for it.

The remaining seventy-seven Libran-X warheads, designed to individually crack a hardened dark traveler’s shell, tore through the hull of the cruiser like knives through paper. One missile punched through the hull, passed through a bridge officer, and entered the captain’s quarters behind the bridge before it detonated. The subsequent explosion killed everyone on the cruiser’s bridge.

The alpha squadron cruiser and its crew died quickly and violently. The Libran-X missiles blew out entire sections of the warship and ignited everything volatile. Within moments after impact, the Haraken missiles had dismembered the mighty cruiser.

Admiral Portland was absorbing the news of the loss of his cruiser when he heard the call from the beta cruiser’s defense officer of the incoming fighter from above the ecliptic and its second salvo launch. When the defense operator claimed a strike on the fighter, Portland’s bridge crew briefly cheered.

Multiple salvos of missiles from two squadrons to eliminate a single fighter,
Portland thought dourly.

The beta commodore was aware of the loss of the sister cruiser and was warning his destroyer captains to eliminate the oncoming salvo before the secondary stage launch, but his cruiser captain was heard to report that he was too late and subsequently was ordering his pilot into evasive maneuvers when the comm went silent.

Portland glanced at his fleet commander, who said, “We’ve lost the second cruiser, Admiral.”

“Two cruisers to their one fighter,” Portland railed.

As the four squadrons continued to encircle Idona and the Haraken carriers, Portland thought he might have seen the worst of it. His self-assurance was slowly reviving when the destroyer captains, who had lost their cruisers and commodores, began reporting serious breaches in their hulls. It began with one captain, but soon, three more captains reported openings to vacuum through the hulls.

When a fleet officer highlighted the four destroyers on Portland’s screen, they were seen to be the foremost ships in the two formations. The pit of Portland’s stomach grew cold.

Within an hour, the two squadrons of destroyers were in shambles as crews fought desperate battles to prevent the disintegration of their ships, attempting to seal off the affected sections, but to no avail. Some captains, those most rearward in the formations, reversed course hoping to avoid contact with the contamination, little knowing that it was too late.

Crews were ordered to abandon ship, and Portland listened once again to the pleas for rescue until, on his orders, the fleet’s comms officer filtered out their cries for help.

Slowly and inexorably the ten destroyers, which had been escorting the cruisers, deteriorated and were lost. Portland’s losses now totaled two entire squadrons.

Deirdre and Darius were tasked with performing the same maneuvers as Ellie and Sheila on the two squadrons approaching the station from above and below the ecliptic. Each squadron contained four destroyers, and the two Haraken pilots fired two missiles that diverged in front of the enemy ships. Secondary launches from the missiles sprayed millions of globules at the squadrons — globules empty of nanites.

Tatia told Captain Shimada the truth. Z didn’t have time to produce a sufficient quantity of nanites to arm all four Daggers. This was why the Harakens’ attacks were carefully timed by Z, per Alex’s instructions. The devastating effect of the nanites on the first two squadrons was relayed throughout the fleet. The destroyer captains in the squadrons facing Darius and Deirdre realized they faced the same type of fighters, launching the same type of attacks — two missiles spreading apart and separating into twenty warheads that burst before they reached a UE ship.

In Deirdre’s squadron, a single rearward destroyer captain ordered his pilot to reverse course. That the captain’s voice reached particularly high and strident tones could be forgiven. His pilot certainly didn’t need any urging.

Moments later, another captain in the squadron retreated. The two remaining captains desperately fought the fighter’s second salvo of missiles spiraling in on them, but they were unsuccessful in eliminating all of them. Both destroyers succumbed to the powerful Libran-X missiles that ripped through their hulls, igniting fuel and armament.

The squadron commodore who Darius confronted exerted tight command over his people, and his destroyers dived back toward the ecliptic to evade the deadly globules they thought were headed their way. Then, as the Haraken fighter’s explosive warheads closed on the squadron, the commodore ordered the other destroyers into a tight shield, creating a field of overlapping fire. One destroyer was lost to the barrage, and the commodore was considering his good fortune when the officer holding down the bridge’s defense position screamed, “Incoming.”

With only moments to spare, the commodore was still issuing battle orders, when Lucia’s 187 travelers swept past his three remaining destroyers, the fighters’ beams cutting holes clear through the destroyers from hull to hull. Lucia’s wing didn’t require a second pass at the squadron. Two destroyers exploded, and their shrapnel tore through the third destroyer nestled tightly between them, igniting that ship.

Franz’s wing came in on the ecliptic, searching for any of the destroyers that might have survived Deirdre’s attack, only to find a field of debris and two destroyers in retreat. His admiral gave no orders concerning warships in retreat so Franz made a judgment call, probably more influenced by the image of a petite, Asian, destroyer captain than he would like to have admitted. He ordered his squadron to allow the two destroyers to abandon the fight.

“Two destroyers of delta squadron have survived, Admiral,” the fleet commander reported to Portland. “The captains report no hull breaches, and the Haraken fighters aren’t pursuing them. They’re asking permission to rejoin the fleet.”

“Tell the captains to quarantine their ships for twelve hours, approaching no closer than 500K kilometers until the time’s elapsed. Any other responses to our hails?” Portland asked his fleet comms officer.

“Negative, Admiral. The guide’s telemetry is back on all four squadrons. Only the two destroyers from delta survived the Haraken fighters.”

The officer’s words sent icy chills down the backs of the battleship’s bridge crew.

“They had no capital ships?” Portland asked.