Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (23 page)

The mass of the projectiles, the speed of the ships and launchers, factored by the total variation of local gravity, would be enough to put them on target. Assuming no unknown variants were entered into the game board, contact was a certainty.

In battle, of course, the one constant was the unknown variables.

Despite that adage, however, every ship in Valkyrie went to rapid fire on their EM launchers, putting a wall of steel into space as they continued their headlong rush into the oncoming gauntlet.

“All hands, red alert,” Roberts said, oddly calm and natural given the pressure they were all under. “We’re about to come into their range. Stand by all damage control teams, secure all blast doors.”

Nadine thought that it was somewhat of a redundant order, since most of those things were assumed to have been done before they came out from behind Hayden’s second moon, but it was better to be redundant than sorry, she supposed.

A buzzer caught her attention, and she glanced to one side in time to see a signal light for a blast door as it changed from yellow to red.

Definitely better to be repetitive.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“Enemy ships are going to cross our beam at less than half a light-second, sir,” Commander William Clarke said, eyes not leaving the displays arrayed around the room. “That’s point blank range, General. Valkyrie’s got them pinned between us, they can’t get out without running the gauntlet.”

“Let’s not waste the opportunity,” Kane growled, eyes on the command displays that distilled the available data down to the most likely pieces of information he might need. “I want three quarters of our satellite network re-tasked to offensive, but check fire. I want them dead in our sights when we open up.”

“Yes, sir, re-tasking in process.”

“Make our missiles hot,” Kane ordered after a brief hesitation.

The men and women in the room all glanced sharply at him, though they’d know that the order was most certainly coming. Priming a nuclear weapon wasn’t something you did lightly, especially not when they were sitting as close to a civilian population as Liberation was.

The station was about as well-armored as could be expected, but it wasn’t a military hull. Without the ceramic plates and other defensive systems hard-lined into hulls like the Cheyenne class, radiation from a new range burst of a nuclear device was a potential threat. At the very least it was going to mean extra shifts for the people who specialized in clearing the accumulated solar radiation from the station; at worst things were going to get real hot in a very short time.

“I want firing solutions on those ships updated in real time! Valkyrie set the trap, now it’s time to bring the hammer down on these bastards!”

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

Master of Ships Parath was not in what one might charitably call a good mood.

Three of ours are gone, but we’ve adjusted our defensive stratagems; that will not happen again. Now, however, I find that I have left myself to be trapped between the Mirrum and the Gola. Will the first tear me asunder, or the other swallow me whole?

He should have been more cautious, perhaps, but he hadn’t taken his own advice in choosing his maneuvers this time around. The lives of his lost crews would have to serve as a very expensive lesson for him, one he should never have required.

The decks were quiet as he overlooked the situation.

He knew that he couldn’t leave that as it was. They needed to pull together and return themselves to the present or those three ships would not rest in this system alone.

“Even the cannons,” he ordered. “Watch for a redoubled assault from the station.”

“Master, we’re picking up fade signals from the fleet.”

“Can you get a better definition?” he demanded, moving over to the sensor station. “I need more information than a
fade signal
.”

“No, Master.” The crewman shook his head. “There’s far too much interference.”

“Blast.” Reethan turned away before speaking and pitched his voice as low as he could, considering his frustrations.
Now what are they up to?

Unfortunately, one of the things he didn’t have at the moment was the luxury of time to consider that question. He didn’t put it out of his mind, but he did shift it to the back while he focused on more pressing matters.

“All ships, this is Master Parath,” he said over the open channels. “Prepare yourselves for maneuvering. New orders are imminent.”

Reethan closed the channels as he refocused on the tracks displayed all over the command deck. The enemy had timed their assault well. Despite the relative sluggishness of their acceleration, it was clear that they had managed to lock his force into a far longer engagement period than he would prefer against a force of superior numbers.

They are respectable ship handlers, to be quite honest. Better than most in the Alliance.
He would have enjoyed the challenge if they hadn’t cost him the lives of over a thousand crewmembers already.

“Master of Ships! More fade contacts, I can’t explain it.”

“Show me,” Reethan ordered, looking to the screen.

The new contacts were anywhere near the enemy ships, and his first instinct was the write it off as debris. Most space-faring populations tended to wind up with a fair amount of detritus in orbit of their worlds; it was an occupational hazard of thinking beings doing unthinking things, as they were wont to do. Something about the location of the fade contacts rang a bell, or perhaps sounded a whistle, for him, however.

“Show me a tracker, from this fade contact to the last,” he ordered, puzzling over the scan.

A line appeared, linking the two signals together, running back closer to where the enemy ships were, but not exactly. It felt off, however, so he went on. “Calculate speed for an object to travel from the first point to the second, adjust for local space-time, and show me where it’s going.” A new set of lines crossed the space on the screen, and now his eyes widened. “Does that plot cross ours at the same point in space-time?”

“Yes, in fact it will cross in…”

He’d already crunched the numbers in his own mind and slammed his hand down on his station, opening the command channel. “All ships! Spread maneuver immediately! Ros’El Formation One!”

Of all orders he could have given, that was one that Ships Master Reethan Parath was well aware would be obeyed, instantly, and without question. When fighting the Ros’El, you didn’t get many chances, and if you wasted one, you were normally quite dead before another came along.

The ships spread instantly, giving up the close proximity reinforcement of their defensive network in exchange for distance from each other in case of a singularity device assault. It wasn’t a device that Reethan was concerned about, however, but something far cruder.

The first of the mass mover objects slammed into the flotilla’s ships as they were spreading, holing through armor like blades through undefended flesh. The
Noble Venture
shook as it, too, was struck, at least three of the steel projectiles perforating their armor, but even as warning whistles sounded, Reethan was already thinking ahead.

It would take more than a few mass accelerated projectiles to take down a Parithalian cruiser. Certainly ones this small couldn’t do it, but he was fed up with playing the target in this little shooting match.

A host of options floating in his mind, Reethan made a snap decision and entered the new commands into his station before opening the flotilla command channels.

“New orders are at your stations, ready yourselves. It is our turn now.”

*****

As the ranges closed, the tempo of the battle increased exponentially. From a relaxed, or at least extended tension, environment where people could take time to eat, drink, or even close their eyes for a period, things had by this point deteriorated to a heart-pounding race to annihilation.

Passive detection systems were now close enough to real time so as to make no difference, given the efficacy of the supercomputers available to every side in the conflict. Shots from even relatively slow weapon systems would cross the intervening space with near instantaneous speed, rendering many advantages of energy weapons null and void.

For all that, however, it was also clear that this compressed period of urgency and tension would only last minutes at most before the effect began to work in reverse. For the alien flotilla, that reversal of fortune would work to their advantage, and they were very much aware of it, but the humans on board the ships of Task Force Valkyrie knew that they had to strike while they were in knife range.

They surged forward, increasing their relative acceleration while using the gravity field of Hayden itself to maximize the maneuver. The crews of Valkyrie had no intention of letting the aliens walk through one of their systems as easily as some had in the past, but for all that they knew deep down that the alien crews most certain had similar intentions themselves.

This fight was perhaps coming rapidly to a finish, but even with only minutes left, they all knew it was ages from being over.

USS Cheyenne

Admiral Brookes swore under her breath as the enemy ships broke at almost literally the last possible second, managing to avoid the greatest part of the steel fusillade aimed in their direction.

They have good sensors, or better techs,
she conceded sourly.
I doubt we’d have seen those in time.

She could hear Roberts calling out new tactical orders, but for herself, Nadine was more focused on what the enemy was about to do instead of what her own ships were doing. Tactics were the realm of her captains, strategy was hers, but in this battle the strategies were almost all determined from the onset of the maneuvers.

With only minutes of engagement left, at the very most, the time for strategies was all but gone. Now was a time for getting down and dirty and, as she had been told in the past, admirals didn’t get down and dirty. It was bad for morale.

For all that, she found herself staring up at the displays floating over her eyes and trying to get in the mind of the enemy commander. So far their actions hadn’t been difficult to predict, and she could almost imagine what her opposite number was thinking at every step.

He came in on a scouting run, didn’t see us when he entered the system. Once we sprang the trap, he didn’t have a choice but to run the gauntlet we’d laid out for them. This maneuver is the first thing they’ve done that I couldn’t have called in advance, but even this shows more their technical capacity than their intelligence.

She knew that wasn’t any sort of indicator of what her opposite number was thinking, however. Space combat was so limited that even ships with acceleration numbers as high as the enemy had only had so many things they could do in response to enemy action. It was a function of how very much distance affected maneuvers, and in the, end space war strategy often simply reduced to relatively simple equations.

Statistically, a computer can fight a space battle better than we can,
she supposed darkly as she glared at the displays.
As close as we are now, though, things are about to get a little too dirty for a nice clean equation.

*****

On the primary command deck of the USS Cheyenne, Captain Roberts was doing his own fair share of glaring at the displays resting above his eyes. The fact that the enemy ships had avoided most of their kinetic strike was frustrating, but he didn’t have time to brood over lost opportunities.

The enemy had incredible point defense; they’d been hammering everything fired at them so far with incredible ferocity. The weapon satellites around Hayden were throwing literally mega-tons of steel directly into the teeth of the enemy point defense, and it didn’t even seem to faze them.

In the end, however, there was only so much even the very best point defense system could take. Numbers would overwhelm it eventually, no matter how good it was. The problem was that they didn’t have until ‘eventually.’ By his count, in another forty-three seconds the enemy fleet would have opened the range enough to take the worst of the heat off the system, and then it would be all over except for the obligatory useless pursuit.

At least these aren’t the Ghoulies,
he grunted in annoyance.
They’d have already imploded at least a couple of our ships and probably the station as well.

Roberts didn’t know what he was expecting as he thought that, but it wasn’t what suddenly erupted in his primary displays.

The enemy formation exploded in his face under ten thousand magnification, forcing him to zoom out rapidly or lose track of some of the enemy ships.

What the hell are they…?

Roberts’s eyes widened as he slapped open the ship-wide. “All hands, stand by for emergency maneuvers! Helm, hard to starboard!”

“Hard to starboard, aye!”

The Cheyenne twisted in space as a sudden barrage of energy blasts tore through space-time in its direction. The HMS Hood, despite the brief moment of startled hesitation on the part of Captain MacKay, heeled over hard in response as she struggled to remain with her cohort leader, and behind them both, the rest of the formation began to break apart as others reacted at various rates to the onslaught of enemy fire.

The lead pulses smashed into the Hood as she showed her flanks to the assault, the reactive armor plates exploding as they were impacted, sending plumes of plasma out to disrupt the attack. Behind them more shots came on, missing the Hood and Cheyenne, but the USS Sioux, HMS Marion, and HMS Bodkin were caught in the center of the onrushing storm.

Their reactive armor turned away blast after blast, but some strikes invariably came down on already damaged sections of the ship and punched through. All three vessels were thrown around, bleeding atmosphere and men as they began to fall out of the shattered formation. As the ships of TFV struggled to regain their coordination, one thing was abundantly clear to all.