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CHAPTER EIGHT

Ossian Wethermere stared at the small holographic image of Admiral Narrok that was being projected to the left side of his conn on the RFNS Krishmahnta: it was another convenience particular to the monitors in the fleet. “This looks like the worst case scenario about which you warned us, sir.”

Narrok was motionless but the vocoder transmission announced, “I suspect so.”

Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s presence was voice-grade only; Orions were less enamored of what they considered communications frippery. “It is difficult to conceive this madness of theirs as a strategy. You are certain they will sacrifice their auxiliary craft merely to slow us down?”

“I am now,” Narrok replied. “Consider the holoplot. The Kaituni’s rearmost and slowest craft are hanging back even further, clustering along the route of our most direct pursuit.”

“And they are hopelessly outgunned. They shall be annihilated in moments.”

Ossian shook his head. “Maybe less quickly than if they ran, Least Fang. Look at what’s coming back to help them: the bulk of the Kaituni monitors. Which are launching waves of fighters.”

Kiiraathra made a noise that sounded like he was both choking and huffing. “Their fighters. That should prove amusing.”

“Granted, they cannot anticipate how profitless that part of their strategy will be. But if you consider the position of their monitors and auxiliaries, I suspect they mean to dare us to run a gauntlet of debris.”

“I see no debris gauntlet, Ossian Wethermere.”

Narrok’s voice sounded grimly amused. “I believe the Senior Commodore is referring to the auxiliaries. For if we destroy them in their current positions, we will be creating a debris field in front of us, flanked on all sides by the monitors. However, if we choose instead to work around the auxiliaries, we will find ourselves in a head to head combat with the monitors. And if we try to outflank their monitors, we shall find ourselves in a long, running battle—which, for the Kaituni, is exactly the outcome they wish.”

“They cannot win such an engagement.”

“Their monitors will not survive,” Narrok agreed. “But all their other craft—particularly the superdreadnoughts and all the lighter classes of ships now racing for the warp point to Bug 26—shall surely escape. And once they have, we cannot prevent them from achieving what is now their primary objective.”

“To reach and warn their main fleet along the warp-line to Earth.”

“A possibility we considered from the start,” Narrok agreed, tactfully omitting that he had been the one to point out and detail this potential problem. Ossian wondered if Miharu would have been so tactful had she been in Narrok’s place. “But I did not foresee their employment of this formation, this particular delaying tactic.”

“How could one foresee a fleet being willing to sacrifice the infrastructure that allows it to remain an effective fighting force?” Kiiraathra sounded as disgusted as he was irritated.

Wethermere frowned. “There could be a benefit to this situation, however. Remember: we have assets that they cannot foresee. And we may be able to use those to leverage their plan to our advantage.”

There was a long silence. Narrok, motionless, asked. “What do you have in mind, Commodore?”

“You should not have asked that question,” Kiiraathra sighed.

“Why?”

“Because Wethermere will answer with one of his insane schemes. And down that path lies madness.”

Narrok sounded amused. “That path has also led to quite a few victories.”

Kiiraathra’s sigh was even deeper. “That such irrationality also leads to triumph is the greatest source of the madness he engenders. But I suppose we have no choice: what bizarre plan do you envision this time, Wethermere?”

Ossian leaned back, smiling. “Sorry to disappoint, Least Fang, but I’m afraid this time, my plan is mostly conventional.” He felt his smile widen, savoring the response he knew his final qualifier would elicit. “Mostly conventional.”

Kiiraathra’ostakjo grumbled, almost growled. “You do this to torture me, human.”

“Most assuredly, Least Fang. Now, let’s consider our alternatives . . .”


Miharu Yoshikuni watched the approaching red horde; the closest of the icons were almost in contact with the outermost blue points of her own staggered grid of defenders. Wei at Sensor Ops was calling out the range. “One point five million kilometers and closing. Enemy shows no sign of adjusting maneuver, no awareness of our formation.”

“Hard lock on all primary, secondary and most tertiary targets, Admiral,” Yaris inserted into the reports from behind her screens at the Tactical station. “Links fully integrated and strong. Automated PDF protocols continuing to adapt to enemy configuration.”

“One million kilometers and closing,” Wei announced.

Yoshikuni glanced at the closest bogeys. They were destroyers and cruisers, the fastest hulls in the enemy fleet. And she would let them pass her front rank. Her own third rank would emerge from stealth to engage them. The enemy heavies behind the Kaituni skirmish line—the battleships and dreadnoughts of various marks and classes—were sure to begin evolving their formation in response. Which was just what Yoshikuni was waiting for.

“Five hundred million kilometers and closing,” Wei said, voice somewhat strangled. Behind her, she could hear Captain Ibrahim swallowing nervously. To date, no one had had the nerve to attempt this tactic: to reveal successive layers of stealthed ships, starting with the rank furthest from the enemy and ending with the one that was closest to—or already interpenetrated with—the threat force. But it was also arguably true that no force so large as Yoshikuni’s had ever enjoyed so complete a measure of surprise . . .

“Enemy craft now moving through defense layer one,” Wei commented, more calmly now that the most tense moment had come and gone.

Yoshikuni nodded, studied the plot. “Defense layer three: weapons free. Engage designated targets.”

Miharu Yoshikuni had fought in many of the hardest, harrowing battles of the prior war with the Arduans. She had watched scores of supermonitors reduced to junk in the first half hour of their ultimately successful attempt to secure a toehold around the warp point into the BR-02 system, her own ship ultimately included in the hulls lost that day. She had seen reversals in which their Arduan foes were blasted by the dozens under withering fire from devastators. But never had she witnessed so abrupt and so bloody a reversal as the one she saw unfold in her holoplot, and could visualize out in space.

The leading wave of smaller Kaituni craft simply ceased to exist in the space of ten seconds. Emerging from stealth at the equivalent of point-blank range, the more advanced ships of the rearmost defensive screen in Yoshikuni’s task force raked their fire across five times their number: in the holoplot, it was like watching a scythe of death sweeping the enemy motes from the color of active hulls—red—to motionless maroon dots.

The Kaituni reacted almost immediately; the leading ships of their next rank—battleships, mostly—slowed, trading fire tentatively as they waited for the heavier marks and classes of dreadnoughts to catch up. As defense layer three peppered them with missiles, the enemy craft dressed their formation so as to optimally engage this new threat, which had begun to give ground slightly. Sensing irresolution, the Kaituni resumed their approach—

—and so entered the close range firing envelope of Yoshikuni’s defense layer two, which added its own close range missile barrage blind, its birds guided by the fire control net of defense layer three. Still stealthed, the ships of defense level two then dodged away to new preplotted positions.

Again, the Kaituni formation drew up short. Then as if resolving itself to uncover these hidden ships and bear down upon the more distant visible ones, it rushed forward, the first of the enemy dreadnoughts hard on the heels of these harriers.

Which put them within half a million kilometers of Yoshikuni’s heaviest strike group: defense layer one.

“Bazin,” she said to the Comms officer, leaning back. “Signal to all hulls in our group: drop stealth and execute preprogrammed firing solutions. Defense layer three is to pick off any threat hulls that still exist behind our position. Second layer is to be fed targeting updates and wait as a stealthed reserve.” She turned to face Ibrahim. “Captain, fight your ship.”


O.A. Knight remembered to relax his fingers where he was clutching the arms of his conn aboard RFNS No-Dachi. Admiral Yoshikuni was wreaking incredible havoc among the Kaituni—probably racking up the most one-sided kill-to-loss ratio in naval history, at the moment—but the weight of steel was still strongly against her. He scanned the stacked disks of blue motes that comprised her formation’s three-tiered defense structure. They were still almost completely intact, but they seemed terribly thin compared to the mass of red that had piled up against them, surging like an immense, wounded amoeba. If more of the inbound Kaituni did not reverse course to engage the approaching Relief Fleet—

“Captain Knight,” called Schendler, “Commander Modelo-Vo on secure channel two.”

“Patch him through.”

The circuit hissed open. Modelo-Vo sounded calm and collected, but his words didn’t match that impression. “Captain, I suspect you’re seeing what I am. If we don’t add our weight to Admiral Yoshikuni’s defenses, I’m concerned that she could be overrun.”

“Commander, I want to help her as much as you do. But we have our orders and our primary objective: defend this warp point and prevent any leakers from getting through.”

“Acknowledged, but the smaller craft that have the speed to slip through her defenses have almost all been neutralized. Our job here—”

“Remains both crucial and our sworn duty—until we are told otherwise.”

Modelo-Vo’s pause was not promising. “Captain, I will remind you that I was granted full autonomy over the Special Recon Detachment. While I would like us to move forward together—”

“Commander, stow that. You have freedom of action to exploit unforeseen opportunities. What you’re watching in your navplot is not an opportunity: it’s a meat-grinder. And if you take your light hulls into that fray, they will be pureed in a minute’s time. I understand your desire to help the admiral,”—by God, do I ever!— “but that’s not our call. Do you understand?”

Modelo-Vo sounded less than convinced. “I don’t fully agree with your interpretation, Captain, but for the time being, I will hold position. Modelo-Vo out.”

Knight drew a deep breath. He had two superdreadnoughts and two heavy superdreadnoughts under his command. He knew better than to wade into that knife-fight up ahead, not without getting integrated into the fire control links first. Modelo-Vo might be loyal and brave, but that wasn’t going to thicken the skins or increase the firepower of his ragtag collection of escorts, frigates, destroyers, and disguised civvie hulls. The light cruiser he’d been given as his command ship might last long enough for him to get in a few telling shots of his own, but that was the sum total of combat impact he could bring to bear.

“Captain,” Schendler asked carefully, “Commander Kundra from Gladius is sending a coded message on secure one. Wants to know if you wish to exercise command change prerogatives as senior officer in the detachment. Just as a precaution.”

Kundra, second in command of this pennant, had been listening in on the conversation with Modelo-Vo, as per general quarters commo redundancy protocols. In short, communiqués between detachment commanders were too important to be lost along with either of the ships exchanging them, so there was always a “listener” on the bridge of the designated deputy commander—in this case, Kundra on the bridge of Gladius. Knight rubbed his chin; it was tempting to relieve Modelo-Vo after that exchange. Admiral Yoshikuni’s decision to keep the recon detachment as a free-response element was understandable, but her former Fleet Tactical officer was proving to lack the temperament—in addition to the experience—needed by a line officer. On the other hand, if Knight started acting as though he didn’t trust the other senior officers around him . . .

“Signal Gladius actual that we will not be altering the command roster at this time. End of message.”

As Schendler sent the communiqué, Knight glanced at the holoplot. Yoshikuni was still holding her own, largely because she had had almost all the enemy ships in target lock when she emerged. And now, as they threatened to breach apparent gaps in her line, she was revealing one after the other of the re-hidden hulls of defense layer two—thereby plugging each new hole and flanking the Kaituni who had hoped to exploit it. But if the entirety of the Kaituni fleet kept coming at her—

Knight moved his point of focus to the rear of the Fourteenth Dispersate’s van. Maybe half of the enemy monitors had hung back to form what looked like a sleeve around their own auxiliaries, through which those lesser hulls were not even trying to flee. Rather they seemed to be loitering there. A good number of the Relief Fleet’s monitors were moving to engage, trying to turn the flank of the enemy battlewagons.

It was a strange arrangement of ships and Knight was pretty sure that one of Wethermere’s unconventional plans might be behind the peculiar tactical maneuvers—which had better show their effectiveness soon. Otherwise . . .

He glanced back at Yoshikuni’s three warping, buckling defense layers. Otherwise, there’s not going to be anyone here left to save.


Ossian Wethermere watched as the Kaituni monitors swung around to deny his own formation of similar ships access to their flank. The range between them was great enough that neither side was committing anything other than an occasional long-range missile, all of which were being knocked down by point-defense fire batteries.

“Sir,” asked the lieutenant at the weapons console, “we could give them a hell of a warmer reception with the energy torpedoes—and not deplete our missile stocks.”

Wethermere looked at the man briefly. “I’m very well aware of the offensive potential of our energy torpedo batteries,” he commented drily. I wonder if you even know that I’m the person who came up with the notional design for that fast-repeating version of the weapons. Which had changed ship-to-ship warfare dramatically in the last ten years. “However, at this point, we’re going through the dance of testing each other’s defenses and capabilities. And there is a reasonable chance that they are unaware of our repeating energy torpedo technology, or are simply uncertain how extensively we have retrofitted our ships with it. Either way, I intend to acquaint them with our full armament all at once. I trust you have no further questions, Lieutenant?”

The officer heard the diminished affect in Wethermere’s the last question, understood he was being obliquely admonished. “No questions, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Ossian nodded, looked back at the holoplot. As the Kaituni monitors turned to face him, they were necessarily peeling away from the core of auxiliaries around which they had arrayed themselves, the protective sleeve of their formation widening and flaring at the outermost cuff. Perfect.

“Comms, selnarmic secure channel to Celmithyr’theaanouw actual.”

“Least Fang Kiiraathra’ostakjo is already standing by, Commodore.”

Of course he is; no true Orion waits patiently to get into a fight. The closer they get to the moment of engagement, the more antsy they become. “Least Fang?”

“It is I. I am receiving regular selnarmic updates from within my ship’s stealth field. The enemy has behaved as you predicted, and my detachment has reached the final waypoint undetected. The time seems propitious.”

“Indeed it is, Least Fang. I say three times, we are now at activation conditions for Phase Two. And good hunting.”

“You also, Ossian Wethermere. Celmithyr’theaanouw out.”

Well, hunting wasn’t exactly what Wethermere and his formation of over a hundred monitors were prepared to do; it would be more like dynamiting goldfish in a bathtub.

“Task Force Deep Fang now coming out of stealth, sir,” reported Sensor Ops as a dense cloud of faint blue icons finished maneuvering into position behind half of the monitors comprising the Kaituni’s defensive sleeve. Led by Celmithyr’theaanouw, almost two hundred superdreadnoughts, heavy superdreadnoughts, and battleships had slipped between the defensive sleeve of Kaituni monitors and the sluggish limb of auxiliaries that they were protecting. Now on the rear flank of their adversaries, the ships of Deep Fang—each an optimum compromise between speed, firepower, and maximum stealth performance—commenced an all-weapons bombardment into the blind spot—the drive cone—of each of their adversaries.

Kaituni monitors flared and died like strings of firecrackers before the majority of them could angle toward a new course that denied these new attackers firing solutions astern. But that course change peeled the enemy further away from the auxiliaries—and each other. The Kaituni’s defensive sleeve was not only widening, but thinning, fraying.

“Now, Gunnery; groom data links with the other ships in our formation and fire all energy-torpedoes. Sustained barrage. Close the range. Watch for them to launch fighters.”

Which the Kaituni did spasmodically. The triad formations—each one comprised of a selnarmically-controlled fighter attended by two smaller, automated wingmen—erupted both fore and aft of the desperate enemy hulls. But in this empty patch of space, they were actually slower than the craft that launched them; without any planet- and stellar-centered Desai limits to contend with, the larger ships were able to employ their immense Desai drives, which allowed them to travel twice as fast.

“Why are they launching fighters at all, sir?” asked Tactical as the enemy icons continued to die at an almost four-to-one ratio, compared to the number of code omegas popping up among the blue icons of the Relief Fleet.

“To get as many offensive platforms into the battle as possible, mostly in an attempt to overload our defensive systems and distract us with new targets. But I think we are just about ready to teach them the futility of that tactic.” Wethermere glanced at the other end of the holoplot, where a red tide of smaller but more numerous red motes surged against the warping defensive disks of Miharu’s task force. Sure enough, sprays of tiny scarlet spindles—fighters—were vomiting out of that Kaituni contingent as well, attempting to probe her lines, exploit gaps, overwhelm her comparatively thin defensive fire assets. “Comms, raise Admiral Yoshikuni on secure selnarm three.”

“Her comms officer has just come on the line, sir.”

“Very well.” Wethermere raised his voice. “This is Krishmahnta actual, for the Flag.”

“This is the Flag,” Miharu said in her Iron Admiral voice. “Threat force has committed the majority of its fighter triads.”

“Here, too. Ready to throw the off-switch?”

“Been ready for three minutes. What took you so long?” He could hear the rueful smile in her voice.

“Sorry; we were all taking a nap back here. Now handing off scrambler activation to my electronic warfare specialist. Who will engage in ten seconds and . . . mark.”

“Engaging mine in ten seconds,” Miharu echoed, “and . . . mark. See you on the other side, Commodore. Flag out.” The line snicked off before Ossian could reply. Classic Iron Admiral brusqueness, he reflected with a smile of his own. He leaned back, listened to the EW Officer’s countdown concluding:

“Three. Two. One and engage.”

The command disruption system that Lentsul and Commander Chong had devised to use against the Kaituni was deceptively simple in principle. The two automated wingmen that accompanied each remote-controlled enemy fighter were not coordinated by selnarm, but by conventional lascom. There was, however, an emergency radio backup in the event that the lascom sustained battle-damage or line of sight was blocked. Although carefully encoded, the enemy had neither lavished time or resources to foolproof it, nor anticipated that their adversaries would ever have the luxury of dissecting one of their robot fighters over the course of many months. The Kaituni war plan had been to attack relentlessly, swamping and overrunning all their objectives with overwhelming numbers and ferocity. And elsewhere, that had worked.

But Relief Fleet, having stayed in the shadow of the Fourteenth Dispersate, had been able to harvest and meticulously examine examples of the fighters. Having picked apart and assessed every subsystem, they had found the cryptographic element that the Kaituni had—quite reasonably—assumed would keep the backup radio links indecipherable to their foes: a digitalized selnarmic recognition failsafe. In short, while the automated “wingman” fighters were not controlled by selnarmic links, they would only recognize commands prefaced by a digitalized representation of a selnarmic code-string—something that non-selnarm using races would have almost no chance of understanding, let alone decoding.

However, Lentsul and the other Arduans in his technical intelligence cluster had managed to crack the code-string. With the automated wingmen thereby triggered to receive radio commands, the Arduans simply needed to generate a full bandwidth broadcast of a single decisive radio command that would be recognized by the wingmen as valid. Lentsul’s intelligence cluster had settled on a deceptively innocuous command: they sent the signal that activated each robot fighter’s self-diagnostic routine, minus one confirmation parameter. So when each wingman then discovered that the very command that initiated the self-diagnostic had possibly been corrupted upon reception, the craft’s robot brain tripped into an endless loop of detect and check, detect and check, detect and check. And so, effectively paralyzed the unit, since the broadcast command kept altering slightly, according to a self-modifying algorithm.

Wethermere witnessed the effects with a growing smile. Throughout both of the Fourteenth Dispersate’s main bodies, the scarlet spindles signifying enemy fighters came largely to a halt, a few incarnadine splinters—the selnarmically-controlled fighters—angling off to continue their missions. Which usually ended abruptly, as Relief Fleet’s now overwhelming defensive fire and manned fighters swarmed and smothered each of these lone wolf survivors.

And best of all, from Ossian’s viewpoint, the carefully structured formations of both Kaituni detachments were now hopelessly awry. Even though their fighters had been slow, they had represented crucial firepower and maneuver elements: a screening force and a slow but tangible counterattack resource—all suddenly gone. Meaning that whatever plans and formation changes the Kaituni had been evolving had now been, in the course of a few seconds, reduced to ruins.

Wethermere leaned back, called for secure selnarm channel two. “Admiral Narrok?” he asked of the thin air to his left.

A small holograph of Narrok materialized there. “Yes, Commodore, I have witnessed it myself. The theater-wide scrambler has performed as hoped. You will now press your attack from both sides?”

Wethermere nodded. “I’ll be the hammer, Least Fang Kiiraathra’ostakjo is the anvil. And you, sir, can now run the gauntlet through the auxiliaries.”

“I shall bypass them as planned, will deploy our own selnarmically-controlled fighters to disable and seize as many as possible.”

“Excellent, but I wouldn’t wait too long to commence that operation, Admiral.” Wethermere glanced at Yoshikuni’s three defensive disks; they had now compressed into one, severely warped shield, red icons having penetrated it at various points.

Narrok was apparently looking at the same image. “I shall make all haste. Narrok out.”

***

Miharu Yoshikuni grunted against the sudden convulsion that ran through the Broadside; a near miss by an antimatter warhead, certainly within two hundred kilometers. “Where’s my point-defense fire grid?” she shouted.

“Working to restore data-links,” Gunnery explained, working frantically at his console. “We lost the ones that were routed through Spatha when she went Code Omega.”

Code Omega. The dreaded term that meant another of her ships had died. She’d been hearing more of that term in the last ten minutes, and the rate at which those reports were accumulating was increasing steadily.

There had been a brief lull in her losses as the robot-fighter scrambler system came on-line. The Kaituni had veered or staggered in confusion, the careful tactical logic of their formation suddenly nonsense. They had wrought order out of that chaos like the professionals they were, but in the five minutes it had taken them to dress their ranks into a different configuration and press on, they had lost dozens of their biggest ships.

But there were still at least fifty enemy dreadnoughts of various classes and marks facing the thirty-one that remained combat effective in Yoshikuni’s task force. And now she had played all her trump cards, including the ones she had hidden up her sleeve and tucked in the top of her boot. Now, it was just tired metal and against tired metal.

Except that the enemy’s remaining selnarmically-controlled fighters, finding large enemy hulls positioned on the approach vector to the warp point the gate, were no longer chasing behemoths that were also, paradoxically, swifter than they were. The gargantuas were now at bay, making them excellent targets for suicide runs. And while the Fourteenth Dispersate’s fighters were comparatively slow, and were down to less than twenty percent of their original number, that meant there were still hundreds of them.

Yoshikuni watched them come. “Half our energy torpedo batteries will shift and link with our defensive fire assets. The other half is to keep attriting primary targets.”

“Admiral, what leeway can you give me for evasive maneuvers?” asked the helmswoman.

“Damned little. You know the position we have to hold to maintain our part of the defensive matrix. You can go wherever you want within that footprint—but not beyond it.” Which was essentially like telling the Helm to try to dodge and evade while staying in a broom closet.

Or maybe, more pertinently, a casket, Yoshikuni reflected as Broadside quaked again. And again. And again.


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