Chapter 8
“A leader is merely the one at the front of the column, leading the way into excellence, or decadence…or mediocrity.”
Legacy Mandate by Emperor Yung I
When the alien Slaggers attacked humanity back in 5196, the standard method of inter-system warfare was well established. The fleet of then-Emperor Khan Li numbered ninety vessels capable of interstellar travel, each equipped with a stack of fast nuclear missiles, a beam weapon or two (for close-range desperation), and sand cannon to create crude defensive screens of flying silica “teeth.”
When battle was joined in those early years, nukes were launched, sand cannon spewed, and ships accelerated under crushing g-forces, squeezing the human crews to unconsciousness, as elementary autopilots attempted to escape from the other side’s nukes.
By the time humanity finally crushed the Slaggers (after less than a century of warfare), costly antimissile missiles were standard equipment, along with more refined defensive beam weapons, but otherwise space battle remained the same game of high speeds, huge nuclear barrages, and crushing acceleration.
When the Shapers arrived, all that swiftly changed.
Artificial gravity meant that incapacitating acceleration was a thing of the past, while dampers suppressed nukes and other high-explosive reactions at a survivable distance. Shield generators deflected kinetic projectiles, micro-asteroids and most radiation with equal facility.
Instead of long range, launch-and-run combat, the new theory leaned toward “close-range” slug matches, with weapons raking opposing ships until heat sinks and shield generators failed. Then boarding penetrators packed with Marines could be employed, or the opposing ship could simply be shredded where it lay. Since starships became the largest repositories of Shaper tech outside direct Imperial oversight, they were not lightly wasted.
Although the “new” theories of space battle remained largely untested in actual combat, simulation models drove Fleet toward larger and larger warships, mounting ever more firepower to overwhelm any theoretical enemy’s shields. Centuries before, in the war against the Slaggers, a large vessel simply meant a bigger target that was harder to accelerate. The largest missile carriers in those days enclosed ten thousand imperial tons, while current Fleet battleships averaged over one hundred thousand tons, and a few new ships rose to nearly five hundred thousand tons.
The standing view held that hulls were cheap. It was all the Shaper tech that came so dear. Fleet relied entirely upon the Shapers for N-drives, shield generators, and artificial gravity generators, along with Shaper fuel to power them all. Dampers, crystal computer stacks, and smart alloy had all fallen to human reverse engineering efforts through the years. Of course, all Fleet officers—or nearly all—carried Shaper implantables in their skulls, too, illustrating exactly who enabled Fleet growth and development.
The fact that the Shapers had apparently not heard of planned obsolescence represented a tremendous boon. Most Shaper hardware functioned for centuries, but consumables, such as power cells, nanotech, and rejuv elements disappeared into the pool of humanity, and the population of 139 worlds hungered for more and more Shaper handiwork.
In the midst of this crescendo of demand, the Ericson Cluster staged a sudden uprising, seized dozens of Fleet warships, and crushed a few more in the frenzied combat of the first few days. The Tyra system fell a day later, with little resistance, its vast orbital platform and tether nearly a duplicate of Core Alpha.
The Emperor, it was said, was apoplectic, and as a result the Fleet Admiralty Board expressed fury and outrage, and generally tried to act busy.
The physical result of their busy-ness involved dispatching powerful task forces to systems deemed “at risk” by the intelligence types. One such system was Skold.
Skold possessed a useful, friendly star, a lush, populated planet, a rich asteroid belt, and a very advanced orbital processing station. Its system defenses amounted to little more than a nuisance by modern standards: two intrasystem cutters, four QE sensor posts, and two old defense platforms.
In the view of Task Force Commodore Thiel, Skold’s defenses provided a small selection of methods to die heroically, and little else. Fortunately, the Fleet task force he commanded entered the Skold system with a much more substantive mix of tools. He stood on the bridge of his flagship, the seventy-five-thousand-ton Titan, a reinforced heavy cruiser mounting a vast array of modern weapons, and as he turned his head left and right, his command UI panned, displaying the glowing icons of his other flotilla members. My command, he proudly thought.
As if on cue, his UI indicated each of the vessels powering their shield generators up, the standard Fleet procedure upon transitioning through to a target system.
The two destroyers, Ramses and Medusa, represented his most powerful assets, like scalpels for a field surgeon. Though both vessels had served Fleet for over a century, Commodore Thiel well knew the weight of weaponry they both mounted, but more than that, he knew both captains very well.
Captain Susan Roush was one of the only Fleet officers to cross swords with the rebels in this weeks-old war, so technically the only officer in his task force with any real combat experience. Her previous ship, scorched and hulled, lay at the Strand orbital yard for refit…or salvage. Thiel considered himself fortunate to get Captain Roush in a good ship and his task force.
Thiel’s own combat experience, serving as a Fleet officer for more than forty years, amounted to trading shots with a pirate on one occasion, and with a smuggler on another.
Captain Roush, on the other hand, had managed to extricate her ship from the ambush at Ericson Two on the first day of the rebellion, and every officer in Fleet had watched and rewatched the vidstream of her running battle to escape. That after-action vidstream graphically displayed the only actual combat between modern warships ever recorded, and every Fleet officer had watched the eight-hour drama with a dry mouth. Most truthful officers admitted that several moments of the vidstream, such as Captain Roush’s terse command to “vent deck three to vac before we fucking explode!” haunted their dreams.
Of course all Fleet officers took part in very realistic simulations as a key part of regular training, but this gritty vidstream surpassed anything they ever simulated or imagined. The undercurrent of fear recorded in every voice, the shrill curses, even the short, desperate cries of pain as Roush’s Marines got shredded—these created a stark, unfamiliar palette coloring this fresh canvas of war. Here, the new white stars of Roush’s desperate antimatter charges, the ruby flickers of enemy beam weapons cascading across her failing shields, and her regular orders, should have seemed familiar territory from countless simulations. It wasn’t.
Commodore Thiel felt nothing but respect for Captain Susan Roush, even before watching the Ericson battle vidstream. He had known her for many years, and he knew her to be a very capable, efficient, and frugal officer, making every effort to keep expenditures to a minimum, just like the Admiralty demanded. She apparently needed her captain’s efficiency bonus just as much as he needed his commodore’s efficiency bonus.
Hopefully, Thiel thought, his need for such unpleasant economizing might soon be over…if only the rebels chose to attack the Skold system soon.…
His bounty on even one captured vessel could be in the millions, if he was so blessed as to encounter a sufficiently substantial enemy. He began to calculate what the commodore’s percentage would be on, say, a thirty-thousand-ton destroyer, even as he observed the last three vessels of his task force power up their shields and begin closing ranks.
Transitioning to and from N-space required considerable “sea room,” with very little mass allowed near any vessel entering or exiting the N-space envelope. Scientists, after centuries of study, still did not know if this was some sort of Shaper safeguard, or if it demonstrated some real quality of N-space physics. The end result meant making all transitions some distance from any planetary gravity well, and spreading formations far apart during transitions. Fortunately “far apart” meant only fractions of a light-second between ships.
His last three ships were not as impressive as the Ramses and Medusa, with two old light frigates and an equally aged expedition force carrier. The carrier, Bulldog, possessed few qualities Commodore Thiel valued in any imagined battle. Its Marines could prove useful, but its atmosphere-capable fighters, launch ships, and tiny shield generators seemed almost pathetic anachronisms in modern warfare. Its large supply of missiles and drones added some capability to his force, but they also represented one more ship he would need to divide any bounty with. If he had to share loot, he wanted to share with a ship that would actually contribute to the lightning victories he dreamed of.
The two small frigates, Knight and Daimyo, were much better equipped for a modern battle, in Thiel’s opinion, but they were both tiny by modern standards; just four thousand and five thousand tons respectively.
He knew the frigate, Daimyo, intimately well. He had served aboard her as a young mid nearly fifty years before. His initials would still be carved on her inner-hull access panel to this day if the nosy ship Intelligence hadn’t ratted him out almost as soon as he had finished carving.
Though composed of older ships (none but the Titan constructed of smart alloy), Commodore Thiel still knew he commanded a powerful force. Out of the 1,800 commissioned Fleet vessels currently serving the Imperium, Titan ranked as the 190th most powerful vessel. The rebellion only possessed a handful of ships more powerful, and combined with his other ships, Commodore Thiel felt more than comfortable meeting nearly any individual rebel ship, and crushing them.
“Sensor returns are beginning to log, Commodore,” the ensign at sensors announced.
Thiel could have set his command UI to show sensor returns, and nearly every other input or output of the ship, but over the many years of his command experience, he found all the constant flashes, ripples, alerts, and updates behind his eyelids to be quite unnecessary…and a cause of migraines, honestly. That’s what bridge officers were for. His own UI provided the most basic overlay for his task force members, then as he turned his gaze across the bridge, the overlay of the officer names and dispositions scrolled past his eyes. Beyond them, Thiel set his command UI to simply display status colors in individual departments. The only exception to this being the detailed readout on his private pantry. Trying to keep those sly devils from siphoning off any more of his expensive liquor stores seemed an impossible task. No matter how long he kept a clerk, or a cox’n or a personal chef, they all seemed to be eventually drawn like magnets to his liquor. The ship Intelligence should be bright enough to figure out warranted versus unwarranted access to the liquor, but on new vessels, the ship Intelligences often lacked the rich dataset of human observations to develop much horse sense. Titan’s Intelligence was as thick as a whale sandwich, Thiel thought.
“Put sensor returns on the holo, Ensign,” Thiel commanded.
“Aye, returns on the holo, sir.”
Upon entering the Skold system, all passive sensors placed everything where it belonged without adding objects of concern. The four QE sensor posts all apparently functioned, the defense platforms orbiting Skold Three without distress. Now the active sensors began receiving return waves from those blasted into the system the moment they transitioned in-system. Of course most active sensors faced the limiting factor of the speed of light, and those sensors not so limited were, unfortunately, not very useful either.
The active sensor image resolving on Titan’s holo tank struck Commodore Thiel like a blow. He stared at the holo for a long, frozen moment, peripherally hearing startled gasps from his bridge crew.
The holo revealed a number of new shapes that had apparently materialized in the Skold system in the last thirty minutes or so.
Commodore Thiel couldn’t be sure what ships he faced, since Shaper shield generators could inhibit many active sensor waves just as they inhibited most other forms of radiation, but some of the ships appeared to be sizeable.
Eight ships. Eight probable enemy ships.
Thiel finally spoke. “Transmit to task force: eight enemy ships sighted. Prepare to engage,” Thiel ordered, his voice sounding more solid than he felt. What ships did he face? Surely the rebels wouldn’t send any great force to a system so poorly defended…would they?
“Sensors, give me optical soundings on those targets, now.”
“Aye, sir,” the ensign replied with a quavering voice.
Thiel turned to his left, his UI focused on Medusa and highlighted. “Medusa, accelerate at twenty gees, deviate on this heading”—he touched his command panel—“in three hundred seconds. Engage the enemy on your own initiative.”
Thiel heard Captain Susan Roush reply with a terse affirmative, her ship already torching ahead of the squadron, but he was turning to the pathetic old Bulldog, his UI locking onto its icon. “Bulldog, deploy drones and first missile salvo, accelerate at six gees. Link up with Skold orbital defenses and hold.”
Bulldog affirmed, and Thiel observed the small swarm of missiles floating slowly out from the aged carrier. Its four drones rocketed ahead toward the enemy as Thiel ordered Knight and Daimyo into an intercept path that mirrored Medusa. Together the two small frigates might form the opposite force in a pincer attack…depending on what the enemy was doing.
He would keep Ramses on station with Titan.
With his orders set, his squadron in motion, and sensor data tricking in, Thiel began to feel his heart rate just starting to settle back down. He had at least thirty minutes before any ship closed sufficiently for action.
“Very well.” Commodore Thiel had initially received a nasty start, finding eight enemies suddenly materialized before his eyes. It had not felt at all as he had often imagined; his avarice for financial bounty an hour before now felt childish. For a long moment he felt only the steady thump of his heart and an undercurrent of unease.
Thiel’s UI chirped with a private message from Captain Roush. Her ship still accelerated hard, but she was less than a light-second ahead of Titan thus far. He accepted the message, his unease growing.
COMMODORE, Roush’s message said, I AM SURE YOU HAVE REALIZED THE ENEMY ANTICIPATED THE MOMENT OF OUR ARRIVAL, SO THEY MUST SURELY KNOW OUR STRENGTH. I AM UNEASY. THAT IS ALL. ROUSH, OUT.
Ice poured into Commodore’s Thiel’s veins, his heart rate soaring back up. Calm, calm… If he had not been so overset with his initial surprise and panic, he would have—should have—realized that whatever force the rebels sent to Skold it would be enough…more than enough for them.
He tried to get a grip on his rattled nerves, to think clearly.
“To squadron: belay acceleration. Begin calculation for N-space transition to Core.” As he said the words, Thiel knew he may have just doomed his entire military career. The Admiralty Board might view this as cowardice. One could never be sure.
All thoughts of the Admiralty Board disappeared a moment later, to be replaced by more immediate, pointed concerns.
“Sir!” the sensor ensign almost screamed. “New sensor contact at one-one-four right azimuth, one-two-zero positive, range is…is three hundred thousand klicks and closing!”
The ice around his heart deepened. What could he do? What was it? What first?
“It’s…it’s big, sir.”
The ever-calm voice of Titan’s Intelligence chimed in, “New contact at one-one-four is a Dreadnought-class battleship, Commodore.”
Dreadnought! It had transitioned from N-space almost on top of them, about as close as the drive would permit. How had it managed that timing?
“Commodore?” the XO called with a pinched voice.
Three hundred thousand klicks? Close. He had no room. An ambush.
“Commodore?”
Thiel ignored the XO and stared at the holo. “To squadron: disperse and transition if possible.”
“Commodore?” The XO stood at Thiel’s side now, her face white, frightened. Thiel looked at her, then through her.
“To Ramses,” he said, and he felt surprised that his voice sounded so calm, “emergency acceleration. Break away if you can.”
“Commodore!” the XO quavered. “Shouldn’t we calculate our transition? We can still get away.”
“Launches!” Sensors yelled out. “Inbound missiles.”
“Weps,” Thiel commanded, continuing to ignore his XO, “bring that salvo Bulldog laid down, and drop a dozen antimatter mines in our wake. Detonate when we’re clear. Point defenses go to work.”
“Commodore,” the XO grabbed his sleeve, “we might still get clear. Shall we calculate a transition?”
Thiel looked down at her hand distractedly, shaking loose. As he stared at her he said, “Sensors? Range to the Dreadnought?”
“Two hundred twenty thousand klicks, sir,” the sensor ensign replied.
“See?” Thiel said. “There’s no running for us. We can’t transition with that great hulk here so close. He may even have enough mass in missiles to block us.”
As if on cue, they felt the steady thumping of the dampers begin, working away on inbound missiles, suppressing their explosive reactions. One missile reached them and careened off Titan’s kinetic shields, spinning away into the blackness. The XO staggered back, pale, her head shaking in disbelief.
“This Dreadnought is the Zeus?” Thiel asked, but he already knew the answer.
“Yes, Commodore,” the ship Intelligence responded.
Only six Dreadnought-class vessels emerged from the mighty Imperial shipyards, and the rebels possessed only one.
How sadly appropriate, Thiel thought. Zeus destroys the Titan.
Ramses still torched away at a shallow angle, trying to run for a transition point, while the two frigates, Knight and Daimyo, along with the carrier, Bulldog, all had plenty of room to transition. Thiel felt especially glad that Bulldog could make it away. The two thousand Marines wedged aboard embodied pure helplessness in a fight such as this.
In Titan’s wake the antimatter mines detonated beautifully about halfway between the approaching Zeus and Titan. Mines employed advanced stealth materials, and in all the rocketry their launch might not have been detected by Zeus. Thiel hoped it was a surprise as the dozen expanding white spheres shimmered into small glowing suns, greedily consuming all missiles streaming toward them. Zeus disappeared behind the curtains of cascading energy.
“Weps,” Thiel commanded, “target on their last known position. Fire everything as we come about. Nav, bring us broadside.”
Like all modern warships, Titan was constructed to make optimal use of Shaper shield generator technology. Gone were the days of spherical, ovoid, or any distributed “pod-type” hulls. Any new warship hulls must enable coverage using as few shield generators as possible, and enable Fleet captains to angle their ships so enemies faced plenty of armament without offering much target surface in return. This initially resulted in hulls that resembled flattened chocolate bars and, more recently, in wedge-shaped hulls. Aside from the practicalities, most Fleet officers found the newer wedge shapes to be much more appealing to the eye.
The wedge shape of Titan rotated in place, continuing to move away from the shrinking globes of scorching antimatter at the same .05 C velocity it held since entering the system. When its armored broadside faced directly into its wake, Titan finally unleashed its fury.
Thiel felt the slight jolt even through the artificial gravity and smart alloy hull, and heard the staccato chatter faintly resonating.
Two patterns of missiles fishtailed “below” the plane of fire and raced off, back toward the ever-shrinking glow of the antimatter mines, while the four gauss cannon fired three scorching salvos per second. Titan’s beam weapons optimally locked and focused at a very precise point in space, but the gunnery logic estimated the range of their opponent, still invisible behind the antimatter explosions. They fired, stabbing back through the murk.
As the beam batteries charged for another shot, the Zeus appeared. It came through, torch first, dumping velocity hard, its point defenses flickering through the blackness, trying to chew up everything that Titan threw at it.
Titan’s beam weapons reached out again, splashing, diffused across Zeus’s hull, and gauss fire careened off in brilliant fireworks, all largely quenched by powerful shields.
Titan’s Intelligence clarified and magnified the optical feed, filling the holo with their massive foe. Despite the fact that outgoing torches of missiles provided the only frame of reference for scale, Zeus looked enormous to Thiel’s eyes. Perhaps it was only because he knew Zeus outmassed and outgunned Titan by a factor of three, making it the most powerful vessel in rebel hands.
Thiel numbly observed Titan’s continuous barrage streaming into Zeus, knowing that the destructive power Zeus shrugged off could blacken an entire planet.
Zeus’s torch disappeared and she rotated, slowly bringing more of its batteries to bear on Titan, but as the rotation began Thiel saw the stab of Titan’s beam weapons streak out again, and instead of splashing harmlessly across Zeus’s shields, a glowing white ring appeared on her smart-alloy hull, a barely visible puff of misty ejecta spewing forth.
“A hit!” Weps yelled out. “We got through.”
Thiel clenched his fist. Please let their shields fall, and I can still pull something out of this.
“Focus fire!” he shouted, but Zeus continued to rotate away, and with nearly a half light-second of range, any chance to probe that weak spot disappeared. Now Titan faced the squat, armored flank of Zeus where the shield strength overlapped. They also faced the brunt of offensive weapons now lining up on them.
“Show me a track on Zeus,” Thiel commanded, feeling a strange detachment as fear slowly drained out of him.
The holo displayed a visual path relative to Titan. Unless Zeus engaged her engines again, she would continue to overtake Titan, passing a relative stone’s throw “above” Titan, undoubtedly on a steady rotation to keep the armored broadside bearing as they traversed.
“Optical view, please,” Thiel said in a calm voice that he hardly recognized.
Zeus completed her rotation as Titan’s rippling fire continued to careen off her shields.
“Nav, give me ten gees now,” Thiel said. Maybe it would help displacing a little, since Titan had not maneuvered at all thus far.
Thiel couldn’t feel any sensation of movement as the Titan accelerated, but he also couldn’t feel the torrent of fire Zeus suddenly unleashed. It rained upon them visibly and invisibly. Beam weapons washed over Titan’s shields, heating the hull almost red hot, and projectiles of various kinds began to arrive seconds later, skipping from their shields like fat multicolored sparks.
In this spell of unreal stillness, Thiel suddenly asked, “What’s the damage assessment for our hit on Zeus?” Maybe they had managed to strike a drive component, and he could maneuver away even now.
“Damage assessment based upon a probable weapon penetration of sixteen meters on deck four,” Titan’s Intelligence said, “indicates a likely destruction of heat-sink banks ten through twenty.”
No miraculous escape after all.
As the incoming fire seemed to surround them, Thiel asked, “How’re our heat sinks holding up?”
“Not good, Commodore,” the XO said, her composure hanging by a thread. “We won’t last four hundred seconds before shield generators begin to fail.”
Thiel thought for a moment, his eyes fixed on the optical field of their enemy, flicking in the exchange of destructive energies. In the back of his awareness he noticed the UI alert of his private liquor stores being pilfered once again; his cox’n likely on a desperate mission to die drunk.
“Where’s that salvo Bulldog left for us?” he asked.
“Th-they’re inbound, silent, at one-two-zero left azimuth, two-zero negative, range about two-hundred thousand, velocity is—”
“I see,” Thiel interrupted, looking at the holo where Titan’s Intelligence helpfully added the track for the cluster of nukes. “Bring them in and—”
A hollow clang rang through Titan and a momentary change in air pressure caused Thiel’s ears to pop. His heartbeat surged as he gulped to clear his ears.
“Damage?”
“Penetrator damage, deck one galley and food storage,” the ship Intelligence immediately reported. “One crew fatality.”
“Okay, okay,” Thiel said, thinking furiously. “Bring the Bulldog’s salvo in, spread and daisy chain just outside Zeus’s damper range.”
“Al-alright—I mean, yes sir,” Weps stammered. “What’s the range of their dampers?”
The ship Intelligence said nothing, so Thiel answered. “Say a third greater range than our own. Should be a safe margin.”
Another loud bang resonated through the ship. Before Thiel could ask, the ship Intelligence said, “Missile impact. Dampened, and failed to penetrate flank armor.”
“Commodore!” the XO yelled. “All dry-side heat sinks are at redline!”
“Thank you, XO,” Thiel said.
Another dampened missile bulled through their shields, impacting without penetrating the thick smart-alloy flank armor. The Zeus coasted rapidly nearer.
“Sir,” the sensor officer said, “Zeus is rotating its broadside away.”
Thiel heard the relieved tone of voice and the exhales from around the bridge as much of the enemy’s weaponry began to turn from them, but Thiel gripped a sterling moment of clarity and yelled, “Nav! Keep us dry side to dry side. Do it! Full emergency acceleration.”
Titan’s torch exploded into life, launching them into massive acceleration, having much greater distance to cover than Zeus, but their broadside bombardment did not relent as they looped relative to the galactic plane, nearly keeping pace with Zeus.
“Weps,” Thiel ordered, “get Bulldog’s nukes on her dry side before we come over. She’ll keep rotating to hide that flank from us, and we can’t possibly keep up long.”
“Yes sir. Twenty seconds out.”
“Continuous launch our entire battery! Forget patterns, just target everything on their dry side and launch!”
“Commodore! Heat sinks are failing!” the XO yelled, and another loud bang rattled their bones.
“Missile penetration on deck two. Damped. Sealed. Two crew fatalities.”
The golden glow of thirty tiny new fifty-megaton stars cut sharp black shadows across Zeus and Titan as the salvo of nukes left behind by the decrepit old Bulldog finally got into the action. Though by old measurement standards each nuke yielded only about fifty megatons of explosive force, the big benefit at this moment arose from sheer thermal energy.
Zeus continued to corkscrew to keep their wounded flank from Titan’s Olympian broadsides, and rotated right into the mounting shower of infrared radiation from old Bulldog’s nukes.
Titan’s entire missile arsenal leaped from the racks and launchers, tracing the shrinking distance to Zeus in a stream of fishtailing arcs, curving to impact the targeted flank of Zeus.
“Shield failure!” the XO screamed. “Generator one and two—” Her voice could not compete with the staccato ring of hull penetrations and the wave of heat that washed over the bridge crew.
“Penetrator damage on decks one, two and three,” the ship Intelligence calmly tolled. “Beam weapon damage of—”
“Keep firing everything on Zeus, damn it!” Thiel shouted over the top of startled oaths, cries, and the ship’s frank monologue.
“—thirty-one crew fatalities,” the ship Intelligence finished reporting.
Another crash resounded and Thiel felt a muffled explosion, but he watched the optical display as Titan’s outgoing fire suddenly scored two clean hits on the behemoth target, the white glowing pits in the enemy hull touching Thiel like precious gifts. Streams of Titan’s missiles began impacting now, too, their explosive charges damped but their kinetic energy unabated.
Nukes, antimissile missiles, sod busters, chase missiles—these all began smashing into the vast hull of Zeus, or fell to the flickering point defenses striving to kill every incoming projectile.
Thiel saw one of Titan’s energy-weapon batteries burn a clean hole amidships and a dozen missiles strike home, but felt an answering shock through the deck beneath his feet.
“Nav, cease acceleration,” Thiel ordered, hearing the ship Intelligence detailing twenty new impacts in the background of his thinking.
“Weps, keep firing as Zeus rotates.”
Thiel smelled smoke and ozone.
“Sir, three ships inbound and closing!” Sensors yelled.
Thiel watched the optical feed as Zeus rolled its crumpled side away from them. Titan’s remaining weapons peppered the broad expanse revealed to them, and Thiel’s heart fell as he saw each hit flash upon strong shields.
He didn’t hesitate. “XO, transmit our surrender. Weps, cease firing and redirect all outbound missiles.”
Both bridge officers affirmed, and Thiel sat back on his command seat, his hands beginning to shake. At least he had clawed Zeus well above his weight.
“Commodore,” the ship Intelligence said in a tone that sounded strangely solicitous, “I’m afraid your private pantry was struck by enemy fire. Your liquor was destroyed. One crew fatality.”
Thiel’s cox’n at least—drunk, then dead—achieved his goals.
* * *
From her position over a million klicks from Titan, Captain Susan Roush captured the entire battle and the resulting surrender as she ran all out, the final Fleet vessel left standing yet again.
She could have made her transition at any time in the last thousand seconds or so, but she had sent a salvo of nukes back toward Zeus, and she wanted to record the battle for Fleet intel if she could.
She only contemplated for a moment before redirecting her nukes toward her two pursuers angling to cut off her transition.
She knew Thiel had experienced tremendous luck in his battle with Zeus, and she pondered the outcome had Medusa remained to fight beside Titan as the other eight rebel vessels streamed in on them.
As persuasive as it seemed, she felt reasonably sure that all the ships in the Fleet task force couldn’t have beat Zeus, or only just beat her. Zeus would have destroyed Bulldog and the frigates in seconds, overwhelming their shields, then it would have been Ramses and Medusa alongside Titan. Without Thiel’s lucky hit, even then Zeus would have pulverized them.
But with that lucky hit?
Maybe. They certainly could have kept Zeus from rolling the wounded flank away from fire.
“Captain, enemy missiles are only a short distance from blocking our transition,” Sensors said with a nervous tremor in his voice.
Captain Roush took one last look at the holo, then nodded. “Very well. Submit the N-space calcs. Transition to Core.”
She would see what the Admiralty thought about it all in a few days.