Democracy's Light

Chapter Twenty-One

“Fire!”

The plan had sounded simple on paper, but Admiral Wolfsan had worried that it wouldn’t be so easy when it came to actually implementing it. In his experience, the simpler the plan, the better… and Admiral Wilhelm’s plan for engaging the Imperial Navy — or the rebel fleet, depending on the terminology — was too complex for certain victory. He’d watched the fleet nervously as the superdreadnaught had crept closer and closer to their positions, but they’d managed to get into firing range undetected.

“Missiles away, sir,” the tactical officer reported, as the superdreadnaught shuddered violently, firing her missiles in anger for the first time in her entire career. A superdreadnaught was rarely called on to do more than show the flag along the Rim — no pirate in their right mind would tangle with a superdreadnaught — but Wolfsan had insisted on regular drills anyway. Combined with the firepower of the other superdreadnaughts, and the massive arsenal ships, the rebels had flown right into a firestorm.

He leaned back and surveyed the position. The rebels hadn’t moved into the gravity shadow, but if they’d timed it right, they shouldn’t have been able to flicker out before the first wave of missiles struck them anyway. They hadn’t fired back on his ships, missing the chance to inflict serious damage before his forces could raise their shields, which argued that they had indeed been completely surprised. In hindsight, they had to be cursing themselves, but Admiral Wilhelm had played them beautifully. Even now, they had to be seriously considering fighting it out, or headlong retreat, and either one suited them just fine.

“Reload and fire a second barrage,” he ordered, calmly. The arsenal ships and the external racks had both shot themselves dry, but his superdreadnaughts were only just beginning. By the time the rebels reacted, they would have already lost. “Locate their command ship and target it specifically.”

For a long moment, Katy’s mind just froze, trapped in memories of First Morrison. The Shadow Fleet had been trapped there, forced to stand off a wave of missiles rather than flickering out and running for their lives, and she’d been captured there. The display’s frantic attempts to inform her of just how badly she’d miscalculated — and she had miscalculated — only made matters worse. Admiral Wilhelm had laid a trap for her and she had walked right into it like a Midshipwoman on her first cruise.

“Lock the arsenal ships onto their superdreadnaughts and fire them dry,” she snapped. One eye flew to the display showing the countdown to flickering out; two minutes. By then, they were going to take at least one beating, perhaps two. Her overconfidence had trapped her until her ships could spin up their drives and escape, trapped her long enough for her fleet to be bled. “Spin the superdreadnaughts and return fire, now!”

Jefferson shuddered as the mighty superdreadnaught fired its first salvo towards the enemy ships. Katy watched, pushing her fear and shock to the back of her mind, as the enemy fleet resolved into view. Their cloaking devices were far better than they should have had — she should have seen them coming — and they’d played their cards very well. The fleet list was terrifying. The enemy had deployed sixty-six superdreadnaughts, seventy battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, backed up by over two hundred escorts. Studying the sensor records, she realised that at least some of the escorts had been configured for point defence service, adding yet another advantage to the enemy fleet. The calculations about relative strength had just been proven so much scrap paper.

They must have brought in ships from the other sectors, she realised, numbly. The hell of it was that she could still inflict horrendous damage on the enemy forces… if she were prepared to accept the total destruction of her fleet. They might have had external racks and arsenal ships, two more items she’d hoped were a rebel monopoly, but they didn’t have the firepower or survivability of the Independence-class ships. She could bully her way down to the shipyard and annihilate it, or even scorch the planet herself, but it would mean the destruction of her fleet. The Shadow Fleet simply couldn’t afford such losses.

“Turn us away from the planet,” she ordered, watching as the point defence network was frantically reshuffled to handle the oncoming storm. They’d configured it to intercept missiles coming from Cottbus and its orbital installations, not missiles coming from the other side of the formation, and they’d been caught badly out of place. The enemy might not have known it — and she wouldn’t have bet her life on it — but they’d caught her with her pants around her ankles. If they’d timed it right, she wouldn’t be able to bring over half her point defence into play until it was too late.

She cleared her throat. “Deploy all of the ECM drones and sensor ghosts,” she ordered, knowing that it was probably futile. The dumb little brains in the onrushing missiles might be tricked, but if they had direct feeds back to their motherships they would adapt and compensate for her trickery. “Lock missiles onto the surviving enemy superdreadnaughts” — and there are going to be dozens of them, her mind gibbered inanely — “and prepare to engage them.”

The wall of missiles flashed into the teeth of her point defence. Gunboats, the fastest ships under her command, flew into the onrushing wave of missiles and started to pick them off, one by one. Their laser cannons and pulsars blew missile after missile into flaming dust, while their sensors burned through the ECM-equipped missiles that were trying to confuse the point defence, but there were too many missiles to be stopped that easily. They raged on into the destroyers, hundreds more flashing out of existence as they were struck by bolts of charged plasma or counter-missiles, while dozens more were decoyed away onto harmless drones. Some of the missiles even targeted the destroyers, blasting away some of her point defence platforms, wiping out entire ships before they could escape.

Katy gritted her teeth. “This is the Admiral,” she said, keying the intercom. “All hands, brace for impact. I repeat, brace for impact.”

The superdreadnaught’s point defence opened fire as the missiles roared into their terminal attack vectors, boosting their drives forward as they sought mutual annihilation. The lights dimmed slightly as power was redirected to fission beams and other energy weapons, sweeping missile after missile out of space, but it wasn’t enough. Katy barely had a moment to grab the handles of her chair before the first missile struck home. A rolling series of thunderclaps shook the mighty ship.

“Report,” she snapped. Nasty-looking red icons had flashed up on the display, but nothing seemed to be failing dramatically. Of course, part of her mind whispered, if a fusion bottle had failed dramatically, the entire ship would have been so much vapour by now. “Damage report!”

“Minor damage,” the engineering officer said. Katy barely heard the details as she glared down at the enemy fleet in the display. They were struggling to survive her missiles, but they had far more ships than she had. “Admiral…?”

“Get the repair teams on it,” Katy snapped, and broke the connection. Either they could flicker out and escape within a minute, or they were dead. There was no middle ground, not this time. She refused to even consider surrender. There was no way she could allow a reasonably intact Independence to fall into enemy hands. “Tactical, fleet report?”

“We lost seven superdreadnaughts,” the tactical officer said, grimly. Katy looked at the display and winced again. She’d thought that the Jefferson was the focus of the enemy’s attack — that, somehow, they’d locked onto her as the flagship — but no, they’d barely been harmed. Other starships were sending damage reports, some of them far more serious… and seven superdreadnaughts and nine other ships were gone. “The enemy fleet lost four superdreadnaughts, but nine more are significantly damaged.”

Katy glanced at the timer. Thirty seconds to flicker. “Target their undamaged superdreadnaughts and open fire,” she ordered. There were still enough superdreadnaughts to seriously damage the enemy fleet, even though the battle would now sink down into more conventional patterns. “Contact all ships. As soon as the flicker drives are ready, we flicker out to the first waypoint!”

“Understood, Admiral,” the communications officer said. “Signal sent.”

There was a curious detachment, Admiral Wilhelm decided, to watching missiles raging in on ships that didn’t happen to carry his person onboard. They might have been his ships, under his command, but his life wasn’t at stake. It gave him a unique opportunity to study the rebel improvements in missile technology in action, while allowing him to remain out of the fighting.

“They’ve managed to improve their jammers,” he commented, to no one in particular. The point defence systems were being confused and forced to rely on their active sensors to track the incoming missiles, which in turn allowed to the rebels to confuse them still further with false returns. A handful of the missiles, he decided, would carry enhanced ECM warheads to confuse his systems, far more capable than the ones he’d put into production. The Nerds had either held the systems back, or they hadn’t known. He wasn’t sure which possibility worried him more.

His ships engaged the rebel missiles with their point defence. The sensor confusion meant that they had to engage every target… and, because of the relative sizes of the missiles, it was impossible to tell if they’d engaged a sensor ghost or just managed to miss a real missile. Wilhelm had seen a study once, conducted back during the days before the rebellion, that concluded that point defence weapons wasted ten shots for every shot that actually hit a target — it had been suppressed, of course. In the Battle of Cottbus, as he’d already named it in his head, he would have been surprised if they weren’t wasting nineteen shots out of every twenty.

“Impact imminent,” the tactical officer said, calmly. “They’re passing through the final line of defences now.”

I should have developed gunboats, Wilhelm thought coldly, as the missiles raged down on his superdreadnaughts. He had had the technology — they weren’t a great improvement on standard gunboats — but they required willing pilots, not men and women who suspected that they were being sent out to die. The death rates for gunboats that entered combat were horrendous… and he wasn’t comfortable asking for that much loyalty from his people. After all, if Colin Harper could rebel, who was to say that one of his subordinates couldn’t rebel either?

The display updated rapidly as the missiles struck home, reporting in cold clinical terms what was happening to the superdreadnaughts. He pushed the thought that they were crewed by living men and women, some vaporised with their ships, others desperately trying to survive as the air blew out into space, out of his mind. The damage was mounting, but they weren’t capitalising on their previous successes.

“Interesting,” he mused to Jake. “Why aren’t they finishing off the damaged ships?”

As soon as he asked the question, he knew the answer. The rebel commander, Katy Garland — one of his analysts had finally identified her as a former Commander, back with the Macore Observation Squadron before the rebellion — had realised that they couldn’t wipe out his fleet, so she was trying to inflict as much damage on his force as possible before she retreated. She had to be powering up her drives now, having decided to leave them on standby rather than permanently powered up and active, and trying to win time.

Time I am not going to give her, he thought, and smiled.

“General signal to 5^th and 7^th Squadron,” he ordered. He’d kept them deep within the gravity shadow, partly because that was what the raiding cruisers would have seen, right back at the beginning, and partly to keep her from becoming suspicious. “They are to advance at once upon the enemy.”

“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. His hands danced across his console. “Message transmitted and understood.”

Wilhelm leaned back in his chair and watched, a slight smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as two fresh squadrons of superdreadnaughts, complete with Nerd-designed external racks, started to advance upon the enemy fleet.

“Admiral, the planetary squadrons have just become active,” the tactical officer said. “They’re leaving orbit and heading up towards our position.”

“Neat,” Katy commented, sourly. It was easy to see what Admiral Wilhelm was doing, but it was going to be too late. If she had considered a death ride into Cottbus’s gravity shadow, intent on destroying the shipyard at all costs, she would have launched it before the incoming fleet could intervene. She glanced up at the display and scowled. The incoming missiles had tapered off slightly now that all of the external racks had been shot dry, but the enemy still had over forty completely intact and undamaged superdreadnaughts. She barely had a ship that hadn’t taken damage. “Confirm; the entire fleet can flicker?”

“Apparently so,” the tactical officer said. He glanced down at his console. “Flicker capability in ten seconds.”

Another wave of missiles struck home against the Jefferson’s shields. They held, barely, against enough fury to burn off half a planet, but the starship couldn’t take much more of that. The hammering was burning holes in the shields and unleashing the primal power of nuclear warheads against her ship. The Jefferson was going to need weeks, at least, in a yard before she was fit for combat action again… and there was no suitable yard short of Earth itself. The facilities at Hawthorn simply weren’t up to the task.

Katy counted down the seconds in her head. “Flicker,” she ordered, finally. “Get us out of here.”

The fleet vanished from the universe.

“Interesting,” Admiral Wilhelm said, as the final rebel ship flickered out and was gone. “Did you notice how well they held together?”

Jake frowned. “I can’t say that I did,” he said, finally. He was many things, not all of them decent or useful, but he wasn’t a space combat expert. “I’ll just take your word for it.”

Wilhelm barely heard him. “They could have broken up into a mob of disorganised ships, or they could have scattered and broken under our beating, but they held together long enough to retreat,” he said, slowly. “We killed forty-seven ships, including eleven superdreadnaughts, and they still didn’t break. They fought like men, Jake, not rebels.”

Jake lifted an eyebrow. “It’s a little late to have doubts,” he pointed out. “They might have been sincere about offering you and yours amnesty before the shooting started, but right now I’d say that Admiral Garland’s most earnest desire is your head on a platter. How many of their people do you think we killed?”

“Not enough,” Wilhelm said. He looked over at the communications officer. “Compress all of our basic sensor records and transmit them to the Robin Hood before she departs,” he ordered. “She has a long trip ahead of her.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Do you think the Robin Hood will get there on time?”

“We can, but hope,” Wilhelm said. He actually thought that the odds were very good, but there was no way to know for sure. “Carola needs to know what’s happened here before something unfortunate happens to her on Earth.”

“Well,” Charlie said, from his position in the cockpit. “I guess that’s us told, right?”

“Shut up,” Sandra said, not unkindly. “Who was it who did all the work to get that signal sent out?”

“Some signal,” Charlie said, angrily. “One warning signal, a non-specific one at that. Do you think that your… Andy will even survive long enough to come back to you next week?”

“You know as well as I do,” Sasha said, tiredly, “that hypnotics are tricky things.”

“Not that tricky,” Charlie said. He tapped the console and brought up the message. Cottbus System Command had laid down the law in no uncertain terms. No starships, passenger, commercial or anything else, would be permitted to leave the planet without special permission. He doubted that it would last that long — the embargo would hurt their economy badly — but it was long enough to prevent them from flying to meet Admiral Garland, assuming that she had survived the battle. “You know what we just saw, right?”

The other two stared at him angrily. “We saw an enemy force that won’t be stopped quickly and easily and can tear up this entire sector and ravish all the way to Earth before the Provisional Government gets its act together and gathers a force capable of ripping it apart,” he said. “We’re behind enemy lines, officially. We can’t get off this planet without being blown to bits. And, because of that warning, they probably know we’re here.”

“And they might find Andy,” Sandra said. Her voice was a parody of concern. “So what?”

“So they find him and they take him into a holding cell and they strap him down and they go through his mind with a fine-toothed comb until he’s a drooling idiot and they know everything he does about you,” Charlie snapped. “You said it yourself. Hypnotics are tricky things. The odds are that they will apply enough pressure to his tiny mind to find out what he remembers about you.”

“And again, so what?”

“He will remember fucking your brains out,” Charlie snapped. “They, on the other hand, will wonder just what actually happened. What is the difference between fantasy and reality anyway? When he tells them that he fucked you while you were both dead drunk… they’re going to know that he’s giving them false memories.”

He tapped the side of the console sharply. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “Our missile has changed from surveillance and intelligence-gathering to active operations — now, before they locate us and move in for the kill. The way this damn planet is organised… that won’t be very long at all.”