shapes in the holo began to change and form distinct, crisp targets. Identification symbols appeared and targeting data streamed down the right side of the holo display.
“Mildred, enlarge display!” Eder ordered. The display revealed more than a dozen battleships and dozens of cruisers. A spurt of fear ran though him, but he pushed it aside.
“Chief Kunnin?” he asked.
Kunnin shook his head. “They’re fuckin’ with us, Captain. They don’t have that many battleships in their entire bloody fleet, and if they had all those cruisers their first volley would have been a lot worse.” He turned to the lieutenant who was commanding the reconnaissance drones. “Lieutenant, can you steer three of the birds in on just one of those battleships. Boost their gain and have them go to continuous pinging.”
Lieutenant Letizia glanced at Eder, who nodded. The active sensors would make the recon birds an easy target to the Dominions, but it was worth it if they could find out if they were facing real battleships or just drones.
“Another missile volley coming in,” Chief Kunnin warned. “Three hundred and eighty missiles. ETA eleven minutes ten seconds.”
“All ships! Fire anti-missile drones!” Eder ordered, but his mind was on the visual display from the three recon birds. As they approached the two enemy battleships, they increased their speed and bore in.
Anti-missiles reached out for the reconnaissance drones, but their profile was very small and the first group of anti-missiles passed by without locking on or exploding. Lines of light — the computer display for enemy lasers — stabbed through the darkness but missed. The recon drones were less than fifteen thousand miles from the Dominion battleships now, approaching from an oblique angle that made it difficult for the other Dominion ships to get a lock on them.
“Lieutenant Letizia, steer one of the birds in an arc so that it comes up behind the battleship,” Eder instructed. “Once you’re behind it and have a direct path, shut down the drone’s drive and coast in. Go to passive sensors until I give you the word.” He was hoping that the Dominion battleships would focus on the incoming pair of birds and that one might slip past their defenses. “Activate the cameras on all three birds, full magnification.”
As Eder followed the recon birds on their flight toward the battleships, the Dominion missiles met the first wave of Victorian anti-missiles. There were fewer incoming missiles this time and drones chewed them up. Anti- missiles exploded in spherical formations, destroying everything inside the sphere, lasers stabbed out, and a remote controlled Bofor platform filled the approach path with pellets. The Dominion missiles jigged, dodged and feinted and filled the space with jamming, but one by one they fell to the fusillade. Three survived the onslaught, only to be lured away by decoys.
Captain Eder stood, hands clasped behind his back. The main holo display showed the Dominions still coming straight at them, still filling the space before them with jamming drones. Dammit, he hated to shoot into a mess like that. It would make for a lousy hit ratio, but it was time to make the Ducks react to him for a change.
“All ships, fire fifty percent load. Concentrate on the center of the Dominion line. Fire now!”
Two hundred and fifty missiles blasted into space and raced for the center of the Dominion line. Now we’ll see how you like it, Eder thought grimly.
Then Lieutenant Letizia was shouting urgently. “Contact! We’ve got visual contact with the Dominion battleship!” And there it was, a clear, crisp image as the recon drone finally reached visual range. At first it was just a speck, but it steadily grew larger and larger.
Instead of a large, menacing battleship, bristling with missile tubes and laser pods, the camera was focused on an oval shaped object with a bulging nose where the decoy pod was located.
It was a decoy drone.
Captain Eder glanced at sensor readout: It still showed the sensor readings of a large Dominion battleship. He smiled at Admiral Douthat, who was staring intently at the picture.
“Good! They aren’t as strong as they appear. If a few more of these ‘battleships’ are really drones, that should go a long way to even the odds,” he said with satisfaction.
“Let’s get some facts first before we celebrate,” she snapped. Eder’s smile dropped away. The Admiral was…what?
Eder glanced at Lieutenant Letizia and nodded. She turned her drone to run parallel along the line of the Dominion ships and increased its speed. It was several more minutes before they had a good view of the next Dominion warship.
Another decoy drone. A distraction, but not a threat.
Meanwhile the Dominions fired another volley. Only two hundred and fifty missiles this time. Eder ordered another volley from the Victorian line. The Dominions continued to fall back. By now all of the Victorian ships had sent reconnaissance drones chasing after them and one by one the Duck “battleships” and “cruisers” turned out to be decoy drones. Finally, more than an hour after the first missile had been fired, the recon drones penetrated to the center of the Dominion line, where they found numerous empty missile pods, six frigates and two carriers. The carriers appeared to be empty of fighters, but were flying in very close formation, sided by side, so that sensors from the Victorian ships showed them as one very large vessel.
The massive Duck strike force was nothing more than a paper tiger.
Using the guidance from the reconnaissance drones, Eder launched another volley of missiles, concentrating on the frigates and carriers. Twenty minutes later the enemy ships were dead or desperately limping away, trailing air, debris and bodies in their wake.
Meanwhile, Admiral Douthat was doing the math.
They had estimated that the Duck force chasing the Atlas had about one hundred and twenty war ships. They thought that sixty six or sixty seven Duck warships had gone in front of them to block the worm hole entrance, leaving a little more than fifty still trailing behind the space station Atlas. Those trailing ships were thought to be the Dominion’s smaller ships.
Instead, the Dominions had sent only eight warships to the worm hole entrance, leaving behind over a hundred ships following the Atlas. And even if they red-lined their engines, the Black Watch and Queen’s Own were almost five hours away from Atlas.
The blood drained from her face.
“We’ve been suckered,” she said, her voice numb and flat. “Atlas is virtually undefended. All that’s left is the Coldstream Guard.”
Chapter 66
Dominion Forces Trailing Behind Space Station Atlas
A strong man could shape the universe, if he had the will.
Admiral Mello had the will.
The Victorians had surrounded the Atlas with an insurmountable shell of mines and static defenses.
Admiral Mello intended to surmount it.
First, he sent in the mine sweepers, the most expendable of his forces. There were ten mine sweepers and they moved forward in a cautious wedge formation, four across, three up and three down. Each minesweeper had thirty turret lasers slaved to a master control. As they moved forward they shot the Victorian mines before the mines could sense them and detonate.
It was not a perfect process. Invariably, one or two mines would be missed or only slightly damaged, and when the mine sweeper got close enough the mine would sense a hostile presence and take its revenge. Fifteen minutes into the minefield, the first mine sweeper died. The rest pressed forward, drilling a large hole into the Victorian defensive shell, like a drill bit biting through hard rock. The second and third mine sweepers died ten minutes later, killed when one mine exploded and caused a ripple effect in nearby mines that were just close enough to the two ships to crush them.
Now there were only seven mine sweepers. The hole they made was smaller, but they pressed forward, firing methodically, slowing the rate of their passage so that they might have more time to find their targets.
