“Our sensors have identified no fewer than twelve major vessels in the alien fleet massing greater than twenty-eight thousand g’ri, including their fighter carrier. Destruction of those vessels would seriously weaken the enemy’s ability to mount a counter-offensive against Turusch fleet elements and bases within the sector.
“And the Sh’daar Seed, as ever, circulates plans within plans. When the enemy reaches the Bright One, all of the enemy ships shall be destroyed, and their homeworld left defenseless.”
“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”
The Turusch tactician considered the matter further, then agreed, Mind Below and Mind Here slipping into harmony. It had to, since the Sh’daar Seed’s suggestions took precedence even over the judgment of a tactician.
Still, it would be extremely difficult for the Turusch fleet to extricate itself without suffering further significant damage. The enemy carrier and several other vessels were concentrating their fire on the Radiant Severing, and other vessels of the fleet were being pounded by enemy fighters.
Emphatic Blossom at Dawn could not directly refuse the Seed’s suggestion-such a choice was literally and physically impossible-but it did have a great deal of latitude in how it carried out the Seed’s suggestions.
The heart of the enemy’s offensive capability was their carrier. Destroying that vessel would be the key to extracting the Turusch battle fleet from this pocket.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Eta Bootis IV
0007 hours, TFT
The last of the fighters-SG-92 Starhawks and the older SG-55 War Eagles-were away, VFA-36, the Death Rattlers, flying Combat Air Patrol around the America, the rest lancing at high-G into the Turusch battle fleet. Kiloton nuclear pulses flashed in the distance as warheads blossomed with white fury, reduced to twinkling pinpoints by the distance.
“Three Golf-Mikes inbound,” a CIC technician reported, her voice calm. “Intercept course, detonation in thirty seconds.”
“Countermeasures deployed,” another voice said.
“Escort Farragut moving to intercept,” Craig reported.
Koenig watched the battle developing. The enemy had more ships than the Confederation battlegroup, and a slight technological lead in such areas as gravitics, shields, and beam weaponry, but they’d been bloodied by the fighter strike earlier and were acting in an uncoordinated, almost sluggish manner.
The large vessel ahead-an asteroid, it appeared, partially hollowed out, given massive gravitic drives and mounted with weapons-was probably the enemy command ship. With more and more of the battlegroup’s weaponry concentrating on that one giant ship, it was possible that they were having trouble coordinating their fleet.
Gravitic shields blocked radio waves and lasercom beams. Typically, ships coordinated with one another in combat by flickering one section of their shields off and on while transmitting tightly packaged comm bursts precisely timed with the shield openings. Pile on enough firepower to keep the enemy’s shields up, and you kept him from communicating with other ships as well.
The Turusch fleet was attempting to rush the America…the largest vessel in the Confederation fleet. That’s what I would do, Koenig told himself. As more and more beams and missiles slammed against the Turusch command vessel’s shields, the enemy’s fleet organization became looser, less coherent.
But the enemy ships kept moving forward, sending waves of nuke-tipped missiles and Toad fighters out ahead of the lumbering capital ships.
Even disorganized, that swarm of Turusch ships would be able to overwhelm America’s defenses in fairly short order.
Koenig looked around, momentarily expecting Quintanilla to be there watching, criticizing. The operational orders issued by the Senate Military Directorate while the battlefleet was still gathering off Mars-several hundred megabytes’ worth of detailed instructions-had been very explicit. Koenig was not to risk the star carrier America. She was one of only six ships of her class, and the Military Directorate wanted to minimize the chances of her being lost or badly damaged. Those orders had directed Koenig, if the tactical situation warranted it, to take the America no closer than fifty AUs to Eta Bootis IV, and to direct the battle from there. At all costs, the America was to avoid direct ship-to-ship combat.
Sheer nonsense, of course, the appraisal of armchair admirals and politicians considering the possible course of a naval engagement from the comfort and security of their offices and conference rooms thirty-seven light years away. You could not direct a battle from four hundred light minutes away, not when the situation was over six and a half hours old by the time you received a status update transmission from the rest of the fleet, and with six and a half hours more before your orders crawled back to the fleet. Even worse, Koenig would actually have had to split his small fleet to ensure that America had combat support. If the Turusch detected America, caught her traveling alone, they could launch a long-range fighter strike or send a small detachment of warships to attack the lurking carrier.
Unsupported, the carrier wouldn’t have a chance in ten of survival.
And so Koenig had deliberately violated his orders. The phrase “if the tactical situation warranted” was his loophole, his way out. So far as Koenig was concerned, the tactical situation did not warrant either splitting his fleet or trying to run the show from over six light hours away. The phrase was, in fact, a cover-your-ass clause for the politicians; if America and her battlefleet were destroyed or suffered serious damage, the admirals and the Directorate senators could shrug and say, “Well, it wasn’t our fault. Koenig disobeyed orders.”
Pretty standard stuff. If the Confederation won and the Marines were successfully evacuated, the breach of orders would be quietly ignored. Otherwise…
Three hundred kilometers ahead, the escort Farragut had changed course, moving across America’s path to help shield the carrier from oncoming missile volleys. Two Turusch missiles struck the escort’s shields, the twin, silent flashes minute but dazzling on the CIC display screens.
But Confederation fire was hammering home among the Turusch ships as well. The Kinkaid continued to slam high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles into the suspected enemy command-control ship. America was cycling her spinal mount weapon as quickly as possible-firing about once each fifteen seconds-targeting the same Turusch asteroid ship. If they could just keep up the pressure, if they could keep the enemy command ship’s shields up…
“Farragut reports heavy damage,” Hughes reported. “She’s falling out of the fight.”
Koenig turned in his seat to check one of the monitors relaying visuals from a battlespace drone out ahead of the carrier. Farragut was a missile escort, small and fast with a bundle of twenty-four mamba launch tubes tunneling through the center of her forward shield cap, massing 2200 tons and carrying a crew of 190 men and 15 officers. The ugly little missile boats were designed to dash in close, loose a swarm of high-yield smart missiles in the merge with the enemy formation, and accelerate clear under high-G boost. On the display, the Farragut was barely making way, her drive fields dead; he could actually see her on the screen, which meant her gravitic shields were down or intermittent only, and a portion of her aft drive structure was a tangled mass of wreckage, glowing white-hot and trailing a stream of half-molten debris like streaming sparks in the night. Another missile struck the craft, the flash lighting up the display, a dazzling, single pulse of light, and as the glare faded, the Farragut reappeared, her drive section gone, the forward stem and shield cap tumbling end-over-end. Radiation scanners aboard the drone were pegging the readouts in CIC off the scale.
There was no sign of escape pods evacuating the hulk. Two hundred five men and women…
The missile boat’s skipper, Maria Hernandez, had been America’s Operations
