maneuvering orders to his or her fleet until it had swept completely through the Alliance forces, and then they could simply turn the entire formation to come back and repeat the battering if needed. Or release the formation into individual ships with orders to independently run down and overwhelm the scattered survivors of the first attack.
Unfortunately for you guys, I have no intention of letting you get in that kind of blow.
Geary waited until his ships had all reached their assigned stations. “All units assume full combat readiness. At time zero seven, all units accelerate to point zero five light speed and proceed along formation axis defined by Dauntless.” Two minutes later, the entire Alliance fleet accelerated in unison, pushing its speed upward. “Damn, that looks nice.”
“It does.” Desjani grinned as Geary showed his surprise. “Didn’t you realize you’d said that out loud?”
“No.” But he smiled again as he watched the display, showing the vast formation of the Alliance fleet rushing onward in perfect unison, while the Syndic force continued to charge straight toward the center of the main body, and thereby straight into the jaws of the nutcracker. It never hurts to have an arrogant or foolish opponent, does it?
And now the really hard part had come, making sure he ordered the next maneuvers at the right times and in the right ways. Geary watched the data and the displays as the two opponents hurtled toward each other, trying to let his training and instincts feel the right moments to call the next orders. The images of the closest Syndic warships were still five minutes old by the time the Alliance saw them. Five minutes wasn’t a huge amount of time, especially given the momentum of those massive warships, but it was enough time for the Syndics to make some last minute moves to mess up Geary’s carefully coordinated attack. Especially if he moved his formations just a little too early and gave the Syndics the warning they needed.
Minutes passed. At one point, he thought Desjani might’ve asked him something, but he stayed focused on the feel of the fleets rushing together, and she didn’t speak again.
A few more minutes. Just a few more.
Geary’s hand reached out and touched the communications control, his eyes never leaving the display. “Formation Fox Five One. At time four five accelerate to point one light speed and alter course down six zero degrees. Align your formation axis perpendicular to the Syndic formation. Adjust course as necessary to enter the top of the Syndic formation about one-third of the way behind its leading edge.”
He paused, wanting to get the timing right. “Formation Fox Five Two. At time four five point five accelerate to point one light speed and alter course up five zero degrees. Align your formation axis perpendicular to the Syndic formation. Adjust course as necessary to enter the bottom of the Syndic formation about two thirds of the way behind its leading edge.”
Forty seconds later came Captain Duellos’s cheerful acknowledgment of the orders to Formation Fox Five One. One minute after that, Captain Numos in command of Formation Fox Five Two acknowledged his orders with no apparent emotion.
Geary waited, trying to keep his mind in that place where it could operate with all the distances and time delays in play. “Formations Fox Five Three and Fox Five Four. At time five zero accelerate to point one light speed and alter course to intercept the leading edges of the Syndic formation on your sides. Align formations to maintain right angles to the Syndic formation.”
As the other formations began accelerating toward the enemy, he could almost physically feel the ships of the main body straining to leap forward at maximum acceleration and join in the attack. “Main body, hold your formation. Reverse headings and prepare to execute braking maneuver.”
He might’ve caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the shock on Desjani’s face or just imagined it. He waited as the Alliance ships swung one hundred and eighty degrees so that their sterns faced the enemy. Come on, come on, he urged the big warships. Get your butts around. Good. “Main body, brake velocity down to point two light, then reverse headings and prepare to engage.” Again he had the sense that the main body’s ships were straining at the leash. “All ships hold formation. You’ll have the entire Syndic attack coming through you in a few minutes and all the combat your hearts can handle.”
Dauntless shuddered as her engines thrust against her motion, slowing her, then she swung up and around another time to face the enemy head-on once again.
By this time, momentum had heavily committed the Syndics to their attack, but they could still react in minor ways if they figured out what Geary was doing. But because of the time-lag in being able to see the movements of the Alliance ships, it would take them a few minutes to spot that the jaws above and below their course had started closing. Minutes later, they’d see the cheeks of the nutcracker closing in from the sides. Even then, they might think they could engage the main body of the Alliance fleet before the jaws could bite down on them, but Geary’s braking maneuver had just altered the time to contact enough that the jaws would actually hit minutes before the van of the Syndic force hit the Alliance main body.
They can try veering up or down to engage one of the jaws separately, but if they do that, I should be able to get the main body on them anyway, and the light units will still be able to hit their flanks. They’re not going to get out of this without getting hurt.
“Blue shift on the Syndic ships,” the tactical watch reported.
“They’re speeding up?” Desjani wondered.
“Trying to counteract the effect of our braking maneuver and come to contact quicker. Maybe they think they’ll be able to blow right through the main body here and out of the trap,” Geary noted. “I don’t think they’ll make it. Duellos and Numos shouldn’t have any trouble compensating for the Syndics’ acceleration by increasing the angle of their intercept.”
“We’ll have a harder time dealing with them at those speeds, though.”
“Not really. We know where they’re going. They’re the one’s who’ll have a harder time, because they’ll have more trouble seeing us through the distortion.”
As the last minutes to contact scrolled down, Geary had to imagine events in his mind’s eye, because time lag meant he wasn’t really seeing it as it happened. Dauntless’s sensors and Geary’s eyes told him that the two jaws of the nutcracker were still closing to contact, when at that moment the upper disc of Alliance ships was already cutting down through the Syndic hammer at a high angle even as the second disc should be cutting upward farther back. While the Alliance ships shot through the Syndic formation along its shortest axis, each Alliance ship was in contact with the enemy for only a few minutes, able to flay any ships within range and then racing onward before its own defenses were too heavily stressed. But while the Alliance ships were continuing outward, allowing time for their shields to recover, the Syndic ships were getting hit again and again by new Alliance warships as the narrow disc of the Alliance formation swept through the Syndic formation.
But he couldn’t get lost in that vision. “All units in main body open fire as enemy ships enter your weapon engagement envelopes. Ensure first volley is grapeshot, followed by specters.”
He feared for a long minute that he’d cut the timing too fine, left the final open- fire command too late, in his desire to make sure a concentrated barrage hit the Syndic formation that had just been savaged by two Alliance buzz saws. Then he heard Dauntless’s weapons officer reporting that the projected paths of Syndic ships were entering the engagement envelopes of the flagship’s weapons, and moments later reporting that Dauntless’s weapons systems were firing. Even given the time lag needed for his command to reach every ship in the main body, they should all have opened fire at the optimum time.
Space between the Syndic force and the Alliance main body was suddenly populated by rapid bursts of light as a missile volley fired by the Syndics against the main body ran into and was wiped out by the wave of Alliance grapeshot. Moments later, space in front of the Dauntless lit up in a broad area as the charging Syndic warships ran head-on into the barrage of grapeshot, the ball bearings flashing into gas as collisions with Syndic shields converted their kinetic energy to heat and light. It looked for all the world like someone had painted a sweep of space with light.
The huge flare was still fading when brighter and bigger lights started flaring like flashbulbs. Geary kept his expression dispassionate, knowing he was looking at the deaths of Syndic minor combatants whose shields had been overwhelmed, leaving the ships exposed to more grapeshot slamming them at high relative speeds.
