Most of the time, space battles, even the most pitched and violent ones I’d experienced, were spread-out affairs, with isolated skirmishes where a cluster of ships happened to emerge from T-space close enough to each other to use energy weapons but otherwise involving heavily-armored anti-ship missiles chasing down their prey while defensive weapons chipped away at their shields and sprayed ECM jamming their way.
Not this time. I had never seen this many ships, not even in interactive military fiction ViR-dramas about daring, human captains fighting imaginary battles against overwhelming odds. These odds were overwhelming, and I didn’t know if our captains were daring, but they had more balls than I did if they could sail straight into this psychedelic vision of hell without running away screaming.
There was not one speck of darkness in the sensor display that I could have pointed to and said, “there’s nothing there.” Everywhere there were ships, ours and theirs, spread around us in a globular formation, enough that I could have sworn the Iwo Jima was the center of it, but I knew that was an illusion, like the models that showed our galaxy at the center of the universe. It only seemed that way because there was so much around us that any one of the ships could have been the center.
We weren’t at the rear of the Fleet formation; I knew that much from the op order and our briefings. As always, the carriers brought up the rear, farthest away from the action but closer now than usual. They would normally have sat the battle out near the edge of the system, at the farthest Transition Points, ready to pick up the surviving missile cutters and run like hell if things turned bad. This time, they’d emerged from Transition Space just a couple light-seconds behind us, squadrons of Search-and-Rescue craft clutching the thin docking spokes stretched between their twin, redundant saucer sections, standing ready to pick up survivors stranded in space in the wake of the battle. Their number was endless, more carriers than I’d ever seen in one place, and I wondered if, like the cruisers, we’d committed every single carrier we had to this battle.
We were next, the troop ships, seven massive, bulbous cylinders, heavily armored and lightly-armed, riding flaring fusion drives inward toward Point Barber, their Marines strapped into drop-ships and ready to launch. I wondered if they felt as conflicted about it as I did, scared to be shed of the armor of the larger ship but eager to leave the huge targets before the Tahni anti-ship missiles had a chance to reach them.
If anything could make me feel more confident about our chances, it was the cruisers. Each of them was a mountain carved into a fortress and sent a-sail with the power of a star harnessed behind them, the work of the gods, not of men. And there were eight of them, more than had ever been in once place at one time in the whole history of humanity, more raw, destructive power than had ever existed before.
The missile cutters were mosquitoes flying around elephants by comparison, but there were clouds of them, uncountable. They popped in and out of existence like the subatomic particles in the quantum foam that I’d learned about in the physics annex I’d had to take for OCS.
And yet, for all that, the enemy’s numbers were even greater.
The destroyer was the largest class of military starship the Tahni had, nowhere near as large as our cruisers but more agile, able to jump in and out of Transition Space quicker, though still glacial compared to our missile cutters. There had been two or three around in every system we’d hit in the course of the war, whether the Tahni outposts we’d struck at or the occupied colonies we’d freed. There were dozens of them here at Point Barber, formed up in clusters like fighters, burning toward us at high-g boosts, their missiles outpacing them because they were accelerating faster than a living being could withstand.
Their corvettes were slightly larger than our missile cutters, not quite as versatile, nowhere near as fast, but there were thousands of them; as many as the stars revealed by the infrared filters on the cameras. Their lasers and missiles crossed the silent blackness of the vacuum with the proton beams of our cutters, a spider-web pattern in the computer simulation, and people died. Not just a ship here and there, the two-person crew vanishing in a flash of vaporizing metal or a sphere of fusion fire, but dozens at a time, winking out of existence like bubbles popping as they floated into the sky and lost surface tension.
How many of those men and women had been sure they were going to be the ones who survived? How many of the Tahni felt the same way? Or did they even think about that? For all our intelligence analysts had discovered about the enemy, one thing missing from every briefing I’d audited was how they faced death. They were certainly willing to die, to give up their lives in service to an immortal, spiritual Emperor who manifested himself in a series of physical hosts. Which seemed weird, but then again, every religion seems weird from the outside.
Part of me wanted to think that any sexually-reproducing humanoid life form would be afraid of death, but I was about as far from a scientist as you could get without my knuckles dragging on the ground when I walked, so who was I to say? Maybe the Tahni threw their lives away and never had a doubt, never flinched. Maybe that’s why they’d come so close to
