But I could hear the Skipper’s voice in my ear, laughing with an amusement that came from having seen it all happen before, so many times.
“It’s always the same story,” he would have told me, had told me or one of the other platoon leaders before during one of our company professional development sessions. “In every war, one side wants to paint the other as having some special fortitude, some fearlessness or fanaticism unheard of before in history. It’s a way to make us feel better about ourselves, to explain why we haven’t already won, why when we do, we’ll have accomplished something incredible. So, if it’s any comfort, feel free to imagine they’re thinking the same thing about us.”
The only thing that would have given me comfort was for all those damned red icons in the threat display to go away.
“Come on, Fleet,” I muttered, careful to make sure my mic was cold. “Make yourself useful for once.”
As if they’d been listening, the cruisers went into action. Their beam weapons spoke first, the raging flood of protons simulated by the white lightning discharge they would have shown in an atmosphere. That wasn’t strictly necessary, I knew. The tactical computer systems could just as easily have made the cannon strikes checkered threads of white or yellow or crimson, but those wouldn’t have been as dramatic, and this simulation was meant to invoke an emotional reaction as much as it was meant to convey the tactical situation. The crews watching their outgoing fire would feel more confident if their shots were the bolts of Zeus thrown down from Olympus.
And to the Tahni corvettes in their way, they might as well have been. Each bolt struck two or three of the smaller craft, erasing them from existence, a giant swatting at flies. More of them fell to point-defense Gatling laser turrets and pulse torpedoes and if all the fragments of ships could have been arranged into a solid surface, I might have been able to walk to Point Barber from here.
The Tahni forces saw the cruisers as well as I did, and their destroyers reacted with the glacial response time of capital-ship crews everywhere, waiting a solid thirty seconds before the first wave jumped in, a micro-Transition across a few light-seconds. Micro-Transitions were something that Attack Command pilots liked to brag about in the bars after a battle, telling the locals how dangerous they were, how hard it was to keep your lunch down when you hopped in and out of Transition Space with just a half second between the jumps. They went on and on about how the missile cutters were the most agile and versatile starships around because they could make multiple micro-Transitions in a fight.
The Tahni must have heard about the brag, because a hundred destroyers micro-jumped from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away to only a thousand kilometers in front of the formation of cruisers in the space of a second. I heard a gasp and realized it must have come from me, sheer disbelief at the audacity, the risk…the cost. At least a dozen of the ships collided, jumping out within a few hundred meters of each other, and I was absolutely sure I’d seen at least two pairs of them try to emerge into the same spacetime, all four disappearing into bursts of pure energy, not a speck of matter left of the ships.
But the rest…
Dozens of anti-ship missiles leapt out from launch bays, each the size of an assault shuttle, raging on plumes of annihilated antiprotons, defended by centimeters of boron honeycomb armor and its own deflector shield. What happened next was almost impossible for me or any other human to follow, and I wondered how advanced the targeting systems on the cruisers had to be to handle it. Lasers and proton cannons and pulse torpedoes fired almost nonstop, from the cruisers and from wave after wave of missile cutters popping in and targeting the enemy anti-ship missiles with their own, wasting weapons designed to blow up the destroyers to take out the biggest threat to the cruisers.
Then the cruisers opened up with their main guns, the massive railguns on spinal mounts, as if the flying mountains had been built around the guns. They weren’t conventional railguns, or so I’d been told over and over by the Skipper, who seemed to have an appreciation for the weapons. The longer the conductive surface of the rails, the more velocity the shot had. So, the engineers who’d built the cruiser’s spinal guns had worked out a system where ionized gas was ejected from the muzzle of the railgun before each shot and ran an electrical charge through it. The charged cylinder of gas added velocity to the shot like an afterburner and, more importantly to us grunts watching the show, it was a yellow lance of flame extending out from the nose of the cruiser, a fireworks show in the vacuum.
Where they struck, destroyers were ripped apart, cored lengthwise, their reactors spewing plasma into the vacuum in their dying spasms, just one more flash in a web of chain lightning stretching from one side of visible space to another as far as the sensors could see. It was simultaneously awe-inspiring and terrifying and my breath caught in my throat. It was thousands of kilometers away, but it seemed close enough for me to feel the heat through my armor.
I happened to be looking straight at the Salamis when she exploded. The cruisers were so huge, even the multi-megaton warhead from a Tahni anti-ship missile couldn’t vaporize one completely. What was left of the ship looked like a half-burned log in the remnants of one of the bonfires the squad would make on Hachiman back when I’d been an NCO, the front half burned away, glowing at the molten edges of the hull armor. Nothing had lived through the blast, though. Even if the crew had been dressed in pressure suits and the vacuum hadn’t killed
