Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Turmoil (15 page)

"Form up behind
and above us," Captain Montari told the image of Captain Rese on his
screen.  He stood behind his chair, hands on the seat back in his customary
place while fighting his ship.  "Our shields will largely protect you, and
I figure we'll earn most of the Primans' wrath.  Take your shots and keep
Majestic between you and their force.  Break off if you must or see an
opportunity worth taking, but remember that once we're isolated we probably
won't be able to rejoin."

Captain Rese
acknowledged with a nod and a yes sir, but she didn't like it one bit.  Her
cruiser wouldn't fare well against eight Priman ships, but a cruiser's job was
to help screen the major fleet elements.  Since there was no carrier to guard,
she needed to protect the battleship.  The problem was, the battleship didn't
really need Cobalt's help.

Knowing Captain Rese
and not wanting to take away from her fighting spirit, Captain Montari quickly
concluded and call and disconnected.  He knew she wouldn
’
t be happy with being told to hide under cover.

"There is one
unhappy captain," Montari's XO concluded from her chair two steps away
from him. 

"She lost a
ship once; while I know she'd do it again if it meant winning the battle,
there's no need for that kind of voluntary sacrifice.  Yet."

They paused for a
second as they watched the volleys of fire between Confed and Priman ships
cover less and less distance as the two forces closed the gap.  Hits were
coming in continuously now, though Majestic's huge shield generators and power
banks were keeping up with demand.  

"This is going
to hurt, XO," Montari said softly as the silent countdown in his mind
crept towards zero.

"At least I'm
not making the payments on this old girl," she said with a fatalistic
grin.

"Helm,"
Montari said slowly.  "Execute turn... now!"

Majestic volleyed
off one more salvo of four torpedoes from her forward tubes, then executed a
surprisingly nimble ninety degree turn to starboard, which uncovered her six
broadside torpedo tubes.  Still not taking the ability of his weapons to home
in on Priman targets for granted, Captain Montari had ordered his XO to have
them launched into the path of the oncoming Priman ships.  His guided torpedoes
this battle had only been managing about a fifty percent lock-on rate; the rest
had careened off into the void, unable to lock onto anything as advanced Priman
ECM stripped them of their tracking abilities.

Six torpedoes
running unguided so close together were hard to cope with, however.  The Priman
ships scattered in a disorganized melee as the lead ships tried desperately to
avoid the weapons.  Their laser batteries tried to shoot them down as well, but
it wasn't enough.  Three of the weapons connected amidships in the same cruiser
as she was pulling her nose hard up; the shaped charges cut through the ship
and Majestic's laser batteries were on the ball, shifting to concentrate fire
on the explosions scarring the ship's hull.  The Priman ship's keel failed;
with her back broken, the ship began to fold up on itself as the fore and aft
sections of the perforated hull tried to go in different directions.

Wasting no time,
Captain Montari ordered Majestic to come to port and begin to circle the dispersing
Priman fleet, Cobalt riding high and behind, adding her own volume of fire to
the deadly mix.

Three of the
'Lightweight' torpedoes got through the Priman defenses, one each to three
different ships.  Captain Vol cursed everything about this galaxy again as he
watched his ships valiantly try to rebuild their formation.  Luckily, there was
no major damage dealt by the mysteriously appearing torpedoes, though the ships
were damaged and lives were lost.  This was war, though, and in the middle of a
brutal knife fight like this, all that counted was whether the ships were still
fighting.  He'd worry about repairs and lost crew later.

He spared a second
to look at his tactical display again.  His ships were finally giving as good
as they got now, having formed up again and scoring repeated hits on the tough Confed
battleship.  It was difficult to coordinate precision fire on specific
locations, but he was going to have to try to take out their torpedo tubes if
he wanted to take an advantage.  The battleship was trying to gradually open
the range between itself and his own ships; even if half her torpedoes didn't
track his own vessels, it made perfect sense for the Confed captain to stay far
back and cram torpedoes down his throat.  At that distance, the Confed
captain's ship stood a better chance of doubling up shields to intercept his
own blasts while at the same time swatting at the Primans with the long arm of
those torpedoes.  

"Keep us at
medium range!" Vol shouted to the helmsman as his ship was rocked by an
explosion.  "We'll have to deal with those torpedoes either way, but only
at this range are our weapons going to hurt them!"

He saw with a small
sense of accomplishment the battleship execute a roll to show the Primans her
heavily armored underside.  Her shields had finally weakened to the point where
the ship's captain had needed to give the ship a break, and it gave Vol hope.

"We can kill
them!" he rallied his crew.  "Look; they're rolling because we've
taken too much out of their shields."  He plotted quickly in his head,
then looked at his board and selected three of his ships by tapping their icons
and dragging a course line on the display.  Sending the command through the
data link, he ordered those ships to angle above the plane of the battle and
come down on the battleship's other side.  He'd pound the ventral shields from
every direction until his shots tore the guts right out of that ship.

"They started
without us," Cory heard Merritt say on their private channel.  The main
Priman body was already well-engaged with Majestic and Cobalt, and their
maneuvers had meant it took longer than planned for Cory's Intruders to get
within launch range of their small torpedoes. 

"Don't worry,
dear," she chided, "the battle will catch up with us any second
now."  She was painfully correct on that matter.  The Priman fighters were
seconds away.  In fact, if she was going to launch her torpedoes at optimum
range, they'd have to fly right through the initial meeting with the enemy
fighters.  She watched her heads-up display; a single Priman cruiser was in her
sights, and a signal-strength bar was showing her the amount of ECM being
blasted in their direction.  The bar was in the red; her computer was saying
that her squadron's torpedoes would be scrambled the instant they left their
hardpoints.  That meant a close-in, boresight launch, which meant getting right
into the hail of AA fire and more than likely losing people.  It was a risk
they'd signed up for, but that didn't make the consequences any easier to
contemplate. 

Since the Intruders
didn't have to hold a steady track to allow the targeting computer time to hand
off guidance to the torpedo, at least her ships were free to maneuver.  They
began to roll and juke as the Priman fighters closed in.  Intruders and Talons
sprayed laserfire ahead of them, as did the Primans.  Instinctively, Cory
pushed her flight stick forward hard just as a blast came in; she felt a thud
through her spaceframe that reminded her of the time her repulsors had
malfunctioned and her Intruder had backed right into a hangar bay bulkhead. 
The ship rocked and he eyes flashed to the damage control screen.  Whatever
sort of blast that had been had hit her upper dorsal hull, right on the
hyperdrive pod.  It showed severe damage, but the rest of her systems seemed
unaffected.

"You alright
over there?" she heard over the net.  Naturally, Merritt was right on her
wing as he inspected her ship.

"You're my
gallant hero," she said with a smile.  "I'm fine, as long as we don't
need to hit hyperspace.  Now, honey, go blow up those Priman fighters so we can
take out this cruiser."

"Anything for
you," he replied.  He snap-rolled his fighter ninety degrees to port,
putting it up on one wing as if he was flying in atmosphere, then pulled back
on the flight stick and arced out of her view. 

Merritt looked at
the odds.  Twenty-four Primans, twelve Talons.  Well, he didn't have to destroy
them all, just keep them distracted until Cory's ships launched their
torpedoes.  "Alright Vipers," he called out the squadron name on the
comm net, "let's buy our friends in the Intruders some time."

"We've lost
another one," Renner heard his XO say with surprising calm as another
destroyer icon winked out.  It was hard to hear over the rumble and vibration
that constantly buffeted his own ship now.  They'd taken a hit in the
engineering spaces, and while their acceleration didn't seem affected, they
were losing fuel and the engines had begun a concerted effort to tear
themselves apart.  The Engineer had given them fifteen or twenty minutes at
these power settings before they tore themselves to pieces.  Renner knew it
would be over one way or the other by then.

His ship was down to
only two functioning laser batteries now, and the XO was doing her best to keep
them firing at worthy targets.  He was beginning to wonder if this was going to
amount to anything then he saw a flash from the main display and the lead
Priman cruiser suddenly veered off course, trailing bright white gas from the
engine spaces.

"Report!"
Renner yelled excitedly.

"Looks like an
engine containment breach," the sensors operator called back over the
noise.  "I see her speed dropping every time she maneuvers, and power
levels are down as well.  Whatever it was, she's out of the hunt."

"Great news,"
Renner admitted.  "Maybe now we can-"

He was interrupted
as concentrated fire from the remaining Priman cruiser tore the bow clean off
another destroyer, the resulting explosion sending the rest of the ship
careening off course and towards the planet's upper atmosphere.

Cory was down to ten
Intruders now; one of her wingmates had been destroyed by AA fire from the
cruiser they'd been approaching and one had been the victim of a lucky
high-deflection shot by a Priman fighter that had been blown to bits an instant
later by one of Merritt's Talon fighters.

"Ready,"
she called on the frequency.  They were almost at the launch point; the spot
where they were too close for the Priman ship to be able to evade the incoming
torpedoes.  Finally, mercifully, the countdown reached zero. 
"Launch!" she called, somewhat unnecessarily since all the Intruders
were sync'ed to the same timer.  Ten Quick Strike light torpedoes leapt from
their hardpoints on the bellies of the Intruders, protected until that point by
being nestled in between the powerful engines of the big attack fighters.

They streaked
through space towards the cruiser, which was already beginning an ineffective
turn to port.  The torpedoes piled in, eight of them in total ramming into the
engines one after another.  The other two barely missed, passing down the
stricken ship's flanks and off past her bow.  The ship's captain had avoided
letting the torpedoes stitch a line down her flank, but instead had allowed the
majority of them to hit his ship's engines.  The Priman cruiser started to
spin, the rotation of the turn they'd started continuing as they lost control
of the ship and were unable to correct for it.  The rear spun around the long
axis, putting the ship in a slow but helpless flat spin as it drifted
helplessly off.

"Gotcha,"
Cory said to herself triumphantly.  Her celebration was cut short a second
later as another of her Intruders died as as result of Priman fighters.  Joy
turned to rage, and she vowed to exterminate every last Priman that defiled the
space around her.

"Warbirds!"
she yelled to her squadron.  "Form up on me.  We're going to help
Commander Elder take out these Priman fighters." 

"We've lost
another ship?" Captain Vol said incredulously to his sensor officer.  He'd
watched the sensor feeds as the swarm of torpedoes from the Confed Intruders
had crippled the vessel.  "Why are our fighters not wiping them out?"

"Unknown,"
the officer replied neutrally.  "The enemy formation is down six attack
ships and six fighters," he offered by way of consolation.

"I don't care
about the attack ships any more," Vol countered.  "They've fired
their ordnance; they're not a primary threat at this point unless they try to
strafe our hull."

He was about to give
another command when a thunderous impact rocked his ship.  It sounded like a
thunderstorm in the passageways, and the shock wave that ran through the bridge
almost knocked him out of his seat.  It took a moment to regain his senses, and
he was finally able to sort out the scene around him.

His ship had taken
some sort of direct hit, most likely followed by a secondary explosion.  He saw
damage indicators for the entire starboard side of his vessel, and at least one
member of his bridge crew was on the ground where they'd landed after the
impact had sent them sprawling.  He peered through the haze, which was
occasionally lit by arcs from shorted energy conduits, and saw Representative
Ravine assuming the station of the assistant helm operator, the officer in
question flat on the decking either unconscious or dead.  Ravine turned to him
and nodded, then started working the panel under the instructions of the
helmsman.
 If she survived to rise to become Commander
, Vol thought,
she
just might go very far
.

If Majestic hadn't
been equipped with the inertial compensators that damped down motion and
inertia to those aboard, everyone would probably have long since vomited up
everything they'd eaten in the last two days.  Majestic was constantly
spinning, climbing, dodging and rolling as she uncovered her laser batteries or
torpedo tubes to fire on the Primans, then offered her thickly armored keel as
the enemy fire poured in.  A track of her course on the tactical plot would
have looked like a child's random scribbles, such was her need to stay moving
and never show the same spot of hull for long.