Hegemony (18 page)

The question kept coming to her; what were those ships? They massed like lance-ships, half a megaton each, and they accelerated like lance-ships. Their basic hull shape
looked
like lance-ships. But each enemy ship's firepower was equal to that of an assault-ship. It should have been an impossible combination, except that it was obviously real.

"Muir, get me a comm-link to Captain Meryl. Maybe he has something on these ships," Freya said.

"Captain Tralk," came Meryl's "voice." He was not bothering with a visual avatar. "What do you suggest we can accomplish with our current acceleration? We will make the intercept, if at all, well after the current engagement is done."

"We're trying to add one more factor to the mix, Captain Meryl," said Freya. "I would welcome any ideas as to what else we can do. We're lasing them as well; it's not much but it might degrade their sensors somewhat."

"I don't believe there
is
anything we can do, Captain Tralk. But this acceleration is running down our already depleted reaction mass."

Freya was silent. The bitter fact was that Meryl was right. The swift-ships had burned hard to keep up with, and away from, the lance-ships; reaction mass reserves were getting quite low. There was still more than enough to make this intercept; the lance-ships and the swift-ships weren't on radically divergent vectors. But there was no quick way to refuel in this system; there was no readily available source of refined carbon reaction mass, and her little ships lacked the processing gear to refine "raw" carbon taken from an asteroid. She could find an icy asteroid and take on water as reaction mass, but that was a distant second best. And the current burn was running down the remaining reaction mass.

And yet, there
might
be something that could be done. Briefly, Freya cursed the earlier decision that now placed the two swift-ships so far from the enemy lance-ships, but it was too late to second guess now. The one thing that was certain was that she could not influence the battle from her current position. She did not know how the engagement would end, except that it would be over in a few more minutes.
Conquering Sun
might be badly damaged; the enemy lance-ships might be. It was her job to be in position to deal with it. If only she had stayed closer... but there was no time for useless might-have-beens.

"Maintain acceleration on this vector," Freya said.

(Acting) Wave Leader Alekzandra Neel checked the telemetry data of her wave. First Wave had five interceptors left. Two of them, including hers, were slightly damaged by being caught at the edges of the focus areas of enemy x-ray lasers.

The intercept with the enemy lance-ships was coming up fast; closure rate was over six thousand kilometers per second; range was just over a million kilometers. Most of that closure rate was the target's base vector, but that didn't matter; fifty seconds left.

She opened a comm-link to Third Wave Leader.

"Third Lead, this is First Lead; how do you want to split the targeting?"

"Where's Handric?" came the response.

"His 'ceptor is gone. I hope he linked back to the
'Sun.
I'm acting Wave Leader."

"Roger, First Lead. We're down to four. They're going to expect us to aim one wave at each ship, so let's disappoint them. I'm going to keep my wave together till we're close; I expect a last-ditch defensive launch from the targets. Then I'm going to send two of my 'ceptors at the lead ship and two at the trailing one. I suggest you do the same; three and two, but don't split up too early.

"Roger, Third Lead," said Zandy. "That sounds like a plan."

"First Wave," she sent, "I'm assigning your targets. We have to hit both ships to shut down the lasers boosting the enemy 'ceptors. Split up and come in on a... radial dispersion; Pattern Beta-Nine... Aim for about a thousand klicks." That was very close; there would be a severe danger from enemy secondary laser arrays; the engagement time would be too short for beams to burn through bow-shields, but if the enemy's secondary arrays were used in pulse mode, and managed to hit, then a properly focused pulse would blast an interceptor to shrapnel.

Zandy went on, "Stay close till we're past their next defensive salvo. Never mind maneuvering against the enemy 'ceptors; deploy all remaining anti-'ceptor warheads to saturate the area; don't go for a kill, just blind them and get past them. We need to get our anti-ship warheads into range.

"Third Wave will be splitting up with us, but we'll be coming in so close that enemy jamming's going to degrade communications, so we won't try for coordinated attacks." That was standard doctrine. God, was she missing something? Was this going to be enough?

"Once you're past the enemy's defensive salvo, execute your own attacks..." She could have done that better, she knew.

"Good hunting," she added, sounding uncertain in her own mind. Maybe she should say more, or should have said less... Her first orders as Wave Leader... and probably her last.

Killing those lance-ships was more important than surviving. She didn't know if the
Conquering Sun
could defend against thirty-six enemy interceptors. If First and Third Waves killed these lance-ships, the
Conquering Sun
wouldn't have to.

There was no more time. The lance-ships were launching a last ditch salvo of defensive interceptors; only six between the two enemy ships. It was a point blank attempt to stop her attack, but the enemy should have been able to launch twelve, using the beams left free from their last defensive salvo; the enemy interceptors that had survived trying to stop her salvo had been abandoned, their pilots probably linked back to their mother ships. Why only six? she wondered. But there was no time to think about it.

Zandy plotted out her attack, launching sensor drones and pre-targeting her warheads. She had to get these warheads in. She briefly considered detonating the warheads while they were still attached to the interceptor. It would be suicide, of course, but would it be more likely to score a kill? No. It would give the enemy only one target to deal with, instead of half a dozen if she let the anti-ship warheads spread out.

Six enemy interceptors were just seconds away now, and the enemy lance-ships just a few second farther. This was going to be tricky.

Blinding lasers were on her now; her sensors showed nothing but a searing glare of laser energy. Sensor drones were feeding her data, but they were being burned out, going dark one after the other. She was still feeding data to the rest of her wave, pumping it out in radio, making her interceptor a beacon for the enemy's detectors. It barely mattered.

She was at full power, pouring fission fuel into the drive at an unsustainable rate; together with laser power she was pushing ninety gees of acceleration, slewing the interceptor in a chaotic spiral, leaving and reacquiring the beam almost at random. She had the bow-shields and the drive angled as far as she could, trying to keep the shields interposed and still manage the evasive maneuvers. The integrity of the 'ceptor was suffering; some of the systems weren't meant to sustain ninety gees.

Seconds were a long time, she thought. Somehow it was all happening slowly, just like it had in the simulation. There was lots of time to think in a second. She tasked all eight of her remaining anti-interceptor warheads and launched them. The interceptor was at ninety-two gees now, and warning alarms were flashing in her mind.

The defensive wave reached her and she detonated her anti-interceptor warheads early, trying to use the flash of the nuclear detonations to blind enemy sensors. That mattered more now than whether the bomb-pumped laser pulses generated by the detonations managed to kill one of the enemy 'ceptors.

Intercept. Hundreds of nuclear warheads detonated; her wave had launched all their remaining anti-'ceptor warheads. The enemy 'ceptors were loaded with nothing but, and had dropped two dozen each.

Radio sensors went blind from the bursts of static pumped out by the nukes. Damage warnings bloomed and flared like fireworks. She ignored them, launching her six anti-ship warheads. Still alive, she thought.

She flashed through the effective range of her anti-ship warheads at more than six thousand one hundred kilometers per second, relative. She was aiming for a point less than a thousand kilometers from the lance-ships. Her wave, whatever was left of it, was aiming at points in a circle around the ships, making them spread their defensive fire as wide as possible.

She had less than two seconds to fire. She was utterly blind. She triggered her warheads. Only the crash of static though her radio detectors told her that warheads were detonating.

Silence. Zandy tried to do a status check. Damage reports almost overwhelmed her. The 'ceptor was tumbling slowly. The reflector ring was gone; external sensors were melted to slag. The bow-shield was gone totally; structural integrity was compromised. The entire main drive was down; burned out by too much thrust. She tried to find out what still worked. Some of the maneuver drives still worked, and she fired them to stop the tumble as best she could.

There was a single salvo of senor drones left, and the backup communications system was mostly intact. She launched one drone; the others were jammed in their launch tubes. At least she could see, now. Behind her was a cloud of high temperature plasma and debris. She could not see details. One lance-ship gone? Both? No way to tell. No sign of the other interceptors.

She needed a link to the
Conquering Sun
. She needed to get out of this dead interceptor, before the power supply died and took the neural net, and her daemon, with it. Communications worked, so she coded a signal. It took long seconds to find the power to send it. If the
'Sun
could establish a comm-link with her, she could get out.

There was a reply from the
Conquering Sun
; they were putting a comm laser on her, but there was too much interference to establish the link. That meant that at least one of the enemy ships was still alive, putting out blinding lasers and jamming communications. Zandy could feel the intermittent flicker of
Conquering Sun's
comm laser on her hull, but the link was elusive. She was still tumbling slowly, and there was so much interference; enemy lasers were blinding the
Conquering Sun
, drowning out Zandy's signal. Power was fading fast; her own comm laser was draining the limited power she had left, but there was no choice. She had to establish a hyper-bandwidth link to the
Conquering Sun
.

For a moment, she picked up the signal, tried to lock on to it, almost had it... then the signal from the assault-ship was gone.

Freya watched the end. The
Conquering Sun
's interceptor wave touched the lance-ships, and the point of the intercept was picked out by a sparkle and radio crackle of nuclear detonations. One of the lance-ships reeled, vomiting vapor and debris. Then it was gone in a ball of expanding plasma. Its singularity reactor had failed, Freya thought; the femto-singularity had been flooded with matter, and, for a fraction of a second before it had collapsed, it had flashed out a burst of energy equal to a large fusion bomb.

Freya cheered silently, but there wasn't much time. Half of the enemy's salvo of interceptors went dead, out of power, and still too far to finish the attack on internal fission fuel. But the other lance-ship was still alive, and still powering interceptors, including some of the orphans of the dead lance-ship. Freya locked sensors on to the salvo; there were still two dozen enemy interceptors headed at the
Conquering Sun.
Less than a minute later, the enemy salvo reached the
Conquering Sun
.

Conquering Sun
launched defensive interceptors, but her lasers were overheated. She could not power a full salvo of two dozen. Twelve defensive interceptors flashed out.

The
Conquering Sun's
drive lit; a bright violet spike of nuclear fire. She was swinging her stern at the enemy, using the drive to blind them, spraying them with radiation. It was a radical maneuver; her bow-shields would be out of line to protect her, but it might work.

From almost three million kilometers away, Freya watched the intercept.
Ice Knife
's sensors could see it all clearly, but everything she was seeing was ten seconds old, she knew. In fact, it was already over.

Freya saw that the enemy interceptors were coming in,
had
come in, in multiple clusters, three groups of eight; that would cost them up-front firepower, but give them more flexibility. They were taking the assault-ship's defensive power seriously.

There was another ripple of nuclear flashes as the
Conquering Sun's
defensive interceptors fired, and then, a few second later, the detonation of the first of the enemy interceptors' anti-ship warheads.

For a fraction of a second it looked as if the
Conquering Sun
had made it; there might have been damage from x-ray laser hits, but the assault-ship was huge and well armored. Then came a second burst of detonations as the second enemy interceptor group fired. And then the stern of the
Conquering Sun
exploded. The entire kilometer-and-a-quarter long assault-ship lurched.