The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible (16 page)

Badaya had two battle cruisers left in good fighting shape, and now
Inspire
and
Formidable
swung away from the rest of his formation, twisting around to come at the Kick armada.

Geary weighed everything: Tulev coming around in a wide arc that took up large amounts of distance and time, his own subformation doing another swing up and over that would take too long, Badaya altering course to head directly away from the oncoming enemy and gain as much time as possible before being overtaken, and the eight battleships on the other side of the enemy from Tulev and Geary trying to claw their way back to Badaya, the entire battle heading upward from the plane of the star system. He ran some hasty maneuvers through the combat systems, coming up with an answer that was desperate but doable. “
Dependable
,
Conqueror
, this is Admiral Geary. Proceed at best speed on an intercept with the enemy.”

Two light-minutes distant, the two battleships would turn and accelerate, leaving behind their much more heavily damaged comrades. That might distract the bear-cows, but Geary didn’t think so. The important thing now was to hit that armada with everything. “Captain Tulev, I am assuming maneuvering control of your subformation.”

No time to run this through the systems, no time to figure out the ever-shifting time delays and distances. He had to depend upon his own skills, his own experience, and the unmatched ability of the human brain to handle this kind of puzzle on the fly. “Captain Badaya, detach all of your escorts at time one seven, order them onto an intercept with the enemy formation at point one five light speed.”

Desjani had noticed the moves, frowning at her display. “What are you doing?”

“Bringing a hammer down. If I don’t, we lose all of the damaged ships and undamaged auxiliaries in Badaya’s formation.” Besides
Incredible
,
Titan
, and
Illustrious
, that included
Kupua
,
Alchemist
,
Cyclops
, two heavy cruisers, and several light cruisers and destroyers.

Inspire
and
Formidable
, moving too fast for the bear-cows to target well, slashed at the enemy but didn’t knock out any warships.

“Captain Duellos,” Geary ordered, “coordinate the movements of
Inspire
and
Formidable
with
Dependable
and
Conqueror
. Make your next firing run in conjunction with them.”

Desjani’s eyes darted about her display. “You’ve got us all coming in together. We’ll hit that armada almost simultaneously. Will that be enough?”

“It had better be.” His gaze swept from place to place on his display. Badaya’s core of damaged ships still going almost straight up, Badaya’s cruisers and destroyers braking to fall behind their comrades and facing the oncoming enemy, the bear-cow armada curving in from the right and below to catch Badaya, Tulev swinging in a wide arc that ended where the Kicks would be, Geary’s own subformation coming over the top of its own curve and steadying out to aim slightly upward at the Kicks, the small force under Duellos on the other side, also climbing but from the left of the enemy. “All units, we need to break their charge. Press your attacks and employ kinetic projectiles against the enemy formation as you close to contact.”

“If anything will make them turn, that will,” Desjani said.

“If they don’t turn, and we hit them with that many rocks, they won’t make it to Badaya.” How badly did the enemy commander want the crippled human warships with Badaya? Did bear-cows suffer from the target fixation that could drive human combatants to fly right into obstacles ignored in their total focus on the objective?

“You know,” Desjani remarked calmly as the several groups of ships rushed toward contact, “the Kicks haven’t taken one important fact into account.”

“What’s that?” Geary asked, not taking his eyes from his display.

“They don’t know how crazy humans can be. If we were sane, we’d be running. Badaya’s formation would have scattered. They’d be able to chase us down and smash us. But we’re crazy, so instead we’re going to hold together and blow their butts off.”

Geary smiled, watching Badaya’s cruisers and destroyers volleying kinetic projectiles at the enemy.

The bear-cow ships shifted positions slightly, trying to dodge the rain of rocks. They probably would have succeeded, because no matter how many rocks there were, space was wide, but Tulev was coming in now as well, hurling rocks ahead of his ships, catching the bear-cows in a cross fire, and then Duellos’s small formation was tossing out rocks as well.

“Here we go,” Desjani said, as the combat systems in Geary’s subformation also began launching kinetic projectiles, so that rocks came at the bear-cows from front, sides, and a bit to the rear.

The last seconds were gone as everything came together, the Kick armada trying to evade without breaking from its track on Badaya’s crippled ships. The bear-cow commander had compromised, Geary realized in the instant before contact, trying to both continue pursuit and evade the human strike. It was the kind of compromise, the failure to choose one way or the other, that had doomed countless human commanders.

He saw one of the five surviving superbattleships lurch under several impacts, its powerful shields overwhelmed by the force of the kinetic projectiles before a single BFR tore into it and blew it apart. Then Geary’s subformation was through the enemy armada again, tearing past with the other human warships in the immediate wake of the kinetic bombardment.

This time he felt few hits on
Dauntless
. Damage reports streamed in from Tulev’s subformation, from Duellos’s small task force, from the other ships in Geary’s subformation, from Badaya’s escorts. Geary took a sudden deep breath as he saw a dreaded symbol appear with names next to it.
No contact. Assessed destroyed. Brilliant.
A hard-luck ship since Captain Caligo had been arrested for conspiring with Captain Kila, but it was hard to believe that the battle cruiser was gone. Heavy cruisers
Emerald
and
Hoplon
. Light cruiser
Balestra
. Destroyers
Plumbatae
,
Bolo
,
Bangalore
, and
Morningstar
.

Not all of the destroyed human warships had been annihilated in the fractions of a second during exchanges of fire with the enemy, denying their crews any chance of escape. Some had survived, broken and helpless, long enough for their crews to take to the escape pods that now awaited rescue.

But the Kicks had paid for their stubborn stand. Even the superbattleships could only take so much, and the multiple firing passes coming close on each other right after the avalanche of kinetic projectiles had devastated the enemy armada. Two of the four surviving superbattleships were only drifting wrecks, a third crippled, with spider-wolf warships already swarming about it to administer the kill, and a fourth spinning away, trying to regain maneuvering control, its main propulsion units torn and mangled. The smaller bear-cow warships had been decimated, with maybe forty remaining, and those streaming frantically toward the jump point from which the enemy had come.

The shield wall had broken.

Geary slumped back, feeling no sense of triumph.

“We did it,” Desjani said, but her voice was subdued, not jubilant.

“Yeah.” He agreed with both her words and her tone of voice. “Isn’t peace great?”

“Feels a lot like war to me,” she said.

Geary roused himself. First priority, those escape pods that held survivors from his ships that had been destroyed in the battle. Many of those survivors would be injured and in need of medical care. “Second and Fifth Light Cruiser Squadrons, intercept and recover all escape pods. Notify me immediately if additional ships are required.” That took care of the most immediate need. All that remained was to order the fleet to re-form, prioritize damage control, get help to the surviving ships that needed it most to deal with their dead and wounded and their battle damage—

“Admiral,” Desjani said in a way that caught his attention.

The last surviving superbattleship had partially stabilized its motion, but now thrusters had ceased firing even though the huge warship was still rolling away uncontrollably.

“It’s a sitting duck,” Desjani said.

“Let the spider-wolves—” Geary began, then sat up straighter again. “It can’t run.”

“Will it self-destruct?” Desjani wondered.

“We haven’t seen any of them self-destruct yet, have we? And there haven’t been any—” He broke off speaking again, suddenly realizing something. “We haven’t seen any bear-cow escape craft leaving any of their ships. None from any of the ships we crippled and destroyed.”

“I guess they don’t see those as cost-effective. When you’ve got that many billions of worker bear-cows, why worry about saving a few here and there? The herd is still strong.” Desjani raised one finger to point. “But, Admiral, if they can’t, or won’t, destroy that superbattleship, it’s ours for the taking.”

A huge warship full of bear-cow technology, bear-cow survivors, bear-cow literature, bear-cow history, science, art . . .

“The taking won’t be easy,” Geary said.

But he knew they would have to try.

EIGHT

“TELL
them to leave it alone!” Geary said.

The images of General Charban and Emissary Rione, locked all this time in attempts to communicate with the spider-wolves, exchanged looks. “We’re not sure we have the means yet to tell them something like that,” Charban said diplomatically.

“Try. You’ve got the civilian experts down there working with you, right? All of you get that message across. We do not want that bear-cow warship destroyed. It is
ours
.”

Spider-wolf warships had clustered around the crippled superbattleship, but since the Kick vessel retained its shields, its armor, and its weapons, the spider-wolves were keeping at a safe distance, pinging shots futilely off the still-powerful defenses of the enemy.

Most of the spider-wolves, though, were harrying the surviving bear-cow warships still accelerating in a stampede for the jump point. It would be most of a day before the Kicks got there, even going hell-for-leather as they were, but the spider-wolves were making sure they kept going.

Ending his call to Charban and Rione, Geary sat back, rubbing his forehead. His eyes reluctantly went to his display to see the latest information. The human fleet was slowly drawing back together, licking its wounds, destroyers and light cruisers darting through the vast area of the recent battle to pick up escape pods carrying crew members from destroyed human warships. Geary hadn’t spotted any spider-wolf ships destroyed during the battle, leading to a rising bitterness in him, but when he replayed the last charge against the bear-cows, he saw that the spider-wolves had joined in, diving into the heart of the Kick armada to help break the enemy and losing several ships in the process. Small lifeboats from those destroyed spider-wolf ships had been scooped up by other spider-wolf craft almost as soon as they ejected.

But his first impression had been right. There had been no lifeboats or escape pods from any bear-cow warship.

Escape pods. He checked the status of recovery efforts on his fleet’s escape pods, seeing that the light cruisers ordered to carry out that task were well along at it. Except for—“Is there a spider-wolf ship picking up one of our escape pods?” He wasn’t sure what to feel. Gratitude? Outrage? Fear?

“The pod was heavily damaged,” Desjani said. “It’s off
Balestra
. Maybe the spider-wolves are seeing if it needs assistance.
Quarte
is on its way to that pod but still half an hour from pickup.”

“Get ahold of someone on that pod,” Geary ordered. “Let me know as soon as you do.”

Because of the distances involved, that meant nearly ten minutes of waiting before an image rendered jerky by damaged comm equipment on the pod finally appeared before Geary. He could see the interior of the pod, crowded with survivors from
Balestra
, both the survivors and the pod itself bearing wounds from the destruction of their light cruiser.

Some of the survivors drifted, too injured to act, while others flung themselves about the packed inside of the escape pod to patch up equipment and their fellows. Geary could see the emergency supply lockers open, their shelves already stripped of tools, medical supplies, and spare parts. The two rolls of duct tape that every escape pod carried as standard equipment were in use. A strip of duct tape already covered a patch on one wall, doubtless sealing a weak point or leak, and another band of tape was being used to help repair something inside an opened equipment panel. A corpsman, working frantically, was in the act of slapping duct tape over a chest wound on one sailor whose splinted arm was being bound up by another sailor.

At the air lock stood two shapes in space armor. Whereas the actual spider-wolves were incredibly repulsive to the human eye, their space armor resembled their ships in its smooth lines and beautiful engineering. The spider-wolves showed six limbs in the armor, but their appearance was otherwise concealed by the protective gear.

“This is Chief Petty Officer Madigan, combat systems, light cruiser
Balestra
,” a sailor with a bruise covering one side of his face reported. “The . . . the . . . aliens have boarded us, but haven’t done anything but watch. The situation in here is stabilized, but we need pickup soonest. Uh, senior officer aboard is Lieutenant Junior Grade Sidera, but she’s unconscious.”

Geary breathed a sigh of relief. “Chief Madigan, there’s a light cruiser on the way. Hang on. I think the spider-wolves came aboard to see if you needed assistance. I’ll get a battle cruiser over your way.” That was the fastest ship he could send with a large medical compartment and doctors aboard. It would take another several minutes for Chief Madigan to hear that reassurance, but he seemed to have the situation under control. “Good work. We’ll get you picked up soon.”

“
Dragon
,” Desjani said. “She’s the closest battle cruiser to them.”

He ordered
Dragon
into motion, then clenched his eyes shut, trying to refocus on other issues.

“What’s the name of the star?” Desjani asked. She looked tired, but relieved.
Dauntless
had taken damage, but aside from a few wounded had lost no crew members this time.

“I don’t know,” Geary said. “Why does it matter?”

“Ships died here, Admiral. Sailors died here. We should have a name for where they died.”

He closed his eyes again, embarrassed not to have thought of that. Part of him wanted a dark name, but another part said that this star marked the graves of dead humans and should reflect their sacrifice and courage. Something that said humans had placed their mark here, far beyond their own borders, fighting to save their comrades. “Is there a star named Honor?”

“Honor?” Desjani questioned, then checked the database. “No. That’s not a name . . . but you get to use any name you want, Admiral.”

“It’s for them,” he said.

“I understand.” She paused, then managed a smile. “It’s a good name to remember them by. Permission to enter the name Honor for this star in the fleet database.”

“Granted.”

Jane Geary had survived the charge she had led though
Dreadnaught
had suffered extensive damage. Captain Badaya, looking unusually subdued, had volunteered that Jane Geary had made that move on her own initiative while he was still trying to figure out how to save his other warships.
Orion
, already beaten up from fighting at Pandora, had been hammered again, but Commander Shen had, with considerable annoyance at the question, declared his ship still fit for battle.

The amount of damage inflicted on
Dreadnaught
,
Orion
,
Relentless
,
Reprisal
,
Superb
, and
Splendid
proved the old maxim that while battleships might take a while to get where they needed to go, once there they were amazingly hard to kill. Still, had the bear-cow commander peeled off even one of the superbattleships with some escorts and sent it after those six beat-up battleships, they probably wouldn’t have survived the fight.

Quarte
reached the damaged escape pod from
Balestra
, the two spider-wolves on the pod withdrawing into their own ship as the light cruiser approached, the spider-wolf ship then soaring off in a grand leap back to its fellows.
Dragon
was still twenty minutes from reaching both
Quarte
and the damaged pod, but was coming on fast.

Geary thought about medical personnel all over the fleet, not just on
Dragon
, struggling with a tidal wave of injured personnel, sick bays and hospitals filled with those in desperate need of care for their wounds. Nowadays if someone made it to a hospital they were unlikely to die no matter how bad their injuries, but even then sometimes not enough could be done. “How do they do it?” he wondered aloud. Desjani turned a questioning glance his way, for once not reading his mind. “Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, medics, all of them,” Geary explained. “Sometimes, no matter what they do, the people they’re trying to help still die. How do they keep going?”

She pondered that. “How do you keep going? Knowing that no matter how well you do, people will still die?”

That stung, yet he saw her logic. “I guess I think about how much worse things would be if I didn’t do everything I could.”

“Yeah. Works for me, too. Usually.”

Captain Smythe was once again proving his value, coordinating a huge amount of repair activity around the fleet, his engineers running on caffeine and chocolate to keep working (“The food of the gods,” in Smythe’s words. “When the old myths talked about nectar and ambrosia, they meant coffee and chocolate.”), the eight auxiliaries each mated with or closing on one of the most badly hurt warships.

Commander Lommand of
Titan
had offered his resignation, which Geary had declined along with an order to Lommand to use his considerable talents to get ships fixed up, including his own.

The fleet administrative system popped up another alert, explaining in dispassionate terms that available storage for dead personnel had been exceeded and recommending burials be undertaken.

As he read that last, Geary knew that if he threw anything at the display or punched it the blows would just go through the virtual information, leaving it unmarred. He was nonetheless tempted. “General Charban, Emissary Rione, we also need to know as quickly as possible,
after
we get across to the spider-wolves to lay off the last superbattleship, whether we can safely bury our dead in this star system.”

Rione looked away, but Charban nodded slowly. “I understand, Admiral.”

He undoubtedly did understand, Geary reflected. The ground forces had also often taken hideous casualties in the war, waging battles across entire worlds and devastating wide portions of those worlds in the process. How many soldiers had Charban lost in battle? How many times had those soldiers spent their lives, only to have the ground they had died for be abandoned with the next shift in strategy, or when the Alliance fleet was driven away and ground forces had to leave before Syndic warships rained death from orbit upon them?

Geary had slept through a century of that, while such sacrifices formed the men and women around him. Desjani would occasionally remind him, sometimes angrily, that he could not understand them even if they needed his reminders of the things their ancestors had believed in before the war warped those caught in it.

And now more of them had died in as vicious a fight as any during the war. He had managed to help them survive that war. Could he manage to ensure that these men and women survived peace?

“Admiral,” Rione called from the conference room aboard
Dauntless
where frantic attempts at communications with the spider-wolves continued, “we have gotten across to the people here that we will deal with the last superbattleship.”

“The people here?” It took him a moment to understand that. “You mean the spider-wolves?”

“Yes, Admiral.” Her voice took on a reproving cast. “We must think of them as people. Because they are people.”

“Exceptionally ugly people,” Desjani murmured.

He gave her a warning look before turning back to Rione’s image. “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

Rione’s smile was pained. “I understand how hard that will be. Believe me.”

“Make sure you and General Charban take some breaks. You’ve been at this continuously for hours now.” Once Rione’s image vanished, Geary bent to his display. He had to start moving ships toward the crippled superbattleship drifting through this star system, ensuring that the spider-wolves didn’t question the human claim to it.

Some of the Alliance warships had only been moving toward an intercept with the superbattleship for half an hour when another alert pulsed. Geary, still anticipating a massive act of self-destruction by the bear-cows trapped on their ship, jerked as if he had been bitten.

But there was no marker showing a spreading cloud of debris where the superbattleship had been. Instead, that ship remained, but oddly changed. “Now what?”

A portion of the crippled superbattleship had been torn outward, making Geary think for a moment that an internal explosion had ripped the warship, too small to destroy it but enough to blow off a large piece. But within seconds it was clear that the detached piece was under power and shaped like a smaller version of one of the bear-cow ships. Where it had rested, cradled mostly inside the superbattleship, a matching depression now showed.

“Escape craft,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Accelerating for the jump point.”

They had finally found an escape craft on a bear-cow ship. But only one? And configured for such speed and endurance? “Surely they don’t have the whole crew on that,” Geary said.

“No,” Desjani replied. “That would be impossible.”

The human ships were still too far from the superbattleship to intercept the escape ship, but spider-wolf warships were slewing about and leaping toward new prey.

“Do we want to warn them off that escape ship?” Desjani asked.

“I’m not sure we have time,” Geary said. Just the amount of time needed for a message to reach those spider-wolf ships was longer than it would take the first of them to achieve an intercept.

Desjani nodded in tight-lipped agreement. “I guess they’re going to blow the wreck now.”

“Maybe.” Geary frowned at his display. “That thing is big for an escape craft, but it’s still less than half the size of a destroyer.”