The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible (36 page)

Even though his ships had taken relatively few hits, system failure reports rippled across Geary’s display. Hell-lance batteries on some ships, fire control on others, here and there shields losing coverage. Another light cruiser was scrambling to get back to the formation, having apparently missed his last command, and wasn’t reporting current status, so
Strike
had probably suffered a comm failure.

“If they aim to ram
Invincible
 . . .” Desjani cautioned.

“Even her armor won’t save her. I know.” Geary tapped a combination of ships to talk to. “Captain Armus, and commanding officers of
Dreadnaught
,
Orion
,
Dependable
,
Conqueror
,
Relentless
,
Reprisal
,
Superb
, and
Splendid
. We assess that the enigmas intend to ram our capital ships, and that
Invincible
will be a focus for their attack on your formation. Watch for enigma ships on collision courses with yourselves and
Invincible
, and ensure neither they nor any large pieces of them get through. Captain Armus, you are to take necessary action to deal with enigma ramming tactics to the best of your ability and ensure that every ship in your formation is on guard for enemy ships aiming for collisions with battle-ships, auxiliaries, and assault transports.”

The enigmas were accelerating again, trying to pull past the point where the path of Geary’s pursuit force would swing through their formation. He watched the point of contact slide farther and farther back, wondering if the enigmas would manage to slip past completely. “All units, hit them in the rear as we make contact. Watch for mines dropped in the wake of the enigma ships.” Using mines that way would be a tactic of desperation but might still cripple some of Geary’s ships if the enigmas got lucky.

The pursuit formation whipped up and across the back of the enigma formation, Alliance missiles and hell-lance fire slamming into the sterns of the enigma warships still accelerating toward the main body of the Alliance fleet. Geary, who had tried to hit the front of the enigma formation, realized that the relative motion, which had instead brought the formations together like this, had spared his own ships a lot of damage. The enigma ships were all stern-on to their attackers, unable to employ most of their weapons. The main propulsion of the enigma warships were also exposed to the Alliance fire, taking damage that might otherwise have been met by hull armor.

“All units immediate execute come starboard five zero degrees, down one zero degrees, accelerate to point one five light speed.” As the pursuit swung back and down again, Geary realized that he couldn’t catch the enigmas once more until after they had reached the main body. The enemy had used their superior acceleration to speed out of reach for now.

But in the wake of the enigma formation, another twenty-three enemy ships drifted, or had spun off out of control or had blown up into clouds of debris, and so far Alliance losses had been minimal.

Desjani shook her head. “Admiral, you’re asking a lot of Captain Armus.”

“I’m aware that Captain Armus is not distinguished by flexibility or quickness,” Geary said, hearing the harshness in his voice. “But he is steady.”

The spider-wolf ships had kept rising a little higher above the plane of the star system and the combatants, then leveled out heading toward the star and the inner planets. Their position would give them a box seat for the rest of the battle, taking them out of any risk of further contact with the enigmas.

The main body of the Alliance forces was almost directly ahead of Geary’s pursuit force, between them the enigma formation, which was rapidly closing on the main body and slowly pulling away from Geary’s ships.

“Contact between main body and enigma formation in twenty-five—” Lieutenant Castries’s voice broke off. “Recalculating. Main body is braking.”

“Braking?” Desjani asked in disbelieving tones. “They have so much trouble getting up to speed, and he’s braking?”

Geary watched his display, understanding dawning. “You’re thinking like a battle cruiser commander. Armus is a battleship captain. He wants the best opportunity to make the firepower of his battleships count, and that means getting the meeting velocity down to less than point two light speed.”

“But when you’re dealing an enemy who wants to ram you—”

“Tanya, he can’t dodge them. Not with those battleships and
Invincible
. And look what he’s doing with the auxiliaries and the assault transports.” Those ships had swung back, taking position behind a wall of combatants, which had compressed down, leaving relatively little space between them. “He knows he needs to blow away anything coming at him.”

“This is way too much like the tactics you told us not to use. Head-to-head, firepower-versus-firepower, no finesse, no fancy maneuvering.”

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Tanya.”

She started to say something else, then an expression of astonishment mixed with awe came over her. “You knew. You knew that you would need Armus now in just this way. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. It was a guess. A lucky guess.”

“Sure.” Desjani made a religious gesture of thanks. “You didn’t feel any hints or inspiration. Sure.”

He shook his head, not answering, knowing that the legend of Black Jack left little room for luck, instead attributing success to the favor of powers far beyond human.

Well, maybe that was another word for luck.

“Ten minutes to enigma contact with main body,” Lieutenant Castries said.

The ships of the main body had stopped braking, turning to face the oncoming enemy bow on, where armor, shields, and weapons were thickest. Geary wanted to call the shots, literally call them, but the main body was too far away for that. He had to depend on Captain Armus’s choosing the right moments to fire.

With the naked eye, he might have been able to see at best a curiously regular lattice of bright objects ahead, where the main body of the fleet came onward. On his display, Geary could see every ship plainly identified. Directly before
Invincible
, in a small diamond formation,
Dreadnaught
,
Orion
,
Dependable
, and
Conqueror
served as a shield for the captured Kick ship and the four battleships mated to it for towing. Watching them, Geary knew with a grim certainty that this time Jane Geary would hold her position just as doggedly as any bear-cow could.

The enigma formation had re-formed into a flat wedge, the broad side facing the center of Armus’s force, as if aiming to slice the human formation in half.

Desjani’s lips were moving in silent prayer, but her expression held confidence.

Geary kept his eyes on his display, knowing as the last minutes counted down that whatever had happened had already taken place. He would see it all too late to do anything but watch.

Bare moments before the two forces collided, specter missiles leaped from every human warship, racing to meet their targets as hell lances fired in terrible volleys; on the heels of the hell lances, masses of grapeshot filled space before the human warships.

The barrage had been perfectly coordinated. Missiles and hell lances struck almost simultaneously, followed within less than a second by the ball bearings of the grapeshot field. Instead of a series of hard blows, a single mighty blow struck all at once.

Geary heard someone on
Dauntless
’s bridge gasp as the region of space just before the main body of the fleet lit up with titanic bursts of energy, the enigma ships following behind the front of their formation running right into the debris and unleashed energy of the weapons and power cores detonating among the leading enigma ships.

More bursts of energy sparkled among the human warships as pieces of debris slammed into their shields and armor.
Dreadnaught
jerked under multiple hits flaring on her bow,
Orion
staggered,
Dependable
fell off under hammerblows to one side of her bow, and for one heart-stopping moment,
Conqueror
looked like she had exploded. Then, as the fleet’s sensors peered beneath that flash of light, and status reports came in, Geary realized that a wave of dense but tiny debris had struck
Conqueror
’s shields, generating that terrifying outburst but not getting through to seriously damage the battleship.

More hits on
Superb
, and on
Splendid
, helplessly connected to
Invincible
. And then a huge blast as something substantial made it through and slammed into the immensely thick armor on
Invincible
’s bow.

As Armus’s formation swept clear of the debris, it could be seen that
Invincible
now bore a substantial crater on her bow. But she was otherwise intact.

“I’ll be damned,” Desjani whispered. “I can’t believe it survived that. An
Invincible
that lived up to the name.”

The auxiliaries and assault transports were rushing ahead, or at least rushing as best they could, to be enfolded among the battleships again, while the heavy cruisers swiftly pivoted and faced the enigmas who had passed through their formation. The battleships began slowly swinging upward by the front edge of the formation, like a plate tilting up slowly to face in another direction, where the enigmas were now to be found.

The enigmas . . . Geary breathed a prayer of his own. Roughly one hundred and sixty enigma ships had met Armus’s formation head-on. Fewer than eighty were still in motion, sweeping around behind the main body and—“What the hell.”

“They’re breaking up their formation,” Desjani said.

In an instant, he knew why. “All units in the pursuit force, immediate execute you are free to maneuver. The enigma force is no longer concentrating on defeating our fleet and is instead scattering to get units past us so they can attack other targets in this star system. Operate independently to engage any enigma warship you can get within weapons range of. I repeat, all units in the pursuit force, maneuver independently now and get every enigma you can.”

Desjani was already rapping out orders to jolt
Dauntless
onto a new vector aimed toward an intercept with a cluster of enigma warships that hadn’t yet separated much. “I agree that they’ve given up on trying to take us out, but how do you know they aren’t scattering to escape to the jump point?” she asked a moment later.

“If they wanted to run, they could have just kept going in formation. The reason for scattering like that is to make it damn near impossible for us to stop all of them from getting to targets like the hypernet gate. Not the complete victory they wanted, but it would still cost us something we want and need.”

“If our main-body formation disperses, too—”

“No! Then some of the enigma ships might try for the assault transports and auxiliaries!”

On his display, the pursuit-force formation looked as if it, too, had exploded, ships hurtling outward on hundreds of vectors.

Geary swept his gaze across the rest of the display, taking in both the likely targets of the surviving enigmas and the three small Syndic or former Syndic flotillas. He hadn’t called any of those possibly friendly/probably neutral forces yet, but now he punched in the right circuit for such a message. “All armed forces in the Midway Star System, this is Admiral Geary. The enigma ships have broken formation and will be heading for targets within this star system. We will stop all that we can, but you must also intercept and engage anything that gets past us. The enigmas will ram targets if all other methods of attack fail. Do not, repeat not, attempt to engage the six ovoid ships that accompanied my fleet. They are neutral in this fight and allies of humanity.” That was perhaps strongly overstating the spider-wolf attitude toward humans, but now was no time to fine-tune adjectives.

“I welcome your assistance in defending this star system,” Geary continued. “To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”

The widely dispersed and still-spreading force of enigma warships was expanding like a puff of dandelion seeds hit by a strong gust of wind, every ship bending toward a course heading toward the star and the human targets there. Opposite them, and slightly closer to the star, the ships of Geary’s pursuit force had also burst outward, more numerous than the enigma vessels but with the harder task of stopping those who wanted to just get by them. Between them lay the main-body formation, and there Geary saw some hope. “The individual enigma ships can’t go too close to our main body, or they’ll get nailed by all the firepower there.”

“It’ll restrict the enigmas’ maneuvering options and help us herd them a little,” Desjani agreed, her expression intent. “I’m giving you two targets, Lieutenant Yuon. I want them both.”

“Yes, Captain! Fire control systems are tracking the targets you’ve designated.”

“Engage the targets as soon as they get close enough,” Desjani ordered.

Geary couldn’t keep track of everything anymore as his display filled with hundreds of vectors rising and dropping around the mass of the main-body formation, hunters and hunted twisting, evading, and pouncing as they flashed by each other.
Dauntless
lashed out as she tore past a much smaller enigma ship, pounding it badly enough that the alien craft broke in two. Moments later, a second enigma ship was engaged, this one tumbling away only partially under control as two Alliance destroyers chased after it.