style="font-size:15px;"> “Escort Farragut moving to intercept,” Craig reported.
Koenig watched the battle developing. The enemy had more ships than the Confederation battlegroup, and a slight technological lead in such areas as gravitics, shields, and beam weaponry, but they’d been bloodied by the fighter strike earlier and were acting in an uncoordinated, almost sluggish manner.
The large vessel ahead—an asteroid, it appeared, partially hollowed out, given massive gravitic drives and mounted with weapons—was probably the enemy command ship. With more and more of the battlegroup’s weaponry concentrating on that one giant ship, it was possible that they were having trouble coordinating their fleet.
Gravitic shields blocked radio waves and lasercom beams. Typically, ships coordinated with one another in combat by flickering one section of their shields off and on while transmitting tightly packaged comm bursts precisely timed with the shield openings. Pile on enough firepower to keep the enemy’s shields up, and you kept him from communicating with other ships as well.
The Turusch fleet was attempting to rush the America … the largest vessel in the Confederation fleet. That’s what I would do, Koenig told himself. As more and more beams and missiles slammed against the Turusch command vessel’s shields, the enemy’s fleet organization became looser, less coherent.
But the enemy ships kept moving forward, sending waves of nuke-tipped missiles and Toad fighters out ahead of the lumbering capital ships.
Even disorganized, that swarm of Turusch ships would be able to overwhelm America’s defenses in fairly short order.
Koenig looked around, momentarily expecting Quintanilla to be there watching, criticizing. The operational orders issued by the Senate Military Directorate while the battlefleet was still gathering off Mars—several hundred megabytes’ worth of detailed instructions—had been very explicit. Koenig was not to risk the star carrier America. She was one of only six ships of her class, and the Military Directorate wanted to minimize the chances of her being lost or badly damaged. Those orders had directed Koenig, if the tactical situation warranted it, to take the America no closer than fifty AUs to Eta Boötis IV, and to direct the battle from there. At all costs, the America was to avoid direct ship-to-ship combat.
Sheer nonsense, of course, the appraisal of armchair admirals and politicians considering the possible course of a naval engagement from the comfort and security of their offices and conference rooms thirty-seven light years away. You could not direct a battle from four hundred light minutes away, not when the situation was over six and a half hours old by the time you received a status update transmission from the rest of the fleet, and with six and a half hours more before your orders crawled back to the fleet. Even worse, Koenig would actually have had to split his small fleet to ensure that America had combat support. If the Turusch detected America, caught her traveling alone, they could launch a long-range fighter strike or send a small detachment of warships to attack the lurking carrier.
Unsupported, the carrier wouldn’t have a chance in ten of survival.
And so Koenig had deliberately violated his orders. The phrase “if the tactical situation warranted” was his loophole, his way out. So far as Koenig was concerned, the tactical situation did not warrant either splitting his fleet or trying to run the show from over six light hours away. The phrase was, in fact, a cover-your-ass clause for the politicians; if America and her battlefleet were destroyed or suffered serious damage, the admirals and the Directorate senators could shrug and say, “Well, it wasn’t our fault. Koenig disobeyed orders.”
Pretty standard stuff. If the Confederation won and the Marines were successfully evacuated, the breach of orders would be quietly ignored. Otherwise …
Three hundred kilometers ahead, the escort Farragut had changed course, moving across America’s path to help shield the carrier from oncoming missile volleys. Two Turusch missiles struck the escort’s shields, the twin, silent flashes minute but dazzling on the CIC display screens.
But Confederation fire was hammering home among the Turusch ships as well. The Kinkaid continued to slam high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles into the suspected enemy command-control ship. America was cycling her spinal mount weapon as quickly as possible—firing about once each fifteen seconds—targeting the same Turusch asteroid ship. If they could just keep up the pressure, if they could keep the enemy command ship’s shields up …
“Farragut reports heavy damage,” Hughes reported. “She’s falling out of the fight.”
Koenig turned in his seat to check one of the monitors relaying visuals from a battlespace drone out ahead of the carrier. Farragut was a missile escort, small and fast with a bundle of twenty-four mamba launch tubes tunneling through the center of her forward shield cap, massing 2200 tons and carrying a crew of 190 men and 15 officers. The ugly little missile boats were designed to dash in close, loose a swarm of high-yield smart missiles in the merge with the enemy formation, and accelerate clear under high-G boost. On the display, the Farragut was barely making way, her drive fields dead; he could actually see her on the screen, which meant her gravitic shields were down or intermittent only, and a portion of her aft drive structure was a tangled mass of wreckage, glowing white-hot and trailing a stream of half-molten debris like streaming sparks in the night. Another missile struck the craft, the flash lighting up the display, a dazzling, single pulse of light, and as the glare faded, the Farragut reappeared, her drive section gone, the forward stem and shield cap tumbling end-over-end. Radiation scanners aboard the drone were pegging the readouts in CIC off the scale.
There was no sign of escape pods evacuating the hulk. Two hundred five men and women …
The missile boat’s skipper, Maria Hernandez, had been America’s Operations officer until she’d been promoted to captain and given command of the Farragut.
She’d also been a friend.
“Controller,” Koenig said.
“Yes, sir.” The controller was Commander Vincent Reigh, and he was responsible for directing all fighters and other secondary spacecraft operating in America’s battlespace—the voice who directed the fighters to their targets and who passed new orders to the fighter squadrons as the combat situation changed.
“Have all fighters concentrate on target …” He paused to read the code group off the tac display. “Target Charlie-Papa One.” Charlie because it was the probable enemy command ship, Papa for a planetoid converted into a warship, and One because it was the most massive vessel so far spotted within the enemy fleet.
“All fighters to target Charlie-Papa One, aye, aye, Admiral.”
Right now, most of America’s fighters had merged with the enemy fleet and passed through to the other side. There, they would decelerate, reform, and begin accelerating back through the enemy fleet, joining the five fighters coming out from Eta Boötis’s night side.
Silent detonations continued to pulse and strobe throughout the Turusch fleet, but more and more were concentrating on the enemy command vessel. So damned little was known about Turisch combat psychology, even after the disasters at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. If the carrier group could decapitate the enemy by taking out that Charlie-Papa … would that be enough to send the rest of them running?
White light filled heaven outside America’s shields, and the combat display broke up momentarily in static. “What’s our Trapper?”
“Transmission
