per second. That was not her only weapon, however. Like an eighteenth-century ship of the line, she possessed an impressive broadside, turret-mounted weapons that could fire in every direction except directly forward, where they were effectively blocked by the shield cap. By rotating ninety degrees along her line of flight, the Spirit of Confederation brought about two thirds of her broadside weapons to bear. With the enemy now just half a light second astern, the battleship began hammering away, pouring immense volumes of fire into the narrow corridor just ahead of the Turusch vessels.
Koenig turned his attention back to the last of the fighters still coming aboard.
“Come on, people,” he murmured, half aloud. “Come on! …”
Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn
Enforcer Radiant Severing
2023 hours, TFT
Tactician Emphatic Blossom watched the combat display, an emotion roughly equivalent to human anger beating behind its optical organs. A tentacle tip coiled and uncoiled reflexively, nervously. If it didn’t know better, if it had not felt the reassurance and calm emanating from the Mind Below, it would have had to assume that the Sh’daar didn’t trust it, didn’t trust the Turusch.
Abyssal whirlwinds! Emphatic Blossom at Dawn was a trained and experienced master tactician! It knew combat, knew how to lead an enemy into a trap, knew how to spring an ambush, knew how to hammer at the foe until nothing in the kill zone was left alive! The Sh’daar Seed’s orders of the past g’nyuu’m simply made no tactical sense whatsoever.
The Turusch fleet had been badly mangled by the enemy fighter attack, true … and there’d been a very real possibility that the Radiant Severing itself would be destroyed. That, however, was a part of combat, a part of war. Emphatic Blossom and every Turusch warrior on board the Severing was ready to sacrifice its life if that sacrifice would bring a decisive victory.
But no! The Seed had ordered, had demanded that the Turusch battle fleet abandon its prey, break orbit and withdraw toward deep space. And Emphatic Blossom had obeyed … as it must. The orders were from its own Mind Below, as inescapable, as relentless as Blossom’s own decisions.
And so the Turusch battle fleet had withdrawn, accelerating close to the speed of light, fleeing the battle.
And then the Sh’daar Seed had spoken again, giving new, and contradictory, orders. The Turusch fleet would turn around and return to the embattled planet, would launch fighters to go in ahead of the fleet and cause as much damage as possible, with the main body of the fleet arriving soon after.
Projectiles and particle beams would be fired into the region, timed to arrive just before the fighters appeared. And every enemy outpost on the target world would be deliberately obliterated, targeted by high-velocity masses aimed with mathematical precision at the locations of the alien surface outposts.
And that didn’t make sense to the Turusch tactician either. The Turusch had spent twelves of g’nyuu’m bombarding the principle enemy base and two others … but the intent had been to capture the humans, not kill them. Why change the point of the battle now?
The Sh’daar Seed, of course, knew what it was doing. Emphatic Blossom had to believe that, or its very existence, its role as master tactician, its very understanding of the cosmos all would be called into question.
But Blossom could not guess what their purpose was now, nor could it understand its role in the battle in these circumstances. As Radiant Severing and the other Turusch ships decelerated into the volume of space surrounding the target planet, sensors showed that the enemy fleet had already withdrawn, as Emphatic Blossom had more than half expected. On the planetary surface, seething, yellow seas of molten rock steamed beneath continent-sized hurricanes where the alien colonies had been.
An entire world rendered lifeless, useless to anyone. Why?…
Radiant Severing shuddered, the rock hull ringing with an impact against the defensive shields. One of the two largest of the enemy vessels had positioned itself at the rear of the human fleet, and was bombarding the Turusch battle fleet as it retreated.
“Threat!” Blossom’s Mind Above could be unpleasantly predictable. “Kill!”
“We can destroy that human vessel,” the Mind Here added. “We should … remind the humans of the risk they take in defying the Seed.”
The Mind Below seemed to consider this, weighing the options with a computer’s calculating efficiency. “Agreed. But do not pursue the enemy. The survivors should take the report of their defeat back to their homeworld.”
“Deploy all fighter fists!” The Mind Here commanded, its emotion as raw and as primitive as that of Mind Above. “Concentrate the full offensive fire of all vessels on that target!
Some thirty capital ships of the Turusch fleet adjusted their positions, then began firing at the distant enemy. Particle beams, fusion bolts, high-energy lasers, and kinetic-kill projectiles sleeted through emptiness.
And they began to find their target.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Outbound, Eta Boötis System
2025 hours, TFT
“The Spirit of Confederation reports she is taking very heavy fire, Admiral,” Hughes told him. “Damage to aft shields, damage to primary broadside weapons, damage to two of the three hab modules. Fire control is down.”
Koenig was watching the Confederation’s struggle on a secondary tactical display, which was relaying the camera view from a battle drone pacing the retreating ships. Straight-edged patches of blackness kept popping on and off along the battleship’s length, responding to incoming fire. One set of aft shields was flickering on and off alarmingly, threatening complete failure. Several sections of her long, thin hull had been wrecked by energies leaking through the shields. The damage was severe, but she continued to fire back.
White light pulsed, dazzlingly bright, as an incoming Turusch missile detonated in a sand cloud a hundred kilometers away.
“Comm,” Koenig ordered. “Patch me through to the Confederation’s CO.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A moment later, the image of Captain Paul Radniak appeared within the holodisplay field beside Koenig’s workstation. His face was worn, his uniform disheveled. Smoke wreathed through the image, which kept flickering on and off with sharp bursts of static as the battleship’s shields rose and fell, and as electromagnetic pulses from particle-beam hits and detonating nukes interfered with the signal.
“Yes, Admiral?”
“You’ve done what you can, Paul,” Koenig told him. “It looks like the bastards aren’t going to follow us.”
Radniak’s eyes flicked away as he checked a readout outside the range of the holo’s pick-up. “It looks like they’re sending fighters after us, Admiral.”
“Fighters we can handle. I recommend you ass-end it out of there.”
The Spirit of Confederation
