The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (27 page)

Dactari Space

A
bright flash appeared just beyond
the second moon of Dactar. One of the new Weiran shuttles, fitted with
experimental short-jump engines, moved into view from the dark side. A second
flash followed closely by a third announced two more scouts, drawing the full
attention of the roughly two hundred vessels guarding the Republic’s home
world. As half of them began to turn toward the new arrivals, the black of
space turned to a fireball as almost sixty flashes announced the arrival of
five Human carrier groups and assorted Midgaard warships.

At the rear
of their formation were the mass drivers, captured from the Dactari three years
ago during a failed attempt to either take Earth or destroy it.

At the
center of the Alliance formation sat the
Midway
with Dwight Young
buckled into one of the bridge chairs. He was completely buttoned up inside his
EVA suit to minimize distraction. His job was to hold a channel open with Hu
Gao and Caul, allowing Admiral Towers to coordinate the next phase of the
battle.

With his
Hothmoen implant, Dwight could maintain a channel with ships in distortion.
Something that even the Dactari logistics module couldn’t do. He simply had to
concentrate on keeping the link open to the two secondary task forces as they
approached.

Towers
watched the three-dimensional projection above the trace table, which was on
but unused in favor of the new technology. He activated the link to Dwight’s
implant. “Enemy is responding as projected. Current template is still in play,
but accelerate drop by five percent.”

Both Hu Gao
and Caul acknowledged.

By making
last-minute adjustments to the velocity of the incoming forces, Towers would be
able to maximize the initial damage to the enemy. The Dactari ships were a
little quicker than expected in rushing to meet Tower’s force.
I’d want to
engage us as fast as possible too,
he thought.
They can’t help but see
that we brought their mass drivers along with us.

The effect
of the planet-killing ships had been underestimated because more than a hundred
Dactari warships were now racing toward Towers’ little task force. In less than
five minutes, the enemy rail guns would be coming into effective range. Markers
were already showing inbound slugs of steel as captains took any chance to deal
damage to the Alliance invaders. 

“Still six
minutes to effective bug range,” the weapons officer advised.

Towers
would hold onto his Mosquitoes for longer than that. They were deadly weapons,
but they could be swatted down if you gave the enemy enough time. The trick was
to get in nice and close and turn a massive swarm lose on them. That way,
they’d overwhelm the enemy’s point defenses.

But it
meant advancing into enemy fire without launching for six more minutes – an
eternity in battle.

“Initiating
approach profile,” the helm reported. The fleet would begin a series of random
fluctuations in course and velocity, making it very difficult for the enemy to
achieve anything more than a lucky strike at this extreme range. As the two forces
drew closer, that difficulty would erode very quickly.

Towers
looked down at the event clock, running in the center of the trace table.
Two
more minutes…

More of the
Dactari ships were opening fire with their main batteries now. The first of
their rounds were now passing through the Alliance fleet and the
Midway
shuddered
as a projectile grazed the dorsal shielding  and tumbled up toward the
bridge.

The VDSA,
or very dense shield array, was designed for just this type of scenario. Rather
than one continuous sheet of shielding, the array was capable of providing a
field of overlapping shields, each currently standing at a thirty-degree angle
from the hull. When facing a frontal threat, the angled array bled off the
velocity of an incoming round and directed it away from the hull.

The two-hundred-kilo
slug quickly lost velocity as it ploughed through hundreds of small shield
segments, going from ten times the speed of sound to little more than a
thousand feet per second by the time it angled up toward the bridge.

Towers
forced his body to stand still as the huge slug bounced off the side of the
bridge shielding and hurtled away toward the
Bosporus
, now lacking the
kinetic energy needed to penetrate.

One
minute.

The
projectiles were invisible to the naked eye except for where they made contact.
“The
Heracles
and the
Nile
are both destroyed,” the tactical
officer announced. “
Kicking Horse, Wailuku
and
Leonidas
are
heavily damaged. They’re combat non-effective.”

Nelson
and his force had to endure nearly an hour of this,
Towers thought.
And he didn’t
have any way of stopping them until he sailed right into their midst.

The
Midway
shuddered again as the starboard side shielding deflected another heavy
round.

And then it
happened.

As the
defensive ships hurtled toward Towers’ force, the space on two adjacent flanks
suddenly erupted in terrible flares of plasma, smashing Dactari ships in a
swirling crossfire. From Towers’ perspective, Gao and Caul had brought their
two task forces out of distortion from port and from above, catching the enemy
in a maelstrom of plasma and gunnery.

More than
sixty of the enemy force had been destroyed by the drop wash and those who
remained now found themselves caught against two hostile forces. Each Alliance
leader had arrived with ten carrier groups as well as more than seventy
Midgaard ships.

And they
were close – very close.

Mosquitoes
began to eject from launchers, separating into sub-munitions almost
immediately. The enemy put out a hail of defensive fire, but they were on their
heels now, and the hundreds of warheads soon began penetrating shields,
stripping away sensors, shield emitters and point defenses.

The Dactari
ships that had lost their offensive weapons opted to become weapons themselves.
They weren’t fighting to add another planet to the Republic; they were fighting
to preserve their own home world and they accelerated toward the Alliance
vessels at top conventional speed.

One heavy
cruiser made it through the hail of sub-munitions and ordinance to strike the
Dan-no-
ura
.
Even though the Dactari ship had been beaten into
an inert lump by the time she struck, she was still more than one hundred sixty
thousand tons of inert lump. She struck the forward shielding with enough force
to tear the shield generators loose from their shock mounts. Within seconds,
the defenses failed entirely and the cruiser hammered through the forward
hangar doors, breaking into the huge central space and tumbling all the way to
the rear at near full velocity.

The Alliance
carrier was torn apart from the inside. Several secondary magazines were struck
and critical systems were crushed beyond repair. Key structural elements, the
very elements needed to survive the current punishment, were smashed in an
instant and the entire ship began to flex and buckle as though experiencing an
earthquake.

As the
remains of the Dactari cruiser reached the aft end of the weakened carrier, her
bulk struck the center support between the starboard and port recovery doors.
The incredibly strong frame was torn loose, along with the aft-most section of
the bridge deck and went tumbling out the back end of the ship to hurtle toward
two escorting frigates who were too slow to react.

The
Indus
and the
Zambezi
had been following the
Dan-no-
ura
,
as part of a swine formation. They were below and slightly to port of their
carrier in two successive layers of the formation, effectively putting them in
a descending line from the stern of the stricken ship. As the rear section of
the
Dan-no-
ura
was torn clear, the ventral
portion proved to be strongest and the combined mass of Dactari cruiser and
carrier’s stern rotated and broke loose at just the right angle to swing down
and smash the two trailing frigates.

A suicide
mission on the part of the Dactari, but the results spoke for themselves. They
had managed to smash four times their tonnage in the action.

Four other
ramming actions were attempted by the desperate defenders, but three were
against heavy Midgaard long ships and the massive vessels shifted nimbly out of
the way before matching course and acceleration to insert boarding parties into
their erstwhile attackers.

The fourth
managed a glancing blow against the carrier
Cape St. Vincent
, tearing
open the starboard side. The wound was almost deep enough to expose the hangar
deck and, though she was still operational, her main batteries were out of
commission and she retired from the line, moving off to set up a clear jump
back to Weirfall.

Of the
original response force of one hundred Republic ships, none remained in action.

Towers
re-activated his link to Dwight’s implants. “Fleet wide… phase three,” he said
simply.

Phase one
was the decoy force. The scouting shuttles had jumped first to get the enemy’s
attention, and then Towers had arrived with his temptingly small task force. He
knew he would draw off a large portion of the enemy defenses because he had the
mass driver ships, still carrying the asteroids harvested by the Dactari to
sterilize Earth.

The
Dactari, of all people, knew what those ships represented and they had deployed
half of their defensive force, the half nearest the threat, to deal with the
incursion.

That half
was now gone, thanks to phase two – the arrival of the two additional task
forces. The remaining enemy ships were scattered around the other side of the
world. There was nothing standing between those mass drivers and
Xo’Khov,
the capital of the Republic.

The Alliance vessels pushed in toward the planet, knowing
that the enemy would now rush into their guns in small desperate squadrons
rather than waiting to consolidate into a larger, more potent force. Every
single defender threw their vessel into a suicidal attempt to destroy the mass
drivers that might launch an attack on the surface at any moment.

“You have
to admire their courage,” Captain Hunter said in a low voice.

“We’d do
the same,” Towers replied. “And we have. Remember the blue fleet, three years
ago?”

The UN
fleet had stood and died between Earth and the enemy. They had held the Dactari
invasion off long enough for the
real
Chinese and NATO fleets, under Gao
and Towers, to return from  a distortion flight through the asteroid belt.
Those asteroids, released as plasma on dropout, had hammered the enemy shortly
after the arrival of Harry Young and his new Midgaard friends.

Though
Towers had little use for the UN as a political entity, the men and women
manning their antiquated ships had gone willingly to their deaths, knowing they
were preserving freedom for their people. Men and women from dozens of nations
had fought and died in ships left over from the first war, now a decade past.

And they
had helped to preserve more than just freedom. The arrival of the mass drivers
and their light escort, shortly after the retreat of the main Dactari force,
had proven that the enemy were ready to destroy all life on the planet should
the ground invasion fail.

They had
passed through the same asteroid belt, but they had been harvesting asteroids
that, if used, would have been enough to plunge the planet into low light
conditions for centuries. Interrogation of those crews, stranded by their own
fleet, became extremely vigorous. Few survived the process.

Now that
those mass drivers were approaching Dactar, the planet’s defenders threw
everything they had into a desperate attempt to save their world.

Hunter
nodded. “Almost a case of history repeating itself, only this time…” He
suddenly raised a hand to shield his eyes as a sharp shadow of a glazing
support washed across his face, and then disappeared as the automatic window
shading activated.

“Distortion
alert!” tactical announced. “Multiple inbounds directly to starboard.
Signatures confirm that this is the previous inbound group.”

R
eis
’ tail jabbed forward in an
atavistic, subconscious gesture of attack as he watched the tumbling, scorched
debris of the Alliance ships. That should take care of the primary objective,
the destruction of the mass drivers. Nothing remained now but to damage the
enemy as much as possible, buying time for the remaining defense forces to
consolidate and join the attack.

“Flota, the
mass drivers are still operational,” Rus, the new second, reported.

Hells
and purgatories!
Reis
turned to look at the blinking icons in the central holo.
How is this
possible?
Sure enough, the ships were in a new location. They would have
had to move at top speed in the last ten minutes, far more drastically than any
other ship. He had stopped his vessels ten minutes out from the battle and
retrieved the latest tactical updates from forces already in contact.