The Shattered Empire (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 2) (64 page)

Squadron Commander Fxuhkd looked at his sensor display.  He tried to identify the ship classes, but with the large number of human cargo ships pressed into service, it wasn't unexpected that he failed.  “Hail them, inform them to identify themselves and their cargo and destination.”  It would be good to get some additional supplies in, they were low on parts and equipment, and many of the systems on his new ship didn't work quite as well as they should.

“Squadron Commander, we are being hit with targeting sensors!” The sensor officer said.  “The ships, they are the enemy!”

***

Commander Boris Kaminsky grinned as the Nagyr-class battlecruiser
Roosevelt Forest
emerged from shadow space only five thousand kilometers from the Chxor squadron.  They had worried, initially, that they might arrive well outside energy weapons range, which was why they had a heavy contingent of Archer-class destroyers to augment their missile salvos. 
Almost perfect,
he thought with satisfaction,
at this range, there's no need to use missiles and to cap it all off, I'm in command, the only thing better would be if Forrest were here. 
Boris had transferred aboard and served as the Executive Officer since just after the Third Battle of Faraday, when the last XO had been killed in action.  In one of those bizarre accidents, Captain Alexi Norov, the commander of the
Roosevelt Forest,
had choked to death in his quarters while dining alone.  That left Boris as the senior officer.

“We have the enemy locked, sir,” Lieutenant Sing said, her voice nervous.  Boris could vaguely understand why.  They were bringing three Nagyr-class battlecruisers, three squadrons of Champion-class heavy cruisers, and four squadrons of destroyers against four Chxor dreadnoughts.  The engagement, even with surprise on their side, should have been nearly suicide.

Then again, Boris had led a flotilla of mining ships against a dreadnought squadron, so he wasn't terribly worried. 
At least I'm not back in the Centauri Confederation,
he thought,
though I wouldn't put the Chxor Empire much above that place. 
The Chxor were callous, cold, and viewed human life as expendable.  At least they had the excuse of being aliens, unlike the leaders of the Centauri Confederation.

Boris waited for the order.  Captain Gregor Malkoski had overall command.  The former Amalgamated Worlds Captain had made it expressly clear that as the commander, no one was to fire until he gave the order.  Boris didn't like his attitude, nor did he like the rumors about the man... or the way he had immediately started to try to win Boris over after his surprise promotion.  Still, Boris had survived under the cutthroat politics of the Centauri Confederation Fleet.  He knew how to hide his distaste... and that he needed to speak with the Baron as soon as possible regarding some of what he had heard.

That's for another time,
he thought, as the order finally came through, “Today, we kill Chxor.  
Open Fire!
” he roared.

The Nagyr battlecruisers mounted three heavy fusion beam mounts in three turrets.  The Champions mounted two in three turrets.  All together, over one hundred and forty directed fusion energy beams lanced out at the Chxor dreadnoughts from only five thousand kilometers.  The four dreadnoughts didn't have their defense screens online.  Their drives were at standby mode.  The only crewmen at full readiness were the shuttle crews, which meant when the beams ripped through the dreadnoughts armor, they died with their shuttles as opposed to dying elsewhere.

The fire of the destroyers was almost an afterthought as their lighter energy weapons raked the Chxor's escort cruisers.  The heavily armored cruisers were battered by the volume of energy weapons fire.  Two of them were completely gutted, reduced to empty hulks, their entire crews slaughtered in the torrent of fire.  All the rest were heavily damaged, their crews thrown off by the attack without warning.

Boris brought up imagery from the high resolution video.  He felt a grim satisfaction as he watched bodies tumble out of a rent in the hull of a dreadnought. 
Good optics on these,
he thought with satisfaction at the clear image.  He updated the targets from Captain Norov's feed and smiled as he settled back in his command chair, “Hit them again!”

***

Fleet Commander Krxil stared at his screens for a long moment.  He wanted to find some rational explanation for the complete destruction of Fxuhkd's squadron. 
I should have put a more capable commander there,
he thought.  Yet, even as he thought that, he couldn't say whether that would have changed anything.  The squadron was so far back, that the logical thing was to leave its systems on standby.

Yet obviously, the humans had planned for that assumption.  They had baited High Commander Chxarals' forces away from Delvar with their main force.  As he realized that, he also realized that perhaps his assumptions regarding the frigate force were also wrong... perhaps dangerously so.

“Message High Commander Chxarals,” Fleet Commander Krxil said.  “Ask him if we have any video sensors in range to confirm the presence of the three behemoth vessels.”

***

Lucius smiled a bit as his independently mobile forces secured the orbit of Delvar.  The only forces even remotely in position to do anything about it was the original screening force, which had already begun acceleration outwards and was badly out of position.  It had been a massive risk

He smiled a bit more as he noticed the secondary timer on his countdown flash the last few seconds away.  Lucius looked over at Captain Daniel Beeson, “We might just pull this off.”

The Crusader-class ships were huge, with massive engines, huge reactors, and serious energy signatures, so powerful that each one was visible on sensors well over thirty light minutes away to even the most basic of electromagnetic sensors.  The radiation emissions of their drives, alone, could cook a person in a normal environmental suit if they were out on the hull.  Each of the Crusaders was over ten thousand meters in length. They were three thousand meters wide and over a thousand meters tall.  The sheer size meant that the very idea of stealth or even concealing such a ship was not just absurd, it was positively ludicrous.

Even so each of the ships had three decoys, each of them the size of a normal cruiser and essentially entirely made up of reactors, jamming systems, and electromagnetic emitters, all designed to match the emissions of one of the Crusaders as closely as possible.  Those decoys were normally deployed in the middle of combat, the better to fool an enemy.  Each one possessed its own drives and limited maneuvering capabilities, though they weren't designed to operate for longer than ten minutes at most before they ran out of power or their systems burned out.  This wouldn't be an issue in combat, where they were likely to be hit and destroyed by enemy fire.  However, if someone had the hair-brained idea to cycle through the nine in order to keep three of them operational for over forty minutes...

On that cue, the first of the Crusader icons on path to intercept the hundred dreadnoughts flickered and died.  Only seconds later, the next followed.  The last one continued for several more minutes before its signature slowly began to dim.  All of this took place in the final minutes before the larger Chxor force reached missile range.  At the same time, the actual Crusaders lit off their drives and brought all their systems up from standby mode to full power in position behind the eighteen frigates which had screened the big ships as they were powered down.  A detailed scan or even just a visual sweep couldn't have missed the three massive ships, but the Chxor hadn't bothered, not when they had the emissions from the drives to see clearly.

The Chxor realized that they had made a critical blunder.  That was when the almost two hundred Harrassers launched their missile loads and sharply broke away... to leave the second Chxor force with nothing to fight... nothing to do but try to survive as almost six hundred of the Mark V shipkiller missiles came at them.

Lucius could mentally picture the Chxor commander's expression, faced not just with the loss of his insurance policy... but the knowledge that he was terribly out of position.  The Chxor did feel emotions, Lucius well knew, and shock and surprise took just as terrible a toll on them as it did humans.

“Inconceivable!” Lucius said, in a mocking, high pitched tone.

The laughter on his flag bridge was most gratifying... even if only Forest Perkins got the actual reference. 
I really need to get some of the old classics distributed,
Lucius thought.

***

Fleet Commander Krxil used a word that probably would have put him in some jeopardy if reported to any kind of Investigator.  Then again, as the three huge ships lit off their drives again directly in his path, he wasn't very certain that he would be around much longer.

“High Commander Chxarals sent an orders update,” his communication officer said, her voice level despite the magnitude of the error.  “Engage and destroy the main force.  He is unable to maneuver in time to provide support.”

“I realize that,” Krxil said.  He refrained from further commentary on the High Commander's orders, however.  For one thing, it would be counterproductive.  For another, it might well get back to the High Commander, if Krxil, against all odds, managed to survive the coming fight.

He could do the math in his head, much less with the aide of his console.  The enemy fighters had launched on High Commander Chxarals's force of dreadnoughts.  The inbound missiles had similar profiles to the shipkiller missiles of the Chxor, which meant they would hit in just under three minutes.  That would force Chxarals to maintain his formation for that time.  After that, he would be free to attempt radical maneuvers, but even if he could have already, his ships didn't have the acceleration to cut the widening distance.  They could and probably would volley missiles to support him, but they could not get into position to hammer the enemy capital ships with energy weapons, not without completely canceling out their outward vector and coming back in again, which would take hours.

The enemy fleet, on the other hand, was perfectly in line with his own force.  Krxil could attempt to break away, but the enemy ships had similar acceleration profiles, and if he did so and failed, his ships would present their rear sections to the enemy, giving them not only more distinct targets, but also negating many of the advantages of his screening cruiser's firefly systems. 
Better,
he thought,
to face them head on.

As he thought that, he saw the fighters' missiles begin their final attack runs on High Commander Chxarals' force.  As ordered, his own ships had already begun to fire interceptor missiles.  Even so, the enemy shipkillers were nastier than expected.  Interceptor fire seemed to detonate them in glaring pinpricks of light.  Data from the screening cruisers made Krxil reevaluate his own survival downward a bit more.

Then the first missiles began to strike home against the Chxor screen.  Moments later, the missile engagement was over.  The Ten-class cruiser screen had served its purpose.  Most of those cruisers had lured in two or more of the missiles.  Remarkably, more than three quarters of the cruiser screen remained, though many of the ships leaked atmosphere and trailed debris.  Krxil saw damage icons among all the surviving cruisers and among the lead elements of the dreadnoughts as well, though clearly only a handful of missiles had penetrated their defenses.

“Prepare for initial engagement,” Fleet Commander Krxil said.  “Initial wave of missiles will be very heavy, priority is interception.”  A check against his display confirmed what he had feared.  The fighters had just enough acceleration to reach the capital ships and presumably to reload and rearm.  “Expect a secondary wave of missiles from the fighters after they rearm.”  That one would be the more dangerous of the two, because the losses in his screening cruisers would leave his dreadnoughts exposed.

“For the glory of the Chxor,” Fleet Commander Krxil said, just as the enemy launched their first salvo.

***

Lucius shook his head a bit as the Chxor formation tightened still further.  While the other Chxor commander had chosen to position his cruisers to take the entirety of the missile flight at the loss of the ability to have overlapping fields of fire by the dreadnoughts, this commander had chosen otherwise.  His ships looked to be more evenly spaced, though it was damnably difficult to tell through the firefly systems. 

“Brave bastards, I'll give them that,” Captain Beeson said grimly.

“Doesn't matter how brave they are,” Ensign Perkins said.  “They're about to get some of what they deserve.  And those other bastards already got some!”

Lucius shrugged slightly.  He actually felt a bit conflicted about the losses amongst the screening cruisers.  He knew well enough that many of those cruisers had conscripted human crews.  Yet there was nothing he could do about that, not right now.  The cruisers screened his enemy... and the men and women who served aboard them, willingly or no, were in a position where they left Lucius the choice of engaging them or dying.

“Fire,” Lucius said.  As one, the three Crusaders opened fire.  The three ships each carried two thousand of the Mark V shipkiller missiles in external, armored cells.  They could have fired that in a single launch, but they didn't.  For one thing, that would leave them with nothing else to fire later and would require hours to reload, even with the automated loading system.  For another, until they cleared the screen, their only targets for the missiles would be the cruisers. 
We don't really want to kill the cruisers,
Lucius thought grimly,
we want the dreadnoughts.