Exodus: Machine War 1 Supernova. (34 page)

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Khrushchev
cringed as she watched the last two icons of her following screen disappear
from the plot, along with a pair of enemy ships.  The screen had accomplished
its mission, inflicting much greater damage on the enemy, trading one point
four million tons of warships for over eight million tons of the enemy.  They
had fought in the best tradition of the Fleet, never giving up.  And at the
moment all of that rang hollow in the Commodore, as she thought of the men and
women who had given their lives to protect the innocent.  Men and women who had
their own plans for the future, families, some already in existence, careers
beyond their time in the service.  All gone, as if they had never been.

Not as if
they had never been
, thought the Commodore as she watched the icons of the
first enemy weapons come at her ships. 
Not ever that.

And they had
learned something when the enemy weapons had turned toward her battle
cruisers.  The enemy weapons out ranged hers in hyper, and now the first nine
of those long ranged weapons were about to enter attack range of her largest
warships.  She would soon find out how the big ships’ defenses stacked up to
the offensive capabilities of those weapons. 
 I wonder if we would fare
better if we still mounted plasma torpedoes, like Fleet ships
.

Those weapons
were really considered obsolete, though Fleet vessels still mounted them as
backups.  But Exploration Command vessels no longer mounted them, freeing up
space to sensors and labs.  She had heard that they were still proving useful
in the war with the Ca’cadasans, especially in a missile defense role in
hyper.  And she would not get the chance to try out that doctrine here.

There seemed to
be no need, as the counter missiles of the battle cruisers, something they did
carry in similar quantities to Fleet vessels, even the hyper variant, reached
out and destroyed all but one of the enemy weapons, while the laser armament of
two capital ships took care of the remaining singleton.

Her own volleys
had damaged another two enemy ships, but they seemed to be learning, and she
had wasted all of her long range fire power for little result.  The enemy had
again fired some of their weapons  in a counter-missile role, at which they
proved to be very effective. 
Greenville
continued to launch all of her
volleys while she had them, putting a total of forty hyper capable missiles in
space.  But they were coming in as five separate waves, each too weak to
overwhelm the enemy defenses.

The second wave
of enemy weapons came in, this time a double volley of twenty-four, just
minutes behind that first strike at the battle cruisers.  Again the defenses
held, though one of the destroyers was hit hard by a weapon detonating just off
its port bow, and
Endurance
took some damage from a pair of near misses,
while
Greenville
sustained heavy damage from a very near miss. 
Otherwise, they weathered the storm, and watched as one last volley came in, to
be defeated once again.

“Bogey Two
is
increasing acceleration, on a heading straight down our throats,” called out
CIC.

“Perhaps they’re
out of weapons,” suggested Captain Timofeyavich.  “Each launched forty thousand
tons of weapons from a slightly more than one and a half million ton platform.”

“That would make
sense,” agreed the Commodore, hoping her ships would fare as well in the knife
fight that seemed to be developing.  “But keep our missile defenses ready, just
in case they didn’t get the memo.”

The captains of
all five ships acknowledged their orders, and were now in charge of
implementing those commands.  The Commodore’s job was to assign the tasks to
her commanders, while theirs was to fight their ships. The fire of the command
was integrated into a single whole, but there was some latitude in how they
allotted that fire, or protected their own ships.

Which a closing
speed of point nine six light, the ships would only be in effective laser
range, less than a light minute, for about one hundred and twenty-two seconds
on approach, pass and recession.  Both forces fired on each other as soon as
they were about a minute out of that range, the humans firing several seconds
before the enemy.  The beams reached across space to where they expected their
targets to be.  Both battle cruisers now presented their broadsides to the
oncoming vessels so they could bring all of their laser rings into action.

Five enemy ships
came right into the beams of the pentawatt lasers, their energy focused through
powerful gravity lenses that minimized their spread.  Electromagnetic fields
attenuated the beams, but not enough.  More of a factor was the tendency of
photons to drop out of hyper, so that only a quarter of their power reached to
that distance.  Each second more of those highly energetic photons reached
target, causing more damage.  As soon as the beams struck the enemy ships started
evasive maneuvers, boosting up and down, side to side, causing the majority of
the beams to miss.  The human ships had already started theirs when they had
fired, and the enemy never got the first flush of victory that normally started
any beam weapon duel.  They still got some hits, just not as many.

As the ships
drew closer the power of the beams on contact increased, their targeting
solutions improved, and the evasives lost their effectiveness.  The Imperial
battle cruisers, with their greater mass and generating power, as well as their
lower surface to volume ratio, deployed the stronger armor and electromagnetic
fields.  With their mass they could handle more energy absorbed into their
forms, and seemed to have all the advantages.  Their beams struck the harder,
and one of the enemy ships blew as something inside reacted poorly from the
penetration of an X-ray laser.

At ten light
seconds distance more lasers were hitting from both sides than missed.  The
ships were constantly shifting frequencies, attempting to get their beams past
the nanoweave skins of the vessels, which changed their reflective qualities to
meet the beams.  Almost always a losing battle, as the beams changed to random
frequencies each second, blasting past that reflective layer.

Enough beams
were hitting to blast considerable transfer energy into the ships.  The
toughest armor either side could make blew into pieces as beams sliced through
and into the interiors of the ships.  On the battle cruisers hundreds of
armored crew withered and died as beams penetrated their hulls.  Most died
instantly as that transfer energy blasted their suits apart.  Some, the
unfortunate, were in a position where their suits almost protected them, and
they died, quickly or slowly, from being roasted alive in their armor.

Greenville
exploded,
the victim of several beams that blasted deep into her engineering spaces and
caused antimatter to breach containment.  One second the eight hundred and
fifty thousand ton light cruiser was battling away.  The next it was a cloud of
plasma that flew swiftly in all directions, disappearing in translation before
it could hit any of its companion ships.

Another enemy
ship exploded a few seconds before the forces passed.   The Imperial ships had
figured out the pattern of the enemy evasives, which didn’t seem to be as
effective as their own, repeating every twelve point three four seconds, and
the hit rate increased for several seconds before the enemy changed their
patterns.  Two more enemy ships suffered blasts that ripped out of their hulls
and sent them spinning off on different paths, still pursued by the lasers of
the human vessels.  One of the destroyers, that most damaged previously,
detonated in an antimatter breach, sending heat and radiation at random into
vessels both friend and foe.  The battle cruisers took a pounding, shuddering
from multiple hits and the reaction of mass blasted free, or atmosphere
venting.  All of it fell out of hyper as they left the hyperfield of the owning
vessel, including still living crew, a few of which found themselves floating
in normal space, light years from the nearest star with no hope of rescue.

Four enemy
vessels passed through the formation of the two battle cruisers and the lone
destroyer, all still firing their lasers, as well as particle beams that could,
for a few seconds, hit the human ships, ripping further holes in the armored
hulls of the Imperial vessels.  Turnabout being fair play, the battle cruisers
opened up with their own, more powerful particle beams, sending antiprotons
into the enemy hulls to explode with the fury of mutual annihilation.  The
seconds passed where the matter could exist long enough to reach the target,
but only one of the enemy ships made it through, streaming particles, clearly
heavily damaged.

“We’re not
picking up enough atmosphere from those ships,” called out CIC, who was getting
his information from the sensor division of the battle cruiser.

“That’s because
they don’t breathe,” said Khrushchev, sure of what she was now facing.  “No
asphyxiation, no hunger, no fear.  And that will be what we will be fighting
out here.”  She shivered a bit, remembering the stories she had been told as a
child, and what she had studied as an adult.  She wasn’t sure if they were the
same machines, those developed by her culture.  It didn’t really matter.  They
would not allow organic life to live, and so they could not be allowed to
survive.

Endurance
was
almost a complete wreck, streaming atmosphere from thousands of holes and
gashes through the hull, only two of her grabber units working and sufficient
hyperdrive capability to stay in hyperspace, but not translate out. 
Drake
was
still battle worthy, barely, with one working laser ring and three quarters of
her particle beams. 
Mihn Quan
, the lone surviving destroyer, was the
most intact of all the vessels, with only minor damage.  Unfortunately, she was
also the weakest of the remaining ships, even
Endurance
still possessing
more firepower.

Mihn Quan
was
decelerating at maximum while continuing to put all of her laser power onto the
remaining enemy ship, which was still on course toward the convoy. 
Drake
was
decelerating at four hundred gravities, her current maximum, turned so that her
final laser ring could target that ship. 
Endurance
was decelerating at
a mere fifty-four gravities, all she was capable of, and really was of no more
use to the convoy.

“What’s the
situation with
New Potsdam
?” she shot the question to CIC, whose job was
to monitor the entire tactical situation.  She was looking at her own tactical
plot, which showed six red arrows still heading into the convoy from that
vector, and two sets of eight green arrows each heading their way.

“
New Potsdam
has
shot her entire hyper missile load at the enemy,” returned the officer who was
her connection to CIC.  “She reports two kills, and the last sixteen missiles
are two and three minutes from contact respectively.”

At that moment
the tactical plot blossomed with six more red arrows, all heading toward the
convoy at just over four thousand gravities, which seemed to be their
acceleration limit.

 At the last
second Khrushchev stopped herself from ordering a warning sent to the heavy
cruiser. 
Mason knows they’re there, and he’ll react when it’s time to.
 
Mihn Quan
was still firing on the enemy, which was still on a course for
the convoy, obviously hoping to get within beam weapon range of the ships, if a
word like hope could be used with the thing controlling it.  She was still
scoring hits, and as she watched a laser from the enemy vessel hit the destroyer
and blasted some of her side armor out into hyper, to translate away.

“I want that
ship surrounded with fire,” she barked into the intercom.  “Full power,
x-rays.  Let’s see if we can get them to jump right into the frying pan.”

The
acknowledgement came back, and
Drake
fired six beams from her final
operative ring, each spearing through space about a light second from the enemy
ship, forming the spokes of a wheel sixty degrees from each other.  As soon as
they were streaming past the ship the
Drake
swung them in.  One of the
beams hit the enemy ship, which tried to dodge away, running into another one,
until three beams made contact, each blasting through armor and into the hull. 
The enemy ship must have decided then to swing through one of the beams and escape
the cage.  That would have been a good decision, except the beam she swung into
shot right through a gash in the hull and blew out the entire side of the
vessel.  It spun in space for a few moments, then exploded into plasma.

“They’re going
for the convoy,” shouted CIC, and Khrushchev turned to the plot to see that the
red arrows had in fact diverged, two still heading for the cruiser, the others
taking paths that would bring each into contact with a different ship, one
freighter and three liners.  The liners each had over six thousand Klassekians
in cryo, the freighter five hundred Imperial technicians.  She didn’t think the
cruiser could stop all of them, and there was no good choice here as to who
should live, and who die.

Drake
continued
to decelerate at 3.9 kilometers per second,
Mihn Quan
keeping station on
the battle cruiser.  The convoy had reached its maximum velocity by this time,
point nine two five light, and was catching up to the slowing battle cruiser. 
It would still take some minutes before they caught up, and some more minutes
for
Drake
to fall through the convoy so she could try to protect the
merchies from the enemy’s close in weapons.  According to the calculations, she
would reach the rear of the convoy two minutes, three seconds before the first
of the enemy ships brought one of the liners into effective laser range.