Opening Moves (22 page)

Thirty seconds later the device was left in the sand, the two ambassadors sprinted back to the central command post in horror. The foaming surf slowly crept up the white beach, touching and grasping the communicator and slowly pulling it out to the green ocean depths.

Senfina Colony

The Érenni Republics, Pact of Ten Suns

“Right. Right! RIGHT!” Tarek yelled, the IRON MAIDEN shuddering under the overstressed engines. On one side a pair of Ashani fighters was lining up on them and on the other the freighter's sensors registered dozens upon dozens of thermal blooms heralding the arrival of more vicious looking warships into space. The freighter was trapped in the middle of what looked like the whole Dominion navy and every second caused its crew to age by a year. Given the alternative he had Alexej steer towards the fighters.

“
Annie, watch right!” he added. The young woman was in charge of the ship's four small caliber railgun cannons and she rapidly brought them on target, the flashing warnings on her tactical screen telling of an enemy weapons' lock.

The freighter was in no way set up for dog-fighting – or any fighting, for that matter. It was fast, and as far as commercial vessels go it was very agile, but there was no way in hell it could face a dedicated fighter attack alone. If more of the dart-like fighters showed up they were going to be very dead very fast.

The two Ashani fighters engaged the freighter, laser beams cutting into the side of the ship from only a few kilometers away and leaving dark craters in the metal, but thankfully not burning through, yet. Fighters usually relied on missiles to go after ships larger than themselves as their own drive cores didn't have the power to support their rapid and nimble movements
and
plasma laser mounts capable of cutting warships to pieces. But against freighters the picture was different, and the only reason the MAIDEN was still going was that her designers had built her commercial grade armor with the effects of railgun artillery in mind. It wasn't quite as heat-resistant as the plating most other spacefaring cultures used, but it was a hell of a lot thicker.

The fighters had to cut short their attack run as the IRON MAIDEN turned towards them, causing them to break on either side to avoid collision with the slab sided vessel. Annie fired with the defense turrets, the small invisible tungsten slugs racing through the dark and missing the agile fighters by a considerable distance, their trajectory mapped only by Annie's fire guidance systems. The small crafts back-flipped and continued peppering the hull with plasma lasers, gradually eating away at the thick metal protection.

“More ships behind us!” Rául relayed information from the sensors. “Good Lord, there's hundreds of 'em!”

There was no doubt now that this was a full scale invasion of Érenni territory. Tarek and his crew had just had the bad luck of stumbling right into the opening phases of a war on a scale beyond anything in recent memory. Tarek had read old history books and entries on the feed detailing the last great war, it was between the Rasenni and the now extinct
Ortani race, and the level of destruction experienced in an interstellar war made the World Wars back home look like church meetings. There was no way he was going to survive something like this for long. Their only option was to run like hell. But first they had to avoid getting fried by the Dominion.

“
We can outrun their warships. Ignore them, just watch the damn fighters!”

The convoy they had followed was now virtually destroyed, shot to pieces by constant fighter attacks. The Dominion's attack craft were proving deadly little starships, able to avoid the tracking gun turrets of the freighter and then hit back with powerful and precise weapons of their own.

There had been a lot of debate about the usefulness of fighters amongst most spacefaring races at one point or another. The Rasenni and most of the Pact thought they were little more than support and escort units for their big ships, built primarily because so many others were building them, too. For a race as old and established as the Rasenni it just wouldn't do not to have something others also possessed. For the Ukhuri and Tuathaan, fighters were in equal parts cultural and military expressions, offering societal status and the chance to win glory in single combat in an age where the fight of man against man no longer was the norm. For them fighters were symbols of their clan and warrior cultures. Apparently it was the Ashani who had truly embraced the idea of mass fighter attacks as a valid tactic.

None of the three human power blocks' navies used fighters, though some of the independent systems were said to employ them. While there also was a cultural impetus at work, based on a short period of 20
th
century history and the lasting pieces of entertainment resulting from it, military planners in all three nations had looked at the concept of a space fighter, laughed, and moved on. The idea that it would somehow be militarily useful to pour millions of credits and years of training into a pilot to have him or her fly something that was nothing other than a better missile and needed the reaction times of virtual intelligence systems, was something not even the most dedicated lobby groups had made fly. Even with direct neural links, tests had proven conclusively that flying space fighters into combat was a sure means to bury any potential pilot under an avalanche of information overkill. If one added to this the fact that no matter how many barrel rolls you did you couldn't outmaneuver a laser cluster, the whole effort became an exercise in futility.

An anti-ship missile with the same range as a fighter didn't have to accommodate the gravitics that kept a pilot alive and safe from the tens of thousands of gees the craft was subjected to while accelerating or decelerating. It also didn't have to set apart the space to actually carry and keep alive  a pilot to begin with. So when faced with the question of whether they should spend a hundred million credits on a space fighter and several millions more on training potentially irreplaceable pilots or to spend a tenth of the money on a virtual intelligence-controlled long range missile with up to ten one-hundred megaton warheads the major human armed forces had made the sensible decision and gone with the missiles. Even the more capable attack drones EMC used in addition were ultimately thought to be a far more sensible investment than manned fighters. The closest thing to space fighters any of the Big Three used were the dropships that supported landings on hostile planets.

But all that theoretical knowledge didn't help you one iota if you had a pack of starfighters on your tail and lacked the means to deal with them.

“
I'm intercepting a message from the planetary authorities,” Llyr intoned as the ship shuddered under the strain of acceleration. “They're asking the Ashani if they are lost! They want to know why they are here!”

Alexej scoffed from the pilot's chair. “Unbe-fucking-lievable.”

“Have they activated the planetary defense grid?” Tarek asked. With so many ships heading their way it should have been plainly obvious they weren't on a sightseeing trip.

“
Doesn't look like it,” Rául read the sensors with a frown. “A lot of ships are milling around but they haven't actually done anything yet.”

“
What the hell? Didn't they see the convoy get wasted?” Annie shouted angrily. “Why don't they do something?”

“
Just watch those fighters!” Tarek urged. “Llyr, open a channel to Senfina Control.”

Tarek had to hold on to his seat for a few moments as Alexej put the ship into a roll. Seconds later there was a series of violent shudders as the Ashani fighters made another pass, peppering the hull with fire. He gritted his teeth and suppressed his anger. The local defense fleet should be out here engaging by now, not leaving them swinging in the breeze. There were cries of panic from the passenger compartment but he couldn't worry about calming them down yet. He just had to keep the ship moving and get them all to safety.

“Control, come in Control, this is independent freighter IRON MAIDEN. Do you receive?”

Tarek held his breath waiting for a response. He was aware of sweat under his arms and on his back but the lower gravity conditions made it crawl down his body rather than run. The MAIDEN's captain listened to the faint static on the radio and the muffled whine of the railgun cannons' accelerators farther down the ship as they targeted the strafing Dominion fighters.

“Senfina Control here,” a dispassionate female voice replied. “This is a military frequency. Please clear it for official communication traffic.”

“
This is a military emergency,” Tarek responded in a stressed voice. This was no time for bureaucracy! “In case you hadn't noticed there are a thousand Ashani warships on our tail trying to kill us!”

“
We have seen the vessels and are formulating a response,” the voice replied.

“
Let me save you some thinking time,” Tarek glowered. “Your response should be to frickin' open fire on them!”

“
We will formulate our own response, thank you,” the disinterested voice stated coldly.

Tarek could feel his frustration and impending doom rapidly overpower his restraint with the officious operator on the other end of the connection. “Listen lady, just where the hell do you think these ships are heading? At their current acceleration levels you've got
maybe
twenty-five minutes before they hit the colony so I suggest you get off your ass and do something, like scramble the damn cavalry!”

“
Without orders from the home world we cannot send ships into action,” the voice said with what sounded like resignation. “Until the threat is classified we must…”

“
Look, your superiors aren't here and about to get their asses shot off,” Tarek emphasized, the freighter bucking under another barrage of fighters' weapons. “Thousands are already dead! The Ashani slaughtered our convoy without mercy or hesitation, and now they're coming for us! I've got two thousand refugees crammed in here. Most of them are your own bloody people, so why don't you just issue the damn orders yourself and do something before you have a disaster on your hands!”

There was a long and expectant pause. Tarek leaned forward in his seat, his nose almost touching the comm unit. Annie and Alexej were busy trying to keep the ship together, but both Llyr and Rául were hooked on the conversation, its repercussions weighing heavily on them. If orbital control ignored them they were as good as dead.

“Standby freighter, help is on its way,” the controller finally replied in an equally flat tone. While the Érenni garrison may not have sounded enthused the IRON MAIDEN crew did. A loud, relieved shout came from Rául and Tarek.

“
Roger that control, we're coming in!” the Captain replied with a wide grin. “Okay people, let's just stay alive for a few more minutes!”

That was easier said than done. With the way cleared more of the Dominion's ships were advancing on the colony itself. Swarms of fighters were already very close to the first line of orbital defenses and the system was
still
not activated. There was a narrow passage between the fighter wings which led to the Senfina orbital minefield. It was the only path not currently full of Ashani hardware so Alexej put the ship on a dead straight course and dumped raw fuel into the engines. The ignition bolted the freighter forward, slamming the passengers and crew back into their seats and raising louder cries of alarm from the terrified cargo of refugees. The IRON MAIDEN was burning days-worth of fuel in seconds, a massive jet of blue fire hundreds of meters long stabbing out from each engine, propelling the ship towards the gap. The attacking fighters were caught flat footed by the ship's sudden acceleration and had to put more power into their own thrusters to follow it.

Despite the shuddering, Tarek could still feel the jolt of weapons impacting. The enemy fighters were still with them. Persistent buggers.

“Look, ahead!” Rául managed to say through the crushing weight pressing on his chest from the acceleration not compensated by their Malenkov-Okuda drives.

Tarek tried to focus his eyes and could plainly see small bright spots outside the window, though whether they were real or a hallucination being brought on by blood being forced from his brain he couldn't quite tell. “What are they?” he grunted.

“Érenni gunships, friendlies!” Rául said through clenched teeth. “It's the cavalry!”

The dots twinkled and then with rapid speed resolved into blue toned twenty thousand ton gunships. They rushed past the battered freighter and engaged the following unit of Ashani fighters in clash a of plasma laser beams.

“Keep on the throttle,” Tarek choked out. “Don't slow down!”

Tarek's caution seemed well founded. A glance at the MAIDEN's aft sensors showed the Érenni gunships, though greatly outmassing the pair of Dominion fighters, being taken apart by the smaller yet far more combat-experienced attackers. The lightweight
Kotha
-class gunships used by the Érenni were totally new, a rapid development of an Aetan design rushed into service to face the expected Ashani attack. Their crews of twenty had trained on these new craft but had never seen battle before, and against the veteran Ashani pilots they stood little chance.

“
Coming up on the minefield,” Rául informed them. “I dunno if it's activated yet!” his voice was still muffled by the effort of talking under the massive G-forces.