The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan (15 page)

The automated maneuvers cut in, every ship in the Alliance force shifting vector, some accelerating as well as altering their track through space. The three diamonds of Geary’s subformations compressed into narrower wedges, all three now on paths that were rapidly bringing them together.

Geary itched to issue commands, to insert himself directly into the maneuvers. But there were times to do that and times to trust in the equipment that men and women had painstakingly created. “We rarely notice them, do we?” he said to Desjani.

She gave him a questioning look, then nodded. “You mean the automated systems? All of the stuff we depend on to keep this ship working?”

“Yeah. We only notice it when it breaks or malfunctions in some ways. The rest of the time, it’s just there.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Desjani replied. “Transparent technology. It works without anyone having to worry about it or having to master arcane commands and rules. Sure, it needs a lot of tender, loving care and the occasional hard kick in the rear to keep it working right, but that’s why we have our enlisted specialists aboard, to provide the help the automated systems need so they can help humans kill each other.”

“You are such a romantic soul,” Geary said, watching the time to contact with the enemy scrolling down rapidly. “I wonder how the dark ships handle maintenance and repair?”

“They must have automated systems to look after the automated systems. And other automated systems to look after the automated systems that look after the automated systems. And maybe another layer beyond to look after those automated systems. Can you imagine the complexity and the cost of all that?”

“Not easily.” He kept his eyes on his display, where the movements of every Alliance ship exactly matched their planned vectors, two hundred warships moving in a complex dance that would soon end in a brutal climax.

Hands off. Having set it up, all he could do now was watch.

“Five minutes to contact,” Lieutenant Castries said, echoing the information on Geary’s display.

“Very well.” Desjani sat back in her command seat as if relaxed, but the expression she turned toward Geary betrayed some worry. “Isn’t this a little last-ditch and desperate for this stage of the battle, Admiral?” she murmured, too low for anyone else to hear.

“We need to hit them really hard this time,” he repeated.

“That should happen, but if the timing of our battleships is off by even a second, you and I and everyone else aboard
Dauntless
will never know it. We’ll take so many hits that the only thing left will be a cloud of dust heading really fast along our last vector.”

“I know.” He had seen just that happen too many times already to too many warships, and he knew that Tanya had seen a lot more ships die in combat than he had. “If that happens, at least what used to be you and me will be part of the same dust cloud.”

“Wow. Is that what you consider romantic, Admiral?”

“It’s the best I’ve got at the moment, Captain.”

She kept her eyes on her display, smiling. “See you on the other side.” Then, much louder, Desjani called out to the watch-standers. “I want every shot to hit. Take out as many of these soulless bastards as we can.”

“Ready, Captain,” the watch-standers chorused.

Geary could hear the tension in their voices but also the determination. He understood the mixed emotions because he felt them himself. Any firing pass was a gamble. No matter how good the maneuvering systems were at avoiding collisions, the fact remained that even the smallest error could result in two warships running into each other at velocities that instantly reduced both to tiny fragments. Or the enemy might choose to target your ship in particular, or a lucky hit might penetrate to a critical area, or . . .

Some things were not worth worrying about, not when you couldn’t do a thing about them.

But this was a particularly risky firing pass, and everyone knew it.

“One minute to intercept,” Lieutenant Castries called out, her voice almost cracking on the first word but steadying and coming out clear and firm at the end.

The six formations were rapidly converging, Geary’s three formations headed for that single point where the center of the dark ship main formation would be, and the dark ships coming on steadily, with the smaller formations on either side sliding closer to the main body.

“Ten seconds.” This time Castries’ voice stayed steady. “We have confirmation that our battleship formations are accelerating.”

Geary didn’t know whether he really saw any of the Alliance
battleships, cruisers, and destroyers rushing in toward the same point where
Dauntless
and the other battle cruisers and their escorts were going. He didn’t know whether he really saw the dark ship formation suddenly loom directly ahead, going from tiny dots of light to massive warships in the blink of a human eye. Maybe he imagined those images, or maybe his brain manufactured them.

He felt
Dauntless
’s weapons firing, felt the battle cruiser shudder from hits, waited for a moment of incredible force to smash himself and this ship.

It took a few seconds for him to realize that they were past the encounter. Geary heard a couple of gasps of relief as some of the watch-standers absorbed the same knowledge.

“Made it,” Desjani said, as if no other outcome had been plausible. “Status, people!”

The watch-standers sprang to action to consolidate information for her, while Geary bent closer to his display, wondering whether the risk had paid off.

The three Alliance formations had essentially merged in the final seconds prior to contact with the dark ships, a mass of warships whose movements had fortunately been coordinated by the fleet’s maneuvering systems. But that mass was slamming head-on into another mass, that of the dark ships. Only the fact that the dark ships held their vectors, sticking to their predicted courses, prevented any collisions.

As the Alliance battleships had surged very slightly ahead of the battle cruisers, their weapons had fired, eighteen huge warships bristling with weaponry unloading everything they had at the dark ships preparing to fire on
Dauntless
and the other battle cruisers. Missiles leaped out, impacting on targets almost as soon as they launched. Hell-lance particle beams formed a brilliant forest of lethal energy that bored into their targets. Grapeshot struck within milliseconds of the other weapons, pounding warships whose shields and armor had already been battered by earlier hits. And where the battleships had passed close enough to
targets, the glowing balls of null fields had eaten holes in opponents, dissolving the bonds that held molecules and atoms together.

Geary had to drastically slow the playback generated by the fleet’s sensors to see that much. Immediately behind the Alliance battleships had come the battle cruiser formation, but instead of running into a wall of fire as well, the battle cruisers had faced only those surviving after the rampage of the battleships.
Dauntless
and her companions had fired, tearing apart smaller warships and adding to the damage inflicted on dark battleships already badly hurt. “We took some hits,” Geary said as his display lit with damage reports from other ships. “But we hit them a lot worse.”

Three dark battleships were gone, blown to pieces despite their mammoth defenses. A fourth was crippled, so badly shot up that it had lost all weapons and all maneuvering control, tumbling helplessly onward in the wake of its companions.

Between them, the Alliance formations had knocked out a dozen dark heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, and twenty-three destroyers.

The vast majority of the enemy ships in that part of their formation within range of the Alliance charge had their fire-control systems locked on
Dauntless
and the other battle cruisers. In the almost-a-second between the time when the Alliance battleships came within range and when
Dauntless
could have been engaged, most of the dark ship weapons had never had a chance to fire, being destroyed while awaiting a shot at their chosen targets.

Few of the warships in Geary’s battleship formations had been targeted by the enemy, so few had received any hits. Many more ships in the battle cruiser formation had been hit, but even though half a dozen Alliance battle cruisers had suffered significant damage, only one heavy cruiser,
Bunker
, and a half dozen destroyers had been hit badly enough to be out of the fight.

Bunker
was staggering away from the other Alliance ships, trying to regain some maneuvering control. The destroyers
Thunderbolt
,
Monitor
, and
Kopis
had been completely obliterated.
Patu
,
Lathi
, and
Naginata
were still at least partly intact but so badly damaged that their surviving crew members were abandoning ship in any escape pods that remained in working condition.

Both
Incredible
and
Dragon
had taken hits to their main propulsion, though, enough to limit their maneuverability, and the battleship
Fearless
had also lost a propulsion unit.

“Several hits on
Dauntless
,” Lieutenant Yuon was summarizing. “Hell-lance battery 2A out of commission. Maneuvering thruster 3B off-line. No estimated times to repair yet. Hull penetrations are being sealed by damage control teams. Two dead confirmed. Seventeen wounded.”

The losses hurt. Even one man or woman killed hurt. The destroyers that had not survived had lost their entire crews. Despite that, it had been a wildly successful tactic. But . . . “Given the firepower advantages of the dark ships,” Geary said, “we’ve only roughly evened the odds with their battleship formations.” He did not have to add that the dark battle cruiser formation charging their way would give the dark ships a major advantage.

Desjani nodded, grimacing. “And we can’t do that again. The dark ships will already be analyzing what happened and preparing to counter it if they see us setting up another attack like that.”

The dark battleships were already closing ranks in their formation, unfazed by their losses, filling in the gap that Geary’s ships had blown through them.

He only had to repeat what he had just done, in terms of losses to the dark ships and losses suffered by his own side, at least twice more to even the odds, and perhaps half a dozen times to win.

A moment of despair filled Admiral John Geary.

Then he began issuing orders again. Because the people he commanded needed Black Jack if they were to survive.

“Immediate execute, all units, come up zero nine five degrees.” His
fleet, the three formations still intermingled, began curving upward and back toward another intercept with the dark battleships.
Incredible
,
Dragon
,
Fearless
, and a score of cruisers and destroyers struggled to match the maneuver due to the damage to their propulsion systems.

His ships were shedding some velocity in the massive turn, but he didn’t worry about maintaining speed. Point one five light was a bit fast for his taste when it came to maneuvering in battle, and limiting acceleration made it easier for the damaged ships to stay with their formations.

“Captain?” Lieutenant Castries said. “The dark battle cruiser formation was up to point three five light speed an hour ago.”

“What?”
Desjani glared at her display. “At the rate they have been moving, they’ll get within combat range in another three hours,” she warned Geary.

“Even though the dark ships can handle more stress on acceleration and deceleration than our ships can, they’ll have to start braking that velocity really soon, or they’ll tear right past us,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have ramped up the velocity on those battle cruisers and their escorts that high. Is the dark ship AI based on my actions breaking down, or is this supposed to be the Black Jack who people imagined before I came back?”

“Maybe the Black Jack legend,” Desjani said. “You in reality try to think a few moves ahead. I don’t know. We might have to assume the AIs are getting erratic, maybe testing their limits.”

“Dr. Nasr said they could run into problems if they encountered new situations,” Geary said. “New limitations, or possibilities they create by working around old limitations. But unless those problems cause their weapons to go off-line, they probably won’t help us much.”

He was studying his display again, seeing the dark battleship formation, a little smaller now, the two subformations on either side remaining close, as it came up and around to head back toward an intercept with the Alliance warships. The dark battleships had been
moving a lot slower, and so could turn in much less distance, though that was a relative term given how huge the turns were when ships were moving at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. The dark ships were steadying out earlier than Geary’s ships were, heading along a flat curve to meet up with the Alliance warships as they cleared the top of their own turn.

The enemy was clearly aiming to hit the Alliance formations head-on again, and this time he couldn’t count on any dark ships holding their fire while waiting for the right target to get within range. “They’re still going at a lot less velocity, so they can keep turning inside our own maneuvers,” he grumbled.

It left only one good option, to change velocity just prior to the dark ships’ intercepting his formations, aiming to throw off the enemy plans and enabling Geary to hopefully hit a portion of the dark ships while the rest of them were unable to engage the Alliance ships.

With plenty of time left before both sides clawed through their vast turns, Geary rearranged his formations, keeping three of them, but changing the diamonds to discs aligned along the path the ships were taking.

Trying to judge the right moment for the next maneuvers, he watched the movements of ships through space, the great arcs marking the projected paths of his formations and the dark battleship formations, as well as the flat curve of the route of the dark battle cruisers racing to reach the scene of the fighting. “All units in First Fleet, reduce propulsion to forty percent maximum at time three six.”