Chapter 35:
December 5th, 4233
New Mozambique
Outer Reaches – Line of Control
United Terran Concord
UTCNS Avenger
This is the moment, Vater thought to himself. There was no turning back, no reconsidering, no second opinions. The 812th had arrived in New Mozambique, and as his last-minute intel had predicted, he’d stumbled into a hornet’s nest. Whether the Lefu had anticipated his attack or simply planned to reinforce the system regardless, he wasn’t sure. Not that it mattered – in either case, their timing had been off. They were still laying their minefields, still towing skeletal OWPs and fortresses into position, still trying to bolster New Mozambique’s defences.
There were over two dozen Lefu construction ships lumbering out of the system as fast as they could – which was to say, not very quickly at all. Even with their warning of the 812ths arrival, Hoss could still overhaul the constructors with his fleet, including the dreadnoughts. The Lefu were scrambling to cover their transports’ escape. They didn’t have enough ships to stop him, despite the presence of a handful of what appeared to be dreadnoughts of their own. He nodded, giving the order to advance. OMI had pegged the enemy’s construction ships as high-priority targets; the ships might be slow, but they were hideously efficient builders. Destroying them would hamper the Lefu’s military far more then smashing their fleet could.
On the bridge of Avenger, Hoss smiled thinly, clasping his hands behind his back as the Concordat’s hand reached for the Lefu. “All dreadnoughts will deploy and grapple their SLIPs,” he ordered. “Primary targets are their transports. Secondary are their DNs. Stand by to launch all HAVOCs.”
~
This system was lost, that much was clear. Command had suspected that Sentinel Twelve would be a priority target for the Enemy, but not that they were prepared to commit this level of forces to it, not this soon. Intelligence had badly misjudged the Enemy’s motivations, but right now the Fleet’s main concern was protecting the Industrial Fleet element. Their haulers were helpless and each was far more important to the war then a dozen Strike Vessels. The Enemy had discovered that for themselves and their entire Fleet element was shifting course to swing past the system’s planets and their half-constructed defences, intending to overrun Industrial Fleet.
That couldn’t be allowed.
Aggressor Fleet launched, the hiveships unleashing their lethal cargos, Fire Knives swarming towards the Enemy Fleet as Strike and Scouting Fleets shifted around the handful of Onslaught Fleet’s tenders, the battleships moving to take the lead.
If this was what the Angel demanded of them, then they would obey Her dictums and fight to the last. Not for glory, or honour, but to save the helpless. To preserve their race.
~
“Damn…” someone whispered.
“Steady,” Hoss said calmly. “We expected this.” At least, they had suspected something like it; the truth was that there was an additional Lakhesis squadron present. Three carriers, nearly five hundred more fighters then he’d anticipated. The 812th had a dozen BCVs at its disposal, with almost two thousand HAVOCs between them, facing down fifteen hundred Evea’shi fighters. He eyed the light codes unhappily; intel had predicted no more then nine hundred hostile HAVOCs, and that had been a liberal estimate. Evidently the Evea’shi had decided that their constructors needed the additional protection. Which only made it more imperative that he take or kill them.
“The carrier squadrons from Alcibiades and Napoleon Bonaparte will exchange their antiship packages for anti-fighter gear and join Giuseppe Garibaldi and Sun Tzu’s carrier squadrons for screening duties. The task group will have to manage without them, I’m afraid. The rest of our wings will attack as prescribed.”
“Yes, admiral. Relaying orders now.”
Hoss nodded, clasping his hands behind his back, continuing to survey the tactical plot. Three enemy dreadnoughts – he’d never seen them before, but he doubted they were pushovers – and twenty more capital ships; eight of their battleships and various classes of what were battlecruisers, heavy cruisers, CAs and CLs along with a smattering of escorts. Unpleasant, yes. But nothing he couldn’t handle. “Make sure the squadron leaders know that they’re to engage the Lefu’s screening elements,” he noted. “I don’t want to see any death-or-glory attack runs on their boomers. The fleet will handle them.” The fleet had to; if some HAVOC-jockey went in on a dreadnought squadron, they’d get picked apart.
He trusted his pilots and HAVOC crew, but the fighter corps had lost a lot of their people to the Lefu. It only took one pilot too blinded by rage or overconfidence to suck an entire squadron into a death trap.
“Yes, sir.”
~
The eclectically-named 812th Squadron could trace its lineage back across twenty centuries to before there had been a United Terran Concordat or even a United Earth. Originally a squadron of police cutters holding down intrasystem trade routes and enforcing customs, they had earned a fierce reputation when they’d responded to a revolt on Ganymede, an action that had been only the first step in a planned rebellion against Earth and Mars from the outer colonies. Quick action on the 812ths part had delayed the uprising long enough for more police cruisers to arrive and quash the insurrection, both with grave cost to the 812th. Still, from those auspicious beginnings, the 812th’s reputation had only gone up. It had been the first unit to be officially inducted into the United Earth Navy and it had been the squadron that had delivered the first crushing blow against the forces of the Centauri Deep Space Conglomerate.
Two thousand years later, the 812th was one of the Concord’s largest and most prestigious squadrons. No longer staffed by a handful of cutters and patrol ships, its nominal registry boasted a solid core of twelve dreadnoughts and a half dozen equally massive BCVs. Unfortunately, the 812th had been no more immune to budgetary cuts then the rest of the Navy and as a result, its fighting edge had dulled in recent years, as periodically happened when officers were promoted to it more as a reward for their political allegiances and less as a commendation of their tactical prowess. When High Admiral Johanen had placed him in command, Hoss had done everything in his power to redress that state of affairs. However, there was nothing he could have do about the three DNs he was forced to leave behind in Sol, the massive warships still laid up in drydock for refitting of obsolete power plants and weaponry. To compensate, Hoss had managed to pry six BCVs out of the fingers of a few Inner World Sectors. Now, before his eyes, the largest combat ever to occur between HAVOCs was unfolding before his eyes.
“Get on them! Get on them now!”
Wing Captain Candice Anderson snapped her orders to her carrier squadron, a hundred and sixty HAVOCs throwing themselves into a solid wall of death, spewing fire all the while. Rocket pods pulsed salvos of counter-missiles as Lefu fighter-killer warheads screamed back. Space burned all around the Concordat lines, and although they outnumbered their foes, they were still outmatched. Each HAVOC’s total firepower was greater then any two Lefu fighters, but the smaller craft were too quick, too hard to lock down, too easily obscured by their jamming. And they knew how to dogfight, how to fight at the speed of thought. Even those carrying antiship weapons were death incarnate, winding and twisting in impossible maneuvers, defying Terran sensors and targeting systems alike.
The Concordat HAVOCs were shredded not by ones and twos, but by threes, fours, fives and even more. Squadrons died in the blink of an eye, men and women erased from existence faster then they could react. Space burned and writhed with the holocaust, as if a terrible god had awakened and swept all before it away.
But the Terrans did not go quietly, nor did they go alone. The Concord’s designers and engineers had not wasted the time that assembling Eighth Fleet had given them and every dogfighting HAVOC carried more missiles, their rocket pods enhanced and enlarged, their antiship energy cannons replaced with weaker, but quicker-firing turrets and laser clusters. The Concordat pilots had drilled again and again in simulations facing Lefu fighters. Though Hoss’s dogfighters could never hurt larger vessels, they were more then adequate in adding to the carnage here. The Evea’shi link pulsed with the silent death screams of hundreds of their pilots, and the distress calls of hundreds more. The size of Fire Knives worked against them: hits that would have merely damaged a HAVOC were enough to obliterate an Evea’shi pilot and their fighter outright.
Anderson snarled with savage joy as her CHAVOC chased a pair of enemy fighters to oblivion, wheeling about to help her squadron from-
She never saw the missile that killed her.
~
“Enemy fighters have b-broken through our forward HAVOC screens. Estimate seven minutes until they can range on us,” the midshipman at one of the sensor repeater consoles whispered, the blood draining from his face.
Hoss couldn’t blame him; the savagery of that assault was something to behold. Nothing had prepared him for that level of ferocity in the Lefu’s attacks and despite the hundreds of fighters they’d lost, they were forming into new squadrons, still coming for his ships, while his HAVOCs were disoriented and trying to recover. Too many of the squadrons’ CHAVOCS had been destroyed and in their absence, it was taking too long to reform. Not that it mattered; that assault wing was going to cut his final screening elements to pieces.
“Move our escorts up to support the HAVOCs from Carrier Group Four,” he ordered, knowing that those words had sentenced thousands of men and women to death.
~
The Fire Knives cut through their Enemy counterparts like wheat before a scythe. Their lives did not matter; only victory. It was a red-hot ember that pulsed through the link and they were prepared to pay any cost to protect Industrial Fleet.
Behind them, Onslaught Fleet’s tenders continued their inexorable approach, cutting across the Enemy Fleet’s lines, preparing their broadsides to fire. Just as inevitably, the time until they could range on the Enemy drew closer.
~
The 812th’s screen surged ahead, adding their fire to CG 4’s screening HAVOCs. Again, space boiled and writhed as missiles flashed back and forth, explosions bright and searing against the darkness, leaving roiling clouds of plasma and radiation.
The Lefu’s targets were the Concordat capital ships and they did their best to break through the screen, carving a corridor through the Terran HAVOCs and escorts. Once again, sensor plots spiked and flashed with the deaths of hundreds. One of many, Albatross squadron was wiped from the stars in a single instant as a Lefu strike dove on them, their belly cannons shearing through Concordat shield walls and armour.
The destroyer Wasp was torn into flaming shrapnel as another Lefu strike gutted it, the death cries of those aboard echoing through the comm lines. Destroyers, light cruisers and cruisers all burned, the survivors rallying, trying to prevent the Lefu from breaking through, attempting to seal them in a cage. The chaos was too much for even Avenger’s systems to track, but Hoss didn’t need them to know what was happening. Good people were dying, too many of them.
“Here they come,” someone whispered as the first squadrons trickled through hole that had been punched in the screen. In moments the trickle became a flood and then a torrent.
Hoss nodded. “All ships: take your assigned defence zones and fire. Take them down.”
~
Scouting Fleet elements adjusted their positions, interposing themselves between Onslaught Fleet and the Enemy Fire Knives. Missiles smote the Enemy fighters unto ruin and still they came. Fire eroded their strikes from all sides and still they came, bleeding entrails of dying and burning ships and still they came. Their command links buckled under the Fleet’s jamming and the loss of so many of the Enemy’s own sigil craft, but still they came.
Magazines wilted away like plants under a desert sun and still they came, pouring themselves towards their goal. Not Industrial Fleet, not Onslaught or Aggressor, but the Scouting Fleet screen. Believing that it was their larger kin in peril, Scouting Fleet had drawn away from their wards, isolating themselves from support fire. Now the Strike Fleet element burned hard towards their brothers and sisters, but it was too late.
Cruisers thrashed, kilometers of warship spasming like tortured animals as an unbelievable wave of missiles came crashing down upon them, destroyers blotted from the sky like insects. Energy weapons snarled and crackled across space, the silent thunder of the survivors’ guns met with the equally noiseless ripples of the Enemy Fire Knives’ lances. Each blow was inconsequential by itself, but there were so many and they concentrated their fire, battering down shield walls and gouging into the hull beneath, orbiting their prey and preventing them from interposing fresh walls between themselves and their tormentors.
Scouting Fleet died.
The Enemy’s victory was not without cost; their attack was smashed, and the Strike Fleet element’s missiles chased the retreating Enemy back to their hiveships, flaying them every step of the way. The revenge was unfulfilling; the Enemy had succeeded in their objectives.
The Fleet no longer had a missile screen. But, Command seethed, that was all right. Neither did the Enemy. Reports were processed, information analyzed. Yes… Aggressor Fleet had hurt the Enemy, badly. Their own Scouting Fleet was gone, and one of their dreadnoughts was burning from a hundred cuts, battlecruisers atomized and a hiveship dragged screaming into the abyss. To earn all those wounds, the Fire Knives had suffered badly. Less then a third were undamaged and all of them were in need of re-arming. They would get, perhaps, one more strike before the fleets began to dance, if that.
Acceptable.
~
“They’re still coming,” Hoss’s flag-captain gaped in disbelief. “They can’t think they can actually win, can they? Even with their technology, we effectively outnumber them more than four to one.”
“I don’t think that they care,” Vater replied, unable to tear his eyes away from the shuddering corpse of Thunderflare. It seemed impossible; a ship over six kilometers long, lost to insignificant gnats less then a percentage point of its own size! But the proof was there on screen for all to see. It should have been Avenger; somehow the Lefu had picked her out as the command ship and hundreds of their fighters had swept towards the dreadnought. Sacrificing herself for the squadron, Thunderflare’s captain had leaked enough interference to make the attacking HAVOCs think she was the flagship, that Avenger was the decoy.
It had worked.
Thunderflare had huddled inside her shield walls, torrents of fire ripping from its flanks, hardlight spears and hateful missiles burning everything they touched, but the Lefu had hit her again and again and again, hammering her aft where her guns couldn’t track them, where her sensors couldn’t find them and from where the dreadnought couldn’t shake them. Her engines had failed first, armour melting and running like water, the proud warship floundering, the fires spreading from her stern as the Lefu fighters continued to wrack Thunderflare, death from a thousand slow cuts.
Hoss took a moment to steady himself, tearing his eyes from the wreckage. His flag-captain was right; despite their losses, the 812th still had enough firepower to handily smash the Lefu garrison and overrun their construction vessels. “Adjust our course by twenty-degrees port. Additional speed to engines. I want to spend as little time within their missile envelope as possible.”
“Defensive missiles in all tubes. BCVs are taking in HAVOC survivors.”
“Arm them for anti-shipping strikes.” Without Thunderflare, he’d need the additional missiles to crack their boomers. “Fire by assigned ranks once hostile missiles are spaceborne. We’ve knocked out their screen and broken their carrier strength. Let’s mop the rest of them up.”
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