“All units, all units. Execute Battle Plan Romeo.”
We are back in normal space. Ahead of us and above our trajectory, there’s the unmistakable bulk of a Lanky seed ship, but it’s in the distance and heading away from us at a thirty-degree angle. I can’t quite get a grip on the situation as well as I would if I had a three-dimensional tactical display in front of me instead of overlapping camera feeds, but I can see that the plan has worked at least partially—the Lanky is moving away from the Alcubierre node, and we have at least fifty kilometers of open space between us and him.
Regulus swings hard to port to clear space for the ships that popped through the node right behind us, and the ship-to-ship channels erupt in terse combat chatter.
“Contact at zero-four-five relative, positive zero-three-zero!”
“Get behind Regulus. Come to new heading three-four-one by negative thirty. Expedite, goddammit.”
“Get me a targeting solution on that huge son of a bitch.”
“Hold all missile fire. Repeat, hold all missile fire. Unmask rail gun batteries and link for barrage fire.”
I try to open up as many camera-feed windows on the display as I can to capture the scope of the action that’s unfolding. Regulus is leading the breakout charge through the node, and all the other ships are behind us in a staggered battle line. We are forming a V with the Lanky ship, with the Alcubierre point at its tip, and the legs of the V slowly diverging as we accelerate away from the seed ship as fast as we can.
“All units, open fire. Weapons free, weapons free.”
We watch the fireworks on the camera feeds in slack-jawed awe. Nine capital warships open fire simultaneously with all their rail gun batteries. Hundreds of tons of kinetic warheads streak toward the Lanky ship, salvo after salvo. They cover the fifty-kilometer distance between the ships in just a few seconds and shatter against the hull of the Lanky ship in spectacular thermal blooms. This concentrated barrage would be enough to take apart any ship ever put into space by us or the SRA, but the Lanky seed ship’s hull shrugs the kinetic rounds off like an animal swatting aside angry wasps.
“Bogey is coming around! Bearing change to zero-four-five relative.”
The seed ship seems annoyed enough with the barrage to break off pursuit of whoever managed to lure it away from the transition point, or maybe whatever entity controls it has decided to pursue the more numerous targets that just popped out of nowhere behind it. But we have a slight speed advantage, and our task group is accelerating as fast as our ships can burn. Whatever cosmic fates have set us on a collision course with this species, at least they’re still beholden to the laws of physics, even if they have ships that can withstand millions of joules of kinetic energy.
The task force ships fire another barrage. The lights on the flight deck dim momentarily as the power output of the ship’s fusion reactors is almost completely eaten up by a propulsion system going at emergency power and a battery of electromagnetic artillery firing from all tubes. We are increasing the distance meter by meter, and trying to slow the Lanky seed ship down by throwing spit wads at their hull, pure defiance and desperation.
Our formation is rapidly pulling apart. Every ship is making its own best acceleration, and some of the older units are falling behind a little. Regulus was leading the charge out of the Alcubierre node, but even with the ten-second head start we had, the frigate Tripoli is pulling ahead of us. The heavy cruiser Avenger, Regulus’s bodyguard unit, could probably outrun us easily, but she is just off our stern and to our starboard, faithfully and doggedly shielding her charge.
“Incoming fire! Vampire, vampire. We have incoming ordnance from the Lanky.”
Overhead, the forceful voice of the Regulus’s CO comes over the 1MC.
“All hands, brace for impact.”
This time I can actually see the Lanky missiles. One of the cameras is angled just right, and against the backdrop of the rail gun impacts in the distance, there are dart-like objects crossing the space between us in a flurry of movement.
This is it, I think. A hit to propulsion or the reactors, we slow down, and then the Lanky closes in for the kill.
But Regulus must be just outside the reach of the Lanky’s weapons envelope, because there are no impacts on our hull, no holes in the flight deck and screams of panic and anguish. Instead, we keep accelerating away from the Lanky ship, which is still in the middle of its wide and ponderous turn to port.
Behind us, one of the task force ships is not so lucky. There’s a soundless explosion blotting out one of the camera feeds and blinding the optical sensor briefly. When the feed returns, it shows a rapidly expanding field of flame and debris, a ship hull losing integrity at full acceleration, getting torn apart by the same forces it had harnessed just moments ago.
“Good God,” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp says, ashen-faced behind the half-lowered shield of his helmet.
“We just lost the Long Beach,” someone says on the ship-to-ship channel.
The escort cruiser to the Midway must have taken a direct hit to the fusion plant or into a launch-ready nuclear warhead. Ten thousand tons of steel and alloy, and five hundred men and women, cease to exist as a cohesive unit in the blink of an eye, the most rapid catastrophic failure I’ve ever seen. Nobody on that ship had time to get into an escape capsule. Nobody on that ship probably even knew what hit them. Just like that, the cruiser CG-97 Long Beach and her crew are gone.
“Shen Yang is falling out of line,” someone else sends.
Our stern camera feed shows the Chinese destroyer. It’s still intact, but there’s obviously something wrong, because they are slowing down and veering off to starboard. As they turn away from the main body of our task force degree by degree, I can see that they’re trailing debris and frozen air from their stern section.
“Oh, no,” I hear myself saying. “No, no, no, no.”