The two remaining seed ships are on the move, but it’s clear they don’t know what they’re hunting. They move away from Mars, accelerating as they’re going, and changing course slightly every few minutes. Cincinnati is much closer to them than the rest of the fleet, and the little OCS is keeping the two Lankies in her sights relentlessly, feeding precise targeting data back to the rest of the task group. By herself, she has no hope of fighting those two behemoths, but the battleships do, and thanks to Cincy they can plot perfect intercept trajectories.
Neither the battleships nor the Lanky seed ships move at anything near the insane acceleration the Orions pulled earlier. The blue icons on the tactical display creep across the situational-awareness sphere, closing the distance minute by minute. I keep scanning the edges of the display for more Lanky ships, expecting to see a cluster of orange icons to come out of nowhere and head for the task group to close the trap they surely laid for us. But the display remains empty except for the tight cluster of blue icons in the center, the two orange lozenges at the far edge of the scale, and the two symbols representing our battleships halfway between. They have the acceleration advantage over the Lankies, and they have the guidance telemetry from Cincinnati. In the past, we got jumped in every engagement because we could never see the Lanky seed ships coming until they were already almost in weapon range. This time, the tables are turned. It’s clear from their course on the plot that the surviving seed ships don’t know where we are, or that two of our battleships are closing in to intercept them.
Agincourt leads the battleship formation, five hundred kilometers ahead of her sister ship, and she reaches firing position first.
“Lima-12 crossing laterally from bearing two-nine-zero, speed six hundred meters per second and accelerating. Range to target twelve thousand kilometers. Agincourt is signaling they have a firing solution.”
“Agincourt, weapons free, weapons free. Light the bastard up,” the command comes in the background of the audio feed from CIC.
“Copy weapons free,” the reply from Agincourt comes, equally muffled and tinny. “Reactor to pulse afterburner. Range ten thousand kilometers. Alpha mount, fifteen-shot burst, fire for effect.”
At the last second, the Lanky seed ship seems to have sensed that someone else is in their neighborhood. On the tactical plot, Lima-12 starts changing its bearing toward the incoming battleships. But the course correction is too little and too late, and the particle cannon’s charge has virtually no travel time at what is almost point-blank range.
“Firing Alpha in three. Two. One. Fire.”
I switch to the visual feed from Cincinnati just in time to see the bloom from the particle cannon’s impact on the Lanky’s hull. Cincinnati is fifty thousand kilometers from the event, but her cameras are so good that I can clearly make out the oblong, organic shape of the seed ship against the blackness of the space behind it. Then the image washes out in a brilliant white flash. When the brightness subsides enough for me to make out anything again, the point in space where a Lanky seed ship just moved across the camera’s field of view at hundreds of meters per second is just an expanding cloud of superheated gas.
“Target destroyed,” the tactical officer half shouts in CIC, and a cheer goes up again.
“Holy mother of fuck,” I murmur into my helmet. The particle cannon mount on Agincourt just turned a three-kilometer seed ship with a hull twenty meters thick into a loose conglomeration of atoms with a second and a half of burst fire.
“Would maybe be good idea to make many more battleships like that,” Dmitry says with a broad grin.
On the plot, Agincourt breaks off its attack run to avoid the plasma cloud by swinging the nose of the ship to port. The particle cannon is a short-range weapon, and at Agincourt’s current speed, it takes only a few seconds to cover the ten thousand kilometers that are the outer edge of the cannon’s effective range.
“Bogey Lima-11 is changing course to intercept,” someone else in CIC warns. “Aspect change from bearing zero-two-zero relative to zero-four-five. They’re going for Agincourt.”
Whether the Lanky ships communicate with each other or the second Lanky simply could not miss the massive energy release that wiped out its companion, our presence is no longer a surprise. Contact Lima-11, the second surviving Lanky seed ship, comes around and heads for Agincourt, which is now swinging around to counter-burn its fusion engines and arrest the momentum that will carry it clean past Mars and into deep space otherwise.
“Agincourt, you have incoming, bearing two-six-six by positive three-five.”
“Alpha mount is off-line,” Agincourt sends back. “Repeat, we have lost function on the particle cannon. Unmasking rail gun batteries.”
I’m reminded of the test-firing a few months back, when Agincourt lost all power after firing the main gun once. The particle cannons they built into Aggie and Archie are insanely powerful, but brand-new technology, mounted in experimental and uncompleted ships. At least Aggie still has her engines, but her rail guns won’t do her much good against the incoming Lanky.
With the counter-burning maneuver, Agincourt’s acceleration advantage over the remaining Lanky disappears. The seed ship closes to thirty thousand kilometers, then twenty thousand, homing in on the battleship like a shark that has smelled blood in the water.
“Arkhangelsk has a firing solution on bogey Lima-11.” The tactical officer on the SRA battleship sends his own updates in excellent English that has just the barest trace of a Chinese accent.
The second battleship is coming in at flank speed to close the distance for an intercept before Agincourt gets overtaken by the Lanky. I can see just by looking at the plot that this is going to get ugly. The particle pulse cannons on the battleships are insanely powerful, but their short range means that the battleships have to be almost in knife-fighting range, tactically speaking. Agincourt had no time to counter-burn at the end of her attack run, so she had no choice but to move into range of the second Lanky seed ship, and Arkhangelsk is about to do the very same thing by necessity to save her sister ship.
“Hold fire, Arkhangelsk. Agincourt is too close to the bogey.”
The range between the seed ship and Agincourt is now down to five thousand kilometers and shrinking with every second. Agincourt is at full burn again to reverse her earlier course, and the seed ship just has to keep accelerating to catch the battleship from astern with her metaphorical pants down.
Eleven seed ships destroyed, and we may still lose this right here, I think. If the last seed ship on the plot manages to destroy or disable the battleships, it will be able to carve through the entire task group like an axe through a soy patty.
On the plot, Arkhangelsk is changing course to get a clean shot at the seed ship. The camera feed from Cincinnati frames both the seed ship and Agincourt hurtling through space on a near-parallel course. Agincourt’s stern is aglow with the fusion flare of her engines burning at full output.