As the last half of the first wave’s warheads committed themselves, and as the second wave of missiles launched from the rapidly maneuvering Earth fleet, the invading Patrons finally reacted. And this reaction was the last thing anyone had expected.
For the first time in over 80 years, the drive star’s radiance shut off. The blue-white beam—which had propelled the Patrons all the way from Delta Pavonis to Sol system, and which had in turn ushered on the technological leaps enabling mankind to meet them on something approaching an equal footing—vanished.
Aboard the Trenton, Rear Admiral Henson would have bolted upright if his restraints had allowed it. His feelings wavered between hope and dread, and he held his breath to see if this meant the end of the battle, or just that it was only now about to truly be joined.
His answer came—again—in an unexpected fashion. Below the battered Control Ship, the tortured lines of color constraining the drive star flexed and writhed. Their confining limbs now curled and looped, gathering the brilliant fusion plasma of the drive star into waves and arcs, not to direct an enhanced photon beam for thrust, but to propel the plasma itself outward.
Sheets of plasma jetted off the drive star to arc over the Control Ship and the museum vessels, coordinated prominences and mass ejections who’s electrically charged sprays of matter attenuated warhead beams, burned missile bodies, and engulfed both laser and railgun fire. Where the vessels of the Patron fleet had been exposed to space and both direct and indirect assault, they were now shielded by atomic flame.
The flares of the drive star swatted the remainder of the first missile wave out of the sky, then broke free to send an intense wave of energy out to scorch both the second wave and the attacking ships. The plasma blasts cooled and dissipated rapidly as they left the confining energies directed by the battered Control Ship, such that they disabled only a tithe of the second wave and had even less effect on the larger, more distant warships. However, the sheets of star matter proved completely effective in shielding the Patron vessels. Worse still, as the level of assault slackened, clouds of nano-assemblers poured out to begin in-battle repairs.
With a command, Henson adjusted his plan, and all the ships of his fleet broke free of their original objectives to instead converge on the Control Ship. Where a distributed attack no longer worked, concentration and mass of fire might still carry the day.
The second wave, now given up for lost due to the mutating nature of the battle, was joined by a third missile assault, a continuous stream of missiles aimed past the Control Ship at the surface of the drive star itself, directed at the continually shifting upwellings which gave birth to the plasma sheets. Nuclear blasts pummeled the immense surface of the star, an attempt to use brute force to disrupt the fiery shields. At first, it seemed like trying to extinguish a blow torch as one would a candle, but after many, many poorly placed explosions, the series of relatively small puffs achieved in aggregate what no one individual blast could.
The shield thinned and faltered, opening clear patches over and around the Control Ship. Into these patches, lasers and railgun fire poured forth from the human warships. Each hit was small and dealt nowhere near the damage even one of the dwindling number of missiles could accomplish, but at the very least it disrupted the nanotech repair effort. At best they achieved a stalemate, but it was a tenuous draw, limited by the relative size of each force’s magazines: missiles and railgun rounds versus the unimaginable mass of a dwarf star. And once their missiles were used up and their magazines had gone dry, the Patrons would pour forth an onslaught of laser and nanobeam fire that would decimate the Earth forces, not to mention the damage the drive star’s propulsion beam could presumably deliver.
Despite the best that humanity could bring to bear, they were still going to lose.
“SITREP, people.” Henson’s voice on the net was grim.
Dan Torrance came back angry. “We’re in position but nothing’s making it past that goddamn plasma shield. Who the fuck uses a solar flare to guard their ships? How is it not burning them up?”
Lawrence, the British DESRON commander, spoke up. “Our lads have analyzed a cross section of the shield. It’s actually quite distant from the ships themselves. Our entire force could easily fit inside that volume.”
Henson jumped on that quickly. “This goes back in our favor if we remove the interference of that shield. If we can’t disrupt it, can we at the very least get inside it?”
Torrance blew a low whistle. “It’s a wall of fusion plasma, Calvin. The only reason it didn’t burn right through our ships when they started throwing solar flares at us was that it dissipates and cools rapidly once it’s away from whatever’s keeping the plasma confined. If we go down there, though, what’s happening to our missiles and railgun rounds will happen to us. Up till now we’ve had virtually no casualties.”
“You think that’s going to stand, Dan? The Deltans haven’t really fired at us yet. The offense has been entirely on our side. As soon as we shoot our last missile, they’re going to drop those shields and skewer us with every last damn megajoule of laser energy they can bring to bear. And we don’t have enough time to retreat, resupply, and re-attack. They’ll be in orbit of the damn planet before we can attack again. No. We have to finish this assault here and now, even if it means ramming the goddamn thing and blowing all our drives. Now then, any bright ideas on how to get past the plasma shield when it’s at its strongest?”
Krueger, the German DESRON commander, then mentioned reluctantly, “We have an idea, but none of you are going to like it.”
The ships of the combined fleet ceased firing missiles and shifted positions, drawing closer and closer to one another until Group One and the UK squadron formed one wedge-like phalanx approaching from the south and Group Two and the EU squadron formed another wedge from the north. The Sword class destroyers arrayed themselves in front of and around the two cruisers, with the bulk of each formation opposite the direction of the plasma flow surrounding the Control Ship. The prominences of their drives blazed so closely to one another, that there was a very real danger of fratricide—destroying their fellow ship’s hulls before the Patrons even fired a shot.
The two formations each went to maximum group acceleration, nearly crushing their crews within, but gaining the vital speed they needed to make it through the wall of plasma and to their quarry. Missiles, lasers, and railguns all ceased firing, as combined fleet tactics turned toward formation and maneuver. Closer and closer, the brilliant ramparts of dense, ionized matter loomed, while within each ship, every servicemember grew silent with the knowledge that finality was upon them.
Just before breaching the curving wall of plasma, missile hatches rippled open, disgorging dozens of missiles, but these did not dive for the plasma sources upon the drive star or scream toward any of the Patron vessels. Instead they flew out a short distance and formed a second wedge leading the first defensive layer of destroyers before the plasma sheath blocking them from the Control Ship. As each missile touched the fringes of the prominence, all six warheads aboard them detonated in maximal fusion glory. Nuclear shockwaves and pulses of radiation battered the destroyers which fired them, but—more importantly—also blew back the plasma of the Patron shield for the briefest of moments.
The destroyers passed through the thinned region of shield plasma, and absorbed or blocked what remained, casting a shadow of safety upon the cruiser at the heart of each of the two wedges. Trenton and Lake Erie followed close behind and breached the Control Ship’s shield in turn, but it was not without cost. A momentary weakening of stellar plasma did not mean that the plasma was not still capable of causing damage, nor that it remained in that weakened state.