But if someone had tried, he thought, would it have been accepted?
He pushed the thought aside as his squadron raced towards the alien craft at a staggering closing speed. Quickly, he flipped his weapons on to automatic — he'd have to gamble that the computers didn't accidentally take a shot at an allied starfighter — then braced himself, keeping his starfighter on a random course. It seemed only seconds before the guns started chattering away, spitting out tiny balls of metal towards the alien fighters. Kurt saw a handful of icons vanish from the display, only to be replaced instantly by other alien craft. His starfighters weren't replaced so quickly…
“Alpha-five and Alpha-seven are gone,” Alpha-nine reported. Kurt hadn't even seen Alpha-seven die. “Alpha-three is disabled…”
Lucky bastard, Kurt thought. A fluke, a million-to-one shot that had damaged a starfighter, rather than destroying it outright. Behind him, the alien starfighters disengaged and roared towards the flotilla. Cursing, he yanked his starfighter around and gave chase, while Delta and Gamma squadrons rose up to cover the carrier. There were so many alien starfighters that some of them were almost certain to get through.
“Incoming starfighters,” Farley reported. “Weapons range in thirty seconds.”
“Open fire as soon as they enter effective weapons range,” Ted ordered. The alien starfighters were ducking and weaving past the frigates, refusing to engage them. It made sense, Ted knew; if they could cripple Ark Royal, the frigates were unlikely to make any difference to the balance of power. Still, he would have preferred the aliens to show tactical inflexibility rather than a limited degree of imagination. “Fire at will.”
He braced himself as the starfighters roared down on the carrier, scorching her hull with plasma bolts. It looked like random fire — it was random fire, he knew — but it had a very definite purpose. The aliens didn't have to target precisely to do damage… and, for them, spraying and praying was actually a viable tactic. Piece by piece, the damage mounted…
The carrier shuddered, slightly.
“Report,” Ted snapped.
“One of the aliens crashed into our hull,” Anderson said. “No major damage, sir.”
But the minor damage was steadily mounting up, Ted knew. One of the mass drivers was already crippled and would need a week of repair before it was ready to use again. Other weapons and sensor blisters had already been destroyed, crippling the carrier’s ability to defend herself.
“Captain,” Farley snapped. Ted heard a hint of panic in his voice. “New contacts!”
Ted swung around and stared at the display. A new series of red icons had appeared, right in front of them… and blocking their escape route from the system.
They were trapped.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For a moment, Ted’s tired mind refused to believe his eyes. How the hell had the aliens managed to get a force in position to come through the tramline and block their escape? If the aliens had a way to communicate at FTL speeds, without sending ships through the tramlines, humanity was thoroughly screwed. There was no way to move inside the alien decision-making loop when the alien leadership could follow events at the front from hundreds of light years away.
Or was it just sheer luck? The aliens had known that the flotilla was poking around; they might have stationed a fleet in the system, then ordered it to move after Ark Royal once the alien fleet at New Russia came under attack. It would work… and it would have the advantage of confusing their enemies. Ted pushed the thought aside for later contemplation as the aliens started to deploy. He could attack the newcomers — he would have to attack the newcomers, if he wanted to use that tramline — and yet the force in to pursuit would catch up and overwhelm the flotilla. If he turned back to fight them, he would still be overwhelmed.
His mind worked frantically, searching for a solution. There was no way they could break contact and hide, not with the aliens close enough to track them even if they shut down all systems and pretended to be a hole in space. The aliens would have a rough idea of where they were, allowing them to sweep space until they stumbled over the lurking carrier. And that assumed they managed to break contact for a few seconds in the first place. Nor could the other tramlines be reached…
He pulled up the in-system display and contemplated it. New Russia had five human-usable tramlines, three of which led to other human settlements. The aliens would have blockaded them by now, placing smaller forces in position to intercept anything that came through the tramlines — or Ark Royal, if she attempted to make it out. One more — the one he had intended to use — was also thoroughly blockaded, but the other…? He looked down at the reports from the drones and frowned. They might just be able to make it.
It could be a trap, he knew. Maybe it led to a red giant, utterly useless to anyone save astronomers who wanted to study, but it was still odd for the aliens to leave it uncovered. But it did make a certain kind of sense. The aliens didn't have unlimited numbers of ships, so they covered the most important targets, assuming that Tramline Five wouldn't be used by a human counterattack. They might well be right, Ted considered. Tramline Five led away from the core of human space and Earth. At the very least, Ark Royal was committing herself and her fleet to several months away from human contact.
“Set course for Tramline Five,” he ordered. “Maximum speed.”
He gritted his teeth. On the display, the alien starfighters were swooping back for another engagement. They’d already stripped Ark Royal of a handful of point defence weapons; now, they were taking advantage of the carrier’s blind spots to get closer to the hull and take out other targets. His own starfighters were chasing them down, at the risk of being accidentally picked off themselves by the carrier’s point defence. If the battering continued, the aliens would eventually render the carrier completely defenceless.
“Target the alien carriers with missiles,” he ordered, “then launch decoys. Confuse them as long as possible.”
“Aye, sir,” Farley said.
Ted forced himself to remain calm and composed on the outside, even through part of him wanted to panic and the rest of him wanted a drink. The crew couldn't see their commander panicking, not when they knew they were in deep shit. He cursed inwardly as one of the frigates vanished, even as the remainder opened fire. A second salvo of missiles headed towards the newcomers, forcing them to look to their own defence. Farley hastily reprogrammed some of the missiles to take out incoming alien starfighters, using the nukes to sweep space clean. The aliens rapidly adapted and spread out, refusing to allow the humans to pick them off again.
He felt a dull tremor running through the carrier as she altered course, heading up and away from the system plane towards Tramline Five. For a long moment, the combination of ECM drones and nuclear explosions seemed to confuse the aliens, but it didn't last long enough for Ark Royal to break contact. The ECM crews took advantage of the brief pause to launch additional drones, giving the aliens several possible targets to engage. Ted would take whatever distraction he could get, but he knew it wouldn't last very long. Ark Royal was the only target shooting back at the aliens, after all.