Despite that, Selkirk had certain offsetting advantages. One was that unlike the deep-space arrays which had given Chartres two full days of warning before the Melconians’ arrival, even a battleship’s detection range against a unit approaching through hyper was severely limited. The Melconian CO had been given less than four hours’ warning before Selkirk’s ships came piling out of hyper, and his combat strength was still out of position. Another advantage was that every one of Selkirk’s ships possessed a fully self-aware AI… and that those ships’ command crews were neurally linked with them. They literally thought and fought at the same hyper-heuristic speed as Bolos.
None of which changed the fact that the battleship component of the enemy force alone out—massed his entire task force by more than two-to-one.
Orders flashed outward from Selkirk’s flagship. He had arranged his approach very carefully, and his task force and the accompanying transports deployed with smooth efficiency. The commodore had deliberately dropped most of his warships back into normal-space well inside the three-light-minute sphere of the Chartres jump point. That was precisely where the Melconians had been expecting him, although he still managed to emerge into n-space outside their immediate engagement range. But the transports, accompanied by the carrier Indomitable and two of his destroyers, had made the transition to normal-space out on the very rim of the jump point at its closest approach to the inner system.
It had been a calculated risk, since it was always possible the Melconian CO might have anticipated the maneuver and deployed to smash the transports first, but it had paid off. The main body of the Melconian fleet was exactly where Selkirk had hoped it would be—well out—system from the transports’ emergence point, with the commodore and his main combatants between it and the transports.
The eight transports, trailing their three escorts, arrowed straight towards the planet while Selkirk and his brutally outnumbered force squared off to keep the Melconians off their backs. Maneka felt physically sick to her stomach as her tactical plot showed the sea of hostile icons sweeping towards the commodore and his handful of ships. She wasn’t trained in Navy tactical iconography, but she didn’t need to be to recognize the dreadful imbalance between the two forces.
She didn’t have a great deal of time to think about that, however. Four Melconian “fists” had apparently been providing orbital fire support for their ground forces, now that the deep-space defenses had been suppressed, and now they came peeling out of Chartres planetary orbit as the transports steadied down on their approach.
“Incoming missiles,” Benjy announced. “The Enemy is targeting the transports.”
“Stand by for antimissile defense,” Maneka replied—more, she was aware, for something to say than because Benjy needed any instructions from her.
“Standing by.”
On each of the Sleipners, pairs of Bolos brought up their battle screen, activated tracking systems, and waited with psychotronic calm as the Melconian missiles shrieked towards them. And, to her own immense surprise, Maneka Trevor felt her own pulse steady as she watched the arrowhead-shaped missile icons race to meet Tannenberg.
More icons blossomed on Benjy’s tactical plot, and Maneka recognized them as Indomitable’s outgoing fighters. There were eighty of them, and they headed straight for the enormously larger Melconian warships under maximum power. The missiles targeted on the transports ignored them, and Maneka bared her teeth as she recognized the Melconians’ error.
They should have tried to nail Indomitable before she launched, she thought. And they’re about to find out that they just wasted their entire initial salvo.
Hypervelocity countermissiles were already spitting outward from the Bolos. Designed for planetary combat, they moved slowly compared to the deep-space weapons charging to destroy the transports, but “slowly” was a purely relative term. They moved quickly enough when they were directed by a Bolo’s targeting and computational systems, and groups of them relentlessly bracketed each incoming missile, boring in through defensive electronic countermeasures.
One-by-one, the Melconian missiles were picked off far short of attack range. Only fourteen got through the countermissile interception envelope, and thirteen of those were picked off by infinite repeater fire far short of their targets. Only one got close enough to actually detonate against the battle screen protecting its intended victim, and that battle screen—reinforced by the full power of the Bolo on the opposite side of the transport’s hull—held.
And while those missiles were attacking, the fighters from Indomitable flung themselves upon their leviathan foes.
Twenty of them died before they got into engagement range. It would have been even worse, Maneka thought, sickened by the carnage, if the Melconians had held back that initial missile launch, targeted it on the fighters they ought to have known had to be coming. But twenty-five percent losses before the surviving fighter pilots even crossed the missile envelope was quite bad enough.
The sixty survivors ignored the destroyers shooting at them. Instead, they charged straight towards the cruisers. Close-in weapons opened up on them, but the fighters bored in grimly, holding their fire. The fleet little vessels carried plasma torpedoes-triple-barreled, short-ranged weapons with an even heavier punch than Benjy’s Hellbore, but slow-firing. The launchers took long enough to recharge that each fighter would be able to fire only a single salvo per firing pass. But their other energy weapons were intended for dogfighting against other fighters, too light to significantly damage something as heavily armored as a warship, and the pilots were determined to make their single launch each count.
Half of them died before they reached the range they sought and salvoed their torpedoes, but unlike missiles, plasma torpedoes were light-speed weapons. They ripped in, impossible to intercept, and all four of the heavy cruisers and one of the light cruisers disappeared in the hellish glare of impacting plasma. Each torpedo was the equivalent of a shaped-charge fusion warhead, slamming its target with a megaton awl of brimstone, and battle screen failed and armor and hull plating vaporized as those man—made thunderbolts disemboweled their targets.
One of the three surviving light cruisers was severely damaged, staggering sideways in a shower of shattered debris and the telltale shroud of venting atmosphere. Her emissions signature flickered uncertainly, and her drive field went down completely, but her consorts had been luckier. The fighter group targeted on one of them had taken murderous casualties on its way in. Only two of its pilots had survived to fire, and their launch sequence had been badly desynchronized. The plasma torpedoes came in as separate, individual attacks, without the focus and precise timing which had killed the cruiser’s fellows, and the ship’s battle screen managed to deflect most of their effectiveness. She was hurt, but not badly, and she continued to belch missiles at the transports.
But the fourth light cruiser had clearly taken heavy damage. Her weapons fire ceased almost entirely, and her battle screen fluctuated wildly for a fraction of the second before it came back up to full strength and steadied. But there was nothing wrong with her drive, and she changed course abruptly.
“Collision vector,” Benjy announced, and Maneka bit her lip as the cruiser’s projected path intersected with Indomitable’s.
The carrier’s AI altered course, dodging hard, but her evasion options were too limited. The geometry was against her, and although her light shipboard weapons fired desperately, carriers weren’t supposed to get this close to enemy main combatants. They were supposed to operate under the cover and protection of an entire task force, providing a fighter umbrella to operate at ranges of up to several light-hours from their flight decks, or on independent operations at extreme range from anything but the enemy’s fighters. And so they were equipped primarily with antifighter weapons, designed to provide volume of fire against swarms of attacking fighters, not to batter their way through a cruiser’s battle screen. But Indomitable had had no choice but to go to meet the enemy this time, as she and her escorting destroyers fought to clear the way and keep the Melconians away from the transports which had to reach the surface of Chartres.