She was too far ahead of Tannenberg and the other transports for any of the Bolos to engage the cruiser before impact, and yet it was so agonizingly close. She was barely a hundred kilometers outside Benjy’s engagement range when the damaged cruiser slammed through her battle screens like a quarter-million-ton hammer and both ships vanished in a kinetic fireball brighter than the system’s sun.
Maneka swore bitterly as both icons disappeared from her plot, but even as she cursed, and even as she felt the horror of the deaths of almost three thousand fellow human beings, she knew that at this moment, right here and now, Indomitable had been expendable. And she and her massacred fighter group, of which only eleven survived, had done their job. Only one of the intercepting Melconian cruisers remained, and a merciless corner of Maneka’s mind wondered if the crew of that ship truly realized what was about to happen to it.
The cruiser and all four enemy destroyers bored in, and the Concordiat destroyers went to meet them. They were faster than the Melconians, more maneuverable, and fought with a deadly efficiency, but there were only two of them, and if their AI-human fusions used their weapons far more effectively, they were outgunned by over five-to-one. It was a short, vicious engagement—a knife-range battle which stripped away much of the combat advantage human ships’ superior coordination and defensive systems normally conferred—because it had to be. The destroyer crews knew they had to clear the transports’ path before any additional Melconian units managed to break past Commodore Selkirk or suddenly appeared unexpectedly from the far side of the planet. And so they took the Melconians on at the enemy’s most effective range.
They died. But they took three of the four intercepting destroyers with them, and the fourth was so badly damaged that it reeled out of the engagement with its battle screen entirely down.
The light cruiser burst through the engagement, streaming atmosphere but with its energy weapons intact, and all her surviving batteries opened fire on CNS Tannenberg, which happened to be the lead transport.
Maneka felt her face locking in a snarl of triumph as the cruiser spat death at her. The battle screen which now protected the transports was Bolo battle screen, designed to deflect the fire of Benjy’s own main armament at anything beyond point-blank range, and it sneered at the lesser energy weapons mounted by a mere light cruiser. Benjy’s screen brushed the long-range fire aside almost contemptuously. Then his main turret traversed slightly and fired once.
When the Mark XXVIII had first been introduced, its main armament had been equivalent to that mounted in the Concordiat Navy’s current-generation ships-of-the-line. Technology had moved on since then, into newer, deadlier, more powerful weaponry, but even today, nothing lighter than a battlecruiser—and precious few of them—mounted anything approaching the lethality of his 110-centimeter Hellbore. Certainly no light cruiser did… and none of them had been designed to survive its fury.
Benjy’s target shattered, blowing apart and then, abruptly, vaporizing as the ship’s antimatter powerplant’s containment fields went down. The fierce, blinding flash of the fireball polarized Benjy’s direct visual display, and Maneka heard her own soprano shriek of triumph as the cruiser disappeared.
The remaining crippled cruiser and destroyer died almost as spectacularly seconds later under the vengeful fire of other Bolos, and then the transports were clear, racing towards the planet they had come to save or die trying.
Despite its population, which was certainly of respectable size for any world outside the Core Sectors, the planet of Chartres had been touched relatively lightly by the imprint of mankind. All of its developed, terraformed cropland was concentrated on only one of its three major land masses, along with virtually all of its citizens, two-thirds of whom had lived in a relatively small number of large urban centers surrounded by rolling farmland or virgin forest.
But Chartres was lightly touched no longer.
Benjy’s assault pod separated from Tannenberg and dived roaringly into the planetary atmosphere, and his infinite repeaters fired steadily as he and the rest of the Battalion systematically eliminated every piece of orbital debris that didn’t carry a Concordiat IFF code. Melconian stealth systems were good, but they weren’t perfect, and the Battalion’s relentless assault burned away the reconnaissance platforms the invaders had deployed.
Maneka studied the visual images from Benjy’s optical heads as the assault wave howled downward.
Laroche City, the planetary capital, with its population of over thirty million, was a smoking, blazing sea of ruins. Provence and Nouveau Dijon were little better, although at least a rim of Nouveau Dijon’s suburbs appeared to have survived partially intact, and the same was true for at least two dozen of the planet’s other cities and larger towns. The green and brown patchwork of farms and the dark-green woodlands surrounding what had once been the habitations of man were dotted with the wreckage of missiles and air-breathing attack craft which had been destroyed by the ruined cities’ perimeter defenses, and towering pillars of smoke and dust seemed to be everywhere.
Although Chartres’ population had been tiny compared to one of the Core Worlds like Old Earth, it had been large enough, and the star system’s industrial base had been extensive enough, to provide quite heavy ground-based defensive systems. The local planetary and system authorities, with the assistance of the Concordiat’s central government, had taken advantage of that and spent most of the past six Standard Years fortifying and preparing against the probability of an eventual Melconian attack. But with the Line grinding back only slowly across the Camperdown Sector, the planning authorities had given higher priority to systems and planets under more immediate threat. No one had anticipated that the Empire would show the daring to strike this deeply into the major star systems inside the Concordiat’s frontier, and the local defenses, however formidable, had not been formidable enough.
Someone should have seen it coming, she thought grimly. Sure, they had to send in the equivalent of an entire fleet to pull it off, but the tempo of this war’s done nothing but accelerate from the very beginning. And both sides are getting more desperate as the casualty totals go up. We should have realized that, sooner or later, the Puppies would roll the dice like this. If they can pull it off—establish a sizable Fleet presence this far into our rear—at the very least, it would force us into major redeployments until we could deal with it. That was probably worth risking the loss of their entire force all by itself, and that doesn’t even count taking out Chartres’ population and industrial base.
But at least the system’s defenders had been given enough warning to execute their evacuation plans. Maneka had no way of knowing—and didn’t want to know—how many citizens of those butchered cities had failed to get out in time, but the glowing green icons of scores of huge refugee centers, all of them with at least rudimentary previously prepared defenses, burned in Benjy’s strategic plot. In addition to the fixed defenses, most of them were ringed by the additional icons of planetary militia and the remnants of the detachments of Regulars deployed to the planet. And those defenses appeared to be holding against the aerial bombardment raining down upon them, now that the fleet units which had been providing the Melconian attackers with fire support from orbit had been dispersed. But there was no way any of them could have hoped to hold more than briefly against the terrifying concentration of ground-based firepower the Melconians had managed to land on the planetary surface before the Concordiat relief force arrived.