Alliance warships fired as well, their weapons aiming for a relatively small point in the huge Syndic wall. Shields flared on Syndic warships in a ragged circle centered on the point where the Alliance cylinder was aimed. Not far from the center of that circle was the Syndic flagship. At a relative closing velocity of just under thirty thousand kilometers per second, one moment it seemed the enemy formation was far away and the next it was behind them as the Alliance cylinder went through the Syndic wall like a bullet through a board.
The moment of contact came and went. Geary let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, feeling Dauntless shuddering from hits the Syndics had scored in that fraction of a second when the forces were within range of all weapons. “Shields down slightly, spot failures, minor hit aft, no system losses,” the watch-standers on Dauntless reported rapidly.
“All units in the Alliance fleet, change formation facing one eight zero degrees, accelerate to point one light at time five nine.”
“We’re going back through them?” Rione asked, sounding shocked.
“That’s the idea. If they brake to match our speed, we’ll be in big trouble, but hopefully they’ll assume we’re going to keep heading away and accelerate toward us again.” Geary’s eyes were on the display, watching the damage readouts for both fleets as sensors tallied the results of the moment of contact.
“Two battleships,” Desjani noted approvingly. “Three battle cruisers knocked out, too. One of those was probably the flagship.”
“Let’s hope so.”
Only ten or twenty more passes just as successful, and they’d have evened the odds in this star system. It wasn’t exactly grounds for getting cocky. “We didn’t take much damage, but it’ll be worse next time.”
The Alliance ships had swung their bows completely around again, facing the jump point for Ixion and toward the Syndic formation. Geary watched the Syndic movements, hoping they’d do the natural thing and reverse course in place to pursue his fleet.
They did, but not quickly enough.
“They’re coming back at us, but we’re going to pass through them at a relative speed of only point zero two light,” Desjani reported.
That would mean a longer time within enemy weapon range and easier targets for the missiles and grapeshot that the enemy still had in far greater abundance than the Alliance fleet.
He didn’t want to look at the state of the fleet’s fuel cells after these maneuvers. It didn’t really matter. He had to burn off fuel cells now or the fleet wouldn’t survive to worry about low fuel states.
The Syndic formation was folding in on itself, trying to thicken where the Alliance fleet would pass through, but fortunately didn’t have much time to accomplish that.
The wall of Syndics came and went, Dauntless’s shields going incandescent from enemy hits.
“Spot failures on bow and flank shields, minor damage from grapeshot impacts, several hell-lance hits amidships, hell-lance batteries 3A and 5B out of commission, estimated time of repair unknown, casualties unknown,” Dauntless’s watch reported.
Geary’s eyes ran over the state of his fleet. Dauntless had come off easy compared to the other battle cruisers. Duellos’s Courageous had been raked badly, Daring had lost half its weapons, Leviathan and Dragon had taken propulsion hits but were grimly keeping up with the formation, Formidable and Incredible were torn up amidships. Even his battleships had taken hits, though none were hurt as badly as the battle cruisers. Scout battleship Exemplar had been hit multiple times but by luck had lost nothing serious. The heavy cruisers Basinet and Sallet were gone, one exploded under a hail of Syndic fire and the other drifting away from the formation, badly hurt and helpless, escape pods leaping from the crippled ship.
Light cruisers Spur, Damascene, and Swept-Guard had been destroyed or wrecked, and destroyers War-Hammer, Prasa, Talwar, and Xiphos shattered despite their protected positions within the cylinder.
Titan had been hit again. The auxiliary seemed to attract Syndic weapons like a magnet attracted iron. But the hit wasn’t critical. Despite his pain at the losses, Geary felt satisfaction as he saw the state of Warrior, Orion, and Majestic. Their degraded shields and new damage told Geary that the three battleships had indeed done their best to protect the auxiliaries.
The Syndics hadn’t come through the latest firing pass unscathed, thanks to the local firepower superiority of the Alliance fleet. Another of their battleships was a drifting wreck, and three more battle cruisers had been blown up or broken. At least a dozen heavy cruisers had been disabled or killed, and the wreckage of numerous light cruisers and HuKs littered space now.
“Another pass?” Desjani asked, her voice subdued as she dealt with the damage to her ship.
“No. We’d have to go through them twice again, and they’d blow us to hell on the fourth pass. We’re less than an hour from the jump point. We head for it.”
The Syndic wall formation, distorted and bent from its maneuvers and the two times the Alliance fleet had passed through it, was reversing its ships’ headings again and accelerating once more in the wake of the Alliance fleet.
Should he try to hit the Syndics again anyway? Try to throw the Syndics off once more? Geary tallied up the status of his ships’ shields, the few specters and small amount of grapeshot remaining, and the damage his ships had already suffered and knew his quick assessment for Desjani had been accurate; another pair of passes through the Syndics would be suicidal. He didn’t have the speed advantage or the distance needed to try to hit a flank of the Syndic formation, which was thicker now, not as tall or wide, but still covered space behind the Alliance fleet.
Forty-five minutes out from the jump point, and the Alliance fleet would have to brake its velocity to get around the minefield in front of the jump point.
The Syndics were too close, coming on too fast. It wasn’t going to be enough. Everything he had tried wasn’t going to be enough.
Geary watched the maneuvering systems predict the outcome of current velocity and directions vectors, and he could see the Syndics overtaking the rear of the Alliance fleet. He’d have an ugly choice, then, to either abandon the ships in the rear or else slow the rest of the fleet to join them and doom every ship in the fleet in the process. Lose a third, at least, of his fleet, or the whole thing? Knowing that even if he ran and left so many ships to their fate it still wouldn’t mean safety when the survivors reached Ixion, because the Syndics would be coming after them.
“Captain Geary.” A small window had popped into existence, showing Captain Mosko looking calm in a numb sort of way. “My division is the farthest back in the formation, closest to the Syndics.”
“Yes.” The Seventh Battleship Division had taken the brunt of Syndic missiles and grapeshot on the first pass through the Syndic formation, avoided that on the second pass when warships on the front of the Alliance cylinder led the way through the Syndics, but now they’d catch hell again as the Syndics overtook the Alliance fleet. There wasn’t a damn thing Geary could do about that, though.