The message should arrive a couple of minutes before Fleche and the gas giant reached each other as the warship zoomed in from the outer star system and the planet swung along its orbit.
Fleche was fifteen light-minutes from Inspire when the light cruiser swooped over the northern pole of the gas giant and got its first look at the side hidden from view of the fleet. Geary watched intently as the images from Fleche appeared on his display. Everything he was seeing had happened fifteen minutes ago.
Fleche’s combat systems sounded alerts as a HuK appeared around the curve of the planet. The HuK had been rising at a slow rate, heading toward the path that Fleche was taking, a dead giveaway that the HuK knew Fleche was coming.
The HuK spun about and accelerated downward, skimming the upper atmosphere of the gas giant as it fled.
Geary watched, appalled, as Fleche rolled, turned, and dove after the HuK in full pursuit. He felt a numbness inside and realized his hand was quivering above the comm controls, wanting to send the commands to the Alliance light cruiser to follow her orders, to finish searching the back side of the gas giant, and to return safely to the rest of the Alliance warships.
But this had all happened fifteen minutes ago. Any order he sent would take fifteen minutes to arrive, and he knew with a sick certainty that would be too late.
As Duellos had reminded him, he hadn’t been in command of this fleet that long. He had been in charge a tiny fraction of the time since the war began, a war whose destructive and mindless path had favored ever-more-aggressive and mindless tactics as trained tacticians died en masse and new commanders sought to make up for lack of training and experience with a narrow focus on what they saw as courage and honor, and on a willingness to die rather than retreat.
Geary had done a lot to change those attitudes. But he could not in a short time eradicate the false lessons created by a century of stubborn bloodletting and pursuit of personal glory. The fact that such attitudes were partly justified by claims that they embodied the true spirit of Black Jack, of him, had only made it harder.
Now he watched Fleche in hot pursuit and waited for what he was certain would come.
Two Syndic-design heavy cruisers appeared around the lower curve of the gas giant, bracketing Fleche and on top of her too fast for the light cruiser to react. The heavy cruisers were too close, the moment of engagement too fleeting, for missiles to be employed, but the two enemy ships each hurled out a volley of hell-lance particle beams and the metal ball bearings known as grapeshot. The fire lashed Fleche’s shields, collapsing them, some of the impacts going on to tear holes in the lightly armored Alliance warship.
Geary could see the damage reports as they appeared on his display, showing that Fleche had suffered serious hits to her maneuvering systems as well as her weapons.
He saw the helm orders appear as Fleche tried to alter her vector.
Ten seconds after the heavy cruisers had flailed Fleche, the Alliance light cruiser caught sight of a massive shape like that of a squat shark rising around the curve of the gas giant. At the velocity the light cruiser was moving, there wasn’t even time for the crew to react before they were within range of the battleship’s weapons.
Two and a half minutes after diving in all-out pursuit of the HuK, Fleche disintegrated under the hammerblows of the battleship’s weapons. None of the light cruiser’s escape pods left the ship. None of the crew had time to reach them and launch them.
The data feed cut off as the light cruiser was blown apart.
Fleche, along with her entire crew, had died fifteen minutes ago.
Geary gradually became aware that the bridge of Inspire was totally silent.
The quiet was finally broken by a single word as a young officer spoke plaintively. “Why?”
“Why?” Geary repeated, wondering why his voice sounded so soft yet could be heard so clearly on the bridge. “Because the commanding officer of Fleche forgot that it was not about him. He forgot that it was not about glory. He forgot his orders, he forgot his responsibilities, he forgot his training and his duty. Because of that, he wasted the lives of his crew. Don’t ever do any of those things.”
Geary took a deep breath, straightened in his seat, then spoke in a firm voice. “We’ve got at least two heavy cruisers and a battleship that must have already popped out from behind that gas giant and will be seen by us at any moment! Do your duties, fight smart as well as bravely, and Fleche is the only ship we will lose today!”
It took them another fifteen minutes to see that the battleship, accompanied by two heavy cruisers and four HuKs, had risen over the top of the gas giant and begun accelerating toward an intercept with the mass of refugee ships.
“We threw off their timing,” Geary said to Duellos. “Fleche accomplished that much. In another hour and a half, we should see those light cruisers and HuKs near the inhabited planet coming toward us, too.”
Duellos’s eyes were searching his display. “Didn’t the refugees say that Tiyannak had four light cruisers?”
“At least four.”
“The other two could be hiding behind this planet,” Duellos said, pointing to a cold, barren world the size of one and a half Earths but lacking much in the way of atmosphere or water. It orbited thirty light-minutes from the star and would cross the path of the Alliance and refugee ships a few hours before they reached that part of space. “Everything else that someone could hide behind is too badly positioned in their orbits.”
“I’ll need to leave the light cruisers and destroyers to screen the refugee ships, while I take the battle cruisers against that battleship flotilla,” Geary said.
“That’s probably your best option,” Duellos agreed. “Given enough time, my battle cruisers can probably wear down that battleship. But we don’t have enough time. How are we going to stop the battleship before it reaches some of the refugee ships, causing them to scatter and become easy prey?”
“I’ll think of something.”
Twelve
Looked at one way, the whole thing was pretty simple. He had to get his warships and all of the refugee ships to the primary inhabited world, off-load the refugees, and along the way deal with any threat posed by the warships, which must be from Tiyannak. A mission so simple it could be condensed into a single sentence.
But, as the ancient warrior sage had said, all of the simple things in war end up being really complicated.
Geary looked over at Duellos. “What do you know about Commander Pajari?”
“Not a lot,” Duellos admitted. “I think she took command of Spur less than a year ago.”
In that year, and since Geary had been reawakened, Pajari had apparently done nothing praiseworthy enough or stupid enough to draw Geary’s special attention. That described many of the commanding officers in the fleet, though, since there were nearly two hundred fifty heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. The captains of the battleships and the battle cruisers tended to speak up at conferences because of their seniority and influence. Usually, the commanders of smaller warships stayed silent except for general expressions of approval or disapproval. One of Geary’s ongoing regrets was that he had never had the time to get to know all of those officers personally.