Desjani gave her display a startled look. “You’re not aiming for the edges of his formation to wear him down.”
“No. He expects that. Upper or lower edges, he thinks that’s what I’ll do.” Geary grinned at Desjani. “I do have a pattern.”
She slowly smiled as she thought through the maneuvers. “He’s planning to do what you did at the first battle at Lakota, right?”
“Probably. Concentrate and punch through the middle of this formation, where Dauntless and I am.”Dauntless had pivoted around and was shuddering now as her propulsion units strove to reduce her velocity. Geary felt the strain, heard the ship’s structure complain, and knew that if the inertial dampers failed, the ship would come apart, and every human in it would be smashed to jelly. All around Dauntless, the rest of the Alliance fleet’s warships were braking as well.
The Syndic commander would expect that, too. Geary had often changed velocity right before contact, and this time he had to slow down, couldn’t accelerate without effectively eliminating any chance of scoring hits on the enemy.
Dauntless was pivoting again, bringing her bow around to face the enemy with only a few minutes left to contact, the subformations above and below the main formation pivoting to almost parallel with the main formation as the battle cruiser subformation above dove down just behind the main body, and just in front of the main body, the battleship subformation below climbed up in front of the rest.
Behind them all, the auxiliaries were climbing straight “up” and away from the path of the Syndics. “All units, weapons free as soon as the enemy enters your weapons engagement envelopes.”
The Syndic formation was altering at the last moments before contact, too, shrinking down to much smaller dimensions, concentrating the ships into a tight block aimed at the center of the main Alliance formation. “If we’d aimed at the edges of his formation,” Desjani observed, “we would have found ourselves too far out to score hits as his formation shrank. Good call, Admiral. Weapons,” she called that watch-stander, “target the enemy flagship.”
“One minute to contact,” the maneuvering watch-stander announced.
Missiles leaped from warships, filling the space between the flotilla and the Alliance fleet, followed within moments by barrages of grapeshot and hell-lance fire, then on the Alliance side, the battleships and battle cruisers fired their null-field weapons.
Instead of avoiding the glancing blows from the Alliance subformations and hitting the single thin layer of the main formation, the Syndic flotilla found itself running headlong into three layers of Alliance warships, the first and last layers moving rapidly at almost right angles to the Syndic movement and hard to target, but hurling out their weapons along the vector the Syndic flotilla was coming down.
Space flared bright as weapons clashed, and ships exploded, the Syndics ramming through the first Alliance subformation, which held more battleships than the entire Syndic flotilla, then hitting the main body with almost as many battleships and some battle cruisers, before staggering through the third subformation, with its battle cruisers and numerous escorts tearing at the weakened Syndic warships.
Coming close behind the Syndics, Duellos led the strike force through the Alliance formations in a heart-stopping maneuver that took only fractions of a second, then slammed fire into the rear of the Syndic flotilla.
It had taken less than a second for the two forces to clash, and now as they separated again, Geary felt Dauntless still shaking from the impacts of enemy hits. He tried not to focus on the damage to Dauntless, concentrating instead on the assessments pouring in from the fleet sensors as they evaluated the results of the clash.
“Have a nice trip to hell,” Desjani snarled at her display as she directed damage-control efforts.
He knew what she meant. All fifteen of the remaining Syndic battle cruisers were gone, including the flagship, torn apart or exploded into fragments by the successive layers of Alliance battleships and battle cruisers. CEO Shalin wouldn’t be ruling the Syndicate Worlds.
Of the twelve Syndic battleships, six were still lurching forward with heavy damage, but those were being overhauled and knocked out one by one by Duellos’s strike force. The rest of the enemy battleships were already out of commission and spitting out swarms of escape pods.
Out of nearly two hundred Hunter-Killers, less than a dozen were left, the small warships annihilated by the amount of firepower concentrated on the space they had traversed. Ten light cruisers had survived, five of them still able to run at full speed, and nearly twenty heavy cruisers were still operational, having been small enough to avoid fire aimed at the battleships and battle cruisers and large enough to survive the weapons that had almost wiped out the smaller warships.
Duellos called in, looking quite pleased with events. “We might need some help on a couple of these battleships, but otherwise things went quite well. You might be interested in knowing that as my formation approached yours, and you exchanged fire with the Syndics, our sensors reported the heaviest recorded density of weapons usage and tried to warn us off.”Inspire was opening the distance once more, but still less than a light-minute away, so something resembling a conversation was possible. “That’s another one of those things I don’t think I want to do again. I’m going to get the fleet turned around, so if you need any assistance, just call.”
He gave the necessary orders, pulling the four subformations back toward each other as they turned through wide swaths of space, then forced himself to face the hard part. Witch headed off toward an intercept with the crippled Agile, accompanied by the battleship Guardian, which should be all the escort needed now that the Syndic flotilla had ceased to exist.
On Geary’s display, red symbols and text told the tale of the price the Alliance had paid during the brutal exchange of fire with the Syndics.
The battleships and escorts in the Fox Five Three subformation had been the first in line and taken the brunt of the Syndic fire. It only now registered on Geary that Dreadnaught had been one of those battleships. He had sent his grandniece into danger without even realizing it, caught up in the planning and execution of the battle. Dreadnaught had been battered but hadn’t sustained critical damage. Orion, still a bad-luck ship, had taken the most damage and would need a lot of repair work. Aside from them, the four battleships Fearless, Resolution, Redoubtable, and War-spite seemed to have been in the wrong places at the wrong time and received the most damage from the Syndic fire.
In the main body, the Syndics had tried to hit the four battle cruisers, assuming one held Geary. Even though the enemy blows had already been seriously blunted, the four battle cruisers had suffered. Daring took the most hits, but Dauntless was far from unscathed. “How many dead?” he asked Desjani.