23

Three cruisers, a carrier, eight destroyers, ten corvettes and eight gunships novaed in a single pulse of blue light. Kira had every datafeed she could access feeding to the cockpit of her Hoplite, her mental finger hovering over the scramble all fighters command.

Cluster 42K7 was a million and a half kilometers ahead of them, but there was no missing the gathered Costar Clans fleet. Kira had agreed with Kim that the Costar Clans were likely to make a stand at the Kiln, but they’d also clearly identified 42K7 as the most likely target for the Coalition Fleet.

She activated the command, exhaling as Deception’s gravity generators flung her starfighter into space. Perseus was deploying as well, and within moments, sixty-four nova fighters were forming up in a defensive formation in front of the fleet.

Kira had them linked up in laser coms without even thinking—and then realized the fleet hadn’t brought up their multiphasic jammers. Neither had the Clan fleet, which had to know they were there by now.

“We have resolution on the defending fleet,” Davidović reported from Deception. “One D9C heavy destroyer, fourteen corvettes, one hundred and forty-five gunships. We’re still resolving defensive installations, but it looks like half a dozen armed asteroids that don’t deserve the title of fortress and fifty or so weapon satellites.”

“Do you see nova fighters?” Kira asked. “If the D9C is here, there should be Weltraumpanzers.”

“I don’t see any, but they could be aboard the asteroid forts or docked at a habitat,” the tactical officer replied. “They wouldn’t be in space, would they?”

“Maybe not,” Kira allowed, then switched to the laser-com web. “Coalition Fleet Nova Group, form on me! Make sure your laser links hold up and stand by.”

The plan called for the missiles to be salvoed first, but Kira was surprised by the complete lack of jamming in the battlespace so far. The Clan fleet was definitely maneuvering on her feeds now, forming up with the heavy destroyer in the center.

Cubic meter for cubic meter, the D9C was the second-most powerful unit in the battlespace. The Clans’ corvettes and gunships, however, were the least powerful units by the same metric. Quantity had a quality all its own, though, and a hundred and sixty ships made for a lot of quantity.

Then the artificial stupid that helped run her fighter’s coms informed her that the Clans were transmitting. It was a broadly directional unencrypted message the entire Coalition Fleet was going to receive.

With a sigh, Kira started it and then glared at the image of a man she’d hoped she’d already killed. She’d never actually met Anthony Davies in person, but she was familiar with file footage of the man.

He’d aged a lot since then, she noted with a certain degree of schadenfreude. A new, ugly scar rose from the right side of his neck, wrapping across his face in a way that suggested they’d come damn close to killing him last time.

But he was alive, wearing a plain black shipsuit with a golden vulture emblazoned across his right breast as he faced a holorecorder.

“Coalition Fleet, I am Anthony Davies,” he told them. Kira had heard his voice before, when he’d deceived Conviction into maneuvering most of her fighters out of position by pretending to be a beleaguered freighter Captain.

“I have been many things to you and to my people,” he continued, and if his voice was just as gruff as it had been when she’d first heard it, there was a gravelly edge to it. The scar had clearly done something to his vocal cords.

“Today, I am charged to speak with you as the new Marshal of the Costar Clans, tasked with the defense of our homes and our culture.” He spread his hands wide. “Today, I am not a raider or a pirate. Today, I am a man standing between my home and those who would crush all that we are.”

He shook his head.

“I could make a grand speech about your crimes, but we all know your mission here. You seek to end us and wrap that truth in pretty lies of future dreams.

“We will not lay down and die for your shining future,” Davies told them. “We are the Costar Clans, born in adversity and abandonment, forged in the fires of your neglect and betrayal. This is our star.

“Leave or be destroyed.”

The transmission ended and Kira glared at the space where the pirate had stood. She didn’t want to sympathize with the bastard, but she had to concede his point. The Clans had been born out of the rest of the Cluster walking away from the systems they now controlled. They had every reason to distrust Redward’s promises of help and a better future.

Even Kira wasn’t sure that Redward would be able to afford to fulfill those promises in the long run. She trusted that they would try, though, and that was all anyone could ask.

In the end, though, Davies had also spoken to why the Coalition Fleet was there: he might be defending his people today, but he was a pirate, a raider and a murderer. Without some guarantee that the Clans would stop stealing from everyone else, the SCFTZ couldn’t tolerate their existence.

“All ships, this is Admiral Kim,” the Admiral’s voice cut into her thoughts. “I don’t see a reason to reply to the Deceiver, but I wanted to remind you all what kind of man we’re facing.

“Anthony Davies is directly linked to the capture or destruction of over a hundred and fifty freighters in the Cluster,” Kim reminded them all. “Thousands of dead, billions of kroner in theft and destruction.

“And remember that the man who speaks of defending his culture and people killed thousands of his own people to destroy the shipyards he’d built when it looked like Redward would capture them. Those were civilians, not pirates or soldiers, people we meant no harm—people he killed.

His people.”

Kim paused.

“Anthony Davies was named the Deceiver for good reason. Do not let his claims of being a grand defender allow you to forget what he is and what he does. Men like him are why we are here, because we cannot trust the Clans to honor any deal that called for them to give up piracy.

“The age of pirates like Anthony Davies must end. He knows this and he will fight us till the end, no matter how many of the people he says he will protect get killed along the way.

“The point of today’s mission is to end the dying, the piracy, the raids and counter-raids, the violence and destruction,” Kim concluded. “I won’t claim we are here to save the Clans. We are here to crush the Clans’ piracy.

“We hope that the Clans’ people will benefit from this, but our priority is to protect the Cluster from monsters like Anthony Davies.”

There was a grim silence.

“And on that note, raise jammers and prepare for missile launch.”

* * *

Even as the multiphasic jammers turned Kira’s sensor feeds into a chaotic mess, she still turned a curious eye and her fighter’s optics toward the clouds of small spacecraft taking shape around Last Denial and Guardian.

In twenty years of service with the Apollo System Defense Force, she had never seen anyone use missiles. They were so vulnerable to multiphasic jamming that they were entirely useless. Anything that was slow enough that it could be easily targeted by something that couldn’t localize it inside the last light-second of the approach had more than enough defenses to vaporize an almost-infinite number of incoming weapons.

Since the Coalition Fleet had built the weapons, however, Admiral Kim had seen no reason not to use them. For the first time in Kira’s entire career, she watched over a thousand sets of Harrington coils light up simultaneously.

They blurred out of the jamming zone in short order, and Kira lost immediate track of them. She was still receiving updates via a serial laser link to a set of sensor probes positioned outside the jamming field.

Those probes and laser links wouldn’t hold up to the serious maneuvering of a real fight, but right now the Coalition Fleet was holding position while they studied their enemies—and Davies clearly had no inclination to start the fight sooner than he had to.

That made Kira suspicious, but it wasn’t like they weren’t expecting a trap.

Even through the multiphasic jamming, it was clear that the Clans had no idea what they were even looking at. Kira was a fully trained military officer with a background in military history. She was entirely familiar with smart munitions and their limited use in deep space combat.

The crews aboard the Costar Clans’ warships didn’t have that education. Their ships’ anti-meteor systems could handle the incoming fire on their own, Kira suspected, but the Clans’ warships were trying to expand their formation, visible in an expansion of the multiphasic-jamming bubble.

She wasn’t sure what they thought they were achieving, though she could see a logic to it. The ships could be trying to open up lines of fire and make it easier for them to engage missiles targeting the other ships.

Of course, the vast majority of the missiles weren’t aimed at the ships. It wouldn’t take much maneuvering to render the missiles’ targeting solutions on the ships useless. Most of the missiles were aimed at the handful of fortified asteroids defending Cluster 42K7.

Once the missiles entered the Clans’ jamming field, they were lost to the sensors of their launching ships. Long-range optics on the remote probes could establish some details of what was going on inside a multiphasic-jamming field, but not enough to track a smart munition barely three meters long.

They could track the asteroid station that came apart under a dozen hundred-megaton warheads, to the shock of everyone who’d been involved in the decision to fire the missiles. Their optics could roughly pick out explosions when the warheads actually managed to detonate, and the computers could interpolate multiple sets of data to estimate the presence, if not the location, of ships.

Out of over a thousand missiles, fired at a force that had no idea of how to handle the weapons and no doctrine for antimissile defense, twenty-six of the Coalition Fleet’s weapons had survived to detonate and taken out one asteroid fort.

That was twenty-six more detonations and one more kill than Kira had actually expected. She waited for the computers to make their final assessment and then checked that she still had a laser link to Colonel Sagairt.

“Helmet, stage two is go,” she told the Colonel. “Fly carefully.”

“Got it,” Sagairt replied. “Perseus-Alpha, Perseus-Bravo…nova and attack!”

* * *

Even a five-light-second nova had a full minute’s cooldown. They could see the moment that the two squadrons of fighter-bombers emerged, and Kira had to keep herself from holding her breath as the seconds ticked away.

Several explosions were visible through the jamming as she counted, too big to be nova fighters, and Kira let the cheers on the fighter network go on for several seconds.

“Belay that,” she finally ordered. “We don’t know what’s happened until they’re back.”

Normally, there’d be a rendezvous point in deep space where they’d lower their multiphasic jamming for updates. With the potential threat of Cobra Squadron, Kira had set the rendezvous point directly behind the Coalition Fleet.

If someone jumped the capital ships, the fighters would all be available. It delayed her update when they did nova back, which meant she was holding her breath after the sixty seconds elapsed.

Eleven seconds after the nova strike was completed, the laser com-links were reestablished.

“Helmet reporting in,” Sagairt greeted her. “Strike complete; downloading data on enemy formation and positions to the Fleet.” He paused. “Two ships down. I think Bravo-Six managed to eject the pods for both crew. I…don’t think Alpha-Four did.”

“Damn,” Kira murmured. “We’ll retrieve them, Helmet. You have my word.”

“Understood. Mark up two corvettes and four gunships for Perseus wing, sir,” Sagairt concluded. “We didn’t even get near the destroyer. That’s what got Alpha-Four killed.”

Kira could look up the callsigns and names of the four people on those two starfighters, but she held off. There would be time for that later.

“Take the Sinisters back to Perseus to rearm and hold for further orders, Helmet,” she ordered. “We’re still playing games with these people.”

The Coalition Fleet was still declining to advance and the Clans were refusing to come out. The worst part, from Kira’s perspective, was that the Clans’ force could afford to trade gunships for fighters at two to one. They’d still have gunships left afterward, though probably not enough to stand a chance against the Fleet.

“Commodore, it’s Kim.” The Admiral linked to her again as she reviewed the data from Helmet’s strike. “Your assessment?”

“About what you’d expect,” Kira replied. “The Clans have put their best on the decks today. They’re short on anti-fighter experience, but they’ve got enough firepower to make up for that. If we launch a mass strike, it’ll be more effective than sending in two squadrons but we’ll leave the Fleet unprotected.

“We’re reasonably sure Davies has at least half a dozen Weltraumpanzers of his own, but we haven’t located them yet. If we uncover the fleet, those ships could do a lot of damage.”

“Because we don’t have much more anti-fighter experience than they do,” Kim concluded. “Understood. We’ll go with Plan Cataphract, then, Commodore Demirci. Once the Sinisters are rearmed, we will commence the advance.

“I have faith in our cruisers to handle corvettes and one destroyer that outclasses us.”

“We’ll watch the Fleet’s back, sir,” Kira promised. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“I have full faith in the nova-fighter group under your command, Demirci. I’m not releasing you for an independent strike, but beyond that…nova-fighter operations are at your discretion. I do not expect you to remain with the battle line if you see an opportunity or a need.”

“Understood, Admiral.”

Kira turned her attention back to the feeds from the drones and the ships around her.

“All fighters, this is Basketball. Plan is Cataphract. Assume defensive formation around the Fleet, but keep your eyes peeled,” she ordered. “We’re watching for Davies’s Weltraumpanzers and we’re watching for Cobra Squadron.

“The Fleet can handle a bunch of raggedy-ass corvettes and gunships. We’re here to handle the fuckers with the nova bombers who jumped King Larry. They don’t get to the Fleet.”

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