52

Commodore Kira Demirci’s worst fears weren’t realized. Her squadron returned to Seventh Fleet to find the fleet intact and peaceful. They weren’t already under attack, but Kira was running worst-case numbers in her head.

Assume a fleet was being kept a few light-months away. They wouldn’t wait for the scout to cool down its drive, but they would need time to wake everyone up from readiness and get ready to nova.

Maybe five minutes, maximum. How long after that depended on whether the first wave was fighters or cruisers. Cruisers would arrive in five minutes. Nova fighters would take a few more minutes because the carriers would nova to within a few light-minutes to save the class two drives.

Everything remained quiet, but that didn’t last.

Kira hit a mental command, sending alerts to every ship in the fleet.

“Fighters, scramble, scramble, scramble,” she barked onto the main command channel. “All ships to battle stations. Incoming enemy strike, ETA three to seven minutes.”

She watched Seventh Fleet’s response and cursed the inexperience of the green crews. Her fighters were moving, but the warships were taking too long.

“What the hell is going on, Demirci?” Remington snapped. “You shouldn’t be calling the fleet to battle stations.”

“There’s no time, Admiral. There was a stealth ship at one light-hour. They novaed just over five minutes ago. Expect imminent contact.”

Nova fighters were spilling into space from the RRF carriers. All of Deception’s fighters were already in space.

“All nova fighters, defensive formation six,” Kira barked, setting her own course into position above Remington’s flagship, the cruiser Duke. “Contact imminent.”

“I’ve repeated the battle stations order,” Remington told her. “Turrets should be spinning up across the fleet. If you’re wrong, Commodore…”

“Then I’m paranoid and we had a lovely readiness exercise,” Kira snapped. “But if I’m no—”

“Nova flare!” she heard someone shout on Remington’s channel. “Multiple nova flares, multiple flares—no number estimate, no number estimate.”

“Jammers up.”

That order was the last Kira heard from the RRF Admiral before the universe dissolved into chaos—but she’d seen the nova flares too. Dozens of them, which could only mean a fighter strike.

And that meant Cobra Squadron.

* * *

With the multiphasic jamming in place, Kira’s visibility was trash and she barely had coms with her own squadron. Watching a hundred and twenty modern fighters flash into Seventh Fleet’s formation, she didn’t even get to hang on to that.

“Memorial-Alphas, break and attack,” she ordered calmly.

Her own focus dropped onto the central strike force of the enemy formation. Thirty nova bombers—not the Uglies the Crest mercs had used but honest-to-goodness Fringe-built bombers, more modern than anything she had—were heading toward the cruiser line.

But even as she charged toward them, a pit formed in her stomach. It had been a long time since she’d seen a professional force fight. Despite the harsh training she’d put her people through to keep their skills up, this wasn’t something her trainees were going to stand up to.

Nova fighters cycled around the bombers in a swirling dance that prevented her getting a clear line of fire. If any of the Manticore-Sevens were carrying torpedoes, it didn’t show in their maneuvers—though they had enough reserve maneuverability that they could probably dance circles around her people, even carrying the heavy weapons.

“Not today,” she muttered to herself, arming her guns and locking in on the closest interceptor.

If she couldn’t get to the bombers, she could try to clear a path for the other fighters to get to the bombers.

She twisted her Hoplite around incoming fire as two other Manticores tried to scare her off her target. The closer she got, the more intense the fire grew, but she made her own range and opened fire.

Her target dodged her first burst, twisting their own ship around to return fire. There were now three fighters focused on Kira, and she felt the weight of the lack of training of her new pilots on her shoulders.

They could risk the focus because they’d kill most of her people in seconds with that kind of concentration.

But she was not a fresh graduate of a compressed training program. She dodged around the incoming fire and lined up her target again. This time, the pilot didn’t manage to evade in time. Her fire tore through the midsection of the fighter and ripped it into several pieces.

Then Kira realized that she’d been drawn away from the bombers. She tried to turn her course back toward the fighters to clear a path, but her two remaining pursuers filled the space around her and focused her attention.

Nobody made it to the bombers before they reached the end of their run. The focused salvos of fire from the cruisers and destroyers took out several of them, but twenty-five survived to ripple-fire the dozen torpedoes each carried…and then they novaed out, taking their nova fighters with them.

Kira watched in horror as Commodore Shang’s entire destroyer squadron vanished, along with half of his RRF counterparts. When the explosions cleared, only two Sensibility-class destroyers remained to escort the RRF cruisers…and that was when the Bengalissimo Fleet arrived.

Like the RRF, they’d decided to keep the corvettes and gunships out of this fight. They still arrived with two of the modern Tabby-class cruisers and fourteen destroyers. It might not be enough, not against five cruisers, but the odds still stank to Kira.

She didn’t even need to give the order. This was what they’d held the Screwballs back against. Even as the Bengal cruisers opened fire, Theseus and Deception cycled one last fighter launch—and put fourteen of their own bombers into space.

* * *

Detailed assessments and communication were impossible. The risk of misidentifying a friendly as a hostile was minimal—so far, at least—but was definitely present. Right now, though, the biggest concern was that Kira couldn’t give orders to her people.

It was absolutely critical that the bomber strike get through, but a third of her nova fighters had novaed to safety during the dogfight and hadn’t returned yet. Even the hundred-plus fighters that remained were out of reach, incommunicado through the chaos of the multiphasic jamming.

All Kira could do was lead by example. Her Hoplite blazed toward the two bomber squadrons, dropping in around them as she maneuvered in a pattern she’d learned long before—one that added even more confusion to the signatures of the bombers.

More fighters joined her. Only her Apollo veterans knew the drill, though. The others, even the veteran RRF pilots, had never flown cover for a bomber strike before. Even for Kira and her Three-Oh-Three vets, though, this was different.

Most of the tactics were built around keeping fighters away from the bombers, and Cobra Squadron wasn’t back yet. They had another thirty seconds to complete the strike before the fighters returned.

Kira led the way, weaving her way through the hail of fire crossing the void between the two fleets. Deception and the RRF cruisers outgunned their Bengal counterparts, but the destroyers were making up the difference. That was the cruel logic of the Cobra Squadron strike—a logic Kira didn’t have the command-and-control loop to duplicate.

The plan was to go after the Tabbies, and that was the course the bombers set. More fighters joined the swarming formation as they drove across the empty space—but fighters were dying as well. A cruiser’s heavy plasma cannon weren’t designed to kill fighters, but they carried secondary guns for just that reason.

A bomber died.

Then another. Then another. Kira watched their alpha strike evaporate around her. She watched as a Weltraumpanzer took a hit intended for one of the bombers, one of her pilots vaporized in an instant.

And then contact. There were no bombers in the second strike, but there were still over eight Manticore-Sevens—and against the crudely bashed-together Screwball bombers, a more-advanced interceptor was the deadliest tool the Bengals could have.

Kira abandoned the bombers, sending her fighter hurtling directly toward the Manticores. She couldn’t directly protect the bombers—but she could distract the other interceptors.

Other pilots followed. In moments, she had at least a hundred fighters charging eighty—and if the quality of the planes and pilots had been equal, it would have been well in her favor.

Instead, it was a massacre. Kira dodged around the enemy fire, doing her damnedest to close with the Manticores and kill them to protect her trainees, but she could feel the destruction around her. The Cobras worked in slick teams, groups of three focusing on a single Redward fighter for a few seconds and then moving on after they’d destroyed their target.

Three came after her and she twisted around, her fire gutting the central fighter and sending it spinning away. Skill still mattered, and good as Cobra’s pilots were, Kira was better.

Her trainees weren’t. They were dying by the dozen around her…and then her computer informed her of torpedo detonation. Multiple torpedoes, dozens of torpedoes—nine of the Screwballs had survived to volley ninety torpedoes into one of the Tabby cruisers.

Seventh Fleet’s heavy fighters were right behind them, sending fifty torpedoes into the other. Fire washed over both of the big ships and only one emerged, half of its turrets offline and visible gouts of flame getting sucked out by vacuum.

Against five other cruisers, the ship never stood a chance—but Kira and her fighters were still being swarmed. A second group of three was now targeting Kira, which meant five fighters were coming after her—and even she wasn’t that good.

She hit the preprogrammed nova command and the battle around her vanished.

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