Kira’s fear gave way to her training and professionalism quickly enough, and she cursed multiphasic jamming as virulently as she ever had. The sheer number of hostile nova fighters was bad enough, but the key was obvious to a twenty-year veteran of nova-fighter warfare: the thirty bombers at the heart of the formation.
Thirty nova bombers charging directly toward the crippled Perseus and her two undersized cruiser escorts.
If she’d had coms, she could have coordinated a counter. If she’d had a full nova group of veterans, she wouldn’t have needed to coordinate anything.
In the realities of the battlespace, all she could do was go after the bombers herself and hope that enough of her people saw the same threat for them to save the capital ships. Her Hoplite whined as she pushed her Harrington coils into overdrive, flashing across the chaos of the jamming to engage the enemy.
The nova fighters turned to meet her, a pair of interceptors flipping out of their formation to protect the bombers from her. Blasters flashed in the void, and Kira barely dodged the incoming fire—and her own went wide.
She’d badly misestimated the maneuverability of the hostile interceptors, and a rock settled into her stomach as her computer analyzed the data it was bringing in. They had at least a thirty-percent edge in acceleration on her.
The Hoplite-IVs were supposed to be the fastest fighters in the Syntactic Cluster, top-line ASDF interceptors stolen and covertly shipped two hundred light-years to the fringe of human space. Very few nova fighters in the Rim could match Apollo’s finest, and the handful that could exceed those planes were from the very Inner Rim.
To have her outclassed this badly, there was only one possible source for the starfighters coming at her.
Cobra Squadron had finally made their move—and Kira Demirci had no way to tell anybody else what was happening.
She twisted her Hoplite through space, her attempt to reach the bombers secondary to pure survival now. She still needed to get through the defensive formation, though, and only seconds remained.
Measuring the distance and the speed, she fired again—and this time, she did hit her target, the more-advanced starfighter proving only slightly more durable than her own as a two-second burst of plasma fire ripped it in half.
Kira charged through the sudden gap in the enemy maneuvers, leaving her second challenger trailing in her wake as she reached her targets.
There were other Coalition nova fighters with her, a scattering of her Hoplites and the Redward Dexters and Sinisters…but not enough. Maybe ten fighters joined her in a desperate strike on the hostile nova bombers.
Plasma fire washed through the hostile formation. Kira watched her own target come apart under her fire with its torpedoes still unfired, but had to twist over the nova bombers as the interceptors came around after her again.
Some of the bombers died. Others novaed out, choosing to preserve their fighters over completing their mission—but Kira was out of options. With Cobra interceptors swarming in on her from multiple angles and every escape cut off, she fell back on the oldest escape of a nova-fighter pilot.
She novaed.
* * *
Kira wasn’t the only one at the secondary rendezvous point. She took a second to throw her fighter’s entire power generation into refilling her guns’ capacitors and then checked in on her people.
“Report,” she ordered.
A cascade of callsigns and status levels came back at her, all of them sounding a bit shaky.
“We’re holding our own against those people,” she told them. “Get back in there when you can and focus on any remaining bombers. Several of them novaed out with full torpedo loads; those are the key threat.
“Cover the capital ships and watch your asses. We need to get as many people home as possible.”
The responses sounded a bit more reassured, but Kira’s attention was focused on the minute-old data she was getting from the battlespace. The jamming shredded any chance of really useful data, but she could at least see novas and the loss of capital ships.
It didn’t look good. The seconds ticked away toward the moment she’d novaed out, and she realized she’d missed Perseus dying. The converted freighter had never been intended to be in the middle of the fight. She should have been left with the troop transports, but that would have required the nova fighters to travel to the Kiln on their own, leaving their drives on cooldown and rendering them useless.
Instead, she’d delivered her starfighters and stuck with the other capital ships because Admiral Kim had figured the carrier was safer with cruisers in company. Now the ship was wreckage, torn apart by Cobra Squadron torpedoes along with a crew of over a thousand.
Fighters were cycling in and out of the rendezvous point as she waited, providing limited updates from their own view of the battle, but Kira paused as Hoffman emerged and downloaded his data.
“Longknife, can you confirm this?” she demanded.
“Yeah. The last of the new fighters novaed out shortly after the Weltraumpanzers returned. I think Davies’s people are still in the fight, but the modern bastards are out.”
“They’ll be back,” Kira said grimly. “I’m heading back in. Watch our lost chicks?”
“Always, Basketball,” he confirmed. “Shoot straight.”
* * *
Three of the Redward fighters novaed with her, giving her a formation of four interceptors she could direct for a few seconds. She emerged to find a wing of six Weltraumpanzers charging toward Deception—while being the last hostile nova fighters in the battlespace.
“Perseus wing, target the hostile Weltraumpanzers. Break and attack!”
The three Dexter interceptors followed her orders and her example, lunging toward the remaining hostiles.
Part of Kira’s mind was watching the entire battlespace. Deception had moved forward to position herself between the Clans’ ships and the Coalition Fleet. There were far too few ships left in the latter force and too many left in the former, but her job was the nova fighters.
The heavy fighters’ pilots were maneuvering as they closed, trying to evade both Deception’s fire and the other nova fighters. They didn’t see Kira’s wing until it was too late—and that gave her time to assess their maneuvers and work out which two fighters still had torpedoes.
Those were the focus of her initial fire, one of them blowing apart before they even knew they were under attack. The rest of the Weltraumpanzers scattered, the one torpedo-equipped plane trying to get closer to Deception—but Davidović’s gunners had been paying attention.
A heavy cruiser’s main turret wasn’t generally the right tool for taking out a heavy fighter, but it had the pulse size and rate of fire to make any nova fighter pay if their attention slipped.
The torp-armed heavy fighter vanished, the plasma burst that hit it almost as large as the fighter itself.
With a mental salute, Kira spiraled her fighter in space and went after another Weltraumpanzer.
There were only three left and their drive cooldowns had them pinned. She did not want to give them a chance to rearm. The Coalition Fleet was battered enough, with Deception the only capital ship still in the fight.
Kira couldn’t tell where the RRF cruisers were through the jamming…or even if they were still there. Thirty bombers had hit the Coalition formation. It was entirely possible all three RRF capital ships were gone.
Unfortunately for the Clans, Deception remained. The Costar Clans were out of heavier warships, only gunships remaining as they tried to tangle with the massive heavy cruiser. Deception was taking a beating, but she was built to take a beating.
Kira’s guns tore apart the last Weltraumpanzer and she turned her own attention to the gunships. There were maybe fifty left and their formation was chaos. Whatever command-and-control network they’d set up was long gone, probably lost with the bigger ships that anchored it.
The remaining gunships were still dangerous, even to Deception. The cruiser might be ten times the size of the smaller nova ships, but there were still fifty of them.
She turned her fighter back into the fray. Her guns were at half-charge, which was more than enough to take out a gunship or two if she was careful. The problem was the nova fighters.
If Cobra Squadron came back, the battle was over and she knew it. She didn’t know who was dead yet, but she could only pick up thirty or so starfighters in the battlespace.
That meant thirty other fighters were gone and at least that many people she was responsible for were dead. Add in the lost carrier and the cruisers… It was a bad day for Redward.
Her focus had to be more immediate and she yanked her attention back to the gunships as she blazed toward them. The Clans’ warship’s focus was mostly on Deception, and she wasn’t the only nova fighter charging to the big cruiser’s aid.
Kira’s guns blazed as she closed with one of the light nova warships, hammering plasma into her target’s turrets as they tried to bear on Deception. Around her, the cruiser’s big guns hammered half a dozen of the gunships to debris, and fighters tore into the others.
For a few seconds, the battle still hung in the balance—and then the gunships broke. They hadn’t novaed to this fight—so they novaed out of it.
Kira had no idea how many of the Clans’ ships had survived to run, but she suspected over a hundred of the Clans’ nova ships had died in the battle. The Costar Clans could probably have replaced them once, given time, but with three-quarters of their systems and eighty percent of their manufacturing capacity in Redward hands…it looked like piracy in the Cluster might just be over.
The only remaining question was the price, a harsh reality still concealed by multiphasic jamming as Kira maneuvered to watch for returning nova fighters.
While the multiphasic jamming remained, the battle appeared to be over. Nova fighters were slowly falling into formation with each other as they orbited the fleet, searching for the potential of Cobra Squadron’s return.
Only silence answered that patient wait, and the jammers slowly began to come down. Kira’s systems were slowly able to identify who was left, of both the capital ships and the fighters, and she hated herself for the sigh of relief that escaped when she realized all of her Apollons had once again beaten the odds.
“All jammers down,” Zoric’s voice said quietly in her as coms reestablished. “I’m… I’m not sure who’s in charge, Commodore. Kim was aboard Perseus and her second-in-command was aboard Last Denial.”
Kira knew what Zoric had to mean, but she looked at her scanners to confirm. Guardian remained, but the Redward cruiser’s energy signature was worrisome. Perseus and Last Denial were gone. One of Shang’s mercenary destroyers was missing, and the rest looked barely better than Guardian.
Their gunships were gone. Only three of the corvettes remained, clustering with the remaining destroyers like terrified puppies.
“Someone needs to make contact with Major General Westley,” Kira said quietly. Reese Westley was the officer designated to serve as the Kiln’s governor. “He might be the best option to take on overall mission command.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not sure we even have the firepower to reduce Forty-Two-Kay-Seven’s defenses enough to allow for a landing, but I think we have to try,” she admitted. “Get Tamboli on the deck and thinking fast. I haven’t crunched the numbers yet, but my money says we can fit thirty-four fighters into the hangar if we leave the RRF birds on the deck itself.”
She shook her head.
“And I know what these birds are worth to Redward. We’re not leaving any of them behind.”