Partly due to her own specializations and partly due to the nature of the war between Apollo and Brisingr, Kira had never been present for a straight-battle-line slugging-match fight between nova ships. Her involvement in that kind of fight had usually been preliminary, with the nova fighters softening up enemy cruisers and then withdrawing to cover the carriers as the Apollon battle cruisers moved in.
Today that wasn’t an option, and she held her Hoplite near Deception as the two multiphasic-jamming zones merged and the battle was joined. Communications were already growing spotty, even the largest capital ships maneuvering heavily to avoid incoming fire.
Deception was the first of the ships to open up. Her targeting optics were better and her guns were bigger and more modern, giving her a small but slight functional range advantage over even the D9C destroyer in the Clans’ formation.
The D9C design was of the same vintage as Deception, even if this one was probably newer than the heavy cruiser. She was the second ship to open fire—but Deception tagged her before she did, heavy plasma bolts hammering into the smaller ship’s armor.
More ships joined the fray as they ranged on each other, evasive maneuvers sending the majority of the bursts of plasma spiraling off into deep space. Kira was holding a fragile com network together with her fighters as they hung back out of the fight, their eyes open.
Then the gunships made their move, a wave of over a hundred smaller ships charging forward at maximum power to try and overwhelm the Coalition capital ships.
“Nova fighters, target the gunships,” she snapped as soon as she spotted the maneuver. “Break and attack.”
It was a trade-off. If they gave up the fragmented but mostly functional com network, the fleet was more vulnerable to a surprise fighter strike—but if the gunships overwhelmed the fleet, there wasn’t going to be anything left to protect.
Kira matched her actions to her words, flaring her Hoplite’s Harrington coils to full power and lunging forward. She picked a gunship at random, firing careful two-second pulses of plasma fire at the larger ship as she charged.
The gunship didn’t see her coming until her fire had torn off one of its turrets. Whoever was in charge was still good, and the ten-kilocubic vessel twisted in space, standing on her engines to dodge the next salvo of Kira’s fire.
The bigger ship’s main guns couldn’t really track a nova fighter, but that was why a gunship even had turrets. There were still three of them left spitting fire at her as she lined her interceptor up and released the torpedo slowing her down.
A flash of plasma filled the space between her and the gunship. She’d pulled close enough that the larger vessel had no chance to dodge, and a blast equivalent to Deception’s main guns hammered into the middle of the gunship, burning a hole bigger than Kira’s fighter through the ship.
Power signatures fluctuated for half a second and then the gunship blew apart as her fusion reactor lost containment.
One down.
Kira flipped her fighter instinctively, dodging a stream of fire from another gunship as she searched for targets. Even without the multiphasic jamming emerging from every vessel, the battlespace would have been a chaotic mess. She couldn’t track the course of the battle from behind the stick of a starfighter—that was why she’d hired Zoric to command Deception, after all.
She was just one more pilot, with her naked eye and some computer-enhanced optics to pick out threats. The gunship shooting at her had earned her attention, and she twisted across its fire, drawing its attention as the other spacecraft she’d spotted surged in.
Kira didn’t know which of her Weltraumpanzer pilots was on her flank, but their timing was perfect. The Weltraumpanzer-Vier had much heavier blaster cannons than her Hoplite-IV did, and the pilot didn’t even bother with their torpedoes.
The gunship’s attempt to shoot down Kira proved fatal as the heavy fighter’s guns blazed in the void. Their torpedoes might have been faster, but the Weltraumpanzer’s pilot held the gunship in their sights for a full five-second burst that tore the larger ship in half.
Kira flashed a thank-you via laser coms and jetted away, hunting new targets. The tempo of the battle was obvious to her—the Clans had more ships, but the Coalition Fleet’s ships were just that much bigger and better.
The D9C destroyer was reeling, a defenseless hulk battered to wreckage by Deception’s guns. She might be rebuildable—and Kira flagged the hulk as a possibility for retrieval later—but she was out of this fight.
Despite the cubage ratio being heavily in the Costar Clans’ favor, it was becoming rapidly clear that they couldn’t stand against the bigger ships the Coalition had brought at all.
And in the moment Kira thought things were finally decided, the nova fighters arrived. Even through multiphasic jamming, nova emergences were clearly visible, and she cursed herself.
She’d known they were going to be ambushed, but she’d grown so used to only dealing with gunships, she hadn’t held back any interceptors to defend the capital ships.
On the other hand, she was assessing the situation even as it took shape. There were only twenty flares, and she was already maneuvering toward them. While some of the Redward pilots had let themselves be lured away from the battle line, all of her veterans from Deception were still in position to support the fleet.
Kira couldn’t give any orders through the jamming, but she didn’t need to. She knew that even as she was turning her own fighter toward the newcomers, her old ASDF hands and the ex-Conviction pilots were doing the same.
So, she noted absently, were about a quarter of the RRF pilots. The rest were catching on as the first fighters changed their course, but many of the Redward pilots definitely had the right instincts.
Kira reached the first nova fighter just as the Weltraumpanzer-Fünf—presumably one of Davies’s fighters—pulled straight for a moment to launch their paired torpedoes at Perseus.
The nova fighter didn’t live that long, her guns tearing into the heavy fighter from below and detonating one of the torpedoes just as it cleared the fighter’s hull. A flash of ignited hydrogen and more superheated plasma tore the spacecraft apart, and Kira flashed on to her next target.
There were more Weltraumpanzers. Almost twice as many as she’d allowed for, and all too many of them had launched their torpedoes. There was nothing her people could do to stop the weapons that were already converting into plasma blasts, but the half of the fighters that hadn’t launched when her people arrived didn’t survive to do so.
Twenty torpedoes still savaged Perseus and Last Denial. The cruiser weathered her hits decently enough, but Perseus was a converted freighter.
Kira looked at the leaking atmosphere her computers were identifying, and a chill ran down her spine. The RRF had done a good job of refitting the ship, but she still had the bones of a sixty-kilocubic bulk hauler.
And the heavy fighters were pressing their attack, charging at the carrier with their heavy guns while her own fighters tried desperately to bring them down.
A Costar Clans fighter died under Kira’s guns. Two more to her compatriots. The RRF fighters were in the mix now, desperately trying to salvage their home base as plasma fire savaged the already-damaged carrier.
Then it was over, the surviving heavy fighters novaing out in a series of blue flashes as Kira exhaled a sigh of relief. Perseus was battered, probably a write-off, but she looked intact enough to bring her people home.
She pinged Deception with a laser.
“Did anyone get a vector on those novas?” she asked.
“Negative,” Davidović replied. “We’re a bit busy, sir.”
The remaining corvettes and gunships were making a hard push at Kira’s cruiser. They were paying for the privilege, with multiple ships dying every time the heavy cruiser opened fire, but they were pressing her hard.
Kira was watching the time. She wasn’t sure how many of the Weltraumpanzers had escaped, but they had a sixty-second cycle until they could return. They weren’t going to get a second pass at Perseus; she was grimly certain of that.
But there were twenty-three seconds left on that timer when the second wave of nova flashes lit up across her screens…and it wasn’t a mere half-dozen survivors of Davies’s squadron coming in now.
Fear froze Kira for a critical second as at least a hundred nova fighters arrived in the battlespace.