By the time Kira made it to her flag deck and linked up to the bridge, Shenzhen had finished transferring most of her data over to the warship. The crew of civilian volunteers had, quite reasonably, erred on the side of safety when the Nova Wing had jumped into the region.
That meant she didn’t have a lot of data—but she had some. She knew that Colossus had achieved basically her worst-case scenario: both N45s and the surviving I50 had arrived together, with four destroyers in escort array.
That was the worst news. The slightly-less-bad news was that at least some of the merchants who’d been coming through Samuels had clearly been feeding intelligence to Colossus. Kira wasn’t entirely surprised by that, but she was kicking herself for not varying the patrol routes more.
The CNW had known exactly which trade-route stop to find Huntress at. What they hadn’t known, and this was the only good news she could see, was where to find the carrier inside a mapped zone roughly a light-hour across.
And they’d got it wrong. The seven-ship strike group had emerged closer to Shenzhen than to Huntress, several light-minutes from the mercenary carrier. That meant their capital ships weren’t in play and that there was a small but measurable warning to Captain Davidović’s people.
“Wallis,” Kira addressed the navigator. “We have their location. I want us to nova in right on top of the bastards.”
“That’s…risky,” Lyssa Wallis replied calmly. “I can do it, but if we interpenetrate, it will be a very short engagement.”
“Then don’t interpenetrate,” Kira told her. The best-case scenario for a six-light-year nova was a thirty-thousand-kilometer error radius. That could put Deception in plasma-cannon range of the enemy carriers, but it also meant that Wallis couldn’t guarantee a safe emergence.
On the other hand, the odds of an unsafe nova were so low as to be almost irrelevant. But the navigator had to give the warning.
“Running the calcs. I need two minutes,” Wallis warned.
“I need to talk to the locals,” Kira replied. Adjusting her channels, she relinked to Admiral Bachchan.
The SDC chief was waiting patiently enough, to her surprise.
“Huntress is in trouble,” Bachchan noted. “Distance gives her a chance, but it also risks her not seeing them coming. And the N-Forty-Fives have more fighters than she does.”
“Scimitar has better planes and better pilots than Colossus does,” Kira said firmly. “The odds are more even than you think.”
“Still, I feel that we need to do something to help,” Bachchan told her. “I have nova fighters scrambling as we speak; I can send them with you.”
“Where they will be lambs to the slaughter with their drives on cooldown,” Kira replied. “No, Admiral, we have this. Without carriers, your people are only set up to deal with pirates and troublemakers.
“Not a fleet battle.”
She shook her head.
“If the depot ships we’d sold you were ready, we’d have your fighters at the trade-route stops, but they’re not,” she admitted. “So long as your fighters can’t hit the battlespace ready to nova, they only have one punch in them before Colossus tears them apart.
“I won’t sacrifice your people when I don’t need them.”
“I appreciate that, Admiral, but this is our star system and our fight,” Bachchan reminded her.
“And you’re paying me to fight it for you,” Kira replied. “And I won’t ask you to send your people to unnecessary deaths when I have the situation under control.”
“Nova plotted,” Wallis reported. “Orders?”
“That’s my cue, Admiral Bachchan,” Kira told the local commander. “I have a plan; I have the firepower. I wanted these people to court a fleet battle, and they’ve played right into my hands.”
She smiled predatorily.
“I’ll see you on the other side.”
Dropping that link, she turned back to the virtual mirror of the bridge.
“Captain Mwangi, is Deception ready?” she asked.
“In all aspects,” Mwangi confirmed. “We await your order.”
“Then stand by jammers, cannon and fighters. You may nova when ready.”
* * *
Their data from Shenzhen was eight minutes old. A lot could change in eight minutes—but with nova drives in cooldown, the location of a spaceship could only change so much.
There was no immediate need for Deception’s jammers. They emerged into the battlespace in the middle of the Colossus ships’ multiphasic jamming field, barely a hundred thousand kilometers from the enemy carriers.
Kira spent a fraction of a second processing the entire scene, riding the digital speed of her headware to allow her to make mistakes faster and with more surety.
The CNW had split their forces. The two N45 light carriers had barely moved and were still roughly where Shenzhen had seen them. They had kept the two smaller destroyers—the newly refitted D5D-class ships—with them, but they had no carrier space patrol.
I50-Q6 had taken the larger destroyers from the SSR and headed straight for Huntress at full thrust. In eight minutes, they’d crossed a third of the distance to Davidović’s ship and taken themselves entirely out of support range for the carriers.
Without data on the enemy course, Wallis had split the difference and dropped Deception almost exactly in the middle of the two Colossus forces. They were closer to the carriers, but Deception could easily catch up to the older I50 cruiser.
“Fighters up,” Cartman’s voice echoed in Kira’s ear. “What’s the target?”
That was the last decision Kira would make before this entire battle devolved onto her subordinates…and it depended entirely on what she thought her other subordinates had done.
“The cruiser is Scimitar’s problem,” she told Cartman and Mwangi. “We go for the carriers.”
The whole analysis, discussion and decision had taken less than twenty seconds—the time necessary for Deception to fling all twenty of her active starfighters into space. It was enough time that the Colossus ships knew they were there too, and the two destroyers guarding the carriers were now charging toward the heavy cruiser.
“Clear the road,” Mwangi ordered. “Soler? Get those destroyers out of my sky!”
Deception shivered as her turrets spun and opened fire. The destroyers fired first, but their lighter cannon simply didn’t have the cohesion to reach the heavy cruiser at that range.
Mwangi and Soler, however, knew the K70-class cruiser’s capabilities to a fine art. Fourteen heavy guns aligned themselves on their targets and spat plasma into the void.
The jamming made a mess of sensors and targeting, especially long-range targeting like this, but Soler’s gunners knew their jobs. Each destroyer was targeted by a shotgun-spread pattern of seven shots, the turrets cycling as they worked their way through the space the destroyers had to be in.
There was no guarantee that they’d see the results of a hit, let alone a miss. False negatives were far more likely than false positives, though, and Kira watched in silence as her people mapped the results onto the holographic displays around them.
The destroyers were doing the same, but the two older ships only had twelve main cannon between them, organized in dual turrets. When they hit Deception, it hurt—but they didn’t land enough hits.
Damage reports flickered across Kira’s displays, but none of it was severe. They were still in sections of ablative armor expended and energy-dispersal webs burned out, defensive systems doing what they were supposed to do and dying to protect the ship and crew.
One destroyer came apart moments before the other, but the conclusion of the uneven duel had never been in question. Deception’s guns began to track the carriers—but where the destroyers had charged, the carriers had retreated. They weren’t in range yet.
And they didn’t need to be. Cartman knew her trade as well as any fighter pilot ever born, and the Colossus Nova Wing were still amateurs at carrier combat. They’d assumed that the destroyers were a reasonable substitute for a carrier space patrol.
The twenty nova fighters appearing on the far side of the carriers were a lesson that the CNW’s carrier captains wouldn’t live long enough to process. Kira couldn’t make out which fighters were which through the jamming, but she knew how she’d have coordinated the strike.
The eight Hussar-Seven heavy fighters would have carried the weight of the strike, with the Wolverines playing decoy to draw the fire from the N45s’ defensive anti-fighter cannon. Sixteen torpedoes, launched at close range, would have gutted Deception.
The N45 carrier on the receiving end of Deception-Charlie’s torpedo strike simply ceased to exist.
The other found itself the sole target of Mwangi’s guns as Deception closed and the nova fighters vanished back to safety. The N45 design paid for its large fighter capacity by having extremely limited onboard defenses, and the carrier’s light cannon were even less of a threat to the cruiser than the destroyers’ guns had been.
There were ways to signal surrender even in the chaotic mess of a multiphasic jamming battlespace, and Kira half-expected to see them all. Instead, the Colossus carrier grimly plunged toward Deception, trying to bring her handful of guns into play.
She failed, breaking apart under the hammering of Deception’s own guns while still over fifty thousand kilometers away.
As the second carrier died, Kira’s attention turned back to the enemy cruiser—in time to watch Scimitar’s bomber strike go in.
Colombera clearly hadn’t known if Kira was going to make it in time and hadn’t seen her through Huntress’s own jamming when he’d put together his plan. Determined to clear the board and protect their carrier at any costs, Huntress’s Avalanche Flight Group, her two squadrons of bombers, went in with only a single squadron of fighters for cover.
That was Kira’s guess, at least, since she only saw eighteen signatures appear out of nova for the run on the cruiser and her destroyer escorts. Again without nova-fighter protection, the destroyers tried to interpose themselves—but the Avalanches ignored them, evading around the lighter warships to clear their lines of fire.
It was a calculated risk, one that Kira knew had to come at a price—but it also fooled the destroyers into focusing on the bombers. It didn’t matter whether the escorting fighters were Wolverines or Hussars at that point. The Hussar-Sevens had two torpedoes each to the Wolverines’ one…but salvoed at point-blank range at a distracted enemy, the difference between three torpedoes and six per destroyer was irrelevant.
Kira guessed the escorts were Wolverines, though, because the destroyers survived the hammering. Crippled and suddenly focused on their own survival, they couldn’t stop the bombers.
With the destroyers out of commission and the fighters either elsewhere or just gone, the cruiser could perhaps have stood off some bombers. She was far from defenseless, after all.
Against twelve bombers easily two decades more modern than the cruiser herself, she never stood a chance. Kira couldn’t see how many torpedoes were launched through the jamming, but she saw the result: the cruiser, like the carriers a few moments earlier, simply ceased to exist.
“Set a course for Huntress,” she ordered Mwangi as she saw the battlespace clear. “Drop our jammers and make full speed to the rendezvous.
“If you get a link to Cartman, send our fighters ahead to support her.”
Deception’s Captain chuckled softly.
“Do you think, for even one moment, that you need to give Nightmare that order?” he asked.