Like the Republic in half a dozen battles before the new missiles had arrived, Mage-Admiral Alexander had the range advantage—and unless the enemy came out to meet Second Fleet, they were going to get hammered to pieces.
Second Fleet’s course was scheduled to take over three hours, and the flag deck crew wasn’t going anywhere in that time frame. The entire fleet was at battle stations, every move, every twitch on the part of the Republican defenders being examined in minute detail.
“They’re not coming out to meet us,” Roslyn concluded as Second Fleet made turnover. Now the massive antimatter engines of ninety-two warships were pointed toward the planet, bleeding velocity at fifteen gravities as they continued to hurtle toward the enemy.
Second Fleet had traveled two and a half million kilometers in an hour and forty minutes. They had magical gravity runes throughout their ships, an ability their enemy didn’t share, which allowed them to consistently out-accelerate their opponents.
Fifteen gravities could go a long way in a few hours, but it still took time to cross interplanetary distances. They could have jumped in closer, but the closer they came to a gravity well, the riskier the jump became. Civilian jump Mages—and the trapped brains inside Republic warships—couldn’t do it safely.
The Navy could but it was still risky. Everything in Alexander’s tactics today was built around minimizing risk. The RIN was going to have surprises. They’d had weeks to prepare for this fight, weeks where Second Fleet had sat at Legatus waiting for new missiles.
“They’re forming up facing us and maintaining defensive maneuvering, but you’re right,” Kulkarni agreed. “Admiral? Are you seeing this?”
“I am,” Alexander confirmed. “It’s a defensive formation with the gunships around the fortifications and the capital ships. They’re hoping that our long-range fire is ineffective enough that they can weather it—at least more readily than we can afford to spend the new missiles.”
Roslyn brought up another screen and concealed a grim swallow.
The battleships and the newest cruisers and destroyers carried twenty-five missiles per launcher. The dreadnoughts had forty…but that didn’t matter when the rest of the fleet, twenty-six cruisers and forty destroyers, only had fifteen missiles per launcher.
The Protectorate’s navy had always been intended to fight pirates, and it shaped their design paradigms. They were built for pursuit and short, high-intensity battles. Only a small portion of their fleet was really designed to fight a true peer opponent.
A lot of people had already died for that mistake. Roslyn hoped they weren’t going to add to that number today.
“They might be right,” Kulkarni warned. “With those gunships, they’ve got more launchers, more defensive lasers, more…everything than we do.”
“The gunships only have three missiles apiece,” Alexander replied. “They want to make me burn missiles at long range…and I have the same plan for them. The first test will be the Samurais.”
The big bombardment missiles had an extra half-million kilometers of range—but most importantly, they came in at thirty percent of lightspeed instead of twenty.
That extra velocity had shredded the defenses at Legatus, and Roslyn hoped it would do the same here—because there were a lot of gunships out there and the projections on her screens were mind-numbing.
On their own, the defensive fleet only had a quarter of Second Fleet’s missile launchers. With the gunships and the fortresses, they were up to almost five times as many.
And Alexander was leaning back in her chair, studying the same numbers as if they were mildly interesting. Roslyn knew what the plan was for dealing with the gunships’ twenty-odd thousand missile launchers, but it was far easier to accept that in a quiet briefing room than on a flag deck as they calmly flew into the teeth of the enemy defenses.
“All Samurai-equipped vessels will target the fortresses,” Alexander ordered. “Kulkarni, I want a targeting order. We hit each one with a full salvo of every Samurai we’ve got, then move on.
“We might not kill a fortress with two hundred-odd missiles, but they’ll know they’ve been touched, and that buys us some leeway.” The Mage-Admiral smiled. “I’m hoping to rattle their cages. Let’s see how we do.”
6
“Range is thirteen million three hundred fifty thousand,” Chief Jian reported calmly. “Samurai range in under one minute.”
“We’ve designated the fortresses One through Twenty-Four,” Kulkarni told Alexander. “Currently, Twenty-One through Twenty-Four are on the other side of Sucre. I’m guessing they’re holding them back as a reserve—but we only have fifteen Samurais per launcher anyway, so we wouldn’t get to them even if we could.
“We have thirty-seven minutes between Samurai range and Phoenix IX range,” she continued. “We can fire all fifteen missiles well before then, but…”
“Say what you’re thinking, Kulkarni,” Alexander ordered.
“The Samurais are proving harder to mass-produce than the Phoenixes, and we don’t have many ships who can fire them. Should we be holding off on some of them?” the operations officer asked.
“Any of them we don’t fire at this range run the risk of being destroyed aboard their ships later,” Alexander noted. “I’d rather spend gold than blood, Mage-Captain. We will expend the full magazines of the Samurais.”
“Yes, sir,” Kulkarni confirmed. “Orders are locked in. We’ll see how well they’ve upgraded their defenses in the last few weeks.”
“Agreed.”
Roslyn kept her focus on the drones sweeping the star system. She was at least certain that the missing gunships weren’t in position to intervene in the immediate battle, but she wanted to know where they were. It might be paranoid—but it might not be.
She was also watching the gunships in Sucre orbit, which meant she caught the blip when a different energy signature flashed across her screen.
“Jian, did you see that?” she asked.
“See what?” the chief asked.
“For a second there, I got a spike of a different energy signature from one of the gunships,” Roslyn told him. “Let me rewind the data.”
The systems were designed to do that for just this reason. While every other screen on the flag deck kept showing the current situation, Roslyn’s pulled back several seconds in time and focused in on the spike.
“That’s an antimatter annihilation signature,” she said softly. “It looks like one of the gunships zigged when they should have zagged, and another had to dodge fast—and fired antimatter engines to do it.”
“I thought they were all using fusion engines?” Jian asked.
“So did I,” Roslyn confirmed. “Because that’s what all the energy signatures we’ve seen so far have been—but our analysis of the gunships we captured in Legatus said that they could have either fusion or antimatter engines.
“It’s apparently an easy-enough refit, one the carriers can do on the fly, but…” She shook her head. “They can only have one type of engine.”