Jack Campbell - Dauntless

He might’ve caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the shock on Desjani’s face or just imagined it. He waited as the Alliance ships swung one hundred and eighty degrees so that their sterns faced the enemy. Come on, come on, he urged the big warships. Get your butts around. Good. “Main body, brake velocity down to point two light, then reverse headings and prepare to engage.” Again he had the sense that the main body’s ships were straining at the leash. “All ships hold formation. You’ll have the entire Syndic attack coming through you in a few minutes and all the combat your hearts can handle.”

Dauntless shuddered as her engines thrust against her motion, slowing her, then she swung up and around another time to face the enemy head-on once again.

By this time, momentum had heavily committed the Syndics to their attack, but they could still react in minor ways if they figured out what Geary was doing. But because of the time-lag in being able to see the movements of the Alliance ships, it would take them a few minutes to spot that the jaws above and below their course had started closing. Minutes later, they’d see the cheeks of the nutcracker closing in from the sides. Even then, they might think they could engage the main body of the Alliance fleet before the jaws could bite down on them, but Geary’s braking maneuver had just altered the time to contact enough that the jaws would actually hit minutes before the van of the Syndic force hit the Alliance main body.

They can try veering up or down to engage one of the jaws separately, but if they do that, I should be able to get the main body on them anyway, and the light units will still be able to hit their flanks. They’re not going to get out of this without getting hurt.

“Blue shift on the Syndic ships,” the tactical watch reported.

“They’re speeding up?” Desjani wondered.

“Trying to counteract the effect of our braking maneuver and come to contact quicker. Maybe they think they’ll be able to blow right through the main body here and out of the trap,” Geary noted. “I don’t think they’ll make it. Duellos and Numos shouldn’t have any trouble compensating for the Syndics’ acceleration by increasing the angle of their intercept.”

“We’ll have a harder time dealing with them at those speeds, though.”

“Not really. We know where they’re going. They’re the one’s who’ll have a harder time, because they’ll have more trouble seeing us through the distortion.”

As the last minutes to contact scrolled down, Geary had to imagine events in his mind’s eye, because time lag meant he wasn’t really seeing it as it happened. Dauntless ’s sensors and Geary’s eyes told him that the two jaws of the nutcracker were still closing to contact, when at that moment the upper disc of Alliance ships was already cutting down through the Syndic hammer at a high angle even as the second disc should be cutting upward farther back. While the Alliance ships shot through the Syndic formation along its shortest axis, each Alliance ship was in contact with the enemy for only a few minutes, able to flay any ships within range and then racing onward before its own defenses were too heavily stressed. But while the Alliance ships were continuing outward, allowing time for their shields to recover, the Syndic ships were getting hit again and again by new Alliance warships as the narrow disc of the Alliance formation swept through the Syndic formation.

But he couldn’t get lost in that vision. “All units in main body open fire as enemy ships enter your weapon engagement envelopes. Ensure first volley is grapeshot, followed by specters.”

He feared for a long minute that he’d cut the timing too fine, left the final open-fire command too late, in his desire to make sure a concentrated barrage hit the Syndic formation that had just been savaged by two Alliance buzz saws. Then he heard Dauntless ’s weapons officer reporting that the projected paths of Syndic ships were entering the engagement envelopes of the flagship’s weapons, and moments later reporting that Dauntless ’s weapons systems were firing. Even given the time lag needed for his command to reach every ship in the main body, they should all have opened fire at the optimum time.

Space between the Syndic force and the Alliance main body was suddenly populated by rapid bursts of light as a missile volley fired by the Syndics against the main body ran into and was wiped out by the wave of Alliance grapeshot. Moments later, space in front of the Dauntless lit up in a broad area as the charging Syndic warships ran head-on into the barrage of grapeshot, the ball bearings flashing into gas as collisions with Syndic shields converted their kinetic energy to heat and light. It looked for all the world like someone had painted a sweep of space with light.

The huge flare was still fading when brighter and bigger lights started flaring like flashbulbs. Geary kept his expression dispassionate, knowing he was looking at the deaths of Syndic minor combatants whose shields had been overwhelmed, leaving the ships exposed to more grapeshot slamming them at high relative speeds.

Right behind the grapeshot came the wave of specters, hammering weakened shields and in many cases breaking through to hit the Syndic ships.

within moments, the van of the Syndic force had been wiped out.

Geary swallowed, trying not to think of how many lives had just been ended in those flashes of light. He glanced over at Desjani, who was studying the display intently, her hands clenching and unclenching.

Holding their courses, though momentum left them little choice, follow-on waves of Syndic ships battered their way through the wreckage of the ships that had once made up their van. Instead of hitting an already softened-up Alliance main body with fresh attackers, the follow-on Syndics had themselves been hit by the two Alliance buzz saws even before they’d been further depleted by encountering the debris field. On the Alliance side, Geary’s ships were still almost untouched, their shields still at maximum.

Then the Syndic charge came within range of the hell-lances of the Alliance fleet, and space was filled with blazing shafts of energy converging toward the paths the Syndic ships were taking. Almost immediately thereafter, Geary saw null-fields being hurled out to also meet the onrushing Syndics.

He could never be sure how much he’d actually seen and how much he’d imagined in snapshot fashion as the two fleets swept through each other at a combined speed of well over .1 light, the moments of actual closest approach flashing by too fast for humans to register. But by that time, the damage had been done.

As the Alliance ships absorbed a heavy barrage against their bow shields, the outgunned Syndics had already run into the much heavier fire of Geary’s ships. Previously weakened and without time to rebuild, Syndic shields failed or let through damaging shots. Null-fields carved sudden gaps in ships while hell-lances flayed the oncoming Syndic warships.

Dauntless ’s instruments, detecting and calculating damage at superhuman speed, told her crew that most of the Syndic ships racing past Geary had taken damage. Many appeared to be little more than wrecks, still carried along with their living comrades by the force of momentum. As the Alliance main body swept through the space once occupied by the Syndic force, Geary realized many of the impacts registering on Alliance shields were actually pieces of shattered Syndic warships.

Forcing himself to ignore the human cost of what had just happened, Geary scanned his display for summaries of the estimated damage to the Syndic force even as he gave new orders. “Main body, reverse course at time one five, turning up through zero nine zero.” That would bring the ships of his main body bending their courses upward in unison, up and over until they were going back in the other direction, chasing after the Syndic force that had passed through them, but slightly above them because of the turning radius required at the speeds they were traveling. They’d also be upside down relative to their former positions, of course, but in space that didn’t matter in the slightest.