Jack Campbell: The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast

He touched another comm switch. “All units in Task Force Dancer, immediate execute, come starboard five three degrees, up zero four degrees, accelerate to point two light speed. All unidentified warships is this star system are to be treated as hostile. You are authorized to engage any that pose any threat to you.”

Tanya waited until Dauntless had swung onto the new vector before she activated the privacy field around their seats and leaned toward him. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“If these are Alliance warships—”

“Then they’ve got a very short time in which to start acting like Alliance warships.”

“Yes, sir.” She sat back, smiling crookedly. “We’re either going to come out of this as heroes, or they’re going to hang us.”

Captain Tulev called in with essentially the same question as Desjani’s and seemed equally satisfied with Geary’s reply.

Badaya didn’t question what was happening at all. He probably, Geary thought, was enjoying having his long suspicions of parts of the Alliance government proven true. If that was what was happening.

“At point two light, we’re thirteen hours from intercept with the nearest of the dark ships,” Lieutenant Castries said, “assuming it remains on its current vector.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Geary eyed his display, thinking that it would be another two and a half hours before the dark ships saw Geary’s task force and received his orders to surrender. “All units in Task Force Dancer, stand down from maximum combat readiness. Rest your crews and maximize your equipment readiness over the next twelve hours.”

Surprisingly, the first dark ships to see Geary’s ships and hear his message didn’t react at all, continuing whatever they were doing while Geary watched the destruction with growing anger and frustration. It was almost six hours after the task force’s arrival at Atalia before the dark ships responded to the appearance of the Alliance warships.

And when they did react, it brought more bad news.

He watched the individual dark ships veer about, altering vectors at an impressive rate as they began gathering together. “Tanya, is it just me, or—”

“It’s not just you. They’re extremely maneuverable,” she said, her expression reflecting cold concentration on her tasks. “Significantly more maneuverable than our ships.”

“They may look like human ships, but the maneuvers remind me of enigmas.”

Lieutenant Castries had already been running an analysis, and now reported the results. “Admiral, they’re not a match for the enigmas, but their maneuvering capabilities are closer to enigmas than our ships are. There’s a roughly thirty percent improvement over what we can do based on the limited observations we have so far.”

“The enigmas don’t have battle cruisers,” Lieutenant Yuon protested. “They don’t have anything that big.”

“Maybe the enigmas copied our ships,” Desjani said. “They’ve seen them. They could have copied the external appearance. Maybe this is all really another attempt to get us and the Syndics at all-out war again.”

“If the enigmas were trying to fool us, why wouldn’t they have made exact copies instead of ones that differed from our ships in external appearance and the number of weapons they carry?” Geary began to say more, paused to think, then looked at Yuon. “We’re seeing their weapons fire now. What can you tell me about the signatures on their weapons?”

“It matches Alliance weaponry, Admiral. The signatures on the hell lances are exactly like ours, and one of the dark ships fired a missile that is either a specter or a perfect copy of a specter.”

Several seconds passed in silence while everyone thought.

“Who or what the hell are they?” Desjani finally demanded. “They maneuver more like enigmas, and our software was covertly modified not to see them, which also matches enigma tactics. They attacked a Syndic-controlled star system, but also a neutral star system and Alliance assets here. And now it looks like they’re getting ready to attack us, all of which would imply either enigmas or some other alien race. Like the Kicks, they won’t respond to attempts to communicate. But they have Alliance designs, and Alliance weapons, and the software modifications that left us blind to them came through official channels rather than being some kind of cyberattack. What are they?”

Geary looked at his display, where the tracks of the dark warships were converging with each other. “I don’t think the answer matters any longer. With that sort of advantage in maneuvering capability, and us having come this far from any jump points, I don’t think we can avoid them if they come after us. We’ll have to defeat them, then find answers in the wreckage.”

“They’re gathering into three formations,” Lieutenant Yuon said.

Geary watched his display, frowning. It looked like the dark ships were going to arrange themselves in a smaller, but mirror-image, set of box formations in a V like the task force was still using.

“No answers to your message, no communications of any kind, and they’re adopting combat formations,” Desjani said. “They’re definitely going to fight. This doesn’t make any sense at all. What those ships did at Indras could be explained partly, but what they’re doing here is just pure destruction. And now fighting us instead of outrunning us, which they could do? It’s like they’re berserkers.”

“Berserkers?”

“You know, those mythical warriors who just go nuts in battle and fight like maniacs until they’re cut to pieces.”

“Maybe that is what we’re dealing with,” Geary said. “Here they come.”

“They’re accelerating to an intercept with us,” Lieutenant Castries confirmed.

If these had been typical warships, the situation wouldn’t have been too serious since Geary’s forces outnumbered the dark ships by better than two to one in escorts and two to one in battle cruisers. But if the estimates produced by the sensor systems were correct, each of the dark ships had the same punch as two of Geary’s ships, and they had a significant advantage in their ability to maneuver as well. “We’ll have to hit each of his subformations hard in turn.”

He decided to make one last check, to see if any other paths might exist. “Lieutenant Iger? Have you heard anything from the dark ships? Anything in any form?”

Iger had recovered his equilibrium and now looked as bleak as Geary felt. “We’ve seen no comms from the dark ships, Admiral. Atalia has sent them messages, attempting to surrender, but they haven’t responded at all.”

There simply wasn’t any alternative to fighting. Geary started planning out the moves in his head. The dark ships were also accelerating to point two light speed as they charged toward the Alliance task force. If the two groups met at a combined velocity of point four light speed the odds of anyone getting a hit were very near zero. They would be tearing past each other at one hundred twenty thousand kilometers a second, which didn’t offer much of a window for hitting a target even if views of the universe weren’t pretty significantly distorted at that velocity.

With the dark ships coming toward an intercept so quickly, the curve of their vector sweeping toward a meeting with the long arc formed by the path of the Alliance task force, the time to meeting had shrunk dramatically. “Two hours to contact on current vectors,” Lieutenant Castries reported.

Geary blinked his eyes, ran one hand through his hair, and straightened in his seat before touching his comm controls. “All units in Task Force Dancer, this is Admiral Geary. We have encountered ships of unknown type and allegiance, which have attacked and destroyed Alliance military and civilian shipping. They are now targeting us. We will destroy them, then determine their origin and motives. All ships are to come to full combat readiness in one hour. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”