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

The heavy cruisers Bartizan and Haidate had taken hits on their bows but not serious damage. Light cruisers Absetzen and Toledo were hurt but still able to keep up, but their sister ship Lancer had been totally knocked out and was tumbling away.

Oddly, only two Alliance destroyers had been hit, Kururi and Sabar . The dark ships had managed a better than usual concentration of fire against major combatants.

Geary was already bringing all three formations around again, curving toward the star and slightly upward to meet the dark ships as they came around also toward the star. He was tempted to break two of the Alliance subformations loose, to maneuver each of the three separately to confuse an enemy already reeling from unexpected losses, but realized that was what Black Jack would do. “What do you think?” he asked Tanya.

“Third time’s a charm.”

“Do it again? But there isn’t any more left-hand subformation.”

“There’s still a subformation to the left of the other one!” she insisted.

Doing a third attack in the exact same manner was, his instincts told him, a recipe for disaster. “It’s really hard to do this,” he muttered. “I feel like I’m going to destroy half my ships.”

The V of the Alliance task-force formations was now almost tilted on edge relative to the plane of the solar system, coming back toward the dark ships, which had closed down smoothly into a single, rectangular box formation with one long side facing forward. If neither opponent adjusted vectors, the three Alliance subformations in their V would slice through the dark ship rectangle at a right angle, like an arrowhead tearing through a bar of butter.

But the dark ship formation was more like a bar of steel. The arrowhead might slice right through the center, carried by velocity and momentum, but it would take tremendous damage in the process.

“The left,” Geary muttered.

“Yes, the left,” Desjani affirmed.

But where would the dark ships go? Would they wait for him to hit the center? No. Black Jack wouldn’t do that.

Geary pivoted his point of view, imagining he was commanding the ships in the rectangle and trying to take down the arrowhead. I’d assume they were going to hit one side of my formation, and I’d go up slightly and swing one wing around to concentrate fire on the top of the arrowhead. And they won’t expect me to go left again. They’ll assume I’ll hit their right. Which means their last-minute maneuvers will be like… “Got it.”

His focus wavered as the dark ship formation passed close enough to the drifting Adroit to fire another volley of missiles, all of them aimed at the helpless battle cruiser. There was no way that Adroit could survive that attack. “ Adroit , abandon ship. I say again, Adroit , abandon ship immediately. Get your crew off as fast as possible.”

Adroit ’s crew apparently hadn’t needed any encouragement. He couldn’t blame them for that, though, as escape pods launched from the sole surviving example of what the fleet had jokingly nicknamed “economy-class” battle cruisers. In a few minutes, when the dark missiles arrived, the last surviving one of those ships would be gone.

Reassured that Adroit ’s crew was as safe as he could manage at this point, Geary called Captain Tulev. “Delta One took the brunt of the enemy fire on the last pass, so I’m going to adjust final approaches so Delta Two comes in ahead this time.”

Tulev, as unshaken and impassive as ever, nodded. “They are concentrating fire on the battle cruisers, I see.”

“Yes. But the heavy cruisers and light cruisers in Delta One took some hits, too. I’ll have Delta One and Delta Three coming in very close behind you to split the attention of the dark ships a bit.”

The huge curves through space were steadying out as the two formations came around to face each other and raced toward another encounter. “Get those shields at one hundred percent,” Desjani snapped.

“Captain, one of the shield generators was clipped during the last firing pass and we’re still—”

“We’re ten minutes from contact. Get it done.”

Geary, having given his orders, sat next to Desjani, watching the two groups of ships rushing toward contact. “It’s funny,” he said.

“I could use a laugh,” she replied.

“Not that kind of funny. I told you earlier that I thought I needed to work on building and strengthening the right patterns. Well, here we are facing the pattern of my own tactics, and we have to break that pattern.”

“Maybe it’s an antipattern,” Desjani said. “You have to break it because it’s the anti version of your real pattern.”

“Works for me.”

In the last minutes before contact, the dark ship rectangle didn’t just pivot one wing forward and up to concentrate fire on Geary’s expected countermove while the rest of the rectangle swung upward as well. Instead, taking advantage of their superior maneuverability, the entire formation compressed and climbed. If Geary had done as their tactical model had predicted, his formation would have been badly raked.

But his ships weren’t there.

Instead, the Alliance task force had swung down and left again, buzz-sawing through the far left wing of the dark ships’ formation.

Dauntless jerked only twice in the wake of the firing run, Geary watching his display tensely for the results. Damage reports were flowing in, most of them from Tulev’s ships, where the battle cruisers had once again been the target of most of the enemy fire. Leviathan and Dragon had taken the most hits, but were still moving. Behind them, in Badaya’s subformation, Steadfast had also accumulated a series of blows.

But as Geary replayed in slow motion the hyperfast combat encounter, he saw that Steadfast had taken those hits because she had swung close enough to one of the dark battle cruisers to employ her null-field projector. The null field had eaten a huge hole out of the dark ship, leaving it rolling out of formation, most systems dead.

Another dark battle cruiser had been destroyed, along with a dark heavy cruiser. Two more dark heavy cruisers had been hit hard and three destroyers either crippled or completely blown apart.

“Come on, you guys,” Desjani said to the representations of the dark ships on her display. “One more time.”

But as Geary began bringing his ships around again, he saw that the remaining two dark battle cruisers, one heavy cruiser, and five destroyers weren’t continuing their own turns in order to reengage. Instead, they had pivoted and were accelerating all out for the jump point for Varandal.

“Looks like our berserkers have had enough.” He tried to keep triumph from his voice as he sent the next command. “All units in Task Force Dancer, immediate execute, come port four five degrees, up zero seven degrees, accelerate to point two light speed.”

“We’ll never catch them,” Desjani said.

“No, but we need to be on their tails if they jump for Varandal.” But her words broke his intense focus on the dark ships. Geary leaned back, looking at everything his display showed. A few crippled dark ships were drifting through the star system, as well as a few badly hurt Alliance warships, including the large number of escape pods from Adroit . Steadfast , whose close firing pass had taken out one of the dark battle cruisers, had partially paid for that with some hits on her main propulsion and was already lagging behind the rest of Captain Tulev’s formation. In Atalia as a whole, mercilessly battered by the dark ship attack, there were enough needs for rescue and support to keep a fleet busy.