Christopher Nuttall - Barbarians at the Gates

Not for the first time, Marius wondered just what had gone through Justinian’s mind when he decided to rebel. Did he have an ambition to become emperor, or did he have another aim in mind? And if so, what was it?

“Get us as close to the Enterprise as you can,” he ordered finally. “Stand by to engage the enemy.”

He knew it would take ten minutes to reach weapons range of Enterprise , providing they were not impeded. On the other hand, Bogey Seven was clearly much weaker than the other enemy fleets, unless they were superdreadnaughts posing as battlecruisers and Marine Landing Craft.

He ran through the converging vectors in his head and frowned. Admiral Justinian had timed it just right. If they attempted to save Enterprise , they would be caught by four converging enemy fleets and forced to accept an engagement on very unfavorable terms—assuming that all the enemy ships were real, which they couldn’t be.

It was an old adage in military history—even back in the days when navies meant ships floating on the ocean—that a stern chase was a long one. On the other hand, the starfighters launched by Bogey Four were capable of accelerating to their maximum speed almost instantly, in harsh contrast to the lumbering superdreadnaughts, and were rapidly gaining on his fleet.

He braced himself as the starfighters raced towards the blue sphere surrounding his craft on the display, the moment when they could be engaged by his point defense, wondering what particular tactics would be used by the enemy this time. Would they try to strip away his screening elements first, or would they ignore them and press in towards the superdreadnaughts? If Admiral Justinian anticipated a long battle, it would be the former; hell, that was what Marius would do, if the positions were reversed. Assuming that they couldn’t return to the Asimov Point they’d used to enter the system, it would take hours before they could retreat through another Asimov Point or escape the mass limit and go to stardrive.

The CSP spread out to intercept the incoming starfighters. Standard doctrine stated that the best counter to one starfighter was another starfighter. Unlike some of the standard tactical doctrine, it wasn’t something Marius had any real objections to, even though he was a big ship admiral. Keeping the lethal little starfighters and their shield-penetrating shipkiller missiles as far as possible from the battle wagons struck him as a very good idea. The CSP had only seconds to intervene before the enemy fighters blew through them—their escorting fighters peeling off to take on the CSP, forcing the invading pilots to worry about defending themselves—allowing hundreds of starfighters to flash through and fall upon the fleet like wolves upon a herd of sheep. Some of the CSP moved in pursuit, leaving Marius to whisper a silent prayer under his breath that their IFF systems wouldn’t fail at a crucial moment. It was an unacknowledged reality that, far too often for comfort, the point defense networks had been known to engage friendly fighters.

“Point defense network switching to condition one,” the tactical officer said. “Point defense engaging the enemy…now.”

A single superdreadnaught mounted hundreds of point defense weapons. Seventy superdreadnaughts—and their escorting carriers, battlecruisers and destroyers—mounted enough point defense to make the cockiest of fighter jocks blanch. Now, with the datanet weaving the ships into a single entity, hundreds of starfighters were picked off one by one. No starfighter could survive a hit with a point defense weapon, although a lucky fighter jock might— might —manage to eject into space before his fighter disintegrated. Marius wondered grimly what would happen to his pilots if they were rescued by the enemy. The Inheritance Wars had seen a wide range of prisoner treatments—some had been treated well, others had been stranded on hellish worlds, if prisoners had been taken at all—but surely Admiral Justinian would be smart enough not to annoy the Senate any more than he already had.

And then, there was the Federation Navy’s attitude to consider. Treating captured prisoners badly would fuel a desire for victory and revenge.

“They’re targeting the carriers, sir,” the tactical officer said. The sheer randomness of the enemy flight paths had defeated any attempt to analyse their targeting priorities, until it was too late. “ Illustrious and Shokaku are primary targets; Graf Zeppelin may be a third…”

“Steer the CSP over to cover the carriers,” Marius ordered calmly. The enemy targeting made perfect sense. Picking off the carriers would destroy his ability to mount a proper CSP, leaving his ships naked and vulnerable to repeated fighter strikes. “Refocus point defense; defending the carriers has absolute priority.”

It was too late. The starfighters had already started to launch their missiles towards Illustrious , hammering the fleet carrier hard. For a long moment, Marius allowed himself to hope that the carrier would survive, seconds before it blew up into a ball of radioactive plasma.

Shokaku was luckier; one of her primary flight decks was wrecked, but the remainder of the ship survived intact. Her other flight decks would still be able to launch and recover fighters.

The remainder of the enemy starfighters pulled back, abandoning the attack and racing back towards Bogey Four. Marius knew they’d be back.

“Admiral,” the sensor officer snapped. “Look at Enterprise !”

Marius stared.

“What the…?”

Jefferson System, 4092

Back at Luna Academy, each cadet had to go through a test that dated all the way back to the early days of human expansion into space. Indeed, its origins were somewhat mythological. The cadet was given command of a simulated starship—with the consoles manned, often, by a real starship crew—and ordered to complete a particular mission. What the cadet wasn’t told was that the simulation was rigged; no matter what the cadet did, the mission would lurch from disaster to disaster until the simulated starship was finally destroyed. Roman had, afterwards, asked the instructor why they were put through a test that had no victorious outcome. The instructor had replied that the test was intended to measure how they coped with stress, and how quickly they thought under combat conditions.

“Get me a full damage report,” he ordered, duly aware that he was barking orders to the chief engineer, a man with more years of service than Roman had been alive. The temptation to just give up was overwhelming, yet who else was there to take over? Everyone who outranked him was dead or missing, presumed dead. The poor bastards who’d been on the bridge when spears of antimatter fury had burned through the shields and hull would have been vaporized. “How many sensors do we have left?”

Enterprise was tumbling through space, but thankfully the gravity had remained operational, Even so, he could feel it in his inner ear, a sense that something wasn’t quite right. The carrier had not only been crippled, but punched out of formation and, without a clear idea of how badly damaged the ship actually was, he didn’t know if he dared power up the drives. The emergency systems had powered down the drives as soon as the ship had been hit and there was no way to know if they were still operational. The internal sensor network had been badly damaged and was barely functioning.