Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“Impact in forty seconds,” the tactical officer said.

Sonja relaxed slightly as the jump completed, feeling the knot of tension in her stomach slowly unlocking and fading away. At least they’d been jumping from rest, rather than at high speed. It wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience for the freighter crewmen, of course, but her crews could handle the sensation. A combat jump, on the other hand, would have been much more dangerous and uncomfortable.

“Get me an updated count on the ships,” she ordered. She wouldn’t have put it past the civilian ships to somehow screw up the coordinates — even if they were slaved to her ship — and appear somewhere else. Civilians couldn’t be trusted. Every naval officer knew that. “I want them all located…”

“ Commodore ,” the tactical officer interrupted. Sonja whirled around, her rebuke fading away as she took in his tone of panic. She’d never heard him badly shaken before, even when they’d jumped alarmingly close to an asteroid and almost rammed it. “We have incoming missiles! We’re under attack!”

For a moment, sheer disbelief held Sonja frozen. Who would dare to attack the Annual Fleet? No pirate fleet could hope to have the firepower needed to take on the defenders… and then she looked at the display and knew what she was facing. Thousands of missiles were roaring towards her ships, her computers faithfully identifying them as Imperial Navy-standard Mark-VII Shipkillers. A superdreadnaught couldn’t stand against such firepower and a battlecruiser like Pegasus was flimsy by comparison. She glanced down at the timer at the bottom of the display and swore. There were at least seven minutes before the battlecruiser could flicker out and escape and, by then, they would be destroyed several times over.

“Bring up the point defence,” she ordered, as training took over. The escorting ships had, thankfully, already established their datanet. There might be no hope of survival, yet they could at least force the enemy to pay a price — and, perhaps, if they held out long enough, one of the smaller ships could get out and alert the sector fleet. She would die doing her duty. “Find me the attackers!”

The display updated as the battlecruiser’s sensors went active, sweeping space for targets and locking in on the source of the missiles. Nine massive starships were wobbling out of cloak, already belching a second swarm of missiles towards her ships… and she knew despair for the first time. They were Imperial Navy superdreadnaughts … and that meant that the sector fleet was compromised. They hadn’t encountered hostile aliens, or even rebels from beyond the Rim; Admiral Percival’s ships had either fallen into enemy hands, or perhaps he’d decided to rebel against the Empire. Who knew? She had never trusted Percival and, judging from a few of their comments, neither had her patrons. The presence of a handful of smaller ships beside the behemoths was irrelevant. Only the superdreadnaughts mattered.

“Target the lead superdreadnaught,” she ordered. The enemy ships weren’t broadcasting IFF signals — a breach of Imperial Law, part of her mind wittered uselessly — and so there was no way to isolate the command ship. Standard Imperial practice was to have the command ship in the middle, where it would be protected by its eight siblings, but there was no way to know how the unknown commander would operate. A brave commander might lead from the front; a coward — and she knew that Percival was a coward — would command from the rear. “Open fire.”

The battlecruiser lurched as it opened its tubes and launched the first salvo towards its target, rapidly combining its fire with that of its comrades. She silently cursed the regulation that forbade the deployment of external racks on convoy escort ships, even though there had been no time to deploy them before the enemy ships opened fire. If she’d thought to load the racks at the last waypoint, instead of waiting impatiently… she shook her head angrily, watching as the storm of icons roared down on her ships. There were only a few seconds left.

The point defence systems did what they could. Decoys were launched, attempting to spoof the missiles into wasting themselves uselessly against drones. The datanet wove long-range tactical lasers, short-range plasma cannons and even close-combat rail guns into a single deadly net, knocking missiles out one by one… but there were always more missiles. Their own penetrator aids helped confuse the point defence, convincing the computers that they weren’t facing thousands of missiles, but hundreds of thousands. Sonja watched helplessly as the missiles passed through the outer defence grid and roared down towards her shields. Her engineering crew had diverted all the power they could to the protective bubble surrounding the ship, yet she knew that it was too little, too late.

She glanced at the timer and knew that there would be no escape, no last-minute relief from death. The enemy ships had fired so many missiles that they could spread them out over her entire fleet, taking them all out in the first salvo, sparing nothing, not even a picket ship. It made sense, she knew; whoever was in command of the opposition was ruthless, but capable — far more capable than Percival. A hundred missiles slammed into a destroyer and it vanished in a ball of flame, followed rapidly by a battlecruiser and two heavy cruisers. The enemy missiles were retargeting, moving from destroyed ships to retarget themselves on ships that had remained intact. Dozens were lost, to point defences or to drones and decoys, but the remainder just kept coming. There was no escape.

Sonja keyed the intercom. “My crew,” she said, finding herself lost for words. She hadn’t been that bad a commander, had she? How did they think of her on the lower decks? Did it even matter? It had certainly never mattered to her when she had been the mistress of everything she surveyed. “It’s been an honour.”

Thirty seconds later, nineteen missiles impacted on the battlecruiser’s shields and slammed through to the hull. Sonja had a microsecond to see the bridge disintegrating into fire… and then there was nothing, but darkness. Her mighty ship disintegrated into a ball of flaming plasma. There were no survivors.

“Incoming missiles,” the tactical officer warned. Colin watched, impressed that the escorting units had even managed to get a few shots off before they had been destroyed. It was only a pitiful handful compared to the salvo he’d thrown at them, but it was enough to be dangerous — assuming that they made their way through the fleet’s datanet and point defence. They’d targeted the General Montgomery in particular, although he wasn’t sure if they’d known it was the command ship or they’d simply fired at the ship leading the charge. “Point defence is coming active… now!

Colin forced himself to relax, even though he wanted to lean forward, as if he could somehow strengthen the point defence by sheer force of will. The superdreadnaughts might have all the beauty and charm of a brick, but they were armed with enough point defence to stand off hundreds of missiles, along with the sensors to separate out real missiles from the decoys. It didn’t look as if the escorts had managed to program in a proper attack pattern before they’d been attacked, a testament to how badly they’d been taken by surprise, but it wouldn’t have mattered. They hadn’t fired anything like enough missiles to swamp the superdreadnaught’s defences.

His fleet closed in around the General Montgomery , adding their weapons fire to the point defence. One by one, the enemy missiles were wiped out, until only a handful survived long enough to make their terminal attack runs. Only one of them made it through the defences to slam harmlessly against the superdreadnaught’s shields, barely even shaking the massive starship. The internal compensators compensated easily. Colin checked on the shield generator and smiled in relief. It had barely been touched, yet alone burned out by the hit.