Jack Campbell - Invincible

“What?” Desjani’s stare centered on him.

“They’re going to ram,” Geary repeated, feeling totally confident in that assessment. “If they order fourteen of their warships to ram, one each for our battle cruisers, they’ll take out the core of our fighting force and a big chunk of our firepower in a single pass. The remaining enigma warships could easily handle our surviving light cruisers and destroyers, then mop up the Syndics here before dropping that hypernet gate on their way out. I will take any odds you want to name that they are planning on doing that.”

Her eyes shifted rapidly as they went from point to point on her display, then Desjani almost snarled her reply. “You’re right. It makes perfect sense to them. We saw them ram that asteroid, and we know they’re willing to sacrifice their own people for any number of reasons. If we went in on a straight firing run, they’d have a real good chance of getting at least a glancing hit on our ships with one of theirs, and at the speeds we’d be moving, that would be all it took. But how will we know that’s what they intend? If we just evade, we’ll lose every chance to engage them.”

“We watch to see if they slow down,” Geary said. “If they don’t brake their velocity down so they’d have a decent chance of scoring hits on a firing pass, it will tell us they want to score a different kind of hit.”

“At those kinds of velocities, that’s a tough shot even with a weapon the size of a warship,” Desjani muttered, running some simulations. “Hmmm. If they assign two ships to ram each battle cruiser, their odds of success go way the hell up. But… a pretty much head-on pass… it’s doable. Oh, hell. That’s why they took up the position they did, so that when we came at them, it would be a head-on firing pass, which would greatly increase their odds of scoring a hit with a ramming tactic.”

An hour could seem like a long time. When a strong force of alien warships was charging right down your throat, quite possibly with intent to take out your biggest ships using the surest and ugliest method available, it felt like far too short a period in which to think of an effective countertactic. After Geary had spent several frustrating minutes coming up with nothing, Desjani turned to look at him.

“Are you going to share with me your brilliant plan for handling this situation?”

“I will as soon as I come up with one,” Geary muttered.

Her next words surprised him.

“You know, Admiral, we don’t have to hit them hard on this pass. We don’t have to hit them at all.”

Geary swiveled his head to stare at her. “Are you feeling all right, Tanya?”

“I’m fine. Maybe a bit too much exposure to thinking when it comes to tactics, but otherwise fine.” Desjani pointed to her display. “We dropped into this star system thinking we would have to hit the enigmas as hard as we could as fast as we could because we thought the enigmas would be destroying everything. The enigmas aren’t doing that, though, because they want that stuff intact to keep us here so we have to fight. But I realized that we’re still thinking we have to hit hard and fast even though the situation is much different than we expected. They’re coming to us. We’re a long ways from anything in this star system that the enigmas might target. At the rates we’re both going, the main-body formation coming in behind us will arrive shortly before the enigmas pass through us, but the enigmas won’t see that arrival until they’ve already gone past us, putting them between our two formations. Then we can go after them hard.”

Geary felt like hitting himself. “That’s right. I’ve still been thinking that time was critical, but right now time is on our side. We don’t have to risk a high-threat firing pass this time. Captain Desjani, have I told you how very valuable you are to me?”

“Not often enough.”

“I’ll try to correct that.” He looked at the situation with new eyes. “How do you see the enigmas trying to pull off ramming even though this fleet has a history of last-moment maneuvers to concentrate our force against one portion of the enemy formation? How are they going to know where to direct the ramming ships?”

“It’s pretty simple,” she said, sounding a trifle smug. “Look.” Her display lit up with representations of Geary’s force and the enigmas rushing toward each other. “They’ve seen us fight. They know you’ll likely alter course at the last moment to hit just part of their formation with everything we’ve got. In order to do that, we’d need to be within a certain range of them, no matter which direction we dodge.” She entered more data and a flattened cone spread out from the future location of Geary’s force, surrounding the enemy formation. “We’d have to be somewhere on that cone. If I was running the show for the enigmas, I’d be watching for the first twitch of movement onto a new vector by us, and the instant I saw the direction of that vector, I would know where on this cone we were aiming to be.

“For example.” Desjani entered one number, and the cone was replaced by a single vector. “See? Easy. If you’re maneuverable enough to change your own vector fast enough to manage a new intercept at that point. Human ships aren’t that maneuverable. Enigma ships are.”

“And if I don’t dodge, it just makes their solution simpler,” Geary said. “I’m glad you’re not running the show for the enigmas.”

“Damn straight. So, what are you going to do?”

“Use your cone. How much farther do we have to deviate from course to hit whichever enigmas try to hit us, and still be safe from an intercept aimed at somewhere on that cone?”

“That depends which way you go.” She raised one eyebrow at him. “You usually choose up and to the right.”

“So you told me.” He paused to think. “Let’s seem to make it easy for them. We’ll go up and to the right. Farther up, though.”

“It might mean a clean miss on that firing run,” Desjani cautioned.

“As a certain battle cruiser commander pointed out, we can afford that,” Geary replied.

Rione was back. “Admiral, the spider-wolves have arrived in this star system.”

“Good.”

“How will we keep the enigmas from destroying them?”

That complicated things.

Desjani spoke as if saying thoughts out loud to Geary. “At least we don’t have to worry about the spider-wolves. They’re not quite as fast as the enigmas, but they seem to be slightly more maneuverable. Unless they want to fight the enigmas, they should be able to avoid any attempt to engage them.”

Geary nodded and looked at Rione. “What she said.”

“Thank you… Admiral.” She looked forward at his display. “I understand that there have been some political changes here.”

“It looks like it though we don’t know the extent yet. Feel free to talk to Lieutenant Iger about it. His people are trying to sort out the changes.”

Rione recognized a dismissal when she heard one. “I’ll let you go back to focusing on your battle, Admiral.”

“Half an hour to contact,” Lieutenant Castries reported.

“Let’s slow it down as if we intend a regular firing pass,” Geary said. “All units in pursuit formation, reduce velocity to point one light speed at time one five.”

A few minutes later, Dauntless and the other ships surrounding her pivoted around so their main propulsion units faced forward and began braking their velocity down to the speed Geary had ordered.

By the time that had been done, and the warships had brought their bows forward again to face the oncoming enigmas, only five minutes remained until contact.