Jack Campbell - Leviathan

“Ten seconds.” This time Castries’ voice stayed steady. “We have confirmation that our battleship formations are accelerating.”

Geary didn’t know whether he really saw any of the Alliance battleships, cruisers, and destroyers rushing in toward the same point where Dauntless and the other battle cruisers and their escorts were going. He didn’t know whether he really saw the dark ship formation suddenly loom directly ahead, going from tiny dots of light to massive warships in the blink of a human eye. Maybe he imagined those images, or maybe his brain manufactured them.

He felt Dauntless ’s weapons firing, felt the battle cruiser shudder from hits, waited for a moment of incredible force to smash himself and this ship.

It took a few seconds for him to realize that they were past the encounter. Geary heard a couple of gasps of relief as some of the watch-standers absorbed the same knowledge.

“Made it,” Desjani said, as if no other outcome had been plausible. “Status, people!”

The watch-standers sprang to action to consolidate information for her, while Geary bent closer to his display, wondering whether the risk had paid off.

The three Alliance formations had essentially merged in the final seconds prior to contact with the dark ships, a mass of warships whose movements had fortunately been coordinated by the fleet’s maneuvering systems. But that mass was slamming head-on into another mass, that of the dark ships. Only the fact that the dark ships held their vectors, sticking to their predicted courses, prevented any collisions.

As the Alliance battleships had surged very slightly ahead of the battle cruisers, their weapons had fired, eighteen huge warships bristling with weaponry unloading everything they had at the dark ships preparing to fire on Dauntless and the other battle cruisers. Missiles leaped out, impacting on targets almost as soon as they launched. Hell-lance particle beams formed a brilliant forest of lethal energy that bored into their targets. Grapeshot struck within milliseconds of the other weapons, pounding warships whose shields and armor had already been battered by earlier hits. And where the battleships had passed close enough to targets, the glowing balls of null fields had eaten holes in opponents, dissolving the bonds that held molecules and atoms together.

Geary had to drastically slow the playback generated by the fleet’s sensors to see that much. Immediately behind the Alliance battleships had come the battle cruiser formation, but instead of running into a wall of fire as well, the battle cruisers had faced only those surviving after the rampage of the battleships. Dauntless and her companions had fired, tearing apart smaller warships and adding to the damage inflicted on dark battleships already badly hurt. “We took some hits,” Geary said as his display lit with damage reports from other ships. “But we hit them a lot worse.”

Three dark battleships were gone, blown to pieces despite their mammoth defenses. A fourth was crippled, so badly shot up that it had lost all weapons and all maneuvering control, tumbling helplessly onward in the wake of its companions.

Between them, the Alliance formations had knocked out a dozen dark heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, and twenty-three destroyers.

The vast majority of the enemy ships in that part of their formation within range of the Alliance charge had their fire-control systems locked on Dauntless and the other battle cruisers. In the almost-a-second between the time when the Alliance battleships came within range and when Dauntless could have been engaged, most of the dark ship weapons had never had a chance to fire, being destroyed while awaiting a shot at their chosen targets.

Few of the warships in Geary’s battleship formations had been targeted by the enemy, so few had received any hits. Many more ships in the battle cruiser formation had been hit, but even though half a dozen Alliance battle cruisers had suffered significant damage, only one heavy cruiser, Bunker , and a half dozen destroyers had been hit badly enough to be out of the fight.

Bunker was staggering away from the other Alliance ships, trying to regain some maneuvering control. The destroyers Thunderbolt , Monitor , and Kopis had been completely obliterated. Patu , Lathi , and Naginata were still at least partly intact but so badly damaged that their surviving crew members were abandoning ship in any escape pods that remained in working condition.

Both Incredible and Dragon had taken hits to their main propulsion, though, enough to limit their maneuverability, and the battleship Fearless had also lost a propulsion unit.

“Several hits on Dauntless ,” Lieutenant Yuon was summarizing. “Hell-lance battery 2A out of commission. Maneuvering thruster 3B off-line. No estimated times to repair yet. Hull penetrations are being sealed by damage control teams. Two dead confirmed. Seventeen wounded.”

The losses hurt. Even one man or woman killed hurt. The destroyers that had not survived had lost their entire crews. Despite that, it had been a wildly successful tactic. But… “Given the firepower advantages of the dark ships,” Geary said, “we’ve only roughly evened the odds with their battleship formations.” He did not have to add that the dark battle cruiser formation charging their way would give the dark ships a major advantage.

Desjani nodded, grimacing. “And we can’t do that again. The dark ships will already be analyzing what happened and preparing to counter it if they see us setting up another attack like that.”

The dark battleships were already closing ranks in their formation, unfazed by their losses, filling in the gap that Geary’s ships had blown through them.

He only had to repeat what he had just done, in terms of losses to the dark ships and losses suffered by his own side, at least twice more to even the odds, and perhaps half a dozen times to win.

A moment of despair filled Admiral John Geary.

Then he began issuing orders again. Because the people he commanded needed Black Jack if they were to survive.

“Immediate execute, all units, come up zero nine five degrees.” His fleet, the three formations still intermingled, began curving upward and back toward another intercept with the dark battleships. Incredible , Dragon , Fearless , and a score of cruisers and destroyers struggled to match the maneuver due to the damage to their propulsion systems.

His ships were shedding some velocity in the massive turn, but he didn’t worry about maintaining speed. Point one five light was a bit fast for his taste when it came to maneuvering in battle, and limiting acceleration made it easier for the damaged ships to stay with their formations.

“Captain?” Lieutenant Castries said. “The dark battle cruiser formation was up to point three five light speed an hour ago.”

“What?” Desjani glared at her display. “At the rate they have been moving, they’ll get within combat range in another three hours,” she warned Geary.

“Even though the dark ships can handle more stress on acceleration and deceleration than our ships can, they’ll have to start braking that velocity really soon, or they’ll tear right past us,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have ramped up the velocity on those battle cruisers and their escorts that high. Is the dark ship AI based on my actions breaking down, or is this supposed to be the Black Jack who people imagined before I came back?”

“Maybe the Black Jack legend,” Desjani said. “You in reality try to think a few moves ahead. I don’t know. We might have to assume the AIs are getting erratic, maybe testing their limits.”