The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

That’s what human warships would do. But he wasn’t dealing with human warships, human commanders, human tactics.

Geary watched the enigmas coming, fast and on a direct intercept with the Alliance formation, an ugly certainty growing in him. They had seen something of enigma tactics in the long journey through enigma space. They knew what the enigmas would do. Straight, stand-up fights weren’t how the enigmas liked doing things. It wasn’t that they lacked courage or feared death. They just did things differently than humans might choose to do them. And one of the things the enigmas had done was . . . “They’re going to ram.”

SEVENTEEN

“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?”