The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

She started to say something else, then an expression of astonishment mixed with awe came over her. “You knew. You knew that you would need Armus now in just this way. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. It was a guess. A lucky guess.”

“Sure.” Desjani made a religious gesture of thanks. “You didn’t feel any hints or inspiration. Sure.”

He shook his head, not answering, knowing that the legend of Black Jack left little room for luck, instead attributing success to the favor of powers far beyond human.

Well, maybe that was another word for luck.

“Ten minutes to enigma contact with main body,” Lieutenant Castries said.

The ships of the main body had stopped braking, turning to face the oncoming enemy bow on, where armor, shields, and weapons were thickest. Geary wanted to call the shots, literally call them, but the main body was too far away for that. He had to depend on Captain Armus’s choosing the right moments to fire.

With the naked eye, he might have been able to see at best a curiously regular lattice of bright objects ahead, where the main body of the fleet came onward. On his display, Geary could see every ship plainly identified. Directly before Invincible, in a small diamond formation, Dreadnaught, Orion, Dependable, and Conqueror served as a shield for the captured Kick ship and the four battleships mated to it for towing. Watching them, Geary knew with a grim certainty that this time Jane Geary would hold her position just as doggedly as any bear-cow could.

The enigma formation had re-formed into a flat wedge, the broad side facing the center of Armus’s force, as if aiming to slice the human formation in half.

Desjani’s lips were moving in silent prayer, but her expression held confidence.

Geary kept his eyes on his display, knowing as the last minutes counted down that whatever had happened had already taken place. He would see it all too late to do anything but watch.

Bare moments before the two forces collided, specter missiles leaped from every human warship, racing to meet their targets as hell lances fired in terrible volleys; on the heels of the hell lances, masses of grapeshot filled space before the human warships.

The barrage had been perfectly coordinated. Missiles and hell lances struck almost simultaneously, followed within less than a second by the ball bearings of the grapeshot field. Instead of a series of hard blows, a single mighty blow struck all at once.

Geary heard someone on Dauntless’s bridge gasp as the region of space just before the main body of the fleet lit up with titanic bursts of energy, the enigma ships following behind the front of their formation running right into the debris and unleashed energy of the weapons and power cores detonating among the leading enigma ships.

More bursts of energy sparkled among the human warships as pieces of debris slammed into their shields and armor. Dreadnaught jerked under multiple hits flaring on her bow, Orion staggered, Dependable fell off under hammerblows to one side of her bow, and for one heart-stopping moment, Conqueror looked like she had exploded. Then, as the fleet’s sensors peered beneath that flash of light, and status reports came in, Geary realized that a wave of dense but tiny debris had struck Conqueror’s shields, generating that terrifying outburst but not getting through to seriously damage the battleship.

More hits on Superb, and on Splendid, helplessly connected to Invincible. And then a huge blast as something substantial made it through and slammed into the immensely thick armor on Invincible’s bow.

As Armus’s formation swept clear of the debris, it could be seen that Invincible now bore a substantial crater on her bow. But she was otherwise intact.

“I’ll be damned,” Desjani whispered. “I can’t believe it survived that. An Invincible that lived up to the name.”

The auxiliaries and assault transports were rushing ahead, or at least rushing as best they could, to be enfolded among the battleships again, while the heavy cruisers swiftly pivoted and faced the enigmas who had passed through their formation. The battleships began slowly swinging upward by the front edge of the formation, like a plate tilting up slowly to face in another direction, where the enigmas were now to be found.

The enigmas . . . Geary breathed a prayer of his own. Roughly one hundred and sixty enigma ships had met Armus’s formation head-on. Fewer than eighty were still in motion, sweeping around behind the main body and—“What the hell.”

“They’re breaking up their formation,” Desjani said.