The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“The enigmas showed up here about a day ago,” Geary said, “so the Syndics, the former Syndics, on that orbital shipyard had only about a day to realize they might have to move that dockyard and get the work done. Somebody showed some very good forethought and initiative.”

“Nice in an Alliance officer,” Desjani replied. “Not so nice in a Syndic. Lieutenant Castries, can they get that thing moved enough to evade those rocks?”

“It’s just barely started moving,” Castries said. “Our systems are having to estimate its mass, and estimate how much thrust the battleship is putting out. There’s a high degree of uncertainty, Captain.”

“It sounds like the answer is ‘maybe,’” Geary said.

“Yes, Admiral. It’s ‘maybe’ calculated out to several decimal points, though.”

“Captain,” Lieutenant Yuon offered, “the enigma bombardment is centered on the points where the orbiting structure and the battleship would have been if neither could move. We use looser patterns to make sure some of the rocks get hits, but the enigmas employed a tight pattern. That would ensure the destruction of the battleship and the dock if they didn’t move. But it also means they don’t have to move as far to get clear of the rocks.”

“Fifteen minutes to impact if they don’t,” Castries added.

At first there was some excitement as the two surviving enigmas from this small group tried to evade not only Kommodor Marphissa’s flotilla but also the human warships still in pursuit. The enigmas made it past the Syndics, but one of them got boxed in by some of Geary’s ships and blown apart. The other ran for the jump point at maximum acceleration, leaving its pursuers once more too far behind to catch it.

That left the ongoing drama of the incoming bombardment. Geary was used to watching ships move at thousands of kilometers per second. Now he watched as the battleship strained to move the far more massive shipyard only a couple of kilometers within the next fifteen minutes. It felt like the old joke about watching paint dry, except in this case an awful amount of destruction was hurtling down on the structure while the space dock built up speed meter by painful meter as the minutes dragged by at a snail’s pace.

“They might make it,” Castries reported with five minutes to go. “It’s going to be close.”

It was. The rocks plummeted past the shipyard and battleship without causing any damage, skipped over the upper ranges of the gas giant’s atmosphere, then continued onward, their paths scattered by the interaction with the gas giant.

“Estimated range of the nearest miss was five hundred meters,” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “Plus or minus one hundred meters.”

“Somebody’s ancestors were looking out for them,” Desjani said. “Remember this incident, Lieutenant. When you employ rocks against an object in space, it doesn’t matter whether you miss by a hundred kilometers or by a meter. It’s still a miss and doesn’t bother the target at all.”

The new battleship had shut off its main propulsion, and now the far-weaker attitude jets on the orbital facility were firing to very gradually brake its motion and settle it back into a fixed orbit that would be slightly farther out from the gas giant, but not by any distance that would matter to anything but rocks aiming for where that facility had once been.

That left the fourteen enigma warships still heading for the hypernet gate, but an hour and a half after the bombardment missed the orbital dockyard, those enigmas saw that event, and it was apparently the last straw. Once again, the enigma ships spun about in maneuvers no human ship could match. Geary’s forces caught one anyway, then, more by luck than design, managed to hit a second hard enough to cause it to self-destruct. “If they keep going like bats out of hell,” Desjani said, “no one else has a chance to get the rest unless you cut loose some of Armus’s ships.”

“No.” Geary felt not just a tiredness over the deaths this day but also a nagging worry that the fleeing enigmas might still choose to ram any pursuer that got too close. Losing another ship or ships to rake in a few more enigma warships didn’t seem like a worthwhile risk given how badly the enigmas had been beaten here.

Near the hypernet gate, CEO Boyens’s flotilla had still not moved.

Desjani saw Geary’s glower directed at that force. “I guess Boyens thought it would be smart to avoid risking getting any scratches on his ships,” she commented.

“Maybe that was smart in the short term,” Geary replied, “but it seriously ticked me off in the long term even though I expected something like that. He’s going to have to deal with me now. I know the people running this star system used to be Syndic CEOs, too, but they sent their ships out to fight while he watched to see what would happen.”

“I can’t wait to hear his first message to us,” Desjani said. “And I’m looking forward to hearing your reply, too. Oh, congratulations.”

“For what?” For a moment, he truly didn’t understand what she was referring to.