The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“They don’t know how crazy humans can be. If we were sane, we’d be running. Badaya’s formation would have scattered. They’d be able to chase us down and smash us. But we’re crazy, so instead we’re going to hold together and blow their butts off.”

Geary smiled, watching Badaya’s cruisers and destroyers volleying kinetic projectiles at the enemy.

The bear-cow ships shifted positions slightly, trying to dodge the rain of rocks. They probably would have succeeded, because no matter how many rocks there were, space was wide, but Tulev was coming in now as well, hurling rocks ahead of his ships, catching the bear-cows in a cross fire, and then Duellos’s small formation was tossing out rocks as well.

“Here we go,” Desjani said, as the combat systems in Geary’s subformation also began launching kinetic projectiles, so that rocks came at the bear-cows from front, sides, and a bit to the rear.

The last seconds were gone as everything came together, the Kick armada trying to evade without breaking from its track on Badaya’s crippled ships. The bear-cow commander had compromised, Geary realized in the instant before contact, trying to both continue pursuit and evade the human strike. It was the kind of compromise, the failure to choose one way or the other, that had doomed countless human commanders.

He saw one of the five surviving superbattleships lurch under several impacts, its powerful shields overwhelmed by the force of the kinetic projectiles before a single BFR tore into it and blew it apart. Then Geary’s subformation was through the enemy armada again, tearing past with the other human warships in the immediate wake of the kinetic bombardment.

This time he felt few hits on Dauntless. Damage reports streamed in from Tulev’s subformation, from Duellos’s small task force, from the other ships in Geary’s subformation, from Badaya’s escorts. Geary took a sudden deep breath as he saw a dreaded symbol appear with names next to it. No contact. Assessed destroyed. Brilliant. A hard-luck ship since Captain Caligo had been arrested for conspiring with Captain Kila, but it was hard to believe that the battle cruiser was gone. Heavy cruisers Emerald and Hoplon. Light cruiser Balestra. Destroyers Plumbatae, Bolo, Bangalore, and Morningstar.

Not all of the destroyed human warships had been annihilated in the fractions of a second during exchanges of fire with the enemy, denying their crews any chance of escape. Some had survived, broken and helpless, long enough for their crews to take to the escape pods that now awaited rescue.

But the Kicks had paid for their stubborn stand. Even the superbattleships could only take so much, and the multiple firing passes coming close on each other right after the avalanche of kinetic projectiles had devastated the enemy armada. Two of the four surviving superbattleships were only drifting wrecks, a third crippled, with spider-wolf warships already swarming about it to administer the kill, and a fourth spinning away, trying to regain maneuvering control, its main propulsion units torn and mangled. The smaller bear-cow warships had been decimated, with maybe forty remaining, and those streaming frantically toward the jump point from which the enemy had come.

The shield wall had broken.

Geary slumped back, feeling no sense of triumph.

“We did it,” Desjani said, but her voice was subdued, not jubilant.

“Yeah.” He agreed with both her words and her tone of voice. “Isn’t peace great?”

“Feels a lot like war to me,” she said.

Geary roused himself. First priority, those escape pods that held survivors from his ships that had been destroyed in the battle. Many of those survivors would be injured and in need of medical care. “Second and Fifth Light Cruiser Squadrons, intercept and recover all escape pods. Notify me immediately if additional ships are required.” That took care of the most immediate need. All that remained was to order the fleet to re-form, prioritize damage control, get help to the surviving ships that needed it most to deal with their dead and wounded and their battle damage—

“Admiral,” Desjani said in a way that caught his attention.

The last surviving superbattleship had partially stabilized its motion, but now thrusters had ceased firing even though the huge warship was still rolling away uncontrollably.

“It’s a sitting duck,” Desjani said.

“Let the spider-wolves—” Geary began, then sat up straighter again. “It can’t run.”

“Will it self-destruct?” Desjani wondered.

“We haven’t seen any of them self-destruct yet, have we? And there haven’t been any—” He broke off speaking again, suddenly realizing something. “We haven’t seen any bear-cow escape craft leaving any of their ships. None from any of the ships we crippled and destroyed.”