The Lost Fleet: Fearless

Geary pondered whether to try some fancy use of his ship’s firepower and decided against it. “All units employ weapons at your discretion. Primary targets are the capital ships. Maintain formation except to maneuver as necessary to avoid enemy fire. Permission granted to open fire when favorable engagement opportunities are presented.”

“Six minutes to contact.”

The Syndics were still settling into formation, doubtless worried about being caught in the middle of another maneuver when the Alliance fleet swept into range. Geary watched on his display as the two fleets rushed toward each other, the Alliance cup overlapping the back half of the Syndic formation. He had positioned his ships and positioned his fleet, given his commanders authority to fire, and now had nothing to do but watch as the Syndic warships and the Alliance fleet raced to contact.

“Enemy is firing,” the weapons watch reported unnecessarily as Geary’s display lit up with warnings. Grapeshot, concentrated on the points where some Alliance warships would soon be. It had been fired at extreme effective range. Geary hoped the commanders of those ships would use the very brief time available to alter course slightly to avoid the worst of the barrage. More warning symbols sprang to life. Syndic missiles.

On the visual display, spots of bright light began flaring as Syndic grapeshot struck Alliance shields. Geary could see his own ships firing, their data up to several seconds time-late for the farthest-off ships.

Captain Desjani had her eyes fixed on her own display. She highlighted a Syndic battleship. “That’s our target,” she informed her watch-standers. “Let’s hurt him.”

The sides of the Alliance cup were plunging into the Syndic rectangle, each Alliance ship only briefly exposed to enemy fire as it tore through, while the Syndic ships in those areas were battered by ship after ship. The lighter Syndic units were ripped apart under the repeated blows, flaring and dying around the stronger islands formed by the surviving Syndic capital ships.

Then the main strength of the Alliance fleet reached the Syndic formation.

After long, slowly passing minutes as the final huge distances were closed, the actual moments of fighting were so swift as to be disorienting. If not for the capability of the combat systems to target and fire at speeds far greater than humans could achieve, there probably would never be hits scored as two opposing fleets flashed by each other at decent fractions of the speed of light. Geary felt as if the moment of combat had come and gone between one blink and the next, Dauntless still quivering from the impacts of weapons on her shields and tallying the damage from an occasional hit that had made its way through a spot failure of the shields.

Behind him, the Syndic battleship targeted by Desjani had also taken fire from many other Alliance ships, including Daring, Terrible, and Victorious. Under that hail of fire, the mighty Syndic warship, an S-Class dreadnought, had first lost its shields then taken an onslaught of hits. Something had hit in the wrong place, and the Syndic battleship’s power core blew while some of the Alliance ships were still closing in.

They were too close when it happened. Geary stared at the display, seeing that the trailing battle cruiser in the Alliance formation, Terrible, had been shooting past close to the Syndic ship, battering it with close-range hell-lance fire. Terrible had already taken a lot of hits, substantially weakening her shields. The shock wave from the explosion of the Syndic ship reached out and slapped the Alliance battle cruiser like a huge hand, sending it tumbling. That alone would’ve been recoverable, but one of the surviving Syndic battle cruisers was too close and traveling on exactly the wrong trajectory. Even the ultrafast computers responsible for maneuvering ships to avoid collisions couldn’t avoid the result. Terrible and the Syndic ship collided as Geary watched in horror.

The collision, at a relative velocity of perhaps.06 light speed, or roughly eighteen thousand kilometers per second, turned both ships into a single titanic ball of heat, light, and scattered fragments that blossomed brilliantly against the dark of space, a human-made nebula that would briefly light the void of Ilion Star System.

A collective gasp of shock and dismay went up on the bridge of Dauntless. Geary heard a voice saying “Damn, damn, damn,” and realized it was his own. “May your ancestors protect you and the living stars welcome you,” he murmured to the dead crew of the Terrible.

Desjani, finally seeming shaken for the first time Geary recalled since they had escaped from the Syndic home system, called out commands to refocus her crew. “Damage report!”

“Minor hits on hull. No systems lost,” one of the watch-standers reported in a stunned voice.