The Ascent

Chapter 25

When the old transports and the ships too damaged to keep were destroyed, the fleet formed up and left the system. We moved in a defensive sphere formation with our slowest and most damaged ships protected in the center. This included our few remaining FACs, some captured alien ships and the faster support ships who could keep up with the fleet.

As we negotiated the first transit station, God's Gift reappeared with twenty or so ships. He approached rapidly sending out a message asking us to wait for him. Half of the fleet had already transited the station when his ships caught up to us and opened fired.

Alerts flashed across my tac screens as dozens of ship AIs reported damage from energy weapons. At close range, particle emission weapons can quickly carve a ship to pieces. Our ship's point defense weapons seemed to come online slowly but by the time our ships responded with their own energy beams and missiles, the attackers went FTL and disappeared.

I cycled through the ship-to-ship coms and heard an unbroken string of curses and shouts of outrage from my tac officers. Harlow was the first to log into command space followed by Mike Williams and Debbie Fowler who I selected to fill Phil and Cathrine's slots. Mike was a wing sub-commander with some fleet operations experience and Debbie was a talented Tac officer from Phil's flagship, the Athena.

"Get me a status report on your ships as soon as you can," I said. "Send it to display zero one eight." I watched our attackers on the gravimetric scanners as they stopped about 2AU out. They're not done with us, I thought.

Fleet status reports began popping up on my displays. I was pleased to see far more green status indicators than I had feared. There were more yellow indicators than I liked, but at least the handful of red status ships all had working drives, power plants and life support systems.

"They're coming back," Harlow said.

"Alert your wings," I told them. Our options were limited. When the enemy was traveling under H-drive, we could throw a whole ship at them and, unless it overloaded the QWEGs, they wouldn't even feel it. The same was true with energy and kinetic weapons. A high enough energy based attack might possibly succeed, but it wasn't possible to attack while traveling under H-drive and it wasn't possible to hit a FTL ship unless you were.

Only our anti-matter missiles had a chance to stop a ship under H-drive. The missiles wouldn't be able to catch the ship so the ship would have to be attacking head-on and we would have to use an inordinate number of missiles since gravimetric sensors are not accurate enough for targeting. The missile itself would disintegrate on contact and fail to explode, but the anti-matter within would still be effective. The problem was we didn't have those numbers of missiles.

The Cack fleet stopped further out, beyond effective energy range but well inside missile range and began launching missiles. Our ships responded in kind, but before our missiles were even half-way to their targets, the Cacks turned and fled again.

Our ship's point defenses stopped most of the missiles, but a few more ships showed up yellow or red on the display who hadn't been that color before.

I looked at the ships transiting through the stations. Our defenders were decreasing in numbers and the odds were shifting against us. I couldn't allow half the fleet to be trapped here and I didn't dare try and call the rest of the fleet back.

"We can't allow this to continue," I said. "I need options."

"We could attack them with fighters," Chris suggested.

"I think they'd have to be manned fighters," Debbie said. "Drones probably wouldn't catch them on reaction drives."

She sounded uncertain, though she was obviously correct. Cathrine, I thought, would have been more confident. I sudden blade of loss stabbed through me. I hadn't thought about her much since the attack and I didn't have time to grieve for her now. I wondered if I would ever live long enough to do that. I took a deep breath and focused on my displays.