Dawn (33 page)

Alarms rang out, and orders and responses flew back and forth across the bridge of the flagship.

“The Thirteenth Fleet will eventually be coming to assist us,” Uranff told his subordinates. “That’s ‘Miracle Yang.’ When that happens, we can catch the enemy in a pincer. Don’t doubt our victory.”

Sometimes commanders had to make their subordinates believe things that they didn’t even believe themselves.
Yang will probably be under attack by multiple enemies at the same time we are and not have the luxury of coming to assist the Tenth Fleet,
Urannf thought.

The Imperial Navy’s massive attack had begun.

Sublieutenant Frederica Greenhill looked up at her commanding officer, tension evident in her white face.

“Excellency! There’s an FTL from Admiral Uranff.”

“They’re under attack?”

“Yes, sir. He says combat with the enemy began at 1607.”

“So it’s finally started …”

An alarm rang out at that moment, drowning out the tail end of his words. Five minutes later, the Thirteenth Fleet was exchanging fire with an imperial force led by Admiral Kempf.

“Enemy missiles closing from eleven o’clock!”

At the operator’s cry, Captain Marino, captain of the flagship
Hyperion
, made a quick-witted response: “Eject decoys! Heading nine o’clock!”

Yang remained silent and focused on his own job, which was operational command of the fleet. Defense and counterattack at the individual ship level was the job of the captain; if a fleet commander were to involve himself to that extent, first of all, his nerves would never hold.

Missiles tipped with laser-triggered fusion warheads bore down on them like ferocious hunting dogs.

To counter them, decoy rockets were fired. These emitted tremendous amounts of heat and electromagnetic radiation to fool the missiles’ detection systems. The missiles in the cluster turned their noses at sharp angles and went after the decoys.

An ominous glow was steadily filling the black void as energy collided with energy and matter clashed against matter.

“Spartanians, stand by for launch!”

The order was relayed, and a pleasant tension ran through the minds and bodies of several thousand spartanian crew members. These were children such as the war god Ares might grant his petitioners, possessed of fierce confidence in their skills and reflexes, to whom the fear of death was but an object of ridicule.

“All right, let’s head out and go around!”

The man who gave this enthusiastic shout aboard the flagship
Hyperion
was ace pilot Lieutenant Waren Hughes.

Hyperion
was carrying four aces. Besides Hughes, there were lieutenants Salé Aziz Cheikly, Olivier Poplin, and Ivan Konev. To show off their titles, each had had an ace mark of spades, diamonds, hearts, or clubs stenciled in special paint onto the hull of his favored spartanian. Having nerve enough to think of warfare as a sport was likely one factor that had kept them alive this long.

After leaping into his spartanian, Poplin shouted out to the mechanic, “I’m shooting down five, so start chilling the champagne!”

But the answer that came back wasn’t what he’d expected:

“There’s no way that’s happening, but I’ll at least get you some water!”

“At least try and play along,” Poplin grumbled, as he and the other three pirouetted out into the space together. The wings of the spartanians shone with rainbow hues, reflecting the light of distant explosions. Missiles rushed toward them with hostile intent, and beams came racing in to attack.

“Think you can hit me?!” Poplin shouted.

All four men were making similar boasts. It was the pride of warriors who had crossed the lines of death any number of times and yet lived to tell the tale that was making them do so.

Showing off divine skill, they banked sharply, dodging past missiles. The slender trunks of the missiles that attempted to follow them, unable to endure the sudden shift in g-force, broke apart from their centers. Up ahead, imperial walküren danced into view, tilting their wings back and forth as if in ridicule as they came in spoiling for a dogfight.

Hughes, Cheikly, and Konev met them gladly, and one by one enemy craft exploded into balls of flame.

One of the alliance aces—Poplin—was flushed crimson with anger and suspicion, however. At a rate of 140 rounds per second, he was firing on the enemy with uranium-238 rounds. These had excellent armor-piercing ability and became superheated and exploded upon striking a target—yet all his shots were merely being swallowed up by the void, hitting nothing.

Without his help, the other three had already drawn first blood, destroying a total of seven enemy fighters.

“What’s the matter with you?”
Vice Admiral Kempf, commanding officer of the imperial force, said with a sharp exhalation of disgust.

Kempf was an ace pilot himself—a hero of many battles who in his silver-winged walküre had flung dozens of enemy craft at the Grim Reaper’s feet. Though he was extremely tall, the breadth of his body was such that people didn’t really notice. His brown hair was cut short.

“Why are you wasting time on enemies like that? Form half-envelopment formations to their afts and drive them into firing range of the battleships!”

Those instructions were right on target. Three walküren assumed a half-envelopment formation to the aft of Lieutenant Hughes’s spartanian and skillfully maneuvered him into a battleship’s firing range. Realizing the danger, Hughes banked sharply and sent a hail of U-238 rounds into the cockpit of one enemy fighter, and then tried to thread his way through the gap he had opened. However, he had failed to take into account the enemy battleship’s auxiliary cannons. Beams flared, erasing both Hughes and his ship from this world in a single shot.

Cheikly was also felled using the same tactic. The remaining two aces barely managed to shake off their pursuers, and ducked into a blind spot of the battleships’ cannons.

Poplin’s sense of self-respect had been hopelessly wounded. It was bad enough that Konev had sent four enemies to their graves already, but Poplin, unable to shoot down a single enemy, had done nothing but run, dodging back and forth.

When he discovered the reason why not a single round had hit its target, his sorrow blazed forth into fury. When he returned to the mother ship, he jumped down from the cockpit, ran toward a mechanic, and grabbed him by the collar.

“Bring out that murdering chief mechanic! I’m gonna kill him!”

When Tech Lieutenant Toda, the chief mechanic, came running, Poplin gave his vitriol free rein.

“The sights on my guns are nine to twelve degrees off! Are you even servicing them, you salary-thieving—!”

Tech Lieutenant Toda’s eyebrows shot upward.

“I’m doing my job—I take good care of them. After all, a human you can make for free, but a fighter craft costs a lot of money.”

“That supposed to be funny, jackass?”

Poplin flung his pilot’s helmet to the ground; it caromed off the floor and went high up into the air. Poplin’s green eyes burned with anger.

In contrast, Toda’s gaze narrowed and sharpened. “You wanna go a round, dragonfly?”

“Bring it on. I’ve lost count how many imperials I’ve killed, but every one of ’em was a better man than you. I’ll even give you a handicap—one hand’s plenty for the likes of you!”

“Listen to you! Trying to shift blame for your own mistakes!”

There were shouts at them to control themselves, but by that time the punches were already flying. Blows were exchanged two or three times, but finally Toda, driven into a purely defensive fight, began to stagger. Just as Poplin’s arm was drawing back again, however, someone grabbed hold of it.

“Enough of that, you fool!” said a disgusted Commodore von Schönkopf.

Things settled down right away. There was no one who failed to acknowledge the hero of the capture of Iserlohn. Though naturally, for von Schönkopf himself, it was terribly disappointing to have no other role in the fighting but this.

The commanding officer of the imperial force attacking Urannf’s Tenth Fleet was Vice Admiral Wittenfeld. He had orange-colored, longish hair and light-brown eyes, and his narrow face seemed somehow out of balance with his body’s firm build. His combative demeanor could be seen in his furrowed brows and the fierce gleam of his eyes.

Furthermore, all vessels under his command were painted black and known collectively as the
Schwarz Lanzenreiter
, or Black Lancers. This force was the very embodiment of swift and violent strength. Uranff had fought a tough, shrewd battle, delivering a steady stream of damage to this force. However, he had taken just as much in return—not percentagewise, but in terms of raw numbers.

Wittenfeld had a larger force than Uranff did, and furthermore, his troops hadn’t been going hungry. Both the commanding officer and his subordinates were fresh and full of energy, and although they were taking considerable casualties, they succeeded at last in fully enveloping the alliance fleet.

The Tenth Fleet, unable to advance or retreat, had no way to avoid the concentrated fire of Wittenfeld’s fleet.

“Fire at will! If you shoot, you’re bound to hit something!”

The imperial force’s gunnery officers rained a monsoon of energy beams and missiles down on the densely clustered vessels of the alliance fleet.

Energy-neutralization fields ruptured, and hulls were pounded by unendurable shocks. The concussions finally breached the interiors, filling the ships with explosions, and soldiers and officers were vaporized by hot, murderous gales.

Pulled by the planetary gravity, shattered vessels that had lost propulsion were now falling. Among the planet’s inhabitants, children forgot their hunger for a brief while, enthralled by the ominous beauty of the countless shooting stars screaming across the night sky.

Rear Admiral Cheng, the fleet’s chief of staff, turned toward the commander with a face gone white as a sheet.

“Excellency, it’s no longer possible to continue combat operations. All we can do now is decide whether to surrender or run.”

“So it’s one dishonor or the other, is it?” Vice Admiral Uranff said, showing a hint of self-deprecation. “Surrender is not in my nature. Let’s try to run. Relay the order to all ships.”

But even to run, they would need to blaze a bloody trail through enemy lines. Uranff reorganized his remaining force into a spindle formation and slammed all of it at once against one point of the encirclement. Uranff knew how to concentrate his force and use it.

Using this bold and clever maneuver, he succeeded in extricating half his subordinates from the jaws of death. He was killed in action himself, however.

His flagship had stayed in the encirclement to the last, and at the very moment it had attempted to break through, had taken a direct hit from an enemy beam up one of its missile tubes and blown apart.

All across the lines of battle, alliance forces were lapping the bitter soup of defeat.