Dawn (34 page)

Vice Admiral Borodin, commander of the Twelfth Fleet, under assault by Vice Admiral Lutz, had fought until a scant eight gunships remained to him, and when both battle and escape became impossible, had shot himself through the head with his own blaster. Fleet command had passed to Rear Admiral Connally, who stood down and surrendered.

The other fleets were also under attack—the Fifth Fleet by von Reuentahl, the Ninth by Mittermeier, the Seventh by Kircheis (who had already destroyed the transport fleet), the Third by Wahlen, and the Eighth by Mecklinger—and pullback had piled upon pullback.

The sole exception was Yang’s Thirteenth Fleet. He had employed a clever half-moon formation against Kempf’s fleet, dodging the enemy’s attacks and bleeding them with alternating strikes on their port and starboard flanks.

Surprised at the unexpected amount of damage he was taking, Kempf had decided that it was better to grit his teeth and choose drastic surgery than to stay the course and die miserably from blood loss. He elected to retreat and regroup his forces.

Seeing the enemy pulling back, Yang made no attempt at using the opening to go on the offense.
What matters in this battle is surviving it, not winning it,
Yang was thinking.
Even if we were to beat Kempf here, the enemy would still have the overall advantage. In the end we’d just end up getting pounded from all sides when the other regiments ganged up on us. The thing to do is run as far from here as we can while the enemy’s pulling back.

In a grave and solemn voice, Yang addressed his forces:

“Attention! All ships: run away!”

The Thirteenth Fleet ran away. But in an orderly fashion.

Kempf couldn’t help being surprised when the enemy—which had the advantage—not only did not give chase, but began a rapid pullback. Though he had been bracing himself for considerable losses when they pursued and attacked, he had been duped instead.

“Why don’t they use their advantage and attack?”

Kempf was both soliciting opinions from his staff officers and wondering aloud.

His subordinates’ responses were split into two camps—the hypothesis that “the alliance force must be rushing to the aid of another force that’s in trouble” and the hypothesis that “their aim is to deliver a killing blow by showing us an opening and inviting us to thoughtlessly go on the offense.”

Ensign Theodor von Rücke, a young officer fresh out of officers’ school, opened his mouth fearfully. “Sir—I mean, Commander—I think it’s possible that they don’t want to fight and are just trying to get away.”

This suggestion went completely ignored, and Ensign von Rücke backed down, alone and red-faced with embarrassment. No one—himself included—understood that he was closer than any of them to the truth.

Kempf, who had a lot of common sense as a strategist, arrived after much thought at the conclusion that the enemy pullback was a trap, and giving up the idea of a second counterattack, set to the regrouping of his fleet.

Meanwhile, Yang Wen-li and his forces continued their escape, arriving in a region of space the imperial forces called War Zone C. There, imperial forces engaged them again, and a new battle began to unfold.

Meanwhile, the Ninth Fleet, commanded by Admiral Al Salem, was under withering assault from Mittermeier’s imperial fleet and had been set to flight repeatedly. Admiral Al Salem was struggling desperately to prevent the chain of command from collapsing.

The swiftness of Mittermeier’s pursuit and assault was such that the vanguard of the pursuing imperial fleet and the rear guard of the fleeing alliance fleet actually got jumbled together, with ships of both forces flying side by side in parallel. One soldier after another was flabbergasted to see the markings of enemy vessels up close through the portholes.

Also, the high matter-density readings detected in that narrow region of space sent the collision-avoidance systems of every ship into overdrive. Whatever direction they tried to turn, however, they found the way was blocked by both enemy and friendly ships, and some vessels had even started spinning as a result.

They did not exchange fire. It was plain to see that if vast energies were released with the ships packed so closely together, an unstoppable chain reaction would result, and all of them would perish together.

Still, bumps and collisions did occur. This was because collision-avoidance systems, unable to find a safe direction in which to advance, had been driven to a horrid state of autonomy, causing some ships to switch over to manual piloting to keep them from going mad.

The astrogators were sweating hard, and this had nothing to do with the temperature-control function of their combat suits. Clinging to their control panels, they could see the enemy right in front of them, struggling with the shared goal of avoiding collisions.

The chaos finally ended when Mittermeier ordered his subordinates to drop speed and increase the distance between the two fleets. Of course, all this meant for the alliance forces was that the enemy fleet was regrouping and would presently return to its strategy of pursue and attack. As the imperial force put a safe distance between itself and the enemy fleet, the alliance’s ships and soldiers were steadily lost amid the deluge of enemy fire.

The hull of the flagship
Palamedes
was damaged in seven places as well, and the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Al Salem, was injured, with broken ribs. His vice commander, Rear Admiral Morton, took over in his stead and just barely kept the remaining force together, treading a long road toward defeat.

The hardships of the path to defeat were of course not theirs alone.

Each of the alliance fleets was enduring that same sorrow now. Even Yang Wen-li’s Thirteenth Fleet was no longer an exception.

By that time, Yang’s Thirteenth, having retreated to a distance of six light-hours from the site of the initial battle, had been forced into a fight with enemies four times more numerous. Moreover, Kircheis, commander of the Warzone C imperial forces, had already set the Seventh Fleet running for their lives and was committing forces and supplies to his front line constantly in order to wear down Yang’s fleet through uninterrupted combat.

This tactic was an orthodox one—not the product of some clever strategy—but it was extremely reliable when put into operation, causing Yang to sigh, “No opening to attack, no opening to run. It seems that Count von Lohengramm has some excellent people working for him. Nothing strange or flamboyant—just good tactics.”

He couldn’t help being impressed. For although he was using orthodox tactics, it was clear that his numerically inferior alliance force was being driven to defeat.

After thinking about it, Yang decided on the tack he should take: abandon the space they had secured and yield it to the enemy’s hands. However, Yang’s orderly retreat would draw the enemy into the midst of a U formation, and then, when their ranks and supply lines were stretched to the breaking point, he would counterattack from three sides with all his forces.

“There’s no other option. And naturally, it depends on the enemy going for it …”

If he’d had the time to accumulate force strength and perfect independence of command, Yang’s strategy might have both secured some measure of success and put a stop to the imperial force’s advance.

However, he was ultimately unable to do either. While enduring the fierce onslaught of imperial forces approaching in overwhelming volume, Yang was struggling to regroup his fleet into the U formation when new orders arrived for him from Iserlohn.

The 14th day of the present month,

Concentrate forces at Point A of the Amritsar star system. Cease combat immediately and change course.

When Yang heard those instructions, Frederica saw a shadow of bitter disappointment flash across his face. It was gone in an instant, but in its place he let out a sigh.

“Easy for you to say.”

That was all that he said, but Frederica understood how hard it would be to retreat under these circumstances, right in front of the enemy. They were not up against an incompetent, either. Kempf was in the same position: if he could have pulled back, he would have done so from the start. He was fighting on because he couldn’t do otherwise.

Yang followed his orders. But during that difficult fighting retreat, the casualties among his fleet were doubled.

On the bridge of
Brünhild,
supreme flagship of the imperial fleet, Reinhard was listening to von Oberstein’s report.

“Though the enemy continues to flee, they’re retaining such order as they are able and would seem to be making for Amritsar.”

“That’s near the entrance to the Iserlohn Corridor. But I don’t think this is merely an attempt to flee inside. What do you think?”

“That they likely intend to gather their strength and take the offensive again. Though it’s a little too late, it looks like they’ve realized the foolishness of spreading their forces so thinly across our space.”

“It is indeed too late.”

Scratching with well-formed fingers at the golden hair that spilled down from his forehead to his eyebrows, Reinhard smiled a cold little smile.

“How shall we respond, Excellency?”

“Naturally, we’ll gather our forces at Amritsar as well. Why deny the enemy their wish, if it’s to make Amritsar their graveyard?”

The voice of the star Amritsar was ever raised in a soundless roar. In its fearsome inferno of nuclear fusion, countless atoms collided, split apart, and reformed, and the tireless repetition of that cycle spilled unimaginable energies out into the void. Varied elements produced multicolored flames that erupted in dynamic bursts of motion measured in the tens of thousands of kilometers, painting the worlds of its respective onlookers in reds, yellows, or purples.

“I don’t like this.”

Vice Admiral Bucock’s whitish eyebrows were drawn together as he peered at the comm panel.

Yang nodded in agreement. “It’s an ominous color,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

“Well, the color is, too, but it’s the name of this star I don’t like.”

“Amritsar, you mean?”

“The initial is
A,
same as Astarte. I can’t help thinking it’s an unlucky letter for our side.”

“I hadn’t thought about it enough to notice.”

Yang was in no mood to make light of the old admiral’s concern. After half a century spent in the empty depths, there were special sensitivities and heuristics that men such as he developed. Yang was more inclined to put stock in the superstitious words of the old admiral than in the decisions of Supreme Command Headquarters, which had designated Amritsar as the site of the decisive battle.

Yang was hardly feeling high-spirited at this point. Although he had fought hard and well, this retreat had cost him one-tenth of the ships under his command, while also putting an end to his attempt at a counterattack. All that he felt now was exhaustion. While his fleet was being resupplied by Iserlohn, while the wounded were being sent back to the rear, and while the formation was being regrouped, Yang had gone to a tank bed to rest, but mentally it hadn’t refreshed him in the slightest.

This isn’t going to work,
he thought. The Tenth Fleet, having lost its commander and more than half of its force strength, had also been placed under Yang’s command. It seemed even Supreme Command HQ had in some way acknowledged his ability—in managing the remnants of defeated forces, if nothing else—but he wasn’t feeling grateful for the added responsibility. There were limits to both his abilities and his sense of responsibility, and no matter how much might be expected of him—or how strongly his arm might be twisted—the impossible was still impossible.
I’m not Griping Yusuf, but confound it, why do you have to give me such a hard time?

“At any rate,” Bucock had said just before ending the transmission, “I wish that bunch at Supreme Command HQ would come out to the front themselves and have a look around. They might understand just a little bit of what the men are going through.”

He had called to discuss adjustments to the positioning of their ships, but the conversation’s latter half had turned into an excoriation of Supreme Command Headquarters. Yang hadn’t felt like telling him he’d gotten off the subject. He, too, felt the same sense of exasperation.

“Please have something to eat, Excellency.”

Yang turned around from the now blank comm panel and saw Sublieutenant Frederica Greenhill standing there holding a tray. On it was a roll of roast gluten stuffed with sausage and vegetables, winged bean soup, a slice of calcium-fortified rye bread, fruit salad smothered in yogurt, and an alkaline drink flavored with royal jelly.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got no appetite. I sure would like a glass of brandy, though …”

The look in his aide’s eyes denied the request. Yang looked back at her, broadcasting objection.

“Why not?” he finally said.

“Hasn’t Julian told you you drink too much?”

“What, you two have ganged up on me?”

“We’re concerned about your health.”

“There’s no need to be that concerned. Even if I drink more than I used to, it’s still just barely what the average person does. I’m a good thousand light-years from hurting myself.”

Just as Frederica was about to answer, though, the harsh, grating voice of an alarm rang out: “Enemy ships closing! Enemy ships closing! Enemy ships clos—”

Yang lightly waved one hand toward his aide.

“Sublieutenant, enemy ships would appear to be closing. If I live through this, I’ll make it a point to eat healthy for the rest of my life.”

The alliance’s force strength had already been halved. The death of a daring and brilliant tactician like Admiral Uranff had come as a particularly hard blow. Morale was not good. How long could they hold out against a thoroughly prepared Imperial Navy that was coming against them, on the heels of victory and ready to employ all the proper tactics?

Von Reuentahl, Mittermeier, Kempf, and Wittenfeld—courageous admirals of the empire—lined up the noses of their battleships and charged forward in a tight formation. Although this had the appearance of the sort of brute-force assault that ignores the finer points of strategy, Kircheis was leading a separate force to circle around to the alliance’s back side, so it in fact both disguised the empire’s intent to catch the enemy in a pincer movement and was the sort of ferocious attack needed to avoid giving the alliance a chance to catch its breath.

“All right,” Yang ordered. “All ships: maximum combat velocity.”

The Thirteenth Fleet began to move.

The clash of the two forces was on. Countless beams and missiles hurtled past one another, and the light of nuclear explosions seared the darkness. Hulls were rent asunder and sent flying through the empty space, tumbling in mysterious dances, borne along by winds of pure energy. Across their eddies the Thirteenth Fleet haughtily sped, racing toward the enemy that lay ahead of them.

The Thirteenth Fleet’s assault was carried out according to a schedule of decelerations and accelerations that Fischer had calculated with utmost precision on Yang’s directive. The Thirteenth Fleet rose fearsomely up from the light of Amritsar’s immense flames, like a tattered corona sent flying from its sun by centrifugal force.

As the swift assault leapt toward them from that unexpected angle, the Imperial Navy commander who undertook to meet it was Mittermeier. He was a courageous man but had undeniably been taken by surprise; he had let Yang take the initiative.

The Thirteenth Fleet’s first attack was quite literally a blistering one for Mittermeier’s regiment.

Its firepower was concentrated to an almost excessive density. When a single battleship—and a single spot on the hull of that battleship—was struck by half a dozen laser-triggered hydrogen missiles, how could it possibly defend itself?

The region surrounding Mittermeier’s flagship was made an enveloping swarm of fireballs, and Mittermeier, taking damage on his own port side as well, was forced to pull back. Even in retreat, however, his remarkable skill as a tactician was plain to see in the way he was flexibly changing his formation, keeping the damage he took to its barest minimum, and watching for his chance to strike back.

Yang, on the other hand, had to content himself with dealing a limited amount of damage, as he dared not pursue the enemy too far.
Damn,
Yang thought,
just look at all these talented people Count von Lohengramm has! Although if we still had Uranff and Borodin on our side, we could have probably fought the empire on equal footing …

Just then, Wittenfeld’s regiment came rushing in at high speed, interposing itself in the space between the Thirteenth and Eighth fleets—a region called Sector D4 for convenience’s sake. It was a move that could only be described as daring or foolhardy.

“Excellency, a new enemy has appeared at two o’clock.”

Yang’s response—“Uh-oh, that’s a problem”—could hardly be called a proper one.

Yang had a strong point in common with Reinhard, though. He recovered his wits quickly and started giving orders.

On Yang’s command, the fleet’s heavily armored dreadnoughts lined up in vertical columns to form a protective wall against enemy fire. From the gaps between them, gunships and missile ships—weakly armored but with mobility and firepower to spare—laid down a ruthless barrage of return fire.

One after another, holes opened up all over Wittenfeld’s regiment. Even so, he didn’t drop speed. His return fire was witheringly intense and caused Yang’s blood to run cold when one part of his dreadnought wall crumbled.

Even so, there was no serious damage to the Thirteenth Fleet as a whole, although the wounds suffered by the Eighth were deep and wide. Unable to counter Wittenfeld’s speed and fury, columns of ships were being shaved off the Eighth Fleet’s flank, and it was steadily losing both its physical and energy-based means of resistance.

The battleship
Ulysses
had taken damage from imperial cannon fire. This damage was of the “minor but serious” variety. What had been destroyed was the microbe-based wastewater treatment system, and for that reason, the crew was forced to continue fighting with their feet drenched in regurgitated sewage. This would surely make for a delightful war story if they ever returned home safely, but if they died out here like this, it was hard to imagine a more tragic and ignominious way to go.

Yang could see before his very eyes an allied fleet on the verge of dissolving into the depths. The Eighth Fleet was like a flock of sheep, and the Wittenfeld regiment a pack of wolves. Alliance vessels flew this way and that trying to escape, only to be destroyed by vicious, incisive attacks.

Should we go and help the Eighth Fleet?

Even Yang had his moment of hesitation. Judging by the enemy’s spirited action, it was clear that if the Thirteenth Fleet made a move to assist them, things would degenerate into a rough-and-tumble brawl, and their systematic chain of command would not hold. That would be the same as committing suicide. In the end, there was nothing he could do but order more concentrated cannon fire.

“Forward! Forward! Nike, goddess of victory, is flashing her panties right in front of you!”

Wittenfeld’s commands could hardly be called refined, but they certainly raised his men’s morale, and heedless of fire incoming from the side, the swarm of Schwarz Lanzenreiter utterly dominated Sector D4. It looked as though the forces of the alliance had been split in two.

“It would appear we’ve won,” said Reinhard, allowing just the faintest hint of excitement to creep into his voice as he looked back at von Oberstein.

Looks like we’ve lost,
Yang was thinking at almost the selfsame instant, though he couldn’t say so out loud.

Since ancient times, the utterances of commanders had possessed a seemingly magical power to make the abstract concrete; whenever a commander said, “We’ve lost,” defeat would inevitably follow—though examples of the opposite were extremely rare.

Looks like we’ve won.

It was Wittenfeld who was likewise thinking this. The alliance’s Eighth Fleet was crumbling already; there was no fear now of being caught in a pincer movement.

“Good, we’ve got a step up on them. Now it’s time to finish them off.”

Wittenfeld was thinking eagerly,
The Thirteenth Fleet has preserved a lot of its strength, but I’ll deliver a killing blow in a dogfight.

“Have all vessels that can function as mother ships deploy walküren. All others, switch from long-range to short-range cannons. We’re going to fight them up close.”

That aggressive intent, however, had been anticipated by Yang.

When the imperial force’s firepower temporarily weakened, Yang instantly intuited the cause: a switchover in their attack methodology. Even though it might have taken them longer, other commanders could also have guessed what Wittenfeld intended. He had moved too early. When Yang saw the error, he determined to put it to maximum use.

“Draw them in,” he said. “All cannons, prepare for a sustained barrage.”

Minutes later, the roles had reversed, and it was the imperial forces of Sector D4 that were facing imminent defeat.

Seeing this, Reinhard spoke out unconsciously: “Wittenfeld blundered into that. He sent out his walküren too early. Can’t he see that they’ve become easy prey for the enemy fusillade?”

It seemed that a chink had appeared in even von Oberstein’s icy demeanor. His naturally pale face looked as if it were illuminated by a comet’s tail. “He wanted to secure victory with his own hands, but …”

The voice in which he answered was nearer a groan than anything else.

The alliance forces, having drawn Wittenfeld’s regiment into range for a point-blank attack, were dealing out destruction and slaughter at will. Launched from magnetic-rail cannons, artillery shells of superhard steel pierced the armor of enemy ships, and bursts of fusion shrapnel and photon rounds reduced walküren, and their pilots, to microscopic particles.

Colorful and colorless flashes overlapped with one another, as every instant saw the opening of gateways to the netherworld, through which ever more soldiers were passing.

It seemed that the black of the Schwarz Lanzenreiter—Wittenfeld’s pride and joy—was coming to suggest the color of burial shrouds.

The communications officer turned toward Reinhard and shouted, “Excellency! Communiqué from Admiral Wittenfeld—he’s requesting immediate reinforcements.”