Dawn (7 page)

Yang closed the folder and glanced up at the ceiling’s wide-angle monitor. Hundreds of millions of stars were glaring back at him coldly.

The young commodore almost started whistling but stopped himself and began working busily at his console.

Vice Admiral Pastolle, commander of the Alliance Navy’s Fourth Fleet, was flummoxed when he heard the report: “Imperial warships closing rapidly!”

The entire display screen of fleet flagship
Leonidas
was being covered in points of light as they swarmed into being, their luminosity climbing by the moment as they swelled ever larger. It was a sight filled with menace—the hearts of all who saw it were set racing, and their mouths went dry.

The vice admiral sat up straight in his command chair. “What’s going on here?” he growled in a low voice. “What do the imperials think they’re doing? Why would they—?”

Some of those present thought it was a ridiculous question, though they numbered just a few. The imperial force intended to bring its full power to bear on the Fourth Fleet—that much should have been obvious. But the alliance leadership had never imagined such a daring assault being launched by an enemy being hemmed in on three sides.

Caught in an enclosure formation, facing a more numerous enemy, the imperial fleet would yield to its defensive instincts, they’d reasoned, contracting their battle lines and concentrating their force into a tight formation. Against this, the alliance forces could then pour in from three sides at uniform velocity, surround them like a finely woven net, and concentrate their firepower to slowly—but most assuredly—shear away their capacity for resistance.

That was how the Dagon Annihilation had been fought 156 years ago, and praises were sung to this day of the two great generals who had emerged victorious then. This enemy, however, had not acted at all in accordance with the alliance military’s calculations.

“What in blazes is this? Has their commander even studied tactics? Who would fight a battle like this?” Foolish words came streaming from the vice admiral’s mouth. He stood up from his command seat and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. A steady temperature of 16.5 degrees was maintained throughout the ship; he shouldn’t have been breaking out in a sweat …

“Commander, what do we do?”

The voice of the staff officer calling him was shrill and lacking proper reserve. The tone grated on the vice admiral’s nerves. Hadn’t his staff officers been the ones insisting that the three-way advance was
the
unbeatable tactic? It only followed that contingency planning was their responsibility as well. What did they mean, ‘What do we do?’! Still, this was neither the time nor place to be losing his temper.

The fleet of imperial warships numbered twenty thousand, and the alliance’s Fourth Fleet only twelve thousand. The alliance’s plans had been utterly derailed. They were supposed to surround and attack an enemy force of twenty thousand ships with three fleets totaling forty thousand—but now the Fourth Fleet was going to have to fight alone against an overwhelmingly larger force.

“Emergency messages to Second and Sixth Fleets: ‘Engaging enemy in sector α7.4, β3.9, γ minus 0.6. Requesting immediate support.’ ”

The vice admiral gave the order, but Lieutenant Commander Nann, communications chief of the flagship
Leonidas
, responded with desperate actions and an expression to match. Jamming signals from the imperial fleet were eating into the alliance fleet’s comm network voraciously. Floating in the void of outer space, tens of thousands of electromagnetic jamming bouys, deployed on Reinhard’s orders, were hard at work.

“In that case, send out courier launches! Two of them to each fleet!” As he shouted those words, a flash of light from the display screen turned the vice admiral’s face white for an instant. The enemy attack had begun, their neutron-beam cannons firing synchronized volleys. Their vast outputs of energy and the accompanying bursts of light were such that it seemed the fundi of the soldiers’ eyes might be scorched.

Flashes of sparkling, rainbow-colored brilliance—the sparks that flew in those instants when enemy beams struck energy-neutralization fields—erupted throughout the alliance’s fleet. Low-energy particles collided at terrific speeds, annihilating one another in a cannibalistic phenomenon.

Arms waving wildly, the vice admiral shouted, “Vanguard formation, return fire! All ships, get ready for all-out war!”

Vice Admiral Pastolle’s order had not been intercepted, but on the bridge of the imperial fleet’s flagship
Brünhild,
ripples of cold contempt danced in Reinhard’s ice-blue eyes as he said to no one, “Your responses are slow, you incompetent fool!”

“Launch fighters! We’re switching to close-quarters combat!” ordered Rear Admiral Fahrenheit. A keen vitality shone in his face and resonated in his voice, born of the exultation of battle, coupled with a confidence that came of seizing the initiative.
Even if the “golden brat” ends up taking the credit, the important thing is still to win!

The single-seater, cross-winged fighter ships known as
walküren
launched from their giant carriers one after another. In the instant when they cut loose from their carriers, they had—due to momentum—already reached speeds exceeding those of the carriers; neither catapult nor runway was needed. The walküren were small craft, and so their firepower was not as great, but they excelled in maneuverability and were extremely effective in a dogfight.

The alliance also had single-seat fighters corresponding to walküren; these were known as spartanians.

Flashes of exploding fusion furnaces ripped across every quarter, and maelstroms of unleashed energies shook the ships of both sides in chaotic swells. New clusters of energy beams lashed across the battlespace, and dodging between them the walküren soared, four-winged angels of death clad in glistening silver. The alliance’s spartanians did not trail the walküren in fighting ability, but a terrible disadvantage dominated all beyond their nose cones, and they found beams awaiting them the moment they separated from their carriers, aiming to destroy both fighter and pilot together.

One hour after the start of the battle, the Fourth Fleet’s vanguard had been almost entirely destroyed by the withering onslaught of the Imperial Navy squadron under Fahrenheit’s command.

Of the 2,600 vessels composing the vanguard, not even 20 percent were still participating in combat. Some ships had been vaporized by fusion-furnace explosions, others had avoided exploding but had been too severely damaged to continue fighting, and others still had light structural damage but now drifted uselessly through space, having lost most of their crew. In this dreadful condition, the front line’s collapse seemed not a half step away.

In the case of the battleship
Nestor,
the damage was limited to a single spot on the vessel’s underbelly, but the neutron warhead that had penetrated there had exploded inside, unleashing a great swell of raging, killing particles that had swept through the entire ship, in an instant turning
Nestor
into a coffin for 660 officers and soldiers.

For this reason, crewless
Nestor
continued to follow the final course input by its astrogator, and as it hurtled along on invisible rails of inertia, it grazed the nose of its confederate,
Lemnos,
just as
Lemnos
’s main front cannons were unleashing a volley of fire at an enemy ship.
Nestor
intercepted the photon-cannon volley at point-blank range and exploded soundlessly an instant later, the energy of the exploding fusion furnace ripping through its neutralization field and hitting
Lemnos
head-on.

There were two flashes of white light, one following the other like twins being born, and by the time they had faded, not even a fragment of inorganic matter remained. The crew of
Lemnos
had destroyed an allied vessel and received death as their recompense.

“What are you people doing?!”

That cry was Vice Admiral Pastolle’s.

But the one who disdainfully murmured, “What are
you
people doing?” was Rear Admiral Fahrenheit.

Both had been looking on at that scene through the screens of their respective flagships. In the words of one was a cry of hopelessness and panic; the words of the other mocked, with all the confidence that comes of a comfortable margin. The difference in those two voices was at the same time the difference between the circumstances of their respective forces.

Vice Admiral Paetta, commander of the Second Fleet, was sitting in the command chair of the flagship
Patroklos,
jiggling one knee outside the crew’s line of sight. Irritation and impatience kept it rocking nonstop. The fleet commander’s psychological state was reflected in his subordinates, and the air on the bridge felt charged with electricity.

Amid all that, the vice admiral noticed one man, and one man only, who didn’t look especially bothered. After the slightest of hesitations, he called out his name: “Commodore Yang!”

“Sir?”

“How do things look to you? Your opinion, please.”

Yang, having risen from his station chair, removed his beret again and lightly scratched through his black hair with one hand. “The enemy is probably trying to destroy our forces individually before we can rendezvous. Since the Fourth Fleet is numerically smallest, it’s only natural they’d try to get rid of them first. The ball’s in their court as far as which target is most pressing, and they’re making the most of the initiative.”

“Do you think the Fourth Fleet can hold out?”

“Both forces have clashed head-on. Which means the advantage lies with the side outnumbering its opponent, and moreover, with the side that strikes the initial blow.”

Yang’s expression and tone of voice seemed indifferent. As Vice Admiral Paetta observed him, he kept opening his fist and then squeezing it shut, trying to exorcise his annoyance.

“In any case, we need to get to the battlefield ASAP to reinforce the Fourth Fleet. With any luck, we should be able to strike the enemy from behind. If we do that, we can turn the tide in one fell swoop.”

“That probably won’t work, sir.”

Yang sounded unconcerned as ever, which almost made Paetta let his words pass by unacknowledged. The vice admiral had started to turn his head back toward the screen, but he stopped and looked again at the young staff officer.

“What makes you say so?”

“The fighting will already be over by the time we get there. The enemy will leave the battlefield, and before the Second and Sixth Fleets can rendezvous, they’ll circle around to the rear of one or the other and launch an attack there. Since the Sixth Fleet is the smaller of the two, it’s almost certain they’ll be the ones targeted. The empire’s taken the initiative, and at present they’ve still got it. I don’t think we need to keep doing what they expect any further.”

“Well then, what do you propose?”

“That we change tactics. Instead of rendezvousing with the Sixth Fleet in that battlespace, we go rendezvous with them now—without a moment to spare—and prepare a new battlespace in that sector. If we combine the fleets, we’ll have twenty-eight thousand vessels, and after that we can challenge them with better than fifty-fifty odds of victory.”

“… Meaning, you want me to just look the other way as the Fourth Fleet is massacred?”

A note of deliberate reproach was apparent in the vice admiral’s tone.
That is one cold-blooded thing to say
, he was thinking.

“Even if we left right now, we wouldn’t get there in time.”

Yang’s tone was curt, whether he knew what was going on in the vice admiral’s head or not.

“But I won’t abandon a friendly force.”

At the vice admiral’s words, Yang shrugged his shoulders lightly. “Then ultimately, their tactic of attacking each group separately will make easy prey of all three fleets.”

“Not necessarily. The Fourth Fleet won’t go down without a good fight. If they can keep holding out …”

“I just told you it was hopeless, but—”

“Commodore Yang, reality is made up of more than just cold-blooded calculation. The enemy commander is Count von Lohengramm. He’s young and inexperienced. But Vice Admiral Pastolle is a seasoned warrior forged in countless battles. Compared to that—”

“Commander, he’s inexperienced as you say, but his tactical planning—”

“Enough, Commodore.” The vice admiral cut him off, displeased. He couldn’t hold back his disgust for this young staff officer who just wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted.

The vice admiral motioned for Yang to sit back down and turned his head back toward the screen.