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More weapons were already on their way—not SLAMs, this time, but Hauptman effect sublight missiles. Their initial acceleration was much higher, and they had barely half as far to go. The first thousand-megaton warhead detonated twenty-seven seconds after launch.
Commander Masterman had just do
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Night turned into day on the planet of Elysium as two-thirds of its orbital defenses vanished in less than two minutes. Shocked eyes cringed away from the ring of suns blazing above them, and minds refused to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Not in four centuries had the Imperial Fleet taken such losses in return for absolutely no damage to the enemy, but never before had the Fleet been attacked by one of its own, and the carnage a cyber-synthed battle-cruiser could wreak totally unopposed was simply beyond comprehension.
The planetary governor dashed for his com in response to the first horrified warning; he arrived just as the last missile went home against the last fort in Poltava's field of fire, and his face was white as whey. The three surviving forts were rushing to battle stations, but the marauding battle-cruiser's speed soared, already above two hundred KPS, as she cut a chord across their protective ring. She cleared the planet and acquired the first of the survivors just before its own weapons came on line, and Ortiz's smile was hellish as a fresh salvo of SLAMs raced outward. The fort had nothing to stop them with, and the governor groaned as they tore it apart.
The second fortress had time for one answering salvo, hastily launched with minimal time for fire control solutions, and then it, too, was gone.
The final fort had time to get its battle screen up, yet faced the crudest dilemma of all. Its crew had SLAMs of their own ... and dared not use them. Ortiz had cut his course recklessly tight, placing Poltava far closer to Elysium than they. They could reply only with beams and warheads, lest a near-miss with a SLAM strike the very world they wanted to protect, and their gu
Twelve-point-five minutes and seventy-three thousand deaths after the attack began, there were no orbital forts in Elysium's skies.
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"First phase successful, Commodore," Commander Rendlema
He shook off a chili and gave Alexsov a tight smile. The chief of staff had argued against trying to sneak in more than one ship, insisting Poltava could do the job alone and that trying to use more would risk losing the priceless element of surprise.
"Two small vessels leaving orbit, sir," Rendlema
"Right on schedule," Alexsov murmured, and Howell nodded again, watching through his synth link as the two corvettes accelerated hopelessly towards their mammoth foe. No corvette had the strength to engage a battle-cruiser ... but they were all Elysium had left.
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The corvettes Hermes and Leander charged the rampaging battle-cruiser, sheltering behind their own Fasset drives as they closed. They were inside her, closer to the planet, but Ortiz spun Poltava to face them head-on. She decelerated towards them even as they rushed to meet her, and Hermes lunged aside, fighting to get outside the battle-cruiser and launch her SLAM drone before she was destroyed.
Ortiz let her go, concentrating on her sister. Close-range lasers and particle beams reduced the tiny warship to half-vaporized wreckage, but the range was too short for effective point defense, and both of Leander's overcharged energy torpedoes erupted against Poltava's screen. Concussion jarred her to the keel, and Ortiz winced as damage reports flickered through his headset. His exec was on it, initiating damage control procedures, but half Poltava's forward energy mounts had been wiped away, along with over thirty of her crew. Her injuries were far from critical— certainly not enough to slow her as she went after the sole survivor—but they hurt all the more after what he'd done to the forts, and they were enough to make him cautious.
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The last corvette's skipper watched the battle-cruiser overhaul him while his brain sought frantically for some way to stop her. Not for a way to survive, for there was none, but for a way to protect Elysium from her.
She was coming up fast from directly astern, her drive aimed straight at him to interdict his fire. She was grav-riding on him, drawing further acceleration from the attraction of his own drive mass even as hers acted as a brake upon his ship. She had more than enough acceleration to overtake him without that, but her captain was playing a cautious end game, using his interposed drive to protect his ship until he chose to turn and engage. Perhaps overly cautious. Hermes' weapons couldn't hurt his ship much, and there were times caution became more foolhardy than recklessness—
"Sir!" His white-faced plotting officer's voice was tight, over-controlled as he fought his own fear, but not so tight as to hide its disbelief! "Data base knows that ship!"
"What?" The captain twisted around in his command chair.
"Yes, sir. That's HMS Poltava, Skipper!"
The captain swallowed a disbelieving curse. It couldn't be true! It had to be some kind of ECM—there was no way a Fleet battle-cruiser could be doing this to her own people! But—
"Prep and update the drone!" he snapped.
"Prepped!" his com officer acknowledged. Then, "Update locked!"
"Launch!"
The captain turned back to his own display, teeth locked in a death's-head grin. There was no way his ship could survive, but he'd gotten the message out. HQ would know everything he knew, for the enemy could never intercept his drone and its sensor data.
The drone snaked away, racing directly ahead of the corvette, hidden by her own and Poltava's drives until it was beyond effective energy weapon range. But Ortiz's scan teams picked up its gravity signature as it began to climb across the ecliptic, and they were ready.
The battle-cruisers com officer transmitted a complicated code, and Herme's skipper gaped in horror as his drone obeyed the command—the proper, authenticated Fleet override—and self- destructed.
He knew, then. Knew who his enemies were and whence they came ... and how utterly he had been betrayed. Something snapped deep inside him, and he barked new helm orders as the battle-cruiser's Fasset drive loomed up close astern. His drive's side shields dropped, and his ship began to turn.
Hermes was in her enemy's blind zone, riding the arc where the battle-cruiser's own drive blocked her sensors. It was a matter of seconds before she spun to clear the drive mass and bring her weapons to bear, but seconds were all the corvette's skipper needed. All in the universe he wanted, now.
Poltava began her swing, and not even her AI had time to realize Hermes had already swung and redlined her drive on an intercept course.
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Commodore Howell swore vilely as both Fasset drives vanished, and the fact that he'd seen it coming only made it worse. That idiot! To blow it all after the bravura brilliance of his initial strike! A second-year middy knew better than to get that close to an enemy's drive mass, for God's sake, especially when the disparity in firepower meant that enemy was doomed anyway.
But there'd been nothing Howell could do. The rest of his squadron was still fifteen light- minutes from Elysium, far too distant for any com to reach Ortiz in time. And so he'd had to sit and watch helplessly as a quarter of his battle-cruiser strength vanished before his eyes.
He sucked in a deep breath and forced himself back under control. He couldn't pour the milk back into the bottle, and he had other things to worry about—like what the planetary governor did with his emergency SLAM drone.
That drone was the only thing in this system which still threatened Howell's ships. It couldn't hurt them now, but it would tell Fleet far too much if it got out with a record of Poltava's emission signature. If Ortiz hadn't gotten his stupid ass killed, the threat would be minimal; even if the governor realized how the corvette's drone had been killed and locked out the self-destruct command, Poltava's weapons would have been more than capable of killing it as it broke atmosphere. His own ships couldn't. Just catching it with a com beam before it wormholed would be hard enough from this distance.
"Think they got a clean reading on us?" he asked Alexsov hopefully, but the chief of staffs shrug was discouraging.
"The forts certainly did. If they kept groundside advised, and we have to assume they did, the planet knows we're Fleet units. More to the point, Control says their port has enough sensor capability to've gotten a good read on Poltava—certainly enough for Fleet's data base to fingerprint her."
"Shit." Howell tugged unhappily at an earlobe. This was what he'd most feared about the entire Elysium operation. The actual attack hadn't worried him, given their inside information, but if the identity of his ships got out, their true objective would be lost. He and his people would
become in truth what everyone now assumed they were: plain and simple pirates.
"Maybe I shouldn't've argued against two ships," Alexsov said sourly.
"Don't blame yourself. Ortiz blew it, and you were right. Control's cover story only allowed for one 'legitimate' ship. We couldn't know he'd—"
The commodore broke off with a curse. His light-speed sensors hadn't been able to see the SLAM drone rise from the planet on counter-grav, but the blue spark of its lighting Fasset drive was glaringly obvious.
"Send the code," he rasped, and the ops officer nodded.