Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(78)
This is it, I think. A hit to propulsion or the reactors, we slow down, and then the Lanky closes in for the kill.
But Regulus must be just outside the reach of the Lanky’s weapons envelope, because there are no impacts on our hull, no holes in the flight deck and screams of panic and anguish. Instead, we keep accelerating away from the Lanky ship, which is still in the middle of its wide and ponderous turn to port.
Behind us, one of the task force ships is not so lucky. There’s a soundless explosion blotting out one of the camera feeds and blinding the optical sensor briefly. When the feed returns, it shows a rapidly expanding field of flame and debris, a ship hull losing integrity at full acceleration, getting torn apart by the same forces it had harnessed just moments ago.
“Good God,” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp says, ashen-faced behind the half-lowered shield of his helmet.
“We just lost the Long Beach,” someone says on the ship-to-ship channel.
The escort cruiser to the Midway must have taken a direct hit to the fusion plant or into a launch-ready nuclear warhead. Ten thousand tons of steel and alloy, and five hundred men and women, cease to exist as a cohesive unit in the blink of an eye, the most rapid catastrophic failure I’ve ever seen. Nobody on that ship had time to get into an escape capsule. Nobody on that ship probably even knew what hit them. Just like that, the cruiser CG-97 Long Beach and her crew are gone.
“Shen Yang is falling out of line,” someone else sends.
Our stern camera feed shows the Chinese destroyer. It’s still intact, but there’s obviously something wrong, because they are slowing down and veering off to starboard. As they turn away from the main body of our task force degree by degree, I can see that they’re trailing debris and frozen air from their stern section.
“Oh, no,” I hear myself saying. “No, no, no, no.”
Shen Yang turns into the trajectory of the Lanky seed ship, which looks massive even at this distance, a streamlined and yet strangely asymmetric matte black shape that has wormed its way into my nightmares years ago. There are only sixty or seventy kilometers between us and the Lanky, and Shen Yang’s speed adds to that of the seed ship as she closes the distance rapidly. I know what the Chinese skipper is about to do, but I can’t avert my eyes, and from the gasps among the 330th grunts in the cargo hold, I know that they are aware of what’s about to happen.
As the Lanky ship rushes out to meet her, the Shen Yang starts launching missiles. The covers for the bow launchers fly open, and ship-to-ship ordnance streaks from the launchers, first singly and then in pairs. The rail gun mount on the dorsal line of the destroyer never stops firing at the Lanky. The missiles stream toward the seed ship and explode against its hull, huge white-hot fireballs that blot out the optical feed momentarily when they hit. There are still missiles coming from her launch tubes when the Chinese destroyer rams the seed ship head-on and instantly disappears in a violently expanding cloud of debris.
So close, I think. They were so close. Already we’re increasing the distance, and it’s clear that the Lanky ship with its millions of tons of mass can’t match our acceleration rate. Twenty seconds more and Shen Yang would have been out of the seed ship’s reach.
All protocols of station-holding and battle-group formation are suspended as every remaining ship in the task force makes maximum acceleration along the same general bearing, away from the Lanky seed ship. We are running for our lives, and we are slowly pulling ahead kilometer by kilometer, but the price we paid is staggering. Between the two ships we lost in the span of three minutes, a thousand sailors, marines, and Spaceborne Infantry troopers are dead, all men and women who had survived the Battle of Mars and the assault on Fomalhaut b.
Thirty minutes later, we are still alive, and still running away. The Lanky seed ship is ten thousand kilometers behind the task force, still pursuing but falling behind more every minute. On the optical feeds, I count only seven other ships of our task force remaining, rushing along at full burn in a procession that stretches for a hundred kilometers.
The infantry soldiers in the cargo hold of the drop ship all seem more than a little shell-shocked by what they just witnessed on the makeshift situational display projected against the bulkhead. Outside, beyond the open cargo ramp, there’s a sort of tense calm among the troops on the flight deck, who know that we are in battle but blissfully unaware of just how close we all came to dying a few minutes ago, and how many people did die.
“All units, proceed to assembly point Alpha at best speed,” Regulus sends over the task force’s tactical channel. One by one, the remaining ships radio in their acknowledgment of the order: Midway. Avenger. Neustrashimyy. Minsk. Gomati. Tripoli. Portsmouth.
Then, after a long delay of maybe ten seconds during which I hold my breath, Major Renner’s voice comes over the channel to acknowledge for her ship.
“Regulus, Indy. Proceeding to assembly point Alpha.”
I let out a long and very shaky breath.
The sudden relief I am feeling doesn’t last very long. A few moments later, someone else chimes in on the ship-to-ship channel. The voice has a heavy Russian accent.
“Supply ship Ivan Donskoi has been destroyed also. Total loss, none survived.”
Two cruisers and a supply ship gone. One hell of an admission fee to get back into the solar system. But the Minsk made it, which means that Dmitry is still alive.