Chapter 1

By the time Corey Andersen’s fighter squadron launched, the other squadrons of the Families carrier group were already heavily engaged. As she accelerated away from the carrier, Corey took in the fight in front of her with a practiced eye, letting impressions wash through her, tasting, seeing, and feeling the action as the sensors of her fighter fed the information directly into her nervous system. Families cruisers were slugging it out with Idenux cruisers while the fighters of both sides tangled nearby. Space was filled with missiles, explosions, and debris.

“Final status checks,” she ordered. They’d been delayed by the loading of the experimental missiles, and she was trying to make up for lost time. The battle group was badly outnumbered, and another squadron of fighters would make a big difference.

“Never seen so many of them in one place,” Svetlana, her Second, said. “We really kicked open the beehive today.” She was silent for a moment, counting. “On numbers, I make it about 2 to 1 in their favor, maybe more.”

“For whatever that’s worth!” Stasya said with a laugh. “It’s that target-rich environment our instructors were always telling us about back in training. Everywhere you shoot, you’re bound to hit one of them. I know we’re supposed to be good, but this is ridiculous. Who decided we could take this place with one strike carrier and several squadrons of cruisers?”

“Weapons active,” Corey said. “Just make sure it’s Idenux you hit, Stasya.”

“Yes, mama,” Stasya said, her drawl setting the girls in B Flight, the one she led, laughing.

“I make it 36 of their cruisers,” Svetlana said, ignoring the laughter, “and another 30 of their smaller ships. They’re in that tight formation again. I don’t see any openings for us.”

“I wish we knew where they get so many ships,” Corey said. “It seems as if there are more of the kin-stealers every time we run into them. I wish we could cut them off at the source.”

“There are more than 100 fighters to play with,” Midori said. She was leading A Flight today and was in line to get her own squadron; Corey just hadn’t told her yet. “There’d be more, but the other girls have been chopping them up. There’s hardly any left for us.”

“Missile,” Stasya said casually as one raced their way. As one, the entire squadron rolled around the vicious thing, giving its seeker head multiple dodging and weaving targets. With a velocity of more than 5,000 kilometers per second, the missile had virtually no chance to attack any of them. It streaked harmlessly past, trying to turn to track any target. Its drive would run out of juice long before it could reverse and come back. The squadron reformed smoothly, as if the missile hadn’t even been there.

Corey switched frequencies. “Janice,” she called to her superior, “it’s Corey. Where do you need us?” They were running parallel to the main engagement but staying out of it. The cruisers of the Jellicoe Battle Group had opened fire on the Idenux with a barrage of missiles. The Idenux returned fire with their own salvoes. Point defense laser clusters tracked incoming missiles and engaged them. Bomb-pumped laser warheads on the missiles fired at the enemy ships. Most shots missed, but enough found targets to cause damage. Area effect warheads exploded between the formations, either the fusion warheads used by the Idenux or the much harsher antimatter warheads of the Families Navy. Both flooded nearby space with blasts of radiation that overloaded defensive scans and covered the next salvoes.

“Ignore the fighters,” Janice Gibson replied. “See if you can break open their formation with those missiles of yours.”

For the previous two years, ever since the Morosini disaster, the Idenux had used a tight formation with interlocked point defenses to hold off Families fighters. They had learned that their own fighters couldn’t hold back half their number of Families fighters. That didn’t stop them from trying, though.

A clump of Idenux fighters managed to weave their way through the chaos and race toward Jellicoe. Corey knew she should leave them to the squadron flying defense, but she angled down to intercept them. “Don’t waste any missiles on this lot,” she said as the squadron split into its fighting pairs. “And share nicely.” She ignored a “Blaaat!” from one of her girls as she began looking for targets.

She dragged out in front of a pair of the diamond-shaped Idenux fighters, dancing tantalizingly close. They turned to follow, and Svetlana chopped them up from behind. Svetlana returned the favor moments later, and Corey shattered that pair of fighters with a barrage of fire. She dodged a missile, snapped a shot at the Idenux who had launched it, and then pulled up to get out of the way as Lori and Nikki ran him down and finished him off.

With the immediate area clear, Corey took a look at the rest of her squadron. They were involved in what everyone called a furball, a swirling melee of fighters dodging and firing in all directions. In that fight, the slower ‘hands-on’ Idenux piloting systems were no match for a Families pilot’s direct link from her brain to her fighter’s systems through her shunt, a mass of nerves that grew in a clump at the top of their spines.

Corey began to issue orders, acting on what her intuition, experience, and training told her. She repeatedly brought four, or even six fighters against each group of Idenux. The kin-stealers couldn’t deal with the rapidly shifting Families fighters, and the few survivors finally ran away.

“What next?” Svetlana asked as the squadron reformed.

“We have these missiles,” Corey said, eyeing the main Idenux cruiser formation. “We should be able to find some use for them over there.”

A fighter pilot had no business getting anywhere near the main body of Idenux ships when the kin-stealers were in their tight formation. The interlocked point defenses destroyed better than 90% of the missiles that came their way and were sure death to any fighter that got too close.

There has to be a way to break up that Idenux formation, Corey thought. When that happens, our cruisers could overwhelm the isolated Idenux warships.

There were at least 60 Idenux ships in their defensive array. About half were the standard Idenux cruiser, but some were the smaller and older warships that the kin-stealers used to use. Their formation keeping was ragged, and she realized that the Idenux commander was trying to turn his formation.

The weakest point of any ship was the stern. The gravity drives on ships distorted tracking and fire control along their thrust axis. Ship designers knew this, and massed extra point defense clusters back there. Her fighter didn’t have a high enough acceleration advantage to make the short, quick approach that would let her survive that point defense fire.

She wasn’t going to go for the flank of the formation. That was a flaming mess of missiles and explosions. Even the cats the Families used for missile defense were having trouble staying there, and their tiny craft were designed for that environment. She’d last as long as a snowflake in a lava field if she tried that.

The only other approach was from ahead of them, and that gave her a perfectly wicked idea. She accelerated as hard as she could on a parallel course, her squadron filing in behind her. A fighter could do 610 Gs for up to 10 minutes. She pushed that, soon outdistancing the enemy formation. This idea was crazy enough it just might work.

“This is going to be quick,” Corey said as they slowed and let their engines cool down. “I want us to go at them head-on. Their point defense fire control will acquire us, and about the time it opens fire we’ll salvo all of our missiles. I’m not sure if that’ll break open their formation, but it should allow us to get close enough to do some good. It’ll also give them something else to shoot at besides us in the last few seconds of our approach.”

“Hopefully it’ll allow us to use our primary weapon,” Svetlana said.

Corey had forgotten all about that. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d used it, but Svetlana had a point.

“Warm them up on the way in,” Corey said. “You’ll have time for only the quickest of shots, so make them count.”

“Never did want to live forever,” Midori said, just like she did before every attack.

Corey eyed the Idenux formation. “On my mark, turn and go. Set acceleration at 450 Gs; I want all of us to get to the launch point at the same time.”

Their missiles had an eel cortex for guidance, and the instructions from R&D said the eel would wake up 0.1 second after launch and look for prey. They carried seven individually maneuvering kill rounds as well as a warhead on the missile itself. The kill rounds weren’t warheads in the normal sense, but generators that produced a sharp gravitational shear. A direct hit probably wouldn’t destroy a kin-stealer’s ship, but even a near miss could cause a lot of damage.

“Center on C Flight,” Svetlana added, improving her boss’s idea just like a good Second should.

“Three ... two ... one ... Go!” All 12 fighters came around in a tight turn, accelerating sharply at the Idenux, some six light-seconds away.

Corey warmed up her primary weapon. It generated a beam of collimated quickly decaying mesons. It’d been designed and installed back when Idenux point defenses weren’t so lethal, and fighters made massed attacks.

The range shrank rapidly. Corey could feel the kin-stealer’s point defense systems tracking her. That gave her another idea. She had a tunable maser. She set it to the Idenux Fire Control frequency and hit the gain. It would only be a momentary advantage, but with this approach vector anything would help. She mentioned it to the rest of the squadron, and could sense the effect it was having on the kin-stealers.