Chapter 22

82 Geminorum System
GNS Challenger Seven
02/24/42 NR 2510 Hours

“They’re late,” the lieutenant manning the tactical station murmured.

Aaron stood with his hands behind him, contemplating the master plot. “They will be here,” he said with more confidence than he felt. Oh, yes, he thought. They are closing for the kill, and they know it. Four cruisers, with escorts, against three frigates and eleven scouts was hardly a fair fight. Of course, the last thing Admiral Aaron Peters intended to give the Terran UN naval forces pursuing him was a fair fight.

An ancient tenet of warfare stated that to be predictable was to give a huge advantage to the enemy. Take the route the enemy expected, and you courted an ambush – or worse. However, another tenet stated that if the enemy was in range, then so were you. The Genevans had the advantage of knowing, within a five hundred meter cylinder along a very precise line in space, where the Terran ships would materialize as they exited the wormhole.

Aaron had emplaced every spare missile they had in a globe around the wormhole, just as they had done previously. There were barely a hundred missiles, and the Terrans were well familiar with the tactic. Beyond the minefield, the remaining ships of the Genevan Navy waited. The frigates were poised to pounce from behind the arriving ships, while the scouts formed a defensive screen for the transports. If a single Terran corvette got through to the transports, they could pound the defenseless leviathans to scrap.

The Genevans had no hope of stopping four cruisers in a stand-up battle with their remaining strength. One, maybe two, but not four. The Terran warships would absorb every warhead the Genevans could throw, and then reduce their smaller, more lightly armed vessels to fragments.

Aaron had told his staff as much, and they discussed their options for hours. Surprisingly, no one even mentioned surrender. Their way of life would be irrevocably gone, and death was preferable to a slide back into the morass their parents had risked everything to flee. Aaron had remarked that the wormhole’s emergence area was little larger than one of the transports, and Albrecht Hannover, his flag captain, had suggested the most audacious idea Aaron had ever heard.

When a starship transited a wormhole, its sensors were effectively blinded, since they received no information about the destination until the ship actually arrived. The ship also carried its original vector through the wormhole. A transit could not be made at a high relative velocity, but the average warship transited at five hundred meters per second relative to the wormhole.

The Genevans had six of the kilometer-long transport ships to transport the fleeing colonists. They were packed with supplies, equipment and a passenger manifest of five thousand people each. Each transport also carried twenty shuttles and forty other assorted small spacecraft. The transports were spacegoing cities; the largest craft humanity had ever built.

Four of the huge vessels still fled the combat zone, coasting on momentum toward the next wormhole four light hours away. The remaining pair of transports was holding formation in the center of the emergence area. They had been hastily stripped of everything that could be packed into the remaining four transports. The remaining materials and supplies that could not be salvaged were packed into containers, which were liberally seeded into the emergence area as well. The transports were spinning on their short axes, forming a roadblock that the Terran ships literally could not miss. At their average transit velocities, the warships would ram the transports literally before they could know they were there.

The hatch leading into the flag bridge cycled, and Aaron turned awkwardly on his walking cast to see who it was. His eyes widened and his heart dropped to his shoes as Luisa McDaniel stepped onto the bridge. He stumped across the bridge and stopped in front of her. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Luisa shrugged as best she could against the cast covering her left arm and shoulder. She’d donned a bulky worker’s spacesuit, and carried a helmet in her right hand. “I got on the wrong transport, and I figured this ship was safer than the others.” She set the helmet on a nearby chair, and cupped his cheek. “There’s no way in this entire galaxy that I’d be anywhere else right now.”

Aaron leaned down and kissed her softly. “I wish that I had the strength to send you away.” His voice was husky with emotion, and he smiled crookedly. “If you don’t do what I say, though, you’re gone, lady.”

“Yessir, of course, Sir.” Her tone was light, but she scrubbed tears away with her good hand. “I’ll sit here and be quiet.”

Aaron hugged her briefly, and then the tactical officer spoke. “Contact! Transit detected!”

Aaron and Luisa faced the master plot as the first Terran ship appeared in the emergence zone. One moment, the vessel was not there; the next moment, it was. A moment later, the ship, a corvette, was an expanding ball of plasma as it plowed straight into a quartet of shipping containers. The house sized blocks of metal crushed their way through the warship, scoring a direct hit on its fusion reactor along the way.

Four other corvettes emerged and suffered similar fates; two fell victim to containers, and two encountered Roddenberry, the leading transport. The transport simply smashed the corvettes and absorbed their bones. Then, the first cruiser appeared, and promptly struck the Roddenberry dead amidships. The cruiser disintegrated into a cloud of fragments, and the transport spun away, torn in two by the collision. The next two cruisers transited close together, and died together as the ends of the spinning transport H. Beam Piper clubbed them to death.

The silence on the flag bridge was profound as they watch the wreckage tumble away. Someone began to applaud, and then a fourth cruiser appeared. There was no debris left in the emergence zone; the dying ships still drifted away on their original vectors, carrying the debris with them.

“Open fire,” Aaron barked. As he watched, four corvettes appeared in succession behind the cruiser, and they swiftly turned to cover the cruiser’s stern. As horrible as their losses were, the Terrans showed no sign of weakness or uncertainty. Their fire control radars and lidars lashed at the Genevan ships, and countermeasures decoys erupted from the cruiser’s flanks.

The mines activated in carefully designed patterns, and a dozen powerful electronic jammers positioned with the mines activated, saturating the area around the wormhole with electronic noise. The Terrans’ radars were temporarily blinded, but their technicians reacted quickly, shifting frequencies and activating countermeasures of their own.

The cruiser took a dozen hits from the mines, and the four corvettes died under the onslaught. Three more corvettes and six Terran scouts had transited, and Aaron turned to his tactical officer. “All ships, focus missile fire on the cruiser. Fire lasers on the corvettes as you bear.”