Dawn (35 page)

“Reinforcements?”

The communications officer recoiled from the young, golden-haired marshal’s pointed response.

“Yes, Excellency, reinforcements. The admiral says he’s going to lose if battle conditions continue to worsen like this.”

The heel of Reinhard’s boot sounded harshly against the floor. If there had been an unsecured station chair nearby, he would have probably been kicking it over.

“What is he thinking?” Reinhard shouted. “That I can pull a fleet of starships out of my magic top hat?”

An instant later, though, he had his anger under control. A supreme commander had to remain calm at all times.

“Message to Wittenfeld: ‘Supreme Command has no surplus forces. If we send in ships from the other lines of battle, the whole formation will become unbalanced. Use your present forces to defend your position with your life, and execute your duties as a warrior.’ ”

No sooner had he closed his mouth than he issued a new command.

“Break off all communications with Wittenfeld. If the enemy picked that up, they’ll realize the difficult spot we’re in.”

Von Oberstein’s eyes followed Reinhard as he turned his gaze back toward the screen.

Harsh and cold, but the correct thing to do,
thought the silver-haired chief of staff.
Still, could he take the same action toward any man, without respect of person? A true conqueror must have no sacred cows he’s unwilling to grind into hamburger …

“They’re doing well, aren’t they?” Reinhard murmured as he stared at the screen. “Both sides, I mean.”

Though their supreme command was far to the rear and their overall command structure lacked smoothness, the alliance forces were putting up a good fight nonetheless. The Thirteenth Fleet’s maneuvers were particularly impressive. Yang Wen-li was their commander, Reinhard had heard. It was often said that a great general never had weak troops. Would that man always appear standing in his way on the road he must travel?

Reinhard unconsciously looked back at von Oberstein.

“Has Kircheis arrived yet?”

“Not yet.”

The chief of staff answered simply and clearly, but then asked a question which, intentionally or no, had a ring of sarcasm to it. “Are you concerned, Excellency?”

“I’m nothing of the sort. I was just checking.”

Swatting aside the question, Reinhard closed his mouth and stared at the screen.

At that moment, Kircheis, leading a huge force amounting to 30 percent of the entire fleet, was taking a wide detour around the Amritsar system’s sun and swinging around toward the rear of the alliance forces.

“We’re a little later than planned. Hurry!”

In order to escape detection by alliance forces, Kircheis’s regiment was flying near the surface of the sun, but its navigational systems had been affected by magnetic and gravitational fields more powerful than anticipated, to the point that the astrogators had been forced to work out their courses using primitive percom calculators. That was why his forces had lost speed, although now they had finally reached the region of space they were bound for.

To the rear of the alliance force lay a deep, wide minefield.

Even if imperial forces were to circle around to their aft, they would find their advance blocked by forty million fusion mines. That was what the alliance leadership believed. Yang was not entirely persuaded, but he figured that even if the enemy did have an effective means of getting through the mines, they couldn’t do it quickly, so it would be possible to prepare a formation for fighting back by the time they arrived at the battlespace.

However, the empire’s tactics surpassed even Yang’s expectations.

Kircheis’s order was relayed down the chain of command: “Release directional Seffl particles.”

The imperial military, one step ahead of the Alliance Armed Forces, had succeeded in developing Seffl particles that could be aimed in a single direction. Their first deployment? This battle, now.

Pulled along by spy vessels, three tube-shaped emission devices drew near to the minefield.

“Do it quickly,” Captain Horst Sinzer, one of the staff officers, said in a loud voice, “or there may not be any enemies left for us.”

Kircheis showed a hint of a wry smile.

The densely clustered particles penetrated the minefield like a pillar of cloud in the interstellar medium. The heat and mass detection systems with which the mines were equipped did not react to them.

A report arrived from the ship at the front of the vanguard: “Seffl particles have penetrated to the far side of the minefield.”

“Very well. Ignite them!”

At Kircheis’s cry, the lead vessel carefully aimed three beam cannons, each in a different direction, and fired.

An instant later, the minefield was speared by three enormous pillars of fire. After the white-hot light had subsided, holes had been bored through the minefield in three places.

Three tunnel-shaped passages—two hundred kilometers in diameter and three hundred thousand kilometers long—had been created in the very midst of the minefield in hardly any time at all.

“All ships, charge! Maximum combat velocity!”

Driven by the commands of the young red-haired admiral, the thirty thousand ships under his command raced through these tunnels like swarms of comets and bore down upon the alliance’s undefended rear.

“Large enemy force sighted aft!”

The swarm of luminescent objects was so great that their numbers were impossible to determine, and even as alliance operators were detecting them and crying out in alarm, hole after hole was beginning to open in the alliance’s ranks due to cannon fire from the vanguard of Kircheis’s regiment.

Astonished, the commanders of the alliance forces lost their wits. Their terror and confusion, amplified many times over, infected their crews—and in that instant, the alliance lines crumbled.

Ships broke ranks, and the imperial forces rained down cannon fire against alliance vessels beginning to scatter in disorder, pounding them mercilessly, smashing them into pieces.

The victor and the vanquished had been decided.

Yang looked on in silence at the sight of his allies in full rout.
It just isn’t possible for human beings to anticipate every situation,
he realized belatedly.

“What do we do, Commander?” asked Patrichev, making a loud noise as he swallowed hard.

“Hmmm … It’s too early to run away,” he replied in a voice that somehow sounded like he was talking to himself.

On the other hand, victory was in the air on the ridge of the imperial flagship
Brünhild
.

“I’ve never seen a hundred thousand ships set to flight before.” Reinhard’s voice was like that of a youth as it rang out. Von Oberstein responded prosaically:

“Shall we bring the flagship forward, Excellency?”

“No, let’s not. If I were to intercede at this stage, I’d be accused of robbing my subordinates of opportunities to distinguish themselves.”

That was a joke, of course, and it showed just how fully at ease Reinhard was.

Though the battle itself was building toward its final curtain, the intensity of the slaughter and destruction showed no sign of waning. The fanatical attacks and the hopeless counterattacks were repeated again and again, and in localized pockets there were even imperial units that found themselves at a disadvantage.

At this stage, no one was even thinking of how much meaning there was in tactical victory; those who had victory before them were apparently striving to make it more thorough, while those on the verge of defeat seemed to be praying that they might atone for their ignominy, even if by taking just one more enemy soldier with them.

But what was bleeding the victorious imperial forces even more than this insanely intense combat was the organized resistance of Yang Wen-li, who was staying behind on the battlefield so that his allies might escape to safe territory.

His technique involved concentrating his firepower on localized regions so as to divide the empire’s force strength and disrupt their chain of command, then dealing blows to the separated forces individually.

The intoxicating feelings that made noble, tragic beauty out of self-destruction and shattered jewels were utterly alien to Yang. While covering the flight of his compatriots, he was also securing an exit route for his own forces and watching for his chance to withdraw.

Von Oberstein, glancing back and forth between the main screen and the tactical computer panel, spoke a warning to Reinhard: “Someone needs to reinforce Admiral Wittenfeld—Admiral Kircheis or anyone will do. That enemy commander is aiming for the weakest part of the envelopment. He’s planning to break through with one sudden push. Unlike before, our forces can afford to spare some ships now, and should do so.”

Reinhard scratched his golden hair and swiftly shifted his gaze: to the screen, to several different panels, and to his chief of staff’s face.

“You’re right. Even so, confound that Wittenfeld—his failure was his alone. May he be cursed forever for it!”

Reinhard’s orders leapt across the void via FTL. Receiving them, Kircheis stretched out his ranks, attempting to deploy another line of defense to the rear of Wittenfeld’s regiment.

Yang, who had still been watching for his chance to pull out, noticed this movement of imperial forces and for an instant felt like his blood had stopped flowing. His way out was being shut off! Had he been too late? Should he have made his escape at some earlier time?

However, luck was on Yang’s side in this.

Seeing the sudden movement of Kircheis’s regiment, the alliance battleships that happened to be in the path of that advance were seized with panic, and paying no heed to the fact that they were near large masses, warped out.

This was not necessarily an unusual occurrence. Starships that knew it was impossible to flee would sometimes choose the fear of the unknown over certain death and flee into subspace with courses still impossible to compute. When flight was impossible, surrender was also an option, and the signal for indicating such intent was also known to both sides. But sometimes people in a frenzy of terror didn’t think of that. What sort of fate awaited those who fled into subspace, no one knew. It was like the world of the dead; there was no consensus opinion.

Nevertheless, they chose their fates with their own hands, and for the others, this spelled grave misfortune. Operators in every regiment of the imperial fleet shouted warnings at the tops of their lungs as they detected ships ahead of the formation vanishing, accompanied by the eruption of violent quakes in space-time. Those cries were overlapped by shouted orders for evasive maneuvers. The forward half of the fleet got caught up in those chaotic undulations, and several ships collided amid the confusion.

For this reason, Kircheis had to spend time reorganizing his fleet, which meant that precious minutes were given to Yang.

Wittenfeld, eager to recover his honor, was leading a numerically inferior number of subordinates in courageous battle. However, each move he made was in response to an enemy that appeared in front of him—not with an eye toward the tide of the battle as a whole.

Had he been paying attention to Kircheis’s movements, he might have been able to guess what Yang was planning, even with communications with Reinhard shut off, and thus effectively cut off Yang’s path of retreat.

Lacking an organic connection with his allies, however, his force was merely a numerically smaller unit and nothing more.

That was the state of Wittenfeld’s regiment when Yang suddenly slammed all his remaining force strength against it.

In his eagerness to make up for his prior blunder, Wittenfeld was filled with fighting spirit, and he was an able commander as well. But at that moment, he also suffered from a critical lack of the force strength necessary to make the most of those qualities.

And he was out of time.

In the space of an instant, ships just a few rows down from Wittenfeld’s flagship had been shot through and destroyed. Even so, the commander was still shouting for a counterattack, and if staff officers like Captain Eugen had not held him back, his forces would have likely faced literal annihilation.

Yang led the Alliance Armed Forces Thirteenth Fleet away from the field of battle along the escape route he had secured. Both Reinhard and Wittenfeld were looking on as that still-orderly river of lights flowed away into the distance—Wittenfeld from nearby in stunned silence, Reinhard from afar, trembling with rage and disappointment.

In the space between them were Mittermeier, von Reuentahl, and Kircheis, the last of whom had had to give up on blocking their retreat. Those three young, capable admirals opened comm channels and began to speak with one another.

“The rebel forces have quite a commander.”

Mittermeier praised him in a straightforward tone of voice, and von Reuentahl agreed.

“Yes, I look forward to meeting him again.”

Von Reuentahl was a very handsome man. His dark-brown hair was nearly black, but what surprised people when they first met him was the fact that his eyes were different colors. His right eye was black and his left eye blue—a physiological condition called heterochromia.