From Furies Forged (Free Fleet Book 5) (23 page)

             
It will be too late by then
. All he could do was watched as fifty-jump-fighters fired into oncoming Kalu. Star-destroyers and warriors died in droves.

                                                                      ***

             
“There goes the siren that warns of the air raid. Then comes the sound of the guns sending flak”

              “Ready?” Smith asked his fellow wing leaders, their plan outlined and their jump points plotted. His music blaring in his ears.

              He got greens across the board from all of the jump fighter wing leaders.

              “Alright then let’s give those bastards something to worry about.”

              He shunted power from his capacitors into his wormhole generators and projectors. A hole in time and space rippled into existence in front of him. He entered and exited it behind the Jump-limit the Kalu were using.

              “C’mon, I was hoping to get the first barrage in!” He complained in a light tone, not meaning anything by it. If anything he was happy that his people were trying to get into the fight as soon as possible, instead of holding back. If Commander Whorst’s plan was going to work, he needed that kind of drive.

              Jump fighters that had made the transition before him were already firing the missiles on their external racks, their internally held missiles following a few moments later.

             
“Move in to fire at the mainstream of bombers Let off a sharp burst and then turn away
,” Music blared through his speakers as trails of missiles ripped away from his craft.

              Jump fighters started jumping back for War-Station as soon as their racks were emptied.

              There were so many targets that Smith barely looked to changing the trajectory of his missiles. The AI’s were using the FTL relays to put the missiles to the most use. He was just the delivery system. His magazines and racks clicked empty.

              He dumped another half-capacitor, jumping towards War-station. He avoided the areas where other ships were supposed to come out of their jump and headed in towards the open hangars. It was a quick process of bringing himself down on the landing pad. Techs were on him in moments, pulling the missile racks off, changing out the two used capacitors with charged versions as a missile loader handed multi-s to the internal rack which secured them and cycled taking on the next missile.

              His song had just ended as they finished.

              He got cleared, powering up his engines and heading back out into the dark. War-Station and the fleet of sixty-three ships around her were heading straight for the twenty or so thousand Kalu charging for them all.

              The next song started up.

              “
One life I'm gonna live it up I’m takin' flight said I'll never get enough. Stand tall I'm young and kinda proud”
He looked at those ships and he felt that pride. He poured more power into his engines as he opened a wormhole. It snapped into existence and he appeared behind the Kalu jump-point once again.

              The fifty jump-fighters had done massive damage; they had launched sixty-two missiles each. The Kalu didn’t have any PDS on the rear of their ships so none of them had been shot down, about four were faulty and didn’t work, but the rest did.

              Three-thousand and Ninety-six missiles had run at emerging Kalu ships. They’d split into Thirty-thousand-nine-hundred and sixty.

              Some had hit ships out of wormholes, they took damage, but usually kept going, or went drifting as their rear sections were hit. The ones that were just emerging, or partially so hadn’t fared as well. Missiles threw their projectors and generators out, wormholes closed, cutting off whatever hadn’t made it out. Some actually survived, missing their rear sections and drifting. Most turned into nuclear suns as their power plants overloaded.

              Seventeen thousand Kalu ships would not be making it to war, another three thousand were heavily damaged.

              “
If you think I'll let it go you're mad You've got another thing comin'
,” Smith sung along with the last line as he pressed his firing stud, missile trails appeared. Smith heard the missiles as they ignited and left his racks, the next volley firing as soon as the first had cleared and the mechanisms of his internal rack had a new missile in place.

              He wasn’t alone, other jump-fighters piled in their missiles.

              Twelve seconds passed and Smith was out of missiles once again.

              He opened another wormhole and headed back to War-station.

              It would be an hour until station closed with the Kalu, which gave him ten more minutes to get his shots into the Kalu’s emerging forces. Which meant, two runs, three if he pushed it.

             
If I’m a little over I don’t think the Commander’s going to be too annoyed.

                                                                      ***

              “The last of the jump wings have returned and re-armed,” Commander Flek said from his holographic table that showed all of the Multiple Environment Fighters, or MEF’s, bombers and Jump fighters.

              “Very well,” Whorst said, his eyes flicking from the constant influx of information that was filling his own holographic sphere around him.

              He grabbed and expanded numbers into his view, he knew them off by heart but he just wanted to make sure.

              One hundred and twenty-seven wings of MEF’s sixty-five wings of bombers and just over four wings of Jump fighters were armed, ready and waiting.

              Seven hundred and six craft positioned themselves between their sixty-three larger brothers and sisters.

              It was the largest group of small craft brought into battle by the Free Fleet to date.

              “Kalu are flushing fighters,” Zal said from his sensor pit.

              There was a half-hour until they were able to engage the Kalu with their laser cannons, another fifteen minutes after that and they would be able to use their other armaments.

              “They’re surging ahead and forming into swarms.”

              “Dev, Frankeuw. I want that minefield right on top of them after we pass through their formation,” Whorst said.

              “Yes sir,” Frankeuw said.

              “Commander,” Devastahli confirmed in his rolling voice from overhead.

              Whorst turned his eyes back to his information sphere, looking at the Kalu fleet which was filling it.

              The Kalu Star-warriors and Destroyers moved fast, damned fast with their bomb-pumped acceleration. Though they had stopped accelerating and were now slowing down so they could board Whorst’s fleet and not just simply smash into their sides.

              The fighters were there to weaken the fleet; they didn’t care about boarding. They just kept on coming, meaning their lead elements would reach the fleet in just twenty minutes.

              The drama of Earth had occurred two-months ago, in that time Felix had distributed the information on the laser cannon to every ship that might be able to use it. Shrift had been part of its development and had quietlymarked out positions for the weapons on War-Stations’  ‘hull’ running power lines and cooling lines.

              Now the information was acrss the fleet Shrift passed the information to Whorst who’d got dibs on the first laser cannons being produced in AIH’s weapons facilities.

              Two of them were installed and completed their run-down.

              They were massive beasts and there hadn’t been time to test-fire them yet.

              They worked by having a nuclear bomb explode in a containment chamber, all of that energy was converted into X-ray and gamma-ray, and then funneled down the weapons barrel which focused and directed it towards the enemy. It needed a decent cool-down else the bombs might blow it up or melt it down.

             
Today we see if we made them good enough or if they’re going to rip us apart.
Whorst thought as the timer wound down.

                                                                      ***

              Shrift watched as the Kalu fighters came closer. He looked over the laser cannons that he had built himself. They were prepped and ready to go. Mounted to two outcrops on either side of the ‘forward hull’ they could shoot ahead of the station as well to either side.

              The timer wound down as the Kalu came into range.

             
Come on Whorst, come on!

              “Laser cannons, fire at will,” Commander Whorst’s voice came through the speakers in the laser cannons command centers.

              “Fire!” Chief Ozkul said. The cannons were three hundred meters away but it was still possible to hear and feel the bombs as they exploded, their charge being directed at the Kalu fighters.

              A swarm was hit straight on. It was as if they had run into a wall. Fighters were simply vaporized by the cannons power, the blast passed through the first fighters and kept going until all of its charge was depleted. Ships tumbled and fell away, their occupants exposed to deadly levels of radiation that had caused their bodies to revolt and destroy themselves.

              The other cannon had missed a swarm, mostly. It clipped the side of the swarm, killing hundreds. Yet the beam wasn’t fully spent, it kept going, a wire frame grid showing it heading for the Kalu fleet.

              The chambers cooled rapidly, new laser cannon rounds were slotted into place, and the chamber sealed as the controller for the cannon watched the numbers, the gunner holding their reticule on target, adjusting the laser cannons aperture to get the most out of their gun.

              “Gun one ready!” The controller said.

              “Clear!” The gunner said, the command rumbling.

              “Gun two, ready!” The opposite gun’s controller said.

              ‘Clear!” The other gun rumbled and two more swarms were hit head-on, the second gun’s gunner fixing whatever issue she’d had.

              Shrift looked over the information from the cannon. Its aiming reticule hadn’t been properly aligned so she was manually correcting, firing into the distance to bring her actual weapon onto their target.

              Chief Ozkul had picker her people well.

              The swarms were hit by the cannons, these two bigger than the first two. They’d adjusted and been given a wide aperture.

              Hundreds of Kalu fighters must have fallen away, but there were hundreds of thousands of fighters coming out of their ships or already in their swarms.

              The round that had scraped the second swarm now hit the Kalu fleet. Three star-warriors and one-star-destroyer were hit, the star-destroyer’s fighters turned into small bombs, ripping the destroyer apart as they blew up leaving their hangars.

              There were no whoops or cheers, just the sounds of controllers calling out information to their gunners who responded with firing their massive weapons with alarming accuracy into the oncoming Kalu fighters.

              “PRC’s are coming online, watch your targets, we have priority but don’t oversaturate an area. Controllers run your checks,” Chief Ozkul said some time later.

              The fleet had turned to present their broadsides to the enemy, every cannon run out and waiting to serve.

              Shrift felt and saw as the planetary cannons fired a wall of rounds at the Kalu.

              Human’s could only process so much information, with the six AI’s in the fleet, information was simplified and passed on with alarming speed.

              Gunners were using tricks from those AI’s to fire four guns instead of one single cannon, then they were broken down into sectors, which were constantly changing and evolving as the fleets came together and Kalu were wiped out of existence.

              It meant that no one was shooting in the same place as anyone else, no round was wasted as the Kalu were left without any room to maneuver.

              So when the Fleet fired every cannon added to a withering wall of fire that rushed to meet the forward swarms like a flyswatter meeting a fly.

              Rounds exploded into shrapnel, tearing through the Kalu swarms with hellish consequences.

              The Free Fleet were doing everything they could to keep the pressure up on the Kalu.

              Fighters started firing their lasers back at the Free Fleet. They were weak, but there were many of them. Shields flashed into existence as the thousands of lasers found their targets.

              The Fleet fired every five seconds creating a wall of rounds impossible to dodge.