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“What’s the point of that?” Park
wondered. “Coming at us from out of the sun I can understand. Do they think
that coming from the opposite direction from Trohavn will fool us?”

“I can’t say, but if victorious,
their ships will already be more or less headed home at the end of the battle,”
Iris shrugged. “Or maybe it’s another religious thing for the Premm.”

“Maybe,” Park shook his head. “It
gives us more time to prepare though. Foolish of them, but I won’t complain.
Let’s start running sims this evening to see if we can find a better way to
fight than just slug it out.”

A day later, when the fleet was
only a few light seconds away, Park had a rough idea of what he wanted to do.
In a vid-conference with the admirals he announced, “We have three fleets here
and according to reports, casualties were evenly distributed. We tried a
three-pronged attack against the Dark Ships in Kertream System and it worked
out fairly well against a fleet of Dark Ships. So, we’ll use the strategy again
only with three whole fleets, rather than three quarters of a fleet per unit.
Admiral Yorro, I’d like you to take the Second Fleet up and out of the
planetary, or to stellar north to be more specific. Admiral Benkon, I’d like
the First to travel a similar route to stellar south. Admiral Cranxton,” he
nodded to the image of a blond-haired blue-skinned woman, bring your fleet to
rest relative to
Tawatir
and her
escorts. I have a few ideas as to how to best arrange our ships, but we’ll have
a few days to play with that. Gentlemen,” he spoke to Yorro and Benkon, I’ll
have my navigator send you course headings. Keep to them if you can, but also
keep an eye on the enemy ships. You’re all experienced military officers and
I’m relying on your expertise to know when to follow orders exactly and when
you must use your own judgment. Don’t let them flank you and also don’t forget
that the ships from Earth can take more of a beating than most Alliance ships.
Use your missiles, they seem to be our best weapons and any enemy ship disabled
by a missile is one less to shoot back.”

“These missiles seem so
primitive,” Admiral Cranxton commented in a deep contralto. “No offense
intended, McArrgh.”

“They are ancient technology,”
Park acknowledged, “but what goes around, comes around, we used to say. They
are so ancient that they are new again. So far the Dark Ships are still trying
to figure out how best to counter them. But they are hard to see coming and
they move faster than ships do in normal space. Also the Dark Ships have had a
tendency to ignore anything smaller than a full-sized ship. They’ve mostly only
shot at my fighters when there was a larger target behind them. They are
starting to respect the missiles, but most of their counter measures have been,
I think, accidental or lucky shots. Don’t shoot straight at them. Program your
missiles to take arcing courses. So far we’ve had more hits that way.”

“What about this new energy
draining weapon of theirs?” Admiral Benkon asked. “Do you have a way to block
that?”

“Not really,” Park admitted,
“although my engineer says that if you keep a power store, what I would call a
battery, isolated from the rest of your systems it may retain enough of a
charge to restart your systems. Engines first, of course, then use the power
they generate to bring everything else back on line.”

“Better have our engineers practice
that,” Yorro suggested.

“Good idea,” Park agreed. “Tell
them they need to make the exercise second nature. Good luck.”

“Staying as a single large fleet
this time,” Park noted as he looked at the displays in the gunnery room. Iris
manipulated the main gunner’s board from the bridge, but there were five others
who controlled each of the ship’s phasers, although once battle had been met
most of the work was done by the computer. Iris kept her hand on the missiles
and the gravity cannon although she could take over any of the phasers or
assign gravity cannon or missile controls to any station. Park had frequently
pointed out that Iris had everything so well-planned that she did not really
leave much to her gunners, but she had pointed out, that anything could happen
and she was not about to rely on a single electronic circuit. “I really
expected them to split up like last time.”

“It doesn’t matter, really,” Iris
pointed out. “We have them out numbered and out maneuvered. This time I’ve been
coordinating missile targets with every ship so equipped, We’re concentrating
on the Dark Ships on the initial salvos, and with them out of the fight, We can
handle the Premm with more conventional weapons. Well, they’re more
conventional to our Alliance friends.”

“Sounds too easy,” Park told her.
“You know the old adage about the life-expectancy of battle plans.”

“I do,” Iris nodded. “I believe
that Sun Tzu left it out of
The Art of
War
for fear of being accused of plaigerism. Don’t worry, nothing is set in
stone after contact with the enemy. Speaking of which…”

“Oh right,” Park nodded as he
ducked out of the gunnery room, “I’ll get out of your way.”

Park started heading back toward
the bridge, but when every speaker on the ship relayed Ronnie’s voice,
“Engineering to the Admiral; Park could you come on down here please?” Park
reversed his course and, instead found the lift that would take him down three
decks to Doctor Sheetz’s kingdom.

There were too many large objects
that had to be moved around a spaceship at times and in designing a ship Ronnie
had decided that the lift would be nothing more than a section of the floor
that moved up and down through the ship. When the lift was not at a specific
floor a
 
large panel would slide into the
space to keep crew people from following through, but at need a wide-open shaft
could be opened as well. Many others had pointed out this was not the safest solution
to the need for an elevator, but Ronnie’s response had been, “If you can find
an OSHA office, feel free to file a report. This is a warship, not an office
building. We’ve more dangerous stuff on board than a bloody hole in the floor!”

Park found her pondering the
monitors that, in battle, mirrored the bridge displays. At the moment, only two
of them were indicating the approaching fleet. The others were filled with
circuit diagrams and various monitor readings from the ship herself. “I’m
here,” Park announced.

“Oh good,” Ronnie turned to face
him. “Park, we have a problem. Two of the fighters are out for the duration. I know
we thought they only got power drained, but something strange happened and the
stasis generators malfunctioned.”

“In what way?” Park asked.

“Their drives are frozen,” Ronnie
replied. “If we were back on Pangaea I could undo it in a few minutes, but I just
don’t have the equipment to do it here. I did figure out what happened, though.
The stasis generators are too close to the drives and in battle there was a
short. Instead of running the stasis effect through the skin of the fighter, it
encased the drives and by-passed the automatic cut-out circuits as well.”

“Could the same thing happen with
the remaining fighters?” Park asked.

“My boys and girls are
retrofitting some non-conductive conduit around the offending wires,” Ronnie
told him, “but there’s still a risk. I thought you needed to know. I can fix
the problem permanently with a new internal design, but it might be safest not
to launch these fighters at all.”

“Maybe,” Park nodded, “but we’re
going to need their missiles and phasers. How big a risk is it?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Ronnie
admitted. “Before the new conduit I would have said you had a fifty percent
chance of it happening again. Now? Well, obviously I hope it won’t, but…”

“Yeah, I get it,” Park nodded
again. “I’ll talk to our fighter pilots.”

“None of them will back down,
Park,” Ronnie told him. “You know that.”

“I do,” Park agreed, “but given
the odds, I think I owe it to them to make their own decisions.”

“Very well,” Ronnie shrugged,
“but don’t downplay the danger when you tell them about this. Sure, I think I
have it in hand, but I can be wrong. In fact, I’m very good at being wrong.”

“You have had an excellent record
at being correct as long as I’ve known you,” Park pointed out.

“That only shows that I’m due,”
Ronnie told him. “Remember, I only think I’ve solved the problem.”

“Right,” Park nodded. However,
when he spoke to the five fighter pilots – three Mer and two Atackack crewmen –
the real problem was getting two of them to willingly stand aside to let the
others fly in the upcoming battle. In the end, Park assigned the two who would
not be in fighters to watching the monitors on the bridge and using the
assistant communications officer’s console to help guide their mates during the
battle.

Finally, it was time for him to
take his place on the bridge. “Do you want to demand their surrender, Park?”
Marisea asked.

“That trick never works,” Park
shook his head. “Frankly, even with their Dark Ship buddies and religious
fanaticism, I’m surprised they’re trying to fight. They haven’t a chance of
winning. This will be a slaughter.”

“You don’t sound happy about
that,” Marisea pointed out.

“I’m not that blood-thirsty,”
Park told her. “I don’t care to crush my enemies, to see them driven before me
or to hear the lamentations of their women. If they would leave me alone, I’d
be glad to accord them the same courtesy. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to
feel the same way about the rest of us.”

Once again, Iris counted down to
the launching of the missiles. As before the ships of the fleet managed to fire
off two waves of missiles before the enemy ships were close enough to use their
own weapons. Then the all-too familiar flickering began on the Earth ships as
their stasis fields protected them while under fire. At first they heard the
familiar metal shriek of the Dark Ships’ mysterious weapon, but then the
display on the screens changed drastically from flicker to flicker and everyone
knew they had been attacked by one or more Premm gravity cannons.

The flickering effect only lasted
five subjective seconds, but much more time had passed. As always Park wondered
just how long they had been under fire and asked as much, “No. Belay that,” he
corrected himself and thought,
When did I
start using this much nautical terminology?
“I know there’s no way to
tell.”

“I estimate it has been fifteen
minutes since contact,” Marisea reported.

“How did you figure that out?”
Park asked.

“Simple, I took the positions and
relative velocities of ships at the front of their formation and the distance
from them we are now and did a quick calculation,” she replied. “The main
reason it’s an estimate is that most of them are trying to turn around for
another pass at us.”

“Most?” Park asked.

Marisea took another look, but it
was Iris who replied. “It looks like the Dark Ships are running for the
Stierdach limit.”

“Set a pursuit course, Admiral?”
Garro asked.

“Absolutely,” Park replied.
“Marisea, invite our fellow Pirates to join us. Now, damage reports?”

“Ronnie called up to warn us we
lost about half the ablative plating on our port side,” Marisea replied, “and
there’s been some minor wear and tear on our starboard belly. Our other Earth
ships are reporting similar situations. No major damage, a few lucky shots on
the next pass and who knows?”

“Situation with the Premm Fleet?”
Park asked.

“They’re the ones who are turning
to face us,” Iris replied. “There’s a lot of debris behind us and only about
thirty Premm Ships left.”

“And the other Alliance ships?”
Park asked.

“I’m still getting reports,”
Marisea told him, then added, “Admirals Yorro, Cranxton and Benkon want a
conference.”

“Set it up, please,” Park
responded. A moment later their faces appeared in a semi-circle around Park’s
chair. “Admirals?” Park greeted them. “How are the fleets?”

The three look at each other and
with a nod, immediately elected Yorro to speak. Park made a mental note of
that, decided that they must have spoken to each other before calling him. “We
lost five ships in the first wave,” Yorro reported, “Another hundred have taken
light to moderate damage. Percentage-wise we did very well. The Premm Fleet is
not likely to survive the next wave, but the Dark Ships do not appear to be
turning to meet us.”

“We’ve noticed the same thing,”
Park agreed. “I think they’re trying to run for it and I plan to chase them
down. I’ll take the Earth ships with me. Get your damaged ships out of harm’s
way, then pick off the rest of the Premm unless they choose to surrender.”

“What about Trohavn?” Yorro
asked.

“What about Trohavn?” Park
echoed. “Once they’re defenseless they ought to surrender.”

“The Premm have never done as
they ought,” Yorro replied. “We were sent to besiege the planet, not attack
it.”

“We can’t exactly starve them
out,” Park argued. “It’s a whole darned world. They’ll just wait us out, but
for now, put a cordon of sorts around the planet. No one gets in or out and we
should do the same with the other Premm worlds. Demand their surrender. Maybe
with the destruction of their fleet they’ll fold. If not, though, we’re going
to have to land on the planet.”

“McArrgh,” Yorro objected, “Wars
have been lost that way. No one in the Alliance cares to make all of Premm a
large set of prison camps. It’s too expensive and too easy for a guerilla
underground to harry the occupying force.”

“We’ll have to occupy eventually
or we’ve just wasted a lot of lives, to say nothing of money, time and
eventually the lives of everyone in the Alliance, I think,” Park told them all.
The Premm, left to their own devices will just build more ships and cause more
trouble until we are forced to do something we really do not want to do. They
have sworn to destroy Earth in atomic fire, if we let them rebuild we’ll
eventually be forced to do the same to them. And I’m not in favor of doing that
to anyone. We need to take out their industrial sites, at least the ones
capable of building ships. Besides a siege is not always just a matter of
sitting around and waiting for a surrender. We need to make them know they are
under attack.”