stopping, protecting the smaller warships behind them.
Jordo could see what was about to happen, but from 50,000Ks back, there wasn't anything he could do.
In front of the Privateer carriers, the UN gunboats formed a range of steel mountains in the enemy’s path with the dreadnought Tamerlane standing as its highest, most impassible peak. The faces of that armored range sparkled as the guns that clung as densely as alpine forests all fired their alpha strike together.
Magnetic acceleration drove the osmium and tungsten sabot to speed and produced inertial gees in excess of 80,000 Earth gravities. The already hyperdense missiles compressed further during their .0004 second trip down the barrel. They superheated into a new state of matter.
The railguns of the UNS and Privateer ships coordinated their fire and Jordo couldn’t count the number of hits the hurtling, burned-out alien cruisers took. The impacting sabot sprayed molten metal and hull like a hundred volcanoes, and all three ships bled wet atmo and fire and melting ship out exit wounds.
The three, dying alien cruisers finally cooked off seconds after that, their overloading power plants leaving nothing behind but hot gas and fast debris. The remaining, smaller alien warships that had been hiding behind them kept their tight formation. The alien destroyers now took the brunt of the railgun fire from the ships of the battlegroup while one, singular and smaller ship now used them for cover. It had the outline of small launch bays on its fat, vertical hull.
" Pocket carrier..." Paladin said through his teeth. He saw it, too.
" Al-most there…"
As the line of alien warships plowed through the fighters and junks, 140mm cannon nipped at the aliens’ light cruisers and destroyers, but those little shells couldn’t stop them fast enough. The alien line ran straight into another salvo from the combined railguns of the entire battlegroup. Burning Squidy hulls tumbled and fell out of formation like broken teeth. The last of them closed ranks, protecting the single ship in the rear.
As the next salvo hit, the last, doomed alien destroyers broke up into parts less than 10Ks out from the battlegroup. Before the railguns could fire again, the debris cloud continued on the collision course the aliens had set. Some of it impacted against the armored hulls of the UN cruisers and bounced off Tamerlane’s steel slopes. Some of it sailed between the steel peaks along with the last, single, remaining alien warship.
The Squidy ship had flown into the middle of the convoy and now, none of the gun batteries could fire on it easily. Before the fighters could swarm it and the junks could put torpedoes into its hull point blank, it streaked right between Hardway and Araby , loosing a single warhead at each of them.
The automated defense systems on the carriers fired over fifty turrets at once, filling the space between the alien warheads and the Privateer hulls with a fiery storm of range-det shells, all blooming like a string of flowers in the black. Araby’s system got lucky in the .3 seconds it had. It caught the warhead early and only got buffeted with dissipated plasma. Hardway wasn’t so lucky. The hailstorm of range det shells didn’t catch the warhead until it was less than a hundred meters out from the carrier’s sides, and when the alien bomb felt its hull casing peppered with shells and knew this was as close as it would get to the carrier, it detonated itself.
The exotic metals and alien composites that made up the Squidies’ flying bomb all converted to high-density plasma and the force of the detonation accelerated it right into the forward, port-side launch bays. One bay took most of the blast. After the flash, the inside of it glowed like a hellish, 70-meter kiln.
The alien warship blew past the carriers and opened up on the cargo haulers with its particle streams. Fat, SCS Luxor took six hits at once and it was like she’d been raked by
Katlin Stack, Russell Barber