Dominion Forces Trailing Behind Space Station Atlas
A strong man could shape the universe, if he had the will.
Admiral Mello had the will.
The Victorians had surrounded the Atlas with an insurmountable shell of mines and static defenses.
Admiral Mello intended to surmount it.
First, he sent in the mine sweepers, the most expendable of his forces. There were ten mine sweepers and they moved forward in a cautious wedge formation, four across, three up and three down. Each minesweeper had thirty turret lasers slaved to a master control. As they moved forward they shot the Victorian mines before the mines could sense them and detonate.
It was not a perfect process. Invariably, one or two mines would be missed or only slightly damaged, and when the mine sweeper got close enough the mine would sense a hostile presence and take its revenge. Fifteen minutes into the minefield, the first mine sweeper died. The rest pressed forward, drilling a large hole into the Victorian defensive shell, like a drill bit biting through hard rock. The second and third mine sweepers died ten minutes later, killed when one mine exploded and caused a ripple effect in nearby mines that were just close enough to the two ships to crush them.
Now there were only seven mine sweepers. The hole they made was smaller, but they pressed forward, firing methodically, slowing the rate of their passage so that they might have more time to find their targets.
But the Vickies had been clever. While the outer skin of the minefield had proximity mines, deeper in there were globe mines, sprinting mines, ripple mines and missile mines. The entire minefield was being carried along by a myriad of tractor beams, so it kept its position around the Atlas space station as Atlas desperately plodded its way to Refuge. The tactics the mine sweepers successfully used against proximity mines in the first layer of the mine field would not work so well against other types of mines.
The mine sweepers stoically crept forward.
They reached the first line of missile mines, missile platforms surrounded by a shell of sensors probing out a thousand miles in every direction. In ten minutes the remaining mine sweepers were destroyed, either by missiles or by stumbling into mines as they desperately tried to evade them.
Then Mello ordered in the frigates.
They went in cautiously, firing missiles and lasers and making the hole begun by the mine sweepers deeper and larger, boring through the Victorian defensive shell like a drill press. They moved slowly, but there were thirty of them and by the time the last fell to Victorian missiles and mines and lasers, they were almost a quarter of the way through to the space station.
Then he ordered in the destroyers.
Captain Pattin had watched in astonishment as Admiral Mello ordered in the mine sweepers and frigates, but when he ordered in the destroyers, she could no longer restrain herself.
“Admiral!” she whispered urgently. “You are killing your own ships! It is no good breaking through the mine field if we have no ships left to exploit it! And — ” she hesitated, afraid to say what she thought, but afraid not to — “if you order the ships’ crews to their certain death, some will refuse to obey. They might even turn their guns on the Vengeance.”
He looked at her, surprised at her naivete. He barked a laugh. “They will not disobey,” he assured her. “Each captain knows that the Intelligence Directoate has their families under constant surveillance. If they fail to obey, their families will pay for their treason.”
“Admiral,” she said urgently. “I beg you to reconsider. If we squander our forces here we are defeated. We must keep the Fleet intact, we must have enough ships to defend the homeland.”
Mello looked at her coldly. “I expected more of you, Jodi. This is the decisive battle. If we kill the Atlas, the Victorians will have no way to rebuild their navy, no way to restart their trading economy, no way to generate wealth. Don’t you understand? Without the Atlas, their new child queen will be nothing more than a homeless refugee and Victoria will be nothing more than a historical footnote. All their planets, all their people, all their wormholes will belong to us, and the Dominion of Unified Citizenry will the dominate the universe for a millennia to come!”
He gestured to the holo display, which showed the first squadron of destroyers entering the minefield. “Against that, the sacrifice of a few ships is nothing. Nothing! If I have to spend every ship in this fleet to destroy the Atlas, it will be worth it. We can build more ships, but if we kill the Atlas, we kill all of Victoria, now and forever!” He leaned close to her. “Do-you-understand?” he shouted into her face.
In his stateroom on the Dominion battleship Fortitude, Admiral Kaeser stared in horror. He had followed the battle through his hologram repeater, which his XO had either forgotten or been too polite to turn off. On the screen the destroyers slowly deepened the breach into the Vicky minefield, but at a terrible price. The rift was more than halfway through the minefield, but of the twenty destroyers that had gone in, only twelve remained. As he watched, another two flickered and disappeared, leaving only a red cross on the holo display to mark their destruction. A long, thick line of red crosses trailed behind, marking all of the other Dominion ships that had died trying to break through the minefield.
Sickened and furious, Admiral Kaeser strode rapidly to his stateroom door and punched the button to open the door.
Nothing happened.
He pounded the door with his fist. “Guard! Guard! Open this door!”
The door hissed open and a scared looking soldier stood there, hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Tell Captain Bauer I must speak to him immediately,” Kaeser ordered.
“But I have orders to-” the guard stammered.
“Do it!” Kaeser barked, but then, more softly, “Hurry, before we all run out of time. Hurry now, for everything you love and cherish, hurry.”