Chapter One Hundred and Ten - Minefield Surprise

Mines in space were generally a bad idea. At least, if they were to be used in the same way that mines on a plenary body were supposed to be used.

As area-denial assets, mines were generally useless. The moment someone became aware of the mines, then as long as they were even partially stationary relative to the area they were defending, then it would be easy to pick them off.

Dawn wasn’t using mines that way, however.

The cloud she scattered contained seven thousand mines. Each weighing in at just under one metric ton. Basically, Dawn had brought twice her mass in mines and had scattered them into a diffuse cloud some fifteen kilometres tall, wide, and deep. Then she manoeuvred that into the path of the Accord-Earth fleet.

Day sent out a last ping, bouncing off of the Accord ships and then moving past them. With each ping coming in on the minute, this one probably wouldn’t seem strange to the enemy.

The truth was that she was focused more on what was past them.

“Wow,” Day said as she took in the mine’s layouts. The original plan called for a wide net, meant to capture as many of the Accord ships as possible within, and dispersed enough that any evasive manoeuvring would only push the ship doing it into another mine’s range.

Instead, Dawn had organised the net into long columns, each one a twisting corkscrew with some rare overlap.

This wasn’t a net designed to capture the entire fleet. It was a spiralling death trap designed to kill specific ships within the enemy fleet.

Then Day noticed something in her scanning suit, something she almost missed entirely. A large void of missing data. She went over it, reconstructing the data in a few millionths of a second to reveal... Dawn, sitting on the edge of her minefield and cloaked to appear as nothing at all.

“What’s Dawn doing there?” Day asked as she sent the image to the others.

“Maybe she needs to coordinate things?” Candle suggested.

“Her ECM stealth’s decent,” Twilight acknowledged.

“Oh,” was Lullaby’s reply, a reply that got all of Day’s attention. “I think she wants to try something.”

“Try what?” Day asked.

“She’s been obsessed with the Accord communication and E-war stuff for a while,” Lullaby said. “I think she wants to show that she’s better.”

That was a concerning thing to discover. And not one Day could do anything about. The edge of the minefield was almost upon the enemy fleet, and soon they’d need to act. The four of them repositioned into a rough square, closer together than they’d been in a while, but with enough room to allow for manoeuvring. They slipped into the formation naturally, making sure that they didn’t look like they were doing anything suspicious.

The leading ship in the Accord-Earth fleet was a small destroyer-sized civilian craft. It slipped into the minefield, entirely unaware of the danger, and entirely safe from it. It wasn’t the target, and nor were the next four ships to enter the mine’s range.

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There were two cruiser-tonnage ships in the fleet. The smaller of the two happened to be a little bit ahead of the other. It was just shy of three hundred metres long, and Day estimated it to weigh in at around two-hundred and fifty thousand tons. Its only defences were a quintet of point defence lasers and a single light particle cannon.

Those defences disappeared the moment the mines detonated.

The mines, already flying in the same direction as the fleet so that they’d almost match velocities, suddenly lit up their thrusters and rushed towards the ship.

It took the Accord-Earth fleet three long seconds to realise what was happening, and a couple more to spin their point-defence weapons towards the attack.

It was too late. The mines were already danger-close. The first exploded spectacularly a kilometre off the ship’s bow. Day was recording with everything she had, so she got to see the sparks and detonations across the cruiser’s hull as the shrapnel splattered against its side.

Then the other mines went off. Most were simple explosives, designed to send hundreds of projectiles out at an angle so that they’d penetrate the enemy. Some, however, were different.

A nuke went off three kilometres away from the cruiser, an expanding ball of plasma which only lasted a second but whose force still rammed into the ship and sent it crashing away.

More mines went off, these firing lasers with pin-point accuracy into and across the cruiser’s side. The laser sweep charred across armoured bulkheads and melted the ship’s point-defence systems, scanners, antenna, and any sensor that Dawn had discovered.

Then the next large ship entered its own section of the minefield, and the entire thing repeated itself.

The Accord-Earth fleet was being hit from all sides and all at once. Space filled with lasers as they fired at anything that wasn’t friendly indiscriminately.

And then Day saw it.

Dawn was pulsing out messages, using some of the smaller mines as relays. They were specifically interfering with communications across a very narrow band.

The same one the Accord used for their IFF.

The civilian ships opened up on each other. Or rather, their primitive point-defence AI, unable to tell that they were being tricked, fired at the next nearest obstacle.

‘It’s our time,” Candle said with relish.

“It is,” Day agreed. “Opening fire now.”

The four of them opened up. Particle cannons fired, sending waves of hyper-velocity particles at the enemy who were now entirely too preoccupied with the mines around them to notice shots coming in from their rear.

Then Candle’s larger kinetic guns roared into the void, massive explosive rounds racing ahead.

Those were still nothing compared to the shot that Lullaby fired from her MAC cannon.

All in all, the Accord were having a really rough day.

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