Vice-Admiral Kayko Fuchida's lips worked as if to spit, but then she wrenched her eyes away from the secondary sonar plot as the first Nasrean battleship of Nasr's Second and Fifth Fleets came lumbering into view far below and north of her task force's position above the alliance fort of Rolana. She darted a bitter, hating look at the dreadnoughts and battleships accelerating steadily towards her, and her face was hard. She was thinking back to the Battle of Esperanza where the then-fledgling Yafutoman Third Fleet had sold itself so dearly to stop the rape, pillage, and sacking of Esperanza by the Confederation First Fleet. So many of her people had died that day, and she still hadn't forgiven herself for living through it without saving them.
Really though, it hadn't been Kayko's fault. At that point in the conflict, the Yafutoman Navy hadn't quite finished switching out their old wooden ships for the metal behemoths she now had under her command. Not to mention the numerical superiority the Confederation had and still enjoyed to this day. All of which resulted in the almost total annihilation of the Yafutoman forces that had fought that day. Since then, Kayko had become head of Yafutoma's Weapon's Development Bureau in addition to her command responsiblities, and had come up with all sorts of inventions and improvements on existing systems to cause death and destruction to the Confederation. The alliance had suffered defeat after defeat, but today, that was all to change. Finally divine judgment was going to descend upon those heartless confederation bastards. And Kayko would be the angel of vengeance that delivered it.
"Our turn now, you bastards," she murmured to himself, so softly no one else ever heard at all, and beckoned the Akagi's executive officer Commander Nakamura over beside her.
"They're twenty minutes away from contact, Ma'am," Commander Nakamura said quietly, and Kayko nodded. She clasped her hands behind herself and turned her back on the main sonarplot. She no longer needed to see it to know what was happening, anyway. She had her entire force in the area now, and they were as ready as they were going to get. Kayko's voice was like falling ice shards then "Nakamura," she said in almost painfully deliberate monotone "Set the launch time for 00:10:00 and prepare to engage the enemy."
The Nasrean commander obviously intended to make a maximum-velocity pass, firing as he came and hoping to saturate the fort's defenses. He must have what he considered to be damned reliable intelligence about the status of Rolana's defenses, or he would never have risked it. Unfortunately, he was risking it, and Kayko was relieved that the work crews had managed to abandon the incomplete shipyards the alliance had begun to build on the city's outskirts. Those unfinished hulls were sitting ducks, with neither active nor passive defenses. Their only protection would be the intervention of their active sisters in Twelfth Squadron—and Fifth Valuan Fleet, Admiral Don Corona commanding—and any Nasrean guncrews which acquired them in their sights were virtually guaranteed to hit.
More losses, she thought, gritting her teeth. I'll be amazed if even one of them comes through this intact enough to make it worthwhile bothering to finish the damned building project. And that, of course, will make a continuing—and heavily reinforced—Fleet picket here absolutely unavoidable. Damn it all, if I only had more barges!"
She shuddered at the thought, already hearing the strident demands that the Fleet provide sufficient protection to stop this sort of thing. If the Nasrean's, and the Confederation as a whole, were smart and audacious enough to try similar raids against another territory or two, they could throw a monumental monkey wrench into the works for the Alliance. It had been hard enough to scrape up the forces for offensive action before; now it would get astronomically harder. Yet if they didn't resume the offensive, they only gave the Confederation time to pick their spots with even more care, land their punches with even more weight behind them, and that—
She jerked her mind back from useless speculation and inhaled deeply. The active forts had strictly limited numbers of turrets and torpedo barges—another point to take up with Logistics Command, she thought grimly; when a fort is declared operational, then it should damned well receive its full ammunition allocation immediately, not "as soon as practical!"—but, fortunately, the Akagi and her five sisters were another story. Built to the radical new design proposed by the Weapons Development Board, they'd been constructed around huge, powerful engines, in order to tow barges packed full of torpedoes and ejection racks to deploy them. Between the six of them, they towed no less than six barges, and they'd been busy preparing them for launching ever since their arrival. Unlike older ships of the wall, they also had the capability to fire heavy torpedo salvos of their own, and they had been prepping their own tubes for launch as well. At a conservative estimate, they would be able to neutralize or destroy at least a third of the Nasrean fleet with almost no losses to themselves. They couldn't realistically hope to stop the Nasrean's juggernaut advance if they were willing to accept the losses, but the price the Nasreans payed for it would be bitter indeed. The Yafutomans had all experienced loss in this war, and mostly at the hands of the Nasreans. So it would be the Akagi and Admiral Kayko Fuchida who would call the shot for them. Not only did she have the best fire control equipment, but they were her navy's torpedo barges . . . and the Yafutoman Navy had paid for and earned the right in their own blood.
"Any sign they've detected us?" Kayko asked Nakamura.
"No, Ma'am," he said firmly, and Commander Nakamura shook his head in support of his statement.
"I don't think they'll be able to detect us with sonar much above 15 or 20 leagues, Ma'am, and they're still 24 leagues out, well within our own sonar range" he said. "The fort's firepower isn't as good on a ton-for-ton basis as our latest mobile refits, but they've got an awful lot crammed on there, and their turrets are a lot bigger—and more powerful—than anything a warship could deploy. I figure those people are going to have to keep coming for another nine and a half minutes before they have a chance of picking us out of the clutter. Whereas we—"
He shrugged and nodded to the crimson display burning in one corner of his sonar plot. It said Time to launch 00:08:27, and as Kayko followed his nod, another second ticked inexorably away.
8.22 seconds later, Kayko turned to her com center, and her voice sounded like a clarion's call through the bridges and decks of Twelfth Squadron. "Admiral Fuchida to all Yafutoman units: The order is---Esperanza, and no mercy!"
"Sir, I've just picked up something I think you should hear," Senior Navigation Chief Cindy Lenneth said.
"What?" Admiral Don Corona looked at her irritably. "Cindy, this is hardly the time—"
"It was an all-ships transmission from Admiral Fuchida to all Yafutoman units, Sir," Lenneth said with stubborn diffidence, and then, before Don could respond, she pressed a stud and Kayko Fuchida's harsh recorded voice echoed through The Newhope's flag bridge.
"Admiral Fuchida to all Yafutoman units," it said, and Don could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its soprano tones. "The order is—Esperanza, and no mercy!"
"What?" Don spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.
Seventy four torpedo barges fired as one, and the Yafutoman battleships' internal torpedo tubes fired with them. The next best thing to nine hundred torpedoes went howling towards the Nasreans at 300 kph, and the range was only five kilometers and the Nasreans were headed straight to meet them at flank speed.
"Take us out of here!" the Nasrean admiral shouted, but flight time was under ninety seconds, and he'd wasted four responding.
Orders were given desperately, and evasive maneuvers were initiated, but there simply wasn't time. His captains needed at least sixty seconds to bring their ships about, and by the time Admiral Ouda (For that was the Nasrean admiral's name, and he was about to become history, literally and figuratively.) snapped the order to Commander Romero, and Romero relayed it to the captains of the other Nasrean ships, and they relayed it to their helmsmen, time had run out.
The sky itself seemed to vanish in the titanic violence as hundreds upon hundreds of torpedo warheads exploded in a solid wall of fury. At least a hundred of the Allies' own warheads killed oneI another in old-fashioned tactical fratricide, but it scarcely mattered. There were more than enough of them to deal with eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers of the Nasr Fifth Fleet. Amazingly, and against all apparent reason, two of Ouda's six destroyers actually escaped from destruction. Because no one was intentionally wasting torpedoes on such small fry, no doubt.
Don Corona grabbed for his own com with frantic haste with Kayko Fuchida's order still ringing in his ears. He was horrified by the implications, and his horror grew as the Yafutoman' cannon turrets continued to sweep the tumbling wreckage and the handful of life boats which had escaped. But none of them fired, and as he slowly relaxed in his chair once more, his memory replayed the words once more. "No mercy," Kayko had said, not "No quarter," and a long, quavering breath sighed out of him as he realized he was not about to see a vengeful atrocity by units under his command.
He inhaled slowly, then looked at Lenneth.
"Remind me to have a little discussion with Admiral Fuchida about communications discipline," he said, and his mouth quirked in a wry, exhausted grin that might actually hold true humor again someday.
Nasr's Second Fleet had been untouched by Kayko's fiery holocaust of destruction, but, upon seeing the fate of their comrades, quickly reversed direction and began sailing back towards Nasr. The Battle of Rolana, although no one knew it at the time, was to be the turning point in the war. The Confederation had inflicted a bitter, unbroken chain of defeats upon the Alliance up until now. Today, that illusion of invincibility had been shaken to the core. Today, the alliance had been reborn from the ashes of its defeat, and it's enemies were about to find out that payback is a stone b!tch.