Assault Line by Max Glebow

Author:Max Glebow [Glebow, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Our battle order flinched and twisted. Following orders from the Admiral, the heavy ships began to change positions, the most powerful and dangerous to the enemy were moving from the center to the conditional bottom of the formation. I ordered the aircraft carriers to move there, and all 11 'Invisibles', on the contrary, to rise up, to hide behind the heavy ships and not to move unless absolutely necessary, maintaining maximum camouflage.

The quargs did not react in any way to our maneuvers, keeping their structure unchanged. Our fleet has started deceleration, because coming into collision at counter-courses with a numerically superior opponent was not our idea of fun. The first salvos were fired at maximum distance and did not yield results to either side, but I didn’t wait for the fire to become more effective, and once the distance allowed the mosquito fleet to be activated, I gave the command:

“Aircraft carriers, get pursuit planes moving. The mission is to cover the drone torpedoes from attack by quarg pursuit planes and to ensure their breakthrough to the battleships of the lower edge of the enemy’s battle formation. Torpedo groups, launch three minutes after the pursuit planes. Pilots of the command machines to get target marking,” and I sent the appropriate files to the torpedoes' guides.

I knew that at that moment Admiral Nelson was assigning a mission to his best battleships: to simulate an attempt of penetrating the breach in the enemy lines, which torpedoes are supposed to make. I was really hoping that the quargs would appreciate the threat, because a breakthrough like this would take our best battleships to the weakly protected ships inside their formation. However, to attempt such a strike as a basic plan would not simply border on an adventure, it would really be it. Weakening the centre of its own order and placing the main forces of the fleet under the almost inevitable flank attack of a powerful central group of enemy ships would eliminate all possible benefits of such a solution and would almost certainly put our fleet in a disastrous position. But I was hoping that the quargs would believe and perceive this maneuver as a gesture of despair by a weaker adversary.

In fact, I needed this whole simulated breakthrough thing to lead the enemy to use all their pursuit planes to repel the torpedoes that were launched from the aircraft carriers. To do that, I wanted to make the quargs believe in the possibility of a spectacular victory, to provide which they simply had to avoid the serious loss of heavy ships from the first, and probably the only, powerful torpedo strike by humans. The quargs have already seen this weapon in action and knew its strengths and weaknesses, and I was confident that they would try to maximize the use of the drone torpedoes vulnerability in their pursuit planes' attacks.

I looked at the tactical projection and I waited for the quargs to respond to the clear threat. The wave of our pursuit planes has already almost reached the enemy formation.

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