He could order the squadron to run, of course. A simple change in warp coordinates, and his ships would be on their way to the Memphis System, nine warp-hours away. All civilian ships capable of warp transit had already fled, but the eleven million civilians still on the planet would be at the mercy of the Lampreys. The admiral shook his head minutely and let his orders stand.
Transition.
Elba found himself surrounded by the dead. Hundreds of solemn figures looked at him, and he found it difficult to meet their steady gazes, in no small part because he recognized every face he saw. They were the crew of the Charlotte and the other ships of CRURON 56. All of whom had been alive and well when the squadron had entered warp space. He was overwhelmed with the certainty those ghosts came from the near future. They were all going to die. And they were going to die at his hands.
Emergence.
It took a few seconds to recover. The admiral shook off the disconcerting vision – They’re only hallucinations, he sternly told himself – and oversaw the preparations for the battle to come. The monitor squadron moved closer to support his ships and the cruiser squadron rearranged its formation to provide fire lanes for the STL ships and orbital fortresses. When the Lampreys began their slow and ponderous final approach, they would get a warm reception.
“Emergence! Half a light second away!”
“What? Are they insane?”
Lampreys – like all other Starfarer species – took far longer to recover from warp transit than humans. The enemy fleet had arrived at ideal combat range, and the crews of those ships would be incapacitated for as long as thirty seconds. Automated systems could only do so much – true artificial intelligence was not only frowned upon, but turned out to be even more vulnerable to warp space than biological sophonts. Usually the best a ship could do upon emergence was to fire a volley of missiles in the general direction of a target. And even capital ships didn’t have enough launch tubes to make such a volley count for much.
These dreadnoughts and battleships were different.
Even as CRURON 56 and the planetary defenders began to fire on the invaders, Admiral Elba peered closely at the alien ships, now that they were close enough for a full sensor scan. Their outlines bulged with box launchers everywhere; they vomited a massive missile volley upon emergence, each ship unleashing as many salvos as a dozen normal ones. Traveling at 0.01 c, that swarm of ship-killers would reach the squadron in less than a minute.
“Divert all fire to point defense!” Elba ordered. Every ship and orbital platform stopped targeting the Viper ships and turned their guns against the unexpected onslaught. CRURON 56 could have handled an ordinary volley from an enemy fleet that size, three to four thousand missiles. Point defense emplacements on the Charlotte alone could destroy twenty missiles per second at the current range. The rest of his ships were somewhat less capable, but their combined fire would reduce four thousand ‘vampires’ to a mere handful that couldn’t hope to inflict much damage.
Fifty thousand missiles were headed towards Melendez-Four and its defenders.
They did their best. Main and secondary guns shifted their aim and went into rapid-fire mode, risking their tubes and energy modules in a desperate bid for survival. Their laser and graviton charges were grossly overpowered for the job, but their accuracy was just as good as the lighter point-defense weapons. Every missile Elba’s ships and the planetary defenses had at hand were hastily reprogrammed to intercept their counterparts and launched. For fifty seconds, starships, monitors, fortresses and planetary defense bases threw everything they had against the impossibly-massive barrage.
At T-minus-thirty seconds, nineteen thousand missiles were left. At T-minus-ten, as the swarm began to converge, presenting better targets, only two thousand remained.
Post-battle calculations estimated some seven hundred and fifty missiles struck CRURON 56 and the orbital defense units.
Charlotte heaved under multiple impacts. Her warp shields swallowed several missiles, but others – too many others – targeted her unprotected sectors, breaching her ordinary force fields and armored hull. Entire compartments were emptied into space or engulfed in plasma fires; the ship shook like a beast in pain. Elba slammed against the harness securing him to the command chair; the impact knocked the breath out of him. Lights flickered for a moment before stabilizing again. His imp dispassionately ran the fleet’s damage reports as quickly as they were generated.
All the fortresses and monitors were gone; unprotected by warp shields, they’d been easy prey despite their heavy conventional defenses. Of the light ships, only one badly-damaged frigate remained. A light cruiser had been destroyed outright. The Charlotte and the rest of the survivors were all damaged but functional, for whatever that was worth. The admiral had some cracked ribs; two of the tactical center’s specialists were down, one of them badly injured, but everyone else was fit for duty.
The Lampreys had plenty of time to recover from warp transit; they began advancing steadily as their beam weapons engaged the survivors of the overwhelming salvo.
Elba was faced with a simple choice: CRURON 56 could stand and die, inflicting negligible losses on the enemy, or it could flee.
No.
A third solution suggested itself.
“Attention all ships,” he announced. “Cease fire. Divert all offensive power toward force field generation. Prepare for warp transit.” Elba transmitted the coordinates directly to the squadron’s warp navigators; they would be the only ones who would know with certainty what was about to happen. All of them understood the situation, and all of them acknowledged the orders without protest. He allowed himself a moment of pride in them. Twenty seconds went by as the enemy ships fired on the silent squadron. Most of the hits were absorbed by the ships’ warp shields; the rest didn’t inflict enough damage to stop Elba’s plan.
“It’s been an honor serving with y’all. Engage.”
CRURON 56 performed the first warp ramming maneuver in known galactic history.
Five ships entered warp space. The lone frigate tried to follow and died in the attempt, preceding the rest of the squadron’s demise by a brief instant.
Each vessel appeared in the path of a Lhan Arkh capital ship. With closure speeds in excess of three hundred kilometers per second and total surprise, there was no chance of avoiding a collision. The American cruisers’ warp shields devoured huge chunks of the Lampreys’ vessels as they ran into each other. That didn’t save the attackers, however. The catastrophic explosions unleashed as each Lamprey warship was destroyed flowed over their shields and onto the unprotected sections of the American ships, consuming them in turn. The Lamprey dreadnoughts and one battleship were destroyed outright. Two others were crippled by near misses.
During his final foray into warp-space, Rear Admiral Elba saw the dead nod at him approvingly.
Earth, Sol System, 163 AFC
“The surviving Lhan Arkh vessels withdrew without finishing their attack run on Melendez-Four, which still retained its planetary defense bases,” Admiral DuPont said as he concluded the report. “There has been no additional enemy activity in the system since then. Given their losses, coupled with the ones sustained at the Battle of Paulus, the Lampreys have been neutralized for at least a year, possibly more. Most of their capital ships in this sector are gone, and their other fleets cannot be reassigned without risking attack from their neighbors. They haven’t been quite reduced to a frigate navy, but it’s close, and it will take them time to rebuild.”
White House Chief of Staff Tyson Keller had always thought kamikaze tactics were for losers, in every sense of the word. CRURON 56 had made their sacrifice count, though. They had saved some ten million people, and given those left behind extra time to hide and hope the Lampreys didn’t find them right away when they finally came back. Long-term, however, exchanging a cruiser squadron for three dreadnoughts and a battleship was not worth it. The ETs could replace those hulls and even their crews faster than the US could.
Even worse, the suicide run was the kind of trick that only worked that well once. The JCs figured that the easiest way to deal with warp-ramming was to keep some thrust power in reserve to perform radical maneuvers the moment a close warp emergence was detected, allowing the target to ‘dodge’ the kamikazes. The end result would be a loss of five to ten percent available power for the enemy, which would lower the chance to ram by over sixty percent, after which the wannabe suicide ship would be a sitting duck with a survival time measured in seconds.
All things considered, however, Tyson couldn’t condemn the squadron commander’s choice. Elba had sacrificed his command to save millions of civilians. They had lain down their lives between their people and the desolation of war. That’s what it all came down to in the end.
“Thank you, Admiral. Keep us appraised.”
President Albert P. Hewer terminated the conference call, leaving him alone with Keller in the new and improved Oval Office, located in the District of Nebraska, a patch of marginal farmland that had become the capital of the United Stars of America.
“We can speak freely,” Hewer said to his second-hand man. “Just lowered the Cone of Silence.” Both men were just old enough – they’d both celebrated their two hundredth birthdays a good while ago – to chuckle at the joke.
“Yes, sir, Mister Presidente Vitalicio, sir,” Tyson said as he poured himself a drink.
“That gag got stale decades ago, Ty.”
“I’ll keep making it as long as you keep running for reelection.”
“Just to keep me on my toes?”
“Just to remind you this wasn’t supposed to be an Eternal Administration. The Puppies chose to help the US, not North Korea.”
“You know how it goes. Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” Another joke only pre-Contact Ancients would get.
“Heh. You had to quote the worst Godfather movie of the bunch.” Tyson shrugged. “I know all your excuses by heart, Al. ‘Nobody else can do the job.’ ‘Look at the pack of idiots vying for the White House.’ ‘After this crisis is over, I’ll retire – but, wait, here’s another crisis.’”
“I almost quit after we settled the Risshah’s hash. Then the Crabs tried to fill the void they left. And after they’d been taught their lesson, along came the Horde. The Gremlins, may they all burn in Hell. And so on and so forth. And now it’s the Lampreys, Vipers and the Goddamn Galactic Imperium. You really want to switch horses in the middle of this shitstorm? We may lose the war before the next election anyhow. We don’t do posthumous swearing-in ceremonies.”
“You don’t sound too optimistic,” Tyson said. He’d been to the same briefings as the President, and he knew the situation wasn’t just terrible, it was close to completely hopeless. But the one good thing about Al was that the man had no quit in him. To hear him spout defeatist crap was worrisome.
“We’re stretched too thin,” Hewer said. “We don’t have the manpower and production capacity. A little under two billion of us, counting immigrants and probationary citizens and every living being that will salute the flag, plus two billion Pan-Asians and about two billion from everyone else, mostly from Africa. There’re still less humans in the galaxy than before First Contact. Even with the longevity treatments helping things along. It’s depressing.”
“We’re about due for a population explosion,” Tyson pointed out. “People are finally figuring out the kinks of being able to live for centuries. Now, they save enough money to take twenty years off, raise a litter of kids, then go back to the grind. We’re going to double in size in about a generation, and double every thirty years of so after that.”
“But we don’t have a generation. Each member of the Tripartite Galactic Alliance can outgun and out-produce us, let alone as a group. This time, we get to play Imperial Japan during the Second Big Mess; it doesn’t matter how good we are if they can bury us in bodies. Or starships, in this case. Especially if they come up with new tricks for a change. Those missile ships are bad news. They play straight into their strengths. Ton by ton, a missile is more expensive than a starship; that volley they fired at those poor bastards at Melendez cost more than the fleet that launched them. They can afford the expense, though. It’s just the kind of stunt we used to pull back when we were the industrial powerhouse of the world. Spend a million bucks to put a smart bomb through some poor dumb bastard’s window. Except now we’re the poor dumb bastards.”
“So you’re telling me we turned the US into a banana republic for nothing.”
“Not a banana republic, an unofficial parliamentary monarchy. Temporarily. We’ve kept the trappings of a republic and I aim to see the republic restored after we’re secure. Assuming we live that long. And no, I’m not surrendering. I just don’t know if we can win this one.”
“You never know, Al. Vegas odds were that the Snakes were going to eat our lunch, and we made them extinct. We’ve always been the underdog and we’ve done pretty well despite that.”
“Not like this. Even with the Wyrms weighing in on our side, the numbers look terrible. And the Wyrms will quit on us as soon as things get tough. They know they can negotiate their way out of this. We can’t. The Days of Infamy made it clear they don’t want a few concessions from us, or even to reduce us to client status. They want us gone from the galaxy, root and branch.”
“Then we need to get the Puppies on board.”
“They have agreed to help out: lots of supplies, all ‘sold’ to us with insanely generous credit terms, and a few extra ships, some of them crewed by ‘volunteers.’ Figure an extra ten percent in firepower, twenty in logistics. Not enough. The House of Royals at the Doghouse is evenly divided, and the High King has decided to stay officially neutral, for now. He’ll slip us as much aid as he can without provoking a declaration of war from the triple assholes, but that’s about it. It won’t make a difference.”
“There is the Langley Project. That’s just about ready.”
Even as he spoke, Tyson knew he was whistling in the dark. Langley was a ‘super-weapon’ project that looked good enough to fast-track, but that didn’t mean much. Ordinarily, he’d have considered it a waste of time and money: the resources spent in developing and fielding new weapon systems could have produced a lot more ordinary, tried-and-true ships, missiles and the logistics necessary to keep them running. Problem was, they couldn’t match their enemies’ production capacity no matter what. Their only hope was to try to come up with some innovation that would overcome the ETs’ numerical and industrial superiority.
And who tried to do just that, historically? The Confederacy, with the CSS Virginia and those suicide subs. The Germans in WW2, with all their Wunderwaffe collection. And what did all that inventiveness get them? A big steaming pile of nothing.
Of course, he reminded himself, in those same wars the winners had also come with a few new toys of their own. Toys like the USS Monitor, or Fat Man and Little Boy. But the winning side had also fielded the most battalions and ships. If you went by past history, the US was screwed.
Guess we’ll have to make our own history.
“Yep. Langley is coming on line,” Al said, sounding about as enthusiastic as Tyson felt. “Going to take at least a couple of years to fully implement. A year minimum for any kind of deployment, and those new gizmos will be crewed by newbies, with zero combat experience. As likely to get slaughtered as to make a difference. Same with all our other tricks. I don’t know if we can produce enough new gadgets, not in time to turn the tide.”
“So we buy some time.”
“We will try. You heard what the JCS had to say. A few good ideas, but most of them are long shots. The biggest thing going for us is that the Tripartite Alliance isn’t coordinating worth a damn. Each bunch is making its own push into our star systems, and the Imperium has been downright halfhearted so far. And the sad thing is, each separate push might be strong enough to steamr
oll us.”
“We play the hand we were dealt, Al. We put it to the touch.”
“To win or lose it all. Yeah, maybe I should use Montrose’s Toast during the next State of the Union address. That’ll cost the Eagle Party a dozen seats in the midterms. People are getting risk averse in their old age. Nobody wants to hear the ‘lose it all’ part. I sure don’t.”
“Buck up, Al.”
The President looked him in the eye. “We’re going down fighting, Ty. But I think we’re going down.” He shuddered, despair clearly written on his homely features. “Not that I’ll let it show when I’m out in public. Never let them see you sweat. And who knows? Maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”
Tyson shrugged. That would have to do; Al was getting punch-drunk with the steady stream of bad news coming from every direction, but he would fake it till he made it, and that should be enough for now. Tyson would keep doing his job, of course. There were a few surrender-monkeys in Congress that needed to go, for one. Luckily one of them was into child porn and most of the others had been feathering their nests for a good while. He’d had files on them for a little while and been waiting for the need to use them. Removing those assholes wouldn’t even require any wet work. His people in the press would take them down in quick succession, and that would encourage the others not to obstruct the new war plans.
It was going to get ugly, both internally and externally. Wars to the knife were like that.
One
New Parris, Star System Musik, 164 AFC
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 34