The Odin was a smoothly-run vessel; its crew had been hand-picked and consisted of experienced officers and chiefs as well as top-rated enlisted personnel. The crew had spent a year of intensive training, including a six-month shakedown cruise months before Kerensky had assumed command of the fleet. The ship had not seen combat yet, however. Neither had many of the new vessels in Seventh Fleet. Their baptism of fire would occur when they confronted the Galactic Imperium armadas currently resting and refitting inside Wyrashat space while the former US ally negotiated its exit from the war.
Losing the Wyrms had been a foregone conclusion after the disastrous defeat at Drakul System. It had taken four months and two more major space actions before the Wyrashat had thrown in the towel, and even now they were drawing out the peace talks, buying humanity a little extra time. Given that the only alternative to surrender would have been to join humanity on the chopping block, nobody could blame them.
Despite their best diplomatic efforts, the Wyrms were going to pay a heavy price for fighting alongside the US. Word was that the peace accords would require them to surrender several strategic systems, although that deal had been supposedly sweetened by getting other disputed systems back. Regardless, they would have to demilitarize their border with the Imperium and provide logistical support for its fleets as they proceeded towards human space. Considering the two polities had been enemies long before Earth’s First Contact, this was a disaster for the Wyrashat.
Kerensky could sympathize with them, but only to a degree. The dragon-like aliens faced a loss of political power or, at worst, the prospect of being absorbed into the multi-species Imperium. Either possibility was a damn sight better than what the Gimps had in store for humankind.
The admiral set the gloomy thoughts aside and concentrated on the task at hand, even if it was little more than a morale-building exercise as well as a dog and pony show for the embedded press corps. Odin began a slow pass around the arrayed ships of his new command. Seventh Fleet was the largest and most powerful formation ever fielded by the United Stars of America, and they stood proudly for inspection.
At its core were the flagship and two other brand-new Pantheon-class superdreadnoughts, the largest warships built by human hands. Three kilometers long and bristling with weaponry, the massive vessels exuded menace. Their six main gun batteries, each featuring a quartet of 42-inch graviton cannon, gave them nearly twice the firepower of any other US capital vessel. Its secondary batteries were comprised of four relatively light 10-inchers apiece, but there were forty of them spread evenly on the dreadnought’s surface. Those hundred and sixty cannon were configured for rapid fire and very precise targeting: their primary purpose was to shoot down incoming missiles and the fast-attack ships the enemy would use to threaten their flanks; at close range they also would do a fine job of pecking their way through any enemy vessel’s shields and armor.
The superdreadnoughts’ own force fields and armored double hulls made them quite capable of exchanging broadsides with any Starfarer warship even without the array of overlapping warp shields that made them nearly impervious to most weapons. Kerensky’s warrior side was looking forward to testing his Pantheon-class warships against the Imperium’s larger counterparts; in a one-on-one fight, he was certain the human super-dreds would prevail. The more sensible part of him knew that the enemy was fielding dozens of capital ships for every one of his. There would be nothing approaching a fair fight in the dark days ahead.
Seven battleships, looking stunted by comparison, stood around their larger counterparts. They were older designs, a mere twelve hundred meters long, but their sixteen 30-inch guns were still worthy of respect. Like the new ship classes, their secondary armament had been reconfigured to better deal with the devastating missile swarms the enemy was sure to employ. The combined tonnage and throw weight of the fleet’s ten capital ships put to shame Fifth Fleet’s heavies.
And I must prove myself a better commander than I was then.
Impressive as the big-gun ships were, they were doomed to be outclassed by the fleet’s Carrier Strike Groups. They comprised three Enterprise-class fleet carriers, each as large as a battleship, and fifteen light carriers. Their total complement of four hundred and sixty-eight War Eagle warp fighters made this the largest concentration of the new wonder weapons ever assembled. One third of the fliers were crewed by newly-minted Navy pilots; the rest were Marines. Finding enough pilots – more replacements were about to arrive, giving him some five hundred War Eagles in total – had required tremendous effort, and a great deal of corner-cutting in training time. Some of that had been patched over with increasing doses of the chemical cocktail colloquially-known as Melange, from some old pre-Contact fairy tale. Knowing those new pilots would be heavily dosed with poorly-understood drugs was worrisome, but the stakes involved made the gamble necessary.
When you considered each of those dinky little fighters carried a 20-inch naval gun and could engage targets at spitting distance with closely-coordinated volleys, the superdreadnoughts didn’t sound very impressive by comparison. Kerensky had studied warp fighter operations very closely, and he’d come up with a few ideas on how to use them for this campaign. Carrier-based spacecraft would win the battles ahead, if anything could.
Thirty battlecruisers, fifty destroyers, twelve frigates and twenty assault ships completed the battle array. He’d refused to take any light cruisers and only two squadrons of frigates; the latter were meant to serve only as scouts, support-vessel escorts, or couriers. The antiquated models simply lacked the firepower and defenses to survive the Sun-Blotter missile swarms the enemy had developed as a counter to the American’s warp advantages. They didn’t have a place in space actions.
Half of the destroyers belonged to the new Aegis-class, hardy missile killers. The rest had been refitted to serve the same purpose. The battlecruisers were a compromise between firepower, armor, and cost: their main virtue lay in being cheaper to produce than battleships, which meant more could be built. The US just didn’t have the industrial capacity to do better, and their firepower was about two-thirds as great at a battleship, for half the cost and one third the survivability. Hammer-wielding eggshells, in other words, and their losses would reflect that.
Some Navy luminaries had decried the resources spent on the Pantheon-class superdreadnoughts, figuring the nation could use a larger number of smaller warships – or even better, more carriers. Kerensky agreed with them to some degree, especially in regards to carriers. The problem there was twofold: fighters were, pound by pound, far more expensive than capital ships and, more importantly, training pilots took a great deal of time. He already feared the Navy had made too many compromises in their mad rush to match the Marines’ longer-lived program.
Second Fleet, the final reserve force, had been saddled with the rejected light vessels, which were being refitted as quickly as the shipyards on Earth and Wolf 1061 could do the work. Hopefully those jury-rigged warships wouldn’t be needed at all. Of course, if Second Fleet deployed, that would mean Seventh had fallen and Kerensky wouldn’t be around to see how well his successors would do.
The unglamorous but indispensable support and supply ships, fifty-four in number, rounded up Seventh Fleet’s number to one hundred and ninety-four vessels of all classes. Over a third of a million Spacers and Marines would sail and fight those ships. Win or lose, many of those men and women would not come back from this cruise. It was Kerensky’s job to make sure their sacrifice mattered.
He watched his forces as the Odin flew by, clustered together in a tight review formation, where distances could be measured in meters rather than thousands of kilometers. During actual operations, the fleet would spread out over a radius of half a light second or more, arranged into a vertical ‘wall of battle.’ Space warfare was waged over vast distances, made possible only through technological aids that shrunk everything into images and diagrams the human mind could process. In the flag bridge’s holotank display, those vessels would ap
pear as closely-spaced icons, belying the reality of tiny beacons in the dark, fighting alone for the most part. Seeing those gleaming hulls in real life was a rare luxury, and meant mostly for the benefit of the civilians at home, who even after doing a few years in uniform understood little of the way things really worked.
A side-window in Kerensky’s field of vision displayed personnel files, providing quick summaries about the officers aboard any ship he looked at. He’d reviewed those before, but it was always nice to match faces and ships, to serve as a reminder of the man or woman in charge of a given vessel, squadron or combat group. That would help give him a sense of who to send off on independent missions, who to hold back for a determined defense, and who to unleash for an all-out attack. Many of them were officers who had served under or alongside him in previous assignments. Most of them brought back fond memories; those who didn’t appeared to have mended their ways at some point in their careers. Every command slot was filled with people who had seen combat and given a good accounting of themselves.
As it should be, Kerensky thought proudly. The US Space Navy had been dominated by fighting officers from its inception, and a century and a half of continuous conflict had kept it that way. One didn’t get very far in the Senior Service without direct experience in its primary purpose: to engage the enemies of the Republic in battle. That wasn’t all to the good, of course: the Navy had an institutional disdain for ‘bean counting’ that had resulted in often severe deficiencies in logistics and administration. Computers helped remedy some of this, but gifted bureaucrats who lacked the stomach for combat soon discovered they couldn’t rise very high in the ranks and left for greener pastures. For all that, the admiral was convinced that it was a far better state of affairs than what would result from having remfies in control.
He found very little to complain about: the fleet was in fine fettle. His superiors had given him everything he could reasonably expect to do his job. The job might still be beyond anyone’s power to accomplish, but he was sailing into battle with the full support of the United Stars of America.
One of the many pre-Contact quotes that Admiral Carruthers was so fond of spouting came to mind:
“It is the function of the Navy to carry the war to the enemy so that it is not fought on US soil.”
Chester W. Nimitz’s words summarized his mission perfectly.
* * *
Transition.
Gus and his Fourth Squadron buddies played pool and drank beer in a virtual lounge while the rest of Seventh Fleet shivered alone in warp space.
Sure, the beer wasn’t real, but it tasted just like the real thing. The shared illusion was better than the best virtual reality system money could buy. In some ways, it was better than the real thing; they could get blotto in the world their minds created, but as soon as they left warp space they’d be perfectly sober.
Gus hadn’t experimented much with the ability to dream up stuff inside warp space, but what little he’d seen made him wonder if staying there for good wouldn’t be preferable to what awaited him in the real world.
Maybe this is where we go after we die.
A Heaven where you could create your own reality sounded pretty good to him. On the other hand, a lot of people thought that going into warp involved tip-toeing around the gates of Hell. He wouldn’t be surprised if both were true.
There were limits to the shared dreams, though. ‘Creating’ inanimate stuff was easy enough, especially if a bunch of pilots joined forces and concentrated on the same thing. The lounge and all its contents were just about perfect. When it came down to living things, though…
About three seconds after warp fighter pilots had discovered they could control what they experienced while in null-space, somebody had tried to call up a virtual girlfriend to spend some quality time with. Rumor was that the pioneering Marine in question had used a popular VR-porn star for inspiration.
The results had been… suboptimal.
Dreaming up objects and places was okay. Anything alive seemed to attract the attention of the Foos, however. The porn star had supposedly turned into a monster at the worst possible time. The jarhead had managed to escape with his life, but he ended up quitting Aviation and going back into Infantry. The story had spread around, reinforced by similar experiences. A couple other pilots had vanished in transit, and the general consensus was that they hadn’t been as lucky as the leatherneck.
Don’t try to dream up living things. A simple rule, and as important as remembering to check your suit seals before going extra-vehicular into hard vacuum. Friends, family, or even a beloved pet could turn on you; those illusions opened a door the Foos could use to drop by for a most unwelcome visit.
All of which lent a little more weight to the theory that this was Hell.
“Your shot, Bingo.”
His mind wasn’t on the game; he sank the eight-ball, to the amusement of all.
“Oh, well,” he said, letting a couple other guys have the table; he grabbed another beer instead. It tasted just like the first time he’d actually enjoyed downing a cold one, as opposed to just drinking to be part of the group. It brought back memories of baseball games while on leave at home, of the familiar green-blue skies on New Maryland-Two, of feeling at peace. He loved the Navy, but he loved the idea of going home even more. When the war was over, he’d take off the uniform for good. Get a job flying something, if he could: National Guard if he still had any fight left in him, or a civvie trash-hauler otherwise.
For a moment, he pictured home so vividly it was like he was already there. His parents’ house, looking just like it had the last time he’d gone to visit them. The front door opened and he stepped inside eagerly, knowing they’d be waiting for him. He smiled and…
“Watch it, Bingo.”
Grinner Genovisi was behind him. Her voice snapped him out of his daze as if she’d poured a glass of ice-cold water over his head. They were still on the front porch of the family house, the sky of New Maryland-Two shimmering under the brightness of its white sun.
“What..? Where...?”
“You were about to say hi to your parents,” Commander Genovisi said. “Except they wouldn’t be your parents. They might have looked like them at first, but not for long.”
“Shit.”
They were back in the lounge a moment later, but an empty version. Grinner’s doing, Gus figured. The witch wanted some alone time with him.
“You’ve been warned about this,” she told him. “You let your mind wander in warp, and it will take you places you won’t like. You have to focus on the same thing everyone is picturing, or you’ll drift off and get in trouble. Either that, or stay in the dark for the duration of the trip. A lot of pilots do just that. It’s a lot safer.”
“I hear you,” he said, mostly meaning it. It was hard not being angry at her, at her know-it-all attitude, but he knew that if she hadn’t stopped him something would have happened. Probably nothing permanent: a bad scare, maybe, a nightmare realistic enough to leave him shaken for a while. But there was always a chance that a Foo would have shown up.
A chance he wouldn’t have come out of warp at all, in other words.
“Fucking sucks,” he said.
“That it does. Whatever this place is, it’s full of things that don’t like us. I’ve been trying to figure it out for years and I still have no idea what it all means.”
“The Foos, you mean.”
Grinner grimaced; she didn’t like the word. “Make fun of Warplings all you want. Just don’t forget they aren’t a joke.”
Gus shrugged. “Thanks for pulling me out of there. I’ll be more careful.”
“I hope so.”
He was still pissed off, at her or the universe. Or maybe at both.
Capricorn System, 167 AFC
King-Admiral Grace Under Pressure watched the emerging American fleet while hope warred with the despondent morass that had been her constant companion since her flotilla’s ignominious retreat from Wyrashat spa
ce.
Since her battered formation had arrived at Capricorn, the local defenders – one cruiser and two destroyer squadrons – had been joined by the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’s Grand Fleet. The wordy title was hardly fitting to the reality, unfortunately: four battleships, eighteen battlecruisers and twenty-four frigates, all near-obsolete cast-offs from the US Navy or even older Hrauwah models, imperfectly refitted to satisfy human life support needs. She had been in no position to begrudge them, however. Along with the remains of the HEF and the system’s twenty STL planetary monitors, those ships were the only forces guarding the gateway to human space, a gateway accessible to both the Lhan Arkh and the Imperium. Having seen a much larger fleet fall before the Imperium, she had feared the worst.
For once, the worst had not come to pass: the Wyrashat’s gallant, doomed resistance had kept the Gal-Imps from arriving before Seventh Fleet. The largest collection of vessels humankind had ever sent into battle was in place, ready to fight.
The data was impressive enough. The sight of the American superdreadnoughts emerging into normal space was awe-inspiring. Smaller than the Imperium capital ships they might be, but the discrepancy in firepower and defense was much narrower, and when you added warp shields that rendered most direct energy attacks harmless, the difference vanished altogether. The Hrauwah Royal Navy would have to combine half of its formations to put together a fleet as impressive as this one.
The humans have outstripped us in a mere century and a half.
There was pride in that thought, but an equal amount of worry. How long would it be before the Kingdom went from being an American friend and potential ally to a mere client? The seizure of Xanadu System gave the US a border with the Hrauwah, something that hadn’t been the case ever since the realignment that had left Earth to her own devices after First Contact. If humanity survived this conflict and some evil circumstance put the United Stars at odds with the Hrauwah Kingdom, she doubted her people would prevail.
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