The Ajax Incursion

by Marc DeSantis

  Disappointed at this thought, Heddrik put it aside. He turned his attention to the holo that floated above his command chair on the bridge of the Arrogant. Picked out in blue icons around his ship were those of the other vessels under his command for this operation.

  Arrogant was one the largest of the ships in the group, of which there were, including the destroyer, forty-three. There was only one other vessel present that was a match for her, and that was Prideful, a destroyer of the same class as Heddrik’s own but, unfortunately, she had not been gifted with a captain the match for the one who commanded the Arrogant.

  Heddrik smiled mirthlessly. That simpleton Kesper Denisen has no business directing one of the emperor’s warships! He sighed. He would have to put up with whomever the Admiralty of the Domain Navy selected to command its ships.

  Just a few short years ago it would have been unheard of for a destroyer captain to have so many ships under his command. Not so today. With him were nineteen ships of the Deathbird-class of corvettes, and twenty-three sloops of the Gremlin-class. Like the Scourges, both classes were fresh, having only just come into service within the last five years. The emphases in their designs, like that of the Scourges, were on low-cost, ease of production, very large missile complements at the expense of other weapon systems, high speed, and the ability to rapidly jump away from trouble when it threatened.

  Crew sizes had been kept to an absolute minimum too. The extensive, and expensive, suite of cryochambers usually found on warships had been almost totally dispensed with, since the numbers of embarked crewmembers were so small that it was judged unnecessary to reduce the draw on supplies by putting excess service people into cold sleep. The Arrogant itself had barely one-third of the crew that would be found on a typical Halifaxian ship of its size. Trained personnel, always at a premium, could be deployed on a larger number of ships if crew sizes were kept small.

  At least the task of bringing Aquitaine back into the fold had been made much easier by the war that had broken out between Halifax and Tartarus. Heddrik, along with every other officer of the Domain Navy, had watched with fascination as the leading states of the Great Sphere had come to blows over the Memnon system. There was more to it than control over a single system, all agreed, but for the course of a standard year the war had largely been limited to Memnon. Both sides had signaled that they were unwilling to see the fighting spill much beyond the border systems.

  Fate was smiling on the Domain. It had so recently been roughly handled by both states, and now they were thrashing each other. Ajax’s two principal enemies would soon be mere shadows of their former selves. It could hardly have turned out any better had the emperor and his ministers planned it themselves.

  Ensign Adler again awoke Heddrik from his musings. “Prideful reports a detection and is relaying its data via tightbeam.” The forward vidscreen on the Arrogant’s bridge showed a plethora of contacts at a range of fifty thousand kilometers.

  “The Aquitainian fleet, right where we expected them to be!” Heddrik roared. “Send the targeting data to all of our ships. We’ll make this swift. I want an execution, not a battle.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  Once they had escaped from the embrace of the Domain, the Aquitainian ingrates had thrown in their lot with the Halifaxians. Most of the reconstituted Aquitainian Navy consisted of hand-me-downs from the RHN or new builds of cheaper ships of corvette-size or smaller obtained from Halifaxian yards. There were a few destroyers, but most were corvettes and sloops. Heddrik’s fleet outnumbered it two to one.

  “Launch on my command,” Heddrik said to Lieutenant Thune. He next commed to the rest of his fleet. “All ships, launch following the Arrogant’s lead.”

  There were ripples of agreement from the other captains on the Ajaxian ships. It took almost two minutes for them to divide the Aquitainian targets amongst themselves as they squabbled and bartered with one another for prey. Such target distributions would ordinarily have been handled in a fraction of a second by the shipbrains of the assembled vessels, but one of the sacrifices that the DN had to make when constructing its latest warships was the shipbrain. It had been deemed too expensive to emplace AI’s on these ships, especially when, it was left unspoken, no one expected them to last very long once a shooting war started. A competent AI would have brought many benefits, but such a system increased the final cost of a warship by roughly ten percent, the naval builders said, and that was something that the DN’s admirals felt they could do without on their lesser ships.

  “Launch missiles, lieutenant!” Heddrik ordered once the targeting issue had been resolved.

  “Aye, captain,” Thune replied. “Birds away!”

  The Deathbirds and Gremlins, like the two Scourges, were armed with a minimal outfit of guns, just a few particle cannons in single-gun turrets fore and aft. None mounted nuke-firing railcannons. These last were judged to be too short-ranged, heavy, and costly for the modern tactics that the DN sought to employ, and their ammunition was too bulky. Heddrik enjoyed bombarding enemies with the fusion weapons, but compromises sometimes had to be made.

  Hundreds of Firebird missiles tore out of their launch silos on the Ajaxian ships, lifted out by electromagnetic boosters before their nuclear engines kicked in. They sped toward the Aquitainian ships, which were heading toward Nantes, an orbital station that shared the same orbit as Pessac.

  Pessac was a lovely world with a good climate and blue oceans. Heddrik would have preferred to have turned both it and Nantes into smoking, vaporous ruins as object lessons as to what would happen to any who strayed from the Domain’s fold. The DN had said no to his proposal. The outright annihilation of civilian structures with weapons of mass destruction would be a violation of the Accords, and might, just might, bring down a very heavy response against Ajax by the other treaty states of the Sphere that were pledged to uphold them. That was to be avoided. Moreover, Pessac was too valuable as an agricultural production center, and similarly Nantes orbital as a fully functional dockyard that would be used by the DN’s ships for repair, to have them be wrecked outright. The emperor wanted Pessac back unspoiled.

  So be it. Heddrik had hidden his disappointment. The emperor’s will would be done.

  “The Aquitainians have taken evasive action and have launched a counterstrike,” Adler reported. “Forty-two Grackles en route. ETA ninety seconds.”

  “Forty-two? That’s all? So few. They seek to conserve their precious warshots,” Heddrik said. “They do not seem to understand that this will be a battle of one salvo apiece. Fools! At least they are trying to make a fight of it. Too bad for them we won’t be staying.” Heddrik keyed the fleetwide commchannel. “All ships. Well done. Time to go. Short-jump to primary rendezvous. See you there. Heddrik out.”

  “Detection! Detection!” cried Adler moments later. “Destroyer contact, four thousand kilometers aft!”

  Heddrik checked the holo that flickered above his chair. It showed a new icon, blood red, heading straight for the fleet, coming from behind. “Damn! So close! How did it get so close!”

  “Missile launch! Missile launch! Sledgehammers! Railguns firing! Thirty-six nukes on the way! ETA ten seconds!”

  “Fire back!” Heddrik’s mind raced. He’d not considered the possibility that the Aquitainians might make a surprise attack on his fleet.

  “Birds away!” Thune said in compliance. “Thirty-two Firebirds!”

  “Are there any other attackers?” Heddrik demanded.

  “No, captain,” Adler reported. “Just the one.”

  “A suicidally brave captain. We’ll give him the death he deserves.”

  “Nukes arriving!”

  The Arrogant and the other ships of the fleet sent up clouds of magnesand and fired defensive lasers at the oncoming nuclear shells. The latter were hard to spot, hard to hit, and hard to knock out, which is why they had a place on ships despite their shorter range in comparison to missiles. The close-in weapon systems of the Ajaxian ships tore apart many
, but others got through. One area that had been shortchanged on Ajax’s new-look warships had been defenses, both shields and weaponry. The lesser ships were intended to be expendable, hence the tiny crews and the lower overall cost of each unit.

  A half-dozen Ajaxian ships disappeared in blue-orange explosions as the Halifaxian atomic detonations overcame their shields. Four more erupted in puffballs of red-orange fire as the slower Sledgehammer missiles began to arrive. Ten ships gone, all taken out by a single enemy craft!

  The nature of the assassin that stalked them became clear when Adler’s sensors identified the lone attacker. “RHN destroyer, class. Designation unknown,” the ensign said.

  “A Halifaxian ship? Here?” DN Intelligence had promised Heddrik that he would be facing only Aquitainian opponents. All RHN vessels had been withdrawn from Aquitaine and other nearby systems months before to shore up the Republic’s defenses elsewhere for the war with Tartarus. Obviously, that was wrong. Yet another one of Stahl’s intelligence failures!

  Adler gasped. “Prideful. . . Prideful is sending out a distress signal. . . all hands are being ordered to abandon ship!”

  “What?”

  An explosion briefly blinded the Arrogant’s sensors and the forward vidscreen became, for a few seconds, a bright white sheet. Prideful was gone. Heddrik felt more sorrow at the loss of the destroyer than he did for Captain Denisen.

  “Four Gremlin sloops reporting severe damage,” Adler continued. “They will not be able to jump to the primary rendezvous point.”

  There was no reason to stay any longer. “What is the RHN destroyer doing?”

  “Breaking off its attack,” Adler said, relief evident in the young man’s voice. “Several of our missiles are scoring hits.”

  “Has it been destroyed?”

  “No, captain. The RHN vessel is running. Displacement envelope forming. It is transiting to hyperspace.”

  “As should we, before those Grackles get here.” Heddrik commed the fleetwide channel. “All ships, displace immediately! I repeat, displace immediately!”

  The remaining Ajaxian ships left the reality of normal space and entered into the hyperspatial dimension that allowed for faster-than-light travel. They were not inside for long. Five-and-a-half seconds later, the warships of Heddrik’s command that could still displace reemerged into realspace. He thought that he’d wait an hour, or perhaps two, before jumping back to see what his missiles had done to the Aquitainians. They must have suffered heavily from them. That had to be the case.

  In the meantime, he began to ponder how he would explain the loss of eleven ships and possibly four more to a single RHN destroyer. He decided that he’d better come up with a very good explanation.

  Chapter Two

  Aboard RHS Kestrel, Aquitaine system

  The Kestrel, a destroyer of the Republic of Halifax Navy, burst back among the stars after a short transit through hyperspace. It was damaged, having taken several hits from the cloud of antiship missiles that the Ajaxian fleet had lobbed at her. Most had missed. The ones that didn’t had not scored direct hits, and their destructive energies had been absorbed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the Kestrel’s substantial shield. The damage that they inflicted, while not mortal, nevertheless had been severe. Many of Kestrel’s systems were down, and others were on the verge of failure.

  Captain Tommasina Carey, a ferocious officer in her calmest state, was incensed that she had been chased away by a flock of crude Ajaxian war buckets. There was no chance that she could get back into the fight anytime soon. Not with Kestrel in the condition she was in. Bleeding herself, and slumped in her command chair, she called out. “Cassie?”

  “Yes, captain,” answered Kestrel’s shipbrain.

  “I want you to send out a pair of courier capsules immediately.”

  *****

  Three days after the fight with the Ajaxian fleet, two ships of the RHN, RHS Steadfast, a heavy cruiser, and RHS Kongo, a destroyer, displaced into the far reaches of the Aquitaine system. They found there a single warship, RHS Kestrel, waiting for them. Captain Carey impatiently answered their tightbeam comms of greeting as soon as they were received.

  “Glad you could finally make it,” she said as the immaterial forms of Captain Matt Heyward of Steadfast and Captain Inigo Yao of Kongo cohered as holograms beside her chair. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your beachgoing to call you back to the war.”

  Heyward raised an eyebrow almost to the top of his skull. “As if we took our time? We practically crash displaced to get here. And yes, my tan did suffer as a consequence of the rush.”

  Yao laughed. “We came as fast as we could. There was a disturbance that we had to help put down in Stone and that delayed us. The Sphinx is stirring up trouble everywhere.”

  “Well, I’d have preferred it if you had dropped everything to come find me, just for old time’s sake. This system has gone to hell in seventy-two hours,” Carey said. “Follow me. We’ll take a closer look and you can see what the barbarians of Ajax have been getting up to.”

  *****

  A half-standard day’s journey brought the three RHN ships to the extreme edge of their passive sensors’ range. The Ajaxians were mostly careless of their comm security, and were happily casting their messages to the ships of their invasion fleet, heedless that others might pick them up. The Ajaxians were not so obtuse as to send unencrypted communications, but their codes were not difficult to break, and it was possible to follow, virtually in real-time, what the Domain Navy and their Imperial Army comrades were doing.

  Pessac, the most populous planet in the Aquitaine system, had been under assault for forty-eight hours. Kestrel had escaped the battle three days before, but the Aquitainian Navy had not been fortunate. The saturation strike by hundreds of Ajaxian missiles had destroyed, based upon a computer estimate of the debris field that Kestrel had come upon when it returned, about three-quarters of its total strength. The two just-arrived captains were aghast, but were even more impressed by Carey’s own tally.

  “You took out eleven of them?” Yao said with wonder. “Not bad.”

  “Damaged a few others too, but I don’t know what became of them. I hope the Jaxers will have to scrap them. Yes, it was one of my better performances. Nabbed a destroyer by the way, though most of the rest were only sloops.”

  “Sloops that won’t be around to trouble anyone again,” Heyward pointed out. “How’d you get so close?”

  “Pure chance,” Carey said. “I was heading to Pessac to check in with the Aquitainian government. Then comms traffic burst like a dam had given way. The whole system was flooded with Ajaxian signals. An invasion was underway and their ships were pouring in. It just so happened that a mess of DN warships displaced, almost on top of me. That’s figurative, I understand, but one hundred thousand kilometers feels very close in space.”

  “One hundred thousand might as well be between your hat and your head where astronomical distances are concerned,” Yao said.

  Carey nodded. “I figured out who those jokers were, and then did a hard burn for them for close to twenty minutes. I couldn’t hit them before they had launched their weapons, and I didn’t know the Aquitainians were in the area to warn them! They were hidden by the orbital. Damn it! But I got in a good swipe before their return fire drove me off and they jumped away. I’ve been making repairs since.”

  “You must have put a real fright into them, to make them displace so quickly,” said Yao.

  Carey shook her head, her blond hair turned stark white in the reciprocal hologram that appeared before each of the other captains on the bridges of their own ships. “It wasn’t me. They were forming their displacement bubbles almost as soon as they let their birds go.”

  “One salvo and then ditch?” Heyward asked. “Doesn’t sound like the DN.

  “No it doesn’t,” Carey agreed. “They usually like to duke things out. Not this time. And the fleet consisted only of destroyers and below them in mass.”

  Yao was
skeptical. “Nothing even something remotely heavy, like a light cruiser?”

  “None. I tagged and identified every ship they had. The battleship and cruisers are occupied leading the assault carriers to Pessac.”

  “There must be a million soldiers between all of the troopships that Ajax has sent here,” Heyward mused. “They want Aquitaine back bad.”

  “Those savages lost it fair and square,” Carey insisted, alluding to the Aquitainian national uprising that had ejected the Ajaxians two decades before.

  “I think that we’re going to have to fight for it, Tommasina,” Heyward consoled. “And considering their numbers, we’re not going to be able to get the Jaxers out of here anytime soon.”

  An angry groan escaped from Carey. “These jerks are going to feast on anything we don’t have the numbers to protect!”

  “We’ll be back,” Heyward promised. “The Domain won’t own this system forever. They’ll have their hands full trying to take Pessac and hold it. The rest of the planets will resist too.”

  “Understood,” Carey said, gazing unhappily at the holo depicting the descent of dozens of Ajaxian orbital craft to the surface of Pessac. For the unfortunate people of the besieged planet, that day of relief and liberation would probably be a long time in coming.

  *****

  Aboard Cawnpore, in orbit above Pessac, Aquitaine system

  Heddrik felt like a schoolboy called to the headmaster’s office. Admiral Timoth Ronner had summoned him to his flagship to account for his actions. He had nothing to be ashamed of. That is what he kept telling himself.

  “Eleven ships destroyed and four so severely damaged that they will not be worth repairing. Total write-offs,” Ronner snarled as he slammed the data tablet to his desk. They were in his ready room aboard the Cawnpore, a battleship of the Miramar-class. Heddrik had his sights set on the captain’s chair of one of these hulking vessels, each of which was commendably named for one of the Domain’s greatest destructions of recalcitrant foreign targets. There was nothing in the Domain Navy that was more coveted by the members of its officer corps. Such massive and expensive ships were precious and scarce in the modern DN, and only the best, most accomplished officers ever got to command one. Ronner had made it his flagship when the Aquitainian Reconquest Operation had been conceived by the Domain’s Admiralty.