Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  “I also believe time is of the essence. Every cycle that goes by gives the Plague more time to develop more tactics, weapons and perhaps even develop new strategies to rid the universe of us. I am not so sure we should wait very long to resume our fight with them. I think we need to keep attacking them even if it is just hit-and-run raids to keep the actual intelligences helping them off balance and trying to deal with too many variables at once.

  “I could be wrong in all of this, but this has been pushing its way to my conscious mind for a few cycles now.”

  I stared at him while I replayed what he had said on my implant. I remembered what I’d said when we were just spooling up to deal with the Plague about asymmetrical warfare and realized while I’d sold it to the Confederation as a tactic we had stopped using it in favour of more conventional set-piece battles and this last one had been particularly damaging to us. When we got back to Mother of Glory I was going to assemble my best tactics gurus and review everything we had on guerrilla tactics and come up with a two-pronged strategy where I could employ both kinds of tactics in the next major battle. In the meantime, we were going to cut them four ways: long, deep, wide and often.

  Livid and its three companions had been following along behind us, and I finally decided to sit somewhere with them and have a talk. I asked Rusty and Elaine to stay, and we found a small room off the galley where we could get a snack and have a private conversation. When we had settled, I looked at Livid and asked, “Tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out and don’t gloss over or embellish anything.

  It began by apologizing for its arrogance back aboard Thermopylae when I’d kicked the squids out of my fleet. Then it got right to the point. I watched Blue Point and Long Arm as Livid described what it found when it returned to the Squid Ark. The Squid council had pardoned all of the rebels and had released them into the population. The rebels had immediately repaid the gesture by taking over the Ark except for the command deck and the engineering sections. Mother of Righteous Anger, the larger of the Squid’s motherships and focus of their military endeavours, was being pressured to sabotage our combined fleet efforts to eradicate the Plague and caved to the pressure when the rebels on the Ark threatened the largely civilian population.

  This was how Boss and his cronies were able to get assigned to the one mega-freighter under control of the Squids that hadn’t already joined the fleet for the main push against the mega-swarm. The course to rendezvous with the Squid contingent was already laid in on the navigation system, they simply needed to engage the drives and go. Everything else was automated.

  The mega-freighter’s commander sensed a problem and was able to reprogram the navigation system to emerge from FTL under the swarm and launch its load of missiles. The odd scattering of the missiles at launch, the subsequent ramming of a globe ship trio and the final destruction of the freighter occurred when the rebels, not knowing the new drive and navigation systems tried to retake control of the ship after killing most of the crew to capture the command deck. The ship’s commander managed to barricade itself in the engineering spaces and initiate the self destruct sequence before it was overcome by the rebels and the ship exploded.

  The commander was able to destroy the ship’s communications suite after sending its personal log to the Squid fleet, preventing the rebels from sending their information on FTL engineering to the rebels on board one of the trios in the mega-swarm. The commander included a complete report on the rebel Squid activities since they boarded its ship and only regretted it hadn’t discovered the treachery early enough to have prevented the disaster.

  I stared hard at Livid, then asked, “What is the stance of your leadership now?”

  “They are embarrassed by being caught and very angry with me for helping the rest of the Confederation and siding with you. I’ve been disowned by my clan and my three colleagues with me. We are under pain of death, even Escargot if we try to return. We have nowhere to go and beg you to please let us rejoin you and try to make amends.”

  “I’ll have to discuss it with my staff and talk to the elders. In the meantime, you will stay here, and all of you will be under constant supervision and surveillance at all times.”

  I’d commed Ewan McFarrel earlier and had set up a relay so he could hear everything that was said in the meeting. When I asked him to come to the room where we were, he must have been hovering right outside because the hatch opened immediately and he strode in.

  I told him, “Ewan, you are in charge of these three and their client. If the conditions warrant it, you can kill them.

  I turned back to Livid to see from its colours it had understood and had accepted its fate. It said, “We will work to repair all we can and hope someday to restore the trust you once placed in us. Thank you, Jason.”

  I asked Rusty, “Do you have anything you can assign these four to that will help with the projects you and I have been discussing concerning AI?”

  “Yes, he replied, “I have several tests they can perform, and it would be helpful if they turned their attention to helping the group here currently researching the various forms of locomotion being proposed for drones after the war.”

  “Good, please brief them and provide in writing what their goals and limits are before we head back to MoG in two cycles.”

  30

  Ginger

  OUR SCOUTS LOCATED SOME SMALL swarms coming outward along the galactic arm between five and six light-kilocycles from Terra and the mega-swarm. They were on different paths than the previous swarms we’ve intercepted, their current course would have them pass Terra by a wide margin—several light-kilocycles towards galactic centre. Knowing that if and when they detected radiation from Terra, they would likely move our way; we didn’t want them linking up with the swarms that remained from our battle with the mega-swarm. Those swarms were cannibalizing themselves and wouldn’t be able to rebuild until they reached the Kuiper Belt if even then.

  We were currently heading for the nearest and sent scouts ahead to team up with those already tracking them. We would be in striking range in less than a cycle now and began to deploy to our attack positions. We planned to make three passes at them with our armoured freighters which would be spaced farther apart than the last time we used this tactic. They would drop out of FTL in different places and different times so the Plague would have no way to predict where to concentrate their fire.

  This swarm was in a hollow cylinder formation. We planned to fly through the middle of it on our first approach, then use different formations on the final two approaches before pulling back and deploying our AI Swift Fangs and bombers. Our bombers would concentrate on picking off targets of opportunity on the outside of the remaining swarm while the Swift Fangs went after the globe ship trio.

  As we were planning this mission, we opted to send three small flotillas spaced two and three cycles apart while one large fleet train shadowed the swarm out of detection range. When each flotilla had shot its magazines dry they would rendezvous with the fleet train to rearm, then the three flotillas would make a final attack together five cycles later before returning to Terra. The same tactics would be used on the other two swarms at ten cycle intervals before we started all over again, assuming there were any survivors after the first missions. As we complete each fire mission, the escorts and fleet train would move ahead of the swarm survivors and if the swarm remained on course would sow the space ahead of them it DJ-3s.

  On our first pass through the swarm, we destroyed two-thirds of the Plague ships with only two losses, one an escorting AI Swift Fang, died protecting a carrier as it deployed its bombers. The other was an armoured freighter that came out of FTL practically on top of the trio and managed to launch its Cracker-3s just before it collided with one of the globe ships. The other two members of the trio died when literally hundreds of the Cracker-3s hit them. Most of the vessels around the trio died only ticks later when our DJ-3s went active and started hunting. The survivors began milling around mindlessly.
When the next two passes of armoured freighters came through and shot themselves dry, less 10 per cent of the swarm remained. We headed for the fleet train and left a couple of scouts to monitor and report while we rearmed.

  Two cycles later, the second flotilla came through and cleaned up the rest of the swarm without a loss then rearmed and sat in space with us to wait for the third flotilla to arrive. While we waited, our fleet train sent in harvesters to process the swarm debris into reaction mass. There weren’t any survivors worth salvaging.

  Our third flotilla arrived on time and were greatly disappointed at not having any Plague to kill. As senior commander on site, I made the decision to move immediately to our next swarm instead of returning to Terra. We still had over 50 per cent of our ordinance left in the fleet train and plenty of fuel, so we advanced on our next target with flotilla three leading, flotilla two following two cycles later and my group coming last. I decided to let someone else have the fun.

  The second swarm was a little harder to kill than the first and a little larger as well. We didn’t lose a freighter on this swarm but the trio forted up halfway through the battle, and we lost a number of our AI Swift Fangs before a few were able to break through and destroy one of the globe ships. After that, it was just a slugfest that went on until we showed up and all three flotillas rat-packed the surviving Plague ships and the battle was done. After rearming, we spent a few cycles sifting the wreckage picking up life support pods from our stricken bombers and making sure no signs of our FTL tech could be found.

  After reviewing our remaining stores and receiving a report from one of our scouts that the third swarm was more massive than the two we had just destroyed together and had three trios, we decided to run back to Terra to resupply our fleet train and organize another flotilla to join with us in destroying the remaining swarm. It would also be helpful to let our crews rest up, they had fought well and deserved a few cycles of downtime before we had to do it all over again.

  When we got back to Mother of Glory four cycles after leaving the site of the second ambush, I took my logs and after action report to Silent in the Intelligence Directorate. He welcomed me back and after skimming my AAR said, “Good on you, Ginger! It looks like you got a twofer as Jase would say. Speaking of Jase, have you checked in with him yet?”

  “No, I’m heading there next, why?”

  “He’s thinking of hitting the mega-swarm remnant again, and I was thinking he might be interested in what worked and what didn’t on this latest attack. I’ll forward your report and logs to him and highlight them as priority.”

  “Thank you, Silent, I’d appreciate that. I want to go visit my cub and see how she is getting along with her new instructors and then track down Tuxedo and go get some real food. If Jase needs me for something, he’ll comm me.

  ◆◆◆

  Jase

  I let the crews of the expeditionary force have ten cycles downtime before I called in Chocolate and Blue to discuss a strike on the mega swarm I was contemplating. I wanted to get their perspectives on how the last raid had gone. I’d read their AARs, but there is nothing like a face-to-face to get a person’s full perspective. Much of the time we tend to filter our personalities and viewpoints from the report we Terrans write, I’d found the same held for the Mmrrreeowwn. Even the Weasels wrote one way but spoke another, and they are the most direct bunch in the Confederation.

  When everyone was seated, I went around the table and had them give an oral report. As each one did, I asked several questions, and when we had gone around the table a few times, I got the impression that all three commanders preferred this type of action to the large-unit tactics we had been using. When I asked why they all said, in one way or another, they saw the smaller size as more flexible in responding to the enemy’s change of tactics in the middle of a fight. They saw the changes coming sooner, their people reacted quicker to the changes, and that seemed to put the enemy off their game because the swarm drones simply couldn’t deal effectively with innovation.

  This bore out some suspicions raised in the aftermath of our last battle and was in line with something Rusty had said a few cycles back when we were returning from the moon. I’d detailed some of our planners to look into using more guerrilla tactics; this latest raid was the first stab at it and had been more fruitful than we had imagined. Because of this, I wanted to test the tactics against the swarm we suspected were getting help from biologicals. When I asked what they wanted to try that might boost their effectiveness, even more, they unanimously agreed that an additional flotilla would probably fill the bill.

  I asked the two of them to pick a third commander to join them and then go sit with our planning staff in the command centre and put a mission together. I also told them that half the planning staff would be along with me on the next mission and they would be spread across the ships participating in the raid to gain first-hand knowledge. They would sit in the backup bridge and would not interfere with the operation nor make suggestions or otherwise distract the crew from its duties.

  This was greeted with grins by my commanders. All of them knew I didn’t care for REMFs and was making sure my planners had some skin in the game, especially if they knew they were going along on the ride. I’d been puzzling for some while how to address this when it just popped into my head I was overthinking the problem. As soon as I admitted that to myself, the solution was obvious—send them out to fight.

  Not twenty centas went by when I got a comm from one of the Mmrrreeowwn planners asking me to clarify what my commanders had told him. I quickly checked his record and realized he was one of a handful of the old-guard officers who’d survived the purge when we first returned from the Proxima operation. I asked him, “Did any of the commanders stutter when they spoke to you?”

  “No, Ser.”

  “So, you understood what they were asking of you, correct?”

  “Yes, Ser.”

  “Then carry on as they direct and do your duty, eh,” I replied.

  When I checked with Chocolate later, she told me, ”He became very compliant after your brief conversation and immediately began working with us as though his life depended on it.”

  “It did,” I said.

  “Who did you pick for the fourth commander?” I asked.

  “We picked Sarah White-Stripe, commander of the Talon, Nightmare. She is well respected in the Talon community and is known for her bravery and battle smarts. She never gambles, and she never shirks—she is just an outstanding leader who can think about ten steps ahead. She may even have some powers like Jacky’s far sight. I wouldn’t be surprised, a number of the weasels seem to have that ability, many of them can use it quite effectively, and she has been looking for an opportunity like this. Sarah was our first choice.”

  “Good, I’ve gotten several of her AARs, she reminds me a lot of you in the clarity and level of detail.”

  “No surprise there, Jase. She served under me on Leopard. She was First Officer and after half a kilocycle became Executive Officer. She was due a ship of her own and turned down a Mammoth, holding out for a Talon. Oh and I forgot to mention she is a master chess player, both 2D as well as 3D.”

  “Damn, I’m really impressed. No wonder Sarah can think ten steps ahead probably more like twenty if she’s any good at 3D chess.

  “So, now you have your third when do you think you will be ready to give the mission a try?”

  “We are thinking in ten to twenty cycles. This will give us a chance to work our flotillas together and practice our gunnery before the war-shot gets fired. We are also waiting for Ginger to return from her mission to get her input. She said she was going to try something different on what she saw as a short mission.”

  “Good. Be sure to let me, Jacky or Johnny know if you have any obstacles in your way regardless of who or what.”

  Ginger had left with a small flotilla, the first of three she had assembled to go take out some small swarms our scouts had found back down our back-trail. She was
due back in two cycles and had sent a short message via our FTL communicator network which was improving almost every cycle as the boffins working on it made new discoveries. She was due for some downtime but, knowing her, she would want to see the second swarm destroyed before it could link back up with the third.

  ◆◆◆

  Ginger arrived on schedule and when she found out we had a fourth senior commander, grinned when she heard Sarah White-Stripe’s name, “She was my choice, I let Chocolate know before I left and I’m pleased she and Blue concurred. How is she settling in working at that level?”

  “She has taken to it like a baby to milk, I think she will give the three of you a run for your money. She is currently flying some gun drills and tactical exercises with Blue and Chocolate and will be back in two cycles. I want you to spend that time with Tuxedo and Squirrel Paws, and I’m serious, take time off.”

  She replied, “I’ve already commed them both, we are meeting in a few centas and will spend most of the cycle together. Tuxedo and I are also hoping we could spend some time with you and Elaine, perhaps a meal and some quiet time tomorrow evening?”

  “I’m definitely up for that,” I said.

  Ishmael commed two cycles later, he was excited about some new toys he and his cronies on Terra had cooked up. I knew he and the Eastern Consortium had been working on integrating AI with fighters but since it was a pet project of his and Rusty’s, he’d been working it off-book, so it didn’t show up on the production forecasts I receive each cycle.

  He said, “Jase I have something here I’d like you to look at. Rusty and I have tested it, and we think it is ready for prime-time. Since you have a series of raids planned, those actions might be the perfect test to see if it provides any sort of advantage. Could you spare the time to come out with us and observe, it would be an all cycle affair, and we would have to leave at 0200 to make it back by evening mealtime.”