by Brian Smith
Ford’s instincts told him the moment was right—now was the time to go active and engage. The cardinal rule of naval engagements from time immemorial had not changed, despite variations in technology and the shift from blue-water oceans to the ocean of interplanetary space: the victor was generally the one who could strike effectively first.
The enemy fleet, too, could see what they were seeing; OURANIA must know its ambush scheme had failed. Its only hope now was hitting first with surprise and violence of action. Federov drives or not, its fleet was outweighed and outnumbered pretty heavily. C’mon, Sir Edward! What the hell are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Ford fumed silently at Branch.
“Combat, signals. Signal from flag: Drop EMCON and go active. Stand by for maneuvering orders.”
“Acknowledge signal,” Yoon replied eagerly, even before Ford could.
The frigate’s active sensor suites were switched on, and suddenly the crew had eyes again.
“TAO, lidar contact! Bearing 330 relative. Range, 140 megameters. Three targets, classified as Copeland and two escorting corvettes!”
“TAO, signal from flag! Close and engage tracks close aboard, bearing 330 relative.”
“Batteries released. Commence firing,” Yoon announced.
Ford passed maneuvering orders to the bridge, where XO Gordon had the deck. Reuben James leapt forward under her Federov drive, closing rapidly with the enemy ships.
The first engagement went quickly. TF50.5 achieved tactical surprise, but the enemy force reacted almost instantly, with decidedly inhuman speed. Copeland’s single particle-beam turret opened up on Murasame; she posed the direst threat, based on her size and relative position. The corvettes did the same, concentrating their fire and releasing torpedoes in a well-coordinated combined salvo.
The enemy vessels focused their fire directly into Murasame’s engineering plant, killing her reactors. Loss of power caused her Federov drive to fail and she went adrift, also unable to use her torch to maneuver to avoid either torpedoes or railgun rounds. The salvo of four AI-controlled torpedoes arced in cooperatively, covering each other from the cruiser’s furious point-defense fire. Two of the torpedoes were killed by defensive fire, while the remaining two struck Murasame and detonated in a brilliant nuclear conflagration, all but vaporizing her instantly.
At the same time that Murasame was being killed, she was going down fighting. Her two particle-beam turrets sent lines of destruction into the former USS Copeland, destroying her reactor in turn as matching fire from Vanguard lased through the narrow neck of her torch bell, amputating it completely. Like Murasame, Copeland went adrift once her drive field lost power. Vanguard’s dual railgun turrets were standing by for that eventuality; four kinetic-tungsten rounds pounded into the frigate and blew her into three briefly burning pieces that tumbled away into the void.
Reuben James engaged the two smaller ships in accordance with the flag’s previously issued fighting instructions for the scenario. Her opening salvo sliced into the reactor compartment of the first corvette and succeeded in cutting her in two just as she released her torpedoes at Murasame. Reuben James shifted fire immediately, giving the second corvette the same treatment. Although the corvettes were small enough that the sustained particle-beam salvos from the frigate’s turret effectively destroyed them, Captain Ford followed up with salvos from their rail turret, blowing what remained of each gunship into fragments.
Everything happened quickly—it was over in seconds. Ford grimaced terribly at Murasame’s fate; given the surprise they’d sprung, he was aghast at the near-instantaneous reaction displayed by the enemy force. Unbidden, Cheryl Ayers’s warning rang in his brain: Don’t underestimate your opponent. They had been operating under the assumption that OURANIA was exercising direct control over its units, but the AI had responded to the ambush with frightening speed, demonstrating that the almost forty-minute signal delay between this position and Titan truly didn’t exist for OURANIA’s quantumly entangled network. It didn’t help that the TOA force was reduced to doing everything manually, issuing orders and passing signals using methods that harked back to the middle of the previous century.
“Combat, signal from flag: general attack. Engage at will.”
“Acknowledge the signal. XO, this is the captain. Close with Task Force 50 and put us in position to screen high-value units. TAO, engage targets at will, as they bear.”
On the bridge, the XO turned to Tanner with a grin after WO1 Hagen had them on their way. “Well, I don’t know about that!” Gordon joked. “I thought we were the high-value unit!”
Task Force 50
From his vantage point in the repaired Dogstar One, LT Mike Ashburn watched the brief fleet action unfold, his bare eyes and the imagers both shielded. They’d launched from Vanguard just before the engagement had begun, so as not to be a liability, glued to the side of their mother ship.
With no orders in hand other than to provide what support he could, Ashburn had taken the Dogstar out wide on the fleet’s right flank, scanning with lidar and running his jamming equipment at full strength. The Dogstar had caught a trio of corvettes closing from that vector, and he’d passed a warning to the British fighter squadron that was screening in that direction.
The Royal Navy fighters were stock, without the advantages offered by the KF-1 mod, so they weren’t able to do much. Ashburn put on an impressive 40-g burst of acceleration that bought them a quick deflection shot as the corvettes raced by en passant. The Dogstar hit and wrecked the trailing gunship’s drive, setting her adrift. The Royal Navy squadron burned back and finished her off.
It wasn’t much in the overall big picture, but it represented one less enemy ship to wreak havoc on the task force. All the Dogstar could do at that point was reorient and burn back toward the fleet, hoping for another lucky-shot opportunity with her single particle cannon or for just getting to jam the ever-loving hell out of the enemy’s sensors. By the time the Dogstar was back in range, it was all over.
The battle was a victory, but a costly one. Without RADM Branch’s early engagement of Copeland and the two corvettes, it would have been far worse. Nine gravity-driven corvette gunships bore down on a fleet of forty larger, heavily armed torchships. In some ways, it was almost as if the gunships themselves were enormous torpedoes homing in on the high-value targets in a cooperative swarm, because that was how OURANIA chose to fight them.
Of the two corvettes that had attacked from behind the fleet, one encountered a KC cloud and went dead in space as it was punctured clean through by an alloy hailstorm that penetrated the hull at several thousand kilometers per second. Intense directed fire from particle beams managed to destroy or disable five more of the nine ships before they could pose a direct threat to the largest ships, in the center of the formation. This savage exchange cost the fleet two more cruisers, a frigate tender, and four destroyers, mostly as a consequence of their cyber-degraded combat capabilities.
The three remaining corvettes kamikazed in, one at each of the gigantic command ships.
The first successfully rammed Hornet at high speed, destroying her outright and taking half of the U.S. Marine Corps assault force with her.
The second was intercepted at the last possible moment by Reuben James; the frigate passed through the formation with the speed of an avenging angel and executed a brilliant combination-particle-beam-and-rail attack that simultaneously disabled the enemy ship and knocked her off course. The corvette spun past Ranger in a rapid tumble, narrowly missing her, and twin torpedoes from JTS Akizuki finished her off as she drifted clear of the task force.
The third and last corvette made a play that turned out to be only partially successful, against HMS Invincible. In response, HMS Vanguard attempted a maneuver similar to the one executed by Reuben James, but the attack geometry didn’t work out as well. A barrage of beam fire and a fairly lucky last-minute hit by a tungsten round shredded the corvette close aboard. Unfortunately, debris from the disintegrating ship s
mashed into Invincible’s torch bell and her engineering section, causing massive damage and resulting in numerous casualties. The remainder of the ship was spared, however, and she remained largely intact.
From start to finish, the engagement lasted less than five minutes. The fighter squadrons and the Dogstar were recalled when it was clear the battle was over, and the fleet began assessing its damage.
The squadrons from the destroyed USS Hornet were directed to recover aboard Ranger and Invincible; neither remaining ship could handle all of them in addition to their own. Invincible was operational but temporarily out of action.
A fleet tender and two frigates maneuvered close aboard to render aid; her captain reported that it would take them two or three days to patch their bell and get their reactors back online. At that point she’d have serious overvelocity in terms of decelerating into the Saturnian system. Depending on how much thrust they could produce after repairs, the estimate was, best case, that Invincible would overshoot Saturn and have to backtrack, running her tanks dangerously low and arriving to the party very late. Worst case: she was out of action for the duration.
They briefly pondered the idea of trying to decelerate her by physically hard-docking her to Vanguard and using the cruiser’s Federov drive, but VADM Costello vetoed it—he preferred to use Vanguard as a fighting unit and not as a tug.
Aside from Invincible and her guardian angels, the remainder of the fleet re-formed, completed turnover, and began its deceleration hard-burn for Titan. VMF-51 and VMF-52, with their KF-1-modded performance, continued to fly patrols as advance scouts to warn against any more minefields or other nasty surprises. There weren’t any; Costello cautiously accepted the possibility that perhaps OURANIA had taken its best shot and failed.
TF50.5, now down to two ships, returned to Saturnian space within a few hours to go on the offensive.
July 16, 2094 (Terran Calendar)
Task Force 50.5
Titan
Dogstar One passed nightside in a low, fast orbit over Titan, her electromagnetic-surveillance suite monitoring enemy lidar and radar emissions while her jamming suite put out enough interference to almost blind them completely. She had detected ground-based stations on both the Saturn side and the back side of the moon so far, along with a constellation of lidar/radar emitters of USN nomenclature, probably robbed from either Marineris or one of Reuben James’s sister ships before their destruction.
Overhead and too fast to be tracked by the naked eye, HMS Vanguard and USS Reuben James executed a fast flyby of Titan which was similar in many ways to the attack against Mars and its moons several months before. This time the ships appeared out of the black with no torch plumes to warn of their coming, approaching at a blistering 0.15 c. They decelerated effortlessly over the moon, just long enough to release a half dozen kinetic lances and fire two salvos apiece from their railgun turrets, making for a combined salvo of a dozen tungsten rail rounds. Vanguard fired two enhanced-EMP nuclear missiles behind the kinetic rounds, all aimed at the coordinates of Janus Station. The combined salvo, properly spaced, produced enough force to lay waste to hundreds of square kilometers; Janus Station and OURANIA’s web of computer nodes didn’t cover even a fraction of that much ground.
As soon as the salvo was fired, both ships accelerated again, retiring safely beyond any chance of being hit by counterfire. In an ideal scenario, the ships could have fired without decelerating, but their fire-control computers and the physical limits of the weapons themselves couldn’t yield the desired accuracy when employed at velocities much higher than the ships were originally designed to achieve.
Ashburn and Albrecht watched with tense anticipation as the rounds fell in ballistic arcs at hypersonic speeds, dropping from space into Titan’s atmosphere. The two of them started slightly when a powerful twin particle beam appeared from the thick layer of atmospheric clouds, reaching up to strike the lead EMP missile and then shifting to the second when the first one melted into fragmented slag. There wasn’t anything the particle beam could achieve against all the kinetic rounds; it switched off once the missiles were destroyed.
Ashburn was expecting the Dogstar to be slagged next—there was no question she was in range, based on what they’d just observed. He flipped the Dogstar end for end and laid on the full 40-g, brute-forcing a retrograde burn back toward the day side of Titan, getting them below Janus Station’s horizon and out of immediate danger.
Worm tried his best to get a little more out of the jammers; he directed their full energy right at the ground station where they’d detected the enemy’s fire-control radar, which was directing the beam fire.
Once Ashburn was convinced that maybe they were going to live another five minutes and speech wasn’t a wasted effort, he asked Worm if he’d successfully triangulated the weapon’s location.
“Affirm,” his partner replied. “Plotting it now. It’s well offsite from Janus, but it looked too powerful to be a mobile shooter. A twin turret capable of punching through that soup of an atmosphere without attenuating the beam down to nothing needs a fusion reactor nearby to generate the output. My classification, based on the beam strength, is that we were seeing a shipboard turret, maybe salvaged from Antrim or Flatley before the enemy used them as Trojan horses against Nimitz and Halsey stations.”
Worm brought up a map and pointed to where he’d tagged a set of coordinates. “It’s there, a few hundred klicks from Janus Station.”
Ashburn felt a slight shiver run down his spine, like someone had “stepped on his grave,” as the saying went. The coordinates Worm plotted were the same ones where Ashburn had made that first, covert drop of Tafuna Yaro mercenaries and cargo in what seemed like another lifetime. It was the site of Bill Campbell’s old secure data archive, obviously repurposed.
He didn’t remember bringing down components for an entire fusion reactor, however, although that wasn’t to say someone else hadn’t done it later on. He wondered if the drop point was just a surface strongpoint now, or were its onsite weapons protecting something more valuable? He’d submit what he knew when he made his report. In the meantime, there was still work to be done.
Ashburn felt a strange sense of déjà vu as he reached out and used his finger to trace a line running roughly northwest to southeast across the Buzzell Planitia. “We can make a recon pass along this line and stay below the horizon of that weapon if we get down low, on the deck.”
“On the deck means slower,” Worm warned. “Sure you want to do that?”
“We may already have won—we need a BDA on that kinetic strike,” Ashburn replied firmly. “We don’t need a direct flyover, either. We can offset a little to the west and let the sensors take an oblique look. If they pop missiles, we can bug out to the southwest—really get in the weeds and lay on the smack. I don’t think missiles are going to do very well in that soup, not with the jammers we’ve got on this baby.”
“You’re the boss, boss,” Worm shrugged.
“Let’s do it,” Ashburn said.
He spent the next few minutes working out the keps, after which there followed another major course change; deorbit; and planetfall. They came down high over Chusuk Station, going for lidar and radar imagery through the smoggy atmosphere from on high. They were through the reentry phase and into thicker air when the threat-warning receiver chirped in their helmets.
One of the big questions everyone had concerned the status of Chusuk Station: Was it still friendly territory? neutral? oblivious? Nobody knew, and there hadn’t been any communications with the settlement since around the time the war started. It didn’t bode well, and what happened next was a confirmation that Chusuk could no longer be considered “friendly.”
“Pair of SAMs coming up at us,” Worm said quickly.
“Got ’em,” Ashburn replied through gritted teeth. His heart pounding, he flew the evasive maneuver by eye. He pitched the Dogstar back 130 degrees and throttled up the torch, pulling the ship into an inverted climb and heading back ov
er Chusuk Station so that the missiles would have to go pure-vertical to chase them. He rolled the Dogstar 180 degrees, got her vertical once the thrust and gravity vectors were all in a line, and then popped two KC cannisters. The cannisters fell lazily back toward the surface and blew open; the countermeasure spheres formed an alloy cloud that shredded the missiles as they accelerated through them.
He kept the climb going, increasing the ship’s speed as the atmosphere thinned, eventually pulling them over onto a high ballistic arc that took them far enough from Chusuk that whoever was firing at them lost them in the jamming.
Once they were clear, Ashburn cut thrust and let the Dogstar come down again, in a steep hypersonic, then supersonic, glide. Once they were nap-of-the-earth, he throttled up again and fought to keep the ship straight and level. The Dogstar operated in this regime only through brute force and by abusing the laws of aerodynamics—she didn’t want to be here any more than her crew did.
“Nice move, Dakota,” Worm said.
“Thanks, tovarich. God love that KF-1 mod, eh? Try that in a Moray, and if you didn’t stroke out from the g-pull you’d be looking for a mass tanker five minutes later.”
“The shit is bona fide!” Worm chuckled. “Here’s a course correction to get us back on the track.”
Ashburn eased the Dogstar over and he and Worm spent the next several minutes watching their instruments and occasionally looking outside. Gradually, the orange haze that prevailed on Titan’s day side faded to black and they again relied solely on lidar and radar terrain mapping in conjunction with low-light mode, which enabled them to navigate and see. As he liked to do, Ashburn switched over to virtual “clear cockpit,” flying his magic-carpet ride by hand, eye, and pure arrogant skill.