by Kali Altsoba
Nine ships turn in unison, engaging Type-3 boosters the instant each comes out of the maneuver. Nine incandescent streaks race across the rear track of the four less-maneuverable enemy cruisers, still headed to intercept an orbital space Alpha never hoped for or ever tried to reach.
War is a harsh classroom where defeat is a better teacher than victory. Where the cost of the smallest error is death. Where only those who learn, live. And not even all of those. That’s why Captain Magda Aklyan and her KRN crews, children of a lesser and defeated navy, now try several new and truly daring things all at once. They’re incentivized by death and defeat.
It’s why Alpha is flying past far more powerful but lazily-captained and crewed enemy cruisers. Why it’s moving at unconventional and unanticipated speeds and an acute gravity-escape angle, while shooting a spread of self-guiding proximity missiles to scare and scatter the enemy and delay his pursuit. To make a distance and time gap behind as it races for the far LP.
It’s also why a perfectly competent, respected and quite professional Kaigun-daisa and all his clever and elite-citizen captains on more powerful warships, and on the eight Zs, hold to staid tradition, to old doctrines and tactics mastered and mattering only in peacetime. This will change for the Kaigun as the Orion War expands and it takes on more equal enemies, and as it gathers and teaches its officers “lessons learned” from these and other early battles.
That change lies in the future. For now, Alpha initially evades the escorts then fires a full spread right at a prewar daisa sitting on the Bridge of the heavy cruiser Magni, awed and aghast at such audacity from a mere destroyer squadron. He still doesn’t believe they pose a threat to his four capital ships.
It’s already too late for the Kaigun-daisa to adjust his intercept, as 14 intelligent fish are “in the water” and burning white, seeking out his cruisers. His ships are only just beginning to brake automatically, with preprogrammed inputs he was sure would bring him to where Alpha would reach orbit. Instead, his cruisers fly into empty intersect space already left behind by their own Zerstörer escorts and never even aimed for or crossed by the brilliant commander of Alpha.
At short ranges, the incoming torpedoes are multiples faster and more maneuverable than the far more massive cruisers. Faster by far even than a Zerstörer moving at flank speed. This threat is like nothing at all in the daisa’s last successful simulation. Nothing like that at all.
Four cruiser captains must suddenly deal with incoming high-velocity missiles capable of evasive action or suddenly shifting main course and flying up the engine funnel of a target ship. Or just smacking into its superstructure with devastating effect. They manage the first dodge but, seeking to return in a grand loop, the smart missiles swoop and bank around 180˚.
They’ll be back at the cruiser line inside a minute. It’s not supposed to be like this. The cruisers should be doing the heavy shooting, not dodging madly while forced into full defensive mode.
What should be or might be doesn’t matter in war. Only what is. Here above Genève it comes down to relative velocity and interception angles as read and altered by AI targeting-bots in the warheads, hurtling back to a cruiser line still trying to engage battle-speed and make nav computers accept evasive maneuver orders that strain and threaten old and creaking bulkheads.
Alpha scoots by fast as the Kaigun cruisers aim plasma-cannon, the only weapons they can bring to bear at this acute angle and short-range while still deflecting or dodging incoming smart missiles. But they’re in each others’ way. Three out of four abort all shooting as the little flotilla levels onto the same plane as the four-cruiser line. That exposes the Krevan ships to one cruiser’s broadside guns but shields it from the other three.
Alpha pulls level, speeding in the opposite direction to the cruiser line. Only the edge-on ship, KG Baldr, is able to shoot two farside batteries to effect. It gets off just one volley before its targeting systems lose accuracy from combined relative speeds, as two sets of warships move past and away from each other on an expanding flat plane. Alpha presents only a minimal silhouette to Baldr, and it’s getting smaller every second. It’s like trying to hit the edge of a coin shot from a high velocity gun, not the flat side. Not impossible, but hard.
Cruiser gunnery isn’t helped by the fact Baldr is frantically jigging to evade incoming missiles completing their loop around. The threat is scattering its sister ships away from the widening spread of 14 white-hot “fish,” each one guided by an excited AI mind just released into the Universe and told by its maker-god to eagerly fulfill its purpose of orgiastic destruction.
Even so, Baldr’s port batteries are well-crewed and commanded. So they’re able to achieve two glancing hits that blacken and score the nearside hull of the closest Alpha ship.
Triomphant’s pallograph howls in protest as its hull shudders from twin concussions. Its carbyne plate-armor stays intact, however, as the destroyer slides past the hard-braking cruisers and scuds off, boosting white from a big Type-3 engine, making for the distant gas giant.
The only damage is to its escutcheon, etched astern and on both sides of its tail work. One side is now scarred with a dark burn that crisped the shackle-and-stock of the silver anchor. The angry falcon is mostly intact, perching on the anchor crown and clutching its lightning bolt. But the other talon holding the wheat sheaves of peace is scorched away, leaving an ugly gouge.
Émile sees it out the Main Scuttle as Triomphant pulls into line abreast formation. It’s also there on his monitors, along with a live image from the planet’s surface showing a smoke-covered world falling behind and below fleeing Alpha. He double checks by glancing down, out the Main Scuttle. A red glowing ring with a fuzzy black edge is visible even to his naked vision. He knows it’s a ring of fire and smoke around the berm that encircles Toruń.
Meanwhile, the Zerstörers are finishing a sharp banking turn, braking to pull and reverse direction so they can boost after the escaping KRN flotilla. The turn puts them on the far side of their own cruiser line as Alpha pulls away from Genève. The nine are well outside the planet’s gravity well, racing away on a spare-nothing, bendix fusion-burn for the distant L2.
Alpha has gained a critical three minutes on the Zerstörers, now chasing it hard after completing a sharp-angle reverse and boost. Fighting the pull of Genève’s gravity, they braked too close, and were forced to reaccelerate into a sudden skidding u-turn. The trail Z skims and skips for a few seconds as it scuds over the last thin upper air. Then it, too, is gone.
The reflected light of Genève is dimmer than it was before it was shrouded in reflective clouds of smoke and vapor. It shrinks rapidly to a disk behind both sets of warships, racing each other to the far outer system. Nine plasma drives pushing all-out to escape, pursed by eight intent on murder.
***
Looking up from the night time surface through wisps of acrid smoke that reek into the detention camp where she’s interned, Madame Janine Whitmore wonders where her son is and if she’ll ever see him again. She’s a woman of simple wants and pleasures. Jarred is her finest.
She doesn’t know what that line of nine little white lights might be that quickly fade in intensity and uniqueness as they move across the starry background of Orion. Or what the other fading line of eight little lights are that seem to be chasing the nine.
She thinks only about her missing son. They used to walk among her flowers together while she taught him poetry and botany, not seeing any difference between the two. To please her, he learned all their Latin as well as common names. He wasn’t the brightest boy at school, but he was the sweetest.
Lines from one of her own best loved childhood verses come back to her as she watches the tiny lights wink then disappear forever.
“There’s a gap in the ranks of little lights.
Why, one of the stars is gone!
Please help me look,
everywhere and forever.
It’s my special, midnight star.
Without it the w
orld has no joy.
So why do all the other stars
still wink at me and whisper?
She feels a sudden ache in her heart, then a rush of loneliness like no other she has felt since she parted from her sweet Jarred as he went off to war. She wants to go home, to see if he might have returned there.
“Back inside, you!”
“Curfew starts in five minutes!”
Beta
Incandescent glows of incoming missiles set off flashing screens and clanging clarions aboard all four Kaigun cruisers. Automatic defenses have already spit out hundreds of thermal, electronic, motion and effulgence decoys. But two seconds of human lag-time elapse before the Kaigun-daisa orders his captains to engage evasive maneuvers.
Vital seconds lost may as well be eons in a ship-to-ship battle. It’s forever and a day to an eager, expectant, incoming AI-guided missile burning all its fuel to complete its mission. A few seconds is a sizable portion of its brief but spectacular life, flying under the stars of Orion.
Seven torps veer off after the flocks of decoys, failing to reach completion of their true purpose. As do most of us. They leave a gapped-spread of seven other missiles outpacing and closing on the lumbering cruisers. Four split, two-up and two-down, homing on mass, light and heat signatures of the two nearest ships, the light cruisers Baldr and Loki. The last three home on the squadron flagship, the heavy cruiser KG Magni.
A clever, last-second change of direction by Baldr ducks its hull under a fast-looming torp, but it catches the near miss in its forward crosstree. The hot plasma containment chamber in the missile warhead demagnetizes on a proximity signal from onboard guidance and targeting systems. The detonation sends an expanding sphere of searing plasma to tear off chunks of communications gear from Baldr’s moonraker, scoring and pitting delicate quantum detectors with cloud balls of micro-fragments, missile casing, and bits of ship as secondary shrapnel.
Baldr doesn’t have enough standard speed to catch boosting Alpha in normal space, and without its quantum gear it can’t follow into a bohr-LP. So one Kaigun light cruiser is out of the fight and the chase. Baldr pulls hard to starboard, shooting off hundreds more effulgent flares as it turns away. They lead astray a second missile, which misses the crippled ship entirely. It spins wildly then scuds off Genève’s upper atmosphere, burning out in unexploded machine futility.
Loki takes a direct hit low-and-larboard. The downside burst implodes a slab of strake-plate and spreads two massive futtocks wide open. The fissure spills 32 surprised crew from the Orlop deck screaming silently into space, along with the ship’s very fat chief cook, two young apprentice kitchen’s mates, four hot ovens with special pastries still inside, and 327 loaves of fresh baked bread. The hand-prepared and delicate pastries are served only to senior officers. Crews eat lesser foods printed from carb and protein wafers, and mockmeat soup and plain baked bread every other day.
When the fight started, the apprentices were told to stay at their posts, that it was just another routine patrol with a little target shooting added. Either way, the daisa would want to eat afterward, no matter what happened.
So one lad is busy making white sauce for the second-shift officers’ meal when the hull of Loki gapes open and he falls into space, the blue-green ball of Genève filling the sky above-below him. He’s astonished that he’s flying, and even more to discover that space has no smell. He always loved the scents of cooking best of all about his chosen role. Like hot potatoes and stinging fresh onions, leeks and sizzling mockmeat, and faux clams in pan-seared butter.
The other boy is happily stirring his first solo tureen of split-pea soup, thinking of the praise he’ll receive if the ship’s daisa likes it. He isn’t that bright. He doesn’t understand what’s happening or why he’s suddenly outside the ship with hundreds of loaves of bread flying away and all around, or why it’s getting hard to breathe. He sees the chief cook tumbling nearby and upside-down. He waves at the fat man as he tumbles past. Just before he goes blind, he collides with a large slab of jagged plate that smacks him senseless. The next sharp slab cuts him in half.
On Loki’s Bridge there’s rising fear as reports come in staccato-style from all over the ship about ruptured systems and major structural damage. The chief engineer calls in that the ship is going down, that it can’t sustain orbit.
He’s wrong. Loki is badly hurt but salvageable. It doesn’t matter. He sets off a panic on the Bridge and in the Main Engine Room, where no one remains to hear maneuver orders that might have saved the ship. Then comes consternation, as the daisa slams his palm down hard on a red emergency control releasing all ship’s boats and pods and calls out over all ship’s coms.
“Abandon ship!”
“What? What are you doing?”
“You can’t give that order!”
“Bloody coward! Traitor!”
There’s running.
There’s shouting.
There’s tussling.
There’s murder.
The XO pulls a snug kinetic pistol from an inside-jacket holster and shoots his daisa in the head. The eruption of bone and hair and warm blood splatters over the captain’s orderly and makes a mess of the command chair and about a quarter of the Bridge. So he stays at the XO Station instead of taking the chair. The Navigation and Weapons Officers look terrified, but are too scared to run. They know this despised Purity fanatic will turn and shoot them in the back.
“Belay that last order!”
“All hands, remain at your posts!”
Men are running for exits all over the ship, no matter what the XO says. Navigation and Weapons crew break for it all at once, desperate to get off the Bridge.
“Secure this ship!”
“No one leaves!”
“Death to mutineers!”
The Navigation and Weapons Officers look at each other, then jump the XO and wrestle him down. It’s the signal two scared men of the Bridge Security Detail are waiting for. They pump four shots into the XO as he lies bleeding from where his forehead smacked into the deck.
More shots ring out elsewhere as other security men make other choices, cutting down “deserters” clambering into hundreds of four-man pods and about a dozen larger ship’s boats. They only increase the panic. Three are beaten bloody and left insensible on a lower deck by desperate crew. Two more are disarmed and shoved into a closed airlock, locked in to go down if Loki does.
The XO’s devotion to Purity fanaticism and a chief engineer’s reckless incompetence are about to get a lot more men killed, as a second missile impacts aft. It snaps the keelson and breaks Loki’s back. Not all onboard hear or heed the conflicting Bridge orders. But everyone feels the heavy blows from the missiles shudder through the ship, and the secondary explosions.
Then they feel a pickup in centripetal force as Loki goes into an uncontrolled and accelerating spin. The mortally wounded warship enters a spiral it can’t stop by frantically firing a hundred attitude correctors. Fire control parties race to put out multiple emergencies erupting down the center line. It’s a hopeless task. If Loki is to be saved, it won’t be by its crew.
Mortal fear waterfalls from deck to deck as men realize just how badly hurt Loki really is. Brave medics ignore the hustle to bend over terribly wounded and dying men and boys. One middy in the Engine Room has no face. It’s swinged off by a searing blob of silent plasma when the main reactor’s nitrobon shield-wall exposes a micro-crack. Still a medic kneels to help.
Another has no flesh anywhere on his torso after a ceramic pipe breaks and a fine spray of superheated catapult steam peels off all skin from his arms, chest and shoulders. Outside the air-tight compartment where they lay him for the last minute of his agony there are plenty who hear his primal wail. A battle in space is filled with final screams. Some are heard, others not.
The worst damage from the spread fired by Alpha before it dodges away is to Magni, which suffers two near-misses and a direct hit when proximity detectors shut off current to sets
of electromagnets forming a closed-torus inside each missile’s warhead. The first erupts into a compact white plasma blossom just 0.2 klics in front of her prow, just close enough to do major damage as spicula of superheated plasma spew into space from the ruptured containment casing.
Initial damage by spicule ejecta is amplified as the first explosion triggers a second torp arriving right behind, at the three-second interval Magda ordered. Double eruptions careen the heavy cruiser as plasma from the second blossom spears right through the afterdeck, already ripped and exposed by the first blast. The white incandescence kills the daisa on the adjacent Bridge, evaporating him and a half-dozen senior officers in a nano-second.
The mortal stroke to the ship itself comes next, when a third stagger-shot torp breaches the stricken cruiser aft. It’s one of the cigar types from a Krevan frigate, fitted with a superhard carbyne nose-cone and a real contact detonator instead of a proximity-fuse. It plunges into Magni’s taffrail, continuing deep inside to penetrate the fusion reactor stokehold before it blows.
Freed hydrogen plasma from stored fuel and weapons adds to an immense explosion that rips the stern apart, sending the greater part of the ruin of Magni tumbling uncontrollably. Some 1,100 male crew and 17 civilian women are trapped inside, with no way out. The women are ‘service wives,’ mistresses illicitly smuggled onboard every ship in the Kaigun by its officers.