All Enemies Foreign and Domestic (Kelly Blake series)

by Smith, Rodney

  As he waited for the captain, he received and processed the reports of twelve destroyer class T’Kab ships and fifteen frigate class. The Fleet escorts started firing missiles at the group, twenty to thirty missiles per ship. The screen got cluttered with offensive missiles outbound toward the T’Kab ships.

  The Captain entered CIC and came over to Gibbons.

  “What have we got, Jim?”

  “Twenty-seven T’Kab ships just dropped into the system. Twelve destroyers and fifteen frigates, no heavies. They haven’t fired any missiles yet, but they are scanning like crazy with every active sensor they got. The escorts have launched missiles at them, but no reaction from them yet. I spoke too soon. Missile launch. We have lock on from ten of them.”

  The Captain took over. “Defensive missiles, launch two per; defensive guns, on standby. Comms, contact our escorts. I want to know what they’re doing.”

  The destroyer/frigate group spun on their center and headed out at just below light speed. Gibbons thought they might be trying to clear the orbital path before they activated FTL. Some of those old engines sometimes overloaded when going into FTL too near a planetary gravity well.

  The friendly situation reporter announced, “Captain, a large number of the escorts are in pursuit. Missiles are having some effect. Three friendly frigates were destroyed: the Daniels, the Constantin, and the Thorvaald.”

  “Comms, signal our escorts to stand fast. This doesn’t smell right.”

  Gibbons saw it, too. “They pop in and stay just long enough to draw our attention, and then leave at sub-light to draw away our escorts. Something smells rotten.”

  “Engine room, make all preparations to get under way. Defensive missiles, how are we doing? Defensive guns, prepare to engage.”

  “Eight missiles destroyed, two still inbound, five minutes ETA.”

  “Long range guns on wide beam, take them out.”

  Shudders could be felt through the deck as the big long-range guns engaged the missiles with charged coherent light. The effect was almost instantaneous, as the sensors showed the missiles exploding into balls of fire. The threat board now showed clear.

  The Captain got on his communicator and spoke to his senior escort commander, “Jules, let’s not get tunnel vision on this. I don’t like that there were no heavies in that group and they were emitting in the communications frequencies.”

  He turned to Commander Gibbons and asked, “Jim, where would you pop in if you had split your heavies off?”

  Realizing where his captain was going, he said, “Sir, I would come in opposite of where that group is heading out.”

  * * * * *

  Admiral Conover, on the Xerxes, watched the situation continue to unfold and recalled half the pursuit of the destroyers and frigates. He assigned one of his scout ships to trail them and report. They were no real threat. Their missile strike had been destroyed and they were moving out. What was coming next? The fact that they dropped out of FTL in the system spoke of two things. Either their navigation sucked or it was a ploy. He called his carriers into high orbits around the planet and spread his somewhat crowded ships as far apart as orbital dynamics would allow. He smelled a rat and waited for it to show.

  Conover had been arguing for days with Admiral O’Brien to move some of these ships out, but he was reluctant in case the T’Kab mounted another massed offensive and they had to lift the Marines or soldiers out. All his attempts to show the mathematical impossibility of moving three corps out did was get him a chewing out for being impertinent. So now he had the dirty job that someone always got to do.

  He moved his second scout on a back azimuth from the direction the destroyers and frigates were running and he noticed they finally went into FTL. His scout following them shot off in hot pursuit and he recalled the other escorts pursuing the destroyer/frigate group.

  * * * * *

  Linda Sawyer, captain of the frigate GRS Conagher, watched the destroyers and frigates speed up and correctly assumed they were preparing to jump to FTL. She fired her last offensive missile and watched it track on a T’Kab frigate in the rear of the formation. As it just reached the frigate, the frigate engaged FTL. The missile exploded as it contacted the forming FTL bubble. The explosion collapsed the bubble and the resulting whiplash, from attaining FTL and being ripped back into normal space, slammed the brakes on so abruptly that the stabilizers could not compensate. The frigate was literally ripped in half. Sawyer ordered the wreckage strafed for good measure, then left the burning wreckage and returned to the formation around the landing ships.

  * * * * *

  The queen commander watched the current play in the system. Her destroyer/ frigate task force had carried out their mission and drew away forty-seven escorts, although half of those had dropped the pursuit and were returning to their stations. They were still out of position to guard the fleet. Her cruisers should pop in any second now. She considered it fortunate that she only lost three frigates. That meant she would still have sufficient combat power when they looped back and attacked the flank while the cruisers were engaging.

  She saw the remainder of the pursuing escorts break off and turn back towards the fleet. Those were twenty more ships that would be out of position when the cruisers arrived.

  She saw the cruisers pop in close to the planet. Twenty-one cruisers dropped out of FTL immediately behind the fleet. Some were so close to the enemy that they were engaging ships with guns as their missile salvos were leaving the rails. One enemy frigate blew up from the combined attention of three light cruisers. The missiles were creating confusion among the enemy ships as they oriented on their targets, but the guns were doing the most damage as the cruisers accelerated to come in behind their missiles. By firing first, her ships got to fire into clear space. The enemy now had to counter fire into a cloud of missiles, decoys, and countermeasures.

  She saw the first missile strike on some sort of ship she didn’t recognize. The missile must have damaged the stabilizers for the ship shook violently and drifted free in space without power.

  * * * * *

  The Red Wasp, an assault landing carrier, took a missile into the hull just forward of the well deck. The explosion tore a hole in engineering, which took all four engines offline, vaporized the stabilizer, and shattered the keel. The Red Wasp’s captain reached the undeniable conclusion that his ship was doomed. He ordered his pilots to fly the AS-500s to the spaceport to save as many of them as he could. The crew would use them instead of the rescue pods – this was not a planet to drop random groups of humans onto.

  As his crew made an orderly exit to the well deck, he waited for the casualty reports to come in. He would have that list before he departed. A corpsman came up to splint and immobilize his broken arm from where he had been thrown from his chair when the stabilizer went offline. His last act as captain was to fire retro rockets, dropping the ship into a lower orbit and out of the battlespace. It would eventually burn up on re-entry. He boarded the last AS-500, got the casualty report and an all clear from his XO, and told the pilot to go. Fifteen minutes later he was on the surface, looking up at the smoking debris burning down through the atmosphere.

  * * * * *

  The cruiser Thomas was close to where the T’Kab cruisers came out of FTL and one of the first ships engaged by their guns. She was just recently launched and had the new plasma shields, so the T’Kab guns were ineffective. She jolted as the T’Kab guns hit her, but the charges just dissipated and slid off the hull. Her charges had a much more serious effect on the T’Kab cruisers. She fired salvo after salvo into the cruisers as they were launching their offensive missile strike and powering up to follow it.

  She managed a lucky shot on one battlecruiser and caught a missile as it left the cell, breaking its antimatter containment shell. The resulting explosion took the bow off the ship, as other missiles in the cells exploded through sympathetic detonation.

  The light cruisers were no matches for the cruiser Cowpens’ rapid-fire gun
sending bolts of Yestepkin energy at the lightly armored gun cruisers. In a short time, she had destroyed or disabled all three light cruisers before she had to break off to fire her missiles as part of the fleet’s defensive missile volley.

  After the volley, she returned to slugging it out with the cruiser group. She couldn’t kill the missile cruisers or battlecruisers, but she could blind them. She methodically fired charge after charge at the ships, stripping away their electronic towers. She kept firing until she had blinded half the ships’ sensor arrays. She then retired to her place in the screen and defended the landing ships.

  * * * * *

  The queen commander joined her destroyer/frigate task force as they turned and prepared to come in on the flank of the biped fleet. She watched the feed come in from her cruisers, showing the devastation they were causing in and among the biped fleet. She saw three cruisers, six destroyers, two frigates, and two of those smaller small ship carriers damaged or destroyed, and her missile strike hadn’t even hit yet.

  She hadn’t scored any hits on the big ships yet, but she ordered a second salvo of offensive missiles just to go after them. This should sow more confusion in their ranks and she was only fifteen minutes out.

  * * * * *

  Angie couldn’t believe her luck in this situation, two squadrons of A-76s with full anti-ship missile loads. She ordered them out immediately. She loaded the F-53s with half anti-ship and half medium seeker anti-fighter missiles. As the A-76s launched, she realized she was all in except for her fighter. She called to CIC and got the captain’s permission to launch. It was not normal practice, under this captain, for the CFW to fly during combat. An excess pilot normally flew her ship, but there were no extra pilots at the moment. She laid all this out for the captain and he let her go. Her fighter had been loaded with the half and half load out and she launched.

  She oriented on her receding fighters and kicked hers to catch up. She had an extra 0.03c speed over all the other ships in her wing because she had hers tweaked with a secret she learned from a lovesick maintenance officer when she was a lieutenant. It was her edge – not much, but enough.

  She was just about to catch up with her fighters when she saw the Saint Elmo’s fire effect when ships dropped out of FTL too close to a planet. It was the destroyer/frigate group popping in just above the polar caps. She ordered two F-53 squadrons to follow her as she turned towards the group of smaller ships. If she could saturate them with ship killers quickly, it might break their momentum and make them an easier target for the big ships’ guns and missiles.

  She called, “Tally ho,” and had her squadrons attack by four ship groups.

  * * * * *

  The small ships appeared just above where the Behemoths were parked in geosynchronous orbit. All five Behemoths opened up with all guns near simultaneously, while their escorts unloaded missile after missile at the destroyer/frigate group. The guns had some effect as guns and missile launchers on the small ships were silenced. A concentrated salvo from the Gigantic tore one destroyer apart and one of the larger pieces sideswiped a T’Kab frigate, crushing the hull and sending it spinning out of control and down into the atmosphere to burn up on re-entry. The destroyer/frigate group fired all their offensive missiles and then the small penetrator ships started launching from the T’Kab cruisers, destroyers, and frigates.

  The fighters from the Xerxes unloaded a salvo of 80 anti-ship missiles and turned in pursuit of the penetrators, which were heading right for the Behemoths. The F-53s closed the gap quickly, knowing the Behemoths would activate their defensive guns as soon as the penetrators reached optimum range. This gave them about thirty seconds to see how many they could take out.

  Angie ordered deconfliction mode on for all her Bolivar fighters and ordered missiles away. As the last fighter emptied his rails, she pulled back and sent one squadron back to rearm. She watched the deadly ballet between the missiles and the penetrators. The penetrators had no countermeasures, designed as they were for a high-speed dash into the side of a ship. The penetrators changed course slightly or dramatically and the missiles calculated a new intercept course, never wavering.

  The first missiles met the first penetrators in blinding flashes, as the antimatter warheads in the missile and the penetrators exploded. Missiles originally oriented on penetrators that had been destroyed, oriented on the unacquired targets. Soon there was only one penetrator left of those from the destroyer/frigate group, being chased by twenty missiles.

  That penetrator was aimed squarely at the Behemoth. It was first in line and it made an inviting target. A decision loop in the anti-missile circuitry was designed to avoid adding to the damage of a successful strike, by autonomously determining they were not going to intercept the target before it hit a ship and veering off, then self-destructing if there were no more targets. That only partially worked – three missiles followed the penetrator as it plunged into the hull of the Behemoth, adding to the damage.

  * * * * *

  Tammy had one of her A-100 and an A-120 squadron on strip alert. They had to be in the air within fifteen minutes of the call. Her executive officer was with the A-120 squadron. She was tagging along with the A-100 squadron. Sitting in the cockpit of a ship that is not running is one of life’s most boring experiences. She used the time to review award recommendations. She thought some were just ‘me too’ awards and culled them out or asked for more info.

  Boredom gave way to adrenalin when the ground crews rushed out to the start carts and hit the power assist buttons to kick over the ships’ powerful engines for the atmospheric flight phase. Tammy was watching her dashboard chronometer, looking at the fifteen-minute mark approaching, as the first A-100 trundled up to the start line, applied power, and gracelessly clawed its way into the air. All eighteen lifted off and it was her turn. Up she went, following her June Bugs into the blackness of space. Her A-120s joined up in trail, with her XO’s ship in the back. She gave the order to transit the gate and away they went. They came out on the far side of the planet where the ring ship was hiding among the supply ships.

  They followed her around the planet until they could make out the hairball that the battle had become on their sensor screen. Red was mixed in with blue on her situation screen. Green signifying debris was tumbling through the battlespace. She found the wedge of cruisers ramming into the formation behind their wall of missiles and sent the A-100s after them. She sent the A-120s after the destroyer/frigate group and they went after the more nimble ships.

  Her A-100s fell in behind the speeding cruisers and launched a salvo of 108 missiles, speeding off towards the cruisers. A combination of dumb luck, sturdy construction, and good defensive fire reduced the effectiveness of the missile strike. Only six of the missiles hit a ship. One cruiser dropped out of the formation after two missiles blew off its tail cones, to be finished off by fighters from the Xerxes. Another cruiser took a missile to the bridge and it tumbled out of control, burning in space until its oxygen dispersed. A third ship took a missile in ammo storage and sympathetic detonations ripped it apart. The fourth and last ship hit in this strike took a missile in the ship’s stern and another in the keel. It tumbled until it ran into a piece of a cruiser torn loose by another missile. The bent and broken hull spun off towards the planet’s atmosphere and a fiery demise.

  Tammy ordered a second strike at the cruisers, approaching from the port side as they fired 120 missiles, including Tammy’s. This time they did better, more missiles hitting ships but fewer ships. Three missile cruisers took multiple strikes and were reduced to burning twisted hulks. The A-120s came in and made strafing runs on the ships’ sensor towers, attempting to blind them, before heading off for the ring ship with two burning destroyers to their credit.

  The cruisers turned towards the Xerxes and Tammy saw an open path for them to the flagship. She saw an opportunity to employ her secret weapon. She ordered her two squadrons to return to base and she lined up near the rear of the Xerxes’s escorts and fired up t
he device she had wired into her ship.

  From the T’Kab cruisers’ perspective, a new fleet of ships dropped out of FTL and was heading right at them, moving to place themselves between the fleet and the T’Kab. Missiles fired by the Xerxes’ escorts added to the realism as Tammy moved her holographic fleet at the T’Kab cruisers. The cruisers changed course and moved away to avoid this new fleet bearing down on them.

  Admiral Conover came up on Tammy’s communicator and asked, “Did you do that?”

  Tammy replied, “I did, sir. It came to me in training one day, and I thought it might come in handy.”

  Admiral Conover thanked her for saving his flagship and bid her good luck. Tammy turned to meet the gate on the other side of the planet, and in an hour she was back in her office, listening to the roar of two A-120 squadrons lifting off to battle the T’Kab.

  * * * * *

  The explosion knocked Commander Gibbons off his feet. He got up and made his way to the damage control board. The penetrator had hit just above the largest collection of large open spaces, the accommodations compartment for the embarked soldiers, but these compartments were empty, awaiting the refugees from the feedlots that were still going through preliminary medical screening. Atmosphere was lost in all those compartments, so Gibbons started flipping switches to establish force field barriers between the damaged areas and the undamaged areas. When he had the fields in place, he told the captain he was going to supervise the damage control parties.

  Captain Harris told him to stay in touch and to be careful.

  He arrived at bulkhead 28, looked through the glass porthole on the hatch, and saw twisted wreckage and black space through the open ceiling. The force fields would keep more of the atmosphere from escaping, but he needed to activate the hull integrity fields. He called the captain and recommended activating hull integrity fields 17, 18, 19, 20, A, B, and C. That would lock the weakened hull sections together as if there were no damage. He worked his way around the perimeter of the damage, calling back modifications to the force fields he already activated.