B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  “The enemy is in full retreat, Captain,” Commander Holmes said. “They have cleared the battlespace at FTL speeds.”

  “Very well,” Gray replied. “Keep an eye on them.”

  “Full power is restored to the ship,” the AI told him.

  “Helm, correct course to put us back on attack vector.”

  Though America had continued to travel at near-c toward Arianrhod even when she’d been disabled, she’d acquired some lateral drift during the attack. If that went uncorrected, she would be off-target when she arrived at her destination.

  “Correcting course to attack vector, aye, sir.”

  “Comm. Open a channel to all ships.”

  “Channel open, aye, sir.”

  “This is Captain Gray, on board America,” he said. “Admiral Steiger and Admiral Delattre are KIA. As flag captain of this squadron, I am formally assuming command. All vessels are to adjust their vectors to maintain an attack approach on the target.”

  Acknowledgements began coming in, from the USNA ships first, but then from several of the Confederation vessels.

  “Captain, Comm,” the communications officer said. “I have a private call for you, tight channel, from the Napoleon.”

  Here it comes, Gray thought. “Very well. Put it through.”

  “Captain Gray,” a new voice said in his mind. “This is Captain Lavallée. As Admiral Delattre’s flag captain, I remind you that I am in command of the fleet.”

  “With respect, sir,” Gray replied, “Admiral Delattre transferred his flag to this vessel two days ago. The America is the flagship of this fleet, and I am hereby taking command.”

  “I regret, sir, that you see things that way. . . .”

  It was the supreme nightmare of joint fleet operations, a breakdown in the normal chain of command that determined who was in charge.

  “Look, Captain,” Gray said. “The worst thing we can do is get into an argument in the middle of an assault. I suggest—”

  “No suggestions, Captain Gray. I am in command. The fleet will execute a near-c fly-by of the objective, then reorient for an immediate return to Sol.”

  Gray bit off an angry reply. It would be better if he knew exactly where he stood.

  “Is he right?” he asked the ship’s AI. “Does the chain of command go from Delattre to him?”

  “That is unclear,” the AI replied, “and beyond my provenance. The question will need to be settled by the Confederation courts.”

  “The Hague is twenty light years away. What does the Act of Military First Right have to say about it?”

  “Nothing about this particular situation, Captain. The Act, as passed by the Confederation Senate, allows the Confederation Government to assume command of USNA fleet assets such as CBG-40, but the battlegroup was under the direct command of Admiral Delattre, who designated America as the flagship for the entire fleet. There is precedent for Lavallée to assume overall command, but there is precedent for America to remain the fleet flagship, with you in command. In addition, your rank of captain was confirmed August 7, 2419. Justin Lavallée was confirmed captain on November 15, 2419. You have seniority, Captain, by over three months.”

  The dilemma was a serious one. If Gray forced the issue, Captain Lavallée might pull the Confederation ships out of the attack, and that exchange just now with twelve Slan warships proved that going up against them with less than the full weight of the fleet was a very bad idea.

  But there was more and worse. Lavallée had just announced his intent to pull a near-c fly-by. If Gray gave in, if he conceded the command to Lavallée, the entire fleet would flash past Arianrhod at 0.997 c . . . and America would be unable to recover the fighters she’d launched over an hour before.

  “Captain Lavallée,” Gray continued, “we need to work together on this. We must continue with the op plan as it was written. If we don’t, we’re going to have trouble recovering our fighters.”

  “The fighters are expendable, Captain Gray,” Lavallée replied. “Our fleet is not. With the demonstrated abilities of the Slan ships, slowing for close combat at the planet would be suicide.”

  “Nothing has changed, Captain,” Gray said. “We knew the Slan had a lead over us in miltech after Arianrhod fell.”

  “In case you missed it, Captain Gray, the Slan have tactical FTL. We cannot fight against that.”

  Unfortunately, the European Union captain might have a point.

  Gray pulled up a navigational 3-D graphic in the bridge tank, showing Arianrhod in orbit about 36 Ophiuchi A, and the projected path of the fleet, a ruler-straight green thread skimming close past the planet and curling around it in a tight loop. Red stars marked the Slan ships identified so far. There were still only fifteen enemy warships in orbit about the planet, but scattered elsewhere through the system were four other outlying groups totaling twenty-two vessels, including the survivors of Tango One. When the fleet reached Arianrhod, those twenty-two outlying ships might shift in toward the planet, and the Confederation fleet would find itself up against all thirty-seven Slan capital warships. As Lavallée had just pointed out, the Slan ability to move tactically within the star system at FTL speeds gave them a tremendous—possibly an overwhelmingly decisive—advantage.

  “Captain,” Gray continued after a moment, “we can beat them if we concentrate our force. Tango One was only in contact with a fraction of the entire fleet. Once we decelerate into near-Arianrhod space, we’ll be able to—”

  “This conversation,” Lavallée said, “serves no useful purpose, sir. The fleet will pass through the objective area at near-c. The USNA contingent can do as it likes. Transmission ends.”

  Lavallée’s dismissal took one worry off of Gray’s docket, at least—the horrific possibility that Confederation ships might actually open fire on America or other ships of the USNA contingent in an attempt to force them to comply with orders. But it also meant that CBG-40 would be on its own if Gray decided to follow the original op plan in order to pick up the fighters. CBG-40 was down to twenty-two ships, now, with the Grant and the Worden both destroyed. Several other vessels, America included, had been badly mauled and were still under repair.

  Just how badly, Gray thought, did he want to recover those fighters?

  The question was scarcely worth considering. We are not abandoning those people, he thought.

  “We may have no alternative.”

  The unexpected voice in his head made Gray start. He checked his in-head, and saw his neural link to America’s AI was open; he’d not been aware that he’d left the connection in place after questioning it about the Confederation’s Act of Military First Right.

  “Damn it,” Gray said. “We do not leave people behind.”

  “But thirteen capital ships—two of them supply and repair vessels—may not be able to eliminate Slan defenses in-system.”

  “Then we’ll have to hope that the fighter storm buys us an advantage.” Fighter storm was the slang term for the large number of fighters sent on a preliminary long-range strike against an enemy-held world.

  “Indeed. And that raises another issue. Remember that there are a total of twenty strike fighter squadrons en route to Arianrhod, Captain, five of ours, but fifteen more launched from the four Confederation carriers an hour ago. The squadrons off the Klemens von Metternich, of course, no longer have a ship on which to recover. America does not have the hangar deck space to take all of them back on board. There will also be streakers.”

  Twenty squadrons—240 fighters. The fighters off the other remaining Confederation carriers—Kali, Bolivar, and Illustrious—should be able to trap on board their mother ships, though catching up to them and trapping at near-c always posed a really hairy challenge. The big problem, though, as America’s AI had reminded him, was streakers—fighters damaged in combat and hurtling off into deep space at near-light speeds, unable to decelerate or mane
uver. Even relatively slight damage to a strike fighter might make it impossible to trap in a carrier’s docking bay.

  That was what SAR tugs—search and rescue vessels sent out to grapple with damaged fighters and haul them back to the carrier—were for. But recovering a damaged fighter at relativistic velocities was awkward and dangerous. Far better to dispatch and retrieve the SAR tugs at planetary speeds—no more than a few thousand kilometers per second.

  And the number of open hangar bay slots for recovered fighters was also an issue. Of course, there might not be enough survivors from the fighter storm to raise a problem. There would be losses in the coming strike pass, of course, but America simply didn’t have room for more than perhaps 100 fighters. Unless 140 or more were destroyed in the coming battle, some of those fighters would be unrecoverable.

  Gray had been in fighter shoot-outs with high casualty rates—two thirds or more. Fighters were considered expendable; the idea was to send them whipping in past an objective at high velocities and ahead of the arrival of the main fleet. A fighter swarm could do incalculable damage to an enemy fleet or orbital defenses, allowing the heavies, arriving hours later, to simply mop up.

  In Gray’s experience, it was rarely that easy. Usually, the best the fighters could do was blunt the opposition’s defenses enough that the heavies had a fighting chance when they got there, especially if the fleet was outnumbered or up against a better, more advanced technology. He knew. He’d been there.

  And he knew from personal experience the terror of being left behind in a hostile system, light years from home.

  “We’ll find a way,” he told the AI. “We have to.”

  He checked the passage of time, subjective and objective. At the fleet’s current velocity, time was passing for them almost thirteen times faster than normal. It was now 0927; in a little more than three hours objective, it would be time to begin deceleration—if the battlegroup was going to do so. At this velocity, that worked out to less than fifteen minutes subjective.

  The pressure to make a decision definitely was on.

  It would have helped, he thought, if America could have waited until the strike wave of fighters hit Arianrhod before making that decision, but the hard physics of the situation made it otherwise. As he reviewed the opplan timetable, the numbers shifting and flickering through his connection with America’s AI, he noted that the fighters were due to pass Arianrhod at 1319 hours; if she was to enter Arianrhod battlespace at planetary speeds, America and her escorts would have to begin deceleration at 1239, almost an hour earlier.

  “America,” he thought, addressing the ship’s primary AI again. “I need full amplification. And a full command-group brainstorm.”

  And new data began flooding into his mind.

  Lieutenant Donald Gregory

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  36 Ophiuchi System

  0935 hours, TFT

  “Great job, Gregory,” Mackey said over the tactical net. “Where’d you come up with that trick?”

  “Not sure, Boss,” Gregory replied. “I was just in the right place, is all. . . .”

  “Patch your mission record back to CIC,” Mackey told him. “They need to know about this.”

  “Jamming my nose into Slan hull armor and making like a can opener?” Kemper said. “Fuck that.”

  “We’ll call it the Nungie maneuver,” Del Rey added. “You have to be crazy as a damned Nungie to try it!”

  “Considering that he just saved our asses,” Jodi Vaughn said, “and the entire fleet, maybe you idiots should just lay off.”

  “I want all of you people to record this,” Mackey said, “and have it ready for implementation. We’re not going to have time to trap and rearm.”

  Gregory looked at his opplan timeline and saw what their squadron leader meant. While hours remained, objective, before deceleration, only fourteen minutes subjective remained to deceleration. The squadron would not have time to return to America’s hangar bays, rearm with new expendables—missiles and high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds—and launch again before the carrier began decelerating. Technically, America could cease deceleration halfway down the velocity slope in order to launch the CAP fighters again, but fourteen minutes wasn’t enough time for the squadron to get all the way back to the carrier and then recover on board. In any case, the CBG needed to stick to the timetable. Ceasing deceleration for a fighter launch meant reaching the mission objective with excess velocity.

  The six surviving fighters of VFA-96 were on their way in toward a hot battlespace zone with damned few nukes or KK rounds left.

  And that meant that they were going to need every weapon and tactic available to them out here just to survive.

  Chapter Thirteen

  12 November 2424

  TC/USNA CVS America

  In transit

  36 Ophiuchi A System

  1224 hours, TFT

  The brainstorming passed like a dream, with images crowding in upon one another in rapid-fire sequence. The thoughts of fourteen men and women merged within the virtual reality of America’s AI, accelerated to transhuman levels as data cascaded through their electronically linked brains. The AI was running through thousands of overlapping scenarios, sequences designed to show the various alternative outcomes of different actions . . . if CBG-40 decelerated and faced the Slan at Arianrhod alone, if CBG-40 stayed with the main Confederation fleet and passed Arianrhod at near-c, if CBG-40 was joined by some Confederation ships but not others, if the Slan reacted by massing all of their ships at Arianrhod, if the outlying Slan ships stayed where they were . . .

  Simulations even modeled what might happen if the Confederation fleet opened fire on CBG-40 . . . not one of the better scenario outcomes.

  One outcome emerged from the virtual sequences with uncomfortable regularity, however. If the Slan fleet at Arianrhod was not engaged, directly and forcefully, those warships might very well seek to eliminate the source of the Confederation strike against 36 Ophiuchi.

  If Arianrhod was just twenty-five hours from Earth, the converse also was true. The strike had to cripple the Slan fleet here, or risk a counterstrike against Earth itself. Hurt them enough, and maybe they wouldn’t attack Sol and Humankind’s homeworld.

  Maybe . . .

  Weighing in to the decision were the opinions and rationalizations of the members of America’s command staff. Command was not a democratic process, and the decision, ultimately, was Gray’s alone . . . but he wanted to hear what the others thought. At the beginning of the mental staff meeting, nine of the other fifteen had voted to bypass Arianrhod at near-c. The fighters, they argued, would be able to accelerate after the fleet and would, eventually, be able to match speeds and trap.

  Streakers unable to do so, and fighters off the von Metternich with no place to trap, all would be lost. But then, combat resulted in combat losses. There was no way to avoid that, and it might be better to lose a few dozen fighters than to lose much of the USNA battlegroup.

  As the scenario run-through had continued, though, more and more of the command staff personnel had changed their minds. The balance now was solidly in favor of battling it out with the Slan, eleven to four.

  Commander Laurie Taggart, America’s weapons officer, was one of the four, and the most outspoken of them. “I still say the Slan have demonstrated that they’re too advanced for us to face them in a stand-up fight,” she said. The flow of imagery through the simulation focused for a moment on what might happen if the USNA ships engaged the main body of the Slan fleet directly. The incoming fighter waves were swept from the sky . . . and when the main fleet arrived an hour later, ship after ship was smashed by antiproton and heavy fusion beams. America took a dozen hits, the carrier crumpling under the onslaught in a matter of seconds.

  “Captain,” Connie Fletcher said on a private channel. “Have you seen this?”

  “What is
it?”

  “A feed from our CAP a few minutes ago. One of the pilots appears to have discovered a new weapon.”

  Gray looked at the imagery and other data passed on by the fighters from the battle a short while before. One of the pilots—Lieutenant Gregory—had sliced open a Slan Ballista with his own drive singularity.

  Gutsy. And near-suicidal . . . but Gregory’s attack appeared to have been the turning point in the skirmish, sending the remaining Slan warships back toward Arianrhod.

  “I’m not sure our people will be able to use this,” he told Fletcher on the side channel. “But we may be able to adapt this somehow.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I’ve already passed it to the Weapons Section to see what they make of it.”

  “Good. Keep me posted.”

  Another voice entered Gray’s mind. “Deceleration in fifteen minutes objective, Captain,” the ship AI reported. “That’s a minute nine subjective. You wanted to be alerted.”

  “Thank you,” Gray said. He interrupted the data flow, entering the simulation stream. “We are out of time, people,” he told the others. “I’m giving the order to decelerate.”

  The command staff officers all acknowledged and dropped from the linkup, all agreeing without argument, even the holdouts. Although his was the absolute say-so in decisions like this one, Gray preferred to have his department heads on his side, committed to the course of action he’d chosen. Eleven for fifteen wasn’t a bad ratio, and he knew that Taggart and the others would support him even if they didn’t agree with his reasoning.

  Gray swam up out of the deep, in-head session, blinking at the sudden glare of light on America’s bridge. “All hands,” he said, using the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain. CBG-40 will begin deceleration in thirty seconds, subjective. The Confederation ships have decided . . . to proceed without us, so it will be up to us to hit the Slan fleet as hard as we can, as decisively as we can, in order to make them think twice about launching a retaliatory strike against the Sol System.