by Aer-ki Jyr
“Not good,” Kelly said, switching her armor’s comm system back to external audio so she could address the tech. “Change in plans. How much of the weaponry can you get back online in three and a half hours?”
“Online?” the tech asked, confused.
“We’ve got incoming.”
“Damn,” the man said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know. What do you want us to prioritize?”
“Missiles,” she said without hesitation. If the enemy got close enough for the point defense weapons then the station was as good as dead, and there were more than 20,000 people onboard.
“Three…unless you can scrape me up a larger workforce?”
“No promises…go,” she ordered, pointing for emphasis.
The tech scurried off, nudging his way past two South Africans as he activated his headset to inform his work crews to stop what they were doing and start undoing everything they’d been working on the past four days. He disappeared down another hallway as Kelly began walking towards the station’s control center.
“Captain, how far out is the cutter?”
“Half an hour.”
“Where’s the nearest target?”
“If speeds hold, it’ll be here within two hours, but our best guess is it’ll rendezvous with the main group and approach at their speed. Attacking one or two at a time would be foolish.”
“Attacking Star Force is foolish,” she reminded him. “I assume they’ve been warned?”
“They don’t appear to care,” the Captain said grimly. “Their feud with the South Africans seems to be overwhelming their judgement.”
“Who has control of the cutter?”
“The Mjolnir.”
“Get me a comm relay to Harper.”
“One moment,” the SR Captain said, arranging the linkage using his ship as a conduit between Kelly’s short range transmitter and the far off Star Force battleship.
“Harper here, Archon.”
“What are your plans, Captain?”
“Get between them and you and dare them to go through,” he said icily. “If they attack us we’re going to nail every warship they possess to the wall and I’ve informed them of that fact.”
“And if they’re determined to attack?”
“It’ll be close, but I think we can take them. Can’t guarantee if the station will survive if they focus their attack there instead of on us.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Kelly admitted. “What’s the math look like for a harassment run with the cutter?”
“Dicey. We can get out and back to hit one of their lone frigates, but only if they maintain unit cohesion. If I send the cutter out and they decide to press their smaller ships forward, they’ll get to the station when it’s unguarded.”
“We’ve got to thin their numbers while we can,” Kelly differed. “We’ll have some of the station’s armament online, plus the defense systems on the SR so we won’t be totally helpless. Go kill what you can before they get here. This station’s armor is nil, and I’d rather have the least amount of enemy weapons come within range as we can manage.”
“If that’s the way you want to play it,” Harper offered.
“It is.”
“Diverting now. Keep your fingers crossed.”
“No can do, Captain. I’ve got some tech work to assist with and I’m going to need my hands free.”
Crossed fingers or not, the gambit paid off and the Star Force cutter was able to intercept and destroy the West African frigate, using up most of its intercepts during the battle with the larger ship, which had been designed and built by Ares Industries, a private corporation dedicated to the manufacture of space-based weaponry. Their warship line was cheap and functional, with most of their sales going to the smaller nations that couldn’t afford to run their own shipyards and design facilities.
Their frigates were armed with missile banks and a small laser, the former of which had become the staple armament in Earth warfleets. Star Force’s ability to track and destroy most, if not all missiles fired at their ships had slowly prompted additional weapon systems to be pushed to the forefront of the market. The small laser the Ares frigate employed had been one such addition, but only managed to melt a few rivulets of armor from the Star Force cutter before the West African ship was destroyed by a series of medium laser strikes on approach, followed by an offensive missile salvo that the frigate couldn’t stop.
The missiles tore through the moderately thick, but cheaply constructed armor after the first few detonations, ripping a gash in the side of the angular ship that resembled an upright clown fish with a narrow forward profile that was the one positive tactical aspect of the otherwise subpar design. The cutter’s laser strikes hit the ‘head’ of the frigate, causing moderate damage, but it wasn’t until the Star Force warship used its superior speed to flank the frigate and fire off its missiles at the wide broadside did it get in a killing strike.
As soon as the frigate was eliminated the cutter turned around and accelerated back towards the South African station…but not precisely. Harper had the ship on an intercept course a few thousand kilometers out where he expected the main bulk of the attacking fleet to rendezvous. If he could use the cutter to hit them from behind and harass them enough to either stall or break up their lines, then the other two Star Force ships would arrive in better position to defend their people.
The cutter had only its single medium laser, 8 offensive missiles, and 12 intercepts left in its tiny arsenal. The laser would be the most effective, with essentially unlimited shots and a range decent enough to keep the ship out away from the cannons of the West African fleet. Their larger ships, in addition to an insane number of missile banks, were equipped with short ranged cannons, similar to those used on tanks, to be able to deliver a large amount of raw kill power in close engagements while their missiles allowed them to attack at range.
When the cutter finally did arrive at the back of the West African fleet, minutes ahead of their intercept with the station, it chose one of their destroyers and began chipping away at its forward, upper missile banks, given that all of the ships were in reverse position using their engines to decelerate on approach. Thanks to the cutter’s omni-direction thrust design, it was able to keep its ‘forward’ mounted laser on target and succeeded in landing a few long range shots on the openings of the missile boxes rising up along the spine of the destroyer like the fins on a Beta.
Other missile boxes were likewise strung out below the narrow hull, but the cutter’s remote pilot kept his attack on the upper ones, hoping to rack up enough damage to disable some of them from launching…or better yet, trigger an internal explosion.
After the first few shots were landed with impunity, the West African fleet commander decided to dispatch two of his three remaining frigates back to deal with the sniping cutter while the larger ships continued to move in towards their primary target.
Harper nodded, glad that he had succeeded in pulling off two more of their ships. As he watched, the cutter began to slowly reduce its forward speed, essentially pulling the frigates further and further back until they got within their effective missile range…or what they calculated as such, given the cutter’s abilities to chew up missiles…and launched a large, dual reprisal salvo.
With the shorter distance to target, the cutter’s anti-missile laser cupola had less time to track and shoot down the missiles, but it succeeded in knocking off a large chunk of them, then used its remaining intercepts to thin the numbers even more. The last of its offensive missiles were launched, four each at both frigates, before it took the brunt of the West Africans’ attack against its Herculium armored hull, which rotated to starboard in an attempt to protect the medium laser port even as the cupolas continued to down missiles up until the moment they hit.
When the explosive debris cloud dissipated, the cutter remained with a section of its port armor gone and significant internal damage along that side. Two engine vents in the area had al
so been destroyed, but thanks to the redundant Star Force design the ship was able to accelerate away from the now damaged, but still operation frigates, preserving it for some future use as they assessed their status from the light missile attack, which had managed to destroy the small laser on one of the ships.
Meanwhile the main bulk of the attacking fleet closed within maximum weapons range of the station. Immediately upon doing so racks of long range missiles blossomed from the South African station as tiny streaks traveling out in packs towards the distant ships. Halfway through their journey the attackers flipped back over, having sufficiently decelerated, and launched their own smaller version of the station’s long range missiles, targeting the habitat rather than the SR stationed alongside it, intending to kill as many South Africans as they could before Star Force eventually ground the war down to a close.
The station continued to pour out more and more missiles, never a massive, coordinated salvo, but a slow, steady stream as the launchers had to reload themselves from internal, armored stores rather than launching them from prefabricated launch boxes such as the warships possessed. A few cannons were also operational, but the enemy ships would have to get within closer range for them to become of use, and it appeared that the West Africans weren’t intent on waiting for that to happen.
SR-119 adjusted its positioning slightly, thrusting away from the projected missile track as it activated its own anti-missile systems, which included both lasers and intercepts, and began striking down the West African long range missiles, with the lasers having to rack up more hits than usual to take the larger weapons down. A few got through and hit the station, but most of the attack was blunted.
Those that did hit blew out hull breaches on the outer levels, but Kelly had already evacuated and pressure sealed those areas, creating an armor-like defensive layer made up of the station itself to protect the people inside and make the West Africans earn their kills. The more time they could buy, the closer the two other Star Force ships would get.
More and more missiles kept coming in, but so did the attacking fleet, minus a destroyer. It had been destroyed as the station’s long range missiles had targeted it exclusively. Seeing that exchanging long range fire with the station while the SR ate up the majority of their own long range missiles wasn’t going to work, the West Africans moved to engage at closer range, bringing their banks of short range missiles into play along with their cannons.
Almost as if preplanned, nearly simultaneous plumes of hundreds of short range missiles manifested from the fish-like ships as they crossed into firing range along with cannon fire being aimed at the somewhat distant station, but given its massive size it wasn’t difficult to target. Several shells hit and penetrated the outer hull ahead of the missiles, some punching through multiple levels and creating small atmospheric breaches, which pre-designated containment teams jumped into action to seal before the atmosphere was able to slowly drain out of the habitat’s interior.
As the missile swarm neared the halfway point a tiny ship streaked into view a few dozen kilometers away from the station, decelerating hard into the gap directly in the path of the attack. Before it had even nulled out all its momentum the Star Force frigate let loose with its entire compliment of intercepts, firing off the tiny, high speed anti-missile missiles against the enemy’s huge missile wave while picking at more with its fast firing laser cupolas.
A large chunk out of the missile wave disappeared over the course of the next thirty seconds, with SR-119 trying to eat up as much of the remainders as it could. More than 20 missiles still got through, but they didn’t hit in unison, spreading a wide scar of destruction across the habitat without gutting it, helped in part by the slow rotation of the two massive gravity cylinders that made up its center of mass.
More long range missiles streaked out from the top and bottom of the station, along with sporadic cannon fire of its own as the virtually invisible slugs were exchanged with the station taking the worst of the damage. Hull plates continued to be pulverized and expelled into space, creating a cacophony of debris plumes across the metallic surface.
The Star Force frigate, now squaring off directly in the face of the encroaching fleet at less than 2 kilometers, fired off swarms of its own offensive missiles while taking a shot at one of three cruisers with its own small, modular rail gun, drilling a hole through the upper ‘fin’ of the shark-like design, which had three fins of missile banks stretching out from a thick body containing four cannons on the ‘face.’ The rail gun slug passed clean through the fin and continued out the back into space, with the damage triggering secondary explosions within the missiles banks.
The six or so missiles around the point of impact detonated their fuel loads, sheering off the top half of the fin entirely while the cruiser fired more missiles at the station while turning its cannons on the frigate. It launched two solid shells toward the frigate, one of which hit and dented the arm on the top side, before the cruiser utterly disintegrated. The West African ship was sheered in two along the midsection with the debris wash annihilating the briefly surviving forward and back halves.
The cruiser on its port side was also hit with a glancing shot, tearing off the top fin and most of the upper hull, but leaving enough connective tissue beneath to retain something to be labeled as a corpse of the ship. The few pieces of the kamikaze cutter that remained recognizable shot off into space on the far side at diverging angles, appearing as a massive shotgun blast as it came out the side of the first cruiser and killed the second.
Before the rest of the West Africans could figure out what had just happened they came under fire from the Star Force destroyer now arriving at the engagement zone. It laid the hammer down on the remaining cruiser and destroyers with several salvos of missiles along with its twin large lasers and rail gun. The remaining enemy frigates, two of which were returning from the brief battle with the cutter, targeted the station rather than the Star Force ships, intent on taking it out before they themselves were killed.
With the Star Force destroyer now in play, coming up to replace the frigate as missile defense shield, none of the remaining missile salvos got past the pair, with the destroyer’s large supply of intercepts eating up what the lasers on both ships couldn’t handle. The offensive weapons, meanwhile, chewed the attackers apart until only a pair of destroyers remained with both of them beginning to accelerate towards the station in a last ditch ramming effort.
Both Star Force ships immediately responded, using their greater maneuverability to pace the attacking ships and ram them off course, with the frigate having a harder time of it, but both succeeded in pushing the trajectories clear, then disengaging and pulling back far enough to blow them apart at point blank range with their rail guns.
The two Star Force warships took no mercy on the West Africans and tore their ships apart, ensuring that they couldn’t fire one more shell or missile against the station under their protection. Afterwards the damaged Star Force ships swung back around and took up parking orbits next to the station, unable to do anything further with their lack of crews, but remaining in place as guards in case any further West African ships would show up and try to finish the job.
It was an unnecessary gesture, given that more warships were already enroute to provide protection, but one that wasn’t lost on the station’s inhabitants. The outer structure was a mess, with pieces floating everywhere and the rotation of the cylinders off balanced enough that they had to be decelerated down to 1/10th speed to keep the torque from causing further structural damage, but all the South Africans had survived thanks to Kelly and the other Star Force personnel moving them to the center of the station and physically sealing off the outer layers above and beyond just closing the doors.
It would take months to repair all the damage, but repair it they could. In the mean time SR-119 and a small fleet of civilian ships would be evacuating the inhabitants to temporary quarters on nearby Star Force stations while the warfleet went on immediate def
ensive deployment to lock down all other South African facilities against further assaults…after which orders went out from Archon Command to the battleship Captains to hunt down and destroy/capture every West African warship in orbit.
6
June 17, 2109
“Director,” the German Ambassador greeted as he entered Davis’s office. “Ambassador.”
His Indian counterpart returned his greeting as the man sat down on the opposite end of the desk. “Mr. Ackerman.”
“What can I do for you, gentlemen,” Davis asked, referring to their mutual request for this meeting.
Ackerman spoke first. “We understand that your troops have now seized five of our territories,” the slightly overweight man said, including the Indian Ambassador in his statement. “We would like to know your terms for reacquiring them.”
Davis sat up a bit straighter in his chair. “As you probably know, we reached an agreement with the South Africans that allowed them to retain a portion of their Lunar territories. If you’re willing to end your participation in the war we can discuss similar terms, but the territories you’re referencing are not on the table, the reason being that those colonies have declared their independence and Star Force has already acknowledged that fact. If you wish to pursue reunification you’ll have to take it up with them diplomatically.”
“The only reason they have their independence,” Ackerman stated with a tired anger, “is because you forcefully removed our troops in those territories.”
“You stole them from us,” Rao said, more to the point.
“They made the request,” Davis answered, suppressing a smile. “And the longer the situation dragged on the more their supplies would have diminished, so we chose to take the most expedient course.”