Battle of Sol

by Lee Guo

  The President took some time to take it all in. “Alright,” he said. “Next subject. What about our fighter complements? How many fighters have we created in the past month and how many do we have in total, right now?”

  “We have about 5000 fighters in total, sir. We’ve been pumping out new fighter pilots and fighters like crazy. Ever since that one pilot took out an entire Titan with one payload, I’ve been forcing the Academy on Mars to pump as many pilots out as possible. I’ve also been pressuring our manufactories to create as many fighters as we have pilots. Because of this, I think our chances of winning the upcoming battle, when it starts, will double. They’ll be slim still, but not as slim as before.”

  The president nodded. “Last question. How much, percentage wise, can you say is our chance of winning the next battle, and also of the war?”

  Yamato stiffened. He took some time. “It’s tough to put a number on our chance of winning a battle, much less a war. But I would say that we have a slim chance of winning the next battle, around the single digits, like 5 to 6 percent. And our chance of winning the war will greatly depend on us winning the battle and learning from the battle and developing new strategies and tactics and technology. In other words, I would say we’d have a 20% of winning the battle after this one, if we win the next one. And as for winning the war, I would say 1 or 2 percent.”

  “That low?” answered the President. “We may as well give up, now…”

  “Don’t, Mr. President. If we do that, we’ll have no chance of winning.”

  “But surely, it’s preferable to gambling with the lives of every man and woman in Sol.”

  “But that’s what precisely what we must do, sir. If we are to have any chance of controlling our future—”

  “Stop, Yamato. I’ve heard of all this before.”

  He didn’t. “Please, Mr. President. Please do not surrender. As long as there is a slimmer of hope, I’d like to take it.”

  “You would, but I can’t say that for every living being in the solar system. The basis of our star nation is a democracy, remember? Nevertheless…” The president sighed. “I will consider what you said and make a decision. Maybe I will decide to gamble our future like you. Maybe I will not…”

  Two minutes later, the President closed the connection.

  Yamato was left with himself in the entire conference room. He was left with the thoughts of what he’d do if his star nation surrendered. Would the Argonans execute the entire military leadership of his nation in an attempt to prevent new insurgencies? How hostile or vehement would the enemy ‒ no, the conquerors ‒ be?

  No… he didn’t want to think of that alternative. Surrender was not an option to him. But if he didn’t surrender, could he fathom the idea of losing the war and gambling away with the lives of all 20 billion citizens on Earth?

  No, he couldn’t. And that’s precisely why he must not lose at all. He must make every effort to win.

  I must win.. He pressed his fists on the table. I am all that stands between a lost future for humanity, and our rightful destiny as a species.

  I must win.

  Wing Commander’s Quarters, Federation Fleetcarrier Enterprise, Sol

  It was cramped inside his quarters, but that was because there was another person in his bunk.

  Trevor Gray gazed at the ceiling lights with exhausted eyes ‒ for none other than the fact that he had fucked this girl in the way she wanted to be fucked.

  He gazed at the florescent rods above him and his sleepy post-orgasm mind thought about the one woman who hadn’t spoken to him for month, ever since that woman had learned that he had gambled with his life trying and successfully taking down a Moebius class Titan.

  Marcy ‘Captain’ Devries had probably forgotten about him. She was probably out there sleeping with whatever new boyfriend she found and simply didn’t have the time to present to him their divorce papers. That or maybe she still thought about him… and was too mad and conflicted to bring herself to a divorce.

  Whatever reason it was, Trevor knew he should forget about her.

  “What are you thinking, Sandy?” murmured Laurie Talbot.

  “I’m thinking of my wife.”

  Pause. “Wait, you’re married?”

  “We don’t speak, anymore. Haven’t seen her in a month.”

  Another pause. “What happened?”

  “I broke a vow.”

  “By sleeping with random girls?”

  “No, no.” Trevor smiled. “A far more ludicrous vow. I gambled with my life to take down a Titan.”

  “You mean she’s mad at you for the very thing that has made you famous?”

  “Yup.”

  A pause. “She cared about you that much?”

  “She was nervous when it came to risks that people close to her took. I often wonder why she decided to become a fighter pilot if she couldn’t handle the risk.”

  “Was she always like that?”

  “No. Only when we married did she start caring, err… worrying about me so much.”

  The woman snuggled beside him was silent for a while. “Now I’m wondering if I should be inside this love triangle.”

  “Don’t go, Laurie. Like I said, I haven’t spoken to her in a month. She’s gone to me. You’re all I have, now. And my new greenies. And my squadron.”

  That calmed her. “Then go to sleep, Sandy. Tomorrow’s a new day.”

  “You too, babe.”

  It took several minutes, but when she started snoring, he knew he was safe. Safe from a week without sex. Then he turned his mind back to his life.

  Wing Commander Trevor Gray. It had a ring to it. Ever since he got promoted, the greenies that were assigned to him gave him loads of respect. ‘How did you find out the solution to taking down that Titan?’ ‘What were you thinking when you put yourself in that much danger?’ ‘How can you stay cool when under that much pressure?’ ‘Wasn’t it scary, being by yourself without your Wing to absorb fire from that Titan?’

  Trevor loved the fame, but not more than he loved getting it. If he could do it all over, again, he’d take the danger in a heartbeat. Now, it was boring wing commander work drilling his greenies with squadron level tactics. It was nice knowing that every one of his greenies wanted to be like him, but not every one of them had the courage to do what he did, nor did most have the courage to do what was needed when that time came.

  That was a problem. If he wanted his wing to function his way, he’d need all of them to change their personalities, and that was impossible, or so he was told. But Trevor being Trevor ‘Sandy’ Gray, he intended to make the near impossible possible. He wanted his wing to have more kills than any other wing in the space force, and he wanted those kills to be big.

  They said that a Wing acted a lot like its Wing Commander, and Trevor hoped that would always true. If it were, then he felt certain he’d gain even more respect and be more revered in the battles to come. Maybe his Wing might have more deaths, but that was only natural…

  Trevor reminded himself that his next teachings would be on defensive strategies. He’d hate to have some of greenies buy it because they wanted to be more like him… and because of him. He would hate for Laurie to buy the farm because she wanted to make him proud, or some other greenie infection.

  He shook his head. No… he didn’t have to worry about that. He knew why Laurie loved him. She loved him because she was attracted physically to him, not because she was a newb and he was this top-dog hero of the Fighter Corps. Well… not all of her love was because of that. But some.

  Trevor closed his eyes and tried drifting to sleep. For a moment, he thought it was Captain sleeping next to him, in his old bunk on board the Yorktown. When he opened his eyes, he saw a different woman with a different figure. And a different sound. In a different place.

  He missed his old quarters. He had spent half a year in them while the Yorktown had moved from battle to battle. Now, it would probably be occupied by another greenie.

 
Taking a deep breath… he realized that he had seen people come and go so fast that he would never remember them by the time the next year hit. Only a few. He told himself to he would spend more time with those around him, while he still could. Who knew? Maybe the next battle would be his last? Maybe the next battle would be their last?

  Maybe there wouldn’t be a last battle if Earth surrendered.

  No, that didn’t sound like Yamato.

  — But Yamato was only one person. There was another who could order Yamato to surrender.

  Fat chance, Trevor thought. If that happened, my career would be over, and my career is just getting started…

  He closed his eyes and fell to sleep dreaming of more kills and big kills.

  Shuttlepod 1, above the wormhole exit, Sol

  Sector General Yamato glanced out of his shuttlecraft’s cockpit window and saw the massive kilometer-long Pulsar-class battlecruiser Carpathia 200 meters away.

  He smiled. No matter how many times he saw his new flagship holographically, nothing could compare with seeing it for the first time with a naked eye… especially not this up close.

  The oblong shaped warship was beautiful and majestic. Sensors and point defense weapon mounts dotted its hull. It looked the way it functioned. Like an inborn killer. 8 million tons of metal and carbon nanofibers… and the latest weapons and defenses the proud star of humanity had.

  Its bow measured 300 meters in diameter, and at its dead center was the very thing that was its namesake. The pulsar gun ‒ a massive 100 meter wide laser cannon that could pump out a beam of gamma rays with the destructive potential of 500 megatons of TNT per blast. It could fire this beam twice per second, making it the deadliest warship humanity had created to date.

  The ship was well defended, too. Its nanofiber carbon armor was 60 meters thick… meaning it was as thick as the standard Artemis class battlecruiser. But that wasn’t what amazed Yamato. The really awe-inspiring part was that it was equipped with the latest mark 9 shield generator, making its shields more powerful than a standard human superdreadnought. Such a shield generator was capable of taking twenty 100-megaton nukes at point blank range and still function with double digit saturation.

  Amazing.

  The oval shaped ship also had embedded on all sides, the latest point defense laser mounts as well as flak cannons to defend against enemy missiles… truly the epitome of modern. Its power core was hidden deep within the center of the ship, armored on all sides by an inner layer of 20 meters of carbon nanofiber.

  But that was not all. The most important equipment the ship had was this ‒ Yamato gazed at the well armored Yatimis drive ring at the aft of the ship. This drive ring could speed the vessel up to .3 c, which was 1.5 times faster than the fastest Argonan warship. This very fact was game changing and it meant that the ship could easily disengage from battle with an enemy fleet and pull distance enough for its shields to recharge before battling again, and Yamato intended to do this in the battles to come.

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it, sir?” said Captain Fletcher, standing beside Yamato in the cockpit. “And we have five of them, with more coming out of the production docks each week.”

  Yamato smiled and turned towards his old flag captain. “I’ll miss your Yorktown, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy my flag was transferring to something better… that’s for sure.”

  “And we’ll miss you, sir. The Yorktown will always miss its fleet commander. We’ll do our part in the coming battles ‒ so will each and every fighter pilot all the way down to the maintenance crew member.”

  Yamato grunted with approval as he felt his stomach churn due to the act of his shuttlecraft passing through the bigger battlecruiser’s artificial gravity field. For a moment, the disconcerting feeling existed, and then it passed.

  It took several more minutes for the shuttlecraft to reach the bigger ‘Pulsar’ class battlecruiser’s docking bay, but that soon came as well. Inside, Yamato felt anxiety, knowing he was about to meet his new flag captain upfront for the first time.

  He saw his shuttlepod move through the force fields that kept the docking bay’s internal oxygenated atmosphere in and felt the sensation of sliding through a waterfall. Then, he was inside the battlecruiser.

  The docking bay looked small, even for a battlecruiser’s standards. 50 meters wide by 80 meters long, it was just barely enough for Yamato’s shuttlepod to edge into a landing port. The small shuttle did so with a clump. And that was it.

  “Opening shuttlepod doors,” said the pilot. “Good to carry you, general.”

  “Thank you, ensign,” said Yamato, who saluted to her salute and walked through the hatch into the docking bay.

  “General on deck!” said the marine honor guard leader.

  The 12 man team saluted, to which Yamato returned the salute. “Permission to come aboard?” Yamato asked another man in captain brevets.

  “Yes, sir,” said the broad shouldered and incredibly tall, red-haired captain. “Welcome, general to your new home. I am your new Flag Captain… Erwin Rogers. It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

  “And it’s an honor to make this my flagship, captain,” answered Yamato. He gazed back at the shuttlepod from which he came and saw Captain Fletcher wave goodbye from the pod’s cockpit. Yamato nodded, and the shuttle lifted. Seconds later, it went through the docking bay’s force field and out into space. “Then without further ado,” said Yamato, turning to face his new flag captain. “Let’s get to the flag bridge, immediately. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Captain Rogers nodded. “Yes, sir, but first allow me to show you your new quarters…?”

  Admiral’s quarters, Federation Battlecruiser Carpathia, above the wormhole exit, Sol

  After a two hour tour of his new flagship, Yamato finally settled into his new quarters on board the Carpathia. If anything, the Pulsar class battlecruiser made sure the flag officers got all the amenities. His new fleet commander’s quarters were spacious. Now also packed with all the things he wanted to transfer from the Yorktown. It would be up to him to place everything into its rightful place.

  Yamato sat on a comfy couch, perspiring from all the introductions to the ship’s personnel. Overall, he liked what he saw… about the ship and its brand new crew as well. To say that the ship was the latest in human innovation would be an understatement. Custom built to kill enemy warships. With a main cannon that had a range of 200,000 kilometers, he was certain his new flagship would be able to take down enough of the enemy than four times its own weight. Not that he wanted to go down anytime soon…

  Now, he was much more confident that he could defeat the enemy fleet when they came through that wormhole. It was no longer a 5% prediction, but at least a 20% prediction ‒ although… a lot still depended on what the enemy would bring through that wormhole.

  He thought about what the enemy would bring.

  In a way, it was unfair. While the enemy could see everything on the Sol side of the wormhole ‒ by using their sensor probe pushes ‒ humanity had no way to see what was on the other side of the wormhole… in Alpha Centauri. The reason was none other than the fact that the Argonans controlled the entire length of the wormhole. They had so many combat probes that the entire wormhole was controlled by their war probes. This enabled them to push out with probes to see what was happening in Sol. And if Yamato wanted to do the same and push out with human probes on the Alpha Centauri side of the wormhole, he needed to at least kill all the enemy probes inside the wormhole… an impossibility. Humanity simply did not have the industry to create that many warprobes to take control inside the wormhole. A convenience that the enemy had… due to their greater industrial capacity.

  This was the same reason... that for the past month, Yamato had failed to close the wormhole gate in Alpha Centauri. He had the megabombs to do it as he eventually produced more, but he had no way to transport those bombs to the gate in Alpha Centauri. Every time he tried to, the enemy moved their warships into the wormhole to
prevent his bomb hauler transports to make it to the other side. And unless he wanted to risk a full scale war inside the wormhole, a battle in which he did not have the ability to use his stationary defenses, missiles, mines, and all his ships. Nor was it a battle in which he had the advantage of facing an enemy that was bottlenecked and forced to come out in pieces only as large as the wormhole exit permitted…

  He sighed. It was as good as it got, he supposed. Now, he had to resort to guessing what would come out based on what the Argonans usually brought for a wormhole exit push.

  So Yamato sat there and guessed. First of all, he knew for a fact that the enemy would send out their SADAMs first ‒ search and destroy all-range missiles. These minesweeper missiles were crucial to lowering humanity’s mine saturation right in front of the wormhole exit. He estimated that, depending on how much they devoted their industrial capacity to minesweeping missiles, Yamato’s mine saturation might be lowered from 100% — which was perfect — to as high as 60% and as low as 20%. It all depended on how many SADAMs the enemy would bring.

  Worse… Yamato wondered if the enemy would send their SADAMs in phases or all at once. Traditional wisdom was that it was best to empty all your minesweeping missiles first to get rid of as many mines before your ships made transit… but who knew what the enemy’s tactics would be. They were inventive, he had to admit this, and if they saw a reason to empty their SADAMs in sequence, they would definitely take it.

  His next guess was that after the enemy depleted their SADAMs, they would send through their least important ships like destroyers and frigates to soak up mine damage and to shoot any mines that were in the way. In this stage, He estimated the enemy would lose anywhere from half to 90% of all their ships that they sent through… because all his forces would be shooting at all of the enemy’s ships as they tried to clear the way of any mines their SADAMs failed to kill.