“And how long do we have, Admiral Cernik?” he asked.
“Three weeks to a month, Mr. Denny. It will take that long to get everything together, get everything in position.”
Denny nodded absently.
“Admiral Svenson, a few more questions, if you would.”
“Of course, Mr. Denny.”
They talked through the plan for another hour, and fleshed out the software requirements much more thoroughly.
“Very well. Thank you, Admiral Svenson.”
Denny nodded to Cernik.
“Admiral Cernik.”
Denny disappeared from the channel.
“He and his group are really very competent,” Cernik told Svenson after Denny had gone. “If he says it will be done, it will be done, appearances notwithstanding.”
“I understand, Stepan. There are few people who understand how deceiving appearances can be as well as I do.”
Operations Flying Duck & Booby Trap
“It looks like we have one on the move, Ma’am,” Captain Andrew Whitlock said as they looked into the hyperspace map.
One massive hyperspace track was beginning out of the Saarland system, heading deeper into Sintaran territory.
“Yes, indeed, Andy,” Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy said to her chief of staff. “Let’s get that to operations. Whatever we have. We can sharpen it as we go.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“And then try to get a vector on it.”
“We do have assets in the area, Sir,” Admiral Jeremy Sandman said. “We’ve been pulling the picket ships back for the tactical department’s Operation Butterfly Net. And they’ve been programmed to drop out of hyperspace once every twelve hours to report and look for new orders.”
“Excellent,” Fleet Admiral Dexter McGee told his chief of staff. “Let’s get some maneuvers together for them, and get this Operation Flying Duck under way.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Sir, we’re picking up one of those hyperspace fogs. It matches the recordings from Admiral Ito’s fleet.”
Admiral Kordecki now wondered how well the formation would follow orders. He couldn’t give new orders, but everybody was warned to be looking for this. His flagship, the DPN Olympia, went to battle stations. So his flag captain was on top of it. He would just have to wait and see whether everyone else was.
“Resolving now, Sir. I make it fifty thousand Sintaran picket ships and five hundred light cruisers on a head-on course. The formation is responding.”
Kordecki felt the Olympia shudder as she fired missiles from her four forward tubes. Even something as big as a battleship shook when you shot the guns. Still, it felt a little different – a little less abrupt, or crisp – because the missile was being lit off in the tube.
“We have outbound eighty thousand missiles, Sir.”
Kordecki hoped they didn’t stop there. Those picket ships had proven awfully hard to hit in normal space, and he didn’t expect any different in hyperspace, where the maneuverability of the missiles was reduced by as much or more than the picket ships’ was. It was all the missiles could do in hyperspace to get out in front of his ships enough to make engagement with the picket ships not dangerous to his own ships.
And then Olympia fired again.
“Second salvo on the way, Sir. We have another eighty thousand missiles outbound.”
And, after a couple minutes, a third time.
“Three salvos on the way, Sir. First salvo will reach engagement distance in five seconds.”
How well would their missiles do against those picket ships?
“Status change, Sir. The Sintaran ships cut their engines and dropped out of hyperspace. No missile contact. Missile drives now expended. They’re falling out of hyperspace.”
Well, at least they wouldn’t run over their own live missiles. What was the point, though?
Nine hours later, it happened again.
“Sir, we’re picking up another one of those hyperspace fogs. Same as last time.”
DPN Olympia went to battle stations, and all of a sudden it hit Admiral Kordecki what was going on. The Imperial Navy was forcing his ships to fire missiles in hyperspace, drawing down his magazines and burning his impeller tubes. At the same time, he didn’t know what else he could do. Even if he could change his formation’s orders, he couldn’t ignore those picket ships, or they would wipe out his force. As it was, in hyperspace, he couldn’t issue new orders until they down-transitioned out of hyperspace even if he had any viable alternatives.
Once again, his formation fired three salvos of eighty thousand missiles at the oncoming mass of picket ships, and once again the picket ships and light cruisers cut their engines and dropped out of hyperspace before any of his missiles reached them. And once again, two hundred and forty thousand of his missiles dropped out of hyperspace as their engines expended the last of their fuel and their acceleration dropped below 0.35 g.
Kordecki’s fleet made the sixty-degree turn that aimed them straight at the red dwarf system that was their true destination. They had been spacing toward another system, an inhabited system, as a ruse, but as they were set to pass the red dwarf at five-light-years distance, they veered toward it. When they were within one light-year of the red dwarf, they dropped out of hyperspace.
During the voyage, Sintaran picket ships had attacked them two more times, and they had expended a total of almost a million missiles of their inventory, and fired their impeller tubes a total of a dozen times in hyperspace, the ignited missiles burning their tubes on their way down the impeller.
Kordecki reported his status to Admiral Benton, and then dispatched half a dozen light cruisers and two hyperspace projector ships to survey the red dwarf system to see what the Rodney had found.
Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy was watching the DP formation with interest. They were headed for Perchon, an inhabited system in the Carolina Sector, but she didn’t know if that would persist. The rest of the DP’s two hundred formations in Sintaran space were staying put in the last systems they had taken possession of while their destroyers scouted ahead of them. There seemed no reason to have a single formation head to Perchon. So she was more or less expecting it when the formation made an abrupt turn and headed for Cache 32.
“OK, Andy, there it is. They’re headed for Cache 32. Inform Admirals Leicester and Cernik.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Fleet Admiral Ivar Svenson had just returned to his mountain-lodge home channel from a conference with his doctors when the message came in from Fleet Admiral Cernik.
Cache 32, was it?
He switched channels to a tactical display of Cache 32, a massive concentration of reaction mass and missiles for resupply of Imperial Navy formations operating against the DP in the Carolina Sector.
Millions of containers of supplies, five hundred robotic heavy cargo shuttles, and a full planetary tactical sensor system constituted the fleet presence in the red dwarf system. Svenson saw with satisfaction the containers had been arranged in the manner he had specified over a year ago.
He replicated his favorite armchair in the tactical display channel and sat down to wait.
Two formations of DP warships, each consisting of three light cruisers and a hypergate projector ship, down-transitioned into the red dwarf system, one above the ecliptic and one below, and well out of missile range of likely warship locations. They surveyed the system and sent their scans to Admiral Kordecki’s formation a light-year away.
“So, nobody guarding the henhouse, eh?” Kordecki said when he reviewed the scans.
“It could be booby-trapped, Sir,” his chief of staff said.
“But there are no warships in the system, Gerry, and we haven’t seen any hyperspace traces of any Imperial Navy formations, either. I think we got lucky.”
“What are we going to do, then, Sir?”
“Let’s go ahead and move into the system. Keep us well away from everything, though. Out of missile range of anything. Let’s see
if we can smoke out what’s going on.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Admiral Svenson saw the half-dozen light cruisers and two projector ships down-transition into the Cache 32 system. He watched impassively as they scanned the system and reported their findings. How long would it be? Admiral Conroy’s latest message said the main formation was only a light-year away. Half an hour in hyperspace.
Forty minutes later, squadrons began down-transitioning into Cache 32. They were transitioning into the system well out of missile range of any of the containers or shuttles. It took the best part of an hour for the whole down-transition, the end of which Svenson recognized by the down-transition of the four hundred projector ships the fleet had used to get there.
About ten minutes into the down-transition, Svenson selected from a menu of ‘robotic’ responses to the arrival of the warships. None of them was transponding, which was typical for DP warships transitioning into a system, so he selected a welcome and traffic pattern message. It told ships how to line up for resupply, first of their reaction mass.
“Huh. The damned thing’s completely robotic. It doesn’t know we’re the enemy, apparently,” Kordecki said.
“Maybe it’s trying to entice us to stay here until the Imperial Navy gets here in force,” his chief of staff said.
“Well, we can foil that. We’ll keep three-quarters of our force out here where we can respond. My compliments to Admiral Niemeier, and order him to get his Force D lined up for refueling. Follow the traffic guidance. We’ll all take turns.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Svenson watched as five thousand ships detached themselves from the main force and started following the traffic pattern to come in alongside the miles-long array of containers and shuttles. Cargo shuttles were lined up, all loaded already.
An Imperial Navy heavy cargo shuttle was about the size and shape of four twelve-by-twelve-by-eighty cargo containers side-by-side, with a cockpit protruding on the front and engines protruding at the back. Rotatable thrusters on the sides allowed for orientation changes and slow-speed vertical maneuvers. The load latched onto both the top and the bottom, as four layers of four containers both above and below, which kept the engine thrust in the middle of the mass. Each cargo shuttle was already loaded with thirty-two containers.
A single twelve-by-twelve-by-eighty cargo container could hold ninety-two thousand gallons of distilled water as reaction mass for the engines of a space-going warship or commercial vessel. Thirty-two containers held almost three million gallons.
The DP warships were all lined up along the row of containers, three high and two deep and miles long, about five miles from the row of blocks and blocks of containers. Fifty shuttles started accelerating toward the warships. When they were still three miles away, Svenson pushed a control in his VR.
The cargo shuttles turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and flushed their containers, all of which contained eight missiles. Twelve thousand eight hundred missiles streaked out and targeted the five thousand warships. They were so close there was no time to react, even with point-defense lasers.
All along their miles-long formation, DP warships exploded and broke up, seemingly all at once. The entire five thousand warships of Admiral Niemeier’s Force D disappeared in a miles-long cataclysm of nuclear explosions, together with the sixteen million men aboard them.
“Fuck!” Admiral Kordecki slammed his fist on the arm of his command chair. “Target those shuttles. We’ll use our own damn shuttles to resupply.”
“We’re out of range, Sir.”
“Then move us into range. We need those supplies, and we have to take out those shuttles before they reload.”
Admiral Svenson watched the DP warships in the tactical display from Cache 32. The natural reaction of any admiral to getting shot at was to shoot back. But this DP admiral would have to move into range first. Would he do that, or would he realize the whole setup was being manipulated remotely?
The DP warships started to get themselves organized, then they moved toward the supply cache. Svenson grinned.
Now it was a question of getting the timing right.
Fifty of the five hundred heavy cargo shuttles in Cache 32 had fired on Admiral Niemeier’s Force D. The other four hundred and fifty shuttles had been retreating behind the cover of the massive array of blocks of containers. They had headed away from the DP main force, keeping the containers between them and the DP warships.
Now, they turned around and went to full acceleration back toward the containers.
“Coming into missile range now, Sir.”
“Stand by tubes on Force A, Battle Group One,” Admiral Kordecki said.
“Standing by, Sir.”
As Kordecki was looking into his tactical display, looking for those fifty shuttles, four hundred and fifty cargo shuttles shot out from the gaps in the huge array of containers before him. They were already moving fast and accelerating hard. It wasn’t unusual for a cargo shuttle to be able to pull five or six gravities light, and missile containers weren’t their heaviest cargo. They were making three gravities as they shot out from the containers.
“Fire missiles!” Kordecki shouted.
Of course, only Force A, Battle Group One fired, and only four hundred missiles shot out from the huge formation. It took Kordecki precious seconds to realize his mistake.
“All ships. Fire missiles,” Kordecki said.
It was several more seconds before the entire force, not warned to stand by, began to fire missiles from their tubes. Some of those tubes, as well, failed, having been burned by the dozen launches in hyperspace of missiles with live engines.
Then the Sintaran cargo shuttles flushed their containers, and a hundred and fifteen thousand missiles bore down on Kordecki’s remaining fifteen thousand warships.
“Retarget to missiles,” Kordecki ordered.
Tens of thousands of the Sintaran missiles died when Kordecki’s fleet fired over sixty thousand counter missiles, but the Sintaran missiles were new stock, with the Mark 2 ECM units, and the DP missiles had a hard time keeping lock. There was no time for the DP warships to fire their own box launchers, and the surviving Sintaran missiles moved into the point-defense envelope. Only in the inner half of the point-defense envelope could the DP warships score hits, and tens of thousands more Sintaran missiles died.
But thirty-four thousand Sintaran missiles remained, and they moved on into Kordecki’s formations.
None of his warships survived.
Fleet Admiral Ivar Svenson, the shattered hulk of a man on full life-support in a flotation tank in the Imperial Navy Medical Research Center on Sintar, changed channels out of the Cache 32 tactical display back to his mountain-lodge home.
He filed his AAR with Admiral Cernik, then looked out on the view out over the tundra and down into the steep mountain valley. He took a deep breath and released it slowly.
It was nice to know, even crippled as he was, he still had it.
Operation Butterfly Net
The picket ships that had attacked Admiral Kordecki’s ships, on dropping out of hyperspace to avoid Kordecki’s missiles, queued up behind their light-cruiser tenders and re-entered hyperspace. They couldn’t catch Kordecki’s formation in hyperspace, where everything goes approximately the same speed, so they headed deeper into Sintar, away from the DP-occupied zone, to take up their positions for Operation Butterfly Net.
It was late in the evening. The kids were in bed, and Peters and Dunham were enjoying the quiet time before their own bedtime, sitting out on the balcony of the private living room in the Imperial Apartment.
The twins’ fourth birthday had come and gone, and they had received the VR nanites preparatory to starting their education. This would likely be in one of the new competitive schooling programs that had become available after the structural reforms of Ilithyia I that Cynthia Newberry Dunham, Dunham’s first wife, had crafted and shepherded through the bureaucracy.
“I see in the reports across my d
esk Fleet Admiral Svenson completely wiped out one of the DP formations without even using a picket ship,” Peters said.
“Yes, in Cache 32. They were looking for supplies.”
“And he destroyed a formation of twenty thousand DP warships with five hundred cargo shuttles?”
“Five hundred cargo shuttles that carried thirty-two missile containers each. A hundred and twenty-eight thousand missiles. With Mark 2 ECM.”
“Ouch. Yeah, that would do it. What were the DP’s casualties, Bobby?”
“Sixty-five million or so.”
“I thought we were trying to minimize their casualties.”
“We are, Amanda. We are. But we can’t let them refuel. That’s the critical element. If they can’t refuel, they lose. Without us killing them all.”
“And what are the total potential casualties?”
“If we kill them all?”
“Yes.”
“Thirteen billion.”
“That’s how many people are on all the DP ships in Sintaran space? Thirteen billion?”
“As near as we can tell, yes. They’re very manpower intensive. It’s one way out of poverty in the DP, so they get a lot of volunteers. But if we kill thirteen billion people, it will make peace very difficult.”
“OK, forget I said anything about casualties in Cache 32. Criminy,” Peters said. “So what’s next?”
“Operation Butterfly Net.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“The problem with Cache 32 came up because a DP recon destroyer saw one of our formations spacing away from that location. We’ve since sent out instructions to space out a few light-years from a cache, then turn to make it look like they’re spacing away from a different system. Preferably an empty one, because then they’ll waste time and reaction mass checking out empty systems.
EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6) Page 8