After the expected chuckles, she resumed, “Once we have powered up the ship, I’ll be able to begin taking on stores and the balance of our crew, and tackle navigation and other critical functions. At present, despite my worst fears, the Krakow appears to actually be a ship, and I see no reason why we cannot break orbit within the time frame given us.”
Alexi mildly asked, “Commander, how much experience do you have with Admiral Lee?” She smiled, “Sir, I have never met him.” Alexi nodded, “I understand; few of us have; how much experience do you have with Admiral of the Fleet Lee?”
She blinked, “Sir, it is my understanding that he is a man of his word, and insists that his people keep theirs.”
Alexi beamed, “Exactly so. That is why I expect this ship to break orbit in twenty days, not four weeks.”
He slowly looked around the desk at his officers, “I give you permission to groan. Do it now, not later, especially in front of our crew.”
Commander Bergman let out a surprisingly loud groan, causing the other officers to laugh and follow suit.
He waited until the space was absolutely quiet and continued, “Some of you have served with me, some of you have not; I tell you now, when I say twenty days, I do not mean twenty days and one minute. Does everyone understand what I am saying? Our beloved navy finds itself in dire straits, and Admiral Lee has given us a grave responsibility – much hinges on this assignment. As soon as we are operational, only then can Seventh Fleet stand down. Only when that happens can the admiral begin to rebuild and repair our single, operational mobile fleet.”
He stood causing everyone else to come to their feet. He ordered, “Commander Bergman will you please come with me to engineering? The rest of you have three hours to provide me with a list of all requirements, both men and material, that you must have to bring this ship to life. Since we must be underway in nineteen days, twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes, I strongly suggest that your target Zero Hour ought to be at least one day earlier. That is all.”
Over the next five hours the two officers went through engineering, often on their hands and knees.
Alexi shook his head, “We have our work cut out for us. Commander, please order ten replacement capacitors. We know six are bad, and we can assume that we’ll encounter problems with more as we begin to power up the ship. Also, send a comm to Fleet Base Jupiter, attention Admiral Lee. Inform his office that we must have those capacitors and that we have not only not received the cabling, we don’t have a time frame.”
She looked sharply at him and he nodded, “You did not believe me? The admiral is at present quite busy, but he has an exceptional aide, and she has been ordered to ensure that we acquire whatever this ship needs. If nothing else, I hope this tells you how critical our task is.”
More than anything he’d said, his order to report directly to the admiral of the fleet seemed to convince his executive officer that he intended to be underway on or before the time he’d given to his officers.
Chapter 34
Fleet Auxiliary Carrier Essex
Chief Elliot Kana
Elliot shifted on his feet and calmly said, “Try it again, but this time let’s see if you can avoid tripping over your own two feet – after all, that’s my job.”
The tall and very lean Marine smiled, “Chief, you seem to be saying that it is your task to trip over your feet.” Kana grinned, “If that were the case, I’d be on my back, and as we can both plainly see, that state of being has yet to occur.”
The Marine moved in, slid to his right and tried to sweep Kana. He simply backed up just enough to avoid the very fast right foot and then launched his own left foot, catching the Marine in the side and dropping him to the deck with a thud.
The petty officer rolled out of the way of the next foot and bounced to his feet. Kana nodded, “Good move. You’ve got the concept of retreat down pat; now, we need to work on your alleged ability to attack.”
The two men spent fifteen minutes on the floor. The PO4 was actually very good, and twice managed to drop Kana.
They spent a few minutes cooling down, taking to a collection of Marines, over half of them fairly senior, at least in time of service, as well as a sprinkling of enlisted Navy, most of them fairly junior.
As he was leaving the space, en route to his own work space, a large space jammed with a forest of the parts and supplies required to keep a fleet auxiliary carrier and her complement of fighters in space for extended periods of time, klaxons began blaring, and a calm female voice stated, “Battle Stations, Battle Stations. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill.”
Kana ran for his station, Fighter Bay Four. He was in charge of a team that loaded missiles, changed out spent capacitors and performed whatever maintenance the small fighters required in order to remain in space while ensuring the enemy didn’t.
Fleet Auxiliary carriers were very large ships, while at the same time being relatively small carriers. They carried fewer fighters than similar sized fleet carriers, but they also contained huge cargo holds and were normally utilized as a combination cargo ship with attached fighters.
The Essex was in the third month of a long tour of the outer systems. It was ferrying equipment and supplies that would be transferred to various Navy bases, and was of course, also the single remaining mobile navy fleet in human space, save for First Fleet, which was responsible for protecting Earth’s system, which it rarely if ever left. In any one cruise, Seventh Fleet could only visit a small portion of earth’s far-flung systems, but with the dismantlement of Fifth and Sixth Fleets, Seventh represented the single remaining collection of military might in human space.
Most systems retained a few old fleet destroyers and a large number of shuttles, but the vast majority of operational fleet ships were older than their personnel.
The single large exception to this incipient decrepitude was the Lightning F/A 191-6, a relatively new model fighter, and the principal offensive weapon of the carrier. It had been slowly replacing the shoddily built Dash 5 and in some cases, the far older Dash 4 fighters.
The Dash 6 was a much smaller craft than it’s older cousins, faster and more nimble. It was quieter, radiated less infrared and had better sensors than its predecessors. On the other hand, its design favored missiles over its single energy weapon, which was relatively small. Its principal defensive weakness had proven to be its inability to soak up or deflect energy weapons. Over the decades, the Federal Navy had gradually emphasized a missile-heavy fighter offense, stealth and less armor.
Elliot ran through the personnel hatch on the flight deck and began donning his suit, the one designed to protect him from the hazards of war, including loss of atmosphere, extremes of heat and cold and various noxious gases that could kill within seconds. These suits were reasonably fresh, but that hadn’t always been the case.
New alarms began blaring as he finished, and he ran toward a small crew space that would remain aired up. Red lights flashed and the main doors began to open. He watched through a view port as three fighters streamed in, all with dummy missiles on their racks. Eight fighters were assigned to this bay.
They had been in the middle of exercises when whatever happened started happening – Elliot had no idea, but even as the doors began to close another alarm shrilled and he felt the faint shudder of missile launches. That, more than anything, told him that whatever was happening, it was not only not a drill, it was very close and extremely serious.
Seventh Fleet spent most of its time in the far reaches of human space, and sometimes, well beyond. It infrequently was called upon to enter a system and look for pirates or put down a minor disturbance, but it had been many years since this fleet engaged in a pitched battle.
As the fighters settled, computers in the ship synced with the returning craft, determining their status as well as providing Elliot and his teammates with the information they required.
Military systems tended to be very basic and robust, designed to take huge amount
s of abuse while continuing to function. This ship was generations older than the fighters now assigned to it, but some of that gap was software, which had been upgraded prior to receiving those relatively delicate combat craft.
As soon as the huge doors boomed shut Elliot palmed the large knob controlling the personnel hatch and he ran to his left to a mobile missile rack. He grabbed the handle and tugged it into powered motion. Two other personnel scrambled to remove the dummies while a fourth hooked into the fighter’s comm system. They simply unlatched the blue dummies and they clanged onto the deck.
Elliot moved the missile pallet into position and levered two missiles up into position while another waited to secure them. As soon as they were attached, he dropped the arm and moved the handler around to the port side of the fighter and repeated the process. The man hooked into the pilot’s comm system was clearly agitated and repeatedly asked, “Who are they?” He couldn’t seem to understand the answer, and kept asking for information.
Within seven minutes from arrival they armed the fighter with missiles. While a missile tech ran back toward the rear of the bay with the now empty handler, Elliot hooked into one of the fighter’s data ports and brought up the information. He stared at the results – the energy weapon capacitor was fried. This information hadn’t been included in the automatic feed. During normal operations, controls prevented this from happening, meaning the crew had deliberately overridden that safety feature.
He yelled at the other technician, “We have to replace the capacitor.” He commed the technician who had just dropped off the missile pallet and within two minutes he brought up another pallet, this one holding fresh capacitors.
This was taking too long.
Elliot had the clamshell hatch open and was frantically ripping connectors loose. It took an agonizing two minutes, but he finished and jumped out of the way, allowing the arm to grab the extremely heavy capacitor and pull it out, drop it into an empty slot and insert a fresh one into the cavity. Elliot could hear the first technician screaming at the pilot, “Two minutes, just two minutes.”
Even before the arm retracted Elliot was reconnecting the power connectors and brackets that held the capacitor in place. He finished, checked to insure all the lights were green and slammed the two hatches closed. He began running for the rear of the bay, just as the huge doors began to rumble open. He was almost blown back out, but reached the relative safety of the personnel hatch.
Their fighter edged out of the bay and disappeared. Elliot turned to the first technician and asked, “What the hell is happening?”
He stared blankly back, “They said, ‘alien fighters attacked us’. They destroyed the Horsham and are taking out our fighters. Aliens. He said we’re getting our ass handed to us by aliens.”
Elliot shook his head, “What does that mean, ‘alien’? Where the hell are those fighters coming from? Nasser?”
The technician finally glared at Elliot, “No! Aliens! Another race, not human. Aliens!”
While Elliot and the others removed the practice missiles from the space, two shuttles from the Essex launched, destined to try to pick up three fighter crews that had survived the destruction of their craft.
The shuttles were unable to get anywhere near the raging battle and were redirected to try to dock with a destroyer that had been hit repeatedly by intense energy fire.
Even that plan fell apart, as the swarm of large fighters engaged the Essex’ escorts at relatively short range. The Horsham was soon joined by three additional destroyers whose ancient engines, nonexistent armor and very light defensive weapons were unable to withstand the extremely powerful energy weapons of this mysterious enemy.
The Essex, her two fast freighters and the two cruisers accelerated away from the approaching fighters, trying to achieve enough of a separation to jump out of the fight, but another wave of enemy fighters appeared just as the Essex and Invictis began to move away. With all their fighters fully engaged the admiral made the decision not to jump, since it would doom close to one hundred fighter pilots and navigators. Potentially worse, those crews were sitting in the Federation’s latest fighter technology.
The cruisers pushed back into the fight, launching repeated flights of missiles, now joined by the inadequate, light AR-12 missiles mounted on the fighters.
Eventually, the enemy broke off and accelerated away from the devastated fleet, virtually minutes before breaking through the thin ranks of federal fighters and directly attacking the precious capital ships.
In those opening minutes, six destroyers were killed, out of a total of sixteen, and all the remaining destroyers and two cruisers received light to heavy damage, all of it the result of the very powerful lasers employed by the fighters, which had not employed or demonstrated the ability to use missiles.
As soon as possible, a large number of shuttles were sent out to search through the expanding clouds of debris marking the death and destruction of hundreds of human beings.
They were only able to recover a small number of survivors, and most of those were fighter crews who had relatively good gear that allowed them a few hours of air after they ejected.
One of those fighter crews had managed to destroy three enemy fighters, with the third coming at the expense of losing their own craft. Few other fighters even managed one kill, and only one of those had survived to celebrate. In fact, most of the destroyed enemy fighters had been killed by destroyers and cruisers, and even that feat had come at great cost: the AR-12 missiles used by fleet fighters were ancient technology, and the federal fighter’s anemic energy weapons were no match for the far more powerful enemy version.
The temporary respite extended into many hours, and three destroyers were able to make enough repairs to allow them to regain most of their acceleration and the ability to jump.
The fleet slowly edged away from the suspected area of space of the still unknown enemy, struggling to hide in the immensity of the huge void while it licked its wounds, attempting to learn as much as possible about the enemy, extend its detection range out far enough to better defend itself, and figure out what to do.
The one thing they knew was that they knew next to nothing about this enemy, didn’t know why it attacked, from where, how the enemy was able to find it while itself remaining hidden, or why it was not following up its relatively huge advantages in fighter craft or significant edge in weapons power.
Chapter 35
Admiral Shin Ho Lee, Fleet Base Jupiter
Shin Ho stormed down the passageway, finding it difficult to stomp his feet in the low gravity. He entered an office and a young officer looked up, automatically saying, “Good morning sir…” He froze in mid greeting and rose to his feet, his eyes focused both on the clearly furious admiral and the four Marines who trailed him.
Behind the Marines were two enlisted ComTechs and an attractive administrative assistant. The admiral barked, “Back away from your console. Do not touch anything, do not warn anyone, do not say one single word.”
The admiral pointed at one of the Marines, who calmly, almost happily, led the aide out of the office.
Admiral Lee ordered one of the technicians, “Shut down all communications. Everything. Shut down all systems save for environmental. Everything”. His technician asked, “Sir, what about system approach and…” The admiral nodded, “All system defenses, traffic and comm systems are being handled by the Spruance.”
His technician sat down at the console and said, “Sir, five minutes to gain access, thirty to…” Shin Ho smiled faintly, “Don’t care about the details. I trust you. If it helps, I want to prevent the destruction of records.”
His technician smiled, “Oh, that’s easy. I’ll just change everyone’s passwords.”
Five minutes later his tech looked up, “Everyone not currently in his account is frozen out.” Shin Ho said, “Shove everyone off. Do it now.”
His tech answered, “Yes sir. In process.”
Admiral Lee waved to the remaining three Ma
rines to follow him, and he carefully forged into the inner office. It was empty. He turned to the first Marine, but she was already comming her office. She spoke to someone for a few moments and turned to the admiral “Sir, he’s in his quarters. Do you want him brought…?” The admiral barked, ”Five minutes ago. It’s oh eight fifteen. I want him here within fifteen minutes. Dressed or not, I don’t care.”
The Marine hesitated, Sir, he’s an…” Shin Ho smiled faintly, “…an admiral. Yes, I know. Fifteen minutes. If he squawks, tell him…shit, don’t tell him anything. Instead, put him in restraints, and make certain he’s seen. Hmm, I suppose if he’s in restraints we’ll have to say something. Just tell him he is to come immediately to his office. I want to perform that task myself.”
Hawk Flight (Flight of the Hawk Book 3) Page 19