by John Lumpkin
It was too much. “Sir? We can do this later, if you prefer,” Neil said.
“No, I’m fine, Mister Mercer. Go ahead.”
Neil projected a map of the Wolf 359 system from his handheld. The star, one of the closest to Earth, served as a strategic junction between wormhole arms controlled by several powers. Fleets guarded five of the six exits from the system, but neither side had the strength for a decisive attack upon the other, for fear of abandoning their own wormholes and leaving vital systems beyond at risk. So for months, Wolf 359 had resembled a middle school dance, with everyone sticking close to the walls and exits, avoiding coming into contact on the dance floor. Gan Ying’s recent clash with a hydrogen tanker convoy and her escorts had been an exception.
The system had seven planets of any size, all worlds of rock and ice, their collective composition closer to that of the moon system of Jupiter or Saturn than that of the Solar System as a whole. The wormholes orbited within the fourth and fifth tracks, far enough apart that they didn’t interfere with one another.
USS Apache was part of a three-frigate escort to a convoy of fourteen space trains and five transports, carrying between them a brigade of troops, including the British Army’s Black Watch and the Royal Marines’ Four Five Commando. They were bound for the New Albion, United Kingdom’s enclave on the multinational world of Entente, where nine thousand British soldiers, backed up by a few thousand Australian and Canadian troops from neighboring territories, had mounted a heroic defense against an entire Chinese corps for the last five months. The son of the Duke of York was among the defenders, and the Western press was calling the resistance the “Long Night.” But Neil knew the defenders were running out of food and ammunition. The new troops were not expected to turn the tide – that force would not be ready for several months – but they would provide some relief to the beleaguered defenses. Substantial portions of the British, Canadian and Australian fleets were waiting several stars downstream to help the reinforcements fight their way to the surface of Entente.
To his captain, Neil said, “Sir, the Hans apparently completed repairs to Gan Ying much earlier than we expected. It looks like our information fell short there. We detected her and a supply tender thrusting to intercept us a little past the halfway mark to the FL Virginis wormhole.”
“So they can reach us?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. She is carrying drop tanks, so she will have enough remass left to fight,” Neil said.
“Three frigates against a cruiser? It would be close,” Hernandez said, shaking his head.
“Too close. And the Hans launched at the worst possible time. The convoy has built up enough velocity that there’s no point to turning around now. I have prepared simulation data for your review.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mister Mercer, but thank you.”
One question answered, Neil thought. As intel officer – the designated bearer of bad news – he shared responsibility with the ops officer to run various simulations of any prospective battles. But they were required to keep the outcomes secret, lest bad results destroy crew confidence and serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or good ones lead to hubris and mistakes. Indeed, one input variable in the simulations was whether the crew would be aware of the output; Neil had, in this case, left it undetermined. Either way, it was up to the captain to order Neil to release the data to the crew, and Hernandez was apparently one of the old-school captains who saw no value in doing so.
Perhaps it was for the best. The probability of defeating Gan Ying with no losses to the troop transports was in the mid-thirties. Victory with all three frigates surviving without major damage was only nine percent.
Hernandez absentmindedly tugged at an earlobe. “Any chance we could be reinforced?”
Neil tried to punch up some calculations, but he was too impatient to find the precise data, so he released his handheld computer to float in front of him and ballparked an estimate.
“Sir, the fleet at the Lalande keyhole is too far away. From the Sol keyhole, I think they would need to run at about eighteen milligees to make the intercept, but …”
“… but would Admiral Sakuri risk weakening his defense any more than he already has to aid a lesser ally? He didn’t want to give up a fourth frigate to escort this convoy. Japan doesn’t have any immediate stake in the outcome on Entente.”
“Yes, sir. My thinking as well,” Neil said. “The only ship that could conceivably reach us is the frigate Kiyokaze, but she’s heading back to Earth for a candle overhaul. The Brits might be able to release some reinforcements from the other side of the FL Virginis keyhole, but Gan Ying can catch us first. And that’s not a big force the Brits have there, and the Chinese know it.”
Hernandez sucked in a long, labored breath. His eyes brightened at the prospect of action, and some of the fatigue seemed to melt away from his frame.
“Mister Mercer, this convoy is going through,” the captain said, his voice drying into a warm tenor. “In the meantime, get to know a Chinese captain for me, if you please.”
They had eight days to prepare. Admiral Sakuri declined to release any relief from the Sol wormhole, and the convoy dispersed in an effort to limit the number of ships the raider could take. The escorts would stay with the troop transports, while the space trains would scatter. Neil wondered how the space train captains took being told to break off from their defenders. Not well, he imagined. But Neil could see the logic in the move – it would limit the damage the Gan Ying could do in a single strike. A more daring alternative would have been to keep them together, and he wondered if he should feel slighted the commodore on the Ajax didn’t have more faith in the escort’s ability to defend their charges.
He studied. The enemy ship was a Ban Chao-class cruiser and one of China’s newest warships. She massed nearly fifteen thousand tons, nearly three times that of the Apache. She was armed for all occasions: missiles, three turreted coilguns, and a laser cannon that, when tuned to ultraviolet frequencies, outranged anything the escorts carried. The intel file on her captain, Lu Jiaheng, described him as a solid but unimaginative officer, chosen for his political reliability over any special talent for command. That means he will follow the PLA’s playbook to the letter. He’ll be predictable. We might have a shot at this customer after all.
A few days later, a message arrived from the allied intel cell in the fleet at the Sol wormhole:
PRIORITY MESSAGE
TOP SECRET
1004Z07JAN2141
FR: CPT VILLANUEVA, S-2, CJTF17
TO: LT KERR, HMS AJAX; LTJG MERCER, USS APACHE; LTJG LAVOIE, CFSS EDMONTON
CC: LT ENDO, JDF KIYOKAZE; CPT HASHIMOTO, JDF SHOKAKU
1. SOURCES INDICATE WHISKEY-12 (CSS GAN YING) RECEIVED NEW COMMANDING OFFICER DURING RENDEZVOUZ WITH CHINESE TASK FORCE AT WOLF 359-PROCYON KH EVENT.
2. NEW CO IS IDENTIFIED AS CPT QIN BAO. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ATTACHED.
3. CONFIDENCE IN THIS INFORMATION IS HIGH.
Neil sighed. Four days of work wasted. I wonder what the sources were. He had no need-to-know, but that didn’t stop his brain from attacking the question anyway. “Sources” suggested they had heard it from two places, and “High” confidence was one step below the top, “Very High,” confidence rating, which analysts employed when they wanted to say, “We really mean it.” The one-off grade made it likely that at least one of the sources belonged to Japanese intelligence, and Captain Villanueva’s analysts on Kitty Hawk didn’t know who or what it was.
Hmm. Probably one or both sources are SIGINT, some tap on Chinese fleet message traffic. And of course, if the Sakis aren’t telling us who their sources are, it’s possible that the “sources” are the same message, intercepted at different points by American and Japanese taps. Does it matter? This would be pretty silly disinformation. Or extremely nuanced … ah, discipline your thoughts, Mercer, and quit wasting time on questions you can’t answer. The mission is to figure this Captain Qin out.
Qin Bao was bor
n January 14, 2100, on Hainan Island, he learned. Her father was a Han Chinese bureaucrat assigned to the island; her mother was a member of the Li minority there. Qin attended Shanghai Jiao Tong University for one year before being selected for the experimental “Achieve Celestial Primacy” officer training program, which emphasized independent decision-making, adaptability and crew morale. A reformist general’s brainchild, the curriculum was couched as a modernization of the teachings of Sun Tzu and other strategists, and it was intended to create innovative officers who could break away from the PLA’s rigid doctrine.
Only one class – Qin’s – completed the curriculum before the general’s adversaries shut it down. But the damage to Qin’s prospects was minimal: She was regarded as an effective administrator and even better captain. Neil learned that it was she who had left the battlecruiser Truman a worthless hulk at the Battle of Kennedy Station six months prior.
It was also she who declined to deliver a coup de grace on the ship. Video from the battle clearly showed three missiles, launched by Qin’s ship, self-destructing as they approached the disabled Truman, affording survival to two hundred American personnel.
Mercy. She showed mercy to a defeated enemy, Neil thought, feeling a brief, melancholy sense of kinship. He found a paper, published in a public Chinese military journal, in which Qin chided the authors of another paper, a group of Army colonels, for caojianrenming – “regarding life as worthless as a straw.”
“We lead men and women, not machines,” Qin wrote. “And we will fight women and men, not machines. We cannot regard doctrine as we would a computer program, to be debugged until it is perfect.”
She’s quite the contrarian to standard Chinese policy. Will she fight like we do? Or some other way we don’t expect?
Neil had joined Apache’s crew eight weeks prior, following several months at U.S. Space Command in geosynchronous orbit over Earth. There, he had undergone formal training to be a shipboard Space Force intelligence officer – an odd experience, given he, unlike his classmates, had served in that capacity in his first assignment on the destroyer San Jacinto, whose original intel officer had been badly wounded in a battle. He had also advised a team of programmers and engineers on ways to counter China’s key technological advantage in the war: beam cruisers that mounted huge ultraviolet lasers able to damage a spacecraft at ten thousand kilometers, well beyond the range at which most vessels could fight back.
Japan and the United States were still working to match that capability, and other efforts had focused on ways to disable the Chinese lasers at such long ranges. The most effective weapon against lasers was a smaller, automated laser turret, called a counterbattery, built to shoot out the fragile optics of an attacking laser, but typical counterbatteries lacked the range to hit the long-range Chinese weapons. His contribution consisted of helping develop doctrine for the team’s best defense: tying a warship’s main offensive lasers into the fast-acting counterbattery system. Although a few physical modifications were required in each ship, the counter primarily consisted of a software package that allowed the counterbattery computer to take over and activate the main lasers. It was an imperfect fix: Counterbattery lasers fired only in response to an enemy laser hit, so the shot required the defending warship to risk serious damage. Moreover, the warship had to have its main lasers – typically mounted on the nose of the ship – facing the beam cruiser when it took that hit.
Neil, who had seen the threat from the Chinese beam cruisers firsthand, had been frustrated at the small size and limited resources provided to the team trying to combat it, but the project was one attempt to adapt among many. The war had taught hard lessons, paid for in ships and blood. Both sides were refitting their ships with extra armor around their antimatter storage rings; too many warships had died to a lucky laser shot or kinetic fragment that had forced some antimatter to crash into regular matter, igniting a fatal explosion.
China, too, had correctly predicted that a widespread space war would destroy ships far faster than they could be replaced. Most shipyards had been above Earth, the war’s deadliest battleground, and had been destroyed during fighting over the high orbits. Only the big neutrals, like Europe, Russia, India and Brazil, still held theirs; for the belligerents, smaller yards around colony planets were the only way to replace lost ships. China had also used particle beams and marines to capture several American and Japanese ships, and the allies were waiting to see one of their own hulls returned to action against them.
China’s preparations had dashed hopes that the war would be quickly concluded after the Space Force smashed a Chinese fleet at the Battle of Kennedy Station last June. China and her Korean allies had been forced to abandon Earth orbit, and the main American and Japanese forces were blockading the Middle Kingdom’s access to space. But the blockade hadn’t ended the war: China still controlled the mining platforms above Saturn and Uranus and the antimatter farms near Mercury, forcing the allies to import vital fusion fuel from other star systems. And Beijing could communicate with its colonies and extrasolar fleets via its Sol-Sirius wormhole.
Nor had China given up the initiative. Her fleets and armies had attacked the alliance across every wormhole link that connected its space to theirs: Earlier in the war, they had captured the American continent on Kuan Yin. They were threatening the Japanese colony on Hoshigawa and the British colony on Entente. All we have to do is grab a single wormhole chain to potentially habitable worlds, and we can sue for peace. But the Chinese have attacked us on every front, tying us up, preventing us from going on the offensive.
Gan Ying captured her first prize four days later.
Chapter 2
NEW YORK CITY – Prices of raw materials cartridges for industrial fabrication units increased by an average of 4.1 percent in the fourth quarter, outpacing inflation and raising fears of broad price increases for manufactured goods. Retail prices for home fab unit cartridges were up 4.8 percent, a spike that could force many families to curtail production of a variety of goods. Analysts blamed the war for the rapid increases, noting that many of the raw materials used in the cartridges are imported from extraction operations in Africa and Asia, and the risk of sea transport to North American ports has sent transit insurance costs skyrocketing.
HMS Ajax, Wolf 359
“I am quite open to ideas,” Commodore Duncan Metcalf assured his audience.
A gloomy silence met his entreaty. Everyone had hoped his summons meant he would unveil his master plan for victory against the oncoming Gan Ying, but he clearly had no more idea what to do than the rest of the escort officers sharing his cramped briefing room. Even the distant Japanese frigate Kiyokaze, patched in via comms laser, had nothing to offer.
Though still only a bright star in their sky, Gan Ying was coming for them. Captain Qin had already put prize crews on three space trains, costing the allies their cargoes of rations, ammunition and combat skytrucks. But she passed on the others, preserving her remass to fight her way to the main convoy.
“Can we go after the tender?” Ajax’s first lieutenant asked. Destroying Gan Ying’s support vessel, known only to the convoy as Whiskey-15, would prevent the cruiser from replenishing its propellant before the battle.
“No,” Metcalf said. “Already considered and discarded. That would provide Gan Ying the option of attacking the convoy without the full escort present to defend it.”
The meeting returned to silence. Neil fought with himself. The unspoken option grated on him. It was so obviously there; he had to say it, so they could at least discuss it.
“Sir, I’m not necessarily endorsing this, but we could give up one of the troop transports,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “Offload as many of the troops as possible, then set it up on a vector that the Gan Ying would have to intercept it. The time it would take to secure the vessel would allow the rest of the convoy to escape. Obviously, it would be a volunteer …”
“Unthinkable,” Metcalf growled, and Neil knew he had made a mistak
e. “What if the enemy simply destroyed the troopship and continued his pursuit of the rest of us?”
“Sir, Captain Qin has behaved quite honorably and given quarter in the past. I expect she would do it again.”
“You seem quite ready to risk the lives of hundreds or more good British soldiers on your expectation, Lieutenant,” the commodore snarled. “I would expect that from our Japanese allies, but not you. I do wonder if you would be so cavalier with your own countrymen.”
No one rose to Neil’s defense, and he shrunk in his seat. It was just an idea. But it had been out of bounds to even suggest. Anxiety spun up within him … What will the Brits think of me? What if the troops hear what I suggested? Did I just hurt the war effort by pissing off an ally?
It occurred to him to save face by volunteering to go on the sacrificial troopship, but Captain Heron of the Edmonton, one of the few Canadian ships that had seen action since her country entered the war late in the prior year, was already speaking. “It seems we have two sets of decisions. Do we separate from the convoy or wait for Gan Ying to reach us? And when we fight, do we approach from one, two or three vectors?”
Neil remained silent for the remainder of the discussion, too worried any attempt to speak would be again shouted down. By the end, Metcalf’s decision was clear: The escorts would leave the convoy and take the fight to the Gan Ying.
USS Apache
Neil watched as Edmonton’s lateral thrusters fired, and the ship began a slow pivot that would take her away from the other escorts. The Canadian was the heaviest of the three frigates, and she would intercept the Gan Ying from one direction, while Ajax and Apache would thrust later, and approach from two other vectors, with the intention of attacking the Chinese cruiser at the same time. This would, Commodore Metcalf hoped, force Captain Qin into a difficult choice; like all warships, Gan Ying’s heaviest armor and primary laser optics faced forward, where the roughly cylindrical ship had its smallest profile. To concentrate her firepower on one ship, she would have to expose her vulnerable flanks to the others. But the cruiser carried three coilgun turrets, all on belts that rotated around her hull, and she could use them to keep the other escorts at bay. Although the gun shells weren’t difficult to avoid at long ranges, they created a hazardous obstacle course, requiring you to dodge and pull your own main laser from the target.