by Darold Higa
Rachel woke up when Elsie gently shook her awake. A Narthian soldier was walking down the bus, checking everyone’s documentation. Rachel glanced outside. The bus had stopped at a fence to what looked like a gigantic tent city. All manners of Narthian shuttles were taking off and landing off in the distance. A stream of trucks were pouring out of the base, lining up on the road leading back to Newport City. Her attention was returned back to the inside of the bus as the soldier approached them.
“Documents please.” The soldier said blandly.
Rachel and Elsie handed over their datacrystals. The soldier stuck it into his portable datatank.
“Both of you will report to block D12.”
Rachel and Elsie continued the rest of the bus ride in silence. When the bus arrived at D12, the two took their belongings and got off the bus. A Narthian civilian checked their datacrystal and uploaded a map to their quarters, also pointing out the communal facilities and kitchen. By now Rachel had been up for nearly 24 hours and went immediately to the tent.
“Well Elsie, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to sleep.”
Before Elsie could respond, Rachel was deep asleep.
4563 July 06
Royal Spincoran Navy, 221st Expeditionary Force, HMS Relentless, Fleet Combat Information Center
In Orbit Above New Boston
Free Renspa
Alicia looked at the datatank one more time. The Narthian attack came at the exact moment that the cease fire ended. Alicia’s initial plan was to leave the system prior to the deadline, but Admiral Sokolov had insisted on transferring all of Sokolov Fleet’s supplies over to Linodan Fleet. While there was little doubt that this was an essential task, it had meant that the fleet was forced to remain in orbit around New Boston past the deadline. In order to protect the two fleets while they transferred supplies, the 10th Fleet had also remained behind to stand guard. Admiral Mitchell had been tempted to send off the transports through the HyNet gate towards Arlington unescorted. Most ships only carried enough fuel for a few jumps without refueling. The ships using the HyNet gates on the other hand barely used any fuel, meaning that they could continue without refueling. For the Narthians to go after the transport fleet would require ditching most of their support ships. It would also mean a one-way trip unless they also managed to clear all of the ships along the way so that supplies could be brought up to the fleet. Still, the risk of losing the possibility of setting up a government-in-exile were deemed too large, so Mitchell instead opted to keep the transports and a small detachment near the HyNet gate with orders to leave at the first sign of trouble. As soon as the Narthian bubbledrives had been detected the transports had been authorized to leave. The action of seeding the gate with mines and placing viruses into the gate computers was now becoming automatic.
The situation did not look good. The Narthians had come with 8 fleets. They had also divided themselves into four groups of two fleets each, presumably to reduce their bubblespace profile. They had also approached the system from four different directions, probably, Alicia noted, to prevent the entire task force from being snared by a minefield, or the allies making a quick getaway. As expected, the Narthians had completely ignored the HyNet gate. The Renspans had already mined the HyNet gate coming from Newport, but Alicia had doubted that the Narthians would try such a risky maneuver, an instinct that had been proven correct. However, mining the gate was still a wise choice. It meant that there would be no surprise reinforcements via HyNet gate either.
Still, the time at New Boston had not been totally wasted. Her crews had managed to all get rest. With the transfer of supplies from Sokolov Fleet and the Renspans, she now had completely replenished her stock of supplies. Her forces had also been bolstered by an unexpected source. A number of New Boston Planetary Guard units requested to serve in the Linodan Fleet. The Renspan Planetary Guard forces were small, but equipped with the latest power armors, fighters and ground forces. Combined with replacement Hurricanes from Sokolov Fleet, she now had several wings of the excellent FA-23 fighters. Alicia also noted that they had one more thing in their favor. Unlike at Newport, New Boston’s orbital defenses were still largely intact and were on full alert status. While fixed emplacements were extremely vulnerable to attack by kinetic energy rounds, there was a mix of energy cannons buried deep under the surface of the 8 planets in the system, mobile orbital defense platforms and anti-orbital submarines. While not as powerful as a mobile fleet, these forces helped the allies.
Alicia knew that she had to work quickly to even the odds. She did some quick calculations to see if her plan would work. Once she was satisfied, she broadcast her plans to Admiral Sokolov, Admiral Mitchell and Commodore Cadwell. Before she even had a chance to set up a conference to explain her ideas, all three fleet commanders had already approved the plan.
4563 July 06
Royal Spincoran Navy, 293rd Task Force, HMS Brightstar, Captain’s Office
In Orbit Above New Marine
Ladera Marginals
Patricia Wainrite sat in a comfortable chair in Commander Kim Petrova’s office onboard the HMS Brightstar. Kim Petrova sat across from her, reading Patricia’s report on her desktop datatank.
“Well, Pat that was certainly a close call. Still, I’m not sure I trust that woman. This new Prime Minister is her brother, after all. Do you think that General Kobayashi can be trusted?”
Patricia paused. “Well, Commander, she certainly seemed sincere enough. Also, it was pretty clear that New Marine is in open civil war. I don’t think she would stage something like that just for my benefit.”
“That is very true.” Commander Petrova nodded. “From all accounts she is very dedicated to the Royalists. I guess it will be all up to Nova Roma to decide. Honestly, the Navy is stretched pretty thin. I’m not sure there is a lot we can do to help the General at this point.”
“Has the New Marine Navy done anything? General Kobayashi seemed to think that the navy had gone to the Anti-Royalists.”
“It is pretty unclear where their loyalties lie, quite honestly. They have been keeping their distance, but they are obviously on full alert. They know full well that they could sink this task force, but it would cost them dearly.” Suddenly there was a chime from the Commander’s datatank.
“Commander, we have reports of bubblespaces appearing. The AI estimates approximately 100 Narthian vessels from Banner Yellow. The New Marine Navy bubbledrives are now active. Both groups have plotted a course towards us.”
“Plot a course back for Spincora, maximum speed. I’ll be there immediately. Well, Captain, we will have to continue this conversation later. Please prepare your wing in case we’re forced to fight.” The commander stood up and headed for the bridge.
Captain Wainrite simply nodded and headed down to the flight deck.
4563 July 06
Central Military Command
Luna
Narthian Empire
Brigadier General Tsai looked at the floating icons showing the locations of the fleets descending on New Boston. Looking at the 8 fleets, he shook his head. He had submitted a plan which called for 12 fleets. Despite his promotion, his suggestions were still being ignored. The only difference, he thought bitterly, was that now they had to pretend to listen to him. The difference wasn’t very satisfying. After the stunning victory at the Battle at Newport, the Military Central Committee were even more enamored by simulations. Through very simplistic simulations, they had derived the minimal force requirements of victory against the forces in orbit of New Boston. Benjamin, despite being head of the Humantide project, was far more wary.
The motivation for not sending those 4 carrier fleets was obvious. Those carrier fleets were needed as the core of another force that would have to go to secure the surrender of other planets nearby. The failure of so many planets to surrender to the occupational authority meant that it would require a Narthian fleet to move from world to world destroying the Planetary Guard. Without a mobile fleet supporting the pl
anetary defenses however, he knew once an example was made on a few planets that the rest of the undefended worlds of the Federal Republic would quickly agree to surrender terms.
Still, the simulation results troubled him. Two factors told him that those crude simulations were incorrect. First, was the lack of Heavy Carrier fleets. Spincorans based all their fleets around carriers. So far all the evidence suggested that the strength of carriers had been underestimated, and that carrier based fleets were far more flexible and powerful than initially believed. Since all of these simulations were still based on pre-war datasets, the failure to send even one of the 4 heavy carrier fleets he had requested would mean that the fleets lacked adequate fighter protection. The second factor was far more difficult to capture in a simulation. He had immediately poured over the reports issued by Admiral Tseng following his crushing defeat. Most had already discarded the report as the ravings of an incompetent commander who had managed to lose in a side battle during the greatest single military victory in Narthia’s history. To Benjamin, however, it pointed to a very different conclusion. It was obvious that Princess Linodan was an able, if not brilliant fleet commander, and that more importantly, she represented a rallying point for the Federal Republic. Princess Linodan was exactly the kind of person that radically affected the starting parameters of any dynamic system, thus rendering any attempt at prediction meaningless.
Benjamin examined the long-term simulation results again. Unfortunately the Humantide simulation was still predicting anything from total victory to crushing defeat. Most of high command had chosen to ignore the defeat outcomes as the worst-case scenario. Benjamin knew better, however. He had made it clear to everyone that the Humantide simulation was not designed to handle the rapidly shifting conditions of large scale warfare and that once the war began the simulation outcomes would begin to drift from reality very rapidly. To prove the point, he had run the data of almost every war, major and minor, he could get his hands on. Thousands of years of military history had been simulated. Every time the simulations produced the same results. Once the opening salvos of a major conflict were fired, the simulation results become unstable. It had taken nearly 2 years of painstaking labor to input every war that had even a shred of reliable data on record. The bank of AI cores that made up the Humantide Project had absorbed the data like sponges. The explosion of data had improved the accuracy of the simulation by several orders of magnitude during times of relative peace. The AI cores had made significant cognitive jumps during the simulations. The auto-evolutionary heuristic networks grew in complexity very rapidly after that point. It even became possible to predict the outcomes, in very general terms, of smaller wars. Still, major conflicts caused the simulation to completely fall apart. Benjamin called the phenomena Deterministic Instability. He had explained it once to General Ho as the fact that war made things impossible to predict with any certainty. Luckily he didn’t have to explain the deterministic systems mathematics, positive maximal Lyapunov exponents, and inverted Poincaré maps that justified his Deterministic Instability.
Benjamin’s thoughts turned back to Princess Linodan. People like her were huge unknowns in predicting the outcome of events. His theory was that under normal circumstances, these types of individuals, whom he labeled as “entropy generators,” were constrained by the weight of regular events. He had called this concept “interactive density.” Under normal conditions, the interactive density is very high, thus limiting the impact of these entropy generators on events, producing Lyapunov exponents that were close to zero. Warfare or other wide-scale social, economic and political crises rapidly disrupted the socioeconomic and political fabric of humanity and sent waves through this interactive space, creating uneven distributions of interactive density. The result was that in certain places and times, low local interactive density meant that the impact of entropy generators was magnified, allowing these individuals to exert influence on the flow of events. Of course, he still had the problem of reconciling how these factors could coexist in the same system. In his dissertation defense he had suggested that the problem might be solved by defining his simulation as a Poincaré map of a deterministic meta phase-space. That had been enough for him to complete his dissertation, and that explanation was also enough for him to get the grant to begin the Humantide project. Now, he had wished that he had solved that particular problem. Staring into the datatank, Benjamin wondered how the Princess would manage to completely ruin his calculations again.
Chapter 5
Battle of New Boston
4563 July 06
Royal Spincoran Navy, 221st Expeditionary Force, HMS Relentless, Fleet Combat Information Center
In Orbit Above New Boston
Free Renspa
Admiral Linodan stood up and began pacing the bridge. After coordinating plans between the four fleet commanders, the plans had been set. Every ship had been given specific waypoints and targets. The allied fleet of 16,000 ships had begun execution of her plan. At this point, everything was up to the individual group commanders and ship captains as the giant mass of ships began its deadly waltz with the enemy fleets. There would be decisions to be made, certainly, but all of that hinged on the results of the first phase of the battle. Even command of the Relentless was in the hands of Rannie Petrova, who took command of the ship when Alicia was in command of the fleet. To Alicia, it was maddening. With so many ships acting in concert, she refrained from making small adjustments to the plan, since changes might cause large-scale confusion. Aside from occasional glances into her datatank to make sure that everything was proceeding as planned, there was little for her to do, except to react if necessary. In a few minutes, Linodan Fleet, which was at the head of the allied formation, would be engaged in battle.
A quick glance into the datatank told Alicia all she needed to know. By now the Narthian commander probably realized the mistake of dividing her fleet into four groups. Even with overall numerical superiority, any one of the four Narthian Task Forces only had 10,000 ships. Any one of those groups could be overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the consolidated allied fleet consisting of Linodan Fleet, Sokolov Fleet, the 7th and 10th Fleets. Alicia’s inspiration came from the discussion between Admiral Huffington and Admiral Johnson at the banquet at Newport. Admiral Huffington had argued that Napoleon’s actions at Lonato and Castiglione could be recreated in space. In that classic series of battles in Italy, Napoleon had maneuvered his outnumbered army to defeat a superior Austrian force by destroying each group before they could link up. Instead of taking advantage of the additional firepower provided by the New Boston orbital defenses, the allied fleet had hurled itself at maximum speed against the flank of the attacking Narthian fleet.
Alicia had identified Banner Blue Task Force “Trade Winds” as the best target for a full frontal assault. Alicia’s intelligence AI used bubblespace signatures to profile Task Force Trade Winds, and it had identified them as New Schwadenland Fleet and Enderby Fleet, two frontline Narthian fleets. The two task forces that flanked Task Force Trade Winds, Task Force Owl and Task Force Westerlies both contained reserve fleets, which usually contained older, slower ships. Task Force Polar Easterlies contained the Spitbergen Fleet, which appeared to hold the flagship for the Narthian forces. Unfortunately Spincoran intelligence couldn’t provide sufficient information on who the commander was or what the flagship was. Alicia glanced at the datatank. The lead elements of the allied force were about to enter weapons range with Task Force Trade Winds. She frowned. So far, things were going as planned, but something kept bringing her attention back to the other three fleets.
Alicia’s attention was immediately drawn to the opening salvos of the battle as the leading edge of the allied fleet opened up with a devastating salvo of missiles. First on the chopping block was Enderby Fleet. The battle was faithfully reproduced in the datatank in front of her. She zoomed in and switched from camera view to iconic view. The icons helped her keep better track of the battle. The dispassionate dots of r
ed and blue also helped her distance herself from the carnage that she knew was about to occur. Two clouds of missiles briefly passed each other before heading towards their respective targets. Taking advantage of her superior numbers, Alicia had merged fleet formations, using the anti-missile picket ships of three fleets as the leading edge of the fleet. As the Narthian missiles closed in on the allied defensive line, they were shattered by a hail of antimissile missiles, rapid-fire e-mag cannons and area defense lasers. A few missiles got through, but the defensive line held their ground. The Narthians were not as lucky. Outnumbered, the missile salvo quickly overwhelmed the defensive picket of Enderby fleet. The missiles cut through the fleet like a giant saw, savagely ripping huge holes in the fleet. Alicia was impressed with the results. Renspan fleets relied on missiles for their main striking power. In the Battle of Newport, the 7th Fleet was barely at 1/5th the strength of a full fleet, so it was difficult to judge how effective those missiles could be. Here, she was witnessing the firepower of a full Renspan fleet. The devastating attack caused by the volley from the 10th Fleet convinced her on the effectiveness of Renspan missiles.