Jack almost missed a turn and kicking himself and decided he had better start concentrating on his job. The gross amateurishness of the Battleships he kept passing still eating at the back of his mind.
Finally he decided to take a closer look at the Battleships he was passing with the TB’s sensors. Maybe that would give him a clue as to what the battleships’ problems were.
“Winslow?” Jack turned and glanced over his shoulder but Winslow was nowhere to be seen. ‘Shit I am going to have to do it myself.’ Jack slowed the little ship down as he approached the next battleship. Bringing up the sensor screens to replace his tactical, navigation and weapons screens. He started a deep scan of the Battleship they were approaching. Not getting what he wanted he changed the settings and tried again with no better luck. Turning the TB around he slowed to a relative stop to the Congressional Battleship before turning back around to scan the battleship again. With no other battleships in sight down the long straight corridor behind him Jack had plenty of time look at the results of the different scans. After a few minutes he noticed he was getting parts of what he wanted with each scan but not the whole picture he needed. Frowning he did his best to combine the scans he had done but only came up with a jumbled mess.
“Good try Admiral. You needed to sink the different scans while taking into account the different frequencies but give me a couple of minutes.” Winslow said from behind him. Less than a minute later the image started to sharpen. “Thanks Admiral I used your scans of the ships together with the scan from my new modules to tune them. Lettingthe computer do the hard part with some algorithms to calibrate and synchronize the scans and Walla, we have a new Googleion scanner that can penetrate anything.
The screen suddenly cleared up showing what he had been after and Jack could only shake his head. Feeling stupid for taking it for granted that the new Battleships were simply the old battleship with the mass tanks moved forward with armored decks between them and required the same 2,000 crewmen per ship.
Winslow said it for Jack as she shook her head. “It is a fucking cruise ship. With State rooms for the entire crew by the looks of it. Olympic sized Pools with wave machines and a beach and restaurants and entire play decks.” Do you want to bet…?” She skimmed across the screen and stopped. “Yes a fucking 20 room sweat for the Captain with progressively smaller sweats for the officers clustered around a monster bridge. If this ship has a crew of a thousand I would be shocked. Hell, I bet half of them are servants for the crew. No, I see traces of robotic servants all over the ship. Criste, only the most expensive and luxurious Cruise ships have robotic servants. I am living in a cabin with 6 others and we eat in the shipscafeteria mess deck. Not Restaurants with robotic servants. These ships have to be incredibly expensive Admiral.”
“Yes it looks that way. You could build 3 conventional battleships for the price of one of these and we have hundreds here alone. I think I need to stop at the life boats around the beacon recovery area we set up not far from the Red Pepper when we get back. I need to find out something about the crews. I wish now I had bothered to talk to even a few of the crewman from the first Battleship I destroyed before I dumped them off on the Ice Moon Mine. But then I remember Captain Leslie saying something to the effect that the crew was more civilian workers than Navy, requiring little training. Which made no sense at the time.”
Shaking his head. “They only have a basic civilian transport type watch standing on the bridge of 2 people, one helmsman and an officer of the deck. With no one on duty in any of the turrets or weapons rooms. No Combat Information Center Watch and only a couple of crewmen in a Central Engine Control Room with no one in the engine rooms themselves. No, I bet that they only have 5 or 6 hundred crewmen at most. Not half enough to fight these ships in combat even with the robot servants serving as damage control and maintenance. Which are worthless the first time something unusual or unexpected happens without human intervention. Which is all the time in combat.” Jack studied the plans closely as he cruised across the top of another Battleship even less worried now he knew more about their cruising arrangements. “At least they have more armor on them around the central core crew birthing section than I have ever seen on a ship. Even the damn Spider Battleships. Stupid of them to have virtually no armor at the back around the engines and even less around the damn Fusion Generator Core. Hell it looks like some committee that had no clue about Combat and only cared about protecting the crew designed the ship using a Spider ship as a vague model. I see few backups or emergency systems or equipment. Would explain how we got almost 600 survivors from a crew of six or seven hundred when we took out that first ship. At least it is a relief that I did not kill the thousands I thought I had.”
Jack flew along pushing the throttles back up as he thought for a few minutes. “I wonder. If they spent enough money, they may have solved enough of the problems with using maintenance bots to make them worth using. You know Winslow, it would solve a lot of crew problems on the DD’s if we had some decent maintenance bots on them. With supervision they are even faster at damage control since they can take a lot more punishment with few environmental worries.” Thinking for a few more minutes. “I think we need to visit that ship that disappeared into the cloud that had all the life pods ejecting from it. It should be an education. Especially if we can get ahold of the bots and the codes they use. We may not have to destroy the whole fleet.”
Jack suddenly reversed course and started slowing down. There was some kind of blockage up ahead at the next corner. Several Battleships were crowded together for some reason.
Approaching slowly. “Winslow what does your new scanner tell you about what is happing ahead?”
“Scanning now. Got it.” Jack’s nav. screen changed to show a battleship with its engine sections gutted as the ship tumbled in the middle of the turn. The other Battleships were having to slowly and carefully go around it. Doing their best to stay out of the cloud.”
“Ok. Looks like our guys have been busy.”
As they approached, a pair of beams streaked out of the cloud behind the closest Battleship slowly trying to work its way beside the tumbling ship, hitting it squarely in the ass and sending it cartwheeling into the tumbling ship next to it. The back of the new ship hitting the tumbling ship stopped the new ships forward momentum while changing the direction of the ship’s tumbling so now it was tumbling across the corridor instead of along it where it hit the other ship trying to go around the first hulk. With three ships in the middle of the corner and all the junk they had knocked off of each other when they had hit, the passageway was totally blocked. The fact that all the other Battleships coming up behind the hulks had to do was go into the cloud to get around them,had not dawned on anyone yet. Jack wondered if it ever would.
It took a good 5 seconds before the first beams from the battleship that had been hit started streaking back into the cloud but Jack could already see that the DD was already long gone even if they had been half way accurate and they hadn’t. It took a good 20 seconds before every ship in and approaching the corner was shooting into the empty cloud in just as many directions.
Jack stayed out of the cloud to avoid being hit by the wild shots as he continued past the battleships being careful to skim each battleship as close as possible between turrets and had soon left them behind. Wishing he had reacted a little faster and not let the DD leave before he could contact it. A Few seconds later he saw massive amounts of weapons fire in the distant cloud only he could see. “Yes my boys are hard at work ok.” Jack started passing tumbling Battleship after tumbling Battleship as he went around corners every 10 or 15 minutes. All of them no longer having engines and were basically well armed and armored barges. Disgusted that they could not even repair their own stabilization systems to keep them from tumbling.
Then he came across the first of the Battleships missing their stern halves completely as the armored decks tumbled at fairly high rates. It took him seeing an attack to realize what the cause was. A
mass of long-range missiles and torpedoes came out of the cloud hitting the Back of a battleship that was not anywhere close to a corner. The missiles and conventional torpedoes taking out the ships point defenses and navigation shield towers at the stern on that side. The fact that only a few of the turrets even tried to shoot was pitiful to Jack in the first place. And then the Black hole torpedo streaked in and hit just forward of the engine modules and aft of the heavily armored crews quarters. Directly on the fusion core hanger section. There was nothing left to slow it down, no point defense turrets left, not even navigation shield towers on that side.
The black hole torpedo destroyed the fusion core’s containment coils, even running at low power it was enough to vaporize the entire stern half of the Battleship leaving only the forward armored decks spinning like a cheerleader’s baton. Jack smiled as he realized the fighter crews had figured out what the Lieutenant’s sensors had already shown him. Not only was there little armor around the engines there was no armor around the Fusion Power Core sitting between the engines and the heavily armored crews section. Virtually nothing that would stop anything more than a few conventional torpedoes. One hit even near the running core with a Blackhole torpedo after the navigation shields in the area were taken out and the damn ship and crew died in an instant. A much easier kill than trying to take out all 4 engines even with the Black hole torpedo. At least the damn engines had some armor and a hit on one side was likely only to take out 2 or 3 engines and not all 4. It had to be hit in the very stern transom between the engines to get them all. A much harder attack. That was the problem. Though the DD’s had been doing it in the corridor’s corners using their pair of 24/16 inch guns with no problems as long as they didn’t hang around afterwards.
Another fusion explosion caught the corner of his eyes in the distant cloud. He realized that he had been seeing the fusion explosions for some time now but had not realized what they were. Another fireworks display appeared in the opposite direction. Beams vaporizing the cloud around a thousand mile circle in the distance. It looked like the fighters and returned Torpedo Bombers were taking out the ships close to the head where they could easily be rearmed while the DD’s were doing their work deeper into the Maze. And with 6 fireworks displays in widely spaced locations within a few minutes of each other had to mean that the other 2 DD’s had made it from the Ice Moon Mine already.
Yes his guys were doing their jobs like he and Zoot had trained them after all. Suddenly worried about how many fighter and bomber crews had been lost while he was off fucking around doing other crewmen’s jobs. ‘No. don’t think that way.’ He had to find out what was going on at the Staging Station and what they were up against across the whole cloud. Not to mention finding an Engineer scientist that could change the course of the entire war even if she was a pain in the butt.
Another fusion blast caught his eye. “But there is no need for that.” Dragging out the map of the maze Jack realized that he was approaching a corner that was only a few minutes from the end of the Maze and the Red Pepper if he could cut across the cloud but without the damn scoop it would take a week. The damn corridor angled back down into the stupid Maze that was going to take him a good hour to fly around even flat out.
“Winslow, did you pick up that module I told the Chief to tell you to get?”
“Ya sure. Had to get the damn First Offices approval and sign my life away again. What the hell is it?”
“A new long range ultra Triga-Hrtz laser comm transmit module I want you to hook up to the TB’s Comm and be quick about it. I’m hoping it will allow me to send a message to the Red Pepper and stop the slaughter. Should have had you hook it up earlier but forgot about it. I really did not want to have to get out and slap it onto the laser comm but I don’t have a choice now.”
“Ok, outside on the Laser Comm. Well it needs to be aimed. How do you propose to do that?”
“Very carefully. Actually, I had not gotten that far when I told the Chief for you to get it. It was just a thought and I needed something to tell you it was OK to bring whatever you wanted after the Chief told me you had a bunch of equipment you thought could increase the range of the sensors in the cloud. Without insulting the Chief directly. Give me a minute to find someplace to hide and we can go out and take a look at the laser head.”
Winslow took the long narrow module out of one of her bags and looked at it. Finding machined flats with groves down the center on two sides and ridges on the other two sides with the proper markings on each, she smiled. “Got it covered there Admiral. Have it up in no time.”
Jack pulled around a corner going over and under and between several hulks and newly created barges and headed back into the Maze away from the Red Pepper. Looking over his shoulder for a second at a busy Winslow, Jack shook his head and pushed the throttles up again trying to cut down the time the little ship was stuck in the damn Maze.
About 10 minutes later as Jack started to relax with the corridor now clear of all but a couple wrecked Battleships, a barge and a tumbling shield hulk as they continued through the Maze. Winslow climbed up next to Jack and held up the long Comm module with one of her modules attached to each of the 4 sides. A transmit and 3 receiver modules. The machine groves and ridges on the flats were machined to the standard dimensions for Area sensors allowing hundreds of modules to be stacked facing the exact same direction down to the sub-micron. Making sure that they all were perfectly lined up to transmit and receive in the same direction down to the micron degree where the electronic steered beams would take over to accurately tap the locations of signals from millions of miles away. “Who do you want to yell at Admiral?”
“Well, think you can find the Red Pepper with that thing. It is over in that direction.” Jack said as he pointed back behind them with his thumb since the section of corridor they were in was now headed back into the Maze and away from the entry head and the Red Pepper.
“Ya sure. I will see what I can pick up in that direction.” She disappeared back down to her console.
A few seconds later a little mousy voice came from her console. “Aaa, Admiral. You may want to take a look at my sensor screen. Aaa sending it to you know.”
Jack looked down at a side screen then hit the side of the screen sending it to his much larger main screen. It showed a three dimensional image of the Cloud with icons headed back toward the Staging Station and the open space around it. “Ok we won. They are retreating.”
Jack started to smile and then he noticed that there were thousands of icons around the Staging Station. Most of them seemed to be out inside the cloud around the station. Tapping on one it read Fighter, Mk. 12 X-wing. “Where the hell did they come from?”
“Ten battleships that are not battleships coming out of the Maze and headed for the Staging Station to The Rock Admiral. I think I see 6 of our TB’s headed into that mess sir. They don’t stand a chance against those fighters if they don’t see them before they launch and stay back.”
“That’s a fact Winslow. Find me the damn Red Pepper now. We have to stop anymore from going that way.” So much for him thinking the TB’s were all operating on the Red Peppers end of the maze.
Jack rounded the last deep corner and the Corridor and headed back toward the head. Now he needed to face the other way to see what was going on back at the Staging Station but the little ship was facing the wrong way.
“Aaaa, Admiral. What the heck is this mass of ships around what looks like a dead star and a small planet orbiting close to it at the center of the Maze? We are headed out away from it again but I got a good scan of it before we turned back toward the Red Pepper.”
It took a second to get his mind back and understand what she was asking but finally he chuckled. “That Sweat Heart, is the best Kept Secret in a thousand light years. It takes 12 hours average to go through the Maze to get to The Rock’s Staging Station and a good 12 hours to a day to get to The Rock making people assume that The Rock is far away from the Maze when The Rock is actually at t
he exact center of the Maze. Hell, the majority of Admirals don’t know that but now you do. So you just became an officer with a death sentence if you ever even hint at that information to anyone. Just like me. No, only the very top dozen Admirals know that little fact and your little scanner saw that the first time you turned it on. You are going to have to filter that out when we install it in the Red Pepper.”
“Now that we know it works give me a look at what is ahead. But save this to compare later. You have the Red Pepper on that Comm yet?”
“This doesn’t have an IFF on it but I think I have it. Not that many big ships still operational outside this end. What do you want to say?”
“Good going. Here it is.” Jack simply sent orders to suspend all fighter and bomber attacks across the Cloud immediately and recall all fighters, bombers and DD’s until he could get back to the Red Pepper. “Repeat that little bit several times Winslow to make sure they get it. Hopefully we will be there in another 45 minutes unless that bunch of battleships I see ahead of us slows us down.”
The closer they got to the group of battleships around the entrance to the Maze the more nervous Jack became as they eased past each successive lone battleship hulk. Winslow’s Comments about trying to get through a bunch of enemy Battleships that had already been fighting the Red Pepper and the Destroyers for the last couple of hours was not helping any.
“You know that as soon as they see us they are going to start firing don’t you. We aren’t going to get a free ride through those bad boys.”
“Don’t worry about it Winslow. I’ve got it covered. Just relax already.”
“Covered like shit you do. The others did not fire at us because they had fighters zipping up and down the passageways delivering messages or didn’t you see that on my little scan of the other side of the Cloud. They sure as hell aren’t going to confuse us with a fucking messenger as we continue past the last ship.”
Battleship Destroyer 2 (Battleship Destoryer) Page 104