“Maybe one ship is all they could spare to send for the liberation? Maybe their attacks into our space went badly, and this is all they could afford!”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Ted. This could be a feint. It could mean they have something new. Or it could be as desperate as it appears. But we don’t deal in could-be’s or maybes. We have to handle what we face. One ship is not an overwhelming force. Our orders are clear: we repel and defend our claim. Pass to the garrison: Dig in and beware of coordination between the incoming destroyer and any rebels on the ground. We’ll be back soon.”
“Yes, sir,” the LTJG answered.
* * *
Annapolis and Puller closed on one another, each at a comfortable one g, on an almost direct glancing course. As Benno had read, and as he recalled from his education in ship tactics back when he was a chief making the transition to warrant officer, maneuver was almost all important—even over the kinetic satisfaction and finality of actual weapons employment. Weapons development and the methods of employing them were mostly equivalent between the two navies. At the ranges and speeds their weapons would be deployed, computers aboard the two ships would conduct the engagements anyway. Effectiveness would be a matter of probability and efficiency.
But maneuver? That was in the hands of the commanders themselves.
Maneuver, or getting your weapons into position in order to employ them most effectively, while simultaneously positioning the engagement to your opponent’s disadvantage, involved engineering, environmental factors, orbital dynamics, intelligence—both innate smarts as well as analysis over one another’s intentions and capabilities. It was a long game of chess, especially in an environment as vast and open as space.
The parameters of the engagement were usually more complicated than this, involving entire squadrons, different types of ships, fixed emplacements around a defended objective, et cetera. This engagement was almost too simple. In open space, with movement unconstrained, and with no other units to consider or a horizon to interfere, combat essentially became one dimensional, even with all three directions out to infinity available to them.
Each ship was a single point in space. Two points formed a line. Thus, a line of action existed between the two opposing parties, and all direct fire that connected and did damage to the other would exist upon that line. The endpoints of the line might move about in the larger volume of space, accelerating and decelerating, jinking and weaving. The line might spin and turn about like mad in the larger space, but the battle would be confined to that single line, shrinking in length as they continued to close on one another.
Such a visualization was a useful mental exercise in focusing one’s attention. The rest of the universe fell away, leaving only that single line. The winner would be determined solely by the ratio and rapidity of successful hits along it. That was a matter of hit probability and the ability to absorb damage, and neither CO would deign to play such a straight hand of attrition.
So they each endeavored to muck things up a bit.
“Sir! I’m picking up weapons fire from the Terran destroyer,” a young petty officer’s voice cried out from the combat coordinator station on the Puller’s bridge, their in-person link to CIC, augmenting the comm link between the TAO and the OOD.
Benno nodded. He had gotten in about four hours of sleep in the last 16 hours, and now he rode atop a tsunami of strong, bitter coffee. He was as alert and prepared as he could be, but slightly on edge.
Of course, that nervous edge might be due to the man strapped into the seat to his right. Ortiz had come on watch as Officer of the Deck about half an hour before. He had done nothing to anger Benno, however. If anything, he had been focused and professional, standing the sort of watch that a pre-mutiny Commander Palmer would have given a grudging degree of respect.
Benno turned to him with an eyebrow raised.
Ortiz nodded and answered the watch stander. “OOD, weapons fire, aye.” He keyed his mic. “TAO, OOD, roger on weapons fire. Do we have a classification and trajectory?”
The line to CIC answered back with Chief Rajput’s voice. “Affirm, OOD. Heat bloom and pattern confirms it as decimeter railgun fire. We’ve lost track of the rounds, so we’re guessing expanding sabot cluster shells. The sabots are cold, no IR signature, and too low a mass to have much divert capability. We figure they’re either trying to get us to light off our radar for fingerprinting or get us to adjust course. Or both.”
“Roger, TAO.” Ortiz turned to Benno. “Orders, sir?”
Benno tried to look confident, when in truth he was anything but. This was it, the culmination of the actions he had begun: the first tactical engagement with him in command. If he ever hoped to see Mio again to free her, he had to get this right, starting now.
In the last 16-plus hours of one g acceleration, they had achieved a 580 kilometers-per-second delta-v, or change in velocity. They had traveled a bit over a quarter of the 0.6 astronomical unit distance they needed to go to reach Paradiso. The Turds had done much the same, and they were now closing with each other at 4 thousandths of the speed of light, but even then, they still had a fifth of an AU between them. The cloud of small sabot rounds would not reach them for hours yet, so they were not a threat worth panicking over. But they did need to be answered with action, lest their incredible kinetic energy destroy the Puller.
An expanding cone of red light appeared on the central screen, intersecting their trajectory in just over five hours, the anticipated threat volume of the fired rounds. If he turned on their radar, the better resolution would allow them to narrow the uncertainty inherent in the projected cone. They could develop targeting solutions for eliminating the sabots, but it would provide emitter data to the enemy, enabling them to better tailor their electronic warfare response, thus increasing the Turd’s ability to jam or spoof their sensors. If they merely maneuvered to avoid the larger, more uncertain cloud, the Turds could dictate where they could go, corralling them with bracketing fire, and altering the terrain of the battlespace to the Terran’s own advantage.
But then, one also had to consider the intelligence environment and the matter of logistics. The Turds were cut off in Alliance space, even if the Alliance had not been actively protecting it. Their supply lines were worse than uncertain; they were virtually non-existent. They could not count on resupply, and with a force of only one ship, they would never have been expected to hold onto Paradiso for long. Thus, they could be expected to conserve their fire and be ready to pull out if it looked like they were expending too much effort to continue the occupation.
The Puller, on the other hand, and as far as the Terrans were concerned, was in its home space, with access to nearly unlimited resources. Even if that were not true, it would not be expected to reserve fire. And it would be expected to act boldly, even if it were but one ship on a virtually even footing.
Benno keyed his mic, realizing he had allowed Ortiz to go unanswered for far too long. “TAO, Captain, they fired five rounds in our path, correct?”
“Yes, sir. That equates to about 95 sabots if their rod cluster rounds are like ours.”
“Understood. Bring our dorsal decimeter railgun online. Bracket the Turds and their path with 20 sabot cluster rounds, a full magazine, but at half of the max rate. Also, increase thrust to 1.2 gravities and hold. That’ll put us out of their rounds’ projected volume and close us even faster for engagement. Agreed?”
Chief Rajput and Ortiz answered simultaneously, “Yes, sir!”
Benno nodded. “Very well. TAO, batteries released, Mount DR1, 20 rounds. OOD, execute maneuvers.”
“TAO, aye!”
“OOD, aye!” Chief Rajput went off the comm to oversee the gunfire, while Ortiz translated Benno’s order to the helmsman. Benno felt their weight increase by a fifth, pressing him further into his seat. Then the hull shook slightly, pulsing twenty times in succession in just over a minute as the ship’s dorsal railgun spat out bundles of tungsten sabots. The long, dense rods, 400
in total, would expand out into clouds of kinetic lethality, forcing the Terrans to think through the same considerations Benno had faced…but they also signaled something more.
We shall not be moved, and we shall not fail to answer your challenge.
Ortiz looked at the green volume of fire moving out in front of them. “That’s a healthy dose of ordnance, Benno. And sabots are cheap, as far as ordnance goes, but not when trying to replenish them will get you shot for treason.”
Chief Dufresne answered from Benno’s other side. “The Turds don’t know that. And right now is not the time to be questioning the skipper.”
“No questioning here, Chief. Just observing.” Ortiz smiled.
Benno said nothing. He purposefully stayed focused on the two patterns of fire. Over the next five hours, clouds of sabots closed, spreading out to fill a greater and greater area, but with so much time and range, both ships could make minor corrections and avoid even vast danger zones. They did succeed in forcing each other to adjust course, giving away potentially critical data about the fidelity of their sensors, the agility of their maneuvers, and the distribution of their mass. They also closed off certain potential diversions, but with the sheer amount of space and nearly infinite approach angles, that amounted to no more than questing jabs between two prize fighters, ploys to test their opponent’s mettle.
The imaginary line of action between them shifted and twisted, but it continued to close, tighter and tighter.
At hour six, the situation changed. “Bridge, Combat. We’re showing a large reorientation of the Terran vessel. We’re looking up her skirt now, and they’ve boosted to flank thrust.”
“Bridge, aye,” Benno responded. He looked away from the status board he was perusing and peered closely at the main screen. The fusion plot showed a new acceleration vector for the enemy vessel. The data block next to it had been calculating the closest point of approach as 45 minutes later, but that number crept up. Accelerating almost directly at one another at +1 gravities for nearly 20 hours, they had been ready to flash by at knife-fighting range. But the velocity between them would have been so high the engagement window—the amount of time they would actually be in effective range of one another’s weapons—would have been just as narrow. Now?
The TAO called up. “They’re committing, sir. This won’t be a one-salvo-and-done sort of fight. They plan to stick with us and pound us until we’re dead, or they are.”
Benno keyed his mic and replied. “We’re due to flip soon if we still plan on doing a zero/zero intercept at Paradiso. Concur. Them flipping early means we have to continue accelerating in this direction and flash by them and Paradiso too, forcing us to backtrack and maybe give them a second pass closer in—”
“Where whatever planetary defenses they have set up can join in,” Ortiz interrupted.
Benno nodded. “Or we flip as planned and get ready to slog it out. They’ve committed. We have to as well.”
Dufresne spoke up. “This was never going to be a quick strike. They were never going to put up a token resistance, then flee. We knew going in freeing the planet was going to suck. Time to stop dancing. Time to start slugging.”
“Roger that.” Benno turned to Ortiz. “OOD, set General Quarters; all hands rig for battle.”
Ortiz nodded and keyed several buttons. Alarms bonged across the Puller, and watch standers moved to replace those on watch with the personnel assigned to fight the ship during GQ. Within three minutes, all stations were manned, and the Puller was ready.
Benno felt a fear and dread he had never experienced during GQ before. Last time he had stood GQ in CSMC, bored but wary. Then had come the hit, the battle, and the news that had changed his life and set him upon this desperate course. Now he was responsible for all these people’s lives. More than that, he was responsible for every colonist on Paradiso and, by extension, all those on the other five of the Lost Six. And Mio. Mio depended upon his untested and late-acquired tactical capability, upon the team and course he directed. It was impossible. It wasn’t fair! It was—
“Flipping ship for deceleration burn,” the helmsman announced, breaking the spiral of Benno’s thoughts.
Now, at the midway point and their highest velocity through the system, the Puller fired attitude thrusters and tumbled the ship through 180 degrees, end over end. Thrust now stabbed out in the opposite direction, slowing them down. The distance between them and the Annapolis still fell, but the engagement window opened wider and wider…
Until it was upon them.
“Turds are firing!” chirped an unannounced voice on the net. The two railgun turrets on the Annapolis blazed with blasts of white hot plasma, hot metal ablating off the sliding armatures each round rode upon, coursing through megajoules of electrical energy. Ten rounds per minute from each mount lanced out into the darkness. The distance was still too far away to be much of a direct danger to the Puller. Time for the rounds to reach them would no longer be measured in hours, but they could still be measured in terms of a minute or two, giving them sufficient time to maneuver. However, they again closed off avenues of escape.
As the threat vectors reached out and red clouds of hit probability blossomed on the screen, a terrain began to form in the void, regions where travel was safe and areas where travel meant certain death. Benno would be damned if he allowed the Terrans to dictate the battlespace to him. “OOD, maneuver to avoid rounds but continue to close Paradiso and the enemy destroyer. Combat, Bridge, let’s add to the mix. Batteries released, mount DR1. Commence regular salvos on a single railgun mount, half of the max rate. Conserve ammo until you have a good shot at making a direct hit but push the Turds out from us and off the direct line of our approach to the planet. Spin up missiles in all cells. Prepare an initial EW solution and stand by to jam. Confirm all point-defense stations at the ready.”
“OOD, aye!”
“TAO, aye!”
The Puller answered Annapolis less stridently, with fewer rounds, but their placement was good. The vectors of each destroyer’s salvos intersected and passed through one another. On the screens, it was like two 3D topological maps crashing into one another in a miscued slide show. As each destroyer entered the threat regions, they turned and diverted, bobbing and weaving faster. Not one round hit, but as they both altered course into valleys of safety between each volley, the shots went off nonetheless.
The Puller’s railgun fire had been designed to move the Terran Navy off their path toward Paradiso and to upset whatever the Terrans planned to do next. It was too late for that, however. The more experienced Terran CO had already made the next move. As the Puller became surrounded by missed railgun salvos, several of the rounds activated…not into clouds of tungsten rods like they had used before, but into electronic warfare barrage jammers.
Globes of atomic plasma erupted into existence around the Puller. These small yield devices were too tiny to power a nuclear-pumped laser or to do direct radiation damage to the Alliance destroyer, but they did provide sufficient electronic noise to nearly overload the passive sensor queues on the mutineers’ ship.
Whole sections of the fusion plot seen by the bridge and CIC crews filled with spurious tracks and static. “Damn it!” Chief Rajput yelled over the net. “Sorry, Bridge. I either have to dial back passive sensitivity or go active early. Activating track discriminators now, but it’ll slow down our detection-to-engagement processing.”
“Roger, TAO. Go active now,” Benno replied. It felt like everyone on the bridge was glaring at him, judging him, even though all eyes remained on their own screens. “Should we seed our counter-fire with barrage jamming rounds now?”
“No, sir. They’d be expecting that and will probably already have filters and discriminators up. Let’s save them for later.”
“Bridge, aye.”
Small radar antennas seeded all over the Puller’s surface stabbed outward with encoded microwave energy. The individual wave fronts of energy from each antenna melded a few tens of meters f
rom the hull and interfered constructively and destructively until they formed a powerful beam of scanning radar energy. This swept around the total volume of space, feeding cleaner, higher resolution encrypted data to the destroyer’s combat computers, combining with the passive data from the IR, UV, and visual spectrum cameras.
The track queues cleaned up in seconds—and revealed missiles already launched.
“Vampires! Vampires inbound!” the CIC liaison on the bridge yelled into the space. Down in CIC, no one said anything. Each of the enlisted watch standers was too busy to talk, going into automatic mode.
The tactical fusion plot devolved into an impossibly complex scene of overlaying and intersecting cones of light. Typically, the well-trained aristo officers would step back and interpret the chaos before them while the enlisted combat techs dealt with the smaller, less-confusing, more limited sections of it. Benno could only look on, his eyes agog, hardly able to interpret the data, much less find some brilliant tactical ploy to avoid the death coming for them.
In the battlespace between the two destroyers, the problem expanded out from a merely linear one. Now instead of a single line of action between two points, each enemy missile and warhead formed a new line of action along an entirely different vector. Two lines created a plane of action, three or more a volume, each complicating the tactical environment more and more until it was beyond what any single human mind could comprehend. Automated systems helped where possible—the speed and degree of aiming precision necessary to hit back, skin upon skin, across such vast distances were beyond what any person could hope to direct manually—but men and women were still needed to control the aim and priorities of the weapons’ computers. They could only handle that by chunking, by ignoring anything but what threatened in their limited sector, paring down the different lines of action until it was once again a more or less linear problem. Identify a threat, assign a defense, fire, assess damage, re-attack or move to the next in the queue, repeat again and again and again.
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