Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2

by Doug Dandridge

  “But when he got within range wasn’t there a lot of firing at each other,” she said, nodding. “And a lot of time to fire. I think that’s the main difference here, sir. When they get close we will both be going at a high fraction of c. That’s what I mean as too fast and furious.”

  “This is the Captain speaking,” came the command over the com. “All station send half crews to refreshments. Condition amber.”

  “So we can send half the crew to eat,” said the Lieutenant. “You go ahead and go, ensign,” he ordered the other officer. “You too, chief. I want you on station while I’m gone. Take what enlisted personnel you want with you.”

  “Yes sir,” she replied, looking over the techs and deciding who should go first. “We’ll be back soon.”

  “Take your time,” he said, leaning back in his accel couch and trying to get comfortable in the bulky outer hull armor. “I’m going to close my eyes and take a nap while I can.”

  At least the Captain agreed to let me come back to my duty station, before the shit hit the fan. It would have been even more boring to be confined to his cabin while the action was occurring out in the working areas. He leaned back in his couch, closed his eyes, and set his implant to a light sleep, knowing that any alert over the net would wake him instantly and completely.

  * * *

  “We’re at point three three c, ma’am,” said the navigation officer.

  Captain Jessica Frazier nodded her head and checked the tactical display. They had traveled a little over seven hundred million kilometers out from the planet in four hours. About forty light minutes. They were still waiting for the radar and lidar returns on the hostiles that were moving into system. Not her own actives. The inner system had sent out waves of directed energy to target the enemy ships. But it would still be a four hour wait for the inner system, three hours for her command, to see some of that energy reflected back. Hopefully.

  They were picking up the infrared emissions of the hostiles, glowing like small stars as they generated large quantities of energy to power their vessels. She was depending on the radiation flowing out from the star to mask her seven hundred sixty eight tiny points of light. She would find out eventually if that was something she should depend on.

  "Ma'am," called the com officer a second before the craft’s own sensors reacted. "Recon birds picking up incoming on passives. They report missile tracking radar coming in from the port side, fifteen degrees."

  "Tell the recon birds to paint them with tight beam sensors," she told the com officer. "I want to know as much as I can about what's coming."

  "Won’t that give our position away, ma'am," said the navigator over his shoulder.

  "I hope not," she said, looking at her plot. The thirty objects were glowing with infrared. Not enough to be boosting at full power. And not giving up enough information to satisfy her curiosity. "I'm hoping the angle of the beam won't give their launching ships any bleed. And they should be low enough intensity that maybe they'll mistake them for the inner system tracking net."

  After a couple of minutes the Captain began to wonder if the missiles were too well stealthed to get a range. The silence dragged on. She was getting some initial figures from infrared, but she didn’t know enough about their emissions to make a determination. At four and a half minutes they got their first returns.

  “Initial range forty million kilometers,” called out the sensor officer. “Velocity two eighty two kilo klicks per second.”

  “Point nine four c,” said the pilot, whistling.

  The sensor readings stacked up on each other as the missiles raced the sensor returns.

  “Seven seconds till match,” said the sensor officer. “No variation of course.”

  “They’re not targeting us,” said the pilot.

  “No indication of infrared signature increase,” said the sensor officer. “They’re not boosting for course change. Passing us on the port.”

  “What else can you tell me,” said the Captain as she watched the objects move by at a million kilometers to the port side.

  “Mass, about one hundred fifty tons,” said the sensory officer. “Their equivalent of a capital ship missile?”

  “Time to target,” asked the Captain, “assuming planetary orbit.”

  “Forty-one minutes,” said the navigator, looking at her board.

  “Signal the inner system,” order the Captain. “Send all of our information. How long till they receive our transmission?”

  “Thirty-nine minutes.”

  “Damn,” said the Captain. “Two minutes warning. And they’ll probably pick them up on their own sensors before that.”

  “Still might give them thirty seconds to a minute earlier warning than without,” said the navigator.

  “That might be the difference,” said the Captain, praying to herself that it would. Please give them the few extra seconds needed to take them all out.

  “They’re traveling pretty damned fast, ma’am,” said the sensor officer as he transmitted the message. “Might be the radiation front they’re generating by their speed will knock some of them out. Or one might hit a micrometeor and blow out.”

  She hoped that might happen. The missiles were traveling at a high enough velocity that even particles standing still in space, if any such existed, would be hard radiation as far as the missiles were concerned. Like spaceships they were generating a dual electromagnetic field, the first part putting a charge on anything in encountered to its front. The second part of the field, of the opposite polarity, would shift the particle around the missile. Of course, particles which already had a charge might be switched in charge and then get through. But micrometeors were a different story. They were much thicker in the inner system, which was one reason ships normally limited their velocity to point three c or less near the relatively crowded interior planets.

  “We’ll just have to pray for the best,” she said, looking at the red dots receding from the plot. “And hope maybe God relocates a convenient meteor storm where we need it most.”

  * * *

  “Troop transports have translated,” said the Subcommander tactical officer to pod leader Klesshakendriakka. “The entire force is now in normal space.”

  “And what do we have to report to them?” growled the pod leader, looking at the tactical display of the entire system before them. There was the large red dot of the occupied planet, which they could assume still had the same orbital platforms that they had picked up on system entry. There were several blinking hollow dots that might or might not be warships. Sometimes there were the heat signatures of fusion plants. Other times they faded from sight. And there were the over seven hundred objects that had been traveling in their general direction, picked up from infrared. Then they too faded.

  “They are putting out so much static and garbage it’s very difficult to tell what is going on,” said the Subcommander. “Their invisibility fields and holographs are very good. Probably better than ours.”

  “Yes,” agreed the pod leader with a snarl. “They seem to be a level of difficulty above what we have encountered before. But they are still inferior to us in most respects.”

  May the God make it so, thought the pod leader as he tried to make the tactical display give up its secrets by force of will.

  “Send to battle group commander what information we have,” said the pod leader to his subordinate. “Caution him that we believe there is a strike on its way from the inner system. We’re not sure what it comprises, but it seems to be big.”

  “Aye Lord,” said the com officer.

  The pod leader leaned back in his chair, stretching both sets of arms. It was his command’s duty to find out the information that the battle group needed to permit forcing the enemy into an engagement to the advantage of the group. And he had a feeling that they would need all the advantages they could gather against this foe.

  * * *

  “We have incoming missiles,” called out the tactical officer of the HIMS Archduc
hess Constance Leonardo. Captain Maria Steinman looked up from the communiqué she was working on and glanced at the tactical that showed twelve objects quickly approaching. Three seemed to be locked on to targets while the others were still veering back and forth as if seeking a kill.

  “What’s coming?” she called out to tactical as she looked over the group disposition. All of the ships were in travel formation and starting to accelerate toward the point chosen for the engagement, based on preliminary data.

  “Twelve capital ship missiles,” called out the tactical officer. “Velocity point nine four c. Coming in from the port bow of the formation at thirty degrees from our vector. Estimated range fifty million kilometers.”

  The Captain knew that the figures quoted were based on the computer’s estimate of the missiles’ position. And that was based on the travel time of the return signal versus the estimated velocity of the missiles. So it was about two point nine minutes till they reached the outer periphery of the group.

  “Order fleet to standard missile engagement,” she said to tactical. “I’ll kick it up to the Admiral and get his confirmation.”

  “This will give our position away,” said the tactical officer. “Especially when there are gigaton warheads going off nearby.”

  “Better that than being given away by warships exploding,” she said, cutting of the argument. She instead sent out a call to the group commander that was answered immediately.

  “Of course, Captain,” confirmed Admiral Sir Gunter Heinrich from his flag bridge. “Do whatever is necessary to defend the fleet. We’ll send the information through fleet circuit to the forts and tell them there is a quartet heading their way.”

  “Thank you sir,” said the Captain. “We’ll get the defenses up and knock them down.”

  The circuit went dead and the Captain switched her attention back to the tactical plot where a quartet of destroyers were leaping ahead at three hundred gravities. The smaller vessels were attempting to get between the capital ships and the capital ship killers, bringing their close in weapons to where they might do some good.

  Be hell if they get in the way of one of those killers, she thought. But it would be hell if one of the battleships, battle cruisers or heavy cruisers got hit too. And that would be a hell of a bigger reduction of their fire power than having a tin can taken out.

  Long range missiles were better weapons at long range than they were at shorter engagement ranges. They moved much faster after building up velocity over many minutes to an hour, which made them more difficult to track. They carried a hell of a lot of kinetic energy, normally many times the destructive power of their warheads. And they carried countermeasures that made them deadly by the time their targets acquired them. They were too much for a human mind to track and engage, even when linked to computers. So the computers were given their orders and did their best without human interference to kill the missiles that were trying to kill their ships.

  The tactical display blossomed with green arrows, as the destroyers and the next layer of vessels, the cruisers, fired a salvo of intermediate range interceptor missiles. At eight thousand gravities the sixty-four counter missiles accelerated at seventy-eight kilometers per second. Their target acquisition systems painted space ahead of them, picking up the ghosted images of the incoming missiles, whose own systems jammed and projected false information to draw the pursuers off. About half the missiles fell for the false information, losing lock. Some regained, then lost again. As they neared their targets only about a dozen had a firm lock. The rest detonated at their best guess closest approach, flooding a small section of space with radiation and debris.

  The incoming missiles released decoys that boosted away at thousands of gees, beaming out the sensor frequencies of the incoming missiles, attempting to spoof the sensors of the counter missiles. The missiles themselves absorbed as much of the sensor frequencies as they could, then rebroadcast at intervals intended to fool the interceptors as to the missiles’ range and velocity. At the same time they moved in erratic, almost random patterns. One of the interceptors broke through the jamming and false sensor images to detonate within thirty kilometers of its target, its twenty megaton warhead sending a blast of radiation and debris into the missile. At the closing velocities two of the wave of penetrators hit the nose of the missile, converting to a heat jet that blasted into the incoming projectile and exploded its warhead. Two of the other interceptors exploded within hundreds of kilometers. They didn’t hit the incoming missiles with any penetrators, but their radiation and smaller particles were enough to destroy the sensor heads and motivational computers, sending the inert missiles on ballistic trajectories that would miss the fleet, and eventually take them out of the system without causing any damage.

  The second wave of counter missiles had much the same result, destroying two of the incoming outright and disabling the targeting systems on two more. The ships of the group were able to track their ballistic course and move out of the way. The five remaining missiles continued to bore in, coming within the engagement envelope of the short range interceptors.

  The short range interceptors were nothing more than one hundred kiloton bars with a sensor cluster on the nose, crystalline batteries and grabber units. The batteries became the warheads if needed. They were accelerated out of the tubes of the destroyers at twenty thousand gravities, switching on their own drives and piling on velocity at twelve thousand gravities. With luck they would hit their randomly evading targets. They had about ten seconds to boost and acquire. There were no direct hits, but several proximity bursts took out two more of the missiles.

  Laser rings on the two closest destroyers searched and tracked targets. The closer the missiles came, the more accurate the light speed weapons became. Mostly because they were targeting objects that could move from side to side before the beams arrived. Each destroyer put out four beams from each of its four rings, sweeping them across the sky in a pattern that hoped to catch the missiles with enough energy to detonate their warheads. One missile was seared by several beams, but not enough energy was imparted to do sufficient damage. One was caught straight on for a thousandth of a second. Enough time for the fifty gigawatts of a second beam to pump fifty megawatts of its energy into the nose of the missile. The missile’s own electromag field shed some of the energy, while its reflective skin shed some more. But the thirty megawatts that did get through was enough to blast into the nose and rupture the containment vessel of the antimatter warhead. With a bright flare of light the missile disintegrated.

  The last two missiles locked onto the closest destroyer and bored in, weaving around in a semi-random pattern, avoiding the beams. At two seconds out the close in weapons fired on best guess best hope trajectories. Hundreds of guns on the hulls of the destroyers fired tens of thousands of rounds each second. The fifty millimeter projectiles were accelerated out of the guns at a hundred thousand gravities, then kicked in their own short range drives at twenty thousand gravities. Their simple warheads burst at closest approach of the fast moving objects.

  One missile took a dozen direct hits and scores of near miss bursts. The missile flew apart as the warhead detonated a hundred thousand kilometers from the destroyer Katie McPoole. About a ton of debris struck the destroyer in the nose, tearing off fifty meters of the length of the ship and killing a dozen crew. The rest of the missile flew out into billions of fragments that scattered across the side of the fleet. One piece penetrated the A ring of the light cruiser Augustus and disabled two of its emitters. Another hit the superstructure of the battle cruiser Remke and put a hole through the outer skin, killing six crew and injuring another dozen.

  The second missile took one direct hit behind the warhead section, along with several near misses. The missile swerved sideways and struck along its length into the midsection of the McPoole, in the process of coming apart in the thousandth of a second between being struck and striking the destroyer. Almost six thousand gigatons of kinetic energy transferred into the two
hundred thousand ton warship. Made of the toughest alloys the Empire could devise, with carbon nanofibers and a nanoliquid shock absorber between layers of armor, it was not enough. The escort vessel shattered from the force that transmitted through it. Every bulkhead, every panel, every deck plate warped and broke loose. Three hundred and eighty naval personnel and Marines were pulped, their battle armor suits crushed, as they were flung at thousands of gravities into the hard remains of the breaking up ship. The five hundred megaton warhead of the missile was more of an afterthought that heated to vapor some of the ship that was already flying into pieces.

  Within milliseconds the containment fields on all of the antimatter on the ship failed. The tons of the volatile substance stored in reactor fuel cells, missile warheads and other key parts of the vessel contacted the matter of their containers. Gigatons of explosive force pushed the ejecta away from the ship with increased speed. A small star birthed for several seconds, then faded. It caused minor damage to several of the ships in the fleet, whose hardened armored skins were proof against particles massing in the milligrams and less that impacted their hulls.

  “They’re gone,” cried the helm, staring at the viewer that showed the shielded image of the explosion.

  “And the enemy knows something of our position,” said the Captain. “Not much, but more than they did.”

  “The whole crew of that ship is dead ma’am,” said the helm, looking back over his shoulder at her with shock on his face.

  “And there are liable to be a whole lot more joining them,” she said in a quiet voice. “Before this day is over. And they might include us. They gave their lives to protect the striking power of the force.”

  “Captain,” came a voice over her link as the Admiral contacted her privately. “Maintain course to the agreed upon point. Then stop us dead in space and prepare to execute the plan.”