“Aye, sir.”
“Captain, if I may?”
“Yes, XO?”
“What makes you think anything’s back there?”
“Call it a hunch. Well, it’s more than that, actually. This little mini-convoy just smells fishy to me. You see, it’s very hard to use a single ship, no matter how powerful it is, to protect a gigantic target like an ore carrier that has no point defense systems. If we want to attack that formation, we just use our superior stealth to sneak in to missile range, fire, and then use the combination of high speed and an exit vector screened by the exploding target to get away before we can be fired on. But if they put two escorts in there along with the ore carrier, then it’s a different ball game.”
“I get it.” The XO caught on quickly. “With two escorts, the old ‘crawl, maul, and haul’ tactic won’t work because at least one escort will have the right firing geometry to cover our exit vector. We would need to get a guaranteed kill on both escorts at the same time, and the Krag know that our standard tactical doctrine for doing that is to sneak up on their six o’clock and hit them simultaneously at close range with a missile, one from each tube. That way, they don’t even know they are under attack until the missiles are too close for them to evade.”
“Exactly, so if they have a third very stealthy ship…,” Max prompted.
“He can sit back there, behind our firing position, silhouette us against the drive emissions of the ore carrier, and blow us to hell just as we are setting up our shot. Those sneaky rat bastards! Putting two escorts right where we can see them dictates our tactics. He knows exactly what we are going to do and exactly where we are going to go—and we generously oblige him by putting ourselves right in his cross hairs.”
“Bingo, XO. And when you add in that these guys aren’t zigzagging to throw off our firing solution, and they don’t seem to be making any effort to hide their drive emissions or their EM signature, they start to look more and more like bait.”
“I see it now. And Skipper, how much you want to bet that when we type those escorts they turn out to be very old destroyers ready for the boneyard?”
“Or even corvettes, just powerful enough to be credible escorts for an ore carrier but not so powerful as to deter us from thinking we can attack successfully. No, XO, I wouldn’t dream of taking that bet.
“So, here’s a command training exercise for you. Assume that there is a ship where we think and that the Krag really, really want us dead. They’re serious about it: it’s a cruiser. Make it a Crustacean class. With their good performance under compression drive, they’ve been slipping through open space into rear areas and ambushing people right and left. And the two escorts we see are corvettes: Cormorants or Cottonmouths. What’s our attack profile?”
“Tough exercise, Skipper.” He thought for about twenty seconds. “Okay. Here’s what we do. We load a Raven in tube one and a Talon in two, with an Egg Scrambler in tube three.”
The Raven was a heavy antiship missile with a large warhead capable of destroying ships up to cruiser size with just one hit. They were precious—the Cumberland carried only five. The Talon was the standard antiship missile with a smaller, variable yield warhead—the Cumberland carried twenty of those. And the Egg Scrambler was a device fired from a missile tube that, when exploded, scrambled the interface between normal space and metaspace such that for nearly an hour it was impossible for a ship to operate its compression drive; more important to the present situation, the ship wouldn’t be able to transmit any comm signal faster than light, to alert anyone about the attack or call for help.
“We come up behind the cruiser and fire all three tubes at about fifteen thousand kills—time on target firing with the Raven targeted on the cruiser and the Talon at one of the corvettes. Assuming that we kill both, we bore in on the second corvette at flank and open up with the pulse cannon as soon as we’re in range, while we reload all three tubes with Talons. We fight it out with the second corvette until we destroy it, then use the cannon on the ore carrier.”
“Good plan. Give the orders.”
Garcia gave the order to Weapons to change the missile load out. Normally, “three-tube” destroyers carried Talons in all three tubes, which meant that this attack would require the unloading and reloading of one of the forward tubes as well as the rear tubes. Max looked at the tactical display—he hadn’t glanced at it for a good forty-five or fifty seconds—and saw that his ship was slowly curving around behind the still theoretical location of the hidden enemy ship. As of yet, the three visible ships had held to their previous course and speed, plowing on straight and stupid, looking more and more like the bait Max suspected them to be.
Every now and then, Max would look at Kasparov, who would shake his head to say that he had no news. An hour passed. Then two. Max had finger food delivered to CIC and the chiller restocked. The coffee pot was getting a workout too. Every now and then, someone would leave his station for a few moments to relieve himself, his position being taken over for that interval by a petty officer reasonably proficient on all stations, known as the “Shortstop,” standing watch in CIC for that purpose. Now the tactical display showed that the Cumberland was nearly at the six o’clock position relative to the convoy.
Kasparov tilted his head as though hearing something in his headset. He said a few words to his back room and listened again for a few seconds. Somebody saw something.
“Skipper, we’re getting a very faint mass detection in the zone, about sixty-five thousand kills behind the ore carrier, right on his six. The mass profile is definite but very flat, as though they’re running a highly efficient graviton capture field to suppress their signature. No way to guess their mass, sir.”
“Very good, Kasparov. Keep your eyes peeled.
“Maneuvering, now that we have an idea where they are, adjust your approach to bring us in closer. For now, keep us fifty thousand kills behind Kasparov’s best guess on a position for the trailer.”
“Aye, sir, fifty thousand behind.” LeBlanc entered some commands into his console to pull up the data channel from the mass detector so he could put the ship just in the right spot.
“And when we get situated in the slot, talk to Kasparov and get his best guesses on an exact position relative to the other ships; then make some minor course adjustments to try to get lined up to see if we can image the trailing ship against the glow from the ore carrier’s sublight drive. Wiggle us around a bit and see if we can spot him.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sir,” Kasparov said, “our EM array is starting to pick up some leakage from the trailer. Internal comms, wireless devices, and so on. The Krag usually shield these things very well, but I’ve seen reports that they sometimes leak EM dead astern in some of their larger classes—something about ionized gases from their waste gas ports creating tiny gaps in the shielding. Anyway, I’ve got their location pinpointed within about a hundred meters now. Revising the plot to incorporate the new data.”
The tactical plot of the trailing ship shifted almost imperceptibly forward and to the left. “Thank you, Kasparov,” Max said. “Talk to LeBlanc and see if the two of you can use this better position to give us a look at these guys.”
The two men talked over their headsets. LeBlanc started giving minute course adjustment orders to his man who controlled pitch and yaw. Max could feel the ship being “wiggled around” to try to find the point in space where the Cumberland’s optical scanners were perfectly aligned with the hidden ship and the roughly one-hundred-meter-square drive exhaust array of the ore carrier.
“Skipper,” Kasparov spoke up. “We’re close enough now to get a posident on Hotels One through Three from their drive signatures. One is a fast ore carrier, Oriole class. Two and three are both corvettes, Corpuscle class.”
“Very well.” This was looking better and better. Corpuscles were an older class dating back to before the beginning of the war. Two such vessels were hardly a match for the state-of-the-art, practically fre
sh-out-of-the-yards Cumberland. Hell, four or five wouldn’t be much trouble. This might prove to be an easy kill.
Several minutes passed, with LeBlanc continuing to “wiggle” the ship based on suggestions from Kasparov.
“Captain, we just got a clear silhouette shot of the trailing ship, now designated as Hotel Four,” Kasparov said, finally. There was a definite “oh, shit” tone to his voice. Well, maybe it wouldn’t prove to be an easy kill after all. “It’s a battlecruiser, heavy. Barrister class.”
Max and Garcia looked at each other.
“I think we need a new plan,” said the XO.
“I think you’re right.” Long pause. Then, in a studiously calm voice, “Maneuvering, steady as she goes. Cease closure maneuver—maintain current distance to the battlecruiser.”
LeBlanc acknowledged the order.
Now, even calmer, in an almost soothing tone, Max ordered, “Stealth, I want a thorough check on all your systems, recheck all emission monitors, verify status of anything on board ship that radiates or could possibly radiate if it were to malfunction. Let’s be absolutely positive that we aren’t leaking any signal or particles or radiating anything that can cause us to be detected.
“Have the midshipmen visually confirm that all shutters are closed, all docking, hatch, and running lights are off, all thermal radiator fins fully retracted with the doors closed, and all waste vents deactivated and sealed. And by ‘visually’ I mean visually. I mean I want them to use the inspection optics and their eyeballs, not the tell tales, the indicator lights, and the status monitors. And if there’s anything else you or your back room thinks we should check, check that too. Twice.”
Nelson at the Stealth Station acknowledged the order, and started typing commands on his keyboard and talking into his headset. He had a small back room, and they were going to be very busy for the next few minutes. A few minutes later, an older mid rushed into CIC, talked to Nelson face to face, and dashed out again.
“Bartoli, talk to me about the Barrister class,” Max prompted. “Refresh our memories as to what we are dealing with.”
“Sir, the Barrister class is the newest and one of the largest Krag battlecruiser classes, designed both for very heavy firepower and extreme stealth, or as much stealth as you can have in something that big. Displacement estimated at between fifty-five and sixty-two thousand metric tons, length just under three hundred meters, beam roughly thirty meters.
“The only time one has been seen before is at the Battle of Sylvan B, and it didn’t fire any weapons, so we don’t have a clear idea of what she’s packing, but based on prior designs and her size, we would expect at least sixteen missile tubes: something like six forward, two each port and starboard, two dorsal, two ventral, and two rear. She almost certainly has their newest generation of pulse cannon, which is a turret-mounted, two-hundred-gigawatt unit, usually arrayed in batteries of three. She will probably have somewhere between twelve and eighteen of those, most likely fifteen. Plus the standard array of point defense weapons, countermeasures, grappling fields, projectile guns, and so on. Intelligence estimates that she’s got four-meter composite armor all around.”
Max could almost hear every asshole in the room puckering in fear. “Okay, Bartoli, I’m sure you have the manual of arms for the Khyber class of destroyers practically committed to memory. So, what is the official line on what a Khyber is supposed to do when it encounters a Barrister?”
“ELEVES, sir, the standard tactic for a detached destroyer encountering an enemy of superior force.” ELEVES was pronounced “elves.” It stood for ELude, EVade, and EScape. No shit.
“Or more plainly, run away. Well, I don’t plan to run away,” Max declared. “Not today, at any rate.”
“But sir,” Bartoli countered, almost pleadingly, “given that ship’s size, and with what we know about Krag shielding, structural integrity fields, and active blast dampers, we would have to hit it with four Ravens, and the safest bet would be to hit it with four Ravens simultaneously.”
“Then we’ll just have to hit it with four Ravens simultaneously.”
Bartoli looked at his captain as though he had proposed attacking the battlecruiser with a thong slingshot and a water pistol. “But we’ve got only two forward missile tubes. And you can’t launch two missiles cold and have them just sitting there in space while we reload two more and then fire all four. The drives on the first two missiles won’t get them going fast enough to penetrate the Krag point defense batteries. If they aren’t launched with the starting velocity imparted by the accelerator coils in the launch tubes, the Krag will just shoot them down.”
“Then, that’s not what we’re going to do.” He hit the comm switch. “Engineering.”
“Engineering. Brown here.”
“Wernher, this is the skipper. Do you happen to know how many regulations there are about proper use of the hardware issued to this vessel?”
“Not precisely. I should think that there would something on the order of two or three hundred.”
“Well, get up here then. I need your help breaking about fifty of them.”
* * *
CHAPTER 14
* * *
12:10 Z Hours, 26 January 2315
The Cumberland had very slowly and very carefully closed within twelve hundred kilometers of the immense battlecruiser, which continued to lumber on, seemingly oblivious to the comparatively tiny destroyer in her wake. Max supposed that she was straining to spot a destroyer slipping in where it was expected, so intent on looking forward that she hadn’t a thought that she was, herself, being stalked from behind.
Twenty minutes before, the destroyer’s hangar deck had opened and her cutter, a small, nimble, multipurpose auxiliary vessel, capable of carrying ten men plus a flight crew of two, slid out on maneuvering thrusters only, then slowly eased in its sublight drive, taking up station thirty-five hundred kilometers behind its mother ship. Ensign Mori, the best small-craft pilot on the ship, settled the tiny vessel into its designated place, experiencing unaccustomed difficulty handling the cutter because of the awkwardly placed additional mass.
Max counted down the seconds to the first step of the minutely calculated timetable that he, Bartoli, Garcia, and Brown had quickly put together. “Maneuvering, EXECUTE.”
LeBlanc brought his hand down on the right shoulder of his drives man, Able Spacer First Fleishman. Two sharp pats. “Go. All ahead Emergency.”
Fleishman pushed his main drive controller all the way forward to the stop, bringing the main sublight drive to 125 percent of its rated power. Like an eager cavalry mount spurred by its rider, the Cumberland leaped forward. The range to the battlecruiser fell rapidly as the ship accelerated: 11,000… 10,500… 10,000… 9,500… 9,000. At that rate of acceleration, stealth went out the window, so at 8,800 kilometers, apparently having gotten a general detection of the destroyer, the Krag vessel began to sweep the area with her powerful active sensors, instantly pinpointing the ship on her tail.
“Battlecruiser has increased her sublight drive to Emergency,” said Bartoli. The larger ship’s top speed was slower than the destroyer’s, and she accelerated more slowly; still, the increased acceleration substantially slowed the closure rate between the two ships. “Battlecruiser is sweeping us with targeting scanners… she’s initiating a lock sequence.”
“Fire the Egg Scrambler” Max ordered. The communications jammer shot from tube three and immediately detonated, making interstellar communications impossible. Unless their enemy survived the battle, any news the Krag passed on about this attack could travel no faster than the speed of light. It would be years before anyone heard it.
“Evasive India Three. Countermeasures.” Immediately LeBlanc started giving a series of intricate orders to his men, jinking the highly maneuverable destroyer erratically to slow the ability of the enemy to get a targeting lock while still continuing to close the range to the battlecruiser. Meanwhile, one Countermeasures officer in CIC and seven of his back room colleagu
es activated and managed various scrambling pulses, confusing echoes, jamming signals, infrared drones, chaff dispensing missiles, and other kinds of subterfuge designed to confuse, deceive, distract, divert, or otherwise discombobulate the Krag targeting systems so that the battlecruiser’s deadly pulse cannon could not get a killing shot.
Max stabbed the comm switch. “CIC to Mori.”
“Mori here.”
“You ready?”
“I’ve got my eye on the sun and my paddle in the water.” Mori was born on a tiny island in the Micronesia chain on Earth. His people, in an almost inconceivable feat of seamanship and navigation, had paddled dugout canoes across thousands of miles of the open Pacific without chart or compass to make precise landfall on tiny islands smaller than the average farm in the American Midwest. Mori himself had spent much of his childhood in such craft before deciding at age nine to venture into an infinitely vaster ocean.
“Go at the designated mark.”
“Affirmative. Three. Two. One. Now.” Mori engaged the powerful sublight drive on the cutter, which, even with the extra weight, quickly began to overtake the destroyer. The accelerating battlecruiser had not spotted him yet, having a more immediate threat to deal with.
The Cumberland’s evasive maneuvers combined with an excellent countermeasures deployment helped confuse the Krag targeting systems, for now. Determining that they could not get a positive lock, the Krag decided to fire by bearing rather than firing by lock, meaning that they pointed their cannon along the measured bearing of the destroyer rather than having a coaxial lock between the targeting scanner and the weapon bore.
Brilliant pulse cannon bolts streaked past the Cumberland, some passing within meters of her hull. Space was big, but it wasn’t that big. It was only a matter of time before the Krag got a hit by this method, or before the decreasing range allowed the targeting scanners to get a lock.
To Honor You Call Us (Man of War) Page 22