The unknowns were huge and the penalty for guessing wrong could make a cinder of the planet beneath her,
An hour later, they had a hundred and sixty more frigates and no end in sight.
Fifteen minutes later, the distant picket’s new report showed twenty more frigates and the first cruisers with three reactors. Twenty of them.
The count on the board now showed three hundred and sixty battleships, one hundred and eighty frigates, and twenty cruisers.
Even if the cruisers topped out at half the number of frigates, this would still be a huge force to reckon with.
“Any suggestions?” Sandy asked her two lead staff men.
Neither of them shot back a ready answer. All three of them stood, eyeing the board, and no matter how hard they stared at it, it told them nothing more than they already knew.
“We could run,” Ashigara said. “We’re facing over twelve hundred hostiles, likely more with only one hundred and seventy-six battlecruisers. That’s seven to one odds. If they bring in another hundred and eighty cruisers, it will be over eight to one odds. And, may I also point out, this new force doesn’t seem to have littered its course with bent, busted, or blown-up ships. Those numbers round up to full dishes.”
“You have several good points. Ignore them for now,” Sandy said.
“If we ordered Admiral Bethea to engage the flying wing, say one system out, she’d be closer to us when she won and could come to our aid faster.”
“Computer, show me how much time it would take an order to reach Bethea.”
The computer projected the likely place of the fleet and the time of flight for a comm message. If the message arrived per the estimate, it would joggle the admiral’s elbow only a couple of hours before she joined battle. That would be a big mess and save them little time.
“Comm, send to both Admirals Miyoshi and Bethea. ‘A third assault force is headed for Sasquan, aiming at Jump Point Gama. Please return to this system as quickly as you can after handling the problem in front of you. Admiral Santiago sends’.”
For another long minute, they stared at the screen. The only solution to this was the obvious one.
“If we aren’t going to run, Admiral Drago will have to be reinforced,” Sandy finally said.
“How do we split what we have left?” Velder asked.
“That is the problem,” Sandy said. “We’ve got the Victory and forty-four ships. What kind of a jump defense can twenty-three ships present?”
“If we anchor them in seven groups of three and a single pair, that would give us something like a hundred and forty, maybe a hundred and sixty guns aimed at the jump at any time,” Ashigara said.
“But at one revolution per minute,” Velder said, “we’ll likely shoot ourselves dry in six seconds and have to wait for another fourteen seconds before the next ship came on line. Worse, we’ll have the lasers reloaded fully twenty to thirty seconds before we swing around and can shoot again.”
“Better we slip our moorings and alternate firing by squadrons,” Sandy said. “The fight won’t last too long, and that would have a hundred and forty to a hundred and sixty lasers ready every nine or ten seconds. That’s much better.”
The two staff officers nodded agreement. “Six seconds firing, three seconds waiting for the next ship to come on line, then another six seconds firing,” Velder said.
“But if they’re sending a ship through every second, we’ll be swamped,” Ashigara said.
“One ship every fifteen or twenty seconds, and we can handle it,” Velder countered.
“So, whether twenty-three ships can hold a jump depends on how fast they come at us,”
Sandy concluded. “Oh well, there are always the atomics if push comes to shove.”
“They worked in the alien system home world,” Velder reminded her.
“But they got enough ships away to let them know how we did it,” Sandy pointed out. It was clear, she wasn’t going find a better option if she kept staring at the screen.
“Cut orders for three squadrons from Admiral Nottingham’s fleet to be detached to Admiral Drago’s command. I better go ask the cats if they have any more warheads they’re willing to share with me if I end up trying to defend a jump with just what I’ve got left.”
While Velder cut the orders, Sandy headed back to the banquet hall. This having to beg for illegal atomics was getting to be a bit of a pain.
25
Admiral Miyoshi watched the main screen in his flag plot. The ships of his command, Second Fleet, were now moored 180,000 kilometers back from the jump. That put the jump 20,000 kilometers inside the range of his 22-inch lasers. At the moment, a longboat was just drifting up to the jump. In a few minutes, it would put a periscope through the jump and let him know exactly what those damn bug-eyed monsters were up to on the other side of it.
With any luck, the aliens should be only hours out from the jump, bearing down on it fast, intent on racing through it at as close to 50,000 kilometers per hour as they could manage it.
The data stream from the periscope sent through the jump was limited. The alien fleet of a hundred and seventy-nine battleships, fifty-nine cruisers, and some ninety-three of those new frigates were approaching the jump, but it was impossible to tell exactly how long it would take them to arrive.
“Send a probe through,” Admiral Miyoshi ordered.
A few moments later, the longboat withdrew the periscope and launched a tiny smart probe through the jump. The plan was for it to spread out, with two atomic laser mass tracking devices at either end of a kilometer-long baseline. The probe also had plenty of passive antennae to pick up any radio, radar, or laser noise. What it found, it would transmit to the periscope then to the longboat and back to the Haruna.
Admiral Miyoshi could wait; he was a patient man.
What he finally received did not please him.
“The enemy fleet is decelerating at a higher gee than it would need to if it intended to go through the jump at 45,000 kilometers an hour,” the duty officer on sensors reported.
Even as he spoke, the main screen showed a projection that had the aliens come dead in space about a 100,000 kilometers short of the jump.
“Damn,” Miyoshi allowed himself. “They aren’t going to charge the jump.”
“What do you think they’re up to?” his chief of staff asked.
“I have no idea, Aki. We will just have to wait and see.”
During the several hours that they waited to see what the alien fleet was up to, Miyoshi was handed the latest message traffic from Admiral Santiago. It took all his patience not to crumble the message up and toss it toward a trash can.
“A problem, sir?” Aki asked.
“It seems that there is now another force. Admiral Santiago asks if I could please handle this bunch quickly and rejoin her. I suspect she fears she will soon be low on reserves.”
Miyoshi initialed the message flimsy and returned it to the comm runner.
How soon can I dispose of this hostile force? Miyoshi thought to himself.
I cannot attack them. That is certain. I can only destroy them when they attempt to close with me.
During the wait, Miyoshi set about mining the jump. If the aliens sent even one of their small cruisers through, there would be a huge thermonuclear device waiting for them. In a flash, the jump would be just one small adjunct to hell.
Farther back, he deployed high acceleration rockets. Carefully protected against electromagnetic pulse and insulated from as much heat as possible, these rockets would be shot into that small bit of hell to stoke the fires. Device after device would keep eating up battleships before the aliens realized where the jump had taken them.
That had worked once for Miyoshi. The foremost question in his mind was, would it work again?
Admiral Miyoshi had ordered the Second Fleet to Battle Stations and Condition Charlie as the time approached for the aliens to arrive. However, from the way they were slowing, he was starting to doubt he was in for a fight.
The probe soon showed that the enemy fleet had indeed come to full stop 100,000 kilometers away from the jump. The battleships were spread in a thin concave curve in front of the jump. The frigates and cruisers floated around its flanks, covering all 360 degrees of its edge.
Before Miyoshi could question what would happen next, several small vessels of ten thousand tons detached from the battleships and began to tiptoe toward the jump. Several began leaving large packages in their wake.
“Will the probe tell us something about whatever those are?” Miyoshi asked.
“It’s coming in now, sir,” Aki answered.
Before the chief of staff fell silent, the sensor duty officer was already reporting. “The devices weigh ten tons, sir. We are getting a radioactive read off the package. They do not yet appear to be active.”
“Thank you, Commander. Order the probe to prepare to return when I order it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Mines, sir?” Aki asked.
“It would appear that they are prepared to mine their side of the jump just as we’ve mined our side.”
The two of them studied developments for the next hour. When the mine layers were within 20,000 kilometers of the jump, they pulled the probe back. After that, they were reduced to just what data the two versions of their periscope could gather. One brought in visual. The other scanned the electromagnetic scale.
It wasn’t a lot of information. However, it did tell them that as the mine layers withdrew, the mines activated a kind of primitive proximity fuse.
“I wonder if we could jigger their proximity fuses to blow themselves all up?” Aki asked.
“We will have to see about that,” Miyoshi said thoughtfully. “Though that is a tool I would prefer to keep in my tool box until it will do me the most good. Now, about those mines.”
And the two of them put their heads together and came up with a plan to annoy the great Enlightened One on the other side of the jump.
An hour later, a much-reduced longboat shot through the jump. No one was aboard it. Humans did not have to rely on suicide crews; we had automation to do what the aliens seemed to demand of their own people.
The armed probe immediately accelerated at 6.73 gees in a tangent course from the jump. It never maintained its direction or acceleration for more than a second. It activated a minimal sensor suite, identified the nearest mine, and shot four 12.6-mm lasers at it.
The mine blew up, but it was not a primary detonation. Some of the conventional explosives surrounding the plutonium were hit and began to burn. Then it exploded, but not with the proper timing. In a moment, in the space where the mine had been, all that existed was a collection of parts and a large, misshapen chunk of worthless weapons-grade plutonium.
The armed probe got off shots that destroyed seven mines before the alien fleet began to wake up to this nuisance. The probe gunned down three more mines before a laser wiped it out of existence. However, three more mines were also wiped out by some of the volleys aimed at the gun boat.
Admiral Miyoshi pursed his lips. “Well done. Very well done,” he said. “Thirteen of those pesky mines gone.”
“Do you think they will attempt a similar raid on our side of the jump?” Aki asked.
“No doubt they will. Unlike them, however, we should be able to nip theirs in the bud. Two, maybe three seconds, yes?”
“I am told that our gunners have the jump zeroed in and are ready to surround it with laser fire. They will not know what hit them.”
“Good. Good. However, my dear Aki, we must do better than them. Advise the gunners to put our mines in their data base. No one fires if they have a mine in their sights as well as an alien intruder.”
“We will make sure of that.”
While Aki went to make sure that his own sharpshooters would not destroy one of the atomic devices Admiral Santiago had to beg the cats for, Miyoshi found himself a dark corner of his flag plot.
Two things were becoming clear. Admiral Santiago feared that her reserves would be soon depleted, and depleted badly. The aliens across this jump from him definitely wanted him to stay here. Stay here or charge through the jump to his doom.
There was no question of abandoning the jump. Mines were nice weapons, but they needed to be protected, as he had just proven. The question he struggled with was just how large a force did he need to keep here to do that.
Too large here, and Admiral Santiago might not be able to stop the other intruder, or the other threat she anticipated.
Too few, and he risked letting this force blast through the jump and strike for those troublesome cats.
The correct answer would only be known when it had succeeded or failed.
Admiral Miyoshi examined his options several more times. Nothing new came to his attention.
Then the aliens made his afternoon interesting.
26
The periscope gave them warning. One of the alien cruisers was approaching the jump at a slow, measured speed. They switched periscopes for the electronic surveillance version and found that none of the mines were still sending out proximity noise.
That made for interesting information.
The longboat retrieved the probe, collected the close-in mine, and, when the cruiser was fifteen minutes from the jump, it accelerated to 2.0 gees to get some distance between it and the jump.
The crew also wanted to clear the fire lanes.
At exactly sixteen minutes, a small device tumbled through the jump.
It took half a second for that news to reach the guard ships. The gunners were on a hair trigger alert; the firing solutions were already worked out. The lasers were already dialed in on the jump. A second later, they had sixty lasers firing in a pattern around the jump.
Exactly one and a half seconds after the object tumbled into the system, it was obliterated.
“Banzai!” was muttered in chorus around the flag plot. Miyoshi smiled at the enthusiasm of his warriors.
“We’ve got radioactive readings off of the wreckage,” Sensors reported to Admiral Miyoshi.
That was no surprise.
Six of his forty-four battlecruisers had used only part of their charges during those one or two seconds. It would take little time to top off their capacitors. There were also another six ships that now had the assignment of nipping the next thing that came through the jump.
The alien cruiser waited for a full minute before a second object shot through into their space. This one rocketed off, heading straight out of the jump. It ran into the lasers two seconds after it arrived and was immolated.
“I wonder how long the safety locks are on those bombs?” Miyoshi said.
“We know it’s not less than two seconds,” Aki answered.
“So far,” his admiral reminded him.
There were two more efforts to lob atomic weapons through the jump, both using rockets. These missiles, however, started to evade immediately. They jinked hard, but that had been accounted for in the fire pattern. Each of the lasers was part of a pattern. While half the 22-inch lasers were at full power, several were now doing stutter shots at one-quarter power as they swept the space.
It didn’t matter. Both missiles ran into a full power laser beam and basically ceased to exist by the time it had been on the human side of the jump for two seconds.
“Do you think we should put more of our lasers on lower power?” Aki asked. “Those missiles are getting more and more rambunctious.”
Admiral Miyoshi shook his head. “Very soon they will risk the cruiser. Very soon.”
The admiral was right. A full two minutes after the last atomic had crossed the jump, a cruiser appeared. It was accelerating hard at 4.0 gees. While its velocity was very low, it was jinking radically. Still, it was ripped apart by laser fire, both at full power and reduced. In less than the blink of an eye, it was an expanding cloud of gas. In hardly a breath,
it was gone.
Miyoshi eyed the screen. Nothing was there. For five minutes, nothing was there. Finally, the admiral ordered the longboat to halt its mad dash from the jump. It took it forty-five minutes to get back close to the jump. It halted well short of the area around the jump that had been targeted, and launched the periscope probe.
It took another five minutes for the probe to make it to the jump, locate it, and send the visual periscope through. It immediately transmitted a picture that showed no warships within 100,000 kilometers of the jump.
Now the longboat tiptoed up to the jump.
A tiny probe was sent through. It showed that the mine field had been reactivated.
“Shall we take out a few more of their mines?” Aki asked.
Admiral Miyoshi shook his head. “That would be too predictable. No, let us wait sixteen hours, and then send one through. For now, I am hungry, and I think we need to stand down the crews from battle stations. Let us go to Condition Bravo and allow half the watch crew to eat and sleep. In four hours, we can rotate.”
“Aye, aye, sir. I will get the order out immediately.”
The problem facing Admiral Miyoshi had not changed. The enemy still occupied the other side of the jump. Like him, they had deployed atomic mines to annihilate any ship that ventured through. There were times when the aliens had tried to withdraw from their position at a jump. The humans had waited until the aliens were well beyond their own gun range, then jumped through and cut down every one of them.
This time, the aliens had mined the jump. Even if humans made the jump, they risked being blown to superheated gases by those mines.
Of course, he had the same deployment on his side. They, of course, had over three hundred ships. If he withdrew from the jump, how long would it take the aliens to know they were gone and risk a few ships to blow the mines?
Miyoshi knew of armies that ordered infantry to walk across any minefields they found, no matter what the cost. A minefield that wasn’t under close observation and support fire was a minefield quickly turned.
He was still lost in thought as his orderly brought him supper. He always liked the nutty taste of the watercress salad. The bowl of udon noodles was served with a fish he did not recognize; likely either from the birds or cats’ home planet, and mixed seaweed from the last shipment from home. The main course was salmon, likely also from home, well marinated, and with short grain rice with just the precise consistency that his cooks knew he liked.
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