Meanwhile, the calculated location of the destroyer and the fighters appeared in the 3D tactical projection. The commander quickly determined that the force was unlikely to be able to reach the limited protection of the installation’s fighter cover and defensive outposts before the humans caught up with them. Standard tactical doctrine dictated that, under these circumstances, he concentrate his forces at the ninth prepared defensive position rather than divide them.
Like any sensible being, the commander always acted in accordance with doctrine.
“Communications, direct the destroyer and fighters to rendezvous with us and continue to make what repairs can be made. I want that destroyer as battle-ready as possible when the enemy arrives, which I expect to be very soon. Inform the captain that he is to remain in command of both his vessel and the fighters, that they are designated as the reserve combat force, and that he is to position his force one hundred thousand standard linear units to our rear. I may need them to harass the fleeing enemy once we break its formation.”
The officer acknowledged his orders and moved swiftly to carry them out. On the tactical display, the commander watched as the other ships of his detachment left their moorings or patrol patterns for the rendezvous. The seeds were coming together quite nicely.
“Warlike Commander,” said the Sensor Officer.
“Proceed.”
“Distant mass detection, bearing eight-three-six break five-five-three. Preliminary indications are that the contact or contacts are at constant bearing, range decreasing. Bearing is consistent with calculated bearing of our destroyers and fighters.”
“Communications, interrogate their transponders—the destroyer and all of the fighters. Two separate challenges to each, separated by fifteen standard heartbeats.”
“As you order.” The Communications Officer did as he was instructed. “New challenges sent and correct responses received.” This time he did not mention anything about anomalies in the transmitter characteristics, even though they were present.
The commander should have been reassured. He was not. Something was making his tail curl. “Sensors, actively scan the destroyer, high-intensity, high-resolution. Paint it for as long as you need in order to be able to tell me without doubt that this is our ship.”
“As you order, Warlike Commander.” Nearly a hundred heartbeats passed. “Warlike Commander, the scans show one Type 43 destroyer, with mild to moderate damage.”
“Are the scans of sufficient resolution to detect the internal structure, the power-flow patterns, the electromagnetic fields, the mass distribution, and other signature characteristics?”
“Affirmative, Warlike Commander. They are. Those characteristics match expected parameters in all respects.”
The commander’s tail, which had acquired an involuntary, nervous twitch, stopped its spasmodic movements. He had to be very careful not to rely on a general sensor profile for a positive identification. Some Union vessels had a sophisticated ability to mimic the sensor profile of friendly ships. Not only that; some of those ships were particularly deadly. He had just received an intelligence report that one such type, the Khyber class destroyers, not only had that capability, but tended to be under the command of the most aggressive and gifted young Union commanders and were being refit with a chin-mounted rotary missile launcher that allowed them to launch ten missiles in quick succession, in addition to the two in the fixed forward-mounted tubes. He very much wanted to keep that set of incisors away from his neck veins.
He could relax, though. No matter how effective the emulation emitters, it would be impossible to mimic a ship at that level of detail and fidelity without comprehensive intelligence of the kind he knew the humans did not possess. And because the Hegemony’s fighters used a mixture of deuterium and tritium in their reactors, their higher energy output made them easily distinguishable from Union, Pfelung, or other enemy fighters, which used the more-abundant deuterium only. There was no way that an enemy fighter could pass itself off as Krag so long as the Krag sensors and the computers interpreting their output were in working order.
The destroyer and fighters arrived at their designated position and began to array themselves into one of the standard formations for tactical reserve forces. There was every indication from sensors that the destroyer’s crew was busy implementing field repairs, as were the pilots of several of the fighters. Those vessels had evidently received more damage than he initially thought. For that reason and because they had recently been defeated in battle, the commander was even more strongly resolved to hold them in reserve. He expected to be able to destroy the enemy easily with the other forces under his command.
“Warlike Commander, there is an unidentified mass detection from Early-Warning Picket Buoy 22,” the Sensors Officer announced. “Transferring readings to your board and to the Tactical Section.”
“Understood. As soon as we get a detection from one of the other buoys, be sure to triangulate, and provide me with a set of rough coordinates,” the commander ordered, essentially telling the Sensors Officer to follow the procedure that the tracking protocols dictated that he follow in any case.
“As you wish, Warlike Commander.” The commander was oblivious to the resentful clicks of the young officer’s teeth as he answered. Within a few moments, Early-Warning Buoy 37 also made a detection, allowing the contact to be localized and tracked.
“Identification challenge sent three times,” the Communications Officer announced. “No response to challenge, and no return transponder pulse received.”
“Classify contacts as hostile,” the commander ordered.
“Enemy vessels are on direct course for this position,” the Tactical Officer said. “Initial indications are that the enemy force is composed of one larger vessel and two smaller ones. Range is still too great to identify by type. The enemy force should be within weapons range in approximately one-half of a daytenth.”
Weapons range. The enemy was already within range of weapons that the Hegemony had in its arsenal. But as a purely defensive command located far behind the front lines, the force the commander controlled had not been issued any of the new Type 965 long-range, superluminal missiles (Union reporting name: “Ridgeback”), which were in short supply throughout the theater. The force was armed with the older Type 961’s (Union reporting name: “Foxhound”). The commander would have to hold his fire until the enemy was close enough to smell.
No matter. The enemy was coming right to him.
Spits Out Bitter Roots looked to the arrangement of his forces, which were arrayed in a plane perpendicular to the path of the approaching enemy force. Viewed from the enemy’s perspective, the battle station was in the center, anchoring the defenses. In a line along what one could arbitrarily call the bottom of the formation, the center of which was 1000 standard linear units from the battle station and spaced 1000 standard linear units apart, were one of the light cruisers, the destroyer, and the second light cruiser. “Above” the battle station, separated from it by 1000 units, was the battlecruiser. In that way, a vessel attempting to go “under” would encounter both light cruisers and the destroyer, one going “over” would encounter the battlecruiser (equal in firepower to all three of the other ships), and one going around either “side” would encounter the battlecruiser and one or the other of the light cruisers. And if the enemy came straight in, he would face the fire of all. The ships and the battle station were able to provide supporting fire to each other and could direct overlapping fire against most plausible enemy-approach vectors.
“We have derived preliminary identifications of the enemy vessels, Warlike Commander,” the Tactical Officer said. “The large vessel is a Type 2 Pfelung escort carrier. One of the smaller vessels is a Rashidian destroyer, Type 5, and the other is a class of vessel unique to them, known as a Zebec, roughly the size of a small destroyer but faster, less heavily armored, and armed differently—no pulse-cannon but a larger supply of missiles fired from a battery of nine missile tubes.�
� The commander smiled. His force possessed five times the firepower of the attackers, perhaps more. This would be an easy victory.
The three enemy vessels approached the prepared defensive position as the Hegemony ships waited for them. Just outside of extreme missile range, the escort carrier disgorged nineteen fighters of a standard thirty-ship contingent. The commander surmised that the other eleven perished in battle with his own fighter squadron or the two destroyers. The carrier removed itself to a safe distance while the fighters formed into two groups of seven and one group of five. The groups, in turn, arranged themselves in a triangle, with the smaller group forming the apex and the two larger groups forming the base. The two Rashidian ships then fell in behind the fighters, and the whole formation began to accelerate toward the defenders.
“Enemy force is now within missile range, Warlike Commander,” the Tactical Officer advised.
“Understood. Weapons, hold your fire,” the commander ordered. “We will wait until they reach optimum range.” If the warlike commander launched his missiles too soon, the enemy would have ample time to track and engage the weapons with its point-defense systems. Too close, and the weapons would not have time to accelerate to full attack speed.
“Holding fire,” the Weapons Officer responded. Just outside optimum range, the formation turned to travel parallel to the plane of the Krag formation, moving toward the “top.” The commander saw through the enemy ruse immediately. Obviously, the attackers believed that he would be reluctant to remove his ship from the cover of the battle station’s protective fire. They were assuming that he would not move to engage them until he could be joined by the ships on the other side of the battle station. He would prove himself far braver than they believed.
“Running Officer, shape course to intercept the attacking formation, ahead flank. Fleet Operations, order the other ships in the formation to rendezvous with us as soon as they are able.”
Shortly after receiving acknowledgments of his orders, the commander heard his ship accelerating and felt it pivot underneath his feet. Immediately after he committed his ship to an intercept course, the Pfelung fighters kicked in their afterfusers and began to accelerate much more rapidly, leaving the remaining enemy ships behind. The fighters were headed for the vulnerable tankers and fuel stores that his force was supposed to be defending, and there was no way the commander could catch them. He had, however, planned for that contingency.
“Operations, order the reserve fighter-combat force to intercept and engage the enemy fighters. Notify the combat-area patrol fighters that reserve combat force is being deployed against the enemy. When the combat-area patrol reaches the enemy, the reserve force should already have engaged them. Direct the patrol to hold their fire until they positively identify the enemy fighters. I want to be certain that we have no friendly-fire casualties in this engagement.” He was going to earn his name of triumph today, and he wanted nothing to mar his achievement.
Operations gave the appropriate orders. The Pfelung fighter formation and the reserve force of his own fighters that had just returned from battle were on an intercept course with one another and would meet several hundred heartbeats before the combat-area patrol fighters joined the fight. That combination of the two fighter elements would be more than sufficient to pin down the Pfelung fighters as well as the Rashidian destroyer and Xebec, preventing them from destroying the vital facilities of Naval Field Readiness Station #252 until Spits Out Bitter Roots could get his larger ships into position to destroy them.
A blinking alert on his console notified him that his first officer wished to communicate by voice. He opened the channel. “Speak,” he said, with no small amount of impatience.
“Warlike Commander,” the first officer proceeded with a great deal of trepidation, “I wished only to remind you that we have no reliable intelligence on the capabilities and tactics of Pfelung fighters. Either no vessel of the Hegemony has ever encountered these vessels in combat, or no vessel that encountered them survived long enough to make a report of the engagement. We know very little about the Pfelung, their technology, their ways of warfare, their physiology, their culture, or anything else. A certain degree of caution would, therefore, be warranted in engaging them.”
“We will discern the enemy’s capabilities when we engage him. I’m not some trembling, pink runt of the litter to be frightened with fables of the Night Owl or the Black Cat. We will proceed as I have directed. If you think caution is warranted, I suggest you be particularly watchful and develop contingency plans to implement if the enemy shows himself to have capabilities we have not suspected.” The commander closed the circuit with no small measure of irritation.
Irritation turned to satisfaction, however, as the commander watched his plan begin to come together. In just a few seconds, the fighters of the reserve force would engage the Pfelung fighters, forcing them to abandon their end-run attack in order to defend themselves. He used the neural interface to direct the tactical display to show the optimum firing range for the reserve force’s Type 961 missiles. A yellowish-brown sphere appeared around the fighter formation, which appeared as a dot at the present scale.
In a few heartbeats, the enemy fighters—another dot—entered the sphere. He eagerly awaited the satisfaction of watching the Type 961 missiles blot the enemy from the display. And yet, the reserve fighters did not fire.
He waited. And waited. After a hundred heartbeats or so, his ears swiveled down and forward in an expression of extreme irritation as he opened a voice link. “Communications, signal the commander of the reserve force and ask why his formation has not fired on the enemy.”
Half-listening to the inferior officer’s acknowledgment of his order, the commander turned his attention back to the tactical display. He increased the scale so that he could see the icons representing individual ships in each formation. Now the formations were near enough to one another to use their projectile weapons, but they still did not fire.
“Warlike Commander, no response from the fighter commander,” the Communications Officer said.
“Keep trying. Attempt to contact the hand leaders and the individual fighters if unsuccessful.”
Something is seriously wrong.
Just as that thought formed and took root in his mind, the commander watched with incomprehension as the fighters did something wholly unexpected. The reserve group turned away from the Pfelung fighters and braked to allow the enemy formation to close. Much to the commander’s surprise, the enemy did not fire, either. Instead, the enemy formation and the reserve-fighter formation merged. The new formation accelerated rapidly as the fighters of the reserve formation fell out of their attack-hand formation and joined with the Pfelung fighters in an apparently random swirling, darting, weaving movement that reminded the commander of a school of fish.
There was only one explanation for what he was seeing: somehow the enemy had managed to install a keyhole, a kind of limited back door that allowed them to transmit a specific instruction or limited set of instructions to the battlecruiser’s computer. In this case someone was instructing the computer to display as friendly fighters a group of vessels that the raw sensor data would undoubtedly show to be hostile. There was a procedure for restoring the sensor-interpretation software from a protected backup file, but doing so required that the computers running the software be shut down and restarted, something that the commander was loath to do in the middle of a battle, particularly when he was confident about what the restored systems would show.
He watched as the swirling enemy-fighter formation accelerated at a rate that no known fighter could match, easily evading the combat-area patrol. There was only one hope for delaying the fighters long enough for the battlecruiser and other ships to catch them. “Fleet operations, advise all forces in the vicinity that all fighters in the area other than those attached to this facility are to be classified as hostile, notwithstanding sensor readings to the contrary. Direct destroyer 43-5325 to intercept and engage the fighte
rs now crossing grid 133-454. Instruct the vessel’s commander that he is to delay the fighters until relieved by other forces and to do so at all costs. To that end he is to consider his vessel and crew to be expendable.”
Before the order could be acknowledged, the destroyer went into motion. It wasn’t long, however, before it became apparent that the destroyer wasn’t on an intercept course with the fighters but was headed directly toward the formation of tankers to which tugs had just finished attaching a maximum load of filled modular fuel tanks. It took the commander only a few seconds to derive an explanation for this apparently impossible development—destroyer 43-5325 had to be a Union Khyber class destroyer that had somehow come into possession of detailed operational data for the Hegemony’s Type 43 destroyer in order to emulate it with sufficient accuracy to fool a detailed scan.
As the Union ship’s acceleration curve bent into a range impossible for a Type 43 to attain, it dropped the pretense of being part of the Hegemony’s navy, engaged its stealth systems, and disappeared from the battlecruiser’s scans. At the same time, the Rashidian vessels veered away from their previous courses. A diversionary force, they would not engage the commander’s warships. He watched as they engaged their compression drives and left the area at high lightspeed multiples.
He ordered his own vessels to change course toward the tankers that were still at the edge of the fuel dump, but knew his actions were in vain. He watched with increasing frustration as the Pfelung fighters spread out and worked their way through the huge field of thousands of modular fuel tanks, vaporizing them with some kind of directed energy weapon. The Khyber class destroyer, still not showing on sensors, nonetheless made its presence known by using its pulse-cannon to obliterate the facility’s three large main fuel storage tanks, the cargo transfer hub, and the repair/refurbishment station. The tankers, observing the danger, powered up their drives and attempted to escape. The enemy destroyer, however, caught them easily and blew them to atoms in fewer than a hundred heartbeats.
Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3) Page 26