Dobbs shook her head. “I just don’t know, Reynolds. We don’t know what the gate is made of or how it could end up reacting to a nuclear detonation happening nearby. I’m concerned it could cause some unintended consequences. I do agree with you that we should use the nukes, but let’s find another spot where we can carry out an ambush from and hit them with the nukes from there. Maybe an asteroid group or the dark side of a moon or something…thoughts?”
Reynolds looked disappointed but nodded in compliance. “OK, Captain. I’ll start looking for another possible location we can carry out an ambush from once we jump.”
Just as Reynolds sat back down at his station, the gate activated. The first Zodark ship jumped through. It was one of the battleships they’d spotted.
“Helm! Increase thrusters to full speed and angle us towards the Zodark ship,” called out Commander Dobbs urgently.
“More ships are jumping through, Captain!” Reynolds shouted. Alarm bells alerted them to the new danger.
Dobbs looked at the display and saw three enemy battleships had just emerged. Then one of the enemy carriers jumped through. She smiled. It was a big, fat, juicy target.
“Lock onto that carrier and unload everything we have on it. Then get us the hell out of here before they have a chance to shoot at us,” Commander Dobbs ordered, shouting to be heard over the alarm bells. They had officially been detected by the Zodarks. At least one of their ships was already trying to lock onto them.
As her weapons officer started releasing their ordnance on the enemy carrier, Dobbs activated the electronic countermeasures or ECM suite and hoped like hell it’d scramble the enemy’s ability to lock onto them just long enough for them to get away.
“Weapons away!” the weapons officers yelled.
“Turning to initiate FTL,” announced Ensign Hunt as he steered the ship to a new trajectory. As the Viper pulled away, the MPD thrusters cut out, and the FTL coils extended as the ship prepared to jump.
“They’re firing!” shouted Reynolds anxiously as they waited for the FTL bubble to form.
Commander Dobbs’s eyes went wide as one of the battleships’ pulse beams fired. She braced herself for the hit, knowing that it was most likely going to destroy them. Just as the laser should have hit them, the ship shot like a flash of light through space as they entered warp.
“Holy crap that was close!” exclaimed Lieutenant Reynolds, clearly shocked that they had made it out alive.
“Nice flying, Ensign. Damn good job, Hunt,” Dobbs said excitedly, sweat running down her cheeks.
She used her neurolink to tie into the 1MC. “We successfully jumped away from the Zodark ships and fired off our weapons,” she announced.
It would be several hours before they learned if their attack had succeeded. Before the engagement, they left a communication drone behind to record the attack and transmit that data back to the rest of the Earth fleet in Rhea. They had also dropped another com drone a few days earlier along their route, so they could daisy-chain the signals together. As long as they weren’t traveling in an FTL bubble or going through a star gate, they could send and receive data, albeit with a slight delay.
“OK, people. It’s time for us to get ready for the next ambush. Reload torpedo tubes and missile launchers. Then I want everyone to grab some food and hit the rack for the next eight hours. Based on the AI’s analysis of the enemy fleet’s travel times, they should cross our current position in fifteen hours. I want everyone rested up for this next battle,” Commander Dobbs announced to the crew.
She felt they had all earned their pay today. Now it was time to rest up while they waited to see how their attack had turned out.
*******
Sitting in the mess deck, Dobbs used her knife to cut up her sirloin steak. It was something she had watched her dad do on their Wyoming ranch—he’d cut his entire steak up before he’d dig in and eat. Thinking about that moment brought her back to some happier times. She loved living in Wyoming. When she was growing up, she wanted to be a rancher, just like her dad. But that dream had fallen apart when she was a teenager and her dad had died of a sudden heart attack. Her mom and brothers had tried, but they’d been unable to maintain the family ranch, and eventually they’d had to sell it and move to Billings.
Her mom had gotten a job working for an advertising company. It was a tough time for her family. Then, in her senior year of high school, a recruiter from Space Command had come to her school. The recruiter had told her about the Space Academy in Colorado Springs. She hadn’t thought she had a chance of getting in, but she’d applied anyway. Then she’d gotten a phone call from that same recruiter, who’d told her she’d been accepted. She’d left for the Academy, and the rest was history, as they say.
Ensign Hunt set his plate down across from her. “Mind if I join you, Captain?” he asked.
She looked up, her mind snapping back to the here and now. She smiled and nodded as he took a seat.
He cut his steak up, just like she did, all at once before he dug in. The ship’s mess room was actually kind of small—they were only able to seat roughly twenty people at a time. With a crew of fifty-six people, they seldom had more than ten or fifteen people in the room at one time.
Looking up at her most junior officer, Dobbs asked, “So, Ethan, what did you think of your first real combat action?”
Ethan was about to shovel in another forkful of steak and potatoes into his mouth, but he held his fork in his hand for a second. “It went by faster than I thought it would,” he said before scarfing down the next bite.
She laughed at the comment. “Yeah, that’s what I said my first time.”
Ethan chuckled. “You know what my dad would say to my mom? That’s what she said.”
Dobbs practically spat her water out as she laughed at the crude joke. “Yeah, I could see your dad saying that. He’s a pretty funny guy when he’s not being serious.”
“How long did you serve with my dad?” Ethan asked. He continued to eat his food like he was in a race against a clock.
Dobbs laughed again. “You know, Ethan, you can slow down and taste your food. We have some time until we receive the battle report from the drone and even more time until the enemy travels past this area.”
Ethan seemed to slow down a bit after that and enjoy the rare steak dinner the cooks had prepared for them. They were, after all, celebrating their first engagement with the enemy as a crew.
Looking at Ethan, Dobbs replied to his earlier question. “I’ve been fortunate to have served with your dad twice during my career. Once on the Rook for nearly three years until our ship was destroyed, and another two-year stint when I was assigned to Space Command headquarters. Your dad is a good man. He’s very devoted to his career, but I also got the sense that he was just as devoted to his family. When he wasn’t talking shop with us junior officers, he bragged about his two kids and his wife all the time.”
Ethan smiled at the mention of his family. He was now an officer in his own right, making his own way in the galaxy. “Dad certainly is dedicated to the job. I mean, he was there for us when he could be, but the job did take him away a lot. I think my best memories of him were during our time living on Mars. It was the one period of my childhood where he wasn’t gone constantly. We got to do a lot of things together as a family during our time on the Red Planet.”
“Oh yeah; I forgot you guys had spent nearly a decade on Mars. It must have been an interesting experience living there back then—back before the big population boom and FTL travel,” Dobbs commented before taking another bite of her own food.
Ethan nodded. “It was a lot sparser back then than it is now, that’s for sure. But in a way, it was nicer. We spent a lot of time together, playing games and talking. I miss those times,” he said as his voice trailed off. He finished his last bite. “But, enough of the past,” he said. “Do you think we should continue to attack this Zodark fleet or head back to Rhea to join the rest of our fleet for the next battle?”
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br /> “That’s a good question, Ethan. I need to wait until I see the results of our last attack,” Dobbs explained. “Once I know how well it went, then I’ll be able to make a better decision. My hope is we can bloody them up a bit before they get to Rhea.”
Just then, one of the senior enlisted sailors came into the mess deck and walked up to her. “Captain, we’ve just received a message from the com drone.”
She nodded, and the petty officer left to head back to his station. She turned back to Ethan. “I guess we’ll find out how well our attack went in a few minutes,” she said with a wink.
The two of them got up, dropped their empty food trays off and headed to the bridge.
When they arrived, several of the officers and enlisted sailors were standing around Lieutenant Reynolds’s station, looking at something. Commander Amy Dobbs walked up to them, clearing her throat as she approached. “What’s going on, Reynolds?” she demanded.
The others who hadn’t noticed her approaching snapped their heads around and then quickly dispersed to their stations. The bridge wasn’t a very big place for people to hide or disappear.
Reynolds perked his head up, a smile on his face. “Good news, Captain. We scored some hits on that Zodark carrier.”
She furrowed her brow. Judging by the facial expressions of the others on the bridge, she would have thought it hadn’t turned out that well. “Why do I get the feeling that there’s a but to this good news?” she asked.
Reynolds shrugged. “I’m trying to focus on the positive. Here, take a look for yourself.” He replayed the video of the attack. “The six plasma torpedoes went right for the carrier. It looks like one of the battleships, the one that tried to fire on us, managed to intercept three of the six torpedoes, but the other three slammed into the ship, as you can see.”
They watched as the three plasma torpedoes tore a deep gash in three different sections of the ship. That was followed by a couple of secondary explosions as the ship started burning atmosphere.
“The ten Havoc missiles didn’t fare so well, Captain,” Reynolds continued. “That same battleship was able to intercept seven of them. The remaining three hit the ship, but as you can see, they didn’t have the same effect as the plasma torpedoes. The Havocs impacted against the armored hull. Near as we can tell, they did minimal damage to the ship. I don’t think the missiles were able to penetrate through the armor, or if they did, they didn’t get very deep inside the ship before the warheads went off.” Reynolds showed her several closeup images of the impact points.
Ten or twenty seconds later, the video ended. “The com drone was taken out by the Zodarks,” Reynolds explained.
She mulled over what she’d just seen. So, the plasma torpedoes were able to burn through the armor, but the Havocs couldn’t. Then there was the timing. She realized that the carrier couldn’t get its own defenses up and running fast enough to defend itself. That could certainly prove to be useful information…
“Reynolds, is it me, or did you notice how the only ship that could respond to our attack was that battleship that jumped through first?” she asked. “Let’s rewind that video and look at the timestamp from when it jumped through to when it was able to get a lock on us and engage our missiles and torpedoes. I think there may be a short window of opportunity when their ships are unable to defend themselves. If that’s true, that might be the key to taking their fleet out.”
For the next twenty minutes, they went over the video multiple times, determining exactly how long both the battleship and the other ships had been in the new system before it appeared they could activate their defensive systems. Once they had concluded that a Zodark ship took roughly sixty seconds from the time it jumped through a gate to when it could defend itself, Commander Dobbs ordered them to make the best possible speed for stargate Z-MO29. That gate connected them to one more stargate that led directly to the Rhea system and their home fleet. She wanted to report their findings and see if maybe they could use this information to pulverize the enemy fleet before they could get themselves organized.
Chapter Eleven
The Grand Fleet
BlueOrigin Shipyard – Earth
RNS George Washington
The inspection craft was just finishing its fifth hour hovering over the exterior of the largest, most powerful warship ever built by Earth. Adrian Rogers, the lead engineer for BlueOrigin, and a couple of his assistants sat at a couple of workstations, carefully watching their video monitors. They were examining their specific parts of the ship, inspecting them for any problems or deficiencies before they certified it as complete.
This was the critical final inspection. After they signed off on it and the new ship commander, Rear Admiral Hunt, signed off, the ship would officially be handed over to Space Command.
Turning to look at the admiral sitting next to him, Rogers asked, “What do you think of the ship, sir?”
Admiral Hunt peeled his gaze away from the video display of the point defense weapons. “I love it,” he replied. “It’s a beautiful ship, and it’s massive. My only concern is getting it ready for combat. There are a lot of new weapon systems and platforms on the GW, many of which have never been tested or fielded before.”
“You’re talking about the drone fighters?” asked Rogers. He was a little skeptical about them as well. Space Command didn’t exactly have a space fighter program—at least not yet. They were still in the process of training up a group of manned fighter craft. Heck, BlueOrigin was still prototyping the fighters.
Hunt nodded. “Yeah, Adrian. I don’t like the idea of drones. I’m not sure they’ll be nearly as responsive as a manned spacecraft would be, but we obviously don’t have any of those ready, let alone pilots to even fly them.”
Hunt shook his head and leaned in. In a hushed tone, he said, “To be frank, Adrian, I think we’re rushing the entire deployment of this ship. We need a proper shakedown cruise and time to get the crew trained up. Nearly two-thirds of my crew is fresh from training. This will be their first assignment on a ship.”
“Yeah, I heard about that, Admiral. Do you know what your assignment will be once you’ve signed off on the ship?” Rogers inquired. Like any other civilian, he was curious as to what was going on in the war.
Hunt sighed. “I’ll be picking up my crew over the next four days. We’ll be shoving off the day after they’re all aboard to head to New Eden. We’ll continue our shakedown cruise and training there. Until the Zodarks arrive, or we find out more information on where their home systems are, we’ll continue to train and work out any kinks in the ship. Speaking of which, has your company identified who all from your group is going to be coming with us?”
Rogers grimaced at the thought of going with them—the last thing he wanted to do was go anywhere near those Zodark beasts. He wanted to stay in Sol and continue living the good life on the massive amount of money his company was paying him. But no, they said he’d be in charge of the three hundred engineers and workers that would be traveling on the ship to continue carrying out tests and fixing bugs and problems the crew found.
He fixed his facial expression and sat up straighter. “As a matter of fact, Admiral, I’ll be the lead man for the company coming with you,” he explained. “I’ll have a crew of three hundred folks joining me as well.”
“I take it you aren’t happy about this?” Hunt countered.
Rogers shrugged. “I’d rather stay here, away from the Zodarks—but at least the company is compensating us for our troubles.”
Hunt chuckled. “Well, at least they’ll be giving you extra pay. Space Command says it’s part of our mission to go and find new aliens to kill, so we don’t get an extra pay bump. However, if it’s possible, I’ll do my best to see if your people can go dirtside and spend some time on New Eden. It’s the least I can do to show my thanks for your help.”
“Oh wow,” Rogers replied, genuinely thrilled at the opportunity to set foot on a new planet. “That would be great, Admiral. Thank you.�
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The next hour wasn’t too bad. They continued to examine the remainder of the ship. Once Hunt was satisfied with what he saw, he signed off. The inspection ship returned to the dock, and they all got off.
That evening, Hunt had a nice dinner with his wife on the John Glenn Orbital Station before returning to his private quarters. This would be his last night with his wife, Lilly. Starting tomorrow, he’d take command of George Washington in an official ceremony. From then on, he’d be staying on the ship as they got her ready to leave. He had five days to get all of the crew members and supplies brought on board before they shoved off. The rest of the fleet would be leaving over the next couple of days—his portion of the fleet would leave last.
*******
The following morning, a large crowd of several thousand sailors and RA soldiers stood at attention on the flight deck of the George Washington. A crowd of dignitaries, officers, and some family members sat in chairs near the front of the group as one person after another gave a short speech. The christening and change of command for the new warship was a big deal.
During the last two months, more than eighty new warships had entered active service. Many of them were the smaller frigates, the Vipers that would lead the fleets. A handful were the newer battleships. But this was the one and only dreadnought-class ship, the RNS George Washington.
As Admiral Miles Hunt stood at attention, the President read off a short speech. Her words were meant to inspire, offer hope, and provide the people of Earth reassurance against the Zodark threat. The RNS George Washington was the culmination of nearly three and a half years of round-the-clock work by more than thirty thousand synthetics and an army of twenty-five thousand human workers. In all, more than four hundred thousand workers on Earth and on the shipyard had worked to provide materials and equipment used in the final assembly of the GW. It was an enormous global effort to build this ship.
At four thousand, two hundred meters in length, four hundred and thirty meters in height, and eight hundred and sixty meters wide, the ship was enormous. And the entire thing was encased in forty meters of armor. Its weakest point, the retractable flight decks on either side of the ship, had twenty-six meters of armor. The ship was a massive flying tank, built to absorb a tremendous amount of enemy fire and survive. It had also been outfitted with a formidable armament of weapons.
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