The others on the bridge all went to work on their own functions, specifically designed to make the ship work as a single unit. The electronic warfare group started their jamming protocols, Engineering ramped up power from the reactors, and the helm got the ship moving slowly, ready to accelerate or maneuver should the order be given.
Next, the tactical and weapons groups assigned targets to the primary and secondary gun batteries, while damage control parties stood by, ready to start repairing the inevitable damage that would occur from a battle. This was what days and weeks of hard drilling looked like, and it often made the difference between a ship surviving a fight or being blown apart.
Hunt sent a message to the battleships in his fleet to all lock onto the single contact. His strategy was to have his battlewagons focus their efforts on one ship at a time. If they could overwhelm the enemy ships, then maybe they could systematically take them down faster.
“More ships are jumping through…five new contacts,” called out the tactical officer.
Looking at the forward display, Hunt saw a total of six ships. The lone battleship was trying to lock on the GW. They looked to be in too close for the GW’s jamming to work effectively. Seconds later, the first volley of magrail slugs fired from the group of batteries on the GW toward the Zodark ship. The other RNS battleships opened up as well.
By the time the other five Zodark ships could start to move and had their own targeting sensors up and running, the first Zodark ship was being pummeled with hundreds of slugs by the GW and the six other battleships. The enemy vessel was already in trouble; dozens of fires appeared across its armored shell.
Hunt then watched as the first string of plasma torpedoes slammed into the Zodark battleship. Eight of the fourteen that had been fired at them scored hits. Moments later, the Zodark ship erupted into a ball of flames, and the ship was ripped apart.
When the Earth fleet had scored their first victory of the battle, Hunt sent a message to the battleships to shift focus to another one of the enemy vessels. He instructed those ship captains to continue to focus their concerted effort on the same ship. Hunt wanted all the fleet’s fire to stay concentrated on a single ship rather than devolving into a circus of small battles between ships.
Hunt had placed three of his six battleships on the starboard side of the gate and the other three on the opposite side. The ships would run in slow-moving figure eight patterns at various degrees and positions around the gate. This allowed the ships room to maneuver while also ensuring his fleet could thoroughly saturate the area with magrail slugs and plasma torpedoes without fear of hitting their own ships. He had created a kill box—a massive kill box.
Looking at the overview of the battle unfolding around the GW, Hunt saw that the plasma torpedo and magrail turrets they had anchored around the gate were randomly engaging the closest ship to them. He couldn’t directly control these weapons—they were running autonomously using their own AI.
Sitting in his command chair, Hunt felt the slight vibration from the massive magrail guns firing. It wasn’t one turret or a set of guns firing that caused the ship to vibrate—it was the culmination of nearly sixty primary and secondary magrail turrets firing slugs at the enemy.
As he watched the battle on a three-dimensional display, Hunt saw his tactic was having the desired effect. The second enemy battleship they engaged was succumbing to their relentless fire. The Zodark ships were in too close to jump out of the way of the Earthers’ magrail slugs. They just had to sit there and take a beating while they tried to get their thrusters up to speed so they could maneuver out of the kill box.
“More ships are jumping through,” the tactical officer called out.
Hunt looked up. Sure enough, eight new warships appeared. It looked like two of them were those Zodark carriers they had been warned about.
Suddenly, the GW shook hard. Hunt saw they were now taking some hits from the enemy. A dozen pulse beams hit them, trying to cut through their thick armor. While they hadn’t been able to burn a hole through yet, the hits were shaking the ship.
“Commander Ross!” Hunt called out. The man turned to look at him, a pensive look on his face like he’d been waiting all day for Hunt to call on him. “Lock your weapon onto that first carrier’s rear section and fire. Let’s see if we can neutralize them quickly,” Hunt directed.
Commander Ross relayed some commands to the crew operating the plasma cannon. The massive single barrel traversed slowly as it aimed at the Zodark carrier. Hunt tapped into the turret controls and watched as Commander Ross used the gun optical sight system to zoom in on the section he had mentioned. At last, the targeting reticle was locked onto the rear section of the massive Zodark vessel. The enemy ship had to be close to three and a half kilometers long—not quite as long as the GW, but far larger than any other human warship.
Ross looked over at Hunt. “We’re ready to fire.”
“Fire!” Hunt ordered.
Hunt heard a loud cracking noise throughout the ship as the massive gun fired its discharge at the enemy vessel. The sheer size of the release and its recoil shook the GW harder than all its other weapon systems combined.
Hunt watched the computer display to see if he could spot the plasma round. The screen whited out, and the display refocused fractions of a second later to reveal a massive gaping hole in the rear section of the enemy vessel.
“Holy crap! Did you see that?” the weapons officer said to no one in particular.
There were a few loud whoops of joy and excitement when they saw the damage the plasma cannon had done to the enemy ship.
Captain McKee looked at Hunt, an expression of shock on her face. The Sumerians had spent more than two years telling the Republic how to build and employ a plasma cannon, but this was the first time any of them had seen the new high-tech weapon used on an enemy warship in combat. It was awesome.
Hunt smiled in satisfaction at the carnage the George Washington had just inflicted on the enemy capital ship. “Commander Ross, hit ’em again near the same spot,” he ordered, hoping to finish ripping the ship apart.
As he watched the gaping hole in the ship on his display, Hunt saw chunks of the vessel and debris blown clear out the other end of the warship. There was a line in space that looked like it stretched from where the plasma cannon and the GW had just been all the way to the now-massive hole in the rear section of the Zodark warship. The enemy vessel seemed to be adrift now, its rear thrusters having gone dark. Parts of the ship still appeared to have power—Hunt attributed that to backup generators or some other power source.
“We’ve got a problem,” called out one of the officers at the tactical station.
Turning to see what was going on, Hunt watched one of the Zodark battleships move to position itself between the GW and the stricken carrier. The other carrier began spitting out dozens upon dozens of their version of fighter spacecraft. The volume of fire in the melee also began to shift. It was all now being concentrated at the GW. The enemy was trying in earnest to take out the ship equipped with this new superweapon before it could blast more of them to kingdom come.
Captain McKee had the primary and secondary magrail turrets shift fire to the battleship that had just positioned itself in front of the stricken carrier, and Hunt sent new targeting orders over to the other battleships in the fleet, directing them to focus their fire on the remaining carrier that was still operational. The damn thing was spitting out fighters at a prodigious rate.
Hunt walked over to Commander Ross’s station and leaned in. “Are we ready to fire again?” he asked.
Ross didn’t take his eyes away from his terminal. “Twenty more seconds, Admiral, and we’ll be powered up and ready to go. Do you still want us to hit the carrier again?”
Looking at the targeting monitor, Hunt saw the enemy battleship was really doing its best to block them from scoring another hit on it. “I’d sure as hell like to, but are you able to get a decent shot in on them? I mean, can you hit anything of
value on the carrier?”
Ross’s forehead scrunched up as he seemed to be making calculations based on what parts of the enemy carrier were still exposed. Then he shook his head.
“If the damn gun didn’t take five minutes to charge between shots, I don’t think it’d matter. We could just pound away. But to be honest, sir, we’d be better off repositioning the gun to hit the other carrier, and if we can’t do that, then one of the battleships.”
As Ross was speaking to Hunt, the ship continued to shake relentlessly from the pounding it was taking. Hunt really wanted that first carrier destroyed. That damn Zodark ship was blocking him, and it really ticked him off, but Ross was right—they should go for the other carrier.
Looking at the second carrier, Hunt saw it was taking an absolute beating right now from the six RNS battleships. No, that ship isn’t going to last much longer, he thought. We need to take another ship out. There…that one will do nicely…
“That ship right there,” Hunt said as he pointed to one of the elongated ships that were doing its best to hide behind a couple of larger cruisers.
Ross smiled devilishly. “A transport. Good idea, sir. We might even nail it with a single shot.”
Commander Ross traversed the massive plasma cannon to aim at the group of transports. As he was getting ready to fire their superweapon, alarm bells rang on the bridge. An automated voice called out, informing them of a hull breach on one of the decks.
“Launch our fighters!” Captain McKee ordered. She barked orders to her engineering group to get the hull breach secured and to stay on top of the repairs.
While it wasn’t chaos on the bridge just yet, it was starting to get really loud. “Take that ship out, Commander,” Hunt shouted over all the activity taking place on the bridge.
“Firing!” Ross announced loudly.
The ship vibrated slightly as they all heard the loud cracking noise from the gun firing and felt its massive recoil. The plasma round shot out in a brilliant flash of light that caused the bridge monitors to momentarily white out again before returning to normal.
As the monitors came back to life, several of the bridge crew let out a gasp; then cheers broke out. The transport ship they had fired upon had been ripped in half. The rear half of the vessel was moving in one direction, while the front half spun slowly in space. Near the sheared-off section of the ship, they could see sparks flying and wreckage being blown out into the vacuum of space.
“Zoom in on that debris,” Admiral Hunt ordered.
Seconds later, they saw the massive cluster was actually thousands of Zodark bodies—soldiers presumably on their way to secure New Eden. Now they were just floating in the darkness of space, their transport nothing more than a wreck.
Turning to Commander Ross, Hunt ordered, “Take those other transports out. We can’t let them land more troops on the planet.”
While the battle continued to rage, the group of remaining transports, along with three cruisers, looked to be making a break for it. They were moving at full speed to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the battle.
“Shift the primaries to the transports and the cruisers!” Hunt shouted over the growing noise on the bridge. “They’re positioning to jump to New Eden!”
“You heard the admiral,” Captain McKee barked. “All weapons shift to take those bastards out. Target our Havoc missiles at them as well.” McKee clearly also recognized what was happening with that group of ships. The Zodarks had probably figured they were going to lose this battle. Now they wanted to do what they could to get their troops delivered to the planet before their fleet was pulverized.
“Ross, can you get another shot off before they jump?” demanded Hunt earnestly.
“Firing now, Admiral,” Ross finally said seconds later.
Boom…
The plasma cannon roared one more time, whiting out their screen once again for a fraction of a second. When the visuals returned, another transport ship had blown apart. This time, the ship didn’t separate, it just exploded from the impact.
“They’re jumping!” shouted the tactical officer a few stations away.
In the blink of an eye, the four remaining transports and two cruisers jumped. The last cruiser and two transports failed to jump; their ships had already been rocked by explosions from the volume of firepower being thrown at them. They wouldn’t last much longer.
Hunt turned to his coms officer. “Send a message to the Voyager and any warships in orbit around New Eden. We have two Zodark cruisers inbound and four troopships. Tell them they need to take those transports out first before they attack those cruisers. We can’t let them land more troops on the surface.”
Captain McKee then ordered the ship’s primary and secondary weapons systems to focus their fire on the remaining Zodark carriers and battleships still at the gate.
“We have enemy fighters inbound,” one of the weapons officers announced.
“Activating point defenses now,” countered another officer operating those systems.
Hunt walked back over to his command chair, feeling the weight of enemy fire continuing to pound his ship’s armor. Looking back at his command monitor, he had a good overview of the battle taking place around them. Two pairs of frigates were swooping in from one of the flanks like a pair of dive bombers. When the ships leveled out from their maneuver, they were lined up on the wounded carrier they had disabled at the start of the battle.
Each RNS ship fired a barrage of six plasma torpedoes along with ten Havoc anti-ship missiles. The frigates then picked up speed to get out of range of the Zodark ship’s weapons. One of the enemy vessels that had been trying to protect the stricken ship fired one of its pulse beam lasers at one of the frigates, and it was swiftly ripped in half by the enemy laser. The other frigate did a couple of fancy maneuvers but ultimately got blown apart by another pulse beam from a different battleship.
The last pair of frigates unloaded their torpedoes and Havoc missiles at the second carrier. Both of those frigates managed to escape and pulled out of the battle to reload their primary weapons before they could circle back to jump into another attack run.
Hunt watched the twelve torpedoes continue toward the crippled Zodark carrier. Two of the torpedoes were taken out by one of the Zodark battleships, but the remaining ten slammed into the carrier. A series of massive explosives rippled across the ship’s armored hull, and several torpedoes managed to rip through the armor of the ship, causing considerable damage to its guts.
Hunt shook his head and sighed. He was ticked that most of the Havoc missiles had been zapped before they could impact. The two that did manage to hit the ship’s armor didn’t appear to make it through the thick belt on the ship. He was going to have to note that in the after-action report so they could get the weapon R&D guys working on a stronger warhead.
Watching the second carrier, Hunt angrily shook his head as he saw it maneuver out of the way of half the torpedoes. It looked like its point defense weapons had taken out the Havoc missiles and two of the four torpedoes. The four that scored hits, however, did considerable damage.
While the slugfest between the large Zodark and human ships continued, Hunt checked the time on his neurolink. Twenty minutes had gone by since the transports had jumped away. He hoped like hell that Admiral Halsey and her small group of ships near New Eden would be able to stop them. He had no idea how many Zodark soldiers were on each of those ships, but he’d seen firsthand what a Zodark soldier could do to humans. It was terrifying, and he wanted to do his best to make sure no enemy soldiers ever got a chance to set foot on a planet that humans controlled.
*******
New Eden
RNS Voyager
I wish we had more real-time data on how the battle is going, Admiral Abigail Halsey thought. I hope Miles is doing OK, and the GW comes out of this in one piece. She looked down at her hand and realized she was drumming her fingers on the side of her chair. She was anxious, she realized.
“How do you suppose the battle is going?” asked President Luca, looking as nervous as Admiral Halsey felt.
Trying to portray a sense of calm confidence, Halsey replied, “Admiral Miles Hunt is the most competent commander I know. I’m sure he’s leading our fleet to a great victory, Madam President.”
The two talked for a couple of minutes, then her coms officer, Lieutenant George Adams, interrupted their conversation. “Admiral, we’re receiving a priority message from Admiral Hunt. It says four Zodark troop transports and two cruisers broke through their kill box and warped out of the battle. He believes they’re headed here!”
The President’s hand rose to cover her mouth as she gasped at the news. “Those things are headed here, for us?” was all she managed to say, her voice shaking.
“What else did the message say?” Halsey demanded.
“He says we should focus our efforts on taking out the troop transports so they can’t land their ground force on the planet,” Adams replied.
Halsey turned to her tactical officer. “Sound general quarters. When those enemy ships are in range, focus our weapons on taking out those transports.”
The tactical officer nodded. He sent orders down to the primary and secondary weapon systems department chiefs to get their people ready.
“Helm, bring our engines up to full speed and head toward New Eden. I want us as close to the planet as possible before the Zodarks get here. When they do show up, keep our ship positioned between them and the planet. Is that understood?” Halsey ordered.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Just then, Fleet Admiral Chester Bailey walked onto the bridge and approached Halsey. “What’s going on, Admiral?”
Halsey filled him in on the message they’d received from Admiral Hunt and what was headed their way. Bailey looked over at President Luca, who was now nervously walking back and forth, wringing her hands.
Politicians, Halsey thought, although she couldn’t blame her too much. She hadn’t served in the military, so this whole experience of fighting was foreign to her.
Into the Battle Page 20