Lisbeth hoped that her squadron reputation as lucky charms lived up to expectation.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 168 AFC
USN Fleet Admiral Sondra Givens conducted a final review of the forces she was about to lead into war.
Even after three months spent organizing and training her new command, a part of her resented being separated from Sixth Fleet. She’d spent years honing those ships and crews to a fine edge, led them to victory during a critical juncture, and followed it with the first offensive operations in the conflict. Sixth Fleet had broken the Vipers and knocked them out of the Tripartite Galactic Alliance. It’d fought seven fleet actions over a two-year period and sunk about ten times its tonnage in enemy warships and an equal displacement of civilian vessels and orbital facilities. Along the way, the men and women that comprised the minds and hearts of the fleet had become hardened veterans. Having to start over with a new and un-blooded formation was hard.
On the other hand, Sixth Fleet wasn’t likely to see combat for the remainder of the war. Sixth Sector was safe, its borders secure after the Vipers’ surrender. The last couple of years had been spent monitoring the Nasstah Union to ensure the aliens kept to the terms of the ceasefire, and a few skirmishes with pirates, most of which were thinly-veiled probes by allegedly ‘friendly’ polities. Those skirmishes had quickly taught everyone concerned that Sixth Fleet wasn’t to be trifled with. After that, things had gotten nearly as boring as peacetime duty.
Until the assassination attempt, that was.
The hit team had struck during a formal dinner at Birmingham-Three, a minor US possession whose local sophonts – commonly known as the Birmos – were under American suzerainty. The natives had been at a Bronze Age level of development at the time of First Contact, and for the most part were left alone, except for a few tribes that ruled the lands around the single spaceport on the planet.
Sondra had been invited by a Birmo chieftain to a dinner that turned out to be an elaborate setup. Halfway through the meal, her imps had detected poison in the local booze, just as knives and guns came into play. Unwanted memories flashed through her mind:
The goblet dropped from her hand as Chief Kimmel knocked her off the chair. She barely felt the rough fall – the poison was a nerve agent, and she was numb and half-paralyzed as her nano-med fought the chemical’s effects. She could barely breathe; drool and snot ran down her face as she convulsed on the ground. Her sight was not impaired, however: from her prone position she saw the master-at-arms fire his beamer over the dinner table before a thrown spear went THUNK into his unarmored chest and sent him toppling back. Blood splashed over Sondra’s face, blinding her, and she gasped for breath, fully expecting a blade or club to finish her off…
Only a combination of good luck – for the American delegation – and poor planning by the locals had saved her life. A professional assassin squad – Starfarer mercenaries – had been hiding nearby, armed with energy weapons, but the natives they’d bribed had ‘helpfully’ launched their own attack, thinking their reward would be greater if they did the killing themselves. The alerted Marine platoon watching outside had engaged the mercs in a running battle around the Birmo village even as Sondra’s bodyguards cut a swath through the local warriors inside the chief’s great hall. When the dust settled, the village was a burned-out ruin, its only survivors the handful of natives who’d run for the hills when the fighting started. Besides Chief Kimmel, five humans were killed. Sondra spent several days in sick bay; it’d been touch and go there for a while. They’d ended up replacing about thirty percent of her nervous system.
The attack hadn’t been an isolated incident, but part of a concerted campaign to strike down the leadership of the US Navy. In some ways, it had been a small-scale version of the Days of Infamy, aimed at a few dozen individuals. The final tally had been grim enough: over a thousand fatalities, including five admirals and a dozen other command officers. The worst attack had been at the Hexagon, right in the heart of New Washington: a bomb had gone off inside the building, killing almost three hundred people.
Sondra was convinced the Lampreys had been behind the attacks, although more recent evidence pointed at the Imperium. The only high note in the aftermath was the appointment of her old friend Nicholas Kerensky to Seventh Fleet. Her fellow flag officer had bounced back from a disastrous defeat and – in her opinion – an undeserved demotion. At least, she’d thought as much at the time. Recent events had shaken her certainties to the core. Kerensky’s mutiny still rankled.
She shook her head. Dwelling on things beyond her control was worse than useless, and she had plenty of things she could control. The final dispositions of the Third Fleet, for one.
The previous CINC-Three (Commander-In-Chief, Third Sector), Admiral Gabriel Verdant, had survived the decapitation strikes only to lose his command the old-fashioned way: by failing to deliver results. Givens knew Verdant; the man used to be a competent officer, but the years hadn’t been kind to him. Now that humans could live for centuries, they were discovering some could handle the passing of time better than others. Some people learned to adapt to change, overcoming the mental inertia that set in at around age twenty-two or so, while others became stuck. Verdant had turned out to be one of the latter. He’d grown up in a battleship-dominated Navy, and his sense of tactics began and ended with closing into range and trading broadsides with the enemy. His lack of flexibility hadn’t been much of an obstacle back when Sector Three had been a quiet backwater, isolated from other Starfarer polities by Xanadu System and its mysterious owners, who did not allow military forces to pass through it. When the US seized Xanadu, however, it opened numerous routes into enemy space. Verdant’s performance during several raids into Lamprey space had been subpar. He’d been convinced to retire with honors, and Sondra had stepped in.
Her mission was to invade the Lhan Arkh Congress and depopulate its core worlds. She’d led Sixth Fleet on a similar task, except that in the end the Nasstah – better known as the Vipers – had thrown in the towel before more than a tenth of its population had been exterminated. Sondra had found even decimation to be an unpleasant task. As much as she hated the Vipers, slaughtering their civilians had been akin to stepping on a swarm of cockroaches with her bare feet – loathsome, whether it was necessary or not. This time, her orders gave her no discretion: no quarter was to be offered.
The Lhan Arkh had been a constant danger to humanity ever since their clients – the Risshah, better known as the Snakes – had stumbled onto Earth and killed some four billion of its inhabitants. While the Lampreys hadn’t been directly responsible for the attempted genocide, their policies were equally bloodthirsty, and they’d eventually decided humanity had to be exterminated. They’d fought a brief and inconclusive conflict shortly after the US had wiped out the Snakes, and then waged a cold war of sorts, always working hard at undermining human interests whenever possible, and lending support to any enemy willing to strike directly at America and the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the main Starfaring human nations.
When an enemy openly states its intention to not stop until you are gone, the only reasonable option is to respond in kind. She wasn’t happy about it – massacre had no appeal for her – but she’d follow her orders. Which meant concentrating on the practical aspects involved.
At the time of Xanadu’s conquest, Third Fleet had been far from impressive. Two antiquated Battlefield-class dreadnoughts – with less firepower than the new battleship classes being built on Earth’s shipyards – led a force comprised of four cruiser squadrons (totaling twenty-four ships), thirty-two frigates, and twenty destroyers. Twelve Marine assault ships carrying roughly two divisions of ground troops rounded up the total. None of the ships had been refitted for point defense – a necessity facing enemies firing Sun-Blotter missile swarms – mainly because there was only so much time and money available to do such refits, and a fleet in charge of a peaceful sector was doomed to suck hind tit, to be crude about it.
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Things had changed rather dramatically after the seizure of Xanadu, however. The recently ‘liberated’ system had been a treasure trove of unimaginable proportions: if given enough time to exploit its resources, it would forever alter the correlation of forces between the US and the rest of the galaxy. Short-term, those resources – including enough fabricators to be the envy of the shipyards of Wolf 1061 – had been put to work improving Third Fleet.
The USS Thermopylae and El Alamo had been outfitted with a couple of three-gun batteries, mounting ultra-heavy graviton cannon taken from Malta’s defenses; those weapons alone gave the dreadnoughts more firepower than the Pantheon-class super-dreds that until very recently had been the pride of the Navy. Their force fields had been improved nearly twofold, and layers of ablative applique armor – a technology beyond current Starfarers’ state of the art – doubled its resistance to attack, at least for as long as those layers of metallic foam coating lasted. Said foam had been applied to all the ships in Third Fleet, giving them an unusual – one might say furry – appearance, but Sondra didn’t care. Her furry ships were tougher than anything else in the galaxy, and that was all that mattered.
The fleet’s lighter space combatants hadn’t gotten similar weapon upgrades, since even the dreadnoughts had barely enough on-board power to shoot those massive cannon, but their point defenses had been improved and were now equal or superior to those of any American ship of their class, and their missile magazines had been filled with improved munitions that she couldn’t wait to spring on the enemy. Six of the assault ships had also gotten upgrades, including some unusual gadgets recently discovered on a remote system. Sondra was still figuring out what to do with them, but it appeared large-scale boarding actions had become feasible for the first time in sixty years.
And then there was the Death Head Squadron.
The Navy had hastily renamed the so-called Corpse-Ships (not exactly the kind of name that generated good PR). The alien retreads were entered into the annals of the fleet as Totenkopf-class gunboats. Despite a new and colorful paint job, they still looked like the partial skeleton of a gigantic alien grafted onto a sinister-looking hull, simply because that was exactly what they were. The creepy little ships were nothing much to look at, but the after-action reports of the Battle of Xanadu made it clear that each of those gunboats had more firepower than even her up-gunned dreadnoughts. When you added their throw weight to the rest of Third Fleet, you got a fairly impressive total. It almost made up for not having any carrier vessels.
Almost. Even though the gunboats were far deadlier than War Eagle fighters, five ships could only sink a relatively small amount of enemy tonnage at a time; Sondra had grown used to two and three hundred fighter sorties. Tough and lethal as they were, each Death Head couldn’t destroy more targets than a dozen fighters in the same amount of time. That meant the rest of Third Fleet would have to endure a longer pounding by the enemy’s guns and missiles, which meant more casualties. And her bench had very little depth: if she lost one of her precious dreadnoughts, there went about a fourth of her conventional firepower. Lose both, and Third Fleet was little better than a frigate navy. The Totenkopfs could pull some nifty tricks, but she needed more ships.
The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had agreed. The cupboard was bare, however. The situation had been made worse by a temporary halt in the fighter training program: Top Gun had been shut down until the techies figured out why warp pilots were losing their minds and developing supernatural powers. After Kerensky’s mutiny, Sondra couldn’t blame them. No carriers were available, and neither were any standard fighting vessels, either.
What she was getting instead was a bunch of converted Lamprey ships.
The Lhan Arkh Middle Quadrant Armada had tried to seize Xanadu System shortly after an American diplomatic mission performed the boldest conquest this side of Pizarro’s expedition and took it over. Much of the Armada was destroyed in the ensuing fight, mostly by a single Corpse-Ship, although a US destroyer squadron had died gallantly while pitching in. The remainder, over fifty Lamprey vessels in total, had reached Starbase Malta and been neutralized by an alien weapon that killed their crews without damaging the ships. In their spare time, the work crews of Malta had begun the long process of converting those captured hulls into something the US could take into combat. Those ships would supplement Third Fleet.
There hadn’t been enough time or personnel to refit all or even most of them, of course, but the ships they had refurbished were hers for the taking, as soon as their crews arrived. They included a slightly-used and abused People’s Choice-class dreadnought, a Workers’ Might missile battleship, and four Grievance Committee-class battlecruisers, all but the dreadnought in near-mint condition. The Lhan Arkh turned out some very nice warships: they were all larger and better armed and armored than the US Navy’s class equivalents. Repairing the damage on the dreadnought – it’d been perforated several times during the fleet action – had been the biggest project, followed by life support conversion. Lampreys were Class One creatures, whose preferred atmosphere was toxic to humans; changing that had taken time.
In addition to those modifications, the budding shipbuilders of Xanadu had added warp shields on all the prize ships; they lacked the coverage of American warships – in no small part because of the larger size of the alien vessels – but they were a damn sight better than no shields at all. They’d even laid on a coat of ablative armor on them, giving them the same fuzzy look that the rest of Third Fleet had. There hadn’t been time for weapon upgrades, but they had filled the huge missile magazines of the battleship with one and a half million guided munitions of all kinds. The dreadnought held half a million missiles as well. The converted Lamprey vessels couldn’t unleash a Sun-Blotter swarm on their own, but it would come closer than anything else flying the Stars and Stripes.
Those six alien ships required twenty-nine thousand people to operate all their systems. She’d found six thousand volunteers within Third Fleet, and filled those slots and the rest of her manpower needs with a mix of reactivated veterans and fresh-faced spacers who’d just finished their second year of Obligatory service. Getting a decent mixture of experienced personnel and newbies had taken a lot of staff work, but after months of preparation they had managed, more or less. Sondra still found herself going over crew manifests and wondering which of those ships would fail to perform because the people manning critical systems had no idea what they were doing, especially when dealing with alien designs nobody had trained on. Cybernetic implants helped immensely – all Starfarers used near-identical software and hardware – but the crews of the new ships would have to learn the kinks of their new postings the hard way. They’d been training for a whole month: the last batch of personnel had arrived just that long ago. It wasn’t enough, but they couldn’t wait much longer.
In the short term, time was against America’s side. If the Galactic Alliance convinced other polities to join in, the US would be overwhelmed before it could produce enough new toys to alter the balance of power. If the Lampreys were eradicated, on the other hand, that would give everyone pause. At least, that was the reasoning of the War Department, the President, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They’d given Sondra her marching orders, and even a Sector Commander in Chief couldn’t question her final directives.
Her fleet, and some hundred and twenty thousand men and women under her command, would soon be underway.
Two
Ship clearing missions sucked ass.
It didn’t matter what kind of alien you dealt with: big or tall, two legs or six, they all built their ships as small as possible, and that meant lots of narrow passageways, tight corners and cramped compartments. Unless you planned on blowing up the tangos’ ride while you were inside it, you couldn’t spray gravitons and plasma any which way. That meant Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison couldn’t carry a Widowmaker portable energy cannon. Nope, when he went ship-clearing, he got either an Alsie or a flamethrower.
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nbsp; Granted, they’d been issued some fancy new ammo which did all kinds of interesting stuff, but it still sucked ass.
“Door,” PFC ‘Grampa’ Gorski called out as he rounded a corner. The rest of the two fireteams – Russell’s, plus four riflemen from First Platoon – spread out to cover the passageway. Lance Corporal ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga took a position behind Grampa, watching their six while his fellow Marines dealt with the door.
“I got it,” Russell called out before he opened fire with his ALS-43. At that range, a standard frag, plasma or even a plasma-armor piercing round would singe everyone a little, reducing the power level of their personal force fields. The 15mm munitions in his gun were new and improved breaching rounds, though. The three rounds he sent downrange created a short-lived wall of force between their target and the Marines on the other side just before they exploded, expending the full power of the blasts on the door. A wall of flame blotted out everything for a second, and the deck vibrated noticeably even under his heavy combat boots. When the fire cleared, there was a jagged, half-melted hole where the door had been.
Grampa fired a burst of 4mm into the hole, to discourage any ETs still standing from doing anything while Russell selected a new ammo type for the Alsie. The Automatic Launch System had three twenty-round magazines, giving him a variety of choices. The damn thing weighted thirty pounds when fully loaded, but it was worth its weight in gold as far as he was concerned.
“Fire in the hole!” Russell shouted before he popping a trio of 15mm grenades through the hole the breaching charges had made. Everybody turned away before they went off.
A plasma grenade had a lethal radius of five meters for unshielded targets. Any armored targets would probably survive the triple explosion, but the bright flashes would overload their sensors and keep them distracted, not to mention draining their force fields.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 3