Launch Sequence (Genesis Book 2)

by Travis Hill

  Just over an hour after the fleet began accelerating toward GP-6, the pink lights reverted back to their normal “daylight” status. Irina felt the hand of gravity gently release her, and within sixty seconds, the gel material of the XO’s chair slowly pushed her up from within its confines. She remained seated, hypnotized by the immense amount of data Raiden generated within its CIC. It boggled the mind to think Raiden was just one of fifty-two ships linked to Silver Fleet’s local net via encrypted burst and LoS transmitters.

  She pulled up the 3D display of the fleet’s control status. Raiden sat at the top, with TCN Hyam Wolski—another heavy battleship—directly below it. Wolksi’s stat panel blinked into view next to the status display, informing her that it was a true heavy battleship with a full complement of hardware made for destroying other warships while commanding from the middle of the fleet. Below the two main heavies sat Sunrise, Xenix, Fariss, and Gemini. The four standard-class battleships were little more than armored weapons platforms attached to capital-class fusion thrusters. Irina scanned through the heavy cruisers, carriers, battlecruisers, destroyers, and frigates.

  A perfectly balanced fleet, Core Admiral Baker had told her back at Command. Balanced for what? she’d asked. Admiral Baker had guessed her intended meaning and remained silent. The Terran Navy had spent almost five decades trying every fleet composition they and their strategic simulators could imagine. After that failed, the engineers removed the limitation parameters from the simulators and let them run wild. Some of the more unorthodox fleets the sims suggested had worked initially, but the Kai seemed too adaptive to anything humans could come up with when it came to warfare outside of a planet’s atmosphere.

  It frustrated Command to no end that humanity’s planet-side dominance was worthless. Even taking a planet in a ground invasion was worthless since the Kai would send in a fleet to wipe out the human ships before hot-dropping a few hundred thousand infantry to the surface. It was a death sentence to the suits slugging it out across the contested regions to fight without a support fleet able to suppress enemy air and space units while the marines captured or destroyed essential Kai areas.

  Irina paused when she came to the dreadnoughts. She hoped the slow-firing behemoths would get at least a salvo from their kilometer-long railguns off before the Kai focused on them. Command had been hopeful dreads would be the answer to the Kai’s superior fleet tactics, but they turned out to be little more than coffins for the unlucky crews assigned to them. Dreadnoughts firing at orbital structures or at other ships could produce impressive results. A small wing of dreadnoughts had destroyed an entire ring complex around one of the Kai’s outermost settlements within an hour, and the few times they’d been able to surprise the enemy, they were capable of destroying a heavy battleship in a single salvo. The Kai quickly learned to focus their initial firing solutions on any human dreadnoughts detected within a fleet, negating their massive firepower and relegating the remaining giants to float in dry dock at the few low-gravity lunar shipyards left in human space.

  Captain Meyer had frowned when she’d asked him about their potential usefulness within Silver Fleet. He’d admitted to having no plan other than directing them to fire on the largest enemy ships should any venture within range of the dreads’ powerful railguns. They both knew hitting a moving ship during an active engagement was dicey enough without guided munitions. Trying to align a ship more than a kilometer in length along a firing solution was almost futile at anything beyond .5AU if it wasn’t stationary, and put the dreadnought into an uncontrollable rotation when targeting anything closer than .25AU.

  “Double-checking my strategy?” Meyer’s voice asked in her ear.

  “Spying on a superior officer?” she countered, receiving a short laugh in response. “I couldn’t help but notice the fleet is running on a skeleton crew.”

  “Really?” the captain asked with surprise. “I thought you spooks had planned it that way.”

  “No. The crews should be at least double the current numbers, and we pulled enough names to run the fleet at full capacity. We even had a few thousand names left over to replace any casualties.”

  “How long ago did you compile the list?” Meyer asked.

  “Two years ago.”

  “We’ve lost almost sixty percent of our fleet and a little more than that in manpower in the last two years,” he said darkly. “Didn’t SF Command notice a bunch of red ‘KIA’ tags on the names?”

  “No…” Irina said, curious herself at why Command had said nothing. “I don’t know. The info I was given claimed to be current, and none of them were KIA or MIA.”

  “Seems a bit strange, doesn’t it?” Meyer asked.

  “Especially now that I have no way of contacting anyone to ask just what the fuck is going on.”

  “If it makes you feel better, most of the capital ships can enter combat with less than thirty operators, and the battlecruisers on down can run on ten or less since everything is automated. Once Raiden issues the command override, we can control any ship we’re still capable of communicating with and has a working CIC computer. And engines. And weapons systems.”

  “Why even crew them, then?” she asked.

  “Computers aren’t human,” he replied. “They can’t make decisions the same way we can. Sure, they’re quicker, more accurate, and have an uncanny prediction model when assessing tactical situations, but they can’t suddenly deke left instead of right. And they can’t repair themselves.”

  “I can understand the need to ‘deke’ left or right on the ground, but it seems a little pointless in space,” she said.

  “That’s because you’re a mudfoot,” he said with a laugh. “You have to be a true spacer to understand the scale of an engagement theater in the vastness of space. Haven’t you ever had that sudden, instinctive feeling to cut the red wire instead of the blue wire?”

  Irina thought of the times she’d had the gut feeling to not open a door, to poke her rifle around a corner and let off a few rounds, or to avoid one building for another. She was still alive thanks to the strange moments where her animal brain had screamed in protest against what her cognitive brain decided.

  “Sure,” she said. “I guess I just can’t fathom how that correlates to an hour’s worth of shooting that takes an entire day to play out. I’m used to fights that take place over an hour and only last an hour.”

  She tried for the thousandth time to imagine aiming her rifle at an enemy, leading him enough that the plasma round wouldn’t arrive for at least four hours, hopefully meeting with the target at the specified time. Meyer chuckled at her silence, but said nothing. Irina spent the next few hours digesting as much data as her eyes and brain would allow, clearing her visor every so often to take in the varied activities within Raiden’s bridge. It was amusing to watch rookies such as herself try to navigate through a ship without gravity. The “sticky” material of the crew’s boots, pants, and gloves were meant to keep a person rooted in place, yet allow unrestricted movement if desired.

  Irina felt like a newborn giraffe and was sure she looked just as ridiculous. She experienced jealousy every time she watched the CIC crew make their way to and from consoles, the holo pit, and other stations within the bridge. They moved with the grace and ease she felt when inside of her CR-33 battle suit.

  ***

  “Orbital insertion complete,” Lt. Commander Hellewege announced over the ship’s comm.

  Irina woke to the soft pink lighting that alerted her the ship was in orbit and beginning its refueling stage. She checked her wrist comm to see if any messages or updates had come in during her sleep shift. The Kai were nowhere to be found and the Veridians hadn’t shown up yet. She wondered which would happen first, then stepped to the small shower stall to wash herself—an awkward affair in low gravity with only a damp cloth.

  Her task required concentration, a necessary distraction to get the image out of her mind that the Kai and the Veridians would arrive within hours of each other. She was u
nder orders to not engage the Veridians or other neutral forces under any circumstances, even if they were aiding the Kai, which wasn’t much of a problem under normal circumstances. Most of the aliens in the Spur looked the other way when Terran Coalition ships moved through their borders, but with the Kai present, it would force her to face two fleets at once. Even if Silver Fleet quickly and easily eliminated the Veridians before engaging the Kai, it wouldn’t be enough to change the outcome.

  Her comm chimed, alerting her to a new message. She tapped the small screen then smiled, sending a reply back to Admiral Huang that she’d be delighted to share breakfast with him and Captain Meyer. Irina struggled with the damp sponge for another three minutes before deciding she was clean enough, making a note to herself to visit Gold Deck when the opportunity arose.

  She’d learned early in her career that each warship’s Gold Deck was the center of the non-combat universe, as it was a self-contained, rotating deck that provided enough gravity to make such activities as bathing, eating, and eliminating waste tolerable. Every ship had an underground bar/nightclub, and every Navy warship she’d ever been on had the bar inside of the ship’s gravity deck—lovingly called Gold Deck (a shortened/slang form of the original Treasure Deck) by sailors for as long as they had been in existence.

  Commander Drazek dressed in her shipboard fatigues, allowing her to blend in with the rest of the crew instead of encouraging them to walk the other way when they noticed her Special Forces insignia. Because the all-black uniform doesn’t already intimidate everyone, she thought, pulling on her sticky boots. She followed the blue line in the floor until arriving at Captain Meyer’s quarters. The door slid open at her approach, making her stifle a grin at the wide-eyed look two ensigns gave her as they passed by.

  “Good morning, Commander,” Admiral Huang said, a coffee pouch clutched to his chest.

  “How the hell can you tell what time it is with this lighting?” she asked, taking a hot coffee pouch from the tray on the desk.

  “I told you she was a mudfoot,” Meyer said to the admiral.

  “Any news?” she asked, cutting out the small talk.

  Neither man seemed perturbed at her wish to get straight to business. They looked like she felt: full of twitchy, brooding anticipation. The three commanders knew it was a question of when, not if the Kai showed up. Anyone else who tried to put a dent in Silver Fleet’s plans was just a bonus round in a game no one wanted to play.

  “Sensors are clear out to twenty light-hours,” Admiral Huang answered. “But without the Wire, we’re still a bit blind.”

  Irina could hear the annoyance in his voice. She felt the same irritation at being cut off from the rest of humanity.

  “How goes the refueling?” she asked Meyer.

  “Right on schedule. A little ahead of schedule, actually. Someone thoughtfully included double the normal number of refueling drones on the four battleships, so we thoughtfully utilized them to get the fleet fueled a little quicker.”

  Irina scratched her cheek. “Good, good. This is probably the least dangerous jump we’ll make, and I already feel like we’re going to pop around the other side of GP-6 only to find an entire armada waiting for us.”

  “You watch too much science fiction,” Huang said with a grin.

  “Maybe,” Meyer said, giving Irina a worried frown before looking back to the admiral. “But with the Kai? Some of the shit they do seems like science fiction.”

  Meyer’s comm chimed. “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “Sir,” Captain Sawalha’s voice said, “we’ve got translation signatures ninety light-minutes out.”

  “Roger that,” Meyer said, closing the connection. “Well, hope you all enjoyed your coffee and eggs.”

  FOUR

  Captain Nasira Sawalha saluted the three officers when they entered the bridge. Sawalha smiled at the Special Forces commander and gestured to the XO’s chair. Irina sat in the gel-lined control seat and donned the tactical helmet. Captain Meyer and Admiral Huang did the same, and within seconds all three were linked into the CIC’s tactical network.

  “Do we have an ID on the ships yet?” Meyer asked.

  “Negative, Captain,” Lt. Aweke replied from his control pad within the holo pit. “We should have them identified within the hour.”

  Meyer nodded, though none of the other humans on the bridge noticed. Fourteen officers were lost within their own worlds, all but the captains and Admiral Huang tied into specific ship subsystems. Raiden’s commanders—including Irina—tried to piece it all together into a single, uniform picture to direct Silver Fleet’s movements and tactics. Irina didn’t envy Sawalha or Meyer for having the extra step of figuring in the other fifty-one ships to the mix.

  “Sound the alarm,” Meyer ordered. “Let’s get our refueling op finished up. Time to contact?”

  “Twelve hours, nineteen minutes until minimum weapon range for Veridian contacts,” Lieutenant Mikkelsen, the second tactical operations commander replied. “Three hours or less for Kai contacts.”

  Irina felt the mood change in an instant once the battle stations alert was initiated. She cleared her visor for a few seconds to marvel at the way the deep red lighting completely changed the atmosphere of the ship. She knew none of the officers would notice it from within their helmets, but the rest of the crew would move double-time to their pre-designated locations and secure themselves unless they were vital to Raiden’s combat operations. The skirmishes she’d been involved in while aboard a starship had been hours of muscle-clenching anticipation followed by the all-clear signal and the lights resuming either pink or daylight hues, or hours of extremely uncomfortable maneuvers under heavy acceleration or deceleration.

  “Contact ID,” Captain Sawalha announced less than an hour later. “Veridian. Looks like a standard border garrison. One battleship, three heavy cruisers, fourteen frigates, and an unknown number of smaller ships. ALVIN estimates no more than fifty, and based on their signatures, they look to be fighters from the capital.”

  “Roger that,” Meyer said. He opened the general channel on the bridge. “All right kids, relay this out to the others. We’re going to compress the fleet while we finish fueling. All ships with their reactors topped up are to help their neighbors. No one is to engage Veridian units for any reason, even if they begin firing at us.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Sawalha said.

  Irina watched the orders relay across the fleet, each ship in her tactical display flashing green twice as it confirmed them. She constantly had to remind herself to unclench her jaw as well as her fists. She knew she was definitely a mudfoot. Waiting for a fight to break out was one thing, but waiting hours before finding out if the enemy had even fired at her, then waiting the same number of hours again before finding out if her comrades had been hit was enough to drive her to the edge of madness—or at least extreme anxiety.

  There was something poetic, almost beautiful in the space between the time her finger activated the firing link in her plasma rifle and the moment the round penetrated a Kai head or torso. Over the years, she had learned to chain those moments together, savoring how the flow of time from one moment to the next melded into each other in perfect harmony, perfect synchronicity. She was too impatient to fire a weapon then break for dinner and a movie before knowing whether or not she’d actually hit anything.

  ***

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Ken said over the CIC link. “We’re receiving comm traffic from the Veridians.”

  “Translation,” Meyer said, immediately opening a new window in his tactical overlay.

  Irina did the same, and began to read the short, oddly-phrased messages from the Veridians. The ship’s AI, ALVIN, did its best to provide a properly-phrased message, but the Veridians were short on context in their communications, leaving the AI and the comm officers the task of having to use their best judgment to choose the correct translation. She couldn’t help smiling at ALVIN’s assessment that the Veridians were either demanding Silver Fleet des
troy the planet it was refueling at by sneezing on it, or they were demanding Silver Fleet be on their merry way lest the planet’s owners sneeze a few nuclear warheads toward Raiden and its friends.

  “Response, Captain?” the communications officer asked.

  Meyer glanced at Irina, then swiveled his seat to look at Admiral Huang. Huang switched to a private channel.

  “What should we tell them, Commander?” the admiral asked.

  “Reply with simple information that we are refueling our fleet before leaving their borders,” Irina said after thinking for a few moments. “If you can, specifically state that we are a non-combat support fleet and will not engage under any circumstances as we are transporting refugees.”

  “You think they’ll buy that?” Meyer asked. “We look exactly like a fleet refueling to jump into a combat zone and get our fight on. There’s not a single civilian ship with us.”

  Irina shrugged, forgetting that neither of them would be watching her instead of the data flashing across their command visors.

  “It doesn’t really matter if they buy it or not. The Veridians are hesitant to engage us since we easily outclass them in terms of naval strength. They might have numbers these days after all we’ve lost to the Kai, but they’ll have to jump in a fleet at least five times our size to make us pay for trespassing.”