Twelve crewmen and two ensigns were temporally transferred to the two cargo ships to help elevate their manpower shortages. Doc Beilor was confident she could save the Jillian's wounded crewmen especially with access to the advanced healing drug onboard the Brittany.
The brig welcomed five more wounded but healing Karduan prisoners. They had been taken captive during the recovery operations on the Jillian and had all been wounded in the process.
All three crews were exhausted, but the need to escape the system before Karduan reinforcements arrived was imperative. Signaling for the other ships to polarize their hulls, the Wolf activated her bender drives and entered the gravity well.
Jericho Six was a binary star system with two old hydrogen stars. It was a perfect place to fall back to having two viable gravity wells that they could use either one to escape from the system. It had fifteen planets some as large as Jupiter others as small as Earth's moon.
None of the planets were Class M or capable of sustaining life. There were no settlements or population centers to worry about endangering or protecting and plenty of asteroid fields and gaseous worlds to use for cover.
"Sensors report," Richard called out, keeping his eyes fixed on the main viewer along with most of the bridge crew.
Lewis was getting better at his job and he knew what the first officer wanted to hear first.
"No enemy ships are in the immediate area that I can detect. There seems to be numerous planetoids and asteroids in this system. I'm picking up what appears to be five, no, six possible ships near the center of the second planetary ring."
Martin also reported having quickly analyzed the data coming in.
"No power readings are coming from those ships and at least two of them are Karduan destroyer escorts. The others seem to have Confederation ship profiles."
"Sir, I'm getting numerous automated distress calls and transponder signals from those ships and the area around them," Comm. Chief Parker said, adding to their information.
Hope let out a little sigh before he broke his quiet calm.
"What ships?" he asked.
"The ISS Java, Ajax, Charity, Alamo and the Lexington," he reported, naming off ships that most of them hadn't even heard of. "Sir, there are also twenty-five distress signals from fighter transponders coming from that area."
Everyone knew that the only time a fighter's emergency signal would activate was if the pilot had jettisoned or if the fighter had taken so much damage that it was no longer functioning.
"The old Lexington is an escort carrier and has a complement of forty-eight fighters," Hope said to no one in particular.
"The Ajax is an old Hero Class heavy cruiser," Richard added, having once served with the old ship during war-games many years ago.
The Hawk nodded in agreement knowing that type of ship well from his days when he commanded the Ajax's sister ship the ISS Theseus.
"Launch a fighter reconnaissance patrol," he ordered, sending out their two Saber fighters with Commander Hutton and Lt. Usheiba at the controls.
Once the fighters were safely away, the Wolf left the freighters by the Alpha gravity well as it entered into the system. If it was a trap, then the Jillian and Brittany could still escape while the Star Wolf fought her way clear.
"Wolf Pup One to Momma Wolf," Hutton started as he and his wingman, Lt. Usheiba raced into the section of space where the ship's signals were coming from. "We have a visual of the ships and it isn't pretty." What he saw was enough to make his stomach drop.
Comm. Chief Parker acknowledged his call and switched over to speaker so the captain and bridge crew could hear his report.
"Go ahead Wolf Pup One."
"The two Karduan destroyer escorts are both destroyed. They look as if they had been hit by hundreds of fusion blast at close range. In fact, I'd say they are un-salvageable and could only be used as scrap metal."
His report made the Wolf's crew relax a little, but the tension in his voice was unmistakable.
"Wolf Pup One is your vid camera operational?" Richards asked, wanting to see for himself the carnage. The Star Wolf would be in visual range in five minutes, but the anticipation for information was overwhelming.
"Roger that and sorry, I should have thought of that myself," Hutton replied a little preoccupied by the sight before him. No one on the bridge crew blamed him once they saw the images sent from his fighter.
The two Kardy DE's were, as he said, nothing more than slag. They were drifting in a large asteroid field that on closer inspection proved to be a field of broken and burnt ship parts. The Confederation ships and fighter signals were spread out within this huge field trapped between the orbits of two of the gas giant's barren planets.
"Mamma Wolf, we are entering the debris field and are heading towards the closest ship's signal," the commando officer said.
Watching from the bridge's main viewer almost made them feel as if they were with Wolf Pup One as he dodged his way through the wreckage. The first ship he came upon was the ISS Alamo.
It was an older frigate that had been refitted for modern service. Like many older ships it found its way to the Defense Fleets rather than to the deep ranging and often more mobile Attack Fleets.
The Alamo was named after the mission turned fort that helped win Texas its independence from Mexico. Mexican Emperor General Santa Anna with an army of thousands had laid siege for thirteen days to the 189 Texan volunteers. In the end the Alamo's weak north wall fell and all of the Texans including frontier legends Jim Bowie and Davie Crockett were killed.
Santa Anna even put to death the five remaining survivors of the assault, which supposedly included Davie Crockett. In return the Mexican army had lost over 1600 men in their three attempts to take the old mission. This costly victory so badly weakened Santa Anna's army that at the Battle of San Jacinto the enraged Texan army of only 800 men would crush the Mexican army that was twice its size. Texas General Sam Houston would also manage to capture Santa Anna who was said to have tried to escape dressed as a woman.
The sacrifice of those 189 men at that crumbling old mission would lead to the end of the war and Texas independence. "Remember the Alamo!" would become not only a Texas’ war cry, but also an American fountainhead of pride and inspired bravery.
Looking at the battered namesake of that ancient battle made many a man swallow hard and reflect on his own bravery. The old frigate had taken numerous energy weapon and missile hits. The Alamo's hull was breached in a dozen places and half of her weapon's turrets were gone. Her engines had also taken damage from missile hits, but were still in one piece due to that section's extra thick armor. The bridge had also been hit and a large hole could be seen just aft of its location.
"It looks as if they boarded her with a ram shuttle," Ken Usheiba said as his fighter passed by the large hole.
A ram shuttle carried Karduan guardswomen and was fired behind an armor-busting torpedo. The torpedo would cause a breech in the hull without destroying the interior. The ram shuttle would follow being fired similar to the way a normal torpedo would be.
It would accelerate to maximum velocity only breaking at the last minute before impacting with the ship’s damaged hull. Needless to say that many of these ram torpedoes failed to make it to their destinations and even when they did they would often have trouble braking in time to safely stop.
"Mamma Wolf, should we stop and board her?" Hutton asked almost hopeful for a yes. He had served his first tour of duty on the exact same class of frigate. The Battle Class frigate he served on was the old ISS Bunker Hill as a gunnery and assistant engineering officer. It pained him to see his old ship's sister in such a condition and he wanted to help if he could.
"Negative Wolf Pup One," Parker voice instructed, "We are going to send a boarding party in the Carronade. You are directed to move on to the next ship."
"Roger that," Hutton replied, picking up the next powerless ship on his scope.
The next four Confederation ships were in even worse c
ondition. A second frigate but not quite as old as the Alamo, was drifting upside down. Its emergency signal identified it as the ISS Java, a twelve-year old frigate that was named after both British and American warships.
The first ship to bear that name was the HMS Java, a British thirty-eight-gun frigate that had lost a famous battle to an American frigate, the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. That Java had been so badly damaged in its fight with the "Old Iron Sides" that it was scuttled. Later the American Navy would build a new frigate and name it the USS Java in honor of the USS Constitution's great victory.
The ISS Java's bridge and upper decks were completely gone, exposing her down to the top of her second deck. It looked as if she caught part of a hit from a capital ship’s spinal mount cannon.
The ISS Ajax was found almost in the center of the debris field. It was an older ship, which had been named after a famous Greek hero from the Trojan War as well as a series of American warships.
Along the way Hutton and Usheiba had also spotted several crushed SF-18 Hornet star fighters. The Hornet was a multipurpose fighter that was the interim star fighter between the ancient Wasp and the ultramodern Saber. It was still a viable multitask fighter capable of fighter-to-fighter or bombing missions.
Passing through the crushed and scorched husks of the onetime Hornets made both Hutton and Usheiba shudder with dread. Whatever happened here they knew that these ships didn't go down without a fight.
Clearing a small cluster of floating rubbish including a Karduan sloop’s engine core, he was able to get a clear picture of the old heavy cruiser.
The older Hero Class cruisers had extra heavy armor, but even that hadn’t been enough to save the ISS Ajax. To say that the warship was in bad shape would have been an understatement.
The old girl was in two pieces having been hit a mid-ship along its starboard side by multiple heavy energy weapons of the spinal variety. Her aft section seemed to be floating in place whereas her front half had been propelled away on a course heading out to deep space.
“She must have been low on fuel and ammunition or hits like that would have blown her to bits,” Usheiba commented as they came closer to the engine section.
“I’d say something about it being like Achilles' heel if I didn’t feel like crying,” Hutton replied, remembering the Iliad from his youth and how Ajax the Greater committed suicide over the loss of Achilles' armor to Odysseus.
“Lets check out the Lexington.”
The two star fighters rushed by the fallen hero and went deeper into the wreckage of the debris field.
The ISS Lexington or the Lady Lex as her crew fondly called her looked no better overall than any other ship they had found so far. Her one saving grace was that she was in relatively one piece. So much so, that Hutton had at first thought that the escort carrier was simply powered down and hiding. As they closed in on the small carrier, the fighters could see that she was as dead as space.
“She’s burned out,” Lt. Usheiba said in a gasp as he passed by her open port hanger bay.
The Lexington had taken a missile or torpedo strike to her hanger bay and a fire had broken out inside the oxygen rich interior. Other laser and missile hits had ruptured her hull's inner compartments enough that it had let the raging fire move from section to section as the air burned itself and the ship out.
“Mamma Wolf, the Lexington doesn’t look to have been boarded and her engines and bridge sections look intact from the outside,” Wolf Pup one reported not seeing any signs of boarding by ram shuttles. If they could get a repair ship or a recover ship out to the old girl then they might be able to get her into the fight again. Of course this would still require months of intensive labor at a repair station, which was something they didn’t have.
The ISS Lexington was named not only from the first battle of the American Revolution, where the seventy minutemen stood against a British army of eight hundred. That is for about a minute until, “The Shot Heard 'Round the World” as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had called it, was fired and eight minutemen lay dead on Lexington Green.
The old escort carrier was one in a long line of famous ships to bear that name. In World War Two the USS Lexington CV-2, also a carrier, was stationed in the Pacific theater. The WWII aircraft carrier was originally laid down as a battle cruiser, but due to the Washington Treaty’s regulations on the amount of capital ship tonnage per country, she and her sister ship, the USS Saratoga CV-3 were converted to carriers.
She was one of the ships that took part in the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the Battle of the Coral Sea she helped sink the small Japanese aircraft carrier, Shoho.
The USS Lexington also helped in the attacks on two larger carriers, the Zuikaku and the Shokaku. Unfortunately, those carriers had also launched their aircraft at the Lex and she received two torpedo and three bomb hits. Despite heroic effort by her crew and a short lived success at saving their ship from the reignited fires, the Lexington had to be abandoned and scuttled.
Another carrier would bear the name USS Lexington, CV-16 that served with honor and later became a museum in Corpus Christi. She held the record for the longest years in service with forty-eight years at sea.
The called her the Blue Ghost as she was nicknamed by her enemies due to her unique camouflage. She also had the record for the most launched and recovered aircraft as well as having the first female crewmembers in U.S. naval history.
The ISS Lexington had once been a paramount ship of the line and like her famous predecessors she was one of the first star carriers. Over the years her size went from large to medium to small being overtaken as newer and larger carriers made her almost obsolete. The war with the Kardua gave her a second life and she had been pulled out of mothballs and refitted for defense duty as an escort carrier. Now she floated as a burned out shell of a ship.
“Lets find the last ship,” Hutton said, having seen enough of the escort carrier remains.
Traveling through the last part of the debris field they found the IMS Charity. The hospital ship was crushed having had only minimal armor and defenses. It literally looked like an old can that had been used for target practice and was then stepped on.
At this horrendous sight the two pilots and the Wolf’s crew kilometers behind them were infuriated.
“I don’t believe they did this?” Wolf Pup Two’s pilot exclaimed in anger and shock.
“Those bitches did this on purpose and probably only gave her one warning if that,” Hutton said, bringing his fighter around to the other side of the wrecked ship of mercy.
This act was unheard of in human warfare as hospital ships were protected under the articles of war. Of course the Karduan had no such treaties with humankind and they thought that only one warning was more than enough.
“Sir, I’m not reading any escape pods anywhere in the area,” Usheiba reported, finding it strange that from all these ships not one pod had managed to escape.
“Wolf Pups One and Two, we copy your last message,” Comm. Chief Parker’s gruff voice informed, “Continue your survey of the battlefield.”
“You heard the man,” Wolf Pup One said as he turned his fighter on a thirty-degree heading and accelerated.
Back on the Wolf’s bridge it was a somber scene as the crew watched the images of death and destruction flashing upon the view screen.
Commander Richards broke the grim silence.
“It looks like they were trying a classic defensive retreat. Skirmishing ships in the lead, followed by heavier ships of the line and then carriers with noncombatant vessels to the rear.”
“Probably trying to get to the second gravity well,” Mister Dover said from the helm station.
Hope stirred from his stillness.
“Any signs of survivors?” he reluctantly asked, knowing that the fighters’ reports of a lack of escape pods was foreboding news.
Martin didn’t want to say it out loud and instead shook his head as he
made eye contact with the old hawk.
“Launch the Carronade,” the captain ordered, “Have Lt. Collins’ team board the Alamo and try to get their computer core back online and download any surviving information. Also send word to the freighters to come in and refuel. They should continue their repair operations and be prepared to bend at a moment’s notice.
Clearing his throat, Martin spoke once the captain had turned to look at him.
“Sir, I think I could lend a hand getting the Alamo’s computer online.”
The Hawk nodded once and turned back to the main viewer.
Martin gave Alister at the helm a big smile and ran to join the boarding party.
“Maser station, continue broad based scans of the battlefield,” Richard said as he manned the computer station until a replacement could be sent for.
As he sat at the station’s terminal information came in from the fighters and the maser station, which was being automatically correlated by the ship’s computer.
“Sir, there is something funny about these readings?” The first officer said as he looked down at the terminal.
Mike waited at the controls of the armored shuttle until Martin finally boarded. The shuttle was packed tight and every man had to stand to make room. They had decided to take two squads of twelve men each. They also had a plasma torch and laser wielder along with an auxiliary power unit.
They had strapped emergency hull patches to the shuttle’s interior walls and had crammed two multi purpose repair robots in the front near the pilot’s cabin.
His men were now armed with the weapons they had taken from the Jillian’s cargo hold. Each man had a Smith and Wesson gauss pistol and a Colt assault needle rifle along with a standard ship’s sword. He would have loved for them to be wearing the suits of powered battle armor they had found. Unfortunately, the advanced armor required a skull jack to interface with its system, which was something none of them had.
The Log of the Gray Wolf (Star Wolf Squadron Book 1) Page 29