by Dietmar Wehr
“I’m not sure I like the idea of allowing them to push even further forward until they find Bradley. My instincts tell me that we should try to stop them where they are now.”
“Well, Sir, in order to do that, we’d have to commit large numbers of frigates, to multiple star systems in order to prevent them from flanking the systems where we’ve already had encounters. Given our recent loses, do we have enough frigates to accomplish that on a sustained basis and wouldn’t we be risking further loses that we can’t really afford?”
“I see your point, Commander. But what’s to prevent them from bypassing Bradley altogether?” Shiloh had to think about that one for a bit.
“In order to bypass it, they have to know about it. If they just explore every star system in the direction that they think we come from, they’ll sooner or later arrive at Bradley. Considering that they’ve inflicted disproportionate losses on us in every battle except one, I’d expect them to have enough confidence in their tactical superiority, to at least make one attempt at attacking Bradley base, if only to further assess our defensive capabilities. Isn’t that what we’d do if the positions were reversed, Sir?”
“Hmm. Perhaps we would and perhaps we wouldn’t but I take your point. Fortifying Bradley would have some advantages that we wouldn’t have if we were trying to hold the line in an otherwise empty system. Refueling would be a lot easier for one thing. So would communications.” Howard paused and Shiloh took the opportunity to comment.
“Operating CFPs out of the base would be give the CFP commander a lot more flexibility too, Sir. CFPs deployed from combat frigates are going to be stuck with whatever modules and weapons load they were given when the frigates left the nearest base but if they’re operating from Bradley, they can be configured for the most effective payload before being launched from the base and also reloaded quickly if they’ve fired their drones and the battle is still continuing.” Shiloh noticed that Howard raised his eyebrows when Shiloh mentioned a CFP commander.
“Do I understand you to mean that any CFPs deployed out of Bradley should have their own commander?”
“Yes, Sir. If Bradley has a mixed force structure that includes frigates and CFPs, then I think each weapon system needs to have someone familiar with the best way to employ that system, in charge of those units. Neither the Base Commander nor the frigate Task Force Commander will be familiar with the potential that CFPs have, Sir.” Howard didn’t respond right away. He continued to look at Shiloh with a thoughtful expression.
“If we go with your recommendation to make Bradley the line in the sand, then I’ll keep your suggestion for a CFP commander in mind. What I’d like you to do now, is spend the next 24 hours writing a detailed proposal on how we can make the best use of our limited quantity of CFPs in defending Bradley. When you’re finished that, you’re free to go on two weeks leave. Just make sure that we know where to reach you. Any questions?”
“No, Sir. I’ll have that report submitted by this time tomorrow.”
“Very good, Commander. You’re dismissed.” Shiloh left and made his way to the Officer’s Mess for a late breakfast followed by a leisurely coffee while he made notes on the back of some napkins. When he got back to his quarters, he settled down in front of a computer terminal and started working on the report. When he had the first draft finished, he looked up and realized that it was now dark outside and he was hungry. The final draft wasn’t finished until it was daylight again. He sent the report off electronically and then stumbled over to the bed where he fell face down and slept for ten hours.
When he woke up, it was evening in Geneva but felt like morning to him. He decided to start his leave by shifting to a time zone that matched his biological clock. After sending several personal messages to Johansen, Chenko and a couple of others as well as letting Howard’s staff know where he was going, Shiloh packed his gear and hitched a ride on a Space Force sub-orbital transport to the opposite side of the world. Six hours later he was once again sunbathing on a white beach with a cold tropical drink in his hand.
To his surprise, he wasn’t called back during the next two weeks. When he checked into to the Temporary Officers quarters again, he found a message from Admiral Howard. It read,
[Your recommendation to make Bradley Base the Line in the Sand has been accepted. You’ll be in command of all CFPs assigned there. Overall command of ALL mobile defenses will rest with Vanguard CO. Report to Vanguard within 48 hours. Good hunting!] Shiloh knew that Vanguard was one of the Sentinel class combat frigates but he didn’t know who its CO was. A quick check made his jaw drop. It was Angela Johansen! Both of them were now Commanders but she was also Squadron Leader and Acting Task Force Leader. His title was Cmdr. Autonomous Group or CAG for short. He wondered if their previous comfortable working relationship would work as well with positions reversed. He was also a little disappointed that he was now reporting to her because if neither one was taking orders from the other, then that made a potential non-professional relationship that much more attractive. But no one claimed that a Space Force career was good for developing personal relationships. Besides, Humanity was at War and he had to focus on that first.
Chapter 13 - The Iceman Cometh
He reported aboard Vanguard six hours later. Angela met him at the docking hatch. Protocol did not require him to salute her even though she was his superior officer because they were technically the same rank. She smiled and offered her hand which he shook.
“Welcome aboard Vanguard, Victor. It’ll be good working together again.” she said.
“Glad to be here, Angela and yes, it IS good to be working together again. Congratulations on your new command. I can’t wait to take the tour!” Johansen laughed as she let go of his hand. Was it his imagination or had she held on to his hand just a bit longer than normal?
“I’ll be glad to show you around but why don’t you get settled into your quarters first. It’s not much but at least you’ll have a cabin all to yourself. When you’re settled, you can find me in the Officers’ Mess, okay?” Shiloh nodded.
“That’s fine and my quarters are where?” Johansen turned to nod at a young man standing off to one side, that Shiloh hadn’t even noticed was there.
“Yeoman Hanson here will lead the way. I’ll see you shortly then.” She gave him a friendly smile as she turned and walked down the corridor. Shiloh turned to the young Space Force Yeoman and said.
“Alright, Hanson. Lead the way.” It didn’t take long to get settled in his small but comfortable cabin and Johansen as soon showing him her new ship with obvious pride. Shiloh was impressed. The Sentinel class of combat frigates was quite different from the exploration class frigate that he was used to. Exploration frigates were designed for long missions where crew comfort was a high priority. In Combat Frigates, crew comfort was clearly a lesser priority. Each major system had multiple backups. The laser turrets could be completely retracted to streamline the ship for gas giant skimming. That was itself something new. Tankers carried fuel shuttles that could skim a gas giant’s atmosphere and scoop up hydrogen. The tanker could then filter out the heavy hydrogen. Those same fuel shuttles could then transfer the heavy hydrogen to other ships. Combat Frigates would not rely on smaller craft to refuel. They would dip down into the gas giant’s atmosphere themselves and while the technique had been successfully tested with ships this large, it’d be a new experience for everyone aboard. Johansen told Shiloh that practicing refueling was a major part of the ship’s shakedown cruise scheduled to commence in less than 48 hours. She saved the best part of the tour for last. It was the ship’s Bridge, which was impressive all by itself but which also included a small section partially partitioned off from the rest of the Bridge, where drones and CFPs could be monitored and controlled with equipment designed especially for that purpose. That would be Shiloh’s station. The main screen wasn’t as large as the main Bridge screen but was quite impressive nevertheless. He sat down in the command chair which immediately readjusted it
self to fit his body. The manual controls were all within easy reach to supplement voice commands if necessary. His part of the shakedown cruise would be to test the equipment and also command the drones and CFPs in simulated exercises with exploration frigates playing the role of enemy vessels. Being able to determine and transmit commands to multiple drones quickly would take practice but Shiloh was determined to master that skill before the next encounter with the enemy.
With the tour complete, Johansen invited Shiloh to join her later for dinner in the Officers Mess. With most of the crew not yet aboard, they had the Officers Mess to themselves which Shiloh was aware of but Johansen didn’t seem to notice. The conversation was mostly about the Vanguard and Johansen did most of the talking. Shiloh managed to ask her if she knew why the CAG was expected to control the autonomous units from a frigate instead of from the base itself since that was where the drones and CFPs would be maintained and configured for missions. Her reply was that since combat frigates were designed from the outset to be able to control large numbers of drones and CFPs in star systems that didn’t have a base and since Bradley Base didn’t yet have the same kind of command and control equipment installed, it just made sense that the CAG would have to be on board one of the combat frigates. Shiloh would have a deputy CAG at the base to look after the day-to-day functions needed to keep drones and CFPs operational. It made sense but only as the best of a series of less than desirable options.
When Vanguard was fully manned, she slipped out of lunar orbit along with the other seven members of the first squadron of frigates designated for a combat role, SFC 007. The squadron included the only other Sentinel-class combat frigate, Sentry, plus six more heavily modified exploration frigates, which would eventually be replaced by Sentinel-class ships as they became available. The squadron headed for Jupiter so that Vanguard and Sentry could practice refueling operations while the other six frigates practiced keeping a protective watch from high orbit. With no drones of any kind to worry about during the refueling exercises, Shiloh monitored the operation from his command station on the Bridge and he was glad that he had enough presence of mind to strap himself down tightly. Unlike the high speed dips that the fuel shuttles used, which were done at supersonic speeds, the Sentinel-class frigates had to decelerate until their speed was subsonic and drop down into the gas giant’s atmosphere in what Johansen later described as a controlled plunge. At the right altitude, the ship then used its maneuvering engines to pitch the nose up at an angle with just enough forward thrust to counteract the pull of gravity. Shiloh learned that the slow speed was necessary to allow a moderate flow of gases into the hydrogen/heavy hydrogen separation plant that would generate a constant flow of heavy hydrogen into storage tanks. Too much speed would cause the faster inflow of gases to overwhelm the separation system and contaminate the flow of heavy hydrogen and because the output of heavy hydrogen was measured in liters per minute, it took a minimum of six hours to fill the fuel tanks. The obvious drawback to subsonic speeds was the vulnerability to turbulence, which the artificial gravity wasn’t able to fully negate. While most of the turbulence was just a nuisance, there were moments when the ship’s motion was so severe that Shiloh would have been thrown from his Command Station chair if he hadn’t been strapped in.
When the exercise was finished and the ship was back in space, Shiloh unstrapped himself and walked over to where Johansen was seated. He could see that her uniform was soaked with sweat and she looked exhausted from the strain of maintaining a constant watch on the ship’s attitude and systems. The rest of the Bridge crew looked like they had been through the wringer too.
“How did we do?” asked Shiloh. Johansen took a deep breath before answering.
“The simulations don’t do this maneuver justice. Not by a long shot. We got through this okay. All systems are still functioning and the crew is able to continue at their posts but I’m not sure that doing this over and over again out in the field will generate the same results. The ship took a hell of shaking! At some point, enough of that will break something and if that something is our maneuvering engines, then we might find ourselves plunging down into a gas giant in an uncontrolled crash. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, what if enemy ships detect us while we’re crawling along at subsonic speeds and can’t defend ourselves? This is a bad idea. They should have given the ship enough room to carry a fuel shuttle the way the new long range scout ships will have but the designers didn’t ask us ship jockeys for our ideas.” Shiloh said nothing but nodded in sympathy. He would not want to be conning a ship for six hours during this kind of refueling maneuver. He wondered if there was a better way. He decided to access the engineering schematics of the refueling system during his off duty shift to see if he could come up with any ideas.
With Vanguard now refueled, Sentry took her turn and Vanguard practiced docking with the exploration frigates to simulate the transfer of heavy hydrogen. In essence, Vanguard became a very heavily armored and armed tanker since the exploration frigates didn’t have the same capability to skim gas giants.
After reviewing the engineering data for hours, Shiloh decided to get some sleep. As he started to drift off, he suddenly had an idea that made him wide awake again. Quickly calling up the data, he asked the ship’s computer to simulate a specific sequence of actions and leaned back in satisfaction as he scanned the results. There WAS a better way. It wasn’t perfect and had its own drawbacks but it would be much easier on both the ship and the crew. He checked Johansen’s duty schedule and saw that she was in the middle of her sleep shift. He left a message for her asking to meet over breakfast to discuss an alternative refueling process. Johansen looked skeptical when she sat down beside him later in the Officers Mess. He waited until she finished ordering breakfast, then slid a data tablet in front of her. As she looked at it, he started explaining.
“The key to this alternative process is the outflow of heavy hydrogen. I’m guessing the designers wanted to have a continuous flow of heavy hydrogen, which requires a continuous supply of atmospheric gases. My approach dispenses with the continuous outflow criteria. Here’s how it works. The ship basically takes the same supersonic dip that a smaller fuel shuttle takes. At those speeds, the intake scoops only have to be open for a few seconds for the holding tanks to be filled with gases. Then the scoops are closed. The ship continues to push its way through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds while the contents of the holding tank, is processed. When the holding tank is empty, the scoops reopen and fill it up again and the whole cycle repeats. Now the drawback to all this is that a complete refueling will take a minimum of 12 hours but on the plus side, the ship won’t have to put up with all that turbulence and since the hull is armored, the hull should be able to stand up to that long supersonic passage quite well. With far less turbulence, wear and tear on the equipment will be much reduced.” He waited while Johansen finished absorbing his verbal explanation and the data displayed on the tablet. When she looked up at him, she said,
“Have you run simulations?”
“Yes and they confirm that it should work.” he said.
“I’d like to see another simulation myself.” she said quietly. She handed the tablet back to Shiloh who accessed the engineering program and reran the simulation. Johansen watched it and when it was finished, she nodded.
“It looks good but as we both know, the real thing is quite often different from the simulations. I’m also not that happy with the extra 6 hours of being vulnerable to enemy fire. At these speeds, our laser turrets would have to be retracted to keep the ship as streamlined as possible.”
“Yes but even under the shorter, subsonic profile, you know that any gas giant’s atmosphere will cut your lasers’ effective range down to just a few kilometers. How likely is it that enemy ships will get that close?” She thought about that for a few seconds and said,
“You have a point there. Okay…I’m tempted to try it but only if my Engineering Officer has no serious objection to the idea. What made
you think of this idea, Victor?” Shiloh grinned and shrugged. For once he could tell the truth.