The Long-Range War

by Christopher Nuttall

  Which is good, Martin thought. His lips twitched in cold amusement. It’s good that they did that.

  A dull thud echoed through the chamber. Martin had a second to realise that the enemy’s first attempt to break down the door had failed before there was a second, much larger explosion. The airlock hatch shuddered, then fell inwards and crashed to the ground. A team of enemy soldiers emerged from the smoke, their weapons sweeping for trouble. Martin gave them a handful of seconds to relax, then barked a command. His men opened fire with savage intensity. Five aliens fell dead at once.

  “Grenade,” Sergeant Howe shouted. “Get down!”

  Martin ducked, sharply, as the alien grenades exploded. They seemed to be conventional HE, rather than plasma charges, but there were a lot of them. He tossed back a grenade of his own, then snapped out the command to retreat as it detonated. The alien advance seemed to slow, just long enough for the marines to beat feet down the corridor to the next prepared ambush site. He wondered how long it would take the aliens to reach them or if they’d concentrate on securing the spaceport rather than chasing a small human unit into a potential trap.

  We’ll see, he thought. He checked the updates, then smiled. The aliens hadn't been stopped - no one had seriously expected them to be stopped - but they had taken a beating. It might just slow them down for a while. And that will buy time for the fleet to return.

  ***

  “They’re definitely forcing their way into the transit tubes, Major,” MCCLELLAN said. The AI didn't sound alarmed, although - as a third-gen AI - MCCLELLAN had emotional as well as conversational overlays. “They’ve already taken out the sensors.”

  Major Griffin nodded, curtly. “I take it they haven’t managed to hack the control system yet?”

  “No,” MCCLELLAN said. “I can keep them out for the moment.”

  “Good,” Major Griffin said. “Inform me if that changes.”

  He turned his attention to the terminal and studied the developing situation. MCCLELLAN was not a battlefield commander - he’d thought, at first, that the AI’s name was a joke - but there were few humans who matched its capabilities for absorbing and analysing vast amounts of information. Indeed, like its namesake, MCCLELLAN was a genius at logistical planning and operations. Griffin and his superiors didn’t have to work through a vast logistics staff to get things done. They could simply order the AI to handle it.

  But that will change, Griffin thought. We’re going to have to leave the control rooms soon.

  There was no denying it. The enemy were pushing their offensive hard, now they’d secured the spaceports. They’d taken some losses - and some of their probes had been wiped out completely - but they were still coming, climbing over the bodies of their own dead. It angered Griffin, in some ways, to see how casual the enemy commanders were with the lives of their men. He’d been a professional soldier long enough to know that lives should never be spent freely.

  “They’re attempting to hack the network,” MCCLELLAN said, suddenly. “I’m countering them, for the moment, but they’re using a brute-force attack keyed to hardwired control functions. I can’t keep them out forever.”

  “Then keep them out as long as you can,” Griffin ordered. “Can you maintain a link if we disengage the physical connection?”

  “Yes, but not for long,” MCCLELLAN informed him. “And their sensors may be able to track me. I may have to go dark.”

  “They’ll be here in an hour, unless they slow down,” Griffin said. He’d prepared a number of possible escape routes, all of which led into a maze of corridors, transit tubes and maintenance depots. The Tokomak would have problems sealing off all the possible ways to leave the control centre, unless they chose to devote most of their manpower to occupying chokepoints. “We’ll leave in forty minutes, unless the situation changes radically.”

  “It might,” MCCLELLAN said. “I’ve lost the active sensors on the ring’s surface, sir, but the passive sensors are reporting a new wave of shuttles. My best estimate is that the enemy intends to land another twenty thousand men.”

  Griffin smiled. Twenty thousand men was nothing to laugh at, not when they might all be advancing on his position, but the sheer size of the ring would be too much for them. Twenty thousand men would vanish without trace in a single sector, let alone the whole ring. And yet, as long as the enemy held the right places, they could safely ignore the remainder of the ring until the war was over. He wondered, morbidly, if they’d start venting chunks of the structure. It would be one way to cleanse the ring of unwanted life forms. And the Tokomak were certainly ruthless enough.

  “We’ll deal with them when we see them,” he said. “Have you managed to make contact with any fleet elements?”

  “No, Major,” MCCLELLAN said. “The skies appear to be uniformly hostile.”

  “Then we’d better prepare for a long war,” Griffin said. There was no point in dwelling on the very real possibility that the war would continue until all of them were dead. He glanced at the terminal, then nodded to himself. “Inform the troops, please. We’re shutting this command centre down and evacuating in forty minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” MCCLELLAN said.

  Griffin watched his men hastily pack up the handful of supplies and equipment they’d moved into the command centre, then emplace demolition charges around the chamber. They wouldn’t do that much damage, he knew, but they’d slow the enemy down while they searched for replacement consoles and supplies. Hopefully, they’d class the whole affair as human incompetence ... and ignore the cluster of viruses and malware inserted into the computers network. The ring was going to have real problems until the Tokomak could clear out the infection, which wouldn’t be easy. Their reluctance to use AI was going to bite them in the rear.

  “The enemy have made a breakthrough,” MCCLELLAN reported. The terminal flashed red, indicating that a delaying team had been wiped out. There were no details, but they weren’t needed. “They’ll be here sooner than expected.”

  “Then we go now,” Griffin said. He raised his voice. “Set the charges to detonate in ten minutes, then run.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Hoshiko sat in her cabin, staring at her sword.

  It was an antique katana, she’d been told. Her grandmother had brought it from Japan when she’d moved to America, but its history stretched back into the mists of time. Noble warriors had worn the sword when they went into battle, although she wasn’t sure how many of the stories she really believed. And yet, it had clearly meant something to her grandmother. Hoshiko had only been given the sword after she saw combat for the first time. She’d been told to keep it with her, despite the risk of losing it. She had to pass it down to her children when they too saw the elephant.

  And yet, she thought she understood - now - why so many of her grandmother’s people had committed suicide, rather than face up to their failures. It must have seemed impossible, in such a prideful culture, to admit that one had screwed up. She’d found it hard to admit her own errors too, even when she’d gone to the academy. But now ... she hadn’t just made a fool of herself. Her mistakes had cost her fleet badly. It was tempting, very tempting, to just commit seppuku to atone for her mistakes.

  And that would mean leaving everyone else in the lurch, she thought, feeling a flash of contempt for her ancestors. How many of them had chickened out of facing up to their mistakes by taking their own lives? How many of them had given up when they could still be redeemed? And how many of them had left the blow to fall on others when it should have been rightfully theirs? Hoshiko had never let her brothers be blamed for her misbehaviour, back on the family asteroid. I owe it to my crews to get them out of this mess.

  In hindsight, the mistake was all too clear. She’d watched hundreds of freighters entering and leaving Apsidal during the occupation. It had been just ... background noise. And, when the system was under heavy attack, she’d ignored the convoy approaching the gravity point until it was far too late. If she’d suspected t
he truth, if she’d taken a handful of precautions, she could have kept the enemy trap from snapping closed. But who would have dreamed of such a plan? Coordinating an offensive on an interstellar scale was incredibly difficult. The KISS principle was the founding platform of interstellar warfare doctrine.

  They have enough ships to make it work, she thought, sourly. In hindsight, the timing might have been a little off. If the second fleet had arrived sooner, her fleet would have been trapped between two fires. The only thing that saved the fleet was enemy incompetence.

  She pinched herself, hard. The enemy had not been incompetent. They’d tried something that shouldn’t have worked at all and come very close to pulling it off. A little more luck and her fleet would have been destroyed. She would have been killed, her crew would have been killed ... and the road to Sol would lie open. She’d underestimated her enemy and paid a steep price for it. If nothing else, she should have realised that the Tokomak would try to copy everything they’d seen. Knowing that something was possible was half the battle.

  Her intercom bleeped. “Admiral,” Yolanda said. “The commanding officers are ready for the conference.”

  “Are they?” Hoshiko fought down her irritation. She’d already faced one attempt to remove her from command, back in the Martina Sector. That had been a close-run thing and she hadn't screwed up anything like so badly. “Do you have a comprehensive set of reports?”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Yolanda said. “Do you want me to forward them to you, or present them at the conference?”

  My ancestors would close their eyes and ears to bad news, Hoshiko thought. And they would take refuge in a fantasy world.

  She wondered, wryly, just how many of her civilian ancestors had believed the lies they were told. American carriers were being sunk in their hundreds, but the ships were being sunk closer and closer to Japan with each battle. Midway, Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Guam, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa ... anyone who looked at a map, if maps had been available in Imperial Japan, would have known that the Americans were closing in. Perhaps the propaganda had also backfired. The Americans were taking staggering losses and they were still advancing.

  “You can present them,” she said. It was no favour, but no one would blame Yolanda for Hoshiko’s mistakes. “I’m on my way.”

  She walked into the washroom and splashed water on her face before inspecting herself in the mirror. Her face looked grim, but otherwise composed. She wondered, morbidly, if some of her commanding officers had expected her to commit suicide. They knew that she’d gotten them out of the mess, but only after she’d gotten them into the mess ... she shook her head, brushed back her hair and headed for the hatch. It was time to plan their next step.

  The conference room was brimming with holograms, overlapping in a manner she had come to detest, but she couldn’t help noticing just how few holograms there were. There should have been more, a lot more. But Commodore Yu and his subordinates were dead, along with dozens - hundreds - of her subordinates. She took a long breath as she sensed the despondency pervading the compartment. The Solar Navy had lost battles before, but never on such a scale. And the route to Earth lay open.

  “Attention on deck,” Captain Lifar said.

  Hoshiko took a moment to survey the holograms as they turned to look at her. They looked grim, but not angry ... not yet. She wondered how long it would be until they started to blame her for the disaster. The plan had been her brainchild, even though hundreds of staffers had worked on it. She had been the one who’d authorised the final version, she’d been the commanding officer ... the buck stopped with her. And yet, she didn’t have time to fight for her command. The situation was dire.

  “We lost a battle,” she said, crisply. There was no point in pretending otherwise. They were competent military officers, not reporters or civilians. “And we took a beating. Yolanda?”

  Yolanda stepped forward, her hands clasped behind her back. She was the lowest-ranking officer present, but her stance showed no awareness of it. Her face was calm and composed as she spoke. Hoshiko wished that some of her other officers could borrow that calm.

  “We managed to get four hundred and seventy ships through the gravity point and into deep space,” Yolanda said. “The remaining warships that were near the gravity point must be presumed destroyed, although they may have managed to escape and link up with the fleet train. It is certain that none of the fortresses remain in our hands. We cannot tell if they were captured or simply destroyed.”

  She paused to let her words sink in, then continued. “The supply situation is dire,” she added, slowly. “Seventeen ships are deemed beyond repair, at least without supplies we don’t have. The remainder are terrifyingly short on ammunition. We must assume that the enemy is capable of keeping us from returning through the gravity point to link up with the fleet train.”

  “They don’t have prefabricated fortresses,” a captain grumbled.

  “They have enough ships to hold a gravity point against us,” Hoshiko said, flatly. Her ships had only a handful of assault pods left. The Tokomak would love a chance to force her into a conventional gravity point assault. It would end very badly. “Getting back through the gravity point is not an option.”

  “We can strip the disabled ships of supplies and weapons,” Yolanda said, “and transfer missiles around the fleet to ensure that the modern ships have full loads, but we’d be pushing the limits as far as they will go. In short, we have enough ammunition for one fairly short engagement and that will be that. A long engagement will leave us without any missiles to shoot at the enemy.”

  And we’d be shot to pieces while we closed the range so we could bring our energy weapons to bear, Hoshiko thought. She’d known the situation was bad, but it was clearly worse than she’d thought. The Tokomak would love that too.

  “We need options,” she said. Asking her subordinates for ideas, particularly in a public forum, would make her look weak or indecisive, but she was past caring. “We need to find a way to flip the situation before they secure their supply lines and start the advance on Earth,”

  “We could block their supply lines,” Captain Pringle said. “We have enough firepower to tear any convoy to shreds.”

  “Or we could punch our way through to GS-3532,” Captain Leedey offered. “And then we sit on the gravity points, blowing them away as they come through.”

  “And then they will simply overwhelm us, as they did in Apsidal,” Captain Nolan sneered, rudely. “Or outflank us by going through GS-3531 and GS-3530.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Captain Leedey glowered at Captain Nolen. “Or are you just talking bullshit?”

  Hoshiko slapped the table. “We are in a bad situation,” she said, sharply. “We are not going to start fighting amongst ourselves.”

  “We could take the supplies,” Commodore Ross suggested. “It isn’t a long flight to Palladio, Admiral. That world could probably supply us with everything we need.”

  “And I’m sure that world will be heavily defended too,” Captain Nolen said. “Could we take everything as easily as you suggest?”

  “And would they have everything we need?” Captain Thaddeus looked grim. “Their missiles will need to be modified before they can be fired from our tubes.”

  “The modifications aren’t hard to make,” Commodore Ross reminded him. “Come to think of it, we could modify the tubes instead. They were designed for hasty modification if necessary.”

  “And then what?” Captain Nolen said. “Do we return to Apsidal? Can we return to Apsidal? Or do we play The Lost Fleet and run rampant in their rear for a few months until they gather the force to tear us to shreds? Or ...”

  Hoshiko gritted her teeth as an argument threatened to break out. The hell of it was that the doubters had a point. They were cut off from Sol. Even if they set off immediately in FTL, heading directly for Sol or for the nearest gravity point that led in the right general direction, it would be months before they reached home. In the meanti
me, the Tokomak could funnel ships and men down the Apsidal Chain and turn the Solar System into a burned-out cinder. She had no doubt they’d do it. Her long-range sensors had detected signs of intensive bombardment on Mokpo. And then ...

  The fleet cannot endure forever, she thought. Her cruisers were designed for long-term missions, but there were limits. We’ll be worn down in time, even if the enemy doesn’t manage to catch us. And then our ships will start to fail.

  Her mind raced. There had to be a solution, something so unconventional that the Tokomak wouldn't see it coming. And yet ... what? The LinkShip could get back through the Apsidal Point without being detected, but then ... what? Try to sneak elements of the fleet train through the point, gambling that the Tokomak wouldn’t insist on inspecting and searching the fleet? She would insist on searching every starship that passed through the point, even if it imposed immense delays on interstellar shipping. The Tokomak wouldn’t miss that trick, not when control of the gravity points underpinned their empire. That, and a network of naval bases in prime position to control the core sectors ...