J.T. Turner lost his life and three-quarters of his ships over the course of those horrible three days last July. Thousands of Alliance spacers lost their lives along with him, but Turner had seemed a man possessed… incapable of understanding when he was beaten, and so in the end, he triumphed. He’d had to shepherd every missile, using them miserly against an enemy so vast as to defy description. But the Alliance 17th Fleet killed Raknii warships with almost every missile they fired. As incredible as Turner’s losses had been, he’d bled the cats dry in their fanatical attempts to ferret his fleet out of those rocks.
Indeed, it had appeared that the Raknii commander had been every bit as desperate to finally disprove the Allied Combined Fleet of Humanity’s legend of being unbeatable, as Turner had been to maintain it. Long past the time when any sane commanders would have cut their losses and withdrawn, the two antagonists continued to claw at each other’s throats. Both sides seemed totally oblivious to losses and casualty rates… their attention focused totally on nothing other than killing.
The miracle that was Hell in the Rocks would not have been possible if not for Turner’s brilliant strategy, the technological superiority of his fighters and missiles, and the iron nerve of his crews. The flight paths of the goings and comings of his 690 Raptors and Demons, making their attack runs and then returning for rearmament, eventually pinpointed the general locations of his nine carriers to the cats. Whenever Raknii fighters tried coming into the rocks after them, they were obliterated by an interlinked, overlapping firestorm of computer-coordinated point-defense weaponry — lasers, charged-particle beams and chain-guns, from ingeniously positioned support ships that surrounded humanity’s carriers.
With their tiny and comparatively primitive fighters unable to penetrate the human defenses, the Raknii tried sending in their old-style corvette class warships by the thousands. Turner wisely withheld using his medium-yield anti-ship missiles, utilizing only his point-defense weaponry and his fleet’s 5 and 3.5-gigawatt pulse lasers, which were all amazingly effective against the cats’ thin, destroyer-grade armor.
A big part of Turner’s genius was his decision to keep his fleet’s scanners and active ECM gear shut down, so as to not give the cats any emissions to home in on. Instead, he depended upon keying his fire-controls to passively-received reflected laser light illuminating their targets, emitted from a half dozen specially equipped spaceplanes, shining relatively invisible broad-band lasers on the cat ships, while drifting hidden among the millions of small rocks.
His fleet ships were actually grounded on larger asteroids, which hid them from the Raknii’s probing scanners in the back-splatter returned by the asteroids themselves. Without any active emissions coming from Turner’s warships to home in on, the cats were forced to rely on line-of-sight for targeting. Unfortunately for the cats, most of their ships that got close enough to pick out a human ship grounded on an asteroid usually didn’t live long enough to make a report of their sighting.
All the while, Turner’s Raptors and Demons repetitively ran the gauntlet of the Raknii envelopment, attacking and returning to their carriers, flitting among the asteroids and enemy warships like flocks of nimble little sparrows. Unlike Turner’s warships, the human fighters used their scanners and ECM gear prodigiously, giving the cats hundreds of fleeting targets that their weaponry found very difficult to hit. The Alliance fighters made every single missile count, angling for stern shots on the cat’s bigger warships.
Like the Confederates at Slithin, the Alliance fleet carried no anti-fighter missiles aboard, but once it was discovered the cats had fighters of their own, the chain-guns on all their Raptors and Demons were fully stocked, which many of the relatively slow and clumsy Raknii fighters fell victim to, whenever they happened to get in the way.
When the cats realized their old-style warships weren’t getting the job done, they sent in their heavies. Turner maintained his strategy, except that his heavier energy weapons on his battlecruisers, heavy cruisers and light cruisers joined the fray. His fighters didn’t have to go out as far to find targets, after the cats started coming in after them. The cat attacks came in waves, as they couldn’t send in nearly all of their capital ships at the same time, as maneuvering room amongst the densely packed asteroid belt was at a premium and they just got in each other’s way.
This gave the cats the advantage of always having rested crews to funnel into the battle at any given moment, while the human crews were stretched far beyond the point of mere exhaustion and managed to stay awake only by carefully monitored doses of stimulants — awake, but not necessarily alert. By the third day of the battle, more human fighters were lost to collisions with rocks than to enemy fire.
Over three days of intense, continuous combat, fire from the human fleet dwindled, as one-by-one, their ships were spotted and eventually destroyed. As Turner’s fleet slowly eroded away, his surviving crews accepted their fate, and saw themselves adding to the legends of the hopelessly outnumbered heroes defending the Alamo and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Heroes possessed with a rare form of combat insanity that sometimes happens occasionally. Heroes in hopeless situations, who didn’t break and didn’t run… who stood and fought to the last man, and died to the last man. Heroes who died, but neither retreated nor surrendered.
After losing over 200 carriers, over 16,000 fighters, over 200 heavy cruisers, 600 cruisers, 200 destroyers and over 2,900 of his old-style warships to the infuriating, frustrating, and horrifyingly effective, unorthodox tactics of these maddening humans, the Raknii commander finally had enough. Just as the Alliance 17th fleet was all but destroyed, the Raknii withdrew, a mere hair’s breadth from their first major victory of the war.
Turner’s fleet survived, but he, himself, did not. Just an hour before the cats suddenly and inexplicably withdrew, Turner’s flagship, the attack carrier USS Alliance was spotted by a cat heavy cruiser and raked by 11-gigawatt pulse-laser fire. Damage control parties found their fleet commander still strapped into his command chair, on the deck below where the bridge had formerly been located.
Most considered it miraculous that J.T. still lived, if even barely. Everything humanly possible was done to save him, but four days later, Vice Admiral James Timothy Turner breathed his last. Many claimed that, knowing his duty done, he chose to go, but that was merely standard spacer’s scuttlebutt —almost as wild as the few claims that he’d been gathered into the arms of angels and whisked off to his reward in the great beyond.
Now it was finally time to honor the great hero, whose exploits would ensure that his name would abide forever in the annals of military history, alongside the enduring legends of Napoleon and Robert E. Lee. At the behest of President McAllister, no expense was spared and Congressional Medal of Honor-winning Admiral James Timothy Turner was given a send-off for the ages — a presidential-grade funeral, including a slow procession along streets lined by hundreds of thousands of flag waving mourners, from the largest cathedral in Waston to Arlinton National Cemetery by horse-drawn caisson and Alliance-wide holovision coverage. It was amazingly sunny and relatively warm for a December day in Waston, which many thought to be a sure sign that God was smiling down, as his Iron Warrior was being laid to his eternal rest. No reigning monarch ever received a more elaborate funeral.
A color guard followed by a Fleet Marine rifle drill team led the procession, followed by the traditional riderless horse, with empty boots reversed in the stirrups, and then the caisson bearing Turner’s body coming next. President Arlene McAllister herself walked immediately behind the flag-draped casket, flanked on either side by Secretary of Defense Admiral Douglas Campbell (ret.), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Simon Bradley, Chief of Fleet Operations, Admiral Enrico Melendez and his aide-de-camp, Commander Marilyn Fredricks. Just behind the president walked Turner’s elderly parents and his siblings, who insisted upon making the long march as well. Most members of Congress who had any intentions whatsoever of running for reelection, immediately fol
lowed behind Turner’s family.
To the president and all who walked beside her, there was an eerie, but universal feeling of an invisible presence walking beside them… a familiar ghost who should have been there, but was not. The pageantry of J.T.’s funeral gave them all a newly profound sense of poignant loss for yet another hero and friend, one who would never be afforded honors such as these — one who had not so much as a simple stone to mark his final resting place, for none could begin to know where that might be.
* * * *
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
One of the largest graveside services in living memory filled that prominent section of Arlinton National Cemetery. The tomb itself was not quite what it would eventually be… there just hadn’t been sufficient time to do everything, but they had gotten the eternal flame installed, which was jointly lit by President McAllister and J.T.’s father in a poignant moment.
Work on the outer, above-ground area of the tomb would continue long after the crowds and holovision crews left — marble slabs set and inscribed, grass and flowers planted. All would eventually culminate in a three times life-sized granite statue of J.T. in a heroic pose, donated on behalf of the people of the Imperial Germanic Empire, by Kaiser Wilhelm VII. That crowning achievement would take several months of painstaking carving and sculpting to finish. Somewhere in the teeming throng of tens of thousands of mourners, a relatively obscure member of the German Royal Family was supposedly in attendance, representing the emperor.
The folding of the flag that had covered J.T.’s casket and its presentation to his mother by the Fleet color guard was another high point in the ceremony, and holovision crews scrambled to captured every tear, many of which were actually unscripted. News producers loved capturing those moments, as they tended to add a touch of reality to the story. Of course, they certainly weren’t above staging whatever scenes were necessary, whenever reality didn’t actually measure up to the exacting standards the networks, for riveting viewers and maximizing their potential for selling dog food and laundry detergent. Edited versions of the event would later be played on all the worlds of humanity. Each would vary in length and content, depending upon local interest and the demands of advertisers.
For security and traffic control reasons, President McAllister and her entourage were the first to actually depart after the conclusion of the ceremony, after one last officially scripted moment of her again offering her personal condolences to Turner’s family, which was certain to appear at the conclusion of the piece that ran on the evening news. Congressional members, high government officials and Turner’s immediate family were next on the Waston police’s list of priorities of VIP limousines, requiring police escort to escape the crowds. It literally took hours for the throngs to finally dissipate.
Admiral Enrico Melendez and his aide-de-camp, Commander Marilyn Fredricks were among the very last mourners and cemetery workers left at the gravesite. Ensuring that all the T’s were crossed and the I’s were dotted, and that cemetery officials were on top of the final sealing of the tomb with a 20-ton marble slab which would have to be lowered in by a crane, would finally conclude their one last duty to an old friend. Even Marilyn’s eyes were finally dry — red, but dry. Her waterworks were finally as exhausted as she was.
“I still can’t quite believe that he’s gone, Admiral.”
“I know. I feel the same way,” replied Melendez softly.
“Who is that over there?” asked Marilyn, as she nodded towards a black-draped couple that were moving forward towards the casket after the crowds thinned out. “I don’t recognize that uniform.”
“German, I think, but definitely not their standard military full-dress uniform,” said Melendez. “It must be that royal family member representing the German emperor, who I heard was supposed to be here.”
“Is he carrying a baby?” Fredricks asked incredulously.
“Looks like it,” replied Melendez. “Perhaps I should go over and thank them for coming. That huge statue of J.T. the Kaiser has commissioned to stand over his tomb, is no small gift.”
As they began walking towards the couple, they saw the man pass the baby to his wife and walk forward alone, oblivious to the Fleet Marine honor guards standing stiffly at attention on each corner, to stand beside the casket and gently place a hand on the lid.
“Look at that, Admiral,” said Fredricks. “He reached out to touch J.T.’s casket… almost as if he knew him.”
As they got closer, Fredricks stopped suddenly and grabbed Melendez’ arm. “My God, Admiral, look! He looks like Bat!”
Melendez shaded his eyes with his free hand as he squinted into the sun. “Hard to tell with the beard. You’ve really been thinking a lot about Bat lately, haven’t you?”
“It’s been hard not to, Admiral. First Bat disappears, and then J.T. gets killed. They were always like Frick and Frack… our two boys. Bat should have been here with us, for J.T.’s funeral.”
“He would have, if he could have, Marilyn,” said Melendez softly. “I don’t know, it’s eerie… it’s almost like I can feel Bat here with us, sometimes. It’s like he’s here in spirit.”
“Do you think that Bat’s dead too, Admiral?” asked Fredricks softly.
Melendez patted Marilyn’s hand, resting in the crook of his elbow and sighed, “I don’t know what to think about Bat… I really don’t. I still pray that he’s alive and well somewhere, but…” Melendez didn’t finish, but just sighed resignedly.
They reached the stunning dark-haired woman holding the baby, standing well back from where her husband still tarried next to the casket. As they walked up, Melendez stopped and said, “I’d like to thank you for coming. It must be a terribly long day for you, holding onto a baby so young, all this time.”
“Oh, little Hans is no problem,” the woman replied in perfect English, with no discernible German accent. “He’s a very good baby!”
“I’m Admiral Enrico Melendez, and this is my aide-de-camp, Commander Marilyn Fredricks.” Melendez didn’t extend a hand, as the woman had both of hers occupied, enwrapping the baby.
“I am pleased to meet you both, Admiral… Commander,” replied the woman, nodding to each in turn. “I am Noreen Guderian.”
“Is that your husband over there?” Melendez asked, nodding towards the man whose hand still rested on the lid of J.T.’s casket.
“Yes, that’s my husband, Diet. Or should I say, Baron Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt.”
“I take it that you and your husband are here representing Kaiser Wilhelm?”
“Yes, Kaiser Wilhelm is my husband’s great-uncle,” Noreen said. “During dinner with the Emperor and Empress in their palace last month, the Kaiser specifically requested that Diet represent him and the German people, here at this sad event.”
“Well, we greatly appreciate your attendance, and also the generous gift of the German government of the statue the Kaiser is having commissioned for the tomb here,” replied Melendez.
“You’re very welcome,” replied the baroness. “As my husband’s great-uncle is emperor, he gets the credit publicly, of course… but it was actually Diet who commissioned the statue and is paying the bills for the project.”
“Your husband is paying to have J.T.’s statue made?” blurted Marilyn, startled.
“Yes. It was originally his idea, actually.”
“Well, the press certainly hasn’t gotten wind of that little wrinkle. I’d like to thank him for his extraordinary generosity,” replied Melendez.
“Think nothing of it, Admiral,” Noreen replied. “For someone of his wealth and station, Diet is amazingly unassuming and quite reticent to draw unnecessary attention to himself.”
“Well, we greatly appreciate his contribution to what is sure to become a national shrine,” said Melendez. “But I am somewhat curious as to why your husband would desire to do something like this, in honor of someone he didn’t even know?”
Noreen’s brows pinched together in concentrati
on, as she pondered the answer to Melendez’ question. “I’m not exactly sure, Admiral,” she said. “Diet may just think of it as his little contribution to the war effort, but subconsciously it probably has something to do with his brother.”
“His brother?” asked Melendez, puzzled.
“Yes, Diet’s brother Halbert was captured by the Raknii during their raid on Bavara, the day after Diet and I were married.”
“Your brother-in-law is currently a prisoner of war, and is still being held by the aliens?” asked an amazed Melendez.
“Yes, I really miss that rascal sometimes. We both really hope that he’s all right.”
“I wasn’t aware the aliens still held any human prisoners, Admiral,” said Fredricks.
“Neither was I,” replied her boss. “Remind me to send a message of inquiry to Admiral Kalis about this.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Fredricks replied, as she made a note to herself in her personal communicator.
* * * *
CSS Leviathan, Slithin System
December, 3868
“I think I’ve isolated the root cause of your little stomach problem, Captain,” said Doctor Nancy Wiesenthal, Ship’s Surgeon aboard the CSS Leviathan. “It turns out you don’t have a stomach virus after all.”
“Good. Whatever it is, just give me some pills that will get rid of it, so I can get back to work without wasting so much time with my head in the head, puking,” replied Captain Dorothy Fletcher-Stillman, wife and Chief-of-Staff of Admiral Benjamin Stillman, commanding officer of the Confederate 2nd Fleet. Dorothy had been complaining of nausea and vomiting for several days and her husband finally ordered her to report to sickbay, as she was just too damned stubborn to come see the sawbones on her own.
“I wish that I could, but there’s nothing technically wrong with you,” responded Wiesenthal.
“Nothing wrong with me?” Dorothy asked incredulously. “You call barfing my socks up every morning, normal?”
Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera Page 28