“War paint?” she wondered aloud as she began to scroll through the rest of the multispectral imagery. In them she could see other details of the ship that began to make it more clear what its purpose was. It had nearly three times the number of maneuvering jets as the Icarus, and her analysts were confident that most of the interior was dedicated to power generation and weaponry with a much smaller crew than a Terran vessel of similar size.
“It’s more like one of Colonel Blake’s gunboats than a starship,” she mused, tapping the desk with a forefinger. "Or at least what what the Vruahn had built that was supposed to be Colonel Blake."
She then went through all of the radar data from the engagement and saw that the ship was impressively maneuverable and had noteworthy acceleration. From the limited data they had from the encounter Celesta was convinced the ship likely had a few nasty surprises left for them, but she’d be ready for it the next time around. The thought made her glance up at the wall display in her office that was showing the master mission clock and saw that they were still just over four days from their destination and they had no idea what they might find when they transitioned in.
“Come in,” President Wellington said, not bothering to get up as everyone filed into his office. The President was pallid and somewhat disheveled-looking even though it was barely early afternoon. He’d been recently complaining of stomach pains and those that knew him best were becoming increasingly concerned for his health. Augustus Wellington hadn’t been an especially healthy man when he took office, known for his militant distaste for physical activity and a lifestyle of excess, but it had recently taken a turn to the point that it was considered a threat to the security of the Federation. The fledgling government barely had its legs under it and losing the man whose iron will had kept it together in the early days would be a devastating blow.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Wellington went on, as if any of them had any choice in the matter.
“Of course, Mr. President,” CIS Director Sala said, an oily smile pasted onto his face as he watched Wellington haul his bulk out of the chair and walk to the side bar in obvious discomfort.
“I want to make sure we’re all on the same page so I called this informal briefing session,” Wellington said as he began pouring Scotch into a glass, not offering anything to his subordinates. “Well … let me clarify that. I want you to brief each other and I’ll just be the person calling out topics. This territorial pissing contest between CENTCOM and CIS is over. We have no time for this sort of petty bullshit. Now, who wants to go first?”
“Our envoy was turned back at the border by ESA frigates before they were even allowed to deliver their message.” Sala wasted no time diving into his brief. “They’re still destroying our com drones when they enter a system and they’ve been quite successful in reprogramming all the existing platforms to no longer take message forwarding requests. Our Tsuyo reps say that even the failsafes have been eliminated. In other words, we’re completely locked out of the ESA’s com network.”
The ESA, or Eastern Star Alliance, was the Asianic Union and Warsaw Alliance enclaves from the old Terran Confederacy along with roughly half of the New European Commonwealth worlds that had broken off and formed their own government. In the aftermath of the Phage War and the restructuring after the loss of the capital world of Haven, many of the old resentments bubbled to the surface and before it could be stopped borders had been drawn up, threats had been made, and now the ESA and the Terran Federation existed in an uneasy standoff while the latter was dragged into a war with a new alien species.
“Did they open fire on the delegation?” Admiral Marcum asked. The CENTCOM Chief of Staff was wearing a civilian suit as per the request of the President. Wellington wanted to impress upon the admiral that he was to no longer be meddling in Fleet operations or he would be replaced.
“Not this time,” Sala deadpanned. “I suppose we could see that as a marginal improvement in relations.”
“This isn’t funny, goddamnit!” Wellington snapped. “Do I need to remind you that we’re critically short of fissile material right now? We lost a major weapons depot and we have no short-term solution to replace those warheads! Will you still be so fucking funny when the Darshik are knocking down Fed worlds at will?”
“My apologies, Mr. President,” Sala said, seeming to be genuinely contrite. “The levity was inappropriate for the moment.”
“Just get on with it,” Wellington waved him off.
“That’s really all I have, sir,” Sala said. “At least on that matter. We’ve tried every way we know of to get the ESA to at least talk to us, but they refuse to engage. We do have assets in their space keeping an eye on things, but that’s all just a lot of technical detail that’s in one of the briefs to be sent out this coming week.”
“Admiral? Good news?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. President.” Marcum cleared his throat. “As you previously mentioned, the loss of the Bespitd Depot was a devastating hit to Fleet’s readiness. We have reserves and the munitions manufacturers are working through the rest of the raw material they have, but—”
“Quick answer, Admiral,” Wellington interjected. “How bad is it?”
“Ships leaving New Sierra right now are carrying a half-load complement of Shrike ship-to-ship missiles,” Marcum said bluntly. “Within the next four weeks of operations we’ll be pulling missiles off of reserve fleet ships to make sure the line can hold.”
“That’s much worse than the projections I was given last time I asked,” Wellington said accusingly.
“We had to revise downward, sir,” Marcum said. “First and Fourth Fleets had apparently been giving inaccurate numbers on their existing munition stores when the Shrikes first went into service.”
“Why the hell would they lie about having more missiles than they really had?” Sala asked.
“Shrikes are very expensive and each numbered fleet is responsible for its own operating budget,” Marcum said. “When the directive came out to replace older missiles with the new ship busters we gave an exception for ships still carrying the older Avengers.”
“And they claimed far more Avengers than they actually had to avoid having to buy Shrikes?” Wellington rolled his eyes. “You’d think fighting a war that could have resulted in the extermination of our species would have knocked that sort of nonsense off.”
“That’s about the long and short of it.” Marcum shifted uncomfortably. “They apparently wanted to spread the expense of the refit across the next few years. Anyway … the people involved are being reprimanded, but it doesn’t change the fact we have far fewer nukes than originally estimated.”
“What’s the status of our latest expedition to free the Juwel System?” Wellington asked.
“As you may remember we re-tasked a group of ships from the 508th Strategic Defense Squadron to replace Captain Wright’s taskforce,” Marcum said, waiting for Wellington to nod that he did. “Captain Rawls was held up by a maintenance issue and his ships didn’t depart the DeLonges System until eight days after they were scheduled to. Unfortunately the Aludra Star had moved out on her own and departed on time before Rawls could let Wolfe know they were aborting—”
“Wait, so the 508th left anyway?” Sala frowned. “And Wolfe took a single assault carrier out to Juwel alone?”
“Yes,” Marcum said slowly. “Apparently there was some disagreement between Wolfe and Rawls about how to run the blockade and the Aludra Star moved out of formation and transitioned out of the system without word to Rawls … whom I had assumed to be the overall mission commander.”
He braced for the explosion from the President he knew was coming. Jackson Wolfe, long a thorn in Marcum’s side, had long been favored by Wellington. More to the point, Wolfe’s legend was useful to the old fox as a political tool as long as he could trot the notorious starship captain out to appease his constituents.
Although he hadn’t been technically ordered not to leave nor even
officially had his ship attached to the 508th, he saw it as yet another instance of Wolfe just doing whatever the hell he wanted with Fleet equipment and personnel. This time it would likely end much as it had with his last two commands: destroyed ships and lives lost. It was the reason Marcum hated the hero culture that permeated Fleet and was perpetuated by politicians and a media hungry for stories to sell an imaginative public.
Nobody could deny the sacrifices and bravery of Jackson Wolfe during the Phage War campaigns, but he’d succeeded as much on dumb luck as from any innate ability to command a starship. While she was still on his personal shit list for the stunt she’d pulled over New Sierra, Marcum much preferred to have Celesta Wright on the bridge in a crisis. She was more steady, a team player, and in Marcum’s opinion a better shipmaster. But Wright was only a hero from the war, not the hero and so Marcum found himself saddled once again with Wolfe and again left holding the bag when the captain felt he knew better than everyone else around him.
“So that means the Aludra Star and her entire complement of Marines is likely lost as well as one of our more important ship commanders,” Wellington said slowly, taking a long drink and setting the glass down on the desk with a thud. “What was the nature of Rawls’s technical trouble and did it affect all of his ships?”
Marcum thought very hard before answering, knowing that the President was accusing one of his captains of sandbagging in a not so subtle way. It infuriated him to no end, but it would do him no good to show it.
“I don’t have the details with me, sir,” he said diplomatically. “I’ll have it included in your morning brief material.”
“See that you do,” the President said. “So … now that we know the Juwel System is likely going to be lost and we have no ability to save it, and we know that the ESA will not be coming to our aid, what do we have in the way of contingency plans for when the Darshik decide to begin pushing further into Terran space?”
For the next four and half hours the CIS Director and CENTCOM Chief of Staff brainstormed with the President to see what resources could be pooled to shore up weak points and, depressingly, which systems would have to be sacrificed to keep the core infrastructure safe. By the end of the unscheduled meeting Marcum began to fully realize just how thin the thread was they hung by. The Darshik didn’t seem especially powerful from what they’d shown so far, but they’d hit humanity right at the worst time.
By the time he was walking out of the office for his ground car he had an irrational surge of hope that Wolfe might pull another miracle out of his ass and save them all. The thought was dismissed as quickly as it popped into his sleep-deprived mind. Lucky though the captain was, a single, borderline obsolete assault carrier wasn’t going to turn the tide of the war in their favor.
12
“Tango One is listing and—secondary explosions detected,” Commander Simmons said. “CIC is reporting that the target is still intact but is going into an uncontrolled tumble. It looks like our Shrike may have taken out their drive section.”
“Let’s go ahead and take advantage of the confusion that’s certainly taking place on that bridge,” Jackson leaned forward. “Hit it with two Hornets; fire them from the aft tubes.”
“Firing solution locked in … firing,” Simmons said. “Missiles away.”
“Mr. Epsen?” Jackson said loudly.
“Two more minutes, sir!”
“We don’t have two more minutes, Lieutenant,” Jackson said. “Give me the odds that there are more Darshik ships sitting on the other side of the planet.”
“It’s just … I … stand by,” Epsen said, his voice cracking. “One of the missiles didn’t properly classify targets … there’s either three more, one more besides the two, or there was only one and it kept counting it over and over based on what the other Shrike was telling it.”
“So two to one odds that we have more ships sitting on the other side,” Simmons said quietly.
“OPS, give me an abort vector. Take us away at as steep an angle as you can and get us into the outer system,” Jackson said in disgust. “We can’t risk it this close if there’s even one more. Helm, all ahead flank.”
“All engines ahead flank, aye.”
“Coms, tell Flight OPS to stand down and get the crews out of the shuttles and secured,” Jackson said. “We’re committed to having to come around again. Once you do that send an encrypted burst transmission to the surface telling Colonel Rucker we’ll be at least another five days from orbit by the time we get turned around.”
“Aye, sir,” Epsen said.
“OPS, drop a drone and have it sit out in high geostationary orbit over the last known location of the Marine detachment,” Jackson said as the ship really began to shake and rumble under full power. “Program it as a com relay between us and them, at an altitude of sixty thousand kilometers plus. Hopefully it’ll go unnoticed and the Darshik won’t swat it down.”
“Aye, sir. Coordinating with Flight OPS now,” Dole said.
The Star didn’t carry any of the wondrous Jacobson drones that Jackson had taken for granted when he was commanding a destroyer, but she did have a small hangar with some decently advanced com and recon drones. They were packed with the latest and greatest hardware since the Star was a recently commissioned ship, but they weren’t mission scalable like the Jacobsons. The drone he was dropping had an impressive suite of com gear, but its optics were not going to be up to the task of any detailed reconnaissance of the surface from the altitude they would have it parked at.
He watched his ship’s indicated relative velocity creep up, the delta V not all that impressive considering the harsh shaking and discernible engine noise as the assault carrier tried to haul its bulk away from the green planet. With the launch bays stuffed with fully loaded shuttles she had a lot of inertia to fight when trying to veer off while so close to something as big as Juwel. His worry was that she didn’t have anything left to give; if there were even two more cruisers sitting in the shadow of Juwel which moved to pursue they’d be in real trouble.
“We’ve lost telemetry from both Shrikes,” Simmons reported. “We’re still not far enough around the planet to know if they were good hits or not.”
“OPS, make sure CIC is focused on getting us a look on the other side of Juwel when we go by,” Jackson said as he looked at the projected flightpath up on the main display. The Star had her prow pointed away from the planet at nearly eighty degrees and was thrusting at full power, but their velocity had still been so high, even after the emergency braking maneuver, that they were going to sail past Juwel at speed, showing their aft quadrant to anyone waiting to take a shot.
“We have debris of sufficient mass to account for two Darshik cruisers, Captain,” Simmons reported. “There are two ships remaining; neither are maneuvering to pursue. In fact, neither has even come about to face us.”
“Interesting,” Jackson frowned. “So they’re not pursuing nor are they fleeing. Are they active?”
“Thermals indicate both have power but neither has its main engines running.”
“Record it for later analysis,” Jackson said. “How does our flight path look on the way out?”
“The ships coming in from the jump points are still coming but have ceased acceleration,” Simmons said. “They don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get down here.”
“How long until we get past the fifth planet?” Jackson asked, checking their flightpath again from his own terminal.
“Seventeen hours under current acceleration,” Dole said almost apologetically.
“Helm, all ahead emergency,” Jackson ordered. “I want to get us at least flying in the right direction while the Darshik picket ships are still so far out. The sooner we can shut down active sensors and the mains the sooner we can begin to plan our return trip to Juwel.”
“Sir, CIC is examining the radar returns from the outer system,” Lieutenant Epsen spoke up from the com station. “They’re saying preliminary scans of the area around
the DeLonges jump point indicate the 508th was not destroyed there.”
“They should be here by now,” Simmons said.
“Yes they should, Commander,” Jackson agreed. “So they’re either in the system and hiding, were destroyed and we aren’t able to pick them out of the other debris at this distance, or they didn’t leave the DeLonges System when they were supposed to.”
The bridge fell quiet as the crew went about their tasks and Jackson pulled whatever information he needed directly from the CIC’s threat assessment rather than bother his tactical officer for it. The ships left around Juwel by the enemy appeared to be damaged according to the high-resolution radar scans they were able to take on the flyby of the planet. That told him that the blockade wasn’t just a thrashing machine chewing up Terran ships as they popped out of warp; the Fleet taskforces were still able to cause damage before being overwhelmed. Since there were still many ships patrolling the outer system Jackson had to assume the Darshik were replenishing their forces after each engagement. Unfortunately that showed a firm commitment by them to maintain their hold on the system.
The only roadblock in his line of reasoning was that if the Darshik were moving in fresh starships, why hadn’t they bolstered their ground invasion forces? His brief conversation with the Marine commander on the surface, a Colonel Rucker, indicated the Darshik troops were just as underequipped as his people and they weren’t seeing them in overwhelming numbers. In fact, they appeared to be clustered just outside their first and only landing area and moving slowly towards the capital city of Neuberlin. It wasn’t exactly overwhelming force when you’ve had complete orbital superiority for months. Why no more troops? Why no heavy equipment or artillery? It sure as hell wouldn’t be how he’d run an invasion and he was just a lowly ship captain.
Iron & Blood: Book Two of The Expansion Wars Trilogy Page 11