The traditional large cylindrical formation of robotic missiles that was so effective in assaults on fixed installations would not work for the kind of combat Saul expected to conduct. He suspected that if his mother had encountered a ground based force she could not overwhelm, she would have retreated and sought help in a more detailed manner. The urgency of her note suggested that she was either under attack or pinned down somewhere that she could not fight her way out. This implied that he would be attacking ships and not a fixed base. To successfully use his robot missiles against ships required changes in their deployment and use that necessitated reprogramming them.
Over the course of the week in transit, Saul briefed his crews on his plans and they developed contingencies in support of his ideas.
They arrived at the second marshaling point without incident and having completed the preparations. Saul deployed the Fourth in their warships, Buddy and Daisy, to meet whatever awaited them at the coordinates hidden in the note.
Aida waited for them in Alexander, her ship, with Delilah, her fire control officer. “I can’t believe it!” Aida exclaimed. “She knew. She knew within the hour when you would be here. She knew who would be the first to arrive. How did she do that?”
“Picture growing up with that for your mother,” Gabby said.
“Good point. So, if Buddy has finished interrogating Alexander and has determined that we are who we say we are, can we go brief the rest of your fleet?”
“As soon as we establish the fiber link, we’ll go.”
After the short jump to rejoin Saul’s task force, the ships were connected by fiber links and data streamed across from Alexander’s computers.
“They knew we were coming,” Aida said. “You know the way your mother likes to send probes in first and then park on an asteroid while she completes her assessment of the situation. They hid until after the probes had passed through and reported that the system was clean. As soon as we settled on the asteroid, the enemy ships appeared out of nowhere. We were surrounded. Elizabeth monitored their patrol pattern and determined that there would be a tiny gap between their patrols and the asteroids that we could get one ship through. I took the note and we left. It was one of the scariest rides I’ve ever done. Here we are. Now what do we do?”
“Have they made any move to attack the Queen Elizabeth?”
“No.”
Saul swore under his breath. “It’s a diversion.” He swore again. “It worked. The real target is headquarters. Peter, get a courier off to alert them to an attack. There’s not much we can do for them from here. We might as well clean up this mess and go home as fast as we can.”
Unlike Saul’s normal preference for smaller targeted strikes, he elected to engage all his robotic missiles at the same time. They would be deployed so they could approach from six different directions pinning the enemy inside their assault. Saul estimated that this should eliminate half to two thirds of the enemy ships in the first volley. Then, on a common command, everything else would attack from as many different directions as possible. As soon as they had completed, Saul would call retreat. Those ships that were capable of returning to headquarters would immediately depart at maximum speed. The rest would meet Peter who would ferry them home.
What developed could best be described as a colossal game of “chicken” with space ships. None of the enemy ships made any attempt to engage the robots. They waited as long as they could and sidestepped out of the way. In the process, they left a hole in the center of their formation big enough for the Queen Elizabeth to escape through if they had been ready.
Saul watched the flow of military hardware and cursed. “They have no intention of engaging us! They’re stalling!”
Saul’s face reddened in anger. None of the enemy ships had been fired on let alone destroyed. Saul stared at his displays in fury.
Shifting to Hebrew to slow interception of his commands, Saul called, “Rebecca! Short jump to aft of Elizabeth’s center axis and turn on your distress beacon!”
“Aye, Captain!”
Rebecca’s ship whisked out of sight and reappeared on the other side of the asteroid from where the Queen Elizabeth was pinned down.
“Peter! Command the drones to home on Rebecca’s distress beacon! Set them for collision avoidance!”
“Aye, Captain,” Peter responded.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Fiona demanded.
“Sylvia! Short jump to one light minute in front of Elizabeth. Everyone else get out of here! Go to headquarters as fast as you can. Be prepared to engage immediately. Get out of here! Go, now!” Sylvia’s ship appeared in front of Elizabeth out of range of the enemy ships that were still dodging the robot missiles which were diverting to converge on Rebecca’s ship.
Saul shouted, “On my mark, Rebecca turn off your beacon and hyper out. Go home as fast as you can. Sylvia, on the same mark turn your distress beacon on. Peter, on the same mark, command the robots to home in on Sylvia’s distress beacon!”
The robots had created a roughly cylindrical formation when Saul called, “Stand by! Ready! Three! Two! One! Mark!” Rebecca’s ship disappeared into hyper drive. The robots described a graceful arc and came around to describe a cone which would pass around the asteroid and come to a point where Sylvia sat squawking like a wounded duck.
“Peter! Set the robots for detonation on proximity!”
“Roger that!”
“Elizabeth! Prepare to jump! As soon as you see a clear space, jump home as fast as you can!”
“Roger that!”
The cone shaped formation blasted its way through the asteroid field spreading debris in its wake. The robots had drawn the enemy ships far enough from Elizabeth that none of them could get a good shot at her. Shielded from the sides by the advancing robots and from the front by the battleship module’s heavy armor, Elizabeth lifted off the asteroid careful to stay in the center of the robot formation. As soon as there was a clear escape path, Elizabeth kicked in her hyper drive and disappeared. Sylvia jumped in barely enough time to be out of Elizabeth’s way.
“Peter! Set the robots for heat seeking and get out of here!” Peter vanished into hyper drive.
Fiona looked across to her husband. Sweat stood out on his face. They were alone and there were a whole lot of enemy ships still out there.
“None of those ships are hyper capable. There’s a tender around here somewhere. We need to find it and kill it.”
“What about headquarters?”
“We need to finish this first.”
None of the enemy ships made any attempt to approach within missile range of Saul’s ship. The Convoy escort’s lethal nature had been demonstrated often enough that they knew the first few waves of attackers facing that ship would die and apparently none of them wanted to lead the charge. The robot drones, which were still patrolling, managed to damage one of the enemy warships. In his haste to retreat to safety, he showed Saul where the tender was. It was a fatal mistake. Saul fired a missile volley which was probably double what it needed to be and ripped the tender in half. Since none of the ships that had penned down the Queen Elizabeth were hyper capable and they could not enter the planet’s atmosphere without burning up, their pilots were condemned to a slow death in their ships. The planet’s defense system might launch a rescue mission, but that was doubtful.
When they were out of range of the remaining enemy ships, Fiona turned to Saul and said, “Well, that was fun.” The Constant News Channel reporter who had witnessed the entire conflict from the flight engineer’s seat behind them on the flight deck shrieked, “You call that fun?” Saul and Fiona turned to look at her having forgotten entirely that she was there. They laughed, their tension broken.
“Yeah, it was,” Saul said. “That’s our idea of a good time.”
“You folks are crazy.”
“Only a little.”
“We need to be going. We have another battle to win.”
CHANGE OF COMMAND - CHAPTER TEN
The initial concept of the siege was flawed to begin with. Space stations, especially stations as large as this one, tended to be self-sufficient and surrounding them would not create the same kind of hardship that surrounding a medieval castle might have caused.
The second big mistake had to do with timing. The siege was initiated with three large convoys in port. Each of these convoys carried three convoy escort ships like the one Saul and Warren flew. Two more were in port awaiting redeployment and one was almost ready to come out from the service bay. Twelve convoy escorts could punch a huge hole in an attacking force.
The third big mistake they made was to not calculate on the speed with which the retired pilots could restart ships in the bone yard. Had they attacked right away, the assault force might have taken the station. With each passing day, the likelihood of success decreased and the cost, even if they did succeed, increased.
The siblings met daily as they wrestled with their plans. Zelda argued vehemently that they should surrender. The mission commander’s communiques had stated plainly that none of them would be hurt. They merely wanted to take control of the station and break Stellar’s monopoly on freight. Timothy, on the other hand, would have none of it. He was angry that Saul and Fiona had left them defenseless, but even without them he was determined to fight. As Janice wrestled with contingency planning she realized that there was no safe place for non-combatants to go. There was no refuge. If the station were sacked like the castles of old, a lot of innocent people would die horrific deaths.
None of the other siblings believed Zelda’s assurances that they would be left unharmed. For hours, the siblings met and squabbled while the station’s staff did what it had to do for the safety of the station and its occupants. At the end of the fourth day, Tab sought out Timothy. She had the evidence she needed and it pointed to Zelda.
Timothy did not get the chance to act on that evidence because the assault started. The in-system interceptors saw combat first, drew first blood and suffered the first casualties. The convoy escorts moved out in a single group and engaged the advancing formation. Other ships stationed in the yard joined the battle. Cruisers and destroyers met the enemy head on. Marginally functional old security vessels attacked with merely their lasers if that was all they had.
The battle was barely six hours old when the first of Saul’s ships returned. Immediately assessing the shape of the battle, they targeted the carriers and mother ships that had transported the attackers. What had been a relatively even conflict balancing the attackers’ greater numbers against the defenders’ better training and equipment quickly turned into a blood bath with the return of Saul’s forces.
The Queen Elizabeth was the last to arrive. She deployed all her ships including the med-evac ships with their puny defensive lasers. Esther developed a technique whereby using her steering jets she could back up on an escape pod and pull it into the med ship’s bay. The other med ship pilots quickly copied the technique and many pilots that would have been lost were rescued.
The battle raged for another twelve hours before all the attackers had been destroyed. The battle had been costly for the defenders. Harold’s people were assessing the damage when Saul and the remains of his group docked. While neither Saul nor the Fourth had lost any of their direct members, all of the ships had been hit and suffered damage. The first line interceptors were gone. Two destroyers, a cruiser and a P I ship had been lost. Two of Elizabeth’s four med ships had been destroyed. Two picket ship tenders were damaged beyond repair. Half of the picket ships would need to be replaced. Five fixed base missile batteries had been destroyed.
The good news was that except for the crews in the missile batteries, no personnel on the station itself had been injured although the station had taken some minor damage. While it was small comfort to the families of the flight crews that died, the battle damage was significantly less than it might have been.
CHANGE OF COMMAND - CHAPTER ELEVEN
NONE OF THE SIBLINGS REMEMBERED being summoned although they all knew that at 0900 the morning following the battle they needed to gather in their conference room. They were a dazed and shaken group when they collected themselves in their private sanctuary. Someone had taken the foresight to provide them breakfast on a temporary table set in front of the wall of ship models. They milled in small groups as was their custom discussing their impressions of the disaster that had shaken them to their roots.
Saul was pouring himself a second cup of coffee when Harold rested his hand on his shoulder. Saul turned to face him.
“Saul, the last few weeks have been something of a shock for us,” Harold admitted softly.
“Myself included,” Saul admitted.
“Until we were attacked, I often complained about the expenditures we devoted to security and our military. I understand them now. I cannot promise you I will be your friend, but I can promise you I will not be your enemy,” Harold said.
“Harold, we need the freedom to agree or disagree as our consciences dictate. I do not ask you to be my friend. I only ask that you listen to what I say with an open mind.”
“That I can promise. I do need to ask you a small favor.”
“Certainly.”
“Do you think I can use the Queen Elizabeth’s galley for an engagement party?”
“I don’t see why not. Who’s the lucky lady?”
“I can’t tell. I haven’t asked her yet.” Harold blushed.
Laughing, Saul slapped Harold on the shoulder almost spilling his coffee. “Best of luck!”
The siblings took their places around the table. Fiona noticed that Zelda was missing. Artemus’ empty chair she understood, but she did not know why Zelda would be absent. She quietly asked Jared seated next to her, “Where’s Zelda?”
Jared’s face turned cold. “She won’t be back. We don’t like traitors. We sent her where she can do no harm. Ask your Tab for the details.”
Harold called the meeting to order. “Brothers and sisters, we have suffered great losses, but if we are to keep this enterprise alive we must pull together and repair the damage. This morning’s meeting will be devoted to damage assessment and the establishment of priorities for repair. I have asked the heads of the relevant departments to prepare reports for our action. As the eldest, tradition would indicate that I should move into the chair until recently occupied by Artemus. With all due respect to one of our sister’s vocal opinions to the contrary, I do not feel that I have the skills or the personality for the job. Therefore I would like to open the floor for discussion on the subject of a new leader. Fiona, you are the only one I have not talked with about this. What is your opinion?”
“Wow, put me on the spot or what? Harold, while I agree with our unnamed sister that you could do the job, and do it well, I respect your decision that you do not want it. As I look around the table, two primary candidates come to mind, Jared and Timothy. I would be willing to follow either of you should you be chosen.”
Harold smiled. “That is the consensus. With the exception of Jared, who would rather Timothy took the job and Timothy who steadfastly insists that I take it, everyone has said that they would support either brother. We need a way to decide that will leave us unified and not divided.”
“It’s more complex than that,” Jared said. “Not only do we need to choose a leader, but we must divide responsibilities to pick up those no longer covered by our missing kin. I have prepared an org chart that divides responsibilities in an equitable fashion b
ased on our relative skills.”
The chart Jared passed around showed Timothy in the chairman’s seat.
The room fell silent as the siblings worked through the implications of the changes. Where Intelligence and police functions had previously been assigned to Zelda, they were now combined with the military and security functions under Fiona. Saul reported to Fiona. Jared had taken mobile capital projects and had given Timothy fixed base capital projects. Kevin was to assume system wide safety. Janice and Geraldine would divide human resources, training and regulatory compliance. Barbara was specifically tasked with new ship design and emergent technologies.
The plan was accepted with minor changes. Janice and Geraldine swapped a few lower level departments as did Kevin and Barbara. Within an hour of the start of the meeting, the job descriptions had been changed and a general memo had been issued to department heads. The transfer of power had been smooth and without rancor.
Compensation for the survivors of the personnel killed in the battle was quickly arranged. Internment and memorial plans were delegated to a committee including the station’s clergy, human resources staff members and security service personnel. The first damage report focused on a detailed explanation of the damage to the station itself. Funding was authorized and personnel assigned to begin the repairs. The meeting broke for lunch with the damage to the shipping fleet to be the next item on the agenda.
Fiona and Saul reviewed their own damage reports over lunch and debated as to the best plan for getting the fleet back up to strength as quickly as possible.
When they returned from lunch, Harold was late. That was unlike him. He was often the first to arrive. When he did return to the meeting Tab was with him. Fiona looked at Saul who broke out in a huge grin and quickly covered his mouth so as to not spoil the surprise.
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