by Rob Buckman
“One of your ex-tankers.”
“It figures.” Scott chuckled. “They’ve been moaning about having nothing to do, and can’t get into space since they got their new tanks. Maybe they’ll quit complaining now. By the way, make sure he gets a suitable reward.”
“It’s a simple idea really, if you think about it. You take an MBT, a main battle tank, and put it into space.”
“That’s the part that sounds crazy to me.”
“Not if you look at it in the right perspective. This tank would be about the size of a corvette. Think of it as a very heavy-duty fighter.” Just then, his holographic comm unit beeped, and answering the call, Kat’s grinning face popped up on the screen.
“I take it, that’s where Kat comes in?” he said, looking over at her holo.
Kat grinned back, cradling their son in her arms. “What struck me was the vulnerability of our fighters to heavy weapons fire.” She wiped baby milk from around the infant’s mouth. “Our fighters are really great for transatmospheric work and taking on their fighters, but for deep space combat missions, they have their limitations.”
“Fuel, ammo, and life support being three of them,” Karl added.
“So, we turn a main battle tank into this gunship?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Karl said. “With a three-man crew, a pilot, gunner, and engineer, that’s all she would need.”
“And armaments?” Scott looked at Devon.
“The guns are particle beam and rail launchers with the capacity to carry external ordnance and extended life-support packs.”
Scott pondered the thought of a twin-gunned tank the size of a corvette, most of its mass made up of armor. In concept the idea looked promising. The sketch was crude and it looked as if someone had taken two turtle shells and stuck them together, with twin snouts sticking out the front.
“Compared to a regular fighter, what’s the increase in firepower?”
“About a thousand percent. The two half shells are fifty-feet-thick of super-compressed laminated ceramic and titanium armor plate, which could absorb several hits from that main energy weapon the aliens use. That’s even without the added protection of the shields. Surround that with a shield that wouldn’t be out of place on a destroyer, and a main gun from a cruiser, and you’ve got one hell of a fighting machine. With the addition of external missile racks and the speed of a fighter, you have one hell of a hard target to take out.”
“Also,” Kat said, “you have to think about the vulnerability of our present fighters. They can go one-on-one with the alien fighters and fighter bombers, but going up against even something as small as a frigate, and they come up short.”
It was a hell of a crazy idea, Scott thought, imagining being able to deploy several squadrons of these against the lizards. If they were as maneuverable as Devon said, and he doubted he exaggerated, it would be like dropping a school of hungry sharks into a pool full of whales. From what Devon was saying, they’d be cheap and easy to build, and the more Scott thought the more he liked the idea, seeing multiple scenarios where they could tip the balance in Earth’s favor. It also gave him pause to think about size. Was it necessary to build battleships, or dreadnoughts? They made wonderful targets for the enemy to shoot at, and costly in terms of material and manpower. He could see the need for carriers, and their versatility, but that was a given. He had a sudden vision of a whole fleet of carriers full of gunships as well as fighter escorts pouring into battle and the carriers withdrawing to a safe distance out of harm’s way. He imagined what it would be like for the enemy commander suddenly faced with thousands of gunships … all hard to hit, even harder to kill, and as deadly as hell.
They could saturate the alien point defense system with missiles, and come in behind them to take out their shields and guns. The question remained if they could take out a capital ship, as aircraft had on Earth during the last major war. It was an idea worth working on. With the addition of those two items, if they could get them deployed in time, he’d have an adequate defense for Earth, no matter what-size fleet the lizards put through the warp point. The question was, would it be sufficient to take the fight to their enemy’s sphere of influence? He doubted this. His first priority was the defense of Earth, though. Taking the fight to the enemy would come later, when he felt they had enough information, and more than one fleet to do it.
“How are ground defense preparations progressing?” He looked at Brock, seeing him grimace.
“In some places great, in others shitty … excuse me, Kat,” Brock grinned.
“Don’t worry, Gunny, one way or another, he’s going to learn all those words sooner or later hanging around a bunch of marines.” She shot Scott a look.
“What?” Scott asked defensively. “I didn’t say a word.”
“Not yet, but you will,” Kat sniffed, looking haughty. We’ll talk about the language after your daughter arrives.” She smiled.
“What … daughter …” That stopped him in his tracks, and he had to think for a minute. “Oh … you mean the one …” He’d almost forgotten about the little embryo Doc Chase had in stasis.
“Yes, that one.” Kat gave him a look that said it might be better for his future health if he didn’t argue about it.
“So much for the presumption of innocence,” Karl muttered into his coffee cup. That brought a laugh.
“That’s goes for you too, Karl.” Karl ducked as if to avoid a shot, and everyone laughed.
“Let’s get back to business, shall we?” Brock grumbled, but smiled as he said it. “We have good defenses here, England, and Japan, but we get an argument the moment we try to put anything on the mainland.” He grimaced again. “Those stupid people just don’t, or won’t understand.”
“The problem is, they think the defense shield will protect them.”
“Even after it was demonstrated last time that the aliens figured out they could get under them by coming in low and slow?” Scott snorted.
“Their answer to that is to pour more power into the shield,” Karl added.
“Christ on a crutch! That still won’t work. The ground interference drains it as fast as they pour it in and leaves a weak spot,” Scott exclaimed. “Didn’t we tell them about that?”
Brock sighed. “We did, repeatedly, but try to explain it to those dip-shit council members, or so-called city fathers. They think it’s a cure-all for defending their cities.”
“So where do we stand?”
“We have an in-depth ground defense around all major installations, plus a rapid reaction force on stand-by to counter any major incursion.”
“Andy has sufficient air defense elements to provide air cover where needed, backed up with multiple SAM and AA batteries, so we should be able to handle any major air-and-ground offensive.”
“I hope so. I have the feeling the lizards will come loaded for bear the next time.”
“I don’t know what more we can do at this time, except maybe more tanks and MRLs deployed, and that’s more a question of production. Training is going well, especially now that we have a ready source of manpower from the detention centers.”
“What percentage are we getting?” Scott asked.
“Forty-five to fifty percent.”
“Not bad, but how many of them are usable?”
“That’s a question we don’t know the answer to yet. A few drop out during basic training, but I suspect we’ll lose a lot more potential combat troops once we go to the second phase and they see the videos of actual combat.”
“Yeah. I was a bit disappointed with our first intake. I didn’t expect to lose that many.”
“The ones who didn’t, or couldn’t fight, did fill in a lot of billets, and we still have places where we can use people, but I need combat troops!” Brock sounded exasperated. “You guys keep bleeding off people to man your ships, damn it.” Scott nodded. Not that he was in charge of work-force assignment anymore: that was now up to the new Bureau of Personnel.
Scott sat back, looking pensive. “It’s a question of balance. We need an adequate space force, since that’s where the major engagements will take place, but we can’t overlook the possibility that these ass … aliens,” he corrected, glancing at Kat, “won’t send a task force to put boots on the ground.”
“Boots on the ground we can handle, it’s the orbital manufacturing that has me worried. If we lose those, or they sustain major damage … we’re screwed,” Brock murmured, pulling his earlobe.
“That’s my job to make sure they don’t,” Scott replied.
“But do you have sufficient ships to do that, Scott?” Kat asked.
They discussed the question of deployment, and they tossed it back and forth, looking at available ships. They quickly concluded they had sufficient forces now to cover both warp points. The old New Zealand and her escorts could cover the south warp point, while he concentrated his main battle fleet between Earth and the north point. So far, they’d only seen one large fleet with capital ships come through the east warp point, for whatever reason, so the old NZ should be able to handle anything that came at her from that direction … or fall back to Earth and act as a backstop against any major thrust in that direction, if it turned out to be a large battle fleet. With the technical advancement of the holographic equipment, he could now station his fleet in the best position to protect all his assets, without the need to actually play war games with the fleet and have them scattered all over the place. This would cut down on the service time on the main components, and other than space trials and run-up tests, he’d have everything in place for the next incursion. With the advantage of the ring gates, he could rotate his personnel on a daily basis. That made a lot of “married” men and women happy, especially his wife. His team worked out and tested the optimum time it took to get all crewmembers from a complete stand-down to full battle stations. It took time, but in the end, he was satisfied with the results. Many people besides Scott were doing some hard thinking, and the training center and the library had a sudden rush of requests for history books and chips.
In answer to the flood of ideas flowing in, Brock suggested placing boxes at strategic locations and arranging for one of the library staff to collect and correlate the mounting avalanche of data chips and hand-drawn sketches that came in. He grouched about this to Pam, who clucked sympathetically as she cuddled up to him. She then put some of the kids to work, sorting and cataloging the data on a secure terminal in her den. Brock looked on in amazement as the kids seem to zip through the pile, shouting to one another and tossing data chips across the room to each other. These were downloaded into the machine and cross-indexed. Sketches were scanned and entered before ending up in the flash disposal unit, even if they were redundant ideas. Nothing was lost or thrown away before someone had looked at it, and only then did they reformat the empty chip to eliminate the possibility of someone stealing and copying the information. Brock was a little dubious about all this activity, until he used a search program one of the children had written, and found it easy to locate any item stored in the crystal chip. Once a week he took the chip to each department and got them to look at the ideas. The viewer would laugh at some, purse their lips and look thoughtful at others. The ideas ranged from the impossible to the obscure, and everything in between, but even those showed that people were thinking.
On several occasions, Karl, Devon, or Jeff or one of his R&D team would take off to the beach for a long think, sometimes coming up with a better way of doing something, or a radical new design. One of these passed through Devon, then Karl, and finally to Scott, which got him thinking.
“About that, Jeff. Can you set up an experiment on say, Pluto for me to test this?”
“No problem, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to bury a power plant in the surface, then take our best shield generators, a lot of them, and build the best shield defense you can with them. Overlap them. Pile them on top of each other if you can.”
“And?” Karl asked, looking at Scott warily.
“Then I’m going to take the most powerful main armament we have and try to incinerate it.” Everyone looked at him a moment, letting the idea sink in.
“You can just bet the aliens are thinking stronger shields,” he explained. “So we had better come up with a weapon that can blast, cut, slice, or whatever, its way through them, or we’re screwed.”
“Good point, Scott,” Jeff said. “It will also help us build better weapons.”
“Right, that’s the idea, one feeding off the other. Each time I fail to penetrate, it’s one for you. When I do, it means you’ll have to rethink your shield technology and try to stop me again. If I don’t get through, then R&D will have to go to work making me a stronger or better weapon.”
“Good point,” Karl acknowledged, “but it means I’ll have to set up a different division. One to work on the shield, the other to work on the weapons to defeat … destroy it.”
“Good idea, make it a contest. The one thing that beat the Germans and the Russians was the R&D in the West. They didn’t stop when they got something new and working, as did the Germans with their fighters. They just went ahead and built something better, building on the data from the last.” They all nodded, seeing the value of an ongoing R&D weapons program and testing.
“We couldn’t afford to wait and test any new weapons on the lizards like we’ve been doing, when they arrived. We have to know they work, and work well, before that happens.”
Scott knew they were guilty of that now, desperately trying anything in the hope that something would work, and so far, they’d been lucky. That couldn’t go on. The next time the lizards arrived, they had to have something in place they knew would work, and keep on working, such as the circuit board-and-fuse problem in the point defense system. They wouldn’t get a second chance … assuming the lizards were at least as smart as they were, it was a sure bet they were looking at their weapon systems and thinking of ways to improve them. They’d sent two major fleets through the warp point, and he’d beaten them both. That meant the lizards would try something different next time.
Scott pondered the question for a while, reversing the situation. What would he do in a similar situation? First, he’d send a stronger fleet, probably one of his frontline units rather than the second tier, or reserve units, and probably more than one. If their combat thinking was in any way similar to humans, they must realize they were dealing with a threat to their dominance of this portion of the galaxy. Which also begged the question, how much of the space out there did the aliens control? He sweated slightly thinking about the size and potential of these lizards. What if he was taking on a vast empire with unlimited resources at their disposal? Hell, they could afford to send ten battle fleets and swamp any defenses he put up.
He brushed the thought aside. He could only do what he could with what he had at his disposal, and prepare his forces as best he could. One battle at a time … his instructors talked about this scenario at the War College, such as Orville Wingate’s treatise on the subject. Evidence from the captured alien battleship showed these people were at war with someone just as powerful as they were, so a similar situation as Wingate outlined existed. All the lizards’ major frontline units were engaged in fighting the other enemy, necessitating the need for a constant supply of food, materials, equipment, and workers. That meant his supply lines were guarded by second-rate, or reserve units, as they’d seen in the first two fleets to arrive in Earth space. The lizards couldn’t afford to pull any frontline units out of the battle line, so their second attempt was to send second-tier units back to reestablish his supply lines and discover what was causing the interruption. Now that fleet was also destroyed, they’d have no choice but to pull a frontline unit out of combat and send it back to eliminate a potential threat in their rear. The enemy commander couldn’t keep on sending his second or reserve troops, since that would weaken his line at the moment he needed those reinforcements the most. The question was, h
ow much bigger and stronger would this fleet be, compared to the others? As Wingate predicted, once pressure diminished in one section of the front, the enemy would take advantage of it. It was one of the major drawbacks to fighting a war on two fronts.
The lizards needed to eliminate the threat in their rear as quickly as possible, with minimal losses, and get the units back into the front line quickly. The longer the Terran Defense Force could keep any major force tied up, the better. If they could inflict massive damage on that force, so much the better. The question of whom the lizards were fighting would have to wait for later, once they could use one of the warp points. The enemy of my enemy is my friend might still be true out there. Any imbalance or weakening of their front line forces could be exploited by their enemy, and the balance of power could change drastically. With those thoughts in mind, Scott increased the training schedule of his fleet, on occasion driving them to the point of exhaustion and beyond. His stony expression during those times forestalled any questions, and his command staff held their peace. Only Kat understood the fear driving him, and more than once, high command wondered if the pressure of command was getting to him.