Excelsior

by Jasper T. Scott

  Alexander drew a circle around the first wave of nukes, then he selected the leading Confederate warship. Giving a verbal command this time, he said, “Calculate time to nearest intersect.”

  A new vector line appeared, connecting the wave of nukes to the Confederate warship. The difference in velocities was ten point six klicks per second in favor of the Confederate ship. Range between the targets was 697,562 klicks. Time to intersect was eighteen hours, sixteen minutes, and forty-seven seconds.

  Forty-six seconds. Forty-five…

  “So we have eighteen hours before World War III begins,” Korbin said.

  Alexander grimaced. He had to try really hard not to see his guilt in the matter. He had given the order to drop the nukes, even if that order had ultimately come from someone else.

  The minutes ticked away with agonizing slowness. Apart from the sound of life support cycling the Lincoln’s air, the steady drone of her thrusters, and the hushed verbal commands of her bridge crew, Alexander could hear nothing but the sound of his own heart thudding relentlessly in his chest.

  “Captain!”

  Thud!

  Alexander recognized Williams’ voice a second before he saw the man sit suddenly bolt upright at his station.

  “What is it, Williams?”

  “We’re detecting the Confederate Fleet slowing down.”

  Alexander felt ice creeping through his veins. They couldn’t have spotted the nukes at this range. “How fast?”

  “Three Gs deceleration, sir. They’re slamming on the brakes.”

  “They must have caught on to our strategy. Do we still have remote access to those warheads?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We may have to revive them.”

  “If we do that, they’ll be detected immediately, and the enemy’s point defenses will have plenty of time to shoot them down,” Lieutenant Cardinal said from gunnery.

  “One or two might still get through. That’s still enough for the purposes of a warning shot. Comms! Get me Lewis Station on the line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A moment later, a man with a shiny scalp and a nest of wrinkles around his eyes appeared on the right-hand holo display. Text above his transmission read Admiral Gaulle. Going by the admiral’s appearance, he’d clearly waited too long to begin his gener treatments. Either that or he’d opted to take the incentives as a credit to his savings account instead.

  “Admiral, the enemy is decelerating. It would appear they’re on to us. Please advise.”

  “We see it, Captain, but it’s unlikely they’ve detected your warheads.”

  “Then they suspected that we might try something like this and they’re taking measures to evade.”

  “Even so…” The admiral shook his head. “In half an hour I want you to alter your trajectory. Make it look like you’re heading straight for the Looking Glass.”

  Alexander’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Our orders are to join your defensive screen, sir.”

  “And you will, but while you’re still a day away from us we don’t need you getting hit by a bundle of dead-dropped nukes.”

  Alexander’s eyes widened. The enemy might have slowed down to dead-drop their own missiles. But if that was the case, the Lincoln wasn’t the most significant Alliance target in the area. She was just over 300 meters long, while Lewis Station was a wheel-shaped megastructure with an outer ring that was over three kilometers in diameter.

  “Sir, they might not have dropped nukes along our trajectory. They may have dropped them on yours.”

  “There’s no way of knowing that yet, and it would take us the better part of a week to alter our heading enough to evade any missiles, so for now let’s just keep our eyes open, shall we? Let us know if you spot anything out there, Captain.”

  Alexander swallowed thickly and nodded once. “What about our missiles?”

  “Leave them alone for now. You can always fire them up later.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  “Lewis Station out.”

  “This is a mess!” Korbin said, turning to him. “For all we know they just dropped a few thousand nukes; we’ve already dropped more than a hundred of our own, and everyone’s still pretending like no one has fired a shot! Lewis Station should be evacuating right now.”

  Alexander shook his head. “And give up the Looking Glass? We’d be playing right into their hands. The station has fighters and drones to watch their backs. They also have us. That should be good enough.”

  Korbin turned to him with a dubious look. “I hope you’re right, sir.”

  *

  Over the last day of the Lincoln’s approach, tensions reached an all-time high. They had managed to avoid any dead-dropped nukes that might have been heading their way by changing their trajectory multiple times during their approach. The Confederates had done likewise, and the Lincoln’s dead-dropped warheads would never reach them now—not without igniting thrusters and lighting them up for the Confederates’ sensors to see.

  The opportunity for a surprise attack was gone, and now the Confederate Fleet was just fifty minutes from effective laser range (ELR) with Lewis Station. Meanwhile, the Alliance’s Third Fleet was racing up fast behind them with an ETA of just twenty minutes to ELR with the Confederates. All of the respective forces were well within missile range and projectile range of each other, but so far no one had been “seen” to fire anything.

  The Lincoln now sat in a stable orbit beside Lewis Station. Over twelve hours ago, while still on approach, they’d launched both the 61st Squadron and a full squadron of accompanying drones to join Lewis Station’s fighter screen and help them scan for incoming dead-dropped missiles. Unfortunately, the only way to detect a piece of dead-dropped ordnance was to set it off. In this case, setting a missile off meant successfully bouncing active sensors off the missile’s EM-absorbing armor.

  Once detected, missiles would split into a dozen or more pieces, most of them armed with lasers rather than explosives, making them deadly long before they reached their targets. Standard sweeping procedure was to send drones ahead of manned fighters, giving them more time to intercept before the lasers started zapping.

  Tactics in space were all about jinking around and trying to hit each other with projectile weapons and missiles before getting into effective laser range.

  Alexander watched the squadrons of Rapier fighters at high magnification on the Lincoln’s main holo display (MHD). The red-hot glow of their thrusters at full burn made them look like a swarm of fireflies in space.

  “Nothing yet,” Commander Korbin whispered, her eyes on the Rapiers.

  Alexander shook his head. “Maybe the Chancellor meant it when he said they wouldn’t fire the first shot.”

  “And I was born a gener,” Korbin replied.

  A few of the bridge crew chuckled at that. McAdams wasn’t one of them. She was the only gener on deck.

  A crackle of static hissed over the bridge speakers, followed by the sound of the fighter group’s Wing Commander reporting in—Lieutenant Hayes had set the comms to the Alliance’s command channel and left it open so they could hear the updates.

  “Lewis Station, we’re entering engagement zone sixty five now… stand by…”

  Mission Control had pre-calculated a hundred different hypothetical engagement zones, each of them 5,000 klicks deep and as wide as the enemy formation. Drones were leading the fighter group by 30,000 klicks.

  “We’re clear. Moving on to—strike that! Contact confirmed! Incoming missiles at 24,000 klicks. Five hundred plus detected.”

  Admiral Gaulle replied, “That’s behind the drones, how did missiles get past them?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Never mind, open fire!”

  “Engaging…”

  Alexander glanced at the tactical map between him and Korbin in time to see the enemy missiles react to detection. Hundreds of red dots suddenly split into ten times as many smaller ones, all of them now going evasive and accelera
ting toward the Rapiers at full burn.

  “Increase magnification on the MHD,” Alexander said as he looked up from the tactical map. Their visual of the Rapiers swelled, and Alexander watched the bright red glows of the fighters’ engines winking out of sight as they turned tail and accelerated away from the incoming ordnance. Their survival depended on staying out of ELR with the laser-armed fragments for as long as possible.

  The Rapiers opened fire and so did the drones. Golden lines of hypervelocity rounds stuttered out, tracking the enemy missiles from both sides. After just a few seconds, a pinprick of light flashed—one of the enemy warheads detonating as the Rapiers’ fire found it. The explosion shouldn’t have been visible, nor the weapons fire, but the Lincoln’s combat computer did a good job of simulating visual and aural feedback. More pinpricks of fire appeared, dozens with every passing second.

  Alexander checked the tactical map, comparing the vectors of the enemy missiles and the fighter group. ETA to laser range was a matter of seconds. Almost all of the enemy missiles would still be intact by then. Thirteen squadrons of twelve Rapier fighters was just over a hundred and fifty, and there were thousands of laser-armed missiles incoming.

  The Rapiers didn’t stand a chance. Unless…

  “Lieutenant Stone! Get me the Wing Commander on the comms.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Korbin turned to him. “We’re not authorized to give orders to the fighter group.”

  “I’m not going to give them orders. I’m going to give them a suggestion, and there’s no time to get Admiral Gaulle’s input.”

  The comms crackled. “Lincoln, Wing Commander Archer here.”

  “Commander, listen up. Flip back around and dead-drop your own missiles. Target the enemy’s ordnance with yours and have your missiles go live just before they reach ELR.”

  “Our missiles are not armed with lasers, Lincoln. Going live at the enemy’s ELR will just get them shot down.”

  “Exactly. Every laser they fire at one of your missiles is a laser they won’t be firing at you. The more missiles you can put out there the better.”

  “Shit—roger that, Lincoln.”

  A moment later they heard Commander Archer relay Alexander’s suggestion to the other squadrons like it was his own.

  Korbin frowned. “Why didn’t Commander Archer think of that?”

  “It’s hard to think straight while you’re pulling six Gs to get away from certain death. The better question is why Admiral Gaulle didn’t think of it.”

  “Maybe he was promoted for technical expertise rather than tactical,” Korbin suggested.

  “Maybe…” Alexander replied while zooming out the tactical map to look for the missiles the Lincoln had dead-dropped a day ago. They were millions of klicks past Lewis Station. Too late to fire them up now. Alexander had requested clearance to bring the ordnance online several times over the past day, but Admiral Gaulle had repeatedly denied his request—presumably to avoid provoking the Confederacy, although that concern was now moot.

  Alexander watched the range between the enemy warheads and the fighter group tick down. ELR for the fighters was 2,000 klicks. The enemy’s laser-armed missiles were shorter-ranged at just over 1,000 klicks.

  The Rapiers finished dead-dropping their missiles, and then turned tail to run once more. As soon as the enemy ordnance reached 2,000 klicks, they opened fire. Bright blue laser beams shot out, simulated on the Lincoln’s MHD.

  Pinprick-sized explosions flared one more, this time at least fifty at a time. Roughly one in every four laser beams hit its mark. Not bad considering the enemy missiles were accelerating at hundreds of Gs on randomly varying trajectories. Unfortunately, fighters couldn’t get anywhere near the kind of acceleration required to evade a laser, so they were bound to fare a lot worse once the enemy’s ordnance started firing back.

  Range dropped to 1,500 klicks and suddenly the fighter group’s warheads went live, popping up out of nowhere and splitting into dozens of fragments, all of them tracking toward the enemy missiles.

  In the next instant, thousands of Confederate laser-armed warheads opened fire all at once. Hundreds of friendly missiles went boom, lighting up the tactical map with simulated explosions that echoed softly through the speakers in Alexander’s helmet.

  The Rapiers kept firing, their aim getting better and better as range decreased. Then they came into the enemy’s ELR and soon they were drawing fire, too. Rapiers were better armored than missiles, so it took several direct hits to take one out, but the enemy had more than enough firepower for that.

  Alexander watched the number of Rapiers drop down to just 76 in a matter of seconds. Then the missiles and fighters flew past one another, and the Rapiers rotated their guns to fore, firing on the missiles from behind. Enemy ordnance dropped from over 6,000 to just under 5,000. All of the Rapiers’ own missiles had been intercepted, but they’d drawn enough fire to save fully half of the fighter group.

  Not that any of that would matter to Lewis Station. There were still 5,000 missiles incoming.

  Alexander grimaced. “Williams! How long until those missiles reach Lewis Station?”

  “Twenty minutes, twenty-seven seconds, sir!”

  Alexander did the math and shook his head. Soon those missiles would be out of ELR, and the fighter group would be back to intercepting them with hypervelocity rounds. Odds were there would still be several thousand missiles left by the time they reached laser range with Lewis Station and the Lincoln, not to mention what would happen when missiles carrying nuclear warheads slammed into the station at over 200 klicks per second. The kinetic energy alone would be enough to take out the station.

  Talk about overkill, Alexander thought.

  Beside him, Korbin whistled and pointed to the tactical map still hovering between their chairs. The Alliance had just opened fire on the Confederate Fleet with thousands of hot-fired missiles. The Confederates returned fire with their own missiles and deployed a fighter screen behind them. The Alliance already had their own fighters deployed. Then streams of hypervelocity rounds went streaking out from fighters and capital ships alike, trying to intercept each other’s missiles. Soon lasers lanced between missiles, drones, and fighters. Explosions peppered the map. Capital ships began hitting each other at extreme range with projectiles fired from rail guns and coil guns at better than 20 klicks per second. A Confederate Battleship got caught in multiple streams of fire, and Alexander watched it burst open at the seams like an overripe piece of fruit. Crewmen and debris went streaming out into space. A few seconds later the ship’s engines went dark. Glancing around the map Alexander picked out at least six more ships already derelict on both sides of the conflict.

  Missiles skipped past fighter screens and came into ELR with capital ships. The capital ships opened fire with dazzling barrages of lasers. Then it was the missiles’ turn. Laser-armed ordnance fired back, specifically targeting the big ships’ lasers to decrease the firepower arrayed against them.

  Only a handful of missiles actually made it to their targets, but each of them was a one-hit-kill that painted a dramatic explosion on the map, leaving nothing but a drifting cloud of debris in its wake.

  Then the capital ships reached ELR and they began firing lasers at each other in a deadly light show—Alliance blue, Confederate red. Missiles and hypervelocity cannons went on firing, but lasers turned the battle into a simple point-and-shoot war of attrition. The side with the most guns and the strongest armor won.

  After all of just a few seconds, that side turned out to be the Alliance, but not by much. They had ten ships out of sixty still firing and maneuvering under active thrust by the time the Confederate fleet was derelict and drifting. It took a few extra seconds to mop up Confederate fighters and drones, and then the Alliance’s remaining starships launched repair ships and space marines, the former to aid repairs aboard their own derelict vessels, and the latter to board and capture derelict enemy ships.

  At the far end of the engagement
a few squadrons of Confederate fighters were fleeing desperately toward Earth with Alliance drones in hot pursuit. Drones could pull higher Gs so they caught up fast. Lasers flashed between them, and explosions flared, bringing the engagement to a decisive end.

  It was over. Horror and disbelief settled in. From the simulated bird’s-eye view of the tactical map, everything looked like a holo game. It couldn’t be real.

  “Sir!” Williams called out from the comms. “Lewis Station is busy evacuating. We’ve been advised to withdraw to a safe distance so we don’t get caught by shrapnel when enemy ordnance hits.”