“Nope,” I replied. “The fleet is just about in stable orbit, Juno is quiet, no comms from them at all, and no sign of hostilities anywhere.”
“Seems rather anti-climactic, doesn’t it?” Farooq said, and then it went back to the typical enlisted bitching about chow, and watches, and duty cycles. It was all so very normal, and very relaxed, right up until one of the indicators on my heads up turned from green to red.
“Guys?” I said. “Did something just happen to the Hampton?”
On the fleet net, I heard multiple calls to their communications officer, and from more than just the Madison. She had passed behind some larger meteoroids, and no one had a visual on her. The calls kept coming, louder, but without a response. Then on the other side, the Sumter went red.
The fleet net erupted. Everyone was trying to figure out what had happened to the two ships, but the communications had died, and even though all my other sensors said the ships were there, no one on board was saying anything. Speculation took over, and people started asking if they had been jammed, or sabotaged, or what.
That was the fleet net. The weapons net was almost silent. All we could do was watch, as one by one the ships lost comms. Whoever was running the net on the Madison lost it, screaming profanities, and was replaced by a calmer head that simply cycled through radio checks, but with fewer and fewer responses. Finally it was only us.
A new voice came on the net. “This is Admiral Brevard. Is Captain Paulson on?”
“Here, sir,” our CO replied.
“Have you seen any activity from Juno?”
“No, sir,” the captain replied. “Everything is quiet.”
“Damn,” the admiral said. “I was hoping with your distance—”
The net went silent. On my heads up, the last green dot turned red. On the weapons net, Turnbull said, “Captain just called for a full stop.” We felt the deceleration begin a moment later, but it would take almost two days at our speed.
I've seen the vids of it, but there were no explosions, no screams from dying men like they show. Hell, I’ll bet the cover plate on this book shows space ships firing at each other in some epic battle. But nothing like that happened, not that we could see. It took less than fifteen minutes, and twenty-six ships, along with thousands of sailors, had died. That’s what we call the Battle of Juno, but it was just a massacre.
Ten minutes later, Captain Paulson appeared on all the monitors all over the ship. “We are the only remaining ship in the fleet,” he said. His eyes were red, and his face was pale. “We have received a message from the enemy, and it was simply this: Please leave. We have heard nothing else.
“We have also received orders from Fleet Admiral Duffy. We are to approach Juno as close as we can, and see if we can’t determine what happened to the other ships. We will approach slowly, with sensors trained on the Madison, but I want everyone to be ready for anything. We will be at general quarters until further notice. Keep steel suit discipline tight, and expect battle rations for the next few days. Your division officers will work up sleep and watch rotations. Good luck, gentlemen.”
I saw no one in my little turret. Ensign Abercrombie contacted me and said, “Do you have enough supplies down there?” When I answered affirmative, he said, “Good. Just keep your comms on, respond to any radio check you hear. I’ll see you when the captain gives the all clear.”
“Any idea how long that might be, sir?”
“No clue. Keep sharp, Wright.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Over the next few hours, I heard about how the rest of the weapons division had fared. Every CIC position was critical, everyone else but me was rotated through on eight hour watches. I stayed up in the hot seat, and no one asked about me for a long time. Everyone sounded dazed and shocked. Smitty remembered me first. “Hey, what’s Wright doing? I didn’t see him on any of the lists.”
I had been dozing a little, but my name made me perk up. “I’m confined to quarters for the duration,” I said.
“Confined to what?” Smitty said. “Oh, you mean they’re leaving you stuck in your hole?”
“Unless someone wants to rotate with me.”
There was a chorus of negatives, ranging from “no” to “oh hell no”. After everyone had quieted down, I said, “Thanks for your support.”
“No problem,” Turnball said cheerfully. “I’ve got some things to check near there. You need me to bring you anything?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “This thing is designed to get knocked off the ship and just keep going. I’ve got supplies for weeks.”
“Still the damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” Johnston said. “Think they’ll put it on other ships?”
Chief Stanley’s deep voice came on. “Not unless they send more pollywogs like Wright out here. Now, everyone worry about your own station, and let Wright have some peace and quiet.”
I felt more alone than ever, but a few minutes later I got a private call from the chief on my tablet. “I’ve got a special assignment for you,” he said.
“For me?”
“Yeah, you,” the Chief said. “That’s why I want the others to leave you alone.”
“What do you want?”
Chief Stanley harrumphed. “It’s not me. It’s the captain. He’s got every sensor we have on Juno itself, but everything you’ve got up there he wants trained at the Madison. If we can figure out how they’re killing us, we might figure out a way to counter it. But right now we got nothing.”
“You got it, chief.”
“And Wright?” He sounded a lot less gruff all of the sudden. “Good luck down there.”
“You too, chief.”
The screen went dark, and I went to work. My little home under the ship had all kinds of scientific equipment for collecting data, but I didn’t know what half of it was, and half of what I did know came from talking to Katy. I configured what made the most sense to me: EM scanners, radars, laser ranging scanners. There were thirty or so telescopes that could combine their data to deliver a remarkably clear picture of anything within a million miles.
I configured everything to look at the Madison. The first thing I noticed was hundreds of holes on the hull. Each measured out around a meter in diameter, and if they all happened at once, it would explain a lot. We were trained to handle a breach, but only a few at a time. That many would cause a catastrophic failure in just the life support systems alone.
Looking at the holes more closely, something didn't make sense to me. The metal around the rim looked twisted, like it had been pulled in several different directions. I would expect a projectile to force the hull inward, and any atmospheric evacuation at that size wouldn’t be strong enough to bend it back out. But that’s exactly what it looked like. I hadn’t heard anything from my chain of command, so I looked at some of the other ships, and they all looked the same.
My tablet beeped. We would have a briefing at 2000. That gave me two hours.
I trained my instruments not on Juno, but on the surrounding space. Like many mining asteroids, unusable debris shot from the surface formed an orbiting cloud. The fleet had died just inside of it, but I couldn't see anything unusual. I marked it down as something to be aware of, and made note of some of the larger meteorites for navigation.
As I was wrapping up, the primary station on the asteroid's surface came into view. Through my optics, I could make out several well lit domes and launch pads. My instruments showed me the major reactors, too, which is where we would focus our fire.
I also saw several dozen rail gun batteries.
The reminder I had set started chiming. I called up the conference on my heads up display to join my first war briefing. Fifteen faces stared back at me. And of all the things I might have expected, the last was Captain Paulson saying, “Did you find out anything, petty officer Wright?”
“Uh…” I said. “Well, sir, there are numerous hull breaches.”
“Yes, son, we can see those up here,” Captain Paulson said.
“Is there anything else?”
“The holes don’t look like any known weapon.”
Lt. Commander Ochoa leaned forward. “Explain what you mean.”
“Well, sir, we were taught that the rim of a breach from a projectile bends inward, but these are twisted, like something inside pushed the metal back out.”
“So the escaping atmosphere pushed it back out.”
“No, sir, not unless they hit a pressurized tank. But all the breaches show the same thing.”
“Explosive round?”
“Maybe. But the holes are pretty small for an explosion happening on the hull surface.”
“Penetrating missile impact would do it,” Abercrombie said.
“A missile breach would be orders of magnitude bigger,” I said. “And we didn’t register any missile launches from the surface.”
“Or anywhere else,” said Cmdr Jeffries.
This started an argument about what might have caused it, and I posted pictures showing what I was talking about. Everyone was shocked by the number of breaches, and agreed that just a few hull ruptures alone would have killed the most of crew. And then came more argument about why none of them lasted long enough to send any kind of communication out to the fleet.
Then Captain Paulson said, “But why didn’t we detect any kind of shots being fired?”
And that set off another round of arguments about what weapon had been used. And why the magnetic shielding didn’t deflect any of the rounds. I felt out of place, since they were talking about tactics and capabilities that were beyond my experience. The briefing took most of an hour, but nothing was settled. The captain said he would send a report to the fleet command, and see what they said.
Everyone signed off, and I was alone again. An hour later, the engines came back to life, and we started towards Juno.
The battle plan ended up very simple: launch half our missiles outside the debris cloud, launch the other half inside. Our target was all the power plants we could identify. Simple, direct. And a real morale builder.
With a plan in place, we got a day of stand down. I stood in the chow line with Farooq and Smitty, laughing about the hurt we were about to put on the miners. “How big an explosion do you think we'll see?” Farooq said.
“Ought to be miles high, if we can hit a core just right,” Smitty said.
“Oh, we’ll hit one all right,” I said. “We've got them all mapped and analyzed.”
“Yep,” Smitty said. “We’ll see how rebellious those bastards are when they freeze to death.”
We got to the front of the line and got our packets. Farooq read the label and whistled. “Lobster and steak? How long has this been in deep freeze?”
“Who the hell knows?” the mess cook said. “I just serve what I'm told. Although I'll admit this doesn't taste like the normal recycled crap.”
Behind us, Big Mike said, “Boy are you guys green. It's an old, old naval tradition that the crew gets good chow before a bad assignment—or bad news. One of the best meals I ever ate on a ship came right before the Captain told us we weren't getting a liberty call at Port Greene, but would be going on to Port Jackson.” He shuddered. “That place is boring even for a Mormon.”
So we ate like kings, and when Big Mike broke out with one of his hymns, no one complained. I had never seen the mess deck so festive, and when Chief Stanley popped in, he just grinned instead of telling us to keep it down.
My biggest complaint was that it didn’t last long enough. Soon I was back in my turret, looking up at the hot seat, and dreading going back up there. But it was the most comfortable place to sit, and I did love the view. As much as I normally wanted to get away from everyone, that night I just wanted to be near them. The nets were quiet while most of the crew tried to get some sleep. I briefly thought about going up to berthing, but knew it would just be a lot of snoring and sleeping sailors. Not exactly what I was looking for.
I took my spot and stared at Juno. We still had two days to go before we were close enough to start phase one of our attack.
Two days felt like an eternity. I spent some time getting familiar with the firing controls on my rail guns, since I might need to actually fire the guns manually if something knocked out CIC. It was pretty straightforward: if I could see it on my targeting screen, I just had to touch it to get a fire control formula. If it was possible to hit, I accepted the data, and then the guns would fire. As long as I took off my own safeties, and as long as the ship’s protocol allowed it. The whole process takes longer to explain than to accomplish. I had all kinds of ammo to choose from, but I queued up depleted uranium rounds for maximum penetration of shielding.
I practiced spinning the turret, which was controlled by foot pedals. Again, nothing surprising, but I had two days to get comfortable with it all, and to let anticipation eat me alive. Most of the crew felt the same way, and communication became clipped and tense on the nets.
On the morning of the third day, Captain Paulson came on the monitors. “I will be frank with you, gentlemen; we still don’t know how the miners killed the battle fleet, and so we don’t know what we face. No matter the outcome, I appreciate you all, and have never served with a finer crew. Godspeed, and God bless us all. Helmets on.”
It wasn’t the most stirring speech in hindsight, but at the time, I didn’t even notice. We were just ready to join the fight.
We came in fast, and used the asteroid's gravity well to pull us into orbit just outside the debris. Even so, the magnetic shield glowed with the dust in our path. We used the first pass to make the final mark on our targets, and on the second go around, we launched our broadside. Fifty missiles streamed away from the starboard side, disappearing behind us, and then we came around again to find a score of fires below. The weapons net was alive with elation; even though it looked like they had knocked out half our birds, we had still made some major hits.
Turnbull said, “That was a pretty good start, but now we're going through the cloud.”
“Don't get knocked off down there, Rightside,” Farooq said.
“Yeah, you might to get to fire those pop guns of yours,” Smitty said. “So pick a good target before they're all gone.”
“No worries,” I said. “I've already got a few in mind.”
The glow of the shield grew brighter. “Here we go,” I said.
We dropped into the debris cloud, and within thirty minutes we had our first rider. We maneuvered around several larger chunks, always towards the surface, but more and more riders glommed onto the hull.
“Hey,” I said. “Someone needs to tell the OS's that we should do a defrag before we launch again.”
“They're on it,” Turnbull said. “Just got to get through the cloud first.”
“How much longer?”
“A couple of more orbits should do it.”
A few hours later, I heard Smitty say, “We’re going to pass close to the Hampton.”
“When?” Farooq said.
“Ten minutes.”
“How close?” Turnbull said.
“Four clicks.”
“That’s pretty close.”
“Hair’s breadth out here.”
Our orbit was faster than theirs, but not so much that we didn’t all get a good look, most of the crew from monitors. Me out the window. She was drifting along like she was just patrolling, but with no flame in her engines, and no lights showing. I couldn’t see the hull breaches, and even with the ship magnified to fill the monitors they were small enough to look like freckles. Numerous, and to all of us, ominous freckles. The captain called for a moment of silence, which we maintained until she had disappeared behind us.
“We’ll be clear to fire in an hour,” the captain said. “Rotate the ship, and commence defrag.”
This was the part I dreaded. Protocol said to protect the reactor, so we kept that away from the surface. That meant that I was exposed, watching Juno fill my window, wondering if any gunner below might try to hit the little pimple on the
belly of the beast. But it stayed quiet, and the rotation pulled me back parallel to the asteroid. As the surface moved away from me, and I got a good look at the debris cloud, backlit by the sun. I could also see the riders in stark outline as my turret became the top of the ship.
That’s when I saw the gun barrels.
They confused me though. They looked like they were pointed from the meteoroids away from the hull. “Um, guys…” I said on the weapons net.
On the fleet net I heard, “Commencing defrag. Prepare port side missile banks.”
About half the riders shot away from the hull. The remaining ones all had guns, and my monitors showed them powering up. “Guys!” I yelled. “I think we’re covered in mines of some sort!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Chief Stanley said.
I spun the turret, trying to see how many there were. My guns knocked one off, and as it drifted away in a slow spin, I saw the gun fire. From the side that had been on the hull. And it fired twice in quick succession. The second shot exploded within ten meters of the meteoroid.
I spun back around, but I already knew what I would see. Dozens of holes, the rims looking particularly jagged so close up. The spent meteoroids drifted lazily away, just more unremarkable debris once more.
“Guys?” I said on the weapons net.
My monitors flickered as the emergency power came on in the turret. I switched over to the fleet net. “Guys? Anyone?”
No one answered. I checked my readouts. No power, no life support, no comms. The ship was dead.
Chapter 12
My little turret had not been targeted. I was safe, and had power, air, and supplies for a few weeks. So my death would be slow, and comfortable—at least at first. I took my helmet off and ran my hand through my hair.
I heard singing. I spun around and around, trying to find it, but it stayed behind me. It took a few panicked moments to realize it was coming from my helmet, hanging on the back of my chair. I grabbed it, slid it on, and said, “Hello? Hello?”
We Are All Enlisted Page 9