Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest)

by VanDyke, David

  At least, the situation that obtained when the information was transmitted.

  What a strange way to think, and travel. Everywhere we look, we see the past. When we see a star system one hundred light-years away, we see it not as it is, but as it was then. Ditto with the solar system. We look backward to Afrana and see reports that seem to be only weeks old, as the light from the past slowly overtakes us.

  Chapter 15

  Conquest sat as dead in space as she could be, all externals off and drifting, though that had little meaning in the vastness between the stars. Minimum watches held the bridge and auxiliary control, while most of the crew had assembled in chairs set up on the largest open space in the boat, the aerospace flight deck. It easily held the five hundred or so people of the three races.

  The human ratings eagerly took the front rows facing the enormous bank of screens set high on the wall, while the Ryss and Sekoi hung around the back edges looking at smaller sets adjusted for their eyes’ wavelengths, mounted on the side and rear walls . They were interested, of course, but not with the desperate attention of the humans. It wasn’t their home system, after all.

  Captain Absen and the senior officers watched from the glass-faced aerospace control room, now turned into a sort of media fusion center, which also allowed them some extra feeds to the screens there. All the StormCrows, grabships, pinnaces and assault sleds had been moved into their launch tubes or bolted to the walls by maintenance bots, well out of the way.

  Commanders Johnstone and Scoggins had worked with their sections to orchestrate all the data flowing in from EarthFleet, and also the feeds from the news services’ broadcasts and anything else that could be picked up, rather like the crew of a major sporting event. Only, this contest would decide the fate of the solar system.

  Absen had ordered a bar set up on the flight deck and a platoon of Marines in MP uniform but with no firearms, led by Sergeant Major Repeth, who had started out long ago as a military police specialist. Their cybernetic physical enhancements outclassed anyone’s but the Stewards, and those stayed near their captain as usual. They could handle a few brawls.

  I’m terrified, Absen realized within the sanctity of his own mind. I’ll see the battle but have no influence over it whatsoever. Forty-three percent chance of successful defense, the first intel assessment had said, and that has not changed. Less than fifty-fifty chance Earth system fights them off.

  Nodding at the audiovisual team, Absen watched as the screens flickered and changed views, one by one stabilizing on various aspects of the battle. The main display provided a gamer’s overhead view, at the captain’s insistence. His interest lay in the strategy and tactics, and he also had no desire to make a bloody engagement even more gut-wrenching by showing too much close-in death. There were advantages to getting the whole crew together this way, such as a sense of unity and esprit de corps, but morale could also take a big hit if things went wrong.

  Absen had thought of delaying the immediate display of the feeds for a few hours, to allow him to edit and shape the production, but discarded that idea after the ferocious opposition his closest officers gave him. Even COB Timmons had locked the door and given the boss a piece of his mind about the common sailor’s viewpoint, and the captain conceded to his crusty chief.

  So, he had no more idea of what would happen than anyone else.

  The overview showed the solar system from a point to the north of Earth’s star, the traditional vantage point, and as friendly blue icons populated the screen from the center outward, some of the humans cheered. Densely packed by the thousands, soon the computers running the map had to group them together or be overwhelmed with dots and markers.

  The inner planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – swarmed with asteroid fortresses, each holding one primary weapons system. Particle beams, lasers, grasers, missile arrays and railguns showed, along with rings representing their effective ranges.

  Unfortunately those circles seemed small compared to the area they needed to defend. Even lightspeed weapons were limited by time. Beyond a few light-seconds, hitting a target became more a matter of luck than anything, as speeding ships could continuously alter course enough to dodge even light at those distances.

  In the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, other icons showed. Absen had Scoggins punch one up for him and between them they figured out it was just an asteroid with an engine package on it, not so different from what the Meme had tried to use against Earth when the first Destroyer showed up. He realized it was a ram or decoy, something that had been in the works when he left. Once they had a surfeit of engines, putting a rocket and a guidance package on an asteroid turned it into a cheap kinetic missile.

  Jupiter and its moons were surrounded by icons, representations of the enormous shipyards and bases teeming there. The gas giant was a system in itself, and its atmosphere provided ample hydrogen and isotopes as fuel, while its many moons were mined for materials from water to metals. The planetoid Ceres had apparently been moved there, Absen saw, at some time after he had left, bringing it closer to the industrial heart of EarthFleet, the Jovian system.

  The only icons farther outside the solar orbit of Jupiter were pickets and sensor drones, and small bases on some moons of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Strategically, Earth was the prize, and there was no reason to place anything too far away. In fact, if the giant planet wasn’t itself an orbiting gas station, Absen would have put everything in the Earth-Moon system. Space was too big to defend anything except certain valuable locations.

  Finally, a dense group of symbols floated about one-sixth of the way spinward of Earth: that is, in a counterclockwise direction along its orbital path. “Zoom in on those,” Absen ordered, and the cluster expanded to show details.

  “Seven Conquest-class dreadnoughts,” Absen breathed. “Twenty-two battleships, sixty-one beam cruisers, over two hundred missile frigates, and forty-five aerospace carriers. That’s the Home Fleet.” A lump crawled into his throat as he contemplated the awesome power the icons represented, and then his blood chilled as he compared them to sixty-four Destroyers.

  They can’t win, fleet to fleet, he said within the privacy of his own mind. Unless there is something I don’t see, some new technology they haven’t told us about, the enemy has about a three to one advantage in firepower.

  Absen found himself wishing Conquest and the rest of the task force had stayed, to add their weight to this battle. Then he reminded himself that the EarthFleet Intelligence assessment had put the chance of successful defense at forty-three percent; better than it looked at first glance. That meant there was something he wasn’t seeing, something Admiral Huen had up his sleeve.

  “Zoom back out. Do we have a plot of the enemy inbounds?”

  Scoggins nodded and signaled one of her linked techs. A moment later the scale enlarged to show space out past Pluto’s orbit. A group of red icons showed at the edge of the screen, too many to count at that scale. Their projected track ended at Earth, bypassing any other orbital obstacle, such as Mars or Jupiter.

  “Give me some Z-axis roll, Scoggins. I want to see how high above the plane of the ecliptic they are coming in.”

  Obediently, the view swooped to a position off to the side but still “above” the solar system’s plane that defined most of the planetary orbits. The enemy fleet’s path now showed how it remained about half an AU, some seventy million kilometers, above that imaginary disc until it passed over Earth.

  Scoggins remarked, “They’ll have to alter course sometime, but this path keeps them out of the asteroid belt, gives them a good angle on our defenses, and complicates our targeting a bit.”

  “Sir,” Rick Johnstone asked, turning in his chair but keeping his link plugged in, “I don’t understand why they come in anywhere near the ecliptic. I mean, why not just loop up and over to come in from solar north or south?”

  “I’ll show you, Rick,” Absen replied, and the rest of the control room turned to listen to their captain. O
ut of the corner of his eye he saw several of the secondary screens scattered around the flight deck now showed his face, as if he was being interviewed, and he glanced at Scoggins.

  “By your leave, sir. I thought the crew might like to hear your play-by-play.”

  “Good thinking.” Absen straightened. “Give me that plate there, please.”

  One of the techs grabbed a round food dish and wiped it clean of scraps, and then handed it to the captain. He held it up flat, with his fingers beneath it. “Imagine this is the plane of the solar system. The sun and inner planets are near the middle, so close in spacegoing terms that it hardly matters to the attackers as they decide their course. Their orbits would be the size of a small coin.”

  Holding the plate with one hand, with his other index finger he indicated a point about thirty centimeters above it. “Let’s say they come in from solar north, aiming for the center. This has the advantage that none of the planetary, orbital or asteroid belt defensive stations are in its way. But,” he turned the plate sideways, moving his finger to keep relative position, “now everyone on the surface of the plate has a straight view and line of attack. Any defensive station that can, will move to intercept. In a sense, it allows us to only defend one side of the possible sphere. The closer the enemy and friendly fleets get, the more we can throw at them.”

  “What if they spread out?” Rick asked.

  “Of course, there are a dozen different variations on this – come in together, separate into groups, feints and so on. But in space – using normal drive, that is – it’s hard to change course. Running around burns energy, especially overcoming momentum to go a different direction. This means that once they commit to a course, their options diminish the closer they get and the faster they are going.”

  Absen shifted his primitive visual aid again. “The very first Destroyer came in right along the ecliptic. That allowed him to peel off an assault force to hit Callisto base in one direction while he went the other way toward Mars. You remember he used it to slingshot and get a free course change to slip past the Aardvark swarm, like a running back going wide around the end. At the same time he kept our asteroid fortresses occupied with asteroid missiles of his own. He thought he had such a preponderance of force that he acted like a bigger fighter moving in on a smaller one, punching hard, left-right, left-right.”

  “He was right, too,” Ford muttered cross-armed from his chair. “If it wasn’t for that crazy-ass Marine…”

  “Exactly. Alan Denham. One man and a Meme ship that our tame Blend made into a weapon.” Unbidden, Raphaela’s magnificent face swam before Absen’s mind’s eye, and he fought to control his emotions. “So we won that one when we really shouldn’t have, and bought time. Then, in 2068, their second attack came. Eight Destroyers. In that instance they tried to split our defenses up, coming in simultaneously at eight different points of the system’s sphere. They had stopped in the Oort Cloud to feed, but they didn’t stay the extra year it would have taken to prepare an equally huge number of powered asteroids.”

  “Why not?” Rick asked, more for the benefit of the onlookers than himself, as he had fought in that battle too.

  Absen put the plate down. “EarthFleet’s Red Team believed they were trying to surprise us. Undoubtedly the Meme had studied the earlier battle and concluded, quite rightly, that we did not have another Meme ship to sacrifice. Besides, they wouldn’t fall for that this time, I was sure. No EarthTech ship could get close enough, going fast enough, to do that again. Bottom line, they were going to use more finesse, avoiding most of the asteroid fortresses.”

  “Except around Earth.”

  Absen nodded. “Of course. We brought in as many as we could to surround the planet, and fell all the mobile forces back too. They wanted us to fight eight separate battles. Had we done that, we had to win all eight. Losing any one of them would have left a Destroyer zooming past our task forces and straight in to Earth.”

  “So you just fought one giant battle.”

  “It was the only thing that made sense.” Absen had told the story many times in different forms, but never to this crew, and not to the other races, who seemed to be hanging on every word as well. Presumably his English was being translated for them – probably by Michelle, now that he thought of it, or by Rick’s computers.

  “I’d rather fight one battle I had to win than eight, so I set up a layered defense in depth, with eight outer strongpoints of grouped asteroid fortresses corresponding to the Destroyers and their paths, and all of the warships inside as linebackers.”

  “Don’t forget the fusion mines, sir,” Ford muttered.

  “Yes, thank you, Mister Ford. Our cheerful weapons officer suggested we deploy thousands of stealthed contact fusion mines along the Destroyers’ paths, as they were so kindly telegraphing their courses. While by themselves they did not kill any enemy ships, they forced the Meme to expend effort looking for more of them, and burn fuel changing course or blazing away with fusors. It was quite a sight.” Absen smiled with the sweet memory of victory.

  “And we ended up winning that one big battle,” Scoggins said.

  “Rather handily, too. I used that political capital to push through the Conquest project, which is why we are here today.” Absen pointed at the screen. “It looks like they kept building sister ships, as I had advised.”

  “Not enough of them, though,” Ford said. “I’d have thought they’d make more.”

  Absen shot a glance at Rick, who wobbled a hand at him as if to say, almost.

  Hope that means he cut Ford’s stupid comment off soon enough. The captain looked out over the throng from the window of the control booth, but nothing seemed amiss. Am I worrying too much? As a crew they may be green, but there are a lot of veterans here. They’ll be all right. If this turns out to be a disaster, it will just fire their blood for battle.

  “Are we off speaker now? Good. Ford, it’s one thing to say such things to your fellow officers. It’s quite another to broadcast your morale-killing thoughts to the whole damn crew.”

  Ford blanched, then lowered his eyes. “Sorry, sir.”

  “If you weren’t the best weapons officer I’ve ever seen, I’d have sidelined you and your mouth long ago, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. No excuse, sir,” he said miserably.

  “We could always install a shut-the-hell-up chip in his head,” Rick quipped.

  For once Ford didn’t rise to the bait, but just rubbed his hands together between his knees. “Anyone want a drink?” He stood up and headed for the bar without waiting for a reply.

  Rick shrugged, earning him a glare from Scoggins, who as Ford’s wife probably felt compelled to defend him.

  “It will be interesting to see what their tactics will be this time,” Fletcher said, obviously trying to lighten the mood again.

  “I think I already know,” Absen said. “Zoom back in on the enemy fleet. See if we can get some real opticals and data rather than just icons.”

  Scoggins did that, and soon the entire main screen had focused in on the group of enemy getting ready to cross the orbit of Pluto, about 50 AUs out. She refined the view and added several layers of data, synthesizing the display until the Meme fleet’s disposition clarified.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Absen said. “Sixty-four large asteroids, each twenty to thirty kilometers in diameter.”

  “And sixty-four Destroyers,” Rick said. “Each one pushing an asteroid, as if it was a giant drive and guidance package.”

  “They are at almost point two lightspeed right now, and accelerating straight in.” Scoggins said. “Looks like about 1.3 G is all. Probably trying to keep the asteroids from crumbling under the stress. Thirty hours to Earth, roughly.”

  Absen said, “They must have picked them up out in the Oort cloud after feeding. They’re in a three-dimensional flying wedge, a cone, with the nose pointing forward. And, I think you’ll find that the biggest rocks are up front.”

  “They’re trying to
just bull their way in?” Rick asked.

  “To a point.”

  “Why not just use something really big – a small moon, for example, a few hundred kilometers across?”

  Absen sat back and lectured a bit. “If Ford were here, he could tell you. Anything that big would be an enormous target. The Meme would have two choices: go in ahead of it, running interference for it and let it be the weapon that smashed Earth, or use it as a battering ram and come in behind it. In either case, there’s no way to miss a nonmaneuvering target that big with any weapon. We could launch missiles from Earth orbit and get them up to half lightspeed before they impacted. If it were me, I’d put some small warships on computer control and use them as giant projectiles, not to mention billions of railgun shots and the beam weapons. We’d crack something like that apart long before it got near us.”

  “Okay, so what’s the optimum size?” Rick asked.

  “Like everything in war, there are tradeoffs. The rocks they are pushing right now are about right for their plan. See, they are spiraling a bit, weaving slightly while still heading to Earth. Even that minor jinking will cause anything not guided to miss. Also, look ahead of them.” Absen pointed at an icon out in front of the fleet.

  When Scoggins brought it up, the order of battle list showed a cloud of over four thousand smaller craft. “Those look like the shark fighters they used on Callisto in the first Destroyer attack.”

  “Correct, Rick. Those are there to attempt to pick off any guided missiles we may send.”

  “They’ve got it all covered. How is EarthFleet going to fight them?”

  Absen realized Rick had put him back on the public address system, as most of the crew outside on the flight deck sat or stood in attitudes of intense listening. “Direct overwhelming opposing force, for the rocks. If we go back to the overall picture…there, you’ll see Admiral Huen has been gathering his own asteroid fortresses from across the solar system and is feeding them into a line pointed straight at the Meme fleet. Those are also accelerating, and while the enemy has sixty-four big rocks, we have over seven hundred smaller ones, just in that train.”