The Complete Thunder Series (Thunder In The Heavens)

by Dietmar Wehr

  “If those are going to be my assets, then I’d like to have an officer in overall charge of all squadrons and drones in addition to the three squadron leaders.”

  Mirakova leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. “I can’t think of a reason to deny that request. Do you have someone in mind?” She smiled as she asked the question.

  Harrow smiled back. She suspected that the Admiral knew who she was going to ask for. “Yes, Gort Eagleton.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Mirakova in a friendly tone. “Well, if Eagleton is going to have squadron leaders who are commanders reporting to him, then he should have at least the acting rank of Senior Commander, wouldn’t you agree, Cate?”

  After some hesitation, she said, “Well, yes, that does make sense, but then we’d have the same situation between Gort and me since he’d be reporting to another officer of the same rank.”

  “Quite so, but we can fix that too. On this last mission, you had two ship C.O.s reporting to you as TFL and you were already at a higher rank than they were, so there wasn’t any need to give you a temporary promotion, but if your next mission is going to be built around multiple squadrons and ships, then something more is required, and therefore you’re going to have the acting rank of Vice-Admiral. This new position for Eagleton: we’ll have to come up with a name for that position. Any ideas?”

  “Ah, well, if he’s going to be in command of all attack assets, why not give him the title of Commander, Attack Group?”

  “I like it. Okay, CAG it is. You can tell him what’s ahead, but the field promotions won’t become effective until the first stinger squadron is organized. Unless you have something else to discuss, we’re done here.”

  Harrow did not, and as she left the office, Mirakova began to ponder how she might be able to move LeClair out of his current position as the primary operations flag officer to make room for Cate Harrow. Eventually the EAF would have enough ships to justify organizing two fleets, but that wouldn’t be the case for at least a year, and Mirakova was worried every time LeClair and Harrow went out on a mission together. If only LeClair wasn’t so impulsive. At least the upcoming raid on the five carrier shipyards should be safe enough. All he had to do was duplicate the same tactics that Cate had used. What could go wrong?

  With a sigh, she returned her attention to the latest report from Mobile Command. Two Alliance races had attempted two separate attacks on Tyrell-controlled star systems. The Zerconn raid had ended in disaster, with one carrier lost to self destruction, another severely damaged but able to return to base and virtually all corvettes destroyed. The Metrone raid, on the other hand, had accomplished their mission of destroying local infrastructure plus several super-ships, with only a few corvettes lost and both carriers undamaged. She checked to see who that Metrone mission commander was. The name was Napelon. She was unable to determine if Napelon was male or female and made a mental note to have one of her aides find out. This Metrone commander was clearly someone to keep an eye on. As mixed as those results were, at least two of the Alliance member races had figured out that they should conduct their own operations. Formations with mixed crews sounded good in theory but were problematic in practice. With that report read, she called for the next one. It was going to be another long day.

  It was several days later when Eagleton found himself looking at the first stinger prototype as it floated in the hangar bay of the station. It looked for all the world like a giant cigar with a bulge on top where the short range anti-tachyon projector was, along with a pair of grapples hanging from underneath where the equally long and narrow kinetic missile would be carried. Right now the stinger wasn’t carrying the missile, but Eagleton could easily image how the two components would look when they were mated together, and he wasn’t comfortable with the image. The prevailing wisdom was that in order to get stingers relatively close to potential targets quickly, corvettes would have to carry them, and corvettes were already being modified with external docking clamps that would grab onto and hold stingers while the corvette maneuvered and micro-jumped. Unfortunately, because the corvette was literally stuffed to the rafters with equipment of various kinds, save for the relatively small space reserved for the crew, there was no way that stinger pilots could transfer directly from a corvette to a stinger. Each pilot would have to don a spacesuit and then exit the corvette, float over to the stinger and enter its airlock. That would take time and put stress on the pilots. The external docking clamps would also make retrieving the stingers a time-consuming and potentially risky operation after their mission was complete. The whole system looked very jury-rigged, and that’s exactly what it was. He kept thinking that there had to be a better way to deploy, recover and if necessary, re-arm stingers quickly, but nothing suitable came to mind. The carriers, as they were designed, were too big and too valuable to risk bringing stingers into operational range themselves, so a smaller ship had to do it. And the only smaller type of ships that could be carried by carriers were corvettes.

  It was the middle of that night when Eagleton woke up with an idea. Could a ship with the same mass as a corvette be configured to be able to take stingers internally so that they could be quickly re-armed with easy access between the stingers and the ship for the pilots? After using his computer for a half hour to do some preliminary calculations, the answer seemed to be yes, but the redesigned ship would only be able to carry about three stingers. That was less than the six that a modified corvette would be able to carry. Would being able to re-arm three stingers quickly be worth losing the ability to field six one-shot stingers? His intuition told him the answer was no, it wasn’t worth that trade-off. He sat at the computer thinking, and less than ten minutes later had another idea. Stingers could accelerate very quickly up to 65% of light speed, so travelling millions of kilometers wasn’t a problem. At maximum speed, a stinger could travel 702 million kilometers in an hour. That equalled 39 light-minutes, which was almost five times the average distance between the Earth and the sun, and far beyond the estimated detection range of 20 light-seconds for the upgraded Tyrell detection system. To his way of thinking, Stingers really didn’t need to be micro-jump ferried closer. The stinger cockpit was sufficiently comfortable that a pilot could spend several hours in it and still be able to function normally. Life support was designed to keep a pilot supplied with air and heat for 48 hours if necessary. The problem was that both the light and heavy carriers weren’t designed to support and field stingers. They were designed to support corvettes. The docking clamps that would hold onto the corvettes were useless for holding stingers. Without something like a corvette to act as an intermediary docking unit, the Ranger and Waterloo-class carriers would not be able to field stingers.

  It was now obvious to Eagleton that using corvettes solely to allow stingers to be held securely inside a carrier hangar bay was a waste of resources. The Ranger-class of light carriers massed over a quarter of a million metric tonnes. If corvettes were used to dock six stingers each, then a Ranger-class carrier could field 72 stingers. He looked again at his rough design for a 21,000 metric tonne ship that could carry and support three stingers each. If he started from the premise that stingers could get close to their targets on their own, then the docking ship didn’t need to have its own maneuvering and jump drives. Eliminating those major components would free up a lot of space. And if it was permanently docked to the carrier, it wouldn’t need its own power plant either. It could just draw power from the carrier itself. What was left was essentially an almost hollow hull that contained equipment to hold and re-arm stingers and allow the crew direct access between the stinger and the carrier. It was no longer a ship per se but rather a very large docking/repair module. The revised numbers checked out. There should be plenty of room for six stingers, plus storage space for two, maybe three kinetic energy missiles for each stinger. By this time he was wide awake and knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep anytime soon, so he spent the rest of the night putting
together the rough outline of a proposal for the engineering design team.

  To his surprise, Mirakova called him into her office two days later. When he arrived, Mirakova nodded and pointed to a chair that was facing her desk. When he was seated, Mirakova leaned back and began speaking.

  “You are just full of surprises, Commander. First you come up with the corvette configuration, then the stinger concept, and now you’ve developed what the design team is calling a pocket hangar bay, although I have no idea why. It didn’t take the team long to confirm your calculations and be convinced of the merits of the idea. They pointed out something that you didn’t, which is that a module of this size could be mass produced on something like an assembly-line basis. So you’ve made converts of the design team. I’ve strongly recommended approval for the construction and testing of a prototype. I expect to get that approval quickly. When we have it, I will want you to supervise that project. Once those pocket hangar bays start being mass produced, you can then resume getting stinger squadrons organized and trained. Any comments or questions?”

  “No, Admiral. I’m anxious to begin,” he said with a grin.

  “Then why are you still sitting there?” she asked with mock exasperation.

  They both laughed, and Eagleton left the room.

  Chapter Three:

  Heavy Carrier Waterloo/Yankee1 star system

  LeClair paced across the front of the holo-display in the Flag Bridge as 36 RD1s began their journey to get into detection range of Yankee1-C, the planet that was deemed most likely to be where the five carrier-building shipyards were orbiting. Third Fleet was coasting at the same 377 light-seconds distance from the planet that Cate’s Task Force had used at Zulu3-C. As an added precaution, all four of Waterloo’s corvette squadrons were in the process of being deployed around the Fleet to provide additional detection coverage and Fleet defense. He contemplated ordering his remaining 36 RD1s to form an outer shell of detection beyond the reach of the corvette’s detection gear but decided to hold them back. The first batch of 36 drones would not be recovered and would end their programmed flights by diving into the local sun. Not recovering a second group of drones seemed wasteful to him, and keeping Third Fleet in this star system after the attack solely to recover those drones seemed unnecessarily risky. With drone production just starting to ramp up to high levels, it might be prudent to bring back that second group of 36 he thought. Cate Harrow would probably have deployed all 72 RD1s if she had been in charge of this mission. It was his impression that she didn’t give a lot of thought to things like building up reserves of drones for future use. She seemed to be more interested in making a big splash, a spectacular mission result, anything that would impress Mirakova and further minimize the clouds over her from the Omega2 disaster. He, on the other hand, would show Mirakova how a mission could be conducted with careful thought and precise execution. Once the CEO understood how good he really was, she would see Harrow’s grandstanding for what it was and make sure that Harrow always had someone steady like him keeping an eye on her in all future missions. A smile crossed his lips as he watched the green icons denoting corvettes and drones moving away from Third Fleet.

  Tyrell Carrier Natron

  Torq listened carefully to the chatter of his Command Deck crew to gauge their states of mind. Technically, this deployment was a training exercise to give his Attack Craft pilots more field experience, but in his own mind he thought of the deployment of the Natron to this star system as an ambush, ready to pounce on the enemy if they had indeed taken the bait of the phony FTL messages. Careful analysis of the sensor data from the last attack on the Home System strongly hinted that the enemy fleet had stationed itself either above or below the planet’s axis. How far above or below was unknown, and so Torq had ordered some of the sensor drones that routinely patrolled around this planet to move further along the planet’s line of axis. Meanwhile, Natron was stationed over the planet’s equator so that it would be mid-way between both possible enemy attack points. Torq checked the status board of his three Attack Craft groups. First Group was still in the process of re-docking with the ship. Second Group had commenced their patrol sweeps around the carrier, and Third Group was getting ready for their patrol duty shift. If the enemy didn’t show up soon, he wondered how much longer he could justify keeping this ship and these pilots engaged in this ‘training’ mission before the boredom became resentment,. High Command had correctly pointed out that the enemy might not be intercepting system-to-system FTL transmissions, and the attack on the Home System really could be just a coincidence. They also pointed out that even if the enemy was reading Tyrell messages, they might see the trap in this star system for what it was. Torq had reluctantly agreed that those interpretations were possible, but the prospect of catching an alien fleet off-guard and perhaps even capturing and interrogating live enemy warriors or capturing their astrogational database intact was so enticing that they had agreed to this mission.

  “Contact report, Ship Master,” said the sensor technician in a calm voice.

  Torq smiled. He had let it be known that arrangements had been made to present both the ship crew and the AC pilots with unexpected events just like this to test their alertness. He also knew that no such arrangements had been made. Therefore, if there were any unusual events, they would be real, not simulated, but the crews and pilots would not drift into Battle Lust.

  “Let me see it,” he commanded. A flashing yellow dot appeared on the tactical display. The sidebar data showed that it was a momentary reflection of sunlight that appeared to be coming from a metal object moving at high speed. As the display rotated its 3D image, Torq noticed that the contact’s bearing was below the planet’s axis and off to one side. This was exactly what he would have expected to see if the enemy were trying to repeat their attack strategy, sending detection drones around to the planet’s side to complicate any attempt at backtracking those drones to their launch point. He, however, already had a pretty good idea of where the launch point was in general terms; only the distance from the planet was in question. A quick check of the status of First and Third Groups told him that the First was still being recovered, which meant that Third Group could not yet be launched, but they could be put on alert.

  “Flight Master, I want Third Group to be put on alert to be ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Weapons Master, I want these sensor drones to move further away from the planet at five percent of light.” Torq used his console to indicate which drones. He was tempted to order Second Group to change their patrol vectors too, but decided to wait until the sensor drones had pinpointed the enemy carriers’ position.

  Carrier Waterloo:

  LeClair was watching the tactical display sidebar so intently that he didn’t notice his CAG step up to stand beside his Command Station. The officer waited to see if the Admiral noticed him, and when several seconds went by without any apparent awareness of his presence, he cleared his throat and spoke when LeClair looked up at him.

  “Admiral, perhaps we should order the RD2s deployed to their attack positions now?”

  LeClair looked back at the sidebar data. “It’s too soon, Cag. The recons won’t be in detection range for another eight minutes. Plenty of time to get the strike force ready.”

  The CAG waited to make sure there was nothing further coming from his Fleet Commander and then walked back to his station.

  Tyrell Carrier Natron:

  Torq tried to remain calm, but his certainty that an enemy carrier was out there somewhere, and perhaps more than one, was prompting his body to release the hormones that, if not resisted, would trigger his battle lust. Keeping that wonderful feeling under firm control was becoming more and more difficult.

  “Sensor drone contact. Multiple large ships!” The sensor technician’s voice was suddenly more excited. He clearly did not believe that these contacts were just Tyrell Ships-of-Battle acting the part of enemy carriers. The approximate position of the contacts appeared on the tactical display befo
re Torq could ask for it. YES! Those ships were directly below the planet’s axis exactly where he would have expected to see them.

  “Flight Master, Third Group is to launch immediately. First Group to be put on alert.” Torq tried hard to keep his voice calm. He didn’t want those pilots to succumb to their battle lust this soon. He wanted it to sound like an unscheduled drill. “I also want a communication channel to Second Group Master using communication laser only.” As he waited for the com channel to be established, he activated the privacy shield around his Command Station.

  “Second Group Master is on channel 1, Ship Master,” said the com technician.

  “Ship Master to Group Master,” said Torq.

  “I hear you, Ship Master.”

  “Your group will have the opportunity to conduct an attack exercise with actual weapons firing. Your targets will appear to be large ships, and there may be smaller ships or craft as well. I want your group to commence firing as soon as you get within one quarter of detection range of the targets. Continue firing at them until you are ordered to cease or until you detect other targets. You’ll be receiving vector changes momentarily. Are my orders clear, Group Master?”

  After the slightest of hesitation, he heard the Group Master’s voice. “Your orders are clear, Ship Master.”