by Moshe Ben-Or
Maybe they’d been looking for scout probes, too, given the size of their synthetic apertures and the number of interferometry drones they’d deployed.
Four sensor corvettes for imagery. An auxiliary cruiser for data fusion and ansible comms with the main Zin force down in the inner system. Not a real warship at all, just a converted freighter with extra shields and armor, and a quad of hundred-kilo guns to help aim its rocket pods. The thing’s job wasn’t to fight other warships. It processed data for a living. It just had to survive long enough for its parent fleet to come rescue it if its corvettes blundered into a bunch of mines, or triggered a drone swarm.
The aux cruiser was key. It had to die first.
“Second, destroy. Prevent communication.” commanded the commodore as he designated the fleeing corvette and its buddies for Maurice’s merry bunch.
The corvette’s wavefronts were fresh. He was only eight light-minutes away. The task force had popped out of subspace almost on top of him. The auxiliary cruiser’s wavefronts were an hour and a half out of date. But he’d been sitting still the whole time, playing fusion center for his corvettes. Even if he’d moved in the past hour and a half, Maurice’s torpedo bombers would sniff him out quickly enough. The fastest he could go was about c, and he had no reason to make flank speed like that. The torpedo bombers could go four times as fast, and they had every reason to hurry.
That aux cruiser would die right about the time when Maurice’s fighters rocketed the corvette into dust, give or take a couple of minutes. The rest of their buddies could be hunted down at leisure. Each of the two next nearest was a bit over two light-hours away from here.
“Lançons,” came the laconic response.
Glorie spat a handful of cylinder-tipped darts into the void.
“Commo!” snapped Baron Papadakis. “Where are my ansible cores?”
The fact that it was rough enough to disentangle ansibles was probably the worst fucking thing about this new manner of PGS jump, thought the acting commander of Task Force Eighteen. Fighting a gun battle without ansibles would utterly suck. He’d had enough of that at First Contact, when the Zin had surprised everyone at Paradise.
“Still entangling, sir!” answered the signal officer. “Another five minutes.”
And then the Allfather-damned cores would have to be distributed between the capital ships, thought the commander of Task Force Eighteen.
The cores couldn’t be entangled while microjumping. In the meantime, while they sat here with their dicks in their hands, their jump signature was racing toward the inner system at the speed of light. Maurice’s pilots would smash the Zin sensor detachment to bits without so much as a meow going out on the ansible, of this he had no doubt. But the original plan was fucking shot regardless, just by virtue of their having to race down the gravity well, scattering signature all over the place. If he set out right this instant, it would still take him over two hours to get ahead of those wavefronts.
In the meantime, once the Zin lost ansible contact with their imagery fusion center, they would start trying to re-establish it. The imagery detachment was well out of the ecliptic, far away from any astronomical body. There was nothing to threaten it out here. Therefore, the enemy’s first assumption would be ansible failure. Prosaic. Common. Readily fixed. If the aux cruiser didn’t come back up on the net in half an hour or so, they would send out a pair of corvettes with a new ansible core.
Those corvettes would be in no hurry. Why burn drive chambers over a commonplace ansible disentanglement? It wasn’t like the imagery updates couldn’t wait. Task Force Intelligence would spend days analyzing the stuff the imagery detachment had sent already, before they even got to the new data collected since the transmission stream had ceased.
They’d move out at about two c. And a bit over two hours later they would encounter the wavefronts that would tell them exactly what had happened. At which point drive chamber maintenance would become a trivial non-concern, and the clock would start ticking down.
Those corvettes had to die without a peep, and they would. But regardless of how he made that happen, the idea of his capital ships catching the enemy with his pants around his ankles was now out the window. The wavefront math simply didn’t work out.
“Eighteen, warning order!” snapped Baron Papadakis as he pushed around icons and drew arrows. “Supporting detachments will launch snap raid. Captain Barzel commands the raid.”
Surprise was everything. Surprise was life itself. If he couldn’t get a surprise gunnery engagement, the next best thing was a surprise torpedo and missile strike. Moshe Barzel’s stereotypically Israeli habit of commanding his detachment from the bridge of a lead-wave corvette would come in quite handy.
The light units would run forward as fast as they could go. Maurice would follow without ansibles, launch his torpedo bombers to arrive moments before the first of Moshe’s corvettes, and turn back toward the main effort to receive his ansible cores. The raid would end up as a three-wave combined assault, with Captain Baumann’s frigate groups riding in to ring the closing bell with a shower of twenty-megaton warheads.
In other words, kick the bastards hard in the nuts, kick ‘em some more while they were down, and run like hell when they got back up. Bonus points for giving ‘em a bloody nose as they chased the missile ships back up the gravity well.
Which they would. Zin blood ran hot. Their commander wouldn’t sit and wait for the other shoe to drop after he’d just been kicked in the balls. He’d roar and leap, the way they always did.
Risky as that may be, Maurice’s escorting gunboats and destroyers would leave the capital ships and go hang right behind Ephraim Baumann’s frigates. The surprise meeting engagement between them and the Zin light units sent to chase down his missile ships would not turn out in the cats’ favor.
The big-gun engagement would be no surprise attack, but the enemy would come into it bloodied and tired, shorn of light units and disorganized by pursuit, while his own force would be fresh and raring to go. After the mauling his light forces had already given the bastards, the outcome would be a foregone conclusion.
“Eighteen, First-One,” dictated the commodore. “Fragmentary order follows:
“Mission: unchanged
“Intent: unchanged.
“Concept: Three phases.
“Phase one: Snap raid. Captain Barzel commands. Detachment Two launches torpedo strike. Carriers turn back to receive ansible cores. Escorting gun units continue forward after the missile ships. Follow-on forces from detachments Three and Four arrive after the torpedo bombers and exploit initial successes as appropriate. Upon Captain Barzel’s order, missile units rapidly withdraw. Chaotic enemy pursuit ensues. Pursuing enemy light forces advance into surprise meeting engagement with Detachment Two gun units and sustain heavy casualties.
“I want a short, sharp engagement, taking maximum advantage of the element of surprise. Hurt ‘em bad, run like the wind. Don’t get tangled up in pitched battle.
“End state: At least 30% of enemy capital ships destroyed. Enemy carriers destroyed. 33% of pursuing enemy light units destroyed.
“Phase two: Detachment One advances in wall of battle, seeking meeting engagement with the enemy. Close gun action ensues. Supporting detachments operate as per SOP. End state: Enemy unable to continue action. 100% of enemy capital ships destroyed.
“Phase three: Mop-up TBD. End state: 100% of ansible-equipped enemy vessels destroyed. 100% of own survivors rescued. No enemy prisoners, no enemy survivors.
“Execution: Graphic attached.
“Acknowledge.”
Laconic acknowledgements crackled over the aether as Task force Eighteen launched itself into battle.
* * *
Acceleration pushed Jean-Marie Leroy back into his crash pad as the Glorie’s catapult threw his torpedo bomber into the void. This was the moment he lived for. It was just him now. Just him and the AI and the pure, icy blackness and the merciless, distant stars. The bomber was mere
shadow around him. An extension of his will, rendered transparent by virtual reality, with naught but ghostly virtual controls and readouts to interfere with his perception of the universe.
He had dreamt of this ever since he could remember. Torpedo bombers had decorated his half of the compartment he’d shared with his sister as a boy. Torpedo bombers had filled his dreams in middle school. On the day he’d turned thirteen, with middle school behind him, on the very first day when he finally could, he’d applied to the selection program. His mother had cried. His father had been silent at the news. But they could not dissuade him, nor could they forbid him. From that day forward he would fight, test after test and selection after selection, to be one of the Fearless Few who lead the charge, and took the greatest risk.
The boldest corvette captain launched his missiles from a range of three light-seconds. Battlecruisers dueled at a light-second, teleporting eight-megaton charges across three hundred thousand kilometers at targets that, often as not, had fled before the half-ton shell even entered the chamber of the gun. Mighty battleships clashing in wall of battle would volley at one another from no closer than a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers away.
The massed megatons of their nuclear fury were expended primarily upon empty space. They called themselves successful if a single shell in a twelve-gun volley came within three hundred kilometers of the target. They cheered when a gravitically-focused beam of x-rays and gamma rays smashed against an enemy shield across fifty or sixty kilometers of empty space, reflecting back, as often as not, in a harmless flash of diffuse white.
They fought, lucky hit by lucky hit and intuition by intuition, to strip off their enemy’s shield, to ablate away protective coatings and fracture his armor with thermal stress, to burn through the hull with blow after merciless blow, to destroy compartments and poison crews with lethal rays until, finally, weakened and bloodied by countless hours of combat, retching from heat exhaustion and radiation poisoning, choking on the stench of his own sweat amid clouds of steam released from bursting pipes and air rendered oven-hot by leakage from overwhelmed heatsinks, the foe surrendered, or else succumbed.
Not so the torpedo bomber pilot. For his was a weapon of hoary antiquity. He was a relic of an earlier, grander age.
In a world of crews, he ventured forth alone. In a world of Abramovian guns, he bore into battle an Einsteinian lance. No manned vessel was faster or more agile than his.
The torpedo bomber pilot’s standard planning ranges ran from twenty-one thousand down to twelve thousand kilometers, depending on the target. At his most cautious, he still approached within twenty-seven thousand kilometers of a lumbering battleship. At his most audacious, he struck at the fastest of cruisers from the spitting distance of less than ten thousand.
Where others took aim by adjusting target models, he took aim by pointing his vessel. He needed no computational simulacrum, no probabilistic guesstimate to supplement the data from his sensors. Direct sensing told him everything he needed to know about his enemy’s position and velocity.
Where others fired dozens and hundreds of shells, he fired but a single shot. Where others counted a volley’s firepower in tens of megatons, he delivered the equivalent of a mere six hundred and eighty-one kilotons of TNT. But he delivered those six hundred and eighty-one kilotons not in radiation but in kinetic energy. He delivered them directly to the surface of his enemy’s hull.
The torpedo bomber was the dread of the mightiest dreadnought. Whole classes of warship – the fighter, the gunboat, even the destroyer – existed in whole or in part in order to stop it. Its pilot was a lone knight afield upon the swiftest of steeds. With but a single blow, his enchanted lance could slay the mightiest of dragons.
At over six and a half meters long and some two meters in diameter, massing a bit more than twenty-five tons when attached to the bomber, Jean Leroy’s weapon dwarfed a man. Yet the thing that actually did the damage was surprisingly tiny. An innocuous-looking rod, a mere twenty-four and a half centimeters long and three and a half wide. A few grams over four and a half kilos in mass. He’d held a gold-plated replica of one in hand just last year, when the Squadron had once again won the Fleet-wide torpedo gunnery competition. A reinforced tungsten monocrystal, sheathed in self-repairing smart ceramic.
An instant after his bomber released the torpedo and slipped back into subspace, all the rest would consume itself in a gigantic torch of fusion flame. A millisecond after ignition, the launch booster would be gone, leaving behind an expanding cloud of vapor that used to be a transport container and some seventeen and a half tons of hydrogen-oxygen plasma hurtling backward at a little over three percent of the speed of light.
Spin-stabilized and accelerated to nearly twelve percent of c, sheathed in some four hundred and fifty kilos’ worth of swirling carbon-metal vapor that used to be a rocket, the innocuous-looking tungsten rod became unstoppable. A shield generator’s powerful electromagnetic fields and the piranha-like action of shield matter would strip away the protective cloud of relativistic vapor that enclosed it, but in the milliseconds it would take to traverse the hundred kilometers of shield that surrounded the most powerful of battleships, the shield matter would have time to take but a few tiny bites from the tungsten penetrator itself, and the spinning rod of death would remain undeflected by its efforts.
It took a lot more snarkyons to dismantle a dense monocrystal of heavy metal than it took to redirect photons and vapor. In the fractions of a second that passed between torpedo ignition and the penetrator striking the hull, a shield generator simply didn’t have time to mass enough shield matter in the tungsten rod’s way.
Arriving at the target virtually unscathed, the penetrator would punch through battleship plate as if it were tissue paper. Nothing man-made could stand before it. It would smash through bulkhead after bulkhead, filling compartment after compartment with a sleet of lethal metal droplets and a fog of superheated gas, the expanding cone of its fiery advance piercing the enemy vessel from one end to the other before exiting the far end of the target and continuing into the universe at large as a cloud of relativistic plasma and scattered hull fragments. One well-placed hit could cripple any warship, however large. Even a glancing hit could do terrible damage.
Jean Leroy delivered the mightiest ship-to-ship weapon known to Man.
A pulse of microjump drive, and he was out in free space. Torpedo Squadron 232 was forming up around him. The Jeanne D’Arc Squadron. His squadron. His family for twenty years, and now, for the past four, his to command. He stood at the pinnacle of his chosen profession. There was nowhere upward to go. With a Lieutenant Commander’s pair of centimeter-wide stripes and the Jeanne D’Arc patch, the pyramid ended.
For three and a half centuries, he who wore those two stripes upon his cuff had commanded the best of the best and the most daring of the daring. For three and a half centuries, the men who’d won the privilege of wearing that patch upon their shoulders had stayed true to their famed squadron’s motto, ever leading the charge in the Corporation’s greatest battles. For three and a half centuries theirs had been the most exclusive of brotherhoods among the knights of the relativistic lance, and none had been their equal. For three and a half centuries they, and no one but they, had been entrusted with the most vital and most dangerous of missions. And so they were again, this day. When Admiral of the Fleet Shimon Bar-El had called forth the best of the best in the nation’s most desperate hour, upon his roster there had been, inevitably, a carrier named Glorie, and the men who wore the Jeanne D’Arc patch.
A swarm of new icons blinked into existence to his port. The bomber’s AI tagged them with friendly-adjacent attributes as it completed handshakes and radio checks.
It would have been disconcerting, smiled Jean Leroy, to end up going on this mission without Maurice Gautier and his gang of hot-dogging rogues from the Victoire. As much as he worked to keep his own pilots away from Maurice’s bunch of troublemakers off duty, there wasn’t any other outfit he
’d rather have by his side in a tough spot. Not that there had ever been a snowball’s chance in Hell of the storied St. Michael Squadron being left behind. Their catalog of martial exploits on the field, past and present, was second only to one, however hotly they would dispute the matter. Their reputation off the field, as usual in these cases, didn’t matter one little bit.
Three and a half centuries ago, when Torpedo Squadron 232 was assembled as the Corporation’s premier bomber strike force, Torpedo Squadron 931 had been founded as its counterpoint. They weren’t that, anymore. Officially.
Regardless of what naval regulations said or didn’t say in any given century, the St. Michael Squadron’s strict admission requirements had never changed. The Naval Police still doubled its shifts whenever the Victoire came into port after a long cruise, and the squadron’s pilots, drunk and sober, still lived up in spades to the piratical flaming-sword-and-grinning-skull patch they wore on their flight suits.
Their current glorious leader fit them to a t. Twice-divorced, thrice-married, once court-martialed Lieutenant Commander Maurice Gautier was a bomber pilot by the grace of God. And were he not, he would’ve gotten drummed right out of the Fleet in disgrace eight years ago, when they’d caught him in flagrante at a wedding reception, with a Preferred Shareholder’s teenage fiancée and her just-married twin sister.
“Torch, Lover,” came Maurice’s cheerful voice on the radio, “Ready when you are.”
He had every reason to be cheerful, thought the commander of TS 232. Fleet Intelligence had done a bang-up job. Looking at the wavefronts from here at launch point, the reinforcements Head Cat had left behind as he rushed toward Hadassah were exactly as predicted. As of five hours twenty minutes ago, the enemy force in the inner system had barely matched what was bearing down on it from out of the ecliptic. Roughly the equivalent of a single reinforced line squadron. Twelve heavy warships, two carriers, four light cruisers. All completely unaware of what was about to erupt atop their furry heads.