Valor's Stand

by Kal Spriggs

  I'd done the calculations in my head and then again on my implant. Part of me was tempted to run a simulation to see just what that would do to a planet. All controlled by six people, I reminded myself. One squadron. Six pilots. My head spun a bit.

  Sure, Century could put thousands of fighters up with sufficient time to call up our Reserve Planetary Militia pilots. Each of those fighters carried four bombs. So we'd need forty-eight Firebolts to match just the number of bombs, but this smart-launch bomb rack sounded like it could deploy a broader spread, which meant that wasn't a fully accurate comparison.

  “Spiders are armed with a light particle cannon,” he went on, “hits a bit harder than what a Firebolt carries, but still not enough to do more than annoy anything bigger than a corvette, not without coordinated fire from a lot of them.”

  “A Drake doesn't have the same size bomb racks, because we wanted to take advantage of some new disruptor tech,” he told us, highlighting a long central element that ran the length of the craft on his display.

  “Wait, did you say disruptor tech, sir?” Ashiri asked with a frown. “I thought dreadnoughts mounted disruptor cannons. You can't mount them on anything smaller.”

  “They do, and it's difficult, they're extremely energy intensive,” Woods smirked. “But a company out of the Preserve has started selling these,” he pointed at the highlighted section. “It's a medium disruptor cannon, but as you can see, it's relatively small.”

  “Relatively” was... relative. The Drake was forty-five meters long, right at the maximum size for a warp envelope, and that medium disruptor cannon ran the entire length of the craft.

  “It's still extremely power intensive, but some of our engineers noticed that while a destroyer or corvette couldn't meet the power requirements and sustain their warp-drive at the same time, a warp-envelope is far less power intensive... after we bring up the warp envelope, anyway. They also figured out that the short-duration power systems we use can be souped up a bit bigger... so here we are, weapon system designed for a cruiser in a fighter-bomber frame.”

  “That's insane,” Ashiri and I both said.

  “We've unofficially classed it as a gunboat, but no one else is building anything like this. It's classified, by the way. We've yet to use them against anyone besides a few piracy patrols, and well, the pirates didn't come out of it very well.” He gave us a bear-like grin.

  I was still having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Normally the armament on a fighter was completely secondary. Firebolts could, if enough of them focused their fire, be a threat to a corvette or a destroyer who'd already taken a glancing hit from a bomb. But disruptor tech was seriously daunting. It used some of the same exotic particles that went into creating and maintaining a drive field. Mounted on something with the size and speed of a fighter...

  “The Mercenary Guild agreed to build them in secret and we haven't exactly advertised their full capabilities, which is part of why we haven't told the average Militia pilot about them. They also come with a Four hundred and fifty million price tag, which is the other part.

  “Four...” I couldn't even finish the words. Four hundred and fifty million dollars for a single fighter craft wasn't just insane, it was beyond insane.

  “The Merc Guild fronted most of the expense, after the Admiral's people delivered them the design a couple years back. I guess there's some proprietary power systems that they really wanted to get their hands on, so they agreed to eat a lot of the expense to see how they work. We got them delivered last year,” Woods went on. “Part of those specs comes with a full non-disclosure agreement. You aren't even allowed to say what you fly, by the way, just that you fly in a squadron of warp envelope craft.”

  “Sir,” Ashiri and I both nodded. But I was starting to put things together in my head. Two years ago, Directorate Thirteen had started looking at the Weisfeldt-Armstrong-Regan drive. I'd been a part of a lot of design systems for the Alexandria Project, too. Power systems had been a part of that.

  The Alexandria doesn't mount disruptors... but the power systems should work. I wondered if that had been a part of the deal. We gave up power system info and got info on how to build these medium disruptor cannons.

  “Our tactics are a bit different from normal fighters, as you might imagine,” Lieutenant Commander Woods went on. “Our tactics are part of the specs I sent over. We've got a training exercise tomorrow morning. I'll want to get you both certified to handle the craft in the simulator two hours prior to the exercise start.” He smiled, leaning forward, “I think you both have a lot of reading to do, ladies. Dismissed.”

  We saluted and hurried out. My head was still spinning a bit as I thought through all the implications... and I was starting to wonder just how much the Admiral had been working behind the scenes... and what she intended my role to be.

  ***

  I hadn't had time to talk to the Admiral about my cousin Mel and what she was doing here.

  Nor had I had time to message Kyle. Back in our quarters, Ashiri and I had buckled down, reading through the entire reading assignment that Lieutenant Commander Woods had transferred us. With our implants, it was actually quite easy to cover a lot of technical material, though. Given the full specs, we actually were able to simulate the vessels and see their capabilities... and we were able to do that within about an hour.

  “Gorgons look scary,” Ashiri noted.

  “Yeah,” I considered the corvettes. The Centurions had only three of the craft, half a squadron, which normally wouldn't be enough firepower to really consider a threat. Most of our corvettes at Century didn't have strategic warp drives, they were Terrier-class ships, designed for system defense, built in the Parisian Military Sector for Guard Fleet over a hundred and fifty years earlier. They'd been shipped out after purchase. Each of them carried eight warp-drive missiles, which was pretty impressive when they were used in-mass, but they only had light particle cannons after those missiles were used up.

  Each Gorgon had been designed around a cell-launch system, and they obviously had strategic warp-drives. They could launch twenty warp-drive missiles per ship, and unlike most corvettes who carried their warp missiles in external racks which were vulnerable to damage, the cell-launch systems were armored and protected inside the ship. So they didn't have to launch all their salvo at once, they could space it out, maintaining the threat throughout a fight. Of course, that wasn't their only armament. They also mounted a twin heavy particle beam. It wasn't much, especially since the ships didn't mount any separate point defense, but it did allow the Gorgons able to defend themselves after they'd volleyed their missiles.

  The rest of the Centurions ships were more standard classes. The Pentacane was a Warrior-class light carrier and it could carry three squadrons of fighters in its external docking clamps and another squadron internal to its hangars. It also had four external combat shuttles, the Valkyrie-class that we'd already ridden to the planet, and it carried a company of infantry in addition to pilots, fighter service crews, and supplies for it's entire escort force.

  There was a full squadron of Cheetah-class corvettes, armed with spine mounted heavy lasers and energy torpedoes. The ships were relatively fast for corvettes, with drive fields almost as powerful as destroyers, but they were still slow compared to larger ships with deeper drive fields. From what I remembered, they functioned well in defensive roles. Century had a handful of the ships, if I remember right. Cheetahs were individually fragile, but they could be enough of a threat to keep larger ships at longer range, where fighters or warp missiles could be used to damage or drive them off. Unlike many corvette classes, Cheetahs mounted strategic warp drives, which was why they were viable for the mercenary force.

  There was a squadron of Endurance-class corvettes, as well, which were... not the best ship from what I knew. Sure, they mounted a powerful twin spinal laser and carried as many as twelve warp drive missiles. But that laser was slow to charge, unless they shut down the drive field and turned that power to t
he weapons. Also, it stored its missiles in an internal battery and launched its missiles through a pair of launchers with a painfully slow launch rate. The six ships would be able to launch twelve warp missiles every twenty to forty seconds, depending on what upgrades they had to their launch systems. The Endurances, like the Cheetahs, had a strategic warp drive, so it could travel through FTL warp.

  More impressive to me was the squadron of Halo-class destroyers. Halos were about two hundred and twenty meters long and they were purpose-built ships, designed to be a threat to larger ships and to function as the main threat. They mounted the same missile launcher system as the Endurances, which made sense seeing as they'd both been built around the same era, fifty years or so earlier. But the Halos mounted two single heavy particle cannons, each one in a turret, and two spinal fusion beams. The directed fusion beams weren't the most powerful weapons, but the controlled and directed fusion process created a broad spectrum of radiation and particles, which often destabilized a ship's warp-drive field even more effectively than a stronger laser or particle beam would. The Halos were also fairly fast with robust drive fields, which made them harder to kill. They weren't individually a match for a cruiser, but a full squadron of six of the ships was pretty impressive amount of firepower. The problem with them was that in order to have the power to fire their main weapons at a sustained rate, they had to drop their warp drives. They were some of the most modern ships of that type to have been built.

  They'd been built for Guard Fleet, who had shifted towards a more balanced energy approach only a decade or so after the first of them been built, even before all of them had been fielded. The Guard had moved on to the Forerunner-class, which even that they'd started phasing out in the favor of building more of the light cruiser classes. Halo-class destroyers as a result were in common use all across Guard Space in mercenary, militia, and even pirates. My grandmother had commanded a half-squadron of them in the defense of Century during the Three Day War... and my grandfather had died commanding one of those ships.

  I was just surprised that we had six of them in the Centurions. They were relatively modern, powerful ships. We had only one full squadron of destroyers back home at Century, and those were the older Lance-class, which were nearly three hundred years old. They were well-built ships, for their time, but they weren't particularly threatening to more modern vessels. They were fast enough to threaten pirate corvettes and frigates and had a good enough armament to take on that kind of threat, but no one thought that they were particularly amazing ships, they were just the best we could afford.

  Or so I'd thought. The Centurions represented a lot of expense in ships and equipment. There was a lot more than just the ships, in the form of transports carrying ground forces, including tanks and armored vehicles, plus the crews of those vehicles and infantry, armed with more modern weapons and equipment than most of the Militia carried.

  I sort of wondered if part of why they didn't share info on how the Centurions were equipped was to prevent some kind of backlash or anger in the rest of our forces. We had a lot of obsolete junk compared to the Centurions. It was painful, because we defended our homeworld with that obsolete junk, while we farmed out equipment the militia couldn't afford in a mercenary unit that served far from home.

  I hadn't realized that I was getting angry until the digital image of the ships shredded. “Well,” Ashiri had a nervous note in her voice, “you might want to control that anger.”

  “Why?” I snapped. “We've been told for five years now that Century can't afford to equip us with modern equipment. Told that we've got to take old fighters into combat against potentially modern threats... and for what, because some of our people are out here playing mercenary?”

  “Because your grandmother slipped in while we were doing the sim, and we're talking out loud,” Ashiri told me.

  I opened my physical eyes and saw the Admiral standing there in our quarters, her eyebrows raised. Ashiri and I snapped to attention, me popping up from my bunk so fast that I hit my head on Ashiri's bunk above me. Ow.

  “Ma'am,” we said, standing at attention.

  She gave us an amused look. “I knocked, and when neither of you answered, I came in.”

  Oh, great... I'd been tired, but also so focused on studying the specs and capabilities of the ships that I hadn't been paying attention to anything else. “Sorry, ma'am, I--”

  “You voiced a serious criticism and a valid point,” she interrupted, holding one hand up. “Just about all those who come serve with the Centurions end up having those same questions. I will note, by the way, that some of our newer ships are very recent acquisitions... but the rest are not. We've had the Pentacane for thirty years, the Halo-class destroyers for almost as long. The Cheetahs and Endurances, we've had for longer, but we only stood up the Centurions around forty years back.”

  “Why, ma'am?” I asked, feeling uncertain as I stared at her, my head aching from whacking it.

  “Because we're sending these people out to fight regularly, is a part of it. We want them to be equipped as well as we could. Part of that is wanting to retain our people with less risk, part of that is we want to scare any potential foes... like Drakkus.

  “Drakkus?” Ashiri asked.

  The Admiral gave her a nod, “They sponsor pirates all across the Periphery, and a lot of what the Centurions gets as work is anti-piracy patrols, sponsored by Guard Fleet. Part of why pirates tend to avoid Century is the reputation of the Centurions. That was the theory, anyway,” she made something of a face. “As we saw with Wessek and his... sponsor, that's not always the case.”

  “Things have changed over the past few years, we're trying to see if we can afford newer ships, even custom-built ones from Hanet's shipyards. That's why we have the Gorgons and Drakes, we're trying some new designs... and we're getting a very big discount from the mercenary guild to have these ships built. They want to see how feasible they are. The other piece of this is that the Centurions go beyond paying for themselves. One of our little anti-piracy patrols fund the company operations for a year. This mission, we're making more each month we're parked here than we would on three of those patrols. That money goes straight to the militia, minus expenses for our operations. This past two months the Centurions have been on-site, we've paid for the lay-down of three more Gorgons and another squadron of Drakes. We finish out the first year here, and we pay for a lot more.”

  “But what happens if we get attacked by the Drakkus Empire or someone else?” I demanded.

  “Generally,” the Admiral said, “in times of war, Guard Fleet releases mercenary units that are militia reservists. So long as we're in good standing with the Mercenary Guild, they might even shake loose another unit to cover down on our mission.” She made a face, “It's not a situation I'm happy about either, trust me, but it's the situation we have.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” Ashiri and I nodded. I still didn't know how I felt about it all, but I understood her reasoning. And she never said this was her choice, she explained the situation and the reasoning. It made me curious who had made the decision in the first place.

  Not that she may be free to tell me, not with Ashiri present.

  “Now then, I just swung by to check on you and to let you know that you'll be leading the protective details for Admiral Rao when we transfer him planet side. I'll need you to familiarize yourselves with the political situation. I've just transferred the information to your implants.”

  Something of my dread at her words must have shown on my face. “Don't worry, it's a light reading, sure to help you fall asleep if you're having any issues. Goodnight, cadets.”

  ***

  Chapter 15: The Reward For Good Work Is More Work

  The next few days were sort of a blur. When we weren't in the simulators, learning the details of our new craft, we were training with the security details we'd lead. I started to wonder if I would ever have a few days to just relax, maybe even to see some of the planet I'd come a hundred and twenty
light years from home to visit.

  The more I learned about Harmony and its delicate political situation, the more and more I felt the answer to that question was going to be “no.”

  Admiral Rao, who my cousin Mel had rescued, was the leader of the coup that had deposed the corrupt government of the Harmony Protectorate. In reading the Admiral's file on him, he was at once both a charismatic officer and utterly terrifying as a person. He had tried and executed the senior leaders of the Protectorate's civilian government and military commands. There had been charges of corruption, piracy, human-trafficking, and even crimes against humanity. Every single person put on trial had been found guilty and all of them had been put to death.

  Matched against that was files about him and his family, videos showing him smiling and charming. His military records showed an unbroken chain of successful efforts, ranging from piracy patrols to commanding dreadnoughts in maneuver exercises and even some time serving as a mercenary for the Protectorate's since-disbanded mercenary company.

  After the last execution and just before the Guard had prepared to launch an invasion, he had stepped down from control over the Protectorate and invited the UN Star Guard to come in and establish a stable interim government and elect a new president.

  That was where things had gone haywire. The Guard had arrested him, putting him in prison. They'd also started a whole ring of extortionate efforts, ranging from restricting the flow of human aide to the unsettled nation to seizing a number of Harmony Protectorate ships and businesses on various charges of 'aiding and abetting the disruption of civilian rule.'

  Not long after all that, someone had submitted Admiral Rao's name as a potential next president and he and two others had won places on the initial ballot. In the two weeks since that, he'd climbed so far ahead in the election polls that his victory was pretty much assured.