by James Rosone
“We then started firing the magrails, but at these distances and speeds, it was going to take close to six minutes for them to hit. So we had the batteries do their best to spread their slugs where we thought the enemy ship would be in six to eight minutes. While all of this was happening, we fired a series of SW missiles to try and interfere with their laser shots. By and large, they had little effect. That could be because we don’t fully understand how to use them correctly, or because they were just not creating a thick enough debris field between us and the enemy ship to really dampen the laser.”
Hunt tried to be patient. He knew they had all read the reports and seen the videos, but nothing beat a firsthand account of what had transpired. Before anyone else could ask him another question, Hunt added, “If I may, Admirals, I’d like to explain why I think our ship survived this engagement and why we succeeded in ultimately destroying the Zodark vessel.”
The group collectively nodded for him to proceed, ready to hear what he had to say. He proceeded to regale them with a detailed play-by-play of the encounter, starting from the beginning. They hung breathlessly on every word.
By the time Hunt finished giving them a summary of the battle, the admirals and engineers in the room looked pleased at the outcome but also nervous about the results. He’d outlined what had worked but also identified some significant shortcomings in both Earth’s current ship designs and weapon systems.
The enemy’s ability to detect their ships from further out was certainly an issue. The pulse beam batteries were supposed to be the primary weapons on warships because lasers almost instantaneously hit their target when fired, but they had been completely ineffective against the Zodarks. The missiles, while useful, were the slowest weapon in the inventory. The magrails, while tried and proven, had limits because it took them time to cross the distance between ships, and if the enemy ship moved, they missed—it would require a huge number of slugs in an almost shotgun effect in hopes that a few of them would score some hits.
The one advantage the Earthers now had was that they had beaten a Zodark ship and lived to tell about it. They could incorporate what had worked and build on the success of it while they looked to overcome the deficiencies in their current tech.
The meeting lasted another hour as the admirals turned their attention to Admiral Halsey, whose ship had mainly observed the battle from a distance. They wanted to know what data she had been able to collect from the sidelines and what she believed could be done differently. When the admirals had completed their lines of questioning, the meeting was finally ended.
Hunt couldn’t have been happier when he was finally released from that room. He was tired of having to relive that event and even more sick of having to recount his failures as a commander. They had won the battle, but the loss of a quarter of his crew still stung. That wasn’t a feeling that went away with a couple of days’ sleep or a few bottles of bourbon. It would take time, and time wasn’t something they had—and he knew it.
“Captain Hunt!” called out Admiral Bailey before he could slip away.
Hunt saw the admiral waving for him to come over and talk to him and Admiral Halsey. He knew he couldn’t duck whatever was coming, so he did his best to put on a happy face and meandered over.
“Sir, how can I be of assistance?” he said with a smile that belied how he truly felt inside. Last night he had finally written the last next-of-kin letter. It was all he could do not to drown himself in a bottle and hide under a rock. He’d spent thirty minutes in the shower this morning, just trying to sober himself up for this meeting.
As Hunt approached, Admiral Bailey looked at him for a moment. Hunt knew he probably could tell he was having a hard time. He didn’t say anything to him about it—at least not publicly. But he’d probably hear about it in private.
As the other brass left the room, Bailey explained, “Miles, that was a very informative brief you gave us. We’re going to have to make a lot of adjustments to our ship construction. Speaking of which, I’m hosting a meeting after lunch with Musk Industries and BlueOrigin to discuss the revised specs for the new battleships and destroyers we’re going to start building. I’d like you and Admiral Halsey to attend. If we’re going to tackle this Zodark threat, we need firsthand information on how best to design our new warships to meet this challenge.”
Captain Hunt leaned in toward the admiral. “Sir, have our analysts had any further luck deciphering the captured enemy material yet?” he inquired.
When the Rook and Voyager had picked up the survivors from the doomed Zodark ship, they’d captured a fair bit of material on them and amongst the wreckage. Hunt was hoping there might have been some useful information uncovered.
Bailey nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes. The Sumerian team has been incredibly helpful. I’m not sure how you guys did it, but apparently, one of the chunks of the blown-up ship you brought back happened to house part of the ship’s data cores. One of the Sumerians insists we’ve got a functional copy of the ship’s star map. If that’s so, then it means we have a working knowledge of their entire empire and where the other occupied human worlds are.”
Hunt’s eyes went wide as saucers. “If that’s true, Admiral, then this is a remarkable piece of intelligence, one I would love to exploit,” Hunt said with a smile. He was itching for some payback for the crew members he had lost.
“I agree, Captain,” Bailey said with a nod. “Let’s meet back up at my office ten minutes prior to fourteen hundred hours. The two shipbuilders are going to present their initial ship concepts to us. I’d like your take on their designs before we move forward with one of them. Once we finalize the plans, we’ll begin full production.”
With that, Admiral Bailey concluded their little sidebar. He left to head off to his next appointment, leaving Hunt and Halsey to themselves for a few hours.
They looked at each other. “Want to grab some lunch, Miles?” Halsey asked.
“Yeah, that sounds good, Abby. I need a break,” Hunt said with a nod.
Halsey smiled. “Despite hundreds of years of military evolution, death by PowerPoint continues to persist,” she said with a chuckle.
*******
After a meal, Captain Hunt found himself sitting in a room listening to a briefer from BlueOrigin discuss the new ship designs. “As you can see, the Ryan-class battleship has four pulse beam laser batteries: two located in the fore section of the ship, and two in the rear, giving the ship the ability to engage multiple targets from several different vantage points. The ship is also equipped with twenty-four ship-to-ship missiles for long-range engagements. These are our newest generation of Havoc missiles with four booster phases of guidable range. They can be fitted with either a ten-thousand-pound warhead or a variable-yield nuclear warhead, depending on the target.”
As he spoke, they watched several 3-D renderings of the ship, followed by a cinematic video they’d created of it in action. The briefer was obviously proud of the design and the ship’s capabilities.
“What’s the armor belt of the ship like?” asked one of the naval captains as he flipped through a few pages of notes looking for something.
“The ship is double-hulled,” the briefer quickly replied. “The most critical functions of the ship are located in the inner hull, which has a two-meter belt of armor separating it from the outer hull of the ship. The outer hull has a four-meter armor belt with both modulated and reactive armor to handle both kinetic and energy-based weapon impacts.”
“What about magrails? I didn’t see any listed,” commented one of the other officers at the table.
The briefer nodded. “The ship has ten 40mm magrail batteries. These are more for intercepting smaller craft and kinetic projectiles fired at the ship.”
Admiral Halsey and Captain Hunt exchanged skeptical glances at each other. This looked like it’d be a great ship if they were fighting the Tri-Parte Alliance, but they didn’t look like they’d fare well against a Zodark ship, not with that level of armor and no
heavy magrails.
The BlueOrigin briefer must have seen their interplay, because he directed his next question to them. “Uh, excuse me, Captain Hunt, you’ve fought the Zodarks. If you’d had the Ryan-class battleship at the time of the fight, how well do you believe it would have fared?”
Hunt looked at Admiral Bailey as if asking for permission to be blunt. Bailey nodded but smiled ever so softly.
Hunt let out a deep breath before he answered the man’s question. “If I had been commanding this vessel during the battle, chances are I wouldn’t be here. The outer armor belt isn’t thick enough. When we got hit with the Zodarks’ pulse beam, it cut through the Rook’s armor like a hot knife through butter. Our own pulse beam battery wasn’t able to cut through their armor and get into their hull. We had to rely on the magrails to do that, and sadly, your ship isn’t equipped with anything large enough to get the job done,” Hunt explained. He continued to go over the different aspects of the ship and how they would have held up against the Zodark vessel they had encountered.
By the time Hunt and Halsey had picked apart the BlueOrigin ship, the poor fellow looked like he wanted nothing more than to sulk back to where he had come from.
Musk Industries was next on deck, and sadly their design featured a lot of the same flaws. Both companies had proposals for a new battleship based on their assumptions about how the first Zodark ship looked and what they thought its weapons were capable of. In light of the recent engagement Hunt and Halsey had just experienced, it had quickly become apparent that the current crop of ship designs wasn’t going to cut it.
When the meeting was over, Hunt asked if the two briefers could stick around for a few minutes. With Admiral Bailey’s blessing, he had the two men bring up a clean design of a ship—no armaments, just a shell. Hunt then used a stylus and elongated the ship, stretching it to forty-five hundred meters in length, five hundred meters in height and five hundred meters in width. He then flattened the ship a bit with a slight rise in the center and bottom of the ship, where he proposed the electronic suite of equipment would be located. The bridge and the CIC would be located in the center of the ship, where it was most heavily protected. Across the entire top and bottom of the ship, he drew a line of six squat turrets on the top of the port side of the vessel, and another six on the bottom. Then he matched them with another twelve on the starboard ship, covering the top and the bottom of the ship. It was similar to how a twentieth-century battleship might have looked, only this ship had weapons on both sides.
On the turrets, he placed three thirty-six-inch magrails, giving the ship a total of forty-eight port and starboard main guns on the top of the ship, and the same number on the bottom. Intermixed between the primary turrets, Hunt drew a total of eight pulse beam laser turrets on either side of the battleship. This would give the ship sixteen pulse beam lasers. Below the primary line of guns, he drew in twelve smaller turrets on either side of the ship. These were the secondary magrail turrets, which would fire dual twenty-four-inch slugs.
Between the primary and secondary magrail turrets, the ship would be able to unload an enormous barrage of slugs at an adversary. This was critical because at a hundred megameters, a ship could move, and dozens, even hundreds of slugs could miss. It was important to be able to throw a huge barrage of projectiles at various positions the enemy ship could move to and hope one or more of the firing patterns would score some hits. The primary and secondary turrets could also be used to hit targets on a planet during an orbital bombardment—something the shipbuilders hadn’t even considered in their original designs.
Along the sides of the ship, below the turrets and near the centerline of the vessel, Hunt drew a series of missile launch tubes. He counted them out, listing thirty-six on each side of the battleship. This would give them some long-range punching power with the new variant of ship-to-ship missiles being produced.
For close-in protection, Hunt added one hundred seven-barreled twenty-millimeter gun batteries. They were placed in various positions around the ship so they’d be able to provide numerous overlapping fields of fire to support each other. Unlike the other projectile-driven weapons, this platform was going to make use of standard liquid propellant rather than railguns. This would ensure the guns could maintain a very high cyclic rate of fire for self-defense actions.
Just when the engineers thought Hunt was done, he drew an extendable flight deck on the bottom of the ship. He left that section a bit more vague for the designers to come up with something, but he made sure they knew it should either be retractable into the lower section of the ship during ship-to-ship combat or heavily armored and able to sustain a lot of hits. He also annotated that they’d need to see if his proposal to include weapons on the belly of the ship would still be possible. Ideally, they’d want to have some weapons down there, even if they couldn’t have the full gambit. Space combat was fought in three dimensions; it wasn’t linear.
Interrupting him, one of the engineers asked, “This flight deck you’ve mentioned—do you intend it to handle flight operations for some sort of starfighter, or is this kind of like the orbital assault ships?”
Hunt paused for a moment to think. “If we build a warship like this, we have to keep in mind that this ship is probably going to last for at least a hundred years if it isn’t destroyed—meaning we need to anticipate how technology is going to change and make sure we’re designing a ship that can keep up with that change. As you’ve previously noted, we currently do not have starfighters. But that won’t always be the case.
“Initially, I think the flight deck will primarily be used to support either Special Forces or Republic Army soldiers, probably at least a battalion-level unit, though if we could, fitting at least two battalions and their equipment on the ship would give it an incredible amount of versatility. In reality, this ship is large enough that you could probably design at least two separate flight bays. Perhaps one could be dedicated to handling fighters while the other handles the ground forces. The point is, this ship needs to handle a multitude of taskings and missions, gentlemen.”
Another engineer asked, “How thick of an armor belt do you believe this thing should be wrapped in?”
“Based on the strength of the Zodark pulse beam and the damage it inflicted on my own ship, I recommend we wrap the ship in twelve meters of armor around the critical functions and weapon platforms while the rest of the ship is encased in eight meters. This’ll allow us to protect the most vital parts of the ship to keep it in the fight while reducing the volume of armor on some of the lesser critical portions,” Hunt explained as he drew a few notes on the side of the tablet.
“Now, I’m not sure how you guys can make this better, but we need to find a way to improve those SW antilaser weapons and integrate them across the ship. We need some type of defense against their lasers, particularly when we encounter multiple enemy ships at the same time. I’d also recommend adding dozens of maneuvering thrusters to aid in turning and shifting the ship when it starts to take a hit. We can’t allow the enemy lasers to stay fixed on a single spot on the armor, or they’ll burn their way through it.”
Once Hunt had gone over the outer weapon systems, he broke down the internal guts of what they absolutely had to have. Mainly, he wanted two Trimarian reactors, not just one. This would increase the power to the pulse beams, but more than that, he explained his idea for improving the ship’s ability to jam the enemy’s sensors and communications. He reiterated the importance of forcing the Zodark ships to get within knife range to engage them. That was when their magrails would be able to tear them apart.
When Hunt had finished explaining what he thought would make an exceptional warship, one of the shipbuilders finally blurted out, maybe in frustration, that something this complicated and broad would take years to design and build. He proposed that they build a fleet of smaller ships that could be more easily produced; they could be used in a swarm rather than relying on a couple of large juggernauts.
“I don�
�t disagree with your suggestion,” Hunt replied. “Creating a few squadrons of capable destroyers is certainly a viable option. Right now, we don’t know if the Zodark ship we fought was a standard-size ship or if they have larger, more capable warships. The destroyer idea you proposed is not bad, but it’d take more than one of them to take out a Zodark ship, and its armor wouldn’t be nearly as thick as even the Rook’s was when we went toe-to-toe with this one. If we were to build a handful of battleships like I drew up and then fielded them with a handful of these destroyers, I think we could create a very formidable fleet to take them on.”
One of the other admirals jumped in to add his own point. “I think you’re both right. We need to move down a track of building out as many of these destroyers as we can while also beginning work on these battleships that’ll eventually anchor the fleet. Right now, I’m concerned that we don’t have a proper fleet to defend Sol, let alone take the fight to the enemy. We need to secure our home system first, and then we can look to expand outwards.”
“We need to capture and hold New Eden,” Admiral Halsey interjected. “Whether we like it or not, we need the Trimar and Morean mineral deposits. The planet has several extensive deposits of the mineral, and we’ll need it for future ship construction, or none of this will matter.”
They had a sudden realization, which was that they’d been talking about building this massive fleet without considering that they’d need to capture New Eden first—with that realization, their grandiose plans came to a halt. They needed New Eden, no two ways about it. Now, the question was how best to capture it with the resources they had on hand.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Belt
Asteroid Belt—Sol
Gaelic Trading Outpost
As Captain Liam Patrick approached the immense asteroid, he could see more than two dozen ships of various sizes all docked at the different docking arms connecting them to the man-made port carved into the giant floating piece of rock.